THE TRAIL OF THE SHEEP
The morning dawned as clear on Bender as if there had never been storm
nor clouds, and the waxy green heads of the greasewood, dotting the
level plain with the regularity of a vineyard, sparkled with a
thousand dewdrops. Ecstatic meadow larks, undismayed by the utter lack
of meadows, sang love songs from the tops of the telegraph poles; and
the little Mexican ground doves that always go in pairs tracked
amiably about together in the wet litter of the corral, picking up the
grain which the storm had laid bare. Before the early sun had cleared
the top of the eastern mountains Jefferson Creede and Hardy had risen
and fed their horses well, and while the air was yet chill they loaded
their blankets and supplies upon the ranch wagon, driven by a
shivering Mexican, and went out to saddle up.
Since his confession of the evening before Creede had put aside his
air of friendly patronage and, lacking another pose, had taken to
smoking in silence; for there is many a boastful cowboy in Arizona who
has done his riding for the Cherrycow outfit on the chuck wagon,
swamping for the cook. At breakfast he jollied the Chinaman into
giving him two orders of everything, from coffee to hot cakes, paid
for the same at the end, and rose up like a giant refreshed--but
beneath this jovial exterior he masked a divided mind. Although he had
come down handsomely, he still had his reservations about the
white-handed little man from Cherrycow, and when they entered the
corral he saddled his iron-scarred charger by feeling, gazing craftily
over his back to see how Hardy would show up in action.
Now, first the little man took a rope, and shaking out the loop
dropped it carelessly against his horse's fore-feet--and that looked
well, for the sorrel stood stiffly in his tracks, as if he had been
anchored. Then the man from Cherrycow picked up his bridle, rubbed
something on the bit, and offered it to the horse, who graciously
bowed his head to receive it. This was a new one on Creede and in the
excitement of the moment he inadvertently cinched his roan up two
holes too tight and got nipped for it, for old Bat Wings had a mind of
his own in such matters, and the cold air made him ugly.
"Here, quit that," muttered the cowboy, striking back at him; but when
he looked up, the sorrel had already taken his bit, and while he was
champing on it Hardy had slipped the headstall over his ears. There
was a broad leather blind on the hacamore, which was of the best
plaited rawhide with a horsehair tie rope, but the little man did not
take advantage of it to subdue his mount. Instead he reached down for
his gaudy Navajo saddle blanket, offered it to the sorrel to smell,
and then slid it gently upon his back. But when he stooped for his
saddle the high-headed horse rebelled. With ears pricked suspiciously
forward and eyes protruding he glared at the clattering thing in
horror, snorting deep at every breath. But, though he was free-footed,
by some obsession of the mind, cunningly inculcated in his breaking,
the sorrel pony was afraid to move.
As the saddle was drawn toward him and he saw that he could not escape
its hateful embrace he leaned slowly back upon his haunches, grunting
as if his fore-feet, wreathed in the loose rope, were stuck in some
terrible quicksands from which he tried in vain to extricate them; but
with a low murmur of indifferent words his master moved the saddle
resolutely toward him, the stirrups carefully snapped up over the
horn, and ignoring his loud snorts and frenzied shakings of the head
laid it surely down upon his back. This done, he suddenly spoke
sharply to him, and with a final groan the beautiful creature rose up
and consented to his fate.
Hardy worked quickly now, tightening the cinch, lowering the
stirrups, and gathering up the reins. He picked up the rope, coiled it
deftly and tied it to the saddle--and now, relieved of the idea that
he was noosed, the pony began to lift his feet and prance, softly,
like a swift runner on the mark. At these signs of an early break
Creede mounted hurriedly and edged in, to be ready in case the sorrel,
like most half-broken broncos, tried to scrape his rider off against
the fence; but Hardy needed no wrangler to shunt him out the gate.
Standing by his shoulder and facing the rear he patted the sorrel's
neck with the hand that held the reins, while with his right hand he
twisted the heavy stirrup toward him stealthily, raising his boot to
meet it. Then like a flash he clapped in his foot and, catching the
horn as his fiery pony shot forward, he snapped up into the saddle
like a jumping jack and went flying out the gate.
"Well, the son of a gun!" muttered Creede, as he thundered down the
trail after him. "Durned if he can't ride!"
There are men in every cow camp who can rope and shoot, but the man
who can ride a wild horse can hold up his head with the best of
them. No matter what his race or station if he will crawl a "snake"
and stay with him there is always room on the wagon for his
blankets; his fame will spread quickly from camp to camp, and the
boss will offer to raise him when he shows up for his time.
Jefferson Creede's face was all aglow when he finally rode up beside
Hardy; he grinned triumphantly upon horse and man as if they had won
money for him in a race; and Hardy, roused at last from his
reserve, laughed back out of pure joy in his possessions.
"How's that for a horse?" he cried, raising his voice above the thud
of hoofs. "I have to turn him loose at first--'fraid he'll learn to
pitch if I hold him in--he's never bucked with me yet!"
"You bet--he's a snake!" yelled Creede, hammering along on his
broad-chested roan. "Where'd you git 'im?"
"Tom Fulton's ranch," responded Hardy, reining his horse in and
patting him on the neck. "Turned in three months' pay and broke him
myself, to boot. I'll let you try him some day, when he's gentled."
"Well, if I wasn't so big 'n' heavy I'd take you up on that," said
Creede, "but I'm just as much obliged, all the same. I don't claim to
be no bronco-buster now, but I used to ride some myself when I was a
kid. But say, the old judge has got some good horses runnin' on the
upper range,--if you want to keep your hand in,--thirty or forty head
of 'em, and wild as hawks. There's some sure-enough wild horses too,
over on the Peaks, that belong to any man that can git his rope onto
'em--how would that strike you? We've been tryin' for years to catch
the black stallion that leads 'em."
Try as he would to minimize this exaggerated estimate of his prowess
as a horse-tamer Hardy was unable to make his partner admit that he
was anything short of a real "buster," and before they had been on the
trail an hour Creede had made all the plans for a big gather of wild
horses after the round-up.
"I had you spotted for a sport from the start," he said, puffing out
his chest at the memory of his acumen, "but, by jingo, I never thought
I was drawin' a bronco-twister. Well, now, I saw you crawl that horse
this mornin', and I guess I know the real thing by this time. Say," he
said, turning confidentially in his saddle, "if it's none of my
business you can say so, but what did you do to that bit?"
Hardy smiled, like a juggler detected in his trick. "You must have
been watching me," he said, "but I don't mind telling you--it's simply
passing a good thing along. I learned it off of a Yaqui Mayo Indian
that had been riding for Bill Greene on the Turkey-track--I rubbed it
with a little salt."
"Well, I'm a son of a gun!" exclaimed Creede incredulously. "Here
we've been gittin' our fingers bit off for forty years and never
thought of a little thing like that. Got any more tricks?"
"Nope," said Hardy, "I've only been in the Territory a little over a
year, this trip, and I'm learning, myself. Funny how much you can pick
up from some of these Indians and Mexicans that can't write their own
names, isn't it?"
"Umm, may be so," assented Creede doubtfully, "but I'd rather go to a
white man myself. Say," he exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly,
"what was that name the old man called you by when he was makin' that
talk about sheep--Roofer, or Rough House--or something like that?"
"Oh, that's my front name--Rufus. Why? What's the matter with it?"
"Nothin', I reckon," replied Creede absently, "never happened to hear
it before, 's all. I was wonderin' how he knowed it," he added,
glancing shrewdly sideways. "Thought maybe you might have met him up
in California, or somewheres."
"Oh, that's easy," responded Hardy unblinkingly. "The first thing he
did was to ask me my full name. I notice he calls you Jefferson," he
added, shiftily changing the subject.
"Sure thing," agreed Creede, now quite satisfied, "he calls everybody
that way. If your name is Jim you're James, John you're Jonathan, Jeff
you're Jefferson Davis--but say, ain't they any f'r short to your
name? We're gittin' too far out of town for this Mister business. My
name's Jeff, you know," he suggested.
"Why, sure," exclaimed Hardy, brushing aside any college-bred
scruples, "only don't call me Rough House--they might get the idea
that I was on the fight. But you don't need to get scared of
Rufus--it's just another way of saying Red. I had a red-headed
ancestor away back there somewhere and they called him Rufus, and then
they passed the name down in the family until it got to me, and I'm no
more red-headed than you are."
"_No_--is that straight?" ejaculated the cowboy, with enthusiasm,
"same as we call 'em Reddy now, eh? But say, I'd choke if I tried to
call you Rufus. Will you stand for Reddy? Aw, that's no good--what's
the matter with Rufe? Well, shake then, pardner, I'm dam' glad I met
up with you."
They pulled their horses down to a Spanish trot--that easy, limping
shuffle that eats up its forty miles a day--and rode on together like
brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the
painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the
river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon
which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the
shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never
returned again, the Indians of the valley have always looked with
superstitious dread.
Creede told the story carelessly, smiling at the pride of the Pimas
who refused to admit that the Apaches alone, devils and bad medicine
barred, could have conquered so many of their warriors. To the west in
a long fringe of green loomed the cottonwoods of Moroni, where the
hard-working Mormons had turned the Salagua from its course and
irrigated the fertile plain, and there on their barren reservation
dwelt the remnant of those warlike Pimas, the unrequited friends of
the white men, now held by them as of no account.
As he heard the history of its people--how the Apaches had wiped out
the Toltecs, and the white men had killed off the Apaches, and then,
after pushing aside the Pimas and the Mexicans, closed in a death
struggle for the mastery of the range--Hardy began to perceive the
grim humor of the land. He glanced across at his companion, tall,
stalwart, with mighty arms and legs and features rugged as a mountain
crag, and his heart leaped up within him at the thought of the battles
to come, battles in which sheepmen and cattlemen, defiant of the law,
would match their strength and cunning in a fight for the open range.
As they rode along mile after mile toward the north the road mounted
gently; hills rose up one by one out of the desert floor, crowned with
towering _sahuaros_, and in the dip of the pass ahead a mighty forest
of their misshapen stalks was thrust up like giant fingers against the
horizon. The trail wound in among them, where they rose like fluted
columns above the lesser cactus--great skin-covered tanks, gorged fat
with water too bitter to quench the fieriest thirst, yet guarded
jealously by poison-barbed spines. Gilded woodpeckers, with hearts red
as blood painted upon their breasts, dipped in uneven flight from
_sahuaro_ to _sahuaro_, dodged into holes of their own making, dug
deep into the solid flesh; sparrow hawks sailed forth from their
summits, with quick eyes turned to the earth for lizards; and the
brown mocking bird, leaping for joy from the ironwood tree where his
mate was nesting, whistled the praise of the desert in the ecstatic
notes of love. In all that land which some say God forgot, there was
naught but life and happiness, for God had sent the rain.
The sun was high in the heavens when, as they neared the summit of
the broad pass, a sudden taint came down the wind, whose only burden
had been the fragrance of resinous plants, of wetted earth, and of
green things growing. A distant clamor, like the babble of many
voices or the surf-beats of a mighty sea, echoed dimly between the
_chuck-a-chuck_ of their horses' feet, and as Hardy glanced up
inquiringly his companion's lip curled and he muttered:
"Sheep!"
They rode on in silence. The ground, which before had been furred with
Indian wheat and sprouting six weeks' grass, now showed the imprints
of many tiny feet glozed over by the rain, and Hardy noticed vaguely
that something was missing--the grass was gone. Even where a minute
before it had covered the level flats in a promise of maturity, rising
up in ranker growth beneath the thorny trees and cactus, its place was
now swept bare and all the earth trampled into narrow, hard-tamped
trail. Then as a brush shed and corrals, with a cook tent and a couple
of water wagons in the rear, came into view, the ground went suddenly
stone bare, stripped naked and trampled smooth as a floor. Never
before had Hardy seen the earth so laid waste and desolate, the very
cactus trimmed down to its woody stump and every spear of root grass
searched out from the shelter of the spiny _chollas_. He glanced once
more at his companion, whose face was sullen and unresponsive; there
was a well-defined bristle to his short mustache and he rowelled his
horse cruelly when he shied at the blatting horde.
The shearing was in full blast, every man working with such feverish
industry that not one of them stopped to look up. From the receiving
corral three Mexicans in slouched hats and jumpers drove the sheep
into a broad chute, yelling and hurling battered oil cans at the
hindmost; by the chute an American punched them vigorously forward
with a prod, and yet another thrust them into the pens behind the
shearers, who bent to their work with a sullen, back-breaking stoop.
Each man held between his knees a sheep, gripped relentlessly, that
flinched and kicked at times when the shears clipped off patches of
flesh; and there in the clamor of a thousand voices they shuttled
their keen blades unceasingly, stripping off a fleece, throwing it
aside, and seizing a fresh victim by the foot, toiling and sweating
grimly. By another chute a man stood with a paint pot, stamping a
fresh brand upon every new-shorn sheep, and in a last corral the naked
ones, their white hides spotted with blood from their cuts, blatted
frantically for their lambs. These were herded in a small inclosure,
some large and browned with the grime of the flock, others white and
wobbly, newborn from mothers frightened in the shearing; and always
that tremendous wailing chorus--_Ba-a-a_, _ba-a-a_, _ba-a-a_--and men
in greasy clothes wrestling with the wool.
To a man used to the noise and turmoil of the round-up and branding
pen and accustomed to the necessary cruelties of stock raising there
was nothing in the scene to attract attention. But Hardy was of
gentler blood, inured to the hardships of frontier life but not to its
unthinking brutality, and as he beheld for the first time the waste,
the hurry, the greed of it all, his heart turned sick and his eyes
glowed with pity, like a woman's. By his side the sunburned swarthy
giant who had taken him willy-nilly for a friend sat unmoved, his lip
curled, not at the pity of it, but because they were sheep; and
because, among the men who rushed about driving them with clubs and
sacks, he saw more than one who had eaten at his table and then
sheeped out his upper range. His saturnine mood grew upon him as he
waited and, turning to Hardy, he shouted harshly:
"There's some of your friends over yonder," he said, jerking his thumb
toward a group of men who were weighing the long sacks of wool. "Want
to go over and get acquainted?"
Hardy woke from his dream abruptly and shook his head.
"No, let's not stop," he said, and Creede laughed silently as he
reined Bat Wings into the trail. But just as they started to go one of
the men by the scales hailed them, motioning with his hand and, still
laughing cynically, the foreman of the Dos S turned back again.
"That's Jim Swope," he said, "one of our big sheep men--nice
feller--you'll like him."
He led the way to the weighing scales, where two sweating Mexicans
tumbled the eight-foot bags upon the platform, and a burly man with a
Scotch turn to his tongue called off the weights defiantly. At his
elbow stood two men, the man who had called them and a wool
buyer,--each keeping tally of the count.
Jim Swope glanced quickly up from his work. He was a man not over
forty but bent and haggard, with a face wrinkled deep with hard lines,
yet lighted by blue eyes that still held a twinkle of grim humor.
"Hello, Jeff," he said, jotting down a number in his tally book,
"goin' by without stoppin', was ye? Better ask the cook for somethin'
to eat. Say, you're goin' up the river, ain't ye? Well, tell Pablo
Moreno and them Mexicans I lost a cut of two hundred sheep up there
somewhere. That son of a--of a herder of mine was too lazy to make a
corral and count 'em, so I don't know where they are lost, but I'll
give two bits a head for 'em, delivered here. Tell the old man that,
will you?"
He paused to enter another weight in his book, then stepped away from
the scales and came out to meet them.
"How's the feed up your way?" he inquired, smiling grimly.
"Dam' pore," replied Creede, carrying on the jest, "and it'll be
poorer still if you come in on me, so keep away. Mr. Swope, I'll make
you acquainted with Mr. Hardy--my new boss. Judge Ware has sent him
out to be superintendent for the Dos S."
"Glad to meet you, sir," said Swope, offering a greasy hand that
smelled of sheep dip. "Nice man, the old judge--here, _umbre_, put
that bag on straight! Three hundred and _fifteen_? Well I know a dam'
sight better--excuse me, boys--here, put that bag on again, and weigh
it right!"
"Well," observed Creede, glancing at his friend as the combat raged
unremittingly, "I guess we might as well pull. His busy day, you
understand. Nice feller, though--you'll like 'im." Once more the glint
of quiet deviltry came into his eyes, but he finished out the jest
soberly. "Comes from a nice Mormon family down in Moroni--six
brothers--all sheepmen. You'll see the rest of the boys when they come
through next month--but Jim's the best."
There was something in the sardonic smile that accompanied this
encomium which set Hardy thinking. Creede must have been thinking too,
for he rode past the kitchen without stopping, cocking his head up at
the sun as if estimating the length of their journey.
"Oh, did you want to git somethin' to eat?" he inquired innocently.
"No? That's good. That sheep smell kinder turns my stomach." And
throwing the spurs into Bat Wings he loped rapidly toward the summit,
scowling forbiddingly in passing at a small boy who was shepherding
the stray herd. For a mile or two he said nothing, swinging his head
to scan the sides of the mountains with eyes as keen as an eagle's;
then, on the top of the last roll, he halted and threw his hand out
grandly at the panorama which lay before them.
"There she lays," he said, as if delivering a funeral oration, "as
good a cow country as God ever made--and now even the jack rabbits
have left it. D'ye see that big mesa down there?" he continued,
pointing to a broad stretch of level land, dotted here and there with
giant cactus, which extended along the river. "I've seen a thousand
head of cattle, fat as butter, feedin' where you see them _sahuaros_,
and now look at it!"
He threw out his hand again in passionate appeal, and Hardy saw that
the mesa was empty.
"There was grass a foot high," cried Creede in a hushed, sustained
voice, as if he saw it again, "and flowers. Me and my brothers and
sisters used to run out there about now and pick all kinds, big
yaller poppies and daisies, and these here little pansies--and
ferget-me-nots. God! I wish I could ferget 'em--but I've been
fightin' these sheep so long and gittin' so mean and ugly them flowers
wouldn't mean no more to me now than a bunch of jimson weeds and
stink squashes. But hell, what's the use?" He threw out his hands once
more, palms up, and dropped them limply.
"That's old Pablo Moreno's place down there," he said, falling back
abruptly into his old way. "We'll stop there overnight--I want to help
git that wagon across the river when Rafael comes in bymeby, and we'll
go up by trail in the mornin'."
Once more he fell into his brooding silence, looking up at the naked
hills from habit, for there were no cattle there. And Rufus Hardy,
quick to understand, gazed also at the arid slopes, where once the
grama had waved like tawny hair in the soft winds and the cattle of
Jeff Creede's father had stood knee-high in flowers.
Now at last the secret of Arizona-the-Lawless and Arizona-the-Desert
lay before him: the feed was there for those who could take it, and
the sheep were taking it all. It was government land, only there was
no government; anybody's land, to strip, to lay waste, to desolate, to
hog for and fight over forever--and no law of right; only this, that
the best fighter won. Thoughts came up into his mind, as thoughts will
in the silence of the desert; memories of other times and places, a
word here, a scene there, having no relation to the matter in hand;
and then one flashed up like the premonitions of the superstitious--a
verse from the Bible that he had learned at his mother's knee many
years before:
"Crying, Peace, Peace, when there is no peace."
But he put it aside lightly, as a man should, for if one followed
every vagrant fancy and intuition, taking account of signs and omens,
he would slue and waver in his course like a toy boat in a mill pond,
which after great labor and adventure comes, in the end, to nothing.