HELL'S HIP POCKET
In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah, Isaiah the son of Amoz is reported
to have seen in a vision a wolf which dwelt with a lamb, while a lion
ate straw like an ox, and a weaned child put his hand in the
cockatrice's den. Equally beautiful, as a dream, was the peace at
Hidden Water, where sheepman and cattleman sat down together in amity;
only, when it was all over, the wolf wiped his chops and turned away
with a wise smile--the millennium not having come, as yet, in
Arizona.
Hardy's wrist was a little lame, figuratively speaking, from throwing
flapjacks for hungry sheep herders, and the pile of grain and baled
hay in the storehouse had dwindled materially; but as the sheep came
through, band after band, and each turned off to the west, stringing
in long bleating columns out across The Rolls, he did not begrudge the
hard labor. After Jasper Swope came Jim, and Donald McDonald, as jolly
a Scottish shepherd as ever lived, and Bazan, the Mexican, who traced
his blood back to that victorious general whom Maximilian sent into
Sonora. There were Frenchmen, smelling rank of garlic and mutton
tallow; Basques with eyes as blue and vacant as the summer skies;
young Mormons working on shares, whose whole fortune was wrapped up in
the one huddle of sheep which they corralled and counted so carefully;
and then the common herders, fighting Chihuahuanos, with big round
heads and staring eyes, low-browed Sonorans, slow and brutal in their
ways, men of all bloods and no blood, lumped together in that
careless, all-embracing Western term "Mexicans."
But though they were low and primitive in mental processes, nearer to
their plodding burros than to the bright-eyed sensitive dogs, they
were the best who would consent to wander with the sheep through the
wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing, knowing nothing, having
before them nothing but the vision of a distant pay day, a drunk, the
_calabozo_, and the kind boss who would surely bail them out. Ah, that
was it--the one love and loyalty of those simple-minded creatures who,
unfit for the hurry and competition of the great world, sold their
lives by spans of months for twenty dollars and found; it was always
to the boss that they looked for help, and in return they did his
will.
When the great procession had drifted past, with its braying clamor,
its dogs, its men on muleback and afoot, the herders with their
carbines, the camp rustlers with their burros, belled and laden with
water casks and kyacks of grub, the sheep owners hustling about with
an energy that was almost a mania, Hardy sat beneath the _ramada_ of
the ranch house with dog-fighting Tommy in his lap and pondered deeply
upon the spectacle. A hundred thousand sheep, drifting like the
shadows of clouds across the illimitable desert, crossing swift
rivers, climbing high mountains, grazing beneath the northern pines;
and then turning south again and pouring down through the passes like
the resistless front of a cloudburst which leaves the earth bare and
wasted in its wake. For this one time he had turned the stream aside
and the tall grass still waved upon the upper range; but the next
time, or the next--what then?
Long and seriously he contemplated the matter, dwelling now upon the
rough good nature of the sheepmen and this almost miraculous
demonstration of their good will; then remembered with vague
misgivings their protestations against the unlawful violence which
presumed to deny them what was their legal right--free grazing on all
government lands. And in the end he wrote a brief note to Judge Ware,
telling him that while the sheepmen had accepted his hospitality in a
most friendly spirit and had respected the upper range, it was in his
opinion only a question of time until they would take the whole
country, unless they were restrained by law. He therefore recommended
that the judge look up the status of the bill to set aside the
watershed of the Salagua as a National Forest Reserve, and in case the
opposition to it indicated any long delay it would be well either to
sell out or reduce his stock. This note he sent out by Rafael, the
Mexican roustabout, who was still hauling in supplies from Bender, and
then with a glad heart he saddled up his horse, left a bait of meat on
the floor for Tommy, and struck out over the mesa for Carrizo Creek.
After his long confinement in the pasture the sorrel galloped along
the rocky trail with the grace and swiftness of an antelope, the warm
dry wind puffed little whirls of dust before them, and once more Hardy
felt like a man. If for the best interests of his employer it was
desirable that he cook beef and bread for sheepmen, he could do so
with good grace, but his spirit was not that of a man who serves.
Since he had left home he had taken a great deal from the world,
patiently accepting her arrogance while he learned her ways, but his
soul had never been humbled and he rode forth now like a king.
Upon that great mesa where the bronco mustangs from the Peaks still
defied the impetuosity of men, the giant _sahuaros_ towered in a
mighty forest as far as the eye could see, yet between each stalk
there lay a wide space, studded here and there with niggerheads of
bristling spines, and fuzzy _chollas_, white as the backs of sheep and
thorny beyond reason. Nor was this all: in the immensity of distance
there was room for _sahuaros_ and niggerheads and _chollas_, and much
besides. In every gulch and sandy draw the _palo verdes_, their yellow
flowers gleaming in the sun, stood out like lines of fire; the bottoms
of the steep ravines which gashed the mesa were illuminated with the
gaudy tassels of mesquite blossoms; gray coffee-berry bushes clumped
up against the sides of ridges, and in every sheltered place the long
grass waved its last-year's banners, while the fresh green of tender
growth matted the open ground like a lawn. Baby rabbits, feeding along
their runways in the grass, sat up at his approach or hopped
innocently into the shadow of the sheltering cat-claws; jack-rabbits
with black-tipped ears galloped madly along before him, imagining
themselves pursued, and in every warm sandy place where the lizards
took the sun there was a scattering like the flight of arrows as the
long-legged swift-jacks rose up on their toes and flew. All nature was
in a gala mood and Rufus Hardy no less. Yet as he rode along, gazing
at the dreamy beauty of this new world, the old far-away look crept
back into his eyes, a sad, brooding look such as one often sees in
the faces of little children who have been crossed, and the stern
lines at the corners of his mouth were deeper when he drew rein above
Carrizo Creek.
Below him lay the panorama of a mountain valley--the steep and rocky
walls; the silvery stream writhing down the middle; the green and
yellow of flowers along the lowlands; and in the middle, to give it
life, a great herd of cattle on the _parada_ ground, weaving and
milling before the rushes of yelling horsemen, intent on cutting out
every steer in the herd. Beyond lay the corrals of peeled cottonwood,
and a square house standing out stark and naked in the supreme
ugliness of corrugated iron, yet still oddly homelike in a land where
shelter was scarce. As he gazed, a mighty voice rose up to him from
the midst of the turmoil, the blatting of calves, the mooing of cows
and the hoarse thunder of mountain bulls:
"Hel-lo, Rufe!"
From his place on the edge of the herd Hardy saw Jefferson Creede,
almost herculean on his tall horse, waving a large black hat.
Instantly he put spurs to his sorrel and leaped down the narrow trail,
and at the edge of the herd they shook hands warmly, for friends are
scarce, wherever you go.
"Jest in time!" said Creede, grinning his welcome, "we're goin' over
into Hell's Hip Pocket to-morrow--the original hole in the ground--to
bring out Bill Johnson's beef critters, and I sure wanted you to make
the trip. How'd you git along with Jasp?"
"All right," responded Hardy, "he didn't make me any trouble. But I'm
glad to get away from that sheep smell, all the same."
The big cowboy fixed his eyes upon him eagerly.
"Did they go around?" he asked incredulously. "Jasp and all?"
"Sure," said Hardy. "Why?"
For a long minute Creede was silent, wrinkling his brows as he
pondered upon the miracle.
"Well, that's what _I_ want to know," he answered ambiguously. "But
say, you've got a fresh horse; jest take my place here while me and
Uncle Bill over there show them ignorant punchers how to cut cattle."
He circled rapidly about the herd and, riding out into the runway
where the cattle were sifted, the beef steers being jumped across the
open into the hold-up herd and the cows and calves turned back, he
held up his hand for the work to stop. Then by signals he sent the
galloping horsemen back to the edge of the herd and beckoned for old
Bill Johnson.
For a few minutes he sat quietly on his horse, waiting for the
harassed cattle to stop their milling. Then breaking into a song such
as cowboys sing at night he rode slowly in among them, threading about
at random, while old Bill Johnson on his ancient mare did likewise,
his tangled beard swaying idly in the breeze. On the border of the
herd they edged in as if by accident upon a fat steer and walked him
amiably forth into the open. Another followed out of natural
perversity, and when both were nicely started toward the beef cut the
two men drifted back once more into the herd. There was no running, no
shouting, no gallant show of horsemanship, but somehow the right
steers wandered over into the beef cut and stayed there. As if by
magic spell the outlaws and "snakes" became good, and with no breaks
for the hills the labor of an afternoon was accomplished in the space
of two dull and uneventful hours.
"That's the way to cut cattle!" announced Creede, as they turned the
discard toward the hills. "Ain't it, Bill?"
He turned to Johnson who, sitting astride a flea-bitten gray mare that
seemed to be in a perpetual doze, looked more like an Apache squaw
than a boss cowboy. The old man's clothes were even more ragged than
when Hardy had seen him at Bender, his copper-riveted hat was further
reinforced by a buckskin thong around the rim, and his knees were
short-stirruped almost up to his elbows by the puny little boy's
saddle that he rode, but his fiery eyes were as quick and piercing as
ever.
"Shore thing," he said, straightening up jauntily in his saddle,
"that's my way! Be'n doin' it fer years, while you boys was killin'
horses, but it takes Jeff hyar to see the p'int. Be gentle, boys, be
gentle with um--you don't gain nawthin' fer all yer hard ridin'."
He cut off a chew of tobacco and tucked it carefully away in his
cheek.
"Jeff hyar," he continued, as the bunch of cowboys began to josh
and laugh among themselves, "he comes by his savvy right--his paw
was a smart man before him, and mighty clever to his friends, to
boot. Many's the time I hev took little Jeffie down the river and
learned him tracks and beaver signs when he wasn't knee-high to a
grasshopper--hain't I, Jeff? And when I tell him to be gentle with
them cows he knows I'm right. I jest want you boys to take notice
when you go down into the Pocket to-morrer what kin be done by
kindness; and the first man that hollers or puts a rope on my gentle
stock, I'll sure make him hard to ketch.
"You hear me, naow," he cried, turning sharply upon Bill Lightfoot,
who was getting off something about "Little Jeffie," and then for the
first time he saw the face of the new cowboy who had ridden in that
afternoon. Not since the day he was drunk at Bender had Bill Johnson
set eyes upon the little man to whom he had sworn off, but he
recognized him instantly.
"Hello thar, pardner!" he exclaimed, reining his mare in abruptly.
"Whar'd you drop down from?"
"Why howdy do, Mr. Johnson!" answered Hardy, shaking hands, "I'm glad
to see you again. Jeff told me he was going down to your ranch
to-morrow and I looked to see you then."
Bill Johnson allowed this polite speech to pass over his shoulder
without response. Then, drawing Hardy aside, he began to talk
confidentially; expounding to the full his system of gentling cattle;
launching forth his invective, which was of the pioneer variety, upon
the head of all sheepmen; and finally coming around with a jerk to the
subject that was uppermost in his mind.
"Say," he said, "I want to ask you a question--are you any relation to
the Captain Hardy that I served with over at Fort Apache? Seems's if
you look like 'im, only smaller."
His stature was a sore point with Hardy, and especially in connection
with his father, but making allowance for Mr. Johnson's ways he
modestly admitted his ancestry.
"His son, eh!" echoed the old man. "Waal--now! I tell you, boy, I
_knowed_ you--I knowed you the minute you called down that dog-robber
of a barkeep--and I was half drunk, too. And so you're the new
superintendent down at the Dos S, eh? Waal, all I can say is: God help
them pore sheepmen if you ever git on their trail. I used to chase
Apaches with yore paw, boy!"
It was Bill Johnson's turn to talk that evening and like most
solitaries who have not "gone into the silence," he availed himself of
a listener with enthusiasm.
Stories of lion hunts and "b'ar fights" fell as trippingly from his
lips as the words of a professional monologist, and when he had
finished his account of the exploits of Captain Samuel Barrows Hardy,
even the envious Lightfoot regarded Rufus with a new respect, for
there is no higher honor in Arizona than to be the son of an Indian
fighter. And when the last man had crawled wearily into his blankets
the old hermit still sat by the dying fire poking the charred ends
into the flames and holding forth to the young superintendent upon the
courage of his sire.
Hardly had the son of his father crept under the edge of Creede's
blankets and dropped to sleep before that huge mountain of energy rose
up and gave the long yell. The morning was at its blackest, that murky
four A. M. darkness which precedes the first glimmer of light; but
the day's work had to be done. The shivering horse-wrangler stamped on
his boots and struck out down the canyon after the _remuda_, two or
three cooks got busy about the fire which roared higher and higher as
they piled on the ironwood to make coals, and before the sun had more
than mounted the southern shoulder of the Four Peaks the long line of
horsemen was well on the trail to Hell's Hip Pocket.
The frontier imagination had in no wise overleaped itself in naming
this abyss. Even the tribute which Facilis Descensus Vergil paid to
the local Roman hell could hardly be said of the Pocket--it is not
even easy to get into it. From the top of the divide it looks like a
valley submerged in a smoky haze through which the peaks and pinnacles
of the lower parks rise up like cathedral spires, pointing solemnly to
heaven. As the trail descends through washed-out gulches and
"stone-patches," now skating along the backbone of a ridge and now
dropping as abruptly into some hollow waterway, the cliffs and
pinnacles begin to loom up against the sky; then they seem to close in
and block the way, and just as the canyon boxes in to nothing the trail
slips into a gash in the face of the cliff where the soft sandstone
has crumbled away between two harder strata, and climbs precariously
along through the sombre gloom of the gorge to the bright light of the
fair valley beyond.
It is a kind of fairy land, that hidden pocket in the hills, always
covered by a mystic haze, for which the Mexicans give it the name
_Humada_. Its steep canyon comes down from the breast of the most
easterly of the Four Peaks, impassable except by the one trail; it
passes through the box and there widens out into a beautiful valley,
where the grass lies along the hillsides like the tawny mane of a
lion, and tender flowers stand untrampled in the rich bottoms. For
three miles or more it spreads out between striated cliffs where hawks
and eagles make their nests; then once more it closes in, the creek
plunges down a narrow gorge and disappears, writhing tortuously on its
way to the Salagua whose fire-blasted walls rise in huge bulwarks
against the south, dwarfing the near-by cliffs into nothingness by
their majestic height.
In the presence of this unearthly beauty and grandeur old Bill
Johnson--ex-trapper, ex-soldier, ex-prospector, ex-everything--had
dwelt for twenty years, dating from the days when his house was his
fortress, and his one desire was to stand off the Apaches until he
could find the Lost Dutchman.
Where the valley narrowed down for its final plunge into the gorge the
old trapper had built his cabin, its walls laid "square with the
world" by sighting on the North Star. When the sun entered the
threshold of the western door it was noon, and his watch never ran
down. The cabin was built of shaly rocks, squared and laid in mud,
like bricks; a tremendous stone chimney stood against the north end
and a corral for his burros at the south. Three hounds with bleared
eyes and flapping ears, their foreheads wrinkled with age and the
anxieties of the hunt, bayed forth a welcome as the cavalcade strung
in across the valley; and mild-eyed cattle, standing on the ridges to
catch the wind, stared down at them in surprise. Never, even at San
Carlos, where the Chiricahua cattle fatten on the best feed in
Arizona, had Hardy seen such mountains of beef. Old steers with six
and seven rings on their horns hung about the salting places, as if
there were no such things as beef drives and slaughter houses in this
cruel world, and even when the cowboys spread out like a fan and
brought them all in to the cutting grounds there was hardly a calf
that bawled.
As the three or four hundred head that made up his entire earthly
possession drifted obediently in, the old man rode up to Creede and
Hardy and waved his hand expansively.
"Thar, boys," he said, "thar's the results of peace and kindness. Nary
a critter thar that I heven't scratched between the horns since the
day his maw brought him down to the salt lick. I even git Jeff and
the boys to brand and earmark 'em fer me, so they won't hev no hard
feelin' fer the Old Man. D'ye see that big white-faced steer?" he
asked, pointing with pride to the monarch of the herd. "Waal, how much
ye think he'll weigh?" he demanded, turning to Creede. "Fifteen
hundred?"
"Um, more 'n that," responded Creede, squinting his eyes down
judicially. "Them Herefords are awful solid when they git big. I
reckon he'll run nigh onto seventeen hundred, Bill." He paused and
winked furtively at Hardy. "I kin git fifty dollars fer that old boy,
jest the way he stands," he said, "and bein' as he can't carry no more
weight nohow, I'll jest cut him into the town herd right now, and--"
"Hyar!" shouted Johnson, grabbing the cowboy's bridle, "who's doin'
this, anyhow?"
"W'y _you_, Bill," answered Creede innocently, "but--"
"That's all right, then," said the old man shortly, "you leave that
steer alone. I'll jest cut this herd to suit myself."
Over at the branding pen the irons were on the fire and the marking
was progressing rapidly, but out in the open Mr. Bill Johnson was
making slow work of his cut.
"He gets stuck on them cows, like an Irishman with his pig," observed
Creede, as the old man turned back a prime four-year-old. "He'd rather
be barbecued by the Apaches than part with that big white-faced boy.
If I owned 'em I'd send down a lot of them big fat brutes and buy
doggies; but Bill spends all the money he gits fer booze anyhow, so I
reckon it's all right. He generally sends out about twenty runts and
roughs, and lets it go at that. Say! You'll have to git a move on,
Bill," he shouted, "we want to send that beef cut on ahead!"
The old man reined in his mare and surveyed the big herd critically.
"Waal," he drawled, "I reckon that'll do fer this trip, then. Take 'em
along. And the fust one of you punchers that hits one of them critters
over the tail with his hondu," he shouted, as the eager horsemen
trotted over to start them, "will hev me to lick!"
He placed an order for provisions with Creede, asked him to keep the
supplies at Hidden Water until he came over for them with the burros,
and turned away contentedly as the cowboys went upon their way.
Down by the branding pen the mother cows licked the blood from their
offsprings' mangled ears and mooed resentfully, but the big
white-faced steer stood in brutish content on the salting grounds and
gazed after the town herd thoughtfully.
A bunch of burros gathered about the doorway of the cabin, snooping
for bacon rinds; the hounds leaned their heavy jowls upon his knees
and gazed up worshipfully into their master's face; and as the sun
dipped down toward the rim of the mighty cliffs that shut him in, the
lord of Hell's Hip Pocket broke into the chorus of an ancient song:
"Oh, _o_-ver the prairies, and _o_-ver the mountains,
And _o_-ver the prairies, and _o_-ver the mountains,
And _o_-ver the prairies, and _o_-ver the mountains,
I'll go till I find me a home."