It was powder that severed a five year partnership between the
rough-hewn Jerk Line and the timid Two Dog. Frozen dynamite.
Those of you who have never cursed and prayed and coaxed and wept your
way with a freight outfit can not quite appreciate the heartbreaking
grief of the Red Lane in bad weather.
Five miles of red adobe gumbo flat. No road but the rutted strip from
the P outfit’s horse corrals to the half way house known as the Hog
Ranch. Five miles of mud up to a horse’s hocks. Mud that sticks in the
spokes of the wide tired freight wagon wheels. Wheels seven feet in
diameter, sunk to the hubs. Five miles of cold, red, sticky, horse
killing hell. Horses floundering. Two Dog hacking away with an ax at the
gumbo clogged between the spokes.
“Drop trail.”
Caboose and rear wagon unhooked. Wallowing in mud up to their knees, the
two freighters labored. Cold. Wet. Hungry. Sweat. Mud. Jerk Line too
weary to curse, blood seaming the chapped cracks that filled his hands
and red wrists. Two Dog whimpering with futile grief. His beloved horses
and rings and buckles and bells caked with mud.
Mud that thawed at midday and froze to cement-like solidity at night.
From daybreak till dark. Shivering through the brief night hours.
Harness lying in the mud. Hobbles caked with the stuff. Broken
fingernails. Freezing, sweating, sobbing, cursing across the Red Lane.
Five days making five miles.
Perhaps it was too much liquor, or it might have been that Jerk Line
needed more of the stuff that warmed the lining of a man’s belly while
his hide was plastered with half frozen mud.
The trail wagon was down to the running gear in the gumbo. The teams
stood bogged with lowered heads and heaving flanks, sweat smeared,
steaming, spent, but waiting to give again the last ounce of strength in
their loyal hearts. But no team that ever looked through collar could
budge that mired load. Jerk Line, white with fatigue and red eyed from
loss of decent rest, was on top of the load, slashing at mud caked ropes
with his jackknife. Though it was past noon they had not eaten since
four that morning. They had unloaded and reloaded that trail wagon three
times since sun-up.
Two Dog, who had been untangling a swing team from a tangle of lead bars
and stretcher chains, was limping painfully back through the mud. His
feet were twin balls of gumbo; leaden balls of weight. A cud of tobacco
bulged his unshaven cheek. Suddenly he halted. His watery eyes widened.
The cud dropped from his gaping mouth. In mud to his knees, he stood
there, petrified, breathless with terror.
For the mud crazed Jerk Line was heaving off wooden boxes with insane
abandon. Box after box, flung from the high piled wagon out into the
congealing, freezing gumbo. One of the boxes broke, spilling forth its
contents of dynamite sticks that looked like yellow candles.
Powder! Two Dog, sick with stark terror, let out a hoarse, croaking
scream.
“Gawd! Gawd A’mighty, Smith! That’s powder!”
“What the hell of it?” bellowed the yellow bearded giant, throwing
another box out. “What the hell of it, hey?” Lend a hand up here, damn
your sniveling little heart!”
Two Dog stood there, sort of crumpled. In his scarecrow rags, his
broken, bleeding, mud caked hands going out in a queer little gesture of
supplication.
“O, Gawd, Jerk Line! Don’t! Don’t, pardner! I’ll unload ’er. Every damn’
case, Jerk Line! But don’t—don’t sling that stuff like that! She’s
powder, Jerk Line! Powder!”
But the yellow haired, mud fouled Jerk Line was like a man gone stark
mad. His harsh voice roared forth a string of curses. He threw boxes of
the frozen dynamite with a sort of giant petulance that was terrible in
its blasphemous contempt for the wrath of God.
“Git!” he bellowed. “Git, you white hearted, sheep herdin’ louse! Git,
afore I brain you with the next box!”
Two Dog turned slowly, very slowly, like a man mortally sick. Like a
stray dog being stoned by his man-god.
Shambling, stumbling, falling sometimes because he was weak and hurt and
blind from the tears that coursed down his little old cheeks, Two Dog
made his way along the Red Lane.
The weary horses eyed him with some sort of dumb understanding. But he
did not look up. He could not look at them. For he was going away. He
was quitting the only thing in the world that he had ever loved.
* * * * *
On down the Red Lane. And even after he had stumbled on for a mile and
more, the silvery tinkle of his beloved bells filled his ears. When he
reached the Hog Ranch, he crawled up into the hayloft and sobbed himself
into the oblivion of exhausted slumber.
While back along the Red Lane, Jerk Line, his sudden burst of fury
spent, worked in a brooding silence.
Already he was regretting his fit of anger. And he worked until darkness
clogged his progress. Then he unhooked his team and turned them into the
Hog Ranch pasture. Too weary and sick at heart to return to the caboose
at the far end of the lane, Jerk Line lay down on the load and slept,
too utterly tired to know that he was hungry.
He hired a passing traveler from the mines and put him to work in Two
Dog’s place. His anger had turned to guilt, then into a sort of shamed
bitterness toward Two Dog. He lied himself into believing that the
little swamper had deserted in an hour of dire need. And when the outfit
had been dragged through the lane and Jerk Line laid over at the Hog
Ranch to mend broken tugs and rebalance his freight, he got very drunk
and sank into a sullen silence.
Two Dog, refreshed by sleep, had quit the barn. Avoiding the little log
saloon and dining room that fed the stage passengers, he took to the
road before Jerk Line pulled into the ranch.
Two Dog found a sheep camp and stayed with the herder. And two days
later he hailed the passing stage and rode with the driver into the
Little Rockies. But he did not go into the town of Zortman. He got off a
mile this side of town and struck off for a sheep ranch.
A few days later Two Dog was back herding sheep. He wore real clothes.
Thick, fleece lined underwear, sox a quarter-inch thick, shoes,
overshoes, blanket lined canvas pants, a sheep lined overcoat and heavy
cap. His covered wagon held adequate bed and good grub. Two collie dogs
for company.
The feed was good, there in the scrub pines of the foothills. There was
water. A good shed for the sheep at night. And his band were stout
wethers that needed little attention save doctoring them for sore mouth
and foot rot. And each morning as they left the shed, Two Dog caught a
few sheep and sheared away the overhanging wool that sometimes grows so
thick as to make the sheep blind—wool blind.
But Two Dog was not happy. Well clothed, well fed, and an ideal winter
camp. A veritable sheepherder’s paradise. And Two Dog was a sheepherder,
as good a sheepherder as ever cheated the wolves and blizzards. He tried
to tell himself that he was happy, that freighting was a hell of a life.
Here he was, warm, with good grub, top wages. This was the life.
But when the sheep bells, reminding him of other bells, tinkled, until
the sound of them found their way into his little old heart, he would
bury his frost blackened face in the thick fur of the biggest collie and
cry like a hurt child.
Sometimes, when the wind was right—for a herder feeds into the wind in
winter so that if a storm comes, he drifts with it back to camp—Two
Dog’s band went up the wind and across the stage road below town. And
from some hiding place among the scrub pines, Two Dog’s tear dimmed eyes
would watch Jerk Line’s freight outfit crawl along the road. Wide steel
tires creaking across the packed snow. Chains rattling. The silver toned
bells sending their siren song across the frozen world to where little
two Dog squatted in the pines.
Because he never went to town, because his camp tender was a Swede who
spoke no English, and because some queer sort of pride pinched his
heart, forbidding him to question men he met, Two Dog did not know how
things were going with Jerk Line.
Jerk Line, never sober any more, whose brief stays in town were silent
and ugly and sodden. He no longer held the barflies spellbound with
fanciful tales of mud and snow and feats of expert hauling.
His horses sensed the change in the man. They no longer gave the best
that was in them. Harness and animals alike took on a shabby, prideless
appearance. Uncurried, with burrs and witches’ knots in their manes and
tails, the eighteen horses, from prideful lead team to the line backed
bronc on the off wheel, seemed to miss the unobtrusive care and
companionship of little Two Dog. Even the bells, weather tarnished and
dull, had lost something of their gallant silvery tone. The caboose was
a litter of cast off clothing, dirty dishes and blackened pots and
skillets. Man, horses, harness and wagons had a neglected appearance.
Nor was that all. There were complaints from Dutch John and Big Fred.
And on one occasion when the outfit had been snowbound a week, and had
taken three weeks to pull from the railroad into the twin towns of
Zortman and Landusky, the saloon men, becoming wrathful at the light
weight of a fifty-gallon barrel, checked up. The whisky was siphoned
into jugs. The barrel was twenty gallons short. And the gimlet marks
were plain to be seen.
Dutch John accused Jerk Line there in the saloon, before a big crowd.
Jerk Line knocked the old fellow through the front window and almost
into the arms of the deputy sheriff who happened to be passing. Jerk
Line was duly jailed, tried and fined. And the final outcome of it all
was this: The saloon men got together and bought a small freight outfit
of their own. A six horse outfit; a former stage driver for skinner. And
when Jerk Line threatened to work over this six horse skinner with a
stay chain, that gentleman borrowed Big Fred’s sawed-off shotgun and
sent word across the street where Jerk Line was doing his drinking.
“Tell that unwashed, louse bound jasper to come on with his stay chain.
This town needs a corpse about his size.”
The skinner had been a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo in Indian days
and meant just about what he said. Jerk Line ignored the message and
carried the bitterness of defeat into a sullen, sulking week of
inebriation.
* * * * *
Jerk Line still hauled powder and grub for the two camps under an old
contract. He still brought in an occasional barrel of whisky to
Landusky, for Jew Jake and old Pike Landusky were too ornery to side in
with the Zortman saloon men.
As the goose flies, Landusky is only about five miles or so across the
mountain from its sister town of Zortman. But the wagon road, heading
the coulees and cañons, is better than twelve miles. And there is the
Grouse Gulch grade. A sharp pitch, twisting and narrow. The skinner of a
jerk line team must need know his business to avoid disaster on the
Grouse Gulch hill. For if a wagon slipped off there, it dropped for a
hundred feet.
“Haulin’ powder down Grouse Gulch hill,” agreed the mule-skinner clan,
“is like sittin’ on the lid of hell.”
But since the departure of Two Dog, Jerk Line displayed a blood-chilling
contempt for powder that made even the hardened miners and “powder
monkeys” shiver. For powder, as any man who handles it will tell you, is
temperamental stuff. Freakish, sort of. And the tawny bearded freighter
handled it as if it were flour.
Perhaps, in his present unhealthy state of mind, Jerk Line blamed the
stuff for all his troubles. He hated powder as if the stuff were alive
and understood. He cursed it as he would curse a man, in terms of the
most terrible blasphemy. No swamper ever made a second trip with him.
The men at the powder house called him crazy. And perhaps they were
right. No man now stayed at his roadside camps for a meal or a drinking
bout; Jerk Line was likely to drive him off in a quick fit of anger. And
when men began to shun his company, Jerk Line grew the more sullen and
moody. Above the sound of bells and chains and creaking wheels could be
heard his big voice as he rode the nigh wheeler or walked alongside,
talking to himself. Jerk Line Smith was no longer quite sane.
Men pitied him without knowing why they did so. Landusky and Zortman did
not know that the bearded, rough-mouthed Jerk Line was grieving for the
companionship of Two Dog. They did not know that he sometimes lay awake
through the long night, calling in a broken, croaking whisper, for his
little partner. That in town or on the road his bloodshot eyes searched
with restless stare for a glimpse of Two Dog Moore.
They did not know, because Jerk Line hid his grief, covering it with
sulky brooding and fits of sudden anger.
Sometimes Jerk Line saw the band of wethers feeding up the wind among
the scrub pines, a dirty gray blotch against the white snow. Once or
twice he caught a brief glimpse of the dogs, as those sagacious animals
trotted around the lead of the band to turn them back. But even though
he stared until his eyes ached, he could catch no glimpse of Two Dog. He
did not guess that the little fellow often crouched within a stone’s
throw of the road where it dropped off the Grouse Gulch hill.
Of the affairs of Jerk Line Smith, Two Dog knew only what his watery
blue eyes told him. That was enough to upset the little fellow, so that
he lay awake far into the night, smoking and thinking and trying to
pray.
Two Dog saw the broken harness, the wheels that needed grease, the
tarnished, blackened bells, the uncurried coats of the horses he loved.
Jerk Line, his lanky frame bent across the hames of the nigh wheeler.
Tossing rocks from the canvas nosebag hung to the saddlehorn. Jerk Line,
bent over like an old man, his tawny hair and beard astonishingly gray.
Mumbling like a man drunk or gone mad. The trail wagon piled high with
powder.