My personage was a hen, and she lived at the Sunk Creek Ranch.
Judge Henry’s ranch was notable for several luxuries. He had milk, for
example. In those days his brother ranchmen had thousands of cattle very
often, but not a drop of milk, save the condensed variety. Therefore
they had no butter. The Judge had plenty. Next rarest to butter and milk
in the cattle country were eggs. But my host had chickens. Whether this
was because he had followed cock-fighting in his early days, or whether
it was due to Mrs. Henry, I cannot say. I only know that when I took a
meal elsewhere, I was likely to find nothing but the eternal “sowbelly,”
beans, and coffee; while at Sunk Creek the omelet and the custard were
frequent. The passing traveller was glad to tie his horse to the fence
here, and sit down to the Judge’s table. For its fame was as wide as
Wyoming. It was an oasis in the Territory’s desolate bill-of-fare.
The long fences of Judge Henry’s home ranch began upon Sunk Creek soon
after that stream emerged from its canyon through the Bow Leg. It was
a place always well cared for by the owner, even in the days of his
bachelorhood. The placid regiments of cattle lay in the cool of the
cottonwoods by the water, or slowly moved among the sage-brush, feeding
upon the grass that in those forever departed years was plentiful and
tall. The steers came fat off his unenclosed range and fattened still
more in his large pasture; while his small pasture, a field some eight
miles square, was for several seasons given to the Judge’s horses, and
over this ample space there played and prospered the good colts which
he raised from Paladin, his imported stallion. After he married, I have
been assured that his wife’s influence became visible in and about the
house at once. Shade trees were planted, flowers attempted, and to the
chickens was added the much more troublesome turkey. I, the visitor, was
pressed into service when I arrived, green from the East. I took hold of
the farmyard and began building a better chicken house, while the Judge
was off creating meadow land in his gray and yellow wilderness. When
any cow-boy was unoccupied, he would lounge over to my neighborhood, and
silently regard my carpentering.
Those cow-punchers bore names of various denominations. There was Honey
Wiggin; there was Nebrasky, and Dollar Bill, and Chalkeye. And they came
from farms and cities, from Maine and from California. But the romance
of American adventure had drawn them all alike to this great playground
of young men, and in their courage, their generosity, and their
amusement at me they bore a close resemblance to each other. Each one
would silently observe my achievements with the hammer and the chisel.
Then he would retire to the bunk-house, and presently I would overhear
laughter. But this was only in the morning. In the afternoon on many
days of the summer which I spent at the Sunk Creek Ranch I would go
shooting, or ride up toward the entrance of the canyon and watch the men
working on the irrigation ditches. Pleasant systems of water running
in channels were being led through the soil, and there was a sound of
rippling here and there among the yellow grain; the green thick alfalfa
grass waved almost, it seemed, of its own accord, for the wind never
blew; and when at evening the sun lay against the plain, the rift of the
canyon was filled with a violet light, and the Bow Leg Mountains became
transfigured with hues of floating and unimaginable color. The sun shone
in a sky where never a cloud came, and noon was not too warm nor the
dark too cool. And so for two months I went through these pleasant
uneventful days, improving the chickens, an object of mirth, living in
the open air, and basking in the perfection of content.
I was justly styled a tenderfoot. Mrs. Henry had in the beginning
endeavored to shield me from this humiliation; but when she found that I
was inveterate in laying my inexperience of Western matters bare to all
the world, begging to be enlightened upon rattlesnakes, prairie-dogs,
owls, blue and willow grouse, sage-hens, how to rope a horse or tighten
the front cinch of my saddle, and that my spirit soared into enthusiasm
at the mere sight of so ordinary an animal as a white-tailed deer, she
let me rush about with my firearms and made no further effort to stave
off the ridicule that my blunders perpetually earned from the ranch
hands, her own humorous husband, and any chance visitor who stopped for
a meal or stayed the night.
I was not called by my name after the first feeble etiquette due to a
stranger in his first few hours had died away. I was known simply as
“the tenderfoot.” I was introduced to the neighborhood (a circle
of eighty miles) as “the tenderfoot.” It was thus that Balaam, the
maltreater of horses, learned to address me when he came a two
days’ journey to pay a visit. And it was this name and my notorious
helplessness that bid fair to end what relations I had with the
Virginian. For when Judge Henry ascertained that nothing could prevent
me from losing myself, that it was not uncommon for me to saunter out
after breakfast with a gun and in thirty minutes cease to know north
from south, he arranged for my protection. He detailed an escort for me;
and the escort was once more the trustworthy man! The poor Virginian was
taken from his work and his comrades and set to playing nurse for me.
And for a while this humiliation ate into his untamed soul. It was his
lugubrious lot to accompany me in my rambles, preside over my blunders,
and save me from calamitously passing into the next world. He bore it in
courteous silence, except when speaking was necessary. He would show me
the lower ford, which I could never find for myself, generally mistaking
a quicksand for it. He would tie my horse properly. He would recommend
me not to shoot my rifle at a white-tailed deer in the particular moment
that the outfit wagon was passing behind the animal on the further side
of the brush. There was seldom a day that he was not obliged to hasten
and save me from sudden death or from ridicule, which is worse. Yet
never once did he lose his patience and his gentle, slow voice, and
apparently lazy manner remained the same, whether we were sitting at
lunch together, or up in the mountain during a hunt, or whether he
was bringing me back my horse, which had run away because I had again
forgotten to throw the reins over his head and let them trail.
“He’ll always stand if yu’ do that,” the Virginian would say. “See how
my hawss stays right quiet yondeh.”
After such admonition he would say no more to me. But this tame
nursery business was assuredly gall to him. For though utterly a man
in countenance and in his self-possession and incapacity to be put at
a loss, he was still boyishly proud of his wild calling, and wore his
leather straps and jingled his spurs with obvious pleasure. His tiger
limberness and his beauty were rich with unabated youth; and that force
which lurked beneath his surface must often have curbed his intolerance
of me. In spite of what I knew must be his opinion of me, the
tenderfoot, my liking for him grew, and I found his silent company more
and more agreeable. That he had spells of talking, I had already learned
at Medicine Bow. But his present taciturnity might almost have effaced
this impression, had I not happened to pass by the bunk-house one
evening after dark, when Honey Wiggin and the rest of the cow-boys were
gathered inside it.
That afternoon the Virginian and I had gone duck shooting. We had
found several in a beaver dam, and I had killed two as they sat close
together; but they floated against the breastwork of sticks out in the
water some four feet deep, where the escaping current might carry them
down the stream. The Judge’s red setter had not accompanied us, because
she was expecting a family.
“We don’t want her along anyways,” the cow-puncher had explained to me.
“She runs around mighty irresponsible, and she’ll stand a prairie-dog
’bout as often as she’ll stand a bird. She’s a triflin’ animal.”
My anxiety to own the ducks caused me to pitch into the water with
all my clothes on, and subsequently crawl out a slippery, triumphant,
weltering heap. The Virginian’s serious eyes had rested upon this
spectacle of mud; but he expressed nothing, as usual.
“They ain’t overly good eatin’,” he observed, tying the birds to his
saddle. “They’re divers.”
“Divers!” I exclaimed. “Why didn’t they dive?”
“I reckon they was young ones and hadn’t experience.”
“Well,” I said, crestfallen, but attempting to be humorous, “I did the
diving myself.”
But the Virginian made no comment. He handed me my double-barrelled
English gun, which I was about to leave deserted on the ground
behind me, and we rode home in our usual silence, the mean little
white-breasted, sharp-billed divers dangling from his saddle.
It was in the bunk-house that he took his revenge. As I passed I heard
his gentle voice silently achieving some narrative to an attentive
audience, and just as I came by the open window where he sat on his bed
in shirt and drawers, his back to me, I heard his concluding words,
“And the hat on his haid was the one mark showed yu’ he weren’t a
snappin’-turtle.”
The anecdote met with instantaneous success, and I hurried away into the
dark. The next morning I was occupied with the chickens. Two hens were
fighting to sit on some eggs that a third was daily laying, and which
I did not want hatched, and for the third time I had kicked Em’ly off
seven potatoes she had rolled together and was determined to raise I
know not what sort of family from. She was shrieking about the hen-house
as the Virginian came in to observe (I suspect) what I might be doing
now that could be useful for him to mention in the bunk-house.
He stood awhile, and at length said, “We lost our best rooster when Mrs.
Henry came to live hyeh.”