WIPED OUT
"It's shore wicked the way you curse, Old Timer," said Pinkey,
reprovingly, as Wallie came up from the corral carrying an empty milk
bucket in one hand and testing the other for broken bones. "I could hear
you talkin' to Rastus from whur I'm settin'."
Wallie exhibited a row of bruised knuckles and replied fiercely:
"If ever I had an immortal soul I've lost it since that calf came!
Between his bunting on one side and me milking on the other, the cow
kicked the pail over."
"Quirl you a brownie and blow it threw your hackamore and forgit it,"
said Pinkey, soothingly, as he handed him a book of cigarette papers,
with a sack of tobacco and made room for him on the door-sill. "I ain't
used to cow milk anyhow; air-tight is better."
Wallie took the offering but remained standing, rolling it dextrously as
he looked off at his eighty acres of spring wheat showing emerald green
in the light of a July sunset.
Pinkey eyed him critically--the tufts of hair which stood out like
brushes through the cracks in what had once been a fine Panama hat, his
ragged shirt, the faded overalls, the riding boots with heels so run
over that he walked on the side of them.
Unconscious of the scrutiny, Wallie continued to gaze in a kind of holy
ecstasy at his wheat-field until Pinkey ejaculated:
"My, but you've changed horrible!"
"How, changed?" Wallie asked, absently.
"You're so danged dirty! I should think you'd have to sand that shirt
before you could hold it to git into it."
"I hardly ever take it off," said Wallie. "I've been so busy I haven't
had time to think how I looked, but I hope now to have more leisure.
Pinkey," impressively, "I believe my troubles are about over."
"Don't you think it!" replied Pinkey, bluntly. "A dry-farmer kin have
six months of hard luck three times a year for four and five years,
hand-runnin'. In fact, they ain't no limit to the time and the kind of
things that kin happen to a dry-farmer."
"But what _could_ happen now?" Wallie asked, startled.
"It's too clost to bed-time fer me to start in tellin' you," said Pinkey,
drily.
"You're too pessimistic, Pinkey. I've prepared the soil and seed
according to the instructions in the Farmers' Bulletins from Washington,
and as a result I've got the finest stand of wheat around here--even
Boise Bill said so when he rode by yesterday."
"Rave on!" Pinkey looked at him mockingly. "It's pitiful to hear you.
You read them bulletins awhile and you won't know nothin'. I seen a
feller plant some corn his Congressman sent him and the ears was so hard
the pigs used to stand and squeal in front of 'em. But of course I'm
glad you're feelin' so lucky; I'm scairt of the feelin' myself for it
makes me take chances and I always git a jolt for it."
Wallie's face was sober as he confided:
"If anything went wrong I'd be done for. I'm so near broke that I count
my nickels like some old woman with her butter-and-egg money."
"I guessed it," said Pinkey, calmly, "from the rabbit fur I see layin'
around the dooryard."
"Nearly everything has cost double what I thought it would, but if I get
a good crop and the price of wheat holds up I'll come out a-flying."
"If nothin' happens," Pinkey supplemented.
"I want to show you one of those bulletins."
"I've seen plenty of 'em. You can't stop 'em once you git 'em started.
Them, and pamphlets tellin' us why we went to war, has killed off many a
mail-carrier that had to fight his way through blizzards, or be fined
fer not deliverin' 'em on schedule. I ain't strong fer gover'mint
literature."
Wallie stepped inside the cabin and brought out a pamphlet with an
illustration of twelve horses hitched to a combined harvester and
thresher, standing in a wheat-field of boundless acreage.
"There," he said, proudly, "you see my ambition!"
Pinkey regarded it, unexcited.
"That's a real nice picture," he said, finally, "but I thought you aimed
to go in for cattle?"
"I did. But I've soured on them since that calf came and I've been
milking."
Pinkey agreed heartily:
"I'd ruther 'swamp' fer a livin' than do low-down work like milkin'."
"When I come in at night, dog-tired and discouraged, I get out this
picture and look at it and tell myself that some day I'll be driving
twelve horses on a thresher. A chap thinks and does curious things when
he has nobody but himself for company."
"That's me, too," said Pinkey, understandingly. "When I'm off alone
huntin' stock, I ride fer hours wonderin' if it's so that you kin make
booze out of a raisin."
"Let's walk out and look at the wheat," Wallie suggested.
Pinkey complied obligingly, though farming was an industry in which he
took no interest.
Wallie's pride in his wheat was inordinate. He never could get over a
feeling of astonishment that the bright green grain had come from seeds
of his planting--that it was his--and he would reap the benefit. Nature
was more wonderful than he had realized and he never before had
appreciated her. He always forgot the heart-breaking and back-breaking
labour when he stood as now, surveying with glowing face the even green
carpet stretching out before him. In such moments he found his
compensation for all he had gone through since he arrived in Wyoming,
and he smiled pityingly as he thought of the people at The Colonial,
rocking placidly on the veranda.
"Did you ever see anything prettier?" Wallie demanded, his eyes shining.
"It's all right," Pinkey murmured, absently.
"You're not looking," Wallie said, sharply.
"I was watchin' them cattle."
"I don't see any."
Pinkey pointed, but Wallie could see nothing.
"If they got cows on Mars, I'll bet I could read the bran's," Pinkey
boasted. "Can't you see them specks movin' off yonder?"
Wallie admitted he could not.
"It's cattle, and they act like somebody's drivin' 'em," Pinkey
declared, positively. "Looks like it's too early to be movin' 'em to the
mountain."
His curiosity satisfied, he gave the wheat his attention.
"It looks fine, Wallie," he said with sincerity.
Wallie could not resist crowing:
"You didn't think I'd last, did you? Miss Spenceley didn't, either.
She'll be disappointed very likely when she hears I've succeeded."
"Don't cackle till you've laid your aig, Gentle Annie. When you've
thrashed and sold your grain and got your money in the bank, then I'll
help you. We'll git drunk if I have to rob a drug-store."
"You're always putting a damper on me. It was you who advised me to go
in for dry-farming," Wallie reminded him.
"I figgered that if you lived through a year of it," Pinkey replied,
candidly, "then almost anything else would look like a snap to you."
It was plain that in spite of his prospects Pinkey was not sanguine, but
in this moment of his exultation failure seemed impossible to Wallie.
In various small ways Canby had tried to break him and had not
succeeded. Boise Bill had prophesied that he would not "winter"--yet
here he was with every reason to believe that he would also "summer."
Wallie felt rather invincible as he reflected upon it, and the aurora
borealis did not exceed in colour the outlook his fancy painted that
evening.
"It's eight-thirty," Pinkey hinted. "When I set up till all hours I
over-sleep in the morning."
Wallie came to earth reluctantly, and as he returned to the cabin he
again permitted himself the luxury of pitying the folk of The Colonial
who knew nothing of such rapturous moments in that stale, uneventful
world which was so remote and different from the present that it was
beginning to seem like a dream to him.
They had been asleep for an hour, more possibly, when Pinkey nudged
Wallie violently.
"What's that huffin', do you reckon?"
Wallie awoke with a start and listened.
"Huffing" was the right word. Lying next to the logs, some large animal
was breathing so heavily in Wallie's ear that it sounded like a bellows.
He peered through a crack and saw something that looked like a mastodon
in the darkness tugging at a sack he had used for chinking. It was not a
horse and was too large for his Jersey. It flashed through his mind that
it might be a roaming silvertip from the mountain.
Pinkey was out of the bunk at a bound and around the corner of the
cabin, where his suspicions were instantly verified.
"It's a bull!" he shouted. "I thought it. Looks like a thousand head of
cattle tramplin' down your wheat-field!"
Wallie turned sick. He could not move for a moment. His air-castles fell
so hard he could almost hear them.
"Do you think they've been in long?" he asked, weakly.
"Can't tell till daylight." Pinkey was getting into his clothes
hurriedly.
Wallie was now in the doorway and he could make out innumerable dark
shapes browsing contentedly in his grain-field.
"What'll we do?" he asked, despairingly.
"Do?" replied Pinkey, savagely, tugging at his boot straps. "I'll send
one whur the dogs won't bite him with every ca'tridge. We'll run a
thousand dollars' worth of taller off the rest of 'em. Git into your
clothes, Gentle Annie, and we'll smoke 'em up proper."
"I don't see how it could happen," said Wallie, his voice trembling.
"The fence was good!"
"If it had been twenty feet high 'twould 'a' been all the same," Pinkey
answered. "Them cattle was _drove_ in."
"You mean----" Wallie's mouth opened.
"Shore--Canby! It come to my mind last night when I seen that bunch
movin'. Pretty coarse work I call it, but he thought you was alone and
wouldn't ketch on to it."
"He'll pay for this!" cried Wallie, chokingly.
"You can't do nothin' with him but deal him misery. He's got too much
money and pull fer you. Do you know what I think's gnawin' on him?"
"My taking up a homestead----"
"That, too, but mostly because Helene dressed him down for sellin' that
locoed team to you. He's jealous."
Even in his despair Wallie felt pleased that any one, especially Canby,
should be jealous of him because of Helene Spenceley.
"He aims to marry her," Pinkey added. "I wisht you could beat his time
and win yerself a home somehow. I don't think you got any show, but if I
was you I'd take another turn around my saddle-horn and hang on.
Whenever I kin," kindly, "I'll speak a good word for you. Throw your
saddle on your horse and step, young feller. I'm gone!"
The faint hope which Wallie had nursed that the damage might not be so
great as he had feared vanished with daylight. Not only was the grain
trampled so the field looked like a race course, but panel after panel
of the fence was down where the quaking-asp posts had snapped like
lead-pencils.
As Pinkey and Wallie surveyed it in the early dawn Wallie's voice had a
catch in it when he said finally:
"I guess I'm done farming. They made a good job of it."
"I'm no 'sharp' but it looks to me like some of that wheat would
straighten up if it got a good wettin'."
Wallie said grimly:
"The only thing I forgot to buy when I was outfitting in Philadelphia
was a rain-making apparatus."
"On the level," Pinkey declared, earnestly, "I bleeve we're goin' to
have a shower--the clouds bankin' up over there in the northwest is what
made me think of it."
Wallie's short laugh was cynical.
"It might drown somebody half a mile from me but it wouldn't settle the
dust in my dooryard."
"I see you're gittin' homesteaditis," Pinkey commented, "but jest the
same them clouds look like they meant business."
Wallie felt a glimmer of hope in spite of himself and he scrutinized the
clouds closely.
"They do look black," he admitted. "But since it hasn't rained for two
months it seems too much to expect that it will rain when I need it so
desperately."
"It's liable to do anything. I've seen it snow here in August. A
fur-lined linen duster is the only coat fer this country. I'll gamble
it's goin' to do _somethin'_, but only the Big Boss knows what."
During breakfast they got up at intervals to look through the doorway,
and while they washed dishes and tidied the cabin they watched the
northwest anxiously.
"She's movin' right along," Pinkey reported. "It might be a stiddy rain,
and then agin it might be a thunder-shower, though you don't often look
for 'em in the morning."
The light grew subdued with the approaching storm and Wallie commented
upon the coolness. Then he went out in the dooryard and stood a moment.
"The clouds are black as ink, and how still it is," he said,
wonderingly. "There isn't a breath of air stirring."
Pinkey was sitting on the floor oiling his saddle when he tilted his
head suddenly, and listened. He got up abruptly and stood in the
doorway, concentrating all his faculties upon some sound of which he
alone was cognizant, for Wallie was aware of nothing unusual save the
uncanny stillness.
"Hear that?" The sharp note in Pinkey's voice filled Wallie with a
nameless fear.
"No--what?"
"That roar--can't you hear it?"
Wallie listened intently.
"Yes--like a crashing--what is it?"
"Hail! And a terror! We've got to run the stock in." He was off with
Wallie following and together they got the cow and horses under shelter
with all the haste possible.
The sound preceded the storm by some little time, but each moment the
roar and the crash of it grew louder and when it finally reached them
Wallie gazed open-mouthed.
Accustomed to hail like tapioca, he never had seen anything like the
big, jagged chunks of ice which struck the ground with such force that
they bounded into the air again. Any one of them would have knocked a
man unconscious. It seemed as if they would batter his roof in, and they
came so thick that the stable and corral could be seen only
indistinctly.
They both stood in the doorway, fascinated and awe-stricken.
"Hear it pound! This is the worst I've seen anywhur. You're licked,
Gentle Annie."
"Yes," said Wallie with a white face. "This finishes me."
"You'll have to kiss your wheat good-bye. It'll be beat into the ground
too hard ever to straighten." He laid an arm about Wallie's shoulder and
there was a sympathy in his voice few had heard there:
"You've put up a good fight, old pardner, and even if you are counted
out, it's no shame to you. You've done good fer a Scissor-bill, Gentle
Annie."
Wallie clenched his hands and shook himself free of Pinkey's arm while
his tense voice rang out above the clatter and crash of the storm:
"I'm not licked! I _won't_ be licked! _I'm going to stick, somehow!_ And
what's more," he turned to Pinkey fiercely, "if you don't stop calling
me 'Gentle Annie,' I'll knock your block off!"
Pinkey looked at him with his pale, humorous eyes and beamed
approvingly.