it made scarcely any difference in his gait. The only difference was in
the trail he made, and from that he was known as Scartoe.
The hurt the cow gave him healed with astonishing rapidity, for sunlight
and dry air are Nature’s magicians. While taking a siesta in front of
his den next afternoon and tenderly licking the ragged wound, he was
witness of a strange encounter. His pups were frisking about, tumbling
and growling and snapping in youthful enjoyment of life, while the
mother lay beside him, encouraging these evidences of prospective adult
ferocity.
At the foot of the knoll whereon they reposed, something rose, wavering,
with a fear-thrilling rattle, and the pups scattered. At the same moment
a sharp hiss answered this first challenge. With eyes glowing and ears
cocked, husband and wife waited for the battle between these enemies.
A dark green reptile with cream-colored bands, about forty inches in
length, was circling a rattler. The latter lay coiled, ready to strike,
his folds curling and uncurling in long ripples as his head turned to
follow the movements of his enemy. Fully six feet in length he was and
of a prodigious thickness; but fear had already entered the heart of
him. The king-snake sped around him with the speed of light; once,
twice, thrice the rattler launched a blow, but there was no foe there.
Then the malignant killer was on him.
A king-snake is immune from the rattler’s poison and wages constant
warfare on all reptiles. Such is the steel-wire strength of his coils
that the size of an adversary never daunts him for an instant. He will
tackle a snake twice his size and weight, and he will kill him, too. It
was all over in a few minutes. Round and round his victim he folded
himself; each second the pressure increased. There was some desperate
flaying of the ground as the combatants struggled, for the enemy of all
brute creation was fighting for his life. When he lay dead, the
king-snake let go and tried to swallow him. He did, in fact, get him
half down, but the practical difficulty in the way of surrounding an
object larger than one’s self triumphed over his appetite. So he gave up
the attempt and the reptile.
* * * * *
“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow.”
Scartoe stood on a butte, with his nose pointing to the moon, his tail
between his legs, and weirdly gave vent to his feelings in song. It
began with two short barks and trailed into a succession of piercing,
reverberating yelps, that melted into one another and rolled and echoed,
as by the ventriloquist’s art, until the night grew hideous with the
clamor. One would have sworn that a hundred coyotes held the hill, and
were indulging in some funereal close-harmony.
This was his evensong. It came welling from his throat in a flood, in
spite of him, and the coyote could no more control the impulse, the
inheritance of ages, than a man can choke back the hiccoughs. His
stomach would retch and his neck muscles work in the throes of it until
the song was released. Once again, in the course of twenty-four hours,
did the impulse seize him. Just before the sun crept over the edge of
the world his nose would be tilted toward the gray vault of heaven.
“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow!”
He desisted at last and, considerably uplifted, departed on his hunt for
food. A score of his fellows he met in his prowling, some hunting in
couples; but Scartoe was a family man and a lone marauder, and would
have none of them. In the half million acres composing the ranch were
fully four hundred of his brethren. This in spite of a once vigorous
warfare, in which poison and trap and gun and dog had been the weapons.
In the last three years the campaign against the coyotes had waned,
though each head would bring the taker a bounty at the county-seat and
another at headquarters.
It is not to be wondered at that the thieves became arrogant and
venturesome. They reveled in their depredations and pitted their keen
wits against man’s intelligence with increasing boldness. What if twenty
thousand of their brethren had been killed in the previous twelvemonth,
in the national forest preserves alone? Many times twenty thousand
survived in the cattle country; and official estimate gives it that each
coyote does damage to stock to the amount of one hundred dollars
annually. Scartoe must have passed, on the silent trails in his night
hunt, the destroyers of ten thousand dollars’ worth of stock in a year.
Once he paused in a patch of broomweed to send his doleful cry to the
stars. It gurgled from his throat like water from a bottle. He gave
tongue no more that night. From the mouth of a cañon, far to his right,
sounded a long-drawn howl, plaintive, threatening. Hardly had it ceased
than a piercing scream broke from a hackberry tree within a hundred
yards of where Scartoe crouched. Truly the lords of the wilds were
abroad to-night; but it was not the panther’s cry which drove Scartoe
from the trail. What he was giving right-of-way to was the lobo.
The coyote drew off a short distance and sank humbly to earth as a
loafer wolf came running out of the shadows. He was a huge fellow,
almost red along the back, gray as to his underbody, and he loped
purposefully, bent on slaughter. Scartoe sank lower and groveled. In
imagination he was fawning upon this mighty creature that inspired him
with dread and respect; for, though of the same race, they were far
apart as the poles. He knew the magnificent courage of the loafer and,
when the King hunted, to him belonged the trail.
He watched him go by, and once more wended his devious way across
country. A nice little scheme had hatched in his brain as he lay there,
born of a long-time feud. Forty turkeys, eighty chickens and nineteen
cocks were now to his credit; to the credit of the ranch-house cook
stood the toes of his left foreleg. One turkey-gobbler remained--that he
knew with accuracy, and Scartoe speculated pleasurably thereon.
Had he been a human being, he would have laughed as he slid under the
outer barb-wire fence at headquarters. Ten paces away he had scented the
handiwork of man. Sprinkle and smooth the sand as he might, set bait and
lay trap ever so cunningly, the cook could not foil that marvelous
instinct. There were but two holes by which Scartoe could enter the pen;
before he started he was well aware that a trap lay in each. Approaching
one, three feet from it, he scratched loose stones and earth behind him
in a shower on a spot which looked too smooth and inviting to his eye
and where his nose told him a man had fussed with his hands.
At last he was rewarded. A stick he rolled over touched the spring, and
the steel jaws leaped together with a clash. He proceeded to dig all
around the trap until it was wholly exposed, after which he gave a
disdainful sniff and jumped over it. Thirty seconds later he emerged
from the pen bearing a fine, fat gobbler, and away he went, careless of
the trail of feathers his dragging prey made.
“You-all kin see for yourself what he done,” cried the cook, gloriously
profane, next morning. “He knowed that was there all the time and simply
sprung it. Got that lil’ ol’ gobbler, too; last one I had.”
“Ki-yotes is shore smart,” the straw boss agreed. “Smart as humans, I
reckon.”
“Smart as humans?” the cook retorted contemptuously. “Why, ol’ Dick is a
human.”
“That’s so,” said the straw boss thoughtfully. “Well, they’s smarter,
then; smart as a good hoss.”
“That ol’ ki-yote and me’s been fighting for three years. I near had him
once; but he done chawed his foot off--they’s that treacherous. Only
last week I done set a rooster in that mesquite tree there, and put
traps all around. He had to step in one to git that bird. Know what he
done?” The cook’s voice rose to a howl. “I’ll eat my shirt if he didn’t
go off and git a friend, who sprung the trap and got caught. Yes, sir.
Then ol’ Scartoe, he done jump in and got the rooster.”
“Ever try poison?”
“Won’t touch it. He kin smell strych-nine farther’n he kin see. Ate some
once and near died, I reckon, for I seen the place where he was took
sick. Every trap I set, he just scratches stones or sticks on to it
until he springs the thing.”
The straw boss, riding to a division camp the next day, came upon
Scartoe trying to imitate a rock as he slept on the brow of a hill. The
rider had no gun, but got down his rope and rode toward the sleeper
carelessly, so as not to alarm him. The coyote let him approach within
thirty yards, then awoke to yawn; but he was wrong in his estimate of
the straw boss, because that worthy gentleman, hot with the memory of
the recent indignity, let out a whoop and gave chase. Before he could
warm up into anything like his usual form, a rope sped through the air
and encircled Scartoe’s neck.
Now, there are three rules to observe in roping coyotes. The first is
not to rope them, and the other two do not matter. A noose was nothing
new to Scartoe and he knew the parry. Before it could tighten and jerk
him into eternity, he took one slashing bite at it and the rope parted,
cut clean. Next moment the coyote had mingled with the scenery.
He was a serious-minded animal, yet he permitted himself some
diversions. When his wife found the remains of the beef, Scartoe
realized that there was a round-up in progress, which meant food in
plenty, and he took to following the outfit from camp to camp, singing
to them about nine o’clock every night and again before the dawn. They
showed their appreciation by taking pot shots at him with a .30-30; but
he bore a charmed life. He managed to pick up much good meat by this
association, too, for the outfit killed a heifer every other day and
left enough to feed half a dozen coyotes. Sometimes he had to scare away
foolish cows or steers, which, attracted by the smell of blood, would be
holding moaning wakes over the remains; and always he had to be on the
watch for the buzzards or they would forestall him.
Lightly footing it about camp one night, he startled a work-horse,
himself a night prowler, bent on stealing buns from the chuck-wagon
which he helped to haul during the day. A coyote would never attack a
horse, placing too much value on his life, but this beast was a young,
inexperienced creature and did not know that. With a snort of dismay, he
dashed off. Pleased with himself, Scartoe gave chase in pure sport,
precisely as a playful dog might have done. Twice around the camp they
ran, then through it, stampeding eleven staked horses and smashing the
guy-ropes of the fly, which fell on the cook, who never claimed to be a
Christian and had no fears of an after-life.
The punchers awoke, cursing volubly, and one of them, sleeping remote
from the others on the edge of camp, shied a boot at the wolf. He
stopped in his run, smelled of it, then bore it homeward. It would make
a fine plaything for the babies. The puncher rode twenty-seven miles to
headquarters next day, in his socks, to get a new pair of boots.
Four months passed thus pleasurably. Sometimes the family nearly
starved, at others the puppies sagged in the middle from overeating.
Always there were bones and odds and ends of hides old Scartoe had
hidden away to gnaw on in moments of leisure, but they made poor stays
to hunger.
When winter shut down on the land Scartoe got rid of wife and children.
He simply wandered off when the puppies grew big enough to care for
themselves; and he found another home in an isolated ravine. In the cold
nights that followed he took to consorting with other bachelors, roving
spirits all. Very often they hunted in bands. They were few in number,
because it is not coyote nature to run in packs, but this union gave
them strength and made them infinitely more dangerous. Two score times
they stalked and killed lonely, unprotected calves.
Later, they were so hard put to it for food that courage was born in
them. One night four surrounded an eight-months’-old steer one of them
would never have tackled singly, and slew him. It was Scartoe who
devised the plan that the three should run him by a bush, behind which
he crouched. It was Scartoe who leapt swiftly, unerringly, for the nose
and brought him down. And it was he who got the lion’s share of the
spoils.
Yet they were cowards for all that. A coyote is always a coward, even
when driven frantic by hunger.
With the storm kings holding sway, their foraging became less and less
fruitful. Several of his race departed for new hunting grounds, but
Scartoe stayed in his own domain and weathered the gales.
Twice had he to eat of his own kind. Toward break of a wintry day he and
one companion slunk homeward from an unsuccessful scout, their empty
stomachs crying aloud for flesh. They watched each other in suspicion,
for in each one the same desire was uppermost. Ahead of them, crossing
their trail, a wounded coyote dragged himself--spent, done almost to
death in a grapple with a nester’s dog. They fell upon and slew and ate
him. Later, a full month, or perhaps two, when the same companion grew
wasted and weak from hunger, and in all the forsaken country they could
not kill, when not even a field mouse rewarded long hours of hunting,
Scartoe ran at him and, with one shrewd stroke upward, slit his throat
and let out the life blood. He ate his fill and came once more into his
strength.
Only once during that time of stress did he pit his cunning against
man’s guile. That was when the snow was off the ground and a party of
visitors at the ranch-house hunted him with imported dogs. Scartoe made
the most glorious mess of his trail. He went back on it, crossed,
recrossed, waded up-stream, returned to the starting point, and employed
all the tricks his long years had taught him. Then he lay down behind a
dead prickly pear and watched the hunt; watched the chagrin of the men;
watched every movement of the dogs, nosing and worrying. Tiring of this
in half an hour, he went to his den and slept. They never untangled the
web of his weaving.
When spring came Scartoe was looking shabby. He was morose, too, and had
a longing for companionship. A week of fine weather improved him so that
he was almost the Scartoe of old; but the longing for companionship was
tenfold greater.
On a February morn he lifted up his voice to herald the dawn.
“Bow-wow! Ki-yi, yeow-eow-eow-eow-eow.”
A joyous bark answered. It was not the call of his kind, yet it thrilled
him, for in it there was a note he knew. He stiffened and trembled with
expectation. A young collie came bounding toward him. She paused
doubtfully a dozen yards away and growled. Scartoe threw up his head,
thrust out his tail from its usual abject droop and went toward her
blithely. Then his hair bristled, his muscles tightened and he was ready
for combat.
Behind her came another coyote. He was big. Even the veteran, large as
he was, appeared small in comparison. Where the newcomer had picked up
the living that had given him such weight was a puzzle; but certain it
was he had ten pounds the better of it. Not a thought gave Scartoe to
that handicap.
The big wolf wasted no time in preliminaries. His strength and skill had
been tried in mêlées innumerable, and foes had been swept before him
like chaff. But Scartoe was a general. Like lightning he dodged the
swift rush; like lightning he ripped even as he swerved, tearing a piece
from his enemy’s neck. Coyotes will not grapple and cling with locked
jaws, as do the brave among dogs; they depend on the swift cutting
powers of their dexterous jaws. Three times they came together; three
times old Scartoe gashed his antagonist so that the blood spurted. Still
he could not quite reach the throat for the death stroke.
And then the end came. Too eager in his desire to finish the battle, he
left himself open for the merest flick of time, as he wheeled for a
fourth onslaught. With one hurtling, upward dive, the big brute gained
the jugular, and Scartoe was thrown back, his throat torn, the life
ebbing from him.
The collie frisked about the victor, playfully showing her teeth, and
they trotted away together.
An hour after sunup, the ranch-house cook, on a quest for his infant
son’s collie pet, came upon the torn, lifeless body.
“Jumping Jupiter!” he exclaimed, prayerfully. “It’s ol’ Scartoe.”
III
CORAZÓN
A man is as good as his nerves
--Cowboy maxim.
With manes streaming in the wind, a band of bronchos fled across the
grama flats, splashed through the San Pedro, and whirled sharply to the
right, heading for sanctuary in the Dragoons. In the lead raced a big
sorrel, his coat shimmering like polished gold where the sun touched it.
“That’s Corazón,” exclaimed Reb. “Head him or we’ll lose the bunch.”
The pursuers spread out and swept round in a wide semicircle. Corazón
held to his course, a dozen yards in advance of the others, his head
high. The chase slackened, died away. With a blaring neigh, the sorrel
eased his furious pace and the entire band came to a trot. Before them
were the mountains, and Corazón knew their fastnesses as the street
urchin knows the alleys that give him refuge; in the cañons the bronchos
would be safe from man. Behind was no sign of the enemy. His nose in the
wind, he sniffed long, but it bore him no taint. Instead, he nickered
with delight, for he smelled water. They swung to the south, and in less
than five minutes their hot muzzles were washed by the bubbling waters
of Eternity Spring.
Corazón drew in a long breath, expanding his well-ribbed sides, and
looked up from drinking. There in front of him, fifty paces away, was a
horseman. He snorted the alarm and they plunged into a tangle of
sagebrush. Another rider bore down and turned them back. To right and
left they darted, then wheeled and sought desperately to break through
the cordon at a weak spot, and failed. Wherever they turned, a cowboy
appeared as by magic. At last Corazón detected an unguarded area and
flew through it with the speed of light.
“Now we’ve got ’em,” howled Reb. “Don’t drive too close, but keep ’em
headed for the corral.”
Within a hundred yards of the gate, the sorrel halted, his ears cocked
in doubt. The cowboys closed in to force the band through. Three times
the bronchos broke and scattered, for to their wild instincts the fences
and that narrow aperture cried treachery and danger. They were gathered,
with whoops and many imprecations, and once more approached the
entrance.
“Drive the saddle bunch out,” commanded the range boss.
Forth came the remuda of a hundred horses. The bronchos shrilled
greeting and mingled with them, and when the cow-ponies trotted meekly
into the corral, Corazón and his band went too, though they shook and
were afraid.
For five years Corazón had roamed the range--ever since he had
discovered that grass was good to eat, and so had left the care of his
tender-eyed mother. Because he dreaded the master of created things and
fled him afar, only once during that time had he seen man at close
quarters. That was when, as a youngster, he was caught and branded on
the left hip. He had quickly forgotten that; until now it had ceased to
be even a memory.
But now he and his companion rovers were prisoners, cooped in a corral
by a contemptible trick. They crowded around and around the stout
enclosure, sometimes dropping to their knees in efforts to discover an
exit beneath the boards. And not twenty feet away, the dreaded axis of
their circlings, sat a man on a horse, and he studied them calmly. Other
men, astride the fence, were uncoiling ropes, and their manner was
placid and businesslike. One opined dispassionately that “the sorrel is
shore some horse.”
“You’re damn whistlin’,” cried the buster over his shoulder, in hearty
affirmation.
Corazón was the most distracted of all the band. He was in a frenzy of
nervous fear, his glossy coat wet and foam-flecked. He would not stand
still for a second, but prowled about the wooden barrier like a jungle
creature newly prisoned in a cage. Twice he nosed the ground and crooked
his forelegs in an endeavor to slide through the six inches of clear
space beneath the gate, and the outfit laughed derisively.
“Here goes,” announced the buster in his expressionless tones. “You-all
watch out, now. Hell’ll be poppin’.”
At that moment Corazón took it into his head to dash at top speed
through his friends, huddled in a bunch in a corner. A rope whined and
coiled, and, when he burst out of the jam, the noose was around his
neck, tightening so as to strangle him. Madly he ran against it, superb
in the sureness of his might. Then he squalled with rage and pain and an
awful terror. His legs flew from under him, and poor Corazón was jerked
three feet into the air, coming down on his side with smashing force.
The fall shook a grunt out of him, and he was stunned and breathless,
but unhurt. He staggered to his feet, his breath straining like a
bellows, for the noose cut into his neck and he would not yield to its
pressure.
Facing him was the man on the bay. His mount stood with feet braced,
sitting back on the rope, and he and his rider were quite collected and
cool and prepared. The sorrel’s eyes were starting from his head; his
nostrils flared wide, gaping for the air that was denied him, and the
breath sucked in his throat. It seemed as if he must drop. Suddenly the
buster touched his horse lightly with the spur and slackened the rope.
With a long sob, Corazón drew in a life-giving draught, his gaze fixed
in frightened appeal on his captor.
“Open the gate,” said Mullins, without raising his voice.
He flicked the rope over Corazón’s hind quarters, and essayed to drive
him into the next corral, to cut him off from his fellows. The sorrel
gave a gasp of dismay and lunged forward. Again he was lifted from the
ground, and came down with a thud that left him shivering.
“His laig’s done bust!” exclaimed the boss.
“No; he’s shook up, that’s all. Wait awhile.”
A moment later Corazón raised his head painfully; then, life and courage
coming back with a rush, he lurched to his feet. Mullins waited with
unabated patience. The sorrel was beginning to respect that which
encircled his neck and made naught of his strength, and when the buster
flipped the rope again, he ran through the small gate, and brought up
before he had reached the end of his tether.
Two of the cowboys stepped down languidly from the fence, and took
position in the center of the corral.
“Hi, Corazón! Go it, boy!” they yelled, and spurred by their cries, the
horse started off at a trot. Reb tossed his loop,--flung it carelessly,
with a sinuous movement of the wrist,--and when Corazón had gone a few
yards, he found his forefeet ensnared. Enraged at being thus cramped, he
bucked and bawled; but, before Reb could settle on the rope, he came to
a standstill and sank his teeth into the strands. Once, twice, thrice he
tugged, but could make no impression. Then he pitched high in air, and--
“NOW!” shrieked Reb.
They heaved with might and main, and Corazón flopped in the dust. Quick
as a cat, he sprang upright and bolted; but again they downed him, and,
while Reb held the head by straddling the neck, his confederate twined
dexterously with a stake-rope. There lay Corazón, helpless and almost
spent, trussed up like a sheep for market: they had hog-tied him.
It was the buster who put the hackamore on his head. Very deliberately
he moved. Corazón sensed confidence in the touch of his fingers; they
spoke a language to him, and he was soothed by the sureness of
superiority they conveyed. He lay quiet. Then Reb incautiously shifted
his position, and the horse heaved and raised his head, banging Mullins
across the ear. The buster’s senses swam, but instead of flying into a
rage, he became quieter, more deliberate; in his cold eyes was a
vengeful gleam, and dangerous stealth lurked in his delicate
manipulation of the strands. An excruciating pain shot through the
sorrel’s eye: Mullins had gouged him.
“Let him up.” It was the buster again, atop the bay, making the rope
fast with a double half-hitch over the horn of the saddle.
Corazón arose, dazed and very sick. But his spirit was unbreakable.
Again and again he strove to tear loose, rearing, falling back, plunging
to the end of the rope until he was hurled off his legs to the ground.
When he began to weary, Mullins encouraged him to fight, that he might
toss him.
“I’ll learn you what this rope means,” he remarked, as the broncho
scattered the dust for the ninth time, and remained there, completely
done up.