LITMIR.BIZ

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his affairs they speedily forgot for a time, in the diversion which Rusty Brown’s familiar place afforded to young men with unjaded nerves and a zest for the primitive pleasures. Not until mid-afternoon did it occur to them that Flying U coulee was deserted by all save old Patsy, and that there were chores to be done, if all the creatures of the coulee would sleep in comfort that night. Pink, therefore, withdrew his challenge to the bunch, and laid his billiard cue down with a sigh and the remark that all he lacked was time, to have the scalps of every last one of them hanging from his belt. Pink was figurative in his speech, you will understand; and also a bit vainglorious over beating Andy Green and Big Medicine twice in succession.

      It occurred to Weary then that a word of cheer to the Old Man and his anxious watchers might not cone amiss. Therefore the Happy Family mounted and rode to the depot to send it, and on the way wrangled over the wording of the message after their usual contentious manner.

      “Better tell ‘em everything is fine, at this end uh the line,” Cal suggested, and was hooted at for a poet.

      “Just say,” Weary began, when he was interrupted by the discordant clamor from a trainload of sheep that had just pulled in and stopped. “‘Maa-aa, Ma-a-aaa,’ darn yuh,” he shouted derisively, at the peering, plaintive faces, glimpsed between the close-set bars. “Mamma, how I do love sheep!” Whereupon he put spurs to his horse and galloped down to the station to rid his ears of the turbulent wave of protest from the cars.

      Naturally it required some time to compose the telegram in a style satisfactory to all parties. Outside, cars banged together, an engine snorted stertorously, and suffocating puffs of coal smoke now and then invaded the waiting-room while the Happy Family were sending that message of cheer to Chicago. If you are curious, the final version of their combined sentiments was not at all spectacular. It said merely:

      “Everything fine here. Take good care of the Old Man. How’s the Kid stacking up?”

      It was signed simply “The Bunch.”

      “Mary’s little lambs are here yet, I see,” the Native Son remarked carelessly when they went out. “Enough lambs for all the Marys in the country. How would you like to be Mary?”

      “Not for me,” Irish declared, and turned his face away from the stench of them.

      Others there were who rode the length of the train with faces averted and looks of disdain; cowmen, all of them, they shared the range prejudice, and took no pains to hide it.

      The wind blew strong from the east, that day; it whistled through the open, double-decked cars packed with gray, woolly bodies, whose voices were ever raised in strident complaint; and the stench of them smote the unaccustomed nostrils of the Happy Family and put them to disgusted flight up the track and across it to where the air was clean again.

      “Honest to grandma, I’d make the poorest kind of a sheepherder,” Big Medicine bawled earnestly, when they were well away from the noise and smell of the detested animals. “If I had to herd sheep, by cripes, do you know what I’d do? I’d haze ‘em into a coulee and turn loose with a good rifle and plenty uh shells, and call in the coyotes to git a square meal. That’s the way I’d herd sheep. It’s the only way you can shut ‘em up. They just ‘baa-aa, baa-aa, baa-aa’ from the time they’re dropped till somebody kills ‘em off. Honest, they blat in their sleep. I’ve heard ‘em.”

      “When you and the dogs were shooting off coyotes?” asked Andy Green pointedly, and so precipitated dissension which lasted for ten miles.

Chapter V. Sheep

       Table of Contents

      Slim rising first from dinner on the next day but one opened the door of the mess-house, and stood there idly picking his teeth before he went about his work. After a minute of listening to the boys “joshing” old Patsy about some gooseberry pies he had baked without sugar, he turned his face outward, threw up his head like a startled bull, and began to sniff.

      “Say, I smell sheep, by golly!” he announced in the bellowing tone which was his conversational voice, and sniffed again.

      “Oh, that’s just a left-over in your system from the dose yuh got in town Sunday,” Weary explained soothingly. “I’ve smelled sheep, and tasted sheep, and dreamed sheep, ever since.”

      “No, by golly, it’s sheep! It ain’t no memory. I—I b’hieve I hear ‘em, too, by golly.” Slim stepped out away from the building and faced suspiciously down the coulee.

      “Slim, I never suspected you of imagination before,” the Native Son drawled, and loitered out to where Slim stood still sniffing. “I wonder if you’re catching it from Andy and me. Don’t you think you ought to be vaccinated?”

      “That ain’t imagination,” Pink called out from within. “When anybody claims there’s sheep in Flying U coulee, that’s straight loco.”

      “Come on out here and smell ‘em yourself, then!” Slim bawled indignantly. “I never seen such an outfit as this is gittin’ to be; you fellers don’t believe nobody, no more. We ain’t all Andy Greens.”

      Upon hearing this Andy pushed back his chair and strolled outside. He clapped his hand down upon Slim’s fat-cushioned shoulder and swayed him gently. “Never mind, Slim; you can’t all be famous,” he comforted. “Some day, maybe, I’ll teach yuh the fine art of lying more convincingly than the ordinary man can tell the truth. It is a fine art; it takes a genius to put it across. Now, the only time anybody doubts my word is when I’m sticking to the truth hike a sand burr to a dog’s tail.”

      From away to the west, borne on the wind which swept steadily down the coulee, came that faint, humming sing-song, which can be made only by a herd of a thousand or more sheep, all blatting in different keys—or by a distant band playing monotonously upon the middle octave of their varied instruments.

      “Slim’s right, by gracious! It’s sheep, sure as yuh live.” Andy did not wait for more, but started at a fast walk for the stable and his horse. After him went the Native Son, who had not been with the Flying U long enough to sense the magnitude of the affront, and Slim, who knew to a nicety just what “cowmen” considered the unpardonable sin, and the rest of the Happy Family, who were rather incredulous still.

      “Must be some fool herder just crossing the coulee, on the move somewhere,” Weary gave as a solution. “Half of ‘em don’t know a fence when they see it.”

      As they galloped toward the sound and the smell, they expressed freely their opinion of sheep, the men who owned them, and the lunatics who watched over the blatting things. They were cattlemen to the marrow in their bones, and they gloried in their prejudice against the woolly despoilers of the range.

      All these years had the Flying U been immune from the nuisance, save for an occasional trespasser, who was quickly sent about his business. The Flying U range had been kept in the main inviolate from the little, gray vandals, which ate the grass clean to the sod, and trampled with their sharp-pointed hoofs the very roots into lifelessness; which polluted the water-holes and creeks until cattle and horses went thirsty rather than drink; which, in that land of scant rainfall, devastated the range where they fed so that a long-established prairie-dog town was not more barren. What wonder if the men who owned cattle, and those who tended them, hated sheep? So does the farmer dread an invasion of grasshoppers.

      A mile down the coulee they came upon the band with two herders and four dogs keeping watch. Across the coulee and up the hillsides they spread like a noisome gray blanket. “Maa-aa, maa-aa, maa-aa,” two thousand strong they blatted a strident medley while they hurried here and there after sweeter bunches of grass, very much like a disturbed ant-hill.

      The herders loitered upon either slope, their dogs lying close beside them. There was good grass in that part of the coulee; the Flying U had saved it for the saddle horses that were to be gathered and held temporarily at the ranch; for it would save herding, and a week in that pasture would put a keen edge on their spirits for

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