Judith of the Plains Part 21

The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as the enfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit. Creek after creek that they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.

The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun, tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its tortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as a fever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen, perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper's bed. Sometimes the dragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they were milling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed back at it, after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying wedge, fought their way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted from their thirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the dull, sullen roar. Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way over the red waste-lands.

A red sun had begun to set over a red earth, and the men who had been out since noon-scouring the country for water, returned to say that none had been found, and they began to look into each other's faces for the answer that none could give. At sunset they made a dry camp; there was but enough water left to cook with. Each man received, as a thirst-quenching ration, a can of tomatoes. After supper they consulted, and it was agreed to trail the herd till midnight, taking advantage of the coolness to hurry them on as fast as possible to Green River. The grave nature of their plight was indicated by the fact that no one smoked after supper. Silent, sullen, they sat round, waiting for the foreman to give the order to advance. He waited for the moon to come up. Slowly it rose over the Bad Land Hills and hung round and full like a gigantic lantern. The watches were arranged for the night with a double guard. Every man in the outfit was beginning to have a feeling of panic that communicated itself to every other man, and as they looked at the herd, tractable now no longer, but a blind force that they must take chances with through the long watches of the night, while the thirst grew in the beasts' parched throats, they foresaw what would in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all that most strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly.

The moon that night was too brilliant for benisons; the gaunt, red world lay naked and unshriven for the sin that long ago had brought upon it the wrath of G.o.d. The picture was still that of the grotesque Chinese screen, with the headless dragon crawling endlessly; but the dream was long, centuries long, it seemed to the men listening to the bellowing of the herd. And while they waited, the red grew dull and the dragon dingy, and its fury made its contortions the more horrible; and that was all the difference between day and night in the land of the red silence. Sometimes the dragon split, and joints of it tried to turn back to the last water it had drunk; for cattle, though blinded with thirst, never forget the last stream at which they have quenched thirst, and will turn back to it, though they drop on the way. But the men pressed them farther and farther, and for yet a little while the cattle yielded.

At midnight the saddle-stock was incapable of moving farther. One horse had fallen and lay too weak to rise. The others, limping and foot-sore, no longer responded to quirt and rowel. The foreman ordered the herd thrown on the bed ground for the night. The herders for the first watch began to circle. The rest of the outfit took to its blankets to s.n.a.t.c.h a little rest for the double duty that awaited every man that night. Now it is a time-honored belief among cow-men that the herd must be sung to, particularly when it is restless, and to-night they tried all the old favorites, the "Cow-boy's Lament" being chief among them. But the herd refused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not once would it lie down.

The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches torn by cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of the earth for the lifting of the wrath of G.o.d. Imperishable grief was writ on the land as on a human face. The night wore on, the watches changed, the herd continued restless; not more than a third of it had bedded down. The third watch was from one o'clock to half-past three in the morning.

Simpson and another "x.x.x" man, with two of the Wetmore outfit, made up a double watch, and rode, singing, about the herd, as the long, dreary watch wore away. The cattle's lowing had taken on a gasping, cracked sound that was more frightful than the maddened bellow of the early evening. Simpson, who was past the age when men live the life of the saddle, felt the hards.h.i.+p keenly. He had ridden since sunrise, but for the respite at noon and the scant time at the dry camp while the evening meal was being eaten.

He was more than half asleep now, as he lurched heavily in the saddle, crossing and recrossing his partner in the half-circle they completed about the herd. Suddenly the sharp yelp of a coyote rang out; it seemed to come from no farther than twenty yards away. The cattle heard it, too, and a wave of panic swept through them. Simpson stiffened in his saddle. The sound, which was repeated, was an exact reproduction of a coyote's yelp, yet he knew that it was not a coyote.

The herd rose to its feet as a single steer, and for a second stood undetermined. From a clump of sage-brush not more than two feet high fluttered something long and white like a sheet. It waved in the wind as the cry was repeated. The herd crashed forward in a stampede, Simpson in the lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a thousand maddened steers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.

"h.e.l.l's loose!" yelled the men in their blankets, making for the temporary rope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with fear, clung like a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast's flanks till they were b.l.o.o.d.y and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney's face above the white cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that came pounding behind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. He was too close to them to attempt to fire his revolver in the air in the hope of turning them, but the boys had evidently got into their saddles, to judge by the volley of shots that rang out and were answered. Simpson alone rode ahead of the herd that tore after him, ripping up the earth as it came, bellowing in its blind fury. His horse, a thoroughly seasoned cow-pony, sniffed the bedlam and responded to the goading spur. She had been in cattle stampedes before, and, though every fibre ached with fatigue, she flattened out her lean body and covered ground to the length of her stride at each gallop.

The herd was so close that Simpson could smell the stench of their sweating bodies, taste their dust, and feel the scorch of their breath.

The sound of their hoofs was like the pounding of a thousand propellers.

From above looked the moon, round and serene; she had watched the pa.s.sing of many peoples in the land of the red silence. The horse seemed to be gaining. A few more lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one side and let the maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked of G.o.d was to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug the rowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; the chorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, the pound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.

Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. "G.o.d! What is it?" as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. "Up, up, you d.a.m.ned brute!" but the mare's leg had cracked like a pipe-stem. In his fury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as the cattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.

The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and rider.

When it had pa.s.sed there was not enough left of either to warrant burial or to furnish a feast for the buzzards. A few shreds of clothes, that had once been a man, lay scattered there; a something that had been a horse.

XVII

Mrs. Yellett Contends With A Cloudburst

The matriarch had delayed longer in moving camp than was consistent with her habitual watchfulness where the interests of the sheep were involved.

Mary Carmichael, who had already become inured to the experience of moving, was even conscious of a certain impatience at the delay, and could only explain the apathy with which Mrs. Yellett received reports of the dearth of pasturage on the ground that she wished each fresh educational germ to take as deep root as possible before transplantation. So that when Mrs. Yellett, shortly after Leander Dax's arrival at camp in the capacity of herder, announced that she and Leander were to make a trip to the dipping-vat that had kept Ben from his cla.s.ses for the past ten days, and invited the "gov'ment" to join the expedition, Mary accepted with fervor.

The Yelletts' "bunch" of sheep did not exceed three thousand head, and the matriarch had wisely decreed that it should be restricted to that number, as she wished always to give the flock her personal supervision.

"'The hen that's the surest of her chicks is the one that does her own settin','" was the adage from the Book of Hiram with which Mrs. Yellett succinctly summed up the case.

Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming. Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers things would go wrong. With the a.s.sistance of her sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.

As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax's husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife's masterful presence, Leander dared to be an "agnostic," as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw's gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander's way of a.s.serting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. The mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing amus.e.m.e.nt, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained the role of doubter with pa.s.sionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoa.r.s.eness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amus.e.m.e.nt; and yet he never saw the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale const.i.tuted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.

"The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that Jonah never come out of the whale's belly," the matriarch had told Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander's disadvantages as a herder. And the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: "Leander Dax, you'd have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein' a infidel, but there's one p'int on which you are particularly locoed, and that's Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist'ry of the United States, n.o.body in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts-none whatever. There's a lot of business round this here camp that's a heap more pressin'. Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin' them three days? G.o.d A'mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah's wife, the interest you have in his absence!"

"I come here to herd sheep," Leander had brazenly retaliated. "I 'ain't come to try to make you think."

Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the journey to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon was the rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout pole. Though she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary Carmichael, discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to ask where she was going to sit, and listened with interest to a discussion between Mrs.

Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses it would take to get the dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp and splendor, was for taking six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried simplicity to a fault, was in favor of only two. They finally compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the extra two.

Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of "Brainard's Beneficial Blackthorn."

"Paw's as hard to manage as a bent pin," she remarked, in an aside to Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she, with the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head under her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if beneficial, dose.

"There, there, paw," she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a baby, "don't take on so! It's all gone, and I can't have you sick on my hands."

But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent language, whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with a drink of condensed-milk and water, "to wash down the nasty taste," she told him, soothingly.

A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs.

Yellett looked doubtfully at a "gov'ment" who could not handle barrels.

Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and Leander, the long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral column, from which huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at the rear a foot or so of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing about the same proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a fox-terrier does to the dog.

Mrs. Yellett kissed "paw" good-bye, explaining to Mary, in extenuation of her weakness, that she would never forgive herself if she neglected it and anything happened to him during her absence. She then climbed to the front barrel and secured the ribbons. Leander had brought out three rolls of bedding of the inevitable bed-quilt variety, but Mrs. Yellett scorned such luxury while driving, and accordingly gave hers to the "gov'ment" for a back-rest. Mary sat on the lower row of barrels, with her feet dangling, using one roll of bedding for a seat and the other comfortably arranged at her back as a cus.h.i.+on.

Madam called sharply to the horses, "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat-kerat!" and they started off at a rattling pace, the barrels of dip creaking and squeaking as they swayed under their rope las.h.i.+ngs. Mary bounced about like a bean in a bag, working loose from between the bed-quilt rolls at each gulley, clinging frantically to barrel ends, shaken back and forth like a shuttle. Indeed, the drive seemed to combine every known form of physical exercise. Mrs. Yellett herself was in fine fettle; she drove sitting for a while, then rose, standing on a narrow ledge while she held the four ribbons lightly in one hand and tickled the leaders with a long whip carried in the other. She drove her four horses over the rough road with the skill of a circus equestrienne, balancing easily on the crazy ledge, s.h.i.+fting her weight from side to side as the wagon rattled down gullies and up ridges, the horses responding gallantly to the shrill "Hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" Her costume on this occasion represented joint concessions to her s.e.x and the work that was before her, as the head of a family at the dipping-vat. She still wore the drum-shaped rabbit-skin cap pulled well down over her forehead for driving. The great, cable-like braids of hair stood out well below the cap, giving her head an appearance of denseness and solidity, but the rambling curls were still blowing about her face, perhaps adding to the sum total of grotesqueness.

She wore a man's s.h.i.+rt of gray flannel, well open at the neck, from which the bronzed column of the throat rose in austere dignity. A pair of Mr.

Yellett's trousers, stuffed into high, cow-puncher's boots, that met the hem of a skirt coming barely to the knees, contributed to the originality of her dress.

The wagon had been pitching like a s.h.i.+p at sea through the desert dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of the wagon to shake her free from the rolls of bedding, and, at the peril of life and limb, looked round. Leander hung over the top row of barrels, gesticulating wildly. The change in the man, since leaving camp some two hours previous, was appalling. He seemed to have shrivelled away to a wraith of his former self. His cheeks, his chin, had waned to the vanis.h.i.+ng point. He opened his lips and mouthed horribly, yet his frightful grimacings conveyed no meaning. Mary called to Mrs. Yellett, but her voice was drowned in the rattle of the wagon, the clatter of four horses' hoofs, and the continual "Hi-hi-hi-kerat! hi-kerat!" of the driver. In the mean time Leander pointed to his mouth and back to the road in indescribably pathetic pantomime. "Perhaps the poor creature wants to turn back and die in his bed, like a Christian, even if he isn't one,"

thought Mary, as she called and called, Leander still emitting the most inhuman of cries, like the sounds made by deaf mutes in distress.

Presently Mrs. Yellett drew up, and asked in the name of many profane things what was the matter with her companions.

Leander resumed his mouthings and his dumb show, but Mrs. Yellett proved a better interpreter than Mary Carmichael.

"G.o.d A'mighty!" she said, "he's lost his false teeth!" And without another word she turned the four horses and the wagon with a skill that fell little short of sleight-of-hand.

The dialogue that followed between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to how far back he had dropped his teeth, cannot be given, owing to the inadequacy of the English language to reproduce his toothless enunciation. Catching, as Mary did, the meaning of Mrs. Yellett's remarks only, she received something of the one-sided impression given by overhearing a telephone conversation:

"What did you have 'em out for?... You didn't have 'em out?... I just shook 'em out? Then what made you have your mouth open? Ef your mouth had been shut, you couldn't have lost 'em.... You was a-yawnin', eh? Well, you are a plumb fool to yawn on this kind of a waggin, with your mouth full o'

china teeth. Your yawnin' 'll put us back a good hour an' we won't reach camp before sundown."

At this point of the diatribe the Infidel left the wagon and began to search along the road. He said he had noticed a buffalo skull near the place where he had dropped the teeth, and thought he could trace them by this landmark. Mrs. Yellett held the ribbons and suggested that Mary get down "and help to prospect for them teeth." As Mary clambered down she heard a fragment of the matriarch's monologue, which, being duly expurgated for polite ears, was to the effect that she would rather take ten babies anywhere than one grown man, and that as for getting in the way, hindering, obstructing, and being a nuisance, generally speaking, man had not his counterpart in the scheme of creation.

"Talk about a woman bein' at the bottom of everything!" sniffed Mrs.

Yellett; "I be so sick of always hearin' about 'the woman in the case!'

Half the time the case would be a blame sight worse if it was left exclusive to the men. The Book of Hiram says: 'A skunk may have his good p'ints, but few folks is takin' the risk of waitin' round to get acquainted with 'em.'"

While Mary was still "prospecting," a glad cry roused her attention, and Leander came up smiling, with his dental treasures nicely adjusted.

"Quit smilin' like a rattlesnake, you plumb fool!" called out Mrs.

Yellett. "Do you want to lose 'em again?"

So, curtailing the muscular contraction indicative of his pleasure, the Infidel again took his place among the bed-quilts and the journey was resumed.

It was now about five in the afternoon. The heat, which had been oppressive all day, suddenly relaxed its blistering grip, and a keenly penetrating dampness, not unlike that of a sea-fog, came from some unknown quarter of the arid wastes and chilled the three travellers to the marrow.