Two Wyoming Girls and Their Homestead Claim Part 9

"There, Ralph, isn't that nice? I'll stay right close by you and you can sleep here in the bushes like the little birds."

Ralph smiled sleepily, nestling his head closer into the impromptu pillow. "'Ess," he murmured drowsily, "'is nice; now me is a yittle yay bird." He meant no reflection on himself in the comparison. His acquaintance with jay birds was limited, but he recognized them when he met them, and considered them very good fellows. The cool breeze fanned him; the leaves rustled, their airy shadows playing over his face, and Ralph was sound asleep almost as soon as his drowsy eyes closed. I watched him for a moment and then hastened back to my chosen corner of the blackberry patch and resumed picking.

Unconsciously, as I worked, I pressed in among the tall vines until at length the rec.u.mbent little figure on the gra.s.s was quite hidden from sight. That did not really matter, for I was easily within call. No sound coming from that quarter I gradually became more and more absorbed in my task. It would be very nice, I thought, to carry a br.i.m.m.i.n.g bucket full of berries down to the house on my return. Once or twice I suspended operations to stand still and listen under the startled impression that I had heard some unusual noise. Convinced each time that there was nothing; that I was mistaken, I continued picking, but I remember that I did glance up once at the cloudless sky, wondering, in an idle way, why I should have heard thunder.

The bucket was quite full and I was backing carefully out from a thick cl.u.s.ter of canes, having a respectful regard for their sharp thorns, when, suddenly, the air was rent with a wild shriek, coming from the direction of the gra.s.sy plot where I had left Ralph. Shriek after shriek followed. I had heard those high piercing notes too many times to be left in an instant's doubt; the shrieks were his. Tearing my way out of the bushes, regardless now of thorns and scratches, I bounded into the open. The scene that presented itself, when I could get a view of what was going on, almost took away my breath. The entire hillside, and the fields below, were literally swarming with cattle.

Not the tame domestic herds of peaceful Eastern meadows, but the wild, long-horned, compactly built, active, and peculiarly vicious beasts known in Western parlance as "range stock."

Ralph had been awakened, none too soon, perhaps by the trampling of hoofs, perhaps by the low bellowing that I had absently attributed to unseen thunder clouds. However it was, he had started up, as he afterward sobbingly expressed it, "To make 'e bad tows do away, so 'ey not hurt 'Essie."

In pursuance of this design he had advanced toward the foremost of them, shouting and waving his big straw hat in one hand, while attempting to wave my ap.r.o.n in the other. The ap.r.o.n was long and he was short, and the effort to wave it in self-defense resulted in his becoming wound up in it, falling, and rolling bodily down the hillside, in the face of some half dozen wild-eyed steers, who were coming up it. It was then that he screamed, and I appeared on the scene at the very instant that one of the steers, awakening from what appeared to be a momentary trance of surprise, advanced toward the screaming little bundle, bellowing and pawing the ground. The immense black head, crowned with a pair of great horns, curving like a Turkish scimiter, and with a point as keen, was lowered; the savage animal was on the very verge of charging on the helpless child, when my screams drew his attention toward me. He paused, lifted his head, stared at me, and, retreating a step or two, began pawing the ground again, at the same time sending forth a hoa.r.s.e challenge which seemed to proclaim his readiness to engage me and all my race in a hand to horn conflict if need be. His bit of bovine bravado had given me time to reach Ralph. I caught him up and thrust him behind me. Clutching my skirt tightly, he brought his scared little face into view for an instant to exhort me. "Don't 'e be 'fraid, Essie, me knock 'e pie out o' 'at bad tow if her touches 'oo!" Then he shrank back, creeping under the friendly shelter of the blackberry canes until he was, as I afterward found, quite lost to view. It all took place so quickly that I had scarcely time to realize the danger before I was called upon to act. If I had turned to run, in the first instance, the great beast would have been upon me, and, in less time than it takes to tell it, I should have been ground and trampled out of human semblance. As I stood my ground he hesitated, challenged again, and, as others of the herd started toward him, charged.

In spite of the signal service that it rendered me, I cannot conscientiously recommend a twelve-quart tin bucket, filled with blackberries, as a reliable weapon of defense. There would be only about one chance in a hundred, I should think, of its proving useful in just the way that mine did. When the steer charged I was, in fact, quite wild with terror; it was instinct alone that prompted me to attempt a defensive use of any article in my hands, and if that article had been a feather duster I should have made the same use of it. The lowered head and sweeping horns were within six feet of me when I threw blackberries, pail and all, full in the creature's face, at the same time giving frantic voice to the wild, high-pitched, long-drawn cry that the cow-boys use in rounding up their cattle. The blackberries did not trouble him; what did trouble him was that, by one chance in a hundred, the handle or bail of the bucket caught on the tip of one horn, and, as feeling it and, perhaps, bewildered by the rattle of tinware, the steer threw up his head, the bucket slid down the horn, lodging against the skull, and wholly obscuring one eye. Undaunted by this mishap the steer backed off, lifting his head high, shaking it and bellowing; then suddenly he lowered it, grinding head and horns into the ground, with the evident intention of pulverizing the strange contrivance rattling about his forehead. The attempt resulted in his getting his nose into the trap where only a horn had been before. Maddened with fright he took to his heels, careering down the hillside, and through the fields at top speed, followed by all the herd.

I had retreated, of course, the instant that I had discharged the bucket at my foe, and was cowering under the canes beside Ralph when the finale came.

CHAPTER XI

THE CATTLE BRAND

We were saved, but my heart swelled with grief and anger, as, creeping out from our shelter, I stood up and looked down on what had so lately been a field of waving grain, ripe for the harvest.

Torn, trampled, beaten into the earth, scarcely a stalk was left standing, and the corn field was in no better shape. Poor little Ralph, with a dim, childish comprehension of the calamity that had befallen us, was crying bitterly. Lifting him to my shoulder I started toward the house, the desolated fields were out of sight behind us, when Jessie came hurrying up the trail.

"What has happened?" she inquired anxiously. "I thought I heard Ralph scream, and I am sure I heard you giving the round-up call; I thought I heard cattle, too." She took Ralph, who was still crying, from my shoulder and carried him in her arms. "Don't cry, precious," she said.

"Tell sister what has frightened you?"

"'Essie frowed all 'e 'ackburries at 'e bad tow, an' 'e bad tows walked all over our pitty torn 'talks, so 'ey don't 'tan' up no more,"

he sobbed incoherently. Jessie looked at me with dilating eyes. We were by this time entering the house, where I was not surprised to find Mrs. Horton again awaiting us, for I had already observed the Horton equipage in the front yard.

"Leslie!" Jessie was exclaiming, as we crossed the threshold. "Don't tell me that the cattle have been in our fields; it isn't possible!"

"I guess it is," I said recklessly, unreasonably resenting our neighbor's placid face. "If you find it hard to believe, just go and look for yourself. There isn't a stalk of grain left standing," and I proceeded to give the details of my late adventure and experience.

Jessie seemed like one dazed. She sank into a chair, holding Ralph, who was willing, for once, to be held tightly in her arms, and spoke never a word.

"What I want to know," cried Mrs. Horton, her face fiery with indignation, "is, whose cattle were they? It's a low shameful, mean, trick; I don't care who did it! Oh, to think of all you've had to suffer, and of all that those fields of grain stood for to you, and then to think--I don't feel as if I could hear it!" she broke off, abruptly, her voice choking. I, avoiding her eyes, looked out of the window through which I saw, indeed, only the trampled fields, invisible to any but the mind's eye from that window.

"I hope you can collect damages," Mrs. Horton broke out again; "and I guess you can if you can prove the owners.h.i.+p of the cattle. Did you notice the brand?"

Feigning not to have heard the question, I still gazed silently out of the window, but Mrs. Horton was not to be put off so easily; she repeated the inquiry, her voice suddenly grown sharp with anxiety.

"Did you notice the brand, Leslie?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

She would not be put off, and, for a wicked moment, my heart was hot against all that bore her husband's name.

"The brand was, 'R, half-circle, A,'" I said, and bolted out of the house to hide myself and my boiling indignation in the hayloft, but, as I went, I heard Mrs. Horton sobbing out an explanation to Jessie:

"Jake started out early this morning, long before sun-up, it was, to drive the cattle from the upper range to the north pasture--he said. I told him I was afraid that he couldn't handle such a big bunch alone--there's nigh three thousand of them, if there's a dozen--but he thought that he could, and they must have got away from him after all!"

Jessie made no comment, but lying at full length in the seclusion of the hayloft, I thought of the relative positions of the upper range, where Mr. Horton's cattle usually grazed, and the north pasture, and knew that, in order to reach our fields, the herd must have "strayed"

at least five miles out of their proper course.

I was still lying in the hayloft when, as my ears informed me, Mrs.

Horton came out, climbed soberly into her wagon, and drove away. With my eyes shut I still seemed to see her drooping head and shamed face.

I had so far recovered my reason by this time that I could feel for her; she believed in her husband. He would soon be able to convince her that what had occurred was due to an unavoidable accident; the cattle had broken away from their one herder, and she would expend her indignation on the fact that he had attempted to drive them alone, and--she would try to make him pay damages. She would fail. One did not need an intimate acquaintance with her husband to know that.

The sound of approaching wheels aroused me from my unhappy meditations. Joe was returning. I sprang up, slid down the ladder, and went out into the yard to meet him. Mr. Wilson, the ranchman, who was to be one of our witnesses, was with him. Joe had found him at the blacksmith shop, and, as his homeward route led past our house, had invited him to ride with him. The two were talking earnestly as the horses stopped before the barn door. Mr. Wilson had been away from home for some weeks, and we had been somewhat worried lest he should not return in time for our proving up. Evidently Joe had just been telling him this, for, as I came near them, he was saying in his hearty way: "No, sir; your young ladies needn't 'a' been a mite worried for fear of my not getting around in time. I was bound to come when they wanted me, and wife's been keeping me posted about their notice. I told her I'd leave whatever I had on hand and come in time, whether or no." He was a large man. Joe had resigned the reaper seat to him and had ridden home himself standing on one of the cross-bars.

He was slowly and cautiously backing down from the high seat as I stopped beside the reaper. When his feet were fairly on the ground he turned to greet me: "Why, what's been happening to you, little girl?

Joe, you didn't tell me that one of your young ladies was sick!"

Joe had begun unharnessing the team; he was tying up the lines, but dropped them as Mr. Wilson spoke, and came around to my side; just then, too, Jessie joined us; she stood with one hand on old Joe's shoulder, while I again told of the incursion of cattle on our fields.

I think that she feared some terrible outburst of rage from the old man who had toiled so faithfully in those fields, and had taken such honest pride in the rich promise of an abundant harvest. If so, her fears were groundless. Joe's sole remark, as he went on with the work of caring for the horses, was:

"Mought jess as well a' spared de trouble ob gettin' de reaper fixed, hit 'pears."

Instinctively, I felt that he was so sure, he understood so well by whose agency the ruin had been wrought that he disdained to ask a question. What had taken place was simply a thing to be borne, like martyrdom.

But Mr. Wilson was not committed to a policy of silence; he had a good deal to say, and what he said was directly to the point.

"Crops plumb ruined, you say, Miss Leslie?"

"Oh, yes; entirely; I think the whole herd must have been there; not feeding quietly so much as tearing through--"

"You say the whole herd? Know of any herd, now, that you could spot?"

"It was Mr. Horton's herd; we all know his brand."

"R, half-circle, A; yes. Now, young folks,"--he paused to roll his eyes impressively from one to the other of us--"I'll tell you what you want to do about this affair. You want to keep still; to keep still!"

"And be ruined!" cried Jessie, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng.

"And not be ruined! There's where the fun's going to come in, Miss Jessie. S'pose you go to work now to try to prove malicious mischief on the part of Horton in driving his cattle into your fields, for that's what he's deliberately done, no doubt of that, why all he's got to do is to take his stand on the law and say that you had no business to sow grain on the range and expect cattle to keep out of it; you've no t.i.tle to this place, and your grain fields are not even fenced. Horton's got the law on his side, you may be sure of that, but he hasn't got the right, and some day he'll find it out; he'll find it out to his cost, no matter what the law says, now you mark my words!"

"There hasn't been a year since we've been here that Mr. Horton's cattle--always Mr. Horton's cattle--haven't destroyed our crops,"

Jessie said, her voice trembling.

"And it has always been an 'accident,'" I added, "but I did think that maybe there would be no such accident this year; it couldn't have occurred at a time when it would be more effective."

"No, you may count on that; that's just the reason why it hasn't taken place before this. Now, the rest of us folks around here don't propose to see you two girls and that purty little orphan boy drove off of this place that you've tried so hard and so bravely to keep, but we've all got to sing low until you get your t.i.tle. Then, Mr. Man, let that--well, I won't call names--just let Mr. Horton try his little games and he'll find that there are laws that will fit his case. The reasons that that man hasn't landed in the penitentiary before this are, first, that the Lord was mighty lenient toward him when he went a courtin' and induced that good woman to become his wife; second, he's so sly. There's never been a time yet when a body could produce direct, damaging evidence against him. It's all 'accident.'"

I thought of that small s.h.i.+ning object that I had picked up in the rubbish the morning after the fire was set under our window. It would have been hard, indeed, to produce more damaging or convincing evidence than that, but Mr. Wilson had just been enjoining a strict silence in regard to Mr. Horton and his works upon us, so I kept the thought to myself.