Hidden Water Part 8

"I look to find you with a sprained wrist," he drawled, "when I come back--throwin' flapjacks for them sheepmen!" He made the quick motion of turning a pancake in midair, smiled grimly, and galloped after the long line of horses and packs that was stringing along up the Bronco Mesa trail. And, having a premonition of coming company, Hardy went in by the fireplace and put on a big kettle of beef. He was picking over another mess of beans when he heard the clatter of hoofs outside and the next moment the door was kicked violently open.

It was Jasper Swope who stood on the threshold, his high Texas hat thrust far back upon his head--and if he felt any surprise at finding the house occupied he gave no expression to it.

"h.e.l.lo, there!" he exclaimed. "I thought you folks was all gone!"

"Nope," replied Hardy, and continued his work in silence.

"Cookin' for the outfit?" queried Swope, edging in at the door.

"Nope," replied Hardy.

"Well, who the h.e.l.l air ye cookin' fer then?" demanded Swope, drawing nearer. "'Scuse me if I pry into this matter, but I'm gittin'

interested." He paused and showed a jagged set of teeth beneath his bristling red mustache, sneeringly.

"Well, I'll tell you," answered Hardy easily. "I thought some white man might come along later and I'd ask him to dinner." He fixed his eyes upon the sheepman with an instant's disapproval and then resumed his cookery. As for Swope, his gray eyes flashed sudden fire from beneath bushy eyebrows, and then a canny smile crept across his lips.

"I used to be a white man, myself," he said, "before I lost my soap.

What's the chance to git a bite of that bymeby?" He threw his hand out toward the pot of beef, which was sending out odors of a rich broth, flavored with onions and chili.

Hardy looked at him again, little shrimp of a man that he was, and still with disapproval.

"D'ye call that a white man's way of entering another man's house?" he inquired pointedly.

"Well," temporized Swope, and then he stopped. "A man in my line of business gits in a hurry once in a while," he said lamely. "But I'm hungry, all right," he remarked, _sotto voce_.

"Yes," said Hardy, "I've noticed it. But here--sit down and eat."

The sheepman accepted the dish of beef, dipped out a spoonful of beans, broke off a slab of bread, and began his meal forthwith, meanwhile looking at Hardy curiously.

"What's that you say you've noticed?" he inquired, and a quizzical smile lurked beneath his dripping mustache as he reached over and hefted the coffeepot.

"I've noticed," replied Hardy, "that you sheepmen get in a hurry once in a while. You can't stop to knock on a door so you kick it open; can't stop to go around a ranch, so you go through it, and so on."

"Ah," observed Swope slyly, "so that's what's bitin' you, eh? I reckon you must be that new superintendent that Jim was tellin' about."

"That's right," admitted Hardy, "and you're Mr. Swope, of course.

Well, I'll say this for you, Mr. Swope, you certainly know how to get sheep across a river. But when it comes to getting along with cowmen,"

he added, as the sheepman grinned his self-approval, "you don't seem to stack up very high."

"Oh, I don't, hey?" demanded Swope defiantly. "Well, how about the cowmen? Your friend Creede gets along with sheepmen like a house afire, don't he? Him and a bunch of his punchers jumped on one of my herders last Fall and dam' nigh beat him to death. Did you ever hear of a sheepman jumpin' on a cowboy? No, by Gad, and you never will! We carry arms to protect ourselves, but we never make no trouble."

He paused and combed the coffee grounds out of his heavy red mustache with fingers that were hooked like an eagle's talons from clutching at sheep in the cold water.

"I don't doubt, Mr. Superintendent," he said, with sinister directness, "that these cowmen have filled you up about what bad _hombres_ we are--and of course it ain't no use to say nothin'

now--but I jest want to tell you one thing, and I want you to remember it if any trouble should come up; we sheepmen have never gone beyond our legal rights, and we've got the law behind us. The laws of the United States and the statutes of this Territory guarantee us the right to graze our sheep on public lands and to go where we dam'

please--and we'll go, too, you can bank on that."

He added this last with an a.s.surance which left no doubt as to his intentions, and Hardy made no reply. His whole mind seemed centred on a handful of beans from which he was picking out the rocks and little lumps of clay which help to make up full weight.

"Well!" challenged Swope, after waiting for his answer, "ain't that straight?"

"Sure," said Hardy absently.

Swope glared at him for a moment disapprovingly.

"Huh, you're a h.e.l.l of a cowman," he grunted. "What ye goin' to do about it?"

"About what?" inquired Hardy innocently.

"Aw, you know," replied Swope impatiently. "How about that upper range?" He shoved back his chair as he spoke, and his eyes lit up in antic.i.p.ation of the battle.

"Well," responded Hardy judicially, "if you've got the legal right to go up there, and if you're goin' where you dam' please, anyhow, it don't look like I could do anything." He paused and smiled patiently at the sheepman.

"You know very well, Mr. Swope," he said, "that if you want to go up on that mesa and sheep off the feed we haven't got any legal means of preventing you. But you know, too, that there isn't more than enough feed for what cows the boys have left. If you want to go up there, that's your privilege--and if you want to go out over The Rolls, that's all right, too."

"Of course you don't give a dam'!" said Swope satirically.

"I guess you know how I feel, all right," returned Hardy, and then he lapsed into silence, while Swope picked his teeth and thought.

"Where'd you come from?" he said at last, as if, forgetting all that had pa.s.sed, his mind had come back from a far country, unbia.s.sed by the facts.

"Over the mountains," replied Hardy, jerking his thumb toward the east.

"Don't have no sheep over there, do they?" inquired Swope.

"Nope, nothing but cattle and horses."

"Ump!" grunted the sheepman, and then, as if the matter was settled thereby, he said: "All right, pardner, bein' as you put it that way, I reckon I'll go around."

CHAPTER VII

h.e.l.l'S HIP POCKET

In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah, Isaiah the son of Amoz is reported to have seen in a vision a wolf which dwelt with a lamb, while a lion ate straw like an ox, and a weaned child put his hand in the c.o.c.katrice's den. Equally beautiful, as a dream, was the peace at Hidden Water, where sheepman and cattleman sat down together in amity; only, when it was all over, the wolf wiped his chops and turned away with a wise smile--the millennium not having come, as yet, in Arizona.

Hardy's wrist was a little lame, figuratively speaking, from throwing flapjacks for hungry sheep herders, and the pile of grain and baled hay in the storehouse had dwindled materially; but as the sheep came through, band after band, and each turned off to the west, stringing in long bleating columns out across The Rolls, he did not begrudge the hard labor. After Jasper Swope came Jim, and Donald McDonald, as jolly a Scottish shepherd as ever lived, and Bazan, the Mexican, who traced his blood back to that victorious general whom Maximilian sent into Sonora. There were Frenchmen, smelling rank of garlic and mutton tallow; Basques with eyes as blue and vacant as the summer skies; young Mormons working on shares, whose whole fortune was wrapped up in the one huddle of sheep which they corralled and counted so carefully; and then the common herders, fighting Chihuahuanos, with big round heads and staring eyes, low-browed Sonorans, slow and brutal in their ways, men of all bloods and no blood, lumped together in that careless, all-embracing Western term "Mexicans."

But though they were low and primitive in mental processes, nearer to their plodding burros than to the bright-eyed sensitive dogs, they were the best who would consent to wander with the sheep through the wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing, knowing nothing, having before them nothing but the vision of a distant pay day, a drunk, the _calabozo_, and the kind boss who would surely bail them out. Ah, that was it--the one love and loyalty of those simple-minded creatures who, unfit for the hurry and compet.i.tion of the great world, sold their lives by spans of months for twenty dollars and found; it was always to the boss that they looked for help, and in return they did his will.

When the great procession had drifted past, with its braying clamor, its dogs, its men on muleback and afoot, the herders with their carbines, the camp rustlers with their burros, belled and laden with water casks and kyacks of grub, the sheep owners hustling about with an energy that was almost a mania, Hardy sat beneath the _ramada_ of the ranch house with dog-fighting Tommy in his lap and pondered deeply upon the spectacle. A hundred thousand sheep, drifting like the shadows of clouds across the illimitable desert, crossing swift rivers, climbing high mountains, grazing beneath the northern pines; and then turning south again and pouring down through the pa.s.ses like the resistless front of a cloudburst which leaves the earth bare and wasted in its wake. For this one time he had turned the stream aside and the tall gra.s.s still waved upon the upper range; but the next time, or the next--what then?

Long and seriously he contemplated the matter, dwelling now upon the rough good nature of the sheepmen and this almost miraculous demonstration of their good will; then remembered with vague misgivings their protestations against the unlawful violence which presumed to deny them what was their legal right--free grazing on all government lands. And in the end he wrote a brief note to Judge Ware, telling him that while the sheepmen had accepted his hospitality in a most friendly spirit and had respected the upper range, it was in his opinion only a question of time until they would take the whole country, unless they were restrained by law. He therefore recommended that the judge look up the status of the bill to set aside the watershed of the Salagua as a National Forest Reserve, and in case the opposition to it indicated any long delay it would be well either to sell out or reduce his stock. This note he sent out by Rafael, the Mexican roustabout, who was still hauling in supplies from Bender, and then with a glad heart he saddled up his horse, left a bait of meat on the floor for Tommy, and struck out over the mesa for Carrizo Creek.

After his long confinement in the pasture the sorrel galloped along the rocky trail with the grace and swiftness of an antelope, the warm dry wind puffed little whirls of dust before them, and once more Hardy felt like a man. If for the best interests of his employer it was desirable that he cook beef and bread for sheepmen, he could do so with good grace, but his spirit was not that of a man who serves.