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CHAPTER XII.
The Post-Hole Digger's Ghost
The skeletons of Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback were found a long time after this all happened by one of the Warren Live Stock Company's fence riders. This fence commences in northeastern Colorado near the 27th degree of longitude west from Washington, and extends west over hills and valleys, plains and mountains, through all kinds of latitudes, longitudes and vicissitudes. There is a legend in regard to the building of this fence that is told in whispers when the fire burns low of a night in western homes. It runs something like this:
Years ago Senator Warren, Manager Gleason and some other Massachusetts Yankees started in the sheep business in southern Wyoming and northern Colorado, and as the country was large they thought it would be a good thing to fence in a few hundred thousand acres of government land and save the grass so fenced in case of hard winters and other things and graze their sheep in this enclosure only when there was no more grass around the little homesteads taken here and there by settlers. So hiring a young German from the Old Country, who couldn't speak a word of English, to dig the post-holes, they got him a brand-new shovel, a post-bar about eight feet long, the famous receipt for cooking jackrabbits, and started him digging near the 27th degree of longitude west from Washington. Pointing toward the setting sun in the west, they went off and left him. The German was never seen alive again, but he left a never-ending line of post-holes behind him. The Warren Live Stock Company, it is said, put on a great many men setting the posts in these holes and stringing barbed wire on them, and although they kept ever increasing the force that built the fence, yet they never caught up with the German, and time after time the post-setters would come to the top of a high hill or a range of mountains and thought they would come in sight of the German, only to see a long line of post-holes stretching away over hill and valley towards the setting sun.
After a while the Mormons along the line of Utah and Wyoming complained of seeing a ghost about the time they drove their cows home of an evening. They said it was a German with grizzled locks and flowing beard, with a large meerschaum pipe in his mouth and a shovel in one hand from which the blade was worn down to the handle and a post-bar no bigger than a drag tooth in the other hand. He was always looking toward the setting sun, shading his eyes with his hand and muttering these words: "Das sinkende Sonne, ich fange sie nicht."
But when they approached close to him, or spoke to him, he immediately vanished. When the ghost wasn't disturbed it seemed to be digging holes. It would go through the motions of digging a hole in the ground, then rising up, take thirteen steps in a westerly direction, look back to see if the line was straight, dig another hole, and go on. Sometimes the ghost seemed to be studying a well-worn piece of paper, which was undoubtedly the receipt for cooking jackrabbits, and would mutter in German, "O wohene, O wohene ist er gegangen, mit Schwanz so kurz und Ohr so lang? O wohene ist mein Hase gegangen?"
After awhile the ghost began to appear in western Utah and still later on in Nevada, always digging a never-ending imaginary line of post-holes. No one never knew where the actual post-holes left off and the imaginary ones commenced.
As the Routt County cattlemen in western Colorado never allowed any sheepmen to encroach on their range, and they always killed all the sheep and sheepmen who dared to intrude, of course, the Warren Live Stock had to stop building fence west and turn north before they got there.
When the ghastly skeletons of Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback were found lying by this fence, their bones picked clean by coyotes and vultures, a small book was picked up near them which proved to be a diary of their adventures and last hours of suffering. It will be remembered that Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback couldn't write, but they had drawn pictures in the book, and when we had gotten another sheepman who couldn't write to examine them he read them just like print. The first picture was a mountain with a lot of marks, which was interpreted as the flood, and two men drawn crosswise laying down was the sheepmen being washed away. The next picture was a wire fence with two men clinging to it. He said that was when they washed into the fence. The next was another fence picture showing two men walking along it. There was about fifty pictures after this one, but they always had a section of a wire fence in them. Several pictures in the front part of the book showed the two men eating jackrabbits, but later on some of the pictures showed them chasing a prairie dog, or trying to slip up on one, indicating that they couldn't find any more jackrabbits. There was pictures of them chewing bits of their clothes to get the sheep grease out of them. Then there was pictures of them pointing to their mouths and stomachs, finally in the last picture they were in the act of eating a piece of paper with some writing on it, which was probably the receipt for cooking jackrabbits. They probably had walked hundreds of miles along this fence before they finally succumbed, and as it was a country where they had herded large bands of sheep the grass had become so exterminated that no jackrabbits could live there, and consequently Rambolet Bill and Cottswool Canvasback had gradually starved to death.
Two guileless sheepmen lay sleeping on the side of a barren hill,
One's name was Cottswool Canvasback, the other was Rambolet Bill.
They were dreaming, sweetly dreaming, the fore part of the night
Of grazing their sheep on a homesteader's claim when he was out of sight.
But hark! to the wind that's rising; 'tis coming fast and warm;
Little recked the sleepers that it would do them harm;
But the roar was growing louder, as the pine trees bent and shook,
And the birds were screaming loudly, "Beware of the warm chinook."
When that hot blast struck their hut, built out of walls of snow,
That house turned into a river in a way that wasn't slow;
Washed off these dreaming sheepmen in the middle of the night.
As the waters swept the dreamers away, what must have been their fright,
Till tangled up in Warren's fence that's built o'er mountain and vale,
They followed it the rest of their lives, winding o'er hill and dale.
When found by the annual fence rider, they long since had been dead,
Their bones picked clean by coyotes, with vultures hovering o'erhead.
CHAPTER XIII.
Grafting
One night while we were in Cheyenne we were going from the dispatcher's office down to our way car, which was, as usual, about one mile from the depot. The railroad company had quite a number of police on duty in the yards to watch for strikers, there having been a machinists' strike on for a long time. No strikers had ever come around the railroad yards nights or even interfered with any one at any time, but a lot of fellows who wanted soft jobs as watchmen made the officials of the road think the strikers were going to do something, and these night watch men had, it seems, been looking for a long time for some weak tramp to beat to death and then claim the tramp was working in the interest of the strikers and was about to injure railroad property when those awful sleuths caught him in the act and put his light out. Thus they could get a fresh hold on their jobs. However, they had been unable to catch a tramp, and as they had to get somebody in order to hold their jobs, they cornered Dillbery Ike, who had loitered behind the rest, and one of the valiant watchmen swiping him over the head with a six-shooter, scalped him as clean as a Sioux Injun would have done it with a scalping knife. Hearing Dillbery Ike's cries for help, we went to his rescue, and none too soon, as the watchman was still beating him. When we had got a doctor for Dillbery, of course the first thing he asked for was Dillbery's scalp, so he could sew it on again. But although we made a long search for the scalp, we only found a few bloody hairs, and undoubtedly some hungry canine prowling around had ate it up. However, the railroad company, after some parleying, agreed to pay for having a new one grafted on, and as grafting is the long suit of the Cheyenne doctors, there was a general scramble for the job. 'Twas finally agreed to divide the job amongst them, or rather divide the space and the money. The doctors immediately advertised for contributions of pieces of scalp to graft on Dillbery's head, but no one responding they offered to buy some sections of scalp, and this ad was responded to in a mysterious way by a midnight visitor at each of their offices, with a small piece of very close shaven fresh scalp, which the visitor (who was a woman in each case and so muffled up that her features couldn't be seen) claimed she had cut off Billy's or Johnny's or Jimmy's head after putting them under the influence of ether.
Each of the four doctors paid her $25 and hiked off to plaster the piece of hide on Dillbery Ike's cranium. The scalped place had been carefully laid off by a civil engineer, so each of the four doctors knew his corner in the block, and without any courtesies to one another they each trimmed down his $25 piece of hide to fit his corner and then fastened it on. The grafting took at once and in a few days was healed over nicely, despite the fact it turned out that the woman had taken a different piece of scalp off from different pet animals which she kept. One was a pet pig, another a pet goat, another a pet sheep and the fourth a pet dog of the Newfoundland breed. When the hair, wool and bristles all began to make a luxuriant growth on Dillbery's new scalp, he seemed to be more or less affected by the dispositions of each animal from which a part of the wonderful scalp was removed, and when the different colored hair, wool and bristles had grown to a good length the effect of this unique head covering was very striking to strangers. However, Dillbery Ike was justly proud of it, as the doctors had charged the Union Pacific $1,200 for this variegated scalp. Of course, no other cowpuncher could boast of such a valuable head covering.
There was one little white bare spot in the center which was above timber line, as it were, where the doctors, making these four corners, had each been a little shy of material, and here was a little open, or park, on the top of his head in which sheep ticks, hog lice, dog fleas and goat vermin could have a common ground to assemble and sun themselves in.
CHAPTER XIV.
The File
After learning the fate of the two sheepmen we prepared to leave Cheyenne and catch up with our stock train, which we figured would take us a day or so. We interviewed the dispatcher, superintendent and station agent at Cheyenne, asking each one of them to wire down the road and see if they could locate the special. Every one of them wired and the next day about noon the agent got word the stock was at Egbert. That evening the superintendent got a message that they was between Egbert and Pine Bluffs. About midnight the dispatcher got a message that they were hourly expected in Pine Bluffs, so we started on to overtake them.
We had noticed with a great deal of anxiety that the wrinkles had commenced to accumulate on our cattle's horns, as a new wrinkle grows each year after an animal is two years old, and we had been advised by several cattlemen who had been in the habit of taking their cattle by rail to market in place of driving them, to procure files and rasps and remove these wrinkles before we got to Omaha. So we secured a lot of rasps and files at Cheyenne and had Jackdo carry them for us, and when we caught up with the train we went to work to take off the sign of old age which had come on our stock since shipping them, as the Nebraska corn-raisers only want young stock to feed. When we first loaded our cattle we were informed that they were a little bit too fat for the killers, but, of course, the next day, they was about four pounds too thin for the killers, but too fat for the feeders. However, by this time they were nothing but petrified skeletons, and Dillbery Ike wanted to leave the wrinkles on their horns and sell the entire outfit for antiques. But the more we discussed it, the more we made up our minds that as this railroad done a large business hauling stock, the antique cattle market must be overstocked. So we finally concluded to take off the wrinkles that had grown since we started and sell the cattle on their merits. We arranged to run two day shifts and one night shift of six hours each and to commence up next the engine and work back. So getting in the first car we climbed astride the critters' necks and commenced to file. Day after day, night after night, we kept at this wearisome task, and when our files and rasps became worn we sent Jackdo (who wouldn't work, but who didn't mind tramping) to the nearest town to get fresh files and rasps. Sometimes we became discouraged when we saw the wrinkles starting again that we had removed to commence with, and our eyes filled with bitter tears when we thought how much better it would have been to have trailed our cattle through, or even sold them to some Nebraska sucker and taken his draft on a commission house. Dillbery Ike, who had some education, made up a song for us to sing while we were at work, called "The Song of the File," and one of us would sing a verse and then all join in the chorus, and this song helped us a great deal. Here it is:
Oh! we are a bunch of cattlemen.
Going to market with our stock again,
And, as we ship over a road that's bum,
The days they go and the days they come.
Chorus
Cheer up, brave hearts, and list to the file
As the wrinkles keep dropping below in a pile;
Never fear, my boys, we have plenty of time
To remove old age that's known by the wrinkle sign.
And as time goes by the wrinkles grow
On the horns of the cattle in a train that's slow;
For every year after the second a cow that's born
Another wrinkle grows upon each horn.
While we have a job that isn't so soft,
A-trying to rasp these wrinkles off,
To make their horns look smooth and bright,
We file all day and we file all night.
And as we file, we whistle and sing,
Trying to make it a jolly thing,
To remove the wrinkles that are sure to grow
On the horns of cattle with a road that's slow.
Astride their necks, we sit and file,
And through our tears, we try to smile.
Cheer up, brave hearts, cheer up, we say again,
As we camp along with the bum stock train.
CHAPTER XV.
The Cattle Stampede
The boys all got to talking about stampedes one night while we were waiting on a sidetrack, and I related to them an experience of my own.
A number of years ago, I bought some 15,000 steers in southern Arizona, and shipping them to Denver, Colorado, divided them up into herds of about 3,500 head in each herd and started to trail these herds north to Wyoming. About 4,000 head of these steers were from 1 to 10 years old and were known as outlaws in the country where they were raised. These steers were almost as wild as elk; very tall, thin, raw-boned, high-headed, with enormous horns and long tails, and as there was great danger of their stampeding at any time, I put all of them in a herd by themselves and went with that herd myself. I worried about these steers night and day, and talked to my men incessantly about how to handle them and what to do if the cattle stampeded. There is only one thing to do in case of a stampede of a herd of wild range steers, and that is for every cowboy to get in the lead of them with a good horse and keep in the lead without trying to stop them, but gradually turn them and get them to running in a circle, or "milling," as it is commonly known among cowboys. Cattle on the trail never stampede but one way, and that is back the way they come from. If you can succeed in turning them in some other direction, you can gradually bring them to a stop. These long-legged range steers can run almost as fast as the swiftest horse.
So we kept our best and swiftest horses saddled all night, ready to spring onto in case the herd ever got started. We were driving in a northerly direction all the time, and every night took the herd fully a mile north of the mess wagon camp before we bedded them down. I had fourteen men in the outfit, half of them old-time cowboys and the other half would-be cowboys; several of them what we used to call tenderfeet.
Amongst the green hands at trailing cattle was the nephew of my eastern partner, a college-bred boy, with blonde, curly hair and a face as merry as a girl's at a May day picnic. The boys all called him Curley. He was as lovable a lad as I ever met, but positively refused to take this enormous herd of old outlaw, long-horned steers as a serious proposition.
We had always four men on night herd at a time, each gang standing night guard three hours, when they were relieved by another four men. The first gang was 8 to 11 o'clock in the evening; the next 11 till 2 and the last guard stood from 2 till daylight, and then started the herd traveling north again. I kept two old cow hands and two green ones on each guard, and had been nine days on the trail; had traveled about a hundred miles without any mishap. We had bright moonlight nights. The grass was fine, being about the first of June, and I was beginning to feel a little easier, when one night we were camped on a high rolling prairie near the Wyoming line.
Curley and three other men had just went on guard at 2 o'clock in the morning. The moon was shining bright as day. Everything was as still as could be, the old long-horned outlaws all lying down sleeping, probably dreaming of the cactus-covered hillsides in their old home in Arizona. Curley was on the north side of the herd and rolling a cigarette. He forgot my oft-repeated injunction not to light a parlor match around the herd in the night, but scratched one on his saddle horn. When that match popped, there was a roar like an earthquake and the herd was gone in the wink of an eyelid; just two minutes from the time Curley scratched his match, that wild, crazy avalanche of cattle was running over that camp outfit, two and three deep. But at that first roar, I was out of my blankets, running for my hoss and hollering, "Come on, boys!" with a rising inflection on "boys." The old hands knew what was coming and were on their hosses soon as I was, but the tenderfeet stampeded their own hosses trying to get onto them, and their hosses all got away except two, and when their riders finally got on them, they took across the hills as fast as they could go out the way of that horde of oncoming wild-eyed demons. The men who lost their hosses crawled under the front end of the big heavy roundup wagon, and for a wonder the herd didn't overturn the wagon, although lots of them broke their horns on it and some broke their legs. When I lit in the saddle, and looked around, five of my cowboys was lined up side of me, their hosses jumping and snorting, for them old cow hosses scented the danger and I only had time to say, "Keep cool; hold your hosses' heads high, boys, and keep two hundred yards ahead of the cattle for at least five miles. If your hoss gives out try to get off to one side," and then that earthquake (as one of the tenderfeet called it when he first woke up) was at our heels, and we were riding for our own lives as well as to stop the cattle, because if a hoss stumbled or stepped in a badger hole there wouldn't be even a semblance of his rider left after those thousands of hoofs had got through pounding him. I was riding a Blackhawk Morgan hoss with wonderful speed and endurance and very sure footed, which was the main thing, and I allowed the herd to get up in a hundred yards of me, and seeing the country was comparatively smooth ahead of me, I turned in my saddle and looked back at the cattle.
I had been in stampedes before, but nothing like this. The cattle were running their best, all the cripples and drags in the lead, their sore feet forgotten. Every steer had his long tail in the air, and those 4,000 waving tails made me think of a sudden whirlwind in a forest of young timber. Once in a while I could see a little ripple in the sea of shining backs, and I knew a steer had stumbled and gone down and his fellows had tramped him into mincemeat as they went over him. They were constantly breaking one another's big horns as they clashed and crowded together, and I could hear their horns striking and breaking above the roar of the thousands of hoofs on the hard ground.
As my eyes moved over the herd and to one side, I caught sight of a rider on a grey hoss, using whip and spur, trying to get ahead of the cattle, and I knew at a glance it was Curley, as none of the other boys had a grey hoss that night. I could see he was slowly forging ahead and getting nearer the lead of the cattle all the time.
We had gone about ten or twelve miles and had left the smooth, rolling prairie behind us and were thundering down the divide on to the broken country along Crow Creek. Now, cattle on a stampede all follow the leaders, and after I and my half dozen cowboys had ridden in the lead of that herd for twelve or fifteen miles, gradually letting the cattle get close to us, but none by us, why we were the leaders, and when we began to strike that rough ground, my cowboys gradually veered to the left, so as to lead the herd away from the creek and onto the divide again. But Curley was on the left side of the herd. None of the other boys had noticed him, and when the herd began to swerve to the left, it put him on the inside of a quarter moon of rushing, roaring cattle. I hollered and screamed to my men, but in that awful roar could hardly hear my own voice, let alone make my men hear me, and just then we went down into a steep gulch and up the other side. I saw the hind end of the herd sweep across from their course of the quarter circle towards the leaders, saw the grey hoss and Curley go over the bank of the gulch out of sight amidst hordes of struggling animals. But as I looked back at the cattle swarming up the other bank I looked in vain for that grey hoss and his curly-haired rider. Sick at heart, I thought of what was lying in the bottom of that gulch in place of the sunny-haired boy my partner had sent out to me, and I wished that eighty thousand dollars worth of hides, horns and hoofs that was still thundering on behind was back in the cactus forests of Arizona.
As the herd swung out on the divide they split in two, part of them turning to the left, making a circle of about two miles, myself and two cowboys heading this part of the herd and keeping them running in a smaller circle all the time till they stopped. The other part of the herd kept on for about five miles further, then they split in two, and the cowboys divided and finally got both bunches stopped; not, however, till one bunch had gone about ten miles beyond where I had got the first herd quieted.
It was now broad daylight, and I started back to the gulch where poor Curley had disappeared. When I came in sight of the gulch, I saw his dead hoss, trampled into an unrecognizable mass, lying in the bottom of the gulch, but could see nothing of Curley. While gazing up and down the gulch which was overhung with rocks in places, I heard someone whistling a tune, and looking in that direction, saw Curley with his back to me, perched on a rock whistling as merry as a bird.
He told me that as his hoss tumbled over the rocky bank, he fell off into a crevice, and crawling back under the rocks, he watched the procession go over him.
We were three days getting the cattle back to where they had started and two hundred of them were dead or had to be shot, and hundreds had their horns broken off and hanging by slivers. It had cost in dead cattle and damage to the living at least $10,000. But I was so glad to get that curly-headed scamp back alive and unhurt I never said a word to him.
