CHAPTER II
THE MAN FROM CHERRYCOW
After lashing the desert to a frazzle and finding the leaks in the Hotel Bender, the wind from Papaguería went howling out over the mesa, still big with rain for the Four Peaks country, and the sun came out gloriously from behind the clouds. Already the thirsty sands had sucked up the muddy pools of water, and the board walk which extended the length of the street, connecting saloon with saloon and ending with the New York Store, smoked with the steam of drying. Along the edge of the walk, drying out their boots in the sun, the casual residents of the town–many of them held up there by the storm–sat in pairs and groups, talking or smoking in friendly silence. A little apart from the rest, for such as he are a long time making friends in Arizona, Rufus Hardy sat leaning against a post, gazing gloomily out across the desert. For a quiet, retiring young man, interested in good literature and bearing malice toward no one, his day in the Bender barroom had been eventful out of all proportion to his deserts and wishes, and he was deep in somber meditation when the door opened and Judge Ware stepped out into the sunshine.
In outward appearance the judge looked more like a large fresh-faced boy in glasses than one of San Francisco’s eminent jurists, and the similarity was enhanced by the troubled and deprecating glances with which he regarded his foreman, who towered above him like a mentor. There was a momentary conference between them at the doorway, and then, as Creede stumped away down the board walk, the judge turned and reluctantly approached Hardy.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he began, as the young man in some confusion rose to meet him, “but I should like a few words with you, on a matter of business. I am Mr. Ware, the owner of the Dos S Ranch–perhaps you may have heard of it–over in the Four Peaks country. Well–I hardly know how to begin–but my foreman, Mr. Creede, was highly impressed with your conduct a short time ago in the–er–affray with the barkeeper. I–er–really know very little as to the rights of the matter, but you showed a high degree of moral courage, I’m sure. Would you mind telling me what your business is in these parts, Mr.–er–”
“Hardy,” supplied the young man quietly, “Rufus Hardy. I am–”
“Er–what?” exclaimed the judge, hastily focussing his glasses. “Hardy–Hardy–where have I heard that name before?”
“I suppose from your daughter, Miss Lucy,” replied the young man, smiling at his confusion. “Unless,” he added hastily, “she has forgotten about me.”
“Why, Rufus Hardy!” exclaimed the judge, reaching out his hand. “Why, bless my heart–to be sure. Why, where have you been for this last year and more? I am sure your father has been quite worried about you.”
“Oh, I hope not,” answered Hardy, shifting his gaze. “I guess he knows I can take care of myself by this time–if I do write poetry,” he added, with a shade of bitterness.
“Well, well,” said the judge, diplomatically changing the subject, “Lucy will be glad to hear of you, at any rate. I believe she–er–wrote you once, some time ago, at your Berkeley address, and the letter was returned as uncalled for.”
He gazed over the rims of his glasses inquiringly, and with a suggestion of asperity, but the young man was unabashed.
“I hope you will tell Miss Lucy,” he said deferentially, “that on account of my unsettled life I have not ordered my mail forwarded for some time.” He paused and for the moment seemed to be considering some further explanation; then his manner changed abruptly.
“I believe you mentioned a matter of business,” he remarked bluffly, and the judge came back to earth with a start. His mind had wandered back a year or more to the mysterious disappearance of this same self-contained young man from his father’s house, not three blocks from his own comfortable home. There had been a servant’s rumor that he had sent back a letter or two postmarked “Bowie, Arizona”–but old Colonel Hardy had said never a word.
“Er–yes,” he assented absently, “but–well, I declare,” he exclaimed helplessly, “I’ve quite forgotten what it was about.”
“Won’t you sit down, then?” suggested Hardy, indicating the edge of the board walk with a courtly sweep of the hand. “This rain will make good feed for you up around the Four Peaks–I believe it was of your ranch there that you wished to speak.”
Judge Ware settled down against a convenient post and caught his breath, meanwhile regarding his companion curiously.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “I wanted to talk with you about my ranch, but I swear I’ll have to wait till Creede comes back, now.”
“Very well,” answered Hardy easily; “we can talk about home, then. How is Miss Lucy succeeding with her art–is she still working at the Institute?”
“Yes, indeed!” exclaimed the judge, quite mollified by the inquiry. “Indeed she is, and doing as well as any of them. She had a landscape hung at the last exhibit, that was very highly praised, even by Mathers, and you know how hard he is to please. Tupper Browne won the prize, but I think Lucy’s was twice the picture–kind of soft and sunshiny, you know–it made you think of home, just to look at it.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” said Hardy, looking up the ragged street a little wistfully. “I kind of lose track of things down here, knocking around from place to place.” He seated himself wearily on the edge of the sidewalk and drummed with his sinewy white hands against a boot leg. “But it’s a great life, sure,” he observed, half to himself. “And by the way, Mr. Ware,” he continued, “if it’s all the same to you I wish you wouldn’t say anything to your foreman about my past life. Not that there is anything disgraceful about it, but there isn’t much demand for college graduates in this country, you know, and I might want to strike him for a job.”
Judge Ware nodded, a little distantly; he did not approve of this careless young man in all his moods. For a man of good family he was hardly presentable, for one thing, and he spoke at times like an ordinary working man. So he awaited the lumbering approach of his foreman in sulky silence, resolved to leave the matter entirely in his hands.
Jefferson Creede bore down upon them slowly, sizing up the situation as he came, or trying to, for everything seemed to be at a standstill.
“Well?” he remarked, looking inquiringly from the judge to Hardy. “How about it?”
There was something big and dominating about him as he loomed above them, and the judge’s schoolboy state of mind instantly returned.
“I–I really haven’t done anything about the matter, Jefferson,” he stammered apologetically. “Perhaps you will explain our circumstances to Mr. Hardy here, so that we can discuss the matter intelligently.” He looked away as he spoke, and the tall foreman grunted audibly.
“Well,” he drawled, “they ain’t much to explain. The sheepmen have been gittin’ so free up on our range that I’ve had a little trouble with ’em–and if I was the boss they’d be more trouble, you can bet your life on that. But the judge here seems to think we can kinder suck the hind teat and baby things along until they git that Forest Reserve act through, and make our winnin’ later. He wants to make friends with these sheepmen and git ’em to kinder go around a little and give us half a chanst. Well, maybe it can be done–but not by me. So I told him either to get a superintendent to handle the sheep end of it or rustle up a new foreman, because I see red every time I hear a sheep-blat.
“Then come the question,” continued the cowman, throwing out his broad hand as if indicating the kernel of the matter, “of gittin’ such a man, and while we was talkin’ it over you called old Tex down so good and proper that there wasn’t any doubt in my mind–providin’ you want the job, of course.”
He paused and fixed his compelling eyes upon Hardy with such a mixture of admiration and good humor that the young man was won over at once, although he made no outward sign. It was Judge Ware who was to pass upon the matter finally, and he waited deferentially for him to speak.
“Well–er–Jefferson,” began the judge a little weakly, “do you think that Mr. Hardy possesses the other qualities which would be called for in such a man?”
“W’y, sure,” responded Creede, waving the matter aside impatiently. “Go ahead and hire him before he changes his mind.”
“Very well then, Mr. Hardy,” said the judge resignedly, “the first requisite in such a man is that he shall please Mr. Creede. And since he commends you so warmly I hope that you will accept the position. Let me see–um–would seventy-five dollars a month seem a reasonable figure? Well, call it seventy-five, then–that’s what I pay Mr. Creede, and I want you to be upon an equality in such matters.
“Now as to your duties. Jefferson will have charge of the cattle, as usual; and I want you, Mr. Hardy, to devote your time and attention to this matter of the sheep. Our ranch house at Hidden Water lies almost directly across the river from one of the principal sheep crossings, and a little hospitality shown to the shepherds in passing might be like bread cast upon the waters which comes back an hundred fold after many days. We cannot hope to get rid of them entirely, but if the sheep owners would kindly respect our rights to the upper range, which Mr. Creede will point out to you, I am sure we should take it very kindly. Now that is your whole problem, Rufus, and I leave the details entirely in your hands. But whatever you do, be friendly and see if you can’t appeal to their better nature.”
He delivered these last instructions seriously and they were so taken by Hardy, but Creede laughed silently, showing all his white teeth, yet without attracting the unfavorable attention of the judge, who was a little purblind. Then there was a brief discussion of details, an introduction to Mr. Einstein of the New York Store, where Hardy was given carte blanche for supplies, and Judge Ware swung up on the west-bound limited and went flying away toward home, leaving his neighbor’s son–now his own superintendent and sheep expert–standing composedly upon the platform.
“Well,” remarked Creede, smiling genially as he turned back to the hotel, “the Old Man’s all right, eh, if he does have fits! He’s good-hearted–and that goes a long ways in this country–but actually, I believe he knows less about the cattle business than any man in Arizona. He can’t tell a steer from a stag–honest! And I can lose him a half-mile from camp any day.”
The tall cattleman clumped along in silence for a while, smiling over some untold weakness of his boss–then he looked down upon Hardy and chuckled to himself.
“I’m glad you’re going to be along this trip,” he said confidentially. “Of course I’m lonely as a lost dog out there, but that ain’t it; the fact is, I need somebody to watch me. W’y, boy, I could beat the old judge out of a thousand dollars’ worth of cattle and he’d never know it in a lifetime. Did ye ever live all alone out on a ranch for a month or so? Well, you know how lawless and pisen-mean a man can git, then, associatin’ with himself. I’d’ve had the old man robbed forty times over if he wasn’t such a good-hearted old boy, but between fightin’ sheepmen and keepin’ tab on a passel of brand experts up on the Tonto I’m gittin’ so ornery I don’t dare trust myself. Have a smoke? Oh, I forgot–”
He laughed awkwardly and rolled a cigarette.
“Got a match?” he demanded austerely. “Um, much obliged–be kinder handy to have you along now.” He knit his brows fiercely as he fired up, regarding Hardy with a furtive grin.
“Say,” he said abruptly, “I’ve got to make friends with you some way. You eat, don’t you? All right then, you come along with me over to the Chink’s. I’m going to treat you to somethin’, if it’s only ham ’n’ eggs.”
They dined largely at Charley’s and then drifted out to the feed corral. Creede threw down some hay to a ponderous iron-scarred roan, more like a war horse than a cow pony, and when he came back he found Hardy doing as much for a clean-limbed sorrel, over by the gate.
“Yourn?” he inquired, surveying it with the keen concentrated gaze which stamps every point on a cowboy’s memory for life.
“Sure,” returned Hardy, patting his pony carefully upon the shoulder.
“Kinder high-headed, ain’t he?” ventured Creede, as the sorrel rolled his eyes and snorted.
“That’s right,” assented Hardy, “he’s only been broke about a month. I got him over in the Sulphur Springs Valley.”
“I knowed it,” said the cowboy sagely, “one of them wire-grass horses–an’ I bet he can travel, too. Did you ride him all the way here?”
“Clean from the Chiricahuas,” replied the young man, and Jefferson Creede looked up, startled.
“What did you say you was doin’ over there?” he inquired slowly, and Hardy smiled quietly as he answered:
“Riding for the Cherrycow outfit.”
“The hell you say!” exclaimed Creede explosively, and for a long time he stood silent, smoking as if in deep meditation.
“Well,” he said at last, “I might as well say it–I took you for a tenderfoot.”
CHAPTER III
THE TRAIL OF THE SHEEP
The morning dawned as clear on Bender as if there had never been storm nor clouds, and the waxy green heads of the greasewood, dotting the level plain with the regularity of a vineyard, sparkled with a thousand dewdrops. Ecstatic meadow larks, undismayed by the utter lack of meadows, sang love songs from the tops of the telegraph poles; and the little Mexican ground doves that always go in pairs tracked amiably about together in the wet litter of the corral, picking up the grain which the storm had laid bare. Before the early sun had cleared the top of the eastern mountains Jefferson Creede and Hardy had risen and fed their horses well, and while the air was yet chill they loaded their blankets and supplies upon the ranch wagon, driven by a shivering Mexican, and went out to saddle up.
Since his confession of the evening before Creede had put aside his air of friendly patronage and, lacking another pose, had taken to smoking in silence; for there is many a boastful cowboy in Arizona who has done his riding for the Cherrycow outfit on the chuck wagon, swamping for the cook. At breakfast he jollied the Chinaman into giving him two orders of everything, from coffee to hot cakes, paid for the same at the end, and rose up like a giant refreshed–but beneath this jovial exterior he masked a divided mind. Although he had come down handsomely, he still had his reservations about the white-handed little man from Cherrycow, and when they entered the corral he saddled his iron-scarred charger by feeling, gazing craftily over his back to see how Hardy would show up in action.
Now, first the little man took a rope, and shaking out the loop dropped it carelessly against his horse’s fore-feet–and that looked well, for the sorrel stood stiffly in his tracks, as if he had been anchored. Then the man from Cherrycow picked up his bridle, rubbed something on the bit, and offered it to the horse, who graciously bowed his head to receive it. This was a new one on Creede and in the excitement of the moment he inadvertently cinched his roan up two holes too tight and got nipped for it, for old Bat Wings had a mind of his own in such matters, and the cold air made him ugly.
“Here, quit that,” muttered the cowboy, striking back at him; but when he looked up, the sorrel had already taken his bit, and while he was champing on it Hardy had slipped the headstall over his ears. There was a broad leather blind on the hacamore, which was of the best plaited rawhide with a horsehair tie rope, but the little man did not take advantage of it to subdue his mount. Instead he reached down for his gaudy Navajo saddle blanket, offered it to the sorrel to smell, and then slid it gently upon his back. But when he stooped for his saddle the high-headed horse rebelled. With ears pricked suspiciously forward and eyes protruding he glared at the clattering thing in horror, snorting deep at every breath. But, though he was free-footed, by some obsession of the mind, cunningly inculcated in his breaking, the sorrel pony was afraid to move.
As the saddle was drawn toward him and he saw that he could not escape its hateful embrace he leaned slowly back upon his haunches, grunting as if his fore-feet, wreathed in the loose rope, were stuck in some terrible quicksands from which he tried in vain to extricate them; but with a low murmur of indifferent words his master moved the saddle resolutely toward him, the stirrups carefully snapped up over the horn, and ignoring his loud snorts and frenzied shakings of the head laid it surely down upon his back. This done, he suddenly spoke sharply to him, and with a final groan the beautiful creature rose up and consented to his fate.
Hardy worked quickly now, tightening the cinch, lowering the stirrups, and gathering up the reins. He picked up the rope, coiled it deftly and tied it to the saddle–and now, relieved of the idea that he was noosed, the pony began to lift his feet and prance, softly, like a swift runner on the mark. At these signs of an early break Creede mounted hurriedly and edged in, to be ready in case the sorrel, like most half-broken broncos, tried to scrape his rider off against the fence; but Hardy needed no wrangler to shunt him out the gate. Standing by his shoulder and facing the rear he patted the sorrel’s neck with the hand that held the reins, while with his right hand he twisted the heavy stirrup toward him stealthily, raising his boot to meet it. Then like a flash he clapped in his foot and, catching the horn as his fiery pony shot forward, he snapped up into the saddle like a jumping jack and went flying out the gate.
“Well, the son of a gun!” muttered Creede, as he thundered down the trail after him. “Durned if he can’t ride!”
There are men in every cow camp who can rope and shoot, but the man who can ride a wild horse can hold up his head with the best of them. No matter what his race or station if he will crawl a “snake” and stay with him there is always room on the wagon for his blankets; his fame will spread quickly from camp to camp, and the boss will offer to raise him when he shows up for his time. Jefferson Creede’s face was all aglow when he finally rode up beside Hardy; he grinned triumphantly upon horse and man as if they had won money for him in a race; and Hardy, roused at last from his reserve, laughed back out of pure joy in his possessions.
“How’s that for a horse?” he cried, raising his voice above the thud of hoofs. “I have to turn him loose at first–’fraid he’ll learn to pitch if I hold him in–he’s never bucked with me yet!”
“You bet–he’s a snake!” yelled Creede, hammering along on his broad-chested roan. “Where’d you git ’im?”
“Tom Fulton’s ranch,” responded Hardy, reining his horse in and patting him on the neck. “Turned in three months’ pay and broke him myself, to boot. I’ll let you try him some day, when he’s gentled.”
“Well, if I wasn’t so big ’n’ heavy I’d take you up on that,” said Creede, “but I’m just as much obliged, all the same. I don’t claim to be no bronco-buster now, but I used to ride some myself when I was a kid. But say, the old judge has got some good horses runnin’ on the upper range,–if you want to keep your hand in,–thirty or forty head of ’em, and wild as hawks. There’s some sure-enough wild horses too, over on the Peaks, that belong to any man that can git his rope onto ’em–how would that strike you? We’ve been tryin’ for years to catch the black stallion that leads ’em.”
Try as he would to minimize this exaggerated estimate of his prowess as a horse-tamer Hardy was unable to make his partner admit that he was anything short of a real “buster,” and before they had been on the trail an hour Creede had made all the plans for a big gather of wild horses after the round-up.
“I had you spotted for a sport from the start,” he said, puffing out his chest at the memory of his acumen, “but, by jingo, I never thought I was drawin’ a bronco-twister. Well, now, I saw you crawl that horse this mornin’, and I guess I know the real thing by this time. Say,” he said, turning confidentially in his saddle, “if it’s none of my business you can say so, but what did you do to that bit?”
Hardy smiled, like a juggler detected in his trick. “You must have been watching me,” he said, “but I don’t mind telling you–it’s simply passing a good thing along. I learned it off of a Yaqui Mayo Indian that had been riding for Bill Greene on the Turkey-track–I rubbed it with a little salt.”
“Well, I’m a son of a gun!” exclaimed Creede incredulously. “Here we’ve been gittin’ our fingers bit off for forty years and never thought of a little thing like that. Got any more tricks?”
“Nope,” said Hardy, “I’ve only been in the Territory a little over a year, this trip, and I’m learning, myself. Funny how much you can pick up from some of these Indians and Mexicans that can’t write their own names, isn’t it?”
“Umm, may be so,” assented Creede doubtfully, “but I’d rather go to a white man myself. Say,” he exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly, “what was that name the old man called you by when he was makin’ that talk about sheep–Roofer, or Rough House–or something like that?”
“Oh, that’s my front name–Rufus. Why? What’s the matter with it?”
“Nothin’, I reckon,” replied Creede absently, “never happened to hear it before, ’s all. I was wonderin’ how he knowed it,” he added, glancing shrewdly sideways. “Thought maybe you might have met him up in California, or somewheres.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” responded Hardy unblinkingly. “The first thing he did was to ask me my full name. I notice he calls you Jefferson,” he added, shiftily changing the subject.
“Sure thing,” agreed Creede, now quite satisfied, “he calls everybody that way. If your name is Jim you’re James, John you’re Jonathan, Jeff you’re Jefferson Davis–but say, ain’t they any f’r short to your name? We’re gittin’ too far out of town for this Mister business. My name’s Jeff, you know,” he suggested.
“Why, sure,” exclaimed Hardy, brushing aside any college-bred scruples, “only don’t call me Rough House–they might get the idea that I was on the fight. But you don’t need to get scared of Rufus–it’s just another way of saying Red. I had a red-headed ancestor away back there somewhere and they called him Rufus, and then they passed the name down in the family until it got to me, and I’m no more red-headed than you are.”
“No– is that straight?” ejaculated the cowboy, with enthusiasm, “same as we call ’em Reddy now, eh? But say, I’d choke if I tried to call you Rufus. Will you stand for Reddy? Aw, that’s no good–what’s the matter with Rufe? Well, shake then, pardner, I’m dam’ glad I met up with you.”
They pulled their horses down to a Spanish trot–that easy, limping shuffle that eats up its forty miles a day–and rode on together like brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never returned again, the Indians of the valley have always looked with superstitious dread.
Creede told the story carelessly, smiling at the pride of the Pimas who refused to admit that the Apaches alone, devils and bad medicine barred, could have conquered so many of their warriors. To the west in a long fringe of green loomed the cottonwoods of Moroni, where the hard-working Mormons had turned the Salagua from its course and irrigated the fertile plain, and there on their barren reservation dwelt the remnant of those warlike Pimas, the unrequited friends of the white men, now held by them as of no account.
As he heard the history of its people–how the Apaches had wiped out the Toltecs, and the white men had killed off the Apaches, and then, after pushing aside the Pimas and the Mexicans, closed in a death struggle for the mastery of the range–Hardy began to perceive the grim humor of the land. He glanced across at his companion, tall, stalwart, with mighty arms and legs and features rugged as a mountain crag, and his heart leaped up within him at the thought of the battles to come, battles in which sheepmen and cattlemen, defiant of the law, would match their strength and cunning in a fight for the open range.
As they rode along mile after mile toward the north the road mounted gently; hills rose up one by one out of the desert floor, crowned with towering sahuaros, and in the dip of the pass ahead a mighty forest of their misshapen stalks was thrust up like giant fingers against the horizon. The trail wound in among them, where they rose like fluted columns above the lesser cactus–great skin-covered tanks, gorged fat with water too bitter to quench the fieriest thirst, yet guarded jealously by poison-barbed spines. Gilded woodpeckers, with hearts red as blood painted upon their breasts, dipped in uneven flight from sahuaro to sahuaro, dodged into holes of their own making, dug deep into the solid flesh; sparrow hawks sailed forth from their summits, with quick eyes turned to the earth for lizards; and the brown mocking bird, leaping for joy from the ironwood tree where his mate was nesting, whistled the praise of the desert in the ecstatic notes of love. In all that land which some say God forgot, there was naught but life and happiness, for God had sent the rain.
The sun was high in the heavens when, as they neared the summit of the broad pass, a sudden taint came down the wind, whose only burden had been the fragrance of resinous plants, of wetted earth, and of green things growing. A distant clamor, like the babble of many voices or the surf-beats of a mighty sea, echoed dimly between the chuck-a-chuck of their horses’ feet, and as Hardy glanced up inquiringly his companion’s lip curled and he muttered:
“Sheep!”
They rode on in silence. The ground, which before had been furred with Indian wheat and sprouting six weeks’ grass, now showed the imprints of many tiny feet glozed over by the rain, and Hardy noticed vaguely that something was missing–the grass was gone. Even where a minute before it had covered the level flats in a promise of maturity, rising up in ranker growth beneath the thorny trees and cactus, its place was now swept bare and all the earth trampled into narrow, hard-tamped trail. Then as a brush shed and corrals, with a cook tent and a couple of water wagons in the rear, came into view, the ground went suddenly stone bare, stripped naked and trampled smooth as a floor. Never before had Hardy seen the earth so laid waste and desolate, the very cactus trimmed down to its woody stump and every spear of root grass searched out from the shelter of the spiny chollas. He glanced once more at his companion, whose face was sullen and unresponsive; there was a well-defined bristle to his short mustache and he rowelled his horse cruelly when he shied at the blatting horde.
The shearing was in full blast, every man working with such feverish industry that not one of them stopped to look up. From the receiving corral three Mexicans in slouched hats and jumpers drove the sheep into a broad chute, yelling and hurling battered oil cans at the hindmost; by the chute an American punched them vigorously forward with a prod, and yet another thrust them into the pens behind the shearers, who bent to their work with a sullen, back-breaking stoop. Each man held between his knees a sheep, gripped relentlessly, that flinched and kicked at times when the shears clipped off patches of flesh; and there in the clamor of a thousand voices they shuttled their keen blades unceasingly, stripping off a fleece, throwing it aside, and seizing a fresh victim by the foot, toiling and sweating grimly. By another chute a man stood with a paint pot, stamping a fresh brand upon every new-shorn sheep, and in a last corral the naked ones, their white hides spotted with blood from their cuts, blatted frantically for their lambs. These were herded in a small inclosure, some large and browned with the grime of the flock, others white and wobbly, newborn from mothers frightened in the shearing; and always that tremendous wailing chorus–Ba-a-a, ba-a-a, ba-a-a– and men in greasy clothes wrestling with the wool.
To a man used to the noise and turmoil of the round-up and branding pen and accustomed to the necessary cruelties of stock raising there was nothing in the scene to attract attention. But Hardy was of gentler blood, inured to the hardships of frontier life but not to its unthinking brutality, and as he beheld for the first time the waste, the hurry, the greed of it all, his heart turned sick and his eyes glowed with pity, like a woman’s. By his side the sunburned swarthy giant who had taken him willy-nilly for a friend sat unmoved, his lip curled, not at the pity of it, but because they were sheep; and because, among the men who rushed about driving them with clubs and sacks, he saw more than one who had eaten at his table and then sheeped out his upper range. His saturnine mood grew upon him as he waited and, turning to Hardy, he shouted harshly:
“There’s some of your friends over yonder,” he said, jerking his thumb toward a group of men who were weighing the long sacks of wool. “Want to go over and get acquainted?”
Hardy woke from his dream abruptly and shook his head.
“No, let’s not stop,” he said, and Creede laughed silently as he reined Bat Wings into the trail. But just as they started to go one of the men by the scales hailed them, motioning with his hand and, still laughing cynically, the foreman of the Dos S turned back again.
“That’s Jim Swope,” he said, “one of our big sheep men–nice feller–you’ll like him.”
He led the way to the weighing scales, where two sweating Mexicans tumbled the eight-foot bags upon the platform, and a burly man with a Scotch turn to his tongue called off the weights defiantly. At his elbow stood two men, the man who had called them and a wool buyer,–each keeping tally of the count.