On the Cowboy's Trail: Western Boxed-Set. Coolidge Dane
of calves, the mooing of cows and the hoarse thunder of mountain bulls:
“Hel-lo, Rufe!”
From his place on the edge of the herd Hardy saw Jefferson Creede, almost herculean on his tall horse, waving a large black hat. Instantly he put spurs to his sorrel and leaped down the narrow trail, and at the edge of the herd they shook hands warmly, for friends are scarce, wherever you go.
“Jest in time!” said Creede, grinning his welcome, “we’re goin’ over into Hell’s Hip Pocket to-morrow –– the original hole in the ground –– to bring out Bill Johnson’s beef critters, and I sure wanted you to make the trip. How’d you git along with Jasp?”
“All right,” responded Hardy, “he didn’t make me any trouble. But I’m glad to get away from that sheep smell, all the same.”
The big cowboy fixed his eyes upon him eagerly.
“Did they go around?” he asked incredulously. “Jasp and all?”
“Sure,” said Hardy. “Why?”
For a long minute Creede was silent, wrinkling his brows as he pondered upon the miracle.
“Well, that’s what I want to know,” he answered ambiguously. “But say, you’ve got a fresh horse; jest take my place here while me and Uncle Bill over there show them ignorant punchers how to cut cattle.”
He circled rapidly about the herd and, riding out into the runway where the cattle were sifted, the beef steers being jumped across the open into the hold-up herd and the cows and calves turned back, he held up his hand for the work to stop. Then by signals he sent the galloping horsemen back to the edge of the herd and beckoned for old Bill Johnson.
For a few minutes he sat quietly on his horse, waiting for the harassed cattle to stop their milling. Then breaking into a song such as cowboys sing at night he rode slowly in among them, threading about at random, while old Bill Johnson on his ancient mare did likewise, his tangled beard swaying idly in the breeze. On the border of the herd they edged in as if by accident upon a fat steer and walked him amiably forth into the open. Another followed out of natural perversity, and when both were nicely started toward the beef cut the two men drifted back once more into the herd. There was no running, no shouting, no gallant show of horsemanship, but somehow the right steers wandered over into the beef cut and stayed there. As if by magic spell the outlaws and “snakes” became good, and with no breaks for the hills the labor of an afternoon was accomplished in the space of two dull and uneventful hours.
“That’s the way to cut cattle!” announced Creede, as they turned the discard toward the hills. “Ain’t it, Bill?”
He turned to Johnson who, sitting astride a flea-bitten gray mare that seemed to be in a perpetual doze, looked more like an Apache squaw than a boss cowboy. The old man’s clothes were even more ragged than when Hardy had seen him at Bender, his copper-riveted hat was further reinforced by a buckskin thong around the rim, and his knees were short-stirruped almost up to his elbows by the puny little boy’s saddle that he rode, but his fiery eyes were as quick and piercing as ever.
“Shore thing,” he said, straightening up jauntily in his saddle, “that’s my way! Be’n doin’ it fer years, while you boys was killin’ horses, but it takes Jeff hyar to see the p’int. Be gentle, boys, be gentle with um –– you don’t gain nawthin’ fer all yer hard ridin’.”
He cut off a chew of tobacco and tucked it carefully away in his cheek.
“Jeff hyar,” he continued, as the bunch of cowboys began to josh and laugh among themselves, “he comes by his savvy right –– his paw was a smart man before him, and mighty clever to his friends, to boot. Many’s the time I hev took little Jeffie down the river and learned him tracks and beaver signs when he wasn’t knee-high to a grasshopper –– hain’t I, Jeff? And when I tell him to be gentle with them cows he knows I’m right. I jest want you boys to take notice when you go down into the Pocket to-morrer what kin be done by kindness; and the first man that hollers or puts a rope on my gentle stock, I’ll sure make him hard to ketch.
“You hear me, naow,” he cried, turning sharply upon Bill Lightfoot, who was getting off something about “Little Jeffie,” and then for the first time he saw the face of the new cowboy who had ridden in that afternoon. Not since the day he was drunk at Bender had Bill Johnson set eyes upon the little man to whom he had sworn off, but he recognized him instantly.
“Hello thar, pardner!” he exclaimed, reining his mare in abruptly. “Whar’d you drop down from?”
“Why howdy do, Mr. Johnson!” answered Hardy, shaking hands, “I’m glad to see you again. Jeff told me he was going down to your ranch to-morrow and I looked to see you then.”
Bill Johnson allowed this polite speech to pass over his shoulder without response. Then, drawing Hardy aside, he began to talk confidentially; expounding to the full his system of gentling cattle; launching forth his invective, which was of the pioneer variety, upon the head of all sheepmen; and finally coming around with a jerk to the subject that was uppermost in his mind.
“Say,” he said, “I want to ask you a question –– are you any relation to the Captain Hardy that I served with over at Fort Apache? Seems’s if you look like ’im, only smaller.”
His stature was a sore point with Hardy, and especially in connection with his father, but making allowance for Mr. Johnson’s ways he modestly admitted his ancestry.
“His son, eh!” echoed the old man. “Waal –– now! I tell you, boy, I knowed you –– I knowed you the minute you called down that dog-robber of a barkeep –– and I was half drunk, too. And so you’re the new superintendent down at the Dos S, eh? Waal, all I can say is: God help them pore sheepmen if you ever git on their trail. I used to chase Apaches with yore paw, boy!”
It was Bill Johnson’s turn to talk that evening and like most solitaries who have not “gone into the silence,” he availed himself of a listener with enthusiasm.
Stories of lion hunts and “b’ar fights” fell as trippingly from his lips as the words of a professional monologist, and when he had finished his account of the exploits of Captain Samuel Barrows Hardy, even the envious Lightfoot regarded Rufus with a new respect, for there is no higher honor in Arizona than to be the son of an Indian fighter. And when the last man had crawled wearily into his blankets the old hermit still sat by the dying fire poking the charred ends into the flames and holding forth to the young superintendent upon the courage of his sire.
Hardly had the son of his father crept under the edge of Creede’s blankets and dropped to sleep before that huge mountain of energy rose up and gave the long yell. The morning was at its blackest, that murky four A. M. darkness which precedes the first glimmer of light; but the day’s work had to be done. The shivering horse-wrangler stamped on his boots and struck out down the cañon after the remuda, two or three cooks got busy about the fire which roared higher and higher as they piled on the ironwood to make coals, and before the sun had more than mounted the southern shoulder of the Four Peaks the long line of horsemen was well on the trail to Hell’s Hip Pocket.
The frontier imagination had in no wise overleaped itself in naming this abyss. Even the tribute which Facilis Descensus Vergil paid to the local Roman hell could hardly be said of the Pocket –– it is not even easy to get into it. From the top of the divide it looks like a valley submerged in a smoky haze through which the peaks and pinnacles of the lower parks rise up like cathedral spires, pointing solemnly to heaven. As the trail descends through washed-out gulches and “stone-patches,” now skating along the backbone of a ridge and now dropping as abruptly into some hollow waterway, the cliffs and pinnacles begin to loom up against the sky; then they seem to close in and block the way, and just as the cañon boxes in to nothing the trail slips into a gash in the face of the cliff where the soft sandstone has crumbled away between two harder strata, and climbs precariously along through the sombre gloom of the gorge to the bright light of the fair valley beyond.
It is a kind of fairy land, that hidden pocket