Hidden Water Part 4

"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 pa.s.sed 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?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 pa.s.s in the mountains where the painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the river. To the east rose Superst.i.tion Mountain, that huge b.u.t.tress 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 superst.i.tious 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 pa.s.s 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 woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, with hearts red as blood painted upon their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 G.o.d forgot, there was naught but life and happiness, for G.o.d had sent the rain.

The sun was high in the heavens when, as they neared the summit of the broad pa.s.s, 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' gra.s.s, now showed the imprints of many tiny feet glozed over by the rain, and Hardy noticed vaguely that something was missing--the gra.s.s 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 gra.s.s 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 w.i.l.l.y-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.

Jim Swope glanced quickly up from his work. He was a man not over forty but bent and haggard, with a face wrinkled deep with hard lines, yet lighted by blue eyes that still held a twinkle of grim humor.

"h.e.l.lo, Jeff," he said, jotting down a number in his tally book, "goin' by without stoppin', was ye? Better ask the cook for somethin'

to eat. Say, you're goin' up the river, ain't ye? Well, tell Pablo Moreno and them Mexicans I lost a cut of two hundred sheep up there somewhere. That son of a--of a herder of mine was too lazy to make a corral and count 'em, so I don't know where they are lost, but I'll give two bits a head for 'em, delivered here. Tell the old man that, will you?"

He paused to enter another weight in his book, then stepped away from the scales and came out to meet them.

"How's the feed up your way?" he inquired, smiling grimly.

"Dam' pore," replied Creede, carrying on the jest, "and it'll be poorer still if you come in on me, so keep away. Mr. Swope, I'll make you acquainted with Mr. Hardy--my new boss. Judge Ware has sent him out to be superintendent for the Dos S."

"Glad to meet you, sir," said Swope, offering a greasy hand that smelled of sheep dip. "Nice man, the old judge--here, _umbre_, put that bag on straight! Three hundred and _fifteen_? Well I know a dam'

sight better--excuse me, boys--here, put that bag on again, and weigh it right!"

"Well," observed Creede, glancing at his friend as the combat raged unremittingly, "I guess we might as well pull. His busy day, you understand. Nice feller, though--you'll like 'im." Once more the glint of quiet deviltry came into his eyes, but he finished out the jest soberly. "Comes from a nice Mormon family down in Moroni--six brothers--all sheepmen. You'll see the rest of the boys when they come through next month--but Jim's the best."

There was something in the sardonic smile that accompanied this encomium which set Hardy thinking. Creede must have been thinking too, for he rode past the kitchen without stopping, c.o.c.king his head up at the sun as if estimating the length of their journey.

"Oh, did you want to git somethin' to eat?" he inquired innocently.

"No? That's good. That sheep smell kinder turns my stomach." And throwing the spurs into Bat Wings he loped rapidly toward the summit, scowling forbiddingly in pa.s.sing at a small boy who was shepherding the stray herd. For a mile or two he said nothing, swinging his head to scan the sides of the mountains with eyes as keen as an eagle's; then, on the top of the last roll, he halted and threw his hand out grandly at the panorama which lay before them.

"There she lays," he said, as if delivering a funeral oration, "as good a cow country as G.o.d ever made--and now even the jack rabbits have left it. D'ye see that big mesa down there?" he continued, pointing to a broad stretch of level land, dotted here and there with giant cactus, which extended along the river. "I've seen a thousand head of cattle, fat as b.u.t.ter, feedin' where you see them _sahuaros_, and now look at it!"

He threw out his hand again in pa.s.sionate appeal, and Hardy saw that the mesa was empty.

"There was gra.s.s a foot high," cried Creede in a hushed, sustained voice, as if he saw it again, "and flowers. Me and my brothers and sisters used to run out there about now and pick all kinds, big yaller poppies and daisies, and these here little pansies--and ferget-me-nots. G.o.d! I wish I could ferget 'em--but I've been fightin' these sheep so long and gittin' so mean and ugly them flowers wouldn't mean no more to me now than a bunch of jimson weeds and stink squashes. But h.e.l.l, what's the use?" He threw out his hands once more, palms up, and dropped them limply.

"That's old Pablo Moreno's place down there," he said, falling back abruptly into his old way. "We'll stop there overnight--I want to help git that wagon across the river when Rafael comes in bymeby, and we'll go up by trail in the mornin'."

Once more he fell into his brooding silence, looking up at the naked hills from habit, for there were no cattle there. And Rufus Hardy, quick to understand, gazed also at the arid slopes, where once the grama had waved like tawny hair in the soft winds and the cattle of Jeff Creede's father had stood knee-high in flowers.

Now at last the secret of Arizona-the-Lawless and Arizona-the-Desert lay before him: the feed was there for those who could take it, and the sheep were taking it all. It was government land, only there was no government; anybody's land, to strip, to lay waste, to desolate, to hog for and fight over forever--and no law of right; only this, that the best fighter won. Thoughts came up into his mind, as thoughts will in the silence of the desert; memories of other times and places, a word here, a scene there, having no relation to the matter in hand; and then one flashed up like the premonitions of the superst.i.tious--a verse from the Bible that he had learned at his mother's knee many years before:

"Crying, Peace, Peace, when there is no peace."

But he put it aside lightly, as a man should, for if one followed every vagrant fancy and intuition, taking account of signs and omens, he would slue and waver in his course like a toy boat in a mill pond, which after great labor and adventure comes, in the end, to nothing.

CHAPTER IV

DON PABLO MORENO

On the edge of the barren mesa and looking out over the sandy flats where the Salagua writhed about uneasily in its bed, the _casa_ of Don Pablo Moreno stood like a mud fort, barricaded by a palisade of the th.o.r.n.y cactus which the Mexicans call _ocotilla_. Within this fence, which inclosed several acres of standing grain and the miniature of a garden, there were all the signs of prosperity--a new wagon under its proper shade, a storehouse strongly built where chickens lingered about for grain, a clean-swept _ramada_ casting a deep shadow across the open doorway; but outside the inclosure the ground was stamped as level as a threshing floor. As Creede and Hardy drew near, an old man, grave and dignified, came out from the shady veranda and opened the gate, bowing with the most courtly hospitality.

"_Buenos tardes, senores_," he p.r.o.nounced, touching his hat in a military salute. "_Pasa!_ Welcome to my poor house."

In response to these salutations Creede made the conventional replies, and then as the old man stood expectant he said in a hurried aside to Hardy:

"D'ye talk Spanish? He don't understand a word of English."

"Sure," returned Hardy. "I was brought up on it!"

"No!" exclaimed Creede incredulously, and then, addressing the Senor Moreno in his native tongue, he said: "Don Pablo, this is my friend Senor Hardy, who will live with me at Agua Escondida!"

"With great pleasure, senor," said the old gentleman, removing his hat, "I make your acquaintance!"

"The pleasure is mine," replied Hardy, returning the salutation, and at the sound of his own language Don Pablo burst into renewed protestations of delight. Within the cool shadow of his _ramada_ he offered his own chair and seated himself in another, neatly fashioned of mesquite wood and strung with thongs of rawhide. Then, turning his venerable head to the doorway which led to the inner court, he shouted in a terrible voice:

"_Muchacho_!"

Instantly from behind the adobe wall, around the corner of which he had been slyly peeping, a black-eyed boy appeared and stood before him, his ragged straw hat held respectfully against his breast.

"_Sus manos!_" roared the old man; and dropping his hat the _muchacho_ touched his hands before him in an att.i.tude of prayer.