The Dude Wrangler Part 23

"You're not looking," Wallie said, sharply.

"I was watchin' them cattle."

"I don't see any."

Pinkey pointed, but Wallie could see nothing.

"If they got cows on Mars, I'll bet I could read the bran's," Pinkey boasted. "Can't you see them specks movin' off yonder?"

Wallie admitted he could not.

"It's cattle, and they act like somebody's drivin' 'em," Pinkey declared, positively. "Looks like it's too early to be movin' 'em to the mountain."

His curiosity satisfied, he gave the wheat his attention.

"It looks fine, Wallie," he said with sincerity.

Wallie could not resist crowing:

"You didn't think I'd last, did you? Miss Spenceley didn't, either.

She'll be disappointed very likely when she hears I've succeeded."

"Don't cackle till you've laid your aig, Gentle Annie. When you've thrashed and sold your grain and got your money in the bank, then I'll help you. We'll git drunk if I have to rob a drug-store."

"You're always putting a damper on me. It was you who advised me to go in for dry-farming," Wallie reminded him.

"I figgered that if you lived through a year of it," Pinkey replied, candidly, "then almost anything else would look like a snap to you."

It was plain that in spite of his prospects Pinkey was not sanguine, but in this moment of his exultation failure seemed impossible to Wallie.

In various small ways Canby had tried to break him and had not succeeded. Boise Bill had prophesied that he would not "winter"--yet here he was with every reason to believe that he would also "summer."

Wallie felt rather invincible as he reflected upon it, and the aurora borealis did not exceed in colour the outlook his fancy painted that evening.

"It's eight-thirty," Pinkey hinted. "When I set up till all hours I over-sleep in the morning."

Wallie came to earth reluctantly, and as he returned to the cabin he again permitted himself the luxury of pitying the folk of The Colonial who knew nothing of such rapturous moments in that stale, uneventful world which was so remote and different from the present that it was beginning to seem like a dream to him.

They had been asleep for an hour, more possibly, when Pinkey nudged Wallie violently.

"What's that huffin', do you reckon?"

Wallie awoke with a start and listened.

"Huffing" was the right word. Lying next to the logs, some large animal was breathing so heavily in Wallie's ear that it sounded like a bellows.

He peered through a crack and saw something that looked like a mastodon in the darkness tugging at a sack he had used for c.h.i.n.king. It was not a horse and was too large for his Jersey. It flashed through his mind that it might be a roaming silvertip from the mountain.

Pinkey was out of the bunk at a bound and around the corner of the cabin, where his suspicions were instantly verified.

"It's a bull!" he shouted. "I thought it. Looks like a thousand head of cattle tramplin' down your wheat-field!"

Wallie turned sick. He could not move for a moment. His air-castles fell so hard he could almost hear them.

"Do you think they've been in long?" he asked, weakly.

"Can't tell till daylight." Pinkey was getting into his clothes hurriedly.

Wallie was now in the doorway and he could make out innumerable dark shapes browsing contentedly in his grain-field.

"What'll we do?" he asked, despairingly.

"Do?" replied Pinkey, savagely, tugging at his boot straps. "I'll send one whur the dogs won't bite him with every ca'tridge. We'll run a thousand dollars' worth of taller off the rest of 'em. Git into your clothes, Gentle Annie, and we'll smoke 'em up proper."

"I don't see how it could happen," said Wallie, his voice trembling.

"The fence was good!"

"If it had been twenty feet high 'twould 'a' been all the same," Pinkey answered. "Them cattle was _drove_ in."

"You mean----" Wallie's mouth opened.

"Sh.o.r.e--Canby! It come to my mind last night when I seen that bunch movin'. Pretty coa.r.s.e work I call it, but he thought you was alone and wouldn't ketch on to it."

"He'll pay for this!" cried Wallie, chokingly.

"You can't do nothin' with him but deal him misery. He's got too much money and pull fer you. Do you know what I think's gnawin' on him?"

"My taking up a homestead----"

"That, too, but mostly because Helene dressed him down for sellin' that locoed team to you. He's jealous."

Even in his despair Wallie felt pleased that any one, especially Canby, should be jealous of him because of Helene Spenceley.

"He aims to marry her," Pinkey added. "I wisht you could beat his time and win yerself a home somehow. I don't think you got any show, but if I was you I'd take another turn around my saddle-horn and hang on.

Whenever I kin," kindly, "I'll speak a good word for you. Throw your saddle on your horse and step, young feller. I'm gone!"

The faint hope which Wallie had nursed that the damage might not be so great as he had feared vanished with daylight. Not only was the grain trampled so the field looked like a race course, but panel after panel of the fence was down where the quaking-asp posts had snapped like lead-pencils.

As Pinkey and Wallie surveyed it in the early dawn Wallie's voice had a catch in it when he said finally:

"I guess I'm done farming. They made a good job of it."

"I'm no 'sharp' but it looks to me like some of that wheat would straighten up if it got a good wettin'."

Wallie said grimly:

"The only thing I forgot to buy when I was outfitting in Philadelphia was a rain-making apparatus."

"On the level," Pinkey declared, earnestly, "I bleeve we're goin' to have a shower--the clouds bankin' up over there in the northwest is what made me think of it."