The Fighting Shepherdess Part 41

Mary, a few feet from the unconscious stranger, was regarding him with the gentle speculative look which Bowers knew to presage mischief. It was not difficult to interpret Mary's intentions, and Bowers was fully aware that it was his duty either to warn the sleeper or reprimand Mary.

His eyes, however, had the fondness of a doting parent who takes a secret pride in his offspring's naughtiness as he watched Mary. He did not like the stranger, anyhow, and the incident of the photograph still rankled.

"The Smart Alec," he muttered, grinning, "it won't hurt him."

The lamb backed off a little, made a run, and with its four feet bunched, landed in the pit of the stranger's stomach.

With an explosive grunt, the stranger's knees and chin came together like the sudden closing of a large pocket knife.

In spite of himself, Bowers snickered, but his grin faded at the expression which came to the stranger's face when he realized the cause of his painful awakening. It was devilish, nothing less than appalling, in its ferocity. Bowers had seen rage before, but the peculiar fiendishness of the man's expression, not knowing himself observed, fascinated him.

The lamb had backed off for another run when the stranger jumped for it.

Bowers called sharply:

"Don't tech that little sheep, pardner!"

The answer was snarled through white teeth:

"I'm goin' to kick its slats in! I'm goin' to break every bone in its body."

"I wouldn't advise nothin' like that. Come here, Mary!" Bowers endeavored to speak calmly, but he was seized with a tremulous excitement when he saw that the stranger intended to carry out his threat.

"I'll pay you fer it," he panted as he tried to catch the lamb, "but I'm aimin' to kill that knot-head!"

Bowers dried his hands on his overalls and stepped inside the wagon. He returned with his shotgun.

"And I aim to blow the top of your head off ef you try it," Bowers said, breathing heavily. "That little innercent sheep don't mean no harm to n.o.body. Sence we're speakin' plain, I don't like you nohow. I don't like the way you act; I don't like the way you talk; I don't like the way your face grows on you; I don't like nothin' about you, and ef I never see you agin it'll be soon enough. You'd better go while I'm ca'm, for when I gits mad I breaks in two in the middle and flies both ways!"

Panting from his chase, the stranger stopped and stood looking at Bowers in baffled fury. Then he turned sharply on his heel, caught his horse and swung into the saddle. He hesitated for the part of a second before spurring his horse a little closer.

"You kin take a message to your boss--you locoed sheepherder. Tell her it's from an old friend that knew her when she was kickin' in her cradle. Show her that photygraph of the feller with the runnin' horse and tell her I said it was the picture of her father, and that he's scoured the country for her, spendin' more money to locate her than she'll make if she wrangles woolies till she's a hundred. Tell her a telegram would bring him in twenty-four hours--on a special, probably.

Give her that message, along with the love of an old, old friend what was well acquainted with her at the Sand Coulee!" He laughed mockingly, and with a malevolent look at Bowers, plunged into the quaking asp and vanished.

Bowers stared after him open-mouthed and round-eyed. He had placed his visitor. "The feller that smelled like a Injun tepee in the drug store the night Mormon Joe was murdered!"

The discovery that his visitor was the malodorous stranger of the drug store impressed Bowers far more than his mocking message to Kate concerning her father. That might or might not be true, but he was entirely sure about the other.

His first impulse was to deliver the message, but upon second thought he decided that nothing would be accomplished by it, and it might disturb her. He argued that with a range war pending she already had enough worries. If only he could get word to Teeters somehow--or Lingle, even--to keep a lookout for the fellow, but since he was many miles off the line of travel and he dared not leave his sheep, there was small chance of notifying either.

It was a good many days before the incident was out of Bowers's mind for any length of time. He kept his shotgun handy and was on the alert constantly, listening, searching the surrounding country for a moving object, and muttering frequently, "What was he doin' here, anyhow--moggin' round the mountains--comin' from nowhur, goin' nowhur!"

But a month pa.s.sed and nothing happened, either in Bowers's camp or at the others. Since the warning had implied that any attempt to move further would be stopped immediately, and yet all the wagons were now well up the mountain, both Kate and Bowers concluded that the threatening scrawl was intended only to annoy her.

"Ma-aa-aa!" Mary bleated like a fretful teething child, and held up his head for Bowers to rub the feverish horns as his foster parent sat on a box beside the wagon one lazy afternoon.

"I declare, Mary, I'll be most as glad when them horns cut through as if they growed on me! I could raise a baby by hand 'thout any more trouble than it's took to bring you up." The lamb stood stock still as he yielded to his importunities, and Bowers continued whimsically: "I been a father and mother to you, Mary, an' you might a-been an orphing through your own orn'riness if I hadn't throwed down on that feller pretty p.r.o.nto.

"No denyin' 'twould have made a preacher peevish to have you land in the pit of his stummick with them sharp hoofs of yourn. But you're only an innercent little sheep, and they wan't no sense in his tryin' to stomp on you.

"Well, I got to be stirrin' up them woolies. Sorry I got to tie you, but you're gittin' such a durned nuisance, with playin' half the night and slidin' down my tepee. I'll give you the big feed when I come down in the mornin', so say your prayers and go to bed like a good lamb orta."

Bowers tied Mary to the wagon wheel, and, with a final rub and pat and admonition, left the lamb, to start the herd feeding toward their bed-ground on the summit.

"Come out o' that, Mother Biddies! Better start now and go to fillin'

up. I want them children of yourn to weigh sixty poun' each, come fall."

The sheep, which had been lying in the shade or standing in a circle with their heads together as a protection against the flies, obeyed slowly, and Bowers followed as they grazed their way toward his tepee gleaming white among the rocks on the top of the mountain.

Occasionally he stopped to pick up something and examine it--a curious pebble, a rock that might make his fortune, a bit of grey moss, which always made him wonder what there was about it, dry as punk, brittle and tasteless, to make sheep prefer it to far better feed, to his notion--salt sage, black sage, grease wood, or even cactus with the thorns pawed off. No accounting for sheep anyway--"the better you knew 'em the less you understood 'em."

"Git to the high hills, Sister!" He tossed a pebble at a lagging ewe.

"Want to feed all day in the same spot? Climb, there, Granny! Better look out or you'll git throwed in with the gummers and shipped afore you know it!"

While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers sauntered after--tall, lank, neutral-tinted, his thoughts going round and round in the groove peculiar to herders--the sheep before him and their individual characteristics, the condition of the range, the weather, religion, the wickedness of "High Society," the items on the next list he would send to the mail-order house in Chicago.

And so the afternoon pa.s.sed as had hundreds like it in Bowers's life until he sat down finally on a rock to watch the rays of the setting sun paint the clouds in ever-changing colors and lose himself in reflections, studying the gorgeous sea surrounding him.

It would be a great place up there for a feller's soul to float--provided he had one--restin' a while in that yaller one, or the rose-colored one up yonder, or takin' a dip into that hazy purple and disappearin'. Personally, he told himself, he believed that when he was dead he was dead as a nit, and he'd never seen anything about dying folks to make him think otherwise.

That Scissor-bill from back East in Ioway that died of heart failure jest slipped and slid off his chair, slow and easy like a sack of bran--he didn't show in his eyes any visions of future glory when he stretched on the floor behind the stove in the bunkhouse and closed 'em for good. Sometimes they kicked and struggled like pizened sheep in their sufferin', and again they went off easy and comfortable, but without any glimpses of Paradise brightenin' their countenances, so far as he could notice.

If he had a soul, all right; if he didn't, all right; that's the way he figgered it.

The lead sheep started for the bed-ground.

"Kick up your dust piles good, Mother Biddies, and git comfortable.

Hurry up and blow out your lights so I can git to my readin'."

The light had faded, and the dingy gray-white backs became indistinguishable from the rounded tops of the sagebrush, as night came upon the mountain. With much sniffling, bleating, asthmatic coughing and crackling of small split hoofs, each sheep settled itself in practically the same little hollow it had previously pawed out to fit itself. A soft rumble came from the band as they stirred in their little wallows.

Then Bowers fired a barrel of his shotgun into the air as a reminder to possible coyotes in the rim rocks that he was present, and lighted the lantern in his tepee.

"I'll have to warsh that chimbly in a couple o' years," he commented as he set the lantern down and reached for a worn and tattered mail-order catalogue in the corner.

Fumbling under his pillow, he produced the stub of a pencil and a tablet, after which, crosslegged on his blankets and soogan, he pored over the catalogue. Jewelry, clothing, cooking utensils and upholstered furniture were on the list which Bowers, with corrugated forehead and much chewing of the pencil, made out laboriously. When the amount reached three hundred and sixty-five dollars, he hesitated over a further expenditure of nine for a manicure set and a pair of pink satin sleeve holders. That was a good deal of money to spend in one evening.

"Thunder!" he finally said recklessly. "No use to deny myself! I ain't goin' to send it, anyway!"

Having written it all in proper form and affixed his signature, he folded the paper and slipped it under his bed along with some three dozen other such orders that never got any farther.

This was Bowers's evening diversion, one in which he experienced all the thrills of purchasing without the pain of paying. He entertained a peculiar feeling of friendship for the House whose catalogue had helped him through long winter evenings, when night came at four, and interminable spells of wet weather, so when he sent a _bona fide_ order to Chicago he never failed to inquire as to the health of each member of the firm and inform them that his own was excellent at time of writing, adding such items concerning the condition of the range and stock as he thought would interest them.

Bowers now slipped the lantern inside a flour sack, went outside in his stocking feet, and wedged the lantern between two rocks. The light "puzzled" coyotes, according to his theory, and gave them something to think about besides getting into his sheep.

When he had folded his trousers under his head his preparations for the night were complete and, this accomplished, the almost immediate expulsion of his breath in little puffs was proof enough that he was sleeping the peaceful sleep of the carefree.

A brisk breeze came at intervals to sway the tepee and snap the loose flaps. Sometimes a lamb bleated in a sleepy tremolo; occasionally, instead of puffing, Bowers snorted; but mostly it was as still as an uninhabited world up there on the tip-top of the Rockies.

Suddenly Bowers half sprang from his blankets--wide-awake, alert, listening intently. He had a notion that a sound had awakened him, something foreign, unfamiliar. Holding his breath, he strained his ears for a repet.i.tion. Everything was still. He stepped outside lightly. The sheep lay on their bed-ground, quiet and contented. Had he been dreaming? It must be. Too much shortening in the dough-G.o.ds probably.