The Flying U Ranch Part 9

"All right," Pink remarked, a little quick-breathed, when the herder decided for the third time to get up. "A friend of mine worked yuh over a little, this morning, and I just thought I'd make a better job than he did. Your eyes didn't match. They will, now."

The herder mumbled maledictions after him, but Pink would not even give him the satisfaction of resenting it.

"I'd like to have broken a knuckle against his teeth, darn him," he observed ruefully when he was in the saddle again. "Come on, Weary. It won't take but a minute to hand a punch or two to that bug-killer, and then I'll feel better. They've both got it coming--come on!" This because Weary showed a strong inclination to take the trail and keep it to his destination. "Well, I'll go alone, then. I've got to kinda square myself for the way I threw it into Andy; and you know blamed well, Weary, they played it low-down on him, or they'd never have got that rope on him. And I'm going to lick that--"

"Mamma! You sure are a rambunctious person when you feel that way,"

Weary made querulous comment; but he rode over with Pink to where the bug-killer was standing with his long stick held in a somewhat menacing manner, and once more he held Pink's horse for him.

Pink was gone longer this time, and he came back with a cut lip and a large lump on his forehead; the bug-killer had thrown a small rock with the precision which comes of much practice--such as stoning disobedient dogs, and the like--and, when Pink rushed at him furiously, the herder caught him very neatly alongside the head with his stick. These little amenities serving merely to whet Pink's appet.i.te for battle, he stopped long enough to thrash that particular herder very thoroughly and to his own complete satisfaction.

"Well, I guess I'm ready to go on now," he observed, dimpling rather one-sidedly as he got back on his horse.

"I thought maybe you'd want to whip the dogs, too," Weary told him dryly; which was the nearest he came to expressing any disapproval of the incident. Weary was a peace-loving soul, whenever peace was compatible with self-respect; and it would never have occurred to him to punish strange men as summarily as Pink had done.

"I would, if the dogs were half as ornery as the men," Pink retorted.

"Say, they hang together like bull snakes and rattlers, don't they? If they was human, they'd have helped each other out--but nothing doing! Do you reckon a man could ride up to a couple of our bunch, and thrash one at a time without the other fellow having something to say about it?" He turned in the saddle and looked back. "So help me, Josephine, I've got a good mind to go back and lick them again, for not hanging together like they ought to." But the threat was an idle one, and they went on to Denson's, Weary still with that anxious look in his eyes, and Pink quite complacent over his exploit.

In Denson coulee was an unwonted atmosphere of activity; heretofore the place had been animated chiefly by young Densons engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, but now a covered buggy, evidently just arrived, bore mute witness to the new order of things. There were more horses about the place, a covered wagon or two, three or four men working upon the corral, and, lastly, there was one whom Weary recognized the moment he caught sight of him.

"Looks like a sheep outfit, all right," he said somberly. "And, if that ain't old Dunk himself, it's the devil, and that's next thing to him."

Dunk, they judged, had just arrived with another man whom they did not know: a tall man with light hair that hung lank to his collar, a thin, sharp-nosed face and a wide mouth, which stretched easily into a smile, but which was none the pleasanter for that. When he turned inquiringly toward them they saw that he was stoop-shouldered; though not from any deformity, but from sheer, slouching lankness. Dunk gave them a swift, sour look from under his eyebrows and went on.

Weary rode straight past the lank man, whom he judged to be Oleson, and overtook Dunk Whittaker himself.

"h.e.l.lo, Dunk," he said cheerfully, sliding over in the saddle so that a foot hung free of the stirrup, as men who ride much have learned to do when they stop for a chat, thereby resting while they may. "Back on the old stamping ground, are you?"

"Since you see me here, I suppose I am," Dunk made churlish response.

"Do you happen to own those Dot sheep, back there on the hill?" Weary tilted his head toward home.

"I happen to own half of them." By then they had reached the gate and Dunk pa.s.sed through and started on to the house.

"Oh, don't be in a rush--come on back and be sociable," Weary called out, in the mildest of tones, twisting the reins around his saddle-horn so that he might roll a cigarette at ease.

Dunk remembered, perhaps, certain things he had learned when he was J. G. Whitmore's partner, and had more or less to do with the charter members of the Happy Family. He came back and stood by the gate, ungraciously enough, to be sure; still, he came back. Weary smiled under cover of lighting his cigarette. Dunk, by that reluctant compliance, betrayed something which Weary had been rather anxious to know.

"We've been having a little trouble with those sheep of yours," Weary remarked between puffs. "You've got some poor excuses for humans herding them. They drove the bunch across our coulee just exactly three times.

There ain't enough gra.s.s left in our lower field to graze a prairie dog." He glanced back to see where Pink was, saw that he was close behind, as was the lank man, and spoke in a tone that included them all.

"The Flying U ain't pasturing sheep, this spring," he informed them pleasantly. "But, seeing the gra.s.s is eat up, we'll let yuh pay for it.

Why didn't you bring them in along the trail, anyway?"

"I didn't bring them in. I just came down from b.u.t.te to-day. I suppose the herders brought them out where the feed was best; they did if they're worth their wages."

"They happened to strike some feed that was pretty expensive. And,"

he smiled down at Whittaker misleadingly, "you ought to keep an eye on those herders, or they might let you in for another gra.s.s bill. The Flying U has got quite a lot of range, right around here, you recollect.

And we've got plenty of cattle to eat it. We don't need any help to keep the gra.s.s down so we can ride through it."

"Now, look here," began the lank man with that sort of persuasiveness which can turn instantly into bl.u.s.ter, "all this is pure foolishness, you know. We're here to stay. We've bought this place, and some other land to go with it, and we expect to stay right here and make a living.

It happens that we expect to make a living off of sheep. Now, we don't want to start in by quarreling with our neighbors, and we don't want our neighbors to start any quarrel with us. All we want--"

"Mamma! You're taking a fine way to make us love yuh," Weary cut in ironically. "I know what you want. You want the same as every other meek and lovely sheepman wants. You want it all--core, seeds and peeling.

Dunk," he said with a more impatient disgust than he was in the habit of showing for his fellowmen, "this man's a stranger; but I should think you'd know better than to come in here with sheep."

"I don't know why a sheep outfit isn't exactly as good as a cow outfit, and I don't know why they haven't as much right here. You're welcome to what land you own, but it always seemed to me that public land is open to the use of the public. Now, as Oleson says, we expect to raise sheep here, and we expect your outfit to leave us alone. As far as our sheep crossing your coulee is concerned--I don't know that they did. But, if they did, and, if they did any damage, let J. G. do the talking about that. I deal with the owners--not with the hired men."

Weary, you must understand, was never a bellicose young man. But, for all that, he leaned over and gave Dunk a slap on the jaw which must have stung considerably--and the full reason for his violence lay four years behind the two, when Dunk was part owner of the Flying U, and when his sneering arrogance had been very hard to endure.

"Are you going to swallow that--from a hired man?" Weary inquired, after a minute during which nothing whatever occurred beyond the slow reddening of Dunk's face.

"I'm not going to fight, if that's what you mean," Dunk sneered. "I decline to bring myself down to your level. One doesn't expect anything from a jacka.s.s but a bray, you know--and one doesn't feel compelled to bray because the jacka.s.s does." He smiled that supercilious smile which Weary had hated of old, and which, he knew, was well used to covering much treachery and small meannesses of various sorts.

"As I said, if the Flying U has any claim against us, let the owner present it in the usual way." Dunk drew down his black brows, lifted a corner of his lip and turned his back deliberately upon them.

Oleson let himself through the gate, which he closed somewhat hastily behind him. "I'm sorry you fellows seem to want to make trouble," he said, without looking up from the latch, which seemed somewhat out of repair, like the rest of the Denson property. "That's a poor way to start in with new neighbors." He lifted his hat with what Pink considered insulting politeness, and followed Dunk into the house.

Weary waited there until they had gone in and closed the door, then turned and rode back home again, frowning thoughtfully at the trail ahead of them all the way, and making no reply to Pink's importunings for war.

"I'd hate to say you've lost your nerve, Weary," Pink cried at last, in sheer desperation. "But why the devil didn't you get down and thump the daylights out of that black son-of-a-gun? I came pretty near walking into him myself, only I hate to b.u.t.t into another fellow's sc.r.a.p. But, if I'd known you were going to set there and let him walk off with that sneer on his face--"

"I can't fight a man that won't hit back," Weary protested. "You couldn't either, Cadwalloper. You'd have done just what I did; you'd have let him go."

"He will hit back, all right enough," Pink retorted pa.s.sionately. "He'll do it when you ain't looking, though. He--"

"I know it," Weary sighed. "I'm kinda sorry, now, I slapped him. He'll hit back--but he won't hit me; he'll aim at the outfit. If the Old Man was here, or Chip, I'd feel a whole lot easier in my mind."

"They couldn't do anything you can't do," Pink a.s.sured him loyally, forgetting his petulance when he saw the careworn look in Weary's face. "All they can do is gobble all the range around here--and I guess there's a few of us that will have a word or two to say about that."

"What makes me sore," Weary confided, "is knowing that Dunk isn't thinking altogether of the dollar end of it. He's tickled to death to get a whack at the outfit. And I hate to see him get away with it; but I guess we'll have to stand for it."

That sentiment did not please Pink; nor, when Weary repeated it later that evening in the bunk-house, did it please the Happy Family. The less pleasing it was because it was perfectly true and every man of them knew it. Beyond keeping the sheep off Flying U land, there was nothing they could do without stepping over the line into lawlessness--and, while they were not in any sense a meek Happy Family, they were far more law-abiding than their conversation that night made them appear.

CHAPTER IX. More Sheep

The next week was a time of hara.s.sment for the Flying U; a week filled to overflowing with petty irritations, traceable, directly or indirectly, to their new neighbors, the Dot sheepmen. The band in charge of the bug-chaser and that other unlovable man from Wyoming fed just as close to the Flying U boundary as their guardians dared let them feed; a great deal closer than was good for the tempers of the Happy Family, who rode fretfully here and there upon their own business and at the same time tried to keep an eye upon their unsavory neighbors--a proceeding as nerve-racking as it was futile.

The Native Son, riding home in jingling haste from Dry Lake, whither he had hurried one afternoon in the hope of cheering news from Chicago, reported another trainload of Dots on the wide level beyond Antelope coulee. There were, he said, four men in charge of the band, and he believed they carried guns, though he was not positive of that. They were moving slowly, and he thought they would not attempt to cross Flying U coulee before the next day; though, from the course they were taking, he was sure they meant to cross.

Coupled with that bit of ill-tidings, the brief note from Chip, saying very little about the Old Man, but implying a good deal by its very omissions, would have been enough to send the Happy Family to sleepless beds that night if they had been the kind to endure with silent fort.i.tude their troubles.

"If you fellers would back me up," brooded Big Medicine down by the corral after supper, "I'd see to it them sheep never gits across the coulee, by cripes! I'd send 'em so far the other way they'd git plumb turned around and forgit they ever wanted to go south."

"It's all Dunk's devilishness," Jack Bates declared. "He could take them in the other way, even if the feed ain't so good along the trail. It's most all prairie-dog towns--but that's good enough for sheep." Jack, in his intense partisanship, spoke as if sheep were not ent.i.tled to decent gra.s.s at any time or under any circ.u.mstances.

"Them herders packin' guns looks to me like they're goin' to make trouble if they kin," gloomed Happy Jack. "I betche they'll kill somebody before they're through. When sheepmen gits mean--"