Chapter 19. An Old, Old Friend

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_ CHAPTER XIX. AN OLD, OLD FRIEND

Bowers lay slumbering tranquilly in the shade of the wagon, his saddle blanket beneath him and his folded arms for a pillow as he slept on his face. The herd chewed its cud drowsily under the quaking asp nearby, out of the mid-day heat and away from pestiferous flies, while under a bush not far from the wagon a lamb lay with eyes half closed, waggling its narrow jaw, and grinding its sharp white teeth noisily.

Quite as though some thought had come to it forcibly, the lamb got up and stood regarding Bowers reflectively with its soft black eyes. Then it swallowed its cud with a gulp and, making a run the length of the herder's legs and spine, planted its forefeet in his neck, where it stopped.

"Mary! You quit that!" Bowers murmured crossly.

The lamb merely reached down and chewed energetically on Bowers's ear.

"Confound you--can't you let a feller sleep?" The hand that pushed the lamb away was gentle in spite of the exasperation of his tone.

The lamb backed away, eyed him attentively for several minutes as he lay prostrate, and then quite as though a tightly coiled spring had been released, leaped into the air and landed with all four feet bunched in the small of Bowers's back.

Bowers sat up and said complainingly as he grabbed the lamb by the wool and drew it towards him:

"There ain't a minute's peace when you're awake, Mary! If I done what I ort, I'd work you over. You're the worst nuisance of a bum lamb ever raised on canned milk."

The lamb, which Bowers had named regardless of its sex, stood motionless with bliss as he rubbed the base of what would some day probably be as fine a pair of horns as ever grew on a buck. At present they were soft and not more than an inch and a half in length as they sprouted through its dingy wool. Thin in the shoulders and rump, yet "Mary's" sides were distended until their contour resembled that of a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point.

Now as the lamb's long white lashes drooped until he seemed about to go to sleep and fall down under Bowers's soothing ministrations, the latter continued the one-sided conversation which was a part of their daily life together:

"You're a smart sheep, Mary--no gittin' away from it--but you're a torment, and you ain't no gratitude. Whur'd you been at if I hadn't heard you blattin' and went after you? A coyote would a ketched you before sundown. And ain't I been a mother to you, giving up all my air-tight milk to feed you? Warmin' it fer you and packin' you 'round like you was a million-dollar baby so the bobcats won't git you--kin you deny it? An' this is my thanks fer it--wake me up walkin' on me, to say nothin' of mornin's when you start jumpin' on my tepee, makin' a toboggan slide out'n it before any other sheep is stirrin'. Ain't you no conscience a-tall, Mary?"

"Ma-a-a-aa!"

The quavering plaintiff bleat evoked a look of admiration.

"Oh, you have--have you? I more'n half believe you know what I'm sayin'. You're some sheep, Mary, an' if you jest stick 'round with me till you're growed I'll make a man of you. How'd you like a cigarette?"

"Ma-a-aa-aa!"

Bowers chuckled.

"Wait till I have my smoke an' then you kin have yourn, young feller."

He rolled and smoked half a cigarette while the lamb stood looking up into his face wistfully.

"I'll jest knock the fire out fer you first, then you kin have your whack out of it."

He shook the tobacco from the paper into his hand and the lamb ate it to the last fleck with gusto.

Bowers cried gleefully:

"You're a reg'lar roughneck, Mary! Doggone you! As you might say--you ain't no lady!"

The herder laughed aloud at his witticism and might have rambled on for some time longer if the crashing of brush had not attracted his attention. A man on horseback was picking his way through the quaking asp and Bowers awaited his approach with keen interest.

"How are you?" the stranger nodded.

"Won't you git off?"

Bowers strained his eyes to read the brand on the shoulder of the horse the man turned loose, but it told him nothing. While the stranger squatted on his heel, Bowers rubbed Mary's horns during an interval of unembarrassed silence.

"Bum?" inquired the stranger, eying Mary with a look which could not be called admiring.

"Yep." The garrulous Bowers had become suddenly reticent. The notion was growing that he did not like his visitor. He asked finally:

"Et yet?"

"Not sence daylight. I seen your tepee up toward the top and thought maybe I could locate your wagon and git dinner."

"I'll feed anybody that's hungry," Bowers replied ambiguously.

The stranger asked innocently:

"Who does this Outfit belong to?"

"Miss Kate Prentice owns this brand."

"Oh--the 'Cheap Queen'!"

Bowers's head swung as though on a pivot.

"What did you say?"

"I've heerd that's what they call her."

Bowers's eyes narrowed as he answered:

"Not in my hearin'." Then he added: "Nobody can knock the outfit I'm workin' for and eat their grub while they're doin' it. Sabe?"

"Don't know as I blame you," the stranger conciliated.

"I'll go cook," said Bowers shortly, getting up.

The stranger urged politely:

"Don't do nothin' extry on my account."

"I ain't goin' to," Bowers responded. "If we had some ham we'd have some ham and eggs if we had eggs. Do you like turnips?"

"I kin eat 'em."

"My middle name is 'turnips,'" said Bowers. "I always cooks about a bushel!"

The look that his guest sent after him was not pleasant, if Bowers had chanced to see it, but since he did not, he was in a somewhat better humor by the time he hung out of the wagon and called with a degree of cordiality:

"Come and git it!"

The visitor arose with alacrity.

"Want a warsh?"

The stranger inspected a pair of hands that looked as if they had been greasing axles.

"No, I ain't very dirty."

"Grab a root and pull!" Bowers urged with all the hospitality he could inject into his voice, as the guest squeezed in between the table and the sideboard. "Jest bog down in that there honey, pardner--it's something special--cottonwood blossoms and alfalfy. And here's the turnips!"

* * * * *

Conversation was suspended until a pan of biscuits had vanished along with the fried mutton, when Bowers, feeling immeasurably better natured, inquired sociably as he passed the broom:

"Where have I saw you before, feller? Your countenance seems kind of familiar."

The stranger looked up quickly.

"I don't think it. I'm a long way off my own range."

He averted his eyes from Bowers's puzzled inquiring gaze and focused his attention upon the business of extracting a suitable straw from the politely tendered broom. When he had found one to his liking, he leaned back and operated with a large air of nonchalance.

"You're fixed pretty comfortable here," he commented, as his roving eye took in the interior of the wagon.

"'Tain't bad," Bowers agreed, prying into the broom for a straw that was clean, comparatively.

"Is them all kin o' yourn?" The stranger pointed to a wire rack suspended from a nail on the opposite side of the wagon in which was thrust some two dozen photographs, fly-specked and yellow, while the cut of the subjects' clothes bore additional evidence of their antiquity.

"Lord, no! I don't know none of 'em. There was a couple of travelin' photygraphers got snowed up here several year ago and I bought ten dollars' worth of old pictures off 'em for company. I got 'em all named, and it's real entertainin' settin' here evenin's makin' up yarns about 'em that's more'n half true, maybe--Mis' Taylor over to Happy Wigwam says I'm kind of a medium."

Glancing at his guest he observed that his eyes were fixed intently upon a photograph in the center and his expression was so peculiar that Bowers asked, curiously:

"Ary friend o' yours in my gallery?"

"Not to say friend, exactly," was the dry answer, "but what-fer-a-yarn have you made up about that feller?"

"Well, sir," Bowers said whimsically, "I'm sorry to tell you but that feller had a bad endin'. He had everything done fur him, too--good raisin' and an education, but it was all wasted. That horse there was, as you might say, his undoin'. It was just fast enough to be beat everywhur he run him. But he kept on backin' him till it broke him--no, sir, he hadn't a dollar! Lost everything his Old Man left him and then took to drinkin'. His wife quit him and his only child died callin' for its father. After that he drunk harder than ever, and finally died in the asylum thinkin' he was Marcus Daly." He demanded eagerly, "How clost have I come to it?"

"Knowin' what I know, it makes me creepy settin' here listenin'."

"Shoo! I ain't that good, am I?" Bowers looked his pleasure at the tribute.

"Good?" ironically. "You oughta sew spangles on your shirt and wear ear-rings and git you a fortune-tellin' wagon. You're right about everything except that that horse never was beat while he owned him and he win about twenty thousand dollars on him, and that the last time I saw that feller he could buy sixteen outfits like this one without crampin' him, and instead of goin' to the asylum they sent him to the state senate."

Bowers laughed loudly to cover his annoyance at having bitten.

"It's come about queer, though," he said, "your knowin' him."

The stranger seemed to check an impulse to say something further; instead, he volunteered to wipe the dishes.

"No, you go out and set in the shade--it's cooler."

The truth was, Bowers did not want the man in the wagon, for his first feeling of mistrust and antagonism had returned even stronger.

"That feller's liable to pick up somethin' and make off with it," he mused as the stranger obeyed without further urging. "I shore have saw them quare eyes of his somewhur. Maybe it'll come to me if I keep on thinkin'."

In the meanwhile the visitor dragged Bowers's saddle blanket into the shade of the wagon and stretched himself upon it. Pulling his hat over his eyes he soon was dozing.

Bowers, rattling the plates and pans inside the wagon, suddenly bethought himself of Mary. What was the lamb doing not to be about his feet begging for the condensed milk which he always prepared for it when his own meal was finished? He flirted the water from his hands and hung out of the doorway.

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 nobody. 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 passed 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 pronto.

"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 passed 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 repetition. 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-gods probably. He'd have to stir up a batch of light bread to-morrow. It was curious, though--that strong impression of having heard something. He returned to his blankets and was puffing again almost immediately.

It was not much after half-past three when the first ewe got up, bleated for her lamb, and moved off slowly. Others rose, stood a moment as though to get the sleep out of their eyes, and followed her example. Ewes bleated for their lambs, lambs for their mothers, until quavering calls in many keys made a din to awaken any sleeper, while the whole mass of dingy, rounded woolly backs started moving from the bed-ground.

"Workin' like angels," Bowers muttered as he came out of the tepee dressed in his erstwhile pillow, to see the sheep spreading out before him.

He extinguished the lantern, replaced it in the tepee, and tied the flap, while the faint, gray streak in the east grew brighter.

"Ouhee! You pinto gypsy! Whur you roamin' to now? Think I want to climb up there and pry you out o' the rocks? Come back here 'fore I git in your wig. Ouhee! Mother Biddies! I'll whittle on your hoofs, first thing you know. You won't enjoy traveling' so fast, if you're a little tender footed.

"That's better--now you're actin' like ladies!"

The air was redolent of sheep and sagebrush, and pink and amber streaks shot up to paint out the dimming stars. Bowers drew a deep breath of satisfaction. O man! but sheep-herding was a great life in summer--like drawing, wages through a vacation. If those "High Society" folks that the Denver Post told of, them worse than Sodomites, steeped in sin and extravagance, could know the joys of getting up at half-past three in the morning and going down at ten to eat off a fat mutton--

Bowers's rhapsody ended abruptly. He drew a hand across his eyes to clear his vision. Down below, where he was wont to look for the white top of the wagon, there was nothing but scattered wreckage! He heard the sound now that had awakened him--the detonation of a charge of dynamite! There was no need to go closer to learn the rest of the story.

Bowers's face twisted in a queer grimace. He cried brokenly in a grief that can be understood fully only by the lonely:

"Pore little Mary! Pore little feller! Pore little innercent sheep that never done no harm to nobody!" _

Read next: Chapter 20. The Fork Of The Road

Read previous: Chapter 18. A Warning

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