The Flying U Ranch Part 7

"N-yes."

Andy took his fingers from the other's Adam's apple, his knee from the other's diaphragm, and went over to where he had thrown down his coat, felt in a pocket for his handkerchief, and, when he had found it, applied it to his nose, which was bleeding profusely.

"Fly at it, then," he advised, eyeing the other sternly over the handkerchief. "I'd hate to ask you a third time."

"I'd hate to have yuh," conceded the herder reluctantly. "I was sure I c'd lick yuh, or I'd 'a' turned 'em before." He sent the dog racing down the south line of the band.

Andy got thoughtfully back upon his horse, and sat looking hard at the herder. "Say, you're grade above the general run uh lamb-hickers," he observed, after a minute. "Who are you working for, and what's your object in throwing sheep on Flying U land? There's plenty of range to the north."

"I'm workin'," said the herder, "for the Dot outfit. I thought you could read brands."

"Don't get sa.s.sy--I've got a punch or two I haven't used yet. Who owns these woollies?"

"Well--Whittaker and Oleson, if yuh want to know."

"I do." Andy was keeping pace with him around the band, which edged off from then and the dogs. "And what makes you so crazy about Flying U gra.s.s?" he pursued.

"We've got to cross that coulee to git to where we're headed for; we got a right to, and we're going to do it." The herder paused and glanced up at Andy sourly. "We knowed you was a mean outfit; the boss told us so.

And he told us you was blank ca'tridges and we needn't back up just 'cause you raised up on your hind legs and howled a little. I've had truck with you cowmen before. I've herded sheep in Wyoming." He walked a few steps with his head down, considering.

"I better go over and talk some sense into the other fellow," he said, looking up at Andy as if all his antagonism had oozed in the fight. "You ride along this edge, so they won't scatter--we ought to be grazin' 'em along, by rights; only you seem to be in such an all-fired rush--"

"You go on and tell that loco son-of-a-gun over there what he's up against," Andy urged. "Blank cartridges--I sure do like that! If you only knew it, high power dum-dums would be a lot closer to our brand.

Run along--I am in a kinda hurry, this morning."

Andy, riding slowly upon the outskirts of the grazing, blatting band, watched the two confer earnestly together a hundred yards or so away. They seemed to be having some sort of argument; the bug-killer gesticulated with the long stick he carried, and the sheep, while the herders talked, scattered irresponsibly. Andy wondered what made sheepmen so "ornery," particularly herders. He wondered why the fellow he had thrashed was so insultingly defiant at first, and, after the thras.h.i.+ng, so unresentful and communicative, and so amenable to authority withal. He felt his nose, and decided that it was, all things considered, a cheap victory, and yet one of which he need not be ashamed.

The herder cane back presently and helped drive the sheep over the edge of the bluff which bordered Antelope coulee. The bug-killer, upon his side, also seemed imbued with the spirit of obedience; Andy heard him curse a collie into frenzied zeal, and smiled approvingly.

"Now you're acting a heap more human," he observed; and the man from Wyoming grinned ruefully by way of reply.

Antelope coulee, at that point, was steep; too steep for riding, so that Andy dismounted and dug his boot-heels into the soft soil, to gain a foothold on the descent. When he was halfway down, he chanced to look back, straight into the scowling gaze of the bug-killer, who was sliding down behind him.

"Thought you were hazing down the other side of 'em," Andy called back, but the herder did not choose to answer save with another scowl.

Andy edged his horse around an impracticable slope of shale stuff and went on. The herder followed. When he was within twelve feet or so of the bottom, there was a sound of pebbles knocked loose in haste, a scrambling, and then came the impact of his body. Andy teetered, lost his balance, and went to the bottom in one glorious slide. He landed with the bug-killer on top--and the bug-killer failed to remove his person as speedily as true courtesy exacted.

Andy kicked and wriggled and tried to remember what was that high-colored, vituperative sentence that Irish had invented over a stubborn sheep, that he might repeat it to the bug-killer. The herder from Wyoming ran up, caught Andy's horse, and untied Andy's rope from the saddle.

"Good fer you, Oscar," he praised the bug-killer. "Hang onto him while I take a few turns." He thereupon helped force Andy's arms to his side, and wound the rope several times rather tightly around Andy's outraged, squirming person.

"Oh, it ain't goin' to do yuh no good to buck 'n bawl," admonished the tier. "I learnt this here little trick down in Wyoming. A bunch uh punchers done it to me--and I've been just achin' all over fer a chance to return the favor to some uh you gay boys. And," he added, with malicious satisfaction, while he rolled Andy over and tied a perfectly unslippable knot behind, "it gives me great pleasure to hand the dose out to you, in p'ticular. If I was a mean man, I'd hand yuh the boot a few times fer luck; but I'll save that up till next time."

"You can bet your sweet life there'll be a next time," Andy promised earnestly, with embellishments better suited to the occasion than to a children's party.

"Well, when it arrives I'm sure Johnny-on-the-spot. Them Wyoming punchers beat me up after they'd got me tied. I'm tellin' yuh so you'll see I ain't mean unless I'm drove to it. Turn him feet down hill, Oscar, so he won't git a rush uh brains to the head and die on our hands. Now you're goin' to mind your own business, sonny. Next time yuh set out to herd sheep, better see the boss first and git on the job right."

He rose to his feet, surveyed Andy with his hands on his hips, mentally p.r.o.nounced the job well done, and took a generous chew of tobacco, after which he grinned down at the trussed one.

"That the language uh flowers you're talkin'?" he inquired banteringly, before he turned his attention to the horse, which he disposed of by tying up the reins and giving it a slap on the rump. When it had trotted fifty yards down the coulee bottom, and showed a disposition to go farther, he whistled to his dogs, and turned again to Andy.

"This here is just a hint to that bunch you trot with, to leave us and our sheep alone," he said. "We don't pick no quarrels, but we're goin'

to cross our sheep wherever we dern please, to git where we want to go.

Gawd didn't make this range and hand it over to you cowmen to put in yer pockets--I guess there's a chance fer other folks to hang on by their eyebrows, anyway."

Andy, lying there like a very good presentation of a giant coc.o.o.n, roped round and round, with his arms pinned to his sides, had the doubtful pleasure of seeing that noisome, foolish-faced band trail down Antelope coulee and back upon the level they had just left, and of knowing to a gloomy certainty that he could do nothing about it, except swear; and even that palls when a man has gone over his entire repertoire three times in rapid succession.

Andy, therefore, when the last sheep had trotted out of sight, hearing and smell, wriggled himself into as comfortable a position as his bonds would permit, and took a nap.

CHAPTER VII. Truth Crushed to Earth, etc.

Andy, only half awake, tried to obey both instinct and habit and reach up to pull his hat down over his eyes, so that the sun could not s.h.i.+ne upon his lids so hotly; when he discovered that he could do no more than wiggle his fingers, he came back with a jolt to reality and tried to sit up. It is surprising to a man to discover suddenly just how important a part his arms play in the most simple of body movements; Andy, with his arms pinioned tightly the whole length of them, rolled over on his face, kicked a good deal, and rolled back again, but he did not sit up, as he had confidently expected to do.

He lay absolutely quiet for at least five minutes, staring up at the brilliant blue arch above him. Then he began to speak rapidly and earnestly; a man just close enough to hear his voice sweeping up to a certain rhetorical climax, pausing there and commencing again with a rhythmic fluency of intonation, might have thought that he was repeating poetry; indeed, it sounded like some of Milton's majestic blank verse, but it was not. Andy was engaged in a methodical, scientific, reprehensibly soul-satisfying period of swearing.

A curlew, soaring low, with long beak outstretched before him, and long legs outstretched behind cast a beady eye upon him, and shrilled "Cor-reck! Cor-reck!" in unregenerate approbation of the blasphemy.

Andy stopped suddenly and laughed. "Glad you agree with me, old sport,"

he addressed the bird whimsically, with a reaction to his normally cheerful outlook. "Sheepherders are all those things I named over, birdie, and some that I can't think of at present."

He tried again, this time with a more careful realization of his limitations, to a.s.sume an upright position; and being a persevering young man, and one with a ready wit, he managed at length to wriggle himself back upon the slope from which he had slid in his sleep, and, by digging in his heels and going carefully, he did at last rise upon his knees, and from there triumphantly to his feet.

He had at first believed that one of the herders would, in the course of an hour or so, return and untie him, when he hoped to be able to retrieve, in a measure, his self-respect, which he had lost when the first three feet of his own rope had encircled him. To be tied and trussed by sheepherders! Andy gritted his teeth and started down the coulee.

He was hungry, and his lunch was tied to his saddle. He looked eagerly down the coulee, in the faint hope of seeing his horse grazing somewhere along its length, until the numbness of his arms and hands reminded him that forty lunches, tied upon forty saddles at his side, would be of no use to him in his present position. His hands he could not move from his thighs; he could wiggle his fingers--which he did, to relieve as much as possible that unpleasant, p.r.i.c.kly sensation which we call a "going to sleep" of the afflicted members. When it occurred to him that he could not do anything with his horse if he found it, he gave up looking for it and started for the ranch, walking awkwardly, because of his bonds, the sun s.h.i.+ning hotly upon his brown head, because his hat had been knocked off in the scuffle, and he could not pick it up and put it back where it belonged.

Taking a straight course across the prairie, he struck Flying U coulee at the point where the sheep had left it. On the way there he had crossed their trail where they went through the fence farther along the coulee than before, and therefore with a better chance of pa.s.sing undetected; especially since the Happy Family, believing that he was forcing them steadily to the north, would not be watching for sheep. The barbed wire barrier bothered him somewhat. He was compelled to lie down and roll under the fence, in the most undignified manner, and, when he was through, there was the problem of getting upon his feet again. But he managed it somehow, and went on down the coulee, perspiring with the heat and a bitter realization of his ignominy. What the Happy Family would have to say when they saw him, even Andy Green's vivid imagination declined to picture.

He knew by the sun that it was full noon when he came in sight of the stable and corrals, and his soul sickened at the thought of facing that derisive bunch of punchers, with their fiendish grins and their barbed tongues. But he was hungry, and his arms had reached the limit of p.r.i.c.kly sensations and were numb to his shoulders. He shook his hair back from his beaded forehead, cast a wary glance at the silent stables, set his jaw, and went on up the hill to the mess-house, wis.h.i.+ng tardily that he had waited until they were off at work again, when he might intimidate old Patsy into keeping quiet about his predicament.

Within the mess-house was the clatter of knives and forks plied by hungry men, the sound of desultory talk and a savory odor of good things to eat. The door was closed. Andy stood before it as a guilty-conscienced child stands before its teacher; clicked his teeth together, and, since he could not open the door, lifted his right foot and gave it a kick to strain the hinges.

Within were exclamations of astonishment, silence and then a heavy tread. Patsy opened the door, gasped and stood still, his eyes popping out like a startled rabbit.

"Well, what's eating you?" Andy demanded querulously, and pushed past him into the room.

Not all of the Happy Family were there. Cal, Jack Bates, Irish and Happy Jack had gone into the Bad Lands next to the river; but there were enough left to make the soul of Andy quiver forebodingly, and to send the flush of extreme humiliation to his cheeks.

The Happy Family looked at him in stunned surprise; then they glanced at one another in swift, wordless inquiry, grinned wisely and warily, and went on with their dinner. At least they pretended to go on with their dinner, while Andy glared at them with amazed reproach in his misleadingly honest gray eyes.

"When you've got plenty of time," he said at last in a choked tone, "maybe one of you obliging cusses will untie this d.a.m.ned rope."

"Why, sure!" Pink threw a leg over the bench and got up with cheerful alacrity. "I'll do it now, if you say so; I didn't know but what that was some new fad of yours, like--"

"Fad!" Andy repeated the word like an explosion.