On the Cowboy's Trail: Western Boxed-Set. Coolidge Dane

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СКАЧАТЬ at first –– ’fraid he’ll learn to pitch if I hold him in –– he’s never bucked with me yet!”

      “You bet –– he’s a snake!” yelled Creede, hammering along on his broad-chested roan. “Where’d you git ’im?”

      “Tom Fulton’s ranch,” responded Hardy, reining his horse in and patting him on the neck. “Turned in three months’ pay and broke him myself, to boot. I’ll let you try him some day, when he’s gentled.”

      “Well, if I wasn’t so big ’n’ heavy I’d take you up on that,” said Creede, “but I’m just as much obliged, all the same. I don’t claim to be no bronco-buster now, but I used to ride some myself when I was a kid. But say, the old judge has got some good horses runnin’ on the upper range, –– if you want to keep your hand in, –– thirty or forty head of ’em, and wild as hawks. There’s some sure-enough wild horses too, over on the Peaks, that belong to any man that can git his rope onto ’em –– how would that strike you? We’ve been tryin’ for years to catch the black stallion that leads ’em.”

      Try as he would to minimize this exaggerated estimate of his prowess as a horse-tamer Hardy was unable to make his partner admit that he was anything short of a real “buster,” and before they had been on the trail an hour Creede had made all the plans for a big gather of wild horses after the round-up.

      “I had you spotted for a sport from the start,” he said, puffing out his chest at the memory of his acumen, “but, by jingo, I never thought I was drawin’ a bronco-twister. Well, now, I saw you crawl that horse this mornin’, and I guess I know the real thing by this time. Say,” he said, turning confidentially in his saddle, “if it’s none of my business you can say so, but what did you do to that bit?”

      Hardy smiled, like a juggler detected in his trick. “You must have been watching me,” he said, “but I don’t mind telling you –– it’s simply passing a good thing along. I learned it off of a Yaqui Mayo Indian that had been riding for Bill Greene on the Turkey-track –– I rubbed it with a little salt.”

      “Well, I’m a son of a gun!” exclaimed Creede incredulously. “Here we’ve been gittin’ our fingers bit off for forty years and never thought of a little thing like that. Got any more tricks?”

      “Nope,” said Hardy, “I’ve only been in the Territory a little over a year, this trip, and I’m learning, myself. Funny how much you can pick up from some of these Indians and Mexicans that can’t write their own names, isn’t it?”

      “Umm, may be so,” assented Creede doubtfully, “but I’d rather go to a white man myself. Say,” he exclaimed, changing the subject abruptly, “what was that name the old man called you by when he was makin’ that talk about sheep –– Roofer, or Rough House –– or something like that?”

      “Oh, that’s my front name –– Rufus. Why? What’s the matter with it?”

      “Nothin’, I reckon,” replied Creede absently, “never happened to hear it before, ’s all. I was wonderin’ how he knowed it,” he added, glancing shrewdly sideways. “Thought maybe you might have met him up in California, or somewheres.”

      “Oh, that’s easy,” responded Hardy unblinkingly. “The first thing he did was to ask me my full name. I notice he calls you Jefferson,” he added, shiftily changing the subject.

      “Sure thing,” agreed Creede, now quite satisfied, “he calls everybody that way. If your name is Jim you’re James, John you’re Jonathan, Jeff you’re Jefferson Davis –– but say, ain’t they any f’r short to your name? We’re gittin’ too far out of town for this Mister business. My name’s Jeff, you know,” he suggested.

      “Why, sure,” exclaimed Hardy, brushing aside any college-bred scruples, “only don’t call me Rough House –– they might get the idea that I was on the fight. But you don’t need to get scared of Rufus –– it’s just another way of saying Red. I had a red-headed ancestor away back there somewhere and they called him Rufus, and then they passed the name down in the family until it got to me, and I’m no more red-headed than you are.”

      “No –– is that straight?” ejaculated the cowboy, with enthusiasm, “same as we call ’em Reddy now, eh? But say, I’d choke if I tried to call you Rufus. Will you stand for Reddy? Aw, that’s no good –– what’s the matter with Rufe? Well, shake then, pardner, I’m dam’ glad I met up with you.”

      They pulled their horses down to a Spanish trot –– that easy, limping shuffle that eats up its forty miles a day –– and rode on together like brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never returned again, the Indians of the valley have always looked with superstitious dread.

      Creede told the story carelessly, smiling at the pride of the Pimas who refused to admit that the Apaches alone, devils and bad medicine barred, could have conquered so many of their warriors. To the west in a long fringe of green loomed the cottonwoods of Moroni, where the hard-working Mormons had turned the Salagua from its course and irrigated the fertile plain, and there on their barren reservation dwelt the remnant of those warlike Pimas, the unrequited friends of the white men, now held by them as of no account.

      As he heard the history of its people –– how the Apaches had wiped out the Toltecs, and the white men had killed off the Apaches, and then, after pushing aside the Pimas and the Mexicans, closed in a death struggle for the mastery of the range –– Hardy began to perceive the grim humor of the land. He glanced across at his companion, tall, stalwart, with mighty arms and legs and features rugged as a mountain crag, and his heart leaped up within him at the thought of the battles to come, battles in which sheepmen and cattlemen, defiant of the law, would match their strength and cunning in a fight for the open range.

      As they rode along mile after mile toward the north the road mounted gently; hills rose up one by one out of the desert floor, crowned with towering sahuaros, and in the dip of the pass ahead a mighty forest of their misshapen stalks was thrust up like giant fingers against the horizon. The trail wound in among them, where they rose like fluted columns above the lesser cactus –– great skin-covered tanks, gorged fat with water too bitter to quench the fieriest thirst, yet guarded jealously by poison-barbed spines. Gilded woodpeckers, with hearts red as blood painted upon their breasts, dipped in uneven flight from sahuaro to sahuaro, dodged into holes of their own making, dug deep into the solid flesh; sparrow hawks sailed forth from their summits, with quick eyes turned to the earth for lizards; and the brown mocking bird, leaping for joy from the ironwood tree where his mate was nesting, whistled the praise of the desert in the ecstatic notes of love. In all that land which some say God forgot, there was naught but life and happiness, for God had sent the rain.

      The sun was high in the heavens when, as they neared the summit of the broad pass, a sudden taint came down the wind, whose only burden had been the fragrance of resinous plants, of wetted earth, and of green things growing. A distant clamor, like the babble of many voices or the surf-beats of a mighty sea, echoed dimly between the chuck-a-chuck of their horses’ feet, and as Hardy glanced up inquiringly his companion’s lip curled and he muttered:

      “Sheep!”

      They rode on in silence. The ground, which before had been furred with Indian wheat and sprouting six weeks’ grass, now showed the imprints of many tiny feet glozed over by the rain, and Hardy noticed vaguely that something was missing СКАЧАТЬ