Sheep Limit/Chapter 1
Where it all happened is no matter now. Only that it was in the upland plains which lie between the mountains, somewhere in the great north-west. What is a difference of five hundred miles in a land where counties are bigger than kingdoms? When it happened matters less. The memory of man, at the best, is short, and time has swept over the record of those days of which you are to hear, as a summer shower erases the footprints of great and small alike from the dust of the highway which they have passed.
That is a broad country, the inter-mountain plains of our north-west, as it should be. Much land is needed to make stage-room for the tragedies of life. For its merriment, there is not required so much space, that being a thing which can be put into a corner, leaving the vastitude open for the fight.
It all began for Rawlins when he was forced to take a job in the stockyards at Kansas City the autumn before, after he had failed to obtain a position on one of the newspapers of that self-proclaiming city by the stinking waters of the Kaw. There was that difference between what he wanted to do and what he was obliged to take: one was a position, the other was a job.
Back of the stockyards job there had been the venture into politics. Not on Rawlins' own account, certainly. He had gone out with the paint of the university still wet on him to put brains into Kansas politics, where that essential had been wanting, it appeared, for a long time. One who aspired to the governorship, with the United States Senate in the distant offing, had put young Rawlins into the editorship of a little boiler-plate weekly out in the short grass region. After a little more than a year of it the man who owned the paper decided Rawlins was not big enough for the task ahead of him. As for the editor, he had come to the emphatic conclusion quite a while ahead of his patron that Horace Greeley himself could not have boosted that man over the political fence.
Perhaps this is as far back as it is necessary to go in the history of a man who never became much of a hero at the best, and only mildly notable in a purely local way. Yet to explain that stockyards job it is only fair to Rawlins to say he was well qualified for it by early training. He was a product of the short grass region; he had left the cow camp for the campus; put down the branding-iron and reata to stumble along with the sage of the Sabine farm.
It was while on the stockyards job, shuttling cattle from pen to pen, that Rawlins became inoculated by the thought of sheep. He saw sheepmen come pouring trainload after trainload of lambs into the market for the Christmas trade, the increase and profit of their distant flocks, realizing such sums of money as newspaper reporters and editors could not hope to earn through the course of long and laborious lives. These sheepmen were so accustomed to gathering in the reward of their virtuous foresight that it seemed to make them sad to pack up a few more bales of it to bulge out the sides of the banks back in Wyoming and Montana.
It was just one recurring cycle of money in the sheepmen's life, Rawlins came to see clearly. After cashing in on the Christmas lambs, or the Easter lambs, the sly fellows had nothing to do but go back home, knock around in their way of silent, greasy contentment until spring, when they would shear the fathers and mothers of the Christmas lambs, gather in another large mass of money for the clip, and grin a little, maybe, over the heft of it in their jeans. Better still, and more of it, the lady sheep, duly shorn, would be suckling then and there another crop of Christmas lambs. So it went in the sheepman's happy life.
To add to the felicity of the sheepman's condition, he had neither rent nor taxes to pay on the land that nurtured his flocks. He roamed them over the wide, unclaimed public domain of his vast States, into the hills and mountains for summer grazing, back to the open spaces, wind-swept and bare of snow, for winter feeding on grass that had cured on the stem as sweet as the most succulent hay of eastern meadows. Nature fed his sheep, nature fended them, with nothing more expensive than a herder to every two or three thousand to keep them from straying off and falling to the wolves.
That was the life for a fellow; that was the short cut to fortune, although there might not be any to either learning or political success. A sheepman's life was the life for him, Rawlins decided, determined to lay the lines of his future to lead to that felicitous condition.
Working on that intention, he began to cultivate the acquaintance of sheepmen, even sheep-herders, who came to market from the far-off ranges beyond the mountains. He began to inquire and learn; to store up his information against the day of his need. Before long his plan lay straight ahead of him, with nothing left to do but invade the sheep country and put it into effect.
Sheepmen told him tales of men who had come to their country and made their start on a few pounds of beans tied in the corner of a sack; a few pounds of dried apples tied in the corner of a sack; a handful of oatmeal tied in the corner of a sack; a little of this, a little of that, never more than a little, and always tied in the corner of a sack. That method of transportation and conservation always gave the nucleus the common, human, down-to-the-grass-roots touch. Just a little of something in the corner of some old sack, to show that sheepmen's fortunes were not founded on over-reaching their fellow men.
What Rawlins was most deeply concerned about getting into the corner of a sack was money enough to buy two or three hundred head of sheep. The age of romance in the sheep business, the dried apple and bean era, was over with, he believed. Let him get enough money to buy two or three hundred head, then go to the sheep country and set up for a flockmaster from the very start.
Many of the old-timers had run sheep on share of the increase for several years, they had told him, before beginning for themselves. Sheep-herders had told him they were employed on the same condition. That would not be so bad for a man of timid spirit, but for one who had been in the business of making governors and senators, it appeared too servile, too tame. The dried-apple chaps were the kind.
Rawlins had learned that a rigorous climate was most favored by sheepmen. The same conditions which cause the sheep-herder to wear three coats and several layers of shirts bring out the long thick wool on the backs of his charges. A flockmaster of the north-west will tell you that sheep spread out and lie far apart, even on the coldest nights of that bleak and bitter land; that they are as warm as stoves; that they thaw the snow around them for several feet as they lie asleep in comfort, without fold or fending except for a hill behind them to break the rough of the wind. All of which a greenhorn may believe or reject, according to his wisdom, and general judgment of the veracity of men and the heat of sheep.
Rawlins had chosen the latitude for his future operations. Concerning the longitude, he was yet uncertain. Five hundred miles, as has been said, makes little difference in a country so wide and deep as that Rawlins had fixed his hopes upon. He had maps from the Department of the Interior, covering public lands in two States of the north-west. After much investigation he had settled in his mind upon one, the exact spot in that one, where the foundation of his fortunes was to be laid.
On the map—Rawlins never had been west of Kansas—the region selected appeared white and sterile, watered by few streams, blank-staring, repellent. It could not be any bleaker in fact than it was in print, Rawlins well believed, even when winter had it locked under a pressure of thirty below zero, as he knew it frequently fell in that latitude so favorable to a long and heavy fleece.
There was public land to be entered in that place, millions of acres of it, for civilization had reached only a sprangling branch into that country at the time Rawlins put his finger down on the map and made his selection, his determined eyes toward the west. Right there, said Rawlins; that was the very spot. All that was wanting was a few pounds of something in the corner of a sack.
Rawlins began to count his money and make long calculations, to palpitate and sweat over it in anxiety lest sheepmen should have all that white place on the map gobbled up before he could break away from the stockyards job with enough in his pocket to justify the dash. He was dubious over the efficiency of this hoard, even when he cashed in on the job one spring day and turned his face toward the sheeplands of the west.
At the end of the railroad reaching into the sheep country in those days the little city of Jasper lay. Jasper was the wool capital of the north-west, as it remains, even to this day. Wool buyers from Boston, which is the wool capital of the world, came to Jasper in the spring to buy the clip. They took away millions of pounds of wool, leaving millions of dollars in the banks of Jasper and the far-lying villages of the great, grey sheeplands.
When Rawlins arrived at Jasper on a day late in May, the clip was already coming down from distant shearing-pens, the long wool-sacks heaped on wagons coupled in trains. The pens at Jasper were crowded with thousands of dusty sheep waiting their turn at the shearers' hands, their coats brown from sun, soil and storm, their lamentations sounding as the wailings of Israel beside the waters of Babylon, rising in sad chorus night and day.
There was plenty of land left to the homesteader in the place where Rawlins had put his finger on the map, he found by inquiry at the United States land office in Jasper. The commissioner was a newspaper man on the side, very much of the kind Rawlins himself had been. He gave what information he had cheerfully enough, but seemed to look on Rawlins as a sort of oddity wanting to range off that way and go in for sheep. Rawlins thought he scorned him a little for his apostasy to the fraternity.
No stage ran from Jasper into the Dry Wood region, as that particular section upon which Rawlins had fixed his preference was called. He should have gone in on the railroad that skirted the Dry Wood country on the north, they said. A stage ran between the railroad and Lost Cabin, the business center of the locality for which he was bound.
The only way to get into Dry Wood from Jasper was to buy a horse, hire one, or walk. For a man with less than five hundred dollars in the corner of his sack, buying a horse for which he might not have any future need would be folly; to hire one, extravagance. There being no established rule against walking in that country, Rawlins determined to walk.
Oh, yes, plenty of people walked around in that country, the land-commissioner-editor said. Sheep-herders, mainly, and shearers on the go from job to job. Nobody cared how a man traveled, as far as he knew, the official said. It was only about a hundred miles; a man with a good leg and sound wind ought to make it in three or four days.
Rawlins thought so too. He rolled such of his possessions as he felt he should have immediate need for, making them as few as possible, in a blanket and roped it neatly; bought a canteen and put his foot on the road. It was a well-worn road, appearing as if much business must flourish along its way.
Except the newness of the blanket, and the rope binding it, there was nothing in the traveler's appearance either conspicuously strange or raw. He was a pretty well-set-up young fellow of twenty-five or six, perhaps a little above the general stature, quick-striding, alert. A fair-skinned man, rather large of visage, especially as to the nose and mouth; his hair dark, eyes grey, direct, deep-probing. At times he whistled a little tune with a peculiar melodious sharpness through his teeth as he walked, drawing his lips back to give it passage, making him seem to smile.
His brown duck coat and tall laced boots he had worn on the stockyards job; they were seasoned with livestock association. Likewise his broad-brimmed grey hat, of pattern in keeping with the accepted standards of the sheep country. He would pass very well in the eyes of ranchmen and flockmasters met on the road for a young fellow with his foot in his hand on the look-out for a job.
The way into the Dry Wood country lay along the river beside which the town of Jasper was built, keeping with it for a distance of twenty miles or so, leaving it then for the hills: This river, bank-full at that time, the springtime rise of it coming on from the melting snow, was an unlovely dark stream, full of swift whirlpools which bored like augers against the sandy shore. Looking at it from a hill-top, it seemed to lie flat, like a stream of quick-silver, on the white plain without confining banks, a few wind-torn cottonwood trees at its margin. It was a melancholy river watering a lonely land.
These harried cottonwoods along the river were only venturing their first tender leaves, for snow was to be found still in deep gullies, where it had packed hard as ice under the trampling of wild-raging winter storms; and on hillsides, where it had eddied in great drifts. Nature sweeps the sheeplands in that way, leaving the grazing-pastures bare, in a purpose that is beneficent and admirable, rough as its mighty hand may seem to man who must face it on the un-tempered wold.
For a country that appeared so empty, a great many people were traveling out of it toward Jasper that morning. Rawlins passed the salutation of the day with the grave and gay alike, taking their dust on his shoulders and hat, beginning to appear quite road-seasoned by the middle of the afternoon. There were wool trains, and single wagons loaded with wool; buggies carrying florid drovers and their rough-cheeked, broad-breasted wives; single horsemen, horsemen in pairs and troops; even a band of Indians coming down from the distant mountains with the moccasins and baskets representing their winter's work to be traded for the luxuries of civilization at Jasper.
Rawlins was offered a job along toward evening by a sheepman who had driven three hundred miles with eight loads of wool. This man had a most imposing train, twelve horses to a double wagon. He was making camp with his many teamsters when Rawlins met him, having a day's drive yet ahead of him to Jasper.
No, he wasn't looking for a job, Rawlins told the sheepman. He was heading for the Dry Wood range to start operations for himself. Not much of a country he was bound for, the sheepman said. It was better over his way, toward the south-west. Rawlins had his plans too complete and firmly fixed on Dry Wood to have his determination shaken by a disparaging report.—He declined the friendly invitation to share camp with the opulent sheepman, pushing on until dusk.
Rawlins made camp that night by a brook that was already dwindling, soon to dry up and cease among its troubled stones. He slept with feet toward his little fire, as he had done many a time on the high, hillocked range in the old buffalo country of Kansas, feeling again quite at home.
When he kicked out of his blankets at the first streak of day, Rawlins felt himself considerably bunged-up and chilled to the bone, for which tenderness he despised himself. A man who intended to go in for the sheep business must case-harden himself against all temperatures, and not shiver around like a chilled dog in such mild weather as this. A sheepman had told him only a few months before, without any enlargement of pride or boasting, that he had not slept in a house for fourteen years.
Rawlins passed a road-ranch that evening, the proprietor eying him with disfavor from the door. Several horses were hitched at the gnawed racks, several men could be seen at a card game just within the window, the "Well-appointed Bar," announced by the tavern sign, in the background. There was a look of cattle about the patrons of the place, type familiar to the traveler. From the attitude of the man at the door, Rawlins concluded they were the favored of that locality. There was an expression of contempt in the landlord's face for a man who passed his door on foot.
Beyond the road-ranch there was no habitation, nor sign of one, during the journey of the next two days. It was a hilly country, and waterless, it seemed; Rawlins would have gone dry only for the gallon canteen which he had included, wisely, in his meager outfit. There were neither sheep nor cattle along the way, nor traces of them on the hills, where sparse grass was springing green among the grey sage and spiked soapweed. Nobody had passed him; he had met nobody since leaving the road-ranch. It appeared as if everybody going out had been taken with the notion at the same time, and poured down to Jasper in a drove.
At sundown of his fifth day on the road, Rawlins sighted a sheep-wagon on a distant hill. Without stopping to debate the question he headed across country toward it, determined to find out where he was, and where Dry Wood began; where Lost Cabin, the supply center of that region, lay, and how far he was distant yet from that broad white place on the map, where there seemed to be room for all the sheep that ever ranged the earth since the days of Abraham.