Sheep Limit/Chapter 15
Clemmons would have been a big sheepman years ago, Rawlins believed, if unsparing driving of himself, rigorous parsimony and avid willingness to profit by the friendly services of somebody who pitied his plight could have advanced him. The old rascal had no intention of hiring a herder; that was as plain as the burrs in his whiskers after Rawlins had been substituting for him three or four days.
He'd be all right to-morrow; there was no use paying out money to a man for doing something one was able to do for himself. Just stick around with the sheep a day or two longer, and he would be all right. Coal oil was a pretty good second for snake grease; it was bringing him around in fine shape.
Just help him along a day or two more, then, the old man begged. It was only play for a young man like Rawlins, and the experience would be worth money to him when he came to running sheep of his own. A man had to learn all sides of that business, the dry side as well as the wet. Rawlins would learn a lot about the habits and needs of sheep in a dry time like that. The old man stressed the benefits of the education so hard Rawlins believed he would put in a bill for it at the end.
Between the rest and the kerosene Clemmons limbered up in eight or nine days enough to resume the care of—his flock. Rawlins' sympathy for him had played out long before that. He was just a hard-rined old grafter who would spraddle out over as much land as Galloway if he had the chance. But he stopped with him a day longer to see that he did not relapse.
Clemmons softened up a little in gratitude for Rawlins' help toward the end, to the extent of revising his position on permitting his sheep to go into the country beyond sheep limit on any condition. He removed that restriction in the case of fifty old ewes and an ancient, tottering ram, which he offered to sell Rawlins for the price of breeding stock. That was as far as his generosity went. Rawlins saddled Graball and went on his way, poorer by ten days in time than when he came.
There was nothing to be hoped for from Clemmons in sheep; that was settled for good. Rawlins wondered if the other small sheepmen who had drifted up against the barbed-wire barrier were as flighty on the subject of going inside the fence as Clemmons. He hoped they were. As long as he must go in there and start things, he was entitled to some handicap.
Rawlins had taken an early start, thinking it would be well to ride over to the ranch for a passing visit to Mrs. Peck and Edith Stone, seeing they were to be his nearest neighbors. It might be possible to negotiate with Mrs. Peck for another horse, and one of the numerous wagons he had seen around her place.
Mrs. Peck might even be engaged in his venture to the extent of stocking him to a little band of sheep, although he doubted the likelihood of that. She was a cautious woman who owned several miles of unfailing water. Still, the dry range and short grazing, with the prospect of a winter's feeding ahead of her, might move her to take a chance.
Speculating on these things, Rawlins rode along, laying his course for the ranch, which he calculated to reach conveniently about noon. He had covered about half the distance when he ran into a scattered band of sheep whose shepherd was nowhere in sight. There was nothing strange in that, for the shepherd, as Rawlins knew, might be hiding behind a bush or lying in a hollow, staring at him like some creature of the wilds.
Those solitary men developed queer streaks frequently. He had heard, long before coming to the range, that sheep-herders commonly developed a mild type of melancholy insanity. Rawlins wondered if it might be a philosophic contempt for the garrulity of other people, the outgrowth of contemplation in their close association with nature, which runs all its business on the silent plan.
When Rawlins came to the top of the next hill and looked down into a little valley where a twisting streak of green willows marked a living stream, he saw the shepherd sitting by a crude shelter of canvas and bushes, engaged in what appeared to be the unbelievable task of preparing breakfast. Dinner it could not be, for it was then only about half-past nine. Here was a sheep-herder worth meeting, Rawlins thought. He proceeded on down the hill, lips drawn back in his way that looked like a desperate grin, whistling a quick little tune between his teeth.
Dowell Peck rose up in flapping garments like a scarecrow in a garden, a stewpan in his hand, and shouted a delighted greeting as Graball came skating down the steep hillside behind the tattered canvas spread over a bush which formed Peck's tent.
"Well, of all men!" said Rawlins, greatly surprised.
"Yes, it's me," Peck admitted, in that fatuous way a man does when he would deny the obvious fact if he felt there was any chance of making it go.
"But I thought you'd jumped the range, I thought you were back in St. Joe listening to the music of a sewing machine by this time, Peck. How come? What happened?"
"I thought at first you was a bear comin' at me down that hill," said Peck, evading the friendly inquiry. "Did you see anything of a gang of stews over that way?"
"Yes, they're right over the hill. Where's your dog?"
"Darned if I know," Peck said, looking around for the animal with hostile eye; "him and me don't mix. He thinks he's boss of them sheep, tries to go over my head every move I make. If I had a gun I'd plug him, and plug him right!"
Rawlins dismounted, Graball standing docilely by after turning his wise eye around to mark the entirely denuded and stripped condition of that particular spot. Peck doubtless was not ranging the sheep very far from his camp. They had gnawed the bushes to the wood, the grass to the ground.
"So Mrs. Peck is making a sheepwoman's man out of you after all?"
"You see me," said Peck, disparaging the exhibit to a most contemptible object, indeed.
"You changed your mind and came back? I thought you would, somehow."
"Did I?" Peck challenged, looking up from his overheated bacon, which was already black around the curled edges before it was half done. "Well, you've got another guess comin'. Dang this cookin' out here in this blame country! Nothing to cook but sowbelly and flopjakes, and canned beans warmed over in the grease. I'm so full of canned beans I spill 'em when I gape."
"Kind of early for dinner, unless you got your sheep out before daylight?"
"It ain't dinner; it's breakfast," Peck corrected, as Rawlins knew he must if he told the truth. "You don't ketch me gittin' up at daylight to wake up a bunch of stews and spread 'em out with their dang noses the right way accordin' to the wind—either with it or agin it, danged if I remember which—but the old lady's particular on that point as I used to be about my neckties before I come to this dad-blamed country.
"What the dickens do I care which way they ought to point in the wind? Head or tail, it's all the same to me. If they ain't got sense enough to turn around the right way if I start 'em wrong, I say let 'em go to the doo—let 'em go to hell!"
"So she followed you to Jasper and grabbed you before you could get your ticket to St. Joe, heh? Tough luck, Peck. But it may work out for the best, after all."
Peck took his smoking skillet from the fire, shook the charred pieces of bacon as if he intended to throw them like dice and read his fortune, emptied them into the stewpan and reached around for his can of beans.
"Eatin' out of a pan, like a dog," he said, lifting his reproachful eyes, his one-time trim and elegant moustache looking ragged and cindery, a growth of reddish, cow-colored beard on his gaunt cheeks and chin, his hair long around his ears. "No, she didn't foller me, Rawlins. She rode over to a ranch where they've got a telephone and called up the sheriff down at Jasper. She told him to arrest a man ridin' such and such a horse with her brand on it, and let it go at that."
"Oh, I see."
"Yeh. She made out she didn't know it was me on that horse. When she come after that blamed skate I was peekin' through them bars. 'Oh, it's my husband,' she says, when the sheriff led her in to take a squint at the thief. 'I thought he was out on the range with a band of sheep. Let him go, Mr. Sheriff—it's my mistake.' That's what she had the gall to do."
"That's hard sleddin', Peck. But it was a pretty shrewd way of keeping a husband; you'll have to hand her that."
"Yeah, took all the money—my own personal, private money—the sheriff frisked off of me, and wouldn't give me back a cent. She said I could either come back here and go to work, or go to the pen for stealin' that horse. It was a bluff, but it worked. I didn't know the law then, but I know it now, and if I could lay my hand on anything else around that ranch I'd show her! Riley—you know Riley, the lawyer that's herdin' for her? Riley he told me the law. A married man can't rob his wife, nor a married woman can't rob her husband. What belongs to one belongs to the other. If I'd 'a' knew the law then I'd 'a' told her to go to the doodle."
"I don't know, but I expect Riley's right. It sounds like he ought to be right, anyhow. So if you can raise the wind you'll strike for St. Joe again?"
"You watch me. Ain't that a h—a dickens of a mess for a man to have to eat and call it a breakfast? Hog grease and beans! I'm so fed up on hog I leak lard when I git a bug in my eye. Yeah, she said she was goin' to make a sheepman out of me. Never expected I'd be as good as that warp-faced feller she had ahead of me—I wish she had him now, I wish to the mighty he'd raise up from the dead and come back—but she'd make a kind of one out of me or bust her hame-strings a tryin'. She can bust 'em, and she can bust herself, wide open, for all the sheepman she'll ever make out of me!"
"How long does she calculate it'll take, or did she say?"
"She said after I'd run around with a bunch of stews two years I'd begin to see some sense, and then maybe she could trust me. You can see how she trusts me now—not even a sheep-wagon to hang up in at night like them hired herders have, and no grub but that you see there in that blame sack. She's a-scairt if I had a wagon I might hitch myself up to it and pull out, I guess. Well, I wouldn't try to give her the dodge that way any more. When I go next time I'll go with some money funds in my jeans. I may be green, but I ain't as simple as I look. I've got a line on something, and when I'm good and ready to go next time I'll burn up the road."
"You'll think better of it after a winter on the range, Peck. They say it takes a winter to break a man in and make him stick."
"I don't see why she didn't marry Tippie," Peck complained, passing over the probabilities of the future. "She trusts him with a roll of money as big as my leg and never asks him for the change. I'd have to give her a bond before she'd let me look at a dime."
"I expect it's because Tippie knew she bore down pretty hard on husbands, Peck. He's been around here a long time, you know."
"Yeah, he was wise, he knew her game. If I'd 'a' been smart I'd 'a' stuck to that little Edith. I didn't think she had money enough to make it worth a feller's time, but what's money? Here I am the husband of a woman with money up to her neck, and me eatin' hog and beans when I ought to be trimmin' a T-bone. Well, I can do that on my little old thirty a week back in St. Joe. But I'll be sway-backed before I ever hit that old town agin, if I can't turn a trick on that old woman."
"If my opinion's worth anything in the case, Peck, I'll bet you turn out a better sheepman than Duke ever was. She'll be so proud of you before your two years are up that you'll be the delegate runnin' around the range with the big wad of money payin' off the hands. My tip to you is, stick; hang on till the ewes come home, seeing there ain't any cows."
"They wouldn't come home, Rawlins," Peck said in reproachful, sad voice, "no more than good luck'll ever come to me on this range. Leave a bunch of them sheep to find their way back to the place where they bunked last night and they'd end up down in Mexico."
"You seem to be learning their ways, anyhow."
"Yes, I'm learnin' more about sheep every day than I ever suspicioned of 'em. One thing I know for sure, and that is you can't starve 'em. The old lady put me off here about a week ago with this bunch. She said I'd have to hunt up a new place for my camp in about three days, as they'd clean everything out around here in that time. I thought if I could starve the dang sapheads she'd throw a fit and fire me, but I tell you, Rawlins, it can't be done. They eat the leaves off of the sage, then they eat the limbs. I look for 'em to begin on the main stems of the danged dwarfy stuff to-morrow, and then go after the roots. Well, where're you headin' for, Rawlins? What's on your mind?"
"I've taken up a homestead north of your ranch a few miles on a little creek. I'm on my way up there now."
"Say, you mean back of that fence where you and Tippie tried to git my gizzard shot out?"
"We didn't have any such design as that on you, Peck; we only wanted to throw a little scare into you. But there's where it is."
"Yes, and it'd been better for me if your dang scheme'd worked out. But say! If I had me a claim up there I could shake that old woman to a fare—you-well, couldn't I? She wouldn't dast to throw her leg over that fence. I'd be as safe as gold money. Say, Rawlins! what do you think of me drivin' that bunch of stews up in there? That'd put a crimp in the old girl! Yeah, and I could drive 'em out on the other side and sell 'em, and raise myself a stake. What do you think? Wouldn't that put a crimp in her?"
"It sure would," Rawlins agreed, thinking that Peck must be desperate in his dissatisfaction to consider so eagerly that plan of escape from his wife's tyranny.
"But I don't suppose I could git by with it!" Peck sighed. "I wouldn't have any grub in there, for one thing, and I expect she'd stand sheriffs all around that fence waitin' for me to come out. That's about what she'd do. They couldn't do anything to me, but they'd grab the sheep off of me before I could drive 'em over to the railroad. I guess I'll have to stick to my other scheme to put a crimp in that old lady. If there was any other woman around here I could run off with, derned if I wouldn't do it. Not Edith; I wouldn't think of runnin' off with Edith, but it'd serve the old woman right if I did."
"That's noble of you, Peck," Rawlins said, his sarcasm wasted on the shepherd's peaked head, where it split like a raindrop on the edge of an axe. "But you don't cut very much of a figure right now, to be honest with you. I don't believe you could run off with the greasiest sheepman's wife in this country."
"If I had a shave and a haircut, and my other hat and that pair of pencil-striped pants," Peck regretted, sighing as if his heart were wrapped in the gay garments and put away in moth-balls to wait the completion of his education in sheep. "I don't suppose I'll ever set eyes on them clothes of mine any more. Well, if I can't put over what I've got lined up, I'll hop a freight and burn my way to St. Joe."
"It's hard on you, Peck, and it's going to be harder when it gets twenty below along in the winter, but she'll give you a wagon before then. You may think she's cruel, but all she's trying to do is reform you from your town habits and make a man of you according to her own pattern. If she can put it through you'll be the one to win. Pull up your puckerin' string and stick to it. Just think of all the money Tippie brought out that time for current expenses, and only skinned the top of her pile."
"I am thinkin' of it, Rawlins," goggling up with his frog eyes knowingly, as if to say there was a lot in the back of his head on that subject which he was keeping to himself.
"I'll be riding on then, and leave you to your sheep and pleasant dreams. Is Mrs. Peck over at the ranch?"
"Maybe she is. I ain't seen her since she kicked me off down here and drove away. She'll be around somewhere, Rawlins; nothing ain't goin' to happen to her. It's her husbands that gits caught between two rocks in the crick and drownded. Nothing like that's ever goin' to happen to her."
Rawlins wished the discontented shepherd well, and went on his way. Peck was getting nothing more than he deserved, or would deserve if he never should succeed in breaking his bondage and escaping back to his lamented St. Joe. Peck came shouting after him as Rawlins was mounting the hill, waving his hat.
"Say, Rawlins," Peck panted, "it just struck me. Sell me that horse, will you, Rawlins? I'll give you my note for any price you ask, and that's as good as gold money. I'll take it up the minute I hit St. Joe."
Rawlins grinned at Peck's impetuosity, shaking his head in denial.
"Not because I don't trust you, Peck. You'd pay me all right. I need the horse, I'm used to him and don't know where I could get another one for the price I'd have to make, between friends, to you."
"You don't need to let the price stand in the way," Peck argued. "Double it—I'll pay any money to git away from that old girl."
"Besides, I think I'd be doing you an injury instead of a favor if I sold you the horse, Peck. This is going to be the making of you if you'll see it through—things will begin to look different to you in two or three months from now. There's a whole lot of generosity and kindness in your wife if you take her right. Show a willing spirit, Peck, and hop to it."
Peck wilted as the animation of his big and sudden scheme died. He looked reproachfully at Rawlins, as a dying man might look when fixing the guilt of his death on the one who had laid him low; turned back to his camp with slow, spiritless step, his shoulders seeming not much wider than a clothespin under the brim of his broad-winged hat.