Sheep Limit/Chapter 20
It was not the gleam of fire on his eyeballs nor the sound of guns in his ears that woke Rawlins when morning was breaking grey over the sheeplands. He heaved himself up suddenly when the sound of it struck through his heavy slumber, bewildered for a moment, sleep-cloyed, as one commonly feels on waking in strange surroundings, believing for a little while that it was the continuation of a dream.
Sheep. The tremulous, pleading, helpless babble of a band of sheep.
Rawlins took a cautious peep through the fringe of his hiding-place, seeing nothing of the complaining creatures which seemed to be near at hand in large numbers. There was a fog in the valley, or a skim of fog, which pressed close to the ground, common to that valley in the early morning. Rawlins often had seen it before, so shallow that the tops of the taller cottonwoods along the creek protruded above it. The sheep were bleating out of it beyond the creek; none of them was to be seen.
He came out of his hole cautiously, relieved to see his house and haystacks still there. He wondered whether this was a new scheme of Galloway's men, running their flocks over to his valley, hoping to drown him in sheep, or whether the herders had acted on orders predicated on the certainty that he would be ousted by that time. It was a trespass, any way they had worked it, for the sheep were on his land. He intended to send them out of there in short order. He wasn't going to have sheep in there ruining his hay crop.
Making a stealthy circuit of his premises, Rawlins encountered the sheep under the creek bank where he had tied his horse the day before. Along there the bank was high on one side of the stream only, the other being a pebbly slope which high water covered. At its present low stage the stream pressed against this high bank, only three or four yards wide, the pebbly shore making a sort of sheltered nook very good for a bedding-ground. Here the shepherds had brought their sheep while he slept, either ignorant of their proximity to his house or assured in their belief that all was safe.
What puzzled Rawlins was that no shepherd was in sight, no smell of his breakfast fire on the air. It is a law among sheep-herders of the north-west that flocks must be moved from the bedding-ground at dawn, faced into the wind and spread to graze while the dew is on the herbage. By careful attention to this rule of the craft, a flock is able to subsist for many days without water. It saves the shepherd labor, and the sheep flesh in long drives to tanks and streams.
There was no voice of sheep-herder rising in the age-old cry that marshaled the sheep forth from the bedding-ground; there was no shepherd to be seen. Not even a dog to bristle and give the alarm of the peering stranger's presence. It was mystifying to Rawlins, who did not care to push his investigations too far.
He would wait until the fog cleared, as it would with the first spears of sunlight lancing over the hills. It was lucky the sheep had not come into his uncut grass, which stood knee-high, ready for the scythe. They would have done great damage trampling there, for it was a middling big band, a thousand or more, from what he could see. There was nothing to do but wait, and act according to what should be revealed.
Rawlins went back to the house, which he had not examined for intruders, thinking the herder or herders might have taken possession and be sleeping late on account of the unaccustomed luxury of a bed beneath a roof. There was nobody in the house; it remained just as he had left it yesterday, the hay on the floor where the incendiary had thrown it, the broken glass from the window littering the ground. He had not thought it worth while, in his uncertain state, to right things up around the place. There might be something bigger to come off around there yet which would muss things up worse than they were.
It was assuring, at any rate, to find things undisturbed. Uneasy as he was over the presence of the sheep, he was strongly tempted to make a fire in the stove and get breakfast, having slighted the matter of sustenance the day before. He pushed the temptation on ahead of him and returned to the creek, where he sat down overlooking the sheep to wait the breaking of the fog.
The sheep were huddling and crying below him, lambs nuzzling their breakfast, not much concerned over the delay in the day's proceedings. A wind began to stir, moving the shallow layer of dense fog, making rifts in it here and there, opening momentary vistas. Rawlins had a glimpse of a dog through one of these rifts, sitting in stolid patience on the farther rim of the flock. It was a big, white-breasted animal, morose in its pose, implacable in its delegated authority, holding the restless flock like a stone wall.
Rawlins got up, a creepiness of apprehension crinkling over him. It was not a stray flock, as he had begun to believe; the herder was somewhere near, tired from his labor of the night in bringing the band into the disputed pasture. As he turned and peered, the quickening wind came with a rush down the creek, dispersing the fog in a breath, revealing what he sought.
The herder was lying beyond the dog, ridiculously covered across the middle part of his body by a blanket and the canvas of his little tent, as if he had struggled against phantoms in his sleep and worked both extremities of his body out of the cover. His arms were thrown out as if he had been staked down; one long leg was drawn up, the bony knee sharp as a stake.
Rawlins' first amazement gave way to humor. He chuckled as he hastened down the creek bank and struck across the shallow stream. For there was not a double of that long figure in the Dry Wood country. It was the romantic form of Dowell Peck.
The dog backed off, bristling, silent, menacing, as Rawlins approached the sleeping keeper of the flock. It retreated within a few yards of its master, where it crouched, ready to repel any intrusion on his weary slumber. Rawlins did not care to test the creature's fidelity any farther. He stood where he was and let out a whoop that brought Peck up in a comical tangle of blanket and tent.
Peck had a gun hung on him; he was making a twohanded effort to haul it out of the scabbard when Rawlins yelled to him not to shoot.
"It's Rawlins," he called. "Don't you know me?"
Peck's long hair was over his eyes, his long moustache drooped in dejection like a wet rooster's tail. He cleared his countenance of the fog-damp locks, one hand still distrustfully on his gun.
"Oh, all right, Rawlins," he said, his voice hoarse and rough-edged from sleep. "Come on over."
Rawlins went up the gravelly strand, opening a way through the flock, water overflowing his boots. He was carrying his rifle, a pistol buckled on him, for he had crawled out of the buffalo wallow expecting a fight. Peck kicked the encumbering covers aside with a gay leg, capering joyously.
"I was headin' for you, and I hit you," Peck called over the diminishing distance. "Purty dang good for a greenhorn in the night, I'll say!"
"Good? Darned good, I call it," Rawlins shouted back over the confusion of the sheep. "But what the devil does it mean? How did you get here—where are you going?"
"Right here," Peck replied, sticking out his long arm in greeting. "I started for right where I'm at and I got here."
"You certainly did," Rawlins marveled. "But how did you do it? What's the object?"
"Well, I tell you, Rawlins, them dan sheep they're more to blame than me, in the first place. If they hadn't started it I never would 'a' thought of it, or if I had thought of it that'd been the end of it, I guess. They run away a couple of days ago, and I couldn't stop oem. They was wild-eyed for a drink, I guess, they hadn't had one for two or three weeks."
"Oh, they bolted on you, did they?"
"They sure did. I couldn't no more stop 'em than I could a freight train. We struck a hole in that dang fence, where you come in at, I guess, and I shot 'em through. I saw your house from the top of a hill out there, and I said there's where I'd break away from the old woman and take a little stake along with me. We hit that hole about sundown, and I kep' them dang stews on the trot till midnight. I'll bet you a bottle of pop they've got enough of runnin' off from yours truly! I'll bet you the drinks they'll think it over a long time before they try a dodge like that on me any more."
"Peck, you're a wonder!" Rawlins commended him in genuine praise. "But how did you know you'd hit my place? You couldn't see it from this side of the creek."
"I knew you'd be on a crick, all sheepmen's nutty about cricks, and when I struck it I stopped. I was goin' to take a look around for you this morning."
"But what possessed you to bring that band of sheep in here, Peck? Don't you know there's a war going on between me and Galloway's gang?"
"Let 'em come," said Peck, with portentous confidence, slapping his gun. "I'm with you."
"What will your wife say when she hears you've run that band of sheep in here?"
"I'd like to hear," said Peck, comfortably.
"She'll raise the roof."
"Let her," said Peck, easy in his mind. "There won't be anybody but her for it to fall back on."
"Things are kind of uncertain in here, Peck, mighty uncertain, to tell you the truth. Darned if I know what you're going to do with that big band of sheep."
"I'm going to run 'em around in here and fatten 'em up, then I'll sell 'em and hit the breeze," Peck announced. "I had that all figgered out when I was shootin' 'em through that hole in the fence. The old lady she'll not bother me here, she's a-scairt to set her leg inside of that wire fence. And I tell you right now, Rawlins, I'd ruther stand up and fight seventeen men a day than live around where that woman can get at me."
"Darned if I know what you're going to do with them," Rawlins said, perplexed, apparently oblivious to Peck's vehement announcement of his readiness to fight.
"I'll have to hustle them stews out on the grass," Peck said, with proprietorial air. "I don't want 'em to run on you, Rawlins. Which way'll I head 'em?"
"Keep them on this side of the creek," Rawlins directed, "and you'll be all right with me. I've got a nice patch of hay over on the other side I want to cut."
"Sure," Peck agreed.
He sent his dog to turn the sheep away from the creek, and set up a whooping that could not have been equaled in volume from one end of Dry Wood to the other.
"I want to burn some breakfast off of you, and git you to hold me up a few days till I can put me in some grub," Peck said, putting it up as a proposal between equals, no favor asked and no thought of being denied.
"You're welcome. Right up that bank—you can see the tops of my haystacks over there—when you're ready. I'll go on and get things started."
Peck came to the house in due time, carrying his scanty bedding and scrap of tent. He threw them down with contemptuous air, kicked them into a corner and grunted.
"That's what a man's wife gives him to lay his bones on and put over his head in the night," he said. "Any hired man of hers has got his wagon or his good tent, and plenty of grub brought to him right along. If she ever puts a leg in here I'll stitch her ears to the back of her neck."
"I see she gave you a gun. She must be loosening up a little."
"All the gun she ever give me!" Peck discounted, drawing the weapon from the scabbard, presenting it proudly for inspection. "Yeah, I bought this old he-gun off of Al Clemmons—I give him four stews for it. He'll carry a mile."
"It sure looks like it would," Rawlins agreed, "It's an old war-time Colt—I used to play with one like it when I was a knee-high little shaver back in Kansas."
"Yeah, it was a Colt when they branded it," Peck said, rubbing his thumb affectionately over the factory stamp, "but it's a stud-horse now. Say, feller, you orta hear this old boy snort!"
"It's an old-timer, Peck, but it looks like a good one. Can you hit anything with it?"
"Sometimes," Peck confessed ingenuously. "But I'll bet you the pop I can throw a bluff with it as big as any man around here."
"I don't believe it would pay you to try it inside of Galloway's fence, Peck. When you pull your gun here you want to begin to shoot. They're not much on the bluff, I'm afraid. You know, I thought they'd run that band of sheep in on me. I took it so much for granted I never thought to look at the brand."
"You'll see another brand on 'em before long. I'm going to cut me a stencil out of a coal oil can and print capital Peck on the sides of them stews a foot high. I'll let that old woman see who's boss of this gang if she ever throws a leg over that fence."
"Maybe you've got a right to claim 'em, Peck. I don't know much about the law in such matters."
"Sure I have. What belongs to the wife belongs to the husband, but what the husband gits his paws on is his. It's going to be that way in this case, I don't give a dang what the law says."
They sat at breakfast, Rawlins with one leg in the door, his guns at hand, watchful against a surprise. Over across the creek Peck's sheep could be seen, making a cheerful picture in a landscape that Rawlins had found empty to lonesomeness in the days past.
"You've got a nice band of them there," he said.
"Yeah," Peck agreed, with the easy, offhand way of a regular sheepman. "It's a good joke on the old woman, the way she loaded me up with that band of sheep, Rawlins. You know Riley, the feller that had the law books in his wagon? Yeah. I was talkin' to Riley one day about gittin' a divorce off of the old woman, but he said I didn't have much of a show. A man had to watch his step not to give his wife an openin' for a knock-out, Riley said. He let me have a book on divorces; said if I'd read that and study up and walk a straight line I might be able to flop her one of these days. Tippie come by one day and caught me readin' that book."
"I heard about it."
"Yeah. She was red-headed. She come tearin' over to my camp next day spittin' fire like a Chessie cat. She said she married me for keeps, and the only way I'd ever shake her was by goin' under ground. She said she'd put me there if I ever made a move to git a bill off of her, and I believe she meant it, Rawlins. She looked as mean as a fried buzzard. She went over and fired Riley, right off the bat. She split his sheep up among us other hired hands, comin' out ahead one man on the deal, the way she figgered it. I had about four hundred before that; she loaded me up with six or seven hundred more. She said she'd give me something to think about besides divorces; she was goin' to make a sheepman out of me or kill me a-tryin'. Glad she loaded me up with them extra stews now. I'm just that much ahead."
"Darned if I see how you're going to come out on it, Peck, but I wish you luck. I suppose you've got a right to sell the sheep if you want to, but I doubt if anybody around here would buy them from you."
"I'm goin' to ship 'em to Kansas City when them lambs grow a little more. I think I'll go over to the bank at Lost Cabin and see if I can't raise a little loan on 'em. If I can, I'll hire some feller to do the work. No sheepman that herds his own sheep ever amounts to anything, Rawlins, no more than any other business man that tries to do it all himself. Look at old Clemmons, look at twenty more of 'em out there like him, dribblin' around with a handful of sheep. That's what keeps 'em down. They ain't got the brains to do the figgerin' and hire somebody to do the work."
"You're not far wrong about it, Peck," Rawlins agreed, knowing that it was true.
"That's where the old woman started off wrong with me. I was workin' at my trade before I come out here, and that ain't no secret, but I had my plans laid to branch out for myself as soon as I got a few hundred more saved up. Well, that's blowed; I busted myself on this dang fool marryin' trip out here. But I'd 'a' made it, all right, if I'd 'a' married Edith instead of that old cow. That little girl and me we'd 'a' went back to St. Joe and started us up a nice little tailorin' and cleanin' and dyein' business. She never would 'a' had to stand behind the counter and wait on the trade, neither; I'd 'a' hired help from the jump. But that's all off. I blowed that chance when I married that old cow."
Rawlins had no comment to nake on the collapsed romance, although he wondered at Peck's perverse stupidity in clinging to the delusion that he could have married Edith at pleasure. He still believed himself an irresistible man, although a less attractive figure scarcely could have been imagined.
Peck was dressed in offcast garments, presumably those of his late predecessor, comprising a faded blue shirt, a brown drilling jumper and overalls of the same material, all much worn and in need of soap. The overalls were too short by many inches, which discrepancy was fully made up in width, Peck's cheap cotton socks running down his thin shanks to the tops of his shoes, displaying a section of briar-scratched, dusty skin between. He was far from the dashing, devilish, perfumed, perky mail-order beau who drove up to the ranch with Smith Phogenphole on a well-remembered day.
"What busted your winder, Rawlins?" Peck inquired, coming alive to his outward surroundings, now that his inner void was filled. "Looks like you'd clean up this shack a little," he went on, not waiting for an answer. "What do you want hay throwin' around on the floor that way for? You been feedin' your horse in here?"
"I mentioned to you a while ago that there's a war going on between me and some of Galloway's men. They came here yesterday morning to tear my house down. They kicked in the window and tried to burn it after they'd failed to upset it with ropes. That accounts for the muss. I haven't had time to clean up."
"What the dickens was you doin' to let 'em bust your winder that way?" Peck wanted to know, with an uncharitable challenge that seemed a reflection on Rawlins' manhood. He got up, walking around the room, peering through the broken window.
"I did the best I could, Peck," Rawlins replied, sighing as with a sad regret.
"Did you shoot some of 'em?" Peck inquired eagerly, pointing to the dark splotch in the yard where the dead man had lain waiting the coming of the coroner. "That looks like somebody'd been bleedin'. Did you plug one of 'em, Rawlins?"
"I'm sorry to say it was necessary, Mr. Peck."
"The doodle you did? Was he hurt bad?"
"No," said Rawlins, slowly, reflectively, that note of sadness in his voice; "I don't believe it hurt him much."