Sheep Limit/Chapter 21
That day passed as peacefully as if no question of a homesteader's rights inside the fence ever had been raised. Rawlins was under a heavy strain of expectation, which relaxed in some degree as evening fell and Peck gathered his sheep in a little bowl which seemed to have been ordered by nature to meet this exigency. Peck's bedding-ground was about half a mile beyond the creek, on Rawlins' land, where the new proprietor of the flock spread his canvas over a bush and crawled under it to his repose after smoking an after-supper pipe with Rawlins.
Peck's attitude toward sheep had undergone a radical transformation, such as is common to men when they pass from a situation of journeyman to master, wage-earner to capitalist. It has been noted often how completely the vision warps around to fit the new position. Peck was a capitalist now, at least in his own belief. How far Mrs. Peck would confirm him in that blissful importance Rawlins held little doubt. Peck was in for a sudden and rude disillusionment at no very distant hour, he believed.
As it was, Peck had all the zeal of a proprietor. He handled the sheep as if he had a personal interest in the welfare of the weakest of them, showing a surprising craftiness for his short apprenticeship on the range. He was planning to go to Lost Cabin the next day and see about raising a loan on the flock. Off there to himself inside Galloway's fence, Peck felt that he had put an insurmountable barrier between himself and his wife.
Rawlins did not encourage this proprietary view, nor the flight into finance which Peck proposed to try. He was greatly disturbed by Peck's invasion of his valley with the sheep, and troubled over the prospect of being blamed by Mrs. Peck for harboring her runaway husband, even if she did not charge him with connivance in the entire plot. It would be difficult to convince the lady, with her present low estimate of Peck's initiative and resourcefulness, that he had brought the flock inside Galloway's fence alone.
The wise thing to do, Rawlins concluded after he had seen Peck stowed away under his bush for the night, was to go to the ranch and inform Mrs. Peck of her husband's adventure. While this course might appear treasonable to Peck, for whom Rawlins was beginning to feel a little sympathy and kindness, it was only just to himself.
Aside from putting himself in the way of being blamed by Mrs. Peck, the presence of the sheep at his place would add to his own complications. Galloway would come down on him hard for this apparent publication to all sheepland that the limit was off for sheep in Dry Wood. Rawlins' secret hope was that Mrs. Peck would move in the matter at once and take the sheep home.
Rawlins felt that it was safe to leave things unguarded for a while at night. After Galloway's men had been shown his determination to hold his own there, they would not be likely to risk an assault by night, in which all the advantage would be his. Hewitt had not been along with them; it was likely they were waiting for him to come, or at least instructions from him, before making another move.
So concluding, he saddled Graball and rode to the ranch, hoping, as he went along, to find Tippie there. Tippie could return with him; they could take an early start and have the sheep outside the fence by sunrise.
Edith was at the gate, a saddled horse standing by. The house was dark and silent. As Rawlins rode up and dismounted, Edith flung the gate open eagerly, greeting him in the exuberance of relief.
"I was about to start over there and see if I could find out anything," she said. "I didn't get to go up to the hill to-day. I was worried about you, Ned."
"It's been as quiet as Sunday up there to-day, Edith. I'm beginning to think they're going to let me alone."
The little paring of moon was very bright, cheering the whole sector of the sky where it seemed to hang not much more than the height of a man above the hills. Rawlins could see the anxiety of her face as she shook her head slowly in denial.
"You know they're not going to," she said. Then quickly, as if her words had been waiting: "Give it up, Ned, give it up! It isn't worth another fight, it isn't worth what you've gone through already. Let them have it—give it up!"
"No, I'm not going to give it up," he replied with argumentative briskness. "I did think of doing it, as you know to my disgrace and"
"No, no!" she protested, remembering her own scorn in the moments of his remorseful weakness.
"But I've got over all that. After the sheriff had been there, after my talk with him and those sheepmen, I felt all right. I was shaken at first—nearly shaken loose from my grip. There's more at stake for me there than my homestead now, Edith: there's every principle of justice and manhood. I'd be a coward to quit it now."
"I urged you on," she said repentantly. "I was always blowin' about a man that would come along some day with nerve enough to open that country. I was proud of you when you went in, but I didn't think you'd ever have to kill anybody, I didn't think they'd crowd you that far. Now they'll kill you to even it up. They're not the kind to let it drop now."
"I'm not worrying about that so much, Edith, as I am about my hay," he said, trying to lighten it with alaugh. "I've got fifty tons or more to cut yet. I've been hoping all day they'd drop it, so I could take the team in again and get a mower. I could make some money out of that hay next winter."
"I was going over to see you," she said, with a manner of dull insistence, as if her long anxiety had stunned her.
"It's all right, and it's going to keep on being all right," he assured her. He took her hand, chafing it, consoling it by his caress, as one comforts a child for a hurt.
There never had been any eye-making between these two, no sentimental passages, no courting, in the sense that that homely word is generally understood. Rawlins did not know just what his feeling toward Edith was. At the best a sort of hopeful, perhaps a bit wistful, friendship, very like his feeling towards that country where he had taken up his claim. There was something big to be done before he could call it his own.
Youth has its way of adjusting these things without many words. It is only when the eye begins to grow flat, the waistline to expand, that the lover has need of sonnets. Youth does not require pretty sayings, lengthy presentations of its case in sentimental speech. It arrives at the contest fully equipped.
In that way the case stood without words between Rawlins and Edith Stone. There was something big to be accomplished before he could think of her in nearer terms. Maybe with Edith it was different. The woman leaps on to her conclusion without so much as barking her shins on the roughest obstacles which lie between the now of reality and the then of her desire.
Only when Peck talked of Edith in that loosetongued, regretful way, Rawlins felt his interest in her to be something more than remotely friendly. Perhaps that was only the resentment of youth for the man's boorish familiarity.
"It's going to be all right," Rawlins repeated, rubbing it in her hand like a liniment; "everything's going to be all right. Has your aunt gone to bed?"
"No, she's not here. We've had a sensation of our own here to-day, Ned. What do you think? Peck's run away again, and not only run away, but taken a band of eleven or twelve hundred sheep along with him. Aunt Lila's out on the range hunting them now—especially the sheep. I was with her all day, but we didn't find a trace of them."
"That's what I've come over about," Rawlins said, the shake of a laugh in his words.
"Have you seen him?"
"I left him not an hour ago. He's over there with me."
"Peck?"
"Sure enough. Peck, sheep, dog, and all."
"Peck, of all men! Taking a band of sheep into that country—Peck!"
"To Peck, and nobody else, the honor belongs. Well, the sheep must be given some credit for initiating the movement, I must admit. Peck says they ran away from him, or with him, and came to the hole in the wire, when he shot 'em through and headed for my place. He'd spotted it from the hills."
"Peck! And he's in there?"
"He seems to be easy, and very much at home. He says he'd rather fight men every day than face his wife once in a while. He's got a gun a yard long hanging on him."
"Peck?"
"The surest thing you know. He says he can hit things with it sometimes, and I believe him so well I'd want to be back of something thick when he turns it loose."
"It knocks me cold!" said Edith, backing up against the fence for support. Then that irrepressible spirit of laughter laid hold of her. She jerked off her hat, slapped her thigh with it, doubled over and whooped.
"It's no laughing matter, young lady," he said, with pretence of great severity. "If you had him on your hands"
"That's what Aunt Lila says."
"If you had him on your hands with twelve hundred sheep, more or less, you wouldn't laugh. I've got troubles enough of my own without your dear old Uncle Dowell. I don't want him and his sheep around there."
"And he won't leave. The poor man wants to stay there where he can fight his way in peace, and not have to study divorce books and have his moustache pulled."
Edith struck her well-known high key of wild, abandoned laughter with that thought, rocking back and forth, hitting the fence as she swayed one way, threatening to pitch into Rawlins' arms when she swayed the other. He stood grinning, ready to catch her if she should collapse at last, worn out by the excess of merriment due to Peck's unprecedented adventure. But Edith did not pitch forward into his ready arms. She seemed as well-rooted to that spot as a young aspen, and as supple.
"You unfeeling little rascal?" said Rawlins, hand on her shoulder in affectionate chastisement. He went a little farther in the daring of his chiding; he embraced her quivering shoulders, and drew her close, and pressed her as if to compress the laughter out of her and set her up in a straight and reasonable mood.
Edith hunched her shoulders and ducked her head, face averted, the laughter shut off as completely as if his reproof were serious. This defensive shrinking was as effective with Rawlins as a kick. He didn't press his advantage, taking for granted the show of reluctance that a more sophisticated man would have known for an invitational bluff. He let her go, feeling scared and confused, afraid he had gone too far.
They were both sobered. Edith found an urgent business in putting back her hair, hat under her elbow; Rawlins making pretence, in a foolish subterfuge, that he must get hold of Graball's bridle reins and hook them over his arm.
"Is Elmer out hunting Peck, too?" he asked, his voice a little shaky in the uncertainty of his standing.
His trepidation was unwarrantable; Edith was as placid as the moon. She gave her hair a twist and a stab, put her hat on precisely, laughing at his inquiry.
"Can you imagine Elmer trailing around after Peck? He's in the mountains."
"I hoped I might get him to go back with me and start that band of sheep out of there at daylight."
"What if Uncle Dowell pulled his gun and said 'No'?"
"He might do it, too. He's got his plans made away ahead for that bunch of sheep. Do you know what he calls them? Stews."
"Aunt Lila told me. She takes it like a reflection on her own dignity. I'm afraid that St. Joe brand of humor failed to make a great big hit with her."
"The question is, will she go after him?"
"I wonder. She's always had a mortal terror of that fence. That's why I had to stop cuttin' it. She used to sweat agony every time I went after the mail."
"My worry is that she'll implicate me in Peck's break for liberty, especially as I'm harboring him. But I was as much surprised to see him as she'll be to hear he's there."
"I don't think she'll blame you, Ned. But it certainly will jolt her when she finds out where he's gone."
"She said she'd glory in a man of hers standing up to them inside that fence with a gun. Do you remember, Edith?"
"Yes, I know she said it, but she wasn't figurin' on him havin' ten or twelve hundred of her sheep along. A man's one thing in Aunt Lila's life, and sheep are something else."
"Peck isn't planning to come out of there in a hurry, at least not back to this range. I don't know what I'm going to do about it, unless I shove him out on his own resources entirely."
"What kind of plans is he making for the sheep, Ned?"
"I'm afraid they're all disloyal to the hand that married him and took his pencil-striped pants away from him. He's says he's going to put a mortgage on them, for one thing, to raise money for hiring somebody to do the work while he does the thinking. I'm afraid Mr. Peck hinted darkly that he intended to drive them out and ship them to Kansas City as soon as the lambs were a little heavier, but I think we'd just as well keep that between us. It wouldn't contribute to harmony between Mr. and Mrs. Peck if she recaptures him, which I feel she's bound to do."
"You wouldn't think that darned old worm had sense enough to plan it all out that way, like a regular man, would you?" Edith said. "I'm beginning to think there's hope for Uncle Dowey after all."
"He's developing sheepmanly traits right along. I was surprised to see it, but it's true. Maybe the gun's got something to do with it."
"Of course she'll get him if he ever breaks out of there, and he'll have to come out when you leave, Ned."
"When I leave? If he stays till I leave he'll be a mighty old man."
There was not very much faith indicated in Edith's voice when she spoke of him leaving. Even in her first almost passionate request that he give it up, Rawlins could read an undertone of reservation, he believed, as if she kept the secret hope that he would refuse while the plea was on her tongue.
He believed now he understood Edith's position in the business. Her conscience was pleading, like an attorney appointed by the court to defend a malefactor for whose case he had not the slightest sympathy. She felt a responsibility for his adventure against such odds, and her conscience argued for acquittal while her honest desire was that he stick to it and show the sheep world, and especially her, that he was indeed a man.
That was his intention, With that friendly sheriff only a few miles away, and those eager sheepmen around Lost Cabin waiting the hour to come in, Rawlins no longer felt himself unsupported and alone. Those sheepmen were ready to jump the day they felt it a little less than half-way safe; Rawlins had seen that sticking out of them like pumpkins in a sack when they sat as jurors in the coroner's inquest. A little while, if he could hold on, and there would be neighbors enough to carry everything inside the fence.
"I wish I was a man," Edith sighed.
"I'm glad wishing can't make you one," Rawlins told her, so seriously it amounted to a rebuke for her profane desire.
"Well, I do," she insisted stubbornly. "But maybe I can help you anyway."
Whatever opportunity this offered for saying something gallant, Rawlins allowed to pass untouched, for sincerity has a slow tongue.
"Do you expect Mrs. Peck home to-night?" he asked, after the chance for saying something that he knew should have been said, and was expected to be said, had fallen as flat as a cake prematurely taken from the oven.
"She was headin' for Clemmons' range when I left her. If she don't hear anything of her sheep down there—and of course she'll not—I expect she'll turn back home. It may be morning before she gets here."
They discussed the probability of Mrs. Peck's invasion of the forbidden territory, Edith being of the opinon that the chances were all in Peck's favor. It was impossible for her to see anything tragic shaping up in the situation for Peck, the comedy outweighing everything else.
The moon was touching the hills when Rawlins left her, lighter of heart and stronger of hope than when he came. Danger was drawing away from him, he believed; peace was about to descend on his valley, where the price it had cost him already was marked by the brown splotch in the white earth before his door.