Sheep Limit/Chapter 3
Rawlins was abroad again early next morning, traveling northward along the senatorial fence, his well-laid plan for beginning the foundation of his fortune thrown into chaos by this wire barrier shutting him from the land of his fervent calculations. Nothing in the corner of a sack would avail against that arbitrary boundary stretched across the frontier of the sheeplands, if the story told by shaggy old Al Clemmons was true.
Clemmons had come with him as far as the fence, which was not more than a mile from the old man's spring, pointing out to him from a hilltop the long line of posts diminishing down to dots in the level distance southward. To the north one could not follow the line so far, the land lying rough and unpromising in that direction.
The old sheepman said the best of the enclosed territory was in the northerly direction, in spite of the sterile and forbidding character it presented opposite his range. A few miles along, a considerable valley began, he said. A creek ran through this, making the paradise of pasturage and water for which the sheepmen of Dry Wood longed.
In that direction also, Clemmons informed the adventurer into Dry Wood, there were several important flockmasters. He would find their ranches scattered, along a creek, the waters of which they had appropriated to their own selfish uses by homesteading, buying or stealing, every mile of land fronting upon the stream. Clemmons was an uncharitable man when considering the prosperity of other men in relation to his own.
This bitter intolerance was so evident in all the old man's discussion of other people's affairs, except those no better off than himself, that Rawlins parted from him with a slight renewal of his overwhelmed hopes. Perhaps the dusty old fellow was incapable of granting that a prosperous man could be an honest one, a prejudice common to the self-defeated and the malcontents wherever they are found. Investigation might reveal conditions in Dry Wood far different from what the old flockmaster represented them. In addition, there might be some selfish design behind all this talk of oppression and fencing of public land.
Rawlins continued northward, following the fence, his object being further exploration and investigation. One of the big sheepmen would be a more reliable source of information than Clemmons, whose yearly trip down to Jasper, with perhaps a visit to Lost Cabin every six months to replenish his supplies, gave him all the contact he had with the affairs of men. There was not much in a life of that kind, Rawlins reflected, isolated in dusty servitude to sheep. Instead of being a flockmaster, as he proudly believed himself, Clemmons was mastered by his flock. That was not the sort of sheepman Rawlins designed to be.
As Lost Cabin had been his primary objective, he still considered continuing on to that place. It would be the community center of those widely separated ranches, the place where information might be secured relative to sheep and land. Not that anything he might learn there would alter the fact of Senator Galloway's fence. That was there, right beside him. It gave him a jolt, Rawlins admitted, to find it dividing him from that white spot on the map by which he had plotted his first scheme. But it was there, and the man who put it there had the power to keep it there, against the demands of thirsty flockmasters and home-seekers from afar.
Lost Cabin lay on the western boundary of this fenced domain, Clemmons had said, the way to the town from his location being almost fifty miles around. The town, having been there first, had been granted an outlet by the imperious land-eater, the flockmaster said. But the senator had run his barbed wire on three sides of it, leaving it sitting in an indenture on his western frontier.
Fine business, thought Rawlins, viewing the fence with growing indignation, to allow one man to grab and hold such a big fistful of the public domain.
The hour was early in the morning, the sun not more than a span from the hilltops, for Clemmons had roused his guest at dawn to share his coffee and bacon. A sheep-herder, the old man explained, must get his flock out while the dew was on the herbage. They would not leave the bedding-ground without the herder; they had been bred to a dependence upon man that seemed to deepen with each succeeding generation. Much more the old flockmaster had told the adventurer into Dry Wood, so much more, in fact, that Rawlins was beginning to think he was no fit guardian of sheep, knowing as little about their habits, and the rigors and peculiarities of that country, as he did.
Take a job with some big sheepman, Clemmons had advised. Stick to it two or three years, learning all he could in that time, before venturing his capital in a flock of his own. A man must go through two or three winters, and the exacting period of lambing, up night and day for days on end caring for the ewes and tender lambs, with the snow still on the ground and the bitter winds of early spring blowing, before he would be qualified to set up on his own responsibility.
Even if he had unlimited capital he stood to lose a great deal of it unless he knew the business from the start to the finish. Of course, a man could hire brains, the old man said, but it was a whole lot better to get a handful into one's own head that could be depended on in a pinch.
Good advice, disinterested advice, Rawlins knew. There was only one side to old Al Clemmons; that was as plain as the whiskers on his face. If he didn't like a man he could no more dissemble than a sheep could shear itself. It would be the wise thing, without a doubt, to hit some big sheepman for a job. A greenhorn was put out with an experienced herder, Clemmons had told him, until he learned the ways of sheep in a measure, and got acquainted with the dogs. The prospect took a good deal of the romance out of the plan of becoming a flockmaster, but it was sensible and sound.
For a simple, pastoral pursuit, as old as civilization, there seemed to be a great deal to learn about this business of growing sheep. In a fenced pasture, with bluegrass and clover, water and shade and a shed against the winter storms, it was simple enough; here on the wild grey range, so vast that a man caught his breath and flinched from it, as from his first step into the sea, it was a different matter.
Why, Rawlins said, with frank astonishment over his own ignorance, he never knew before that morning that lambs' tails must be cut off—Clemmons said some sheepmen bit them off as they went about after the yeaning ewes—to keep them from matting up with burrs and sand and dragging upon the animals, a fatiguing, useless weight.
Perhaps it was just as well that he had run against that fence, stretching there from horizon to horizon between him and the unimproved white waste on the map. It might prove the first check in the precipitate dash of ignorance, saving him an inglorious fall in the end. Senator Galloway could not hold that land always; public pressure would remove his fence in time, probably soon enough for Rawlins' purpose. Meanwhile, nobody else could take up the land. When the lessons of sheep had been learned, maybe the fence would be down. Then a homestead on some creek, and a band of his own to range, with alfalfa growing to carry the sheep over winter hardships when the range was under snow or sleet.
The vision broadened out of the obscurity of first disappointment as Rawlins followed the fence up hill and down, holding his way toward the north.
One thing about it was certain: the pressure of haste was gone out of the adventure. The fence across the frontier of his great white spot had put a new aspect on the entire proceeding for Rawlins. Time was no longer the essence of that business.
He proceeded on his way leisurely, his intention of becoming a flockmaster in no way altered, although the means to that end had undergone a sharp revision overnight. His dollar watch told him it was eight o'clock, near enough to the correct time for all pur-: poses in a country where hours and miles were alike insignificant in the broad pattern of men's lives, when he brought up on a hilltop to project his inquiring gaze over grey slope and green vale for the ranches the sheepman had told him would be found in that direction.
Nothing in the shape of man's habitation was in sight. Except for the fence, the country appeared as empty as on the day it was finished and left there for the solemn sage to cover with its charity, the spiked soapweed to rear its forbidding spears among. Rawlins wondered if the fence-riders would object if he cut across the senator's ranch to strike Lost Cabin, which place Clemmons had told him could be seen from a high hill a little way north of his range.
Concluding that no grounds for opposing a peaceful trespass could be advanced by the guards, chancing that he might run across any of them, Rawlins decided to risk the encounter when he came to the hill from which he could lay his course.
Rawlins got his first understanding of what a sheepman meant by a "little ways" that morning. Clemmons had said it was only a "little ways" to the prominent hill from which the hamlet of Lost Cabin could be seen across the twelve or fifteen miles of Galloway's enclosure, which was narrow in that place owing to the indenture made in its opposite border by the town. Rawlins was certain he had traveled no less than fifteen miles when he hauled himself up to the hilltop about noon. He knew it was the hill Clemmons had meant, for the little white houses of Lost Cabin were as plain as dice on a table, almost due west of him.
If that was only a little way, spare him the long ways, Rawlins thought. From that he fell to speculating, sitting on top of the hill where the grass was green and promising, on the postulation that these unfilled reaches of the north-west had something in their very vastness that contributed to men's success there.
Men grew into the way of thinking in large terms in that country. Five hundred sheep were only a few, three thousand but a band. When a man spoke of a flock, he meant thirty thousand, fifty thousand. Thinking in big terms was followed by planning and doing in big terms. The country was responsible for it, more than the men themselves. That would account for some of the dumb-looking flockmasters he had met at the stockyards. The country had laid hold of them, mediocre seed dropped in its fecund soil, and turned out prodigious growths which might have been only stunted starvelings in another clime.
Nature had cleared the air for human enlargement there; man's field of vision was almost painfully enlarged. His hitherto valued possessions, accomplishments, ambitions, became dwarfed in the immensity that mocked them. He was so suddenly revealed to himself in his insignificance that he was ashamed of the small things of the past, and began moving his feet at once to keep pace with the sudden enlargement of his horizon. Nature simply took hold of him and stretched a pigmy into a giant.
It was easier to understand Senator Galloway's fence in the light of this revelation. The man had grown so big through his mere association that he had enlarged to fit his environment. Hundreds of square miles under one unbroken fence did not seem extraordinary to him; the fact that it was not his land, nothing to trouble his conscience. A man naturally hardened as he broadened and grew immense.
That might explain the fencing-in of the public lands, but it did not justify it in any degree. In the vast territory held without warrant of leasehold or contract of any kind, hundreds of homeless families might find lodgment from their wandering quest. Rawlins pictured them as Clemmons had described them, driving on in eager hope, expecting to find this land open to homestead entry, only to bring up against that insolent fence like tumble weeds before the wind. Tumble weeds, uprooted by the winds of adversity from the soil in which they had grown, destined never to take root again.
So Rawlins rested there in the warm sun of noonday, his thoughts passing from one phase of speculation to another, imagination quickened by the strangeness of all that spread around him, and out of the distance one came riding across the fenced lands from the direction of Lost Cabin, horse and rider appearing no bigger than a fly.
There was new interest in this movement in the landscape. Imagination, conjecture, leaped across the two or three miles—perhaps more—that lay between, to fix upon the rider, now seen, now lost, as he came on over hill and swale.
The rider seemed to be holding a direct course for the hill on which Rawlins sat. If he had been one of Galloway's fence-riders coming to warn the stranger away from that forbidden territory he could not have ridden a straighter line. Coming right for him, Rawlins thought, feeling a little queer, just as if his telescopic eye had revealed the stranger to him as he rode the fence miles away on the other border.
Rawlins felt the absurdity of such a thought, even while the premonitory crinkling of something like the advance breath of trouble ran through him. He had a feeling of undue prominence on that hill. He felt it was time to be getting on his way.
Down through a tangle of unfamiliar shrubs, which grew ranker on the north side of the hills than the south, Rawlins hastened toward the fence, curious to get a closer sight of the rider. Clemmons had given the fence-guards a hard name. It would be interesting to see whether a man so employed in the service of oppression would carry the arrogance of his delegated authority in his face.
Green greasewood stood high among the grey sage at the foot of the hill, so rank and thick the fence was hidden. Rawlins pushed along through it, breaking out suddenly into a promising little glade, which the view from the height had indicated, rather than revealed. Here he came across the first proof that Galloway's fence was not accepted passively by all whom it barred.
Somebody had cut the fence. The ground was marked here by a horse's tracks, seeming to indicate to Rawlins' eye, not unpracticed in such things, that the rider had leaned from the saddle to snip the wires. The trespasser had ridden into the forbidden lands with a bound, deep hoof-prints showing where the animal had leaped under the spur. Now he was returning after his defiant excursion, the hill his landmark, heading for the cut in the fence like a bee to its tree.
Rawlins stood grinning beside the gap in the wires, taking a great satisfaction in the sight, feeling friendly and partisan toward the daring fellow who had made the breach to save himself a ride of thirty-five or forty miles. He would wait there until the rider arrived, pounding headlong for the hole in the fence, and give him greeting, with a word of endorsement, as he passed.
At that moment the interest of the situation began to increase. Somebody else was coming along inside the fence, descending the flank of the hill which Rawlins had come down. Rawlins could not see this rider, the bushy growth being high and thick along there, but he could hear the horse picking its way carefully down the steep slope, the rustle of its passing through the bushes, the noise of dislodged, stones. Easy enough to piece out the shaping comedy, or tragedy, or what it might prove to be. A fence-rider had discovered the cut, and seen the trespasser heading back for it.
Rawlins was keen to hear what might pass between the two, but doubted the wisdom of being present in the character of innocent bystander, upon whom the bitterest blow of public altercations too often lands. He withdrew rapidly and discreetly behind a tall clump of bushes about a rod from the opening, palpitant in his suspense and expectation, just as the fence-rider appeared.