Sheep Limit/Chapter 5
Lila Duke, widow of a good sheepman, was a large red lady with a double chin. Her sleek black hair was rolled into a little wisp with a protruding end at the nape of her neck; her sharp black eyes were shadowed by a hedge of heavy black eyebrows which came together end-on at the bridge of her nose. She appeared to be inflamed to the sweating point, red and moist as if she fed mainly on peppers and fat mutton stew. But she was a surprisingly nimble woman on her feet, with a hearty voice that must have carried from hill to hill like a hunting horn, and a ready laugh lying always in the curl of her tongue.
Mrs. Duke was Edith Stone's maternal aunt. She had been made a widow by the little creek that ran before the ranch-house door. Duke had attempted wading it during a spring freshet; the current had flattened him against a boulder and held him until he drowned. His picture was on the wall of the sitting-room, showing him to have been a neutral sort of force, a curve in his face as if something had been put down on him when he was very young. Not unlike a ram in expression, no collar to his large-breasted white shirt. Rawlins was thankful, looking at the portrait in air-brush and crayon, that Edith Stone had not come from Duke's side of the fence. For the young lady's sake, of course.
They did not explain to Rawlins the status of the concern, whether they were partners in the business, or whether Edith was merely a ward of her relative, making her home there pending the coming of better fortune. Mrs. Duke was a sheep-wise woman, shrewd, inquisitive, quick to find out about another's affairs while saying nothing at all of her own that an assessor or tax collector could profit by.
It did not require long for her to come to the bottom of Rawlins' aims and intentions, for he had nothing to reserve or hide.
"Yes, I can tell just about how you felt when you run up against that fence," she said with friendly sympathy. "I guess it was about the same as if somebody you trusted and depended on had gone back on you at the last minute, leavin' you holdin' the sack."
"Just about like that," Rawlins admitted. "I couldn't conceive, and I can't yet, how one man could sprawl out over a chunk of country as big as that, with a lot of high-minded free American citizens around the edges afraid to lay a hand on his unlawful fence."
"You've seen how he does it, you know now. We'd 'a' been out a good horse and saddle if you hadn't happened to be at that gap in the fence this morning. We might 'a' lawed 'em till we couldn't stand up without ever gittin' hide or hair of that horse back. Senator Galloway owns the law up in this part of the country, except a few offices over at Lost Cabin. They're sore on him there because he strung his fence around the town and cut off its future, they say. It never had any more future than a graveyard. The little opposition to Galloway in that corner don't cut much ice when he can name all the other people that's to be elected or appointed, from federal judge down. It's a wonder they tell people down at the land office at Jasper there's any land open to entry in this part of the country at all."
Edith contributed little to the conversation during the meal, or afterwards as they conducted the stranger around the ranch, Mrs. Duke taking great pride, entirely justified, Rawlins thought, in the complete appointments of the place. Rawlins attributed the young woman's silence to the reaction from her unpleasant adventure, knowing that sensitive people suffer more in retrospection than in the moment of peril. She went along opening gates in a perfunctory, disinterested sort of way.
Edith had changed her garb for one more domestic and graceful, adding greatly to her native attractions, which Rawlins found refreshing as a flower in an unexpected place. She had taken the plaits out of her hair, which was wavy either from the crinkles of them or from a natural ripple, very pleasing to see, let it be due to nature or art. It was a shade darker than Rawlins had thought, with gleams and shadows in it as she moved, such as he used to watch in the ripening wheatfields from the window of his newspaper office out in the golden belt of Kansas.
"This is a hospital band," Mrs. Duke explained, stopping at a corral that contained two or three hundred sheep.
"Sick ones, eh?" said Rawlins, thinking how much taller Edith appeared in that nice blue dress with its edging-around of red. A woman's clothes belonged to a woman, and a man's to a man.
"Under suspicion and observation, most of them," Mrs. Duke said. "The State veterinary he's watchin' us sheepmen like a hawk. Mighty good thing, too. He's afraid of scabies this spring. We're dippin', finished with 'em all as fast as we sheared, holdin' these till some of the cripples picks up a little. Over there's where we dip 'em. Ever see it done?"
"Millions of 'em," Rawlins replied recklessly, not meaning to deceive by making his figures so high, but carried off by a careless exhilaration that appeared to have taken hold of him.
"Thousands, I should say, I guess," he amended under Mrs. Duke's suddenly stern eyes. "I worked in the Kansas City stockyards, you know. Feeders have to be dipped before they ship 'em out—same kind of arrangement as you've got there, a chute full of dip that swims them, a man on the platform above to duck their heads under with a forked stick as they pass. Sure. Just the same."
"Well, I'm glad there's something you know about sheep," Mrs. Duke said drily, her inflection implying that he knew nothing at all. "If you ain't got anything better to do to-morrow you can help me dip that band. I want to get the hearty ones out on the range."
"I'll be glad to do it," Rawlins agreed so readily that Mrs. Duke's momentary displeasure was dispersed out of her broad red face.
"There's not enough dip in that trough for the job," she calculated. "It's been 'vaporatin' away in the sun."
"I'll mix up some if you've got the ingredients," he offered, with the modest way of a man who knew his job.
"You can mix dip, can you?" She eyed him shrewdly, as if to penetrate his bluff. "Where did you learn at?"
"I put in four years at the best agricultural college in the world," he replied, not so much boastfully as with confident pride.
"Oh, you're one of them chemical farmers," apparently fully and satisfactorily enlightened now. "Well, I guess that helps, but I don't know how much. We used to have an old feller with us when Mr. Duke was alive, back on the farm in Iowa. He never had done a day's work of farmin' in his life before we took him in, but you couldn't mention anything to him he couldn't do. 'Sure I can,' he used to say, cheerful and bright; 'sure I can do it. I'm an old soldier.' I'm afraid you chemical farmers are a good deal like that old feller."
"The general public opinion agrees with you," Rawlins admitted, neither disposed to argue down her prejudices nor defend his qualifications.
"Runnin' a band of sheep on the range is the only way anybody can learn the business in this country, no difference what they teach in college. You seem to have sense enough to 'a' got that through your head already."
"Thanks," said Rawlins, turning to her with his honest, ready grin. "It's something to know even a little bit of sense shows through."
"Them onery cowboys and cowmen throw the slur at us sheepmen that we ain't got the courage to come out and fight, just like there was only one kind of courage in this world, the kind that makes a man brawl and booze and yelp around a-straddle of a horse where gittin' away's easy. They hole up in the winter time, never showin' their noses outside the door when a blizzard hits the range, leavin' their stock to shift the best they can.
"When the blow's over they go out and see how many head they've lost, instead of headin' 'em around to some sheltered place the way a sheepman does. Hot or cold, snow or dry, you'll find a sheepman with his flock, takin' the weather the same as they take it, workin' 'em to some shelter in a storm if there's any to be reached."
"Yes, I've had other sheepmen tell me the same thing, Mrs. Duke."
"They say up here a handful of corn a day will carry a sheep through a blizzard and save its life. I've never had to try it, but I've got the corn, right there in that barn. I'd wade in snow up to my neck, forty below, to a band of blizzard-bound sheep. Show me a cowman that'd do as much for his starvin' herd. Oh, here and there you'll find one that'll drive out with a little jag of hay and pitch it off, tryin' to save enough cows to breed him another start, but there ain't many of 'em.
"If you'd 'a' been here two years ago you'd 'a' got a sight of what the cowmen's courage and common sense and humanity amounts to. Over on the range west of Galloway's there was places along the cricks where you could 'a' walked on dead cattle and never put your foot on the ground for a mile at a stretch."
"I remember the big winter kill of that year," Rawlins said.
"It wasn't the winter killed them cattle as much as it was the improvidence and shiftlessness of the cowmen. You never heard of no big winter kill of sheep. We lose a lot of lambs sometimes, when a late storm catches the little things before they're hardly dry, but that ain't because the sheepmen and herders, and every mother's son and daughter of their fam'lies, ain't out in the weather workin' night and day to save the lambs. Maybe we ain't as brash as some onery yelpin' people about pullin' out a gun and shootin' some poor feller, but that's because we think more of other folkses' rights, and law and humanity."
"Sheep raisin' always has been the business of peaceable men," Rawlins remarked. "They never have been fighters, as far as sacred or profane history tells us. Abraham was a notable example of a sheepman, but he hasn't got much of a record with a gun."
"These cowmen say it takes the fight out of a man to live around with sheep, the peaceablest creatures in the world, I guess, and the most dependent on the care of humans. It'd do me good to see some sheepman take the conceit out of them fellers. I'd nearly give forty dollars to see some sheepman step out of the end of his wagon some night when them cowboys 're raidin' his band and knock a few of 'em stiff with a gun. It sure is the dose they need—not that they bother us here any more. But I've seen the time right here in Dry Wood when they raided beddin'-grounds and burnt wagons and killed sheepmen and herders, right along. That's what'd happen to us now if we was to try to run our sheep on that fenced-up range."
"I wonder if it would?" Rawlins speculated, his thoughts with his eyes, it seemed, where they sought the low hilltops to the west, beyond which the forbidden country could not be espied.
"If I was a man, with all to make and little to risk, I'd go in there and homestead," Mrs. Duke declared. "Well, I may do it anyhow one of these days—I've never used my homestead right, Uncle Sam owes me a hundred and sixty acres of farmin' land, or a half-section of grazin', I think that's all called grazin' in there, but some of it's as good farmin' land as ever laid out of doors. I'd locate on the crick, four or five miles west of the fence, if I was goin' in. There's some mighty purty land in there, level and rich, only needin' water to grow any kind of grain but corn. Corn don't do no good up here; the seasons 're too short."
"Clemmons was telling me about that valley last night. He says it's easy to irrigate, plenty of water available. It looks to me as if a few determined homesteaders could go in there and hold their own against Galloway."
"I ain't hopeful of ever seein' it done," she sighed, shaking her head. "You'd better change your clothes before you mix that dip, it's a mussy job, and smelly stuff to splash on a person. If them's the worst you've got I guess I can lend you a pair of overhauls. Ain't that a purty buck? He's a registered Rambouillet. I imported him last fall; he cost me seven hundred dollars put down at Jasper."
Edith had been standing off a little way beside the corral gate while they talked, as if she had no interest at all in the sheep, sick or well. She was pensive and preoccupied; Rawlins wondered what her thoughts might be. Perhaps she was tired of that place; longing to be away among people and scenes she had known, her heart wandering off up the wagon trail that came down the other side of the creek, upon which her eyes were fixed.
Three horses were sunning themselves dreamily in a corral; a few hens wallowed like indolent odalisques in the warm grey dust. These, with the sheep, were the only creatures about the place. In the sheeplands fashion, such milk as was used on that ranch came out of a tin, along with many other necessities and delicacies of the table.
Whether she owned a thousand or ten thousand sheep, Mrs. Duke did not say. She was silent likewise on the number of men she employed, and whether she gained or lost in the business. Yes, she said, in reply to Rawlins' question, she guessed a man could do right well if he had a ranch he could irrigate and grow alfalfa to sell to the sheepmen around there. It took a farmer to do that, not a sheepman. Sheepmen were against farming. It cut up the range.
Fine place, fine location, fine breed of sheep, said Rawlins, looking around approvingly. How long had she been there? Longer than she cared to tell, Mrs. Duke replied, considering that it might give away her age. She laughed it off, turning the talk to something else. Rawlins wondered if she counted her money with one eye shut to keep the other from seeing how much she had, her sheepman-caution seemed so preposterously extreme.
"So you come out here to this country with it all planned out to be a sheepman?" Mrs. Duke said, as they rejoined Edith and walked slowly toward the house. "It's a shame that fence of Galloway's was in your way, but maybe it saved you time and money, after all."
"That's what I concluded after talking with Clemmons," Rawlins admitted.
"It'll not always be there in people's way," Edith said, with positiveness that seemed portentous. "A man will come along here one of these days big enough to make Galloway move his fence—or he'll move it for him."
"Somebody you've been writin' to?" Mrs. Duke suggested, letting Rawlins into the joke by a sly, slow wink.
Edith made no answer to this banter, although she flushed and turned her head as if resenting the introduction of a stranger into her private affairs. Mrs. Duke was not sensitive in the matter at all, nor conscious of any reservation of delicacy.
"That's what took her to the post office this morning, riskin' her neck cuttin' that fence," she said.
"Oh, Aunt Lila! You know we were out of coffee."
"She's got a mail-order beau, away back in Saint Joe, Missouri. She never set eyes on him in her life," Mrs. Duke continued in unfeeling revelation of the family secret, as much to Rawlins' distaste as to the girl's.
"Spare him the details, Aunt Lila," Edith pleaded, attempting a lightness which it was plain she did not feel.
"He's a tailor, he's got a moustache a foot long—she's got his picture propped up on her dresser."
"Oh, Aunt Lila!"
"Ain't it so? Sure it's so. Never saw him in her life, met him in an advertisement. Mail-order beau, I call him."
Mrs. Duke laughed, either unconscious or careless of the embarrassment her raillery caused the young woman. Rawlins glanced at Edith, trying to express sympathy, and his apology for the unavoidable part he had taken in her discomfiture. She grinned, but it was a costly effort, her face looking worried, even anxious, he thought, out of all proportion to the gravity of the case.
Mrs. Duke must keep her eye on the mixing and dilution of the sheep dip, not entirely convinced of the chemical farmer's ability to do all he claimed. When she discovered him fully experienced in the niceties of the compound she grew quite friendly and confidential, for a sheepman, as she invariably called herself, almost ready, it appeared, to accept him into the fraternity.
When Rawlins applied the sheep-shears, with expedition and success, to the coats of several ewes which had, by reason of their invalid condition at shearing-time, escaped the general denudation, she began to watch him out of the corner of her eye, and to question him shrewdly, sometimes cryptically. She suspected he was more than he represented himself to be, not willing to accept his explanation that shearing was part of the curriculum in the college which gave him his degree.
The mistress of the flock was so pleased with her visitor's dexterity as he worked over a forlorn and chastened-looking ewe up-ended between his knees, that she called Edith from the house to witness this almost unbelievable thing. Edith appeared at her loud whoop, suddenly, with a look of consternation.
"Look at him—look at that chemical farmer shearin' a sheep!"
Mrs. Duke offered the spectacle proudly, as if all credit for-this small accomplishment in animal husbandry belonged to her alone. One might have thought she had given the young man his first lesson but a minute before, and he had surpassed his instructor after the first six strokes.
"Oh, I thought the place was afire!" said Edith, neither electrified nor surprised.
"But look at him—just look at him!" Mrs. Duke insisted. "He can shear a sheep dang near as good as I can."
"Why, of course, Aunt Lila. I knew he could all the time."
"He's a natural-born sheepman. That's what that boy is."
"Maybe he is," Edith allowed indifferently, her interest apparently hard to move and harder to hold. She was gazing up the road again, a look of worriment in her eyes.
The object of their discussion was the width of the corral distant, operating in the door of a shed, a wool-sack hanging beside him into which he tossed the fleece, which he had removed like a good shearer, all in one piece. He held the ewe's head between his knees while he marked with brush and paint a big black D on its side, Mrs. Duke nodding approval, her bare arms on the fence.
Rawlins came across the lot for further instructions. A wagon was coming down the road at a brisk pace, having that moment broken into view around the turn, a cloud of dust rising high in the still air behind it. The two women had turned to watch the approach of the wagon, travelers on that road being few.
"That's a livery rig from Lost Cabin," Mrs. Duke said in surprise. "Ain't that Smith Phogenphole drivin'?"
"Yes," said Edith weakly.
"I wonder where he's takin' that man? It can't be a wool-buyer around this late. Why, they're turnin' in here!"
The stout spring wagon was bouncing and jolting across the rocky ford of the little stream, the deepest of its water not more than up to the hubs, the passenger clinging desperately to the seat. The vehicle struck dry land with a lurch, nearly pitching the passenger out on the horses' backs. The driver made a sudden clutch for the man's coat and hauled him back, laughing loudly.
Mrs. Duke confronted her niece with open mouth and staring eyes.
"Edith Stone! That's him!" she said. "I'd know that moustache in a million. That's him—that's your mail-order beau!"
"I didn't think he'd come," said Edith miserably, looking around as if for some place to hide. "I got a letter this morning, he said he was coming, but I didn't think he'd have the nerve—nobody asked him to come. What in the world am I goin' to do?"
"That's what you've been watchin' that road so anxious for, is it? Well, he's here."
"Yes, darn him!" said Edith, vexed to her wits' end. "What am I goin' to do with him? That's what I want to know."
"Why, marry him," Mrs. Duke replied with easy conclusion. "You've got to marry some time, you might as well begin right now."
"Marry him?" Edith repeated in shocked surprise. "Why, I never had the slightest idea of marrying him! Mr. Rawlins"—in desperate appeal—"I only wrote to him for fun. I know you can understand how it was, Mr. Rawlins—I was so lonesome I'd 'a' corresponded with a dog!"
"Sure," said Rawlins cheerfully, immensely diverted by the situation, unprecedented in all his experience.
Edith was almost frantic. She stood there wringing her fingers, a look of humiliation, surprise and fright in her face that was truly moving. Mrs. Duke was answering the driver's waved salutations, which he now began to supplement by shouted hails, the sheepwoman giving them back to him as good as they came. The driver came on through the gate, rounded to and stopped.
The passenger got down from his uneasy seat, trying his legs tentatively with little bendings at the knees as if he had serious doubt of their working order after that rough ride. Mrs. Duke put her hand over her mouth to mask her gaping astonishment, turning to her niece.
"He's seven foot tall and nine inches wide!" she marveled. "I never saw such a scissors-legged man in my life!"
"What made him come, what in the world made him come!" Edith lamented.
"Well, heaven above!" said Mrs. Duke. "After all your writin'! Come on and meet him and take care of him—don't expect to pa'm him off on me."