Sheep Limit/Chapter 9
Peck had his feathers up properly; he was in a fighting frame. It had taken him a little while to come to the conclusion that he was being made the subject of a conspiracy, the purpose of which was to disgrace him and drive him away from his amorous quest. There was fire in his lobster eyes, the flush of defiance in his face.
"I come from a place where you've got to show 'em," he said as they jogged back toward the fence. "You can't pull any of your bluffs on me. You ain't got no better men out here than where I come from. They ain't makin' 'em any more."
Rawlins was not altogether unsympathetic, nuisance that the fellow was, knowing he was not solely to blame for being there in the character of gallant to the sheeplands belle. He had been led up to it; there was something just a bit too drastic in this method of getting rid of him.
There was no question of the danger Peck walking or running his long neck into if he cut the wire and rode for the hill Tippie had pointed out as the goal. That fence-rider had a mean eye; he would be as sore as a scald to-day in his resentment of the affront he had suffered yesterday, and only too keen to take it out of somebody who looked at a distance like a sheepman. The chance was against Peck ever coming out alive if allowed to go ahead with this thing.
Rawlins went along in silence, feeling that it was not his day to talk. Tippie might turn it off some other way to save his face, although there did not appear to be any way around the event now. Tippie had a pair of wire-nippers along, and a large, old-time pistol in his saddle holster. He was the type of man familiar to Rawlins in his range experience, who appreciated the joke in proportion to the discomfort, even peril, the victim suffered. There was no telling how far he would go.
"Well, it's up to you to prove it," Tippie said as they drew up to the fence again.
"I'll eat it up," said Peck. "Maybe you could string a greenhorn along with that stuff about seven men gettin' shot at this game, but it don't go with yours truly. Edith's in on this; she's soured on me. But if I was to let you read some of her letters to me you'd think you was in a Turkish bath."
"My notion of a man," said Tippie severely, "is a feller that keeps them things under his hat."
"I was just a tellin' you. I come out here to marry that girl, and I'm goin' to marry her. She didn't fall for me when I got out of that blame hack yesterday—no man can ride over a rough road like that in a hard hat and look the same when he gits there."
Rawlins was looking along the fence; Tippie was engaged likewise. The fence-rider was not in sight along the mile or two that could be seen on either hand. It was a likely moment for Peck to make his start.
Peck got off his horse, going across the saddle to do it. He stood spying around a little while among the bushes, selecting the tallest one, which was considerably above his head, which he bent down and tied his handkerchief to the tip.
"I want something to head back to," he explained. "Give me them nippers."
Tippie handed the tool to him. In a moment Peck had the wires down. He came back to his horse, returned the nippers to Tippie, held his stirrup with both hands, elevated his long leg and inserted his foot.
"You'd better take my gun," Tippie suggested.
"Wait till I git on him," said Peck.
He hung the pistol over the saddle-horn, sawed on the reins, flapped his knees against the horse's shoulders and clucked. Tippie reached over, a malicious pleasure in his glum face, and cut the animal a sharp blow with his quirt. The horse started with a bounce that nearly upset Peck. The clip of his hunched knees held him, although he lost a stirrup, and he had the fortune to hit the cut panel of fence by his erratic steering. The last they saw of him among the bushes inside the fence he was scraping the horse's side with his foot like a man trying to climb a blank wall, in his desperate efforts to regain the stirrup.
"Don't you think I'd better go after him and give him the nippers, so he can cut his way out if he's crowded?" Rawlins asked.
"Hle wouldn't have sense enough to do it," Tippie replied. "I don't want him to have 'em, anyhow. Let him figger it out his own way."
So saying, Tippie rode to the bush to which Peck had affixed his handkerchief to mark the hole, snatched the signal down and dropped it on the ground. Rawlins thought that was hardly fair, but he did not remonstrate. He did not feel himself responsible for the outcome of Peck's adventure.
"We'll go up the hill and watch him," Tippie said.
It was rather a silly business, the way it had turned out, Rawlins thought. If Tippie's imagination had been kept in bounds to make the thing look a little more probable, Peck very likely would have kept on his way to Lost Cabin. Suppose, attended by the luck of a fool, Peck should go and come on the business he had undertaken? That would make him a champion in his own eyes; he would set himself up as a prince of valor in that country. He might even think, believing as he did that Edith had a hand in the plot to humiliate him, that he had overcome all obstacles in his way to her heart.
Peck might then claim the girl as the reward of his deed, and stick around until she would have to marry him to get rid of him. Rawlins was glad it wasn't his scheme.
Foolish, he said to himself, thinking of Edith, to write such warm letters to an empty-pated swain like Peck. The mail-order beau had a case. There wasn't a bit of doubt on that.
They pulled up at the top of the hill, where they waited concealed by the tall bushes.
"Look!" said Rawlins, rising in his stirrups, pointing. "There's that fence-rider!"
"Um-m-m," said Tippie. "He was layin' for us, watchin' all the time."
There was a note of satisfaction in the foreman's voice. It was coming out just the way he had calculated it from the beginning.
"He may kill the darned fool!" Rawlins protested.
"Sure," Tippie replied, quite pleased by the prospect, it appeared.
"Don't you think we ought to do something? I'd hate to see anything serious happen to him."
"I ain't got no gun," Tippie replied, his conscience entirely untroubled.
"I'll go back and get some guns, if you say the word," Rawlins offered.
"It'd be all over before you got back. Let him go."
Very likely it would be so, Rawlins knew. Peck was out of sight over the first hill, the fence-rider cutting after him like a streak.
"Anyway, I think I'll go in there and whoop around a little," Rawlins proposed, making a tentative start. "That might split his attention and give old Peck a chance for his neck."
"If you go, you'll go afoot," Tippie said, stern and threatening. "One horse is all I'm goin' to risk on a fool to-day."
"You're the doctor," Rawlins yielded. "But it looks a little raw."
"What did you suppose was goin' to happen?" Tippie inquired.
"I didn't believe the darned fool'd try it."
"Well, neither did I."
"If he comes through with his hide whole he'll think he's won the girl. She'll never get rid of him then."
"He won't be half through," Tippie growled. "He'll have to lick me before he goes back to that house."
Neither the trespasser nor the defender was in sight now. Tippie's face was a shade more stern as he posed in stiff attention, head turned to catch the first sound of encounter beyond the hill. As if unconsciously drifting with his thoughts, he began to ride slowly toward the fence, Rawlins trailing. Tippie was thinking of the horse he had risked in that foolish venture, and the price of it he should be obliged to make good if it were lost. That was plain as the fence posts to Rawlins' eyes.
When shooting began presently over the hill, Tippie's uneasiness increased. He fidgeted, stretching himself, toes in the stirrups, to see something where nothing offered to the anxious eye. It was not Peck's pistol they heard, but a high-powered rifle, fired at intervals, as a man might shoot at something that came into sight by starts.
Rawlins took some hope for Peck from the uncertainty the fence-rider would have on the identity of the trespasser. It was likely he would believe the girl of yesterday had invaded his pastures again, as she had threatened. The fellow hardly would risk shooting a woman, impossible as it would be to mistake Peck's gender a quarter of a mile away.
Peck broke over the top of the hill behind which he had disappeared but a few minutes before. There was no mistaking Peck, although he was half a mile or more distant, his pose in the saddle being somewhat eccentric, and truly original.
The little roan flashed across the bare hilltop, plunging down the slope into the bushes, dodging the thick clumps like a rabbit. He was traveling independent of Peck, whose wishes in the course he ignored, if Peck had any thought in that emergency except the one of putting space between himself and that gun. The course the horse was shaping would bring Peck to the fence a long distance from the hole.
Seeing how it was to terminate, Tippie kicked his horse forward, signalling Rawlins to follow. The fence-rider popped up that second as if he had been produced by a trick, taking a crack at Peck from the top of the hill, darting down after him as hot as a hornet.
"He'll corner him and take that horse!" Tippie shouted to Rawlins, who was scrambling to overtake him. "We've got to beat him to it and git that gun of mine!"
Maybe they could do it, maybe they couldn't, Rawlins thought. It all depended on the way Peck's horse took a notion to turn when it struck the fence. Peck had a good lead on his pursuer; his horse appeared to be as fully conscious of its peril as anybody around there. If it happened to head their way when it struck the fence, Tippie could grab his gun from Peck, they could slash a hole and let him through.
They lost sight of the race as they scurried down the slope into a grassy dip, but Rawlins knew Peck was still up and traveling by the report of the rifle that reached them as they rode silently across the spongy ground in that little hollow of green. They clawed up the steep ridge before them, reaching the top to see Peck shoot into a clear spot several hundred yards ahead, making for the fence as if he intended to take it at a jump and go right on.
Only Peck had no such intention. It was improbable that he even realized his proximity to the fence, or anything at all except that he was on the run, a persistent man behind him trying to make a mussy ending of his romantic career. Peck's hat was gone, his reins were flying wild. He was holding to the saddle-horn with both hands, bumping considerably, his long legs clamped on the horse's neck, bending forward in earnest effort to reduce to short and inconspicuous appearance a figure that nature had made uncommonly prominent and long.
The fence-rider was not in sight, that being a place of irregular small hills looking pretty much as if nature's dump-wagons had been emptied of their last loads there, ridding themselves of the left-over from the job. Tippie humped to the race, to get to the spot where Peck must hit the fence before the guard could overhaul him and take the horse as liquidated damages.
It was a hopeless race, as Rawlins could see from the jump-off. They had not covered half the distance when the little roan dashed up to the wires as if he hadn't been figuring on a fence within forty miles.
When he discovered his mistake, the little horse braced himself for a stop, forelegs stiff as posts, hoofs driven into the ground. It was a beautiful slide for home, the horse coming up suddenly with his nose against the wire. Peck was not prepared for this abrupt stop. Perhaps he would not have been prepared if he had-known it was coming. When the horse stopped, Peck rose from the saddle with the ease and celerity of an eagle from his rock, going on over the fence supremely immune from its threatening barbs.
Peck spread like a frog on the leap, or a breaststroke swimmer exemplifying his art. So spread, he came down on his narrow breast-bone in the top of an inhospitable bush, at the exact moment when the fence-rider broke from the shrubbery which fringed the brow of the hill.
Peck's horse gathered himself from the shock of his sudden stop, starting up the fence in the direction of his friends on the outside. Seeing him heading right, Tippie wheeled around and started back toward the cut in the wires, there being no time, under the fence-rider's gun, to make a new opening for the swift little creature that had carried Peck to safe ground and unloaded him.
"Head him off at the gap!" Tippie shouted, neck and neck with Rawlins, the roan coming on hot-foot after them, closing up on them surprisingly. He surely was a corner, Rawlins thought, and he had all the reason in the world for stretching himself and keeping it up. The fence-guard was after him, rifle put away for rope, determined to have the horse, having lost the man.
"Cut in there and head him—he's so scairt he'll pass it!" Tippie yelled, his voice breaking high, his mouth open as he rode.
Rawlins pushed ahead of him, the little roan abreast inside the wire, the fence-rider not more than a hundred yards behind. But no need to rush about heading that little horse off and turning him through the gap. He beat them all to it, knowing where it was as well as the wisest of them. When he came to it he cut through like a cat scuttling under a crib, his stirrups dancing a mocking jig in the eyes of the man who surely would have roped him if they'd had another mile to go.
The roan struck for home, Tippie and Rawlins veering off suddenly from the fence to follow him. When they had pulled out of sight of the irate fence rider, with whom neither of them cared to stop and argue just then, Tippie said he guessed they'd better take a look for Peck and see if he was hurt.
They had no trouble finding the place where Peck had crossed the fence, nor the bush in which he had landed. But there was no Peck around there. Tippie was relieved.
"He's lit out," he declared, positively. "That's the last we'll see of that feller around here. We might as well go on to the house and throw his things in the wagon. Maybe if you'll drive fast you'll overhaul him between here and town."
They swung off in a gallop for the ranch-house, Tippie pretty well pleased with the result of his plot. When they rode over the hill that looked down into the snug little pocket where the ranch buildings stood, they saw the roan horse standing by the corral gate, and something that looked like, very much like, indeed, the leg of Dowell Peck disappearing in the kitchen door.