Cowboys -- Fiction; Montana -- Fiction; Ranch life -- Fiction; Western stories
Even while he spoke his eyes were fixed with cold intensity upon a
fringe of gray across the coulee below the little pasture. To the
nostrils of the outraged Happy Family was borne that indescribable aroma
which betrays the presence of sheep; that aroma which sheepmen love and
which cattlemen hate, and which a favorable wind will carry a long way.
They slapped saddles on their horses in record time that morning, and
raced down the coulee ironically shouting commiserating sentences to
the unfortunate Andy, who rode slowly up to the mess-house for the lunch
which Patsy had waiting for him in a flour sack, and afterward climbed
the grade and loped along outside the line fence to a point opposite
the sheep and the shouting horsemen, who forced them back by weight of
numbers.
This morning the herders were not quite so passive. The bug-killer still
scowled, but he spoke without the preliminary sulky silence of the day
before,
“We're goin' across the coulee,” he growled. “Them's orders. We range
south uh here.”
“No, you don't,” Weary dissented calmly. “Not by a long shot, you don't.
You're going back where you come from--if you ask me. And you're going
quick!”
CHAPTER VI. What Happened to Andy
With the sun shining comfortably upon his back, and with a cigarette
between his lips, Andy sat upon his horse and watched in silent glee
while the irate Happy Family scurried here and there behind the band,
swinging their ropes down upon the woolly backs, and searching their
vocabularies for new and terrible epithets. Andy smiled broadly as a
colorful phrase now and then boomed across the coulee in that clear,
snappy atmosphere, which carries sounds so far. He did not expect to
do much smiling upon his own account, that day, and he was therefore
grateful for the opportunity to behold the spectacle before him.
There was Slim, for instance, unwillingly careening down hill toward
home, because, in his zeal to slap an old ewe smartly with his rope, he
drove her unexpectedly under his horse, and so created a momentary panic
that came near standing both horse and rider upon their heads. And there
was Big Medicine whistling until he was purple, while the herder, with a
single gesture, held the dog motionless, though a dozen sheep broke
back from the band and climbed a slope so steep that Big Medicine was
compelled to go after them afoot, and turn them with stones and profane
objurgations.
It was very funny--when one could sit at ease upon the hilltop and smoke
a cigarette while others risked apoplexy and their souls' salvation
below. By the time they panted up the last rock-strewn slope of the
bluff, and sent the vanguard of the invaders under the fence, Andy's
mood was complacent in the extreme, and his smile offensively wide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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