Before he laid him down to sleep, that night, Weary had repeated to himself many times and fervently that wish for old J. G. Whitmore and the stout staff upon which he was beginning more and more to lean, his brother-in-law, Chip Bennett. As matters stood, Weary could not even bring himself to let then know anything about his trouble—and that the thing was beginning to assume the form and shape and general malevolent attributes of Trouble, Weary was forced to admit to himself.
Just at present an unthinking, unobserving person might pass over this sheep outfit as a mere unsavory incident; but Weary was neither unobserving nor unthinking—nor, for the matter of that, were the rest of the Happy Family. It needed no Happy Jack, with his foreboding nature, to point out the unpleasant possibilities that night when the committee of two made their informal report at the supper table.
They had ridden to Denson coulee, which was in reality a meandering branch of Flying U coulee itself. To reach it one rode out of Flying U coulee and over a wide hill, and down again to Denson's. But the creek—Flying U creek—followed the devious turnings from Denson coulee down to the Flying U. A long mile of Flying U coulee J. G. Whitmore owned outright. Another mile he held under no other title save a fence. The creek flowed through it all—but that creek had its source somewhere up near the head of Denson coulee. J. G. Whitmore had, to his regret, been unable to claim the whole earth—or at least that portion of it—for his own; so, when he was constrained to make a choice, he settled himself in the wider, more fertile coulee, which he thereafter called the Flying U. While it is good policy to locate as near as possible to the source of those erratic little creeks which water certain garden spots of the northern range land, it is also well to choose land that will grow plenty of hay. J. G. Whitmore chose the hay land, and trusted that providence would insure the water supply. Through all these years Flying U creek had never once disappointed him. Denson, who settled in the tributary coulee, had not made any difference in the water supply, and his stock had consisted of thirty or forty head of cattle and horses.
When Denson sold, however, things might be different. And, if he had sold to a sheepman, the change might be unpleasant If he had sold to Dunk Whittaker—the Flying U boys faced that possibility just as they would face any other disaster, undaunted, but grim and unsmiling.
It was thus that Pink and Weary rode slowly down into Denson coulee. Two miles back they had passed the band of Dot sheep, feeding leisurely just without the Flying U fence, which was the southern boundary. The bug-killer and the other were there, and they noted that the features of that other bore witness to the truth of Andy's story of the fight. He regarded them with one perfectly good eye and one which was considerably swollen, and grinned a swollen grin.
The two had ridden ten paces past him when Pink pulled up suddenly. “I'm going to get off and lick that son-of-a-gun myself, just for luck,” he stated dispassionately. “I'm going to lick 'em both,” he revised while he dismounted.
“Oh, come on, Cadwalloper,” Weary dissuaded. “You'll likely have all the excitement you need, without that.”
“Here, you hold this fool cayuse. No.” He shook his head, cutting short further protest. “You're the boss, and you don't want to mix in, and that part is all right. But I ain't responsible—and I sure am going to take a fall or two out of these geesers. They're a-w-l together too stuck on themselves to suit me.” Pink did not say that he was thinking of Andy, but nevertheless a vivid recollection of that unfortunate young man's rope-creased wrists and swollen hands sent him toward the herder with long, eager strides.
Pink was not tall, and he was slight and boyish of build; also, his cherubic face, topped by tawny curls and lighted by eyes as deeply blue and as innocent as a baby's, probably deceived that herder, just as they had deceived many another. For Pink was a good deal like a stick of dynamite wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with blue ribbon; and Weary was not at all uneasy over the outcome, as he watched Pink go clanking back, though he loved him well.
Pink did not waste any time or words on the preliminaries. With a delightful frankness of purpose he pulled off his coat and threw it on the ground, as he came up, sent his hat after it, and arrived fist first.
The herder had waited grinning, and he had shouted something to Weary about spanking the kid if Weary didn't make him behave. Speedily he became a very surprised herder, and a distressed one as well.
“All right,” Pink remarked, a little quick-breathed, when the herder decided for the third time to get up. “A friend of mine worked yuh over a little, this morning, and I just thought I'd make a better job than he did. Your eyes didn't match. They will, now.”
The herder mumbled maledictions after him, but Pink would not even give him the satisfaction of resenting it.
“I'd like to have broken a knuckle against his teeth, darn him,” he observed ruefully when he was in the saddle again. “Come on, Weary. It won't take but a minute to hand a punch or two to that bug-killer, and then I'll feel better. They've both got it coming—come on!” This because Weary showed a strong inclination to take the trail and keep it to his destination. “Well, I'll go alone, then. I've got to kinda square myself for the way I threw it into Andy; and you know blamed well, Weary, they played it low-down on him, or they'd never have got that rope on him. And I'm going to lick that—”
“Mamma! You sure are a rambunctious person when you feel that way,” Weary made querulous comment; but he rode over with Pink to where the bug-killer was standing with his long stick held in a somewhat menacing manner, and once more he held Pink's horse for him.
Pink was gone longer this time, and he came back with a cut lip and a large lump on his forehead; the bug-killer had thrown a small rock with the precision which comes of much practice—such as stoning disobedient dogs, and the like—and, when Pink rushed at him furiously, the herder caught him very neatly alongside the head with his stick. These little amenities serving merely to whet Pink's appetite for battle, he stopped long enough to thrash that particular herder very thoroughly and to his own complete satisfaction.
“Well, I guess I'm ready to go on now,” he observed, dimpling rather one-sidedly as he got back on his horse.
“I thought maybe you'd want to whip the dogs, too,” Weary told him dryly; which was the nearest he came to expressing any disapproval of the incident. Weary was a peace-loving soul, whenever peace was compatible with self-respect; and it would never have occurred to him to punish strange men as summarily as Pink had done.
“I would, if the dogs were half as ornery as the men,” Pink retorted. “Say, they hang together like bull snakes and rattlers, don't they? If they was human, they'd have helped each other out—but nothing doing! Do you reckon a man could ride up to a couple of our bunch, and thrash one at a time without the other fellow having something to say about it?” He turned in the saddle and looked back. “So help me, Josephine, I've got a good mind to go back and lick them again, for not hanging together like they ought to.” But the threat was an idle one, and they went on to Denson's, Weary still with that anxious look in his eyes, and Pink quite complacent over his exploit.
In Denson coulee was an unwonted atmosphere of activity; heretofore the place had been animated chiefly by young Densons engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, but now a covered buggy, evidently just arrived, bore mute witness to the new order of things. There were more horses about the place, a covered wagon or two, three or four men working upon the corral, and, lastly, there was one whom Weary recognized the moment he caught sight of him.
“Looks like a sheep outfit, all right,” he said somberly. “And, if that ain't old Dunk himself, it's the devil, and that's next thing to him.”
Dunk, they judged, had just arrived with another man whom they did not know: a tall man with light hair that hung lank to his collar, a thin, sharp-nosed face and a wide mouth, which stretched easily into a smile, but which was none the pleasanter for that. When he turned inquiringly toward them they saw that he was stoop-shouldered; though not from any deformity, but from sheer, slouching lankness. Dunk gave them a swift, sour look from under his eyebrows and went on.
Weary rode straight past the lank man, whom he judged to be Oleson, and overtook Dunk Whittaker himself.
“Hello, Dunk,” he said cheerfully, sliding over in the saddle so that a foot hung free of the stirrup, as men who ride much have learned to do when they stop for a chat, thereby resting while they may. “Back on the old stamping ground, are you?”
“Since you see me here, I suppose I am,” Dunk made churlish response.
“Do you happen to own those Dot sheep, back there on the hill?” Weary tilted his head toward home.
“I happen to own half of them.” By then they had reached the gate and Dunk passed through and started on to the house.
“Oh, don't be in a rush—come on back and be sociable,” Weary called out, in the mildest of tones, twisting the reins around his saddle-horn so that he might roll a cigarette at ease.
Dunk remembered, perhaps, certain things he had learned when he was J. G. Whitmore's partner, and had more or less to do with the charter members of the Happy Family. He came back and stood by the gate, ungraciously enough, to be sure; still, he came back. Weary smiled under cover of lighting his cigarette. Dunk, by that reluctant compliance, betrayed something which Weary had been rather anxious to know.
“We've been having a little trouble with those sheep of yours,” Weary remarked between puffs. “You've got some poor excuses for humans herding them. They drove the bunch across our coulee just exactly three times. There ain't enough grass left in our lower field to graze a prairie dog.” He glanced back to see where Pink was, saw that he was close behind, as was the lank man, and spoke in a tone that included them all.
“The Flying U ain't pasturing sheep, this spring,” he informed them pleasantly. “But, seeing the grass is eat up, we'll let yuh pay for it. Why didn't you bring them in along the trail, anyway?”
“I didn't bring them in. I just came down from Butte to-day. I suppose the herders brought them out where the feed was best; they did if they're worth their wages.”
“They happened to strike some feed that was pretty expensive. And,” he smiled down at Whittaker misleadingly, “you ought to keep an eye on those herders, or they might let you in for another grass bill. The Flying U has got quite a lot of range, right around here, you recollect. And we've got plenty of cattle to eat it. We don't need any help to keep the grass down so we can ride through it.”
“Now, look here,” began the lank man with that sort of persuasiveness which can turn instantly into bluster, “all this is pure foolishness, you know. We're here to stay. We've bought this place, and some other land to go with it, and we expect to stay right here and make a living. It happens that we expect to make a living off of sheep. Now, we don't want to start in by quarreling with our neighbors, and we don't want our neighbors to start any quarrel with us. All we want—”
“Mamma! You're taking a fine way to make us love yuh,” Weary cut in ironically. “I know what you want. You want the same as every other meek and lovely sheepman wants. You want it all—core, seeds and peeling. Dunk,” he said with a more impatient disgust than he was in the habit of showing for his fellowmen, “this man's a stranger; but I should think you'd know better than to come in here with sheep.”
“I don't know why a sheep outfit isn't exactly as good as a cow outfit, and I don't know why they haven't as much right here. You're welcome to what land you own, but it always seemed to me that public land is open to the use of the public. Now, as Oleson says, we expect to raise sheep here, and we expect your outfit to leave us alone. As far as our sheep crossing your coulee is concerned—I don't know that they did. But, if they did, and, if they did any damage, let J. G. do the talking about that. I deal with the owners—not with the hired men.”
Weary, you must understand, was never a bellicose young man. But, for all that, he leaned over and gave Dunk a slap on the jaw which must have stung considerably—and the full reason for his violence lay four years behind the two, when Dunk was part owner of the Flying U, and when his sneering arrogance had been very hard to endure.
“Are you going to swallow that—from a hired man?” Weary inquired, after a minute during which nothing whatever occurred beyond the slow reddening of Dunk's face.
“I'm not going to fight, if that's what you mean,” Dunk sneered. “I decline to bring myself down to your level. One doesn't expect anything from a jackass but a bray, you know—and one doesn't feel compelled to bray because the jackass does.” He smiled that supercilious smile which Weary had hated of old, and which, he knew, was well used to covering much treachery and small meannesses of various sorts.
“As I said, if the Flying U has any claim against us, let the owner present it in the usual way.” Dunk drew down his black brows, lifted a corner of his lip and turned his back deliberately upon them.
Oleson let himself through the gate, which he closed somewhat hastily behind him. “I'm sorry you fellows seem to want to make trouble,” he said, without looking up from the latch, which seemed somewhat out of repair, like the rest of the Denson property. “That's a poor way to start in with new neighbors.” He lifted his hat with what Pink considered insulting politeness, and followed Dunk into the house.
Weary waited there until they had gone in and closed the door, then turned and rode back home again, frowning thoughtfully at the trail ahead of them all the way, and making no reply to Pink's importunings for war.
“I'd hate to say you've lost your nerve, Weary,” Pink cried at last, in sheer desperation. “But why the devil didn't you get down and thump the daylights out of that black son-of-a-gun? I came pretty near walking into him myself, only I hate to butt into another fellow's scrap. But, if I'd known you were going to set there and let him walk off with that sneer on his face—”
“I can't fight a man that won't hit back,” Weary protested. “You couldn't either, Cadwalloper. You'd have done just what I did; you'd have let him go.”
“He will hit back, all right enough,” Pink retorted passionately. “He'll do it when you ain't looking, though. He—”
“I know it,” Weary sighed. “I'm kinda sorry, now, I slapped him. He'll hit back—but he won't hit me; he'll aim at the outfit. If the Old Man was here, or Chip, I'd feel a whole lot easier in my mind.”
“They couldn't do anything you can't do,” Pink assured him loyally, forgetting his petulance when he saw the careworn look in Weary's face. “All they can do is gobble all the range around here—and I guess there's a few of us that will have a word or two to say about that.”
“What makes me sore,” Weary confided, “is knowing that Dunk isn't thinking altogether of the dollar end of it. He's tickled to death to get a whack at the outfit. And I hate to see him get away with it; but I guess we'll have to stand for it.”
That sentiment did not please Pink; nor, when Weary repeated it later that evening in the bunk-house, did it please the Happy Family. The less pleasing it was because it was perfectly true and every man of them knew it. Beyond keeping the sheep off Flying U land, there was nothing they could do without stepping over the line into lawlessness—and, while they were not in any sense a meek Happy Family, they were far more law-abiding than their conversation that night made them appear.
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