Judith of the Plains
Page 17
XVI
In The Land Of The Red Silence
The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and hadmade the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating upsimooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confoundingitself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed fora week, tractable as toys in the hands of children. Little had happened tovary the monotony for the cow-punchers that handled the herd--they grazed,guarded, watered, night-herded the cattle day after day, night afternight. Pasturage had been sufficient, if not abundant. The creeks wererunning low and slimy with the advance of summer, but there had beensufficient water to let the herd drink its fill at least once a day.
The outfit ate its "sow-belly," soda-biscuit, and coffee three times aday, and smoked its pipes, but was a little shy on yarns round thecamp-fire.
"This yere outfit don't lather none," commented the cook to thehorse-wrangler, over the smoke of an early morning fire.
"Don't lather no more than a chunk of wood," agreed the horse-wrangler."That's the trouble with a picked-up outfit like this. Catch 'W-square'men kowtowing to a 'XXX' boss, even if he is only acting foreman."
Simpson, the origin of whose connection with the "XXX" was rather asensitive subject with that outfit, had begun to take his duties as acattle-man with grim seriousness; he was untiring in his labors; he spentlong hours in the saddle, he took his turn at night herding, though he wasold for this kind of work. He condemned the sheep-men with foul-moutheddenunciations, scoffed at their range-rights, said the sheep questionshould be dealt with in the business-like manner in which the Indianquestion had been settled. He was an advocate of violence--in short, aswaggering, bombastic wind-bag. He talked much of "his outfit" and "hismen." "What was good enough for them was good enough for him," he wouldannounce at meal-time, in a snivelling tone, when the food happened to beparticularly bad. He split the temporary outfit, brought together for thepurpose of handling the beef-herd, into factions. He put the "XXX" inworse repute than it already enjoyed--he was, in fact, the discordantspirit of the expedition. The men attended to their work sullenly. Discordwas rife. The one thought they shared in common was that of the wages thatwould come to them at the end of the drive; of the feverish joy of"blowing in," in a single night; perchance, of forgetting, in one long,riotous evening, the monotony, the hardship, the lack of comradery thatmade this particular drive one long to be remembered in the mind of everyman who had taken part in it.
Meanwhile the herd trailed its half-mile length to the slaughtering pensday after day, all unconscious of its power. When the steers had trailedfor about a fortnight, the question of finding sufficient water for thembegan to be a serious one. The preceding winter had been unusually mild,the snow-fall on the mountains averaging less than in the recollection ofthe oldest plains-man. Summer had begun early and waxed hot and dry. Theearth began to wrinkle, and cracked into trenches, like gaping mouths,thirsty for the water that came not. Such streams as had not dried shrankand crawled among the willows like slimy things, that the herd, thirstythough it was from the long drives, had to be coaxed to drink from.
Discontent grew. The acting foreman, who was a "XXX" man, and acomparative stranger to that part of the country, refused to consult withthe "W-square" men in the outfit, who knew every inch of the ground. Theacting foreman thought the Wetmore men looked down on him, "put on dog";and, to flaunt his authority, he ordered the herd driven due west insteadof skirting to the north by the longer route, where they would have hadthe advantage of drinking at several creeks before crossing Green River.Moreover, the acting foreman was drinking hard, and he insisted upon hisorder in spite of the Wetmore men's protestations.
The character of the country began to change, the soil took on the colorof blood, even the omnipresent sage-brush began to fail the landscape;sun-bleached bones glistened on the red soil, white as ulcers. All theanimal trails led back from the country into which they were proceeding.The sky, a vivid, cloudless blue, paled as it dipped earthward. The sunlooked down, a flaming copper shield. There was no sign of life in all theland. Even the grasshoppers had left it to the sun, the silence, and thedesolation. To ears accustomed to the incessant shrilling of the insects,the cessation was ominous, like the sudden stopping of a clock in achamber of death. Above the angry bellow of the thirsty herd the menstrained their ears again and again for this familiar sound of life, butthere was nothing but the bellowing of the cattle, the trampling of theirhoofs, and sometimes the long, squealing whinny of a horse as he threwback his head in seeming demand to know the justice of this thing.
Across the red plain snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoricreptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. Acloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them aweary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were athousand steers, a handful of men and horses, in the land of the redsilence? It had seen the comings and goings of many peoples, and once ithad flowed with streams; but that was before the curse of God came uponit, and in its harsh, dry barrenness it grew to be a menace to livingthings.
The saddle-stock had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that hadscarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water hadweakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-sixhours were being pushed on a course slightly northwest as rapidly as theenfeebled condition of the saddle-horses would permit. Creek after creekthat they had made for proved to be but a dry bed.
The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun,tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plainstretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over whichwrithed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing itstortuous way over the red world. Sometimes it was as unreal as afever-haunted dream, a drug-inspired nightmare, when a Chinese screen,perchance, has stood at the foot of the sleeper's bed. Sometimes thedragon curled itself into a ball, and the foreman sung out that they weremilling, and the men turned and rode away from it, then dashed back at it,after getting the necessary momentum, entered like a flying wedge, foughttheir way into the rocking sea of surging bodies, shouted from theirthirst-parched throats imprecations that were lost in the dull, sullenroar. Then the dragon would uncoil and again trail its way over the redwaste-lands.
A red sun had begun to set over a red earth, and the men who had been outsince noon-scouring the country for water, returned to say that none hadbeen found, and they began to look into each other's faces for the answerthat none could give. At sunset they made a dry camp; there was but enoughwater left to cook with. Each man received, as a thirst-quenching ration,a can of tomatoes. After supper they consulted, and it was agreed to trailthe herd till midnight, taking advantage of the coolness to hurry them onas fast as possible to Green River. The grave nature of their plight wasindicated by the fact that no one smoked after supper. Silent, sullen,they sat round, waiting for the foreman to give the order to advance. Hewaited for the moon to come up. Slowly it rose over the Bad Land Hills andhung round and full like a gigantic lantern. The watches were arranged forthe night with a double guard. Every man in the outfit was beginning tohave a feeling of panic that communicated itself to every other man, andas they looked at the herd, tractable now no longer, but a blind forcethat they must take chances with through the long watches of the night,while the thirst grew in the beasts' parched throats, they foresaw whatwould in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all thatmost strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly.
The moon that night was too brilliant for benisons; the gaunt, red worldlay naked and unshriven for the sin that long ago had brought upon it thewrath of God. The picture was still that of the grotesque Chinese screen,with the headless dragon crawling endlessly; but the dream was long,centuries long, it seemed to the men listening to the bellowing of theherd. And while they waited, the red grew dull and the dragon dingy, andits fury made its
contortions the more horrible; and that was all thedifference between day and night in the land of the red silence. Sometimesthe dragon split, and joints of it tried to turn back to the last water ithad drunk; for cattle, though blinded with thirst, never forget the laststream at which they have quenched thirst, and will turn back to it,though they drop on the way. But the men pressed them farther and farther,and for yet a little while the cattle yielded.
At midnight the saddle-stock was incapable of moving farther. One horsehad fallen and lay too weak to rise. The others, limping and foot-sore, nolonger responded to quirt and rowel. The foreman ordered the herd thrownon the bed ground for the night. The herders for the first watch began tocircle. The rest of the outfit took to its blankets to snatch a littlerest for the double duty that awaited every man that night. Now it is atime-honored belief among cow-men that the herd must be sung to,particularly when it is restless, and to-night they tried all the oldfavorites, the "Cow-boy's Lament" being chief among them. But the herdrefused to be soothed, and round and round it circled; not once would itlie down.
The moon gleamed almost brazen, showing the cruel scars, the trenches tornby cloud-bursts, the lines wrought by the long, patient waiting of theearth for the lifting of the wrath of God. Imperishable grief was writ onthe land as on a human face. The night wore on, the watches changed, theherd continued restless; not more than a third of it had bedded down. Thethird watch was from one o'clock to half-past three in the morning.Simpson and another "XXX" man, with two of the Wetmore outfit, made up adouble watch, and rode, singing, about the herd, as the long, dreary watchwore away. The cattle's lowing had taken on a gasping, cracked sound thatwas more frightful than the maddened bellow of the early evening. Simpson,who was past the age when men live the life of the saddle, felt thehardship keenly. He had ridden since sunrise, but for the respite at noonand the scant time at the dry camp while the evening meal was being eaten.He was more than half asleep now, as he lurched heavily in the saddle,crossing and recrossing his partner in the half-circle they completedabout the herd. Suddenly the sharp yelp of a coyote rang out; it seemed tocome from no farther than twenty yards away. The cattle heard it, too, anda wave of panic swept through them. Simpson stiffened in his saddle. Thesound, which was repeated, was an exact reproduction of a coyote's yelp,yet he knew that it was not a coyote.
The herd rose to its feet as a single steer, and for a second stoodundetermined. From a clump of sage-brush not more than two feet highfluttered something long and white like a sheet. It waved in the wind asthe cry was repeated. The herd crashed forward in a stampede, Simpson inthe lead on a tired horse, but a scant length ahead of a thousand maddenedsteers bolting in a panic of thirst and fear.
"Hell's loose!" yelled the men in their blankets, making for the temporaryrope corral to secure horses. Simpson, tallow-colored with fear, clunglike a cat to his horse, and dug the rowels in the beast's flanks tillthey were bloody and dripping. He had seen Jim Rodney's face above thewhite cloth as it fluttered in the face of the herd that came poundingbehind him with the rumble of nearing thunder. He was too close to them toattempt to fire his revolver in the air in the hope of turning them, butthe boys had evidently got into their saddles, to judge by the volley ofshots that rang out and were answered. Simpson alone rode ahead of theherd that tore after him, ripping up the earth as it came, bellowing inits blind fury. His horse, a thoroughly seasoned cow-pony, sniffed thebedlam and responded to the goading spur. She had been in cattle stampedesbefore, and, though every fibre ached with fatigue, she flattened out herlean body and covered ground to the length of her stride at each gallop.The herd was so close that Simpson could smell the stench of theirsweating bodies, taste their dust, and feel the scorch of their breath.The sound of their hoofs was like the pounding of a thousand propellers.From above looked the moon, round and serene; she had watched the passingof many peoples in the land of the red silence. The horse seemed to begaining. A few more lengths ahead and Simpson could turn her to one sideand let the maddened cattle race to their own destruction. All he asked ofGod was to escape their trampling hoofs, and though he gained he dug therowel and plied the quirt, unmindful of what he did. On they came; thechorus of their fear swelled like the voice of a mighty cataract, thepound, pound, pound of their hoofs ringing like mighty sledge-hammers.
Suddenly he felt himself sinking, horribly, irresistibly. "God! What isit?" as his horse went down with her foreleg in a gopher-hole. "Up, up,you damned brute!" but the mare's leg had cracked like a pipe-stem. In hisfury at the beast Simpson began kicking her, then started to run as thecattle swept forward like a black storm-cloud.
The next second the great sea of cattle had broken over horse and rider.When it had passed there was not enough left of either to warrant burialor to furnish a feast for the buzzards. A few shreds of clothes, that hadonce been a man, lay scattered there; a something that had been a horse.