“No idee.”
“Twenty-six cents.”
Bowers whistled.
“Gosh a'mighty! You’re goin’ to take it, ain’t you?”
“I’ll get a quarter more, if I hold out for it.”
His face fell a little.
“I’ll get it!” Her voice had a metallic quality. “It’s a fine long staple, and clean. If he won’t, some one else will give it to me.”
The sheep woman had the reputation now of being difficult to deal with, of haggling over fractions, and it was of this that Bowers was thinking. To others he would never admit that she was anything but perfect, though to himself he acknowledged the hardening process that was going on in her. He saw the growth of the driving ambition which made her indifferent to everything that did not tend to her personal interest.
Outside of himself and Teeters, Kate took no interest whatever in individuals. There was no human note in her intercourse with those who worked for her. She cared for results only, and showed it.
They resented her appraising eyes, her cold censure when they blundered, her indifference to them as human beings, and they revenged themselves in the many ways that lie in a herder’s power if he cares to do so.
They gave away to the dry-farmers in the vicinity the supplies and halves of mutton she furnished them. In the lambing season they left the lambs whose mothers refused to own them to die when a little extra effort would have saved them. When stragglers split off from the herd they made no great attempt to recover them. They shot at coyotes and wildcats when it was convenient, but did not go out of their way to hunt them.
She was just but not generous. She never had spared herself, and she did not spare her herders. “Hard as nails” was the verdict in general. In her presence they were taciturn to sullenness; among themselves they criticised her constantly, exaggerating her faults and taking delight in recounting her failures. She was too familiar with every detail of the business for her men to dare to neglect her interests too flagrantly, but they had learned to a nicety how high their percentage of losses might run without getting their “time” for it.
Bowers knew of this silent hostility, which was so unnecessary, but he dared not speak of it. He could only deny that she had faults and resent it with violence when the criticisms become too objectionable.
If Kate had known of the antagonism, it would have made no difference—she would rather have taken the losses it entailed than to conciliate. She would have argued that if she was harsh, imperious, it was her privilege—she had earned it.
Life for Kate had resolved itself into an unromantic routine—like extracting the last penny for her wool that was possible, shipping on favorable markets, acquiring advantageous leases, discharging incapable herders and hiring others, eliminating waste and unnecessary expenditures, studying range conditions against hard winters.
“Any mail for the herders?” Bowers asked, innocently, since she showed no disposition to give him her confidence farther.
He watched her intently as she sorted the mail, tossing him a paper finally from which he removed the wrapper with a certain eagerness. He peered into it with a secrecy that attracted her attention, and, looking at it hard, Kate recognized it as the publication of a matrimonial agency.
“Bowers, you surprise me!” She regarded him quizzically.
Bowers started guiltily.
“Aw—it’s one they sent me,” he said disparagingly—“jest a sample copy.”
“Bowers, I think you’re lying,” she accused him good-humoredly. “Tell me the truth—didn’t you send for it?”
He squirmed and colored.
“I did write to ’em—out of cur'osity.”
“Don’t forget that married men are not hired into this Outfit,” she reminded him, smiling. “I’d be sorry to lose you.”
“Gosh a'mighty!” he protested vigorously. “I ain’t no use fer women!”
The subject seemed to interest him, however, for he continued with animation:
“They’s always somethin’ about ’em I don’t like when I git to know ’em. I’ve knowed several real well—six or eight, altogether, countin’ two that run restauraws and one that done my warshin’. I got a kind o’ cur'osity about ’em, but I don’t take no personal interest in ’em. Why—Gosh—a'mighty—”
Bowers nearly kicked the stove over in his embarrassed denial.
Kate looked after him speculatively as he made his escape in a relief that was rather obvious. His protests had been too vehement to be convincing. Was he growing discontented? Didn’t her friendship satisfy him any longer?
There was something of the patient trust of a sheepdog in Bowers’s fidelity. “The queen can do no wrong,” was his attitude. Kate was so accustomed to his devotion and admiration that it gave her a twinge to think of sharing it.
She called after him as he was leaving:
“If you meet that freighter, tell him for me he’ll get his check if he gets in again as early as he did last trip. I won’t have a horse left with a sound pair of shoulders.”
“And I fergot to tell you that somebody’s ‘salted’ over in Burnt Basin,” he answered, turning back. “There’s a hunerd head o’ cattle eatin’ off the feed there. We’ll need that, later.”
“Tsch! tsch!” Kate frowned her annoyance at the information.
“Be sure and warn Neifkins’s herder as soon as you can get around to it,” she reminded him.
“You bet!” Bowers responded cheerfully, and went on.
Yes, she certainly would miss Bowers if anything happened that he left her, she thought as she turned inside to her market report and her letters.
It was days, however, before Bowers found the opportunity to go to Dibert’s camp with supplies and incidentally warn Neifkins’s herder, if he was still crowding. Now as he jolted towards the fluttering rag, thrust in a pile of rocks to mark the location of Dibert’s sheep-wagon, his thoughts, for once, were not of sheep or anything pertaining to them. He was, forsooth, composing for the matrimonial paper an advertisement which should be sufficiently attractive to draw a few answers without making himself in any way liable. He thought he might with safety say that he was a single gentleman, crowding forty, interested in the sheep industry, who would be pleased to correspond with a plump blonde of about thirty. He would not go so far as to say that his object was matrimony, since, of course, it was not, and the declaration might somehow prove incriminating. The Denver Post was full of suits for breach of promise and it behooved him to be wary.
Bowers felt like a fox, at the adroit wording of the advertisement, and chuckled at his cunning. He would notify the postmaster in Prouty to hold out his mail for him and thus escape further “joshing” from Kate, who would be sure to observe letters addressed to him in feminine writing.
The matrimonial paper had proved to be in the nature of a debauch to Bowers, who had worn it to tatters poring over its columns. The “petite blondes” and “dashing brunettes” who enumerated their charms without any noticeable lack of modesty furnished food for his imagination. He selected brides, as the description pleased him, with the prodigal abandon of a sultan.
However, the idea of an advertisement of his own, dismissed promptly at first, grew upon him. The thought of getting something in the mail besides a catalogue and the speeches of his congressman, of having something actually to look forward to, appealed to him strongly the more he considered it. Bowers craved a little of the warmth of romance in his drab existence and this was the only way he knew of obtaining it.
Smiling at the brash act he contemplated, Bowers threw the brake mechanically as the front wheels of the wagon sank into a chuck-hole and the jolt all but landed him on the broad rump of Old Peter.
As he raised his eyes he saw a sight charged with significance to one familiar with it.
Neifkins’s sheep were coming down the side of the mountain like a woolly avalanche. In the shape of a wedge with a leader at the point of it, they were running with a definite purp
ose and as though all the dogs in sheepdom were heeling them. The very thing against which he had come to warn the herders was about to happen—the band was making straight for Dibert’s sheep, which were still feeding peacefully on the hillside.
With an imprecation that was not flattering to either herder, Bowers wrapped the lines around the brake and leaped over the wheel to head them if it were possible. But they seemed possessed by all the imps of Satan, as they came on bleating, hurdling boulders, letting out another link of speed at Bowers’s frantic shoutings.
The leaders of the two bands were not fifty feet apart when Bowers, realizing he could not get between them, reached for a rock with a faint hope that he might hit what he aimed for. His prayer was answered, for the ewe in the lead of Neifkins’s band blinked and staggered as the rock bounced on her forehead. With a surprised bleat she turned and started back up the mountain, the rest of the band following.
The perspiration was streaming from under Bowers’s hat as his eyes searched the surrounding country. Not a sign of either herder! A cactus thorn that had penetrated his shoe leather did not improve Bowers’s temper. As he sat down to extract it, he considered whether it would be advisable to pound Dibert to a jelly when he found him or wait until they got a herder to replace him.
The man’s horse and saddle were missing in camp, Bowers discovered, so it was fairly safe to assume that he was over visiting Neifkins’s herder.
After Bowers had brought the supply wagon up and unloaded, he secured the horses and started on foot up the mountain.
From the summit he could see the white canvas top of Neifkins’s wagon gleaming among the quaking asp well down the other slope of the mountain. No one was visible, but as he got closer he saw Dibert’s horse tied to the wheel. Bowers felt “hos-tile.”
“What you doin’ here?” he demanded unceremoniously, as Dibert, hearing the rocks rattle, all but tumbled out of the wagon in his eagerness.
“I never was so tickled to see anybody in my life!” he cried.
“I’m about as pleased to see you as a stepmother welcomin’ home the first wife’s children,” Bowers replied, eyeing him coldly. “You ain’t answered my question.”
The herder nodded towards the wagon:
“He’s come down with somethin’. Clean off”—he touched his forehead—“I dassn’t leave him.”
Bowers immediately went into the wagon, where, after a look at the man mumbling on the bunk, he said laconically:
“Tick bite.”
The brown blotches, flushed forehead, and burning eyes told their own story.
As Bowers continued to look at the sick man, with his unshaven face and mop of oily black hair, so long that it was beginning to curl, Dibert commented:
“He ain’t what you’d call pretty—I’ve no idee he has to keep a rock handy to stone off the ladies.”
But Bowers was searching his mind in the endeavor to recall where he had seen those curious eyes with the muddy blue-gray iris. It came to him so suddenly that he shouted it:
“I know him! It’s the feller that blowed up my wagon! It’s the—that killed Mary!”
* * *
CHAPTER XXII
MULLENDORE WINS
Kate sat on the side bench listening to Mullendore’s disjointed mumblings. It was now well towards midnight and she had been sitting so for hours in the hope that he might have a lucid moment, but to the present her vigil had been unrewarded. Mostly his sentences were a jumble relative to trapping or sheep. Again, he lay inert with his eyes fixed upon her face in a meaningless stare.
Gusts of wind shook the wagon and swayed the kerosene lamp in its bracket, while a pounding rain beat a tattoo on the canvas cover. The tension was telling on Kate and a kind of nervous frenzy grew upon her as the time dragged by and she was no nearer learning what she had hoped to learn—than when she had had Mullendore brought to her camp.
She and Bowers had taken turns guarding him, and in growing despair she had watched him weaken, for each day the chances lessened that his mind would clear; and now Kate sat staring back into his unblinking eyes asking herself if it was possible that his crime was to be buried with him and she must go on the rest of her life bearing the onus of his guilt? The answer to every question she wanted to know was locked in the breast of the emaciated man lying on the bunk.
Bowers had proved to be correct in his diagnosis. The headache, backache, stiff neck and muscles with which Mullendore’s illness had started were the forerunner of brown blotches, fever and jangling nerves. A virulent case of spotted fever, it was pronounced by “Doc” Fussel, who doubted that he would recover.
“I’d knock him in the head and put him to bed with a shovel, if 'twere me,” Bowers had grumbled when he had helped move Pete Mullendore over to Kate’s headquarters.
“We’ve got to make him talk,” Kate had replied grimly. “We’ve got to get the truth somehow, Bowers, before he goes.”
Kate had no prearranged plan as to the course she would pursue if Mullendore became rational, but trusted to her instinct to guide her. She was certain only of one thing—that if he had a spark of manhood in him she would reach it somehow. Though he inspired in her a feeling which was akin to her repugnance for creeping things, and there were moments when something like her childish terror of the half-breed trapper returned, she was determined that there were no lengths to which she would not go, in the way of humbling her pride, to attain her end.
The clock, ticking loudly on its nail, said midnight, and still Mullendore, deaf and blind to all save the fantastic world into which he stared, mumbled incoherently.
At last, unable longer to sit quietly, Kate arose and leaned over him.
“Do you remember the Sand Coulee, Pete?—the Sand Coulee Roadhouse where you used to stop?” she asked softly.
His mumblings ceased as if her voice had penetrated his dulled ears. Then his lips moved:
“The Sand Coulee Roadhouse—the Sand Coulee—”
“Where you trapped. Remember the bear hides you brought in that spring Katie left?”
“The pack’s slippin’ agin—them saddles is far and away too narrer—and them green hides weigh like lead—” He ran his words together like a person talking in his sleep.
“You load too heavy—you load to break a horse’s back—Katie Prentice always told you that.”
A troubled frown grew between his eyes as though he was groping, vainly groping for some elusive thought.
“Katie told me—Katie Prentice—” His voice trailed off and ended in a breath.
She made a gesture of despair, but repeated persistently:
“She told you that you ought to be ashamed to pack a horse like that. Three hundred pounds, Pete Mullendore! You haven’t any feeling for a horse.”
“Killed Old Blue and left him on the trail. My, but you’re gittin’ growed up fast. Ain’t you got a kiss for Pete?”
She leaned closer.
“Would you do something for me if I kissed you—if Katie Prentice kissed you, Pete Mullendore?”
She repeated her words, speaking in a whisper, with careful distinctness.
“Will you tell Katie something that she wants to know, if she kisses you, Pete Mullendore?”
“Goin’ to take you back to the mountings next trip—learn you to tan hides good—with ashes and deer brains—all—same—squaw—make good squaw out o’ you—Katie—break your spirit first—you brat—lick you till I break your heart.”
Katie’s hands clenched.
“My mother wouldn’t let me go with you!”
A shadowy cunning crossed his face.
“You’ll go, when I say so. I got the whip-hand o’ Jezebel.”
“You’re bragging, Pete Mullendore. My mother’s not afraid of you.”
“Jest a line on a postal—ud bring the Old Man on a special. You’re more afraid of the Old Man than you are of dyin’—ain’t it the truth, Isabelle?” he mumbled.
“You’re only talking to hear yourself—yo
u wouldn’t know where to write. You’ve forgotten the name of the town where the 'Old Man’ lives. You can’t remember at all, can you, Pete?”
A frown lined his forehead while she waited with parted lips, afraid to move lest she start him rambling elsewhere again.
“You couldn’t say the name of the town where Katie Prentice’s father lives!”
Bending over him, rigid, tense, it seemed as though she would draw the answer from him through sheer will power.
He rolled his head fretfully to and fro, looking into her eyes with dilated pupils that burned in yellow bloodshot eyeballs. The wind rattled loose wagon bolts and scattered the ashes on the hearth in a puff, while Kate with a thumping heart waited for a response.
“Think!” she urged. “Say it out loud, Mullendore—the name of the town you’d put on the postal if you were going to write to the 'Old Man.'”
His lips moved to speak, and then somewhat as if the habit of secrecy asserted itself even in his delirium, he checked himself with an expression of obstinacy on his face.
Kate’s hand crept to his shoulder and clutched it tight.
“Tell me, Pete!” She shook him hard. “Say it—quick!”
He muttered thickly:
“What for?”
“You’re a liar, Pete Mullendore!” she taunted. “You don’t know. You haven’t any idea where Katie Prentice’s father lives!”
The gibe brought no response; yet slowly, so gradually that it was not possible to tell when it began, a look that was wholly rational came into his eyes. He blinked, touched his dry lips with his dry tongue and, turning his head, recognized her without surprise.
“Git me a drink.”
She held a dipper to his lips.
He fixed his eyes upon her face.
“I been sick?”
“Spotted fever.”
He stirred slightly.
“What’s this?” A weak astonishment was in his voice as he felt a rope across his arms and chest.
“To keep you in bed.”
“I been—loony?”
The Fighting Shepherdess Page 23
