Chancing to glance over his shoulder and raise his eyes to the side of the mountain, which was separated from the one at the back of the bar by a canon, a smile of pleasure suddenly lighted Bruce"s dark face, and he stopped rocking.
"Old Felix and his family!" he chuckled. Whimsically he raised both arms aloft in a gesture of welcome. "Ha--they see me!"
The band of mountain sheep picking their way down the rough side stopped short and looked.
"It"s all of a month since they"ve been down for salt." Then his face fell. "By George, we"re shy on salt!"
He turned to his rocker, and the sheep started down again, with Old Felix in the lead, and behind him two yearlings, two ewes, and the spring lamb.
Their visits were events in Bruce"s uneventful life. He felt as flattered by their confidence as one feels by the preference of a child. His liking for animals amounted to a pa.s.sion, and he had been absurdly elated the first time he had enticed them to the salt, which he had placed on a flat rock not far from the cabin door. For the first few visits their soft black eyes, with their amber rims, had followed him timorously, and they were ready to run at any unusual movement. Then, one afternoon, they unexpectedly lay down in the soft dirt which banked the cabin, and he was so pleased that he chuckled softly to himself all the time they stayed.
Now he laid down his dipper, and started toward the house.
"I"ll just take a look, anyhow, and see how much there is."
He eyed uncertainly the small bag of table salt which he took from the soap-box cupboard nailed to the wall.
"There isn"t much of it, that"s a fact. I guess they"ll have to wait."
He slammed the door of the improvised cupboard hard upon its leather hinges made of a boot-top, and turned away.
"Aw, dog-gone it!" he cried, stopping short. "I haven"t got the heart to disappoint the poor little devils." He turned back and took the salt.
The sheep were just coming out of the canon between the mountains when Bruce stepped through the cabin door. Old Felix stopped and stood like a statue--Old Felix, the Methuselah of the Bitter Roots, who wore the most magnificent pair of horns that ever grew on a mountain sheep. Solid and perfect they were, all of nineteen and three-quarters inches at the base and tapering to needle points. Of incredible weight and size, he carried them as lightly on his powerful neck as though they were but the sh.e.l.ls of horns. Now, as he stood with his tremulous nozzle outstretched, sniffing, cautious, wily, old patriarch that he was, he made a picture which, often as Bruce had seen it, thrilled him through and through.
Behind Old Felix were the frisking lamb and the mild-eyed ewes. They would not come any closer, but they did not run.
"It wouldn"t have lasted but a few days longer anyhow," Bruce murmured half apologetically as he divided the salt and spread it on the rock. He added: "I suppose Slim will be sore."
He returned to his work at the river, and the sheep licked the rock bare; then they lay down in leisurely fashion beside the cabin, their narrow jaws wagging ludicrously, their eyelids drooping sleepily, secure in their feeling that all was well.
Bruce had thrust a cold biscuit in the pocket of his shirt, and this he crumbled for the little bush birds that twittered and chirped in the thicket of rosebushes which had pushed up through the rocks near the sand bank.
They perked their heads and looked at him inquiringly when it was gone.
"My Gawd, fellers," he demanded humorously, "don"t you ever get filled up?"
As he rocked he watched the water ouzel teetering on a rock in the river, joyously shaking from its back the spray which deluged it at intervals. Bruce observed.
"I"d rather you"d be doing that than me, with the water as cold as it is and," with a glance at the fast-clouding sky, "getting colder every minute."
The sheep sensed the approaching storm, and started up the gulch to their place of shelter under a protecting rim rock close to the peak.
When they were no longer there to watch and think about, Bruce"s thoughts rambled from one subject to another, as do the minds of lonely persons.
While the water and sand were flowing evenly over the ap.r.o.n he fell to wishing he had a potato. How long had it been--he threw back his head to calculate--how many weeks since he had looked a potato in the eye?
Ha!--not a bad joke at that. He wished he might have said that aloud to some one. He never joked with Slim any more.
He frowned a little as he bent over the grizzly and crushed a small lump between his thumb and finger. He wandered if there was clay coming into the pay streak. Clay gathered up the "colors" it touched like so much quicksilver. Dog-gone, if it wasn"t one thing it was another. If the tunnel wasn"t caving in, he struck a bowlder, and if there wasn"t a bowlder there was----
"Bang! bang! Bang! bang!" Then a fusillade of shots. Bruce straightened up in astonishment and stared at the mountainside.
"Boom! boom!" The shots were m.u.f.fled. They were shooting in the canon.
Who was it? What was it? Suddenly he understood. The _sheep_! _His_ sheep! They were killing Old Felix and the rest! Magnificent Old Felix--the placid ewes--the frisking lamb! What a bombardment! That wasn"t sport; "twas slaughter!
His dark skin reddened, and his eyes blazed in excitement. He flung the dipper from him and started toward the cabin on a run. They were killing tame sheep--sheep that he had taught to lose their fear of man. Then his footsteps slackened and he felt half sick as he remembered that the big-game season was open and he had no legal right to interfere.
Bruce had not seen a human face save Slim"s since the end of May, and it now was late in October, but he had no desire to meet the hunters and hear them boast of their achievement. Heavy-hearted, he wondered which ones they got.
The hunters must have come over the old trail of the Sheep-eater Indians--the one which wound along the backbone of the ridge. Rough going, that. They were camped up there, and they must have a big pack outfit, he reasoned, to get so far from supplies at this season of the year.
He tried to work again, but found himself upset.
"Dog-gone," he said finally. "I"ll slip up the canon and see what they"ve done. They may have left a wounded sheep for the cougars to finish--if they did I can pack it down."
Bruce climbed for an hour or more up the bowlder-choked canon before his experienced eye saw signs of the hunters in two furrows where a pair of heels had plowed down a bank of dirt. The canon, as he knew, ended abruptly in a perpendicular wall, and he soon saw that the frightened sheep must have run headlong into the trap. He found the prints of their tiny, flying hoofs, the indentations where the sharp points had dug deep as they leaped. Empty sh.e.l.ls, more sh.e.l.ls--they must have been b.u.m shots--and then a drop of blood upon a rock. The drops came thicker, a stream of blood, and then the slaughter pen. They had been shot down against the wall without a single chance for their lives. The entire band, save Old Felix, had been exterminated. Their limp and still-bleeding carca.s.ses, riddled and torn by soft-nosed bullets, lay among the rocks. Wanton slaughter it was, without even the excuse of the necessity of meat, since only a yearling"s hind quarters were gone. Not even the plea of killing for trophies could be offered, since the heads of the ewes were valueless.
Bruce straightened the neck of a ewe as she lay with her head doubled under her. It hurt him to see her so. He looked into her dull, glazed eyes which had been so soft and bright as they had followed him at work a little more than an hour before. He ran his hand over a sheep"s white "blanket," now red with blood, and stood staring down into the innocent face of the diminutive lamb.
Then he raised his eyes in the direction in which he fancied the hunters had gone. They shone black and vindictive through the mist of tears which blinded him as he cried in a shaking voice:
"You butchers! You game hogs! I hope you starve and freeze back there in the hills, as you deserve!"
A snow cloud, drab, thick, sagging ominously, moved slowly from the northeast, and on a jutting point, sharply outlined against the sky, motionless as the rock beneath him, stood Old Felix, splendid, solitary, looking off across the sea of peaks in which he was alone.
III
"THE GAME BUTCHERS"
"Ain"t this an awful world!" By this observation Uncle Bill Griswold, standing on a narrow shelf of rock, with the sheep"s hind quarters on his back, meant merely to convey the opinion that there was a great deal of it.
The panting sportsman did not answer. T. Victor Sprudell was looking for some place to put his toe.
"There"s a hundred square miles over there that I reckon there never was a white man"s foot on, and they say that the West has been went over with a fine-tooth comb. Wouldn"t it make you laugh?"
Mr. Sprudell looked far from laughter as, by placing a foot directly in front of the other, he advanced a few inches at a time until he reached the side of his guide. It _was_ an awful world, and the swift glance he had of it as he raised his eyes from the toes of his boots and looked off across the ocean of peaks gave him the feeling that he was about to fall over the edge of it. His pink, cherubic face turned saffron, and he shrank back against the wall. He had been in perilous places before, but this was the worst yet.
"There might be somethin" good over yonder if "twas looked into right,"
went on Uncle Bill easily, as he stood with the ball of his feet hanging over a precipice, staring speculatively. "But it"ll be like to stay there for a while, with these young bucks doin" all their prospectin"
around some sheet-iron stove. There"s n.o.body around the camps these days that ain"t afraid of work, of gittin" lost, of sleepin" out of their beds of nights. Prospectin" in underbrush and down timber is no cinch, but it never stopped me when I was a young feller around sixty or sixty-five." A dry, clicking sound as Sprudell swallowed made the old man look around. "Hey--what"s the matter? Aire you dizzy?"
Dizzy! Sprudell felt he was going to die. If his shaking knees should suddenly give way beneath him he could see, by craning his neck slightly, the exact spot where he was going to land. His chest, plump and high like a woman"s, rose and fell quickly with his hard breathing, and the barrel of his rifle where he clasped it was damp with nervous perspiration. His small mouth, with its full, red lips shaped like the traditional cupid"s bow, was colorless, and there was abject terror in his infantile blue eyes. Yet superficially, T. Victor Sprudell was a brave figure--picturesque as the drawing for a gunpowder "ad," a man of fifty, yet excellently well preserved.
A plaid cap with a visor fore and aft matched his roomy knickerbockers, and canvas leggings encased his rounded calves. His hob-nailed shoes were the latest thing in "field boots," and his hunting coat was a credit to the sporting house that had turned it out. His cartridge belt was new and squeaky, and he had the last patents in waterproof match safes and skinning knives. That goneness at his stomach, and the strange sensations up and down his spine, seemed incongruous in such valorous trappings. But he had them unmistakably, and they kept him cringing close against the wall as though he had been glued.
It was not entirely the thought of standing there that paralyzed him; it was the thought of going on. If accidentally he should step on a rolling rock what a gap there would be in the social, financial, and political life of Bartlesville, Indiana! It was at this point in his vision of the things that _might_ happen to him that he had gulped.