The big range, p.5
The Big Range, page 5
I went to the front bars and whistled. Eakins came and let me out and led to the front room, locking the door again behind us. He handed me the gun from the desk and I slipped it into the holster.
“Changed your mind about the coffee?” he said.
“No,” I said. I went outside and swung up on the gray and started home. The sun was a little higher up the sky and the air was warming. I took off the jacket and folded it and tucked it under the front of the saddle.
Yes, I gave Miley Bennett the gun.
But, then, I knew what he would do with it.
I guess you’ll have to let me tell this in my own way. There’s no one else can tell it, not so it comes out right. I guess I’ll just have to hope you understand what I mean. And how I felt.
The first time I saw Miley Bennett he was jogging steadily along my inner fence line on his burro. Small as he was, he was oversize on the tiny beast. I had just finished washing the supper dishes, plate and cup, and stepped out on the porch of my two-room frame ranch house and I saw him, legs almost dragging, head bouncing.
He came right up to the house, slid off the burro, stepped on the porch, straightened the whole five-foot—well, maybe five-foot two or three of him and grinned at me.
“The name is Bennett,” he said. “Miley Bennett. Have you got any tobacco about the place?”
I had. And I had enough politeness or plain curiosity to ask this pint-size package of queer humanity in to smoke a pipeful with me. Things got mighty lonesome when your nearest neighbor was some two miles away and you were working hard to get a place in shape so you could have it ready and stock it before winter came down out of the mountains.
He was a talker, the first and only of his kind I ever knew to be. In half an hour I had a good handful of facts.
He was a sheepherder. He was herding sheep for one of the Association outfits with headquarters at Thermopolis. They had outfitted him and sent him off with a flock of eight hundred to graze them all spring and summer on government range. He was new at it then, so new that he took the job. It was four months later now, and he had worked his way, as near as I could judge from his talk, to a valley five miles above my place. The supply wagon that was supposed to stop by every six weeks or so was overdue. He had run out of tobacco two days ago and stood it as long as he could. He had left the sheep bedded for the night with the dogs and poked the burro into taking him in search of some he could borrow and someone who might bring him a supply from a next trip to the nearest town.
Some queer instinct must have headed him in my direction, kept him from the other places he might have hit. He certainly was an innocent one.
Half an hour seemed to be all he would allow himself. Call it one good pipeful. With a pokebag packed from my canister in his pocket and a promise I would have a supply soon in his mind, he became fidgety and stopped looking straight at me when he talked.
“Got to be going,” he blurted suddenly. “Got to be getting back quick as I can.”
“It’ll be full dark before you get there,” I said. “Are you sure you can find the way?”
He was at the door. “I’ll find it. Or Beulah will. She can always find her way back to camp.” He looked at me quickly and away. “You see, I’ve got to. The sheep are depending on me. I told them I’d be back early.”
I listened to the soft little hoofbeats dropping away in the dusk and I thought of that funny frog-faced little man riding his burro through strange country in the darkness. And I began to realize just how innocent he was.
He probably thought he had a good job, was getting good pay. The pay part at least would be right. Members of the Sheepmen’s Association were paying good wages for herders—when they could get them. They had to. Few men who knew what was what would take on the work at any price. Not in this section of the newly organized State where the cattlemen had been running beef stock, mostly on wide open range, for plenty of years and had dominant influence all along the line. Most cattlemen hated sheep and anyone who had anything to do with them, claimed they ruined the range. Sheep ate the grass, crown and all, right down to the roots, not just cropping the way cattle did, and they bunched together so closely and worked over the ground so thoroughly that when they moved on it was mighty bare, knocked out for the rest of the season. Some ranchers said they left a bad smell in the ground so that cattle would never go back where they had grazed. I think that was exaggerated, but shows how far some men would go in their thinking.
Sheep didn’t bother me. I was a newcomer to this Territory with some fairly new ideas. I knew the open range wouldn’t last, would be taken over by homesteaders and carved up by the creeping fence lines. I had seen it all happen before back in the Dakotas before I moved on to this new State of Wyoming. I knew you would make out better in the long run with a small herd held by fences, with your own pastures you could improve. You could control your breeding and feed right in the winter, get better grade stuff with hardly any losses. I had my land and my first fences. A consignment of low-slung Herefords would be along in about a month. The only thing I’d want from the open range would be some hay to add to that I’d clip from my own pasture. Sheep didn’t worry me any.
They did worry the old-style ranchers. Worried them and made them mad. They had been running cattle in their own way a long time and didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t keep right on as they always had. These men and their kind controlled the State Government. It didn’t mean a thing to them that the free grass belonged to the Federal Government and that the Federal laws made no distinction between cattle and sheep. They did, and they intended to enforce it, and they had been finding ways. Sheep had been killed and flocks stampeded. I knew of two herders found dead back in the hills and several more beaten badly. Miley Bennett’s was the only flock I had heard about anywhere around that year.
A week went past and he didn’t appear. There was a three-pound can of tobacco waiting for him in the kitchen. It represented a cash outlay to me and I wanted to collect. Maybe that was why or maybe I was just plain curious again. Anyway, I saddled the gray late one afternoon, tied the can in a bag behind the saddle, tucked the Winchester in the worn scabbard, and rode out looking for him. I found him about where I figured. He was warming a can of beans over a wood fire and they smelled good and tasted the same.
The sheep were a hundred yards away where the ground was packed like they had been spending the night there for quite a while. They were in a tight bunch with two dogs patrolling, one old and knowing and taking this easy, the other a youngster wasting energy and acting excited despite a noticeable limp. Miley was haggard like a man needing sleep. He seemed pleased to see me and not just for the tobacco.
“What’s wrong with the dog?” I said when the coffee was in the tin cup he handed me.
“Murderers,” he said. “Damn sneaking murderers. Wolves. They got three of my sheep the other night and damn near killed the one dog. The other one’s a coward, must have stayed out of reach.”
“He’s not a coward,” I said. “He’s sensible. A wolf can kill a dog in about one slice. Have you seen them?”
“You bet I’ve seen them,” he said. “Three of them. They came sneaking back the next night, last night. Not close enough for a shot, though. They won’t get any more of my sheep. I won’t let them. But I thought they weren’t ever around this time of year.”
“They come down out of the timber sometimes,” I said. “There’s a bounty on them. You want me to stay and see if we can scare them back tonight? Two guns are better than one.” I was thinking of my own cattle coming. Wolves had a taste for calves. I was thinking he wouldn’t be much good at this kind of thing and of the small shot-gun leaning against a nearby rock. A wolf would just laugh at a nuisance like that. He must have known what I was thinking.
“Hey, would you?” he said. “But let me show you something. I use that shotgun for snakes.” He threw the empty bean can as far as he could out on the sod. He crawled into his little pup tent and came out with an old Army Hotchkiss. “I’ve been practicing ever since I started this job,” he said.
He hit that can, a jagged chunk of tin bouncing farther away each time, four shots out of the five.
“You’ll do,” I said. “If you can do the same when your sights are down on a wolf.”
He could all right. And he could lie absolutely quiet on his belly behind a boulder, patient as you had to be often in this country, for more than two hours on the windward side of the flock, which was the way the wolves would come. He drilled his clean, just behind the shoulder, and it dropped in its tracks. Mine stumbled with a broken leg and scrambled up and I had to pump in another shot quickly or it would have gotten away. The third one was off so fast, belly low and over a knoll, that we didn’t have a chance at it.
“You won’t have any trouble with that last one,” I said when we had the ears and were back where the dogs were tied. “It’ll head for the timber now.”
Miley was so excited he could hardly settle down. He had to go over to his sheep and tell them all about it before he could sit by the fire I had got going again. Then he talked like he had a lot of words dammed inside him that had to break loose. I filled in behind the facts I already knew.
He was born and grew up back East in the factory badlands of New Jersey across the Hudson from the human beehives of Manhattan. His father was a factory hand and he was one of nine kids, and they rarely had full meals, and they lived on the streets as much as they did in the old tenement. He was the runt of the family. I guess he was slapped around plenty by his brothers as well as the neighborhood gang because he pulled out when he was sixteen and went on his own, setting pins in a bowling alley and living in a loft room the operator let him use.
After that he must have had a couple of dozen different jobs in nearly as many years, none of them amounting to much. He was just a little guy lost among the thousands of others, puttering through life and getting slapped around always by the bigger guys. The best job he ever had, he seemed to think, was as second bartender in a Newark saloon. His size didn’t matter there. The other man was a husky brute who took a liking for him and could handle any trouble in the place without any help. Miley was working there when the coughing started and the doctor told him he’d not last long if he didn’t head for a high dry climate.
The doctor meant some sanatorium. Miley had no money for anything like that, never had and never expected to have. It was the big bartender gave him the push. Fired him and handed him an extra week’s pay and told him to keep going West till he reached the mountains, real mountains past the Mississippi and the prairie States.
He had reached Cheyenne the spring before, panhandling and picking up odd work on the way. A haying job nearly killed him, but carried him through the summer. Dishwashing in a scrubby hotel took him through the winter—and started the coughing again. The herding offer, spotted in a weekly paper, struck him like a miracle out of the blue. As near as I could gather, he had some silly notions about the noble life of the shepherd out in the great open spaces, all tied in somehow with some pictures he remembered from an early schoolbook. He still had them and he was proud that he hadn’t lost a lamb all through the spring season.
He sat there by the fire talking and finally he talked himself out. The moon, a clear three-quarters moon, climbed over the far horizon and silvered the land, making pools of shadow between the rolls of the valley floor and shifting patterns of light and dark on the hills in front of the solid black of the soaring mountains beyond. The fire was only a few embers and I was trying to decide whether to saddle the gray or borrow one of his blankets for the night when he spoke.
“It’s big, ain’t it?” he said.
That was what it was. Big. You could use a lot of fancy words and never get anywhere as close as with that one little word.
“Makes a man feel big too,” he said.
I stood up and started to walk around. Here was a funny frog-faced little runt from the worrying squirrel-cages of the eastern seaboard telling me for the first time, making me realize for the first time, why I was out in this Territory myself, why I had kept moving on out of the flat States till I found this Big Horn country.
I came back by the fire and I made my try. I tried to tell him what he was up against bringing sheep into this cow country and grazing them on the open range. I tried to tell him how the cowmen felt.
“That’s all kind of silly,” he said. “Look.” He crawled into his pup tent again and scrooged around and came out with a paper pamphlet in his hand. “That’s from the Government,” he said. “You can’t read it now, but I’ll tell you about it. It’s all about sheep raising. It says sheep eat things close down to the ground all right. But it says if you don’t let them eat too long any one place, the grass comes back better than ever the next spring. That’s the way I’m doing with them. It says that country like this up here is better for sheep than cows, anyway, because they’ll eat stuff the cows won’t and get more from every acre. It says they’re more productive on rough range because they’re two-crop animals, wool as well as lambs. Why, these cowmen you talk about would be better off if they took to sheep themselves.”
“I won’t argue that,” I said. “I don’t know enough. I just happen to like cows. They smell cleaner and they’ve got more sense.”
“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said. “Sheep don’t smell bad after you get used to it. It’s a kind of a warm nice smell on a chilly night. They’ve got lots of sense. They pick a leader and follow him. They get to know you and depend on you and do what you say. They’ll listen to you and sometimes you get to understanding what they’re saying back.”
“Sounds crazy to me,” I said. “But that’s outside the argument. If you’ve got any sense yourself, you’ll pack that burro and start moving yourself and your talking sheep far away.”
“That’s what the other fellow told me,” he said. “Only he told me meaner.”
“What other fellow?” I said.
“A big fellow on a black horse,” he said. “They stopped by here two days ago.”
“Must be Jeff Clayton,” I said. “He has a lot of cattle on the range. He’s not one to play games with. Are you taking his advice?”
“No,” he said. “The man who hired me told me to come up this way and stay till September. My sheep aren’t hurting anybody. I don’t believe all that you’ve been telling me. People can’t really act that way up here where it’s so big. There’s plenty of room for us all.”
I was so peeved at the thick-headed little fool that I saddled the gray in the dark and rode home even though it was past midnight when I got there.
A couple of days later I took the ears into town and collected the bounty and for some reason on the way back Miley’s share was burning a hole in my pocket, so I kept right on going. About noon when I headed into the valley I was surprised to see sheep scattered in little bunches in every direction.
The gray didn’t like it much, and the sheep were slow and stupid, running in little spurts everywhere but where you wanted them to go, but I began herding them up the valley towards his camp. About half a mile coming over a knoll I saw him. He and the dogs were gathering them in, herding them into a single flock again. He was plodding along on foot and the dogs were racing after strays. He waved at me, grim-faced, and plodded on, and I kept my side closing in till the flock was about complete.
“What happened this time?” I said, dismounting to rest the gray.
“Horses,” he said. “Lots of them. Wild ones. Worse murderers than those wolves. Before I got up this morning they came tearing. Ran right through my sheep. They trampled nine of them.”
I pointed to one sheep whose left foreleg was dangling. “Better shoot that one,” I said. “It won’t be able to travel.”
He looked at me like he thought I was out of my mind. “Shoot her? Shoot one of my sheep? I’ll fix that leg with a splint. What do you mean travel?”
“If you’ve got a grain of sense,” I said, “you’ll be heading out of here now. There are no wild horses around here. Half-wild, maybe, but you’ll find every one has a brand. And not even wild ones would stampede through a herd of sheep by themselves. Come on, I’ll show you.”
We followed the trail of the hooves back up the valley a ways and at last off to one side a bit I found what I was looking for.
“See, Miley,” I said, “that horse had shoes. It’s being worked. Someone was riding it. Hunt around some more and probably we’d find more tracks.”
He didn’t say a word all the way back to his camp. He dug through his stuff and pulled out a small short miner’s shovel.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“I’m going to bury my sheep like I did the others,” he said.
“You’re the worst kind of a fool,” I said. “You don’t have to bury things out here. The buzzards take care of that. With that toy in this ground it would take you two whole days.”
“No buzzards are getting my sheep,” he said. He looked up at me, the whole little length of him shaking. “We’re not getting out of here neither. I was pushed around enough back home. I’m not going to be pushed around here. We’re going into that canyon on up there where there’s good grass for a couple of weeks at least and I’m camping at the way in and nothing’s going to get in to bother my sheep. Not with me there. I’ll stay awake every night if I have to.”
I quit trying then. I gave him his share of the bounty and I rode home, and I felt I had to call him plenty of hard names to myself all the way.
What happened after that isn’t easy to tell. I can put it together fairly well because I knew Miley Bennett and heard him talk. The few words they got out of him at the trial helped some. What one of Jeff Clayton’s men told, talking slow because of the bullet-hole in his shoulder, didn’t mean much because he had to cover himself, but parts of it fitted the rest. Add all this to what I figured when I went over the ground the morning after it happened and you can fill in the whole thing. As I said before, I’ll have to tell it in my own way. Small parts may be wrong, but the substance has to be right.
