Hardly had Chapuli mounted the ridge before every head was raised; the swarthy Mexicans unslung their guns with a flourish, and held them at a ready. Yet for half an hour the lone horseman sat there like a statue, and if he resented their coming or saw the dust of other bands behind, he made no sign. Even when the guard of men passed beneath him, craning their necks uneasily, he still remained silent and immobile, like a man who has councils of his own or leads a force behind.
The leader of the vanguard of the sheep was a white man, and not unversed in the principles of war, for after trailing safely through the box of the cañon –– where a single rock displaced would kill a score of sheep, and where the lone horseman had he so willed could have potted half of the invaders from the heights –– he turned his herd up a side cañon to the west and hastily pitched his camp on a ridge. As the heat of the day came on, the other bands up the cañon stopped also, and when the faint smoke showed Hardy that the camp rustlers were cooking dinner, he turned and rode for the leader’s camp.
Dinner was already served –– beans, fried mutton, and bread, spread upon a greasy canvas –– and the hungry herders were shovelling it down with knives in their own primitive way when Hardy rode up the slope. As he came into camp the Chihuahuanos dropped their plates, reached for their guns, and stood in awkward postures of defence, some wagging their big heads in a braggartly defiance, others, their courage waning, grinning in the natural shame of the peasant. In Hardy they recognized a gentleman of categoría –– and he never so much as glanced at them as he reined in his spirited horse. His eyes were fixed upon the lone white man, their commander, who stood by the fire regarding him with cold suspicion, and to whom he bowed distantly.
“Good-morning,” he said, by way of introduction, and the sheepman blinked his eyes in reply.
“Whose sheep are those?” continued Hardy, coming to the point with masterful directness, and once more the boss sheepman surveyed him with suspicion.
“Mine,” he said, and Hardy returned his stare with a glance which, while decorously veiled, indicated that he knew he lied. The man was a stranger to him, rather tall and slender, with drawn lips and an eye that never wavered. His voice was tense with excitement and he kept his right thumb hooked carelessly into the corner of his pocket, not far from the grip of a revolver. As soon as he spoke Hardy knew him.
“You are Mr. Thomas, aren’t you?” he inquired, as if he had no thought of trouble. “I believe I met you once, down in Moroni.”
“Ump!” grunted Mr. Thomas unsociably, and at that moment one of the Mexicans, out of awkwardness, dropped his gun. As he stooped to pick it up a slow smile crept over the cowman’s lips, a smile which expressed polite amusement along with a measured contempt –– and the boss herder was stung with a nameless shame at the false play.
“Put up them guns, you dam’ gawky fools!” he yelled in a frenzy of rage. “Put ’em up, I say. This man ain’t goin’ to eat ye!” And though the poor browbeaten Chihuahuanos understood not a word of English they felt somehow that they had been overzealous and shuffled back to their blankets, like watchdogs that had been rebuked.
“Now,” said the sheepman, taking his hand from his gun, “what can I do for you, Mr. Hardy?”
“Well,” responded Hardy, “of course there are several things you might do to accommodate me, but maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me how you got in here, just for instance?”
“Always glad to ’commodate –– where I can, of course,” returned the sheepman grimly. “I came in over the top of them Four Peaks yonder.”
“Um,” said Hardy, glancing up at the rocky walls. “Then you must’ve had hooks on your eyebrows, for sure. I suppose the rest of the family is coming, too! And, by the way, how is my friend, Mr. Swope?”
He appended this last with an artless smile, quite lacking in bitterness, but somehow the boss herder felt himself discredited by the inquiry, as if he were consorting with thieves. It was the old shame of the sheepman, the shame which comes to the social outcast, and burns upon the cheek of the dishonored bastard, but which is seared deepest into the heart of the friendless herder, the Ishmaelite of the cow-country, whose hand is against every man and every man’s against him. Hunger and thirst he can endure, and the weariness of life, but to have all men turn away from him, to answer him grudgingly, to feed him at their table, but refuse themselves to eat, this it is which turns his heart to bitterness and makes him a man to be feared. As Thomas had looked at this trim young cowboy, smooth-shaven and erect, sitting astride a blooded horse which snorted and pawed the ground delicately, and then had glanced at the low and brutal Mexicans with whom his lot was cast, a blind fury had swept over him, wreaking its force upon his own retainers; and now, when by implication he was classed with Jim Swope, he resented it still more bitterly.
“Dam’fino,” he answered sullenly. “Haven’t seen ’im for a month.”
“Oh, isn’t he with you this trip?” asked Hardy, in surprise. “I had hoped that I might find him up here.” There was a suggestion of irony in his words which was not lost upon the mayordomo, but Thomas let the remark pass in silence.
“Perhaps his brother Jasper is along,” ventured Hardy. “No? Well, that’s Jim’s earmark on those sheep, and I know it. What’s the matter?”
“Matter with what?” growled Thomas morosely.
“Why, with Jim, of course. I thought after the pleasant times we had together last Spring he’d be sure to come around. In fact,” he added meaningly, “I’ve been looking for him.”
At this naive statement, the sheepman could not restrain a smile.
“You don’t know Jim as well as I do,” he said, and there was a suggestion of bitterness in his voice which Hardy was not slow to note.
“Well, perhaps not,” he allowed; “but you know, and I know, that this is no pleasure trip you’re on –– in fact, it’s dangerous, and I never thought that Jim Swope would send a man where he was afraid to go himself. Now I’ve got nothing against you, Mr. Thomas, and of course you’re working for him; but I ask you, as a man, don’t you think, after what I’ve done for him, that Jim Swope ought to come along himself if he wants to sheep me out?
“I’ve fed him, and I’ve fed all his herders and all his friends; I’ve grained his horses when they were ga’nted down to a shadow because his own sheep had cleaned up the feed; I’ve made him welcome to my house and done everything I could for him; and all I asked in return was that he would respect this upper range. He knows very well that if his sheep go through here this Fall our cattle will die in the Winter, and he knows that there is plenty of feed out on The Rolls where our cows can’t go, and yet he sends you in where he’s scared to go himself, just to hog our last piece of good feed and to put us out of business. I asked him down in Moroni if he thought a cowman had a right to live, and he dodged the question as if he was afraid he’d say something.”
He stopped abruptly and looked out over the country toward Hidden Water, while the Mexicans watched him furtively from beneath their slouched hats.
“Expecting some friends?” inquired Thomas, with a saturnine grin.
Hardy shook his head. “No. I came out here alone, and I left my gun in camp. I haven’t got a friend within forty miles, if that’s what you mean. I suppose you’ve got your orders, Mr. Thomas, but I just want to talk this matter