When the herders, therefore, rounded up the sheep and started them moving south, the Happy Family speedily rebelled against that shuffling, nibbling, desultory pace that had kept them long, weary hours in the saddle with the other band. But it was Irish who first took measures to accelerate that pace.
He got down his rope and whacked the loop viciously down across the nearest gray back. The sheep jumped, scuttled away a few paces and returned to its nibbling progress. Irish called it names and whacked another.
After a few minutes he grew tired of swinging his loop and seeing it have so fleeting an effect, and pulled his gun. He fired close to the heels of a yearling buck that had more than once stopped to look up at him foolishly and blat, and the buck charged ahead in a panic at the noise and the spat of the bullet behind him.
“Hit him agin in the same place!” yelled Big Medicine, and drew his own gun. The Happy Family, at that high tension where they were ready for anything, caught the infection and began shooting and yelling like crazy men.
The effect was not at all what they expected. Instead of adding impetus to the band, as would have been the case if they had been driving cattle, the result was exactly the opposite. The sheep ran—but they ran to a common center. As the shooting went on they bunched tighter and tighter, until it seemed as though those in the center must surely be crushed flat. From an ambling, feeding company of animals, they become a lumpy gray blanket, with here and there a long, vacuous face showing idiotically upon the surface.
The herders grinned and drew together as against a common enemy—or as with a new joke to be discussed among themselves. The dogs wandered helplessly about, yelped half-heartedly at the woolly mass, then sat down upon their haunches and lolled red tongues far out over their pointed little teeth, and tilted knowing heads at the Happy Family.
“Look at the darned things!” wailed Pink, riding twice around the huddle, almost ready to shed tears of pure rage and helplessness. “Git outa that! Hi! Woopp-ee!” He fired again and again, and gave the range-old cattle-yell; the yell which had sent many a tired herd over many a weary mile; the yell before which had fled fat steers into the stockyards at shipping time, and up the chutes into the cars; the yell that had hoarsened many a cowpuncher’s voice and left him with a mere croak to curse his fate with; a yell to bring results—but it did not start those sheep.
The Happy Family, riding furiously round and round, fired every cartridge they had upon their persons; they said every improper thing they could remember or invent; they yelled until their eyes were starting from their sockets; they glued that band of sheep so tight together that dynamite could scarcely have pried them apart.
And the herders, sitting apart with grimy hands clasped loosely over hunched-up knees, looked on, and talked together in low tones, and grinned.
Irish glanced that way and caught them grinning; caught them pointing derisively, with heaving shoulders. He swore a great oath and made for them, calling aloud that he would knock those grins so far in that they would presently find themselves smiling wrong-side-out from the back of their heads.
Pink, overhearing him, gave a last swat at the waggling tail of a burrowing buck, and wheeled to overtake Irish and have a hand in reversing the grins. Big Medicine saw them start, and came bellowing up from the far side of the huddle like a bull challenging to combat from across a meadow. Big Medicine did not know what it was all about, but he scented battle, and that was sufficient. Cal Emmett and Weary, equally ignorant of the cause, started at a lope toward the trouble center.
It began to look as if the whole Family was about to fall upon those herders and rend them asunder with teeth and nails; so much so that the herders jumped up and ran like scared cottontails toward the rim of Denson coulee, a hundred yards or so to the west.
“Mamma! I wish we could make the sheep hit that gait and keep it,” exclaimed Weary, with the first laugh they had heard from him that day.
While he was still laughing, there was a shot from the ridge toward which they were running; the sharp, vicious crack of a rifle. The Happy Family heard the whistling hum of the bullet, singing low over their heads; quite low indeed; altogether too low to be funny. And they had squandered all their ammunition on the prairie sod, to hurry a band of sheep that flatly refused to hurry anywhere except under one another’s odorous, perspiring bodies.
From the edge of the coulee the rifle spoke again. A tiny geyser of dust, spurting up from the ground ten feet to one side of Cal Emmett, showed them all where the bullet struck.
“Get outa range, everybody!” yelled Weary, and set the example by tilting his rowels against Glory’s smooth hide, and heading eastward. “I like to be accommodating, all right, but I draw the line on standing around for a target while my neighbors practise shooting.”
The Happy Family, having no other recourse, therefore retreated in haste toward the eastern skyline. Bullets followed them, overtook them as the shooter raised his sights for the increasing distance, and whined harmlessly over their heads. All save one.
Chapter XIV. Happy Jack
Big Medicine, Irish and Pink, racing almost abreast, heard a scream behind them and pulled up their horses with short, stiff-legged plunges. A brown horse overtook them; a brown horse, with Happy Jack clinging to the saddle-horn, his body swaying far over to one side. Even as he went hurtling past them his hold grew slack and he slumped, head foremost, to the ground. The brown horse gave a startled leap away from him and went on with empty stirrups flapping.
They sprang down and lifted him to a less awkward position, and Big Medicine pillowed the sweat-dampened, carroty head in the hollow of his arm. Those who had been in the lead looked back startled when the brown horse tore past them with that empty saddle; saw what had happened, wheeled and galloped back. They dismounted and stood silently grouped about poor, ungainly Happy Jack, lying there limp and motionless in Big Medicine’s arms. Not one of them remembered then that there was a man with a rifle not more than two hundred yards away; or, if they did, they quite forgot that the rifle might be dangerous to themselves. They were thinking of Happy Jack.
Happy Jack, butt of all their jokes and jibes; Happy the croaker, the lugubrious forecaster of trouble; Happy Jack, the ugliest, the stupidest, the softest-hearted man of them all. He had “betched” there would be someone killed, over these Dot sheep; he had predicted trouble of every conceivable kind; and they had laughed at him, swore at him, lied to him, “joshed” him unmercifully, and kept him in a state of chronic indignation, never dreaming that the memory of it would choke them and strike them dumb with that horrible, dull weight in their chests with which men suffer when a woman would find the relief of weeping.
“Where’s he hurt?” asked Weary, in the repressed tone which only tragedy can bring into a man’s voice, and knelt beside Big Medicine.
“I dunno—through the lungs, I guess; my sleeve’s gitting soppy right under his shoulder.” Big Medicine did not bellow; his voice was as quiet as Weary’s.
Weary looked up briefly at the circle of staring faces. “Pink, you pile onto Glory and go wire for a doctor. Try Havre first; you may get one up on the nine o’ clock train. If you can’t, get one down on the ‘leven-twenty, from Great Falls. Or there’s Benton—anyway, git one. If you could catch MacPherson, do it. Try him first, and never mind a Havre doctor unless you can’t get MacPherson. I’d rather wait a couple of hours longer, for him. I’ll have a rig—no, you better get a team from Jim. They’ll be fresh, and you can put ‘em through. If you kill ‘em,” he added grimly, “we can pay for ‘em.” He had his jack-knife out, and was already slashing carefully the shirt of Happy