Happy Jack continued to eye the three distrustfully. Too often had he been the victim of their humor for him now to believe implicitly in their ignorance. It was too good to be real, it seemed to him. Still, if by any good luck it were real, he hated to think what would happen if they ever found out the truth. He eased the clothing cautiously away from his smarting back, and stared hard into a coulee.
“It was likely some sheepherder gone clean nutty,” mused Irish.
“Well, the most uh them wouldn’t have far to go,” ventured Happy Jack, thinking of the Swede.
“What we ought to do,” said Pink, keen for the chase, “is for the whole bunch of us to come down here and round him up. Wonder if we couldn’t talk Chip into laying off for a day or so; there’s no herd to hold. I sure would like to get a good look at him.”
“Somebody ought to take him in,” observed Irish longingly. “He ain’t safe, running around loose like that. There’s no telling what he might do. The way them campers read his brand, he’s plumb dangerous to meet up with alone. It’s lucky you didn’t run onto him, Happy.”
“Well, I didn’t,” growled Happy Jack. “And what’s more, I betche there ain’t any such person.”
“Don’t call us liars to our faces, Happy,” Weary reproved. “We told yuh, a dozen times, that we saw him ourselves. Yuh might be polite enough to take our word for it.”
“Aw, gwan!” Happy Jack grunted, still not quite sure of how much—or how little—they knew. While they discussed further the wild man, he watched furtively for the surreptitious lowering of lids that would betray their insincerity. When they appealed to him for an opinion of some phase of the subject, he answered with caution. He tried to turn the talk to his experiences on the Shonkin range, and found the wild man cropping up with disheartening persistency. He shifted often in the saddle, because of the deep sunburns which smarted continually and maddeningly. He wondered if the boys had used all of that big box of carbolic salve which used to be kept in a corner of the mess-box; and was carbolic salve good for sun-blisters? He told himself gloomily that if there was any of it left, and if it were good for his ailment, there wouldn’t be half enough of it, anyway. He estimated unhappily that he would need about two quarts.
When they reached camp, the welcome of Happy Jack was overshadowed and made insignificant by the strange story of the wild man. Happy Jack, mentally and physically miserable, was forced to hear it all told over again, and to listen to the excited comments of the others. He was sick of the subject. He had heard enough about the wild man, and he wished fervently that they would shut up about it. He couldn’t see that it was anything to make such a fuss about, anyway. And he wished he could get his hands on that carbolic salve, without having the whole bunch rubbering around and asking questions about something that was none of their business. He even wished, in that first bitter hour after he had eaten and while they were lying idly in the shady spots, that he was back on the Shonkin range with an alien crew.
It was perhaps an hour later that Pink, always of an investigative turn of mind, came slipping quietly up through the rose bushes from the creek. The Happy Family, lying luxuriously upon the grass, were still discussing the latest excitement. Pink watched his chance and when none but Weary observed him jerked his head mysteriously toward the creek.
Weary got up, yawned ostentatiously, and sauntered away in the wake of Pink. “What’s the matter, Cadwolloper?” he asked, when he was close enough. “Seen a garter snake?” Pink was notoriously afraid of snakes.
“You come with me, and I’ll show yuh the wild man,” he grinned.
“Mama!” ejaculated Weary, and followed stealthily where Pink led.
Some distance up the creek Pink signalled caution, and they crept like Indians on hands and knees through the grass. On the edge of the high bank they stopped, and Pink motioned. Weary looked over and came near whooping at the sight below. He gazed a minute, drew back and put his face close to the face of Pink.
“Cadwolloper, go get the bunch!” he commanded in a whisper, and Pink, again signalling needlessly for silence, slipped hastily away from the spot.
Happy Jack, secure in the seclusion offered by the high bank of the creek, ran his finger regretfully around the inside of the carbolic salve box, eyed the result dissatisfiedly, and applied the finger carefully to a deep cut on his knee. He had got that cut while going up the bluff, just after leaving the tent where had been the shrieking females. He wished there was more salve, and he picked up the cover of the box and painstakingly wiped out the inside; the result was disheartening.
He examined his knee dolefully. It was beginning to look inflamed, and it was going to make him limp. He wondered if the boys would notice anything queer about his walk. If they did, there was the conventional excuse that his horse had fallen down with him—Happy Jack hoped that it would be convincing. He took up the box again and looked at the shining emptiness of it. It had been half full—not enough, by a long way—and maybe some one would wonder what had become of it. Darn a bunch that always had to know everything, anyway!
Happy Jack, warned at last by that unnamed instinct which tells of a presence unseen, turned around and looked up apprehensively. The Happy Family, sitting in a row upon their heels on the bank, looked down at him gravely and appreciatively.
“There’s a can uh wagon dope, up at camp,” Cal Emmett informed him sympathetically.
“Aw—” Happy Jack began, and choked upon his humiliation.
“I used to know a piece uh poetry about a fellow like Happy,” Weary remarked sweetly. “It said
‘He raised his veil, the maid turned slowly round
Looked at him, shrieked, and fell upon the ground.’
Only, in this case,” Weary smiled blandly down upon him, “Happy didn’t have no veil.”
“Aw, gwan!” adjured Happy Jack helplessly, and reached for his clothes, while the Happy Family chorused a demand for explanations.
A TAMER OF WILD ONES.
When the days grow crisp at each end and languorous in the middle; when a haze ripples the skyline like a waving ribbon of faded blue; when the winds and the grasses stop and listen for the first on-rush of winter, then it is that the rangeland takes on a certain intoxicating unreality, and range-wild blood leaps with desire to do something—anything, so it is different and irresponsible and not measured by precedent or prudence.
In days like that one grows venturesome and ignores difficulties and limitations with a fine disregard for probable consequences, a mental snapping of fingers. On a day like that, the Happy Family, riding together out of Dry Lake with the latest news in mind and speech, urged Andy Green, tamer of wild ones, to enter the rough-riding contest exploited as one of the features of the Northern Montana Fair, to be held at Great Falls in two weeks. Pink could not enter, because a horse had fallen with him and hurt his leg, so that he was picking the gentlest in his string for daily riding. Weary would not, because he had promised his Little Schoolma’am to take care of himself and not take any useless risks; even the temptation of a two-hundred-dollar purse could not persuade him that a rough-riding contest is perfectly safe and without the ban. But Andy, impelled by the leaping blood of him and urged by the loyal Family, consented and said he’d try it a whirl, anyway.
They had only ridden four or five miles when the decision was reached, and they straightway turned back and raced into Dry Lake again, so that Andy might write the letter that clinched matters. Then, whooping with the sheer exhilaration of living, and the exultation of being able to ride and whoop unhindered, they galloped back to camp and let the news spread as it would. In a week all Chouteau County knew that Andy Green would ride for the purse, and nearly all Chouteau County backed him with all the money it could command; certainly, all of it that knew Andy Green and had seen him ride, made haste to find someone who did not know him and whose faith in another contestant was strong, and to bet all the money it could lay hands upon.
For Andy was one of those