As they gathered about the fire that evening it was Bill Lightfoot who engaged his portentous interest. He listened to Bill’s boastful remarks critically, cocking his head to one side and smiling whenever he mentioned his horse.
“Yes, sir,” asserted Bill belligerently, “I mean it––that gray of mine can skin anything in the country, for a hundred yards or a mile. I’ve got money that says so!”
“Aw, bull!” exclaimed Creede scornfully.
“Bull, nothin’,” retorted Lightfoot hotly. “I bet ye––I bet ye a thousand dollars they ain’t a horse in Arizona that can keep out of my dust for a quarter!”
“Well, I know you ain’t got no thousand dollars––ner ten,” sneered Creede. “Why don’t you bet yearlings? If you’d blow some of that hot air through a tube it’d melt rocks, I reckon. But talk cow, man; we can all savvy that!”
“Well, where’s the horse that can beat me?” demanded Lightfoot, bristling.
“That little sorrel out in the pasture,” answered Creede laconically.
“I’ll bet ye!” blustered Lightfoot. “Aw, rats! He ain’t even broke yet!”
“He can run, all right. I’ll go you for a yearling heifer. Put up or shut up.”
And so the race was run. Early in the morning the whole rodéo outfit adjourned to the parada ground out by the pole corrals, the open spot where they work over the cattle. Hardy danced his sorrel up to the line where the gray was waiting, there was a scamper of feet, a streak of dust, and Bill Lightfoot was out one yearling heifer. A howling mob of cowboys pursued them from the scratch, racing each other to the finish, and then in a yell of laughter at Bill Lightfoot they capered up the cañon and spread out over The Rolls––the rodéo had begun.
As the shadow of the great red butte to the west, around which the wagon road toiled for so many weary miles, reached out and touched the valley, they came back in a body, hustling a bunch of cattle along before them. And such cattle! After his year with the Chiricahua outfit in that blessed eastern valley where no sheep as yet had ever strayed Hardy was startled by their appearance. Gaunt, rough, stunted, with sharp hips and hollow flanks and bellies swollen from eating the unprofitable browse of cactus and bitter shrubs, they nevertheless sprinted along on their wiry legs like mountain bucks; and a peculiar wild, haggard stare, stamped upon the faces of the old cows, showed its replica even in the twos and yearlings. Yet he forbore to ask Creede the question which arose involuntarily to his lips, for he knew the inevitable answer.
Day after day, as they hurriedly combed The Rolls for what few cattle remained on the lower range, the cowmen turned their eyes to the river and to the cañons and towering cliffs beyond, for the sheep; until at last as they sat by the evening fire Creede pointed silently to the lambent flame of a camp fire, glowing like a torch against the southern sky.
“There’s your friends, Rufe,” he said, and the cowmen glanced at Hardy inquiringly.
“I might as well tell you fellers,” Creede continued, “that one reason Rufe come up here was to see if he couldn’t do somethin’ with these sheepmen.”
He paused and looked at the circle of faces with a smile that was almost a sneer.
“You fellers wouldn’t back me up when it come to fightin’––none except Ben Reavis and the Clark boys––so I told the old judge we might as well lay down, and to send up some smooth hombre to try and jockey ’em a little. Well, Hardy’s the hombre; and bein’ as you fellers won’t fight, you might as well look pleasant about it. What’s that you say, Bill?”
He turned with a sardonic grin to Lightfoot, who had already been reduced to a state of silence by the relentless persecutions of the rodéo boss.
“I never said nawthin’,” replied Lightfoot sullenly. “But if you’d’ve gone at ’em the way we wanted to,” he blurted out, as the grin broadened, “instead of tryin’ to move the whole outfit by daylight, I’d’ve stayed with you till hell froze over. I don’t want to git sent up fer ten years.”
“No,” said Creede coolly, “ner you never will.”
“Well, I don’t see what you’re pickin’ on me fer,” bellowed Lightfoot, “the other fellers was there too. Why don’t you sass Ensign or Pete a while?”
“For a durned good reason,” replied Creede steadily. “They never was for fightin’, but you, with that yawp of yours, was always a-hollerin’ and ribbin’ me on to fight, and then, when the time come, you never said ‘Boo!’ at ’em. Tucked your young cannon into the seat of your pants and flew, dam’ ye, and that’s all there was to it. But that’s all right,” he added resignedly. “If you fellers don’t want to fight you don’t have to. But, dam’ it, keep shut about it now, until you mean business.”
As to just who this man Hardy was and what he proposed to do with the sheep the members of the Four Peaks round-up were still in ignorance. All they knew was that he could ride, even when it came to drifting his horse over the rocky ridges, and that Jeff Creede took him as a matter of course. But, for a superintendent, he never seemed to have much to say for himself. It was only when he walked up to his sorrel pony in that gentle, precise way he had, and went through the familiar motions of climbing a “bad one” that they sensed, dimly, a past not without experience and excitement. Even in the preoccupation of their own affairs and doings they could not fail to notice a supple strength in his white hands, a military precision in his movements, and above all a look in his eyes when he became excited––the steady resolute stare with which his militant father had subdued outlaw horses, buck soldiers, and Apaches, even his own son, when all had not gone well. It was this which had inspired Bill Lightfoot to restrain his tongue when he was sore over his defeat; and even though Hardy confessed to being a rider, somehow no one ever thought of sawing off Spike Kennedy’s “side winder” on him. The quiet, brooding reserve which came from his soldier life protected him from such familiar jests, and without knowing why, the men of the Four Peaks looked up to him.
Even after his mission was announced, Hardy made no change in his manner of life. He rode out each day on the round-up, conning the lay of the land; at the corral he sat on the fence and kept tally, frankly admitting that he could neither rope nor brand; in camp he did his share of the cooking and said little, listening attentively to the random talk. Only when sheep were mentioned did he show a marked interest, and even then it was noticed that he made no comment, whatever his thoughts were. But if he told no one what he was going to do, it was not entirely due to an overrated reticence, for he did not know himself. Not a man there but had run the gamut of human emotions in trying to protect his ranch; they had driven herders off with guns; they had cut their huddled bands at night and scattered them for the coyotes; they had caught unwary Mexican borregueros in forbidden pastures and administered “shap lessons,” stretching them over bowlders and spanking them with their leather leggings; they had “talked reason” to the bosses in forceful terms; they had requested them politely to move; they had implored them with tears in their eyes––and still like a wave of the sea, like a wind, like a scourge of grasshoppers which cannot be withstood, the sheep had come on, always hungry, always fat, always more.
Nor was there any new thing in hospitality. The last bacon and bread had been set upon the table; baled hay and grain, hauled in by day’s works from the alfalfa fields of Moroni and the Salagua, had been fed to the famished horses of the very men who had sheeped off the grass; the same blanket had been shared, sometimes, alas, with men who were “crumby.” And it was equally true that, in return, the beans and meat of chance herders had been as ravenously devoured, the water casks of patient “camp-rustlers” had been drained midway between the river and camp, and stray wethers had showed up in the round-up fry-pans in the shape of mutton. Ponder as he would upon the problem no solution offered itself to Hardy. He had no policy, even, beyond that of common politeness; and as the menacing clamor of the sheep drifted up to them from the river the