The Flying U Ranch by B. M. Bower (free biff chip and kipper ebooks .TXT) 📖

up, caught Andy’s horse, and untied

Andy’s rope from the saddle.

 

“Good fer you, Oscar,” he praised the bugkiller. “Hang onto him

while I take a few turns.” He thereupon helped force Andy’s arms

to his side, and wound the rope several times rather tightly

around Andy’s outraged, squirming person.

 

“Oh, it ain’t goin’ to do yuh no good to buck ‘n bawl,”

admonished the tier. “I learnt this here little trick down in

Wyoming. A bunch uh punchers done it to me—and I’ve been just

achin’ all over fer a chance to return the favor to some uh you

gay boys. And,” he added, with malicious satisfaction, while he

rolled Andy over and tied a perfectly unslippable knot behind,

“it gives me great pleasure to hand the dose out to you, in

p’ticular. If I was a mean man, I’d hand yuh the boot a few times

fer luck; but I’ll save that up till next time.”

 

“You can bet your sweet life there’ll be a next time,” Andy

promised earnestly, with embellishments better suited to the

occasion than to a children’s party.

 

“Well, when it arrives I’m sure Johnny-on-the-spot. Them Wyoming

punchers beat me up after they’d got me tied. I’m tellin’ yuh so

you’ll see I ain’t mean unless I’m drove to it. Turn him feet

down hill, Oscar, so he won’t git a rush uh brains to the head

and die on our hands. Now you’re goin’ to mind your own business,

sonny. Next time yuh set out to herd sheep, better see the boss

first and git on the job right.”

 

He rose to his feet, surveyed Andy with his hands on his hips,

mentally pronounced the job well done, and took a generous chew

of tobacco, after which he grinned down at the trussed one.

 

“That the language uh flowers you’re talkin’?” he inquired

banteringly, before he turned his attention to the horse, which

he disposed of by tying up the reins and giving it a slap on the

rump. When it had trotted fifty yards down the coulee bottom, and

showed a disposition to go farther, he whistled to his dogs, and

turned again to Andy.

 

“This here is just a hint to that bunch you trot with, to leave

us and our sheep alone,” he said. “We don’t pick no quarrels, but

we’re goin’ to cross our sheep wherever we dern please, to git

where we want to go. Gawd didn’t make this range and hand it over

to you cowmen to put in yer pockets—I guess there’s a chance fer

other folks to hang on by their eyebrows, anyway.”

 

Andy, lying there like a very good presentation of a giant

cocoon, roped round and round, with his arms pinned to his sides,

had the doubtful pleasure of seeing that noisome, foolish-faced

band trail down Antelope coulee and back upon the level they had

just left, and of knowing to a gloomy certainty that he could do

nothing about it, except swear; and even that palls when a man

has gone over his entire repertoire three times in rapid

succession.

 

Andy, therefore, when the last sheep had trotted out of sight,

hearing and smell, wriggled himself into as comfortable a

position as his bonds would permit, and took a nap.

 

CHAPTER VII. Truth Crushed to Earth, etc.

 

Andy, only half awake, tried to obey both instinct and habit and

reach up to pull his hat down over his eyes, so that the sun

could not shine upon his lids so hotly; when he discovered that

he could do no more than wiggle his fingers, he came back with a

jolt to reality and tried to sit up. It is surprising to a man to

discover suddenly just how important a part his arms play in the

most simple of body movements; Andy, with his arms pinioned

tightly the whole length of them, rolled over on his face, kicked

a good deal, and rolled back again, but he did not sit up, as he

had confidently expected to do.

 

He lay absolutely quiet for at least five minutes, staring up at

the brilliant blue arch above him. Then he began to speak rapidly

and earnestly; a man just close enough to hear his voice sweeping

up to a certain rhetorical climax, pausing there and commencing

again with a rhythmic fluency of intonation, might have thought

that he was repeating poetry; indeed, it sounded like some of

Milton’s majestic blank verse, but it was not. Andy was engaged

in a methodical, scientific, reprehensibly soul-satisfying period

of swearing.

 

A curlew, soaring low, with long beak outstretched before him,

and long legs outstretched behind cast a beady eye upon him, and

shrilled “Cor-reck! Cor-reck!” in unregenerate approbation of the

blasphemy.

 

Andy stopped suddenly and laughed. “Glad you agree with me, old

sport,” he addressed the bird whimsically, with a reaction to his

normally cheerful outlook. “Sheepherders are all those things I

named over, birdie, and some that I can’t think of at present.”

 

He tried again, this time with a more careful realization of his

limitations, to assume an upright position; and being a

persevering young man, and one with a ready wit, he managed at

length to wriggle himself back upon the slope from which he had

slid in his sleep, and, by digging in his heels and going

carefully, he did at last rise upon his knees, and from there

triumphantly to his feet.

 

He had at first believed that one of the herders would, in the

course of an hour or so, return and untie him, when he hoped to

be able to retrieve, in a measure, his self-respect, which he had

lost when the first three feet of his own rope had encircled him.

To be tied and trussed by sheepherders! Andy gritted his teeth

and started down the coulee.

 

He was hungry, and his lunch was tied to his saddle. He looked

eagerly down the coulee, in the faint hope of seeing his horse

grazing somewhere along its length, until the numbness of his

arms and hands reminded him that forty lunches, tied upon forty

saddles at his side, would be of no use to him in his present

position. His hands he could not move from his thighs; he could

wiggle his fingers—which he did, to relieve as much as possible

that unpleasant, prickly sensation which we call a “going to

sleep” of the afflicted members. When it occurred to him that he

could not do anything with his horse if he found it, he gave up

looking for it and started for the ranch, walking awkwardly,

because of his bonds, the sun shining hotly upon his brown head,

because his hat had been knocked off in the scuffle, and he could

not pick it up and put it back where it belonged.

 

Taking a straight course across the prairie, he struck Flying U

coulee at the point where the sheep had left it. On the way there

he had crossed their trail where they went through the fence

farther along the coulee than before, and therefore with a better

chance of passing undetected; especially since the Happy Family,

believing that he was forcing them steadily to the north, would

not be watching for sheep. The barbed wire barrier bothered him

somewhat. He was compelled to lie down and roll under the fence,

in the most undignified manner, and, when he was through, there

was the problem of getting upon his feet again. But he managed it

somehow, and went on down the coulee, perspiring with the heat

and a bitter realization of his ignominy. What the Happy Family

would have to say when they saw him, even Andy Green’s vivid

imagination declined to picture.

 

He knew by the sun that it was full noon when he came in sight of

the stable and corrals, and his soul sickened at the thought of

facing that derisive bunch of punchers, with their fiendish grins

and their barbed tongues. But he was hungry, and his arms had

reached the limit of prickly sensations and were numb to his

shoulders. He shook his hair back from his beaded forehead, cast

a wary glance at the silent stables, set his jaw, and went on up

the hill to the messhouse, wishing tardily that he had waited

until they were off at work again, when he might intimidate old

Patsy into keeping quiet about his predicament.

 

Within the messhouse was the clatter of knives and forks plied

by hungry men, the sound of desultory talk and a savory odor of

good things to eat. The door was closed. Andy stood before it as

a guilty-conscienced child stands before its teacher; clicked his

teeth together, and, since he could not open the door, lifted his

right foot and gave it a kick to strain the hinges.

 

Within were exclamations of astonishment, silence and then a

heavy tread. Patsy opened the door, gasped and stood still, his

eyes popping out like a startled rabbit.

 

“Well, what’s eating you?” Andy demanded querulously, and pushed

past him into the room.

 

Not all of the Happy Family were there. Cal, Jack Bates, Irish

and Happy Jack had gone into the Bad Lands next to the river; but

there were enough left to make the soul of Andy quiver

forebodingly, and to send the flush of extreme humiliation to his

cheeks.

 

The Happy Family looked at him in stunned surprise; then they

glanced at one another in swift, wordless inquiry, grinned wisely

and warily, and went on with their dinner. At least they

pretended to go on with their dinner, while Andy glared at them

with amazed reproach in his misleadingly honest gray eyes.

 

“When you’ve got plenty of time,” he said at last in a choked

tone, “maybe one of you obliging cusses will untie this damned

rope.”

 

“Why, sure!” Pink threw a leg over the bench and got up with

cheerful alacrity. “I’ll do it now, if you say so; I didn’t know

but what that was some new fad of yours, like—”

 

“Fad!” Andy repeated the word like an explosion.

 

“Well, by golly, Andy needn’t think I’m goin’ to foller that

there style,” Slim stated solemnly. “I need m’ rope for something

else than to tie n’ clothes on with.”

 

“I sure do hate to see a man wear funny things just to make

himself conspicuous,” Pink observed, while he fumbled at the

knot, which was intricate. Andy jerked away from him that he

might face him ragefully.

 

“Maybe this looks funny to you,” he cried, husky with wrath. “But

I can’t seem to see the joke, myself. I admit I let then herders

make a monkey of me…. They slipped up behind, going down into

Antelope coulee, and slid down the bluff onto me; and, before I

could get up, they got me tied, all right. I licked one of ‘en

before that, and thought I had ‘en gentled down—”

 

Andy stopped short, silenced by that unexplainable sense which

warns us when our words are received with cold disbelief.

 

“Mh-hm—I thought maybe you’d run up against a hostile

jackrabbit, or something,” Pink purred, and went back to his

place on the bench.

 

“Haw-haw-haw-w-w!” came Big Medicine’s tardy bellow. “That’s more

reasonable than the sheepherder story, by cripes!”

 

Andy looked at them much as he had stared up at the sky before he

began to swear—speechlessly, with a trembling of the muscles

around his mouth. He was quite white, considering how tanned he

was, and his forehead was shiny, with beads of perspiration

standing thickly upon it.

 

“Weary, I wish you’d untie this rope. I can’t.” He spoke still in

that peculiar, husky tone, and, when the last words were out, his