The Coming of Cassidy by Clarence E. Mulford (children's ebooks online .txt) 📖

“Kings up!” exclaimed Clayton. “Why, say you bet th’ worst of anybody I ever knew! You’ll balk on bettin’ two bits on threes, and plunge on a bluff. I reckoned you didn’t have nothin’. Why ain’t you more consistent?” he asked, winking at Towne.

“Gonsisdency iss no chewel in dis game it means go broke,” placidly grunted Schultz, raking in his winnings.

His friend Schneider smiled.

“Coyotes are gettin’ too numerous, this year,” Baxter remarked, shuffling.

Youbet pushed his sombrero back on his head. “They don’t get numerous on a cow range,” he said significantly.

“Huh!” snorted Baxter. “They’ve got too much respect to stay on one longer than they Ve got to.”

“They’d ruther be with their woolly-coated cousins,” rejoined the cowman quietly. It was beneath his dignity as a cowman to pay much attention to what sheepmen said, yet he could not remain silent under such a remark.

He regarded sheep herders, those human beings who walked at their work, as men who had reached the lowest rung in the ladder of human endeavors. His belief was not original with him, but was that of many of his school. He was a horseman, a mounted man, and one of the aristocracy of the range; they were, to him, the rabble, and almost beneath his contempt.

Besides, it was commonly believed by cowmen that sheep destroyed the grass as far as cattle grazing was concerned and this was the chief reason for the animosity against sheep and their herders, which burned so strongly in the hearts of cattle owners and their outfits.

Youbet drained his glass, and continued: “The coyote leaves th’ cattle range for th’ same good reason yore sheep leave it because they are chased out, or killed. Naturally, blood kin will hang together in banishment.”

“You know a whole lot, don’t you?” snorted Clayton, with sarcasm. “Yo’re shore wise, you are!”

“He is so vise as a a gow,” remarked Schultz, grinning.

“You’ll know more, when you get as old as me,” replied the ex-foreman, carefully placing the empty glass on the bar.

“I don’t want to get as old as you, if I have to lose all my common sense,” retorted Clayton angrily.

“An’ be a damned nuisance generally,” observed Towne.

“I’ve seen a lot of things in my life,” Youbet began, trying to ignore the tones of the others. They were young men, and he knew that youth grew unduly heated in argument. “I saw th’ comin’ of th’ Texas drive herds, till th’ range was crowded where th’ year before there was nothin’. I saw th’ comin’ of th’ sheep an’ barb’ wire, I’m sorry to say. Th’ sheep came like locusts, leavin’ a dyin’ range behind ‘em. Thin, half -starved cattle showed which way they went. You can’t tell me nothin’ I don’t know about sheep.”

“An’ I’ve seen sheep dyin’ in piles on th’ open range,” cried Clayton, his own wrongs lashing him into a rage. ff l Ve seen ‘em dynamited, an’ drowned and driven hell-to-split over canyons! I’ve had my men taunted, an’ chased, an’ killed killed, by God! just because they tried to make a’ honest livin’! Who did it all? Who killed my men an’ my sheep? Who did it?” he shouted, taking a short step forward, while an endorsing growl ran along the line of sheepmen at his side.

“Cowpunchers they did it! They killed ‘em an’ why? Because we tried to use th’ grass that we had as much right to as they had that’ss why!”

“Th’ cows was here first,” replied Youbet, keenly alert, but not one whit abashed by the odds, long as they were. “It was theirs because they was there first.”

“It was not theirs, no more ‘n th’ sun was!” cried Towne, unable to allow his chief to do all the talking.

“You said you knowed Waffles,” continued Clayton loudly. “Well, he’s another of you oldtime cowmen! He killed MacKay murdered him because we was usin’ a hill range a day’s ride from his own grass! He had twenty men like hisself to back him up. If we’d been as many as them, they wouldn’t ‘a’ tried it an’ you know it!”

“I don’t know anything of th’ kind, but I do know “began Youbet; but Schultz interrupted him with a remark intended to contain humor.

“Ven you say you doand know any t ‘ing, you know somedings; ven you know dot you doand know noddings, den you know somedings. Und das iss so yah.”

“Who th’ devil told you to stick yore Dutch mouth “retorted Youbet; but Clayton cut him short.

“So yo’re a oldtimer, hey?” cried the sheepman. “Well, by God, yore oldtime friend Waffles is a coward, a murderer, an’ “

“Yo’re a liar!” rang out the vibrant voice of the cowman, his gun out and leveled in a flash. The seven had moved forward as one man, actuated by the same impulse; and their hands were moving toward their guns when the crashes of Youbet’s weapon reverberated in the small room, the acrid smoke swirling around him as though to shield him from the result of his folly a result which he had weighed and then ignored.

Clayton dropped, with his mouth still open.

Towne’s gun chocked back in the scabbard as its owner stumbled blindly over a chair and went down, never to rise. Schultz fired once, and fell back across the table.

The three shots had followed one another with incredible quickness; and the seven, not believing that one man would dare attack so many, had not expected his play. Before the stunned sheepmen could begin firing, three were dead.

Price, badly wounded, fired as he plunged to the wall for support; and the other three were now wrapped in their own smoke.

Wounded in several places, with his gun empty, Youbet hurled the weapon at Price, and missed by so narrow a margin that the sheepman’s aim was spoiled. Youbet now sprang to the bar, and tried to vault over it, to get to the gun which he knew always lay on the shelf behind it. As his feet touched the upper edge of the counter, he grunted and, collapsing like a jackknife, loosed his hold, and fell to the floor.

“Mein Gott!” groaned Schneider, as he tried to raise himself. He looked around in a dazed manner, hardly understanding just what had happened. “He vas mat; crazy mat!”

Oleson arose unsteadily to his feet, and groped his way along the wall to where Price lay.

The fallen man looked up, in response to the touch on his shoulder; and he swore feebly: “Damn that fool—that idiot!”

“Shut up, an’ git out!” shouted the bartender, standing rigidly upright, with a heavy Colt in his upraised hand. There were tears in his eyes, and his voice broke from excitement. “He wouldn’t swaller yore insults! He knowed he was a better man! Get out of here, every damned one of you, or I’ll begin where he stopped. G ‘wan get out!”

The four looked at him, befuddled and sorely hurt; but they understood the attitude, if they did not quite grasp the words and they knew that he meant what he looked. Staggering and hobbling, they finally found the door, and plunged out to the street, to meet the crowd of men who were running toward the building.

Jimmy, choking with anger and with respect for the man who had preferred death to insults, slammed shut the door and, dropping the bar into place, turned and gazed at the quiet figure huddled at the base of the counter.

“Old man,” he muttered, “now I understands why th’ sheep don’t stay long on a cattle range.”

SAMMY PORTER, detailed by Hopalong, the trail-boss, rode into Truxton three days before the herd was due, to notify the agent that cars were wanted. Three thousand three-year-olds were on their way to the packing houses and must be sent through speedily. Sammy saw the agent and, leaving him much less sweeter in temper than when he had found him, rode down the dismal street kicking up a prodigious amount of dust. One other duty demanded attention and its fulfillment was promised by the sign over the faded pine front of the first building.

“Restaurant,” he read aloud. “That’s mine. Beans, bacon an’ biscuits for ‘most a month! But now I’m goin’ to forget that Blinky Thompkins ever bossed a trail wagon an’ tried to cook.”

Dismounting, he glanced in the window and pulled at the downy fuzz trying to make a showing on his upper lip. “Purty, all right. Brown hair an’ I reckon brown eyes. Nice li’l girl. Well, they don’t make no dents on me no more,” he congratulated himself, and entered. His twenty years fairly sagged with animosity toward the fair sex, the intermittent smoke from the ruins of his last love affair still painfully in evidence at times. But careless as he tried to be he could not banish the swaggering mannerisms of Youth in the presence of Maid, or change his habit of speech under such conditions.

“Well, well,” he smiled. “Here I ‘are’ again. Li’l Sammy in search of his grub. An’ if it’s as nice as you he’ll shore have to flag his outfit an’ keep this town all to hisself. Got any chicken?”

The maid’s nose went up and Sammy noticed that it tilted a trifle, and he cocked his head on one side to see it better. And the eyes were brown, very big and very deep they possessed a melting quality he had never observed before.

The maid shrugged her shoulders and swung around, the tip-tilt nose going a bit higher.

Sammy leaned back against the door and nodded approval of the slender figure in spicand-span white. “Li’l Sammy is a fer-o-cious cowpunch from a chickenless land,” he observed, sorrowfully. “There ain’t no kinds of chickens. Nothin’ but men an’ cattle an’ misguided cooks; an’ beans, bacon an’ biscuits. Li’l Miss, have you a chicken for me?”

“No!” The head went around again, Sammy bending to one side to see it as long as he could. The pink, shell-like ear that flirted with him through the loosely-gathered, rebellious hair caught his attention and he leveled an accusing finger at it. “Naughty li’l ear, peekin’ at Sammy that-a-way! Oh, you stingy girl!” he chided as the back of her head confronted him. “Well, Sammy don’t like girls, no matter how pink their ears are, or turned up their noses, or wonderful their eyes. He just wants chicken, an’ all th’ fixin’s. He’ll be very humble an’ grateful to Li’l Miss if she’ll tell him what he can have. An’ he’ll behave just like a Sunday-school boy.

“Aw, you don’t want to get mad at only me,” he continued after she refused to answer. “Got any chicken? Got any eggs? Lucky Sammy! An’ some nice ham? Two lucky Sammies. An’ some mashed potatoes? Fried? Good. An’ will Li’l Miss please make a brand new cup of strong coffee? Then he’ll go over an’ sit in that nice chair an’ watch an’ listen. But you oughtn’t get mad at him. Are you really-an’-truly mad?”

She swept down the room, into the kitchen partitioned off at the farther end and slammed the door. Sammy grinned, tugged at his upper lip and fancy-stepped to the table. He smoothed his tumbled hair, retied his neck-kerchief and dusted himself off with his red bandanna handkerchief. “Nice li’l town,” he soliloquized. “Fine li’l town. Dunno as I ought to go back to th’ herd Hoppy didn’t tell me to. Reckon I’ll stick in town an’ argue with th’ agent. If I argue with th’ agent I’ll be busy; an’ I can’t leave while I’m busy.” He leaned back and chuckled. “Lucky me! If Hoppy had gone an’ picked Johnny to argue with th’ agent for