“One minute, Miss Hilda. Did you say them doegies were to go into the south pasture with our own stuff, then?”
Hilda had not mentioned the south pasture. However she said now:
“I suppose that will be all right, won’t it?”
“Well, if they was mine I’d keep ’em in the corrals for a bit, and give ’em the once-over in case they’s any blackleg among em. They’s one or two looks kind o’ suspicious.”
“All right, then. Keep them in the corrals.”
After all, the man knew his business, and she looked at him curiously through the screen door.
“Everything else on the place all right? Nothing loose? I thought I saw some stuff in the bull pasture when I rode up from the Minnehaha ranch today.”
“Them doegies is all right, Miss Hilda. There ain’t nothin’ out ’cept what’s meant to be out. You leave it to me. Nothin’s goin’ to git out of hick with the boss away, you can take it from me.”
“I didn’t mean to question that,” she said quickly.
Her father’s sense of squareness in treatment of his men was shared by her, and she added with a slightly more friendly tone:
“You know an awful lot about cattle, don’t you, Ho?”
To give Ho “an inch” was to yield the proverbial mile. Instantly he was grinning back at her, his chest swelling with conceit and self-esteem, as he pressed against the screen door, his bold eyes seeking hers.
“I know ’bout everything they is to know ’bout cattle—the two-legged as well as the four.”
“Is that so?”
“You see, Miss Hilda, they ain’t much difference between ’em, whichever way you look at ’em. Some folks are scrub stock and go up blind before the branding iron; others is like yourself, Miss Hilda, with high spirits and you got to get ’em broke in the Squeezegate before you can use ’em. Pretty hard to slip a lariat over that kind, but they’s a saying among cowhands that ‘every outlaw has his day,’ and I’m thinking”—his bold eyes leered into her own with significance, “the rope’ll git you too.”
“You think so, do you? Well, who do you think is smart enough to get the rope over my head, I’d like to know?”
He leered and chuckled. The conversation was to his liking.
“Can’t say, but the woods is full of them as is achin’ for the chance. Some day when you’re loose on the range maybe you’ll slip under.”
Hilda’s scorn had turned to anger. Holy Smoke’s body was against the screen door, bulging the wirework in. His cunning gaze never left her face. He had lowered his voice meaningly.
“How about that English fly, Miss? He’s getting fair handy with the lariat, they do say.”
Hilda had flushed scarlet and drawn back with blazing eyes, but the words of the cowhand on the outer side of the door stopped her in her premeditated flight and sent a cold shiver all over her.
“Ye needn’t to worry ’bout him, Miss Hilda. He ain’t likely to swing his lariat in your direction. It’s hooked already over another one.”
Hilda’s dry lips, against her will, moved in burning query:
“Who do you mean?”
She scarcely knew her own voice. Something wild and primitive was surging through her being. She wanted to cry out, to hurl something into the face of the grinning man at the door, yet fascinated, tormented, she stayed for an answer:
“Her that’s under his pillow. Her that he takes along of him wherever he goes and has locked up in one of them gold gimcracks as if her face was radio. It’d make you laugh to see him take it to bed with him, and tuck it just as if it was heaven under his pillow and—”
Hilda stared blankly at the man on the other side of the door. She uttered not a word. Her hand shot out, as if she were dealing a blow to him, and the inside door banged hard.
XI
There were eighteen hundred head of calves to be vaccinated, branded, dehorned and weaned. Over the wide-spreading hills and meadows the cattle poured in a long unbroken stream, bellowing and calling as they moved. The roundup included the mothers, eighteen hundred head of white-faced Herefords. These, sensing danger to their young, came unwillingly, moaning and stopping stolidly to bawl their unceasing protests or to call peremptorily to their straying offspring. Sometimes a mother would make a break for freedom and a rider would have his hands full driving her out of the dense brush where the fugitive might find a temporary asylum.
At the corrals they were driving long posts four feet deep into the earth. Close by the posts a soft coal fire spat and blazed. “Doc” Murray, veterinary surgeon, on an upturned wooden box, sleeves rolled to elbow and pipe in the corner of his mouth, squatted, directing the preparations. Everything was done shipshape at O Bar O.
For some time, oblivious to the taunts and jeers cast at him, Cheerio, returned from the roundup, had been standing by his horse’s head gazing up the hill in a brown study of rapture. The sight of that army sweeping in from all directions over the hills and from the woods, to meet in the lower pastures and automatically form in to that symmetrical file, fascinated him beyond words. Even the riders, loosely seated on their horses, their bright handkerchiefs blowing free in the breeze, whirling lariat and long cattle whips, flanking and following the herd, seemed pleasing to the eye of the Englishman.
Though the day of the chap-clad, large-hatted type of cowboy is said to have passed in the Western States, in Alberta he is still a thriving, living reality. In this “last of the big lands,” where the cattle still range over hundreds of thousands of acres, their guardians appear
