THE EVENING AFTER THE invitation came I had a heart-to-heart talk with Lizzie. She and Dorothy had likewise been invited to the round-up, and I was feeling Lizzie out.
“How,” I said tentatively, “do you feel about cows, Lizzie?”
“I don’t care about them,” she replied promptly, “and I don’t mean maybe!”
“But a horse can run faster than a cow,” I argued, largely for my own comfort. “And they said a cow-and-calf round-up. That doesn’t include bulls.”
“Still, I daresay the bulls will be hanging round,” she observed pessimistically. “They generally are.”
Dorothy, on the other hand, was quite placid about it. Living in New York, as she does, she was entirely fearless.
“They never attack people on horses,” she said, with an air of finality. “Of course, if one is thrown——The thing to do is to stick to your horse, of course.”
Well, that sounded simple enough at the time, and on that basis it was decided. None of us, you see, had ever heard of Pink and his ability to turn on a dime and have a nickel left over; later I was to ride Pink and to be a party to this celebrated performance of his, but I did not know this at the time.
And so, on a soft summer day, we started.
There was nothing particularly dressy about us as we left the ranch. Lizzie wore a battered sombrero, riding breeches, boots and an ancient leather hunting coat, into the pockets of which she had stuffed everything she had forgotten to put into her bag. Dorothy was similarly equipped save that her pockets held two packs of cards and a bridge score. Personally I had abandoned a brilliant red neckerchief for one of a color more soothing to the bovine eye, and carried a stub of a pencil and some sheets of paper.
“If we get through all right,” I said, “there may be some material in it. After all, what do we know about our beefsteaks, except that they cost too much?”
“Well, we’re going to know more,” said Lizzie gloomily. “But if you ask me, I’ll take my beef hereafter on my plate and not on the hoof.”
Our saddles were lashed to the running board, our bridles lay at our feet in the rear of the car. We stopped in Sheridan for ice-cream sodas, on the theory that we were going into a dry and thirsty land, and then struck out for the Montana line and what lay beyond.
Almost at once the country began to change.
The mountains receded and we found ourselves in a maze of low and barren buttes, among which the road threaded through empty country, except where at long intervals a rough track struck the main highway, and where at such intersections there were mail boxes. But not the neat boxes of the Eastern rural free delivery. Mounted on a post at intervals of a few miles would be, sometimes, a corrugated zinc washtub, set on its side against the weather, or a rough wooden box, and even now and then a tin gasoline can with the end cut out. Sturdy little points of contact with the outer world, to many a rancher in this back country his three-times-a-week trip to these small outposts is the only break in the dull and arduous routine of his days.
A post card from Aunt Sallie down in Colorado, even a catalogue from a mail-order house, are like sounds to break his silence and to remind him of a distant life from which he is cut off.
Prairie dogs everywhere. Sitting up on top of their burrows, their tiny-tails wagging up and down instead of laterally, and their bark rather like the squeaking of an unoiled gate. It was hard not to run over them as they dashed across the road; my heart was in my mouth, for I have a weakness for prairie dogs. Indeed, I bid fair to become one of the world's great experts on prairie dogs, for I own two of them.
Thus I am able to state that it is the custom of the prairie dog to live in the wood bin beside the fireplace; to make its private and particular home in a small wooden box with a hole cut in the side, and to close the opening to this box after his entrance, with a teacup; that by preference he lines his nest with hairs from a fine polar-bear rug; that he sharpens his front teeth on the legs of wicker chairs and whenever possible on the fingers of the human hand, and that while he will eat oats and bread, he greatly favors the sunflower seeds a parrot spills on the floor, candy and the icing from cakes.
Yes, I have a parrot. He was wished on me recently. He has a cold and fishy eye, but after I heard him sing “Good-bye, my lover, good-bye,” in a sort of adenoidal soprano I simply had to have him.
Well, to go back, prairie dogs everywhere, and once in many miles a homesteader's cabin, mostly abandoned; a one-room log shack falling to ruins, a tiny barn built to house hopes that never materialized, and here and there evidences of what was once a plowed field, the only crop now the ever-present sagebrush.
But as the road winds on, the country improves. It grows more rugged, and the brilliantly colored buttes show unexpected trees. It is like Arizona. Now and then one glimpses the Tongue River, and here and there ranch houses surrounded by green and irrigated fields. But all about and above them lie the dry hills, almost the last open cattle range in the country.
And then Hanging Woman Creek, and the ranch house, and a hot-and-cold shower, and supper.
The next day was given over to getting ready for the round-up. Near the corral Dad had set up the cook tent and the mess wagon, and was experimenting with a new stove. He exuded all that day a spicy odor of boiling ham and an air of joyous anticipation. For Dad dearly loves a round-up, and he dearly loves to cook.
Out here a man numbers cooking as a part of his necessary accomplishments; a considerable part of his life is spent on the range—not cooking, but mountain—and the efficiency of the outfit depends largely on its food. But then, what doesn’t a man have to know out here? He has to be able to shoe a horse in the field without most of the necessary adjuncts, he has to be a carpenter, to repair his own automobile, to be a hydrostatic engineer of sorts, to cook, to break horses, to farm, to handle wild cattle, in emergency to do minor surgical operations, to build and keep in order his wire fences and his gates, to raise his own vegetables and to slaughter his own meat.
And by that same token, on the evening of that day, we slaughtered. We had to have fresh beef for the round-up.
“How’s your shooting?” Little Bones asked me casually after supper.
“Pretty bad,” I replied modestly.
“We’re going up to kill a beef steer,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d like to shoot him.”
“Shoot him!” I echoed faintly.
I had read, by and large, a good bit about the slaughtering of beef animals, and I had an idea one knocked them on the head, or something. Anyhow it was scientific, and every ounce of the carcass was used, for food and glue and buttons, and so on. And all the profit the packers made was the buttons. Or was it the glue? But to go out in cold blood and shoot one!
However, the creature was going to be shot, and for some reason everyone seemed to think I was the logical person to shoot it. So at last I took the rifle and we started out. On the way I deliberately hardened my heart. I counted all my old scores against the race of cows. The time one chased me along the country lane because it didn’t like my parasol; the other time when another one flew after my Airedale dog and the idiot of a dog ran to me for protection.
And I think—I still think—it would have been all right when we got there had not the creature stood gazing at me ruminatively. And it looked exactly like a woman who had lived next door to me when I was a little girl, and I couldn’t do it; it would have been murder.
So Little Bones dropped on one knee and shot him. It was neatly done, and the steer just fell down and lay still. Percy ran over and cut his throat, and within a minute they were skinning the hide off.
Somewhere Lizzie had secured a folding seat. Like the story of the little boy who said the spinal column was a long thin bone, your head set on one end and you set on the other—this seat consisted of one rodlike support, with a point stuck into the ground at one end and Lizzie at the other. And as the proceedings went on, this seat began visibly to wabble. It was not until the enormous stomach was rolled out, however, that Lizzie rose feebly from her perch and moved to a distance.
“I am perfectly all right,” she said in a small voice. “I was just thinking about tripe, that’s all. I used to be fond of it. Tripe and onions, you know.”
She shuddered and moved away.
The hide lay on the ground. Thus stretched out it looked enormous, but it is only worth a dollar and a half today. The boys will sell it for that and later buy back its equivalent in leather for fifty dollars or so. Made into shoes or suit-cases, it will bring several times that amount.
Long knives now, and the beef being cut into segments for transportation. The dogs are being fed choice bits from the head; the rest is being placed in the meat sheet, a canvas as large as a tent, later to be stowed in the mess wagon along with the stove, Dad’s bed, the bags of potatoes, the condensed milk, the canned stuff and those fresh vegetables and fruits which had been added in deference to our Eastern stomachs, and the cook tent itself. The real round-up dinner consists of beefsteak with plenty of gravy, potatoes, canned corn or peas, sirup and, as a great delicacy, sugar-coated prunes.
It was the next day in the hills that I saw Lizzie sitting on the ground with her plate in her lap, surveying a slice of roast beef thoughtfully. Then she shoved it gingerly to one side and began on potatoes and beans.