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Her costume was a thing apart, suggesting neither sex, epoch, nor personal vanity, but what it lacked of these more usual sartorial characteristics, it more than made up in a passionate individualism; an excessively short skirt, so innocent of "fit" or "hang" in its wavering, indeterminate outline as to suggest the possible workmanship of teeth rather than of scissors; and riding-boots coming well to the knee, displaying a well-shaped, ample foot, perched aloft on the usual high heel that cow-punchers affect as the expression of their chiefest vanity.
At first only a few outlaws took advantage of it; but hard years came on, the cattle business became less and less profitable, we were forced to lay off our men, and so at last the range swarmed with idle cow-punchers; then came the breakdown in our scheme! The cowboys took to 'mavericking' on their own account.
Shoved, dragged, carried, some of them cruelly wounded and a few dead but all who lived swearing horribly, the prisoners were hustled to the street. Last of all came Monte Joe, securely held by two brawny cow-punchers. At sight of his mottled, blood-besmeared visage, the crowd went wild. "Hang him! Lynch the dirty brute! Get a rope!" The cry was taken up by fifty voices.
"At the Flying U," he went on, looking at Luck pensively, "you'll see the effect of too many people moved into the range country. If there's anything more distressing than a baby left without a mother, it's a bunch of cow-punchers that's outlived their range. Ain't that right?" "Sure it's right!" Luck's sympathy was absolutely sincere. "How well I know it!
Despite the ingenuity of the ranch owners and the unceasing vigilance and night rides of the cow-punchers, the losses steadily increased until there was promised a shortage which would permit no drive to the western terminals of the railroad that year.
Then, afraid to go away and leave the mad cow-punchers so close to town, he ordered them to drive their herd farther east, nearer to Dent's store, and never to return to San Felippe unless they needed the padre; and they obeyed him after a long talk.
He and Jesus Menendez had been herding on Lone Pine when riders of the Twin Star outfit had descended upon them and attacked the sheep. He and Menendez had elected to fight, and Jesus had been shot down; he himself had barely escaped with his life and that not without a wound. The cow-punchers had followed him, and continued to fire at him, but he had succeeded in escaping.
"To-night, when they've all shot off their chins an' it's quiet-like, I want you to ask me, jest this way, 'Monty, seein' as you've hed more adventures than all them cow-punchers put together, tell us about the most turrible time you ever hed. Will you ask me, Miss Hammond, jest kinda sincere like?" "Certainly I will, Monty," she replied.
With all this going round and round, monotonously persistent in his brain, and with the care of four thousand lean kine and more than a hundred saddle-horses to say nothing of a dozen overworked, fretful cow-punchers Rowdy acquired the "corrugated brow" fast enough without any cultivation. The men were as the Silent One had predicted.
He was discovering to his great amazement that the loneliness of the mountain desert is nothing at all compared to the loneliness of the Manhattan crowd. Two very gloomy and silent cow-punchers ate their dinner that night and went to bed early. But in the morning they began the actual work of their campaign. It was an arduous labor.
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