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Sandy Sawtelle savagely demanded a cup of coffee, gulped it heroically, rose in a virtuous hurry, and at the door wondered loudly if he was leaving a bunch of rich millionaires that had nothing to do but loaf in their club all the afternoon and lie their heads off, or just a passell of lazy no-good cowhands that laid down on the job the minute the boss stepped off the place.
A few days would find the cowhands back from the round-up. The homesteaders must make one more trip to the railroad to freight in the stacker and the two buck-sweeps to be used in putting up the hay. This trip was delayed only till the round-up crew was back from the range for a week of leisure and could act as guards while the others were away.
These cowhands, vaqueiros, were of the type with which we were now familiar: dark- skinned, lean, hard-faced men, in slouch-hats, worn shirts and trousers, and fringed leather aprons, with heavy spurs on their bare feet. They are wonderful riders and ropers, and fear neither man nor beast.
Just behind stood the rough shanty, which was the bunkhouse for the cowhands employed in this region. The doctor was still within, tending the grievously injured man who had been so badly wounded in the previous night's raid by the rustlers. For the time Dug's beaming eyes were shadowed with a concern that was half angry and wholly depressed.
Five miles back up the slope of the hills two men worked in a valley of lodgepole pine, felling, trimming and peeling sets of matched logs for the cabins that must be erected on each filing. The cowhands were out working the range in pairs, branding late-dropped calves and moving drifted stock back to the home range.
After an hour or two we found the fresh tracks of two, and after them we went. Our party consisted of Colonel Rondon, Lieutenant Rogaciano an excellent man, himself a native of Matto Grosso, of old Matto Grosso stock two others of the party from the Sao Joao ranch, Kermit, and myself, together with four dark-skinned camaradas, cowhands from the same ranch.
I have known of these feats being performed several times in northern Wyoming, although never in the immediate neighborhood of my ranch. Mr. Archibald Roger's cowhands have in this manner caught several bears, on or near his ranch on the Gray Bull, which flows into the Bighorn; and those of Mr. G. B. Grinnell have also occasionally done so.
"And then I get some men out of town to work with me on it. But they get lonely. Don't like working on a ranch. Besides, they had a scrap with me. I wouldn't have 'em loafing around the job. Rather have no help at all than have a loafer helping me. So they quit. Then I tried to get my cowhands to give me a lift, but they wouldn't touch a hammer.
"Yet nobody seems to have wakened at that ranch when and it must have happened the herd stopped making any noise whatever. The utter silence should have wakened seasoned cowhands. It didn't. Why? What happened to them that they slept so soundly they heard nothing?" Eyer did not answer. It wasn't the first time he had been called upon to hear Jeter think out loud.
At last Waddles swung into the tune of it and as they buried the poor cowboy far out on the lone prair-ee she noted the difference at once, and more clearly than ever before she divined the reason why cowhands were apparently so devoid of sentiment, refusing to be serious on any topic, passing off those things nearest to their hearts with a callous jest.
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