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Updated: June 25, 2025
"And we got through ahead of the storm," Weary sweetly reminded Happy Jack. Happy looked moodily up at the muttering black mass nearly over their heads and said nothing; Happy never did have anything to say when his gloomy predictions were brought to naught. "I'm going to get on the bed-ground without any red tape or argument, if yuh ask me," volunteered Cal Emmett, rubbing his aching arms.
The Kid was telling Daddy Chip about the skunk he saw, and he hated to be interrupted. He looked at his Doctor Dell and at the familiar, white garment with lace at the neck and wristbands, and he waved his hand with a gesture of dismissal. "Aw, take that damn' thing away!" he told her in the tone of the real old cowpuncher. "When I get ready to hit the bed-ground, a blanket is all I'll need."
Orders rang out, and instead of catching our regular guard mounts, the boys picked the best horses in their strings. The cattle were then nearly a mile north of camp, coming in slowly towards the bed-ground, but a half-dozen of us rushed away to relieve the men on herd and turn the beeves back.
The first day we gathered two hundred, and the attempt to hold them under herd was a constant fight, resulting in every hoof arising on the bed-ground at midnight and escaping to their old haunts. I worked as good a ranch outfit of men as the State ever bred, I was right there in the saddle with them, yet, in spite of every effort, to say nothing of the profanity wasted, we lost the herd.
The lambs and good mothers of a period of twenty-four hours are bunched together and placed a little remote from the bed-ground, with a little pen and a herder to themselves: they constitute a so-called "baby-flock."
I'll pay you off and you can walk back to the ranch or," grimly, "take a short cut through the Pass up there to 'Nebrasky." "I can't hold dem ewes and lambs on de bed-ground no more! Dey know it's time to be gettin' up to deir summer range; nobody has to tell a sheep when to move on."
A little earlier than usual, Tom kicked the branding fire apart, ordered the herd thrown on water and grazed back to the bed-ground that had been used during round-up time ever since he could remember, and rode slowly toward camp, whither the lucky ones not on herd were speeding.
Ewes bleated for their lambs, lambs for their mothers, until quavering calls in many keys made a din to awaken any sleeper, while the whole mass of dingy, rounded woolly backs started moving from the bed-ground. "Workin' like angels," Bowers muttered as he came out of the tepee dressed in his erstwhile pillow, to see the sheep spreading out before him.
Six miles back toward the edge of the "breaks" which are really the beginning of the Badlands that border the Missouri River all through that part of Montana, an even five hundred head of the Flying U's best grade cows and their calves were settling down for the night upon a knoll that had been the bed-ground of many a herd.
Despite his alarming experience he had not lost his reckoning, and, facing toward the bed-ground of the herd, he had ridden but a short way, when the familiar sounds told him he was near the animals from which he was lost only a short time before. "They are here, Baby, just as I thought." The remark was made by Gleeson, who loomed up in the gloom as he spoke, with his mustang on a deliberate walk.
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