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"If he ever comes to," said Curly, as he cast away through the open door the contents of the pockets of the King of Gee-Whiz, "we'll try to get him through the D. T. stage as well as the V. C., whatever that is, and I reckon he's good for a job on the Carrizoso range. This country can't afford to be too damned particular about a feller's past."
The Strange Story of the King of Gee-Whiz, and his Unusual Experience in Foreign Parts In the absence of McKinney with the sheriff's posse, Curly became, by virtue of seniority, acting foreman on the Carrizoso ranch. Grieving over the edict which held him home from sheriffing, and disconsolate now that Ellsworth and Constance had departed, he sought an outlet for his feelings.
"I'll show folks what a real cow foreman is like," he asserted, and forthwith began plans which, in his opinion, had been too long deferred by the more conservative McKinney. The wagons of the Carrizoso cow outfit came into town one morning, with a requisition for all the loose .44-caliber ammunition that could be bought, begged, or commandeered under the plea of urgent necessity.
Reproachful eyes were turned on Curly, but he went on. "It's goin' to run right between Carrizoso ranch and the mouth of our cañon," said he. "You'll have to cross it every time you come to town, McKinney. When she gits to runnin' right free and general, there'll be a double row of cow corpses from here to Santa Rosa.
"Elk!" snorted McKinney, as he arose and walked to the other edge of the snowbank. "Here's your elk tracks." McKinney, foreman on Carrizoso, was an old range-rider, and he was right. Here was the track, plunging through the snow, and here was a deep hole where an elk, or something, had digged hurriedly, deeply, and, as it proved, effectively. "Elk!" said McKinney again, savagely.
Beside them, bucked up and bound, lay a strange and long-haired figure, at which the new foreman occasionally looked back with a gaze of mingled curiosity and respect. It appeared that Carrizoso cow honor had been maintained.
There was no variableness. Surprises did not come thither. The world ran always in one pleasant and unchanging groove. But the breeze this evening brought no smile of content to Dan Anderson's face as he sat waiting for the coming of the new and fateful visitor to our ancient Eden. "They'll be about at the Carrizoso Springs now," said Dan Anderson, "twelve miles away down the trail.
Timid at best, he was all the more so since the raid of the Carrizoso stock men. His legs trembled under him, but he slowly approached in obedience. "Willie," said Tom Osby, sternly, "I'm some hardened as a sinner my own self, but the kind of way you do pains me.
And does it look any like Mac has studied bakery doin's out on the Carrizoso ranch? You know Tom Osby couldn't. As for me, if hard luck has ever driv me to cookin' in the past, I ain't referrin' to it now. I'm a straight-up cow puncher and nothin' else. That cake? Why, it come from the Kansas outfit. "Don't know which one of 'em done it, but it's a honey," he went on.
There had always been ammunition in Heart's Desire sufficient for all benevolent and social purposes. No one had suspected sheep. The Carrizoso plateau had been sacred ground, and it was unsupposable that it could ever be desecrated by the trampling hoofs and scissor noses of these woolly abominations.
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