Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 14, 2025
"I reckon them men wouldn't go out of their way to drive a poor little dogie in off the range. They're that hard hearted." "Correct," agreed Rope. "You ain't missin' them none there." Ferguson smiled, urging his pony about. "I'm figgerin' on gettin' back to the Two Diamond," he said. He rode a few feet and then halted, looking back over his shoulder.
The sun had swung well to the westward before the cowboy took notice of his surroundings. Antelope Butte lay ten or twelve miles away and he headed for it with a laugh. "You must have thought I sure enough was headin' for Cow Island Crossing didn't you, you old dogie chaser?" He touched his horse lightly with his spurs and the animal struck into a long swinging trot.
"Shucks! Nothin' to it a-tall," the range-rider assured himself. "That li'l' girl sure must have the number of this guy. She's flirtin' with him to beat three of a kind, but I'll bet a dogie she knows right where she's at." Clay did not in the least believe his own argument. If he had come from a city he would have dismissed the matter as none of his business.
Where are th' cows that we used to own?" he cried, hotly. "What happens to a maverick-hunter, nowadays? If a man helps hisself to a pore, sick dogie he's hunted down! It can't go on much longer, an' that's shore." Slivers Lowe leaped up from his chair. "Yo're right, Harper! Dead right! I was a little cattle owner onct, so was you, an' Jerry, an' most of us!"
He knew of two punchers killed within the year from falls. "Ridin' for a dogie outfit ain't no sin-cure, as Blister told you while he was splicin' you 'n' Miss Tolliver," Dud went on. "It's a man-size job. There's ol' Charley Mason now.
He 'peared to be very much at home with you too dern much at home!" She was prepared for his displeasure, but not for words like these. She answered, quietly: "He just dropped in on his way to town, and he's not a dogie!" She resented his tone as well as his words.
I disremembeh eveh hearin' any she-male talkin' about thu goodness of any r'ally decent man, married er single; but jest let some tur'ble mean-minded cuss get to cuttin' capehs with some fool woman er tother, an' every ole brindle on thu range chaws on thu cud of it like a dogie on May blue-joint; an' as fer thu heifers, every blessed one on 'em purtends to be buffaloed if he crosses theah trail an' skitteh away, lookin' back disap'inted if he don't folleh an' try to raound 'em up.
I must have scared this one off." He swung into the saddle, a queer light in his eyes. "Mustard, old boy, we're goin' to Bear Flat. Mebbe Radford's hangin' around there now. An' mebbe he ain't. But we're goin' to see." But he halted a moment to bend a pitying glance at the calf. "Poor little dogie," he said; "poor little orphan. Losin' your mother just like a human bein'. I call that mean luck."
"All Are Welcome," he spelled out slowly. "Shore they are!" he muttered. "I never nowhere saw such hard-working, all-embracing rustlers as them fellers. They'll stick their iron on anything from a wobbly calf or dying dogie to a staggering-with-age mosshead, an' shout 'tally one' with the same joy. Well, not for mine, this trip. I'm going to graze loose an' buck-jump all I wants.
They had returned empty handed. And so another link had been added to the chain of mystery. Where was the dogie? A few months before her first meeting with Ferguson, Mary Radford had come West with the avowed purpose of "absorbing enough local color for a Western novel." So she had come. But Destiny had stepped in.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking