CHAPTER XII
Holy Smoke rode in ahead with orders from Bully Bill for all hands finished riding to fall to and help at the branding and the dehorning. To each man was assigned some especial post or task, and Ho was in his element as he shouted his orders to the men, “showing off” in great form. His left eye had flattened in a broad wink to the veterinary surgeon, as he paused by Cheerio, turned now from the Squeezegate and trying to recapture the enthusiasm that had animated him before he had noted that platform.
“Hey you there! Bull ses yer to give a hand to the Doc, and there ain’t no time neither for mannicarring your nails before fallin’ to. This ain’t no weddin’ march, take it from me. We ain’t had no round-up for fun. We’re here to brand and dehorn, d’ you get me?”
“Righto!”
Cheerio drew up sprightly before Dr. Murray and saluted that grimy, nicotine-stained “vet.” The latter glimpsed him over in one unflattering and comprehensive sweep of a pair of keen black eyes. Then, through the corner of his mouth, he hailed young Sandy, right on the job at the fire.
“Hey, kid, give a poke, will yer? Keep that fire agoing.”
This was a job upon which Sandy doted. From his baby years, fire had been both his joy and his bane, for despite many threats and whippings, the burning down of a costly barn brought a drastic punishment that was to stick hotly in the memory of even a boy who loved fire as dearly as did Sandy. It caused him forevermore to regard matches with respect and an element of fear. P. D. had deliberately burned the tips of his son’s fingers. Though Sandy feared the fire, he still loved it. With both care and craft, therefore, he poked the fire, and pounded the huge pieces of coal till they spluttered and burst into flames. The heat grew intense.
The cattle were now pouring into the corrals and the riders by the gates were cutting out such of the mothers as had gotten through, besides certain weaklings of the herd that were to be spared the branding. These, temporarily driven to adjoining corrals, set up the most deafening outcries and calls for their young, while in the calf corrals these sturdy young creatures voiced their indignant and anguished protests.
Darting in and out of the clamouring herd, the experienced “hands” bunched and separated them according to the bellowing orders of Holy Smoke.
The scorching crunch of the closing Squeezegate and the first long bawl of agony swept the pink from the cheeks of the Englishman. He was seized with a sudden, overwhelming impulse to flee from this Place of Horrors, but as he turned instinctively toward the gate, he saw Hilda standing upon it. She had climbed to the third rung and, hands holding lightly to the top rail, she watched the operations with professional curiosity. For a moment, Cheerio suffered a pang of revolting repugnance. That one so young and so lovely should be thus callous to suffering seemed to him an inexcusable blemish.
It may be that Hilda sensed something of his judgment of her, for there was a pronounced lifting of that dangerous young chin and the free toss of the head so characteristic of her wild nature, while her dark eyes shone defiantly. Almost unconsciously, he found himself excusing her. She had been born to this life. Since her baby years she had been freely among cattle and horses and men. Daughter of a cattleman, Hilda knew that the most painful of the operations, namely, the dehorning, was, in a measure, a merciful thing for the cattle, who might otherwise gore each other to death. The vaccination was but a pin prick, an assurance against the deadly blackleg. As for the branding, it was not nearly as painful as was generally supposed, and first aid was immediately administered to relieve the pang of the burning. It was the only means the cattlemen had for the identification of their property. She resented, therefore, the horror and reproach which she sensed in the stern gaze of the Englishman. Her cool, level glance swept his white, accusing face.
“Pretty sight, isn’t it?” she taunted. “If there’s one thing I love,” she went on, defiantly, “it is to see a brand slapped on true!”
With a nonchalant wisp of a smile, her tossing head indicated the stake, to which a three-month-old calf was bound, its head upturned as the red-hot branding iron smote with a firm, quick shot upon its left side.
The odour of burnt hide nauseated Cheerio. He felt the blood deserting his face and lips. His knees and hands had a curiously numb sensation. He was dizzy and almost blind. He found himself holding to the gate rail, the critical, judging glance of the girl fixed in question upon his face.
Like one hypnotized, he forced his gaze toward the branded calf and he saw something then that brought his trembling hand out in a gesture of almost entreaty and pain. A long, red spurt of blood was trickling down the animal’s side. The old terror of blood swept over him in a surge—a terror that had bitten into his soul upon the field of battle. It was something constitutional, pathological, utterly beyond his control.
Cheerio no longer saw the girl beside him, nor felt the stab of her scornful smile. He had the impulse to cry out to her, to explain that which had been incomprehensible to his comrades in France.
Hilda’s voice seemed to come from very far away and the tumult that made up the bawling voices of Holy Smoke and the raging hands of the O Bar O was utterly unintelligible to him; nor could he comprehend that the shouts were directed at him. In a way, the shouting brought him stark back to another scene, when, in wrath, men seemed to rush over him and all in a black moment the world had spun around him in a nightmare that was all made up of blood—filthy, terrifying, human blood.
Ho’s bawling message was transmitted from bawling mouth to bawling mouth.
“Take the rope at the south stake, and take it damn quick. Are yer goin’ to let the bloody calf wait all the damn day for his brandin’?”
Above the tumult cut the girl’s quiet, incisive words:
“Get on your job! You’re wanted at the south stake.”
“My job? Oh, by Jove, what was it I was to do?”
His hand went vaguely across his eyes. He staggered a few paces across the corral.
“Hold the rope!” squealed Sandy, jumping up and down by the stake. “I gotter keep the fire goin’, and the other fellers has their hands full at the Squeezegate.”
“Hold the bally rope! Oh, yes. Wh-wh-where is the bally thing?”
“Here! Catch him! That’s Jake! There you go, round and round. Keep agoin’. Hold taut there! Don’t let go whatever you do. That calf’s awful strong. If you don’t look out she’ll get away!”
Sandy’s young wrists had been barely strong enough to hold the rope that bound the wretched calf to the stake. Pink Eye, wielding with skill a long lariat that never failed to land upon the horns of the desired calf and bring it to the stake, urged all hands along with profane and impure language. Automatically and with perfect precision, Hootmon was clapping the brand upon one calf after another and passing them along to the “Vet,” who in turn thrust the syringe into the thigh, the prick of the vaccination being dulled in comparison with the fiercer pang of the branding iron. Now the rope had passed from Sandy to Cheerio and there was a pause.
“Get a wiggle on you! Hold tight! Round this way! For the love of Saint Peter!”
At the other end of the rope that Sandy had thrust into his hands, a three-month-old calf pulled and fought for freedom. From its head, where the dehorning shears had already performed their work a dark sickening stream dripped. Sandy had twisted the rope partly around the post but it still remained unknotted.
Someone was calling something across the corral. Cheerio found himself going around and around the post. Suddenly a wild bawl of anguish from the tortured animal sent him staggering back and at the same moment the calf seemed to plunge against him and the hot blood spurted against his face.
At that moment he clearly heard again the crisp whipping words of his captain, scorching his soul with its bitter ring of hatred and scorn. The rope slipped from his hand. He threw up his arm blindly, shrinking back. His breath caught in the old craven sob. Down into deep depths of space he sank, sickened.
Hilda McPherson had leaped down from the rail and with an inarticulate cry, she gathered Cheerio’s head into her arms. It was the coarse sneering voice of Holy Smoke that recalled her and forced her to see that shining thing that was pinned to the breast of the unconscious man.
“Wearin’ her over his heart, huh!” chuckled Ho, one thick, dirty finger upon the locket, while his knowing glance pinned the stricken one of the girl. With a sob, Hilda drew back, and came slowly to her feet, her eyes still looking down at the unconscious face with an element of both terror and anguish.
He returned with a cry—a startling cry of blended agony and fear, for the odour of blood was still in his nostrils and all about him was the tumult of the battlefield; but all that Hilda noted was that his first motion was that grasp at his breast. His hand closed above the locket. He sat up unsteadily, dazedly. He even made an effort now to smile.
“That’s f-funny. Carn’t stand the blood. M-makes me f-funky. C-c-constitutional—” His words dribbled off.
Hilda said nothing. She continued to stare down at him, but her face had hardened.
“What t’ ’ell’s the matter?” snarled Ho. “Ain’t yer fit to stand the gaff of a bit of brandin’ even?”
The girl’s averted face gave him no encouragement, and Cheerio went on deliriously, slipping deeper and deeper into the mire of disgrace.
“C-carn’t stand the b-b-blood. M-makes me sick. Constitutional. Affected me like that in France. I w-w-went f-funky when they needed me m-most—dr-opped out, you know—r-r-r-ran away and——”
Ho, hand cupped at the back of his ear, was drinking in every word of the broken confession, while his delighted eyes exchanged glances with the girl. Her chin had gone to a high level. Without looking at Cheerio, she said:
“Say no more. We have your number.”
“Better get to the bunkhouse,” said Ho. “This ain’t no place for a minister’s son.”
Cheerio managed somehow to come to his feet. He still felt fearfully weak and the persisting odour of blood and burnt hide made him sick beyond endurance. Limping to the gate, he paused a moment to say to the girl, with a pathetic attempt at lightness of speech:
“’Fraid I’m not cut out for cowboy life. I’d j-jolly well like to learn the g-game. I d-don’t seem exactly to fit.”
She was leaning against the corral gate. Her face was turned away, and the averted cheek was scarlet. He felt the blaze of her scornful eyes and suffered an exquisite pang of longing to see them again as sometimes, after the readings in the evening, humid and wide, they had looked back at him in the twilight.
“No, you don’t fit,” she said slowly. “It takes a man with guts to stand our life—a dead game sport, and not—not——”
She left the sentence unfinished, leaving the epithet to his imagination. She turned her back upon him. He limped to the house. For a long time he sat on the steps, his head in his hands.
Slowly there grew into his consciousness another scene. He had come to suddenly out of just such a moment of unconsciousness as that he had suffered at the corral. Then there had flooded over him such an overpowering consciousness of what had befallen him that he had staggered, with a shout, to his feet. At the psychological moment, when his company had started forward, he had welched, stumbled back, and, with the anguished oaths of the captain he loved ringing in his ears, Cheerio had gone down into darkness. He had come to as one in a resurrection, born anew, and invigorated with a passionate resolve to compensate with his life for that error, that moment of weakness.
There was an objective to be taken at any cost. The men had gone on. He found himself crawling across No Man’s Land. But a hundred feet away he came to his company. Upon the ground they lay, like a bunch of sheep without a leader. There was not an officer left, save that one who had been his friend and who had cursed him for a renegade when he turned back. Fearfully wounded, his captain was slowly pulling his way along the ground, painfully worming toward that clump of wood from which the sporadic bursts of gun fire were coming. Cheerio understood. Someone had to put that machine-gun out of commission or they would all be annihilated. He was crawling side by side with his captain, begging him to turn back and to trust him to take his place. He was pleading, arguing, threatening and forcing the wounded man down into a shell-hole where he could not move. Now he was on his own job.
Alone, within forty or fifty yards of the machine-gun, he paused, to take stock of what he had in the way of ammunition with him. He found he had a single smoke bomb and resolved to use it. Getting into a shell-hole, he unslung his rifle and placed the bomb into it and prepared it for firing. He waited for the right wind to shift the smoke and then carefully fired the gun.
By some remarkable stroke of fortune, it fell and exploded in such a position that the wind carried the smoke in a heavy cloud immediately over the German machine-gun post, rendering the operators of the machine absolutely powerless. At that moment Cheerio leaped from the shell-hole, and rushing forward, pulled a pin from a Mills bomb, as he ran. When about twenty yards away, he threw the bomb into the smoke and fell to the ground to await the explosion. It came with a terrific crash, fragments of the bomb bursting overhead. Jumping up and grasping his rifle firmly, he plunged into the smoke which had not yet cleared. Suddenly he fell into a trench, and he could not restrain a cheer to find that the machine-gun was lying on its side. It was out of action.
There was no time to survey the situation, for two of the enemy had rushed toward him swinging their “potato mashers” as the British soldiers were wont to call this type of bomb. Now that he realized that he had accomplished his objective, his elation had turned to the old sickening feeling of terror, as he watched one of the Germans pull the little white knob and throw the grenade. It missed him and struck the parapet of the trench. About to rush him, the Germans were restrained by an officer who had come up unobserved until then. He would take the Englishman prisoner. There were questions he desired to put to him. Yelling: “Komm mit!” they pushed him to his feet, and with prods of the bayonet, Cheerio went before the Germans.
His hands swept his face as if by their motion he put away that scene that had come back so clearly to memory. No! Not even the girl he loved—for in his misery, Cheerio faced the fact that he loved Hilda—not even she could truthfully name him—coward!