CHAPTER XII—A MAVERICK
In spite of the delay, the boys had made good progress on the Grub Stake trail when they stopped for a bite at noon. They were well through the foothills, the tall mountain in which were located the silver mines above Silver Run, was behind them, and the trail had become only a faint trace, yet easily followed because of the nature of the country.
Now and again they had obtained glimpses of the open plains through the gullies between the wooded hills—here a great stretch of lawn covered with short buffalo grass; yonder an open piece of country strewn with brilliant flowers.
As they sat on their haunches, cowboy fashion, beside the dying fire over which the coffee had been boiled, the chums suddenly saw a flight of swiftly bounding little animals cross the line of their vision. They passed across the opening between two hills to the north and were gone in a breath.
“Whew! did you see them?” gasped Dig, almost spilling his coffee.
“I saw something,” admitted Chet.
“What I want to know is, did you see the same thing I did?” pursued Dig, grinning. “They went so fast I didn’t know but I had ’em again.”
“I can assure you that you didn’t have those again. They’re almost too quick to lasso. They’re antelopes.”
“Whew! I’d like to catch one; but I never do have any luck catching things, unless it’s measles, or something perfectly useless.”
“Too bad, too bad!” said Chet pityingly, and quoted:
“‘’Twas ever thus since childhood’s hour
My fondest hopes I’ve seen decay....
I never loved a dear gazelle—’”
“Waugh!” grunted Dig. “What’s a gazelle?”
“It’s something like an antelope.”
“Well, it sounds awfully mushy. I’d like to catch one of ’em to eat.”
“Sorry,” said Chet, throwing out the remainder of his coffee. “But it would take a long time to trail those fellows. Maybe we’ll try it on our way back.”
“We’re going to fast, then, going over to Grub Stake?” suggested Dig, complainingly. “This sort of a snack isn’t going to keep me in the saddle for long.”
“Perhaps we’ll come across a deer, poor boy,” said Chet soothingly. “I shouldn’t wish you to starve. You know, the redman only pulled his belt the tighter when he had to go without food, and did not complain.”
“That’s all right. I’ll leave that to John Peep. When little Dig Fordham gets hungry you’re going to hear a holler—be sure of that.”
“Keep your eye open for deer, then—or, when we get in the open, for sage hens or quail.”
“I’d rather have a supper of deer liver,” Dig returned, smacking his lips at the thought.
“Well, maybe we can shoot a deer. They are not so swift as the antelope.”
“But aren’t antelope easily trapped? I’ve heard Rafe Peters tell about catching them with a red rag tied to a stalk.”
“Pshaw!” exclaimed Chet. “You mean he toled them near enough with a red rag to pot-shoot them. The little creatures are very curious.”
“Oh! then you shake salt on their tails, I s’pose?” grumbled Dig.
Chet had to laugh at this. But both boys, after the noon halt, kept a bright outlook for game. Their supper actually depended upon the discovery of some game which they might capture.
An hour after their noontide stop the chums rode out upon a plain from between two heavily wooded hills. This open space was a great, level valley, through which a stream ran, and it should have been a paradise for ruminant animals.
There was the shelter of the hills on both the east and north; the clear, placid stream; the abundant grass and low bushes; with sufficient shade along the watercourse to attract the herds.
“Hello!” exclaimed Dig suddenly. “What’s been digging up the prairie in that way? Why, Chet! did you ever see the like?”
“Yes, I have,” returned his chum. “You know, when I went to Benway with father that time, we travelled for a week with a herd.”
“A herd? Cattle, do you mean?” exclaimed Dig.
“Yes.”
“You don’t mean to say this is a cattle trail?” demanded the other boy, drawing the black horse to a stop at the edge of a wide track in the sodded land, and gazing at it wonderingly.
“That’s what it is. More than twice as wide as the street we live in, Dig. See how the cattle’s sharp hoofs have cut it up? The herd we were with was a great sight. The column was a mile long, the cattle trotting along as they pleased, and seemingly of their own accord.”
“But didn’t the cowpunchers hurry ’em on, and crack their quirts and shoot guns to hurry them and all that?”
“Of course not,” said Chet, with disgust. “How much fat would there be left on a steer, do you suppose, if they were treated that way on the trail? I didn’t see a man carrying a whip, and we rode with them nearly a week.
“Everything was quiet; nobody shouted; nobody seemed to bother the cattle at all.”
“But there must have been lots of cowpunchers on hand, so that if the cattle stampeded—” Dig urged.
“There weren’t but eleven men with that herd,” Chet told him. “I tried to find out all about the herd and how they handled them. You see, the men in the lead were called ‘point men,’ those riding along the sides of the herd were the ‘swing men’ and the one who brought up the rear was the ‘drag man.’
“In addition, there was the cook, who drove the chuck wagon, and the horse wrangler, who had charge of the remuda of a hundred and fifty ponies. ‘Remuda’ means relay, you know.”
“Ugh-huh!” grunted Dig. “But didn’t they stop to graze? Why, according to this trail, the cattle went right through the finest kind of grass without taking a bite.”
“This was a big herd,” said Chet, eying the cut-up sod seriously. “But, of course, they grazed. The way they did it when father and I travelled with them was this: An hour before noon one of the point men whistled and the whole column of beeves turned aside and went to grazing. They called it ‘throwing the herd off the trail to graze.’”
“Great!” exclaimed his chum.
“When it was time to start on, the men gathered them, got them headed right, and all settled into the trail again.”
“But how about the nights, Chet?” inquired Digby. “How could eleven men handle such a large herd?”
“Why,” said Chet, “they threw the herd off the trail to graze and to water just the same. The men were divided into watches, something like the watches at sea. Those on watch rode around and around the herd. If the cattle were uneasy they sang.”
Dig chuckled. “Sang what?” he asked. “‘Rock-a-bye-baby’ and the like?”
“No,” laughed Chet. “One fellow didn’t know anything but ‘Beulah Land’—and after you’ve heard it sung a thousand times, you get tired of it. The regular cattle-herding songs have hundreds of verses to them; but the tunes get monotonous, too, after a while.”
“I should think so!” ejaculated Digby. “D’you know, I thought cattle herding was more boisterous.”
“You’ve driven cows to pasture, haven’t you?”
“Yes. For old man Feltman. He has seven,” Digby said.
“Multiply his seven by a thousand and you have a good-sized trail herd. Only there will be more crippled and strayed animals left behind a regular herd. And coyotes, wolves, and bears to pick them up.”
“Whew! Maybe we can find a wolf on this trail,” cried Dig.
“I hope not! There’s nothing wickeder in this country than a grey wolf,” declared Chet Havens.
“Why! I thought they were cowards. Everybody says: ‘As cowardly as a wolf.’”
“Then everybody is mistaken,” said Chet firmly. “Don’t you fool yourself. They are not like coyotes. Rafe has told me that an old she wolf, especially with young, will go out of her way to attack man.”
“Gidap!” exclaimed Dig. “Rafe was stringing you.”
“I don’t think so. And when they run in packs, I’ve read that wolves are very dangerous indeed.”
“Well! we might find a maverick along this trail,” urged Dig. “Say! a yearling that hadn’t been branded might sell for a few dollars at Grub Stake.”
“Goodness me! Do you think for a minute we can stop to drive a dogy all the way to Grub Stake?” laughed Chet.
“Huh! you’d stop for that big buffalo, all right, all right, if you saw him.”
“I expect I would,” admitted his chum. “Wouldn’t you?”
“If I ever see a buffalo—Say, Chet! why do they call them ‘mavericks’?”
“They don’t.”
“What d’you mean, they don’t? Of course they do. Unbranded calves—”
“Oh!” chuckled Chet. “You got me twisted. I thought you meant the buffaloes.”
“Oh! Don’t be funny.”
“Why, mavericks are unbranded cattle—usually yearlings. Called such, so I’ve read, because a certain cattleman in Texas, named Colonel Maverick, refused to brand his cattle. All the other cattle owners did, so Maverick claimed all unbranded stock.”
“Oh!”
“It was a sharp trick, you see,” Chet said. “He gathered in lots of cattle that way. Cowpunchers made a joke of it at first. They called every stray and unbranded beast a ‘maverick.’ The name stuck.”
The boys crossed the cattle trail, for it came up from the south through a pass between the hills there, while the faint trace they were following took them almost due west. The stream flowed with them, and during the afternoon they were never far from its bank.
Therefore they started up several groups of animals that were either feeding near the river or were drinking—a second small herd of antelopes (or possibly the same herd they had caught a glimpse of before), a pair of red deer, coyotes uncounted, and some animal that went crashing off through the willows, which they did not see, but which Dig declared made as much noise as a heavy freight.
“Your big buffalo, I bet, Chet,” he chuckled. “That’s the only chance you’ll have of knocking him over.”
“Maybe not,” his chum said cheerfully.
“Talking of knocking something over,” pursued Digby, “what are we going to have for supper? There’s nothing hearty left in my pack but a condensed milk tin. All these creatures seem to spot us half a mile off.”
“The birds don’t,” said Chet, unmoved.
“What have you in this outfit to shoot sage hens with?” growled Digby. “If you’d have let me bring a shotgun—”
His grumbling was stopped almost instantly. Chet had been riding with the six-shooter loosened in its case while his eyes roved all about them as the horses walked.
He threw up his left hand in warning to Dig and spoke in a low voice to Hero:
“Whoa, Hero! Stand still!”
Dig drew his black horse to a stop, being half a length behind the bay. Chet threw the long barrel of the pistol across his left forearm just as a flock of grouse whirred up from the grass ahead.
Chet Havens’ arm-rest was as steady as an iron bracket. Hero stood like a statue. Crack! crack! crack! Three of the prairie hens fluttered to the ground while the others disappeared beyond the willows across the river.
“Whew!” yelled Dig, clambering down from his saddle. “There’s our supper.”
He threw his lines to his chum while he ran to pick up the birds.
“By the last hoptoad that was chased out of Ireland! you shot the head off of one of these, Chet.”
“That is the first one I shot,” returned his chum calmly, pushing fresh cartridges into his revolver and leaving the hammer resting on an empty shell.
“Talk about Davy Crockett!” chuckled Digby. “I believe you’ve got him beaten—with a six-shooter, anyway.”
“Reckon you’re right,” admitted Chet. “Davy never saw such a gun as this. But what would we do with a long barreled squirrel rifle with the flint filed to a sharp point and a few grains of powder sprinkled in the pan? I bet we’d starve on this journey, Dig.”
“Huh! Maybe. But we’re not going to starve to-night,” returned his chum with assurance, and tying the legs of the grouse to his saddle.
This trail to Grub Stake had never been a wagon trail, and for some months it had scarcely been used; therefore its trace was dim in places. Chet had been told the landmarks to follow by his father, however, and through this first valley there was no chance of the boys going astray.
They would not get out of this valley until the next day. The horses had not been driven hard, save when Poke ran away from the bear, but they had brought the boys a good many miles from Silver Run before sunset.
They made camp in a grove on the river’s bank. The sun had dropped behind the western range and night was coming fast. Chet was making the fire and skinning the grouse. Dig hobbled the horses nearby, where the grazing was good, and then went along the river bank to see if there was a spring, the water of which would be fresher and colder than the river water.
And in stumbling along through the bushes in the half-darkness Dig Fordham fell upon his next adventure. Chet suddenly heard a mighty thrashing and bellowing in the brush. Dig’s voice rose in excitement:
“Bring your rope, Chet! Bring your rope! I have a deer!”
His chum did not believe him, but he did as Dig said and ran with the lariat coiled and ready in his hand. Only a few yards away he came upon his chum on the back of some animal, struggling in the mud beside the river. Dig had his arms around the creature’s neck, and was hanging on for dear life.
“I have him! I have him!” cried Dig.
“Looks as though he had you,” laughed Chet.
The creature had evidently been lying in the mud and Dig had fallen over him. Chet slipped the noose over the head of the animal and then advised his chum to rise.
“You’re frightening the poor thing to death,” he said, for it was bawling as well as struggling. And its voice was unmistakable to Chet’s ear.
“Whew! I fell right over that deer,” gasped Dig, getting up as the creature danced around at the end of the rope, trying to get away from Chet.
“Deer! Your grandmother’s hat!” Chet said scornfully. “You fell on a calf—that’s what you fell on. Don’t you know a deer from a calf?”
“Calf?” repeated the chagrined Dig. “Where did it come from? There’s no ranch around here, is there?”
“This is what you were looking for,” laughed Chet. “It’s a maverick. It likely strayed from the last bunch of cattle that went over the trail we crossed. But how under the sun it managed to escape the coyotes and lions and bears is a mystery to me. Poor little fellow!”
“Come on!” exclaimed Dig. “We’ll drag him back to camp, and I’ll gentle him. We aren’t travelling very fast, Chet, and we can lead him to-morrow.”
“Well! I’d rather you tried it than that I should,” his chum said grimly, handing him the end of the rope. “Go to it, boy!”