“You have the contract drawn like I tell you—hear? Why, great Scott! I’d stand to lose the whole herd—fixed like I am—less’n I had an honest man and a mighty good friend to hold ’em and pertect my interests. You make a good thing out of it? Well, you needn’t fret about that—I want you to.”
“All right, Trace.” Uncle Hank’s answer was lower, but the little girl heard it.
“Well, that’s settled,” said Jacox. “Come on, Berry; we can finish our game now. Me an’ Pearsall’s all done.”
Uncle Hank and Hilda went back to the Three Sorrows outfit, which camped on the fifth night at the Lazy W., three miles beyond Capitan.
The cattle were all rounded into a fenced pasture for tally. With a little sack of pink Mexican beans, Hilda, on her pony, was stationed to one side of the gate, while Uncle Hank, pencil and paper in hand, held Buckskin quiet on a rise a little way inside the pasture. As the boys drove the cattle up and strung them out through the gate in single file, Hank put down a straight, upright mark for what he called “every cow-brute” that passed him. When the same cow-brute got to Hilda, she dropped a bean from the full sack into an empty one she held on the saddle horn before her. When Uncle Hank had marked down ten animals he drew a slanting line through the ten upright ones. His record was going to look a good deal like a picket fence. Hilda kept no record of tens. She was only the checker. When the herd was through into the other pasture, where the boys were rushing the road-branding, Uncle Hank would add up his tens into hundreds, and then Hilda would sit down in some quiet spot, if she could find any such, and count her beans one by one.
She was very proud of coming out within three of Uncle Hank’s reckoning. She had made it three more than he did, and she told him she believed they got by him that time the new hand interrupted their work with a call from the branding-pen. He agreed, and said they’d give Trace the benefit of her count, not his.
Ten new hands had been hired for the work, and on the second day the big herd was put in motion; one of the new men drove the grub wagon, and after herd, riders and wagon were all started, Uncle Hank and Hilda rode out side by side.
“We’ll swing around by way of town. I want to stop and say good-by to Trace,” he told her.
At the courthouse he dismounted and went up to his partner, who was sitting with the amiable sheriff on the shady side of the jail, their chairs tilted back against the adobe wall. Hilda saw that there was a long, speechless hand-grip; and when Hank was mounted, he wheeled again to answer the other’s “Good luck!” which accompanied the free-hearted, open movement and smile of one who has no complaints to make and to whom a few years in jail comes as one of the fairly plentiful bad jokes of the cattle-country life.
A lump rose in her throat as she thought of that man of wind and sun and open plain shut away from it all for four years. Maybe, too, the “poplar man” was offensive; maybe prison would be as terrible to Jacox as it would have been to Pearse Masters. But there had been nobody to hide him and bring him food and lend him a horse. Uncle Hank, wrapped in his own somber reflections, did not see the furtive wiping of tears; and, presently, as by mutual understanding, they put their ponies to a lope and caught up with the outfit. The drive up the trail home was actually begun.