The column of cattle, with attendant riders—Hilda being one of these—strung out over a mile long. It looked like a great snake on the face of the open country, a vast snake that, day in day out, in dawn or noon or dusk, moved always northwestward, traveling with rustle and swish of twelve thousand hoofs in the short plains grass, or sending forth a murmur as of a smothered rain-storm when it inched itself over naked places; this continuous undernote punctuated and picked out by the plaintive bleating of calves; the occasional more remonstrant lowing of a steer, the clinking of stirrups or bridle bits, the squeak of saddles, the swift patter of galloping hoofs and the calling back and forth, as the boys rode up and down along the flanks of the herd.
They were up in the morning at daybreak, so as to travel as much as possible before the heat of the day. At noon there was a long rest, with dinner, the men lying at ease to smoke afterwards, the cattle scattered out under the fewest herders, grazing. On the trip down they had scouted out and marked the route, noting places where a herd of this size could be watered, and each afternoon there was the eager looking for a curving line of growth that advertised the expected stream, or the clumps of tall cottonwoods about a carefully fenced-in spring or water-hole.
There was some rough country to be traversed. They crossed steep-sided arroyos, breaks and gulches, where lariats were attached to the back of the wagon as it plunged down, the ponies “setting back on the rope” to prevent the big vehicle from coming bodily on the mules that pulled it. Once down, the ropes were transferred to wagon-tongue and singletrees, and, with a whoop and a great whip-cracking, snorting ponies and straining mules rushed the bank ahead.
One stormy night Hilda awakened to find all about her lumbering, plunging cattle, clashing horns, yelling men and, for a few moments, cracking pistols. It seemed to her like a pandemonium—chaos—the end of the world. Later, from the safe spot under a handy mesquite where she had been placed, she dimly saw the heading back of the cattle, the milling of them round and round and, finally, their safe bedding down.
Then came, thin and airy on the night wind, the broken strains of “The Sweet Bye and Bye.” Indian Joe, one of the hands hired at El Capitan, played beautifully on the mouth organ. He was riding night herd; she got snatches of the tune as he circled the quieting cattle. She fell asleep on it and waked next morning to hear the talk of Buster and a casual rider who had stopped at the camp to borrow tobacco.
“Had a stampede?” suggested the stranger, as he rolled his cigarette, and Buster shook his head negligently above the broken stirrup strap he was mending.
“Shucks, no. They run a little—nothin’ much,” was his notion of last night’s frightful hazards, its inhuman toil. “You’re welcome, old timer,” he nodded to the other’s thanks. “So long!”
That drive, with its vicissitudes, its new, strange experiences, its open sky and measureless outlook, lay like a bright baldric across Hilda’s childhood, dividing what went before from what came after. She watched, day by day, how the boys buckled to their labors, how they faced with a laugh all the hardships of the trip, making light of the long night watches, going without sleep sometimes in emergencies till they nodded and almost fell forward in their saddles. She heard them jeer each other mercilessly for the least mistake or shortcoming, clothing their rare praise of each other in half-sarcastic terms; she believed they would have jeered a broken leg—their own or another’s. Not “be good” but “make good” was their slogan. Life was mostly a joke; a sour one or a gay one, but still a joke. The impression of unquestioning, off-hand fidelity to exacting duties, of uncomplaining bravery and good nature, was laid ineffaceably on the young spirit. The code all this contributed to build up was, inevitably, more a man’s than a woman’s.
Fourteen men the outfit traveled; fourteen strong they snailed the big herd across the face of northwestern Texas toward Lame Jones County. But it was the fifteenth, the limber, swift fellow, with eyes keen and bright like daggers, that was the life of all. Him they never saw, this lively comrade, this clever adversary; only his voice they heard in the deep note of the water that rolled down like a wall on the face of treacherous Maricopa, from a cloudburst above; in the thunder of hoofs at night when skulking rustlers flapped a blanket in a steer’s face and the sleeping cattle rose as one and broke away; the gleam of his eyes they caught dancing in those curious little flames that play sometimes on the tips of clashing horns, in the furious night stampede that followed; a flash of his flying hair upon the wind, or amid the dust-cloud that enwrapped the approach of a bunch of bad men or hostile Indians.
Ah, that fifteenth rider—viewless and unapparent, but vividly present—that one who, in the eighties, crossed the plains with every trail herd and gave zest and spirit to the trip, in whose company no labor, no hardship could become mean, commonplace, sordid; he who was never licked—or being so for the moment, always came again, fresher, more vigorous, more inciting, more taunting than before, whispering: “My name is Danger—come out and face me!”—the opponent with whom every man in the outfit was always eager to try a fall—the fifteenth rider rescued all from the dullness of routine, maintained men and enterprise ever upon the iris-hued border of true romance.