“Hehup, Ned!” she chirruped.
And in almost no time the pan was full and running over, and the team was moving off with it toward the fill.
“It looks so easy when you do it,” Manzanita complained. “Dump it and I’ll try again.”
“You jest watch a little,” advised Wing o’ the Crow.
Manzanita felt humiliated by the words. She thought that her efforts to become a dirt mover were hampering the work. She had tried six times to load a slip, always with the same result, except that now and then she had managed to keep her feet.
Jeddo the Crow was driving the snap team, which is used only in loading the scrapers with wheels. In “sticking pigs” the skinner himself loads and drives and dumps. As Wing o’ the Crow came down the dump with her empty slip Jeddo called to her. Manzanita saw him hurry to camp for something, and while he was away his daughter let her slip team stand and drove the trio on the snap.
Manzanita watched her enviously. She swung the cumbersome eveners as easily as had her one-armed father. Earlier in the afternoon the desert girl had seen her driving six mules hitched to a huge railroad plow. In the saddle Manzanita was at home, but as a railroad builder she had shown many shortcomings. Mart had been driven to the mountains to build drift fence by his father. Manzanita was lonesome. She envied this girl who could do things that really counted. She had forgotten her aversion to the railroad. Suddenly she had grown ambitious to be doing something in life besides riding over the desert on a pinto, wandering aimlessly. She even did not wish to become a moving picture actress now. “Life is real and life is earnest,” she had quoted to Mrs. Ehrhart, apropos of nothing at all, that morning, greatly to the kindly housekeeper’s surprise.
She sighed pensively now; and when Jeddo returned and Wing o’ the Crow drove into the borrow pit with the slip team again, she arose from her seat on a felled yucca.
“I guess I’d better be riding home, Wing-o,” she said. “I’ve lots to do. I’ll see you to-morrow maybe, if I can find the time.”
Whereupon she mounted her mare and galloped toward Squawtooth.