Starr, of the Desert

by B. M. Bower

"Aw for gosh sake!" grumbled Vic, stooping reluctantly to pick up the old hoe-handle he used for a staff. "What ridge?" He paused to thunder up at her, his voice unexpectedly changing to a shrill falsetto on the last word, as frequently happens to rob a mancub of his dignity just when he needs it most.

"That ridge before your face, chump," Helen May informed him crossly. "If it comes to choosing between goats and a boy, I'll take the goats! And if there's any spot on the face of the earth worse than this, I'd like to know where it is. The idea of expecting people to live in such a country! It looks for all the world like magnified pictures of the moon's surface. And," she added with a dreary kind of vindictiveness, "it's here, and I'm here. I can't get away from it—that's the dickens of it." Then, because Helen May had a certain impish sense of humor, she sat down and laughed at the incongruity of it all. "Me—me, here in the desert trying to raise goats! Can you beat that?"

She watched Vic toiling up the ridge, using the hoe-handle with a slavish dependence upon its support that tickled Helen May again. "You'd think," she told the scenery for want of other companionship, "you'd think Vic was seventy-nine years old at the very least. Makes a difference whether he's after a bunch of tame goats or hiking with a bunch of boy scouts to the top of Mount Wilson! I don't believe that kid ever did wear his legs out having fun, and it's a sure thing he'll never wear them out working! Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps."

Vic disappeared over the ridge beyond the spring. Lower down, where the ridge merged into the Basin itself, the big curly-horned Billy that had cost Helen May more than any half dozen of his followers stepped out briskly at the head of the band. Helen May wondered what new depravity was in his mind, and whether Vic would cross the gully he was in and confront Billy in time to change the one idea that seemed always to possess that animal.

Helen May did not know how vitally important it is to have a good dog at such work. She did not know that Billy and his band felt exactly like boys who have successfully eluded a too lax teacher, and that they would have yielded without argument to the bark of a trained sheep dog. She had set Vic a harder task than she realized; a task from which any experienced herder would have shrunk. In her ignorance she blamed Vic, and called him lazy and careless and a few other sisterly epithets which he did not altogether deserve.

She watched now, impatient because he was so long in crossing the gully; telling herself that he was trying to see how slow he could be, and that he did it just to be disagreeable and to irritate her—as if she were there of her own desire, and had bought those two hundred miserable goats to spite him. Harmony, as you must see, did not always dwell in Sunlight Basin.

Eventually Vic toiled up the far side of the gully, which was deep and as hot as an oven, and followed it down within rock-throwing distance of the goats. A well-aimed pebble struck Billy on the curve of one horn and halted him, the band huddling vacant-eyed behind him. Vic aimed and threw another, and Billy, turning his whiskered face upward, stared with resentful head-tossings and a defiant blat or two before he swerved back into the Basin, his band and Vic plodding after.

"Well, for a wonder!" Helen May ejaculated ungraciously, grudging Vic the small tribute of praise that was due him. But she was immediately ashamed of that, and told herself that it was pretty hard on the poor kid, and that after all he must hate the country worse than she did, even, which would certainly mean a good deal; and that she supposed he missed his boy chums just as much as she missed her friends, and found it just as hard to fit himself comfortably into a life for which he had no liking. Besides, it wasn't his health that had shunted them both out here into the desert, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for treating him the way she did.

After that she decided that it was her business to find the nine goats that were lost. Vic certainly could not do both at once; and deep down in her heart Helen May knew that she was terribly afraid of Billy and would rather trudge the desert for hours under the hot sun than stay in the Basin watching the main flock. She wished that she could afford to hire a herder, but she shrunk from the expense. It seemed to her that she and Vic should be able to herd that one band, especially since there was nothing else for them to do out there except cook food and eat it.

Speaking of food, it seemed to take an enormous quantity to satisfy the hunger of two persons. Helen May was appalled at the insatiable appetite of Vic, who seemed never to have enough in his stomach. As for herself—well, she recalled the meal she had just eaten, and wondered how it could be possible for hunger to seize upon her so soon again. But even so, food could not occupy all of their time, and a two-room cabin does not take much keeping in order. They would simply be throwing away money if they hired a herder, and yet, how they both did loathe those goats!