But the Happy Family had not ridden those breaks for cattle, all these years, to be hindered by rough going. Weary, when the band stopped and huddled, blatting incessantly against a sheer wall of sandstone and gravel, got the herders together and told them what he wanted.
“You take 'em down that slope till you come to the second little coulee. Don't go up the first one—that's a blind pocket. In the second coulee, up a mile or so, there's a spring creek. You can hold 'em there on water for half an hour. That's more than any of yuh deserve. Haze 'em down there.”
The herders did not know it, but that second coulee was the rude gateway to an intricate system of high ridges and winding waterways that would later be dry as a bleached bone—the real beginning of the bad lands which border the Missouri river for long, terrible miles. Down there, it is possible for two men to reach places where they may converse quite easily across a chasm, and yet be compelled to ride fifteen or twenty miles, perhaps, in order to shake hands. Yet, even in that scrap-heap of Nature there are ways of passing deep into the heart of the upheaval.
The Happy Family knew those ways as they knew the most complicated figures of the quadrilles they danced so lightfootedly with the girls of the Bear Paw country. When they forced the sheep and their herders out of the coulee Weary had indicated he sent Irish and Pink ahead to point the way, and he told them to head for the Wash Bowl; which they did with praiseworthy zeal and scant pity for the sheep.
When at last, after a slow, heartbreaking climb up a long, bare ridge, Pink and Irish paused upon the brow of a slope and let the trail-weary band spill itself reluctantly down the steep slope beyond, the sun stood high in the blue above them and their stomachs clamored for food; by which signs they knew that it must be near noon.
When the last sheep had passed, blatting discordantly, down the bluff, Weary halted the sweating herders for a parting admonition.
“We don't aim to deal you any more misery, for a while, if you stay where you're at. You're only working for a living, like the rest of us—but I must say I don't admire your trade none. Anyway, I'll send some of your bunch down here with grub and beds. This is good enough range for sheep. You keep away from the Flying U and nobody'll bother you. Over there in them trees,” he added, pointing a gloved finger toward a little grove on the far side of the basin, “you'll find a cabin, and water. And, farther down the river there's pretty good grass, in the little bottoms. Now, git.”
The herders looked as if they would enjoy murdering them all, but they did not say a word. With their dogs at heel they scrambled down the bluff in the wake of their sheep, and the Happy Family, rolling cigarettes while they watched them depart, told one another that this settled that bunch; they wouldn't bed down in the Flying U door-yard that night, anyway.