The man they relieved met them silently and rode away to camp. Off to the right an animal coughed, and a black shape moved out from the shadows.
Bob swung towards it, and the shape melted again into the splotch of shade which was the sleeping herd. He motioned to the left. “Yuh can go that way; and yuh want to sing something, or whistle, so they'll know what yuh are.” His tone was subdued, as it had not been before. He seemed to drift away into the darkness, and soon his voice rose, away across the herd, singing. As he drew nearer Thurston caught the words, at first disjointed and indistinct, then plainer as they met. It was a song he had never heard before, because its first popularity had swept far below his social plane.
“She's o-only a bird in a gil-ded cage,
A beautiful sight to see-e-e;
You may think she seems ha-a-aappy and free from ca-a-re..”
The singer passed on and away, and only the high notes floated across to Thurston, who whistled softly under his breath while he listened. Then, as they neared again on the second round, the words came pensively:
“Her beauty was so-o-old
For an old man's go-o-old, She's a bird in a gilded ca-a-age.”
Thurston rode slowly like one in a dream, and the lure of the range-land was strong upon him. The deep breathing of three thousand sleeping cattle; the strong, animal odor; the black night which grew each moment blacker, and the rhythmic ebb and flow of the clear, untrained voice of a cowboy singing to his charge. If he could put it into words; if he could but picture the broody stillness, with frogs cr-ekk, er-ekking along the reedy creek-bank and a coyote yapping weirdly upon a distant hilltop! From the southwest came mutterings half-defiant and ominous. A breeze whispered something to the grasses as it crept away down the valley.
“I stood in a church-yard just at ee-eve,
While the sunset adorned the west.”
It was Bob, drawing close out of the night. “You're doing fine, Kid; keep her a-going,” he commended, in an undertone as he passed, and Thurston moistened his unaccustomed lips and began industriously whistling “The Heart Bowed Down,” and from that jumped to Faust. Fifteen minutes exhausted his memory of the whistleable parts, and he was not given to tiresome repetitions. He stopped for a moment, and Bob's voice chanted admonishingly from somewhere, “Keep her a-go-o-ing, Bud, old boy!” So Thurston took breath and began on “The Holy City,” and came near laughing at the incongruity of the song; only he remembered that he must not frighten the cattle, and checked the impulse.
“Say,” Bob began when he came near enough, “do yuh know the words uh that piece? It's a peach; I wisht you'd sing it.” He rode on, still humming the woes of the lady who married for gold.
Thurston obeyed while the high-piled thunder-heads rumbled deep accompaniment, like the resonant lower tones of a bass viol.