In the Bad Lands

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

Bill Mather lived up to Charlie Shaw’s first estimate. He more than held up his end. Did it with a peculiar sort of concentration on the job. For a youngster he was uncommonly self-contained. He would answer with a nod or a smile rather than a word. The rough joking of a round-up crew slid off him as rain off a slicker. In camp he would sit staring at nothing, chin in hand, his lean, dark face as impassive as a Buddha’s.

Charlie learned more about him from the Block S.

“Nice kid,” their range foreman said. “Made a good hand for me one season. Folks ain’t much. Old man’s no account. Got a brother that’s slick as hell at a lot of things, but lazy. Girl down there, sister or something, wild as a hawk. Keep their ranch like a boar’s nest. Got a few stock in the edge of the breaks. Scrap among themselves all the time. Bill’s all right. He’ll amount to somethin’. ‘Bad Land,’ we used to call him.”

Bad Land Bill. The Block S had christened him that. The Wineglass revived it. The name fitted the boy. He was like some wild, dynamic creature out of that desolate and distorted region which lies like a barrier on both sides of the Missouri River. The round-up moved its wagons along the edge of this sinister jumble of canyons, gullies, washouts, sagebrush, thickets of scrub pine, cut banks banded with layers of varicolored earth, like stripes of Indian paint. They reached down long, narrow plateaus winding through a network of impassable crevices, driving range cattle out ahead of them. It was like a vast maze, the Bad Land country. Yet it had its good points for a cattleman—also for others whose business was not so legitimate. There lay pasture and shelter for winter-driven stock. Aridity and bitter water kept sheep out in summer, and left a heavy stand of bunch grass where grass could grow. If, now and then, some sheriff cursed the country because he had to hunt a lawbreaker fruitlessly, it was no matter. It was a hard country to get about in on horseback, impossible for wheeled traffic.

In the edge of the Bad Lands, on a fork of Birch Creek, a furious rainstorm tied up the round-up. After twelve hours of downpour the gumbo soil softened so that a horse sank ankle-deep in stuff like putty, withdrawing his hoof with a curious sucking plop! The wagon tires cut inch by inch into the earth where they stood. It was like the Flood, with the Bear Paws a distant Ararat on the north, hidden in the murk, and not for their saving. They had to stay in the flats and take it. Day-herders on the cattle herd, the horse wrangler with his saddle bunch, in slicker and chaps, humped backs to the storm and endured their hours on watch. The rain grew colder, became sleety squalls. The second evening snow drove thick and fast, hard, stinging particles, out of the northwest. Overnight it piled fourteen inches deep. Noon laid two feet of this unwelcome white purity on the levels. The two round-up bosses held confab and turned their herds loose. It was too much to ask men to face day and night the blast of that untimely storm, to grow numb in their saddles on night guard. Their saddle stock they had to hold—they were the tools of their trade. They marshaled the cowboys into regular watches with the horse wranglers, standing two-hour shifts. There was no fenced pasture within thirty miles to relieve them of that necessity.

“What the hell’s the country comin’ to?” Bud Cole complained to Bill Mather. “The world musta slipped a couple of cogs north.”

“Maybe,” Bad Land agreed. “Tough on cowboys.”

The others slept, killed time with penny ante, cursed the weather, swapped range lore. Charlie Shaw brooded in the cook tent. It would clear with a hard frost. New-born calves dying in snowbanks in the last of May. April showers bring May flowers! Damn such weather!

Upon a convenient hillock a dozen riders laid ropes on a varied collection of dead-pine snags, dragged them down before the bed tent. They were saturated with pitch. One father of roots would burn for three days. They made bets on its duration. Once ignited, neither snow, wind, rain nor buckets of water could extinguish that pitch-fed flame. It made a pleasant glow between the opened flaps of the tent. Also it made a serviceable beacon in the dark, a mark for the relief men on night guard, a wavering yellow tongue like a lighthouse on a rocky coast.

The third night of the deep snow, when the fall had ceased, when the blustering northwest wind sank to a murmur, and sharp frost was setting a crust on the damp drifts, a man staggered into the circle of light. He had on overalls and a short sheepskin coat. He was an oldish man, with a tangled beard extending fanwise from his chin, a black beard like those of the prophets.