“Stranger,” said he, “you look like a cowpuncher.”
“Looks don’t deceive you this time,” Rock admitted.
“Can you pack a mule?”
“I have lashed packs on a variety of animals,” Rock said. “But I have no ambition to be a government muleteer.”
“Be a good sport an’ help me out,” the man appealed. “It won’t be but for four or five days, till we get to the post. I’m short-handed, and these mules is bad medicine. I shore need a man that’s handy with a rope. I’ll give you five dollars a day.”
Rock grinned and accepted. The mules were certainly bad medicine, and he was handy with a rope, and a few days more or less didn’t matter.
Fort Assiniboine lay eighty miles eastward. Fort Benton hugged the north bank of the Missouri, some sixty miles southwest. But here was a job just begging to be taken in hand. So for five days thereafter he was a mule packer, learning something of the way of men and mules in Uncle Sam’s service. He even had an officer suggest that he would make a likely cavalryman. But Rock had different ideas. He took his twenty-five dollars in the shadow of this military post and set his face westward again.
He left in the gray of dawn. The second evening he dropped from the level of the plains, full three hundred feet into the valley of the Marias, where a little stream sang and whispered over a pebbly bed, through flats of rich, loamy soil. Sagebrush grew here, and natural meadows spread there. Willows lined the banks. Groves of poplar studded the flats, thickets of service berry. Great cottonwoods, solitary giants and family groups, cast a pleasant shade from gnarly boughs in full leaf.
“Gosh, places like this,” Rock murmured, “fairly shout out loud for a fellow to settle down and make himself a home. No wonder Texas is flocking North.”
In the first bottom Rock crossed, he stirred up a few cattle, then a band of horses, several of which bore trimmed manes and tails and marks of the saddle—fine-looking beasts, bigger than the Texas mustang. He couldn’t see the brand.