He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. He only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight pleased him in a way he could not describe.
The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green. The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman silhouetted like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved about the chuck wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated up to Robin’s nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the human eye over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny resonance to sounds, the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring. Some one was singing a ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined lustily in the chorus:
“Comin’ up the Chisholm Trail
I tell you what you’ll get,
A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meat
Little black coffee with sugar on the sly,
Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”
Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down the hill. He loosed his reata and slung a noose. Fifty yards short of the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string, shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse packing his bed.
Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.
Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these youths where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone, “Gentlemen, dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it vigorously with an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And the crew swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens gathering about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat worms.
The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up. The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent, sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource, initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain, sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down—it was all one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay on his unrolled bed.
He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them. Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his fellows.
“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.
“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”