The song was too much for the coyote, and he paused to yield to the craving for harmony reawakened in him.
"He's imitatin' you, Jim," chanted Gardner as he passed Lefferts. "Which same I says is well done."
"Go to th' devil, an' join yore tribe," sang Jim in delicate repartee, and forthwith began the mournful lay of Clementine:
In a hut a-mong th' bushes, all a-long th' foamin' brine,
Lived a min-er, 'forty nin-er, an' his daugh-ter, Clementine.
She was fair-er than th' ros-es, an' her for-m-m, it was di-vine;
Two dry-goods box-es, without their top-ses, made gaiters for-r my Clementine.
At half-past eleven Gardner rode in to the wagon, aroused the next shift, sought his blankets and was sound asleep before his three shift companions reached the camp. At three o'clock the second shift was relieved by the third, and last, which would stay with the herd until it was taken over by all the others, after breakfast.
The new day brought further developments. Several fires burned not far from the herd, irons projecting from them. The cattle were again cut out and driven away to a new herd, one by one, but this time they were taken close to the fires, and because of their weight and strength two ropers joined in the efforts of branding each animal. The glowing iron bit deeply through hair and into the skin on the left flank, filling the air with bellowing anguish, surprise, and indignation, and the odors of burning hair and flesh. There were fights, balkings, charges, but the hard-working, hard-riding punchers, the deftly cast ropes, and the trained horses, together with waving hats and an occasional revolver shot close to the nose of refractory, pugnacious bulls, and an occasional waved slicker or coat, won out, and the work proceeded at a good pace in spite of the general and apparent confusion. But whatever aspect of confusion there was, very little really existed except among the victims themselves, for the men proceeded along well-established lines, and the work went on as though it were running in a groove. Horses were changed every hour or two, depending upon the rider's judgment, and the inspectors, with the Triangle foreman, checked off the branded animals as they joined the road-branded herd. This herd grew rapidly and its guards were increased as needed from the ropers and iron men at they became too tired to hold the pace set. All day long the busy scene continued in the dust and the heat of the sun, with a bedlam of noise, an endless weaving and shifting, with lathered horses, sweat-and-dust-grimed riders, shouts of "Hot iron! Hot iron!" "Tally one!" "Ropers up!" and cries of warning and bursts of laughter. It were well that the Double X had sent three men to help; ten would not have been too many. Even with their help there was only one pair of ropers working at the fires and only three cutters-out, the rest being used to hold the two herds of restless cattle; and when night finally put an end to the operations less than half of the trail herd had been branded.
"Two more days," growled an inspector. "It's time you fellers throwed this worn-out, ancient way aside, an' got up even with th' times. You can build a chute that'll hold eight head an' by usin' stampin' irons you can turn out from sixty to eighty, yes, sometimes even a hundred, an hour, after you get th' hang of it. This handful should 'a' been done by noon. If I was you, Huff," he said, turning to the Bar H foreman, "I'd get on th' jump an' make a couple of them chutes, an' lay in half a dozen irons. One iron will do two or three with one heatin'; sometimes, if th' iron handlers work fast, two irons will stamp th' whole eight. You'll laugh when you see 'em comin' out, all branded, eight to a clip; an' th' work ain't near so hard. There ain't no holdin', nor ropin', nor throwin'. Here we've toted half a dozen Question Mark irons up here, an' they ain't hardly saved us any time. You've got plenty of time to put up a chute before we start on yore thousand—if you don't, we'll be a week on 'em, an' a week's too long."