“It couldn’t, hey? It came off a nine-foot grizzly, that’s how big it was,” retorted Jim, sitting down and filling his pipe. “Nine whole feet from stub of tail to snoot, plumb full of cussedness, too.”
“How’d you get it–Sharps?” queried Charley.
“No, Colt,” responded Jim. “Luckiest shot I ever made, all right. I shore had visions of wearing wings when I pulled the trigger. Just one of them lucky shots a man will make sometimes.”
“Give us the story, Jim,” suggested Silent, settling himself easily in his bunk. “Then we’ll have another smoke and go right to bed. I’m some sleepy.”
“Well,” began Jim after his pipe was going well, “I was sort of second foreman for the Tadpole, up in Montanny, about six years ago. I had a good foreman, a good ranch and about a dozen white punchers to look after. And we had a real cook, no mistake about that, all right.
“The Old Man hibernated in New York during the winter and came out every spring right after the calf round-up was over to see how we was fixed and to eat some of the cook’s flapjacks. That cook wasn’t no yaller-skinned post for a hair clothes line, like this grinning monkey what we’ve got here. The Old Man was a fine old cuss–one of the boys, and a darn good one, too–and we was always plumb glad to see him. He minded his own business, didn’t tell us how we ought to punch cows and didn’t bother anybody what didn’t want to be bothered, which we most of us did like.
“Well, one day Jed Thompson, who rustled our mail for us twice a month, handed me a letter for the foreman, who was down South and wouldn’t be back for some time. His mother had died and he went back home for a spell. I saw that the letter was from the Old Man, and wondered what it would say. I sort of figured that it would tell us when to hitch up to the buckboard and go after him. Fearing that he might land before the foreman got back, I went and opened it up.
“It was from the Old Man, all right, but it was no go for him that spring. He was sick abed in New York, and said as how he was plumb sorry he couldn’t get out to see his boys, and so was we sorry. But he said as how he was sending us a friend of his’n who wanted to go hunting, and would we see that he didn’t shoot no cows. We said we would, and then I went on and found out when this hunter was due to land.
“When the unfortunate day rolled around I straddled the buckboard and lit out for Whisky Crossing, twenty miles to the east, it being the nearest burg on the stage line. And as I pulled in I saw Frank, who drove the stage, and he was grinning from ear to ear.
“‘I reckon that’s your’n,’ he said, pointing to a circus clown what had got loose and was sizing up the town.