CHAPTER XIV
A NIGHT OF ADVENTURE
Because in this story of Snap's life there are so many adventures I don't want my boy readers to go away with the idea that life out West is all fun and frolic, for of course I know, as well as anyone, that, to a hot-blooded English boy, roughing it, and facing dangers which he just manages to overcome, are fun and frolic. In the summer, the cowboy has a pretty idle time of it. If he is a fisherman, and there are trout-streams handy, he may while away the hours with a rod, but the rivers of the plains on which he and his cattle live are oddly enough very destitute of fish. Up in the hills, in the tarns and mountain streams, there is plenty of lovely Salmo fontinalis, or Canadian trout, strong and game fish, which take a fly as well as their English cousins, and make a really good fight before the angler manages to land them, bright bars of quivering purple and gold, on the grass at his feet. There are, too, towns sometimes near enough to attract the 'boys,' who think nothing of a fifty-mile ride across the prairie, and in these a good deal of the money advanced by parents at home is apt to be spent on billiards (of a very poor quality), gambling, and worse.
Luckily the autumn 'round-up' necessitates everyone's presence on the ranche, and from that time until summer there is constant, and occasionally severe, work to be done.
Snap found the worst time was from Christmas, when the really hard weather set in, until March. Luckily, the Rosebud people had laid in a very large supply of hay for winter use. Nares's rule was, 'Get in as much as can possibly be needed for the worst winter men ever saw, even though you may not want a quarter of it.'
And it was well in Snap's first year that such ample provision had been made, for not only did the snow fall continuously for many days, but it packed, thus preventing the beasts from getting at the sun-dried, self-cured prairie hay below. In the bitterest weather Snap and the other men had to go out and feed; had to visit the different bands sheltering in the coulees and hollows of the foot-hills; look alter the young and the feeble; get the beasts out of the timber, where, if left alone, they would shiver and starve rather than face the bitter wind which drove them back from the feeding-ground on the bare lands below; keep an eye on the coyotes and wolves; and perform a hundred other duties which required strength and hardihood, and which were certain either 'to kill a boy or make a man,' as Wharton put it.
Nature must have meant Snap for a cowboy. His long, lean figure, broad shoulders, and red-brown skin made him look a typical cowboy, almost before he was one. Enduring as a wolf, he made up by staying-power what he lacked in muscles, and day by day these developed through constant use.
The severe weather had brought down other beasts from the hills besides the patient oxen. Now and again, as Snap went his rounds, he saw in the snow a track into which both his own feet would go without destroying its outline. Sometimes, after following this track for a while, he would find patches of blood on the trail, and then a dead steer, torn by the huge claws and mangled by the teeth of 'old Ephraim,' as the trappers used to call the grizzly. If the beast had been killed some time, there would be other tracks near—wolf and coyote—showing that others had finished what the fierce king of the forest had begun. A dose of arsenic hid in the flesh that was left would generally enable the cowboys to cry quits with the wolves, and go some way towards compensating for the death of the steer by the acquisition of three or four handsome skins, but the grizzly himself never touched a 'doctored carcase.'
When Christmas came round it brought letters for Snap which kept his imagination busy all day. One was from the Admiral, another from the little mother, and a third from the guardian. The Admiral's accompanied a pair of field-glasses which had belonged to the dear old fellow for ages, and through which he had looked over many a stormy sea and sunny land. Through them he had seen the edges of all the world, the ports of every country, the shattered, shot-torn rigging of the enemy's fleet, and perhaps the powdered faces of many a European prima donna. 'Now,' he wrote, 'they are no good to me. Even these glasses won't help you to see through a London fog, and it's hardly respectable for the Chairman of the 'Company associated for the Culture and Civilisation of Puffin Islands' to be seen at a theatre. So, Snap, I send them to you. I wish I could look through them, my boy, and see you tending the cattle on a thousand hills.'
So the old gentleman was the director of a company, and Snap, knowing him well, thought that the shareholders in that company were luckier than their director, for, if downright honesty would insure the payment of a dividend by Puffin Islands, Puffin Islands, under the command of the Admiral, would pay. Poor old gentleman, it was a change to him, trudging into the City through sludge and fog to talk about guano and its prospects, instead of with gun and spaniel pottering about Fairbury coverts on the off chance of a 'cock.'
Then there was a letter from the 'mother,' concealing the miserable life she and her gallant old brother were leading in a dingy London back-street—a letter full of thanks to Snap for looking after her 'other two boys' on the way out, and regretting that the three could not be all together. She sent Snap what she imagined would be useful Christmas presents, and the tears came into his eyes as he thought of the weary hours which she must have spent stitch-stitching in the gloom of a London parlour to make those useless white robes for him. For, indeed, they were useless. Two of them were night-shirts—linen night-shirts!—to sleep in in a country where, if you touched an axe out of doors, the cold made it cling to your hand until either the skin came away on the axe or you put axe and hand together into hot water to thaw and dissolve partnership. He treated them very reverently at first, but, long after, Snap confessed that they had been very useful 'as overalls, with a pudding-bag used as an extempore night-cap, for stalking wild-fowl in the snow-time.'