Scott Burton on the Range

by Edward G. Cheyney

“Maybe I can get a job with a detective agency when I get through with this gum shoe business here,” Scott growled to himself. “First you try to keep a man from getting extra sheep onto your district and then you try harder to keep him from getting them off.”

It was rather good fun just the same. It was funny, too, to think of Baxter, his guard, himself, and all the sheep herders in the other district tearing madly around the forest to prevent other herders from driving their sheep off of a highly desirable piece of range. He was getting very curious to see just what their scheme would be and how far they would go to hide those extra sheep. Had he known how they came to be on there he would have known that they would go the limit and that a man’s life would not be considered too high a price.

Scott was beginning to get a little worried. He had passed half way across his district, crossed two of the areas allotted to two of the bands and had not yet seen a sheep. It looked as though they must be moving to the southwest and he wondered if they could possibly slip by Baxter along the rim of the valley cliffs. Then he thought of the look on Baxter’s face when he promised his help, and grinned. “It would be easier for them to hide the sheep in the tree tops,” he laughed.

But if that was not the plan, what could it be? Could there possibly be a trail down over those cliffs? It hardly seemed possible that he could have missed it. And yet the scene which unfolded from behind the next shoulder of the slope filled him with wonder and apprehension.

There were the sheep. They looked to Scott like all the sheep in the world. He had thought that his experience with Baxter had taught him something about estimating sheep, but he could not tell anything about a bunch like that. All the bands in the district must have been driven together there. Twelve thousand sheep in one big band. It was a great sight. There were no herders in sight but the dogs were holding the sheep closely bunched. The innumerable bleatings blended into a mighty raucous chorus unlike anything that Scott had ever heard. The band as a whole was stationary but all through it there were little whirlpools of local unrest where small groups were milling around nervously. Every now and then a leader with a few followers would break away from the bunch, but they never went far before they either lost their nerve and dashed wildly back to join the main band or were driven back by the keen-eyed dogs.

There they were, all right, but what under the sun were they doing there? And where were the herders?

The bands were grouped around the heads of two of the largest cañons in the valley cliffs, but Scott remembered very distinctly examining them both carefully. He knew that there was no possibility of getting sheep down through them. They both ended in a sheer drop of three hundred feet to the valley below. He had crawled to the very brink of the cliff and inspected it with great care. He had tried to imagine a man climbing it and had come to the conclusion that it could not be done.

Scott noted a tiny wisp of smoke floating up from the mouth of one of the cañons.

“There is certainly something doing down there,” Scott said to himself, “and both my official duty and my own personal curiosity demand an investigation of it.”

He dismounted, left Jed in a clump of timber, and walked slowly down toward the cañon.