“But I have never seen a mountain before,” Scott answered, “and right over there is the Great Divide. I have always been crazy to see a mountain.”
“They are a grand sight,” said the old gentleman. “Those old peaks up there are like brothers to me. Yes, they must look pretty fine to a stranger. They look pretty good to me when I have been away for a while. Mountains are a good deal like home folks, you don’t think much about them when you are with them all the time, but when you go away you are crazy to get back to them.”
“You live here then?” Scott asked politely.
“Live here,” exclaimed the old man indignantly, “wouldn’t live anywhere else. I reckon I have been living here longer than most anything else except those old mountains there. Why, I used to start out at the Mexican border with a herd of cattle every spring and graze ’em right north to Montana in time for the fall market. Right straight through we drove ’em and never seen a settler the whole summer. I knew every water hole from the Big Bend to Miles City.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Scott becoming really interested. “It must have been great sport.”
“Sport! You bet it was. And there was money in cattle, too, in the good old days before the settler and the sheep men came. Can’t chase a jack rabbit now,” he added a little bitterly, “without scratching your horse’s nose on a barbed wire fence.”
“Don’t the cattle men make any money now?” Scott asked.
“Some, but it’s mostly sheep in here now. Had to go into sheep myself,” he grinned. “I fought ’em for a long time but I saw it wasn’t any use, so I bought some myself, and I’ve made my pile out of ’em. There’s some that’s fighting them yet, but they’ll never get anywhere.”
“I suppose you had some pretty bitter fights,” Scott said encouragingly.
“I should remark. When I went into sheep, all the cattle men looked on me as a traitor. The sheep men were mostly greasers then and I was one of the first white men in this section to go into it. I remember when I rode up from San Rosario with my first band of sheep and met old Tom Butler on the plain he tried to pull his gun on me, but I had the drop on him and I made him set there while I told him what I thought of the situation. He did a lot of cussin’ and spittin’, but it soaked into him all right and when I beat him onto the summer range in the spring, he sold out his cattle and bought him a band of sheep. That’s where we had the fights, for the summer range, up there on those old mountains.”