“Tinkle, tinkle,” placidly sounded the bell of the old bell-wether, to prove that he and the other sheep were grazing near at hand in the stiff brush.
“All right,” thought Jimmie Dunn, whose business it was to keep tab on the whereabouts of that bell.
For this was a simmering hot summer afternoon of the year 1870, far, far down in southern Arizona Territory; and here on a hill-slope of the Pete Kitchen big ranch about half-way between Tucson town and the Mexican line Jimmie was lying upon his back under a spreading crooked-branched mesquite tree, lazily herding the ranch sheep.
The Kitchen ranch really was not Jimmie’s home. He lived with his uncle Joe Felmer (not really his uncle, either), who was the blacksmith for Camp Grant, the United States army post ninety miles northward, or fifty-five miles the other side of Tucson.
But the region close around Camp Grant was a sandy pocket famous for fever and ague as well as for other disagreeable features, such as scorpions, tarantulas, ugly Gila monsters (thick, black, poisonous lizards), heat and sand-storms; so that Joe had sent Jimmie down to their friend Pete Kitchen, on a vacation.
Everybody, American, Mexican and Indian, in southern Arizona, knew the Pete Kitchen ranch. It was noted for its battles with the Apaches who, passing back and forth on their raids out of the mountains of Arizona and Mexico both, were likely to plunder and kill, at any time. Sturdy Pete had not been driven away yet, and did not propose to be driven away.
Jimmie himself was pretty well used to Apaches. They prowled about Camp Grant, and attacked people on the road from Tucson, and frequently the soldiers rode out after them. Joe Felmer had married an Apache woman, who was now dead; he spoke Apache and Jimmie had picked up a number of the words; but there were plenty of unfriendly Apaches who every little while ran off with Joe’s mules or filled his hogs with arrows.
On his back under the mesquite tree Jimmie was not thinking of Apaches. He was idly surveying the country—at the same time having an ear open to the musical tinkle of the bell-wether, who told him where the sheep were straying. And a delightful, dreamy outlook this was, over all those quiet miles of mountain and desert Arizona which only the Southern stage-line traversed, and which, so thinly settled by white people, the roving Apache Indians claimed as their own.
In his loose cotton shirt and ragged cotton trousers Jimmie felt very comfortable. Presently his eyes closed, his head drooped, and he nodded off, for forty or so winks.