“Got you,” said Johnny.
He went hotfoot to the wagon, grabbed a tin washbasin, held it under the water-barrel faucet and made a spluttering toilet—first man, since he had not rolled his bed.
The bobtail rode off at a laughing gallop. Daylight grew. The horse herd drew near with a soft drumming of trotting feet in the sand. Johnny rustled tools from the stacked tin plates and cups; he stabbed a mighty beefsteak with his iron fork; he added hot sour-dough biscuit, a big spoonful of hot canned corn; he poured himself a cup of hot black coffee, sat down on one of his own feet in the sand, and became a busy man.
Others joined that business. The last guard came in; the chattering circle round the fire grew with surprising swiftness. Each, as he finished, carried cup, plate and iron cutlery to the huge dishpan by the chuck box, turned his night horse loose, and strode off to the horse herd, making a noose in his rope. They made a circle round the big horse herd, a rope from each to each by way of a corral on three sides of it; night wrangler and day wrangler, mounted, holding down the fourth side. Grumbling dayherders caught their horses, saddled with miraculous swiftness and departed to take over the herd. The bobtail was back before the roping out of horses was completed. While the bobtail roped out their horses, Johnny and the two wranglers lured out the four big brown mules for the chuck wagon and the two small brown mules for the bed wagon, tied them to convenient soapweeds and hung a nose bag full of corn on each willing brown head. Last of all the horse wrangler caught his horse. The night wrangler was to ride the bed wagon, so he needed no horse.
The circle of men melted away from about the horse herd; there was a swift saddling, with occasional tumult of a bucking rebel; the horse herd grazed quietly away; the wranglers went to breakfast; even as they squatted cross-legged by the fire the last horse was saddled, the Bar Cross outfit was off to eastward to begin the day’s drive, half a dozen horses pitching enthusiastically, cheered by ironical encouragement and advice bestowed on their riders. The sun would not be up for half an hour yet. Forty men had dressed, rolled their beds, eaten, roped out their day’s horses in the half light from a dodging mob of four hundred head, saddled and started. Fifty minutes had passed since the first call of beds. The day herd was a mile away, grazing down the long road to Preisser Lake; at the chuck box the cook made a prodigious clatter of dish washing.
The Bar Cross had shipped the north drive of steers from Engle; the wagon had then wandered southward for sixty miles to Fort Selden, there to begin the south work in a series of long zigzags across the broad plain. This was the morrow after that day on which Charlie See had ridden to Garfield.
The wagon was halfway home to Engle now; camped on the central run-off of the desert drainage system, at the northmost of the chain of shallow wet-weather lakes—known as Red Lakes—lying east and south from Point of Rocks Hills. Elsewhere these had been considerable hills; ten or fifteen miles square of steepish sugar loaves, semi-independent, with wide straits of grassy plain winding between; but here, dumped down in the center of the plain, they seemed pathetically insignificant and paltry against the background of mighty hill, Timber Mountain black in the west, San Andreas gleaming monstrous against the rising sun.
Theoretically, the Jornada was fifty miles wide here; in reality it was much wider; in seeming it was twice as wide. From Red Lakes as a center you looked up an interminable dazzle of slope to the San Andreas, up and up over a broken bench country to Timber Mountain, the black base of it high above the level of Point o’ Rocks at its highest summit; and toward the north looked up and up and up again along a smoother and gentler slope ending in a blank nothingness, against which the eye strained vainly.
Johnny sipped another cup of coffee with the wranglers; he smoked a cigarette; he put on fresh clothing from his bed; he took his gun from his bed and buckled the belt loosely at his waist. His toilet completed, he rolled his bed. By this time the wranglers had breakfasted.
They piled the bed rolls high on the bed wagon and roped them tight for safe riding; they harnessed and hitched the two small mules. The night wrangler tied the reins to the dashboard and climbed to the top of the stacked bedding.