Joe Kerr Loading Sheep for South St. Joe.
'Twas here at Grand Island that we met Joe Kerr again. We had met him in Utah before we shipped, and he had tried very hard to get us to ship our cattle to the coming live stock market of the United States at St. Joe. Kerr travels in the interest of the St. Joe stockyards, and while in the fullness of our youth and conceit when we first loaded our stock we wouldn't have taken a suggestion from Teddy Roosevelt, yet we had grown older and had lost some of our self-confidence; in fact, I've often thought since these experiences that the old proverb, "He who ships his range cattle to market place of selling them at home leaves hope behind," would apply to most range shipments.
Now it seems Joe Kerr had kept posted as to our movements right along through friends of his who were in the sheep business and who had trailed their herds past our train at different times on their trip East to sell their sheep for feeders, and Kerr had made such nice calculations by casting horoscopes and looking up the signs of the zodiac that he knew to a month when we would arrive in Grand Island, and was waiting there to persuade us to ship our stock to St. Joe in place of Omaha. He was right on the spot to help us unload them; knew all the pens where the mud was the deepest, even helped us smear the mud into their hair on the few spots that was missed, when we were swimming them through the mud batter. Joe had loads of statistics for sheepmen, cattlemen, horsemen and hogmen that would convince any man that wasn't too suspicious that St. Joe was the best market. He had beautiful colored maps of the yards, showing the clear limpid waters of the Missouri River, flowing along at the foot of the bluffs; the waters swarming with steamboats and smaller craft; the city of St. Joe covering the bluffs and river bottoms for miles, and just down the river at the lower end of this great city was stockyards and packing plants laid out like some great city park and hundreds of acres, all paved with brick, laid into walks and floors for the pens with perfect precision, and all divided in different compartments for all kinds of live stock; everything arranged so sheep could be unloaded one place, hogs another place, cattle another, so as to admit of no delay in unloading when stock arrived. He told us that their yards were kept so clean that ladies could walk all over them in rainy weather without soiling their costumes. Said no Sheenies were skinning people in their yards. He made such a square talk we finally agreed to split the shipment and let part of the train go to St. Joe, and sent Jackdo along to take care of the cattle.
[CHAPTER XXII.]
"Sarer."
The rainy season had now set in in good earnest all through Nebraska, and while the natives have typhoid fever and malaria to a more or less extent, yet most of them live through it, but people from the dry mountain regions that have been used to pure air and water all their lives fare worse from these fevers ten times over than the natives, and Dillbery Ike fell a victim right in the start. One evening soon after we left Grand Island I noticed his face was flushed very red, and he complained of a dull headache, but as he had the headache a good deal ever since the railroad police had scalped him at Cheyenne in mistake for a striker, I didn't think so much of his headache. But when I come to look at his tongue and feel his pulse I found every indication of high fever. In a few hours he was out of his mind and talked of shady mountain sides, babbling brooks and clear mountain springs of water, and he talked of his hosses and cattle, his cow ranch and alfalfa meadows, but most of all he talked of "Sarer."
Now Dillbery had only one romance in his life that we knew of, and that happened in this way: Several decades previous to our story the few families living in the vicinity of Dillbery's ranch in Utah had got together and built an adobe school-house, and voting a special tax on the piece of railroad track that run through their part of the country had raised enough money to pay for the school-house and hire a school-teacher. At first each of the three married women in the neighborhood wanted to teach the school. Then each of them offered to take turns about teaching it so they could divide the money, but their husbands, who was the directors, wanted a school-marm, so as to have a little young female blood diffused through the atmosphere in that part of the country, and after advertising for a school teacher, the New England brand preferred, got hundreds of answers very shortly. So putting their heads together they selected one that had a kind of crab apple perfume attached to the application, and was worded in such way as to give the reader a notion of pleading blue eyes, with a wealth of golden brown hair and heaving bosom, not too young to teach school nor too old to be romantic and sympathetic, and closed a deal with her to come West and teach their school. She had signed her name Sarah Jessica Virginia Smythe, but was always known as Miss Sarer. When she was about to arrive at the railroad station, thirty miles away, all the married men wanted to go and meet her. All of them had particular business in at the station that day, but none of their wives would stand for it. They said that Dillbery Ike was a bachelor and the proper one to get her.