Bud Shoop and Bondsman
As a young man, Bud Shoop had punched cattle on the southern ranges, cooked for a surveying outfit, prospected in the Mogollons, and essayed homesteading on the Blue Mesa, served as cattle inspector, and held for many years the position of foreman on the great Gila Ranch, where, with diligence and honor, he had built up a reputation envied by many a lively cow-puncher and seldom tampered with even by Bud's most vindictive enemies. And he had enemies and many friends.
Meanwhile he had taken on weight until, as one of his friends remarked, "Most any hoss but a Percheron draft would shy the minute Bud tried to put his foot in the stirrup."
And when Bud came to that point in his career when he summed up his past and found that his chief asset was experience, garnished with a somewhat worn outfit of pack-saddles, tarps, bridles, chaps, and guns, he sighed heavily.
The old trails were changing to roads. The local freight intermittently disgorged tons of harvesting machinery. The sound of the Klaxton was heard in the land. Despite the times and the manners, Bud's girth increased insidiously. His hard-riding days were past. Progress marched steadily onward, leaving an after-guard of homesteaders intrenched behind miles of barbed-wire fence and mazes of irrigating-ditches. The once open range was now a chessboard of agricultural endeavor, with the pawns steadying ploughshares as they crept from square to square until the opposing cattle king suffered ignominious checkmate, his prerogative of free movement gone, his army scattered, his castles taken, and his glory surviving only in the annals of the game.
Incidentally, Bud Shoop had saved a little money, and his large popularity would have won for him a political sinecure; but he disliked politics quite as heartily as he detested indolence. He needed work not half so much as he wanted it.
He had failed as a rancher, but he still held his homestead on the Blue Mesa, some twenty miles from the town of Jason, an old Mormon settlement in the heart of the mesa country.
Friday morning at sunup Bud saddled his horse, closed the door of his cabin on the Blue Mesa, and, whistling to his old Airedale, Bondsman, rode across the mesa and down the mountain trail toward Jason. By sundown that night he was in town, his horse fed, and he and Bondsman sitting on the little hotel veranda, watching the villagers as they passed in the dusk of early evening.
Coatless and perspiring, Bud betook himself next morning to the office of the supervisor of that district of the Forest Service. Bondsman accompanied him, stalking seriously at his master's heels. The supervisor was busy. Bud filled a chair in the outer office, polished his bald spot with a blue bandanna, and waited.
Presently the supervisor called him in. Bud rose heavily and plodded to another chair in the private office. Torrance, the supervisor, knew Bud; knew that he was a solid man in the finer sense of the word from the shiny dome of his head to his dusty boot. And Torrance thought he knew why Bud had called. The Airedale sat in the outer office, watching his master. Occasionally the big dog rapped the floor with his stubby tail.