The hotel did a rushing business, Mrs. Stanley’s output making a pleasant contrast to camp-cooking. Norah, the bright-eyed, was besieged in form by relays of admirers, the more favored ones being allowed to help cook or wash dishes. Perhaps it should be stated in this connection that Norah was the only girl in a section fifty miles square. All the same, she was a jolly, pretty girl.
Now, when steer-shipping time comes the season’s hard work is over, and all except the “old hands” get their time. And while most men of the cow countries drink colored fluids on occasion, the superfluent ones, who consider the putting down of liquor the first duty of man, are not the stuff of which old hands are made, the law of survival obtaining on the free range as elsewhere.
So, after the first few days, drinking at Jim Gale’s place became perfunctory, though, as Dundee consisted of one hotel, one saloon, one depot, one store, the section house and two other buildings, the saloon was necessarily the prime center. The boys would not be paid until the cattle were sold, so gambling was barred by etiquette, “jaw-bone” games being viewed with disfavor as tending to unseemly contention. Similarly the code forbade more than two or three persecuting Miss Norah at once, and time ticked slowly.
Sun in the east at morning—
Sun in the west at night,
a cloudless sky, and a daily statement by a badgered agent that the cars would be in at once.
Given seventy-five full-blooded, vigorous, healthy cow-boys, twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week, and no work, and the Purveyor of Mischief may be depended upon to uphold their idle hands.
Inhospitality is mortal sin in all thinly-settled countries, but all things have their limit. For ten days a plague of tramps had overrun the chuck-wagons, feasting on steaks, hot biscuits and the like, getting a meal at one wagon and on to the next. And when one left he spread the glad tidings up and down, sending back seven others worse than the first, making hospitality act like a camel.
It was Johnny Patton, cook for the Pool wagon, that spoke unto Cornelius Brown and Tinnin, of the Toyah crowd, suggesting the advisability of slaying a tramp or so.
“Too harsh,” remarked Burt Mossman. “I speak for a Kangaroo Court.”
“A word to the Y’s is sufficient,” said Tinnin. Thus the pit was digged and thus the net contrived, the three collaborators appropriating the leading parts unto themselves. A particularly “gall-y” and tenacious tramp, who had adopted the V V wagon, was cast for the star. He was to be “It.” Minor places were filled and drilled; the rest of us were Roman populace. The curtain rose promptly after dinner. Brown and Tinnin began to bicker.