One day the regular herder was sick and I took his place. He was a “lunger,” a victim of tuberculosis, who had waited too long before coming to Colorado. At one time I worked with three of these men, and I came to know how their disease could send them to the top round of ecstasy and to the lowest level of depression in a single day. I have seen them get up in the morning dancing at the very joy of life, planning their “going home” to surprise the old folks with their cure. Yet by night perhaps they put a handkerchief to the mouth and took it away stained with blood—and their spirits would fall to earth abruptly. They are even more distressing companions than inhabitants of the silence who feel that they have lost life, fortune and future with the closing of their ears.
This herder had built up trouble for me without telling me about it. The deaf man usually runs blindly into that form of trouble every week of his life; it is a sort of legacy which others leave at his door. Down the river some two miles lived a ranchman who had seeded wheat and made a garden on a low flat where the river curved past a bluff. The herder had carelessly let the cattle get away from him the previous day, and before he could stop them several cows had trampled through this garden with all the exasperating nonchalance that a fat and stupid cow is capable of showing. When a man has lived for a year or so on “sow belly,” pancakes and potatoes, and when he is naturally inclined to a profane disposition of language, he knows precisely what to do to the responsible party. As I came along the river behind the herd, I saw this ranchman and his wife advancing to meet me. He opened up at long range, but as I did not know what it was all about, and, moreover, could not hear him, I kept on riding right up to meet him. My pony had once belonged to a mule driver noted for his remarks to mules, and the little horse actually seemed to recognize a master in this excited individual. This man’s boy afterwards told me that as he advanced his father was relating in a dozen ways in which he proposed to punish me. Shooting, it appeared, was too easy. He would meet me man to man and roll me in the cactus, etc., and worse! Unfortunately, I did not hear at all until I got close to him, and then his breath had failed somewhat, so that he was not doing himself full justice. So I rode right up to him and asked him the most foolish of questions—so he must have thought:
“What can I do for you?”
He looked at me in amazement.
“Are you deaf?”
I told him that I could not hear well.
“Ain’t you heard a word of what I’ve been handing you?”
“Hardly a word!”
“Well, by God, if that don’t beat all! I’ve wasted all them words on a deaf man!”
There was genuine sorrow in his voice as he spoke of the loss sustained by society through my failure to hear. All his anger was gone.