WILD ROSES
Chapter I
A COWBOY CELEBRATION
SOME unpoetic old frontiersman first called the place a trapper’s “hole,”—an ugly, misleading name for this wondrous mountain valley, lying up there on the western slopes of the Continental Divide next to the Yellowstone country, almost surrounded by a rim of craggy, snow-streaked mountains, and grassy, wooded hills, out of whose picturesque canyons streams came leaping and sparkling to make a silvery network over the valley floor and to combine at last into the beautiful river that winds along the base of the western hills. This web of streams may still be traced as one gets a kind of bird’s-eye view of it from the hills above; but irrigation has given a conventional aspect to the valley floor by checkering it with farms, dotting it with regularly laid out towns and cities, and marking it with surveyors’ roads and canals.
Some thirty years ago, when the first wave of colonization broke over the rim of this valley, it was still nature’s playground, the haunt of herds of antelope, elk and deer. A few widely scattered ranch shacks, a trapper’s hut or two, with occasionally a group of tepees, pitched temporarily by some wandering band of Indians, were the only human habitations within its borders.
There were no garden roses in the valley then, but the wild ones ran riot along the streams among a tangle of thorns, sending their sweet fragrance everywhere.
In that not-so-long-ago time, one day in July, the month of roses there, the valley lay dozing under the spell of the noontide heat. A warm haze spread over the drowsy hills; the cooling canyon breezes were asleep; even the quaking aspens were still; the sky was cloudless; there was nothing to keep the sun from pouring down all of its rays fiercely upon the scene.
To escape its scorching heat, everything had sought the shade except the grasshoppers and locusts; they were reveling in the burning brightness, dancing and singing all over the grassy and sage-spread flats.
The cowboys at the Bar B ranch were sprawled about on their bunks, sleeping after their noonday meal—all but Jim Hardy. He stood out under the porch-like projection of the old log shack, making faces at himself in a broken mirror as he worked with a dull razor to shave the brown stubble off his square-set jaws and chin. Topsy and Rock, the ranch dogs, lay near him, lazily snapping at the buzzing flies.
When the scraping process was done, Jim rubbed his persecuted face to comfort it a little, and then stepped inside of the shack to get a drink. As he was enjoying his second cup of coolness, his attention was suddenly turned on Dick Davis, lying there with his half-open mouth emitting a purring snore. The spirit of rough fun, always strong in Jim, found expression as usual; he dashed the rest of the cup of water into Dick’s face.