Each autumn, therefore, the wethers and the dry-bag ewes were sent to the market, and as the result of continual weeding of the stock the matriarch had as promising a herd of its size as could be found in Wyoming. Often she had explained to Mary, who was learning of the wonders of this new world with remarkable aptness, that she had constantly to fight against the inclination to increase her business of sheep-raising, but that as soon as she should begin to hire herders or depend on strangers things would go wrong. With the assistance of her sons, she therefore managed the entire details of the herd, with the exception of those occasions on which Leander lent his semi-professional co-operation.
As a workman Leander was, considering his size and apparent weakness, surprisingly efficient. It was as a dispenser of anti-theological doctrine that Mrs. Dax’s husband annoyed his temporary employer. Freed from his wife’s masterful presence, Leander dared to be an “agnostic,” as he called himself, of an unprecedentedly violent order. His iconoclasm was not of a pattern with paw’s gusty protests against life in general, but it was Leander’s way of asserting himself, on the rare occasions when he got a chance, to deny clamorously every tenet advanced by every religion. The mere use of certain familiar expletives drove him, ordinarily mild and submissive though he was, to frantic gesticulation and diatribe. Mary Carmichael could not make out, as she watched the comedy with growing amusement, whether poor Leander really believed that he was the first of doubting Thomases, or whether he took an unfair advantage of the lack of general information in his casual audiences to set forth well-known opinions as his own. Whatever its basis may have been, Leander sustained the rôle of doubter with passionate zeal, wearing himself to tatters of rage and hoarseness over arguments maliciously contrived beforehand by cow-punchers and sheep-herders in need of amusement; and yet he never saw the traps, going out of his way, apparently, to fall into them, tumbling headlong into the identical pits time after time. Jonah and the whale constituted one bait by means of which Leander could be lured from food, sleep, or work of the most pressing nature.
“The poor fool would stop in the middle of shearing a sheep to argue that Jonah never come out of the whale’s belly,” the matriarch had told Mary Carmichael, in summing up Leander’s disadvantages as a herder. And the first remark she had addressed to him on his arrival was: “Leander Dax, you’d have to be made over, and made different, to keep you from bein’ a infidel, but there’s one p’int on which you are particularly locoed, and that’s Jonah and the whale. Now at this particular time in the hist’ry of the United States, nobody in his faculties has got no call to fret hisself over Jonah and his whereabouts—none whatever. There’s a lot of business round this here camp that’s a heap more pressin’. Now, Leander Dax, if I do hereby undertake to hire, engage, and employ you to herd sheep, do you agree to renounce discussions, arguments, and debates on the late Jonah and his whereabouts durin’ them three days? God A’mighty, man, any one would think you was Jonah’s wife, the interest you have in his absence!”
“I come here to herd sheep,” Leander had brazenly retaliated. “I ’ain’t come to try to make you think.”
Nevertheless, he appeared docile enough as the time came for the journey to the dipping-vat, and did his part in making ready. The wagon was the rudest of structures; it consisted merely of one long, stout pole. Though she saw the horses being harnessed to this pole, Mary Carmichael, discreetly exercising her newly acquired wisdom, forbore to ask where she was going to sit, and listened with interest to a discussion between Mrs. Yellett and Leander as to the number of horses it would take to get the dip up the mountain. Leander, who loved pomp and splendor, was for taking six, but Mrs. Yellett, who carried simplicity to a fault, was in favor of only two. They finally compromised on four, and Leander went to fetch the extra two.
Mrs. Yellett, ever economical of the flitting moment, took advantage of the delay to give Mr. Yellett a dose of “Brainard’s Beneficial Blackthorn.”
“Paw’s as hard to manage as a bent pin,” she remarked, in an aside to Mary, while he protested and fought her off with his stick. But she, with the agility of an acrobat, got directly back of him, took his head under her arm, pried open his mouth, and poured down the unwelcome, if beneficial, dose.
“There, there, paw,” she said, wiping his mouth as if he had been a baby, “don’t take on so! It’s all gone, and I can’t have you sick on my hands.”
But Mr. Yellett continued to splutter and flare and use violent language, whereupon the matriarch went into the tent and returned with a drink of condensed-milk and water, “to wash down the nasty taste,” she told him, soothingly.
A moment afterwards she and Leander were engaged in rolling the barrels of sheep-dip to the wagon, Mary Carmichael helplessly looking on while Mrs. Yellett looked doubtfully at a “gov’ment” who could not handle barrels. Finally, under the skilful manipulation of Mrs. Yellett and Leander, the long pole took on the aspect of a colossal vertebral column, from which huge barrel-ribs projected horizontally, leaving at the rear a foot or so of bare pole as a smart caudal appendage, bearing about the same proportion to the wagon as the neatly bitten tail of a fox-terrier does to the dog.