“Where in hot hell did my daughter learn such language? You blocketty, blinketty, gosh darned, sons of cooks and dish-washers have got to cut out all this damned, cursed, hellish language when my daughter’s around. D’you hear me?”
And to the foreman!
“Orders to your men, sir, no more damned cursing upon the place! I’ll have you and your men know that this is O Bar O and not a G— D— swearing camp for a blasted lot of bohunks.”
This, then, was the outfit to which the seemingly guileless Englishman had become attached.
P. D., his bushy eyebrows twitching over bright old eyes, confirmed the judgment of the foreman, that “a bite of entertainment won’t come amiss at O Bar O” in the shape of the English tenderfoot.
“Put him through the ropes, damn it. Get all the fun you want out of him. Work the blasted hide off him. Make him sweat like hell to earn his salt. Go as far as you like, but—” and here P. D.’s bushy eyebrows drew together in an ominous frown, “give the man a damned square deal. This is O Bar O, and we’ll have no G— D— reflections upon the place.”
So the Englishman was “put through the ropes.” Despite his greenness and seeming innocence, it is possible that he was wider awake than any of the men who were working their wits to make his days and nights exciting and uproarious. He played up to his part with seeming ingenuousness and high good humour. If the hands of O Bar O regarded him as a clown, a mountebank, a greenhorn, he played greener and funnier than they had bargained for.
He was given steers to milk. He was assigned the job of “housemaid, nurse, chambermaid, and waitress” to the house barn stock. He fed the pigs, and he did the chores of cook-car and bunkhouse. All the small and mean jobs of the ranch were assigned to the newcomer. He was constantly despatched upon foolish and piffling errands. For an indefinite period, he was relegated to the woodpile of the cook-house. This was a job that the average cowman scorned. The cowpuncher and ranch rider consider any work not concerned with horse or cattle a reflection upon their qualities as riders. Cheerio, however, acquired a genuine fondness for that woodpile. He would chop away with undiminished cheer and vigour, whistling as he worked, and at the end of the day, he would sit on a log and contentedly smoke his pipe, as he surveyed the fruit of his labours with palpable pride and even vanity.
“Boastin’ of how many logs he’d split. Proud as a whole hen. Hell! you can’t feaze a chap like that. He’d grin if you put’m to breakin’ stones.”
Thus Bully Bill to Holy Smoke, assistant foreman at the O Bar O. “Ho” as he was known for short, scowled at that reference to breaking stones, for Ho knew what that meant in another country across the line. Out of the side of his mouth he shot: