CHAPTER XIV.
A MIGRATION.
All that summer John tended the work stock, keeping them together on good feeding ground during the short night and driving them into camp soon after daylight.
Much of this work was very pleasant; the two herders, Curran and John, met regularly and many were the long talks and interchanges of experiences they enjoyed.
The rainless summer nights were cool enough to be refreshing and yet warm enough to make the time spent in the open air delightful. But when rain came all this was changed. The horses became nervous and restless and required constant watchfulness and continual riding, regardless of treacherous foothold and hidden, water-filled prospect holes. The long, yellow "slicker" or oilskin coat, being cut deep in the back and hanging over the rider's legs to his spurred heels, served but poorly to keep out the driving rain, and by morning he was fairly soaked. Arriving in camp with his dripping charges, he would dismount stiffly, and after a half-cold breakfast crawl into a damp bed under an oozing tent.
John, however, learned to take things as they came, good or ill, gathering valuable experience from right and left. Curran was a horseman of long standing, and gave the fast-maturing boy a great many points that served him in good stead later in life. He taught him how to detect any uneasiness in the stock that might grow into fright and start a stampede; how to check this by voice and by constant active presence; and, above all, by force of example he showed that only through quick thought and unhesitating exposure of himself to danger could harm to his charges be averted. By nature courageous, almost to recklessness, John learned these lessons unconsciously.
And so the summer passed—herding horses at night, sleeping and panning gold by day. By the latter operation he was able to add, on an average, fifty cents a day to his hardly princely income of seven dollars a week.
As the warm season drew to a close, the night wrangler's work became more of a hardship and less a pleasure; only by dint of constant exercise and a roaring fire was the life made endurable. The night's work over, horse and rider would come in stiff with cold and not infrequently wet as well.