‘Mule, hell, motor truck—can’t you hear her?’
‘I’m afraid I can,’ Elbert said wearily. His father had been right.
One distinct value about Heaslep and Company, however—no women in the establishment. Even the cooking staff was Chinese. But the rest was hard to bear. Efficiency and trade had settled down as unromantically as upon a tannery. Heaslep’s was a stock farm, a beef factory, anything but the cattle ranch of dreams. This part of Arizona was sunk in no foam of Indian red. The vast range lay on a squat mesa, partly penciled over with irrigation ditches. Elbert’s tardy soul, longing for the thunder of a stampede, sickened at the sight of thousands of domesticated moos, rack-fed in winter, market-fattened from fenced alfalfa fields, branded in chutes and railroaded as scientifically as tinned biscuit. The only longhorns hung over the mantelpiece in the dormitory of the cowhands. Even the imported bulls were businesslike.
Most of the ranges were deserted by this time, the cold weather settling down. Elbert had been taken on as ‘Bert’ Sartwell, but his first letters from home gave the real thing away. All hands relished the discovery. Over a dozen of the men were in for his first Sunday, the day they started him in filling up gopher holes in the environment of the main buildings. Elbert was told that the best way was to soak old newspapers into a pulp and poke them down into the holes with a stick; necessary business every week or ten days during the gopher season. This was the height of it, he was informed.
‘You see, the paper hardens down,’ Cal Monroid said.
‘And gets fire-proof,’ added Slim Gannon, his side-kick.
Elbert set about his work, a bit coldish and blank at the extent of the job before him. He had never read of this department of ranch work, and wondered if it meant he was to be relieved of the motor truck. Toward midday he looked up from his poking, to find that at least ten of the cowhands had closed in, having stalked him like an Indian band. Their enthusiasm was high and prolonged. Elbert smiled and blushed, but said nothing. For a day or two after that they tried to call him ‘Poke,’ but the name didn’t take hold. The men liked to say Elbert too well. ‘Elber-r-rt,’ they would chirrup, and inquire if he had ever done any bull-dogging.
He was not relieved from the truck. His work was to carry mails and bring in supplies from the town of Harrisburg, eleven miles to the north. He sometimes made two trips a day when the truck would permit, but the tantrums of old Fortitude were a subject of conversation at Heaslep’s only a little lower in the scale than the hoof-and-mouth disease.
On his third or fourth Sunday, Elbert spread newspapers on the ground and set about taking down Fortitude’s strained and creaking mechanism part by part. His activity and absorption began to attract a Sabbath crowd.
‘He’s gettin’ her whole plumbin’ out,’ Slim Gannon remarked. ‘I’m layin’ four to three that we’ve heard her last belch.’