The Phantom Herd by B. M. Bower (online e book reader .TXT) 📗

in the world into this venture. I've worked day and night on this picture. I've worked you boys in weather that wasn't fit for a dog to be out in. I've seen Rosemary Green slaving in this dark little hole of a kitchen because we can't afford a cook for the outfit. You've all been dead game—I'll hand it to you for that—every white chip has gone into the pot. If we fail we'll have to borrow carfare to get outa here. And here's Applehead. We've used his ranch, we've used his house and his horses and himself; we've killed his cattle for beef, by ——! And we've got just that one chance—the chance of a storm—for winning out. One chance, and that chance getting slimmer every day, as he says. No—there's no joke in this; or if there is, I've lost my appetite for comedy. I can't laugh." He stopped as suddenly as he had begun his rapid speech, caught up his hat, and went out alone into the soft morning sunlight. He left silence behind him,—a stunned silence that was awkward to break.

"It's a perfect shame!" Rosemary said at last, and her lips were trembling. "He's just about crazy—and I know he hasn't slept a wink, lately, just from worrying."

"I calc'late that's about the how of it," Applehead agreed, rubbing his chin nervously. "He lays awful still, last few weeks, and that thar's a bad sign fer him. And I ain't heerd 'im talkin' in his sleep lately, either. Up till lately he made more pitchers asleep than he done awake. Take it when things was movin' right along, Mis' Green, 'n' Luck was shore talkative, now I'm tellin' yuh!"

"My father, he got one oncle," Annie-Many-Ponies spoke up unexpectedly from her favorite corner. "Big Medicine man. Maybe I write one letter, maybe Noisy-Owl he come, make plenty storm. Noisy-Owl, he got awful strong medicine for make storm come."

"Well, by cripes, yuh better send for 'im then!" Big Medicine advised gruffly, and went out.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE STORM

The Phantom Herd, as the days slipped nearer and nearer to April, might almost have been christened The Forlorn Hope. On the twenty-first the sun was so hot that Luck rode in his shirt sleeves to Albuquerque, stubbornly intending to order more "positive" for his prints in the final work of putting his Big Picture into marketable form. He did not have the slightest idea of where the money to pay for the stuff was coming from, but he sent the letter ordering the stock sent C.O.D. He was playing for big results, and he had no intention of being balked at the last minute because of his timidity in assuming an ultimate success which was beginning to look extremely doubtful.

On the twenty-second, a lark flew impudently past his head and perched upon a bush near by and sang straight at him. As a general thing Luck loved to hear bird songs when he rode abroad on a fine morning; but he came very near taking a shot at that particular lark, as if it were personally responsible for the sunny days that had brought it out scouting ahead of its kind.

On the twenty-third the sky was a brassy blue, and Applehead won Luck's fierce enmity by remarking that he "calc'lated he'd better get his garden in." Luck went away off somewhere on the snuffy little bay, that day, and did not return until after dark.

On the twenty-fourth he took the boys away back on the mesa, where the mountains shoulder the plain, and scattered them on a wide circle, rounding up the cattle that had been permitted to drift where they would in their famished search for the scant grass-growth. Bill Holmes and the camera followed him in the buckboard with the lunch, and Luck, when the boys had met with their gleanings, "shot" two or three short scenes of poor cows and their early calves, which would go to help along his range "atmosphere." To the Happy Family it seemed a waste of horseflesh to comb a twenty-mile radius of mesa to get a cow and calf which might have been duplicated within a mile of the ranch. The Happy Family knew that Luck was wading chin deep in the slough of despond, and they decided that he kept them riding all day just for pure cussedness.

I suppose they thought that his orders to range-herd the cattle they had gathered came from the same mood, but they did not seem to mind. They did whatever he told them to do, and they did it cheerfully,—which, in the circumstances, is saying a good deal for the Happy Family. So with the sun warm as early May, and the new grass showing tiny green blade-tips in the sheltered places, they began range-herding two thousand head of cattle that needed all the territory they could cover for their feeding grounds.

The twenty-fifth day of March brought no faintest promise of anything that looked like snow. Applehead sharpened his hoe and went pecking at the soil around the roots of his grape-vine arbor, thereby irritating Luck to the point of distraction. He had reached a nervous tension where he could not eat, and he could not sleep, and life looked a nightmare of hard work and disappointments, of hopes luring deceitfully only to crush one at the moment of fulfilment.

It was because he could not sleep, but spent the nights stretched upon his side with his wide-open eyes boring into vacancy and a drab future, that he heard the wind whine over the ridgepole of the squat bunk-house and knew that it had risen from a dead calm since bedtime. The languor of nervous exhaustion was pulling his eyelids down over his tired eyes, and he knew that it must be nearly morning; for sleep never came to him now until after Applehead's brown rooster had crowed for two o'clock.

He closed his eyes and dreamed that he was "shooting" blizzard scenes with the snow to his armpits. He was chilled to the middle of his bones, and his hand went down unconsciously and groped for the blankets he had pushed off in his restlessness. In his sleep he was yelling to the Cattlemen's Convention to wait,—not to adjourn yet, because he had something to show them.

"Well, show'em, dang it, an' shut up!" muttered Applehead crossly, and turned over on his good ear so that he could sleep undisturbed.

Luck, half awakened by the movement, curled up with his knees close to his chin and went on with his dream. With the wind still mooing lonesomely around the corners of the house, he slept more soundly than he had slept for weeks, impelled, I suppose, by a subconscious easement from his greatest anxiety.

A slow tap-tap-tapping on the closed door near his head woke him just before dawn. The lightest sleeper of them all, Luck lifted his head with a start, and opened his sleep-blurred eyes upon blackness. He called out, and it was the voice of Annie-Many-Ponies that answered.

"Wagalexa Conka! You come quick. Plenty snow come. You be awful glad when you see. Soon day comes. You hurry. I make plenty breakfast, Wagalexa Conka."

As a soldier springs from sleep when calls the bugle, Luck jumped out into the icy darkness of the room. With one jerk he had the door open and stood glorying in the wild gust of snow that broke over him like a wave. In his bare feet he stood there, and felt the snow beat in his face, and said never a word, since big emotions never quite reached the surface of Luck's manner.

"Day come quick, Wagalexa Conka!" The voice of Annie-Many-Ponies urged him from without, like the voice of Opportunity calling from the storm.

"All right. You run now and have breakfast ready. We come quick." He held the door open another half minute, and he heard Annie-Many-Ponies laugh as she fought her way back to the house through the blinding blizzard. He saw a faint glow through the snow-whirl when she opened the kitchen door, and he shut out the storm with a certain vague reluctance, as though he half feared it might somehow escape into a warm, sunny morning and prove itself no more than a maddeningly vivid dream.

"Hey! Wake up!" he shouted while he groped for a match and the lamp.
"Roll into your sourdoughs, you sons-uh-guns—"

"Say, Applehead," came a plaintive voice from Pink's hunk, "make Luck turn over on the other side, can't yuh? Darn a man that talks in his sleep!"

"By cripes, Luck's got to sleep in the hay loft—er I will," Big Medicine growled, making the boards of his bunk squeak with the flop of his disturbed body.

Then Luck found the lamp and struck a match, and it was seen that he was very wide awake, and that his face had the look of a man intent upon accomplishment.

The Native Son sat up in one of the top bunks and looked down at Luck with a queer solemnity in his eyes. "What is this, amigo?" he asked with a stifled yawn. "Another one of your Big Minutes?"

"Quien sabe?" Luck retorted, reaching for his clothes as his small ebullition subsided to a misleading composure. "Storm's here at last, and we'll have to be moving. Roll out and saddle your ridge-runners; Annie's got breakfast all ready for us."

"Aw, gwan!" grumbled Happy Jack from sheer force of habit, and made haste to hit the floor with his feet before Luck replied to that apparent doubt of his authority.

"Dress warm as you can, boys," Luck advised curtly, lacing his own heavy buckskin moccasins over thick German socks, which formed his cold-weather footgear. "She's worse than that other one, if anything."

"Mamma!" Weary murmured, in a tone of thanksgiving. "She didn't come any too soon, did she?"

Luck did not reply. He pulled his hat down low over his forehead, opened the door and went out, and it was as though the wind and snow and darkness swallowed him bodily. The horses must first be fed, and he fought his way to the stables, where Applehead's precious hay was dwindling rapidly under Luck's system of keeping mounts and a four-horse team up and ready for just such an emergency. He labored through the darkness to the stable door, lighted the lantern which hung just inside, and went into the first stall. The manger was full, and the feed-box still moist from the lapping tongue of the gray horse that stood there munching industriously. Annie-Many-Ponies had evidently fed the horses before she called Luck, and he felt a warm glow of gratitude for her thoughtfulness.

He stopped at the bunk-house to tell the boys that they had nothing to do but eat breakfast before they saddled, and found them putting on overcoats and gloves and wrangling over the probable location of the herd that would have drifted in the night. So they ploughed in a straggling group to the house, where Annie-Many-Ponies was already pouring the coffee when they trooped in.

Day was just breaking when they rode out into the full force of the belated storm and up on the mesa where they had left the cattle scattered and feeding more or less contentedly at sundown. They had not gone a mile until their bodies began to shrink under the unaccustomed cold. Bill Holmes, town-bred and awkward in the open, thankfully resigned to the Indian girl the dignity of driving the mountain wagon with its four-horse team, and huddled under blankets, while Annie-Many-Ponies piloted them calmly straight across country in the wake of the riders whom her beloved Wagalexa Conka was leading on the snuffy bay. Save for the difference in his clothes, Annie-Many-Ponies thought that he much resembled that great little war-chief of the white people who rode ahead of his column in a picture hanging on the wall of the mission school. Napoleon was the great little war-chief's name, and her heart swelled with pride as she drove steadily through the storm and thought what a great war-chief her brother Wagalexa Conka might have made, were these but the days of much fighting.

There was to be no trouble with "static" this time, if Luck could help it. To be doubly safe from blurred film, he had brought his ray filter along, for the flakes of snow were large and falling fast. He had chosen a different location, because of the direction of the wind and the difficulty the boys would have had in driving the cattle back in the face of it to the side hill where he had first taken the scenes of the drifting herd.

To-day he "shot" them first as they were filing reluctantly out through a narrow