Part 6

With a final spurt and shout the veteran puncher wheeled and came to a standstill, regarding the smashing run of the big steer with a smile of admiration. The red-and-white was already disappearing in the distance, far, far away from all further danger of pursuit, his tail held high, his head swaying. Steve watched him until he topped a rise and disappeared. He had lost a goodly prize; but he was content. He chuckled as he recalled the steer’s past misdeeds on the bed-ground.

The outlaw went back to his remotest fastnesses. He may be there yet, boss of the Croton brakes.

V SHIELA

A panther’s scream split the whine of the wind and Shiela reared herself in front of the fire, her body retched by an answering challenge.

“Shee-la,” her master rebuked. “Lie down, girl.”

The wolfhound sank to the floor with a reluctant flop, but the hairs on her neck and along her spine bristled still. She continued to rumble.

There were four men playing at cards in the bunkhouse. Cold weather had set in and the Tumbling H outfit were eating out their hearts in winter camps. Here at headquarters, the range boss, wagon boss, blacksmith and cook played half the day at seven-up and pitch; and listened to Mit’s varying accounts of high life in the East, as he had plumbed it in Fort Worth; and raved at the climate and cursed petty annoyances with the savage irritability of full-blooded men lacking enough to do.

“Hark to that ol’ wind,” mourned the wagon boss--he was fifty and considered fourteen hours a day in the saddle mere child’s play--“It was sixty-six above this morning, and now it’s zero. No wonder a man cain’t be healthy.”

The others nodded gravely and the cook shuffled the cards.

“It’s a wonder, Steve,” he observed, “that you don’t--my deal?--you don’t try that dog in wolf huntin’. Not by herself, but with a bunch of ’em.”

“Wait till she’s used to the country and has got her growth. Then you’ll see.”

Mit remarked that he referred, of course, to the hunting of coyotes, which prompted a passionate declaration from the wagon boss that the range ought to be cleared of these pests. They killed too many calves in bad years: poison ’em, he urged. Nobody opposed objection and they went on with the game. Then from the mouth of the cañon came to the ears of the players the vibrant cry of the lobo. Right upon it broke Shiela’s roar of defiance, and the beast was at the door in a bound, whimpering frenziedly, her terrible teeth bared. Beside her, his head three inches short of Shiela’s breast, Friday stiffened in sympathetic rage, his stubby tail wagging. He raised a shrill treble bark.

“Down, Shee-la! Down, girl.” Running from the table, O’Donnell led her back to the fire.

“Friday, you come here,” the blacksmith cried. “Lay down under the table, and don’t you go for to move!”

Not to cattle-browsed stretches of prairie land had Shiela been reared, nor to vast sweep of hills and mesquite-flecked valleys, and of torn, brick-red sandstone and tortuous, dry river-beds. She was a stranger in a strange land, and her new kingdom struck to the roots of her nature. Far as she could wander in a frivolous all-day rabbit hunt with Friday was no sign of human habitation; and beyond that, away to the pale-blue line that must surely be the rim of all things,--full sixty miles,--no handiwork of man was visible. Here was an unspoiled empire, and her master was the autocrat. For the first time in her life the wolfhound drew the breath of unrestrained liberty, chafed hotly to the tang of the air, cast about and trailed wild creatures whose taint stirred her to mad longings for the chase and a fight.

How can one tell of Shiela’s beauty? A great animal and a wonderful--light fawn in color, with a shaggy coat. Her eyes were in general gentle and melting. But it must be confessed that her proportions did not fit Shiela to be a comfort about the home, for she weighed a hundred and eighteen pounds and could not go under the tallest table without stooping. As she always forgot to stoop, her progress was fraught with excitement.

On the day following her arrival, the cook scrambled out of bed long before sunup to ascertain what manner of idiot could be knocking on the door in this deserted region. Man alive, why couldn’t they walk in? Shiela leaped on him to be fondled--the wolfhound had been wagging her tail against the door as she lay across the threshold.

“Ef I was you,” Mit suggested civilly, “I’d lay out on the range where you’d have room to move round. Git a nice big butte all to yourself.”

Her heart and her courage were big as her body. Following O’Donnell on a day when he fared to Stinking Water, quite by accident she roused up a loafer in the cañon. Shiela flew in pursuit, deaf to O’Donnell’s frantic commands to come back. And when the wolf turned fiercely at bay to pit her might against this daring hunter, a hundred and eighteen pounds of dauntless pluck launched itself at her neck like a bolt from a storm-cloud.

“She’s a dead one now,” O’Donnell groaned, circling for a shot. “She’s a goner, sure.”

Had the wolfhound been more wary, she would have fared better. She could not have slain her foe; the dog does not breathe that can go to the death-grapple with a loafer wolf in the flush of his strength; and Shiela knew neither the amazing quickness of the wild, nor how to guard against those slashing counter-attacks. The lobo could dodge and rip simultaneously, using her jaws from any direction. Even when bowled over by the hound’s unreckoning rush, she tore Shiela’s throat with a backward thrust of her muzzle and was free in a twinkling. Badly cut in several places, dazed by the speed of the combat, the wolfhound was soon forced to let her go.

Shiela and Friday were fast friends, albeit the diversity of dimensions was productive of intermittent rancor. It was Friday’s wont to rush at her fiercely, to seize one powerful leg in his mouth and worry it, whereat Shiela would hit him a playful pat that sent him reeling ten yards. But Friday came of a staunch breed, and he returned to the sport again and again. Often the wolfhound would stretch herself out on the ground, and thus recumbent, the fox-terrier could almost reach her head. Over Shiela would roll, lying on her back with legs in the air, while Friday snorted and grunted valorously as he shook her by the throat or the ear. But the fun always ended in the same way: a clumsy blow would catch Friday full on the head and he would dash off to his master with cries of pain.

“Steve oughtn’t for to keep her round headquarters,” the blacksmith remonstrated to Dick. “She’s shore too big. Pore li’l Friday! When she gits into my shop, Dick, I swan her ol’ tail is like to send my tools flying which-ways.”

“Where’d he keep her, then? He cain’t turn her out on the range to eat grass,” sneered Dick.

The blacksmith was silenced, but there was born in him a dislike of the hound. It happened that, when next the terrier came yelping from play, O’Donnell had ridden off to a tank. The blacksmith issued from the shop and hurled a bolt at Shiela. She dodged, but did not run, and the bristles on her neck stiffened in warning.

Aside from the manager, who spent much of the year with his family in Denver, the blacksmith was the only married man with the Tumbling H outfit. He had a son three years of age. Oscar was the child’s name,--a sturdy, ruddy-cheeked youngster he was--and from the outset he was the apple of Shiela’s eye. The boy could pull her ears or tail with absolute impunity, and into the yawning cavity she would open to his teasing, he would thrust a chubby fist.

“Oscar! Oscar! My baby, don’t,” his mother would cry. But Shiela was infinitely tender with him, and the two would roll on the ground in a tight embrace, while the child thumped a tattoo on the wolfhound’s ribs.

It befell on a morning that they indulged in this frolic until both were in a state of unbridled excitement. Crowing with delight, the baby staggered to his feet and tried to butt Shiela with his head. Forgetting for a fraction of time how fragile was this cherished morsel of humanity, the wolfhound struck out joyously with her paw, bowling him over like a ninepin. As he went backward, the boy essayed to break his fall on the ground by thrusting out his left arm; it doubled under him and snapped at the elbow.

A single wailing cry brought his father running from the smithy. Oscar lay white-faced, the wolfhound nosing him eagerly in an endeavor to stir the baby to a resumption of play. Flinging a curse at the dog, the blacksmith picked up his son and carried him to his mother. Ten minutes passed, which Shiela spent in vain efforts to ascertain what kept her playmate from her, and Peck emerged from the bunkhouse with a shotgun. The quick-sensing Shiela disappeared without further ado around a corner of the saddle-shed; but, as the blacksmith followed on a run, O’Donnell’s voice stayed him.

“What’re you doing with that gun, Peck?”

“Shiela done broke Oscar’s arm, and I aim to git even--that’s what.”

“Don’t be a fool!” the boss cried sharply.

Peck faced him, his lips twitching.

“I may do more’n shoot a bitch, Steve,” he said, and his voice was calm now.

“You don’t mean that, Peck.” The range boss continued to advance, his eyes on the troubled eyes of the blacksmith. “Shee-la and little Oscar have always been friends. Didn’t she pull him out of the creek only last week? She couldn’t have smashed his arm on purpose. You can’t blame a dog for an accident.”

The blacksmith cursed Shiela to the eightieth generation; but O’Donnell smiled and tapped the barrel of the gun with his forefinger. There would be no shooting of man or dog now, he knew.

“Put it away, Peck. We’ll forget all about it. I’ll ride over to Deadeye and bring the doctor myself.”

The blacksmith wavered and obeyed.

Little Oscar was soon able to toddle about, with his arm in a cast and a sling. But Peck’s dislike for the hound grew to hate. In the short winter days and long winter nights he watched and brooded, waiting for an opportunity to make her suffer. His hostility to the soft-eyed, affectionate Shiela took the form of an intense nervous sensibility to her every movement--one sees precisely the same symptoms in persons who are unhappily cooped up for any length of time. Soon the bigness of the animal grated on his nerves, so that whatever she did excited in him childish spleen. Even when Shiela ate, Peck could not look at her magnificent satisfaction without falling into a paroxysm of loathing.

Once he spread pieces of meat cunningly about the saddle-shed where she was wont to loll while the child slept in the afternoons. Shiela espied and swallowed these tidbits with much relish, and stalked away to get a drink, feeling unaccountably thirsty. There was no water in the trough; and that saved her life. Soon a tremor came upon the wolfhound, so that she swayed uncertainly, her nose close to the ground, froth slathering her muzzle.

At this moment Oscar rocketed from the bunkhouse at his usual ungainly gallop. The boy knew exactly what to do. Had he not endured agony, too? There was only one sure remedy for belly-pains, and it stood on a shelf in the kitchen--he never passed the shelf without a certain creeping of the flesh. How he forced castor oil upon the dog is one of those modern miracles that are wrought for babes and the inebriated. At any rate, with only one arm free, he administered a glorious dose, and, feeling full of pity for the tortures of which she mumbled so weakly, he followed it with generous hunks of greasy bacon purloined from the big brown crockery jar in the pantry. Shiela became violently ill and Oscar feared for her life.

“Dick! Dick! She sick. Hurry, oh hurry!” Oscar ran to summon help.

Shiela survived, and O’Donnell devoted the better part of a day to impassioned dissertations on the folly of leaving strychnine baits for coyotes round the saddle-shed.

One evening in midwinter, the range boss, Dick, the cook, and Peck sat in the bunkhouse, as usual, trifling with a pile of dominos. Shiela lay dozing in front of the fire. The wolfhound had shown considerable restlessness of late and Dick had cautioned O’Donnell to chain her up. It came Mit’s turn to play and, as he was ponderously miring himself, the night silence was rent by the hunting cry of the loafer. So near was it, so savagely compelling, that the men sent the benches back in amaze. The effect on Shiela was extraordinary. She was at the door, scratching for her liberty, whining, turning appealing eyes to O’Donnell that he should open.

Dick gazed at the range boss and waggled his wise bald head. “You better lock her up, Steve, or you’ll shore lose that ol’ dog.”

She was locked in the smithy the next evening, and in the morning the shed was empty. O’Donnell was positive that the staple and chain on the door had been secure when he left her the night before; yet now the staple dangled free, with a splinter attached. Reflecting that the hound’s weight made this feat possible, he ceased to speculate; and in the blacksmith’s soul entered peace. Shiela had fled.

The Wednesday following fell blustery, with a bullying wind, and the range boss sat late at his table, working over a cattle tally by the light of a lantern. A timid scratching on the door-sill disturbed him, and he listened curiously. There it was again, this time accompanied by a plaintive whine. He reached the handle in a stride.

“Shee-la! Shee-la, old girl!” His glad cry brought Mit running. Shiela slunk into the room and crossed to the fire, which she sniffed doubtfully and then lay down in front of it. Down her throat and across her left shoulder burned cherry-colored slashes. She touched her tongue to them and began to clean her soiled coat, while O’Donnell stood watching, lost in wonder. The wolfhound growled as he moved, but he laughed affectionately and stooped to the fearfully lowered head.

“So you’ve come back--like the prodigal,” he whispered. “Poor, poor Shee-la!”

“Mit,” he bawled the next instant, “kill the spotted calf, or the fatted heifer, or whatever else will do. She’s hungry.”

Not being conversant with the tale of the erring son, the cook roared back a request to Steve to have sense--didn’t he know there wasn’t a calf in the pen?

“Bring some beef, then,” laughed the boss.

The animal’s eyes followed her master furtively. He noted that flickering gleam with a pang--the fear and suspicion of the hunted in it. So much had three days with the wild linked up the slack chain of her blood tie. Then presently she licked his hand, and the look that answered his was soft and appealing as of old.

“Here’s enough to choke her,” announced Mit cheerily, entering with a slab of beef.

The hound sprang at him and the cook, taking no chances, hurled the raw meat into the air. She caught it as it touched the floor and tore into it with the desperate zest of the famished.

The days drifted one into another, and the Tumbling H men rose and ate and slept, and rose again, which is the sum of many lives. Of work there could be little until the spring rains fell. Would the good days of the roundup never come? Oh, the sweltering hours in the saddle, and the bellowings of mighty herds, and the choking dust of the corrals in branding!

Shiela was carefully guarded. In the first of the mild weather she contributed to the bustling cheer of the bunkhouse a litter of four lusty pups. It was as much as a man’s life was worth to go nearer than six feet to the tugging little rascals; but the boy Oscar, who did not know this, proceeded calmly to inspect and caress them. The mother flared in a sudden, quaping rage, but instantly sank back and became reconciled to the extent of permitting the baby, quite undaunted by his first reception, to stroke her progeny with his pudgy hands. She watched him jealously.

Summer rushed upon the land, and the Tumbling H outfit got to horse and rode forth. In November O’Donnell shipped seven thousand head of steers to help stay the world’s maw, and in December there were four men playing at cards again in the bunkhouse.

“Steve,”--the cook cleared his throat as he riffled the cards,--“is it my deal? Shore. Say, Steve, one of Shiela’s pups is killing chickens. He’d ’a got a turkey too, only I done seen him.”

“You ought for to have killed ’em all when they were teeny pups, Steve,” broke in the blacksmith. “What was the use of keeping two? Anyone kin see they’re more wolf than dog.”

“It’s your play,” the boss said evenly.

Shiela had the run of quarters, but her broad-jowled, heavy-shouldered pups were chained in the smithy. Just what to do with them was a problem. Shiela had exhibited no special affection since they were weaned, and it needed only the merest glance to detect the bar sinister. Had only the eyes been visible, there was that in their glint which betrayed the wolf. Yet, in the tawny coats and a certain lithe spring in gathering for a stride, the youngsters favored their mother.

A loafer wolf made a foray from the cañon on a Sunday night, when the range boss and Mit played seven-up and the blacksmith poisoned life with a concertina. He killed a milch-pen calf close to headquarters; yet so silent was the raid that the men heard nothing of it, though Shiela cried protests to be gone and growled at intervals. In the smithy the pups bayed deep-voiced greetings. They leaped and snapped their teeth, and gnawed and raved to be free. Forgetting that O’Donnell had unchained them, Dick went to the door to still the brutes. They hurled themselves over him.

“Here’s where the trouble starts, Shee-la,” observed her master dubiously. She wagged her tail and looked up at him in curiosity, for she had practically forgotten the pups.

It was a bitter winter, and the cattle sickened and died in hundreds. The men rode range in all weathers, setting out oil-cake and salt; but what help could be given to thirty thousand head? Carrion waxed fat. And then, one day in Deadeye, whither he had journeyed for supplies at the first hint of spring, the range boss stumbled on a strange tale. The wolves were out, bolder and stronger than they had been in a generation. They were making no stealthy, lone hunts,--a swift leap from the dark upon a helpless thing, and then the gorge,--but waged an almost systematic war of pillage. The leader was a shaggy veteran of speckled gray that ran with a limp; and with him--the men of Deadeye hoped they might perish horribly were this not so--with him there ran two fawn-colored wolves like no lobo of the west country. They were, perhaps, slightly shorter than a cowhorse; that is, of course, a strong roping horse, not a stunted pony.

“Shee-la, you’ve surely done it now,” O’Donnell told her with a sigh. She thrust her moist muzzle into his hand to be petted.

In less than seven days’ time Padden reported from a division camp that he had come on the carcass of a freshly killed heifer near a salt trough. The wolves had hamstrung the poor brute and had fallen to their grim feast before life was extinct, he thought; which is not unusual. O’Donnell vowed a war of extermination.

The mail-carrier came upon the pack casting about beside the trail, at fault in running an antelope. They let him approach within two hundred yards, gazing insolently, then flitted swiftly through a jungle of mesquite trees. His story was that beside the wily gray scoundrel that led, raced two tall creatures, half wolf, half dog, which ran with a long, springy stride foreign to lobo locomotion.

“It’s Shiela’s pups,” the blacksmith exclaimed venomously, when the mail-carrier related this experience at dinner.

“Yes, they’re Shee-la’s pups,” O’Donnell admitted; and, “Poor Shee-la!” he said. Then raising his voice with decision:

“Johnson, you tell them in Deadeye that I’ll give fifty dollars each for those pups, and fifty for the old gray fellow. Put up a notice in the post-office. Or--wait, I’ll write one for you.”

The result of this placard was an egress from Deadeye of eight ambitious hunters, who went their several ways, wishful to earn two months’ pay by a lucky shot. They straggled back empty-handed at the end of a week. While they were thus engaged, the pack ranged wide. They killed at Cedar Creek, but were compelled to abandon their prey, and slew again before daylight on a nester’s place on the outskirts of Deadeye. Here, too, they let the life out of an interfering collie. Long immunity had made them contemptuous--or was it that they gave ear to the counsels of man-raised mates? They raided the Tumbling H headquarters in quest of certain turkeys that were Mit’s solace in dark days, and from ambuscade the cook slew his finest gobbler with buckshot, in a berserker effort to shoot one lissome marauder.

Shiela and Friday led uneventful lives amid all this harrying and turmoil of pursuit. They frisked and wrestled on the baked, cracked ground, or basked in the sun until it grew too hot and the flies became unbearable in attack, when they would slouch to the cool of the long bunk-room. Shiela had forgotten all about her degenerate offspring, and held herself fearlessly and with pride as an honest dog.

More than once she and the terrier took jaunts over the low hills toward the cañon, in spite of the watch on her goings-out. It might be a rabbit they pursued, or the zigzagging trail of a coyote; or it might be that rare scent, the antelope’s. One afternoon they disported themselves, chasing some half-wild hogs that roamed the range.

A long-snouted porker of tender years was rooting about a patch of bear-grass, when suddenly he cocked his impudent nose and appeared to listen intently. Shiela and Friday stopped short in a game of tag, to watch. The pig did not turn his head, but continued to stand at attention, his ears twitching. What could it mean? Shiela crept closer. With a speed that left her dumbfounded, the pig sprang sidewise on to a spot his glance had certainly not been regarding, and simultaneously tore with his jaws at a writhing, earth-colored coil. Shiela drew off respectfully and in trepidation, while he devoured his victim with beautiful hog voracity. It was the dreaded rattler, which he had killed with two lightning strokes of forefeet and jaws.

So the days passed.

In the meantime, O’Donnell had other things than Shiela or wolves to think about. The manager had resigned, and the boss added to the superintendence of the active work of the range, the conduct of the business of the Tumbling H company, the sale and the shipping of Tumbling H cattle. He was an enthusiast on improving the breed of his cattle and horses; and his anger was deep, therefore, when late in the autumn his men found the remains of a young stallion. He was a splendid beast, but newly come from Kentucky, and ignorant of perils and the necessity for perpetual vigilance. Apparently he had been cut out from the band he lorded it over,--sheer foolhardiness, this--and, alone in the battle against heavy odds, had been pulled down. That he died full of fight was sufficiently evident: the battered body of an exceptionally large young wolf lay on the ground beside his own.

Shiela sniffed at the carcass of this creature, then moved away unconcernedly, circling for another scent; but the hide caught O’Donnell’s gaze and held it. The coat was of a peculiar tawny hue, running in spots to red. There was something in the lines of the body and legs that struck a reminiscent chord in his memory. He glanced from it to Shiela, turning the body over with his foot.

“If that isn’t one of your litter, old girl, I’m much mistaken,” he said.

Shiela, then, must atone. With all the dogs of Deadeye to help, she should hunt these bold ravagers. Hers was the crime; hers must be the expiation, even at the cost of life.