brow in the late seventies and early eighties came Britishers and Bostonians, New Yorkers and Ohioans, not forgetting Canucks and Chicagoans, a motley group full of ginger and snap, with more energy than business sense. There at the club they met and they fashioned it after eastern and foreign methods. The foreigner was caught by the ease and luxury of its cafe and dining room. There was an atmosphere of success among its members. They spent money freely, for all along the line there was a swelling song of victory. What did it matter if the money obtained came more from capital than earnings. The wastage on the range was vastly underestimated, for the man that walked up and down Piccadilly in winter time or faced the dealer at Monte Carlo, or better still sailed across country astride a good horse in pursuit of the red fox knew little of what was taking place around Laramie Peak or the headwaters of the Cheyenne River as the drifting snow played pranks over level grassy divides or sagebrush flats. CHAPTER IX THE SHEEPHerder's GraVE N MY early days the name of Joseph Arthur was IN of England, his home lying under the shadow of the Cheviot Hills; an old-fashioned house with a pleasant oldtime garden by its side covered the head of himself and family. Eastward was a sylvan scene among whose woods ran a tortuous stream, full of trout and grayling. Southwards was a grassy hill, with a hazel wood on its side creeping a third of the way up, and then grass and rocks and a rounded top as if some giant of ancient days had pared it off and made a perfect cone. It was a fair scene, the pleasant valley, the rippling stream, the green hills, with gentle sheep dotting with spots of white the sloping sward and then in front of the house a rich meadow land with the cows browsing or sleeping dreamily beneath summer suns. The farm was kindly, but the farmer had no luck. He was scarcely ever at home. He had the sporting fever, expert with rod and gun, keen with horse and hound, a late sitter after market, hail fellow well met with his neighbors-and so a day came when a local auctioneer sold his stock and effects to pay his creditors. Then he drifted with his family into a small town and commenced to sell feed stuffs and fertilizers on commission. His old friends patronized him for a year or two, but the continual nipping in public houses soon got in its work, and one day, when I was growing up to manhood, Arthur went abroad to find a new home for his folks and seek fickle fortune under other skies. He had been drifting all his life, a slow downward pull, a road easy to travel. The Canadian backwoods were no kinder to him than his fertile vale, and when his family realized the truth, they had to go out and do their best. They scattered, and where they went I know not. Many years afterwards I was ranching in the Sweetwater Valley in Wyoming. At first it was a successful business. The great sage brush flats gave winter feed and up the valleys and mountain sides there was grass galore. The winter of 1886-87 almost cleared the country of cattle, and from this blow the ranchmen never recovered, although we hung on to a broken reed for a few years. Sheep began to come in and one day down the valley below the Three Crossings, under the Shadow of Old Split Rock, mighty landmark of the valley, I met "English Joe," an old weather-beaten man. There he stood on a knoll, unshaven and unshorn, a greasy hat on his head, his clothes worn and ragged, watching a flock of sheep as they kept slowly trailing from a bench of rich grass land towards the river where a sheep wagon stood. The first words spoken told the land of his birth. A few days afterwards he told me the story of his life. The "English Joe" of Sweetwater was the Joseph Arthur of the Northumberland vale. What a strange, weird, pathetic tale it was! A tear stood in his eye as he talked of his wife and family, gone so far as he was concerned, another shipwreck on life's ocean. And then some of the old spirit came back again for he had seen "King Death" win the Waterloo and "Hermit" the Derby. A flash of fire came across his face and away in that lonely valley we heard the deep guttural notes of the otter hounds ring their changes in the valley of the Bowmont, though the echo lay a quarter of a century behind us. A year or two slipped by, faded away all too rapidly. In summer days Joe camped on Sage Hen, a little creek that empties into the Sweetwater from the north just above Split Rock. There by a bubbling spring, ice cold, his wagon stood and 'round about were all the untidy evidences of a sheep herder's camp-old shoes, rejected clothes, tin cans thrown carelessly away, the heads and wings of a grouse or prairie chicken, potato peelings and all the loose paraphernalia that gathers round a summer camp. Here, returning from the round-ups just as evening was falling o'er the scene, we would stop and have a chin with Joe. He was a kindly old chap with a vein of the ascetic in his nature. He seemed to love the mountains, the great granite peaks; perchance he worshipped the vivid lightning that lit up their bald heads in the warm summer nights. With the bonds of fellowship almost gone, at least only a memory lying in a tangled skein of remorse and wasted opportunity, his only solace was Nature, that mother which appeals to all of us. Even your silent dead are oft forgotten amid imposing scenes. What Joe's innermost thoughts were I could never tell. The long days in the sage brush or on the benches of the foothills with his sheep and dog as his only company had deadened the finer instincts of his soul; if he had any religion I never found it out, and like many of his class, that innumerable army whose brand is failure, he lived much in the past; for that reason he loved to gossip and pass away a half hour with me. It was like a tonic to his system and if he had stopped there it would have been all right. But the old fault still lived within him. The smell of the whiskey bottle drove him crazy. Whenever he had enough of money coming he hied away to Rongis, some 15 or 20 miles up the river. In those days Johnnie Signor ran a gin mill there while Joe worked for a thrifty Scotch sheepman, Mackenzie by name. Today he still flourishes, but has moved away to another part of Wyoming, where, it matters not to the reader. Our story is about Joe. When the fit came on Joe, and it always happened when he had some cash ahead, Mackenzie had to herd the sheep while Joe was enjoying the hospitality of the Signor ranch. He would invariably take dinner at the Z (Seventyone Quarter Circle) ranch. He would smoke his pipe and gossip with Flood, the cook, and very often would induce Pete Steckle to ride up the river a bit. Pete liked the company, so that they were at Rongis before they knew it. We will draw a veil over what took place. In a day or two a haggard, wasted man rode past the ranch, his bleary eyes sunk into his head, the neck of a bottle showing in his hip pocket. If the bottle was empty and he was fairly sober when he reached his band of sheep, Mackenzie mounted his cow-pony and left Joe to his solitary job. One day in February we left Rawlins at noon and made Bohack's ranch at Lost Soldier shortly after dark. There we slept, and bright and early next morning we were on the move. It is a long, steady pull to the Divide. After it is reached you trot merrily down the hill, passing through Crook's gap, and as you progress the valley of the Sweetwater opens gradually to your view. It was a glorious day, clear and bright. The valley was bathed in sunshine. Westward the Big Horns rose in majestic splendor, the gray foothills, the dark sides of lower mountains, pine clad, all under a crest of everlasting snow. Down the valley, amid a forest of sage brush, ran the sinuous Sweetwater, a streak of silver; high up were granite crags and rock-ribbed hills, the silent peaks turned by the sun's flashing rays into jeweled pillars; far, far away an island of white floated on a sea of deepest blue. Not even Turner's ecstatic touch could have depicted the beauty of that scene. You come to a fork in the road; northward it leads to Rongis, while the other turns eastward and at the Three Crossings you strike the Sweetwater. Long before you reach the ranch you see a blue wreath of smoke rising skyward. By it you knew that Flood, the cook, has refreshed his fire and is getting the dinner ready. And what meals we got in that rough, rude log cabin! When the gong, which consisted of a string of old horse shoes, was touched by the stove poker there was a hurried movement from the bunk-house to the kitchen, which served as dining room also. The air has sharpened your appetitie and you go to work without much ceremony. Even Flood's gossip delays you a little. You soon find out that Tom Sun's wife presented him with a third addition to the family; that Denny Sheehan, who has been up at Lander as a witness on a stealing case, is to be in tonight; that English Joe passed homewards two days ago from Rongis, somewhat the worse for wear. You get all the country clash and Pete Steckle, who gets this as a part of his daily ration, utters a low growl, half language, |