Edward G. Cheyney

INTO A FAR COUNTRY

Scott Burton leaned eagerly forward and searched the scenery which rolled steadily past the Pullman window. The other occupants of the car, worn out with the long journey and surfeited with scenery, centered their attention on their books or tried to sleep away the weary miles. They had seen it all, or at least too much of it. But to Scott Burton it was a new country and to him a new country was of more absorbing interest than anything else.

Born in a little Massachusetts town, he had lived a stay at home life with the single exception of his trip to a college in the Middle West. But even then, before he had any idea that he would ever really have a chance to travel, it was always the tales of strange lands that fascinated him. He had been looking out of that car window for three solid days just as intently as he was looking now and there was not a bump on the landscape which failed to interest him. He had laid over one night in St. Louis that he might not miss anything by night travel, and another one in Pueblo. And still he stared at the country with almost unwinking eye.

A kindly old gentleman who had been watching him for some time, and whose curiosity was piqued by the boy’s unusual alertness, dropped into the seat beside him and opened a conversation.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Tell me if I annoy you, but it hurts my eyes to read on the train, I have seen the country no end of times and I can’t sleep in the daytime. That leaves me nothing to do but watch my neighbors; and I have been watching you till I could not keep down my curiosity any longer.”

Scott was glad to have some one to talk to and he liked the old man’s manner. Moreover, he felt rather curious to know what had made the other man curious.

“I suppose I am rather curious looking,” Scott laughed.

“No, no,” protested the old gentleman, “that is a very good pun, but it is not at all what I meant.”

“I did not mean it either,” said Scott, “I shall be very glad of your company, especially if you have seen the country so often.”

“Well,” said the old gentleman, hastening to satisfy his curiosity, “I have been watching you stare out of that window for almost a whole day now, and I simply could not wait any longer to learn what you were hunting for.”

“I am afraid it will be horribly disappointing to you,” Scott smiled, “but I am only looking at the country.”

“Looking at the country,” the old man echoed, “all day long.” He seemed not only disappointed but also a little incredulous.

“Why, yes,” Scott said, “you see it is all new to me.”

“I don’t see what there is in this country that a man would want to look at for a whole day,” the old man insisted.

“But I have never seen a mountain before,” Scott answered, “and right over there is the Great Divide. I have always been crazy to see a mountain.”

“They are a grand sight,” said the old gentleman. “Those old peaks up there are like brothers to me. Yes, they must look pretty fine to a stranger. They look pretty good to me when I have been away for a while. Mountains are a good deal like home folks, you don’t think much about them when you are with them all the time, but when you go away you are crazy to get back to them.”

“You live here then?” Scott asked politely.

“Live here,” exclaimed the old man indignantly, “wouldn’t live anywhere else. I reckon I have been living here longer than most anything else except those old mountains there. Why, I used to start out at the Mexican border with a herd of cattle every spring and graze ’em right north to Montana in time for the fall market. Right straight through we drove ’em and never seen a settler the whole summer. I knew every water hole from the Big Bend to Miles City.”

“I’ve read about that,” said Scott becoming really interested. “It must have been great sport.”

“Sport! You bet it was. And there was money in cattle, too, in the good old days before the settler and the sheep men came. Can’t chase a jack rabbit now,” he added a little bitterly, “without scratching your horse’s nose on a barbed wire fence.”

“Don’t the cattle men make any money now?” Scott asked.

“Some, but it’s mostly sheep in here now. Had to go into sheep myself,” he grinned. “I fought ’em for a long time but I saw it wasn’t any use, so I bought some myself, and I’ve made my pile out of ’em. There’s some that’s fighting them yet, but they’ll never get anywhere.”

“I suppose you had some pretty bitter fights,” Scott said encouragingly.

“I should remark. When I went into sheep, all the cattle men looked on me as a traitor. The sheep men were mostly greasers then and I was one of the first white men in this section to go into it. I remember when I rode up from San Rosario with my first band of sheep and met old Tom Butler on the plain he tried to pull his gun on me, but I had the drop on him and I made him set there while I told him what I thought of the situation. He did a lot of cussin’ and spittin’, but it soaked into him all right and when I beat him onto the summer range in the spring, he sold out his cattle and bought him a band of sheep. That’s where we had the fights, for the summer range, up there on those old mountains.”

The old man looked dreamily toward the towering mountains and Scott knew that he was living over a story that would be good to hear.

“You had to race for the summer range, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Race for it? Lord, yes! The whole caboodle of us would live as peaceable as a bunch of kittens down on the plains all winter, but when spring was coming we all got sort of offish and nervous. Each man was scared to start too early for fear there would not be any feed in the mountains, and he was scared to wait too long for fear the other fellow would beat him to it. I remember one time when old Tim Murphy tied a sheep bell on his dog and led him by old JosÉ’s place in the night going towards the mountains. It was two weeks sooner than any one would have dared to move, but JosÉ was so scared that he started his whole band before daylight and drove ’em ten miles before he found out that Tim had fooled him.”

“I suppose the government regulation of the range has spoiled all that now?” Scott suggested.

“Spoiled it!” the old man exclaimed, “Yes, they’ve spoiled it, and it’s a mighty good thing, too. There were lots of lambs lost in that spring race for the grass, many an acre of range spoiled, and many a small rancher ruined. Even when you succeeded in beating the other fellow to the range you never knew how long it would be ’til some bigger fellow would come along and crowd you off. Now you know a year ahead just what you are going to get, how many head you can hold over, and that the grass will be there whenever you want to go.”

“But I thought the sheep men were opposed to the government regulation,” Scott protested.

“Humph,” grunted the old man contemptuously, “some of ’em are. They are the fellows who want to hog the whole thing and crowd out the little fellow. The government will not let them do that and they are sore. Still think they are bigger than Uncle Sam. I knew better right from the first and took my medicine like a man and now I like it.”

“It is certainly building up the range,” Scott said; “they are supporting more sheep now than under the old system and doing it better.”

“Certainly they are,” agreed the old gentleman. “You seem to know a good deal about this country, young man, for any one who has never seen a mountain before,” he added suspiciously.

Scott laughed. “I don’t know nearly as much about it as I should like to. I have been reading up on it because I am coming down here to work, but it seems as though the very things a fellow wants to know most are always left out of the books.”

“What are you going to do, if it is any of my business?”

“It may be some of your business,” Scott laughed. “I’m going to be a patrolman with the Forest Service.”

“On what forest?”

“The Cormorant.”

“No, too far west, you will not get any of mine there. You don’t know the west at all?” he asked musingly.

“Only what I have read,” Scott said. “I feel as though I know the timber pretty well, but I’m afraid I don’t know the stock business at all.”

“Well, I’m leaving you at the next station. I get over your way once in a while and shall probably see you again, if you stay there,” he added with a grin. “If you study the stock business the way you have been studying this country, and keep your eye on Jed Clark you will be all right. Don’t let them bluff you.” With this advice he walked back to his seat to collect his things.

Scott turned back to his examination of the country, but his mind was busy with the old man’s last remarks. He had intimated that patrolmen did not last very long in that particular section, and had warned him specifically against one man. Evidently some of the former patrolmen had been bluffed out. Well, he was willing to admit that he was a tenderfoot with very little knowledge of the stock business, but he made up his mind right there that no one was going to bluff him. He did not believe in going out to meet trouble, but he never dreamed how often the old man’s advice would stand him in good stead. Possibly if he had, he would have thought about it a little longer.

The train skirted the edges of queer, flat-topped mesas which appeared to be scattered carelessly about the plain; timber crowned and green they were in the midst of the dark brown of the dried up plains. Gradually the great mountains were closing in. Irregular saw-tooth ranges took the place of the mesas, deep-cut gulches caused the track to make long detours—twenty miles in one place—to get a mile across a ravine. Far down in one of the narrow valleys he saw a flock of sheep, the first time in his life he had ever seen more than twenty-five in any one bunch.

He was now rapidly approaching the little town which was to be his headquarters. As the train rounded the shoulder of a mountain which jutted out into the valley, he saw it afar off. It looked very small and insignificant in the center of that great flat plain, and also very bare and treeless to a lad from a superbly elm-clad New England village. And all about it the baked plain lay glaring in the late afternoon sun. It seemed a queer place to pick for a town, but it was just like most of the others he had seen in the last two hundred miles.

On either side of the plain, apparently walling it in with an unbroken rim, were the mountains. In the clear atmosphere they seemed to rise sheer from the valley like perpendicular walls. On them the pine forests were draped like a mantle hanging down toward the valley in irregular points and fringes, and between these points like great wedges driven up into the slope from the valley, were triangular patches of aspen marking the caÑons.

At long intervals slender green threads extending down from the larger caÑons to the wiggling green line in the center of the plain traced the more or less permanent water courses. It did not look very attractive to Scott and he scanned the mountains with a good deal of satisfaction in the thought that most of his work would be up there.

Scott was the only passenger to get off the train at the little town. He was thoroughly inspected by the station loafers as he shouldered his packsack and started boldly up the main street, almost the only street in the town. Like so many western towns it was built like a string of beads. To Scott’s eastern eyes the mixture of little ’dobe houses, concrete block stores, cement sidewalks and electric street lights presented a strange mixture. The complete absence of trees and the consequent glare of light almost blinded him, it was such a contrast to the darkened elm-lined streets of his old home town.

Scott did not see how he could very well get lost in a one-street town. He trudged along as though he had known the place for years and carefully inspected each building for some sign of the supervisor’s office. In the fourth block he found it. The Stars and Stripes waving from the roof caught his attention and painted on the second story window he saw the sign, “Cormorant National Forest, Supervisor’s Office.”

He ascended the stairs rather nervously, for he was entering upon his first real job, and upon entering the office found himself confronted by the clerk. The clerk sized him up, guessed who he was, but remained contemptuously silent. It was the contempt of a native son for an Eastern man.

“Mr. Ramsey?” Scott asked.

“In the next room,” growled the clerk, nodding toward an open door.

Scott dropped his packsack in a corner and walked in, curious to see what his chief would be like. He was surprised to see a man who looked little older than himself. He was dark, of middle height, broad shouldered and square of jaw. Scott noted the straight cut, thin lipped mouth and was not very favorably impressed. Here would be a hard, unsympathetic man to deal with. The supervisor looked up at the sound of his step and the clear frank look reassured him a little.

“Mr. Ramsey?” Scott inquired again.

“Yes,” said the supervisor quietly.

“My name is Burton. I have been assigned to this forest and ordered to report to you.”

The supervisor smiled cordially and lost his “hard” look at once. “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Burton,” he said, rising to shake hands. “I have been expecting you and hoping that you would come to-day. It is almost time for the range to open up and we need you badly.” He closed the door into the outer office. “I know that you have just landed from a long trip and are probably tired, but there are one or two things that I want to tell you now. It may save you trouble later. Have a seat.”

Scott was a little surprised at being pushed into the harness so soon, but he was anxious to get to work, and the town, as he had seen it, did not seem to offer any attractions. He sat down to get his first instructions.

“I’ll be perfectly frank with you,” said Mr. Ramsey, “because if we are going to get along together we have to understand each other. The job to which you have been assigned is a hard and not altogether pleasant one. The three men who have held it have been busted out one after the other in rapid succession because they have either been ‘run out’ or ‘bought up’ by the sheep men. The regulations are to be enforced in that district.” His face looked hard enough now. “It is the only district in this forest where they have not always been enforced in the past and I am going to put them through there if I have to bust a patrolman every week to do it.”

“You will have a particularly hard time because you are an Easterner. These Westerners will all look on you with contempt until you make good and will try to slip something over on you at every opportunity. As a rule, we do not put an Easterner in as a patrolman for that reason. But since the last man there seemed to be in the pay of the sheep men as well as of the service I determined to try an Eastern man who would be a stranger here.”

“I am afraid it will be only too plain that I am not connected with the sheep men,” Scott laughed. “I am horribly green on the sheep business.”

“I am glad of it,” Mr. Ramsey replied. “Don’t let any of these fellows here in town get you into a muss before you get out of town. They will probably try it. They will guy you at every opportunity. Take it as well as you can, but do not let any one walk over you.”

“Thank you,” Scott said, “I appreciate your advice and shall try to keep out of trouble.”

The quiet answer which showed neither boastfulness nor a willingness to be walked over seemed to please the supervisor. “Good,” he exclaimed, “now I’ll take you over to the hotel and you can get some supper and a little rest. To-morrow we’ll get you outfitted, and the next day I’ll take you out to your headquarters and show you around a little.”

Mr. Ramsey introduced Scott to the clerk, Mr. Benson. The clerk shook hands grouchily, and Scott understood that his reports and expense accounts would have to be flawless if they were to get by this man who seemed to have conceived a violent dislike for him at first sight. If he could have seen him a few minutes before listening at the keyhole he would have been even more certain of it.

The supervisor led the way up the street to a very comfortable looking up-to-date hotel. Nearly every one spoke pleasantly to the supervisor but looked Scott over with a rather amused and condescending smile. One man especially, whom they passed just outside of the hotel, stared at Scott with a malicious sneer of contempt that was hard to overlook; nor did he make any pretense of speaking to Mr. Ramsey.

In the hotel Scott was introduced to Mr. McGoorty, the proprietor. “Put him in the boys’ room, McGoorty,” the supervisor explained. “He is one of the new patrolmen and will probably be in from time to time like the rest of them. Well, so long, Burton. McGoorty will take care of you. Come over in the morning at about eight.”

At the door he turned back suddenly and spoke to Scott aside. “Did you notice that sour looking fellow just outside?”

“Yes, I wanted to punch him.”

“Don’t do it. That is Jed Clark, the worst sheep man in the country. He is probably in town now to size you up. He seems to get all the news somehow. Don’t mix with him, no matter what happens.”

Scott was not sure that he could resist it if he had another of those sneering looks, and as he went up to his room he heard several uncomplimentary remarks which made his blood boil. “These Westerners may be hospitable and warm hearted,” he muttered to himself, “but they have a mighty peculiar way of showing it.”