The Flying U's Last Stand by B. M. Bower (ebook reader with highlighter TXT) 📕

audience increased to a couple of dozen perturbed settlers. The owner of this particular shack, feeling the strength of numbers behind him, was disposed to argue the point.

“Oh, you'll sweat for this!” he shouted impotently when the Happy Family was placing the timbers.

“Ah, git outa the way!” said Andy, coming toward him with a crowbar. “We're sweating now, if that makes yuh feel any better.”

The man got out of the way, and went and stood with the group of onlookers, and talked vaguely of having the law on them—whatever he meant by that.

By the time they had placed the third shack in the bottom of the coulee, the sun was setting. They dragged the timbers up the steep bluff with their ropes and their saddle-horses, loaded them on to the wagon and threw the crowbars and rolling timbers in, and turned to look curiously and unashamed at their audience. Andy, still tacitly their leader, rode a few steps forward.

“That'll be all today,” he announced politely. “Except that load of lumber back here on the bench where it don't belong—we aim to haul that over the line. Seeing your considerable interest in our affairs, I'll just say that we filed on our claims according to law, and we're living on 'em according to law. Till somebody proves in court that we're not, there don't any shack, or any stock, stay on our side the line any longer than it takes to get them off. There's the signs, folks—read 'em and take 'em to heart. You can go home now. The show's over.”

He lifted his hat to the women—and there were several now—and went away to join his fellows, who had ridden on slowly till he might overtake them. He found Happy Jack grumbling and predicting evil, as it was his nature to do, but he merely straightened his aching back and laughed at the prophecies.

“As I told you before, there's more than one way to kill a cat,” he asserted tritely but never the less impressively. “Nobody can say we wasn't mild; and nobody can say we hadn't a right to get those chickencoops off our land. If you ask me, Florence Grace will have to go some now if she gets the best of the deal. She overlooked a bet. We haven't been served with any contest notices yet, and so we ain't obliged to take their say-so. Who's going to stand guard tonight? We've got to stand our regular shifts, if we want to keep ahead of the game. I'm willing to be It. I'd like to make sure they don't slip any stock across before daylight.”

“Say, it's lucky we've got a bunch of boneheads like them to handle,” Pink observed thankfully. “Would a bunch of natives have stood around like that with their hands in their pockets and let us get away with the moving job? Not so you could notice!”

“What we'd better do,” cut in the Native Son without any misleading drawl, “is try and rustle enough money to build that fence.”

“That's right,” assented Cal. “Maybe the Old Man—”

“We don't go to the Old Man for so much as a bacon rind!” cried the Native Son impatiently. “Get it into your systems, boys, that we've got to ride away around the Flying U. We ought to be able to build that fence, all right, without help from anybody. Till we do we've got to hang and rattle, and keep that nester stock from getting past us. I'll stand guard till midnight.”

A little more talk, and some bickering with Slim and Happy Jack, the two chronic kickers, served to knock together a fair working organization. Weary and Andy Green were informally chosen joint leaders, because Weary could be depended upon to furnish the mental ballast for Andy's imagination. Patsy was told that he would have to cook for the outfit, since he was too fat to ride. They suggested that he begin at, once, by knocking together some sort of supper. Moving houses, they declared, was work. They frankly hoped that they would not have to move many more—and they were very positive that they would not be compelled to move the same shack twice, at any rate.

“Say, we'll have quite a collection of shacks down in Antelope Coulee if we keep on,” Jack Bates reminded them. “Wonder where they'll get water?”

“Where's the rest of them going to get water?” Cal Emmett challenged the crowd. “There's that spring the four women up here pack water from—but that goes dry in August. And there's the creek—that goes dry too. On the dead, I feel sorry for the women—and so does Irish,” he added dryly.

Irish made an uncivil retort and swung suddenly away from the group. “I'm going to ride into town, boys,” he announced curtly. “I'll be back in the morning and go on day-herd.”

“Maybe you will and maybe you won't,” Weary amended somewhat impatiently. “This is certainly a poor time for Irish to break out,” he added, watching his double go galloping toward the town road.

“I betche he comes back full and tries to clean out all them nesters,” Happy Jack predicted. For once no one tried to combat his pessimism—for that was exactly what every one of them believed would happen.

“He's stayed sober a long while—for him,” sighed Weary, who never could quite shake off a sense of responsibility for the moral defections of his kinsman. “Maybe I better go along and ride herd on him.” Still, he did not go, and Irish presently merged into the dusky distance.

As is often the case with a family's black sheep, his intentions were the best, even though they might have been considered unorthodox. While the Happy Family took it for granted that he was gone because an old thirst awoke within him, Irish was thinking only of the welfare of the outfit. He did not tell them, because he was the sort who does not prattle of his intentions, one way or the other. If he did what he meant to do there would be time enough to explain; if he failed there was nothing to be said.

Irish had thought a good deal about the building of that fence, and about the problem of paying for enough wire and posts to run the fence straight through from Meeker's south line to the north line of the Flying U. He had figured the price of posts and the price of wire and had come somewhere near the approximate cost of the undertaking. He was not at all sure that the Happy Family had faced the actual figures on that proposition. They had remarked vaguely that it was going to cost some money. They had made casual remarks about being broke personally and, so far as they knew, permanently.

Irish was hot-headed and impulsive to a degree. He was given to occasional tumultuous sprees, during which he was to be handled with extreme care—or, better still, left entirely alone until the spell was over. He looked almost exactly like Weary, and yet he was almost his opposite in disposition. Weary was optimistic, peace-loving, steady as the sun above him except for a little surface-bubbling of fun that kept him sunny through storm and calm. You could walk all over Weary—figuratively speaking—before he would show resentment. You could not step very close to Irish without running the risk of consequences. That he should, under all that, have a streak of calculating, hard-headed business sense, did not occur to them.