FullReads

Slowly at Indian trot we encircle the herd. Earlier in the evening a prairie-wolf had pulled down a calf, and the beasts were still restless.

Little eddies of nervousness at long intervals developed here and there in the mass–eddies that not impossibly might widen at any time with perilous quickness to the maelstrom of a stampede. So as he rode Bunt sang to these great brutes, literally to put them to sleep–sang an old grandmother’s song, with all the quaint modulations of sixty, seventy, a hundred years ago:

“With her ogling winks
And bobbling blinks,
Her quizzing glass,
Her one eye idle,
Oh, she loved a bold dragoon,
With his broadsword, saddle, bridle.
Whack, fol-de-rol!”

I remember that song. My grandmother–so they tell me–used to sing it in Carolina, in the thirties, accompanying herself on a harp, if you please:

“Oh, she loved a bold dragoon,
With his broadsword, saddle, bridle.”

It was in Charleston, I remembered, and the slave-ships used to discharge there in those days. My grandmother had sung it then to her beaux; officers they were; no wonder she chose it–“Oh, she loved a bold dragoon”–and now I heard it sung on an Idaho cattle-range to quiet two thousand restless steers.

Our talk at first, after the cattle had quieted down, ran upon all manner of subjects. It is astonishing to note what strange things men will talk about at night and in a solitude. That night we covered religion, of course, astronomy, love affairs, horses, travel, history, poker, photography, basket-making, and the Darwinian theory. But at last inevitably we came back to cattle and the pleasures and dangers of riding the herd.

“I rode herd once in Nevada,” remarked Bunt, “and I was caught into a blizzard, and I was sure freezing to death. Got to where I couldn’t keep my eyes open, I was that sleepy. Tell you what I did. Had some eating-tobacco along, and I’d chew it a spell, then rub the juice into my eyes. Kept it up all night. Blame near blinded me, but I come through. Me and another man named Blacklock–Cock-eye Blacklock we called him, by reason of his having one eye that was some out of line. Cock-eye sure ought to have got it that night, for he went bad afterward, and did a heap of killing before he did get it. He was a bad man for sure, and the way he died is a story in itself.”

There was a long pause. The ponies jogged on. Rounding on the herd, we turned southward.

“He did ‘get it’ finally, you say,” I prompted.

“He certainly did,” said Bunt, “and the story of it is what a man with a’ imaginary mind like you ought to make into one of your friction tales.”

“Is it about a treasure?” I asked with apprehension. For ever since I once made a tale (of friction) out of one of Bunt’s stories of real life, he has been ambitious for me to write another, and is forever suggesting motifs which invariably–I say invariably–imply the discovery of great treasures. With him, fictitious literature must always turn upon the discovery of hidden wealth.

“No,” said he, “it ain’t about no treasure, but just about the origin, hist’ry and development–and subsequent decease–of as mean a Greaser as ever stole stock, which his name was Cock-eye Blacklock.

“You see, this same Blacklock went bad about two summers after our meet-up with the blizzard. He worked down Yuma way and over into New Mexico, where he picks up with a sure-thing gambler, and the two begin to devastate the population. They do say when he and his running mate got good and through with that part of the Land of the Brave, men used to go round trading guns for commissary, and clothes for ponies, and cigars for whisky and such. There just wasn’t any money left anywhere. Those sharps had drawed the landscape clean. Some one found a dollar in a floor-crack in a saloon, and the barkeep’ gave him a gallon of forty-rod for it, and used to keep it in a box for exhibition, and the crowd would get around it and paw it over and say: ‘My! my! Whatever in the world is this extremely cu-roos coin?’