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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In Rodeo, B.M. Bower masterfully intertwines themes of tradition, ambition, and self-discovery against the vibrant backdrop of the American West. As the Fourth of July approaches, the Flying U Ranch prepares for a reunion, bringing together the legendary "Happy Family" of cowboys, now aged and changed by time. Among them is Claude "Kid" Bennett, son of the renowned Chip Bennett, who returns from college to find his childhood idols transformed and his place in the world uncertain. Disillusioned and yearning to prove himself, Kid embarks on a journey to Chicago to participate in a grand rodeo, aiming to carve out his own legacy. Along the way, he encounters challenges that test his mettle, including a spirited young woman named Dulcie Harlan, whose presence adds complexity to his quest. Bower's narrative captures the essence of a young man's struggle to reconcile the romanticized past with the realities of the present, offering readers a compelling tale of growth, resilience, and the enduring spirit of the West.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Rodeo
Cover
Rodeo
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. — THE HAPPY FAMILY RETURNS
II. — CHIP'S KID
III. — "WHY, THEY'RE GETTING OLD!"
IV. — THE KID REBELS
V. — PARTS UNKNOWN
VI. — ONE OF THOSE COWBOYS
VII. — THE KID MAKES HIMSELF AT HOME
VIII. — CONTESTANT NUMBER ONE
IX. — DULCIE HARLAN LOOKS AROUND
X. — RODEO
XI. — "YOU'D MAKE A DOCTOR OF HIM?"
XII. — THE KID GOES AFTER HIS SHIRT
XIII. — ROBBERY
XIV. —THE TRAIL OF THE SHIRT
XV. — "IT WASN'T ANYTHING"
XVI. — "MRS. BENNETT—MONTANA KID!"
XVII. — FAME BUT FEEDS THE FEUD
XVIII. — BEATEN, BUT NOT WHIPPED
XIX. — THE KID PLUMBS THE DEPTHS
XX. — SCRAPS OF PAPER HELP
XXI. — TROUBLES MULTIPLY
XXII. — WHAT'S A CHAMPION ANYWAY?
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Kid—Chip's son—had the legs and eyes of a roper but the Flying U hands said he didn't have the guts, until...
"They think the West has slowed down!", the Kid thought angrily. "They're wrong, dead wrong! It isn't tame yet, by a long shot! They just think it's slowed down because they've slowed down themselves! They don't hit the pace they used to hit. It—oh heck, it's their youth that's gone and they don't know it!"
It wasn't entirely the Kid's fault. He had remembered the Happy Family, Stetsoned booted and spurred, riding recklessly across the prairies, their careless laughter keeping time with the quick staccato hoofbeats. And now, at the reunion at the old Flying U, just look at them! The Native Son wore gray plaid knickers and low tan shoes. Andy Green and Pink and Weary wore gray whip-cord breeches, leather puttees and Panamas. The Kid—Chip's son—was grown up, tall, lean and hard from riding and roping (even though the only steers he had to rope were five-hundred-dollar calves). But the Happy Family treated him as if he were still a child.
The Kid was fed up, resentful, disillusioned. After a battle of words with Chip and the Native Son he packed up and headed for the big rodeo in Chicago, riding and leading his own ponies. He'd show those washed-out oldtimers how to rope and ride! As it happened, Chip and the old Flying U boys were attending the rodeo, too. The old West came back to life in that huge metropolitan arena. The Native Son held up the reputation with his fists, but the Kid showed he had not only the legs and eyes of a roper, but he had the guts too. He was what he should be—Chip's son.
I. — THE HAPPY FAMILY RETURNS
TWO days before the Fourth of July a small procession of three automobiles lifted a ribbon of fine gray dust from the road that wound eastward along the edge of the Bear Paw foothills. Far back toward Dry Lake the haze was still slowly settling to earth when the last car passed through the high gate of the Flying U fence and a small, slight man got out and pulled the gate shut, hooked the chain around the post and into a link worn smooth with much use and climbed back beside the driver.
"Same identical chain, hooked the same way as when I came through here years ago," he observed pensively to his companion. "Don't it seem like yesterday we hit out for California, Weary?"
"It sure does when I look at these hills," Weary replied. "I miss a few chucks in the road, though. They been doing some work on it lately, looks like. We'll be in sight of the coulee in a minute."
Even as he spoke the lead car, a long, low-slung roadster of a famous foreign make, slid up to the very brow of the hill and stopped with a sudden flash of the warning red light seen rather dimly through its coating of dust. The driver, capped and goggled and otherwise bearing the earmarks of a tourist de luxe, twisted his slim body so that he faced to the rear, though his gauntleted hand pointed dramatically down into the valley.
"My God, boys, they've built a red barn!" he cried in the tragic voice of one unexpectedly confronted with the worst that can befall. "Can you feature it? A red barn, and it's trimmed in white like a million other barns in a dozen States!" He sank down into the seat again, shaking his head in mournful acceptance of the sacrilege. "They might as well put up a windmill and a silo and finish the job!"
Heads craned out of the following limousine. The driver flapped a hand forward in the gesture of dismissal.
"Hey, cut the agony scene and drive on, Mig! Or else pull outa the road to do your wailing, and let me past."
"What's wrong?" Weary shouted from the rear car. "Mig stalled in that tin toy of his? Lemme past, Andy, and I'll give him a tow."
But even while he was speaking the yellow roadster slid on down the steep hill, took the narrow Hogsback trail like a darting lizard and swept at a reckless speed down the last slope and across the creek on a bridge that, like the red barn, was a late improvement, leaving the two cars to bore through the thick curtain of dust at their leisure. As he passed through the big gate he remembered so well, the driver slowed and came to a stand before the bunk house where he had slept through many a bitter night when he was only a poor cowboy working for the Flying U.
As he pulled off his brown goggles and gazed reminiscently at the squat log building, the brown limousine and the blue coach that had trailed him from Dry Lake slid up and stopped with a squeal of brakes which brought a tall man to the door of the white house on the knoll beyond the cabin. Through a window beside him an old man looked out with the peering intentness of one whose sight is failing.
"Here come the boys, Dell!" the man in the doorway called over his shoulder and came hurrying down the porch steps. "Hey, you fellows, what're you stopping down there for? Drive on up here. That you in the band wagon, Mig? Hello, Andy! Hello, Weary and Pink—everybody, hello!"
"Hello yourself!" Pink, the little fellow with dimples and eyes of a childlike candor, called exuberantly. "We're running ahead of our schedule, Chip—and that's more than you could expect with these bum cars and drivers."
"The quicker the better. Say, you're sure riding good stock these days, boys. Beats plugging along on a cayuse, don't it?" Chip went from car to car, shaking hands and flinging personal jibes at them, affection turning them to compliments by the very look and tone of him.
"Get out and come in, all of you. J. G.'s been watching the road ever since we got your letter saying you could come. I don't see how you got down the hill without him spotting you. Rosemary, Dell will want to murder you if you didn't bring those two kids of yours along."
"Oh, they're here—asleep on cushions in the back of the car." Mrs. Andy Green turned to glance in where they lay. "It's a pretty long trip for little tads like them, and I hate to wake them up. Drive over there and park in the shade, can't you, Daddy? They ought to sleep another hour or two. We needn't take out the grips yet. We stopped in Dry Lake and cleaned up," she explained to Chip, as they went up to the porch. "The same old hotel—it hasn't changed a chair. Even the same paper on the wall! But we didn't see a soul we knew."
"No, the hotel has changed hands since you left. Here's Dell—come on in, all of you."
Eagerly, yet with a certain gravity hidden beneath the talk and laughter, they went trooping into the big living room of the Flying U ranch house where they had gone booted and spurred more times than they could remember. Eyes shining with something more than welcome, something of gratitude and a secret understanding, the Little Doctor greeted them each with a special significance in her warm handclasp.
It was because she had called them that they had dropped everything and come. She had told them that J. G., their beloved Old Man whose querulous but kindly rule had held them together on the ranch with a bond stronger than the blood tie, was failing with every day that passed. He had lost interest in life and would sit for hours brooding silently upon the past, scarcely hearing when they tried to rouse him to the present. Sometimes he would talk of the old days, though not often; frequently he would ask about various members of the Happy Family. Wouldn't they try and come to spend the Fourth at the old ranch, with a real old-time reunion? Seeing them might pull J. G. back into life before he slipped too far out and away from them. There was no organic reason, she wrote, why he should not live for several years yet. His rheumatism troubled him a great deal, but aside from that, his health should be much better than it was. He was letting go on life. It might be his last Fourth of July, she had stated frankly. It would be, unless they could get hold of him somehow and pull him back.
So here they were, trying not to seem conscious of her appeal; trying not to betray the shock they felt at the change in the old man sitting there by the window in a wheel chair, a soft robe thrown across his knees on this hot midsummer day.
Shrunken, stooped through sheer lack of energy, he sat there staring at them with that remote look in his lusterless eyes which comes when the soul is beginning to loosen its hold upon the body. His handclasp lacked the old sturdy grip of the fingers; his voice was flat, expressionless, tired. He had the habit of repeating words vaguely and of asking the same question twice or even oftener, forgetting that it had been answered. Yet there were moments when he rallied and was the Old Man they remembered, probing their activities with something approaching real interest. These moments they clung to, sought to prolong.
"They tell me you're a movin'-pitcher man now," he said accusingly to Andy Green, who was at that minute selecting a monogrammed cigarette from the Native Son's silver case. "That so? And they say Mig-uell here is an actor, and Pink too. Somebuddy was tellin' me Pink, here, puts on dresses and plays a woman's part in the movies. What's the straight of the story? Any truth in it?"
"I'm afraid so, J. G. Pink doubles for Minna Waska in all her stunt stuff and a lot of her straight drama. She's that Indian princess that stars in Westerns. Pink's about two thirds of Minna Waska. The girl in the close-ups and love scenes is a Pilack girl with a pair of wonderful eyes that get over big on the screen. It takes 'em both to be Minna Waska, so I guess you could say Pink plays a woman's part, all right."
The Old Man grunted and eyed Pink dubiously.
"Any rider in Hollywood 'd be tickled at the chance to do my work and draw down the salary I'm getting," Pink defended himself, coloring a little under the look of disapproval. "There's plenty can ride as well as I can, and if they get fifty a week they consider themselves lucky. They're all too big to double for a girl, though. I get five hundred a week—that's why I double for Minna Waska."
"What's doublin'?" demanded J. G. pettishly, having failed to grasp it all.
They explained to him again what doubling meant. They told him all about how the Native Son had suddenly found himself a favorite with the screen public because of his slim grace in the saddle and his face that photographed so well, so that now he was playing leads under his screen name of Luis Mendoza, with a salary of fifteen hundred a week and the prospect of getting twice that much when his present contract expired. They related their successes—how Andy was making good as a director of Westerns for Universal, and how Weary owned a fine lot of horses which he rented to different studios. Weary was making all the money he could spend and remain sober, he declared, with that sunny smile they remembered so well, that had carved deep lines around his eyes.
"Looks like the Flyin' U is prospering too," he added, swinging the subject away from himself as was his habit. "Mig almost took a fit and fell off the bluff up here when he got sight of that big red barn you've got now. He was looking for the silo that oughta go with it."
"Well, we've been thinking of putting in a silo," Chip confessed somewhat guiltily. "We're raising nothing but blooded stock now, and a silo would certainly cut down the cost of winter feeding. You can't turn a thousand-dollar cow out on the range to rustle through the winter, you know. Nor thoroughbred horses, either. We're running everything under fence and we need better shelter than we did in the old days. So we had to have a big barn," he finished in whimsical apology, looking at Miguel.
"You didn't have to paint it red," the Native Son retorted. "From the top of the hill this location could be duplicated in Iowa or Indiana or any one of a dozen States. You've killed the old range atmosphere, Chip. A two-story red barn is about as Western as a high board fence—and as picturesque. And you're an artist too! And the Little Doctor here—I can't seem to get that red barn in the picture at all."
Her sudden laughter halted his whimsical, half-earnest diatribe.
"Even artists have to eat and wear clothes," she reminded him. "One could starve in picturesque, thoroughly Western atmosphere, but we prefer to adapt ourselves to changing conditions and go on living, just as you boys have done. Big red barns are an economic necessity, these days. Perhaps not red—but it's a good warm color that holds up well in all weathers. We're like Pink; we do it because there's more money in it than trying to patch up old sheds and letting our stock freeze."
"You're as bad as the Kid," Chip grinned ruefully. "He thinks we ought to turn this blooded stock loose in the Badlands so we'd have to run a round-up outfit, same as we used to. Called me a hayseed the other day, the young whelp!"
"Oh, yeah—where's the Kid?" Weary pulled his pitying glance away from the Old Man. "I was going to ask about him. Big as you are, Chip, I'll bet!"
"Bigger," Chip answered laconically. "A good inch taller; weighs about what I did when I was riding every day—" He broke off abruptly, glancing involuntarily toward the Little Doctor.
"He's home, ain't he?"
"Oh, yes—got home a week ago. Rode horseback up from Laramie where we've had him in school. Crazy about horses, but—"
"But what?" Pink boldly inquired. "He ain't the kind that can't stick on a horse, is he? That don't seem possible, the way he started out when he was a little tad. It oughta run in the blood. Don't it?"
"I don't know," Chip confessed with manifest reluctance. "He likes horses and he's got no use for cars—you can hardly get him into one. He's got three good saddle horses and he seems to spend most of his time fooling around them. He sets a horse like a rider. I don't know how he'd perform on a real salty bronc."
"I hope," the Little Doctor spoke up, "he has more sense than to try performing on one. The time for that has gone by. Our boy is going to be a doctor."
"Yeah?" Weary started as if some one had given him a blow on the back. The Old Man gave a snort of dissent, and Pink sent a quick, inquiring look toward Andy Green.
"She means," Chip explained dryly, "that she wants him to be a doctor, since he won't take any interest in the ranch. We don't know what he thinks about it, though. We don't," he added queerly, "know what he thinks about anything, much. He's taken possession of those weaning sheds and corral down in the lower pasture, and he keeps his horses down there all summer and rides around in the hills a lot. We don't see much of him, to tell you the truth."
"I want him to keep in the open air as much as possible during the summer," his mother spoke up quickly. "Claude is a very quiet, studious boy, and he is growing so fast that he needs all the fresh air and sunshine he can get. I did want him to go to some good college in the East, but he chose Laramie University—because it's nearer home, I suppose; and it's a very good school, we find. We're all very proud of Claude, and his father is just pretending he doesn't know that we're to have a young M.D. in the family one of these days."
"That'll be fine," Weary observed with a lukewarm interest. "I never used to think the Kid would ever be anything but a real old cow-puncher. That's the way he started out, and I'd 'a' thought he'd keep it up. It kinda surprises me to hear he's taken to studying medicine."
"Well, of course he hasn't, yet," his mother admitted. "He has to lay the foundation first. And he does love horses as well as he ever did. I think he must spend most of his time in the saddle during the summers, to make up for being indoors all winter."
"Funny he don't take to ranching," Pink remarked doubtfully. "You'd think—"
"Oh, he'll fool with a rope—he's pretty good at spinning a loop. But he sure ain't cut out for a rancher," Chip told them. "I don't believe he's been inside the new barn since he came back."
"Old pioneer stock," the Old Man suddenly broke into the discussion. "Take to it all right, if it was like it used to be. Open range and the wagons startin' out by the middle uh May—he'd make a better wagon boss than his father ever did,—give 'im a chance! Soon as this dang leg uh mine lets up, I'm goin' to hunt me a new range and run cattle like they oughta be run. I'll take the Kid and Cal's boy and make range hands outa them. Him a doctor, ay? That's all you know! He's got the legs of a rider and the eyes of a roper—and if he ain't a cowhand it's because there ain't nothin' but tame milk cows left in the country. Him a doctor! Hunh!"
"Why don't you boys walk down in the pasture and see if he's there?" the Little Doctor hastily inquired. "He's anxious to see you boys—he hasn't forgotten the good times we all used to have on the ranch when he was a little fellow, and I know he made it a point to hurry home from school just because he knew you were coming."
"Yeah, let's go hunt him up," Weary agreed with alacrity, understanding perfectly well that the Little Doctor wanted to keep the Old Man from getting himself worked up over the vanished days of open range and round-ups.
They went off to find the Kid, therefore; though their eagerness was a shade dimmed by the description they had just listened to. The Kid a studious youth, going to be a doctor! Somehow they were disappointed, though they could not have told why.
II. — CHIP'S KID
DOWN in the lower pasture on a level stretch above the corral that stood against the creek bank, the Kid wheeled his clean-limbed sorrel, backed him over a line gouged in the meadow sod, shook out his loop, hung a small rope between his teeth and glanced toward the corral. A boy of twelve had just turned out a Hereford bull calf and was fastening the gate against others. As he swung his horse to chase the animal down past the waiting rider he pulled a watch from his pocket, squinted at it, looked at the calf, picked a white flag from beneath his thigh, held it aloft for a second, dipped it suddenly and shouted:
"Go!"
The sorrel leaped forward, the rope circling over the rider's head. A quick drumming of hoofbeats as they surged up alongside the running calf, and the loop shot out and over the animal's head as the Kid jumped off and ran forward. The sorrel settled back, holding the rope taut, and the Kid seized the fighting victim, flipped it dexterously on its side, grabbed and bound together a hind foot and the forefeet with the rope he jerked from between his teeth, gave a twist and a yank and rose, flinging up both hands in signal that he had finished. Whereupon the boy on the little bay cow-pony dropped the flag which he had been holding aloft, stared fixedly at the watch in his left hand and shouted in a high, clear treble that carried across to the Happy Family concealed in the willows along the creek:
"Kid Ben-nett! Ti-ime, for-tee sev'n an' one-fifth seck-unds!"
"Aw, you're all wet, Boy!" the roper disgustedly protested, looking up from freeing the young bull. "Where do you get that stuff? If I didn't make it in thirty flat, I'm a dry-farmer! You had your darned flag nailed to the mast after I signalled. Forty-seven my eye! And what's the idea of whittling it down to fifths? Go get an alarm clock, Boy. It'd beat that Sears-Roebuck stop watch, anyhow."
"Say, who's doin' this judgin', anyhow?" Boy demanded hotly. "You're penalized ten seconds, Kid Bennett, for gettin' over the foul line before the critter crossed the dead line!"
"Oh, go soak! I was a good six inches back of the line!" Kid suddenly laughed and flung out both arms, shooing the bull off down the flat. "I told you to hold me strictly down to the rules, Boy, but that don't mean you've got to disqualify me every time we come out here. And you needn't call time on me from the minute I saddle up, either! I made that in thirty flat, and I know it."
"Well, s'posin' you did? You want me to go swellin' your head every time you make a good throw? You got to get used to strict judgin'. I betcha Weary or Pink or any of the boys that's comin' can beat your time so far, Kid. You're good, but you ain't good enough yet. You just think you are."
"Well, give a fellow some show, anyway. Thirty flat is pretty good—especially when you ran in a bigger calf on me this time and never said a word. That baby weighs close to four hundred, and I'd bet money on it. He's one of the new bunch Dad just got. You can't fool me, Boy. He was a son-of-a-gun to lay down!"
"Well, for the crying-out-loud!" Boy leaned and spat into the grass, man-fashion. "What'd yuh want? One that'll lay down and stick his feet together and beller for you to come an' tie 'im? All them others is got so they'll do it, almost, you've throwed an' tied 'em so much. You want 'em big an' tough, Kid. You said the only way to get good is to throw big ones, so contest calves will feel like throwin' a tame cat!"
"Well, that's all right too," the Kid began temporizingly, when voices from the willows halted him. He swung that way, his face a mask of guarded resentment. An observant person would have seen the sensitive hurt in his eyes when laughter mingled with the words that came to him in fragments of sentences.
"—five hundred dollars for that calf," Chip was saying. "—break a leg—darned kids haven't got any sense—"
"—comes natural—" another voice broke in. And then, distinct, unforgivable, patronizing it seemed to the Kid, came that platitude, "Boys will be boys."
The Kid's lips set in a straight line. He sent a glance toward Boy, who was hastily untying his handkerchief flag from the stick. Boy looked scared, as if he had been caught in mischief. The Kid thrust a toe in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. He was riding away straight-backed and angry when Chip's voice stopped him.
"Hey, wait a minute! The boys are here and they want to say hello."
Kid gave the reins a twitch and the sorrel swung in toward the willows, from which the Happy Family came walking with eager steps. The Kid stared frankly, forgetting his resentment in the shock of this meeting.
Well as he remembered those idols of his childhood, Pink and Weary, Andy Green and the Native Son, he scarcely recognized them now. Like centaurs of the range they had ridden through his worshipful memory; the best riders in the world, he loyally believed; the best ropers, the best shots, the finest friends. Heroes all, drifting out of his life before he had learned that after all they were human, and being human they were subject to changes if they were to adapt themselves to new environments.
The Kid remembered them Stetsoned, booted and spurred, riding recklessly across the prairies, their careless laughter keeping time with the quick staccato of hoofbeats. While he had not taken the trouble to apply a bit of logic to the matter, it seemed reasonable to suppose that they would return very much as he had last seen them. They did not. The Native Son wore gray plaid knickers, woolly golf stockings, and low tan shoes. His coat was a soft gray and his modish cap was gray. Any country club would recognize him as one of their own kind, but to the Kid he was as alien as a Hindu in that meadow. Andy Green and Pink and Weary wore gray whipcord breeches, leather puttees and Panamas. Even their faces were unfamiliar, though Pink's dimples woke memories of bunk-house laughter long ago. Which one of the four, he wondered, had suggested that boys would be boys? Did they think he was merely playing, down there in the heat of afternoon? They and their Hollywood get-up!
"Say, you'll be a fair-sized man when you grow up," Weary greeted him facetiously as he reached up a hand to the Kid sitting there immobile on Stardust, looking down at them with a baffling reserve in his smoky gray eyes.
"Yes, I suppose I shall," the Kid agreed unsmilingly, as he shook hands. His old idol, Weary, wearing putts!
"Trying to be a re'l ol' cow-puncher, still," Andy Green observed lightly, hiding a great tenderness that welled up in his heart as he took the gloved hand of the Kid who had snuggled against him in the saddle, many's the time, and lisped grave prophecies of the wonderful things he would do when he was a man.
"Oh, no—just exercising the horse a little, is all. Real cow-punchers are a thing of the past. It's all out of date to talk of punching cows, Andy."
"It sure is with this registered stock," Chip grimly agreed. "Pretty expensive stuff to bust on a rope, Kid. You'll have to find something cheaper than these bulls to practise on."
"Where?" The Kid gave his dad a slow, level look, and leaned to shake hands with Pink and the Native Son. "I'm certainly glad to see you all," he said. But he did not look glad, and what he felt would never be put into words; the heartachy disappointment, the sense of loss and of bafflement. It was with a distinct feeling of relief that he saw them turn toward Boy, hovering near with the reins tight on his little bay cow-pony as if he were all ready to wheel and make a dash across the meadow.
"This is Cal's boy," Chip announced in the casual tone one usually adopts in introducing children to their grown-ups. "They've got a ranch up above Meeker's. Say, you wouldn't know old Cal! He's as big one way as he is the other—weighs over two hundred. But he's got a nice wife and bunch of kids. Boy's the oldest. Cal and his wife couldn't agree on a name for him, so they call him Boy."
"My name's Calvin Claude," Boy announced with bashful abruptness, and immediately his ears turned a deep red framed with his tow-colored hair.
"That's not according to your mother," Chip said teasingly. "You've heard a lot about Weary and Pink and Andy and Mig. Your dad used to punch cows with them before he got too fat to ride. If you're going home pretty soon, Boy, tell your dad the boys are here—got here sooner than we expected them. He may want to drive down after supper."
"All right. I'm goin' now." His round eyes still staring frankly at the four, Boy reined his horse away, hammered him on the ribs with his run-down heels and rode off.
"I think I'll ride over with him," the Kid announced suddenly, breaking a somewhat awkward pause. "I have an errand over that way. If I'm not back by supper time, Dad, tell Mother not to wait. I'll see you later, all of you. I'm surely glad to have met you again." Two fingers went up and tilted his gray Stetson half an inch downward as he wheeled and galloped after Boy, while the five stood there watching him go.
"Oughta have a camera on that," Andy muttered mechanically, though that is probably not what he was thinking.
"Say, if I could high-hat 'em like that, I could pull down ten thousand a week!" the Native Son murmured enviously.
Further than that they made no comment as they turned to walk back up the creek to the house. But Chip was chewing a corner of his lip in the way he did when he was bottling his fury, and the faces of the four looked as they did when they stood contemplating a blow-out ten miles from the nearest service station.
"The Kid's been off to college, you say?" Andy ventured, after a silent five minutes.
"One year is all. We wanted to put him in Berkeley or Stanford, but he balked and wouldn't go anywhere but Laramie. He's something of a problem," Chip confessed. "Dell wants him to be an M.D.—I don't know how that's going to pan out, though. Fact is, we can't seem to get a line on him, what he thinks or wants. Except that he's crazy about horses and guns, we don't know much about him."
"He's a dead ringer for you, Chip, when I first saw you," Weary said bluntly. "Taller, maybe, and his eyes are different. Better looking by a whole lot, but shut up inside of himself, the way you used to be. Seems to me you ought to get together somehow. You've got things in common; horses and saddles and ropes and spurs—lots of things."
"Theoretically, yes. But when a kid goes off to school you seem to lose all track of him. I didn't even know he could throw and tie a critter, till he did it just now. He never let on to me that he ever wanted to try." Chip stopped to roll a cigarette. "Acted sore because we caught him at it. He's a queer make-up, somehow."
"Wish we'd got there half a minute sooner," Weary observed. "I guess they were just playing contest, but still he musta made his catch, all right. That critter sure picked himself up like he'd been tied down and didn't like it. Looks to me, Chip, like he's got the earmarks, all right. Why don't yuh feel him out, kinda? The Old Man may be right. In fact, I think he is. The Kid has got the look—"
"What good would it do if he had?" Chip cut in sharply. "If it was twenty years ago—but it's now, remember. I don't want the Kid to have the old fever in his blood; not when there's nothing to work it out on. If we had open range and were running ten or twenty thousand head of cattle like we used to do—sure, I'd make a real hand of the Kid. Good as any of us, Weary. The Kid's got the stuff in him, but the less it's cultivated the better off he is. I don't know whether he realizes it or not. I hope not. He hates the ranch as it is, so I hope he takes the notion to be a doctor, as Dell wants him to be."
"It's a damn shame," sighed Weary. "We oughta be in off round-up now, for the Fourth; with the wagons camped on Birch Creek or maybe here at the ranch; and a bunch of broncs in the corral and a dance on in Dry Lake schoolhouse—"
"Say, I wish you'd shut up," Pink entreated almost tearfully. "I had a hunch this visit back here was going to call up old times till I'll be a year getting over it. Say, I'd give five years of my life to be back on round-up with the same old string of horses—Casey and Frog and old Fritz—"
"Who's callin' up things now?" Andy shut him off. "Can't yuh let well enough alone? I been trying all day to forget how it'd feel to be ridin' into camp in a high lope, hungry as a wolf, and smellin' those blueberry pies old Patsy used to make."
"Say, I'd give all I've got to be standing night guard again, with a cool breeze whisperin' through the grass and the stars all sprinkled over the sky—say what you will, there's nothing to compare with it!" The Native Son flicked ash from his cigarette and stared wistfully at the familiar line of hills.
"It sure is a crime the way the country has settled up," Andy lamented. "I never realized that the old range is a thing of the past, till I got to driving up this way. It ain't the same country to me."
"You're dead right, it's changed," Chip gloomily agreed. "But while I think of it, boys, don't talk about it before the Old Man if you can help it. He gets all stirred up over it, and he can't stand it. We try to keep his mind as quiet as we can—though he does sometimes forget times are changed and talks as if he could run cattle like he used to. I don't know what he thinks of your city clothes—I saw him eyeing you kinda funny. But I suppose there's too many movie cowboys as it is."
"That's right," Pink attested somewhat sourly. "Fellows that never saw a round-up in their lives—aw, hell! We've got so we class ridin' boots and Stetsons with grease paint; we keep 'em for the camera. The world has changed a lot, Chip, and it ain't changed for the better, either. An old cowhand has got no show at all to be himself, these days. He's either got to crawl off and die somewhere, or join the parade and get as close to the band wagon as he can, and look as if he liked it!"
