CHAPTER V

DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINS

A cold spell had come, and Russell, Jami and Raquel had ridden up to the Reservation range to bring down the cattle. A large part of the herd were always left up on the mountain ranges as long as possible in order to take advantage of the fine grass, and spare the lower slopes. They were brought down before the winter grew too cold, or there was danger of blizzards and snow, and had been left overlong this year.

Russell did not want Raquel to ride so far, since she had not been in the saddle for three months.

“But I have been riding, Russell, two or three times a week anyway.”

Russell wouldn’t allow that there could be any real riding back there. But Raquel was going.

They had left Los Ranchos at six in the morning and it was now noon. By ten o’clock they had reached the foothills and, striking off from the mesas, had ridden steadily upward ever since. Through a rocky canyon, the steep sides of which were covered with stunted piñon, cedar, and oak rubble, they picked their way, following a trail which led up and over a great rounded slope--an upland meadow, sparsely wooded with pine.

It was sharply cold in the mountains, and as they mounted higher and higher the wind became keener. Raquel buttoned her sheepskin jacket tighter about her throat and was glad she had worn “woolies,” the sheepskin chaps with fleece turned out.

Some of the cattle had been put on fenced ranges early in the summer by her father. He usually divided the herd into several lots and put them on different fenced ranges in order to make it easier to bring them down, as a few men could easily handle a hundred at a time.

“Oughtn’t take us more’n a hour now,” Russell, riding ahead, called back. “Guess we’ll have to put up to Peevey’s tonight after we locate them fellers. Then we c’n round ’em up and herd ’em down to the pastures on the lee side of yon peak.”

Peevey was a mountaineer who managed to eke out a living for himself and his family by trapping. He had also a few cattle. He lived with his wife, a sixteen-year-old girl and a ten-year-old son in a log cabin at an altitude of more than eight thousand feet. Old Man Daniels had allowed him to “squat” on land adjoining a rented range, because the old fellow had lived there for twenty years, without bothering any one or paying anything.

Peevey’s place nestled in a thicket of pine at the foot of a tall cliff. So like a very part of the forest it was that you could not see it until you were right on it. As they rode through the trees and came suddenly upon the cabin a boy darted away and disappeared behind a rock.

“That’s Boy Peevey,” said Jami. “Ain’t it funny the way he runs like a deer whenever any one heaves in sight? He’s a reg’lar wild boy, ’fraid o’ no four-footed thing, but skeert at the sound of a human voice.”

“Well, he’s never spoken to any one but his family, so that’s natural,” Raquel replied. She had known the Peeveys for years and remembered Boy had always been so.

“Ma Peevey says he don’t hardly speak to his fam’ly no more,” said Russell. “Won’t talk to his Dad at all, don’t hardly speak to his sister, and won’t come for no one but his mother. He sets a lot o’ store by her.”

They had reached the cabin and Old Man Peevey came out to meet them. He was a strange little man, gloomy and passionate by turns, whiskered up to his cap. “Fences down, gates open, cattle’s all in together,” was his greeting, in an accusing tone of voice. He was supposed to keep an eye on gates and fences.

Russell was in an instant fury at the news and Raquel turned to question Peevey, but just then Mrs. Peevey came to the door, all aflutter to see Raquel, the Boss’s daughter.

Mrs. Peevey called back as she came hurrying out, “Lena, come, here is Raquel Daniels.”

Lena Peevey had sometimes been down at the Daniels ranch for a few days at a time, and she had been at school in Alamogordo one winter when her mother, who was a good cook, had taken a job in town. It had been a cold winter, bitter, and Mrs. Peevey had had to supply bacon and flour, and meal, as Pop had been laid up with the rheumatics, never setting foot out of the cabin all that winter.

Lena came running now to see the visitors, her pimply face beaming with delight. They had dismounted, and leaving their horses to forage and find their way down into a little gully where ran a mountain stream, the three entered the cabin to warm themselves at the fire, while Mrs. Peevey and Lena bustled about getting something to eat.

Within an hour a steaming meal was on the table. Rabbit stew--“Boy ketched ’em in his hands,” Mrs. Peevey said--hot biscuits, coffee with condensed milk. It was nearly four when Raquel started out again with Russell, Jami following with Pop Peevey.

Some spite work, Pop thought, but it mought a been fall hunters layin’ down the barbed wire fer to let their cars through. Most likely that’s what it was, come to think of it. He’d aimed to get down last week and let Mr. Daniels know about it, didn’t know it hisself till then. Boy’d seen some o’ the Ranchos’ cattle on the lower slope when he was layin’ his traps. He’d had rheumatics ever since, though, an’ couldn’t stir. Jami winked and tilted his elbow behind Pop’s back. Peevey’s attacks of rheumatics were known to come from a bottle.

Well, there was nothing to do about it but go after them all. Russell made straight for the Corona, a high peak from which the surrounding country could be seen. An hour’s climb through spruce, pine and cedar, so fresh and lovely that it did not seem like winter weather; then a somber glade of hemlock, mysterious, forbidding--and they were out in the open at the top of the world.

It was already dark in the canyons far below, but up in these high regions the sun still rode well above the horizon and they could see for miles in every direction; light and shadow, light and shadow, of crest and peak and valley; timberline, where the forest stopped abruptly at creation’s gesture.

Raquel was silent under the solemn vast beauty. She had not been up on the Corona in more than a year, and then it was summer. The cold, the quiet, were intense now. The air was strangely still, as it often is just before sunset, and the riders did not feel the cold.

Each of them carried field glasses; Russell was already searching the valleys below for whitefaces, the Ranchos cattle, unmistakable even at a distance of several miles. Raquel came out of her dreaming with a start, guiltily. She was the Boss of the Rancho; she’d better be looking for her cattle!

Glasses raised, she and Jami scanned the lower levels in different directions. Yes, they were there, full five hundred head all together, Jami thought. Yeah, Russell allowed that many. They’d not move afore mornin’ lessen a blizzard came up and it didn’t look like it from that clear sky.

The sun was sinking with sudden speed over the edge of the world. You had a sense of the world’s being round, up there; it curved and dropped away to the horizon. It seemed up there as though it were not such a very big globe after all because you could see all the sides, and you were on the top of it.

They were back at Peevey’s in less than an hour, but it was already dark in the forest, and a wind rustled mournfully in the bare branches of the pallid aspen groves. The log cabin was pleasant and warm and smelling of salt pork and frijoles. They were ready to eat again.

“Boy, he’s et and gone to bed in the loft,” Ma Peevey indicated as they came in. “He’s clean run out. Had to doctor his legs. Huntin’ cat, he says; but he’s friends with the bars, an’ the bulls an’ the deer too.”

“It’s a hard winter,” Pop Peevey mumbled over his food. “Froze tight many a night, withouten any snow, and gonna be worse. Watch out fer the bars and catamounts, says I, and the coyotes and lobos down on the range.

“It were just such a winter as this’n when early spring that young engineer took his bride down by the Rio Grande near the dam, an’ she was et by a grizzly. It was after the bacon, an’ they didn’t have no bacon, so the bar took her.” He chewed gloomily on his own salt pork.

“Never throw nothin’ at a bar, specially a grizzly,” Ma Peevey contributed piously. “I alwiz give a bar what it wants. Recollec’, Lena, when the big brown bar came in the door last spring lookin’ fer bacon an’ took it from the shelf, an’ took the surrup; we didn’t bother him none, an’ he didn’t bother us. Just went out ’thouten any trouble.”

“How would you and Lena like to come down to the ranch for the spring roundup and help Mom with the cookin’, Miz Peevey?” Raquel asked.

Mrs. Peevey started to reply affirmatively and then looked questioningly at her husband.

“She don’t have to work out,” he decided grandly. “Sooner’n have her go out to work I’d work myself even.”

“That sure is noble an’ generous of you, Pop.” Jami winked at Russell.

Pop Peevey relished his wife’s cooking too well to part with it as long as there was a strip of bacon in the house, or a rabbit in Boy’s traps. Boy Peevey, wild little faun that he was, really kept the family in food, bringing his tribute each day to his mother.

“I hate to go away count o’ Boy,” she decided, “but Lena can go if she wants.”

Lena showed her wishes by a broad smile.

Raquel shared Lena’s room that night, while Russell and Jami slept on shakedowns before the fire in the living-room. Lena insisted that Raquel take the bed, with its lumpy mattress of pine needles, while she slept on a shakedown on the floor at Raquel’s side.

Lena took off only her dress and her shoes, and pulled a somewhat soiled flannel nightgown over her underwear. Raquel unrolled her gown, her comb, her toothbrush, and a cake of soap in a little case, from a red neckerchief which she always carried in her saddle pocket. She was tired enough with the long ride and the cold to relax comfortably into the hollows of her pine mattress, redolent of the forests that closed about the tiny cabin.

Less than a month ago she had been sleeping across from Anne in a beautiful big room, fresh and fragrant. How clean and straight Anne was, how beautiful her skin, so clear and rosy, and creamy! They were just the same age, Anne and Lena. And look at poor Lena!

“I want to be a school teacher.” Lena’s unexpected words, ending with a silly-sounding giggle, broke in on Raquel’s thoughts.

“Why, Lena, where did you get that idea?”

“Down to district school.” Lena’s eagerness dispelled her embarrassment, although she always laughed at everything Raquel said, because poor Lena was so glad to be with another girl that she could express her happiness only by laughing.

“The teacher there said I could learn. I think it’s awful nice to be a teacher. I bin through the sixth grade.”

“I think it would be lovely, Lena,” Raquel answered. “Perhaps you could work this summer and save some money, and then if you got work in Alamo this winter you could get ready for the State Normal.”

Raquel opened the tiny window, and although Lena looked at her in astonishment, she felt that everything Raquel did must be perfect. The fresh wind blew in and put out their candle, and as Raquel went to sleep she thought how pitiful, how different Lena’s life was from hers or Anne’s.

Well, how different her own life was from Anne’s, though she had never thought that way about it before she went to school. She wondered if Lena could ever possibly get to be a teacher.

“I aim I’m goin’ to do it all right,” Lena’s voice came startlingly out of the darkness.

And Raquel was vaguely troubled in her dreams by seeing her wonderful Anne with a diploma in her hands laughingly refusing to teach the little mountain district school when they asked her to, while Lena, struggling up the mountain side, kept calling, “Wait, I’m coming. I’ll be the teacher.”

* * * * *

It was still dark when they left Peevey’s cabin the next morning. As they trotted briskly along the sun rose somewhere behind the mountain and a green dawn filtered down through the pine needles. Jami led the way, a shepherd dog belonging to Custer, which he had left up at the Peevey cabin for use on the upper range, running along with them, leaping about their horses’ heads to show them how glad he was to be with his ranch folks again.

When they had climbed half way up the Corona suddenly the sun burst upon them, an hour before it would reach into the valley below. From a vantage point on the hill Russell cupped hands to his mouth, gave the salt cry, “Coo-ee-coo-ee-ee. Coo-oo-ee.” Down the thin air it carried, echoing back from distant mountain sides, spreading over mountain meadow, into canyon and thicket.

Raquel tingled at the thrill of the call, and her own clear shrill voice took up the echo and sent its vibrant message down into far-off glades, full four miles away.

From where they were they could see the cattle come running from all sides, hurrying down to an open space below them, towards which Russell was already riding, still calling his “Coo-ee, coo-ee-ee.” Down there sounded such a lowing and bellowing as would have terrified a tenderfoot.

Great bulls, young bulls, white-faced cows, fawn-colored heifers with horns still short, were milling and seething in their efforts to get at the salt which Russell was scattering on the “licks,” the hollows worn in the flat rocks of the meadow by the rough tongues of countless cattle.

Jami rode herd on the edge of the roundup, turning back the strays or those that had had their fill of salt and were turning back to their feeding grounds. The shepherd dog rode before him on the saddle leaping down among the crowding animals to nip at a pair of hocks, here and there, and leaping back to safety when menacing horns were lowered at him.

Raquel and Pop Peevey circuited the herd and slowly drove the animals toward the outleading valley. Had it been on the plains instead of in the mountains the four could not have ridden herd on the wild bunch. But the hills hemmed them in, the older cattle responded from habit to the yells, and the younger cattle followed.

Nevertheless, it made them busy to keep the great mass moving along, and moving in the right direction. Russell’s hoarse shouts, Raquel’s high call, piercing, but clear as a flute, echoed now from this side, now from that. On one hand there were at one time five contests going on between as many pairs of young bulls, which snorted, pawed the dirt in great clots over their backs, while with lowered heads pressed together, they pushed back and forth furiously.

On the other hand a bunch of cows would pile up, finally clambering upon each other’s backs in the crush. The cattle became jammed; packed. It looked as if they would not be out for hours. Jami, with the aid of the collie and a sharply pointed pole, was riding back and forth, trying to separate them, to prod them along with the slowly moving mass.

There was a time when, as they approached the narrow exit to the meadow, chaos reigned. It was nearing noon, the sun was high, and in that upturned pocket so near the sky, unprotected from the fierce light that beat so straight down upon them, it was unbelievably hot.

Would they never get out?

Then suddenly the confusion quieted. The mooing and bellowing became less frantic, the cattle seemed to be following along easily. Far off in the center of the herd Raquel saw a tiny figure, like a little old mountain gnome, atop the magnificent back of Big Cap, the blooded black bull, patriarch of the herd.

It was Boy Peevey, legs straight out, hands grasping firmly the horns of the big bull as he rode him down the glade. Big Cap raised his head in a long deep-throated bellow, full of majesty and command, calling the herd after him.

The powerful vibrations filled the glade with a thunder that even the great crouching cats of Corona respected.

“That’s music to my ears,” called Raquel to Russell. “Look at Boy bringin’ home the cows.”

“He talks their tongue all right. He’s a wild un. Yoo-ee-ee.” And Russell was off whirling his rope after a straying cow.

And so they came down from the upper mountain, and by four in the afternoon had their cattle safely within the Daniels’ fences, with twenty miles to roam in between them and the Rancho.

Elated, glowing with the exhilaration of the rare air, and the successful outcome, Raquel was for returning to the Rancho that night. So with a wave to Pop Peevey, and a tightening of their cinches, they were off, the horses apparently as fresh as when they had started out that morning.

Although there was only an hour of daylight left, stars were out with the twilight, and it was by their bright radiance that the three trotted briskly along across the open mesa towards that far spot on the mountain slope which was Los Ranchos.

Even before they saw the lights in the windows a pale, brilliant moon had risen over the tops of the craggy mountains to guide them on their way.