Weary, when the band
stopped and huddled, blatting incessantly against a sheer wall of
sandstone and gravel, got the herders together and told them what
he wanted.
"You take 'em down that slope till you come to the second little
coulee. Don't go up the first one--that's a blind pocket. In the
second coulee, up a mile or so, there's a spring creek. You can
hold 'em there on water for half an hour. That's more than any of
yuh deserve. Haze 'em down there."
The herders did not know it, but that second coulee was the rude
gateway to an intricate system of high ridges and winding
waterways that would later be dry as a bleached bone--the real
beginning of the bad lands which border the Missouri river for
long, terrible miles. Down there, it is possible for two men to
reach places where they may converse quite easily across a chasm,
and yet be compelled to ride fifteen or twenty miles, perhaps, in
order to shake hands. Yet, even in that scrap-heap of Nature
there are ways of passing deep into the heart of the upheaval.
The Happy Family knew those ways as they knew the most
complicated figures of the quadrilles they danced so
lightfootedly with the girls of the Bear Paw country. When they
forced the sheep and their herders out of the coulee Weary had
indicated he sent Irish and Pink ahead to point the way, and he
told them to head for the Wash Bowl; which they did with
praiseworthy zeal and scant pity for the sheep.
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