“I’ve read about that,” said Scott becoming really interested. “It must have been great sport.”
“Sport! You bet it was. And there was money in cattle, too, in the good old days before the settler and the sheep men came. Can’t chase a jack rabbit now,” he added a little bitterly, “without scratching your horse’s nose on a barbed wire fence.”
“Don’t the cattle men make any money now?” Scott asked.
“Some, but it’s mostly sheep in here now. Had to go into sheep myself,” he grinned. “I fought ’em for a long time but I saw it wasn’t any use, so I bought some myself, and I’ve made my pile out of ’em. There’s some that’s fighting them yet, but they’ll never get anywhere.”
“I suppose you had some pretty bitter fights,” Scott said encouragingly.
“I should remark. When I went into sheep, all the cattle men looked on me as a traitor. The sheep men were mostly greasers then and I was one of the first white men in this section to go into it. I remember when I rode up from San Rosario with my first band of sheep and met old Tom Butler on the plain he tried to pull his gun on me, but I had the drop on him and I made him set there while I told him what I thought of the situation. He did a lot of cussin’ and spittin’, but it soaked into him all right and when I beat him onto the summer range in the spring, he sold out his cattle and bought him a band of sheep. That’s where we had the fights, for the summer range, up there on those old mountains.”
The old man looked dreamily toward the towering mountains and Scott knew that he was living over a story that would be good to hear.
“You had to race for the summer range, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Race for it? Lord, yes! The whole caboodle of us would live as peaceable as a bunch of kittens down on the plains all winter, but when spring was coming we all got sort of offish and nervous. Each man was scared to start too early for fear there would not be any feed in the mountains, and he was scared to wait too long for fear the other fellow would beat him to it. I remember one time when old Tim Murphy tied a sheep bell on his dog and led him by old José’s place in the night going towards the mountains. It was two weeks sooner than any one would have dared to move, but José was so scared that he started his whole band before daylight and drove ’em ten miles before he found out that Tim had fooled him.”