The Untamed

“Git your nose out’n that pot. Hi, you flop-eared--I swan, that ol’ mule makes me mad sometimes. He’d jist as leave snake your whole batch right from under your nose as look at you. Git, you long-legged rascal! Whoopee!”

The cook dashed at the offender, swinging a bit of firewood. It struck the hybrid upon the hindquarter and he countered instantaneously by lashing out with his heels. Then he turned to smell of the projectile, but finding it unfit for consumption, trotted off up a neighboring rise and presently disappeared from view.

Certain coarse men of the Lazy L outfit called him Hell-on-Wheels, among other things, but his real name was Sam, and he made one of the four-mule team that hauled the chuck-wagon during round-up. Between him and Dave was a personal feud; they were most loving enemies. In the beginning the cook had pampered him by feeding bread to the big creature, taking no heed, and now this artificial appetite he had created made of Dave’s waking hours a perpetual vigil and conjured up nightmares in place of refreshing sleep.

For whenever Sam wasn’t doing the major share of hauling some four thousand odd pounds of wagon, bedding and provisions from one round-up ground to another, he was loafing on the confines of camp, awaiting a favorable opportunity to go in surreptitiously and nose among the pots or at the back of the wagon for the buns Dave made so cunningly. What time he lost this way from grazing he made up easily by his pillage; bread is very fattening, and then, of course, the chuck-wagon team received regular rations of corn.

Yet Dave was a watchful scoundrel, and day by day it was being borne in upon Sam that in these attempts at pilfering he received blows and abuse more often than huns. But at night, when the punchers lay asleep on the ground and he could hear the cook slumbering stertorously beneath the wagon-fly, it was different: then Sam would wander into camp and make his way on soundless feet to the dead fire. Beside its ashes he knew there would be scraps of bread, perhaps some of them sweetened with molasses, and for these his whole being craved. On one such excursion, as he munched happily on a wet crust, he inadvertently put his foot into Dave’s face, and, because Hell-on-Wheels weighed about thirteen hundred pounds, the cook awoke very peevish.

“If it wasn’t,” he remarked next morning as he hitched up--“if it wasn’t that you could haul more’n them other three put together, I’d skin you alive. Oh, you needn’t go for to pretend you didn’t do it a-purpose. You seen me there, all right. Look at that lip! Don’t it look as if I’d fell off’n a mountain?”

The cook always knew what to expect of Sam. When putting the mules in the wagon he was cognizant of the precise moment that Sam would kick, and could judge to a hair’s breadth at what angle the smashing blow would be delivered. On his part, Sam knew that the cook was prepared; otherwise it is doubtful whether he would have let go some of the vicious side-sweeps of his left leg that he did. On occasions when the attacks were especially wicked, or when Dave calculated the margin of safety with too fine nicety, he would possess himself of a stout club and hammer Hell-on-Wheels until he was weak. In this way were bred mutual respect and a thorough understanding.