Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch; Schoolgirls Among Cowboys

“I’ve ridden at night,” said Jane Ann, proudly. “Haven’t I, Jimsey?”

“Just so,” admitted the cowboy, gravely. “But a whole bunch o’ gals might make the critters nervous.”

“Too many cows would sure make the girls nervous!” laughed Bob, grinning at his sister.

But the idea once having taken possession of the minds of Ruth and her girl friends, the conclusion was foregone. Uncle Bill at first (to quote Jane Ann) “went up in the air.” When he came down to earth, however, his niece was right there, ready to argue the point with him and – as usual – he gave in to her.

“Tarnashun, Jane Ann!” exclaimed the old ranchman. “I’ll bet these yere gals don’t get back home without some bad accident happening. You-all are so reckless.”

“Now Uncle Bill! don’t you go to croaking,” she returned, lightly. “Ain’t no danger of trouble at all. We’ll only be out one night. We’ll go down to Camp Number Three – that’s nearest.”

“No, sir-ree! Them boys air too triflin’ a crew,” declared the ranchman. “Jib is bossing the Rolling River outfit just now. You can go over there. I can trust Jib.”

As the rest of the party was so enthusiastic, and all determined to spend a night at Number Two Camp on the Rolling River Range, Mary Cox elected to go likewise. She declared she did not wish to remain at the ranch-house in the sole care of a “fat and greasy Mexican squaw,” as she called the cook.

“Ouch! I bet that stings Maria when she knows how you feel about her,” chuckled Heavy. “Why let carking care disturb your serenity, Mary? Come on and enjoy yourself like the rest of us.”

“I don’t expect to enjoy myself in any party that’s just run by one girl,” snapped Mary.

“Who’s that?” asked the stout girl, in wonder.

“Ruth Fielding. She bosses everything. She thinks this is all her own copyrighted show – like the Sweetbriars. Everything we do she suggests – ”

“That shows how good a ‘suggester’ she is,” interposed Heavy, calmly.

“It shows how she’s got you all hypnotized into believing she’s a wonder,” snarled The Fox.

“Aw, don’t Mary! Don’t be so mean. I should think Ruth would be the last person you’d ever have a grouch on. She’s done enough for you – ”

“She hasn’t, either!” cried Mary Fox, her face flaming.

“I’d like to know what you’d call it?” Heavy demanded, with a good deal of warmth for her. “If she wasn’t the sweetest-tempered, most forgiving girl that ever went to Briarwood, you’d have lost your last friend long ago! I declare, I’m ashamed of you!”

“She’s not my friend,” said Mary, sullenly.

“Who is, then? She has helped to save your life on more than one occasion. She has never said a word about the time she fell off the rocks when we were at Lighthouse Point. You and she were together, and you know how it happened. Oh, I can imagine how it happened. Besides, Nita saw you, and so did Tom Cameron,” cried the stout girl, more hotly. “Don’t think all your tricks can be hidden.”

“What do you suppose I care?” snarled Mary Cox.

“I guess you care what Tom Cameron thinks of you,” pursued Heavy, wagging her head. “But after the way you started those ponies when we drove to Rolling River Cañon, you can be sure that you don’t stand high with him – or with any of the rest of the boys.”

“Pooh! those cowboys! Great, uneducated gawks!”

“But mighty fine fellows, just the same. I’d a whole lot rather have their good opinion than their bad.”

Now all this was, for Jennie Stone, pretty strong language. She was usually so mild of speech and easy-going, that its effect was all the greater. The Fox eyed her in some surprise and – for once – was quelled to a degree.

All these discussions occurred on Monday. The Rolling River Camp was twenty miles away in the direction of the mountain range. Tuesday was the day set for the trip. The party would travel with the supply wagon and a bunch of ponies for the herders, bossed by Maria’s husband. On Wednesday the young folk would return under the guidance of little Ricarde, who was to go along to act as camp-boy.

“But if we like it out there, Uncle Bill, maybe we’ll stay till Thursday,” Jane Ann declared, from her pony’s back, just before the cavalcade left the ranch-house, very early on Tuesday.

“You better not. I’m going to be mighty busy around yere, and I don’t want to be worried none,” declared the ranchman. “And I sha’n’t know what peace is till I see you-all back again.”

“Now, don’t worry,” drawled his niece. “We ain’t none of us sugar nor salt.”

“I wish I could let Ike go with ye – that’s what I wish,” grumbled her uncle.

Ruth Fielding secretly wished the same. The direction of the Rolling River Camp lay toward Tintacker. She had asked the foreman about it.

“You’ll be all of thirty mile from the Tintacker claims, Miss Ruth,” Bashful Ike said. “But it’s a straight-away trail from the ford a mile, or so, this side of the camp. Any of the boys can show you. And Jib might spare one of ’em to beau you over to the mine, if so be you are determined to try and find that ‘bug’.”

“I do want to see and speak with him,” Ruth said, earnestly.

“It’s pretty sure he’s looney,” said Ike. “You won’t make nothing out o’ him. I wouldn’t bother.”

“Why, he saved my life!” cried Ruth. “I want to thank him. I want to help him. And – and – indeed, I need very much to see and speak with him, Ike.”

“Ya-as. That does make a difference,” admitted the foreman. “He sure did kill that bear.”

The ponies rattled away behind the heavy wagon, drawn by six mules. In the lead cantered Ricarde and his father, herding the dozen or more half-wild cow-ponies. The Mexican horse-wrangler was a lazy looking, half-asleep fellow; but he sat a pony as though he had grown in the saddle.

Ruth, on her beloved little Freckles, rode almost as well now as did Jane Ann. The other girls were content to follow the mule team at a more quiet pace; but Ruth and the ranchman’s niece dashed off the trail more than once for a sharp race across the plain.

“You’re a darling, Ruthie!” declared Jane Ann, enthusiastically. “I wish you were going to live out here at Silver Ranch all the time – I do! I wouldn’t mind being ‘buried in the wilderness’ if you were along – ”

“Oh, but you won’t be buried in the wilderness all the time,” laughed the girl from the Red Mill. “I am sure of that.”

“Huh!” ejaculated the Western girl, startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that we’ve been talking to Uncle Bill,” laughed Ruth.

“Oh! you ain’t got it fixed for me?” gasped the ranchman’s neice. “Will he send me to school?”

“Surest thing you know, Nita!”

“Not to that boarding school you girls all go to?”

“Unless he backs down – and you know Mr. Bill Hicks isn’t one of the backing-down kind.”

“Oh, bully for you!” gasped Jane Ann. “I know it’s your doing. I can see it all. Uncle Bill thinks the sun just about rises and sets with you.”

“Helen and Heavy did their share. So did Madge – and even Heavy’s aunt, Miss Kate, before we started West. You will go to Briarwood with us next half, Nita. You’ll have a private teacher for a while so that you can catch up with our classes. It’s going to be up to you to make good, young lady – that’s all.”

Jane Ann Hicks was too pleased at that moment to say a word – and she had to wink mighty hard to keep the tears back. Weeping was as much against her character as it would have been against a boy’s. And she was silent thereafter for most of the way to the camp.

They rode over a rolling bit of ground and came in sight suddenly of the great herd in care of Number Two outfit. Such a crowd of slowly moving cattle was enough to amaze the eastern visitors. For miles upon miles the great herd overspread the valley, along the far side of which the hurrying river flowed. The tossing horns, the lowing of the cows calling their young, the strange, bustling movement of the whole mass, rose up to the excited spectators in a great wave of sound and color. It was a wonderful sight!

Jib rode up the hill to meet them. The men on duty were either squatting here and there over the range, in little groups, playing cards and smoking, or riding slowly around the outskirts of the herd. There was a chuck-tent and two sleeping tents parked by the river side, and the smoke from the cook’s sheet-iron stove rose in a thin spiral of blue vapor toward that vaster blue that arched the complete scene.

“What a picture!” Ruth said to her chum. “The mountains are grand. That cañon we visited was wonderful. The great, rolling plains dwarf anything in the line of landscape that we ever saw back East. But this caps all the sights we have seen yet.”

“I’m almost afraid of the cattle, Ruthie,” declared Helen. “So many tossing horns! So many great, nervous, moving bodies! Suppose they should start this way – run us down and stamp us into the earth? Oh! they could do it easily.”

“I don’t feel that fear of them,” returned the girl from the Red Mill. “I mean to ride all around the herd to-night with Nita. She says she is going to help ride herd, and I am going with her.”

This declaration, however, came near not being fulfilled. Jib Pottoway objected. The tent brought for the girls was erected a little way from the men’s camp, and the Indian stated it as his irrevocable opinion that the place for the lady visitors at night was inside the white walls of that tent.

“Ain’t no place for girls on the night trick, Miss Jinny – and you know it,” complained Jib. “Old Bill will hold me responsible if anything happens to you.”

“‘Twon’t be the first time I’ve ridden around a bunch of beeves after sundown,” retorted Jane Ann, sharply. “And I’ve promised Ruth. It’s a real nice night. I don’t even hear a coyote singing.”

“There’s rain in the air. We may have a blow out of the hills before morning,” said Jib, shaking his head.

“Aw shucks!” returned the ranchman’s niece. “If it rains we can borrow slickers, can’t we? I never saw such a fellow as you are, Jib. Always looking for trouble.”

“You managed to get into trouble the other day when you went over to the cañon,” grunted the Indian.

“‘Twarn’t Ruthie and me that made you trouble. And that Cox girl wouldn’t dare ride within forty rods of these cows,” laughed the ranchman’s niece.

So Jib was forced to give way. Tom and Bob had craved permission to ride herd, too. The cowboys seemed to accept these offers in serious mood, and that made Jane Ann suspicious.

“They’ll hatch up some joke to play on you-all,” she whispered to Ruthie. “But we’ll find out what they mean to do, if we can, and just cross-cut ’em.”

The camp by the river was the scene of much hilarity at supper time. The guests had brought some especially nice rations from the ranch-house, and the herders welcomed the addition to their plain fare with gusto. Tom and Bob ate with the men and, when the night shift went on duty, they set forth likewise to ride around the great herd which, although seemingly so peacefully inclined, must be watched and guarded more carefully by night than by day.

Soon after Jane Ann and Ruth rode forth, taking the place together of one of the regular herders. These additions to the night gang left more of the cow punchers than usual at the camp, and there was much hilarity among the boys as Jane Ann and her friend cantered away toward the not far-distant herd.

“Those fellows are up to something,” the ranchman’s niece repeated. “We must be on the watch for them – and don’t you be scared none, Ruthie, at anything that may happen.”

CHAPTER XVI – THE JOKE THAT FAILED

The two girls rode into the melting darkness of the night, and once out of the radiance of the campfires became suddenly appreciative of the subdued sounds arising from the far-extending valley in which the herd lay.

At a great distance a coyote howled in mournful cadence. There was the uncertain movements of the cattle on the riders’ left hand – here one lapped its body with its great tongue – again horns clashed – then a big steer staggered to its feet and blew through its nostrils a great sigh. There was, too, the steady chewing of many, many cuds.

A large part of the herd was lying down. Although stars flecked the sky quite thickly the whole valley in which the cattle fed seemed over-mantled with a pall of blackness. Shapes loomed through this with sudden, uncertain outline.

“My! it’s shivery, isn’t it?” whispered Ruth.

“There won’t nothing bite us,” chuckled the Western girl. “Huh! what’s that?”

The sudden change in her voice made Ruth giggle nervously. “That’s somebody riding ahead of us. You’re not afraid, Nita?”

“Well, I should say not!” cried the other, very boldly. “It’s one of the boys. Hello, Darcy! I thought you were a ghost.”

“You gals better git back to the camp,” grunted the cowboy. “We’re going to have a shower later. I feel it in the air.”

“We’re neither sugar nor salt,” declared Jane Ann. “We’ve both got slickers on our saddles.”

“Ridin’ herd at night ain’t no job for gals,” said Darcy. “And that cloud yander is goin’ ter spit lightnin’.”

“He’s always got a grouch about something. I never did like old Darcy,” Jane Ann confided to her friend.

But there was a general movement and confusion in the herd before the girls had ridden two miles. The cattle smelled the storm coming and, now and then, a faint flash of lightning penciled the upper edge of the cloud that masked the Western horizon.

“’Tain’t going to amount to anything,” declared Jane Ann.

“It just looks like heat lightning,” agreed Ruth.

“May not rain at all to-night,” pursued the other girl, cheerfully.

“Who’s that yelling?” queried Ruth, suddenly.

“Huh! that’s somebody singing.”

“Singing?”

“Yep.”

“Way out here?”

“Yep. It’s Fred English, I guess. And he’s no Caruso.”

“But what’s he singing for?” demanded the disturbed Ruth, for the sounds that floated to their ears were mournful to a degree.

“To keep the cattle quiet,” explained the ranch girl. “Singing often keeps the cows from milling – ”

“Milling?” repeated Ruth.

“That’s when they begin to get uneasy, and mill around and around in a circle. Cows are just as foolish as a flock of hens.”

“But you don’t mean to say the boys sing ’em to sleep?” laughed Ruth.

“Something like that. It often keeps ’em quiet. Lets ’em know there’s humans about.”

“Why, I really thought he must be making that noise to keep himself from feeling lonely,” chuckled Ruth.

“Nobody’d want to do that, you know,” returned Jane Ann, with seriousness. “Especially when they can’t sing no better than that Fred English.”

“It is worse than a mourning dove,” complained the girl from the East. “Why doesn’t he try something a bit livelier?”

“You don’t want to whistle a jig-tune to keep cows quiet,” Jane Ann responded, sagely.

The entire herd seemed astir now. There was a sultriness in the air quite unfamiliar on the range. The electricity still glowed along the horizon; but it seemed so distant that the girls much doubted Darcy’s prophecy of rain.

The cattle continued to move about and crop the short herbage. Few of them remained “bedded down.” In the distance another voice was raised in song. Ruth’s mount suddenly jumped to one side, snorting. A huge black steer rose up and blew a startled blast through his nostrils.

“Gracious! I thought that was a monster rising out of the very earth! And so did Freckles, I guess,” cried Ruth, with some nervousness. “Whoa, Freckles! Whoa, pretty!”

“You sing, too, Ruthie,” advised her friend. “We don’t want to start some foolish steer to running.”

The Eastern girl’s sweet voice – clear and strong – rang out at once and the two girls rode on their way. The movement of the herd showed that most of the cattle had got upon their feet; but there was no commotion.

As they rode around the great herd they occasionally passed a cowboy riding in the other direction, who hailed them usually with some witticism. But if Ruth chanced to be singing, they broke off their own refrains and applauded the girl’s effort.

Once a coyote began yapping on the hillside near at hand, as Ruth and Jane Ann rode. The latter jerked out the shiny gun that swung at her belt and fired twice in the direction of the brute’s challenge.

“That’ll scare him,” she explained. “They’re a nuisance at calving time.”

Slowly, but steadily, the cloud crept up the sky and snuffed out the light of the stars. The lightning, however, only played at intervals, with the thunder muttering hundreds of miles away, in the hills.

“It is going to rain, Nita,” declared Ruth, with conviction.

“Well, let’s put the rubber blankets over us, and be ready for it,” said the ranch girl, cheerfully. “We don’t want to go in now and have the boys laugh at us.”

“Of course not,” agreed Ruth.

Jane Ann showed her how to slip the slicker over her head. Its folds fell all about her and, as she rode astride, she would be well sheltered from the rain if it began to fall. They were now some miles from the camp on the river bank, but had not as yet rounded the extreme end of the herd. The grazing range of the cattle covered practically the entire valley.

The stirring of the herd had grown apace and even in the thicker darkness the girls realized that most of the beasts were in motion. Now and then a cow lowed; steers snorted and clashed horns with neighboring beeves. The restlessness of the beasts was entirely different from those motions of a grazing herd by day.

Something seemed about to happen. Nature, as well as the beasts, seemed to wait in expectation of some startling change. Ruth could not fail to be strongly impressed by this inexplicable feeling.

“Something’s going to happen, Nita. I feel it,” she declared.

“Hark! what’s that?” demanded her companion, whose ears were the sharper.

A mutter of sound in the distance made Ruth suggest: “Thunder?”

“No, no!” exclaimed Jane Ann.

Swiftly the sound approached. The patter of ponies’ hoofs – a crowd of horses were evidently charging out of a nearby coulie into the open plain.

“Wild horses!” gasped Jane Ann.

But even as she spoke an eerie, soul-wracking chorus of shrieks broke the oppressive stillness of the night. Such frightful yells Ruth had never heard before – nor could she, for the moment, believe that they issued from the lips of human beings!

“Injuns!” ejaculated Jane Ann and swung her horse about, poising the quirt to strike. “Come on – ”

Her words were drowned in a sudden crackle of electricity – seemingly over their very heads. They were blinded by the flash of lightning which, cleaving the cloud at the zenith, shot a zigzag stream of fire into the midst of the cattle!

Momentarily Ruth gained a view of the thousands of tossing horns. A chorus of bellowing rose from the frightened herd.

But Jane Ann recovered her self-confidence instantly. “It’s nothing but a joke, Ruthie!” she cried, in her friend’s ear. “That’s some of the boys riding up and trying to frighten us. But there, that’s no joke!”

Another bolt of lightning and deafening report followed. The cowboys’ trick was a fiasco. There was serious trouble at hand.

“The herd is milling!” yelled Jane Ann. “Sing again, Ruthie! Ride close in to them and sing! We must keep them from stampeding if we can!” and she spurred her own pony toward the bellowing, frightened steers.

CHAPTER XVII – THE STAMPEDE

Be it said of the group of thoughtless cowboys (of whom were the wildest spirits of Number Two camp) that their first demonstration as they dashed out of the coulie upon the two girls was their only one. Their imitation of an Indian attack was nipped in the bud by the bursting of the electric storm. There was no time for the continuance of the performance arranged particularly to startle Jane Ann and Ruth Fielding. Ruth forgot the patter of the approaching ponies. She had instantly struck into her song – high and clear – at her comrade’s advice; and she drew Freckles closer to the herd. The bellowing and pushing of the cattle betrayed their position in any case; but the intermittent flashes of lightning clearly revealed the whole scene to the agitated girls.

They were indeed frightened – the ranch girl as well as Ruth herself. The fact that this immense herd, crowding and bellowing together, might at any moment break into a mad stampede, was only too plain.

Caught in the mass of maddened cattle, the girls might easily be unseated and trampled to death. Ruth knew this as well as did the Western girl. But if the sound of the human voice would help to keep the creatures within bounds, the girl from the Red Mill determined to sing on and ride closer in line with the milling herd.

She missed Jane Ann after a moment; but another flash of lightning revealed her friend weaving her pony in and out through the pressing cattle, using the quirt with free hand on the struggling steers and breaking them up into small groups.

The cowboys who had dashed out of the coulie saw the possibility of disaster instantly; and they, too, rode in among the bellowing steers. With so many heavy creatures pressing toward a common center, many would soon be crushed to death if the formation was not broken up. Each streak of lightning which played athwart the clouds added to the fear of the beasts. Several of the punchers rode close along the edge of the herd, driving in the strays. Now it began to rain, and as the very clouds seemed to open and empty the water upon the thirsty land, the swish of it, and the moaning of the wind that arose, added greatly to the confusion.

How it did rain for a few minutes! Ruth felt as though she were riding her pony beneath some huge water-spout. She was thankful for the slicker, off which the water cataracted. The pony splashed knee-deep through runlets freshly started in the old buffalo paths. Here and there a large pond of water gleamed when the lightning lit up their surroundings.

And when the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun, the cattle began to steam and were more troublesome than before. The lightning flashes and thunder continued, and when a second downpour of rain began it came so viciously, and with so great a wind, that the girls could scarcely ride against it.

Suddenly a shout came down the wind. It was taken up and repeated by voice after voice. The camp at the far end of the herd had been aroused ere this, of course, and every man who could ride was in the saddle. But it was at the camp-end of the herd, after all, that the first break came.

“They’re off!” yelled Darcy, riding furiously past Ruth and Jane Ann toward where the louder disturbance had arisen.

“And toward the river!” shouted another of the cowboys.

The thunder of hoofs in the distance suddenly rose to a deafening sound. The great herd had broken away and were tearing toward the Rolling River at a pace which nothing could halt. Several of the cowboys were carried forward on the fore-front of the wave of maddened cattle; but they all managed to escape before the leaders reached the high bank of the stream.

Jane Ann screamed some order to Ruth, but the latter could not hear what it was. Yet she imitated the Western girl’s efforts immediately. No such tame attempts at controlling the cattle as singing to them was now in order. The small number of herdsmen left at this point could only force their ponies into the herd and break up the formation – driving the mad brutes back with their quirts, and finally, after a most desperate fight, holding perhaps a third of the great herd from running wildly into the stream.

This had been a time of some drought and the river was running low. The banks were not only steep upon this side, but they were twenty feet and more high. When the first of the maddened beeves reached the verge of the bank they went headlong down the descent, and some landed at the edge of the water with broken limbs and so were trampled to death. But the plunging over of hundreds upon hundreds of steers at the same point, together with the washing of the falling rain, quickly cut down these banks until they became little more than steep quagmires in which the beasts wallowed more slowly to the river’s edge.

This heavy going did more than aught else to retard the stampede; but many of the first-comers got over the shallow river and climbed upon the plain beyond. All night long the cowboys were gathering up the herd upon the eastern shore of the river; those that had crossed must be left until day dawned.