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Page 80
The bugles sounded. The horses were forced into a gallop. With
clashing accouterments and jingling spurs and bits, they dashed
across the mesa to the head of the trail. Here they met Slim
Hoover and his posse coming from an opposite direction.
The firing in the canon was more intermittent now. Dick and Jack
were saving their revolver-shots. The Indians were closing in
for the last rush.
Hardie dismounted his men and threw his troops as groups of
skirmishers down the draws leading into one side of the canon.
Slim and his posse were on the left flank, armed with revolvers.
Hardie, with a section, dashed down the trail.
They came upon the Apaches with the rush of a mountain torrent,
striking them in the front and on the flank. The cavalrymen
fired at will, each plunging from one cover to another as he
picked out his man.
The Indians, for a few moments, replied shot for shot. Their
stand was a short one, however, and they began to fall back.
Slim entered the canon at the head of the scouts, driving the
Apaches before him. Both Jack and Dick had fallen. Across the
bodies a wave of the battle flowed.
Once the Indians rallied, but so sudden was the attack, so
irresistible the forward dash of the cavalrymen, that they became
discouraged, and broke and fled toward their horses, with the
soldiers in pursuit.
Slim hurried to Dick's side, seeing he was the worst hurt. As he
knelt beside him, the dying man opened his eyes and smiled.
Leaning over him, Slim heard him gently whisper: "Tell her I
know she was true, and not to mind."
With a deep sigh, his eyelids fluttered, and all was still.
The scouts had taken charge of Jack, who was unconscious, and
bleeding freely.
From the spring the fighting had drifted southward. Few of the
Indians reached the horses, and fewer still got away. Scattering
shots showed the hunt for those who fled on foot was still on.
Then soft and mellow over canon and mesa and butte floated the
bugle-call, recalling the cavalrymen to the guidon. Back they
came, cheering and tumultuous, only to be silenced by the
presence of their dead.
They buried Dick's body near the spring, and carved his name with
a cavalry saber on a boulder near-by.
At dawn the next day they began the long march back to Fort
Grant.
Slim took charge of Jack, nursing him back to life.
CHAPTER XIV
The Round-up
Much has been written of the passing of the cowboy. With the
fenced range, winter feeding, and short drives his occupation once
appeared to be gone. But the war of the sheep and cattlemen in
the Western States has recently caused the government to compel
the cattlemen to remove the fences and permit the herds of sheep
and cattle to range over public lands, and this means a return of
the regime of the cowboy, with its old institutions.
Chief among these is the round-up.
A sheepman can shear wherever he happens to be. He can entrain
at the nearest shipping-point to his grazing-bed. But a herd of
cattle will range four hundred miles in a season, so the
cattlemen will be forced to revive the round-up, and make the
long drives either back to the home ranch, or to the railroad.
More cowboys will have to be employed. All the free life of the
open will return. At work the cow-puncher is not of the
drinking, carousing, fight-hunting type; nor again is he of the
daring romantic school. He is a Western man of the plains. True,
after loading up his cattle and getting "paid off," he may spend
his vacation with less dignity and quiet than a bank clerk. But
after a year of hard work with coarse fare he must have some
relaxation. He takes what he finds. The cattle-towns cater to
his worst passions. He is as noisy in his spending as a college
boy, and, on the average, just as good natured and eager to have
a good time.
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