Judith of the Plains | Page 8

sought to put a better face on his cowardice. Now
that his enemy was well out of sight, Simpson handled his revolver
with easy assurance.
"Put ut up," shouted Costigan, above the general uproar. "'Tis toime to
fear a revolver in the hands av Simpson whin he's no intinsions av
shootin'."
Simpson still attempted to harangue the crowd, but his voice was lost in
the general thigh-slapping and the shouts and roars that showed no
signs of abating. But when he caught a man by the coat lapel in his
efforts to secure a hearing, that was another matter, and the man shook
him off as if his touch were contagion. Simpson, craving mercy on
account of petticoats, evading a meeting that was "up to him," they
were willing to stand as a laughing-stock, but Simpson as an equal,
grasping the lapels of their coats, they would have none of.
He slunk away from them to a corner of the eating-house, feeling the
stigma of their contempt, yet afraid to go out into the street where his
enemy might be waiting for him. Much of death and blood and
recklessness "Town" had seen and condoned, but cowardice was the
unforgivable sin. It balked the rude justice of these frontiersmen and
tampered with their code, and Simpson knew that the game had gone
against him.
"What was it all about? Were they in earnest, or was it only their way
of amusing themselves?" inquired Mary Carmichael, who had slipped
into Mrs. Clark's kitchen after the men at the table had taken things in
hand.

"Jim Rodney was in earnest, an' he had reason to be. That man Simpson
was paid by a cattle outfit--now, mind, I ain't sayin' which--to get Jim
Rodney's sheep off the range. They had threatened him and cut the
throats of two hundred of his herd as a warning, but Jim went right on
grazin' 'em, same as he had always been in the habit of doing. Well, I'm
told they up and makes Simpson an offer to get rid of the sheep. Jim
has over five thousand, an' it's just before lambing, and them pore ewes,
all heavy, is being druv' down to Watson's shearing-pens, that Jim
always shears at. Jim an' two herders and a couple of dawgs--least, this
is the way I heard it--is drivin' 'em easy, 'cause, as I said before, it's just
before lambing. It does now seem awful cruel to me to shear just before
lambing, but that's their way out here.
"Well, nothing happens, and Jim ain't more'n two hours from the pens
an' he comes to that place on the road that branches out over the top of
a cañon, and there some one springs out of a clump of willows an'
dashes into the herd and drives the wether that's leading right over the
cliff. The leaders begin to follow that wether, and they go right over the
cliff like the pore fools they are. The herder fired and tried to drive 'em
back, they tell me, an' he an' the dawg were shot at from the clump of
willows by some one else who was there. Three hundred sheep had
gone over the cliff before Jim knew what was happening. He rode like
mad right through the herd to try and head 'em off; but you know what
sheep is like-- they're like lost souls headin' for damnation. Nothing can
stop 'em when they're once started. And Jim lost every head--started for
the shearing-pens a rich man--rich for Jim--an' seen everything he had
swept away before his eyes, his wife an' children made paupers. My
son he come by and found him. He said that Jim was sittin' huddled up
in a heap, his knees drawed up under his chin, starin' straight up into
the noonday sky, same as if he was askin' God how He could be so
cruel. His dead dawg, that they had shot, was by the side of him. The
herder that was with Jim had taken the one that was shot into Watson's,
so when my son found Jim he was alone, sittin' on the edge of the cliff
with his dead dawg, an' the sky about was black with buzzards; an' Jim
he just sat an' stared up at 'em, and when my son spoke to him he never
answered any more than a dead man. He shuck him by the arm, but Jim
just sat there, watchin' the sun, the buzzards, and the dead sheep."

"Was nothing done to this man Simpson?"
"The cattle outfit that he done the dirty work for swore an alibi for him.
Jim has been in hard luck ever since. He's been rustlin' cattle right
along; but Lord, who can blame him? He got into some trouble