Scott Burton on the Range

Scott Burton leaned eagerly forward and searched the scenery which rolled steadily past the Pullman window. The other occupants of the car, worn out with the long journey and surfeited with scenery, centered their attention on their books or tried to sleep away the weary miles. They had seen it all, or at least too much of it. But to Scott Burton it was a new country and to him a new country was of more absorbing interest than anything else.

Born in a little Massachusetts town, he had lived a stay at home life with the single exception of his trip to a college in the Middle West. But even then, before he had any idea that he would ever really have a chance to travel, it was always the tales of strange lands that fascinated him. He had been looking out of that car window for three solid days just as intently as he was looking now and there was not a bump on the landscape which failed to interest him. He had laid over one night in St. Louis that he might not miss anything by night travel, and another one in Pueblo. And still he stared at the country with almost unwinking eye.

A kindly old gentleman who had been watching him for some time, and whose curiosity was piqued by the boy’s unusual alertness, dropped into the seat beside him and opened a conversation.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Tell me if I annoy you, but it hurts my eyes to read on the train, I have seen the country no end of times and I can’t sleep in the daytime. That leaves me nothing to do but watch my neighbors; and I have been watching you till I could not keep down my curiosity any longer.”

Scott was glad to have some one to talk to and he liked the old man’s manner. Moreover, he felt rather curious to know what had made the other man curious.

“I suppose I am rather curious looking,” Scott laughed.

“No, no,” protested the old gentleman, “that is a very good pun, but it is not at all what I meant.”

“I did not mean it either,” said Scott, “I shall be very glad of your company, especially if you have seen the country so often.”

“Well,” said the old gentleman, hastening to satisfy his curiosity, “I have been watching you stare out of that window for almost a whole day now, and I simply could not wait any longer to learn what you were hunting for.”

“I am afraid it will be horribly disappointing to you,” Scott smiled, “but I am only looking at the country.”

“Looking at the country,” the old man echoed, “all day long.” He seemed not only disappointed but also a little incredulous.

“Why, yes,” Scott said, “you see it is all new to me.”

“I don’t see what there is in this country that a man would want to look at for a whole day,” the old man insisted.

“But I have never seen a mountain before,” Scott answered, “and right over there is the Great Divide. I have always been crazy to see a mountain.”

“They are a grand sight,” said the old gentleman. “Those old peaks up there are like brothers to me. Yes, they must look pretty fine to a stranger. They look pretty good to me when I have been away for a while. Mountains are a good deal like home folks, you don’t think much about them when you are with them all the time, but when you go away you are crazy to get back to them.”

“You live here then?” Scott asked politely.

“Live here,” exclaimed the old man indignantly, “wouldn’t live anywhere else. I reckon I have been living here longer than most anything else except those old mountains there. Why, I used to start out at the Mexican border with a herd of cattle every spring and graze ’em right north to Montana in time for the fall market. Right straight through we drove ’em and never seen a settler the whole summer. I knew every water hole from the Big Bend to Miles City.”

“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.”

“I suppose the government regulation of the range has spoiled all that now?” Scott suggested.

“Spoiled it!” the old man exclaimed, “Yes, they’ve spoiled it, and it’s a mighty good thing, too. There were lots of lambs lost in that spring race for the grass, many an acre of range spoiled, and many a small rancher ruined. Even when you succeeded in beating the other fellow to the range you never knew how long it would be ’til some bigger fellow would come along and crowd you off. Now you know a year ahead just what you are going to get, how many head you can hold over, and that the grass will be there whenever you want to go.”

“But I thought the sheep men were opposed to the government regulation,” Scott protested.

“Humph,” grunted the old man contemptuously, “some of ’em are. They are the fellows who want to hog the whole thing and crowd out the little fellow. The government will not let them do that and they are sore. Still think they are bigger than Uncle Sam. I knew better right from the first and took my medicine like a man and now I like it.”

“It is certainly building up the range,” Scott said; “they are supporting more sheep now than under the old system and doing it better.”

“Certainly they are,” agreed the old gentleman. “You seem to know a good deal about this country, young man, for any one who has never seen a mountain before,” he added suspiciously.

Scott laughed. “I don’t know nearly as much about it as I should like to. I have been reading up on it because I am coming down here to work, but it seems as though the very things a fellow wants to know most are always left out of the books.”

“What are you going to do, if it is any of my business?”

“It may be some of your business,” Scott laughed. “I’m going to be a patrolman with the Forest Service.”

“On what forest?”

“The Cormorant.”

“No, too far west, you will not get any of mine there. You don’t know the west at all?” he asked musingly.

“Only what I have read,” Scott said. “I feel as though I know the timber pretty well, but I’m afraid I don’t know the stock business at all.”

“Well, I’m leaving you at the next station. I get over your way once in a while and shall probably see you again, if you stay there,” he added with a grin. “If you study the stock business the way you have been studying this country, and keep your eye on Jed Clark you will be all right. Don’t let them bluff you.” With this advice he walked back to his seat to collect his things.