Raymond S. Spears

“ The Scrambling Gulchers explained well enough the fellow who had come to Pretty Shells’s cabin hammering on the door contrary to the code which demands that honorable men hail from a distance rather than alarm a woman by their coming, unbidden, to the door. Always in criminal bands are degenerates from civilized standards. Tom Redding was trapping between his raids on earnings of honest people, or at least on the accumulations of those who conformed to the conventional rules of conduct. Many a scouter from the law retreats to the fur land wilds after a hold up or an attack. ”

“ Conklin puzzled, for he was badly concerned about the woman who, going Indian according to her blood, had cheerfully made her claim for peace and happiness on the Singing Bird Mountains. As a man, knowing what he did, he could not leave her unguarded. Circumstances were favoring him in his not-too-welcome necessity. As soon as Wool-Head heard the wolf report he would order Conklin to stay with them till they were destroyed. He must become, for the time at least, the professional trapper for the Bell Brand range. ”

“ I must tell you about Lop-Ear. He brings his pack through my own country—”
“I followed him there, Pretty Shells,” he nodded. “I’ve some things I must tell you. A man came down from the north yesterday, blazing a line down through to the edge of the lower timber line, claiming the trapping and building cubbies. He started to smash in the cabin door, so I came out. I’d stopped there. I borrowed one of your horses to bring in my stuff. Lop-Ear and his wolves killed my pack horse the other day. ”

“ I sure despise living in cities where you gets kept awake by loud speaker and permanent music. I don’t mind coyotes ’r the whispering when the sand’s running before the wind. They ain’t civilized. You know, being civilized’s a detriment to humanity. ”

“ It gets on a man’s nerve. That’s what ails N’York an’ Europe an’ all them places. Tribulation’s bad ’nough, but think of Chicago an’ Kansas City an’ Sante Fe an’ Flag Staff an’ all them metropoluses. Don’t it make you turn your toes in an’ hunch up, thinkin’ of them gawd-awful crowds? It does me. The two worsest things in this world is big cities an’ a noisy woman. But I s’pose it takes all kinds and rattlesnakes to make the world.”
“It sure do—and does,” Park Cable declared. “You might add Lop-Ear to such sentiments.”
“That’s right!” Conklin exclaimed. ”

“ In mixed company of a cowboy crew there are topics about which one absolutely must mind his own business, even to the point of practically perfect ignorance. The Scrambling Gulch country was notorious for one sufficient reason. ”

“ Lava beds, bad lands, some timber in the mountains, the Disappearing River, some good bottoms where Latter Day Saints had established farms here and there at the edge of the wilds, were recalled as features of the territory. ”