Powder

“Mud?” said Jerk Line Smith to the barflies in the Bloody Heart Saloon. “Mud? I’ll tell a man we was in mud. I’m haulin’ grub, powder and licker to the camps at the Little Rockies, five wagons and the caboose, loaded a thousand pounds to the horse, and workin’ thirty-two o’ the best hosses north o’ hell. Bogged to the hubs. It taken us twenty-one days and part o’ that night tuh pull the Rocky Point Hill.

“Mud? Mister, them Montana bad lands, comin’ up from the Rocky Point crossin’ on the Missouri, is eye deep to a tall camel. Ol’ Hard Luck Jones laid over at the Point and goes on a big drunk. Turned his hosses loose fergettin’ to tie up their tails. Tails gits balled with that gumbo till it weighted down them pore animals. Stretched their hides back. In a week every one o’ them hosses was dead. Hide so tight they couldn’t close their eyes. The pore things died from lack o’ sleep.”

“That was in ’81,” agreed Two Dog Moore, Jerk Line’s swamper. “The summer o’ the blue snow.”

Whereupon fresh drinks were set up. Out on the street stood Jerk Line Smith’s freight outfit. The two wagons and canvas topped cart, or caboose. Eighteen horses standing at rest; the off wheeler a bronc. A battered old saddle on the nigh wheeler; brass knobbed hames; chain harness; the lead team decorated with double rowed strings of bells strung on a hoop shaped support fastened to the tops of the hames; check reins and bridles ornate with ivory rings of red, white and blue. The wagons heavily loaded with grub, dynamite and whisky billed to Zortman and Landusky in the Little Rockies.

Presently the tall, yellow bearded freighter and his diminutive swamper would pull out of town, before they got too drunk. And Chinook would pause in its collective business or boredom to watch the long string team under Jerk Line’s guidance turn the corner of the town business street and head for the open country. From the rear of the caboose to the ears of the lead team the distance was approximately half a block. Yet, drunk or sober, Jerk Line Smith would accomplish the impossible by rounding that corner with neat and profane perfection. Astride his nigh wheeler, guiding nine span of horses by means of a single line, he would swing around that corner and on to the straight road.

“Tighten up, thar! Blondy, Joe, Snowball, Buck! Ribs, you long backed, cow hocked son of a cross between a bogged cow and a wore out winter! Ginger, Pete! Tighten up! Keno, you high withered, cold shouldered, hip shot, ring-boned, box ankled specimen o’ humanity, tighten them tugs! You, Greyback! Born a-sleepin’ an’ never woke up! Louse! Injun! Tadpole! Roosevelt an’ Bryan! Roulette an’ Faro! Stand Up an’ Lay Down! D. T. and Hangover! Whisky an’ Chaser! Stumble an’ Fall Down! Tighten up!”

Out on to the open road. Winter and summer. Bells chiming, wheels creaking, harness rattling. Jerk Line riding his nigh wheeler, Two Dog sitting on the plank known as the jockey bar, or walking alongside. Two Dog’s business was setting and releasing the brakes, helping with the harnessing and hobbling of the teams, wrangling in the morning, cooking, fastening roughlocks on grades, blocking wheels on long climbs, watching the loads, greasing wheels, mending harness, jacking up wheels in the mud, nursing Jerk Line over periods of delirium tremens. In short, swamping.

Motor trucks have replaced the snail-like freight outfits. Fences crisscross the old open range. That breed of frontiersman to which belonged Jerk Line Smith and Two Dog Moore is now extinct. Save in the memory of men who loved the old West, their names and deeds are forgotten. Yet the freighter filled his place in the building of an empire. When the West needed him, he served. Through heat and blizzard. Ragged, bearded, his blacksnake hung across his shoulders. Freezing, drinking, laboring, cursing. Broken wheels and empty bottles marking his passing.

Pride of their breed cropped out in their teams. Bells and colored rings. They boasted not of their own deeds, but of what their teams could do. The passing cowboy knew him and liked him. Trapper and sheepherder were ever welcome to a drink and a meal and the latest gossip of the towns.

It was said of Jerk Line Smith that he was the orneriest human north of the Pecos, save one. That one was hanged. Tall, with rawhide muscles, unwashed and unshaven, his rough-hewn features red and cracked from bad weather. And each spring, after the chinook wind had melted the winter snow, Two Dog brought the sheep shears from the jockey box and cut Jerk Line’s matted yellow hair.

Two Dog had been a sheepherder, and as Jerk Line often said, “the damn’ li’l’ cuss never got over it.”

Small of stature, inoffensive, with watery eyes of mild blue, he did his work, swallowed his liquor as an obedient child takes medicine, and stoutly vouched for Jerk Line’s stories.

He had attached himself to the freight outfit in much the same manner that a stray dog picks up a master. Jerk Line claimed that Two Dog “must ’a’ been with him six months or so afore he sobered up an’ found him one day jackin’ up a bogged wheel with a case o’ powder fer a jack-rest.”

But the truth of that statement might be questioned, because Two Dog, above all the dangers that roam the earth, feared powder.

At some spot along the colorless career of little Two Dog Moore, he had been a prospector and hard rock miner. He had lost two fingers and all the toes of his right foot while thawing a stick of frozen dynamite in the oven.

His fear of powder became an obsession. Yet almost every freight load had its quota of dynamite and blasting powder. Jerk Line handled powder with a contemptuous nonchalance that drove the blood from Two Dog’s face and sent the little swamper into a sweat chilled fever.

“Gawd. Oh, Gawd!” he groaned in silent agony. “Someday it’ll happen! Someday....”

Yet even his terrible fear could not drive him away from the freight outfit. No more than beating can drive off the stray dog from the man he has chosen for master.

Perhaps Two Dog drew wages of some sort. Or it may have been that Jerk Line, in moments of drunken generosity, gave the little fellow money. For the harness maker at Chinook could tell you that almost every trip to town Two Dog would shamble into the shop. Here he would spend an hour fondling the red, white and blue rings, brass buckles and bells. A folded bill would come from the pocket of his disreputable overalls in exchange for rings or buckles or a new bell.

He was never known to buy clothes of any sort. He wore what Jerk Line cast aside as being worn out. With harness thread and the sheep shears, he cut down and patched these abandoned garments until they hung to him somehow. His feet, when wrapped in gunny sacking, would fill the rusty shoes he picked up. Jerk Line fed him. He drank when called up to the bar.

He managed to keep those eighteen horses and the wrangling pony curried and brushed after a fashion. He spent hours trimming their tails. He filled them with grain, and if he put an extra hatful of oats in the nosebag, Jerk Line pretended not to notice.

A good hand around a horse, Two Dog. Even the broncs seemed to savvy that the little old fellow was harmless. Before Jerk Line gave the starting howl that put the long string team in motion, Two Dog went down the line with the blacksnake no man ever saw him use. Mumbling gentle profanity, prodding them with the wooden butt of his blacksnake, talking to those horses as if they were children. And when Jerk Line bawled forth his “Tighten up!” the tugs tightened along the line, lead bars and stretchers, and chains lifted from the ground. Every horse in the string was giving the best that was in him. And deep down in his mule-skinner’s heart, Jerk Line gave credit to little Two Dog. Two Dog, who had a way with hosses.

Evenings, when he had the time, the little swamper polished the brass buckles and bells until they glistened.

Their evenings, especially during mild weather, were usually visited by stray cowboys, an occasional trapper, or a sheepherder.

“I seen Jerk Line pullin’ in on to Black Coulee this evening,” word would pass along from camp to ranch and from ranch to camp.

“Dunno who you are,” would come the reply from within the lantern lit caboose, “but light and rest your saddle.”

If the man was a cowboy, or a trapper, he was welcome to imbibe freely of the liquor. But a sheepherder was limited to one or two “light ’uns”.

Not that the freighter was snobbish, for the herder and his dog was ever welcome. But there was a large band of woolies in the herder’s care, and despite the fact that Montana makes wanton desertion of a band of sheep punishable by a term in prison, herders had been known to turn loose their sheep. Because most sheepherders were habitual drunkards, and because it took but a few drinks to set them on the trail for town, Jerk Line used caution in the passing of his jug.

Once when a herder, goaded by the taste from Jerk Line’s jug, quit his band, the freight outfit laid over and Two Dog herded the sheep until the camp tender discovered the absence of the herder and brought out a man to relieve Two Dog. That week’s delay had cost money. Jerk Line had been duly cussed out for his tardiness. And from that time on, the jug was passed with due caution.

Jerk Line’s jug was kinfolks to that fabled pitcher that never became empty. Care of this earthenware container fell to Two Dog. And its replenishing was as much a rite as was the polishing of the bells and care of the stock.

By holding the jug to his ear and gently shaking it, Two Dog could tell a man, almost never failing, the number of man-size drinks left in it. And when its contents were lowered to a certain amount, the swamper would set about refilling it.

Whisky was shipped in huge barrels. To tap this barrel en route from wholesaler to retailer was unlawful. For, allowing for small natural shrinkage, the saloon man paid good cash for the net contents as listed on the bill of lading made out at the shipping point.

Now Jerk Line was a man of honest habit. He paid his bills. His word in money matters was as true and good as signed paper or Christian oath. Yet no whisky barrel ever landed at its final destination without being tapped.

Unlike the trained ear of Two Dog, the saloon man could not gauge the amount of liquor inside the fifty-gallon barrel or the hundred-gallon barrel. Furthermore, no naked eye could detect any sign of the barrels having been tampered with. Yet, from that barrel had come a gallon, three, or perhaps five gallons of its original contents.

From the jockey box would come a hammer, a strip of canvas and a cold chisel with its edge filed round and smooth so that it made a dull sort of instrument. Selecting one of the hoops that bound the wooden staves of the barrel, the swamper became a barrel cooper. With hammer and chisel, the canvas as a buffer to prevent marking the hoop, Two Dog would lift the hoop until it was an inch or so above its original place.

A gimlet and length of rubber tubing now came from the jockey box. A tiny hole was bored in a carefully selected spot somewhere along the rim marked by the hoop. The bit of tubing was inserted, its lower end vanishing into the neck of the jug. If necessary, a tiny air hole was made in the top of the barrel. This hole was made somewhere on the lettering of the maker that was customarily burned into the wood by a red-hot stencil.

The siphoning was now under way. A slow process, for the air hole was small, as was the tube that led from the barrel to the jug. But Two Dog, from experience, could time the process with fair accuracy.

“Some barrels,” he would tell Jerk Line, “gives down their licker faster’n others.”

And when the jug was filled, tiny wooden pegs were driven into the gimlet holes and the white dots of the wooden pegs were seared into a blending, charred color by means of a hot iron. The hoop was painstakingly driven back into place. No visible trace remained of the looting. Two Dog would step back, head on one side, surveying the barrel with the pleased eye of an artist who has put the final touches to a masterpiece.

Yet Jerk Line was an honest man. And Two Dog was of guileless bearing, meek as the man of the Scriptures.

“I reckon we earn that much, haulin’ the stuff over this damn’ road. Anyhow I allers tell ’em.”

Jerk Line, with a wink and a grin, would always boast that he had tapped the barrel.

“Show me whar we tapped ’er an’ I’ll pay fer the whole dang barrel,” he’d tell Dutch John or Big Fred or Buster or Jew Jake or old Pike. “Ain’t that right, Two Dog?”

It was powder that severed a five year partnership between the rough-hewn Jerk Line and the timid Two Dog. Frozen dynamite.

Those of you who have never cursed and prayed and coaxed and wept your way with a freight outfit can not quite appreciate the heartbreaking grief of the Red Lane in bad weather.

Five miles of red adobe gumbo flat. No road but the rutted strip from the P outfit’s horse corrals to the half way house known as the Hog Ranch. Five miles of mud up to a horse’s hocks. Mud that sticks in the spokes of the wide tired freight wagon wheels. Wheels seven feet in diameter, sunk to the hubs. Five miles of cold, red, sticky, horse killing hell. Horses floundering. Two Dog hacking away with an ax at the gumbo clogged between the spokes.

Caboose and rear wagon unhooked. Wallowing in mud up to their knees, the two freighters labored. Cold. Wet. Hungry. Sweat. Mud. Jerk Line too weary to curse, blood seaming the chapped cracks that filled his hands and red wrists. Two Dog whimpering with futile grief. His beloved horses and rings and buckles and bells caked with mud.

Mud that thawed at midday and froze to cement-like solidity at night. From daybreak till dark. Shivering through the brief night hours. Harness lying in the mud. Hobbles caked with the stuff. Broken fingernails. Freezing, sweating, sobbing, cursing across the Red Lane. Five days making five miles.

Perhaps it was too much liquor, or it might have been that Jerk Line needed more of the stuff that warmed the lining of a man’s belly while his hide was plastered with half frozen mud.

The trail wagon was down to the running gear in the gumbo. The teams stood bogged with lowered heads and heaving flanks, sweat smeared, steaming, spent, but waiting to give again the last ounce of strength in their loyal hearts. But no team that ever looked through collar could budge that mired load. Jerk Line, white with fatigue and red eyed from loss of decent rest, was on top of the load, slashing at mud caked ropes with his jackknife. Though it was past noon they had not eaten since four that morning. They had unloaded and reloaded that trail wagon three times since sun-up.

Two Dog, who had been untangling a swing team from a tangle of lead bars and stretcher chains, was limping painfully back through the mud. His feet were twin balls of gumbo; leaden balls of weight. A cud of tobacco bulged his unshaven cheek. Suddenly he halted. His watery eyes widened. The cud dropped from his gaping mouth. In mud to his knees, he stood there, petrified, breathless with terror.

For the mud crazed Jerk Line was heaving off wooden boxes with insane abandon. Box after box, flung from the high piled wagon out into the congealing, freezing gumbo. One of the boxes broke, spilling forth its contents of dynamite sticks that looked like yellow candles.

“What the hell of it?” bellowed the yellow bearded giant, throwing another box out. “What the hell of it, hey?” Lend a hand up here, damn your sniveling little heart!”

Two Dog stood there, sort of crumpled. In his scarecrow rags, his broken, bleeding, mud caked hands going out in a queer little gesture of supplication.

“O, Gawd, Jerk Line! Don’t! Don’t, pardner! I’ll unload ’er. Every damn’ case, Jerk Line! But don’t—don’t sling that stuff like that! She’s powder, Jerk Line! Powder!”

But the yellow haired, mud fouled Jerk Line was like a man gone stark mad. His harsh voice roared forth a string of curses. He threw boxes of the frozen dynamite with a sort of giant petulance that was terrible in its blasphemous contempt for the wrath of God.

“Git!” he bellowed. “Git, you white hearted, sheep herdin’ louse! Git, afore I brain you with the next box!”

Two Dog turned slowly, very slowly, like a man mortally sick. Like a stray dog being stoned by his man-god.

Shambling, stumbling, falling sometimes because he was weak and hurt and blind from the tears that coursed down his little old cheeks, Two Dog made his way along the Red Lane.

The weary horses eyed him with some sort of dumb understanding. But he did not look up. He could not look at them. For he was going away. He was quitting the only thing in the world that he had ever loved.

On down the Red Lane. And even after he had stumbled on for a mile and more, the silvery tinkle of his beloved bells filled his ears. When he reached the Hog Ranch, he crawled up into the hayloft and sobbed himself into the oblivion of exhausted slumber.

While back along the Red Lane, Jerk Line, his sudden burst of fury spent, worked in a brooding silence.

Already he was regretting his fit of anger. And he worked until darkness clogged his progress. Then he unhooked his team and turned them into the Hog Ranch pasture. Too weary and sick at heart to return to the caboose at the far end of the lane, Jerk Line lay down on the load and slept, too utterly tired to know that he was hungry.

He hired a passing traveler from the mines and put him to work in Two Dog’s place. His anger had turned to guilt, then into a sort of shamed bitterness toward Two Dog. He lied himself into believing that the little swamper had deserted in an hour of dire need. And when the outfit had been dragged through the lane and Jerk Line laid over at the Hog Ranch to mend broken tugs and rebalance his freight, he got very drunk and sank into a sullen silence.

Two Dog, refreshed by sleep, had quit the barn. Avoiding the little log saloon and dining room that fed the stage passengers, he took to the road before Jerk Line pulled into the ranch.

Two Dog found a sheep camp and stayed with the herder. And two days later he hailed the passing stage and rode with the driver into the Little Rockies. But he did not go into the town of Zortman. He got off a mile this side of town and struck off for a sheep ranch.

A few days later Two Dog was back herding sheep. He wore real clothes. Thick, fleece lined underwear, sox a quarter-inch thick, shoes, overshoes, blanket lined canvas pants, a sheep lined overcoat and heavy cap. His covered wagon held adequate bed and good grub. Two collie dogs for company.

The feed was good, there in the scrub pines of the foothills. There was water. A good shed for the sheep at night. And his band were stout wethers that needed little attention save doctoring them for sore mouth and foot rot. And each morning as they left the shed, Two Dog caught a few sheep and sheared away the overhanging wool that sometimes grows so thick as to make the sheep blind—wool blind.

But Two Dog was not happy. Well clothed, well fed, and an ideal winter camp. A veritable sheepherder’s paradise. And Two Dog was a sheepherder, as good a sheepherder as ever cheated the wolves and blizzards. He tried to tell himself that he was happy, that freighting was a hell of a life. Here he was, warm, with good grub, top wages. This was the life.

But when the sheep bells, reminding him of other bells, tinkled, until the sound of them found their way into his little old heart, he would bury his frost blackened face in the thick fur of the biggest collie and cry like a hurt child.

Sometimes, when the wind was right—for a herder feeds into the wind in winter so that if a storm comes, he drifts with it back to camp—Two Dog’s band went up the wind and across the stage road below town. And from some hiding place among the scrub pines, Two Dog’s tear dimmed eyes would watch Jerk Line’s freight outfit crawl along the road. Wide steel tires creaking across the packed snow. Chains rattling. The silver toned bells sending their siren song across the frozen world to where little two Dog squatted in the pines.

Because he never went to town, because his camp tender was a Swede who spoke no English, and because some queer sort of pride pinched his heart, forbidding him to question men he met, Two Dog did not know how things were going with Jerk Line.

Jerk Line, never sober any more, whose brief stays in town were silent and ugly and sodden. He no longer held the barflies spellbound with fanciful tales of mud and snow and feats of expert hauling.

His horses sensed the change in the man. They no longer gave the best that was in them. Harness and animals alike took on a shabby, prideless appearance. Uncurried, with burrs and witches’ knots in their manes and tails, the eighteen horses, from prideful lead team to the line backed bronc on the off wheel, seemed to miss the unobtrusive care and companionship of little Two Dog. Even the bells, weather tarnished and dull, had lost something of their gallant silvery tone. The caboose was a litter of cast off clothing, dirty dishes and blackened pots and skillets. Man, horses, harness and wagons had a neglected appearance.

Nor was that all. There were complaints from Dutch John and Big Fred. And on one occasion when the outfit had been snowbound a week, and had taken three weeks to pull from the railroad into the twin towns of Zortman and Landusky, the saloon men, becoming wrathful at the light weight of a fifty-gallon barrel, checked up. The whisky was siphoned into jugs. The barrel was twenty gallons short. And the gimlet marks were plain to be seen.

Dutch John accused Jerk Line there in the saloon, before a big crowd. Jerk Line knocked the old fellow through the front window and almost into the arms of the deputy sheriff who happened to be passing. Jerk Line was duly jailed, tried and fined. And the final outcome of it all was this: The saloon men got together and bought a small freight outfit of their own. A six horse outfit; a former stage driver for skinner. And when Jerk Line threatened to work over this six horse skinner with a stay chain, that gentleman borrowed Big Fred’s sawed-off shotgun and sent word across the street where Jerk Line was doing his drinking.

“Tell that unwashed, louse bound jasper to come on with his stay chain. This town needs a corpse about his size.”

The skinner had been a shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo in Indian days and meant just about what he said. Jerk Line ignored the message and carried the bitterness of defeat into a sullen, sulking week of inebriation.

Jerk Line still hauled powder and grub for the two camps under an old contract. He still brought in an occasional barrel of whisky to Landusky, for Jew Jake and old Pike Landusky were too ornery to side in with the Zortman saloon men.

As the goose flies, Landusky is only about five miles or so across the mountain from its sister town of Zortman. But the wagon road, heading the coulees and cañons, is better than twelve miles. And there is the Grouse Gulch grade. A sharp pitch, twisting and narrow. The skinner of a jerk line team must need know his business to avoid disaster on the Grouse Gulch hill. For if a wagon slipped off there, it dropped for a hundred feet.

“Haulin’ powder down Grouse Gulch hill,” agreed the mule-skinner clan, “is like sittin’ on the lid of hell.”

But since the departure of Two Dog, Jerk Line displayed a blood-chilling contempt for powder that made even the hardened miners and “powder monkeys” shiver. For powder, as any man who handles it will tell you, is temperamental stuff. Freakish, sort of. And the tawny bearded freighter handled it as if it were flour.

Perhaps, in his present unhealthy state of mind, Jerk Line blamed the stuff for all his troubles. He hated powder as if the stuff were alive and understood. He cursed it as he would curse a man, in terms of the most terrible blasphemy. No swamper ever made a second trip with him.

The men at the powder house called him crazy. And perhaps they were right. No man now stayed at his roadside camps for a meal or a drinking bout; Jerk Line was likely to drive him off in a quick fit of anger. And when men began to shun his company, Jerk Line grew the more sullen and moody. Above the sound of bells and chains and creaking wheels could be heard his big voice as he rode the nigh wheeler or walked alongside, talking to himself. Jerk Line Smith was no longer quite sane.

Men pitied him without knowing why they did so. Landusky and Zortman did not know that the bearded, rough-mouthed Jerk Line was grieving for the companionship of Two Dog. They did not know that he sometimes lay awake through the long night, calling in a broken, croaking whisper, for his little partner. That in town or on the road his bloodshot eyes searched with restless stare for a glimpse of Two Dog Moore.

They did not know, because Jerk Line hid his grief, covering it with sulky brooding and fits of sudden anger.

Sometimes Jerk Line saw the band of wethers feeding up the wind among the scrub pines, a dirty gray blotch against the white snow. Once or twice he caught a brief glimpse of the dogs, as those sagacious animals trotted around the lead of the band to turn them back. But even though he stared until his eyes ached, he could catch no glimpse of Two Dog. He did not guess that the little fellow often crouched within a stone’s throw of the road where it dropped off the Grouse Gulch hill.

Of the affairs of Jerk Line Smith, Two Dog knew only what his watery blue eyes told him. That was enough to upset the little fellow, so that he lay awake far into the night, smoking and thinking and trying to pray.

Two Dog saw the broken harness, the wheels that needed grease, the tarnished, blackened bells, the uncurried coats of the horses he loved. Jerk Line, his lanky frame bent across the hames of the nigh wheeler. Tossing rocks from the canvas nosebag hung to the saddlehorn. Jerk Line, bent over like an old man, his tawny hair and beard astonishingly gray. Mumbling like a man drunk or gone mad. The trail wagon piled high with powder.

A warning chinook wind had melted some of the snow, but before its task was completed the wind swung a few points north, and smoke-hued clouds shoved up across the skyline, spreading like a pall across the blue sky. Snow, fine and hard as specks of ice, filled the air. The mercury dropped to ten below zero.

The wether band fed into the wind for two hours, then balked. Humped up in the lee of the rocks, the sheep stood there in stupid, stubborn bunches. The dogs barked and snapped at their heels. Two Dog hobbled about, slapping his arms to keep warm. And when he saw the futility of trying to make his sheep graze north, he gave it up and hobbled over toward the head of the Grouse Gulch hill. He had kept close tabs on Jerk Line’s trips and he knew that the freight outfit was about due.

When he reached the grade he stared in scowling silence at the frozen, ice-glazed ruts. Dangerous at any time, that road was little more than a devil’s slide this morning. Icy, slippery, treacherous.

“Smith’ll have to put rough locks on his wheels,” he mused. “Them brakes o’ his needs new shoes. Wore bad, last trip. Rough locks. Hug the bank clost. Take ’er slow, an’ he’ll make ’er. If them brakes slip on this hill, he’ll....”

A shudder swept his little frame. He was thinking of that trail wagon, piled with powder cases.

Out of the gray morning came the distant sound of bells. Clear and sweet, like Christmas bells. To little Two Dog they were voices. Just like the voices of fairies. “A-callin’ fer him.”

Two Dog scurried to a brush thicket beside the frozen road, ten feet above the road level, on the slope of the hill. He could lean over and spit down on the road.

Then, up over the brow of a low rise, came the freight outfit. Black Jack and Monte, the two black leaders, leaning into their padded collars, their bells chiming. The other teams, plodding behind. The high boxed wagons, lurching and swaying. The dingy tarp-covered caboose. Jerk Line, walking alongside the lead wagon to keep warm. In grease-caked overalls and torn, faded mackinaw, his blue flannel shirt open at the throat. Beating his chapped, gloveless hands across his barrel chest. His blacksnake hung across his shoulders. Walking with bent-over shoulders, as if he carried a heavy pack, his bearded chin sunk on his chest. A little unsteady from too much whisky and too little decent grub. Mumbling into his matted beard.

Plodding along. The wide tires creaking dismally on the frozen snow. Coming on at a dogged, sullen pace, slantwise to the bitter wind. Without a swamper. The trail wagon loaded high with powder.

And when the swing teams were directly under Two Dog’s hiding place, the wise leaders slacked to a halt. The other teams halted in unison and stood there. Jerk Line looked up as if waking from a dream; as if he did not quite realize where he was. He passed a reddened, calloused hand across his eyes, then reached into the jockey box.

But when the freighter’s hand came out of the box, it held a jug. Uncorking the jug with his teeth, he spat out the cork and tipped up the jug. For the space of ten long seconds, Jerk Line let the whisky gurgle down his throat. When the jug came away from his bearded lips, he picked the cork out of the snow and with a sort of fumbling movement replaced the jug. Again his hand passed across his eyes, as if he tried to wipe away a curtain or film that clouded his vision. Then he stumbled with a faltering step back along the wagon.

The brake poles, made of seasoned birch, were equipped with ropes. To set the brakes you pulled the rope taut and tied it to a steel brace up forward. Jerk Line set the two brakes in a haphazard fashion. Instead of a bowline knot, he merely gave the ropes a couple of half hitches and a twist. Two Dog, watching every move, choked back a little groan. And when Jerk Line mounted his wheel horse, the little watcher clapped a mittened hand across his mouth to smother the cry that came to his throat.

“Tighten up, thar!” roared Jerk Line. Chains rattled taut. Brakes creaked. The wagons lurched forward.

Two Dog shivered in terror, a thin, whispering scream tearing from his tight throat. But Jerk Line did not hear. Two Dog saw the front brake rope give, slacking off under the strain. The second rope jerked loose. The heavy wagons rolled forward toward the brink of the hill. Jerk Line, loaded with powder, was starting down that pitch with no brakes!

Two Dog, pasty white, leaped like an animal, landing in a heap on the first wagon. Half crawling, he scrambled across the load to the brake rope, just as the wagon reached the pitch of the hill. The rear wagon, still on level ground, held it back. Two Dog reached for the rope as the wagon rolled against the wheel team. The horses, sensing danger, jumped a little, then leaned back against the breeching.

Jerk Line seemed to wake from a stupor. He stiffened in the saddle, cast a swift, furtive look back at the towering load that was not holding. Then he roared a hoarse, screaming shout at the horses. His blacksnake cracked like pistol shots. The long team, frightened at the terror in the man’s voice, leaped forward.

In split second movements, Two Dog swung his weight on the brake rope. The brake shoes smoked, screamed, then held the wide tires in a tight grip. Two Dog, with deft, swift hitches, made fast the rope and knotted it. Then he leaped to the ground, was saved by a miracle from death under the wheels of the second wagon, and scrambled up over the end gate of the trail wagon, grasping at the dangling rope.

No prayer of man ever held more pitiful entreaty, more blind faith, more stark terror. And as if in answer to his screaming prayer, his hands found the rope.

The little fellow’s weight was puny against the strain of the load that was rolling the huge wheels. He cast a panicky glance about for some object that was solid. Something to throw a hitch around and take up the slack. His eyes fell on a thick iron brace that spanned the sides of the wagon-box. Two Dog threw a hitch about it, then threw his weight against the rope, his feet braced, every muscle straining.

Jerk Line’s blacksnake spat and popped. His hoarse screams goaded the terrified horses. They broke into a trot. Faster. Every second courting a pile-up. For if the long, jointed bars that served as a wagon tongue ever slacked and a horse became tangled in the stretchers and lead bars, the whole outfit would pile up in a snarl of mangled flesh. Wagons, horses and men broken and smashed, jerked over the edge and down that hundred feet of boulders. And the trail wagon piled with high explosive powder.

Then, with a horrible squeal the brake blocks of the trail wagon took hold. The momentum of the loads slacked. And as the stridor of the brake shoes smothered to a low moan, Two Dog’s voice traveled out of the rattling chains, along the line of fear stricken horses.

Crooning, calling, talking to them as a mother soothes the fright of her children.

Jerk Line heard it and thought that he had gone clear mad. But he felt the horses slacken to a walk. He knew that some miracle had checked the momentum of the wagons. His hand, shaking as if with palsy, made that queer, brushing motion across his eyes. Then something inside him seemed to break and he swayed in his saddle, tears streaming down into his matted beard, sobs shaking his big frame. But the hands that handled the jerk line were mechanical, sure, skilled even after the man’s brain had quit. And so Jerk Line Smith rode down the Grouse Gulch hill. And when the outfit was again on level ground and the horses stood quiet, he still sat in the saddle, sobbing and laughing. Crazy. Crazy from pain and liquor and lack of decent grub. And blind. Snow blind since the day before yesterday.

But out of that babbling delirium and red black of snow blindness Jerk Line recognized Two Dog and clung to him, sobbing like a baby. While Two Dog, laughing through tears of sheer happiness, put his partner to bed in the caboose. Ten minutes after Two Dog had Jerk Line’s clothes off and had put him to bed, the freighter dropped into a heavy sleep.

Two Dog unhooked the teams, chuckling and talking to each horse as he unbuckled their harness and fastened on nose bags and hobbles.

“Yep, by gravy, it’s ol’ Two Dog come back, babies. Gol damn your gosh darned hungry hides. Know me, don’t you? I’ll tell a wet hen. Quit nibblin’ at a man’s duds. Here’s grain till hell’s no more. A extry hatful. An’ I’m tellin’ you, ponies, tomorrow is gonna come Sunday. We’re declarin’ ’er a holiday. Gotta nuss ol’ Jerk Line. He’s got ’em shore bad this time. Loco as hell. Gotta lay over an’ touch up this harness some. Looky at them bells! Gawd A’mighty, what a mess!”

“Got a sick man in yonder caboose. I’m quittin’. Yep, goin’ back to freightin’.”

“What’s them cases you’re unloadin’, Two Dog?” asked the camp tender who had replaced the Swede a few weeks ago.

“Powder,” said Two Dog grimly, as he carefully carried a case away from the wagons and placed it gently on top of a pile fifty feet away.

“Me’n’ Jerk Line has quit haulin’ powder. I aim to tell him so when he comes outa it.”

But it was none other than Jerk Line himself who grinned weakly out of his delirium, and made the flat statement that he’d never haul another ounce of powder.

“Fu’thermore, Two Dog, I’m tyin’ you up so’s you can’t quit me, never no more. I’m makin’ you half owner. Half owner, hear that, you gosh darned li’l ol’ son of a gun?”

Two weeks later the freight outfit was again in Chinook after a load. Dutch John and Big Fred and the others had held a conference. The six horse outfit was taken off the road.

“All that was wrong with Jerk Line, he was just nacherally homesick fer Two Dog. Who’d uh guessed it? Homesick!”

Once more Jerk Line Smith addressed the crowded bar at the Bloody Heart Saloon, while outside the freight team, bells and buckles shining in the sun, waited lazily.

“Mud? I’ll tell a stranger! I see’s a hat layin’ on top o’ the mud. Good hat. When I picks ’er up, danged if there ain’t a man under it.”

“‘You needn’t bother,’ says he. I’ll be out directly. I got a stout hoss under me!”

“I’ll tell a man I do, Jerk Line. It was the summer of ’81. The summer o’ the blue snow.”

Notes on the Text

This ebook was transcribed from Adventure, August 15, 1928. Spelling has been lightly modernized and obvious typographical errors corrected; see bookcove.net for details. The story is believed to be in the public domain in the United States; copyright status may differ in other countries. BookCove’s contributions to this ebook are released under CC0.