Slowly at Indian trot we encircle the herd. Earlier in the evening a
prairie-wolf had pulled down a calf, and the beasts were still restless.
Little eddies of nervousness at long intervals developed here and there
in the mass--eddies that not impossibly might widen at any time with
perilous quickness to the maelstrom of a stampede. So as he rode Bunt
sang to these great brutes, literally to put them to sleep--sang an old
grandmother's song, with all the quaint modulations of sixty, seventy, a
hundred years ago:
"With her ogling winks
And bobbling blinks,
Her quizzing glass,
Her one eye idle,
Oh, she loved a bold dragoon,
With his broadsword, saddle, bridle.
_Whack_, fol-de-rol!"
I remember that song. My grandmother--so they tell me--used to sing it
in Carolina, in the thirties, accompanying herself on a harp, if you
please:
"Oh, she loved a bold dragoon,
With his broadsword, saddle, bridle."
It was in Charleston, I remembered, and the slave-ships used to
discharge there in those days. My grandmother had sung it then to her
beaux; officers they were; no wonder she chose it--"Oh, she loved a bold
dragoon"--and now I heard it sung on an Idaho cattle-range to quiet two
thousand restless steers.
Our talk at first, after the cattle had quieted down, ran upon all
manner of subjects. It is astonishing to note what strange things men
will talk about at night and in a solitude.
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