Rodney’s squaw wife was taken in by some neighbors, good folk who were conversant with all phases of the romance. They stood by her in her hour of trial, and afterwards continued to keep her as a servant. Her son Jim grew up with their own children. When he was four years of age his mother, Singing Stream, died, and Sally persuaded her husband to take young Jim into their own home, partly as a sop to neighborly criticism, partly as a salve to her own conscience. Sally had children of her own, and looked at things differently now from the time when she fought the squaw for Rodney’s favor.
Jim’s foster-parents were, in truth, glad to part with him. From his earliest babyhood he had been known as a “limb of Satan.” He was an Ishmael by every instinct of his being. And Mrs. Warren Rodney, née Tumlin, felt that in dealing with him, in her capacity of step-mother, she daily expiated any offence that she might have done to his mother.
Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—a consolation imported from her former home—and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a little, he raised a little stock, and he drank a great deal of whiskey. Sally hated the Black Hill country. She felt that it knew too much about her. The neighborly inquisition had fallen like a blight on the family fortunes. A vague migratory impulse was on her. She wanted to go somewhere and begin all over again. By dint of persistent nagging she persuaded her husband to move to Wyoming, then in the golden age of the cattle industry. Those were days when steers, to speak in the cow language, had “jumped to seventy-five.” The wilderness grew light-headed with prosperity. Wonderful are the tales still told about those fat years in cattle-land. It was in those halcyon days of the Cheyenne Club that the members rode from the range, white with the dust of the desert, to enjoy greater luxuries than those procurable at their clubs in New York.
Nor was it all feasting and merrymaking. A heroic band it was that battled with the wilderness, riding the range with heat and cold, starvation and death, and making small pin-pricks in that empty blotch of the United States map that is marked “Great Alkali Desert” blossom into settlements. When the last word has been said about the pioneers of these United States, let the cow-boy be remembered in the universal toast, that bronzed son of the saddle who lived his little day bravely and merrily, and whose real heroism is too often forgotten in the glamour of his own picturesqueness.