Yellowstone Kelly by Peter Bowen

Author:Peter Bowen [Bowen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Westerns
ISBN: 9781453295489
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1987-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

27

THE DUKE WAS GETTING fidgety, what with all of the songbirds around to shoot, and him without a shotgun. I had told him about the mountain goats and sheep, and he muttered that he wanted to wait until the wagons come up, as he had a special gun for that sort of work. So to pass the time he went down to the creek and tried to shoot the trout, this with a gun designed for elephants and rhinoceroses and such. The cartridges was the size of a Havana seegar. When the bullet hit the water it sent spray fifty feet in the air. He killed some fish with the concussion, and we had them for dinner. It made a nice change from the bacon and pan bread.

The main party arrived just at dusk—they had sent one of the drovers up to make sure that we were where we said we would be—and the servants and the chef scuttled around and served a splendid eight-course meal in the big double Sibley tent. One of the odds and ends being packed along was a huge “Peerless” woodburning cookstove that took four of the teamsters to lift out of the wagon that carried it.

Jack seemed in decent spirits, so I assumed that the Lady Violet was still slipping into his tent of nights. The Lady Lydia looked right through me, which as you may well guess did not upset me one bit.

Jack had a badly sprained knee, got when he was helping heave one of the freight wagons over some hump or other, so I was detailed to guide the Duke on a hunt for sheep and goats.

The Duke had a special gun, the kind that is called a Mauser needle gun. It shoots a very slender, long slug at high velocity. He had had a telescopic sight fitted to it.

The two of us took off before first light. There was an outside chance that the sheep might be feeding low down, so I told the Duke to be as quiet as possible. It was hard to see. Wisps of mist were wandering this way and that, and the rising sun gave a back-glow to the fog. I had us halt by a big meadow. The wind was right, it was coming toward us, and we waited to see if when the sun burned off the fog, anything would be feeding out there.

When the fog burned off it did it all of a sudden-like. There weren’t any sheep, but there were a couple of moose gobbling up huge mouthfuls of water weeds. Just as I turned to tell the Duke we’d have to sneak up on them, he fired. The moose raised their heads at the noise, and then went back to feeding. We crept closer. I had tethered the horses back in the lodgepole, and we were creeping through grass that was waist high and soaking wet. Going on our hands and knees got us soaked clear through in the first ten feet that we crawled.

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