ail and let him
kick me to death! Ain't got any grub! Ain't got--"

Irish interrupted him then with a sentence that stung. Irish, remember,
distinctly approved of himself and his actions. True, he had forgotten
to bring anything to eat with him, but there was excuse for that in the
haste with which he had left his own breakfast. Besides how could he
be expected to know that the cattle had been driven away down here, and
scattered, and that the Happy Family would not have overtaken them long
before? Did they think he was a mind-reader?

Pink, with biting sarcasm, retorted that they did not. That it took a
mind to read a mind. He added that, from the looks of Irish, he must
have started home drunk, anyway, and his horse had wandered this far of
his own accord. Then three or four cows started up a gulch to the right
of them and Pink, hurling insults over his shoulder, rode off to turn
them back. So they did not actually come to blows, those two, though
they were near it.

Big Medicine lingered to bawl unforgivable things at; Irish, and
Irish shouted back recklessly that they had all acted like a bunch of
sheepherders, or the cattle would never have been driven off the bench
at all. He declared that anybody with the brains of a sick sage hen
would have stopped the thing right in the start. He said other things
also.

Big Medicine said things in reply, and Pink, returning to the scene with
his anger grown considerably hotter from feeding upon his discomfort,
made a few comments pertinent to the subject of Irish's shortcomings.

You may scarcely believe it, unless you have really lived, and have
learned how easily small irritations grow to the proportions of real
trouble, and how swiftly--but this is a fact: Irish and Big Medicine
became so enraged that they dismounted simultaneously and Irish jerked
off his slicker while Big Medicine was running up to smash him for some
needless insult.

They fought, there in the rain and the mud and the chill wind that
whipped their wet cheeks. They fought just as relentlessly as though
they had long been enemies, and just as senselessly as though they were
not grown men but schoolboys. They clinched and pounded and smashed
until Pink sickened at the sight and tore them apart and swore at them
for crazy men and implored them to have some sense. They let the cattle
that had been gathered with so much trouble drift away into the gulches
and draws where they must be routed out of the br