"Firemen Should Be Seen, But Not Herd"
Chapter Two
In the course of his sixteen years with the Fire Service, Hank Stanley had been forced to call upon his 'field engineering' skills on numerous occasions. Why, compared to the difficulties some of his past 'impromptu' projects had presented, the fire officer figured 'assembling a makeshift cattle corral' would be mere child's play.
The Captain had his crew remove two twenty-foot wooden ladder sections, and four fifty-foot coils of rope from their truck. Then he took two hundred-foot sections of rope from one of Big Red's side compartments and turned to go. "Follow me!" he ordered.
All five firemen began heading off down the freeway—in the direction of the roundup.
"Try ta keep up, will yah?" Chet whined, to the person tugging on the tail-end of the heavy ladder section he was toting.
"Why don't you try walking in a straight line—for a change?" Marco complained and gave his grumpy, zigzagging buddy's back an annoyed glare.
"Hey! I'm tryin' ta thread my way through a manure minefield up here."
The task was proving to be child's play, all right.
'Literally,' the Captain mused, suppressing a smile all the while. "All right. This looks good. Place your ladder sections down right here, perpendicular to the center lane, and about five-feet apart."
His crew unquestioningly obeyed.
"Fine. Now, I want you to secure the ends of those four ropes to the four sides of these ladders—right at around the last rungs. That's it," the Captain commended his men, as they again did as directed. "Okay. Mike, Roy, start stringing your ropes out. Don't stop til you've reached the shoulder of the road. Chet, Marco, you guys do the same, only, in the opposite direction. The idea is, to use the four ropes to form a giant 'V'."
"For victory. Right, Cap?" Marco Lopez lightly commented, as he obligingly began to uncoil his rope.
"Right!" the Captain replied, with an uncertain smile.
Whether they were going to be victorious, or not, was yet to be seen.
Chet started walking away, uncoiling—and complaining—all the while.
When his blood sugar dropped, Kelly had a tendency to get rather cranky.
Hank set his heavy coils of rope down and then backtracked over to where their firetruck was parked.
The Captain reached up into Big Red's cab and popped the glove box open.
Hank quickly counted out and removed six Snickers bars from his 'stash' of emergency snacks. He dropped the candy into his coat pockets, and then himself down onto the pavement.
Before heading back over to their 'cattle-pen-in-progress', the fire officer stopped to pull five, broad, leather life-belts from one of the truck's open equipment compartments.
The Captain returned and began dispensing the items he was carrying to his crew.
Chet gazed gleefully down at the snack in his right hand. "All right! Thanks, Cap!" The famished fireman then turned his attention to the object that had been deposited in his left. "What's with the belts?"
"Our corral is going to have two rails," his Captain promptly replied. "Clip the bottom rope to your belt. And, for Pete's sake, DON'T take a wrap with the rope! I want everybody to be able to unclip—in a hurry—if we have to."
Kelly looked curious. "What're you gonna do with your ropes, Cap?"
"These are what we are going to use to close the corral," Hank answered.
The five firemen stood there, in V-formation, on the freeway, manning their ropes and contentedly munching away on their Snickers bars.
Three miles further down the freeway, the sixth member of Station 51's crew finally came upon—what he hoped—was the last of the spooked—and still stampeding—steers.
A few of the critters he'd come across were limping a little and missing some hair—here and there. But, thanks to their tough cowhides, there were no cuts visible.
He snatched up his truck's dash-mounted radio's mic' and thumbed its 'send' button. "Squad 51 to HT 51…Switching to Channel 3," he advised, and turned his tuner's knob until it matched the announced number.
"HT 51," his Captain quickly came back. "Roger that, Squad 51…Switching to Channel 3."
The paramedic pressed his mic' button again. "Cap? This is John. How do you read?"
"Read you loud and clear."
"Okay, Cap, I've come across thirty-eight animals, so far. Could you ask the trucker how many head he was haulin'?"
"Thirty-eight head," his Captain replied, following a few moments of dead air space.
"Great! That means the cattle are all present and accounted for. I'm gonna start headin' 'em back your way. How's the corral comin'?"
"It's ready and waiting."
"I sure hope so," the paramedic mumbled to himself, just prior to thumbing the mic' button. "All right, Cap. John out." The vaquero got his vehicle turned around and started driving the steers back down the freeway, toward the scene of the accident.
John cursed, as one of the belligerent beasts he was dogging kept doubling back. The fireman's arms and elbows flailed wildly, as he whipped the wheel—first in one direction, and then another!
It was inevitable. Every group—be it composed of animals or humans—always seemed to contain one 'bunch quitter'.
There were drainage ditches running along both sides of the freeway.
The firemen watched the rapidly moving rescue truck's front tires disappear into one of them. A second later, the Squad bounced up out of the ditch.
Roy winced, as his partner's helmeted head impacted with the roof of the cab.
Hank winced, as the truck's occupant suddenly wrenched its steering wheel ridiculously hard—to the right, no, left—no, right. "If Charlie wants to know why the Squad suddenly needs a new front-end alignment…we didn't see a thing. Got it?…Got it?" the Captain menacingly repeated, his narrowed eyes making direct contact with Kelly's.
"I see noth-thing. I see noth-thing," Chet unenthusiastically responded, doing a stellar impersonation of 'Stalag 13's 'Sergeant Schultz'.
The guys exchanged grins.
"Cap?" Kelly continued, his glum gaze reluctantly returning to the roundup. "How come we have to stand around, holding this stupid rope, while Gage gets to wreck the Squad?"
"You operate the heavy equipment. Gage rounds up the cattle," his Captain calmly replied. "It's the way of the world."
"Yeah. But operating heavy equipment requires skill. Anybody can drive around in circles."
"Oh? Really?" Hank's helmeted head slowly swung back in the complainer's direction. "How many 'Cutting and Roping' trophies do you have settin' on the top of your bookcase, Kelly?"
"Chet doesn't even have a bookcase," Mike Stoker teased, when Kelly failed to reply.
Chet gave each of his chuckling chums an annoyed glare. "I do so got a bookcase—and there's a trophy settin' on it, too."
"Yeah," Marco bemusedly concurred. "For winning a Demolition Derby—back when you were a senior in high school."
Their Captain's eyebrows arched and his pursed lips parted. "I rest my…'case'."
"Technically speaking, what you have is a barbed wire case," Mike continued to tease.
"Golly be'll, Mikey," Kelly drawled back. "You ornery old scudder, you. Why, you're antsier than a gal with a big ole bee in her bonnet."
"Who's that supposed to be?" Mikey wondered, struggling desperately to keep a straight face. "Gomer Pyle?"
"Festus Hagen," Kelly smugly informed him.
"Figures," Stoker stated, sounding even smugger. "The onliest thing Kelly knows about herding cattle comes from what he's seen on 'Gunsmoke'."
"Not just 'Gunsmoke'," Kelly corrected. "I watched 'Rawhide', 'Bonanza', 'Lancer', 'Cimarron Strip' and 'The High Chaparral', too, yah know!"
His firemen friends remained highly amused—and most unimpressed.
"Would yah look at him go!" Lopez exclaimed, as Gage shot across the freeway, through another drainage ditch and then drove slantingly down one of the steep grassy slopes, to head an escaping steer off at the pass—er, the overpass. "Did you see that? It's almost like he knew what that cow was thinking!"
"Big deal," Chet said, sounding every bit as bored as he looked. "Gage has got 'bovine brains'. So? What else is new?"
The guys exchanged grins—again.
Their Captain simply rolled his eyes.
TBC