“Is the excitement all over?” Charlie Shaw asked, grinning. “Guess I’ll go put mycaballoin the barn. I’ll go back an’ cut my string this afternoon.”
“Round-up over?” Nona asked.
She had put one arm protectingly about Alice Snell. That disturbed young woman, her tawny hair in a tangle, her cheeks tear stained, stared at Rock. Her eyes expressed complete incredulity, surprise and a strange blend of grief and wonder.
Charlie nodded. “Glad, too,” he said. “Hope you don’t send me with that outfit this fall.”
“Some one will have to go,” Nona said dispiritedly.
“Oh, well!” Charlie shrugged his shoulders and took his horse away to the stable. Nona led Alice inside. Rock stood his rifle against the wall and sat down on the porch steps to roll a smoke. He found the fingers that sifted tobacco into the paper somewhat tremulous. Odd that a man could face a situation like that with cold determination and find himself shaky when it was all over. Rock smiled and blew smoke into the still air. He could see the teams plodding in the hayfield. The whir of the mower blades mingled with the watery murmur of the river. A foraging bee hummed in a bluster of flowers by his feet. Except for these small sounds, the hush of the plains lay like a blanket, a void in which men and the passions of men were inconsequential, little worrying organisms agitated briefly over small matters, like flies on the Great Wall of China.
He sat there a long time. Charlie came back and went into the bunk room. Rock saw him stretch out on a bed. Good kid—loyal to his friends and his outfit. What a mess there would have been if a fight had started. Like the Alamo. Two of them intrenched behind log walls, and thirty angry men in the open, spitting lead. Alice Snell must certainly have thought a lot of Doc Martin. Rock could see the look on Buck Walters’ face when she flung her scornful epithets in his face. Funny about Doc and Nona Parke and Elmer Duffy. Not so funny, either. Hearts were caught on the rebound. Alice Snell was worth a second look. Passionate, willful, beautiful. Her fingers had clutched his arms with a frenzy of possession, when she pleaded with him to get away from danger. She was certainly capable of loving.
Nona came out. She, too, sat down on the edge of the porch near him. She stared at the haymakers, off down the river, where that hanging squad had departed, up at the banks where the plains pitched sharp to the valley floor.
“Isn’t it peaceful?” she said absently.
“Yes, by comparison. Sweet Alice calm her troubled soul?”
“How can you joke about it? I made her lie down. She’s in a terrible state—all on edge. I didn’t think she was like that.”
“Like what?” Rock inquired.
“I didn’t think she had it in her to feel so much about anything. She’s heartbroken,” Nona said. “Doc, it appears, meant a lot to her. She just babbles about him.”
“Everybody seems to know that but you,” Rock told her.
“I don’t understand it,” Nona said slowly. “Doc—oh, well, I guess he made love to her, same as he did to me.”
“You blame him?” Rock inquired. “She’s attractive. Offhand, I’d say she loved this rider of yours a heap. You didn’t have any use for him except in his capacity as a cowpuncher. Sometimes, I’ve noticed, a man craves affection. If he can’t find it one place he’ll look elsewhere. Maybe he was in love with you both. You’re funny, anyhow. You didn’t want him, yourself. But it seems to jar you because he consoled himself with another girl.”
“It isn’t that,” she replied in a bewildered sort of fashion. “Why should he lie to me? Why should he quarrel with Elmer Duffy about me—make an issue of me—if—if—”
“I don’t know. I do know that I may have a man-size quarrel with Elmer, myself, now, if Buck Walters makes a few more public cracks about my run-in with Mark. Elmer’s apt to brood over that, and I’m handy if he concludes it’s up to him to get action over a grievance. And it’s likely he will.”
“What’ll you do, if he does?” she said anxiously.
“Oh, take it as it comes. There’s something fishy to me about all this upheaval. Of course I can savvy why Buck Walters wanted to get your man, Doc. Alice would be reason enough. Buck’s face gave him away. But I somehow don’t believe that’s the whole answer. Perhaps both Elmer and Buck are such honest, God-fearing cattlemen that the very idea of rustling would make them froth at the mouth simultaneously. But I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe for a single instant that Doc Martin had anything to do with any rustling whatever,” Nona declared. “I don’t care what these Burrises said, or anybody.”
“I’m not an awful lot interested in that, now,” Rock remarked thoughtfully. “It would appear from the way these fellows were ready to act that there has been rustling. Duffy wouldn’t back a play like that just to satisfy either his own or Buck Walters’ grudge. Between the Seventy Seven and the Maltese Cross, ranging around forty thousand cattle, a few rustled calves by the Goosebill don’t cut so much figure, except as an excuse for action. No; ‘there’s more in this than meets the eye,’ as Shakespeare or some other wise gazabo said once. You have lost calves, yourself.”
“Yes, I know I have, and I can’t afford to. I certainly hate a thief.”
“So do I,” Rock murmured. “Still, I don’t hate you.”
“Me?” she uttered in astonishment. Her head went up imperiously. “What do you mean?”
“You steal hearts.” Rock said calmly. “You admitted it. You told me you did, only, of course, you said you didn’t mean to.”
The blood leaped to her cheeks. It was the first time he saw her momentarily at a loss for words, embarrassed by an imputation.
“It worries me a little,” Rock continued meditatively. “You may steal mine. Of course, you don’t intend to. You hate to do it, as the fellow said when he took the town marshal’s gun away from him. But, on the other hand, you don’t care a boot if you find you’ve got the darned thing. You’re immune. And mine is an innocent, inexperienced sort of a heart. It’s useful to me. I’d be mighty uncomfortable without it. Maybe I’d better pull out while the going is good.”
“You want to quit now?” she asked. “There won’t be any more trouble, I think,” she said stiffly. “And I’m just getting used to you. I hate strange men around. Can’t you think of me as your boss instead of as a woman? Oh, dear, it’s always like this!”
Her distress was so comical, yet so genuine, that Rock laughed out loud.
“Good Lord, Nona—everybody calls you Nona, so it comes natural—I’m the world’s crudest josher, I guess,” he declared. “Say, you couldn’t drive me off this range now. I promised you, didn’t I, that if my admiration for you did get powerful strong I wouldn’t annoy you with it? Don’t you give me credit for fully intending to keep my word?”
Nona smiled frankly at him and with him.
“You like to tease, don’t you?” she said simply. “You aren’t half so serious as you look and act.”
“Sometimes I’m even more so,” he drawled lightly.
“You were serious enough a while ago,” she said. Her next words startled Rock, they were so closely akin to what had been running in his mind not long before. “If Elmer hadn’t known you, there would have been a grand battle here. You and Charlie in the bunk house. I would probably have bought into it from one of the kitchen windows. I have dad’s old rifle, and I can shoot with it probably as straight as most men. They wouldn’t have won much from us. Buck Walters and his cowboys, I don’t think.”
“What makes you think Charlie would have backed me up?” he asked curiously.
“He did, didn’t he?” she asked. “I know that boy.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Of course I was scared,” she admitted. “But that didn’t paralyze me. It never does. Do you think I’d stand and wring my hands, while a man was fighting for his life?”
“I see,” Rock nodded. “Sort of united we stand, eh?”
“Well, neither Buck Walters nor anybody else will ever take a man out of my house and hang him to a cottonwood tree if I can stop it,” she said hotly. “There is law in this Territory, if it is not very much in evidence. They don’t have to take it in their own hands in that brutal way.”
“No,” Rock agreed. “And when they do, there is a reason. I am rather curious about the real reason. As a matter of fact, speaking of law, I heard something in Benton which may be news to you. Buck Walters must have known about it, too, which makes his move seem all the more hasty. They have organized county machinery. There is to be an election in about a month for a judge of the superior court, a sheriff, a treasurer, a clerk, and a board of county commissioners. There will be no good excuse for Judge Lynch after that.”
“I’m glad,” the girl said seriously. “It’s time we were getting civilized.”
Rock laughed.
“It will take more than a set of duly elected county officers to civilize this country the way you mean. Texas is well civilized in that way, but it is still not so tame that bad men eat out of an officer’s hand. Organized law isn’t always a guarantee of peace in a country where it’s a hundred miles between ranches, sometimes. As often as not, it’s some peaceful citizen instead of a sheriff that unlimbers his gun to pacify the bad actor. Ten or fifteen years from now—— Oh, well, what’s on the program as soon as Charlie gets home with his string?”
“We’ll bring in and brand what few calves still have to be marked,” she said. “Then I wonder if you’d mind haying for two or three weeks. Charlie takes a whirl at it for me.”
“I’d do pretty much anything for you because you’re a good game sport,” Rock said quite casually. “I’m not too proud to shovel hay. I may have to do it for myself some time. I reckon I have to earn my wages.”
An odd twinkle showed in Nona’s gray eyes.
“And perhaps you’ll be able to console Alice. She says she will never go back to the Maltese Cross while Buck Walters runs it.”
“She didn’t have to go there in the first place,” Rock said. “She is her own mistress, and she has a home in Texas.”
“Well, she’s going to stay here with me for a while,” Nona said, “until she makes up her mind what to do. So you and Charlie better be nice to her.”
“Oh, I see,” Rock said. But somehow he didn’t feel comfortable about that. He wasn’t sure that he cared to be thrown too much in the company of this yellow-haired girl with the pansy-blue eyes and the come-hither smile lurking always about her mouth. He had no intention of stepping into Doc Martin’s shoes a second time.
“I expect I’d better get some dinner on,” Nona said finally. “After dinner you’d better go with Charlie when he heads for the Maltese Cross and have him show you where those work horses run. We’ll need them for this haying business.”
Rock went into the bunk room when Nona departed to cook. Charlie Shaw’s long form was still draped on a bunk, but he was merely resting.
“Gosh, I’ll get caught up on sleep when I get home,” he grumbled. “The man who rides with the Maltese Cross don’t need a bed. He’d just as well trade it off for a lantern, so he could see to catch his saddle horse before daylight.”
“We’re going to be hay diggers for a spell, you and me,” Rock informed him.
“Don’t hurt my feelin’s.” Charlie yawned. “Have a good bunk to sleep in an’ fancy home grub. Make up for all these hardships in the winter. Nothin’ to do then but play crib with Nona and take a ride to town once in a while. Say, there was pretty near something to clean up around here, wasn’t there? All will be peaceful along the Potomac now, I guess. Buck was hell-bent to string Doc to a cottonwood bough. They cleaned up the Burrises last night, so the boys said.”
“Was the Seventy Seven in on that?” Rock inquired.
“No; not even the whole Maltese Cross bunch. Just Buck and a few of his pets—the hardest nuts in the outfit.”
“Then their word was all that was plastered on Doc. No wonder Elmer Duffy wasn’t overly eager about the job,” Rock commented.
“Just Buck’s word, so far as I know,” the boy drawled. He turned on his side and eyed Rock attentively. “The other fellows just grunted.”
“Yet the whole of two outfits came along to get Doc Martin. And Elmer took Buck’s word for it.”
“Elmer didn’t love Doc exactly, no more than Buck did,” Charlie said. “An’ I guess Elmer won’t love you none, by the look of him when Buck made that crack about you gettin’ his brother. So you’re the feller that put Mark Duffy’s light out, eh? I was in the Odeon myself, once, first summer it opened. Some joint. One of the Seventy Seven men told me about ‘Big’ Duffy’s downfall. But I’d forgotten your name. He told me. I guess you don’t need to worry about any of these bad actors troublin’ you much.”
He stared at Rock with a trace of admiration.
“I don’t know, Charlie,” Rock answered. “I can’t help thinking there was more in this than just jealousy over women, or a few stolen calves. And I have a hunch you could give me an idea what therealreason was for Buck being so dead set to get Doc Martin out of the way.”
“Forget it,” Charlie counseled. “You’re a kind of a mind reader. But Doc’s dead. Let his troubles stay buried with him. I’d go all the way with Doc if he was alive and in trouble. He was a white man. I think myself that this talk about the Burris boys sayin’ Doc was in with them is pure bunk. But it ain’t our funeral now. Forget it. Buck’s wise enough to leave sleepin’ dogs lie—when they’re dead. Our job is to look out for ourselves an’ the TL an’ let the Seventy Seven an’ Maltese Cross skin their own cats.”
Farther Charlie would not go. Nor did Rock try pressing. The boy knew something. Rock suspected it was something he would like to know. But Charlie would not tell, and doubtless he had what seemed to him cogent reasons. Rock conceded that the wisdom of this youth might be sound, so he let it drop. He lay in a bunk opposite to Charlie. They smoked and chatted until the hay diggers stabled their horses for noon, and the half-breed girl called them to dinner.
After that Rock set out with Charlie Shaw to gather in a few work horses ranging by some springs over toward the Maltese Cross. The river made a bend toward the south, away below the Parke Ranch. So they cut across the bench.
Five miles out from home, Charlie, glancing back over his shoulder, spotted a couple of riders on a rise less than a mile behind them.
“Funny we didn’t see them,” he remarked. “Musta been in some low ground somewhere.”
They saw the horsemen sit motionless for half a minute or so, then drop out of sight in a hollow. A mile farther along Charlie pointed out the location of the spring, and they parted. Rock jogged along, keeping to high ground and looking for small bands of horses. A half circle of the springs brought him on the bunch he wanted. A short, sharp dash cut seven or eight TL horses off from a band of broom-tail mares and colts, and he headed them homeward, thundering down a long, gentle slope toward the river. The work horses knew the way better than he, for they knew where they were headed, as mountain cattle know where the roundup grounds lie on the flat. They ran the bench for two miles and dropped into a swale that deepened and narrowed to a ravine scarred by spring torrents. Water holes dotted the dry course of its bed. Small flats spread here and there. Willows grew in clumps. Patches of high service-berry brush made thickets.
The sleek brutes ahead of him settled to a sedate trot. Rock jogged along at their heels, whistling.
Something that felt like the sting of a giant bee struck him on the head. His horse went down under him, as if pole-axed in midstride, throwing Rock clear. And, as he fell, he saw two wisps of powder smoke, blue on the edge of a thicket. His ear had heard two shots, so close together that they were like one.
He wasn’t hurt. A heavy mat of grass on turf softened the shock of his fall. He felt no wound beyond that sharp sting on his scalp. His wits worked as usual. He lay quite still where he fell, his eyes on the place where the smoke drifted lazily. His gun was in his hand, and he was searching for movement, although he lay like a man dead. He could hear the rasping death rattle in his horse’s nostrils. The beast sprawled on its side a few feet away, a convenient bulwark if he should need one. He noted thankfully that it lay left side up, the carbine scabbarded under its stirrup leather unharmed. The varnished stock pointed toward him invitingly. But he dared make no move toward it as yet.
Inert as a log, both hands clasped on the butt of his Colt, Rock waited for the ambush to show. He depended on that. They would want to be sure. Presently his stratagem and patience were rewarded. A hatless head took form in the edge of the brush a matter of thirty yards distant. Still Rock waited. Another face joined the second. After a time one extended a hand. Rock could see the gun muzzle trained on his prone body, as his own eye lined the foresight on a spot slightly below that extended arm.
Rock fired. That lurking figure in the brush must have pulled trigger in the same breath, for a bullet plowed dirt in the region of Rock’s breast. But the man spun and staggered clear of the brush, waving his arms, reeling. He was a fair mark now, and Rock fired again.
The other had vanished. Rock lay waiting. He was in the open, true, and the second man secure in tall thickets. But all about him stood heavy grass. He knew that very little of his body was visible, so long as he did not move.
“One bird in the hand and another in the brush,” he exulted.
Crimson trickled in a slow stream into one eye and spilled over his cheek. He wiped it away. That first shot had grazed his scalp. That troubled him very little. That second assassin, still lurking in the thicket, troubled him much more. And at that instant he heard the quick drum of hoofs.
Rock knew precisely how far that thicket of berry brush extended. Their saddle horses would be tied in that. Whether the second man was scared, or merely acting on the prudent theory that he who shoots and rides away will live to shoot another day, did not matter to Rock. He wanted them both. He leaped for his carbine, snatched it, and ran for the brush. One downward glance, as he passed, showed him a dead man. The next second he was in the thicket. A few quick strides took him out the other side.
Straight for the next brush patch, over an intervening grass flat of two hundred yards, a sorrel horse was stretching like a hound in full flight, his rider crouched in the saddle, looking back over one shoulder.
Rock dropped flat on his stomach, propped his elbows, and drew a bead. He hated to kill a horse, but he wanted that man alive, if he could get him. The sorrel ran at a slight angle. Rock could just see his shoulder. He held for that, low on the body, just ahead of the cinch. He was a fair shot with a six-shooter, deadly with a rifle. And he was neither hurried nor excited. His forefinger tightened as deliberately as if he had been shooting at a tomato can.
The horse went down, as if his feet had been snatched out from under him in mid-air, which was precisely what Rock had banked on. His rider, sitting loose, was catapulted in an arc. His body struck the earth with a thud. And Rock ran for his man. There was no craft in that sprawl. The fall had stunned him as effectually as if he had been slung from a train at thirty miles an hour.
He wasn’t unconscious, merely dazed. But Rock had a gun in his face before he got control of his senses. And, after disarming him, Rock did exactly what he would have done with a wild steer he wanted to keep harmless. He hog-tied him, hands behind his back, one foot drawn tight up to the lashed wrists, with a hairmacarteoff the dead horse.
Incidentally, Rock examined the sorrel horse, which bore the Maltese Cross. Rock didn’t know the man and had never seen him before. He was none of the riders Rock had seen either at the Cross round-up, or in the vigilance committee that morning.
Rock stood looking down at the man reflectively, for a time. Then he took him by the armpits and dragged him over the grass back to the very thicket where the ambush had been held. He walked through to take a look at the body on the other side. Rock did not know him, either. But he took his weapons and a short search of the thicket presently located a saddled horse securely tied.
This beast also carried a Maltese Cross. Rock took him by the reins and went back to his prisoner.
The crimson stream kept trickling down over Rock’s face. He had no pain except a burning sensation on the top of his head, but the crimson flow annoyed him. He finally hit upon the expedient of stuffing the black silk handkerchief which he habitually wore about his neck, into the crown of his hat, adding thereto a smaller one from his pocket. Then he jammed the crown tightly down on his head to absorb the flow. That done, he rolled himself a cigarette. Then he stood looking speculatively down at his captive.
“Are you Joe Stack or Bill Hurley?” he inquired.
“Stack,” the man grunted. He stared at Rock out of sullen eyes.
“Then I suppose that was Mr. Hurley that I downed, eh?”
The man assented with a nod. Those were the names of the two hard citizens Buck Walters kept hanging around the Cross home ranch, so Charlie Shaw had told him. Rock was not in the least surprised to find his guess correct. Men who had acquired notches on their guns in the South were not usually averse to adding more notches when they drifted North—either for profit or satisfaction.
“Well, you took on a contract,” he said. “And you have fallen down on it. I am going to tell you a few things, Stack, then I am going to ask you some questions. You’re a Texan. Did you ever hear of Steve Holloway who was a U. S. marshal at Abilene for a spell? I expect you did. He cleaned out a nest of outlaws up in the Childress country, where I understand you made yourself a reputation. Steve was my father. Then there is Tom Holloway, who is a captain in the rangers. ‘Long Tom’ they call him. He’s an uncle. Then there’s Ben Holloway who owns the Ragged H down on Milk River, not so awful far from this neck of the woods. He’s a cousin of mine. There are other Holloways scattered here and there west of the Mississippi. Most any one of them would go a long way to shoot a skunk, especially of the two-legged variety. I’m something like that myself. You were sure hunting big game when you camped on my trail. Did you know it?”
The man didn’t answer. But the look of apprehension in his eyes deepened.
“And Buck didn’t tell you? Maybe he didn’t know, himself,” Rock said. “Now, why did Buck Walters set you to kill me the way he got Doc Martin killed? Will you answer me that?”
“You got me foul,” Stack muttered. “I tried to get you, an’ you got me, instead. But I ain’t talkin’.”
“No?” Rock said very softly. “Well, I was raised in an Apache country, Stack. I expect I canmakeyou talk.”
He turned away with a frown. No use wasting words. All about in the thicket were dry twigs, dead sticks. He gathered an armful of these, broke them up into short lengths, and dumped the lot by his prisoner. He took out his knife and whittled a lot of shavings. Once he stopped to roll another smoke.
“Don’t you reckon you better talk, Stack?” he suggested.
The man’s mouth shut in a tight line.
Rock lit the fire with the same match he used for his cigarette. When it began to crackle briskly he laid hold of the boot on Stack’s free foot and jerked it off. The man’s face went livid. For a second he struggled in a momentary panic, then lay still, his face gradually turning ashy, little beads of moisture breaking out on his forehead.
Rock addressed him quite casually.
“I want to know just why Buck Walters is so anxious to have me killed off. I want to know what sort of skin game he is working on the Maltese Cross, and how he works it. I want to know why he was so eager to hang Doc Martin when he thought he had failed at bushwhacking him. You know why, I am pretty sure. Cough up what you do know.”
“I don’t know nothin’ except that Buck offered me and Hurley five hundred dollars to put your light out. That’s all I know.”
“You are lying,” Rock said. “I will jog your memory a little, I think.”
With a jerk he drew the man close to the fire and thrust his foot at the small, hot blaze. Stack jerked his knee up. Rock put his spurred foot on that cocked knee, forced it down, and stood on it with all his weight. The heat made a singeing smell rise from the man’s sock. His eyes bulged. He set his teeth in his under lip. Rock stood over him, holding him helpless. Outwardly Rock was hard and merciless, but inwardly he felt his stomach turning. He hated the thing he had set his hand to. It was a contest of a sort between his fundamental humanity, his sense of decency, and the nerve of this cowardly assassin. And Stack weakened a trifle before Rock felt he could go no farther with that fiery ordeal.
“Oh!” Stack groaned. “Let up! I’ll tell you.”
Rock kicked the glowing coals aside. His own face was white.
“Spill it all,” he snarled. “I know enough to tab you if you try to stall.”
For the next ten minutes words tumbled out of Stack in short, jerky sentences. Here and there Rock put a question.
“An’ that’s all I know,” Stack gasped at last.
“It’s enough—plenty,” Rock said. “I’m tickled to death you waylaid me to-day.”
“What you goin’ to do with me?” Stack muttered, as Rock stood over him in brooding silence.
“If I were some people I know you’d never get out of this draw alive,” Rock said. “You certainly have it coming. I’m not just sure I ought to turn you loose.”
“All I want is a chance to get a long ways from this country now,” the man declared.
“I wonder what Buck Walters would do to you if you went to him and told him I pried all this out of you?”
“I ain’t crazy,” Stack protested. “You turn me loose, an’ neither you nor Buck Walters’ll ever see me for the cloud of dust I’ll raise foggin’ it to Idaho or Oregon, or some place a long ways from the Marias River. I know when I got enough.”
“I expect that would be your best move,” Rock agreed.
He bent over Stack and undid the rope. The man sat up, rubbed his foot gingerly, and drew on his boot.
“Now,” Rock said sternly, “people like you sometimes say one thing and do another. You may change your mind, once you get hold of a gun again and get a horse between your legs. You may figure you’d like to get even with me. I am not letting you go out of sympathy. I haven’t time to bother with you, or I would take you to Fort Benton and throw you in the calaboose and land you eventually in the pen. But I am after Buck Walters—not small fry. It is not going to be healthy for him nor any of his crowd around here very soon. So, I will make you an offer and give you a piece of advice. The offer is that if you will walk out in plain sight on the hill, in about an hour, I will give you back this horse. The advice is that you mount him, head south, and keep going.”
Stack rubbed his wrists where the hair macarte had sunk deep in his flesh.
“That suits me down to the ground,” he said. “I don’t never play in a losin’ game if I get a chance to draw out. You needn’t worry about me changin’ my mind. I don’t want none ofyourgame, no more. But I got stuff at the Maltese Cross I’d like to have.”
“Buck Walters is too clever for a man like you,” Rock declared. “He would get out of you what has happened before you knew where you were at. And I don’t want him to know. He’d probably end up by throwing a bullet into you.”
“Maybe. Only I don’t think he’d be there at the ranch,” Stack declared.
“What makes you think that? Where would he most likely be.”
“I have only got a hunch,” Stack said slowly. “But I think he’s goin’ North for a spell, with a hand-picked crew.”
Rock considered this gravely.
“Look,” Stack offered. “I ain’t hankerin’ to take a chance with Buck. I don’t see nothin’ in this country for me no more, nohow. Can’t you stake me to an extra horse, a bed, an’ some grub? Then I can light right out.”
“You’ve sure got gall,” Rock said coldly. “To ask me to stake you to anything after trying to kill me.”
“Well, long as I’m alive I got to eat,” the man retorted. “I got some money on me, but it might be quite a ways to another job.”
Rock regarded the man for a moment. He was not moved by any feeling of kindness. Stack was a gunman whose services were for sale to the highest bidder. He would kill for money, and he would kill for lack of it. There was nothing of loyalty in his make-up. He would embark on desperate undertakings without any personal rancor toward his victims. And he would desert with as little compunction if the game didn’t seem worth the candle.
Stack had had enough of Rock Holloway. To save his feet from being toasted, he had divulged information which made northern Montana no place for him. He had blood money in his pocket. With a horse under him, a dead running mate behind him, he would leave for new fields, where his peculiar talents might find suitable employment. Buck Walters would be a long time finding out what had become of his two thugs, if this one had a horse, a blanket, and a little food to start him on his journey.
“You don’t get no extra horse,” said Rock. “I’ll bring you back this one. A Maltese Cross horse is as good for you to ride out of the country as any. I’ll stake you to a blanket and a little grub. You can take it or leave it.”
“You’re the doctor,” Stack agreed indifferently. “I’d like another cayuse, but if you ain’t got one to spare——” He shrugged his shoulders in acceptance of those terms.
Rock swung into the saddle and left him. He had all the guns. He galloped down the ravine after Nona Parke’s work stock, picking them up where they had stopped to graze, half a mile below. He had to haze them into the ranch, catch a fresh mount, secure the things he had promised Stack, and return here.
After that—well, riding fast toward the Marias, with an ache beginning to make his temples throb, Rock could still smile with anticipation. It was worth a sore head. He would very soon have a weird tale to relay to Uncle Bill Sayre in Fort Worth. He would surprise that estimable banker. And it was not impossible that he might surprise Buck Walters even more in the immediate future.
Rock staved off Nona Parke’s agitated questions when he asked for food. He robbed his own bed reluctantly, but a promise was a promise, apart from his desire to have Stack out of the country between dusk and dawn. The blood on his face and the strange sight of him riding a Maltese Cross horse stirred Nona to a curious pitch. But Rock moved fast, told her nothing, and got away again.
He made the round trip in an hour. As he drew up on the brink of the ravine, Stack walked up to meet him, carrying on his back Rock’s saddle which he had stripped from the dead horse.
“I reckoned you’d want this,” he said genially.
Rock sat on his own horse, watching the man ride away. Stack headed south. As far as Rock could see him, he bore straight for Fort Benton. He would never turn back, Rock felt assured. Stack had shot his bolt. There was a certain strange relief in that. He marveled at the queer compound of savagery, cupidity, cunning and callousness that characterized such a man. They were rare, but they did exist.
Stack admitted that Hurley had shot Doc Martin. He admitted that he and Hurley were to share five hundred dollars for ambushing Rock. He didn’t seem to have any emotion about it, except a mild shame over his failure. He didn’t seem to regard Rock with anything except a grudging admiration for beating him at his own game. Owning himself beaten, he withdrew. And, at that, Rock muttered to himself, Stack had nothing on Buck Walters when it came to vileness and treachery.
Rock turned his horse and rode homeward, reaching the TL about supper time. He was tired. His head ached intolerably, now that the bleeding had ceased. When he took off his hat and removed the handkerchief compress, he could feel the slash cut by that bullet. A quarter of an inch lower! By such narrow margins chance operates. Rock sat on the side of his bed, wondering if he should wash and bandage that wound. Now he began to fear that it might give him a good deal of trouble. He hoped not, because, unless he had guessed wrong, some rapid-fire action lay ahead of him. And while he pondered thus, Nona walked into the room.
He scarcely remembered how he had accounted to her for the crimson stains on his face. But her quick glance took in the discolored handkerchief and the matted brown hair. She stood over him with a worried look.
“Youarehurt,” she said. “What happened?”
“Fellow took a shot at me—one of Buck Walters’ men. Keep that under your hat,” he warned. “It’s only a scratch.”
She bent over his head and parted the hair with gentle finger tips.
“It isn’t bad,” she murmured. “But it must be painful. And it ought to be cleaned. I’ll get some stuff and dress it.”
She returned in a minute with a basin, scissors and carbolic acid. Very deftly she snipped the hair away from about the wound, cleaned it with a solution that burned like fire, and drew the edges together with a patch of court-plaster. Then she sat down on the bed beside Rock and said earnestly:
“Now tell me about it.”
“Nothing much to tell,” Rock demurred.
“You mean you won’t?”
“Not just now,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you, anyway. Buck seems to want me out of the way. I am quite a bit wiser about things than I was this morning, but I still have a few guesses coming. There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t let on to any one that I have been shot at. I will say a horse fell with me and cut my head.”
“But it does worry me,” she protested. “I feel uneasy. Something’s got to be done about this, if a man riding for me can’t go anywhere except in danger of his life.”
“Something is going to be done about it,” Rock assured her. “Darned quick, too! It isn’t because I am riding for you. It is because I am supposed to be dangerous, just as Doc was dangerous for something he knew or guessed. He was foolish enough to tip his hand to Buck. I am not going to talk. I’m going to get busy. All you can do is to wish me luck.”
“I do,” she murmured. “I wish the Maltese Cross had never come into this country.”
“In that case I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “And I’m darned glad I came.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Oh, lots of reasons.” Rock smiled. “I’ll tell you some of these days, when the dove of peace spreads her wings across this part of the world.”
“I wish you’d tell me,” she begged. “I hate mysteries. I’m getting so I go around here with my heart in my mouth, wondering what terrible thing will happen next.”
“I don’t think anything more will happen around this ranch,” Rock declared. “I’m the center of this trouble, and I’m going to take myself away from here—for a while. But I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be sorry to see you go,” she whispered. “But perhaps it’s best, if you are going to be ambushed at every turn.”
She looked down at the floor frowningly for a few seconds. Rock stared at the curve of her neck, the scarlet twist of her lips, the dark cloud of hair, and a queer breath-taking sensation stirred in him, an almost uncontrollable impulse to draw her up to him. He shook himself. Why the devil should a woman have that effect on a man? And Nona seemed to be unconscious of it—even to be irritated by the manifestation of a feeling she was the factor in arousing.
Nona got up. She looked at him with such frowning composure that Rock couldn’t meet those level gray eyes. It seemed to him they read him through and through.
“Come along to supper. It’s all ready,” she said.
Rock shook his head. “Don’t feel like eating,” he replied. “After a while I’ll have a cup of coffee, maybe; but not just now. Will Charlie be back to-night, I wonder?”
“I think so.”
“I’m going to pull out at daylight,” he told her. “If I am gone before you get up, so long.”
“I’ll be up,” she said briefly and left him.
Charlie Shaw came jingling his spurs across the porch at sundown.
“Did Buck have anything to say to you while you were at camp?” Rock asked.
“Didn’t see hide nor hair of him,” Charlie replied. “He took one of the wagons, about half his crew, a bunch of saddle stock, and pulled his freight as soon as they all got back from that session here this mornin’. So the boys told me.”
“I thought the spring work was all over,” Rock commented.
“It is.”
“Nobody know where Buck headed for?”
Charlie shook his head.
“I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut,” Rock said, “that he took with him only his special pets.”
“You’d win your bet,” Charlie growled. “I didn’t count noses, but the hard pills were among the missin’. How’d you guess?”
“‘Birds of a feather.’” Rock quoted the old proverb. “I’m leaving you, myself, in the morning, Charlie.”
“What for?” Charlie inquired.
“Well, for public consumption.” Rock smiled. “I’m pulling out because I find life here much too exciting. I don’t like vigilance committees and private wars. Privately, between you and me and the gatepost, I’ll be back before long. And I’m coming back with bells on.”
Charlie frowned.
“Kinda hate to see you go,” he said. “But I guess you know your own business best.”
“Did Doc Martin ever tell you about finding a set of corrals with a branding chute, tucked away somewhere in the Sweet Grass?”
“Hell!” Charlie exclaimed. “How’d you findthatout?”
“Did he tell you where they were?”
“No,” Charlie shook his head. “He didn’t tell me nothin’. If he’d kept as close a mouth to everybody as he did to me, he’d be alive yet, I guess. I know he did, that’s all.”
“And he made some sort of crack at Buck about this, didn’t he?” Rock hazarded. “After that the fireworks began.”
Charlie nodded.
“Doc was awful outspoken when he got his back up about anything,” he said. “Buck tried to horn him away from the Maltese Cross on account of Alice, I guess. They had words about it. Nobody was around to hear what was said, but Doc told me he put a bug in Buck’s ear about range bosses with ambitions to get rich off the outfit they worked for. I asked him if he meant that Buck wanted to grab Alice an’ the outfit, with a parson’s assistance, an’ he just grinned. I told him if he knew anything he better keep his mouth shut where Buck Walters was concerned. Been better for him if he had.”
“I wish he had, too,” Rock said. “He’d be alive now, and he’d be darned useful. I got ideas about Mister Buck Walters, myself.”
“How?”
“Better not be too curious, kid,” Rock advised. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Better you aren’t mixed up in anything. Nobody aims to hang you to a cottonwood, or bushwhack you in some lonely coulee. I only asked you about these mysterious pens to check up on something I found out. If you don’t know, of course you can’t put me wise.”
“Have they got anything to do with us bein’ shy a few calves this spring, d’you suppose?” Charlie asked thoughtfully. “Because, if it has, I might get mixed up in it yet. I don’t know as I’d sit tight an’ keep quiet if I thought anybody was rustlin’ off Nona. She needs all she’s got.”
“That I don’t know, yet,” Rock said frankly. “I can tell you this much, Charlie: If there is any connection between what I know and suspect and Nona’s missing calves, she’ll get ’em back with interest.”
“Gosh! You sure got me goin’,” Charlie grumbled.
“Don’t let it get away with you,” Rock told him. “Keep mum. I’ll be back here again, by and by. If anybody inquires about me, say I quit the Marias because there was too much high life around here to suit me.”
The boy grinned and said no more. In an hour the TL was severally and collectively asleep. It seemed to Rock that he had no more than closed his eyes before they opened again at the first streak of dawn. He had caught up his two horses the night before. Now he went down to the stable to feed them. A lot of miles lay ahead of those ponies. When he came back to the house, smoke streamed from the kitchen chimney, and Nona was making coffee and slicing bacon. The two of them were the only souls astir. It was still an hour and a half before the regular rising time.
“You didn’t have to get up at this unearthly hour,” Rock protested.
“I heard you, and I didn’t want you to go away without your breakfast,” she said.
“For a fellow that has no use for men,” Rock teased, “you are awful darned good to them. You’d make an excellent wife for a ranchman.”
“I am a pretty darned good ranchman myself, without being a wife, thank you, Mister Holloway,” she retorted.
“You won’t escape forever,” he told her. “Some of these days somebody will spread a wide loop and snare you.”
Nona slid three strips of bacon on a hot plate and set it before him, with a toss of her head.
“Men,” she said disdainfully, “seem to think that a woman’s chief business in life is to be captured by some man.”
“Well,” Rock said between mouthfuls, “when you stop to consider it, isn’t it? It seems that way, when you think of it.”
“Fiddlesticks!” She laughed. “That may be some women’s ambition, but not mine.”
“It isn’t an ambition,” Rock murmured. “It’s just human nature. You ask Alice. When you get to be a cattle queen, you’ll find yourself a heap more interested in men than you are in cows. You’re darned haughty about this poor worm man, right now. Your father was a man, old girl, and I expect your mother was glad of it.”
Nona stared at him, half astonished, half amused.
“I don’t know whether you’re preaching,” she said artlessly, “or drumming up trade for a matrimonial bureau.”
“Neither,” Rock said. “Just thinking out loud, that’s all.”
He rode up to the house and, dragging out his bed, lashed it across the black horse. Sangre stood shaking his glossy head, with the white star. Rock swung up. He hesitated a second. He wanted to say good-by, and still—— Then Nona came out of the kitchen with a package in her hand.
“Here’s a lunch,” she said. “You didn’t say where you were going, but if it’s an all-day ride a bite will come handy.”
“Thanks!” He tucked it in a saddle pocket. “Well, here’s hoping there’s no more excitement around here till I come back, Nona. And if I don’t come back, you’ll know it’s because I can’t, not because I don’t want to.”
“You’re not going on the warpath after Buck Walters, are you, Rock?” she asked uneasily. “Please don’t. It isn’t worth while. A man like that always gets what’s coming to him. Let him be.”
“I’m going on the warpath, but not the way you mean,” Rock answered. “I am not going after anybody with a gun in my hand and blood in my eye. Not yet. Listen! Let me whisper something in your ear.”
Nona stood beside Sangre, one hand resting on the red horse’s curved neck. Rock bent down as if to whisper. And when Nona turned her face up, he kissed her lightly on the red mouth that was beginning to haunt him and to trouble him wherever he went, very much to his dismay.
And when she drew back with startled eyes, Rock touched his horse gently and rode away without a backward glance. If he looked back, he would turn back, whether to apologize or plead, he could scarcely say. For a young man who had always been rather egotistically sure of himself he found his breast filled with a strange commotion.
“That,” he sighed at last, with a backward look into the Marias Valley from the south bank, “is sure a hell of a way for a fellow to treat a girl that got up at daybreak to get him his breakfast. Well, I guess it’s either kill or cure.”
As the sun rose, a hot ball in the east, flinging its careless gold over the bleached grass, that rolled away to limitless horizons, and Rock gradually left that familiar, pleasant valley far behind, he thought less and less of that unpremeditated kiss and more and more of the business in hand. He had set out on what seemed a mad undertaking, but there was method in his madness.
He came down to the bed of the Missouri and into the streets of Fort Benton shortly after noon. He let his horses rest and munch hay in a livery stable for three hours. Then, with a little food tied on his pack, he embarked on the ferry and so gained the southern shore, whence ran the great freight trails to the Judith Basin and farther to towns along the Yellowstone, threaded like forlorn beads on that steel string which was the Northern Pacific Railway.
His specific destination was Billings, two hundred miles in an air line southeast. But first he turned aside into the rich grazing lands of the Judith Basin to find Al Kerr of the Capital K. It was a far cry to the Odeon and Clark’s Ford on the bleak plains of Nebraska. But Rock was riding into the Judith to draw on a promise the little man had made him that night under the stars.
He forged southeast all that afternoon, picketed his horses overnight by a rippling creek, wiped the dew off his saddle at dawn, and rode again—rode at a jog trot, hour after hour. He met a stage and held converse with the driver, passed on and came to a stage station on that rutted artery of travel to Lewistown. Here a hostler gave him specific directions. And at sunset he rode into the home ranch of the Capital K. The first man that hailed him was Kerr himself.
“Well, well, well,” Kerr said. “You have shore been a long time gettin’ around to pay a sociable call.”
“Can you stake me to two horses in the morning?” Rock asked, after they had exchanged greetings. “I got to hotfoot it on to Billings early.”
“Sure,” Kerr said. “Give you the best we got.”
They sat up late that night, talking. The Capital K had taken over a lovely valley watered by a shining stream, bordered by natural meadows. Kerr had concentrated all his cattle there. They swarmed by tens of thousands over a radius of forty miles. The little man was well content. He would move no more. He had preëmpted a kingdom, and there were no more worlds to conquer. He had built a substantial house and brought his family from Texas for the summer. But, beyond these visible evidences of prosperity, he didn’t talk much about himself. Rock’s story engrossed all his attention. And to the tentative, provisional request with which Rock ended, he gave hearty assent.
“Sure, I will,” he declared. “Hell, I’d do it like a shot, just on your own account. As it happens, I know Uncle Bill Sayre darned well. He loaned me twenty thousand dollars on my unbacked note, one time. I had a speakin’ acquaintance with Dave Snell, too. You go on to Billings and get word to him. Once you get back here I can throw an outfit together for you in a matter of hours. I have saddle horses to burn. An’ I got men that’ll foller you to hell and back again. By gum, that’s some formation up there, if you got it figured right. Same old story—the beggar on horseback. What a fool that man is. Ain’t satisfied with a good thing. Tryin’ to grab the earth, regardless.”
“It may be covered up so that it’ll be hard to get at him personally,” Rock said. “But if I can make sure of the Steering Wheel, I can force his hand. It looks air tight, but there’s always a weak spot in that sort of undertaking you know.”
“You watch he don’t dynamite you. He may have a joker up his sleeve as well as an ace in the hole,” Kerr warned. “I have heard of Buck Walters plenty down South. He’s a smart man. He’s got to be that an’ a cattleman, besides, or he’d never got in so strong with Dave Snell. If you get the goods on him, don’t give him a chance—the dirty dog. Gosh, a man that hires his killin’ done is lower’n a snake in the bottom of a forty-foot well.”
Rock chewed a pencil butt until it looked as if it had been mouthed by an earnest puppy. He wrote and erased the length and breadth of half a dozen telegraph forms before he evolved a suitable communication. And finally he thrust the lengthy message through the wicket at the operator. The man pawed over the sheets.
“All one message?” he asked incredulously.
“One message,” Rock assured him.
He counted the words.
“Gee whiz, partner, that’ll cost you a young fortune,” he said in a tone compounded of surprise and awe. “That ain’t a telegram. It’s a letter.”
“Send her just the same,” Rock requested. “And get it on the wire as soon as you can. How long will it take to get an answer?”
“Depends. It’ll have to be relayed from St. Paul to Chicago and then to Fort Worth. With close connections and your man on the job at the other end, maybe four hours, maybe twelve, maybe longer.”
“Is there any way I can get quick action?” Rock asked. “It’s darned important. Time is money.”
“Gosh, money is certainly no objection to nobody that sends two-hundred-word telegrams,” the man replied. “I might ask the St. Paul office to rush it if they can.”
“Look!” Rock laid a ten-dollar gold piece on the counter. “That’s to grease your axles. Go as far as you like to get that message hurried. Shoot her quick. I’m going to the N. P. Hotel and turn in. The clerk can tell you my room number. You get the answer to me hot off the griddle when it comes. If I’m asleep, wake me up.”
The operator grinned, as he pocketed the ten. “I’ll get you all the action there is,” he promised.
Rock dragged himself across the street, too tired to seek a restaurant, despite his hunger. Within twenty minutes he was fast asleep, at three in the afternoon. Billings went about its daily affairs. The sound of rattling wagons in the street, the voices of men, the intermittent bang of carpenter’s hammers and the whine of saws floated in through his open windows on the hot summer air. These sounds receded and died away, powerless to break the deep slumber of weariness. Rock was really exhausted.
A pounding at his door wakened him. Dark had closed in. His room was like a cellar. For a second, in that subterranean gloom, Rock struggled to remember where he was, and why he was there. Then sleep fell away from him like a discarded garment, and he leaped up, opened the door to a man in shirt sleeves, with a green eye shade, a lantern in one hand, and a telegram in the other.
“Here’s your wire from Texas,” he said. “Just come.”
Rock ripped open the envelope.