Act on your own judgment. Will back any action you take. Suspected this. Coming north, first train.Sayre.
Act on your own judgment. Will back any action you take. Suspected this. Coming north, first train.
Sayre.
“Thanks. There’s no answer,” Rock told the operator, and the man left. Rock fumbled for a match, lit a lamp, and read the telegram again. It told him nothing, but it authorized him to act. Very well; hewouldact. He looked at his watch—ten thirty. He had slept seven hours. He felt fresh. He dressed. The clerk in the hotel office told him where he could find a night lunch counter. This Rock located. Fortified with ham and eggs and two cups of coffee and a cigarette, he sought the livery stable where his tired horses stood in stalls. No use depending on them to carry him back to the Capital K. He had ridden them too hard. But he had to go. Therefore, he routed out a sleepy proprietor and made a bargain with him for a rig and a driver. Twenty minutes later he was burrowing through the night, in a buggy behind a pair of slashing bays, his saddle and bed lashed on the back of the rig, and a cheerful youth driving.
Over rough roads and smooth, over stretches where no road at all marked the rolling land, nodding beside the driver, dawn found Rock looking down the northern slope toward the Judith country. They halted by a spring, grazed the team, fed them grain, and went on again. Mid-afternoon brought them to the Kerr Ranch, a hundred and ten miles in seventeen hours.
At sunrise the following morning Rock turned north once more. But this time he rode with a dozen men at his back, the pick of the Capital K, who, when Rock frankly asked them if they were willing to follow him and burn powder, if necessary, laughed and told him to lead them to it. Ahead on the trail rattled a chuck wagon drawn by a four-horse team, tooled by a capable cook. A hundred head of saddle horses, urged on by a wrangler, made an equine tail to the rolling wagon. And every man carried a rifle under his stirrup leather and a belt full of shiny brass cartridges, ready for action.
They reached Fort Benton in two days, swam their stock, and ferried the wagon. Twenty-four hours later Rock pointed his outfit down to the Marias Valley, a mile above the western end of Nona Parke’s upper fence. He sat on his horse on the rim and stared north to where the blue spires of the Sweet Grass stood like cones on the sky line. He gazed at those distant buttes with something akin to anticipation. Over there lay the solution of a problem. It might prove a battle ground, and he might draw a blank; but he did not think so. He sat there visualizing mentally what strange sights those insentient buttes had imperturbably beheld, what nefarious secrets lay darkly in some scarred ravine or mountain meadow. And, away beyond the Sweet Grass, the Steering Wheel crowd on the Old Man River had a finger in this devil’s pie. Or did they? That he would presently discover.
And, while he pondered, fretfully impatient because another night and day must elapse before he could breast the steep escarpments of the Sweet Grass, he saw a rider lope up along the river flat. His men were staking tents for the night and disposing their beds. Rock rode down the bank and crossed the flat. As he neared the camp, which already flung a blue pennant from the fire under the Dutch ovens, this rider drew near, a familiar gait and color to his mount. Presently he materialized into Charlie Shaw.
They shook hands.
“How’s everything and everybody?” Rock asked.
“Fine. Alice is still at the ranch. She ain’t so sad as she used to be. Mentions you quite frequent. Hopes you’ll blow back so she can get acquainted. You’re a brave man, she says, an’ it’s awful strange how much you look like poor old Doc. She makes Nona look at her sidewise sometimes. You was a wise man to pull out when you did.”
Rock laughed at the mischief in the boy’s bright blue eyes.
“I got other fish in the pan, right now,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to console Alice.”
“I wondered where a round-up blew in from,” Charlie said. “So I rode up to have a look. What outfit’s this?”
“Capital K from Judith Basin.”
“There ain’t no such outfit this side of the Big Muddy, that I’ve ever seen,” Charlie remarked. “That’s the Kerr outfit from Buffalo Creek, ain’t it? What do you aim to round-up over here?”
“Oh, hidden branding pens and men that hire gun fighters to shoot up other people, and such.” Rock had lowered his voice discreetly.
“You runnin’ this round-up of undesirable stock?” Charlie questioned.
“Uh-huh. Borrowed some men an’ horses from old Al, and came over here on a—— Oh, well, call it a prospecting tour.”
“I kinda suspected as soon as I seen your phiz,” Charlie murmured. “You’ll be goin’ up around the Sweet Grass for a spell, eh? You full-handed?”
Rock laughed.
“Do you crave excitement that much?” he bantered. “Don’t you reckon Nona needs you worse than I do?”
“Not for a few days. I might be darned useful to you, if you’re lookin’ for corrals in out-of-the-way places.”
“Oh, no!” Rock said. “A few days back you sung a different tune. You’re remembering things you’d forgotten. You do know something, then?”
The boy shook his head. He got down off his horse. Rock followed. There was a clear space of dusty clay by Charlie’s feet. He squatted on his spurred heels.
“Not the way you think,” he said in an undertone. His boyish face grew sober and intent. A trace of excitement warmed his eyes. “What you said that last night started me thinkin’. I got uneasy. I never did have much likin’ for Buck Walters. Too darned smooth and high-handed—too arbitrary. I got to thinkin’ that if anybody was puttin’ over somethin’ in the rustlin’ line, why should they overlook the TL? A little outfit is always safe to pick. So I organized myself the next day and whooped it up for the Sweet Grass. An’ I found that set of corrals with the brandin’ chute that Doc mentioned. I didn’t know where they were, but I worked on round-up all around the Sweet Grass last summer an’ this spring. I knew where not to look for such a thing.”
“And you found them? Did you find out anything else?” Rock questioned eagerly.
“Nothin’ to find out. The only two outfits that ever touches those hills is the Cross an’ the Seventy Seven. Neither outfit ever used those pens.”
“But they have been used?”
“I rise to remark they been used,” Charlie declared. “Used plenty—used recent. I have a hunch they’re goin’ to be used again pretty pronto.”
“Why?” Rock demanded.
“Well,” Charlie grinned, “Buck an’ six of his pet snakes are camped on a creek about five miles from them corrals—layin’ low and doin’ nothin’. An’ there’s heaps of cattle in their vicinity. An’ five riders with pack outfits an’ about forty loose horses joined ’em from the North yesterday afternoon.”
“Yesterday afternoon?” Rock took quick reckoning of the distance and the hour. “How do you know?”
“I seen ’em,” Charlie murmured. “I lay low, lookin’ at ’em. I rode all night to get home. I was out of grub, an’ between you an’ me an’ the gatepost, I didn’t want none of that outfit to catch me circulatin’ there alone. I don’t hanker to get caught in no lonely coulee all by my lonesome.”
“You couldn’t see what brand was on the horses those fellows rode in from the North?” Rock went on.
“Uh-uh. Too chancy. I pulled my freight. That bunch wasn’t there on no picnic.”
“Well, I’m going up there with these boys on a picnic party.” Rock smiled sardonically. “If you’re fond of picnics, you can come along. You’ll be welcome as the flowers in May. I may go farther North—plumb up into Canada. But first I would like to look at these mysterious corrals on the Sweet Grass. And I would like to know what Buck Walters is doing there.”
“Will I come? Say, watch my smoke!” Charlie grunted. “You might as well amble down to the ranch with me, while I collect my bed and three or four horses.”
“I don’t think I will,” Rock declined. A swift memory of the startled, indignant blaze in Nona Parke’s eyes when he stole that farewell kiss troubled him. “You can tell Nona anything you want. Better bring along your Winchester. There’s liable to be dirty work at the crossroads.”
Charlie laughed and swung up on his horse, declining Rock’s invitation to supper. He had an odd job or two to see about that evening, but he would join the Capital K with a string of horses by dusk. The two hay diggers, he told Rock, were good, reliable men, and, with Nona fortified by Alice Snell and Mary Vieux, it was all right to leave the ranch alone.
Rock smiled at Charlie’s air of responsibility when he said that. He couldn’t imagine Nona Parke being gratified at such manly solicitude for her welfare, nor of being in need of Charlie’s protection under any circumstances—according to her. But it was decent of the kid to feel that way about her, just the same. Loyalty untainted by sentimentalism. To Charlie wild horses, hard riding, moving herds, night guards, the trail, and all that vast panoramic sweep of the range, with its incidental excitements, crowded the importance of women as a part of life into the very background. And so far as Nona Parke was concerned, Rock half wished that he could say the same of himself. But he couldn’t truthfully. He was too fundamentally honest to deny the impulse behind that stolen kiss. He had ridden too much with Nona and watched her too often, with a clear consciousness of what was happening to himself. He couldn’t help it. Damn it! How could a man help his feelings?
And he shrugged his shoulders impatiently and joined his men, as the cook called, “Gru-u-b pi-i-le!” He loaded his plate with food and squatted on the ground to eat. But his mind grew busy with abstractions. Things sometimes worked curiously in harmony toward a given end, almost as if there were a design, a pattern of some sort, a definite impulse from some obscure source. He had expected to spend days seeking those hidden corrals. Joe Stack had known about them, too, but without knowing their location. They were not something Doc Martin had dreamed about. And here was Charlie Shaw prepared to lead him to the very spot.
Rock looked away to the north, coffee cup in hand, with a thrill of eagerness. He despised murder, theft and betrayal of a trust. He was hot on the trail of all three, unless he had made an error in deduction. If he were in error, he would be laughed out of Montana, and his name made a synonym for a fool, and his works would be derided on every range between the Marias and the Texas Panhandle.
But the laugh, Rock felt in his soul, would be on another man; if, indeed, any unseemly merriment should arise out of this matter, which had already cost two lives and bestowed upon him a hurt of which his chafing hatband still reminded him.
Viewed from the southern approach, the triple buttes of the Sweet Grass Hills rise like immense cones abruptly from the level of the plains. Gold Butte stands in the middle. West Butte looks toward the Rockies. East Butte faces the rising sun. Between each the prairie flowed in glades, carpeted with grass, dotted with sloughs, and threaded by aimless streams. It was, indeed, as if some whimsical giant had snatched three peaks off some distant mountain range and set them there for geologists to puzzle over.
Upon East Butte, the larger of the three and the most northerly, where the plains began to wrinkle and lift to foothills, like a grassy sea frozen into immobility, as it laved the shore of the peak, Rock camped his wagon. At daybreak, while the sun was yet merely a promise uttered by a golden haze in the east, he rode with all his men up that precipitous slope. An hour’s climbing brought them to the top, but not to the uttermost pinnacle; for that was a gray, rocky spire, where bands of mountain sheep took refuge against less sure-footed creatures. They had climbed to a shoulder that brought them under the rim rock, around to the head of the north slope.
Milk River lay a shining silver thread in its valley, with broken country extending on either hand, deep canyons and gray sage flats. They looked from this height into a foreign land, for the Canada line ran east and west, six miles below. Like a monument the Butte towered over the boundary and over a wilderness. In all the Sweet Grass country no man had as yet laid the foundation logs of a home. Within a radius of fifty miles the land was as it spread when Columbus brooded on the poop of his caraval, except that the buffaloes were gone, and wild cattle from Texas grazed where the bison had recently fed.
East Butte threw a long, westward shadow, away past its fellows. Its eastern declivities blazed yellow in the eye of a sun just clear of the horizon. The riders sat there, watching the sunbeams hunt slinking shadows out of every hollow. Birds twittered in thickets about them. The air was full of pine smells and the scent of the aromatic grass that gave the hills their name. It was cool and fresh at that sunrise hour, five thousand feet above the sea.
“Lord,” one rider drawled, “if you could marry this here grass and scenery to the Texas climate, you’d have a paradise to live in.”
Rock and Charlie Shaw had their heads together. Charlie was pointing at something.
“You can see where those three coulees come in,” he said. “There’s a peach of an open basin. A place like a park—maybe three-four hundred acres. The corrals are one side of that, under a bank, tucked in the edge of some pines. Down where you see that white clay bank, Buck Walters’ outfit was camped on a creek.”
“How close can we all ride without showing ourselves?” Rock asked.
“That depends on whether there is anybody on lookout,” Charlie told him. “If there is any monkey business goin’ on, they will have an eye peeled, you can gamble. Somebody could be lookin’ at us now, if he was rangin’ around. But we could go on a mile or so together by keepin’ in the bottom of that gulch. It’s timbered.”
They moved down into this hollow, quiet now, for Rock had explained to them that they might happen on men who would not welcome visitors. The gulch Charlie indicated made a screen for their passage. It was full of lodgepole pine, slender, graceful trees, with tufted tops like ostrich plumes. The earth was a litter of dried needles, a carpet for shod hoofs. The jingle of a spur, the faint clank of a loose-jawed bit mouthed by a fretful horse; a low squeaking of saddle leather—these were the only sounds, as they rode. Suddenly the draw ended. Grassy contours showed through a screen of timber. In the edge of that Charlie Shaw pulled up.
“It’s pretty open below here for a crowd,” he suggested.
“How far now?” Rock inquired.
“Coupla miles.”
“I don’t want to show a squad of armed men around here till I know what we’re going up against,” Rock mused. “If we got to take action, it would better be a surprise party, with us doing the surprising. I think you and me had better scout a little, Charlie.”
“I was goin’ to suggest that,” Charlie said.
“All right. You boys lay low here,” Rock ordered. “From the edge of this timber you can look down over the slope, without anybody seeing you or your horses. If we should happen to get in a mix-up, there will be guns popping. And if they pop too long and loud, you had better come running. I don’t want to stage any wild play, if it can be helped, but, if we have to throw lead to protect ourselves, we will. Otherwise, we will be back in a couple of hours at the outside. Now don’t show yourselves unless you have to. Use some judgment.”
The riders got down off their horses, stretched their legs, and rolled cigarettes. Rock and Charlie Shaw bore along in the edge of the timber. A narrow plateau, open, grassy, almost level, ran along under the low, pine-swathed ridge, where they left the riders. Off to the left a hillside lifted a stretch of jack pine and scrubby juniper. They darted across a narrow bit of open and trotted along under cover once more.
“Not far now—not so far as I thought it was,” Charlie said after a time. “I remember this place.”
In a few minutes he pulled up, lifted his face, and sniffed.
“Say, we’re right on top of them corrals,” he whispered. “An’ I’d say they was populated. Smell that?”
“Wood smoke,” Rock muttered. But he knew that with the smell of burning wood there was mingled another, more pungent odor—the smell of burning hair. He had sweated around too many branding fires not to recognize that.
“We better leave our horses here,” Charlie suggested. “Only a few steps to where we can get a look from a bank right above the pens.”
Rock nodded. They took no chances of their mounts shifting, despite the fact that every cow horse is trained to stand on dropped bridle reins, as if he were anchored. They tied them to saplings. Carbines in hand, they stole warily to a point where the thicket inched out on the edge of a drop-off. They were on a narrow bench. Behind them, like a series of huge steps, other benches rose, one above the other, to a bare grassy ridge.
From the timber they could not quite see over the brow. They dropped on all fours, crawled a few yards, crept, then crawled on their stomachs and, at last, lay peering down a sharp slope.
Rock’s eyes lit up at the activity below. The corrals were right under them. He could have cast a stone into the fire where the irons glowed. The hidden pens were built the shape of a dumb-bell. Two circular inclosures made the knobs. A chute connecting the two was the grip. Either pen would hold fully five hundred head of stock. The one nearest them was jammed with cattle.
Three mounted men worked in this uneasy mass of horned beasts, forcing them, one by one, into the chute. There, at the most constricted part of the passage, an ingenious arrangement wedged each animal fast, while through an opening in the wall of poles an artist with a running iron sent up little puffs of smoke from scorching hair and hide.
Rock couldn’t read the brands, either the old or the new ones, at that distance. He had no need. He knew as well as if he had been sitting on that fence that the brand those cattle bore when they had passed through the chute was not the mark seared on when they were frisky calves. They carried a different mark—the mark of a different owner, deftly superimposed over the first. The old brand and the new could only be what he knew they must be, because he could recognize more than one man diligently laboring in the dust and the heat.
Buck Walters was there, unmistakable in his high-crowned hat with the silver band; also, Dave Wells, long, lean and efficient. Neither was a common-looking man. Rock knew every characteristic pose and action of Dave Wells. Buck Walters loomed as distinctive. He could swear to them.
A group of saddle horses stood outside the corrals. Rock counted. Three men mounted, three working at the fire—six. Out on the flat, where the grassy basin spread like a pocket in the vast skirt of the butte, two more riders rode herd on a bunch of cattle. Eight men in sight.
“That stuff on the flat isn’t worked yet, I don’t think,” Charlie whispered. He, too, was counting noses. “So they’ll probably have a herd of rebranded stuff down the canyon on the creek. Likely be two men on herd there.”
“That makes ten. That tally all of ’em?” Rock asked.
“No, it don’t, darn it,” Charlie said. “Buck had six riders besides himself. This hombre from the North joined him with five. That’s thirteen. Coupla more somewhere. What you goin’ to do about this, Rock? We got ’em red-handed.”
“I guess the best bet is to go back and get the boys,” Rock whispered. “We got here unseen. The bunch can make it, if we go careful. Then we’ll surround these festive stock hands and see just what all this secret industry means.”
“I wonder if——”
Charlie’s wonder was cut short. He straightened out with a gasp, and the contortion of his body coincided with a sharp crack above, so close that it seemed in their very ears. Rock’s head twisted. He saw the upper half of a man’s body against the morning sky, on a bank above the brush that concealed their horses. He was drawing a careful bead on Rock with a rifle, and Rock rolled sidewise, thrusting up the muzzle of his carbine. Partly hidden in the long grass, Rock made a difficult target. Twice the lookout fired. Both bullets shaved Rock. He loosed two shots, himself, without effect, save to make the rifleman draw back. For the moment there was silence, while an echo went faintly back in the hills.
Lying flat, Rock parted the grass and looked over for Charlie Shaw. The boy had gone over the edge. His body had lodged against a cluster of wild cherry, twenty feet below. Another scalp for the enemy, Rock thought, with anger burning in him. But his wrath did not close his eyes. He saw that the men at the branding fire had dropped irons and were mounting, and that those in the corral were stepping their horses over lowered bars.
Of course they would have lookouts posted! And if that bunch of predatory thieves ever got on the bench above him, he was trapped. His own men couldn’t hear gunfire at that distance. It would be all off with him before they could buy into the game, anyway, if he had to face that bunch, single-handed, where he lay. Pretty fix! Rock gritted his teeth. He had been a little too sanguine—taken rather too long a chance. He had to move and move fast.
He began to worm himself hurriedly through the grass. Mount and ride; get out of gunshot and draw pursuit after him; decoy this enterprising aggregation right in under the guns of his own crew. Excellent! That would be a master stroke of retaliation. Rock’s nimble brain saw all this in illuminating flashes, while he moved.
The fellow above him kept firing at the quivering grass tops, shot after shot. Bullets bored into the mold beside him. He didn’t bother to shoot back. A kingdom for his horse—yes, two kingdoms! He could hear hoofs beating earth now. He found himself on the edge of the timber. Erect, four strides, a snatch at the tiedmacarte, the smack of his leg across the saddle, and he went crashing through the brush.
He was none too soon. The man above was yelling to those below. They were riding to head him off. Rock could hear the drum of their galloping. He laughed. He was above pursuit, ahead of it. Nothing, he felt confident, could gain on the rangy beast between his legs, bar accident—a badger hole, unseen in the grass, or a chance shot at long range.
The second was a chance. Because he meant to show himself—must show himself, to draw the pursuers hot on his trail right under that low ridge on which his riders lay. He did not mean to skulk in timber. They might lose him altogether, and they might possibly surround him. And he was hot with the memory of the agonized twist of Charlie Shaw’s face, as he slid over the bank.
So now he took a chance and bored into the open. Long, bare slopes slanted upward, contours that tried the wind and limb of stout horses. Behind, spread in open order, like skirmishing cavalry, riders drummed the turf. They were not so far behind that a bullet couldn’t reach him, but they were far enough to make shooting from the back of a plunging horse a futile business.
A yell arose at his appearance. Half a dozen guns barked at him. The bullets whined, as the wind whines in taut cordage. Rock kept his carbine in hand, not to shoot, but to hold safe. If his horse went down by a fluke, he wanted no broken gun stock to stand off these ugly customers.
They would kill him with a good deal of satisfaction and a certain amount of venom. For their own safety, they must. Rock looked over his shoulder. The lookout who had shot Charlie had come clear of the timber and was converging with his fellows. The day herders had quit their cattle to join the chase. The hunt was up strong. They would follow him to hell. He had spied upon their operations in that secluded hollow. Rock could imagine them confident of getting him. They had all that wild country to run him down, as hounds run down a wolf.
And when the bulk of that race was run, with a steep slope still to breast before he could thunder along that open plateau, overlooked by his own riders, Rock was not so sure that he would win. For a mile he had gained ground, had saved his mount a little, and still opened a gap. Now the gap was closing slowly, but inexorably. By the time he reached that bench, they would be close enough to throw lead. If he didn’t reach that level, they would have him on an open side hill, and they would riddle him before the firing drew his own crowd.
Very well, let the firing begin. Rock turned his carbine backward and fired repeatedly. They did not bother to reply. They were gaining, and they would shoot when they were ready. Their horses were fresh at the corrals. His mount had gone fifteen miles that morning. The brute was game. He did not falter. Head up, tail like a pennant, he took the short, steep slope with gallant leaps. But it slowed him.
The pursuit swept to the foot of the hill. It, too, slowed. Rock had reloaded his carbine. He fired at random now and drew reply, a fusillade that whistled close. Surely those Capital K riders would come alive and swoop down when they saw a dozen guns belching lead at one lone rider.
Rock’s horse scrambled panting over the brow, out on the level. Grass lifted yellow to the ridge above. Pines stood black against the sky, but never the shape of a horseman. And behind him, dangerously close, the heads and shoulders and horses of those angry thieves came over the lip of the hill. They were shooting now in a continuous stream.
Rock’s horse went out from under him, leaving him for a moment, it seemed, suspended in the air. He threw up one hand to protect that precious carbine, and fell limber, slack-muscled, by a great effort of will over instinct, ten feet ahead of his horse.
No badger hole had tripped that sure-footed beast. A bullet had done the work. He lay on his side with scarcely a quiver, a convenient bulwark to which Rock hastily crawled, and, flat on his stomach, he laid his carbine across the sweat-warm body.
A most astonishing thing happened. As his forefinger sought the trigger, that squad of riders jerked their mounts, each back on his haunches. For a moment, the extended hands holding six-shooters, seemed poised and uncertain. Two or three began to reel in their saddles. One man slid off slowly, headfirst. Then the gunfire broke loose again. But they did not charge down on Rock. He pulled, saw a man fall, drew down on another, deliberately and unhurried—smiling, in spite of the hot rage in his heart. For he knew his own men were in the fight now. Behind and above him a staccato burst of firing resounded above the nearer shooting. Pow! Pow! Rifles. Pow! Pow! Another man down. A horse spinning around and around on his hind legs, squealing with pain.
And then out of Buck Walters’ group of hesitant horsemen, who were shooting still, their horses plunging this way and that, one rider bent his head and came like a quarter horse off the mark. He didn’t shoot, and his gun hand was held stiffly straight before him. He had no great way to come—less than a hundred yards. He rode a coal-black horse with a white face, the same horse he had ridden the day he led his men to Nona Parke’s to hang Doc Martin to a cottonwood limb.
For a second, Rock held his fire. He could hear hoofbeats coming down from the pines. He saw those who had pursued him break and turn tail, shooting over their shoulders.
And this frenzied fool was coming straight at him, at Rock, at a man entrenched behind a dead horse, with a rifle in his hands.
The hate on Buck Walters’ face, the passion, and the suddenpang! pang!of his six-shooter fascinated Rock, even as he let the tip of the carbine sight settle on Buck’s heaving breast.
At twenty yards he fired. Walters straightened in his saddle. His mouth opened, as if in one last incredulous “Oh!” and he toppled sidewise.
But the black horse kept on, like a charging lion, like a cougar launched on its spring, like anything animate or inanimate that has acquired momentum beyond control. The brute was either blind or mad, or both. For one instant Rock hesitated. It seemed childish to shoot down a riderless horse. Surely the brute would see where he was going and turn aside. He had never seen anything like that. The black’s eyeballs were staring, his mouth foam-flecked with blood. Crazy. Hit perhaps. Running amuck. Rock flung up his carbine and fired. But he had waited a fraction of a second too long. The black horse loomed in the air right over Rock, and, as the bullet paralyzed him, came down in a heap, with crimson spurting from the hole Rock had drilled in the white blaze of his face.
One flying hoof struck Rock, and a tremendous weight smashed down on him. For a second or so, he seemed to be gifted with a strange, magnified awareness of all that was taking place. He could see his own men sweeping by on either side with exultant yells, firing. He could see figures prone on the grass, a couple of saddle horses galloping aimlessly, with stirrups flapping. It was all illuminated with an unearthly radiance, a light brighter and whiter than any sun that ever shone on the plains. In the midst of this transfigured reality, very strangely—wondering how that could be—he could see Nona Parke’s face, sad and troubled, but very alluring.
Then, as if some one had turned a switch, it all went black.
On the plain slanting imperceptibly toward the Marias River, a herd grazed south in loose formation, nearly a thousand head of mature cattle. All these horned beasts bore on their ribs a freshly seared brand—the Maltese Cross. Also, rather strangely, considering that the Maltese Cross home ranch lay just out of sight in the valley, taken in conjunction with this foreign brand, the four riders loafing on the fringes of the herd rode horses with a Capital K gracefully curved on each glossy shoulder.
A mile from the leaders of this herd, now occasionally sniffing at water afar, the clustered buildings of the Maltese Cross stood beside the river. In a stout log bunk house, with one door and two windows, a group of sullen-faced men sat disconsolate. The door was shut. Each window was boarded to the top, so that the interior lay in a sort of gray gloom. And, outside, by the single door and by each window stood a bored cowpuncher, doing sentry duty with a rifle in the crook of his arm.
A pleasant, comfortably furnished house of several rooms stood apart from the lesser buildings. In the center room, occupying an armchair, Rock Holloway sat with an elderly, thin-faced gentleman, who stroked a long mustache, while Rock talked.
“I would like to have got them both alive,” Rock was saying. “But Buck must have gone loco when he saw what he was up against. I expect, he concluded he would get me then and there, if it was the last act of his life. Which, of course, it was. Wells fought ’em to the last, the boys say. So we got what was left, who didn’t feel like shooting it out to the last man. And while we were at it, we brought along all these cattle they worked over—come home from the wars bringing our trophies, you might say. If you know of any Indian fighting, going on anywhere, Uncle Bill, I wish you’d tell me. I think I’d go mingle into it, so I could lead a peaceful life for a while. This last two weeks has been much too hair raising for my taste.”
“You done well,” Uncle Bill muttered. “You done damn well. My hunch was right.”
“As it happens, it don’t matter whether Wells or Walters owned the Steering Wheel,” Rock said thoughtfully. “We caught ’em red-handed, with the goods on ’em. Funny, how things work out. If I hadn’t had trouble with Mark Duffy, I’d never have seen the Steering Wheel or known there was such an outfit across the Canada line. If Buck hadn’t been so eager to shut Doc Martin’s mouth first, and then transferred his attention to me, as soon as he found I’d been with this precious outfit up North, I would not have tumbled to his game. I began to smell a rat when I saw him and Wells together in Fort Benton. When I got Stack to talk, of course, it was simple to put the whole thing together, seeing that I’d wondered just where the Steering Wheel got a whole herd of fresh-branded steers so early in the spring. All I had to do was make a few marks, like those on a piece of paper to satisfy myself. It’s an old trick—almost as old as the crime of forgery which you bloated bankers are always hounding men for. But it was well thought out, just the same. Buck was a pretty brainy man. He would have stolen the Maltese Cross blind in two or three years.”
Uncle Bill stared at a piece of paper lying on the table. Rock had made certain marks on it a few minutes earlier. To a range man the meaning was as words of one syllable to an eighth-grade schoolboy. He had demonstrated in four figures how easy it was to transform a Maltese Cross into a steering wheel. The change was easy, as both men knew, when it was a finished product on the ribs of a steer. It was a suspicion-proof job, once the hair had grown out on the worked-over brand.
“Yes, sir, you done well,” Uncle Bill repeated. “I can tell you how it started—this Steering Wheel business. I found out before I left. Buck borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars a year ago last winter on the strength of his prospects as coadministrator of Snell’s estate. He used that money to buy twelve hundred head of cattle in the Panhandle. But I hadn’t connected him up with Dave Wells or the Steering Wheel brand. The how of it, as you say, don’t matter so much now. We got to get them cattle out of Canada. My idea would be to clean everything outa that country. If Wells or Buck Walters has any kin or creditors to put in a claim, we can settle with them. Eh?”
“I’d grab the Steering Wheel, lock, stock and barrel,” Rock advised. “They may have stolen that herd in the South, for all we know. No, hardly. I told you the brands, didn’t I? That’s how you found out he bought ’em?”
Sayre nodded.
“There’s a heap to do,” he ruminated. “I have this whole darned thing on my shoulders now. Say, Rock, will you take hold here for me? You can name your own figure to run the Maltese Cross till this estate is cleaned up? Will you?”
Rock sat thoughtful for some seconds.
“I’ll tell you ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to-morrow, Uncle Bill,” he said. “Right now, I don’t know——”
He relapsed into frowning silence. After a time he said:
“I wonder if there’s a buggy around this ranch? I am too darned stiff and sore to fork a horse, and I want to go up to the Parke ranch.”
“There sure is,” Uncle Bill replied. “I drove one out from Benton. Say, Alice is up there, one of the men told me. How’d it be if I come along an’ drive you? I want to see that young woman.”
“Fine,” Rock agreed. “Kill two birds with one stone. Alice’ll be wanting to pin medals on us, I expect. She was death against Buck Walters. I don’t blame her much, seeing he killed off a boy she’d set her heart on.”
“Yes, I heard about him soon after I got here,” Uncle Bill observed. “They say he was a twin for you.”
“Quite a lot like. That resemblance got me into a heap of trouble.”
“Maybe you could console Alice,” Uncle Bill suggested hopefully. “She’s a mighty fine girl, and she is going to be a mighty rich girl.”
“No, thank you, kind sir. I ain’t marrying for either good looks or riches,” Rock murmured. “Let’s get that buggy hitched and be on our way, Uncle Bill.”
Sayre, grinning, went to call a man.
“I think them boys around the ranch are all right,” he confided to Rock, as they went rolling across the river flats. “I don’t think they are the sort Buck would mix into his nefarious schemes. Swear they didn’t know he was crooked, anyhow. So I expect we got to give ’em the benefit of the doubt.”
“Probably,” Rock agreed, with more or less indifference. He had done his job, and he was ill at ease in mind and body for the doing. Let Uncle Bill or some one else fret about the welfare of the Maltese Cross and the loyalty of its riders. He had other things on his mind just then.
“Say, Uncle Bill, although there was not much mixed stock among these stolen cattle, there was some,” Rock said, after a long time. “And this girl I’ve been working for is shy sixty or seventy calves this spring.”
“We’ll brand a hundred for her on fall round-up,” Sayre said largely. “A couple of hundred, if you say so. We’ll treat our friends right and give our enemies their due. I listened to that towhead boy rave about Nona Parke this morning. Always did admire a woman with brains to undertake things and the spunk to see ’em through. You tell her I said so.”
They fell silent. A breeze from the west played on their faces, killing the sweltering heat in that valley. A little bunch of Nona Parke’s horses tore out of a low place, snorted, and wheeled to stand, with heads high, watching them pass. The river sang its ancient crooning song, white on the riffles, dark and still in the pools that mirrored overhanging willows. Beautiful, Rock thought, peaceful, tranquil beyond words. The last time he had crossed that flat—— It made him shiver a little to remember. He was still sick from building a fire at Stack’s feet, and his head swam sometimes from pain. But that was past. The bushwhackers and hanging squads would ride no more. There had been close shaves. Yes. Perhaps the gods had flung a protecting mantle about him so that he could come back and enjoy this in restful security. He had no great pride or joy in his success; only a mild satisfaction, a relief that it was over. And he found himself afflicted with a strange mixture of eagerness and nervousness, as they drove in to the TL.
Uncle Bill drew his team to a halt by the kitchen door. A saddled horse stood there—a Seventy Seven mare. Rock got out of the buggy. Perhaps he had disposed of one enemy only to encounter another. He did not want a feud with Elmer Duffy. But who could fathom another man’s moods and tenses? And Rock was not organized for war. Still, a man must do the best he could, always.
“I’ll drive this team down to the barn and tie ’em to the fence,” Uncle Bill said. “I don’t see no ranch hands around to take hold of ’em.”
“What do you think this is? A livery stable?” Rock scoffed. Uncle Bill grinned amiably and drove on.
Rock stood, uncertain. He suspected that was Elmer’s mount, and he hadn’t come there to exchange either civilities or animosities with Elmer. He was tempted to go on to the porch and the bunk house. He could hear voices in the kitchen. But he was instinctively direct. He hated subterfuge. If Elmer Duffy was there, what did it matter? He granted the man common sense equal to his own.
He stepped, hobbled rather, to the kitchen door, for he had a very sore leg, where Buck Walters’ frenzied horse had fallen across him. A stray bullet had furrowed a streak under one armpit. He had been fortunate, but these minor injuries crippled him and made his step uncertain. His actions were slow.
As once before he had approached Elmer Duffy unseen, from the rear, so it happened now. Elmer was talking. Rock didn’t catch the words—had no wish to—but the note in his voice was pleading. And Nona’s expression was of annoyance, even of worry. But her eyes lit up at sight of Rock. And that swift change on her face warned Duffy. He swung on his heel, just as Rock called: “Hello, people.”
A scowl formed on Duffy’s homely, angular face. He didn’t speak. His countenance spoke for him. A storm gathered in that look, Rock felt. What he could, he did, to ward that off.
“Like the cat, I came back,” he said easily. “Somewhat the worse for wear. Say, Elmer, you should have been in on the big doings up in the Sweet Grass with us. Did it ever strike you that Buck Walters was making some queer moves around here lately?”
Duffy looked puzzled. After a moment he asked briefly:
“How?”
“Stirring up a lot of agitation over petty rustling,” Rock said casually, “when he was stealing wholesale from his own outfit, the Maltese Cross.”
“Buck Walters stealin’ cattle! What you talkin’ about?”
“They say you should never speak ill of the dead,” Rock went on, “but what I tell you is a solemn fact. Some of his crowd went over the divide with him. The rest of them are on their way to jail. We got them dead to rights, working over the brand in a set of hidden corrals on the slope of East Butte. There’s been some excitement, I wish to remark. Uncle Bill Sayre, the other executor of the Snell estate, came up from Texas. He’s tying up his buggy team down at the stable. You know Bill Sayre from Fort Worth, don’t you? You’ve heard of him, anyway.”
He addressed his remarks directly to Elmer who glanced out and saw a tall figure approaching the house.
“Well, by heck!” he said in frank astonishment. “That’s the darnedest thing I ever heard of. You say Buck is dead?”
Rock nodded.
“I was on his trail. He knew it, I guess. That’s why he was so anxious to put me away. He started a war, and he got what was coming to him. He had worked the brand on nearly two thousand Maltese Crosses that we know of already.
“I’ll be darned,” Elmer said again feebly. “I wonder if that was why he was sicking me onto you?”
“I expect,” Rock said coolly. “He made a dirty break that morning, here. He was pretty deep, Buck was.”
Duffy shuffled his feet, then looked at Nona and at Rock.
“No hard feelin’s about that hangin’ expedition?” He inquired diffidently.
“None whatever.” Rock shook his head. “You spoke for me like a man, Elmer, when you were satisfied who I was. I thank you for that.”
“Well, shake on it.” Duffy suddenly held out his hand. “You never bamboozled me, anyway. I respect you enough to admit I’d rather be friendly than fight.”
“Same here,” Rock agreed heartily.
“Guess I’ll step out an’ say hello to Uncle Bill,” Duffy said quietly. “Then I guess I’ll split the breeze. So long. So long, Nona.”
So he went. As he stepped out, Alice Snell from somewhere about the house espied the elderly gentleman from Fort Worth and ran to meet him with welcoming shrieks. The three of them stood in a knot talking.
“So it was you that Charlie went off with!” Nona exclaimed.
Rock nodded.
“Say, mind if I camp myself in a chair, Nona? I’ve got a game leg, and I’m more or less caved in otherwise.”
“Goodness, yes. Here.” Nona came around the table, dragging a chair to him against his protest. “What happened, anyhow?”
“Plenty.” Rock sank thankfully on the seat. “I went up to the Sweet Grass with that outfit, looking for something, and I found a heap.”
“Trouble?”
“Lots of it. What I really came up here to tell you, Nona, is that Charlie got shot,” Rock said wearily. “I’m sorry, because I partly got him into the mix-up. He knew where these hidden corrals were, and he went along to show us. But he has lived it out three days now, and he seems strong. He’s a nervy, husky kid. I think he will be all right. I sent him on to Benton in a wagon. He will have the best of everything that can do him good. He helped us clean up a dirty mess.”
“Tell me about it,” Nona begged. “All about it, please.”
Rock began at the beginning and told her briefly, but clearly, all that had happened since the day Uncle Bill Sayre called him into Fort Worth and laid a mission on his shoulders, down to the present. She sat staring at him, mute, impassive-faced, but with a queer glow in her eyes.
“I am glad that man is dead,” she said at last. “Now we can all go about our business, easy in our minds.”
“Can we?” Rock said. “I wonder? What was Elmer so earnest and so eloquent about when I came in?”
Nona flushed.
“Oh, pestering me to marry him, as usual,” she said. “He makes me tired.”
“Yes? And I have a sort of feeling in my bones that when I get all right again, if I should come back to work for you again, I’d make you tired like that, too,” Rock said dispiritedly.
“You?” Nona looked at him earnestly. “We-ll—you’re different.”
“Eh?” He stared at her unbelievingly. She was smiling at him. A bit wistfully, it is true, but smiling. He couldn’t find any of that old imperious disdain. A ripple of amusement crossed her face and vanished.
Rock disregarded his game leg. Impetuously he rose. So did Nona. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked searchingly into the gray pools of her eyes. He could read nothing there. It seemed to him that his heart was coming up into his throat to choke him.
“Darn you!” he whispered. “Do you like me, or don’t you?”
She looked up at him with a smile, just the faintest quiver of a smile.
“To tell the truth,” she said, in a breathless sort of tone, “I like you a heap—and that’s saying a lot—for me.”
A minute or so later, Rock tilted her head away from his breast, to stare down at her with a strange misgiving. The gray eyes uplifted to his own were wet, shiny and filled with tears.”
“Why, honey,” he asked, “what’s the matter? What’s gone wrong now?”
“You silly thing,” she murmured. “Don’t you know that there are two times when every woman cries? When she’s very sad, and when she’s very happy. And I’m certainly not sad!”