Billie Warren heard the steady buzz of a saw and later the ringing strokes of an axe. The men had departed three hours before to be gone for a week on the horse round-up but she had not yet issued from her own quarters. The music of axe and saw was ample evidence that her new and undesired partner was making valuable use of his time. She went outside and he struck the axe in a cross section of pine log as she moved toward him.
"We'll have to get along the best we can," she announced abruptly. "Of course you will have a say in the management of the Three Bar and draw the same amount for yourself that I do."
He sat on a log and twisted a cigarette as he reflected upon this statement.
"I'd rather not do that," he decided. "I don't want to be a drain on the brand—but to help build it up. Suppose I just serve as an extra hand and do whatever necessary turns up—in return for your letting me advise with you on a few points that I happen to have worked out while I was prowling through the country."
"Any way you like," she returned. "It's for you to decide. Any money which you fail to draw now will revert to you in the end so it won't matter in the least."
His reply was irrelevant, a deliberate refusal to notice her ungenerous misinterpretation of his offer.
"Do you mind if I gather a few Three Bar colts round here close and break out my own string before they get back?" he asked.
"Anything you like," she repeated. "I'm not going to quarrel. I've made up my mind to that. I'll be gone the rest of the day."
Five minutes later he saw her riding down the lane. She was not seeking companionship but rather solitude and for hours she drifted aimlessly across the range, sometimes dismounting on some point that afforded a good view and reclining in the warm spring sun. Dusk was falling when she rode back to the Three Bar. As she turned her sorrel, Papoose, into the corral she noticed several four-year-old colts in the pasture lot. As she returned to the house Harris appeared in the door.
"Grub-pile," he announced.
They sat down to a meal of broiled steak, mashed potatoes, hot biscuits, coffee and raspberry jam. She had deliberately absented herself through the noon hour and well past the time for evening meal, confidently expecting to find him impatiently waiting for her to return and prepare food for him.
"You make good biscuits—better than those Waddles stirs up," she said. "Though I'd never dare tell him so." It was the first time she had conceded that there might be even a taint of good in him.
"Well, yes—they're some better than those I usually turn out," he confessed. "Having a lady to feed I flaked the lard in cold instead of just melting it and stirring her in like I most generally do. I'm right glad that you consider them a success."
When the meal was finished she rose without a word and went into her own quarters, convinced that this desertion would certainly call forth a protest; but the man calmly went about the business of washing the dishes as if he had expected nothing else, and presently she heard the door close behind him and immediately afterwards a light appeared in the bunk-house window.
The rattle of pots and pans roused her before daylight. Some thirty minutes later he called to her.
"I've finished," he said. "You'd better eat yours before it gets cold," and the closing of the door announced that he had gone without waiting for an answer. She heard again the sound of saw and axe as he worked up the dry logs into stove lengths. At least he was making good his word to the cook. The sounds ceased when the sun was an hour high and when she looked out to determine the reason she saw him working with four colts in one of the smaller corrals.
He had fashioned a hackamore for each and they stood tied to the corral bars. He left them there and repaired to the big gates of the main corral. The two swinging halves sagged until their ends dragged on the ground when opened or closed, necessitating the expenditure of considerable energy in performing either operation. She watched him tear down the old support wires and replace them with new ones, stretching a double strand from the top of the tall pivot posts to the free ends of the gates. Placing a short stick between the two strands of heavy wire he twisted until the shortening process had cleared the gate ends and they swung suspended, moving so freely that a rider could lean from his saddle and throw them open with ease.
This completed to his satisfaction he fashioned heavy slabs of wood to serve as extra brake-blocks for the chuck wagon. Between the performance of each two self-appointed duties he spent some little time with the colts, handling them and teaching them not to fear his approach, cinching his saddle on first one and then the next, talking to them and handling their heads.
For three days there was little communication between the two. It was evident that he had no intention of forcing his society upon her, and her failure to prepare his meals failed to elicit a single sign to show that he had expected otherwise; the contrary was true, in fact, for he invariably prepared enough for two. It was clear that he exercised the same patience toward her that he showed in handling the green four-year-olds; and she was inclined to be a little scornful of his method of gentle-breaking them. She felt her own ability to handle any horse on the range although old Cal Warren had gentled every animal she had wanted for her own and flatly refused to let her mount any others. Waddles was as insistent upon this point as her parent had been, but never had she known a cowhand who took time and pains to gentle his own string.
In the afternoon of the third day she saw him swing to the back of a big bay, easing into the saddle without a jar, and the colt ambled round the corral, rolling his eyes back toward the thing clamped upon him but making no effort to pitch. He dismounted and stripped off the saddle, cinched it on a second horse and let him stand, leading a third out to a snubbing post near the door of the blacksmith shop where he proceeded to put on his first set of shoes.
The girl went out and sat on the sill of the shop door and watched him. The colt pulled back in an effort to release the forefoot that the man held clamped between his leather-clad knees, then changed his tactics and sagged his weight against Harris.
"You Babe!" the man ordered. "Don't you go leaning on me." He pared down the hoof and fitted the shoe but before nailing it on he released the colt's foot and addressed the girl. "If I'd fight him now while he's spooky and half-scared it would spoil him maybe," he explained.
"I gentle-break mine, too," she said, and the man overlooked the inflection which, as plainly as words, was intended to convey the impression that his ways were effeminate. "If every man used up his time gentling his string he'd never have a day off to work at anything else."
"Why, it don't use up much time," he objected. "They halfway break themselves, standing round with a saddle on and having a man handle them a little between spells of regular work—like cutting firewood and such. And it's a saving of time in the end. There's three hundred odd days every year when a man consumes considerable time fighting every horse he steps up on—if they're broke that way to start."
"So your only reason for not riding them out is to save time," she said.
"If you mean that I'm timid," he observed, "why, I don't know as I'd bother to dispute it." He moved over and sat on his heels facing her, twisting the ever handy cigarette. "Listen," he urged. "Let's you and I try to get along. Now if you'll only make up your mind that I'm not out to grab the Three Bar, not even the half of it that's supposed to be mine—unless you get paid for it—why, we're liable to get to liking each other real well in the end. I'll give you a contract to that effect."
"Which you know would be worthless!" she returned. "The will specifically states that any agreements between us prior to the time of division are to be disregarded. A written contract would have no more value than your unsupported promise and in view of what's happened you don't expect me to place a value on that."
He pulled reflectively at his cigarette and she rather expected another of the irrelevant remarks with which he so often replied to her pointed thrusts.
"No," he said at last. "But it's a fact that I don't want the Three Bar—or rather I do if you should ever decide to sell."
"I never will," she stated positively. "It's always been my home. I've been away and had a good time; three winters in school and enjoying every second; but there always comes a time when I'm sick to get back, when I know I can't stay away from the Three Bar, when I want to smell the sage and throw my leg across a horse—and ride!"
"I know, Billie," he said softly. "I was raised here, up until I was eight. My feeling is likely less acute than yours but I've always hankered to get back to where the sage and pine trees run together. I mentioned a while back that I was tied up peculiar and stood to lose considerable if I failed to put in two years out here—which wouldn't have been of any particular consequence only that I found out that the Three Bar was going under unless some one put a stop to what's going on. I'll pull it out of the hole, maybe, and hand it back to you."
She was swayed into a momentary belief in his sincerity but steeled herself against it, and in the effort to strengthen the crumbling walls of her dislike she fell back on open ridicule.
"You!" she flared. "And what can you do against it—a man that was raised in squatter country behind a barb-wire fence, who has to gentle his horses before he can sit up on one, who has hitched a gun on his belt because he thinks it's the thing to do, and has stowed it in a place where he'd have to tie himself in a knot—or undress—to reach it. And then you talk of pulling the Three Bar out of a hole! Why, there are twenty men within fifty miles of here that would kill you the first move you made."
"There's considerable sound truth in that," he said. He looked down at his gun; it swung on his left side, in front, the butt pointing toward the right. "It's easier to work with it sort of out of the way of my hands," he explained and smiled.
She found herself liking him, even in the face of the treachery he had practiced against her father and was correspondingly angry, both with herself and at him. She left him without a word and returned to the house.
He finished putting the shoes on the colt and as he turned him back into the corral he observed a horseman jogging up the lane at a trail trot. He knew the man for Slade, whose home ranch lay forty miles to the south and a little west, the owner of the largest outfit in that end of the State; a man feared by his competitors, quick to resent an insinuation against his business methods and capable of backing his resentment.
Slade dropped from his horse and accorded Harris only a casual nod as he headed for the house. Slade's face was of a peculiar cast. The black eyes were set very close together in a wide face; his cheek bones were low and oddly protruding, sloping far out to a point below each eye. His small ears were set so close to his skull that the outcropping cheek bones extended almost an inch beyond them to either side. Yet there was a certain fascination about his face and bearing that appealed to the spark of the primitive in women; that last lingering cell that harks fondly back to men in the raw. His age might have been anywhere above twenty-six and under fifty-six.
He walked through the cookhouse and opened the door of the girl's quarters without the formality of a knock, as if a frequent visitor and sure of his privileges.
"How many times have I told you to knock?" she demanded. "The next time you forget it I'll go out as you come in."
Slade dropped into a chair.
"I never have knocked—not in twelve years," he said.
"It was somewhat different when I was a small girl and you were only a friend of my father," she pointed out. "But now——"
"But now that I've come to see you as a woman it's different?" he inquired. "No reason for that."
She switched the channel of conversation and spoke of the coming round-up, of the poor condition of range stock owing to the severity of the winter; but it was a monologue. For a time the man sat and listened, as if he enjoyed the sound of her voice, contributing nothing to the conversation himself, then suddenly he stirred in his chair and waved a hand to indicate the unimportance of the topics.
"Yes, yes; true enough," he interrupted. "But I didn't come to talk about that. When are you coming home with me, Billie?"
"And you can't come if you insist on talking about that," she countered.
"I'll come," he stated. "Tell me when you're going to move over to the Circle P."
"Not ever," she said. "I'd rather be a man's horse than his wife. Men treat women like little tinsel queens before, and afterwards they answer to save a cook's wages and drudge their lives out feeding a hunch of half-starved hands—or else go to the other extreme. Wives are either work horses or pets. I was raised like a boy and I want to have a say in running things myself."
"You can go your own gait," he pledged.
"I'm doing that now," she returned. "And prefer going on as I am."
Slade rose and moved over to her, taking her hands and lifting her from her chair.
The girl pushed him back with a hand braced against his chest.
"Stop it!" she said. "You're getting wilder every time you come, but you've never pawed at me before. I won't have people's hands on me," and she made a grimace of distaste.
The man reached out again and drew her to him. She wrenched away and faced Slade.
"That will be the last time you'll do that until I give the word," she said. "I don't want the Circle P—or you. When I do I'll let you know!"
He moved toward her again and she refused to back away from him but stood with her hands at her sides.
"If you put a finger on me it's the last lime you'll visit the Three Bar," she calmly announced.
He stood so close as almost to touch her but she failed to lift a hand or move back an inch, and Slade knew that he faced one whose spirit matched his own, perhaps the one person within a hundred miles who did not fear him. He had tamed men and horses—and women; he raised his arms slowly, deliberately, to see if she would flinch away or stand fast and outgame him. She knew that he was harmless to her—and he knew it. He might perpetrate almost any crime on the calendar and come clear; but in this land where women were few they were honored. One whisper from the Three Bar girl that Slade had raised his hand against her and, powerful as he was, the hunt for him would be on, with every man's hand against him.
His arms had half circled her when he whirled, catlike, every faculty cool and alert, as a voice sounded from the door. Both had been too engrossed to notice its noiseless opening.
"I've finished cleaning up round the shop and corrals," Harris said. "Is there any rubbish round the house you'd like to have throwed out and piled in a dry gulch somewheres out of sight?"
He stood in the door, half facing them, his left side quartering toward Slade. To the girl it appeared that the strange pose was for the purpose of enabling him to take a quick step to the right and spring outside if Slade should make a move and she felt a tinge of scorn at his precaution even though she knew that it would avail him nothing if Slade's deadly temper were roused by the insult. Slade, who had killed many, would add Harris to his list before he could move.
Slade's understanding of the quartering position and the odd sling of Harris's gun was entirely different and as he shifted his feet until he faced the man in the door, his movements were slow and deliberate, nothing that could be misconstrued.
"Who summoned you in here?" he demanded.
Harris did not reply but stood waiting for some word from the girl. She had a sudden sick dread that Slade would kill him and was surprised at the sentiment, for no longer than an hour before she had wished him dead. She made belated answer to his original question.
"No," she said. "Go on out, please."
He turned his back on Slade and went out.
"And you," she said to Slade, "you'd best be going too. We've been too good neighbors to quarrel—unless you come over again with the same idea you did to-day."
At sunset the girl called to Harris and he repaired to the house and found her putting a hot meal for two on the end of the long pine table, the first time she had deigned to eat with him since that first meal.
"There's no use of our going on like this," she said. "We've two years of it to face; so it's best to get on some kind of a neutral footing."
For her own peace of mind she had tried to smother her dislike of him and he was very careful to avoid any topic that would rekindle it. They washed the dishes together, and from that hour their relations, to all outward appearance, were friendly or at least devoid of open hostility. They no longer ate separately; she did not avoid him during the day, and the second evening she prepared two places at her own table in the big living room before the fireplace.
"It's so empty out there," she explained.
"With only the two of us at a table built for twenty."
He lingered for an hour's chat before her fire and each evening thereafter was the same. But he knew that she was merely struggling to make the best of a matter that was distasteful, that her opinion of him was unaltered. Her bitterness could not be entirely concealed, and she frequently touched on some fresh point that added to her distrust of his present motives and confirmed her belief in his double-dealing in the past. There were so many of these points; his refusal to accept her offer to give him his half-interest if he would stay off the place; his weak insinuations that there was some reason why he must spend two years on the Three Bar; his prowling the country for a year spying on the methods she followed in running the outfit, half of which would soon be his; his buying the school section and filing on a quarter of land, the location blocking the lower end of the Three Bar valley. Whenever she mentioned one of these he refused to take issue with her. And one night she touched on still another point.
"What was the reason for your first idea—of coming here under another name?" she demanded.
"I thought maybe others knew I'd been left a part interest," he said, "and it might be embarrassing. The way it is, with only the two of us knowing the inside, I can stay on as a regular hand until the time is up."
"You're so plausible," she said. "You put it as a favor to me. Did it ever strike you that if the truth were known it might also be uncomfortable for you?"
He smiled across at her and once more she frowned as she discovered that he was likeable for all his underhandedness.
"Worse than that—suicidal," he admitted.
"If you mentioned what you think of me, that I've framed to rob you by law, you wouldn't be bothered with me for long." He laughed softly and stretched his feet toward the fire. "Look at it any way you like and I'm in bad shape to deal you any misery," he pointed out. "If you'd drop a hint that I'm an unwelcome addition it would only be a matter of days until I'd fail to show up for meals. If you view it from that angle you can see I'm setting on the powder can."
She did see it, but had not so clearly realized it till he pointed it out, and for the first time she wavered in her conviction that he had come simply to deprive her of her rights. But the thought that her father would not easily have willed away the home place to another without being unduly influenced served to reinstate her distrust along with a vague resentment for his having shaken it by throwing himself so openly on her mercy.
"You probably thought to overcome that by reaching the point the whole thing so patently aims for," she said. "And you calculated well—arriving at a time when we'd be alone for a week. The whole scheme was based on that idea and I've been patiently wondering why you don't rush matters and invite me to marry you."
He rose and flicked the ash from his cigarette into the fireplace.
"I do invite you—right now," he said, and in her surprise she left her chair and stood facing him. "I'd like real well to have you, Billie."
"That's the final proof," she said. "I'm surprised that you didn't tell me the first day."
"So am I," he said.
She found no answer for this but stood silent, knowing that she had suddenly become afraid of him.
"And that's the living truth," he affirmed. "Other men have loved you the first day. You know men well enough to be certain that I wouldn't be tied to one woman for the sake of owning a few head of cows—not if I didn't want her for herself." He waved an arm toward the door. "There's millions of miles of sage just outside," he said. "And millions of cows—and girls."
He moved across to her and stood almost touching her, looking down into her face. When Slade had stood so a few days past she had been coldly indifferent except for a shiver of distaste at the thought of his touching her. Before Harris she felt a weakening, a need of support, and she leaned back from him and placed one hand behind her on the table.
"You judge for yourself whether a man wouldn't be right foolish—with all those things I mentioned being right outside to call him—to marry a woman he didn't want for herself, because she had a few hundred head of cows." He smiled down at her. "Don't pull back from me, Billie; I won't lay a finger on you. But now do you think it's you I want—or the little old Three Bar?"
"You can prove it," she said at last. "Prove it by going away for six months—or three."
He shook his head.
"Not that," he said. "I've told you I was sewed up in a right peculiar way myself—which wouldn't matter a damn if it wasn't for this. I'd have tossed it off in a second if the girl on the Three Bar had turned out to be any other than you. Now I'm going to see it through. The Three Bar is going under—the brand both our folks helped to found—unless some one pulls it out of the hole. Believe me if you can and if you can't—why, you know that one remark about my being unwelcome here will clear the road for you, like I mentioned a few minutes back."
He turned away without touching her and she had not moved when the door closed behind him.
An hour past noon on the following day a drove of horses appeared at the lower extremity of the valley and swept on toward the ranch. As Harris threw open the gates of the big corral he saw her standing in the door of the cookhouse watching the oncoming drove. Riders flanked the bunch well out to each side to steady it. There was a roar of hoofs and a stifling cloud of dust as three hundred half-wild horses clattered past and crowded through the gates, scattering swiftly across the pasture lot back of the corral. A dozen sweat-streaked riders swung from their saddles. There was no chance to distinguish color or kind among them through the dust caked in the week-old growth of beard that covered every face.
One man remained on his mount and followed the horses into the pasture lot, cutting out fifty or more and heading them back into the corral; for Waddles had decreed that they could have the rest of the afternoon off for a jaunt to Brill's Store and they waited only to change mounts before the start.
Calico stood drooping sleepily in one of the smaller corrals and Harris moved toward him, intending to ride over with the rest of the men.
"The boss said for you to ride Blue," Morrow stated as Harris passed the group at the gates of the corral. "He's clear gentle-broke, Blue is."
The men looked up in surprise. Morrow had not been near the house to receive instructions from the girl. The lie had been so apparent as to constitute a direct challenge to the other man.
Harris stood looking at him, then shrugged his shoulders.
"Whatever the boss says goes with me," he returned evenly.
A rangy blue roan swept past with the fifty or so others. At least once every round of the corral he laid back his ears and squealed as he scored some other horse with his teeth, then lashed out with wicked heels.
"I reckon that'll be Blue?" Harris asked of Evans and the lanky one nodded. The men scattered round the corral and each watched his chance to put his rope on some chosen horse. The roan kept others always between himself and any man with a rope but at last he passed Harris with but one horse between. Harris nipped his noose across the back of the intervening horse and over the blue roan's head.
Blue stopped the instant the rope tightened on his neck.
"You've been busted and rope-burnt a time or two," Harris remarked, and he led the horse out to saddle him. The big blue leaned back, crouching on his haunches as the man put on the hackamore. His eyes rolled wickedly as Harris smoothed the saddle blanket and he flinched away with a whistling snort of fear, his nostrils flaring, as the heavy saddle was thrown on his back.
Harris tightened the front cinch and the blue horse braced himself and drew in a long, deep breath.
"That's right, Blue, you swell up and inflate yourself," Harris said. "I'll have to squeeze it out of you." He fastened the hind cinch loosely, then returned to the front and hauled on the latigo until the pressure forced the horse to release the indrawn breath and it leaked out of him with a groaning sigh.
"I wonder now why Morrow is whetting his tommyhawk for me," Harris remarked as he inspected the big roan. "You're a hard one, Blue. I'll let that saddle warm up on you before I top you off."
Every horse pitched a few jumps from force of habit when first mounted, some of them indifferently, others viciously, then moved restlessly around, anxious for the start.
"Well, step up on him and let's be going," Morrow ordered surlily.
Harris took a short hold on the rope reins of the hackamore with his left hand, cramped the horse's head toward him and gripped the mane, his right hand on the horn, and swung gently to the saddle, easing into it without a jar.
"Easy, Blue!" he said, holding up the big roan's head. "Don't you hang your head with me." He eased the horse to a jerky start and they were off for Brill's at a shuffling trot. Three times in the first mile Blue bunched himself nervously and made a few stiff jumps but each time Harris held him steady. The pace was increased to a long, swinging trot and he felt the play of powerful muscles under him as the blue horse seemed to reach out for distance at every stride.
"You'd have made one good little horse, Blue," he said, "if some sport hadn't spoiled you on the start."
"Don't speak loud or the blue horse might shy and spill his pack," Morrow remarked in a tone loud enough for Harris to overhear. Evans turned in his saddle and eyed the dark man curiously.
"He won't upset his load to-day," he prophesied. "Harris is just past the colt stage, round twenty-seven or eight somewheres, and has out-growed his longing to show off. But he'll be able to sit up in the middle of anything that starts to move out from under him."
They left the horses drooping at the several hitch rails before the post and crowded in. A few paused along the counters of merchandise that flanked the left side of the big room while the rest headed straight for the long bar that extended the full length of the opposite side. The Three Bar men had scarcely tossed off their first drink before there sounded a clatter of hoofs outside and twelve men from the Halfmoon D trooped in.
"Out of the way!" the foremost youth shouted. "Back off from the pine slab, you Three Bar soaks, and give parched folks a chance. Two hours' play and six months' work—so don't delay me."
The throng before the bar was a riot of color; Angora chaps ranging from orange and lavender to black and silky white; smooth leather chaps, and stamped, silver-ornamented and plain, with here and there an individual design, showing that the owner had selected some queerly spotted steer and tanned the pelt with the hair on to be fashioned into gaudy vest and pants. 'Twas an improvident, carefree lot who lived to-day with scarce a thought for to-morrow. The clatter of sardine and salmon cans mingled with the clink of glassware at the bar as the men who had missed the noon meal lunched out of cans between drinks.
Some few detached themselves from the group and occupied themselves with writing. Several started a game of stud poker at one of the many tables. Harris wrote a few letters before joining in the play, and as he looked up from time to time he caught many curious glances leveled upon him. Morrow had been busily spreading the tidings that a would-be squatter was among them and they were curious to see the man who had deliberately defied the unwritten law of the Coldriver Range. When he had finished his writing he crossed over to the group, tossed a bill on the bar and waved all hands to a drink.
Waddles had instructed Evans to start the men back before the spree had progressed to a point where they would refuse to leave Brill's and so leave the Three Bar short-handed. At the end of two hours he looked at his watch and snapped it shut.
"Turn out!" he shouted. "On your horses!"
"That goes for my men, too," the Halfmoon D foreman seconded. "Outside!"
Morrow had not neglected to inform the men from the Halfmoon D that Harris gentled his horses.
"Handle the little roan horse gentle," he advised as they moved toward the door. "Better hobble your stirrups before you crawl him." Several men turned and grinned. In riding contests women were allowed to hobble their stirrups while the same precaution disqualified a man.
Most of the men were young, scarcely more than boys, full of rough play and youthful pride of accomplishment along with a desire to make a presumably careless display of it. A Halfmoon D youth mounted a blocky bay and as he threw his leg across it he loosed a shrill yip and reached forward to rake the horse's shoulder. The bay dropped his head and performed. A half-dozen others followed his example and their horses pitched off in as many directions. All eyes were turned on Harris as he neared the big roan.
"Oh, I might as well act up a little," he said to Evans. "They seem to be looking for it."
"He's a hard citizen, that roan," Evans remarked. "I'll wrangle for you, Cal."
Harris stepped over to the horse.
"I wonder what old Blue can do," he said. He hooked the roan in the shoulder as he mounted and the horse plunged his head between his knees and rose in the air. The big roan bawled and expelled a long-drawn "wa-a-augh" each time he struck the ground, then savagely shook his whole frame as he rose again. The first four jumps Harris swung both feet forward and hooked his shoulders and the next two bounds reached back and raked his flanks, in accordance with the regulation rules prescribed for contest riding.
"He's riding for the judges," a megaphone voice announced. "Boy, you've rode your horse!"
Blue varied his leaps, draping himself in fantastic curves, lighting on a slant with his side arched out, sunfishing and swapping ends, then threw himself over and smashed down on his back. Harris slipped sidewise and cleared himself.
"Fourteen long jumps," one man testified. "One hell of a long time on an eel like that!"
As Blue regained his feet Harris stepped into the saddle and rose with him, the hackamore rope trailing loose under the horse's feet. A chorus of approving yelps broke out.
"Rake him from ears to tail roots!" "Ri-ide 'im, rider!" "Hang 'em up into that horse!" "Claw him!" "Scra-a-atch him!"
This wave of questionable advice ceased as Blue, after three short jumps, somersaulted forward and his rider made a headlong side-dive for safety.
Evans had flanked the roan's course and he now leaned from the saddle and seized the hackamore rope; as Blue scrambled to his feet he took two quick turns of the rope and snubbed his head short to the saddle horn. The roan struggled and threw himself, his head still suspended by the rope, rose and reared to strike savagely at the man who held him, but Evans left his saddle and leaned far out, his right foot on the ground, left still in the stirrup, and eased himself back into the saddle as the fighting horse slid down. He had never once lost his hold which snubbed Blue to the horn, a pretty bit of wrangling.
"He's on the fight now," Evans said. "I'll hold him solid till he cools down—which won't be long, for Cal didn't cut him any; he was swinging his feet free and never hooked him once." He jerked his thumb at the roan's shoulder and flanks where not a drop of blood appeared; his hide would have been tattered indeed if Harris had driven home his rowels each time he swung his feet. "Nice ride."
Harris walked back to a small group that had not yet mounted, Morrow among them. His left side was quartering toward Morrow and apparently he was addressing the group as a whole instead of any one man.
"The next time some one frames me to put on a show like that," he said, "why, he'd better make certain beforehand about what part he's willing to play in the performance himself—for next time I won't take it out of the horse."
It is said that there comes a day in the life of every handler of bad horses when he will mount one and ride him out, master him and dismount,—and forever after decline to ride another. Riley Foster was evidence of this. For three years Rile and Bangs had been inseparable, riding together on every job, and the shaggy youth topped off the animals in Foster's string before the older man would mount them. As Bangs went about his work his faded blue eyes were ever turned toward the Three Bar boss who stood in the door of the blacksmith shop.
The girl was vaguely troubled as she noted this. Bangs and Foster had returned for their second season at the Three Bar. All through the previous summer the boy had evidenced his silent adoration, his eyes following her every move.
The scene round Billie was one of strenuous activity, every effort bent toward whipping the remuda into shape for the calf round-up in the least possible space of time.
Every rider must have nine horses in his string. His five circle horses needed but little training, the only necessary qualifications being endurance and a sufficient amount of breaking to make it possible to saddle them; the two night mounts must be partially broken to work the herd, then switched to night guarding and thereafter used exclusively for that. But the two cow horses required long and skilful training. Every man gave one of his circle string the preliminary training of the cow horse each season, the work resumed by the man to whose string the horse was allotted the following year; thus new ones were coming on to replace the older horses as fast as they were condemned.
Four pairs of men worked within a hundred yards of the girl, taking equal turns at riding and wrangling. The one who wrangled put his rope on a horse and led him out, snubbed him to the saddle horn and frequently eared him as well, while the one who was to ride him out cinched on his saddle and mounted.
Green horses were led out, one after another, to be saddled for the first time, and those previously broken required a few work-outs to knock the wire edge off their unwillingness to carry a rider after a winter of freedom on the range.
Three men were shoeing horses tied to snubbing posts at ten-yard intervals before the shop. One animal that had fought viciously against this treatment had been thrown and stretched, his four feet roped to convenient posts, and while he struggled and heaved on the ground Rile Foster calmly fitted and nailed the shoes on him. Cal Harris finished shoeing the colt he was working.
"That's the last touch," he said. "My string is all set to go."
"You have five colts gentled for your circle bunch," she said. "But you didn't pick a single cow horse. The boys have sorted out the best ones and the few that are left won't answer for a man that insists on a gentled string."
"Creamer and Calico will do for me," he said. "I broke them myself and maybe I can worry along."
"Did you break them like that?" she asked. Bangs was topping a horse that strenuously refused to be conquered and as they looked on the animal threw himself.
"Like that? Well, no—not precisely," Harris said. "They're not breaking horses. They're proving that they're bronc-peelers that can ride 'em before they're broke. A horse started out that way will be a bronc till the day he dies. The first thing he knows some straddler swarms him and hangs the spurs in him. He bogs his head and starts out to slip his pack—and from right then on he thinks the first thing to do whenever a man steps up on him is to try his best to shake him off."
Three men were lashing their bed rolls and war bags on three pack horses and when this task was completed they rode down the lane, each one leading his pack animal. Harris knew this as evidence that they would start after the calves on the following day. The custom was to exchange representatives to ride with each wagon within a reasonable distance, the reps to look after the interest of the brand for which they rode.
"How many reps do you trade?" he asked.
"Three," she said. "Halfmoon D, V L and with Slade."
The Halfmoon D lay some fifteen miles eastward along the foot of the hills; the V L the same distance to the west, but cached away in a pocket that led well back into the base of the range, a comparatively small outfit owned by the Brandons, father and four sons, who made every effort to keep the bulk of their cows ranging in their own home basin and exchanged reps only with the Three Bar.
Slade's home place lay forty miles south and a little west and his cows grazed for over a hundred miles, requiring three wagons to cover his range.
During the afternoon the three reps came in to replace the men who had left. The surplus horses had been cut out and thrown back on the range, only those required for the remuda remaining in the pasture lot. The chuck wagon was wheeled before the cookhouse door and packed for an early start. Before the first streaks of dawn the men had saddled and breakfasted. It was turning gray in the east when four horses, necessitating the attentions of four men, were hooked to the wagon. A man hung on the bit of each wheel horse while another grasped the bits of the lead team as Waddles made one last hasty trip inside.
"This will be a rocky ride for a mile or two," he prophesied, as he mounted the seat and braced himself. "These willow-tails haven't had on a strap of harness for many a month. All set. Turn loose!"
The men stepped back and the four horses hit the collars raggedly. One wheel horse reared and jumped forward. The off leader dropped his head and pitched, shaking himself as if struggling to unseat a rider, then the four settled into a jerky run and the heavy wagon clattered and lurched down the lane.
"Fine way to break work stock," Harris remarked to Evans. "That layout would bring maybe a dollar a head."
The men swung to their saddles and followed the wagon at a shuffling trot. From where she rode between Evans and Harris, the girl turned in her saddle and watched two men throw open the gates of the big corral where the remuda was held. The wrangler, whose duty it was to tend the horse herd by day, and the nighthawk who would guard it at night sat on their horses at the far end of the corral and urged the herd out as the gates swung back. The remuda streamed down the valley, the two first riders swinging wide to either flank while the nighthawk and wrangler brought up the rear.
The four that pulled the wagon had settled to a steady gait and when some three miles below the Three Bar Waddles wheeled to the right and angled up the bench that flanked the bottoms, the wagon tilting perilously in the ascent, then struck out westward across a rolling country that showed not even a wagon track. The big cook unerringly picked the route of least resistance to the point from which the first circle would be launched, striking every wash and coulee at a place where a crossing was possible.
Shortly before noon the wagon was halted in a broad bottom threaded by a tiny spring-fed stream. The teams were unhitched; mounts were unsaddled and thrown into the horse herd, which was then headed into the mouth of a branching draw and allowed to graze. Waddles dumped off the bed rolls that were piled from the broad lowered tail-gate to the wagon top and each man sorted out his own and spread it upon some spot which struck him as a likely bed ground.
One man carried water from the stream. Two others snaked in wood for the chuck-wagon fire. Still another drove long stakes in the shape of a hollow square, stretching a single rope from one to the next and fashioning a frail rope corral.
Harris and Evans took three poles that were slung under the wagon, looped the top-rope of a little teepee round the small ends of them and erected the three, tripod fashion, after having first pegged down the teepee sides. Harris brought the girl's bed roll and war bag from the wagon and placed them inside.
"There's your house," he said. "All ready to move in."
The men repaired to the creek bank and splashed faces and hands. The big voice of the cook bellowed angrily from the wagon.
"Downstream! Downstream!" he boomed. "Get below that water hole!"
Two men who had elected to perform their ablutions above the point from which the culinary water supply was drawn moved hastily downstream.
It was not long before Waddles was dispensing nourishment from the lowered tail-gate, ladling food and hot coffee into the plates and cups which the men held out to him. They drew away and sat cross-legged on the ground. The meal was almost finished when six horsemen rode down the valley and pulled up before the wagon.
"What's the chance for scraps?" the leader asked.
"Step down," Waddles invited. "And throw a feed in you. She's still a-steaming."
Four of the men differed in no material way from the Three Bar men in appearance. The fifth was a ruffian with little forehead, a face of gorilla cast, stamped with brute ferocity and small intelligence. The last of the six was a striking figure, a big man with pure white hair and brows, his pale eyes peering from a red face.
"The roasted albino is Harper, our leading bad man in these parts," Evans remarked to Harris. "And the human ape is Lang; Fisher, Coleman, Barton and Canfield are the rest. Nice layout of murderers and such."
Harper's men ate unconcernedly, conscious that they were marked as men who had violated every law on the calendar, but knowing also that no man would take exceptions to their presence on that general ground alone, and as they had neared the wagon each man had scanned the faces of the round-up crew to make certain that there were none among them who might bear some more specific and personal dislike.
The Three Bar men chatted and fraternized with them as they would have done with the riders of any legitimate outfit. Harper praised the food that Waddles tendered them.
Billie Warren forced a smile as she nodded to them, then moved off and sat upon a rock some fifty yards from the wagon, despising the six men who ate her fare and inwardly raging at the conditions which forced her to extend the hospitality of the Three Bar to men of their breed whenever they chanced by.
Harris strolled over and sat down facing her, sifting tobacco into a brown paper and deftly rolling his smoke.
"Has it been on your mind—what I was telling you a few nights back, about how much I was loving you?" he asked.
"You had your chance to prove it by going away," she said, "and refused; so why bring it up again? The next two years will be hard enough without my having to listen to that."
"Our families must have been real set on throwing us together," he observed. "I was cut off without a dime myself—unless I spent two full years on the Three Bar."
She was angry with herself for believing him sincere, for being convinced that he too, as he had several times intimated, was tied in much the same fashion as herself. The explanation came to her in an illuminating flash. The elder Harris must have nursed a lifelong enmity against her father, who had believed him the most devoted friend on earth.
She had often heard the tale of how her parent had, in all friendliness, followed old Bill Harris step by step from Dodge City to the Platte, to old Fort Laramie and finally to the present Three Bar range. Perhaps the one so followed had felt that Cal Warren was but the hated symbol of the whole clan of squatters who had driven him from place to place and eventually forced him to relinquish his hope of seeing the Three Bar brand on a hundred thousand cows; that his friendliness had been simulated, his vindictiveness nursed and finally consummated by leaving his affairs in such fashion that his son must carry on the work his trickery had begun.
The voice of Waddles reached them. He was announcing a half-day of rest, according to her orders.
"It's kill-time for the rest of the day," he stated. "Make the most of it."
For three weeks past, excepting for the trip to Brill's, the men had toiled incessantly, breakfasting before sunup and seeking their bunks long after dark. Some immediately turned to their bed rolls to make up lost sleep. Others repaired to the stream to wash out extra articles of soiled clothing before taking their rest.
Harris resumed where he had broken off some five minutes before.
"And I'd have tossed it off, as I told you once, if the Three Bar girl had turned out to be any except you. You've had a tough problem to work out, girl," he said. "I sold out my little Box L outfit for more than it was worth—and figured to stop the leak at the Three Bar and put the old brand on its feet."
His calm assurance on this point exasperated the girl.
"How?" she demanded. "What can you do?" She pointed toward the six men near the wagon. "During the time you spent prowling the hills did you ever come across those men?"
"Not to pal round with them," he confessed. "But I did cut their trail now and then."
"Then don't you know what every other man in this country knows—that those six and a lot more of their breed are responsible for every loss within a hundred miles? They can operate against a brand one week and stop at the home ranch and get fed the next. That's where the Three Bar loss comes in. And I have to feed them when they come along."
"Some day we'll feed them and hang them right after the meal," he said. "They're not the outfit that's going to be hardest to handle when the time arrives."
"What do you mean?" she asked. "No one has ever been able to handle them up to date."
"Did it ever strike you as queer that Slade could come into this country twelve years back, with nothing but a long rope and a running iron, and be owning thirty thousand head to-day?"
"He has the knack to protect his own and increase," she said. "They're afraid of Slade."
Harris absently traced the Three Bar in the dust with a stick, then fashioned the V L and the Halfmoon D, the three brands that ranged along the foot of the hills. With a few deft strokes he transformed the Three Bar into the Three Cross T, reworked the V L into a Diamond Box and the Halfmoon D into Circle P, each one of the worked-overs representing one of the dozen or so brands registered by Slade. He blotted out his handiwork with the flat of his hand.
"Don't you suppose that the owner of every one of those brands knows that?" she scoffed. "A clumsy rebrand would loom up for a mile. Slade's no fool."
"Not in a thousand years," Harris agreed. "I was just commenting on how peculiar it was that the three brands he runs farthest north should be so easy worked over into any one of the three that his range overlaps up this way. And I happen to know his farthest south brands would work out the same way with the outfits at the other end of his range. But he earmarks all of his brands the same—with jinglebobs; and jinglebobs most generally drop off and leave nothing but a good big piece absent out of the ear."
"So you think a man as big as Slade is stupid enough to try his hand at brand-blotting on all sides at once?" she asked.
"No; nor even once on one side," he returned. "Not him. The one fact that the similarity of brands would make it easy to fall into the habit is enough to keep every outfit watching him. He couldn't start—and knows it."
"Then what does it all amount to?" she asked.
"While folks watch him on that score he could work in a dozen ways that don't concern those brands at all," he said.
The girl shook her head impatiently and looked across at the six men who ate her fare.
"Look at them," she flared. "Eating my food; and in a few nights they'll be hazing a bunch of Three Bar steers toward the Idaho line. Why doesn't some man that is a man kill that albino fiend and all his whelps and rid the country of his breed? Even Slade lets them put up at his place."
"If they're pestering you I'll order them off," he said.
"And what effect would that have?" she inquired scornfully.
"The effect of causing them to climb their horses and amble off down the country," he returned. He sprawled on the grass, his head propped on one hand as he regarded them.
"Then probably you'd better order them off," she suggested. "You have my permission. Now's your chance to make good the lordly brag of helping the Three Bar out of the hole." She instantly regretted having said it. A dozen times of late she had wondered if she were turning bitter and waspish, if she would ever again be the even-tempered Billie Warren with a good word and a smile for every one.
Harris was, as always, apparently undisturbed by her words. Far down the bottoms she could see a point of light which she knew for a white sign that read: "Squatter, don't let sundown find you here." The man before her had defied these sinister warnings scattered about the range and publicly announced that he would put in hay on his filing, knowing that he was a marked man from the hour he turned the first furrow. Whatever his shortcomings, lack of courage was not one of them.
"I take that back," she said, referring to her words of a few moments before. Harris straightened to a sitting position in his surprise at this impulsive retraction, and as he smiled across at her she divined that this man, seemingly so impervious to her sarcasm, could be easily moved by a single kind word.
"Thanks, Billie," he said. "That was real white of you."
He rose and sauntered toward the wagon and Billie Warren felt a sudden clutch of fear as he halted before Harper and she realized that he had taken her words literally and intended ordering them off.
"I've been made temporary foreman of the Three Bar—just so the boss could try me out on that job for an hour or two," he remarked conversationally. "So I'm putting in a new rule that goes into effect right off. When you boys ride away, in a few minutes from now, you can tell folks that the grub line is closed as far as the Three Bar is concerned."
Lang took a half-step toward him, his face reflecting his gathering rage as his slow brain comprehended the fact that this speech was but another way of announcing that he and his men would find no welcome at the Three Bar from that moment on. Harper caught his arm and jerked him back. The albino was an old hand and could rightly read the signs.
"The gentleman was remarking to me," he said to Lang; "not you." He turned to Harris, noting as he did so that every Three Bar man, excepting those asleep, had suddenly evidenced keen interest in what was transpiring there; several carelessly shifted their positions. "There's no law to make you feed any man," he said to Harris. "From now on we'll pay our way—as far as the Three Bar is concerned."
His tones were casual; only his pale eyes, fastened unblinkingly on Harris's face, betrayed his real feeling toward the man who, notwithstanding the roundabout nature of his announcement, had practically ordered him to stay away from the Three Bar for all time.
"But even in the face of that," he resumed, "we'll welcome you any time you happen to ride down our way."
Every man within earshot understood the threat that lay beneath the casual words.
"Then I'll likely drop in some time," Harris said. "If you'll send word where it is. And I'll bring fifty men along."
The albino motioned his men toward their horses and they mounted and rode off down the bottoms. Harris walked back and resumed his seat near the girl, who sat looking at him as if she could not believe what she had just witnessed.
"You see it was just as easy as I'd counted on," he said. "It'll be a considerable saving on food."
"But how did you know?" she asked. "Why is Harper afraid of you?"
"He's not," Harris said. "Not for a single second. But he's an old hand and has left a few places on the jump before he came out here."
"And he thinks you know it!" she guessed.
"He don't care what I know; it's what he knows himself—that the wild bunch is always roosting on the powder can even when it appears like they're sitting pretty—that counts with him. You thought I was taking a fool chance of out-gaming him. In reality I was taking almost an unfair advantage of him, providing he had the brains he must possess to have lived to his age."
She could find no ready-made answer to this surprising statement. He sprawled comfortably on the grass, turning over in his mind the conditions that were but a repetition of the history of so many frontiers; first the earliest settlers resenting the intrusion of the later ones and resorting to lawless means of protecting their priority; then the strengthening of the outlaw element, half the countryside in league with the wild bunch, the two opposing factions secretly hiring the predatory class to prey upon rival interests; then, inevitably, the clean split, usually occasioned by the outlaws having increased in power until they felt competent to defy both sides, to play both ends against the middle, to commit atrocities that opened the eyes of those who, believing they had subsidized the lawless, suddenly woke to the fact that they had subsidized themselves; then the outlaws, in their turn, discovering that every man's hand was against them; the ruthless establishing of a definite line between those inside and those outside the law, replacing the vague middle ground of semi-lawlessness. Always their friends fell away from them, those secretly leagued with them fearing to be seen in their company, and those not too definitely known to belong to their ranks invariably quitting them cold, often joining forces against them and developing into more or less substantial citizens, according to the standards of their day.
"Don't you know that the albino will kill you for that?" the girl asked at length.
"Not unless he can stage it as a personal quarrel," he said. "He'll never follow it up as coming out of what happened to-day by taking it out on me as temporary foreman of the Three Bar—for ordering him off."
"Why?" she puzzled. "What possible difference would that make to a man like him?"
"Just this," he said: "There's a good majority of folks that don't relish seeing Harper's bunch ride up—that feed them through policy. But whenever you make it plain to a man that he's compelled to do a thing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out of sheer human pride. If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on the grounds that he refused to feed all his men—why then, right off, every other foreman and owner within a hundred miles starts to resenting the possibility that maybe the albino feels the same way toward him. Harper knows that."
"But if your theory had been wrong?" she persisted. "What then?"
"Then," he said, "then there'd have been hell and repeat. I wasn't just acting as me, a personal affair, but, as I took pains to remark aloud, as the foreman of the Three Bar. Every Three Bar man would have gone into action the second Harper made a move at me. You know that—and Harper knew it."
She realized the soundness of this statement. The one unalterable code of the country, a code that had been fostered till it eclipsed all others, decreed that a man should be loyal to the brand for which he rode. The whole fabric of the cow business was based on that one point.
"And a wrangle of that magnitude was something he couldn't risk," Harris said. "It would stir folks up, and any time they're stirred a mite too far Harper has come to the end of his rope. Any other brand could have done the same—only folks fall into a set habit of mind and figure they must do what others do just because it's custom."
"But now they'll work their deviltry all the stronger against the Three Bar," she predicted. "They could wreck us if they tried. You couldn't get a conviction in five years. Not a man would testify against one of Harper's outfit."
"Then we'll put on a fighting crew and hold them off," he said. "But that's not the layout that will be hardest to handle in the long run. Slade is the one real hard nut for the Three Bar to crack. He can work it a dozen different ways and you couldn't prove one of them on him to save your soul. He's one smooth hombre—Slade."
Harris rose and headed for his bed roll and the girl sought the shelter of her teepee for a rest. All was quiet near the wagon till Waddles boomed the summons to feed. After the meal a youth named Moore mounted a saddled horse that was picketed nearby and rode up a branching gulch, returning with a dry cedar log which he snaked to the wagon at the end of his rope. After a few hours' rest and the prospects of a full night's sleep ahead the hands snatched an hour for play.
They sat cross-legged round the fire kindled from the cedar and raised their voices in song. Waddles drew forth a guitar and picked a few chords. Bentley, the man who repped for Slade, carried the air and the rest joined in. The voices were untrained but from long experience in rendering every song each man carried his part without a discordant note. Evans sang a perfect bass. Bangs a clear tenor; Moore faked a baritone that satisfied all hands and Waddles wagged his head in unison with the picking of his guitar and hummed, occasionally accenting the air with a musical, drumlike boom. They rambled through all the old familiar songs of the range. The Texan herded his little dogie from the Staked Plains to Abilene; the herd was soothed on the old bed ground—bed down my dogie, bed down—and the poor cowboy was many times buried far out on the lone prair-ee.
Bangs had stationed himself so that he could see the girl and throughout the evening his surprised eyes never once strayed from Billie Warren's face.
She leaned back against the wagon wheel, enjoying it all, but her complacence was jarred as she half-turned and noted Morrow's face, drawn and bleak, unsoftened by the music. Again the feeling of dislike for him rose within her; but he was an efficient hand and she had nothing definite against him. At the end of an hour Waddles rose and returned his instrument to the wagon. The group broke up and every man turned in.
Billie Warren lay in her teepee, her mind busily going over the events of the day. The night sounds of the range drifted to her. A bull-bat rasped a note or two from above. A picketed horse stamped restlessly just outside and a range cow bawled from an adjacent slope. The night-hawk had relieved the wrangler and she could half-hear, half-feel the low jar of many hoofs as he grazed the remuda slowly up the valley, singing to while away the time.
She reflected that Cal Harris was at least possessed of self-confidence and that procrastination was certainly not to be numbered among his failings. It came to her that his interests, for the present, were identical with her own. As half-owner in the Three Bar it would be as much to his advantage as to her own to build it up. Waddles's warped legs prevented his acting as foreman on the job and it might be that the other man would find some way to prevent the leak that was sapping the life from the Three Bar. His half-ownership entitled him to the place. Billie Warren loved her brand and her personal distrust of Harris was submerged in the hope that his sharing the full responsibility with herself might be a step toward putting it back on the old-time plane of prosperity.
The jar of hoofs had ceased and she knew that the remuda had bedded down; and having at last reached a decision she fell asleep with the crooning voice of the nighthawk drifting to her ears.