CHAPTER IIIMACHIAVELLI?From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders lay ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding. The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural meadow in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of poplars and clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply to the timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember. Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old, commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always been a part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself as a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of its actors.He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. He only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight pleased him in a way he could not describe.The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green. The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman silhouetted like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved about the chuck wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated up to Robin’s nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the human eye over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny resonance to sounds, the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring. Some one was singing a ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined lustily in the chorus:“Comin’ up the Chisholm TrailI tell you what you’ll get,A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meatLittle black coffee with sugar on the sly,Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down the hill. He loosed hisreataand slung a noose. Fifty yards short of the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string, shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse packing his bed.Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these youths where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone, “Gentlemen, dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it vigorously with an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And the crew swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens gathering about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat worms.The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up. The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent, sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource, initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain, sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down—it was all one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay on his unrolled bed.He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them. Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his fellows.“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable beeves.In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and Shadow Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells tinkled with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight passed. When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern broke out yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the east the cook lifted his call.In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line the outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout, beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons drawn by four-horse teams.There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely settled land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the chuck wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven by the nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by the horse wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted, shook the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop. Some passed theremudaand the wagons. Some jogged leisurely. They rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop.Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele, “Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a cowman from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of the Block S over the heads of older hands.He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of his horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread before them as they topped each little rise.“Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently.“Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,” Robin answered.“Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with the Pool last spring.”Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men far better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s—just ill luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding him. He knew that with his present string he could take the outside circle and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept silent.“I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You weren’t in sight.”“Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or both, had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway?“Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually.“Sothat’sit,” Robin thought—recalling the dead cows and the rifle shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud he said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.”“Much stock in sight?”“Quite a lot.”They rode two hundred yards in silence.“There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out suddenly.“The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was surprise at information coming to him from this source.“I been ridin’ myself some lately,” Mark went on in his crisp tone. “I’ve seen things.”“What you been drinkin’?” Robin tried raillery.Steele frowned.“I seen some pretty fishy lookin’ work,” he growled. “Pretty raw. There’ll be a necktie party when I get it figured out.”“Well, they can’t steal no cows of mine,” Robin said lightly. “’Cause I don’t own ary a split hoof. You don’t surprise me much. I guess there’s no range in Montana, nor any place where cows run, that there isn’t somebody packin’ a runnin’ iron and draggin’ the long rope now and then.”“Ain’t you seen nothin’—no big calves with a fresh brand and no mother handy?” Steele persisted.Robin shook his head.“If I’d come across stuff like that anywhere in Bar M Bar territory I guess old Dan Mayne would be ridin’ the pinnacles with a Winchester and frothin’ at the mouth,” he drawled. “What’s the brand?”“I ain’t talkin’,” Steele said darkly. “An’ you keep this to yourself what I say.Sabe?They’re workin’ on the Block S mostly, I expect. But they might not overlook the Bar M Bar. So keep your eyes open, kid, an’ let me know if you spot anything that looks queer.”Three or four riders behind broke their horses into a lope, came abreast, laughing, elbows flopping like limp-winged birds. Steele and Robin fell into their pace. In a row, bobbing uniformly, hoofs beating out a steady rhythm on the dry turf, they passed the saddle herd, the wagons. The night hawk driving the bed wagon popped his whiplash as they went by. The cook, acting Jehu, braced himself by the four-horse reins, a cigarette in his lips. Far ahead of the wagons they overtook and joined the other riders.At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught fresh horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a rise below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush, the town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There the chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would drink Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the Block S would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to return again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two thousand strong.And all the way to town Robin wondered what Shining Mark was getting at; what was his real object in that conversation. Was he craftily seeking to discover if Robinhadbeen the rider on the sorrel horse who turned over the dead cow to read her brand?Or was he shooting straight when he promised a necktie party for cow thieves unknown? When Robin gazed at Steele’s easy erectness in the saddle, the flashy ornamentation of his riding rig, he was troubled by a promise of trouble. He was sure, yet not so sure.More than ever he wished he had been able to see what brand went on those calves that day.Coupled with uncertainty went the firm conviction that if Shining Mark once linked him with a knowledge of those dead cows and stolen calves, he, Robin Tyler, would need eyes in the back of his head whenever he rode alone.
From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders lay ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding. The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural meadow in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of poplars and clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply to the timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.
Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle bunch scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself drew up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember. Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old, commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always been a part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself as a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of its actors.
He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a queer glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. He only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight pleased him in a way he could not describe.
The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green. The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman silhouetted like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved about the chuck wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated up to Robin’s nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the human eye over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny resonance to sounds, the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring. Some one was singing a ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined lustily in the chorus:
“Comin’ up the Chisholm TrailI tell you what you’ll get,A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meatLittle black coffee with sugar on the sly,Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”
Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down the hill. He loosed hisreataand slung a noose. Fifty yards short of the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string, shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse packing his bed.
Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.
Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these youths where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone, “Gentlemen, dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it vigorously with an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And the crew swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens gathering about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat worms.
The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up. The rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent, sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource, initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold, rain, sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night watches on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses, lip-cracking thirst allayed by alkali water, days when they rode from sun to sun and slept with their boots on wherever they could lie down—it was all one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled space, action swift and purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work that was always tinged with the excitement of the unexpected, barred monotony from the range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what often was necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought diversion in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of being a unit in Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and colorful background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a sense of humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that his phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass current in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire of talk among the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no more to do with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as he lay on his unrolled bed.
He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one remarked that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the dusk Mark Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his uncanny skill with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them. Mark remained in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the wagon boss, he slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his fellows.
“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.
“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”
Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable beeves.
In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and Shadow Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells tinkled with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight passed. When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern broke out yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the east the cook lifted his call.
In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line the outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout, beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons drawn by four-horse teams.
There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely settled land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the chuck wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven by the nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by the horse wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted, shook the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop. Some passed theremudaand the wagons. Some jogged leisurely. They rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop.
Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele, “Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a cowman from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of the Block S over the heads of older hands.
He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of his horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread before them as they topped each little rise.
“Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently.
“Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,” Robin answered.
“Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with the Pool last spring.”
Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men far better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s—just ill luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding him. He knew that with his present string he could take the outside circle and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept silent.
“I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You weren’t in sight.”
“Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or both, had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway?
“Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually.
“Sothat’sit,” Robin thought—recalling the dead cows and the rifle shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud he said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.”
“Much stock in sight?”
“Quite a lot.”
They rode two hundred yards in silence.
“There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out suddenly.
“The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was surprise at information coming to him from this source.
“I been ridin’ myself some lately,” Mark went on in his crisp tone. “I’ve seen things.”
“What you been drinkin’?” Robin tried raillery.
Steele frowned.
“I seen some pretty fishy lookin’ work,” he growled. “Pretty raw. There’ll be a necktie party when I get it figured out.”
“Well, they can’t steal no cows of mine,” Robin said lightly. “’Cause I don’t own ary a split hoof. You don’t surprise me much. I guess there’s no range in Montana, nor any place where cows run, that there isn’t somebody packin’ a runnin’ iron and draggin’ the long rope now and then.”
“Ain’t you seen nothin’—no big calves with a fresh brand and no mother handy?” Steele persisted.
Robin shook his head.
“If I’d come across stuff like that anywhere in Bar M Bar territory I guess old Dan Mayne would be ridin’ the pinnacles with a Winchester and frothin’ at the mouth,” he drawled. “What’s the brand?”
“I ain’t talkin’,” Steele said darkly. “An’ you keep this to yourself what I say.Sabe?They’re workin’ on the Block S mostly, I expect. But they might not overlook the Bar M Bar. So keep your eyes open, kid, an’ let me know if you spot anything that looks queer.”
Three or four riders behind broke their horses into a lope, came abreast, laughing, elbows flopping like limp-winged birds. Steele and Robin fell into their pace. In a row, bobbing uniformly, hoofs beating out a steady rhythm on the dry turf, they passed the saddle herd, the wagons. The night hawk driving the bed wagon popped his whiplash as they went by. The cook, acting Jehu, braced himself by the four-horse reins, a cigarette in his lips. Far ahead of the wagons they overtook and joined the other riders.
At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught fresh horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a rise below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush, the town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There the chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would drink Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the Block S would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to return again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two thousand strong.
And all the way to town Robin wondered what Shining Mark was getting at; what was his real object in that conversation. Was he craftily seeking to discover if Robinhadbeen the rider on the sorrel horse who turned over the dead cow to read her brand?
Or was he shooting straight when he promised a necktie party for cow thieves unknown? When Robin gazed at Steele’s easy erectness in the saddle, the flashy ornamentation of his riding rig, he was troubled by a promise of trouble. He was sure, yet not so sure.
More than ever he wished he had been able to see what brand went on those calves that day.
Coupled with uncertainty went the firm conviction that if Shining Mark once linked him with a knowledge of those dead cows and stolen calves, he, Robin Tyler, would need eyes in the back of his head whenever he rode alone.