CHAPTER XXIVTHE BACKWASHThe J7 took a short swing eastward, turned back when T Bar S’s grew scarce, and pitched camp one evening on Birch Creek below Cold Spring within sight of where Robin first saw with a shock of surprise the flash of silver on a rustler’s gear. The Bad Lands lay in a tumbled stretch below. A few thickets of jack pine spotted the valley walls, made dark patches about the heads of those torn gulches. Birch Creek was a mere trickle in its alkali bed. It was like the jaws of hell for heat in that deep, sage-floored bottom. At dawn, when the riders saddled and mounted, the air was cool and scented with the odor of bruised sage.Robin sat half-turned in his saddle watching the wagons vanish up the steep pitch of a draw that led to high ground. The day herd and the saddle bunch climbed the slope in long files. Very soon he would finish that gathering. In and around Chase Hill he expected to end the clean-up. After that—he was wondering what would come after that, as he sat there.Some of his riders sat quietly resting gloved hands on their saddle horns. Some rolled a final cigarette. Two or three were giving the last tightening to their cinches.Something stung Robin in the side, like a hornet, or the touch of a live coal. Involuntarily he flinched. The prick of his spur, the lurch of his body, startled the nervous brute under him. Touch and movement were simultaneous. Already off balance, when the horse spun like an uncoiled spring, Robin lost his seat—went headlong to earth, precisely as if he had been shot.That was no mere conjecture flashing through his brain as he fell. He saw a dust spurt rise twenty feet beyond him while he was yet in mid-air. And he lay still where he had fallen, listening for a sound that made the tale complete—the clear, staccato report of a rifle.Every detail of what occurred, every possibility, stood clear in Robin’s mental and visual processes. He saw two other horses jump and swerve at the spurt of dust. He knew where his own horse stood when the shot was fired, and so marked the line of the bullet’s flight, a point on the eastern bank three hundred yards distant, perhaps three hundred feet above the flat, a spot masked by a clump of scrubby pines.He did not rise. He did not move. He lay watching, and his riders flung themselves off their horses to gather around him. His fall and that crack told them the story.“Are you hurt bad?” they cried.“Never mind me,” Robin said. “Look. See that bunch of pine? That’s where he fired from. Go get him. Get him alive if you can, but get him. Spread out and burn the earth. Quick, or he’ll slip you in the rough country.”One man stayed with him, knelt beside him. The others flung themselves astride, broke away on the run, spreading fanwise as they rode. Every man was armed. Robin had seen that they rode armed once they crossed the Big Muddy. Two or three carried rifles under their stirrup leathers. Robin smiled to himself as the dust rolled out from under those drumming hoofs.“He’ll have to go some to get away. And if he does he’ll think he got me,” he reflected. Then, in answer to Jim Stratton’s anxious query:“I don’t know. I don’t feel as if I was finished. But somethin’ sure stung me. Guess I’ll look.”Baring his waist showed a red line like a scar of a brand, where the bullet had seared his skin.“Now that’s what I’d call close,” Robin commented. “Darned if it didn’t feel like it had plowed right through me. She sure stings but don’t amount to much. Get my horse, Jim. I’m all right.”Stratton galloped over to where Robin’s mount after a brief bolt stood still on the fallen reins. He led him back, Robin got up, mounted, nursing that sharp pain in his side and a bruised shoulder from the fall, but practically unharmed.“We’ll join the hunt,” he said briefly, and rode for the eastern bank.Empty bench land, brown and yellow with ripe grass, a network of coulees, canyons, ravines, clumps of pines, great areas of sagebrush, the Bear Paws looming high and blue on the north, met their gaze. No riders moved in sight, only a few bunches of wild cattle stirred to flight by the pursuit.“Hark!” said Stratton, after a minute. “They’ve opened the ball.”A burst of shots rose, echoed, died away. The plains silence closed in again. The morning air fanned their faces, rippled the long grass. They waited, watching, five minutes, ten, half an hour, the sun dazzling their eyes as they looked to the east.“There they come,” Robin pointed.Two miles off a group of horsemen debouched from a hollow, riding slowly. Robin and Stratton loosed their mounts to a gallop.On a horse led by Sam Connors and flanked by the J7 riders sat Tommy Thatcher. He was disarmed, hatless, his hands tied behind his back. A smear of blood streaked his face. He rode a J7 horse and the rider of that horse sat riding double behind another man’s cantle. The J7 men grinned widely at Robin and Robin stared at Thatcher.“Lucky we were,” Sam Connors said. “We dropped his horse at long range an’ Mr. Man went down so hard he didn’t come to till we closed in on him.”“I busted him one when he started to get gay,” said the rider who was mounted double, “so they made me give him my horse, they was so kind to him. I’d ’a’ made the skunk trot at the end of a lass-rope. What’ll we do with him, Tyler? Name your poison.”Robin lifted his hat and ran his fingers through the mat of his curly hair. He didn’t speak to Thatcher. The man stared at him in dumb fear.“First it was shootin’ cows to steal their calves. Then it was Tex Matthews. Now it’s me,” he mused. Aloud, he said:“Bring him down into the creek.”They plowed up the loose earth on the steep bank, gained the sage-gray bottom. Where the canyon from Cold Spring joined Birch Creek three gnarly old cottonwoods grew, a trio like the weird sisters. They stood within half a mile of where Mark Steele and Thatcher shot the Bar M Bar cows. Robin remembered those trees. He led the way until his riders were bunched in the leafy shade. Thick, crooked limbs spread from the rough-barked trunks fifteen feet above ground.“Heave a rope over that branch,” Robin pointed.The Texan’s face blanched. For a second or two the J7 men looked startled.“I sure do despise a bushwhacker,” one reckless youth said at last. “I’ll donate my rope in a good cause.”He flung the noosed end deftly over a stout limb.“Lead him under,” Robin spoke again.Connors gave the lead rope to a J7 man, wheeled his horse aside and sat looking thoughtfully at Robin. The J7 man led the horse Thatcher bestrode under the dangling noose.“Put it around his neck. Tighten it up and tie the end to the tree,” Robin ordered.Robin’s young face was hard as iron. He looked at the shrinking Texan and there was no mercy in his eyes. The horse that bore Thatcher was gentle. He stood passive, a living scaffold, such as the old West devised for the speedy execution of malefactors long before Robin Tyler was born. A flick of a rope-end and the beast would leap from under, to leave Thatcher’s spurred heels kicking three feet clear of mother earth. Robin raised his braided quirt. Thatcher’s lips trembled.“For God’s sake, Tyler, take this rope off my neck!” he pleaded. “Give me a chance for my life. I’ll talk.”“What chance did you give Tex Matthews or me?” Robin sneered. “You’re not gagged. Speak out if you want.”“Take away the rope,” Thatcher begged. “I’ll cough it all up, if you won’t hang me here. Shinin’ Mark’s the man you want, not me.”“Say what you want,” Robin answered coldly. “I make no promises. It’s hangin’ or the pen for you, anyway.”“If I hang, I want him to hang with me,” the Texan mumbled. “He got me into this. I’ll take a chance on the penitentiary if you’ll keep me off’n this tree.”“Say your say,” Robin lowered his quirt.“Steele’s been rustlin’ off the Bar M Bar an’ the Block S for two seasons, brandin’ what he stole with the T Bar S, which he owns on the quiet. I’ve been in with him from the start. He got a hold over me an’ I had to go through. At first we shot the cows, like we did that day a year ago in this here bottom, when you rode down an’ looked for the brand on that cow. It was Mark took a crack at you that day. Mostly we cut back cows with big calves an’ separated ’em later. We had a corral in the Bad Lands down toward Cow Creek where we got in our work late in the fall. A lot of the stuff we threw across the Missouri on the ice. It was Steele shot Tex Matthews when we got onto you fellers prowlin’ down there. He tried to get you too. An’ we was lookin’ for you, figurin’ how we could get away with you the time we walked in on you asleep in the Birch Creek line camp—the day you turned Mark’s gun back on him an’ shot him in the neck.“When you jumped the country thinkin’ you’d killed him, he figured it was all clear. When you come back this spring he was scared to rustle, and he was leary of jumpin’ you in public. He began to think you was tougher game than he’d reckoned. Then he got worried when he knew you was runnin’ the J7 round-up in the Judith because he knew you’d come on lots of T Bar S yearlin’s. When you blew into the Block S the other day an’ made that play about havin’ bought the T Bar S an’ undertook to sell it to Sutherland, he knew the stuff was off an’ he had to claim ownership. He figured he could bluff Sutherland since there wasn’t enough proof to convict him. But he was afraid you’d either keep on his trail until you got evidence, or you an’ Sutherland would just naturally grab every T Bar S in sight an’ hold ’em in spite of hell. So he foamed around after Sutherland fired him an’ decided we had to kill you first chance an’ that would be the end of it. You were the only man in the country that really knew how it was worked. So he put it up to me to ambush you. I’ve been layin’ for you for three days. That’s all. I’ll swear to that in court if you take him alive.”The J7 men had crowded close to listen.“By the Lord,” one growled. “You sure ought to hang. A cow thief an’ a murderer. Will I hit old Bones a clip, Robin?”“Untie the rope,” Robin said calmly. “We’ll let the sheriff of Chouteau county hang him an’ Shinin’ Mark together.”“One other thing,” Robin said when Thatcher’s neck was free of the noose. “Where is Mark Steele now?”“I dunno. I expect,” Thatcher mumbled, “he’ll be around somewheres in public establishin’ a alibi for himself, in case he got accused of shootin’ you. I’ve had to do the dirty work.”“All right.” Robin nodded to Sam Connors. That individual moved up beside Thatcher.“You’re under arrest by a qualified officer,” he said pleasantly. “We’ll treat you nice, an’ have you safe in jail at Fort Benton inside of twenty-four hours. So behave yourself.”“Listen,” Robin addressed his crew. “You’ve heard his yarn. It’s true. I’ve been up against this for a year. Keep your mouths shut tight about all this until you’re called in court as witnesses. Shinin’ Mark won’t be as easy to handle as this fellow. Now, two of you ride, one on each side of him, to camp.”They moved off in a cavalcade. Sam Connors fell in beside Robin, looking curiously at him.“If he hadn’t weakened would you ’a’ hung him?” he asked at last.“I don’t know,” Robin answered truthfully. “Maybe. But he did weaken.”“You had me guessin’,” Connors observed. “I couldn’t hardly ’a’ stood for a lynchin’. Did you figure he’d squeal when you made that hangin’ play?”“Yes,” Robin admitted. “That’s why I made it. I’ve got ’em both dead to rights now. Next thing is to round up Shinin’ Mark Steele. Then this range’ll be clean once more.”
The J7 took a short swing eastward, turned back when T Bar S’s grew scarce, and pitched camp one evening on Birch Creek below Cold Spring within sight of where Robin first saw with a shock of surprise the flash of silver on a rustler’s gear. The Bad Lands lay in a tumbled stretch below. A few thickets of jack pine spotted the valley walls, made dark patches about the heads of those torn gulches. Birch Creek was a mere trickle in its alkali bed. It was like the jaws of hell for heat in that deep, sage-floored bottom. At dawn, when the riders saddled and mounted, the air was cool and scented with the odor of bruised sage.
Robin sat half-turned in his saddle watching the wagons vanish up the steep pitch of a draw that led to high ground. The day herd and the saddle bunch climbed the slope in long files. Very soon he would finish that gathering. In and around Chase Hill he expected to end the clean-up. After that—he was wondering what would come after that, as he sat there.
Some of his riders sat quietly resting gloved hands on their saddle horns. Some rolled a final cigarette. Two or three were giving the last tightening to their cinches.
Something stung Robin in the side, like a hornet, or the touch of a live coal. Involuntarily he flinched. The prick of his spur, the lurch of his body, startled the nervous brute under him. Touch and movement were simultaneous. Already off balance, when the horse spun like an uncoiled spring, Robin lost his seat—went headlong to earth, precisely as if he had been shot.
That was no mere conjecture flashing through his brain as he fell. He saw a dust spurt rise twenty feet beyond him while he was yet in mid-air. And he lay still where he had fallen, listening for a sound that made the tale complete—the clear, staccato report of a rifle.
Every detail of what occurred, every possibility, stood clear in Robin’s mental and visual processes. He saw two other horses jump and swerve at the spurt of dust. He knew where his own horse stood when the shot was fired, and so marked the line of the bullet’s flight, a point on the eastern bank three hundred yards distant, perhaps three hundred feet above the flat, a spot masked by a clump of scrubby pines.
He did not rise. He did not move. He lay watching, and his riders flung themselves off their horses to gather around him. His fall and that crack told them the story.
“Are you hurt bad?” they cried.
“Never mind me,” Robin said. “Look. See that bunch of pine? That’s where he fired from. Go get him. Get him alive if you can, but get him. Spread out and burn the earth. Quick, or he’ll slip you in the rough country.”
One man stayed with him, knelt beside him. The others flung themselves astride, broke away on the run, spreading fanwise as they rode. Every man was armed. Robin had seen that they rode armed once they crossed the Big Muddy. Two or three carried rifles under their stirrup leathers. Robin smiled to himself as the dust rolled out from under those drumming hoofs.
“He’ll have to go some to get away. And if he does he’ll think he got me,” he reflected. Then, in answer to Jim Stratton’s anxious query:
“I don’t know. I don’t feel as if I was finished. But somethin’ sure stung me. Guess I’ll look.”
Baring his waist showed a red line like a scar of a brand, where the bullet had seared his skin.
“Now that’s what I’d call close,” Robin commented. “Darned if it didn’t feel like it had plowed right through me. She sure stings but don’t amount to much. Get my horse, Jim. I’m all right.”
Stratton galloped over to where Robin’s mount after a brief bolt stood still on the fallen reins. He led him back, Robin got up, mounted, nursing that sharp pain in his side and a bruised shoulder from the fall, but practically unharmed.
“We’ll join the hunt,” he said briefly, and rode for the eastern bank.
Empty bench land, brown and yellow with ripe grass, a network of coulees, canyons, ravines, clumps of pines, great areas of sagebrush, the Bear Paws looming high and blue on the north, met their gaze. No riders moved in sight, only a few bunches of wild cattle stirred to flight by the pursuit.
“Hark!” said Stratton, after a minute. “They’ve opened the ball.”
A burst of shots rose, echoed, died away. The plains silence closed in again. The morning air fanned their faces, rippled the long grass. They waited, watching, five minutes, ten, half an hour, the sun dazzling their eyes as they looked to the east.
“There they come,” Robin pointed.
Two miles off a group of horsemen debouched from a hollow, riding slowly. Robin and Stratton loosed their mounts to a gallop.
On a horse led by Sam Connors and flanked by the J7 riders sat Tommy Thatcher. He was disarmed, hatless, his hands tied behind his back. A smear of blood streaked his face. He rode a J7 horse and the rider of that horse sat riding double behind another man’s cantle. The J7 men grinned widely at Robin and Robin stared at Thatcher.
“Lucky we were,” Sam Connors said. “We dropped his horse at long range an’ Mr. Man went down so hard he didn’t come to till we closed in on him.”
“I busted him one when he started to get gay,” said the rider who was mounted double, “so they made me give him my horse, they was so kind to him. I’d ’a’ made the skunk trot at the end of a lass-rope. What’ll we do with him, Tyler? Name your poison.”
Robin lifted his hat and ran his fingers through the mat of his curly hair. He didn’t speak to Thatcher. The man stared at him in dumb fear.
“First it was shootin’ cows to steal their calves. Then it was Tex Matthews. Now it’s me,” he mused. Aloud, he said:
“Bring him down into the creek.”
They plowed up the loose earth on the steep bank, gained the sage-gray bottom. Where the canyon from Cold Spring joined Birch Creek three gnarly old cottonwoods grew, a trio like the weird sisters. They stood within half a mile of where Mark Steele and Thatcher shot the Bar M Bar cows. Robin remembered those trees. He led the way until his riders were bunched in the leafy shade. Thick, crooked limbs spread from the rough-barked trunks fifteen feet above ground.
“Heave a rope over that branch,” Robin pointed.
The Texan’s face blanched. For a second or two the J7 men looked startled.
“I sure do despise a bushwhacker,” one reckless youth said at last. “I’ll donate my rope in a good cause.”
He flung the noosed end deftly over a stout limb.
“Lead him under,” Robin spoke again.
Connors gave the lead rope to a J7 man, wheeled his horse aside and sat looking thoughtfully at Robin. The J7 man led the horse Thatcher bestrode under the dangling noose.
“Put it around his neck. Tighten it up and tie the end to the tree,” Robin ordered.
Robin’s young face was hard as iron. He looked at the shrinking Texan and there was no mercy in his eyes. The horse that bore Thatcher was gentle. He stood passive, a living scaffold, such as the old West devised for the speedy execution of malefactors long before Robin Tyler was born. A flick of a rope-end and the beast would leap from under, to leave Thatcher’s spurred heels kicking three feet clear of mother earth. Robin raised his braided quirt. Thatcher’s lips trembled.
“For God’s sake, Tyler, take this rope off my neck!” he pleaded. “Give me a chance for my life. I’ll talk.”
“What chance did you give Tex Matthews or me?” Robin sneered. “You’re not gagged. Speak out if you want.”
“Take away the rope,” Thatcher begged. “I’ll cough it all up, if you won’t hang me here. Shinin’ Mark’s the man you want, not me.”
“Say what you want,” Robin answered coldly. “I make no promises. It’s hangin’ or the pen for you, anyway.”
“If I hang, I want him to hang with me,” the Texan mumbled. “He got me into this. I’ll take a chance on the penitentiary if you’ll keep me off’n this tree.”
“Say your say,” Robin lowered his quirt.
“Steele’s been rustlin’ off the Bar M Bar an’ the Block S for two seasons, brandin’ what he stole with the T Bar S, which he owns on the quiet. I’ve been in with him from the start. He got a hold over me an’ I had to go through. At first we shot the cows, like we did that day a year ago in this here bottom, when you rode down an’ looked for the brand on that cow. It was Mark took a crack at you that day. Mostly we cut back cows with big calves an’ separated ’em later. We had a corral in the Bad Lands down toward Cow Creek where we got in our work late in the fall. A lot of the stuff we threw across the Missouri on the ice. It was Steele shot Tex Matthews when we got onto you fellers prowlin’ down there. He tried to get you too. An’ we was lookin’ for you, figurin’ how we could get away with you the time we walked in on you asleep in the Birch Creek line camp—the day you turned Mark’s gun back on him an’ shot him in the neck.
“When you jumped the country thinkin’ you’d killed him, he figured it was all clear. When you come back this spring he was scared to rustle, and he was leary of jumpin’ you in public. He began to think you was tougher game than he’d reckoned. Then he got worried when he knew you was runnin’ the J7 round-up in the Judith because he knew you’d come on lots of T Bar S yearlin’s. When you blew into the Block S the other day an’ made that play about havin’ bought the T Bar S an’ undertook to sell it to Sutherland, he knew the stuff was off an’ he had to claim ownership. He figured he could bluff Sutherland since there wasn’t enough proof to convict him. But he was afraid you’d either keep on his trail until you got evidence, or you an’ Sutherland would just naturally grab every T Bar S in sight an’ hold ’em in spite of hell. So he foamed around after Sutherland fired him an’ decided we had to kill you first chance an’ that would be the end of it. You were the only man in the country that really knew how it was worked. So he put it up to me to ambush you. I’ve been layin’ for you for three days. That’s all. I’ll swear to that in court if you take him alive.”
The J7 men had crowded close to listen.
“By the Lord,” one growled. “You sure ought to hang. A cow thief an’ a murderer. Will I hit old Bones a clip, Robin?”
“Untie the rope,” Robin said calmly. “We’ll let the sheriff of Chouteau county hang him an’ Shinin’ Mark together.”
“One other thing,” Robin said when Thatcher’s neck was free of the noose. “Where is Mark Steele now?”
“I dunno. I expect,” Thatcher mumbled, “he’ll be around somewheres in public establishin’ a alibi for himself, in case he got accused of shootin’ you. I’ve had to do the dirty work.”
“All right.” Robin nodded to Sam Connors. That individual moved up beside Thatcher.
“You’re under arrest by a qualified officer,” he said pleasantly. “We’ll treat you nice, an’ have you safe in jail at Fort Benton inside of twenty-four hours. So behave yourself.”
“Listen,” Robin addressed his crew. “You’ve heard his yarn. It’s true. I’ve been up against this for a year. Keep your mouths shut tight about all this until you’re called in court as witnesses. Shinin’ Mark won’t be as easy to handle as this fellow. Now, two of you ride, one on each side of him, to camp.”
They moved off in a cavalcade. Sam Connors fell in beside Robin, looking curiously at him.
“If he hadn’t weakened would you ’a’ hung him?” he asked at last.
“I don’t know,” Robin answered truthfully. “Maybe. But he did weaken.”
“You had me guessin’,” Connors observed. “I couldn’t hardly ’a’ stood for a lynchin’. Did you figure he’d squeal when you made that hangin’ play?”
“Yes,” Robin admitted. “That’s why I made it. I’ve got ’em both dead to rights now. Next thing is to round up Shinin’ Mark Steele. Then this range’ll be clean once more.”