CHAPTER V.
MOUNTED AGAIN.
We stumbled along, close up, for the thick-piled clouds still hung theirlight-obscuring banners over the sky. Three yards apart we becameinvisible to each other. I followed behind MacRae more or lessmechanically, though I was, in a way, acutely conscious of the necessityfor stealthy going, one part of my mind busy turning over the quickmarch of events and guessing haphazard at the future.
Striding along in this mental semi-detachment from the business in hand,some three hundred yards down the coulee I tripped over a fallencottonwood and drove the point of a projecting limb clean through theupper of my boot and into the calf of my leg--not a disabling wound, butone that lacked nothing in the way of pain. The others stopped while Ipulled out the snag, which had broken off the trunk, and while I wasabout this a familiar clattering noise uprose near-by. Ever hear a horseshake himself, like a water-spaniel fresh from a dip, when he has beentied for a long time in one place with the dead weight of a heavy stocksaddle on his back? There is a little by-play of grunting and clearingof nostrils, then the slap of skirts and strings and stirrup-leathers--aman never forgets or mistakes the sound of it, if he has ever slept in around-up camp with a dozen restless night-horses saddled and tied to awagon twenty feet from his bed. But it made us jump, welling up out ofthe dark so unexpectedly and so near.
"Saddle-horse--tied," Mac tersely commented. We squatted in the longgrass and buck-brush, listening, and a few seconds later heard a horsesnort distinctly. This sound was immediately followed by the steady beatof an impatient forefoot.
"Over yonder," I said. "And there's more than one, I think. Let'sinvestigate this. And we'd better not separate."
Fifty yards to the left we struck a cottonwood grove, and in the outeredge of it loomed the vague outline of a horse--when we were almostwithin reaching-distance of him. I ran my hand over the saddle and knewit instantly for Bruce Haggin's rig. A half-minute of quiet prowlingrevealed our full quota of livestock, even to the pack-horse that boreour beds and grub, each one tied hard and fast to a tree. Also oursix-shooters reposed in their scabbards, the four belts hooked over thehorn of MacRae's saddle.
Maybe it didn't feel good to be on the hurricane deck of a good horseonce more! Whenever I have to walk any distance, I can always understandwhy a horse-thief yields to temptation and finally becomes confirmed inhis habit. It was rather an odd thing for those outlaws to leaveeverything, even to our guns, but I figured--and time proved thecorrectness of my arithmetic--that they had bigger fish to fry.
Once in the saddle, with the comfortable weight of a cartridge-beltaround each man's middle, we experienced a revulsion of feeling. Primedfor trouble if we could jump it out of the brush, we rode the bottomfor half an hour. But our men were gone. At least, we could not locatethem. So we took to the upland again and loped toward Pend d' Oreille.
"I've been thinking it isn't so strange--those old fellows being in thiscountry--after all," Mac suddenly began, as we slowed our horses down totake a hill. "I didn't remember at first, but two years ago, just afterI joined the Force, I ran across a bull-whacker on the Whoop Up trail,and he told me that the Double R had closed out. He said Hank had gotinto a ruction with Dick Feltz--you recollect there was considerablefeeling between them in our time down there--and killed him one day atFort Worth. Feltz had some folks that took it up, and Hank had to spenda barrel of money to come clear. That, and a range war that grew out ofthe killing, and some kind of a business deal just about broke them.That's the way this fellow had it; said a trail-boss told him atOgalalla that spring. I didn't take much stock in the yarn at the time,but I'm beginning to think he had it straight. You didn't hear anythingabout it?"
"Not a word; it's news to me," I said. "When I left that country I keptmoving north all the time. The last three years I've been in the JudithBasin, and southern outfits haven't begun to come in there yet. So Ihaven't had much chance to hear from that part of the world. But I'mframing up my think-works so I won't be surprised at anything I see orhear after to-night. How long since you left that country, Mac?"
"Next spring after you did," he answered. "If they did go broke, I can_sabe_ their being here. Rutter said, you know, that they'd made a stakeon the Peace--Peace River, I suppose he meant. There's been a lot ofplacer mining in that north country the last three or four years. Theymight have been up there and struck it good and plenty. They made theirstart in the cow business off a placer in California, you know."
I knew that, for Rowan often spoke of it. And granting that we hadsurmised rightly, it required no vivid imagination to picture whatmight happen to men crossing those wide prairies with a fortune inyellow dust. But my imagination was hardly equal to the task ofreconciling the fact that the evil pair had been busy at other deviltryand yet knew I carried a large sum of money and where it was concealedabout my person. That brought me back to something else Rutter had toldus; something that I knew--or thought I knew--touched MacRae veryclosely.
"Hans said Lyn was at Walsh," I remarked. "I don't think she was there,this morning. But she might be due to arrive there. Hang it all, Mac,what the dickens chased you away from the Canadian?"
"Looking back, I can't just say what it was," he presently replied, in ahard, matter-of-fact tone. "You see, one's feelings can change, Sarge.It looks different to me now than it did then. I reckon I could havewritten essays on the futility of sentiment, and the damned silliness ofa man who thinks he cares for a woman. But I'm past that stage. And soI can't say for sure just how it was or why. Something came up betweenme and Lyn--and I drifted, and kept drifting. Went through Colorado,Wyoming, Montana; finally rambled here, and went into the Forcebecause--well, because a man with anything to him can go to the top. Aman must play at something, and this looked like a good game."
There was a note of something that I'd never heard in MacRae's voicebefore; neither bitterness nor anger nor sorrow nor lonesomeness, andyet there was a hint of each, but so slight, so elusive I couldn't graspit. I remembered that the last sentence MacRae had spoken to me in theSouth was a message to Lyn Rowan, a message that I never had thepleasure of delivering, for my hasty flitting took me out other trailsthan the one that led to the home ranch. And so they had parted--gonedifferent ways--probably in anger. Well, that's only another example ofthe average human's cussedness. Lyn could be just as haughty as she wassweet and gracious, which was natural enough, seeing she'd ruled acattle king and all his sunburned riders since she was big enough totoddle alone; and Gordon MacRae wasn't the sort of man who would come toheel at any woman's bidding--at least, he wasn't in the old days. Oh, Icould understand how it happened, all right. Each of them was chuck fullof that dubious sort of pride that has busted up more than onelove-_fiesta_.
Neither of us spoke again, and at length the squat log buildings of Pendd' Oreille loomed ahead of us in the night. Tired and hungry, we stabledour horses, ate a bite, and rolled into bed.