IV
It is said that there comes a day in the life of every handler of badhorses when he will mount one and ride him out, master him anddismount,--and forever after decline to ride another. Riley Foster wasevidence of this. For three years Rile and Bangs had been inseparable,riding together on every job, and the shaggy youth topped off theanimals in Foster's string before the older man would mount them. AsBangs went about his work his faded blue eyes were ever turned towardthe Three Bar boss who stood in the door of the blacksmith shop.
The girl was vaguely troubled as she noted this. Bangs and Foster hadreturned for their second season at the Three Bar. All through theprevious summer the boy had evidenced his silent adoration, his eyesfollowing her every move.
The scene round Billie was one of strenuous activity, every effort benttoward whipping the remuda into shape for the calf round-up in theleast possible space of time.
Every rider must have nine horses in his string. His five circlehorses needed but little training, the only necessary qualificationsbeing endurance and a sufficient amount of breaking to make it possibleto saddle them; the two night mounts must be partially broken to workthe herd, then switched to night guarding and thereafter usedexclusively for that. But the two cow horses required long and skilfultraining. Every man gave one of his circle string the preliminarytraining of the cow horse each season, the work resumed by the man towhose string the horse was allotted the following year; thus new oneswere coming on to replace the older horses as fast as they werecondemned.
Four pairs of men worked within a hundred yards of the girl, takingequal turns at riding and wrangling. The one who wrangled put his ropeon a horse and led him out, snubbed him to the saddle horn andfrequently eared him as well, while the one who was to ride him outcinched on his saddle and mounted.
Green horses were led out, one after another, to be saddled for thefirst time, and those previously broken required a few work-outs toknock the wire edge off their unwillingness to carry a rider after awinter of freedom on the range.
Three men were shoeing horses tied to snubbing posts at ten-yardintervals before the shop. One animal that had fought viciouslyagainst this treatment had been thrown and stretched, his four feetroped to convenient posts, and while he struggled and heaved on theground Rile Foster calmly fitted and nailed the shoes on him. CalHarris 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. "Butyou didn't pick a single cow horse. The boys have sorted out the bestones and the few that are left won't answer for a man that insists on agentled string."
"Creamer and Calico will do for me," he said. "I broke them myself andmaybe I can worry along."
"Did you break them like that?" she asked. Bangs was topping a horsethat strenuously refused to be conquered and as they looked on theanimal threw himself.
"Like that? Well, no--not precisely," Harris said. "They're notbreaking horses. They're proving that they're bronc-peelers that canride 'em before they're broke. A horse started out that way will be abronc till the day he dies. The first thing he knows some straddlerswarms him and hangs the spurs in him. He bogs his head and starts outto slip his pack--and from right then on he thinks the first thing todo 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 packhorses and when this task was completed they rode down the lane, eachone leading his pack animal. Harris knew this as evidence that theywould start after the calves on the following day. The custom was toexchange representatives to ride with each wagon within a reasonabledistance, the reps to look after the interest of the brand for whichthey 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 thehills; the V L the same distance to the west, but cached away in apocket that led well back into the base of the range, a comparativelysmall outfit owned by the Brandons, father and four sons, who madeevery effort to keep the bulk of their cows ranging in their own homebasin and exchanged reps only with the Three Bar.
Slade's home place lay forty miles south and a little west and his cowsgrazed for over a hundred miles, requiring three wagons to cover hisrange.
During the afternoon the three reps came in to replace the men who hadleft. The surplus horses had been cut out and thrown back on therange, only those required for the remuda remaining in the pasture lot.The chuck wagon was wheeled before the cookhouse door and packed for anearly start. Before the first streaks of dawn the men had saddled andbreakfasted. It was turning gray in the east when four horses,necessitating the attentions of four men, were hooked to the wagon. Aman hung on the bit of each wheel horse while another grasped the bitsof 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 hemounted the seat and braced himself. "These willow-tails haven't hadon a strap of harness for many a month. All set. Turn loose!"
The men stepped back and the four horses hit the collars raggedly. Onewheel horse reared and jumped forward. The off leader dropped his headand pitched, shaking himself as if struggling to unseat a rider, thenthe four settled into a jerky run and the heavy wagon clattered andlurched down the lane.
"Fine way to break work stock," Harris remarked to Evans. "That layoutwould bring maybe a dollar a head."
The men swung to their saddles and followed the wagon at a shufflingtrot. From where she rode between Evans and Harris, the girl turned inher saddle and watched two men throw open the gates of the big corralwhere the remuda was held. The wrangler, whose duty it was to tend thehorse herd by day, and the nighthawk who would guard it at night sat ontheir horses at the far end of the corral and urged the herd out as thegates swung back. The remuda streamed down the valley, the two firstriders swinging wide to either flank while the nighthawk and wranglerbrought up the rear.
The four that pulled the wagon had settled to a steady gait and whensome three miles below the Three Bar Waddles wheeled to the right andangled up the bench that flanked the bottoms, the wagon tiltingperilously in the ascent, then struck out westward across a rollingcountry that showed not even a wagon track. The big cook unerringlypicked the route of least resistance to the point from which the firstcircle would be launched, striking every wash and coulee at a placewhere a crossing was possible.
Shortly before noon the wagon was halted in a broad bottom threaded bya tiny spring-fed stream. The teams were unhitched; mounts wereunsaddled and thrown into the horse herd, which was then headed intothe mouth of a branching draw and allowed to graze. Waddles dumped offthe bed rolls that were piled from the broad lowered tail-gate to thewagon top and each man sorted out his own and spread it upon some spotwhich struck him as a likely bed ground.
One man carried water from the stream. Two others snaked in wood forthe chuck-wagon fire. Still another drove long stakes in the shape ofa hollow square, stretching a single rope from one to the next andfashioning 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 anderected the three, tripod fashion, after having first pegged down theteepee sides. Harris brought the girl's bed roll and war bag from thewagon 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. Thebig 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 fromwhich the culinary water supply was drawn moved hastily downstream.
It was not long before Waddles was dispensing nourishment from thelowered tail-gate, ladling
food and hot coffee into the plates and cupswhich the men held out to him. They drew away and sat cross-legged onthe ground. The meal was almost finished when six horsemen rode downthe 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 stilla-steaming."
Four of the men differed in no material way from the Three Bar men inappearance. The fifth was a ruffian with little forehead, a face ofgorilla cast, stamped with brute ferocity and small intelligence. Thelast of the six was a striking figure, a big man with pure white hairand 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 menwho had violated every law on the calendar, but knowing also that noman would take exceptions to their presence on that general groundalone, and as they had neared the wagon each man had scanned the facesof the round-up crew to make certain that there were none among themwho might bear some more specific and personal dislike.
The Three Bar men chatted and fraternized with them as they would havedone with the riders of any legitimate outfit. Harper praised the foodthat Waddles tendered them.
Billie Warren forced a smile as she nodded to them, then moved off andsat upon a rock some fifty yards from the wagon, despising the six menwho ate her fare and inwardly raging at the conditions which forced herto extend the hospitality of the Three Bar to men of their breedwhenever they chanced by.
Harris strolled over and sat down facing her, sifting tobacco into abrown 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, "andrefused; so why bring it up again? The next two years will be hardenough without my having to listen to that."
"Our families must have been real set on throwing us together," heobserved. "I was cut off without a dime myself--unless I spent twofull years on the Three Bar."
She was angry with herself for believing him sincere, for beingconvinced that he too, as he had several times intimated, was tied inmuch the same fashion as herself. The explanation came to her in anilluminating flash. The elder Harris must have nursed a lifelongenmity against her father, who had believed him the most devoted friendon earth.
She had often heard the tale of how her parent had, in allfriendliness, followed old Bill Harris step by step from Dodge City tothe Platte, to old Fort Laramie and finally to the present Three Barrange. Perhaps the one so followed had felt that Cal Warren was butthe hated symbol of the whole clan of squatters who had driven him fromplace to place and eventually forced him to relinquish his hope ofseeing the Three Bar brand on a hundred thousand cows; that hisfriendliness had been simulated, his vindictiveness nursed and finallyconsummated by leaving his affairs in such fashion that his son mustcarry on the work his trickery had begun.
The voice of Waddles reached them. He was announcing a half-day ofrest, according to her orders.
"It's kill-time for the rest of the day," he stated. "Make the most ofit."
For three weeks past, excepting for the trip to Brill's, the men hadtoiled incessantly, breakfasting before sunup and seeking their bunkslong after dark. Some immediately turned to their bed rolls to make uplost sleep. Others repaired to the stream to wash out extra articlesof 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 girlhad turned out to be any except you. You've had a tough problem towork out, girl," he said. "I sold out my little Box L outfit for morethan it was worth--and figured to stop the leak at the Three Bar andput 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 sixmen near the wagon. "During the time you spent prowling the hills didyou ever come across those men?"
"Not to pal round with them," he confessed. "But I did cut their trailnow and then."
"Then don't you know what every other man in this country knows--thatthose six and a lot more of their breed are responsible for every losswithin a hundred miles? They can operate against a brand one week andstop at the home ranch and get fed the next. That's where the ThreeBar 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 thetime arrives."
"What do you mean?" she asked. "No one has ever been able to handlethem up to date."
"Did it ever strike you as queer that Slade could come into thiscountry twelve years back, with nothing but a long rope and a runningiron, and be owning thirty thousand head to-day?"
"He has the knack to protect his own and increase," she said. "They'reafraid of Slade."
Harris absently traced the Three Bar in the dust with a stick, thenfashioned the V L and the Halfmoon D, the three brands that rangedalong the foot of the hills. With a few deft strokes he transformedthe Three Bar into the Three Cross T, reworked the V L into a DiamondBox and the Halfmoon D into Circle P, each one of the worked-oversrepresenting one of the dozen or so brands registered by Slade. Heblotted out his handiwork with the flat of his hand.
"Don't you suppose that the owner of every one of those brands knowsthat?" 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 onhow peculiar it was that the three brands he runs farthest north shouldbe so easy worked over into any one of the three that his rangeoverlaps up this way. And I happen to know his farthest south brandswould work out the same way with the outfits at the other end of hisrange. But he earmarks all of his brands the same--with jinglebobs;and jinglebobs most generally drop off and leave nothing but a good bigpiece absent out of the ear."
"So you think a man as big as Slade is stupid enough to try his hand atbrand-blotting on all sides at once?" she asked.
"No; nor even once on one side," he returned. "Not him. The one factthat the similarity of brands would make it easy to fall into the habitis enough to keep every outfit watching him. He couldn't start--andknows it."
"Then what does it all amount to?" she asked.
"While folks watch him on that score he could work in a dozen ways thatdon't concern those brands at all," he said.
The girl shook her head impatiently and looked across at the six menwho ate her fare.
"Look at them," she flared. "Eating my food; and in a few nightsthey'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 hiswhelps and rid the country of his breed? Even Slade lets them put upat 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 downthe country," he returned. He sprawled on the grass, his head proppedon one hand as he regarded them.
"Then probably you'd better order them off," she suggested. "You havemy permission. Now's your chance to make good the lordly brag ofhelping the Three Bar out of the hole." She instantly regretted havingsaid it. A dozen times of late she had wondered if she were turningbitter and waspish, if she would ever again be the even-tempered BillieWarren with a good word and a smile for every one.
Harris was, as always, apparently undisturbed by her words. Far downthe bottoms she could see a point of light which she knew for a whitesign that read: "Squatter, don't let sundown find you here." The manbefore her ha
d defied these sinister warnings scattered about the rangeand publicly announced that he would put in hay on his filing, knowingthat 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 momentsbefore. Harris straightened to a sitting position in his surprise atthis impulsive retraction, and as he smiled across at her she divinedthat this man, seemingly so impervious to her sarcasm, could be easilymoved 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 suddenclutch of fear as he halted before Harper and she realized that he hadtaken her words literally and intended ordering them off.
"I've been made temporary foreman of the Three Bar--just so the bosscould try me out on that job for an hour or two," he remarkedconversationally. "So I'm putting in a new rule that goes into effectright off. When you boys ride away, in a few minutes from now, you cantell folks that the grub line is closed as far as the Three Bar isconcerned."
Lang took a half-step toward him, his face reflecting his gatheringrage as his slow brain comprehended the fact that this speech was butanother way of announcing that he and his men would find no welcome atthe Three Bar from that moment on. Harper caught his arm and jerkedhim 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." Heturned to Harris, noting as he did so that every Three Bar man,excepting those asleep, had suddenly evidenced keen interest in whatwas transpiring there; several carelessly shifted their positions."There's no law to make you feed any man," he said to Harris. "Fromnow on we'll pay our way--as far as the Three Bar is concerned."
His tones were casual; only his pale eyes, fastened unblinkingly onHarris's face, betrayed his real feeling toward the man who,notwithstanding the roundabout nature of his announcement, hadpractically 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 timeyou happen to ride down our way."
Every man within earshot understood the threat that lay beneath thecasual words.
"Then I'll likely drop in some time," Harris said. "If you'll sendword where it is. And I'll bring fifty men along."
The albino motioned his men toward their horses and they mounted androde off down the bottoms. Harris walked back and resumed his seatnear the girl, who sat looking at him as if she could not believe whatshe had just witnessed.
"You see it was just as easy as I'd counted on," he said. "It'll be aconsiderable 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 oldhand 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 wildbunch is always roosting on the powder can even when it appears likethey're sitting pretty--that counts with him. You thought I was takinga fool chance of out-gaming him. In reality I was taking almost anunfair advantage of him, providing he had the brains he must possess tohave lived to his age."
She could find no ready-made answer to this surprising statement. Hesprawled comfortably on the grass, turning over in his mind theconditions that were but a repetition of the history of so manyfrontiers; first the earliest settlers resenting the intrusion of thelater ones and resorting to lawless means of protecting their priority;then the strengthening of the outlaw element, half the countryside inleague with the wild bunch, the two opposing factions secretly hiringthe predatory class to prey upon rival interests; then, inevitably, theclean split, usually occasioned by the outlaws having increased inpower until they felt competent to defy both sides, to play both endsagainst the middle, to commit atrocities that opened the eyes of thosewho, believing they had subsidized the lawless, suddenly woke to thefact that they had subsidized themselves; then the outlaws, in theirturn, discovering that every man's hand was against them; the ruthlessestablishing of a definite line between those inside and those outsidethe law, replacing the vague middle ground of semi-lawlessness. Alwaystheir friends fell away from them, those secretly leagued with themfearing to be seen in their company, and those not too definitely knownto belong to their ranks invariably quitting them cold, often joiningforces against them and developing into more or less substantialcitizens, according to the standards of their day.
"Don't you know that the albino will kill you for that?" the girl askedat length.
"Not unless he can stage it as a personal quarrel," he said. "He'llnever follow it up as coming out of what happened to-day by taking itout on me as temporary foreman of the Three Bar--for ordering him off."
"Why?" she puzzled. "What possible difference would that make to a manlike him?"
"Just this," he said: "There's a good majority of folks that don'trelish 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 athing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out ofsheer human pride. If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on thegrounds that he refused to feed all his men--why then, right off, everyother foreman and owner within a hundred miles starts to resenting thepossibility 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'tjust acting as me, a personal affair, but, as I took pains to remarkaloud, as the foreman of the Three Bar. Every Three Bar man would havegone into action the second Harper made a move at me. You knowthat--and Harper knew it."
She realized the soundness of this statement. The one unalterable codeof the country, a code that had been fostered till it eclipsed allothers, decreed that a man should be loyal to the brand for which herode. 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 amite too far Harper has come to the end of his rope. Any other brandcould have done the same--only folks fall into a set habit of mind andfigure they must do what others do just because it's custom."
"But now they'll work their deviltry all the stronger against the ThreeBar," she predicted. "They could wreck us if they tried. You couldn'tget a conviction in five years. Not a man would testify against one ofHarper's outfit."
"Then we'll put on a fighting crew and hold them off," he said. "Butthat'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 workit a dozen different ways and you couldn't prove one of them on him tosave your soul. He's one smooth hombre--Slade."
Harris rose and headed for his bed roll and the girl sought the shelterof her teepee for a rest. All was quiet near the wagon till Waddlesboomed the summons to feed. After the meal a youth named Moore mounteda 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 endof his rope. After a few hours' rest and the prospects of a fullnight's sleep ahead the hands snatched an hour for play.
They sat cross-legged round the fire kindled from the cedar and raisedtheir voices in song. Waddles drew forth a guitar and picked a fewchords. Bentley, the man who repped for Slade, carried the air and therest joined in. The voices were untrained but from long experience inrendering every song each man carried his part without a discordantnote. Evans sang a perfect bass. Bangs a clear tenor; Moore faked abaritone that satisfied all hands and Waddles wagged his head in unisonwith the picking of his guitar and hummed, occasionally accenting theair with a musical, drumlike boom. They rambled through all the oldfamiliar songs of the range. The Texan herded his l
ittle dogie fromthe Staked Plains to Abilene; the herd was soothed on the old bedground--bed down my dogie, bed down--and the poor cowboy was many timesburied far out on the lone prair-ee.
Bangs had stationed himself so that he could see the girl andthroughout the evening his surprised eyes never once strayed fromBillie Warren's face.
She leaned back against the wagon wheel, enjoying it all, but hercomplacence was jarred as she half-turned and noted Morrow's face,drawn and bleak, unsoftened by the music. Again the feeling of dislikefor him rose within her; but he was an efficient hand and she hadnothing definite against him. At the end of an hour Waddles rose andreturned his instrument to the wagon. The group broke up and every manturned in.
Billie Warren lay in her teepee, her mind busily going over the eventsof the day. The night sounds of the range drifted to her. A bull-batrasped a note or two from above. A picketed horse stamped restlesslyjust outside and a range cow bawled from an adjacent slope. Thenight-hawk had relieved the wrangler and she could half-hear, half-feelthe 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-confidenceand that procrastination was certainly not to be numbered among hisfailings. It came to her that his interests, for the present, wereidentical with her own. As half-owner in the Three Bar it would be asmuch to his advantage as to her own to build it up. Waddles's warpedlegs prevented his acting as foreman on the job and it might be thatthe other man would find some way to prevent the leak that was sappingthe life from the Three Bar. His half-ownership entitled him to theplace. Billie Warren loved her brand and her personal distrust ofHarris was submerged in the hope that his sharing the fullresponsibility with herself might be a step toward putting it back onthe old-time plane of prosperity.
The jar of hoofs had ceased and she knew that the remuda had beddeddown; and having at last reached a decision she fell asleep with thecrooning voice of the nighthawk drifting to her ears.