TOM had ridden out ahead of the outfit at his own re quest. He had slept very little, and the call to roll out at dawn the next morning found him with his decision made. While the majority of the L. D. cattle grazed in summer around or near the salt licks in the mountains, a wild bunch of almost a hundred had drifted over toward Elk Butte, and Tom's proposition to Jake that early morning was that he go and get them.
"By yourself?"
"I figured on going alone."
"You won't get much sleep."
"I wasn't figuring to sleep," said Tom simply, and waited.
Jake agreed. He felt that it was to be his last round-up for the L. D., and he was late as it was. It would be two more days before the wagons and the outfit could start, and at any time now the weather would break again and the winter come to stay. Already the slopes of the foothills were painted with mahogany splotches where the chokecherry bushes had turned, and the ducks were coming in from the North, looking for their old halting places of reservoir and pool. And although the sun was shining that morning, low-lying white clouds, like banks of thick fog, filled the mountain cañons and hid the summits of the peaks. The early autumn of the high country was close at hand.
"All right," he said. "I suppose you know the family's going?"
"I guess I can bear up under it."
The swagger in his walk as he left was for Jake's benefit, and so Jake understood it. So also was the noisy cheerfulness with which he roped out and packed a buckskin horse and saddled the Miller.
"What you takin' a gun for, Tom? Lookin' for Little Dog?"
"Got to be careful, Tom. That Indian'll get you yet, if you don't watch out."
"Give him time!" he said, tightening his ropes. "He's buying more arnica than ammunition right now. I saw some wolf tracks last time I was up."
But Jake, watching him as he rode out, saw the smile fade and felt vaguely anxious. He had his own troubles, however. He busied himself half-heartedly that morning, ate very little at noon, and by three o'clock knew that the ranch had definitely changed hands. He left the main house and went down by the creek for a time, that creek that he and old Lucius had always meant to dam back in the mountains and use for power as well as irrigation, and then he went to his cottage. His wife was baking bread, but she knew before he spoke.
"Well, it's gone," he told her heavily. "Lock, stock and barrel to the Potters. They'll be turning in their sheep in a week or so. Sheep!"
She went on with her bread-making, but after a time she looked up.
"We'll have to be taking Nellie out of school."
"We might keep her there this winter."
"And leave me alone in the cabin?" she said. "Without a house nearer than ten miles? I'd lose my mind."
"The cabin" was on Jake's homestead, in the land which Herbert considered God had forgot.
"I don't know what else to do, mother."
She put her bread in the oven, and after he had gone she moved slowly around the cottage which had been her home for twenty years. It was a good house, like everything old Lucius built. It was warm in winter and cool in summer. And she had lived like a lady here. The women from the church in town drove out and called on her; she had standing. When she knew they were coming she baked enormous cakes and froze ice-cream for them, and they sat around the front room with stiffly laundered napkins over their best dresses, and held plates from which they ate decorously.
"Do have some more, Mrs. Billings. We haven't made a dent in that freezer yet."
All over. All gone. Only that cabin down south of the river, with the water to be carried from the well behind the corral, and winter coming on and no wood laid in. It was hardly weather-proof, that cabin. She couldn't take Nellie there. She wouldn't. Nellie was young; she had a right to live, and to live like a lady.
Suddenly she smelled her bread burning. When she threw open the oven door she could hardly see it for tears.
It was a melancholy day. Tom, climbing through the cloud banks, which were cold and saturated with moisture, was filled with anger and savage resentment. Heretofore he had taken what he wanted from life and had been answerable to nobody. Girls had come and gone; he had made his violent brief love to them, had taken them when he could, and then promptly forgotten them. "God's gift to women," they called him at the ranch. He had eaten when he was hungry, drunk whisky when he could get it, and because he asked nothing more of life, except a good top horse to his string, he had been satisfied.
And now had come this girl. She had attracted him first because she was different and unattainable. He had liked her small white hands, the tilt of her head, even the way she rode. But at first he had been wary. She was a Dowling, and what were the Dowlings to him? Perhaps had it not been for Herbert he would have let her alone entirely. But there was Herbert, obviously infatuated and jealous. And so he had played the game like the fool he was, at first for the fun of it and now
Perhaps it was defeat more than anything else which sent him scowling on his way that day. Defeat and resentment that he had let himself be caught, and that now he was suffering like a trapped animal.
He looked back only once. Just before he entered the cloud bank he reined in the Miller and throwing a leg over his neck, turned and looked back. Spread out beneath him was the ranch, its white buildings gleaming in the early morning sun. Tiny dot-like figures moved here and there, but too far away for identification.
He sat there for a long time, while the buckskin grazed along the side of the trail and the Miller drowsed on his feet.
Then he turned and went on. The trail wound along, steadily climbing. Now it lay through some upland valley; again it hugged the bare face of a cliff, and at such times the buckskin went warily, for fear the pack would strike the granite wall and overthrow it. He had taken a short cut, not the broader and easier cattle route, and by noon he was high in the range. For the lunch hour he unsaddled, hobbling the pack horse but turning the Miller loose, and himself lying flat on the earth, his face turned up to the sky.
What did life hold for him anyhow? He was twenty-eight, and he was still a cow-hand. That was all he knew.
A bit of schooling, riding or walking miles through the snow to a small frame school house; snowed in on the range, with the cattle drifting before blizzards and freezing to death overnight, a trip once to Omaha with a load of cattle; some exhibition riding and first or second money, with luck—that had been his life so far.
And even that could not go on indefinitely. There was an age limit to his work. There came a time when a man could no longer ride in the teeth of the northwestern blizzards, his saddle blanket and latigo frozen stiff and icicles hanging from the horse's bridle. Or drift to some new "stamping ground" in Arizona or New Mexico, exchanging the icy North for the deserts and heat and cactus of the South.
Then what?
At one o'clock he grunted—he was still stiff from the riding at the Fair and the fight with Little Dog—and with a set face he started off again. He was putting as many miles as possible between Kay and himself.
But he was a cow-man as well as a lover. As he rode his quick eye automatically searched groves of evergreen trees. No coulee with brush, no grove offering shelter, or a hiding place, escaped attention. And he watched for signs of wolf and coyote as he moved along. Once he saw a herd of elk disappear over a rise, and made a mental note of the spot. There was to be a three-day open season on elk that fall.
He was rather more cheerful after that.
He missed nothing. The great blocks of salt, packed up so laboriously, had been licked almost to nothing. The streams were very low, pending another winter's snows, and where a pool still lay the mud showed innumerable hoof-prints. Once he saw the ominous dog-like tracks of a wolf.
After that he rode with his rifle across his knees, but he saw no wolf. Toward night the Miller began to show signs of fatigue; he moved along with the racking gait of a weary horse, and Tom had not the heart to spur him.
"Get along, horse," he said now and then. "Get along, can't you?"
At last he camped by a spring, set up a tarp as a protection against the cold night wind from the snow mountains just beyond, and having made a meal of sorts, crawled into his bed and slept. He had accomplished his purpose; no weakening on his part, no turning back, could get him to the ranch before Kay had gone.
He found his cattle late the next day, and began his round-up the following morning.
By noon he had them more or less in hand, and he commenced his single-handed drive. Once bunched they were tractable enough, but they moved with incredible slowness, and to his still sore and always impatient spirit the afternoon was endless. But now and then some recalcitrant would leave the herd, circle about and head forthe back trail again; he would ride madly, head it off and return, to find that the herd had lost its compactness and must be once more assembled.
Then again the slow advance, calves wailing and mothers calling, young steers stopping now and then to lower their heads and confront each other, invitations to battles which never took place.
That night he held them in a box cañon, having first watered them at the stream below. The cattle were uneasy, suspicious of the towering cliffs above, and they were restless most of the night. He did not unsaddle, but stretched himself out near the mouth of the gorge, between two fires. He slept little, however.
At three o'clock in the morning he sat up suddenly, with an instinctive sense of something wrong. The herd had suddenly stopped grazing and was listening. The next moment he heard them stampede toward him, and he had no more than time to throw himself into the saddle when they were abreast of him.
Shouting and cursing, he tried to hold them in the bottle neck of the cañon, but they passed him, running like crazy things, into the open. Fortunately, once out in the broad valley, they quieted, stopped running and shortly fell to grazing again. But he could not trust them. He rode herd over them until daylight, alternately singing and whistling to quiet them, and without even the comfort of a cigarette, lest the lighted match start them off again. He did not relax his vigilance until at dawn they began quietly to graze. And at dawn he rode into the cañon to find what had caused the trouble.
He found the stripped carcass of a cow in the upper valley, and by the way the meat was cut from the bones he knew that Indians had been at work. Probably a hunting party which was looking for deer out of season, and failing had killed beef, after their easy fashion. Such thieving was common enough, and angry as he was he would probably have accepted the situation and gone on, had not a movement along the side of the cañon, a fluttering of the scrub which grew out of its steep sides, caught his eye.
Sitting on his horse, the cattle quietly grazing outside, he watched it. It was something in motion, something slowly climbing to the top. But it was so skillful, took such advantage of projecting rocks and scrub, that it was not until it reached the top and stood outlined against the sky that he knew it for what it was, the thief himself, carrying his booty in a sack.
In a frenzy of anger he reached down under his stirrup and jerked out his rifle, and hardly sighting the gun, fired it. It was an impulsive action, and ineffectual as well. The figure stood for a moment surveying him, then it made a gesture of derision and moved out of sight.
Two hours later he was ambushed.
He had been keeping to the center of the valley, but now it narrowed, and down timber from a forest fire made the going slow and extremely painful. And from somewhere on the rocky hillside above a rifle shot suddenly rang out. There was a second shot before he could lift his rifle, but both missed. He fired back as soon as he could, having taken what shelter he could find, but the attack was not repeated, and since to ride up the slope alone was suicidal, when nothing more happened he went on.
On Saturday he found the result of the first day's round-up bunched, as Jake had told him, on the hill above Timber Creek. He was dirty and unshaven, and his eyes were sunken with fatigue. He handed his cattle over to the men riding herd, rode to the camp and unsaddled the Miller, and then, whistling and slightly swaggering, wandered into the cook tent, where Slim was paring potatoes.
"Open a can of beans for me, Slim, will you?" he said. "Seems like I haven't had a meal for a week."
"You look it. What in hell made you tackle that job single-handed?"
"Maybe I wanted to show I could do it," he drawled lazily.
When Slim had filled a plate with hot beans and a tin cup with coffee, he found him sound asleep under a tree.
It was not until the round-up was on its fourth day that there came the repercussion from that unlucky shot of Tom's.
The men were working hard.
At three-thirty in the morning they rolled out and ate breakfast morosely, by the light of a lantern hung over the stove in the mess tent; at four or a little after they were in the saddle.
All morning until dinner at 10:30, and all the afternoon, they rode, throwing off the cattle, bunching them, and by mid-afternoon driving in these fresh accretions to the rapidly growing herd. When the day's work was done and the men lay in their beds, their faces to the sky, the night guards held the cattle through the long and nervous nights, making no unexpected movements, even riding far out to light their cigarettes. Each two hour period saw these guards changed. Quietly two fresh men rode out, exchanged a few words and took their places, and so until the day herders relieved them.
Tom was not popular with the outfit during those laborious days and nights. He worked like ten men, but he was brooding and morose. They watched him surreptitiously, handled him with more than their usual care.
"Just spoilin' for trouble, Tom is."
"Well, let them as wants it have it."
And, almost at the end of the round-up, trouble came.
Supper was over and the tired men lay about, rolling cigarettes and talking. Tom as usual lately was off by himself, his hat pulled down over his eyes, his handsome hawk-like face brooding and unamiable. Slim was washing dishes, when he looked up and said:
"Company coming, Jake."
Jake raised himself on his elbow, but he could see nothing.
"Who is it?"
"Looks like a couple o' Indians."
"Ridin' the grub line, likely," said Jake, and lay back again. But when the Indians rode into camp on their painted horses, it was evident that food was not their object. One was a Reservation policeman, in a dirty khaki uniform with a revolver in his belt; the other was a squaw. She rode cross-saddle, her calico skirts picked up, and her heavy figure sagging as she sat.
That there was trouble brewing was evident, and the men got up and waited. The policeman dismounted. The woman remained as she was. Jake went forward for the parley.
"You boss this outfit?"
"I am."
"This woman, she say one of your men he shoot her husband."
"That's nonsense. We haven't been near the Reservation. What do you mean, shoot her husband? Is he dead?"
"Not dead. Very sick man."
"Any of you fellows know what they're talking about?"
But apparently nobody did. The story was circumstantial enough. The wounded Indian claimed that he had been returning from across the range with a sack of potatoes which had been given him, and that his horse had got away from him; he had shouldered his sack and was on his way back when he had been shot.
"Sure there was potatoes in that sack?" Jake asked suspiciously.
The squaw, following a word from the policeman, nodded vigorously.
"Just where was all this?"
It was when he heard where it had happened that Jake turned and called to Tom McNair, haughtily aloof under his tree. And Tom sauntered over.
"Know anything about this, Tom?"
"About what?"
"An Indian shot over on the East fork."
"If it's the Indian who killed a cow up there maybe I do. He tried to kill me too."
Jake's frown deepened.
"You God damned fool!" he said. "You got the fellow."
"Then there's one bad Indian the less," he retorted. "He'd a sack of meat over his shoulder when I saw him."
"He claims it was potatoes."
"Then he's not dead! That's bad news."
He faced the stolid policeman and the almost equally stolid squaw.
"Now get this," he said. "Go back to the Agency and tell the Superintendent that I caught Weasel Tail killing beef and I fired and missed him. And tell him that later on he did his damnedest to kill me, and I fired back. If he got his he had it coming, and more too. And now get out. Vamoose. Good night."
But the policeman did not go at once. He took Tom's name, writing it slowly and carefully in a note book while the squaw watched phlegmatically, and then without further words mounted and rode away, letting the woman follow as she would.
The outfit watched them off. At the top of the rise, with the policeman out of sight, she stopped and looked back at them. Then she made an obscene gesture, grinned, and went on.
Late that night Tom saddled a fresh horse and rode to the cañon, but he found things as he had suspected. The carcass of the dead cow had disappeared; not so much as a horn remained to prove his story. He got back in time for the before-dawn breakfast, and worked all day as usual, having been in the saddle for thirty-six practically continuous hours.
It was on the next night that the outfit realized that the Indian woman's obscene gesture had had a special significance. They had moved to a new location and the herd, nervous on the strange bed ground anyhow, was stampeded just before dawn by a half dozen shouting demons on horseback who rushed at it in the darkness, yelling. The cattle scattered wildly in every direction, and dawn revealed the almost complete destruction of the results of their incessant care and labor.
When they were finally ready for the drive down to the railroad the weather had definitely changed; behind the slow-moving herd the men rode chilled to the bone. Now and then a wet snow would fall, and in the early mornings the socks they had taken off to dry would be frozen stiff. The very ropes on the saddles were too rigid for easy handling, and the horses were irritable when the icy saddle blankets were thrown over their backs. Now and then they bucked in the gray dawn, and criesof "Ride him, cowboy!" or "Stay a long time, Gus!" would ring out on the frosty air.
Physically uncomfortable and weary, and mentally despondent and discouraged, Tom carried on as best he could. This was his life; it always would be his life, until he was too old to live. Spooky horses and spookier cattle, the wagon boss grumbling; the wheels sinking into the mud to their hubs and having to be lifted out; cutting grounds, bed grounds, horns and swaying backs; heat of desert summers and blizzards of northern winters, his body either baked or frozen but never at ease for long—that was his existence.
But there were times too, as he drifted the cattle along—Jake was already at the railroad, and Tom was in charge of the beef herd—when he felt the born cow-man's pride in achievement. The big steers were coming through in good shape; they were losing no weight, even possibly were gaining. He drew himself up at those times; he was proud of the cattle, of the great back country which had reared them, even of his own strong and active body.
Then he would remember Kay, and his pride was gone. He would look at the other men, unshaven, dirty, cold and weary, and knew that he too looked like that.
"You can have me always, if you want me!"
That was a joke. A fellow ought to laugh at a joke like that.
He had erased the wounded Indian from his mind entirely.