John Moore was one of the barons of the Arkansas. He owned several thousand acres of land, which in all did not represent a great outlay of money in that time, much of it good for nothing but grazing, good for nothing else to this day. In the valley of the Arkansas, where his house stood on a little lift that brought it above flood-water, his possessions embraced much land that could have been turned to agricultural use if its owner had been a farming man.
But such would have been a contemptuous use of the land to John Moore, who did not so much as cultivate a garden to give his family summer greens. He was a cattleman of the old type; cattle was all he knew, or wanted to know. His value of the valley lands was not based on their productive potentiality under the plow, but on the amount of herbage grown there during the summer months for the use of his herds when the upland ranges were covered with snow.
At such times the cattle were worked down into the valley, where they found tall grass that had been carefully guarded against trespass all summer, fairly succulent still, and life-sustaining; and shelter against the cruel sharp blasts of winter storms under the shallow banks of the river, among the willows and cottonwood trees, and in the deep washes which carried the summer torrents from the sod-roofed hills into the stream. The one use that John Moore saw for the land was to take off of it with his cattle what nature had put on it for no other purpose under the clouds, according to his understanding and belief.
Cattlemen along the Arkansas were enjoying prosperous days. Moore had been one of the first with the courage to risk his capital on the belief that cattle could live off the range and withstand the winters of that bleak, unsheltered land. He hadn't much to risk in the beginning, to be sure, and he always played a lone game. He had been twenty years on the Arkansas, and now he was in the middle fifties, a man with a reputation for sagacity and good judgment, whose word was as good as money paid.
Moore had married late, going back to Missouri, his native state, for a woman of his own kind. She had become a typical range wife; his children were range born. His house was a rangeman's conception of distinction and comfort, a hideous gabled thing with a tower—an architect from Wichita had designed it, after the current cattle baron style—built of lumber, painted a bilious green, with staring white trimming around cornice, windows and doors. A veranda with spindling columns filled its front and curved around the tower, suggesting leisure, elegance and ease, three things as completely strange to the habits and desires of John Moore as a feather bed to a horse.
A few cottonwood and soft-maple trees had been planted around the house, but otherwise the situation was unadorned, and bare as trampling hoofs could beat it. The house stood on the north bank of the river, beside what once had been the Santa Fé Trail. The notches in the river bank where the old trail crossed were still there, the road still between them, although romance was a stranger to it now, and its adventurous days were gone.
Behind the house were corrals, fenced in untidy patchwork of barbed wire, planks and poles; and a long low shed-like structure for housing cattle hands and stores. There was no other dwelling nearer than Pawnee Bend, which seemed very close by, indeed, to John Moore and his hardy family.
It was in this bunk house behind the bilious villa that Bill Dunham woke next morning at the lusty call of Shad Brassfield. It was only faintly dawn, paling stars were still to be seen, but no earlier than Dunham had been accustomed to piling out of bed ever since reaching what preachers used to be fond of calling the age of accountability. Bill was aware of the responsibility, but he never could be quite convinced of the sense. He didn't stop to question it now any more than he had done back in his grafting days, when Schoonover used to get him out before he could even smell the dawn.
There appeared to be nobody else in the bunk house, no noise of movement, no rummaging around for boots. Dunham arrayed himself in his blue serge, uncertain of what waited him that day, or what kind of clothes the job, if there was to be a job, might demand.
His belt was hanging just inside the door, but he was dubious of the propriety of putting it on, even if he had a gun to grace it. He thought he'd put it out of sight in the suitcase, which MacKinnon had sent in the wagon, and leave it there until he had lawful need of it in a business where he might shoot without regret if he must shoot at all.
He was greatly surprised to find his gun in the holster. So, that girl Zora hadn't thrown it away at all; she'd had it stuck around her somewhere all the time. She had given it to that old Shad fellow, and he had sneaked it back.
Bill was glad to have the old gun back again, although there seemed to be something of belittlement in the act of restoration. It was as if his unsophistication had been brought up with derision before his face. Stringing him along that way, with his gun stuck around her all the time!
She had treated him like a boy, going on the presumption that he was too green to suspect her, and too timid to take her by the neck and make her give it back. He grew hot under the collar at the unavoidable admission that both her conclusions were true.
He was green, and he was soft. But he would ripen and grow hard, hard as they made them, so hard they could cut their eyeteeth on him if they tried to bite through his rind. He felt resentful and injured, where he knew he should have been humble and grateful.
That redheaded girl had saved his life, and he wasn't man enough to admit it without a grudge; she had given his gun back that way to save his feelings, and he was too low-down and onery to be grateful for her delicacy. This self-arraignment braced him up like a good friendly kick. He grinned as he rubbed his hand over the long blue gun, and looked toward the house, wondering if she was up, and whether he was to have breakfast with her, and how the day was going to start.
He had liked that girl from the very first sight, he recalled. Even before the first sight, when her well-modulated, soft voice had spoken in his defense at the hardware merchant's door. The farther they walked together last night the higher his opinion had mounted. She was the right kind of a girl, and it would be a comfort to any man to hold her pretty soft chin in the cup of his hand.
But there would not be much chance of further intimacy, judging from the evidence of wealth around the place. Bill looked at the house, which he approved in all particulars, and considered very fine. There was nothing lacking in its environment to him, any more than there was to its owner. There are that kind of people everywhere, not alone in the cattle lands, to whom a house is the same as a diamond. What is the difference where you wear it, as long as people can see you've got it?
It was a very fine house indeed, a house after his own desire. The Moores were people of consequence, plainly. It would take a footless man like him a long time to get up to the level where he might hope to enter that house on terms of equality and hold Zora Moore's nice little friendly hand.
There was a smell of coffee in the cool air, and a quick broadening of day. Shad Brassfield came along with a saddle on his shoulder, looking somewhat trifling and mean, Dunham thought, hatchet-faced and half-whiskered that he was; lean and gangling in the legs, spare in the body as a snake.
"Oh, you got up, did you?" Shad said, in a voice somewhat between derision and surprise.
"I made a stagger at it," said Bill, wide awake and alert, according to his habit, for he was a chap who left sleep on the pillow when he rose up, be it early or late.
"I got to go and chase up some horses," Shad informed him. "If you want to make a hit around this ranch grab that milk-bucket offen that bainch over there by the kitchen door and pump them two cows in the lot yonder. It'll save me the job when I git back, and I may have to go to hell-an'-gone after them damn horses."
The two cows got up when they saw Dunham coming with the pail, stretching their backs with the incredulous curves cows can put into that section of their anatomy when framing themselves up for the day's business. Brassfield hung around to see how the stranger would go about relieving the animals of their milk, his very attitude one of sardonic expectation, for the belief that Dunham was a railroader had got mixed up somehow in Shad's small and not too active brain. A railroader's ignorance of the workings of a cow was one of the standard jokes of the range.
Shad was more disappointed than pleased to see Dunham go about the operation from the proper side, sitting on the little tack of a one-legged stool that was Shad's special pride, owing to the difficulty of maintaining a balance if the cow began to shift. Shad heard two streams hitting the pail at a clip that beat his own, and went on, with backward looks, and hopeful. He had much simple faith in the stool.
Brassfield didn't have to go very far afield after the horses; he was back shortly after Dunham had finished the milking, peering into the pail to see if his substitute had drained as much out of the unprolific cows as his own refined efforts produced. He seemed to be satisfied, and said he reckoned breakfast was ready and they'd better go. They could strain the milk or leave it stand till the cream rose, for all he give a damn.
Brassfield and his wife inhabited one end of the long bunk house, where Dunham was introduced to the lady and breakfast at the same time. Mrs. Brassfield was moving about with a sort of philosophic deliberation, smoking a little gray clay pipe with cane stem. She was tall, flat and flaccid, brown as the tobacco which she smoked out of the "hand," a loquacious, friendly soul, unfeigned in her hospitality.
She appeared to be about fifty, but probably was not more than thirty-eight, the business of wife to Shad Brassfield being a wearing one, full of hardships and privations, as Dunham was soon to hear. She put her pipe away on a little shelf behind the stove, exclaiming and wondering over Dunham as if her husband had brought a rare curiosity to the house. But there was such sincerity in her manner, and unfeigned welcome, that Dunham felt more at ease than he had since waking up to discover the evidences of opulence around him.
Mrs. Brassfield had everything ready, which is to say the bacon and canned hominy, and sorgum to be dipped out of a yellow bowl with a spoon, with a crock of batter on the back of the stove and a smoking griddle waiting to fry the corn cakes. She placed Dunham at the table, which was big enough to seat twelve or fourteen men, with great solicitation for his comfort, as she might have treated a boy one-third his years, and turned her attention to the griddle, greasing it with a distressing dark rag which she dipped in a can.
They held out their plates to receive the first batch of cakes, which Mrs. Brassfield did not stir from the stove to deliver, flipping them deftly from her caketurner, never missing a word or a shot. It was a very interesting procedure to Dunham, lending a certain gambling element to the meal as well as establishing a feeling of fellowship between them that could not have been reached by more conventional means of deilvering corn cakes to a plate.
Mrs. Brassfield inquired into Dunham's sources of origin and his reasons for coming to that country, exclaiming in depreciation of his misguided ambition when he explained that he had been moved by a desire to throw his feet.
"Lord love you, Mr. Dunham," she said, feelingly and affectionately, her sharp brown face not a tint livelier for all the close operation above her griddle, "I've been throwin' my feet for nineteen years I've been married to Brassfield, traipsin' around lookin' for a better place than the one I was at. I don't see why a young man like you wants to leave a country where you can grown roastin' years and snap beans to come out here and rummage your livin' out of tin cans."
"Corn and beans'd grow here, right here in this valley, if anybody had sense enough, and git-up enough, to plant 'em," Brassfield said.
"If they wait on you to do it they'll never see it done," she said placidly, not a shade of accusation or mockery in her tone.
"If I had the land I'd show 'em," Brassfield declared. "But a pore man's got about as much show of gittin' him a piece of land in this valley as he has of findin' him a gold-mind. These rich cattlemen they've spraddled all over the country, grabbin' and stealin' till a pore man ain't got—"
"Lord love you, Mr. Dunhan, it don't pay to roam around," Mrs. Brassfield broke in, serenely indifferent to her husband's effort to excuse his own trifling habits in the indictment of more enterprising men, a human weakness so general and so mean that it deserved squelching, just as Mrs. Brassfield squelched Shad, by passing over him as if he was not there.
There was so little of Brassfield above the ears with his hat off that Dunham would have been slow to accept him as an authority without Mrs. Brassfield's 'calm demonstration of how a cipher should be placed in the sum of human consequence. Brassfield had his hair cut short all over his head, which came to a point at the top as if it had been tied in a pudding-cloth and carried around before it set. His hair had a mean sandy tint, about the color of a Duroc hog.
"We've traipsed up and down between Kansas and Texas five times the last eight or nine years," Mrs. Brassfield went on with her argument against roving, "Shad always lookin' for some place where he could git along with less work than he could in the last one. I buried all of my children, one after another, on that long road between this state and Texas. I feel sometimes like I've left a grave ever' hundred miles between here and Waco, Mr. Dunham."
"It wasn't movin' that was to blame, Mollie," Brassfield said, a note of gentleness and kindness in his tone that lifted him considerably in Dunham's regard. "You know they tuck the aiger in Arkansaw—it's the worst place for aiger in the world—I wouldn't live in that state if they 'lected me gov'ner and crowned me with a solid gold crown."
Out of Brassfield's shingled baldness his big eyebrows stood on his face with a surprising, almost startling, effect. He worked them when he talked, especially when he denounced, his pale eyes weak and purposeless, his half-whiskers giving a sternness to the lower part of his features which there was nothing in his gizzard to sustain.
"If I had me forty acres of this river land," he said, "and a couple of good teams, I'd show these stockmen corn and oats'll grow here as good as they'll grow anywhere. I'm goin' to get the gover'ment after—"
"If I had five acres back in Henry County, Missouri, and a cow and some hens, I'd be happy, and you could have the rest of the world to do whatever the notion struck you to do," Mrs. Brassfield said.
She said it with a sigh, so hopeless and sad that Dunham knew at once she had no vision of a better day. She brought her stack of corn cakes, which she had accumulated on a sort of percentage basis, adding one to her own pile out of the three she cooked on the griddle at each round, to the table and sat down to her break fast.
Brassfield pushed back, his barrel full. Dunham rose with him. The sun was yellow on the kitchen wall, and the clatter of a horse on the gallop sounded down the road from the south.