CHAPTER I
EL MONTE DEL MUERTE
Sheridan checked his sorrel as Jackson first held up his hand in sign of caution and then changed the gesture, pointing at something beyond the brow of the hill. The cowboy slid lithely from his saddle and the owner of the Circle S followed suit, anchoring the sorrel mare with reins he let trail from bit to ground, joining his foreman, who had drawn back his pinto mount from the top of the rise.
"What is it, Red?" asked Sheridan, instinctively lowering his voice.
"Smoke, down the draw a ways. 'T aint grub-time. Someone's heatin' a runnin' iron."
Sheridan followed the direction of Jackson's finger, finding it hard to differentiate the faint plume of blue smoke from the mid-afternoon haze that shimmered over all the foothills. He located it and his lips tightened, his eyebrows lowered to a straight line above his eyes in which danced a sudden sparkle of excitement and resolution. His right hand dropped automatically to his gun holster and eased the weapon in its smooth leather sheath. Jackson had already shifted his own gun farther back on his lean flank. The two nodded at each other with grim satisfaction.
"Hollister," said Sheridan quietly. "If he's after that red and white heifer we'll get him with the goods."
"He'll likely hev' a Greaser along with him. We better split. Leave the hawses. I'll take the other side the draw."
They were in the lower hills, halfway between the mesa and timber line on the mountains. Where they stood, close to the crest of a rolling ridge, it was joined to the next by a sage- tufted buttress of rocky soil. To right and left the ground sloped sharply off from this junction. Jackson had pointed to the left, where the land drew down towards a little spring, favored by the strays they were seeking on the open range.
The cowpuncher dropped to all-fours, then flat wriggling on his stomach across the connecting spur under cover of the scanty brush. Sheridan gave him a minute or two, and followed his example, working down the draw towards the smoke, and the spring.
Cicadas whirred and leaped about him as he crawled on towards a heavy growth of mesquite that flourished in the deeper soil of the hollow. The lacy foliage, brown above, tender green beneath, quivered as he disappeared among the mahogany-colored trunks. A hawk, suspended high above him, spiraled down for a closer look at the disturbance and planed off again. Save for the cicadas' strident chirruping, there was silence, broken suddenly by the frightened blat of a calf.
The mesquite was high enough for Sheridan to risk rising to his feet and travel with his body bent double from the hips. The sparkle in his eyes changed to a steely glitter at the bawl of the calf and he increased his speed through the thick, jungly growth, parting the feathery leaves in wide ripples of changing hue as he brushed them aside. But he still went cautiously and, when he came to a flat outcrop of rock that saddled the draw, he flattened again and crept on his belly along a crack that made a zigzag trough across the ledge. It was oven-hot under the sun, almost scorching to knees and palms, and the sweat dripped from his forehead as he went.
A brisk rattle sounded, a burr-r-r of alarm, electric in its sudden signal. Sheridan halted, his hand going swiftly back to the grip of his gun and staying there while his whole body stiffened and his eyes swept the low ledges for the owner of that warning.
Not ten feet away a diamond-back rattlesnake lay, its body inflated and flung into a graceful fighting coil, the jetty eyes glittering, the blunt head poised for a lightning strike, the tongue waving slowly in and out of the opened mouth where the poison fangs were already lifting their hollow, curving needles for the deadly injection; to take toll for this invasion of the reptile's sunning ground. The greenish-yellow body, stamped with a connected chain of brown, diamond-shaped blotches, outlined in white, the vivid black and white bars of the tail, the uplifted rattle, were indelibly photographed upon Sheridan's memory. For a few heartbeats man and snake faced each other, both alert, the one determined, the other defiant. Sheridan could have blown off that proudly balanced head with its undulating tongue and beady eyes, but a shot would have defeated his purpose with Hollister. The snake's neck twisted into the shape of an S, the buttons of the rattle rasped incessantly; it seemed to quiver with rage, measuring distance for a stroke.
A shadow drifted over the ledge, covered the snake, dimmed for a second the glitter of its glance. Instantly it uncoiled, away from Sheridan, and glided, swiftly, but with dignity, to a crevice where it disappeared. Sheridan exhaled a breath of relief and glanced up at the soaring rock falcon gratefully.
"I owe you a fat chicken for that," he said, under his breath, and, as the graceful bird wheeled on, quickly crossed the remainder of the rocky flat and plunged again into the mesquite.
Beside the little pool of the foothill spring a man stood over a red and white calf that lay with its feet tied in a bunch. Its tongue lolled out, its sides rose and fell like a blacksmith's bellows, the piteous, white-rimmed eyes rolling fearfully. The man was tall and swarthy, broad of shoulder, inclined to thickness at the waist and he was wearing a blue denim shirt above overalls and well-scuffed leather chaparejos. His broad sombrero was pushed well back, showing sleek black hair that matched his clipped mustache, his eyebrows, his eyes. He held the string of a tobacco sack in his teeth and he was deftly rolling a cigarette with one hand when Sheridan emerged from the mesquite. Paper and tobacco grains fluttered to the ground, the man's fingers clutched towards the butt of his gun but the motion halted midway. Sheridan stood erect, thumbs hooked inside the belt of his own chaps.
"Whose calf are you going to brand, Hollister?" he asked.
The eyes of Hollister had something in common with those of the rattlesnake. In proportion they were set more closely. His mustache twitched in his sneer.
"So long 's it aint yore's, I don't see as it's any of yore bisiness," he answered, with a side glance towards the smoke a little way back of him, where the heads of two cayuses showed above the brush.
"It is mine," said Sheridan quietly. "Take off the rope."
"Talk's cheap. This is a maverick. "
"My calf, Hollister. I can prove it."
"How? Where's its mother?"
"You may know that better than I do. I know the calf is mine by the markings. I noticed it a few days after it was dropped. That red shoulder patch, shaped like a boot with a spur, is distinctive enough. I saw the calf earlier today. I've been trailing it with other strays."
Hollister guffawed.
"Trubble is with you, tenderfoot, yo're a stray yoreself an' don't know it. You don't belong on the range. Know its markings, do you? Well, I know the caf's mine by the patch on the underside that's shaped like a ha'f chewed hotcake." His voice changed to bluster. "You sneak back into the mesquite, Pete Sheridan, like the mangy coyote you are. You know the rules of the range. This is a maverick an' I found it. It's mine an' I'm goin' to set my iron on it."
"Take off that rope."
"You go plumb to hell! You don't know jest how close you are to it this minnit."
"If I go there it 'll be to find you waiting, Hollister." Sheridan stood motionless, in easy pose, but his voice was crisp with purpose, his grey eyes shone like the glint of sun on the mica flakes imprisoned in grey granite. Hollister had crouched slightly from the hips, arms away from his body, out-curving, his face set in a snarl. He was instinct with the desire to shoot, to kill, but something in Sheridan's seemingly careless confidence held him baffled him.
"You've seen me shoot, Hollister. Better take off that rope."
Hollister's eyes shifted. His hands closed and opened jerkily.
"Hands up! High! Grab for the sky, Greaser! Muy pronto. Now stan' up an' stan' still!"
Two arms, clad in cotton of gaudy check, shot up from the brush to Sheridan's right. Then the head and upper body of a Mexican came into view, mushroomed beneath his sombrero. A pistol gleamed in one hand. With them rose half the lean length of Jackson, hatless, his red hair fuzzy in the sun. He reached for the gun in the Mexican's nerveless grasp and with it covered the discomfited Hollister, while his own pistol menaced the man he had tracked through the mesquite, unheard and unseen while the other had been intent upon surprising Sheridan.
"Two aces in the draw, Hollister," drawled Jackson. "An' don't fergit I'm double-handed. What they call amberdexterous. There's yore hawses, what 's yore hurry?" he jeered as Hollister swore, first at him and then at the Mexican, whose walnut colored face was dirty grey with fright.
"You can take your rope with you, if you like," suggested Sheridan, "and ride down draw, please. All right. Red, give him his gun. "
Jackson slid his own gun back to the holster, broke the weapon of the Mexican and tossed into the brush the cartridges flung from the cylinder into his palm. Then he threw the weapon at its owner's feet.
"Git, you Greaser. Vamos." The man followed Hollister through the brush to the horses. They mounted, wheeled and galloped off down the draw, Hollister turning in his saddle to shake his fist and sputter out an oath.
"If you'll git back to the hawses," said Jackson, "I'll put our brand on the ca'f an' let it go. And I'll find my Stetson. A bush hooked it while I was trailin' that Greaser. He had his dirty finger crooked to pull when I called him. "
"Thanks, Red." The two were close enough, in the western intimacy between employer and employee, to make further expression of gratitude superfluous, though Jackson had been less than six months with the Circle S. Sheridan rejoined the horses and stood looking out across the mesa while his sorrel mare, Goldie, nuzzled and gently poked at him in protestation at this unshaded, unwatered halt.
Below him the plain unrolled far to the south where it blent with the horizon. To east and west faint violet outlines of sawtooth ranges showed. On the wide level, cactus and greasewood, soapweed and gramma grass and mesquite fought it out for existence and the right of reproduction. Ghost Creek meandered through the midst of it, a series of blue, sky-reflecting pools, strung on a silver thread, redeeming the mesa from complete surrender to the desert. There were times when the creek was a raging torrent, cutting viciously through the soft, powdery oil, and there were times, when it was most needed, that Ghost Creek proved its name and became a phantom stream, a wraith that mocked the parched cattle, drifting helplessly down to the alkali-rimmed bogholes where their scattered skeletons would lie, after the buzzards and coyotes had feasted on their shriveled carcasses.
Arid and hot lay Chico Mesa, desolate and inhospitable. Yet, ten miles distant, where the low buildings of the Circle S showed in the clear atmosphere, there were cottonwoods and willows and certain squares of alfalfa that looked like sections of bright green carpet. Sheridan had sunk for water and found it in the subterranean reservoirs of treacherous Ghost Creek. His gasoline pump supplied him with enough for limited irrigation and the experiment quickened his imagination as to what could be done with the floury soil that only needed water to produce five crops of alfalfa a year, the fattening for beeves, heavy and firm of flesh.
He saw a puff of white smoke off to the east. He fancied he heard the toot of a whistle from the railroad spur that ran from the main line, on the other side of the range that mounted behind him, to Metzal, the County Seat and shipping point for the community. It was sparsely settled as yet, but the stage was set for Capital to come in, to cut the mesa up into flourishing little farms, divided off by ditches, blossoming like the rose.
Jackson came up behind him, fanning himself with his recovered Stetson. In his other hand he carried two running-irons, not yet cool.
"Hollister left his iron behind in his hurry," he said. "The Lazy H. A damn good brand for him." He hurled the offending tool down the slope. "You 'd have had a hard time to prove title to that ca'f on 'count of its markings, Sheridan, even with me for witness. It was sure a maverick. It had lost its ma. D' you know why?"
Sheridan turned, surprised at the tense quality of Jackson's utterance.
"That skunk had slit the tongue of that ca'f, " said the cowboy, "so it c'udn't suck. It was nigh to weanin' an' it got to eatin' grass after it starved a while an' forgot it's ma. But that's a dawg's trick. If I had my way, a man who 'd do a thing like that sh'ud have his own tongue slit an' be turned loose where he'd know what it was to go thirsty an' hungry, with his mouth all filled up. Damn him, I wish I'd plugged him! I c'ud bury a man like him, cheerful." He rolled a cigarette and inhaled it strenuously.
"It was a rotten trick, Red," said Sheridan, gravely. "I hate to have him for even a near neighbor. Some day we'll chivvy his sort out of here. It's too good a place for men of his breed."
Jackson had recovered his temper with the soothing indraughts of the smoke. He looked out across the mesa with his eyes crinkling to the wide grin of his mouth.
"Looks like Paradise to you, don't it?" he said. "An' to me it looks like—well Texas suits me a heap better," he added politely. After all this was his boss's holding.
"All Chico Mesa needs, Red, is a few good men and water."
"Yep," drawled Red. "They tell me Hell's in much the same condition." He stamped out the butt of his cigarette under his high heel and swung to his saddle while Sheridan roared with laughter.
"I'll show you the water before the sun's down," he said as the mare caught up with Jackson's fussing pinto. "We'll camp there tonight. Lake of the Woods, I call it, right at the base of Ghost Peak. Trout there and all the vension you want, later in the season. I've got a cache there under some rocks. Just a frying pan and coffee pot with a tin plate or so. And I built a compromise between a leanto and a cabin. I never knew of any one going there but myself. At least, I've never seen any sign. "
"Why the leanto?" asked Jackson. "Did you bach' up there?"
"For a bit. When I first came out. I was shy half a lung and most of my ambition and I healed up both at Lake of the Woods. Which way 'll we take now?"
They ran across no more strays and evening found them high up in the range among the pinion and cedars. The sunset over the mesa was hidden from them but the afterglow flamed and faded above their heads and the face of the scarred, bare battlements of the range was bright with the reflection of the gleaming west.
Lake of the Woods lay like a fire opal, holding as a mirror the shifting rose and violet of the sky. The trees came thickly down, close to its sloping beach and stabbed the water with their shadows. Back of it rose the splintered crags of Ghost Mountain, El Monte del Muerte, the Mount of Death, as the Mexicans and Indians called it; remote, inaccessible, a sheer wall of granite, ground smooth to glassiness by a thousand centuries of driving, sand-laden winds, planed, perhaps, by ancient glaciers; the grim summit notched with fantastic parapet and spire and turret, a brooding mass, bearing the ineffaceable placidity of infinite ages upon its brow.
"West is always goin' to be West," said Jackson, coming up from the lake with a lard pail of fresh water for supper after he had attended to the horses, while Sheridan prepared the meal, bacon and flour and coffee they had brought with them and trout that he had conjured from the lake with the magic wand of his steel-rod and a Royal Coachman fly, always a part of his equipment when he went to Lake of the Woods.
"You can build a railroad an' all the cities you want down there on the mesa," went on Jackson, "but they aint goin' to change the landscape a heap while the mountains stick around. An' you can't shift them in a hurry. Stick one of them skyscrapers, now, up again the foot of the peak, an' what would it amount to? Not to shucks. A match laid up to the trunk of a yeller pine 'ud make a better showin'. You can change the ways of men but you can't shunt them peaks, nor what they stand for. No, sirree."
Sheridan was used to occasional outbursts like this from the cowpuncher, who usually masked all feelings beneath a certain suggestion half swagger, half boredom. And he knew he was not expected to answer. Red was long on poetry and short on the expression of it, save at rare intervals. So Sheridan laid the trout tenderly in the sizzling bacon grease and checked the bubbling coffee in the blackened pot with a few drops from the pail they had unearthed from the undisturbed cache.
"She smells good." Red hunkered down, prodding the fire. "You are one almighty good cook, Sheridan. It wouldn't do to have the boss huggin' the cookstove, but I sure do wish you'd give Stoney a few tips. His hotcakes taste like they was made out of old cinches." He peered into an oven improvised from a cracker tin. "Biscuit. Hot biscuits! Whoopee! Let's never go back to the ranch. Let's you an' me play hermits."
They made rare play with the food while the afterglow slowly faded and a star or two peeped out. Ghost Mountain lapsed to grey with a long scarf of mauve mist trailing among the pinnacles. Back of the peak the sky was translucent olive-green. Trout were splashing in the lake.
"Why Ghost Mountain?" demanded Jackson, suddenly. "Indian stuff? Lovesick maiden dives over cliff so she won't have to marry the bow-legged brave the old chief has sold her to for seven-spavined ponies an' a slab of chewin'?"
"I don't know, Red. Some old legend like that, I suppose. I'm only a tenderfoot myself."
"Shucks. Why you...."
Suddenly Jackson clutched Sheridan's forearm in a grip that made the latter wince with the quick pain.
"My Gawd!" he said, pointing upwards. "There's the Ghost."
Against the olive sky the gray turrets stood out sharply, the mauve scarf of mist twining in wreaths about them, puffed out by gusts of air, trailing away in smoky frazzles. For a moment Sheridan fancied he saw the figure of a horse and rider silhouetted against the sky between two fantastic juts of rock. Then the mist curled up into the notch and it was gone.
"Did you see it?" demanded Jackson, in an awed voice. "A gel, on a hawse! Up there. How in time did she make it, if it was a human?"
"I don't believe it was. You see, the gap is clear now. I imagine it was just the mist and the shadows on the rock. I've been to the foot of the cliffs and not even a mountain goat could get up there from this side, much less a horse. And they say the other is just as steep. Imagination, Red."
Jackson shook his head.
"But we both saw it, or thought we saw it. An' my eyesight 's sure one of my strong points. No, sir, it was a gel, on a hawse. I saw the mane lift in the wind. A gel on Ghost Mountain, sure as I'm sittin' here." He continued to gaze until the sky darkened and the range became only a dusky bulk that blotted out the stars. Sheridan smoked on in content, busy with his own visions. He had dismissed the image of the girl on horseback as a fantasy and he was pondering over what he was going to do in the morning.
Lake of the Woods was to supply Chico Mesa, at least a large part of it, with water. Sheridan held a half section in his own right. He had bought up relinquishments. His plan conceived the raising of high-bred beef-cattle on a big scale, fattening them on alfalfa grown under irrigation, producing first-quality beef, firm and larded with fat, commanding a top price.
The lake was fed with springs and its supply seemed sufficient, to his amateur engineering. It would need no dam; it could be siphoned by suction pumps to flumes, covered to prevent evaporation, or to pipes, leading down to the mesa by way of a box-canyon he had discovered that ran from his holding deep into the foothills. It would take money, more money than he knew any way of commanding at present. He was loath to go back east and form a company, he wanted the project, and its profit, to be all his own. And he had brought Jackson up here to camp so that he could make a preliminary survey in the morning. While he waited for the money he could work out the problem. At present he was raising cattle enough to show a slight profit, but they were not the fat steers he wanted to produce, that the market demanded.
Sheridan felt that he had found his bit to do in the question of increased production of staples, the betterment of quality. He liked the life, he was beginning to understand the work, he thought on a big scale, and he wanted action in like quantity. One success might lead to another in the reclamation of these semi-deserts by individual enterprise, the building up of a self-respecting owners' community. He was not going to be a hog about the water; once he secured rights and put through the project, he hoped to be a pioneer if not a promoter of similar affairs. He had an altruistic streak in him. It struck him that the proper uses of natural sources in such locations by the land-owners would come to mean an almost ideal Socialism. Opportunity for all, coupled to recognition of enterprise. It was all a bit vague at present but he fancied it would work out satisfactorily and the gradual evolution of it was delightful thinking. His main picture was not so hazy. It showed Chico Mesa as a great cattle-producing country, sending out the best, prosperous, progressive, self-supporting, profits invested for the good of the actual owners, not collected as dividends for watered stock held by the promoters of companies that cared not whether the land advanced or perished, so long as they could wring out the last drop of usury.
Jackson, coming back from a last look at the horses, interrupted his dreaming.
"'Bout time to roll in, I reckon," he said. "One thing I meant to ask you. I heard you say to Hollister, 'you've seen my shootin'.' Hollister was just itchin' to shoot. He was all set for it, an' he was afraid. When did he see yore shootin'? I ain't seen much of it. Are you a crackajack with the gun?"
"I'll tell you. Red. Before I came out here I was a lawyer, in New York. Not a very good one, nor a very bad one. And there are a lot of good ones there. I had some money, not much. I've had an idea lately that my being sick had something to do with my lack of success. I was short of the great essential to getting by in New York—'pep.' When my trouble developed I lost what I had. I didn't care much whether school kept or not. They suggested Arizona and I wanted New York. I didn't know what it was out here and I thought I couldn't get along without the rush and the lights and the things that seem to make life worth living in New York. I figured I wasn't going to last long and I might as well crowd through to the finish.
"I had a hemorrhage and it frightened me. Scared me into buying my ticket West. I had heard some one talk about Metzal and one place seemed to me as good as another, as long as I wasn't cooped up with a lot of T.Bs.
"I had a horror of those sort of places. I'd seen something of them in the east, up in the Adirondacks. If I was going to get well, or if I was going to pass on, I wanted to go off somewhere by myself and fight it out or quit."
"Sure thing," said the Texan. "I know jest how you felt. I'd feel the same way if I was laid out."
"I came up here and found Lake of the Woods. I couldn't do much but lie around in the sun and sniff the pines. Even after I stopped coughing, began to put on flesh, got some strength back and could take a full breath again—that was great. Red, to do that in this air—I didn't have much to do. Fishing and hunting a bit. A few books to read. I hadn't thought of taking up land. The country hadn't really gripped me then. I got a Colt, the one I carry, and a lot of cartridges, and I started target practice.
"I was a long time getting the hang of it—I mean offhand shooting—for I could take a steady aim and pepper a target fairly well before long. Then—did you ever, when you were a kid. Red, stick pellets of clay on the end of a limber twig and flip them at a mark?"
"Sure I did. I sabe what you're drivin' at. It's the right idea."
"One day I found I could flip out the bullets like that. And I kept on practising. You know how a tenderfoot is about guns. He wants to be another Kit Carson, right off the reel. I practised drawing from the holster and I chucked up cans for myself to shoot at.
"I was fishing Ghost Creek, up in the foothills. I had a full mess for myself and I had just eaten them and was clearing up an early supper when I first met Hollister. He was out hunting strays, he told me, just as he was today, I suppose. And he was halfway drunk. Offered me a flask, but I had cut that out when I came West, long before prohibition hit us. I was a bit too fond of it, at one time. I offered him grub, said I'd catch him a couple of fish but he said he was fed up on trout. Then a brace of willow grouse came out of the brush, just as if they had been whistled up, and, without thinking anything about it, I shot, and had the luck to take off both heads with the two cartridges.
"Hollister's face was funny. He had me sized up for a tenderfoot. He picked up the birds and handled them as if he thought it was some sort of a trick performed for his benefit.
"'I didn't see you draw,' he said, 'let alone aim. I'd hate to have you throw lead at me. Mister.' I don't know if I could do it again—two out of three, perhaps—but I used the bluff this afternoon and he evidently remembered."
"He sure did," drawled Jackson. "I reckon it wasn't much of a bluff at that, Sheridan. You ain't that kind."
The testimonial was a rare thing for the Texan and Sheridan warmed to it. He had felt that he was accepted by his men as one of them but the certainty was none the less pleasant.
"I can shoot middlin' well myself. It comes in handy, when there is Hollisters around. I admired to hear your yarn, Mr. Sheridan. I reckon you came where you belonged when you come out to a Man's Country, the West."
The second tribute was amplified by the Mister, a title scrupulously avoided by the hands of the Circle S. thus far.
"Hollister got quite friendly after that," said Sheridan. "He sold me my first bunch of cattle. And he's been trying to steal them back ever since," he added drily.
"Prohibition don't mean much to him," said Jackson. "I've seen him with a souse on in Metzal a dozen times. It warn't mescale, either. Rotgut whisky from Vasquez' blind pig over on the east fork, I reckon. Me, I aim to be a law-abiding citizen, but I ain't passin' up a slug of good juice if it comes my way. But I draw the line at Vasquez' licker. It 'ud turn a Sunday School Superintendent into the Apache Kid at one session, and they say it's gettin' worse. I like a bite to a drink but I like a clean bite. That stuff 'ud pizen a rattlesnake blind. Eat holes in a Dutch oven. It 'll git him some day. Yeh-ah, but I'm sleepy!"
Five minutes later he turned in his chrysalis roll of blanket to say, sleepily:
"I'll bet you a month's pay, jest the same, Sheridan, that was a gel on top of Ghost Mountain."
But Sheridan was asleep beneath the stars that swam in a purple void above them, his mended lungs inhaling and exhaling the rare, crisp air.