CHAPTER V
The morning after she had buried her father Hilma Ring set herself to a conscientious survey of the debit and credit aspect of her future; what were the assets and what the liabilities of Old Man Ring's daughter, left fatherless? She did this methodically and without any hindrance of emotion or grief born of the events of yesterday. Not once had she given way to tears since first she met Uncle Alf riding with her father's body swung across his saddle horn. Tears she 'd not known since the day her mother died; grief there could not be where tragedy had not trampled on love. Instead, her single inspiration, aside from the dominant one of necessity, was a vague, formless curiosity: What had this grubby little man she had lived with so long to show for all the years of bitter isolation in the Big Country?
So, when she had breakfasted on bacon and coffee and ashed her plate and skillet, Hilma dragged to the doorway the blue glazed zinc trunk containing the Bible, the family album and her doll and sat down on the doorstep to investigate. She chose the doorway, flooded in sunshine and with the stupendous panorama of the tumbling divides and the Broken Horns unrolled to infinite distances, because somehow the gnawing pain of lonesomeness was less sensible away from the dark corners of the house. Out from the trunk came a square tin box which she had never dared open before; it had been a Bluebeard's cache, exclusively the prerogative of her father to explore. Almost a thrill of expectation attending turning the key and lifting of the lid.
Nothing within to justify thrills. Just a sheaf of papers, a yellow-bound bank book, a portentous document with the arms of the United States graven in the midst of a frilled and curlicued border,—and a photograph. Hilma snatched at the latter the instant she spied it and let the hot sunshine fall on its dimmed surface while she gazed at it many minutes without movement. A woman—a very young woman—gazed back at her from the glossed surface. She stood, in wedding dress and veil, one hand stiffly holding a bouquet in a paper cornucopia, the other resting on the shoulder of a seated man, who glared frozenly, his silk hat nursed in the crook of one arm.
Her mother and father, these two. They had posed in wedding finery back there in a forgotten day when love was young and life lay rosy along their path. Dully, yet with a dogged insistence, Hilma's imagination began to reconstruct the picture that lay beyond that figured back drop the photographer had arranged behind the stiffly posed bridal couple. The back drop rolled up and she saw these two—the young girl with her cornucopia of flowers, the man with his sacerdotal silk hat—walk down a vista together. She saw the figure of the girl fade as if in twilight—fade until it disappeared altogether, and the man stood beside a graven stone on a cheerless prairie. Then on and on, through the vista imagination painted, the man walked stumblingly, purposelessly; he fell and rose again, fell and struggled to his feet, then went down a last time
The girl slowly lifted her gaze to that flower-blown knoll above the creek where yesterday she had dug a grave,—the end of the long road. From the distant mound of earth to the photograph and back to the mound once more Hilma's eyes traveled. She was stirred to depths never before plumbed; some deep-lying, half-sensed sympathy struggled for a form of thought to clothe itself. Life: Hilma Ring never before had glimpsed it subjectively. Life, with its promise of joy and high hopes, life, which buffeted and scarred its creatures yet held inexorably to the road of obstacles, to fall and to rise again, to fall at last into the long rest; for the driven creatures on this road of life rather than concretely for the twain of the photograph was Hilma Ring's sympathy awakened.
For the first time in her nineteen years the daughter of the sheepman of Teapot Creek recognized herself kin with that high blue rampart of the Broken Horns, kin with the blue-bonnets that blossomed just beyond the beaten 'dobe of the dooryard. Just a pencil dot in a vast chart.
Catching at only the penumbra of this truth, sensing it vaguely as some indefinable overtone of the life that was Hilma Ring, first the girl was appalled, then blind battle lust of her Norse forefathers claimed her all its own.
"Me!" she challenged a hundred-mile sweep of the Big Country, and there was no histrionic stilting in her voice, just a cold matter-of-factness. "Me, I 'm going to fight you—fight everybody. No love, no wedding veil and hand on some man's shoulder for me. Just fight."
Speech cleared the atmosphere of introspection like a thunderstorm. Immediately she dismissed the photograph from her mind—nor did it occur to her that this hidden treasure might have been a shrine of a withered little man's devotions—and came back to hard dollars and cents. Rather the search for them, for in the box on her knees was not so much as a Mexican dollar.
The bank book showed her father had something over two thousand dollars to his credit in the Grangers' Bank at Two Moons, but the box yielded a note for fifteen hundred dollars held against Ring, once renewed and due again in five months; interest was eight per cent. The government paper was title to the homestead here on Teapot—one hundred and sixty fenced acres with the house and water rights appertaining thereto. For the rest, sheep books.
Hilma studied these with slow thoroughness. Her father's bookkeeping was primitive and followed a system all his own. The sum of three hours' solid burrowing through the maze of crabbed figures and script—part of which was in Danish, which the girl translated with difficulty—was this: One of Old Man Ring's bands, numbering about twelve hundred, was ranging under the care of Miguez, the Basque, on the highlands where the Crazy Squaw breaks out of its gorge in the Broken Horns. A second and smaller band was thrown in with the big band that Woolly Annie, the sheep queen of the Big Country, was running over on the headwaters of the Poison Spider, a parallel stream down from the mountains fifteen miles or so to the south of the Crazy Squaw. Ring had been maintaining one sheep wagon and two herders with that outfit.
Hilma's assets, so she figured them, were two thousand sheep, two thousand dollars in the bank, three sheep wagons, with their crude equipment, and the homestead. Chief of her liabilities was that note for fifteen hundred dollars; the pay of the three herders totaled seventy-five dollars monthly and sowbelly, as the phrase of the country had it.
There was no will; Hilma knew nothing about wills, anyway. What had been her father's now was hers; she took that for granted. What disturbed her most was the total absence of ready cash. She could not think of sheep in terms of dollars, and had the vaguest idea of how a sheep or its wool was minted into dollars, what were the transactions of marketing and where the buyer might be found. All those things her father had kept secret, following his fixed idea that a woman had neither competency nor right in matters of business.
"I 've got to find money. Can't run a sheep outfit without money. Can't run myself even without money," Hilma complained querulously as she quit her place in the doorway and began to rummage through the house. She opened the pendulum door of the clock with the picture of the Minnesota State capitol on it and peered into the tiny cubby-hole. She explored all the stones of the fireplace and chimney throat above until her bare arm was sooty to the shoulder, but not one of them was loose or ready to swing out to disclose the hoped for cache.
"That old man!" Hilma caught herself exploding in anger; then she regretted the outburst. He was not here to answer back; it was unfair to quarrel with the dead. But even tolerance for the crotchet of a dead man yielded no dollars. The ransacked house was bare of coin as the sweep of the divide down to the dooryard. After several hours' searching Hilma went back to the mantel and, leaning her elbows on it, stood looking down at a little stack of silver piled thereon—three silver dollars, a quarter and two dimes. Yesterday Uncle Alf had put the money there; he said he had found it in her father's pockets.
Three silver dollars, a quarter and two dimes! This was the available capital Hilma had to start a life alone. To be sure, there was that two thousand dollars in the Two Moons bank, thirty miles away. But the girl never had been inside a bank, knew nothing about banks. She was more than half convinced that nobody but the one who deposited that money would be recognized by the bank people as competent to withdraw it. Bankers were all sharks she had heard her father say many times.
The girl went to the flour barrel, took stock of the sides of bacon on the nails over the wood box, opened the coffee canister and peered inside. Three dollars and forty-five cents
Zang Whistler found her brooding thus when he rode up. Hilma had not heard his pony's hoof beats outside the door; she made a quick leap toward the rifle propped against one wall of the fireplace when the man from Teapot Spout appeared in the doorway.
"Sho, now, Miss Hilma, you 're not figurin' to pump lead at a good friend come to make good medicine for you." Zang swept off his hat with a cavalier's grace; his bold eyes, a little raffish and devil-may-care in their way of falling on women, were challenging the spirit of the feminine creature to tilt in the age-old tourney. Hilma's answering glance, impersonal and cleanly cold as light struck from crystal, was matched by her voice:
"You round here again? Yesterday you dropped in right timely when I needed you, but to-day"
"You 're past needing a little neighborly help, I suppose," Zang cut in with a disarming smile. "Don't need anybody to advise you how to run the sheep business, or what kind of a game to play in this war the cow outfits have started over the range question? All wised up along them lines?" He straddled a chair, though the girl still stood, back to the fireplace suggesting anything but hospitality by her pose of calm self-sufficiency. The leader of the Teapot Spout nest of outlaws spread out his hands with a giving gesture.
"Look here, Miss Hilma, I did n't ride all the way over here from the Spout this morning just to have you play the old game of looking at me like I was some crop-eared coyote yap-yappin' for his supper. Your old game of makin' small of me 's sort of in the discard now that your pappy 's gone over, and looks to me from this side of the road like time 's come for you and Zang Whistler to have a man talk together—all cards on the table an' no sanded deck. How 'bout it?"
This new line of attack, at such variance with Zang's accustomed rough gallantries on the occasions of his past visits to the Ring home ranch, caught Hilma with no matching strategy. She stared at the confident, smiling face of the cattle rustler with no attempt to dissimulate either surprise or curiosity.
"It 's just this way, Miss Hilma," Zang ran on easily, "whether you know it or not—and I reckon not, because your pappy was tight-mouthed as any old porcupine—but since you all took up your claim here on Teapot, your pappy 's sorta th'owed in with me an' my boys over to the Spout. He used to give us information whenever he heard Original Bill, the inspector, had his war paint on an' was projectin' round to give us a run; now an' then we 'd leave a few weaned calves in that little hid corral you 've got. Long an' short of it all is your pappy was in pretty deep with Zang Whistler an' his outfit of blackballed cow-punchers—so you 're in, too." Zang's talking hands moved to show his cards were falling fairly on the table.
"Well?" This from Hilma without enthusiasm.
"Now your pappy's stake in this deal," Zang continued imperturbably, "was an occasional split when we managed to run some of our stock over to Niobrara for a sale, an' my promise to put every man an' gun I 've got in the Spout behind him come time when the big cow outfits and he came to a show-down on the range fight. That promise stands, Miss Hilma—for you just like it did for him."
"You mean your boys stand ready to back up the sheep people with guns?" For the first time animation fired the girl's features and a light kindled in her eyes.
"I did n't say we 'd back all the sheep people," Zang corrected. "I said you could count on us in case the cattle outfits start to move your sheep off the range. An' listen, girl, that time isn't far off as I reckon it. Here 's the layout. Five years ago, when ole Woolly Annie was the first to bring sheep into this country, the Hashknife an' the Flying O an' the Circle Y outfits drawed a line down along the spurs of the Broken Horns an' says, 'Everything east of this line 's cattle range; keep your woollies back in the high ground.'
"But 'long comes old Hard Winter Peters up on Beaver, an' he runs his sheep across the dead line. Then your pappy breezes in with his band on Crazy Squaw, inside the cowmen's boundary, an' th'ows in with Woolly Annie. Not to mention Zang Whistler, who has ways of his own for invadin' the cow outfits' rights. Which it 's all made the big cow owners to Cheyenne and back in England plumb restless an' rollicky as a new-broke bronc. So they sets this shorthorn, Original Bill—which he an' me used to ride night herd together on many a drive up the ole Plummer Trail—they sets him on the trail of Zang Whistler an' a-snoopin' round keeping a lookout on the sheep people who 're invadin' the cattle range. Fact he called here other day shows you 're on his blacklist.
"But still the sheep keep edgin' in an' edgin' in—your pappy's, ole Woolly Annie's an' all the rest—an' still Zang Whistler rides out of Teapot Spout to see what he can see. You 're followin' close?"
Hilma nodded tensely. Her visitor was touching upon that subject which had called forth such fiery prophecies of woe from Uncle Alf, which had moved her to vow undying enmity against the barons of the Big Country; he revealed much she had only guessed under her father's tight-lipped dominion. Zang drove home his point with unconscious eloquence. He had risen from his chair and now stood facing the girl.
"So you see, the big owners are gettin' mighty riled up; an' they hired the Killer to go through the range country an' do with his rifle—sneaking behind coulee banks an' pot-shotting from under bridges—and do with a rifle what they can't do with strong talk. They aim to scare the sheepmen an' homesteaders who 've busted up their range with fence lines—scare 'em out of the country by killings. Your pappy, ole Hard Winter Peters, Jay North—all lyin' with a stone on their heads so 's the Killer can collect for his tally from the big augers down to Cheyenne.
"When they savvy murders an' killing in the dark won't work, what 's the next step? Just as sure as prairie dogs have chin whiskers, girl, the powerfulest men in the Stockmen's Alliance 'll play their last card. They 'll hire a gang of bad men and quick shots to come into this country an' clean up—just like those Montana Vigilantes did a few years ago. Then it 's goin' to be knock-down-an'-drag-out, an' hell's cinders flyin' every which way."
"Sooner that comes the better," the girl gritted, her mouth pulled down in a hard bow of hate. Zang, who gloried in his new-found power finally to play upon the emotions of this baffling creature of cold beauty, permitted a new note to creep into his voice, one of tender solicitude:
"What are you aimin' to do, girl? How 're you goin' to tackle life when all these things I 've been specifyin' are buildin' right up in front of you?" Hilma's eyes instantly became glazed over with their old defensive aloofness. Their cold stare seared like needles of liquefied air.
"Me? Why, I 'm going to run my sheep; that's all." Zang's face suddenly went red; he took a swift step toward the girl.
"No, you 're not, girl," came his hot words. "You 're not goin' to stand up against a cyclone alone—not when I 've got every claim on you a man can have." Hilma's lips were parted in a slow, teasing smile; her eyes mocked.
"They call me an outlaw," Zang's words tumbled on tumultuously. "Well, you 're an outlaw at heart, an' fit to team up with another of the same brand. You 're comin' with me over to the Spout so 's we can see through together all the hell that busts loose an'"
Zang leaped lightly as a mountain cat and threw an arm about Hilma's waist. His free hand he slipped under her chin to force her head, with its glory of dandelion gold, back for the kiss his lips flamed to give. The eyes that blazed so close to his were wild as a trapped panther's. Full lips so near his parted over sharp teeth in almost an animal snarl.
Hilma did not scream. She merely slashed Zang twice across the face from ear to chin with lightning sweep of her nails, then bowed her strong shoulders and pressed one knee against his thigh to break his hold upon her.
"This kiss—is comin'—with interest added on to it," Zang panted. Silently, desperately the girl fought him.
A figure darkened the doorway. Came a drawling voice: "Ex-cuse me!"
Zang Whistler released the girl and leaped back, his hand dropping swiftly toward his hip.
Original Bill Blunt, the range inspector, stood with shoulder against doorpost, laughing silently.