OH, YOU TEX!
CHAPTER I
THE LINE-RIDER
Day was breaking in the Panhandle. The line-rider finished his breakfastof buffalo-hump, coffee, and biscuits. He had eaten heartily, for itwould be long after sunset before he touched food again.
Cheerfully and tunelessly he warbled a cowboy ditty as he packed hissupplies and prepared to go.
"Oh, it's bacon and beans most every day, I'd as lief be eatin' prairie hay."
While he washed his dishes in the fine sand and rinsed them in thecurrent of the creek he announced jocundly to a young world glad withspring:
"I'll sell my outfit soon as I can, Won't punch cattle for no damn' man."
The tin cup beat time against the tin plate to accompany a kind ofshuffling dance. Jack Roberts was fifty miles from nowhere, alone on thedesert, but the warm blood of youth set his feet to moving. Why shouldhe not dance? He was one and twenty, stood five feet eleven in hissocks, and weighed one hundred and seventy pounds of bone, sinew, andwell-packed muscle. A son of blue skies and wide, wind-swept spaces, hehad never been ill in his life. Wherefore the sun-kissed world lookedgood to him.
He mounted a horse picketed near the camp and rode out to a _remuda_ ofseven cow-ponies grazing in a draw. Of these he roped one and brought itback to camp, where he saddled it with deft swiftness.
The line-rider swung to the saddle and put his pony at a jog-trot. Hetopped a hill and looked across the sunlit mesas which rolled in longswells far as the eye could see. The desert flowered gayly with thepurple, pink, and scarlet blossoms of the cacti and with the white,lilylike buds of the Spanish bayonet. The yucca and the prickly pearwere abloom. He swept the panorama with trained eyes. In the distance alittle bunch of antelope was moving down to water in single file. On aslope two miles away grazed a small herd of buffalo. No sign of humanhabitation was written on that vast solitude of space.
The cowboy swung to the south and held a steady road gait. With analmost uncanny accuracy he recognized all signs that had to do withcattle. Though cows, half hidden in the brush, melted into the color ofthe hillside, he picked them out unerringly. Brands, at a distance sogreat that a tenderfoot could have made of them only a blur, were plainas a primer to him.
Cows that carried on their flanks the A T O, he turned and startednorthward. As he returned, he would gather up these strays and drivethem back to their own range. For in those days, before the barbed wirehad reached Texas and crisscrossed it with boundary lines, the cowboywas a fence more mobile than the wandering stock.
It was past noon when Roberts dropped into a draw where an immense manwas lying sprawled under a bush. The recumbent man was a mountain offlesh; how he ever climbed to a saddle was a miracle; how a littlecow-pony carried him was another. Yet there was no better line-rider inthe Panhandle than Jumbo Wilkins.
"'Lo, Texas," the fat man greeted.
The young line-rider had won the nickname of "Texas" in New Mexico ayear or two before by his aggressive championship of his native State.Somehow the sobriquet had clung to him even after his return to thePanhandle.
"'Lo, Jumbo," returned the other. "How?"
"Fat like a match. I'm sure losin' flesh. Took up another notch in mybelt yestiddy."
Roberts shifted in the saddle, resting his weight on the horn and theball of one foot for ease. He was a slim, brown youth, hard as nails andtough as whipcord. His eyes were quick and wary. In spite of the impsof mischief that just now lighted them, one got an impression ofstrength. He might or might not be, in the phrase of the country, a "bad_hombre_," but it was safe to say he was an efficient one.
"Quick consumption, sure," pronounced the younger man promptly. "Youdon't look to me like you weigh an ounce over three hundred an' fiftypounds. Appetite kind o' gone?"
"You're damn whistlin'. I got an ailment, I tell you, Tex. This mo'nin'I didn't eat but a few slices of bacon an' some lil' steaks an' a pan ortwo o' flapjacks an' mebbe nine or ten biscuits. Afterward I felt kindo' bloated like. I need some sa'saparilla. Now, if I could make out toget off for a few days--"
"You could get that sarsaparilla across the bar at the Bird Cage,couldn't you, Jumbo?" the boy grinned.
The whale of a man looked at him reproachfully. "You never seen meshootin' up no towns or raisin' hell when I was lit up. I can take adrink or leave it alone."
"That's right too. Nobody lets it alone more than you do when it can'tbe got. I've noticed that."
"You cayn't devil me, boy. I was punchin' longhorns when yore mammy waspaddlin' you for stealin' the sugar. Say, that reminds me. I'm plumb outo' sugar. Can you loan me some till Pedro gits around? I got to havesugar or I begin to fall off right away," the big man whined.
The line-riders chatted casually of the topics that interest men in theland of wide, empty frontiers. Of Indians they had something to say, oftheir diminishing grub supply more. Jumbo mentioned that he had found anA T O cow dead by a water-hole. They spoke incidentally of the Dinsmoregang, a band of rustlers operating in No Man's Land. They had littlenews of people, since neither of them had for three weeks seen anotherhuman being except Quint Sullivan, the line-rider who fenced the A T Ocattle to the east of Roberts.
Presently Roberts nodded a good-bye and passed again into the solitudeof empty spaces. The land-waves swallowed him. Once more he followeddraws, crossed washes, climbed cow-backed hills, picking up drift-cattleas he rode.
It was late afternoon when he saw a thin spiral of smoke from a rise ofground. Smoke meant that some human being was abroad in the land, andevery man on the range called for investigation. The rider moved forwardto reconnoiter.
He saw a man, a horse, a cow, a calf, and a fire. When these five thingscame together, it meant that somebody was branding. The present businessof Roberts was to find out what brand was on the cow and what one wasbeing run on the flank of the calf. He rode forward at a slow canter.
The man beside the fire straightened. He took off his hat and swept itin front of him in a semicircle from left to right. The line-riderunderstood the sign language of the plains. He was being "waved around."The man was serving notice upon him to pass in a wide circle. It meantthat the dismounted man did not intend to let himself be recognized. Theeasy deduction was that he was a rustler.
The cowboy rode steadily forward. The man beside the fire picked up arifle lying at his feet and dropped a bullet a few yards in front of theadvancing man.
Roberts drew to a halt. He was armed with a six-shooter, but a revolverwas of no use at this distance. For a moment he hesitated. Anotherbullet lifted a spurt of dust almost at his horse's feet.
The line-rider waited for no more definite warning. He waved a handtoward the rustler and shouted down the wind: "Some other day." Quicklyhe swung his horse to the left and vanished into an arroyo. Then,without an instant's loss of time, he put his pony swiftly up the drawtoward a "rim-rock" edging a mesa. Over to the right was Box Canon,which led to the rough lands of a terrain unknown to Roberts. It was athree-to-one chance that the rustler would disappear into the canon.
The young man rode fast, putting his bronco at the hills with a rush.He was in a treeless country, covered with polecat brush. Through thishe plunged recklessly, taking breaks in the ground without slackeningspeed in the least.
Near the summit of the rise Roberts swung from the saddle and ranforward through the brush, crouching as he moved. With a minimum ofnoise and a maximum of speed he negotiated the thick shrubbery andreached the gorge.
He crept forward cautiously and looked down. Through the shin-oak whichgrew thick on the edge of the bluff he made out a man on horsebackdriving a calf. The mount was a sorrel with white stockings and a splashof white on the nose. The distance was too great for Roberts to make outthe features of the rider clearly, though he could see the fellow wasdark and slender.
The line-rider watched him out of sight, then slithered down the face ofthe bluff to the sandy wash. He knelt down and studied intently thehoofprints written in the soil. T
hey told him that the left hind hoof ofthe animal was broken in an odd way.
Jack Roberts clambered up the steep edge of the gulch and returned tothe cow-pony waiting for him with drooping hip and sleepy eyes.
"Oh, you Two Bits, we'll amble along and see where our friend is headin'for."
He picked a way down into the canon and followed the rustler. At thehead of the gulch the man on the sorrel had turned to the left. Thecowboy turned also in that direction. A sign by the side of the trailconfronted him.
THIS IS PETE DINSMORE'S ROAD-- TAKE ANOTHER
"The plot sure thickens," grinned Jack. "Reckon I won't take Pete'sadvice to-day. It don't listen good."
He spoke aloud, to himself or to his horse or to the empty world atlarge, as lonely riders often do on the plains or in the hills, but fromthe heavens above an answer dropped down to him in a heavy, masterfulvoice:
"Git back along that trail _pronto_!"
Roberts looked up. A flat rock topped the bluff above. From the edge ofit the barrel of a rifle projected. Behind it was a face masked by abandana handkerchief. The combination was a sinister one.
If the line-rider was dismayed or even surprised, he gave no evidence ofit.
"Just as you say, stranger. I reckon you're callin' this dance," headmitted.
"You'll be lucky if you don't die of lead-poisonin' inside o' fiveminutes. No funny business! Git!"
The cowboy got. He whirled his pony in its tracks and sent it joggingdown the back trail. A tenderfoot would have taken the gulch atbreakneck speed. Most old-timers would have found a canter none toofast. But Jack Roberts held to a steady road gait. Not once did he lookback--but every foot of the way till he had turned a bend in the canonthere was an ache in the small of his back. It was a purely sympatheticsensation, for at any moment a bullet might come crashing between theshoulders.
Once safely out of range the rider mopped a perspiring face.
"Wow! This is your lucky day, Jack. Ain't you got better sense than totrail rustlers with no weapon but a Sunday-School text? Well, here'shopin'! Maybe we'll meet again in the sweet by an' by. You never canalways tell."
Oh, You Tex! Page 2