by Alan Lemay
"It's time you laid off this jumping from job to job, and set out to make something for yourself," Andrews said. He looked more weather beaten and more tired than ever; it had been a bad, tough year. "I've been figuring Macpherson is old, and about done. I'm old, too. 1 got too much on my hands to run everything at once. You take over the feeding pens. When you get them organized to suit you, take the crop lands and the irrigation, and run that, too. I don't know where you soaked up the savvy on all such stuff. But you proved out you know what you're up to. You showed a less cost per pound of beef than we've ever had at Bluestone. And you know cattle. You were right about feeding those cows."
"Those cows," said Cantrell, "lost out in the market."
"All beef lost out," Andrews amended. "Fat baby beeves are being kicked back onto the range, full to the eyes with cottonseed that will never put money in any man's pants. The only profit in all the Fifty-Mile come in on those eight hundred cows."
The young man and the old man looked at each other in silence for a minute. "The valley has taken a terrible shellacking," Andrews said. "Jim Grover, and lots of others, have their backs to the wall. A hundred and fifty is the best 1 can give you. But you take hold, and we'll dope out a scheme whereby you'll be cut in on the profits, if any. The Fifty-Mile has a future. You can just as well grow up with the valley, if you want to stick."
Just as Cantrell could have given no good reason for having stuck the year in Fifty-Mile Valley, he could think of no reason now for not jumping at an offer like that. He had worked hard, fighting the times as he would have fought a bucking horse, and he had seen himself as helpless and disarmed in the end as in the beginning. And now, suddenly, it seemed the whole victory was being handed to him on a plate, with Grover as good as licked. It was the offer of a cut-in that was the big thing. From that start there was no doubt that Cantrell could build to a full partnership in the end, and become a power, of a kind, in that valley.
He knew that he should feel elated, but he did not. He only felt dazed. He rode off into the hills and spent the day by himself, and taught himself to realize that this thing was true - that he had won. But still he felt no sense of triumph. It was as if he had put too much into the winning, and had nothing left with which to enjoy the unexpected victory. Or perhaps something else was wrong.
His trail back to the Circle Three led him past Jim Graver's home ranch, and now he remembered that early in the day someone had told him Grover was looking for him, wanted to see him. On an impulse - perhaps because he was obscurely reluctant to go back to the Circle Three - he turned into Grover's layout.
Grover had built his layout himself, and he had a big, fine barn with a corrugated roof, but the house in which he was baching it was an adobe of three small rooms, only two of which had wood floors. Not so much, but often, in riding by this place, Cantrell had speculated morosely on what a pretty place Marjory Andrews would make of this when she came to live here - a place worthy of all a man's life.
He went around to the back where a light showed that Jim Grover, alone now that he had fired his extra fall help, was cooking himself a belated supper. Tom Cantrell glanced once at the room, littered and dimly lit by the smoky kerosene lamp, then leaned in the doorway, easy and balanced, light on his boot heels, as he always stood. Grover swung from the stove to face him, stoop shouldered and head down, like a crowded steer. He was big and square built, but with a weariness in his young features that foretold the dark doggedness in toil toward which this man's destiny was set.
"1 heard you were looking for me," Tom Cantrell said.
"Maybe 1 am," said Grover. The wall of studied politeness they had always kept between them fell away. "Hardly figured you'd come for it, though. Come in here."
Cantrell took two steps into the room, grit crackling under his high heels, for Grover's layout caught the blow of the sand from the range. Jim Grover picked up the lamp and set it on a high shelf. Cantrell knew what Grover wanted with him, when he did that. Then Grover crossed, kicked the door shut, and leaned his back against it. He began to make a cigarette, studying Cantrell as he did so, with eyes gone as expressionless as the eyes of a pike.
"You're shot with luck, aren't you?" he said at last.
"Some say 1 am."
"1 understand," Grover said again, "you've been drifting up and down the country since you were fourteen years old."
Cantrell nodded.
"I ran off from home about the same age," Grover went on. "I figured to do like you've done.. .get out of this valley, drift up and down the world. Only, 1 turned back."
"You used your head," said Cantrell.
Grover disregarded him. "For the last ten years I've worked like hell. Even as a kid 1 was trying to figure out ways to amount to something, to get ahead. After ten years a man can't change. A way of going at things builds into you, and you can't get loose. 1 could be standing in your shoes now. But 1 turned back. That was my mistake. One mistake... and one to last me all my life. But you were shot with luck, and you stayed out."
"And that," Cantrell said, "was my mistake."
"Mistake, hell!" Grover roared with anomalous fury. "How was it you could swing that irrigation stunt that knocked everybody cock-eyed? How did you get ahead on things like grading feeder steers? How was it you knew that baby beef was going to choke the market, but could show old Andrews how to clean up with his no-good cows? Because you're better than the valley men? Like hell! You built up that dope drifting up and down the West, all that time I was sweating to grow a few cows in this dusty hole in the hills!"
"Something wrong there," Cantrell said. His sleet-blue eyes were dreamy, off in the distance beyond the close walls, beyond the far-cupped ranges. "I can tell you this.. .trail dusting doesn't fit any man for anything, except moving on."
"The devil it doesn't," Grover snarled at him. Cantrell was amazed at the black bitterness of the man. Perhaps working everlastingly in one place built up a man's capacity for hate. "You're the smart boy, aren't you? You're the boy knows it all. You took one summer, and you built yourself into a partnership with the biggest cowman in the Fifty-Mile. One summer.. .and you set yourself up for life! That's what you learned to do, huh, giving yourself a break? And you learned to turn the head of a girl, and gather her in, just easy, with one hand behind your back!"
"What is it you want with me?" Cantrell demanded. His eyes came out of the distance beyond the walls with a snap, and met Grover's gaze with still points of steel.
"I'll tell you what 1 want with you. I'm through, and I'm beat, and I know it. But 1 don't like you. 1 don't like your looks, or your ways, or the shape of your hat. And right now I'm going to whip you."
Cantrell drew a deep breath of the kerosene-smoked air. "Well," he said, "1'm ready."
Jim Grover came with a rush, releasing all the furious energy of a defeated man, of a man who had worked ten years and seen his winnings tricked away in a moment by a Johnnycome-lately who had spent his life having a good time. Jim Grover weighed two hundred and four pounds, and what of that was not bone was muscle hardened by the labors of the saddle. He came fast and he came hard, charging like a cross between a longhorn and a silvertip. And Tom Cantrell swayed away without even raising his hands, and let Grover bring up against the wall with a crash that shook the solid adobe.
What chance has a good saddle-toughened boy against a man who has gone eighteen battles in the professional ring? Jim Grover turned, gathered himself, and came again, and Cantrell stabbed out with a reaching left, his balanced weight leaning behind it. That was the beginning. They were not going to come to the end for a long time.
Unless Grover could close in upon Cantrell in the cramped quarters, and make use of his sheer power, there could be only one kind of end. But he could not close in. It must have seemed to Grover, as his eyes closed and the wind went out of him, that he could not even find Cantrell. Cantrell went down once from a wild, high blow on the side of his head, and his arms and shoulders turned hot and lame from heavy b
attering, but when Grover finally did close in, weary and windbroke, Cantrell ripped his right hand four times to the heart, and the fight was done.
Done as far as any doubt of outcome was concerned, yet not done. It was not until Grover was whipped and definitely through that he showed the stuff he was made of. He showed it by getting up and coming on, over and over again, when everything he had was gone, and all hope was gone, and what power he had left would not have broken a paper bag. He was still trying to fight, staggering stone blind, groping for his enemy, when Cantrell pushed him to the floor in a corner and held him there with one hand.
Grover struggled to sit up, his back braced against the wall, but swayed crazily even then. "Come on and fight," he said dimly.
"It's the end of round one, fella," Cantrell told him. The sweat was running down his face, and, with his hair clawed into his eyes, he appeared as if he were looking through the mane of a horse. "Sit quiet until you hear the gong."
He got water and poured it over Graver's head. After a while Grover peered out of his swollen eyes and seemed able to see Cantrell. "1 suppose," said Grover at last, "you learned this stuff at Fish Creek, or Madre de Dios, or some place."
"Mostly at San Berdoo."
"Uh-huh," said Grover. "If she's given me one sample of what you did in outlandish places, she's given me a million. Don't go away. I'll whip...."
"As for me," said Cantrell, "I wish to hell 1'd killed you. That crack on the head must have waked my brain up, and I'll never forgive you for that."
"1 don't know what you're talking about," Jim Grover said.
"I never heard such infernal blather as you talk," said Cantrell. "All day long I've known something was wrong. 1 knew things couldn't have worked out so good. Not on the level. But 1 didn't realize what a lot of baloney it all was until I heard you spiel it out in one long parade of bunk."
"When was this?" Grover mumbled.
"All this stuff about how come 1 got ahead of you...I never heard such hooey," Cantrell said. "Hitting the trail never taught any man how to settle down to a success with cattle or anything else. For more than a little while."
Grover lifted his head, fighting ugly yet. "The hell it didn't," he said. "It taught you cattle, but leave that out. If you didn't get anything else out of it, you anyway learned how to gather in a girl."
"And turn to living off her father," Cantrell said, his low tones fit to skin a mule. "A fine end for a man who's rode the country I've rode!"
"You turned her head," Grover insisted doggedly.
"When you've made love to a hundred girls, 1 reckon it should be no great trick to make some sort of showing with one more."
The other got to his hands and knees, and tried to climb up the wall to his feet. "As soon as 1 get up," he said, "1 aim to break your back!"
"1 wish you had," said Cantrell.
Grover half rose, but his knees buckled under him again, and he went down. "You mean that now you've won her over, you don't want her any more?"
"1 want her," said Cantrell, "worse than 1 ever wanted anything in my life."
He found his hat, trampled under the broken table, and left Jim Grover still sitting on the floor in the yellow light of kerosene.
He knew now what had been wrong all day long. If Grover had seen the truth and had told him outright that the trail fitted a man for nothing but the trail, if he had told Cantrell that he was a fluke and a fraud, and was lined up to sponge a living from the father of the girl he loved, Cantrell would have bucked, and thrown it off. But when Grover had voiced the very phrases that Cantrell himself had tried to think, the unsoundness of the whole thing came out, clear and plain and ugly, so that he could not evade it or put it down.
The bag of tricks the trail had given him were trivial tricks - impressive to a valley-bound man and a girl. But Grover had said one true thing - that after ten years a man can't change. If one thing in the world was certain, it was that the everlasting, unconquerable pull of the trail would sooner or later twist the heart out of him, and make him worse than useless to Marjory Andrews in the end. Cantrell turned his horse toward the Circle Three with a reluctance that was almost dread.
It was coldly raw and starless as he put his pony up the back trail that had first brought him into the Fifty-Mile. When he had told Andrews that he was on his way, he had not been able to bring himself to stay under a Circle Three roof another night. He pushed upward, seeking the southward track.
At the fork of the trail he pulled up his blowing horse and sat for a little while, looking back. Far out on the valley floor he could make out the tiny yellow lights of the Circle Three, marking a place of friendliness and warmth in the vast, cold dark. Farther yet, winking behind distance, he could make out two or three more, where people of other ranches were getting somewhere and building up families around them. More than ever in his life, he felt that nothing in the world had any meaning compared to the worth of one lighted window, somewhere far off in the dusk, with warmth behind it, and a girl waiting.
And he knew that down in this valley there was a girl who would have waited for him - perhaps forever, if he had asked it. Tonight, for all he knew, her pillow would be wet with tears.
He tried to hum his favorite song:
But the picture that had come to him of a gray-eyed girl in tears took the song out of him, along with nearly everything else. He tried to spit through his teeth, and found that for some reason he could not. Then he spoke out loud. Yes, they had him talking to himself. "Better tonight," he said, his voice thin and unfamiliar against the wind - "better tonight than all through the years." He turned his horse downwind and drifted south.
Everybody saw the change in Bob Porter when he came back to his father's ranch - the Diamond Dot - in the Sunrise River country. Some change, of course, was noticeable at sight, for he was considerably filled out and more mature (he had left at the age of nineteen); but it wasn't until he had been around for a few weeks that they began to realize what a punk effect four years of wandering had really had upon him.
To old Raff Porter, Bob's father, it seemed that his son had had the heart taken out of him, somewhere in those four years. He tried to draw the boy out about where he had been, and what had happened to him. Bob Porter had been a lot of places - as far north and east as Oklahoma, as far south as southern Sonora - and he had wandered a crooked roundabout trail between. He spoke readily, though without enthusiasm, about any part of his travels that anybody seemed interested in, but his father was unable to discover any clue to the change in his son.
Sometimes Raff Porter, letting his memory drop back ten years, thought that Bob was acting a whole lot like some of the boys he had seen return from the A.E.F.This did nothing to modify his bafflement. Bob Porter had not been to any war, for there had been no war. That he had not been uniformly unsuccessful in his wandering was attested by the fact that he still had eight or nine thousand dollars left from a clean-up he had made in some oil-well shenanigan in Oklahoma. Yet, the unmistakable symptoms of something wrong were there: a lack of interest in anything whatsoever which an evident effort to dissimulate was not able to cover up and a general silent wordlessness, as if the effort involved in speech was out of proportion to the possible accomplishment thereof.
Raff Porter was not the only one who noticed the change. Neighboring cattlemen, some of whom had known Bob all his life, noticed it too; and Madge Alexander noticed it, and she was, perhaps, the most puzzled of all.
For four years Madge Alexander had hung onto her mental picture of the reckless, hard-riding kid that Bob Porter had been when last seen in the Sunrise River country. Physically, at first glance, she found that he more than lived up to that picture, but something not physical was very obviously and literally gone. Men might have called that missing element by the homely name of guts. Madge, recognizing the change perhaps more keenly than anyone else, did not know what to call it, even in her own mind.
But what Madge Alexander noticed was that Bob Porter hardly ev
er came to see her now that he was back. He had been home two months and a half before he rode over to the Alexander place for the third time, and even then mere was nothing satisfactory about it to a girl who had carried Bob Porter's image in her mind all the time he had been gone.
It was only shortly after midday, but Lee Heston had stopped by in passing, as he frequently did, and his presence made it even worse. Lee was the outstandingly eligible young man who is always among those present wherever a man is trying to raise an attractive girl. Heston already had his own average-size outfit that he had inherited from an uncle. And he had been after Madge Alexander ever since she was nineteen years old - which is to say, ever since Bob Porter had been away. Everybody assumed that Madge would ultimately drift into marrying him, if ever she got Bob out of her head.
And it looked as if Bob Porter were in a fair way to count himself out. Madge was much too wide awake, to say nothing of short tempered, to dedicate herself to a washout.
Now, as they sat on the broad gallery of the Circle Slash ranch house, watching the mouse-colored shadows of the Volunteer Peaks eclipse the mesas, it appeared that Madge found herself unable to watch the slow death of an hallucination any longer.
"What are you going to do, Bob?" Her voice was casual, yet all three must have recognized that a direct challenge had come to the surface at last.
"Do? Do about what?"
"Are you going to stay in the Sunrise River country?"
Bob Porter had sat as motionless as a resting dog for the better part of an hour, but now he stirred with an uneasy restlessness. "Why, I might," he said vaguely. "But maybe I'll push on up Saskatchewan way."
"Are you right sure you'll find it much different from where you've already been?"
"No," he admitted; "1 expect not. 1 suppose that's the reason I can't hardly make up my mind to go. 1 kind of don't dare go to Saskatchewan, I guess."