Spanish Crossing

by Alan Lemay

  "Don't dare? What do you mean?"

  "Seems like 1'd kind of like to save out one place, in this cow belt, that 1 haven't actually gone and sifted out myself"

  "Sifted? For what?"

  There was another of those dopey silences Bob Porter made a specialty of nowadays. "I'm not right sure I know for what," he finally brought out.

  Nobody said anything for a little bit. Then Madge asked in a curious voice: "What's her name?"

  "Name? Whose name?"

  "Let it go," Madge said.

  Lee Heston allowed that he had heard that Saskatchewan was a mighty pretty country, and that they paid good wages, too.

  "Yeah?" said Bob. He hitched himself to his feet slowly, straightening up his long length. "Well, I'll be drifting along." He idled his way toward his horse. "Take care of yourselves."

  "Hurry back," Lee Heston called after him with an imitation heartiness.

  "0 K," said Porter, and rode shuffling away.

  When he was gone, the thickness of the dusk gave Madge hope that she could snap herself out of the dark mood that had come upon her in time to conceal it from Lee Heston. With her boots as silent as moccasins she danced a slow solo step the length of the gallery and back, snapping her fingers to the time of a low-chanted song. It was a new song that the radio had brought in only a few days before:

  Lee Heston had leisurely got up to dance with her, but Madge suddenly turned away from him to burst into tears that could not be hid.

  Old Man Porter and Roddy Morton, who had ridden over with Bob to talk feed with Jess Alexander, were waiting for Bob out by one of the corrals. The three rode back a different way than they had come, Old Man Porter wishing to estimate certain possibilities of the winter graze.

  "A feller over at Phoenix," said Roddy with irony, "was telling me that the old open range is gone. `The cow country is all fenced up,' says he, `and privately controlled."'

  "1'd like to lay hands on a feller like that," said Old Man Porter vindictively. "Lord knows, 1 wish he was right! But seeing that only about one-sixth of Arizona was private-owned by the Nineteen Twenty-Five report ...1 guess a few thousand of us will have to keep right on blundering ahead on the delusion that we're still up against open-range conditions."

  He drew up his horse on the edge of the mesa they rode and waved a buckskin-gloved hand at a broken twenty-mile expanse. "Open range!" he repeated bitterly. "1 can remember when we was strong for it." He ran a disillusioned eye over the very visible results of too long a usage without control.

  "Look at it now!" Porter urged them. "That's what you might call over-grazed! Sometimes it seems like it's time to move on."

  Bob Porter laughed, a harsh sound, unexpected in the quiet of limitless space. "Move on, huh? That's a hot one!" The embittered, derisive note in his voice was unfamiliar, but his father did not take affront.

  "Maybe down in old Mex'...," the old man's voice trailed off.

  "I've just come from old Mex'," Bob Porter reminded him. "You're as good as looking at it now. Or maybe you think you'd like to push north. I can tell you you're looking at Nevada, too, just while you're looking at this basin."

  His father glanced at him curiously, then wheeled his pony and led the way northward along the shoulder of the mesa. "I'll show you something that looks some better, pretty quick, now, Bob," he promised. "I reckon it'll do us all good to take a look at the stretch we're coming to now."

  "You mean this reserve range up here?"

  "It's the first reserve winter feed we've been able to hold out for years. It was plenty hard for the Sunrise outfits to get together to save this out, and we took an awful chance on some outsider coming in on it. But when we come to the end of this shoulder, you'll be looking down at something the Sunrise country hasn't seen for many a long year... near ninety sections of winter feed, untouched by the summer graze."

  "It sure should look almighty good," Bob admitted.

  Then, as they reached the northern shoulder of the mesa, there came to them a familiar odor and a familiar sound, and they reached the crest of the pitch to find themselves looking upon a broad, long-reaching scatter of grazing sheep.

  The elder two looked at each other, and Roddy Morton's leather face twisted in a wry, dusty grin.

  Raff Porter had a peculiar genius for counting any amount of stock at a glance. "Eight hundred and eighty-odd," he said wearily, "not counting lambs hid behind ewes."

  He set spur to his pony and went loping down the break, the others trailing after. An Indian whose rank hair almost reached his shoulders sat on the hillside, overlooking his flock. Beside him lay a silver-sprinkled old dog, like a wolf. A couple of dusky striplings squatted on their heels off to one side on the plain below, and there were four more dogs of that peculiar smoky-blue desert breed that has so long worked Southwestern sheep. Porter rode directly to the man on the slope, who watched his approach dourly, without salute.

  Raff Porter demanded: "You on herd contract or payroll?"

  "Contract, for the Double 0."

  The man spoke as good Western English as Porter, and that in itself seemed to anger the old man. "What do you think you're doing here?"

  "Why not?" he said. "This range is free. You ain't using it."

  "Nor you either," Raff Porter snapped at him. "All that's been threshed out ten thousand times. No sheep come this side of Mike's Wash, and you know that as well as me. Already you've cut a half-mile-wide belt through ninety sections we was holding for winter feed. Now you get them sheep back beyond Mike's Wash!"

  "Abe Atwood is back of these sheep," the herder warned him. "The law says...."

  "To hell with Abe Atwood! If you and Atwood want law, I'll give you law!"

  The herder appeared to consider. Curiously, he showed no resentment - perhaps because he felt no surprise. "All right," he said at last, his eyes contemplative upon the sheep. "it'll take maybe three, four days to get them moved."

  Bob Porter suddenly rose in his stirrups. "Three, four days, hell! You'll put those sheep over the line tonight!"

  "We can't...."

  "You can't move 'em, huh? By God, I'll show you how to move 'em!" He struck steel to his horse, and the cow pony exploded into a thundering streak of dust. The hazing yell that is yet heard in old Mexico rang out: "Aye, the-wah-wah! Pick 'em up! Che-wah-wah-wah! Get gone!"

  The sheep at the margin of the herd blundered into a stupid bunch. Those nearest the horse put their heads down and cannoned into the others, fighting to get into the middle. One half-moon sweep threw the woollies into some semblance of a driven herd, another put them on the move. "Aye, che-wahwah! Whoppee!" The shuffle of hoofs changed to a groundshaking rumble, then a continuous, muffled roar.

  Young Porter rode back. "You keep them on the prod... and if you know what's good for you, you'll never stop until you're across Mike's Wash! I aim to ride this range tonight ...and Lord knows I'm hoping I'll find you here!"

  Bob Porter held to his intention. He went back to the home ranch with the others, for supper and a fresh horse, but rode out again, and breakfast was half finished before he reappeared, saddle worn and dusty, but not apparently tired.

  "Come onto any sheep?" his father asked him.

  Bob answered: "There's no sheep in Powder Basin."

  That was all that was said then, but late in the day a rider from the Bar Five stopped by, bursting with news peculiarly disturbing to old Raff Porter.

  "Did you hear about the sheep run?" was almost the first thing the Bar Five cowboy said. "Somebody jumped down on one of the big Double 0 herds, over in the Soapweed Flats, and scattered near two thousand head from hell to Tuesday!"

  Raff Porter turned a slow eye upon his son, but Bob Porter's face was expressionless.

  "Abe Atwood is swearing he'll have somebody's scalp if it costs him his last cent. Seems like somebody caught a herd of wool over on the Powder Basin land, and they figure the row must have started there, but Abe Atwood claims that herd was only moving down to the desert fo
r the winter lambing and pushing along as fast as it could. The sheepmen are in an almighty boil!"

  That night Jess Alexander and Lee Heston, representing the Seven B and the Circle Slash, rode over to the Porters' to talk of what might well prove the beginning of another expensive war.

  "Look here," said Lee Heston, speaking slightly out of turn, but with great reasonableness. "Old Abe Atwood's the toughest sheepman in the Sunrise. First thing we know there's going to be reprisals, and what kind of shape are we in for that?"

  "Better let the thing rest," Raff Porter recommended. "Sheepmen have to be put in their place every so often, anyway. For all we know this will turn out to have done more good than harm."

  "The Sunrise won't be cow country again until somebody buys out Atwood. He's the root of sheep trouble here," Heston fretted. "He was near ready to sell when this broke, but now he'll stick like a fever tick. Still, if you want to let this drift...."

  This they decided to do. There the matter rested for all of three days.

  On the third day Bob Porter elected himself to ride night herd on a bunch of long yearlings that were being held in one corner of the Diamond Dot range, pending a disposition not yet decided.

  That night a red glow upon the sky told the length and breadth of the Sunrise valley a story which the swift news of next day confirmed. A brush corral in which Double 0 herders had bedded nearly fifteen hundred head had gone up in flames.

  By the testimony of the herders the fire was no accidental blaze started by a cook-fire spark. The sheepmen had heard at least one ridden horse, shots had been exchanged, and the herders had been driven back.

  They added to this the details of a scene which, to sheepmen at least, appealed as one of devastation and horror. As the dry brush had roared up in sky-reaching flame, more than two hundred head of sheep had died, trapped and trampled in the smoke. Fifty-eight head died in a straight-sided wash into which a part of the herd avalanched in the dark, and all along the long course of that merciless drive the weaker of the lambs and ewes were left wind broken on their knees, many of them never to rise.

  The herders had recognized no one, except that they could swear to the one long yell that the hazing rider had used as he drove down upon the stampeding sheep: "Aye, che-wahwah! Get gone!" Nobody in the Sunrise valley used that yell except just one man.

  In less than a day the news had spread. That night, as the coyotes gathered from afar to the scent of the scorched wool and mutton, the cowmen of six brands gathered at the home ranch of Porter's Diamond Dot. Among them also appeared Tom Frazier, Sunrise sheriff, who arrived alone.

  "Look here, Raff," Jim Earle, owner of the Bar Five, put it up to the boss of the Diamond Dot, "this thing's going to cause trouble... what your kid did to them sheep last night."

  "Who said it was my boy?"

  "Why, it's all over the range that them sheep herders said it was him...or as good as said so."

  "Some sheep herders as good as said," Raff Porter repeated ironically. "You've got crust, Jim, offering me that!"

  "What does he say," Lee Heston demanded sharply, "about where he was last night?"

  Raff Porter looked him over with a cool eye. "In the first place," he said, "I wouldn't have the nerve to ask Bob where he spent his night, no, not me! In the second place, it happens he did mention where he was going to be. I suppose I might ask him now if he ran a sneak, under cover of a lie, to go trample under a lot of stock that was minding its own business on its own range. But if you think I'm going to, you don't know me!"

  Restless glances turned to Bob Porter. He did not look at all perturbed.

  "Ain't you got anything to say, Bob?" Jess Alexander asked.

  Bob Porter smiled faintly and shook his head.

  The cattlemen, upset by the Porters' reticent stand, were momentarily at a loss. By ones and twos they went their way, uneasy and uncertain. These were men quick enough in action, once they saw their way, but very slow to make decisions that would alter old ties.

  Tom Frazier stayed after the others. The Sunrise sheriff was a lank, loose-knit man with a friendly eye and huge, competent hands.

  "People," he said, "this here is a real serious thing. I'm asking you, is this the right way to do?"

  "Let's not begin to yell before we're bit," Raff suggested.

  "I'll smooth over whatever of this 1 can," Frazier assured him. "But hell's going to pop before we hear the last of this." He rode off, looking serious.

  Now three days passed in that utter quiet which the untrusting human mind invariably associates with coming storm. In this time nothing was heard from Abe Atwood or his faction. The sheep stayed on their own side of Mike's Wash. Yet the air was full of electricity. No one doubted for a moment that reprisals would come. The cowmen waited, restless and dark tempered.

  At the Diamond Dot, Raff Porter remained as good as his word: he had never asked his son for an explanation of his whereabouts upon the night of the raid, and Bob offered none.

  On the fourth day Bob Porter saddled a good, tough circle pony, and guessed that he would go to town. "Don't look for me until tomorrow," he told Raff Porter. "1 don't know but what I'll be coming back in a kind of roundabout way."

  The elderly, wistful look that came into Raff Porter's face swiftly turned to something pretty dark and grim. He opened his mouth, but he closed it again. Afterward, he blamed himself for that, for that night saw history made on the Sunrise range.

  Shortly after midnight a red flare once more painted the sky, and the rattle of gunfire perforated the desert night. Far downwind the coyotes pricked up their ears to the bleat of lambs lost from a stampeded herd and their noses to the suggestive odor of burnt wool. It was the ultimate injury-uponinsult, the final turn of the screw.

  Bob Porter and his ridden-out pony did not get in until the middle of the next afternoon.

  His father faced him with bleak eyes, his face hard. "Bob, boy, what the hell am 1 supposed to think?"

  Bob Porter threw his hat at a nail, and skidded the frying pan onto the stove. "Dad, the fact is, 1 haven't been right sure what you'd think. But my mind was set. 1 figured to go about my own business my own way."

  Raff Porter exploded. "You infernal young squirt!" he bellowed. "If you've gone to work and...!"

  "Take your time!" Bob Porter checked him. "We've got a visitor here."

  Sheriff Tom Frazier was with them again. He stepped in uninvited, and shot an angry glance from father to son.

  "By God," he said, "this thing has got to stop! If you think you're going to send this country up in a cloud of yells and dust, you can think two times again!"

  "Now just a minute," Bob said. "You want a stop put to this messing with sheep, do you? I'll put a stop to it for you."

  "You're damn' tootin' you'll stop it. And that ain't all...."

  Bob Porter turned so hard an eye upon Frazier that he was given time to speak. "Let me ask you one thing," Bob said. "Were you ever taken for a fool?"

  "Maybe I was," said Frazier belligerently.

  "So I have been," said Bob. "Not only by you, but by everybody on the Sunrise range, and even by my own dad." "Who? Me?" said Porter.

  "Yes, you," said Bob. "If 1 was going out to burn out a passel of sheep under cover of dark, you think I wouldn't have any more sense than to go at them yelling.. .Aye, the-wahwah!...the one yell that nobody uses but me? I'm sick and tired of this, and 1 don't aim to stand for it any more!" He started pulling on his chaps.

  "Where you going?" Frazier demanded.

  "1'm going to put a stop to these here night raids," Bob told him, "and don't you worry but what 1 know where to go!"

  "If you're starting more trouble," said Frazier, "1'm coming along."

  "You'll stay back," Bob told him. "There isn't going to be any trouble, not any trouble at all!"

  It was sundown by the time Bob Porter, arriving by the saddle cut-off, pulled up at the Circle Slash.

  Lee Heston was there. It had taken no great application of brain
s for Bob Porter to figure out where to start looking for him. Just now he was sitting with Madge Alexander on the top rail of the corral.

  Bob Porter swung down without being invited, and tied his horse to the fence.

  "Howdy, Bob," Madge said.

  "Heston," said Porter, "I'll talk to you,"

  Lee Heston stiffened. "Go ahead and talk," he said.

  "Heston," said Porter, "there's going to be an end to this hazing of Double 0 sheep."

  Lee Heston regarded him ironically. "You should know best!"

  "I'll make it my business to know. And one reason for that is, the Double 0 sheep are my sheep!"

  "They're what?" Heston was jolted out of his studied calm.

  "1 took over the Double 0 yesterday. The losses from last night's stampede are my losses."

  Heston looked blank. "It's an outright lie," he decided. "You haven't got enough cash to buy half interest in a thrown mule shoe!"

  "You'll find that Abe Atwood and the Sunrise bank figured I had enough."

  "Then," Lee Heston hazarded, "you ran those first two stampedes to break Atwood's price, and you ran another last night on a corral of your own... willing to take a loss to cover up your tracks!"

  "There isn't going to be any loss," Porter told him. "In the first place, I bought the Double 0 for the same price 1 offered before the first stampede. In the second place, Heston, you're going to pay damages for every sheep you've run to death. You're up against a cowman now."

  "You mean to say 1...?"

  "1 mean to say it's you that tried to start this sheep war, and put it off on me. It's been almighty thin. I know exactly how you found out each of those three times that I was going to be away from home. 1 know what your idea was.. .which was to break Abe Atwood's price to where you could swing it yourself. 1 even know what horses you rode."

  "You'll never prove a nickel's worth of it," Heston lathered. "If you think you can come back here and high lord me... why, you worthless saddle bum, 1'11...."