by Noel Loomis
“It’s a great night for trouble,” growled Major wearily, turning away from the window. Then, sheepishly, he turned back to close the shutters. “After all,” he explained himself, “they’ve took a shot at you once tonight. Seems like most fellers that get shot do all they can to lay themselves wide open for it. Did you ever notice that?”
“Yes,” said Hughes.
Major went to his desk and cut himself a chew of tobacco. “I don’t know what I ought to do about you, Hughes,” he said. “The only fair thing to do is to tell you to take your horse and get out of here, as far as you can, and as quick as you can. Way things stand, you’re awful likely to get gunned.”
“Probably,” Clay agreed.
“Do you realize,” Major insisted, “that even if you want to back down now, and admit Donnan never said anything before he died—do you realize it’s too late for that? From here out, no matter what you do or say, them that are against us are going to have to go ahead on the idea that you know something almighty dangerous. Do you realize that?”
“I don’t even know who’s against us, yet,” Hughes reminded him.
“If anybody in the world’s got a right to know, you have,” Major admitted. “We all have lived under the shadow of this feud for so long that it’s hard for us to realize that there’s folks that never even heard of it. Us that’s lived here a long time—we can’t look any direction without seeing the marks of old trouble, and the makings of new. It’s in the set of the hills, and the lay of the land; it’s in the run of the Buckhorn melts…”
“If I’m going to play this hand out,” said Hughes with determination, “I’m going to have to know something, at least. Over and over, all day long, I’ve been hearing the name of Earl Shaw and Adobe Wells, Adobe Wells and Earl Shaw. Now I’d like to know who is this important cuss? He sure sounds like part rain-maker and part haunt-up-a-canyon. And I want to know what ails Adobe Wells—ants in the pants, or a set-to of the water-gimmes?”
“You can’t savvy—nobody but us here can understand it—what it means to us here to hang onto this range.” The old range wolf drew a deep breath, and the slow red glow came into his eyes again. “You first set eyes on this valley today, did you? Yesterday? Seems hard to remember when I first rode in from the Gunsight, like you done this morning, it’s so long ago. But this I remember plain: as soon as I saw the Buckhorn, spread out below, I knew that this here was the range that I’d come a long way to find. My brother and me—his name was Sol—we’d scraped together nigh two thousand head, and I went back, and we carried ’em here. Only a little over half of ’em made it all the long way—but they was enough for seed. It was hard going those first few years, but every once in a while we’d make a little beef drive—for the government usually—and get enough out of it to piece along a little while more.
“Then, while we was still in our beginnings, was when Earl Shaw put in his appearance for the first time. Well, it’s no wonder if you’ve heard that name!
“Well, this Earl Shaw come riding through, and we put him up at the ranch and made him at home; and he took an almighty interest in our range. Then he rode on.
“But a year later he was back. He come in the lower end of the valley this time—and he was driving with him five thousand head. Five thousand head! I thought that was a lot of cattle then. Earl Shaw built his main ranch at Adobe Wells, and that was all right; though I could see that his cattle was going to run mighty gaunt, down on that desert land. But the next year, come grass, the Shaw herd come trailing north.”
The old man’s hands were restless, as if his mind was only partly on the story he was telling, while the rest of him listened for the step outside the door, which still did not come; yet the part of him that was speaking was reliving old battles. It was a story old on the ranges; a story that Clay Hughes could understand as vividly as if those early scenes of stubborn struggle were being relived before his eyes.
Even in that first year many a trailing bunch of cattle bearing Shaw’s Bar S brand wandered northward into Lazy M territory. The longhorn blood, still very strong in the range cattle of those days, could carry the herds so far that only the great distance between water holes held most of the Bar S stock upon the lower desert. Then, in the second year Earl Shaw made a drive of it from roundup, moving his herds bodily into the better territory of the Lazy M.
Shaw began his drive northward without serving the Major brothers any notice of his purpose. Not until the drive was on the way did Oliver Major realize that their grasslands were about to be flooded with Bar S stock.
In those days it was not always practical for two brands to run intermingled as one. The cow country was still too close to the days of the wild cattle, when unbranded stock was free to the man who would go out and make it his own. The Majors looked their choice squarely in the face. They could give up, now and forever, before superior numbers; or they could fight, turning to the only court of appeal the west then had—the six-shooter and the buffalo gun.
There was nothing timorous in the Major blood. The brothers swung into the saddle and rode out to meet the first of the Bar S herds.
Earl Shaw was not outriding that first herd; he was somewhere in the background, many miles to the rear—as, it seemed, he was always to be thereafter. As the Major brothers came up, the Bar S range boss, who was himself riding point, was joined by three or four more cowboys who came up at a high lope to back their brand in whatever play was to be made. They were expecting trouble all right—and it came.
The Bar S range boss laughed in Sol Major’s face when Sol warned him they could not let the northward drive go on. This was very much to be expected; and as was to be expected too, one word led to another, and before either side knew exactly how it had begun, the guns were out of their leather. It was the beginning of the Buckhorn feud.
Sol Major went down in that first crashing volley. Oliver Major caught his brother as he swayed from the saddle, dragged him clear of his stampeded pony, and held him upon the withers of his own horse. Firing across the body of his brother, Major downed the Bar S range boss; and another cowboy was downed, and a third wounded, before they let him ride clear.
That night, beside his brother’s grave, Oliver Major raised clenched hands to the stars, and pledged his last cowhide, his last ounce of powder, to the wiping out of Earl Shaw and the Bar S brand.
It was a hard, bitter struggle before the Bar S gave up. At one time the little Lazy M was carrying no less than fifteen riders, competent gun fighters brought at any cost from far away. Young Oliver Major, saddle-raised and trail-hardened, turned into an avenging fury; irresistibly he swept the valley of the Buckhorn clear. Many an unremembered rider went down before that first war was done. If it had happened a few years later it would have become one of the famous range wars of the west. But such feuds were common then.
Yet, Oliver Major never accomplished quite all he had meant to do. He broke the Bar S brand, and sent the remnants of it back to the Adobe Wells desert, where it stayed; but Earl Shaw himself he did not meet. The riders with whom the Lazy M men repeatedly clashed were only the employees of Earl Shaw, good tough men who fought gamely for their brand, but who had had no more connection with the death of Oliver Major’s brother than the ponies they rode. So Oliver Major sickened of it at last, and let peace return to the Buckhorn, while Earl Shaw himself still lived and retained the remnants of an outfit at Adobe Wells.
And there at Adobe Wells Earl Shaw had hung on stubbornly. It was Shaw who had got the spur track which eventually ended at the loading corrals of Adobe Wells. Starting with this frustrated railhead and the Buckhorn’s first saloon, Shaw had managed to gather about him the beginnings of a desert town. It had even boomed a little, once, as the gold fever swept southward. And it remained a thorn in the side of Oliver Major that every head of his annual calf shipments paid a profit into the pocket of Earl Shaw.
The Buckhorn was still free range when Earl Shaw came up the valley the second time. This time the he
rds that crept northward into the Lazy M land were neither long-horned nor white-faced—but instead a broad, slow-flowing river of sheep. The blatting grey tide came onto the grasslands, its dust clouds drawing nearer week by week; it left a new belt of desert behind it, as if it carried the curse of the dry land. The sheep cropped to the level of the soil, and their sharp hoofs cut to pieces the very roots of the feed. Long after the grass returned, the soil remained impregnated with the hated odor of the woolies, so that no horse or cow would graze where they had fed.
Earl Shaw had counted upon the law this time; but he learned that he had counted upon it too soon. The law of that country was still cattle law. Once more, unimpeded by outside interference, the cowboys of the Lazy M swept down upon the encroachers, and the coyotes grew fat on fresh-killed mutton. It was a hard thing, this ruthless destruction of the blatting herds, and the manhandling of dismounted men; but for the lord of the upper Buckhorn there was no other way, except to fold up and quit altogether. Once more Earl Shaw was driven back to Adobe Wells, hating the boss of the Buckhorn water as only a stubborn and defeated man can hate.
After that Oliver Major thought he had learned his lesson. He scoured the southwest for government land scrip, railroad scrip, any scrip; he bought it high and low, or at any price at all. Into it he poured all the gains of the past, and mortgaged his future as deep as the faith of money can go. He nearly broke himself; but in the end he made the upper Buckhorn his own.
He had thought the battle was over then, that nothing remained except to develop the future of the Buckhorn Valley. And the whole of the Buckhorn Valley was embraced in his far-seeing dreams. Looking into the future, Oliver Major saw the ultimate impounding of the Buckhorn’s annual spring torrent, and the final bringing to full fruition of the possibilities inherent in the Buckhorn water.
And now, after all this time, Earl Shaw had turned his guns upon the Lazy M once more. This time they were a different sort of guns, treacherous and subtle; Earl Shaw at last was not only backed by the law, but was using the fabric of the law itself as an entrapping net. The new attack was from the rear; it struck at the very source of the Buckhorn water.
Oliver Major, ready at last to sink a fortune in the impounding of the Buckhorn’s surplus flow—the project toward which the whole of his life had been built—had suddenly found his plans blocked on every side, and his project lost in an entanglement of legal complications as intricate as a snarled roll of barbed wire. Shaw had in truth made good the vacant desert years. Working steadily, always in the shadows, Earl Shaw had made himself the political boss of first a county, then a region; until presently he became a cog in the machine which governed the state. Being a cog in that machine was worth something, for when the machine was running smoothly it pulled strong wires in certain departments of the national government itself. It was running smoothly now. Earl Shaw, the defeated, the man sentenced by his own stubbornness to the desert land, was now able to clamp Oliver Major’s project in an iron grip.
Nor was this all. It was Shaw’s plan now to seize the Buckhorn water in the hills at its source, and by a practicable engineering project divert the Buckhorn River from its own valley entirely, carrying it across a range to water the Silverado desert on the other side!
As an engineering feat it was well within reason; and unexpectedly, the legal obstacles had proved surmountable too. Only a nominal trickle of water was to be left to the vast holdings of the Lazy M. The watering of the Silverado would enrich by many a million the instigators of this extraordinary scheme; while in the deprived valley of the Buckhorn the old cattleman would be left broken and hopeless in the dust of a withered domain.
It was a stupendous scheme, resolute and daring; and Earl Shaw had waited until all was ready before he made his play. Once started, his movements had been swift and sure. Almost before the first rumors of the Silverado project were out, the thing had gathered a momentum almost impossible to stop. Every technical blockade dissolved before the political influence of the machine of which Earl Shaw was a part. At the last only Oliver Major himself, the fighting old lord of the Buckhorn water, stood in the way.
Yet, Oliver Major, once aroused and aware of his danger, was a formidable opponent still. That state was shot through with the drivers of the old trails, to whom Oliver Major’s name had meant something since the earlies. Almost overnight Major brought to bear such a thrust of luridly expressed opinion that Shaw’s allies were checked by a new fear for their own strength.
Thus the old man of the Buckhorn water now stood as stubbornly back to the wall as a run down bear. Once Major’s personal influence in the southwest was broken down, ruin would roll over the Buckhorn like the herds of sheep which he had once turned back in another way.
As one scene after another fitted itself into the story, the great sweep and thrust of the Buckhorn feud seemed to loom before Hughes suddenly, as a gaunt mountain becomes visible behind fog, monstrous and terrible, yet with an elemental grandeur. Certainly the forces of war which shadowed the Buckhorn had their roots very deep, deeper than the roots of the cottonwoods which drew a prodigious strength from sources deep under the hot surface of the ground.
The exact significance of the death of Hugo Donnan, which had led to his own involvement, he did not at once see so clearly; but certainly old Oliver Major seemed to fear that the final fate of the Buckhorn water would turn upon this one killing. And though the feud was old, this much was new: Clay Hughes was now committed to it as a new factor. Overnight he had become a new card in Major’s hand, another gun, a fresh impact of stubborn youth in this last conclusive chapter of the Buckhorn struggle. He found himself eager for the half-understood conflict ahead; for with the face of Sally Major in his mind it seemed to him a privilege to bring horse, gun, and wit unreservedly to the support of her people, careless of cost. He half smiled as he recalled again the words of old Pony Hughes: “Never throw away the key to a door…”
Oliver Major got out a pipe and lighted it. The blue smoke poured from his nostrils in a prodigious blast. He leaned forward through the smoke and his face twisted wryly as he gimleted Hughes with his acute old eyes.
“I ought to hustle you out of this; but I don’t dast overlook the least bet. It’ll come very hard,” he said, “if it turns out that you, a youngster, a stranger in the Buckhorn, should turn out to be the only hope of the Buckhorn water.” The old man raised a shaking fist above his head. “I tell you—”
The awaited step in the hallway was approaching the door at last. Oliver Major lowered his fist to the desk top, and the flame in his eyes burned lower as Sally Major came into the room, followed by a young man who Hughes knew must be old Major’s son.
Chapter Six
“Hughes,” said Major, “this is my boy, Dick.”
Hughes thought that there was a dry irony in his voice as he spoke the words, “my boy.” The two nodded without shaking hands, and waited while the old man seemed to study his son.
“But I guess you know each other already,” Major added, slowly.
“What do you mean by that?” Dick Major flared. He met his father’s eyes squarely. Father and son were alike, and yet not alike. In Dick Major’s face was no suggestion of any shrewdness of judgment, nor perhaps even any notable quickness of wit. Instead, it showed the marks of a reckless boldness, a fiery temper and an explosive defiance of all restraint. Still, the qualities that were lacking in the young man’s face might perhaps have been those which age can bring; Hughes thought it quite possible that he was looking at a good duplicate of the old man in his young days. If so, the similarity had incurred no bond of sympathy between the two. Hughes knew that if he had ever seen a father and son who had behind them a lifetime of misunderstanding, he was looking at them now.
“If you two don’t know each other,” said old Major to his son, “what’s your gun doing in this man’s belt?”
Dick Major opened his mouth, but shut it again, as if momentarily at a loss. Sally spoke. “I got the gun from
Dick and took it to Hughes. I gave it to him just after he was shot at. If he’s going to be shot at here in your own house, I say he has the right to something to defend himself with.”
The glance that Sally shot at Clay was unreadable, but it was sufficient to stir Hughes acutely. Sally, out of her cowpony clothes, was like something unexpectedly delicate and lovely out of a cocoon. Her presence in the heart of this ugly tangle of male lusts and hatreds was the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen; yet she gave a soul of urgent necessity to the Lazy M’s impending battles. She was at once the heart of all action and an all but unattainable anomaly. That they were mutually concealing even a meaningless circumstance created a tenuous bond between them, which to him was a welcome one.
Old Major hesitated, looking balked; then took a new angle. “Where have you been for the last couple of days?” he demanded of Dick.
“I told you I was going to ride long circle,” Dick Major answered him.
Father and son held each other’s eyes as intently as prairie wolves facing each other across the carcass of a winter-killed elk. “Looking for what?” said Major.
There was a moment of silence, but Dick’s stubborn arrogant eyes did not waver from the old man’s face. “A man,” he said at last.
Sally Major seized her brother’s arm, but it was her father to whom she spoke. “Dad, be careful what you say! Can’t you two ever use any sense?”
Old Major’s face had turned a shade more grim, if that were possible; but his words were quiet and slow. “Where were you hunting, son?”
“On the upper rim,” Dick snapped.
Old Major drew a deep breath and dropped his eyes to his hands upon the desk before him. “All my life,” he said, “I’ve worked toward one thing. And now in the end it had to be you to knock it out from under me. Oh, I’ll get you off all right,” he went on as Dick made a move to speak. “I’ll get you out of it, and you’ll ride clear, and be proud of your work too, I’ve got no doubt.”