“Nat Ellis?” Masterson cried. “Knew him for years. That’s enough, son. You’ve got the job of ramrodding this spread. Get to work.”
“You pull uptown and get out of the heat,” Montana suggested. “Take your time, Mister—”
“Pop Masterson to the boys,” the old fellow said. Then his face grew grave. “The way you just spoke—about this Thunder Basin ruckus—you’ve heard something?”
“Nothing to speak of. Just gossip.”
“I’ve got a hunch. There hasn’t been enough of the natives down to the yards to look us over. ’Pears like they’re either uppish or hostile. Lewis gave me a tip or two. But he was leery of talking too much. I’ve got a permit to stay in these yards as long as I want. I’m in favor of feeding and holding the stuff right here until the critters get seasoned a little and we nose around. I’ll leave you boys some money to buy hay. I’ll shag it uptown and plank myself down where it’s cool. Kind of feel out the natives.”
He drew forth a large roll of bills and peeled off several, which he passed over to Montana.
“I’m taking you at your face value as ramrod of this outfit,” he said. “If I’ve picked wrong, I’m out of luck. If not, you’re setting prettier than you ever dreamed. There’s plenty more money where this came from, so you don’t have to be niggardly with anything in this spread. This herd is just feeder stuff; we’ll bring in a real one later. But now, I know you can handle the critters a heap better without me. I’ve been away from it too long. I’m only in your way. And just to show you my heart’s in the right place I’ll hoist one for you as soon as I get uptown.”
Smiling broadly, he quit the yards and started his pony on a dog trot toward the village, his body pounding the saddle, his stubby arms flapping. Montana watched him until he had dipped from sight in a ravine. Then he turned back to the punchers, who were regarding him suspiciously.
“The old jasper has a lot of faith in mankind,” Montana remarked, pocketing the bills beneath his chaps.
“It’s Pop’s way,” one of the cowboys said. “He either likes you or he don’t the minute he lays eyes on you. And if he does size you up as a square-shooter, he’ll give you his shirt. He’s worth all kinds of money, too.”
“Hope he didn’t get overheated,” Montana remarked. “He strikes me as a white man if there ever was one.”
“They don’t come any whiter on any range,” the puncher agreed. “And his men scrap for him to the finish. What are you aiming to do?”
“Pop said he had a permit to hold the herd in the stockyards as long as he wanted to. So we’ll feed right here. But we’ll have to rustle hay. Shake a leg, jaspers. Let’s shag them out.”
The sun had sunk behind a barrier of sullen gray clouds when the last animal had been unloaded. Then, carefully padlocking the gates, Montana headed for the village, the men at his heels.
As he rode across the dreary sagebrush flats, which stretched to the verge of sight in every direction, their level floor gashed by ugly draws, Montana, too, now that he had so suddenly been precipitated into a position of responsibility, became prey to a vague uneasiness. Time and again during the last two hours he had peered anxiously toward the village, hopeful that some of the natives would be drawn by curiosity to the stockyards. But he had waited in vain. Not once did anyone come near. Only occasionally did he so much as sight a horseman galloping along the trail that ran to meet the sky line to the south.
A man of the West who played his hunches, he sensed the gravity of the situation. The sudden activity he had seen in Elbar, the humid August air itself seemed pregnant with some vast and ominous portent. Thunder Basin had issued a challenge in the way it had ignored the new spread. Cowboy that he was he knew that Thunder Basin was arraying itself for war!
CHAPTER FIVE
AN EVIL PLOT
While Montana, the new foreman of the Buzzard spread, was busy unloading cattle at the stockyards, Elbar had taken on even more the appearance of a city. The Midway saloon—before which Montana had encountered Smokey Tremaine upon his arrival—was packed. Punchers gathered in knots to converse in undertones. Some stood staring thoughtfully into space, others hunched against the bar to toy with half-empty glasses. Still others sprawled over poker tables, idly thumbing a deck of cards or rattling a stack of chips. The doors had been shut against the swirling dust. The air reeked with the odor of leather and stale beer.
No one spoke save the bartender, a stubby, red-faced Irishman, who kept up a running fire of conversation as he scooted bottles and glasses with unerring aim along the polished bar.
“They don’t dare do it,” he rattled on garrulously. “Just you fellows wait until King Kent of the Diamond A gets here. Kent will danged soon show them where to head in, make them hunt cover. And Smokey Tremaine—Say, won’t that bunch be duck soup for that hell-bending foreman of the Diamond A? Especially now since he’s stowed away a few under his belt?
“That fellow Tremaine is poison both ways from Sunday when he’s sober as a judge, but when he’s drinking, like he is today, say, tying into a litter of coyotes with the ma around is plumb kid’s play compared to this. Tremaine will eat them up guts, feathers, and all. Here, you funeral-faced rannyhans, drag your carcasses up here. See if one on the house won’t cheer you up.”
He paused long enough in his prattling to fill the glasses of the men who, while they came trooping up in willing, eager acceptance of his invitation, nevertheless signed for their drinks like mutes.
“Crossed Sevens—the Buzzard outfit,” the bartender snorted contemptuously, when he had served the silent crew and stepped back to wipe red hands on the soiled apron tucked in the belt at his ample paunch. “Who in hell ever heard of the Buzzard outfit on this range? Or any other?” His hands dry, he fell to polishing the glasses piled high below the bar. “Probably some wild-onion spread that just grew up from nothing and never will amount to anything more than that. The cow country is full of them. Pop up from nowhere in the spring, just like wild onions. Do fine on summer range until the sun gets in its licks. Come winter they’ve got no feed. They’re busted clean to their dewclaws. Mark my words, jaspers, this Buzzard outfit has bit off a sight bigger chunk than it can chew in Thunder Basin. Fill ’em up again—on the house. We cowmen have got to stick together if—” He broke off abruptly to face the door as a man entered importantly. “Howdy, Mister Kent.”
A great, strapping fellow was Kent, with frozen steely eyes, a leathery, weather-pitted face, purple, deep-seamed, cold-set. A thin, grim mouth was domineering, suggestive of relentless determination, a ruthlessness more noticeable because of the eyes that seemed to pierce with a heartless gleam. Unlike the others, clad in denim and leather, he was flashily garbed, reflected in his silk and flannel shirt, his bangle-studded chaps, a flare for the ornate.
The bartender reached for a special bottle on the back-bar, caromed it dexterously the length of the bar and brought a glass sliding up to stop neatly beside it.
“Throw that under your belt,” he invited cordially. “I’ll bet she was just plenty hot and disagreeable riding. Ninety in the shade here in Elbar this morning. Seems to be getting hotter right along. Come sundown, unless that storm hits, there’ll be no sleeping tonight. Well, I’ll be a box-kneed, spavined mule—” as a second man ducked inside to bang shut the door against the inrush of the whistling wind. “Howdy, Smokey. Thought mebbeso you’d pulled back to the ranch. What will yours be?”
Along with Kent, Tremaine, still decked out in his flashy garb, swaggered to the bar. His eyes were beady, glinting. His pock-marked, brutal face was covered with a stubble that made it swarthy. Thick, weather-cracked lips curled back like a cornered wolf’s over tobacco-stained teeth. When he spoke his great sullen voice held something of a reminder of a grunting porcupine.
“Still running off at the head, you Irish bum,” he threw sourly at the talkative bartender. “Never will learn to keep a da
lly on your tongue, will you? Make mine straight whisky and plenty of it. What you drinking there, King?”
“Special blend.” King Kent slapped the dust from his shirt and hat and faced the crowd which, after muttered greetings in which respect and fear were intermingled, had fallen back to watch him with something of eager expectancy.
“Well, what have you wallopers got on your chests to shag me in from the ranch, hot as it is?” he demanded.
“There’s a new outfit pulled into the stockyards and is unloading two thousand head of stuff.” Bob Hartzell of the T6 stepped out from the crowd to answer. “Crossed Sevens they’re branded—the old Buzzard brand. Jasper by the name of Masterson owns them—Kirk Masterson. He’s bought the Dunning place in the Basin, north of your Diamond A spread. It’s only a six-hundred-and-forty. That means he’ll run his stuff on our range and the Lord knows it’s got every hoof on it now that it will feed. You being president of the County Stock Association we figured it would be best to get you in here and auger the thing. We’re plumb willing and eager to back you up in anything you decide to do.”
“Another damned wild-onion spread, huh?” Kent snorted disgustedly. “Getting so they’re worse than drought on any man’s cow range. Masterson? Masterson? You’re dead sure this walloper calling himself Masterson isn’t running stuff for some commission house we don’t dare get funny with?”
Hartzell, a tall, angular man with little, shifty, faded eyes, a wizened, peaked face, set off by a straggling yellow mustache that drooped at the corners of a flaccid mouth, found a plug in the hip pocket of soiled overalls and twisted off a chew with snaggle teeth.
“Commission stuff, hell,” he blurted out when he had worked the chew into a ball in his cheek. “He’s just another one of those range spongers that have driven us crazy for the last ten years. They bring critters in here from God knows where. They manage somehow to pull them through a winter, snake poor. The brutes put on a little heft by hogging our grass in the summer. Come fall, the moochers ship the half-starved stuff and pocket every cent they can get while we foot the bill with short range. If we don’t like it we can go to hell. That’s the way the state and the government are treating us in backing up the homesteaders and range hogs, throwing our range open to any drifter with a flea-bit pony and lame cow.
“I claim this here Masterson has got just plenty of gall dumping that many critters onto Thunder Basin range and expecting us to turn over our feed to him without a holler. The T6, for one, isn’t going to stand for it without bellyaching just long and plenty.” As his anger mounted he fell to chewing faster until his lean jaws were working like those of a rabbit, his little eyes snapping hatefully. He paused to glare around at the set faces and note with smug satisfaction the nods of approval.
“There’s no denying it’s gaily,” Kent agreed, tossing off the drink the solicitous, but now thoroughly squelched, bartender had poured for him. He lifted his wide-brimmed hat to brush close-cropped gray hair back from a deeply furrowed brow. “But as you say, thanks to the interference of the state and government we can’t come out any more and post No Trespassing signs on open range. Most of it is government land when you come right down to it—open to homestead entry—and we’ve broke our hearts trying to grow beef on it. But that’s another story. Have any of you jaspers got a scheme?”
“You’re danged right,” Hartzell offered hotly. “Lope down to the stockyards, give this Masterson an earful, make him reload his stuff and get the hell back to where he came from with his wild-onion outfit.”
Kent helped himself to another drink from the bottle, dashed it off, smacked his lips loudly, dragged forth a gaudy kerchief and dabbed his mouth.
“That might have worked ten years ago,” he said, wagging his head thoughtfully, “but we’ve got to figure a little on the law nowadays.” He turned his back to the staring crew to scrutinize himself appraisingly in the big mirror behind the bar. “It’s a dead mortal cinch that six hundred and forty acres in the old Dunning place won’t feed any two thousand head of critters,” he mused to his image in the glass. “And there isn’t a drop of water on it winter or summer. Our fences take in the springs. But there’s only one thing we can do. Give them rope and let them hang themselves.”
“I’ve got a scheme.” Smokey Tremaine, who had been drinking steadily while the others talked, and whose hard face had grown even more brutal with the flush of liquor, now hoisted his chaps with his wrists and lurched around to regard the group with unconcealed contempt. “If those critters have come very far they’re gaunt and wolfy as teased snakes.” A crafty gleam flared up in his eyes. A crooked smile twisted his lips. He reeled away from the bar to stand on spraddled legs, the unlighted stub of a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, gloved thumbs hooked in his studded cartridge belt beside his two forty-fives. “They’ve got to be fed and watered right here in Elbar. Supposing a big bunch of cattle—say that five hundred head of Diamond A’s we’ve bunched down on Powder River, for instance—was run up to the stockyards on the pretext of us going to weed out some old stuff and ship? This here Buzzard spread could be warned not to mix their critters with ours. Then just what the hell would this new friend of ours, Mister Masterson, do?”
CHAPTER SIX
GUNPLAY IF NECESSARY
A moment of silence greeted Tremaine’s question. Apparently the significance of it was lost on the crowd.
More apathetic now under the influence of liquor, they only regarded the foreman of the Diamond A with uncomprehending stares. Tremaine stood swaying on his feet, leering at them, antagonism, brutality in his glazed eyes.
“I’m asking you again,” he demanded, thick-tongued, “just what the hell our friend, Mister Masterson, would do in a case like that?”
Still no reply. The cowboys edged in, waiting for him to continue. But obviously given to a flare for the dramatic, Tremaine chose to speak in riddles.
“I guess I don’t just get your scheme,” Hartzell ventured timidly after a time. “Supposing we did throw five hundred head of stuff outside the stockyards and warn Masterson not to mix his Buzzards with us?”
“He can’t keep his critters under fence forever in this heat, can he?” Smokey snorted. “And just how is he, or anybody else, going to turn his stuff out of the stock-yards without mixing if we’ve got him surrounded?”
Slowly the trick began to dawn on the groggy crew. Furtive glances passed between them.
“And if they did?” Hartzell essayed.
“I don’t reckon the law Kent talks about, or anything else, could make us stand for him turning his two thousand head out when he knows they’re dead certain to mix, can it?” Tremaine snapped.
“Why, they’d feed and water in the yards, of course,” Hartzell countered in a tone which, while mildly argumentative, carried a note of subservience.
“But just supposing Kent went over and told the railroad agent they weren’t going to feed in the yards because the Diamond A needed those yards right away to load out?” Tremaine countered sneeringly. “Then supposing every storekeeper in Elbar ran out of hay suddenlike? And there wasn’t a pound to be bought at any price in the county?”
At last the liquor-dulled crowd caught on.
“That’s the boy, Smokey!” the punchers broke their long and moody silence to yell.
“Damn me, that is a scheme that’s bound to get em,” Kent cried, slapping his foreman on the back and helping himself to another generous drink from the bottle the watchful bartender kept close beside him. “Give that Masterson fair warning not to mix with our herd—then make him do it. That will furnish us the best kind of an excuse for scattering his stuff from hell to breakfast. What do you think of it, Jerry?” he demanded of the bartender who, with elbows crooked on the bar, chin braced in the palms of his hands, was hanging on to every word.
“That’s the ticket, Mister Kent!” The bartender beamed. “And I’m saying for one yo
u’re just plenty lucky having a foreman with the head Smokey’s got on him. Us cowmen can’t have wild-onion spreads invading our range and eating off all our grass. Why, two thousand head—”
“Shut up your yawp, you lousy bar-swipe,” Smokey cut in hatefully. “Us cowmen! You give me a pain in my innards with your raving. Us cowmen? Shake a leg filling up those glasses for the house and you won’t have so much time to run off at the head. It’s on me!”
The bartender jerked away to obey. Long since he had learned to heed the storm warnings. Liquor always made Tremaine more brutal. Sober he was bad enough; drunk he was a ruthless brute. And well aware of the ugly spirit whisky fired within the foreman of the Diamond A, the loquacious bartender wilted under the scathing rebuke and did meekly as he was ordered.
When the group had gulped down the new rounds of drinks, Hartzell spoke.
“This here thing of cornering the hay in Elbar might work, and then again it might not,” he ventured ponderingly. “It would for sure if it wasn’t for that new jasper, Whitey Hope, who bought the store down on the corner a while back. He’s as bullheaded and unreasonable as his ma, who runs the restaurant—and you boys know how stubborn she is. The way we’ve treated him he sure hasn’t got any cause to love us, either.”
“Whitey Hope!” Tremaine swung around to snort. “Why, that damned counter-jumper—“
“I haven’t heard of anybody hanging the Injun sign on him just the same,” Hartzell had the temerity to say. “Any more than they have on his mother, or his pa before him. And from what I’ve seen of him, even if he is a counter-jumper, he don’t buffalo worth a damn. He’s got hay and I’ll lay top horses to goats we’ll have to buy it from him to keep him from selling it to the Buzzards or any other outfit that has the cash.”
“Like hell we will,” Smokey boasted thickly. “I don’t cater any to that cotton-headed walloper. Never did from the day I laid eyes on him. I’ve just been itching for a chance to call him since he wormed in here and bought that store. I’ll tell him he can’t sell hay to the Buzzard spread. And I won’t mince any words either. Then, if he does, he’d better go to shooting or have a fast horse and just plenty of open road out of town for I’ll be—”
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