“I reckon it is,” he said in a voice he himself scarcely recognized. “But it don’t seem just real. I’ve been dreaming about you from that day; but you were so pretty, so different. I’m still scared to believe that—”
“You frightened?” she teased. “After the way you’ve cleaned up the crooks in Elbar?”
“That’s different. You can fight your way out with men. But with women. Your feeling for them kind of hits you where you can’t get at it. Just a kind of a dull ache I’ve had for you, Sally.” Once started he was rushing along. “And seeing Button love you the way he did—I didn’t dare hope. Then that night at the depot—That kiss has burned my lips ever since. But I thought you meant it for Whitey.”
“Girls don’t kiss their brothers that way. I thought I could make you see then, Montana. Thought my eyes would tell you. I nearly fainted when you rode onto the rodeo grounds. I’d cried so many nights I just couldn’t believe—Then, when you accidentally put your arm around me today—Oh, Montana!”
He folded her closer, bent over. His lips found hers.
“It’s my turn now, Sally!” They started guiltily, drew apart at Little Montana’s yell. The boy slipped into the girl’s arms. Montana whirled. Mother Hope, Whitey, Cousins stood in the doorway, their faces wreathed in smiles.
“A fine partner you turned out to be,” Whitey growled. “Introduce you to my family and you steal the best sister I’ve got. Dang you, Montana.”
“He had nothing to do with it,” Sally defended quickly. “Buddy did it.” She smiled up at Montana. “And I’m awful glad.”
“So am I.” Montana found his voice as Mother Hope came over to pat him on the shoulder and Sally snuggled back into his arms. “And I reckon if it’s all right with Sally we’ll just make her the third Montana. What do you say?” He lifted her chin in his hand.
“It would break my heart if you didn’t,” she whispered. “Any girl who will smash a whole tray of dishes just to wake a man up deserves some sort of a break.”
INDIAN BEEF, by Harold Channing Wire
Originally published in 1940.
DEDICATION
To William Gerard Chapman.
CHAPTER ONE
By The Night Fire
Even those names that meant so much have vanished now, so that you will look in vain for Ox Bow or Dripping Spring or the valley of the Little Comanche on any recent map. And it is hard to believe that this land where flashing beacons now guide the roaring course of planes by night, and by day motorcars dart effortlessly across its endless miles, was then but a wild and rolling prairie of buffalo grass, and a journey of any length had no certain ending, and all of a restless nation seemed to be following the sun in a mad race set off by the cry, “Go West, young man, go West!”—not seventy years ago.
This was a time of new and unbelievable happenings. Pullman’s Golden Palace cars were running clear to the Pacific, with their red velvet curtained windows, their gas lamps that made the coaches as brilliant as a ladies’ drawing-room and their sleeping-compartments in which many women still refused to undress when going to bed at night. Three thousand Negroes were marching afoot from Alabama, with their women and children and half-starved dogs, to claim the forty acres of land and the span of mules which the state of Kansas promised. Boxcar emigrant trains rolled out of the East one upon another, spewing settlers along the way, and the high-topped Pittsburg wagons lumbered West behind their ox teams, to meet—not a barren prairie—but the red swarms of Texas longhorns coming up from the South.
For this was a time when the man in the saddle was king of the plains and prairie; all others were hoe-men, beneath him, to be swept aside by the relentless march of his trail herds. Ten million Texas longhorns that had run wild since the Rebellion were finding a market in the shipping towns of the new railroads; a thousand cattle ranches were being made in the new lands of Montana and Wyoming, where cattle had never been before. Up that trail, twelve hundred miles long, unchecked by storm or drought, by roving bands of Comanches or the barbed wire of the hoe-men, the great flood poured northward, a million head in a single year.
This was a time of a young man’s opportunity. Whatever a man was going to be depended only upon himself.
* * * *
In the upper valley of the Little Comanche that night only one campfire pierced the blackness, a small one, glowing faintly where high rimrock guarded a narrow entrance down from the vast empty reaches of the Staked Plain.
Lew Burnet was cooking supper over a cautious blaze. He had laid his cottonwood twigs together at the ends, Indian fashion, spreading them outward like the spokes of a wheel. That way they burned with no smoke and a small flame, but made an intense point of heat beneath his pot of coffee.
It was not so much that he feared the renegade bands of Cherokees and Comanches now. He was south of the Indian Nations. This was Texas and home. Yet the manner of his life and the dangers of a country which he understood so well had made this wariness a very part of his nature. Even if there had not been a letter in his pocket, soiled and creased many times in its five weeks’ journey to Wyoming, he still would have camped like this, guardedly, on his last night before going on to the Cross T at the valley’s southern end. He did not need Tom Arnold’s letter.
The coffee boiled and he pushed the pot back. He took a smooth stick and dipped it into a can of heavy batter, brought it out, and turned it slowly over the campfire coals. The batter swelled a little, grew brown and crisp; in a moment he slipped off the slender tube of bread. He made another. A comb of antelope ribs, already braised, stood propped against a rock. In time the dough can was empty. A pile of stick bread lay at his knee. He tore the antelope ribs apart and fell to eating with the hunger of a man who’d had nothing since dawn.
The peace of this Texas night lay around him in a quiet hush. It was as safe a camp as he had known in a month’s travel down from Wyoming. And yet his eyes lifted often to watch his saddle horse and pack mule munching dry grass off in the shadows. When a faint wind stirred whispering voices through the leafless cottonwood, he paused in his eating to listen.
Crouched with his long legs in black-and-white-checked Texas breeches bent under him, Lew Burnet showed little of his tall, rawboned size. There was a trail roughness about him; he wore only the plain clothing of his trade. Flat-crowned hat and short-topped boots had no fancy decoration. Before sundown he had shaved off a month’s beard. His face was lean and smooth. Hair and eyes and skin were all of a same dark brown.
It was a young face, with sober strength in its long lines, but strangely marked from the trampling hoofs of an outlaw horse years ago. There was left now only a curved crease from his right cheekbone to his chin and a white crescent close to the hairline of his forehead. Yet those first years when the wounds were raw and ugly had left another mark. He had never forgotten how the girls turned from him, shocked, and he had understood.
A sensitive nature protects itself in deeply hidden ways, and this early accident had made Lew Burnet, more than he realized, a restless and lonely man. His work had been all man’s work, hard and dangerous and singlehanded; at twenty-five he had bossed three great herds of longhorns up the trail from Texas to Dodge and Ogallala. Even the new ranch he had established in Wyoming this past winter had risen in his vision as a place only for himself.
That was what he had tried to think. But tonight he had known it was no use. This yearlong absence from the valley of the Little Comanche had not done what he had hoped. Even now the thought of Joy Arnold, Tom’s daughter, stirred him with its tormenting force. Wyoming hadn’t killed that. Time hadn’t. He knew tonight that nothing could.
In front of him the campfire burned into a little heap of red coals. With his supper finished, he shook a handful of gravel around in the coffeepot, scouring it, then rinsed it in the pool of Dripping Spring. Afterward he tossed some twigs onto the dying embers, deciding to wait up anot
her half-hour.
There had been too little information in Tom Arnold’s letter. He wanted more, even more, perhaps, than Arnold could give. A month ago he had mailed a letter of his own south from Wyoming, and late this afternoon, before coming down off the rimrock, he had stopped long enough to kindle a pillar of white smoke into the still air. He had whipped his rawhide coat across it twice, breaking it. If old Willy Nickle had received the letter and had stayed anywhere within twenty miles of the Little Comanche he would see that signal and know this meeting place.
But the half-hour passed and the night’s hushed silence remained unbroken. By the simple process of pulling off his coat and boots he was ready for bed. He had turned into the dark toward his unrolled blankets when something sailed past him and fell with a soft thud.
It brought his right hand to the heavy frontier gun holstered low on his leg; then he saw the gray pebble lying near the camp embers and he grinned. Yet that moment’s chilled feeling stayed in his blood with the knowledge that a man could come upon him like this, without the slightest sound.
He stooped and pushed the unburned ends of cottonwood together and crouched there, waiting. It was not until the little flame leaped up, shedding a wide circle of light, that a figure stepped from the shadows. Even then he didn’t move. He sat wholly still, watching Willy Nickle, feeling as he always did that this was a ghost shape from out of a far-off past, when buffalo still roamed these plains in great black pools, when this was the red man’s happy hunting ground and the only white men were these strange, solitary individuals—the true pathfinders for others of a later time.
He came forward silently on deerskin moccasins with high tops laced halfway to his knees, a small, thin, fragile-looking man, ageless. Long chestnut hair brushed his shoulders, but his cheeks and chin were shaved clean. His face was very dark, yet oddly smooth and as gentle as a child’s except for the sharp, quick brightness of its small gray eyes.
“How are you, Willy?” Lew said and got no answer. His only greeting was a nod as the old man came from the shadows with an ancient needle gun cuddled like a baby across his thin chest.
He looked at the gun with its barrel five feet long that could drop an antelope at eight hundred yards, and he thought again that a man didn’t gain so much from the new Springfield-Allin repeaters after all.
Crouched on his side of the fire, he watched old Willy squat down cross-legged opposite him, the little flame of light glancing from the hard surface of his deer-hide coat and breeches, which had been rubbed with grease until they were like cordovan leather, dark and shiny and as waterproof as a duck’s back.
Still there was no talk.
There would be first a certain ritual. With an inner amusement he watched as old Willy searched in one deep side pocket of his coat for the pipe with a black clay bowl and short cherry-wood stem—no other sort of pipe would ever do—poured into it kinnikinnick from a leather pouch and then gravely handed the pouch across the fire.
He packed his own pipe bowl sparingly. This was the stuff that plains Indians used long before they knew tobacco. Inner bark scraped from red willow and dried. A heady smoke, filled with the power of wild hallucination.
Always it was not until three deep puffs of kinnikinnick hit old Willy’s brain with their terrific force that talk seemed jolted out of him. Even then it was veiled talk of his own strange kind. You never learned anything from Willy Nickle by bluntly asking questions. He took his three puffs and lifted his head and looked sharply all around him.
“Well!” he said suddenly. “It has been some. I do say!” His squinted gray eyes came back.
Lew nodded. “A year now come calf time,” he said. “A year in Wyoming and they do say things have happened on the Little Comanche since I’ve been gone.”
“So I guess,” said Willy. “This nigger wouldn’t know.”
He knew all right. There were no longer beaver to trap in the great South Park of Colorado, nor shaggy herds of buffalo to follow north to the headwaters of the Yellowstone, and the Mexican girls of Taos and Santa Fe could not lure old Willy any more. But those trails still drew him, afoot, with only his needle gun over his shoulder and the short, curved blade of a scalping knife in his belt. Summer or winter he was always moving, and little ever happened here at the edge of the Staked Plain or for a thousand miles beyond that he didn’t see or know of in some way.
Lew waited, smoking and feeling the kinnikinnick already start to spin his head. It often seemed a strange thing that he had been picked out for one of Willy Nickle’s few friends. But it was so, a queer, loyal, unspoken friendship, which he knew he was going to need now more than ever.
“Wyoming,” Willy mused across the fire. “No place for a man now, but didn’t me and Bill Evans find beaver a heap there that winter? I can tell you! A pretty smart lot of boys was camped on the Sweetwater and the way whisky flowed that time was some. Poor Bill! As clever a man as I ever saw tickle a Pawnee’s hump ribs at five hundred yards’ shooting. He lost his topknot to a Blackfoot. Well, he did!”
“Still a good place, Wyoming,” Lew said and then brought Willy’s wandering mind back to the Little Comanche. “They do tell me that Tom Arnold is moving his Cross T up there. Taking four thousand longhorns up the trail this month, all the way to the north. And I’ve a letter to trail-boss for him. That’s the proposition. But there’s Clay Manning, Tom’s foreman now, who’s been north once or twice himself and could lead this herd maybe. Then what am I here for? I don’t know. Things happen in a country when a man’s been gone a year.”
“Well, they do!” said Willy. He smoked thoughtfully for a moment, his thin cheeks making deep hollows. Then he said, “That’s one beaver this old coon never did cotton to, Clay Manning. And that Steve young ’un of Tom Arnold’s, was it him night ridin’ up Crazy Woman Creek not two hours after the bank was robbed? Him and four strangers here? Seems like I was camped on Crazy Woman then.”
Lew stared at him. “The bank in Ox Bow?”
Willy nodded. “But was a man to hunt some trouble now he’d see why so many Cross T horses go loose-herded up Crazy Woman. That would be at nighttime, early.”
“Tonight?”
“No, already made it. Was some gunshot late this afternoon which must have hurried ’em. If it was this nigger tomorrow going down the valley he’d keep to the east side. That’s talk, though. Maybe some sort wouldn’t listen.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t,” Lew agreed and smiled. “Maybe he’d like to know.”
“He’ll find tracks then,” Willy offered. “They’re plain enough. But was it me I’d have old Silverbell here ready.” He stroked the slender barrel of his needle gun.
Through a little silent time, while Willy Nickle’s head drooped and he seemed to doze, Lew sorted out the old man’s information.
He felt a grimly troubled meaning in that none of these things had been in Tom Arnold’s letter. The bank in Ox Bow belonged to Arnold; its robbery, he knew, could be pretty bad. What puzzled him, wholly unexplainable, was this business of loose horses being run up Crazy Woman to the Staked Plain. If it was rustling, Arnold or his foreman, Clay Manning, should be more on watch than that. The trail drive would need every saddle animal the Cross T had. And Steve—“Willy,” he asked, “you’re sure it was Steve riding that night of the robbery?”
Old Willy opened one eye. “Certain,” he said and closed it.
There was no answer to that. Things happen in a year. Even twelve months ago, Lew remembered, Steve’s young rebellion had turned into violent ways.
He was coming back, perhaps, just in time. For he and Steve had grown up together in a close companionship, more confiding than between father and son. Everything Tom Arnold had built here in Texas was planned around his boy. Still, there was that antagonism between them, a reckless, high-strung nature fighting the strict, unsparing one of the man.
Inevitably Steve brought up h
is sister Joy. Lew bent forward and knocked his pipe out against his boot toe. Behind all his thinking tonight was one question. He asked it now.
“Willy, when did Tom’s girl marry Clay Manning?”
Willy’s head lifted. His gray eyes squinted brightly. “Never did. There’s been none of that on the Cross T. Why not, this child couldn’t say. But there’s somebody could make a better man for her. Well, he could!”
“No,” Lew said. “It’s the sleek bucks they run to, Willy. You know that.”
In a moment when the old man stood up to go he knew there was no use offering a bed here. Willy always slept alone. It might be ten miles from Dripping Spring or only off a hundred yards; he wouldn’t know.
Standing with the ancient needle gun cuddled again across his chest, Willy took that quick glance all around him into the shadows. He stepped back. “Raise your smoke,” he said, “if you’ve a mind.” That was his promise and Lew understood. He’d not stray far from the Little Comanche for a while.
In his own bedroll afterward, with the camp dark and a dead-tiredness in his bones, he still couldn’t fall asleep at once. Against that darkness he could see her face clearly. They’d had a year and she had not married Clay Manning yet. It wasn’t much, he knew, to hold to. But it ran with a hot impatience in his blood.
CHAPTER TWO
The Men In The Willow Patch
He broke camp in the dark next morning, saddled while his coffee boiled, and in the cold sharp gray of daylight he was traveling south. This was the end of a month-long trail. Even the tall black beneath him stepped out with a home-coming knowledge, and the reel mule with its white tarpaulin pack trotted behind, needing no leash.
Texas in May! No hint now of the burned barrenness to come, the long droughts and the parched, cracked land. A strong life sap was in the air, spiced with the opening buds of cottonwood and willow, sweet with springtime blossoms of wild cherry like drifted snowbanks against the dark foliage of creek-bottom trees. It stirred his own senses with a vitally alive feeling; he rode with a grayness gone from his mind. A catbird dropped down close and taunted him. And in the first sun’s rays two prairie dogs came from their hole and boxed and tumbled like two little fat men on a carpet of flowers.
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