Some of these animals had never known a brand. They were all a wild and rebellious breed, long-legged and long-faced, potbellied as mules, their horns reaching a spread of seven feet. They galloped ahead of Quarternight’s men, tails high and kinked at the ends. But the fence stopped them, led them slanting toward the chute mouth. Then the leaders were crowding, into the narrow runway, held there by Jim Hope’s gate, ten in a line.
Lew’s wave brought Quarternight around to him. He yelled above the rattle of horns slashing at the fence logs and the bellowing din. “Takes two hands for this, John!” The old man stepped down beside him and grabbed a hot iron, shaped like a cross, with another bar on top to make the T. They worked from opposite ends of the penned steers, meeting in the middle. It was a choking job. Cottonwood made clouds of smoke. The rancid odor of singed hide filled the air. Over them a midday sun poured down a breathless heat.
But the longhorns were moving, ten by ten in endless parade. In half an hour’s time Lew waved Joe Wheat and Ash Brownstone down to relieve himself and Quarternight at the irons. He walked back out of the dust and smoke to where Tom Arnold sat his horse, watching.
Arnold jerked a nod at the work. He looked as if a heavy weight had been lifted from him. There was humor in him again.
“Man’s never too old,” he said, “to learn a new wrinkle! You’ll have this job done by dark.”
“Barring accidents,” Lew agreed. “You can get your wagons ready to move at dawn tomorrow, I think. Owl-Head can bring his chuck outfit down here tonight. Have you got your papers?” It cost five cents per head to move longhorns out of Texas with a clean bill of health.
“Inspector was here two days ago,” Arnold said. “That’s done.”
In its noise and heat the branding went on without stop. Around the middle of the afternoon Lew saw Clay Manning lope off toward the ranch house. He knew things were still to be done there—Owl-Head’s ton of trail food to be loaded and Joy’s wagon to be made ready, her home for the next three months. At sundown, with the job’s end near, he left orders with Quarternight and rode up to pack his own war bag.
He splashed through the creek and threaded the darkness of its gaunt cottonwoods and had passed the bunk shacks, standing vacant in the yard, when a sound drifted across the still twilight. He held his horse to a walk.
It was the music of an organ, someone pumping out Good-by, My Lulu Belle with a stumbling vigor, and a girl’s voice, Joy’s, lifted gaily, ignoring the maudlin sadness of that song.
Then a wagon with a canvas not yet drawn over the high bows of its top made a vague shape near the front gallery of the house. He saw the two figures in it. One seated, one standing. The music ended. Clay Manning’s gusty whoop of laughter burst across the yard. He rose and gathered the girl toward him, bent his blond head and kissed her.
They were like that long enough for him to halt and start to swing his horse away. Then they saw him.
“Lew!” Joy called. “Lew, come here. Come and look!”
She was laughing when he reached them, holding onto Clay’s arm, with her lips softened and all the gravity of her face changed by this man. She pointed at a cabinet organ wedged against the wagon seat, exactly filling the box from side to side.
“Don’t blame me! Clay wanted it.”
The fun they’d been having had put a high color on Clay’s ruddy face. He grinned down at her.
“Think of all those nights, honey, I’ll want you to sing to me in Wyoming!” Looking up, he asked, “Get your job done?”
“Just about,” Lew told him. “We’ll set the guard tonight. I’m having Owl-Head haul his outfit into camp for supper.”
He saw that Joy’s wagon was packed, with a narrow chest of drawers along one side, balanced by an ironbound leather trunk on the other. A mattress for her bed was made of Indian blankets down the middle. Clothes she would wear on the trail were hung from wooden pegs on the arched top bows.
Clay’s talk of work had changed the mood. The two of them stood silently together, and Lew felt himself shut out.
“See you in camp,” he said and rode on.
The cook’s rolling commissary loomed near the kitchen door, a huge wagon, specially built. Its sideboards were five feet high before the canvas top began. Four mules would pull it. The interior was like a cavern, piled with barrels of flour and sugar, burlap bags of coffee, kegs and boxes and big round tins. There was hardly room for the bedrolls which this wagon must carry also.
At the gallery’s edge he stepped down from his saddle and entered the front room of the house. Its emptiness struck him with a cold feeling. The life and warmth and color that had filled this place so long were gone. The bright rugs were gone. The hearth fire was dead. It made him move on suddenly. Too many memories came crowding back. And then in the hallway, before quite reaching his own room, an open door into the ranch office turned him.
Tom Arnold was in there sorting out a pile of worn account books from the drawers of his desk. One was in his hands, held close to the window light.
He brought his gray head around, smiling faintly and far off.
“Takes a man back, these things do.” He ran a finger down the page. “Here’s the first entry I ever made—‘For Stella, ten yards poplin, two sets whalebone, one copper kettle, eighteen dollars.’” He looked outside over the deserted corrals and buildings. “Wasn’t any of this here then, only a one-room house and a pile of ambition.”
A quietness came over him and there was nothing that Lew wanted to say.
Then Arnold said strongly, “Well, no complaint! A man loves a woman, raises a family, and builds a ranch—that about completes the account, I guess.” He turned back and laid the book on top of others in a wooden box. “Only one more thing I’d like to see. There’s a paper in this, signed and legal. I’m storing the box in Joy’s wagon. Not crowding fate any, but things happen. If that comes to me before we reach Ogallala you look in this book.”
Afterward, going on to his own room for his war bag, Lew understood the old man’s quiet moment; Tom Arnold was a Texan, rooted in this sun-drenched land. Wyoming with its snows and mountains could never be home to him. It was all right for a young man like himself. He could begin the circle that Tom was ending with a single-room house and a pile of ambition. The one other thing that Arnold wanted to see puzzled him. He hoped, one way, he’d never have to look in that book.
With his canvas bag packed he went out and tossed it into the chuck wagon, and when he reached his horse Joy was not in sight. But Clay was mounted, waiting.
His time with the girl seemed to have reassured something in him, bringing back his good humor, for as they rode down toward the cattle he said easily, “You tipped my hand today, Lew. Showed me how to do a job. Maybe it’s something I can use.”
“It’s a good trick, sure,” he said and wondered how Joy had done that.
Clay’s moods were quickly changeable, yet this light one lasted through the evening meal. Around the chuck-wagon camp, where the tired crew sat cross-legged, eating on their bedrolls, it was Clay’s jokes that passed a usually silent and weary hour. Even then it was not Clay Manning first who changed the easy drift of things.
Time had come to set the guard. Night shadows had slid like a blanket off the high rimrock. Out beyond the firelight four thousand longhorns made a black pool, watered and contented now, ready to bed down.
Lew dropped his tin plate and cup into Owl-Head’s wreck pan. He understood well enough that trail custom allowed a crew to draw for their turns at night riding. First watch from eight until eleven was always the best choice. No man wanted to break his sleep in the middle and so hated the second guard from eleven until two. From two until dawn was only a little better, the whole day being ahead then with these early-morning hours tacked on.
But for his own reason this trip he had decided to set the watch deliberately. He wanted Clay and Splan
n and Steve in separate guards.
He made a cigarette in brown corn-shuck paper and stooped for a burning stick end. With the light up close he looked across at lank Joe Wheat.
“Joe,” he said, “I’m picking you to lead the first watch.”
All of the faces ringed around the fire lifted toward him. There was a tight silence.
Then Ed Splann, his huge shape sprawled off, half hidden, growled out, “How about lettin’ us cut cards for turns, Mister Boss? Ain’t that the usual caper? Cut for choice and choose our own watchmates, that’s what.”
It had been in Lew’s mind that he could fire this man. Get rid of him. That was his foreman’s right now. But then he had known it was better to keep him close. Before he could answer he saw Splann turn to Clay beside him, mutter something, and Clay’s laughing humor was gone.
Bluntly he said, “That’s right, Lew. We’ll cut. You can’t split men who bed down together. We’ll cut and choose!”
Over at the chuck wagon Owl-Head stopped what he was doing and turned his bald face and stood motionless. Lew smoked his cigarette, taking his time. He let the silence build up, waiting for any other show of rebellion.
Then he said, “Well, Clay, we might as well understand something at the start. You’ve been a foreman long enough to know what the job means. Plenty of times come along when you don’t stop to explain your orders. I don’t intend to. Like the way I’m setting this guard.” He brought his eyes around the ring of faces and stopped on Splann’s surly stare. “If anyone here can’t take my say-so he’d better quit right now.”
He held that stare for a moment, saw its cold, hard steeliness and understood what he saw.
“All right,” he said and turned again to Wheat. “Joe, you’ll take first guard with Clay and Jim and Neal Good. I’ll take second; Steve, I want you to ride with me, you and John. That leaves the tag end for you, Ash, with Charley Storms and Ed Splann.”
Ash Brownstone, Quarternight, and Joe Wheat were the old men of this crew, all of them dependable. Thus he had one trusted hand in each of the three guards.
With no more talk the first watch pulled their picket pins, saddled, and rode to the dark bed ground. Owl-Head emptied a keg of cold water into the big wooden wreck pan heaped with tin cups and plates, pulled two hot rocks from the fire with a pair of tongs, and dropped them in. Steam rose instantly from the water. He poured soft lye soap from a jug and began to wash up.
Some of the men unrolled their blankets beneath gray canvas tarpaulins. Standing near the fire, Lew watched Steve make a cigarette with unsteady hands, spill part of the tobacco, and irritably start another. But then he threw the paper away.
“I’m going in to the house, Lew,” he said and looked off somewhere before he asked, “You riding in?”
Lew shook his head idly. “No, guess not.” Yet he watched the quick turn of Steve’s shoulders with a frowning interest. And afterward, when he heard his horse’ race off toward the creek woods, he said quietly to John Quarternight, “Wouldn’t hurt to stand double guard for a little while. Let’s ride.”
Mounted, he held to the darkness, keeping clear of the longhorns, and then drew to a halt off on the barren, empty plain. He saw old Rebel John sitting up high in his saddle, smelling the wind for trouble, and said, “Wait.”
It wasn’t long. Moving slowly, a horse circled out from the creek growth, shielded by the dark. Later its hoofbeats struck up a faster pace, aiming for the short row of lights that was Ox Bow town, five miles away.
Angry and bitter with this knowledge that Steve was making a sneak, Lew sat rigid, listening, until Quarternight said, “That boy never could cover his tracks!”
“He’s got no good business in town, John—not now.”
“Well, yes, one,” Quarternight drawled softly. “There’s a girl at Rowdy Kate’s.”
“If that’s all he’s going in for,” Lew said and let the talk die.
They cruised on in a wide circle out from the longhorns, their horses making little sound on the short dry grass.
In a moment Quarternight mused, “That kind won’t hurt him none. Did you ever notice it’s most often a good woman and not a bad one that brings a man down?”
“No,” he said. “You’ve got the edge on me there. How is it?”
“Well, you take the bad ones, they see a man as he is. They’re wise and they let him know. Sometimes they stop him. Trouble with the other kind is they sure enough fall in love. They don’t see more’n the color of a man’s hair. He might be too crooked to sleep in a bed, but they wouldn’t know it. So they don’t stop him and nothing else does, till maybe when it’s too late.”
Lew turned his head to look for the old man’s deeper meaning.
“You want to bring that out in the open?” he asked. “Got someone in mind?”
“Maybe,” Quarternight admitted. “Take that Joy girl of Tom’s. There’s one in love for you. Blind as a horny owl in daytime!”
“John, what do you know?” He pulled his horse in sharply. “What’s Clay into here?”
The white head wagged in the dark slowly. “All I know is what I see. Clay’s smart. He knows he’ll marry into a big thing—close to a hundred thousand dollars when the herd hits Ogallala. But he hasn’t been doing all a foreman could to get us on the trail. That’s hard to figure. More so is the new member he’s hired. Where there’s a buzzard there’s always spoiled meat. And they say birds of a feather flock together. But what for? Right now I plain can’t tell you.”
They rode back to camp, saying no more. But in bed, smoking a last cigarette with the cold tarp pulled up to his chin, Lew lay trying to find the answers. Clay and Splann. Clay and Steve. And the answer to a thing in himself.
He thought of Joy, sleeping for the last night in her little white-walled room. He knew how she would look, huddled, with her dark hair tossed on the pillow. It goaded the restlessness in him again, and deliberately he sent his thoughts up the long trail starting-tomorrow.
There was peace in thinking of that. Plenty of men would give their shirts to be in his place here—trail boss of so big a herd, with Dodge and Ogallala to look forward to and the pick of new lands in Wyoming for a ranch. He was lucky; he ought to take the life that was cut out for him and not hound himself with something that might never come within his reach.
He leaned over and rubbed out his cigarette against the ground. Far off a coyote lifted its quavering bark, and through the hard earth beneath him he could feel the slow thud of night riders passing. Dew began to fall softly from the stars. He pulled the canvas tarp across his head.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Signs Near Crazy Woman
May 18, 1885. At four in the morning Owl-Head Jackson’s alarm clock, set on the bottom of an overturned tin pan for more noise, clattered and bounced and fell off into the dirt. It was still dark. The camp came awake slowly, moody and silent.
In his shirttail and long-legged underwear, Owl-Head crawled from his blankets beneath the chuck wagon. He stirred up the fire and hung the two-gallon coffeepot on its tripod, poured in a pound of XXX. He lifted the lid of a Dutch oven in which beans had been simmering all night, tasted them, and nodded, satisfied. Afterward, dressed, he let down the grub-box cover at the end of his wagon and on it began to roll out stiff dough with an empty beer bottle.
From the gray tarpaulins paired off beyond the fire, men were rising up like moths shucking their cocoons. They dressed in the way that cowboys had always dressed and always would—hats first, then shirts if they had not worn them sleeping, then trousers, socks and boots, all done sitting in their blankets before they stepped out onto the cold ground.
Singly or in pairs, still silent, they moved off into the dark to where their horses had been picketed. By the time they had saddled breakfast was ready.
They took up the big flat dough cakes stacked on the end board of Owl-Head’
s wagon, rolled a serving of beans in them, tortilla fashion, and ate standing around the fire. They drank their coffee, had a smoke, and waited then for Lew Burnet to give the marching order.
Off in the east the first lonely gray of dawn was spreading upward from the plains. The black pool of four thousand longhorns had risen, held by the last guard of the night.
“Well, boys,” he said, “let’s get started.”
As casually as that, as if this might be only a half day’s drive to the railroad, the Cross T moved into its march of twelve hundred miles.
He had told no one except Tom Arnold of the route he was taking. There was a leak here on the Cross T. His plan too easily could have reached the Indian Supply herd. Now those men were already a day’s drive up the regular trail. They would be watching backward for his dust, and it gave him a certain satisfaction to know they would watch in vain.
It was not until he had come in behind the pooled longhorns, riding with the men bunched around him, that he said, “We’ll not shape into trail formation right off. We’re driving west at first, up the rims.”
Clay Manning’s blond head jerked up and around. He didn’t speak.
But Jim Hope, too young to know better, blurted, “Judas priest! We can’t go west. That’s all Staked Plain!”
Quarternight, riding near him, growled, “Kid, you’re speakin’ out of turn!”
“You always were a closemouthed cuss, Lew,” Clay Manning said. “But if you’re leading us off the trail we ought to know why.”
“Too crowded, Clay.” He let it go at that.
The men spread out and moved in behind the cattle, and slowly the great pool lengthened into a stream flowing toward a wide notch in the rimrock wall. It took an hour to reach the top. There the longhorns began to fan out over the buffalo grass on a flat tableland, grazing forward into the north.
From the rim heights he turned in his saddle for a last look down into the valley of the Little Comanche. It was full daylight now, the air of this May morning cool and sharp and brilliantly clear. In the canyon below him he could see Moonlight Bailey bringing up the horse herd of eighty saddle animals, still thirty short. Two white-topped wagons came rocking along a little in their rear, Owl-Head Jackson and Joy, her small figure making a bright spot of color on the seat of one. She was driving a span of sorrel mules.
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