“I broke a hamestrap coming in last night and had to get a new one and take it down and put on my harness. Shay rode into town by himself and saw me down there, so he came back after he tied his horse and caught me headed back to the bunch.”
“Where’s your gun?”
“I left it in my wagon.”
“I told you about being caught without it.”
“I figgered if Shay jumped me and I had my gun on, he’d kill me sure as hell. I can’t outshoot a regular gunman, so I took it off. He couldn’t very well shoot me unarmed, and I’d rather take a whipping with his fists than to get shot.”
“You’ve got more sense than I thought you had,” Woodbine admitted as they turned into the Rattlesnake.
His men were there, fifteen or twenty cowhands, log haulers and farmers who had let the high wages Woodbine offered overcome their doubts of Woodbine’s ability to buck Noble Fry. They all wore guns.
Woodbine went over and joined Bob Burnham at the end of the mahogany. Bob was in his sixties, grizzled and quiet. He had been foreman for old Abner Sterling until Ab’s death, and he had stayed on to run the place for Virginia, saying that she needed a boss to keep a tight rein on her. The fact was that she ran him.
Burnham said, “Fry’s got his men over at the Parisian. Got some new hands that look pretty salty. Probably twenty, counting old and new. Think we ought to go through with it?”
“You know any better time?”
Burnham shrugged. “Virginia will have a fit when she comes home and finds out there’s been a battle.”
“She’s home. At the hotel. How about sending one of your men up and seeing if they can get her started to the ranch before this thing breaks?”
Burnham groaned. “Why don’t you? You know if she smells a mouse she’ll be down here jerking both of our hair out by the roots.” He lifted his hat and mopped his bald head. “If she’s here, we won’t move a spool of that wire as long as Fry is against it. She is dead set against trouble. I got her out of town long enough for that wire to be delivered, but you couldn’t get it here in time—so it’s up to you.”
“Then she can just pull up a chair and watch us unload it,” Woodbine said evenly. “She’s got almost as much money tied up in it as I have, and I’m not going to let it sit on the siding and rust.”
“She can stop us from fencing her land.”
“Sure, if you can’t keep her persuaded that it’s the right thing to do.”
“It’s me against Fry, and she’s got a lot of faith in him.”
“Too much,” Woodbine admitted. “If we could have got that wire shipped in time to have had the fencing finished, I believe he would have shown his hand by now and she would have seen what kind of an hombre he is.”
“But we didn’t,” Burnham mourned, “and now the fat’s in the fire. I bet we don’t fence an acre.”
“We fence all of mine no matter what she says,” Woodbine answered.
“If Noble Fry lets us,” Bob Burnham grinned. “He’s done spoke his piece in public, and he can’t afford not to back it up.”
“In that case,” Woodbine told him, “it’s just as good as trying to fence it all. Let’s get the boys moving.”
He called to his own foreman standing at the other end of the bar. “Jess, you boys ready to shove?”
Jess Hardracker was slightly less than middle-aged, somewhat unnaturally stooped and bowed of legs, and he wore a long mournful pair of moustaches under a large amount of nose. He had a deliberate movement and gestures that gave the impression that life was not really worth the effort a man had to put into the job of living. But, as though accepting the verdict that living could serve no useful purpose, he went about it with the equally strong conviction that there was nothing he could do to remedy matters, and so he made the best of it in a very satisfactory way.
Jess wiped the beer foam off his cherished pair of whiskers and bowlegged over to join Woodbine and Burnham. “Yeah. We got enough men to get the car unloaded on to the dock, and enough wagons to get it all out to the place in two trips per wagon—that is, if this bunch will stand hitched. They ain’t any too happy about what Fry is going to do. They’re trying to talk themselves into believing that he won’t show up at all—that he was just bluffing.”
“Fry don’t bluff,” Woodbine said. “He told me he wouldn’t let me unload that wire, and a dozen people heard him. He just can’t afford not to try to stop me.”
“I was afraid of that,” Jess mourned. “Well—” he paused in his speech, as did every man in the room.
The familiar hoot of the switch engine’s whistle filled the room and spoke into the ears of the men, as it had done once a week for years when it came around the bend at the end of Pinetop Mountain. But this time it was bringing more than mail and goods for Roberson’s Trading Store. Every grunt of the old four-six wheeler brought war closer to Ashfork.
Woodbine’s eyes went down the line of the bar, scanning faces, judging the men he had to help him, and the things he saw were not reassuring. These were woodsmen, farmers, a few riders from a couple of the friendly ranches, and his own small crew of riders.
There was not a paid gunman among them. Probably not a one of them had ever looked at a man over the sights of his pistol, and probably all of them hoped they never would have to, knowing that they could not acquit themselves very well. They had been persuaded into this thing, most of them, in the belief that it would not come to a showdown.
Now they knew better.
“You boys drink up and go get your teams harnessed,” Woodbine told them cheerfully. “About six of you at a time can spell each other unloading the wire out of the car.”
These men finished their drinks hastily, greedily, as though they were afraid they might be the last they would ever taste. Woodbine said, “Anybody who would rather not go can pull out now before we head for the car.” But none among them would pull out of the thing he had got himself into.
As the men filed out, Woodbine turned back to Burnham. “You going to try to handle Virginia?”
Burnham wiped his mouth nervously. “Look, Jim, you know she can outsmart me on anything. I’d rather face Noble’s gunnies. Why don’t you see her?”
Woodbine’s grin was rueful. “I probably wouldn’t do any better. Let’s just forget it, and maybe she’ll keep out of the way.”
“You’d better not depend on it,” Burnham assured him. “Ready?”
They followed their own men out of the saloon. The men were walking grouped closely together as though for protection, and they cast nervous eyes across the street towards the Parisian Bar where Fry’s men were collected. There were two faces showing through the window of the Parisian, faces of men reporting their movements to those within, but none of Fry’s men came out. Woodbine’s group turned the corner and headed down to the station where the engine was slowing down with a freight car and an empty gondola in tow.
At the station the men scattered to their wagons and hitched up their teams. Burnham broke the seal on the freight car and Woodbine went to the empty coal gondola and looked into it, while the switch engine backed away. The train crew from over at Kiowa knew something was going to happen, for the engine stopped some distance away after Woodbine had signed the bill of lading for the car, the switchman went back to the engine cab and they all waited there, as though expecting to see something.
Burnham noticed this and said to Woodbine, “Well, they’ve got something to get away in when the trouble starts. We may have to hitch a ride with them.”
Woodbine and Burnham together shoved the big sliding door of the boxcar back, revealing the load of shining spools of barbed wire. The first wagon rolled up and came alongside the car. Woodbine called to six men, and they put on leather gloves and climbed into the car of wire and broke the shoring out, their guns flapping on their hips. As the other men got their teams hitched u
p, they came and hung around the open door of the car while those inside began passing the wire spools out to the first wagon.
The wagon was half loaded before Woodbine called a halt. “Here they come, men,” he said quietly. “You fellows in the car get your gloves off. You can’t handle a gun with heavy gloves.”
There was a stir among the men as they spread out along the side of the car.
Woodbine cautioned them, “Don’t any of you get panicky and start pulling triggers. We’ll wait and see what Fry’s got to say. There may not be any shooting at all, and you be sure you don’t shoot until you’re shot at.”
Woodbine dropped down from the car and walked out towards the approaching group. They were on horseback, moving at a leisurely pace with Noble Fry at the head of the column of about twenty men. Woodbine stood and waited until they came up.
About a hundred feet from the car the column halted and Fry rode on until he was within ten paces of Woodbine, then stopped his horse. Fry was a big man riding a big horse. His face was clean and pink and well filled out, and he wore fine whipcord riding breeches and a tan shirt open at the neck. His hair was midnight black under his oyster white Stetson, and his eyes were large and deep blue set under heavy black brows. He was cool and unhurried, and there was a solidity about him that suggested granite. Woodbine looked at him carefully and saw again as he had often seen before that the man did not know fear, nor how to turn aside from an objective he had once decided on.
Fry looked over Woodbine’s small collection of men and rightly measured them as being of no great threat to him. Satisfied that his own men were more than a match for them, he turned his attention back to Woodbine.
“You’re still determined to start a little war?” he asked.
“No. I’m not trying to start a war. I’m just going to fence my ranch.”
“There’s no use in repeating what I told you,” Fry said persuasively. “Barbed wire will ruin this range, and I don’t intend to be ruined.”
“We’ve gone over that,” Woodbine answered. “You could catch all the water you need if you’d dam your ravines or dig ponds. I can’t let myself be ruined because you don’t want to spend money to catch your water.”
“We’ve gone over this before. Now I’m telling you for the last time, don’t unload another spool of that wire. If you do, my men are going to stop you, and you will be responsible for the deaths of a lot of your neighbors. This is it, Woodbine—the last word.”
Woodbine’s eyes swept over Fry’s crew with Moody Shay at the head of it. “Looks like you’ve got a bunch of new hands,” he observed softly. “Gun-hands, I’d call ’em.”
Fry smiled. “You called it right,” he said. “You’ve asked for war, so I’ve taken the wise course and brought in half a dozen boys who know something about a war. You can’t blame me, under the circumstances, can you?”
“No,” Woodbine admitted. “But before you move them into action, I’d suggest that you look over my reserves.” He turned and shouted at the apparently empty coal car. “All right, boys. The gentleman wants a look at you.”
Noble Fry’s eyes went to the gondola, and his face went hard.
At Woodbine’s shout, ten men raised up behind the steel breastworks of the gondola, and ten hard-bitten faces looked over its edge. Every man in the car was looking at Noble Fry from behind the sights of a Winchester rifle, and every one of the ten rifles was aimed directly at Noble Fry’s heart.
“Now,” Woodbine said softly, “now that we understand each other, you can turn your dogs loose when it suits you.” He turned his back on Fry and said, “All right, boys, go on with your unloading.”
Woodbine kept his back to Fry long enough to see his men start moving back on to the job—and long enough to give Fry time enough to let the deadlock sink into his mind. Then he turned back to the man and watched him.
He saw the shock of it still paralyzing Fry’s handsome face on which had been registered the strength of his urge to dominate. The man, Woodbine had suspected, had gotten away with a great deal in his lifetime by the use of his own dominating appearance and manner, and perhaps had never been seriously challenged. And now, stopped cold by a contemptuous defiance in the presence of his own men, he was stunned, for he had not expected any such an occurrence. He could only stare at Woodbine without speaking.
The men back of Fry saw that there had been a hitch in his plans, and now Moody Shay pushed his horse up alongside of Fry. He looked at the row of guns in the coal car, and then at Fry.
“How about it?” he asked. “Do we stop ’em or don’t we?”
Still Fry didn’t answer, and Woodbine smiled coldly at Moody Shay.
“He hasn’t yet decided whether he’s ready to die now or not. Give him a minute to make up his mind.”
Then before Woodbine’s eyes, Fry became a changed man. Some of the bluster went out of the man, and it would never again be used against a man who might possibly call his hand. The dominating bully-boy died, but a more dangerous man was born, a man who would use his good brain and his guile and even cruelty to gain his ends. For Noble Fry was a man of insatiable ambition, and that ambition did not die with the death of the blusterer, but lived and grew stronger in the man who had risen from the ashes of his humiliation.
Noble Fry turned and rode back towards town without a word. The puzzled men behind him saw their leader back down before their eyes, and they turned and followed him with an attitude of contempt towards him. They were to change this soon.
Bob Burnham came up and joined Woodbine where he was standing in the dust, and they both watched until Fry and his men turned out of sight around the corner. Burnham shook his head wonderingly.
“Where did you get those gun-hands?” he asked, watching the men crawl out of the gondola.
“Went over to Kiowa and hired ’em yesterday.”
“Why didn’t you say something about it?”
“And have it leak out so Fry could get set for ’em? I wanted it to surprise him and throw him off balance. It worked.”
“I never expected to live to see him back down from a bluff he had made.”
“Did you ever see anybody try to back him down before?”
“Come to think about it, no.”
“Trouble with him was that he was a creature of habit. He had the habit of expecting people to rim before him, and so he wasn’t prepared to act when one man failed to do it.”
“Well, anyway,” Burnham said, wiping his head with a bandanna, “I’m sure glad we whipped him so easy.”
“We didn’t,” Woodbine said. “We’ve just made him more dangerous.”
“How come?”
“He’s a man of too much pride. We made a fool out of him, and he’s not a man who can stand that. He’ll brood over it; it’ll eat at his vitals, and it’ll poison him inside, because it has shown him that he is afraid. I don’t think he knew that before. But he knows it now, and knowing it, he will have to act differently. His pride will demand that he destroy me, and his fear will make him do it in an underhand way. No, Bob, he’s not whipped. He’s a more dangerous man now than he was when he rode up here.”
CHAPTER 3
Straws in the Wind
A Spring dusk had fallen over Woodbine’s ranch, bringing the cooling breezes down from the hills. There had been no further effort to stop the unloading, and now the barbed wire spools were lying three in a group every quarter of a mile along the roadway in front of the ranch. Woodbine and his crew had cut bois d’Arc posts all winter and they had long since been strung out and set one every three paces across the front of his property.
His ten imported gun-hands had joined his own five riders in the bunkhouse, and now smoke curled upwards from the chimney of the cook-stove and drifted lazily away. It was a picture which had always brought peace and relaxation to Woodbine, but now the quiet stillness had a different ef
fect on him. It was ominous, impregnated with the general tension, as though the very air itself were poised, waiting for something to explode.
A curl of dust pinpointed itself on the road to the westward and moved slowly towards him, and after a while Bob Burnham rode up and got out of his saddle. He and Woodbine walked over to the porch and sat down, and the old man wiped his red forehead with a bandanna before speaking.
“Virginia’s on the warpath,” he said abruptly. “Noble’s got to her and convinced her that barbed wire means bloodshed. She says she won’t fence unless the whole range gets together and agrees to it. Noble told her he’d be willing for fences to come if the majority says it’s all right.”
“Meaning he’s got the majority behind him in trying to keep the wire out.”
“Sure, he knows what he’s doing, but he’s got her convinced that it’s not him that’s making the trouble. I can’t understand a girl that’s got as much sense as she has, falling for the line that hombre puts over on her. She’s as blind as a bat when he starts talking.”
“Blinded by his brilliance,” Woodbine speculated. “She always admired ambition.”
“Anyway, when she agreed to go along with the majority, Noble sent his riders to round up all the ranchers for a meeting at her house to-night. She told me to tell you. Coming?”
Woodbine said, “Sure, but you know the answer already. Everybody not on the creek bottom will be against us, and that’s Fry’s majority.”
“I know, but what are we going to do if the majority says the range stay open?”
“I’m going to fence, just like I started to do.”
Burnham shook his head. “I knew you would.” He got up and looked off across the grass. “Of course, Virginia’s calling us off, so that’s that as far as we’re concerned. I mean, as a crew. But you know how I feel personally.”
“I know,” Woodbine agreed. “I hate to lose you, but I know how it is. Nothing personal, Bob.”
The Sixth Western Novel Page 45