“Your horses are up the hill, Mr. West,” he said pointedly.
It is doubtful whether the trader heard. He could not keep his desirous eyes from the girl.
“Is she a half or a quarter-breed?” he asked McRae.
“That’ll be her business and mine, sir. Will you please tak the road?” The hunter spoke quietly, restraining himself from an outbreak. But his voice carried an edge.
“By Gad, she’s some clipper,” West said, aloud to himself, just as though the girl had not been present.
“Will you leave my daughter oot o’ your talk, man?” warned the Scotchman.
“What’s ailin’ you?” West’s sulky, insolent eyes turned on the buffalo-hunter. “A nitchie’s a nitchie. Me, I talk straight. But I aim to be reasonable too. I don’t like a woman less because she’s got the devil in her. Bully West knows how to tame ’em so they’ll eat outa his hand. I’ve took a fancy to yore girl. Tha’s right, McRae.”
“You may go to the tent, Jessie,” the girl’s father told her. He was holding his temper in leash with difficulty.
“Wait a mo.” The big trader held out his arm to bar the way. “Don’t push on yore reins, McRae. I’m makin’ you a proposition. Me, I’m lookin’ for a wife, an’ this here breed girl of yours suits me. Give her to me an’ I’ll call the whole thing square. Couldn’t say fairer than that, could I?”
The rugged hunter looked at the big malformed border ruffian with repulsion. “Man, you gi’e me a scunner,” he said. “Have done wi’ this foolishness an’ be gone. The lass is no’ for you or the like o’ you.”
“Hell’s hinges, you ain’t standin’ there tellin’ me that a Cree breed is too good for Bully West, are you?” roared the big whiskey-runner.
“A hundred times too good for you. I’d rather see the lass dead in her coffin than have her life ruined by you,” McRae answered in dead earnest.
“You don’t get me right, Mac,” answered the smuggler, swallowing his rage. “I know yore religious notions. We’ll stand up before a sky pilot and have this done right. I aim to treat this girl handsome.”
Jessie had turned away at her father’s command. Now she turned swiftly upon the trader, eyes flashing. “I’d rather Father would drive a knife in my heart than let me be married to a wolfer!” she cried passionately.
His eyes, untrammeled by decency, narrowed to feast on the brown immature beauty of her youth.
“Tha’ so?” he jeered. “Well, the time’s comin’ when you’ll go down on yore pretty knees an’ beg me not to leave you. It’ll be me ’n’ you one o’ these days. Make up yore mind to that.”
“Never! Never! I’d die first!” she exploded.
Bully West showed his broken, tobacco-stained teeth in a mirthless grin. “We’ll see about that, dearie.”
“March, lass. Your mother’ll be needin’ you,” McRae said sharply.
The girl looked at West, then at Morse. From the scorn of that glance she might have been a queen and they the riffraff of the land. She walked to the tent. Not once did she look back.
“You’ve had your answer both from her and me. Let that be an end o’ it,” McRae said with finality.
The trader’s anger ripped out in a crackle of obscene oaths. They garnished the questions that he snarled. “Wha’s the matter with me? Why ain’t I good enough for yore half-breed litter?”
It was a spark to gunpowder. The oaths, the insult, the whole degrading episode, combined to drive McRae out of the self-restraint he had imposed on himself. He took one step forward. With a wide sweep of the clenched fist he buffeted the smuggler on the ear. Taken by surprise, West went spinning against the wheel of a cart.
The man’s head sank between his shoulders and thrust forward. A sound that might have come from an infuriated grizzly rumbled from the hairy throat. His hand reached for a revolver.
Morse leaped like a crouched cat. Both hands caught at West’s arm. The old hunter was scarcely an instant behind him. His fingers closed on the wrist just above the weapon.
“Hands off,” he ordered Morse. “This is no’ your quarrel.”
The youngster’s eyes met the blazing blue ones of the Scot. His fingers loosened their hold. He stepped back.
The two big men strained. One fought with every ounce of power in him to twist the arm from him till the cords and sinews strained; the other to prevent this and to free the wrist. It was a test of sheer strength.
Each labored, breathing deep, his whole energy centered on coördinated effort of every muscle. They struggled in silence except for the snarling grunts of the whiskey-runner.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the wrist began to turn from McRae. Sweat beads gathered on West’s face. He fought furiously to hold his own. But the arm turned inexorably.
The trader groaned. As the cords tightened and shoots of torturing pain ran up the arm, the huge body of the man writhed. The revolver fell from his paralyzed fingers. His wobbling knees sagged and collapsed.
McRae’s fingers loosened as the man slid down and caught the bull-like throat. His grip tightened. West fought savagely to break it. He could as soon have freed himself from the clamp of a vice.
The Scotchman shook him till he was black in the face, then flung him reeling away.
“Get oot, ye yellow wolf!” he roared. “Or fegs! I’ll break every bone in your hulkin’ body. Oot o’ my camp, the pair o’ you!”
West, strangling, gasped for air, as does a catfish on the bank. He leaned on the cart wheel until he was able to stand. The help of Morse he brushed aside with a sputtered oath. His eyes never left the man who had beaten him. He snarled hike a whipped wolf. The hunter’s metaphor had been an apt one. The horrible lust to kill was stamped on his distorted, grinning face, but for the present the will alone was not enough.
McRae’s foot was on the revolver. His son Fergus, a swarthy, good-looking youngster, had come up and was standing quietly behind his father. Other hunters were converging toward their chief.
The Indian trader swore a furious oath of vengeance. Morse tried to lead him away.
“Some day I’ll get yore squaw girl right, McRae, an’ then God help her,” he threatened.
The bully lurched straddling away.
Morse, a sardonic grin on his lean face, followed him over the hill.
CHAPTER V
MORSE JUMPS UP TROUBLE
“Threw me down, didn’t you?” snarled West out of the corner of his mouth. “Knew all the time she did it an’ never let on to me. A hell of a way to treat a friend.”
Tom Morse said nothing. He made mental reservations about the word friend, but did not care to express them. His somber eyes watched the big man jerk the spade bit cruelly and rowel the bronco when it went into the air. It was a pleasure to West to torture an animal when no human was handy, though he preferred women and even men as victims.
“Whad he mean when he said you could tell me how he’d settled with her?” he growled.
“He whipped her last night when I took her back to camp.”
“Took her back to camp, did you? Why didn’t you bring her to me? Who’s in charge of this outfit, anyhow, young fellow, me lad?”
“McRae’s too big a man for us to buck. Too influential with the half-breeds. I figured it was safer to get her right home to him.” The voice of the younger man was mild and conciliatory.
“You figured!” West’s profanity polluted the clear, crisp morning air. “I got to have a run in with you right soon. I can see that. Think because you’re C.N. Morse’s nephew, you can slip yore funny business over on me. I’ll show you.”
The reddish light glinted for a moment in the eyes of Morse, but he said nothing. Young though he was, he had a capacity for silence. West was not sensitive to atmospheres, but he felt the force of this young man. It was not really in his mind to quarrel with him. For one thing he would soon be a partner in the firm of C.N. Morse & Company, of Fort Benton, one of the biggest trading outfits in the country. West could no
t afford to break with the Morse interests.
With their diminished cargo the traders pushed north. Their destination was Whoop-Up, at the junction of the Belly and the St. Mary’s Rivers. This fort had become a rendezvous for all the traders within hundreds of miles, a point of supply for many small posts scattered along the rivers of the North.
Twelve oxen were hitched to each three-wagon load. Four teams had left Fort Benton together, but two of them had turned east toward Wood Mountain before the party was out of the Assiniboine country. West had pushed across Lonesome Prairie to the Sweet Grass Hills and from there over the line into Canada.
Under the best of conditions West was no pleasant traveling companion. Now he was in a state of continual sullen ill-temper. For the first time in his life he had been publicly worsted. Practically he had been kicked out of the buffalo camp, just as though he were a drunken half-breed and not one whose barroom brawls were sagas of the frontier.
His vanity was notorious, and it had been flagrantly outraged. He would never be satisfied until he had found a way to get his revenge. More than once his simmering anger leaped out at the young fellow who had been a witness of his defeat. In the main he kept his rage sulkily repressed. If Tom Morse wanted to tell of the affair with McRae, he could lessen the big man’s prestige. West did not want that.
The outfit crossed the Milk River, skirted Pakoghkee Lake, and swung westward in the direction of the Porcupine Hills. Barney had been a trapper in the country and knew where the best grass was to be found. In many places the feed was scant. It had been cropped close by the great herds of buffalo roaming the plains. Most of the lakes were polluted by the bison, so that whenever possible their guide found camps by running water. The teams moved along the Belly River through the sand hills.
Tom Morse was a crack shot and did the hunting for the party. The evening before the train reached Whoop-Up, he walked out from camp to try for an antelope, since they were short of fresh meat. He climbed a small butte overlooking the stream. His keen eyes swept the panorama and came to rest on a sight he had never before seen and would never forget.
A large herd of buffalo had come down to the river crossing. They were swimming the stream against a strong current, their bodies low in the water and so closely packed that he could almost have stepped from one shaggy head to another. Not fifty yards from him they scrambled ashore and went lumbering into the hazy dusk. Something had frightened them and they were on a stampede. Even the river had not stopped their flight. The earth shook with their tread as they found their stride.
That wild flight into the gathering darkness was symbolic, Morse fancied. The vast herds were vanishing never to return. Were they galloping into the Happy Hunting Ground the Indians prayed for? What would come of their flight? When the plains knew them no more, how would the Sioux and the Blackfeet and the Piegans live? Would the Lonesome Lands become even more desolate than they were now?
“I wonder,” he murmured aloud.
It is certain that he could have had no vision of the empire soon to be built out of the desert by himself and men of his stamp. Not even dimly could he have conceived a picture of the endless wheat-fields that would stretch across the plains, of the farmers who would pour into the North by hundreds of thousands, of the cities which would rise in the sand hills as a monument to man’s restless push of progress and his indomitable hope. No living man’s imagination had yet dreamed of the transformation of this terra incognita into one of the world’s great granaries.
The smoke of the traders’ camp-fire was curling up and drifting away into thin veils of film before the sun showed over the horizon hills. The bull-teams had taken up their steady forward push while the quails were still flying to and from their morning water-holes.
“Whoop-Up by noon,” Barney predicted.
“Yes, by noon,” Tom Morse agreed. “In time for a real sure-enough dinner with potatoes and beans and green stuff.”
“Y’ bet yore boots, an’ honest to gosh gravy,” added Brad Stearns, a thin and wrinkled little man whose leathery face and bright eyes defied the encroachment of time. He was bald, except for a fringe of grayish hair above the temples and a few long locks carefully disposed over his shiny crown. But nobody could have looked at him and called him old.
They were to be disappointed.
The teams struck the dusty road that terminated at the fort and were plodding along it to the crackling accompaniment of the long bull-whips.
“Soon now,” Morse shouted to Stearns.
The little man nodded. “Mebbe they’ll have green corn on the cob. Betcha the price of the dinner they do.”
“You’ve made a bet, dad.”
Stearns halted the leaders. “What’s that? Listen.”
The sound of shots drifted to them punctuated by faint, far yells. The shots did not come in a fusillade. They were intermittent, died down, popped out again, yielded to whoops in distant crescendo.
“Injuns,” said Stearns. “On the peck, looks like. Crees and Blackfeet, maybe, but you never can tell. Better throw off the trail and dig in.”
West had ridden up. He nodded. “Till we know where we’re at. Get busy, boys.”
They drew up the wagons in a semicircle, end to end, the oxen bunched inside, partially protected by a small cottonwood grove in the rear.
This done, West gave further orders. “We gotta find out what’s doin’. Chances are it’s nothin’ but a coupla bunches of braves with a cargo of redeye aboard, Tom, you an’ Brad scout out an’ take a look-see. Don’t be too venturesome. Soon’s you find out what the rumpus is, hot-foot it back and report, y’ understand.” The big wolfer snapped out directions curtly. There was no more competent wagon boss in the border-land than he.
Stearns and Morse rode toward the fort. They deflected from the road and followed the river-bank to take advantage of such shrubbery as grew there. They moved slowly and cautiously, for in the Indian country one took no unnecessary chances. From the top of a small rise, shielded by a clump of willows, the two looked down on a field of battle already decided. Bullets and arrows were still flying, but the defiant, triumphant war-whoops of a band of painted warriors slowly moving toward them showed that the day was won and lost. A smaller group of Indians was retreating toward the swamp on the left-hand side of the road. Two or three dead braves lay in the grassy swale between the foes.
“I done guessed it, first crack,” Brad said. “Crees and Blackfeet. They sure enough do mix it whenever they get together. The Crees ce’tainly got the jump on ’em this time.”
It was an old story. From the northern woods the Crees had come down to trade at the fort. They had met a band of Blackfeet who had traveled up from the plains for the same purpose. Filled with bad liquor, the hereditary enemies had as usual adjourned to the ground outside for a settlement while the traders at the fort had locked the gates and watched the battle from the loopholes of the stockade.
“Reckon we better blow back to camp,” suggested the old plainsman. “Mr. Cree may be feelin’ his oats heap much. White man look all same Blackfeet to him like as not.”
“Look.” Morse pointed to a dip in the swale.
An Indian was limping through the brush, taking advantage of such cover as he could find. He was wounded. His leg dragged and he moved with difficulty.
“He’ll be a good Injun mighty soon,” Stearns said, rubbing his bald head as it shone in the sun. “Not a chance in the world for him. They’ll git him soon as they reach the coulée. See. They’re stoppin’ to collect that other fellow’s scalp.”
At a glance Morse had seen the situation. This was none of his affair. It was tacitly understood that the traders should not interfere in the intertribal quarrels of the natives. But old Brad’s words, “good Injun,” had carried him back to a picture of a brown, slim girl flashing indignation because Americans treated her race as though only dead Indians were good ones. He could never tell afterward what was the rational spring of his impulse.
At
the touch of the rein laid flat against its neck, the cow-pony he rode laid back its ears, turned like a streak of light, and leaped to a hand gallop. It swept down the slope and along the draw, gathering speed with every jump.
The rider let out a “Hi-yi-yi” to attract the attention of the wounded brave. Simultaneously the limping fugitive and the Crees caught sight of the flying horseman who had obtruded himself into the fire zone.
An arrow whistled past Morse. He saw a bullet throw up a spurt of dirt beneath the belly of his horse. The Crees were close to their quarry. They closed in with a run. Tom knew it would be a near thing. He slackened speed slightly and freed a foot from the stirrup, stiffening it to carry weight.
The wounded Indian crouched, began to run parallel with the horse, and leaped at exactly the right instant. His hand caught the sleeve of his rescuer at the same time that the flat of his foot dropped upon the white man’s boot. A moment, and his leg had swung across the rump of the pony and he had settled to the animal’s back.
So close was it that a running Cree snatched at the bronco’s tail and was jerked from his feet before he could release his hold.
As the cow-pony went plunging up the slope, Morse saw Brad Stearns silhouetted against the sky-line at the summit. His hat was gone and his bald head was shining in the sun. He was pumping bullets from his rifle at the Crees surging up the hill after his companion.
Stearns swung his horse and jumped it to a lope. Side by side with Morse he went over the brow in a shower of arrows and slugs.
“Holy mackerel, boy! What’s eatin’ you?” he yelled. “Ain’t you got any sense a-tall? Don’t you know better ’n to jump up trouble thataway?”
The Second Western Megapack Page 158