by Alan Lemay
"So you," Walk Lasham said, "are the tough gunman that killed Cleve Tanner."
Bill Roper raised his eyes to Lasham's face. "And you," he said, "are one of the dirty cowards that murdered Dusty King."
Sparks jumped in Lasham's eyes, and instantly disappeared again.
"And I suppose," Walk Lasham said, "it's in your mind to get me, one of these times?"
"When I'm ready, I'll get you, all right."
Lasham drew a deep breath and held it for a moment; the corners of his nostrils were white. "Well-I'm here."
This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.
HIS was the crisis the climax of all that long war. Here they sat, these men who had fought a common enemy for so long: Dusty King, who, with the hoofs of countless cattle, had carved many a Great Plains trail deep into the short grass; young Bill Roper, who had begun following those trails with Dusty King before he was big enough to hold a horse; and old Lew Gordon, Texas man, whose wild marketless herds had been the roots of fortune.
Bill Roper got up to stand looking out into the night. Through the open window was coming the smell of spring on the northern plains - a wet, living odor of melted snow and new grass; it brought something keen and enlivening into the room, cutting the smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes. It was as if the night itself knew that history was being made here, among the clutter of worn saddles and ropes in this little shack on the edge of Ogallala.
Dusty King and Lew Gordon constituted KingGordon, the famous partnership that had developed with the great cattle trails; until now their many brands marked far-scattered herds beyond estimate. They were here because of tomorrow's auction of land leases. Under the hammer would go the grazing rights on the Crying Wolf Indian lands-those miles and miles of stirrup-deep grass that King-Gordon wanted, and that Ben Thorpe had to have.
It was curious that their long war with Ben Thorpe should have met its true climax here; more natural that it should have come in the roar and smoke of six-guns in a dusty street, or in some titanic clash in the cattle market, in which one huge organization or the other would have to go down. But the three in this room understood that the outcome would rest upon what the two older men decided here. Possession of the Crying Wolf meant dominance in the north to King-Gordon, or to Ben Thorpe; there was no longer going to be room for both.
The loose-hung frame of Dusty King slouched at rest, and his blue eyes, that never seemed to grow any older, remained noncommittal. But behind his leathery face tough and dark from the whip of sun and sleet, and deep-carved with humorous lines-these other two who knew him could see the curious gleam that spoke of war, and delight in war.
He said, "Lew we're looking down his throat!"
Lew Gordon sat perfectly motionless, solidly braced in his heavy chair, he seemed planted there for all time. His kind and steady grey eyes, his calm grave face, showed him for exactly what he was - a sane, thoughtful man, in search always of the ways of security, of orderliness, of peace. He remained silent, waiting his partner out.
"This is an old fight, Lew," Dusty King said. "It goes back as far as that first time you backed me with a little herd, to see if I could make it through to Abilene. It's as old as Jesse Chisholm's wagon tracks, that marked the trail I took. Don't hardly seem like we better draw back now."
Lew Gordon stirred, swaying his shoulders imperceptibly, like a stubborn bear. "Credit's going to be terrible hard, this coming year," he said at last.
Dusty King seemed to sprawl a little more loosely; he was playing poker in a way of his own. Swaggering, easy-going, spendthrift he still was a man who believed invincibly in himself. Always he had been in the forefront of those tough, game, Texan trail drivers who had shown the way to the others, over and over making new trails to meet the westward-crawling railhead.
"I passed Ben Thorpe in the road, today," he said. "He was looking mighty prosperous. I bet he weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds now, with his stomach pulled in. But it seemed like he had the look of a man who knows where he's going and how he's going to get there, too."
"His backing is terrible strong," Lew Gordon said, his eyes on the floor.
No one knew better than Lew Gordon that Dusty King, in tackling the impossible a hundred times, had a hundred times shown the way for the rest. But Gordon remembered too the poverty of the cattle poor days before any outlet was found for Texas beef. To risk all they had won, in a single slashing stroke at an old enemy, was almost more than Gordon could bear.
"You know why Ben Thorpe's strong," Dusty King said. "And you know how he got his start. Folks say now that nobody knows who the trail raiders were in the cross timbers, or how come so many Texas men left their bones beside the old Sedalia trail. But you know, and I know, I think."
"Nobody could ever prove it on him," Lew Gordon said.
"Just the same, we know. And we know how he went on from there. We know why it is that so many Texas outfits stand in Ben Thorpe's name; and how many different ways he's found to jump down on little lonely Texan cowmen and leave them broke or dead. And we know what's happened to many a little traildrive outfit that started north, but never brought their cattle through, nor got home."
Lew Gordon stirred again but he didn't speak. Silence clamped down again in that little saddlecluttered room, and behind it the distant bawling of held cattle made a restive background.
"Every year," Dusty King said, "since we began driving up the big trails, we've locked horns in one way or another with this one gang. I'm not forgetting who started the Red Crick stampede where Dave and Bob Henry died under piled up cattle; nor the Tula rosa shootings, with four more of my boys dead; nor the adobe ruins where old Dan Murphy's little outfit used to stand. There's some good cowboys under the prairie, Lew."
Gordon said almost inaudibly, "Never could prove anything."
"His herds have grown faster than ours have grown," Dusty King's expressionless voice droned on. "He's as big as we are; he'll be bigger soon. From the Big Bend to the Tetons, he owns more outfits than he knows the names of. He's never run an honest deal where he could run a crooked one, nor a square trick where he could play a mean one; it's a long time since he rode all night with his rifle in his hands, but by God, Lew, if he isn't stopped there's plenty he can hire to do his dark-of-the-moon stuff now."
"Dusty," Lew Gordon said, "we've blocked him every way we could."
"That's why he'll get you, and me too, in the end."
Again the silence closed, with behind it the perpetual bawling of the cattle, far off in the spring night.
Dusty King said casually, "Cleve Tanner's here."
Bill Roper saw Lew Gordon's eyes flick up to look at Dusty King. "Cleve Tanner?"
"Here in Ogallala."
"What the devil's the meaning of that?"
"Cleve and Walk Lasham are the only two of Ben Thorpe's men that raided the cross timbers with him in the old days; the only two he can really trust, now."
"It's natural that Walk Lasham should be here," Lew Gordon conceded; "but CleveTanner, all the way up from the Big Bend-"
"Shows you," Dusty King said, "what store they set on the Crying Wolf lands. Ben Thorpe is sold mighty deep into next year's deliveries. Already he's committed for more northern-fed cattle than he can show unless he can get the Crying Wolf"
Slowly Lew Gordon got a frayed tally book out of his back pocket, put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. They looked out of place, on Gordon's weathered face. Nobody knew whether those glasses did Lew Gordon any good or not. Certainly every figure in the tally was already clear in his head. But when the time came for slow deliberation, Lew Gordon always got out the glasses and the book. Dusty King watched ironically and let h
im alone. Here was the old story Gordon always thinking of the defense, Dusty King always head-up for the attack.
"The survey "Lew Gordon's voice was curiously bewildered "it's hard to believe there's any land as good as this."
Their private survey had been made by Bill Roper; it represented weeks of hard riding, and shrewd calculation of the strength and depth of the feed upon the surface of the broken land.
"Mr. Gordon," Bill Roper said, "I've been over every mile of"
Dusty King said, "Sit down, kid."
"One place here reads fifty head to the section," Lew said wonderingly. "Fifty head of cattle grazing one section of land! It's past belief"
"This isn't Texas, Lew."
They were silent again, waiting to hear what Lew Gordon would decide.
"I figure we might pay as high as thirty cents to the acre," Gordon said, "by the year's lease."
A flicker like that of heat lightning showed for a moment behind Dusty King's eyes; but his voice was low and monotonous as before. "Thirty cents be damned," he said.
Lew Gordon looked at him for a long time. How deep you figure to go?"
"Get the land," Dusty King said.
"Ben Thorpe is liable to go crazy and bid his head off."
"We're looking down his throat," King said for the second time. "The least the deputy commissioner can accept is drafts on Kansas City. Ben Thorpe hasn't realized the value of the land. We'll catch him short and force him off the board."
"At what cost to ourselves?" Gordon demanded.
"At all costs."
Slowly Lew Gordon shook his head. "Maybe thirty-five cents an acre."
Dusty King's voice rose explosively for the first time. "Thirty-five cents," he echoed "or fifty cents, or seventy-five, or a dollar! Get the land!"
Lew Gordon stared at Dusty King for a long time. For a few moments it seemed to Roper that a curious gleam had come up behind Gordon's eyes; but as he watched he saw it die. He saw Gordon blow out his breath, and settle his eyes stubbornly on the floor once more. He knew as Gordon opened his mouth what the old Texan would say.
But Dusty King cut in as Gordon was about to speak. "I'm thinking about the boys that are dead," he reminded his partner.
"It won't help them if we break ourselves now."
"I'm thinking of something else," King said. "I'm thinking of a river crossing on the old Sedalia trail. I'm thinking of a dead nigger cook, spread out on his back in the brush. And I'm thinking of a dead white man, face down in the ashes of his wagon. I'm thinking I'm thinking of a pinto horse."
Looking at the two older men, Bill Roper knew that something queer was happening here under the spring night. The future of a range was at its turn, but behind that something else was changing, hidden. It was past him, then, to know what it was. Dusty King's face was smiling a little, but his eyes had turned to sleepy, tilted slits, so that what was behind them could not be seen.
Lew Gordon sighed, and he looked like a man who was weary and old. His big hands, gnarled by the years of rope and rein, dangled slack from the arms of his chair.
"You want that land," Gordon said, "even if-"
"At all costs," Dusty King said again.
Gordon looked his partner in the eyes.
"Go in and bid!"
WINGING down the board walks of Ogallala in the cool spring sunlight, Dusty King and Bill Roper looked a whole lot alike. The more than twenty years difference in their ages had not changed Dusty King's loose-jointed swagger, the rakish cock of his old soft hat, nor the cracking ring of the spurs he was believed to sleep in. The trail years had leathered his face, but they could not diminish his gay exuberance; just as prosperity was unable to take from him the look of the trail. Whatever Dusty King wore, he always appeared to be wearing disreputable saddle clothes.
Perhaps young Bill Roper had picked up a lot of Dusty King's characteristics in the course of an association that had lasted almost as long as Bill Roper's life. Literally raised a cattle driver by Dusty King, Bill Roper, too, bore the marks of the trail, so that the two men seemed to have been cast in the same mold.
Everybody who knew King-Gordon at all knew the story of Bill Roper and Dusty King. Fifteen years ago, at the age of five, Bill Roper had been found hiding in the brush, like a little rabbit, beside a wrecked outfit on the old trail to Sedalia. It was Dusty King who had found him there; and it was Dusty King who had buried the bullet-shattered body of Bill's father beside that God-forsaken trail.
In the fifteen years since then, Bill Roper had learned guns and horses and cattle, and the tricks of the trail as only Dusty King knew them. He had been able to read prairie signs before he could read print, and if it had not been for tomato can labels, perhaps would never have learned to read print at all. Everything he knew he had learned with Dusty King. There was every reason that he should have grown to look something like the great trail driver who had brought him up.
Now, as they made their way down the muddy street, before the false-fronted wooden buildings, half the cowmen that thronged Ogallala hailed Dusty with comradeship and delight; so that his progress was that of a celebrated character, already famous. The other half they were Ben Thorpe men seemed not to see him at all. It was hard to tell which tickled Dusty King more the warmth of his many friends, or the bitterness of his innumerable enemies.
The bidding for the Crying Wolf lands was being held in a disused store, and here the sidewalk and half the street were filled with knotted groups. Through this crowd Dusty King and Bill Roper waded, Dusty trying to look like something bewildered, from the tall country. Beside the door was posted a handbill in black type, giving due legal notice of the auction of leases, and Dusty stopped to study this with a grave empty face, as if he had never heard of it before.
"Mr. King," somebody said, "they've been waiting for you, fully an hour."
Dusty looked blank. Then he clutched his hat to his head in a startled way, and rushed inside with a clownish representation of haste.
Within, the crowd of plains-country menbronzed men, saddle-faced men, sometimes bearded men-gave way as King, followed by Bill Roper, shouldered his way to the back.
"Is this the place," King asked, "where the feller is selling the horse?"
The deputy commissioner took his feet off his table. "The sale was supposed to start at two o'clock," he complained.
A little tribute, there. The commissioner perhaps already in Ben Thorpe's pay hardly dared start an important sale, without present this slouching, nondescript-looking representative of KingGordon.
"No word has come from your partner at all," the commissioner said.
"He ain't coming."
Three men who sat in chairs grouped around one end of the table looked at each other. They ignored King and Roper, as hostile dogs ignore an enemy of whom they are not yet keenly aware.
The big man in the light-colored hat was Ben Thorpe the Ben Thorpe, whose far-scattered holdings perhaps already exceeded those of King-Gordon. Ben Thorpe, who, some thought, first learned his tactics with Quantrell's guerrillas, and got his start with those same tactics in the dark, ugly days of the cross timbers. As he sat here today he was no longer the lean night rider, the watchful raider he once had been. Thick-shouldered now, heavy-bodied, he was today more than ever a power feared in the cattle country still unscrupulous, still menacing, but now of a different sort-a power of wealth, of organization, and of bought-up law.
Thorpe's face was big and mask-like, with eyes heavy lidded, sleepy looking. The black suit he wore was well cut; both collar and shirt were freshly starched. Only the thickness of the skin of his face, laid now in rounded folds, attested his saddle years. He had a way of speaking softly, of moving softly, with a deceptive inertia.
Beside him, the tall man, lean and narrowbodied as a slat, was Cleve Tanner; a hawk-faced man, keen-eyed, so cleanly shaven that the tight skin of his jaws seemed to shine. Cleve Tanner was manager of Ben Thorpe's Texas holdings, the breeding grounds from which Thorpe's whole
organization drew its strength.
The other, the man who seemed uncommonly dark, even among these sun-darkened men, was Walk Lasham. Some thought Walk Lasham had more than a little Indian blood, but his exact origin was unknown. Those who thought they knew all about it claimed that Walk Lasham, like Cleve Tanner, had ridden with Ben Thorpe in the bloody days of the cross timbers. He was Ben Thorpe's manager in the north, now; under his poker-faced watchfulness lay Ben Thorpe's northern holdings, the feeding grounds now necessary to any wide operation in the cattle trade.
"Seems like," said Ben Thorpe, "we've waited long enough."
The deputy commissioner said, "If Mr. Gordon isn't coming, I suppose we might as well begin." He raised his voice. "This," he said, "is a federal auction, to place by public bidding certain lands in the charge of the Indian Department, by the authority of the Secretary of the Interior and the President of the United States; namely certain lands..."
He droned through his preamble perfunctorily; everyone in the crowd knew exactly what was involved. Something more than land was here changing hands. To hold the Crying Wolf would all but mean supremacy in the north. But this thing was bigger than that. The two organizations which here clashed again were the great powers of the trails; behind each of them were whole counties of Texas mesquite grass plains, great areas of the middle shortgrass country, scores of outfits. The struggle between them had developed with the Chisholm trail itself a decade-long combat between men of diametrically opposed principles and methods. And now
"This land," the deputy commissioner concluded, "is thrown into blocks. I think, gentlemen, you are already familiar with the placement of the lands. Block 1 includes, as previously agreed, an estimated one hundred sections, or sixty-four thousand acres, known hereinafter as `Block 1'; bounded on the north by"
Cleve Tanner leaned close to Ben Thorpe, whispered, and Thorpe nodded.