by Alan Lemay
Roper turned his back on her, tired of her unconcealed mockery. He stood staring out the win dow; the curtains made him feel as if he had cobwebs in his eyes, and he started to strike them aside, but did not. For all he knew, they would come down on him, or tear. Southward as far as he could see, the prairie was stripped bare by the close cropping of held herds-a soggy brown waste. But beyond, where the grass began, beyond vision from here, the broad, deep-cut tracks ran south the manybranched, vague wanderings of the Great Trail...
Two, three more days now, and he and Dusty would be heading south on that trail, Dusty to meet Windy Thompson, now pressing north, somewhere on that long trail with four thousand head from Texas, Bill himself to meet Jack Harper, still farther back, with twenty-five hundred more. Months out with the cattle
He turned from the window, and she was laughing at him as he had thought, her mouth smothered with her fingers.
"Come here a minute," he said, going toward her.
"What for?"
She twisted from the edge of the table, as if to put it between them, but she was too late. His ropehard fingers caught her wrist, and held her as easily as if he had dallied a calf to the horn.
"Listen," he begged her. "Listen-"
He caught her up, clamped an arm behind her head, and kissed her hard. Hard, and for a long time.
So long as she was rigid in his arms, fighting him, he held her; but when she stood limp, neither yielding nor resisting, his arms relaxed, and Jody tore herself free. She lashed out at him like a little mustang, striking him across the mouth. Her face was white, all that quick, irrepressible laughter gone, as for a moment she looked at him. A trickle of blood ran from Bill Roper's lips, and made a crooked mark on his chin. Then she turned and fled.
When she was gone Bill Roper stood still, sucking his cut lips. After a little while he went to the window, instinctively turning to open space for his answers, as his breed inevitably did, always.
He could remember Jody Gordon as a little tow-headed kid, before her hair had darkened into the elusive misty brown that it was now. Or as a colt-legged girl with scratches on her shins from riding bare-legged through the sage. Or as a peculiarly tempestuous, uncertain thing, neither child nor woman. But this latest phase he couldn't understand at all.
He picked up his hat, and for a little while stood turning it in his hands. Then he threw it in the corner, and went searching through the house.
Jody was in the tallest of the four foolish towers. From here you could see the town, and the slim, glittering line of the railroad, connecting these far plainsmen with a world hungry for beef. The town sprawled neither compactly nor with self-confidence; but it drew in tightly to the loading chutes, as if it knew that the rails were its life. Beyond, you saw the prairie; already the many threads of the Long Trail were bitten into it so deep that no hoeman would ever again completely stir up that hoofhammered ground...
Jody said matter-of-factly, "We've got to have more loading pens, Bill."
Bill's face broke into a slow grin. Abruptly he laid hard hands on disused sashes, and broke them open. Into their little cubicle flowed the sweet air of the open prairie sweep, inspiriting with the fresh smell of the new grass.
She said, "Tell me about your new job."
"It isn't new."
"They said that you'd be the new boss of the Crying Wolf, if we got it."
For more years than he could remember, he had been working toward this opportunity-the chance to take two years, or three, with such-and-such cattle, on such-and-such land, and show that he could pay out on market deliveries in pounds of beef. But now-a million horns and hoofs didn't seem to mean so much.
Something was here something that wasn't any place else not on the long trail, not in the wild terminal towns. He knew now he had to tell her that, and he dreaded it, because she probably would think it was funny. He wouldn't look at her as he spoke, because he didn't want to see her laughing at him.
"I don't know as I'm so much interested as I was," he said.
"Why, Billy not interested in the Crying Wolf nearly five hundred square miles of feeder land! What's come over you?"
"I guess maybe I'm tired of riding alone," Bill said.
"Alone? With all the outfit you'll have -I wouldn't call it alone."
"I would."
He still didn't look at her, and she couldn't see what was in his eyes. All she could see was his profile; a profile at once young and somehow craggy - strong, easy, watchful, accustomed to a lot of grinning. This youngster was the Long Trail itself. Banjos were the music in his brain; the thud of hoofs and the bawling of cattle made up the rhythms of his life. The profile Jody looked at now had been lighted by a thousand far, lost campfires before he was twenty.
"Grass country is lonely country," he said now, "as lonely as the dry plains. You get to wondering what the everlasting cattle add up to, in the course of a life. Then some night you know you don't care what they add up to; and you think, 'Damn fat beef!'"
"Why, Billy why, Billy-"
"None of it means a damn, without you're there," he told her. "Working cattle doesn't mean anything, because you'll always have all the cattle you heed anyway; and no long trail means anything, without you're at the end of it. I'm sick of long drivetrails, empty of you at the end."
There was a long, motionless silence; he kept his eyes on the far sand hills as presently she leaned forward to look up into his face.
"You really mean it, don't you?" Jody said.
Down in the town a fusillade of pistol shots rattled, and they could hear the whoops of cowboys celebrating the fact that they were alive.
Jody's words came very faint, and a little breathless.
"Why didn't you say so before?"
He looked at her then, and she wasn't laughing. In her eyes was a new, grave light, such as he had never seen; a warm light, a beloved light, better than sunset to a weary day-rider who has worked leather since before dawn. Timorously, but very willingly, she came into his arms; and he held her as if she were not only a very precious but a very fragile thing. For a little while it seemed that one trail, a trail longer than the Long Trail itself, had come to its end.
"Can't believe," he said at last, his lips in her hair, "you're sure-enough mine."
"All yours-all, all!"
"Forever?"
"Oh, my darling! Longer than you'll ever be mine...."
They had one hour, there in the prairie lookout tower, discovering each other, getting acquainted as if for the first time. The sun went down in a tremendous welter of color - a medicine sunset, such as made the Sioux read spirit signs. A cool, gently fading light painted the sand hills red-gold on one side and smoky lavender on the other, and through the dusk lights winked up at them from the town. Another short fusillade of gunfire spoke, somewhere down there among the wooden buildings.
Jody shivered a little. "I wish Dad and Dusty would come. Especially Dusty."
"Why?" •
"He has so many enemies. Some of them are dangerous as diamond-backs. It worries me when he's due and doesn't get back."
"Dusty'll take care of himself"
"I thought the town ordinance barred out guntoting."
"It does. But some of the boys brush over that. Don't you fret, honey. Dusty's all right."
"Just the same, I wish he'd come."
Bill Roper chuckled, and held her closer. "I hope he never comes!" She settled deeper into his arms.
One half hour more...
Up from the town came a crazily ridden horse, splashing mud eaves-high under the urge of spur and quirt.
"He'll lame his pony if he goes down in that slick," Bill commented. "Now what do you suppose-"
The rider tried to pull up in front of the house, and the frantic pony swerved and slid, mouth wide open to the sky. Its shoulder crashed the fence, taking down a dozen feet of pickets. The rider tumbled off, ran up the steps to hammer on the door.
"Bill! Bill Roper!"
"Let him h
oller," Bill said.
"No find out what he wants. Maybe it's-"
"Oh, all right."
Roper went clattering down the stairs, pulled open the door. "Now listen, you-"
"Bill Dusty Mr. King he"
Bill Roper froze, and there was a long moment of paralyzed silence. "Spit it out, man!" Roper shouted at him.
"Bill-he's daid!"
"Who who-"
"Dusty King's daid! Bill, they gunned him they gunned him down!"
"Who did?"
"Tain't known. Mr. Gordon's there; he-"
"Dusty King-you sure it's him that's dead?"
"Daid sartin. Nobody knows how, or who, yet."
Bill Roper walked out past the cowboy stiffly, like a man gone blind. Without knowing what he did he walked down to the gate, and stood gripping the pickets with his two hands. He was hearing his own words: "I hope he never-"
He wanted a smoke, he wanted a chew, but he just stood there like a wooden man.
This spring the northern grass would come rich and deep, and the backs of ten thousand cattle would be steaming as they fattened in the spring warmth; but in all that sunlight Dusty swaggering-never any more
HEY buried Dusty King five miles south of Ogallala, beside the Great Trail which he himself had pioneered. They thought he would want to rest out there in the open plain, near enough to the cattle trail so that the rumble of hoofs would sometimes come to him through the ground.
Over his grave they piled boulders, after the fashion of the prairie men. Bill Roper himself fitted a cross of railroad ties, the most durable and massive timber available at Ogallala.
After that was all done, and night had come on, and everybody had gone back to town, Bill Roper went back to that lonely cross and squatted on his heels against the pile of stone. He was smoking cigarettes that he rolled, and recalling things kid memories that he had not thought of for a long time. He remembered Dusty's long patience in teaching him the Indian sign language. He remembered Dusty setting his broken arm, when Bill, eight years old then, had somersaulted his horse in the Black Butte rocks.
After a while he was even able to remember the first time he had seen Dusty King. The thundering slam of hoofs, the crashing of long rifles, the shouting, the terror of disaster, his own father's voice-all that was a blur. Then the long stillness while the little boy lay hidden, waiting for the call that could never come. At last, other different men and horses...
Perhaps nobody in the world but Dusty King could have sensed that little presence. But presently a big bristle-faced man, in a slouch hat and worn saddle clothes, dropped on his knees and held out his arms to the blank brush; and the little boy ran out to cling sobbing to the rawhide trail driver, Dusty King.
Roper sat there a long time; and the butts of his brown-paper cigarettes made a little litter at the foot of Dusty's pile of stone.
After a while a ridden horse came toward the cross at a walk; and Bill Roper put out his smoke and remained motionless, unseen against the stones, as the horseman came up.
The rider stepped to the ground and walked slowly toward the cross, the reins of his pony on his arm.
"Well?" Roper said at last.
The effect of that single word was explosive. In the next split second the horseman had vaulted into the saddle, and the thin starlight showed on the barrel of his sky-raised gun.
"Quien es?"
Roper said, "Oh, hello, Dry Camp."
The rider's gun slapped back into its holster. Swinging down again, the wiry little man known as Dry Camp Pierce came and sat down beside Bill at the foot of the stones.
"Find out anything, in the town?"
"Hell, no."
"No," Dry Camp repeated after him. "No, and they won't."
"You talk mighty sure, Dry Camp."
"I talk mighty sure because I am mighty sure. Nobody saw Dusty killed except the three men that done it; and one other man."
Bill Roper's hand shot out and caught Dry Camp's lean arm in a grip that bit like a trap. "Who was that?"
"Me."
There was a silence, sharp and hard, before Bill said, "You were there, and you didn't-"
"What could I do? I had no gun."
Bill Roper let his hand drop away. Out on the plain a coyote yammered, serenading the night.
"Way I'm fixed," Dry Camp grunted, "I got to keep my horns pulled in. They got a law there against gun-toting in town. They don't all mind it, but I got to mind it. I've been checking my gunbelt every time I go into the damned town."
"How in hell is it you haven't told anybody this?"
"Haven't had any chance to talk to you," Dry Camp said. "I'm telling you now, ain't I? Who the hell else would I tell?"
"Lew Gordon-"
"Lew Gordon be damned! It was him got that law against gun-toting put through. If it wasn't for that I'd have got a couple of the bastards. Or tried."
"Who was it?"
"Cleve Tanner; and Walk Lasham, and Ben Thorpe."
Dry Camp took a match out of the pocket of his cowhide vest and chewed the end.
"You see-" he searched for his words painfully, after the manner of men who are much alone "Dusty, he tied his horse out back of the Lone Star Bar, in the angle of the wagon shed. There's a kind of a corner there, like you can't see into it from any place, hardly; and what with it getting dark-"
"Where were you?"
"I was in Bailey's Harness Shop, next door. I saw Dusty turn off the walk, and walk back between the buildings. I'd been watching for him, because I wanted to speak to him a minute. I went back through the harness shop, and I was just going out the back door. And then hell bust in the wagon shed angle."
"The time it happened," Bill Roper said, "there must have still been a little light."
"Enough to see by, all right. These three varmints steps out of the shed quick and quiet. Dusty knew what he was up against, all right. His gun come out; but Walk Lasham grabs his gun arm with his left hand and bears down like he was wrastling him. Then the whole works seems to blow up, as all three of 'em let loose. They just stood and throwed it into him, and it seemed like he was never going to fall. Ben Thorpe pumped two more shots after Dusty was down, and dead."
That was all the story. Both of them seemed to recognize that there were no questions to ask, nothing to add.
"I promise you this, Bill:" Dry Camp said at last. "I can't go up and testify against these men. You know why. If I let it be known that I'm here, that's the finish of me. But that would be all right. Only, what court, that we got, would believe me against them?"
Bill Roper said, "There isn't anything you can do, I don't suppose."
"Oh, yes, there is. There's one thing I can do. I'll have to kind of bide my time, and make it sure; but I'm going to get me these three men."
"No, you ain't," Bill Roper said. "We're going to go at this thing a different way."
"What different way is there to go? I know how you feel, Bill like as if you wanted 'em yourself, but you're young, and you got a future, and you got a girl. It's different with me. You and Lew Gordon go on your way I'll go mine."
"Trouble with you," Bill Roper said, "you're figuring these three men as just three men. They ain't. They got the biggest string of tough outfits in the country, and they spread all the way from the Rio Grande to the Rosebud, and beyond. We got to bust up the whole works, if we want to get any place."
Dry Camp shrugged. "That's no job for a couple of outlaw punchers, Bill. And it ain't work for you and Lew Gordon, neither. You got to fight fire with fire. Lew Gordon won't do that. KingGordon could be twice as strong as Thorpe, and Thorpe would hold the whole works off with one hand."
"It's different now."
"How is it different?"
"I'm the King half of King-Gordon," Roper said.
Dry Camp was silent for several minutes. "What you aim to do?"
"I aim to start in Texas, where Cleve Tanner runs Thorpe's breeding outfits in the Big Bend; I aim to tie into him piece by piece, t
ill Ben Thorpe is smashed out of the West."
"Lew Gordon will never stand for-"
"Then, by God, King-Gordon has come to its split-up!"
Silence again before Dry Camp said, "And I suppose I'm expected to just kind of stand aside and stay out of it and see how you work it out, huh? Well, I won't do it, Bill."
"You're in this, Dry Camp."
"How am I in it?"
"I've got to have me an outfit. It's got to be made up of boys that aren't afraid of Ben Thorpe or all hell; boys that haven't got anything more to lose. I'll need near fifty men. But to start off with I want Lee Harnish, and Tex Daniels and Tex Long; Nate Liggett-Dave Shannon-"
"Wow!" said Dry Camp.
"What's the matter?"
"You get those four or five in the same bunch, they'll eat each other alive."
"That's the kind I want," Bill Roper said. "I want a wild bunch such as the West has never seen before."
"And me what am I supposed to do?"
"You you're heading south. You're going back to Texas and you're going to start rounding 'em in."
"What you offering these boys?"
"Horses and grub, and what other stuff we'll need. Not another damned thing. I'll see you again before you go; we'll know by then whether KingGordon is making this fight, or if I split off on my own."
"You sure you want to do this, Bill?"
"I know what I want to do."
They sat silent for a long time more.
"All right," Dry Camp said. "I'll go."
N THE starlight Bill Roper swung down in front of the little shack which served King-Gordon as a loading-foreman's office at their Ogallala pens. This was the little saddle-cluttered room in which Dusty King and Lew Gordon had come to the decision which brought King-Gordon the Crying Wolf lands and cost Dusty King his life. Within, four or five lanterns were lit, and here Bill Roper found Lew Gordon sitting alone.