by Alan Lemay
"All right, you hard guys," Bill Roper said; "you know who told you to come here. Dry Camp Pierce told you to come here. Maybe he told you what you could look for here, huh?"
"Don't know as he did."
"All right. Maybe then you didn't figure on something you won't get. Because, all I can promise you now is just your horses and your grub, my honey chil's!"
"We got horses. If we got horses, and a little lead, I guess we got grub...."
These four gunfighters who met Roper here were none of them older than Bill; yet each was famous as a killer in his own right. Of them all Bill Roper alone had no name, no reputation. Yet, in respect for the name of Dusty King, they had come to hear him out.
Nate Liggett, a round-faced kid with eyelashes that looked as if they had been powdered with white dust, said, "Well, what seems to be your offer?"
"I guess you already know Bob Graham," Roper said. "You know how a warrior gang of Cleve Tanner's jumped down on him, on some thin excuse, and run him off his range. They even took over his house and his windmill and his corrals. Now, I aim to hand back that range to Bob Graham; he's waiting in Bigspring for the word. Your part of the job is simple enough you just go and take it away from the Tanner bunch."
"Simple, huh? Just how do you figure this simple trick is to be done?"
"How did the Tanner outfit get the range in the first place?"
"This sounds kind of rough," said Nate Liggett, with deceptive mildness. "Like something that would get the Rangers on our necks-very sure and quick!"
"A lawyer in San Antonio kept the Rangers off when Tanner jumped Graham. Now we've got another better lawyer in San Antonio to keep them off when Graham jumps Tanner. The only question is, who's got enough salt to grab that range-and then hang onto it?"
"And what do we get out of all this?"
"Graham takes over the outfit and runs it. You hang around and help him, and see that he doesn't get run off again. For that you get a half interest in the outfit. You split it among you any way you see fit. I'll back Graham with cattle, and what other stuff he needs."
The others didn't say anything for a little while. It was Dave Shannon, huge-shouldered and bluntfaced, who finally spoke. "I'll tell you what it sounds like to me," he said, studying the curl of smoke from his cigarette. "Once there was a fellow watching driftwood come down the Mississippi river. He turns to another feller and he says, `You want a job? You fish this here driftwood out of the river, and I'll give you half of all you get'."
Nate Liggett said, "It's a fact, Bill, I don't see where we come in for no advantage."
"You got a chance to do something here that will get you some place," Roper said good-humoredly. "First thing, you've got a chance to own some cattle in a way where you stand to get something out of it once in a while. Another thing, you get a certain amount of protection. Another thing, you're fixed up with a string of friendly camps, half across Texas; when you've got to move, there's always an established outfit you can head for, with fresh horses and whatever you need, waiting for you all the time."
"Been making out all right as it is, seems like," Red Miller said. He sprawled lazily, but he was squinting, his green eyes narrow, into the outer dark.
"If you're satisfied with this lone wolf stuff you've been pulling, I haven't got anything to offer you," Roper admitted. "But I'll tell you this the boys that string with me now will see the day when they'll run Texas; and Cleve Tanner, and Ben Thorpe, too, will be busted up and forgot!"
"It's a hefty order!"
"Maybe it is. This Graham business is a kind of experiment; it'll work if you make it work. But if it goes through okay it's only the beginning, you hear me? You string with me a little while; and maybe, by God, we'll show a couple of people something...."
0T, DRY DAYS OF EARLY AUGUST
.As the first sun struck with a red heat across the plains, the Tanner men who held the Graham ranch were already saddling. All over Texas, cowmen were throwing together the last trail herds of the year; it was time for these Tanner men to roll their chuck wagons again, to round up the last of the trailfit stock that remained in the herds which had belonged to Bob Graham.
At the crest of a rise an unnamed cowboy lay flat to the ground, his rifle sighted through the short grass. Ultimately, inevitably, a rider came in line with his gunsight; it was the wrangler, loping out to bring his remuda in. Abruptly his horse somersaulted as the rifle whacked from the hill; and the wrangler was afoot on the prairie.
Out from what had been the Graham corral, three riders swept through the dusty dawn; but they had hardly left the pole fences behind when six other riders confronted them, rising into their saddles like Comanches, out of the brush. The strangers closed in a semi-circle, unhurriedly, their carbines in their hands. In another minute or two the three Tanner riders were grouped in a defensive knot, while from the semi-circle of the raiders Nate Liggett jogged forward to talk it over.
"I don't think you want to go on," he said. "I don't even think you want to work for this outfit any more."
Of the four gunfighters to whom Bill Roper had talked at Willow Creek, only Nate Liggett was here. Already more work had been found for the others, and the four had split; they were far-scattered now, each gathering about him riders of his own whom he knew where to get.
But now the steel in the hands of Liggett's riders shone convincingly in the hot, dull light of first morning....
Two nights later, one hundred and fifty miles away-
With the approach of dusk, a peculiar light lay upon the valley of the Potreros; the sun went down in a copper welter, its light hanging on for a long time. In a reach of open grass a herd of five hundred head bunched loosely tame, heavy cattle, already well removed by breeding from the old, wild, longhorn strain. But they had not bunched voluntarily. They shuffled restlessly, watching the brush! something was happening around them that they did not understand.
As the light failed, the figures of horsemen emerged from the brush, cutting mile-long shadows into the flat rays of sunset; the huge, heavy-shouldered man who signaled to his spread-out cowboys by turning his horse this way or that, in Indian horse language, was Dave Shannon.
They did not harass the cattle. Only, between sunset and the next daylight, no cow took a step other than in the direction of the Mexican border....
Dry-grass season; Texas scorched by the hot winds
All across the southern ranges a peculiar thing was happening. As word spread from twenty points of disturbance, certain of the older cattlemen began to sense that there was a curious, almost systematic order to what in itself seemed a widespread disruption. All over the Big Bend country, eastward almost to the well settled Nueces, westward beyond the barren Pecos, northward to the fever line, was breaking a spotty wave of raids of an unparalleled boldness. Far apart, but almost simultaneously, hell had busted loose in a great number of places, covering more than half of Texas.
And presently it began to appear that the tough, notoriously trouble-making outfits under Cleve Tanner were not holding together as they always had before. For almost a decade Ben Thorpe had been a law unto himself, and in Texas Cleve Tanner had been the expression of that private law. For a long time it had been supposed that to antagonize Cleve Tanner was to set against yourself the toughest and most unscrupulous range riders in Texas. But now it was beginning to appear that some of the toughest of them all were outside and didn't want to get in. Here and there men were beginning to desert the Tanner outfits sometimes fired because they had failed, sometimes voluntarily deserting to the ranks of the raiders who were now almost openly punishing the Thorpe-Tanner holdings. Some of the first to be missed from the Tanner ranks were the very men upon whom Tanner had depended as the hard, cutting edge of his range roughers....
Mid-August, in the season of driest heat-
Into the Potreros, by a little used trail, a blacksombreroed horseman rode. He was a tested gunman, a proved man whose name was known and feared half the length of the Great T
rail. Trouble-shooting for Cleve Tanner now, he was moving into the Potreros to find out what had gone wrong with some of Tanner's choicest herds. He had come fast, changing horses frequently, riding far into the night.
Loping down the almost invisible trail through the dark, his horse suddenly dropped from under him, headlong into nothingness. The pony might have stepped into a prairie dog hole-or it could have been the loop of a rope. But as the dazed rider struggled up, his mouth full of dirt, a rifle was prodding his belly, and a voice was saying, "Don't you think you might have took the wrong way?..."
Mid-August still, at the edge of the vast quadrant of the sand hills-
A very quiet file of riders came in the middle of the night into a roundup camp on the range of the Cross-Bar-Cross. So cleverly they moved that they were between the wagons before anyone knew that something was wrong. The foreman he had been one of Tanner's right-hand men almost since Tanner's beginnings stood up in his blankets, suddenly as wide awake as a roused wolf.
Instantly a gun muzzle was in his armpit, and a soft voice was saying, "We're taking this camp over, Bud."
It was Windy Slater, most silent and usually most wary of all Bill Roper's lieutenants, who made that mistake. It was a mistake that brought quick disaster to raider and raided alike, for Slater had misjudged his man. A gun ripped out of its leather, and two guns spoke at once; in a moment the camp was ablaze with the smashing reports of the short guns. Good brave cowboys, who didn't know what they were fighting for, but who spiked out gamely in the thin dark, dropped there on the Texas plain. A rumble of hoofs rose to a ground-shaking thunder as the held herd stampeded, later to break itself into a hundred bunches, lost in the sandy hills....
West Texas, far up the lonely Pecos
One of Cleve Tanner's outfit bosses was talking to the Ranger stationed at Mustang Point.
"Such a damn' outbust of lawlessness has cut loose here as I never seen before," he said.
The ranger here was Val McDonald. He had gone out nineteen times in battle, sometimes against Mexicans, sometimes against the Comanches, and he had hunted white renegades galore.
"Awfully tough," he said in his own sympathetic way.
The foreman of the outfit that was busted up was fit to be tied. "I tell you, we're being stolen blind," he raved. "Not just a calf here and there, either they take 'em in swoops and bunches. It's the boldest damn' thing I've ever seen. Even when there's no chance of getting clear with any cattle, they're game to stampede a cut herd that it's took weeks to round up, and scatter it from hell to-"
"This is one of Ben Thorpe's outfits? No?"
"Does that mean-"
"Well, what the hell, here? How many times has Cleve Tanner passed out the word, `The Rangers be damned?' He's put more obstructions in the way of things we was trying to do than any other one man. Who was it had the legislature cut down our pay until we practically ride for nothing, and furnish all our own stuff?"
"The question here is whether we're going to have any law, or are we going to have"
"From what I heard," McDonald said, "Cleve Tanner has left it be known that he's the biggest end of the law himself. Go talk to Cleve Tanner if you want law."
"My understanding is," the foreman argued, "that the Rangers are supposed to-"
"I'll move out and straighten up your little old range," McDonald said. "I'll be glad to. Just as soon as I get orders from headquarters. I'm waiting for them orders now!"
But the weeks rolled by, and headquarters was curiously still....
End of summer; a welcome end
Cleve Tanner himself, the Cleve Tanner, who represented Ben Thorpe in the south, master of breeding grounds, the man who controlled the roots of all Ben Thorpe's plains organization, was talking to the United States Marshal at San Antonio.
"There hasn't been such a wave of outlawry since the horse Indians was put down. Damnation, man! It's set us back ten years.... I know what your policy has been. Your idea is to let us fight it out for ourselves, against Mexico, against the Indians, against all hell. But I tell you, this thing comes from inside; this thing might be something that I couldn't beat without help."
The United States Marshal at San Antonio smiled to himself a little smile; and he said, "Seems like this must be a terrible bad thing for you, Cleve?"
"I'm telling you-"
"Go ahead and tell me. You're a Ben Thorpe man, ain't you? A right leading Ben Thorpe man. Well-maybe I'll tell you a couple of things, some
There was law in Texas, even in those days; but there was no such law as could stand against the combined renegades of the long trail, with behind them a lawyer who could delay forever in the courts; and a reckless expenditure of money, the source of which some suspected, but which was not definitely known.
ITH the fall, Lew Gordon, now in sole charge of the far-scattered cattle holdings he had shared with Dusty King, came to Texas to inspect the southern holdings of King-Gordon-the breeding ranges from which all the King-Gordon holdings drew their essential sustenance.
Reports kept coming to Bill Roper at his constantly shifting bases by way of the many riders who kept him in touch with his far-spread wild bunch. Nowadays few things of consequence happened on the Texas ranges that he did not know. He was aware, almost to the day, when Jody Gordon and her father returned to Texas; and by report, he traced Lew Gordon's travels. Sometimes he grinned to himself, a little ironically, as he thought of what Gordon must be learning.
Inevitably he knew that Jody was at the headquarters of the old Two-Circle, not far from Uvalde. The Two-Circle had been the original Gordon stand; from this camp had been driven the first trail herd that Dusty King had pushed north. It was a different outfit now than it had been then, for today it was King-Gordon's main headquarters in Texas. Here, as at Ogallala, Gordon had seen to it that a suitable house had been put up, of painted wood. Except that here, instead of the tall jig-sawed towers Lew Gordon had designed for Ogallala, the house was simple and rambling, based on the first little home in which Jody had been born.
Roper knew that she was there. Yet the fall dragged on, and November passed into December before he went to see her.
The northers were sweeping the Texas plains as Christmas drew near bitter winds that rushed across a thousand miles without obstruction, gathering a blasting force. The wild bunch was as good as holed up; there was little they could do. Roper's time now was spent in riding from one to another of those ranches upon which he had rehabilitated the men who had owned them before Cleve Tanner had swallowed them up. To hold his organization steady through the winter months was about all that he could accomplish. He hadn't done all he had hoped to do before winter closed not half of what he had hoped to do. Now he could only hang on, and plan for the action that spring would bring.
He had told himself that there was no use in his going to see Jody Gordon; but in the end, of course, he went.
He rode up to the Two-Circle ranch house in late afternoon of a cold December day. The sky was low and heavy, and the bitter norther had brought a scud of hard snow a long way to throw it in his face. Night was closing down two hours early, so that it was almost dark as he approached. There were ponies in the corrals; and threads of smoke trailed from the chimneys; but the place looked so tightly shut up that he could have readily believed that no one was there certainly no one who wanted to see him now.
He pulled up his horse a few yards from the kitchen gallery, then sat there looking at the house, his sheepskin hunched about his throat. Even now, having come this far, he almost made up his mind to go away.
Then Jody Gordon stepped out on the gallery in a whippy woolen dress, and stood estimating the uninvited horseman through the dusk. Something like the strike of a buffalo lance went through Bill Roper; it was so long since he had seen that one slim little figure that could so change everything under the sky, for him.
A split pole fence separated them; and after a moment she came across the few yards of space, leaning sideways against the bitter
wind, and stood gripping a bar of the fence as she peered up into his face.
"I knew it was you," she said.
"Child," said Bill Roper, "you get back in that house. You'll freeze!"
"Then you put up your horse and come in."
"Is your father here?"
"He's in San Ant onio."
"I don't think he'd want me here, Jody."
"Lew Gordon has never turned away any rider without a cup of coffee; not yet."
He gave in then, and stepped down; but when she tried to insist that he put his pony in the barn, a fragment of an old song went through his head
"My horses ain't hungry,
They won't eat your hay-"
"I'll only be here about a minute." Stubbornly he tied his horse to the fence, and followed her into the house.
The fire in the big wood range made the room a dazing contrast to the cold sweep of the prairie; he threw his coat open, but he did not take it off.
"How have you been?" he asked.
"I've been all right. You?"
"I've been all right."
Then a silence dropped between them, there in the long dusky kitchen of the ranch house; such an empty, unuseable silence as he had never seen between them before.
"Of course," Jody said, "we keep hearing about you."
"That's too bad. I expect you wouldn't be hearing anything good."
"No.
Silence again. He didn't know why he had come; there wasn't anything he could say. He stood by the stove, his eyes brooding on the iron. Deep in the pockets of his coat there was a trembling in his slack fingers, not caused by cold. It was a strange and uncomfortable thing to be so near this girl again, and yet to be so far away.
"Still," Jody said, "you seem to be getting done what you set out to do."