The Smoky Years

by Alan Lemay

  "You want we should cut for grade, at all?"

  "Drive everything don't stop to cut. If you fall in with some big bunches, more'n you can handle, let the poor stock and the mosshorns go to hell as they please; bring as many as you can, trying to save the best, and come on. A band of Gro' Vont' is going to meet us at Wolf Point. So I aim to drive north along the Prairie Elk. The two pairs of you working northeast and northwest can just as well start picking up cattle as you leave here, and push 'em along as you go."

  "What you want done if we run into Lasham's riders?"

  "I figure they'll be holed in until the snow lets up; but if it turns off clear, and you run into 'em, quit your cattle and circle back. What I want now is cattle, not war. You'll hear plenty of lead whispering `cousin' before you're through!"

  They slept that night under the slowly falling snow. Roper himself made coffee and routed out his riders two hours before the first light. They caught their horses in the dark, with hands that fumbled the stiffened ropes; then split off in pairs to comb the range.

  Roper left one man to hold the horses where they could be found again, and scouted southeast alone to look for signs of activity at Lasham's camp. A curl of sulky smoke hung over the little shanty by the corrals, but no one was working, so far as he could make out. He found himself badly tempted to go into the camp, posing as a wandering stranger, and see what he could learn from Lasham's winter foremen; but concluded that he could risk no gunfight now.

  For two days Roper watched the enemy camp while the snow held on, piling a deeper and deeper mat; then on the third day he returned to the rendezvous as the roundup men began straggling in.

  Tex Long was the first one back.

  "This range is plumb solid with stock," Tex declared. "How many head do you figure me and Kid Johnson scraped up, just us two?"

  "Well," Roper grunted, "upwards of a dozen- I should hope."

  "Better'n six hundred head! Lord Almighty, Bill! Figuring they're worth twenty dollars apiece, and allowing that all the other boys do as good, we're liable to get out of here with around eighty thousand dollars worth of cattle! You realize that?"

  "We're not out of here yet. The weather's breaking, Tex."

  "Let her break! Only thing bothers me, ain't those Gro' Vont' going to be awful spooky about coming down so close to Fort Union?"

  "They aren't worse scared than hungry, I guess."

  Tex Long couldn't understand Bill Roper's grim lack of enthusiasm. "Can't you get it through your head, kid? We're punishing hell out of him!"

  "I'm thinking of something else," Bill Roper said. "I'm thinking of a dead man under a pile of stone, south out of Ogallala."

  That was only a half truth. More than he was thinking of Dusty King, Roper was thinking of the letter in his pocket; the appeal of a girl who needed him in some unknown way, and who did not even know why he couldn't come.

  All the next day they worked to throw the little bunches together into a trail herd. Not all of them had done as well as Tex Long and Kid Johnson, but most of them had done well enough. And then, at last, the first herd privateered in the Great Raid began to roll. A long unsteadily-moving river of cattle poured northward, a dark welter in the thinning fall of the snow. White-faces, mostly, blocky and heavy, well wintered on the prairie hay-Roper counted two thousand six hundred odd!

  "Git on, you dogies-move up, move up!"

  Pressed hard by the heavy force of cowboys, the cattle bawled and complained but humped along northward into the valley of the Prairie Elk, leading out on their last long trail.

  Rounding up within a day's ride of Miles City itself, Roper's men had taken this herd almost out of the very corrals of Lasham's outposts; and yet, so far as any of them knew, that swift-moving drive represented a harder blow than had ever been struck a cattleman in a single raid. In all their months of effort the winter wild bunch had been unable to achieve an equal reprisal upon Lasham, and now they could hardly believe their own success. They forced the cattle hard, driving through the clogging snow at a rate incredible to men accustomed to handling market herds.

  "Roll along, roll along! Hup, Babe, hup!"

  The cattle that broke the way through the snow kept dropping back, blown and tired; but as fast as they failed, others were forced forward to take their places. Longhorned, stag-legged steers of the old Texas strain fought the riders, breaking the heavy column repeatedly in their wild-eyed thrusts for liberty, and these were allowed to get away. Gaunt, weak cattle lagged back, unable to keep up even under the snapping rope ends of the tail riders; they also were allowed to drop out, promptly forgotten. Yet, in that first day, the side riders swept in enough north-roaming cattle to more than make up the loss. Tex Long, wearing out ponies to do the work of six men, was singing a trail song, more exultantly than it had ever been sung before.

  "Roll, dogies, roll! Git on, git on!"

  Thus the first herd to fall to the Great Raid plowed northward, the backs of the hard-driven cattle steaming; northward across the tributaries of Timber Creek and the Little Dry, northward still beyond the valley of the Prairie Elk, gone, clean gone, out of Lasham's range. Their work had been bitter-hard in the smother of the snow; but their first slashing blow had met with an unbelievable success.

  "Hump, you cow critters! Turn him, boy!"

  Roper went with the herd as far as Circle Horse Creek; but when they had forded the shallows, crashing through the rotten ice, he turned back. With him he took four men who he believed would do what he said. The cattle were moving more slowly now, plodding doggedly through the heavy going; Tex Long and the remaining eight men could hold them to their way. What was needed now was work of a different kind, and Roper thought he knew how that was to be done.

  It was his intention to fight a rear guard action not only for this first herd, which would be delivered within the week to the Indians who would spirit it away, but for the protection of all the rest of the wild bunch raiding to westward.

  But now as he neared the head of the Little Dry, a rider came dropping down a long slope upon a racing horse. His carbine was held above his ragged sombrero in sign of peace; and as he came near they saw that it was Hat Crick Tommy.

  Roper jumped his horse out to meet Hat Crick. "What is it? Is there any word? Did she-"

  Tommy's face was haggard with fatigue. "She's gone!" he jerked out. "She's been to Miles City and now she's gone!"

  "Gone? Gone where?"

  "Nobody knows. She's missing disappeared - strayed or lost or rustled, God knows which! Her father's wild crazy, and every K-G outfit in the north is combing the trails-"

  Roper sat staring for a full half minute. Then his hands fumbled for his reata, shook out the loop.

  "Turn that roan pony! I've got to have a fresh horse...."

  HOSHONE WILCE, riding with Jody Gordon through the same hundred-mile snow which screened Bill Roper and Tex Long in their raid on the Little Dry, found himself the most bewildered and the most unhappy of men.

  In a way, he sympathized with Jody's purpose - insofar as he understood it. But what stood out a good deal more plainly in his thoughts was that his luck was putting him in wrong with some very roughacting people. Shoshone saw with great clarity that he had every chance of getting himself shot.

  He could have refused to guide Jody Gordon to Bill Roper's rendezvous; he thought it improbable that Jody Gordon would have been able to locate the rendezvous alone. But whether she found it, or merely got herself lost, Shoshone Wilce would have been answerable to Bill Roper for leaving her to attempt the ride alone. And he supposed that Roper, now accredited one of the most dangerous and unrelenting gunfighters on the Plains, would be hot on his trail.

  The alternative he had chosen offered no greater prospect for a long and helpful life. Lew Gordon would go wild as a wounded silvertip at the disappear ance of his daughter; and every King-Gordon cowboy in the country would be scouring the brakes after Shoshone's scalp. The situation would have looked better to him if he had seen any h
ope of Jody's succeeding in getting Bill Roper and her father together.

  "You'll never get anywheres with it," he kept objecting to Jody. "I'd just as leave try to hitch up a bobcat and a longhorn steer, and drive 'em in team, as try to get your Paw and Bill Roper together."

  "I can try. I have to try."

  For Jody believed now that the split between Lew Gordon and Bill Roper was the basis of inconceivable disaster not only immediate and personal, but far-reaching in its import to the cow country. Together, those two very different cattlemen could have beaten Thorpe, and consolidated the King-Gordon empire. Bill Roper could have been built into another Dusty King, supplying the bold, hard-fighting, but practical qualities which Dusty King had meant to the partnership of King-Gordon. Without Dusty King or Bill Roper in Dusty King's place Jody Gordon felt that King-Gordon was incomplete, unfitted to survive the times; instead of settling its vast foundations into a sound structure that would steady the whole cow country, King-Grdon would go down, carrying many lesser cattle companies with it, injuring the cow country throughout the length of the Plains.

  Separated, Lew Gordon and Bill Roper were mutually destructive; Lew Gordon was probably right that Bill Roper's savage attacks upon the Thorpe interests were the cause of Ben Thorpe's heavy reprisals upon King-Gordon. And even though Roper might bring down Ben Thorpe in the end, which still seemed incredible, he could never profit by his victory, even if he lived. Unless Gordon and Roper could be reconciled, Roper would in the end become just one more outlawed cowboy whose trails could have no meaning, and only one end.

  Jody Gordon had one other motive in attempting the all but hopeless reconciliation. She believed her father's life to be in the sharpest danger. Bill Roper, an even harder fighter than the old trail breaker who had trained him, would automatically take those precautions that would safeguard her father's life, if once they could be brought to work together again.

  But the first move toward reconciliation must come from Bill Roper himself. If she could persuade Roper to this, there was a bare possibility that she could also manage her father. It was a forlorn hope; but, as she saw it, of such vital importance that it could no longer be ignored. It was as if events that would alter the whole history of the cow country lay in her persuasion of those two stubborn men. She rode doggedly now, with set face, trusting Shoshone to find the way.

  They rode until after midnight, blind, as far as Jody could see, in the wet fall of the snow. They threw down their bedrolls then in the shelter of stunted snow-laden trees, and Shoshone Wilce measured grain for the horses onto his own poncho.

  "They'll never follow the trail I've twisted out - not with the snow favoring us like it does," Shoshone suggested hopefully. "We've lost considerable time, foxing up the trail; but it would be awful kinder unlucky for me, if we was caught up with."

  "I know."

  They pushed on again, miserable in the raw dawn, after coffee which Shoshone made in a frying pan. All day long they rode steadily, stopping only once for bread and bacon, and to bolster their horses with more grain. They were moving through a country now which Jody had never seen, a country broken and rolling with long weather-breaks of scraggly timber. Twice they sighted distant smoke, pressed low by the leaden sky; watchful and worried, Shoshone gave these signs of encampment a wide berth.

  The snow slacked off, giving place to a bitter wind. Jody's knees stiffened with saddle cramp and she continually had to nurse her fingers deep in her pockets to keep them from going numb. She had a strange sense of having taken an irrevocable step which she might find great reason to regret. The fact that the snow had hidden the trail they had made, so that no one could follow to find her, gave her a feeling of being cut off from everything friendly she had ever known. She no longer knew where she was. She set her eyes straight ahead, too proud to ask Shoshone how far they had come, or how much farther they must go.

  Just before dusk they climbed a long rocky ridge which commanded the length of a shallow valley set brokenly with juniper and ragged cedar.

  Shoshone motioned her to stop her horse. "Wait a minute."

  Far down the valley Jody Gordon could see a faint haze that blurred a rabbit-fur grey and brown of the brush and runty timber. A whisky jack cried mournfully for a time somewhere in the scrub while Shoshone Wilce sat motionless upon his tired horse; but this sound had stopped before Shoshone finished his study of the valley.

  "That's smoke," Shoshone Wilce said at last. "This ought to be the place."

  "So we really got here at last...."

  "Two hours more."

  "The smoke-that means he's there."

  Shoshone Wilce, suspicious and doubtful by temperament, was less sure. "Don't know if it's him. Somebody's there. Or, anyway, somebody's been there."

  He shivered, rubbed his nose with his glove, and led off down the slope.

  Night overtook them as they threaded the long valley. Just as darkness closed, a great horned owl dodged in front of them, winging silently close to the snow, a drifting shadow; but though it passed almost under their horses' feet, the tired ponies did not shy. To Jody in her weariness, it seemed that they plodded on and on while the prophesied two hours stretched at least to four. She had almost given up ever reaching the end of the trail at all when Shoshone Wilce spoke at last, low-voiced.

  "I kin smell the cooking smoke."

  "Good."

  "I hope so. I don't know this country like I wish I did."

  A swift panic chilled Jody at the thought of meeting Bill Roper face to face again after so long a time. She tried to imagine what she was going to say to him, and was completely unable. She wondered how he would look, and whether he would be glad to see her.

  Now Shoshone Wilce reached out to catch her bridle reins, and they stopped. She started to ask what was the matter, but checked herself. Wilce had become tensely watchful, and she saw that he was listening.

  After a moment or two of utter stillness, Wilce whispered "Wait a minute;" and pushed his horse slowly forward into the dark. For a little while as he moved away from her she could see the tall black silhouette of his horse against the pale snow, but soon this blurred with the darkness and was lost. Just after she lost sight of him altogether she heard his pony's hoofs fall silent as if he had stopped again; and there was a long interval while nothing happened, and she heard no sound except the low thin voice of the wind across the snow-laden brush, and the rhythmic breathing of her own pony.

  Growing impatient at last, and a little uneasy, Jody moved her pony ahead after Shoshone. There was a moment or two of panic, in which it seemed that she had lost him altogether in the dark; but her pony knew where the other was if she did not, and presently brought her alongside.

  Shoshone Wilce was sitting perfectly motionless on his horse, staring ahead into a darkness to which the snow gave a curiously deceptive luminosity that did not aid the eye.

  "That's her, all right," Shoshone whispered at last.

  Straining her eyes, Jody could not see what he was looking at.

  "I don't like this so good," Shoshone said.

  "What's the matter?"

  "No lights."

  "Maybe there's no window on this side."

  "Otter be."

  "You mean you think-"

  "Shut up."

  They moved ahead a little now, Jody holding her pony beside that of Shoshone Wilce. Shoshone moved his horse forward twenty paces, and stopped again for a full minute; then ten paces more.

  Jody said, "What in the world-"

  Wilce seized her arm and silenced her with a quick shake. Then suddenly-

  An inarticulate oath snarled in Shoshone's throat; he snatched at Jody's rein, whirling her pony. His own horse came straight up on its hind legs as he spun it at close quarters.

  "Get going!" he said between his teeth; and brought his romal down across her pony's flank in a snapping cut that made it plunge ahead. She heard the rip of steel on leather as Shoshone's gun came out. Then the silence of the night exp
loded into happenings that were incredible.

  Two guns smashed out in a swift flurry of detonation. A queer whistling grunt was knocked out of Jody's horse. It dropped from under her, and the ground struck upward with stunning violence.

  For a moment Jody Gordon lay motionless, her cheek buried in the cool snow. She was aware of further firing, and more than one running horse, and she tasted blood from a cut lip; but at first she was unable to think.

  After a moment, as she raised herself, she could make out figures that seemed all around her, although there were only two or three. Her hair had fallen loose about her shoulders, blowing into her mouth and eyes, and she struck it aside.

  Someone said, "Well, we got one of 'em, anyway."

  "Haul him inside."

  "Look out now, Bud no funny business." The voice was unknown to her, as was the figure that now bent over her. Suddenly the man jerked forward to peer at her more closely.

  "Jesus-what the-Hey! It's Calamity Jane, or somebody!"

  Jody Gordon struggled to her feet, shock giving way to anger. "You fools, are you crazy? Bill Roper will kill you for this!"

  There was a moment's silence, and she sensed rather than saw that they were looking at each other.

  "Bill Roper," one of them repeated. "She says she's looking for Bill Roper!"

  "Lady, you better come inside!"

  AZED and shaky as the fall of her killed horse had left her, Jody Gordon still appeared the most self possessed of them all as she allowed herself to be led into the little cabin at which she had hoped to find Bill Roper. Her boots were silent on the hard-tramped bare earth of the floor; but the clean blue steel of her spurs rang thinly as she turned to face the two men who followed her.