Nobody ever claimed the way of the West was easy. It had rich rewards, but you had to earn them.
You still do.
FORK YOUR OWN BRONCS
_______________
MAC MARCY TURNED in the saddle and, resting his left hand on the cantle, glanced back up the arroyo. His lean, brown face was troubled. There were cattle here, all right, but too few.
At this time of day, late afternoon and very hot, there should have been a steady drift of cattle toward the waterhole.
Ahead of him he heard a steer bawl and then another. Now what? Above the bawling of the cattle he heard another sound, a sound that turned his face gray with worry. It was the sound of hammers.
He needed nothing more to tell him what was happening. Jingle Bob Kenyon was fencing the waterhole!
As he rounded the bend in the wash, the sound of hammers ceased for an instant, but only for an instant. Then they continued with their work.
Two strands of barbed wire had already been stretched tight and hard across the mouth of the wash. Several cowhands were stretching the third wire of what was obviously to be a four-wire fence.
Already Marcy’s cattle were bunching near the fence, bawling for water.
As he rode nearer, two men dropped their hammers and lounged up to the fence. Marcy’s eyes narrowed and his gaze shifted to the big man on the roan horse. Jingle Bob Kenyon was watching him with grim humor.
Marcy avoided the eyes of the two other men by the fence, Vin Ricker and John Soley, who could mean only one thing for him—trouble, bad trouble. Vin Ricker was a gunhand and a killer. John Soley was anything Vin told him to be.
“This is a rotten trick, Kenyon.” Marcy declared angrily. “In this heat my herd will be wiped out.”
Kenyon’s eyes were unrelenting. “That’s just tough,” he stated flatly. “I warned yuh when yuh fust come in here to git out while the gittin’ was good. Yuh stayed on. Yuh asked for it. Now yuh take it or git out.”
_______
TEMPER FLARING WITHIN him like a burst of flame, Marcy glared. But deliberately he throttled his fury. He would have no chance here. Ricker and Soley were too much for him, let alone the other hands and Kenyon himself.
“If you don’t like it,” Ricker sneered, “why don’t yuh stop us? I hear tell yuh’re a plumb salty hombre.”
“You’d like me to give you a chance to kill me, wouldn’t you?” Marcy asked harshly. “Someday I’ll get you without your guns, Ricker an’ I’ll tear down your meat house.”
Ricker laughed. “I don’t want to dirty my hands on yuh, or I’d come over an’ make yuh eat those words. If yuh ever catch me without these guns, yuh’ll wish to old Harry I still had ’em.”
Marcy turned his eyes away from the gunman and looked at Kenyon.
“Kenyon, I didn’t think this of you. Without water, my cows won’t last three days, an’ you know it. You’ll bust me flat.”
Kenyon was unrelenting. “This is a man’s country, Marcy,” he said drily. “Yuh fork your own broncs an’ yuh git your own water. Don’t come whinin’ to me. Yuh moved in on me, an’ if yuh git along, it’ll be on your own.”
Kenyon turned his horse and rode away. For an instant Marcy stared after him, seething with rage. Then, abruptly, he wheeled his grayish-black horse—a moros—and started back up the arroyo. Even as he turned, he became aware that only six lean steers faced the barbed wire.
He had ridden but a few yards beyond the bend when that thought struck him like a blow. Six head of all the hundreds he had herded in here! By rights they should all be at the waterhole or heading that way. Puzzled, he started back up the trail.
By rights, there should be a big herd here. Where could they be? As he rode back toward his claim shack, he stared about him. No cattle were in sight. His range was stripped.
Rustlers? He scowled. But there had been no rustling activity of which he had heard. Ricker and Soley were certainly the type to rustle cattle, but Marcy knew Kenyon had been keeping them busy on the home range.
He rode back toward the shack, his heart heavy.
He had saved for seven years, riding cattle trails to Dodge, Abilene, and Ellsworth to get the money to buy his herd. It was his big chance to have a spread of his own, a chance for some independence and a home.
A home! He stared bitterly at the looming rimrock behind his outfit. A home meant a wife, and there was only one girl in the world for him. There would never be another who could make him feel as Sally Kenyon did. But she would have to be old Jingle Bob’s daughter!
Not that she had ever noticed him. But in those first months before the fight with Jingle Bob became a dog-eatdog fight, Marcy had seen her around, watched her, been in love with her from a distance. He had always hoped that when his place had proved up and he was settled, he might know her better. He might even ask her to marry him.
It had been a foolish dream. Yet day by day it became even more absurd. He was not only in a fight with her father, but he was closer than ever to being broke.
Grimly, his mind fraught with worry, he cooked his meager supper, crouching before the fireplace. Again and again the thought kept recurring—where were his cattle? If they had been stolen, they would have to be taken down past the waterhole and across Jingle Bob’s range. There was no other route from Marcy’s corner of range against the rim. For a horseman, yes. But not for cattle.
The sound of a walking horse startled him. He straightened and then stepped away from the fire and put the bacon upon the plate, listening to the horse as it drew nearer. Then he put down his food, and loosening his gun, he stepped to the door.
The sun had set long since, but it was not yet dark. He watched a gray horse coming down from the trees leading up to the rim. Suddenly he gulped in surprise.
_______
IT WAS SALLY Kenyon! He stepped outside and walked into the open. The girl saw him and waved a casual hand and then reined in.
“Have you a drink of water?” she asked, smiling. “It’s hot, riding.”
“Sure,” he said, trying to smile. “Coffee, if you want. I was just fixin’ to eat a mite. Want to join me? Of course,” he said sheepishly, “I ain’t no hand with grub.”
“I might take some coffee.”
Sally swung down, drawing off her gantlets. She had always seemed a tall girl, but on the ground she came just to his shoulder. Her hair was honey colored, her eyes gray.
He caught the quick glance of her eyes as she looked around. He saw them hesitate with surprise at the spectacle of flowers blooming near the door. She looked up, and their eyes met.
“Ain’t much time to work around,” he confessed. “I sort of been tryin’ to make it look like a home.”
“Did you plant the flowers?” she asked curiously.
“Yes, ma’am. My mother was always a great hand for flowers. I like ’em, too, so when I built this cabin, I set some out. The wild flowers, I transplanted.”
He poured coffee into a cup and handed it to her. She sipped the hot liquid and looked at him.
“I’ve been hearing about you,” she said.
“From Jingle Bob?”
She nodded. “And some others. Vin Ricker, for one. He hates you.”
“Who else?”
“Chen Lee.”
“Lee?” Marcy shook his head. “I don’t place him.”
“He’s Chinese, our cook. He seems to know a great deal about you. He thinks you’re a fine man. A great fighter, too. He’s always talking about some Mullen gang you had trouble with.”
“Mullen gang?” he stared. “Why, that was in—” He caught himself. “No, ma’am, I reckon he’s mistook. I don’t know any Chinese an’ there ain’t no Mullen gang around I know of.”
That, he reflected, was no falsehood. The Mullen gang had all fitted very neatly into the boothill he had prepared for them back in Bentown. They definitely weren’t around.
“Going to stay here?” she asked, looking at him over her coffee cup, her gray eyes level.
/>
His eyes flashed. “I was fixin’ to, but I reckon your old man has stopped me by fencin’ that waterhole. He’s a hard man, your father.”
“It’s a hard country.” She did not smile. “He’s got ideas about it. He drove the Mescaleros out. He wiped out the rustlers; he took this range. He doesn’t like the idea of any soft-going, second-run cowhand coming in and taking over.”
His head jerked up.
“Soft-going?” he flared. “Second-run? Why, that old billy goat!”
Sally turned toward her horse. “Don’t tell me. Tell him. If you’ve nerve enough!”
He got up and took the bridle of her horse. His eyes were hard.
“Ma’am,” he said, striving to make his voice gentle, “I think you’re a mighty fine person, an’ sure enough purty, but that father of yours is a rough-ridin’ old buzzard. If it wasn’t for that Ricker hombre-”
“Afraid?” she taunted, looking down at him.
“No, ma’am,” he said quietly. “Only I ain’t a killin’ man. I was raised a Quaker. I don’t aim to do no fightin’.”
“You’re in a fighting man’s country,’ she warned him. “And you are cutting in on a fighting man’s range.”
She turned her gray and started to ride away. Suddenly she reined in and looked back over her shoulder.
“By the way,” she said, “there’s water up on the rim.”
_______
WATER UP ON the rim? What did she mean? He turned his head and stared up at the top of the great cliff, which loomed high overhead into the night. It was fully a mile away, but it seemed almost behind his house.
How could he get up to the rim? Sally had come from that direction. In the morning he would try. In the distance, carried by the still air of night, he heard a cow bawling. It was shut off from the waterhole. His six head, starving for water!
Marcy walked out to the corral and threw a saddle on the moros. He swung into the saddle and rode at a canter toward the waterhole.
They heard him coming, and he saw a movement in the shadows by the cottonwoods.
“Hold it!” a voice called. “What do you want?”
“Let that fence down an’ put them cows through!” Marcy yelled.
There was a harsh laugh. “Sorry, amigo. No can do. Only Kenyon cows drink here.”
“All right,” Marcy snapped. “They are Kenyon cows. I’m givin’ ’em to him. Let the fence down an let ’em drink. I ain’t seein’ no animal die just to please an old plughead. Let em through.”
Then he heard Sally’s voice. He saw her sitting her horse beside old Joe Linger, who was her bodyguard, teacher, and friend. An old man who had taught her to ride and to shoot and who had been a scout for the Army at some time in the past.
Sally was speaking, and he heard her say, “Let them through, Texas. If they are our cows, we don’t want to have them die on us.”
Marcy turned the moros and rode back toward his cabin, a sense of defeat heavy upon him….
He rolled out of his blankets with the sun and after a quick breakfast, saddled the grayish-black horse and started back toward the rim. He kept remembering Sally’s words, “There is water on the rim.” Why had she told him that? What good would water do him if it was way up on the rim?
There must be a way up. By backtracking the girl, he could find it. He was worried about the cattle. The problem of their disappearance kept working into his thoughts. That was another reason for his ride, the major reason. If the cattle were still on his ranch, they were back in the breaks at the foot of the rim.
As he backtracked the girl’s horse, he saw cow tracks, more and more of them. Obviously, some of his cattle had drifted this way. It puzzled him, yet he had to admit that he knew little of this country.
Scarcely a year before, he had come into this range, and when he arrived, the grass in the lower reaches of the valley was good, and there were mesquite beans. The cattle grew fat. With hotter and dryer weather, they had shown more and more of a tendency to keep to shady hillsides and to the canyons.
The cow tracks scattered out and disappeared. He continued on the girl’s trail. He was growing more and more puzzled, for he was in the shadow of the great cliff now, and any trail that mounted it must be frightfully steep. Sally, of course, had grown up in this country on horseback. With her always had been Joe Linger. Old Joe had been one of the first white men to settle in the rim country.
Marcy skirted a clump of piñon and emerged on a little sandy level at the foot of the cliff. This, at one distant time, had been a stream bed, a steep stream that originated somewhere back up in the rimrock and flowed down here and deeper into his range.
Then he saw the trail. It was a narrow catwalk of rock that clung to the cliff’s edge in a way that made him swallow as he looked at it. The catwalk led up the face of the cliff and back into a deep gash in the face of the rim, a gash invisible from below.
The moros snorted a few times, but true to its mountain blood, it took the trail on dainty feet. In an hour Marcy rode out on the rim itself. All was green here, green grass. The foliage on the trees was greener than below. There was every indication of water, but no sign of a cow. Not even a range-bred cow would go up such a trail as Marcy had just ridden.
_______
FOLLOWING THE TRACKS of the gray, Marcy worked back through the cedar and piñon until he began to hear a muffled roar. Then he rode through the trees and reined in at the edge of a pool that was some twenty feet across. Water flowed into it from a fair-sized stream, bubbling over rocks and falling into the pool. There were a number of springs here, and undoubtedly the supply of water was limitless. But where did it go?
Dismounting, Marc, walked down to the edge of the water and knelt on a flat rock and leaned far out.
Brush hung far out over the water at the end of the pool, brush that grew on a rocky ledge no more than three feet above the surface of the water. But beneath that ledge was a black hole at least eight feet long. Water from the pool was pouring into that black hole.
Mac Marcy got up and walked around the pool to the ledge. The brush was very thick, and he had to force his way through. Clinging precariously to a clump of manzanita, he leaned out over the rim of the ledge and tried to peer into the hole. He could see nothing except a black slope of water and that the water fell steeply beyond that slope.
He leaned further out, felt the manzanita give way slowly, and made a wild clutch at the neighboring brush. Then he plunged into the icy waters of the pool.
He felt himself going down, down, down! He struck out, trying to swim, but the current caught him and swept him into the gaping mouth of the wide black hole under the ledge.
Darkness closed over his head. he felt himself shooting downward. He struck something and felt it give beneath him, and then something hit him a powerful blow on the head. Blackness and icy water closed over him.
Chattering teeth awakened him. He was chilled to the bone and soaking wet. For a moment he lay on hard, smooth rock in darkness, head throbbing, trying to realize what had happened. His feet felt cold. He pulled them up and turned over to a sitting position in a large cave. Only then did he realize his feet had been lying in a pool of water.
Far above he could see a faint glimmer of light, a glimmer feebly reflecting from the black, glistening roar of a fall. He tilted his head back and stared upward through the gloom. That dim light, the hole through which he had come, was at least sixty feet above him!
In falling he had struck some obstruction in the narrow chimney of the water’s course, some piece of driftwood or brush insecurely wedged across the hole. It had broken his descent and had saved him.
His matches would be useless. Feeling around the cave floor in the dark, he found some dry tinder that had been lying here for years. He still had his guns, since they had been tied in place with rawhide thongs. He drew one of them, extracted a cartridge, and went to work on it with his hunting knife.
When it was open, he placed it carefully on the rock besid
e him. Then he cut shavings and crushed dried bark in his hand. Atop this he placed the powder from the open cartridge.
Then he went to work to strike a spark from a rock with the steel back of his knife. There was not the slightest wind here. Despite that, he worked for the better part of an hour before a spark sprang into the powder.
There was a bright burst of flame and the shavings crackled. He added fuel and then straightened up and stepped back to look around.
He stood on a wide ledge in the gloomy, closed cavern at the foot of the fall’s first drop, down which he had fallen. The water struck the rock not ten feet away from him. Then it took another steep drop off to the left. He could see by the driftwood that had fallen clear that it was the usual thing for the rushing water to cast all water-borne objects onto this ledge.
The ledge had at one time been deeply gouged and worn by running water. Picking up a torch, Marcy turned and glanced away into the darkness. There lay the old dry channel, deeply worn and polished by former running water.
At some time in the past, this had been the route of the stream underground. In an earthquake or some breakthrough of the rock, the water had taken the new course.
Thoughtfully, Marcy calculated his situation.
_______
HE WAS FEARFUL of his predicament. From the first moment of consciousness in that utter darkness, he had been so. There is no fear more universal than the fear of entombment alive, the fear of choking, strangling in utter darkness beyond the reach of help.
Mac Marcy was no fool. He was, he knew, beyond the reach of help. The moros was ground hitched in a spot where there was plenty of grass and water. The grayish-black horse would stay right there.
No one, with the exception of Sally, ever went to the top of the rim. It was highly improbable that she would go again soon. In many cases, weeks would go by without anyone stopping by Marcy’s lonely cabin. If he was going to get out of this hole, he would have to do it by his own efforts.
Collection 2005 - Riding For The Brand (v5.0) Page 21