The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  “Shall we go?” Mr. Dill poised the two heads for another bang and held them so. By this time every one in the room was watching, but he had eyes only for Billy.

  “Just as you say,” Billy assented submissively.

  Mr. Dill shook the two with their faces close together, led them to a couple of chairs and set them emphatically down. “Now, see if you can behave yourselves,” he advised, in the tone a father would have used toward two refractory boys. “You have been acting boorishly and disgracefully all evening. It was you who directed me wrong, today. You have not, at any time since I first met you, acted like gentlemen; I should be sorry to think this country held many such brainless louts.” He turned inquiringly toward Charming Billy and nodded his head toward the door. Billy, stooping unsteadily for his hat which he discovered under his feet, followed him meekly out.

  CHAPTER VII

  “Till Hell’s a Skating-rink”

  Charming Billy opened his eyes slowly, but with every sense at the normal degree of alertness; which was a way he had, born of light sleeping and night-watching. He had slept heavily, from the feel of his head, and he remembered the unwisdom of drinking four glasses of whisky and then changing irresponsibly to beer. He had not undressed, it would seem, and he was lying across the middle of a bed with his spurred boots hanging over the edge. A red comforter had been thrown across him, and he wondered why. He looked around the room and discovered Mr. Dill seated in a large, cane rocker—which was unquestionably not big enough for his huge person—his feet upon another chair and his hands folded inertly on his drawn-up knees. He was asleep, with his head lying against the chair-back and his face more melancholy than ever and more wistful. His eyes, Billy observed, were deep-sunk and dark-ringed. He sat up suddenly—did Billy, and threw off the cover with some vehemence. “Darn me for a drunken chump!” he exclaimed, and clanked over to the chair.

  “Here, Dilly”—to save the life of him he could not refrain from addressing him so—“why in thunder didn’t yuh kick me awake, and make me get off your bed? What did yuh let me do it for—and you setting up all night—oh, this is sure a hell of a note!”

  Mr. Dill opened his eyes, stared blankly and came back from his dreaming. “You were so—so impatient when I tried to get you up,” he explained in a tired voice. “And you had a way of laying your hands on your revolver when I insisted. It seems you took me for a shepherd and were very unfriendly; so I thought it best to let you stay as you were, but I’m afraid you were not very comfortable. One can rest so much better between sheets. You would not,” he added plaintively, “even permit me to take your boots off for you.”

  Charming Billy sat down upon the edge of the bed, all tousled as he was, and stared abstractedly at Mr. Dill. Perhaps he had never before felt so utterly disgusted with himself, or realized so keenly his shortcomings. Not even the girl had humbled him so completely as had this long, lank, sinfully grammatical man from Michigan.

  “You’ve sure got me where I live, Dilly,” he said slowly and haltingly, feeling mechanically for the makings of a smoke. “Charming Billy Boyle ain’t got a word to say for himself. But if yuh ain’t plumb sick and disgusted with the spectacle I’ve made uh myself, yuh can count on me till hell’s a skating-rink. I ain’t always thisaway. I do have spells when I’m some lucid.”

  It was not much, but such as it was it stood for his oath of allegiance.

  Alexander P. Dill sat up straight, his long, bony fingers—which Billy could still mentally see gripping the necks of those two in the saloon—lying loosely upon the chair-arms. “I hope you will not mention the matter again,” he said. “I realize that this is not Michigan, and that the temptations are—But we will not discuss it. I shall be very grateful for your friendship, and—”

  “Grateful!” snorted Billy, spilling tobacco on the strip of faded ingrain carpet before the bed. “Grateful—hell!”

  Mr. Dill looked at him a moment and there was a certain keen man-measuring behind the wistfulness. But he said no more about the friendship of Charming Billy Boyle, which was as well.

  That is why the two of them later sat apart on the sunny side of the hotel “office”—which was also a saloon—and talked of many things, but chiefly of the cattle industry as Montana knows it and of the hopes and the aims of Alexander P. Dill. Perhaps, also, that is why Billy breathed clean of whisky and had the bulk of his winter wages still unspent in his pocket.

  “Looks to me,” he was saying between puffs, “like you’d uh stayed back where yuh knew the lay uh the land, instead uh drifting out here where it’s all plumb strange to yuh.”

  “Well, several incidents influenced my actions,” Mr. Dill explained quietly. “I had always lived within twenty miles of my birthplace. I owned a general store in a little place near the old farm, and did well. The farm paid well, also. Then mother died and the place did not seem quite the same. A railroad was built through the town and the land I owned there rose enormously in value. I had a splendid location for a modern store but I could not seem to make up my mind to change. So I sold out everything—store, land, the home farm and all, and received a good figure—a very good figure. I was very fortunate in owning practically the whole townsite—the new townsite, that is. I do not like these so-called booms, however, and so I left to begin somewhere else. I did not care to enter the mercantile business again, and our doctor advised me to live as much as possible in the open air. Mother died of consumption. So I decided to come West and buy a cattle ranch. I believed I should like it. I always liked animals.”

  “Uh-huh—so do I.” It was not just what Charming Billy most wanted to say, but that much was perfectly safe, and noncommittal to say.

  Mr. Dill was silent a minute, looking speculatively across to the Hardup Saloon which was practically empty and therefore quite peaceful. Billy, because long living on the range made silence easy, smoked and said nothing.

  “Mr. Boyle,” began Dill at last, in the hesitating way that he had used when Billy first met him, “you say you know this country, and have worked at cattle-raising for a good many years—”

  “Twelve,” supplemented Charming Billy. “Turned my first cow when I was sixteen.”

  “So you must be perfectly familiar with the business. I frankly admit that I am not familiar with it. You say you are at present out of employment and so I am thinking seriously of offering you a position myself, as confidential adviser if you like. I really need some one who can accompany me about the country and keep me from such deplorable blunders as was yesterday’s experience. After I have bought a place, I shall need some one who is familiar with the business and will honestly work for my interests and assist me in the details until I have myself gained a practical working-knowledge of it. I think I can make such an arrangement to your advantage as well as my own. From the start the salary would be what is usually paid to a foreman. What do you say?”

  For an appreciable space Charming Billy Boyle did not say a word. He was not stupid and he saw in a flash all the possibilities that lay in the offer. To be next the very top—to have his say in the running of a model cow-outfit—and it should be a model outfit if he took charge, for he had ideas of his own about how these things should be done—to be foreman, with the right to “hire and fire” at his own discretion—He turned, flushed and bright-eyed, to Dill.

  “God knows why yuh cut me out for the job,” he said in a rather astonished voice. “What you’ve seen uh me, so far, ain’t been what I’d call a gilt-edge recommend. But if you’re fool enough to mean it serious, it’s as I told yuh a while back: Yuh can count on me till they’re cutting figure-eights all over hell.”

  “That, according to the scientists who are willing to concede the existence of such a place, will be quite as long as I shall be likely to have need of your loyalty,” observed Mr. Dill, puckering his long face into the first smile Billy had seen him attempt.

  He did not intimate the fact that he had inquired very closely into the record and the general range quali
fications of Charming Billy Boyle, sounding, for that purpose, every responsible man in Hardup. With the new-born respect for him bred by his peculiarly efficacious way of handling those who annoyed him beyond the limit, he was told the truth and recognized it as such. So he was not really as rash and as given over to his impulses as Billy, in his ignorance of the man, fancied.

  The modesty of Billy would probably have been shocked if he had heard the testimony of his fellows concerning him. As it was, he was rather dazed and a good deal inclined to wonder how Alexander P. Dill had ever managed to accumulate enough capital to start anything—let alone a cow-outfit—if he took on trust every man he met. He privately believed that Dill had taken a long chance, and that he should consider himself very lucky because he had accidentally picked a man who would not “steal him blind.”

  * * * *

  After that there were many days of riding to and fro, canvassing all northern Montana in search of a location and an outfit that suited them and that could be bought. And in the riding, Mr. Dill became under the earnest tutelage of Charming Billy a shade less ignorant of range ways and of the business of “raising wild cattle for the Eastern markets.”

  He even came to speak quite easily of “outfits” in all the nice shades of meaning which are attached to that hard-worked term. He could lay the saddle-blanket smooth and unwrinkled, slap the saddle on and cinch it without fixing it either upon the withers or upon the rump of his long-suffering mount. He could swing his quirt without damaging his own person, and he rode with his stirrups where they should be to accommodate the length of him—all of which speaks eloquently of the honest intentions of Dill’s confidential adviser.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Just a Day-dream

  Charming Billy rode humped over the saddle-horn, as rides one whose mind feels the weight of unpleasant thoughts. Twice he had glanced uncertainly at his companion, opening his lips for speech; twice he had closed them silently and turned again to the uneven trail.

  Mr. Dill also was humped forward in the saddle, but if one might judge from his face it was because he was cold. The wind blew chill from out the north and they were facing it; the trail they followed was frozen hard and the gray clouds above promised snow. The cheek-bones of Dill were purple and the point of his long nose was very red. Tears stood in his eyes, whipped there by the biting wind.

  “How far are we now from town?” he asked dispiritedly.

  “Only about five miles,” Billy cheered. Then, as if trivial speech had made easier what he had in mind to say, he turned resolutely toward the other. “Yuh expect to meet old man Robinson there, don’t yuh?”

  “That was the arrangement, as I understood it”

  “And you’re thinking strong of buying him out?”

  “His place appeals to me more than any of the others, and—yes, it seems to me that I can’t do better.” Mr. Dill turned the collar of his coat up a bit farther—or fancied he did so—and looked questioningly at Billy.

  “Yuh gave me leave to advise yuh where yuh needed it,” Billy said almost challengingly, “and I’m going to call yuh, right here and now. If yuh take my advice yuh won’t go making medicine with old Robinson any more. He’ll do yuh, sure. He’s asking yuh double what the outfit’s worth. They all are. It looks to me like they think you’re just out here to get rid of your pile and the bigger chunk they can pry loose from yuh the better. I was going to put yuh next before this, only yuh didn’t seem to take to any uh the places real serious, so it wasn’t necessary.”

  “I realize that one cannot buy land and cattle for nothing,” Dill chuckled. “It seemed to me that, compared with the prices others have asked, Mr. Robinson’s offer was very reasonable.”

  “It may be lower than Jacobs and Wilter, but that don’t make it right.”

  “Well, there were the Two Sevens”—he meant the Seventy-Seven, but that was a mere detail—“I didn’t get to see the owner, you know. I have written East, however, and should hear from him in a few days.”

  “Yuh ain’t likely to do business with that layout, because I don’t believe they’d sell at any price. Old Robinson is the washout yuh want to ride around at present; I ain’t worrying about the rest, right now. He’s a smooth old devil, and he’ll do yuh sure.”

  To this Mr. Dill made no reply whatever. He fumbled the fastenings on his coon-skin coat, tried to pull his cap lower and looked altogether unhappy. And Charming Billy, not at ail sure that his advice would be taken or his warning heeded, stuck the spurs into his horse and set a faster pace reflecting gloomily upon the trials of being confidential adviser to one who, in a perfectly mild and good-mannered fashion, goes right along doing pretty much as he pleases.

  It made him think, somehow, of Miss Bridger and the way she had forced him to take his gun with him when he had meant to leave it. She was like Dill in that respect: nice and good-natured and smiling—only Dill smiled but seldom—and yet always managing to make you give up your own wishes. He wished vaguely that the wanderings of Dill would bring them back to the Double-Crank country, instead of leading them always farther afield. He did not, however, admit openly to himself that he wanted to see Miss Bridger again; yet he did permit himself to wonder if she ever played coon-can with any one else, or if she had already forgotten the game. Probably she had, and—well, a good many other things that he remembered quite distinctly.

  Later, when they had reached town, were warmed and fed and when even Billy was thinking seriously of sleep, Dill came over and sat down beside him solemnly, folded his bony hands upon knees quite as bony, regarded pensively the generously formed foot dangling some distance before him and smiled his puckered smile.

  “I have been wondering, William, if you had not some plan of your own concerning this cattle-raising business, which you think is better than mine but which you hesitate to express. If you have, I hope you will feel quite free to—er—lay it before the head of the firm. It may interest you to know that I have, as you would put it, ‘failed to connect’ with Mr. Robinson. So, if you have any ideas—”

  “Oh, I’m burning up with ’em,” Charming Billy retorted in a way he meant to be sarcastic, but which Mr. Dill took quite seriously.

  “Then I hope you won’t hesitate—”

  “Now look here, Dilly,” expostulated he, between puffs. “Recollect, it’s your money that’s going to feed the birds—and it’s your privilege to throw it out to suit yourself. Uh course, I might day-dream about the way I’d start into the cow-business if I was a millionaire—”

  “I’m not a millionaire,” Mr. Dill hastened to correct. “A couple of hundred thousand or so, is about all—”

  “Well, a fellow don’t have to pin himself down to just so many dollars and cents—not when he’s building himself a pet dream. And if a fellow dreams about starting up an outfit of his own, it don’t prove he’d make it stick in reality.” The tone of Billy, however, did not express any doubt.

  Mr. Dill untangled his legs, crossed them the other way and regarded the other dangling foot. “I should like very much,” he hinted mildly, “to have you tell me this—er—daydream, as you call it.”

  So Charming Billy, tilted back in his chair and watching with half-shut eyes the intangible smoke-wreath from his cigarette, found words for his own particular air-castle which he had builded on sunny days when the Double-Crank herds grazed peacefully around him; or on stormy nights when he sat alone in the line-camp and played solitaire with the mourning wind crooning accompaniment; or on long rides alone, when the trail was plain before him and the grassland stretched away and away to a far sky-line, and the white clouds sailed sleepily over his head and about him the meadowlarks sang. And while he found the words, he somehow forgot Dill, long and lean and lank, listening beside him, and spoke more freely than he had meant to do when Dill first opened the subject a few minutes before.

  “Recollect, this is just a day-dream,” he began. “But, if I was a millionaire, or if I had two hundred thousand dollars—and to me t
hey don’t sound much different—I’d sure start a cow-outfit right away immediately at once. But I wouldn’t buy out nobody; I’d go right back and start like they did—if they’re real old-timers. I’d go down south into Texas and I’d buy me a bunch uh two-year-olds and bring ’em up here, and turn ’em loose on the best piece of open range I know—and I know a peach. In a year or so I’d go back and do the same again, and I’d keep it up whilst my money held out I’d build me a home ranch back somewheres in a draw in the hills, where there’s lots uh water and lots uh shelter, and I’d get a bunch uh men that savvied cow-brutes, put ’em on horses that wouldn’t trim down their self-respect every time they straddled ’em, and then I’d just ride around and watch myself get rich. And—” He stopped and dreamed silently over his cigarette.

  “And then?” urged Mr. Dill, after a moment.

  “And then—I’d likely get married, and raise a bunch uh boys to carry on the business when I got old and fat, and too damn’ lazy to ride off a walk.”

  Mr. Dill took three minutes to weigh the matter. Then, musingly: “I’m not sure about the boys. I’m not a marrying man, myself—but just giving a snap judgment on the other part of it, I will say it sounds—well, feasible.”

  CHAPTER IX

  The “Double-Crank”

  The weeks that followed immediately after bulged big with the things which Billy must do or have done. For to lie on one’s back in the sun with one’s hat pulled low, dreaming lazily and with minute detail the perfect supervision of a model cow-outfit from its very inception up through the buying of stock and the building of corrals and the breaking of horses to the final shipping of great trainloads of sleek beef, is one thing; to start out in reality to do all that, with the hundred little annoyances and hindrances which come not to one’s dreaming in the sun, is something quite different.