by B. M. Bower
He looked at me with a curious mixture of wonder and amusement. “Dinner,” he drawled calmly, “has been over for three hours; but I guess we can give yuh some supper any time after five.”
I suppose he looked upon me as the rankest kind of a tenderfoot. I calculated the time of my torture till I might, without embarrassing explanations, partake of a much-needed repast, and went to the door; waiting was never my long suit, and I had thoughts of getting outside and taking a look around. At the second step I changed my mind—there was that deceptive mud to reckon with.
So from the doorway I surveyed all of Montana that lay between me and the sky-line, and decided that my bets would remain on California. The sky was a dull slate, tumbled into what looked like rain-clouds and depressing to the eye. The land was a dull yellowish-brown, with a purple line of hills off to the south, and with untidy snow-drifts crouching in the hollows. That was all, so far as I could see, and if dulness and an unpeopled wilderness make for the reformation of man, it struck me that I was in a fair way to become a saint if I stayed here long. I had heard the cattle-range called picturesque; I couldn’t see the joke.
Frosty Miller sat opposite me at table when, in the course of human events, I ate again, and the way I made the biscuit and ham and boiled potatoes vanish filled him with astonishment, if one may judge a man’s feelings by the size of his eyes. I told him that the ozone of the plains had given me an appetite, and he did not contradict me; he looked at my plate, and then smiled at his own, and said nothing—which was polite of him.
“Did you ever skip two meals and try to make it up on the third?” I asked him when we went out, and he said “Sure,” and rolled a cigarette. In those first hours of our acquaintance Frosty was not what I’d call loquacious.
That night I took out the letter addressed to one Perry Potter, which dad had given me and which I had not had time to seal in his presence, and read it cold-bloodedly. I don’t do such things as a rule, but I was getting a suspicion that I was being queered; that I’d got to start my exile under a handicap of the contempt of the natives. If dad had stacked the deck on me, I wanted to know it. But I misjudged him—or, perhaps, he knew I’d read it. All he had written wouldn’t hurt the reputation of any one. It was:
The bearer, Ellis H. Carleton, is my son. He will probably be with you for some time, and will not try to assume any authority or usurp your position as foreman and overseer. You will treat him as you do the other boys, and if he wants to work, pay him the same wages—if he earns them.
It wasn’t exactly throwing flowers in the path my young feet should tread, but it might have been worse. At least, he did not give Perry Potter his unbiased opinion of me, and it left me with a free hand to warp their judgment somewhat in my favor. But—“If he wants to work, pay him the same wages—if he earns them.” Whew!
I might have saved him the trouble of writing that, if I had only known it. Dad could go too far in this thing, I told myself chestily. I had come, seeing that he insisted upon it, but I’d be damned if I’d work for any man with a circus-poster name, and have him lord it over me. I hadn’t been brought up to appreciate that kind of joke. I meant to earn my living, but I did not mean to get out and slave for Perry Potter. There must be something respectable for a man to do in this country besides ranch work.
In the morning we started off, with my trunks in the wagon, toward the line of purple hills in the south. Frosty Miller told me, when I asked him, that they were forty-eight miles away, that they marked the Missouri River, and that we would stop there overnight. That, if I remember, was about the extent of our conversation that day. We smoked cigarettes—Frosty Miller made his, one by one, as he needed them—and thought our own thoughts. I rather suspect our thoughts were a good many miles apart, though our shoulders touched. When you think of it, people may rub elbows and still have an ocean or two between them. I don’t know where Frosty was, all through that long day’s ride; for me, I was back in little old Frisco, with Barney MacTague and the rest of the crowd; and part of the time, I know, I was telling dad what a mess he’d made of bringing up his only son.
That night we slept in a shack at the river—“Pochette Crossing” was the name it answered to—and shared the same bed. It was not remarkable for its comfort—that bed. I think the mattress was stuffed with potatoes; it felt that way.
Next morning we were off again, over the same bare, brown, unpeopled wilderness. Once we saw a badger zigzagging along a side-hill, and Frosty whipped out a big revolver—one of those “Colt 45’s,” I suppose—and shot it; he said in extenuation that they play the very devil with the range, digging holes for cow-punchers to break their necks over.
I was surprised at Frosty; there he had been armed, all the time, and I never guessed it. Even when we went to bed the night before, I had not glimpsed a weapon. Clearly, he could not be a cowboy, I reflected, else he would have worn a cartridge-belt sagging picturesquely down over one hip, and his gun dangling from it. He put the gun away, and I don’t know where; somewhere out of sight it went, and Frosty turned off the trail and went driving wild across the prairie. I asked him why, and he said, “Short cut.”
Then a wind crept out of the north, and with it the snow. We were climbing low ridges and dodging into hollows, and when the snow spread a white veil over the land, I looked at Frosty out of the tail of my eye, wondering if he did not wish he had kept to the road—trail, it is called in the rangeland.
If he did, he certainly kept it to himself; he went on climbing hills and setting the brake at the top, to slide into a hollow, and his face kept its inscrutable calm; whatever he thought was beyond guessing at.
When he had watered the horses at a little creek that was already skimmed with ice, and unwrapped a package of sandwiches on his knee and offered me one, I broke loose. Silence may be golden, but even old King Midas got too big a dose of gold, once upon a time, if one may believe tradition.
“I hate to butt into a man’s meditations,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “but there’s a limit to everything, and you’ve played right up to it. You’ve had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough more to keep you hustling the allotted span; you’ve been given an opportunity to reconstruct the universe and breed a new philosophy of life. For Heaven’s sake, say something!”
Frosty eyed me for a minute, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched. “Sure,” he responded cheerfully. “I’m something like you; I hate to break into a man’s meditations. It looks like snow.”
“Do you think it’s going to storm?” I retorted in the same tone; it had been snowing great guns for the last three hours. We both laughed, and Frosty unbent and told me a lot about Bay State Ranch and the country around it.
Part of the information was an eye-opener; I wished I had known it when dad was handing out that roast to me—I rather think I could have made him cry enough. I tagged the information and laid it away for future reference.
As I got the country mapped out in my mind, we were in a huge capital H. The eastern line, toward which we were angling, was a river they call the Midas—though I’ll never tell you why, unless it’s a term ironical. The western line is another river, the Joliette, and the cross-bar is a range of hills—they might almost be called mountains—which I had been facing all that morning till the snow came between and shut them off; White Divide, it is called, and we were creeping around the end, between them and the Midas. It seemed queer that there was no way of crossing, for the Bay State lies almost in a direct line south from Osage, Frosty told me, and the country we were traversing was rough as White Divide could be, and I said so to Frosty. Right here is where I got my first jolt.
“There’s a fine pass cut through White Divide by old Mama Nature,” Frosty said, in the sort of tone a man takes when he could say a lot more, but refrains.
“Then why in Heaven’s name don’t you travel it?”
“Because it isn’t healthy for Ragged H folks to travel that way,” he
said, in the same eloquent tone.
“Who are the Ragged H folks, and what’s the matter with them?” I wanted to know—for I smelled a mystery.
He looked at me sidelong. “If you didn’t look just like the old man,” he said, “I’d think yuh were a fake; the Ragged H is the brand your ranch is known by—the Bay State outfit. And it isn’t healthy to travel King’s Highway, because there’s a large-sized feud between your father and old King. How does it happen yuh aren’t wise to the family history?”
“Dad never unbosomed himself to me, that’s why,” I told him. “He has labored for twenty-five years under the impression that I was a kid just able to toddle alone. He didn’t think he needed to tell me things; I know we’ve got a place called the Bay State Ranch somewhere in this part of the world, and I have reason to think I’m headed for it. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of our interest here. I never heard of the White Divide before, or of this particular King. I’m thirsting for information.”
“Well, it strikes me you’ve got it coming,” said Frosty. “I always had your father sized up as being closed-mouthed, but I didn’t think he made such a thorough job of it as all that. Old King has sure got it in for the Ragged H—or Bay State, if yuh’d rather call us that; and the Ragged H boys don’t sit up nights thinking kind and loving thoughts about him, either. Thirty years ago your father and old King started jangling over water-rights, and I guess they burned powder a-plenty; King goes lame to this day from a bullet your old man planted in his left leg.”
I dropped the flag and started him off again. “It’s news to me,” I put in, “and you can’t tell me too much about it.”
“Well,” he said, “your old man was in the right of it; he owns all the land along Honey Creek, right up to White Divide, where it heads; uh course, he overlooked a bet there; he should have got a cinch on that pass, and on the head uh the creek. But he let her slide, and first he knew old King had come in and staked a claim and built him a shack right in our end of the pass, and camped down to stay. Your dad wasn’t joyful. The Bay State had used that pass to trail herds through and as the easiest and shortest trail to the railroad; and then old King takes it up, strings a five-wired fence across at both ends of his place, and warns us off. I’ve heard Potter tell what warm times there were. Your father stayed right here and had it out with him. The Bay State was all he had, then, and he ran it himself. Perry Potter worked for him, and knows all about it. Neither old King nor your dad was married, and it’s a wonder they didn’t kill each other off—Potter says they sure tried. The time King got it in the leg your father and his punchers were coming home from a breed dance, and they were feeling pretty nifty, I guess; Potter told me they started out with six bottles, and when they got to White Divide there wasn’t enough left to talk about. They cut King’s fence at the north end, and went right through, hell-bent-for-election. King and his men boiled out, and they mixed good and plenty. Your father went home with a hole in his shoulder, and old King had one in his leg to match, and since then it’s been war. They tried to fight it out in court, and King got the best of it there. Then they got married and kind o’ cooled off, and pretty soon they both got so much stuff to look after that they didn’t have much time to take pot-shots at each other, and now we’re enjoying what yuh might call armed peace. We go round about sixty miles, and King’s Highway is bad medicine.
“King owns the stage-line from Osage to Laurel, where the Bay State gets its mail, and he owns Kenmore, a mining-camp in the west half uh White Divide. We can go around by Kenmore, if we want to—but King’s Highway? Nit!”
I chuckled to myself to think of all the things I could twit dad about if ever he went after me again. It struck me that I hadn’t been a circumstance, so far, to what dad must have been in his youth. At my worst, I’d never shot a man.
CHAPTER III
The Quarrel Renewed
That night, by a close scratch, we made a little place Frosty said was one of the Bay State line-camps. I didn’t know what a line-camp was, and it wasn’t much for style, but it looked good to me, after riding nearly all day in a snow-storm. Frosty cooked dinner and I made the coffee, and we didn’t have such a bad time of it, although the storm held us there for two days.
We sat by the little cook-stove and told yarns, and I pumped Frosty just about dry of all he’d ever heard about dad.
I hadn’t intended to write to dad, but, after hearing all I did, I couldn’t help handing out a gentle hint that I was on. When I’d been at the Bay State Ranch for a week, I wrote him a letter that, I felt, squared my account with him. It was so short that I can repeat every word now. I said:
DEAR DAD: I am here. Though you sent me out here to reform me, I find the opportunities for unadulterated deviltry away ahead of Frisco. I saw our old neighbor, King, whom you may possibly remember. He still walks with a limp. By the way, dad, it seems to me that when you were about twenty-five you “indulged in some damned poor pastimes,” yourself. Your dutiful son, ELLIS.
Dad never answered that letter.
Montana, as viewed from the Bay State Ranch in March, struck me as being an unholy mixture of brown, sodden hills and valleys, chill winds that never condescended to blow less than a gale, and dull, scurrying clouds, with sometimes a day of sunshine that was bright as our own sun at home. (You can’t make me believe that our California sun bothers with any other country.)
I’d been used to a green world; I never would go to New York in the winter, because I hate the cold—and here I was, with the cold of New York and with none of the ameliorations in the way of clubs and theaters and the like. There were the hills along Midas River shutting off the East, and hills to the south that Frosty told me went on for miles and miles, and on the north stretched White Divide—only it was brown, and bleak, and several other undesirable things. When I looked at it, I used to wonder at men fighting over it. I did a heap of wondering, those first few days.
Taken in a lump, it wasn’t my style, and I wasn’t particular to keep my opinions a secret. For the ranch itself, it looked to me like a village of corrals and sheds and stables, evidently built with an eye to usefulness, and with the idea that harmony of outline is a sin and not to be tolerated. The house was put up on the same plan, gave shelter to Perry Potter and the cook, had a big, bare dining-room where the men all ate together without napkins or other accessories of civilization, and a couple of bedrooms that were colder, if I remember correctly, than outdoors. I know that the water froze in my pitcher the first night, and that afterward I performed my ablutions in the kitchen, and dipped hot water out of a tank with a blue dipper.
That first week I spent adjusting myself to the simple life, and trying to form an unprejudiced opinion of my companions in exile. As for the said companions, they sort of stood back and sized up my points, good and bad—and I’ve a notion they laid heavy odds against me, and had me down in the Also Ran bunch. I overheard one of them remark, when I was coming up from the stables: “Here’s the son and heir—come, let’s kill him!” Another one drawled: “What’s the use? The bounty’s run out.”
I was convinced that they regarded me as a frost.
The same with Perry Potter, a grizzled little man with long, ragged beard and gray eyes that looked through you and away beyond. I had a feeling that dad had told him to keep an eye on me and report any incipient growth of horse-sense. I may have wronged him and dad, but that is how I felt, and I didn’t like him any better for it. He left me alone, and I raised the bet and left him alone so hard that I scarcely exchanged three sentences with him in a week. The first night he asked after dad’s health, and I told him the doctor wasn’t making regular calls at the house. A day or so after he said: “How do you like the country?” I said: “Damn the country!” and closed that conversation. I don’t remember that we had any more for awhile.
The cowboys were breaking horses to the saddle most of the time, for it was too early for round-up, I gathered. When I sat on the corral fence and watched th
e fun, I observed that I usually had my rail all to myself and that the rest of the audience roosted somewhere else. Frosty Miller talked with me sometimes, without appearing to suffer any great pain, but Frosty was always the star actor when the curtain rose on a bronco-breaking act. As for the rest, they made it plain that I did not belong to their set, and I wasn’t sending them my At Home cards, either. We were as haughty with each other as two society matrons when each aspires to be called leader.
Then a blizzard that lasted five days came ripping down over that desolation, and everybody stuck close to shelter, and amused themselves as they could. The cowboys played cards most of the time—seven-up, or pitch, or poker; they didn’t ask me to take a hand, though; I fancy they were under the impression that I didn’t know how to play.
I never was much for reading; it’s too slow and tame. I’d much rather get out and live the story I like best. And there was nothing to read, anyway. I went rummaging in my trunks, and in the bottom of one I came across a punching-bag and a set of gloves. Right there I took off my hat to Rankin, and begged his pardon for the unflattering names he’d been in the habit of hearing from me. I carried the things down and put up the bag in an empty room at one end of the bunk-house, and got busy.