by B. M. Bower
Sam Pretty Cow studied the match, decided which was the head of it, and drew it sharply along his boot sole.
“Yeah—yo’re damn right. Crazy, you bet yore life. Uh-huh.”
“He said the Miller’s Block brand could easily be turned into the N Block—Belle’s brand. He said horses had been run off the range—”
“He’s dead,” Sam observed unemotionally. “You bet. He’s gettin’ fun’ral today.”
“How long will the boys be out?” Lance pulled a splinter off the rail beside him and began separating the fibers with his finger nails that were too well cared for to belong to the Black Rim folk.
“I dunno, me.”
“Scotty sure was crazy, Sam. He tried twice to kill me. Once he jumped up and ran into the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife off the table and came at me. He thought I was there to rob him. He called me Tom.”
“Yeah,” said Sam Pretty Cow, blowing smoke. “He’s damn lucky you ain’t Tom. Uh-huh—you bet.”
Lance lifted his eyebrows, was silent while he watched Shorty limping down from the house, this time with table scraps for the chickens.
“Scotty was certainly crazy,” Lance turned again to Sam. “Over and over he kept saying, while he looked up at the ceiling, ‘The Lorrigan days are numbered. Though the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, they shall perish as dry grass. The days are numbered—their evil days are numbered.’”
Sam Pretty Cow smoked, flicked the ash from his cigarette with a coppery forefinger, looked suddenly full at Lance and grinned widely.
“Uh-huh. So’s them stars numbered, all right. I dunno, me. Tom Lorrigan’s damn smart man.” He reached down for an old bridle and grinned again. “Scotty, I guess he don’ say how many numbers them days is, you bet.” He started off, trailing his bridle reins carelessly in the dust.
“If you’re going to catch up a horse, Sam, I wish you’d haze in the best one on the ranch for me.”
Sam Pretty Cow paused, half turned, spat meditatively into the dust and jerked a thumb toward the stable.
“Me, I dunno. Bes’ horse on the ranch is in them box stall. Them’s Coaley. I guess you don’ want Coaley, huh?”
Lance bit his lip, looking at Sam Pretty Cow intently.
“You needn’t catch up a horse for me, Sam. I’ll ride Coaley,” he said smoothly. Which brought a surprised grunt from Sam Pretty Cow, Indian though he was, accustomed though he was to the ways of the Lorrigans.
But it was not his affair if Lance and his father quarreled when Tom returned. Indeed, Tom might not return very soon, in which case he would not hear anything about Lance’s audacity unless Lance himself told it. Sam Pretty Cow would never mention it, and Shorty would not say a word. Shorty never did say anything if he could by any means keep silence.
Lance returned to the house, taking long strides that, without seeming hurried, yet suggested haste. He presently came down the path again, this time with a blanket roll and a sack with lumpy things tied in the bottom. He wore chaps, his spurs, carried a yellow slicker over his arm. On his head was a black Stetson, one of Tom’s discarded old hats.
He led Coaley from the box stall where he had never before seen him stand, saddled him, tied his bundles compactly behind the cantle, mounted and rode down the trail, following the hoof prints that showed freshest in the loose, gravelly sand. Coaley, plainly glad to be out of his prison, stepped daintily along in a rocking half trot that would carry him more miles in a day than any other horse in the country could cover, and bring him to the journey’s end with springy gait and head held proudly, ears twitching, ready for more miles if his rider wanted more.
The tracks led up the road to the Ridge, turned sharply off where the brush grew scanty among the flat rocks that just showed their faces above the surface of the arid soil. Lance frowned and followed. For a long way he skirted the rim rock that edged the sheer bluff. A scant furlong away, on his right, a trail ran west to the broken land of Indian Creek. But since the horsemen had chosen to keep to the rocky ground along the rim, Lance followed.
He had gone perhaps a mile along the bluff when Coaley began to toss up his head and perk his ears backward, turning now and then to look. Lance was sunk too deep in bitter introspection to observe these first warning movements which every horseman knows. He was thinking of Mary Hope, who would be waking now to a day of sorrowful excitement. Thinking, too, of old Aleck Douglas and the things that he had said in his raving.
What Douglas had shouted hoarsely was not true, of course. He did not believe,—and yet, there was Shorty’s enigmatical answer to a simple question; there was Sam Pretty Cow, implying much while he actually said very little; there was this unheralded departure of all the Devil’s Tooth riders in the night, in the season between round-ups. There was Coaley feeling fit for anything, shut up in the box stall while Tom rode another horse; and here was Lance himself taking the trail of the Devil’s Tooth outfit at a little after sunrise on a horse tacitly forbidden to all riders save Tom.
Coaley, in a place where he must pick his way between boulders, paused and lifted his head, staring back the way they had come. Lance roused himself from gloomy speculations and looked back also, but he could not see anything behind them save a circling hawk and the gray monotone of the barren plateau, so he urged Coaley in among the boulders.
There must be something back there, of course. Coaley was too intelligent a horse to make a mistake. But it might be some drifting range stock, or perhaps a stray horse. Certainly it was no one from the Devil’s Tooth, for Sam Pretty Cow had set off to mend a fence in the lower pasture, and Shorty never rode a horse nowadays for more than a half mile or so; and six o’clock in the morning would be rather early for chance riders from any other ranch. With a shrug, Lance dismissed the matter from his mind.
Where a faint, little-used trail went obliquely down the bluff to the creek bottom, Lance saw again the hoofprints which the rocky ground had failed to reveal. He could see no reason for taking this roundabout course to go up the creek, but he sent Coaley down the trail, reached the bottom and discovered that the tracks once more struck off into rocky ground. His face hardened until his resemblance to Tom became more marked than usual, but where the tracks led he followed. Too often had he trailed stray horses in the past to be puzzled now, whether he could see the hoofprints or not.
They must have made for the other side of the creek, gone up Wild Horse gulch or the Little Squaw. There was just one place where they could cross the creek without bogging in the tricky mud that was almost as bad as quicksand. He therefore pulled out of the rocky patch and made straight for the crossing. He would soon know if they had crossed there. If they had not, then they would have turned again up Squaw Creek, and it would be short work cutting straight across to the only possible trail to the higher country.
He had covered half of the distance to the creek when Coaley again called his attention to something behind him. This time Lance glimpsed what looked very much like the crown of a hat moving in a dry wash that he had crossed not more than five minutes before. He pulled up, studied the contour of the ground behind him, looked ahead, saw the mark of a shod hoof between two rocks. The hoof mark pointed toward the crossing. Lance, however, turned down another small depression where the soil lay bare and Coaley left clean imprints, trotted along it until a welter of rocks made bad footing for the horse, climbed out and went on level. Farther up the valley an abrupt curve in Squaw Creek barred his way with scraggly, thin willow growth that had winding cow trails running through it. Into one of these Lance turned, rode deep into the sparse growth, stopped where the trail swung round a huge, detached boulder, dismounted and dropped Coaley’s reins to the ground and retraced his steps some distance from the trail, stepping on rocks here and there and keeping off damp spots.
He reached the thin edge of the grove, stood behind a stocky bush and waited. In two or three minutes—they seemed ten to Lance—he saw the head and shoulders of a rider just emerging from the gully he himse
lf had so lately followed.
Back on Coaley, following the winding trail, Lance pondered the matter. The way he had come was no highway—no trail that any rider would follow on any business save one. But just why should he be followed? He had thought at first that some one was trailing the Devil’s Tooth outfit, as he had been doing, but now it seemed plain that he himself was the quarry.
He flicked the reins on Coaley’s satiny neck, and the horse broke at once into a springy, swift trot, following the purposeless winding of the cow path. When they emerged upon the other side where the creek gurgled over a patch of rocks like cobblestones, Lance stopped and let him take a sip or two of water, then struck off toward the bluff, letting Coaley choose his own pace, taking care that he kept to low ground where he could not be seen.
For an hour he rode and came to the junction of Mill Creek and the Squaw. Then, climbing through chokecherry thickets up a draw that led by winding ways to higher ground, Lance stopped and scrutinized the bottomland over which he had passed. Coaley stood alert, watching also that back trail, his ears turned forward, listening. After a moment, he began to take little mincing steps sidewise, pulling impatiently at the reins. As plainly as a horse could tell it, Coaley implored Lance to go on. But Lance waited until, crossing an open space, he saw a rider coming along at a shambling trot on the trail he had himself lately followed.
He frowned thoughtfully, turned Coaley toward home and rode swiftly in a long, distance-devouring lope.
He reached the ranch somewhere near ten o’clock, surprising Belle in the act of harnessing her pintos to a new buckboard at which they shied hypocritically. Belle stared at him round-eyed over the backs of her team.
“My good Lord, Lance! You—you could be Tom’s twin, in that hat and on that horse! What you been doing—doubling for him in a lead?”
Lance swung down and came toward her. “Belle, where did dad and the boys go?”
“Oh—fussing with the stock,” said Belle vaguely, her eyes clouding a little. “We’re getting so many cattle it keeps Tom on the go day and night, seems to me. And he will keep buying more all the while. Did—did you want to go with them, honey? I guess Tom never thought you might. You’ve been away so long. You’d better not ride Coaley, Lance. Tom would just about murder you if he caught you at it. And where did you get hold of that hat?”
Lance laughed queerly. “I just picked it off the table as I came out. Mine is too new and stiff yet. This seemed to fit. And Coaley’s better off under the saddle than he is in the stable, Belle. He’s a peach—I always did want to ride Coaley, but I never had the nerve till I got big enough to lick dad.”
He caught Belle in a quick, breath-taking hug, kissed her swiftly on the cheek and turned Coaley into the corral with the saddle still on.
“Are you going over—to the funeral?” he asked as he closed the gate.
“I’m going to town, and I’ve got the letters you left on the table to be mailed. No, I’m not going to the funeral. I don’t enjoy having my face slapped—and being called a painted Jezebel,” she added dryly.
Under his breath Lance muttered something and went into the house, not looking at Belle or making her any reply.
“Lance,” said Belle to the pintos, “thinks we’re rough and tough and just about half civilized. Lord, when you take a Lorrigan and educate him and polish him, you sure have got a combination that’s hard to go up against. Two years—and my heavens, I don’t know Lance any more! I never thought any Lorrigan could feaze me—but there’s something about Lance—”
In the house Lance was not showing any of the polish which Belle had mentioned rather regretfully. He was kneeling before a trunk, throwing books and pipes and socks and soft-toned silk shirts over his shoulder, looking for something which he seemed in a great haste to find. When his fingers, prying deep among his belongings, closed upon the thing he sought, he brought it up, frowning abstractedly.
A black leather case, small and curved, opened when he unbuckled the confining strap. A binocular, small but extremely efficient in its magnifying power he withdrew, dusting the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt. He had bought the glasses because some one had advised him to take a pair along when he went with a party of friends to the top of Mount Tamalpais one Sunday. And because he had an instinctive dislike for anything but the best obtainable, he had bought the highest-priced glasses he could find in San Francisco,—and perhaps the smallest. He buckled them back into their case, slapped them into his pocket and closed the trunk lid with a bang. From the mantel in the living room he gleaned a box of cartridges for an extra six-shooter, which he cleaned and loaded carefully and tucked inside the waistband of his trousers, on the left side, following an instinct that brought him close to his grandfather, that old killer whom all men feared to anger.
“The horse and the hat; he thought it was dad he was trailing!” he said to himself, with his teeth clamped tight together. “Oh, well, when it comes to that kind of a game—”
He went out and down to the corral, watered Coaley and mounted again, taking the trail across pastures to Squaw Creek.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LANCE RIDES ANOTHER TRAIL
With a two-days’ growth of beard on his chin and jaws, a new, hard look in his eyes and the general appearance of a man who has been riding long and has slept in all his clothes, Lance rode quietly up to the corral gate and dismounted. A certain stiffness was in his walk when he led Coaley inside and turned a stirrup up over the saddle horn, his gloved fingers dropping to the latigo. Lance was tired—any one could see that at a glance. That he was preoccupied, and that his preoccupation was not pleasant, was also evident to the least observing eye.
Tom, coming out of the bunk house, studied him with narrowed lids as he came walking leisurely down to the corral. Tom’s movements also betrayed a slight stiffness of the muscles, as though he had ridden hard and long. He did not hurry. Lance had pulled off the saddle and the sweaty blanket and the bridle, and had turned Coaley into the corral before he knew that some one was coming. Even then he did not turn to look. He was staring hard at a half-dozen horses grouped in the farther corner of the corral,—horses with gaunt flanks and the wet imprint of saddles. They were hungrily nosing fresh piles of hay, and scarcely looked up when Coaley trotted eagerly up to join them. Six of them—a little more than half of the outfit that had ridden away the other night.
“Well! I see you helped yourself to a new saddle horse,” Tom observed significantly, coming up behind Lance.
“Yes. Coaley acted lonesome, shut up in the box stall. Thought a little riding would do him good.” Lance’s eyes met Tom’s calmly, almost as if the two were mere acquaintances.
“You give him a plenty, looks like. Where yuh been?”
“I? Oh—just riding around.” Lance stooped indifferently to untie his slicker and blanket from the saddle.
“Thought I’d like to use him myself. Thinking some of riding into town this afternoon,” Tom said, still studying Lance.
“Well, if you want to ride Coaley, he’s good for it. I’d say he has more miles in him yet than any of that bunch over there.” With slicker and blanket roll Lance started for the house.
Tom did not say anything. He was scowling thoughtfully after Lance when Belle, coming from the chicken house with a late hatching of fluffy little chicks in her hat, looked at him inquiringly. To her Tom turned with more harshness than he had shown for many a long day.
“Schoolin’ don’t seem to set good on a Lorrigan,” he said. “How long’s he goin’ to stay this time?”
“Why, honey, don’t you want Lance home? He rode Coaley—but that’s no crime. Lance wouldn’t hurt him, he’s too good a rider and he never was hard on horses. And Coaley just goes wild when he has to stand shut up all day—”
“Oh, it ain’t riding Coaley, altogether. He can ride Coaley and be darned. It’s the new airs he’s putting on that don’t set good with me, Belle. You wanted to make something of Lance, and now, by Henry, y
ou’ll have to name the job you’ve made of him—I’d hate to!”
Belle put a hand into the cheeping huddle in her hat, lifted out a chick and held it to her cheek. “Why, you’re just imagining that Lance is different,” she contended, stifling her own recognition of the change. “He’ll settle right down amongst the boys—”
“The boys ain’t cryin’ to have him, Belle. Black Rimmers had ought to stay Black Rimmers, or get out and stay out. Lance ain’t either one thing or the other.”
“Why, Tom Lorrigan!” Belle dropped the chick into her hat and tucked the hat under her arm. Her eyes began to sparkle a little. “I don’t think Lance liked it about the piano, but he’s the same Lance he always was. I’ve watched him, and he hasn’t said a thing or done a thing outa the way—he’s just the dearest great big fellow! And I can’t for the life of me see why you and the whole outfit hang back from him like he was a stranger. Education ain’t catching, Tom. And Lance don’t put on any airs at all, so why in the name of heaven you all—”
“Well, well, don’t get all excited, Belle. But if education was ketching, a lot of the boys would be rollin’ their beds. I’m going to town. Anything yuh want brought out?”
Belle did not answer. She went away to the house with her hatful of chicks, and put them into a box close to the stove until the mother hen made sure whether the four other eggs were anything more than just stale eggs. It would have been hard for Belle to explain just what the heaviness in her heart portended. Certainly it was not in her nature to worry over trifles,—yet these were apparent trifles that worried her. On the surface of the Devil’s Tooth life only faint ripples stirred, but Belle felt somehow as though she were floating in a frail boat over a quiet pool from whose depths some unspeakable monster might presently thrust an ominous head and drag her under.
In the crude yet wholly adequate bathroom she heard a great splashing, and guessed that it was Lance, refreshing himself after his trip. That, she supposed, was another point that set him apart from the other boys. From June to September, whenever any of the male inhabitants of the Devil’s Tooth felt the need of ablutions beyond the scope of a blue enamel wash basin, he took a limp towel and rode down across the pasture to the creek, and swam for half an hour or so in a certain deep pool. Sometimes all of the boys went, at sundown, and filled the pool with their splashings. Only Lance availed himself of tub and soap and clean towels, and shaved every morning before breakfast.