CHAPTER III—THE STEERING WHEEL
When the sun flung its Midas touch across the Nebraska plains the morning after what was but an episode in Clark’s Ford, it struck a ruddy sheen on the sorrel horse Rock Holloway bestrode and made the sleek coat of the black pony that carried his bed, shine like a piece of widow’s silk.
Rock hummed a little tune as he rode. He had lived through that unavoidable encounter with Mark Duffy. He had avoided open clash with Duffy’s brother by quitting the Seventy Seven. A blood feud is no light thing to be involved in. Rock had no regrets over Mark. The man’s bulldozing disposition had brought them to the verge once or twice on the trail. But Rock had no desire to burn powder against a man who would be actuated chiefly by some vague notion that it was proper to avenge a dead kinsman.
Duffy, the trail boss, had been a little stunned by the death of his domineering brother. He had tentatively agreed that Rock was not to blame. He had paid him his wages and let him go unmolested. But later on, Rock knew, the surviving Duffy would ponder and brood, be urged to reprisal, as in the cloak-and-sword period gallants brooded upon a slight to their honor, whether real or fancied, until they had no course but to draw blade.
So Rock was well satisfied to be a lone horseman in a waste of grass and sage in the cool of a summer morning. On the flat area running unbroken by mountain or forest, from horizon to horizon, he marked northbound herds in the offing, as a lookout might descry distant sails at sea. Over yonder was a Matador herd, yonder marched the horned regiment of the Turkey Track. At a guess, Rock could have named the brand of the five herds visible within the radius of his sight. Northbound, headed for free grass and abundant water, as the Israelites of old went forth seeking the land of milk and honey. Texas was full of cattle, full to overflowing, and the overflow in that season swept in full volume over twenty-three degrees of latitude to end in Montana, with sundry minor spillings into the Canadian northwest.
Rock, like the cattleman with his herds, had set his face North. Like many another young Texan, he had lent eager ear to tales of this terra incognita, out of which scouting cattlemen sent reports that it was a paradise for herds, now that the bison were exterminated, and the Indians herded on reservations. Nine hundred miles still lay between Rock and his destination. But that was nothing. He had two good horses, a rifle and a .45 Colt, ammunition, food, bedding and a sanguine soul. Many a pioneer had set forth with less. It was not precisely hostile country he had to traverse alone. True, a lone rider was a temptation to scouting braves who might have jumped the reservation. But that was a detail. In thirty days, more or less, he could reach Fort Benton. Once there—well, even if he had not the mission bestowed on him in Fort Worth, an able range rider could always find useful employment in his calling.
So Rock rode with a little tune on his lips and wondered how far it was between water holes.
Three days out from Clark’s Ford he sighted the mass of a trail herd and caught up with it at sundown. Four riders were bunching the cattle on the bed ground. Rock exchanged greetings with one, noted the brand, a Maltese Cross, and went on to the chuck wagon, camped by a nameless creek, meandering out of an endless sweep of plains to the westward into an equally limitless void on the east. The Maltese Cross made him welcome. It was a rare thing for a lone man to come out of those empty spaces. But the range properly held that a man’s business was his own until he chose to divulge it. The Cross herd was bound for northern Montana, they told him. Rock knew that already. The trail boss casually remarked that he was welcome to keep them company if he liked.
Since they had a full crew, Rock didn’t care to be a guest and crawl North at the mad speed of ten miles a day, when he could make thirty or forty a day on his own. So he accepted a hunk of beef from the cook next morning and rode on.
Two weeks brought him into Wyoming, into a different type of country. The flat, undulating surface of the great plains became sharply rolling ridges. He crossed creeks lined with willows and clumps of quaking aspen. He rode through open forests of pine. He made lonely camps in spots of rare beauty. Once or twice he stopped overnight at ranches well established.
Off to the northwest, mountains began to loom. He bore on until these white and purple peaks were behind him on the left, and so came to a watershed dipping in a long slant to the north. By which he guessed that he was well within the Territory of Montana, following a stream that flowed to the Yellowstone.
When he came to that turbulent river, in a valley traversed by the first transcontinental railway to cross the Northwest, he found eight men with a mixed herd at a fording place. They were a weary lot. Eight men to twelve hundred cattle was a short trail crew. They had left Kansas early that spring, they told Rock. They had made fast time, and their horses bore the trace, being gaunt and leg weary, although the cattle were in fair flesh. And the men were even more tired than their stock. Of the scores of trailed herds Rock had passed, this was the first that was short-handed. A trail outfit left the South with a full crew. Barring accident or death, the riders stayed with the herd to the journey’s end. It was equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy for a trail hand to quit for a whim. In all that bovine pilgrimage, there was no place where riders could be secured, no more than a ship can replace its crew a thousand miles offshore.
“I can use you plenty,” the trail boss said, as soon as he sized Rock up, “if you hanker to be usefully employed.”
“Where you bound for?” Rock asked.
“Canada. Old Man River in the Fort MacLeod country,” the man said.
“In the home of the mounted police, eh?” Rock drawled. “We go through the Blackfeet country. That’s about as far North as cattle range, isn’t it?”
“Just about; although, if this Northern drive keeps extendin’ itself, there’ll be longhorns winterin’ at the north pole, it looks like,” the wagon boss replied. “If you want to see some new country, here’s a chance.”
“From Mexico to Canada, personally conducted!” Rock laughed. “All right, I’m with you.”
Thus did he come into the foothills of the Rockies, north of 49°, in the month of September. They crossed the Missouri where Chief Joseph had forded it with his braves ten years earlier, with U. S. cavalry in hot pursuit. They plodded west and north to their destination, leaving the Bear Paws to the right, Sweet Grass Hills on their left, sweeping across a country where grass grew to their stirrups, driving before them twelve hundred cattle of divers age and sex, marked with a brand on the left ribs, called a steering wheel.
Rock looked once or twice to the westward before they reached the boundary line. Somewhere in that great empty area the Marias River split the plains. Somewhere on the Marias was the headquarters of the Maltese Cross. The Cross would keep. He had given his word to go through with the Steering Wheel. In the winter or in the spring he would drift into Fort Benton, and he would contrive to make himself familiar with the ways and works of Buck Walters. For the present——
The Old Man revealed itself as a pleasant country, well grassed, well wooded with small pine, and with a small, swift-flowing stream in which trout lurked in eddying pools. Axes and saws they had in the chuck wagon. By some mysterious agency of freighting across the plains, they found themselves in possession of a mower and a dump rake. For once, faced as it were by an emergency, these knights of the saddle, who had all the man-on-horseback’s traditional contempt for labor on foot, fell to as carpenters, corral builders, reapers and stackers of hay.
So that, when the first November snows hit them, they were housed in a comfortable log dwelling. Each man had a saddle horse tied in a warm stable, and hay stacked to feed his mount till spring. The Steering Wheel cattle had sun-cured grass to graze upon and brushy creek bottoms to shelter them against the blizzard.
“It might be worse,” Rock said to a fellow rider a few days before Christmas. “I had an idea this Canada country was like the arctic regions. But it shapes up like a real cattle country. It’s colder than Texas, but there’s more grass and better shelter. These mounted police, with their funny red coats and striped pants, are about like the Texan rangers, only they don’t shoot so frequent nor play as tight a game of poker.”
“She’s a lonesome country,” the other rider said.
It was indeed a lonely land. When spring opened, with streams in flood and blue windflowers thrusting ahead of the first grass blades, Rock missed the gathering of the clans, the scope of great round-ups, and the hundreds of riders with gossip from a thousand miles of range. It was like being a chip in an eddy, he thought to himself, being given to similes and metaphors. The Steering Wheel seemed to have the entire Northwest to itself. They heard that another big outfit lay somewhere north of them. The STV had headquarters two hundred miles east. But from September to April Rock saw no four-footed beast on the range outside of the Steering Wheel brand. Nor did any rider ever come up from the horizon to pass the time of day. Fort MacLeod was a police barracks chiefly. It boasted a trading store, where trappers from the mountains sold their furs and bought supplies. Community life there was none at all.
The nine men of the Steering Wheel had a sinecure over the winter. Rock took to speculating on what brought that particular one-horse cow outfit all the way to Canada, when there were magnificent ranges to be had for the taking south of the line. None of the men knew who owned the Steering Wheel. A typical Texan, tall, thin-faced, with a drawly voice, and a good-natured soul, who knew cattle, ran the outfit. When a man needed money to buy goods at the fort, Dave Wells produced cash. His reticence discouraged curiosity. Rock, who knew the cow business both in practice and in theory, wondered at this dead silence—this absence of outlined plan. Twelve hundred cattle didn’t need nine riders in comparative idleness.
This gave him a good excuse in April for leaving. When he told Wells, that individual looked thoughtful.
“I sho’ don’t need eight riders right along,” he said. “I kept yo’ boys over the winter, mostly because I didn’t want to turn yo’ loose in a country where they’s no chance for a job. I’m aimin’ to let four of yo’ go. But not for a spell. I’d like for yo’ to stay on three-fo’ weeks yet. I got to take a pasear after some stock. If yo’ drift back across the line in May, yo’ll still be able to get on as hands with some round-up.”
Rock agreed. May would do as well as April. He had written once to Uncle Bill Sayre, and had received a reply. If he got around to the Maltese Cross range that summer, it would be good enough.
Immediately thereafter, Dave Wells flung his men out on a horse-gathering expedition. The Steering Wheel ponies were brought in by tens and dozens. They ranged uniformly within ten miles of the ranch. Most of the cattle grazed in the same area. And, as soon as forty horses were in the pasture, Wells organized a pack outfit, took four men with him, and vanished.
He left a red-headed youth in nominal charge. The duties of the riders left at home were to build an extension of the pole pasture and to gather the rest of the Steering Wheel saddle stock. Thereafter they were to scout around the outer fringes of the range and throw all cattle close home.
“The old he-coon gone South for another trail herd?” Billy Gore asked the deputy foreman, once he was in Rock’s hearing.
“Naw,” the red-headed one divulged the first information. “Said he was goin’ somewhere after a bunch of doggies.”
“Doggy” in range parlance meant farm cattle, scrubs, nondescript stock generally, sometimes cheaply bought to help stock a range.
Rock recalled that remark three weeks later, when Wells and his four riders rode into the ranch. They had left with forty saddle horses. These mounts were ridden to a standstill. The five men were heavy-eyed and obviously weary. Wells kept his own counsel, as did the four who had ridden with him. They appeared at noon, turned loose their horses, ate, and then slept still sunrise of the next day. After breakfast Dave Wells called the four riders who had stayed on the ranch, told them courteously that he would have to let them go, and paid them off in gold.
The discharged quartet rode south, leading pack horses, within two hours. They discovered, once clear of the ranch and free to air their personal views, that they were mutually eager to be away to a real cow country. They had had enough of comparative isolation. They were all Texans. Three of them were for home, via Butte and south over the Oregon Short Line to the Union Pacific. They had had enough of the North for the present. Only Rock proposed to linger, and he would keep them company until they were well into Montana.
Five miles south of the ranch they jumped a bunch of cattle out of a draw, mature cattle, with a freshly burned Steering Wheel black on their ribs. On the slope which they breasted were others; by a cluster of sloughs were still more.
Doggies! The cowpunchers, free of any loyalty or responsibility to any outfit, glanced and kept on talking of home. Rock looked and kept his thoughts to himself. They were not doggies. They were simon-pure longhorns, with a touch of Hereford blood, here and there—the type of cattle that poured annually by the hundred thousand out of Texas. If they were purchased range stock, other brands, vented or barred out, should have shown. All the mark that Rock saw on any beast was a fresh-burned Steering Wheel. But he kept his speculations to himself. After all, it was no business of his. The Steering Wheel might have cattle all over the Northwest, for all he knew or cared. If his fellow riders thought it queer, they were not concerned enough to mention the fact.
Five days later he parted from his companions under the shoulder of the Sweet Grass Hills. They were bearing off for Silver Bow Junction, homeward bound. Rock’s course lay a trifle east of south, toward Fort Benton. Ahead of him, in that spring-green void, big round-ups were mustering from the upper Teton to the Larb Hills. The Bear Paws loomed faintly on the horizon. Milk River, Sun Prairie, the Bad Lands—place names to conjure with. There was nothing petty in all that sweep of plain and mountain. It gave Rock a curious sense of thrilling possibilities. He rode alone without being lonely, fired by some subtle anticipation.
He often asked himself afterward what it is that gives a man a definite urge along a definite line that may lead him to both triumph and disaster. But he was never able to answer that question, any more than he was able to answer it that June day when, parting company with his fellows, he pointed the red horse’s head toward Fort Benton murmuring whimsically:
“Here we comes, and there we goes,
And where we’ll stop nobody knows.”