CHAPTER IX—ORDERED SOUTH
By midforenoon Rock had the striking contour of the Goosebill breaking the sky line far on his right. As the team jogged with rattling wagon wheels on a trail that was no more than two shallow ruts in the grassy plateau, his mind dwelt on the Burris boys—two unsavory brothers, with a ranch in a tangle of ravines behind that strange hump on the flat face of Montana. Charlie had sketched them for his benefit. They were suspected and had been for some time. They had a few cattle, and their herd seemed to increase more rapidly than cows naturally breed. No mavericks—unbranded yearlings; hence the property of whosoever first got his irons on them—were ever found on their range. They were supposed to ride with a long rope, lifting the odd calf here and there. It was only a matter of time, Charlie declared, before some big outfit would deal with them, as the feudal barons dealt with miscreants within their demesnes.
And Doc Martin’s name was being coupled with these two in the Maltese Cross camp. Rock’s lip curled. When a man with power in his hands wanted another man out of the way, he would go to great lengths. Rock had observed the workings of such sinister intent in his native State. He kept thinking about Uncle Bill Sayre’s estimate of Buck Walters.
He was still more or less revolving this in his mind, when he came to the brow of the steep bank that slanted sharply down to Fort Benton. This one-time seat of the Northwest Fur Company was the oldest settlement in the Territory, a compact unit of adobe and log and frame dwellings, when the first gold was found at Bannack and Virginia City, and when the eager miners looted the treasure of Last Chance Gulch. Still the head of navigation on the Missouri River, it had become the pivotal point of the cow business in northern Montana, which had supplanted gold, as gold had supplanted furs, as a road to fortune.
A conglomeration of buildings stood by the bank of the wide, swift river. Away southward loomed a mountain range. The Bear Paws stood blue, fifty miles east. A ferry plied from shore to shore, for the convenience of horsemen, teams and three-wagon freight outfits hauling supplies to the Judith Basin. The Grand Union Hotel loomed big in the town, a great square building in a patch of green grass, set off from Main Street, the single street which formed the business heart of the town. A singularly attractive spot, it had had its historic day. Buffalo had swarmed in its dooryard not so long before. The Blackfeet and the Crows had fought each other there and joined forces to fight the white man. In the spring at high water the stern-wheel steamers from St. Louis laid their flat bows against the clay bank and unloaded enormous cargoes of goods. Otherwise, since furs and gold no longer dominated the Northwest, Fort Benton lived a placid, uneventful day-to-day existence, except when roundups came that way, and the cowboys took the town.
Yet there was life in it. The exciting scenes of a decade earlier arose on a small scale. And between these high lights business flourished. The fort was the hub of a great area, in which herds and settlers were taking root. It supported a permanent population of two hundred or more, stores, saloons and the Grand Union, which had housed miners, gamblers, military men, river pilots, rich and enterprising fur dealers, and was now headquarters for the cattle kings and their henchmen.
Rock put his team in a livery stable and registered at the Grand Union. He sought the bar, his parched throat craving St. Louis beer fresh off the ice.
In the doorway, between lobby and barroom, he halted to look. Anywhere between the Rockies and the Mississippi, between the Rio Grande and the Canada line, a range rider might meet a man whom he knew. They were rolling stones, gathering moss in transit, contrary to the proverb. And Rock was not disappointed, although it would be wrong to say that he was pleased.
For he saw two men whom he recognized. They leaned on the bar at one end, deep in talk, glasses before them. They did not see him. Their backs were toward the doorway in which he stood. Their eyes were on each other, not on the broad mirror over the back bar, which showed Rock their faces.
One was Buck Walters; the other was Dave Wells, the Texan boss of the Wagon Wheel on Old Man River, north of the Canada line.
Rock drew back, unseen, sought a chair in the lobby, and sat down, with some food for thought. Here were two men, each of whom knew him quite well—one as Doc Martin, a Parke cowpuncher; while the other had employed him for nine months in his real identity. Fort Benton was small. He could not remain in that town over the night without meeting both, face to face. Which identity should he choose?
It did not take Rock long to decide. He rose and made for the bar. This time he put his foot on the rail and made an inclusive sign to the bartender, after the custom of the country.
There were other men in the bar now. Walters and Wells looked up to see who was buying. A shadow, very faint, flitted across Buck Walters’ face. He nodded, with a grunt. Wells grinned recognition and stuck out his hand.
“You got the best of me,” Rock drawled. “But shake, anyway.”
“I’d know your hide on a fence in hell,” Wells declared. He was jovial, and his eyes were bright. He had been hoisting quite a few, Rock decided. Walters seemed coldly sober.
“Gosh, who do you think I am?” Rock asked. “Your long-lost brother or something?”
“Why, you’re Rock Holloway, darn you!” Wells said bluntly. “I’d ought to know you. I paid you off less’n a month ago. Course, if you’re layin’ low for somethin’——” He paused significantly. Over his shoulder Rock marked the surprised attention of Buck Walters.
“If that is so, I sure must have a double,” Rock said. “I been drawin’ wages from the TL on the Marias River for goin’ on two years, without a break. Does this Holloway fellow you speak of look so much like me, stranger?”
Wells looked him up and down in silence.
“If you ain’t Rock Holloway, I’ll eat my hat,” he said deliberately.
“Let’s see a man eat a Stetson for once,” Rock said to the manager of the Maltese Cross. “Tell him who I am.”
“Eat the hat, Dave,” Walters said. “This feller never rode for you—not in this country. His name is Doc Martin. He rides for a lady rancher on my range. I know him as well as I know you.”
Wells scratched his head.
“I need my sky piece to shed the rain,” he said mildly. “Maybe the drinks are on me. If you ain’t the feller I think you are, you certainly got a twin.”
“I never had no brothers,” Rock declared lightly and reached for his glass. “Never heard of anybody that looked like me. Well, here’s luck.”
That was that. He got away from the barroom in a few minutes.
Wells kept eying him. So did Walters. He felt that they were discussing him in discreet undertones. They did not include him in their conversation after that drink. Once out of there, Rock set about his business. He had no desire to paint the town. He went seeking casual labor. Luck rode with him. Within an hour he had located and hired two men—the only two souls in Fort Benton, he discovered, who needed jobs. He went back to the Grand Union for supper. In the dining room he saw Wells and Walters still together, seated at a table by themselves. He observed them later in the lobby, deep in cushioned chairs, cigars jutting rakishly from their lips.
Early in the evening Rock went up to his room. He had left the Marias at sunrise, and had jolted forty miles in a dead-axle wagon. He would hit the trail early in the morning, with the hay diggers, before they changed their mind and hired themselves to some one else. He needed sleep.
But he couldn’t sleep. The imps of unrest propped his eyelids open. An hour of wakefulness made him fretful. His mind questioned ceaselessly. Could a man like Buck Walters deliberately set out to destroy another man merely because he was a rival for a girl’s capricious affection? It didn’t seem incentive enough. A man with as much on his hands as Walters, could scarcely afford petty feuds like that. Still——
Rock dressed again, drew on his boots, and tucked his gun inside the waistband of his trousers. He would stroll around Fort Benton for an hour or so. By that time he would be able to sleep.
A battery of lighted windows faced the Missouri. Saloons with quaint names, “Last Chance,” “The Eldorado,” “Cowboy’s Retreat,” the “Bucket of Blood.” They never closed. They were the day-and-night clubs of frontier citizens. Business did not thrive in all at once. It ebbed and flowed, as the tides of convivial fancy dictated. In one or two the bartender polished glasses industriously, while house dealers sat patiently playing solitaire on their idle gambling layouts. But in others there were happy gatherings, with faro and poker and crap games in full swing. Rock visited them all and chanced a dollar or two here and there. Eventually he retraced his steps toward the hotel.
In the glow of lamplight from the last saloon on the western end of the row, just where he had to cross the street to the Grand Union, sitting in its patch of grass and flanked by a few gnarly cottonwoods, Rock met Buck Walters and Dave Wells.
He nodded and passed them. A little prickly sensation troubled the back of his neck. It startled Rock, that involuntary sensation. Nervous about showing his back to a potential enemy? Nothing less. The realization almost amused Rock. Absurd! Nobody would shoot him down on a lighted street. Yet it was a curious feeling. Expectancy, a sense of danger, a conscious irritation at these psychological absurdities. He was not surprised when a voice behind him peremptorily called:
“Hey, Martin!”
He turned to see Buck Walters stalking toward him. Wells’ long, thin figure showed plain in the glimmer of light. He stood on the edge of the plank walk, staring at the river.
“Got somethin’ to say to you,” Walters announced curtly.
“Shoot,” Rock answered in the same tone.
Walters faced him, six feet away. His face, so far as Rock could see, told nothing. It was cold and impassive, like the face of a gambler who has learned how to make his feature a serviceable mask to hide what is in his mind. Buck’s face was unreadable, but his words were plain.
“This country ain’t healthy for you no more, Martin.”
“Why?”
“Because I tell you it ain’t.”
“You’re telling me doesn’t make it so, does it?”
“I know. Talk’s cheap. But this talk will be made good. You need a change of scenery. I’d go South if I was you—quick. You’ve been on the Marias too long.”
“Why should I go South, if I don’t happen to want to?” Rock asked.
“Because I tell you to.”
Rock laughed. For the moment he was himself, Doc Martin forgotten, and he had never stepped aside an inch for any man in his life.
“You go plumb to hell,” he said. “I’ll be on the Marias when you are going down the road talking to yourself.”
“All right,” Buck told him very slowly. “This is the second time I’ve warned you. You know what I mean. You’re huntin’ trouble. You’ll get it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rock retorted. “Say it in plain English. What’s eating you?”
“I’ve said all I aimed to say,” Walters declared. “You know what I mean, well enough.”
“If I had never laid eyes on you before,” Rock answered quietly, “you have said enough right now to justify me in going after you. Is that what you want? Do you want to lock horns with me? The light’s good. Pop your whip, you skunk!”
Rock spat the epithet at him in a cold, collected fury. He meant precisely what he said. There was such an arrogant note in that cool intimidation. It filled him with a contemptuous anger for Buck Walters and all his ways and works and his veiled threats.
“You are just a little faster with a gun than I am,” Walters replied, unruffled, the tempo of his voice unchanged. “I take no chances with you. I am not afraid of you, but I have too much at stake to risk it on gun play—by myself. If you do not leave this country, I will have you put away. You can gamble on that.”
Rock took a single step toward him. Walters held both hands away from his sides. He smiled.
“If you so much as make a motion for that gun in your pants,” he said in an undertone, “my friend Dave Wells will kill you before you get it out.”
Now Rock had made that step with the deliberate intention of slapping Walters’ face. No Texan would take a blow and not retaliate. He couldn’t live with himself if he did. But, “my friend, Dave Wells,” made him hesitate. Rock’s glance marked Wells, twenty feet away, a silent watchful figure. And it was more than a mere personal matter. Down in Fort Worth, Uncle Bill Sayre had joint responsibility with this man for the safeguarding of a fortune, and a medley of queer conclusions were leaping into Rock’s agile brain. Reason, logic, evidence—all are excellent tools. Sometimes instinct or intuition, something more subtle than conscious intellectual processes, short-circuits and illuminates the truth with a mysterious flash of light. This man before him was afraid of Doc Martin. He was afraid of Doc, over and above any desire for possession of a woman—any passion of jealousy. There was too much at stake, he had said. Rock would have given much to know just what Buck Walters meant by the phrase. Doc Martin would have known. Rock didn’t regret the surge of his own temper—the insult and challenge he had flung in this man’s teeth. But he fell back on craft.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d expect you to take no chance on an even break, with anybody or about anything. You’ll play safe. You’ll pass the word that I’m to be put away. You tried it already.”
“Next time there will be no slip-up,” Walters answered with cold determination. “You have said things you shouldn’t have said. You have shot off your mouth at me. You have made a play at a fool of a girl that I aim to have for myself. I have a cinch, Martin, and I am goin’ to play it for all it is worth.”
“A cinch on me—or on the Maltese Cross?” Rock taunted.
“Both,” Walters muttered, in a whisper like a hiss, the first emotion that had crept into his cold, malevolent voice.
“That’s a damaging admission to make,” Rock sneered.
“Not to you,” Walters said flatly. “You’ll never have a chance to use it. You are goin’ to be snuffed out, if you don’t pull out. I don’t like you, for one thing; you are interferin’ with my plans, for another.”
“Those are pretty strong words, Buck,” Rock told him soberly. “I’m not an easy man to get away with.” He tried a new tack. “If you are so dead anxious to get rid of me, why don’t you try making it worth my while to remove myself?”
Walters stared at him.
“I ain’t buyin’ you,” he said at last. “There’s a cheaper way.”
“All right, turn your wolf loose on me.” Rock laughed. “See what’ll happen. Now you run along, Mister Buck Walters, before I shoot an eye out of you for luck, you dirty scoundrel!”
Rock’s anger burned anew, but he did not on that account lose his head. He abused Walters in a penetrating undertone, with malice, with intent, with venom that was partly real, partly simulated. But he might as well have offered abuse and insult to a stone. He could not stir Walters to any declaration, any admission that would have been a key to what Rock sought.
“Talk is cheap. I don’t care what you say. It don’t hurt me,” the Maltese Cross boss told him stiffly. “I will shut your mouth for good, inside of forty-eight hours.”
And with that he turned his back squarely on Rock and walked to rejoin his friend, Dave Wells, who stood there, ready to shoot in the name of friendship.
Rock stood staring at their twin backs sauntering past lighted saloons. He wouldn’t have turned his back on Walters, after that. Which was a measure of his appraisal of the man’s intent. Buck would make that threat good!
Rock shrugged his shoulders and strolled across the dusty street into the Grand Union. He was little the wiser for that encounter, except that he could look for reprisal, swift and deadly. He wondered calmly what form it would take.
Certainly he had stepped into a hornet’s nest when he stepped into the dead cowpuncher’s boots. Rock lay down on his bed with his clothes still on and stared up at the dusky ceiling. He was trying to put one and one together, to make a logical sum. It made no difference now, whether he was Doc Martin or Rock Holloway. After to-night Buck Walters was an enemy. And Rock reflected contemptuously that he would rather have him as an enemy than a friend.
He recalled again Uncle Bill Sayre’s distrust of his fellow executor. Uncle Bill’s instinct was sound, Rock felt sure in his own soul, now.
“I expect I am in for some exciting times,” Rock murmured to himself. “Yes, sir, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Ten minutes later he was sound asleep.