CHAPTER VII—MARINERS
Rock’s horse splashed knee-deep through the sparkling Marias, where it raced down a long, pebbled stretch to foam into a black pool. The draw indicated by Nona opened a yawning mouth, coming in from the illimitable spread of Lonesome Prairie, although Rock had yet to learn the name and its aptness. A small creek trickled through this depression. The draw narrowed and lifted, as he rode. He climbed at last to the upper levels, where the eye could span fifty miles. Here cattle lay in the midday heat, along the tiny stream that meandered in a shallow trough, or they fed in bunches on the tops of low rises, where vagrant airs stirred.
Rock counted and estimated, as he jogged from bunch to bunch, noting brands and earmarks, admiring the glint of sun on slender curving horns, the chubby roundness of fat calves and sleek yearlings, and the massive bulk of challenging bulls.
Most of these cattle were branded TL. A few bore the Maltese Cross. Rock smiled to himself. Here he was where Uncle Bill Sayre wanted him to be. The odd part of it was that, if he had never ridden into Fort Worth, he would still be here. It was as if some obscure force had been heading him toward this spot for more than a year. He noted, too, as he glanced over these cattle, an odd 77. He might still be a Seventy Seven rider he reflected, if Mark Duffy had not been a wanton bully in a region where there was no law save that enforced by Colonel Colt.
“Yes, I seemed bound to land here, anywhere,” Rock thought, “whether I came with the Seventy Seven or on my own. I suppose that’s just chance.”
Blind, blundering chance. Very likely. Yet chance might be a maker of secret patterns, Rock reflected, when he had put ten miles between himself and the Marias. The far-rolling land seemed to carry only cattle with the Maltese Cross and few of those. For here he dropped into a low hollow, and on top of the next small lift in the plains he rode into three riders, one of whom was a woman.
Rock had keen eyes. Moreover, since that meeting with Elmer Duffy he was acutely conscious of his newly acquired identity. Thus he marked instantly the brands of the horses. Two were Maltese Cross stock, the other, bestridden by a youth of twenty or less, carried Nona Parke’s brand on his left shoulder. His rider was a blue-eyed slender boy, with a smile that showed fine white teeth when he laid his eyes on Rock.
“Hello, Doc, old boy,” he said. “How’s the ranch an’ the family and everythin’?”
“Same as usual,” Rock answered genially. “What you expect?”
They had reined up, facing each other. The second man nodded and grunted a brief, “Howdy.” The girl stared at Rock with frank interest, as he lifted his hat. Her expression wasn’t lost on him. He wondered if he were expected to know her well, in his assumed identity. In the same breath he wondered if a more complete contrast to Nona Parke could have materialized out of those silent plains. She was a very beautiful creature, indeed. It was hot, and she had taken off her hat to fan her face. Her hair was a tawny yellow. A perfect mouth with a dimple at one corner fitted in a face that would have been uncommon anywhere. Curiously, with that yellow hair she had black eyebrows and eyelashes. And her eyes were the deep blue, almost purple, of mountains far on the horizon. To complete the picture more effectually her split riding skirt was of green corduroy, and she sat atop of a saddle that was a masterpiece of hand-carved leather, with hammered-silver trimmings. It was not the first time Rock had seen the daughters of cattle kings heralding their rank by the elaborate beauty of their gear. He made a lightning guess at her identity and wondered why she was there, riding on roundup. She seemed to know him, too. There was a curious sort of expectancy about her that Rock wondered at.
However, he took all this in at a glance, in a breath. He said to the boy on the Parke horse:
“Where’s the outfit?”
“Back on White Springs, a coupla miles. You might as well come along to camp with us, Doc. It’s time to eat, an’ you’re a long way from home.”
“Guess I will.” Rock was indeed ready to approach any chuck wagon thankfully. It was eleven, and he had breakfasted at five.
They swung their horses away in a lope, four abreast. What the deuce was this Parke rider’s name, Rock wondered? He should have been primed for this. Nona might have told him he would possibly come across the Maltese Cross round-up. This must be her “rep.”
And he was likewise unprepared for the girl’s direct attack. Rock rode on the outside, the girl next. She looked at him sidewise and said without a smile, with even a trace of resentment:
“You must be awful busy these days. You haven’t wandered around our way for over two weeks.”
“I’m working for a boss that don’t believe in holidays,” he parried.
“I’d pick an easier boss,” she said. “Nona never lets the grass grow under anybody’s feet, that I’ve noticed. Sometimes I wish I had some of her energetic style.”
“If you’re suffering from lack of ambish,” Rock said, merely to make conversation, “how’d you get so far from home on a hot day?”
“Oh, Buck was in at the home ranch yesterday, and I rode back with him. Took a notion to see the round-up. I think I’ll go home this afternoon.”
“Say, where’d you get that ridin’ rig, Doc?” the young man asked. He craned his neck, staring with real admiration, and again Rock felt himself involved in a mesh of pretense which almost tempted him to proclaim himself. But that, too, he evaded slightly. He did have a good riding rig. It hadn’t occurred to him that it might occasion comment. But this youth, of course, knew Doc Martin’s accustomed gear probably as well as he knew his own. Naturally he would be curious.
“Made a trade with a fellow the other day.”
Rock registered a mental note to cache Martin’s saddle, bridle, and spurs as soon as he got home.
“I bet you gave him plenty to boot,” the boy said anxiously. “You always were lucky. He musta been broke an’ needed the mazuma.”
“I expect he was,” Rock agreed.
Again the girl’s lips parted to speak, and again the boy interrupted. Rock out of one corner of his eye detected a shade of annoyance cross her alluring face. He wondered.
“How’s Nona an’ the kid?”
“Fine,” Rock informed him. “I left her riding down to Vieux’s after that dark-complected nurse girl.”
“Are you going back home to-night?” the girl asked abruptly.
“I’d tell a man,” Rock said. “As soon as I do business with the chuck pile, I’m riding. I’m supposed to be back by three, and I’ll certainly have to burn the earth to make it.”
“You won’t lose your job if you don’t.”
“Well, if I do, I know where I can get another one,” Rock said lightly. “But I aim to be on time.”
“Him lose his job!” the TL rider scoffed. “You couldn’t pry him lose from that job with a crowbar. Now don’t shoot,” he begged in mock fear. “You know you got a snap, compared to ridin’ round-up with the Maltese Cross—or any other gosh-danged cow outfit. I’m goin’ to put up a powerful strong talk to Nona to send you on beef round-up this fall an’ let me be ranch boss for a rest.”
“You got my permission,” Rock said a little tartly. These personalities irked him. “I’ll be tickled to death if you do.”
He didn’t know what there was in his words, or tone, perhaps, to make the boy stare at him doubtfully, and the yellow-haired girl to smile with a knowing twinkle in her eyes, as if she shared some secret understanding with him.
By then they were loping swiftly into a saucerlike depression in the plains, in the midst of which a large day herd grazed under the eye of four riders, and the saddle bunch was a compact mass by the round-up tents.
Rock left his horse standing on the reins. The others turned their mounts loose. The Cross riders were squatted about the chuck wagon in tailor-fashion attitudes, loaded plates in their laps. Rock followed the other three to the pile of dishes beside the row of Dutch ovens in the cook’s domain. Some of the men looked up, nodded and called him by name. And, as Rock turned the end of the wagon, he came face to face with a man holding a cup of coffee in one hand—a man who stared at him with a queer, bright glint in a pair of agate-gray eyes, a look on his face which Rock interpreted as sheer incredulity.
He was a tall man, a well-built, good-looking individual, somewhat past thirty, Rock guessed. His clothing was rather better than the average range man wore. Neither his size nor his looks nor his dress escaped Rock’s scrutiny, but he was chiefly struck by that momentary expression.
And the fellow knew Rock. He grunted: “Hello, Martin.”
“Hello,” Rock said indifferently. Then, as much on impulse as with a definite purpose, he continued with a slight grin: “You seem kinda surprised to see me.”
Again that bright glint in the eyes, and a flash of color surged up under the tan, as if the words stirred him. Rock didn’t stop to pry into that peculiar manifestation of a disturbed ego. He was hungry. Also, he was sensible and reasonably cautious. He felt some undercurrent of feeling that had to do with Doc Martin. Between the vivacious blonde and this brow-wrinkling stockman, Rock surmised that posing as Doc could easily involve him in far more than he had bargained for.
So he filled his plate and busied himself with his food. No one tarried to converse. As each rider finished eating, he arose, roped a fresh horse out of the remuda, and saddled. The girl and the other two riders ate in silence. From the corner of one eye Rock could see the girl occasionally glance at him, as if she were curious or tentatively expectant. He couldn’t tell what was in her mind. He was going it blind. He didn’t know a soul whom he was supposed to know. That amused him a little—troubled him a little. The quicker he got on his way the better. He had got a little information out of this visit, though. He heard one of the riders address the big, well-dressed man as “Buck.” He heard him issue crisp orders about relieving the day herders. Old Uncle Bill Sayre’s words floated through his mind: “Buck Walters is young, ambitious and high-handed with men an’ fond of women. He dresses flash. A smart cowman.”
That was Buck Walters, the range-functioning executor of the Maltese Cross estate. And there was some distaste in Buck Walters for Doc Martin. More wheels within wheels. Rock wondered if this tawny-haired girl could be the daughter of the deceased Snell. Probably. That didn’t matter. But it might matter a good deal to him if there was any occasion for bad blood between Walters and the dead man into whose boots he, Rock, had stepped.
He finished and rose.
“Well, people,” said Rock, “I’ll be like the beggar, eat and run. I have a long way to go.”
“Tell Nona to ride over to see me,” the girl said politely, but with no particular warmth. “I’ll be at the ranch most of the summer.”
“Sure,” Rock said laconically. “So long.”
He was a trifle relieved when he got clear of that camp. He had plenty of food for thought, as he covered the miles between White Springs and the Marias. Stepping out of his own boots into those of a dead man seemed to have potential complications. When Rock pulled up on the brink of the valley, he had just about made up his mind that he would be himself. Or, he reflected, he could turn his back on Nona Parke and the TL, and the curious atmosphere of mystery that seemed to envelope that ranch on the Marias. He was a capable stock hand. He could probably work for the Maltese Cross and learn all he wanted to know under his own name. Why burden himself with a dead man’s feud, even if the dead man might have been his brother?
As far as Nona Parke went, one rider was as good as another to her. And Rock had no intention of remaining always merely a good stock hand. Other men had started at the bottom and gained independence. No reason why he should not do the same. Land and cattle were substantial possessions. Cattle could be bought. From a small nucleus they grew and multiplied. Land could be had here in the Northwest for the taking. Why should he commit himself to a dead man’s feuds and a haughty young woman’s personal interests? For a monthly wage? He could get that anywhere. He could probably go to work for the Maltese Cross, without question and in his own identity.
Rock, looking from the high rim down on the silver band of the Marias, on the weather-bleached log buildings, asked himself why he should not ride this range and fulfill his promise to an uneasy man in Texas in his own fashion? Why shouldn’t he work for some outfit where there were neither women to complicate life, nor enemies save such as he might make for himself?
The answer to that, he decided at last, must be that one job was as good as another, and that somehow, for all her passionate independence, Nona Parke needed him. There was a peculiar persuasiveness about that imperious young woman. Rock could easily understand why men fell in love with her, desired her greatly, and were moved to serve her if they could. She seemed to generate that sort of impulse in a man’s breast. Rock felt it; knew he felt it, without any trace of sentimentalism involved. He could smile at the idea of being in love with her. Yet some time he might be. He was no different from other men. She had made a profound impression on him. He knew that and did not attempt to shut his eyes to the truth. All these things, sinister and puzzling, of which her dead rider seemed the focus, might be of little consequence, after all. As far as he was concerned, every one simply insisted on taking him for a man who was dead. That had a comical aspect to Rock.
He stared with a speculative interest at the Parke ranch lying in the sunlight beside that shining river. Nona Parke had the right idea. She had the pick of a beautiful valley, eight hundred cattle, and the brains and equipment to handle them. That outfit would make a fortune for her and Betty. Yet it was a man’s job.
“She’s an up-and-coming little devil,” Rock said to himself. “Mind like a steel trap. Hard as nails. A man would never be anything more than an incident to her.”
Thus Rock unconsciously safeguarded his emotions against disaster. He was neither a fool nor a fish. He liked Nona Parke. He had liked her the moment he looked into the gray pools of her troubled eyes. But he wouldn’t like her too well. No; that would be unwise. She had warned him. But he could work for her. Her wages were as good as any—better, indeed, by ten dollars a month. And if there should be trouble in the offing—— Rock shrugged his shoulders. Bridge crossing in due time.
A moon-faced, dark-haired girl of sixteen was puttering around in the kitchen when Rock walked up to the house. Betty came flying to meet him, and Rock swung her to the ceiling two or three times, while she shrieked exultantly.
“Where’s Miss Parke?” he asked the half-breed girl.
“Workin’ in the garden.”
“Where the dickens is the garden?” Rock thought, but he didn’t ask. He went forth to see.
Ultimately he found it, by skirting the brushy bank of the river to the westward beyond the spring. Its overflow watered a plot of half an acre, fenced and cultivated. Rich black loam bore patches of vegetables, all the staple varieties, a few watermelon vines, and cornstalks as tall as a man. In the middle of this, Nona was on her knees, stripping green peas off a tangle of vines.
“Did Mary give you your dinner?” she asked.
“I struck the Maltese Cross round-up about eleven and ate with them,” he told her.
“Oh! Did you see Charlie Shaw?” she asked. “Did he say whether they picked up much of my stuff on Milk River?”
“Charlie Shaw is the name of that kid riding for you, eh? Well, I saw him, but he didn’t say much about cattle. And I didn’t ask. I had to step soft around that outfit. I don’t know any of these fellows, you see, and they all persist in taking me for Doc Martin. I suppose I’d have a deuce of a time persuading anybody around here that I wasn’t.”
“It’s funny. I keep thinking of you as Doc, myself. You’re really quite different, I think,” she replied thoughtfully. “Somehow, I can’t think of Doc as being dead. Yet he is.”
“Very much so,” Rock answered dryly. “And I’m myself, alive, and I wish to stay so. I’ve been wondering if posing as your man, Doc, is, after all, a wise thing for me to do. What do you think?”
“You don’t have to,” she said quickly. “I’m sure Elmer Duffy would be relieved to know you aren’t Doc Martin.”
“I don’t know about that,” Rock mused. “Elmer might have just as much to brood over if he knew who I really am.”
“Why so?” she asked point-blank.
Rock didn’t question the impulse to tell her. His instinct to be himself was strong. The pose he had taken with Duffy that morning had arisen from mixed motives. He wasn’t sure he wanted to carry on along those lines. And he most assuredly didn’t want Nona Parke to think him actuated by any quixotic idea of functioning as her protector after her declarations on that subject.
So he told her concisely why Elmer Duffy might think a feud with Rock Holloway a sacred duty to a dead brother. Nona looked at him with wondering eyes and an expression on her face that troubled Rock, and finally moved him to protest.
“Hang it,” he said irritably. “You needn’t look as if I’d confessed to some diabolical murder. Mark Duffy was as hard as they make ’em. He was running it rough on an inoffensive little man who happens to be my friend. I had to interfere. And Mark knew I’d interfere. He brought it on himself. If I hadn’t killed him he would have killed me. That’s what he was looking for.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” she said earnestly. “Of course, you were quite justified. I was just thinking that this explains why Elmer always hated Doc. Doc told me so. He felt it. I suppose it was the resemblance. I don’t see, now, so far as trouble with Elmer is concerned, that it matters much whether you pass as yourself or Doc Martin. You’d have to watch out for Elmer Duffy in either case. I couldn’t trust that man as far as I could throw a bull by the tail.”
“Nice estimate of a man that’s in love with you,” Rock chuckled. “You’re a little bit afraid of Elmer, aren’t you?”
“No,” she declared. “But he’s brutal at heart. He’s the kind that broods on little things till they get big in his own mind. He would do anything he wanted if he was sure he could get away with it. And he would like to run both me and my ranch.”
“Powerful description,” Rock commented. “Still it sort of fits Elmer—all the Duffys, more or less. They’re inclined to be more aggressive than they ought. Well, I guess it doesn’t make much difference if I do pass as Doc. I’m not trying to put anything over on anybody doing that. Now——”
He went on to tell her about meeting the girl at the Maltese Cross. He described the man who had glared at him and puzzled him by his attitude, but he didn’t tell Nona this latter detail. He merely wanted to know who was who.
“That was Buck Walters, range foreman of the Maltese Cross,” she confirmed Rock’s guess.
“Did Doc Martin ever have any sort of run-in with him?” he asked.
“Heavens, no! I would certainly have heard of it if he had. Why?”
“Oh, he seemed rather stand-offish, that’s all,” Rock answered indifferently.
“Buck thinks rather highly of himself,” Nona told him. “He’s in charge of a big outfit. The Maltese Cross is an estate, and he is one of the administrators. He’s pretty high-handed. There are men in this country who don’t like him much. But I don’t think Doc cared two whoops, one way or the other. Probably Buck was thinking about something.”
“Very likely. And who is the yellow-haired dulce?”
“Alice Snell. She and a brother inherit the whole Maltese Cross outfit when the boy comes of age.”
“She told me to tell you to ride down to see her—that she’d be at the ranch all summer.” Thus Rock delivered the message. “I didn’t hardly know what she was talking about.”
“Alice never does talk about anything much, although she talks a lot,” Nona said coolly. “Her long suit is getting lots of attention.”
“Well, I expect she gets it,” Rock ventured. “She’s good looking. Heiress to a fortune in cows. She ought to be popular.”
“She is,” Nona said—“especially with Buck Walters.”
“Oh! And is Buck popular with her?” Rock asked with more than mere curiosity. This was an item that might be useful in the task of sizing up Buck Walters and his way with the Maltese Cross.
“She detests him, so she says,” Nona murmured.
“Then why does she stick around up here in this forsaken country, when she doesn’t have to?”
“You might ask her,” Nona replied.
Rock had squatted on his heels, picking pods off the vines and chucking them by handfuls into the pan.
“I might, at that,” he agreed, “when I have a chance.”
“Alice is very ornamental,” Nona Parke continued thoughtfully. “But quite useless, except to look at. She gives me a pain sometimes, although I like her well enough.”
“You’re not very hard to look at yourself, it happens,” Rock told her deliberately. “And I don’t suppose you object to being ornamental as well as very useful and practical.”
Nona looked at him critically.
“Don’t be silly,” she warned.
“Don’t intend to be.” Rock grinned. “I never did take life very seriously. I sure don’t aspire to begin the minute I find myself working for you. I’m a poor but honest youth, with my way to make in the world. Is it silly for a man to admire a woman—any woman?”
“I wish you’d pull those weeds out of that lettuce patch,” she said, changing the subject abruptly. “They grow so quickly. I’m always at these infernal weeds. After you get that done, roll up your bed and bring it to the house. There’s lots of room.”
Rock performed the weeding in half an hour. If another had asked him to do that, he would probably have told him to go hire a gardener, he reflected.
“She’ll have me baking bread and working the churn next,” he chuckled to himself. “Trust Miss Nona Parke to get her money’s worth out of the hired man.”
That was an exaggeration. Nona wasn’t a driver. Within a week Rock found himself doing various jobs about the ranch because he saw that they needed doing, not because she told him to do them. He rode more or less every day, and most of the time Nona rode with him. It was easier, if less exciting and glamorous, than round-up. He had a comfortable bed in a big room, with a huge stone fireplace, which had been the bunk room when the TL had a dozen riders and cattle by the thousand. Between Nona and the half-breed girl, the vegetable garden and the two milch cows, Rock ate better food than had fallen to his lot since he was at school on the Atlantic seaboard.
It was pleasant to live there, pleasant to ride range with this dark-haired, competent young person, who could be brusque and curt when she chose, and self-sufficient at all times. They went clattering away from the ranch in the cool of morning. They combed far coulee heads, hidden springs, river bottoms above and below the ranch. Rock was never quite sure what the girl looked for in these long rides. The only actual stock work they did was to throw back straggling bunches that grazed beyond certain limits. That, as Rock understood the range business, was not important. He concluded that Nona simply had a passion for looking over her possessions. He had seen men like that—men who owned longhorns by the tens of thousands.
But she seemed to be looking for something. Rock merely surmised that. For a week after he happened on the Maltese Cross, they covered the surrounding country, day by day. Nona talked very little. She rode like a man, easily, carelessly, a component part of her mount. She could handle a rope with fair skill. There was strength in her slender arms, an amazing endurance in her slim body. She knew her stock, bunch by bunch— leader cows and oddly marked bulls. She knew where to find certain little herds. It was as if she watched over them jealously, as a miser gloats over his hoard. There was something in that Rock couldn’t fathom. Branded cattle on a recognized range were safer than bonds in a steel safe, as a rule. Sometimes there were exceptions to that rule. If there was such an exception here, Nona never breathed it, and the riders of a cow outfit were usually the first to be warned if there was any suspicion of rustling in the air. And Rock would not ask. But he wondered. He began to grow a little uneasy, too. He had accepted pay from Uncle Bill Sayre to secure certain information. He was on the ground, but he was not learning much about the Maltese Cross and Buck Walters. He had grown personally curious about Buck Walters, too, since meeting him. He didn’t like the man. Rock wasn’t given to sudden likes and dislikes. Nevertheless, on that one eye-to-eye clash he disliked Buck Walters—a much more active feeling than he could muster up either for or against Elmer Duffy, for instance.
Rock had plenty of time for these mental conjectures. They were like mariners stranded on an island in midocean—himself, Nona Parke, the half-breed girl, and Baby Betty. No riders passed. Elmer Duffy did not come again. The sun rose, swung in a hot arc across a sapphire sky, and sank behind the far-off Rockies. They rode, rested, and slept, while the stars twinkled in a cool canopy, and the frogs along the Marias croaked antiphony to the soprano of a myriad of unseen crickets in the grass.
Then one day Rock rode alone on the benches to the North. When he splashed through the shallows and came to the corrals late in the afternoon, there was a bay horse in the stable, and Charlie Shaw sat talking to Nona in the shade of the porch.