CHAPTER XIII—ON THE WARPATH
Rock staved off Nona Parke’s agitated questions when he asked for food. He robbed his own bed reluctantly, but a promise was a promise, apart from his desire to have Stack out of the country between dusk and dawn. The blood on his face and the strange sight of him riding a Maltese Cross horse stirred Nona to a curious pitch. But Rock moved fast, told her nothing, and got away again.
He made the round trip in an hour. As he drew up on the brink of the ravine, Stack walked up to meet him, carrying on his back Rock’s saddle which he had stripped from the dead horse.
“I reckoned you’d want this,” he said genially.
Rock sat on his own horse, watching the man ride away. Stack headed south. As far as Rock could see him, he bore straight for Fort Benton. He would never turn back, Rock felt assured. Stack had shot his bolt. There was a certain strange relief in that. He marveled at the queer compound of savagery, cupidity, cunning and callousness that characterized such a man. They were rare, but they did exist.
Stack admitted that Hurley had shot Doc Martin. He admitted that he and Hurley were to share five hundred dollars for ambushing Rock. He didn’t seem to have any emotion about it, except a mild shame over his failure. He didn’t seem to regard Rock with anything except a grudging admiration for beating him at his own game. Owning himself beaten, he withdrew. And, at that, Rock muttered to himself, Stack had nothing on Buck Walters when it came to vileness and treachery.
Rock turned his horse and rode homeward, reaching the TL about supper time. He was tired. His head ached intolerably, now that the bleeding had ceased. When he took off his hat and removed the handkerchief compress, he could feel the slash cut by that bullet. A quarter of an inch lower! By such narrow margins chance operates. Rock sat on the side of his bed, wondering if he should wash and bandage that wound. Now he began to fear that it might give him a good deal of trouble. He hoped not, because, unless he had guessed wrong, some rapid-fire action lay ahead of him. And while he pondered thus, Nona walked into the room.
He scarcely remembered how he had accounted to her for the crimson stains on his face. But her quick glance took in the discolored handkerchief and the matted brown hair. She stood over him with a worried look.
“You are hurt,” she said. “What happened?”
“Fellow took a shot at me—one of Buck Walters’ men. Keep that under your hat,” he warned. “It’s only a scratch.”
She bent over his head and parted the hair with gentle finger tips.
“It isn’t bad,” she murmured. “But it must be painful. And it ought to be cleaned. I’ll get some stuff and dress it.”
She returned in a minute with a basin, scissors and carbolic acid. Very deftly she snipped the hair away from about the wound, cleaned it with a solution that burned like fire, and drew the edges together with a patch of court-plaster. Then she sat down on the bed beside Rock and said earnestly:
“Now tell me about it.”
“Nothing much to tell,” Rock demurred.
“You mean you won’t?”
“Not just now,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you, anyway. Buck seems to want me out of the way. I am quite a bit wiser about things than I was this morning, but I still have a few guesses coming. There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t let on to any one that I have been shot at. I will say a horse fell with me and cut my head.”
“But it does worry me,” she protested. “I feel uneasy. Something’s got to be done about this, if a man riding for me can’t go anywhere except in danger of his life.”
“Something is going to be done about it,” Rock assured her. “Darned quick, too! It isn’t because I am riding for you. It is because I am supposed to be dangerous, just as Doc was dangerous for something he knew or guessed. He was foolish enough to tip his hand to Buck. I am not going to talk. I’m going to get busy. All you can do is to wish me luck.”
“I do,” she murmured. “I wish the Maltese Cross had never come into this country.”
“In that case I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “And I’m darned glad I came.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Oh, lots of reasons.” Rock smiled. “I’ll tell you some of these days, when the dove of peace spreads her wings across this part of the world.”
“I wish you’d tell me,” she begged. “I hate mysteries. I’m getting so I go around here with my heart in my mouth, wondering what terrible thing will happen next.”
“I don’t think anything more will happen around this ranch,” Rock declared. “I’m the center of this trouble, and I’m going to take myself away from here—for a while. But I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be sorry to see you go,” she whispered. “But perhaps it’s best, if you are going to be ambushed at every turn.”
She looked down at the floor frowningly for a few seconds. Rock stared at the curve of her neck, the scarlet twist of her lips, the dark cloud of hair, and a queer breath-taking sensation stirred in him, an almost uncontrollable impulse to draw her up to him. He shook himself. Why the devil should a woman have that effect on a man? And Nona seemed to be unconscious of it—even to be irritated by the manifestation of a feeling she was the factor in arousing.
Nona got up. She looked at him with such frowning composure that Rock couldn’t meet those level gray eyes. It seemed to him they read him through and through.
“Come along to supper. It’s all ready,” she said.
Rock shook his head. “Don’t feel like eating,” he replied. “After a while I’ll have a cup of coffee, maybe; but not just now. Will Charlie be back to-night, I wonder?”
“I think so.”
“I’m going to pull out at daylight,” he told her. “If I am gone before you get up, so long.”
“I’ll be up,” she said briefly and left him.
Charlie Shaw came jingling his spurs across the porch at sundown.
“Did Buck have anything to say to you while you were at camp?” Rock asked.
“Didn’t see hide nor hair of him,” Charlie replied. “He took one of the wagons, about half his crew, a bunch of saddle stock, and pulled his freight as soon as they all got back from that session here this mornin’. So the boys told me.”
“I thought the spring work was all over,” Rock commented.
“It is.”
“Nobody know where Buck headed for?”
Charlie shook his head.
“I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut,” Rock said, “that he took with him only his special pets.”
“You’d win your bet,” Charlie growled. “I didn’t count noses, but the hard pills were among the missin’. How’d you guess?”
“‘Birds of a feather.’” Rock quoted the old proverb. “I’m leaving you, myself, in the morning, Charlie.”
“What for?” Charlie inquired.
“Well, for public consumption.” Rock smiled. “I’m pulling out because I find life here much too exciting. I don’t like vigilance committees and private wars. Privately, between you and me and the gatepost, I’ll be back before long. And I’m coming back with bells on.”
Charlie frowned.
“Kinda hate to see you go,” he said. “But I guess you know your own business best.”
“Did Doc Martin ever tell you about finding a set of corrals with a branding chute, tucked away somewhere in the Sweet Grass?”
“Hell!” Charlie exclaimed. “How’d you find that out?”
“Did he tell you where they were?”
“No,” Charlie shook his head. “He didn’t tell me nothin’. If he’d kept as close a mouth to everybody as he did to me, he’d be alive yet, I guess. I know he did, that’s all.”
“And he made some sort of crack at Buck about this, didn’t he?” Rock hazarded. “After that the fireworks began.”
Charlie nodded.
“Doc was awful outspoken when he got his back up about anything,” he said. “Buck tried to horn him away from the Maltese Cross on account of Alice, I guess. They had words about it. Nobody was around to hear what was said, but Doc told me he put a bug in Buck’s ear about range bosses with ambitions to get rich off the outfit they worked for. I asked him if he meant that Buck wanted to grab Alice an’ the outfit, with a parson’s assistance, an’ he just grinned. I told him if he knew anything he better keep his mouth shut where Buck Walters was concerned. Been better for him if he had.”
“I wish he had, too,” Rock said. “He’d be alive now, and he’d be darned useful. I got ideas about Mister Buck Walters, myself.”
“How?”
“Better not be too curious, kid,” Rock advised. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Better you aren’t mixed up in anything. Nobody aims to hang you to a cottonwood, or bushwhack you in some lonely coulee. I only asked you about these mysterious pens to check up on something I found out. If you don’t know, of course you can’t put me wise.”
“Have they got anything to do with us bein’ shy a few calves this spring, d’you suppose?” Charlie asked thoughtfully. “Because, if it has, I might get mixed up in it yet. I don’t know as I’d sit tight an’ keep quiet if I thought anybody was rustlin’ off Nona. She needs all she’s got.”
“That I don’t know, yet,” Rock said frankly. “I can tell you this much, Charlie: If there is any connection between what I know and suspect and Nona’s missing calves, she’ll get ’em back with interest.”
“Gosh! You sure got me goin’,” Charlie grumbled.
“Don’t let it get away with you,” Rock told him. “Keep mum. I’ll be back here again, by and by. If anybody inquires about me, say I quit the Marias because there was too much high life around here to suit me.”
The boy grinned and said no more. In an hour the TL was severally and collectively asleep. It seemed to Rock that he had no more than closed his eyes before they opened again at the first streak of dawn. He had caught up his two horses the night before. Now he went down to the stable to feed them. A lot of miles lay ahead of those ponies. When he came back to the house, smoke streamed from the kitchen chimney, and Nona was making coffee and slicing bacon. The two of them were the only souls astir. It was still an hour and a half before the regular rising time.
“You didn’t have to get up at this unearthly hour,” Rock protested.
“I heard you, and I didn’t want you to go away without your breakfast,” she said.
“For a fellow that has no use for men,” Rock teased, “you are awful darned good to them. You’d make an excellent wife for a ranchman.”
“I am a pretty darned good ranchman myself, without being a wife, thank you, Mister Holloway,” she retorted.
“You won’t escape forever,” he told her. “Some of these days somebody will spread a wide loop and snare you.”
Nona slid three strips of bacon on a hot plate and set it before him, with a toss of her head.
“Men,” she said disdainfully, “seem to think that a woman’s chief business in life is to be captured by some man.”
“Well,” Rock said between mouthfuls, “when you stop to consider it, isn’t it? It seems that way, when you think of it.”
“Fiddlesticks!” She laughed. “That may be some women’s ambition, but not mine.”
“It isn’t an ambition,” Rock murmured. “It’s just human nature. You ask Alice. When you get to be a cattle queen, you’ll find yourself a heap more interested in men than you are in cows. You’re darned haughty about this poor worm man, right now. Your father was a man, old girl, and I expect your mother was glad of it.”
Nona stared at him, half astonished, half amused.
“I don’t know whether you’re preaching,” she said artlessly, “or drumming up trade for a matrimonial bureau.”
“Neither,” Rock said. “Just thinking out loud, that’s all.”
He rode up to the house and, dragging out his bed, lashed it across the black horse. Sangre stood shaking his glossy head, with the white star. Rock swung up. He hesitated a second. He wanted to say good-by, and still—— Then Nona came out of the kitchen with a package in her hand.
“Here’s a lunch,” she said. “You didn’t say where you were going, but if it’s an all-day ride a bite will come handy.”
“Thanks!” He tucked it in a saddle pocket. “Well, here’s hoping there’s no more excitement around here till I come back, Nona. And if I don’t come back, you’ll know it’s because I can’t, not because I don’t want to.”
“You’re not going on the warpath after Buck Walters, are you, Rock?” she asked uneasily. “Please don’t. It isn’t worth while. A man like that always gets what’s coming to him. Let him be.”
“I’m going on the warpath, but not the way you mean,” Rock answered. “I am not going after anybody with a gun in my hand and blood in my eye. Not yet. Listen! Let me whisper something in your ear.”
Nona stood beside Sangre, one hand resting on the red horse’s curved neck. Rock bent down as if to whisper. And when Nona turned her face up, he kissed her lightly on the red mouth that was beginning to haunt him and to trouble him wherever he went, very much to his dismay.
And when she drew back with startled eyes, Rock touched his horse gently and rode away without a backward glance. If he looked back, he would turn back, whether to apologize or plead, he could scarcely say. For a young man who had always been rather egotistically sure of himself he found his breast filled with a strange commotion.
“That,” he sighed at last, with a backward look into the Marias Valley from the south bank, “is sure a hell of a way for a fellow to treat a girl that got up at daybreak to get him his breakfast. Well, I guess it’s either kill or cure.”
As the sun rose, a hot ball in the east, flinging its careless gold over the bleached grass, that rolled away to limitless horizons, and Rock gradually left that familiar, pleasant valley far behind, he thought less and less of that unpremeditated kiss and more and more of the business in hand. He had set out on what seemed a mad undertaking, but there was method in his madness.
He came down to the bed of the Missouri and into the streets of Fort Benton shortly after noon. He let his horses rest and munch hay in a livery stable for three hours. Then, with a little food tied on his pack, he embarked on the ferry and so gained the southern shore, whence ran the great freight trails to the Judith Basin and farther to towns along the Yellowstone, threaded like forlorn beads on that steel string which was the Northern Pacific Railway.
His specific destination was Billings, two hundred miles in an air line southeast. But first he turned aside into the rich grazing lands of the Judith Basin to find Al Kerr of the Capital K. It was a far cry to the Odeon and Clark’s Ford on the bleak plains of Nebraska. But Rock was riding into the Judith to draw on a promise the little man had made him that night under the stars.
He forged southeast all that afternoon, picketed his horses overnight by a rippling creek, wiped the dew off his saddle at dawn, and rode again—rode at a jog trot, hour after hour. He met a stage and held converse with the driver, passed on and came to a stage station on that rutted artery of travel to Lewistown. Here a hostler gave him specific directions. And at sunset he rode into the home ranch of the Capital K. The first man that hailed him was Kerr himself.
“Well, well, well,” Kerr said. “You have shore been a long time gettin’ around to pay a sociable call.”
“Can you stake me to two horses in the morning?” Rock asked, after they had exchanged greetings. “I got to hotfoot it on to Billings early.”
“Sure,” Kerr said. “Give you the best we got.”
They sat up late that night, talking. The Capital K had taken over a lovely valley watered by a shining stream, bordered by natural meadows. Kerr had concentrated all his cattle there. They swarmed by tens of thousands over a radius of forty miles. The little man was well content. He would move no more. He had preëmpted a kingdom, and there were no more worlds to conquer. He had built a substantial house and brought his family from Texas for the summer. But, beyond these visible evidences of prosperity, he didn’t talk much about himself. Rock’s story engrossed all his attention. And to the tentative, provisional request with which Rock ended, he gave hearty assent.
“Sure, I will,” he declared. “Hell, I’d do it like a shot, just on your own account. As it happens, I know Uncle Bill Sayre darned well. He loaned me twenty thousand dollars on my unbacked note, one time. I had a speakin’ acquaintance with Dave Snell, too. You go on to Billings and get word to him. Once you get back here I can throw an outfit together for you in a matter of hours. I have saddle horses to burn. An’ I got men that’ll foller you to hell and back again. By gum, that’s some formation up there, if you got it figured right. Same old story—the beggar on horseback. What a fool that man is. Ain’t satisfied with a good thing. Tryin’ to grab the earth, regardless.”
“It may be covered up so that it’ll be hard to get at him personally,” Rock said. “But if I can make sure of the Steering Wheel, I can force his hand. It looks air tight, but there’s always a weak spot in that sort of undertaking you know.”
“You watch he don’t dynamite you. He may have a joker up his sleeve as well as an ace in the hole,” Kerr warned. “I have heard of Buck Walters plenty down South. He’s a smart man. He’s got to be that an’ a cattleman, besides, or he’d never got in so strong with Dave Snell. If you get the goods on him, don’t give him a chance—the dirty dog. Gosh, a man that hires his killin’ done is lower’n a snake in the bottom of a forty-foot well.”