CHAPTER XIV—HOT ON THE TRAIL
Rock chewed a pencil butt until it looked as if it had been mouthed by an earnest puppy. He wrote and erased the length and breadth of half a dozen telegraph forms before he evolved a suitable communication. And finally he thrust the lengthy message through the wicket at the operator. The man pawed over the sheets.
“All one message?” he asked incredulously.
“One message,” Rock assured him.
He counted the words.
“Gee whiz, partner, that’ll cost you a young fortune,” he said in a tone compounded of surprise and awe. “That ain’t a telegram. It’s a letter.”
“Send her just the same,” Rock requested. “And get it on the wire as soon as you can. How long will it take to get an answer?”
“Depends. It’ll have to be relayed from St. Paul to Chicago and then to Fort Worth. With close connections and your man on the job at the other end, maybe four hours, maybe twelve, maybe longer.”
“Is there any way I can get quick action?” Rock asked. “It’s darned important. Time is money.”
“Gosh, money is certainly no objection to nobody that sends two-hundred-word telegrams,” the man replied. “I might ask the St. Paul office to rush it if they can.”
“Look!” Rock laid a ten-dollar gold piece on the counter. “That’s to grease your axles. Go as far as you like to get that message hurried. Shoot her quick. I’m going to the N. P. Hotel and turn in. The clerk can tell you my room number. You get the answer to me hot off the griddle when it comes. If I’m asleep, wake me up.”
The operator grinned, as he pocketed the ten. “I’ll get you all the action there is,” he promised.
Rock dragged himself across the street, too tired to seek a restaurant, despite his hunger. Within twenty minutes he was fast asleep, at three in the afternoon. Billings went about its daily affairs. The sound of rattling wagons in the street, the voices of men, the intermittent bang of carpenter’s hammers and the whine of saws floated in through his open windows on the hot summer air. These sounds receded and died away, powerless to break the deep slumber of weariness. Rock was really exhausted.
A pounding at his door wakened him. Dark had closed in. His room was like a cellar. For a second, in that subterranean gloom, Rock struggled to remember where he was, and why he was there. Then sleep fell away from him like a discarded garment, and he leaped up, opened the door to a man in shirt sleeves, with a green eye shade, a lantern in one hand, and a telegram in the other.
“Here’s your wire from Texas,” he said. “Just come.”
Rock ripped open the envelope.
Act on your own judgment. Will back any action you take. Suspected this. Coming north, first train.
Sayre.
“Thanks. There’s no answer,” Rock told the operator, and the man left. Rock fumbled for a match, lit a lamp, and read the telegram again. It told him nothing, but it authorized him to act. Very well; he would act. He looked at his watch—ten thirty. He had slept seven hours. He felt fresh. He dressed. The clerk in the hotel office told him where he could find a night lunch counter. This Rock located. Fortified with ham and eggs and two cups of coffee and a cigarette, he sought the livery stable where his tired horses stood in stalls. No use depending on them to carry him back to the Capital K. He had ridden them too hard. But he had to go. Therefore, he routed out a sleepy proprietor and made a bargain with him for a rig and a driver. Twenty minutes later he was burrowing through the night, in a buggy behind a pair of slashing bays, his saddle and bed lashed on the back of the rig, and a cheerful youth driving.
Over rough roads and smooth, over stretches where no road at all marked the rolling land, nodding beside the driver, dawn found Rock looking down the northern slope toward the Judith country. They halted by a spring, grazed the team, fed them grain, and went on again. Mid-afternoon brought them to the Kerr Ranch, a hundred and ten miles in seventeen hours.
At sunrise the following morning Rock turned north once more. But this time he rode with a dozen men at his back, the pick of the Capital K, who, when Rock frankly asked them if they were willing to follow him and burn powder, if necessary, laughed and told him to lead them to it. Ahead on the trail rattled a chuck wagon drawn by a four-horse team, tooled by a capable cook. A hundred head of saddle horses, urged on by a wrangler, made an equine tail to the rolling wagon. And every man carried a rifle under his stirrup leather and a belt full of shiny brass cartridges, ready for action.
They reached Fort Benton in two days, swam their stock, and ferried the wagon. Twenty-four hours later Rock pointed his outfit down to the Marias Valley, a mile above the western end of Nona Parke’s upper fence. He sat on his horse on the rim and stared north to where the blue spires of the Sweet Grass stood like cones on the sky line. He gazed at those distant buttes with something akin to anticipation. Over there lay the solution of a problem. It might prove a battle ground, and he might draw a blank; but he did not think so. He sat there visualizing mentally what strange sights those insentient buttes had imperturbably beheld, what nefarious secrets lay darkly in some scarred ravine or mountain meadow. And, away beyond the Sweet Grass, the Steering Wheel crowd on the Old Man River had a finger in this devil’s pie. Or did they? That he would presently discover.
And, while he pondered, fretfully impatient because another night and day must elapse before he could breast the steep escarpments of the Sweet Grass, he saw a rider lope up along the river flat. His men were staking tents for the night and disposing their beds. Rock rode down the bank and crossed the flat. As he neared the camp, which already flung a blue pennant from the fire under the Dutch ovens, this rider drew near, a familiar gait and color to his mount. Presently he materialized into Charlie Shaw.
They shook hands.
“How’s everything and everybody?” Rock asked.
“Fine. Alice is still at the ranch. She ain’t so sad as she used to be. Mentions you quite frequent. Hopes you’ll blow back so she can get acquainted. You’re a brave man, she says, an’ it’s awful strange how much you look like poor old Doc. She makes Nona look at her sidewise sometimes. You was a wise man to pull out when you did.”
Rock laughed at the mischief in the boy’s bright blue eyes.
“I got other fish in the pan, right now,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to console Alice.”
“I wondered where a round-up blew in from,” Charlie said. “So I rode up to have a look. What outfit’s this?”
“Capital K from Judith Basin.”
“There ain’t no such outfit this side of the Big Muddy, that I’ve ever seen,” Charlie remarked. “That’s the Kerr outfit from Buffalo Creek, ain’t it? What do you aim to round-up over here?”
“Oh, hidden branding pens and men that hire gun fighters to shoot up other people, and such.” Rock had lowered his voice discreetly.
“You runnin’ this round-up of undesirable stock?” Charlie questioned.
“Uh-huh. Borrowed some men an’ horses from old Al, and came over here on a—— Oh, well, call it a prospecting tour.”
“I kinda suspected as soon as I seen your phiz,” Charlie murmured. “You’ll be goin’ up around the Sweet Grass for a spell, eh? You full-handed?”
Rock laughed.
“Do you crave excitement that much?” he bantered. “Don’t you reckon Nona needs you worse than I do?”
“Not for a few days. I might be darned useful to you, if you’re lookin’ for corrals in out-of-the-way places.”
“Oh, no!” Rock said. “A few days back you sung a different tune. You’re remembering things you’d forgotten. You do know something, then?”
The boy shook his head. He got down off his horse. Rock followed. There was a clear space of dusty clay by Charlie’s feet. He squatted on his spurred heels.
“Not the way you think,” he said in an undertone. His boyish face grew sober and intent. A trace of excitement warmed his eyes. “What you said that last night started me thinkin’. I got uneasy. I never did have much likin’ for Buck Walters. Too darned smooth and high-handed—too arbitrary. I got to thinkin’ that if anybody was puttin’ over somethin’ in the rustlin’ line, why should they overlook the TL? A little outfit is always safe to pick. So I organized myself the next day and whooped it up for the Sweet Grass. An’ I found that set of corrals with the brandin’ chute that Doc mentioned. I didn’t know where they were, but I worked on round-up all around the Sweet Grass last summer an’ this spring. I knew where not to look for such a thing.”
“And you found them? Did you find out anything else?” Rock questioned eagerly.
“Nothin’ to find out. The only two outfits that ever touches those hills is the Cross an’ the Seventy Seven. Neither outfit ever used those pens.”
“But they have been used?”
“I rise to remark they been used,” Charlie declared. “Used plenty—used recent. I have a hunch they’re goin’ to be used again pretty pronto.”
“Why?” Rock demanded.
“Well,” Charlie grinned, “Buck an’ six of his pet snakes are camped on a creek about five miles from them corrals—layin’ low and doin’ nothin’. An’ there’s heaps of cattle in their vicinity. An’ five riders with pack outfits an’ about forty loose horses joined ’em from the North yesterday afternoon.”
“Yesterday afternoon?” Rock took quick reckoning of the distance and the hour. “How do you know?”
“I seen ’em,” Charlie murmured. “I lay low, lookin’ at ’em. I rode all night to get home. I was out of grub, an’ between you an’ me an’ the gatepost, I didn’t want none of that outfit to catch me circulatin’ there alone. I don’t hanker to get caught in no lonely coulee all by my lonesome.”
“You couldn’t see what brand was on the horses those fellows rode in from the North?” Rock went on.
“Uh-uh. Too chancy. I pulled my freight. That bunch wasn’t there on no picnic.”
“Well, I’m going up there with these boys on a picnic party.” Rock smiled sardonically. “If you’re fond of picnics, you can come along. You’ll be welcome as the flowers in May. I may go farther North—plumb up into Canada. But first I would like to look at these mysterious corrals on the Sweet Grass. And I would like to know what Buck Walters is doing there.”
“Will I come? Say, watch my smoke!” Charlie grunted. “You might as well amble down to the ranch with me, while I collect my bed and three or four horses.”
“I don’t think I will,” Rock declined. A swift memory of the startled, indignant blaze in Nona Parke’s eyes when he stole that farewell kiss troubled him. “You can tell Nona anything you want. Better bring along your Winchester. There’s liable to be dirty work at the crossroads.”
Charlie laughed and swung up on his horse, declining Rock’s invitation to supper. He had an odd job or two to see about that evening, but he would join the Capital K with a string of horses by dusk. The two hay diggers, he told Rock, were good, reliable men, and, with Nona fortified by Alice Snell and Mary Vieux, it was all right to leave the ranch alone.
Rock smiled at Charlie’s air of responsibility when he said that. He couldn’t imagine Nona Parke being gratified at such manly solicitude for her welfare, nor of being in need of Charlie’s protection under any circumstances—according to her. But it was decent of the kid to feel that way about her, just the same. Loyalty untainted by sentimentalism. To Charlie wild horses, hard riding, moving herds, night guards, the trail, and all that vast panoramic sweep of the range, with its incidental excitements, crowded the importance of women as a part of life into the very background. And so far as Nona Parke was concerned, Rock half wished that he could say the same of himself. But he couldn’t truthfully. He was too fundamentally honest to deny the impulse behind that stolen kiss. He had ridden too much with Nona and watched her too often, with a clear consciousness of what was happening to himself. He couldn’t help it. Damn it! How could a man help his feelings?
And he shrugged his shoulders impatiently and joined his men, as the cook called, “Gru-u-b pi-i-le!” He loaded his plate with food and squatted on the ground to eat. But his mind grew busy with abstractions. Things sometimes worked curiously in harmony toward a given end, almost as if there were a design, a pattern of some sort, a definite impulse from some obscure source. He had expected to spend days seeking those hidden corrals. Joe Stack had known about them, too, but without knowing their location. They were not something Doc Martin had dreamed about. And here was Charlie Shaw prepared to lead him to the very spot.
Rock looked away to the north, coffee cup in hand, with a thrill of eagerness. He despised murder, theft and betrayal of a trust. He was hot on the trail of all three, unless he had made an error in deduction. If he were in error, he would be laughed out of Montana, and his name made a synonym for a fool, and his works would be derided on every range between the Marias and the Texas Panhandle.
But the laugh, Rock felt in his soul, would be on another man; if, indeed, any unseemly merriment should arise out of this matter, which had already cost two lives and bestowed upon him a hurt of which his chafing hatband still reminded him.