THE CATTLE BRAND
We were saved, but my heart swelled with grief and anger, as, creeping out from our shelter, I stood up and looked down on what had so lately been a field of waving grain, ripe for the harvest.
Torn, trampled, beaten into the earth, scarcely a stalk was left standing, and the corn field was in no better shape. Poor little Ralph, with a dim, childish comprehension of the calamity that had befallen us, was crying bitterly. Lifting him to my shoulder I started toward the house, the desolated fields were out of sight behind us, when Jessie came hurrying up the trail.
“What has happened?” she inquired anxiously. “I thought I heard Ralph scream, and I am sure I heard you giving the round-up call; I thought I heard cattle, too.” She took Ralph, who was still crying, from my shoulder and carried him in her arms. “Don’t cry, precious,” she said. “Tell sister what has frightened you?”
“’Essie frowed all ’e ’ackburries at ’e bad tow, an’ ’e bad tows walked all over our pitty torn ’talks, so ’ey don’t ’tan’ up no more,” he sobbed incoherently. Jessie looked at me with dilating eyes. We were by this time entering the house, where I was not surprised to find Mrs. Horton again awaiting us, for I had already observed the Horton equipage in the front yard.
“Leslie!” Jessie was exclaiming, as we crossed the threshold. “Don’t tell me that the cattle have been in our fields; it isn’t possible!”
“I guess it is,” I said recklessly, unreasonably resenting our neighbor’s placid face. “If you find it hard to believe, just go and look for yourself. There isn’t a stalk of grain left standing,” and I proceeded to give the details of my late adventure and experience.
Jessie seemed like one dazed. She sank into a chair, holding Ralph, who was willing, for once, to be held tightly in her arms, and spoke never a word.
“What I want to know,” cried Mrs. Horton, her face fiery with indignation, “is, whose cattle were they? It’s a low shameful, mean, trick; I don’t care who did it! Oh, to think of all you’ve had to suffer, and of all that those fields of grain stood for to you, and then to think—I don’t feel as if I could hear it!” she broke off, abruptly, her voice choking. I, avoiding her eyes, looked out of the window through which I saw, indeed, only the trampled fields, invisible to any but the mind’s eye from that window.
“I hope you can collect damages,” Mrs. Horton broke out again; “and I guess you can if you can prove the ownership of the cattle. Did you notice the brand?”
Feigning not to have heard the question, I still gazed silently out of the window, but Mrs. Horton was not to be put off so easily; she repeated the inquiry, her voice suddenly grown sharp with anxiety. “Did you notice the brand, Leslie?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
She would not be put off, and, for a wicked moment, my heart was hot against all that bore her husband’s name.
“The brand was, ‘R, half-circle, A,’” I said, and bolted out of the house to hide myself and my boiling indignation in the hayloft, but, as I went, I heard Mrs. Horton sobbing out an explanation to Jessie:
“Jake started out early this morning, long before sun-up, it was, to drive the cattle from the upper range to the north pasture—he said. I told him I was afraid that he couldn’t handle such a big bunch alone—there’s nigh three thousand of them, if there’s a dozen—but he thought that he could, and they must have got away from him after all!”
Jessie made no comment, but lying at full length in the seclusion of the hayloft, I thought of the relative positions of the upper range, where Mr. Horton’s cattle usually grazed, and the north pasture, and knew that, in order to reach our fields, the herd must have “strayed” at least five miles out of their proper course.
I was still lying in the hayloft when, as my ears informed me, Mrs. Horton came out, climbed soberly into her wagon, and drove away. With my eyes shut I still seemed to see her drooping head and shamed face. I had so far recovered my reason by this time that I could feel for her; she believed in her husband. He would soon be able to convince her that what had occurred was due to an unavoidable accident; the cattle had broken away from their one herder, and she would expend her indignation on the fact that he had attempted to drive them alone, and—she would try to make him pay damages. She would fail. One did not need an intimate acquaintance with her husband to know that.
The sound of approaching wheels aroused me from my unhappy meditations. Joe was returning. I sprang up, slid down the ladder, and went out into the yard to meet him. Mr. Wilson, the ranchman, who was to be one of our witnesses, was with him. Joe had found him at the blacksmith shop, and, as his homeward route led past our house, had invited him to ride with him. The two were talking earnestly as the horses stopped before the barn door. Mr. Wilson had been away from home for some weeks, and we had been somewhat worried lest he should not return in time for our proving up. Evidently Joe had just been telling him this, for, as I came near them, he was saying in his hearty way: “No, sir; your young ladies needn’t ’a’ been a mite worried for fear of my not getting around in time. I was bound to come when they wanted me, and wife’s been keeping me posted about their notice. I told her I’d leave whatever I had on hand and come in time, whether or no.” He was a large man. Joe had resigned the reaper seat to him and had ridden home himself standing on one of the cross-bars. He was slowly and cautiously backing down from the high seat as I stopped beside the reaper. When his feet were fairly on the ground he turned to greet me: “Why, what’s been happening to you, little girl? Joe, you didn’t tell me that one of your young ladies was sick!”
Joe had begun unharnessing the team; he was tying up the lines, but dropped them as Mr. Wilson spoke, and came around to my side; just then, too, Jessie joined us; she stood with one hand on old Joe’s shoulder, while I again told of the incursion of cattle on our fields. I think that she feared some terrible outburst of rage from the old man who had toiled so faithfully in those fields, and had taken such honest pride in the rich promise of an abundant harvest. If so, her fears were groundless. Joe’s sole remark, as he went on with the work of caring for the horses, was:
“Mought jess as well a’ spared de trouble ob gettin’ de reaper fixed, hit ’pears.”
Instinctively, I felt that he was so sure, he understood so well by whose agency the ruin had been wrought that he disdained to ask a question. What had taken place was simply a thing to be borne, like martyrdom.
But Mr. Wilson was not committed to a policy of silence; he had a good deal to say, and what he said was directly to the point.
“Crops plumb ruined, you say, Miss Leslie?”
“Oh, yes; entirely; I think the whole herd must have been there; not feeding quietly so much as tearing through—”
“You say the whole herd? Know of any herd, now, that you could spot?”
“It was Mr. Horton’s herd; we all know his brand.”
“R, half-circle, A; yes. Now, young folks,”—he paused to roll his eyes impressively from one to the other of us—“I’ll tell you what you want to do about this affair. You want to keep still; to keep still!”
“And be ruined!” cried Jessie, her eyes flashing.
“And not be ruined! There’s where the fun’s going to come in, Miss Jessie. ’Spose you go to work now to try to prove malicious mischief on the part of Horton in driving his cattle into your fields, for that’s what he’s deliberately done, no doubt of that, why all he’s got to do is to take his stand on the law and say that you had no business to sow grain on the range and expect cattle to keep out of it; you’ve no title to this place, and your grain fields are not even fenced. Horton’s got the law on his side, you may be sure of that, but he hasn’t got the right, and some day he’ll find it out; he’ll find it out to his cost, no matter what the law says, now you mark my words!”
“There hasn’t been a year since we’ve been here that Mr. Horton’s cattle—always Mr. Horton’s cattle—haven’t destroyed our crops,” Jessie said, her voice trembling.
“And it has always been an ‘accident,’” I added, “but I did think that maybe there would be no such accident this year; it couldn’t have occurred at a time when it would be more effective.”
“No, you may count on that; that’s just the reason why it hasn’t taken place before this. Now, the rest of us folks around here don’t propose to see you two girls and that purty little orphan boy drove off of this place that you’ve tried so hard and so bravely to keep, but we’ve all got to sing low until you get your title. Then, Mr. Man, let that—well, I won’t call names—just let Mr. Horton try his little games and he’ll find that there are laws that will fit his case. The reasons that that man hasn’t landed in the penitentiary before this are, first, that the Lord was mighty lenient toward him when he went a courtin’ and induced that good woman to become his wife; second, he’s so sly. There’s never been a time yet when a body could produce direct, damaging evidence against him. It’s all ‘accident.’”
I thought of that small shining object that I had picked up in the rubbish the morning after the fire was set under our window. It would have been hard, indeed, to produce more damaging or convincing evidence than that, but Mr. Wilson had just been enjoining a strict silence in regard to Mr. Horton and his works upon us, so I kept the thought to myself.
“Your father was a good man,” Mr. Wilson continued. “He had one big advantage over Horton from the start—he was able to hold both his tongue and his temper even when Horton, by his acts, kept him so short-handed that he was unable to build the fence that would have saved his crops and so helped to defeat Horton. The fencing will cost about three hundred dollars. When I sold off that big bunch of steers, two years ago, I offered to lend him money to fence his claim, but, no sir, he wouldn’t touch a cent—seemed to have a kind of prejudice agin’ borrowing money, even of me. Another thing about Horton is,” went on our friend, who seemed to have made an exhaustive study of his subject, “that he must brag about what he’s going to do before he does it. That’s how every one knows, in reason, that he is the one who has made you all this trouble. He hasn’t scrupled to say that he’s bound to have this place, by hook or by crook, whatever happens—and so he looks out for it that things happen. But there is one thing that I will say for him, and it’s kind of curious, too—let him once be fairly and squarely beaten, so that there’s no way but for him to own up to it, and you needn’t ask for a better or more faithful friend than he is; but he’s like—” Mr. Wilson lifted his hat and scratched his grizzled head, casting about for a simile; his eye fell on Guard. “Why, he’s like a bull-dog, you might say—he’ll hang on until beaten, and then he’s yours to command ever after.”
Jessie was greatly cast down; she looked at Guard and accepted the simile mournfully.
“There’s no hope of our ever being able to do anything that will make him admit himself beaten,” she said, “so, I suppose, we must resign ourselves to enduring his enmity as best we can.”
“I ain’t calculating on his keeping up this racket after you get your title,” Mr. Wilson declared, hopefully; “he’s dead set on getting this land now. He’s made his brags that he would have it, but when it’s once passed out of his reach, he’ll kind of tame down, I’m thinking. Now, about your fences,” he continued, with a sudden, cheery change of tone: “they’re going up. Don’t you worry about the loss of your crop, but Joe, you just whirl in and go to plowing those fields again for fall wheat; nothing better for raising money on than fall wheat; and by the time it’s sprouted, we’ll have it fenced, snug and tight; we will, if I have to mortgage my farm to do it! But I shan’t have to do that. I can raise the money for you somehow.”
Jessie was sitting on the wagon-tongue. She looked gratefully up into the ranchman’s weather-beaten face.
“I think you’re just awful good, Mr. Wilson, but—would it be right for us to let you lend us the money when we know how opposed poor father was to anything of that kind?”
This was a vital question. I leaned forward, awaiting the answer, while Jessie listened with parted lips, as she might if our good neighbor had been some ancient oracle, whose lightest word was law. Mr. Wilson regarded us steadfastly for a moment, then scratched his head again.
“Well,” he said slowly, at last, “I s’pose, setting aside all questions of circumstances, that when the Bible said: ‘Honor thy father and thy mother in the days of thy youth,’ it meant to reach clean down to the things that your parents wanted you to do—or not to do—whether they was alive to see it done or not. I do s’pose that that was what it means, and your father he was sure set against borrowing.”
Stooping, he picked up a straw, and began biting it meditatively, while we two pondered his plain interpretation of a very plain text. Suddenly he dropped the straw, and looked at us with a brightening face:
“Why, say, you can give a mortgage on your own land, when you get your title, and your father, nor the Bible, nor nobody else, would say there was anything wrong in your neighbor’s helping you out, if so be that you couldn’t lift the mortgage when the time come. Not that there’ll be any danger of that, with the price that wheat always brings in this grazing country.”
He went away shortly after, leaving us much comforted. Joe had housed the un-needed reaper in the shed and was examining the plow before he had been gone an hour. Some bolts needed tightening and Jessie offered her services as assistant.
“We’ll get ahead of Mr. Horton yet!” she exclaimed, hammering away at the head of the bolt that she was manipulating, under Joe’s direction, as vigorously as though it might have been the head of the gentleman in question.