The Settling of the Sage

by Hal G. Evarts

IV

It is said that there comes a day in the life of every handler of bad horses when he will mount one and ride him out, master him and dismount,—and forever after decline to ride another. Riley Foster was evidence of this. For three years Rile and Bangs had been inseparable, riding together on every job, and the shaggy youth topped off the animals in Foster's string before the older man would mount them. As Bangs went about his work his faded blue eyes were ever turned toward the Three Bar boss who stood in the door of the blacksmith shop.

The girl was vaguely troubled as she noted this. Bangs and Foster had returned for their second season at the Three Bar. All through the previous summer the boy had evidenced his silent adoration, his eyes following her every move.

The scene round Billie was one of strenuous activity, every effort bent toward whipping the remuda into shape for the calf round-up in the least possible space of time.

Every rider must have nine horses in his string. His five circle horses needed but little training, the only necessary qualifications being endurance and a sufficient amount of breaking to make it possible to saddle them; the two night mounts must be partially broken to work the herd, then switched to night guarding and thereafter used exclusively for that. But the two cow horses required long and skilful training. Every man gave one of his circle string the preliminary training of the cow horse each season, the work resumed by the man to whose string the horse was allotted the following year; thus new ones were coming on to replace the older horses as fast as they were condemned.

Four pairs of men worked within a hundred yards of the girl, taking equal turns at riding and wrangling. The one who wrangled put his rope on a horse and led him out, snubbed him to the saddle horn and frequently eared him as well, while the one who was to ride him out cinched on his saddle and mounted.

Green horses were led out, one after another, to be saddled for the first time, and those previously broken required a few work-outs to knock the wire edge off their unwillingness to carry a rider after a winter of freedom on the range.

Three men were shoeing horses tied to snubbing posts at ten-yard intervals before the shop. One animal that had fought viciously against this treatment had been thrown and stretched, his four feet roped to convenient posts, and while he struggled and heaved on the ground Rile Foster calmly fitted and nailed the shoes on him. Cal Harris finished shoeing the colt he was working.

"That's the last touch," he said. "My string is all set to go."

"You have five colts gentled for your circle bunch," she said. "But you didn't pick a single cow horse. The boys have sorted out the best ones and the few that are left won't answer for a man that insists on a gentled string."

"Creamer and Calico will do for me," he said. "I broke them myself and maybe I can worry along."

"Did you break them like that?" she asked. Bangs was topping a horse that strenuously refused to be conquered and as they looked on the animal threw himself.

"Like that? Well, no—not precisely," Harris said. "They're not breaking horses. They're proving that they're bronc-peelers that can ride 'em before they're broke. A horse started out that way will be a bronc till the day he dies. The first thing he knows some straddler swarms him and hangs the spurs in him. He bogs his head and starts out to slip his pack—and from right then on he thinks the first thing to do whenever a man steps up on him is to try his best to shake him off."

Three men were lashing their bed rolls and war bags on three pack horses and when this task was completed they rode down the lane, each one leading his pack animal. Harris knew this as evidence that they would start after the calves on the following day. The custom was to exchange representatives to ride with each wagon within a reasonable distance, the reps to look after the interest of the brand for which they rode.

"How many reps do you trade?" he asked.

"Three," she said. "Halfmoon D, V L and with Slade."

The Halfmoon D lay some fifteen miles eastward along the foot of the hills; the V L the same distance to the west, but cached away in a pocket that led well back into the base of the range, a comparatively small outfit owned by the Brandons, father and four sons, who made every effort to keep the bulk of their cows ranging in their own home basin and exchanged reps only with the Three Bar.

Slade's home place lay forty miles south and a little west and his cows grazed for over a hundred miles, requiring three wagons to cover his range.

During the afternoon the three reps came in to replace the men who had left. The surplus horses had been cut out and thrown back on the range, only those required for the remuda remaining in the pasture lot. The chuck wagon was wheeled before the cookhouse door and packed for an early start. Before the first streaks of dawn the men had saddled and breakfasted. It was turning gray in the east when four horses, necessitating the attentions of four men, were hooked to the wagon. A man hung on the bit of each wheel horse while another grasped the bits of the lead team as Waddles made one last hasty trip inside.

"This will be a rocky ride for a mile or two," he prophesied, as he mounted the seat and braced himself. "These willow-tails haven't had on a strap of harness for many a month. All set. Turn loose!"

The men stepped back and the four horses hit the collars raggedly. One wheel horse reared and jumped forward. The off leader dropped his head and pitched, shaking himself as if struggling to unseat a rider, then the four settled into a jerky run and the heavy wagon clattered and lurched down the lane.

"Fine way to break work stock," Harris remarked to Evans. "That layout would bring maybe a dollar a head."

The men swung to their saddles and followed the wagon at a shuffling trot. From where she rode between Evans and Harris, the girl turned in her saddle and watched two men throw open the gates of the big corral where the remuda was held. The wrangler, whose duty it was to tend the horse herd by day, and the nighthawk who would guard it at night sat on their horses at the far end of the corral and urged the herd out as the gates swung back. The remuda streamed down the valley, the two first riders swinging wide to either flank while the nighthawk and wrangler brought up the rear.

The four that pulled the wagon had settled to a steady gait and when some three miles below the Three Bar Waddles wheeled to the right and angled up the bench that flanked the bottoms, the wagon tilting perilously in the ascent, then struck out westward across a rolling country that showed not even a wagon track. The big cook unerringly picked the route of least resistance to the point from which the first circle would be launched, striking every wash and coulee at a place where a crossing was possible.

Shortly before noon the wagon was halted in a broad bottom threaded by a tiny spring-fed stream. The teams were unhitched; mounts were unsaddled and thrown into the horse herd, which was then headed into the mouth of a branching draw and allowed to graze. Waddles dumped off the bed rolls that were piled from the broad lowered tail-gate to the wagon top and each man sorted out his own and spread it upon some spot which struck him as a likely bed ground.

One man carried water from the stream. Two others snaked in wood for the chuck-wagon fire. Still another drove long stakes in the shape of a hollow square, stretching a single rope from one to the next and fashioning a frail rope corral.

Harris and Evans took three poles that were slung under the wagon, looped the top-rope of a little teepee round the small ends of them and erected the three, tripod fashion, after having first pegged down the teepee sides. Harris brought the girl's bed roll and war bag from the wagon and placed them inside.

"There's your house," he said. "All ready to move in."

The men repaired to the creek bank and splashed faces and hands. The big voice of the cook bellowed angrily from the wagon.

"Downstream! Downstream!" he boomed. "Get below that water hole!"

Two men who had elected to perform their ablutions above the point from which the culinary water supply was drawn moved hastily downstream.

It was not long before Waddles was dispensing nourishment from the lowered tail-gate, ladling food and hot coffee into the plates and cups which the men held out to him. They drew away and sat cross-legged on the ground. The meal was almost finished when six horsemen rode down the valley and pulled up before the wagon.

"What's the chance for scraps?" the leader asked.

"Step down," Waddles invited. "And throw a feed in you. She's still a-steaming."

Four of the men differed in no material way from the Three Bar men in appearance. The fifth was a ruffian with little forehead, a face of gorilla cast, stamped with brute ferocity and small intelligence. The last of the six was a striking figure, a big man with pure white hair and brows, his pale eyes peering from a red face.

"The roasted albino is Harper, our leading bad man in these parts," Evans remarked to Harris. "And the human ape is Lang; Fisher, Coleman, Barton and Canfield are the rest. Nice layout of murderers and such."

Harper's men ate unconcernedly, conscious that they were marked as men who had violated every law on the calendar, but knowing also that no man would take exceptions to their presence on that general ground alone, and as they had neared the wagon each man had scanned the faces of the round-up crew to make certain that there were none among them who might bear some more specific and personal dislike.

The Three Bar men chatted and fraternized with them as they would have done with the riders of any legitimate outfit. Harper praised the food that Waddles tendered them.

Billie Warren forced a smile as she nodded to them, then moved off and sat upon a rock some fifty yards from the wagon, despising the six men who ate her fare and inwardly raging at the conditions which forced her to extend the hospitality of the Three Bar to men of their breed whenever they chanced by.

Harris strolled over and sat down facing her, sifting tobacco into a brown paper and deftly rolling his smoke.

"Has it been on your mind—what I was telling you a few nights back, about how much I was loving you?" he asked.

"You had your chance to prove it by going away," she said, "and refused; so why bring it up again? The next two years will be hard enough without my having to listen to that."

"Our families must have been real set on throwing us together," he observed. "I was cut off without a dime myself—unless I spent two full years on the Three Bar."

She was angry with herself for believing him sincere, for being convinced that he too, as he had several times intimated, was tied in much the same fashion as herself. The explanation came to her in an illuminating flash. The elder Harris must have nursed a lifelong enmity against her father, who had believed him the most devoted friend on earth.

She had often heard the tale of how her parent had, in all friendliness, followed old Bill Harris step by step from Dodge City to the Platte, to old Fort Laramie and finally to the present Three Bar range. Perhaps the one so followed had felt that Cal Warren was but the hated symbol of the whole clan of squatters who had driven him from place to place and eventually forced him to relinquish his hope of seeing the Three Bar brand on a hundred thousand cows; that his friendliness had been simulated, his vindictiveness nursed and finally consummated by leaving his affairs in such fashion that his son must carry on the work his trickery had begun.

The voice of Waddles reached them. He was announcing a half-day of rest, according to her orders.

"It's kill-time for the rest of the day," he stated. "Make the most of it."

For three weeks past, excepting for the trip to Brill's, the men had toiled incessantly, breakfasting before sunup and seeking their bunks long after dark. Some immediately turned to their bed rolls to make up lost sleep. Others repaired to the stream to wash out extra articles of soiled clothing before taking their rest.

Harris resumed where he had broken off some five minutes before.

"And I'd have tossed it off, as I told you once, if the Three Bar girl had turned out to be any except you. You've had a tough problem to work out, girl," he said. "I sold out my little Box L outfit for more than it was worth—and figured to stop the leak at the Three Bar and put the old brand on its feet."

His calm assurance on this point exasperated the girl.

"How?" she demanded. "What can you do?" She pointed toward the six men near the wagon. "During the time you spent prowling the hills did you ever come across those men?"

"Not to pal round with them," he confessed. "But I did cut their trail now and then."

"Then don't you know what every other man in this country knows—that those six and a lot more of their breed are responsible for every loss within a hundred miles? They can operate against a brand one week and stop at the home ranch and get fed the next. That's where the Three Bar loss comes in. And I have to feed them when they come along."

"Some day we'll feed them and hang them right after the meal," he said. "They're not the outfit that's going to be hardest to handle when the time arrives."

"What do you mean?" she asked. "No one has ever been able to handle them up to date."

"Did it ever strike you as queer that Slade could come into this country twelve years back, with nothing but a long rope and a running iron, and be owning thirty thousand head to-day?"

"He has the knack to protect his own and increase," she said. "They're afraid of Slade."

Harris absently traced the Three Bar in the dust with a stick, then fashioned the V L and the Halfmoon D, the three brands that ranged along the foot of the hills. With a few deft strokes he transformed the Three Bar into the Three Cross T, reworked the V L into a Diamond Box and the Halfmoon D into Circle P, each one of the worked-overs representing one of the dozen or so brands registered by Slade. He blotted out his handiwork with the flat of his hand.

"Don't you suppose that the owner of every one of those brands knows that?" she scoffed. "A clumsy rebrand would loom up for a mile. Slade's no fool."

"Not in a thousand years," Harris agreed. "I was just commenting on how peculiar it was that the three brands he runs farthest north should be so easy worked over into any one of the three that his range overlaps up this way. And I happen to know his farthest south brands would work out the same way with the outfits at the other end of his range. But he earmarks all of his brands the same—with jinglebobs; and jinglebobs most generally drop off and leave nothing but a good big piece absent out of the ear."

"So you think a man as big as Slade is stupid enough to try his hand at brand-blotting on all sides at once?" she asked.

"No; nor even once on one side," he returned. "Not him. The one fact that the similarity of brands would make it easy to fall into the habit is enough to keep every outfit watching him. He couldn't start—and knows it."

"Then what does it all amount to?" she asked.

"While folks watch him on that score he could work in a dozen ways that don't concern those brands at all," he said.

The girl shook her head impatiently and looked across at the six men who ate her fare.

"Look at them," she flared. "Eating my food; and in a few nights they'll be hazing a bunch of Three Bar steers toward the Idaho line. Why doesn't some man that is a man kill that albino fiend and all his whelps and rid the country of his breed? Even Slade lets them put up at his place."

"If they're pestering you I'll order them off," he said.

"And what effect would that have?" she inquired scornfully.

"The effect of causing them to climb their horses and amble off down the country," he returned. He sprawled on the grass, his head propped on one hand as he regarded them.

"Then probably you'd better order them off," she suggested. "You have my permission. Now's your chance to make good the lordly brag of helping the Three Bar out of the hole." She instantly regretted having said it. A dozen times of late she had wondered if she were turning bitter and waspish, if she would ever again be the even-tempered Billie Warren with a good word and a smile for every one.

Harris was, as always, apparently undisturbed by her words. Far down the bottoms she could see a point of light which she knew for a white sign that read: "Squatter, don't let sundown find you here." The man before her had defied these sinister warnings scattered about the range and publicly announced that he would put in hay on his filing, knowing that he was a marked man from the hour he turned the first furrow. Whatever his shortcomings, lack of courage was not one of them.

"I take that back," she said, referring to her words of a few moments before. Harris straightened to a sitting position in his surprise at this impulsive retraction, and as he smiled across at her she divined that this man, seemingly so impervious to her sarcasm, could be easily moved by a single kind word.

"Thanks, Billie," he said. "That was real white of you."

He rose and sauntered toward the wagon and Billie Warren felt a sudden clutch of fear as he halted before Harper and she realized that he had taken her words literally and intended ordering them off.

"I've been made temporary foreman of the Three Bar—just so the boss could try me out on that job for an hour or two," he remarked conversationally. "So I'm putting in a new rule that goes into effect right off. When you boys ride away, in a few minutes from now, you can tell folks that the grub line is closed as far as the Three Bar is concerned."

Lang took a half-step toward him, his face reflecting his gathering rage as his slow brain comprehended the fact that this speech was but another way of announcing that he and his men would find no welcome at the Three Bar from that moment on. Harper caught his arm and jerked him back. The albino was an old hand and could rightly read the signs.

"The gentleman was remarking to me," he said to Lang; "not you." He turned to Harris, noting as he did so that every Three Bar man, excepting those asleep, had suddenly evidenced keen interest in what was transpiring there; several carelessly shifted their positions. "There's no law to make you feed any man," he said to Harris. "From now on we'll pay our way—as far as the Three Bar is concerned."

His tones were casual; only his pale eyes, fastened unblinkingly on Harris's face, betrayed his real feeling toward the man who, notwithstanding the roundabout nature of his announcement, had practically ordered him to stay away from the Three Bar for all time.

"But even in the face of that," he resumed, "we'll welcome you any time you happen to ride down our way."

Every man within earshot understood the threat that lay beneath the casual words.

"Then I'll likely drop in some time," Harris said. "If you'll send word where it is. And I'll bring fifty men along."

The albino motioned his men toward their horses and they mounted and rode off down the bottoms. Harris walked back and resumed his seat near the girl, who sat looking at him as if she could not believe what she had just witnessed.

"You see it was just as easy as I'd counted on," he said. "It'll be a considerable saving on food."

"But how did you know?" she asked. "Why is Harper afraid of you?"

"He's not," Harris said. "Not for a single second. But he's an old hand and has left a few places on the jump before he came out here."

"And he thinks you know it!" she guessed.

"He don't care what I know; it's what he knows himself—that the wild bunch is always roosting on the powder can even when it appears like they're sitting pretty—that counts with him. You thought I was taking a fool chance of out-gaming him. In reality I was taking almost an unfair advantage of him, providing he had the brains he must possess to have lived to his age."

She could find no ready-made answer to this surprising statement. He sprawled comfortably on the grass, turning over in his mind the conditions that were but a repetition of the history of so many frontiers; first the earliest settlers resenting the intrusion of the later ones and resorting to lawless means of protecting their priority; then the strengthening of the outlaw element, half the countryside in league with the wild bunch, the two opposing factions secretly hiring the predatory class to prey upon rival interests; then, inevitably, the clean split, usually occasioned by the outlaws having increased in power until they felt competent to defy both sides, to play both ends against the middle, to commit atrocities that opened the eyes of those who, believing they had subsidized the lawless, suddenly woke to the fact that they had subsidized themselves; then the outlaws, in their turn, discovering that every man's hand was against them; the ruthless establishing of a definite line between those inside and those outside the law, replacing the vague middle ground of semi-lawlessness. Always their friends fell away from them, those secretly leagued with them fearing to be seen in their company, and those not too definitely known to belong to their ranks invariably quitting them cold, often joining forces against them and developing into more or less substantial citizens, according to the standards of their day.

"Don't you know that the albino will kill you for that?" the girl asked at length.

"Not unless he can stage it as a personal quarrel," he said. "He'll never follow it up as coming out of what happened to-day by taking it out on me as temporary foreman of the Three Bar—for ordering him off."

"Why?" she puzzled. "What possible difference would that make to a man like him?"

"Just this," he said: "There's a good majority of folks that don't relish seeing Harper's bunch ride up—that feed them through policy. But whenever you make it plain to a man that he's compelled to do a thing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out of sheer human pride. If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on the grounds that he refused to feed all his men—why then, right off, every other foreman and owner within a hundred miles starts to resenting the possibility that maybe the albino feels the same way toward him. Harper knows that."

"But if your theory had been wrong?" she persisted. "What then?"

"Then," he said, "then there'd have been hell and repeat. I wasn't just acting as me, a personal affair, but, as I took pains to remark aloud, as the foreman of the Three Bar. Every Three Bar man would have gone into action the second Harper made a move at me. You know that—and Harper knew it."

She realized the soundness of this statement. The one unalterable code of the country, a code that had been fostered till it eclipsed all others, decreed that a man should be loyal to the brand for which he rode. The whole fabric of the cow business was based on that one point.

"And a wrangle of that magnitude was something he couldn't risk," Harris said. "It would stir folks up, and any time they're stirred a mite too far Harper has come to the end of his rope. Any other brand could have done the same—only folks fall into a set habit of mind and figure they must do what others do just because it's custom."

"But now they'll work their deviltry all the stronger against the Three Bar," she predicted. "They could wreck us if they tried. You couldn't get a conviction in five years. Not a man would testify against one of Harper's outfit."

"Then we'll put on a fighting crew and hold them off," he said. "But that's not the layout that will be hardest to handle in the long run. Slade is the one real hard nut for the Three Bar to crack. He can work it a dozen different ways and you couldn't prove one of them on him to save your soul. He's one smooth hombre—Slade."

Harris rose and headed for his bed roll and the girl sought the shelter of her teepee for a rest. All was quiet near the wagon till Waddles boomed the summons to feed. After the meal a youth named Moore mounted a saddled horse that was picketed nearby and rode up a branching gulch, returning with a dry cedar log which he snaked to the wagon at the end of his rope. After a few hours' rest and the prospects of a full night's sleep ahead the hands snatched an hour for play.

They sat cross-legged round the fire kindled from the cedar and raised their voices in song. Waddles drew forth a guitar and picked a few chords. Bentley, the man who repped for Slade, carried the air and the rest joined in. The voices were untrained but from long experience in rendering every song each man carried his part without a discordant note. Evans sang a perfect bass. Bangs a clear tenor; Moore faked a baritone that satisfied all hands and Waddles wagged his head in unison with the picking of his guitar and hummed, occasionally accenting the air with a musical, drumlike boom. They rambled through all the old familiar songs of the range. The Texan herded his little dogie from the Staked Plains to Abilene; the herd was soothed on the old bed ground—bed down my dogie, bed down—and the poor cowboy was many times buried far out on the lone prair-ee.

Bangs had stationed himself so that he could see the girl and throughout the evening his surprised eyes never once strayed from Billie Warren's face.

She leaned back against the wagon wheel, enjoying it all, but her complacence was jarred as she half-turned and noted Morrow's face, drawn and bleak, unsoftened by the music. Again the feeling of dislike for him rose within her; but he was an efficient hand and she had nothing definite against him. At the end of an hour Waddles rose and returned his instrument to the wagon. The group broke up and every man turned in.

Billie Warren lay in her teepee, her mind busily going over the events of the day. The night sounds of the range drifted to her. A bull-bat rasped a note or two from above. A picketed horse stamped restlessly just outside and a range cow bawled from an adjacent slope. The night-hawk had relieved the wrangler and she could half-hear, half-feel the low jar of many hoofs as he grazed the remuda slowly up the valley, singing to while away the time.

She reflected that Cal Harris was at least possessed of self-confidence and that procrastination was certainly not to be numbered among his failings. It came to her that his interests, for the present, were identical with her own. As half-owner in the Three Bar it would be as much to his advantage as to her own to build it up. Waddles's warped legs prevented his acting as foreman on the job and it might be that the other man would find some way to prevent the leak that was sapping the life from the Three Bar. His half-ownership entitled him to the place. Billie Warren loved her brand and her personal distrust of Harris was submerged in the hope that his sharing the full responsibility with herself might be a step toward putting it back on the old-time plane of prosperity.

The jar of hoofs had ceased and she knew that the remuda had bedded down; and having at last reached a decision she fell asleep with the crooning voice of the nighthawk drifting to her ears.