“Don’t interest me much.”
“Say, now,” Charlie drawled, “I got quite a bunch of stuff I can turn over at a pretty low figure. And I know where I can get more. Say three cents a pound.”
“Well, that’s fair enough,” the chubby one admitted. “But I think maybe I could do a mite better still, if I had to. And I’ve got some stock ahead. No; I guess we can’t do business, stranger. Thanks, just the same.”
“You’re the doctor,” Charlie said and stepped out.
As he walked back to his horses, he emitted sundry unbelieving grunts. Three cents a pound was ridiculous; and yet the fat one thought he could get it for still less. There was a screw loose somewhere. Three-year-old beef steers were netting forty dollars in Chicago; cows about thirty. A fair three-year-old would dress six or seven hundred pounds; a cow four or five hundred. At three cents they would bring about eighteen and fifteen dollars respectively. Charlie had named those prices to the contractor as a bait, and if he hadn’t caught a fish, he had at least got a nibble that quickened his pulse. No rancher would sell beef for half what it would bring in the open market. If that railroad camp got beef at anywhere near that price, it was stolen beef. And any man buying supplies on a large scale would be familiar enough with current prices to know that it was stolen. Still, a suspicion was not convicting evidence.
On his way in and out of that camp, Charlie had used a pair of naturally keen eyes. He marked the meat house by its screened windows. He would have liked a look inside, but that was hardly feasible. He considered, however, how he might get such a look and decided upon the only method open to him. There was a risk, to be sure. But a period of uneventful placidity had not wholly atrophied in Charlie Shaw a capacity for discounting risks. There had been plenty during his first years in Montana. He decided to take a chance.
He saddled, packed, mounted and ambled slowly south again. The camp beef herd grazed abroad. Again Charlie met the pimply-faced youth resplendent in Angora-faced chaps, with a long-barreled six-shooter dangling at his hip. He sat sidewise in his saddle, as proud as if he had been riding point on a trail herd from the Panhandle.
“With all that crew to feed,” Charlie remarked over a cigarette, “the butcher gang ought to cut your herd down pretty fast.”
“Oh, so-so,” the herder said. “About a couple a day.”
Charlie jogged on. A couple a day. If that camp didn’t consume at least fifteen hundred pounds of beef per diem, he was a poor judge of appetites. Beef was the cheapest food in the country. Men who worked ten hours a day behind plow and scraper could eat like the vikings of old. Two scraggy cows a day? Hardly.