“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.