“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.
CHAPTER XV—POPPING GUNS
Viewed from the southern approach, the triple buttes of the Sweet Grass Hills rise like immense cones abruptly from the level of the plains. Gold Butte stands in the middle. West Butte looks toward the Rockies. East Butte faces the rising sun. Between each the prairie flowed in glades, carpeted with grass, dotted with sloughs, and threaded by aimless streams. It was, indeed, as if some whimsical giant had snatched three peaks off some distant mountain range and set them there for geologists to puzzle over.
Upon East Butte, the larger of the three and the most northerly, where the plains began to wrinkle and lift to foothills, like a grassy sea frozen into immobility, as it laved the shore of the peak, Rock camped his wagon. At daybreak, while the sun was yet merely a promise uttered by a golden haze in the east, he rode with all his men up that precipitous slope. An hour’s climbing brought them to the top, but not to the uttermost pinnacle; for that was a gray, rocky spire, where bands of mountain sheep took refuge against less sure-footed creatures. They had climbed to a shoulder that brought them under the rim rock, around to the head of the north slope.