Milk River lay a shining silver thread in its valley, with broken country extending on either hand, deep canyons and gray sage flats. They looked from this height into a foreign land, for the Canada line ran east and west, six miles below. Like a monument the Butte towered over the boundary and over a wilderness. In all the Sweet Grass country no man had as yet laid the foundation logs of a home. Within a radius of fifty miles the land was as it spread when Columbus brooded on the poop of his caraval, except that the buffaloes were gone, and wild cattle from Texas grazed where the bison had recently fed.
East Butte threw a long, westward shadow, away past its fellows. Its eastern declivities blazed yellow in the eye of a sun just clear of the horizon. The riders sat there, watching the sunbeams hunt slinking shadows out of every hollow. Birds twittered in thickets about them. The air was full of pine smells and the scent of the aromatic grass that gave the hills their name. It was cool and fresh at that sunrise hour, five thousand feet above the sea.
“Lord,” one rider drawled, “if you could marry this here grass and scenery to the Texas climate, you’d have a paradise to live in.”
Rock and Charlie Shaw had their heads together. Charlie was pointing at something.
“You can see where those three coulees come in,” he said. “There’s a peach of an open basin. A place like a park—maybe three-four hundred acres. The corrals are one side of that, under a bank, tucked in the edge of some pines. Down where you see that white clay bank, Buck Walters’ outfit was camped on a creek.”
“How close can we all ride without showing ourselves?” Rock asked.
“That depends on whether there is anybody on lookout,” Charlie told him. “If there is any monkey business goin’ on, they will have an eye peeled, you can gamble. Somebody could be lookin’ at us now, if he was rangin’ around. But we could go on a mile or so together by keepin’ in the bottom of that gulch. It’s timbered.”
They moved down into this hollow, quiet now, for Rock had explained to them that they might happen on men who would not welcome visitors. The gulch Charlie indicated made a screen for their passage. It was full of lodgepole pine, slender, graceful trees, with tufted tops like ostrich plumes. The earth was a litter of dried needles, a carpet for shod hoofs. The jingle of a spur, the faint clank of a loose-jawed bit mouthed by a fretful horse; a low squeaking of saddle leather—these were the only sounds, as they rode. Suddenly the draw ended. Grassy contours showed through a screen of timber. In the edge of that Charlie Shaw pulled up.
“It’s pretty open below here for a crowd,” he suggested.