In fact, Rock was not wholly certain that he would ever arrive. He had another private horse beside Sangre with the Seventy Seven. His bed was in the wagon. He had two months’ wages due. Before he could get anywhere, he had to collect his belongings and his pay.
And that might very well lead to a continuation of the unpleasantness this night had already spanned. The man whom he had killed in the Odeon was the brother of the trail boss of the Seventy Seven, and the Duffys were a clannish lot, with more nerve than good judgment.
He mighn’t be lucky twice in one night. The pitcher that goes often enough to the well—— Rock shrugged his shoulders and shook his horse into a lope. In twenty minutes he drew up to where the Seventy Seven herd lay bedded, a huge dark blot on the bleached grass, with the chuck tent looming a ghost-white outline, half a mile past the sleeping herd.
CHAPTER III—THE STEERING WHEEL
When the sun flung its Midas touch across the Nebraska plains the morning after what was but an episode in Clark’s Ford, it struck a ruddy sheen on the sorrel horse Rock Holloway bestrode and made the sleek coat of the black pony that carried his bed, shine like a piece of widow’s silk.
Rock hummed a little tune as he rode. He had lived through that unavoidable encounter with Mark Duffy. He had avoided open clash with Duffy’s brother by quitting the Seventy Seven. A blood feud is no light thing to be involved in. Rock had no regrets over Mark. The man’s bulldozing disposition had brought them to the verge once or twice on the trail. But Rock had no desire to burn powder against a man who would be actuated chiefly by some vague notion that it was proper to avenge a dead kinsman.
Duffy, the trail boss, had been a little stunned by the death of his domineering brother. He had tentatively agreed that Rock was not to blame. He had paid him his wages and let him go unmolested. But later on, Rock knew, the surviving Duffy would ponder and brood, be urged to reprisal, as in the cloak-and-sword period gallants brooded upon a slight to their honor, whether real or fancied, until they had no course but to draw blade.
So Rock was well satisfied to be a lone horseman in a waste of grass and sage in the cool of a summer morning. On the flat area running unbroken by mountain or forest, from horizon to horizon, he marked northbound herds in the offing, as a lookout might descry distant sails at sea. Over yonder was a Matador herd, yonder marched the horned regiment of the Turkey Track. At a guess, Rock could have named the brand of the five herds visible within the radius of his sight. Northbound, headed for free grass and abundant water, as the Israelites of old went forth seeking the land of milk and honey. Texas was full of cattle, full to overflowing, and the overflow in that season swept in full volume over twenty-three degrees of latitude to end in Montana, with sundry minor spillings into the Canadian northwest.
Rock, like the cattleman with his herds, had set his face North. Like many another young Texan, he had lent eager ear to tales of this terra incognita, out of which scouting cattlemen sent reports that it was a paradise for herds, now that the bison were exterminated, and the Indians herded on reservations. Nine hundred miles still lay between Rock and his destination. But that was nothing. He had two good horses, a rifle and a .45 Colt, ammunition, food, bedding and a sanguine soul. Many a pioneer had set forth with less. It was not precisely hostile country he had to traverse alone. True, a lone rider was a temptation to scouting braves who might have jumped the reservation. But that was a detail. In thirty days, more or less, he could reach Fort Benton. Once there—well, even if he had not the mission bestowed on him in Fort Worth, an able range rider could always find useful employment in his calling.
So Rock rode with a little tune on his lips and wondered how far it was between water holes.