Rock recalled that remark three weeks later, when Wells and his four riders rode into the ranch. They had left with forty saddle horses. These mounts were ridden to a standstill. The five men were heavy-eyed and obviously weary. Wells kept his own counsel, as did the four who had ridden with him. They appeared at noon, turned loose their horses, ate, and then slept still sunrise of the next day. After breakfast Dave Wells called the four riders who had stayed on the ranch, told them courteously that he would have to let them go, and paid them off in gold.
The discharged quartet rode south, leading pack horses, within two hours. They discovered, once clear of the ranch and free to air their personal views, that they were mutually eager to be away to a real cow country. They had had enough of comparative isolation. They were all Texans. Three of them were for home, via Butte and south over the Oregon Short Line to the Union Pacific. They had had enough of the North for the present. Only Rock proposed to linger, and he would keep them company until they were well into Montana.
Five miles south of the ranch they jumped a bunch of cattle out of a draw, mature cattle, with a freshly burned Steering Wheel black on their ribs. On the slope which they breasted were others; by a cluster of sloughs were still more.
Doggies! The cowpunchers, free of any loyalty or responsibility to any outfit, glanced and kept on talking of home. Rock looked and kept his thoughts to himself. They were not doggies. They were simon-pure longhorns, with a touch of Hereford blood, here and there—the type of cattle that poured annually by the hundred thousand out of Texas. If they were purchased range stock, other brands, vented or barred out, should have shown. All the mark that Rock saw on any beast was a fresh-burned Steering Wheel. But he kept his speculations to himself. After all, it was no business of his. The Steering Wheel might have cattle all over the Northwest, for all he knew or cared. If his fellow riders thought it queer, they were not concerned enough to mention the fact.
Five days later he parted from his companions under the shoulder of the Sweet Grass Hills. They were bearing off for Silver Bow Junction, homeward bound. Rock’s course lay a trifle east of south, toward Fort Benton. Ahead of him, in that spring-green void, big round-ups were mustering from the upper Teton to the Larb Hills. The Bear Paws loomed faintly on the horizon. Milk River, Sun Prairie, the Bad Lands—place names to conjure with. There was nothing petty in all that sweep of plain and mountain. It gave Rock a curious sense of thrilling possibilities. He rode alone without being lonely, fired by some subtle anticipation.
He often asked himself afterward what it is that gives a man a definite urge along a definite line that may lead him to both triumph and disaster. But he was never able to answer that question, any more than he was able to answer it that June day when, parting company with his fellows, he pointed the red horse’s head toward Fort Benton murmuring whimsically:
“Here we comes, and there we goes,
And where we’ll stop nobody knows.”
CHAPTER IV—A DEAD DOUBLE
Rock knew where he was going and why. But it was not on the cards that his course was to be direct. Halfway between Milk River and the Marias he rode down a coulee in search of water for a noon camp. He found water eventually and beside it a troop of United States cavalry, in the throes of getting under way. “Throes” is correct. They had a considerable amount of equipment to be packed upon mules. They were cantankerous mules. A dozen men were fighting them with pack lashings and profanity.
Rock drew rein to watch the circus. A man, a civilian, approached him, mopping the sweat from his brow.