Nona called them presently to supper. They ate, then smoked a cigarette on the porch. Charlie Shaw strolled off to the stable, mounted and rode away to rejoin the Maltese Cross. While Rock sat on the edge of the porch, pondering on what he had learned, Nona joined him. She leaned against a log pillar, looking absently out across the river flats. Rock watched her. She was so young, so utterly free from self-consciousness, so intent upon her own purposes. Something about her warmed his heart. It wasn’t beauty, as Alice Snell was beautiful. It was an air, an atmosphere, something indefinable, subtle, but very powerful, like the invisible force in a bit of bent steel that draws other bits of steel to itself.
“I want you to take a wagon and go to Fort Benton to-morrow,” she said abruptly, “and see if you can hire a couple of men for haying. We’ve got to get up a couple of hundred tons of hay for next winter.”
Rock smiled. He had been brooding over life and death, treachery and broken faith, loyalty in unexpected phases, the mystery of passion that bred hatred and bloody clashes. Nona had been thinking of hay for her stock.
Each to his own thoughts. He envied her a little and admired her for that simplicity, the directness of her faith and works. His own mental groping and convolutions would have distressed her, no doubt.
CHAPTER IX—ORDERED SOUTH
By midforenoon Rock had the striking contour of the Goosebill breaking the sky line far on his right. As the team jogged with rattling wagon wheels on a trail that was no more than two shallow ruts in the grassy plateau, his mind dwelt on the Burris boys—two unsavory brothers, with a ranch in a tangle of ravines behind that strange hump on the flat face of Montana. Charlie had sketched them for his benefit. They were suspected and had been for some time. They had a few cattle, and their herd seemed to increase more rapidly than cows naturally breed. No mavericks—unbranded yearlings; hence the property of whosoever first got his irons on them—were ever found on their range. They were supposed to ride with a long rope, lifting the odd calf here and there. It was only a matter of time, Charlie declared, before some big outfit would deal with them, as the feudal barons dealt with miscreants within their demesnes.
And Doc Martin’s name was being coupled with these two in the Maltese Cross camp. Rock’s lip curled. When a man with power in his hands wanted another man out of the way, he would go to great lengths. Rock had observed the workings of such sinister intent in his native State. He kept thinking about Uncle Bill Sayre’s estimate of Buck Walters.
He was still more or less revolving this in his mind, when he came to the brow of the steep bank that slanted sharply down to Fort Benton. This one-time seat of the Northwest Fur Company was the oldest settlement in the Territory, a compact unit of adobe and log and frame dwellings, when the first gold was found at Bannack and Virginia City, and when the eager miners looted the treasure of Last Chance Gulch. Still the head of navigation on the Missouri River, it had become the pivotal point of the cow business in northern Montana, which had supplanted gold, as gold had supplanted furs, as a road to fortune.
A conglomeration of buildings stood by the bank of the wide, swift river. Away southward loomed a mountain range. The Bear Paws stood blue, fifty miles east. A ferry plied from shore to shore, for the convenience of horsemen, teams and three-wagon freight outfits hauling supplies to the Judith Basin. The Grand Union Hotel loomed big in the town, a great square building in a patch of green grass, set off from Main Street, the single street which formed the business heart of the town. A singularly attractive spot, it had had its historic day. Buffalo had swarmed in its dooryard not so long before. The Blackfeet and the Crows had fought each other there and joined forces to fight the white man. In the spring at high water the stern-wheel steamers from St. Louis laid their flat bows against the clay bank and unloaded enormous cargoes of goods. Otherwise, since furs and gold no longer dominated the Northwest, Fort Benton lived a placid, uneventful day-to-day existence, except when roundups came that way, and the cowboys took the town.
Yet there was life in it. The exciting scenes of a decade earlier arose on a small scale. And between these high lights business flourished. The fort was the hub of a great area, in which herds and settlers were taking root. It supported a permanent population of two hundred or more, stores, saloons and the Grand Union, which had housed miners, gamblers, military men, river pilots, rich and enterprising fur dealers, and was now headquarters for the cattle kings and their henchmen.