“I ain’t talkin’ about rustlers, but some of the gents what has come to work on this outfit since the or man died,” Bill McAllister said gruffly.
Allen allowed the subject to drop. He had learned enough for the present. The horse herd was pastured to the south of the ranch in a large meadow which was partly fenced in by dense thickets and partly by wire. Here he met “Maverick Ed” Stone, the other day herder.
Maverick was a lantern-jawed, stoop-shouldered, lanky man of forty, and Allen found him almost as taciturn as his boss. The herder’s job was an easy one. It consisted in riding along the boundaries of the meadow and watching to see that none of the horses escaped through the brush.
That night at chow, Allen glanced along the long table in the cookhouse at the score of punchers present. The riders were of all ages. The seven men who sat at the far end of the table were as different from the others as sheep from goats. They were quiet-spoken men and all wore their holsters tied down. The others were cow-punchers pure and simple, who, while they would all fight at the drop of a hat, were not professional fighters. To Allen these gunmen were one more point against Spur Treadwell. He knew they could be explained satisfactorily to others by the fact that the ranch was close to the Nations and that several raids had been made on the Double R stock. Every ranch in such a situation would keep a gang of fighters on its payrolls.
By keeping his ears open and asking a few judicious questions that night in the bunk house, Allen learned that the gunmen worked the northern end of the ranges, as this was considered the danger point. It was near the Hard Pan country which led to the Nations.
“That’s plumb natural, but if a gent was lootin’ the ranch, it would make it plumb easy,” he told himself.
Yet he was convinced that Spur Treadwell had a deeper game than the looting of the ranch. Sooner or later, Treadwell would be sure to be discovered if he tried that—yet it was hard for Allen to decide what his game was. It would take time to burrow deep enough to uncover the mystery and it might necessitate several trips into the Hard Pan country.
The little outlaw was talking, laughing, and adroitly questioning a short squat puncher named “Shorty” when two men entered the bunk house. Allen’s eyes flicked yellow for a moment as they rested on the newcomers, then he turned so that his back was against the light. He knew them, but would they remember him? If they did—— He worked the gun he wore in a shoulder holster a little more forward.
The bunk house was lined on either side with a double row of bunks, with wooden pegs on either side for the occupants’ clothing. The place was lighted by two big lamps, one at each end of the long room. Here, as in the cookhouse, there was the same sharply drawn demarcation between the gunmen and the cow-punchers.
The newcomers stalked down the room and took their places at the table at the farther end among their own kind.