Mrs. Porter shifted her eyes and looked around the room. There was nothing attractive about the rough shack interior. Outside, a mule-skinner spoke in the only language known to mules, and a heavy wagon lurched past through the dust. Mrs. Porter shoved the hair back from her face and got slowly to her feet.
She lifted up the sodden shirt and slapped it against the wash-board.
“This here shirt belongs t’ Doc Sykes, the coroner. Kinda prophetic-like, so it is, ’cause I’ve told him that he was the last person I ever expected t’ do business with. Gimme room t’ wring, young woman, ’cause I’m sure goin’t’ wind up m’ career in a big splash. You sure got somethin’ wished on to you when you issued a invite t’ me to go where men change their shirts once per week. Whooee!”
Mary Leeds laughed joyously and gave Mrs. Porter plenty of room for her last appearance as a laundress in a mining-camp.
While Mary Leeds and Mrs. Porter prepared to leave Sunbeam, and while Skeeter Bill Sarg smoked innumerable cigarets and waited for the sheriff to take him to the penitentiary at Red Lodge, a disgruntled crew of cowboys and paid gunmen loafed around the Lazy H ranch.
It had developed that Cleve Hart was not sole owner of the Lazy H, and that the other owners, who were Eastern capitalists, were disgruntled over their investment, and ordered an immediate sale of the property and the discharge of all employees forthwith.
Nick Kales had sold his services to Cleve Hart without any agreement from the other owners; with the result that he was forced to look forward to about two weeks’ pay at the rate of forty dollars a month, instead of the generous bonus due him as a professional gunman.
“Dutch” Van Cleve, a protegé of Nick Kales, was also a bit disgruntled over the outcome. The rest of the remaining cowpunchers, “Red” Bowen, “Swede” Sorenson, “Roper” Bates and “Boots” Orson, faced a lean year, as none of them saved more than tobacco money out of their monthly salary.
The killing of Cleve Hart and the arrest and conviction of Skeeter Bill had quieted things to some extent, but it was only an armed truce. Cowboys rode dead-lines and managed to keep the sheep within a well-defined area; but the cattlemen knew that an adverse court decision would wipe out dead-lines, and with it the cattle business.