Two fares east

by W. C. Tuttle

Honey sat down with them. Sleepy looked gloomily at Hashknife and reminded him gently that sugar was for the coffee, and not for the eggs.

Hashknife chuckled, but sobered quickly. The rain still pattered on the old roof and dripped off the eaves. It was warm in the kitchen.

“Five thousand dollars is a lot of money,” mused Hashknife, stirring his coffee with a fork. He had used the same fork to dip sugar from the bowl and did not seem to realize that it had all leaked out.

Sleepy knew the symptoms and groaned inwardly. Years of association with Hashknife had taught Sleepy to recognize the sudden moods of the tall cowboy. Trouble and mystery affected Hashknife as the scent of upland fowl affects a pointer.

Hashknife, in the days of his callow youth, had been known as George. His father, an itinerant minister in the Milk River country and head of a big family, had had little time or money to do more than just let this boy grow up. As soon as he was able to sit in a saddle he lived with the cowboys and became one of them.

Blessed with a balanced mind, possibly inherited from his father, who surely needed a balanced mind to make both ends meet, the boy struck out for himself, absorbing all kinds of knowledge, studying human nature. Eventually he drifted to the ranch, which gave him his nickname, and here he met the grinning Sleepy Stevens, whose baptismal name was David.

From the Hashknife ranch their trail led to many places. Soldiers of fortune they became, although Hashknife referred to themselves as cowpunchers of disaster. From the wide lands of Alberta to the Mexican Border they had left their mark. They did not stay long in any place, unless fate decreed that a certain time must elapse before their work was finished. And then they would go on, possibly poorer in pocket. Their life had made them fatalists, had made them very human. To salve their own consciences they declared that they were looking for the right spot to settle down; a place to live out the rest of their life in peaceable pursuits.

But down in their hearts they knew that this place did not exist. They wanted to see the other side of the hill. Hashknife’s brain rebelled against a mystery. It seemed to challenge him to combat. Where range detectives had failed utterly because they were unable to see beyond actual facts, Hashknife’s analytical mind had enabled him to build up chains of evidence that had cleared up mystery after mystery.

But solving mysteries was not a business with them. They did not pose as detectives. It merely happened that fate threw them into contact with these things. Sleepy’s mind did not function with any more rapidity than that of any average man, but he was blessed with a vast sense of humor, bulldog tenacity and a faculty for using a gun when a gun was most needed.

Whether it was merely a pose or not, Sleepy always tried to prevent Hashknife from getting interested in these mysteries of the range country. He argued often and loud, but to no avail. But once started, Sleepy worked as diligently as Hashknife. Neither of them were wizards with their guns. No amount of persuasion would induce them to compete with others in marksmanship, nor did they ever practise drawing a gun.