The golden west boys, Injun and Whitey to the rescue

by William S. Hart

For two days after the round-up nothing was done at the ranch, beyond the oiling of guns, and consultations among the men. Walt Lampson seemed to be waiting for something. On the third night there was a meeting in the ranch-house living-room. A meeting which Whitey and Injun attended unseen, by the simple method of hiding. It may have been wrong to listen, but it was worse to die, and Whitey felt that he surely would expire if he didn't know what was going on. Injun had no scruples at all.

A traveler might have thought that all trails led to the Star Circle Ranch, that gloomy night, for from every point of the compass came riders, alone, by twos, and by threes. Desperate, hard men, who had used their bodily strength to conquer the elements and to build up their herds, as mine-owners use machinery to crush the gold out of the ore. For this war of the sheep against the cattle was a common war, and it was to be fought to a finish in that country.

So that was what Walt was waiting for, thought Whitey as he looked into the living-room from a crack in the office door, held slightly ajar. Had Whitey been in a criminal court during the last appeal of opposing counsel, he would have seen in the jury box no more thoughtful, set, and determined faces than those assembled in that ranch-house room.

The decision this court reached was: to catch the culprits and hang them; to drive their sheep over the hills into the deepest canyons to die by thousands; to hunt out the hiding owners, and let Colt guns be both judge and jury. Merciless and hard it seems, doesn't it? But those were merciless and hard days, when "only the strong survived."

"There's just one man I ever knowed who could do this work right," Walt Lampson said. "The greatest two-handed man with a gun that ever was born, an' a fool jury sent him to the pen, five years ago, for brandin' a few calves."

"You mean Mart Cooley," said another ranchman. "There was only one of him. But he done two years at Deer Lodge, an' nobody's ever seen him since."

"Guess again," Walt replied. "I heard o' him. He's been down in the Chinook Country. An' what's more I've got word o' Mart, an' he's comin' here t'night."

Walt's words caused a sensation, and while it is subsiding I may as well explain that in those frontier days there was a vast stretch of mesa or prairie known as the Chinook Country, because of the unseasonable, warm, and soothing winds that blew there. You may have read Bill Jordan's tale about these winds, in the first Injun and Whitey story. They would melt the snow, and cause the cowmen to start out their feeding herds, only to be caught by the northers, that brought the bitter, perishing cold, and killed the stock by thousands. On account of this uncertain condition the Chinook Country was avoided in the early days, save by those who located there for reasons—which no one was ever known to question. And in this desolate place Walt Lampson had heard of Mart Cooley, and from there he had lured him to the Star Circle Ranch.

Whitey waited, almost breathless, for the thrill that was to come at his first sight of the "bad man" of the West; the "two-gun man" who has long since passed into history, but was then a factor of the troublous times.

And you might like to hear a word or two about the ways he handled his gun, for he had more than one way. But first, the way he didn't handle it. Ordinarily, when you are shooting at a mark with a pistol, you cock the weapon, close one eye, and gaze along the barrel with the other until the sight is in line with the mark, and, holding the pistol steady, pull the trigger. That was what the gunman didn't do.