Out of the Blue

By Bertrand W. Sinclair

Author of “North of Fifty-three,” “The Land of Frozen Suns,” Etc.

Headed north, a carefree young ranger rides on a risky mission—rides in the open, spacious days of a West with worlds of elbowroom, when the winds came winging, when hoof beats came ringing, when bullets came singing, “out of the blue.”

CHAPTER I—A RETAINING FEE

Once upon a time, as the old tales used to begin, a young man came riding down the main street of Fort Worth in the sovereign State of Texas. He was mounted on a bright sorrel horse, which stepped daintily in the dust of the thoroughfare, for Fort Worth had not yet come to the high estate of asphalt paving and such civic ornamentation as followed in the wake of petroleum and cotton. The longhorn was still king of the plains, a source of wealth in his unnumbered thousands. The cattle kings and their followers were like the ancient Romans; they made their own roads—made them into far places, in a spirit of high emprise. They did not mind a little dust here and there.

This rider, who looked out from under a gray Stetson hat, holding his reins in a buckskin-gloved hand, while he scanned the windows of the various establishments that fronted on the street, was plainly of the range. He was young and deeply tanned. He was armed, as men commonly were in those times. His saddle, bridle, and spurs were beautifully made, and the silver-inlaid steel clinked faintly, as his horse moved. The coiled-rawhide reata at his saddle fork was limber with much use. He might have been considered picturesque. That idea would never have occurred to him or his fellows. The seed of romance indubitably lay in the stout hearts of Rock Holloway and his like, living and moving and having their being on the fringes of an encroaching civilization, but they were practical in their activities, which had to do with a major industry, wherein there was doubtless romance, but also a considerable portion of hard work and long chances which the range man accepted as incidental to his calling. This long-limbed youth, with the keen eyes and pleasant face, could probably have told why he preferred the range to a university campus; but he was merely the occasional exception. And he may have had glimpses of the future, apart from cattle and trail herds and the wide pastures that were in process of reclamation from the bison and the Indian. But he would never have embodied such dreams in words. And he was not steeping his soul in the color and aspect of a little cow town when he rode along that street. He was looking for a certain place. Presently, and without very much trouble, he found it.

He pulled up before a one-story adobe building. On the paneled door, across the plate-glass windows, ran a legend in gilt lettering:

“The Trinity Bank.”

Rock dismounted and left his sorrel standing on dropped bridle reins, as securely anchored in the utilitarian fashion of the plains as if he had been tied to a post. He paused a moment at the door to grin. On this piece of plain oak some wag had lately scrawled in red chalk the word “Holy” between “The” and “Trinity.” It was not inappropriate, Rock knew. The Trinity Bank of Fort Worth was owned and operated by three men who were old and wise and upright, as near to a state of holiness as bankers in the cow country ever got. That is to say, “Uncle Bill” Sayre, who was president, manager, and chief stockholder, and Marcus Proud, and Abel Stewart were square men, whose word was as good and, indeed, sometimes went farther than an explicit bond.

Rock thrust his face at the first wicket in a low grille along a counter.

“Is Mr. Sayre in?”

“Did you want to see him?” The teller looked up from his work.

“If he isn’t too busy. Tell him it’s Rock Holloway.”

The man walked back a few steps and put his head inside a doorway. He beckoned Rock and indicated an opening in the counter through which Rock could enter.

When Rock reached the inner office, a tall, thin-faced man of sixty rose to greet him, shook hands, shoved forward a chair, and closed the door. Then he seated himself, smiling benignantly.

“Well, well,” said he. “Yo’ young fellows change fast. Le’s see. It’s nigh two years since I saw yo’, Rock. Yo’ favor yo’ ol’ dad mo’ and mo’ all the time. How’s yo’ mammy and Cecilia?”

“Fine,” Rock replied. “Mother says Austin suits her right down to the ground to live in. Cissy’s going to be married this fall.”

“Yo’ don’t say! Why, she ain’t but seventeen. Who to?”

“Nobody I know personally,” Rock answered. “But I know of his family. He’s a Brett. Son of the Brett that runs the B X over toward El Paso. Mother says he’s a nice boy.”

“I know the Bretts. Pretty good people, take ’em all around. Still, pretty young, pretty young, for marryin’. Kinda sudden after yo’-all fixin’ it so she could get whatever advantages lie in an education.”

“Pshaw, Uncle Bill,” Rock said. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t give up anything. There was only so much money to go around, and I’m certainly able to rustle for myself. I had all the show I needed, when I needed it. I don’t know as I would have stayed back East long enough to take a degree, anyhow, only to please the old man. It’s lots of fun to make a hand on the range, and I don’t figure to be a cow hand forever, nohow. But, say, how did you know I was passing this way? Of course I would have come in to say hello, anyhow, but you beat me to it, sending out word you wanted to see me.”

“Oh, I keep tab on lots of things, son.” Old Sayre’s eyes twinkled. “There’s a lot of cowmen an’ cow business passes through this bank. Su’prise yo’, how well they keep me posted on who’s who, and what’s what. Now, I didn’t send fo’ yo’, Rock, just to ask after yo’ health, this time. Yo’ goin’ No’th with a Seventy Seven trail herd?”

“Right through to Montana,” Rock nodded.

“What do yo’-all aim to do after yo’ get there?” Sayre inquired. “Stay on with the Seventy Seven?”

“Don’t think so.” Rock frowned slightly. “I’d as soon work right along, but I don’t know as I like this outfit well enough to tie to.”

“Yo’ mean yo’ don’t cotton much to yo’ boss?” the old man supplied.

“Well, perhaps. Know him?”

“A Duffy, ain’t he?”

Rock nodded.

“I know the tribe. They’s four boys—all big—all inclined to be high-handed. Le’s see. There’s Joe, Elmer, Ed, an’ Mark. Elmer’s handlin’ this herd yo’-all are with?”

Again Rock nodded.

“Elmer ain’t bad. Joe’s noisy, but harmless. Ed is real tough. Mark’s both noisy and mean. He always aimed to be bad, unless he’s changed a heap lately. He’s big as a house. Overbearin’ accordin’ to his size.”

“Mark’s trail hand with this Seventy Seven herd,” Rock said.

“Huh? If Elmer’s startin’ No’th with that handicap, he’ll have trouble on the trail, I reckon. Ought to have more sense than have that disturber in his outfit. I don’t expect yo’ and Mark love each other, eh? No, I shouldn’t imagine yo’d want to stay with the Seventy Seven after the drive’s over, not if yo’ got to rub elbows with Mark. He sure is the wrong kind.”

“Maybe not even all the way,” Rock said casually. “Mark’s inclined to ride me. No particular reason. Just don’t like me, I expect.”

“Better quit the Seventy Seven, son,” Sayre counseled after a moment’s silence. “There’s other herds drivin’ No’th that need good men.”

Rock shook his head. A little smile flitted across his face.

“Would you?” he challenged. “Just to get away from a man that don’t like the shape of your head, or something? Would you, Uncle Bill, after you’d promised a trail boss you’d go?”

“Well, no, I reckon I wouldn’t, come to think it over,” the old man answered dryly. “At least, when I was twenty-five I sho’ wouldn’t. At my age, now, I c’n see the wisdom of side-steppin’ trouble. Still, yo’ better quit the Seventy Seven soon as yo’ get to yo’ destination, providin’ yo’ and Mark both do get there all right.”

“I certainly aim to do both.” Rock smiled. “Mark’s welcome to flourish, so long as he don’t step on my corns too frequent. I want to get into this North country. I hear there’s chances there for a fellow with a little money. Time I’ve worked another year I’ll have a couple of thousand dollars. I might find a place where I could start in with a hundred cows or so, and grow up with the country.”

“When yo’ get around to that, let me know,” the banker said. “I hear good reports of that Montana country. I might put in some money if yo’ locate a range. Texas is full up. She’ll spill a heap of stock and men into the Northwest in the next five years. Cattle grow into money tol’able fast.”

That was an indubitable fact. Sayre, as Rock knew, was a cattle owner as well as a banker. And Texas was getting crowded. That was why the longhorns were swarming North and West to free grass and plentiful water, like droves of horned locusts. They were grazing year by year farther afield into regions dotted by the bones of the buffalo, bleaching where they but lately fell before the rifles of the hide hunters. Rock promised that he would remember the suggestion. They talked a while longer desultorily. Then a clerk asked if Mr. Sayre was busy. A man wanted to see him. Rock rose to his feet.

“Sit still,” Sayre told him. To the clerk he said: “Tell him to come back in half an hour, and I’ll see him.”

And when the door closed again he put both feet up on his desk, looked Rock over with an appraising eye, and said:

“Fact is, young man, I sent fo’ yo’ because I want yo’-all to do something fo’ me when yo’ hit Montana. The question is, will yo’? Yo’ the man I want fo’ the job. Yo’-all will be well paid, and yo’ sho’ will be doing yo’ Uncle Bill Sayre a favor.”

“Name your poison,” Rock said lightly. “What is it you’d have me do? I’m open to any kind of engagement, Uncle Bill. So long as you don’t aim to have me bushwhack some enemy for you and mail you his scalp.”

Sayre grinned. Then he grew sober.

“This is strictly confidential, son,” said he. “First off, do yo’ know the Maltese Cross? Dave Snell’s outfit. Used to range on the west fork of the Trinity.”

From where he sat, Rock could see the silver of the Trinity River looping by the town. He knew the upper Trinity only by hearsay. Texas is an empire, and its cattle kings were many, not all with honor and fame beyond their own little kingdoms. He shook his head.

“Don’t matter. Dave Snell was a friend of mine. Yo’ dad knew him, too. He owned a lot of range. Ran about thirty thousand cattle. More’n a year ago he started to move all his stock to Montana. Took two herds up that season. There’s three more on trail now. Meantime Dave ups and dies. He leaves all he has to two children. A girl just come twenty-one, a boy sixteen. Said estate to be carried on as a going concern until the boy’s twenty-five. The income from this is to be paid to each annually, as he or she comes of age, and finally equally divided in the end. I’m an executor of this document. The other executor is a man named Walters— ‘Buck’ Walters. Know him by name?”

“No.”

“Thought yo’ might. Don’t matter. He was once in that Pecos country yo’ve frequented lately. I’ll get down to cases pretty soon. This Buck Walters was range boss for old Dave for quite a spell before he died. Dave thought a heap of him. I don’t.”

Uncle Bill stopped to roll a cigarette.

“No, suh, I sho’ don’t think a heap of my fellow executor,” he resumed. “Dave Snell was pretty specific in his will. He had a couple of months to think up all the details. I have a free hand with the business end, and all money is checked in and out of this bank. Buck Walters has a free hand with the cattle. The outfit’s pretty well moved into Montana. It was Buck’s notion in the first place. He says there’s no room to range the Maltese Cross on the Trinity no mo’. He says no sense havin’ ten thousand cattle in Montana and another ten thousand in Texas.”

“May be right, at that,” Rock commented.

“Maybe so, maybe so,” Sayre agreed. “But I’d a heap rather the Maltese Cross stock wasn’t on a range two thousand miles from Fort Worth, even if it is a mite better range. To cut it short, Rock, I don’t know what’s goin’ on up there, an’ I got ideas that make me uneasy. I want to know how he handles this outfit, and how he handles himself. I sent for yo’ specifically to ask if yo’-all would consider going up there and keep cases on the Maltese Cross fo’ me, Bill Sayre, personally. Will you?”

“I’d do most anything you wanted me to do, Uncle Bill,” Rock said promptly. “But I’m no detective.”

“Yo’ a practical cowman,” Sayre countered. “Yo’ know all the tricks of the trade. I don’t want no detective. What I want up there is a man that can size up what’s going on on a cattle range—a man that can’t be bought and is not easy fooled. I picked on yo’-all, for that reason.”

“Thanks. Just what would you aim for me to do?” Rock asked.

“Well, it’s easy to keep tab on what a man does with thirty thousand cattle if yo’ circulate in his vicinity,” Sayre observed. “You ain’t no fool, Rock. I don’t care how yo’ manage it—whether yo’ work for another outfit or get a job with the Maltese Cross. Don’t care whether yo’ work at all; yo’ll be paid direct by me. What I want is fo’ yo’ to linger around in that territory and use yo’ eyes and ears. Yo’ll know in one season whether the outfit is going up or down, and whether Buck is shootin’ straight.”

“You think maybe he isn’t?”

“Buck Walters is young, ambitious, high-handed with men, and powerful fond of women,” Sayre said frowningly. “He dresses flash. He’s mighty fond of stiff poker. He’s a smart cowman, I’ll admit. But he’s been drawin’ big wages fo’ ten years and never held onto a dollar. Yo’ put a man like that in complete control of three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of live stock, with nobody to check up on him——”

Sayre threw out his hands in an eloquent gesture.

“He had old Dave hypnotized,” he went on. “I think Dave was a damn fool to give him such a swing. I may be wrong about Walters. If I am, so much the better fo’ him. But I aim to play my hunch. I mean to see that the Snell estate don’t get the worst of it, no way. I feel more than ordinary responsibility in this. Dave was my friend. I can’t leave my business here to go up into Montana every few weeks to keep tab on Buck Walters. Next best thing is to send a man I can trust.”

“I’m young and ambitious,” Rock mused. “I don’t shy none from poker games; in fact, I horn into ’em deliberate because I frequently beat ’em. I’ve held down good jobs, too, in the last three years, without savin’ much of my wages. Gosh, Uncle Bill, are you sure I’m to be trusted?”

The old man gazed at him affectionately.

“I know yo’,” he said, “and I know yo’r breed. Will yo’ do this for me, Rock?”

“Why, sure,” Rock agreed. “I don’t suppose it would be very difficult for me to get a pretty good idea of how this Buck Walters is handling the Maltese Cross.”

“That’ll be good enough,” Sayre nodded. “If yo’re on the ground takin’ notice, I’ll be satisfied. Le’s see,” he stopped to reflect, “yo’ll be into Montana about September. I don’t issue no orders, son. Use your own judgment. Barrin’ a hard season, nothing much ever happens on a cow range in the winter.”

“Don’t you fool yourself,” Rock said seriously. Then he stopped. Old Uncle Bill was grinning at him understandingly.

“I ain’t going to prime yo’ with no false ideas, Rock,” he declared. “Yo’ just circulate around in that vicinity as it suits yo’ and let me know how she stacks up.”

“Whereabouts in Montana is the Maltese Cross located?” Rock inquired.

“Marias River. Their post office is Fort Benton—no’thern part of the territory. You’re bound for the Marias with the Seventy Seven. Course, she’s a long stream. The Maltese Cross is on the lower end, near where the Marias joins the upper Missouri.”

“I understood the Seventy Seven was headed for the Musselshell,” Rock observed.

“Maybe yo’-all understood that, son, but that herd’ll be turned loose on the Marias,” Sayre said positively. “I get that info’mation from the men that’s backin’ the Duffys. Joe Duffy is on trail with a herd in the same brand, too, from the Panhandle.”

“I didn’t know. Don’t matter to me, nohow,” Rock said, “so long as I get to Montana. I’m bound North, like the bear that went over the mountain, to see what I can see. And I won’t be on the Seventy Seven pay roll after I get there. I sort of feel that in my bones.”

Sayre opened a drawer. His hand came out with a small canvas bag which clinked gently, as he laid it on the oak desk and slid it across to Rock.

“There’s five hundred dollars’ advance in gold,” he said abruptly. “I’ll allow yo’ sixty dollars a month from date, until I notify yo’ this arrangement is canceled. Now”—he lifted a hand to silence Rock’s protest—“I don’t want yo’ to hesitate about nothing that’s calculated to protect the Snell interests. When yo’ protect them yo’ protect me. You’re a smart boy. Yo’ been raised in a cow country and had considerable Eastern education rammed down yo’ gullet. I don’t need to tell yo’ what a range boss can do to a cow outfit, if he sets out to do some good for himself at the outfit’s expense. It’ll be yo’ job to let me know if Buck Walters shows any such symptoms. If, to make sure of anything in connection with him, yo’ find it necessary to spend money, draw on this bank in yo’ own name. There is a railroad and a telegraph line through the southern part of Montana now. Yo’ can wire me direct anything important. If yo’-all get into trouble, I’ll back yo’ play.”

“You certainly sound pessimistic, Uncle Bill,” Rock declared.

“I don’t trust that fellow executor of mine no farther than I could throw him,” Sayre stated bluntly. “He’s a mighty powerful man, so yo’ can reckon how far that is. I feel a powerful sight of responsibility. I aim to see that Dave Snell’s children inherit this estate unimpaired by other persons with ambitions to enrich theirselves by methods that ain’t strictly accordin’ to Hoyle.”

“All right, Uncle Bill,” Rock promised. “I’ll wander around the Maltese Cross and keep you posted on how she stacks up to my innocent eye. It won’t be soon. I’ll be six months on the drive. It may take me some time to learn anything. I can’t saunter onto the Maltese Cross range and say right off who’s who, and what’s what. So I’d just as soon not take your money until I start earning it. If you hear from me inside a year, you’ll be lucky.”

“I’m not expectin’ Buck to try and put thirty thousand cattle in his hip pocket right off,” Sayre grinned. “He couldn’t. And he’s too all-fired smart to let his work—if any—be coarse. I’m merely insurin’ against contingencies. I could have picked thirty men to send into Montana, with a big cow outfit apiece, and never have an uneasy moment over any one of ’em. As I size up this situation——”

Again that eloquent spread of his hands.

“So,” he went on, “yo’ keep that money, because yo’-all might need it. That’s like a lawyer’s retaining fee, my son—an earnest of an’ undertakin’ entered into for a duly acknowledged consideration. Yo’ the man for the job, Rock. Yo’-all are entitled to pay. So don’t get highfalutin’ about a few measly dollars.”

“Never found ’em measly yet,” Rock said lightly. “Though I’ve known lots of measly things done in behalf of ’em.”

He slid the bag of gold into his trousers pocket, where it sagged uncomfortably when he arose.

“Well, Uncle Bill,” said he, “now you’ve got that off your chest, suppose we go out and have a farewell drink together? The Seventy Seven is moving. I’ve got quite a ways to ride to catch that herd to take my regular turn on guard to-night.”

A mile from the last scattered houses of Fort Worth, Rock paused on the north side of the Trinity. The river flowed beneath him, a lovely, sparkling stream. Its banks were green with spring growth. Texas wore an April smile for her sons that were departing into far lands with many a herd. Rock looked down at the river and back at the town.

“Well, Sangre,” he addressed the twitching ears of his sorrel horse, “if Uncle Bill Sayre’s hunch about this fellow executor of his happens to be right, we ought to be able to keep time from hanging heavy on our hands after we hit Montana, provided we get that far in peace and quietness.”

Rock frowned slightly, as he muttered this. He had his doubts; not of the mission he had promised to undertake, however. He was thinking of something else when he repeated the last sentence. It wasn’t just an idle phrase.

CHAPTER II—IN THE ODEON

East and west across the flat face of Nebraska runs a river, which needs no naming, looping, like a great watery rope, the Rocky Mountains and its ultimate confluence with the Big Muddy. It was once said of this stream that it resembled the speeches of a well-known politician, inasmuch as it was a thousand miles long, a mile wide, and about four inches deep.

In one particular year of our Lord, when herds of longhorn cattle were spilling out of Texas like milk seeping over a polished table top, from an overflowing bowl, the curses of many a trail boss and cattle owner were heaped upon this wide, shallow, sandy-bottomed river. Northbound herds must cross it. Under its ankle depths of flow lurked miles of quicksand. The first drives to the North suffered. Later, hard bottom crossings were located.

In the height of the great bovine exodus, such crossings were like the junction of two great thoroughfares. They were heavily traffic laden. From May to September the march of the herds never slackened. Every herd had its quota of riders. Wherever there are men there is money, and money is made to be spent. So, at each of these river crossings, enterprising merchants set up with stocks of goods. Equally enterprising individuals set up establishments where a cowpuncher could find something for his throat besides dust and alkali water, where he could take a fling at faro bank and poker. In other words, the saloon and gambling hall arose, side by side, with the general store, to the profit of their owners and the glory of the trail.

Clark’s Ford was such a place. When Ben Clark bogged his first herd in the quicksands, he lay on the bank, and his riders scouted for hard bottom, found it, passed over and passed on, leaving his name to the place and bequeathing future herds on that route the only safe crossing in a hundred miles.

A year later a cluster of frame buildings on the north bank greeted the lead of each herd, as it emerged from the stream. Here outfits could replenish their grub supply, get or send mail by a stage route, before they vanished into the empty land that spread north to the Canada line, a land that was empty even unto the arctic circle.

And into Clark’s Ford one July evening Rock Holloway rode alone, on the same sorrel horse, one of his own private mounts, that had stepped light-footedly in the dust of a Fort Worth street that spring. For weeks he had faced the dip and roll and flatness of plains as bare as the seas Columbus faced when he crossed the Western ocean. Ride, eat, sleep, and ride again, in the dust of eight thousand hoofs, on that pilgrimage from the Rio Grande to the forty-ninth parallel, across silent leagues of grass, from which the bison had but lately vanished, and where the Indian had not yet forgotten how to take a white man’s scalp.

So Rock, who had nothing much on his mind but a Stetson hat, rode into Clark’s Ford. Little sinks of iniquity like this were not new in his experience. He was too sensible to take a moral attitude. They were not, with their gaudy activities, much to his taste, but they supplied a want. He didn’t drink much at any time, preferring poker for pastime, and he had been known to wander about for hours in the midst of cow-town hilarity doing nothing but watch his fellows make merry.

Clark’s Ford numbered scarcely a dozen buildings. One general store, one blacksmith shop, one combined saloon and dance hall. A gaunt boarding house purveyed food and sleeping quarters to clerks, gamblers, bartenders, and transients. Clark’s Ford was little more than a camp, a mushroom growth with neither a past nor a future.

It was not a place that Ben Clark would have been proud to bear his name. If it catered in some measure to the legitimate necessities of these Argonauts of the plains, it likewise battened on their weaknesses. Cattlemen and their riders had few illusions about such places, except in moments of alcoholic exaltation. They were tolerant of them, that was all, because they were centers of human contact, in the midst of an unpeopled wilderness.

It was a dreary place in the glare of day. Sagebrush flowed to the very doors—gray—monotonously gray. A river, with a dozen channels plowed by the spring floods in its yellow sands, slunk at the feet of Clark’s Ford. For a mile about no green thing flourished. Only the tough sagebrush defied obliteration under the trampling hoofs that passed in myriads. That valley had yet to become verdant under irrigation canals. Even the red brother shunned it in bygone days except when the buffalo herds passed that way. The cattleman would have shunned it if he could. But the herds focused at this point, but, once across, they radiated like the spokes of a wheel to pleasanter ranges farther north, where grass waved like fields of ripe wheat; where clear streams flowed in gravelly beds, and now and then a man’s eye would be gladdened by a tree.

But at night Clark’s Ford shook off its daytime somnolence, shrouded itself in the dusky mantle of night and decked itself with yellow jewels. Night and lamps! There is magic in those two. A pianist and a fiddler strummed in the dance hall. The women glowed in silk and satin and smiled their mechanical smiles. Within, the light softened hard faces, struck glints from glass, and spread over green-topped tables, the racked silver and gold behind the games, and the multicolored poker chips. A man could get action there. Seldom any one paused outside those doors, behind which the piano tinkled, and the fiddle wailed, and the voices of men and women were pitched a little above the normal key.

Rock paused now, after he had swung down from his horse. He stared up at the sky, the inverted bowl of the Persian poet, studded with stars. He looked absently upward, the fingers of one hand tangled in Sangre’s mane. Perhaps he studied the stars in their courses. Perhaps he saw something invisible save to the imaginative eye, off in that calm, obscuring night. And then he shrugged his shoulders, gave his gun belt a hitch, and walked into the Odeon. Why the exploiter of Clark’s Ford bestowed on a tin-pot dance hall a name that derived from ancient Greek through modern French, Heaven only knows. Perhaps that was what made Rock smile, as he noted the name painted in white on a door illuminated by a hung lantern. He had a way of noting such things.

A bar ranged along one side of the Odeon. A low platform lifted against the opposite wall, where the two musicians played, and now and then a woman sang the sentimental ballads of the period. A clear space in the middle was left for dancing. One side was set with pine tables and chairs. The other wall made a backstop for gambling paraphernalia, operated by bored men with impassive faces, who dealt for the house and watched winning or losing with equal indifference.

All this Rock took in rapidly. He had heard about Clark’s Ford and the Odeon a thousand miles south. He reflected that there were other places of the same stripe, which he had seen here, and they were more impressive, if less widely known. Yet it was a fairly big night at the Odeon. Four herds had made the crossing that day. Three more lay within ten miles. There were riders from all in Clark’s Ford this night, seeking diversion. The gabble of voices and laughter filled the big room. The click of chips greeted Rock’s ears, a faint, penetrating sound. A woman was singing, “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” It sounded at once incongruous and highly appropriate in that atmosphere. She had a fairly good voice, too. He stood within the door until the last note sounded, then walked across the room to a poker game, where he recognized a cattleman he knew from Waco.

“Well, well!” Al Kerr reached up to shake hands. “Seems like everybody’s headed North these days. How’s tricks?”

“So, so,” Rock answered. “Laying up much wealth in this noble pastime?”

“Not so you could notice,” Kerr grinned. “Just amusin’ myself. This here table sort of attracted me. First green thing I’ve seen for six weeks. Here, cash these.”

He shoved half a stack of reds to the dealer, got five silver dollars in exchange, and pushed back his chair.

“Let’s inhale a drink,” he suggested. “Maybe you and me could horn into an easier game later on.”

“I’m due on guard at one thirty, and it’s eleven now,” Rock said, “so I won’t play poker to-night. But I will have a glass of beer.”

“Beer’s no good except off ice in hot weather,” Kerr told him. “And ice is as scarce as square men among the regular population of Clark’s Ford. Better drink rye.”

As the choice lay between lukewarm beer and the stronger drink, Rock chose whisky. It didn’t matter what he drank.

He didn’t intend to tarry long in the Odeon.

Nor did he. If he could have foreseen the manner and necessity of his departure, he might not have entered the place. And again he might have braved fate, even with certain knowledge, since he was not by nature inclined to dodge issues either present or potential. A man on the frontier seldom got anywhere if he were always counting costs. If Rock had not got anywhere, he was at least on his way.

They walked over to the bar and stood near the farther end from the main entrance. Rock was not a tall man, perhaps a little over medium height. Even so he towered over his companion. Kerr barely reached his shoulder. He was a little wisp of a man, with a gnomelike face. Small bodied, but big-hearted, full of humorous quips and kindly impulses, Al Kerr was the type of Texas cowman who never figures in song and story. He had never killed any one. He had never found it necessary. Probably he had not exchanged a dozen harsh sentences with another man in his life. Yet he was a successful man. He had cattle scattered over the length of three States. He had fifty riders on his pay roll. And for every rider he had a score of friends. Rock happened to be one of them. And Rock looked down on the little, middle-aged man, whose hair was thin, but whose blue eyes were merry, and he wondered what it was that made some men succeed in whatever they undertook. It wasn’t size, it wasn’t blatant force, and it wasn’t always the power of possessions. What was it, Rock wondered?

A dance had just ended. Several lusty, perspiring young trail hands had led their ladies to the bar to liquidate the Terpsichorean debt, after the custom of such places. They were lined up twenty in a row. As they stood there, glass in hand, some in the act of pouring their drink, the door of the Odeon flew open, and a man swaggered in.

He stood a moment staring with eyes a trifle reddened. He was a mountain of a man, well over six feet, and thick in proportion. He wore a rider’s usual costume. Like most of those who trafficked across the plains, he was armed. He took two quick strides from the door to the bar end and, picking up the nearest glass of whisky, drank it at a gulp. Then he stood, towering above the man whose drink he had taken, grinning, as if at a capital joke.

“Well, well,” Kerr murmured. “The village cut-up is with us again. He was around here this afternoon raisin’ Cain. He aims to be bad, it looks like. Wonder where he escaped from?”

Rock smiled. He knew the man. He watched with a detached sort of interest to see what would happen. For a second nothing happened. A quick-witted bartender hastily set up another glass, thus stifling the protest that was evidently on tap by the man whose drink had been taken. That, to Rock, was an indication of how far Mark Duffy’s size and disposition had carried him in Clark’s Ford. But he was hardly prepared for the big man’s next action. Considering the time and place, it seemed suicidal.

Duffy walked right down the bar, shouldering all and sundry out of his way. His big red face was wreathed in a sardonic grin, and his bellowing voice uttered a warning to all in his path:

“Make room for a man. I’m goin’ to drink, an’ when I drink I need lots of room.”

He seemed in a fair way to get all the room he desired without opposition. Probably any other man would have been smelling powder before he got halfway, Rock reflected. But Duffy looked neither to right nor left nor hesitated in his ponderous stride, nor heeded the curses that were hurled at him. He was asserting himself, he wanted room, and he got it—a clear path, until he came to Al Kerr and Rock Holloway.

Neither moved. Their second drink was before them. Rock had one elbow on the bar, and he kept it there. Kerr stood between him and Duffy.

The big man loomed over Kerr. He looked down.

“Say, runt!” he bellowed. “Did you hear me say I wanted room?”

“Seems to me you got plenty,” Kerr answered. “Nobody’s crowdin’ you.”

For answer Duffy seized him by both shoulders, picked him off his feet, as if he had been a child, and set him on the bar. Kerr stood probably five foot four. He never carried a six-shooter. He was handy with a rifle, but that was not a weapon he carried in town.

Duffy kept that iron grip on his shoulders. The little man was helpless. Faint snickers arose in the room. Kerr’s face flushed. He felt the indignity. But he said nothing, only looked Duffy coldly in the eye. And Duffy began to shake him until his head snapped back and forth, yanking him at last roughly off the bar, so that his boot heels struck the floor with a crack.

“Buy a drink for the crowd, runt,” he commanded.

“You go to hell,” Kerr defied him. “Buy your own drinks. You’re too big for me to fight with my hands. But you lay off’n me long enough for me to get a gun, and I’ll shoot with you for the drinks, you side of raw beef on the hoof!”

Duffy’s face wreathed in a grin. He reached his gorilla-like arms and took a step forward. Kerr dodged sidewise. And for the first time Duffy seemed to see and recognize Rock. He stared briefly. Rock looked back at him, expressionless. Duffy turned on Kerr again. His hand crept toward the gun in his belt.

“You’ll buy a drink, or you’ll dance,” he said meaningly. “Look spry, little feller! Buy drinks or dance.”

He punctuated the last sentence with a shot into the floor at Kerr’s feet. Whereat Rock stepped between the little man and his tormentor. His Colt was in his hand. Like Duffy’s, it pointed at the floor. There was a swift surge of men away from the bar.

“You’ve gone far enough with this, Duffy,” Rock said quietly. “Don’t be a damn fool.”

For five tense seconds Duffy glared at Rock; then his gun jerked. At the movement, Rock fired. He was pitching himself sidewise, as he pulled trigger. He knew when he interfered that there would only be one end to such interference, and he had discounted that. Duffy’s bullet sped somewhere past his face. And Rock held his second shot, for the big man was sagging slowly forward, until suddenly he collapsed on the floor.

Rock slid the fallen six-shooter with his toe toward Kerr, his eyes on the crowd.

“Take that till we get out of here,” he said. “Maybe he’s got friends.”

But other friends were at hand. Half a dozen of Kerr’s men came shouldering their way toward him.

“That was neat,” one grinned at Rock. “We couldn’t very well bust our way through that crowd, but if anybody wants to go farther with it, we’re here to take ’em on.”

Evidently no one did. They walked, Kerr and Rock and five trail hands, the length of the room to the entrance door, while the hush that sudden death always brings held the crowd in the Odeon.

Once in the street beside their mounts, Kerr said:

“Well, I think I better amble off to camp before some other ambitious drunk picks on me. You fellers comin’ along?”

“I expect we better,” they agreed. “That joint is no great shakes for amusement, nohow.”

“Where’s your outfit camped?” Rock asked.

“About nine miles north,” Kerr answered. “Where’s your camp, Rock?”

“Same direction. Not quite so far,” Rock answered. “I’ll ride with you a ways.”

They went jingling away from Clark’s Ford, Kerr’s riders laughing and joking. Rock and the little cowman silent. The Dipper wheeling on its ancient circle of the pole star gave them bearings. The night hush enfolded them, as the lights and sounds were swallowed in the dark hollow by the river. Three miles out Rock pulled up his horse.

“Here’s where I turn aside,” he said. “So long, boys.”

“Look, Rock,” Kerr said slowly. “You done me a good turn back there. If you’re ever in a jack pot, you let me know. I’m locatin’ in Montana for good this season. You’ll find me in the Judith Basin, on Arrow Creek. Capital K they call my outfit up there. Post office is Lewistown. My house is yours any time you show up.”

“Maybe, I’ll call your bluff some time, Al,” Rock laughed. “You never can tell. I’m bound for Montana, myself, so I may see you-all again this summer. So long. Be good, and if you can’t be good be careful.”

Rock sat his horse, listening to the patter of departing hoofs. So Kerr was bound for the Judith Basin. Rock had said that the outfit he was with was also bound for Montana. But he had omitted to mention that he would not be with it when it arrived.

In fact, Rock was not wholly certain that he would ever arrive. He had another private horse beside Sangre with the Seventy Seven. His bed was in the wagon. He had two months’ wages due. Before he could get anywhere, he had to collect his belongings and his pay.

And that might very well lead to a continuation of the unpleasantness this night had already spanned. The man whom he had killed in the Odeon was the brother of the trail boss of the Seventy Seven, and the Duffys were a clannish lot, with more nerve than good judgment.

He mighn’t be lucky twice in one night. The pitcher that goes often enough to the well—— Rock shrugged his shoulders and shook his horse into a lope. In twenty minutes he drew up to where the Seventy Seven herd lay bedded, a huge dark blot on the bleached grass, with the chuck tent looming a ghost-white outline, half a mile past the sleeping herd.

CHAPTER III—THE STEERING WHEEL

When the sun flung its Midas touch across the Nebraska plains the morning after what was but an episode in Clark’s Ford, it struck a ruddy sheen on the sorrel horse Rock Holloway bestrode and made the sleek coat of the black pony that carried his bed, shine like a piece of widow’s silk.

Rock hummed a little tune as he rode. He had lived through that unavoidable encounter with Mark Duffy. He had avoided open clash with Duffy’s brother by quitting the Seventy Seven. A blood feud is no light thing to be involved in. Rock had no regrets over Mark. The man’s bulldozing disposition had brought them to the verge once or twice on the trail. But Rock had no desire to burn powder against a man who would be actuated chiefly by some vague notion that it was proper to avenge a dead kinsman.

Duffy, the trail boss, had been a little stunned by the death of his domineering brother. He had tentatively agreed that Rock was not to blame. He had paid him his wages and let him go unmolested. But later on, Rock knew, the surviving Duffy would ponder and brood, be urged to reprisal, as in the cloak-and-sword period gallants brooded upon a slight to their honor, whether real or fancied, until they had no course but to draw blade.

So Rock was well satisfied to be a lone horseman in a waste of grass and sage in the cool of a summer morning. On the flat area running unbroken by mountain or forest, from horizon to horizon, he marked northbound herds in the offing, as a lookout might descry distant sails at sea. Over yonder was a Matador herd, yonder marched the horned regiment of the Turkey Track. At a guess, Rock could have named the brand of the five herds visible within the radius of his sight. Northbound, headed for free grass and abundant water, as the Israelites of old went forth seeking the land of milk and honey. Texas was full of cattle, full to overflowing, and the overflow in that season swept in full volume over twenty-three degrees of latitude to end in Montana, with sundry minor spillings into the Canadian northwest.

Rock, like the cattleman with his herds, had set his face North. Like many another young Texan, he had lent eager ear to tales of this terra incognita, out of which scouting cattlemen sent reports that it was a paradise for herds, now that the bison were exterminated, and the Indians herded on reservations. Nine hundred miles still lay between Rock and his destination. But that was nothing. He had two good horses, a rifle and a .45 Colt, ammunition, food, bedding and a sanguine soul. Many a pioneer had set forth with less. It was not precisely hostile country he had to traverse alone. True, a lone rider was a temptation to scouting braves who might have jumped the reservation. But that was a detail. In thirty days, more or less, he could reach Fort Benton. Once there—well, even if he had not the mission bestowed on him in Fort Worth, an able range rider could always find useful employment in his calling.

So Rock rode with a little tune on his lips and wondered how far it was between water holes.

Three days out from Clark’s Ford he sighted the mass of a trail herd and caught up with it at sundown. Four riders were bunching the cattle on the bed ground. Rock exchanged greetings with one, noted the brand, a Maltese Cross, and went on to the chuck wagon, camped by a nameless creek, meandering out of an endless sweep of plains to the westward into an equally limitless void on the east. The Maltese Cross made him welcome. It was a rare thing for a lone man to come out of those empty spaces. But the range properly held that a man’s business was his own until he chose to divulge it. The Cross herd was bound for northern Montana, they told him. Rock knew that already. The trail boss casually remarked that he was welcome to keep them company if he liked.

Since they had a full crew, Rock didn’t care to be a guest and crawl North at the mad speed of ten miles a day, when he could make thirty or forty a day on his own. So he accepted a hunk of beef from the cook next morning and rode on.

Two weeks brought him into Wyoming, into a different type of country. The flat, undulating surface of the great plains became sharply rolling ridges. He crossed creeks lined with willows and clumps of quaking aspen. He rode through open forests of pine. He made lonely camps in spots of rare beauty. Once or twice he stopped overnight at ranches well established.

Off to the northwest, mountains began to loom. He bore on until these white and purple peaks were behind him on the left, and so came to a watershed dipping in a long slant to the north. By which he guessed that he was well within the Territory of Montana, following a stream that flowed to the Yellowstone.

When he came to that turbulent river, in a valley traversed by the first transcontinental railway to cross the Northwest, he found eight men with a mixed herd at a fording place. They were a weary lot. Eight men to twelve hundred cattle was a short trail crew. They had left Kansas early that spring, they told Rock. They had made fast time, and their horses bore the trace, being gaunt and leg weary, although the cattle were in fair flesh. And the men were even more tired than their stock. Of the scores of trailed herds Rock had passed, this was the first that was short-handed. A trail outfit left the South with a full crew. Barring accident or death, the riders stayed with the herd to the journey’s end. It was equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy for a trail hand to quit for a whim. In all that bovine pilgrimage, there was no place where riders could be secured, no more than a ship can replace its crew a thousand miles offshore.

“I can use you plenty,” the trail boss said, as soon as he sized Rock up, “if you hanker to be usefully employed.”

“Where you bound for?” Rock asked.

“Canada. Old Man River in the Fort MacLeod country,” the man said.

“In the home of the mounted police, eh?” Rock drawled. “We go through the Blackfeet country. That’s about as far North as cattle range, isn’t it?”

“Just about; although, if this Northern drive keeps extendin’ itself, there’ll be longhorns winterin’ at the north pole, it looks like,” the wagon boss replied. “If you want to see some new country, here’s a chance.”

“From Mexico to Canada, personally conducted!” Rock laughed. “All right, I’m with you.”

Thus did he come into the foothills of the Rockies, north of 49°, in the month of September. They crossed the Missouri where Chief Joseph had forded it with his braves ten years earlier, with U. S. cavalry in hot pursuit. They plodded west and north to their destination, leaving the Bear Paws to the right, Sweet Grass Hills on their left, sweeping across a country where grass grew to their stirrups, driving before them twelve hundred cattle of divers age and sex, marked with a brand on the left ribs, called a steering wheel.

Rock looked once or twice to the westward before they reached the boundary line. Somewhere in that great empty area the Marias River split the plains. Somewhere on the Marias was the headquarters of the Maltese Cross. The Cross would keep. He had given his word to go through with the Steering Wheel. In the winter or in the spring he would drift into Fort Benton, and he would contrive to make himself familiar with the ways and works of Buck Walters. For the present——

The Old Man revealed itself as a pleasant country, well grassed, well wooded with small pine, and with a small, swift-flowing stream in which trout lurked in eddying pools. Axes and saws they had in the chuck wagon. By some mysterious agency of freighting across the plains, they found themselves in possession of a mower and a dump rake. For once, faced as it were by an emergency, these knights of the saddle, who had all the man-on-horseback’s traditional contempt for labor on foot, fell to as carpenters, corral builders, reapers and stackers of hay.

So that, when the first November snows hit them, they were housed in a comfortable log dwelling. Each man had a saddle horse tied in a warm stable, and hay stacked to feed his mount till spring. The Steering Wheel cattle had sun-cured grass to graze upon and brushy creek bottoms to shelter them against the blizzard.

“It might be worse,” Rock said to a fellow rider a few days before Christmas. “I had an idea this Canada country was like the arctic regions. But it shapes up like a real cattle country. It’s colder than Texas, but there’s more grass and better shelter. These mounted police, with their funny red coats and striped pants, are about like the Texan rangers, only they don’t shoot so frequent nor play as tight a game of poker.”

“She’s a lonesome country,” the other rider said.

It was indeed a lonely land. When spring opened, with streams in flood and blue windflowers thrusting ahead of the first grass blades, Rock missed the gathering of the clans, the scope of great round-ups, and the hundreds of riders with gossip from a thousand miles of range. It was like being a chip in an eddy, he thought to himself, being given to similes and metaphors. The Steering Wheel seemed to have the entire Northwest to itself. They heard that another big outfit lay somewhere north of them. The STV had headquarters two hundred miles east. But from September to April Rock saw no four-footed beast on the range outside of the Steering Wheel brand. Nor did any rider ever come up from the horizon to pass the time of day. Fort MacLeod was a police barracks chiefly. It boasted a trading store, where trappers from the mountains sold their furs and bought supplies. Community life there was none at all.

The nine men of the Steering Wheel had a sinecure over the winter. Rock took to speculating on what brought that particular one-horse cow outfit all the way to Canada, when there were magnificent ranges to be had for the taking south of the line. None of the men knew who owned the Steering Wheel. A typical Texan, tall, thin-faced, with a drawly voice, and a good-natured soul, who knew cattle, ran the outfit. When a man needed money to buy goods at the fort, Dave Wells produced cash. His reticence discouraged curiosity. Rock, who knew the cow business both in practice and in theory, wondered at this dead silence—this absence of outlined plan. Twelve hundred cattle didn’t need nine riders in comparative idleness.

This gave him a good excuse in April for leaving. When he told Wells, that individual looked thoughtful.

“I sho’ don’t need eight riders right along,” he said. “I kept yo’ boys over the winter, mostly because I didn’t want to turn yo’ loose in a country where they’s no chance for a job. I’m aimin’ to let four of yo’ go. But not for a spell. I’d like for yo’ to stay on three-fo’ weeks yet. I got to take a pasear after some stock. If yo’ drift back across the line in May, yo’ll still be able to get on as hands with some round-up.”

Rock agreed. May would do as well as April. He had written once to Uncle Bill Sayre, and had received a reply. If he got around to the Maltese Cross range that summer, it would be good enough.

Immediately thereafter, Dave Wells flung his men out on a horse-gathering expedition. The Steering Wheel ponies were brought in by tens and dozens. They ranged uniformly within ten miles of the ranch. Most of the cattle grazed in the same area. And, as soon as forty horses were in the pasture, Wells organized a pack outfit, took four men with him, and vanished.

He left a red-headed youth in nominal charge. The duties of the riders left at home were to build an extension of the pole pasture and to gather the rest of the Steering Wheel saddle stock. Thereafter they were to scout around the outer fringes of the range and throw all cattle close home.

“The old he-coon gone South for another trail herd?” Billy Gore asked the deputy foreman, once he was in Rock’s hearing.

“Naw,” the red-headed one divulged the first information. “Said he was goin’ somewhere after a bunch of doggies.”

“Doggy” in range parlance meant farm cattle, scrubs, nondescript stock generally, sometimes cheaply bought to help stock a range.

Rock recalled that remark three weeks later, when Wells and his four riders rode into the ranch. They had left with forty saddle horses. These mounts were ridden to a standstill. The five men were heavy-eyed and obviously weary. Wells kept his own counsel, as did the four who had ridden with him. They appeared at noon, turned loose their horses, ate, and then slept still sunrise of the next day. After breakfast Dave Wells called the four riders who had stayed on the ranch, told them courteously that he would have to let them go, and paid them off in gold.

The discharged quartet rode south, leading pack horses, within two hours. They discovered, once clear of the ranch and free to air their personal views, that they were mutually eager to be away to a real cow country. They had had enough of comparative isolation. They were all Texans. Three of them were for home, via Butte and south over the Oregon Short Line to the Union Pacific. They had had enough of the North for the present. Only Rock proposed to linger, and he would keep them company until they were well into Montana.

Five miles south of the ranch they jumped a bunch of cattle out of a draw, mature cattle, with a freshly burned Steering Wheel black on their ribs. On the slope which they breasted were others; by a cluster of sloughs were still more.

Doggies! The cowpunchers, free of any loyalty or responsibility to any outfit, glanced and kept on talking of home. Rock looked and kept his thoughts to himself. They were not doggies. They were simon-pure longhorns, with a touch of Hereford blood, here and there—the type of cattle that poured annually by the hundred thousand out of Texas. If they were purchased range stock, other brands, vented or barred out, should have shown. All the mark that Rock saw on any beast was a fresh-burned Steering Wheel. But he kept his speculations to himself. After all, it was no business of his. The Steering Wheel might have cattle all over the Northwest, for all he knew or cared. If his fellow riders thought it queer, they were not concerned enough to mention the fact.

Five days later he parted from his companions under the shoulder of the Sweet Grass Hills. They were bearing off for Silver Bow Junction, homeward bound. Rock’s course lay a trifle east of south, toward Fort Benton. Ahead of him, in that spring-green void, big round-ups were mustering from the upper Teton to the Larb Hills. The Bear Paws loomed faintly on the horizon. Milk River, Sun Prairie, the Bad Lands—place names to conjure with. There was nothing petty in all that sweep of plain and mountain. It gave Rock a curious sense of thrilling possibilities. He rode alone without being lonely, fired by some subtle anticipation.

He often asked himself afterward what it is that gives a man a definite urge along a definite line that may lead him to both triumph and disaster. But he was never able to answer that question, any more than he was able to answer it that June day when, parting company with his fellows, he pointed the red horse’s head toward Fort Benton murmuring whimsically:

“Here we comes, and there we goes,
And where we’ll stop nobody knows.”

CHAPTER IV—A DEAD DOUBLE

Rock knew where he was going and why. But it was not on the cards that his course was to be direct. Halfway between Milk River and the Marias he rode down a coulee in search of water for a noon camp. He found water eventually and beside it a troop of United States cavalry, in the throes of getting under way. “Throes” is correct. They had a considerable amount of equipment to be packed upon mules. They were cantankerous mules. A dozen men were fighting them with pack lashings and profanity.

Rock drew rein to watch the circus. A man, a civilian, approached him, mopping the sweat from his brow.

“Stranger,” said he, “you look like a cowpuncher.”

“Looks don’t deceive you this time,” Rock admitted.

“Can you pack a mule?”

“I have lashed packs on a variety of animals,” Rock said. “But I have no ambition to be a government muleteer.”

“Be a good sport an’ help me out,” the man appealed. “It won’t be but for four or five days, till we get to the post. I’m short-handed, and these mules is bad medicine. I shore need a man that’s handy with a rope. I’ll give you five dollars a day.”

Rock grinned and accepted. The mules were certainly bad medicine, and he was handy with a rope, and a few days more or less didn’t matter.

Fort Assiniboine lay eighty miles eastward. Fort Benton hugged the north bank of the Missouri, some sixty miles southwest. But here was a job just begging to be taken in hand. So for five days thereafter he was a mule packer, learning something of the way of men and mules in Uncle Sam’s service. He even had an officer suggest that he would make a likely cavalryman. But Rock had different ideas. He took his twenty-five dollars in the shadow of this military post and set his face westward again.

He left in the gray of dawn. The second evening he dropped from the level of the plains, full three hundred feet into the valley of the Marias, where a little stream sang and whispered over a pebbly bed, through flats of rich, loamy soil. Sagebrush grew here, and natural meadows spread there. Willows lined the banks. Groves of poplar studded the flats, thickets of service berry. Great cottonwoods, solitary giants and family groups, cast a pleasant shade from gnarly boughs in full leaf.

“Gosh, places like this,” Rock murmured, “fairly shout out loud for a fellow to settle down and make himself a home. No wonder Texas is flocking North.”

In the first bottom Rock crossed, he stirred up a few cattle, then a band of horses, several of which bore trimmed manes and tails and marks of the saddle—fine-looking beasts, bigger than the Texas mustang. He couldn’t see the brand.

“I wonder if we’re anywhere near the Maltese Cross, Sangre, old boy?” he asked the sorrel horse. “Funny, if we’d stumble in there for the night.”

He rounded a point masked by thickets of young, green poplar and saw a house with smoke curling blue from the chimney. There was a stable beyond, corrals, a stack of last year’s hay, and the lines of a pole fence running away along the river. It was a typical cow outfit’s headquarters. The house was roomy, of pine logs, L-shaped, with a low porch in front. Rock stopped at the front of the house. He saw no one anywhere. The only sign of life about the place was that wisp of blue, a wavering pennant in the still air.

He hesitated, sitting in his saddle. There was life here. Why didn’t it show itself? Range hospitality was more than a courtesy to friends and neighbors. Even outlaws in a hidden camp would share food and blankets with a passing stranger. The logical accepted thing for any man faring across the plains was to make himself free wherever nightfall or mealtime overtook him. He was expected to put his horses in the stable and make himself at home. It wasn’t altogether good form to wait for an invitation. The open-handed hospitality of the old West did have its forms, and Rock knew them.

He was a little surprised at himself, at his hesitation, this unaccountable feeling of delicacy, as if he were intruding. Why should he expect some one to rush out of that house to bid him welcome? Why did he hesitate? He asked himself that question in so many words, as he rode on to the stable.

It was a large stable, well kept, with room in it for twenty horses. Harness hung on pegs against the wall. The mangers were full of hay. The doorway was wide and high, so that Rock rode in before he dismounted. And from his seat he looked down at two horses, standing on bridle reins in their stalls, saddled, still rough with sweat. He stared at them.

The saddle of the nearest, the mane and foreshoulder, was stained with blood, not yet dried to the blackening point. It stood like the brand of Cain on the gray beast—on the yellow leather.

Was that why he had hesitated at the house? Could a man sense the unknown? Could fear or awe or the presence of tragedy impregnate the atmosphere like a sinister mist? These were uncommon questions for a cowpuncher to stand asking himself, but Rock Holloway had an uncommon sort of mind.

Still he was not merely mind. He had a body and appetites and all the natural passions man is heir to. If he had the mentality to analyze a situation, he had also a capacity for instantaneous, purposeful action. He had proved that long before he waited by the Odeon bar to halt Mark Duffy’s high-handed career. He proved it once more. He left his two horses standing where he dismounted and walked quickly toward the house. He was conscious that he merely obeyed instinct—a hunch, if you will, except that Rock distrusted hunches which had no basis in reason—because he had felt an intuition of something wrong before he laid eyes on that bloodstained saddle. He strode toward that house with the certainty that he was needed there, yet in one portion of his mind he wondered how he came by that conclusion.

A door opened out of the north wall, which was guiltless of porch. One stepped from the threshold to the earth. The door stood wide. Rock looked in. He had seen many ranch rooms like this—a stove against one wall, a set of shelves for dishes and utensils, a long table in the middle of the room.

Beside this table, her back to him, a woman sat with her face buried in her hands. A few feet beyond a little girl in green calico, no more than three or four years of age, sat looking at Rock, out of blue baby eyes, her little, round, red mouth opened in a friendly smile.

“’Lo ‘Doc,’” she piped.

The woman lifted her head, looked, sprang to her feet, and shrank back. For one instant, unbelieving terror stood in her wide gray eyes, in the part of her lips, as plain as Rock had ever seen it on any human face.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he said quickly. “I’m merely a passing stranger.”

“Ah!” Her pent breath came with an explosive release. She put her hands to her breast for a second. Her features relaxed into a somber intentness.

Wordless, she stared at Rock, her eyes sweeping him from head to foot, coming back to rest searchingly, with a look of incredulity, on his face. And Rock stared back, wondering, yet alive to the strange compelling quality that seemed to radiate from this woman like an aura, to command interest and admiration and profound respect.

She hadn’t been afraid of him. No; timidity was no attribute of that dark, imperious face. She had been shocked, startled, by something about him. Rock wondered what it could be.

Two spots of color crept slowly into her cheeks. A very striking-looking creature, Rock thought. Not beautiful; not even pretty. Proud, passionate, dominant—yes. Slender as a willow, with a cloud of dark hair. Deep-gray eyes, like pools; scarlet lips.

“’Lo, Doc,” the little girl repeated, in a childish treble. She clambered to her feet and toddled forward a step or two, waving a rag doll by one arm. “W’y don’t oo tum in?”

“Hello, baby!” Rock answered and doffed his hat. “You don’t seem to find me a fearsome object, anyway.”

“Nor do I.” The woman suddenly had found her voice—a deep, throaty sound, like water rippling gently over pebbles. “But I thought I was seeing a ghost.”

“A ghost?” Rock grinned. His interest quickened at the tone, the clean-clipped words. No semiliterate range beauty this. Education had done one thing for Rock Holloway. It had made his ear sensitive to enunciation. “I’m a pretty substantial spook, I wish to remark. Rock Holloway is my name. I hail from Texas, via the Canadian Northwest and way points. I’m poor, but honest, and my intentions are reasonably honorable, even if my performances aren’t always up to par. No, lady, I’m no ghost. I’m a stock hand in search of occupation. I stopped in here because this was the first ranch I’ve seen to-day, and it’s near sundown. But, if I make you uncomfortable, I’ll ride on.”

“No, no!” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. Come in. I’ll show you what I mean. I think you’ll understand. It may startle you, too.”

Rock stepped into the room. The baby generously offered her doll in token of amity.

“I’s hung’y,” she announced, with juvenile directness. “I wan’ my suppah. Nona just sits an’ cwies. Make her ’top, Doc.”

The girl—Rock decided she could be no more than twenty-one or two—gathered the child up and set her on a chair.

“Sit right there till I come back, honey,” she murmured. “Then you shall have your supper.”

The fair-haired, blue-eyed mite obeyed without question. The girl beckoned Rock. She walked to the other end of the room, through a doorway. Rock followed her. He found himself in a narrow hallway that bisected the house. She opened a door off that and motioned him to enter.

He found himself in a woman’s room. No man ever surrounded himself with such dainty knickknacks. It was an amazing contrast to the bare utility of the kitchen.

A man lay stretched at full length on the white counterpane that covered the bed—a dead man. One glance told Rock that. Crimson marked the pillow that held his head, and crimson speckled the yellow and blue of a hooked rug on the floor. A hand basin, with crimson-stained cloths in it, stood on a chair.

“Look at him!” the girl whispered. “Look closely at his face!”

But Rock was already looking. He needed no prompting. He stared. The amazed certainty came to him that, except for very minor differences, he might well have been looking at his own corpse.

Yet he was alive, never more so. And he had no brothers, nor indeed any kin that so resembled him. Coincidence, he reflected. Such things were. No great mystery that, of the millions of men cast in the image of their Maker, the mold for two should be strangely alike. He did not now wonder at the shock he must have given this girl, when he stood in the doorway, the image of the man dead in her room.

But Rock passed at once to a more practical consideration. The man had been shot. His bared chest showed a blue-rimmed puncture.

“Do you wonder?” the girl’s voice said in his ear. “You see the resemblance. It is uncanny. You could pass for him anywhere. My heart stood still when I saw you in the doorway.”

Rock nodded. He put his hand on the body. The flesh was still soft, not yet cold.

“He hasn’t been dead long,” he remarked.

The girl looked down at the dead man and reached one slim-fingered hand to smooth the brown hair back from his forehead with a caressing gesture. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“About half an hour,” she whispered. “It was like lightning out of the blue. We were up the river a couple of miles. He had separated from me to look at some cattle around the bend. I heard a shot—just one. I didn’t think anything of that until he came back to me, holding himself on his horse by main strength, dying in his saddle. He couldn’t talk. He never did speak again. I got him home. He died in a little while.”

“Where are the other men?” Rock asked.

“There are no other men.”

“Any neighbors?”

“Not near. There is the Maltese Cross on the river, seven miles below, and the Seventy Seven about the same distance above.”

“The Seventy Seven? Texas outfit? Pull in here last fall? Fellow name of Duffy run it?”

She nodded.

A curious conviction, based on less than nothing, arose in Rock’s mind. It couldn’t be—and still—— Absurd—of course.

“And you don’t know who shot him nor why? Well, I suppose it isn’t my business. Only he might be my twin. He isn’t, but——” Rock stopped. He had very nearly spoken what was in his mind.

“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I only suspect.”

Rock did not press for particulars.

“It hurts you,” he said kindly. “I expect you thought a lot of him. But it’s done. Now, is there anything I can do?”

“What can you do?” she cried, the first despairing note that had entered her voice. “Can you give back life? Can you——”

She checked herself in the middle of the sentence.

“Oh, I mustn’t be silly,” she said, after a moment. “It’s so useless. Only, it seems—— Ah, well.”

She turned away. Rock closed the door behind them. The baby sat on the chair by the table, waiting patiently.

“If you’ll put up your horse,” she said, “I’ll get some supper.”

“Look here,” Rock said bluntly, “I’m foot-loose for the time being. Is there anything you want done? Anybody you want notified about this? My horses are fairly fresh.”

She stood a second. “Oh, I’ve got to think,” she said. “No, not to-night. And there is no one, anyway. In the morning we may——”

She turned to the kitchen stove and lifted a lid. It had gone down to a few charred sticks. Rock took that matter off her hands. He rebuilt the fire and noted empty water pails on a bench.

“Get your water out of the river?” he asked.

“No. There’s a spring by those willows to the right.”

Rock found the spring, a small pool bubbling out of white sand, clear as crystal and cold as ice. He filled the pails and brought them back. The girl was peeling potatoes when he came in. Sliced bacon sizzled in a pan.

Rock went to the stable by the river bank, unsaddled the three horses, took off his pack, fed and watered all four. When he reached the house again supper was on the table. They ate in silence. The sun filled the valley with the fire of its last beams. Bright shafts shot dazzling through the windows, a yellow blaze that grew red and then rose pink and faded into a pearly gray. Yellow-haired Betty laid down her spoon, slid off her chair, climbed on Rock’s knee, and snuggled her round face against his shirt. In two minutes she was fast asleep.

The girl, who had been sitting with her eyes absently on her plate, smiled briefly—a phantom smile that strangely transformed her face.

She was young to have a kid like that, Rock thought. And it was tough losing a man by the gun route. Was it going to be his lot to step into the breach? If—if—— Well, he had to get to the bottom of this, somehow. Here was a fellow who looked exactly like him, same build, same age, same features, shot down in a river bottom. It smelled of ambush. The Seventy Seven was less than an hour’s ride to the west. And Elmer Duffy was running the Seventy Seven. For the moment the Maltese Cross and Buck Walters and the mission he had undertaken for Uncle Bill Sayre had no place in Rock’s mind.

The girl took the baby out of his arms and carried her off into a bedroom. Rock put away these reflections and gathered the dishes off the table and began to wash them.

“I might as well earn my night’s lodging,” he murmured whimsically, probably to hide the fact that he was moved by a desire to make his sympathy take some practical form.

The girl reappeared, put the food away in a pantry, took a cloth, and wiped the dishes as Rock washed. She made no comment. She moved quickly, and efficiently. Her hands were deft. But her mind was elsewhere. She was scarcely conscious of him, Rock perceived. And when the supper things were finished, he went outside and sat down on a chopping block to smoke a cigarette in the twilight.

Dusk gathered. The pearl-gray mist of the evening sky merged into the lucent shroud of a plains night. Crickets chirped in the grass. The Marias whispered its sibilant song in a stony bed. A lamp glowed through a window in the house. Rock saw the girl sitting by the table again, as when he first saw her, elbows on the wood, face buried in her palms.

“She aches inside,” he thought. “Poor devil! She needs folks or friends or something, right now.”

But he couldn’t be one or the other, he knew. He was too sensible to blunder with well-meant, useless words. She had forgotten he was there. So he walked softly down to the stable, drew his blankets in the canvas tarpaulin off to one side, under the stars, and turned in.

So the Seventy Seven did locate on the Marias instead of the Judith? Uncle Bill was right. This might be no healthier a neighborhood for him than it had proved for his double.

“Well, you got to be in this neighborhood for a spell, whether it’s dangerous or not, you darned fool,” Rock apostrophized himself. “This is the Maltese range, and you’ve promised to look over the Cross.”

Thus Rock, with the blankets drawn up to his chin and his gaze meditatively on the three stars that make Orion’s belt.

His last drowsily conscious act was to smile at the obliquity of his thought. In the morning he would do whatever that dark-haired, gray-eyed young woman requested. He had ridden slap into this thing. Whatever it was, he would see it through. Yet he couldn’t imagine her requiring anything of him except that he would perhaps ride into Fort Benton and notify whatever authorities functioned there that a man had been shot on the Marias. And that didn’t call for any great resolution on his part.

Just the same, he desired greatly to know who this man was who looked so much like him, who shot him, and why?

CHAPTER V—WRAPPED IN CANVAS

Birds twittering in the poplars and willows by the river wakened Rock when the rose-pink dawn was turning to gold. He lay watching, listening. He could hear the ripple of running water. He could see the bleached hills rising abrupt from the gray-green valley floor. The cool air was like balm on his face. Beyond all doubt this was a pleasant country. If a man could settle on one of these river bottoms, with a couple of hundred cows, in ten years—— But Rock was a long way from peering anxious-eyed into the future.