Shoe-Bar Stratton Part 16

"You mean you're a regular cow-boy?" the girl asked in surprise. "Why, you never told me that aboard ship?"

A sudden chill swept over Stratton, and for a moment he was stricken speechless. Aboard ship! Was it possible that this girl had been part of that uncanny, vanished year, the very thought of which troubled and oppressed him. His glance desperately evaded her charming, questioning eyes and rested suddenly with a curious cool sense of relief on the face of Mary Thorne, who had come up unperceived from behind.

But as their eyes met Buck was conscious of an odd veiled expression in their clear depths which vaguely troubled him. It vanished quickly as Miss Thorne moved quickly forward to embrace her friend.

"Stella!" she cried. "I'm so awfully glad to see you."

There were kisses and renewed embracings; the young man was greeted more decorously but with almost equal warmth, and then suddenly Miss Thorne turned to Stratton, who stood back a little, struggling between a longing to escape and an equally strong desire to find out a little more about this attractive but startling reminder of his unknown past.

"I had no idea you knew Miss Manning," she said, with the faintest hint of stiffness in her manner.

Buck swallowed hard but was saved from further embarra.s.sment by the girl.

"Oh, yes!" she said brightly. "We came home on the same ship. Mr. Green had been wounded, you know, and was under my care. We got to be--great friends."

Was there a touch of meaning in the last two words? Stratton preferred to lay it to his imagination, and was glad of the diversion caused by the introduction of the young man, who proved to be Miss Manning's brother.

Buck was not at all impressed by the fellow's handsome face, athletic figure, and immaculate clothes. The clothes especially seemed ridiculously out of place for even a visitor on a ranch, and he had always detested those d.i.n.ky half-shaved mustaches.

Meanwhile the trunks had been carried in and the team led away, and Pedro was peevishly complaining from the kitchen door that dinner was getting cold. Buck learned that the visitors were from Chicago, where they had been close friends of the Thorne family for years, and then he managed to break away and join the fellows in the kitchen.

During the meal there was a lot of more or less quiet joking on the subject of Stratton's acquaintance with the lady, which he managed to parry rather cleverly. As a matter of fact the acute horror he felt at the very thought of the truth about himself getting out, quickened his wits and kept him constantly on his guard. He kept his temper and his head, explaining calmly that Miss Manning had been one of the nurses detailed to look after the batch of wounded men of whom he had been one. Naturally he had seen considerable of her during the long and tedious voyage, but there were one or two others he liked equally well.

His careless manner seemed to convince the men that there was no particular amus.e.m.e.nt to be extracted from the situation, and to Buck's relief they pa.s.sed on to a general discussion of strangers on a ranch, the bother they were, and the extra amount of work they made.

"Always wantin' to ride around with yuh an' see what's goin' on," declared Butch Siegrist sourly. "If they're wimmin, yuh can't even give a cuss without lookin' first to see if they're near enough to hear."

Stratton made a mental resolution that if anything of that sort came up, he would do his best to duck the job of playing cicerone to Miss Stella Manning, attractive as she was. So far his bluff seemed to have worked, but with a mind so entirely blank of the slightest detail of their acquaintance, he knew that at any moment the most casual remark might serve to rouse her suspicion.

Fortunately, his desire to remain in the background was abetted by Tex Lynch. Whether or not the foreman wanted to keep him away from the ranch-owner's friends as well as from Miss Thorne herself, Buck could not quite determine. But while the fence-repairing progressed, Stratton was never by any chance detailed to other duties which might keep him in the neighborhood of the ranch-house, and on the one occasion when Miss Thorne and her guests rode out to where the men were working, Lynch saw to it that there was no opportunity for anything like private conversation between them and the object of his solicitude.

Buck watched his manoeuvering with secret amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Wouldn't he be wild if he knew he was playing right into my hands?" he thought.

His face darkened as he glanced thoughtfully at the departing figure of Miss Manning. She had greeted him warmly and betrayed a very evident inclination to linger in his vicinity. There had been a slight touch of pique in her treatment of Lynch, who hung around so persistently.

"I wish to thunder I had an idea of how much she knows," he muttered. "Did I act like a brainless idiot when I was--was that way, or not?"

He had asked the same question of the hospital surgeon and got an unsatisfactory answer. It all depended, the doctor told him non-committally. He might easily have shown evidences of lost memory; on the other hand, it was quite possible, especially with chance acquaintances, that his manner had been entirely normal.

There was nothing to be gained, however, by racking his brain for something that wasn't there, and Buck soon gave up the attempt. He could only trust to luck and his own inventiveness, and hope that Lynch's delightfully unconscious easing of the situation would continue.

The work was finished toward noon on the third day after the arrival of the Mannings, and all the connections hooked up. There remained nothing to do but test the line, and Tex, after making sure everything was in order, glanced over his men, who lounged in front of the Las Vegas shack.

"Yuh may as well stay down at this end," he remarked, looking at Buck, "while the rest of us go back. Stick around where yuh can hear the bell, an' if it don't ring in, say, an hour, try to get the house yourself. If that don't work, come along in an' report. I reckon everything's all right, though."

Stratton was conscious of a sudden sense of alertness. He had grown so used to suspecting and a.n.a.lyzing everything the foreman said or did that for a moment he forgot the precautions he had taken and wondered whether Lynch was up to some new crooked work. Then he remembered and relaxed mentally. Considering the consequences, Tex would hardly dare try any fresh violence against him, especially quite so soon. Besides, in broad daylight and in this open country, Buck couldn't imagine any form of danger he wouldn't be able to meet successfully alone.

So he acquiesced indifferently, and from the open doorway of the hut watched the others mount and ride away. There were only four of them, for Kreeger and Butch Siegrist had been dispatched early that morning to ride fence on the other side of the ranch-house. When they were well on their way, Buck untied his lunch from the saddle and went into the shack to eat it.

In spite of the feeling that he had nothing to fear, he took a position which gave him a good outlook from both door and window, and saw that his gun was loose in the holster. After he had eaten, he went down and got a drink from the creek. He had not been back in the shack a great while before the telephone bell jangled, and taking down the receiver he heard Lynch's voice at the other end.

Owing to the rather crude nature of the contrivance there was a good deal of buzzing on the line. But this was to be expected, and when Tex had talked a few minutes and decided that the system was working as well as could be hoped, he told Stratton to come in to the ranch, and hung up.

Buck had not ridden more than a quarter of a mile across the prairie, when all at once he pulled his horse to a standstill. The thought had suddenly come to him that this was the chance he had wanted so long to take a look at that mysterious stretch of desert known as the north pasture. He would be delayed, of course, but explanations were easy and that did not disturb him. It was too good an opportunity to miss, and without delay he turned his horse and spurred forward.

An instinct of caution made him keep as close as possible to the rough, broken country that edged the western extremity of the ranch, where he would run less chance of being seen than on the flat, open plain. He pushed his horse as much as was wise, and presently observed with satisfaction--though it was still a good way off--the line of fence that marked the northern boundary of middle pasture.

A few hundred yards ahead lay a shallow draw, and beyond it a weather-worn ridge thrust its blunt nose out into the plain considerably further than any Buck had yet pa.s.sed. He turned the horse out, intending to ride around it, but a couple of minutes later jerked him to a standstill and sat motionless in the saddle, eyes narrowing with a sudden, keen surprise.

He had reached a point where, for the first time, he could make out, over the obstruction ahead, the extreme northwest corner of the pasture. Almost at the spot where the two lines of fence made a right angle were two hors.e.m.e.n in the typical cow-man attire. At first they stood close together, but as Stratton stared intently, rising a little in his stirrups to get a clearer view through the scanty fringe of vegetation that topped the ridge, one of them rode forward and, dismounting, began to manipulate the fence wires with quick, jerky movements of his hands.

CHAPTER XV

"BLACKLEG"

More than once during the next ten minutes Buck cursed himself inwardly for not having brought along the small but powerful pair of field-gla.s.ses that were tucked away in his bag. He had picked them up at the Divisional Headquarters only a week or two before the Belleau Woods business, and how they had stuck to him until his arrival in America remained one of the minor mysteries of that vanished year. He would have given anything for them now, for though he could make out fairly well the movements of the two men, he was too far away to distinguish their faces.

Watching closely, he saw that the first fellow was taking down a short section of the fence, either by cutting or by pulling out the staples.

When this lay flat he remounted and, joining his companion, the two proceeded to drive through the gap nothing more significant than a solitary steer.

It was a yearling, Buck could easily see even at that distance, and he almost laughed aloud at the sudden let-down of suspense. By this time a little individual trick of carriage made him suspect that the foremost puncher was Butch Siegrist, and when the men came into clearer view, he recognized scarcely without question the big sorrel with white tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs on which Kreeger had ridden off that morning. The two men had found a Shoe-Bar stray; that was all. And yet, on second thought, how did they come to be here when they were supposed to be working at the very opposite extremity of the ranch?

It was this query which made Stratton refrain from showing himself. With considerable annoyance, for time was pa.s.sing, he waited where he was until the two men had gone back through the gap in the fence and restored the wires. He watched them turn northward and ride rapidly across the sandy waste until at length their diminishing figures disappeared into the distance. Even then it was ten or fifteen minutes before he emerged from his seclusion, and when he finally did he headed straight for the young steer, who had been the cause of so much exertion on the part of the two men who ordinarily shirked work whenever they could.

Under the lash of a rope, the animal had lumbered across the pasture for several hundred yards, where he paused languidly to crunch some bunch-gra.s.s. There was an air of la.s.situde and weakness about the creature which made Buck, as he approached, eye it with anxious intentness. A dozen feet or so away he jerked his horse to a standstill and caught his breath with an odd whistling sound.

"Great G.o.dfrey!" he breathed.

Bending slightly forward in the saddle, he stared at the creature's badly-swollen off hind leg, but there was no need whatever for a prolonged inspection. Having been through one blackleg epidemic back in Texas, he knew the signs only too well.

"That's it, sure enough," he muttered, straightening up.

His gaze swept across the prairie to where, half a mile away, a bunch of Shoe-Bar cattle grazed peacefully. If this sick beast should get amongst them, the yearlings at least, to whom the disease is fatal, would be dying like flies in twenty-four hours. Buck glanced back at the steer again, and as he noted the T-T brand, his face hardened and he began taking down his rope.

"The h.e.l.lions!" he grated, an angry flush darkening his tan. "They ought to be strung up."

The animal started to move away, and Buck lost no time in roping him. Then he turned his horse and urged him toward the fence, dragging the reluctant brute behind. Fortunately he had his pliers in the saddle-pocket, and, taking down the wires, he forced the creature through and headed for a deep gully the mouth of which lay a few hundred yards to the left.

Penetrating into this as far as he was able, he took out his Colt and deliberately shot the steer through the head. And if Kreeger or Siegrist had been present at that moment, he was furious enough to treat either of them in the same way without a particle of compunction.

"Hanging would be too good for them, the dirty beasts!" he grated.

The thing had been so fiendishly cold-blooded and calculating that it made his blood boil, for it was perfectly evident now to Buck that he had thwarted a deliberate plot to introduce the blackleg scourge among the Shoe-Bar cattle. Instead of riding fence, the two punchers must have made their roundabout way immediately to the stricken T-T ranch, secured in some manner an infected yearling and brought it back through the twisting mountain trail Bud had spoken of a few days before.

Lynch's was the directing spirit, of course; for none of the others would dare act save under his orders. But what was his object? What could he possibly hope to gain by such a thing? Buck could understand a man allowing rustlers to loot a ranch, if the same individual were in with them secretly and shared the plunder. But there was no profit in this for anyone--only an infinite amount of trouble and worry and extra work for them all, to say nothing of great financial loss to--Mary Thorne.