The Settling of the Sage Part 1

The Settling of the Sage.

by Hal G. Evarts.

I

A rider jogged northward along the road on a big pinto horse, a led buckskin, packed, trailing a half-length behind. The horseman traveled with the regulation outfit of the roaming range dweller--saddle, bed roll and canvas war bag containing personal treasures and extra articles of attire--but this was supplemented by two panniers of food and cooking equipment and a one-man teepee that was lashed on top in lieu of canvas pack cover. A ranch road branched off to the left and the man pulled up his horse to view a sign that stood at the forks.

"Squatter, don't let the sun go down on you," he read. "That's the third one of those reminders, Calico," he told the horse. "The wording a little different but the sentiment all the same."

Fifty yards off the trail the charred and blackened fragments of a wagon showed in sharp contrast to the bleached white bones of two horses.

"They downed his team and torched his worldly goods," the rider said.

"All his hopes gone up in smoke."

He turned in his saddle and looked off across the unending expanse of sage. Coldriver--probably so named from the fact that the three wells in the town const.i.tuted the only source of water within an hour's ride--lay thirty miles to the south, a cl.u.s.ter of some forty buildings nestling on a wind-swept flat. Seventy miles beyond it, and with but two more such centers of civilization between, the railroad stretched across the rolling desolation. North of him the hills lifted above the sage, angling with the directions so that four miles along the Three Bar road that branched off to the left would bring him to their foot and a like distance along the main fork saw its termination at Brill's store, situated in a dent in the base of the hills, the end of the Coldriver Trail.

The man took one more look at the evidence left behind to prove that the sign was no empty threat before heading the paint-horse along the left-hand fork. The crisp cool of early spring was blown down from the slope of the hills. Old drifts, their tops gray-streaked with dust, lay banked in the gulches and on sheltered east slopes, but the new gra.s.s had claimed the range to the very foot of the drifts, the green of it intensified in patches watered by the trickle that seeped from the downhill extremities of the snow banks. He noted that the range cows along his route were poor and lean, their hip bones showing lumpily through sagging skin, giving them the appearance of milkers rather than of beef stock. The preceding summer had been hot and dry, browning the range six weeks before its time, and the stock had gone into the winter in poor shape. Heavy snowfalls had completed the havoc and ten per cent. of the range stock had been winter-killed. Those that had pulled through were slow in putting on weight and recovering their strength.

A big red steer stood broadside to him, the Three Bar brand looming on its side, and the man once more pulled up his horse and lost himself in retrospection as he gazed at the brand.

"The old Three Bar, Calico," he remarked to the horse. "The old home brand. It's been many a moon since last I laid an eye on a Three Bar cow."

The man was gazing directly at the steer but he no longer saw it.

Instead he was picturing the old-time scenes that the sight of the brand recalled. Step by step he visioned the long trail of the Three Bar cows from Dodge City to the Platte, from the Platte to the rolling sage-clad hills round old Fort Laramie and from Laramie to the present range. Many times he had heard the tale, and though most of the scenes had been enacted before his birth, they were impressed so firmly upon his mind by repet.i.tion that it seemed as if he himself had been a part of them.

His mind pictured two boys of somewhere round eighteen years of age setting forth from the little home town of Kansas City, nestling at the confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw. A year later Cal Warren was whacking bulls on the Santa Fe Trail while the other, William Harris, was holding the reins over four plunging horses as he tooled a lumbering Concord stage over the trail from Omaha to the little camp called Denver.

It was five years before their trails crossed again. Cal Warren was the first of the two to wed, and he had established a post along the trail, a rambling structure of 'dobe, poles and sod, and there conducted the business of "Two for One," a calling impossible and unknown in any other than that day and place.

The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour of the day. The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod oxen, and when footsore they could not go on. One sound bull for two with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade. These crippled ones were soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for one.

Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard so much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds.

The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his boyhood pal.

It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all future enterprise, but this was not to be. Warren had seen the bottom drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion that any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the extreme and he insisted that the solution of all their financial problems rested upon owning land, not cows. Harris could not be induced to farm the soil while steers were selling round eight dollars a head.

Warren squatted on a quarter of land. Harris bought a few head of she-stock and grazed his cows north and west across the Kansas line into the edge of the great unknown that was styled Nebraska and Northwest District. At first his range was limitless, but in a few short years he could stand on the roof of his sod hut and see the white points of light which were squatters' wagons dotting the range to the far horizon in any direction he chose to look. The first of these to invade his range had been Cal Warren, moving on before the swarm of settlers flocking into the locality of his first choice in such alarming numbers that he feared an unhealthy congestion of humanity in the near future. The debate of farming versus cows was resumed between the two, but each held doggedly to his own particular views and the longed-for partnership was again postponed.

Harris moved once more--and then again--and it was something over two decades after his departure from Dodge with the Three Bar cows that he made one final shift, faring on in search of that land where nesters were unknown. He made a dry march that cost him a fourth of his cows, skirted the Colorado Desert and made his stand under the first rim of the hills. Those others who came to share this range were men whose views were identical with his own, whose watchword was: "Our cows shall run free on a thousand hills." They sought for a spot where the range was untouched by the plow and the water holes unfenced. They had moved, then moved again, driven on before the invasion of the settlers.

These men banded together and swore that here conditions should be reversed, that it was the squatter who should move, and on this principle they grimly rested.

Cal Warren had been the vanguard of each new rush of settlers that had pushed Bill Harris on to another range, and the cowman had come to see the hand of fate in this persistence. The nesters streamed westward on all the trails, filing their rights on the fertile valleys and pushing those who would be cattle barons undisputed back into the more arid regions. When the Warren family found him out again and halted their white-topped wagon before his door, Bill Harris gave it up.

"I've come up to see about getting that partnership fixed up, Bill,"

Warren greeted. "You know--the one we talked over in Dodge a while ago, about our going in together when either of us changed his mind.

Well, I've changed mine. I've come to see that running cows is a good game, Bill, so let's fix it up. I've changed my mind."

"That was twenty years ago, Cal," Harris said. "But it still holds good--only I've changed my mind too. You was dead right from the first. Squatters will come to roost on every foot of ground and there'll come a day when I'll have to turn squatter myself--so I might as well start now. The way to get used to crowds, Cal, is to go where the crowds are at. I'm headed back for Kansas and you better come along. We'll get that partnership fixed up."

A single child had come to bless each union in the parents' late middle age. The Harris heir, a boy of eight, had been named Calvin in honor of his father's friend. Cal Warren had as nearly returned the compliment as circ.u.mstances would permit, and his three-year-old daughter bore the name of Williamette Ann for both father and mother of the boy who was his namesake, and Warren styled her Billie for short.

Each man was as stubbornly set in his new views as he had been in the old. The Harrises came into possession of the Warrens' prairie schooner and drove off to the east. The Warrens took over the Three Bar brand and the little Williamette Ann slept in the tiny bunk built for the son of the Harris household.

For a s.p.a.ce of minutes these old pictures occupied the mind of the man on the pinto horse. The led buckskin moved fretfully and tugged on the lead rope, rousing the man from his abstraction. Distant strings of prairie schooners and ox-bows faded from his mind's eye and he way once more conscious of the red steer with the Three Bar brand that had stirred up the train of reflections. He turned for another glimpse of the distant sign as he headed the paint-horse along the road.

"All that was quite a spell back, Calico," he said. "Old Bill Harris planted the first one of those signs, and it served a good purpose then. It's a sign that stands for lack of progress to-day. Times change, and it's been eighteen years or so since old Bill Harris left."

The road traversed the bench, angled down a side hill to a valley somewhat more than a mile across. Calico p.r.i.c.ked his ears sharply toward the Three Bar buildings that stood at the upper end of it.

Curious eyes peered from the bunk house as he neared it, for the paint-horse and the buckskin were not without fame even if the man himself were a stranger to them all. For the better part of a year the two high-colored horses had been seen on the range,--south to the railroad, west to the Idaho line. The man had kept to himself and when seen by approaching riders he had always been angling on a course that would miss their own. Those who had, out of curiosity, deliberately ridden out to intercept him reported that he seemed a decent sort of citizen, willing to converse on any known topics except those which concerned himself.

He dropped from the saddle before the bunk house and as he stood in the door he noted half a dozen men lounging on the bunks. This indolence apprised him of the fact that they were extra men signed on for the summer season and that their pay had not yet started, for the cowhand, when on the pay roll, works sixteen hours daily and when he rests or frolics it is, except in rare instances, on his own time and at his own expense.

A tall, lean individual, who sat cross-legged on a bunk, engaged in mending a spur strap, was the first to answer his inquiry for the foreman.

"Billie Warren is the big he-c.o.o.n of the Three Bar," he informed.

"You'll likely find the boss at the blacksmith shop." The lanky one grinned as the stranger turned back through the litter of log outbuildings, guided by the hissing squeak of bellows and the clang of a sledge on hot iron. Several men pressed close to the windows in antic.i.p.ation of viewing the newcomer's surprise at greeting the Three Bar boss. But the man did not seem surprised when a young girl emerged from the open door of the shop as he neared it.

She was clad in a gray flannel skirt and black Angora chaps. The heavy brown hair was concealed beneath the broad hat that was pulled low over her eyes after the fashion of those who live much in the open. The man removed his hat and stood before her.

"Miss Warren?" he inquired. The girl nodded and waited for him to state his purpose.

"What are the chances of my riding for the Three Bar?" he asked.

"We're full-handed," said the girl. "I'm sorry."

"You'll be breaking out the remuda right soon now," he suggested. "I'm real handy round a breaking corral."

"They're all handy at that," she said. Then she noted the two horses before the bunk house and frowned. Her eyes searched the stranger's face and found no fault with it; she liked his level gaze. But she wondered what manner of man this was who had so aimlessly wandered alone for a year and avoided all other men.

"Since you've finally decided to work, how does it happen that you choose the Three Bar?" she asked, then flushed under his eyes as she remembered that so many men had wished to ride for her brand more than for another, their reasons in each case the same.

"Because the Three Bar needs a man that has prowled this country and gathered a few points about what's going on," he returned.

"And that information is for sale to any brand that hires you!" said the girl. "Is that what you mean?"

"If it was, there would be nothing wrong with a man's schooling himself to know all points of his job before he asked for it," he said. "But it happens that wasn't exactly my reason."

A shade of weariness pa.s.sed over her face. During the two years that her father had been confined to the house after being caved in by a horse and in the one year that had elapsed since his death the six thousand cows that had worn the Three Bar brand on the range had decreased by almost half under her management.

"I'll put you on," she said. "But you'll probably be insulted at what I have to offer. The men start out after the horses to-morrow. I want a man to stay here and do tinkering jobs round the place till they get back."

"That'll suit me as well as any," he accepted promptly. "I'm a great little hand at tinkering round."

The clang of the sledge had ceased and a huge, fat man loomed in the door of the shop and mopped his dripping face with a bandanna.

"I'm glad you've come," he a.s.sured the new-comer. "A man that's not above doing a little fixing up! A cowhand is the most overworked and underpaid saphead that ever lost three nights' sleep hand running and worked seventy-two hours on end; sleep in the rain or not at all--to hold a job at forty per for six months in the year. The other six he's throwed loose like a range horse to rustle or starve. Hardest work in the world--but he don't know it, or money wouldn't hire him to lift his hand. He thinks it's play. Not one out of ten but what prides himself that he can't be browbeat into doing a tap of work. Ask him to cut a stick of firewood and he'll arch his back and laugh at you scornful like. Don't that beat h.e.l.l?"