The Settling of the Sage Part 13

She was half asleep when a voice some distance from the teepee roused her by speaking the name of Bangs.

"I've a pretty elastic conscience myself," the voice went on. "I'm not above lifting a few calves for the brand I'm riding for or any little thing like that, but this deal sort of gorges up in me. They'll never cinch it on to any man--they never do. Old Rile is brooding over it.

He'll likely run amuck. One way or another he'll try to break even for Bangs."

Billie recognized the voice as Moore's and knew that one of her men, at least, had not forgotten Bangs. It was the first time an intimation that the affair was other than an accident had reached her ears.

In the evening, after resting, the men once more gathered round a fire for an hour's play. They had evidently blotted out the memory of a friend who had raised his voice with theirs on the last such event, for they sang mostly the rollicking airs with even more than the usual amount of chaff between songs. But there was one old favorite that they did not sing. At last Waddles swung into the tune of it and as they buried the poor cowboy far out on the lone prair-ee she noted the difference at once, and more clearly than ever before she divined the reason why cowhands were apparently so devoid of sentiment, refusing to be serious on any topic, pa.s.sing off those things nearest to their hearts with a callous jest. It was only that there were so many rough spots in the hard life they led that they avoided dwelling too seriously on matters that could not be rectified lest they become gloomy and morose. There were warm hearts under the indifferent exteriors. For now the voices were soft and hushed and she knew that every man was thinking of the lonely mound of rocks that marked the last resting place of Bangs.

VII

The calf round-up was nearing the end. Two weeks would see the finish and supply the final tally. The figures had already progressed to the point where they gave evidence of another shrinkage from the count of the previous year; and during one of the weekly half-day periods of rest three members of the Three Bar personnel found their minds occupied with a problem which excluded all thoughts of sleep. The problem in each case was the same but each one viewed it from the individual standpoint of his own particular knowledge of the subject.

Harris sat on a rock and reviewed the plans he had formulated for the salvation of the Three Bar brand, realizing the weak spots and mapping out some special line of defense that might serve to strengthen them.

In the seclusion of the wagon Waddles was carefully rereading a much-thumbed doc.u.ment for perhaps the hundredth time. A man had come in at daylight with the mail from Brill's and Billie Warren was within her teepee poring over her share of it. The men had finished theirs and were sleeping.

The girl read first the four letters in the same handwriting, one to mark each week she had been on the round-up. The fifth was from Judge Colton, her father's old friend, to whose hands all his affairs had been entrusted. After scanning this she read again the other four.

Ever since her last visit to the Coltons, just prior to her father's death, the arrival of these letters had been as regular as the recurrence of Sunday, one for each week, and in moments of despondency over the affairs of the Three Bar she drew strength from them. Very soon now, in the course of a few months at the outside, she and the writer would meet away from his native environment and in the midst of her own. Always before this had been reversed and her a.s.sociation with Carlos Deane had held a background of his own setting,--a setting in startling contrast to her log house, nestling in a desert of sage. The Deane house was a wonderful old-fashioned mansion set in a grove of century-old elms and oaks. She knew his life and now he would see her in her natural surroundings.

Perhaps it was her very difference from other girls that had first interested Carlos Deane, and the fact that he stood out from others, even among his own intimates, that had drawn her interest to him.

Deane had been an athlete of renown and a popular idol at school and his energy had been brought to bear in business as successfully as in play. In a hazy sort of way she felt that some day she would listen to the plea that, in some fashion or other, was woven into every letter; but not till the Three Bar was booming and no longer required her supervision. Everything else in the world was secondary to her love for her father's brand and the anxiety of the past two years of its decline eclipsed all other issues.

Her reflections were interrupted by Harris's voice just outside her teepee.

"Asleep, Billie?" he asked softly.

"No," she said. "What is it?"

"I've thrown your saddle on Papoose," he said. "Let's have a look around."

She a.s.sented and they rode off up the left-hand slope of the valley. A mile or so from the wagon Harris dismounted on a high point.

"Let's have a medicine chat," he offered. "I've got considerable on my mind."

She leaned against a rock and he sat cross-legged on the ground, facing her and twisting a cigarette as an aid to thought. Her head was tilted back against the rock, her eyes half-closed.

"They say folks get disappointed in love and go right on living," he observed. "I wonder now. I've met quite a scattering of girls and maybe there were a dozen or so out of the lot that sized up a shade better than the rest. Looking back from where I sit it occurs to me that it was a right colorless a.s.sortment, after all. I've heard that men run mostly to form and at one time or another let it out to some little lady that there's no other in the world. That's my own state right about now. Are you always going to keep on disliking me?"

"I don't dislike you," she said. She was still convinced of his father's trickery toward her own; but Cal Harris's quiet efficiency and his devotion to Three Bar interests had convinced her, against her will, that he had taken no part in it. "But if you brought me out here to go into that I'm going back."

"I didn't," he denied. "But I drifted into it sort of by accident. No matter what topic I happen to be conversing on I'm always thinking how much I'd rather be telling you about that. Whenever I make some simple little a.s.sertion about things in general, what I'm really thinking is something like this, 'Billie, right this minute I'm loving you more than I did two minutes back.' You might keep that in mind."

The girl did not answer but sat looking off across the jumbled foothills, rock-studded and gray with sage. Some distance from them a bare shale-slide extended for half a mile along a sidehill, barren and devoid of all vegetation. Here and there, far off across the country, vivid patches on the slopes indicated thickets of willows and birch growing below spring seeps. A few scattered cedars sprouted from the rocky ledges of the more broken country and a clump of gnarled, wind-twisted cottonwoods marked a distant water hole. A whitish glare was reflected from an alkali flat in the bottom of a shallow basin.

Twenty miles to the north the first rims of the hills rose out of the low country and through the breaks in them she could see long sloping valleys of lodgepole, the dark green relieved by the pale silvery sheen of aspen clumps; dense spruce jungles of the more precipitous slopes topped by rugged peaks covered with perpetual snow; certainly no soft or homelike scene. One must be filled with a vast love of it--or die of it--for without that love of the open life would be a deadly thing to bear in a desert of sage.

"I've always loved it," she said. "Whenever I've been away there always came a time when I was restless to get back. I've always felt that it would kill me to leave with the idea that I'd never see the Three Bar range again. But now the country has changed. At times it seems as if it would be a vast relief to me to leave it all behind."

"It's the people that have changed," he said. "It's only the history of all frontiers. The first settlers win it for themselves. Then clashing elements creep in; sheep and cattle wars; stockmen and squatter quarrels; later the weeding out of the wild bunch--parasites like Harper's crew: still later there'll be squabbles between the nesters themselves; jumping claims and rowing over water rights. Then it will all iron out, the country will settle up according to its topography and give its best to the human race. You may grow to think you hate the hills for what happens to you individually during the change--but it's in your blood to love them and that love will always return."

"It may return if the Three Bar weathers the change," she said.

"We'll weather it," he a.s.serted cheerfully. "Shall I tell you how?"

"Yes. Tell me," she said. "I'd like to know. The Three Bar is going to show another loss this year."

"And likely the next," he a.s.sented. "Maybe still another. But that will be about all."

"That will surely be all," she said. "Two more years of decrease and there won't be enough left of the Three Bar to divide."

"Listen," he said, tapping his knee with a forefinger to emphasize his point. "Cal Warren always wanted to put the Three Bar flats under cultivation. He's probably told you that a hundred times."

"A thousand," she amplified. "But the sentiment of the country was against it the same as it is to-day."

"But it's not," he contradicted.

"Then why all those signs?" she asked. "They run every squatter out now just as they always did."

"Who?" he asked. "Do you have a hand in it?"

"No," she said. "The others do."

"Probably they think the same of you," he pointed out. "There's just one man in this country that profits by keeping that no-squatter sentiment alive."

"You must hate Slade," she observed.

"I haven't any feeling toward him one way or the other," he a.s.serted.

"He's an obstacle, that's all. That's the way he would feel about me if I stood in his way. There's at least one Slade in every locality and in every line of business throughout the world. Ambition for power. He wants the whole countryside. If he'd win out on that he'd want the next--and finally he'd want the world."

"He has this particular part of the world under his thumb," she said.

"But he won't have for long," he insisted. "He's topheavy and ripe for a fall. Those signs are all that saves him from going to pieces like an over-inflated balloon. He's the only man we'll have to fight."

"What convinces you of that?" she asked.

"See here," he urged, the emphasizing forefinger tapping again. "This will always be range country. It will only support a certain number of cows. If the Three Bar had a section in hay to winter-feed your stuff you could run double what you do now on the same range. It's the same with every other small concern. There's only a few spots suitable for home-ranch sites and every one of those has a brand running out of it now--excepting those sites down in Slade's range. If all those outfits put in hay it wouldn't cut up the range any more than it is now--except down Slade's way. Every outfit in the country could run twice as many head as they do now--except Slade. He couldn't."

"Why?" she asked. "Why wouldn't that apply to him as well?"

"Because he's strung out over a hundred miles. The minute farming starts there'll be squatters filing on every quarter where they can get water to put it in crop. There's twenty places Slade would have to cover by filings to hold his range where the others would only have to file on one to control the amount of range they're using now."

She nodded as she caught this point.

"Folks have fallen into a set habit of mind," he explained. "You think because every squatter is burned out that every outfit but the Three Bar is against sticking a plow in the ground. The rest probably feel the same way--know they haven't a hand in it but figure that you have.

As a matter of fact, it's Slade alone. That's how I got a line on Morrow the first night I landed. I said something about putting in hay and he came right to the front and made a red-hot anti-squatter talk.

I knew right off he was Slade's man."

"How could you be sure of that?" she asked. "I've heard men with every outfit express the same views."