The Settling of the Sage Part 26

"He's broke--and reformed," he said. "Absolutely."

The sheriff drew Carson aside.

"If you're wanting a job I'll stake you to an outfit and feed you through till spring. Forty a month from then on. I'll need a parcel of deputies, likely, after that."

"You've got one," Carson stated. "I'll sign now."

The storekeeper, the sheriff and the new deputy stood at one end of the bar.

"It's queer that folks don't see the real object of this rumor," Brill observed.

"Its object is to clean out the hardest citizens in the country,"

Carson said. "That's why they're named. Why else?"

"The object is to clean up the rest of the country first," Brill said.

Carson grunted his disbelief.

"If Harris only wanted to wipe out those on the list he wouldn't go to all this fuss," Brill explained. "He'd just put on an extra bunch of hands and raid the Breaks himself. Swear he caught them running off a bunch of Three Bar cows. Simpler and considerable less expense."

"Then what's the object of this bounty?" Carson insisted.

"That's aimed at the doubtful folks," Brill stated. "Folks that was on the fence--like you. This death list makes them spooky and they turn into good little citizens in one round of the clock. It leaves the worst ones outside without a friend. Every one lined up solid behind the law. Public sentiment will start running strong against those outside. Then it'll be easy for the sheriff and a bunch of deputies--like you--to clean the country up from end to end, with the whole community backing your play."

Carson considered this for some time.

"Well, I can furnish the deputies," he said at last. "Boys that are strong for law and order from first to last."

"I've got about all I need," the sheriff said. "A dozen or so. Mostly old friends of yours. I've picked 'em up on and off in the last two weeks. They're strong for upholding the last letter of the law--just like you said."

"A dozen?" Carson asked. "How'll you raise the money to pay that many at once?"

"I'm sort of expecting maybe the Three Bar will make up the deficit,"

Alden said. "It's cheaper than paying rewards. That's another reason I don't think Cal had a hand in this blacklist report."

The storekeeper grinned.

"Surely not. Surely not. I'd never suspect him of that," he said.

"But all the same it's working just as well as if he really had."

XIII

The first warm days of spring had drawn the frost from the ground.

Billie rode beside Harris down the lane to the lower field. A tiny cabin stood completed on every filing. Two men were digging post holes across the valley below the edge of the last fall's plowing and the mule teams were steadily breaking out another strip.

"Almost a year," she said, referring to the commencement of the new work.

"Just a year to-day," Harris corrected, and he was thinking of the day he had first met the Three Bar girl. "This is our anniversary, sort of."

She nodded as she caught his meaning.

"The anniversary of our partnership," she said. "You're good on dates.

We've pulled together pretty well, considering our start."

"It was a rocky trail for the first few days," he confessed. "But all the time I was hoping it would get smoothed out."

"You told me there were millions of miles of sage just outside," she recollected. "And millions of cows--and girls."

"Later I told you something else," he said. "And I've been meaning it ever since. The road to the outside is closed. If I was to start now I'd lose the way."

She pointed down the valley as a drove of horses moved toward them under the guidance of a dozen men. The hands would start breaking out the remuda the following day. The spring work was on.

"Off to a running start on another year," he said. "And sure to hold our lead." They drew aside as the remuda thundered past and on toward the corrals. "From to-day on out, you and I'll be a busy pair," he prophesied.

His prediction proved true. The Three Bar was a beehive of activity and it seemed that the hours between dawn and dark were all too short for the amount of work Harris wished to crowd into them.

The cowhands were breaking out the horses in the corrals while the acreage of plowed land in the lower fields steadily increased.

The heaviest cedar posts were tamped in place for the outer fence and a six-wire barrier held range cows back from the bottoms which would soon be in growing crops. It crossed the flats below the lower filings and followed the road that held to one side of the valley clear to the Three Bar lane. On the far side it mounted the bench that flanked the bottoms and followed the crest of it, tying into the home corrals.

Lighter three-wire fences marked the homestead lines within.

The day that Evans led the men out on the calf round-up, the mule teams made their first trip across the plowed land with the drill.

Harris and the girl sat their horses and watched the initial trip. The fields were being seeded to alfalfa and oats so that the faster growing grain might shade and protect the tender shoots of hay. Before the grain ripened it would be cut green for hay, cured and stacked.

When the seeding was completed Billie worked with Harris and together they ran a level over the seeded ground, marking out the laterals on grade across the fields from points where they would tap the main feed ditches and carry water to the crops.

Russ and Tiny followed the lines of stakes which marked their readings of the level, throwing a plow furrow each way. A second pair of homesteaders followed behind them, their mules dragging a pointed steel-shod ditcher which forced out the loosened earth.

A concrete head gate was installed at a feasible take-out point on the Crazy Loop. Then all hands worked on a main feed ditch which would carry sufficient volume of water to cover every filing. Lead ditches tapped the main artery at frequent intervals, each one of capacity to carry a head of water to irrigate one forty. These in turn feathered out into the tiny laterals across the meadow.

Early rains had moistened the fields and they were faintly green with tiny shoots of oats. These thickened into a rank velvety carpet while the homesteaders were hauling a hundred loads of rocks to form a crude dam across the stream below the take-out. The water was gradually raised till it ran almost flush with the top of the head gate. The gates were lifted and the diverted waters sped smoothly down the new channel to carry life to a portion of the sagebrush desert.

A few days would find the cowhands back from the round-up. The homesteaders must make one more trip to the railroad to freight in the stacker and the two buck-sweeps to be used in putting up the hay. This trip was delayed only till the round-up crew was back from the range for a week of leisure and could act as guards while the others were away.

As the tangible results of the work became more apparent Harris's vigilance increased. There was now more than plowed ground to work on; crops to be trampled at a time when they would not lift again to permit of mowing; fences to be wrecked so that range stock might have free access to the fields. A single night could upset the work of many months. But as he stood with Billie at the mouth of the lane he allowed none of his thoughts to be reflected in his speech.

It was two hours before dark and the perspective toward the east was already foreshortened. Two jackrabbits hopped into the lane and moved down toward the meadow. The homesteaders had turned their hands to another job. Tiny and Russ, shod with rubber boots, were leaning on their long-handled shovels in the forty nearest the house. Beyond them the other irrigators were spreading the water over the growing crops.

Billie Warren half-closed her eyes and viewed the broad expanse of rippling green in the bottoms. How many times she had stood here in the past with old Cal Warren while he visioned this very picture which now unrolled before her eyes in reality; the transformation of the Three Bar flat from a desert waste to a scene of abundant fertility under the reclaiming touch of water.

It was a quiet picture of farm life if one looked only upon the blooming fields and took no account of the raw, barren foothills that flanked them,--the gaunt, towering range behind. She found it difficult to link the scene before her with the deviltry of a few months past. The killing of Bangs and Rile Foster's consequent grim retaliation; the raid on Three Bar bulls and the stampede of her trail herd; all those seemed part of some life so long in the past as to form no part of her present.

The continued immunity had had its effect, regardless of her earlier suspicions. She still realized the possibility of further raids but they had been so long delayed that the prospect had ceased to impress her as imminent. Tiny and Russ changed their head of water. As they shifted positions she noted that each carried some tool beside his irrigator's shovel. No man in the field ever strayed far from the rifle which was part of his equipment. But even this was an evidence of vigilance which had met her eye every day for months and had ceased to impress.