The Settling of the Sage Part 7

One man carried water from the stream. Two others snaked in wood for the chuck-wagon fire. Still another drove long stakes in the shape of a hollow square, stretching a single rope from one to the next and fashioning a frail rope corral.

Harris and Evans took three poles that were slung under the wagon, looped the top-rope of a little teepee round the small ends of them and erected the three, tripod fashion, after having first pegged down the teepee sides. Harris brought the girl's bed roll and war bag from the wagon and placed them inside.

"There's your house," he said. "All ready to move in."

The men repaired to the creek bank and splashed faces and hands. The big voice of the cook bellowed angrily from the wagon.

"Downstream! Downstream!" he boomed. "Get below that water hole!"

Two men who had elected to perform their ablutions above the point from which the culinary water supply was drawn moved hastily downstream.

It was not long before Waddles was dispensing nourishment from the lowered tail-gate, ladling food and hot coffee into the plates and cups which the men held out to him. They drew away and sat cross-legged on the ground. The meal was almost finished when six hors.e.m.e.n rode down the valley and pulled up before the wagon.

"What's the chance for sc.r.a.ps?" the leader asked.

"Step down," Waddles invited. "And throw a feed in you. She's still a-steaming."

Four of the men differed in no material way from the Three Bar men in appearance. The fifth was a ruffian with little forehead, a face of gorilla cast, stamped with brute ferocity and small intelligence. The last of the six was a striking figure, a big man with pure white hair and brows, his pale eyes peering from a red face.

"The roasted albino is Harper, our leading bad man in these parts,"

Evans remarked to Harris. "And the human ape is Lang; Fisher, Coleman, Barton and Canfield are the rest. Nice layout of murderers and such."

Harper's men ate unconcernedly, conscious that they were marked as men who had violated every law on the calendar, but knowing also that no man would take exceptions to their presence on that general ground alone, and as they had neared the wagon each man had scanned the faces of the round-up crew to make certain that there were none among them who might bear some more specific and personal dislike.

The Three Bar men chatted and fraternized with them as they would have done with the riders of any legitimate outfit. Harper praised the food that Waddles tendered them.

Billie Warren forced a smile as she nodded to them, then moved off and sat upon a rock some fifty yards from the wagon, despising the six men who ate her fare and inwardly raging at the conditions which forced her to extend the hospitality of the Three Bar to men of their breed whenever they chanced by.

Harris strolled over and sat down facing her, sifting tobacco into a brown paper and deftly rolling his smoke.

"Has it been on your mind--what I was telling you a few nights back, about how much I was loving you?" he asked.

"You had your chance to prove it by going away," she said, "and refused; so why bring it up again? The next two years will be hard enough without my having to listen to that."

"Our families must have been real set on throwing us together," he observed. "I was cut off without a dime myself--unless I spent two full years on the Three Bar."

She was angry with herself for believing him sincere, for being convinced that he too, as he had several times intimated, was tied in much the same fashion as herself. The explanation came to her in an illuminating flash. The elder Harris must have nursed a lifelong enmity against her father, who had believed him the most devoted friend on earth.

She had often heard the tale of how her parent had, in all friendliness, followed old Bill Harris step by step from Dodge City to the Platte, to old Fort Laramie and finally to the present Three Bar range. Perhaps the one so followed had felt that Cal Warren was but the hated symbol of the whole clan of squatters who had driven him from place to place and eventually forced him to relinquish his hope of seeing the Three Bar brand on a hundred thousand cows; that his friendliness had been simulated, his vindictiveness nursed and finally consummated by leaving his affairs in such fashion that his son must carry on the work his trickery had begun.

The voice of Waddles reached them. He was announcing a half-day of rest, according to her orders.

"It's kill-time for the rest of the day," he stated. "Make the most of it."

For three weeks past, excepting for the trip to Brill's, the men had toiled incessantly, breakfasting before sunup and seeking their bunks long after dark. Some immediately turned to their bed rolls to make up lost sleep. Others repaired to the stream to wash out extra articles of soiled clothing before taking their rest.

Harris resumed where he had broken off some five minutes before.

"And I'd have tossed it off, as I told you once, if the Three Bar girl had turned out to be any except you. You've had a tough problem to work out, girl," he said. "I sold out my little Box L outfit for more than it was worth--and figured to stop the leak at the Three Bar and put the old brand on its feet."

His calm a.s.surance on this point exasperated the girl.

"How?" she demanded. "What can you do?" She pointed toward the six men near the wagon. "During the time you spent prowling the hills did you ever come across those men?"

"Not to pal round with them," he confessed. "But I did cut their trail now and then."

"Then don't you know what every other man in this country knows--that those six and a lot more of their breed are responsible for every loss within a hundred miles? They can operate against a brand one week and stop at the home ranch and get fed the next. That's where the Three Bar loss comes in. And I have to feed them when they come along."

"Some day we'll feed them and hang them right after the meal," he said.

"They're not the outfit that's going to be hardest to handle when the time arrives."

"What do you mean?" she asked. "No one has ever been able to handle them up to date."

"Did it ever strike you as queer that Slade could come into this country twelve years back, with nothing but a long rope and a running iron, and be owning thirty thousand head to-day?"

"He has the knack to protect his own and increase," she said. "They're afraid of Slade."

Harris absently traced the Three Bar in the dust with a stick, then fashioned the V L and the Halfmoon D, the three brands that ranged along the foot of the hills. With a few deft strokes he transformed the Three Bar into the Three Cross T, reworked the V L into a Diamond Box and the Halfmoon D into Circle P, each one of the worked-overs representing one of the dozen or so brands registered by Slade. He blotted out his handiwork with the flat of his hand.

"Don't you suppose that the owner of every one of those brands knows that?" she scoffed. "A clumsy rebrand would loom up for a mile.

Slade's no fool."

"Not in a thousand years," Harris agreed. "I was just commenting on how peculiar it was that the three brands he runs farthest north should be so easy worked over into any one of the three that his range overlaps up this way. And I happen to know his farthest south brands would work out the same way with the outfits at the other end of his range. But he earmarks all of his brands the same--with jinglebobs; and jinglebobs most generally drop off and leave nothing but a good big piece absent out of the ear."

"So you think a man as big as Slade is stupid enough to try his hand at brand-blotting on all sides at once?" she asked.

"No; nor even once on one side," he returned. "Not him. The one fact that the similarity of brands would make it easy to fall into the habit is enough to keep every outfit watching him. He couldn't start--and knows it."

"Then what does it all amount to?" she asked.

"While folks watch him on that score he could work in a dozen ways that don't concern those brands at all," he said.

The girl shook her head impatiently and looked across at the six men who ate her fare.

"Look at them," she flared. "Eating my food; and in a few nights they'll be hazing a bunch of Three Bar steers toward the Idaho line.

Why doesn't some man that is a man kill that albino fiend and all his whelps and rid the country of his breed? Even Slade lets them put up at his place."

"If they're pestering you I'll order them off," he said.

"And what effect would that have?" she inquired scornfully.

"The effect of causing them to climb their horses and amble off down the country," he returned. He sprawled on the gra.s.s, his head propped on one hand as he regarded them.

"Then probably you'd better order them off," she suggested. "You have my permission. Now's your chance to make good the lordly brag of helping the Three Bar out of the hole." She instantly regretted having said it. A dozen times of late she had wondered if she were turning bitter and waspish, if she would ever again be the even-tempered Billie Warren with a good word and a smile for every one.

Harris was, as always, apparently undisturbed by her words. Far down the bottoms she could see a point of light which she knew for a white sign that read: "Squatter, don't let sundown find you here." The man before her had defied these sinister warnings scattered about the range and publicly announced that he would put in hay on his filing, knowing that he was a marked man from the hour he turned the first furrow.

Whatever his shortcomings, lack of courage was not one of them.

"I take that back," she said, referring to her words of a few moments before. Harris straightened to a sitting position in his surprise at this impulsive retraction, and as he smiled across at her she divined that this man, seemingly so impervious to her sarcasm, could be easily moved by a single kind word.