The Trail Horde Part 17

For a long time, as she stood there, pride fought a savage battle with duty. Her face was pallid, her lips tight-clenched, and shame unutterable gripped her. To be sure, Lawler had enjoined her father to silence, and it was evident that she was not to know. Still, she did know; and Lawler had added an obligation, a debt, to the already high barrier that was between them. Yet she dared not evade the obligation, for that would be robbing her father of a chance over which he seemed to exult, a chance which promised the reformation, for which she had prayed.

Her heart was like lead within her--a dull weight that threatened to drag her down. And yet she felt a pulse of thankfulness. For if her father really meant to try--if he should succeed in redeeming himself in Lawler's eyes and in her own, she might one day be able to go to Lawler with no shame in her eyes, with the comforting a.s.surance that her father had earned the right to hold his head up among men. To be sure, there always would be the shadow of the past mistake lurking behind; but it would be the shadow of a mistake corrected, of a black gulf bridged.

Her father was waiting when she finally turned to him--waiting, his chin on his chest, his face crimson with shame.

"Ruth, girl--you ain't goin' to judge me too harsh, are you?" he begged.

Once more she yielded to the pathetic appeal in his eyes. She ran to him again, holding him tightly to her. A cool gust swept in through the open doorway--the night wind, laden with mystery. But the girl laughed and snuggled closer to the man; and the man laughed hoa.r.s.ely, vibrantly, in a voice that threatened to break.

CHAPTER XIII

THE INVISIBLE MENACE

At the close of the second day the big trail herd halted at the edge of the vast level over which it had come. The herd had been driven forty miles. Cattle, men, and horses had pa.s.sed through a country which was familiar to them; a country featured by long grama gra.s.s, greasewood, and cactus plants.

There was no timber on the plains. The gray of the grama gra.s.s and the bare stretches of alkali shone white in the glare of a sun that swam in a cloudless sky of deepest azure. Except for the men, the cattle, the horses, and the two slow-moving, awkward-looking canvas-covered wagons, there had been no evidence of life on the great plain. In a silence unbroken save by the clashing of horns, the bleating and bawling of the cattle, the ceaseless creaking of the wagons, and the low voices of the men, the cavalcade moved eastward.

The wind that swept over the plains was chill. It carried a tang that penetrated; that caused the men, especially in the early morning, to turn up the collars of their woolen shirts as they rode; a chill that brought a profane protest from the tawny-haired giant who had disclosed to Lawler the whereabouts of Joe Hamlin that night in the Circle L bunkhouse.

The first camp had been made on the Wolf--at a shallow about five miles north of the Two Bar, Hamlin's ranch. And with the clear, sparkling, icy water of the river on his face, and glistening beads of it on his colorless eyelashes, the giant had growled to several of his brother cowboys, who were likewise performing their ablutions at the river:

"This d.a.m.n wind is worse'n a Kansas regular. You lean ag'in' it an' it freezes you; you turn your back to it an' you've got to go to clawin'

icicles out of your back. Why in h.e.l.l can't they have a wind that's got some sense to it?"

"It ain't c-cold, Shorty," jibed a slender puncher with a saturnine eye and a large, mobile mouth.

"Kells," grinned the giant; "your voice is froze, right now!"

And yet the men enjoyed the cold air. It had a tonic effect upon them; they were energetic, eager, and always ravenously hungry. The cook offered testimony on that subject, unsolicited.

"I never seen a bunch of mavericks that gobbled more grub than this here outfit!" he stated on the second morning. "Or that swilled more coffee,"

he added. "Seems like all they come on this drive for is to eat!"

Toward the close of the second day corrugations began to appear in the level. Little ridges and valleys broke the monotony of travel; rocks began to dot the earth; the gray gra.s.s disappeared, the barren stretches grew larger and more frequent, and the yucca and the lancelike octilla began to appear here and there. The trend of the trail had been upward all afternoon--gradual at first, hardly noticeable. But as the day drew to a close the cattle mounted a slope, progressing more slowly, and the horses. .h.i.tched to the wagons began to strain in the harness.

The rise seemed to be endless--to have no visible terminus. For it went up and up until it melted into the horizon; like the brow of a hill against the sky. But when, after hours of difficult travel, herd and men gained the summit, a broad, green-brown mesa lay before them.

The mesa was miles wide, and ran an interminable distance eastward.

Looking back over the way they had come, the men could see that the level over which they had ridden for the past two days was in reality the floor of a mighty valley. Far away into the west they could see a break in the mesa--where it sloped down to merge into the plains near Willets. The men knew that beyond that break ran the steel rails that connected the town with Red Rock, their destination. But it was plain to them that the rails must make a gigantic curve somewhere in the invisible distance, or that they ran straight into a range of low mountains that fringed the northern edge of the mesa.

Lawler enlightened the men at the camp fire that night.

"The railroad runs almost straight from Willets," he said. "There's a tunnel through one of the mountains, and other tunnels east of it. And there's a mountain gorge with plenty of water in it, where the railroad runs on a shelving level blasted out of the wall. The mountains form a barrier that keeps Willets and the Wolf River section blocked in that direction. It's the same south of here, the only difference being that in the south there is no railroad until you strike the Southern Pacific.

And that's a long distance to drive cattle."

When the herd began to move the following morning, Blackburn sent them over the mesa for several miles, and then began to head them down a gradual slope, leaving the mesa behind. There was a faint trail, narrow, over which in other days cattle had been driven. For the gra.s.s had been trampled and cut to pieces; and in some places there were still prints of hoofs in the baked soil.

The slope grew sharper, narrowing as it descended, and the cattle moved down it in a sinuous, living line, until the leaders were out of sight far around a bend at least a mile distant.

Blackburn was at the head of the herd with three men, riding some little distance in front of the cattle, inspecting the trail. Lawler and the others were holding the stragglers at the top of the mesa, endeavoring to prevent the crowding and confusion which always results when ma.s.sed cattle are being held at an outlet. It was like a crowd of eager humans attempting to gain entrance through a doorway at the same instant. The cattle were plunging, jostling. The concerted impulse brought the inevitable confusion--a jam that threatened frenzy.

By Lawler's orders the men drew off, and the cattle, relieved of the menace which always drives them to panic in such a situation, began to filter through and to follow their leaders down the narrow trail.

Down, always down, the trail led, growing narrower gradually, until at last cattle and men were moving slowly on a rocky floor with the sheer wall of the mesa on one side and towering mountains on the other.

The clatter of hoofs, the clashing of horns, the bellowing, the rumble of the wagons over the rocks and the ring of iron-shod hoofs, created a bedlam of sound, which echoed and re-echoed from the towering walls until the uproar was deafening.

Shorty, the tawny-haired giant, was riding close to Lawler.

He never had ridden the trail, though he had heard of it. He leaned over and shouted to Lawler:

"Kinney's canon, ain't it?"

Lawler nodded.

"Well," shouted Shorty; "it's a lulu, ain't it?"

For a short time the trail led downward. Then there came a level stretch, smooth, damp. The day was hours old, and the sun was directly overhead. But down in the depths of the canon it was cool; and a strong wind blew into the faces of the men.

The herd was perhaps an hour pa.s.sing through the canon; and when Lawler and Shorty, riding side by side, emerged from the cool gloom, they saw the cattle descending a shallow gorge, going toward a wide slope which dipped into a basin of mammoth size.

Lawler knew the place; he had ridden this trail many times in the years before the coming of the railroad; and when he reached the crest of the slope and looked out into the hazy, slumbering distance, he was not surprised, though his eyes quickened with appreciation for its beauty.

Thirty miles of virgin land lay before him, basking in the white sunlight--a green-brown bowl through which flowed a river that shimmered like silver. The dark bases of mountains loomed above the basin at the eastern edge--a serrated range with lofty peaks that glowed white in the blue of the sky. South and north were other mountains--somber, purple giants with pine-clad slopes and gleaming peaks--majestic, immutable.

Looking down from where he sat on Red King, Lawler could see the head of the herd far down the ever-broadening trail. The leaders were so far away that they seemed to be mere dots--black dots moving in an emerald lake.

The cattle, too, had glimpsed the alluring green that spread before them; and at a little distance from Lawler and several of the other men they were running, eager for the descent.

"She's a whopper, ain't she?" said Shorty's voice at Lawler's side.

"I've seen a heap of this man's country, but never nothin' like that. I reckon if the Lord had spread her out a little mite further she'd have took in mighty near the whole earth. It's mighty plain he wasn't skimpin' things none, anyway, when he made this here little hollow."

He grinned as he rode, and then waved a sarcastic hand toward the cattle.

"Look at 'em runnin'! You'd think, havin' projected around this here country for a year or so, they'd be better judges. They're thinkin'

they'll be buryin' their mugs in that right pretty gra.s.s in about fifteen seconds, judgin' from the way they're hittin' the breeze toward it. An' it'll take them half a day to get down there."

Shorty was a better judge of distance than the cattle. For it was afternoon when the last of the herd reached the level floor of the basin. They spread out, to graze industriously; the men not caring, knowing they would not stray far from such a wealth of gra.s.s.

By the time the chuck-wagon had come to a halt and the cook had clambered stiffly from his seat to prepare the noonday meal, Lawler and the others saw the horse-wrangler and his a.s.sistant descending the long slope with the _remuda_. The horses had fallen far behind, and Lawler rode to meet them, curious to know what had happened.

When he rode up, the horse-wrangler, a man named Garvin--a stocky individual with keen, inquiring eyes--advanced to meet him.

"Boss," he said, shortly; "there's somethin' mighty wrong goin' on behind us. Me an' Ed--my helper--has been kind of hangin' back, bein'

sort of curious. They's a bunch of ornery-lookin' guys trailin' us. I first saw 'em after we'd struck the bottom of that canon. They was just comin' around that big bend, an' I saw 'em. They lit out, turnin'

tail--mebbe figurin' I hadn't seen 'em; but pretty soon I seen 'em again, sort of sneakin' behind us. I reckon if they was square guys they wouldn't be sneakin' like that--eh?"