Title: In the Bad Lands
Author: Sinclair, Bertrand W.
Language: English
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IN THE BAD LANDS

By Bertrand W. Sinclair

Author of “Out of the Blue,” “Easy Money,” Etc.


“Bad Land” Bill, the new rider, was a likable kid, but he was a mystery
to the bunch at the Wineglass range. And when another strange individual
stumbled into the light of the camp fire one night, the mystery
deepened.

Against a window that faced the west bank of Plentywater, Charlie Shaw
flattened his nose for a minute. April showers bring May flowers.
Charlie grinned--because the April shower had become a snowstorm. The
morning rain had turned into wet flakes the size of a thumb nail,
eddying out of a darkened air. Now the ground lay six inches under a
coat of arctic down. Tough on the sheepmen with lambing in full swing.
Charlie grinned again. Cattle could stand it. The tougher the better.
Sheep were a thorn in the rangeman’s tenderest side. They were becoming
too plentiful for cow outfits to regard them with indifference. Shaw was
not vindictive--but the less lambs the more grass for cattle.

Most of the stuff floating through his brain was idle thought. But his
looking was not idle. The Benton trail skirted the rim of the plateau
that flowed up to the hollow of Plentywater, and one of his riders was
due from the stage road with mail. Bad weather had penned Charlie close
for days. He was bored. Lacking action, he craved something to read.
There might be letters. He stared through a brief let-up in the ballet
of the snowflakes. Then the white curtain closed so that looking was
vain. Charlie went back to the fireplace and yawned over a cigarette.

Boots thumped on the porch. Jerry Smith came in with the mail, cursed
the water, clanked his spurs out again. Charlie looked over a letter or
two, and buried himself in a Fort Benton newspaper until the cook called
him to supper.

He marked a new face at the long table. A slim, dark youngster, thin
faced, thin lipped, neatly dressed. He had white, even teeth that shone
when he opened his mouth. But he only opened it for the purpose of
stowing food. Charlie looked him over once. Riders came and went at all
seasons. In the spring they drifted, and restless ones, from one range
to another, looking for a job, looking for variety, looking for
horses--genial nomads.

But as he sat before his fireplace, toasting his stockinged feet and
studying a letter from the Sutherland range boss, a knock sounded at his
door.

“Come in,” he grunted.

The slim, dark stranger faced him. His words were as spare as his frame.

“Full handed?” he asked.

Now Charlie Shaw had a full crew of able riders--the only kind suffered
on the Wineglass pay roll. Ordinarily, he would have said: “Yeah. Full
up, unless somebody breaks his neck.” That would have ended it. But
something about this youngster caught Charlie’s fancy. Neat, but not
gaudy. Slender and keen--like a new sword. So he asked a question.

“Where you from?”

“Bad Lands.”

“That’s a lot of territory,” Charlie remarked. “All kinds of people use
it.”

The boy smiled slightly.

“Oh, I’m no outlaw. My folks has a one-horse outfit down on a fork of
Sand Coulee. Nothin’ much for me at home, so I ride round-up. I been up
in the Sun River Basin breakin’ horses all winter.”

“Sand Coulee, eh.” Charlie glanced at the letter in his hand. It was a
friendly suggestion from the Block S that the Wineglass come down and
work with them and the Picador, as northwesterly blizzards had drifted
several thousand Wineglass cattle to the heart of that range. And there
was mention of this place in the letter. “That the Sand Coulee down on
the Sutherland range?”

“Uh-huh. I worked for the Block S two seasons back,” the boy answered.

“Good outfit,” Charlie commented.

“Sure. They say the Wineglass is a good outfit to ride for, too,” the
other said. “I could go to work for Sutherland again, I guess. Thought
I’d try you.”

“I guess I can use you,” Charlie said on impulse. He could. A good man
always fitted in, and somehow this boy in three sentences and a look
impressed him as being more than capable. Horses _did_ fall on men.
Occasionally a rider yearned for distant pastures and left. “What’s your
name?”

“Bill Mather.”

“All right, Bill,” Charlie nodded. “I guess you know how to make
yourself at home in a bunk house.”

Mather nodded and withdrew.

At ten o’clock Charlie looked out before he went to bed. All white, and
more falling. A foot of snow in mid-April. Erratic weather.

It continued to be erratic. The Wineglass floundered in a white world
for thirty-six hours. A touch of frost. Then warm rain. Dirty slush.
More rain, like ice water on the bare face, slashing out of a lowering
sky. Then the sun, smiling wanly, as if conscious of some seasonal
aberration, and new grass slowly thrusting up green blades to surround
the blue windflowers that spread petals bravely before the snow was
fairly gone.

The Wineglass gathered the last of its saddle stock, and moved across
the sodden plains to join the Block S south of the Bear Paws by the
tenth of May, in a spring the like of which none of the old-timers
recalled. Snow, rain, hail and sunshine--all in a twenty-four-hour day.
Riders were crabbed, horses fractious. The plains wind whipped their
faces and their tempers raw. But while a wheel could roll from one creek
to another and cattle be bunched on a round-up ground, work went on.

Bill Mather lived up to Charlie Shaw’s first estimate. He more than held
up his end. Did it with a peculiar sort of concentration on the job. For
a youngster he was uncommonly self-contained. He would answer with a nod
or a smile rather than a word. The rough joking of a round-up crew slid
off him as rain off a slicker. In camp he would sit staring at nothing,
chin in hand, his lean, dark face as impassive as a Buddha’s.

Charlie learned more about him from the Block S.

“Nice kid,” their range foreman said. “Made a good hand for me one
season. Folks ain’t much. Old man’s no account. Got a brother that’s
slick as hell at a lot of things, but lazy. Girl down there, sister or
something, wild as a hawk. Keep their ranch like a boar’s nest. Got a
few stock in the edge of the breaks. Scrap among themselves all the
time. Bill’s all right. He’ll amount to somethin’. ‘Bad Land,’ we used
to call him.”

Bad Land Bill. The Block S had christened him that. The Wineglass
revived it. The name fitted the boy. He was like some wild, dynamic
creature out of that desolate and distorted region which lies like a
barrier on both sides of the Missouri River. The round-up moved its
wagons along the edge of this sinister jumble of canyons, gullies,
washouts, sagebrush, thickets of scrub pine, cut banks banded with
layers of varicolored earth, like stripes of Indian paint. They reached
down long, narrow plateaus winding through a network of impassable
crevices, driving range cattle out ahead of them. It was like a vast
maze, the Bad Land country. Yet it had its good points for a
cattleman--also for others whose business was not so legitimate. There
lay pasture and shelter for winter-driven stock. Aridity and bitter
water kept sheep out in summer, and left a heavy stand of bunch grass
where grass could grow. If, now and then, some sheriff cursed the
country because he had to hunt a lawbreaker fruitlessly, it was no
matter. It was a hard country to get about in on horseback, impossible
for wheeled traffic.

In the edge of the Bad Lands, on a fork of Birch Creek, a furious
rainstorm tied up the round-up. After twelve hours of downpour the gumbo
soil softened so that a horse sank ankle-deep in stuff like putty,
withdrawing his hoof with a curious sucking _plop_! The wagon tires cut
inch by inch into the earth where they stood. It was like the Flood,
with the Bear Paws a distant Ararat on the north, hidden in the murk,
and not for their saving. They had to stay in the flats and take it.
Day-herders on the cattle herd, the horse wrangler with his saddle
bunch, in slicker and chaps, humped backs to the storm and endured their
hours on watch. The rain grew colder, became sleety squalls. The second
evening snow drove thick and fast, hard, stinging particles, out of the
northwest. Overnight it piled fourteen inches deep. Noon laid two feet
of this unwelcome white purity on the levels. The two round-up bosses
held confab and turned their herds loose. It was too much to ask men to
face day and night the blast of that untimely storm, to grow numb in
their saddles on night guard. Their saddle stock they had to hold--they
were the tools of their trade. They marshaled the cowboys into regular
watches with the horse wranglers, standing two-hour shifts. There was no
fenced pasture within thirty miles to relieve them of that necessity.

“What the hell’s the country comin’ to?” Bud Cole complained to Bill
Mather. “The world musta slipped a couple of cogs north.”

“Maybe,” Bad Land agreed. “Tough on cowboys.”

The others slept, killed time with penny ante, cursed the weather,
swapped range lore. Charlie Shaw brooded in the cook tent. It would
clear with a hard frost. New-born calves dying in snowbanks in the last
of May. April showers bring May flowers! Damn such weather!

Upon a convenient hillock a dozen riders laid ropes on a varied
collection of dead-pine snags, dragged them down before the bed tent.
They were saturated with pitch. One father of roots would burn for three
days. They made bets on its duration. Once ignited, neither snow, wind,
rain nor buckets of water could extinguish that pitch-fed flame. It made
a pleasant glow between the opened flaps of the tent. Also it made a
serviceable beacon in the dark, a mark for the relief men on night
guard, a wavering yellow tongue like a lighthouse on a rocky coast.

The third night of the deep snow, when the fall had ceased, when the
blustering northwest wind sank to a murmur, and sharp frost was setting
a crust on the damp drifts, a man staggered into the circle of light. He
had on overalls and a short sheepskin coat. He was an oldish man, with a
tangled beard extending fanwise from his chin, a black beard like those
of the prophets.

All but two of the Wineglass crew were in their blankets. These two were
Charlie Shaw and Bud Cole, squatting between the bed tent and the
glowing pine snag, talking in undertones. They looked at this
apparition, wavering on its feet. He didn’t belong in either outfit.

“Hello,” Charlie greeted. “This is tough weather to be runnin’ around
loose. You lost, or are you just goin’ some place?”

“Both, I guess. What outfit is this?”

“The Wineglass from Lonesome Prairie,” Charlie told him. “Come on up to
the fire.”

They rose from their boot heels with an exclamation. The man took a
step, swayed, moved uncertainly.

“Don’t be scared,” Charlie said kindly. It struck him that this old
fellow was furtive--and he had seen men on the dodge, edging cautiously
into a camp for food and shelter.

“I ain’t scared,” the man mumbled, in little more than a whisper. “I’m
played out, that’s all.”

“You been wanderin’ afoot in this snow?” Bud asked.

“Since last night,” he answered.

As if shelter, warmth and the presence of men jarred loose some prop
which had sustained him, he put one hand to his face and lurched, and
would have fallen if Bud and Charlie had not caught him. He sagged in
their grip. His head dropped to his breast.

“For the love of Pete!” Bud said. “The old boy’s certainly all in. Now
what in blazes----”

“Pack him over to the chuck tent an’ get some dry clothes on him, an’
throw some hot coffee into him,” Charlie answered, with the practical
wisdom born of experience.

Bill Mather thrust in between them and dropped on his knee beside the
old man. He was in his sock feet. His black hair stood in a tangle. His
dark face was alight with troubled inquiry. And he spoke to the
unconscious man, as if he expected, indeed, as if he demanded, an
answer:

“How’d you get here, dad? What’s happened?”

“He’s out, Bill. No use askin’ yet. You know him?”

“’S my old man,” young Bill muttered. “I wonder what’s up?”

“Let’s get him over to the tent,” Charlie suggested. “An’ bring him to
an’ get him warmed an’ fed. Then he’ll tell us. He said he’s been out in
this since last night. So I guess the old boy had a license to fade
away.”

The three picked the man up as if he had been a sack of oats. Bill
Mather strode sock-footed, in his underclothes, through the trampled
snow between the two tents. Charlie’s quick mind took stock of the
elements. Three feet of snow in a mid-May night, a lost old man, and an
agitated cow-puncher who looked at the elderly whiskered one with an
agony of apprehension in his eyes. It never rained but it poured.
Charlie dragged his rolled bed close to the stove, in which a few coals
still glowed.

“Hop into your pants, Sam,” he ordered the cook, lifting an inquiring
eye above his own blankets in one corner. “Make some coffee. We got a
half-froze gent on our hands.”

They laid their burden on Charlie’s bed, listened for a moment to his
breathing. Bill stripped off his father’s sodden foot gear. Bud stoked
the fire. Sam Barnes shuffled into his clothes. They were all sympathy,
commiseration. That dead faint troubled them, too. They chafed the cold
hands and icy feet. In the end, as the kettle began to steam, the old
man sat up. A lantern, slung over the stove, shed a dull light on his
unkempt features. Something flickered in his old eyes at sight of Bill.
The boy himself didn’t speak, at first, only stared.

The old man’s teeth set up a sudden chatter.

“Here, throw this hot coffee into you.” Charlie passed him the cup.

He gulped it in two swallows.

“Thank you all,” he said. “That sure tasted good.”

“You’re all wet,” Bill said. “Drink some more coffee an’ peel off your
clothes. I’ll rustle you dry ones outa my war bag.”

He went off to the bed tent. In a minute, when the old man had finished
his second cup of coffee and accepted the makings of a cigarette, and
the cook was setting out food for him, Charlie and Bud withdrew. They
found Mather in the glow of the burning root, digging clothes out of his
bag. He stamped his feet into boots, and went back to the chuck tent
with an armful of clothes.

“That kid’s the original clam,” Bud Cole remarked. “He don’t never say
nothin’. He’s worried. I wonder what that old hombre’s hoofin’ it forty
miles from nowhere in a snowstorm for?”

“I ain’t no clairvoyant,” Charlie answered.

After a few minutes Bill joined them. He squatted on his heels, rolled a
smoke, silent.

“How’s the old man?” Charlie asked.

“Stowin’ some fodder,” Bill replied. “Sam’s gone back to bed.”

He stared into the flames, brooding, abstracted, frowning.

Bud Cole yawned.

“I’m goin’ to turn in,” he said, and departed to his bed.

Mather volunteered no information. A cow-puncher’s respect for other
people’s private concerns does not lessen his natural curiosity. Charlie
contemplated his toes. He was young--one of the youngest range bosses in
Montana. Life, for Charlie, had embraced a number of stirring episodes,
and he had not been unconscious of the drama. He had uncanny perception,
a reflective, imaginative quality, allied to a capacity for action. He
looked up at young Bill and he knew the boy was troubled, out of all
proportion to the fact of his father having got astray in a snowstorm.

“He can roll in with you when he’s fed an’ warmed, Bill,” he said.

Mather nodded. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then turned without a
word back to the cook tent. He was there quite a time. When he came back
he brought his father with him. Bill overtopped him by a head. The
tangled beard and unkempt hair made the old fellow a wild-looking
figure. Bill stowed him in his own bed. Then he came back to the fire,
to Charlie Shaw, and sat humped on his boot heels, with a face like a
mask.

“Like a frozen man,” Charlie thought. “’Tain’t natural for a kid like
him. Make a good gambler with that poker face. Never tell what went on
behind it.”

“Somethin’s happened,” Bill broke the silence abruptly, speaking in an
undertone. “He won’t tell me. I got to go see for myself.”

“Where? When?” Charlie could be concise, himself.

“Right now. Down to our place.”

“In the middle of the night, an’ three foot of snow? How far is it?”

“About twelve miles. Fork of Sand Coulee, a couple of miles down in the
breaks.”

“Gosh, man,” Charlie remonstrated. “Unless it’s a case of life an’ death
this ain’t no night to flounder that far in the Bad Lands. Chances are
you wouldn’t find it till daylight.”

“I could find that ranch blindfold,” young Bill said, with conviction.
“It worries me. He won’t tell me nothin’. I got to go. He’s been
wanderin’ around in this for twenty hours. He ain’t the flighty kind,
either. Took somethin’ to scare him out.”

“Just what are you afraid might have come off?” Charlie asked. He had
the impression that Bill Mather wanted to tell him something and
couldn’t, wouldn’t, without encouragement. “What’s the trouble, Bill?”

“Maybe none--till I get there,” the youngster said moodily.
“Maybe--well, there’s a girl there. Aw, shucks! there’s no use talkin’.
She was raised with us, but she ain’t no kin. I used to think a heap of
her. I got a brother, Jed. There’s a feller name uh Munson got a holdout
a ways below our place. I don’t know what there is about Dolly, but she
gets men crazy. Them two’s been ready to lock horns over her for a year.
I had to get out. Don’t matter why. Now somethin’s happened. Somethin’
fierce, to make the old man light out in weather like it was last night.
He won’t say. He’s that kind. I got to go see.”

There was that in his tone which moved Charlie.

“No matter what’s come off,” he said kindly, “you couldn’t hardly make
it tonight, Bill. Wait till daybreak. I’ll ride down with you, myself.”

“I got to go _now_,” Mather replied. “She’s alone down there--with them
two locoed fools. An’ somethin’s happened.”

“Oh, well, gosh darn it, go ahead,” Charlie acquiesced. “You got me all
excited, kid. I’ll come along, if you like. I’m tired layin’ around camp
lookin’ at snowdrifts, anyway.”

A dozen saddled horses stood tied to the bed wagon. The night men all
kept horses ready. Mather had a mount there. So did Shaw. They drew on
chaps, overcoats. Deep breathing, punctuated by snores, filled the bed
tent. Every man was sound asleep. The light was out in the cook tent.
They stumbled in there for a last cup of coffee out of the still warm
pot, and Charlie left a word with the cook for Bud Cole, who was his
second in command. As they came back by the fire, old Mather sat up in
bed. He peered out at his son dressed for travel. He beckoned and Bill
halted in the mouth of the tent.

“Yo’ a damn fool,” he grumbled. “Leave ’em settle their own troubles.”

“If you’d tell me,” Bill said. A weary patience sounded in his voice.

“It’s that hellcat of a girl,” the old man sputtered. “She’s got Munson
on the warpath. He’s bad, Munson is. Like a crazy man. Jed ain’t much
better, as fur as that goes.”

“You’re a fine head of a family,” young Bill said scornfully, “runnin’
away, leavin’ Dolly to two fellers like that.”

“I got scared,” the old fellow muttered. “But I didn’t exactly run. Just
lit out till they cooled off or got it settled. Then I couldn’t find my
way back. Mighty nigh perishin’ in that there storm.”

“You won’t perish here,” Bill said shortly. He turned to his horse.
Mounted, he said to Charlie: “There ain’t really no call for you to ride
down there with me. I’ll bring back a horse for the old man to ride home
to-morrow.”

“If you’re goin’ into the Bad Lands to interfere with two fellers that
have gone bughouse over a girl,” Charlie said cheerfully, “you better
have company. You sure this ain’t no false alarm?”

Mather shook his head.

“Well, I’d as soon ride as lay thinkin’,” Charlie declared; “so let’s
hit the trail.”

The crust on the snow was steadily hardening. The frost had teeth. Clear
of that fire they moved in a luminous darkness. Clouds made the sky very
black above. Underfoot the snow made a pale glimmer. The way became
deceptive. Left to himself, Charlie Shaw would scarcely have known north
from south, east from west, except for the run of the coulee, dipping
uniformly from the flats to the valley of the Missouri. He would have
had difficulty finding his way back to the round-up camp. But Mather
plodded at a slow trot, at a walk where the snow lay deeper. Here and
there it took a horse to the belly. He never hesitated. They crossed
plateaus, slid into gulches, floundered in high sage, passed clumps of
pine that made black blotches on the snow. And at last he angled down a
steep hillside into a narrow bottom where they passed ghastly
cottonwoods, and suddenly buildings loomed before them, the high pole
wall of a round corral. Mather stopped.

“Dark as the grave,” he whispered. “I don’t like it. There always used
to be a couple of hounds that made a row when anybody rode up.”

They tied their horses to the pole corral.

“You stay here,” Bill whispered. “I don’t like this quiet. I’m goin’ to
the house. If it’s all right, I’ll holler for you.”

“Everybody asleep, most likely,” Charlie commented. “It’s past midnight,
man.”

“I know,” the boy muttered. “Just the same--you wait till I look in the
house. I got a funny feelin’.”

He moved away. Cracks had opened here and there in the cloud bank.
Charlie could see him dimly, crossing the yard. The house was a vague
blur, black walls under a snow-capped roof. He heard the creak of a
door. After that, no sound for a minute.

Then a match flared yellow through a window. It went dark, flared again,
became the steady glow of a lamp. But there was no hail. Once a shadow
fell on the uncurtained panes.

Charlie’s feet grew cold in the snow. He grew impatient. No way to leave
a man, cooling his heels on a frosty night.

“Gosh darn these fool people an’ their family troubles,” he grumbled.

Then, between impatience and discomfort, he started for the house. It
was a low-walled structure. The windows opened on a level with his
waist. The door stood ajar, casting a knife-blade gleam. The window laid
a bright square on the snow. Abreast of it Charlie stopped.

A man lay face down on the floor, his head turned sidewise, arms spread
in a crooked curve. He had black hair like Bill Mather’s. His face,
white in the lamplight, was very like Bad Land Bill’s, only it was
curiously twisted, the mouth open, slack jawed. A white-handled gun lay
just beyond the fingertips of one hand. Bill Mather stood over him,
staring like a man shocked and bewildered.

Charlie stepped into the doorway. His rider turned like a cat. His gun
came halfway out of its holster on his hip.

“Looks like your hunch was right.” Charlie said.

“She’s gone,” young Mather said. “Munson’s killed Jed an’ took her. He’s
stone cold. Stiff as a board. Must ’a’ been done yesterday.”

“Your brother?”

Bill nodded.

“We never hitched good,” he said, after a long interval. “But he was my
brother. An’ Dolly’s gone. Munson’s took her away. An’ she hated the
sight of him.”

“Gosh, Bill, that don’t follow,”. Charlie declared. “A killin’ is a
killin’. It happens now an’ then. But men don’t steal women against
their will.”

“This feller would,” young Mather replied slowly. “So would he”--he
nodded at the dead man--“an’ you don’t know Dolly. I should never ’a’
left here.”

“Maybe she did the same as your old man,” Charlie suggested. “Got scared
an’ lit out when the trouble started.”

“No. She’d stay an’ laugh at them,” Bill muttered. “Well, I can soon
find out. Help me pick him up, Charlie. I’d rather he was on a bed.”

“Better leave him where he lays,” Charlie said. “There’ll be county
officers wantin’ to look into this in a day or two.”

“Let ’em look,” young Bill said. “I don’t like him layin’ all this time
on a cold, bare floor.”

Two rooms opened off the larger one, which was at once kitchen, dining
and living quarters. One of these had a bunk in each corner--a man’s
room, with blankets tumbled as they were last slept in. They laid the
stiff body on one bunk and closed the door. Bill looked at his watch.

“It lacks hours till daylight,” said he. “Let’s put up our horses an’
start a fire.”

They walked back to the house under a sky now beginning to show stars. A
south wind whistled forlornly down that cut in the Bad Lands. Pines
loomed in dark patches against white canyon walls. Frost-crisp snow
crunched underfoot. The south wind would soften that soon, but for the
present the frost still had its teeth bare. Bill found wood in a box and
stoked a kitchen range. He looked with distaste at the crimson-stained
floor. Eventually he found a piece of canvas and covered that dark patch
on the raw wood. Lamp in hand, while the fire crackled, he roamed about
the room, examining floor, walls, doorways, windows. Charlie Shaw pulled
off his boots, put his feet on the oven door, rolled a cigarette, and
watched this survey. Bill set the lamp on a table and joined him by the
stove.

“There was only one shot fired,” he said at last. “Jed never even drawed
his gun. It was laid there by his hand after he was down. They fought
first. Jed’s face is marked. His knuckles is skinned.”

He slumped in a chair by the stove, chin on his breast. Passion had
flared and death taken its toll in that room. An atmosphere intangible
but sobering, with a touch of the sinister, remained. Charlie felt it as
something unpleasant. How it affected young Bill, he did not know. The
boy stared at the stove, his dark face darker still with the shadow of
brooding. They sat waiting in silence for the dawn, each occupied with
his own obscure thoughts.

Young Bill drew out his watch again. In an hour it would be day. He
looked at Charlie.

“I’m goin’ after Munson,” he said.

Charlie nodded. There was no use trying to dissuade a man with that look
in his eyes, no use to speak of the law and county officers. But he did.
And young Bill only shook his head, as Charlie suspected he would.

“The law,” he said slowly, “is a long way off. An’ I’m here. There’s a
woman in this, too.”

There generally was, Charlie reflected, a woman somewhere in the
background of things like this.

“I should never have left here,” young Mather said again. “Munson was
afraid of me. I thought he was afraid of Jed. Seems like he wasn’t. I
got to make it good. I expect we better feed ourselves. It’s a long way
back to the Wineglass on an empty stomach.”

“I’m not hungry,” Charlie replied. “But a cup of coffee wouldn’t do no
harm.”

They had that. There was food, cold meat and bread. But coffee seemed to
satisfy them. They resaddled their mounts. The cloud bank of the night
had become scattered wraiths, fleeing across a luminous sky. Touches of
color streaked the east.

“I forgot,” Mather said from his saddle. “I was goin’ to send a horse
back for the old man to ride home. You could take him.”

“It’ll be three or four days before we move a wheel, maybe longer,”
Charlie answered. “Can’t work cattle in snowbanks. Your old man can stay
at the wagon, or, if he wants to ride home, there’s plenty of extra
horses there. Somebody ought to send word to Benton about this killin’.
Listen, kid. Your business is your own. I’m askin’ you friendly. What
are you aimin’ to do?”

“Find Munson an’ Dolly.”

“Yeah. But how? An’ what about when you find ’em?”

“Munson has a place about two miles down this bottom,” said young Bill.
“I expect they'll be there. Munson’ll claim self-defense. What I’ll
do--well, that depends.”

“If you’re goin’ straight to that place, I'll be along,” Charlie said,
wondering, as he uttered the words, why he should, what impulse prompted
him to commit himself so, what curious motive prompted him to ride with
this grave-faced boy on a blood feud. For it was nothing else, now.

“You ain’t interested in this,” young. Bill answered.

“I’m interested in _you_,” Charlie told him. “Gosh darn it, I don’t
blame you, but these family feuds are hell. I’ll ride as far as this
feller’s place with you just for luck. If he ain’t there and you still
aim to camp on his trail, I’ll go back to the round-up.”

“All right,” young Bill muttered “That’s white of you. But don’t mix in,
Charlie. ’Tain’t your funeral.”

Light grew as they rode down a winding bottom between high walls of
earth, where stunted trees clung precariously. Snow masked short
sagebrush. A white world with pines black on the rim of the canyon.
Their horses floundered deep. The hard crust tinkled as hoofs broke
through.

“Hell of a May mornin’, this is.” Charlie Shaw thought of weak cattle
dying by the hundred in this untimely burst of arctic weather. What Bill
Mather thought lay behind the mask of his unsmiling face.

The canyon wound a tortuous course. The sun laid a sparkling beam on the
western bank. A log cabin stood on the flat. A small corral looped from
the end of a low stable. A pole fence, from wall to wall of the gorge
above and below the buildings, inclosed a few acres of pasture.

Mather rode straight for the house. Considering the circumstances and
his errand, Charlie reckoned that foolhardy, but he said nothing.
Between house and stable Bill drew rein for a moment, looking down.
Fresh tracks in the snow. Some one had walked to the stable. The
footprints were paralleled by the track of a horse leading away, past
the house toward the canyon wall, where a cleft notch lifted to the
upper levels. Then young Bill rode on to the door and swung down.

Charlie crowded at his heels when he shoved open the door. Light
streamed through frosted windows. A shaft of sunshine played on the
figure of a man lying on the floor.

Unlike Jed Mather, this dead man lay on his back. The rawhide-bound
handle of a knife stood up above his breast, like a pin thrust in a
cushion.

“Ah,” young Bill whispered, “she beat me to it.”

They stared at the corpse.

“This Munson?” Charlie asked.

Young Bill nodded.

“I gave her that knife once,” said he. “Made it myself out of an old
flat file. Look! Didn't I say they must ’a’ fought?”

Munson’s face was bruised, marked by knuckles. Charlie laid a hand on
him. He was cold, rigid.

“Let’s get outa here,” young Mather said. “Gives me the creeps. But I
was right. He got what he deserved.”

He walked the fresh tracks to the stable, looked in, came back on the
trail of the horse, mounted, and followed the hoof marks into that
notch. A barrier of poles lay in the mouth. The bars were down. They
breasted that steep slope. Their horses were blown when they reached the
plateau above. The trail in the snow turned sharply southward, skirting
the canyon’s rim. It led straight to the Mather ranch and dipped into
the canyon again and doubled back to the stable. Only--at a point two
hundred yards above the ranch the trail stopped under a cottonwood tree.
There was trampled snow there, and foot marks, as if some one had
tarried there.

Smoke lifted from the stovepipe. They dismounted. A face pressed briefly
at the window. Then the door opened and a girl faced them.

“Somethin’ about her gets men crazy.” Charlie remembered that. He looked
at this girl and he wondered. No Helen to lure a Paris. A mop of tawny,
yellow hair. White skin with freckled spots across the bridge of a
straight nose. But her cheek bones were too high, her mouth too wide.
Her eyes were twin heralds of temper. Steel-bright blue eyes that looked
on young Bill with surprise, anger, resentment. She was like a willow
for slenderness. How could that slight arm drive home a knife?

He got light on that a moment later. Bill Mather’s dark face went pale.
He caught the girl by the wrists.

“What happened?” he demanded.

One quick wrench of her body and she was free. Her right hand popped on
Bill’s cheek, and red welts sprang out on his dark skin. She stood
poised, her hands clenched--like a young lioness.

“Dolly!” Bill’s tone was like a cry. “What happened?”

She stared at him. The blaze went out of her eyes. Her bosom heaved. The
poised tensity went out of her body.

“Nothing, nothing,” she said, in a tone tremulous like a frightened
child’s. “Munson an’ Jed fought, an’ your dad got scared an’ lit out.
Jed beat him. After _he_ come back an’ shot Jed through a window. That
was yesterday. He took me down to his place. I got away in the evenin’.
I saw the light here an’ I was afraid to come in till I saw you leave
this morning. I didn’t know who it was. If you’d only stayed home,
Bill!”

Young Bill put his arms around her.

“’S all right, Dolly,” he murmured. “I didn’t know. You said--you know,
you said----”

“Bill,” she lifted her face. “Don’t you know me yet, at all? Take me
away from here--take me away.”

Bill patted her shoulder. Her face was buried against his breast. He put
one hand on her forehead and tilted her head back--and kissed her.

“You killed him?” he whispered.

“I did,” she gritted. “I’ve carried that knife you made for me for six
months. I jabbed it into him the first time he tried to lay his hands on
me. Will they hang me, Bill?”

“Hang you! Good Lord!” Young Bill threw back his head and laughed--the
first time Charlie had ever heard him laugh like that, a laugh of sheer
relief and happiness. “They ought to give you a medal. Go get your
clothes together, Dolly. We’re goin’ away from here for good, you an’ me
together.”


[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September 7, 1927 issue
of _The Popular Magazine_]



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