Title: The Lure of the Dim Trails
Author: Bower, B. M.
Language: English
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THE LURE OF THE DIM TRAILS

By B. M. Bower



CHAPTER I. IN SEARCH OF THE WESTERN TONE

“What do you care, anyway?” asked Reeve-Howard philosophically. “It
isn’t as if you depended on the work for a living. Why worry over the
fact that a mere pastime fails to be financially a success. You don’t
need to write--”

“Neither do you need to slave over those dry-point things,” Thurston
retorted, in none the best humor with his comforter “You’ve an income
bigger than mine; yet you toil over Grecian-nosed women with untidy hair
as if each one meant a meal and a bed.”

“A meal and a bed--that’s good; you must think I live like a king.”

“And I notice you hate like the mischief to fail, even though.”

“Only I never have failed,” put in Reeve-Howard, with the amused
complacency born of much adulation.

Thurston kicked a foot-rest out of his way. “Well, I have. The fashion
now is for swashbuckling tales with a haze of powder smoke rising
to high heaven. The public taste runs to gore and more gore, and
kidnappings of beautiful maidens-bah!”

“Follow the fashion then--if you must write. Get out of your pink tea
and orchid atmosphere, and take your heroines out West--away out, beyond
the Mississippi, and let them be kidnapped. Or New Mexico would do.”

“New Mexico is also beyond the Mississippi, I believe,” Thurston hinted.

“Perhaps it is. What I mean is, write what the public wants, since you
don’t relish failure. Why don’t you do things about the plains? It
ought to be easy, and you were born out there somewhere. It should come
natural.”

“I have,” Thurston sighed. “My last rejection states that the local
color is weak and unconvincing. Hang the local color!” The foot-rest
suffered again.

Reeve-Howard was getting into his topcoat languidly, as he did
everything else. “The thing to do, then,” he drawled, “is to go out and
study up on it. Get in touch with that country, and your local color
will convince. Personally though, I like those little society skits you
do--”

“Skits!” exploded Thurston. “My last was a four-part serial. I never did
a skit in my life.”

“Beg pardon-which is more than you did after accusing my studies of
having untidy hair. Don’t look so glum, Phil. Go out and learn your
West; a month or so will put you up to date--and by Jove! I half envy
you the trip.”

That is what put the idea into Thurston’s head; and as Thurston’s ideas
generally bore fruit of one sort or another, he went out that very day
and ordered from his tailor a complete riding outfit, and because he
was a good customer the tailor consented to rush the work. It seemed to
Thurston, looking over cuts of the very latest styles in riding clothes,
that already he was breathing the atmosphere of the plains.

That night he stayed at home and dreamed, of the West. His memory,
coupled with what he had heard and idealized by his imagination,
conjured dim visions of what he had once known had known and forgotten;
of a land here men and conditions harked back to the raw foundations
of civilization; where wide plains flecked with sage-brush and ribboned
with faint, brown trails, spread away and away to a far sky-line. For
Phil Thurston was range-born, if not range-bred, His father had chosen
always to live out on the edge of things--out where the trails of men
are dim and far apart-and the silent prairie bequeaths a heritage of
distance-hunger to her sons.

While he brooded grew a keen longing to see again the little town
huddled under the bare, brown hills that shut out the world; to see the
gay-blanketed Indians who stole like painted shadows about the place,
and the broad river always hurrying away to the sunrise. He had been
afraid of the river and of the bare hills and the Indians. He felt that
his mother, also, had been afraid. He pictured again--and he picture was
blurred and indistinct-the day when strange men had brought his father
mysteriously home; men who were silent save for the shuffling of their
feet, and who carried their big hats awkwardly in their hands.

There had been a day of hushed voices and much weeping and gloom, and
he had been afraid to play. Then they had carried his father as
mysteriously away again, and his mother had hugged him close and cried
bitterly and long. The rest was blank. When one is only five, the
present quickly blurs what is past, and he wondered that, after
all these years, he should feel the grip of something very like
homesickness--and for something more than half forgotten. But though
he did not realize it, in his veins flowed the adventurous blood of his
father, and to it the dim trails were calling.

In four days he set his face eagerly toward the dun deserts and the
sage-brush gray.

At Chicago a man took the upper berth in Thurston’s section, and settled
into the seat with a deep sigh--presumably of thankfulness. Thurston,
with the quick eye of those who write, observed the whiteness of his
ungloved hands, the coppery tan of cheeks and throat, the clear keenness
of his eyes, and the four dimples in the crown of his soft, gray hat,
and recognized him as a fine specimen of the Western type of farmer,
returning home from the stockman’s Mecca. After that he went calmly back
to his magazine and forgot all about him.

Twenty miles out, the stranger leaned forward and tapped him lightly on
the knee. “Say, I hate to interrupt yuh,” he began in a whimsical drawl,
evidently characteristic of the man, “but I’d like to know where it is
I’ve seen yuh before.”

Thurston glanced up impersonally, hesitated between annoyance and a
natural desire to, be courteous, and replied that he had no memory of
any previous meeting.

“Mebby not,” admitted the other, and searched the face of Thurston with
his keen eyes. It came to Phil that they were also a bit wistful, but he
went unsympathetically back to his reading.

Five miles more and be touched Thurston again, apologetically yet
insistently. “Say,” he drawled, “ain’t your name Thurston? I’ll bet
a carload uh steers it is--Bud Thurston. And your home range is Fort
Benton.”

Phil stared and confessed to all but the “Bud.”

“That’s what me and your dad always called yuh,” the man asserted.
“Well, I’ll be hanged! But I knew it. I knew I’d run acrost yuh
somewheres. You’re the dead image uh your dad, Bill Thurston. And me and
Bill freighted together from Whoop-up to Benton along in the seventies.
Before yuh was born we was chums. I don’t reckon you’d remember me? Hank
Graves, that used to pack yuh around on his back, and fill yuh up on
dried prunes--when dried prunes was worth money? Yuh used to call ‘em
‘frumes,’ and--Why, it was me with your dad when the Indians pot-shot
him at Chimney Rock; and it was me helped your mother straighten things
up so she could pull out, back where she come from. She never took to
the West much. How is she? Dead? Too bad; she was a mighty fine woman,
your mother was.

“Well, I’ll-be-hanged! Bud Thurston little, tow-headed Bud that used to
holler for ‘frumes’ if he seen me coming a mile off. Doggone your measly
hide, where’s all them pink apurns yuh used to wear?” He leaned back and
laughed--a silent, inner convulsion of pure gladness.

Philip Thurston was, generally speaking, a conservative young man
and one slow to make friends; slower still to discard them. He was
astonished to feel a choky sensation in his throat and a stinging of
eyelids, and a leap in his blood. To be thus taken possession of by
a blunt-speaking stranger not at all in his class; to be addressed
as “Bud,” and informed that he once devoured dried prunes; to be told
“Doggone your measly hide” should have affronted him much. Instead, he
seemed to be swept mysteriously back into the primitive past, and to
feel akin to this stranger with the drawl and the keen eyes. It was the
blood of his father coming to its own.

From that hour the two were friends. Hank Graves, in his whimsical
drawl, told Phil things about his father that made his blood tingle
with pride; his father, whom he had almost forgotten, yet who had lived
bravely his life, daring where other men quailed, going steadfastly upon
his way when other men hesitated.

So, borne swiftly into the West they talked, and the time seemed short.
The train had long since been racing noisily over the silent prairies
spread invitingly with tender green--great, lonely, inscrutable, luring
men with a spell as sure and as strong as is the spell of the sea.

The train reeled across a trestle that spanned a deep, dry gash in the
earth. In the green bottom huddled a cluster of pygmy cattle and mounted
men; farther down were two white flakes of tents, like huge snowflakes
left unmelted in the green canyon.

“That’s the Lazy Eight--my outfit,” Graves informed Thurston with the
unconscious pride of possession, pointing a forefinger as they whirled
on. “I’ve got to get off, next station. Yuh want to remember, Bud, the
Lazy Eight’s your home from now on. We’ll make a cow-puncher of yuh in
no time; you’ve got it in yuh, or yuh wouldn’t look so much like your
dad. And you can write stories about us all yuh want--we won’t kick.
The way I’ve got the summer planned out, you’ll waller chin-deep in
material; all yuh got to do is foller the Lazy Eight through till
shipping time.”

Thurston had not intended learning to be a cow-puncher, or following
the Lazy Eight or any other hieroglyphic through ‘till shipping
time--whenever that was.

But facing Hank Graves, he had not the heart to tell him so, or that he
had planned to spend only a month--or six weeks at most--in the West,
gathering local color and perhaps a plot or two? and a few types.
Thurston was great on types.

The train slowed at a little station with a dismal red section house in
the immediate background and a red-fronted saloon close beside. “Here
we are,” cried Graves, “and I ain’t sorry; only I wisht you was going
to stop right now. But I’ll look for yuh in three or four days at the
outside. So-long, Bud. Remember, the Lazy Eight’s your hang-out.”



CHAPTER II. LOCAL COLOR IN THE RAW

For the rest of the way Thurston watched the green hills slide by--and
the greener hollows--and gave himself up to visions of Fort Benton;
visions of creaking bull-trains crawling slowly, like giant brown worms,
up and down the long hill; of many high-piled bales of buffalo hides
upon the river bank, and clamorous little steamers churning up against
the current; the Fort Benton that had, for many rushing miles, filled
and colored the speech of Hank Graves and stimulated his childish
half-memory.

But when he reached the place and wandered aimlessly about the streets,
the vision faded into half-resentful realization that these things were
no more forever. For the bull-trains, a roundup outfit clattered
noisily out of town and disappeared in an elusive dust-cloud; for the
gay-blanketed Indians slipping like painted shadows from view, stray
cow-boys galloped into town, slid from their saddles and clanked with
dragging rowels into the nearest saloon, or the post-office. Between
whiles the town cuddled luxuriously down in the deep little valley
and slept while the river, undisturbed by pompous steamers, murmured a
lullaby.

It was not the Fort Benton he had come far to see, so that on the second
day he went away up the long hill that shut out the world and, until the
east-bound train came from over the prairies, paced the depot platform
impatiently with never a vision to keep him company.

For a long time the gaze of Thurston clung fascinated to the wide
prairie land, feeling again the stir in his blood. Then, when a deep cut
shut from him the sight of the wilderness, he chanced to turn his head,
and looked straight into the clear, blue-gray eyes of a girl across
the aisle. Thurston considered himself immune from blue-gray--or any
other-eyes, so that he permitted himself to regard her calmly and
judicially, his mind reverting to the fact that he would need a heroine
to be kidnapped, and wondering if she would do. She was a Western girl,
he could tell that by the tan and by her various little departures from
the Eastern styles--such as doing her hair low rather than high. Where
he had been used to seeing the hair of woman piled high and skewered
with many pins, hers was brushed smoothly back-smoothly save for little,
irresponsible waves here and there. Thurston decided that the style was
becoming to her. He wondered if the fellow beside her were her brother;
and then reminded himself sagely that brothers do not, as a rule, devote
their time quite so assiduously to the entertainment of their sisters.
He could not stare at her forever, and so he gave over his speculations
and went back to the prairies.

Another hour, and Thurston was stiffing a yawn when the coaches bumped
sharply together and, with wheels screeching protest as the brakes
clutched them, the train, grinding protest in every joint, came, with a
final heavy jar, to a dead stop. Thurston thought it was a wreck, until
out ahead came the sharp crackling of rifles. A passenger behind him
leaned out of the window and a bullet shattered the glass above his
head; he drew back hastily.

Some one hurried through the front vestibule, the door was pushed
unceremoniously open and a man--a giant, he seemed to Thurston--stopped
just inside, glared down the length of the coach through slits in the
black cloth over his face and bawled, “Hands up!”

Thurston was so utterly surprised that his hands jerked themselves
involuntarily above his head, though he did not feel particularly
frightened; he was filled with a stupefied sort of curiosity to know
what would come next. The coach, so far as he could see, seemed filled
with uplifted, trembling hands, so that he did not feel ashamed of his
own. The man behind him put up his hands with the other--but one of them
held a revolver that barked savagely and unexpectedly close against the
car of Thurston. Thurston ducked. There was an echo from the front, and
the man behind, who risked so much on one shot, lurched into the aisle,
swaying uncertainly between the seats. He of the mask fired again,
viciously, and the other collapsed into a still, awkwardly huddled heap
on the floor. The revolver dropped from his fingers and struck against
Thurston’s foot, making him wince.

Thurston had never before seen death come to a man, and the very
suddenness of it unnerved him. All his faculties were numbed before that
terrible, pitiless form in the door, and the limp, dead body at his feet
in the aisle. He did not even remember that here was the savage
local color he had come far a-seeking. He quite forgot to improve the
opportunity by making mental note of all the little, convincing details,
as was his wont.

Presently he awoke to the realization of certain words spoken
insistently close beside him. He turned his eyes and saw that the girl,
her eyes staring straight before her, her slim, brown hands uplifted,
was yet commanding him imperiously, her voice holding to that murmuring
monotone more discreet than a whisper.

“The gun--drop down--and get it. He can’t see to shoot for the seat in
front. Get the gun. Get the gun!” was what she was saying.

Thurston looked at her helplessly, imploringly. In truth, he had never
fired a gun in all his peaceful life.

“The gun--get it--and shoot!” Her eyes moved quickly in a cautious,
side-long glance that commanded impatiently. Her straight eyebrows drew
together imperiously. Then, when he met her eyes with that same helpless
look, she said another word that hurt. It was “Coward!”

Thurston looked down at the gun, and at the huddled form. A tiny river
of blood was creeping toward him. Already it had reached his foot, and
his shoe was red along the sole. He moved his foot quickly away from it,
and shuddered.

“Coward!” murmured the girl contemptuously again, and a splotch of anger
showed under the tan of her cheek.

Thurston caught his breath and wondered if he could do it; he looked
toward the door and thought how far it was to send a bullet straight
when a man has never, in all his life, fired a gun. And without looking
he could see that horrible, red stream creeping toward him like some
monster in a nightmare. His flesh crimpled with physical repulsion, but
he meant to try; perhaps he could shoot the man in the mask, so that
there would be another huddled, lifeless Thing on the floor, and another
creeping red stream.

At that instant the tawny-haired young fellow beside the girl gathered
himself for a spring, flung himself headlong before her and into the
aisle; caught the dead man’s pistol from the floor and fired, seemingly
with one movement. Then he sprang up, still firing as fast as the
trigger could move. From the door came answer, shot for shot, and the
car was filled with the stifling odor of burnt powder. A woman screamed
hysterically.

Then a puff of cool, prairie breeze came in through the shattered window
behind Thurston, and the smoke-cloud lifted like a curtain blown upward
in the wind. The tawny-haired young fellow was walking coolly down the
aisle, the smoking revolver pointing like an accusing finger toward the
outlaw who lay stretched upon his face, his fingers twitching.

Outside, rifles were crackling like corn in a giant popper. Presently
it slackened to an occasional shot. A brakeman, followed by two coatless
mail-clerks with Winchesters, ran down the length of the train calling
out that there was no danger. The thud of their running feet, and the
wholesome mingling of their shouting struck sharply in the silence after
the shooting. One of the men swung up on the steps of the day coach and
came in.

“Hello, Park,” he cried to the tawny haired boy. “Got one, did yuh?
That’s good. We did, too got him alive. Think uh the nerve uh that
Wagner bunch! to go up against a train in broad daylight. Made an easy
getaway, too, except the feller we gloomed in the express car. How’s
this one? Dead?”

“No. I reckon he’ll get well enough to stretch a rope; he killed a man,
in here.” He motioned toward the huddled figure in the aisle. They came
together, lifted the dead man and carried him away to the baggage car.
A brakeman came with a cloth and wiped up the red pool, and Thurston
pressed his lips tightly together and turned away his head; he could not
remember when the sight of anything had made him so deathly sick. Once
he glanced slyly at the girl opposite, and saw that she was very white
under her tan, and that the hands in her lap were clasped tightly and
yet shook. But she met his eyes squarely, and Thurston did not look at
her again; he did not like the expression of her mouth.

News of the holdup had been telegraphed ahead, and all Shellanne--which
was not much of a crowd--gathered at the station to meet the train and
congratulate the heroes. Thurston alighted almost shamefacedly into the
midst of the loud-voiced commotion. While he was looking uncertainly
about him, wondering where to go and what to do, a voice he knew hailed
him with drawling welcome.

“Hello, Bud. Got back quicker than you expected, didn’t yuh? It’s lucky
I happened to be in town--yuh can ride out with me. Say, yuh got quite
a bunch uh local color for a story, didn’t yuh? You’ll be writing
blood-and-thunder for a month on the strength of this little episode, I
reckon.” his twinkling eyes teased, though his face was quite serious,
as was his voice.

She of the blue-gray eyes turned and measured Thurston with a
deliberate, leisurely glance, and her mouth still had that unpleasant
expression. Thurston colored guiltily, but Hank Graves lifted his hat
and called her Mona, and asked her if she wasn’t scared stiff, and if
she were home to stay. Then he beckoned to the tawny-haired fellow with
his finger, and winked at Mona--a proceeding which shocked Thurston
considerably.

“Mona--here, hold on a minute, can’t yuh? Mona, this is a friend uh
mine; Bud Thurston’s his name. He’s come out to study us up and round up
a hunch uh real Western atmosphere. He’s a story-writer. I used to whack
bulls all over the country with his father. Bud, this is Mona Stevens;
she ranges down close to the Lazy Eight, so the sooner yuh git
acquainted, the quicker.” He did not explain what would be the quicker,
and Thurston’s embarrassment was only aggravated by the introduction.

Miss Stevens gave him a chilly smile, the kind that is worse than none
at all and turned her back, thinly pretending that she heard her brother
calling her, which she did not. Her brother was loudly explaining what
would have happened if he had been on that train and had got a whack at
the robbers, and his sister was far from his mind.

Graves slapped the shoulder of the fellow they had called Park.
“You young devil, next time I leave the place for a week--yes, or
overnight--I’ll lock yuh up in the blacksmith shop. Have yuh got to be
Mona’s special escort, these days?”

“Wish I was,” Park retorted, unmoved.

“Different here--yuh ain’t much account, as it is. Bud, this here’s my
wagon-boss, Park Holloway; one of ‘em, that is. I’m going to turn yuh
over to him and let him wise yuh up. Say, you young bucks ought to get
along together pretty smooth. Your dads run buffalo together before
either of yuh was born. Well, let’s be moving--we ain’t home yet. Got a
war-bag, Bud?”

Late that night Thurston lay upon a home-made bed and listened to the
frogs croaking monotonously in the hollow behind the house, and to
the lone coyote which harped upon the subject of his wrongs away on a
distant hillside, and to the subdued snoring of Hank Graves in the room
beyond. He was trying to adjust himself to this new condition of things,
and the new condition refused utterly to be measured by his accepted
standard.

According to that standard, he should feel repulsed and annoyed by the
familiarity of strangers who persisted in calling him “Bud” without
taking the trouble to find out whether or not he liked it. And what
puzzled Thurston and put him all at sea was the consciousness that he
did like it, and that it struck familiarly upon his ears as something to
which he had been accustomed in the past.

Also, according to his well-ordered past, he should hate this raw life
and rawer country where could occur such brutal things as he had that
day witnessed. He should dislike a man like Park Holloway who, having
wounded a man unto death, had calmly dismissed the subject with the
regret that his aim had not been better, so that he could have saved the
county the expense of trying and hanging the fellow. Thurston was amazed
to find that, down in the inner man of him, he admired Park Holloway
exceedingly, and privately resolved to perfect himself in the use of
fire-arms, he who had been wont to deplore the thinly veneered savagery
of men who liked such things.

After much speculation he decided that Mona Stevens would not do for a
kidnapped heroine. He could not seem to “see” her in such a position,
and, besides, he told himself that such a type of girl did not attract
him at all. She had called him a coward--and why? simply because he,
straight from the trammels of civilization, had not been prepared to
meet the situation thrust upon him-which she had thrust upon him. She
had demanded of him something he had not the power to accomplish, and
she had called him a coward. And in his heart Thurston knew that it was
unjust, and that he was not a coward.



CHAPTER III. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Thurston, dressed immaculately in riding clothes of the latest English
cut, went airily down the stairs and discovered that he was not early,
as he had imagined. Seven o’clock, he had told himself proudly, was not
bad for a beginner; and he had smiled in anticipation of Hank Graves’
surprise which was fortunate, since he would otherwise have been cheated
of smiling at all. For Hank Graves, he learned from the cook, had eaten
breakfast at five and had left the ranch more than an hour before; the
men also were scattered to their work.

Properly humbled in spirit, he sat down to the kitchen table and ate his
belated breakfast, while the cook kneaded bread at the other end of the
same table and eyed Thurston with frank amusement. Thurston had never
before been conscious of feeling ill at ease in the presence of a
servant, and hurried through the meal so that he could escape into the
clear sunshine, feeling a bit foolish in the unaccustomed bagginess of
his riding breeches and the snugness of his leggings; for he had never
taken to outdoor sports, except as an onlooker from the shade of a grand
stand or piazza.

While he was debating the wisdom of writing a detailed description of
yesterday’s tragedy while it was still fresh in his mind and stowing it
away for future “color,” Park Holloway rode into the yard and on to the
stables. He nodded at Thurston and grinned without apparent cause, as
the cook had done. Thurston followed him to the corral and watched him
pull the saddle off his horse, and throw it carelessly to one side. It
looked cumbersome, that saddle; quite unlike the ones he had inspected
in the New York shops. He grasped the horn, lifted upon it and said,
“Jove!”

“Heavy, ain’t it?” Park laughed, and slipped the bridle down over the
ears of his horse and dismissed him with a slap on the rump. “Don’t yuh
like the looks of it?” he added indulgently.

Thurston, engaged in wondering what all those little strings were for,
felt the indulgence and straightened. “How should I know?” he retorted.
“Anyone can see that my ignorance is absolute. I expect you to laugh at
me, Mr. Holloway.”

“Call me Park,” said he of the tawny hair, and leaned against the fence
looking extremely boyish and utterly incapable of walking calmly down
upon a barking revolver and shooting as he went. “You’re bound to learn
all about saddles and what they’re made for,” he went on. “So long as
yuh don’t get swell-headed the first time yuh stick on a horse that
side-steps a little, or back down from a few hard knocks, you’ll be all
right.”

Thurston had not intended getting out and actually living the life he
had come to observe, but something got in his nerves and his blood and
bred an impulse to which he yielded without reserve. “Park, see
here,” he said eagerly. “Graves said he’d turn me over to you, so you
could--er--teach me wisdom. It’s deuced rough on you, but I hope you
won’t refuse to be bothered with me. I want to learn--everything. And I
want you to find fault like the mischief, and--er--knock me into shape,
if it’s possible.” He was very modest over his ignorance, and his voice
rang true.

Park studied him gravely. “Bud,” he said at last, “you’ll do. You’re
greener right now than a blue-joint meadow in June, but yuh got the
right stuff in yuh, and it’s a go with me. You come along with us after
that trail-herd, and you’ll get knocked into shape fast enough. Smoke?”

Thurston shook his head. “Not those.”

“I dunno I’m afraid yuh can’t be the real thing unless yuh fan your
lungs with cigarette smoke regular.” The twinkle belied him, though.
“Say, where did you pick them bloomers?”

“They were made in New York.” Thurston smiled in sickly fashion. He had
all along been uncomfortably aware of the sharp contrast between his own
modish attire and the somewhat disreputable leathern chaps of his host’s
foreman.

“Well,” commented Park, “you told me to find fault like the mischief,
and I’m going to call your bluff. This here’s Montana, recollect, and I
raise the long howl over them habiliments. The best thing you can do is
pace along to the house and discard before the boys get sight of yuh.
They’d queer yuh with the whole outfit, sure. Uh course,” he went on
soothingly when he saw the resentment in Thurston’s eyes, “I expect
they’re real stylish--back East--but the boys ain’t educated to stand
for anything like that; they’d likely tell yuh they set like the hide
on the hind legs of an elephant--which is a fact. I hate to say it, Kid,
but they sure do look like the devil.”

“So would you, in New York,” Thurston flung back at him.

“Why, sure. But this ain’t New York; this here’s the Lazy Eight corral,
and I’m doing yuh a favor. You wouldn’t like to have the boys shooting
holes through the slack, would yuh? You amble right along and get some
pants on--and when you’ve wised up some you’ll thank me a lot. I’m going
on a little jaunt down the creek, before dinner, and you might go along;
you’ll need to get hardened to the saddle anyway, before we start for
Billings, or you’ll do most uh riding on the mess-wagon.”

Thurston, albeit in resentful mood, went meekly and did as he was
commanded to do; and no man save Park and the cook ever glimpsed those
smart riding clothes of English cut.

“Now yuh look a heap more human,” was the way Park signified his
approval of the change. “Here’s a little horse that’s easy to ride and
dead gentle if yuh don’t spur him in the neck, which you ain’t liable
to do at present; and Hank says you can have this saddle for keeps. Hank
used to ride it, but he out-growed it and got one longer in the seat.
When we start for Billings to trail up them cattle, of course you’ll get
a string of your own to ride.”

“A string? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

“Yuh don’t savvy riding a string? A string, m’son, is ten or a dozen
saddle-horses that yuh ride turn about, and nobody else has got any
right to top one; every fellow has got his own string, yuh see.”

Thurston eyed his horse distrustfully. “I think,” he ventured, “one will
be enough for me. I’ll scarcely need a dozen.” The truth was that he
thought Park was laughing at him.

Park slid sidewise in the saddle and proceeded to roll another
cigarette. “I’d be willing to bet that by fall you’ll have a good-sized
string rode down to a whisper. You wait; wait till it gets in your
blood. Why, I’d die if you took me off the range. Wait till yuh set out
in the dark, on your horse, and count the stars and watch the big dipper
swing around towards morning, and listen to the cattle breathing close
by--sleeping while you ride around ‘em playing guardian angel over their
dreams. Wait till yuh get up at daybreak and are in the saddle with
the pink uh sunrise, and know you’ll sleep fifteen or twenty miles from
there that night; and yuh lay down at night with the smell of new grass
in your nostrils where your bed had bruised it.

“Why, Bud, if you’re a man, you’ll be plumb spoiled for your little
old East.” Then he swung back his feet and the horses broke into a lope
which jarred the unaccustomed frame of Thurston mightily, though he kept
the pace doggedly.

“I’ve got to go down to the Stevens place,” Park informed him. “You
met Mona yesterday--it was her come down on the train with me, yuh
remember.” Thurston did remember very distinctly. “Hank says yuh compose
stories. Is that right?”

Thurston’s mind came back from wondering how Mona Stevens’ mouth looked
when she was pleased with one, and he nodded.

“Well, there’s a lot in this country that ain’t ever been wrote about, I
guess; at least if it was I never read it, and I read considerable. But
the trouble is, them that know ain’t in the writing business, and them
that write don’t know. The way I’ve figured it, they set back East
somewhere and write it like they think maybe it is; and it’s a hell of a
job they make of it.”

Thurston, remembering the time when he, too, “set back East” and wrote
it like he thought maybe it was, blushed guiltily. He was thankful that
his stories of the West had, without exception, been rejected as of
little worth. He shuddered to think of one of them falling into the
hands of Park Holloway.

“I came out to learn, and I want to learn it thoroughly,” he said, in
the face of much physical discomfort. Just then the horses slowed for a
climb, and he breathed thanks. “In the first place,” he began again when
he had readjusted himself carefully in the saddle, “I wish you’d tell me
just where you are going with the wagons, and what you mean by trailing
a herd.”

“Why, I thought I said we were going to Billings,” Park answered,
surprised. “What we’re going to do when we get there is to receive a
shipment of cattle young steer that’s coming up from the Panhandle which
is a part uh Texas. And we trail ‘em up here and turn ‘em loose this
side the river. After that we’ll start the calf roundup. The Lazy Eight
runs two wagons, yuh know. I run one, and Deacon Smith runs the other;
we work together, though, most of the time. It makes quite a crew,
twenty-five or thirty men.”

“I didn’t know,” said Thurston dubiously, “that you ever shipped cattle
into this country. I supposed you shipped them out. Is Mr. Graves buying
some?”

“Hank? I guess yes! six thousand head uh yearlings and two year-olds,
this spring; some seasons it’s more. We get in young stock every year
and turn ‘em loose on the range till they’re ready to ship. It’s cheaper
than raising calves, yuh know. When yuh get to Billings, Bud, you’ll see
some cattle! Why, our bunch alone will make seven trains, and that ain’t
a commencement. Cattle’s cheap down South, this year, and seems like
everybody’s buying. Hank didn’t buy as much as some, because he runs
quite a bunch uh cows; we’ll brand six or seven thousand calves this
spring. Hank sure knows how to rake in the coin.”

Thurston agreed as politely as he could for the jolting. They had
again struck the level and seven miles, at Park’s usual pace, was
heartbreaking to a man not accustomed to the saddle. Thurston had
written, just before leaving home, a musical bit of verse born of his
luring dreams, about “the joy of speeding fleetly where the grassland
meets the sky,” and he was gritting his teeth now over the idiotic
lines.

When they reached the ranch and Mona’s mother came to the door and
invited them in, he declined almost rudely, for he had a feeling that
once out of the saddle he would have difficulty in getting into it
again. Besides, Mona was not at home, according to her mother.

So they did not tarry, and Thurston reached the Lazy Eight alive, but
with the glamour quite gone from his West. If he had not been the son of
his father, he would have taken the first train which pointed its
nose to the East, and he would never again have essayed the writing
of Western stories or musical verse which sung the joys of galloping
blithely off to the sky-line. He had just been galloping off to a
sky-line that was always just before and he had not been blithe; nor did
the memory of it charm. Of a truth, the very thought of things Western
made him swear mild, city-bred oaths.

He choked back his awe of the cook and asked him, quite humbly, what
was good to take the soreness from one’s muscles; afterward he had crept
painfully up the stairs, clasping to his bosom a beer bottle filled with
pungent, home-made liniment which the cook had gravely declared “out uh
sight for saddle-galls.”

Hank Graves, when he heard the story, with artistic touches from the
cook, slapped his thigh and laughed one of his soundless chuckles. “The
son-of-a-gun! He’s the right stuff. Never whined, eh? I knew it. He’s
his dad over again, from the ground up.” And loved him the better.



CHAPTER IV. THE TRAIL-HERD

Thurston tucked the bulb of his camera down beside the bellows and
closed the box with a snap. “I wonder what old Reeve would say to that
view,” he mused aloud.

“Old who?”

“Oh, a fellow back in New York. Jove! he’d throw up his dry-point heads
and take to oils and landscapes if he could see this.”

The “this” was a panoramic view of the town and surrounding valley of
Billings. The day was sunlit and still, and far objects stood up with
sharp outlines in the clear atmosphere. Here and there the white tents
of waiting trail-outfits splotched the bright green of the prairie.
Horsemen galloped to and from the town at top speed, and a long, grimy
red stock train had just snorted out on a siding by the stockyards where
the bellowing of thirsty cattle came faintly like the roar of pounding
surf in the distance.

Thurston--quite a different Thurston from the trim, pale young man who
had followed the lure of the West two weeks before--drew a long breath
and looked out over the hurrying waters of the Yellowstone. It was good
to be alive and young, and to live the tented life of the plains; it
was good even to be “speeding fleetly where the grassland meets the sky
“--for two weeks in the saddle had changed considerably his view-point.
He turned again to the dust and roar of the stockyards a mile or so
away.

“Perhaps,” he remarked hopefully, “the next train will be ours.” Strange
how soon a man may identify himself with new conditions and new aims. He
had come West to look upon the life from the outside, and now his chief
thought was of the coming steers, which he referred to unblushingly as
“our cattle.” Such is the spell of the range.

“Let’s ride on over, Bud,” Park proposed. “That’s likely the Circle Bar
shipment. Their bunch comes from the same place ours does, and I want to
see how they stack up.”

Thurston agreed and went to saddle up. He had mastered the art of
saddling and could, on lucky days and when he was in what he called
“form,” rope the horse he wanted; to say nothing of the times when his
loop settled unexpectedly over the wrong victim. Park Holloway, for
instance, who once got it neatly under his chin, much to his disgust and
the astonishment of Thurston.

“I’m going to take my Kodak,” said he. “I like to watch them unload, and
I can get some good pictures, with this sunlight.”

“When you’ve hollered ‘em up and down the chutes as many times as I
have,” Park told him, “yuh won’t need no pictures to help yuh remember
what it’s like.”

It was an old story with Park, and Thurston’s enthusiasm struck him as
a bit funny. He perched upon a corner of the fence out of the way, and
smoked cigarettes while he watched the cattle and shouted pleasantries
to the men who prodded and swore and gesticulated at the wild-eyed
huddle in the pens. Soon his turn would come, but just now he was
content to look on and take his ease.

“For the life of me,” cried Thurston, sidling gingerly over to him, “I
can’t see where they all come from. For two days these yards have never
been empty. The country will soon be one vast herd.”

“Two days--huh! this thing’ll go on for weeks, m’son. And after all is
over, you’ll wonder where the dickens they all went to. Montana is some
bigger than you realize, I guess. And next fall, when shipping starts,
you’ll think you’re seeing raw porterhouse steaks for the whole world.
Let’s drift out uh this dust; you’ll have time to get a carload uh
pictures before our bunch rolls in.”

As a matter of fact, it was two weeks before the Lazy Eight consignment
arrived. Thurston haunted the stockyards with his Kodak, but after the
first two or three days he took no pictures. For every day was but a
repetition of those that had gone before: a great, grimy engine shunting
cars back and forth on the siding; an endless stream of weary, young
cattle flowing down the steep chutes into the pens, from the pens to the
branding chutes, where they were burned deep with the mark of their new
owners; then out through the great gate, crowding, pushing, wild to flee
from restraint, yet held in and guided by mounted cowboys; out upon the
green prairie where they could feast once more upon sweet grasses and
drink their fill from the river of clear, mountain water; out upon the
weary march of the trail, on and on for long days until some boundary
which their drivers hailed with joy was passed, and they were free at
last to roam at will over the wind-brushed range land; to lie down in
some cool, sweet-scented swale and chew their cuds in peace.

Two weeks, and then came a telegram for Park. In the reading of it he
shuffled off his attitude of boyish irresponsibility and became in a
breath the cool, business-like leader of men. Holding the envelope still
in his hand he sought out Thurston, who was practicing with a rope. As
Park approached him he whirled the noose and cast it neatly over the
peak of the night-hawk’s teepee.

“Good shot,” Park encouraged, “but I’d advise yuh to take another
target. You’ll have the tent down over Scotty’s ears, and then you’ll
think yuh stirred up a mess uh hornets.

“Say, Bud, our cattle are coming, and I’m going to be short uh men. If
you’d like a job I’ll take yuh on, and take chances on licking yuh into
shape. Maybe the wages won’t appeal to yuh, but I’m willing to throw in
heaps uh valuable experience that won’t cost yuh a cent.” He lowered an
eyelid toward the cook-tent, although no one was visible.

Thurston studied the matter while he coiled his rope, and no longer.
Secretly he had wanted all along to be a part of the life instead of an
onlooker. “I’ll take the job, Park--if you think I can hold it down.”
 The speech would doubtless have astonished Reeve-Howard in more ways
than one; but Reeve-Howard was already a part of the past in Thurston’s
mind. He was for living the present.

“Well,” Park retorted, “it’ll be your own funeral if yuh get fired.
Better stake yourself to a pair uh chaps; you’ll need ‘em on the trip.”

“Also a large, rainbow-hued silk handkerchief if I want to look the
part,” Thurston bantered.

“If yuh don’t want your darned neck blistered, yuh mean,” Park flung
over his shoulders. “Your wages and schooling start in to-morrow at
sunup.”

It was early in the morning when the first train arrived, hungry,
thirsty, tired, bawling a general protest against fate and man’s mode
of travel. Thurston, with a long pole in his hand, stood on the narrow
plank near the top of a chute wall and prodded vaguely at an endless,
moving incline of backs. Incidentally he took his cue from his
neighbors, and shouted till his voice was a croak-though he could
not see that he accomplished anything either by his prodding or his
shouting.

Below him surged the sea of hide and horns which was barely suggestive
of the animals as individuals. Out in the corrals the dust-cloud hung
low, just as it had hovered every day for more than two weeks; just as
it would hover every day for two weeks longer. Across the yards near the
big, outer gate Deacon Smith’s crew was already beginning to brand. The
first train was barely unloaded when the second trailed in and out
on the siding; and so the third came also. Then came a lull, for the
consignment had been split in two and the second section was several
hours behind the first.

Thurston rode out to camp, aching with the strain and ravenously hungry,
after toiling with his muscles for the first time in his life; for his
had been days of physical ease. He had yet to learn the art of working
so that every movement counted something accomplished, as did the
others; besides, he had been in constant fear of losing his hold on the
fence and plunging headlong amongst the trampling hoofs below, a fate
that he shuddered to contemplate. He did not, however, mention that
fear, or his muscle ache, to any man; he might be green, but he was not
the man to whine.

When he went back into the dust and roar, Park ordered him curtly to
tend the branding fire, since both crews would brand that afternoon and
get the corrals cleared for the next shipment. Thurston thanked Park
mentally; tending branding-fire sounded very much like child’s play.

Soon the gray dust-cloud took on a shade of blue in places where the
smoke from the fires cut through; a new tang smote the nostrils: the
rank odor of burning hair and searing hides; a new note crept into the
clamoring roar: the low-keyed blat of pain and fright.

Thurston turned away his head from the sight and the smell, and piled
on wood until Park stopped him with. “Say, Bud, we ain’t celebrating any
election! It ain’t a bonfire we want, it’s heat; just keep her going and
save wood all yuh can.” After an hour of fire-tending Thurston decided
that there were things more wearisome than “hollering ‘em down the
chutes.” His eyes were smarting intolerably with smoke and heat, and the
smell of the branding was not nice; but through the long afternoon he
stuck to the work, shrewdly guessing that the others were not having any
fun either. Park and “the Deacon” worked as hard as any, branding the
steers as they were squeezed, one by one, fast in the little branding
chutes. The setting sun shone redly through the smoke before Thurston
was free to kick the half-burnt sticks apart and pour water upon them as
directed by Park.

“Think yuh earned your little old dollar and thirty three cents, Bud?”
 Park asked him. And Thurston smiled a tired, sooty smile that seemed all
teeth.

“I hope so; at any rate, I have a deep, inner knowledge of the joys of
branding cattle.”

“Wait ‘till yuh burn Lazy Eights on wriggling, blatting calves for two
or three hours at a stretch before yuh talk about the joys uh branding.”
 Park rubbed eloquently his aching biceps.

At dusk Thurston crept into his blankets, feeling that he would like the
night to be at least thirty six hours long. He was just settling into
a luxurious, leather-upholstered dream chair preparatory to telling
Reeve-Howard his Western experiences when Park’s voice bellowed into the
tent:

“Roll out, boys--we got a train pulling in!”

There was hurried dressing in the dark of the bed-tent, hasty mounting,
and a hastier ride through the cool night air. There were long hours at
the chutes, prodding down at a wavering line of moving shadows, while
the “big dipper” hung bright in the sky and lighted lanterns bobbed back
and forth along the train waving signals to one another. At intervals
Park’s voice cut crisply through the turmoil, giving orders to men whom
he could not see.

The east was lightening to a pale yellow when the men climbed at last
into their saddles and galloped out to camp for a hurried breakfast.
Thurston had been comforting his aching body with the promise of rest
and sleep; but three thousand cattle were milling impatiently in the
stockyards, so presently he found himself fanning a sickly little blaze
with his hat while he endeavored to keep the smoke from his tired eyes.
Of a truth, Reeve-Howard would have stared mightily at sight of him.

Once Park, passing by, smiled down upon him grimly. “Here’s where yuh
get the real thing in local color,” he taunted, but Thurston was
too busy to answer. The stress of living had dimmed his eye for the
picturesque.

That night, one Philip Thurston slept as sleeps the dead. But he awoke
with the others and thanked the Lord there were no more cattle to unload
and brand.

When he went out on day-herd that afternoon he fancied that he was
getting into the midst of things and taking his place with the veterans.
He would have been filled with resentment had he suspected the truth:
that Park carefully eased those first days of his novitiate. That was
why none of the night-guarding fell to him until they had left Billings
many miles behind them.



CHAPTER V. THE STORM

The third night he was detailed to stand with Bob MacGregor on the
middle guard, which lasts from eleven o’clock until two. The outfit had
camped near the head of a long, shallow basin that had a creek running
through; down the winding banks of it lay the white-tented camps of
seven other trail-herds, the cattle making great brown blotches against
the green at sundown. Thurston hoped they would all be there in the
morning when the sun came up, so that he could get a picture.

“Aw, they’ll be miles away by then,” Bob assured him unfeelingly. “By
the signs, you can take snap-shots by lightning in another hour. Got
your slicker, Bud?”

Thurston said he hadn’t, and Bob shook his head prophetically. “You’ll
sure wish yuh had it before yuh hit camp again; when yuh get wise,
you’ll ride with your slicker behind the cantle, rain or shine. They’ll
need singing to, to-night.”

Thurston prudently kept silent, since he knew nothing whatever about it,
and Bob gave him minute directions about riding his rounds, and how to
turn a stray animal back into the herd without disturbing the others.

The man they relieved met them silently and rode away to camp. Off
to the right an animal coughed, and a black shape moved out from the
shadows.

Bob swung towards it, and the shape melted again into the splotch of
shade which was the sleeping herd. He motioned to the left. “Yuh can go
that way; and yuh want to sing something, or whistle, so they’ll know
what yuh are.” His tone was subdued, as it had not been before. He
seemed to drift away into the darkness, and soon his voice rose, away
across the herd, singing. As he drew nearer Thurston caught the words,
at first disjointed and indistinct, then plainer as they met. It was a
song he had never heard before, because its first popularity had swept
far below his social plane.

     “She’s o-only a bird in a gil-ded cage,
     A beautiful sight to see-e-e;
     You may think she seems ha-a-aappy and free from ca-a-re..”

The singer passed on and away, and only the high notes floated across to
Thurston, who whistled softly under his breath while he listened. Then,
as they neared again on the second round, the words came pensively:

     “Her beauty was so-o-old
     For an old man’s go-o-old, She’s a bird in a gilded ca-a-age.”

Thurston rode slowly like one in a dream, and the lure of the range-land
was strong upon him. The deep breathing of three thousand sleeping
cattle; the strong, animal odor; the black night which grew each moment
blacker, and the rhythmic ebb and flow of the clear, untrained voice
of a cowboy singing to his charge. If he could put it into words; if
he could but picture the broody stillness, with frogs cr-ekk, er-ekking
along the reedy creek-bank and a coyote yapping weirdly upon a distant
hilltop! From the southwest came mutterings half-defiant and ominous.
A breeze whispered something to the grasses as it crept away down the
valley.

     “I stood in a church-yard just at ee-eve,
     While the sunset adorned the west.”

It was Bob, drawing close out of the night. “You’re doing fine, Kid;
keep her a-going,” he commended, in an undertone as he passed, and
Thurston moistened his unaccustomed lips and began industriously
whistling “The Heart Bowed Down,” and from that jumped to Faust. Fifteen
minutes exhausted his memory of the whistleable parts, and he was not
given to tiresome repetitions. He stopped for a moment, and Bob’s voice
chanted admonishingly from somewhere, “Keep her a-go-o-ing, Bud, old
boy!” So Thurston took breath and began on “The Holy City,” and came
near laughing at the incongruity of the song; only he remembered that he
must not frighten the cattle, and checked the impulse.

“Say,” Bob began when he came near enough, “do yuh know the words uh
that piece? It’s a peach; I wisht you’d sing it.” He rode on, still
humming the woes of the lady who married for gold.

Thurston obeyed while the high-piled thunder-heads rumbled deep
accompaniment, like the resonant lower tones of a bass viol.

     “Last night I lay a-sleeping, there came a dream so fair;
     I stood in old Jerusalem, beside the temple there.”

A steer stepped restlessly out of the herd, and Thurston’s horse,
trained to the work, of his own accord turned him gently back.

     “I heard the children singing; and ever as they sang,
     Me thought the voice of angels from heaven in answer rang.”

From the west the thunder boomed, drowning the words in its
deep-throated growl.

     “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lift up your gates and sing.”

“Hit her up a little faster, Bud, or we’ll lose some. They’re getting on
their feet with that thunder.”

Sunfish, in answer to Thurston’s touch on the reins, quickened to a
trot. The joggling was not conducive to the best vocal expression, but
the singer persevered:

     “Hosanna in the highest,
     Hosanna to your King!”

Flash! the lightning cut through the storm-clouds, and Bob, who had
contented himself with a subdued whistling while he listened, took up
the refrain:

     “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”

It was as if a battery of heavy field pieces boomed overhead. The entire
herd was on its feet and stood close-huddled, their tails to the coming
storm. Now the horses were loping steadily in their endless circling--a
pace they could hold for hours if need be. For one blinding instant
Thurston saw far down the valley; then the black curtain dropped as
suddenly as it had lifted.

“Keep a-hollering, Bud!” came the command, and after it Bob’s voice
trilled high above the thunder-growl:

     “Hosanna in the high-est.
     Hosanna to your King!”

A strange thrill of excitement came to Thurston. It was all new to him;
for his life had been sheltered from the rages of nature. He had never
before been out under the night sky when it was threatening as now. He
flinched when came an ear-splitting crash that once again lifted the
black curtain and showed him, white-lighted, the plain. In the dark that
followed came a rhythmic thud of hoofs far up the creek, and the rattle
of living castanets. Sunfish threw up his head and listened, muscles
a-quiver.

“There’s a bunch a-running,” called Bob from across the frightened herd.
“If they hit us, give Sunfish his head, he’s been there before--and keep
on the outside!”

Thurston yelled “All right!” but the pounding roar of the stampede
drowned his voice. A whirlwind of frenzied steers bore down upon
him--twenty-five hundred Panhandle two-year-olds, though he did not know
it then, his mind was all a daze, with one sentence zigzagging through
it like the lightning over his head, “Give Sunfish his head, and keep on
the outside!”

That was what saved him, for he had the sense to obey. After a few
minutes of breathless racing, with a roar as of breakers in his ears and
the crackle of clashing horns and the gleaming of rolling eyeballs close
upon his horse’s heels, he found himself washed high and dry, as it
were, while the tumult swept by. Presently he was galloping along behind
and wondering dully how he got there, though perhaps Sunfish knew well
enough.

In his story of the West--the one that had failed to be convincing--he
had in his ignorance described a stampede, and it had not been in the
least like this one. He blushed at the memory, and wondered if he should
ever again feel qualified to write of these things.

Great drops of rain pounded him on the back as he rode--chill drops,
that went to the skin. He thought of his new canary-colored slicker in
the bed-tent, and before he knew it swore just as any of the other
men would have done under similar provocation; it was the first real,
able-bodied oath he had ever uttered. He was becoming assimilated with
the raw conditions of life.

He heard a man’s voice calling to him, and distinguished the dim shape
of a rider close by. He shouted that password of the range, “Hello!”

“What outfit is this?” the man cried again.

“The Lazy Eight!” snapped Thurston, sure that the other had come with
the stampede. Then, feeling the anger of temporary authority, “What in
hell are you up to, letting your cattle run?” If Park could have heard
him say that for Reeve-Howard!

Down the long length of the valley they swept, gathering to themselves
other herds and other riders as incensed as were themselves. It is not
pretty work, nor amusing, to gallop madly in the wake of a stampede at
night, keeping up the stragglers and taking the chance of a broken neck
with the rain to make matters worse.

Bob MacGregor sought Thurston with much shouting, and having found him
they rode side by side. And always the thunder boomed overhead, and by
the lightning flashes they glimpsed the turbulent sea of cattle fleeing,
they knew not where or why, with blind fear crowding their heels.

The noise of it roused the camps as they thundered by; men rose up,
peered out from bed-tents as the stampede swept past, cursed the delay
it would probably make, hoped none of the boys got hurt, and thanked the
Lord the tents were pitched close to the creek and out of the track of
the maddened herds.

Then they went back to bed to wait philosophically for daylight.

When Sunfish, between flashes, stumbled into a shallow washout, and sent
Thurston sailing unbeautifully over his head, Bob pulled up and slid off
his horse in a hurry.

“Yuh hurt, Bud?” he cried anxiously, bending over him. For Thurston,
from the very frankness of his verdant ignorance, had won for himself
the indulgent protectiveness of the whole outfit; not a man but watched
unobtrusively over his welfare--and Bob MacGregor went farther and
loved him whole-heartedly. His voice, when he spoke, was unequivocally
frightened.

Thurston sat up and wiped a handful of mud off his face; if it had not
been so dark Bob would have shouted at the spectacle. “I’m ‘kinda sorter
shuck up like,”’ he quoted ruefully. “And my nose is skinned, thank you.
Where’s that devil of a horse?”

Bob stood over him and grinned. “My, I’m surprised at yuh, Bud! What
would your Sunday-school teacher say if she heard yuh? Anyway, yuh ain’t
got any call to cuss Sunfish; he ain’t to blame. He’s used to fellows
that can ride.”

“Shut up!” Thurston commanded inelegantly. “I’d like to see you ride a
horse when he’s upside down!”

“Aw, come on,” urged Bob, giving up the argument. “We’ll be plumb lost
from the herd if we don’t hustle.”

They got into their saddles again and went on, riding by sound and the
rare glimpses the lightning gave them as it flared through the storm
away to the east.

“Wet?” Bob sung out sympathetically from the streaming shelter of his
slicker. Thurston, wriggling away from his soaked clothing, grunted a
sarcastic negative.

The cattle were drifting now before the storm which had settled to a
monotonous downpour. The riders--two or three men for every herd that
had joined in the panic--circled, a veritable picket line without the
password. There would be no relief ride out to them that night, and they
knew it and settled to the long wait for morning.

Thurston took up his station next to Bob; rode until he met the next
man, and then retraced his steps till he faced Bob again; rode until the
world seemed unreal and far away, with nothing left but the night and
the riding back and forth on his beat, and the rain that oozed through
his clothes and trickled uncomfortably down inside his collar. He lost
all count of time, and was startled when at last came gray dawn.

As the light grew brighter his eyes widened and forgot their
sleep-hunger; he had not thought it would be like this. He was riding
part way across one end of a herd larger than his imagination had ever
pictured; three thousand cattle had seemed to him a multitude--yet
here were more than twenty thousand, wet, draggled, their backs humped
miserably from the rain which but a half hour since had ceased. He was
still gazing and wondering when Park rode up to him.

“Lord! Bud, you’re a sight! Did the bunch walk over yuh?” he greeted.

“No, only Sunfish,” snapped Thurston crossly. Time was when Philip
Thurston would not have answered any man abruptly, however great the
provocation. He was only lately getting down to the real, elemental man
of him; to the son of Bill Thurston, bull-whacker, prospector,
follower of dim trails. He rode silently back to camp with Bob, ate
his breakfast, got into dry clothes and went out and tied his slicker
deliberately and securely behind the cantle of his saddle, though the
sun was shining straight into his eyes and the sky fairly twinkled, it
was so clean of clouds.

Bob watched him with eyes that laughed. “My, you’re an ambitious
son-of-a-gun,” he chuckled. “And you’ve got the slicker question settled
in your mind, I see; yuh learn easy; it takes two or three soakings to
learn some folks.”

“We’ve got to go back and help with the herd, haven’t we?” Thurston
asked. “The horses are all out.”

“Yep. They’ll stay out, too, till noon, m’son. We hike to bed, if
anybody should ask yuh.”

So it was not till after dinner that he rode back to the great
herd--with his Kodak in his pocket--to find the cattle split up
into several bunches. The riders at once went to work separating the
different brands. He was too green a hand to do anything but help hold
the “cut,” and that was so much like ordinary herd-ing that his interest
flagged. He wanted, more than anything, to ride into the bunch and
single out a Lazy Eight steer, skillfully hazing him down the slope to
the cut, as he saw the others do.

Bob told him it was the biggest mix-up he had ever seen, and Bob had
ridden the range in every State where beef grows wild. He was in the
thickest of the huddle, was Bob, working as if he did not know the
meaning of fatigue. Thurston, watching him thread his way in and out of
the restless, milling herd, only to reappear unexpectedly at the edge
with a steer just before the nose of his horse, rush it out from among
the others--wheeling, darting this way and that, as it tried to dodge
back, and always coming off victor, wondered if he could ever learn to
do it.

Being in pessimistic mood, he told himself that he would probably always
remain a greenhorn, to be borne with and coached and given boy’s work to
do; all because he had been cheated of his legacy of the dim trails and
forced to grow up in a city, hedged about all his life by artificial
conditions, his conscience wedded to convention.



CHAPTER VI. THE BIG DIVIDE

The long drive was nearly over. Even Thurston’s eyes brightened when
he saw, away upon the sky-line, the hills that squatted behind the home
ranch of the Lazy Eight. The past month had been one of rapid living
under new conditions, and at sight of them it seemed only a few days
since he had first glimpsed that broken line of hills and the bachelor
household in the coulee below.

As the travel-weary herd swung down the long hill into the valley of the
Milk River, stepping out briskly as they sighted the cool water in the
near distance, the past month dropped away from Thurston, and what had
gone just before came back fresh as the happenings of the morning.
There was the Stevens ranch, a scant half mile away from where the tents
already gleamed on their last camp of the long trail; the smoke from
the cook-tent telling of savory meats and puddings, the bare thought of
which made one hurry his horse.

His eyes dwelt longest, however, upon the Stevens house half hidden
among the giant cottonwoods, and he wondered if Mona would still smile
at him with that unpleasant uplift at the corner of her red mouth. He
would take care that she did not get the chance to smile at him in any
fashion, he told himself with decision.

He wondered if those train-robbers had been captured, and if the one
Park wounded was still alive. He shivered when he thought of the dead
man in the aisle, and hoped he would never witness another death;
involuntarily he glanced down at his right stirrup, half expecting to
see his boot red with human blood. It was not nice to remember that
scene, and he gave his shoulders an impatient hitch and tried to think
of something else.

Mindful of his vow, he had bought a gun in Billings, but he had not yet
learned to hit anything he aimed at; for firearms are hushed in roundup
camps, except when dire necessity breeds a law of its own. Range cattle
do not take kindly to the popping of pistols. So Thurston’s revolver was
yet unstained with powder grime, and was packed away inside his bed.
He was promising his pride that he would go up on the hill, back of the
Lazy Eight corrals, and shoot until even Mona Stevens must respect his
marksmanship, when Park galloped back to him--“The world has moved some
while we was gone,” he announced in the tone of one who has news to tell
and enjoys thoroughly the telling. “Yuh mind the fellow I laid out in
the hold-up? He got all right again, and they stuck him in jail along
with another one old Lauman, the sheriff, glommed a week ago. Well, they
didn’t do a thing last night but knock a deputy in the head, annex his
gun, swipe a Winchester and a box uh shells out uh the office and hit
the high places. Old Lauman is hot on their trail, but he ain’t met
up with ‘em yet, that anybody’s heard. When he does, there’ll sure be
something doing! They say the deputy’s about all in; they smashed his
skull with a big iron poker.”

“I wish I could handle a gun,” Thurston said between his teeth. “I’d
go after them myself. I wish I’d been left to grow up out here where I
belong. I’m all West but the training--and I never knew it till a month
ago! I ought to ride and rope and shoot with the best of you, and I
can’t do a thing. All I know is books. I can criticize an opera and a
new play, and I’m considered something of an authority on clothes, but I
can’t shoot.”

“Aw, go easy,” Park laughed at him. “What if yuh can’t do the
double-roll? Riding and shooting and roping’s all right--we couldn’t
very well get along without them accomplishments. But that’s all they
are; just accomplishments. We know a man when we see him, and it don’t
matter whether he can ride a bronk straight up, or don’t know which way
a saddle sets on a horse. If he’s a man he gets as square a deal as we
can give him.” Park reached for his cigarette book. “And as for hunting
outlaws,” he finished, “we’ve got old Lauman paid to do that. And he’s
dead onto his job, you bet; when he goes out after a man he comes pretty
near getting him, m’son. But I sure do wish I’d killed that jasper while
I was about it; it would have saved Lauman a lot uh hard riding.”

Thurston could scarcely explain to Park that his desire to hunt
train-robbers was born of a half-defiant wish to vindicate to Mona
Stevens his courage, and so he said nothing at all. He wondered if Park
had heard her whisper, that day, and knew how he had failed to obey
her commands; and if he had heard her call him a coward. He had often
wondered that, but Park had a way of keeping things to himself, and
Thurston could never quite bring himself to open the subject boldly. At
any rate, if Park had heard, he hoped that he understood how it was and
did not secretly despise him for it. Women, he told himself bitterly,
are never quite just.

After the four o’clock supper he and Bob MacGregor went up the valley
to relieve the men on herd. There was one nice thing about Park as a
foreman: he tried to pair off his crew according to their congeniality.
That was why Thurston usually stood guard with Bob, whom he liked better
than any of the others-always excepting Park himself.

“I brought my gun along,” Bob told him apologetically when they were
left to themselves. “It’s a habit I’ve got when I know there’s bad men
rampaging around the country. The boys kinda gave me the laugh when
they seen me haul it out uh my war bag, but I just told ‘em to go to
thunder.”

“Do you think those--”

“Naw. Uh course not. I just pack it on general principles, same as an
old woman packs her umbrella.”

“Say, this is dead easy! The bunch is pretty well broke, ain’t it? I’m
sure glad to see old Milk River again; this here trailing cattle gets
plumb monotonous.” He got down and settled his back comfortably against
a rock. Below them spread the herd, feeding quietly. “Yes, sir, this is
sure a snap,” he repeated, after he had made himself a smoke. “They’s
only two ways a bunch could drift if they wanted to which they don’t-up
the river, or down. This hill’s a little too steep for ‘em to tackle
unless they was crowded hard. Good feed here, too.

“Too bad yuh don’t smoke, Bud. There’s nothing like a good, smooth rock
to your back and a cigarette in your face, on a nice, lazy day like
this. It’s the only kind uh day-herding I got any use for.”

“I’ll take the rock to my back, if you’ll just slide along and make
room,” Thurston laughed. “I don’t hanker for a cigarette, but I do wish
I had my Kodak.”

“Aw, t’ell with your Kodak!” Bob snorted. “Can’t yuh carry this layout
in your head? I’ve got a picture gallery in mine that I wouldn’t trade
for a farm; I don’t need no Kodak in mine, thankye. You just let this
here view soak into your system, Bud, where yuh can’t lose it.”

Thurston did. Long after he could close his eyes and see it in every
detail; the long, green slope with hundreds of cattle loitering in the
rank grass-growth; the winding sweep of the river and the green, rolling
hills beyond; and Bob leaning against the rock beside him, smoking
luxuriously with half-closed eyes, while their horses dozed with
drooping heads a rein-length away.

“Say, Bud,” Bob’s voice drawled sleepily, “I wisht you’d sing that
Jerusalem song. I want to learn the words to it; I’m plumb stuck on that
piece. It’s different from the general run uh songs, don’t yuh think?
Most of ‘em’s about your old home that yuh left in boyhood’s happy days,
and go back to find your girl dead and sleeping in a little church-yard
or else it’s your mother; or your girl marries the other man and you get
it handed to yuh right along--and they make a fellow kinda sick to his
stomach when he’s got to sing ‘em two or three hours at a stretch on
night-guard, just because he’s plumb ignorant of anything better. This
here Jerusalem one sounds kinda grand, and--the cattle seems to like it,
too, for a change.”

“The composer would feel flattered if he heard that,” Thurston laughed.
He wanted to be left alone to day-dream and watch the clouds trail
lazily across to meet the hills; and there was an embryonic poem
forming, phrase by phrase, in his mind. But he couldn’t refuse Bob
anything, so he sat a bit straighter and cleared his throat. He sang
well--well enough indeed to be sought after at informal affairs among
his set at home. When he came to the refrain Bob took his cigarette from
between his lips and held it in his fingers while he joined his voice
lustily to Thurston’s:

     “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
     Lift up your gates and sing
     Hosanna in the high-est.
     Hosanna to your King!”

The near cattle lifted their heads to stare stupidly a moment, then
moved a few steps slowly, nosing for the sweetest grass-tufts. The
horses shifted their weight, resting one leg with the hoof barely
touching the earth, twitched their ears at the flies and slept again.

     “And then me thought my dream was changed,
     The streets no longer rang,
     Hushed were the glad Hosannas
     The little children sang--”

Tamale lifted his head and gazed inquiringly up the hill; but Bob was
not observant of signs just then. He was Striving with his recreant
memory for the words that came after:

     “The sun grew dark with mystery,
     The morn was cold and still,
     As the shadow of a cross arose
     Upon a lonely hill.”

Tamale stirred restlessly with head uplifted and ears pointed straight
before up the steep bluff. Old Ironsides, Thurston’s mount, was not the
sort to worry about anything but his feed, and paid no attention. Bob
turned and glanced the way Tamale was looking; saw nothing, and settled
down again on the small of his back.

“He sees a badger or something,” he Said. “Go on, Bud, with the chorus.”

     “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
     Lift up your gates and sing.”

“Lift up your hands damn quick!” mimicked a voice just behind. “If yuh
ain’t got anything to do but lay in the shade of a rock and yawp, we’ll
borrow your cayuses. You ain’t needin’ ‘em, by the looks!”

They squirmed around until they could stare into two black
gun-barrels--and then their hands went up; their faces held a
particularly foolish expression that must have been amusing to the men
behind the guns.

One of the gun-barrels lowered and a hand reached out and quietly took
possession of Tamale’s reins; the owner of the hand got calmly into
Bob’s saddle. Bob gritted his teeth. It was evident their movements had
been planned minutely in advance, for, once settled to his liking, the
fellow tested the stirrups to make sure they were the right length, and
raising his gun pointed it at the two in a business-like manner that
left no doubt of his meaning. Whereupon the man behind them came forward
and appropriated Old Ironsides to his own use.

“Too bad we had to interrupt Sunday-school,” he remarked ironically.
“You can go ahead with the meetin’ now--the collection has been took
up.” He laughed without any real mirth in his voice and gathered up the
reins. “If yuh want our horses, they’re up on the bench. I don’t
reckon they’ll ever turn another cow, but such as they are you’re quite
welcome. Better set still, boys, till we get out uh sight; one of us’ll
keep an eye peeled for yuh. So long, and much obliged.” They turned and
rode warily down the slope.

“Now, wouldn’t that jar yuh?” asked Bob in deep disgust His hands
dropped to his sides; in another second he was up and shooting savagely.
“Get behind the rock, Bud,” he commanded.

Just then a rifle cracked, and Bob toppled drunkenly and went limply to
the grass.

“My God!” cried Thurston, and didn’t know that he spoke. He snatched up
Bob’s revolver and fired shot after shot at the galloping figures. Not
one seemed to do any good; the first shot hit a two-year-old square in
the ribs. After that there were no cattle within rifle range.

One of the outlaws stopped, took deliberate aim with the stolen
Winchester and fired, meaning to kill; but he miscalculated the range a
bit and Thurston crumpled down with a bullet in his thigh. The revolver
was empty now and fell smoking at his feet. So he lay and cursed
impotently while he watched the marauders ride out of sight up the
valley.

When the rank timber-growth hid their flying figures he crawled over to
where Bob lay and tried to lift him.

“Art you hurt?” was the idiotic question he asked.

Bob opened his eyes and waited a breath, as if to steady his thought.
“Did I get one, Bud?”

“I’m afraid not,” Thurston confessed, and immediately after wished that
he had lied and said yes. “Are you hurt?” he repeated senselessly.

“Who, me?” Bob’s eyes wavered in their directness. “Don’t yuh bother
none about me,” evasively.

“But you’ve got to tell me. You--they--” He choked over the words.

“Well--I guess they got me, all right. But don’t let that worry yuh; it
don’t me.” He tried to speak carelessly and convincingly, but it was
a miserable failure. He did not want to die, did Bob, however much he
might try to hide the fact.

Thurston was not in the least imposed upon. He turned away his head,
pretending to look after the outlaws, and set his teeth together tight.
He did not want to act a fool. All at once he grew dizzy and sick, and
lay down heavily till the faintness passed.

Bob tried to lift himself to his elbow; failing that, he put out a hand
and laid it on Thurston’s shoulder. “Did they--get you--too?” he queried
anxiously.

“The damn coyotes!”

“It’s nothing; just a leg put out of business,” Thurston hurried to
assure him. “Where are you hurt, Bob?”

“Aw, I ain’t any X-ray,” Bob retorted weakly but gamely. “Somewheres
inside uh me. It went in my side but the Lord knows where it wound
up. It hurts, like the devil.” He lay quiet a minute. “I wish--do yuh
feel--like finishing--that song, Bud?”

Thurston gulped down a lump that was making his throat ache. When he
answered, his voice was very gentle:

“I’ll try a verse, old man.”

“The last one--we’d just come to the last. It’s most like church. I--I
never went--much on religion, Bud; but when a fellow’s--going out over
the Big Divide.”

“You’re not!” Thurston contradicted fiercely, as if that could make it
different. He thought he could not bear those jerky sentences.

“All right--Bud. We won’t fight over it. Go ahead. The last verse.”

Thurston eased his leg to a better position, drew himself up till his
shoulders rested against the rock and began, with an occasional, odd
break in his voice:

     “I saw the holy city
     Beside the tideless Sea;
     The light of God was on its street
     The gates were open wide.
     And all who would might enter
     And no one was denied.”

“Wonder if that there--applies--to bone-headed--cowpunchers,” Bob
muttered drowsily. “‘And all--who would--” Thurston glanced quickly at
his face; caught his breath sharply at what he saw there written, and
dropped his head upon his arms.

And so Park and his men, hurrying to the sound of the shooting, found
them in the shadow of the rock.



CHAPTER VII. AT THE STEVENS PLACE

When the excitement of the outrage had been pushed aside by the
insistent routine of everyday living, Thurston found himself thrust from
the fascination of range life and into the monotony of invalidism, and
he was anything but resigned. To be sure, he was well cared for at the
Stevens ranch, where Park and the boys had taken him that day, and Mrs.
Stevens mothered him as he could not remember being mothered before.

Hank Graves rode over nearly every day to sit beside the bed and curse
the Wagner gang back to their great-great-grandfathers and down to more
than the third generation yet unborn, and to tell him the news. On the
second visit he started to give him the details of Bob’s funeral; but
Thurston would not listen, and told him so plainly.

“All right then, Bud, I won’t talk about it. But we sure done the right
thing by the boy; had the best preacher in Shellanne out, and flowers
till further notice: a cross uh carnations, and the boys sent up to
Minot and had a spur made uh--oh, well, all right; I’ll shut up about
it, I know how yuh feel, Bud; it broke us all up to have him go that
way. He sure was a white boy, if ever there was one, and--ahem!”

“I’d give a thousand dollars, hard coin, to get my hands on them
Wagners. It would uh been all off with them, sure, if the boys had run
acrost ‘em. I’d uh let ‘em stay out and hunt a while longer, only old
Lauman’ll get ‘em, all right, and we’re late as it is with the calf
roundup. Lauman’ll run ‘em down--and by the Lord! I’ll hire Bowman
myself and ship him out from Helena to help prosecute ‘em. They’re dead
men if he takes the case against ‘em, Bud, and I’ll get him, sure--and
to hell with the cost of it! They’ll swing for what they done to you and
Bob, if it takes every hoof I own.”

Thurston told him he hoped they would be caught and--yes, hanged; though
he had never before advocated capital punishment.

But when he thought of Bob, the care-naught, whole-souled fellow.

He tried not to think of him, for thinking unmanned him. He had the
softest of hearts where his friends were concerned, and there were
times when he felt that he could with relish officiate at the Wagners’
execution.

He fought against remembrance of that day; and for sake of diversion he
took to studying a large, pastel portrait of Mona which hung against the
wall opposite his bed. It was rather badly; done, and at first, when he
saw it, he laughed at the thought that even the great, still plains of
the range land cannot protect one against the ubiquitous picture
agent. In the parlor, he supposed there would be crayon pictures of
grandmothers and aunts-further evidence of the agent’s glibness.

He was glad that it was Mona who smiled down at him instead of a
grand-mother or an aunt. For Mona did smile, and in spite of the cheap
crudity the smile was roguish, with little dimply creases at the corners
of the mouth, and not at all unpleasant. If the girl would only look
like that in real life, he told himself, a fellow would probably get to
liking her. He supposed she thought him a greater coward than ever now,
just because he hadn’t got killed. If he had, he would be a hero now,
like Bob. Well, Bob was a hero; the way he had jumped up and begun
shooting required courage of the suicidal sort. He had stood up and
shot, also and had succeeded only in being ridiculous; he hoped nobody
had told Mona about his hitting that steer. When he could walk again he
would learn to shoot, so that the range stock wouldn’t suffer from his
marksmanship.

After a week of seeing only Mrs. Stevens or sympathetic men
acquaintances, he began to wonder why Mona stayed so persistently away.
Then one morning she came in to take his breakfast things out. She did
not, however, stay a second longer than was absolutely necessary, and
she was perfectly composed and said good morning in her most impersonal
tone. At least Thurston hoped she had no tone more impersonal than that.
He decided that she had really beautiful eyes and hair; after she had
gone he looked up at the picture, told himself that it did not begin
to do her justice, and sighed a bit. He was very dull, and even her
companionship, he thought, would be pleasant if only she would come down
off her pedestal and be humanly sociable.

When he wrote a story about a fellow being laid up in the same house
with a girl--a girl with big, blue-gray eyes and ripply brown hair--he
would have the girl treat the fellow at least decently. She would read
poetry to him and bring him flowers, and do ever so many nice things
that would make him hate to get well. He decided that he would write
just that kind of story; he would idealize it, of course, and have the
fellow in love with the girl; you have to, in stories. In real life it
doesn’t necessarily follow that, because a fellow admires a girl’s hair
and eyes, and wants to be on friendly terms, he is in love with her.
For example, he emphatically was not in love with Mona Stevens. He only
wanted her to be decently civil and to stop holding a foolish grudge
against him for not standing up and letting himself be shot full of
holes because she commanded it.

In the afternoons, Mrs. Stevens would sit beside him and knit things
and talk to him in a pleasantly garrulous fashion, and he would lie and
listen to her--and to Mona, singing somewhere. Mona sang very well, he
thought; he wondered if she had ever had any training. Also, he wished
he dared ask her not to sing that song about “She’s only a bird in a
gilded cage.” It brought back too vividly the nights when he and Bob
stood guard under the quiet stars.

And then one day he hobbled out into the dining-room and ate dinner with
the family. Since he sat opposite Mona she was obliged to look at
him occasionally, whether she would or no. Thurston had a strain of
obstinacy in his nature, and when he decided that Mona should not only
look at him, but should talk to him as well, he set himself diligently
to attain that end. He was not the man to sit down supinely and let a
girl calmly ignore him; so Mona presently found herself talking to him
with some degree of cordiality; and what is more to the point, listening
to him when he talked. It is probable that Thurston never had tried so
hard in his life to win a girl’s attention.

It was while he was still hobbling with a cane and taxing his
imagination daily to invent excuses for remaining, that Lauman, the
sheriff, rode up to the door with a deputy and asked shelter for
themselves and the two Wagners, who glowered sullenly down from their
weary horses. When they had been safely disposed in Thurston’s bedroom,
with one of the ranch hands detailed to guard them, Lauman and his man
gave themselves up to the joy of a good meal. Their own cooking, they
said, got mighty tame especially when they hadn’t much to cook and dared
not have a fire.

They had come upon the outlaws by mere accident, and it is hard telling
which was the most surprised. But Lauman was, perhaps, the quickest man
with a gun in Valley County, else he would not have been serving his
fourth term as sheriff. He got the drop and kept it while his deputy
did the rest. It had been a hard chase, he said, and a long one if you
counted time instead of miles. But he had them now, harmless as rattlers
with their fangs fresh drawn. He wanted to get them to Glasgow before
people got to hear of their capture; he thought they wouldn’t be any too
safe if the boys knew he had them.

If he had known that the Lazy Eight roundup had just pulled in to the
home ranch that afternoon, and that Dick Farney, one of the Stevens
men, had slipped out to the corral and saddled his swiftest horse, it
is quite possible that Lauman would not have lingered so long over his
supper, or drank his third cup of coffee--with real cream in it--with so
great a relish. And if he had known that the Circle Bar boys were camped
just three miles away within hailing distance of the Lazy Eight trail,
he would doubtless have postponed his after-supper smoke.

He was sitting, revolver in hand, watching the Wagners give a practical
demonstration of the extent of their appetites, when Thurston limped in
from the porch, his eyes darker than usual. “There are a lot of riders
coming, Mr. Lauman,” he announced quietly. “It sounds like a whole
roundup. I thought you ought to know.”

The prisoners went white, and put down knife and fork. If they had never
feared before, plainly they were afraid then.

Lauman’s face did not in the least change. “Put the hand-cuffs on,
Waller,” he said. “If you’ve got a room that ain’t easy to get at from
the outside, Mrs. Stevens, I guess I’ll have to ask yuh for the use of
it.”

Mrs. Stevens had lived long in Valley County, and had learned how to
meet emergencies. “Put ‘em right down cellar,” she invited briskly.
“There’s just the trap-door into it, and the windows ain’t big enough
for a cat to go through. Mona, get a candle for Mr. Lauman.” She turned
to hurry the girl, and found Mona at her elbow with a light.

“That’s the kind uh woman I like to have around,” Lauman chuckled. “Come
on, boys; hustle down there if yuh want to see Glasgow again.”

Trembling, all their dare-devil courage sapped from them by the menace
of Thurston’s words, they stumbled down the steep stairs, and the
darkness swallowed them. Lauman beckoned to his deputy.

“You go with ‘em, Waller,” he ordered. “If anybody but me offers to lift
this trap, shoot. Don’t yuh take any chances. Blow out that candle soon
as you’re located.”

It was then that fifty riders clattered into the yard and up to the
front door, grouping in a way that left no exit unseen. Thurston,
standing in the doorway, knew them almost to a man. Lazy Eight boys,
they were; men who night after night had spread their blankets under the
tent-roof with him and with Bob MacGregor; Bob, who lay silently out
on the hill back of the home ranch-house, waiting for the last, great
round-up. They glanced at him in mute greeting and dismounted without a
word. With them mingled the Circle Bar boys, as silent and grim as their
fellows. Lauman came up and peered into the dusk; Thurston observed that
he carried his Winchester unobtrusively in one hand.

“Why, hello, boys,” he greeted cheerfully. But for the rifle you never
would have guessed he knew their errand.

“Hello, Lauman,” answered Park, matching him for cheerfulness. Then:

“We rode over to hang them Wagners.” Lauman grinned. “I hate to
disappoint yuh, Park, but I’ve kinda set my heart on doing that little
job myself. I’m the one that caught ‘em, and if you’d followed my trail
the last month you’d say I earned the privilege.”

“Maybe so,” Park admitted pleasantly, “but we’ve got a little personal
matter to settle up with those jaspers. Bob MacGregor was one of us, yuh
remember.”

“I’ll hang ‘em just as dead as you can,” Lauman argued.

“But yuh won’t do it so quick,” Park lashed back. “They’re spoiling the
air every breath they draw. We want ‘em, and I guess that pretty near
settles it.”

“Not by a damn sight it don’t! I’ve never had a man took away from me
yet, boys, and I’ve been your sheriff a good many years. You hike right
back to camp; yuh can’t have ‘em.”

Thurston could scarcely realize the deadliness of their purpose. He knew
them for kind-hearted, laughter-loving young fellows, who would give
their last dollar to a friend. He could not believe that they would
resort to violence now. Besides, this was not his idea of a mob; he
had fancied they would howl threats and wave bludgeons, as they did in
stories. Mobs always “howled and seethed with passion” at one’s doors;
they did not stand about and talk quietly as though the subject was
trivial and did not greatly concern them.

But the men were pressing closer, and their very calmness, had he known
it, was ominous. Lauman shifted his rifle ready for instant aim.

“Boys, look here,” he began more gravely, “I can’t say I blame yuh,
looking at it from your view-point. If you’d caught these men when yuh
was out hunting ‘em, you could uh strung ‘em up--and I’d likely uh had
business somewhere else about that time. But yuh didn’t catch ‘em; yuh
give up the chase and left ‘em to me. And yuh got to remember that I’m
the one that brought ‘em in. They’re in my care. I’m sworn to protect
‘em and turn ‘em over to the law--and it ain’t a question uh whether
they deserve it or not. That’s what I’m paid for, and I expect to go
right ahead according to orders and hang ‘em by law. You can’t have
‘em--unless yuh lay me out first, and I don’t reckon any of yuh would go
that far.”

“There’s never been a man hung by law in this county yet,” a voice cried
angrily and impatiently.

“That ain’t saying there never will be,” Lauman flung back. “Don’t yuh
worry, they’ll get all that’s coming to them, all right.”

“How about the time yuh had ‘em in your rotten old jail, and let ‘em get
out and run loose around the country, killing off white men?” drawled
another-a Circle-Bar man.

“Now boys.”

A hand--the hand of him who had stood guard over the Wagners in the
bedroom during supper--reached out through the doorway and caught his
rifle arm. Taken unawares from behind, he whirled and then went down
under the weight of men used to “wrassling” calves. Even old Lauman was
no match for them, and presently he found himself stretched upon the
porch with three Lazy Eight boys sitting on his person; which, being
inclined to portliness, he found very uncomfortable.

Moved by an impulse he had no name for, Thurston snatched the sheriff’s
revolver from its scabbard. As the heap squirmed pantingly upon the
porch he stepped into the doorway to avoid being tripped, which was the
wisest move he could have made, for it put him in the shadow--and
there were men of the Circle Bar whose trigger-finger would not have
hesitated, just then, had he been in plain sight and had they known his
purpose.

“Just hold on there, boys,” he called, and they could see the glimmer of
the gun-barrel. Those of the Lazy Eight laughed at him.

“Aw, put it down, Bud,” Park admonished. “That’s too dangerous a toy for
you to be playing with--and yuh know damn well yuh can’t hit anything.”

“I killed a steer once,” Thurston reminded him meekly, whereat the laugh
hushed; for they remembered.

“I know I can’t shoot straight,” he went on frankly, “but you’re taking
that much the greater chance. If I have to, I’ll cut loose--and there’s
no telling where the bullets may strike.”

“That’s right,” Park admitted. “Stand still, boys; he’s more dangerous
than a gun that isn’t loaded. What d’yuh want, m’son?”

“I want to talk to you for about five minutes. I’ve got a game leg, so
that I can neither run nor fight, but I hope you’ll listen to me. The
Wagners can’t get away--they’re locked up, with a deputy standing over
them with a gun; and on top of that they’re handcuffed. They’re as
helpless, boys, as two trapped coyotes.” He looked down over the crowd,
which shifted uneasily; no one spoke.

“That’s what struck me most,” he continued. “You know what I thought of
Bob, don’t you? And I didn’t thank them for boring a hole in my leg; it
wasn’t any kindness of theirs that it didn’t land higher--they weren’t
shooting at me for fun. And I’d have killed them both with a clear
conscience, if I could. I tried hard enough. But it was different then;
out in the open, where a man had an even break. I don’t believe if I
had shot as straight as I wanted to that I’d ever have felt a moment’s
compunction. But now, when they’re disarmed and shackled and altogether
helpless, I couldn’t walk up to them deliberately and kill them could
you?

“It could be done, and done easily. You have Lauman where he can’t do
anything, and I’m not of much account in a fight; so you’ve really only
one deputy sheriff and two women to get the best of. You could drag
these men out and hang them in the cottonwoods, and they couldn’t raise
a hand to defend themselves. We could do it easily--but when it was done
and the excitement had passed I’d have a picture in my memory that I’d
hate to look at. I’d have an hour in my life that would haunt me. And
so would you. You’d hate to look back and think that one time you helped
kill a couple of men who couldn’t fight back.

“Let the law do it, boys. You don’t want them to live, and I don’t;
nobody does, for they deserve to die. But it isn’t for us to play judge
and jury and hangman here to-night. Let them get what’s coming to them
at the hands of the officers you’ve elected for that purpose. They won’t
get off. Hank Graves says they will hang if it takes every hoof he owns.
He said he would bring Bowman down here to help prosecute them. I don’t
know Bowman--”

“I do,” a voice spoke, somewhere in the darkness. “Lawyer from Helena.
Never lost a case.”

“I’m glad to hear it, for he’s the man that will prosecute. They haven’t
a ghost of a show to get out of it. Lauman here is responsible for their
safe keeping and I guess, now that he knows them better, we needn’t be
afraid they’ll escape again. And it’s as Lauman said; he’ll hang them
quite as dead as you can. He’s drawing a salary to do these things, make
him earn it. It’s a nasty job, boys, and you wouldn’t get anything out
of it but a nasty memory.”

A hand that did not feel like the hand of a man rested for an instant on
his arm. Mona brushed by him and stepped out where the rising moon shone
on her hair and into her big, blue-gray eyes.

“I wish you all would please go away,” she said. “You are making mamma
sick. She’s got it in her head that you are going to do something awful,
and I can’t convince her you’re not. I told her you wouldn’t do anything
so sneaking, but she’s awfully nervous about it. Won’t you please go,
right now?”

They looked sheepishly at one another; every man of them feared the
ridicule of his neighbor.

“Why, sure we’ll go,” cried Park, rallying. “We were going anyway in a
minute. Tell your mother we were just congratulating Lauman on rounding
up these Wagners. Come on, boys. And you, Bud, hurry up and get well
again; we miss yuh round the Lazy Eight.”

The three who were sitting on Lauman got up, and he gave a sigh of
relief. “Say, yuh darned cowpunchers don’t have no mercy on an old man’s
carcass at all,” he groaned, in exaggerated self-pity. “Next time yuh
want to congratulate me, I wish you’d put it in writing and send it by
mail.”

A little ripple of laughter went through the crowd. Then they swung up
on their horses and galloped away in the moonlight.



CHAPTER VIII. A QUESTION OF NERVE

“That was your victory, Miss Stevens. Allow me to congratulate you.” If
Thurston showed any ill grace in his tone it was without intent. But it
did seem unfortunate that just as he was waxing eloquent and felt sure
of himself and something of a hero, Mona should push him aside as though
he were of no account and disperse a bunch of angry cowboys with half a
dozen words.

She looked at him with her direct, blue-gray eyes, and smiled. And
her smile had no unpleasant uplift at the corners; it was the dimply,
roguish smile of the pastel portrait only several times nicer. Re could
hardly believe it; he just opened his eyes wide and stared. When he came
to a sense of his rudeness, Mona was back in the kitchen helping with
the supper dishes, just as though nothing had happened--unless one
observed the deep, apple-red of her cheeks--while her mother, who showed
not the faintest symptoms of collapse, flourished a dish towel made of
a bleached flour sack with the stamp showing a faint pink and blue XXXX
across the center.

“I knew all the time they wouldn’t do anything when it came right
to the point,” she declared. “Bless their hearts, they thought they
would--but they’re too soft-hearted, even when they are mad. If yuh go
at ‘em right yuh can talk ‘em over easy. It done me good to hear yuh
talk right up to ‘em, Bud.” Mrs. Stevens had called hi Bud from
the first time she laid eyes on him. “That’s all under the sun they
needed--just somebody to set ‘em thinking about the other side. You’re a
real good speaker; seems to me you ought to study to be a preacher.”

Thurston’s face turned red. But presently he forgot everything in his
amazement, for Mona the dignified, Mona of the scornful eyes and the
chilly smile, actually giggled--giggled like any ordinary girl, and shot
him a glance that had in it pure mirth and roguish teasing, and a dash
of coquetry. He sat down and giggled with her, feeling idiotically happy
and for no reason under the sun that he could name.

He had promised his conscience that he would go home to the Lazy Eight
in the morning, but he didn’t; he somehow contrived, overnight, to
invent a brand new excuse for his conscience to swallow or not, as it
liked. Hank Graves had the same privilege; as for the Stevens trio, he
blessed their hospitable souls for not wanting any excuse whatever for
his staying. They were frankly glad to have him there; at least Mrs.
Stevens and Jack were. As for Mona, he was not so sure, but he hoped she
didn’t mind.

This was the reason inspired by his great desire: he was going to write
a story, and Mona was unconsciously to furnish the material for his
heroine, and so, of course, he needed to be there so that he might study
his subject. That sounded very well, to himself, but to Hank Graves,
for some reason, it seemed very funny. When Thurston told him, Hank
was taken with a fit of strangling that turned his face a dark purple.
Afterward he explained brokenly that something had got down his Sunday
throat--and Thurston, who had never heard of a man’s Sunday throat,
eyed him with suspicion. Hank blinked at him with tears still in
his quizzical eyes and slapped him on the back, after the way of the
West--and any other enlightened country where men are not too dignified
to be their real selves--and drawled, in a way peculiar to himself:

“That’s all right, Bud. You stay right here as long as yuh want to. I
don’t blame yuh--if I was you I’d want to spend a lot uh time studying
this particular brand uh female girl myself. She’s out uh sight,
Bud--and I don’t believe any uh the boys has got his loop on her so far;
though I could name a dozen or so that would be tickled to death if they
had. You just go right ahead and file your little, old claim--”

“You’re getting things mixed,” Thurston interrupted, rather testily.
“I’m not in love with her. I, well, it’s like this: if you were going to
paint a picture of those mountains off there, you’d want to be where you
could look at them--wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t necessarily want to--to
own them, just because you felt they’d make a fine picture. Your
interest would be, er, entirely impersonal.”

“Uh-huh,” Hank agreed, his keen eyes searching Phil’s face amusedly.

“Therefore, it doesn’t follow that I’m getting foolish about a girl just
because I--hang it! what the Dickens makes you look at a fellow that
way? You make me?”

“Uh-huh,” said Hank again, smoothing the lower half of his face with one
hand. “You’re a mighty nice little boy, Bud. I’ll bet Mona thinks so,
too and when yuh get growed up you’ll know a whole lot more than yuh do
right now. Well, I guess I’ll be moving. When yuh get that--er--story
done, you’ll come back to the ranch, I reckon. Be good.”

Thurston watched him ride away, and then flounced, oh, men do flounce at
times, in spirit, if not in deed; and there would be no lack of the deed
if only they wore skirts that could rustle indignantly in sympathy with
the wearer--to his room. Plainly, Hank did not swallow the excuse any
more readily than did his conscience.

To prove the sincerity of his assertion to himself, his conscience,
and to Hank Graves, he straightway got out a thick pad of paper and
sharpened three lead pencils to an exceeding fine point. Then he sat him
down by the window--where he could see the kitchen door, which was the
one most used by the family--and nibbled the tip off one of the pencils
like any school-girl. For ten minutes he bluffed himself into believing
that he was trying to think of a title; the plain truth is, he was
wondering if Mona would go for a ride that afternoon and if so, might he
venture to suggest going with her.

He thought of the crimply waves in Mona’s hair, and pondered what
adjectives would best describe it without seeming commonplace.
“Rippling” was too old, though it did seem to hit the case all right.
He laid down the pad and nearly stood on his head trying to reach his
Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms without getting out of his chair.
While he was clawing after it--it lay on the floor, where he had thrown
it that morning because it refused to divulge some information he
wanted--he heard some one open and close the kitchen door, and came near
kinking his neck trying to get up in time to see who it was. He failed
to see anyone, and returned to the dictionary.

“‘Ripple--to have waves--like running water.’” (That was just the way
her hair looked, especially over the temples and at the nape of her
neck--Jove, what a tempting white neck it was!) “Um-m. ‘Ripple; wave;
undulate; uneven; irregular.’” (Lord, what fools are the men who write
dictionaries!) “‘Antonym--hang the antonyms!”

The kitchen door slammed. He craned again. It was Jack--going to town
most likely. Thurston shrewdly guessed that Mrs. Stevens leaned far more
upon Mona than she did upon Jack, although he could hardly accuse her
of leaning on anyone. But he observed that the men looked to her for
orders.

He perceived that the point was gone from his pencil, and proceeded to
sharpen it. Then he heard Mona singing in the kitchen, and recollected
that Mrs. Stevens had promised him warm doughnuts for supper. Perhaps
Mona was frying them at that identical moment--and he had never seen
anyone frying doughnuts. He caught up his cane and limped out to
investigate. That is how much his heart just then was set upon writing a
story that would breathe of the plains.

One great hindrance to the progress of his story was the difficulty he
had in selecting a hero for his heroine. Hank Graves suggested that he
use Park, and even went so far as to supply Thurston with considerable
data which went to prove that Park would not be averse to figuring in
a love story with Mona. But Thurston was not what one might call
enthusiastic, and Hank laughed his deep, inner laugh when he was well
away from the house.

Thurston, on the contrary, glowered at the world for two hours after.
Park was a fine fellow, and Thurston liked him about as well as any man
he knew in the West, but--And thus it went. On each and every visit to
the Stevens ranch--and they were many--Hank, learning by direct inquiry
that the story still suffered for lack of a hero, suggested some fellow
whom he had at one time and another caught “shining” around Mona. And
with each suggestion Thurston would draw down his eyebrows till he came
near getting a permanent frown.

A love story without a hero, while it would no doubt be original and
all that, would hardly appeal to an editor. Phil tried heroes wholly
imaginary, but he had a trick of making his characters seem very real
to himself and sometimes to other people as well. So that, after a few
passages of more or less ardent love-making, he would in a sense grow
jealous and spoil the story by annihilating the hero thereof.

Heaven only knows how long the thing would have gone on if he hadn’t,
one temptingly beautiful evening, reverted to the day of the hold-up and
apologized for not obeying her command. He explained as well as he could
just why he sat petrified with his hands in the air.

And then having brought the thing freshly to her mind, he somehow lost
control of his wits and told her he loved her. He told her a good deal
in the next two minutes that he might better have kept to himself just
then. But a man generally makes a glorious fool of himself once or twice
in his life and it seems the more sensible the man the more thorough a
job he makes of it.

Mona moved a little farther away from him, and when she answered she
did not choose her words. “Of all things,” she said, evenly, “I admire
a brave man and despise a coward. You were chicken-hearted that day, and
you know it; you’ve just admitted it. Why, in another minute I’d have
had that gun myself, and I’d have shown you--but Park got it before
I really had a chance. I hated to seem spectacular, but it served you
right. If you’d had any nerve I wouldn’t have had to sit there and tell
you what to do. If ever I marry anybody, Mr. Thurston, it will be a
man.”

“Which means, I suppose, that I’m not one?” he asked angrily.

“I don’t know yet.” Mona smiled her unpleasant smile--the one that
did not belong in the story he was going to write. “You’re new to the
country, you see. Maybe you’ve got nerve; you haven’t shown much, so far
as I know--except when you talked to the boys that night. But you must
have known that they wouldn’t hurt you anyway. A man must have a little
courage as much as I have; which isn’t asking much--or I’d never marry
him in the world.”

“Not even if you--liked him?” his smile was wistful.

“Not even if I loved him!” Mona declared, and fled into the house.

Thurston gathered himself together and went down to the stable and
borrowed a horse of Jack, who had just got back from town, and rode home
to the Lazy Eight.

When Hank heard that he was home to stay--at least until he could join
the roundup again--he didn’t say a word for full five minutes. Then,
“Got your story done?” he drawled, and his eyes twinkled.

Thurston was going up the stairs to his old room, and Hank could not
swear positively to the reply he got. But he thought it sounded like,
“Oh, damn the story!”



CHAPTER IX. THE DRIFT OF THE HERDS

Weeks slipped by, and to Thurston they seemed but days. His
world-weariness and cynicism disappeared the first time he met Mona
after he had left there so unceremoniously; for Mona, not being aware of
his cynicism, received him on the old, friendly footing, and seemed to
have quite forgotten that she had ever called him a coward, or refused
to marry him. So Thurston forgot it also--so long as he was with her.

How he filled in the hours he could scarcely have told; certain it
is that he accomplished nothing at all so far as Western stories were
concerned. Reeve-Howard wrote in slightly shocked phrases to ask what
was keeping him so long; and assured him that he was missing much by
staying away. Thurston mentally agreed with him long enough to begin
packing his trunk; it was idiotic to keep staying on when he was clearly
receiving no benefit thereby. When, however, he picked up a book which
he had told Mona he would take over to her the next time he went, he
stopped and considered:

There was the Wagner trial coming off in a month or so; he couldn’t get
out of attending it, for he had been subpoenaed as a witness for the
prosecution. And there was the beef roundup going to start before
long--he really ought to stay and take that in; there would be some fine
chances for pictures. And really he didn’t care so much for the Barry
Wilson bunch and the long list of festivities which trailed ever in
its wake; at any rate, they weren’t worth rushing two-thirds across the
continent for.

He sat down and wrote at length to Reeve-Howard, explaining very
carefully--and not altogether convincingly--just why he could not
possibly go home at present. After that he saddled and rode over to the
Stevens place with the book, leaving his trunk yawning emptily in the
middle of his badly jumbled belongings.

After that he spent three weeks on the beef roundup. At first he was
full of enthusiasm, and worked quite as if he had need of the wages, but
after two or three big drives the novelty wore off quite suddenly, and
nothing then remained but a lot of hard work. For instance, standing
guard on long, rainy nights when the cattle walked and walked might at
first seem picturesque and all that, but must at length, cease to be
amusing.

Likewise the long hours which he spent on day-herd, when the wind
was raw and penetrating and like to blow him out of the saddle; also
standing at the stockyard chutes and forcing an unwilling stream of
rollicky, wild-eyed steers up into the cars that would carry them to
Chicago.

After three weeks of it he awoke one particularly nasty morning and
thanked the Lord he was not obliged to earn his bread at all, to say
nothing of earning it in so distressful a fashion. There was a lull
in the shipping because cars were not then available. He promptly took
advantage of it and rode by the very shortest trail to the ranch--and
Mona. But Mona was visiting friends in Chinook, and there was no telling
when she would return. Thurston, in the next few days, owned to himself
that there was no good reason for his tarrying longer in the big,
un-peopled West, and that the proper thing for him to do was go back
home to New York.

He had come to stay a month, and he had stayed five. He could ride and
rope like an old-timer, and he was well qualified to put up a stiff
gun-fight had the necessity ever arisen--which it had not.

He had three hundred and seventy-one pictures of different phases of
range life, not counting as many that were over-exposed or under-exposed
or out of focus. He had six unfinished stories, in each of which the
heroine had big, blue-gray eyes and crimply hair, and the title and bare
skeleton of a seventh, in which the same sort of eyes and hair would
probably develop later. He had proposed to Mona three times, and had
been three times rebuffed--though not, it must be owned, with that tone
of finality which precludes hope.

He was tanned a fine brown, which became him well. His eyes had lost the
dreamy, introspective look of the student and author, and had grown keen
with the habit of studying objects at long range. He walked with that
peculiar, stiff-legged gait which betrays long hours spent in the
saddle, and he wore a silk handkerchief around his neck habitually and
had forgotten the feel of a dress-suit.

He answered to the name “Bud” more readily than to his own, and he made
practical use of the slang and colloquialisms of the plains without any
mental quotation marks.

By all these signs and tokens he had learned his West, and should have
taken himself back to civilization when came the frost. He had come to
get into touch with his chosen field of fiction, that he might write
as one knowing whereof he spoke. So far as he had gone, he was in touch
with it; he was steeped to the eyes in local color--and there was the
rub The lure of it was strong upon him, and he might not loosen its
hold. He was the son of his father; he had found himself, and knew that,
like him, he loved best to travel the dim trails.

Gene Wasson came in and slammed the door emphatically shut after him.
“She’s sure coming,” he complained, while he pulled the icicles from
his mustache and cast them into the fire. “She’s going to be a real, old
howler by the signs. What yuh doing, Bud? Writing poetry?”

Thurston nodded assent with certain mental reservations; so far the
editors couldn’t seem to make up their minds that it was poetry.

“Well, say, I wish you’d slap in a lot uh things about hazy, lazy, daisy
days in the spring--that jingles fine!--and green grass and the
sun shining and making the hills all goldy yellow, and prairie dogs
chip-chip-chipping on the ‘dobe flats. (Prairie dogs would go all right
in poetry, wouldn’t they? They’re sassy little cusses, and I don’t know
of anything that would rhyme with ‘em, but maybe you do.) And read it
all out to me after supper. Maybe it’ll make me kinda forget there’s a
blizzard on.”

“Another one?” Thurston got up to scratch a trench in the half-inch
layer of frost on the cabin window. “Why, it only cleared up this
morning after three days of it.”

“Can’t help that. This is just another chapter uh that same story. When
these here Klondike Chinooks gets to lapping over each other they never
know when to quit. Every darn one has got to be continued tacked onto
the tail of it the winter. All the difference is, you can’t read the
writing; but I can.”

“I’ve got some mail for yuh, Bud. And old Hank wanted me to ask yuh if
you’d like to go to Glasgow next Thursday and watch old Lauman start the
Wagner boys for wherever’s hot enough. He can get yuh in, you being in
the writing business. He says to tell yuh it’s a good chance to take
notes, so yuh can write a real stylish story, with lots uh murder and
sudden death in it. We don’t hang folks out here very often, and yuh
might have to go back East after pointers, if yuh pass this up.”

“Oh, go easy. It turns me sick when I think about it; how they looked
when they got their sentence, and all that. I certainly don’t care to
see them hanged, though they do deserve it. Where are the letters?”
 Thurston sprawled across the table for them. One was from Reeve-Howard;
he put it by. Another had a printed address in the corner--an address
that started his pulse a beat or two faster; for he had not yet reached
that blase stage where he could receive a personal letter from one of
the “Eight Leading” without the flicker of an eye-lash. He still gloated
over his successes, and was cast into the deeps by his failures.

He held the envelope to the light, shook it tentatively, like any woman,
guessed hastily and hopefully at the contents, and tore off an end
impatiently. From the great fireplace Gene watched him curiously and
half enviously. He wished he could get important-looking letters from
New York every few days. It must make a fellow feel that he amounted to
something.

“Gene, you remember that story I read to you one night--that yarn about
the fellow that lived alone in the hills, and how the wolves used to
come and sit on the ridge and howl o’ nights--you know, the one you
said was ‘out uh sight’? They took it, all right, and--here, what do you
think of that?” He tossed the letter over to Gene, who caught it just as
it was about to be swept into the flame with the draught in Thurston, in
the days which he spent one of the half-dozen Lazy Eight line-camps with
Gene, down by the river, had been writing of the West--writing in
fear and trembling, for now he knew how great was his subject and his
ignorance of it. In the long evenings, while the fire crackled and the
flames played a game they had invented, a game where they tried which
could leap highest up the great chimney; while the north wind whoo-ooed
around the eaves and fine, frozen snow meal swished against the one
little window; while shivering, drifting range cattle tramped restlessly
through the sparse willow-growth seeking comfort where was naught but
cold and snow and bitter, driving wind; while the gray wolves hunted in
packs and had not long to wait for their supper, Thurston had written
better than he knew. He had sent the cold of the blizzards and the howl
of the wolves; he had sent bits of the wind-swept plains back to New
York in long, white envelopes. And the editors were beginning to watch
for his white envelopes and to seize them eagerly when they came, greedy
for what was within. Not every day can they look upon a few typewritten
pages and see the range-land spread, now frowning, now smiling, before
them.

“Gee! they say here they want a lot the same brand, and at any old price
yuh might name. I wouldn’t mind writing stories myself.” Gene kicked
a log back into the flame where it would do the most good. His big,
square-shouldered figure stood out sharply against the glow.

Thurston, watching him meditatively, wanted to tell him that he was
the sort of whom good stories are made. But for men like Gene--strong,
purposeful, brave, the West would lose half its charm. He was like Bob
in many ways, and for that Thurston liked him and, stayed with him in
the line-camp when he might have been taking his ease at the home ranch.

It was wild and lonely down there between the bare hills and the frozen
river, but the wildness and the loneliness appealed to him. It was
primitive and at times uncomfortable. He slept in a bunk built against
the wall, with hard boards under him and a sod roof over his head. There
were times when the wind blew its fiercest and rattled dirt down into
his face unless he covered it with a blanket. And every other day he
had to wash the dishes and cook, and when it was Gene’s turn to cook,
Thurston chopped great armloads of wood for the fireplace to eat o’
nights. Also he must fare forth, wrapped to the eyes, and help Gene
drive back the cattle which drifted into the river bottom, lest they
cross the river on the ice and range where they should not.

But in the evenings he could sit in the fire-glow and listen to the wind
and to the coyotes and the gray wolves, and weave stories that even the
most hyper-critical of editors could not fail to find convincing. By
day he could push the coffee-box that held his typewriter over by the
frosted window--when he had an hour or two to spare--and whang away at
a rate which filled Gene with wonder. Sometimes he rode over to the home
ranch for a day or two, but Mona was away studying music, so he found no
inducement to remain, and drifted back to the little, sod-roofed cabin
by the river, and to Gene.

The winter settled down with bared teeth like a bull-dog, and never
a chinook came to temper the cold and give respite to man or beast.
Blizzards that held them, in fear of their lives, close to shelter for
days, came down from the north; and with them came the drifting herds.
By hundreds they came, hurrying miserably before the storms. When the
wind lashed them without mercy even in the bottom-land, they pushed
reluctantly out upon the snow-covered ice of the Missouri. Then Gene and
Thurston watching from their cabin window would ride out and turn them
pitilessly back into the teeth of the storm.

They came by hundreds--thin, gaunt from cold and hunger. They came by
thousands, lowing their misery as they wandered aimlessly, seeking that
which none might find: food and shelter and warmth for their chilled
bodies. When the Canada herds pushed down upon them the boys gave over
trying to keep them north of the river; while they turned one bunch a
dozen others were straggling out from shore, the timid following
single file behind a leader more venturesome or more desperate than his
fellows.

So the march went on and on: big, Southern-bred steer grappling the
problem of his first Northern winter; thin-flanked cow with shivering,
rough-coated calf trailing at her heels; humpbacked yearling with little
nubs of horns telling that he was lately in his calfhood; red cattle,
spotted cattle, white cattle, black cattle; white-faced Herefords,
Short-horns, scrubs; Texas longhorns--of the sort invariably pictured
in stampedes--still they came drifting out of the cold wilderness and on
into wilderness as cold.

Through the shifting wall of the worst blizzard that season Thurston
watched the weary, fruitless, endless march of the range. “Where do they
all come from?” he exclaimed once when the snow-veil lifted and showed
the river black with cattle.

“Lord! I dunno,” Gene answered, shrugging his shoulders against the
pity of it. “I seen some brands yesterday that I know belongs up in the
Cypress Hills country. If things don’t loosen up pretty soon, the whole
darned range will be swept clean uh stock as far north as cattle run.
I’m looking for reindeer next.”

“Something ought to be done,” Thurston declared uneasily, turning away
from the sight. “I’ve had the bellowing of starving cattle in my ears
day and night for nearly a month. The thing’s getting on my nerves.”

“It’s getting on the nerves uh them that own ‘em a heap worse,” Gene
told him grimly, and piled more wood on the fire; for the cold bit
through even the thick walls of the cabin when the flames in the
fireplace died, and the door hinges were crusted deep with ice. “There’s
going to be the biggest loss this range has ever known.”

“It’s the owners’ fault,” snapped Thurston, whose nerves were in
that irritable state which calls loudly for a vent of some sort. Even
argument with Gene, fruitless though it perforce must be, would be a
relief. “It’s their own fault. I don’t pity them any--why don’t they
take care of their stock? If I owned cattle, do you think I’d sit in the
house and watch them starve through the winter?”

“What if yuh owned more than yuh could feed? It’d be a case uh have-to
then. There’s fifty thousand Lazy Eight cattle walking the range
somewhere today. How the dickens is old Hank going to feed them fifty
thousand? or five thousand? It takes every spear uh hay he’s got to feed
his calves.”

“He could buy hay,” Thurston persisted.

“Buy hay for fifty thousand cattle? Where would he get it? Say, Bud, I
guess yuh don’t realize that’s some cattle. All ails you is, yuh don’t
savvy the size uh the thing. I’ll bet yuh there won’t be less than three
hundred thousand head cross this river before spring.”

“Some of them belong in Canada--you said so yourself.”

“I know it, but look at all the country south of us: all the other cow
States. Why, Bud, when yuh talk about feeding every critter that runs
the range, you’re plumb foolish.”

“Anyway, it’s a damnable pity!” Thurston asserted petulantly.

“Sure it is. The grass is there, but it’s under fourteen inches uh snow
right now, and more coming; they say it’s twelve feet deep up in the
mountains. You’ll see some great old times in the spring, Bud, if yuh
stay. You will, won’t yuh?”

Thurston laughed shortly. “I suppose it’s safe to say I will,” he
answered. “I ought to have gone last fall, but I didn’t. It will
probably be the same thing over again; I ought to go in the spring, but
I won’t.”

“You bet you won’t. Talk about big roundups! what yuh seen last spring
wasn’t a commencement. Every hoof that crosses this river and lives till
spring will have to be rounded up and brought back again. They’ll be
scattered clean down to the Yellowstone, and every Northern outfit has
got to go down and help work the range from there back. I tell yuh, Bud,
yuh want to lay in a car-load uh films and throw away all them little,
jerk-water snap-shots yuh got. There’s going to be roundups like these
old Panhandle rannies tell about, when the green grass comes.” Gene,
thinking blissfully of the tented life, sprawled his long legs toward
the snapping blaze and crooned dreamily, while without the blizzard
raged more fiercely, a verse from an old camp song:

     “Out on the roundup, boys, I tell yuh what yuh get
     Little chunk uh bread and a little chunk uh meat;
     Little black coffee, boys, chuck full uh alkali,
     Dust in your throat, boys, and gravel in your eye!
     So polish up your saddles, oil your slickers and your guns,
     For we’re bound for Lonesome Prairie when the green grass comes.”



CHAPTER X. THE CHINOOK

One night in late March a sullen, faraway roar awakened Thurston in
his bunk. He turned over and listened, wondering what on earth was the
matter. More than anything it sounded like a hurrying freight train only
the railroad lay many miles to the north, and trains do not run at large
over the prairie. Gene snored peacefully an arm’s length away. Outside
the snow lay deep on the levels, while in the hollows were great, white
drifts that at bedtime had glittered frostily in the moonlight. On the
hill-tops the gray wolves howled across coulees to their neighbors, and
slinking coyotes yapped foolishly at the moon.

Thurston drew the blanket up over his ears, for the fire had died to a
heap of whitening embers and the cold of the cabin made the nose of
him tingle. The roar grew louder and nearer-then the cabin shivered and
creaked in the suddenness of the blast that struck it. A clod of dirt
plumbed down upon his shoulder, bringing with it a shower of finer
particles. “Another blizzard!” he groaned, “and the worst we’ve had yet,
by the sound.”

The wind shrieked down the chimney and sought the places where the
chinking was loose. It howled up the coulees, putting the wolves
themselves to shame. Gene flopped over like a newly landed fish, grunted
some unintelligible words and slept again.

For an hour Thurston lay and listened to the blast and selfishly thanked
heaven it was his turn at the cooking. If the storm kept up like that,
he told himself, he was glad he did not have to chop the wood. He
lifted the blanket and sniffed tentatively, then cuddled back into cover
swearing that a thermometer would register zero at that very moment on
his pillow.

The storm came in gusts as the worst blizzards do at times. It made him
think of the nursery story about the fifth little pig who built a cabin
of rocks, and how the wolf threatened: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and
I’ll blow your house down!” It was as if he himself were the fifth
little pig, and as if the wind were the wolf. The wolf-wind would stop
for whole minutes, gather his great lungs full of air and then without
warning would “huff and puff” his hardest. But though the cabin was
not built of rocks, it was nevertheless a staunch little shelter and
sturdily withstood the shocks.

He pitied the poor cattle still fighting famine and frost as only
range-bred stock can fight. He pictured them drifting miserably before
the fury of the wind or crowding for shelter under some friendly
cutback, their tails to the storm, waiting stolidly for the dawn that
would bring no relief. Then, with the roar and rattle in his ears, he
fell asleep.

In that particular line-camp on the Missouri the cook’s duties began
with building a fire in the morning. Thurston waked reluctantly,
shivered in anticipation under the blankets, gathered together his
fortitude and crept out of his bunk. While he was dressing his teeth
chattered like castanets in a minstrel show. He lighted the fire
hurriedly and stood backed close before it, listening to the rage of the
wind. He was growing very tired of the monotony of winter; he could no
longer see any beauty in the high-turreted, snow-clad hills, nor the
bare, red faces of the cliffs frowning down upon him.

“I don’t suppose you could see to the river bank,” he mused, “and Gene
will certainly tear the third commandment to shreds before he gets the
water-hole open.”

He went over to the window, meaning to scratch a peep-hole in the frost,
just as he had done every day for the past three months; lifted a hand,
then stopped bewildered. For instead of frost there was only steam with
ridges of ice yet clinging to the sash and dripping water in a tiny
rivulet. He wiped the steam hastily away with his palm and looked out.

“Good heavens, Gene!” he shouted in a voice to wake the Seven Sleepers.
“The world’s gone mad overnight. Are you dead, man? Get up and look out.
The whole damn country is running water, and the hills are bare as this
floor!”

“Uh-huh!” Gene knuckled his eyes and sat up. “Chinook struck us in the
night. Didn’t yuh hear it?”

Thurston pulled open the door and stood face to face with the miracle of
the West. He had seen Mother Nature in many a changeful mood, but never
like this. The wind blew warm from the southwest and carried hints of
green things growing and the song of birds; he breathed it gratefully
into his lungs and let it riot in his hair. The sky was purplish and
soft, with heavy, drifting clouds high-piled like a summer storm. It
looked like rain, he thought.

The bare hills were sodden with snow-water, and the drifts in the
coulees were dirt-grimed and forbidding. The great river lay, a gray
stretch of water-soaked snow over the ice, with little, clear pools
reflecting the drab clouds above. A crow flapped lazily across the
foreground and perched like a blot of fresh-spilled ink on the top of a
dead cottonwood and cawed raucous greeting to the spring.

The wonder of it dazed Thurston and made him do unusual things that
morning. All winter he had been puffed with pride over his cooking, but
now he scorched the oatmeal, let the coffee boil over, and blackened the
bacon, and committed divers other grievous sins against Gene’s clamoring
appetite. Nor did he feel the shame that he should have felt. He simply
could not stay in the cabin five minutes at a time, and for it he had no
apology.

After breakfast he left the dishes un-washed upon the table and went out
and made merry with nature. He could scarce believe that yesterday he
had frosted his left ear while he brought a bucket of water up from the
river, and that it had made his lungs ache to breathe the chill air. Now
the path to the river was black and dry and steamed with warmth. Across
the water cattle were feeding greedily upon the brown grasses that only
a few hours before had been locked away under a crust of frozen snow.

“They won’t starve now,” he exulted, pointing them out to Gene.

“No, you bet not!” Gene answered. “If this don’t freeze up on us the
wagons ‘ll be starting in a month or so. I guess we can be thinking
about hitting the trail for home pretty soon now. The river’ll break up
if this keeps going a week. Say, this is out uh sight! It’s warmer out
uh doors than it is in the house. Darn the old shack, anyway! I’m plumb
sick uh the sight of it. It looked all right to me in a blizzard, but
now--it’s me for the range, m’son.” He went off to the stable with long,
swinging strides that matched all nature for gladness, singing cheerily:

   “So polish up your saddles, oil your slickers and your guns,
   For we’re hound for Lonesome Prairie when the green grass comes.”



CHAPTER XI. FOLLOWING THE DIM TRAILS!

Thurston did not go on the horse roundup. He explained to the boys,
when they clamored against his staying, that he had a host of things to
write, and it would keep him busy till they were ready to start with
the wagons for the big rendezvous on the Yellowstone, the exact point of
which had yet to be decided upon by the Stock Association when it met.
The editors were after him, he said, and if he ever expected to get
anywhere, in a literary sense, it be-hooved him to keep on the smiley
side of the editors.

That sounded all right as far as it went, but unfortunately it did
not go far. The boys winked at one another gravely behind his back and
jerked their thumbs knowingly toward Milk River; by which pantomime they
reminded one another--quite unnecessarily that Mona Stevens had come
home. However, they kept their skepticism from becoming obtrusive, so
that Thurston believed his excuses passed on their face value. The boys,
it would seem, realized that it is against human nature for a man to
declare openly to his fellows his intention of laying last, desperate
siege to the heart of a girl who has already refused him three times,
and to ask her for the fourth time if she will reconsider her former
decisions and marry him.

That is really what kept Thurston at the Lazy Eight. His writing became
once more a mere incident in his life. During the winter, when he did
not see her, he could bring himself to think occasionally of other
things; and it is a fact that the stories he wrote with no heroine at
all hit the mark the straightest.

Now, when he was once again under the spell of big, clear, blue gray
eyes and crimply brown hair, his stories lost something of their
virility and verged upon the sentimental in tone. And since he was not a
fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why
it was. Surely a man who is in love should be well qualified to write
convincingly of the obsession but Thurston did not. He came near going
to the other extreme and refusing to write at all.

The wagons were out two weeks--which is quite long enough for a crisis
to arise in the love affair of any man. By the time the horse roundup
was over, one Philip Thurston was in pessimistic mood and quite ready
to follow the wagons, the farther the better. Also, they could not start
too soon to please him. His thoughts still ran to blue-gray eyes and
ripply hair, but he made no attempt to put them into a story.

He packed his trunk carefully with everything he would not need on
the roundup, and his typewriter he put in the middle. He told himself
bitterly that he had done with crimply haired girls, and with every
other sort of girl. If he could figure in something heroic--only he
said melodramatic--he might possibly force her to think well of him.
But heroic situations and opportunities come not every day to a man, and
girls who demand that their knights shall be brave in face of death need
not complain if they are left knightless at the last.

He wrote to Reeve-Howard, the night before they were to start, and
apologized gracefully for having neglected him during the past three
weeks and told him he would certainly be home in another month. He said
that he was “in danger of being satiated with the Western tone” and
would be glad to shake the hand of civilized man once more. This was
distinctly unfair, because he had no quarrel with the masculine portion
of the West. If he had said civilized woman it would have been more just
and more illuminating to Reeve-Howard who wondered what scrape Phil had
gotten himself into with those savages.

For the first few days of the trip Thurston was in that frame of mind
which makes a man want to ride by himself, with shoulders hunched
moodily and eyes staring straight before the nose of his horse.

But the sky was soft and seemed to smile down at him, and the clouds
loitered in the blue of it and drifted aimlessly with no thought of
reaching harbor on the sky-line. From under his horse’s feet the prairie
sod sent up sweet, earthy odors into his nostrils and the tinkle of the
bells in the saddle-bunch behind him made music in his ears--the sort of
music a true cowboy loves. Yellow-throated meadow larks perched swaying
in the top of gray sage bushes and sang to him that the world was good.
Sober gray curlews circled over his head, their long, funny bills thrust
out straight as if to point the way for their bodies to follow and
cried, “Kor-r-eck, kor-r-eck!”--which means just what the meadow larks
sang. So Thurston, hearing it all about him, seeing it and smelling it
and feeling the riot of Spring in his blood, straightened the hunch out
of his shoulders and admitted that it was all true: that the world was
good.

At Miles City he found himself in the midst of a small army, the
regulars of the range---which grew hourly larger as the outfits rolled
in. The rattle of mess-wagons, driven by the camp cook and followed by
the bed-wagon, was heard from all directions. Jingling cavvies (herds of
saddle horses they were, driven and watched over by the horse wrangler)
came out of the wilderness in the wake of the wagons. Thurston got out
his camera and took pictures of the scene. In the first, ten different
camps appeared; he mourned because two others were perforced omitted.
Two hours later he snapped the Kodak upon fifteen, and there were four
beyond range of the lens.

Park came along, saw what he was doing and laughed. “Yuh better wait
till they commence to come,” he said. “When yuh can stand on this little
hill and count fifty or sixty outfits camped within two or three miles
uh here, yuh might begin taking pictures.”

“I think you’re loading me,” Thurston retorted calmly, winding up the
roll for another exposure.

“All right--suit yourself about it.” Park walked off and left him
peering into the view-finder.

Still they came. From Swift Current to the Cypress Hills the Canadian
cattlemen sent their wagons to join the big meet. From the Sweet Grass
Hills to the mouth of Milk River not a stock-grower but was represented.
From the upper Musselshell they came, and from out the Judith Basin;
from Shellanne east to Fort Buford. Truly it was a gathering of the
clans such as eastern Montana had never before seen.

For a day and a night the cowboys made merry in town while their foremen
consulted and the captains appointed by the Association mapped out the
different routes. At times like these, foremen such as Park and Deacon
Smith were shorn of their accustomed power, and worked under orders as
strict as those they gave their men.

Their future movements thoroughly understood, the army moved down upon
the range in companies of five and six crews, and the long summer’s work
began; each rider a unit in the war against the chaos which the winter
had wrought; in the fight of the stockmen to wrest back their fortunes
from the wilderness, and to hold once more their sway over the
range-land.

Their method called for concerted action, although it was simple enough.
Two of the Lazy Eight wagons, under Park and Gene Wasson (for Hank that
spring was running four crews and had promoted Gene wagon-boss of one),
joined forces with the Circle-Bar, the Flying U, and a Yellowstone
outfit whose wagon-boss, knowing best the range, was captain of the five
crews; and drove north, gathering and holding all stock which properly
ranged beyond the Missouri.

That meant day after day of “riding circle”--which is, being
interpreted, riding out ten or twelve miles from camp, then turning and
driving everything before them to a point near the center of the circle
thus formed. When they met the cattle were bunched, and all stock which
belonged on that range was cut out, leaving only those which had crossed
the river during the storms of winter. These were driven on to the
next camping place and held, which meant constant day-herding and
night-guarding work which cowboys hate more than anything else.

There would be no calf roundup proper that spring, for all calves were
branded as they were gathered. Many there were among the she-stock that
would not cross the river again; their carcasses made unsightly blots in
the coulee-bottoms and on the wind-swept levels. Of the calves that had
followed their mothers on the long trail, hundreds had dropped out of
the march and been left behind for the wolves. But not all. Range-bred
cattle are blessed with rugged constitutions and can bear much of cold
and hunger. The cow that can turn tail to a biting wind the while she
ploughs to the eyes in snow and roots out a very satisfactory living
for herself breeds calves that will in time do likewise and grow fat and
strong in the doing. He is a sturdy, self-reliant little rascal, is the
range-bred calf.

When fifteen hundred head of mixed stock, bearing Northern brands, were
in the hands of the day-herders, Park and his crew were detailed to take
them on and turn them loose upon their own range north of Milk River.
Thurston felt that he had gleaned about all the experience he needed,
and more than enough hard riding and short sleeping and hurried eating.
He announced that he was ready to bid good-by to the range. He would
help take the herd home, he told Park, and then he intended to hit the
trail for little, old New York.

He still agreed with the meadow larks that the world was good, but he
had made himself believe that he really thought the civilized portion
of it was better, especially when the uncivilized part holds a girl who
persists in saying no when she should undoubtedly say yes, and insists
that a man must be a hero, else she will have none of him.



CHAPTER XII. HIGH WATER

It was nearing the middle of June, and it was getting to be a very hot
June at that. For two days the trail-herd had toiled wearily over the
hills and across the coulees between the Missouri and Milk River. Then
the sky threatened for a day, and after that they plodded in the rain.

“Thank the Lord that’s done with,” sighed Park when he saw the last
of the herd climb, all dripping, up the north bank of the Milk River.
“To-morrow we can turn ‘em loose. And I tell yuh, Bud, we didn’t get
across none too soon. Yuh notice how the river’s coming up? A day later
and we’d have had to hold the herd on the other side, no telling how
long.”

“It is higher than usual; I noticed that,” Thurston agreed absently. He
was thinking more of Mona just then than of the river. He wondered if
she would be at home. He could easily ride down there and find out.
It wasn’t far; not a quarter of a mile, but he assured himself that he
wasn’t going, and that he was not quite a fool, he hoped Even if she
were at home, what good could that possibly do him? Just give him
several bad nights, when he would lie in his corner of the tent and
listen to the boys snoring with a different key for every man. Such
nights were not pleasant, nor were the thoughts that caused them.

From where they were camped upon a ridge which bounded a broad coulee
on the east, he could look down upon the Stevens ranch nestling in the
bottomland, the house half hidden among the cottonwoods. Through the
last hours of the afternoon he watched it hungrily. The big corral ran
down to the water’s edge, and he noted idly that three panels of the
fence extended out into the river, and that the muddy water was creeping
steadily up until at sundown the posts of the first panel barely showed
above the water.

Park came up to him and looked down upon the little valley. “I never
did see any sense in Jack Stevens building where he did,” he remarked.
“There ain’t a June flood that don’t put his corral under water, and
some uh these days it’s going to get the house. He was too lazy to dig
a well back on high ground; he’d rather take chances on having the whole
business washed off the face uh the earth.”

“There must be danger of it this year if ever,” Thurston observed
uneasily. “The river is coming up pretty fast, it seems to me. It must
have raised three feet since we crossed this afternoon.”

“I’ll course there’s danger, with all that snow coming out uh the
mountains. And like as not Jack’s in Shellanne roosting on somebody’s
pool table and telling it scary, instead uh staying at home looking
after his stuff. Where yuh going, Bud?”

“I’m going to ride down there,” Thurston answered constrainedly. “The
women may be all alone.”

“Well, I’ll go along, if you’ll hold on a minute. Jack ain’t got a lick
uh sense. I don’t care if he is Mona’s brother.”

“Half brother,” corrected Thurston, as he swung up into the saddle. He
had a poor opinion of Jack and resented even that slight relation to
Mona.

The road was soggy with the rain which fell steadily; down in the
bottom, the low places in the road were already under water, and the
river, widening almost perceptibly in its headlong rush down the narrow
valley, crept inch by inch up its low banks. When they galloped into the
yard which sloped from the house gently down to the river fifty yards
away, Mona’s face appeared for a moment in the window. Evidently she had
been watching for some one, and Thurston’s heart flopped in his chest
as he wondered, fleetingly, if it could be himself. When she opened the
door her eyes greeted him with a certain wistful expression that he had
never seen in them before. He was guilty of wishing that Park had stayed
in camp.

“Oh, I’m glad you rode over,” she welcomed--but she was careful, after
that first swift glance, to look at Park. “Jack wasn’t at camp, was he?
He went to town this morning, and I looked for hi back long before now.
But it’s a mistake ever to look for Jack until he’s actually in sight.”

Park smiled vaguely. He was afraid it would not be polite to agree with
her as emphatically as he would like to have done. But Thurston had no
smile ready, polite or otherwise. Instead he drew down his brows in a
way not complimentary to Jack.

“Where is your mother?” he asked, almost peremptorily.

“Mamma went to Great Falls last week,” she told him primly, just
grazing him with one of her impersonal glances which nearly drove him to
desperation. “Aunt Mary has typhoid fever--there seems to be so much of
that this spring and they sent for mamma. She’s such a splendid nurse,
you know.”

Thurston did know, but he passed over the subject. “And you’re alone?”
 he demanded.

“Certainly not; aren’t you two here?” Mona could be very pert when she
tried. “Jack and I are holding down the ranch just now; the boys are all
on roundup, of course. Jack went to town today to see some one.

“Um-m-yes, of course.” It was Park, still trying to be polite and not
commit himself on the subject of Jack. The “some one” whom Jack went
oftenest to see was the bartender in the Palace saloon, but it was not
necessary to tell her that.

“The river’s coming up pretty fast, Mona,” he ventured. “Don’t yuh think
yuh ought to pull out and go visiting?”

“No, I don’t.” Mona’s tone was very decided. “I wouldn’t drop down on a
neighbor without warning just because the river happens to be coming up.
It has ‘come up’ every June since we’ve been living here, and there have
been several of them. At the worst it never came inside the gate.”

“You can never tell what it might do,” Park argued. “Yuh know yourself
there’s never been so much snow in the mountains. This hot weather we’ve
been having lately, and then the rain, will bring it a-whooping. Can’t
yuh ride over to the Jonses? One of us’ll go with yuh.”

“No, I can’t.” Mona’s chin went up perversely. “I’m no coward, I hope,
even if there was any danger which there isn’t.”

Thurston’s chin went up also, and he sat a bit straighter. Whether she
meant it or not, he took her words as a covert stab at himself. Probably
she did not mean it; at any rate the blood flew consciously to her
cheeks after she had spoken, and she caught her under lip sharply
between her teeth. And that did not help matters or make her temper more
yielding.

“Anyway,” she added hurriedly, “Jack will be here; he’s likely to come
any minute now.”

“Uh course, if Jack’s got some new kind of half-hitch he can put on
the river and hold it back yuh’ll be all right,” fleered Park, with the
freedom of an old friend. He had known Mona when she wore dresses to her
shoe-tops and her hair in long, brown curls down her back.

She wrinkled her nose at him also with the freedom of an old friend and
Thurston stirred restlessly in his chair. He did not like even Park to
be too familiar with Mona, though he knew there was a girl in Shellanne
whose name Park sometimes spoke in his sleep.

She lifted the big glass lamp down from its place on the clock shelf
and lighted it with fingers not quite steady. “You men,” she remarked,
“think women ought to be wrapped in pink cotton and put in a glass
cabinet. If, by any miracle, the river should come up around the house,
I flatter myself I should be able to cope with the situation. I’d just
saddle my horse and ride out to high ground!”

“Would yuh?” Park grinned skeptically. “The road from here to the hill
is half under water right now; the river’s got over the bank above, and
is flooding down through the horse pasture. By the time the water got up
here the river’d be as wide and deep one side uh yuh as the other. Then
where’d yuh be at?”

“It won’t get up here, though,” Mona asserted coolly. “It never has.”

“No, and the Lazy Eight never had to work the Yellowstone range on
spring roundup before either,” Park told her meaningly.

Whereupon Mona got upon her pedestal and smiled her unpleasant smile,
against which even Park had no argument ready.

They lingered till long after all good cowpunchers are supposed to be
in their beds--unless they are standing night-guard--but Jack failed to
appear. The rain drummed upon the roof and the river swished and gurgled
against the crumbling banks, and grumbled audibly to itself because the
hills stood immovably in their places and set bounds which it could not
pass, however much it might rage against their base.

When the clock struck a wheezy nine Mona glanced at it significantly
and smothered a yawn more than half affected. It was a hint which no man
with an atom of self-respect could overlook. With mutual understanding
the two rose.

“I guess we’ll have to be going,” Park said with some ceremony. “I kept
think ing maybe Jack would show up; it ain’t right to leave yuh here
alone like this.”

“I don’t see why not; I’m not the least bit afraid,” Mona said. Her tone
was impersonal and had in it a note of dismissal.

So, there being nothing else that they could do, they said good-night
and took themselves off.

“This is sure fierce,” Park grumbled when they struck the lower ground.
“Darn a man like Jack Stevens! He’ll hang out there in town and bowl up
on other men’s money till plumb daylight. It’s a wonder Mona didn’t go
with her mother. But no--it’d be awful if Jack had to cook his own grub
for a week. Say, the water has come up a lot, don’t yuh think, Bud?
If it raises much more Mona’ll sure have a chance to ‘cope with the
situation. It’d just about serve her right, too.”

Thurston did not think so, but he was in too dispirited a mood to argue
the point. It had not been good for his peace of mind to sit and
watch the color come and go in Mona’s cheeks, and the laughter spring
unheralded into her dear, big eyes, and the light tangle itself in the
waves of her hair.

He guided his horse carefully through the deep places, and noted
uneasily how much deeper it was than when they had crossed before. He
cursed the conventions which forbade his staying and watching over the
girl back there in the house which already stood upon an island, cut off
from the safe, high land by a strip of backwater that was widening and
deepening every minute, and, when it rose high enough to flow into the
river below, would have a current that would make a nasty crossing.

On the first rise he stopped and looked back at the light which shone
out from among the dripping cottonwoods. Even then he was tempted to go
back and brave her anger that he might feel assured of her safety.

“Oh, come on,” Park cried impatiently. “We can’t do any good sitting
out here in the rain. I don’t suppose the water will get clear up to
the house; it’ll likely do things to the sheds and corrals, though, and
serve Jack right. Come on, Bud. Mona won’t have us around, so the sooner
we get under cover the better for us. She’s got lots uh nerve; I guess
she’ll make out all right.”

There was common sense in the argument, and Thurston recognized it and
rode on to camp. But instead of unsaddling, as he would naturally have
done, he tied Sunfish to the bed-wagon and threw his slicker over his
back to protect him from the rain. And though Park said nothing, he
followed Thurston’s example.



CHAPTER XIII. “I’ll STAY--ALWAYS”

For a long time Thurston lay with wide-open eyes staring up at nothing,
listening to the rain and thinking. By and by the rain ceased and he
could tell by the dim whiteness of the tent roof that the clouds must
have been swept away from before the moon, then just past the full.

He got up carefully so as not to disturb the others, and crept over two
or three sleeping forms on his way to the opening, untied the flap and
went out. The whole hilltop and the valley below were bathed in mellow
radiance. He studied critically the wide sweep of the river. He might
almost have thought it the Missouri itself, it stretched so far
from bank to bank; indeed, it seemed to know no banks but the hills
themselves. He turned toward where the light had shone among the
cottonwoods below; there was nothing but a great blot of shade that told
him nothing.

A step sounded just behind. A hand, the hand of Park, rested upon his
shoulder. “Looks kinda dubious, don’t it, kid? Was yuh thinking about
riding down there?”

“Yes,” Thurston answered simply. “Are you coming?”

“Sure,” Park assented.

They got upon their horses and headed down the trail to the Stevens
place. Thurston would have put Sunfish to a run, but Park checked him.

“Go easy,” he admonished. “If there’s swimming to be done and it’s a
cinch there will be, he’s going to need all the wind he’s got.”

Down the hill they stopped at the edge of a raging torrent and strained
their eyes to see what lay on the other side. While they looked, a
light twinkled out from among the tree-tops. Thurston caught his breath
sharply.

“She’s upstairs,” he said, and his voice sounded strained and unnatural.
“It’s just a loft where they store stuff.” He started to ride into the
flood.

“Come on back here, yuh chump!” Park roared. “Get off and loosen the
cinch before yuh go in there, or yuh won’t get far. Sunfish’ll need
room to breathe, once he gets to bucking that current. He’s a good water
horse, just give him his head and don’t get rattled and interfere with
him. And we’ve got to go up a ways before we start in.”

He led the way upstream, skirting under the bluff, and Thurston, chafing
against the delay, followed obediently. Trees were racing down, their
clean-washed roots reaching up in a tangle from the water, their
branches waving like imploring arms. A black, tar-papered shack went
scudding past, lodged upon a ridge where the water was shallower, and
sat there swaying drunkenly. Upon it a great yellow cat clung and yowled
his fear.

“That’s old Dutch Henry’s house,” Park shouted above the roar. “I’ll bet
he’s cussing things blue on some pinnacle up there.” He laughed at the
picture his imagination conjured, and rode out into the swirl.

Thurston kept close behind, mindful of Park’s command to give Sunfish
his head. Sunfish had carried him safely out of the stampede and he had
no fear of him now.

His chief thought was a wish that he might do this thing quite alone.
He was jealous of Park’s leading, and thought bitterly that Mona would
thank Park alone and pass him by with scant praise and he did so want
to vindicate himself. The next minute he was cursing his damnable
selfishness. A tree had swept down just before him, caught Park and his
horse in its branches and hurried on as if ashamed of what it had done.
Thurston, in that instant, came near jerking Sunfish around to follow;
but he checked the impulse as it was formed and left the reins alone
which was wise. He could not have helped Park, and he could very easily
have drowned himself. Though it was not thought of himself but of Mona
that stayed his hand.

They landed at the gate. Sunfish scrambled with his feet for secure
footing, found it and waded up to the front door. The water was a foot
deep on the porch. Thurston beat an imperative tattoo upon the door
with the butt of his quirt, and shouted. And Mona’s voice, shorn of its
customary assurance, answered faintly from the loft.

He shouted again, giving directions in a tone of authority which must
have sounded strange to her, but which she did not seem to resent and
obeyed without protest. She had to wade from the stairs to the door and
when Thurston stooped and lifted her up in front of him, she looked as
if she were very glad to have him there.

“You didn’t ‘cope with the situation,’ after all,” he remarked while she
was settling herself firmly in the saddle.

“I went to sleep and didn’t notice the water till it was coming in at
the door,” she explained. “And then--” She stopped abruptly.

“Then what?” he demanded maliciously. “Were you afraid?”

“A little,” she confessed reluctantly.

Thurston gloated over it in silence--until he remembered Park. After
that he could think of little else. As before, now Sunfish battled as
seemed to him best, for Thurston, astride behind the saddle, held Mona
somewhat tighter than he need to have done, and let the horse go.

So long as Sunfish had footing he braced himself against the mad rush of
waters and forged ahead. But out where the current ran swimming deep
he floundered desperately under his double burden. While his strength
lasted he kept his head above water, struggling gamely against the flood
that lapped over his back and bubbled in his nostrils. Thurston felt his
laboring and clutched Mona still tighter. Of a sudden the horse’s head
went under; the black water came up around Thurston’s throat with a
hungry swish, and Sunfish went out from under him like an eel.

There was a confused roaring in his ears, a horrid sense of suffocation
for a moment. But he had learned to swim when he was a boy at school,
and he freed one hand from its grip on Mona and set to paddling with
much vigor and considerably less skill. And though the under-current
clutched him and the weight of Mona taxed his strength, he managed to
keep them both afloat and to make a little headway until the deepest
part lay behind them.

How thankful he was when his feet touched bottom, no one but himself
ever knew! His ears hummed from the water in them, and the roar of
the river was to him as the roar of the sea; his eyes smarted from the
clammy touch of the dingy froth that went hurrying by in monster flakes;
his lungs ached and his heart pounded heavily against his ribs when he
stopped, gasping, beyond reach of the water-devils that lapped viciously
behind.

He stood a minute with his arm still around her, and coughed his voice
clear. “Park went down,” he began, hardly knowing what it was he was
saying. “Park--” He stopped, then shouted the name aloud. “Park! Oh-h,
Park!”

And from somewhere down the river came a faint reassuring whoop.

“Thank the Lord!” gasped Thurston, and leaned against her for a second.
Then he straightened. “Are you all right?” he asked, and drew her toward
a rock near at hand--for in truth, the knees of him were shaking. They
sat down, and he looked more closely at her face and discovered that
it was wet with something more than river water. Mona the self-assured,
Mona the strong-hearted, was crying. And instinctively he knew that not
the chill alone made her shiver. He was keeping his arm around her waist
deliberately, and it pleased him that she let it stay. After a minute
she did something which surprised him mightily--and pleased him more:
she dropped her face down against the soaked lapels of his coat, and
left it there. He laid a hand tenderly against her cheek and wondered if
he dared feel so happy.

“Little girl--oh, little girl,” he said softly, and stopped. For the
crowding emotions in his heart and brain the English language has no
words.

Mona lifted her face and looked into his eyes. Her own were soft and
shining in the moonlight, and she was smiling a little--the roguish
little smile of the imitation pastel portrait. “You--you’ll unpack your
typewriter, won’t you please, and--and stay?”

Thurston crushed her close. “Stay? The range-land will never get rid
of me now,” he cried jubilantly. “Hank wanted to take me into the Lazy
Eight, so now I’ll buy an interest, and stay--always.”

“You dear!” Mona snuggled close and learned how it feels to be kissed,
if she had never known before.

Sunfish, having scrambled ashore a few yards farther down, came up to
them and stood waiting, as if to be forgiven for his failure to carry
them safe to land, but Thurston, after the first inattentive glance,
ungratefully took no heed of him.

There was a sound of scrambling foot-steps and Park came dripping up to
them. “Well, say!” he greeted. “Ain’t yuh got anything to do but set here
and er--look at the moon? Break away and come up to camp. I’ll rout out
the cook and make him boil us some coffee.”

Thurston turned joyfully toward him. “Park, old fellow, I was afraid.”

“Yuh better reform and quit being afraid,” Park bantered. “I got out uh
the mix-up fine, but I guess my horse went on down--poor devil. I was
poking around below there looking for him.”

“Well, Mona, I see yuh was able to ‘cope with the situation,’ all
right--but yuh needed Bud mighty bad, I reckon. The chances is yuh won’t
have no house in the morning, so Bud’ll have to get busy and rustle one
for yuh. I guess you’ll own up, now, that the water can get through the
gate.” He laughed in his teasing way.

Mona stood up, and her shining eyes were turned to Thurston. “I don’t
care,” she asserted with reddened cheeks. “I’m just glad it did get
through.”

“Same here,” said Thurston with much emphasis.

Then, with Mona once more in the saddle, and with Thurston leading
Sunfish by the bridle-rein, they trailed damply and happily up the long
ridge to where the white tents of the roundup gleamed sharply against
the sky-line.





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