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.”