From the Bar M Bar to Shadow Butte, where the Sutherland riders lay
ready to start the fall work, was a matter of three hours’ riding.
The round-up was camped under the Butte itself on a natural meadow
in Little Eagle, a lovely spot ringed about by groves of poplars and
clumps of willows, just where the foothills lifted sharply to the
timbered slopes of the Bear Paw Mountains.
Robin’s string, heads up and ears erect at sight of the saddle bunch
scattered on the flat, went downhill on the run. Robin himself drew
up on the edge of the high bank to have a look. He had seen
round-ups sweeping the plains, trail herds coming up from one
horizon and vanishing below another ever since he could remember.
Wild horses and wild cattle and wild riding had never grown old,
commonplace, to Robin. He always thrilled a little to the sights and
sounds of range work. Perhaps because he was and had always been a
part of it, dimly conscious of its dramatic significance as the
greatest pastoral movement in the history of the world, of himself
as a minor figure playing a part in a spectacle bigger than any of
its actors.
He had risen in his stirrups many a time on last guard to sniff the
morning air, to stare at the sun’s brilliant upper segment thrusting
above the eastern sky line, shooting yellow fingers across grassland
that waved and shimmered like silken crêpe. At such a moment a queer
glowing gladness in simply being alive, in being there on the fringe
of a sleepy herd with a good horse under him, would give Robin an
odd sensation. He got the same feeling when they went thundering
down a long ridge, twenty riders abreast, elbows out, reins swinging
loose, to the music of jingling bits and spurs, the creak of saddle
leather. He had a touch of that strange uplift now, for a moment. An
artist with an analytical turn might have defined it as a dumb
response to beauty. Robin didn’t attempt to define his feelings. He
only knew that when he looked down into Eagle Creek the sight
pleased him in a way he could not describe.
The white tents gleamed like snowflakes against the poplar green.
The yellow grass spread like a carpet under the feet of two hundred
grazing horses, sleek-bodied brutes well broken to range use. Bells
on the leaders tinkled as they moved their heads in feeding. The
horse wrangler sat on the opposite bank, a lone horseman silhouetted
like a statue against the evening sky. Figures moved about the chuck
wagon. The smell of coffee and frying beef floated up to Robin’s
nostrils. In dry, thin air that doubled the range of the human eye
over a sea-level atmosphere and lent an uncanny resonance to sounds,
the voices of the cowboys had a mellow ring. Some one was singing a
ribald trail song. Half a dozen voices joined lustily in the chorus:
“Comin’ up the Chisholm Trail
I tell you what you’ll get,
A little chunk of bread and a little chunk of meat
Little black coffee with sugar on the sly,
Dust in your throat boys, and gravel in your eye!”
Robin whooped once, long and loud, and jumped Red Mike down the
hill. He loosed his _reata_ and slung a noose. Fifty yards short of
the wagons he swept like a whirlwind upon the heels of his string,
shot the rawhide full length to encircle the head of the horse
packing his bed.
Five minutes later his riding gear was stacked under his saddle
blanket, and Robin was squatting on his heels by the bed wagon
swapping repartee with a dozen riders he knew.
Shortly the cook sounded an alarm. He did not approach these youths
where they lounged and say in a softly modulated tone, “Gentlemen,
dinner is served.” He seized a dishpan, hammered it vigorously with
an iron spoon, shouted raucously, “Grub pi-i-ile!” And the crew
swooped down on the chuck wagon like a flock of chickens gathering
about the mother hen when she clucked discovery of fat worms.
The riders ate. A couple volunteered to help the cook wash up. The
rest withdrew. They sat about the bed wagon, in the bed tent,
sprawled on the earth, swapping yarns. They had no cares. Without
capital or herds they worked on terms of perfect equality for those
who had both in abundance. Their life called for courage, resource,
initiative, endurance at divers times and in strange places. Cold,
rain, sleet, driving snow, burning sun and buffeting winds, night
watches on sleeping herds, rivers in flood, wild horses,
lip-cracking thirst allayed by alkali water, days when they rode
from sun to sun and slept with their boots on wherever they could
lie down--it was all one. They took it as it came. Untrammeled
space, action swift and purposeful toward a clearly seen end, work
that was always tinged with the excitement of the unexpected, barred
monotony from the range. Saving injury, the mishaps incident to what
often was necessarily wild riding, the cow-puncher worked or sought
diversion in uniformly high spirits. If he had no clear sense of
being a unit in Homeric episodes enacted against a spacious and
colorful background, he had a rude dignity of his own as well as a
sense of humor which frequently took a Rabelaisian twist, so that
his phraseology often needed expurgating before it would pass
current in polite society. The tales circulating and the cross-fire
of talk among the Block S riders needs no repeating, since it had no
more to do with Robin Tyler than to make him chuckle now and then as
he lay on his unrolled bed.
He had at once noted Mark Steele’s absence. Later some one remarked
that Shining was due to eat a cold supper. Then in the dusk Mark
Steele and Tommy Thatcher, a lean Texan, noted for his uncanny skill
with a rope, rode in and unsaddled. The cook fed them. Mark remained
in the chuck-tent, where, with the privilege of the wagon boss, he
slept in comparative privacy. Tommy joined his fellows.
“Well, we hit her for Big Sandy in the morning,” he announced.
“Heigh-ho,” one stretched his arms wide. “Me for the high pillow
then. Once we hit Lonesome Prairie us and bed’ll be strangers.”
Which was an oblique way of anticipating days in the saddle and
nights on guard while the Block S combed the range for marketable
beeves.
In twenty minutes silence fell on the camp. The men were in their
blankets. The nighthawk relieved the day wrangler and moved his
horse herd away from about the tents. A moon swam up and Shadow
Butte cast a long black cone toward the northwest. Bells tinkled
with distant sweetness where the ponies grazed. Midnight passed.
When the few hours of darkness began to wane a lantern broke out
yellow in the cook tent. As the first paleness showed in the east
the cook lifted his call.
In less than an hour, with the sun heaving up above the sky line the
outfit was under way, all their equipment, tents, cooking layout,
beds, extra ropes and gear piled high and lashed on two wagons drawn
by four-horse teams.
There were few trails and those dim ones over that sparsely settled
land. One rider acted as pilot across country. In his wake the chuck
wagon led the van. Behind this rattled the bed wagon driven by the
nighthawk. Behind these came the saddle herd, urged on by the horse
wrangler with a trailing rope. Last of all the riders mounted, shook
the kinks out of their fractious horses and broke into a gallop.
Some passed the _remuda_ and the wagons. Some jogged leisurely. They
rode as they pleased, in pairs, in clusters, at a walk or a gallop.
Robin found himself riding elbow to elbow with Mark Steele,
“Shining” Steele. Appropriate name, apart from the beaten silver
ornaments with which he adorned his gear, even to a row of conchos
down the outer seam of his leathern chaps, for the man himself was
like a steel blade, tall, lithe, thin-faced, a rider born and a
cowman from his heels up. Mark Steele had come into the Bear Paws
unheralded and unsung, and in two years had become range boss of the
Block S over the heads of older hands.
He jogged beside Robin, hat pushed back, swaying to the gait of his
horse, humming a little tune, his eyes roving over what spread
before them as they topped each little rise.
“Mayne give you a good mount, kid?” he asked presently.
“Thirteen head. And I brought along a ridge runner of my own,” Robin
answered.
“Uh-huh. You won’t be afoot, then, half the time, like you was with
the Pool last spring.”
Mark said it with a smile but there was a sting in the remark, an
implied sneer. Robin had joined the general round-up with the Bear
Paw Pool that spring, having only ten horses in his mount. Of these
one had gone crazy with loco weed, another grew lame. He rode the
remaining eight to a standstill trying to hold up his end with men
far better mounted. It was neither his fault nor Dan Mayne’s--just
ill luck. Saddle horses had vanished, others had got crippled. There
was no time to break colts. But both Robin and the Bar M Bar had
lost a modicum of prestige. He didn’t thank Steele for reminding
him. He knew that with his present string he could take the outside
circle and come into camp with the best of the Block S. So he kept
silent.
“I was down to Mayne’s night before last,” Steele observed. “You
weren’t in sight.”
“Hunting horses,” Robin explained. He knew Mayne, or Ivy, or both,
had told Steele that. What business of Mark’s was it, anyway?
“Where’d you ride?” Shining asked quite casually.
“So _that’s_ it,” Robin thought--recalling the dead cows and the
rifle shot that put him on the run out of Birch Creek bottom. Aloud
he said: “Sand Coulee, Boggy Spring, west side of Chase Hill.”
“Much stock in sight?”
“Quite a lot.”
They rode two hundred yards in silence.
“There’s thieves workin’ on this range,” Shining Mark broke out
suddenly.
“The hell you say!” Robin’s surprise was not simulated, but it was
surprise at information coming to him from this source.
“I been ridin’ myself some lately,” Mark went on in his crisp tone.
“I’ve seen things.”
“What you been drinkin’?” Robin tried raillery.
Steele frowned.
“I seen some pretty fishy lookin’ work,” he growled. “Pretty raw.
There’ll be a necktie party when I get it figured out.”
“Well, they can’t steal no cows of mine,” Robin said lightly.
“’Cause I don’t own ary a split hoof. You don’t surprise me much. I
guess there’s no range in Montana, nor any place where cows run,
that there isn’t somebody packin’ a runnin’ iron and draggin’ the
long rope now and then.”
“Ain’t you seen nothin’--no big calves with a fresh brand and no
mother handy?” Steele persisted.
Robin shook his head.
“If I’d come across stuff like that anywhere in Bar M Bar territory
I guess old Dan Mayne would be ridin’ the pinnacles with a
Winchester and frothin’ at the mouth,” he drawled. “What’s the
brand?”
“I ain’t talkin’,” Steele said darkly. “An’ you keep this to
yourself what I say. _Sabe?_ They’re workin’ on the Block S mostly,
I expect. But they might not overlook the Bar M Bar. So keep your
eyes open, kid, an’ let me know if you spot anything that looks
queer.”
Three or four riders behind broke their horses into a lope, came
abreast, laughing, elbows flopping like limp-winged birds. Steele
and Robin fell into their pace. In a row, bobbing uniformly, hoofs
beating out a steady rhythm on the dry turf, they passed the saddle
herd, the wagons. The night hawk driving the bed wagon popped his
whiplash as they went by. The cook, acting Jehu, braced himself by
the four-horse reins, a cigarette in his lips. Far ahead of the
wagons they overtook and joined the other riders.
At noon they camped two hours on a creek bottom, ate, caught fresh
horses and moved on. Mid-afternoon saw the cavalcade top a rise
below which, in the middle of a great gray stretch of sagebrush, the
town of Big Sandy lifted a huddle of unpainted buildings. There the
chuck wagon would take on a month’s grub, the cowboys would drink
Bourbon whisky and play poker overnight, and at dawn the Block S
would depart into the wide waste of Lonesome Prairie, to return
again in due time with a herd of prime beef cattle two thousand
strong.
And all the way to town Robin wondered what Shining Mark was getting
at; what was his real object in that conversation. Was he craftily
seeking to discover if Robin _had_ been the rider on the sorrel
horse who turned over the dead cow to read her brand?
Or was he shooting straight when he promised a necktie party for cow
thieves unknown? When Robin gazed at Steele’s easy erectness in the
saddle, the flashy ornamentation of his riding rig, he was troubled
by a promise of trouble. He was sure, yet not so sure.
More than ever he wished he had been able to see what brand went on
those calves that day.
Coupled with uncertainty went the firm conviction that if Shining
Mark once linked him with a knowledge of those dead cows and stolen
calves, he, Robin Tyler, would need eyes in the back of his head
whenever he rode alone.