The Block S outfit, far into that night, staged a good-natured minor
riot in a town whose population of something less than a hundred
souls was eighty per cent dependent on Block S activities for its
existence. There were half a dozen small ranches within a ten mile
radius, men who owned from three to five hundred head of stock. A
few sheep-masters with flocks and herders and camp tenders helped
put money in circulation there and lent a color--and odor--of their
own to the region. Brooklyn-born fiction to the contrary, the
cattleman and the sheep owner were not always at each others’
throats. The man on horseback tended to look down on the shepherd
who guarded his flocks afoot. In all history the man on horseback
has done that. But physical clashes between the two groups only
occurred when one encroached too arrogantly on what the other deemed
his inalienable rights and privileges.
And all these folk lived under the tolerant shadow of Adam
Sutherland, whose Block S marked the ribs of thirty thousand cattle.
Sutherland owned the town site of Big Sandy. He owned the general
store and operated the post office. If he didn’t own the hotel and
the three saloons and the blacksmith shop it was simply because he
didn’t care to bother about petty details of commerce. So Big Sandy
supported a number of people and activities that were like mistletoe
on the parent oak, some ornamental, some possibly useful, but a
secondary growth as far as the Block S was concerned.
Sutherland had come into Montana with a beef herd for a military
post. He had remained to grow up with the country. He had become big
financially. He had been a big man physically. Now that he was no
longer young his flesh was becoming a burden. He liked to jog around
the home ranch on Little Eagle in the summer, to ride out and watch
his men handle stock when the round-up worked near home. He liked to
be in Big Sandy when his beef herds were marshaled into the
stockyards in a cloud of dust and see the fat steers go rolling east
in trainloads. He liked to see his riders have their fling in town.
His rule over all that lay under his ægis was beneficent, almost
paternal. Adam Sutherland had never heard of such a thing as an
efficiency system, but he had its equivalent at his service,
functioning smoothly, ungrudgingly. A vision of the future was a
phrase he might not have fully comprehended, but he had that too, or
he would not have owned thousands of acres of meadow land, the
headwaters of mountain streams, a score of unfenced pastures in a
country where grass and water were as yet free to all men, in a
period when most cattlemen still believed that the great plains must
remain a cow pasture for all time to come. The Sutherland holdings
dotted the foothills of the Bear Paws in a semicircle fifty miles
south and east.
He sat on the counter in the big store now, and greeted his riders
as they passed in and out making sundry small purchases. Later in
the evening he made the round of the saloons and hotel bar, the
Silver Dollar, Monty’s Place, the Exchange, bought a round of drinks
for “the house” in each place. Then he went away to his house set
off on a knoll to one side of the town, a white, sprawling cottage
with a green patch of lawn about it, surrounded by a picket fence to
keep out the wandering stock that sometimes strayed wide-eyed into
the single street of this frontier hamlet. The fence served also the
secondary purpose of keeping out over-hilarious cow-punchers who
might mistake the place for something else and in high spirits--both
literally and figuratively--undertake to ride their horses up the
front steps and along the porch, crying a jovial challenge to those
within to come out and “whoop ’er up.”
Mark Steele’s outfit went north into the flat waste of Lonesome
Prairie next morning. The Block S cowboys struck town again in
something less than three weeks. They had sent a trainload of cattle
east from Galata on the high line of the Great Northern. Now they
drew up to Big Sandy with a herd seventeen hundred strong, sleek,
fat, long-horned beasts moving like an army without banners but
armed with spears that glinted in the sun, the slender wide-curving
horns inherited from bulls of Andulasian blood.
The outfit camped where the level of the Prairie pitched down to the
sagebrush flats. Robin went on first guard with the lights of Big
Sandy glimmering two miles distant and five hundred feet below.
East, west, north, Lonesome Prairie spread its night-shrouded
breadth, an enormous, uninhabited triangle of grassland a hundred
miles on each side, with a railway crossing its middle and scarcely
a dwelling in all those miles except the dull red section houses
where the railroad laborers lived.
Robin jogged his two hours and a half, meeting and passing the other
rider, around and around the outer edge of a herd that slept as
peacefully as a babe in the cradle, a vast amorphous blot on the
shrouded plain. They crooned chanty songs as they rode, not because
they loved singing well enough to drone interminable ditties for
their hours on watch, but because a rider moving silently in the
dark might sneeze, flap a slicker, his horse might stumble--and at a
strange noise breaking the night silence that herd would jump the
bed-ground as one, in a panic, making the earth shake with the
thunder of their flight. So they sang, crooned rather. And the
relief coming on at eleven o’clock came droning or whistling to the
herd.
“All right. You got ’em. See that you keep ’em.” Robin and his mate
jocularly greeted the relief, and departed.
Robin was paired for night work with Tex Matthews, a middle-aged
Texan, a quiet, soft-voiced man whose gentle ways were a serviceable
mask for a rider who had seen a good deal of wild west in his time.
They turned toward camp. Matthews rode a little way, turned to look
into the flat below. In the dark and the silence a night breeze
sighed, as if the range breathed audibly. The Texan stared at the
town lights. Half the Block S crew had ridden in when first guard
was set. Sometime before dawn they would come galloping back.
“They’ll be gettin’ action down there, I expect,” he murmured.
“Let’s ride in,” Robin suggested. “I don’t want to sleep, nohow.”
They swung their horses about. In fifteen minutes they were
dismounting before the Silver Dollar. That particular house was the
favorite resort of the Block S. They patronized all saloons without
favor, as a rule, but the Silver Dollar was roomy, clean, it had a
billiard table and comfortable chairs. More important, it was
conducted by a genial soul who, having been a range-rider himself,
knew and welcomed cow-punchers regardless of whether or not they had
money to spend over his bar.
Now Robin and Matthews had neither expectation nor purpose beyond a
natural hankering for the glow of bright lights, a drink or two--a
little diversion, so to speak. They would ordinarily have found some
of the outfit, perhaps have played stud poker an hour or two, taken
a stirrup cup and departed.
But once inside the door Robin Tyler had a strange intuition of
something in the air. Mark Steele leaned on one end of the bar.
Three or four Block S men stood or lounged about. A couple of
strangers were present. And slumped in a chair against the farther
wall sat Dan Mayne. His chin was sunk on his breast. His dispirited
mustache drooped more dispiritedly than ever. But he was neither
asleep nor in a stupor. Mark Steele regarded him with a smile that
was a mixture of contempt and calculation.
“Hello cowboys,” Steele greeted the two. “Couldn’t resist temptation
eh? C’mon. Have a drink. Ho, Dan!”
He called Mayne.
“Line up, old-timer. Have a shot.”
“I ain’t drinkin’,” Mayne snarled.
Robin, who had started toward him, and so stood between the two,
heard Mayne add a rider to the sentence under his breath--“not with
you, damn your soul!”
“No, you don’t drink, do you?” Mark laughed unpleasantly. “You just
pour it down, that’s all. Come on, kid,” he spoke to Robin, “line up
here. The old man’s on the prod, but the rest of us are sociable.”
Robin hesitated a moment. There _was_ something in the air. There
was a subtle shade of the peremptory in that “line up here.” The
tone nettled him out of all reason. And he didn’t like the
conjunction of Dan Mayne drunk and resentful in the same room with
Shining Mark Steele.
“Leave me out this time,” he said casually. “Looks like I better put
my boss to bed. I generally have to when he goes on a bust.”
“Suit yourself,” Steele replied tartly. “All the same to me.”
That muttered sentence of Mayne’s was apparently the last coherent
speech he was capable of making. Robin got him out of the chair,
steadied his uncertain progress across the way to the hotel and
half-carried him up to a bedroom.
He sat down beside him, and piled a wet towel on Mayne’s head. In
the course of half an hour the thickness of tongue and brain
partially cleared.
“You been squabblin’ with Mark to-night?” Robin asked then. He
wanted to know. If Mayne had jumped Steele, he, Robin, would be in a
difficult situation, working under Steele. Somehow Mark’s attitude
promised trouble.
“Naw, not about _that_.” Mayne understood his meaning at once. “I
ain’t a damn fool altogether. But I don’t like that _hombre_. And I
_am_ drunk. When I’m drunk I ain’t got as much sense as I should
have about some things. Ivy’s in town with me. Mark he comes ridin’
in about supper time and gets her corraled in the parlor an’ sets
there talkin’ the kid black in the face. So I tell him to lay off,
that I don’t want no flashy, silver-spangled wagon bosses in my
family. I wanted to say cow thief instead uh wagon boss, but I
didn’t. Least I don’t think I did.”
“You _are_ a damn fool,” Robin said angrily. “Ivy’s a blamed sight
abler to stand off Mark Steele than you are. I’m a darned sight more
interested in who she talks to than you are, an’ I sure wouldn’t
jump any man for settin’ talkin’ to her in a hotel parlor. Darn it,
he comes to the ranch, and you make him welcome.”
“No more,” Mayne asserted with drunken emphasis. “’F he ever jingles
his spurs on my porch again I’ll ventilate him.”
After a minute he said thickly:
“I found them dead cows below Cold Spring. I rode a week steady
before I located the calves. I found ’em fresh marked. I can’t prove
nothin’. But I found ’em.”
“S-sh,” Robin warned. “Not so loud. What brand’s on the calves?”
“T Bar S.”
“Huh! I’ve seen a few around.” Robin wrinkled his brows. “Little
bunch was thrown in on the Block S range a year ago. Supposed to
belong to some Helena man.”
“Yeah,” Mayne snorted. “I looked into that, too. Helena hell! The T
Bar S is registered in Jim Bond’s name. I’ve known him a long time.
He keeps a two-by-four saloon in Helena. Never owned a cow in his
life. Them T Bar S’s was throwed in here last year, a hundred and
fifty head mixed stock. I bet you Mark Steele put up the money. But
I can’t prove it. I can’t prove nothin’--yet.”
“Well, if you can’t prove nothing, you can’t, that’s all,” Robin
said. “You just got to lay low, and see which way the cat hops.”
“I’m goin’ to ask old Adam to-morrow if _he’s_ got any idea what’s
goin’ on around here,” Mayne growled. “An’ I’m goin’ to ride an’
watch. Ride an’ watch,” he repeated darkly. “Ride an’ watch!”