Produced by Al Haines
SAWTOOTH RANCH
BY
B. M. BOWER
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
JEAN OF THE LAZY A
GOOD INDIAN
THE UPHILL CLIMB
THE GRINGOS
THE FLYING U'S LAST STAND
THE PHANTOM HERD
THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX
SKYRIDER
This Book was First Published in Great Britain . . . March 10th, 1921
First Issued in this Cheap Form . . . 1922
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. LITTLE FISH
II. THE ENCHANTMENT OF LONG DISTANCE
III. REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING
IV. "SHE'S A GOOD GIRL WHEN SHE AIN'T CRAZY"
V. A DEATH "BY ACCIDENT"
VI. LONE ADVISES SILENCE
VII. THE MAN AT WHISPER
VIII. "IT TAKES NERVE JUST TO HANG ON"
IX. THE EVIL EYE OF THE SAWTOOTH
X. ANOTHER SAWTOOTH "ACCIDENT"
XI. SWAN TALKS WITH HIS THOUGHTS
XII. THE QUIRT PARRIES THE FIRST BLOW
XIII. LONE TAKES HIS STAND
XIV. "FRANK'S DEAD"
XV. SWAN TRAILS A COYOTE
XVI. THE SAWTOOTH SHOWS ITS HAND
XVII. YACK DON'T LIE
XVIII. "I THINK AL WOODRUFF'S GOT HER"
XIX. SWAN CALLS FOR HELP
XX. KIDNAPPED
XXI. "OH, I COULD KILL YOU!"
XXII. "YACK, I LICK YOU GOOD IF YOU BARK"
XXIII. "I COULDA LOVED THIS LITTLE GIRL"
XXIV. ANOTHER STORY BEGINS
SAWTOOTH RANCH
CHAPTER I
LITTLE FISH
Quirt Creek flowed sluggishly between willows which sagged none too
gracefully across its deeper pools, or languished beside the rocky
stretches that were bone dry from July to October, with a narrow
channel in the centre where what water there was hurried along to the
pools below. For a mile or more, where the land lay fairly level in a
platter-like valley set in the lower hills, the mud that rimmed the
pools was scored deep with the tracks of the "TJ up-and-down" cattle,
as the double monogram of Hunter and Johnson was called.
A hard brand to work, a cattleman would tell you. Yet the TJ
up-and-down herd never seemed to increase beyond a niggardly three
hundred or so, though the Quirt ranch was older than its lordly
neighbours, the Sawtooth Cattle Company, who numbered their cattle by
tens of thousands and whose riders must have strings of fifteen horses
apiece to keep them going; older too than many a modest ranch that had
flourished awhile and had finished as line-camps of the Sawtooth when
the Sawtooth bought ranch and brand for a lump sum that looked big to
the rancher, who immediately departed to make himself a new home
elsewhere: older than others which had somehow gone to pieces when the
rancher died or went to the penitentiary under the stigma of a long
sentence as a cattle thief. There were many such, for the Sawtooth,
powerful and stern against outlawry, tolerated no pilfering from their
thousands.
The less you have, the more careful you are of your possessions.
Hunter and Johnson owned exactly a section and a half of land, and for
a mile and a half Quirt Creek was fenced upon either side. They hired
two men, cut what hay they could from a field which they irrigated, fed
their cattle through the cold weather, watched them zealously through
the summer, and managed to ship enough beef each fall to pay their
grocery bill and their men's wages and have a balance sufficient to buy
what clothes they needed, and perhaps pay a doctor if one of them fell
ill. Which frequently happened, since Brit was becoming a prey to
rheumatism that sometimes kept him in bed, and Frank occasionally
indulged himself in a gallon or so of bad whisky and suffered
afterwards from a badly deranged digestion.
Their house was a two-room log cabin, built when logs were easier to
get than lumber. That the cabin contained two rooms was the result of
circumstances rather than design. Brit had hauled from the
mountain-side logs long and logs short, and it had seemed a shame to
cut the long ones any shorter. Later, when the outside world had crept
a little closer to their wilderness--as, go where you will, the outside
world has a way of doing--he had built a lean-to shed against the cabin
from what lumber there was left after building a cowshed against the
log-barn.
In the early days, Brit had had a wife and two children, but the wife
could not endure the loneliness of the ranch nor the inconvenience of
living in a two-room log cabin. She was continually worrying over
rattlesnakes and diphtheria and pneumonia, and begging Brit to sell out
and live in town. She had married him because he was a cowboy, and
because he was a nimble dancer and rode gallantly with silver-shanked
spurs ajingle on his heels and a snake-skin band around his hat, and
because a ranch away out on Quirt Creek had sounded exactly like a
story in a book.
Adventures, picturesqueness, even romance, are recognised and
appreciated only at a distance. Mrs Hunter lost the perspective of
romance and adventure, and shed tears because there was sufficient
mineral in the water to yellow her week's washing, and for various
other causes which she had never foreseen and to which she refused to
resign herself.
Came a time when she delivered a shrill-voiced, tear-blurred ultimatum
to Brit. Either he must sell out and move to town, or she would take
the children and leave him. Of towns Brit knew nothing except the
post-office, saloon, cheap restaurant side,--and a barber shop where a
fellow could get a shave and hair-cut before he went to see his girl.
Brit could not imagine himself actually _living_, day after day, in a
town. Three or four days had always been his limit. It was in a
restaurant that he had first met his wife. He had stayed three days
when he had meant to finish his business in one, because there was an
awfully nice girl waiting on table in the Palace, and because there was
going to be a dance on Saturday night, and he wanted his acquaintance
with her to develop to the point where he might ask her to go with him,
and be reasonably certain of a favourable answer.
Brit would not sell his ranch. In this Frank Johnson, old-time friend
and neighbour, who had taken all the land the government would allow
one man to hold, and whose lines joined Brit's, profanely upheld him.
They had planned to run cattle together, had their brand already
recorded, and had scraped together enough money to buy a dozen young
cows. Luckily, Brit had "proven up" on his homestead, so that when the
irate Mrs Hunter deserted him she did not jeopardise his right to the
land.
Brit was philosophical, thinking that a year or so of town life would
be a cure. If he missed the children, he was free from tears and
nagging complaints, so that his content balanced his loneliness. Frank
proved up and came down to live with him, and the partnership began to
wear into permanency. Share and share alike, they lived and worked and
wrangled together like brothers.
For months Brit's wife was too angry and spiteful to write. Then she
wrote acrimoniously, reminding Brit of his duty to his children. Royal
was old enough for school and needed clothes. She was slaving for them
as she had never thought to slave when Brit promised to honour and
protect her, but the fact remained that he was their father even if he
did not act like one. She needed at least ten dollars.
Brit showed the letter to Frank, and the two talked it over solemnly
while they sat on inverted feed buckets beside the stable, facing the
unearthly beauty of a cloud-piled Idaho sunset. They did not feel that
they could afford to sell a cow, and two-year-old steers were out of
the question. They decided to sell an unbroken colt that a cow-puncher
fancied. In a week Brit wrote a brief, matter-of-fact letter to Minnie
and enclosed a much-worn ten-dollar bank-note. With the two dollars
and a half which remained of his share of the sale, Brit sent to a
mail-order house for a mackinaw coat, and felt cheated afterwards
because the coat was not "wind and waterproof" as advertised in the
catalogue.
More months passed, and Brit received, by registered mail, a notice
that he was being sued for divorce on the ground of non-support. He
felt hurt, because, as he pointed out to Frank, he was perfectly
willing to support Minnie and the kids if they came back where he could
have a chance. He wrote this painstakingly to the lawyer and received
no reply. Later he learned from Minnie that she had freed herself from
him, and that she was keeping boarders and asking no odds of him.
To come at once to the end of Brit's matrimonial affairs, he heard from
the children once in a year, perhaps, after they were old enough to
write. He did not send them money, because he seemed never to have any
money to send, and because they did not ask for any. Dumbly he sensed,
as their handwriting and their spelling improved, that his children
were growing up. But when he thought of them they seemed remote,
prattling youngsters whom Minnie was for ever worrying over and who
seemed to have been always under the heels of his horse, or under the
wheels of his wagon, or playing with the pitchfork, or wandering off
into the sage while he and their distracted mother searched for them.
For a long while--how many years Brit could not remember--they had been
living in Los Angeles. Prospering, too, Brit understood. The girl,
Lorraine--Minnie had wanted fancy names for the kids, and Brit
apologised whenever he spoke of them, which was seldom--Lorraine had
written that "Mamma has an apartment house." That had sounded
prosperous, even at the beginning. And as the years passed and their
address remained the same, Brit became fixed in the belief that Casa
Grande was all that its name implied, and perhaps more. Minnie must be
getting rich. She had a picture of the place on the stationery which
Lorraine used when she wrote him. There were two palm trees in front,
with bay windows behind them, and pillars. Brit used to study these
magnificences and thank God that Minnie was doing so well. He never
could have given her a home like that. Brit sometimes added that he
had never been cut out for a married man, anyway.
Old-timers forgot that Brit had ever been married, and late comers
never heard of it. To all intents the owners of the Quirt outfit were
old bachelors who kept pretty much to themselves, went to town only
when they needed supplies, rode old, narrow-fork saddles and grinned
scornfully at "swell-forks" and "buckin'-rolls," and listened to all
the range gossip without adding so much as an opinion. They never
talked politics nor told which candidates received their two votes.
They kept the same two men season after season,--leathery old range
hands with eyes that saw whatever came within their field of vision,
and with the gift of silence, which is rare.
If you know anything at all about cattlemen, you will know that the
Quirt was a poor man's ranch, when I tell you that Hunter and Johnson
milked three cows and made butter, fed a few pigs on the skim milk and
the alfalfa stalks which the saddle horses and the cows disdained to
eat, kept a flock of chickens, and sold what butter, eggs and pork they
did not need for themselves. Cattlemen seldom do that. More often
they buy milk in small tin cans, butter in "squares," and do without
eggs.
Four of a kind were the men of the TJ up-and-down, and even Bill
Warfield--president and general manager of the Sawtooth Cattle Company,
and of the Federal Reclamation Company and several other companies,
State senator and general benefactor of the Sawtooth country--even the
great Bill Warfield lifted his hat to the owners of the Quirt when he
met them, and spoke of them as "the finest specimens of our old,
fast-vanishing type of range men." Senator Warfield himself
represented the modern type of range man and was proud of his
progressiveness. Never a scheme for the country's development was
hatched but you would find Senator Warfield closely allied with it, his
voice the deciding one when policies and progress were being discussed.
As to the Sawtooth, forty thousand acres comprised their holdings under
patents, deeds and long-time leases from the government. Another
twenty thousand acres they had access to through the grace of the
owners, and there was forest-reserve grazing besides, which the
Sawtooth could have if it chose to pay the nominal rental sum. The
Quirt ranch, was almost surrounded by Sawtooth land of one sort or
another, though there was scant grazing in the early spring on the
sagebrush wilderness to the south. This needed Quirt Creek for
accessible water, and Quirt Creek, save where it ran through cut-bank
hills, was fenced within the section and a half of the TJ up-and-down.
So there they were, small fish making shift to live precariously with
other small fish in a pool where big fish swam lazily. If one small
fish now and then disappeared with mysterious abruptness, the other
small fish would perhaps scurry here and there for a time, but few
would leave the pool for the safe shallows beyond.
This is a tale of the little fishes.