“East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The
phrase kept haunting me all through these first days when everything
was so new and strange. I almost felt as though I had passed into a
new phase of existence.
Except for Owen, there was no point of contact between the world of
cities and people I had just left and this land of cattle and
cow-punchers, bounded by the sky-rimmed hills. In Owen, however, the
East and the West did meet. He understood and belonged to both and
adapted himself as easily to the one as to the other. Wearing his
derby, he belonged to the life of the East; in his broad-brimmed
Stetson, he was a living part of the West.
The compelling reality of this new life affected me deeply.
Non-essentials counted for nothing. There were no artificial problems
or values.
No one in the country cared who you might have been or who you were.
The _Mayflower_ and Plymouth Rock meant nothing here. It would be
thought you were speaking of some garden flowers or some breed of
chickens.
The one thing of vital importance was what you were—how you adjusted
yourself to meet conditions as you found them, and how nearly you
reached, or how far you fell below their measure of man or woman.
I felt as though up to this time I had been in life’s kindergarten,
but that I had now entered into its school, and I realized that only
as I passed the given tests should I succeed.
I learned much from the rough, untutored men with whom I was in daily
association. They were men whose rules of conduct were governed by
individual choice, unhampered by conventions. They were so direct and
honest, so unfailingly kind and gentle toward any weaker thing, and so
simple and responsive, that I liked and trusted them from the first.
All but old Bohm, the man from whom we were buying. He was such a
totally different type that he seemed a man apart. The son of a German
father and an Irish mother, he had inherited a nature too complex and
contradictory to be easily fathomed.
Mrs. Bohm, with her white, calm face and gentle voice, attracted me,
but her husband aroused in both Owen and me an instinctive distrust.
He was good nature personified, a most companionable person, with his
easy, contagious laugh, his amusing stories, quick wit, and breezy air
of good fellowship. He could quote Burns, Scott, and other poets by
the hour, and fiddle away on his violin, until we were nearly moved to
tears. He was almost too good-natured; he didn’t quite ring true. I
noticed that while he always referred or spoke to his wife
affectionately, as “my old mammy,” her attitude toward him was rather
impersonal. She called him “James” with quiet dignity, but seldom
talked with him, and appeared to take very little interest.
On the side of a hill, some distance from the house, was an old root
cellar, used, according to Bohm, for storing potatoes, turnips, and
other vegetables for winter. It was most inconveniently located; there
were hillsides much nearer, and considering that the cellar under the
house was always used for such purposes, it seemed strange that
another should be needed so far away. I was possessed with a desire to
explore it. It suggested hidden treasures and Indian relics, which I
was collecting. One day I was poised on the top of the cellar step,
about to descend into its mysterious depths.
Old Bohm appeared. “Was you lookin’ for something’?” he asked,
somewhat out of breath.
“Oh, no,” I replied, going down a few steps. “I was just exploring,
and thought I would investigate this old root cellar.”
“I thought that was what you was goin’ to do, and I hurried up to tell
you to be awful careful of rattlesnakes; there’s a pile of ’em ’round
these here old cellars.” Bohm spoke with apparent solicitude.
“Heavens! I wouldn’t go down there for anything!” I exclaimed,—and I
got out of the cellarway as quickly as possible.
Old Bohm looked down the steps at the strong, closed door of heavy
boards.
“Oh, maybe it would be all right. You could listen for ’em and jump,
if you heard ’em rattle,” he remarked, casually.
I shook my head. “Not much; I don’t want to hear them rattle,” and I
started toward the house.
Bohm went up toward the wind-mill. As I turned away I caught a curious
expression on his face—a faint gleam of something.
As I came through the meadow gate, Owen was getting into the buggy.
“Hello,” he called, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I have to
drive over to Three Bar. Do you want to go?”
I was always ready to go anywhere, so while Owen was driving the
horses about, I ran in to get my hat.
Not one of our horses was thoroughly broken, so we always had to
follow the same method of procedure before starting anywhere. After
the horses were hitched up, Charley, to whom fell odd jobs of every
sort, stood at their heads until Owen was fairly seated and had the
lines firmly in his hands. Then, after a few ineffectual attempts to
kick or run down Charley before he could get out of the way, off
dashed the horses around and around the open space between the house
and the pond, until a little of the edge had been taken off their
spirits. Then Owen stopped them for one moment, I made a quick jump
into the buggy, and away we went at top speed toward the gate that
Charley had run to open. We usually missed the post by a quarter of an
inch, and at that juncture I invariably shut my eyes and held my
breath.
The road to Three Bar Ranch led to the North and wound up a very long
hill, then across a rolling mesa. The prairie was covered with short
grama grass, just turning a faint brown, the yellow sunflowers and
great clumps of rattleweed, with its spikes of lovely purple, giving a
touch of color to the scene before us. The Spanish bayonet dotted the
hillsides, and over all hung the summer sky like burnished copper. The
only sound, aside from that of the horses’ hoofs and the crunch of the
wheels on the soft prairie road, was the occasional song of the meadow
lark, all the joy of the summer day sounding in its one short
thrilling note. In the gulches, where the grass grew deep and rank,
the wind tossed it softly, and it rippled and sparkled in the shifting
light, as water gleams in the sun. Everything was so still that
animation seemed for the time suspended, as we drove along silenced by
the spell of the prairies.
Three Bar, one of the oldest ranches in the country, stood against the
side of a hill. It was a long, low structure of logs built in the
prevailing fashion of the early ranch houses, room after room opening
into one another, usually with an outside door to each.
The ranch was owned by the Mortons, English people, who were among the
earliest settlers in the country. They greeted us most cordially, and
as Owen went out to the corral with Mr. Morton to look at some horses,
Mrs. Morton took me into the house.
The room we entered had very little furniture, but was redeemed from
bareness by a wonderful old stone fireplace at one end.
Mrs. Morton was short and heavy set. “Spotless” was the only word her
appearance suggested when I first saw her. Her skin was as fair as a
child’s, while her hair was as white as the apron she wore.
Her flow of conversation was unceasing, and I was reminded of a remark
that Charley made to me when the telephone was first put in over the
fence lines.
“Old lady Morton talked so fast that she ripped all the barbs off the
wire.” Before I had time to reply to one question, she had asked
another, and was off on an entirely different subject. I suppose the
accumulated conversation of months was vented on my innocent head, for
she told me, poor thing, that she hadn’t seen another woman since
Christmas.
“Us”—she never said we—“us never visits the neighbors, but was
coming up to see you, Mrs. Brook, for us heard you and Mr. Brook was
different. Us lives out here on a ranch, but us knows when people are
the right kind.”
I didn’t know whether to be considered “different” was desirable, or
not, and I was dying to ask her what constituted “the right kind,” but
had no time before she suddenly asked:
“Have the Bohms gone? Us was waiting till they went.”
I explained that they were still on the ranch, as Mr. Bohm had to
gather and counterbrand all the stock before turning it over to Owen,
and that he had been delayed.
Mrs. Morton gave a little grunt of contempt. “Old Bohm won’t hurry any
while he’s getting free board. He may be with you all winter. Us hopes
Mr. Brook won’t be imposed on. He’s a smart man, old Jim Bohm is, but
he’s a bad one.”
“Bad one?” I repeated, inwardly praying that the Bohms would not be
permanent guests.
“Old Jim Bohm is a bad man,” Mrs. Morton said again, rocking violently
back and forth. “I was here when they came. She’s all right, but there
is nothing he won’t do. Why”—her voice sank to a whisper—“sixteen
men have been traced as far as that ranch and never been heard of
again, and Jim Bohm’s been getting richer all along.”
Mrs. Morton scarcely paused for breath, so I couldn’t have said
anything. But I was speechless, anyhow.
“Not one of them, not one,” she declared, “was ever heard of again,
and if you were to examine that old root cellar on the hill, you’d
find out what I say is true.”
The incident of the morning flashed across my mind, and I felt as
though a piece of ice were being drawn slowly along my spine.
“How perfectly horrible!” I managed to gasp, “but it can’t be true.”
[Illustration: ROPING A STEER TO INSPECT BRAND]
“It’s true, all right.” There was no doubting Mrs. Morton’s
conviction. “There’s facts there’s no getting ’round. Jim Bohm and old
Happy Dick, that used to work for him, came up here over the trail
from Texas with a band of horses that Bohm and another man owned. The
other fellow was with them when they started, but Bohm said he died on
the way, and that’s all anyone knows about it, except that old Bohm
kept all the horses.”
“Then a few years later, a young fellow that was consumptive, came out
to work for them. I know he had quite a bit of money, because he
stopped here once to ask John what to do with it. He hadn’t been there
very long before he dropped dead, according to Jim Bohm’s story. His
folks back East tried to get the money, but Bohm said the fellow owed
it to him, and they couldn’t do a thing about it.”
I sat as if petrified, unable to take my eyes from Mrs. Morton’s face,
as she went on and on.
“He was in with all the rustlers in the country,” she continued, “and
once when a posse was hunting a man who had stole a lot of horses,
Bohm tried his best to keep them from searching the place, but the
Sheriff told him they would arrest him if he made any more fuss about
it, so he had to keep still. When they came to the haymow, they stuck
a pitchfork right into a man hidden in the hay, and old Bohm swore he
didn’t know a thing about his being there. The next us heard, old Bill
Law had dropped dead in the corral. I tell you”—Mrs. Morton leaned
forward and shook her finger in my face—“it’s mighty funny, the way
men keeps dropping dead over there; they don’t do it anywhere else.
Happy Dick was the last. About a year ago he told Morton he’d stole
two men rich, and now he was going to steal himself rich. But two days
after he was found dead in the willows, and Bohm said that when he
came upon the body, Happy Dick had been dead for hours.”
Mrs. Morton showed signs of running down for a moment, so I hastened
to ask why it was that, though suspicion always pointed toward him,
old Bohm had never been arrested.
“Jim Bohm’s too smooth,” Mrs. Morton answered. “If you found him with
a smoking gun in his hand and a man dead on the ground beside him,
he’d lie out of it somehow; probably would swear that as he came up,
he saw the man shoot himself. Oh! he’s a slick one. Us always said us
pitied anyone who had business dealings with him, but,” she stopped as
she saw Owen and Mr. Morton coming up the walk, “Mr. Brook looks like
a man that can take care of himself. I’d watch out for Bohm, though.
Watch out for him!”
“Thank you, Mrs. Morton,” I said, as Owen came to the door. “I am glad
you told me. Please come to see us,” and with conflicting emotions I
prepared to leave Three Bar Ranch.