[Illustration: "Ride Low--They're Coming!"]
THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER
By G. W. OGDEN
WITH FRONTISPIECE
By FRANK E. SCHOONOVER
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers--New York
Published by Arrangement with A. C. McClurg & Company
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1917
Published March, 1917
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Strange Bargainings 1
II Beef Day 11
III The Ranchhouse by the River 28
IV The Man in the Plaid 41
V If He was a Gentleman 55
VI A Bold Civilian 66
VII Throwing the Scare 81
VIII Afoot and Alone 89
IX Business, not Company 102
X "Hell's a-goin' to Pop" 119
XI The Señor Boss Comes Riding 131
XII "The Rustlers!" 147
XIII The Trail at Dawn 160
XIV When Friends Part 182
XV One Road 196
XVI Danger and Dignity 215
XVII Boots and Saddles 227
XVIII The Trail of the Coffee 240
XIX "I Beat Him to It" 252
XX Love and Death 268
XXI The Man in the Door 280
XXII Paid 298
XXIII Tears in the Night 303
XXIV Banjo Faces Into the West 312
XXV "Hasta Luego" 322
THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER
CHAPTER I
STRANGE BARGAININGS
When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as
the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five
cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that
Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers' Association, should sit there
at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit.
Usually Saul Chadron was a man who picked his companions, and was a
particular hand at the choosing. He could afford to do that, being of
the earth's exalted in the Northwest, where people came to him and put
down their tribute at his feet.
This stranger, whom Chadron treated like a long-wandering friend, had
come down the mountain trail that morning, and had been hanging about
the hotel all day. Buck Snellin, the proprietor--duly licensed for a
matter of thirty years past by the United States government to conduct
his hostelry in the corner of the Indian reservation, up against the
door of the army post--did not know him. That threw him among
strangers in that land, indeed, for Buck knew everybody within a
hundred miles on every side.
The stranger was a tall, smoky man, hollow-faced, grim; adorned with a
large brown mustache which drooped over his thin mouth; a bony man
with sharp shoulders, and a stoop which began in the region of the
stomach, as if induced by drawing in upon himself in times of poignant
hunger, which he must have felt frequently in his day to wear him down
to that state of bones; with the under lid of his left eye caught at a
point and drawn down until it showed red, as if held by a fishhook to
drain it of unimaginable tears.
There was a furtive look in his restless, wild-animal eyes, smoky like
the rest of him, and a surliness about his long, high-ridged nose
which came down over his mustache like a beak. He wore a cloth cap
with ear flaps, and they were down, although the heat of summer still
made the September air lively enough for one with blood beneath his
skin. He regaled himself with fierce defiance, like a captive eagle,
and had no word in return for the generous importunities of the man
who was host to him in what evidently was a long-deferred meal.
Chadron paid the bill when the man at last finished packing his
internal cavities, and they went together into the hotel office which
adjoined the dining-room.
The office of this log hotel was a large, gaunt room, containing a few
chairs along the walls, a small, round table under the window with the
register upon it, a pen in a potato, and a bottle of ink with trickled
and encrusted sides. The broad fireplace was bleak and black,
blank-staring as a blind eye, and the sun reached through the window
in a white streak across the mottled floor.
There was the smell of old pipes, old furs, old guns, in the place,
and all of them were present to account for themselves and dispel any
shadow of mystery whatever--the guns on their pegs set in auger-holes
in the logs of the walls, the furs of wild beasts dangling from like
supports in profusion everywhere, and the pipes lying on the mantel
with stems hospitably extended to all unprovided guests. Some of them
had been smoked by the guests who had come and gone for a generation
of men.
The stranger stood at the manteltree and tried the pipes' capacity
with his thick-ended thumb, finding one at last to his requirements.
Tall as Saul Chadron stood on his own proper legs, the stranger at his
shoulder was a head above him. Seven feet he must have towered, his
crown within a few inches of the smoked beams across the ceiling, and
marvelously thin in the running up. It seemed that the wind must break
him some blustering day at that place in his long body where hunger,
or pain, or mischance had doubled him over in the past, and left him
creased. The strong light of the room found pepperings of gray in his
thick and long black hair.
Chadron himself was a gray man, with a mustache and beard like a
cavalier. His shrewd eyes were sharp and bright under heavy brows, his
brown face was toughened by days in the saddle through all seasons of
weather and wind. His shoulders were broad and heavy, and even now,
although not dressed for the saddle, there was an up-creeping in the
legs of his trousers, and a gathering at the knees of them, for they
were drawn down over his tall boots.
That was Chadron's way of doing the nice thing when he went abroad in
his buckboard. He had saddle manners and buckboard manners, and even
office manners when he met the cattle barons in Cheyenne. No matter
what manners he chanced to be wearing, one remembered Saul Chadron
after meeting him, and carried the recollection of him to the sundown
of his day.
"We can talk here," said Chadron, giving the other a cigar.
The tall man broke the cigar and ground part of it in his palm,
looking with frowning thoughtfulness into the empty fireplace as the
tobacco crushed in his hard hand. He filled the pipe that he had
chosen, and sat with his long legs stretched out toward the
chimney-mouth.
"Well, go on and talk," said he.
His voice came smothered and hoarse, as if it lay beneath all the
oysters which he had rammed into his unseen hollow. It was a voice in
strange harmony with the man, such a sound as one would have expected
to come out of that surly, dark-lipped, thin mouth. There was nothing
committal about it, nothing exactly identifying; an impersonal voice,
rather, and cold; a voice with no conscience behind it, scarcely a
soul.
"You're a business man, Mark--"
"Huh!" said Mark, grunting a little cloud of smoke from the bowl of
his pipe in his sarcastic vehemence.
"And so am I," continued Chadron, unmoved. "Words between us would be
a waste of time."
"You're right; money talks," said Mark.
"It's a man's job, or I wouldn't have called you out of your hole to
do it," said Chadron, watching the man slyly for the effect.
"Pay me in money," suggested Mark, unwarmed by the compliment. "Is it
nesters ag'in?"
"Nesters," nodded the cattleman, drawing his great brows in a frown.
"They're crowdin' in so thick right around me that I can't breathe
comfortable any more; the smell of 'em's in the wind. They're runnin'
over three of the biggest ranches up here besides the Alamito, and the
Drovers' Association wants a little of your old-time holy scare
throwed into the cussed coyotes."
Mark nodded in the pause which seemed to have been made for him to
nod, and Chadron went on.
"We figger that if a dozen or two of 'em's cleaned out, quick and
mysterious, the rest'll tuck tail and sneak. It's happened that way in
other places more than once, as you and I know. Well, you're the man
that don't have to take lessons."
"Money talks," repeated Mark, still looking into the chimney.
"There's about twenty of them that counts, the rest's the kind you can
drive over a cliff with a whip. These fellers has strung their cussed
bob-wire fences crisscross and checkerboard all around there up the
river, and they're gittin' to be right troublesome. Of course they're
only a speck up there yet, but they'll multiply like fleas on a hot
dog if we let 'em go ahead. You know how it is."
There was a conclusiveness in Chadron's tone as he said that. It spoke
of a large understanding between men of a kind.
"Sure," grunted the man Mark, nodding his head at the chimney. "You
want a man to work from the willers, without no muss or gun-flashin',
or rough houses or loud talk."
"Twenty of them, their names are here, and some scattered in between
that I haven't put down, to be picked up as they fall in handy, see?"
"And you're aimin' to keep clear, and stand back in the shadder, like
you always have done," growled Mark. "Well, I ain't goin' to ram my
neck into no sheriff's loop for nobody's business but my own from now
on. I'm through with resks, just to be obligin'."
"Who'll put a hand on you in this country unless we give the word?"
Chadron asked, severely.
"How do I know who's runnin' the law in this dang country now? Maybe
you fellers is, maybe you ain't."
"There's no law in this part of the country bigger than the Drovers'
Association," Chadron told him, frowning in rebuke of Mark's doubt of
security. "Well, maybe there's a little sheriff here and there, and a
few judges that we didn't put in, but they're down in the farmin'
country, and they don't cut no figger at all. If you _was_ fool enough
to let one of them fellers git a hold on you we wouldn't leave you in
jail over night. You know how it was up there in the north."
"But I don't know how it is down here." Mark scowled in surly
unbelief, or surly simulation.
"There's not a judge, federal or state, that could carry a bale of hay
anywhere in the cattle country, I tell you, Mark, that we don't draw
the chalk line for."
"Then why don't you do the job yourselves, 'stead of callin' a
peaceable man away from his ranchin'?"
"You're one kind of a gentleman, Mark, and I'm another, and there's
different jobs for different men. That ain't my line."
"Oh hell!" said Mark, laying upon the words an eloquent stress.
"All you've got to do is keep clear of the reservation; don't turn a
card here, no matter how easy it looks. We can't jerk you out of the
hands of the army if you git mixed up with it; that's one place where
we stop. The reservation's a middle ground where we meet the
nesters--rustlers, every muddy-bellied wolf of 'em, and we can prove
it--and pass 'em by. They come and go here like white men, and nothing
said. Keep clear of the reservation; that's all you've got to do to be
as safe as if you was layin' in bed on your ranch up in Jackson's
Hole."
Chadron winked as he named that refuge of the hunted in the Northwest.
Mark appeared to be considering something weightily.
"Oh, well, if they're rustlers--nobody ain't got no use for a
rustler," he said.
"There's men in that bunch of twenty"--tapping the slip of paper with
his finger--"that started with two cows a couple of years ago that's
got fifty and sixty head of two-year-olds now," Chadron feelingly
declared.
"How much're you willin' to go?" Mark put the question with a
suddenness which seemed to betray that he had been saving it to shoot
off that way, as a disagreeable point over which he expected a
quarrel. He squinted his draggled left eye at Chadron, as if he was
taking aim, while he waited for a reply.
"Well, you have done it for fifty a head," Chadron said.
"Things is higher now, and I'm older, and the resk's bigger," Mark
complained. "How fur apart do they lay?"
"You ought to get around in a week or two."
"But that ain't figgerin' the time a feller has to lay out in the
bresh waitin' and takin' rheumatiz in his j'ints. I couldn't touch the
job for the old figger; things is higher."
"Look here, Mark"--Chadron opened the slip which he had wound round
his finger--"this one is worth ten, yes, all, the others. Make your
own price on him. But I want it _done_; no bungled job."
Mark took the paper and laid his pipe aside while he studied it.
"Macdonald?"
"Alan Macdonald," nodded Chadron. "That feller's opened a ditch from
the river up there on my land and begun to _irrigate!_"
"Irrigatin', huh?" said Mark, abstractedly, moving his finger down the
column of names.
"He makes a blind of buyin' up cattle and fattenin' 'em on the hay and
alfalfer he's raisin' up there on my good land, but he's the king-pin
of the rustlers in this corner of the state. He'll be in here tomorrow
with cattle for the Indian agent--it's beef day--and you can size him
up. But you've got to keep your belly to the ground like a snake when
you start anything on that feller, and you've got to make sure you've
got him dead to rights. He's quick with a gun, and he's sure."
"Five hundred?" suggested Mark, with a crafty sidelong look.
"You've named it."
"And something down for expenses; a feller's got to live, and livin's
high."
Chadron drew out his wallet. Money passed into Mark's hand, and he put
it away in his pocket along with the list of names.
"I'll see you in the old place in Cheyenne for the settlement, if you
make good," Chadron told him.
Mark waved his hand in lofty depreciation of the hint that failure for
him was a possible contingency. He said no more. For a little while
Chadron stood looking down on him as he leaned with his pipe over the
dead ashes in the fireplace, his hand in the breast of his coat, where
he had stored his purse. Mark treated the mighty cattleman as if he
had become a stranger to him, along with the rest of the world in that
place, and Chadron turned and went his way.