THROWING THE SCARE
Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald's place the following day, from
Sam Hatcher's ranch across the river, bringing news that three
homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They
had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their
fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give
any further particulars; he did not know the victims' names.
Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the
slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new
procedure in the cattle barons' land; this scourge had been
fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given
him.
The word had gone out to them to be on guard. Now death had begun to
leap upon them from the roadside grass. Perhaps his own turn would
come tonight or tomorrow. He could not be more watchful than his
neighbors had been; no man could close all the doors.
The price of life in that country for such men as himself always had
been unceasing vigilance. When a man stood guard over himself day and
night he could do no more, and even at that he was almost certain,
some time or other, to leave a chink open through which the waiting
blow might fall. After a time one became hardened to this condition of
life. The strain of watching fell away from him; it became a part of
his daily habit, and a man grew careless about securing the safeguards
upon his life by and by.
"Them fellers," said Banjo, feeling that he had lowered himself
considerably in carrying the news involving their swift end to
Macdonald, "got about what was comin' to 'em I reckon, Mac. Why don't
a man like you hitch up with Chadron or Hatcher, or one of the good
men of this country, and git out from amongst them runts that's nosin'
around in the ground for a livin' like a drove of hogs?"
"Every man to his liking, Banjo," Macdonald returned, "and I don't
like the company you've named."
They never quarreled over the point, but Banjo never ceased to urge
the reformation, such as he honestly believed it to be, upon Macdonald
at every visit. The little troubadour felt that he was doing a
generous and friendly turn for a fallen man, and squaring his own
account with Macdonald in thus laboring for his redemption.
Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his
life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring
when the musician, heading for Chadron's after playing for a dance,
had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse
into it. On that occasion Banjo's wits had been mixed with liquor, but
his sense of gratitude had been perfectly clear ever since.
Macdonald's door was the only one in the nesters' colony that stress
or friendship ever had constrained him to enter. Even as it was, with
all the big debt of gratitude owing, his intimacy with a man who had
opened an irrigation ditch was a thing of which he did not boast
abroad.
Banjo made but a night's stop of it with Macdonald. Early in the
morning he was in the saddle again, with a dance ahead of him to play
for that night at a ranch twenty miles or more away. He lingered a
little after shaking hands with his host, trying the violin case as if
to see that it was secure, and fidgeting in his saddle, and holding
back on the start. Macdonald could see that there was something unsaid
in the little man's mind which gave him an uneasiness, like
indigestion.
"What is it, Banjo?" he asked, to let it be known that he understood.
"Mac, did you ever hear tell of a feller named Mark Thorn?" Banjo
inquired, looking about him with fearful caution, lowering his voice
almost to a whisper.
"Yes, I've heard of him."
"Well, he's in this country."
"Are you sure about that, Banjo?" Macdonald's face was troubled; he
moved nearer the musician as he made the inquiry, and laid his hand on
his arm.
"He's here. He's the feller you've got to watch out for. He cut
acrosst the road yisterday afternoon when I was comin' down here, and
when he seen me he stopped, for I used to know him up north and he
knew it wasn't no use to try to duck and hide his murderin' face from
me. He told me he was ranchin' up in Montany, and he'd come down here
to collect some money Chadron owed him on an old bill."
"Pretty slim kind of a story. But he's here to collect money from
Chadron, all right, and give him value received. What kind of a
looking man is he?"
"He's long and lean, like a rail, with a kind of a bend in him when he
walks, and the under lid of his left eye drawed like you'd pulled it
down and stuck a tack in it. He's wearin' a cap, and he's kind of
whiskered up, like he'd been layin' out some time."
"I'd know him," Macdonald nodded.
"You couldn't miss him in a thousand, Mac. Well, I must be rackin'
along."
Banjo scarcely had passed out of sight when three horsemen came
galloping to Macdonald's gate. They brought news of a fresh tragedy,
and that in the immediate neighborhood. A boy had been shot down that
morning while doing chores on a homestead a little way across the
river. He was the son of one of the men on the death-list, and these
men, the father among them, had come to enlist Macdonald's aid in
running down the slayer.
The boy's mother had seen the assassin hastening away among the scant
bushes on the slope above the house. The description that she gave of
him left no doubt in Macdonald's mind of his identity. It was Mark
Thorn, the cattlemen's contract killer, the homesteaders' scourge.
It was a fruitless search that day, seeking old Mark Thorn among the
hills which rose brokenly a few miles back from the river and climbed
to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil's
darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as
quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.
As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize
his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced
lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him
dead at the handles of his plow.
Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency
in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of
this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself
was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left
his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle
interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find
lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an institution of
destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power
strong enough to circumvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.
There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, bloody-muzzled great
beasts of dark forests, that struck deeper fear into the hearts of
primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and
hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was
a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings
out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on
facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer,
from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.
Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and
children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage,
combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by
one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides
Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five
remained on the evening of the third.
It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads.
When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse
predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the
backing of the Drovers' Association, which had an arm as long in that
land as the old Persian king's. He would strike there, like the ghost
of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows' blood,
and slink away as silently as a wolf out of the sheepfold at dawn when
his allotted task was done.
Better to go home and guard what was left, they said. All of them were
men for a fight, but it was one thing to stand up to something that a
man could see, and quite another to fight blindfolded, and in the
dark. Catching Mark Thorn was like trying to ladle moonlight with a
sieve. The country wasn't worth it, they were beginning to believe.
When Mark Thorn came in, it was like the vultures flying ahead of the
last, devastating plague.
The man whose boy had been shot down beside the little grass-roofed
barn was the last to leave.
"I'll stick to it for a year, Alan, if you think it's any use," he
said.
He was a gaunt man, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes; gray, worn,
unwashed, and old; one of the earth's disinherited who believed that
he had come into his rood of land at last. Now the driving shadow of
his restless fate was on him again. Macdonald could see that it was
heavy in his mind to hitch up and stagger on into the west, which was
already red with the sunset of his day.
Macdonald was moved by a great compassion for this old man, whose hope
had been snatched away from him by the sting of a bullet in the dawn.
He laid his hand on the old homesteader's sagging thin shoulder and
poured the comfort of a strong man's sympathy into his empty eyes.
"Go on back, Tom, and look after the others," he said. "Do your chores
by dark, morning and night, and stick close to cover all days and
watch for him. I'll keep on looking. I started to get that old hyena,
and I'll get him. Go on home."
The old man's eyes kindled with admiration. But it died as quickly as
it had leaped up, and he shook his long hair with a sigh.
"You can't do nothin' agin him all alone, Alan."
"I think I'll have a better chance alone than in a crowd, Tom. There's
no doubt that there were too many of us, crashing through the brush
and setting ourselves up against the sky line every time we rode up a
hill. I'll tackle him alone. Tell the neighbors to live under cover
till they hear I've either got him or he's got me. In case it turns
out against me, they can do whatever seems best to them."