"SOMETHING ABOUT THESE GUYS"
West glared at Morse, his heavy chin outthrust, his bowed legs wide
apart. "You've done run on the rope long enough with me, young feller.
Here's where you take a fall hard."
The younger man said nothing. He watched, warily. Was it to be a
gun-play? Or did the big bully mean to manhandle him? Probably the
latter. West was vain of his reputation as a two-fisted fighter.
"I'm gonna beat you up, then turn you over to the Crees," the
infuriated man announced.
"You can't do that, West. He's a white man same as you," protested
Stearns.
"This yore put-in, Brad?" West, beside himself with rage, swung on the
little man and straddled forward a step or two threateningly.
"You done said it," answered the old-timer, falling back. "An' don't
you come closter. I'm liable to get scared, an' you'd ought not to
forget I'm as big as you behind a six-shooter."
"Here they come--like a swarm o' bees!" yelled Barney.
The traders forgot, for the moment, their quarrel in the need of
common action. West snatched up a rifle and dropped a bullet in front
of the nearest Indian. The warning brought the Crees up short. They
held a long consultation and one of them came forward making the peace
sign.
In pigeon English he expressed their demands.
"He's gone--lit right out--stole one of our broncs. You can search the
camp if you've a mind to," West replied.
The envoy reported. There was another long pow-wow.
Brad, chewing tobacco complacently behind a wagon wheel, commented
aloud. "Can't make up their minds whether to come on an' massacree us
or not. They got a right healthy fear of our guns. Don't blame 'em a
bit."
Some of the Crees were armed with bows and arrows, others with rifles.
But the trade guns sold the Indians of the Northern tribes were of the
poorest quality.[4]
[Footnote 4: These flintlock muskets were inaccurate. They would not
carry far. Their owners were in constant danger of having fingers or a
hand blown off in explosions. The price paid for these cheap firearms
was based on the length of them. The butt was put on the floor and
the gun held upright. Skins laid flat were piled beside it till they
reached the muzzle. The trader exchanged the rifle for the furs.
(W.M.R.)]
The whites, to the contrary, were armed with the latest repeating
Winchesters. In a fight with them the natives were at a terrible
disadvantage.
The Crees realized this. A delegation of two came forward to search
the camp. West pointed out the tracks of the horse upon which their
tribal enemy had ridden away.
They grunted, "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"
Overbearing though he was, West was an embryonic diplomat. He filled
a water-bucket with whiskey and handed it, with a tin cup, to the
wrinkled old brave nearest him.
"For our friends the Crees," he said. "Tell your chief my young
man didn't understand. He thought he was rescuing a Cree from the
Blackfeet."
"Ugh! Ugh!" The Indians shuffled away with their booty.
There was more talk, but the guttural protests died away before the
temptation of the liquor. The braves drank, flung a few shots in
bravado toward the wagons, and presently took themselves off.
The traders did not renew their quarrel. West's reasons for not
antagonizing the Morse family were still powerful as ever. He subdued
his desire to punish the young man and sullenly gave orders to hitch
up the teams.
It was mid-afternoon when the oxen jogged into Whoop-Up. The post was
a stockade fort, built in a square about two hundred yards long, of
cottonwood logs dovetailed together. The buildings on each side of
the plaza faced inward. Loopholes had been cut in the bastions as a
protection against Indians.
In the big stores was a large supply of blankets, beads, provisions,
rifles, and clothing. The adjacent rooms were half-empty now, but in
the spring they would be packed to the eaves with thousands of buffalo
robes and furs brought in from outlying settlements by hunters. Later
these would be hauled to Fort Benton and from there sent down the
Missouri to St. Louis and other points.
Morse, looking round, missed a familiar feature.
"Where's the liquor?" he asked.
"S-sh!" warned the clerk with whom he was talking. "Haven't you heard?
There's a bunch of police come into the country from Winnipeg. The
lid's on tight." His far eye drooped to the cheek in a wise wink. "If
you've brought in whiskey, you'd better get it out of the fort and
bury it."
"That's up to West. I wouldn't advise any police to monkey with a
cargo of his."
"You don't say." The clerk's voice was heavy with sarcasm. "Well, I'll
just make a li'l' bet with you. If the North-West Mounted start to
arrest Bully West or to empty his liquor-kegs, they'll go right
through with the job. They're go-getters, these red-coats are."
"Red-coats? Not soldiers, are they?"
"Well, they are and they ain't. They're drilled an' in companies. But
they can arrest any one they've a mind to, and their officers can try
and sentence folks. They don't play no favorites either. Soon as they
hear of this mix-up between the Crees and the Blackfeet they'll be
right over askin' whyfors, and if they find who gave 'em the booze
some one will be up to the neck in trouble and squawkin' for help."
West had been talking in whispers with Reddy Madden, the owner of the
place. He stepped to the door.
"Don't onhook, Brad. We're travelin' some more first," he called to
Stearns.
The oxen plodded out of the stockade and swung to the left. A guide
rode beside West and Morse. He was Harvey Gosse, a whiskey-runner
known to both of them. The man was a long, loose-limbed fellow with a
shrewd eye and the full, drooping lower lip of irresolution. It had
been a year since either of the Fort Benton men had been in the
country. Gosse told them of the change that was taking place in it.
"Business ain't what it was, an' that ain't but half of it," the lank
rider complained regretfully. "It ain't ever gonna be any more. These
here red-coats are plumb ruinin' trade. Squint at a buck cross-eyed,
whisper rum to him, an' one o' these guys jumps a-straddle o' yore
neck right away."
"How many of these--what is it you call 'em, Mounted Police?--well,
how many of 'em are there in the country?" asked West.
"Not so many. I reckon a hundred or so, far as I've heard tell."
West snorted scornfully. "And you're lettin' this handful of
tenderfeet buffalo you! Hell's hinges! Ain't none of you got any
guts?"
Gosse dragged slowly a brown hand across an unshaven chin. "I reckon
you wouldn't call 'em tenderfeet if you met up with 'em, Bully.
There's something about these guys--I dunno what it is exactly--but
there's sure something that tells a fellow not to prod 'em overly
much."
"Quick on the shoot?" the big trader wanted to know.
"No, it ain't that. They don't hardly ever draw a gun. They jest walk
in kinda quiet an' easy, an' tell you it'll be thisaway. And tha's the
way it is every crack outa the box."
"Hmp!" West exuded boastful incredulity. "I reckon they haven't bumped
into any one man-size yet."
The lank whiskey-runner guided the train, by winding draws, into the
hills back of the post. Above a small gulch, at the head of it, the
teams were stopped and unloaded. The barrels were rolled downhill into
the underbrush where they lay cached out of sight. From here they
would be distributed as needed.
"You boys'll take turn an' turn about watching till I've sold the
cargo," West announced. "Arrange that among yoreselves. Tom, I'll let
you fix up how you'll spell each other. Only thing is, one of you has
to be here all the time, y' understand."
Morse took the first watch and was followed by Stearns, who in turn
gave place to Barney. The days grew to a week. Sometimes West appeared
with a buyer in a cart or leading a pack-horse. Then the cached
fire-water would be diminished by a keg or two.
It was a lazy, sleepy life. There was no need for a close guard.
Nobody knew where the whiskey was except themselves and a few
tight-mouthed traders. Morse discovered in himself an inordinate
capacity for sleep. He would throw himself down on the warm, sundried
grass and fall into a doze almost instantly. When the rays of the sun
grew too hot, it was easy to roll over into the shade of the draw.
He could lie for hours on his back after he wakened and watch
cloud-skeins elongate and float away, thinking of nothing or letting
thoughts happen in sheer idle content.
He had never had a girl, to use the word current among his fellows.
His scheme of life would, he supposed, include women by and by, but
hitherto he had dwelt in a man's world, in a universe of space and
sunshine and blowing wind, under primitive conditions that made for
tough muscles and a clean mind trained to meet frontier emergencies.
But now, to his disgust, he found slipping into his reveries pictures
of a slim, dark girl, arrow-straight, with eyes that held for him only
scorn and loathing. The odd thing about it was that when his brain was
busy with her a strange exultant excitement tingled through his veins.
One day a queer thing happened. He had never heard of psychic
phenomena or telepathy, but he opened his eyes from a day-dream of her
to see Jessie McRae looking down at him.
She was on an Indian cayuse, round-bellied and rough. Very erect she
sat, and on her face was the exact expression of scornful hatred he
had seen in his vision of her.
He jumped to his feet. "You--here!"
A hot color flooded her face with anger to the roots of the hair.
Without a word, without another glance at him, she laid the bridle
rein to the pony's neck and swung away.
Unprotesting, he let her go. The situation had jumped at him too
unexpectedly for him to know how to meet it. He stood, motionless, the
red light in his eyes burning like distant camp-fires in the night.
For the first time in his life he had been given the cut direct by a
woman.
Yet she wasn't a woman after all. She was a maid, with that passionate
sense of tragedy which comes only to the very young.
It was in his mind to slap a saddle on his bronco and ride after her.
But why? Could he by sheer dominance of will change her opinion of
him? She had grounded it on good and sufficient reasons. He was
associated in her mind with the greatest humiliation of her life, with
the stinging lash that had cut into her young pride and her buoyant
courage as cruelly as it had into her smooth, satiny flesh. Was it
likely she would listen to any regrets, any explanations? Her hatred
of him was not a matter for argument. It was burnt into her soul as
with a red-hot brand. He could not talk away what he had done or the
thing that he was.
She had come upon him by chance while he was asleep. He guessed that
Angus McRae's party had reached Whoop-Up and had stopped to buy
supplies and perhaps to sell hides and pemmican. The girl had probably
ridden out from the stockade to the open prairie because she loved to
ride. The rest needed no conjecture. In that lone land of vast spaces
travelers always exchanged greetings. She had discovered him lying
in the grass. He might be sick or wounded or dead. The custom of the
country would bring her straight across the swales toward him to find
out whether he needed help.
Then she had seen who he was--and had ridden away.
A sardonic smile of self-mockery stamped for a moment on his brown
boyish face the weariness of the years.