THE PRELIMINARY
Very early in the morning of the day set for the preliminary hearing of
Jesse Black, the young owner of the Three Bars ranch rode over to
Velpen. He identified and claimed the animal held over from shipment by
Jim’s persuasion. Brown gave possession with a rueful countenance.
“First time Billy Brown ever was taken in,” he said, with great disgust.
Langford met with no interruption to his journey, either going or
coming, although that good cowpuncher of his, Jim Munson, had warned him
to look sharp to his pistols and mind the bridge. Jim being of a
somewhat belligerent turn of mind, his boss had not taken the words with
much seriousness. As for the fracas at the pontoon, cowmen are touchy
when it comes to a question of precedence, and it might well be that the
inflammable Jim had brought the sudden storm down on his head. Paul
Langford rode through the sweet early summer air without let or
hindrance and looking for none. He was jubilant. Now was Williston’s
story verified. The county attorney, Richard Gordon, had considered
Williston’s story, coupled with his reputation for strict honesty,
strong and sufficient enough to bind Jesse Black over to appear at the
next regular term of the circuit court. Under ordinary circumstances,
the State really had an excellent chance of binding over; but it had to
deal with Jesse Black, and Jesse Black had flourished for many years
west of the river with an unsavory character, but with an almost awesome
reputation for the phenomenal facility with which he slipped out of the
net in which the law—in the person of its unpopular exponent, Richard
Gordon—was so indefatigably endeavoring to enmesh him. The State was
prepared for a hard fight. But now—here was the very steer Williston saw
on the island with its Three Bars brand under Black’s surveillance.
Williston would identify it as the same. He, Langford, would swear to
his own animal. The defence would not know he had regained possession
and would not have time to readjust its evidence. It would fall down and
hurt itself for the higher court, and Dick Gordon would know how to use
any inadvertencies against it—when the time came. No wonder Langford was
light-hearted. In all his arrogant and unhampered career, he had never
before received such an affront to his pride and his sense of what was
due to one of the biggest outfits that ranged cattle west of the river.
Woe to him who had dared tamper with the concerns of Paul Langford of
the Three Bars.
Williston drove in from the Lazy S in ample time for the mid-day dinner
at the hotel—the hearing was set for two o’clock—but his little party
contented itself with a luncheon prepared at home, and packed neatly and
appetizingly in a tin bucket. It was not likely there would be a
repetition of bad meat. It would be poor policy. Still, one could not be
sure, and it was most important that Williston ate no bad meat that day.
Gordon met them in the hot, stuffy, little parlor of the hotel.
“It was good of you to come,” he said to Louise, with grave sincerity.
“I didn’t want to,” confessed Louise, honestly. “I’m afraid it is too
big and lonesome for me. I am sure I should have gone back to Velpen
last night to catch the early train had it not been for Mary. She is
so—good.”
“The worst is over now that you have conquered your first impulse to
fly,” he said.
“I cried, though. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t help it. You see
I never was so far from home before.”
He was an absorbed, hard-working lawyer. Years of contact with the
plain, hard realities of rough living in a new country had dried up,
somewhat, his stream of sentiment. Maybe the source was only blocked
with debris, but certainly the stream was running dry. He could not help
thinking that a girl who cries because she is far from home had much
better stay at home and leave the grave things which are men’s work to
men. But he was a gentleman and a kindly one, so he answered, quietly,
“I trust you will like us better when you know us better,” and, after a
few more commonplaces, went his way.
“There’s a man,” said Louise, thoughtfully, on the way to McAllister’s
office “I like him, Mary.”
“And yet there are men in this county who would kill him if they dared.”
“Mary! what do you mean? Are there then so many cut-throats in this
awful country?”
“I think there are many desperate men among the rustlers who would not
hesitate to kill either Paul Langford or Richard Gordon since these
prosecutions have begun. There are also many good people who think Mr.
Gordon is just stirring up trouble and putting the county to expense
when he can have no hope of conviction. They say that his failures
encourage the rustlers more than an inactive policy would.”
“People who argue like that are either tainted with dishonesty
themselves or they are foolish, one of the two,” said Louise, with
conviction.
“Mr. Gordon has one stanch supporter, anyway,” said Mary, smiling.
“Maybe I had better tell him. Precious little encouragement or sympathy
he gets, poor fellow.”
“Please do not,” replied Louise, quickly. “I wonder if my friend, Mr.
Jim Munson, has managed to escape ‘battle, murder, and sudden death,’
including death by poison, and is on hand with his testimony.”
As they approached the office, the crowd of men around the doorway drew
aside to let them pass.
“Our chances of worming ourselves through that jam seem pretty slim to
me,” whispered Mary, glancing into the already overcrowded room.
“Let me make a way for you,” said Paul Langford, as he separated himself
from the group of men standing in front, and came up to them.
“I have watered my horse,” he said, flashing a merry smile at Mary as he
began shoving his big shoulders through the press, closely followed by
the two young women.
It was a strange assembly through which they pressed; ranchmen and
cowboys, most of them, just in from ranch and range, hot and dusty from
long riding, perspiring freely, redolent of strong tobacco and the
peculiar smell that betokens recent and intimate companionship with that
part and parcel of the plains, the horse. The room was indeed hot and
close and reeking with bad odors. There were also present a large
delegation of cattle dealers and saloon men from Velpen, and some few
Indians from Rosebud Agency, whose curiosity was insatiable where the
courts were concerned, far from picturesque in their ill-fitting,
nondescript cowboy garments.
Yet they were kindly, most of the men gathered there. Though at first
they refused, with stolid resentment, to be thus thrust aside by the
breezy and aggressive owner of the Three Bars, planting their feet the
more firmly on the rough, uneven floor, and serenely oblivious to any
right of way so arrogantly demanded by the big shoulders, yet, when they
perceived for whom the way was being made, most of them stepped hastily
aside with muttered and abashed apologies. Here and there, however,
though all made way, there would be no red-faced or stammering apology.
Sometimes the little party was followed by insolent eyes, sometimes by
malignant ones. Had Mary Williston spoken truly when she said the will
for bloodshed was not lacking in the county?
But if there was aught of hatred or enmity in the heavy air of the
improvised court-room for others besides the high-minded young counsel
for law and order, Mary Williston seemed serenely unconscious of it. She
held her head proudly. Most of these men she knew. She had done a man’s
work among them for two years and more. In her man’s work of riding the
ranges she had had good fellowship with many of them. After to-day much
of this must end. Much blame would accrue to her father for this day’s
work, among friends as well as enemies, for the fear of the law-defiers
was an omnipresent fear with the small owner, stalking abroad by day and
by night. But Mary was glad and there was a new dignity about her that
became her well, and that grew out of this great call to rally to the
things that count.
At the far end of the room they found the justice of the peace enthroned
behind a long table. His Honor, Mr. James R. McAllister, more commonly
known as Jimmie Mac, was a ranchman on a small scale. He was ignorant,
but of an overweening conceit. He had been a justice of the peace for
several years, and labored under the mistaken impression that he knew
some law; but Gordon, on short acquaintance, had dubbed him “Old
Necessity” in despairing irony, after a certain high light of early
territorial days who “knew no law.” Instead of deciding the facts in the
cases brought before him from the point of view of an ordinary man of
common sense, McAllister went on the theory that each case was fraught
with legal questions upon which the result of the case hung; and he had
a way of placing himself in the most ridiculous lights by arguing long
and arduously with skilled attorneys upon questions of law. He made the
mistake of always trying to give a reason for his rulings. His rulings,
sometimes, were correct, but one would find it hard to say the same of
his reasons for them.
Louise’s little table was drawn closely before the window nearest the
court. She owed this thoughtfulness to Gordon, who, nevertheless, was
not in complete sympathy with her, because she had cried. The table was
on the sunny side, but there was a breeze out of the west and it played
refreshingly over her face, and blew short strands of her fair hair
there also. To Gordon, wrapped up as he was in graver matters, her sweet
femininity began to insist on a place in his mental as well as his
physical vision. She was exquisitely neat and trim in her white
shirt-waist with its low linen collar and dark blue ribbon tie of the
same shade as her walking skirt, and the smart little milliner’s bow on
her French sailor hat, though it is to be doubted if Gordon observed the
harmony. She seemed strangely out of place in this room, so bare of
comfort, so stuffy and stenchy and smoke-filled; yet, after all, she
seemed perfectly at home here. The man in Gordon awoke, and he was glad
she had not stayed at home or gone away because she cried.
Yes, Jim was there—and swaggering. It was impossible for Jim not to
swagger a little on any occasion. The impulse to swagger had been born
in him. It had been carefully nurtured from the date of his first
connection with the Three Bars. He bestowed an amiable grin of
recognition on the new reporter from the far side of the room, which was
not very far.
The prisoner was brought in. His was a familiar personality. He was
known to most men west of the river—if not by personal acquaintance,
certainly by hearsay. Many believed him to be the animating mind of a
notorious gang of horse thieves and cattle rustlers that had been
operating west of the river for several years. Lax laws were their
nourishment. They polluted the whole. It was a deadly taint to fasten
itself on men’s relations. Out of it grew fear, bribery, official
rottenness, perjury. There was an impudent half smile on his lips. He
was a tall, lean, slouching-shouldered fellow. To-day, his jaws were
dark with beard bristles of several days’ standing. He bore himself with
an easy, indifferent manner, and chewed tobacco enjoyingly.
Louise, glancing casually around at the mass of interested, sunbrowned
faces, suddenly gave a little start of surprise. Not far in front of
Jimmie Mac’s table stood the man of the sandy coloring who had so
insolently disputed their right of way the day before. His hard, light
eyes, malignant, sinister, significant, were fixed upon the prisoner as
he slouched forward to hear his arraignment. The man in custody yawned
occasionally. He was bored. His whole body had a lazy droop. So far as
Louise could make out he gave no sign of recognition of the man of sandy
coloring.
Then came the first great surprise of this affair of many surprises.
Jesse Black waived examination. It came like a thunderbolt to the
prosecution. It was not Black’s way of doing business, and it was
generally believed that, as Munson had so forcibly though inelegantly
expressed it to Billy Brown, “He would fight like hell” to keep out of
the circuit courts. He would kill this incipient Nemesis in the bud.
What, then, had changed him? The county attorney had rather looked for a
hard-fought defence—a shifting of the burden of responsibility for the
misbranding to another, who would, of course, be off somewhere on a
business trip, to be absent an indefinite length of time; or it might be
he would try to make good a trumped-up story that he had but lately
purchased the animal from some Indian cattle-owner from up country who
claimed to have a bill-of-sale from Langford. He would not have been
taken aback had Black calmly produced a bill-of-sale.
There were lines about the young attorney’s mouth, crow’s feet diverging
from his eyes; his forehead was creased, too. He was a tall man, slight
of build, with drooping shoulders. One of the noticeable things about
him was his hands. They were beautiful—the long, slim, white kind that
attract attention, not so much, perhaps, on account of their graceful
lines, as because they are so seldom still. They belong preëminently to
a nervous temperament. Gordon had trained himself to immobility of
expression under strain, but his hands he had not been able so to
discipline. They were always at something, fingering the papers on his
desk, ruffling his hair, or noisily drumming. Now he folded them as if
to coerce them into quiet. He had handsome eyes, also, too keen, maybe,
for everyday living; they would be irresistible if they caressed.
The absoluteness of the surprise flushed his clean-shaven face a little,
although his grave immobility of expression underwent not a flicker. It
was a surprise, but it was a good surprise. Jesse Black was bound over
under good and sufficient bond to appear at the next regular term of the
circuit court in December. That much accomplished, now he could buckle
down for the big fight. How often had he been shipwrecked in the
shifting sands of the really remarkable decisions of “Old Necessity” and
his kind. This time, as by a miracle, he had escaped sands and shoals
and sunken rocks, and rode in deep water.
A wave of enlightenment swept over Jim Munson.
“Boss,” he whispered, “that gal reporter’s a hummer.”
“How so?” whispered Langford, amused. He proceeded to take an
interested, if hasty, inventory of her charms. “What a petite little
personage, to be sure! Almost too colorless, though. Why, Jim, she can’t
hold a tallow candle to Williston’s girl.”
“Who said she could?” demanded Jim, with a fine scorn and much relieved
to find the Boss so unappreciative. Eden might not be lost to them after
all. Strict justice made him add: “But she’s a wise one. Spotted them
blamed meddlin’ hoss thieves right from the word go. Yep. That’s a
fac’.”
“What ‘blamed meddlin’ hoss thieves,’ Jim? You are on intimate terms
with so many gentlemen of that stripe,—at least your language so leads
us to presume,—that I can’t keep up with the procession.”
“At the bridge yistidy. I told you ’bout it. Saw ’em first at the Bon
Amy—but they must a trailed me to the stockyards. She spotted ’em right
away. She’s a cute ’n. Made me shet my mouth when I was a blabbin’ too
much, jest before the fun began. Oh, she’s a cute ’n!”
“Who were they, Jim?”
“One of ’em, I’m a thinkin’, was Jake Sanderson, a red-headed devil who
came up here from hell, I reckon, or Wyoming, one of the two. Nobody
knows his biz. But he’ll look like a stepped-on potato bug ’gainst I git
through with him. Didn’t git on to t’ other feller. Will next time, you
bet!”
“But what makes you think they are mixed up in this affair?”
“They had their eyes on me to see what I was a doin’ in Velpen. And I
was a doin’ things, too.”
Langford gave a long, low whistle of comprehension. That would explain
the unexpected waiving of examination. Jesse Black knew the steer had
been recovered and saw the futility of fighting against his being bound
over.
“Now, ain’t she a hummer?” insisted Jim, admiringly, but added
slightingly, “Homely, though, as all git-out. Mouse-hair. Plumb homely.”
“On the contrary, I think she is plumb pretty,” retorted Langford, a
laugh in his blue eyes. Jim fairly gasped with chagrin.
Unconcerned, grinning, Black slouched to the door and out. Once
straighten out that lazy-looking body and you would have a big man in
Jesse Black. Yes, a big one and a quick one, too, maybe. The crowd made
way for him unconsciously. No one jostled him. He was a marked man from
that day. His lawyer, Small, leaned back in his chair, radiating waves
of self-satisfaction as though he had but just gained a disputed point.
It was a manner he affected when not on the floor in a frenzy of words
and muscular action.
Jim Munson contrived to pass close by Jake Sanderson.
“So you followed me to find out about Mag, did you? Heap o’ good it did
you! We knew you knew,” he bragged, insultingly.
The man’s face went white with wrath.
“Damn you!” he cried. His hand dropped to his belt.
The two glared at each other like fighting cocks. Men crowded around,
suddenly aware that a quarrel was on.
“The Three Bars’s a gittin’ busy!” jeered Jim.
“Come, Jim, I want you.” It was Gordon’s quiet voice. He laid a
restraining hand on Munson’s over-zealous arm.
“Dick Gordon, this ain’t your put-in,” snarled Sanderson. “Git out the
way!” He shoved him roughly aside. “Now, snappin’ turtle,” to Jim, “the
Three Bars’d better git busy!”
A feint at a blow, a clever little twist of the feet, and Munson
sprawled on the floor, men pressing back to give him the full force of
the fall. They believed in fair play. But Jim, uncowed, was up with the
nimbleness of a monkey.
“Hit away!” he cried, tauntingly. “I know ’nough to swear out a warrant
’gainst you! ’T won’t be so lonesome for Jesse now breakin’ stones over
to Sioux Falls.”
“Jim!” It was Gordon’s quiet, authoritative voice once more. “I told you
I wanted you.” He threw his arm over the belligerent’s shoulder.
“Comin’, Dick. I didn’t mean to blab so much,” Jim answered, contritely.
They moved away. Sanderson followed them up.
“Dick Gordon,” he said with cool deliberateness, “you’re too damned
anxious to stick your nose into other people’s affairs. Learn your
lesson, will you? My favorite stunt is to teach meddlers how to mind
their own business,—this way.”
It was not a fair blow. Gordon doubled up with the force of the punch in
his stomach. In a moment all was confusion. Men drew their pistols. It
looked as if there was to be a free-for-all fight.
Langford sprang to his friend’s aid, using his fists with plentiful
freedom in his haste to get to him.
“Never mind me,” whispered Gordon. He was leaning heavily on Jim’s
shoulder. His face was pale, but he smiled reassuringly. There was
something very sweet about his mouth when he smiled. “Never mind me,” he
repeated. “Get the girls out of this—quick, Paul.”
Mary and Louise had sought refuge behind the big table.
“Quick, the back door!” cried Langford, leading the way; and as the
three passed out, he closed the door behind them, saying, “You are all
right now. Run to the hotel. I must see how Dick is coming on.”
“Do you think he is badly hurt?” asked Louise. “Can’t we help?”
“I think you had best get out of this as quickly as you can. I don’t
believe he is knocked out, by any means, but I want to be on hand for
any future events which may be called. Just fly now, both of you.”
The unfair blow in the stomach had given the sympathy of most of the
bystanders, for the time being at least, to Gordon. Men forgot,
momentarily, their grudge against him. Understanding from the black
looks that he was not in touch with the crowd, Sanderson laughed—a short
snort of contempt—and slipped out of the door. Unable to resist the
impulse, Jim bounded out after his enemy.
When Paul hastened around to the front of the building, the crowd was
nearly all in the street. The tension was relaxed. A dazed expression
prevailed—brought to life by the suddenness with which the affair had
developed to such interesting proportions and the quickness with which
it had flattened out to nothing. For Sanderson had disappeared,
completely, mysteriously, and in all the level landscape, there was no
trace of him nor sign.
“See a balloon, Jim?” asked Langford, slapping him on the shoulder with
the glimmer of a smile. “Well, your red-headed friend won’t be down in a
parachute—yet. Are you all right, Dick, old man?”
“Yes. Where are the girls?”
“They are all right. I took them through the back door and sent them to
the hotel.”
“You kin bet on the Boss every time when it comes to petticoats,” said
Jim, disconsolately.
“Why, Jim, what’s up?” asked Langford, in amused surprise.
But Jim only turned and walked away with his head in the air. The
serpent was leering at him.