MOUNTED AGAIN.
We stumbled along, close up, for the thick-piled clouds still hung their
light-obscuring banners over the sky. Three yards apart we became
invisible to each other. I followed behind MacRae more or less
mechanically, though I was, in a way, acutely conscious of the necessity
for stealthy going, one part of my mind busy turning over the quick
march of events and guessing haphazard at the future.
Striding along in this mental semi-detachment from the business in hand,
some three hundred yards down the coulée I tripped over a fallen
cottonwood and drove the point of a projecting limb clean through the
upper of my boot and into the calf of my leg--not a disabling wound, but
one that lacked nothing in the way of pain. The others stopped while I
pulled out the snag, which had broken off the trunk, and while I was
about this a familiar clattering noise uprose near-by. Ever hear a horse
shake himself, like a water-spaniel fresh from a dip, when he has been
tied for a long time in one place with the dead weight of a heavy stock
saddle on his back? There is a little by-play of grunting and clearing
of nostrils, then the slap of skirts and strings and stirrup-leathers--a
man never forgets or mistakes the sound of it, if he has ever slept in a
round-up camp with a dozen restless night-horses saddled and tied to a
wagon twenty feet from his bed. But it made us jump, welling up out of
the dark so unexpectedly and so near.
"Saddle-horse--tied," Mac tersely commented. We squatted in the long
grass and buck-brush, listening, and a few seconds later heard a horse
snort distinctly. This sound was immediately followed by the steady beat
of an impatient forefoot.
"Over yonder," I said. "And there's more than one, I think. Let's
investigate this. And we'd better not separate."
Fifty yards to the left we struck a cottonwood grove, and in the outer
edge of it loomed the vague outline of a horse--when we were almost
within reaching-distance of him. I ran my hand over the saddle and knew
it instantly for Bruce Haggin's rig. A half-minute of quiet prowling
revealed our full quota of livestock, even to the pack-horse that bore
our beds and grub, each one tied hard and fast to a tree. Also our
six-shooters reposed in their scabbards, the four belts hooked over the
horn of MacRae's saddle.
Maybe it didn't feel good to be on the hurricane deck of a good horse
once more! Whenever I have to walk any distance, I can always understand
why a horse-thief yields to temptation and finally becomes confirmed in
his habit. It was rather an odd thing for those outlaws to leave
everything, even to our guns, but I figured--and time proved the
correctness of my arithmetic--that they had bigger fish to fry.
Once in the saddle, with the comfortable weight of a cartridge-belt
around each man's middle, we experienced a revulsion of feeling. Primed
for trouble if we could jump it out of the brush, we rode the bottom
for half an hour. But our men were gone. At least, we could not locate
them. So we took to the upland again and loped toward Pend d' Oreille.
"I've been thinking it isn't so strange--those old fellows being in this
country--after all," Mac suddenly began, as we slowed our horses down to
take a hill. "I didn't remember at first, but two years ago, just after
I joined the Force, I ran across a bull-whacker on the Whoop Up trail,
and he told me that the Double R had closed out. He said Hank had got
into a ruction with Dick Feltz--you recollect there was considerable
feeling between them in our time down there--and killed him one day at
Fort Worth. Feltz had some folks that took it up, and Hank had to spend
a barrel of money to come clear. That, and a range war that grew out of
the killing, and some kind of a business deal just about broke them.
That's the way this fellow had it; said a trail-boss told him at
Ogalalla that spring. I didn't take much stock in the yarn at the time,
but I'm beginning to think he had it straight. You didn't hear anything
about it?"
"Not a word; it's news to me," I said. "When I left that country I kept
moving north all the time. The last three years I've been in the Judith
Basin, and southern outfits haven't begun to come in there yet. So I
haven't had much chance to hear from that part of the world. But I'm
framing up my think-works so I won't be surprised at anything I see or
hear after to-night. How long since you left that country, Mac?"
"Next spring after you did," he answered. "If they did go broke, I can
_sabe_ their being here. Rutter said, you know, that they'd made a stake
on the Peace--Peace River, I suppose he meant. There's been a lot of
placer mining in that north country the last three or four years. They
might have been up there and struck it good and plenty. They made their
start in the cow business off a placer in California, you know."
I knew that, for Rowan often spoke of it. And granting that we had
surmised rightly, it required no vivid imagination to picture what
might happen to men crossing those wide prairies with a fortune in
yellow dust. But my imagination was hardly equal to the task of
reconciling the fact that the evil pair had been busy at other deviltry
and yet knew I carried a large sum of money and where it was concealed
about my person. That brought me back to something else Rutter had told
us; something that I knew--or thought I knew--touched MacRae very
closely.
"Hans said Lyn was at Walsh," I remarked. "I don't think she was there,
this morning. But she might be due to arrive there. Hang it all, Mac,
what the dickens chased you away from the Canadian?"
"Looking back, I can't just say what it was," he presently replied, in a
hard, matter-of-fact tone. "You see, one's feelings can change, Sarge.
It looks different to me now than it did then. I reckon I could have
written essays on the futility of sentiment, and the damned silliness of
a man who thinks he cares for a woman. But I'm past that stage. And so
I can't say for sure just how it was or why. Something came up between
me and Lyn--and I drifted, and kept drifting. Went through Colorado,
Wyoming, Montana; finally rambled here, and went into the Force
because--well, because a man with anything to him can go to the top. A
man must play at something, and this looked like a good game."
There was a note of something that I'd never heard in MacRae's voice
before; neither bitterness nor anger nor sorrow nor lonesomeness, and
yet there was a hint of each, but so slight, so elusive I couldn't grasp
it. I remembered that the last sentence MacRae had spoken to me in the
South was a message to Lyn Rowan, a message that I never had the
pleasure of delivering, for my hasty flitting took me out other trails
than the one that led to the home ranch. And so they had parted--gone
different ways--probably in anger. Well, that's only another example of
the average human's cussedness. Lyn could be just as haughty as she was
sweet and gracious, which was natural enough, seeing she'd ruled a
cattle king and all his sunburned riders since she was big enough to
toddle alone; and Gordon MacRae wasn't the sort of man who would come to
heel at any woman's bidding--at least, he wasn't in the old days. Oh, I
could understand how it happened, all right. Each of them was chuck full
of that dubious sort of pride that has busted up more than one
love-_fiesta_.
Neither of us spoke again, and at length the squat log buildings of Pend
d' Oreille loomed ahead of us in the night. Tired and hungry, we stabled
our horses, ate a bite, and rolled into bed.