CATTLE
CATTLE
BY
WINNIFRED EATON
(ONOTA WATANNA)
FRONTISPIECE BY
GEORGE W. GAGE
[Illustration: Logo]
W. J. WATT & CO.
PUBLISHERS
601 MADISON AVE., NEW YORK.
Copyright, 1924, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
TO MY OLD FRIEND
FRANK PUTNAM
CATTLE
[Illustration: HIS EYES RESTED ON THE GLOWING FACE OF THE GIRL
IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT]
CATTLE
CHAPTER I
Four Alberta ranches are the scene of this story.
Of these, three were quarter sections of land in
Yankee Valley, and the fourth the vast Bar Q,
whose two hundred thousand rich acres of grain, hay
and grazing lands stretched from the prairie into the
foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where it spread over
the finest pastures and the "Chinook"-swept south
slopes, where the cattle grazed all winter long as in
summer-time, its jealous fingers, like those of a miser
who begrudges a pinch of his gold, reaching across into
the Indian Reserve.
For many years the Bar Q cattle had had the right
of way over the Indian lands, the agents who came and
went having found it more profitable to work in the
interests of the cowman than in those of mere Indians.
As everywhere else in the country thereabouts, including
the Indians themselves, the agents soon came under
the power, and were swept into the colossal "game,"
of the owner of the Bar Q, the man known throughout
the country as the "Bull."
Few could recall when first the Bull, or to give him
his proper name, Bill Langdon, had come into the foothills.
His brand had blazed out bold and huge when
the railroads were pushing their noses into the new
land before the trails were marked. Even at that early
period, his covetous eye had marked the Indian cattle,
"rolling fat" in the term of the cattle world, and
smugly grazing over the rich pasture lands, with the
"I. D." (Indian Department) brand upon their right
ribs, warning "rustlers" from east, west, south, and
north, that the beasts were the property of the Canadian
Government.
Little Bull Langdon cared for the Canadian Government
and he spat contemptuously at the name. Bull
had come in great haste out of Montana, and although
he had flouted the laws of his native land, away from
it he chose to regard with supreme contempt all other
portions of the earth that were not included in the
great Union across the line.
His first cattle were "rustled" from the unbranded
Indian calves which renegade members of the tribe had
driven to convenient forest corrals and traded them to
the cowman for the drink they craved. Though the
rustling of Indian cattle proved remunerative and easy,
Langdon by no means overlooked or despised the cattle
of the early pioneers, nor the fancy fat stock imported
into the country by the English "remittance men."
Slowly the Bar Q herd grew in size and quality, and
as it increased, Bull Langdon acquired life-long leases
upon thousands of acres of Government land--Forest
and Indian Reserve. Closing in upon discouraged and
impoverished homesteaders and pioneers he bought
what he could not steal.
Somewhere, somehow, the Bull had come upon a
phrase of the early days that appealed vastly to his
greedy and vain imagination.
"The cattle on a thousand hills are mine!" he gloated,
and roared aloud another favorite boast:
"There ain't no cattle on two or four legs that Bull
Langdon fears."
He was a man of gigantic stature, with a coarse,
brutal face, and in his expression there was something
of the primitive savage.
The name "Bull" had been given him because of his
bellowing twice, his great strength and his driving
methods with men and cattle. Tyrannical, unprincipled
and cruel, Bull was hated and feared. He had
fought his way to the top by the sheer force of his
raging, dominating personality, and once there he
reigned in arrogance without mercy or scruple.
To him cattle and men were much alike. Most men,
he asserted, were "scrub" stock, and would come tamely
and submissively before the branding iron. Very few
were spirited and thoroughbred, and for these the
Squeezegate had been invented, in which all who were
not "broke," emerged crippled or were killed. Finally
there were the mavericks, wild stuff, that escaping the
lariat of the cowpuncher, roamed the range unbranded,
and for these outlaws the Bull had a measure of respect.
There was a double bounty for every head of such stuff
rolled into the Bar Q, and quite often the Bull himself
would join in the dangerous and exciting business of
running them to ground.
If the Bull looked upon men in the same way as on
cattle, he had still less respect for the female of the
human species. With few exceptions, he would snarl,
spitting with contempt, women were all scrub stock,
easy stuff that could be whistled or driven to home
pastures. A man had but to reach out and help himself
to whichever one he wanted.
By some such contemptuous speeches as these he had
overruled the alarmed objections with which his proposal
had been received by the timid, gentle girl from
Ontario, whom he had found teaching in the rural school
planted in the heart of the then stern and rigid country.
It is true, he had thrown no lariat over the school
teacher's neck, for he had no wish to kill the thing he
coveted, but the cowmen knew of diabolical traps more
ingenious than the Squeezegate in which a girl's unwary
feet might be ensnared.
She was an innocent, harmless creature, soft and
devoted, the kind that is born to mother things, but
Mrs. Langdon had had only dream-things to mother;
the babes that came to her with every year were born
only to die immediately, as on some barren homestead
the mother fought out her agony and longing alone and
with no one to minister to their needs.
That was the tragedy of this land in the early days,
that in innumerable cases the doctors' help would often
come not at all, or come too late to be of any avail.
Time could neither accustom nor compensate the wife
of the cattleman to those fearful losses, nor compensate
her for them. And each time she would cling to
the hope that the Bull would send her, before it was too
late, to the city, to Calgary. Those were the years,
however, when the Bull had had neither time nor thought
for such unimportant things as his wife's troubles. He
was the type of man who will sit up all night long with
a sick cow, or scour the range in search of a lost one,
but look with indifference and callousness upon a
woman's suffering, especially if she be his wife. Those
were the years when the Bull was building up his herd.
He was buying and stealing land and cattle. He was
drunk with a dream of conquest and power, intent upon
climbing to the top. It was his ambition to become
the cattle king of Alberta--the King Pin of the northwest
country.
And when the years of power and affluence did come,
it was too late to help the cattleman's wife, for Mrs.
Langdon had reached the age when she could no longer
bear a child. The maternal instinct which dominated
her, however, found an outlet in mothering the children
of neighboring ranchers, the rosy-cheeked papooses on
the little squaws' backs, the rough lads who worked
upon the ranch, and she even found room in her heart
for Jake, the Bull's half-witted illegitimate son.
Jake was a half-breed, whose infirmity was due to a
blow Langdon had dealt him on the day when, as a boy,
his mother having died on the Indian Reserve, he had
come to the Bar Q and ingenuously claimed the Bull
as his father. As far as lay in her power, Mrs. Langdon
had sought to atone to the unfortunate half-breed
for the father's cruelty, and it was her gentle influence--she
was newly married to the Bull at the time--that
had prevailed upon him to allow Jake to continue upon
the ranch. The boy worked about the house, doing the
chores and the wood chopping and the carrying of
water. He was slavishly devoted to his stepmother,
and kept out of the reach of the heavy hand and foot
of the Bull, for whom he entertained a wholesome terror.