When the sun flung its Midas touch across the Nebraska plains the
morning after what was but an episode in Clark’s Ford, it struck a
ruddy sheen on the sorrel horse Rock Holloway bestrode and made the
sleek coat of the black pony that carried his bed, shine like a piece
of widow’s silk.
Rock hummed a little tune as he rode. He had lived through that
unavoidable encounter with Mark Duffy. He had avoided open clash with
Duffy’s brother by quitting the Seventy Seven. A blood feud is no light
thing to be involved in. Rock had no regrets over Mark. The man’s
bulldozing disposition had brought them to the verge once or twice on
the trail. But Rock had no desire to burn powder against a man who
would be actuated chiefly by some vague notion that it was proper to
avenge a dead kinsman.
Duffy, the trail boss, had been a little stunned by the death of his
domineering brother. He had tentatively agreed that Rock was not to
blame. He had paid him his wages and let him go unmolested. But later
on, Rock knew, the surviving Duffy would ponder and brood, be urged to
reprisal, as in the cloak-and-sword period gallants brooded upon a
slight to their honor, whether real or fancied, until they had no
course but to draw blade.
So Rock was well satisfied to be a lone horseman in a waste of grass
and sage in the cool of a summer morning. On the flat area running
unbroken by mountain or forest, from horizon to horizon, he marked
northbound herds in the offing, as a lookout might descry distant sails
at sea. Over yonder was a Matador herd, yonder marched the horned
regiment of the Turkey Track. At a guess, Rock could have named the
brand of the five herds visible within the radius of his sight.
Northbound, headed for free grass and abundant water, as the Israelites
of old went forth seeking the land of milk and honey. Texas was full of
cattle, full to overflowing, and the overflow in that season swept in
full volume over twenty-three degrees of latitude to end in Montana,
with sundry minor spillings into the Canadian northwest.
Rock, like the cattleman with his herds, had set his face North. Like
many another young Texan, he had lent eager ear to tales of this _terra
incognita_, out of which scouting cattlemen sent reports that it was a
paradise for herds, now that the bison were exterminated, and the
Indians herded on reservations. Nine hundred miles still lay between
Rock and his destination. But that was nothing. He had two good horses,
a rifle and a .45 Colt, ammunition, food, bedding and a sanguine soul.
Many a pioneer had set forth with less. It was not precisely hostile
country he had to traverse alone. True, a lone rider was a temptation
to scouting braves who might have jumped the reservation. But that was
a detail. In thirty days, more or less, he could reach Fort Benton.
Once there--well, even if he had not the mission bestowed on him in
Fort Worth, an able range rider could always find useful employment in
his calling.
So Rock rode with a little tune on his lips and wondered how far it was
between water holes.
* * * * *
Three days out from Clark’s Ford he sighted the mass of a trail herd
and caught up with it at sundown. Four riders were bunching the cattle
on the bed ground. Rock exchanged greetings with one, noted the brand,
a Maltese Cross, and went on to the chuck wagon, camped by a nameless
creek, meandering out of an endless sweep of plains to the westward
into an equally limitless void on the east. The Maltese Cross made him
welcome. It was a rare thing for a lone man to come out of those empty
spaces. But the range properly held that a man’s business was his own
until he chose to divulge it. The Cross herd was bound for northern
Montana, they told him. Rock knew that already. The trail boss casually
remarked that he was welcome to keep them company if he liked.
Since they had a full crew, Rock didn’t care to be a guest and crawl
North at the mad speed of ten miles a day, when he could make thirty or
forty a day on his own. So he accepted a hunk of beef from the cook
next morning and rode on.
Two weeks brought him into Wyoming, into a different type of country.
The flat, undulating surface of the great plains became sharply rolling
ridges. He crossed creeks lined with willows and clumps of quaking
aspen. He rode through open forests of pine. He made lonely camps in
spots of rare beauty. Once or twice he stopped overnight at ranches
well established.
Off to the northwest, mountains began to loom. He bore on until these
white and purple peaks were behind him on the left, and so came to a
watershed dipping in a long slant to the north. By which he guessed
that he was well within the Territory of Montana, following a stream
that flowed to the Yellowstone.
When he came to that turbulent river, in a valley traversed by the
first transcontinental railway to cross the Northwest, he found eight
men with a mixed herd at a fording place. They were a weary lot. Eight
men to twelve hundred cattle was a short trail crew. They had left
Kansas early that spring, they told Rock. They had made fast time, and
their horses bore the trace, being gaunt and leg weary, although the
cattle were in fair flesh. And the men were even more tired than their
stock. Of the scores of trailed herds Rock had passed, this was the
first that was short-handed. A trail outfit left the South with a full
crew. Barring accident or death, the riders stayed with the herd to the
journey’s end. It was equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy
for a trail hand to quit for a whim. In all that bovine pilgrimage,
there was no place where riders could be secured, no more than a ship
can replace its crew a thousand miles offshore.
“I can use you plenty,” the trail boss said, as soon as he sized Rock
up, “if you hanker to be usefully employed.”
“Where you bound for?” Rock asked.
“Canada. Old Man River in the Fort MacLeod country,” the man said.
“In the home of the mounted police, eh?” Rock drawled. “We go through
the Blackfeet country. That’s about as far North as cattle range, isn’t
it?”
“Just about; although, if this Northern drive keeps extendin’ itself,
there’ll be longhorns winterin’ at the north pole, it looks like,” the
wagon boss replied. “If you want to see some new country, here’s a
chance.”
“From Mexico to Canada, personally conducted!” Rock laughed. “All
right, I’m with you.”
* * * * *
Thus did he come into the foothills of the Rockies, north of 49°, in
the month of September. They crossed the Missouri where Chief Joseph
had forded it with his braves ten years earlier, with U. S. cavalry in
hot pursuit. They plodded west and north to their destination, leaving
the Bear Paws to the right, Sweet Grass Hills on their left, sweeping
across a country where grass grew to their stirrups, driving before
them twelve hundred cattle of divers age and sex, marked with a brand
on the left ribs, called a steering wheel.
Rock looked once or twice to the westward before they reached the
boundary line. Somewhere in that great empty area the Marias River
split the plains. Somewhere on the Marias was the headquarters of the
Maltese Cross. The Cross would keep. He had given his word to go
through with the Steering Wheel. In the winter or in the spring he
would drift into Fort Benton, and he would contrive to make himself
familiar with the ways and works of Buck Walters. For the present----
The Old Man revealed itself as a pleasant country, well grassed, well
wooded with small pine, and with a small, swift-flowing stream in which
trout lurked in eddying pools. Axes and saws they had in the chuck
wagon. By some mysterious agency of freighting across the plains, they
found themselves in possession of a mower and a dump rake. For once,
faced as it were by an emergency, these knights of the saddle, who had
all the man-on-horseback’s traditional contempt for labor on foot, fell
to as carpenters, corral builders, reapers and stackers of hay.
So that, when the first November snows hit them, they were housed in a
comfortable log dwelling. Each man had a saddle horse tied in a warm
stable, and hay stacked to feed his mount till spring. The Steering
Wheel cattle had sun-cured grass to graze upon and brushy creek bottoms
to shelter them against the blizzard.
“It might be worse,” Rock said to a fellow rider a few days before
Christmas. “I had an idea this Canada country was like the arctic
regions. But it shapes up like a real cattle country. It’s colder than
Texas, but there’s more grass and better shelter. These mounted police,
with their funny red coats and striped pants, are about like the Texan
rangers, only they don’t shoot so frequent nor play as tight a game of
poker.”
“She’s a lonesome country,” the other rider said.
It was indeed a lonely land. When spring opened, with streams in flood
and blue windflowers thrusting ahead of the first grass blades, Rock
missed the gathering of the clans, the scope of great round-ups, and
the hundreds of riders with gossip from a thousand miles of range. It
was like being a chip in an eddy, he thought to himself, being given to
similes and metaphors. The Steering Wheel seemed to have the entire
Northwest to itself. They heard that another big outfit lay somewhere
north of them. The STV had headquarters two hundred miles east. But
from September to April Rock saw no four-footed beast on the range
outside of the Steering Wheel brand. Nor did any rider ever come up
from the horizon to pass the time of day. Fort MacLeod was a police
barracks chiefly. It boasted a trading store, where trappers from the
mountains sold their furs and bought supplies. Community life there was
none at all.
The nine men of the Steering Wheel had a sinecure over the winter. Rock
took to speculating on what brought that particular one-horse cow
outfit all the way to Canada, when there were magnificent ranges to be
had for the taking south of the line. None of the men knew who owned
the Steering Wheel. A typical Texan, tall, thin-faced, with a drawly
voice, and a good-natured soul, who knew cattle, ran the outfit. When a
man needed money to buy goods at the fort, Dave Wells produced cash.
His reticence discouraged curiosity. Rock, who knew the cow business
both in practice and in theory, wondered at this dead silence--this
absence of outlined plan. Twelve hundred cattle didn’t need nine riders
in comparative idleness.
* * * * *
This gave him a good excuse in April for leaving. When he told Wells,
that individual looked thoughtful.
“I sho’ don’t need eight riders right along,” he said. “I kept yo’ boys
over the winter, mostly because I didn’t want to turn yo’ loose in a
country where they’s no chance for a job. I’m aimin’ to let four of yo’
go. But not for a spell. I’d like for yo’ to stay on three-fo’ weeks
yet. I got to take a pasear after some stock. If yo’ drift back across
the line in May, yo’ll still be able to get on as hands with some
round-up.”
Rock agreed. May would do as well as April. He had written once to
Uncle Bill Sayre, and had received a reply. If he got around to the
Maltese Cross range that summer, it would be good enough.
Immediately thereafter, Dave Wells flung his men out on a
horse-gathering expedition. The Steering Wheel ponies were brought in
by tens and dozens. They ranged uniformly within ten miles of the
ranch. Most of the cattle grazed in the same area. And, as soon as
forty horses were in the pasture, Wells organized a pack outfit, took
four men with him, and vanished.
He left a red-headed youth in nominal charge. The duties of the riders
left at home were to build an extension of the pole pasture and to
gather the rest of the Steering Wheel saddle stock. Thereafter they
were to scout around the outer fringes of the range and throw all
cattle close home.
“The old he-coon gone South for another trail herd?” Billy Gore asked
the deputy foreman, once he was in Rock’s hearing.
“Naw,” the red-headed one divulged the first information. “Said he was
goin’ somewhere after a bunch of doggies.”
“Doggy” in range parlance meant farm cattle, scrubs, nondescript stock
generally, sometimes cheaply bought to help stock a range.
Rock recalled that remark three weeks later, when Wells and his four
riders rode into the ranch. They had left with forty saddle horses.
These mounts were ridden to a standstill. The five men were heavy-eyed
and obviously weary. Wells kept his own counsel, as did the four who
had ridden with him. They appeared at noon, turned loose their horses,
ate, and then slept still sunrise of the next day. After breakfast Dave
Wells called the four riders who had stayed on the ranch, told them
courteously that he would have to let them go, and paid them off in
gold.
The discharged quartet rode south, leading pack horses, within two
hours. They discovered, once clear of the ranch and free to air their
personal views, that they were mutually eager to be away to a real cow
country. They had had enough of comparative isolation. They were all
Texans. Three of them were for home, via Butte and south over the
Oregon Short Line to the Union Pacific. They had had enough of the
North for the present. Only Rock proposed to linger, and he would keep
them company until they were well into Montana.
Five miles south of the ranch they jumped a bunch of cattle out of a
draw, mature cattle, with a freshly burned Steering Wheel black on
their ribs. On the slope which they breasted were others; by a cluster
of sloughs were still more.
Doggies! The cowpunchers, free of any loyalty or responsibility to any
outfit, glanced and kept on talking of home. Rock looked and kept his
thoughts to himself. They were _not_ doggies. They were simon-pure
longhorns, with a touch of Hereford blood, here and there--the type of
cattle that poured annually by the hundred thousand out of Texas. If
they were purchased range stock, other brands, vented or barred out,
should have shown. All the mark that Rock saw on any beast was a
fresh-burned Steering Wheel. But he kept his speculations to himself.
After all, it was no business of his. The Steering Wheel might have
cattle all over the Northwest, for all he knew or cared. If his fellow
riders thought it queer, they were not concerned enough to mention the
fact.
Five days later he parted from his companions under the shoulder of the
Sweet Grass Hills. They were bearing off for Silver Bow Junction,
homeward bound. Rock’s course lay a trifle east of south, toward Fort
Benton. Ahead of him, in that spring-green void, big round-ups were
mustering from the upper Teton to the Larb Hills. The Bear Paws loomed
faintly on the horizon. Milk River, Sun Prairie, the Bad Lands--place
names to conjure with. There was nothing petty in all that sweep of
plain and mountain. It gave Rock a curious sense of thrilling
possibilities. He rode alone without being lonely, fired by some subtle
anticipation.
He often asked himself afterward what it is that gives a man a definite
urge along a definite line that may lead him to both triumph and
disaster. But he was never able to answer that question, any more than
he was able to answer it that June day when, parting company with his
fellows, he pointed the red horse’s head toward Fort Benton murmuring
whimsically:
“Here we comes, and there we goes,
And where we’ll stop nobody knows.”