Viewed from the southern approach, the triple buttes of the Sweet Grass
Hills rise like immense cones abruptly from the level of the plains.
Gold Butte stands in the middle. West Butte looks toward the Rockies.
East Butte faces the rising sun. Between each the prairie flowed in
glades, carpeted with grass, dotted with sloughs, and threaded by
aimless streams. It was, indeed, as if some whimsical giant had
snatched three peaks off some distant mountain range and set them there
for geologists to puzzle over.
Upon East Butte, the larger of the three and the most northerly, where
the plains began to wrinkle and lift to foothills, like a grassy sea
frozen into immobility, as it laved the shore of the peak, Rock camped
his wagon. At daybreak, while the sun was yet merely a promise uttered
by a golden haze in the east, he rode with all his men up that
precipitous slope. An hour’s climbing brought them to the top, but not
to the uttermost pinnacle; for that was a gray, rocky spire, where
bands of mountain sheep took refuge against less sure-footed creatures.
They had climbed to a shoulder that brought them under the rim rock,
around to the head of the north slope.
Milk River lay a shining silver thread in its valley, with broken
country extending on either hand, deep canyons and gray sage flats.
They looked from this height into a foreign land, for the Canada line
ran east and west, six miles below. Like a monument the Butte towered
over the boundary and over a wilderness. In all the Sweet Grass country
no man had as yet laid the foundation logs of a home. Within a radius
of fifty miles the land was as it spread when Columbus brooded on the
poop of his caraval, except that the buffaloes were gone, and wild
cattle from Texas grazed where the bison had recently fed.
East Butte threw a long, westward shadow, away past its fellows. Its
eastern declivities blazed yellow in the eye of a sun just clear of the
horizon. The riders sat there, watching the sunbeams hunt slinking
shadows out of every hollow. Birds twittered in thickets about them.
The air was full of pine smells and the scent of the aromatic grass
that gave the hills their name. It was cool and fresh at that sunrise
hour, five thousand feet above the sea.
“Lord,” one rider drawled, “if you could marry this here grass and
scenery to the Texas climate, you’d have a paradise to live in.”
Rock and Charlie Shaw had their heads together. Charlie was pointing at
something.
“You can see where those three coulees come in,” he said. “There’s a
peach of an open basin. A place like a park--maybe three-four hundred
acres. The corrals are one side of that, under a bank, tucked in the
edge of some pines. Down where you see that white clay bank, Buck
Walters’ outfit was camped on a creek.”
“How close can we all ride without showing ourselves?” Rock asked.
“That depends on whether there is anybody on lookout,” Charlie told
him. “If there is any monkey business goin’ on, they will have an eye
peeled, you can gamble. Somebody could be lookin’ at us now, if he was
rangin’ around. But we could go on a mile or so together by keepin’ in
the bottom of that gulch. It’s timbered.”
* * * * *
They moved down into this hollow, quiet now, for Rock had explained to
them that they might happen on men who would not welcome visitors. The
gulch Charlie indicated made a screen for their passage. It was full of
lodgepole pine, slender, graceful trees, with tufted tops like ostrich
plumes. The earth was a litter of dried needles, a carpet for shod
hoofs. The jingle of a spur, the faint clank of a loose-jawed bit
mouthed by a fretful horse; a low squeaking of saddle leather--these
were the only sounds, as they rode. Suddenly the draw ended. Grassy
contours showed through a screen of timber. In the edge of that Charlie
Shaw pulled up.
“It’s pretty open below here for a crowd,” he suggested.
“How far now?” Rock inquired.
“Coupla miles.”
“I don’t want to show a squad of armed men around here till I know what
we’re going up against,” Rock mused. “If we got to take action, it
would better be a surprise party, with us doing the surprising. I think
you and me had better scout a little, Charlie.”
“I was goin’ to suggest that,” Charlie said.
“All right. You boys lay low here,” Rock ordered. “From the edge of
this timber you can look down over the slope, without anybody seeing
you or your horses. If we should happen to get in a mix-up, there will
be guns popping. And if they pop too long and loud, you had better come
running. I don’t want to stage any wild play, if it can be helped, but,
if we have to throw lead to protect ourselves, we will. Otherwise, we
will be back in a couple of hours at the outside. Now don’t show
yourselves unless you have to. Use some judgment.”
The riders got down off their horses, stretched their legs, and rolled
cigarettes. Rock and Charlie Shaw bore along in the edge of the timber.
A narrow plateau, open, grassy, almost level, ran along under the low,
pine-swathed ridge, where they left the riders. Off to the left a
hillside lifted a stretch of jack pine and scrubby juniper. They darted
across a narrow bit of open and trotted along under cover once more.
“Not far now--not so far as I thought it was,” Charlie said after a
time. “I remember this place.”
In a few minutes he pulled up, lifted his face, and sniffed.
“Say, we’re right on top of them corrals,” he whispered. “An’ I’d say
they was populated. Smell that?”
“Wood smoke,” Rock muttered. But he knew that with the smell of burning
wood there was mingled another, more pungent odor--the smell of burning
hair. He had sweated around too many branding fires not to recognize
that.
“We better leave our horses here,” Charlie suggested. “Only a few steps
to where we can get a look from a bank right above the pens.”
Rock nodded. They took no chances of their mounts shifting, despite the
fact that every cow horse is trained to stand on dropped bridle reins,
as if he were anchored. They tied them to saplings. Carbines in hand,
they stole warily to a point where the thicket inched out on the edge
of a drop-off. They were on a narrow bench. Behind them, like a series
of huge steps, other benches rose, one above the other, to a bare
grassy ridge.
From the timber they could not quite see over the brow. They dropped on
all fours, crawled a few yards, crept, then crawled on their stomachs
and, at last, lay peering down a sharp slope.
Rock’s eyes lit up at the activity below. The corrals were right under
them. He could have cast a stone into the fire where the irons glowed.
The hidden pens were built the shape of a dumb-bell. Two circular
inclosures made the knobs. A chute connecting the two was the grip.
Either pen would hold fully five hundred head of stock. The one nearest
them was jammed with cattle.
Three mounted men worked in this uneasy mass of horned beasts, forcing
them, one by one, into the chute. There, at the most constricted part
of the passage, an ingenious arrangement wedged each animal fast, while
through an opening in the wall of poles an artist with a running iron
sent up little puffs of smoke from scorching hair and hide.
Rock couldn’t read the brands, either the old or the new ones, at that
distance. He had no need. He knew as well as if he had been sitting on
that fence that the brand those cattle bore when they had passed
through the chute was not the mark seared on when they were frisky
calves. They carried a different mark--the mark of a different owner,
deftly superimposed over the first. The old brand and the new could
only be what he knew they must be, because he could recognize more than
one man diligently laboring in the dust and the heat.
Buck Walters was there, unmistakable in his high-crowned hat with the
silver band; also, Dave Wells, long, lean and efficient. Neither was a
common-looking man. Rock knew every characteristic pose and action of
Dave Wells. Buck Walters loomed as distinctive. He could swear to them.
* * * * *
A group of saddle horses stood outside the corrals. Rock counted. Three
men mounted, three working at the fire--six. Out on the flat, where the
grassy basin spread like a pocket in the vast skirt of the butte, two
more riders rode herd on a bunch of cattle. Eight men in sight.
“That stuff on the flat isn’t worked yet, I don’t think,” Charlie
whispered. He, too, was counting noses. “So they’ll probably have a
herd of rebranded stuff down the canyon on the creek. Likely be two men
on herd there.”
“That makes ten. That tally all of ’em?” Rock asked.
“No, it don’t, darn it,” Charlie said. “Buck had six riders besides
himself. This hombre from the North joined him with five. That’s
thirteen. Coupla more somewhere. What you goin’ to do about this, Rock?
We got ’em red-handed.”
“I guess the best bet is to go back and get the boys,” Rock whispered.
“We got here unseen. The bunch can make it, if we go careful. Then
we’ll surround these festive stock hands and see just what all this
secret industry means.”
“I wonder if----”
Charlie’s wonder was cut short. He straightened out with a gasp, and
the contortion of his body coincided with a sharp crack above, so close
that it seemed in their very ears. Rock’s head twisted. He saw the
upper half of a man’s body against the morning sky, on a bank above the
brush that concealed their horses. He was drawing a careful bead on
Rock with a rifle, and Rock rolled sidewise, thrusting up the muzzle of
his carbine. Partly hidden in the long grass, Rock made a difficult
target. Twice the lookout fired. Both bullets shaved Rock. He loosed
two shots, himself, without effect, save to make the rifleman draw
back. For the moment there was silence, while an echo went faintly back
in the hills.
Lying flat, Rock parted the grass and looked over for Charlie Shaw. The
boy had gone over the edge. His body had lodged against a cluster of
wild cherry, twenty feet below. Another scalp for the enemy, Rock
thought, with anger burning in him. But his wrath did not close his
eyes. He saw that the men at the branding fire had dropped irons and
were mounting, and that those in the corral were stepping their horses
over lowered bars.
Of course they would have lookouts posted! And if that bunch of
predatory thieves ever got on the bench above him, he was trapped. His
own men couldn’t hear gunfire at that distance. It would be all off
with him before they could buy into the game, anyway, if he had to face
that bunch, single-handed, where he lay. Pretty fix! Rock gritted his
teeth. He had been a little too sanguine--taken rather too long a
chance. He had to move and move fast.
He began to worm himself hurriedly through the grass. Mount and ride;
get out of gunshot and draw pursuit after him; decoy this enterprising
aggregation right in under the guns of his own crew. Excellent! That
would be a master stroke of retaliation. Rock’s nimble brain saw all
this in illuminating flashes, while he moved.
The fellow above him kept firing at the quivering grass tops, shot
after shot. Bullets bored into the mold beside him. He didn’t bother to
shoot back. A kingdom for his horse--yes, two kingdoms! He could hear
hoofs beating earth now. He found himself on the edge of the timber.
Erect, four strides, a snatch at the tied _macarte_, the smack of his
leg across the saddle, and he went crashing through the brush.
* * * * *
He was none too soon. The man above was yelling to those below. They
were riding to head him off. Rock could hear the drum of their
galloping. He laughed. He was above pursuit, ahead of it. Nothing, he
felt confident, could gain on the rangy beast between his legs, bar
accident--a badger hole, unseen in the grass, or a chance shot at long
range.
The second was a chance. Because he meant to show himself--must show
himself, to draw the pursuers hot on his trail right under that low
ridge on which his riders lay. He did not mean to skulk in timber. They
might lose him altogether, and they might possibly surround him. And he
was hot with the memory of the agonized twist of Charlie Shaw’s face,
as he slid over the bank.
So now he took a chance and bored into the open. Long, bare slopes
slanted upward, contours that tried the wind and limb of stout horses.
Behind, spread in open order, like skirmishing cavalry, riders drummed
the turf. They were not so far behind that a bullet couldn’t reach him,
but they were far enough to make shooting from the back of a plunging
horse a futile business.
A yell arose at his appearance. Half a dozen guns barked at him. The
bullets whined, as the wind whines in taut cordage. Rock kept his
carbine in hand, not to shoot, but to hold safe. If his horse went down
by a fluke, he wanted no broken gun stock to stand off these ugly
customers.
They would kill him with a good deal of satisfaction and a certain
amount of venom. For their own safety, they must. Rock looked over his
shoulder. The lookout who had shot Charlie had come clear of the timber
and was converging with his fellows. The day herders had quit their
cattle to join the chase. The hunt was up strong. They would follow him
to hell. He had spied upon their operations in that secluded hollow.
Rock could imagine them confident of getting him. They had all that
wild country to run him down, as hounds run down a wolf.
And when the bulk of that race was run, with a steep slope still to
breast before he could thunder along that open plateau, overlooked by
his own riders, Rock was not so sure that he would win. For a mile he
had gained ground, had saved his mount a little, and still opened a
gap. Now the gap was closing slowly, but inexorably. By the time he
reached that bench, they would be close enough to throw lead. If he
didn’t reach that level, they would have him on an open side hill, and
they would riddle him before the firing drew his own crowd.
Very well, let the firing begin. Rock turned his carbine backward and
fired repeatedly. They did not bother to reply. They were gaining, and
they would shoot when they were ready. Their horses were fresh at the
corrals. His mount had gone fifteen miles that morning. The brute was
game. He did not falter. Head up, tail like a pennant, he took the
short, steep slope with gallant leaps. But it slowed him.
The pursuit swept to the foot of the hill. It, too, slowed. Rock had
reloaded his carbine. He fired at random now and drew reply, a
fusillade that whistled close. Surely those Capital K riders would come
alive and swoop down when they saw a dozen guns belching lead at one
lone rider.
Rock’s horse scrambled panting over the brow, out on the level. Grass
lifted yellow to the ridge above. Pines stood black against the sky,
but never the shape of a horseman. And behind him, dangerously close,
the heads and shoulders and horses of those angry thieves came over the
lip of the hill. They were shooting now in a continuous stream.
Rock’s horse went out from under him, leaving him for a moment, it
seemed, suspended in the air. He threw up one hand to protect that
precious carbine, and fell limber, slack-muscled, by a great effort of
will over instinct, ten feet ahead of his horse.
No badger hole had tripped that sure-footed beast. A bullet had done
the work. He lay on his side with scarcely a quiver, a convenient
bulwark to which Rock hastily crawled, and, flat on his stomach, he
laid his carbine across the sweat-warm body.
* * * * *
A most astonishing thing happened. As his forefinger sought the
trigger, that squad of riders jerked their mounts, each back on his
haunches. For a moment, the extended hands holding six-shooters, seemed
poised and uncertain. Two or three began to reel in their saddles. One
man slid off slowly, headfirst. Then the gunfire broke loose again. But
they did not charge down on Rock. He pulled, saw a man fall, drew down
on another, deliberately and unhurried--smiling, in spite of the hot
rage in his heart. For he knew his own men were in the fight now.
Behind and above him a staccato burst of firing resounded above the
nearer shooting. Pow! Pow! Rifles. Pow! Pow! Another man down. A horse
spinning around and around on his hind legs, squealing with pain.
And then out of Buck Walters’ group of hesitant horsemen, who were
shooting still, their horses plunging this way and that, one rider bent
his head and came like a quarter horse off the mark. He didn’t shoot,
and his gun hand was held stiffly straight before him. He had no great
way to come--less than a hundred yards. He rode a coal-black horse with
a white face, the same horse he had ridden the day he led his men to
Nona Parke’s to hang Doc Martin to a cottonwood limb.
For a second, Rock held his fire. He could hear hoofbeats coming down
from the pines. He saw those who had pursued him break and turn tail,
shooting over their shoulders.
And this frenzied fool was coming straight at him, at Rock, at a man
entrenched behind a dead horse, with a rifle in his hands.
The hate on Buck Walters’ face, the passion, and the sudden _pang!
pang!_ of his six-shooter fascinated Rock, even as he let the tip of
the carbine sight settle on Buck’s heaving breast.
At twenty yards he fired. Walters straightened in his saddle. His mouth
opened, as if in one last incredulous “Oh!” and he toppled sidewise.
But the black horse kept on, like a charging lion, like a cougar
launched on its spring, like anything animate or inanimate that has
acquired momentum beyond control. The brute was either blind or mad, or
both. For one instant Rock hesitated. It seemed childish to shoot down
a riderless horse. Surely the brute would see where he was going and
turn aside. He had never seen anything like that. The black’s eyeballs
were staring, his mouth foam-flecked with blood. Crazy. Hit perhaps.
Running amuck. Rock flung up his carbine and fired. But he had waited a
fraction of a second too long. The black horse loomed in the air right
over Rock, and, as the bullet paralyzed him, came down in a heap, with
crimson spurting from the hole Rock had drilled in the white blaze of
his face.
One flying hoof struck Rock, and a tremendous weight smashed down on
him. For a second or so, he seemed to be gifted with a strange,
magnified awareness of all that was taking place. He could see his own
men sweeping by on either side with exultant yells, firing. He could
see figures prone on the grass, a couple of saddle horses galloping
aimlessly, with stirrups flapping. It was all illuminated with an
unearthly radiance, a light brighter and whiter than any sun that ever
shone on the plains. In the midst of this transfigured reality, very
strangely--wondering how that could be--he could see Nona Parke’s face,
sad and troubled, but very alluring.
Then, as if some one had turned a switch, it all went black.