Part 1
EASY MONEY
By Bertrand W. Sinclair
Author of “Hands Off!” “The Land of Frozen Suns,” Etc.
When Charlie Shaw, the carefree cow-puncher, was accused of being a shallow josher, and therefore worthless for rounding up cow thieves, Charlie got angry and proved that even a “kidder” can get down to business.
The cool autumn wind riffled across Lonesome Prairie. It fluttered the manes and tails of a dozen saddled horses standing in a compact group, awaiting the pleasure of their riders, who stood and squatted in various postures, casting occasional glances at a number of flat, wrinkled objects in the grass of a tiny hollow. They had come upon these objects quite unexpectedly and had stopped to examine them. One rider had gone galloping back toward camp. The rest waited.
“Gosh, old Elmer’ll go straight in the air when he sees this,” one remarked.
Two miles distant a herd was stringing south. Heavy-loaded wagons, tooled respectively by a cook and a night herder, with a comet’s tail of saddle stock following behind, bore in the same direction. And from that direction three men were now riding full tilt toward the dismounted cow-punchers.
When they pulled up at the group, Elmer Duffy gave an immediate exhibition of what his rider had termed “going straight in the air.” Elmer was past forty, a sandy-haired Texan, with a capacity for irritable conduct that remained mostly hidden beneath a placid exterior. He had a long, solemn face. He took his position as the active head of a big cow outfit rather more seriously than range bosses usually did. This attitude, together with his slumbering crabbedness, did not make him popular with his men.
“What’s all this?” he demanded.
“Well,” one sunny-faced young fellow explained, “as near as we can see, it’s eight beef hides with the Seventy-seven brand, that’s been skinned off their rightful wearers and laid out to dry in the sun by some kind soul. We happened on ’em an’ sent Mike back to tell you, because we thought maybe you’d be interested.”
Mr. Duffy prowled from one hide to the other. The skulls and shin bones and hoofs of the defunct animals were scattered about for all and sundry to behold, where the coyotes had gnawed them. But they knew very well that neither wolf nor coyote had pulled down a bunch of mature cattle like that. And, as the foreman of the Seventy-seven gathered the import of these remains, he grew red in the face, and his language became eloquent but unprintable.
“Some dirty thieves has been butcherin’ beef an’ gettin’ away with it,” he stormed. “I’d give five hundred dollars cold cash to lay hands on ’em.”
“If you’d advertise that in the _River Press_,” the same youngster laughed, “maybe they’d come in and give themselves up for the reward.”
Elmer glared at him.
“Don’t get fresh,” he growled. “This here’s serious.”
“So it seems,” Charlie Shaw replied carelessly. “But there’s no law against joshin’.”
“This ain’t no josh,” Duffy declared, embellishing his statement with an earnest oath. “And I suppose all a man can expect when he finds that a bunch of thieves is loose on the range is for featherheads like you to make a joke of it. If it was your cattle that’d been killed, you’d sing a different tune.”
Charlie Shaw’s laughing mouth shut in a tight line.
“I would, Elmer,” he said quietly. “I’d keep my mouth shut and go after ’em. I wouldn’t waste my breath cussin’.”
“_You_ wouldn’t waste your breath cussin’!” Elmer exploded. “No! All you c’n waste is the outfit’s time an’ your money at poker. If I had to depend on boneheads like you to protect the outfit’s interests, the Seventy-seven would go to hell in two seasons. Josh--that’s all you know how to do.”
Charlie took a step toward him. He was tall and slim, older in years and experience than his boyish face told, and his merry blue eyes suddenly ceased to be merry.
“Don’t get too personal in your remarks, Elmer,” he warned. “I might get serious myself.”
“Personal! Personal!” Duffy bellowed. “Say, lemme tell you somethin’.”
As an offset to his unfortunate disposition, Elmer Duffy had a reasonable amount of common sense; otherwise, he could not have guided the destiny of the Seventy-seven. He realized that he _had_ got too personal. And he couldn’t back down without losing face. He had no high opinion of Charlie Shaw’s intelligence. No serious-minded man ever has a high opinion of light-minded youth, and Charlie had been the play boy of the Seventy-seven all that summer--a competent enough range rider, with no proper sense of responsibility, according to Elmer. But Shaw had nerve. His record and his actions made even Elmer Duffy concede that. And Elmer didn’t hunger for war over a mere matter of levity.
“You go onto the wagon,” he said stiffly, refusing to pursue the contention farther. “Catch your horses, pack your bed, and we’ll part company. Here’s your time.”
* * * * *
He disregarded Charlie’s palpably belligerent attitude, sat himself on the grass, drew a check book and indelible pencil from his pocket, and proceeded to write out a check.
“You drew most all you had comin’ last trip,” he said, as he handed over the green slip. “There’s the balance.”
“So you think I’m a bonehead, do you?” Charlie inquired gravely. “I wonder if I couldn’t sort of change your mind about that.”
“I don’t want to have no fuss with you, Shaw,” Elmer said curtly. “I can’t have a man in the outfit I don’t hitch with. You’re young an’ careless an’ hot-headed an’----”
“An’ you’re middle-aged an’ staggerin’ under a tremendous weight of responsibility an’ cranky as a bull with the seven-year itch,” Shaw retorted. “I don’t give a damn about you firin’ me, Elmer. But nobody can talk to me----”
A couple of men horned in between them. Everybody in the crew liked Charlie Shaw. They respected Duffy, even if they didn’t love him. No one wanted to see a fuss over nothing. And they could see the making of a powder fog in that unexpected clash born of irritation and a loose tongue. They twisted Charlie Shaw about and spoke soothingly to him. While they strove with his outraged dignity, Elmer Duffy, exercising uncommonly good judgment, mounted his horse and issued orders.
Thereafter Charlie could only let it go as it stood, or make himself ridiculous by insisting on a ruction with a man who patently desired to avoid one. Duffy could indicate his distaste without having his nerve questioned.
But when the dozen riders were bobbing away in a row, Charlie sat on his horse, disconsolate, indignant and still resentful.
“Darn his hide,” he reflected. “I was just about to tangle with him, I guess. By gosh, I’ll make him sing a different tune yet. Bonehead? Huh! Thinks I don’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Just because I pushed him over some beefed steers. Gosh darn him, I _will_ show him.”
Just how, Charlie hadn’t the remotest idea. The present occasion did not look particularly auspicious. The drama of an old range song flitted unpleasantly through Charlie’s mind:
Heaps of fun in the summertime, Pockets full of gold. But when you’re broke in the wintertime, Oh, mister, ain’t it cold!
A raw October wind whistled mournfully across Lonesome Prairie. Charlie thought regretfully of the celebrated poker game in which he had recently dropped practically a summer’s wages. Round-up was nearly over. The big outfits seldom took on men in the fall. Oh--well. But he would certainly show Elmer Duffy he could do something besides taking life as a perpetual joke.
Even a natural clown has his serious moments.
* * * * *
Darkness on the plains is like darkness on the sea. If the stars are hidden there is no guiding mark--nothing but an immensity of shrouded silence in which a rider is like a ship without a compass. Yet men cast away at sea in open boats win to a landfall by day or night. Men cross the plains when night spreads her ebony wings and do not miss their destination. Each has his own resources of location and direction; the mariner by dead reckoning, based on observation of wind and heaving swells at sundown, the plainsman by his knowledge of the roll of the ground and the directional trend of gently undulating slopes. The rider feels these under the feet of his horse, as the seaman feels the lift and fall of his vessel.
So Charlie, crossing alone a forty-mile stretch of Lonesome Prairie, was as sure of his course as if bright day had shown him the Sweet Grass in the north, the blue summit of the Bear Paws on the eastern sky line, and the dark broken line to the south, where Marias Valley cut the plains. He rode at a jog trot, bearing south, always south, toward a ranch he knew, although the cloud rack in the sky darkened the plains, so that the outstretched fingers of a hand were scarcely visible.
He had fifteen miles yet to go, if he had not miscalculated. Nowhere in the stretch he had covered was there any great difference in elevation. It was all flat, with scarcely perceptible hollows bearing away to the east, toward Lonesome Prairie Lake. But he approached now a terrain of less monotony, and he began to peer ahead for a well-known beacon, something akin to that which guided the Israelites on an historical occasion, a pillar of fire by night.
Scarcely exact to call it a pillar. It was no more than a flickering gleam--an uncanny momentary glow. It came from an exposed surface seam of lignite coal, mysteriously set on fire long ago and burning still in the bowels of the earth. In the dark, flame and ignited gas would regularly flare about the pit, a ghostly incandescence, flashing intermittently above the smoldering embers of the burning seam.
He marked it, at last, well ahead and a little to the right. He let the reins dangle loosely. The black horse he bestrode had been bred and broken in the Marias Valley. He would bear straight south, now, at a steady, smooth trot.
“I expect,” he muttered to the beast’s dim ears, “you know we’re headed for the TL, like the feller who went home when there was no place else to go, eh, Crepe? You wouldn’t, bein’ a one-ideaed animal, think of headin’ back for the Seventy-seven round-up. Well, go to it, old boy.”
Out of the dark a strange whispering sound arose. At first, Charlie took it to be the wind springing up again. Yet his ears no more than caught the sound, than he knew it was no wind rustling across the prairie. He pulled up. It sounded plainer, then--not so far ahead of him; it was unaccountable, mysterious, beyond identification. The curious fancy came to Charlie that it was like a giant snake crawling on its belly over the stiff dry grass. And that bit of imagery made him smile. Pythons in the jungle night! And the largest reptile in Montana was a four-foot rattlesnake.
But that whispering sound stirred his curiosity to a great pitch. He had not the remotest idea what caused it, and he was familiar with every legitimate noise a man might expect to hear anywhere on the plains after nightfall--the rush of wind, the sound of running water, the thunder of hoofs, insect voices, the tumult of a herd, or the tiniest stirring.
And, as he sat his horse, wondering what it could possibly be, the sound died away to nothing.
He shook up his horse. The pack animal came up on a slack rope. A hundred yards straight ahead Crepe shied and snorted violently.
“Now, what the dickens!” Charlie exclaimed testily. “You darned fool! What’s eatin’ you?”
He was tired. These coltish antics from a staid old cow horse annoyed him. He spoke this annoyance aloud. He jabbed Crepe chastisingly with his spurs. Leather creaked. The bit chains and spur rowels clanked. The black horse’s hoofs thudded sharply on the hard ground, as he plunged under the prick of the rowels. Charlie swore.
* * * * *
In that still air a man’s voice carried a long way. There was nothing he could see to scare the horse. But the last of his harsh, reproving words was still in his mouth when something occurred to justify, in a measure, Crepe’s strange behavior, although it explained nothing.
A rose-and-orange flower bloomed suddenly in the blackness on his left. A sharp _pow!_ as a gun spoke in the abrupt, staccato manner of guns when they speak. Something whined, _wh-e-e-e!_ away off. For a second Charlie hesitated, reins taut, wondering. A signal--somebody lost? Or----
His perceptions were exceedingly rapid and logical. The sluggish-minded did not usually function long in the range country. Nor was he a nervous or timorous man. He did not jump to the conclusion that he had been shot at, because he knew of no reason why any one should shoot at him. Nor was he apt to be nervous under fire, having had that unpleasant experience once or twice. At the same time he wanted to know just what _was_ afoot. He felt reasonably safe in the shrouding cover of the dark, if he were intruding on anything or any one.
So he lifted up his voice in a lusty bellow.
“Hey, there! What you shootin’ at?”
He got his answer at once. The gaudy flower of the Winchester gardens bloomed its momentary brilliance in the night--once, twice, a third time.
Charlie did not pause to investigate. He gave Crepe his head and departed thence. Two more shots followed upon the hurried beat of the hoofs. The whine of bullets overhead told Charlie that whoever fired back, there in the darkness, was firing at him, sight unseen.
“Visitors ain’t popular here,” he muttered. “Far be it from me to disturb anybody’s privacy. _I_ don’t need no second hint, you darned fool. Save your powder.”
Half a mile at headlong gallop, and he pulled up to listen. No sound of pursuit. No breath of air stirred. Nothing. He might have been a solitary soul in a darkened void. That silence could be felt. He rode on at the same jog trot.
“Now, what was all that about, back there, I wonder?” he said to himself.
He was still wondering when he dropped down the north bank of the Marias, forded a clear shallow river that sang a welcome song in a night that held a touch of frost, and into which Crepe and the pack pony dipped their muzzles thirstily. And this puzzled wonder still persisted in Charlie’s mind half an hour later, when he snuggled down in his unfolded bed beside the TL stable wall, inside which his horses contentedly munched hay. His last conscious thought was of that strange, whispering sound in the night, and the reason for those shots. And it was the first thing in his mind when he opened his eyes to bright sunshine pouring into the valley, and “Rock” Holloway inquiring jovially why in blazes he didn’t use the bunk house instead of the open air for sleeping purposes.
“I just got in during the night, myself,” Rock told him. “Been riding with the Maltese Cross. Come on and have some breakfast.”
Nona Holloway smiled at Charlie. Neither she nor her husband asked questions. Charlie Shaw had ridden for her long before Rock came into the Marias country, when she was a slim, sad wisp of a girl, with a baby sister and a bunch of cattle on her hands and a strange quality of exciting the admiration and respect of every man she came in contact with. Rock had fallen in love with her and married her, and the TL had waxed prosperous under their joint control. And Charlie Shaw had drifted out of their employment for reasons that he could never think about, much less discuss. He didn’t know why he drifted in there now, except that these two were his friends, and he knew he was welcome, and it was on his way, because, when he parted with the Seventy-seven, he had decided to head for Fort Benton in search of a job. He would not ask Rock for a job. A foolish pride forbade, although he had never been able to rid himself of a feeling that the TL was home.
So he ate breakfast and merely remarked that he was through with the Seventy-seven and on his way. And after breakfast, as he and Rock stood on the porch, Charlie looked out over the valley with a touch of regret. Four years is a long time, and just that period had elapsed since Rock Holloway came jogging across Lonesome Prairie, to look his first on the silver band of the Marias, to find himself faced at this very ranch with a tragic emergency. And now, Charlie reflected, Rock had a wife and a son and three thousand cattle and a ranch that was a tiny kingdom in itself. They had fought side by side against high-handed thieves. Charlie had drifted, and Rock had taken root. Peace and prosperity and happiness had come to him and the girl to whom Charlie had been a loyal servant before Rock took a hand in the game. Charlie knew all about it. He had watched the drama enacted. Some men were lucky, and some were wise. He himself was neither, he supposed.
* * * * *
He looked out on irrigated meadows which gave their harvest into ranked stacks of hay. The river bank was cluttered with painted buildings. Lines of fence, inclosing choice pastures, spread up and down the valley as far as he could see. He stole a look at Rock--a look that was wistful and wholly without envy. And Charlie was not thinking so much of land and cattle as the most desirable of Rock’s possessions. Consequently he was surprised to keen attention by the words that presently Rock uttered.
“I guess things have been coming too easy for us, too long,” Rock said. “We had a wild time here once, Charlie, and it looked like a tough game. Then we got organized, and it has been smooth as silk. I suppose there is always somebody who hasn’t got anything, cooking up a scheme for getting something for nothing.”
“What’s wrong?” Charlie asked him bluntly.
“We’re shy about a hundred head of beef this fall,” Rock told him.
Charlie didn’t need the significance of that explained to him. He was a range rider, born to the business. He recalled those sun-dried hides in the grass. The Seventy-seven was losing cattle--beef cattle, too.
“Gosh!” he murmured. “I wonder if we got another ‘Buck’ Walters among us again.”
“I don’t know.” Rock frowned. “That is to be found out. I know we are out that many because the bulk of the beef is shipped. There will be only a few picked up on the outskirts of the range before the Maltese Cross round-up quits for the season. I have been with them all fall, so I know nothing was overlooked. That’s about forty-five hundred dollars in cold cash, Charlie--more than a small outfit like us can afford to lose.”
“Got any idea?” Charlie asked.
“None worth shouting,” Rock admitted. “It’s so long since we had anything like this to deal with that it seems impossible such a thing could happen. Yet these cattle are gone. I have no reason to suspect anybody. But I am going to scout with my eyes and ears open, you can bet your life on that.”
“There is always some feller ready to bust the Eighth Commandment wide open if he sees a chance,” Charlie observed. “Has it struck you that all this railroad-construction work offers a chance for somebody to butcher beef on the range and sell it to them camps?”
“Sure,” Rock declared. “But nobody has showed signs of that, that I know of.”
“I’m not so sure. The Seventy-seven has lost beef, too.”
He went on to tell Rock of finding those dried and wrinkled hides and Elmer Duffy’s explosion, which had led to Charlie’s parting with the outfit.
“I’m full-handed, or I’d put you to work,” Rock said. “You were a darned fool to quit us, anyhow. I don’t like to fire a man to make room for you, Charlie, but you stick around for a while, and I’ll see.”
“Oh, shucks, it’s easy enough to get a job,” Charlie replied, turning Rock’s remark aside.
“And that hide thing is interesting,” Rock said thoughtfully. “Perhaps those construction camps would bear watching.”
* * * * *
Charlie didn’t tell him about that odd whispering sound in the night, nor the shots that were fired at him. There was no apparent connection between what he heard and cattle stealing--none that Charlie could see. And it seemed an entirely incredible affair, anyway, viewed from the sun-warmed porch of the ranch house. Nevertheless an idea as fantastic as that experience in the black dark popped into Charlie Shaw’s head--an idea that he felt powerfully urged to act upon. But he kept it to himself. If it proved imaginary, he would not have made himself ridiculous by talking. And Elmer Duffy’s scornful, angry epithets of “bonehead” and et cetera, had got deeper under Charlie’s skin than he cared to admit. He wanted to make Elmer swallow both his words and his opinions. And Charlie Shaw hated a cow thief. He had reasons, both personal and general. He carried scars on his body from the hands of such gentry. So did Rock. They were a unit in that. And they were equally close mouthed in important matters. They stood now silent, looking out across the river.
“The Cross missed any stock?” Charlie asked at last.
“No; nor the Narrow Gauge nor the Circle,” Rock replied. “But the trouble is they have so many cattle they would not miss any unless the loss was heavy; whereas we know within a few head how many calves we should brand and how many beef we should ship. We are shy almost one fourth of our beef cattle, and that is too big a whack at us. I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s aggravatin’, all right,” Charlie said. “By gosh, y’know, I think it would be a good thing to make a round of them gradin’ camps on Lonesome Prairie. Let’s do it, Rock, you an’ me.”
“I got to go to Helena,” Rock said. “Be gone a week. If you don’t get restless and move on, we’ll go scouting when I come back.”
“I’m restless right now,” Charlie said. “If you’ll have your cook put up about three days’ grub for me, I’m goin’ to turn back north on a expedition of my own. Maybe I’ll know something when I get back, maybe not. I’ll tell you, anyhow.”
“All right,” Rock said. He asked no questions. A man’s business, unless he was on the pay roll of an outfit, was entirely his own. Rock knew that Charlie didn’t turn in his tricks without a reason. But he knew better than to inquire that reason if Shaw didn’t volunteer it. He watched Charlie ride, leading his pack horse, up the north bank of the Marias, some time later, with a certain amount of unsatisfied curiosity and a feeling that he should perhaps be riding alongside that fair-haired youth. And if Rock had known what worked in Charlie Shaw’s mind, he would have mounted and followed him.
As it was, Charlie rode north alone. There had been a time when he never left that ranch in the valley without a rifle under his stirrup leather. When Buck Walters’ shadow lay like a menace across that range a man needed to be armed. But for a long time the Winchester carbine had reposed in Charlie’s bed, except when he occasionally hunted antelope or wolves. Now it was in its worn scabbard beneath his leg. And Charlie felt a little keyed up, a little expectant. If he were lucky he might have the laugh on Elmer Duffy at last. For things had assumed a different aspect since he learned that the TL was losing beef wholesale. On that was based the idea that had popped suddenly into Charlie’s mind--an idea too far-fetched to divulge to Rock Holloway. Some one had begun to steal cattle again, where none had dared, after the private war that wiped out Buck Walters and his crowd. Here and there in the range country there was always some one who coveted his neighbor’s ox, just as in more highly organized communities light-fingered folk always seek to filch goods that other men have accumulated by legitimate enterprise and honest industry.