Part 2

If a man could not enjoy the fruits of his labor, he would know the reason why. Charlie considered the situation. There had been no known rustling on the Marias for four years, and perhaps it looked like good picking. With that to spur him, Charlie was inordinately curious to know who was so nervous as to smoke up an unseen solitary traveler crossing Lonesome Prairie at night--and why? The way to read a book is to open it and turn the pages. The way to learn what Charlie wanted to know was to look over the ground. There was, besides, a farther field to explore in the light of Rock’s lost cattle.

He had the wispy intermittent blue of smoke from the burning coal seam to mark the place where those shots had been fired. By half past one he drew up on the low rise above the swale in which he had heard that peculiar sound.

* * * * *

Nothing in sight. Autumn-bleached grass, miles of it; cattle grazing here and there. Distant saw-toothed mountain summits breaking the sky line. Away off to the north, below the horizon, Charlie knew that gangs of men with plows and scrapers and teams swarmed like an extended column of warrior ants, constructing the grade of a transcontinental railway. Charlie had in his own mind established a possible relation between the vanished cattle and this activity. It had come to him, far-fetched but possible, as he talked to Rock. But first, he wanted to look about here for some sign which might confirm his suspicions.

A casual inspection of the spot revealed nothing. The earth was baked hard. The short grass, dry and stiff, sprung back to erectness when released from underfoot. He was, however, quite sure of his location, having almost an uncanny sense about such things.

He swung in a circle. Dipping into the hollow at a slow walk, he pulled up. In that swale strange marks showed. The grass was pressed flat in swaths less than three feet wide, as if heavy objects had been dragged or rolled across the surface. He got down, bent to examine these peculiarities, and then walked on, leading his two horses, while he conned the ground. So moving, he came to a patch of prickly pear. Stooping, he examined the crushed spiny leaves. A squinting look brought wrinkles between his eyes.

“Huh!” he grunted.

Then he mounted and followed the marks at a trot. As the crow flies, the flattened swaths ran straight for the burning lignite, where the blue vapors drifted, and it was no great distance to the place.

He halted a few yards short of a crevice with ragged edges. Twenty feet on either side the grass had perished long ago. Charlie dismounted and approached with caution. To have the ground break at the lip under his feet meant that he would perish, like a fly cast in a camp fire. The opening, narrow and fairly deep, gave off fumes and smoke, like the breath of some uneasy subterranean monster. Now and then an upward whiff of gas ignited and burned with a wavering flame. Anything dropped in that crevice was utterly beyond rescue.

The marks that Charlie followed ran up to the brink, which proved solid earth when he stamped cautiously. Hoofprints and boot marks appeared, with disturbed places in the powder-dry soil. A few broken places showed where comparatively weighty objects had been pushed over the edge. And that was all he could see.

Charlie stood a few minutes staring thoughtfully. He frowned into the pit. Few signs, but highly significant ones to him. Queer. Then he mounted his horse and back-tracked. He partly guessed what had made that whispering sound in the night. Now he desired to disprove or verify that guess.

That was what he had in mind when he loped back to where he took up this trail. By the bend of the grass blades he knew they had been dragged up that swale. Where there was an end, there must be a beginning. Charlie made a bet with himself that these marks would begin somewhere near the spot from which those shots had been fired at him.

He won his bet. The narrow swaths lay along the draw. The depression narrowed, then deepened. Charlie remembered then that a soak spring seeped out of a bank down there, affording water to a hundred head or so of stock. He recalled something else. Three years earlier a horse outfit had located on that spring and built a small corral there, part sod, part poles. Then they had abandoned the place for a better one, forty miles east.

He came around a low shoulder of hill. The old corral still stood. It was still in fair shape, and it had been in use. That was plain enough. The marks he had followed began at the gate. The loose dust on the floor was trampled. And from just outside the gate the tracks of a wagon led away northward.

“Huh!” He grunted his favorite monosyllable.

He walked about the place, noted every mark in the dust, and poked with his toe, here and there, at certain slightly discolored patches in the corral.

“This,” he muttered to himself, “is a highly interestin’ state of affairs, I wish to remark.”

He sat on his horse for a minute after he mounted again. He looked off toward the Marias, in two minds at the moment. Then he reflected that Rock Holloway was on his way to Helena. And for various reasons Charlie concluded to play a lone hand. So he made a complete circle of the place, carefully scanning the ground; when he came back to the wagon track, he followed that, riding at a steady trot.

* * * * *

If he expected that to lead him to any new place, person or conclusion, he was disappointed. In the few years since Charlie first crossed the Marias River, with all the territory north of it an unpeopled waste, the first waves of the ultimate flood of settlers had begun to seep into the country. Up in the Sweet Grass, where he and Rock Holloway had fought a battle with organized thieves, there were now many ranches, small and large. A wagon trail ran between the Sweet Grass and Fort Benton--a trail which crossed the Marias halfway between the TL and the Seventy-seven. The single wagon track Charlie followed angled off until it merged with the Sweet Grass Trail. It was lost in these twin ruts. Wagons came and went daily on that road. One wheel track is as another. For purposes of identification, the trail was lost.

But Charlie kept riding. Far off the construction camps began to show--dim smudges on the horizon. As he drew nearer, he could see the dark streak of the grade and the moving teams. And when the Sweet Grass Trail crossed the right of way, Charlie turned aside and jogged toward a cluster of buildings, like a small village sitting by a stream, where the buffalo lodges of the Blackfeet had been pitched in years gone by.

Half a mile from this camp he came on a small herd of cattle grazing under the eye of a solitary rider. Perhaps a hundred head of cows, aged, scraggy, culls in fair flesh. He marked three or four different brands from the Judith Basin.

“Camp beef?” he asked the herder.

“Yeah,” the fellow drawled. He was a pimply-faced youngster with a visible swagger. “Beef for the bohunks.”

“Butchered as needed, I suppose?” Charlie commented.

“Sure. This is a headquarters commissary. Big layout. Feeding two or three camps from here.”

Charlie passed on. On a bit of good grass along the creek bottom he staked his horses and cooked his supper. Grading camps offered none of the hospitality the range afforded. No casual wayfarer got anything there unless he paid his way. They were there to build a grade for the Great Northern, for the profit of the contractors, and it was a grubby, driving business.

Charlie ate his supper by the fire, watched the men and teams string in at six o’clock. It was a big camp. He estimated four hundred men. Four hundred men ate a lot of beef. And two other camps drew supplies from there. He looked at the camp and at the grazing herd, and then he did a lot of thinking. He still lay thinking, looking up at the stars, long after he turned in. With the tarpaulin drawn up to his chin, he stared at the Big Dipper, the North Star, and at many a constellation glittering in its appointed place. But his mind was not on the stars in their courses--upon the cosmic wonder of an October night. No. More practical matters engaged his busy brain. And not until the sharp nip of the autumn frost made him draw his head under the canvas did he fall asleep.

In the morning, with his own matutinal coffee bestowed where it would do the most good, and the grading crews stringing out to work in a cold dawn, Charlie walked into the camp and sought the head cook.

“Who does the beef buying for this outfit?” he asked.

The man pointed to a small tent-roofed wooden shack. “Chief’s office,” he said and turned to his work.

* * * * *

Charlie rapped on the door. Some one said: “Come in!” Charlie entered. A rotund man sat at a rudely constructed desk littered with account sheets. He half turned on the box that served for a chair.

“What can I do for you?” he inquired briskly.

“Buy some beef off me,” Charlie answered. “Patronize home industry an’ help the country flourish.”

The man bit the end of a pencil reflectively.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said.

“I’m telling you so you will know,” Charlie returned impudently. “Beef is my business, I raise it, buy it, and sell it, on the hoof or dressed--any old way that seems profitable. You must need a heap to feed this gang.”

“Sure. But I don’t buy beef as casual as you’d buy a pair of socks,” the other declared. “I’ve got a considerable supply on hand and contracted for.”

“I can deliver you prime dressed beef right here in your camp for four cents a pound,” Charlie offered crisply.

“I can get it for less’n that.” The commissariat manager shook his head. “Don’t use prime beef, nohow.”

“Still, if you could get first-class beef at third-class prices, you’d make money by buying it,” Charlie pointed out. “It goes farther. How about three and a half cents?”

“Don’t interest me much.”

“Say, now,” Charlie drawled, “I got quite a bunch of stuff I can turn over at a pretty low figure. And I know where I can get more. Say three cents a pound.”

“Well, that’s fair enough,” the chubby one admitted. “But I think maybe I could do a mite better still, if I had to. And I’ve got some stock ahead. No; I guess we can’t do business, stranger. Thanks, just the same.”

“You’re the doctor,” Charlie said and stepped out.

As he walked back to his horses, he emitted sundry unbelieving grunts. Three cents a pound was ridiculous; and yet the fat one thought he could get it for still less. There was a screw loose somewhere. Three-year-old beef steers were netting forty dollars in Chicago; cows about thirty. A fair three-year-old would dress six or seven hundred pounds; a cow four or five hundred. At three cents they would bring about eighteen and fifteen dollars respectively. Charlie had named those prices to the contractor as a bait, and if he hadn’t caught a fish, he had at least got a nibble that quickened his pulse. No rancher would sell beef for half what it would bring in the open market. If that railroad camp got beef at anywhere near that price, it was stolen beef. And any man buying supplies on a large scale would be familiar enough with current prices to know that it was stolen. Still, a suspicion was not convicting evidence.

On his way in and out of that camp, Charlie had used a pair of naturally keen eyes. He marked the meat house by its screened windows. He would have liked a look inside, but that was hardly feasible. He considered, however, how he might get such a look and decided upon the only method open to him. There was a risk, to be sure. But a period of uneventful placidity had not wholly atrophied in Charlie Shaw a capacity for discounting risks. There had been plenty during his first years in Montana. He decided to take a chance.

He saddled, packed, mounted and ambled slowly south again. The camp beef herd grazed abroad. Again Charlie met the pimply-faced youth resplendent in Angora-faced chaps, with a long-barreled six-shooter dangling at his hip. He sat sidewise in his saddle, as proud as if he had been riding point on a trail herd from the Panhandle.

“With all that crew to feed,” Charlie remarked over a cigarette, “the butcher gang ought to cut your herd down pretty fast.”

“Oh, so-so,” the herder said. “About a couple a day.”

Charlie jogged on. A couple a day. If that camp didn’t consume at least fifteen hundred pounds of beef per diem, he was a poor judge of appetites. Beef was the cheapest food in the country. Men who worked ten hours a day behind plow and scraper could eat like the vikings of old. Two scraggy cows a day? Hardly.

* * * * *

Two miles south in a convenient hollow he picketed his horses. The rest of that day he lay low, keeping a more or less casual watch from a grassy rise. Nothing like a wagon arrived or departed. When dusk fell again, he packed his outfit and rode back to the construction camp.

He didn’t wait until everybody went to bed. He desired a little private inspection. His chance of going unmolested was better while men still moved about the camp. If he were challenged, he would act as judgment dictated.

He gained a corner of the cook house unseen. From there it was only a step or two to the meat house. Chance favored him. A light burned in the place. Charlie stole up and peered through a screened window. The same brusque cook he had spoken to that morning was slicing steak on a block. Back of him, in rows, hung quarters of beef. At least six head of dressed beef hung from the pointed hooks in the beams above. Charlie knew beef on the hoof, in the round, in the pen. They were prime steer quarters, as good beef as ever went into Chicago. Nothing in that meat house had come out of that herd of scraggy cows. That was certain.

He stole back to his horses. Clear of the camp, he paused to look back, frowning at the scores of lights--yellow dots against the darkened plain.

If he had read the sign right, first at the burning coal seam and now here, some enterprising persons were collecting a lot of easy money. Charlie knew how Rock Holloway felt about such things. No man likes to have his pocket picked. It is poor satisfaction merely to know how the picking is done. Charlie suspected that Rock felt very much as old Elmer Duffy had felt when he blew up over the hides in the grass, only he sympathized with Rock, and he still held that old Elmer had no business to insult him. Yes, Rock would feel like the Saturday shopper whose purse has been snatched--he would be furiously eager to get his hands on the snatcher. And the burden of Charlie’s thought was how this could be done.

Lightning seldom strikes twice in the same place, but thieves frequently do, especially range thieves. It was this conviction that sent Charlie loping away southward in the dark.

Twenty-five miles is no great matter to fresh horses. Charlie swung in on the Benton-Sweet Grass Trail, held it till he was abreast of the burning coal seam, then turned straight east. By midnight the ghostly flicker wavering above that incandescent crevice was a beacon before him.

He skirted it, moving slowly, with a watchful eye, and dropped into the draw. When he judged that he was within a few hundred yards of the old corral, he dismounted, hobbled both horses, and left them. They wouldn’t stir after that ride. He could easily find them again. Then he took his carbine in hand and stole toward his destination, as cautiously as if he were stalking a wolf. He had, indeed, the certainty that he stalked not a lone wolf but a pack, and he was well aware that wolves have teeth. The wolves he sought might be hunting, and they might not.

The old corral loomed before him. Keeping close under the southern bank, he was one with the night. A shadow lay where he moved. One stealthy step at a time. He reflected that a hunch is a strange thing. When it worked properly it gave curious results.

A lantern glowed dimly on the floor of the corral. Within the radius of its gleam two men were skinning the carcass of a dead beast. Other bulky carcasses lay in the dust; some were reddish white, where the hide had been flenched out on either side; some were still waiting the knife, where the ax or other killing instrument had felled them, not long before.

Charlie stole nearer, one thumb hooked over the hammer of his carbine. He could see the dim outline of a wagon backed up by the gate and the faint forms of saddled horses. There should be more than two men. Yet the fewer sharing in that nefarious business, the greater the profit. Too many cooks usually spoiled that kind of broth.

In two more steps he could thrust his carbine through the pole and cover them. With their hands in the air, the rest was simple. A really exultant thrill stirred Charlie Shaw. He remembered Elmer Duffy’s angry epithets. To-morrow he would make Elmer sing a different tune.

And the next moment he was borne to earth. A sharp rap on the head put a full stop to his pleasant anticipations.

* * * * *

When Charlie revived to consciousness he found himself in a situation unique and dangerous. He lay flat on his back. His head was free. He could twist it about. The pole height of the corral towered over him. Within the inclosure, not two men, but three slashed hurriedly with skinning knives, and they were working at the last carcass.

But, apart from looking on, he was quite helpless. His arms were straight down by his sides. His legs were straight. He was not tied, being more effectually trussed than with a rope. He was wrapped tight in an excellent substitute for a strait-jacket, inasmuch as they had folded him in a raw beef hide, wet and strong with animal smell, and they had laced it tight, from his ankles to his neck, with thongs of the same material. A mummy swathed in its ancient bandages was no more thoroughly bound than he.

Charlie watched them deftly quarter the carcasses. The head, feet and offul of each steer were piled in the middle of the hide, and the edges drawn together. Once one man looked through the pole fence at him and grinned. He couldn’t make out their faces in that dim light, but he could see what they did. The quarters of beef were stacked in the deep wagon box. One mounted his horse and dragged the bundles of hide outside. They scratched the dust of the corral back and forth to obliterate bloodstains and telltale signs. Eventually he could hear the jingling of harness, and a four-horse team was hitched to the wagon.

Charlie regretted a little that he had been so sanguine; still---- His eyes marked every move. One man mounted the high seat. The wheels rolled away in the dark.

And when the cluck and clack grew fainter, the other two led saddle horses out of the gloom.

“Take him first trip?” one said.

“Better,” the other replied. “I’ll snake him. You bring one of the hides. We’ll have to get a wiggle on, too, or it’ll be daylight.”

The noose of a rope was slipped over Charlie’s feet. He was yanked along over the grass. Once a clump of prickly pear raked his cheek. Otherwise he suffered no bruise. The ground was smooth. The thick hide protected his body. Behind him the second horse plodded, dragging his burden by the saddle horn. Again Charlie heard that mysterious, slithering, whispering sound, like a huge snake scraping over dry grass. Only, now, he himself was helping to make this noise in the night.

His two horses loomed in the draw. The cavalcade stopped.

“Here’s his outfit,” said one. “What’ll we do with ’em?”

“Turn ’em loose when we’re through,” the other replied. “They’ll amble off to their own range, an’ whoever finds ’em will have to guess. Simplest.”

They moved on. The draw flattened out to the level of the plains, and the flicker of the burning lignite showed ahead. They drew up twenty yards back from the crevice.

A wind blew faintly out of the west. Charlie could smell the gas wafted from that underground furnace. A very neat incinerator. It would not be the first time that thieves, surprised red-handed, had acted on the principle that dead men tell no tales.

Yet in his shroud of green rawhide, Charlie made no protest and lifted no plea for mercy when the riders dismounted and stood over him. A wavering tongue of fire lifted above the crevice, casting a fitful glow on horses and men. They dragged the bundle of hide and offal to the rim and dumped it in. A strong odor of scorching hair and hide wafted up. They came back to Charlie.

“Take his head,” one muttered. “I’ll get him by the feet.”

They stooped.

When the head of one bent over, and his fingers touched the hide, something went _pow!_ in his face. He fell backward, as if clouted with a hammer. Simultaneously Charlie’s arm thrust straight at the man reaching for his feet, and that outstretched hand held a six-shooter.

“Hands up!” he commanded, and the man obeyed.

Charlie sat up. The rawhide fell away from him, parted at the lacings. He wiggled his legs out of the narrow pocket.

“Keep ’em up, too,” he said cheerfully, “unless you’d rather join your partner.”

Charlie stretched his legs casually. He glanced at the body behind him. Not much need to look. The muzzle of the gun had been fairly in the man’s face when he fired. He stepped behind the other man, disarmed him, and then ordered him to walk over beside his horse and mount. With the fellow’s own reata he tied both wrists securely behind his back.

“Next time you sew a man in a cowhide and figure to dump him in a burning coal seam to roast alive,” Charlie said, “you’d better search him to make sure he hasn’t got a gun in a Texas holster under his armpit. And try to remember that green hide stretches quite a lot if a man has any strength in his arms, and he has an hour or so to work it loose.”

He mounted the other horse and hazed his prisoner down the draw until he picked up his own outfit. Then he headed straight for the Marias, riding fast. Riders on fresh horses could beat that wagonload of stolen beef to the railroad camp. The Seventy-seven round-up would just about be camped at the ranch. It was a little closer to the Seventy-seven than to Rock Holloway’s, and Charlie felt that it would really be a lot of responsibility off his shoulders if he delivered his prisoner and his information straight to the hands of Elmer Duffy.

* * * * *

Charlie lifted his head from a bunk in one corner of the Seventy-seven ranch house. A wagon was clattering into the yard. Elmer Duffy and half a dozen riders flanked it like a bodyguard.

The box was piled high with beef. A tarpaulin was stretched over the quarters. On top of the tarp lay several fresh hides. Beside the man driving the wagon sat a sullen-looking captive.

Charlie went out to meet them without undue haste. He looked the layout over from the porch and stooped to buckle on his spurs. Elmer Duffy swung down from his sweaty horse.

“Well, kid,” he said genially, “we got ’em with the goods. That contractor slid out, but the stock inspectors are after him. Come back by the furnace an’ the old corral an’ pick up the hides an’ the feller you bumped off. Some of them cattle was Seventy-sevens, but mostly TL stuff. These fellers had a lot of the money on ’em they got for this beef. You sure done a nice stroke of business last night.”

“Yeah,” Charlie agreed, “for a bonehead josher--yes.”

He walked on to the stable. His two horses stood in stalls. He had them out, saddled, and his pack part hitched, when Elmer Duffy came striding from the house. He had a green slip in his hand which he held out to Charlie. It was a check for five hundred dollars.

“Say, you ain’t pullin’ your freight, are you, Charlie?” Elmer inquired.

“Oh, no,” Charlie replied ironically, his eyes on the check. “I’m fixin’ to make myself at home with the Seventy-seven for all time, naturally. What’s this?”