Part 1

IN THE BAD LANDS

By Bertrand W. Sinclair

Author of “Out of the Blue,” “Easy Money,” Etc.

“Bad Land” Bill, the new rider, was a likable kid, but he was a mystery to the bunch at the Wineglass range. And when another strange individual stumbled into the light of the camp fire one night, the mystery deepened.

Against a window that faced the west bank of Plentywater, Charlie Shaw flattened his nose for a minute. April showers bring May flowers. Charlie grinned--because the April shower had become a snowstorm. The morning rain had turned into wet flakes the size of a thumb nail, eddying out of a darkened air. Now the ground lay six inches under a coat of arctic down. Tough on the sheepmen with lambing in full swing. Charlie grinned again. Cattle could stand it. The tougher the better. Sheep were a thorn in the rangeman’s tenderest side. They were becoming too plentiful for cow outfits to regard them with indifference. Shaw was not vindictive--but the less lambs the more grass for cattle.

Most of the stuff floating through his brain was idle thought. But his looking was not idle. The Benton trail skirted the rim of the plateau that flowed up to the hollow of Plentywater, and one of his riders was due from the stage road with mail. Bad weather had penned Charlie close for days. He was bored. Lacking action, he craved something to read. There might be letters. He stared through a brief let-up in the ballet of the snowflakes. Then the white curtain closed so that looking was vain. Charlie went back to the fireplace and yawned over a cigarette.

Boots thumped on the porch. Jerry Smith came in with the mail, cursed the water, clanked his spurs out again. Charlie looked over a letter or two, and buried himself in a Fort Benton newspaper until the cook called him to supper.

He marked a new face at the long table. A slim, dark youngster, thin faced, thin lipped, neatly dressed. He had white, even teeth that shone when he opened his mouth. But he only opened it for the purpose of stowing food. Charlie looked him over once. Riders came and went at all seasons. In the spring they drifted, and restless ones, from one range to another, looking for a job, looking for variety, looking for horses--genial nomads.

But as he sat before his fireplace, toasting his stockinged feet and studying a letter from the Sutherland range boss, a knock sounded at his door.

“Come in,” he grunted.

The slim, dark stranger faced him. His words were as spare as his frame.

“Full handed?” he asked.

Now Charlie Shaw had a full crew of able riders--the only kind suffered on the Wineglass pay roll. Ordinarily, he would have said: “Yeah. Full up, unless somebody breaks his neck.” That would have ended it. But something about this youngster caught Charlie’s fancy. Neat, but not gaudy. Slender and keen--like a new sword. So he asked a question.

“Where you from?”

“Bad Lands.”

“That’s a lot of territory,” Charlie remarked. “All kinds of people use it.”

The boy smiled slightly.

“Oh, I’m no outlaw. My folks has a one-horse outfit down on a fork of Sand Coulee. Nothin’ much for me at home, so I ride round-up. I been up in the Sun River Basin breakin’ horses all winter.”

“Sand Coulee, eh.” Charlie glanced at the letter in his hand. It was a friendly suggestion from the Block S that the Wineglass come down and work with them and the Picador, as northwesterly blizzards had drifted several thousand Wineglass cattle to the heart of that range. And there was mention of this place in the letter. “That the Sand Coulee down on the Sutherland range?”

“Uh-huh. I worked for the Block S two seasons back,” the boy answered.

“Good outfit,” Charlie commented.

“Sure. They say the Wineglass is a good outfit to ride for, too,” the other said. “I could go to work for Sutherland again, I guess. Thought I’d try you.”

“I guess I can use you,” Charlie said on impulse. He could. A good man always fitted in, and somehow this boy in three sentences and a look impressed him as being more than capable. Horses _did_ fall on men. Occasionally a rider yearned for distant pastures and left. “What’s your name?”

“Bill Mather.”

“All right, Bill,” Charlie nodded. “I guess you know how to make yourself at home in a bunk house.”

Mather nodded and withdrew.

At ten o’clock Charlie looked out before he went to bed. All white, and more falling. A foot of snow in mid-April. Erratic weather.

It continued to be erratic. The Wineglass floundered in a white world for thirty-six hours. A touch of frost. Then warm rain. Dirty slush. More rain, like ice water on the bare face, slashing out of a lowering sky. Then the sun, smiling wanly, as if conscious of some seasonal aberration, and new grass slowly thrusting up green blades to surround the blue windflowers that spread petals bravely before the snow was fairly gone.

The Wineglass gathered the last of its saddle stock, and moved across the sodden plains to join the Block S south of the Bear Paws by the tenth of May, in a spring the like of which none of the old-timers recalled. Snow, rain, hail and sunshine--all in a twenty-four-hour day. Riders were crabbed, horses fractious. The plains wind whipped their faces and their tempers raw. But while a wheel could roll from one creek to another and cattle be bunched on a round-up ground, work went on.

Bill Mather lived up to Charlie Shaw’s first estimate. He more than held up his end. Did it with a peculiar sort of concentration on the job. For a youngster he was uncommonly self-contained. He would answer with a nod or a smile rather than a word. The rough joking of a round-up crew slid off him as rain off a slicker. In camp he would sit staring at nothing, chin in hand, his lean, dark face as impassive as a Buddha’s.

Charlie learned more about him from the Block S.

“Nice kid,” their range foreman said. “Made a good hand for me one season. Folks ain’t much. Old man’s no account. Got a brother that’s slick as hell at a lot of things, but lazy. Girl down there, sister or something, wild as a hawk. Keep their ranch like a boar’s nest. Got a few stock in the edge of the breaks. Scrap among themselves all the time. Bill’s all right. He’ll amount to somethin’. ‘Bad Land,’ we used to call him.”

Bad Land Bill. The Block S had christened him that. The Wineglass revived it. The name fitted the boy. He was like some wild, dynamic creature out of that desolate and distorted region which lies like a barrier on both sides of the Missouri River. The round-up moved its wagons along the edge of this sinister jumble of canyons, gullies, washouts, sagebrush, thickets of scrub pine, cut banks banded with layers of varicolored earth, like stripes of Indian paint. They reached down long, narrow plateaus winding through a network of impassable crevices, driving range cattle out ahead of them. It was like a vast maze, the Bad Land country. Yet it had its good points for a cattleman--also for others whose business was not so legitimate. There lay pasture and shelter for winter-driven stock. Aridity and bitter water kept sheep out in summer, and left a heavy stand of bunch grass where grass could grow. If, now and then, some sheriff cursed the country because he had to hunt a lawbreaker fruitlessly, it was no matter. It was a hard country to get about in on horseback, impossible for wheeled traffic.

In the edge of the Bad Lands, on a fork of Birch Creek, a furious rainstorm tied up the round-up. After twelve hours of downpour the gumbo soil softened so that a horse sank ankle-deep in stuff like putty, withdrawing his hoof with a curious sucking _plop_! The wagon tires cut inch by inch into the earth where they stood. It was like the Flood, with the Bear Paws a distant Ararat on the north, hidden in the murk, and not for their saving. They had to stay in the flats and take it. Day-herders on the cattle herd, the horse wrangler with his saddle bunch, in slicker and chaps, humped backs to the storm and endured their hours on watch. The rain grew colder, became sleety squalls. The second evening snow drove thick and fast, hard, stinging particles, out of the northwest. Overnight it piled fourteen inches deep. Noon laid two feet of this unwelcome white purity on the levels. The two round-up bosses held confab and turned their herds loose. It was too much to ask men to face day and night the blast of that untimely storm, to grow numb in their saddles on night guard. Their saddle stock they had to hold--they were the tools of their trade. They marshaled the cowboys into regular watches with the horse wranglers, standing two-hour shifts. There was no fenced pasture within thirty miles to relieve them of that necessity.

“What the hell’s the country comin’ to?” Bud Cole complained to Bill Mather. “The world musta slipped a couple of cogs north.”

“Maybe,” Bad Land agreed. “Tough on cowboys.”

The others slept, killed time with penny ante, cursed the weather, swapped range lore. Charlie Shaw brooded in the cook tent. It would clear with a hard frost. New-born calves dying in snowbanks in the last of May. April showers bring May flowers! Damn such weather!

Upon a convenient hillock a dozen riders laid ropes on a varied collection of dead-pine snags, dragged them down before the bed tent. They were saturated with pitch. One father of roots would burn for three days. They made bets on its duration. Once ignited, neither snow, wind, rain nor buckets of water could extinguish that pitch-fed flame. It made a pleasant glow between the opened flaps of the tent. Also it made a serviceable beacon in the dark, a mark for the relief men on night guard, a wavering yellow tongue like a lighthouse on a rocky coast.

The third night of the deep snow, when the fall had ceased, when the blustering northwest wind sank to a murmur, and sharp frost was setting a crust on the damp drifts, a man staggered into the circle of light. He had on overalls and a short sheepskin coat. He was an oldish man, with a tangled beard extending fanwise from his chin, a black beard like those of the prophets.

All but two of the Wineglass crew were in their blankets. These two were Charlie Shaw and Bud Cole, squatting between the bed tent and the glowing pine snag, talking in undertones. They looked at this apparition, wavering on its feet. He didn’t belong in either outfit.

“Hello,” Charlie greeted. “This is tough weather to be runnin’ around loose. You lost, or are you just goin’ some place?”

“Both, I guess. What outfit is this?”

“The Wineglass from Lonesome Prairie,” Charlie told him. “Come on up to the fire.”

They rose from their boot heels with an exclamation. The man took a step, swayed, moved uncertainly.

“Don’t be scared,” Charlie said kindly. It struck him that this old fellow was furtive--and he had seen men on the dodge, edging cautiously into a camp for food and shelter.

“I ain’t scared,” the man mumbled, in little more than a whisper. “I’m played out, that’s all.”

“You been wanderin’ afoot in this snow?” Bud asked.

“Since last night,” he answered.

As if shelter, warmth and the presence of men jarred loose some prop which had sustained him, he put one hand to his face and lurched, and would have fallen if Bud and Charlie had not caught him. He sagged in their grip. His head dropped to his breast.

“For the love of Pete!” Bud said. “The old boy’s certainly all in. Now what in blazes----”

“Pack him over to the chuck tent an’ get some dry clothes on him, an’ throw some hot coffee into him,” Charlie answered, with the practical wisdom born of experience.

Bill Mather thrust in between them and dropped on his knee beside the old man. He was in his sock feet. His black hair stood in a tangle. His dark face was alight with troubled inquiry. And he spoke to the unconscious man, as if he expected, indeed, as if he demanded, an answer:

“How’d you get here, dad? What’s happened?”

“He’s out, Bill. No use askin’ yet. You know him?”

“’S my old man,” young Bill muttered. “I wonder what’s up?”

“Let’s get him over to the tent,” Charlie suggested. “An’ bring him to an’ get him warmed an’ fed. Then he’ll tell us. He said he’s been out in this since last night. So I guess the old boy had a license to fade away.”

The three picked the man up as if he had been a sack of oats. Bill Mather strode sock-footed, in his underclothes, through the trampled snow between the two tents. Charlie’s quick mind took stock of the elements. Three feet of snow in a mid-May night, a lost old man, and an agitated cow-puncher who looked at the elderly whiskered one with an agony of apprehension in his eyes. It never rained but it poured. Charlie dragged his rolled bed close to the stove, in which a few coals still glowed.

“Hop into your pants, Sam,” he ordered the cook, lifting an inquiring eye above his own blankets in one corner. “Make some coffee. We got a half-froze gent on our hands.”

They laid their burden on Charlie’s bed, listened for a moment to his breathing. Bill stripped off his father’s sodden foot gear. Bud stoked the fire. Sam Barnes shuffled into his clothes. They were all sympathy, commiseration. That dead faint troubled them, too. They chafed the cold hands and icy feet. In the end, as the kettle began to steam, the old man sat up. A lantern, slung over the stove, shed a dull light on his unkempt features. Something flickered in his old eyes at sight of Bill. The boy himself didn’t speak, at first, only stared.

The old man’s teeth set up a sudden chatter.

“Here, throw this hot coffee into you.” Charlie passed him the cup.

He gulped it in two swallows.

“Thank you all,” he said. “That sure tasted good.”

“You’re all wet,” Bill said. “Drink some more coffee an’ peel off your clothes. I’ll rustle you dry ones outa my war bag.”

He went off to the bed tent. In a minute, when the old man had finished his second cup of coffee and accepted the makings of a cigarette, and the cook was setting out food for him, Charlie and Bud withdrew. They found Mather in the glow of the burning root, digging clothes out of his bag. He stamped his feet into boots, and went back to the chuck tent with an armful of clothes.

“That kid’s the original clam,” Bud Cole remarked. “He don’t never say nothin’. He’s worried. I wonder what that old hombre’s hoofin’ it forty miles from nowhere in a snowstorm for?”

“I ain’t no clairvoyant,” Charlie answered.

After a few minutes Bill joined them. He squatted on his heels, rolled a smoke, silent.

“How’s the old man?” Charlie asked.

“Stowin’ some fodder,” Bill replied. “Sam’s gone back to bed.”

He stared into the flames, brooding, abstracted, frowning.

Bud Cole yawned.

“I’m goin’ to turn in,” he said, and departed to his bed.

Mather volunteered no information. A cow-puncher’s respect for other people’s private concerns does not lessen his natural curiosity. Charlie contemplated his toes. He was young--one of the youngest range bosses in Montana. Life, for Charlie, had embraced a number of stirring episodes, and he had not been unconscious of the drama. He had uncanny perception, a reflective, imaginative quality, allied to a capacity for action. He looked up at young Bill and he knew the boy was troubled, out of all proportion to the fact of his father having got astray in a snowstorm.

“He can roll in with you when he’s fed an’ warmed, Bill,” he said.

Mather nodded. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then turned without a word back to the cook tent. He was there quite a time. When he came back he brought his father with him. Bill overtopped him by a head. The tangled beard and unkempt hair made the old fellow a wild-looking figure. Bill stowed him in his own bed. Then he came back to the fire, to Charlie Shaw, and sat humped on his boot heels, with a face like a mask.

“Like a frozen man,” Charlie thought. “’Tain’t natural for a kid like him. Make a good gambler with that poker face. Never tell what went on behind it.”

“Somethin’s happened,” Bill broke the silence abruptly, speaking in an undertone. “He won’t tell me. I got to go see for myself.”

“Where? When?” Charlie could be concise, himself.

“Right now. Down to our place.”

“In the middle of the night, an’ three foot of snow? How far is it?”

“About twelve miles. Fork of Sand Coulee, a couple of miles down in the breaks.”

“Gosh, man,” Charlie remonstrated. “Unless it’s a case of life an’ death this ain’t no night to flounder that far in the Bad Lands. Chances are you wouldn’t find it till daylight.”

“I could find that ranch blindfold,” young Bill said, with conviction. “It worries me. He won’t tell me nothin’. I got to go. He’s been wanderin’ around in this for twenty hours. He ain’t the flighty kind, either. Took somethin’ to scare him out.”

“Just what are you afraid might have come off?” Charlie asked. He had the impression that Bill Mather wanted to tell him something and couldn’t, wouldn’t, without encouragement. “What’s the trouble, Bill?”

“Maybe none--till I get there,” the youngster said moodily. “Maybe--well, there’s a girl there. Aw, shucks! there’s no use talkin’. She was raised with us, but she ain’t no kin. I used to think a heap of her. I got a brother, Jed. There’s a feller name uh Munson got a holdout a ways below our place. I don’t know what there is about Dolly, but she gets men crazy. Them two’s been ready to lock horns over her for a year. I had to get out. Don’t matter why. Now somethin’s happened. Somethin’ fierce, to make the old man light out in weather like it was last night. He won’t say. He’s that kind. I got to go see.”

There was that in his tone which moved Charlie.

“No matter what’s come off,” he said kindly, “you couldn’t hardly make it tonight, Bill. Wait till daybreak. I’ll ride down with you, myself.”

“I got to go _now_,” Mather replied. “She’s alone down there--with them two locoed fools. An’ somethin’s happened.”

“Oh, well, gosh darn it, go ahead,” Charlie acquiesced. “You got me all excited, kid. I’ll come along, if you like. I’m tired layin’ around camp lookin’ at snowdrifts, anyway.”

A dozen saddled horses stood tied to the bed wagon. The night men all kept horses ready. Mather had a mount there. So did Shaw. They drew on chaps, overcoats. Deep breathing, punctuated by snores, filled the bed tent. Every man was sound asleep. The light was out in the cook tent. They stumbled in there for a last cup of coffee out of the still warm pot, and Charlie left a word with the cook for Bud Cole, who was his second in command. As they came back by the fire, old Mather sat up in bed. He peered out at his son dressed for travel. He beckoned and Bill halted in the mouth of the tent.

“Yo’ a damn fool,” he grumbled. “Leave ’em settle their own troubles.”

“If you’d tell me,” Bill said. A weary patience sounded in his voice.

“It’s that hellcat of a girl,” the old man sputtered. “She’s got Munson on the warpath. He’s bad, Munson is. Like a crazy man. Jed ain’t much better, as fur as that goes.”

“You’re a fine head of a family,” young Bill said scornfully, “runnin’ away, leavin’ Dolly to two fellers like that.”

“I got scared,” the old fellow muttered. “But I didn’t exactly run. Just lit out till they cooled off or got it settled. Then I couldn’t find my way back. Mighty nigh perishin’ in that there storm.”

“You won’t perish here,” Bill said shortly. He turned to his horse. Mounted, he said to Charlie: “There ain’t really no call for you to ride down there with me. I’ll bring back a horse for the old man to ride home to-morrow.”

“If you’re goin’ into the Bad Lands to interfere with two fellers that have gone bughouse over a girl,” Charlie said cheerfully, “you better have company. You sure this ain’t no false alarm?”

Mather shook his head.

“Well, I’d as soon ride as lay thinkin’,” Charlie declared; “so let’s hit the trail.”

The crust on the snow was steadily hardening. The frost had teeth. Clear of that fire they moved in a luminous darkness. Clouds made the sky very black above. Underfoot the snow made a pale glimmer. The way became deceptive. Left to himself, Charlie Shaw would scarcely have known north from south, east from west, except for the run of the coulee, dipping uniformly from the flats to the valley of the Missouri. He would have had difficulty finding his way back to the round-up camp. But Mather plodded at a slow trot, at a walk where the snow lay deeper. Here and there it took a horse to the belly. He never hesitated. They crossed plateaus, slid into gulches, floundered in high sage, passed clumps of pine that made black blotches on the snow. And at last he angled down a steep hillside into a narrow bottom where they passed ghastly cottonwoods, and suddenly buildings loomed before them, the high pole wall of a round corral. Mather stopped.

“Dark as the grave,” he whispered. “I don’t like it. There always used to be a couple of hounds that made a row when anybody rode up.”

They tied their horses to the pole corral.

“You stay here,” Bill whispered. “I don’t like this quiet. I’m goin’ to the house. If it’s all right, I’ll holler for you.”

“Everybody asleep, most likely,” Charlie commented. “It’s past midnight, man.”

“I know,” the boy muttered. “Just the same--you wait till I look in the house. I got a funny feelin’.”

He moved away. Cracks had opened here and there in the cloud bank. Charlie could see him dimly, crossing the yard. The house was a vague blur, black walls under a snow-capped roof. He heard the creak of a door. After that, no sound for a minute.

Then a match flared yellow through a window. It went dark, flared again, became the steady glow of a lamp. But there was no hail. Once a shadow fell on the uncurtained panes.

Charlie’s feet grew cold in the snow. He grew impatient. No way to leave a man, cooling his heels on a frosty night.

“Gosh darn these fool people an’ their family troubles,” he grumbled.

Then, between impatience and discomfort, he started for the house. It was a low-walled structure. The windows opened on a level with his waist. The door stood ajar, casting a knife-blade gleam. The window laid a bright square on the snow. Abreast of it Charlie stopped.

A man lay face down on the floor, his head turned sidewise, arms spread in a crooked curve. He had black hair like Bill Mather’s. His face, white in the lamplight, was very like Bad Land Bill’s, only it was curiously twisted, the mouth open, slack jawed. A white-handled gun lay just beyond the fingertips of one hand. Bill Mather stood over him, staring like a man shocked and bewildered.

Charlie stepped into the doorway. His rider turned like a cat. His gun came halfway out of its holster on his hip.

“Looks like your hunch was right.” Charlie said.

“She’s gone,” young Mather said. “Munson’s killed Jed an’ took her. He’s stone cold. Stiff as a board. Must ’a’ been done yesterday.”

“Your brother?”

Bill nodded.

“We never hitched good,” he said, after a long interval. “But he was my brother. An’ Dolly’s gone. Munson’s took her away. An’ she hated the sight of him.”

“Gosh, Bill, that don’t follow,”. Charlie declared. “A killin’ is a killin’. It happens now an’ then. But men don’t steal women against their will.”

“This feller would,” young Mather replied slowly. “So would he”--he nodded at the dead man--“an’ you don’t know Dolly. I should never ’a’ left here.”

“Maybe she did the same as your old man,” Charlie suggested. “Got scared an’ lit out when the trouble started.”

“No. She’d stay an’ laugh at them,” Bill muttered. “Well, I can soon find out. Help me pick him up, Charlie. I’d rather he was on a bed.”

“Better leave him where he lays,” Charlie said. “There’ll be county officers wantin’ to look into this in a day or two.”

“Let ’em look,” young Bill said. “I don’t like him layin’ all this time on a cold, bare floor.”