The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 10
"IT MAKES me sweat vinegar when I think how near I come to bunglin' that job," Fred Grubb said.
"I'm the fellow that bungled, walked right into their hands when I knew," Barrett said. "If you hadn't come when you did, I was goin' to make a break for the stove, but I suppose they'd 'a' got me before P'd ever made it."
"They sure would, kid."
The pair had ridden an hour or more in flight from Eagle Rock camp, saving breath to cool a hotter bowl of porridge than they had left, as they expected they would be called on to do before going many miles. But whether Findlay did not hold them worth pursuit, or whether the start had been so great that it was hopeless before those at camp could catch horses and set out, they did not know. Nobody had lifted the hills behind them as the miles reeled out. Grubb was coming to the opinion now that no start after them had been made.
"Findlay's bankin' on you leavin' the range after this, I guess. He thinks you've got a craw full by now. Well, we might as well take it easy now; we'll need all our plugs's got in 'em if they do take a notion to come."
"How did you know they were going to gang me, Fred?" Barrett inquired, not able to account for the poet's opportune appearance with his shotgun.
"Manuel tipped it off to me. He helped me run them horses off. But I wasn't lookin' for 'em to start anything at the table, Findlay likes to eat when he's eatin' and fight when he's fightin'. That's why I kind of took my time. And I nearly bungled the job!"
"Did that Mexican Alvino stuck work for the Diamond Tail?"
Fred rode on a little way, looking very serious and sober. Presently he shook his head.
"No, that feller never worked here. Ed, that feller was side-pardner of the rustler you shot, I saw him sneakin' around down there when the boss sent me to pick up them remains and haul 'em in. Is there any needcessity for me to say more?"
"Not a bit."
Several miles again without words, Barrett with thoughts enough crowding his mind to make him oblivious to whatever danger might be behind them, Fred watching unremittingly for the first hat to show above the hill and grow suddenly into a man. The poet carried his shotgun across his shoulder, rather clumsily and uncomfortably.
"Well, I'm out of a job, Ed."
"It looks like I'm with you."
"What do you aim to do, kid?"
"They sent for me to come to the ranch."
To himself Barrett had answered the same question as he rode away from Eagle Rock camp. He was not going to stand around any longer and allow Nearing and his partners in this open robbery to load anything more on him. Here was where he struck out to start something of his own. Just what his next definite move would be, he did not know, but he did know that he had evidence enough of crooked dealing and collusion with thieves and murderers to smoke somebody out of his hole.
He reasoned and planned along this intention as he rode, reaching the conclusion that his first work would be to go to Nearing and demand the discharge of Dale Findlay, and the complete clearing out of the gang that worked under him. It made no difference what the superintendent might hold over Nearing, the eattleman would have to face it and set that scoundrel adrift. That would be the first business ahead of him at the end of that ride.
"Well sir, I'll tell you what me and you could do, and be right where you could keep counters on matters and things around this ranch, as the feller said."
Fred spoke as if he had been talking all along at a pace with his speculations and thoughts. He was then, as he had been from the first moment of his appearance with his unromantic but effective weapon, entirely cool and undisturbed by the adventure in which be had played a small hero's part.
"What's that, Fred?"
"Well sir, I know of a place where a couple of fellers out of a job could light and clean up some money between now and winter, if they had the grit and the sand to face the music."
"You do? Where is it, what's the scheme?"
"Place up the river about seven miles from the ranch where a couple of brothers from Iowa took up claims side by side, built their house so it stood half way over the line on each end. They could live together that way and each one of 'em hold down their claim accordin' to law at the same time. Finest track of hay land in this country, them two claims."
"Well, we couldn't buy 'em out, Fred. You don't mean to chase 'em off, do you?"
"They're already chased, the Diamond Tail boys chased 'em. That land I'm speakin' of is on the Diamond Tail."
"You mean we'd turn grangers, Fred?"
"Somebody'll take up them claims again one of these days. Might as well be me and you. That's a kind of a marshy land in spots, I've seen elks by the hundred there, right now you can see 'em sometimes, mixin' with the cattle as tame as anything on the Diamond Tail."
"You don't mean that, Fred. Who ever heard"
"Wait till you see with your own eyes; that's all I got to say."
Fred seemed offended that his friend should doubt his word, incredible as it seemed to one not accustomed to that country. Barrett hastened to set it right by acknowledging his hasty judgment, and Fred went on with his talk about the chance that lay out there for the taking.
"Them two boys from Iowa put a bob-wire fence all around them two claims. They got a contract from the quartermaster at the post to sell him hay, and Nearing let 'em go ahead till they had it all mowed and stacked, then he sent Dale Findlay over there and set their tails afire. Them two boys never looked back from that day to this, I'll bet you."
"How much hay could a couple of fellers out of a job cut and sell up there, do you suppose?"
"Well, I ain't no hay man, Ed, but one of them boys from Iowa told me they aimed to sell a couple of hundred tons. Nearing's kep' them fences up, he's saved that hay and cut it two seasons now. It's about ready for some enterprisin' fellers that'll pull together and stand by each other to step in and take up that land and enjoy life a little on their own hook. Them claims went back to the gover'ment when them two fellers let Findlay and the boys bluff 'em off. I know an old lawyer over at Saunders, Charley Thomson—maybe you've heard of him?"
"Never did."
"Charley Thomson could fix up the papers and head us right with the land agent over at Saunders. We'd be headed right then, we'd have our papers to show for it, and Uncle Sam he'd be back of us if we had to put up a fight to hold our own."
Barrett heard this man, whom he had judged to be subjugated and poor in spirit before the developments of that day, with thrilling admiration. He thought it must be the wine of emancipation in the poet's heart, the new-sprung courage of one who had declared his independence from a long bondage and staked all recklessly on the adventure. Confidence seemed to have come to him when he threw his gun down on the boss.
"It sounds good, Fred, and I don't doubt we'd be in our rights, but it would mean a fight to hold the land, we'd be outcast and branded, the hand of every cowman on the range would be against us."
"Let 'em come, damn 'em all! I've saved up wrath enough in the days of my life to last me a long time with them cattle barons! They're spraddlin' out over this country like they're bigger'n the Almighty, bluffin' out honest men that'd make homes here and plow up the land and turn it into something. Killin' 'em off sometimes, burnin' 'em out and drivin' 'em on. I think one of the lowest tricks a man ever done was to let them two boys from Iowa put up that house and fence their land, and spend all that money and do work worth hundreds of any man's money the way Hal Nearing did, and then run 'em off."
"That was a kind of a low-down trick."
"Of course, a feller with money in the Diamond Tail might hang back on goin' into a thing that'd look like cuttin' off his own nose, for if two nesters stuck it out in that valley more of 'em would come. It's the best grazin' on this range, and a man with money in the Diamond Tail"
"It's already gone to hell!" said Barrett, with the bitterness of a man robbed by a friend.
Fred Grubb rode a little while again in his reflective way of silence. Then:
"If a man with money in the Diamond Tail was right on the spot to watch the last jackpot he might step up with his gun in his hand and git some of it back when the crooks went to cash in, Ed."
"Something to that," Barrett admitted, in humor grim enough to go any length, spare nobody in the reckoning he was determined to force. 'But we'd need horses and machinery, and money to buy grub. We can't reach up and pull that stuff out of the air."
"I've got some salted down"—Fred patted his girdle to signify where he carried it—"and I know a man the gover'ment's got up here teachin' them sneakin' Arapahoes to farm, that'll lend us some mowers and rakes. I know he will, for them dam' Indians won't no more make hay than they'll eat it. He told me I could have 'em last year when I was figgerin' on breakin' out on this move, but I didn't have erry pardner I could bank on that time. He got cold chisels down to the end of the spine of his backbone when it come to takin' possession of the land."
"I don't guarantee this one to stand without hitchin', Fred."
"We might ride past and take a look at that land," Fred suggested. "It's right on the gover'ment road, a little ways from Bonita."
"All right."
"Springs bust up out of the ground around there, like the weight of the mountains gushed 'em up, makin' little lakes as clear as lookin' glasses, Irrigated all from underneath, never need a ditch to grow all the stuff a man could plant. I call it Marsh Meadows."
"You must have been spying out the land a long time, to know it the way you do."
"Yes, I've had my eye on it ever since that little Alma Nearing was a kid. But I never thought of nestin' there while Peter Nearing, her paw, was alive. He was the one white cowman I've ever knew."
No pursuit developed to trouble the friends as they rode their way, Jogging at considerably sharper pace than Barrett and Nearing had covered the same ground but a few days before. Fred Grubb was as light in the saddle as a leaf, as much a part of his horse as the best cowboy on the range. Barrett often had wondered why he never had advanced from wrangler to the better paid, more respected pursuit. He felt that he knew the poet well enough now, considering the latter's confidences, to ask him as they rode through the waning day.
"Well sir," said Fred, in his oratorical manner of prefacing even the most trivial matters, "it was because I never had the guts in me to sock a redhot iron up agin the silk-soft hide of a little calf."
"That would be an ordeal for a poet," Barrett agreed, wondering how he, himself, would have come up to this trial if his education on the range had progressed that far.
"A man hardens to it gradual, they say," Fred went on, "seein' it done, seein' it done, smellin' the burnt hair and fried livin' flesh, but it never was in me to set like cement to the sufferin's of any creature the Poet Lariat of this here universe ever turned loose in the world."
"I believe you, old feller."
"I will take my gun and kill a bird or beast I want to eat, end 'em sudden and humane, and that's all right; I'll straddle the wildest outlaw bronco that ever busted the lights out of a man, and I'm here to tell you, kid, without any blowin', it takes a purty frisky horse to slam me. I can throw a rope with any man that ever rode between the Rio Grande and the Little Missouri, but it ain't in me to take an iron from the fire and hold it on a roped calf till the meat sizzles. I wouldn't do it for all the gold of Gopher!"
Sunset was over the valley that had called to Fred Grubb's heart through so many years with the appeal of home, when the two riders drew rein on the brow of the last hill to look down into its peace, all glorified as if nature had set a halo upon it. Behind it some five or six miles the mountains stood, green of deciduous forest trees in the canyons, dark green of pine and cedar on the slopes. Far away one tall peak, wrapped in a wimple of snow, flashed in the sun; on either hand the valley, green with sweet grasses, parked here and there with clumped trees, spread into the trailing blue which came down like fold on fold of impalpable soft curtains to deny the exploring eye.
Barrett gasped in astonishment, moved by the serene beauty of it as he never had felt his emotions stir when confronting some of the mightiest spectacles in nature that the world offers. There was the quality of appeal in this blue-curtained stage, mountains guarding it against the rigors of the north, that struck at once the desire to step upon it and begin the play.
The low-walled log house built by the unfortunate brothers on their claims stood in the foreground, its shadow reaching out toward the travelers. There stretched the lines of posts encircling the half section of rich meadow lands, the protected grass lush and tall. A little way beyond the house a small lake pictured its border of tall sedge, clear and still as a mirror, just as Fred Grubb had said. Cattle stood in the ease of repletion all about the valley, far-spread, numerous. Barrett wondered if they belonged to the Diamond Tail, and put the question to his friend.
"Yes, them mountains is the line of the Diamond Tail," Fred replied. "Them's your cattle down there, Ed; looks like they're comin' up home, don't it?"
"I'm afraid I haven't got enough left in them to make a pair of shoestrings from their hides," Barrett told him, already accepting as having come to pass Nearing's prophecy of the condition meddling would bring.
"Well, what do you think of the lay of the land?"
"It's the finest sight I ever saw, Fred. It feels to me like home."
"I always think I'm the heir of the Almighty and this is the estate that's come down to me when I look over that valley," said Fred. "Do you think we could buckle on our guns and hold them crooks off like a couple of men?"
"We can try it like a couple of men," Barrett said.
And that was all there was to the compact. The two adventurers turned their horses and resumed their journey to the ranch, this detour to view the seat of their future hopes having delayed them somewhat. Only Fred Grubb said, by way of settling all details:
"I've got to go to the ranch to get my time, then we'll rack on over to Saunders and see Charley Thomson. When we come back with our shootin' papers we'll go on over and take possession."