The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 3

by George Washington Ogden

Chapter III

The Diamond Tail

THE Elk Mountain Cattle Company's brand was the diamond tail, a device like this:

By the name of its brand, rather than its legal title, according to the custom of the range everywhere, the ranch was known throughout the inter-mountain country of the west. The Diamond Tail, and the hardriding men who made up its muster roll, are only a memory and a tradition now among the alfalfa fields and farms, for this tale is of a time that was, and is no more.

In those days there were many enterprises like the Elk Mountain Cattle Company scattered over the range country of the west and northwest, for cattle-raising was a business with its romantic phases and profitable lures which drew many people into it who had no reasonable foundation for having a hand in any such hazardous game. To make it worse, many of them played it from a distance, frequently with seas intervening. The Elk Mountain Company had its stockholders in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, London, and the farther away from the scene of activities they chanced to be, the higher they were valued by Hal Nearing, organizer and president of the concern.

For the Elk Mountain Cattle Company was not returning the promised dividends to those who had put their money into it. Hal Nearing, once lieutenant governor and United States senator from his state, was resourceful in promises, ready in explanations. Evil days had come upon the cattle business of the inter-mountain range, he said. Summer droughts for two years running, the encroachments of homesteaders, of sheepmen; the incursions of rustlers, the toll of wolves, bears and mountain lions—all these reasons Nearing advanced with good foundation of argument, to account for the lack of profits.

There was much to his explanation of conditions, so much, in fact, that a deputation of stockholders had returned from an investigation a year before the time you first heard of Hal Nearing and his enterprise through this tale, with a report bearing him out in every particular. While this investigation sufficed to stay the threatened receivership and ousting of President Nearing, it had not quieted doubts and suspicions in all quarters, nor revived the falling hopes of many who had their little fortunes bound up in the company's failure or success.

Among these latter was Edgar Barrett, late seaman in the United States navy, now on his way with Dan Gustin to the headquarters of the Diamond Tail ranch. Barrett's father had been an under secretary of the navy at the period of Nearing's senatorial splurge. In the belief that he was being peculiarly favored, Barrett had put his lifetime winnings into Nearing's cattle company, along with many other friends of the senator, each of whom was made feel himself to be the last one squeezed in through the narrow door of a rare opportunity by the senator's personal regard.

At that time, some five years before the opening of this story, young Edgar Barrett, glowing with the romance that this new venture seemed to bring to the family's door, was for quitting college, taking train for Wyoming, and setting up in the wildly adventurous life of cowboy, such as it was in those days, and generally is yet, from a distance believed to be.

No, said Barrett senior. Take four years in the navy to make a man of him, then go his way as he might choose. Into the navy the young man went, dutiful as always, cheerful according to his way. In the first year of his enlistment his father died, leaving shares in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company instead of insurance. Sixty shares of the company's stock he left his family, representing an investment of sixty thousand dollars. What percentage of the whole capitalization this was, young Barrett did not know. Whether a thousand or ten thousand shares had been sold, he never had been able to learn. Events of the past two or three years had confirmed him in his growing suspicion that the shares were not worth sixty cents.

Whether the stockholders in Nearing's company had been led deliberately into a shearing, or whether vindictive nature and outlawed man and beast had combined to work the failure of the enterprise, Barrett had journeyed into that land to learn. He was determined to get to the bottom of it, and find out whether there was any use in looking to the business for future returns, or whether he must wipe the slate clean and set his face about other undertakings. For there were other Barretts besides his mother, young female Barretts numbering three.

Long before the days of his enlistment were done, Ed Barrett had figured out his programme. His mother had secured him the opening he desired, a favor which Nearing could not well refuse, considering the past social relations of the families, especially as the candidate for cowboy honors proposed to serve for the experience to be gained, without pay. His eagerness to take up the trail of the family's vanishing fortunes had been so great that Ed virtually had leaped from deck to train, as has been seen, not considering the sensation he might create by his unusual garb in that mountain-locked land.

To learn exactly how many head of cattle carried the Diamond Tail brand; how many men were employed in herding them, and the extent of the payroll; what'the sales in numbers of hoofs and dollars had been during the past three years, where the sales had been made and where the money had gone; the present resources and liabilities, and future prospects—all this young Barrett had set himself the task of learning, expeditiously as might be. Job enough, he realized, to be accomplished under the guise of a greenhorn.

It was difficult to believe Nearing a dishonest man who had lured his friends intentionally into a game to shear them. Barrett's recollections of the senator rose up to refute what, in his heart and conscience, he had felt growing upon him day by day. The senator, a placid, urbane gray gentleman, slender, quick, hearty; his face tinged by a brown tint of sun and wind from his early years in the saddle, the healthy rose of careful living and much open air glowing under it, A man of studied, deliberate speech, exact, mild, generous. Such Barrett remembered Senator Nearing. Incredible that he could turn out in the end to be a dishonest, a heartlessly dishonest, a ruinously dishonest man.

The nucleus of the great Diamond Tail ranch was the Nearing homestead on the shore of the river, where the commodious ranch-house with its village of outbuildings now stood. This original homestead was owned in fee simple by Nearing, as was the practice of all the cattle barons to own a bit of land in the midst of vast, usurped territory belonging to the public domain. Nearing had reserved this homestead out of the pool into which all the rest had been thrown when he organized the cattle company.

The method among the cattle barons of that time was to first locate on some attractive bit of land, such as this homestead by the river, take title to it, and spread from there over as many miles on every side as cupidity might direct or force could control. Boundaries were fixed by mutual agreement among themselves, by hills, mountains, rivers. As in the instance of the Diamond Tail, the southern boundary of which was the little river upon which the home place stood, the eastern a range of distant mountains, and other natural barriers and monuments serving in like capacity elsewhere.

This ranch contained millions of acres, hundreds of square miles; it was greater in extent than half some of the New England states. And every inch of it, save alone the homestead where the houses stood, belonged to the public domain. No rent was paid for it, no taxes were levied against it. Hal Nearing and his forces reigned over it like a tsar with Cossacks at his back.

It was a common saying among the cattle barons, great and small, that God made that country for cattle. No price was too great to pay, except in taxes after the manner of honest men, to hold it inviolate to their sacred purpose. Many a man paid with his blood for striking a furrow in its sward.

Time had not altered Hal Nearing's appearance greatly. He was sitting on the long porch, smoking his after-supper cigar, when Barrett and Dan drove up. Still slender and graceful, the only evidence left by the passing years against his youth was his blanched mustache and hair. These now were as white as the ashes of time could ever leach them, lending him a distinction which seemed singularly original and peculiar, taken with the healthy brown of his smooth skin, the friendly brightness of his strong eyes.

Time is partial in this manner with some men; it does not record upon their faces the secrets of their living.

The boss of the ranch came down the steps with a quizzical, good-humored smile of recognition for the young man who piled out of the wagon with all his sea nimbleness in his legs.

"In harness already!" Nearing laughed, when the first greetings were over, still holding his young guest warmly by the hand, clasped over in both of his in his fatherly way.

"I'm afraid I'll scare the cows all off the ranch if I look anything like I feel," Barrett said, quite serious in his self-criticism.

"I'll bet the old rig sits easier, but you'll fall into this—why," looking him over approvingly, admiration and approval in tone and expression, "you begin to look like a bronco-buster already."

"I'll be bronco-busted about the first shot out of the box. Ask Dan."

Dan grinned from his perch on the wagon, from which he had not moved to lay a hand to any of the supplies which he had freighted out along with Barrett's trunk. That labor was for wranglers and Mexicans, not a full-blooded cowboy of the aristocracy of his kind, like Dan.

"He'll take to it like a pig to swill, or I miss my guess," said Dan.

"And that's a compliment you may well cross the continent to win!" Nearing declared. "Why," still holding Barrett off at arm's length, shaking hands in his warmest political style, "it's been—how long has it been since I saw you, Ed?"

"I don't just recall the last time, sir, but it must have been shortly before I went to sea."

"No it wasn't—it was on the President's yacht, you were on some kind of special detail—don't you remember?"

"I served there during a cruise, by special favor of the President, but I didn't know anybody saw me. I'm afraid I wasn't as proud of that detail then as I am now."

Dan, still lounging on the wagon, leaned over to hear this talk involving the President as incidentally as cowboys on the ranch would discuss the big boss. His eyes enlarged a little, his mouth fixed itself as if to whistle, and his thoughts were about as plainly expressed in his astonished visage as he could have put them into words.

"Back up to the kitchen porch, Dan, and tell Manuel to get that stuff out," Nearing directed, speaking as kindly to his retainer as Barrett would have expected, still with his paternal air. "There's no hurry about beginning your apprenticeship, Ed; I want you to be my guest a little while before you become my employe. Come in and get acquainted with such of the family as you don't already know."

Mrs. Nearing appeared on the porch that moment, and hailed Barrett. She was a small, vivacious lady, who had been a famous entertainer in her Washington days. Now she had laid down all contest and contention against time, resigning herself in her graceful way to the white hair that became her so well, and the pink of skin that needed no cosmetic to enliven nor pencil to improve.

Barrett leaped up the steps to grasp her hands, outstretched to him in a pretty entreaty, to be drawn close and kissed, and held off and admired, and exclaimed and wondered over softly as a son returned to his place at home. Then she turned to the door and called:

"Alma! He's come!"

She laughed when the one summoned appeared almost instantly in the door, and came forth with sprightly eagerness which she made no dishonest attempt to hide.

Barrett, puzzled to account for this unexpected member of the household—for he knew there never had been a daughter in that family—felt himself suddenly uncouth in his strange garb. He backed off a little on his high-heeled boots as awkwardly as the rawest cowpuncher from the back range.

"My niece, Miss Nearing," Barrett heard Nearing say.

Barrett bowed, blushing to the ears in the foolish weakness he never could control, overlooking for a moment her frankly-offered hand.

"We've been talking about you for days and days," Alma Nearing said.

"I never hoped to be half that important," he told 'her, repairing at once the oversight of her friendly hand.

"I expected to see a sailor from the deep, not a cowboy," she laughed.

Barrett was still a boy in his way with women, in spite of his five-and-twenty years. He regarded them with deferential awe; to him they still were the holiest handiwork of the Creator, however they might suffer abasement and become defiled. He looked at her now out of his hot confusion, the touch of her hand still cool as a passing breath upon his own.

"I'm only a masquerader," he said, his courage increasing with his ease, bold enough now to look at her fully, and find her fair.

It seemed to Barrett, in the swift appraisement he made of Alma Nearing, that she was laughing at him with her eyes. Not in derision; more like in the friendly, patronizing, quizzical, knowing fashion of an older and wiser person laughing down at a boy. For laugh eut of her eyes she unquestionably did, with a provoking, engaging little gathering of wrinkles about them, a light and brightness in their soft clearness as if her soul had come to the window with its candle to make merry over the mystification of men.

Her hair was dark red, as if touched with a deep oriental dye, the red of sumach berries after frost. Her forehead was low and calm, her features blending with that entrancing softness from girlhood to maturity which is a woman's greatest charm. Across her nose a little track of freckles ran, as if she had gazed up at a flight of wild geese and their shadow had fastened upon her milk-white skin.

Barrett was not a sentimental young man, rather practical and worldly-bent, in truth; but he knew that this girl must have touched depths of life strange to him, felt its poetry as he never had responded to it, gathered beauties out of it which had escaped him, except for a yearning touch here and there, in his cruise up to this point. To know her well would be to walk among the high places, familiar with the best. So he felt, rather than thought in the sequence of ordered words, as one grasps the great essentials of life in its quick moments without illustration or printed page.

"She's the boss of the ranch, you'll have to take orders from her, all of us do," Nearing was saying.

"That doesn't discourage me a bit," Barrett replied, and sincerely, but afraid the moment the words were out of his mouth that he might appear flippant, or, more to be dreaded, ridiculous or contemptuous in her eyes.

Mrs. Nearing and Alma sat at table with Barrett when the soft-footed Mexican woman had spread his late supper, to bear him company in their hospitable way.

"It isn't good for youth to sit alone and commune with its own soul at meal-time," Mrs. Nearing said. "I've cured more than one case of incipient dyspepsia in diplomats and young secretaries of legation by sitting them down with young ladies and flowers."

And there were flowers here, also, a bowl of roses, for that place was fruitful of the comforts and beauties of life, although eighty miles from the nearest railroad. While Barrett restored himself they talked of many things—his adventures at sea, his unaccountable freak in coming there to rough it as a cowboy after the romance of that larger, happier hfe. That, at least, was Alma's view of it.

Barrett told her of his early longing to come to the range, an ambition deferred until, as she declared the case, the romance all had been lived and nothing was left to him but the hardships and rough work.

"There never was any romance in this life on the range—it's been highly misrepresented to you. Mr. Barrett," she said.

"What a sour old materialist!" Mrs. Nearing laughed.

"Aunt Hope, I was born here, I ought to know if anybody does. There isn't a bit of romance in cowpunching, Mr. Barrett. You'll find that out the first time it rains your boots full this fall."

"Oh, you weren't born so very long ago, Alma," Mrs. Nearing said, in gentle disputation; "maybe you chanced to arrive after the age of romance, granting there isn't any left for poor Edgar, You haven't seen it all, child, very little of it, in fact, since you were old enough to give romance a thought. She's been away at school the past six years, most of that time, anyway, Ed. Don't shatter his dream before he's had a chance to see for himself, prophet of sorrow."

"Not for half the world," Alma declared, laughing lightly, looking so charming in the soft lamplight that Barrett felt himself to be on the very borderland of romance that hour.

"If I could people the range with wild cowboys, shooting, rollicking; riding incredible distances on errands of gallantry and mercy, I'd put them there for him, every one that ever had 'loped through the pages of romance. But Mr. Barrett will find cowboys to be of quite a different stripe—you know it, Aunt Hope, as well as anybody."

"You've eaten rue out of my garden, young lady," Aunt Hope charged, lifting a solemn finger.

"And what sort are the cowboys?" Barrett inquired, curiously, glad that it wasn't romance, but something very substantial and prosaic, indeed, that had brought him to the range.

"Swearing, unwashed, wicked drunkards, taking them as they come," Alma replied, not halting for a word.

"There are chivalrous men, nature's gentlemen, among them, Alma," Mrs. Nearing corrected, "I've known them, you must have, too."

"I've never been under the necessity of proving their chivalry," Alma returned, without heat, deeply as Barrett could see she felt on the subject of the romance of the range. "I've known them to pick up my hat when it blew off—when I was a little girl riding straddle-legged out to camp to get flapjacks from the cook, I'll grant them a certain rough chivalry, under restraint. Let them go, and they're wolves, ignorant, blasphemous, foul of body and soul."

"I'm afraid I'm at least a generation too late," said Barrett, making out that he did not take her seriously. "Cowboys must have changed scandalously."

"They're all alike," said Alma, "yesterday and today the same. Cowboys live by tradition, their tricks are all handed down, their cuss words, their stories and songs. They all come from Texas and Montana, the real ones. I can tell one of them a mile off. They came up here from Texas with the old drives and established the breed in Montana, No genuine ones are natives of this part of the country at all."

"I wonder if the boy that brought me out is from Texas?" Barrett speculated.

"Dan Gustin?" said Mrs. Nearing. "Yes, Dan's from San Antone. You'll have to except Dan in your general arraignment, Alma."

"He might rise on occasion," Alma granted, but with no great warmth of faith.

"He struck me as a pretty fair-minded and honest boy," Barrett said, thinking of the way Dan had drawn his iron in that little controversy over the blue-eyed wolf.

"Well, I will except Dan," Alma granted, her native generosity coming to his aid.

"And many another one when you come to think," Aunt Hope added. "Some of them are bad characters, all of them are rough, but there's a lot of good in them when friends are needed."

"I've seen them roll in the dirt like dogs and bite each other's noses off!" said Alma, not greatly horrified in the recounting of it.

"Good-bye, romance!" said Barrett, waving his hand as to an evanishing dream.

They had their laugh at that, and felt better acquainted, at least the two young ones rs, Nearing only smiled, her eyes on the bowl of roses, as if she knew deep in her heart that romance was indeed gone out of the world, but it was better for men to practice on them the deceit that they might live it yet.

"The leading ambition of every cowboy's life is to kill a man, or several men," said Alma, returning to her indictment of the craft. 'Every one of them is a potential Billy. The Kid. I hope you haven't come here with any such sanguinary designs, Mr. Barrett?"

"Alma!" Aunt Hope chided, in shocked protest.

"No," said Barrett, "my present intentions are pastoral and peaceful."

He looked at her with puzzled eyes, unable to determine whether her drawing of the cowboy character was founded on her long experience, or grew out of revulsion with certain exceptional cases.

"It will come on you if you stick to the range long enough," Alma predicted. "It seems to be in the breed of men to want to kill."

She did not say this lightly, nor with derision or accusation for the inherited curse of mankind; rather, with a sadness that gloomed over her fair face as a cloud.

"Your Uncle Hal never killed a man, and he's been on the range more than thirty years," Aunt Hope said, in prideful refutation of this all-including charge.

"He hasn't been a cowboy since I've known him, either," the girl whimsically returned.

"He was in his young days, he rode on the long drive from Texas to Montana more than once, and made his start right here on this range in the saddle at forty dollars a month."

"I know, Aunt Hope; I've heard about it. Yl let Uncle Hal out of my generalization, I'll give him a clean bill. But he's a man with a different vision, not just a common cowboy's little squint."

"You're not very complimentary to Mr. Barrett, intimating that he'll turn out a short-sighted cowboy with a passion for killing off his kind!"

"I didn't mean to be complimentary. What six-foot man with the world before him wants or needs the unction of compliments, Aunt Hope, Mr. Barrett?"

"Not this pilgrim," said Barrett, trying to be at ease, but feeling a strange smallness and inadequacy, for all his six feet, in this strange, out-spoken girl's eyes.

"And there's Uncle Hal, striding up and down the porch like a tiger in a cage," said Alma, nodding toward the door through which the sound of footfalls came as Nearing walked back and forth. "He's waiting to have a talk with you; I know the symptoms."