The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 4
"IT'S entirely natural that you should come out here to investigate things for yourself, Edgar; it's a sensible business move. You're not the only one that's uneasy over the failure of this company to live up to expectations, and mine is the most uneasy head of all."
Nearing spared all fencing, feeling about and circuitous approach. He drove straight into the matter with those words inside of five minutes after Edgar Barrett joined him on the porch, Barrett, winded for a moment by this straight-out reading of his purpose, which he foolishly believed had been sufficiently masked under his pretense, could not make any immediate reply. He felt a certain smallness in being thus suddenly uncovered, a guilt as if he had been faced with proof of a meanness beneath the consideration of an honest man.
"That was only incidental," he said at last, speaking slowly, thoughtfully, as if he had no desire to evade or conceal, which was in fact the truth, now that his intentions had been guessed. "As you say, I thought it was prudent to investigate for myself. You must know that about all the family has is tied up in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company."
"I didn't know just what resources there were in the family, Edgar."
"A few thousand and the house, enough that mother could live with what I could send her out of my pay."
"You can't afford to work without wages here, then," rather gruffly, as if the discovery carried offense.
Barrett was disturbed by Nearing's tone. He felt that this puerile attempt at investigating the secret affairs of the company had put him in such disfavor that nothing would come of his long planning and ardent hopes, Nearing had seen through him so easily as to make his scheme appear foolish. He found himself wondering how he ever could have taken hold of it with such sincerity.
"I'll put you on the payroll at sixty dollars a month, but keep it under your hat," Nearing said. "That's a little above the wages of a beginner."
"I wouldn't want to do anything to get me in bad with the boys," Barrett protested, glad for the darkness which covered his outer confusion.
"That will rest with you, Ed," Nearing reminded him, back in a word to his paternal form.
"It's mighty fine and generous of you, Senator Nearing, but I'd rather you'd make it about forty, or whatever it is that greenhorns pull down. I don't want to be a load on the company just because my family owns stock in it."
"All right, Ed, we'll say forty-five and found, all except clothes, of course. And in the morning I want you to go through the books and satisfy yourself that everything is being done, and always has been done, open and above board."
Thank you for the offer, Senator Nearing." Barrett felt the wind dying out of his sails with every word, leaving the craft of his brave intentions, which had begun to sail with graceful headway, as he believed, entirely becalmed. "I'm certain you could tell me more in ten minutes than I could grub out of the books in ten hours. I'm not much of a hand at accounts."
"It's possible that I could, but I want my word verified. You'd be helping yourself and me at the one operation. But we'll come to that later. What you're anxious to have explained to you is the failure of the company, and its organizer and president, to live up to their obligations to the stockholders."
Nearing was not humble, in the manner of a man who had failed through a weakness of his own, nor whining, as one defeated who seeks to mitigate his downfall. He had made mistakes, he had erred in judgment; this he frankly admitted. Circumstances which he should have taken into account for more than the threat of their development years ago seemed to warrant, had combined against the enterprise and held it back, he said. But he said it like a man who had nothing to cover up or fear, stripping Barrett of his offensive armament before he had more than opened the door.
"You understand, Ed, that profits in the cattle business are slow in coming, for one thing. Take a herd of twenty-seven thousand head, such as we started with, and it'll not pay interest on the investment, except in a cumulative way, for nearly three years. The increase of the first year isn't ready for market before then. We started out with a hard winter that took a heavy toll of calves and weaklings, only to run into a drouth next summer that parched up the range and dried up the water holes. Why, the river along here was nothing but a trickle for miles.
"Our loss was woeful that summer, the bones of nine thousand cattle are spread around this range right now from that visitation—you'll see them when you get to riding around. That was a discouraging beginning, but a thing to be expected, although not foreseen in the order of its coming."
"That would be too much to expect of anybody but a prophet," said Barrett, beginning to see hazards in this mighty game that he never had dreamed of being so great.
"A cattleman on the range must gamble against the universe," said Nearing.
"It takes a prince, instead of a baron, to play the game, I think," Barrett said, speaking more to himself than to his host.
Nearing smoked on a little while, saying nothing to this. He sat with his feet on the low railing of the porch, his strong face lifted to the stars, strewn thicker than his cattle ever stood upon his grassy hills.
Presently Nearing went on to tell of minor troubles with sheepmen and homesteaders, or nesters, as they were called in the cattle country, treating these as small pests, more annoying than menacing.
"The boys have kept the sheepmen pretty well on the jump, and we've smoked the nesters out along the river on the Diamond Tail, although others have allowed them to lodge above and below us."
"Smoked them out?" said Barrett.
"Burned their damned shacks over their heads!" said Nearing, dispassionately, nodding in confirmation.
To him the destruction and terror carried by his men to these humble lodgments of the poor involved no deeper question of right and justice than smoking wolves from their dens among the rocks.
"Wasn't it a little rough on the poor devils?" Barrett ventured.
"They can hitch up and go on," Nearing explained. "We always leave them their teams. They're a bad outfit; most of them ought to be shot."
"Where do they go?" Barrett inquired, unable to put aside out of his mind the picture of poignant desolation which the cattleman's few unfeeling words had conjured up.
"We don't bother with them as long as they don't light again on the Diamond Tail."
Nearing took his feet from the railing, turned to face his young guest with slow, impressive movement, portentous of some important disclosure.
"We'd have been on our feet, paying dividends as expected, and rightly expected of us, Ed, in spite of the calamity of drouth and hard winters, if it hadn't been for the infernal damned thieves—rustlers, we call them out here."
"I've heard of them," Barrett said.
"It's become a business up here in the Northwest, as systematically organized, I tell you, Barrett, as any business in the country. The increase of our herd, that ought to go to pay dividends, melts away like snow on the mountains. We couldn't pay more than sixty cents on the dollar if every beef on the ranch was sold today. That infernal damned gang of rustlers keeps us robbed to the bone!"
"That is one phase of it that I can't understand," Barrett frankly admitted.
"Understand!" bitterly, "I tell you it's an organized industry, with ramifications in every big market in the middle-west."
"How they can keep it up, in such volume as to cut the revenues of a big enterprise like this, I mean. I can see well enough how they might pick up a few dozen head a year, even a hundred or two, but"
Nearing laid his hand on the young man's knee, leaned forward a little to impress his words.
"Take one little sheriff, and him not an overly honest one, always, to a county that's as big as New Hampshire, with thousands of cattle spread on its plains and mountains, and figure to yourself where he's going to begin to patrol it."
"Yes, and at the same time take the hundreds of cowboys and ranchers—what are they doing to let this thing grow and sap their herds?"
"No man knows who's a thief in this country," said Nearing, with the desperation of a man honestly and entirely baffled. "I've got as trustworthy a bunch on the Diamond Tail as ever rode leather, I think, but the leak goes on in spite of our vigilance."
"The loss must run into hundreds in the course of a year, to cut"
"Between three and four thousand head the last two years!"
"What?" said Barrett, springing to his feet in the shock of this revelation. "And you cattlemen let it go on! What kind of stuff"
"Better reserve your judgment till you understand conditions, boy," Nearing interrupted, frigidly censorious.
"I beg your pardon, Senator Nearing," Barrett said, contritely, his flash of angry indignation gone as quickly as it had gleamed. "You are right; I'm not the one to come here and judge hot-foot. Only I'm mystified; the figures stagger me."
"If any man had told me five years ago that such wholesale thievery and safe, undetected marketing of the stolen product could ever be done, I'd have called him a fool," Nearing said. "The only way I can account for it is by inside leaks, thieves among the cattlemen themselves, I mean."
"But the brand—how do they manage"
"There's nothing easier changed than a brand. There's a Diamond Tail Cross north of us, a Diamond T in Texas, and various diamond devices all over the western and southwestern range. A bar here, a burn there, and three months for the scar to heal and look old, and the animal's ready for market. A seller doesn't have to show a bill of sale for every head of cattle carrying a different brand from his own in any of the markets, Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago. It'll be different one of these days, but right now the cattle a man offers on the market are supposed to be his own."
"I see," said Barrett, thoughtfully.
"It's hell!" said Nearing. "If I could stop this infernal drain on my herd for three years I could clean up and pay off every stockholder dollar for dollar—I never hope to be able to do anything more now. Yes, I'll do damned well if I come out with clean hands!"
"And the sheriffs are not always straight? That makes it harder."
"Oh, they round a few of them up sometimes, and once in a while we do get a fairly honest man in office in some of the counties around here. But even at that, the combination they have to fight is too big. It's international, it laps over the Canadian line north, and Mexico on the south. A sheriff is a mighty little man to buck a thing like that."
"Are your neighbors standing losses in proportion to yours?" Barrett inquired, hardly willing yet to credit his ears in the report of this amazing robbery.
"No, I've suffered heavier than any of them, five or ten to one. That's due to the peculiar isolation of this range, cut off on two sides by hills, peculiarly favorable to rustlers. There's another trap up the river a few miles below the military post, a settlement of those outcast parasites that always hang on the flanks of military reservations. My men fall into the lure of those joints too often, led away by the decoys that are a part of the system. A gang of them will stay away on a bender up there for days at a time, frequently before we know their cattle are roaming unprotected. I've fired them so often I've had a procession of cowpunchers trailin' across this ranch like a Frontier Day parade, but it don't do any good. There's a lot to contend with here that an outsider never would dream of, Barrett."
"I see there is," Barrett agreed, fully convinced that it was true. "It looks to me that the wise thing to do would be to close out the property and quit before they ruin you."
"I'm not ready to quit," Nearing returned grimly; "I never quit yet in my life."
They were silent while a man could have ridden a mile, Nearing looking at the stars again in that way of his that seemed to tell of far-ranging thoughts, projected over mighty spaces to bright-glittering promises which drew on at his approach.
"It's hell!" said he.
"I was wondering," Barrett began, tentatively, as one tries doubtful ice with cautious foot.
"Yes?"
"Whether I couldn't be of more service to the company and myself, coming in here a stranger"
"A stranger?"
"By turning detective, I mean, trying to get a lead on this big thieving gang."
Nearing jumped to his feet as if springing to answer a shout for help. He stood half leaning over Barrett, hand on his shoulder, fingers so tense they pressed into the flesh.
"Keep out of it! Keep out of it!" he said, his utterance thick, his whole manner that of a man suddenly and completely out of self-control.
"Why, Senator Nearing!"
Barrett stood facing him, cold in the surprise of such unaccountable excitement.
"I owe your mother too much already to permit you to run your head into a danger like that," Nearing said, regaining hold of himself by a great effort, his voice shaken, the sound of it unnatural and dry.
"It just occurred to me to make the suggestion, I wouldn't want to put my foot into something I might make worse," Barrett said, his thoughts leaping and scurrying like a dog that has dropped the scent.
"That's it, that's the very point," Nearing was regaining his poise with every word, "it's strangers they suspect. I can do more, I am doing more. I'm on track of something right now, big developments are due to break any hour. A slip, a new suspicion—don't you see how it would be?"
"Naturally, being on the ground, you"
"Certainly. Then I owe it to your mother to keep you out of a thing that could have only one ending for you. Sit down; don't let this detective folly run away with you. You don't know these wolves of the range, Ed. You could no more track down evidence that would nail one of them than you could scale the heavens!"
"I don't suppose I could," said Barrett resuming his chair.
He was disturbed by a strange, shaken feeling, as if he had escaped some great peril which had developed in a moment where no danger was dreamed to lurk, It was as if a gun had burst on the deck of his ship, scattering woe and desolation.
"No, it would be like settin' a puppy dog to run down a mountain lion," Nearing said, but with such seriousness that the comparison carried no offense. Contrarily, it only emphasized the feeling of foolish rashness and inadequacy that oppressed Barrett in hot, overwhelming conviction.
"A man must know the range like a book," said Nearing, "not for a matter of a few square miles, but hundreds of square miles; every arroyo, every wooded canyon, every cave in the hills. It would take a hundred sheriffs, every one of them up on the country like a range man, to cover this county alone. You can begin to guess, then, what kind of a job is cut out for me with forty-five cowboys that have to divide their attention between cattle and rustlers."
"I'm beginning to see," Barrett humbly confessed.
"You'd have to ride the range a year, maybe two years, all depending on how you took to it, before you'd be safe alone five miles away from camp. You'd think it an easy matter to track a bunch of cattle run off by rustlers, I expect that's running through your head right now. But they don't drive them off in bunches, they split them up in threes, fives, seldom more than tens, assemble them miles away in the mountains where a coyote couldn't pick up a week-old trail. They drive them over to the Black Hills and split 'em up again. The ingenuity of the devil's in them! If they applied as much thought and craft to business out in the open, they'd skin the world."
Nearing had regained his usual calm, the whirlwind of his perturbation seemed stilled, outwardly at least. What turmoil surged within his breast no man might read in the steady, low-modulated voice, the easy bearing, the carefree laugh with which he now and then illuminated his conversation, even though his theme still was that of thievery and loss.
Barrett had no such outward calm, for inwardly he was boiling with resentment of the heavy toll such uncurbed outlawry drew from him and his. Nearing might be able to hold his feeling under the lid; Barrett, young and impetuous, resentful of oppression, burned to say what was on his tongue to speak.
And that would have been nothing reassuring or sedative to the senator's jangled nerves. Barrett held himself in, answering disjointedly, speaking fragmentarily, a poor listener now and a poor talk-maker. His thoughts were sweeping the range like a free wind, searching for a lead on many perplexing things, and first and greatest among them, this: Why was the Diamond Tail ranch, its disadvantages of location and all considered, the peculiar prey of this outlawed gentry? Why should the losses of that company run so much heavier than the losses of neighboring cattlemen?
There seemed to be a seacock open somewhere in the craft; a careless hand must be remiss in some vital duty. Could a greenhorn do anything to shut off this perilous opening? In his heart Barrett was convinced that a greenhorn could do it, and do it better than an old hand. But he would have to begin by tracking back, back to the heart of things on that ranch itself, and not go roaming strange wilds after elusive men who skulked like gaunt gray wolves among the solemn sage.
There sounded the tinkle of a harp in the dark house, its trilling notes had swelled and fallen away from time to time during the hour or more he had been talking with Nearing on the porch. A fitting instrument, Barrett thought, for expressing the capricious wilfulness which must lie in that young lady's heart. Something wild there was in it, such as this barbarian instrument might relieve, and comfort with its mellow cadence, its treasured secrets and heroic memories of its thousand years.
His thought trailed off on this new and more pleasant speculation. There was one, with her Grecian hair, who would rise to heroic heights if there was any more romance in this dun world to live, indeed. It might never come to her to sacrifice for love and honor and the dear and precious things such as the women of old days gave their all for before their gods. Should romance ever dawn again, and involve her in its tragedies and loves and recompenses, there was one to rise to its heights like a young eagle in the glad morning sun.
"So, a few days around the ranch," said Nearing—Barrett noted that all of them spoke of the home place invariably as the ranch, the rest of it usually as the Diamond Tail—"to get your bearings and harden a little to the saddle, then you can go out and take up your duties at Eagle Rock camp."
"There is so much to learn," said Barrett, "that I'd like to begin as soon as I can, Don't think I'm ungrateful for the hospitality of this house, sir, when I say I'd like to go on the job tomorrow."
"I suppose it's just as well, Ed. The quicker you begin the sooner you'll get enough of it," Nearing laughed.
"You think I'll not be able to stick, senator?"
"You can, you can, but—will you? There aren't many compensations, and darn little poetry, in the rough life of a cow camp."
Mrs. Nearing came to the porch, cutting off by her appearance whatever protest or declaration of intentions Barrett might have made. Alma came after her shortly, to say good night. Senator Nearing told them of their guest's desire to take up life in the sadde next day, at which both ladies protested, and argued volubly against it. Barrett remained firm, in spite of the comically dismal picture Alma drew of such adventuring.
"Well, sleep late in the morning, then," she advised, as she gave him her hand in good night, "It will be a blanket among the ants for you after this, and up at the streak o' day."
"Raven!" laughed Nearing, waving her away. "Off to roost with you!"
Up in the morning early.
quoted Alma from the door.
Barrett, in his room a good while later, sat by the window watching the moonlight whiten in the patio where the roses bloomed, and aspen trees whispered like prophets of things that have been and are to be again. Disarmed by Nearing's frank statement of conditions, his offer to throw the books open and uncover all transactions to the root, Barrett was doubtful, nevertheless.
There was something that books would not show nor receipts account for, in the very heart and secret core of this enterprise. That Nearing's alarm over his suggestion that he attempt to uncover the working of the rustlers' organization was founded solely on a consideration of his guest's safety, Barrett was not at all convinced. Was Nearing afraid that investigation might reveal something to his own incrimination and disgrace?
Nearing did not seem sincere. There was a superficiality, a certain straining to make a case, that was not convincing to Barrett. What secrets did this suave man carry in his heart, what fear under his bravely assuring exterior?
Guilty or not guilty must be determined in the course of the adventure that was to begin tomorrow, Barrett resolved. But, fortified as Nearing was, it was going to be a difficult task to undermine the man; a hard task, and distasteful in some ways, especially one. There seemed to be an echo of the harp in the tinkle of the little fountain in the patio, with roses growing close to its rim.