The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 6
ROMANCE was to be encountered at Eagle Rock camp; that was the very nearest point to the ranch-house which the elusive fay would approach for several weeks. So Hal Nearing declared at breakfast, which he presided over like a campaigner in the field, booted and belted, his pistols hanging on the back of his chair.
Barrett protested that he could find the camp, in spite of its forty-odd miles distance, if given directions; that it was unnecessary for his employer to go to the length of riding there with him. Nearing replied that he had no doubt that a sailor of the main would be able to keep his course over that unmarked expanse of land, but the superintendent of the working forces must be approached and handled.
"He's a little bit shy of green men," Nearing explained.
That revealed why he had not been turned over to Dan Gustin, Barrett understood. No less hand than the big boss' own could place a greenhorn in the acceptation of that mighty man, mightier than Barrett, in the speculations of that light moment, ever dreamed.
Barrett expected Alma to say something more in disparagement of range life and the men who followed it. Whether out of deference to her uncle, or due to a change in her mood, she did not attempt further discouragement of the novice. Her gloomy spell of dissatisfaction appeared to have passed quite away; she chatted lightly through the meal, her clouded spirits seeming to have been transferred, like a Brahman's sickness, to her aunt.
The elder woman was downcast, nervous, distrait. Barrett saw that she looked often across at her husband with what he read as an unspoken appeal in her face, a fear in her eyes. That he had read her uneasiness perfectly was disclosed when it came to mounting and riding away. She came then to the porch and clung to her husband, a pain of great anxiety and distress evident in her bearing, as if he rode on a mission ambuscaded by perils, and not a simple journey across some forty miles of prairie and foothill plains.
What Nearing said to her, Barrett did not hear, for he withdrew apart out of delicacy. But he saw the rancher stroke her hair and caress her hand assuringly as he held it with a cavalier's gallant tenderness a moment before he kissed her and came down the steps to mount.
Alma went with Barrett to where the horses stood, to wish him well of his venture. But neither she nor Mrs. Nearing invited him to return to the house. He felt, as he swung into the saddle, that their silence told him he was riding out from his state of equality with them into a lower plane, from which he must come purged by advancements and success before he might stand in their presence again.
Out of regard for his strangeness to the saddle, the rancher set Barrett an easy pace, for which the sailor was duly appreciative. He had not mounted a horse in years before that morning, not since his early college days, in fact, when he had been considered a daring horseman among his polo-playing kind.
This was going to be different from playing polo on a level field, an hour or so at a stretch. The truth of this was shot through him from every aching joint, every saddle gall, as that forty-mile ride stretched out to seemingly endless distance. But he would take it as it came; his training through the past four years had built him up to that, let them pile it on as heavy as they might.
More than once that day he noted Nearing sizing him up to see how he was taking it, turning eyes which had more of contempt, he was certain, than faith in them, eyes that sneered for the figure the sailor cut, with his lifting in the saddle with the horse's stride.
Nearing advised him, kindly enough, that it would be well to sit down in the saddle, even going to some length to explain and illustrate how it was to be accomplished. Barrett did the best he could to catch the theory, if nothing more, and theory was about all he managed to get out of it. It was something like learning to write with simplified spelling when a man has been schooled in the accepted way. Many costly lessons under a fashionable riding-master had fastened the lifting habit upon this candidate for range proficiency. It was going to be equal to pulling teeth to get over it and learn a strange, new style.
The rifle slung in saddle holster, the barrel of it eoming under the hollow of the rider's knee, did not add anything to Barrett's comfort. He had found the rifle there when he mounted, accepting it without question or comment as part of his equipment.
Nearing had said nothing about side arms, neither had Barrett ventured to reveal the entirely dependable, many-times proved pistol of man-size caliber concealed in his blanket roll. Perhaps pistols were not permitted recruits; maybe a man must progress to them, as to the tools belonging to advanced knowledge of the craft.
Nearing's easy-going pace held the travelers long on their way. While they were still several miles from Eagle Rock camp the sun dipped behind the near-by hills, purple shadows came reaching across the plain like an incoming tide. They were mounting to this ridge which hid the sun, a long, grassy, upheaval, gray ledges breaking from its sides like the bones of a faminedead range beast. Gray-boled, stunted cedars grew along its summit, a thousand years of torture by drouth, fire and storm recorded in their twisted trunks and knotted branches.
"This is winter pasture, we keep the cattle out of here after the spring months to let the grass grow and cure where it stands," Nearing explained. He halted on the eminence, sweeping his hand to include the merely incidental hundreds of square miles which stretched brokenly into the west.
"It's a better looking country than any we've crossed, it looks better to me, anyway," Barrett commented, scanning the grazing lands with a certain proprietary interest which perhaps was out of place, he thought, considering his subordinate state.
"Nothing equal to it in the northwest," Nearing said.
But he did not speak with the proud confidence of overlordship that his position among the mighty cattle barons warranted, Barrett felt. There was more in his manner of regretful melancholy, as of a landowner who views with bitter regret his possessions, incumbered by debts which soon must wrest them from beneath his hand.
Unschooled as he was in the resources of this country, Barrett saw as readily as a pioneer scout seeking a settlement for a Mormon colony would have seen, the shelter from winter storms that the broken nature of the land offered. Numerous small valleys were rank with cottonwood and willow, telling from a distance of water there, making, through their rapid summer growth, winter browsing for cattle when snow lay deep over the cured grasses on the range. Shelter was there among the wind-barriers of the promiscuous hills, with their low forests of cedar; nature had made a vast pasture to care for its herb-eating beasts in the days when it set the seal of winter over this rigorous land.
"That's Eagle Rock canyon, that one where you see the tall cottonwoods," Nearing pointed. "There's water there the year 'round, runs so swift in places it never freezes. Our camp's at the head of the canyon, not more than three miles on."
"I thought we must be pretty close," said Barrett, cheered by the assurance, "I saw a couple of men down there driving up the cows."
"Cows?" said Nearing, turning quickly. "Who? What cows?"
"Down there among the trees—you'll see them come out in the open place in a minute."
"They don't drive up any cows in this country, bud; the only milk you'll ever get here will be out of a tin can. It's some of the boys driving out a few strays that have got in here—they will slip through, especially the cows with calves."
"Well, I don't blame 'em for that," said Barrett, feeling as cheap, very likely, as Nearing meant to make him feel, taking the sneering patronage of his tone.
Nearing said no more. He started down the slope to come into the little valley on a long angle, Barrett following painfully, for the gait was quicker now, as if the cattleman had become impatient of lagging to accommodate the saddle softness of his charge.
They were within a quarter of a mile of the bottom when the two men whom Barrett had noted reappeared from behind the screen of willows. Nearing stopped suddenly, putting out his hand to stay his companion.
The rancher drew cautiously behind a clump of cedars, Barrett following. A little while Nearing watched the two men below, who were swearing volubly at a cow and calf which persisted in galloping after the ten or twelve other cattle they were urging ahead of them.
"Who are they?" Barrett asked, a pretty well defined feeling growing on him that it wasn't honest business going on below.
"I'm not certain," Nearing replied, leaning to peer through the cedar boughs.
"Are they rustlers?"
"Keep still—till we see what they're up to," Nearing returned, cautiously, with lowered voice.
Barrett was no longer conscious of his weariness and saddle soreness. He was tingling with a resurge of the indignant feeling that had swept him last night over the unchecked robbery of these pirates of the plains, only now it came upon him intensified, hot as fire in his eyes.
"They're driving away our cattle, whoever they are," said Barrett.
In his eagerness to watch their movements he rode from the cover of the cedar clump. Scarcely a hundred yards below him one of the men was pursuing a head of the little herd which appeared bent on remaining behind with the rejected cow and calf.
This man, so intent on his business, which he pursued with the noise and confidence of security, did not see Barrett standing out in the open above him. He headed the rebellious animal back to join the little herd, not once looking about to see whether his movements were watched. Judging from their demeanor, the men were honest cowboys following their duty. Yet Barrett had a very good reason for believing they were not.
"Does that man work for us?" he inquired rather sharply, riding back to Nearing, who still kept his place of concealment behind the thick branches of the low cedars.
"He don't work for the Diamond Tail," Nearing returned, with emphasis that seemed to rebuke this assumption of partnership.
"I don't understand your indifference, Senator Nearing!" Barrett hotly gave it back to him. "That man's a thief, I had a run-in with him down at Saunders—Grimmitt and all of them said he was a thief. They're running off our cattle—our cattle—I don't care a damn how you like the sound of it!"
"Take it easy, Eddie, boy," Nearing placated, coming down at once from his high horse. "Maybe Findlay put those fellows to work, he's got the right to hire and fire without consulting me, I can't inquire into the character of every scab-leg cowboy that rides the range—I told you half of them were thieves."
"We've got a right to stop them and find out whether they belong to this outfit or not," Barrett insisted, starting as if he intended to go into the matter on his own account. Nearing checked him with a sharp word.
"It's all right, they're working them over the hill," he said.
"Why are they leaving the cow and calf?"
"They'll follow along," Nearing replied.
"So will I!" Barrett declared, with sudden outbreak again.
"They might be thieves, but I don't think so, from the noise they make," Nearing said. "Go straight along the ridge and head them off—I'll cut in behind them. We'll hold them up and find out where they're going with that bunch."
Barrett rode on as directed, pulling the rifle from the holster as he galloped. He shaped a course to bear down on the two men, who were now driving the little bunch of cattle along at a lively trot. He hailed them in his good sea voice as he drew in after them, his horse sliding down the shale of the hillside in a cloud of dust.
The man who had rounded the straying beast back to the herd was the nearer of the two. As he turned, drawing sudden rein at the challenge, startled in every line of his pose, Barrett's identification of him was complete. It was the long-nosed man from the Indian Nation who claimed to be blood relation to the wolf.
If ever a man looked the justification of such a contention, this cattle-thief looked it then. He threw a shot across the sailor's bows, so close to him it nicked the steel pommel of his saddle. Quicker than the eye could mark his movements the fellow acted, and almost as quickly threw himself over the saddle, hanging to his horse Indian fashion, its body hiding all of him but one hand on the saddle horn, one foot hooked by its spur in the cantle.
Barrett threw up his rifle for a crack at the horse, hoping to pin the scoundrel down like a bug under a stone. The hammer clicked; the lever ejected nothing at Barrett's impatient jerk. The magazine was empty.
Cooled by this discovery to a sudden realization of his danger, Barrett drew up his headlong chase after the thief, who rode the farther side of his horse with as much facility as he sat the saddle. The cattle-thief threw another shot across his saddle; it struck Barrett's stirrup, making his horse wince and jump with a start that almost unseated him.
The other thief, who had ridden madly off at the first sight of this unknown challenger, evidently in the belief that it was some misguided officer of the law, now came back to take a hand in the easy finish. Sheriff or no sheriff, the stranger was a greenhorn with an empty gun, for only a greenhorn would run into trouble with an empty gun. So the fellow doubtless reasoned, returning to his partner's help with a shrill, barking whoop.
Barrett jammed the useless rifle into the scabbard, wheeled and rode for the brush, heading in the direction Nearing said he would take to come up behind the thieves. But not in the hope of Nearing's aid, for Nearing was not in sight, his gun was not talking as it should have been doing in a crisis like that when it stood behind a friend. Not for Nearing's help, nor the hope of any man's help; only for a few seconds' time to get that blanket roll off and his hand on the weapon inside it.
Barrett worked gt the fastening of his bed roll with one hand, reining up for a precious moment when he looked back and saw the thieves waving arms and shouting to each other. The unknown of the pair turned back toward the cattle, which were standing bunched and panting, untroubled by human hunt and defense of life so long as it left them free to breathe in peace a little while.
The rustlers required but a moment to reach this understanding. No need in two of them chasing a defenseless man down and losing time and labor picking up the scattered cattle again, when one man could do the job in safety. So Barrett knew they argued, fumbling at the cords of his roll.
The fellow in pursuit began to shoot again. Fifty yards from the cover of willows along the little stream, Barrett's horse stumbled to its knees, falling with a catch of its breath that sounded like a sigh.
Barrett went on over the wounded creature's head, falling full length, clutching the reins as if life depended on the retention of his hold. When he lifted himself to his hand, dazed and breathless from the hard fall, he expected to meet the crash of the bullet that would end that first adventure of his upon the range.
The rustler had checked his pursuit, stopping perhaps not more than twenty yards from the place where Barrett had fallen. There he sat leaning forward, the high horn of his saddle against his lean gizzard, gun raised to throw the last shot. He seemed to be peering to see whether Barrett might be so badly wounded that another shot would be wasted on him.
Barrett's wounded horse lay between the men, the dust of the overthrow still hanging above the scene. And there on the ground beside it, not three yards from where he braced himself in his sick confusion, lay Barrett's broken blanket roll, the grip of his own pistol offering to his hand.
Moved by the hope this sight inspired, quickened out of his daze by the chance of giving the ruffian an equal fight, Barrett lunged toward the gun. At the same moment the rustler shifted his position to get a better view. At Barrett's start, he fired. The shot set Barrett's crippled horse thrashing and struggling to rise. In uprearing it received the rustler's second shot, which otherwise would have closed the day for Barrett, with nothing more to be said.
The horse snorted blood, which spattered Barrett in a hot baptism as it sank down to struggle no more. Barrett had reached the shelter of the animal's body, his pistol was in his hand with one wrench from the encumbering folds of the blanket, when the rustler rode forward to pitch in his concluding shot at close range.
It seemed to Barrett that only the outstretched legs of his horse separated him from the oncoming rustler when he rose to his knees and fired. In a quickening dash of hoofs the thief's horse went past; the dust of its going was before his eyes, in his nostrils, with the ecent of earth long dry. On the ground a little way off the rider lay, his arms flung out as men who die by violence 'most commonly fling them when they fall, as if in protest against the blind turning of fortune which will not give them always the way of their own wilful hearts.
"You could have killed a man anywhere, you didn't have to come to this country to do it!"
Barrett heard those words again, heard them rise from the well of his conscience as plainly as he had heard them that morning from Alma Nearing's lips. But he had come to that country, and he had killed a man. There he lay, unworthy of life as he had been, violent, dishonest, aggressive toward the end that had overtaken him. Dead, his outstretched arms lifted above his head. But he had been a man, and the golden bowl that held the essence of his immortal soul was broken.
Nearing came galloping up, dust on his clothing as if he, too, had suffered the humiliation of a fall.
"I tried to jump an arroyo, the damn horse fell and rolled me," he explained, more vexed on account of his mishap, it seemed, than interested in what had gone forward without his help.
Barrett jerked the rifle from beneath the carcass of his horse, offering it for his employer's inspection with severe countenance.
"That was one hell of a gun to hang on a man!" he said, opening the magazine to show that it was unloaded.
Nearing took the gun, a curious look of cheapness on his face.
"I didn't intend for you to use it, just to carry it out to camp, Ed. It's Dale Findlay's gun; he sent it over to town to have a new breech block put in. I didn't know we'd run into anything like this, any more than you did."
"You knew there was a possibility of it," Barrett returned shortly.
"Well, you seemed to have a gun of your own stuck around on you somewhere, from the look of things, kid."
"It was tied up in my blankets, I had to rum from that lizard like a rabbit."
"Roll him over," Nearing ordered.
Barrett moved the body of the slain thief to reveal his face. Nearing rode nearer, and peered down into the dusty features.
"He's an outsider, I've never seen him on the range. See if he's got any papers on him."
The only thing the fellow carried about him but his guns and ammunition was a patent medicine memorandum book, such as cowboys of that day generally kept a record of their time in to be presented in case of argument with the boss. This contained nothing; not even a mark. But Nearing took possession of it, along with the few dollars the range wolf owned, saying they must be turned over to the coroner.
"I heard a man at Saunders say he went by the name of Wells, and that he lived on Horse Creek," Barrett said.
"You can't go much on what you hear in this country. Where's his partner gone?"
"He stayed back with the cattle, I don't know where he is now."
"Well, it don't matter, I guess. Wait—I'll catch this one's horse for you."
Nearing said nothing more of the fight and its bitter ending, dismissing it as a mere incidental of the day. He did not congratulate Barrett on his victory, nor express any satisfaction over the recovery of the four or five hundred dollars' worth of stock. All of which appeared to Barrett very strange and unusual.
To Barrett the adventure was painfully exciting; its termination had left him shaken and weak. Spectres of remorse, fear, accusation, rose thick in his troubled mind. He had killed a human being, and this serene, unmoved, indifferent man beside him had not a word of comfort, condemnation or justification to utter.
Perhaps it was the way of the range to pass over tragedies such as this in silence; maybe it was no more and no less than was expected of every man, any man, in the course of the day's duty. If Nearing had blamed him, rebuked him, found fault, cursed, railed—anything would have been better than that serene, unperturbed indifference.
There was nothing exhilarating in this business of shooting a man down, even in the unquestioned defense of one's own life. It was a fearful thing, a thing that clung to the heart like mould of the grave. Shadows of vengeance reached out after a man who slayed; the fires of remorse leaped within him and seared his soul.
"Feels like rain," said Nearing, as they rode on up the canyon, Barrett on the dead rustler's horse.
Barrett was not conscious of any atmospheric change that might denote the approach of rain. He would not have been conscious of it if flakes of snow had begun to drift against his face. All he could bring himself to think of, to turn with the ebullitions of a tortured and conscience-stricken mind, was that he had slain a man.
Night fell gray upon the two riders before they came to Eagle Rock camp.