The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 8
BARRETT believed that he understood the reason for his sequestration there in Eagle Rock cow camp. It was only a part of Nearing's plan to humiliate and discourage him, isolate him, cut him off by reason of his duties and subordinate position from any chance of coming at the facts upon which the disastrous conduct of the business rested. Nearing's attitude plainly told him that, if he didn't like what they had given him, the road was open to him to return whence he came.
In their long talk the night of Barrett's arrival at: the ranch, Nearing had covered the ground pretty thoroughly as far as his way of explanation went. All lines led back to the main point of the beginning: that he, Nearing, was the one and only man who could save the company from complete wreckage and the loss of all involved. He had even taken up the question of a receivership, opening on that theme when it lay just under the surface of Barrett's mind, with almost disconcerting penetration.
Receiverships in the cattle business were even more expensive and destructive than elsewhere, Nearing had said. Certain stockholders lately had threatened such proceedings. He had thrown his cards before them and told them to plunge into it if they thought they could save their money that way. Put the Elk Mountain Cattle Company into a receivership for three years and there wouldn't be enough left of it to cut a shoestring out of. That's what he had made plain to them. The one thing to do was give him, Hal Nearing, ex-senator and man of reputation from sea to sea, time to develop his plans, to curb this drain of outlawry, and at least end the whole matter where it had begun.
Every hour's developments confirmed Barrett in his belief that there was something crooked in the inside office. Nearing seemed, through all his indifference over the affair, to resent the killing of the cattle thief.
Barrett knew that Nearing had not turned a hand to help him in that fight; he knew as well as if he had been there, that Nearing's horse had not fallen short in the jump over the arroyo, for the horse hadn't a spot of dust on him, the saddle was clean.
Through that idle, lonesome day, and the idle, lonesome days following it, Barrett pondered these things. The leak that drained the increase of twenty-odd thousand cattle was wide; surely not so easily hidden as to be undiscoverable.
Sticking there at the camp would not accomplish anything. Barrett was seriously considering quitting the job after ten days of it, drawing off a distance, say to Saunders, and quietly taking up his investigation from the outside. He was singularly confirmed in his belief that this was the wisest and best course by no less person than the "poet lariat" of the plains.
It happened while they were playing seven-up under a quaking asp in a little mountain valley not far from camp one morning. Fred Grubb, who was a dry, beetle sort of man, small and light, with a great iron-gray mustache of which he was unjustly proud, was shuffling the cards with thoughtful, distracted air.
"You ain't errey detective, are you, Ed?" he asked, in a curiously apologetic, half-sneaking way.
"Detective? Holy mackerel! What put that in your head?"
"Some of the boys was sayin' you was."
"Wise bunch, ain't they?"
"They say you're up here on the range after somebody, and every guilty, saddle-gallded crook amongst 'em thinks he's the one. I'm the only man in this outfit that's got a clear conscience and can step out and look the world in the eye. Even that poor old cuss of a Alvino killed a man down in Santa Fe and had to gallop. But he had a case; the skunk took both of his wives away from him."
"I should say he had a case! Well, if I were a detective I wouldn't be after Alvino. You can put his mind easy on that."
Fred offered the deck for the cut, abstracted from the game, mind-wandering, ill at ease.
"I thought maybe some of them fellers that put money in this company sent you out to track it down," he said.
"I'm here on my own hook, Fred."
Fred studied his hand, according to his rule, led an ace, fishing for the ten.
"You ain't related to one of them English lords, Ed?"
"No more than you are, Fred."
"I thought maybe you was."
Fred played out his hand, counted his points, gathered up his cards with deliberation, still thinking.
"One of them come over here about two years ago."
"A lord?"
"No, he wasn't no lord. I don't suppose he was any more than a low-class angel in that nobility across the water."
"A kind of a wrangler," Barrett suggested.
"I guess that's about where he'd 'a' classed. Somebody with money in the company, his daddy or aunt or somebody, got him a job, like they did you. He wore a red flannel shirt and back-east boots, black and shiny. Looked like a feller I saw actin' he was a minin' man in a play one time. I never saw a feller with so much laugh in him as that boy—he wasn't nothing but a big, applefaced kid, harmless as a pup, it seemed to me."
"What became of him, Fred?"
"They found him dead one morning down there about a mile the other side of where you shot that rustler."
"The hell you say!"
"Shot through the gizzard. They say he was a detective tryin' to find out who's gittin' the money out of this ranch. I don't know. Fellers'll say things like that."
"Well! Did they ever find out who killed him?"
"They never nailed it on anybody. His mother come over here, took the poor feller up and buried him in Cheyenne. If you ever go up there, take a walk around the graveyard, it's the purtiest place in town. You'll see that boy's grave. 'Murdered May 14, 1886.' That's what it says on his tombstone. His mother had it put there. She was around here a month or two tryin' to find out who shot him, had detectives from Denver smellin' around. But I tell you, Ed, private and confidential, and I don't give a damn who knows it, when two certain men on the Diamond Tail don't want things found out, things ain't found out."
Barrett thumbed the cards, head bent in thought. Presently he looked up into his partner's face, his own very grave.
"I'd begun to think the same way myself, old feller," he said.
A moment the two pairs of eyes met in a deep, understanding gaze, much as solemnly and meaningly as men shake hands over a matter when they have come to a point in their mutual understanding where words are no longer necessary.
"I guess it's your deal," said Fred.
The game went on, an interminable relay in a game that had been stretching out for many days. Several hands were played, each man keeping a careful score for the final casting up when the series should close.
"What became of that rustler's body, Fred?" Barrett asked, quietly, between plays, his eyes on the cards.
"You can search me, kid. I've been wonderin', It was gone when I got up that morning. If I was guessin', but I ain't, kid—put that down in your little red pill book, I ain't—I'd say he must 'a' had friends not very far off."
"It looks that way," Barrett said, feeling rise in him the same dark disquietude that had troubled him almost without cessation since the tragedy, the whisper of some far-reaching warning that the incident was not yet closed.
This feeling had been with him, cold in his heart as a sickness that would not yield to change, sunshine nor medicaments, in spite of the fact that, on the outward appearance of things, the killing of the rustler was completely erased from the minds of men. The coroner never had come to make inquest into the matter, the men in camp seldom spoke of it, and when they did so it was only casually, as of a minor event to fix something else in dispute definitely.
The rustler's body had vanished like a spirit; no wagon had come to carry it away. Barrett had slept little that first night, but he had not heard even the trampling of horses in the direction of the cedar where the body lay.
"If I was a man with money tied up in the Diamond Tail," said Fred, breaking in upon this train of disturbing thought, his voice that of a wholly disinterested man, "I wouldn't monkey around wranglin' horses away back of the line of battle, as the feller said. I wouldn't hire out to Hal Nearing in no kind of a job and let him plant me off where I'd be the most seen and the littlest heard man on the range."
"Fred, if you were a man in that fix, what would you do?" Barrett inquired, his outward manner as disinterested as the poet's own.
"I'd go down to Bonita and make a stall like I was a feller hidin' out from the law, and I'd warm up like a Dutch uncle to Cattle Kate."
"Dan Gustin mentioned her," Barrett said.
"Cowpunchers mostly do."
"What do you suppose she could tell a man that had money tied up in the Diamond Tail, Fred?"
"She could tell him who's rakin' in the chips, and why, if he could come up on the blind side of her."
"Cattle Kate," said Barrett, thoughtfully, as a man turning a trifling reminiscence in his mind.
"She knows who's ridin' the range for a hundred and fifty miles, when they come, where they go. Some say she's a spy for the rustlers—that's what these cattle barons say—but I don't know. Wouldn't be surprised if she was. All I know is a man's welcome to her door any hour of the day or night if he's hidin' out from the law."
"Bonita. That's the town I've heard the boys speak of, over by the post," said Barrett, in his reflective way.
"Twelve miles up the river from the ranch, squattin' on the edge of the military reservation like a louse."
They allowed the subject to close there, played out their hands, and went about the duties of the day. It was toward noon, when Fred Grubb, coming back to join his companion from an excursion into some far canyon for wild blackberries, reported that two men were approaching camp.
"One of 'em looks like old Manuel from the ranch," he said. "The other one's a stranger to me. You wasn't expectin' nobody, was you, kid?"
"Not a soul."
"Set down in your saddle, set down in your saddle!"
Fred scolded, his long patience with his friend's weakness breaking fretfully. 'Whenever you git in a hurry to go some place you begin gittin' up and settin' down like you had a bee under you."
"I know I do, Fred. But I'm workin' hard to get over it."
"You're comin' on all right, too, you're doin' fine—only when you git a little excited. You stick around with me three or four months and you'll ride like a man with the bark on."
"I hope so, Fred."
"Yes, I'll bet a dime that's old Manuel, and I ain't seen that old feller since Peter Nearing was superintendent of this ranch. He rides with his wings out, like an Indian. The one that's with him's a cowpuncher. He's a stranger to me."
Fred was right in his identification of Manuel, the Mexican from the ranch. He was unsaddling the two horses at the corral when the two wranglers rode into camp, the companion of his journey being nowhere in sight. Manuel returned Fred's rather patronizing greeting with low-spoken word, and dignity that wore the mask of meekness, according to his kind.
Manuel immediately produced a letter from the pocket of his shirt and delivered it to Barrett, following it by opening his saddle pouch and discovering several more. But his manner of delivering the one that he carried close to his person bore with it an unspoken injunction to mark its importance above all the rest.
This letter bore no stamp; it was addressed only with Barrett's name. Manuel paused, the other letters in his hand, as if waiting for Barrett to acquaint himself with the contents of the first before other matters might come between him and it for even a moment. Barrett stood with reins over his arm, his horse familiarly nosing his shoulder, and opened the letter.
Mr. Barrett:
Come to the ranch at once—I must see you on a matter of the first importance.
Barrett read it again to certify to his surprised senses that he had made no mistake. There was something in the old Mexican's eyes when he looked up that interrogated him. He nodded; the old man offered the remaining letters.
"Give me your horse, kid; I'll skin the saddle off while you read your mail," said Fred.
"Thanks, old feller, but never mind. I'll leave him saddled, I'll be needin' him right after dinner."
Manuel drew a step nearer as Fred went off with his own animal.
"The man with one thumb, señor. He has come to kill you." Manuel whispered this amazing information, at once walking away, his face as innocent of any sectet as a brown and wrinkled leaf.