Transley and Linder were so early about on the morning after their conversation with Y.D. that there was no opportunity of another meeting with the rancher’s wife or daughter. They were slipping quietly out of the house to take breakfast with the men when Y.D. intercepted them.
“Breakfast is waitin’, boys,” he said, and led them back into the room where they had had supper the previous evening. Y.D. ate with them, but the meal was served by the Chinese boy.
In the yard all was jingling excitement. The men of the Y.D. were fraternally assisting Transley’s gang in hitching up and getting away, and there was much bustling activity to an accompaniment of friendly profanity. It was not yet six o’clock, but the sun was well up over the eastern ridges that fringed the valley, and to the west the snow-capped summits of the mountains shone like polished ivory. The exhilaration in the air was almost intoxicating.
Linder quickly converted the apparent chaos of horses, wagons and implements into order; Transley had a last word with Y.D., and the rancher, shouting “Good luck, boys! Make it a thousand tons or more,” waved them away.
Linder glanced back at the house. The bright sunshine had not awakened it; it lay dreaming in its grove of cool, green trees.
The trail lay, not up the valley, but across the wedge of foothills which divided the South Y.D. from the parent stream. The assent was therefore much more rapid than the trails which followed the general course of the stream. Huge hills, shouldering together, left at times only wagon-track room between; at other places they skirted dangerous cutbanks worn by spring freshets, and again trekked for long distances over gently curving uplands. In an hour the horses were showing the strain of it, and Linder halted them for a momentary rest.
It was at that moment that Drazk rode up, his face a study in obvious annoyance.
“Danged if I ain’t left that Pete-horse’s blanket down at the Y.D.,” he exclaimed.
“Oh, well, you can easily ride back for it and catch up on us this afternoon,” said Linder, who was not in the least deceived.
“Thanks, Lin,” said Drazk. “I’ll beat it down an’ catch up on you this afternoon, sure,” and he was off down the trail as fast as “that Pete-horse” could carry him.
At the Y.D. George conducted the search for his horse blanket in the strangest places. It took him mainly about the yard of the house, and even to the kitchen door, where he interviewed the Chinese boy.
“You catchee horse blanket around here?” he inquired, with appropriate gesticulations.
“You losee hoss blanket?”
“Yep.”
“What kind hoss blanket?”
“Jus’ a brown blanket for that Pete-horse.”
“Whose hoss?”
“Mine,” proudly.
“Where you catchee?”
“Raised him.”
“Good hoss?”
“You betcha.”
“Huh!”
Pause.
“You no catchee horse blanket, hey?”
“No!” said the Chinaman, whose manner instantly changed. In this brief conversation he had classified Drazk, and classified him correctly. “You catchee him, though—some hell, too—you stickee lound here. Beat it,” and Drazk found the kitchen door closed in his face.
Drazk wandered slowly around the side of the house, and was not above a surreptitious glance through the windows. They revealed nothing. He followed a path out by a little gate. His ruse had proven a blind trail, and there was nothing to do but go down to the stables, take the horse blanket from the peg where he had hung it, and set out again for the South Y.D.
As he turned a corner of the fence the sight of a young woman burst upon him. She was hatless and facing the sun. Drazk, for all his admiration of the sex, had little eye for detail. “A sort of chestnut, about sixteen hands high, and with the look of a thoroughbred,” he afterwards described her to Linder.
She turned at the sound of his footsteps, and Drazk instantly summoned a smirk which set his homely face beaming with good humor.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, with an elaborate bow. “I am Mr. Drazk—Mr. George Drazk—Mr. Transley’s assistant. No doubt he spoke of me.”
She was inside the enclosure formed by the fence, and he outside. She turned on him eyes which set Drazk’s pulses strangely a-tingle, and subjected him to a deliberate but not unfriendly inspection.
“No, I don’t believe he did,” she said at length. Drazk cautiously approached, as though wondering how near he could come without frightening her away. He reached the fence and leaned his elbows on it. She showed no disposition to move. He cautiously raised one foot and rested it on the lower rail.
“It’s a fine morning, ma’am,” he ventured.
“Rather,” she replied. “Why aren’t you with Mr. Transley’s gang?”
The question gave George an opening. “Well, you see,” he said, “it’s all on account of that Pete-horse. That’s him down there. I rode away this morning and plumb forgot his blanket. So when Mr. Transley seen it he says, ‘Drazk, take the day off an’ go back for your blanket,’ he says. ‘There’s no hurry,’ he says. ‘Linder an’ me’ll manage,’ he says.”
“Oh!”
“So here I am.” He glanced at her again. She was showing no disposition to run away. She was about two yards from him, along the fence. Drazk wondered how long it would take him to bridge that distance. Even as he looked she leaned her elbows on the fence and rested one of her feet on the lower rail. Drazk fancied he saw the muscles about her mouth pulling her face into little, laughing curves, but she was gazing soberly into the distance.
“He’s some horse, that Pete-horse,” he said, taking up the subject which lay most ready to his tongue. “He’s sure some horse.”
“I have no doubt.”
“Yep,” Drazk continued. “Him an’ me has seen some times. Whew! Things I couldn’t tell you about, at all.”
“Well, aren’t you going to?”
Drazk glanced at her curiously. This girl showed signs of leading him out of his depth. But it was a very delightful sensation to feel one’s self being led out of his depth by such a girl. Her face was motionless; her eyes fixed dreamily upon the brown prairies that swept up the flanks of the foothills to the south. Far and away on their curving crests the dark snake-line of Transley’s outfit could be seen apparently motionless on the rim of the horizon.
Drazk changed his foot on the rail and the motion brought him six inches nearer her.
“Well, f’r instance,” he said, spurring his imagination into action, “there was the fellow I run down an’ shot in the Cypress Hills.”
“Shot!” she exclaimed, and the note of admiration in her voice stirred him to further flights.
“Yep,” he continued, proudly. “Shot an’ buried him there, right by the road where he fell. Only me an’ that Pete-horse knows the spot.”
George sighed sentimentally. “It’s awful sad, havin’ to kill a man,” he went on, “an’ it makes you feel strange an’ creepy, ‘specially at nights. That is, the first one affects you that way, but you soon get used to it. You see, he insulted—”
“The first one? Have you killed more than one?”
“Oh yes, lots of them. A man like me, what knocks around all over with all sorts of people, has to do it.
“Then there’s the police. After you kill a few men nat’rally the police begins to worry you. I always hate to kill a policeman.”
“It must be an interesting life.”
“It is, but it’s a hard one,” he said, after a pause during which he had changed feet again and taken up another six inches of the distance which separated them. He was almost afraid to continue the conversation. He was finding progress so much easier than he had expected. It was evident that he had made a tremendous hit with Y.D.‘s daughter. What a story to tell Linder! What would Transley say? He was shaking with excitement.
“It’s an awful hard life,” he went on, “an’ there comes a time, Miss, when a man wants to quit it. There comes a time when every decent man wants to settle down. I been thinkin’ about that a lot lately.... What do YOU think about it?” Drazk had gone white. He felt that he actually had proposed to her.
“Might be a good idea,” she replied, demurely. He changed feet again. He had gone too far to stop. He must strike the iron when it was hot. Of course he had no desire to stop, but it was all so wonderful. He could speak to her now in a whisper.
“How about you, Miss? How about you an’ me jus’ settlin’ down?”
She did not answer for a moment. Then, in a low voice,
“It wouldn’t be fair to accept you like this, Mr. Drazk. You don’t know anything about me.”
“An’ I don’t want to—I mean, I don’t care what about you.”
“But it wouldn’t be fair until you know,” she continued. “There are things I’d have to tell you, and I don’t like to.”
She was looking downwards now, and he fancied he could see the color rising about her cheeks and her frame trembling. He turned toward her and extended his arms. “Tell me—tell your own George,” he cooed.
“No,” she said, with sudden rigidity. “I can’t confess.”
“Come on,” he pleaded. “Tell me. I’ve been a bad man, too.”
She seemed to be weighing the matter. “If I tell you, you will never, never mention it to anyone?”
“Never. I swear it to you,” dramatically raising his hand.
“Well,” she said, looking down bashfully and making little marks with her finger-nail in the pole on which they were leaning, “I never told anyone before, and nobody in the world knows it except he and I, and he doesn’t know it now either, because I killed him.... I had to do it.”
“Of course you did, dear,” he murmured. It was wonderful to receive a woman’s confidence like this.
“Yes, I had to kill him,” she repeated. “You see, he—he proposed to me without being introduced!”
It was some seconds before Drazk felt the blow. It came to him gradually, like returning consciousness to a man who has been stunned. Then anger swept him.
“You’re playin’ with me,” he cried. “You’re makin’ a fool of me!”
“Oh, George dear, how could I?” she protested. “Now perhaps you better run along to that Pete-horse. He looks lonely.”
“All right,” he said, striding away angrily. As he walked his rage deepened, and he turned and shook his fist at her, shouting, “All right, but I’ll get you yet, see? You think you’re smart, and Transley thinks he’s smart, but George Drazk is smarter than both of you, and he’ll get you yet.”
She waved her hand complacently, but her composure had already maddened him. He jerked his horse up roughly, threw himself into the saddle, and set out at a hard gallop along the trail to the South Y.D.
It was mid-afternoon when he overtook Transley’s outfit, now winding down the southern slope of the tongue of foothills which divided the two valleys of the Y.D. Pete, wet over the flanks, pulled up of his own accord beside Linder’s wagon.
“‘Lo, George,” said Linder. “What’s your hurry?” Then, glancing at his saddle, “Where’s your blanket?”
Drazk’s jaw dropped, but he had a quick wit, although an unbalanced one.
“Well, Lin, I clean forgot all about it,” he admitted, with a laugh, “but when a fellow spends the morning chatting with old Y.D.‘s daughter I guess he’s allowed to forget a few things.”
“Oh!”
“Reckon you don’t believe it, eh, Lin? Reckon you don’t believe I stood an’ talked with her over the fence for so long I just had to pull myself away?”
“You reckon right.”
George was thinking fast. Here was an opportunity to present the incident in a light which had not before occurred to him.
“Guess you wouldn’t believe she told me her secret—told me somethin’ she had never told anybody else, an’ made me swear not to mention. Guess you don’t believe that, neither?”
“You guess right again.” Linder was quite unperturbed. He knew something of Drazk’s gift for romancing.
Drazk leaned over in the saddle until he could reach Linder’s ear with a loud whisper. “And she called me ‘dear’; ‘George dear,’ she said, when I came away.”
“The hell she did!” said Linder, at last prodded into interest. He considered the “George dear" idea a daring flight, even for Drazk. “Better not let old Y.D. hear you spinning anything like that, George, or he’ll be likely to spoil your youthful beauty.”
“Oh, Y.D.‘s all right,” said George, knowingly. “Y.D.‘s all right. Well, I guess I’ll let Pete feed a bit here, and then we’ll go back for his blanket. You’ll have to excuse me a bit these days, Lin; you know how it is when a fellow’s in love.”
“Huh!” said Linder.
George dropped behind, and an amused smile played on the foreman’s face. He had known Drazk too long to be much surprised at anything he might do. It was Drazk’s idea of gallantry to make love to every girl on sight. Possibly Drazk had managed to exchange a word with Zen, and his imagination would readily expand that into a love scene. Zen! Even the placid, balanced Linder felt a slight leap in the blood at the unusual name, which to him suggested the bright girl who had come into his life the night before. Not exactly into his life; it would be fairer to say she had touched the rim of his life. Perhaps she would never penetrate it further; Linder rather expected that would be the case. As for Drazk—she was in no danger from him. Drazk’s methods were so precipitous that they could be counted upon to defeat themselves.
Below stretched the valley of the South Y.D., almost a duplicate of its northern neighbor. The stream hugged the feet of the hills on the north side of the valley; its ribbon of green and gold was like a fringe gathered about the hem of their skirts. Beyond the stream lay the level plains of the valley, and miles to the south rose the next ridge of foothills. It was from these interlying plains that Y.D. expected his thousand tons of hay. There is no sleugh hay in the foothill country; the hay is cut on the uplands, a short, fine grass of great nutritive value. This grass, if uncut, cures in its natural state, and affords sustenance to the herds which graze over it all winter long. But it occasionally happens that after a snow-fall the Chinook wind will partially melt the snow, and then a sudden drop in the temperature leaves the prairies and foothills covered with a thin coating of ice. It is this ice covering, rather than heavy snow-fall or severe weather, which is the principal menace to winter grazing, and the foresighted rancher aims to protect himself and his stock from such a contingency by having a good reserve of hay in stack.
Here, then, was the valley in which Y.D. hoped to supplement the crop of his own hay lands. Linder’s appreciative eye took in the scene: a scene of stupendous sizes and magnificent distances. As he slowly turned his vision down the valley a speck in the distance caught his sight and brought him to his feet. Shading his eyes from the bright afternoon sun he surveyed it long and carefully. There was no doubt about it: a haying outfit was already at work down the valley.
Leaving his team to manage themselves Linder dropped from his wagon and joined Transley. “Some one has beat us to it,” he remarked.
“So I observed,” said Transley. “Well, it’s a big valley, and if they’re satisfied to stay where they are there should be enough for both. If they’re not—”
“If they’re not, what?” demanded Linder.
“You heard what Y.D. said. He said, ‘Cut it, spite o’ hell an’ high water,’ and I always obey orders.”
They wound down the hillside until they came to the stream, the horses quickening their pace with the smell of water in their eager nostrils. It was a good ford, broad and shallow, with the typical boulder bottom of the mountain stream. The horses crowded into it, drinking greedily with a sort of droning noise caused by the bits in their mouths. When they had satisfied their thirst they raised their heads, stretched their noses far out and champed wide-mouthed upon their bits.
After a pause in the stream they drew out on the farther bank, where were open spaces among cottonwood trees, and Transley indicated that this would be their camping ground. Already smoke was issuing from the chuck wagon, and in a few minutes the men’s sleeping tent and the two stable tents were flashing back the afternoon sun. They carried no eating tent; instead of that an eating wagon was backed up against the chuck wagon, and the men were served in it. They had not paused for a midday meal; the cook had provided sandwiches of bread and roast beef to dull the edge of their appetite, and now all were keen to fall to as soon as the welcome clanging of the plow-colter which hung from the end of the chuck wagon should give the signal.
Presently this clanging filled the evening air with sweet music, and the men filed with long, slouchy tread into the eating wagon. The table ran down the centre, with bench seats at either side. The cook, properly gauging the men’s appetites, had not taken time to prepare meat and potatoes, but on the table were ample basins of graniteware filled with beans and bread and stewed prunes and canned tomatoes, pitchers of syrup and condensed milk, tins with marmalade and jam, and plates with butter sadly suffering from the summer heat. The cook filled their granite cups with hot tea from a granite pitcher, and when the cups were empty filled them again and again. And when the tables were partly cleared he brought out deep pies filled with raisins and with evaporated apples and a thick cake from which the men cut hunks as generous as their appetite suggested. Transley had learned, what women are said to have learned long ago, that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and the cook had carte blanche. Not a man who ate at Transley’s table but would have spilt his blood for the boss or for the honor of the gang.
The meal was nearing its end when through a window Linder’s eye caught sight of a man on horseback rapidly approaching. “Visitors, Transley,” he was able to say before the rider pulled up at the open door of the covered wagon.
He was such a rider as may still be seen in those last depths of the ranching country where wheels have not entirely crowded Romance off of horseback. Spare and well-knit, his figure had a suggestion of slightness which the scales would have belied. His face, keen and clean-shaven, was brown as the August hills, and above it his broad hat sat in the careless dignity affected by the gentlemen of the plains. His leather coat afforded protection from the heat of day and from the cold of night.
“Good evening, men,” he said, courteously. “Don’t let me disturb your meal. Afterwards perhaps I can have a word with the boss.”
“That’s me,” said Transley, rising.
“No, don’t get up,” the stranger protested, but Transley insisted that he had finished, and, getting down from the wagon, led the way a little distance from the eager ears of its occupants.
“My name is Grant,” said the stranger; “Dennison Grant. I am employed by Mr. Landson, who has a ranch down the valley. If I am not mistaken you are Mr. Transley.”
“You are not mistaken,” Transley replied.
“And I am perhaps further correct,” continued Grant, “in surmising that you are here on behalf of the Y.D., and propose cutting hay in this valley?”
“Your grasp of the situation does you credit.” Transley’s manner was that of a man prepared to meet trouble somewhat more than half way.
“And I may further surmise,” continued Grant, quite unruffled, “that Y.D. neglected to give you one or two points of information bearing upon the ownership of this land, which would doubtless have been of interest to you?”
“Suppose you dismount,” said Transley. “I like to look a man in the face when I talk business to him.”
“That’s fair,” returned Grant, swinging lightly from his horse. “I have a preference that way myself.” He advanced to within arm’s length of Transley and for a few moments the two men stood measuring each other. It was steel boring steel; there was not a flicker of an eyelid.
“We may as well get to business, Grant,” said Transley at length. “I also can do some surmising. I surmise that you were sent here by Landson to forbid me to cut hay in this valley. On what authority he acts I neither know nor care. I take my orders from Y.D. Y.D. said cut the hay. I am going to cut it.”
“YOU ARE NOT!”
Transley’s muscles could be seen to go tense beneath his shirt.
“Who will stop me?” he demanded.
“You will be stopped.”
“The Mounted Police?” There was contempt in his voice, but the contempt was not for the Force. It was for the rancher who would appeal to the police to settle a “friendly” dispute.
“No, I don’t think it will be necessary to call in the police,” returned Grant, dropping back to his pleasant, casual manner. “You know Y.D., and doubtless you feel quite safe under his wing. But you don’t know Landson. Neither do you know the facts of the case—the right and wrong of it. Under these handicaps you cannot reach a decision which is fair to yourself and to your men.”
“Further argument is simply waste of time,” Transley interrupted. “I have told you my instructions, and I have told you that I am going to carry them out. Have you had your supper?”
“Yes, thanks. All right, we won’t argue any more. I’m not arguing now—I’m telling you, Y.D. has cut hay in this valley so long he thinks he owns it, and the other ranchers began to think he owned it. But Landson has been making a few inquiries. He finds that these are not Crown lands, but are privately owned by speculators in New York. He has contracted with the owners for the hay rights of these lands for five years, beginning with the present season. He is already cutting farther down the valley, and will be cutting here within a day or two.”
“The trout ought to bite on a fine evening like this,” said Transley. “I have an extra rod and some flies. Will you try a throw or two with me?”
“I would be glad to, but I must get back to camp. I hope you land a good string,” and so saying Grant remounted, nodded to Transley and again to the men now scattered about the camp, and started his horse on an easy lope down the valley.
“Well, what is it to be?” said Linder, coming up with the rest of the boys. “War?”
“War if they fight,” Transley replied, unconcernedly. “Y.D. said cut the hay; ‘spite o’ hell an’ high water,’ he said. That goes.”
Slowly the great orb of the sun sank until the crest of the mountains pierced its molten glory and sent it burnishing their rugged heights. In the east the plains were already wrapped in shadow. Up the valley crept the veil of night, hushing even the limitless quiet of the day. The stream babbled louder in the lowering gloom; the stamp and champing of horses grew less insistent; the cloudlets overhead faded from crimson to mauve to blue to grey.
Transley tapped the ashes from his pipe and went to bed.
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