The Big Corral, page 14
“We’ve got other work to do,” North added. “A few things to settle. After that we’ll round them up and put my brand on them. But that can wait.”
The other could have waited, but there was a thirst in North. It had been building in him since the day he had paused to survey the black desolation which marked where his empire had run. It was that anticipation of vengeance which had kept him going when everything seemed hopeless. Now the time was at hand.
“Those of you who want to be paid off can go,” North told his crew. “But I told you when I hired you that there’d be a job here, at double pay. It’s up to you.”
Almost without exception they hated him. That hate had been born of cold and hardship along the trail, nourished when there was nothing else to cling to. But along with the hate was a grudging admiration. He was a hard man, Rawe North, but only a hard man could have brought them through. Likewise, their destiny was bound up with his now. They knew it without needing to be reminded of it. None of them could go back to Texas. Here it was better to work for him at double pay than to go off alone. There might be others that they would run into, men who would remember.
North deigned to explain.
“Some of you thought I was high-handed, down in Texas,” he said. “But what I’m going to do here is only taking back my own. Last fall this land was black, where it’s pure green now—because I’d been burned out. My herds had been stolen, my men killed or chased off or bought. So what I’m going to do now is settle for that. Pay them back in a way they’ll understand. When I get through I’ll be boss of about half of Kansas. Those who ride with me won’t need to worry about what’s behind them.”
That was big talk. But it appealed to them. Far better to work for a man who could back what he said, back them when it might be necessary. North had been given some unpleasant lessons, but he had profited by them.
“We’ll start riding in the morning,” he added. “That’s all.”
For the first time since he had set out for St. Louis with the summer sun hot overhead, he rode back to his old headquarters. The land was green now, warm with the unfolding promise of the spring. For all that, it was still a melancholy prospect. The cook house stood as it had been left, but no man had been near the place for a long while. Weeds had sprung up to hide the scars where the big new house and the other buildings had gone down in ruin, but lack of them was like a blot against the landscape.
He splashed his horse across and up to the door, then dismounted and entered. There was the shattered chair on the floor, a sense of confusion in the room. He looked about for a moment, puzzled, then with growing incredulity. Here was a glove, lying on the edge of a bunk, a glove which he had seen times enough. He picked it up, ran it through his fingers uncertainly, and seemed to thrill to a touch of old fire. Marian Breen’s!
There was no doubt of it. A faint intangible perfume still lingered on the glove, as though she had been in this room. Here were other small evidences that she had lived in this house. Long ago, somehow, which meant that she had come on here, despite the burned-over ground. Seeing it, knowing what it meant, she had not turned back. She had come here, had waited for him—
Then what had happened? There was the broken chair, the evidences of struggle, of hasty departure. Nothing more. None of his crew, nor any others, had been here during the winter. But she had come on, and had waited for him! And he had not returned.
It was in a grimmer, more savage mood that North rode back to join the crew. He’d looked forward to what had to be done with anticipation. Now there was something in his air which caused the others to look and draw away. But no man questioned him.
He had sent Doll on ahead, days before. Doll was a changed man from the hot-head who had ridden south with winter at his back. A man grown dour and taciturn as North himself, but, as always, dependable. He had not said whether or not he liked the job given him, but he had gone without comment. Now he returned.
“There’s five of the old crew workin’ for Devero now,” he reported. “Tate, Van Gordy, Squint, Larrigan and Sneezy. That’s all I could find.”
“Five?” North frowned in surprise. “But that’s only a handful. There ought to be a score, at least.”
Doll shrugged.
“Five is all,” he repeated.
“We’ll find the rest of them—somewhere, sooner or later,” North promised. “Else they’ll travel far from Kansas. What else?”
“I’ve ridden across a good bit of Devero’s range. And talked to several men. He’s got a good calf crop. And his herd wintered through. But he only has seven thousand head of stock, otherwise.”
“Seven thousand? But he stole my herd—besides his own. Where are they? And where the blazes is he? What’s he been up to?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Doll said woodenly. “He hasn’t been around all winter. Report has it he went back to St. Louis. North swore.
“He would, damn him!” he gritted. “Well, once this job’s done, I’ll hunt him down, if it’s the last thing I do!”
Doll asked no questions. North fired another at him.
“You didn’t find out anything else?”
“That’s about all. You said not to talk to anybody that would know me. But there’s something funny here.”
North disregarded that.
“Tell the men to saddle,” he instructed. “I’m not waitin’ for morning. They struck in the dark—and it’s a good idea.”
Midnight, and a half-moon hovering hawk-like. There was just enough light to see the bedded herds of Tripp Devero, where they spread wide in full-fed content. Only the moon and a ranging coyote was about to see them stirred to startled action, a vast herd gradually rounded up and set in motion, across toward the land which North claimed for his own. The smell of dawn was in the air, a moist dawn pregnant with bursting buds and etched with bird-song, when the whole bunch was well under way.
“Keep them going,” North instructed, and swung the bulk of his crew back. “Now we’ll really get at work.”
A startled meadow lark soared to flight, away from the pounding hoofs of half a hundred horses as they thundered past. One light had appeared in the window of the cook shack, a tremulous streamer of smoke was lifting against the lingering dark. Otherwise the place drowsed as the avengers swept down. This, North reflected grimly, would be an eye for an eye.
Everything was coming his way at last. It had been a long grind and a hard one, but his parents had named him well. He was Rawe North, and no one could stand in his way. This was the beginning of settlement. He savored it as he rode.
The surprised crew put up a fight, but from the outset they had no chance. That was the way he’d planned it. Guns sharp in the shattered dawn, overwhelming force. Some of Devero’s men escaped, and he let them go, merely making sure that they were chased so that they would not stop. Of those who remained to fight, the five who had once taken his pay were among them. North was watchful for that.
Two of them, along with others of their comrades, died with their boots on. It was unseasonably early for hail, but there was a leaden rain of it this morning. The other three, along with the remaining part of the crew, sullenly surrendered.
North gestured.
“You can have two choices,” he said. “Work for me—or get out of the country. Except for these three!” He gestured again, to where cottonwoods grew tall. “Hang them!”
He turned his back to their pleas and protests, then paused for one afterthought. The new house had been rising, was nearing completion. A structure of graceful sweep such as his own had been, the fall before.
“Burn it,” North ordered. And the drifting smoke of it was in his nostrils as he turned away. So that he knew he should have been content. But, strangely enough, his mood was more savage than ever, so that his cayuse leaped to the goad of the spurs.
For a couple of days he threw himself into the work to be done—the branding of these vast herds which now ranged on his acres, corraled under his Rail Road iron. The order was the same in every case. Never mind what brand they wore to begin with. Put his on them, slit their ears in the lop of the Jingle Bob.
Sound arose endlessly from thousands of throats as the disturbed herd was handled. Bawling which grew hoarse and strained, ebbing after midnight, only to begin with full vigor as the new day came with the riders about their task. Music to the ears of any cattleman.
But in the ears of Rawe North it was only a din. He gestured impatiently, swung to Doll.
“There’s nothing to do here,” he said. “The boys can do this as well as we can. Pack your duffle. We’re startin’ for the railroad in the morning. It’s quicker.”
Doll, obeying in silence, had no need to ask what their destination would be. He knew. St. Louis.
- 24 -
FATE, Devero was discovering, had a way of playing pranks. Or maybe, as some others did, he should call it luck. In any event, it was putting on the same sort of scene which had been played in this room some weeks before, but in reverse.
Now it was he who sat in the chair in the sunlight, still pale and thin, while Marian hovered anxiously about him and worried because his recovery was so slow. Though the doctor insisted that he was lucky to be alive at all.
“A forty-five bullet, my dear, is nothing to toy with,” the man of medicine had declaimed. “The knock-down power of it is simply terrific, the killing power little less. And he took a bad wound. Only a strong man would recover from that at all.”
Well, he was recovering, though his legs were still as uncertain as those of a new-born calf. And there had, perhaps, been some good out of that murderous shot of Hartse’s. The bullet which had struck Devero down had had the effect upon the Golden-Throated Thrush which both he and the medico had hoped something might accomplish.
His sickness had roused her out of that deadly lethargy, and since then she had nursed him back toward health, taking no thought for herself. There had been long vigils when he hovered close between life and death. Only her presence, the touch of her cool hand on his fevered head, had been able to draw him back from the brink. But in the process she seemed to have recovered her own old vitality and interest in life, and so, he figured, it was cheap at the price.
Feet were upon the stairs outside, a knock sounded on the door. Marian opened it, and gave a little cry of surprise and welcome at sight of the man who stood there. Bud Farris. But a changed Bud. Tanned and husky again, fiddling his hat in his hands. If one eye looked out at the world more blankly than the other, there was nothing outwardly to indicate it.
“I—uh—yore foreman, Big Ben, he asked me to come an’ see how you was gettin’ along—an’ bring you a message,” Farris explained. “Last fall, Tripp, you told him to try and find out what had happened to North’s big herd. So he—”
Devero glanced warningly at Marian.
“Not now—” he began, but Marian interposed quickly.
“Right now, Bud. I want to hear this. What did happen to Mr. North’s herd?”
“Well—it took Ben quite a while to find out, for sure,” Farris explained. “Course, it was plain enough that whoever had rustled them and burned the range had worked to lay the blame on you, Tripp. I—uh—I figured that about you myse’f, from what I’d overheard some of ’em say when they struck. That is, till I got to know you better.”
“Go on,” Marian urged.
“Well, it turns out it was just a case of a man who hated North and aimed to get even with him and have his herd,” Farris explained. “And he was clever enough to work it to lay the blame on somebody else—you, as it happened. Big Ben found that out. Learned who it was. A man named Zip— he and a twin brother of his hated North for somethin’ from long back.”
“And he hated me,” Devero said quietly. “I helped bust up a ring of rustlers that they headed, once. Another brother of theirs got strung up in the process. They were too speedy.”
“That it, eh? Well, Big Ben found who it’d been. And he followed a cold trail of that rustled herd for two-three hundred miles, over into the Colorado country. He was just about losin’ all trace and ready to give it up as a bad job when he met up with a Mexican named Pedro Gonzales. And this Pedro, he knew about that herd. Fact is, he told Ben of a place not too far off that everybody in that part of the country had taken to callin’ the Valley of Death.”
“How come?”
“Pedro said he’d show Ben. So he took him there. Ben says it was easy to see why—though the sight near turned his stomach. There were black specks in the sky, same as there’d been above that place for weeks. Vultures. And more of ’em on the ground, so gorged they could hardly fly. And bones—bones and horns. Accordin’ to Ben, it wasn’t a pretty place, with whitenin’ skeletons of that herd as far as the eye could reach. That was where a lot of North’s bunch ended up—there in that valley.”
“But what on earth happened to them?” Marian gasped. “Why should such a herd die? Did they starve?”
Farris shook his head.
“Nope. That was what Ben asked Pedro. But there was plenty grass—and water enough. And they died before winter hit. Pedro said it was the hand of God, a judgment upon the evil men who would do this thing. But Ben, bein’ a cattleman, and practical, he figured out what had hit them. Blackleg.”
“Blackleg?” Devero half rose up from his chair, then sank back again.
“Yeah. Pedro said that when they first died, you could run yore hand down the leg of one, and it’d crackle like paper. And they died by the thousands. Ben said it was better luck than Rawe North deserved, whether he knew it or not.”
“Luck? For North? I don’t see how he figured that out,” Marian protested. “After all, it was his herd—and he lost them.”
“Sure he did,” Farris conceded. “But like Big Ben says, the bunch must have had the germs of that blackleg in them before ever they left the Arkansas. Workin’ in their blood, gettin’ ready to bust out. Funny how things like that’ll work, sometimes. Keepin’ them on the move after they was stolen spread it through the whole herd, of course, and made it twice as bad a killer, likely.” He shook his head.
“But the point is this. Even if they’d been left alone, it would still have broken out, of course. And then it’d not only have wiped out North’s bunch, but would have spread across to yore herd as well, Tripp. But the bad thing then is that it’d have been in the earth, so that cattle couldn’t be grazed safe on that range for a dozen years. This way, since nothin’s happened to your stock this winter, Tripp— least, nothin’ had when I left there—why, it looks like the plague missed them. So, if North only knew it, havin’ his sick bunch drove off his range that way was a lucky break for him in the long run.”
Marian was looking, not at Farris, but at Devero. He reddened uncomfortably under her gaze.
“The big thing,” she said, “is that you had nothing to do with it, Tripp. You wouldn’t bother to deny it, would you— not even to me. You were too proud for that. But somehow I knew all along that you’d never stoop to fight that way.”
“Well, I brought word, like Ben asked me to,” Farris added. “I got to be going now. Got some other business to tend to.”
He went out, and they heard his boots going down the stairs. Then coming back up again, as though he had forgotten something. This time he didn’t bother to knock. For a moment, neither looked. Then Marian spun about suddenly, and her hand went to her throat. It was not Bud Farris who stood there now, but Rawe North.
- 25 -
NORTH’S gaze went from one of them to the other, to the gaunted face of Devero, the flush on Marian’s, and his look grew more dour. Carefully he closed the door behind him.
“Heard I’d find you here, Devero,” he said, “and figured you’d be around, Marian. It’s been a long trail—since last fall. But I’d have followed it if it’d led me straight to hell itself.”
Some of the old mocking note crept back into Devero ‘s voice.
“From your looks, North, you might have come from there.”
“I have,” North agreed grimly. “After last fall, I traveled to Texas, and then back to the Arkansas with seven thousand head of beef. Drivin’ through the worst winter that country’s seen in half a century. But I brought them back, Marian. I didn’t lose any time—not a day. I promised you an empire, that you’d be the wife of a rich man. I keep my promises. Maybe I made a mistake, leavin’ you to look after yourself. I figured you’d turn right back when you found I’d been wiped out. But I did it all for you. And now I’m back again, bigger than ever.”
The old arrogance was in his voice, the cold challenge in his eyes. He had been well named. North. There was only coldness in him, nothing of warmth. If ever there had been, that had been squeezed out somewhere along those winter trails. Looking at him, half understanding, Marian felt a sudden rush of pity.
“I did stay, Rawe,” she said gently. “I waited for you— on what was your land. I would have married you if you had come.”
North swallowed. Here was confirmation of what he had guessed, but he could no more understand it than when he had discovered that glove which whispered of her presence, there in that shattered room. And what he could not understand served always to make him uncomfortable.
“I—I found your glove—where you’d been there,” he blurted. “Just the other day.”
Marian nodded, her eyes seeming to see beyond him, back to that barren country.
“I waited,” she repeated. “But you didn’t come, Rawe. I would have married you, then. But not now. Now I’m going to marry Tripp.”
Devero looked up, startled. She had been very good to him, in these weeks of illness. But for her care, the long hours of patient nursing, he guessed that he wouldn’t be here now. But he had kept a tight rein on himself, saying nothing. She was paying back a debt, as she viewed it. That, and pity, would account for all this. And he was no man to trespass on the pity of anyone.
