The Big Corral, page 3
- 4 -
WEST, following near the line of steel whose twin rails, North had adopted for his own brand. West, through a land grown old overnight, settled and sedate. Rawe North had ridden here when this, like the lands on the Arkansas now, was open far as the eye could reach, when buffalo were as likely to be encountered as the big trail herds up from Texas. When, aside from the cowboys who companied these herds, no human foot trespassed here or human eye scanned the empty horizon, save only the Indian.
That had not been long ago. He had been just a boy then, a boy doing a man’s work, on his first long drive. It had not even entered his head that the immensity of this land could be changed, its emptiness filled in his own lifetime. There had been the big trail north at Independence, the road to Oregon. But what was one road in a limitless land?
The coming of the railroad had changed all that. Here were homesteads, changing already to settled farms, villages growing to towns and towns threatening to become cities. Plowed land and fenced fields, roads laid in a straight line instead of twisting where a man’s fancy might lead him. He was like Tripp Devero in one way. This was a nightmare.
But Rawe North was unlike Devero in the motivating reason. Whereas Devero loved the open because it was wild and free, North had more practical reasons. There was land out there on the far reaches of the Arkansas—free land for the taking, to the man big enough in vision, strong enough to grasp and hold it. An empire, where a man might reign as a king. Land and cattle meant wealth and power, and North was greedy for both.
There was a lesson here for men such as he, and looking about on the smokes which arose from a thousand scattered soddies or new-built frame houses, he took it to heart. This had been a cattle empire a few short years ago, its sod unbroken save by the goring horns or trampling hoofs of the buffalo since the polar ice cap had relinquished its arctic clutch in a forgotten past. Free land and open, but claimed now by a new breed of men as alien to the cattlemen as they in turn had been to the Indian.
This had taken them unaware, this march of the homesteader—men who had swarmed like the grasshoppers, as persistent and as devouring. They had won, the little men. But with this lesson before him, he would see to it that such were turned back when they reached the edge of his dominion. When landgrabbers got that far, he would be ready for them.
His Rail Road Track spread was as far from the actual railroad as he could well get in these days. That absence of steel was a boon to the big landholder, though a railroad within driving distance was a key to prosperity because it insured a market for his beef. But prosperity had been followed too often by the curse of those who came behind the rails.
He had traveled to unsurveyed land, free as this had been a few years before. He had taken it as other cattlemen had taken land before him. The difference would be that he would hold what he claimed—hold it against all comers.
North turned now to glance toward the wagon, to where Marian rode. She had raised no objection to the slower journey west by wagon. Time could have been saved by going a good part of the way by train. But, like Tripp Devero who had ridden ahead, North hated the train. He had traveled this country by horse and wagon when there was no other way to go, and it was still the natural thing to him. Besides, with such company, he was in no hurry.
An interlude such as this was pleasant, a pause from fighting. For that was what his life had been, almost as far back as he could remember—a continual struggle, a constant fight for survival and for mastery. It attested to his ability that he had not only survived in a rough land but had mastered wherever he went. His name, as he had always felt, was prophetic. And he had worked to make it so.
Rawe North. It was the right name for him. The Norths had always been strong, ruthless men, like the land the name suggested. His mother had been a Rawe of Kentucky, and that in itself told all that most people needed to know. So now he was a man for his environment, and he had found a woman to match him.
He swung closer alongside the wagon, observing pridefully how effortlessly Marian Breen controlled the fractious team. Like himself, she could handle horses or men. And like himself, she knew exactly what she wanted, and no price was too high to pay to get it. Conversely, nothing short of her goal would satisfy her. Again like him, she was not one to be swayed by foolish sentiment. In that, she was a woman in a million. The one woman he had ever found to measure up to his own harsh standard.
“This was open land, ten years ago,” he observed. “Not a house in a hundred miles. Country like the Arkansas is now. Only out there it’s going to stay that way!”
“Do you think you can keep it so?” she asked.
“I’ll hold what I take,” he promised. “There’s one law on the frontier—the law of the gun. I’ve never seen the man could beat me that way.”
“How about Devero?” Marian asked. “I hear he’s never been bested.”
North’s smile was grim.
“A man’s never bested but once, that way,” he retorted. “It’s true, he’s probably the best man there is across a thousand miles—next to me. He’s a man I could like—if he hadn’t made two mistakes.”
“And those?” she asked.
“Pitchin’ his spread next to mine, for one thing. There’s a lot of room out there, but not enough for the two of us. And wantin’ the same woman. I might pass up the one—but not the other.”
She surveyed him, this man she had agreed to marry, with eyes faintly troubled. Troubled but not disillusioned. She had foreseen with sure clarity what the outcome of this clash must be. One would survive. Only one.
Where a lesser woman would have shrunk from the issue she had faced it. She was the issue, and she knew it. Both wanted her, and both were strong men in a ruthless land. If the issue were not fought on the Arkansas it would be settled in St. Louis, and whether she liked it or not. It was not in the nature of either of them to consult her about their own differences.
That was what she liked about them. She might have settled it in a third way by marrying some other man. But after seeing these two, she knew that she could never be content with one of the lesser breed. There was destiny out ahead, there on the winding banks of the Arkansas. Destiny beyond Wichita.
Remembering the quick, hard pressure of a mouth against her own, gay laughing eyes and the gun-swift speed which had beaten the knife in the hand of Hartse, she felt a strange stirring in her like sap rising in the red willows at springtime. She had made her choice with her head, but sometimes, deep down, she was still a woman with a woman’s unruly heart.
- 5 -
THEY HAD LEFT the old lands behind. Those settled fields, grown old in a night, tamed and harnessed, where even the wind, sweeping hard behind the rain, seemed no longer quite the same. Wichita was behind them, and the still-pushing line of steel, its raw snout burrowing like a mole across the land, scarring as it shoved, was turned away from them.
Here was the new land, old and unchanged since time had smiled upon it and the prisoning ice had withdrawn. Old but new, the newness of the untamed frontier. Again Rawe North swung his horse alongside the jouncing wagon.
“Another three days,” he pronounced, “and we’ll be there. I hope you’ll like it, Marian. I’ve built the biggest house this side of St. Louis for you. Twelve rooms, and big ones. Frame, with windows and hardware, all freighted out from the railroad. I had to order some of the furniture from New York and Philadelphia. I’ve had twenty men working on the house for a half year, and as many more planting a lawn and bringing in trees and fixing the grounds. I hope you’ll like it.”
She looked at him steadily for a moment, seeing him as he would never see himself—a strong man, rough-edged, harsh and unlovely of exterior. Perhaps as hard within, since here a man must be hard if he would survive, to say nothing of dominating. And she had chosen him because he could dominate, and in doing that, offer her what she wanted.
Yet this was a side hidden from most people, a part of him generally unsuspected. A softening, redeeming trait which she had guessed at before.
Despite that deep-buried part of him, he had spoken no word of love. She doubted if he ever would. This was a business proposition with him, as he had made sure that it was with her. She would grace his empire, a queen at the heart of it, throned in the big house. She would be the mother of strong sons in the tradition of the Rawes and the Norths. Both of them were getting what they wanted, and neither, as he saw it, would have cause to repent of their bargain.
That was all that he saw or knew of himself. But he had built this house for her. Partly as a bribe, a part of the price which she would exact for leaving St. Louis and coming to a raw land. Partly as a sop to his own pride of achievement. All of that she recognized. But he had built it in part, she liked to believe, for her—the woman. That it might say to her what he would never find the words to voice.
“I’ll like it, Rawe,” she agreed. “Don’t let that worry you.”
“I’m not worried,” he denied. “I’ve found that I can get what I want by going after it. So I don’t worry.”
In that, far more simply than he knew, was expressed the philosophy of the man. A strange restlessness, a growing eagerness, was in him. It lay in part, he supposed, in returning home again. And a part would be in the imminence of his marriage to this woman, which would mark a definite milestone in his life, an accomplishment to rate with the claiming of this land, the overflowing of it with cattle bearing his brand, or the building of his big house. Conquest!
But the last weeks, save for that single episode in St. Louis, that fight with Hartse, had been tame ones and uneventful. He tingled for action, for a good fight. And there would be a fight ahead. Of that he had not the least doubt. He and Tripp Devero had an issue to settle between them—
A speck had appeared upon the horizon, growing in size with a long tail behind. A tail of dust, hanging like a haze in the air. There had been no rain since leaving the Missouri country. Dust rolled with the wagon, rose up in little pops from every fall of the horses’ hoofs. The grass was luxuriant, but it was cured and brown. The blue haze of late summer was in the air, shimmering on the horizon.
Now the rider was close enough for North to recognize him. A dark man, product of Basque and Louisiana French —a hot blood of long mixing in hot lands by the river, come now to a strong potency in Noland Doll. He was like the low-slung gun he wore, a fancy gun with silver filigree, but deadly. He was Rawe North’s right-hand man, and no one ever made fun of his name—at least not a second time.
Seeing the way he rode, North swore, deep in his throat, and put his own horse to a run. He met Doll a mile from the wagon, and read the trouble in his face.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded. No word of greeting, after these long weeks. But Doll was not the man for frills.
“There’s hell to pay,” Noland Doll said shortly. “I’ve been ridin’ all night and the day. You got a fresh horse for me? This one’s near finished.”
“There’s an extra one back at the wagon,” North agreed.
“Then I’ll take it. We’d better be gettin’ back so you can take a hand, fast.”
North’s lips compressed. But he asked no further questions as they rode, more slowly, back toward the oncoming wagon. Here was trouble already, for Doll was not the man to exaggerate. He voiced a name.
“Devero?”
“Yeah,” Doll said thinly.
North eyed him bleakly. The same stirring impatience was in him now that Doll was voicing, but he had long since learned to look after his men. Doll had ridden his horse almost to death, had driven himself in the same relentless fashion.
“Want to eat and rest a while?”
Doll shook his head.
“Not now. Time enough for that.”
North introduced him briefly as they reached the wagon. Already, save for one searching glance at this woman whom his employer had ridden to St. Louis to fetch, Noland Doll was untying the fresh cayuse behind the wagon, replacing it with his own. Stripping off the saddle and slapping it on the fresh horse with a driving impatience.
“There’s trouble at the ranch,” North told Marian. “I’ve got to get there now. You’ll be all right. There’s nothing along the road these days to bother you. Just follow the track three days, and you’ll be there.”
“Of course,” Marian agreed. “I’ll be fine.” She waited, expecting some farewell, planning then to tell him that she hoped the trouble would not be too great. But Doll had the saddle on now. He jerked the stirrup off the saddle-horn, stuck his toe in and was up as the cayuse was away at a run. Rawe North lifted his hand in brief salute and was beside him, and the dust ran in a long wave behind them.
- 6 -
NOLAND DOLL was a tight-twisted man, made darker by sun and wind. A man hard and tough as the saddle he rode in. A man who had literally cut his teeth on a gun barrel and been inured to hardship on the long drives up from Texas. He rode past the going down of the sun with no sign of checking, onward through the closing night as fast as horses could maintain the pace, in silence.
North raised no objection, offered no suggestion, and asked no further question. By streaks Doll was a garrulous man. It bespoke the gravity of the situation that he rode now with clamped jaw. But finally, as North had known he must, he spoke.
“I was off on the Little Cottonwood when it happened,” he said, as though the words were dragged from him. “Toby Miller had been shot over there, and I figured I’d better see about it. I should have stayed at home.”
Rawe North was a hard man, but he was fair.
“You couldn’t tell that,” he said.
“Maybe it’s why I’m alive to tell you now,” Doll muttered, and rage thickened his tones. “Though I might have killed a few of them first!”
“Devero’s men?”
“Maybe. I wasn’t thinkin’ so much of them. It’s our own crew—most of the yellow skunks sold out. Took his pay. That’s why the few that stayed loyal didn’t have a chance.”
“You mean—I’ve no crew left?”
“No crew, no cattle—no nothing” Doll said savagely, and relapsed into silence again.
North did not question him. He was staggered, but he had heard enough. Bleakness was in him, like the chill in the wind which stirred now across the hidden land. A bleak bitterness which rose up hot and ugly in his mouth, that numbed his brain even as it made it more alive. Here was trouble, as he had known there would be. Trouble, and a fight ahead.
It was more than that. For the moment he refused to think how much more it might be. Never did he allow himself to worry. As he had told Marian, he had always been able to get what he wanted by going after it. There might be delays, defeats, setbacks. But in the long run he triumphed. He always had. It was certain in his own mind that he always would.
Even so. it came as a shock to him when daylight pushed aside the cloak as they reached his own empire. The grass had been green when he had ridden away, rains washing across the land, freshening it. Vast herds of cattle, all wearing the Rail Road Track on their left ribs, all with four ears, as it appeared, from the Jingle Bob which, like John Chisum in Texas and New Mexico, North had adopted for his own sign here in Kansas. These herds, his herds, watched by his crews, had spread across the land. And his big house, two stories high, with great pillars in the front of it, patterned after the mansions of the Old South, shining in its first coat of white paint, had been nearing completion.
Time had brought change. Change which made him suck in his breath painfully. Here at his feet his horse still stood in good brown grass, cured dry by the sun. But this was the edge of the grass, the beginning of devastation. No longer did greenery spread like a living carpet between and beyond the two horizons. Here was emptiness, a black scar upon a tortured earth.
Far as he could see was the bare black ground with no spear of grass remaining. Fire had swept here, only a few days before. The smell of it, like a sickness, came up at him in a wave, causing the horses to paw and nicker anxiously. But the ground was cold and no smoke arose. There was no living thing, cattle or horse or man as far as the eye could reach.
“How long ago?” he asked tightly.
“I saw the smoke as I headed back from the Cottonwood,” Doll said wearily. “A shower came up—the first in weeks. Too late to do any good. But it put it out.”
There was no sign of the rain left now in the parched, thirsty ground. There would be more rains soon, as the clouds in the east promised this morning. But they, too, would be too late.
“How far?”
“Almost all the range.”
“And the herd?”
“They were driven off first—our own crew helpin’.”
“And the house?”
It lay beyond the horizon, but already he knew the answer. Doll’s voice added confirmation.
“One buildin’ still stands—the old cook house. That’s all.”
It was characteristic of North that he asked no more questions. For a few minutes he sat, erect in the saddle, staring out at this desolation which represented the blasting of his hopes. Here was ruin, stark and complete. But he did not bother with details.
Men had been killed. He knew that, but dead men, even though they might have died loyally in his service, were of no further use to him. Other men had been hired away, had turned traitor. One day he would settle with them, but for the time being there was no need to know their names. Time enough for that when he was in a position to watch them die.
It was long miles across the burned strip to where one building still stood. There would be water there, but he had no desire to see the ashes of his big house. Traveling to it would waste the better part of a day, and serve no useful purpose.
Looking south, he could see the line of black stretching to the horizon. Better to ride where the grass still ran. Down beyond the horizon he could obtain food and fresh horses. Far enough to the south lay Texas.
Already his mind was shaping a plan, coldly, methodically. It would be folly to search for herds missing for days, with no crew behind him. Worse folly to hunt out Tripp Devero for settlement without men to back his play. All of those matters would have to be postponed.
