by Alan Lemay
He arrived in the Redregon country in travel-worn condition. Somebody had got his horse away from him on the road, and he had tramped the last two hundred miles with his saddle on his back. Confidently, however, he offered his recommendation to the first range foreman he came upon in the Redregon, certain that the magic paper Verne Harris had signed would assure him of ready work, good pay, and all prosperity.
When he had handed the scribbled tally sheet to his first prospective employer in the Redregon, this is what the delighted rancher read:
To Whom It May Concern:
The bearer is Charley Busted Wing, run out of the Kettle country as the damnedest liar, thief, and drunkard out of the Crow Nation, which is going some. If he stops in your country, you will be missing calves, etc., and the truth is positively not in him. Kick him out.
V.Harris, Circle Bar.
Now the Redregon was more familiar with Indians of Busted Wing's general description than was the Kettle country. A considerable number of "first Americans" inhabited - infested was the word the ranchers used - the Redregon in a straggling and desultory sort of way, interesting themselves in sheep. This, in a new country, was bad enough. But, in addition, certain of Busted Wing's distant relatives seemed never to have grasped the law of property as well as they understood the white man's debt to the Indian; and many were the unfortunate misunderstandings which had come up from time to time.
The right or wrong of the matter - or the truth, either, so far as that goes - is less important here than the plain fact that Charley Busted Wing's race enjoyed but little popularity in the Redregon. Busted Wing was astonished to find himself classified as a nuisance on sight. On more than one occasion he found his efforts to secure employment diverted by the much more pressing necessity of making a sudden escape.
Anyone who knew the contents of Busted Wing's recommendation could have foreseen this much. What no one would have been likely to foresee - even one who knew Busted Wing's limitations well - was that Charley should continue to present that preposterous recommendation off and on for no less than four long years. Four years of tramping up and down the long reaches of the Redregon, his saddle on his back; four years of mysterious explosions on the part of the white man, including fourteen kinds of unpredictable assault; four years of continuous demonstration that all the world had gone crazy except himself!
Sometimes he was able to sponge for a time upon relatives, but the Indian families of the Redregon were in no position to feed him long. For the most part he was reduced to igno minious pilfering, a practice that did nothing toward promoting love and respect for the red man in that locality. Four years! That is the incredible thing - that Busted Wing's outrageous odyssey should have lasted for so long.
Toward the end of the fourth year a suspicion began to dawn upon Busted Wing that something might be wrong. He began to doubt whether, after all, he was really wanted in the Redregon. So, at last, he pointed his saddle - it was still on his own back - southwestward toward the far Kettle country, which he had so unadvisedly left with his recommendation in his hand.
It took him more than a month to walk back over the mountains, but it was almost as if the fates had called him at an appointed time, for as he arrived at the edge of the Kettle country, the fight over the Wagon Bed water, in which Busted Wing was to play so important - though unconscious - a part, was already begun.
And there at the edge of the Kettle country he came upon Verne Harris himself, heatedly changing the tire of his long yellow roadster. Busted Wing completed the job for him, recounting as he did so his experiences among the crazy people of the Redregon, and, when this story and the tire change were complete, Verne Harris, weak with laughter, thanked Busted Wing very decently, refused his application for a job, and drove on.
A short distance down the road, however, Harris stopped, turned his car, and drove back.
"I've changed my mind, Charley," he said, studying the travel-worn Indian with a speculative eye. "Report at my ranch. I've got a short job that 1 think you can handle probably better than anybody 1 know." Busted Wing almost broke into tears as he promised to obey, and Verne Harris once more turned and drove on.
He did not offer the foot-weary Indian a lift, and that was why Busted Wing was still footing his weary way to the Circle Bar when he came in sight of Hugh Douglas's ranch house early next day. Charley hesitated, then made furtive approach. He was hoping to steal a breakfast - or at least to beg a little something, even if Douglas was so lucky as to see him first.
Six o'clock on the morning of June 5th - the hour that Charley Busted Wing chose for his appearance at the Two Box - found Hugh Douglas in a mood of singular bafflement. This was unusual. At twenty-six Douglas had already brought back to some semblance of prosperity the herd-dotted miles of over-grazed land that his father had left him. Horses he had topped, as well as men he had hit, might have testified that there was no indecision about Hugh Douglas at all. But this, he told himself, was different.
Early as it was, the morning had already brought word that rumor, for once, was correct. Verne Harris of the Circle Bar had actually begun his long-threatened fence on what Douglas had good reasons to believe was Douglas land. Now, as Hugh Douglas stood looking out across the long sage-broken reaches of the Kettle valley floor, several plans for the frustration of the encroaching Circle Bar were in his mind - all of them, it seemed to him, very poor.
Still debating with himself, Douglas turned and walked back through the cool, dark hall of his adobe to the kitchen, where Steve Garrett was warming beans and bacon for breakfast. Steve was one of those chronic mumblers found wherever bust-ups force free American citizens to lay the saddle aside and pick the skillet up. He was mumbling now - something that sounded like: "Aw, nuts! That's what 1 say...nuts!"
"I didn't quite catch that," said Hugh, his mind elsewhere.
"I thought," said Steve, thundering an armload of wood into the box, "1 thought 1 had a broncho topper out here for you. Old Charley Busted Wing is out here, and I thought...."
"Is that the Crow that was riding twisters around here four, five years ago?"
"The same."
"He'll do. Have him...."
"He says he told Verne Harris he'd show up at the Circle Bar."
Hugh Douglas exploded: "Harris! Harris! All 1 ever hear is Harris this, Harris that. All my damn' life," he added in a muffled growl.
"Uhn-huh," agreed Steve. "He's fencing off your land, and he's stole your best water, and he's beat your time with your girl, and now he's done you out of a twist rider. Some say he's stole your cattle, too. 1 perdict that some day...."
Douglas pretended not to hear him. "If you mean that wreck on the woodpile, Steve, that isn't Busted Wing."
"The old buck is looking kind of hard wintered," Steve admitted. "But it's him. Bet you five dollars it's him."
"All right."
Steve, afterward, claimed that right there, in that exact moment, Kettle country history was made.
Douglas was stalling himself, holding back his decision on what he meant to do about that fence. For once he was reduced to concealing his own indecision from himself - pretending to be interested in a broken-down Crow, making petty bets with his cook. He approached the woodpile, and a certain gleam in his eyes caused the Indian to take one look and shoulder his saddle for flight.
"What's the idea, boy, claiming to be Charley Busted Wing?" he said. "You don't look like Busted Wing to me."
"I can prove it," the itinerant suggested. He eyed Hugh speculatively before rummaging from his pocket a flat tin covered box that had once contained snuff. He stood looking at this object, half reverently, half suspiciously, for so long that Douglas thought the man was turning over some ancient tribal fetish, one in which he had somehow begun to disbelieve.
Out of the tin the Crow finally took a yellowed bit of paper, worn through at the creases by long handling. As he handed it to Douglas, Hugh saw that it was a sheet torn from a tally book, and bore a penciled scrawl:
>
To Whom It May Concern:
The bearer is Charley Busted Wing, run out of Kettle country as the damnedest liar, thief, and drunkard out of the Crow Nation, which is going some. If he stops in your country you will be missing calves, etc., and the truth is positively not in him. Kick him out.
V.Harris, Circle Bar.
Steve Garrett, spelling out the words over Hugh's shoulder, let out a great guffaw. "That's good! That's hot! Boy, that's a whizzer!"
"Yes," said Douglas deliberately, "that is a very comical joke, in its way." He turned to the Indian. "We'd better tear this up, Charley," he said. "You realize this paper makes you out a liar and a thief?"
"You lie!" the old Indian snarled at him. "Give it here! 1 need!"
Never, thought Douglas, had Harris's plausibility obtained a greater tribute than that. He wasn't used to being called a liar, but he handed the paper back. "You going to work for the Circle Bar?"
"Short job."
Even in his anger it occurred to Douglas that Harris might be planning one joke more on a victim who had had enough. "If you find the short job is used up," he told Busted Wing, "come here ...I'll give you a job any time."
Douglas hunched his shoulders and went into his adobe house with deliberate long strides. He turned aside to lift his gun belt from a hook in the wall, and strapped it on, then went out the front of the house to his battered touring car.
Steve followed him. "What you aim to do?"
Hugh appeared not to hear. But now Steve noticed the gun belt, and for the first time seemed to perceive the quality of Hugh's crazy eyes. "Holy smoke, kid! Wait a minute! I'll be with you right off!"
"The hell you will!" said Douglas.
His engine bellowed, dust spurted from his rear wheels, and the old car swung into the downcountry road.
If it had taken a Crow twist rider to get Hugh started, it now required a girl - a particular girl - to swerve him from his immediate purpose. A yellow roadster was coming to meet him, ripping up the downcountry road into a mountainous, trailing phantom of dust. Just at the fork where the uptrail parts from the valley track to writhe twistily up the mountain way to Loper, the yellow car whirled on locked tires, coming to rest squarely across the road, and there waited for him. That yellow roadster belonged to Verne Harris, but, as he brought his own car to a grinding stop, Hugh saw that it was not Harris, but Dee Daniels herself who was at the wheel.
Hugh had gone to school with Dee Daniels years ago and never noticed her, and he had forgotten her altogether when he went away to study law. Recently, however, he had rediscovered her and wondered amazingly why this remarkable person had escaped his attention for so long. She had loose, curly chestnut hair and humorous eyes that squinted into the Kettle country sun, and she was in several other ways the most in teresting thing included in his range-limited world.
He had fallen in love abruptly and completely. Yet he had made but little headway - and Verne Harris, of course, was the stumbling block, as he always was, as he always had been, for Hugh Douglas.
Just now, however, as he dismounted and walked over to the other car, he was staring straight through her. Beyond her, beyond the rolling horizon of the sage, he was seeing the figure of Verne Harris on a classy horse, watching the building of a fence. And he knew well enough why she was there. The whole Kettle country knew about the approaching fight over the Wagon Bed water, and nobody knew more about it than Dee Daniels, who, of course, had heard both sides. Dee Daniels liked both Hugh Douglas and Verne Harris. She dreaded, and had tried before now to postpone, the open outbreak of hostilities that was bound to come. There was an attempt at lightness in her voice but a determined set to her lips as she spoke to him now.
"Where you going with the artillery, boy?"
"Thought 1 might jump a coyote. I've got something to see about, down here, Dee." He started back to his car. He couldn't talk to her, today.
"Hugh!" That was an order, and he stopped. "I bet you're going down to the Wagon Bed fence!"
Seeing Dee at the wheel of Verne's car brought the blood into Hugh's head again. "I've been meaning to have a war talk with Harris," he admitted.
"Hugh, you're not going down there."
"No? Why?"
Dee hesitated, studying him. "1 suppose you know his foreman is standing over that job with a sawed-off shotgun?"
"That's good."
"Verne says...."
"Damn Verne!" he exploded.
They looked at each other in silence, their eyes strange to each other with an unaccustomed hostility. Twice before she had dissuaded him from action in just such a situation. He was determined that she should not dissuade him now.
"Well, there's no use going down there and rowing with him, anyway," said Dee stubbornly.
"1'm not going to row with him. I'm just going to put him off my land, that's all, and his outfit with him."
"You think you can?" she asked curiously.
He smiled twistily and shrugged. "I suppose you think I ought to file suit, and run into a...."
"No," she said. "For heaven's sake, Hugh, don't try going into court against Verne! 1 know you're supposed to be a member of the bar, but you've never practiced a day, and, if you get in there against the smart counsel he'll dig up...I don't want it. He makes fools out of enough people. It isn't good for him."
Then abruptly wheels spun in the sand as she backed the roadster, and in a moment more he was watching the recession of the dust geyser that Dee's style of driving always tore up from the rutted Kettle country roads.
Hugh went and sat behind the wheel of his stopped car. A terrific impulse swept him to descend like a thunderbolt upon Harris at the Wagon Bed. Instead, he unbelted his gun and shoved it into a door pocket. Then, jerking his hat over his eyes, he wheeled his car into the Loper road.
As Hugh Douglas stood up, the drone of conversation in the courtroom subsided to a buzzing undertone, then a rustle of whispers. Judge Wes Randolph, seeing Hugh hesitate, kindly shifted his bleak gray gaze from Douglas long enough to rap for better order. After that, the courtroom was still with that heavy, thick stillness of crowded air.
"This," began Douglas - and found that his voice tangled in his throat. It was his first appearance at any bar. Not yet, however, did he regret that he had stubbornly rejected all assistance himself. "This," he said again, "is just one of those cases, Judge, that grows out of the burning down of the old courthouse. If the fire hadn't burned out the records, there wouldn't be any need for bringing this suit. But now 1 aim to quiet title and get hold of an injunction stopping the defendant from using Wagon Bed Springs the same as if it was his own. I'll open by calling Bill Freeman."
In the momentary pause, Hugh let his mild blue eyes wander over the courtroom. Clear at the back he could see the crinkly brown head of Dee Daniels beside that of old Noah Daniels, her father.
"Bill," he began his examination, "what were you doing in Eighteen Ninety-One?"
Freeman, white mustached and with age-bleary eyes, pulled himself together to state that he had been a government surveyor.
"Did you get to Wagon Bed Springs that year?"
"Yes... once. On the fifth of July."
"How do you remember so close, Mister Freeman?"
"Because," said the witness, "at the Wagon Bed camp 1 was hit by a skunk."
"1 got a mind to clear the court," said Judge Randolph, pounding.
Freeman now identified the Wagon Bed Springs property by surveyors' description, and Windemer, for Harris, waived cross-examination.
"Call Henry Martin," said Hugh.
Martin's aged face was hairless as his gleaming head. When he was seated, Hugh, remembering that the old man was deaf, raised his voice: "Mister Martin, were you county recorder in Eighteen Ninety-Nine?"
"1 don't care if 1 do," came the answer.
Randolph tapped for order, and Hugh went nearer. Under close-range questioning Martin admitted his past recordership, remembered Pete Douglas, Hugh's father, well, and d
eclared that he recollected perfectly most of the titles he had recorded in the year mentioned. Conveniently for Hugh, Martin had a great reputation for memory in the vicinity of Loper.
"Who recorded title to Wagon Bed Springs?" Hugh shouted.
"Dutch Bill," came the prompt reply.
Hugh was rocked back on his heels. "You mean to tell me that Dutch Bill took title to Wagon Bed Springs?"
"1 remember distinctly," Martin answered. "It was a corkinghot day in the latter part of June, and a Tuesday. Bill...."
"Try to collect yourself," Hugh bellowed. "Don't you remember perfectly well that in September of that year my father, Peter Douglas, recorded title on the basis of script that...."
"Here, whoa up," Windemer protested. "We can't have this. He's literally leading the witness all over the range."
"Sustained," said Randolph. "You can't put that, I think."
"As to Dutch Bill," shouted Hugh, shifting his ground, "do you mean to tell me that, after all these years, you even remember the weather...?"
"I object to that, too," Windemer interrupted. "Learned counsel is trying to impeach his own witness!"
"You've got a foot through the wire, Hugh," said Randolph gently. "You put him a definite question, and he answered it, and you can't turn around and try to discredit him now."
"I'll call Tom Casey," said Hugh hotly. "Call Tom Casey, Martin's assistant recorder!"
"If 1 can get a word in edgeways," Windemer chuckled, "I'd be pleased to cross-examine first. I'd like a crack at the local memory wizard myself."
"Take him," snapped Douglas.
Walt Windemer rose. There were pockets under his warily confiding blue eyes, and his face was pink instead of tanned, but the bristle of his short white hair was a war cry. Today the folds of the old jury advocate's long-used face wore an apologetic look, in addition to his customary expression of absolute surety. He was crushing a mere gnat, a nice boy who had been to law school, but who could hardly expect to stand against the best trial lawyer the Kettle country had ever known.
