by Alan Lemay
"I think some of drifting north," he said. "1 want to see how spring looks, north of Oregon."
Unexpectedly she said - softly, moodily, without looking at him - "I'll be sorry when you go."
Cantrell stirred uneasily in his saddle, but his clean-carved face, weather stamped beyond his years, remained without expression, almost sleepy. He noticed now that he had to hold his horse to a slower and slower gait to keep pace with hers. And he suddenly realized that this was perhaps the last time he would ever be with her alone. He pulled his pony to a stop, and they sat looking out across the great valley through the dusk.
"I've worked here three months," he said. "I don't suppose I've hardly ever worked in one place so long as that. I've been on the loose nearly twelve years, and I've worked cattle from Sonora to Saskatchewan, but never found a place that could hold me yet."
Marjory said slowly: "Don't you like Fifty-Mile Valley?"
Even in the bright sunlight of a spring morning, with the trail pull fairly roaring in his ears, he would not have known how to explain to her that the Fifty-Mile seemed to him an imprisoning little cup in the hills, in which rooted people lived rooted and unendurable lives. And now the sun was gone, and a raw cold wind was moaning down from the northern peaks with a whip of sleet in it. His pony shifted on tired feet, blowing out a long, complaining breath, and the rider fell victim to a queer, lonely, gone sensation. He hummed a line or two of his own particular song:
Long gone, sweetheart, long gone;
For I know a better place where we can go....
The song lacked conviction. Far scattered over the valley floor, some little pin-point lights marked places where people were getting somewhere, and making themselves comfortable - giving themselves a break. And suddenly it seemed to Cantrell that all he had seen in his driftings was cheap and meaningless compared to the worth of one lighted window somewhere in the dusk, with warmth behind it, and a girl waiting for him - this girl.
Tom Cantrell was built all in one piece, and hardly any man could outdo him in the handling of a horse. His sleet-blue eyes - they seemed lighter now by contrast to the dark bristle on his jaws - saw photographically, without effort or apparent attention, and he understood what he saw. He knew how to take care of himself in a hundred situations these rooted people had never seen. But he could not compete with Jim Grover, or any of them, on their own ground. Among them he stood discredited, so that now he sat cold and broke on a tired horse, a saddle bum whose time had come to move on. His temper rose in a kind of fury, and on a rebellious impulse he did what he had long ago decided he would not do.
"listen," he said. "I'd just as leave be dead somewhere, horse and all under a rock slide, as to ride out of this valley and leave you behind."
He thought her breath drew in, but she did not speak.
"I don't amount to shucks in this valley," he said. "But I know cattle and horses, and I know this country. 1 can take you where it's never winter and the desert blossoms out in flowers as big as my hat, such as you wouldn't believe. I can show you spring coming into the Black Giants, where the snow brooks make waterfalls in the big timber. I can show you a thousand things that nobody in the Fifty-Mile has ever seen."
She had pressed her gloved knuckles against her mouth and was sitting very still. She did not look at him, even yet. Her voice came to him hardly more than a whisper, very near in the dusk. "What are you saying? You...you don't know...."
"1 love you," he said, his voice a low, slow drawl. He leaned toward her, looking into her face, trying to compel her eyes. "1 loved you the first moment I saw you, and I'll love you the last day of my life. You say the word, and I'll work for you as I never worked for anything in this world before."
She sat silent for so long that he thought she wasn't going to answer him at all. "Do you think that's fair?" she asked him at last.
He was mystified. "1 don't get you."
"There aren't many things," she said, "that a ranch-born girl can do to make her own way. Cook a little? Wait on table? Maybe. People rush into things like that. It kind of hurts to say this, Tom, but it seems to me a life like that must get kind of tiresome in the course of the years."
"You mean," he said without belief, "you don't think 1 could take care of you?"
"Tom," she said, "I...I'd rather bite out my tongue than say this. But you asked for it. You know cows and horses ...maybe better than anyone who ever rode for the Circle Three. For that" - her voice contracted as if she had to force the words out - "for that you get sixty dollars a month. And by your own account, you never held a steady job in your life."
He sat perfectly still for a long minute. A crazy black temper came up into him as swiftly as if somebody had taken a bite out of him with a rope end. Against that slash he was defenseless, for he knew that she happened to be right. He waited until the anger died out, and, when he spoke, it was entirely without expression.
"All right," he said at last. "I'll ride on, and you'll stay here. By and by you'll marry Jim Grover, a good, solid, young man, with a coming ranch. You'll marry him as a matter of course, in the regular run of events."
"Yes," she repeated, "I expect 1 will ...in the regular run of events."
The quick vitality had gone back from the surface of his face again, and his cool eyes were sleepy on the far fade of the trail. He let his horse shift its feet, in silent suggestion that she move on ahead. Yet, for a moment she paused there, waiting as quietly as he. Somehow, in that moment Cantrell knew that, job or not, money or not, hope of a future or not, she would still go with him if ever he asked her again. He sat motionless and silent, and at the end of a minute she let her horse drift downward into the thin dark.
Cantrell did not move on that week, or even that month, though why he stayed he had no idea. He saw now, for the first time in his life, that his wandering career had brought him into a blind canon. Not only had the long trails given him nothing to offer Marjory Andrews; they had also disarmed him of any means to a remedy. Jim Grover had six years' start on him. Grover had worked hard and stubbornly, and apparently with luck. He had a few hundred head of cattle, a few dozen horses, and, though he had mortgages and debts, he had credit, too. Jim Grover had accomplished more than anybody had a right to expect of a man at Jim's age. In comparison, Tom Cantrell was as good as afoot. Certainly he could not ask Marjory to stick around half a dozen years to see if he could overcome Grover's start.
Too, now that he thought of it, his effort to get Marjory to run off with him was not such a hot proposition as he had wanted it to look. Many a time Cantrell had slept hungry in the rain, dog dirty and living like a wolf. For the trail of a saddle bum is a whimsical trail, beset with many a good slam on the nose.
Yet Cantrell stayed on, often asking himself what he was waiting for. In a general way he was studying the valley - working along in it, familiarizing himself with its possibilities and people. At bottom, of course, what he wanted was a miracle that would enable him to go to war against Jim Grover. But he kept this hope down and simply stayed on.
And this situation, he found, was one that could quickly grow worse. Spring came over the hills with a rush, and it was time for branding. Cantrell had learned roping in Sonora; his sixty-foot rawhide reata had almost the dexterity of an elephant's trunk. He always looked forward to the brandings. But now, because he had not expected Cantrell to stay on, Old Man Andrews had made other arrangements, and Cantrell was not needed in the brandings. The best the Circle Three could do for him was a job behind a scraper and a span of mules, along with an itinerant muleskinner named Happy Withers.
Walking behind the scraper and the mules, Tom Cantrell marveled at himself
"I never thought 1'd sink so low," he told Happy Withers frankly, but without bitterness. "If you had told me 1 was ever going to be found afoot, playing a tune on the back end of a mule, why, I'd have laughed at you."
Happy Withers was a weary and washed-out little party who, through many vicissitudes, still thought of himsel
f as a buckaroo. "Me, too," he agreed. "But me, 1 sunk even lower once. 1 once milked some cows."
For three days Happy and Tom Cantrell grubbed ineffectually in the weed-grown bottom of an irrigation ditch. There had been little snow, and the stored waters of the Wagon Box River were so far short of expected levels that water stood even lower than the big concrete sluice that was supposed to carry it to Circle Three cultivation, and east winds had already dried out the hay fields beyond. The ditches had to be deepened to carry it to the lower land back from the river, and the sluice gate rebuilt, when Andrews got around to it. Happy and Tom Cantrell were not supposed to accomplish much, merely to muddle along in the crumbling mud until further notice.
Cantrell stuck to this program for better than two whole days. Mid-morning of the third day he pulled up his mules, and sat gloomily on the back of one of them, his sleet-blue eyes on the broken horizon.
"1 don't know but what I'll quit, too," said Happy Withers.
"The Oregon country is great stuff in spring," Cantrell said. But he was thinking of something else. There should have been some other way of getting this work done. There was a broken-down tractor on the place, but it lacked parts, and the company which had made it was extinct. There should have been some way of siphoning the water, instead of the massive labor of building a new sluice, but the levels were all wrong, and there were no materials. There was one power pump in the valley, but someone else was using that.
Cantrell unhooked his team. "I'll be back by sundown."
"You figure to draw your time?"
"Not yet."
The black anger was on him again, driving him into unsparing effort. For five days the fit held on.
On the sixth day Cantrell showed up on Bitter Flats, where Andrews was branding. He was equipped for rope work.
"Well, the water's running on the hay."
Old Man Andrews was tall and stooped, with sun-weary eyes that had lost their color, and a bony bald head. When emergency roused other men to a fury of action, old Andrews was accustomed to spit ironically and hold his own pace. But now genuine terror whipped across his craggy features.
"If you've cracked those dikes...."
"We wouldn't fool with dikes or gates. We rigged a siphon."
"Siphon? There's no pipe for a siphon. And there's no...."
"We found some tile," Cantrell told him, "and faked us a siphon."
"Tile won't siphon! The water seeps...."
"Bunk," said Cantrell.
"But you didn't have any pump to start the siphon."
"We plugged the ends and dipped up water with pails."
"But that main ditch wouldn't carry. The levels...."
"We deepened the ditch."
"You mean to tell me two men with mules...?"
"Happy and me was anxious to get through. We worked in shifts and run the tractor all night. After that it went faster."
"The tractor? What tractor?"
"One day I went to town and bought a wrecked car on credit. That night 1 patched up that old tractor with pieces of the car."
"But, man alive, even with the tractor...."
"Well, it did go kind of slow, until we rigged the drag line."
"Drag line?"
"We found a way to rig a drag line out of that big hay stacker."
This was too much for Andrews. He had to see it for himself. When he had seen, he stared a long time, his weather-beaten facade expressing disbelief. "Where the hell did you fall into all this loose-running savvy?" he demanded at last.
"1 helped move dirt in the Imperial, and Montana, and Gila Bend," Cantrell told him. "1 never was much of a hand to stay put."
"1'm damned," said Andrews. He turned his horse and started back to his branding. He hardly ever referred to the irrigation stunt again. When he did refer to it, it was in tones of incredulity and disbelief.
After the trick irrigation job was done, the work of the range proceeded. The spring was gone, and the summer wore on, and still Cantrell worked for the Circle Three. Now that he saw for sure that he had nothing to offer Marjory Andrews, he realized that she was the only wholly desirable thing he had ever seen. And he cussed himself, but he stayed.
Three evenings a week, as regularly as clockwork, Jim Grover rode with Marjory Andrews. To live near Marjory and see her every day of the world was a supreme privilege, but to catch and saddle her horse and then see her ride off with Jim Grover was a bitterness almost impossible to take.
Cantrell at one time or another had fought eighteen bouts in the professional ring, and he could have taken Grover apart. Cantrell had broken horses in eight states, and he could have outridden Jim Grover in any style Grover cared to name. Yet it was Grover who would presently marry Marjory Andrews. Everything Cantrell had done, everything he could do, summed up in a grand total of helplessness in the face of a destiny that he had not foreseen. In the light of these things, it was a welcome relief when old Paul Andrews transferred Tom Cantrell from the labors of the range to the feeding corrals at Bluestone.
Bluestone, at the foot of the valley, was a little dump that was trying to make itself into the beginnings of a town. As everywhere in the Fifty-Mile, the hand of Old Man Andrews showed prominently, for he owned the big feeding pens that justified Bluestone. Here a nearly senile old man named Ollie Macpherson was boss for the Circle Three. By pure force of habit this old-timer directed the feeding of cottonseed cake to the market cattle, the idea being to put such covering of meat onto them as would force a yell of enthusiasm from the cattle buyers. It was a very bad year for enthusiastic yells, or even whispers. Meantime, the actual work was done by a handful of antedated cow hands - mestizo breeds mostly - and by Tom Cantrell.
Cantrell saw less of Marjory Andrews here. Once a week sometimes oftener - Marjory Andrews came down to Bluestone. On these occasions she often sat for a quarter hour with Tom Cantrell on a corral fence, a slim, bright-faced figure, as out of place as a flower pinned on a steer. Cantrell inhaled smoke and tried not to look at her too much. Sometimes after he had talked with Marjory the mood of fury with which he had licked the irrigation project came back to him, so that he swore he would lick the Fifty-Mile if it took a hundred years.
After a mood like that he would take a spurt of working like three men at whatever project he could dig up. He doubled the capacity of the loading chutes, and set up a new quarantine pen beyond the tick dip. He got the tractor from the Circle Three, rebuilt it again, and graded half the feeding pens, so that in another spring the cattle would not stand hock deep in mire, as they usually did. Gradually he took over from old Macpherson the cutting and rationing of the beeves, introducing ideas he had picked up on feed lots from Brawley to the Buckeye Valley.
He even argued three weeks persuading Andrews to trim out his barren cows and feed them for beef. This was the reason that the Circle Three alone, in all the Fifty-Mile, fed cows that year, their raw-hipped she cattle were a laughing stock among the overflowing pens of smooth, straight-built baby beeves.
Then presently he remembered he was just a sixty-dollar cow hand, after all, and the trail pull returned, jerking at him unendurably. Sometimes he would think of the sultry, sweetaired nights of Mazatlan, where little adobes clustered close in the light of stars hardly farther than the palm tops, and endless Mexican songs wailed softly to the beat of murmuring guitars. Or on hot days he would get to thinking about the icy little streams of the Cascades, and he would almost smell the trout trying, and hear an elk whistling beyond timber where hardly anybody realized an elk would be any more. Or he would think of the branding fiestas of California, where all the neighbors get together and make a joke of the work, the girls roping and riding with the men. And he'd know for sure that a cowhand shoveling cottonseed cake at Bluestone might just as well be dead.
But still he stayed on, because he knew that, once he rode out of the Fifty-Mile, he would never see Marjory Andrews again. He stuck the summer out, and on through the fall works. Away from the feeding pens, ridin
g hard in the roundup, he was able to get a perspective on the year he had spent. Head down at his work, he had been unable to see the herd for the cows. But in the saddle again, he was able to see what he should have seen before. He knew now that he had failed - that his failure had been certain from the beginning. He had stifled the trail pull and stuck to his job; he had done the work of three men. And he was right where he might have expected to be. No place. He saw this all clearly by the time the fall work was done. He went to Old Man Andrews.
"I've got four months' pay coming, 1 think," he told the boss of the Circle Three. "It's time to be moving on."
He said the words almost reluctantly. The trail pull was on him very strong, like the nagging beat of a toothache, but more than ever it was difficult for him to imagine a life in which Marjory Andrews did not exist. He knew every glint in the high-country light in her fine hair, every shift of color in the moving depths of her restless eyes, and he could not leave these things behind him forever without an insuperable sense of loss.
To himself he said: Here goes nothing... that much is done with... and it time.
But now Old Man Andrews was studying Tom Cantrell with a hard, fixed eye. Cantrell had changed somewhat. He looked thinner and harder, and perhaps a little older, as if holding down in one place had let time catch up with him.
"No," Andrews said with a heavy and utter finality.
For a minute Cantrell could not think what the man was talking about.
"You aren't going to quit on me," Andrews told Cantrell. "Men that can get something done come too far between."
Cantrell began: "It's time 1...."
