by Zane Grey
“Wal, there’s Bodkin,” resumed Coglan. “He’s taken office as sheriff. No one in town cared to dispute his claim. An’ some of the Cattlemen’s Association appeared to be back of him.”
“Yu don’t tell me!” ejaculated Brazos. “Wal, thet’s a sticker. Coglan, shore as yu’re smokin’ thet punk cigar, Surface was stronger than I guessed. An’ his combine was stronger. . . . I’m a son of a gun.”
“Brazos, is Bodkin crooked?”
“Crooked! Say, man, a Missouri rail fence would be straight alongside Bodkin. . . . But come to think aboot it I didn’t implicate Bodkin. Neither did Bess in her confession. . . . Wal, of all the nerve! I wonder what Kiskadden an’ Inskip said aboot thet.”
“I’ll tell you, Brazos. I know them both well. An’ you bet this trip to town I was meetin’ everybody, buyin’ drinks an’ smokes, an’ thirstin’ for news. . . . Kiskadden said the situation was by no means cleared up. An’ Inskip said it never would be until the cattle range was all plowed up. Neither of them came out blunt about Bodkin. But Bilyen did. He said Miller had stepped into Surface’s boots an’ the new Cattlemen’s Association was as strong as ever, with fewer dissentin’ voices. What did Bilyen mean by thet, Brazos?”
“I don’t savvy. It’s got me buffaloed.”
“Wal, the town people are inclined to lay hands off. An’ the cattlemen are waitin’ to see what Bodkin makes out of his job.”
“Ahuh. Wal, I’m not predictin’,” said Brazos. “Let thet pass. . . . How aboot the Neeces?”
“I rode out to Twin Sombreros,” returned Coglan. “Thet’s where I seen Bilyen. Neece remembered me. He was sure a new man—if what I heerd was true. Same keen-eyed cattleman I knew, busy as a bee. Asked me if I had any stock to sell, an’ I said yes—what the rustlers left me. An’ he said, ‘Drive it down before the snow flies.’ . . . Bilyen took me all over the ranch. Surface had spent a pile of money on improvements. It sure is a wonderful ranch. I met the twins, June an’ Janis. Couldn’t tell them apart! But who’d want to? They ’peared to me like girls in a trance.”
“Trance! Wal, no wonder. . . . What’d they do with their restaurant?”
“Kept it, by golly. It’s a money-maker. They put in a manager—a woman whose name I forget—an’ they’ll run it as before.”
“Good idee. But I reckon all the young buckaroos will stop eatin’ there. . . . What’d Neece do with Surface’s ootfit?”
“Let ’em go pronto. He’s hired a new bunch of riders an’ he’s waitin’ for you to come back an’ be his foreman.”
“Aw!” gasped Brazos, and in his collapse he bit his cigar almost into two pieces.
“What ails you, cowboy?” queried Coglan. “Don’t be a damn fool now, an’ go ridin’ away! Yu should have seen the eyes of them twins when their Dad said thet.”
“Aw!” repeated Brazos, in greater volume.
“Cowboy, I’m givin’ you a pointer,” replied the puzzled homesteader. “Some of the young bucks around Las Animas would like to be in your boots. You might marry one of them twins. It wouldn’t make any difference which one. You’re a hero down thar, an’ you ought to make hay while the sun shines. Young Henry Sisk is throwin’ in with Neece on some pardnership deal. An’ Jack Sain is temporary foreman of the outfit. Them two boys ain’t lettin’ any grass grow under their feet. Bilyen says they make life miserable for the twins.”
“Aw, hell!” burst out Brazos, and unable to endure more he flung his cigar away and strode to the solitude of his camp.
Brazos sawed and split all the wood Coglan had hauled in for winter use. When he surveyed the cords of neatly stacked billets he could scarcely believe his own eyes. He belonged essentially to that class of cowboy who rode and stood guard, and handled ropes and guns. To have set Brazos Keene to the task of digging fence-post holes would have been to invite disaster. Yet there stood the evidence of his toil—a long winter’s firewood.
After that job was completed Brazos took to the slopes with a rifle. He climbed. He hunted. Deer, wild turkey and elk fell to his unerring aim; and it took strenuous work to pack the meat down to the valley. When to kill more would have been wanton slaughter, Brazos still climbed and hunted, but did not shoot again.
Brazos had the prairie range rider’s love for slopes and hills and peaks—all high places. Not since he left Don Carlos’ Rancho had he indulged in mountain climbing. Here he satisfied a long-felt want—a climbing and a hunting for he knew not what. It was perhaps the epitome of solitude.
As September wore on toward October he unconsciously grew to returning to certain places that fascinated him. One was a sunny open swale thickly carpeted with high silver grass and yellow daisies, and marked by clusters of aspens burning dead gold against the blue sky. Pines and firs walled this swale about. Deer and elk browsed there paying little attention to the lonely watcher.
Brazos went there every day, to cast himself on the thick grass just at the edge of the pines where sun and shade met. And here he would rest and dream for hours.
Another favored spot was a rocky glen, heavily timbered, and full of huge moss-covered boulders. At the bottom rushed a mountain brook, clear as crystal, falling white here and eddying there, filling the glen with melody. Such experiences were rare in a cowboy’s life. Brazos idled there the sleepy noon hours, when only a low moan of wind stirred the lofty tree tips, and the brook seemed to grow drowsy and tarry in its descent.
At length Brazos came to frequent more and more a lofty promontory and to linger there longer and longer. It looked down upon the fastnesses of the mountain gorges, the gray rock ridges, the green thickets and yellow patches, out through a grand gateway to the vast plateau to the south. Somewhere across that dim purple stretch Brazos had ridden the Old Trail from Dodge to Cimarron.
Coglan had been twice again to Las Animas to return with pleasant, disturbing, thought-provoking news and gossip. Brazos grew increasingly eager to ride down to Twin Sombreros. Yet he was loath to leave this high country. He would stay on into October. It seemed long since he had first arrived in Coglan’s, and though rest and change had come in full measure, the transformation he had hoped for had not materialized. Perhaps Brazos had longed for a miracle. He found that unless a man-killer retrograded toward the beast he would never be free from remorse, from doubt, from the consciousness that fate must await him with another encounter, that his past inevitably militated against his chances of making a wife and her children happy. But Brazos had to face that gamble.
He got back one October night to the valley to find Coglan home a day earlier than he had expected him. The rancher lacked his usual geniality.
“Bilyen says you’re stayin’ away too long. Bodkin is braggin’ he will arrest you if you ever come back.”
“Good Lord!” ejaculated Brazos, incredulously.
“Wal, thet oughtn’t to surprise you, Brazos,” said Coglan, tersely. “Sure we know his breed. Bodkin ain’t very bright. He’s like an animal. He soon forgets when the danger is gone. . . . But I reckon Bilyen is keen about your reputation. He’s sore. He knows soon as you come back to Las Animas thet Bodkin will shut his loud mouth.”
“Gosh, I hope he does,” replied Brazos, ponderingly.
“There’s a stranger lately dropped into town. Calls himself Knight an’ says he’s a cattle buyer for a big Kansas City firm. He an’ Bodkin got thick pronto. Bilyen remembers seein’ this man with Bodkin once last August.”
“Wal, I’ll ride down soon. gosh, I hate to leave this valley. . . . What else did yu heah, Coglan?”
“Not much. I didn’t go out to Twin Sombreros. But I met Neece in town. No one would think he’d ever been down an’ out. The Neece-Sisk-Henderson cattle deal went through. They’re runnin’ eighty thousand head.”
“Thet’s a solid combine. Reckon they’re gonna buck the Miller ootfit. Neece is not goin’ to get caught again. I reckon Bilyen is behind thet deal.”
“They’re buildin’ a big barn at the ranch. Hauled in a sawmill. Ha
nk says it’ll be the biggest in Colorado. They got the roof up an’ the floor down when the twins stopped work with an idee. To give a grand dance!”
“Twins—idee—dance?” echoed Brazos, suddenly intensely curious.
“So Hank said. An’ thet if you didn’t rustle down you’d miss a hell of a time.”
“Aw, June wouldn’t give a dance withoot me!” exclaimed Brazos, vaguely disbelieving.
“Girls are queer critters. You’d better rustle, Brazos.”
Nevertheless Brazos had to have one more climb up the scarlet and gold slopes to the heights.
The morning was frosty. The meadows and fields shone white. Over the valley hung a gray fog curtain through which faint blue patches and streaks appeared. Soon Brazos was lost in the cloud. At length when he emerged above it into the open sunlight the roof of this canopy resembled a soft pearly sea of rounded ripples with island crags lifting their tufted heads. And it was as if the sea circled the black base of a huge mountain with its peak rosy with the flush of sunrise.
Brazos climbed on into the forest and lost himself in the great windfalls and the jumbles of avalanche, where to cover a short distance he had to travel a meandering course, through a labyrinth of ruined walls and fallen timber, until he came out upon the promontory which had been his favorite retreat.
The grassy mossy ledge with its swaying columbines lay warm and dry and fragrant under the sun, its background a forest and its foreground a leap into the abyss. Far below hung the silver fog curtain, dissolving in places, moving slowly, split by spear-pointed firs and shiningfaced rocks.
Brazos had not yet found out why he came so often to this almost inaccessible spot. And now he divined that probably he never would know. He reveled in its color and beauty and wild grandeur, but these were only a part of what he felt. It was the nearest he could come to being an eagle, which boyish wish had persisted in him. The secret, perhaps, abided mostly in the solitude that seemed never to have been broken.
He sat down in his accustomed place and gave himself over to the influence of these lonely heights, feeling it magnified by the fact of this last visit and the need to carry it away with him, back to the haunts of men. Nature was lavish here with its magnificent ruggedness of cliff and peak, its ghastly bones of bared rock and bleached dead pines, its hundreds of perches that only an eagle could reach, its belts of scarlet, its patches of gold, its black fringe of fir high up and its purple clefts of canyon low down.
As Brazos gazed, a golden eagle crossed his vision, sailing on broad still wings across the void, dominant in his command of his kingdom of the heights. Suddenly he bowed his wings and shot like a thunderbolt into the depths.
The eastern wall of that colossal amphitheater was shrouded by shade, a blank mountain page, mysterious with its dim letter. Brazos followed the western fall, blazing with sunlight, to where it stepped down and down, in endless broken line, to the foothills below. These, black-domed and high, billowed away and down, losing height and color, until they sloped out into the world of plateau range.
Hours afterward Brazos wended a thoughtful way back to Coglan’s valley. He gathered from all his vigils up there that he had found a strength to lose himself in solitude and be at peace should his dream of love fail him. There was just one little ineradicable drop of bitterness in his cup and that was a strange vague doubt of the enchantment which burned like a rainbow in its promise of love, happiness, fortune.
Then he put it out of his mind and next morning at dawn he left Coglan’s and rode the down hill journey to Las Animas in eight hours.
Brazos installed himself again at Mexican Joe’s and sallied forth to visit the barber and to make purchases.
“Howdy,” he drawled to everybody. “I shore am glad to see yu-all again. Been holed-up in the hills, choppin’ wood an’ huntin’ deer. Looks like the old burg got along withoot me.”
Brazos walked into the big general store and said: “I want the doggonedest best ootfit yu have in this heah store.” Despite the most various and ample stock of cowboy garb short of Denver, Brazos seemed inordinately hard to please. “I gotta look handsome, which is shore a turrible job for me.” At last he chose a soft gray blouse and red scarf, a huge light sombrero, and the finest of high-top boots, soft as a glove and as snug. In addition to this principal outfit he bought low shoes and black socks, shirts, scarfs, underwear, a shaving kit, and altogether so many things that he forgot what they were. By the time his purchases had been brought to his room, darkness had set in. Brazos had supper with Joe and then went out to let the saloon and the gambling halls know he had returned. He went everywhere, even into Hall’s saloon, where they had printed “Brazos Keene” under bullet holes in the wall, and he was the same cool, easy, drawling cowboy as of old.
Next morning Brazos paid vastly more attention to his appearance than was usual with him. His cleanshaven face, tanned with a hint of red, did not show a line nor a shadow. “Doggone it! I could look better,” he soliloquized, dissatisfied. “But at thet I’m not so pore.” when he buttoned up his new gray coat he found that only the tip of his gun sheath, belted high, showed beneath it. That afforded him great satisfaction, but when he went out to ride to Twin Sombreros he left that coat open and hitched the gun sheath to its old place.
CHAPTER
11
BRAZOS turned off the road at the brook and rode down to the pine-skirted glade where he had once met Lura Surface. Almost he saw her red hair and green provocative eyes and enticing lips. Impossible to help a little twinge of regret!
“Doggone it! Where women air concerned no man is any good,” he soliloquized. “Heah I am burstin’ with love for the girl I’m goin’ to see—an’ yet regrettin’ I didn’t kiss thet red-haided cat!”
He forded the brook and rode through the pines down to the lane that came up from the pastures to the corrals and barns at the back of the ranch house. Presently he came upon the skeleton structure of a new barn, huge in dimensions. The floor was clean and shining. Benches had been built and set all around the wide square floor.
“By golly, I’m in time for thet dance.”
Another new structure, probably of Surface’s engineering, was a bunkhouse that almost could have rivaled Holly Ripple’s at Don Carlos’ Rancho. Saddle horses stood bridles down, and cowboys watched Brazos’ slow approach. He reined in before them. How many times in his range life had Brazos surveyed such a group with narrowed gaze! On this occasion it left him favorably impressed.
“Howdy, cowboys. Is this heah Twin Sombreros Ranch?” he drawled.
“It sure is, cowboy. Get off an’ be at home,” answered one young fellow.
“Where’s them twins? I want to hit them for a job ridin’ heah.”
“Fact is, stranger, we got so many bosses thet we don’t know who’s boss,” said another clear-eyed youth, with a laugh.
“How many bosses?” queried Brazos, in pretended alarm.
“Mr. Neece, Henderson an’ Sisk, Hank Bilyen an’ Jack Sain.”
“Doggone! Thet’s an ootfit of bosses. I’ll take my chance askin’ the twins.”
“Say, cowboy, you can’t fool us. You’re Brazos Keene,” spoke up another.
“Who’n hell said I wasn’t?” inquired Brazos, mildly.
“Hey, Jack, come here,” called Brazos’ first interrogator sticking his head into the door of the bunkhouse. “You’re wanted.”
Whereupon Jack Sain emerged to look, to stare, to give a whoop and thump clinking off the porch. No doubt as to his gladness! It shone in his eyes.
“Brazos! What you doin’ on that hoss? Git down!” he yelled, leaping to meet Brazos’ outstretched hand.
“Howdy, Jack. Gosh, but yu look fat to what yu was. . . . Heah! careful of thet hand! . . . I’m tolerably glad to see yu, Jack.”
“Maybe I’m not. Why, cowboy, if you hadn’t come, there wouldn’t have been a dance. Bilyen was sore an’ Neece was worried. An’ the twins! They don’t ask about you any more. They’re mad!”
“Aw, thet’s too bad. I’m doggone sorry.”
“Where you been? You look great—young an’ pert—somehow different.”
“I been workin’ oot. . . . Jack, introduce me to these heah boys.”
“Damn! Excuse my manners, Brazos, I clean forgot. This is Neece’s outfit, picked by. . . . Bilyen Fellars, walk forward an’ meet Brazos Keene.”
“Shore glad to meet yu-all,” replied Brazos, and shook the hand of each in turn. They were the youngest, cleanest bunch of cowboys Brazos had seen for years. Then Hank Bilyen appeared on the scene.
At sight of Brazos he swore lustily. But the cloud left his tanned face. He beamed.
“Yu Texas ghost! . . . I was scared stiff. Reckoned yu’d pulled yore old trick of ridin’ away. Pile off so I can hug yu!”
Brazos warmed to this welcome, yet it gave birth to an incalculable regret. Was he not going to ride for Twin Sombreros Ranch?
“Come on to the house,” said Hank, eagerly. “Neece was just hollerin’ aboot yu. He wants to go on puttin’ up thet barn, so to get it done before the snow flies. An’ he cain’t go on with it because June and Janis wouldn’t give the dance ’till yu come.”
“Wal now, thet’s doggone nice of them. . . . Hank, do I look all right to yu? I’m kinda nervous.”
“Nice? My Gawd! Yu look like Brazos Keene ten years ago—a pink-cheeked, curly-haired cowboy of sixteen, which you was when I met yu first at Doan’s Post.”
“Only ten years? I feel turrible old, Hank. But if I don’t look it, what the hell? . . . Say, isn’t thet Henry Sisk on the porch?”
“Yep. One of Abe’s pardners. Fine chap, but so lovesick he cain’t be himself.”
“Aw! Lovesick? Who with?” ejaculated Brazos, in alarm.
“Janis. An’ is she leadin’ him a merry chase!”
Brazos’ keen perception never had been any stronger than when he met Henry Sisk again. The young rancher was a gentleman but his courtesy did not deceive Brazos. He was not glad for the return of the cowboy. Then a resonant voice, dry and crisp, gave Brazos a thrill.
