by Noel Loomis
Clay Hughes, single man in saddle, was one of those who keep the ponies at work. He turned to the long lonelinesses of the horse trails with an instinct inherited from men drawn irresistibly to the frontier in a day when the frontier could offer no desirable thing. He had been working stock since his first memory; he supposed he would be running cattle—though he hoped it would be his own cattle—when he died. At twenty-five, Hughes owned the horse and saddle he rode, and the clothes he stood in; and little more. But the long horse-and-rope labors of mountain and plain had given him other things less easily detached.
The quick strength of his hands and his easy endurance in the saddle were perhaps the least of his heritages from the trails. More important, probably, was a certain essential attitude toward himself and the trails he rode; it had carved a deep curving grin line in one cheek, though not the other, and had put into his blue eyes a humor that was at once mild and keen. He was tall and long-legged, and though sufficiently slender, he lacked that notable gauntness common to most in a country where men grow as lean as the living rock; his physical ability was principally visible in a certain easy poised balance of movement, not only in the saddle, but on the ground as well. No one ever saw Clay Hughes look sprawling or unready; he was like some well-tuned animal, too close knit ever to take a wholly ungraceful position.
And he was a rolling stone. Young as he might be called, he had worked stock all the way from the Panhandle to Powder River, and westward through the Beaverhead country to the Divide, and beyond. He had never been able to take root. Sooner or later, wherever he might be, the old nagging question always returned to him: “Is this all there is?” And when that happened, all too frequently for his own good, nothing seemed possible to him but to move on.
He might be sleeping upon a far lonely prairie when the trail itch would come and wake him up, and he would sit up in his soogans staring at the stars, aware that this range could hold him no more. Or he might be foreman at a branding corral, or busting broncs at ten dollars a head, or running a pack train: anywhere or any time that irrational impatience might come upon him, and set him once more upon the weary, welcome trail to nowhere. Those long trails had made him at home everywhere, comfortable in any place, and almost any situation.
His circumstance now, however, was an unfamiliar one, and he was at first uncertain what he had better do. Something was warning him that there were entanglements ahead; that he had better go over the hill now, leaving alone a situation in which he had no logical part. That sense of the impending, perhaps, took its source from a dimly incoherent note of warning apparent in the unschooled phrases of a letter now in his saddle bag. The presence of Clay Hughes in Crazy Mule Canyon was attributable to more than chance, if less than fortune. The letter in his saddle bag was from Bob Macumber, foreman of the Lazy M, now but a few hours’ ride beyond. Those two, Hughes and Macumber, had crossed trails more than once; and though their meetings and partings were as casual as those of range horses, a strong tacit bond of friendship existed between them, made up of the exact understanding which each had of the other’s ability. Lately, word having reached Hughes that Bob Macumber had become foreman of the Lazy M, the big outfit at the head of Buckhorn Valley, Hughes had written to ask if Macumber had a job for him there. The reply was the first written communication he had ever had from Bob Macumber.
Friend Clay:
I am glad to hear they haven’t hung you yet.
Yes, you can have a job at the Lazy M if you want to come, but I will be honest with you, if I was you, you had better stay where you are.
Conditions is very funny here in the Buckhorn. I would not be surprised if something would bust wide open any time now, and anybody can have my job that wants it.
Take my advice and stay where you are at. Whatever become of them half-blood colts?
Yours truly,
Robert Macumber.
That peculiarly reticent letter had reached Clay Hughes during one of those periodic lapses of his when his bed-roll was as good as on his horse, and his horse as good as on the move. With the long-dust mood upon him, he had taken Bob Macumber’s unenthusiastic letter in the only way he could possibly take it—as an irresistible invitation: an invitation, he was wondering now, to what?
Tonight just before dusk, obedient to his instinct to take a look around before turning in, Hughes had climbed to a high point on the rocky rim which rose sheer above the Crazy Mule. A little way beyond, the Gunsight Pass trail which he had followed plunged downward sharply into the valley of the Buckhorn itself. From his high lookout point he had seen the valley spread out below him, a hundred mile reach, mountain-hemmed, but broad and level, stretching into distances lost in the purples of approaching night. Hughes experienced a quick lift of the spirit.
Below him, not five miles from the foot of the mountain trail, lay a broad patch of green, where acequias carried the waters of the river to long stands of alfalfa, or some other hay. In the heart of this green carpet, backed by the quarter-mile shadows of evening, there nested a stand of cottonwood and willow, half screening a scatter of adobe buildings. This, he knew, must be the Lazy M, the ranch that commanded all the northern reaches of the Buckhorn.
By the color of the land he could judge the number of cows each reach of the valley could sustain. Here to the north a man could try twenty-five or thirty head to the section. Farther on, where cattle showed as ruddy specks, fifteen to the section would be enough; and farther yet, comprising the greater part of the valley, lay the desert, where a man would run what cattle he could. Assuredly the Lazy M, at the head of the water, held the present and the future of the Buckhorn in its own hands.
He realized suddenly that he was looking upon a vast dominion. Gazing down upon the Buckhorn he could envision the achievement of the coming years: the year by year advance of ditch and dam, conserving the spring rush of the high snows, until at last the Buckhorn should blossom with the full use of its water. With the great reserve of feed which could be raised upon the watered land, the day would come when the Buckhorn herds would be numbered in hundreds of thousands of head. That was the domain which a man of strength and vision could build for himself, and for the world, in Buckhorn Valley; the unborn sovereignty whose future rested in the master of the Lazy M. It was a good stand, a great stand; the best he had ever seen.
Then, before the death of this stranger in his camp had added grim reality to the vague warning in Bob Macumber’s letter, it had been hard to believe that some hidden struggle was rising to the surface in that valley, that the Lazy M was waiting in the shadow of some impending disaster.
Even yet the mystery of that shadow gave the vast reach of Buckhorn Valley the irresistible allure of the unknown. As his mind returned to it, he grinned at himself wryly for ever supposing that he had any choice as to what he must do now. With the first light, when he had caught up and saddled, he turned the roan’s head onward and downward—toward the Lazy M.
The sun was hardly above the jagged black outline of the Finger Peaks to eastward when Clay Hughes came out upon the hanging bench at the foot of Gunsight Pass. Once more, nearer this time, he saw the hundred mile valley of the Buckhorn spread below him, sometimes broad and flat, sometimes broken by thrusting spurs of mountains whose long barriers seemed to guard a chosen range. The Lazy M seemed to have its own way here, a practical monopoly of the water. He was wondering what disaster could threaten anyone who held such a grand range for running stock.
Suddenly the rider conveyed to his pony the faintest flexure of his fingers upon the reins; and the blue roan stopped, and stood with that motionless disinterest of a horse very far away from the feed bins behind and with no special hope of feed bins ahead—literally a horse balanced in space and time. For a moment it had seemed to Hughes that the desert was trying to give him an answer to the question in his mind; an answer which he could not read.
Far down the valley of the Buckhorn—fifty miles it must have been—the early mirage parted and drew aside like the
sudden draining away of false waters, so that for a few moments, by a trick of the desert, there became visible to the man on the hanging trail the minute huddled outline of adobe houses, naked and sun-whipped in the empty plain. That would be Adobe Wells, parched but clinging stubbornly to life in the desert.
Through the dry air of the Buckhorn he could make out every detail of that flat, sprawling cluster, microscopic, but surprisingly distinct. He could see the steely glint of the spur railway which ended at Adobe Wells, and the sketchy outline of loading corrals, covering a much greater area than the town itself. Even at first glance, Hughes thought that town was ugly. Adobe Wells looked like the worthless fragments of something smashed to bits by the hammering of half a century of sun. And those fragments somehow had a look of insensate stubbornness; as if they forever waited a malignant destiny, unable to yield their place until that destiny was fulfilled.
Turning over in his mind his experience of the night, together with Macumber’s cryptic letter, Hughes was suddenly aware that he was looking down upon the true materials of war. If one man lived who controlled the desert—as in truth one man controlled the Buckhorn water—the man of the desert would hate the man of the grasslands with a hatred dry as the forage of an August prairie. Only the least spark would be needed to sweep all the Valley of the Buckhorn with a consuming feud…
Hughes tightened his legs almost imperceptibly upon the barrel of the roan, and horse and rider jogged downward into Buckhorn Valley.
Chapter Two
Bob Macumber, Hughes was glad to find, was almost the first man in sight when Clay coon-trotted into the layout of the Lazy M an hour later. Macumber shook hands with a strong wrenching grip, but almost no words at all.
“Why, hello, Clay.”
“Howdy, Bob.”
They stepped back and regarded each other with mild satisfaction; Macumber might have been looking over a favorite cow pony, pleased that the animal seemed to have wintered fairly well.
“Got your letter all right,” said Hughes.
Bob Macumber searched the ground for a straw, found one, and chewed it reflectively. An uneasy melancholy seemed to be upon the man, resting heavily upon his blocky shoulders. His short legs, bowed and powerful, seemed planted with an unusual solidity, giving him a look of baffled stubbornness.
“I don’t suppose,” Macumber grunted, “you sighted anybody, coming over the Gunsight.” His face was expressionless, a rugged irregular face such as a man might chop out of wood with a hatchet.
“Well, yes,” said Hughes. “There’s a dead man up there, Bob.”
Macumber turned like a wheeling bear and took half a step toward a cow pony that stood saddled beside the nearest corral; but checked, and turned back to Hughes.
“What did he look like?”
Hughes told him, reeling off details. “A kind of easygoing, cowhand-looking feller, maybe four years older than me,” he finished.
“How’d they get him?”
“One shot, drilled clear through, from behind and to the left. Got his left lung, I’d say. He checked in at about quarter after two this morning.”
“Real close guessing.”
“I was with him when he died, Bob.”
Macumber’s mild eyes jerked back to Hughes’ face.
“He come stumbling into my camp,” Hughes explained.
“Talk any?” asked Macumber, very low.
“Few words, Bob.”
“Come here,” Macumber growled. He gave Clay’s arm a quick haul, as if the cowboy had to be started by hand, and went striding ahead toward the largest adobe.
The ranch house of the Lazy M was built in the shape of a commodious square about an open patio. Its batten-shuttered windows were deeply recessed in walls the least of which was four feet thick, after the old southwestern fashion. Long gritty winds had sanded off the harsh corners, weathering the massive adobe until it seemed integral with the land.
The half-dozen outbuildings were of the same stuff, thick-walled and solid, with the heavy butt ends of timbers sticking out of the adobe at the line of their flat roofs. And all through the layout of the Lazy M stood the tall cottonwoods, scattered in random clumps. They rattled drily in the hot wind of the valley, and threw shifting mottles of shade upon the sunny walls of the adobes. Their height and vigor suggested plainly that their roots were finding plenty of water, deep under the hot ground.
Following Macumber into the ranch house, Hughes found himself in a great shadowy hallway. Beyond, the patio opened; in the contrasting smash of its sunlight Hughes saw with visual shock the bright green of clipped grass, and the astounding scarlet mass of a bougainvillea, which climbed the posts of an inner veranda beyond. Macumber, turning aside, knocked upon a heavy door, and entered without awaiting the growl of acknowledgment from within.
An old man, dressed like a common cow hand, sat at a safe-like desk of old-fashioned design. The gaunt, big-boned frame of old man Major looked little at home in a swivel chair. His face was that of an old cow foreman, deeply furrowed, heavily weathered, but scrupulously shaved. Only his grey mustache, clipped short and straight at the line of the thin lips, suggested any compromise with modern ways.
But it was the presence of the other person in the room which appeared to dumfound Macumber, who started to speak, failed, and stood turning his big hat in his hands. A girl was sitting near the old man’s desk, and Hughes grinned, remembering that Bob Macumber was always tongue-tied by girls. She wore belted overalls and flannel shirt such as riders wear; but her fine faintly wavy hair, looking dust-colored in the shadowy light, altered the effect to something supremely feminine, supremely young—and Macumber was put out of working order.
“Mr. Major,” Bob got out, “this here is a good rider, Clay Hughes.”
The old man nodded, watching Macumber, as if he sensed—or expected—more here than the advent of a hand. The range foreman turned and made a curious, inarticulate gesture with his hat toward the girl; but no words came out of him.
“What the devil’s the matter with you?” Major demanded testily.
“Mr. Major,” said Macumber in a thick voice, “there’s a man been killed.”
Glancing at the girl, Hughes saw that she did not appear to have moved. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, and she was watching her father with unreadable eyes. Suddenly Clay Hughes was struck by the fact that the faces of the men were rough and ugly, and that a cow camp, however elaborate, was made to seem crude and makeshift by the presence of this girl. Her casual stock-working clothes, of which only the boots were beautiful, could not conceal the slim strong grace of her body, any more than the deep golden tan of her skin could conceal that her face was delicately and beautifully made. It seemed strange to find her here in what, without her, would have been after all, just another cattle range. But this room, this range, could never be ordinary while she sat there among them, anomalously belted and spurred—but very much a girl.
An odd stillness seemed to come upon old man Major while, for a long moment, the cattleman and his foreman held each other’s eyes. Then Major got up and walked to the wooden-barred recess of the window. He stood looking out for some moments; and as he stood there much of the weight of his years seemed to drop away from him, so that the silhouette against the outer glare of the sun might have been that of a young man. When he spoke, however, his voice was very old.
“You’d better chase along, Sally.”
The girl looked astonished. After a moment she said, “You’re sure you want that?” The low pitch of her voice surprised Hughes, it made her seem so much more mature than she had looked. It occurred to Hughes that the trail which had led him here was different from all those others he had traveled. He had followed a thousand long horse trails, drawn on by an unidentified allure of things supposedly waiting beyond; but until now none of them had ever brought him to anything at all extraordinary at the end.
“Chase along, I said,” Major repeated. “Go see how that mare is getting along.
”
She hesitated a moment more, then left them silently. Hughes prevented his eyes from following her as she went out. Something more than a slim belted figure seemed to have left the room when she was gone. The space she left remained definitely vacant, and the place lost its meaning.
The old man waited a long minute more before he turned to face them. “Who is it?”
“Hugo Donnan!”
Oliver Major smothered an oath. “Who knows about it besides you?”
“Clay Hughes, here, is the only one knows anything about it. He just swung down, and I hazed him right in.”
“Let him tell it, then.”
The eyes of old man Major bored into Clay as he repeated briefly what he had told Macumber of the death of the stranger. Major’s questions were few, and had to do chiefly with the description of the wounded man.
“There’s no doubt of it, Bob,” he said at last.
“No sir; that’s Donnan all right.”
Major swung upon Hughes. “Did Donnan say anything before he died?”
A hard, speculative quality came into Hughes’ blue eyes, altering their mildness. He answered Major as he had answered Macumber. “Few words.”
“And what were those words?”
Hughes hesitated a moment more. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “you don’t want to know what those words were.”
The old man’s voice rose to a harsh thunder. “You mean to stand there and hold out on me?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Clay answered. “Set easy.”
The surprise that swept the old man’s face was followed immediately by the narrowing of a swift suspicion. Hughes smiled faintly, and, flicking his tobacco sack from the pocket of his shirt, began the rolling of a cigarette.
Oliver Major’s voice crackled and thundered. “So that’s the tune, is it? Well, get this, young man: if I start to have what you know out of you, I’ll have it out of you, all right! If you aim to come in here and—”
