“I don’t see it that way.”
“Cain, we’ll run all of you little men out of the country before the snow flies this fall.”
Cain glanced over at the dozen armed cowboys half-hidden in the chokecherries. “You haven’t got enough guns to bluff us, Jesse, even with them. As you know, we elected us a sheriff last year.”
At that Jesse began to curse, loud, profane. “Yeh, that Ned Sine, that mother-forking bastard. If I’d’ve known he was going to turn traitor on me when he worked for me I’d’ve drilled him center right then and there. May the Devil fly away with his soul and the dogs water on his grave.”
Cain said, “Give up, Jesse. Bighorn County was meant for the small stockman.”
Jesse rose in his saddle. His brows climbed his forehead, revealing the high whites of his eyeballs. “It’s always been big-spread country and by Grab it’s gonna stay big-spread country or my name ain’t Billy Hell.”
Cain waved a hand at the canyon they were in, then waved down at the Crimson Wall below to the east. “Look at it. Small valleys with the hogback ridges making natural barriers between one spread and another. God meant Bighorn County for the little man. It’s not like it is down on the Sweetwater. Or just south of here near Casper, where your friends, Senator Thorne and Governor Barb, has their spreads. Where the country is one big pasture from the North Pole to the Gulf of Mexico and not a stick, no, not even a twig to get in the way. That country I admit was meant for big outfits. But not this. This country here is a little pocket all by itself. Especially this side of the Bitterness.”
Jesse’s already red face turned a deeper red. He was almost too choked for words. “It was my country before this and it’s going to stay my country after this.”
Cain said, “You’re forgetting something, Jesse. Who really owns the land you graze your cattle on? We all do. It’s public domain. All you own is the three-twenty homestead you built your ranch buildings on. Just like the rest of us who got us a piece of land from the guv’ment too.”
Jesse said, “But you forget we big fellers was here first. Why, it was me and fellers like Thorne and Barb that built up this country. And from nothing, too. With beans and whisky. And dirty old dugouts for our wimmen. And with baking-powder bread when they wasn’t no wimmen. With Indians hot on our necks night and day. Why, not even the Pilgrim Fathers had it as tough. Why, if it hadn’t been for us there never would’ve been a American territory out here, let alone a state. Cain, I tell you, we’re not just going to sit around here like a bunch of big-hearted parsons while a lot of honyocker newcomers and dishonest cowpokes with their hoes and plows and Sunday schools—”
“Hrrp!” Cain cleared his throat loudly, and just barely managed to sit tight. Again he could feel dirt under the nail of his trigger finger. “Listen, if it comes to that, you know we’d all rather have American big spreads in here if it has to be big spreads. Instead of them high-headed English absentee owners. English absentee owners just naturally ain’t good for the country, mostly because they ain’t got much heart for the American little man. While the American big man sometimes has. Them English is the worst foreigner we ever let into the States. You know that. And you two especially should know that.” Cain did a little dance in his saddle. “But, for a fact now, Jesse, the times have changed. The little man is in this valley to stay. Whether it’s the dry farmer like Red Jackson, or horse rancher like Dencil Jager, or sheepman like my brother Dale, or small stockman like myself.”
Jesse cursed. “Blast the guv’ment for passing that homestead law. Blast the Immigration Bureau for allowin’ all that leftover honyocker riffraff to come in from Europe. And blast the railroads for bringing them all the way here by the carload. A great blasting damnation on them all!”
The brook behind them gurgled over stones. Out of the comer of his eye, Cain spotted a small herd of antelope high on a bench. Cain restrained an impulse to grab the Winchester tucked under his right leg. Then, even as he watched, the head buck in the herd showed his tin-pan tail and with a flick all the pronghorn were gone.
Cain said, “Sorry, Jesse, but them’s the times.”
“Well, goddam the times then!”
“And maybe you should check it to the will of God.”
“And goddam God then tool”
Silence. Saddle leather creaked in the chokecherries. Lonesome and Jesse’s horse nosed each other in friendly fashion, lipping each other a little. Mitch’s horse, like its master, remained offish.
Cain said, “Jesse, in some ways you and the earl, and Senator Thorne and Governor Barb, got it coming to you. After you fellows was almost cleaned out by the big freeze-out four winters ago, you set a lot of your boys adrift. Nobody worried about them. Well, now that times is better, them cowboys have elected to stay out. And set up on their own like I done. Because they remember.”
Jesse said, “Cain, you fellows are crowdin’ us and I’m warnin’ ye. We’re gonna fight back, pronto.”
“Better remember we also elected us a judge last fall. With Judge Traves on the bench, there ain’t a jury in the county that’ll find against a gunfighter or a rustler. So much are the people agin you fellows and your high-headed ways.”
“Cain, listen. Trying to squeeze eight married couples into the same bed just don’t work. You know that, you old stubhorn you.”
“If the bed is big enough, it will. Or if the couples is runt enough.”
Mitch broke in with a scoffing snort. “I suppose that’s the way you three Hammett brothers cut the bed with kissin’ cousin Rory —even if Dale is the only one married to her legal.”
Lonesome turned his handsome black head and caught the toe of Cain’s boot in his mouth and gave it a tug, as if to say, “All right, we’ve had enough of this. Let’s head for oats and home.”
“In a minute, boy,” Cain said. Then Cain suddenly turned on Mitch. He rose in his saddle even as his left hand came up with his quirt. He lashed Mitch across the face, once, twice, raising instant welts. “I’ll ask you to keep Rosemary’s name off your tongue. You have a woman of your own to dribble on.”
Mitch threw up an arm; quailed; scrunched down in his saddle. Then, a second later, Mitch’s left hand shot down.
“And don’t try for it, bud, or I’ll burn you down!” Cain’s left hand hung poised over his gun too, hovering separate and apart from him, a rattler free to strike on its own.
Jesse abruptly came down. “All right, that’s enough! The both of you!” Jesse spurred his horse between Cain and Mitch. Then over his shoulder he said to Cain, with a look of what almost seemed like pleading in his dark bold eyes, “So you ain’t acceptin’ my invitation?”
“I’m sorry, Jesse, but like I say I’m throwin’ in with the little man.”
With that Jesse threw up an arm. In an instant the cowboys in the chokecherries wheeled out and thundered off, Jesse and Mitch following, with Mitch, red-necked, turning around, once, to give Cain a glittering look of hate. Higher on the bench another bunch of cowboys clopped out of brush too and joined the first group.
Cain
Lonesome and Animal rolled along swiftly, eight hooves hitting the earth with rocking cadence, with ringing pound on rock, with muted sound on dirt. Leather creaked. Cain’s seat clung to the cantle with a soft sucking sound every time Lonesome came down. The dead bighorn flopped behind on Animal’s back, head and horns on one side and skinful of choice meats on the other.
The footslopes gradually leveled off into a long troughing valley. Behind and high above were the Big Stonies, the white peaks clear and bluish in the stark midday sun. Ahead stretched the soft red cliffs of Crimson Wall. A cooling wind soughed slowly down the valley, claddering the bottom leaves of the cottonwoods, tinkling the prisming aspen, raising little red whirlwinds off the ground.
The valley earth had the color of dried blood turned to soft red dust. It stived up around them in a gentle rolling following cloud. Cain coughed in it. Lonesome and Animal snorted to clear their nostrils in i
t. Presently red dust got into the corners of Cain’s eyes and they teared red mud, giving him the look of a fleeing Oedipus bleeding from the eyeballs. His black clothes slowly pinked over.
Great herds of cattle began to show. Flows of spotted red hides moved over a thousand hills. The light wind blew all the tails sideways, to the south. The nearest cows wore the Derby brand. They grazed slowly. Their rasp tongues poked in and out between darning-needle grass, gathering in only the more succulent short grasses. Some of the cows, hungry for seasoning, climbed to the foot of the red cliff and nibbled on the pale green leaves of salt sage.
An occasional mule-eared rabbit shot from cover, and sprang long, to the right and then the left, rear legs and high ears showing. Cain remembered that as a boy Gramp Hammett had told him jack rabbits always ran uphill. For a long time he had a vision of mountaintops being overrun with jack rabbits.
Horses began to show next. Dencil Jager’s lay like a gray crab over their left flank. Bar Forty-one stood for the year when Dencil finally got married. The horses were scattered over the greening redlands in small bands. Some of the colts slept at the feet of their grazing dams, and except for wiggling ears assumed a deathlike pose in the grass. The horses were of all colors: paints, wolfskins, crow-blacks, buckskins, dollar-spots, polecats, blues, sorrels, bays, chestnuts. Most were the new quick quarter-horse bred atop the old mustang base, a specialty of Jager’s. Most were tame. Some of the nearer horses looked up with quick heads, manes flowing back, nickering at Lonesome and Animal. But both Lonesome and Animal were all business. They were in a hurry to get home to grain and barn.
Near the turn where Red Fork headed for Shaken Grass, a band of some twenty-odd half-wild ones suddenly threw up their heads with a wild startled look and broke into a shying gallop, the colts with their fawnlike rears chasing far ahead of their dams, hooves dopping, tails popping.
Cain watched them go with a keen eye. It was from just such a band of Jager horses that he’d spotted a little black colt and had fallen in love with it, had fed it from a bottle like he might a bum lamb, had called it Lonesome. He’d had no trouble breaking Lonesome into a good riding horse. Bucky his cow pony had given him plenty of trouble, but Lonesome had just naturally grown up into a wonderful trail horse.
They came up over a rise and below lay the Jager ranch yard: barn, corrals, shed, and house. The circular breaking corral with its high pole fence especially caught the eye. It was built of huge timbers hauled down from the mountains and inside was worn as smooth as a honing stone. The strong smell of horse manure and hoof rind hit the nose. Cain liked the smell most times, but this time it seemed to come a bit too thick for him, like stifling smoke almost.
He saw movement near the house. Dencil. And his wife Clara. In an argument too, if one could trust joggled eyes. Dencil was scuffing the ground with his boot; Clara’s head was jerking up and down. Clara was also holding the new baby, with the two other little tykes, girls, underfoot and gawking at it all.
Cain touched Lonesome under the belly, and both horse and mule broke into a lightsome canter down the sage-tufted slope. They slanted through an open pole-gate, stirred up a cloud of manure dust below the barn, clattered around some feedbunks, and then rocked across the barren red yard, coming to a flourishing stop beside the family. “How do, folks,” Cain greeted.
Cain hated family fights, and he hoped his showy arrival might break up the ruckus. But Jager, who always had a quiet smile for him, this time gave him only a quick troubled low-eyed look and then stared down at the ground again, while Clara kept up her harangue as if no more than a fly had dropped by for a visit.
“—it was a mistake to come all the way out here to the ends of the earth, Dencil, and you know it,” Clara shrilled. “Far better we should’ve stayed in Antelope, with you running a livery stable, since you liked horses so well, where Sheriff Sine would have been around to protect us, when you know neither one of us ain’t much on fighting, let alone—”
“Pah!” Jager spat from under his huge mustache, still glaring down at the ground, scuffing at a horseball with a stained boot. Jager was very bowlegged, and every time he kicked the horseball the side of his boot, not his toe, hit it.
“You go ‘pah’ yourself, you big boob you.” Clara had rashy skin. Her eyes were almost those of a blind one, a hazed-over skim-milk blue. When she became angry the blue in them slowly whitened to the color of frozen milk. “Dencil I If you was to die for it, you wouldn’t fight with a butterfly for the sake of your family, let alone an ordinary fly, would you? Dencil, I tell you, I sometimes just don’t know what—”
Jager threw back his tan hat, revealing a very high round forehead. He tugged at one of his big flap ears as if he were trying to shake a bug out of it. The tips of his mustache waggled up and down like the broken wings of a blackbird. The big round forehead and the huge mustache made his head seem much too large for his short body and stumpy bowlegs. “Pah!” he exclaimed again.
“Dencil Jager! That’s enough out of you! These snotnoses of yours’s already got a bad enough start in life without you swearing around them like that!”
“But I didn’t swear, Clara.” Dencil looked down at his two little girls. “Did I, Sukie? Dody?”
The girls blinked up at him like a pair of baffled puppies. They were exactly what she called them—snotnoses. They were always dripping and the roots of their noses were always inflamed. They had the weak chins of baby squirrels. And like their mother’s, their little bodies had the look of being poorly knit.
Watching it all from his lofty saddle, Cain shook his head. If ever a family had the look of doom hovering over it, this one did. That Clara! Man! It was hardly a wonder cousin Rory said of her that she was too dumb to teach a setting hen to cluck. Once again Clara reminded him of an old heifer Gramp Hammett owned back in Siouxland. The heifer had been so poorly, so bony, none of the bulls in the neighborhood would top her. And she was a full ten years old before a half-blind bull, scenting her in one of her romantic moods, finally did cover her. When questioned about it, Gramp said he’d kept the old maid heifer around the place so she might have her chance at sex before she was sent off to the slaughterhouse. Well, the chance almost drove her crazy. Because by great luck she became pregnant. Cracking her ice had snapped her brain. When the little calf came—her dead ringer in markings and also hardly worth a bullet—she went on the prod. No one, not even Gramp, could get in the same pasture with her. Tail switching, she set after anything moving within a mile of her. Gramp finally had to shoot her to repossess his pasture. And so now too poor old Clara. Caught finally by a bull, marrying Dencil Jager in her thirty-eighth year, she’d lost her head. The outrage of having been broken into at last, and of finally having three kids one right on top of the other, had been too much for her. It had made of her a nutzy switchtail.
Cain swung down from the saddle and dropped Lonesome’s reins to the ground. He bowlegged stiffly up beside Dencil. “Well, Dencil, what seems to be the trouble here? Somebody threaten to hang you?”
Clara noticed Cain for the first time. “Oh, so you know about that then too?” With her free hand, the left, she covered her eyes. Two worn rings, a diamond engagement ring and a wedding ring, shone in the sun. Both rings were too big for her, and even as Cain watched, the weight of the setting in the diamond ring made it turn on her finger.
Cain tipped his hat to her. “Hey, that so? What happened?”
Jager ran a hand up and down his pant leg. Stray horsehairs wafted around his boots. Jager wore no gun. Jager had once told Cain that he felt safer admitting he wasn’t overgood with a six- shooter.
The vague milk eyes of the little girls staring up at him finally got Cain. He touched the tops of their twine-hair heads.“Don’t you think you little tykes ud better …”
Before he could finish he heard it. Then saw it. Rattler. It lay in a folded coil of two eights, with the top eight quivering and sliding over the bottom eight, while up through the middle of the whole coil
trilled a tufted stalk. The snake’s arrow-shaped head wavered back and forth in a slow tense dance.
There was a shot; the head of the snake vanished; dust exploded up around where the head had been; and Cain found himself with gun in hand.
Slowly the rattler uncoiled out of its double eights and in a long lazy undulation stretched out on rocky ground. For a little while its tail rustled softly against a small sagebrush.
Everybody stood enstatued for a moment: Dencil with head shot forward and mustache tips stiff; Clara on toetip with free hand over mouth; the little girls slowly wying their heads around and down; and Cain with smoking six-gun in hand.
“Great granpap!” Cain exclaimed. “That was a close call! The biggest snake I ever seen without likker!”
The baby awoke in its wrappings and began to cry. Only then did Clara come to. She blew sky-high. “Oe! Dencill! Dencilll!” She stooped down, the bawling baby almost tipping out of her stiff arm, and clutched the girls to her flat bosom.
Dencil awoke from his freeze. His voice was a sudden roar on the yard. “Get! In the house! All of you!” He gave Clara such a shove she almost fell down. “Get!” He gave her a second shove and she and the stringy tykes shot through the open door of the log cabin. With a leap he slammed the heavy log door shut after her.
Cain said, “Well, now, Dencil boy, easy there. They couldn’t help the snake, you know.”
Dencil stood trembling. “She-stuff? Kids? Pah!”
Cain put his gun back. He tried to laugh it off. “Sorry to scare everybody like that.” He wiped his lips on his sleeve. “But the dam thing was about to strike.” Looking down at the rattler, Cain saw that it was still twisting on the ground, still softly drumming its tail. Except for the bloody raw end, where its head had been, the diamond-check pattern of the snake was hard to make out against the ground. Cain said, “Now there, Dencil, is another reason why you should maybe wear you a gun.”
Dencil shook his head.
Riders of Judgment Page 4
