“Why not?” Woodbine returned with a trace of impatience. “You can’t hold back progress any more that you can hold back a rain cloud, even if you had a right to. And nobody’s got a right to tell me I can’t fence my own land if I want to.”
“No,” Roberson agreed. “But when you’re doing it just to injure a neighbor…”
“Is that what Fry is claiming?” Woodbine snapped. “I thought you could see clearer than that.”
Roberson shrugged. “That’s what he’s telling—and you won’t talk. What can we believe?”
“All right, I’ll tell you once, and you can suit yourself which side you believe,” Woodbine said briskly. “I know you do business with everybody, and you’ve got to sit on the fence, but at least you’ll know what the truth is.”
He picked up Roberson’s pencil and an empty envelope, and drew a rough sketch.
“Pecan Creek runs through our two places for a distance of eight miles; through ten sections of my land and six sections of Sterling land. Fry’s ten sections lie to the north of us, and when the ravines are dry his cattle have to cross our land to get to the creek to water.
“Now here’s the trouble. When the ravines are dry, his cattle come to the creek to water, but when they graze, they hang around close to water, which means that they are grazing our grass. In short, at the very time when our graze is scarcest, we’ve got to stand by and watch Fry’s stock eating it up. And he’s got twice as much stock as we have, so he’s getting more good off our graze than we are. We’re just furnishing him feed to make money, while we have to sell off early because his stock has eaten all our grass. We either fence or go broke—so I’m fencing.”
“And what will Fry do for water? He claims you’ll cut him off entirely, and he can’t raise cattle without water.”
“That’s not so! He can do what we’re doing; dam up the ravines and catch his run-off water in ponds. He doesn’t want to spend the money to do that. But even so, it’s against the law to fence a public stream, and we’re not doing that. Also, according to law, we’ll leave a crossroad at every section line. Fry’s cattle can take those crossroads down to the creek from his land. He knows that; what’s he mad about is that his cows won’t get to fatten on our grass any longer.”
Roberson sighed. “I see. But it means war, Jim. You’re right legally, but you’ll never make an open range man see that.”
“I found that out. I tried to show him that we’d all make more money under fence, but he can’t see it.”
“Fry don’t make threats,” Roberson warned, “but you know he’ll fight. He won’t back down from his position.”
“I know that. But I can’t back down without quitting the cattle business entirely.”
Roberson ran his hand through his hair. “It means bloodshed if you try to unload that car of wire. You know Fry is in town?”
“I supposed he would be.”
“Well, if you’re determined, I guess nothing short of a bullet will stop you. Did you know that Virginia is back? She’s at the hotel waiting for somebody to take her out home.”
“I suppose Fry will see that she gets out all right.”
“Not if she hears about what is happening.”
“I’d better see her, then.”
“And get her out of town,” Roberson said. “She’d take you and Fry and butt your heads together if she knew what was up. She wouldn’t have let you and Bob Burnham talk her into fencing along with you if she’d known it would have made trouble.”
Woodbine got to his feet. “This part of the job would have been over by now if the wire had come in time. I told Bob to write and see if he couldn’t persuade her to stay at her aunt’s another week.”
Roberson was thoughtful a moment, then asked with sudden resolve, “Maybe this is none of my business, but I’d like to know just what’s behind this. It’s more than just a matter of fencing.”
“The fencing angle is enough, isn’t it?” Woodbine countered.
“For the public, yes. But not for me. After all, I’m Virginia’s uncle, and her only male relative. I’ve got a kind of personal interest, I suppose.”
Woodbine came to a quick decision. “All right, then, but what I tell you has got to be in confidence.”
“I’m not noted for talking too much.”
“Well, I can’t prove a thing, but I’m sure of what I’m talking about. You know Fry. He’s hungry for a dollar and he won’t let anything stand in his way of getting it as long as he’s got a leg to stand on. He wants Virginia, but I don’t believe he would want her if it wasn’t for her land.”
“And you want her, too.”
“I don’t,” Woodbine answered quickly. “We were raised together. I’ve been fighting with her from the time she’s been old enough to annoy me. I’d just as soon marry a she wildcat, but I like her as a friend and neighbor. I don’t want to see her hurt, and if she doesn’t wake up, Fry’s going to hurt her.”
“He’s older than she is, and probably has a lot more sense,” Roberson admitted. “But after all, she’s grown and has a right to do what she likes. It looks like you’re trying to protect her whether she wants to be protected or not.”
“I am,” Woodbine admitted. “I’ve got reason to be-live that Moody Shay killed her dad just to get him out of Noble Fry’s way, so Fry could have a clear field to try to get her and her land.”
“That’s a serious charge,” Roberson reminded him.
“I know it is, and I can’t prove it. That’s why I hadn’t spoken of it before, and why I told you this had to be in confidence.”
“Are you trying to prove it?”
“Not directly. I know I couldn’t convince Virginia of Fry’s guilt just by talking to her. But I can make Fry show his hand so she can see it. That’s the only chance I’ve got.”
“But do you have to? Why can’t you just drop it if you can’t prove it?”
“Because if I dropped it there’d be no stopping Fry. He’d destroy Virginia and get her land, and then he’d go on to be so big that he’d get control of this whole community and ruin everybody else, including me. He’s an octopus and he’s got to be stopped before he gets too strong.”
Roberson pondered this and then spoke sadly. “I don’t question you, Jim. But you’re biting off a big slice of trouble. I don’t know how you and Burnham persuaded Virginia to fence her land without talking with Fry first, but when she finds out that Fry is against it, she’s going to be hard to manage. So you’ll have her against you even while you’re fighting for her.”
“I know it,” Woodbine admitted. “But we never could have got started if we hadn’t done it that way. Burnham sees it my way, and he talked her into it. He got her to go visit her aunt, then wrote to her and got her to agree to fence. We’d have had the job done by now if we could have got the wire in time. We’ll just have to face things as they come up, now.”
“They’ll come up fast enough,” Roberson sighed. “Everybody in town is looking for a showdown gun-battle the minute you start unloading that car of wire.”
Woodbine looked out the rear window of the office. Down the block a railroad spur came to an end with the two rails drawn together and upward to a post. A small low station building and shed stood unpainted and dreary at the rail’s end, and to the left of it a freight dock. Still farther on were a series of cattle pens and loading chutes.
The pens contained twenty-five or thirty horses, and more than a dozen wagons stood around, empty shafts on the ground and their horses’ harness on the spring seats. Woodbine had scoured the countryside to find enough wagons and teams, and men willing to drive them in the face of opposition, to haul the wire when it came.
“Wonder when they’ll get it in?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Any time now. I ’phoned Kiowa, and the switch engine has already left there.”
Woodbine went out, walked
down the dusty board walk towards the Rattlesnake Bar in the next block. As he approached the corner by The Drovers’ Bank he saw three men running down the lone cross street in the direction of the railroad station, and he turned his gaze towards them.
He saw a circle of men gathered, attracted by the smell of trouble as buzzards gather at the approaching death of a calf, and he made his way towards them.
As he approached the men he heard a taunting voice urging, “Give it to him, Blocker, he asked for it. Whip him all over the street.”
Woodbine pushed a hole in the crowd with his shoulder and got into the inner open space of the circle, where he saw Blocker, one of the drivers he had hired, standing on widespread legs, his hat upside down in the dust at his feet, his hair mussed and dust on the back of his sweaty shirt and the seat of his overalls. A stream of blood trickled from his nostrils and down the corner of his mouth.
The man facing him was Moody Shay, who lived down on Pecan Creek and often worked for Fry. Moody had the mind of a fox in the body of a giant grizzly bear, and now having already hit the unarmed Blocker, the fence-post chopper, he was standing back and unbuckling his gunbelt, a sly, hungry grin on his face.
He handed his gun and belt to a man beside him and began slowly rolling up his sleeves, taking his time so that he could relish every moment of his greedy anticipation.
“So,” he said tauntingly, “you call me a liar right in the presence of my friends.”
“I didn’t call you a liar,” the youth said heatedly, and yet with visible fear. “I was just going along minding my own business.”
Moody grinned at the crowd. “He calls me a liar again. He says I lied when I said he called me a liar. That makes it double, and I can’t stand by and have him call me a liar every time I open my mouth, now can I?”
“I didn’t call you a liar in the first place. I wasn’t bein’ unfriendly to the Frying Pan because I tried to make a day’s wages hauling a load of stuff for Woodbine.”
“That’s right you did. But that’s the same as calling me a liar because I told you it would be right unfriendly to me and Noble if you did haul that load. Barbed wire! You haulin’ barbed wire for Woodbine and saying I was a liar for calling that an unfriendly act. Well, friend, you just can’t keep on calling me a liar like that. My self respect won’t permit it, and now I’m going to bust you wide open. I’m going to rip your skin clean off your body with my fingernails and throw it over a fence to dry. I’m going to tear all the flesh off that lanky skeleton of yours and chase you down the street in your bare bones, and then I’m going to yank your bones off one at a time and throw them to the dogs. And then maybe you’ll call me a liar some more.”
The boy from the hills was having a battle with himself. It was as clear to him as it was to the onlookers that he was in for a brutal beating, and his instincts told him to take out and try to save his skin. But the native pride of the youth held him back, and the conflict between his two desires left his face grey and his tongue dry.
Moody enjoyed the effect he had on the youth, and he eyed him with amused satisfaction while he gave the crowd time to appreciate it. He was in no hurry to start the slaughter, but, like a cat with a rat, he would squeeze the last drop of pleasure out of the scene, both because he liked it this way and because it would have its effect on the crowd.
Woodbine turned his eyes and swept the crowd of onlookers with his critical gaze, and he saw cruel anticipation in their faces as well. This was a queer thing, he noted, for they were just plain everyday men, some from town and some from the country. They were men who did their day’s work and had their day’s fun, and they were no better nor no worse individually than any men. But they were not individuals now, they were responding to that atavistic urge in the human to run in packs like wolves, and they had the wolf smell on them when they were in packs, and their craving was for blood. And though there was not a man among them who had any personal liking for the brutish Moody Shay, whom they all knew to have a record obscured by darkness, he was now the pack’s champion who would satisfy their bloodlust, for that is the way men are.
There were these things going on beneath the surface of this street fight, and Woodbine saw them clearly, though the crowd did not. He knew also that Shay saw them, for despite his grossness, Shay had a strong streak of animal cunning and an instinctive knowledge of the forces that moved beneath the surface around him. And this made him all the more dangerous a man. For Shay, knowing that these men despised him, got a kind of amused satisfaction out of seeing them waiting for him to satisfy their animal instincts while hating him for doing it. Shay knew that these men wished that the youth from the hills would beat him into a pulp, but he knew and they knew their hopes could not be realized.
Woodbine had broken through the circle at a point where he had not been under the eyes of Shay, but gradually the eyes of the crowd had focused on Woodbine, and had read the significance of his unexpected presence, and so all of them had shifted their attention to him.
Shay, seeing this, had turned, and now he saw Woodbine for the first time. Woodbine stood in the edge of the circle, his arms crossed over his shirt front, his hand a considerable distance from his gun.
Shay’s face underwent a change, the anticipatory grin wiping from his features with the flash of light. He ceased rolling his sleeves, and his hands dropped to his sides, while he studied Woodbine attentively, calculating what changes in circumstances he had brought with him. Shay was figuring what turn this sudden shift in affairs would necessitate. Now as the two men faced each other an uncomfortable silence fell over the crowd.
Woodbine said easily, “Hello there, Blocker. How’s everything?” and then turned and said, “How are you, Shay?”
Moody grabbed at the chance for more time to think, and his face broke into a smile. “How, yourself, Jim. Long time no see.”
Woodbine said easily, his eyes meeting those of Shay, “No, I don’t get into town very often. Been busy, riding here and there, up around the head of Pecan Creek. You ought to ride up that way some time. Good hunting.”
Moody Shay’s mouth was open easily, his thick lips loose as he watched Woodbine sharply. He took the words and turned them over in his mind, and he knew that Jim Woodbine was telling him something, warning him. And he knew he would have to take more time to think this warning out before he would know what to do about it.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I might take my gun and ride up that way some time.”
“You like to shoot up that way, don’t you?”
Shay kept the easy smile on his face while his eyes tried to read the meaning behind this. “Sure. I like to shoot wherever there’s anything to shoot.”
Woodbine did not remark on this statement, and the crowd moved restlessly. They sensed that there was something behind these words, and it annoyed them that they could not make out what it was. They tried to read it on Moody’s face and they tried to read it on Jim Woodbine’s, and what they saw told them nothing and made them impatient. They waited to hear more, to get more words they could examine to see what lay behind them. And Woodbine left them out on a limb and hanging there, for he did not continue along those lines.
They looked at Moody Shay, knowing that Woodbine had thrown it into his lap, and they wanted to see what he was going to do with it. It was his next move, and they shuffled and waited.
Moody saw these things, and knew that it was his move. His eyes went from Woodbine to the crowd and to Blocker, who had stood waiting to see how long his reprieve was going to last. Blocker stood in front of him, and he could go on with his fight. The crowd was waiting to see if he would do this, and if he did, it would add to his stature. Provided he got over the hurdle of Woodbine’s cryptic words.
He weighed these things in the balance, then made an indifferent shrug with his shoulders. He laughed easily. “Aw, well, I’ll be seeing you around, Woodbine.”
He turned and took his gun from the man holding it, attended to the buckling of it around his hips, then pushed through the crowd and walked on up towards the Parisian Bar.
The air went out of the combined lungs of the whole crowd in one great puff like the deflation of a carcass that had lain in the sun too long, and somebody said, “Well, I’ll be double-dogged damned. I’d never thought to see the day that anybody whipped Moody Shay without doubling a fist.”
The crowd was disintegrating like a clod in the rain, and the man answering the other one said as they drifted away. “He didn’t whip Moody. There’s a polecat in the woodpile somewhere. They was talking over our heads, and Woodbine was somehow threatening him, maybe with something he knowed about Moody. Moody got it and was afraid to go on and lick Blocker. Wonder what it could have been?”
“Reckon that’s it?”
“It’s bound to be. There ain’t a man in this neck of the woods that can stand up to Shay with his fists, and Shay ain’t afraid of a thing that walks on two legs. No sir, Woodbine somehow give him something to think about, and so he allowed he’d better wait and think about it before he done anything. I’m telling you for sure, that ain’t the end of this.”
“I’d kinda liked to have seen that fight.”
“I wouldn’t. Shay would have butchered that kid up something brutal. He’s plumb vicious inside.”
“I reckon you’re right. Maybe it wasn’t nothing for us to be proud of to stand around and watch a kid get his guts stomped out by a man twice as big and twice as mean. Still and all—”
“We’ll see a fight yet,” the other promised. “You can’t leave a thing like that up in the air.”
“Maybe not. Suppose Woodbine was to bring in that wire like he says he’d do. Not that he’s likely to buck Noble Fry, but if he was to, I doubt if Fry would leave enough of him for Shay to work on.”
CHAPTER 2
Noble Fry
Woodbine and young Blocker walked on towards the Rattlesnake Bar, and Woodbine said to the youth, “I told you all to stick together, and not to go unarmed. This is not a game we’re playing. How’d he happen to get you cut out of the herd?”
The Sixth Western Novel Page 44
