by Dean Owen
“I can understand your feeling about it. Well, at any rate old Nat can keep on hunting for the Rusk gold. And if it’s as secretly hidden as you think, he’ll have the hunt for the rest of his days.”
Gary slowly nodded. All through the past two weeks, while Leda and himself were fixing up the cabin, old Nat had been gone from dawn till the mountain twilight, searching for the cache. Yes, the hunt would last him, all right; and now he would know that the gold of the Chilcote Rusk pack was no myth but a solid actuality. For the rest of his old years he could go on living up Little Saghelia, poking around in the rocks and woods of that beautiful valley, till his twilight settled down and night came peacefully across the range.
* * * *
Despite himself as he stood with Leda before the cloth-covered desk, Gary could not keep his mind on what was happening.
In slow voice, touched with solemnity, Rhodes was reading to Leda and him. Behind them stood Alec and Regina Bergelot, almost their only two friends in Saghelia. Old Nat, fidgety and restless in the mossy-green suit, necktie and celluloid collar which he had resurrected for the occasion, seemed to have one eye on blue-hazy Little Saghelia and one on the rites which were making man and wife of the two young people who had found haven in his crude wilderness home. His whole manner seemed to imply that he had had a very narrow escape indeed from being a wealthy man and having to come down and live in the town and wear clothes like these all the time.
Though he realized vaguely that he really ought to be listening, Gary scarcely heard what Rhodes was reading. For him the marriage ceremony had resurrected the memory of a rainy sidewalk, a purring limousine, and a harassed old man barking impetuously: “What’ll you take to marry that girl?… No sham stuff… Legal and court-tight… This Rhodes person can do it.”
Past Leda and through the rose-cluttered window he could see the Tibetan pines of the Ludlow home; and a deep pity stirred in him for old Hugh Ludlow. Blind to all values except seizing and possessing, Hugh’s father had never really lived. How different his way of life from old Nat Higgens’! He had sought happiness in grasping and acquiring, and had found only bitterness and defeat. But old Nat, caring little about actually acquiring the cache of gold, found happiness in the hunt itself. For him there was lots of hunting—and lots of happiness.
Rhodes paused in his reading, Leda nudged Gary’s arm and brought him out of his thoughts, and he became aware of a strained silence.
Ashamed of himself for woolgathering at such a time, he answered hastily: “I do!”
Again as Rhodes read on, his thoughts went straying. A shaft of that afternoon sun was touching Leda’s auburn hair, lighting soft fires in it, and that started him thinking of the hundred times when he and she had sat together on rock or mossy log or mountainside meadow up Little Saghelia. In her dainty new clothes Leda seemed so strange, so different from his bush-loping Lee partner, that he almost wished she were clad again in her moccasins, corduroy dress and old jacket of their cave-hunting trips.
When the ceremony was over and Rhodes was ushering his guests into the adjoining room for tea, he and Leda lingered behind the others and had a few moments to themselves. As they looked at each other Gary tried, gropingly, to express his feeling of their one-ness now.
“Gosh, Lee, we’re—we’re married!”
Leda’s hazel eyes were reproachful. “Are you positive? You didn’t pay a bit of attention. I’m ashamed of you.”
“Well, so’m I, Lee. But—but I was thinking things.”
“You might have saved them for some other time. A person doesn’t get married every day. Anyway, I don’t.”
“Well, I don’t either. In fact, one of the things I was thinking was that this once was for our whole lives, Lee. Anyway, I know it’ll be for mine.”
Leda relented. “It’ll be for mine too, Gary. But haven’t you forgotten—something?”
As she stood tiptoe and Gary kissed her, it came home to him how utterly Leda’s happiness lay in his hands. Except himself she had no friend or kin on earth. He and she were partners now on a longer trail and trip than any they had taken yet, and they could not expect their trail to lead them always in so auspicious a place as Little Saghelia.
* * * *
Near six o’clock that evening the small narrow-gauge train—a few cars of mixed freight and lumber and ore-mill products, with a remodeled caboose for the half-dozen passengers—stopped on top of the high pass, as though the diminutive engine had to wheeze and puff for a time, after the long winding climb out of the valley.
While the train crew was lashing a car of lumber more securely, Gary and Leda slipped away from their fellow-travelers and wandered out through an aspen drogue to a bold cliff overlooking Big Saghelia. On the edge of the rock they stood gazing down—Leda, at her girlhood home; Gary, at the isolated country which had been kinder to him than he had ever imagined when he had come through this pass alone, a hunted fugitive, two months ago.
The town far away below, the lifeless river, the slag heaps and blackened acres of the main valley were unlovely even in the dusk of evening; and he lifted his eyes across the miles to Little Saghelia. The wilderness valley was filling swiftly with purple shadow; the overfalls and hanging lakes were already veiled from him; but he could still faintly see the whitish rim-rock and the tiny dot of a meadow where old Nat’s cabin nestled.
He noticed that Leda was shivering in her dainty silk frock, and put his jacket around her shoulders.
“Do you remember our tarn, Lee, over yonder?”
“I couldn’t ever forget it, Gary.”
“And how shy you were that first night when I came? We never thought, Lee, that in less than two months, we’d be going away like this, together.”
They lapsed into silence, gazing at the distant valley and watching a snow cloud blanket Sentinel Knob with white. When the creeping twilight finally had shut the meadow from sight and mantled Little Saghelia in soft owl-dusk, they turned away slowly, and walked back, hand in hand—sorry over their farewell to old Paradise Trail and old Nat Higgens and Sergeant Rhodes, but eager, with the zest of youth and love, to face the unknown trail ahead of them.
RIMROCK TRAIL, by J. Allan Dunn
Originally published in 1922.
DEDICATION
To Arthur Sullivant Hoffman
for his loyal friendship, his sincerity and the caustic but kindly criticism which has made my stuff printable.
CHAPTER I
GRIT
“Mormon” Peters carefully shifted his weighty bulk in the chair that he dared not tilt, gazing dreamily at the saw-toothed mountains shimmering in the distance, sniffing luxuriously the scent of sage.
“They oughter spell Arizona with three ‘C’s,’” he said.
“Why?” asked Sandy Bourke, wiping the superfluous oil from the revolver he was meticulously cleaning.
“’Count of Climate, Cactus, Cattle—an’ Coyotes.”
“Makin’ four, ’stead of three,” said the managing partner of the Three Star Ranch.
Came a grunt from “Soda-Water” Sam as he put down his harmonica on which he had been playing The Cowboy’s Lament, with variations.
“Huh! You got no more eddication than a horn-toad, an’ less common sense. You don’t spell Arizony with a ‘C.’ You can’t. ’Cordin’ to yore argymint you should spell Africa with a ‘Z’ ’cause they raise zebras there, ’stead of mustangs. Might make it two ‘R’s,’ ’count of rim-rock an’—an’ revolvers.”
Mormon snorted.
“That’s a hell of a name for a man born in Maricopa County to call a gun. Revolver! You ’mind me of the Boston perfesser who come to Arizona tryin’ to prove the Cliff Dwellers was one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He blows in with an introduction to the Double U, where I was workin’. Colonel Pawlin’s wife has a cold snack ready, it bein’ middlin’ warm. The perfesser makes a prett
y speech, after he’d eaten two men’s share of victuals tryin’, I reckon, to put some flesh on to his bones. An’ he calls the lunch a col-lay-shun! Later, he asks the waitress down to the Rodeo Eatin’ House, while he’s waitin’ for his train, for a serve-yet. A serve-yet! That’s what he calls a napkin. You must have been eddicated in Boston, Sam, though it’s the first time I ever suspected you of book learnin’.”
It was Sunday afternoon on the Three Star rancheria. The riders, all the hands—with the exception of Pedro, the Mexican cocinero, indifferent to most things, including his cooking; and Joe, his half-breed helper,—had departed, clad in their best shirts, vests, trousers, Stetsons and bandannas of silk, some seeking a poker game on a neighboring rancho, some bent on courting. Pedro and Joe lay, faces down, under the shade of the trees about the tenaya, the stone cistern into which water was pumped by the windmills that worked in the fitful breezes.
The three partners, saddle-chums for years, ever seeking mutual employ, known through Texas and Arizona as the “Three Musketeers of the Range,” sat on the porch of the ranch-house, discussing business and lighter matters. One year before they had pooled their savings and Sandy Bourke, youngest of the three and the most aggressive, coolest and swiftest of action, had gloriously bucked the faro tiger and won enough to buy the Three Star Ranch and certain rights of free range. The purchase had not included the brand of the late owner. Originally the holding had been called the Two-Bar-P. As certain cattlemen were not wanting who had a knack of appropriating calves and changing the brands of steers, Sandy had been glad enough, in his capacity of business manager, to change the name of the ranch and brand. Two-Bar-P was too easily altered to H-B, U-P, U-B, O-P, or B; a score of combinations hard to prove as forgeries.
There had been lengthy argument concerning the new name. Three Star, so Soda-Water Sam—whose nickname was satirical—opined, smacked of the saloon rather than the ranch, but it was finally decided on and the branding-irons duly made.
Sandy Bourke had dark brown hair, inclined to be curly, a tendency he offset by frequent clipping of his thatch. The sobriquet of “Sandy” referred to his grit. He was broad-shouldered, tall and lean, weighing a hundred and seventy pounds of well-strung frame. His eyes were gray and the lids sun-puckered; his deeply tanned skin showed the freckles on face and hands as faint inlays; his long limber legs were slightly bowed.
Not so the curve of Soda-Water Sam’s legs. You could pass a small keg between the latter’s knees without interference. Otherwise, Sam, whose last name was Manning, was mainly distinguished by his enormous drooping mustache, suggesting the horns of a Texas steer, inverted.
As for Mormon, disillusioned hero of three matrimonial adventures, woman-soft where Sandy was woman-shy, he was high-stomached, too stout for saddle-ease to himself or mount, sun-rouged where his partners were burned brown. His pate was bald save for a tonsure-fringe of grizzle-red.
All three were first-rate cattlemen, their enterprise bade fair for success, hampered only by the lack of capital, occasioned by Sandy’s preference for modern methods as evidenced by thoroughbred bulls, high-grading of his steers, the steadily growing patches of alfalfa and the spreading network of irrigation ditches.
Business exhausted, ending with an often expressed desire for a woman cook who could also perform a few household chores, tagged with a last attempt to persuade Mormon to marry some comfortable person who would act in that capacity, they had reverted to the good-humored chaff that always marked their talks together.
Mormon, with stubby fingers wonderfully deft, was plaiting horsehair about a stick of hardwood to form the handle of a quirt, Sandy overhauling his two Colts and Sam furnishing orchestra on his harmonica. Now he put it to his lips, unable to find a sufficiently crushing retort to Mormon’s diatribe against words of more than one syllable, breathing out the burden of “My Bonnie lies over the Ocean.”
Mormon, in a husky, yet musical bass, supplied the cowboy’s version of the words.
“Last night, as I lay in the per-rair-ree.
And gazed at the stars in the sky,
I wondered if ever a cowboy,
Could drift to that sweet by-an’-by.
“Roll on, roll on,
Roll on, li’l’ dogies, roll—”
He broke off suddenly, staring at the fringe of the waving mesquite.
“Look at that ornery coyote!” he said. “Got his nerve with him, the mangy calf-eater, comin’ up to the ranch thataway.”
Sam put down his harmonica.
“My Winchester’s jest inside the door,” he said. “But he’d scoot if I moved. Slip in a shell, Sandy, mebbe you kin git him in a minute.”
“Yo’re sheddin’ yore skin, Sam. Got horn over yore eyes. Mormon, you need glasses fo’ yore old age. That ain’t a coyote, it’s a dawg,” pronounced Sandy.
The creature left the cover of the mesquite and came slowly but determinedly toward the ranch-house, past the corral and cook shack; its daring proclaiming it anything but a cowardly, foot-hill coyote. Its coat was whitish gray. Its brush was down, almost trailing, its muzzle drooped, it went lamely on all four legs and occasionally limped on three.
“Collie!” proclaimed Sandy. “Pore devil’s plumb tuckered out.”
“Sheepdawg!” affirmed Sam, disgust in his voice. “Hell of a gall to come round a cattle ranch.”
The gray-white dog came on, dry tongue lolling, observant of the men, glancing toward the tenaya where it smelled the slumbering Pedro and Joe. It halted twenty feet from the porch, one paw up, as Sandy bent forward and called to it.
“Come on, you dawg. Come in, ol’ feller. Mormon, take that hair out of that pan of water an’ set it where he can see it.”
Mormon shifted the pan in which he had been soaking the horsehair for easier plaiting and the dog sniffed at it, watching Sandy closely with eyes that were dim from thirst and weariness. Sandy patted his knee encouragingly, and the tired animal seemed suddenly to make up its mind. Ignoring the water, it came straight to Sandy, uttered a harsh whine, catching at the leather tassel on the cowman’s worn leather chaparejos, tugging feebly. As Sandy stooped to pat its head, powdered with the alkali dust that covered its coat, the collie released its hold and collapsed on one side, panting, utterly exhausted, with glazing eyes that held appeal.
Sandy reached for the pan, squatting down, and chucked some water from the palm of his hand into the open jaws, upon the swollen tongue. The dog licked his hand, whined again, tried to stand up, failed, succeeded with the aid of friendly fingers in its ruff and eagerly lapped a few mouthfuls.
Again it seized the tassel and pulled, looking up into Sandy’s face imploringly.
“Somethin’ wrong,” said the manager of the Three Star. “Tryin’ to tell us about it. All right, ol’ feller, you drink some more wateh. Let me look at that paw.” He gently took the foot that clawed at his chaps and examined it. The pad was worn to the quick, bleeding. “Come out of the Bad Lands,” he said, looking toward the range. “Through Pyramid Pass, likely.”
“Some derned sheepman gone crazy an’ shot his-self,” grumbled Sam. “Somethin’ bound to spile a quiet afternoon.”
“Not many sheep over that way,” said Mormon. “No range.”
Sandy rolled the dog on his side and found the other pads in the same condition. Running his fingers beneath the ruff, scratching gently in sign of friendship, he discovered a leather collar with a brass tag, rudely engraved, the lettering worn but legible.
GRIT. Prop. P. Casey.
“They sure named you right, son,” he said. “We’ll ’tend to P. Casey, soon’s we’ve ’tended to you. You need fixin’ if you’re goin’ to take us to him. You’ll have to hoof it till we cut fair trail. Sam, fetch me some adhesive, will you? An’ then saddle up; Pronto fo’ me, a hawss fo’ yoreself an’ rope a spare mount.”
“What for? The spare?”
�
�Don’t know for sure. May have to bring him back.”
“A sheepman to Three Star! I’d as soon have a sick rattler around. Mormon, yo’re elected to nurse him.”
Sam went into the house for the medical tape, then to the corral. Sandy bathed the raw pads softly, cut patches of the tape with his knife, put them on the abrasions, held them there for the warmth of his palm to set them. Grit licked at his hands whenever they were in reach, his brightening eyes full of understanding, shifting to watch Sam striding to the corral.
“One thing about a sheepman is allus good,” said Mormon. “His dawg. Reckon you aim on me tendin’ the ranch, Sandy?”
“Come if you want to.”
“Two’s plenty, I reckon. I do more ridin’ through the week than I care for nowadays. I’ll stick to the chair.”
“Prod up Pedro to git some hot water ready. Keep a kittle b’ilin’. No tellin’ what time we’ll git back,” said Sandy. “I’ll take along some grub an’ the medicine kit. Have to spare some of that whisky Sam’s got stowed away.”
“Goin’ to waste booze at fifteen bucks a quart on a sheepman?” grumbled Mormon.
“Not if you an’ Sam don’t want I should,” replied Sandy, with a smile. He knew his partners. “Now then, Grit,” he went on to the dog in a confidential tone, “you-all have got to git grub an’ wateh inside yore ribs. Savvy? I’m goin’ to rustle some hash fo’ you. You stay as you are, son.”
He pressed the dog on its side once more, in the shade, and went into the house. Mormon followed him. Grit watched them disappear, gave a little whine of impatience, accepted the situation philosophically as he listened to sounds from the corral that told him of horses being caught, and drooped his head on the dirt, lying relaxed, eyes closed, gaining strength against the return trip.
Sam rode to the porch on his roan, Sandy’s pinto and a gray mare leading, and “tied them to the ground” with trailing reins as Sandy came out bearing a pan of food, a package and a leather case. Mormon showed at the door.
“Where’d you hide yore bottle, Sam?” he asked.
