by Lauran Paine
Miggs’ distant, probing look this time vanished. He brought his eyes down and around in a big sweep, settled them flintily upon McCoy, and grimly shook his head. “No you don’t,” he growled. “You don’t get me all upset again, doggone you.”
McCoy smacked his lips, raffishly smiled, lifted his tin cup, and emptied it. “Tell me one thing, Jack. Exactly what solid objection have you got to Bev and Fred Brian being interested in one another?”
“Well … I don’t rightly know, Frank. None really, I reckon, only she’s so young.”
“He’s a good boy, and he’s got guts. Maybe not a whole lot of sense. Now, neither you nor me’d have tried bracing that whole crew like he did just over a husky little girl.”
Miggs looked at Frank. McCoy’s expression was sly again; he was deliberately leading Miggs along to a rash statement. Miggs recognized this and said: “That’s not true, and you know it isn’t. If he hadn’t gone over there, either you or I would have.”
McCoy’s sly look faded. He slowly nodded, his gaze still upon Miggs. “All right, then he was noble, like she said he was, and he’s got guts. Those are pretty good virtues in my eyes.”
“Doggone you, Frank,” snapped Miggs, then paused, finished his coffee, and leaned forward with both elbows upon the table. “All right. I’ve got no objections. Is that what you want me to say?”
“It is.”
“I said it. Now what?”
Frank rummaged for his little pipe. “Nothing, Jack. Nothing at all. Now we just keep our long noses out of it and sort of sit back and see what happens between ’em. You got a match?”
Jack tossed one over, watched Frank light up, lean back, and contentedly puff. “You good and comfortable?” he asked.
“Never been more comfortable, Jack.”
“That’s good, because since I got the supper, your chore is to clean up the dishes.”
Jack got up, went over to dig out his own pipe, stuff it, and go back to the table and also light up. The pair of them sat for a long quiet moment just gazing at one another.
McCoy chuckled deep down, heaved upright, and leaned upon the table, his eyes dancing affectionately. He did not speak a single word, yet something gentle and yet entirely masculine passed back and forth between McCoy and Miggs.
Out in the quiet night, a long distance off, a cow bawled. This sound came down the stillness without any echo. Another sound, much farther out, also briefly broke the stillness—the sad, mournful tonguing of a wolf as he sat alone howling at the lopsided old pewter moon that was serenely floating overhead.
Miggs went to his washstand, considered his unshaven, unkempt condition, and prepared to rectify this by taking down the new straight razor McCoy had brought him.
As he worked at this, and as Frank passed back and forth from table to dishpan, Miggs said: “Frank, if Holt had come out and said he’d leave me alone, instead of telling me to keep away from him, maybe I’d believe he was leaving the country with his Durhams. But I’ve been turning that over in my mind, and I think he’s up to something.”
McCoy turned, leaned upon the cooling stove, and spoke around the little pipe tightly clamped between his teeth. “Funny you should mention Holt. I was thinking of him, too … him and his boy.”
Miggs swung around, one side of his face lathered with white. He put an intent look on Frank. “Now don’t you go getting any ideas about riding over and settling up for Bev. One noble tomfool around here is enough.”
“Why I wasn’t thinking that at all, Jack. I was thinking that, if Fred’s noble, what’s wrong with both you and me being noble, also?”
Miggs, with that glistening razor hanging in midair, remained entirely still for a long time before he turned back toward the mirror again. “Sometimes,” he murmured as he shaved, “you come up with a rare good idea, Frank. Suppose we were to put out the lamp in an hour or such matter … after Beverly’s returned and gone to bed … then just up and did that, just up and slipped out of here.”
“Tell you one thing,” said McCoy. “Won’t any of that rough, tough crew walk up behind us two like they did young Brian.”
“They’ll be watching, though.”
“Sure they will, Jack. It’d be sort of disappointing if they weren’t watching.”
Miggs went on with his shaving. Nothing more was said for a long time. Not until McCoy had finished cleaning up once Jack himself was through, when somewhere out in the night, up by the pole gate across the horse canyon’s mouth, a tinkle of rich, warm laughter came down the soft night air to bring those older men around, slowly listening and exchanging a long look.
“That was Bev,” pronounced Frank.
“I’m not deaf,” growled Miggs, looking bleak. “I don’t figure she’d ought to be out there alone with Brian like that. It’s not … well … ladylike.”
“What d’you know about what’s ladylike and what isn’t?” McCoy asked, smiling while draping a dish towel between two nails behind the stove. “Besides, how’s a feller going to do his courting with old grannies like you and me shooing all the little chicks back under the old hen’s wings come sundown?”
Miggs crossed to where his rifle stood beside the door, picked the weapon up, returned to the table with it, and frowningly started cleaning the gun.
McCoy watched this for a while, then also took his rifle to the table and worked over it.
“What would old Jed Shafter say, do you reckon,” he asked Miggs, “if he saw his girl tonight?”
Jack looked up, his dead-level smoky eyes perplexed. “Don’t know,” he eventually said. “I can’t picture Jed having a girl like that at all.”
“And he,” observed McCoy shrewdly, “would probably have the same trouble trying to picture you being father or foster father to a girl like that.”
Miggs resumed working on his gun. He seemed to have gone off on some private thought trail of his own now, which suited McCoy just fine, because all he’d meant to do was divert Miggs’ attention from those two lovers out in the night.
A horned owl around back somewhere began its nocturnal hooting. This mysterious and lonely sound persisted, at spaced intervals, for perhaps ten minutes. Finally, when it stopped, the hush was deeper than ever.
Miggs finished with his gun. Frank likewise finished, but he refilled his shell belt instead of just sitting there, and after a while he said: “Come on, let’s go. We don’t have to wait for Bev anyway.”
Chapter Fifteen
The night was composed of several things—the dying, curling light from down at the cow camp, the great, curving overhead sky with its myriad diamond-like small lights, and the good, safe aroma from two cooking fires.
There was something else, too, but neither Jackson Miggs nor Frank McCoy let on to the other that they were aware of this as they passed on silent moccasined feet around behind the cabin northward toward the dark forest. There were two vague silhouettes up by the horse canyon pole gate, one tall, one quite short and sturdy.
Miggs slowed almost to a halt as he glided on past those two closely standing shadows by the pole gate. Frank gave him a rough nudge, but Miggs did not pick up the gait at all. If anything, he seemed to slow still more.
“Leave ’em be,” hissed McCoy. “Besides, if they see us out here with our guns, they’ll know …”
“They wouldn’t see us right now, Frank, if we was to burst down upon them with scalping knives.”
Miggs halted finally, watching those two silhouettes. He settled his gun butt into the ground, hooked both massive arms around the weapon, and leaned there, saying nothing, just watching.
“This isn’t decent,” objected McCoy in a bleak whisper. “You’re not supposed to spy on folks like this, Jack. It’s downright indecent.”
Miggs remained rooted and totally silent.
“Come on, consarn it, we haven’t got all night to get over to Ho
lt’s camp and back.”
Still Miggs did not move.
McCoy finally gave it up, leaned upon his own gun, and also watched.
Fred was clean-shaven and attired in a fresh, clean, blue work shirt. He was hatless in the silver glow of moonlight. He stood less than a foot from Beverly, gazing down at her. He said: “I’d do it over again. Even if you didn’t mean as much to me as you do, I’d still do it over again.”
She murmured something in reply to this, but it was not entirely distinguishable from where Jack and Frank stood in formless tree shadows, looking and listening.
“… necessary, really, Fred.”
“Yes, it was,” came back his swift and emphatic reply to this. “He’s no good, Beverly, and if it hadn’t been you, believe me, it’d have been some other girl. If not up here, then down around one of the settlements. I’m not finished with him, either.”
Beverly drew upright. She put a hand upon his arm, saying firmly, loudly enough for Jack and Frank to hear: “Let it go. Please let it go, Fred. I’m all right. It was that bull elk that gashed my arm, not him.”
“Beverly, if he hadn’t thought he’d killed you with that knock over the head, do you know what he’d have done?”
“No, Fred, I don’t, and neither do you, because it didn’t happen.”
“I know, Beverly. I know because I know his kind. And when they had me … it was Bert arguing loudest to dump my carcass in a canyon. I owe him something for that, don’t I?”
She raised her head to him, shook it gently from side to side, and murmured something neither Miggs nor McCoy could hear. Frank fidgeted in his tracks; he was feeling mean about this eavesdropping, but at the same time, what was very clearly going to happen thrilled him to the bottom of his raffish old soul.
And it happened. Bev stood up on her tiptoes, leaned into him, and Fred’s dark head cut down swiftly to seek her lips.
Frank turned all limp where he was hugging his rifle and let out a soft, melancholy sigh.
Jack watched that kiss for a moment, turned, squinted, and said: “Frank, didn’t that elk stew agree with you? You’re looking almighty peaked around the jowls.”
McCoy dragged his limpid gaze around, focused it upon Miggs, and very gradually drew upright. “The trouble with you,” he pronounced in a loud hiss, “is that you got no romance in your heart, Jackson Miggs.”
“But I’m powerful good at tracking,” retorted Miggs, returning his glance to where Beverly Shafter and Fred Brian stood, parted now, quite silent and seeming abashed.
McCoy snorted, cradled his long rifle, and turned away. “You can stay here if you’re of a mind to,” he snapped, “but me, I’ve got a long walk and maybe a little brawling to do yet tonight.”
Miggs turned, watched McCoy’s irate stride for a moment, slyly smiled, and passed on silently behind Frank up into the forest. It appeared that two could play at that game of being cunning, of baiting others.
A half mile later, before either Miggs or McCoy had really gotten into their stride, something large and dark sprang out of a pine needle bed, gave a startling snort, and went charging northward through the forest.
Frank McCoy, in the lead when this happened, almost dropped his rifle and afterward his voice was a squeak.
Miggs, down on one knee and with his rifle snugged back to fire, did not pull the trigger. He very slowly lowered the weapon, very slowly stood upright again, and, although Frank’s wild profanity was making concentration difficult, Miggs hearkened to the crashing sounds of that fleeing animal until the beast was lost entirely to sight.
“Danged bull elk!” exclaimed McCoy, his voice coming back down to normal. “Big as a damned tree he was, Jack. Did you see him? Biggest bull I ever saw.”
“Bull elk, hell,” grumbled Miggs. “And if you’d had your eyes where they’d ought to have been, you wouldn’t have stumbled over the thing, either, Frank.”
“What d’you mean it wasn’t a bull elk … why, I saw those two little bloodshot eyes close enough to poke a finger into ’em. Don’t you stand there and tell me …”
“Well, I am telling you, Frank. That was no bull elk.”
“Then what the hell was it? Isn’t another critter in the mountains that big. His dad-blasted shoulder come even with my …”
“That was a big Durham bull.”
McCoy let his protests trail off long enough for him to stare at Miggs, to blink at him.
“He was a big devil, and he was a muley bull … no horns. He’d be one of Denver Holt’s critters, Frank.”
“This far east?”
“Yes, this far east, and if some of the men we used to know had seen you practically fall over a regular range bull without even seeing it, they’d just about …”
“Anyone can have accidents, Jackson Miggs, doggone you.”
Miggs twisted at the waist, looked upcountry where that big old bull had disappeared, twisted back, and said: “I think I’m beginning to understand about Holt’s roundup, Frank. I think we guessed every reason for it but the right one. I don’t think he’s heading out of the country, at all, and I don’t believe he’s going westward looking for new range. If that was so, why would one of his bulls be this far east?”
Frank opened his mouth. Miggs cut in ahead of whatever McCoy had meant to say.
“He’s coming east with his herd. He figures we’ve got the best grass over here, and he’s right about that, too.”
“But, hell, Jack … Tolman’s white-faces are over here.”
“Old Holt will know that. He just won’t give a damn. Aside from thinking he’s entitled to go anywhere he pleases up in here, he doesn’t care about his cows being bred to Hereford bulls … it’s Fred Brian and Hyatt Tolman who don’t want their white-face crosses bred to those shorthorn bulls.”
Miggs cradled his rifle, strode firmly on past Frank, and left McCoy to unravel this new trouble at his leisure. Frank did, but he slipped along behind Miggs as he did so, and he kept his eyes constantly moving, too, as he reassumed his westward progress.
They encountered bedded-down cows, calves, young heifers, and even a sifting of short yearling steers. The numbers of Holt’s cattle steadily increased until, finally, a little over a mile and a half onward, Miggs halted altogether.
When McCoy came up, looking around at all those uneasy cattle in the inky night, he said: “You’re dead right, Jack. Holt’s figuring on taking over the country Tolman’s been using up in here for many years.”
“Trouble,” muttered Jackson Miggs more to himself than to McCoy. “Holt’s out for trouble. He’s not going to ride roughshod over Brian or anyone else up in my country. I don’t give a copper-colored damn how tough and rough he thinks he is.” Miggs reversed his course and brushed angrily past McCoy.
Frank called softly: “What you figure to do?”
“Get Fred, Red, Lex, you, and me on horseback, and at the first sign of daylight push these doggoned Durhams back west. Come along.”
Once more McCoy fell in behind the thoroughly aroused burly man hiking back the way they had come and had almost to trot to keep up.
By the time they got back to Miggs’ meadow, neither one of those two silhouettes was still there by the pole gate. But then Frank hadn’t expected them to be there, because it was now past midnight.
Even the campfire from Brian’s cow camp had died to nothing more illuminating than a bed of rusty-red coals.
Miggs hesitated in front of his cabin, looking over that way.
Frank, reading his thoughts, said: “She’s abed. Don’t worry about her.”
They went on down to the cow camp, their movements silent, their silhouettes shadowy and unreal-looking. There, Miggs went from blanket roll to blanket roll until he’d located Brian. He dropped to one knee with his rifle standing straight up beside him and ungently shook Tolman’s range boss awake.
/> Brian sat up, blinked at the grim visage of those two older men hovering over him, ran a hand across his eyes, and straightened his upper body.
In short sentences Miggs told what he and Frank had encountered less than a mile from this very meadow. He also said that he was positive those Durhams were not out there by accident. “My guess is that he meant to drive his cattle over here with your critters right from the start, Fred. He’s undoubtedly scouted my cabin, the countryside hereabouts, and the amount of feed your critters are grazing on this land. He deliberately bunched his critters yesterday, and, even before the fight, he meant to drive them over here.”
Brian ran bent fingers through his hair. “See any bulls among his cattle?” he asked.
McCoy made a loud snort. “See ’em!” he exclaimed. “We stumbled right over one, Fred. Danged critter was a muley, and, so help me, he was bigger’n a saddle horse and three times as heavy. And, boy, he wasn’t no more than a long half mile from right here where I’m standing this minute.”
Fred heard McCoy out, stopped scratching his head, and looked at Jackson Miggs. “What do you figure we’ll have to do?” he asked, and until Fred had said that, Miggs had entirely forgotten the trust Hyatt Tolman had put upon him, as well as his own spur-of-the-moment agreement to help Brian with Tolman’s cattle.
“Run ’em out of the country,” interjected Frank McCoy. “Isn’t that what you said out there, Jack?”
Miggs felt trapped; he also felt thoroughly angry. He got up from beside Brian’s bedroll and nodded. “That’s what we’re going to do, too,” he rumbled. “Fred, come sunup, saddle a couple of extra horses for Frank and me. The five of us will drift Holt’s cattle back westerly where they came from, and this time, if he gets his back up, so help me, he’s going to think a whole war party of Utes is breathing down his cussed neck!”
Brian nodded, looking enormously relieved. He eased back down in his blankets, watched Miggs’ craggy old tough face for a moment, then, in an altogether different tone, he said: “Jackson … and you, too, Frank … sometime tomorrow I’d like to talk to you fellers off by ourselves if we can. It’s got nothing to do with Holt or his Durhams, either.”
