A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  Then his fist smashed Garrit across the face, knocking him back against the wall of the cave, and his other hand pulled the knife free of Garrit’s upper arm. Garrit rolled over, dazed by the blow. His eyes were open, but he could barely see the Frenchman, lunging up above him, raising the knife for the kill. He tried to rise, but his stunned nerves would not answer his will. Anne Corday stood on the other side of the cave, the loaded Jake Hawkins in her hands. There was a wide-eyed vindication on her face.

  The Frenchman straddled Garrit with a triumphant bellow, and the uplifted knife flashed in the firelight as it started to come down.

  Then the shot boomed out, rocking the cave with its thunder. As if from a heavy blow, the Frenchman was slammed off Garrit and carried clear up against the wall of the cave. He hung there a moment, and then toppled back, to sprawl limply on the ground. Garrit shared blankly at him, until he finally realized what had happened. A Jake Hawkins packed that much punch, close up.

  Slowly he turned his head, to see the girl, still holding the gun, smoke curling from its muzzle. Her face was blank, as if she was surprised what she had done. Then that same confusion widened her eyes. With a small cry, she dropped the rifle, wheeled, and ran out of the cave. He got to his feet and tried to follow, but almost fell again at the mouth and had to stop there. He heard a whinny, then the drumming of hooves. He stared out into the dripping timber, knowing he was too weak to follow her. The knowledge turned his face bleak and empty.

  JOHN BRUCE’S PACK train returned to Fort Union on the first day of September. The trade goods were gone from the packs, now. They were bulging with dark brown beaver pelts and buffalo robes. The saddle-galled horses filed soddenly in through the great double-leaved gates, met by cheers and greetings of the engagés and hunters and trappers of the post.

  Farrier took Bruce and Garrit to his office. Enid was there, in a wine dress, a pale expectancy in her face. Bruce grasped her arms, a boyish eagerness lighting his heavy features momentarily. Garrit thought the presence of himself and Farrier must have restrained them from an expression of their true feelings, for after looking into her eyes a long moment, Bruce turned to Farrier, telling him of Anne Corday. When he was finished, Farrier turned in amazement to Garrit.

  “And what happened to the girl?”

  Garrit stared around at the walls, feeling that constriction again. He rubbed at his arm, still sore from the knife wound Frenchie had given him. “She got away,” he said, curtly. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Your name will be cleared anyway,” Farrier said. “Bruce’s whole crew is witness to what happened. You’ve saved Yellowstone Fur, Garrit, and they’ll certainly reinstate you with honors.” He scratched his beard, studying Bruce and Enid with a knowing grin. “Maybe we better go out and talk it over, while these two reunite.”

  Bruce had been watching Enid, whose eyes had never left Garrit. “Perhaps it is I who had better go out with you, Farrier,” he said.

  Enid turned sharply to him. “Bruce, I—”

  “Never mind, Enid.” His voice had a dead sound. “I guess I should have known how you felt, ever since you saw Garrit here last April.”

  He turned, shoulders dragging, and went out with a perplexed Farrier. Garrit felt sorry for the man. He knew he should have felt elation for himself, however, as he turned back to Enid, but it did not come.

  “I have always wondered, Vic, why you let her make such a fool of you, that first time, on the Platte,” Enid said.

  He stopped, frowning deeply. “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  “Perhaps, Vic, it was because she is really the woman, and I never was,” she said.

  He turned to her, tried to say something. She shook her head.

  “You’ll never be happy with the old life. I can see that now. If you want to go to her, Vic, you’re free.”

  He stared at her a long time, realizing she had touched the truth. And he knew now why Anne Corday’s face had been with him in so many dreams. It hadn’t been there as a symbol of his revenge, or vindication.

  “Thank you, Enid,” he said, softly.

  He left the fort with but one packhorse and enough supplies to take him as far as Flathead Lake. He rode across the flats and into the timber where a magpie’s scolding drew a fleeting grin to his lips. He stopped, to take one look backward, and then he turned his face toward the mountains, and rode.

  Not only a writer of Western fiction, Frank Bonham (1914–1988) also produced mysteries, television scripts, and articles for magazines and journals. Starting out small, Bonham turned out several hundred Western and mystery short stories and novelettes for pulp magazines and other magazines such as McCall’s, Argosy, and The Saturday Evening Post. During his career he published more than forty books, approximately half of them adult Westerns, including Lost Stage Valley, Cast a Long Shadow, and the novel many consider to be his masterpiece, The Eye of the Hunter.

  Burn Him Out

  Frank Bonham

  Will Starrett squatted before the campfire in the creek bottom, drinking his coffee and watching the other men over the rim of his tin cup. In the strong light from the fire, the sweat and the dirt and the weariness made harsh masks of their faces. They were tired men. But pushing up through their fatigue was a growing restlessness. Now and then, a man’s face was lost in heavy shadow as he turned away to talk with a neighbor. A head nodded vigorously, and the buzz of talk grew louder. To Starrett, listening, it was like the hum a tin of water makes as it comes to a boil. The men were growing impatient now, and drawing confidence from each other. Snatches of talk rose clearly. Without the courtesy of direct address, they were telling Tim Urban what to do.

  Starrett swirled his cup to raise the sugar from the bottom and studied Urban coldly. The man leaned against the wheel of a wagon, looking cornered. He held a cup of coffee in his hand and his puffy face was mottled with sweat and dirt. On his hands and forearms was the walnut stain of grasshopper excrement. He was a man for whom Starrett felt only mild contempt. Urban was afraid to make his own decisions, and yet unable to accept outside advice. The land on which he stood, and on which they had worked all day, was Urban’s. The decision about the land was his, too. But because he hesitated, so obviously, other voices were growing strong with eagerness to make up his mind for him. Tom Cowper was the most full-throated of the twenty-five who had fought the grasshoppers since dawn.

  “If the damned poison had only come!” he said. “We could have been spreading it tonight and maybe had them stopped by noon. Since it ain’t come, Tim—” He scowled and shook his head. “We’re going to have to concoct some other poison just as strong.”

  “What would that be?” Starrett struck a match and shaped the orange light with his hands.

  Cowper, a huge man with a purplish complexion, badger-gray hair, and tufted sideburns, pondered without meeting Starrett’s eyes, and answered without opening his mind.

  “Well, we’ve got time to think of something, or they’ll eat this country right down to bedrock. We’re only three miles from your own land right now. The hoppers didn’t pasture on Urban’s grass because they liked the taste of it. They just happened to land here. Once they get a start, or a wind comes up, they’ll sweep right down the valley. We’ve got to stop them here.”

  Will Starrett looked at him and saw a big angry-eyed man worrying about his land as he might have worried about any investment. To him, land was a thing to be handled like a share of railroad stock. You bought it when prices were low, you sold it when prices were high. Beyond this, there was nothing to say about it.

  When Starrett did not answer him, Cowper asked, “What is there to do that we haven’t already done? If we can’t handle them here on Tim’s place, how can we handle them on our own?”

  They all knew the answer to that, Starrett thought. Yet they waited for someone else to say it. It was Tim Urban’s place to speak, but he lacked the guts to do it. Starrett dropped the match and tilted his chin as he drew on the cigarette. The fire’s c
rackling covered the far-off infinite rattling of the grasshoppers, the night covered the sight of them. But they were still there in every man’s mind, a hated, crawling plague sifting the earth like gold-seekers.

  They were there with their retching green smell and their racket, as of a herd of cattle in a dry cornfield. Across two miles of good bunchgrass land they had squirmed, eating all but a few weeds, stripping leaves and bark from the trees. They had dropped from the sky upon Urban’s home place the night before, at the end of a hot July day. They had eaten every scrap of harness in the yard, gnawed fork-handles and corral bars, chewed the paint off his house and left holes where onions and turnips had been in his garden.

  By night, four square miles of his land had been destroyed, his only stream was coffee-colored with hopper excrement. And the glistening brown insects called Mormon crickets were moving on toward the valley’s heart as voraciously as though wagon loads of them had not been hauled to a coulee all day and cremated in brush fires. And no man knew when a new hatch of them might come across the hills.

  Starrett frowned. He was a dark-faced cattleman with a look of seasoned toughness, a lean and sober man, who in his way was himself a creature of the land. “Well, there’s one thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Cowper asked.

  “We could pray.”

  Cowper’s features angered, but it was his foreman, Bill Hamp, who gave the retort. “Pray for seagulls, like the Mormons?”

  “The Mormons claim they had pretty good luck.”

  With an angry flourish, Hamp flung the dregs of his coffee on the ground. He was a drawling, self-confident Missourian, with truculent pale eyes and a brown mustache. The story was that he had marshaled some cowtown a few years ago, or had been a gunman in one of them.

  He had been Cowper’s ramrod on his other ranches in New Mexico and Colorado, an itinerant foreman who suited Cowper. He did all Cowper asked of him—kept the cows alive until the ranch could be resold at a profit. To Hamp, a ranch was something you worked on, from month to month, for wages. Land, for him, had neither beauty nor dimension.

  But he could find appreciation for something tangibly beautiful like Tom Cowper’s daughter, Lynn. And because Starrett himself had shown interest in Lynn, Bill Hamp hated him—hated him because Starrett was in a position to meet her on her own level.

  Hamp kept his eyes on Starrett. “If Urban ain’t got the guts to say it,” he declared, “I have. Set fires! Burn the hoppers out!” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.

  Around the fire, men began to nod. Urban’s rabbity features quivered. “Bill, with the grass dry as it is I’d be burned out!”

  Hamp shrugged. “If the fire don’t get it, the hoppers will,” he said.

  Cowper sat there, slowly nodding his head. “Tim, I don’t see any other way. We’ll backfire and keep it from getting out of hand.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Starrett said.

  “It’s take the risk or accept catastrophe,” Cowper declared. “And as far as its getting out of hand goes, there’s the county road where we could stop it in a pinch.”

  “Best to run off a strip with gangplows as soon as we set the fires,” Hamp said. He looked at Starrett with a hint of humor. Downwind from Tim Urban’s place at the head of the valley was Starrett’s. Beyond that the other ranches sprawled over the prairie. Hamp was saying that there was no reason for anyone to buck this, because only Urban could lose by the fire.

  Starrett said nothing, and the opinions began to come.

  Finally Cowper said, “I think we ought to take a vote. How many of you are in favor of setting fires? Let’s see hands on it.”

  There were twenty men in the creek bottom. Cowper counted fourteen in favor. “The rest of you against?”

  All but Starrett raised their hands. Hamp regarded him. “Not voting?”

  “No. Maybe you’d like to vote on a proposition of mine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That we set fire to Cowper’s ranch house first.”

  Cowper’s face contorted. “Starrett, we’ve got grief enough without listening to poor jokes!”

  “Burning other men’s grass is no joke. This is Urban’s place, not yours or mine. I’m damned if any man would burn me out by taking a vote.”

  Bill Hamp sauntered to the wagon and placed his foot against a wheel-hub. “Set by and let ourselves be eaten out—is that your idea?”

  “Ourselves?” Starrett smiled.

  Hamp flushed. “I may not own land, but I make my living from it.”

  “There’s a difference, Hamp. You need to sweat ten years for a down payment before you know what owning an outfit really means. Then you’d know that if a man would rather be eaten out than burned out, it’s his own business.”

  Hamp regarded him stonily and said, “Are you going to stand there and say we can’t fire the place to save the rest?”

  Starrett saw the men’s eyes in the firelight, some apprehensive, some eager, remembering the stories about Bill Hamp and his cedar-handled .45. “No,” he said. “I didn’t say that.”

  Hamp, after a moment, let a smile loosen his mouth. But Starrett was saying, “I’ve got nothing against firing, but everything against deciding it for somebody else. Nobody is going to make up Urban’s mind for him, unless he agrees to it.”

  Urban asked quickly, “What would you do, Will?”

  It was not the answer Starrett wanted. “I don’t know,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

  Urban knew an ally when he saw one. He straightened, spat in the fire, and with his thumbs hooked in the riveted corners of his jeans pockets, stared at Cowper. “I’m going to wait till morning,” he said. “If the poison don’t come—and if it don’t rain or the wind change—I may decide to fire. Or I may not.”

  Information passed from Cowper to Bill Hamp, traveling on a tilted eyebrow. Hamp straightened like a man stretching slowly and luxuriously. In doing so, his coat was pulled back and the firelight glinted on his cartridge belt. “Shall we take that vote again, now that Mr. Starrett’s finished stumping?” he asked.

  Starrett smiled. “Come right down to it, I’m even principled against such a vote.”

  Hamp’s dark face was stiff. The ill-tempered eyes held the red catch-lights of the fire. But he could not phrase his anger for a moment, and Starrett laughed. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve always wondered how much of that talk was wind.”

  Cowper came in hastily. “All right, Bill! We’ve done all we can. It’s Urban’s land. As far as I’m concerned, he can fight the grasshoppers himself.” He looked at Starrett. “We’ll know where to lay the blame if things go wrong.”

  He had brought seven men with him. They got up, weary, unshaven cowpunchers wearing jeans tied at the bottoms to keep the grasshoppers from crawling up their legs. Cowper found his horse and came back, mounted.

  “You’ll be too busy to come visit us for a while.” His meaning was clear—he was speaking of his daughter. “As for the rest of it—I consider that a very dangerous principle you’ve laid down. I hope it never comes to a test when the hoppers have the land next to mine.

  They slept a few hours. During the night a light rain fell briefly. Starrett lay with his head on his saddle, thinking of the men he had so nearly fought with.

  Cowper would sacrifice other men’s holdings to protect his own. That was his way. Urban would protest feebly over being ruined with such haste, but he would probably never fight. Hamp was more flexible. His actions were governed for the time by Cowper’s. But if it came to a showdown, if the hoppers finished Urban and moved a few miles east onto Starrett’s land, this dislike that had grown into a hate might have its airing.

  Starrett wished Cowper had been here longer. Then the man might have understood what he was trying to say. That land was not shares of stock, not just dirt with grass growing on it. It was a bank, a feedlot, a reservoir. The money, the feed, the water were there as long as you used them wisely. But spend the
m prodigally, and they vanished. Your cattle gaunted down, your graze died. You were broke. But after you went back to punching cows or breaking horses, the grass came back, good as ever, for a wiser cowman to manage.

  It was a sort of religion, this faith in the land. How could you explain it to a man who gypsied around taking up the slack in failing ranches by eliminating extra hands, dispensing with a useless horse-herd, and finally selling the thing at a profit?

  Ranching was a business with Cowper and Hamp, not a way of life.

  Just at dawn the wind died. The day cleared. An hour later, as they were riding, armed with shovels, into the blanket of squirming hoppers to shovel tons of them into the wagons and dozers, a strong wind rose. It was coming from the north, a warm, vigorous breeze that seemed to animate the grasshoppers. Little clouds of them rose and flew a few hundred yards and fell again. And slowly the earth began to shed them, the sky absorbed their rattling weight and they moved in a low cloud toward the hills. Soon the land was almost clean. Where they had passed in their crawling advance, the earth was naked, with only a few clumps of brush and skeletal trees left.

  Urban leaned on the swell of his saddle by both elbows. He swallowed a few times. Then he said softly, like a man confessing a sin, “I prayed last night, Will. I prayed all night.”

  “Then figure this as the first installment on an answer. But this is grasshopper weather. They’re coming out of the earth by the million. Men are going to be ruined if they come back out of the brush, and if the wind changes, they will. Don’t turn down that poison if it comes.”

  That day Starrett rode into Antelope. From the stationmaster he learned that Tim Urban’s poison had not come. A wire had come instead, saying that the poison had proved too dangerous to handle and suggesting that Urban try Epsom salts. Starrett bought all the Epsom salts he could find—a hundred pounds. Then he bought a ton of rock salt and ordered it dumped along the county road at the southwest border of his land.