by Alan Lemay
The faces of the wild bunch riders were expressionless, noncommittal; Roper knew they wouldn't have much to say. They were youngsters still-all except Pierce; but their faces were carved lean and hard by long riding, and a lot of that riding had been for him.
He stood up, shaking his shoulders.
"Catch up your ponies."
"We pulling out? Tonight yet?"
"You bet your life we are. Ought to make Red Horse Springs by midnight."
"And after that," Harnish said slowly, "what is it, Bill? Is it Ogallala?"
Once more the silence, while they waited for Bill.
"It's the raid," Roper said.
EW GORDON came stumping across the corral of his little Miles City house, his spurs ringing at every stride. His big hands, rope-hardened and thickened at the knuckles, swung loose at his sides; but his face had the look of a man beset.
Here was a man born and bred to the rigors of the saddle, and competent to face them, even yet; but now he was face to face with necessities other than those of the plainsmen. At this hour in his life Lew Gordon controlled a greater potential wealth and power than that of most international bankers. The obscure, inadequate figures in his tally books had multiplied in meaning, even since the death of Dusty King. He found himself now fighting a desperate battle of his own, in which no man was equipped to help him; and like all truly great battles, it was one which a blind courage, however stubborn, could not win.
No pomp and circumstance marked the life of Lew Gordon, master of an empire though he might be. Like his daughter, he usually unsaddled his own horse as he came in, and with his calloused hands rubbed away the bridle itch from his pony's jaw and poll before he kicked it loose. Only, his eyes had a far-off look now, and his hands dangled lank as he walked, unready for the gun which they had forgotten to belt about his still-lean hips.
Opening the back door of the house he sent a great roar through the walls "Jody! Jody, where are you?"
She answered him, and Lew Gordon, picking up a cold steak from a platter always left for him in the kitchen, went to find her, tearing off mouthfuls of beef as he walked.
"What's the meaning of this?" was his greeting as his daughter came running to him through the house. "You were supposed to stay in Ogallala!"
Jody threw her arms about his neck and pulled his head down to kiss him; but Lew Gordon was not to be put off.
"That horse wrangler just brought me word that you was here," he said. "There's a pretty kettle of soap, when some horse wrangler knows more about where a man's daughter is at than he knows himself! How in heck did you get here?"
"I rode, Dad. I couldn't send you word I was coming because I came faster than the mail could come through."
"You rode? Alone? Better'n four hundred miles across all that say!"
"Some cowboys were riding up this way," she told him.
"Cowboys! What's the good of that? I won't stand for it! You ain't a child any more. This thing of larruping all over the country with a pack of saddle tramps-damn my soul if I ever heard the beat!"
"Dad I want to talk to you."
"Darned if I know how I'm ever going to get you raised. You don't pay any more attention to what I say than as if-"
"Dad, will you please sit down? I tell you, I want to talk to you!"
"Oh, all right." Lew Gordon flopped into a chair, jabbed his spurs into the floor at long range, and tore off another huge mouthful of beef.
"There are two pieces of bad news," Jody said now. "First thing, Ben Thorpe has cut under us in the bidding for the government contracts, at Dodge."
A spark leaped into Lew Gordon's eyes; under the pressure of the last two years he had turned edgy and garrulous, as if his mind had become hasty on the trigger, now that his hands were idle. "I might have known it!" his big voice boomed. "Those infernal-"
Nowadays a vast swarm of intricacies, having to do with markets, and costs, and the holding of land, made a puzzle through which Lew Gordon could hardly find his way. The raw materials with which he traded were those he understood cattle and grass lands, horses and guns and men. But the rise of the West had now brought the old cowman to the necessities of a financier and a politician even to those of a statesman. What the bankers with their precise figures could never understand was that Lew Cordon's problems involved the conflicting wills of a thousand men.
Under the prophetic leadership of Dusty King, King-Gordon had become great. Few empires had ever included more latent power than lay in the miles of loading chutes, the thousands of head of horses, the countless cattle now literally scattered from border to border under the many King-Gordon brands. Small wonder that the old cowman's ropegnarled hands sometimes moved uncertainly, now that he, alone, was King-Gordon...
"The loss of those contracts is going to hurt," Jody said; "I've brought the books up into fair shape, and it looks to me as if King-Gordon is starting the worst year in history. If the losses go on piling up the way they are-"
"Everybody is up against losses," Lew Gordon growled. "I guess we can stand it if anybody can. What's the other bad news?"
Jody Gordon came and sat on the arm of her father's chair. "There was a man rode up to Ogallala from Dodge City," she said. "He brought some very peculiar news, and I don't like it at all."
"If that renegade Colorado outfit think they're going to-" Lew Gordon began.
"This was a Bill Roper man," Jody said.
Lew Gordon checked as suddenly as if he had been struck across the face. His voice stopped, and he stopped chewing his beef, and for a few moments every fibre in his body seemed to relax; except that his eyes remained alive, fixed upon the eyes of his daughter, and the new light that came into them was a light that burned.
When Lew Gordon spoke his voice was so quiet that its very stillness carried threat of imminent destruction. "Bill Roper sent a man to you?"
"I didn't say that. He's a man who was with Bill Roper in the Texas Rustlers' War; he doesn't seem to be in the Montana raids. In the Texas war he rode for Bill Roper as a scout, I think. I guess you'll admit that the men who scouted for Roper in Texas knew their business."
"Who was it?" Lew Gordon rumbled. "What's his name?"
"Shoshone Wilce."
"Wilce! I know that name. I know it well. I'd rope and drag him in a second, if I caught him talking to you!"
"This man has talked with Ben Thorpe in Dodge," Jody told her father. "A lot of strange news is working down to Thorpe from up here in Montana. Some bands of rustlers are slashing up and down Montana throwing lead and leather into the Thorpe outfits under Lashamj they say he's badly hurt already nobody will know how badly until the winter breaks. They say"
"Well," her father interrupted her, "everybody knows that. If you made this fool trip to tell me that Montana law has gone to hell on a pinto, you've wasted your-"
"That isn't all," Jody insisted. "They say there's going to be a split between Thorpe and Lasham. They say that nobody knows who is behind the rustling that is cutting into the Thorpe herds under Lasham; but Thorpe thinks"
"Nobody knows?" Gordon repeated with impatience. "Everybody knows! Don't you know?"
Jody hesitated. "Yes," she admitted, "I suppose I do."
"This is Bill Roper's work," Lew Gordon said. "It's getting so a man can recognize his style a hundred mile oft-1 The same wild bunch that was with him in Texas is with him again, and no rider comes into Miles City without packing in a new rumor about some damn' devilment. Why, just last week, Roper and Tex Long and Lee Harnish were seen strutting up and down openly, in the streets of this town. Dry Camp Pierce is supposed to be tied up with him, and that little gunthrower that calls himself Hat Crick Tommy. Roper has pulled outlawed gunfighters up into Montana until it ain't safe for a decent citizen to ride the range!"
"Have we lost any stock? Has anybody, except Walk Lasham?"
"What's that got to do with it? Law that's worthless to one outfit is worthless to everybody else. All my life I've fought for law and order; more
than any other one thing, I've wanted to see the cow country made into a decent place to live at. And now this renegade kid, that was practically raised under my own roof he's working a damage to the range that will set us back twenty years, before he's through!"
Jody Gordon was silent for a minute. "It's Ben Thorpe that I want to talk to you about," she said at last.
Her father waited, his eyes angry.
"The word from Dodge explains half the trouble that King-Gordon is up against," Jody said. "Thorpe can't believe that one lone cowboy, deserted by everyone who should have been his friend, could manage to smash his Texas holdings, and go on to cut away his herds in Montana. He thought that we were backing Billy Roper in the Texas Rustlers' War. And he believes that we're backing him now. He thinks that King-Gordon is behind the Montana raids; and he holds you responsible for everything that Roper has done. That's why he's fighting King-Gordon so desperately, in the markets, in the government bidding, wherever we turn-"
"Well?" Lew Gordon said. "You mean to say you came all this way to tell me that?"
"But that isn't all!"
"Well?" Gordon said again.
"Ben Thorpe means to kill you."
Lew Gordon's face showed no change of expression. But he did not reply at once.
"I don't doubt it," he said at last; "what would you expect? You bring war into a range and anybody is likely to go down."
"But what can we do?"
"What is there to do? As long as Bill Roper is on the loose, this is the kind of goings-on we'll have. But mark you, I'm a long way from through. We'll beat--"
Jody's face was white. She said in a level voice, "If Thorpe means to get you, he'll get you all right."
"By God," said Gordon, "nobody's got me yet!"
"That was because you never forgot the tools you were working with. Because you were thinking of horses and men instead of pastures and dollars. Because, until now, you always had Dusty King-"
"I don't see exactly," Lew said, "why you bring Dusty in."
"Because Dusty King is dead. Because he was killed by the same men that want to kill you!"
"You know what's at the bottom of all the trouble we're having," her father said. "You know as well as I do that two years of nothing but trouble lays square at the door of Bill Roper."
Jody sprang up to face him. "I certainly do not know anything of the kind!" she answered him.
Lew Gordon stared at her.
"It's an everlasting shame upon the cow country that Dusty King's killers are still in their saddles. I tell you, Billy Roper is the only man I've seen with courage enough to-"
And now her father angered as she had seldom seen him anger. "You'll tell me nothing!" he roared, "Roper! I'm sick of hearing his name-a dirty outlaw whelp that knows nothing but kill and burn and raid! Better for him, and for us all, if Dusty had let him die on the old Sedalia trail, with his Dad!"
Jody's eyes narrowed and filled with tears. "You may as well know this," she told her father. "The day that Billy Roper dies I want to die too."
For a moment Lew Gordon seemed bewildered; he stared at his daughter as if the devil had come up through the floor. The girl who faced him was entirely strange to him.
He heard her say, "If you had stayed by him, as Dusty King would have done, Thorpe would have been whipped and through, long ago."
"Child," he said queerly, "what are you talking about?"
"If you'd only take Billy Roper back into KingGordon -"
"That'll never happen while I live," her father said flatly.
A silence fell between them, presently broken by the girl. "He asked me to ride with him once, when he first took the outlaw trail. I wish I had. To the last day I live, I'll wish I'd ridden with him then. And now I'll tell you something more. If ever he asks me again, I'll go."
At first her father's bewilderment seemed increased. Before now he had always looked at her as a child, just a baby even when she had in some part taken over the ledgers which now guided his work. But now he saw that Jody had changed had become something new and strange to him. Belatedly, Lew Gordon perhaps now perceived that his daughter had not been a child for a long time.
For several moments he stared at her, more shaken than he had been since the death of Dusty King. Then his face congested, and he rose up on his boot heels to tower over the girl.
"By God," he said, his voice unsteady with the repression he put upon it, "that closes the deal! I've kept my riders off him because of Dusty King, and I let him run on and on, rousing up a range war that has close to busted King-Gordon. But when it comes to tampering with you it's the end! I'm through, you hear me?"
"Dad!"
"If it's the last thing I'll ever do, I'll clean the range of him so help me God!"
He caught up his battered sombrero, and his spurs rang as he turned toward the door.
"Dad, what are you going to do?"
"Thorpe has a reward on Bill Roper's head. King-Gordon is going to double that reward."
"But Dad, Dad, can't you see"
"I see he's an outlaw and a renegade; in Texas that's the same as a coyote and we stamp them out of the range!"
He went storming out, his face black and violent with portent of war.
For several moments Jody Gordon stood motionless where he had left her. Then she turned and went out of the house to the long shed-like stable.
Shoshone Wilce was loitering there in the shadow of the rear wall, an uneasy and restless figure.
"Did you find out where Billy Roper can be reached?" Jody demanded.
"Yes, main, I kind of did, I guess; and I got to be getting on there, Miss Gordon. If you'll just give me any message you want me to take, I'd sure like to be pulling out of here, before-"
"Where is he?"
"Why, seems like he has some kind of a hole-up camp somewheres up Fork Crick; I know about where it would be, I think. I figure I better--"
"All right. You be here with two good horses just after dark."
"If you could just as leave give me the message now, I'd sure like to-"
"There is no message. I'm going with you to Bill Roper."
Shoshone stared at her, unbelieving. "Hey! Wait a minute! I can't-"
"You'll do as I say, Shoshone."
Shoshone Wilce looked like a man entrapped. "I can't do it! Your father-I just won't do it, Miss Gordon!"
"All right. I'll make the ride by myself."
"Hey, look! You can't-"
"Bill Roper isn't going to like this, Wilce."
Shoshone studied her searchingly, but found nothing to reassure him. It was in his mind that this girl would do exactly as she said. "My life ain't worth a nickel, either way," he almost whimpered.
"You be here with the horses," Jody said.
She turned and went into the house, leaving Shoshone Wilce standing unhappy and uncertain, ankle deep in the wet snow.
HE rounding up of the wild bunch riders lost Roper a few days; but within the week Bill Roper and Tex Long rode into the plains of the Little Dry. Snow was falling again; it came down in huge flakes, soft, wet, and heavy, blinding the range. Through this slow smother the men under Roper and Long pushed steadily, carrying with them more than forty head of loose horses lately obtained from the Rosebud Sioux to camp at last in the lee of a low flat butte.
Here around a spluttering fire the riders crouched in their sodden blankets, like Indians, while Roper gave out his orders. Their faces, clouded by lack of razoring, showed gaunt and bony in the orange light of the fire, and over their blanketed shoulders the snow fell steadily, as if the prairie were trying in its formless way to blot out the fire and the men.
Thirty-two men and six outlaw leaders were now in the field against Walk Lasham's powerful Montana outfits in the Great Raid. Thirty-eight picked men most of them gunfighters, all of them crack cowboys concentrated in a single wild bunch under a chief who knew his ground!
Their force was strong enough to have called itself a company of cavalry and it
would have been a good one. There were enough of them to have captured Miles City or Ogallala, or they could have handled twenty-five thousand head of cattle in a single bunch. They numbered more than twice as many as the party of buffalo hunters who had beaten off the siege of a thousand Indians the picked warriors of half a dozen tribes at the battle of Adobe Walls.
Roper's first move had been to split his renegade riders into five bunches under the leaders that he knew Tex Long, Lee Harnish, Dave Shannon, Dry Camp Pierce and himself. Hat Crick Tommy he sent to Miles City in search of further word from Jody Gordon; Hat Crick would later rejoin Roper as messenger and scout.
Dry Camp Pierce was in charge, in a general way, of most of the wild bunch; he was to sweep westward across Montana, raiding as he went. By running the cattle northward in relays to Iron Dog's people, Pierce could strike hard, gut a choice range, and two days later launch a new raid a hundred miles away.
It was Roper's plan that he and Tex Long, with twelve men between them, should make the most daring raid of all; a raid upon the big herds which Lasham held between the headwaters of Timber Creek and the Little Dry. Of all the ranges in which the wild bunch was interested, this was the nearest Miles City the most accessible, the most closely watched, the best protected. How many cattle he could transfer from this range to the starving Canadian Sioux, Roper did not know; but it was his hope to raise such a conspicuous and stubborn disturbance as would mask the operations of the rest of the wild bunch, and permit Pierce to work unimpeded.
"The fourteen of us will split seven ways," Roper told them now. "I figure Lasham's look-out camp for this range is about twelve miles southeast. We'll comb every way but that way. I'm not telling you how to gather stock. Hunt 'em like you know how to hunt 'em. Move out one day's ride, spotting your cow bunches. Next day pick 'em up and work 'em this way. And on the third day throw your gather against a coulee or something, where one man can hold 'em, and the other man of each pair ride back and meet me here. I figure this range is heavy with cattle. I don't see any reason why two good men can't easy throw together three hundred head in a couple of days. That gives us a nice bunch of anyway two thousand. The more the better but with two thousand we'll make our drive."
