The Smoky Years

by Alan Lemay

  He knew that Jody's disappearance was volun tary, and he knew its purpose. The brief but highly informative note that Jody had left him told him that much. It simply said:

  "One of you must be made to see reason. I am going to talk to Billy Roper myself."

  What this did not tell him was where Roper was, or how Jody expected to find him. Impatient of mystery and delay, he could not understand why his many far-scattered cowboys could dig up no word. He neither believed Jody competent to travel the Montana ranges alone, nor trusted any rider who might have been with her. On top of that, he had made certain that all of his own men were accounted for, and could not imagine who was acting as Jody's guide if anyone was unless it might be a Roper man. For all he knew, his daughter was by this time lost somewhere in the frozen wastes of snow, in immediate desperate need of help.

  A constant but irregular chain of couriers kept coming in to him from his outlying outfits, a messenger system that brought him little comfort, but enabled him to direct operations. Tonight, it was a little after eight o'clock as the latest of these riders came in from one of the western camps.

  This was an ineffectual youngster on the pay rolls as a horse wrangler; he brought word that nothing had been accomplished, and Gordon practically skinned him alive.

  "Get back to your worthless outfit," Lew Gordon finished at last. "Get a fresh horse and let me hear later that you burnt up the trail. By God, I'm sick of this infernal dawdling! Get out! Get out of my sight!"

  At quarter after nine the town marshal came in, a lank weary-looking man, trailing a couple of his deputies at his heels. This man brought the first word of any kind that Gordon had received yet.

  "We've kept right on checking up on everybody in town," the marshal reported, "and we finally found a teamster off a hide wagon that thinks he seen her ride out of town. He says he met her in the road as he was coming into town with his team, just after dark night before last."

  "Alone?" Gordon demanded. "Was she alone?"

  "She was riding with a man."

  "Who was it? What kind of looking man?"

  "He doesn't know that. You see, it was dark; and all he can say is it didn't look like anybody he knew. The girl was on a good lively-stepping horse. Leastwise he's virtually certain it was a girl. But he says he didn't know the horse. They was heading out of town toward the west, and there was blanket rolls and saddle bags on both saddles,"

  "Is that all you got?"

  "That's all we got yet As soon as we found out this, we thought you'd want to hear it. We aim to try again on the horse situation, next thing. If we can only find out whose horses those were, we'll find out who the man with her was."

  "It beats me," Lew Gordon exploded impatiently, "why the hell you can't find out a simple thing like what horses she took. I know hootin' well she didn't take mine, and somebody sure must know-"

  "It's awful hard going, finding out that," the marshal said mildly. "What few friends this Roper has in Miles City seem real tie-fast. If they're close enough to Roper to know what he's up to, they're close enough to keep their mouth shut. Mostly they're old side kicks of Dusty King's. Dusty was a great hand to make friends that never would go back on him, and seems like they don't go back on his boy, neither."

  Lew Gordon suppressed his exasperation with the greatest difficulty, but he did not speak again until he had it under control.

  "All right," he said at last. "I guess you fellers are doing the best you can. Go on ahead; try to find out about the ponies they took, and who she was with in case that was really her."

  When they were gone Lew Gordon sat alone for a little while. For the moment his helpless anger was burned down into a heavy weariness. His mind was full of his daughter, whom he persistently pictured as a little girl, much more of a child than she actually was any more.

  Suddenly it struck him how curious it was that in this bare room in which he sat there was no sign of any kind that Jody had ever been here at all. This was partly because she had never lived here nor even been expected here; but it brought home to him sharply how much of his life had been given to cattle, how little to his daughter. All around him was a sparse disorder of saddles, blankets, ropes and guns, and a great litter of business papers. There were spurs, and boots, bridles, tally books, and the irons of his various brands; but not one single thing to indicate that a little motherless girl had ever claimed any part of his thought. It made him realize how little he knew his daughter, and how little he had ever given her of himself.

  This was Lew Gordon's state of mind as the door thrust open, letting in a brief lash of wintry wind; and he wheeled in his chair to face the last man on earth he had expected to see.

  Bill Roper shook a powdering of dry snow off the roll of his coat collar, then stood looking at Lew Gordon in a cool hard silence as he pulled off his gloves. This was the outlaw leader on whose head Gordon had put a price double that posted by Thorpe, his own bitterest enemy. Once this man had been almost a son to Lew Gordon the adopted son, in actuality, of Lew Gordon's dead partner. But a definite enmity now replaced what a little while ago had been a friendship as deep and close as the variance in their ages could permit. All the meaning of their association, almost as long as Bill Roper's life, was gone, wiped out by those two smoky years since the death of Dusty King.

  For a moment or two Lew Gordon stared at him in utter disbelief. Then he whipped to his feet.

  "Where is she?" he demanded intensely, furiously. "What have you done with her?"

  Bill Roper no longer looked like the youngster Dusty King had raised on the trail. His grey eyes looked hard and extremely competent, old beyond his age, in a face so dark and lean-carved it was hard to recognize behind it the face of Dusty King's kid. He made no attempt to answer a question which was necessarily meaningless to him. He finished pulling off his gloves, unbuttoned his coat, and hooked his thumbs in his belt before he spoke.

  "I heard yesterday that Jody has turned up missing," he said. "I came to Miles hell-for-leather to see if it's so. From what I could find out down in the town, no word has come in on where she is. If that's true, I don't aim to give my time to anything else until she's found."

  "By God," said Lew Gordon, "I've got reason to think you know exactly where she is right now!"

  "If I knew that I wouldn't be here. What I want from you is what you know about this."

  "You mean to deny you know where she is?" Gordon shouted.

  Roper's voice did not change. "You talk like a fool," he said.

  Lew Gordon's eyes were savagely intent upon Roper's face; he was trying to discover if this man could be believed.

  "You may be lying," he added at last, "and you may not, but I'll tell you this-you sure won't leave here till I find out where my girl is. You're wanted anyway, my laddie buck; there's a legal reward on your head, right now-and part of it was put up by me."

  "I heard that," Bill Roper said. "When I get ready to leave, I'll leave, all right. My advice to you is to begin using your head. I may be in a kind of funny position. But it puts me where I know things about the Montana range that neither you nor your outfits have got any clue to. If you want your daughter back you better figure to use what I know about the Deep Grass."

  Lew Gordon compelled himself to temporize. What he couldn't get around was his own belief that Roper knew something definite, specific, about where Jody had gone-or had started out to go. He must have known also, in spite of the bluff to which anger had prompted him, that he could not hold Roper here when Roper decided to leave, nor force any information from him in any way whatever.

  "What is it you want to know?" he asked at last, helpless, and angry in his helplessness.

  "In the first place, I want to know what made you think Jody was with me?"

  "You swear," Lew Gordon demanded, "you don't know the answer to that?"

  "I don't swear anything," Roper said. "I asked you a question, Lew."

  Lew Gordon hesitated. It was a good many years since anyone had talk
ed to him in the tone Bill Roper took; but for once the purpose in hand outpowered the violence of his natural reaction. He turned from his litter of papers, and handed Bill Roper'the little scrap of Jody's handwriting which was all she had left to indicate where she was gone.

  "One of you must be made to see reason. I am going to talk to Billy Roper myself."

  When Bill Roper had read that, the eyes of the two men met in hostile question.

  "This looks mighty like a false lead, to me," Bill Roper said at last. "Like as if she aimed to cover up where she really went. Don't hardly seem likely she'd start out to come to me."

  "My girl don't cover up anything," Lew Gordon snarled at him.

  "You lost her, didn't you?"

  Gordon turned away with a jerk. His boot heels sounded dull and heavy on the carpetless floor as he resumed the pacing which had lately occupied so many of his hours.

  "She in love with some man?" Roper demanded bluntly.

  Lew Gordon reddened darkly, but he answered. "Hell, no."

  "Some boy in one of your outfits could be shining up to her without you knowing it, I guess."

  "All my boys are accounted for. She didn't even know anybody else, anywhere around Miles."

  "She rode out with somebody just the same."

  Gordon's eyes lifted sharply. "You knew that?"

  "Seem to, don't l?"

  Gordon resumed his sullen pacing.

  "Lew," Roper said, an edge of anger coming into his own voice, "did you have a row with that girl?"

  "Stay back of your rights," Gordon warned him. "There's such a thing as more slack than I'll take from anybody."

  "Uh huh," Roper said, "you did have a row with her. Just what was this about, Lew?

  Suddenly the older man came to the end of his endurance. `By God, if anything came up between Jody and me, you were behind it! Just as you're the cause of the cut-throat war that Thorpe has put on us in every territory in the West, and every mile of the Trail. Just as you're the cause of every costly ruckus King-Gordon has had, since the death of Dusty King. It's a wonder to me I don't blast you where you stand."

  "Even if I stood here and let you," Roper commented, "you couldn't fire on me while I stood here without raising a hand. You've proved out mighty weak-handed, Lew, without Dusty King, and mighty short of memory, and general guts; but you couldn't ever bring yourself to that."

  Gordon's speech was thick-tongued with repression, but his voice was low. "I've stood for peace and law and decency; you've turned yourself over to cow-stealing and bush-whacking and gunplay. You've started things no mortal man can stop; you've gone so deep that you can't ever back up. So deep that you can't ever get square with the world again, or your record forgot."

  "Mostly," Bill said, "I've stood for the memory of a man. But let that go. What I want from you is why you had a row with Jody and why she should come hunting for me, if that's what she did."

  "I know she went looking for you because she said she did. My girl don't lie."

  Roper shrugged. "Why in all hell should she do that?"

  "It was your own man talked her into it," Gordon said with menace.

  "My own man? What man?"

  "A man of yours sneaked into Ogallala with some wild cock-and-bull story about Thorpe's fixing to gun me. He gets this kid girl all stirred up with the idea that the only way to save us from all getting kilt is to get you and your gunmen to balance off Thorpe's gunmen. That's why Jody and me had a row-if you want to call it that; because I wouldn't take any stock in the cock-and-bull yarn, and wouldn't throw in with a bunch of criminals if I did. That's what she means in this here note, and that's why she went looking for you. And that's why God knows where she is tonight! By God, Roper, there's not a man in the West has more to answer for than-"

  "If a man of mine says Thorpe has decided to rub you out, you most likely'll get rubbed out," Roper told him. "Quite a few of my boys have a knack of finding out such things."

  "If you figure you can use a flimsy game like that to get a penny's worth of backing out of KingGordon -"

  "I wouldn't use your backing to rub on a horse as a cure for mange," Roper told him. "That's what I think of that. I sent no man anywhere near you nor your girl. Who was this feller claimed to be hooked up with me?"

  "A little sniveler called Shoshone Wilce. Everybody knows he was a scout coyote for you, before Texas ever run you out."

  "Nobody run me out of any place," Roper said; but his mind whipped to something else. It was true that he talked to certain men in the town before he had come here. Now suddenly he knew that he had learned what he had come to find out. He buttoned his coat, pulled on his gloves.

  Gordon confronted him stubbornly. "I mean you shan't leave here without telling me what you know."

  A glint of hard amusement was plain in Bill Roper's eyes. "I know what you've told me. But I'll add this onto it. I think you'll soon have back your girl. I'm walking out of here now, Lew, because it's time for me to look into a couple of things. But I'll be seeing you if Thorpe don't get you first."

  The veins stood out sharply on Lew Gordon's forehead, high-lighted by a faint dampness. "In all fairness I'll tell you this," he said. "It's true I can't lift a gun on you, or on any man who stands with empty hands. But as soon as you're out of that door, all Miles City will be on the jump to see you don't get loose. Twenty thousand hangs over your head, my boy!"

  "Quite a tidy little nest egg," Roper agreed. "I'd like to have it myself."

  A trick of the wind sent a great whirl of papers across the room as he went out."

  He had not come here without providing that the horse which waited under his saddle was fresh and good. He struck westward now out of Miles City, unhurrying. At the half mile he found a broad cross trail where some random band of cattle had trampled the snow into a trackless pavement. He turned north in this, followed it for a mile, then swung northwest over markless snow. Now that this horse was warmed a little he settled deep in his saddle and pushed the animal into a steady trot; at that gait, even in the snow, he could expect the tough range-bred pony to last most of the night.

  TIRED horse is not much inclined to shy, toward the end of a long day's travel; and when Bill Roper's horse snorted and jumped sidewise out of its tracks the rider looked twice, curiously, at the carcass which had spooked his pony. A dead pony on the winter range being a fairly common thing, he was about to ride on, when he noticed something about this particular dead pony which caused him to pull up and dismount for a closer examination.

  After leaving Lew Gordon he had ridden deep into the night; and though his pony had proved disappointing he had made fast enough time so that now, an hour and a half before sunset, he was in the low hills which hemmed the valley of the Fork. Half an hour would bring him within sight of the Fork Creek rendezvous, and he was eager to push on, so that his deduction as to Jody's whereabouts might have a quick answer, one way or the other; but when he had examined the dead pony he was glad that he had checked.

  This was no winter-killed pony. The bright trace of frozen blood that had first caught Roper's eye was the result of two gunshot wounds in neck and quarters. The pony had been well fed, and bore the sad die marks of recent hard riding. Evidently it had wandered some distance since its rider had pulled off the saddle and turned it loose to shift as it could.

  A dark foreboding possessed Roper as he studied the dead pony. Roper himself was short-cutting through the hills, following no trail. The coincidence that he had stumbled upon the carcass in all those snowy wastes could be accounted for only in one way: both Roper and the pony had followed a line of least resistance through the hills a line that had the Fork Creek rendezvous at its far end. His discovery told him that there had been fighting at Fork Creek within the last forty-eight hours. If he was right in believing that Jody had come to Fork Creek-

  He remounted and swung northward, mercilessly whipping up his weary pony, but approaching the Fork Creek camp roundabout, behind masking hills and through hidden
ravines. An hour passed before he threw down his reins and crept on hands and knees to the crest of a ridge commanding the valley of the Fork.

  The soft snow of two days before had at first begun to melt, but was now frozen hard under the lash of a bitter wind. The steely glaze of its crust caught the sunset with strange red reflections, filling the valley with an unnatural light. Peering through an ice-hung bit of wolfberry bush, Roper made out, far up the valley, an irregularity in the snow that was the Fork Creek rendezvous.

  For a little while he could not be sure whether or not smoke rose from the camp. If anyone was here they were being mighty careful what kind of fuel they burned. He decided at last that a faint haze hung over the brush where the cabin stood. His blood stirred, making a tingle in his cold hands.

  He moved a half mile closer and resumed his watch; but for some time he could make out nothing more.

  Then just as the sun set, three men moved out of the cabin. For a moment or two they stood in the snow close together. One went back into the cabin. The two others disappeared for a moment, to reappear mounted. They separated, and Roper watched them ride in opposite directions up the nearest slopes of the hills. These passed beyond his sight, but in another minute or two their ways were retraced by two other riders.

  "Outposts," Roper decided. "Somebody's keeping a hell of a careful watch."

  The light was failing now. Roper was about to leave his lookout when something else happened that held him fastened to the ground.

  To his right, surprisingly close, a rifle spoke, once only. Roper could neither see the man who had fired nor guess his target. He waited five minutes, gun ready, then stood up and moved his pony downslope into a shallow draw in which it was hidden by the brush. Moving cautiously, he proceeded north along the cut, seeking the position of the man who had fired.