The four walls were really more furnished than the rest of the room. To the right and left of the fireplace hung twin bighorn heads, and elk and stag antlers on the other walls supplied racks for an ample variety of rifles, polished by familiar use and kept, through love of trusty friends, in good order. Trophies of the hunt, disposed sometimes in effective and sometimes in mere man fashion, flanked the racks and showed the tastes of the owner of the isolated habitation; for few trails led within miles of Laramie's ranch on the Turkey.
"Breakfast?" Simeral looked at his companion, who stood vacantly musing at the door of the kitchen.
"Coffee," answered Laramie, taking off his jacket, laying his Colt's on the table and slipping off his breast harness.
"I got no bread," announced Ben, to forestall objection. "Flour's low 'n' I didn't bake."
"Crackers will do."
"Ain't no crackers, neither," returned Ben, raising his voice and his smile in self-defense.
"Give me coffee and bacon," suggested Laramie, impatiently.
"'N' I'll fry some potatoes," muttered Ben, shuffling with a show of speed into the kitchen, and calling inquiries back in his unsteady voice to the living-room, patiently digging at Laramie for scraps of news from Sleepy Cat, volunteering, in return, scraps from the range and ranch. Laramie sat down in the nearest chair, tilted it slightly back, and resting one arm on the table gazed into the empty fireplace. He appeared as if much preoccupied—nor would, nor could, he talk of what was in his mind, nor think of anything else.
Some minutes later he began in the same absent-minded manner on a huge plateful of bacon, with a pot of coffee in keeping, and was eating in silence when the stillness of the sunshine was broken by the sound of a horse's hoofs. Laramie looked out and saw, through the open door, a horseman riding in leisurely fashion up from the creek.
The man was tall. He swung lightly out of his saddle near the door, and as he walked into the house it could be seen that he was proportioned in his frame to his height; strength and agility revealed themselves in every move. A rifle slung in a scabbard hung beside the shoulder of the horse, and the man's rig proclaimed the cowboy, though aside from a broad-brimmed Stetson hat his garb was simplicity itself.
It was the way in which he carried his height and shoulders that arrested attention, nor was his face one easily to be forgotten. He wore a jet-black beard that grew close and dropped compactly down. It was neither bushy nor scraggly and with his black brows it made a striking setting for strong and rather deep-set eyes which if not actually black were certainly very dark. His smile revealed white, regular teeth under his dark mustache, and his olive complexion, though tanned, seemed different from those of men that rode the range with him—perhaps it was owing to the glossy, black beard.
Abe Hawk was evidently at home in Laramie's cabin. He stepped through the door and pushing his hat back on his forehead took a chair and sat down. The two men, masters of taciturnity, looked at each other while this was taking place, and as Hawk seated himself Laramie called for a cup and pushed the coffee pot toward his visitor. Paying no attention to the unspoken invitation, Hawk's features assumed the quizzical lines they sometimes wore when he relaxed and poked questions at his friend.
"Well," he demanded, banteringly, "where's Jimmie been?"
"Medicine, Sleepy Cat—pretty near everywhere."
"I hear you got a job."
"I was offered one."
"Deputy marshal, eh?"
"Farrell Kennedy got me down to Medicine Bend to talk it over."
"What's the matter, couldn't you hold it?"
"I didn't want it."
"You're out of practise on this law-and-order stuff—you've lived up here too long among thieves, Jim. Find out who tore down your wire?"
Laramie replied in even tones but his voice was hard: "I trailed them across the Crazy Woman. It was somebody from Doubleday's ranch."
"They had a story at Stormy Gorman's you'd gone over there to blow Barb's head off."
"Barb wasn't home."
Hawk was conscious of the evasion. "Was Stormy's talk true?" he demanded curtly.
"I expected to ask Barb whether he wanted to put my wire back. I was going to give him a chance."
"It wouldn't be hard to guess how that would come out. Where was he?" asked Hawk, with evident disappointment.
"They said he was in Sleepy Cat. I rode in and missed him there. He'd gone to the mines. I took the train up to the Junction, There I accidentally got switched off my job and came home."
"How'd you get switched off?" asked Hawk, resenting the outcome.
Laramie's manner showed he disliked being bored into. He leaned forward with a touch of asperity and looked, straight at his visitor: "By not 'tending strictly to my own business, Abe."
Hawk knew from the expression of Laramie's eyes he must drop the subject, and though he lost none of his bantering manner, he desisted: "They didn't have a warrant for me down at the marshal's office, did they?"
"They were short of blanks," retorted Laramie coolly.
"How you fixed for flour?"
"Plenty of it." Laramie spoke loudly for fear Simeral might protest. Then he called promptly to the kitchen: "Ben, get up some flour for Abe."
Ben quavered a protest.
"Get it up now before you forget it," insisted Laramie.
"Is Tom Stone still foreman over at Doubleday's?"
"I guess he is," returned Laramie.
"What does Doubleday aim to do with Stone?" asked Hawk, cynically, "steal his own cattle from himself?"
"A cattleman nowadays might as well steal his own cattle as to wait for somebody else to steal 'em." Laramie spoke with some annoyance. "There's going to be trouble for these Falling Wall rustlers."
"Meaning me?" asked Hawk, contemptuously.
"I never mean you without saying you, Abe—you ought to know that by this time. But this running off steers is getting too raw. From the undertalk in Sleepy Cat there's going to be something done."
"Who by?"
"By the cattlemen."
"I thought," Hawk spoke again contemptuously, "you meant by the sheriff."
"But I didn't," said Laramie. "I meant by the bunch at the range. And when they start they'll stir things up over this way."
Hawk hazarded a guess on another subject: "It looks like Van Horn—putting in Stone over at Doubleday's."
"It is Van Horn."
Hawk looked in silence out of the open door at the distant snow-capped mountains. "Why don't you kill him, Jim?" he asked after a moment, possibly in earnest, possibly in jest, for his iron tone sometimes meant everything, sometimes nothing.
Laramie, at all events, took the words lightly. He answered Hawk's question with another. But his retort and manner were as easy as Hawk's question and expression were hard. "Why don't you?"
The bearded man across the table did not hesitate nor did he cast about for words. On the contrary, he replied with embarrassing promptness: "I will, sometime."
"A man that didn't know you, Abe, might think you meant it," commented Laramie, filling his coffee cup.
Hawk's white teeth showed just for the instant that he smiled; then he talked of other things.
CHAPTER IX
AT THE BAR
The arrival of a baby at the home of Harry Tenison in Sleepy Cat had an immediate effect on Kate Doubleday's fortune in the mountains—and, indeed, on the fortunes of a number of other people in Sleepy Cat—wholly out of proportion to its importance as a family event. It was not, it is true, for the Tenisons a mere family event. Married fifteen years, they had been without children until the advent of this baby. And the birth of a boy to Harry Tenison excited not alone the parents, but the town, the railroad division and the hundred miles of range and desert, north and south, tributary to the town.
For a number of years Tenison had run his place in Sleepy Cat undisturbed by the swiftly changing fortunes of frontiersmen and railroad men. Tragedies, in their sudden sweep across the hor
izon of his activities, the poised gambler and hotel man had met unmoved. Men went to the heights of mining or range affluence and to the depths of crude passion, inevitable despair and tragic death, with Harry Tenison coldly unruffled. He was a man in so far detached from his surroundings, yet with his finger on the pulse of happenings in his unstable world. But the birth of one baby—and that a small one—upset him completely and very unexpectedly shocked others of his motley circle of acquaintance.
The complications followed on the announcement—on a Monday when the baby was three days old and the mother and boy were reported by the nurse to be coming along like kittens—that the following Saturday would be "open day" at the Mountain House—Tenison's new and almost palatial hotel; with the proprietor standing host for the town and the countryside.
Before the week was out this word had swept through the mountains, from the stretches of the Thief River on the South to the recesses of the Lodge Poles on the North. It was the one topic of interest for the week on the range. Few were the remote corners where the news did not penetrate and the unfortunates who missed the celebration long did penance in listening to long-winded accounts of Sleepy Cat's memorable day.
It dawned in a splendor of blue sky and golden sun, with the mountain reaches, snow-swept and still, brought incredibly near and clear through the sparkling air of the high plateau. The Sleepy Cat band were Tenison's very first guests for breakfast.
"'N' you want to eat hearty, boys," declared Ben Simeral, who had reached town the night before in order that no round crossing the Tenison bar should escape him: "Harry expec's you to blow like hell all day."
Few men are more conscientious in the discharge of duty than the members of a small-town brass band. The Sleepy Cat musicians held back only until the arrival of the early local freight, Second Seventy-Seven, for their bass horn player, the fireman. When the train pulled up toward the station on a yard track, the band members in uniform on the platform awaited their melodic back-stop, and the fireman, in greeting, pulled the whistle cord for a blast. The switch engine promptly responded and one whistle after another joined in until every engine in the yard was blowing as Ben had declared Tenison expected the band itself to blow.
In this wholly impromptu and happy way the day was opened. The band, laboriously trained for years by the local jeweler—said to be able to blow a candle through an inch board with his South Bend B flat cornet—now formed in marching order, the grimed fireman gamely in place even after a night run, with his silver contrabass. At an energetic signal from their leader they struck up a march and started down street with the offering as a pledge of what they might be expected to do. They were not called on, however, to do all, for at noon the Bear Dance Band arrived from the West and an hour later came the crack thirty-two-piece military band from Medicine Bend, carrying more gold on their lacings and their horns than the local musicians carried in the savings bank.
By the time the noon whistle blew at the roundhouse every trail and road into Sleepy Cat showed dust—some of them an abundance. The hotel was naturally the center of attraction, and Main Street looked like a Frontier Day crowd. The Reservation, too, sent a delegation for the occasion and mingling in the jostling but good-natured crowd were chiefs, bucks and squaws, who, in a riot of war bonnets, porcupine waistcoats, gay trappings and formal blankets, lent yellows and reds and blues to the scene. All entrances to the Mountain House were decorated and a stream of visitors poured in and out, with congratulations for Tenison, who received them at the bar in the big billiard hall opening on Main Street.
By evening the hall presented an extraordinary scene. Every element that went to make up the shifting life of the frontier could be picked from the crowd that filled the room. Most numerous and most aggressive in the spectacle, cattlemen and range riders in broad hats, leathern jackets and mottled waistcoats, booted and spurred and rolling in their choppy steps on pointed heels, moved everywhere—to and from the bar, around the pool tables and up and down the broad flight of stairs leading to the second floor gambling rooms. At the upper end of the long bar there was less crowding than nearer the street door and at this upper end three men, somewhat apart from others, while nominally drinking, stood in confab. First among them, Harry Van Horn was noticeable. His strong face, with its hunting nose, reflected his active mind, and as he spoke or listened to one or the other of his companions—standing between them—his lively eyes flashed in the overhead light. On his left stood Tom Stone, foreman of the Doubleday ranch. His head, carried habitually forward, gave him the appearance of always looking out from under his eyebrows; and the natural expression of his face, bordering on the morose, was never lighted by more than a strained smile—a smile that suggested a grin, that puckered the corners of his eyes and drew hard furrows down his cheeks, but evidenced nothing akin to even the skim-milk of human kindness.
On Van Horn's left stood an older man of massive features, the owner of the largest ranch in the north country, Barb Doubleday.
Miners from Thief River, with frank, fearless faces, broad-throated, belted and shifted, and with brawny arms for pick and sledge and doublejack, moved to and from the bar like desert travelers breathing in an oasis. Men from the short spillway valleys of the Superstition Range—the coyotes and wolves of the Spanish Sinks—were easily to be identified by their shifty eyes and loud laughter and handy six-shooters. Moving in a little group rather apart from these than mingling with them, talking and drinking more among themselves, were men from the Falling Wall—men professedly "ranching" on the upper waters of the Horse, the Turkey and Crazy Woman creeks, tributaries of the Falling Wall river—in point of fact, rustlers between whom and the big cattlemen of the range there always existed a deadly enmity and at times open warfare.
At two card tables placed together in the upper inner corner of the room sat a little party of these Falling Wall men smoking and drinking in leisurely, or, more correctly, in preliminary fashion, for the evening was still young; and inspecting the moving crowd at the bar. At the head of the table sat the ex-cowboy and ex-pugilist, Stormy German, his face usually, and now, reddened with liquor—square-shouldered, square-faced and squat; a man harsh-voiced and terse, of iron endurance and with the stubbornness of a mule; next him sat Yankee Robinson, thin-faced and wearing a weatherbeaten yellow beard. And Dutch Henry was there—bony, nervous, eager-eyed, with broken English stories of drought and hardship on the upper Turkey. These three men—brains and resource of several less able but not less unscrupulous companions who preyed on the cattle range north of Sleepy Cat—led the talk and were the most carefully listened to by the men that surrounded them.
It was later that two men entered the room from the hotel office together. The contained, defiant walk of the slightly heavier and taller of the two was characteristic, and without the black beard, deep eyes and the pallor of his face, would almost have identified him as Abe Hawk; while in the emotionless, sandy features of his companion and in his more frank, careless make-up, the widely known ranchman of the Falling Wall, Jim Laramie, was easily recognized.
Hawk, separating from his companion, walked to the right. German hailed him and Hawk paused before the table at which the former prize fighter sat with his friends. Each of these in turn had something effusive to say to Hawk. Hawk listened to everything without a change of countenance—neither smile nor word moved him in the competition to arouse his interest. When all had had their fling of invitation and comment he refused an oft-repeated invitation to sit down: "I might injure your reputations," he said grimly, and moved unconcernedly on.
Van Horn's eyes had not missed the inconspicuous entrance of the two Falling Wall men: "There's the man himself, right now," he exclaimed, looking toward Laramie.
"No better time to talk to him, either, than right now," added Barb Doubleday hoarsely. "Take him back into the office, Harry. When you're through come up to the room."
Van Horn, leaving the bar, intercepted Laramie. Doubleday and Stone, pretending not to observe,
saw Van Horn, on the plea of important talk, succeed, after some demur, in inducing Laramie to return with him to the hotel office. Once there and in a quiet corner with two chairs, Van Horn lost no time in opening his subject: "You know as well as I do, Jim, what shape things are in on the North range. It can't go on. Everybody is losing cattle right and left to these rustlers. They've been running Doubleday's steers right down to the railroad camp on the Spider Water—we traced the brands on 'em. You know as well as I do who took 'em."
Laramie listened perfunctorily, his eyes moving part of the time over the room. "Speak for yourself. Harry," he intervened at this juncture. "I know exactly nothing about who took anybody's steers, nor that any were taken."
Van Horn uttered a quick exclamation: "Well, you sure heard about it!"
"In this country a man can hear anything," observed Laramie, not greatly moved. "I've heard there isn't a crooked cattleman north of Sleepy Cat."
Van Horn stared.
"Go on," continued Laramie, looking at the passers-by, "I'm listening."
"Doubleday has sold the eating house and disposed of his property at the Junction——"
"You mean his creditors took it, don't you?"
"Put it any way you like. He's going in for more cattle and we're going to put this range on the map. But—we've got to clean out this Falling Wall bunch first. The big men can't stand it any longer and won't stand it."
"What then?"
"I want you to get in right, on the move, with us, Jim—this is your chance. You're in a tough neighborhood over there. Now I know you're not a rustler."
Laramie Holds the Range Page 7
