Rim o' the World

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

LANCE TRAILS A MYSTERY

Lance, rising at what he considered an early hour–five in the morning may well be considered early,–went whistling down to the corral to see what plans were on for the day. It was the day of Aleck Douglas’s funeral, but the Devil’s Tooth outfit would be represented only by a wreath of white carnations which Belle had ordered sent up from Pocatello. White carnations and Aleck Douglas did not seem to harmonize, but neither did the Devil’s Tooth and Aleck Douglas, and the white wreath would be much less conspicuous and far more acceptable than the Lorrigans, Lance was thinking.

He paused at the bunk-house and looked in. The place was deserted. He walked through it to the kitchen where the boys ate–the chuck-house, they called it–and found nothing to indicate that a meal had been eaten there lately. He went out and down to the stable, where Sam Pretty Cow was just finishing his stall cleaning. Shorty, who now had a permanently lame leg from falling under his horse up in the Lava Beds a year ago, was limping across the first corral with two full milk buckets in his hands.

“Say, what time does this ranch get up, for heck sake?” Lance inquired of Sam Pretty Cow, stepping aside so that Sam might carry in a forkful of fresh hay.

“I dunno–long time ago.” Sam Pretty Cow turned the hay sidewise and went in to stuff his fragrant burden into the manger.

“I was going out with the boys, if they went anywhere. Where have they all headed for, Sam? I could overtake them, maybe.”

Sam Pretty Cow, returning to the doorway, shifted a quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other and grinned.

“I dunno, me,” he responded amiably.

“You don’t know? Didn’t dad say anything? Didn’t the boys?” And then, with faint exasperation, “Doesn’t any one ever talk any more on this ranch?”

Sam Pretty Cow gave him a swift, oblique glance and spat accurately at a great horsefly that had lighted on a board end.

“Not much, you bet. Nh-hn.”

Lance called to Shorty, who had set his milk buckets down that he might open the little gate that swung inward,–the gate which horses were not supposed to know anything about.

“Oh-h, Shorty! Where did dad and the boys go this morning?”

Shorty turned slowly, pulling the gate open and propping it with a stick until he had set the buckets through. Deliberation was in his manner, deliberation was in his speech.

“Las’ night, you mean. They hit out right after midnight.”

“Well, where did they go?” Lance ground his cigarette under his heel.

“You might ask ’em when they git back,” Shorty suggested cryptically, and closed the gate just as carefully as if forty freedom-hungry horses were milling inside the corral.

Lance watched him go and turned to Sam Pretty Cow who, having thrust his hay fork behind a brace in the stable wall, was preparing to vary his tobacco-chewing with a smoke.

“What’s the mystery, Sam? Where did they go? I’m here to stay, and I’m one of the family–I think– and you may as well tell me.”

Sam Pretty Cow lipped the edge of his cigarette paper, folded it down smoothly on the tiny roll of tobacco, leaned his body backward and painstakingly drew a match from the small pocket of his grimy blue overalls.

“I’m don’ know nothing,” he vouchsafed equably. “I’m don’ ask nothing. I’m don’ hear nothing. You bet. Nh-hn–yore damn right.”

From under his lashes Lance watched Sam Pretty Cow. “I was over helping hold old Scotty in his bed, the other day,” he said irrelevantly. “He was crazy–out of his head. He kept yelling that the Lorrigans were stealing his stock. He kept saying that a few more marks with a straight branding iron would turn his Eleven into an NL, ANL, DNL, LNL–any one of the Devil’s Tooth brands. Crazy with fever, he was.”

Sam Pretty Cow studied the match, decided which was the head of it, and drew it sharply along his boot sole.

“Yeah–yo’re damn right. Crazy, you bet yore life. Uh-huh.”

“He said the Miller’s Block brand could easily be turned into the N Block–Belle’s brand. He said horses had been run off the range–”

“He’s dead,” Sam observed unemotionally. “You bet. He’s gettin’ fun’ral to-day.”

“How long will the boys be out?” Lance pulled a splinter off the rail beside him and began separating the fibers with his finger nails that were too well cared for to belong to the Black Rim folk.

“I dunno, me.”

“Scotty sure was crazy, Sam. He tried twice to kill me. Once he jumped up and ran into the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife off the table and came at me. He thought I was there to rob him. He called me Tom.”

“Yeah,” said Sam Pretty Cow, blowing smoke. “He’s damn lucky you ain’t Tom. Uh-huh–you bet.”

Lance lifted his eyebrows, was silent while he watched Shorty limping down from the house, this time with table scraps for the chickens.

“Scotty was certainly crazy,” Lance turned again to Sam. “Over and over he kept saying, while he looked up at the ceiling, ‘The Lorrigan days are numbered. Though the wicked flourish like a green bay tree, they shall perish as dry grass. The days are numbered–their evil days are numbered.’”

Sam Pretty Cow smoked, flicked the ash from his cigarette with a coppery forefinger, looked suddenly full at Lance and grinned widely.

“Uh-huh. So’s them stars numbered, all right. I dunno, me. Tom Lorrigan’s damn smart man.” He reached down for an old bridle and grinned again. “Scotty, I guess he don’ say how many numbers them days is, you bet.” He started off, trailing his bridle reins carelessly in the dust.

“If you’re going to catch up a horse, Sam, I wish you’d haze in the best one on the ranch for me.”

Sam Pretty Cow paused, half turned, spat meditatively into the dust and jerked a thumb toward the stable.

“Me, I dunno. Bes’ horse on the ranch is in them box stall. Them’s Coaley. I guess you don’ want Coaley, huh?”

Lance bit his lip, looking at Sam Pretty Cow intently.

“You needn’t catch up a horse for me, Sam. I’ll ride Coaley,” he said smoothly. Which brought a surprised grunt from Sam Pretty Cow, Indian though he was, accustomed though he was to the ways of the Lorrigans.

But it was not his affair if Lance and his father quarreled when Tom returned. Indeed, Tom might not return very soon, in which case he would not hear anything about Lance’s audacity unless Lance himself told it. Sam Pretty Cow would never mention it, and Shorty would not say a word. Shorty never did say anything if he could by any means keep silence.

Lance returned to the house, taking long strides that, without seeming hurried, yet suggested haste. He presently came down the path again, this time with a blanket roll and a sack with lumpy things tied in the bottom. He wore chaps, his spurs, carried a yellow slicker over his arm. On his head was a black Stetson, one of Tom’s discarded old hats.

He led Coaley from the box stall where he had never before seen him stand, saddled him, tied his bundles compactly behind the cantle, mounted and rode down the trail, following the hoof prints that showed freshest in the loose, gravelly sand. Coaley, plainly glad to be out of his prison, stepped daintily along in a rocking half trot that would carry him more miles in a day than any other horse in the country could cover, and bring him to the journey’s end with springy gait and head held proudly, ears twitching, ready for more miles if his rider wanted more.

The tracks led up the road to the Ridge, turned sharply off where the brush grew scanty among the flat rocks that just showed their faces above the surface of the arid soil. Lance frowned and followed. For a long way he skirted the rim rock that edged the sheer bluff. A scant furlong away, on his right, a trail ran west to the broken land of Indian Creek. But since the horsemen had chosen to keep to the rocky ground along the rim, Lance followed.

He had gone perhaps a mile along the bluff when Coaley began to toss up his head and perk his ears backward, turning now and then to look. Lance was sunk too deep in bitter introspection to observe these first warning movements which every horseman knows. He was thinking of Mary Hope, who would be waking now to a day of sorrowful excitement. Thinking, too, of old Aleck Douglas and the things that he had said in his raving.

What Douglas had shouted hoarsely was not true, of course. He did not believe,–and yet, there was Shorty’s enigmatical answer to a simple question; there was Sam Pretty Cow, implying much while he actually said very little; there was this unheralded departure of all the Devil’s Tooth riders in the night, in the season between round-ups. There was Coaley feeling fit for anything, shut up in the box stall while Tom rode another horse; and here was Lance himself taking the trail of the Devil’s Tooth outfit at a little after sunrise on a horse tacitly forbidden to all riders save Tom.

Coaley, in a place where he must pick his way between boulders, paused and lifted his head, staring back the way they had come. Lance roused himself from gloomy speculations and looked back also, but he could not see anything behind them save a circling hawk and the gray monotone of the barren plateau, so he urged Coaley in among the boulders.

There must be something back there, of course. Coaley was too intelligent a horse to make a mistake. But it might be some drifting range stock, or perhaps a stray horse. Certainly it was no one from the Devil’s Tooth, for Sam Pretty Cow had set off to mend a fence in the lower pasture, and Shorty never rode a horse nowadays for more than a half mile or so; and six o’clock in the morning would be rather early for chance riders from any other ranch. With a shrug, Lance dismissed the matter from his mind.

Where a faint, little-used trail went obliquely down the bluff to the creek bottom, Lance saw again the hoofprints which the rocky ground had failed to reveal. He could see no reason for taking this roundabout course to go up the creek, but he sent Coaley down the trail, reached the bottom and discovered that the tracks once more struck off into rocky ground. His face hardened until his resemblance to Tom became more marked than usual, but where the tracks led he followed. Too often had he trailed stray horses in the past to be puzzled now, whether he could see the hoofprints or not.

They must have made for the other side of the creek, gone up Wild Horse gulch or the Little Squaw. There was just one place where they could cross the creek without bogging in the tricky mud that was almost as bad as quicksand. He therefore pulled out of the rocky patch and made straight for the crossing. He would soon know if they had crossed there. If they had not, then they would have turned again up Squaw Creek, and it would be short work cutting straight across to the only possible trail to the higher country.

He had covered half of the distance to the creek when Coaley again called his attention to something behind him. This time Lance glimpsed what looked very much like the crown of a hat moving in a dry wash that he had crossed not more than five minutes before. He pulled up, studied the contour of the ground behind him, looked ahead, saw the mark of a shod hoof between two rocks. The hoof mark pointed toward the crossing. Lance, however, turned down another small depression where the soil lay bare and Coaley left clean imprints, trotted along it until a welter of rocks made bad footing for the horse, climbed out and went on level. Farther up the valley an abrupt curve in Squaw Creek barred his way with scraggly, thin willow growth that had winding cow trails running through it. Into one of these Lance turned, rode deep into the sparse growth, stopped where the trail swung round a huge, detached boulder, dismounted and dropped Coaley’s reins to the ground and retraced his steps some distance from the trail, stepping on rocks here and there and keeping off damp spots.

He reached the thin edge of the grove, stood behind a stocky bush and waited. In two or three minutes–they seemed ten to Lance–he saw the head and shoulders of a rider just emerging from the gully he himself had so lately followed.

Back on Coaley, following the winding trail, Lance pondered the matter. The way he had come was no highway–no trail that any rider would follow on any business save one. But just why should he be followed? He had thought at first that some one was trailing the Devil’s Tooth outfit, as he had been doing, but now it seemed plain that he himself was the quarry.

He flicked the reins on Coaley’s satiny neck, and the horse broke at once into a springy, swift trot, following the purposeless winding of the cow path. When they emerged upon the other side where the creek gurgled over a patch of rocks like cobblestones, Lance stopped and let him take a sip or two of water, then struck off toward the bluff, letting Coaley choose his own pace, taking care that he kept to low ground where he could not be seen.

For an hour he rode and came to the junction of Mill Creek and the Squaw. Then, climbing through chokecherry thickets up a draw that led by winding ways to higher ground, Lance stopped and scrutinized the bottomland over which he had passed. Coaley stood alert, watching also that back trail, his ears turned forward, listening. After a moment, he began to take little mincing steps sidewise, pulling impatiently at the reins. As plainly as a horse could tell it, Coaley implored Lance to go on. But Lance waited until, crossing an open space, he saw a rider coming along at a shambling trot on the trail he had himself lately followed.

He frowned thoughtfully, turned Coaley toward home and rode swiftly in a long, distance-devouring lope.

He reached the ranch somewhere near ten o’clock, surprising Belle in the act of harnessing her pintos to a new buckboard at which they shied hypocritically. Belle stared at him round-eyed over the backs of her team.

“My good Lord, Lance! You–you could be Tom’s twin, in that hat and on that horse! What you been doing–doubling for him in a lead?”

Lance swung down and came toward her. “Belle, where did dad and the boys go?”

“Oh–fussing with the stock,” said Belle vaguely, her eyes clouding a little. “We’re getting so many cattle it keeps Tom on the go day and night, seems to me. And he will keep buying more all the while. Did–did you want to go with them, honey? I guess Tom never thought you might. You’ve been away so long. You’d better not ride Coaley, Lance. Tom would just about murder you if he caught you at it. And where did you get hold of that hat?”

Lance laughed queerly. “I just picked it off the table as I came out. Mine is too new and stiff yet. This seemed to fit. And Coaley’s better off under the saddle than he is in the stable, Belle. He’s a peach–I always did want to ride Coaley, but I never had the nerve till I got big enough to lick dad.”

He caught Belle in a quick, breath-taking hug, kissed her swiftly on the cheek and turned Coaley into the corral with the saddle still on.

“Are you going over–to the funeral?” he asked as he closed the gate.

“I’m going to town, and I’ve got the letters you left on the table to be mailed. No, I’m not going to the funeral. I don’t enjoy having my face slapped–and being called a painted Jezebel,” she added dryly.

Under his breath Lance muttered something and went into the house, not looking at Belle or making her any reply.

“Lance,” said Belle to the pintos, “thinks we’re rough and tough and just about half civilized. Lord, when you take a Lorrigan and educate him and polish him, you sure have got a combination that’s hard to go up against. Two years–and my heavens, I don’t know Lance any more! I never thought any Lorrigan could feaze me– but there’s something about Lance–”

In the house Lance was not showing any of the polish which Belle had mentioned rather regretfully. He was kneeling before a trunk, throwing books and pipes and socks and soft-toned silk shirts over his shoulder, looking for something which he seemed in a great haste to find. When his fingers, prying deep among his belongings, closed upon the thing he sought, he brought it up, frowning abstractedly.

A black leather case, small and curved, opened when he unbuckled the confining strap. A binocular, small but extremely efficient in its magnifying power he withdrew, dusting the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt. He had bought the glasses because some one had advised him to take a pair along when he went with a party of friends to the top of Mount Tamalpais one Sunday. And because he had an instinctive dislike for anything but the best obtainable, he had bought the highest-priced glasses he could find in San Francisco,–and perhaps the smallest. He buckled them back into their case, slapped them into his pocket and closed the trunk lid with a bang. From the mantel in the living room he gleaned a box of cartridges for an extra six-shooter, which he cleaned and loaded carefully and tucked inside the waistband of his trousers, on the left side, following an instinct that brought him close to his grandfather, that old killer whom all men feared to anger.

“The horse and the hat; he thought it was dad he was trailing!” he said to himself, with his teeth clamped tight together. “Oh, well, when it comes to that kind of a game–”

He went out and down to the corral, watered Coaley and mounted again, taking the trail across pastures to Squaw Creek.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

LANCE RIDES ANOTHER TRAIL

With a two-days’ growth of beard on his chin and jaws, a new, hard look in his eyes and the general appearance of a man who has been riding long and has slept in all his clothes, Lance rode quietly up to the corral gate and dismounted. A certain stiffness was in his walk when he led Coaley inside and turned a stirrup up over the saddle horn, his gloved fingers dropping to the latigo. Lance was tired–any one could see that at a glance. That he was preoccupied, and that his preoccupation was not pleasant, was also evident to the least observing eye.

Tom, coming out of the bunk house, studied him with narrowed lids as he came walking leisurely down to the corral. Tom’s movements also betrayed a slight stiffness of the muscles, as though he had ridden hard and long. He did not hurry. Lance had pulled off the saddle and the sweaty blanket and the bridle, and had turned Coaley into the corral before he knew that some one was coming. Even then he did not turn to look. He was staring hard at a half-dozen horses grouped in the farther corner of the corral,–horses with gaunt flanks and the wet imprint of saddles. They were hungrily nosing fresh piles of hay, and scarcely looked up when Coaley trotted eagerly up to join them. Six of them–a little more than half of the outfit that had ridden away the other night.

“Well! I see you helped yourself to a new saddle horse,” Tom observed significantly, coming up behind Lance.

“Yes. Coaley acted lonesome, shut up in the box stall. Thought a little riding would do him good.” Lance’s eyes met Tom’s calmly, almost as if the two were mere acquaintances.

“You give him a plenty, looks like. Where yuh been?”

“I? Oh–just riding around.” Lance stooped indifferently to untie his slicker and blanket from the saddle.

“Thought I’d like to use him myself. Thinking some of riding into town this afternoon,” Tom said, still studying Lance.

“Well, if you want to ride Coaley, he’s good for it. I’d say he has more miles in him yet than any of that bunch over there.” With slicker and blanket roll Lance started for the house.