Out of the blue

Once upon a time, as the old tales used to begin, a young man came riding down the main street of Fort Worth in the sovereign State of Texas. He was mounted on a bright sorrel horse, which stepped daintily in the dust of the thoroughfare, for Fort Worth had not yet come to the high estate of asphalt paving and such civic ornamentation as followed in the wake of petroleum and cotton. The longhorn was still king of the plains, a source of wealth in his unnumbered thousands. The cattle kings and their followers were like the ancient Romans; they made their own roads—made them into far places, in a spirit of high emprise. They did not mind a little dust here and there.

This rider, who looked out from under a gray Stetson hat, holding his reins in a buckskin-gloved hand, while he scanned the windows of the various establishments that fronted on the street, was plainly of the range. He was young and deeply tanned. He was armed, as men commonly were in those times. His saddle, bridle, and spurs were beautifully made, and the silver-inlaid steel clinked faintly, as his horse moved. The coiled-rawhide reata at his saddle fork was limber with much use. He might have been considered picturesque. That idea would never have occurred to him or his fellows. The seed of romance indubitably lay in the stout hearts of Rock Holloway and his like, living and moving and having their being on the fringes of an encroaching civilization, but they were practical in their activities, which had to do with a major industry, wherein there was doubtless romance, but also a considerable portion of hard work and long chances which the range man accepted as incidental to his calling. This long-limbed youth, with the keen eyes and pleasant face, could probably have told why he preferred the range to a university campus; but he was merely the occasional exception. And he may have had glimpses of the future, apart from cattle and trail herds and the wide pastures that were in process of reclamation from the bison and the Indian. But he would never have embodied such dreams in words. And he was not steeping his soul in the color and aspect of a little cow town when he rode along that street. He was looking for a certain place. Presently, and without very much trouble, he found it.

He pulled up before a one-story adobe building. On the paneled door, across the plate-glass windows, ran a legend in gilt lettering:

Rock dismounted and left his sorrel standing on dropped bridle reins, as securely anchored in the utilitarian fashion of the plains as if he had been tied to a post. He paused a moment at the door to grin. On this piece of plain oak some wag had lately scrawled in red chalk the word “Holy” between “The” and “Trinity.” It was not inappropriate, Rock knew. The Trinity Bank of Fort Worth was owned and operated by three men who were old and wise and upright, as near to a state of holiness as bankers in the cow country ever got. That is to say, “Uncle Bill” Sayre, who was president, manager, and chief stockholder, and Marcus Proud, and Abel Stewart were square men, whose word was as good and, indeed, sometimes went farther than an explicit bond.

The man walked back a few steps and put his head inside a doorway. He beckoned Rock and indicated an opening in the counter through which Rock could enter.

When Rock reached the inner office, a tall, thin-faced man of sixty rose to greet him, shook hands, shoved forward a chair, and closed the door. Then he seated himself, smiling benignantly.

“Well, well,” said he. “Yo’ young fellows change fast. Le’s see. It’s nigh two years since I saw yo’, Rock. Yo’ favor yo’ ol’ dad mo’ and mo’ all the time. How’s yo’ mammy and Cecilia?”

“Fine,” Rock replied. “Mother says Austin suits her right down to the ground to live in. Cissy’s going to be married this fall.”

“Nobody I know personally,” Rock answered. “But I know of his family. He’s a Brett. Son of the Brett that runs the B X over toward El Paso. Mother says he’s a nice boy.”

“I know the Bretts. Pretty good people, take ’em all around. Still, pretty young, pretty young, for marryin’. Kinda sudden after yo’-all fixin’ it so she could get whatever advantages lie in an education.”

“Pshaw, Uncle Bill,” Rock said. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t give up anything. There was only so much money to go around, and I’m certainly able to rustle for myself. I had all the show I needed, when I needed it. I don’t know as I would have stayed back East long enough to take a degree, anyhow, only to please the old man. It’s lots of fun to make a hand on the range, and I don’t figure to be a cow hand forever, nohow. But, say, how did you know I was passing this way? Of course I would have come in to say hello, anyhow, but you beat me to it, sending out word you wanted to see me.”

“Oh, I keep tab on lots of things, son.” Old Sayre’s eyes twinkled. “There’s a lot of cowmen an’ cow business passes through this bank. Su’prise yo’, how well they keep me posted on who’s who, and what’s what. Now, I didn’t send fo’ yo’, Rock, just to ask after yo’ health, this time. Yo’ goin’ No’th with a Seventy Seven trail herd?”

“What do yo’-all aim to do after yo’ get there?” Sayre inquired. “Stay on with the Seventy Seven?”

“Don’t think so.” Rock frowned slightly. “I’d as soon work right along, but I don’t know as I like this outfit well enough to tie to.”

“I know the tribe. They’s four boys—all big—all inclined to be high-handed. Le’s see. There’s Joe, Elmer, Ed, an’ Mark. Elmer’s handlin’ this herd yo’-all are with?”

“Elmer ain’t bad. Joe’s noisy, but harmless. Ed is real tough. Mark’s both noisy and mean. He always aimed to be bad, unless he’s changed a heap lately. He’s big as a house. Overbearin’ accordin’ to his size.”

“Huh? If Elmer’s startin’ No’th with that handicap, he’ll have trouble on the trail, I reckon. Ought to have more sense than have that disturber in his outfit. I don’t expect yo’ and Mark love each other, eh? No, I shouldn’t imagine yo’d want to stay with the Seventy Seven after the drive’s over, not if yo’ got to rub elbows with Mark. He sure is the wrong kind.”

“Maybe not even all the way,” Rock said casually. “Mark’s inclined to ride me. No particular reason. Just don’t like me, I expect.”

“Better quit the Seventy Seven, son,” Sayre counseled after a moment’s silence. “There’s other herds drivin’ No’th that need good men.”

“Would you?” he challenged. “Just to get away from a man that don’t like the shape of your head, or something? Would you, Uncle Bill, after you’d promised a trail boss you’d go?”

“Well, no, I reckon I wouldn’t, come to think it over,” the old man answered dryly. “At least, when I was twenty-five I sho’ wouldn’t. At my age, now, I c’n see the wisdom of side-steppin’ trouble. Still, yo’ better quit the Seventy Seven soon as yo’ get to yo’ destination, providin’ yo’ and Mark both do get there all right.”

“I certainly aim to do both.” Rock smiled. “Mark’s welcome to flourish, so long as he don’t step on my corns too frequent. I want to get into this North country. I hear there’s chances there for a fellow with a little money. Time I’ve worked another year I’ll have a couple of thousand dollars. I might find a place where I could start in with a hundred cows or so, and grow up with the country.”

“When yo’ get around to that, let me know,” the banker said. “I hear good reports of that Montana country. I might put in some money if yo’ locate a range. Texas is full up. She’ll spill a heap of stock and men into the Northwest in the next five years. Cattle grow into money tol’able fast.”

That was an indubitable fact. Sayre, as Rock knew, was a cattle owner as well as a banker. And Texas was getting crowded. That was why the longhorns were swarming North and West to free grass and plentiful water, like droves of horned locusts. They were grazing year by year farther afield into regions dotted by the bones of the buffalo, bleaching where they but lately fell before the rifles of the hide hunters. Rock promised that he would remember the suggestion. They talked a while longer desultorily. Then a clerk asked if Mr. Sayre was busy. A man wanted to see him. Rock rose to his feet.

“Sit still,” Sayre told him. To the clerk he said: “Tell him to come back in half an hour, and I’ll see him.”

And when the door closed again he put both feet up on his desk, looked Rock over with an appraising eye, and said:

“Fact is, young man, I sent fo’ yo’ because I want yo’-all to do something fo’ me when yo’ hit Montana. The question is, will yo’? Yo’ the man I want fo’ the job. Yo’-all will be well paid, and yo’ sho’ will be doing yo’ Uncle Bill Sayre a favor.”

“Name your poison,” Rock said lightly. “What is it you’d have me do? I’m open to any kind of engagement, Uncle Bill. So long as you don’t aim to have me bushwhack some enemy for you and mail you his scalp.”

“This is strictly confidential, son,” said he. “First off, do yo’ know the Maltese Cross? Dave Snell’s outfit. Used to range on the west fork of the Trinity.”

From where he sat, Rock could see the silver of the Trinity River looping by the town. He knew the upper Trinity only by hearsay. Texas is an empire, and its cattle kings were many, not all with honor and fame beyond their own little kingdoms. He shook his head.

“Don’t matter. Dave Snell was a friend of mine. Yo’ dad knew him, too. He owned a lot of range. Ran about thirty thousand cattle. More’n a year ago he started to move all his stock to Montana. Took two herds up that season. There’s three more on trail now. Meantime Dave ups and dies. He leaves all he has to two children. A girl just come twenty-one, a boy sixteen. Said estate to be carried on as a going concern until the boy’s twenty-five. The income from this is to be paid to each annually, as he or she comes of age, and finally equally divided in the end. I’m an executor of this document. The other executor is a man named Walters— ‘Buck’ Walters. Know him by name?”

“Thought yo’ might. Don’t matter. He was once in that Pecos country yo’ve frequented lately. I’ll get down to cases pretty soon. This Buck Walters was range boss for old Dave for quite a spell before he died. Dave thought a heap of him. I don’t.”

“No, suh, I sho’ don’t think a heap of my fellow executor,” he resumed. “Dave Snell was pretty specific in his will. He had a couple of months to think up all the details. I have a free hand with the business end, and all money is checked in and out of this bank. Buck Walters has a free hand with the cattle. The outfit’s pretty well moved into Montana. It was Buck’s notion in the first place. He says there’s no room to range the Maltese Cross on the Trinity no mo’. He says no sense havin’ ten thousand cattle in Montana and another ten thousand in Texas.”

“Maybe so, maybe so,” Sayre agreed. “But I’d a heap rather the Maltese Cross stock wasn’t on a range two thousand miles from Fort Worth, even if it is a mite better range. To cut it short, Rock, I don’t know what’s goin’ on up there, an’ I got ideas that make me uneasy. I want to know how he handles this outfit, and how he handles himself. I sent for yo’ specifically to ask if yo’-all would consider going up there and keep cases on the Maltese Cross fo’ me, Bill Sayre, personally. Will you?”

“I’d do most anything you wanted me to do, Uncle Bill,” Rock said promptly. “But I’m no detective.”

“Yo’ a practical cowman,” Sayre countered. “Yo’ know all the tricks of the trade. I don’t want no detective. What I want up there is a man that can size up what’s going on on a cattle range—a man that can’t be bought and is not easy fooled. I picked on yo’-all, for that reason.”

“Well, it’s easy to keep tab on what a man does with thirty thousand cattle if yo’ circulate in his vicinity,” Sayre observed. “You ain’t no fool, Rock. I don’t care how yo’ manage it—whether yo’ work for another outfit or get a job with the Maltese Cross. Don’t care whether yo’ work at all; yo’ll be paid direct by me. What I want is fo’ yo’ to linger around in that territory and use yo’ eyes and ears. Yo’ll know in one season whether the outfit is going up or down, and whether Buck is shootin’ straight.”

“Buck Walters is young, ambitious, high-handed with men, and powerful fond of women,” Sayre said frowningly. “He dresses flash. He’s mighty fond of stiff poker. He’s a smart cowman, I’ll admit. But he’s been drawin’ big wages fo’ ten years and never held onto a dollar. Yo’ put a man like that in complete control of three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of live stock, with nobody to check up on him——”

“He had old Dave hypnotized,” he went on. “I think Dave was a damn fool to give him such a swing. I may be wrong about Walters. If I am, so much the better fo’ him. But I aim to play my hunch. I mean to see that the Snell estate don’t get the worst of it, no way. I feel more than ordinary responsibility in this. Dave was my friend. I can’t leave my business here to go up into Montana every few weeks to keep tab on Buck Walters. Next best thing is to send a man I can trust.”

“I’m young and ambitious,” Rock mused. “I don’t shy none from poker games; in fact, I horn into ’em deliberate because I frequently beat ’em. I’ve held down good jobs, too, in the last three years, without savin’ much of my wages. Gosh, Uncle Bill, are you sure I’m to be trusted?”

“I know yo’,” he said, “and I know yo’r breed. Will yo’ do this for me, Rock?”

“Why, sure,” Rock agreed. “I don’t suppose it would be very difficult for me to get a pretty good idea of how this Buck Walters is handling the Maltese Cross.”

“That’ll be good enough,” Sayre nodded. “If yo’re on the ground takin’ notice, I’ll be satisfied. Le’s see,” he stopped to reflect, “yo’ll be into Montana about September. I don’t issue no orders, son. Use your own judgment. Barrin’ a hard season, nothing much ever happens on a cow range in the winter.”

“Don’t you fool yourself,” Rock said seriously. Then he stopped. Old Uncle Bill was grinning at him understandingly.

“I ain’t going to prime yo’ with no false ideas, Rock,” he declared. “Yo’ just circulate around in that vicinity as it suits yo’ and let me know how she stacks up.”

“Marias River. Their post office is Fort Benton—no’thern part of the territory. You’re bound for the Marias with the Seventy Seven. Course, she’s a long stream. The Maltese Cross is on the lower end, near where the Marias joins the upper Missouri.”

“I understood the Seventy Seven was headed for the Musselshell,” Rock observed.

“Maybe yo’-all understood that, son, but that herd’ll be turned loose on the Marias,” Sayre said positively. “I get that info’mation from the men that’s backin’ the Duffys. Joe Duffy is on trail with a herd in the same brand, too, from the Panhandle.”

“I didn’t know. Don’t matter to me, nohow,” Rock said, “so long as I get to Montana. I’m bound North, like the bear that went over the mountain, to see what I can see. And I won’t be on the Seventy Seven pay roll after I get there. I sort of feel that in my bones.”

Sayre opened a drawer. His hand came out with a small canvas bag which clinked gently, as he laid it on the oak desk and slid it across to Rock.

“There’s five hundred dollars’ advance in gold,” he said abruptly. “I’ll allow yo’ sixty dollars a month from date, until I notify yo’ this arrangement is canceled. Now”—he lifted a hand to silence Rock’s protest—“I don’t want yo’ to hesitate about nothing that’s calculated to protect the Snell interests. When yo’ protect them yo’ protect me. You’re a smart boy. Yo’ been raised in a cow country and had considerable Eastern education rammed down yo’ gullet. I don’t need to tell yo’ what a range boss can do to a cow outfit, if he sets out to do some good for himself at the outfit’s expense. It’ll be yo’ job to let me know if Buck Walters shows any such symptoms. If, to make sure of anything in connection with him, yo’ find it necessary to spend money, draw on this bank in yo’ own name. There is a railroad and a telegraph line through the southern part of Montana now. Yo’ can wire me direct anything important. If yo’-all get into trouble, I’ll back yo’ play.”

“I don’t trust that fellow executor of mine no farther than I could throw him,” Sayre stated bluntly. “He’s a mighty powerful man, so yo’ can reckon how far that is. I feel a powerful sight of responsibility. I aim to see that Dave Snell’s children inherit this estate unimpaired by other persons with ambitions to enrich theirselves by methods that ain’t strictly accordin’ to Hoyle.”

“All right, Uncle Bill,” Rock promised. “I’ll wander around the Maltese Cross and keep you posted on how she stacks up to my innocent eye. It won’t be soon. I’ll be six months on the drive. It may take me some time to learn anything. I can’t saunter onto the Maltese Cross range and say right off who’s who, and what’s what. So I’d just as soon not take your money until I start earning it. If you hear from me inside a year, you’ll be lucky.”

“I’m not expectin’ Buck to try and put thirty thousand cattle in his hip pocket right off,” Sayre grinned. “He couldn’t. And he’s too all-fired smart to let his work—if any—be coarse. I’m merely insurin’ against contingencies. I could have picked thirty men to send into Montana, with a big cow outfit apiece, and never have an uneasy moment over any one of ’em. As I size up this situation——”

“So,” he went on, “yo’ keep that money, because yo’-all might need it. That’s like a lawyer’s retaining fee, my son—an earnest of an’ undertakin’ entered into for a duly acknowledged consideration. Yo’ the man for the job, Rock. Yo’-all are entitled to pay. So don’t get highfalutin’ about a few measly dollars.”

“Never found ’em measly yet,” Rock said lightly. “Though I’ve known lots of measly things done in behalf of ’em.”

He slid the bag of gold into his trousers pocket, where it sagged uncomfortably when he arose.

“Well, Uncle Bill,” said he, “now you’ve got that off your chest, suppose we go out and have a farewell drink together? The Seventy Seven is moving. I’ve got quite a ways to ride to catch that herd to take my regular turn on guard to-night.”

A mile from the last scattered houses of Fort Worth, Rock paused on the north side of the Trinity. The river flowed beneath him, a lovely, sparkling stream. Its banks were green with spring growth. Texas wore an April smile for her sons that were departing into far lands with many a herd. Rock looked down at the river and back at the town.

“Well, Sangre,” he addressed the twitching ears of his sorrel horse, “if Uncle Bill Sayre’s hunch about this fellow executor of his happens to be right, we ought to be able to keep time from hanging heavy on our hands after we hit Montana, provided we get that far in peace and quietness.”

Rock frowned slightly, as he muttered this. He had his doubts; not of the mission he had promised to undertake, however. He was thinking of something else when he repeated the last sentence. It wasn’t just an idle phrase.

CHAPTER II—IN THE ODEON

East and west across the flat face of Nebraska runs a river, which needs no naming, looping, like a great watery rope, the Rocky Mountains and its ultimate confluence with the Big Muddy. It was once said of this stream that it resembled the speeches of a well-known politician, inasmuch as it was a thousand miles long, a mile wide, and about four inches deep.

In one particular year of our Lord, when herds of longhorn cattle were spilling out of Texas like milk seeping over a polished table top, from an overflowing bowl, the curses of many a trail boss and cattle owner were heaped upon this wide, shallow, sandy-bottomed river. Northbound herds must cross it. Under its ankle depths of flow lurked miles of quicksand. The first drives to the North suffered. Later, hard bottom crossings were located.

In the height of the great bovine exodus, such crossings were like the junction of two great thoroughfares. They were heavily traffic laden. From May to September the march of the herds never slackened. Every herd had its quota of riders. Wherever there are men there is money, and money is made to be spent. So, at each of these river crossings, enterprising merchants set up with stocks of goods. Equally enterprising individuals set up establishments where a cowpuncher could find something for his throat besides dust and alkali water, where he could take a fling at faro bank and poker. In other words, the saloon and gambling hall arose, side by side, with the general store, to the profit of their owners and the glory of the trail.

Clark’s Ford was such a place. When Ben Clark bogged his first herd in the quicksands, he lay on the bank, and his riders scouted for hard bottom, found it, passed over and passed on, leaving his name to the place and bequeathing future herds on that route the only safe crossing in a hundred miles.

A year later a cluster of frame buildings on the north bank greeted the lead of each herd, as it emerged from the stream. Here outfits could replenish their grub supply, get or send mail by a stage route, before they vanished into the empty land that spread north to the Canada line, a land that was empty even unto the arctic circle.

And into Clark’s Ford one July evening Rock Holloway rode alone, on the same sorrel horse, one of his own private mounts, that had stepped light-footedly in the dust of a Fort Worth street that spring. For weeks he had faced the dip and roll and flatness of plains as bare as the seas Columbus faced when he crossed the Western ocean. Ride, eat, sleep, and ride again, in the dust of eight thousand hoofs, on that pilgrimage from the Rio Grande to the forty-ninth parallel, across silent leagues of grass, from which the bison had but lately vanished, and where the Indian had not yet forgotten how to take a white man’s scalp.

So Rock, who had nothing much on his mind but a Stetson hat, rode into Clark’s Ford. Little sinks of iniquity like this were not new in his experience. He was too sensible to take a moral attitude. They were not, with their gaudy activities, much to his taste, but they supplied a want. He didn’t drink much at any time, preferring poker for pastime, and he had been known to wander about for hours in the midst of cow-town hilarity doing nothing but watch his fellows make merry.

Clark’s Ford numbered scarcely a dozen buildings. One general store, one blacksmith shop, one combined saloon and dance hall. A gaunt boarding house purveyed food and sleeping quarters to clerks, gamblers, bartenders, and transients. Clark’s Ford was little more than a camp, a mushroom growth with neither a past nor a future.

It was not a place that Ben Clark would have been proud to bear his name. If it catered in some measure to the legitimate necessities of these Argonauts of the plains, it likewise battened on their weaknesses. Cattlemen and their riders had few illusions about such places, except in moments of alcoholic exaltation. They were tolerant of them, that was all, because they were centers of human contact, in the midst of an unpeopled wilderness.

It was a dreary place in the glare of day. Sagebrush flowed to the very doors—gray—monotonously gray. A river, with a dozen channels plowed by the spring floods in its yellow sands, slunk at the feet of Clark’s Ford. For a mile about no green thing flourished. Only the tough sagebrush defied obliteration under the trampling hoofs that passed in myriads. That valley had yet to become verdant under irrigation canals. Even the red brother shunned it in bygone days except when the buffalo herds passed that way. The cattleman would have shunned it if he could. But the herds focused at this point, but, once across, they radiated like the spokes of a wheel to pleasanter ranges farther north, where grass waved like fields of ripe wheat; where clear streams flowed in gravelly beds, and now and then a man’s eye would be gladdened by a tree.

But at night Clark’s Ford shook off its daytime somnolence, shrouded itself in the dusky mantle of night and decked itself with yellow jewels. Night and lamps! There is magic in those two. A pianist and a fiddler strummed in the dance hall. The women glowed in silk and satin and smiled their mechanical smiles. Within, the light softened hard faces, struck glints from glass, and spread over green-topped tables, the racked silver and gold behind the games, and the multicolored poker chips. A man could get action there. Seldom any one paused outside those doors, behind which the piano tinkled, and the fiddle wailed, and the voices of men and women were pitched a little above the normal key.

Rock paused now, after he had swung down from his horse. He stared up at the sky, the inverted bowl of the Persian poet, studded with stars. He looked absently upward, the fingers of one hand tangled in Sangre’s mane. Perhaps he studied the stars in their courses. Perhaps he saw something invisible save to the imaginative eye, off in that calm, obscuring night. And then he shrugged his shoulders, gave his gun belt a hitch, and walked into the Odeon. Why the exploiter of Clark’s Ford bestowed on a tin-pot dance hall a name that derived from ancient Greek through modern French, Heaven only knows. Perhaps that was what made Rock smile, as he noted the name painted in white on a door illuminated by a hung lantern. He had a way of noting such things.

A bar ranged along one side of the Odeon. A low platform lifted against the opposite wall, where the two musicians played, and now and then a woman sang the sentimental ballads of the period. A clear space in the middle was left for dancing. One side was set with pine tables and chairs. The other wall made a backstop for gambling paraphernalia, operated by bored men with impassive faces, who dealt for the house and watched winning or losing with equal indifference.

All this Rock took in rapidly. He had heard about Clark’s Ford and the Odeon a thousand miles south. He reflected that there were other places of the same stripe, which he had seen here, and they were more impressive, if less widely known. Yet it was a fairly big night at the Odeon. Four herds had made the crossing that day. Three more lay within ten miles. There were riders from all in Clark’s Ford this night, seeking diversion. The gabble of voices and laughter filled the big room. The click of chips greeted Rock’s ears, a faint, penetrating sound. A woman was singing, “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” It sounded at once incongruous and highly appropriate in that atmosphere. She had a fairly good voice, too. He stood within the door until the last note sounded, then walked across the room to a poker game, where he recognized a cattleman he knew from Waco.

“Well, well!” Al Kerr reached up to shake hands. “Seems like everybody’s headed North these days. How’s tricks?”

“Not so you could notice,” Kerr grinned. “Just amusin’ myself. This here table sort of attracted me. First green thing I’ve seen for six weeks. Here, cash these.”

He shoved half a stack of reds to the dealer, got five silver dollars in exchange, and pushed back his chair.

“Let’s inhale a drink,” he suggested. “Maybe you and me could horn into an easier game later on.”

“I’m due on guard at one thirty, and it’s eleven now,” Rock said, “so I won’t play poker to-night. But I will have a glass of beer.”

“Beer’s no good except off ice in hot weather,” Kerr told him. “And ice is as scarce as square men among the regular population of Clark’s Ford. Better drink rye.”

As the choice lay between lukewarm beer and the stronger drink, Rock chose whisky. It didn’t matter what he drank.

Nor did he. If he could have foreseen the manner and necessity of his departure, he might not have entered the place. And again he might have braved fate, even with certain knowledge, since he was not by nature inclined to dodge issues either present or potential. A man on the frontier seldom got anywhere if he were always counting costs. If Rock had not got anywhere, he was at least on his way.

They walked over to the bar and stood near the farther end from the main entrance. Rock was not a tall man, perhaps a little over medium height. Even so he towered over his companion. Kerr barely reached his shoulder. He was a little wisp of a man, with a gnomelike face. Small bodied, but big-hearted, full of humorous quips and kindly impulses, Al Kerr was the type of Texas cowman who never figures in song and story. He had never killed any one. He had never found it necessary. Probably he had not exchanged a dozen harsh sentences with another man in his life. Yet he was a successful man. He had cattle scattered over the length of three States. He had fifty riders on his pay roll. And for every rider he had a score of friends. Rock happened to be one of them. And Rock looked down on the little, middle-aged man, whose hair was thin, but whose blue eyes were merry, and he wondered what it was that made some men succeed in whatever they undertook. It wasn’t size, it wasn’t blatant force, and it wasn’t always the power of possessions. What was it, Rock wondered?

A dance had just ended. Several lusty, perspiring young trail hands had led their ladies to the bar to liquidate the Terpsichorean debt, after the custom of such places. They were lined up twenty in a row. As they stood there, glass in hand, some in the act of pouring their drink, the door of the Odeon flew open, and a man swaggered in.

He stood a moment staring with eyes a trifle reddened. He was a mountain of a man, well over six feet, and thick in proportion. He wore a rider’s usual costume. Like most of those who trafficked across the plains, he was armed. He took two quick strides from the door to the bar end and, picking up the nearest glass of whisky, drank it at a gulp. Then he stood, towering above the man whose drink he had taken, grinning, as if at a capital joke.

“Well, well,” Kerr murmured. “The village cut-up is with us again. He was around here this afternoon raisin’ Cain. He aims to be bad, it looks like. Wonder where he escaped from?”

Rock smiled. He knew the man. He watched with a detached sort of interest to see what would happen. For a second nothing happened. A quick-witted bartender hastily set up another glass, thus stifling the protest that was evidently on tap by the man whose drink had been taken. That, to Rock, was an indication of how far Mark Duffy’s size and disposition had carried him in Clark’s Ford. But he was hardly prepared for the big man’s next action. Considering the time and place, it seemed suicidal.

Duffy walked right down the bar, shouldering all and sundry out of his way. His big red face was wreathed in a sardonic grin, and his bellowing voice uttered a warning to all in his path:

“Make room for a man. I’m goin’ to drink, an’ when I drink I need lots of room.”

He seemed in a fair way to get all the room he desired without opposition. Probably any other man would have been smelling powder before he got halfway, Rock reflected. But Duffy looked neither to right nor left nor hesitated in his ponderous stride, nor heeded the curses that were hurled at him. He was asserting himself, he wanted room, and he got it—a clear path, until he came to Al Kerr and Rock Holloway.

Neither moved. Their second drink was before them. Rock had one elbow on the bar, and he kept it there. Kerr stood between him and Duffy.

“Seems to me you got plenty,” Kerr answered. “Nobody’s crowdin’ you.”

For answer Duffy seized him by both shoulders, picked him off his feet, as if he had been a child, and set him on the bar. Kerr stood probably five foot four. He never carried a six-shooter. He was handy with a rifle, but that was not a weapon he carried in town.

Duffy kept that iron grip on his shoulders. The little man was helpless. Faint snickers arose in the room. Kerr’s face flushed. He felt the indignity. But he said nothing, only looked Duffy coldly in the eye. And Duffy began to shake him until his head snapped back and forth, yanking him at last roughly off the bar, so that his boot heels struck the floor with a crack.

“You go to hell,” Kerr defied him. “Buy your own drinks. You’re too big for me to fight with my hands. But you lay off’n me long enough for me to get a gun, and I’ll shoot with you for the drinks, you side of raw beef on the hoof!”

Duffy’s face wreathed in a grin. He reached his gorilla-like arms and took a step forward. Kerr dodged sidewise. And for the first time Duffy seemed to see and recognize Rock. He stared briefly. Rock looked back at him, expressionless. Duffy turned on Kerr again. His hand crept toward the gun in his belt.

“You’ll buy a drink, or you’ll dance,” he said meaningly. “Look spry, little feller! Buy drinks or dance.”

He punctuated the last sentence with a shot into the floor at Kerr’s feet. Whereat Rock stepped between the little man and his tormentor. His Colt was in his hand. Like Duffy’s, it pointed at the floor. There was a swift surge of men away from the bar.

“You’ve gone far enough with this, Duffy,” Rock said quietly. “Don’t be a damn fool.”

For five tense seconds Duffy glared at Rock; then his gun jerked. At the movement, Rock fired. He was pitching himself sidewise, as he pulled trigger. He knew when he interfered that there would only be one end to such interference, and he had discounted that. Duffy’s bullet sped somewhere past his face. And Rock held his second shot, for the big man was sagging slowly forward, until suddenly he collapsed on the floor.

Rock slid the fallen six-shooter with his toe toward Kerr, his eyes on the crowd.

“Take that till we get out of here,” he said. “Maybe he’s got friends.”

But other friends were at hand. Half a dozen of Kerr’s men came shouldering their way toward him.

“That was neat,” one grinned at Rock. “We couldn’t very well bust our way through that crowd, but if anybody wants to go farther with it, we’re here to take ’em on.”

Evidently no one did. They walked, Kerr and Rock and five trail hands, the length of the room to the entrance door, while the hush that sudden death always brings held the crowd in the Odeon.

“Well, I think I better amble off to camp before some other ambitious drunk picks on me. You fellers comin’ along?”

“I expect we better,” they agreed. “That joint is no great shakes for amusement, nohow.”

“Same direction. Not quite so far,” Rock answered. “I’ll ride with you a ways.”

They went jingling away from Clark’s Ford, Kerr’s riders laughing and joking. Rock and the little cowman silent. The Dipper wheeling on its ancient circle of the pole star gave them bearings. The night hush enfolded them, as the lights and sounds were swallowed in the dark hollow by the river. Three miles out Rock pulled up his horse.

“Look, Rock,” Kerr said slowly. “You done me a good turn back there. If you’re ever in a jack pot, you let me know. I’m locatin’ in Montana for good this season. You’ll find me in the Judith Basin, on Arrow Creek. Capital K they call my outfit up there. Post office is Lewistown. My house is yours any time you show up.”

“Maybe, I’ll call your bluff some time, Al,” Rock laughed. “You never can tell. I’m bound for Montana, myself, so I may see you-all again this summer. So long. Be good, and if you can’t be good be careful.”

Rock sat his horse, listening to the patter of departing hoofs. So Kerr was bound for the Judith Basin. Rock had said that the outfit he was with was also bound for Montana. But he had omitted to mention that he would not be with it when it arrived.

In fact, Rock was not wholly certain that he would ever arrive. He had another private horse beside Sangre with the Seventy Seven. His bed was in the wagon. He had two months’ wages due. Before he could get anywhere, he had to collect his belongings and his pay.

And that might very well lead to a continuation of the unpleasantness this night had already spanned. The man whom he had killed in the Odeon was the brother of the trail boss of the Seventy Seven, and the Duffys were a clannish lot, with more nerve than good judgment.

He mighn’t be lucky twice in one night. The pitcher that goes often enough to the well—— Rock shrugged his shoulders and shook his horse into a lope. In twenty minutes he drew up to where the Seventy Seven herd lay bedded, a huge dark blot on the bleached grass, with the chuck tent looming a ghost-white outline, half a mile past the sleeping herd.

CHAPTER III—THE STEERING WHEEL

When the sun flung its Midas touch across the Nebraska plains the morning after what was but an episode in Clark’s Ford, it struck a ruddy sheen on the sorrel horse Rock Holloway bestrode and made the sleek coat of the black pony that carried his bed, shine like a piece of widow’s silk.

Rock hummed a little tune as he rode. He had lived through that unavoidable encounter with Mark Duffy. He had avoided open clash with Duffy’s brother by quitting the Seventy Seven. A blood feud is no light thing to be involved in. Rock had no regrets over Mark. The man’s bulldozing disposition had brought them to the verge once or twice on the trail. But Rock had no desire to burn powder against a man who would be actuated chiefly by some vague notion that it was proper to avenge a dead kinsman.

Duffy, the trail boss, had been a little stunned by the death of his domineering brother. He had tentatively agreed that Rock was not to blame. He had paid him his wages and let him go unmolested. But later on, Rock knew, the surviving Duffy would ponder and brood, be urged to reprisal, as in the cloak-and-sword period gallants brooded upon a slight to their honor, whether real or fancied, until they had no course but to draw blade.

So Rock was well satisfied to be a lone horseman in a waste of grass and sage in the cool of a summer morning. On the flat area running unbroken by mountain or forest, from horizon to horizon, he marked northbound herds in the offing, as a lookout might descry distant sails at sea. Over yonder was a Matador herd, yonder marched the horned regiment of the Turkey Track. At a guess, Rock could have named the brand of the five herds visible within the radius of his sight. Northbound, headed for free grass and abundant water, as the Israelites of old went forth seeking the land of milk and honey. Texas was full of cattle, full to overflowing, and the overflow in that season swept in full volume over twenty-three degrees of latitude to end in Montana, with sundry minor spillings into the Canadian northwest.

Rock, like the cattleman with his herds, had set his face North. Like many another young Texan, he had lent eager ear to tales of this terra incognita, out of which scouting cattlemen sent reports that it was a paradise for herds, now that the bison were exterminated, and the Indians herded on reservations. Nine hundred miles still lay between Rock and his destination. But that was nothing. He had two good horses, a rifle and a .45 Colt, ammunition, food, bedding and a sanguine soul. Many a pioneer had set forth with less. It was not precisely hostile country he had to traverse alone. True, a lone rider was a temptation to scouting braves who might have jumped the reservation. But that was a detail. In thirty days, more or less, he could reach Fort Benton. Once there—well, even if he had not the mission bestowed on him in Fort Worth, an able range rider could always find useful employment in his calling.

So Rock rode with a little tune on his lips and wondered how far it was between water holes.

Three days out from Clark’s Ford he sighted the mass of a trail herd and caught up with it at sundown. Four riders were bunching the cattle on the bed ground. Rock exchanged greetings with one, noted the brand, a Maltese Cross, and went on to the chuck wagon, camped by a nameless creek, meandering out of an endless sweep of plains to the westward into an equally limitless void on the east. The Maltese Cross made him welcome. It was a rare thing for a lone man to come out of those empty spaces. But the range properly held that a man’s business was his own until he chose to divulge it. The Cross herd was bound for northern Montana, they told him. Rock knew that already. The trail boss casually remarked that he was welcome to keep them company if he liked.

Since they had a full crew, Rock didn’t care to be a guest and crawl North at the mad speed of ten miles a day, when he could make thirty or forty a day on his own. So he accepted a hunk of beef from the cook next morning and rode on.

Two weeks brought him into Wyoming, into a different type of country. The flat, undulating surface of the great plains became sharply rolling ridges. He crossed creeks lined with willows and clumps of quaking aspen. He rode through open forests of pine. He made lonely camps in spots of rare beauty. Once or twice he stopped overnight at ranches well established.

Off to the northwest, mountains began to loom. He bore on until these white and purple peaks were behind him on the left, and so came to a watershed dipping in a long slant to the north. By which he guessed that he was well within the Territory of Montana, following a stream that flowed to the Yellowstone.

When he came to that turbulent river, in a valley traversed by the first transcontinental railway to cross the Northwest, he found eight men with a mixed herd at a fording place. They were a weary lot. Eight men to twelve hundred cattle was a short trail crew. They had left Kansas early that spring, they told Rock. They had made fast time, and their horses bore the trace, being gaunt and leg weary, although the cattle were in fair flesh. And the men were even more tired than their stock. Of the scores of trailed herds Rock had passed, this was the first that was short-handed. A trail outfit left the South with a full crew. Barring accident or death, the riders stayed with the herd to the journey’s end. It was equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy for a trail hand to quit for a whim. In all that bovine pilgrimage, there was no place where riders could be secured, no more than a ship can replace its crew a thousand miles offshore.

“I can use you plenty,” the trail boss said, as soon as he sized Rock up, “if you hanker to be usefully employed.”

“In the home of the mounted police, eh?” Rock drawled. “We go through the Blackfeet country. That’s about as far North as cattle range, isn’t it?”

“Just about; although, if this Northern drive keeps extendin’ itself, there’ll be longhorns winterin’ at the north pole, it looks like,” the wagon boss replied. “If you want to see some new country, here’s a chance.”

“From Mexico to Canada, personally conducted!” Rock laughed. “All right, I’m with you.”

Thus did he come into the foothills of the Rockies, north of 49°, in the month of September. They crossed the Missouri where Chief Joseph had forded it with his braves ten years earlier, with U. S. cavalry in hot pursuit. They plodded west and north to their destination, leaving the Bear Paws to the right, Sweet Grass Hills on their left, sweeping across a country where grass grew to their stirrups, driving before them twelve hundred cattle of divers age and sex, marked with a brand on the left ribs, called a steering wheel.

Rock looked once or twice to the westward before they reached the boundary line. Somewhere in that great empty area the Marias River split the plains. Somewhere on the Marias was the headquarters of the Maltese Cross. The Cross would keep. He had given his word to go through with the Steering Wheel. In the winter or in the spring he would drift into Fort Benton, and he would contrive to make himself familiar with the ways and works of Buck Walters. For the present——

The Old Man revealed itself as a pleasant country, well grassed, well wooded with small pine, and with a small, swift-flowing stream in which trout lurked in eddying pools. Axes and saws they had in the chuck wagon. By some mysterious agency of freighting across the plains, they found themselves in possession of a mower and a dump rake. For once, faced as it were by an emergency, these knights of the saddle, who had all the man-on-horseback’s traditional contempt for labor on foot, fell to as carpenters, corral builders, reapers and stackers of hay.

So that, when the first November snows hit them, they were housed in a comfortable log dwelling. Each man had a saddle horse tied in a warm stable, and hay stacked to feed his mount till spring. The Steering Wheel cattle had sun-cured grass to graze upon and brushy creek bottoms to shelter them against the blizzard.

“It might be worse,” Rock said to a fellow rider a few days before Christmas. “I had an idea this Canada country was like the arctic regions. But it shapes up like a real cattle country. It’s colder than Texas, but there’s more grass and better shelter. These mounted police, with their funny red coats and striped pants, are about like the Texan rangers, only they don’t shoot so frequent nor play as tight a game of poker.”

It was indeed a lonely land. When spring opened, with streams in flood and blue windflowers thrusting ahead of the first grass blades, Rock missed the gathering of the clans, the scope of great round-ups, and the hundreds of riders with gossip from a thousand miles of range. It was like being a chip in an eddy, he thought to himself, being given to similes and metaphors. The Steering Wheel seemed to have the entire Northwest to itself. They heard that another big outfit lay somewhere north of them. The STV had headquarters two hundred miles east. But from September to April Rock saw no four-footed beast on the range outside of the Steering Wheel brand. Nor did any rider ever come up from the horizon to pass the time of day. Fort MacLeod was a police barracks chiefly. It boasted a trading store, where trappers from the mountains sold their furs and bought supplies. Community life there was none at all.

The nine men of the Steering Wheel had a sinecure over the winter. Rock took to speculating on what brought that particular one-horse cow outfit all the way to Canada, when there were magnificent ranges to be had for the taking south of the line. None of the men knew who owned the Steering Wheel. A typical Texan, tall, thin-faced, with a drawly voice, and a good-natured soul, who knew cattle, ran the outfit. When a man needed money to buy goods at the fort, Dave Wells produced cash. His reticence discouraged curiosity. Rock, who knew the cow business both in practice and in theory, wondered at this dead silence—this absence of outlined plan. Twelve hundred cattle didn’t need nine riders in comparative idleness.

This gave him a good excuse in April for leaving. When he told Wells, that individual looked thoughtful.

“I sho’ don’t need eight riders right along,” he said. “I kept yo’ boys over the winter, mostly because I didn’t want to turn yo’ loose in a country where they’s no chance for a job. I’m aimin’ to let four of yo’ go. But not for a spell. I’d like for yo’ to stay on three-fo’ weeks yet. I got to take a pasear after some stock. If yo’ drift back across the line in May, yo’ll still be able to get on as hands with some round-up.”

Rock agreed. May would do as well as April. He had written once to Uncle Bill Sayre, and had received a reply. If he got around to the Maltese Cross range that summer, it would be good enough.

Immediately thereafter, Dave Wells flung his men out on a horse-gathering expedition. The Steering Wheel ponies were brought in by tens and dozens. They ranged uniformly within ten miles of the ranch. Most of the cattle grazed in the same area. And, as soon as forty horses were in the pasture, Wells organized a pack outfit, took four men with him, and vanished.

He left a red-headed youth in nominal charge. The duties of the riders left at home were to build an extension of the pole pasture and to gather the rest of the Steering Wheel saddle stock. Thereafter they were to scout around the outer fringes of the range and throw all cattle close home.

“The old he-coon gone South for another trail herd?” Billy Gore asked the deputy foreman, once he was in Rock’s hearing.

“Naw,” the red-headed one divulged the first information. “Said he was goin’ somewhere after a bunch of doggies.”

“Doggy” in range parlance meant farm cattle, scrubs, nondescript stock generally, sometimes cheaply bought to help stock a range.

Rock recalled that remark three weeks later, when Wells and his four riders rode into the ranch. They had left with forty saddle horses. These mounts were ridden to a standstill. The five men were heavy-eyed and obviously weary. Wells kept his own counsel, as did the four who had ridden with him. They appeared at noon, turned loose their horses, ate, and then slept still sunrise of the next day. After breakfast Dave Wells called the four riders who had stayed on the ranch, told them courteously that he would have to let them go, and paid them off in gold.

The discharged quartet rode south, leading pack horses, within two hours. They discovered, once clear of the ranch and free to air their personal views, that they were mutually eager to be away to a real cow country. They had had enough of comparative isolation. They were all Texans. Three of them were for home, via Butte and south over the Oregon Short Line to the Union Pacific. They had had enough of the North for the present. Only Rock proposed to linger, and he would keep them company until they were well into Montana.

Five miles south of the ranch they jumped a bunch of cattle out of a draw, mature cattle, with a freshly burned Steering Wheel black on their ribs. On the slope which they breasted were others; by a cluster of sloughs were still more.

Doggies! The cowpunchers, free of any loyalty or responsibility to any outfit, glanced and kept on talking of home. Rock looked and kept his thoughts to himself. They were not doggies. They were simon-pure longhorns, with a touch of Hereford blood, here and there—the type of cattle that poured annually by the hundred thousand out of Texas. If they were purchased range stock, other brands, vented or barred out, should have shown. All the mark that Rock saw on any beast was a fresh-burned Steering Wheel. But he kept his speculations to himself. After all, it was no business of his. The Steering Wheel might have cattle all over the Northwest, for all he knew or cared. If his fellow riders thought it queer, they were not concerned enough to mention the fact.

Five days later he parted from his companions under the shoulder of the Sweet Grass Hills. They were bearing off for Silver Bow Junction, homeward bound. Rock’s course lay a trifle east of south, toward Fort Benton. Ahead of him, in that spring-green void, big round-ups were mustering from the upper Teton to the Larb Hills. The Bear Paws loomed faintly on the horizon. Milk River, Sun Prairie, the Bad Lands—place names to conjure with. There was nothing petty in all that sweep of plain and mountain. It gave Rock a curious sense of thrilling possibilities. He rode alone without being lonely, fired by some subtle anticipation.

He often asked himself afterward what it is that gives a man a definite urge along a definite line that may lead him to both triumph and disaster. But he was never able to answer that question, any more than he was able to answer it that June day when, parting company with his fellows, he pointed the red horse’s head toward Fort Benton murmuring whimsically:

CHAPTER IV—A DEAD DOUBLE

Rock knew where he was going and why. But it was not on the cards that his course was to be direct. Halfway between Milk River and the Marias he rode down a coulee in search of water for a noon camp. He found water eventually and beside it a troop of United States cavalry, in the throes of getting under way. “Throes” is correct. They had a considerable amount of equipment to be packed upon mules. They were cantankerous mules. A dozen men were fighting them with pack lashings and profanity.

Rock drew rein to watch the circus. A man, a civilian, approached him, mopping the sweat from his brow.

“I have lashed packs on a variety of animals,” Rock said. “But I have no ambition to be a government muleteer.”

“Be a good sport an’ help me out,” the man appealed. “It won’t be but for four or five days, till we get to the post. I’m short-handed, and these mules is bad medicine. I shore need a man that’s handy with a rope. I’ll give you five dollars a day.”

Rock grinned and accepted. The mules were certainly bad medicine, and he was handy with a rope, and a few days more or less didn’t matter.

Fort Assiniboine lay eighty miles eastward. Fort Benton hugged the north bank of the Missouri, some sixty miles southwest. But here was a job just begging to be taken in hand. So for five days thereafter he was a mule packer, learning something of the way of men and mules in Uncle Sam’s service. He even had an officer suggest that he would make a likely cavalryman. But Rock had different ideas. He took his twenty-five dollars in the shadow of this military post and set his face westward again.

He left in the gray of dawn. The second evening he dropped from the level of the plains, full three hundred feet into the valley of the Marias, where a little stream sang and whispered over a pebbly bed, through flats of rich, loamy soil. Sagebrush grew here, and natural meadows spread there. Willows lined the banks. Groves of poplar studded the flats, thickets of service berry. Great cottonwoods, solitary giants and family groups, cast a pleasant shade from gnarly boughs in full leaf.

“Gosh, places like this,” Rock murmured, “fairly shout out loud for a fellow to settle down and make himself a home. No wonder Texas is flocking North.”

In the first bottom Rock crossed, he stirred up a few cattle, then a band of horses, several of which bore trimmed manes and tails and marks of the saddle—fine-looking beasts, bigger than the Texas mustang. He couldn’t see the brand.

“I wonder if we’re anywhere near the Maltese Cross, Sangre, old boy?” he asked the sorrel horse. “Funny, if we’d stumble in there for the night.”

He rounded a point masked by thickets of young, green poplar and saw a house with smoke curling blue from the chimney. There was a stable beyond, corrals, a stack of last year’s hay, and the lines of a pole fence running away along the river. It was a typical cow outfit’s headquarters. The house was roomy, of pine logs, L-shaped, with a low porch in front. Rock stopped at the front of the house. He saw no one anywhere. The only sign of life about the place was that wisp of blue, a wavering pennant in the still air.

He hesitated, sitting in his saddle. There was life here. Why didn’t it show itself? Range hospitality was more than a courtesy to friends and neighbors. Even outlaws in a hidden camp would share food and blankets with a passing stranger. The logical accepted thing for any man faring across the plains was to make himself free wherever nightfall or mealtime overtook him. He was expected to put his horses in the stable and make himself at home. It wasn’t altogether good form to wait for an invitation. The open-handed hospitality of the old West did have its forms, and Rock knew them.

He was a little surprised at himself, at his hesitation, this unaccountable feeling of delicacy, as if he were intruding. Why should he expect some one to rush out of that house to bid him welcome? Why did he hesitate? He asked himself that question in so many words, as he rode on to the stable.

It was a large stable, well kept, with room in it for twenty horses. Harness hung on pegs against the wall. The mangers were full of hay. The doorway was wide and high, so that Rock rode in before he dismounted. And from his seat he looked down at two horses, standing on bridle reins in their stalls, saddled, still rough with sweat. He stared at them.

The saddle of the nearest, the mane and foreshoulder, was stained with blood, not yet dried to the blackening point. It stood like the brand of Cain on the gray beast—on the yellow leather.

Was that why he had hesitated at the house? Could a man sense the unknown? Could fear or awe or the presence of tragedy impregnate the atmosphere like a sinister mist? These were uncommon questions for a cowpuncher to stand asking himself, but Rock Holloway had an uncommon sort of mind.

Still he was not merely mind. He had a body and appetites and all the natural passions man is heir to. If he had the mentality to analyze a situation, he had also a capacity for instantaneous, purposeful action. He had proved that long before he waited by the Odeon bar to halt Mark Duffy’s high-handed career. He proved it once more. He left his two horses standing where he dismounted and walked quickly toward the house. He was conscious that he merely obeyed instinct—a hunch, if you will, except that Rock distrusted hunches which had no basis in reason—because he had felt an intuition of something wrong before he laid eyes on that bloodstained saddle. He strode toward that house with the certainty that he was needed there, yet in one portion of his mind he wondered how he came by that conclusion.

A door opened out of the north wall, which was guiltless of porch. One stepped from the threshold to the earth. The door stood wide. Rock looked in. He had seen many ranch rooms like this—a stove against one wall, a set of shelves for dishes and utensils, a long table in the middle of the room.

Beside this table, her back to him, a woman sat with her face buried in her hands. A few feet beyond a little girl in green calico, no more than three or four years of age, sat looking at Rock, out of blue baby eyes, her little, round, red mouth opened in a friendly smile.

The woman lifted her head, looked, sprang to her feet, and shrank back. For one instant, unbelieving terror stood in her wide gray eyes, in the part of her lips, as plain as Rock had ever seen it on any human face.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he said quickly. “I’m merely a passing stranger.”

“Ah!” Her pent breath came with an explosive release. She put her hands to her breast for a second. Her features relaxed into a somber intentness.

Wordless, she stared at Rock, her eyes sweeping him from head to foot, coming back to rest searchingly, with a look of incredulity, on his face. And Rock stared back, wondering, yet alive to the strange compelling quality that seemed to radiate from this woman like an aura, to command interest and admiration and profound respect.

She hadn’t been afraid of him. No; timidity was no attribute of that dark, imperious face. She had been shocked, startled, by something about him. Rock wondered what it could be.

Two spots of color crept slowly into her cheeks. A very striking-looking creature, Rock thought. Not beautiful; not even pretty. Proud, passionate, dominant—yes. Slender as a willow, with a cloud of dark hair. Deep-gray eyes, like pools; scarlet lips.

“’Lo, Doc,” the little girl repeated, in a childish treble. She clambered to her feet and toddled forward a step or two, waving a rag doll by one arm. “W’y don’t oo tum in?”

“Hello, baby!” Rock answered and doffed his hat. “You don’t seem to find me a fearsome object, anyway.”

“Nor do I.” The woman suddenly had found her voice—a deep, throaty sound, like water rippling gently over pebbles. “But I thought I was seeing a ghost.”

“A ghost?” Rock grinned. His interest quickened at the tone, the clean-clipped words. No semiliterate range beauty this. Education had done one thing for Rock Holloway. It had made his ear sensitive to enunciation. “I’m a pretty substantial spook, I wish to remark. Rock Holloway is my name. I hail from Texas, via the Canadian Northwest and way points. I’m poor, but honest, and my intentions are reasonably honorable, even if my performances aren’t always up to par. No, lady, I’m no ghost. I’m a stock hand in search of occupation. I stopped in here because this was the first ranch I’ve seen to-day, and it’s near sundown. But, if I make you uncomfortable, I’ll ride on.”

“No, no!” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. Come in. I’ll show you what I mean. I think you’ll understand. It may startle you, too.”

Rock stepped into the room. The baby generously offered her doll in token of amity.

“I’s hung’y,” she announced, with juvenile directness. “I wan’ my suppah. Nona just sits an’ cwies. Make her ’top, Doc.”

The girl—Rock decided she could be no more than twenty-one or two—gathered the child up and set her on a chair.

“Sit right there till I come back, honey,” she murmured. “Then you shall have your supper.”

The fair-haired, blue-eyed mite obeyed without question. The girl beckoned Rock. She walked to the other end of the room, through a doorway. Rock followed her. He found himself in a narrow hallway that bisected the house. She opened a door off that and motioned him to enter.

He found himself in a woman’s room. No man ever surrounded himself with such dainty knickknacks. It was an amazing contrast to the bare utility of the kitchen.

A man lay stretched at full length on the white counterpane that covered the bed—a dead man. One glance told Rock that. Crimson marked the pillow that held his head, and crimson speckled the yellow and blue of a hooked rug on the floor. A hand basin, with crimson-stained cloths in it, stood on a chair.

But Rock was already looking. He needed no prompting. He stared. The amazed certainty came to him that, except for very minor differences, he might well have been looking at his own corpse.

Yet he was alive, never more so. And he had no brothers, nor indeed any kin that so resembled him. Coincidence, he reflected. Such things were. No great mystery that, of the millions of men cast in the image of their Maker, the mold for two should be strangely alike. He did not now wonder at the shock he must have given this girl, when he stood in the doorway, the image of the man dead in her room.

But Rock passed at once to a more practical consideration. The man had been shot. His bared chest showed a blue-rimmed puncture.

“Do you wonder?” the girl’s voice said in his ear. “You see the resemblance. It is uncanny. You could pass for him anywhere. My heart stood still when I saw you in the doorway.”

Rock nodded. He put his hand on the body. The flesh was still soft, not yet cold.

The girl looked down at the dead man and reached one slim-fingered hand to smooth the brown hair back from his forehead with a caressing gesture. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“About half an hour,” she whispered. “It was like lightning out of the blue. We were up the river a couple of miles. He had separated from me to look at some cattle around the bend. I heard a shot—just one. I didn’t think anything of that until he came back to me, holding himself on his horse by main strength, dying in his saddle. He couldn’t talk. He never did speak again. I got him home. He died in a little while.”

“Not near. There is the Maltese Cross on the river, seven miles below, and the Seventy Seven about the same distance above.”

“The Seventy Seven? Texas outfit? Pull in here last fall? Fellow name of Duffy run it?”

A curious conviction, based on less than nothing, arose in Rock’s mind. It couldn’t be—and still—— Absurd—of course.

“And you don’t know who shot him nor why? Well, I suppose it isn’t my business. Only he might be my twin. He isn’t, but——” Rock stopped. He had very nearly spoken what was in his mind.

“It hurts you,” he said kindly. “I expect you thought a lot of him. But it’s done. Now, is there anything I can do?”

“What can you do?” she cried, the first despairing note that had entered her voice. “Can you give back life? Can you——”

“Oh, I mustn’t be silly,” she said, after a moment. “It’s so useless. Only, it seems—— Ah, well.”

She turned away. Rock closed the door behind them. The baby sat on the chair by the table, waiting patiently.

“Look here,” Rock said bluntly, “I’m foot-loose for the time being. Is there anything you want done? Anybody you want notified about this? My horses are fairly fresh.”

She stood a second. “Oh, I’ve got to think,” she said. “No, not to-night. And there is no one, anyway. In the morning we may——”

She turned to the kitchen stove and lifted a lid. It had gone down to a few charred sticks. Rock took that matter off her hands. He rebuilt the fire and noted empty water pails on a bench.

Rock found the spring, a small pool bubbling out of white sand, clear as crystal and cold as ice. He filled the pails and brought them back. The girl was peeling potatoes when he came in. Sliced bacon sizzled in a pan.

Rock went to the stable by the river bank, unsaddled the three horses, took off his pack, fed and watered all four. When he reached the house again supper was on the table. They ate in silence. The sun filled the valley with the fire of its last beams. Bright shafts shot dazzling through the windows, a yellow blaze that grew red and then rose pink and faded into a pearly gray. Yellow-haired Betty laid down her spoon, slid off her chair, climbed on Rock’s knee, and snuggled her round face against his shirt. In two minutes she was fast asleep.

The girl, who had been sitting with her eyes absently on her plate, smiled briefly—a phantom smile that strangely transformed her face.

She was young to have a kid like that, Rock thought. And it was tough losing a man by the gun route. Was it going to be his lot to step into the breach? If—if—— Well, he had to get to the bottom of this, somehow. Here was a fellow who looked exactly like him, same build, same age, same features, shot down in a river bottom. It smelled of ambush. The Seventy Seven was less than an hour’s ride to the west. And Elmer Duffy was running the Seventy Seven. For the moment the Maltese Cross and Buck Walters and the mission he had undertaken for Uncle Bill Sayre had no place in Rock’s mind.

The girl took the baby out of his arms and carried her off into a bedroom. Rock put away these reflections and gathered the dishes off the table and began to wash them.

“I might as well earn my night’s lodging,” he murmured whimsically, probably to hide the fact that he was moved by a desire to make his sympathy take some practical form.

The girl reappeared, put the food away in a pantry, took a cloth, and wiped the dishes as Rock washed. She made no comment. She moved quickly, and efficiently. Her hands were deft. But her mind was elsewhere. She was scarcely conscious of him, Rock perceived. And when the supper things were finished, he went outside and sat down on a chopping block to smoke a cigarette in the twilight.

Dusk gathered. The pearl-gray mist of the evening sky merged into the lucent shroud of a plains night. Crickets chirped in the grass. The Marias whispered its sibilant song in a stony bed. A lamp glowed through a window in the house. Rock saw the girl sitting by the table again, as when he first saw her, elbows on the wood, face buried in her palms.

“She aches inside,” he thought. “Poor devil! She needs folks or friends or something, right now.”

But he couldn’t be one or the other, he knew. He was too sensible to blunder with well-meant, useless words. She had forgotten he was there. So he walked softly down to the stable, drew his blankets in the canvas tarpaulin off to one side, under the stars, and turned in.

So the Seventy Seven did locate on the Marias instead of the Judith? Uncle Bill was right. This might be no healthier a neighborhood for him than it had proved for his double.

“Well, you got to be in this neighborhood for a spell, whether it’s dangerous or not, you darned fool,” Rock apostrophized himself. “This is the Maltese range, and you’ve promised to look over the Cross.”

Thus Rock, with the blankets drawn up to his chin and his gaze meditatively on the three stars that make Orion’s belt.

His last drowsily conscious act was to smile at the obliquity of his thought. In the morning he would do whatever that dark-haired, gray-eyed young woman requested. He had ridden slap into this thing. Whatever it was, he would see it through. Yet he couldn’t imagine her requiring anything of him except that he would perhaps ride into Fort Benton and notify whatever authorities functioned there that a man had been shot on the Marias. And that didn’t call for any great resolution on his part.

Just the same, he desired greatly to know who this man was who looked so much like him, who shot him, and why?

CHAPTER V—WRAPPED IN CANVAS

Birds twittering in the poplars and willows by the river wakened Rock when the rose-pink dawn was turning to gold. He lay watching, listening. He could hear the ripple of running water. He could see the bleached hills rising abrupt from the gray-green valley floor. The cool air was like balm on his face. Beyond all doubt this was a pleasant country. If a man could settle on one of these river bottoms, with a couple of hundred cows, in ten years—— But Rock was a long way from peering anxious-eyed into the future.

He sat up and rolled a cigarette. The sun thrust searching yellow fingers into the valley of the Marias. The winter-bleached log walls of the house drew his gaze and set his mind to work in fruitless speculation. This must be quite an outfit, he reflected. The house was big, built to accommodate a score of men. He had marked a bunk room across that hall from the roomy kitchen. The stable argued plenty of riding stock in winter. There were machinery and wagons, even a spring buggy, under a lean-to shed. Yet apparently the place was held down by a young woman, a baby, and one man. Hadn’t the girl said there were no other men? Still, she had been more or less fussed at the time. The riders might be afar on round-up. But Rock had that sense of abandonment, just the same. It was rather puzzling. Whereupon he reached for his boots, dressed, fed and watered the horses, and sat down on the river bank to watch the clear water sparkle in the sun, while he waited some sign of life from the house.

He didn’t wait long. A voice at his elbow roused him to attention. The girl had come unseen and unheard. Her dark hair was coiled in a neat rope about her head. She had on a short gray skirt and a white blouse. Her skin, in the clear morning light, was like a piece of satin, dusky and transparent. Rock had seen enough of slatternly women on ranches to make him appreciate freshness. There was a peculiar interest-compelling quality about this girl, over and above her youth and charm. Rock had felt it last night. He felt it now, even when she said no more than a low-toned: “Good-morning, Mr. Holloway.

“I thought you had gone,” she continued, “until I saw you moving around here. I must have seemed rather inhospitable last night, not even thinking where you were to sleep.”

“A cowpuncher,” Rock drawled, “generally carries his bed with him when he’s on the move. And there’s all outdoors to spread it in.”

“I got up early,” she said when they had finished. “Betty generally sleeps till seven or eight o’clock. I thought——”

“Yes. I’m sure he’d as soon be buried here as anywhere. There is nothing else we can do for him. You know what this country is like. We’re practically out of the world.”

“Isn’t this part of the country organized at all?” Rock asked. “No local authorities?”

“Are you a complete stranger here?” she countered. “I didn’t think so by the way you spoke of the Seventy Seven last night.”

“I passed through this country last fall with a trail herd bound from Texas to Canada.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, this Territory of Montana is a good deal of a no man’s land, outside of the western part, where there is a lot of mining. Fort Benton is the nearest thing to a town. It’s quite a place, but it isn’t a regularly organized community. There’s a United States marshal there, I think, and a judge comes down from the western part of the State, once a year, to hold court. There aren’t enough people to form a proper county organization yet, although it’s talked of. When my father came in here four years ago, we were the first outfit on the Marias. Betty is the first white child born north of the Missouri River in the Territory, I believe. So, you see,” she motioned abruptly with her hands, “there’s not much use running around in circles telling that Doc Martin has been shot. Last night I was in a terrible state. But I can think straight now. Doc is dead. We can’t do anything but bury him. I’d like to get it over with before Betty wakes up. She doesn’t know. She was awfully fond of Doc, and he of her.”

“All right,” Rock agreed. If there were no formalities to be complied with, no coroner to sit in inquiry, no sheriff to seek trace of the killers, the sooner the dead man was buried the better. Trail outfits buried their dead and went on. And, perhaps, the last rites men performed for their dead under such circumstances lost nothing of sincerity because they were informal.

So Rock, shovel in hand, followed her to a spot a hundred yards east of the house, near the river bank. Under a giant cottonwood stood a small picket inclosure. Within that inclosure lifted two grassy mounds, long and narrow, a painted board at the end of each. For a second Rock thought the girl would break down again.

“It’s ghastly,” she whispered. “It’s almost as if there were a curse on this place, if I believed in such a thing. Mamma died when Betty was born. A horse fell on dad. They’re both there. Now Doc.”

The soft mold dug easily. When Rock had a hole deep enough, they returned to the house. Some time between dark and dawn the girl had changed the man’s clothing and wiped clean every trace of blood. She had put on him a clean, soft shirt, with a coat and trousers of blue serge. He looked calm and contented, as if he slept. And Rock, gazing at the still face, marveled again at the resemblance to himself. He would have liked to meet this man alive, he thought.

They wrapped the body in heavy canvas, swathed like a mummy. A coffin was out of the question. Sawed lumber there was none. Except furniture, freighted in from afar, everything about that place was hewn from raw timber with axes. And canvas, Rock thought, was as good as a steel casket. The dead are careless of their housing. Only the living fret over such things.

He piled on the last shovelful of earth and stood aside. The girl looked down at the raw soil. Her lips quivered. She dropped to her knees. She seemed to whisper something like a prayer. Rock stood with bared head in the morning sun that sent bright shafts of light through the crooked boughs above. Then he left her, still on her knees, her head bowed, her fingers locked tight together.

CHAPTER VI—VERY ADROIT ROCK

Some minutes later he heard her stirring in the house. The sun grows hot early on the plains in midsummer. Rock had planted himself on the porch steps, in the shade, debating his next move. Should he ride on about his business? Logically, yes. He had a definite task to perform. It was time he set about it. He was on the ground. This was only an incident, a happening by the way. Yet his mind was full of this woman and child, alone on a ranch in the wilderness. The girl had said there were no other men. But this ranch and equipment spelled men and stock. It was more than the cabin of a settler striving for a foothold and security in a virgin land. A woman with a three-year-old baby had no business alone on a ranch in this waste, without a man in the background.

That problem—which was more a state of feeling than a problem, Rock knew—was solved for him in unexpected fashion. He rose at last and entered the house, specifically to ask her if there was anything else he could do before he departed.

The girl had the child in a high chair and was giving the youngster her breakfast. Silently she poured a cup of coffee and handed it to Rock. When he drank it she said:

“You told me last night you were a stock hand in search of occupation. Do you want to go to work for me?”

Rock liked her directness. His mind was quick to grasp possibilities. Work to Rock meant activity on the range He was next door to the Maltese Cross. Two birds had been killed before with one stone. Still, he wasn’t fond of mysteries that involved sudden death. He liked to know where he was going when he took a new trail.

“I’d as soon ride range here as anywhere,” he said. “It’s immaterial to me who I work for, so long as it’s my kind of work.”

“Are you one of these stock hands that considers it beneath his dignity to work for any outfit with less than ten thousand head of cattle?” she asked, with a comical note of asperity.

“Well, no,” he laughed. “Hardly so finicky as that. If you’ve got a rider’s job for me, consider me on the pay roll. Only, I’d like to know, if I’m going to work for you, whether I’m likely to find myself being buried some morning at sunrise—and why?”

“Wait a minute,” she said. She turned back into the house. In a second she was back with a hat on and two shiny tin pails.

“Come down to the stable with me, and we’ll talk this over while I milk. I was in such a state last night that I forgot the cows. Will you saddle up and bring them in out of the pasture?”

Rock drove two amiable-looking red cows from the far end of a small pasture to the corral. The girl tied both to the fence and sat down beside one on a low stool.

“It’s considered woman’s work, I suppose,” she replied. “But even the wild and woolly cowboy, I notice, likes real milk and cream and butter. I don’t want you to milk cows, though. I’m not running a dairy. I have about eight hundred cattle scattered around here.”

“We had more than eight thousand when we came here,” she said. “That is why the house is big and the stable. My father drove three trail herds in here from the Pecos. But we lost most of them.”

“So, as I said, I have about eight hundred cattle on the range. I have a rider with the Maltese Cross round-up. I need another rider on the ranch.”

“But if you keep a rep with the Cross,” Rock interpolated, “does it matter if your stock does scatter considerable? The outfit would brand the calves and ship your beef as long as you supply a man and a string of horses.”

“Yes and no,” she said. “I see you know range work. I suppose what you say is true. Only I have reasons for handling cattle in my own way. But that’s all beside the point. What you want to know is whether you’ll be expected to step into a dead man’s boots and take the risk of getting shot for some reason or other, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rock admitted. “I have no hankering to inherit a private war along with a forty-dollar job.”

“It’ll be fifty if you work for me,” she said. “There may be a risk. Not if you can be around here and work for me, without getting sentimental and jealous. That was what got Doc killed, I believe. I’m sure it was.”

Perhaps Rock looked his curiosity and surprise. The girl stood up. She had worked, as she talked, and finished milking the first cow.

“I had better explain a little,” she said calmly. “As I said, four years ago we came in here with nearly nine thousand cattle and a dozen riders in our outfit. I was eighteen then. I had just finished school. Our first winter here was a bad one—a terrible winter of hard frost and deep snow and storms. In the spring a round-up out two months gathered less than five hundred cattle in our brand. Betty was born that winter, and mamma died. The next summer a horse fell on my father, injured his back, so that he was a helpless cripple for nearly a year. Then he died. He left all there was to me and Betty. I have full control of everything until she comes of age. So I have managed here ever since. Mostly with one man, sometimes with two.”

So that was that. The dead man was a range rider, not a husband, and the baby was a sister. She was a level-headed, plucky girl to run a shoe-string outfit by herself. Yet he suspected that in this man’s country, men would make it easy for this capable and determined young person. Rock’s interest quickened.

“I have none—at least none that I care much about,” she replied. “And how much would I get for five or six hundred cattle? A few thousand dollars. The ranch isn’t salable. Who would pay money for a ranch, when land and water can be had anywhere for taking? Why should I sell out? I know cattle. This is a new country, a good range. We may not have another hard winter in a lifetime. It just happened. The old trappers and the Indians never saw a winter like that. Every four years my cattle will double. After a while it will make Betty and me independent. Why should I sell out? What would I do? Go to some town and be a clerk in a store?”

“Oh, you got the right idea,” he admitted. “You’re working on the same principle that has built up every big outfit in the country. Only, it’s sort of unexpected in a woman no bigger than a minute.”

“Please understand me clearly,” she said, with a peremptory note in her curiously musical voice. “I don’t need any sympathy from anybody. I know what I’m doing, and I’m doing very well here. I want any one who works for me to work on exactly the same basis as he would work for any cow outfit. I don’t want any of this ‘That’s all right, little girl, we’ll see you through,’ business. That’s mostly what got Doc Martin killed, I suspect. Every man who works for me gets the idea that he’s in love with me.”

“It embarrasses me. I’ve fired two or three for getting mushy. I don’t want that sort of thing. Do you think you can ride for me without getting sentimental—without presently getting the attitude that it’s your duty and privilege to protect me from every man in the country except yourself?”

“Well, then, Miss Parke,” Rock said a little stiffly, “I can assure you that if I do draw wages from you I’ll try to earn them without making a bid either for your gratitude or your affection.”

“You talk like a man with some sense. If you can handle horses and cattle the way you handle the English language, you ought to be useful.”

“You’re getting too personal,” Rock said rudely. “Tell me about this shooting. That’s what I want to know before I decide whether I want to make myself the same kind of a target. I have ambitions to live and do well in the world, myself.”

“Now you’re getting offended,” she reproached. “And I’m only trying to be frank and have things understood. You can’t imagine what a nuisance men can be sometimes. Doc worked for me ever since dad died. He was a good man. But he persisted in wanting to love me. I let him go once and then took him on again. He promised to behave himself. But he wouldn’t. He was jealous. He couldn’t bear other men coming here to see me. He stirred up trouble for himself with Elmer Duffy, the boss of the Seventy Seven outfit. I am fairly sure that Elmer shot Doc yesterday afternoon.”

She said this reluctantly, but with an earnestness that convinced Rock she really believed it. To him it seemed rather simple. He had seen men quarrel over women before.

“Elmer, I suppose, is a victim, too,” Rock commented. “Was he inclined to be jealous of a good-looking fellow like Doc Martin being in your company all the time?”

“Yes; that’s about it.” She sighed. “It sounds horrid, but it’s true. I’m quite sure Duffy was a little afraid of Doc. Doc had a quick temper, and he was supposed to be rather deadly. I don’t know how he got that reputation, because I never knew of him having trouble with anybody in this country.”

“No.” She replied soberly. “I think Doc was ambushed. There was only one shot. He had been mean and arbitrary with Elmer Duffy the last time they met. In fact, he threatened him and told him never to set foot on this ranch when I was here alone.”

“Listen, Miss Parke,” Rock said positively. “I know something about Elmer Duffy, myself. I’ll confess that I don’t like his style with men very much. I don’t know what it would be like with women. Elmer belongs to a family that walks roughshod over people when they feel like it. But I don’t think he would lay for your man and bushwhack him.”

“I tell you simply what I believe,” she said gravely. “I don’t know. There is no proof. I wouldn’t breathe this to any one. I only say it to you because I’m asking you to work for me. I don’t know that I would even tell you, if you didn’t look so much like Doc that you could easily be taken for him. If you ride for me, you may fall heir to whatever bad blood did exist between him and Elmer Duffy. If Doc hadn’t made an issue of me with this man he would still be alive. I don’t want to be a bone of contention. I won’t be. I like men well enough until they get too friendly. If a man works for me, he’s working for me, and that’s all there is to it. So now you know all about it. And I do need a rider to take Doc’s place.”

“It was very inconsiderate of him to get himself killed off when you needed him.” Rock couldn’t forbear the ironic note. “Riders can’t always be picked up in this country just when you want ’em.”

“You’re brutal.” Nona drew herself up, and her eyes filled. “I liked Doc. He was nice. He was loyal. It made me sick to see him die like that. It made me feel guilty, because I was partly the cause. But I can’t help it that I’m a woman. Can’t you understand? I’m not a callous beast.”

“Well, I’ll guarantee not to afflict you with my admiration if I feel any,” he smiled. “And it’s a cowpuncher’s nature to be loyal to the people he works for. If I ever lock horns with Elmer Duffy, it won’t be for the reason you say your man, Doc, did. No. And I like the looks of this country. I’d sort of like to linger on this range for a while. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason why I shouldn’t work for you.”

“All right,” she answered composedly. “If you’ll bunch those horses that are in the pasture, I’ll show you what ones to saddle. I want you to go down the river with me after I’ve milked this other cow.”

While Rock gathered a few horses out of the pasture, he saw a rider cross the flat. The milch cows were in a small corral. Rock bunched the horses in a larger one and walked through the stable to where Nona finished her dairymaid’s task. From the door he saw that the man was Elmer Duffy. Rock’s mind worked fast. He was bound to encounter Duffy some time, and it might as well be now. Duffy’s business was with Nona Parke, not with him. But Rock cared nothing for that. He remembered that he had killed this man’s brother. He was going to live for a time in Duffy’s immediate neighborhood. If Duffy had taken Mark’s death to heart and brooded over it, Rock wanted to know and be ready for what might follow.

But he was hardly prepared for what did happen. He walked straight toward Duffy. The man’s back was toward him. He was talking to Nona. She was just rising from her stool. Duffy was in no way excited. His tone was the habitual slow drawl of the native Texan.

Duffy wheeled. His arms hung by his sides. There wasn’t the faintest twitch of the fingers hanging a little below his gun belt, nor any quick lighting of his slaty eyes, nor the frowning recognition Rock half expected. True, recognition impended in the man’s attitude. And he was wary—wary without being hostile.

“Doc!” A ripple of sardonic amusement stirred in Rock. Duffy thought he faced Nona Parke’s dead rider. Rock stood perfectly still for a second or two. The man’s eyes never left his.

Surely his voice would establish his identity. Duffy had been in daily contact with Rock Holloway for two months on trail and had known him casually the season earlier. But he didn’t know him now. His words proved that.

“Why, I reckoned I might,” he answered, “seein’ I rode in here. You didn’t expect me to take what you said serious, did you?”

“Shucks! I’ve changed my mind about caring a whoop whether you come here, there, or the other place,” Rock said slowly, “so long as you act white. But there’s something I do want to tell you, Duffy. Up the river yesterday somebody took a pot shot at me. Nona heard it.”

He looked at her. For a second her face was a study. Would she play up to his lead? Rock didn’t know himself precisely why he did this, except that instinctively he took the opening Duffy gave him.

A rising inflection put an edge in Duffy’s tone. The tan of his long, homely face went a brick red.

“Lissen, Doc Martin.” His tone was flat—squeezed dry of all feeling. “You don’t like me. You’ve been kinda high-handed with me more’n once. I don’t suffer with admiration for you, myself. But I’ll tell you this: if I want you, I’ll take you with an even break. I’m no bushwhacker. If somebody shot at you, an’ you think it was me, you got another think comin’. When I shoot at you, I’ll be lookin’ you in the eye.”

“I’m inclined to take your word for that, Duffy,” Rock said coolly. “If you say you didn’t, we’ll let it go at that.”

“The way you’ve acted with me the last few months,” said Duffy, growing querulous, “I’d as soon shoot it out with you as not. I’m tellin’ you straight, Martin, but it’s up to you to make the break. I don’t hunt trouble.”

“I have,” said he. “I’ve sort of convinced myself I’ve been barking up the wrong tree, Elmer. I aim to change my ways. Don’t know whether for better or worse. But if you don’t go gunnin’ for me, I certainly don’t hanker to pick a fuss with you.”

“Well, we might as well let it go at that,” Duffy finally said. “Sounds reasonable.”

“All right. Let her go as she lays.” Rock closed the conversation abruptly by turning on his heel. He walked back through the stable, into the larger corral, where he perched himself on the top rail. He looked down on the sleek backs of Nona Parke’s saddle stock, but his mind was wholly on the amazing fact that he had practically committed himself to a dead man’s identity.

He watched Duffy walk up to the house with Nona, carrying the two pails of milk, saw him stand at the door and talk for a minute. Then he came back, swung into his saddle, and rode around the stable end. Rock tightened up a little. The girl had been a restraining influence. Now, perhaps Duffy would have more to say or do. Long ago Rock had privately estimated Elmer Duffy as the most dangerous of the Duffy quartet, chiefly because he was tenacious of an idea or a grievance and inclined to be moody. But he only looked up at Rock and said:

“You kinda got me goin’. Martin. You’ve changed your tune a heap. You recollect what you told me last time we talked?”

“Let’s get down to cases,” Duffy persisted. “Do I understand that you’ve changed your idea that you got a license to close-herd this girl of Parke’s, any time another man acts like he wanted to speak to her?”

“I don’t know as I like your way of putting it,” he said, with a pretense at being sullen. “But she’s convinced me she aims to be a free agent. It’s nothing to me who she talks to, from now on. I don’t claim no special privileges no more. She’s made it clear that she’s able to look out for herself, as far as men are concerned.”

“It don’t look to me,” he said thoughtfully, “like any man’s got the inside track with that girl. She sure don’t favor nobody that I know of. So you were just naturally buildin’ up trouble for yourself, takin’ the stand you did.”

“I guess so,” Rock admitted indifferently. “Anyway, I got something else besides her on my mind, now. I’d sure like to find out who tried to pot me yesterday, Duffy. I’d make him hard to catch.”

“Don’t know as I blame you,” Duffy remarked. “But don’t you never think it was me, Doc. I’ve done told you where I stand. So long.”

Yes, Duffy had made it clear enough where he stood. Still, somebody had shot Doc Martin. Rock was still pondering on that problem when Nona came back from the house. She had changed into a pair of overalls and leather chaps. She wore a beautifully made pair of tan riding boots. She looked like a slim, capable boy, with her dark hair tucked out of sight under a felt hat.

“Well, he was so darned sure of it, for one thing,” Rock answered thoughtfully. “It struck me as a good chance to feel around and find out if he did take that crack at Doc. I don’t believe he did. Also, I think I’ve convinced him that I’m going—as Doc Martin—to mind my own business so far as you’re concerned.”

“I noticed how you managed to create that impression,” Nona admitted. “You were very—very——”

“I meant to be,” Rock interrupted, frowning. “I value my scalp, and I never like to scrap over nothing.”

“See here: If people around here persist in taking me for Doc Martin, why not let it go at that?” he suggested.

“Why do you want to pass for him?” she demanded. “Are you on the dodge for something?”

Rock shook his head. He didn’t want to explain to her the possibility of Elmer Duffy starting a blood feud with him over Mark’s death. He had disarmed Duffy, he thought, in his rôle of Doc Martin, no longer jealously hostile toward any ambitious male who came wooing Nona Parke. And Rock was quite willing to chance some unknown enemy of the dead rider. Pity and wonder had stirred in his breast when he looked at his double stretched on the bed, and when he helped to bury him. He had a sense of outrage in a man being murdered from ambush. He was puzzled about that shooting—curious about the how and why.

“No,” he said. “I have told you my name, and where I came from. I have nothing to hide. Just the same, I have a notion to play Doc Martin for a while. I might find out who killed him. Duffy didn’t.”

“Perhaps not. I’d hate to believe it. And, still, I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. If Elmer Duffy didn’t shoot Doc, I can’t imagine who would. Doc never quarreled with any one else around here that I know about, and I think that I would know if he had.”

“Sometimes,” Rock said, and he was thinking of himself when he spoke, “things that are a long way behind a man crop up. Queer things happen in the cow country. Well, what about it? Do you want to keep it dark about Doc being shot and let me play his hand for a while? Or shall I announce myself to Elmer Duffy and everybody else who takes me for Doc Martin?”

“Oh, well, I don’t mind taking a sporting chance now and then.” Rock swung lightly off the fence. “What’s the program now, Miss Parke?”

“Rope that sorrel for me and that chunky bay for yourself,” she said crisply. “And catch me that black pony.”

Nona saddled her horse as soon as Rock, and she had him saddle the small black horse with an extra rig in the stable. They rode to the house. The girl swung down, darted in, and came out with a cushion, which she fastened across the fork of her saddle. Then she called Betty, and that chubby person toddled forth.

Nona put her on the cushion and swung up to her seat. The child, all smiles for Rock, rode easily within the protection of her sister’s arm. The extra horse trotted at the end of Rock’s lead rope, as they set off down the valley.

Nona shook her head. “I left her shut in the house when we made that ride yesterday. You can see she takes you for granted.”

“I don’t like to leave her alone much,” Nona explained. “That’s why we’ve got this extra cayuse. There’s a half-breed family lives down river a few miles. One of the girls has been nurse for Betty most all the last year. She’s been away for a while, and I’ve got to get her back. I’ve carried this child hundreds of miles like this, but it’s too hard on her and on me. I’ve got to be free to ride when I need to.”

They traversed long river flats, gray with sage, heavily grassed here and there, spotted with natural meadows of blue-joint hay. Meadow larks caroled. In the still pools, where foaming riffles ended, wild ducks mothered flapping broods. Gray and brown buffalo birds haunted the berry thickets and fluttered out at their approach. Except for this wild life, the bottoms were deserted. Few cattle grazed in those valleys, so hotly scrutinized by a brassy sun. They kept to high ground and cooler airs. And, just as Rock was beginning to wonder if his day’s ride should consist of acting solely as Nona’s escort, she pulled up and pointed to a wide-mouthed draw, opening into the Marias from the north.

“Ride up that about six or eight miles, then swing west, and circle back to the ranch,” she said. “My brand is a TL, same as on your horse. Left rib on cattle. Make a sort of rough estimate of how many you see. You ought to get in about two or three o’clock. I’ll have some dinner cooked.”

CHAPTER VII—MARINERS

Rock’s horse splashed knee-deep through the sparkling Marias, where it raced down a long, pebbled stretch to foam into a black pool. The draw indicated by Nona opened a yawning mouth, coming in from the illimitable spread of Lonesome Prairie, although Rock had yet to learn the name and its aptness. A small creek trickled through this depression. The draw narrowed and lifted, as he rode. He climbed at last to the upper levels, where the eye could span fifty miles. Here cattle lay in the midday heat, along the tiny stream that meandered in a shallow trough, or they fed in bunches on the tops of low rises, where vagrant airs stirred.

Rock counted and estimated, as he jogged from bunch to bunch, noting brands and earmarks, admiring the glint of sun on slender curving horns, the chubby roundness of fat calves and sleek yearlings, and the massive bulk of challenging bulls.

Most of these cattle were branded TL. A few bore the Maltese Cross. Rock smiled to himself. Here he was where Uncle Bill Sayre wanted him to be. The odd part of it was that, if he had never ridden into Fort Worth, he would still be here. It was as if some obscure force had been heading him toward this spot for more than a year. He noted, too, as he glanced over these cattle, an odd 77. He might still be a Seventy Seven rider he reflected, if Mark Duffy had not been a wanton bully in a region where there was no law save that enforced by Colonel Colt.

“Yes, I seemed bound to land here, anywhere,” Rock thought, “whether I came with the Seventy Seven or on my own. I suppose that’s just chance.”

Blind, blundering chance. Very likely. Yet chance might be a maker of secret patterns, Rock reflected, when he had put ten miles between himself and the Marias. The far-rolling land seemed to carry only cattle with the Maltese Cross and few of those. For here he dropped into a low hollow, and on top of the next small lift in the plains he rode into three riders, one of whom was a woman.

Rock had keen eyes. Moreover, since that meeting with Elmer Duffy he was acutely conscious of his newly acquired identity. Thus he marked instantly the brands of the horses. Two were Maltese Cross stock, the other, bestridden by a youth of twenty or less, carried Nona Parke’s brand on his left shoulder. His rider was a blue-eyed slender boy, with a smile that showed fine white teeth when he laid his eyes on Rock.

“Hello, Doc, old boy,” he said. “How’s the ranch an’ the family and everythin’?”

They had reined up, facing each other. The second man nodded and grunted a brief, “Howdy.” The girl stared at Rock with frank interest, as he lifted his hat. Her expression wasn’t lost on him. He wondered if he were expected to know her well, in his assumed identity. In the same breath he wondered if a more complete contrast to Nona Parke could have materialized out of those silent plains. She was a very beautiful creature, indeed. It was hot, and she had taken off her hat to fan her face. Her hair was a tawny yellow. A perfect mouth with a dimple at one corner fitted in a face that would have been uncommon anywhere. Curiously, with that yellow hair she had black eyebrows and eyelashes. And her eyes were the deep blue, almost purple, of mountains far on the horizon. To complete the picture more effectually her split riding skirt was of green corduroy, and she sat atop of a saddle that was a masterpiece of hand-carved leather, with hammered-silver trimmings. It was not the first time Rock had seen the daughters of cattle kings heralding their rank by the elaborate beauty of their gear. He made a lightning guess at her identity and wondered why she was there, riding on roundup. She seemed to know him, too. There was a curious sort of expectancy about her that Rock wondered at.

However, he took all this in at a glance, in a breath. He said to the boy on the Parke horse:

“Back on White Springs, a coupla miles. You might as well come along to camp with us, Doc. It’s time to eat, an’ you’re a long way from home.”

“Guess I will.” Rock was indeed ready to approach any chuck wagon thankfully. It was eleven, and he had breakfasted at five.

They swung their horses away in a lope, four abreast. What the deuce was this Parke rider’s name, Rock wondered? He should have been primed for this. Nona might have told him he would possibly come across the Maltese Cross round-up. This must be her “rep.”

And he was likewise unprepared for the girl’s direct attack. Rock rode on the outside, the girl next. She looked at him sidewise and said without a smile, with even a trace of resentment:

“You must be awful busy these days. You haven’t wandered around our way for over two weeks.”

“I’d pick an easier boss,” she said. “Nona never lets the grass grow under anybody’s feet, that I’ve noticed. Sometimes I wish I had some of her energetic style.”

“If you’re suffering from lack of ambish,” Rock said, merely to make conversation, “how’d you get so far from home on a hot day?”

“Oh, Buck was in at the home ranch yesterday, and I rode back with him. Took a notion to see the round-up. I think I’ll go home this afternoon.”

“Say, where’d you get that ridin’ rig, Doc?” the young man asked. He craned his neck, staring with real admiration, and again Rock felt himself involved in a mesh of pretense which almost tempted him to proclaim himself. But that, too, he evaded slightly. He did have a good riding rig. It hadn’t occurred to him that it might occasion comment. But this youth, of course, knew Doc Martin’s accustomed gear probably as well as he knew his own. Naturally he would be curious.

Rock registered a mental note to cache Martin’s saddle, bridle, and spurs as soon as he got home.

“I bet you gave him plenty to boot,” the boy said anxiously. “You always were lucky. He musta been broke an’ needed the mazuma.”

Again the girl’s lips parted to speak, and again the boy interrupted. Rock out of one corner of his eye detected a shade of annoyance cross her alluring face. He wondered.

“Fine,” Rock informed him. “I left her riding down to Vieux’s after that dark-complected nurse girl.”

“I’d tell a man,” Rock said. “As soon as I do business with the chuck pile, I’m riding. I’m supposed to be back by three, and I’ll certainly have to burn the earth to make it.”

“Well, if I do, I know where I can get another one,” Rock said lightly. “But I aim to be on time.”

“Him lose his job!” the TL rider scoffed. “You couldn’t pry him lose from that job with a crowbar. Now don’t shoot,” he begged in mock fear. “You know you got a snap, compared to ridin’ round-up with the Maltese Cross—or any other gosh-danged cow outfit. I’m goin’ to put up a powerful strong talk to Nona to send you on beef round-up this fall an’ let me be ranch boss for a rest.”

“You got my permission,” Rock said a little tartly. These personalities irked him. “I’ll be tickled to death if you do.”

He didn’t know what there was in his words, or tone, perhaps, to make the boy stare at him doubtfully, and the yellow-haired girl to smile with a knowing twinkle in her eyes, as if she shared some secret understanding with him.

By then they were loping swiftly into a saucerlike depression in the plains, in the midst of which a large day herd grazed under the eye of four riders, and the saddle bunch was a compact mass by the round-up tents.

Rock left his horse standing on the reins. The others turned their mounts loose. The Cross riders were squatted about the chuck wagon in tailor-fashion attitudes, loaded plates in their laps. Rock followed the other three to the pile of dishes beside the row of Dutch ovens in the cook’s domain. Some of the men looked up, nodded and called him by name. And, as Rock turned the end of the wagon, he came face to face with a man holding a cup of coffee in one hand—a man who stared at him with a queer, bright glint in a pair of agate-gray eyes, a look on his face which Rock interpreted as sheer incredulity.

He was a tall man, a well-built, good-looking individual, somewhat past thirty, Rock guessed. His clothing was rather better than the average range man wore. Neither his size nor his looks nor his dress escaped Rock’s scrutiny, but he was chiefly struck by that momentary expression.

“Hello,” Rock said indifferently. Then, as much on impulse as with a definite purpose, he continued with a slight grin: “You seem kinda surprised to see me.”

Again that bright glint in the eyes, and a flash of color surged up under the tan, as if the words stirred him. Rock didn’t stop to pry into that peculiar manifestation of a disturbed ego. He was hungry. Also, he was sensible and reasonably cautious. He felt some undercurrent of feeling that had to do with Doc Martin. Between the vivacious blonde and this brow-wrinkling stockman, Rock surmised that posing as Doc could easily involve him in far more than he had bargained for.

So he filled his plate and busied himself with his food. No one tarried to converse. As each rider finished eating, he arose, roped a fresh horse out of the remuda, and saddled. The girl and the other two riders ate in silence. From the corner of one eye Rock could see the girl occasionally glance at him, as if she were curious or tentatively expectant. He couldn’t tell what was in her mind. He was going it blind. He didn’t know a soul whom he was supposed to know. That amused him a little—troubled him a little. The quicker he got on his way the better. He had got a little information out of this visit, though. He heard one of the riders address the big, well-dressed man as “Buck.” He heard him issue crisp orders about relieving the day herders. Old Uncle Bill Sayre’s words floated through his mind: “Buck Walters is young, ambitious and high-handed with men an’ fond of women. He dresses flash. A smart cowman.”

That was Buck Walters, the range-functioning executor of the Maltese Cross estate. And there was some distaste in Buck Walters for Doc Martin. More wheels within wheels. Rock wondered if this tawny-haired girl could be the daughter of the deceased Snell. Probably. That didn’t matter. But it might matter a good deal to him if there was any occasion for bad blood between Walters and the dead man into whose boots he, Rock, had stepped.

“Well, people,” said Rock, “I’ll be like the beggar, eat and run. I have a long way to go.”

“Tell Nona to ride over to see me,” the girl said politely, but with no particular warmth. “I’ll be at the ranch most of the summer.”

He was a trifle relieved when he got clear of that camp. He had plenty of food for thought, as he covered the miles between White Springs and the Marias. Stepping out of his own boots into those of a dead man seemed to have potential complications. When Rock pulled up on the brink of the valley, he had just about made up his mind that he would be himself. Or, he reflected, he could turn his back on Nona Parke and the TL, and the curious atmosphere of mystery that seemed to envelope that ranch on the Marias. He was a capable stock hand. He could probably work for the Maltese Cross and learn all he wanted to know under his own name. Why burden himself with a dead man’s feud, even if the dead man might have been his brother?

As far as Nona Parke went, one rider was as good as another to her. And Rock had no intention of remaining always merely a good stock hand. Other men had started at the bottom and gained independence. No reason why he should not do the same. Land and cattle were substantial possessions. Cattle could be bought. From a small nucleus they grew and multiplied. Land could be had here in the Northwest for the taking. Why should he commit himself to a dead man’s feuds and a haughty young woman’s personal interests? For a monthly wage? He could get that anywhere. He could probably go to work for the Maltese Cross, without question and in his own identity.

Rock, looking from the high rim down on the silver band of the Marias, on the weather-bleached log buildings, asked himself why he should not ride this range and fulfill his promise to an uneasy man in Texas in his own fashion? Why shouldn’t he work for some outfit where there were neither women to complicate life, nor enemies save such as he might make for himself?

The answer to that, he decided at last, must be that one job was as good as another, and that somehow, for all her passionate independence, Nona Parke needed him. There was a peculiar persuasiveness about that imperious young woman. Rock could easily understand why men fell in love with her, desired her greatly, and were moved to serve her if they could. She seemed to generate that sort of impulse in a man’s breast. Rock felt it; knew he felt it, without any trace of sentimentalism involved. He could smile at the idea of being in love with her. Yet some time he might be. He was no different from other men. She had made a profound impression on him. He knew that and did not attempt to shut his eyes to the truth. All these things, sinister and puzzling, of which her dead rider seemed the focus, might be of little consequence, after all. As far as he was concerned, every one simply insisted on taking him for a man who was dead. That had a comical aspect to Rock.

He stared with a speculative interest at the Parke ranch lying in the sunlight beside that shining river. Nona Parke had the right idea. She had the pick of a beautiful valley, eight hundred cattle, and the brains and equipment to handle them. That outfit would make a fortune for her and Betty. Yet it was a man’s job.

“She’s an up-and-coming little devil,” Rock said to himself. “Mind like a steel trap. Hard as nails. A man would never be anything more than an incident to her.”

Thus Rock unconsciously safeguarded his emotions against disaster. He was neither a fool nor a fish. He liked Nona Parke. He had liked her the moment he looked into the gray pools of her troubled eyes. But he wouldn’t like her too well. No; that would be unwise. She had warned him. But he could work for her. Her wages were as good as any—better, indeed, by ten dollars a month. And if there should be trouble in the offing—— Rock shrugged his shoulders. Bridge crossing in due time.

A moon-faced, dark-haired girl of sixteen was puttering around in the kitchen when Rock walked up to the house. Betty came flying to meet him, and Rock swung her to the ceiling two or three times, while she shrieked exultantly.

“Where the dickens is the garden?” Rock thought, but he didn’t ask. He went forth to see.

Ultimately he found it, by skirting the brushy bank of the river to the westward beyond the spring. Its overflow watered a plot of half an acre, fenced and cultivated. Rich black loam bore patches of vegetables, all the staple varieties, a few watermelon vines, and cornstalks as tall as a man. In the middle of this, Nona was on her knees, stripping green peas off a tangle of vines.

“I struck the Maltese Cross round-up about eleven and ate with them,” he told her.

“Oh! Did you see Charlie Shaw?” she asked. “Did he say whether they picked up much of my stuff on Milk River?”

“Charlie Shaw is the name of that kid riding for you, eh? Well, I saw him, but he didn’t say much about cattle. And I didn’t ask. I had to step soft around that outfit. I don’t know any of these fellows, you see, and they all persist in taking me for Doc Martin. I suppose I’d have a deuce of a time persuading anybody around here that I wasn’t.”

“It’s funny. I keep thinking of you as Doc, myself. You’re really quite different, I think,” she replied thoughtfully. “Somehow, I can’t think of Doc as being dead. Yet he is.”

“Very much so,” Rock answered dryly. “And I’m myself, alive, and I wish to stay so. I’ve been wondering if posing as your man, Doc, is, after all, a wise thing for me to do. What do you think?”

“You don’t have to,” she said quickly. “I’m sure Elmer Duffy would be relieved to know you aren’t Doc Martin.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rock mused. “Elmer might have just as much to brood over if he knew who I really am.”

Rock didn’t question the impulse to tell her. His instinct to be himself was strong. The pose he had taken with Duffy that morning had arisen from mixed motives. He wasn’t sure he wanted to carry on along those lines. And he most assuredly didn’t want Nona Parke to think him actuated by any quixotic idea of functioning as her protector after her declarations on that subject.

So he told her concisely why Elmer Duffy might think a feud with Rock Holloway a sacred duty to a dead brother. Nona looked at him with wondering eyes and an expression on her face that troubled Rock, and finally moved him to protest.

“Hang it,” he said irritably. “You needn’t look as if I’d confessed to some diabolical murder. Mark Duffy was as hard as they make ’em. He was running it rough on an inoffensive little man who happens to be my friend. I had to interfere. And Mark knew I’d interfere. He brought it on himself. If I hadn’t killed him he would have killed me. That’s what he was looking for.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” she said earnestly. “Of course, you were quite justified. I was just thinking that this explains why Elmer always hated Doc. Doc told me so. He felt it. I suppose it was the resemblance. I don’t see, now, so far as trouble with Elmer is concerned, that it matters much whether you pass as yourself or Doc Martin. You’d have to watch out for Elmer Duffy in either case. I couldn’t trust that man as far as I could throw a bull by the tail.”

“Nice estimate of a man that’s in love with you,” Rock chuckled. “You’re a little bit afraid of Elmer, aren’t you?”

“No,” she declared. “But he’s brutal at heart. He’s the kind that broods on little things till they get big in his own mind. He would do anything he wanted if he was sure he could get away with it. And he would like to run both me and my ranch.”

“Powerful description,” Rock commented. “Still it sort of fits Elmer—all the Duffys, more or less. They’re inclined to be more aggressive than they ought. Well, I guess it doesn’t make much difference if I do pass as Doc. I’m not trying to put anything over on anybody doing that. Now——”

He went on to tell her about meeting the girl at the Maltese Cross. He described the man who had glared at him and puzzled him by his attitude, but he didn’t tell Nona this latter detail. He merely wanted to know who was who.

“That was Buck Walters, range foreman of the Maltese Cross,” she confirmed Rock’s guess.

“Oh, he seemed rather stand-offish, that’s all,” Rock answered indifferently.

“Buck thinks rather highly of himself,” Nona told him. “He’s in charge of a big outfit. The Maltese Cross is an estate, and he is one of the administrators. He’s pretty high-handed. There are men in this country who don’t like him much. But I don’t think Doc cared two whoops, one way or the other. Probably Buck was thinking about something.”

“Alice Snell. She and a brother inherit the whole Maltese Cross outfit when the boy comes of age.”

“She told me to tell you to ride down to see her—that she’d be at the ranch all summer.” Thus Rock delivered the message. “I didn’t hardly know what she was talking about.”

“Alice never does talk about anything much, although she talks a lot,” Nona said coolly. “Her long suit is getting lots of attention.”

“Well, I expect she gets it,” Rock ventured. “She’s good looking. Heiress to a fortune in cows. She ought to be popular.”

“Oh! And is Buck popular with her?” Rock asked with more than mere curiosity. This was an item that might be useful in the task of sizing up Buck Walters and his way with the Maltese Cross.

“Then why does she stick around up here in this forsaken country, when she doesn’t have to?”

Rock had squatted on his heels, picking pods off the vines and chucking them by handfuls into the pan.

“Alice is very ornamental,” Nona Parke continued thoughtfully. “But quite useless, except to look at. She gives me a pain sometimes, although I like her well enough.”

“You’re not very hard to look at yourself, it happens,” Rock told her deliberately. “And I don’t suppose you object to being ornamental as well as very useful and practical.”

“Don’t intend to be.” Rock grinned. “I never did take life very seriously. I sure don’t aspire to begin the minute I find myself working for you. I’m a poor but honest youth, with my way to make in the world. Is it silly for a man to admire a woman—any woman?”

“I wish you’d pull those weeds out of that lettuce patch,” she said, changing the subject abruptly. “They grow so quickly. I’m always at these infernal weeds. After you get that done, roll up your bed and bring it to the house. There’s lots of room.”

Rock performed the weeding in half an hour. If another had asked him to do that, he would probably have told him to go hire a gardener, he reflected.

“She’ll have me baking bread and working the churn next,” he chuckled to himself. “Trust Miss Nona Parke to get her money’s worth out of the hired man.”

That was an exaggeration. Nona wasn’t a driver. Within a week Rock found himself doing various jobs about the ranch because he saw that they needed doing, not because she told him to do them. He rode more or less every day, and most of the time Nona rode with him. It was easier, if less exciting and glamorous, than round-up. He had a comfortable bed in a big room, with a huge stone fireplace, which had been the bunk room when the TL had a dozen riders and cattle by the thousand. Between Nona and the half-breed girl, the vegetable garden and the two milch cows, Rock ate better food than had fallen to his lot since he was at school on the Atlantic seaboard.

It was pleasant to live there, pleasant to ride range with this dark-haired, competent young person, who could be brusque and curt when she chose, and self-sufficient at all times. They went clattering away from the ranch in the cool of morning. They combed far coulee heads, hidden springs, river bottoms above and below the ranch. Rock was never quite sure what the girl looked for in these long rides. The only actual stock work they did was to throw back straggling bunches that grazed beyond certain limits. That, as Rock understood the range business, was not important. He concluded that Nona simply had a passion for looking over her possessions. He had seen men like that—men who owned longhorns by the tens of thousands.

But she seemed to be looking for something. Rock merely surmised that. For a week after he happened on the Maltese Cross, they covered the surrounding country, day by day. Nona talked very little. She rode like a man, easily, carelessly, a component part of her mount. She could handle a rope with fair skill. There was strength in her slender arms, an amazing endurance in her slim body. She knew her stock, bunch by bunch— leader cows and oddly marked bulls. She knew where to find certain little herds. It was as if she watched over them jealously, as a miser gloats over his hoard. There was something in that Rock couldn’t fathom. Branded cattle on a recognized range were safer than bonds in a steel safe, as a rule. Sometimes there were exceptions to that rule. If there was such an exception here, Nona never breathed it, and the riders of a cow outfit were usually the first to be warned if there was any suspicion of rustling in the air. And Rock would not ask. But he wondered. He began to grow a little uneasy, too. He had accepted pay from Uncle Bill Sayre to secure certain information. He was on the ground, but he was not learning much about the Maltese Cross and Buck Walters. He had grown personally curious about Buck Walters, too, since meeting him. He didn’t like the man. Rock wasn’t given to sudden likes and dislikes. Nevertheless, on that one eye-to-eye clash he disliked Buck Walters—a much more active feeling than he could muster up either for or against Elmer Duffy, for instance.

Rock had plenty of time for these mental conjectures. They were like mariners stranded on an island in midocean—himself, Nona Parke, the half-breed girl, and Baby Betty. No riders passed. Elmer Duffy did not come again. The sun rose, swung in a hot arc across a sapphire sky, and sank behind the far-off Rockies. They rode, rested, and slept, while the stars twinkled in a cool canopy, and the frogs along the Marias croaked antiphony to the soprano of a myriad of unseen crickets in the grass.

Then one day Rock rode alone on the benches to the North. When he splashed through the shallows and came to the corrals late in the afternoon, there was a bay horse in the stable, and Charlie Shaw sat talking to Nona in the shade of the porch.

CHAPTER VIII—GETTING DOWN TO CASES

Under his ready laugh and effervescent smile, Charlie Shaw gave the impression of entire competence. The downright self-reliance demanded by the range of all who would pass muster in its service, was quite apparent to Rock. In a cow camp a man was judged by the way he carried himself, and what he could do, rather than his years. Charlie had been giving Nona an account of things on round-up. Apparently he had just ridden in. He nodded to Rock and went on with his talk. Rock sat down beside them to roll a cigarette.

“I know within a dozen head how many unbranded calves are scattered around here,” Nona said finally. “We had an open winter. We should have at least seventy or eighty more calves than last year. Yet the tally is less.”

“The range is covered to the last fringe,” Charlie stated. “They’ll make a few more rides, but they won’t show much. I don’t savvy it either, Nona, but that’s the count.”

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “There ought to be more calves than that.”

Charlie didn’t comment. After a minute she got up and went inside. Shaw looked at Rock smoking in silence.

“Say, old-timer,” he remarked abruptly, but in a discreet undertone, “there’s some whisperin’ about you in the Maltese Cross outfit.”

“Yes?” Rock became alert. “What do they whisper? And who’s whispering?”

“I don’t know who started it,” Charlie said. “I heard it the first day you rode in with me and Alice Snell and Joe Bishop. I don’t like to repeat gabble, but seems to me you’d ought know.”

“It’s just a whisper,” Charlie mumbled seriously. “Nobody said a word to me direct. I just overheard here and there. They say you’re rustlin’.”

“Me—rustling?” Rock perked up in astonishment. For the moment he forgot his assumed identity. The idea was so utterly ludicrous. He laughed. Recollection sobered him. This must be more Martin history.

“Ye’ah. Got you hooked up with them Burris boys over behind the Goosebill,” Charlie murmured. “Talkin’ about rawhide neckties. Some of them Texicans in Buck’s crew are bad hombres, Doc.”

Rock knitted his brows. He hadn’t heard before of the Burris boys. The Goosebill he had seen only as an oddshaped hill standing blue on the southwestern sky line, halfway between the Marias and Fort Benton.

“Well, you reckon I’ve been draggin’ the long rope in my spare time and should be a candidate for their kind attentions?” he asked.

“Buck Walters, of course,” Charlie returned promptly. “Who else? Just like his damn left-hand ways. Didn’t you never figure he’d shoot at you over somebody else’s shoulder? As a matter of fact, I’m satisfied Buck aims to get you.”

“Say, you know why well enough,” Charlie blurted irritably. “You been flirtin’ with the undertaker all spring. You ain’t a fool.”

“Sure.” Charlie looked at him out of narrowed eyes, the bright blue of which held a peculiar gleam, whether of friendship or disapproval Rock could not tell from the boy’s otherwise impassive face. No; not disapproval; merely the recollection of something unpleasant, either in the past or threatening in the future. This capable youngster was by no means an open book. “I wouldn’t yeep, only to give you a hint to step soft. Buck’s mean. He’ll make trouble. Nona’s had a hard enough row to hoe. Long as we draw wages from her, we got to do the best we can for her. The TL ain’t so popular as it used to be with the Maltese Cross.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said frankly. “I’ve told you all I know. That talk about rustlin’ an’ hangin’ parties was meant for me to hear. Savvy?”

Rock didn’t, but he nodded. His brows wrinkled deeply. The solution finally came to him. To make a decision with him was to act.

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Meantime I want to show you something.” He rose. “Come on in!”

“Will you open up that room?” Rock asked Nona. “The one where that stuff is we put away?”

“Why——” She stopped short. Something on the faces of the two men checked the question on her lips. Silently she took a key out of a drawer and walked into the hall, the narrow passage that divided the house. She opened a door—the only locked door in all those log-walled rooms.

A window from the south let sunlight into the room. A bed long unslept in stood against one wall. On the floor lay a saddle, bridle, a pair of black, Angora-faced chaps, and a pair of silver-inlaid spurs. Beside them a pair of worn riding boots, a brown calfskin belt full of .45 cartridges, and in the holster a plain, black-handled Colt. On a nail above hung a man’s felt hat. A canvas war bag lay across a chair, stuffed with the dead man’s belongings.

Rock pointed to the saddle. On the yellow leather a stain lay black like dried paint.

“Do you know that rig?” he asked. “Do you see that smear? That’s blood.”

“Well?” The boy looked at the dead man’s outfit in puzzled wonder. He looked at Nona Parke and back again at Rock. “Well?” he repeated. “I see it. What’s it all about?”

“Are you crazy?” Charlie demanded. “What are you getting at? Who do you think you are? Have you gone loco?”

“Doc is dead,” she whispered. “He was shot from ambush a week ago yesterday.”

Nona Parke’s cowpuncher looked at her unbelievingly. She gave him details, chapter and verse, describing that tragic afternoon, Rock’s coming, and the burial at sunrise.

“That’s all,” she said wearily. “You can see his grave beside dad and mamma.”

“Poor old Doc,” Shaw muttered. He looked at Rock with new interest. “I wouldn’t ’a’ believed it if she hadn’t told me. You’re the dead spit of him. You talk like him. Only, you seemed a little different, some way, from what Doc used to be.”

“Come on into the bunk room,” Rock invited. “Let’s try to get down to cases.”

“Gosh, no,” Rock equivocated. “Nothing at all. I wanted this kid to know how things stand, though. I couldn’t go on and not tip my hand, for fear he’d think there was something queer about me.”

“Probably it’s best,” Nona agreed. “Supper will be ready in a few minutes. Charlie has to ride back to the round-up. I’ll call you.”

They turned out of the hall into the huge room where Rock slept. Side by side, they sat on a bed that seemed lost in that empty space, where forgotten riders had clanked their spurs and joked and told stories through long winter nights, while the fireplace roared.

“Now you see where I stand,” Rock said. “I’m having a dead man’s troubles wished on me. Tell me just how Doc Martin stood with Alice Snell, and why Buck Walters had his knife out for Doc.”

“That’s simple,” the boy answered. “This blond dulce was soft on Doc—crazy about him. I don’t blame you. Darn it, I keep thinkin’ of you as Doc Martin. I can’t get it that he’s cashed in.”

“You can see how hard it is for me to make any one believe I’m not Doc,” Rock observed.

“Hell, yes. They’d have to have it proved. They’d laugh and think you were trying to put it over ’em.”

“Were you and Doc friends?” Rock asked. He wanted to know where this boy stood.

“I liked Doc,” the boy said simply. “He showed me lots of things. He was kinda high-handed with anybody he didn’t like. But he was darned good to me. Doc was a white man.”

“Buck’s the fly in the ointment.” Charlie frowned. “As I said, I don’t blame Doc for playin’ up to Alice. She’s a mighty sweet-lookin’ girl. Only——”

“I gathered somehow,” Rock filled in the pause, “that the late Doc was pretty sweet on Nona Parke. So much so, that he was jealous of any man that paid her much attention, and that he got himself in wrong with Elmer Duffy over that.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But Nona don’t want nothin’ of a man except that he be a good stock hand around her outfit. Sure, Doc thought a heap of her. So do I. But not the way he did. Even if he got to consolin’ hisself with Alice, I expect he still felt like protectin’ Nona from fellers like Duffy. Elmer ain’t such a much. I’d be inclined to horn off fellers like Duffy, myself. An’ I’m not stuck on Nona. Me ’n’ Doc worked for her two years, off ’n’ on. She’s been like a sister to me. She’s game as they make ’em. Darned few girls would have the nerve to run this one-horse show the way she’s done. I’d rather have her for a boss than anybody I know.”

There was a sincerity in this stumbling, embarrassed declaration that Rock admired. But he was still on the trail of the unknown, and he quizzed Shaw further.

“This Snell girl’s of age. She’s rich. I guess she’s been spoiled. Always had her own way about anythin’. She come up here last summer, first time. Come back again this spring. Took a dickens of a shine to Doc and didn’t hide it much. Everybody in the country knows it, except Nona. She ain’t got eyes nor ears for anything but her ranch and her cattle. An’ Buck Walters is crazy about this Snell girl, himself, though she has no use for him. She told Doc once that she’d can Buck off the Maltese Cross if her dad hadn’t made him an administrator of his will. I don’t know if there was anythin’ definite between Doc an’ Alice. I do know Buck has turned to hatin’ you—Doc I mean—like poison, lately. His eyes burn whenever your name comes up. That’s why I said he aims to get you—get Doc. Darn it, I keep gettin’ you all mixed up.”

“Better go on thinkin’ of me as Doc Martin,” Rock suggested, “until something breaks. I’m interested in this. Listen, now, Charlie: Do you remember where the Maltese Cross was a week ago yesterday—the day Doc was shot? Were they in easy reach of the Marias? Do you recollect if Buck Walters was missing that afternoon?”

“I know where we were,” Charlie said. “Couldn’t say for sure whether Buck was early or late off circle that afternoon. Anyhow, I’m here to tell you that he wouldn’t be likely to do his own bushwhackin’. Too foxy for that. He’s got at least half a dozen riders in his outfit that’d kill a man for two bits—especially if Buck told ’em to.”

“Maybe; I don’t know. I know he’s got some hard citizens in his crew. None of ’em has made a crooked move since they come to Montana, but they got ‘Killer’ written all over ’em. There’s two fellers that never ride with the round-up. They hang around the home ranch all the time, foolin’ with horses. They got a name down South. A rider in Benton told me their history last fall.”

“I see. Buck Walters has a lot of hard pills on his pay roll.” Rock nodded. “Not because they’re such good range hands, eh? Most cowpunchers aren’t killers—not by choice or for money. Now, why do you reckon he keeps men like that around, Charlie?”

But all Shaw could answer was a shake of his head and a muttered, “Search me.”

“It would sort of seem as if Buck kept a crowd around that would burn powder free and easy, if the play came up,” Rock mused. “Consequently, he must expect something to break. What would it likely be? A cow outfit don’t have to fight for nothin’ in this country.”

“He wouldn’t surround himself with bad men from Bitter Creek, waiting for their night to howl, just to deal with Doc Martin for shining up to a girl he has his mind on.”

“No; because he brought most of his crowd up from the South with him,” Charlie answered. “But he’ll put your light out, just the same, if he gets a good chance.”

“I keep forgettin’,” the boy muttered. “If I was you I’d advertise that fact pronto. It ain’t healthy to be in Doc Martin’s shoes around here.”

“I have a notion to fill ’em for a while, just to see what comes of it,” Rock said slowly. “You’re sure Buck Walters had it in for Doc over this girl—and nothing else?”

Something in the boy’s tone made that denial unconvincing and warned Rock that there was more in Charlie Shaw’s mind than he would utter.

“Do you suppose there was something that Doc Martin knew or had found out or suspected, that would make Buck want him out of the way?”

Shaw stared at Rock for a minute, as if trying to fathom his purpose—as if he were suspicious of subtleties beyond his understanding.

“I can’t answer for what Doc might have known. All I know is that I’m a Parke rider, and I don’t aim to horn into nothin’ that don’t concern me nor the outfit I ride for—nor my friends.”

“I’m a TL rider, too,” Rock said pointedly. “I aim to be as good a hand, if not better, to the outfit I work for as any rider that ever forked a cayuse. Even if you don’t know anything positive, Charlie, you could tell me what you think about Buck Walters.”

“I might tell you when I know you better,” the boy said bluntly. “A man that wags his tongue too free is a fool. I’ve told you what I know. It ain’t important what I think.”

Rock gave him credit for a wisdom beyond his years and did not press the matter. He had taken a liking to this slender, smiling youth. Charlie was good stuff—that curious mixture of which all good range men were made—loyalty, courage and a rude dignity. And he was damnably efficient. The boy had an eye like an eagle and a discerning, practical mind. He knew or suspected far more than he would ever admit to any one he didn’t know inside out and could trust implicitly. He would have told things to Doc Martin that he would only reveal to Rock Holloway when Rock had demonstrated that he was all wool and a yard wide.

Nona called them presently to supper. They ate, then smoked a cigarette on the porch. Charlie Shaw strolled off to the stable, mounted and rode away to rejoin the Maltese Cross. While Rock sat on the edge of the porch, pondering on what he had learned, Nona joined him. She leaned against a log pillar, looking absently out across the river flats. Rock watched her. She was so young, so utterly free from self-consciousness, so intent upon her own purposes. Something about her warmed his heart. It wasn’t beauty, as Alice Snell was beautiful. It was an air, an atmosphere, something indefinable, subtle, but very powerful, like the invisible force in a bit of bent steel that draws other bits of steel to itself.

“I want you to take a wagon and go to Fort Benton to-morrow,” she said abruptly, “and see if you can hire a couple of men for haying. We’ve got to get up a couple of hundred tons of hay for next winter.”

Rock smiled. He had been brooding over life and death, treachery and broken faith, loyalty in unexpected phases, the mystery of passion that bred hatred and bloody clashes. Nona had been thinking of hay for her stock.

Each to his own thoughts. He envied her a little and admired her for that simplicity, the directness of her faith and works. His own mental groping and convolutions would have distressed her, no doubt.

CHAPTER IX—ORDERED SOUTH

By midforenoon Rock had the striking contour of the Goosebill breaking the sky line far on his right. As the team jogged with rattling wagon wheels on a trail that was no more than two shallow ruts in the grassy plateau, his mind dwelt on the Burris boys—two unsavory brothers, with a ranch in a tangle of ravines behind that strange hump on the flat face of Montana. Charlie had sketched them for his benefit. They were suspected and had been for some time. They had a few cattle, and their herd seemed to increase more rapidly than cows naturally breed. No mavericks—unbranded yearlings; hence the property of whosoever first got his irons on them—were ever found on their range. They were supposed to ride with a long rope, lifting the odd calf here and there. It was only a matter of time, Charlie declared, before some big outfit would deal with them, as the feudal barons dealt with miscreants within their demesnes.

And Doc Martin’s name was being coupled with these two in the Maltese Cross camp. Rock’s lip curled. When a man with power in his hands wanted another man out of the way, he would go to great lengths. Rock had observed the workings of such sinister intent in his native State. He kept thinking about Uncle Bill Sayre’s estimate of Buck Walters.

He was still more or less revolving this in his mind, when he came to the brow of the steep bank that slanted sharply down to Fort Benton. This one-time seat of the Northwest Fur Company was the oldest settlement in the Territory, a compact unit of adobe and log and frame dwellings, when the first gold was found at Bannack and Virginia City, and when the eager miners looted the treasure of Last Chance Gulch. Still the head of navigation on the Missouri River, it had become the pivotal point of the cow business in northern Montana, which had supplanted gold, as gold had supplanted furs, as a road to fortune.

A conglomeration of buildings stood by the bank of the wide, swift river. Away southward loomed a mountain range. The Bear Paws stood blue, fifty miles east. A ferry plied from shore to shore, for the convenience of horsemen, teams and three-wagon freight outfits hauling supplies to the Judith Basin. The Grand Union Hotel loomed big in the town, a great square building in a patch of green grass, set off from Main Street, the single street which formed the business heart of the town. A singularly attractive spot, it had had its historic day. Buffalo had swarmed in its dooryard not so long before. The Blackfeet and the Crows had fought each other there and joined forces to fight the white man. In the spring at high water the stern-wheel steamers from St. Louis laid their flat bows against the clay bank and unloaded enormous cargoes of goods. Otherwise, since furs and gold no longer dominated the Northwest, Fort Benton lived a placid, uneventful day-to-day existence, except when roundups came that way, and the cowboys took the town.

Yet there was life in it. The exciting scenes of a decade earlier arose on a small scale. And between these high lights business flourished. The fort was the hub of a great area, in which herds and settlers were taking root. It supported a permanent population of two hundred or more, stores, saloons and the Grand Union, which had housed miners, gamblers, military men, river pilots, rich and enterprising fur dealers, and was now headquarters for the cattle kings and their henchmen.

Rock put his team in a livery stable and registered at the Grand Union. He sought the bar, his parched throat craving St. Louis beer fresh off the ice.

In the doorway, between lobby and barroom, he halted to look. Anywhere between the Rockies and the Mississippi, between the Rio Grande and the Canada line, a range rider might meet a man whom he knew. They were rolling stones, gathering moss in transit, contrary to the proverb. And Rock was not disappointed, although it would be wrong to say that he was pleased.

For he saw two men whom he recognized. They leaned on the bar at one end, deep in talk, glasses before them. They did not see him. Their backs were toward the doorway in which he stood. Their eyes were on each other, not on the broad mirror over the back bar, which showed Rock their faces.

One was Buck Walters; the other was Dave Wells, the Texan boss of the Wagon Wheel on Old Man River, north of the Canada line.

Rock drew back, unseen, sought a chair in the lobby, and sat down, with some food for thought. Here were two men, each of whom knew him quite well—one as Doc Martin, a Parke cowpuncher; while the other had employed him for nine months in his real identity. Fort Benton was small. He could not remain in that town over the night without meeting both, face to face. Which identity should he choose?

It did not take Rock long to decide. He rose and made for the bar. This time he put his foot on the rail and made an inclusive sign to the bartender, after the custom of the country.

There were other men in the bar now. Walters and Wells looked up to see who was buying. A shadow, very faint, flitted across Buck Walters’ face. He nodded, with a grunt. Wells grinned recognition and stuck out his hand.

“I’d know your hide on a fence in hell,” Wells declared. He was jovial, and his eyes were bright. He had been hoisting quite a few, Rock decided. Walters seemed coldly sober.

“Gosh, who do you think I am?” Rock asked. “Your long-lost brother or something?”

“Why, you’re Rock Holloway, darn you!” Wells said bluntly. “I’d ought to know you. I paid you off less’n a month ago. Course, if you’re layin’ low for somethin’——” He paused significantly. Over his shoulder Rock marked the surprised attention of Buck Walters.

“If that is so, I sure must have a double,” Rock said. “I been drawin’ wages from the TL on the Marias River for goin’ on two years, without a break. Does this Holloway fellow you speak of look so much like me, stranger?”

“Let’s see a man eat a Stetson for once,” Rock said to the manager of the Maltese Cross. “Tell him who I am.”

“Eat the hat, Dave,” Walters said. “This feller never rode for you—not in this country. His name is Doc Martin. He rides for a lady rancher on my range. I know him as well as I know you.”

“I need my sky piece to shed the rain,” he said mildly. “Maybe the drinks are on me. If you ain’t the feller I think you are, you certainly got a twin.”

“I never had no brothers,” Rock declared lightly and reached for his glass. “Never heard of anybody that looked like me. Well, here’s luck.”

Wells kept eying him. So did Walters. He felt that they were discussing him in discreet undertones. They did not include him in their conversation after that drink. Once out of there, Rock set about his business. He had no desire to paint the town. He went seeking casual labor. Luck rode with him. Within an hour he had located and hired two men—the only two souls in Fort Benton, he discovered, who needed jobs. He went back to the Grand Union for supper. In the dining room he saw Wells and Walters still together, seated at a table by themselves. He observed them later in the lobby, deep in cushioned chairs, cigars jutting rakishly from their lips.

Early in the evening Rock went up to his room. He had left the Marias at sunrise, and had jolted forty miles in a dead-axle wagon. He would hit the trail early in the morning, with the hay diggers, before they changed their mind and hired themselves to some one else. He needed sleep.

But he couldn’t sleep. The imps of unrest propped his eyelids open. An hour of wakefulness made him fretful. His mind questioned ceaselessly. Could a man like Buck Walters deliberately set out to destroy another man merely because he was a rival for a girl’s capricious affection? It didn’t seem incentive enough. A man with as much on his hands as Walters, could scarcely afford petty feuds like that. Still——

Rock dressed again, drew on his boots, and tucked his gun inside the waistband of his trousers. He would stroll around Fort Benton for an hour or so. By that time he would be able to sleep.

A battery of lighted windows faced the Missouri. Saloons with quaint names, “Last Chance,” “The Eldorado,” “Cowboy’s Retreat,” the “Bucket of Blood.” They never closed. They were the day-and-night clubs of frontier citizens. Business did not thrive in all at once. It ebbed and flowed, as the tides of convivial fancy dictated. In one or two the bartender polished glasses industriously, while house dealers sat patiently playing solitaire on their idle gambling layouts. But in others there were happy gatherings, with faro and poker and crap games in full swing. Rock visited them all and chanced a dollar or two here and there. Eventually he retraced his steps toward the hotel.

In the glow of lamplight from the last saloon on the western end of the row, just where he had to cross the street to the Grand Union, sitting in its patch of grass and flanked by a few gnarly cottonwoods, Rock met Buck Walters and Dave Wells.

He nodded and passed them. A little prickly sensation troubled the back of his neck. It startled Rock, that involuntary sensation. Nervous about showing his back to a potential enemy? Nothing less. The realization almost amused Rock. Absurd! Nobody would shoot him down on a lighted street. Yet it was a curious feeling. Expectancy, a sense of danger, a conscious irritation at these psychological absurdities. He was not surprised when a voice behind him peremptorily called:

He turned to see Buck Walters stalking toward him. Wells’ long, thin figure showed plain in the glimmer of light. He stood on the edge of the plank walk, staring at the river.

Walters faced him, six feet away. His face, so far as Rock could see, told nothing. It was cold and impassive, like the face of a gambler who has learned how to make his feature a serviceable mask to hide what is in his mind. Buck’s face was unreadable, but his words were plain.

“I know. Talk’s cheap. But this talk will be made good. You need a change of scenery. I’d go South if I was you—quick. You’ve been on the Marias too long.”

Rock laughed. For the moment he was himself, Doc Martin forgotten, and he had never stepped aside an inch for any man in his life.

“You go plumb to hell,” he said. “I’ll be on the Marias when you are going down the road talking to yourself.”

“All right,” Buck told him very slowly. “This is the second time I’ve warned you. You know what I mean. You’re huntin’ trouble. You’ll get it.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rock retorted. “Say it in plain English. What’s eating you?”

“I’ve said all I aimed to say,” Walters declared. “You know what I mean, well enough.”

“If I had never laid eyes on you before,” Rock answered quietly, “you have said enough right now to justify me in going after you. Is that what you want? Do you want to lock horns with me? The light’s good. Pop your whip, you skunk!”

Rock spat the epithet at him in a cold, collected fury. He meant precisely what he said. There was such an arrogant note in that cool intimidation. It filled him with a contemptuous anger for Buck Walters and all his ways and works and his veiled threats.

“You are just a little faster with a gun than I am,” Walters replied, unruffled, the tempo of his voice unchanged. “I take no chances with you. I am not afraid of you, but I have too much at stake to risk it on gun play—by myself. If you do not leave this country, I will have you put away. You can gamble on that.”

Rock took a single step toward him. Walters held both hands away from his sides. He smiled.

“If you so much as make a motion for that gun in your pants,” he said in an undertone, “my friend Dave Wells will kill you before you get it out.”

Now Rock had made that step with the deliberate intention of slapping Walters’ face. No Texan would take a blow and not retaliate. He couldn’t live with himself if he did. But, “my friend, Dave Wells,” made him hesitate. Rock’s glance marked Wells, twenty feet away, a silent watchful figure. And it was more than a mere personal matter. Down in Fort Worth, Uncle Bill Sayre had joint responsibility with this man for the safeguarding of a fortune, and a medley of queer conclusions were leaping into Rock’s agile brain. Reason, logic, evidence—all are excellent tools. Sometimes instinct or intuition, something more subtle than conscious intellectual processes, short-circuits and illuminates the truth with a mysterious flash of light. This man before him was afraid of Doc Martin. He was afraid of Doc, over and above any desire for possession of a woman—any passion of jealousy. There was too much at stake, he had said. Rock would have given much to know just what Buck Walters meant by the phrase. Doc Martin would have known. Rock didn’t regret the surge of his own temper—the insult and challenge he had flung in this man’s teeth. But he fell back on craft.

“Yes,” he said. “I’d expect you to take no chance on an even break, with anybody or about anything. You’ll play safe. You’ll pass the word that I’m to be put away. You tried it already.”

“Next time there will be no slip-up,” Walters answered with cold determination. “You have said things you shouldn’t have said. You have shot off your mouth at me. You have made a play at a fool of a girl that I aim to have for myself. I have a cinch, Martin, and I am goin’ to play it for all it is worth.”

“Both,” Walters muttered, in a whisper like a hiss, the first emotion that had crept into his cold, malevolent voice.

“Not to you,” Walters said flatly. “You’ll never have a chance to use it. You are goin’ to be snuffed out, if you don’t pull out. I don’t like you, for one thing; you are interferin’ with my plans, for another.”

“Those are pretty strong words, Buck,” Rock told him soberly. “I’m not an easy man to get away with.” He tried a new tack. “If you are so dead anxious to get rid of me, why don’t you try making it worth my while to remove myself?”

“All right, turn your wolf loose on me.” Rock laughed. “See what’ll happen. Now you run along, Mister Buck Walters, before I shoot an eye out of you for luck, you dirty scoundrel!”

Rock’s anger burned anew, but he did not on that account lose his head. He abused Walters in a penetrating undertone, with malice, with intent, with venom that was partly real, partly simulated. But he might as well have offered abuse and insult to a stone. He could not stir Walters to any declaration, any admission that would have been a key to what Rock sought.

“Talk is cheap. I don’t care what you say. It don’t hurt me,” the Maltese Cross boss told him stiffly. “I will shut your mouth for good, inside of forty-eight hours.”

And with that he turned his back squarely on Rock and walked to rejoin his friend, Dave Wells, who stood there, ready to shoot in the name of friendship.

Rock stood staring at their twin backs sauntering past lighted saloons. He wouldn’t have turned his back on Walters, after that. Which was a measure of his appraisal of the man’s intent. Buck would make that threat good!

Rock shrugged his shoulders and strolled across the dusty street into the Grand Union. He was little the wiser for that encounter, except that he could look for reprisal, swift and deadly. He wondered calmly what form it would take.

Certainly he had stepped into a hornet’s nest when he stepped into the dead cowpuncher’s boots. Rock lay down on his bed with his clothes still on and stared up at the dusky ceiling. He was trying to put one and one together, to make a logical sum. It made no difference now, whether he was Doc Martin or Rock Holloway. After to-night Buck Walters was an enemy. And Rock reflected contemptuously that he would rather have him as an enemy than a friend.

He recalled again Uncle Bill Sayre’s distrust of his fellow executor. Uncle Bill’s instinct was sound, Rock felt sure in his own soul, now.

“I expect I am in for some exciting times,” Rock murmured to himself. “Yes, sir, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

CHAPTER X—THIRTY ANGRY MEN

He had been given forty-eight hours! When twenty-four of them had elapsed, Rock lay in his bunk at the TL, staring at roof beams dim above his head. The small noises of the night, insect voices, and the river’s eternal whisper drifted through an open window. In an opposite corner the two hired men snored. Perhaps to-morrow something would happen. Perhaps not. Yet Rock could not take easy refuge behind the idea that Buck Walters’ talk had been a bluff. Fire burned under that smoke. To-morrow would tell the tale.

Sunrise came and breakfast. Rock set the men at work in a meadow. The whir of the mower blades droned in the quiet valley. There were odds and ends of work that kept him busy until ten o’clock. While he attended to these jobs, he debated with himself whether to tell Nona Parke about his encounter with Buck. He concluded to keep it to himself. He wished that he had taken advantage of Dave Wells’ presence to establish his own identity. Yet who the devil, he asked himself fretfully, would have expected Buck Walters to declare open war?

At the next opportunity, he decided, he would be himself and be done with a dead man’s troubles. It had been altogether too easy to let people go on thinking he was Doc Martin. But there was no use worrying Nona Parke with that just now. She wasn’t concerned. If anything happened to him, she could get other riders. And she was quite helpless to prevent anything happening. Rock didn’t intend that anything should happen to him. He would be wary, watchful, his weapons always handy.

Nona sat on the porch, darning stockings for Betty. She stopped Rock to mention the need of getting in more work horses, and while they talked, her eyes, looking past Rock, began to twinkle.

“Well,” she said, “we are about to have a distinguished visitor. There’s Alice Snell, and she’s certainly burning the earth.”

Rock turned. That range phrase for speed was apt. Alice came across the flat on a high gallop, her skirt flapping, bareheaded, and the gold of her hair like a halo in the sun. Her bay horse, when she jerked him to a stop, was lathered with sweat, his breast spotted with foam flecks. The girl’s face struck Rock as being stricken with a terrible fear. She swung down. To Nona Parke she gave no greeting whatever. Her eyes never left Rock, except for one furtive, backward glance. And she cried with a hysterical tremble in her voice:

“Buck Walters and Elmer Duffy, with all the boys, are coming to hang you! For God’s sake, Doc, get away from here before they come! I heard them talking it over, and I sneaked away from the ranch. They can’t be far behind me.”

So that was it. Rock’s lip curled. But a vigilance committee from two big outfits didn’t function without some excuse.

Alice Snell put her hands on his arms, her white face turned up to his in a fever of anxiety.

“They say—they say,” she gulped, “you’re stealing cattle. They mean to hang you.”

“They won’t hang me,” he said lightly. “Thank you, just the same, for coming to tell me of their kind intentions.”

“Doc, please! There’s a lot of them. Elmer Duffy and his crew as well as the Maltese Cross riders. You can’t fight that bunch. Get a horse and ride fast.”

Rock smiled and put Alice Snell’s trembling, clutching hands off his own. But there was no mirth in that smile, for a squad of horsemen, a long line of them abreast, had swung around the point of brush, a quarter of a mile away. Nona Parke stared at the two of them in blank amazement. Alice didn’t seem to know that she was there. She had no thought for anything but this man she took for Doc Martin. But out of one corner of her eye she marked the approaching riders and began to babble incoherently.

“Take her into the kitchen,” Rock commanded Nona. “Stay in there. If she’s right, there’ll be a fuss. I can’t run. And neither Buck Walters nor anybody else is going to hang me.”

He darted into the bunk room. His rifle hung above his bed, and he took it down. Out of his war bag he snatched two boxes of cartridges and stuffed them in his trousers pocket. He had on his belt gun. Both six-shooter and carbine were the same caliber. Then he went back to the door. The line of riders drew close, bobbing in unison, a long row. The sun made their silver ornaments gleam—white hats and black, red horses, blacks, bays, dun, and spotted—on they came, a brave sight. Thirty riders to confront a single miscreant. Rock wondered if Charlie Shaw rode with them, and if he would stand by, unprotesting. But he had brief time to speculate. The two girls were still on the porch. Nona had her arms about Alice, steadying her, encouraging her, and Alice was sobbing in a panic of grief and fear.

“For Heaven’s sake get her and yourself inside,” Rock snapped. “This is not going to be a Sunday-school picnic. Buck Walters warned me in Fort Benton that he’d get me inside of forty-eight hours. He’s going to make it good, if he can. This is nothing for you to be mixed up in.”

“This is as good a place as any for her and me,” Nona declared. “This is my ranch. They won’t dare!”

“Dare!” Rock grinned. “The man leading that bunch will dare anything. But I aim to fool him, if I get a chance to declare myself.”

“And if you don’t, they won’t stop to listen to anything,” she declared. Her eyes were full of questions.

“From the bunk room,” Rock said softly. “I will give them a good run for their money. The walls are thick, and I have plenty of ammunition.”

The eyeballs of horses and men were visible now, faces staring from under hat brims. Rock could see Seventy Seven riders he had worked with on trail. Charlie Shaw rode beside Buck Walters and Elmer Duffy. They slowed to a trot, then to a walk and drew up before the house. Rock moved back a little in the doorway, his rifle in the crook of his arm. He stood in plain sight; but if a hand moved toward a weapon he would be under cover before it could be drawn, or fired, at least.

Walters, Duffy and Charlie Shaw dismounted. Buck Walters looked at Alice Snell, her face hidden yet against Nona’s shoulder. His own face remained impassive, but his eyes burned. And Rock got in the first word.

“Miss Snell, not liking the idea of coldblooded murder to satisfy a personal grudge, rode up a little ahead of you-all to tell us you aimed to hang Doc Martin. If——”

“If that is true,” Nona Parke’s voice cut like a knife across his sentence, “you are a pack of dirty cowards—and you are too late.”

She thrust the weeping girl away from her and faced them, with her head up, her gray eyes wide with scorn.

“Is it true?” she demanded. “What do you want here, all of you with rifles, as if you were going to war?”

“We want him,” Buck Walters pointed at Rock. “And we will take him, dead or alive. He is a thief.”

Duffy, Walters, and Charlie Shaw had stepped up on the porch. They stood within eight feet of Rock, apparently secure in the belief that under thirty pairs of watchful eyes he could neither escape nor menace them.

“You two girls better go inside,” Duffy said. “Leave us men handle this thing. They ain’t no room for argument, I guess.”

“Guess again, Elmer,” Rock said quietly. “There is lots of room for argument. In the first place, I am not Doc Martin. I can prove that by you, Duffy, and by Buck Walters himself.”

“It is quite true,” Nona declared. “Doc Martin is dead. He was shot from ambush ten days ago. This man, no matter how much he may look like Doc, is not Doc.”

“I told you that, but you wouldn’t listen, you were so hell-bent to hang somebody,” declared Charlie Shaw, opening his mouth for the first time and addressing Buck Walters. “Now it can be proved right here, unless you got to hang somebody for your own personal satisfaction.”

“Listen, all of you!” Rock put in. “I have told you, and Miss Parke has told you, I am not Doc Martin. Do you want to listen to proof, or do you want it proved to you after a bunch of men have gone to hell in a fog of powder smoke? Because, if you don’t want to listen to reason, there will be a lot of shooting before there is any hanging. And I will get you, Mr. Buck Walters, first crack, in spite of all your men. Just think that over.”

Charlie Shaw winked at Rock, then took two quick steps to the doorway and slid through. Walters’ right hand moved ever so little, suggestively and involuntarily, and the muzzle of Rock’s carbine pointed straight at his breast.

“Just one move,” said Rock, “one more little move like that, Buck, and the Maltese Cross will be shy your services for good. I will give you leave to hang me or shoot me, if you can, but this crowd is going to hear who I am before the ball opens. I am going to keep this gun right on your middle. If I feel anything or hear anything, I pull trigger. If one of your men should pot me, I can still kill you, even if I were dead on my feet. Now, I tell you again I am not Doc Martin. I came to this ranch the day he was killed—murdered, as a matter of fact. I helped to bury him. His riding gear and all his stuff is here in the house.”

The riders edged their horses nearer and craned their necks. At best, destroying a thief was an unpleasant task even for honest men who despised stock thieves with the contempt such a thief inspired on the range. Every word uttered on that porch carried distinctly to their ears. They were not fools. They knew, and Rock banked on that knowledge, that, whether the man in the doorway was Doc Martin or not, he had the drop on Buck Walters, and the chances were a hundred to one he would kill not only Walters but several of them before they got him. Perhaps too late they realized the tactical error of letting Charlie Shaw get inside. He was a TL man. Right or wrong, if there was a fight, Shaw would fight against them. They would have been confirmed in that supposition if they could have looked behind Rock. That young man’s heart warmed at the boy’s quick wit and unhesitating loyalty. A little behind him Charlie whispered:

Elmer Duffy stared at Rock. He glanced sidewise at Buck Walters, then back to the man in the door.

“If you ain’t Doc Martin,” he said at last, “there’s only one other man you could be.”

“Hell and damnation!” Walters burst out. “Who else could he be? Are we goin’ to be old women and let him bluff us out with a fairy story?”

“We got plenty of time, Buck,” Elmer Duffy reminded him. “He can’t get away. We don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Young Shaw did tell us this before we started.”

“Rats!” Rock laughed. “You sure don’t want to be convinced, do you, Buck? You surely want to see Doc Martin dance on a rope end. Maybe you’d just as soon hang me, even if I’m not Doc. You recollect what Dave Wells named me in Fort Benton, night before last, don’t you? Well, you have Elmer Duffy say who he thinks I might be if I’m not Doc.”

“If Doc Martin is dead an’ buried,” Duffy said, “there’s only one man you can be.”

“You are right,” Rock said. “I will bet you a new hat, Walters, that Elmer Duffy names me what Dave Wells called me in Benton. I can see half a dozen riders in this crowd I worked on trail with, until we came to Clark’s Ford in Nebraska. If you want to be dead sure, Elmer, there is a sorrel horse with two white hind feet and a big star on his forehead, branded JB, and a black, branded a Bleeding Heart, grazing in the pasture back of the barn. And I could tell you more that only one man could know, Elmer. Tell Buck Walters who I am.”

“Bull’s-eye!” Rock said. “I have been in Montana less than three weeks. It seems a plumb exciting place. Are you satisfied, Buck? Are you still eager to hang me under the impression that I’m Doc Martin? Do you want to see his saddle, with bloodstains on it, where somebody—who also wanted to see him dead—shot him, while he rode along the river bottoms? Maybe you’d like to dig up his body, where he’s buried over by those poplars?”

“What is the use of carrying this on any longer?” Nona demanded. “I don’t believe Doc did what Alice says you claim he did. I don’t believe he was a thief. But, whether he was or was not, he is dead. This man is what he says he is. He came here the day Doc was killed. He told me his name was Rock Holloway. I hired him. That is all there is to it.”

“Isn’t that what Dave Wells called me?” Rock said to Walters. “Are you satisfied?”

“You denied it,” Walters said. “When he spoke to you, you used me to prove you were Doc Martin.”

“A man can have a joke with his friends, if he likes. It isn’t against any law that I know of. He probably told you I joined his outfit on the Yellowstone last summer and worked for him all winter.”

“I don’t recollect him mentionin’ it,” Walters replied. “Why have you passed yourself off for Doc Martin, anyway?”

“Shucks!” Rock said. “Everybody just naturally insisted on taking me for Doc. Miss Parke knew my name. I explained myself to Charlie Shaw as soon as I had a chance. I didn’t care much, one way or the other. I didn’t know anybody in this neck of the woods, barring the Seventy Seven. I fooled Elmer Duffy purposely, the first time I saw him, because I was kinda interested in trying to find out who killed Doc Martin, seeing I looked so much like him and was taking his place as a TL rider. Are you satisfied, or is there still something you’d like to know about?”

“Yes, I can see there’s been a mistake,” Walters said in a different tone. “You can’t blame us. We got it straight that Martin was standing in with some pretty bald-faced stealing. We’ve cleaned out his partners. I guess this settles it as far as you’re concerned. I’ll have to take Elmer’s word for it. He ought to know you, seein’ you killed his brother.”

It seemed to Rock that Walters raised his voice a trifle, and that he managed to impart a sneer into those words. Every man could hear. It seemed to Rock like a deliberate taunt, a barb purposely planted to rankle in Duffy’s skin. For a second there was silence. Elmer Duffy’s Adam’s apple slid nervously up and down his lean throat. His face flushed. Rock read the signs for himself. A few spiteful reminders like that, and Duffy would feel that he had to go gunning for his brother’s slayer. Buck Walters broke that strained hush. He lifted his hat to Nona.

“I’m sorry if this has been disagreeable,” he said politely. “But those Burris thieves incriminated your man Martin. He has been in with them on their rustling. We’ve lost a lot of stock. Maybe they didn’t overlook you. It’s as well Doc Martin has cashed in. We would certainly have hung him to the nearest cottonwood. We don’t reckon there’ll be any more trouble. I hope you don’t hold grudges,” he said, turning to Rock. “In our place you’d do the same. Nobody told us what happened to Martin. You passed for him. We got to protect our range. There’s only one way to deal with rustlers.”

“All right, boys,” he said. “You’ve heard the whole show, and we’re saved a nasty job. Ride on. We’ll catch up with you.”

Elmer Duffy muttered something, stepped down off the porch, and swung into his saddle, without a word or a look at Rock. Buck Walters stepped over beside Alice. She had listened, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Now she shrank away from Buck.

“Go home with you!” Alice Snell shrilled. “I’ll never go on that ranch again till you’re off it for good, you blackhearted beast! If Doc Martin was murdered, I know who did it and why. I hate you—I hate you!”

“You’re all worked up,” Walters said diffidently. “You’ll be sorry for saying such a thing about me when you cool off. I didn’t kill Doc Martin, although he had it coming. A man who steals can’t flourish on any range I have charge of.”

“Doc Martin never stole anything in his life,” the girl cried. “He was a better man than you, any day. You were afraid of him,” she raved. “I know. You hated him because I loved him, and he loved me. Get away from me, you—you toad!”

Walters’ face flamed. He shot a quick sidewise look at Nona and Rock Holloway. But he was cool and patient.

“Hysterics,” he said to Nona. “I guess I’ll have to leave her to you, Miss Parke. See she gets home, will you? Sorry about all this fuss. Couldn’t be helped, the way things stood.”

Rock said nothing. He had declared himself. This was a matter between these others, interesting, dramatic, and with hints of passionate conflict. Rock knew Nona Parke’s side of it. What she had told him about Doc Martin was fresh in his mind. And there was Martin’s attitude and actions toward Elmer Duffy. She, like himself, stood silent, while Alice leaned against the log wall and lashed at her foreman, her breast heaving, a fury blazing in her pansy-blue eyes.

Walters stepped off the porch and mounted his horse. The riders were crossing the flat at a walk. Buck lifted his hat to Nona, flung “So long, boys!” over his shoulder to Rock and Charlie Shaw, and loped away after his men.

A very cool hand, Rock reflected. Smooth and dangerous. He had denied that Dave Wells mentioned anything. Rock felt that to be a lie. It was simpler now that he had established his real identity. But he wasn’t done with Buck Walters yet. No! Rock couldn’t quite say why he had that conviction; but he had it very clear in his mind.

CHAPTER XI—RIDERS ON A RISE

“Is the excitement all over?” Charlie Shaw asked, grinning. “Guess I’ll go put my caballo in the barn. I’ll go back an’ cut my string this afternoon.”

She had put one arm protectingly about Alice Snell. That disturbed young woman, her tawny hair in a tangle, her cheeks tear stained, stared at Rock. Her eyes expressed complete incredulity, surprise and a strange blend of grief and wonder.

Charlie nodded. “Glad, too,” he said. “Hope you don’t send me with that outfit this fall.”

“Oh, well!” Charlie shrugged his shoulders and took his horse away to the stable. Nona led Alice inside. Rock stood his rifle against the wall and sat down on the porch steps to roll a smoke. He found the fingers that sifted tobacco into the paper somewhat tremulous. Odd that a man could face a situation like that with cold determination and find himself shaky when it was all over. Rock smiled and blew smoke into the still air. He could see the teams plodding in the hayfield. The whir of the mower blades mingled with the watery murmur of the river. A foraging bee hummed in a bluster of flowers by his feet. Except for these small sounds, the hush of the plains lay like a blanket, a void in which men and the passions of men were inconsequential, little worrying organisms agitated briefly over small matters, like flies on the Great Wall of China.

He sat there a long time. Charlie came back and went into the bunk room. Rock saw him stretch out on a bed. Good kid—loyal to his friends and his outfit. What a mess there would have been if a fight had started. Like the Alamo. Two of them intrenched behind log walls, and thirty angry men in the open, spitting lead. Alice Snell must certainly have thought a lot of Doc Martin. Rock could see the look on Buck Walters’ face when she flung her scornful epithets in his face. Funny about Doc and Nona Parke and Elmer Duffy. Not so funny, either. Hearts were caught on the rebound. Alice Snell was worth a second look. Passionate, willful, beautiful. Her fingers had clutched his arms with a frenzy of possession, when she pleaded with him to get away from danger. She was certainly capable of loving.

Nona came out. She, too, sat down on the edge of the porch near him. She stared at the haymakers, off down the river, where that hanging squad had departed, up at the banks where the plains pitched sharp to the valley floor.

“How can you joke about it? I made her lie down. She’s in a terrible state—all on edge. I didn’t think she was like that.”

“I didn’t think she had it in her to feel so much about anything. She’s heartbroken,” Nona said. “Doc, it appears, meant a lot to her. She just babbles about him.”

“I don’t understand it,” Nona said slowly. “Doc—oh, well, I guess he made love to her, same as he did to me.”

“You blame him?” Rock inquired. “She’s attractive. Offhand, I’d say she loved this rider of yours a heap. You didn’t have any use for him except in his capacity as a cowpuncher. Sometimes, I’ve noticed, a man craves affection. If he can’t find it one place he’ll look elsewhere. Maybe he was in love with you both. You’re funny, anyhow. You didn’t want him, yourself. But it seems to jar you because he consoled himself with another girl.”

“It isn’t that,” she replied in a bewildered sort of fashion. “Why should he lie to me? Why should he quarrel with Elmer Duffy about me—make an issue of me—if—if—”

“I don’t know. I do know that I may have a man-size quarrel with Elmer, myself, now, if Buck Walters makes a few more public cracks about my run-in with Mark. Elmer’s apt to brood over that, and I’m handy if he concludes it’s up to him to get action over a grievance. And it’s likely he will.”

“Oh, take it as it comes. There’s something fishy to me about all this upheaval. Of course I can savvy why Buck Walters wanted to get your man, Doc. Alice would be reason enough. Buck’s face gave him away. But I somehow don’t believe that’s the whole answer. Perhaps both Elmer and Buck are such honest, God-fearing cattlemen that the very idea of rustling would make them froth at the mouth simultaneously. But I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe for a single instant that Doc Martin had anything to do with any rustling whatever,” Nona declared. “I don’t care what these Burrises said, or anybody.”

“I’m not an awful lot interested in that, now,” Rock remarked thoughtfully. “It would appear from the way these fellows were ready to act that there has been rustling. Duffy wouldn’t back a play like that just to satisfy either his own or Buck Walters’ grudge. Between the Seventy Seven and the Maltese Cross, ranging around forty thousand cattle, a few rustled calves by the Goosebill don’t cut so much figure, except as an excuse for action. No; ‘there’s more in this than meets the eye,’ as Shakespeare or some other wise gazabo said once. You have lost calves, yourself.”

“Me?” she uttered in astonishment. Her head went up imperiously. “What do you mean?”

“You steal hearts.” Rock said calmly. “You admitted it. You told me you did, only, of course, you said you didn’t mean to.”

The blood leaped to her cheeks. It was the first time he saw her momentarily at a loss for words, embarrassed by an imputation.

“It worries me a little,” Rock continued meditatively. “You may steal mine. Of course, you don’t intend to. You hate to do it, as the fellow said when he took the town marshal’s gun away from him. But, on the other hand, you don’t care a boot if you find you’ve got the darned thing. You’re immune. And mine is an innocent, inexperienced sort of a heart. It’s useful to me. I’d be mighty uncomfortable without it. Maybe I’d better pull out while the going is good.”

“You want to quit now?” she asked. “There won’t be any more trouble, I think,” she said stiffly. “And I’m just getting used to you. I hate strange men around. Can’t you think of me as your boss instead of as a woman? Oh, dear, it’s always like this!”

“Good Lord, Nona—everybody calls you Nona, so it comes natural—I’m the world’s crudest josher, I guess,” he declared. “Say, you couldn’t drive me off this range now. I promised you, didn’t I, that if my admiration for you did get powerful strong I wouldn’t annoy you with it? Don’t you give me credit for fully intending to keep my word?”

“You like to tease, don’t you?” she said simply. “You aren’t half so serious as you look and act.”

“You were serious enough a while ago,” she said. Her next words startled Rock, they were so closely akin to what had been running in his mind not long before. “If Elmer hadn’t known you, there would have been a grand battle here. You and Charlie in the bunk house. I would probably have bought into it from one of the kitchen windows. I have dad’s old rifle, and I can shoot with it probably as straight as most men. They wouldn’t have won much from us. Buck Walters and his cowboys, I don’t think.”

“Of course I was scared,” she admitted. “But that didn’t paralyze me. It never does. Do you think I’d stand and wring my hands, while a man was fighting for his life?”

“Well, neither Buck Walters nor anybody else will ever take a man out of my house and hang him to a cottonwood tree if I can stop it,” she said hotly. “There is law in this Territory, if it is not very much in evidence. They don’t have to take it in their own hands in that brutal way.”

“No,” Rock agreed. “And when they do, there is a reason. I am rather curious about the real reason. As a matter of fact, speaking of law, I heard something in Benton which may be news to you. Buck Walters must have known about it, too, which makes his move seem all the more hasty. They have organized county machinery. There is to be an election in about a month for a judge of the superior court, a sheriff, a treasurer, a clerk, and a board of county commissioners. There will be no good excuse for Judge Lynch after that.”

“I’m glad,” the girl said seriously. “It’s time we were getting civilized.”

“It will take more than a set of duly elected county officers to civilize this country the way you mean. Texas is well civilized in that way, but it is still not so tame that bad men eat out of an officer’s hand. Organized law isn’t always a guarantee of peace in a country where it’s a hundred miles between ranches, sometimes. As often as not, it’s some peaceful citizen instead of a sheriff that unlimbers his gun to pacify the bad actor. Ten or fifteen years from now—— Oh, well, what’s on the program as soon as Charlie gets home with his string?”

“We’ll bring in and brand what few calves still have to be marked,” she said. “Then I wonder if you’d mind haying for two or three weeks. Charlie takes a whirl at it for me.”

“I’d do pretty much anything for you because you’re a good game sport,” Rock said quite casually. “I’m not too proud to shovel hay. I may have to do it for myself some time. I reckon I have to earn my wages.”

“And perhaps you’ll be able to console Alice. She says she will never go back to the Maltese Cross while Buck Walters runs it.”

“She didn’t have to go there in the first place,” Rock said. “She is her own mistress, and she has a home in Texas.”

“Well, she’s going to stay here with me for a while,” Nona said, “until she makes up her mind what to do. So you and Charlie better be nice to her.”

“Oh, I see,” Rock said. But somehow he didn’t feel comfortable about that. He wasn’t sure that he cared to be thrown too much in the company of this yellow-haired girl with the pansy-blue eyes and the come-hither smile lurking always about her mouth. He had no intention of stepping into Doc Martin’s shoes a second time.

“I expect I’d better get some dinner on,” Nona said finally. “After dinner you’d better go with Charlie when he heads for the Maltese Cross and have him show you where those work horses run. We’ll need them for this haying business.”

Rock went into the bunk room when Nona departed to cook. Charlie Shaw’s long form was still draped on a bunk, but he was merely resting.

“Gosh, I’ll get caught up on sleep when I get home,” he grumbled. “The man who rides with the Maltese Cross don’t need a bed. He’d just as well trade it off for a lantern, so he could see to catch his saddle horse before daylight.”

“We’re going to be hay diggers for a spell, you and me,” Rock informed him.

“Don’t hurt my feelin’s.” Charlie yawned. “Have a good bunk to sleep in an’ fancy home grub. Make up for all these hardships in the winter. Nothin’ to do then but play crib with Nona and take a ride to town once in a while. Say, there was pretty near something to clean up around here, wasn’t there? All will be peaceful along the Potomac now, I guess. Buck was hell-bent to string Doc to a cottonwood bough. They cleaned up the Burrises last night, so the boys said.”

“No; not even the whole Maltese Cross bunch. Just Buck and a few of his pets—the hardest nuts in the outfit.”

“Then their word was all that was plastered on Doc. No wonder Elmer Duffy wasn’t overly eager about the job,” Rock commented.

“Just Buck’s word, so far as I know,” the boy drawled. He turned on his side and eyed Rock attentively. “The other fellows just grunted.”

“Yet the whole of two outfits came along to get Doc Martin. And Elmer took Buck’s word for it.”

“Elmer didn’t love Doc exactly, no more than Buck did,” Charlie said. “An’ I guess Elmer won’t love you none, by the look of him when Buck made that crack about you gettin’ his brother. So you’re the feller that put Mark Duffy’s light out, eh? I was in the Odeon myself, once, first summer it opened. Some joint. One of the Seventy Seven men told me about ‘Big’ Duffy’s downfall. But I’d forgotten your name. He told me. I guess you don’t need to worry about any of these bad actors troublin’ you much.”

“I don’t know, Charlie,” Rock answered. “I can’t help thinking there was more in this than just jealousy over women, or a few stolen calves. And I have a hunch you could give me an idea what the real reason was for Buck being so dead set to get Doc Martin out of the way.”

“Forget it,” Charlie counseled. “You’re a kind of a mind reader. But Doc’s dead. Let his troubles stay buried with him. I’d go all the way with Doc if he was alive and in trouble. He was a white man. I think myself that this talk about the Burris boys sayin’ Doc was in with them is pure bunk. But it ain’t our funeral now. Forget it. Buck’s wise enough to leave sleepin’ dogs lie—when they’re dead. Our job is to look out for ourselves an’ the TL an’ let the Seventy Seven an’ Maltese Cross skin their own cats.”

Farther Charlie would not go. Nor did Rock try pressing. The boy knew something. Rock suspected it was something he would like to know. But Charlie would not tell, and doubtless he had what seemed to him cogent reasons. Rock conceded that the wisdom of this youth might be sound, so he let it drop. He lay in a bunk opposite to Charlie. They smoked and chatted until the hay diggers stabled their horses for noon, and the half-breed girl called them to dinner.

After that Rock set out with Charlie Shaw to gather in a few work horses ranging by some springs over toward the Maltese Cross. The river made a bend toward the south, away below the Parke Ranch. So they cut across the bench.

Five miles out from home, Charlie, glancing back over his shoulder, spotted a couple of riders on a rise less than a mile behind them.

“Funny we didn’t see them,” he remarked. “Musta been in some low ground somewhere.”

They saw the horsemen sit motionless for half a minute or so, then drop out of sight in a hollow. A mile farther along Charlie pointed out the location of the spring, and they parted. Rock jogged along, keeping to high ground and looking for small bands of horses. A half circle of the springs brought him on the bunch he wanted. A short, sharp dash cut seven or eight TL horses off from a band of broom-tail mares and colts, and he headed them homeward, thundering down a long, gentle slope toward the river. The work horses knew the way better than he, for they knew where they were headed, as mountain cattle know where the roundup grounds lie on the flat. They ran the bench for two miles and dropped into a swale that deepened and narrowed to a ravine scarred by spring torrents. Water holes dotted the dry course of its bed. Small flats spread here and there. Willows grew in clumps. Patches of high service-berry brush made thickets.

The sleek brutes ahead of him settled to a sedate trot. Rock jogged along at their heels, whistling.

Something that felt like the sting of a giant bee struck him on the head. His horse went down under him, as if pole-axed in midstride, throwing Rock clear. And, as he fell, he saw two wisps of powder smoke, blue on the edge of a thicket. His ear had heard two shots, so close together that they were like one.

He wasn’t hurt. A heavy mat of grass on turf softened the shock of his fall. He felt no wound beyond that sharp sting on his scalp. His wits worked as usual. He lay quite still where he fell, his eyes on the place where the smoke drifted lazily. His gun was in his hand, and he was searching for movement, although he lay like a man dead. He could hear the rasping death rattle in his horse’s nostrils. The beast sprawled on its side a few feet away, a convenient bulwark if he should need one. He noted thankfully that it lay left side up, the carbine scabbarded under its stirrup leather unharmed. The varnished stock pointed toward him invitingly. But he dared make no move toward it as yet.

Inert as a log, both hands clasped on the butt of his Colt, Rock waited for the ambush to show. He depended on that. They would want to be sure. Presently his stratagem and patience were rewarded. A hatless head took form in the edge of the brush a matter of thirty yards distant. Still Rock waited. Another face joined the second. After a time one extended a hand. Rock could see the gun muzzle trained on his prone body, as his own eye lined the foresight on a spot slightly below that extended arm.

Rock fired. That lurking figure in the brush must have pulled trigger in the same breath, for a bullet plowed dirt in the region of Rock’s breast. But the man spun and staggered clear of the brush, waving his arms, reeling. He was a fair mark now, and Rock fired again.

The other had vanished. Rock lay waiting. He was in the open, true, and the second man secure in tall thickets. But all about him stood heavy grass. He knew that very little of his body was visible, so long as he did not move.

Crimson trickled in a slow stream into one eye and spilled over his cheek. He wiped it away. That first shot had grazed his scalp. That troubled him very little. That second assassin, still lurking in the thicket, troubled him much more. And at that instant he heard the quick drum of hoofs.

Rock knew precisely how far that thicket of berry brush extended. Their saddle horses would be tied in that. Whether the second man was scared, or merely acting on the prudent theory that he who shoots and rides away will live to shoot another day, did not matter to Rock. He wanted them both. He leaped for his carbine, snatched it, and ran for the brush. One downward glance, as he passed, showed him a dead man. The next second he was in the thicket. A few quick strides took him out the other side.

Straight for the next brush patch, over an intervening grass flat of two hundred yards, a sorrel horse was stretching like a hound in full flight, his rider crouched in the saddle, looking back over one shoulder.

Rock dropped flat on his stomach, propped his elbows, and drew a bead. He hated to kill a horse, but he wanted that man alive, if he could get him. The sorrel ran at a slight angle. Rock could just see his shoulder. He held for that, low on the body, just ahead of the cinch. He was a fair shot with a six-shooter, deadly with a rifle. And he was neither hurried nor excited. His forefinger tightened as deliberately as if he had been shooting at a tomato can.

The horse went down, as if his feet had been snatched out from under him in mid-air, which was precisely what Rock had banked on. His rider, sitting loose, was catapulted in an arc. His body struck the earth with a thud. And Rock ran for his man. There was no craft in that sprawl. The fall had stunned him as effectually as if he had been slung from a train at thirty miles an hour.

He wasn’t unconscious, merely dazed. But Rock had a gun in his face before he got control of his senses. And, after disarming him, Rock did exactly what he would have done with a wild steer he wanted to keep harmless. He hog-tied him, hands behind his back, one foot drawn tight up to the lashed wrists, with a hair macarte off the dead horse.

Incidentally, Rock examined the sorrel horse, which bore the Maltese Cross. Rock didn’t know the man and had never seen him before. He was none of the riders Rock had seen either at the Cross round-up, or in the vigilance committee that morning.

Rock stood looking down at the man reflectively, for a time. Then he took him by the armpits and dragged him over the grass back to the very thicket where the ambush had been held. He walked through to take a look at the body on the other side. Rock did not know him, either. But he took his weapons and a short search of the thicket presently located a saddled horse securely tied.

This beast also carried a Maltese Cross. Rock took him by the reins and went back to his prisoner.

CHAPTER XII—STACK DECIDES TO TALK

The crimson stream kept trickling down over Rock’s face. He had no pain except a burning sensation on the top of his head, but the crimson flow annoyed him. He finally hit upon the expedient of stuffing the black silk handkerchief which he habitually wore about his neck, into the crown of his hat, adding thereto a smaller one from his pocket. Then he jammed the crown tightly down on his head to absorb the flow. That done, he rolled himself a cigarette. Then he stood looking speculatively down at his captive.

The man assented with a nod. Those were the names of the two hard citizens Buck Walters kept hanging around the Cross home ranch, so Charlie Shaw had told him. Rock was not in the least surprised to find his guess correct. Men who had acquired notches on their guns in the South were not usually averse to adding more notches when they drifted North—either for profit or satisfaction.

“Well, you took on a contract,” he said. “And you have fallen down on it. I am going to tell you a few things, Stack, then I am going to ask you some questions. You’re a Texan. Did you ever hear of Steve Holloway who was a U. S. marshal at Abilene for a spell? I expect you did. He cleaned out a nest of outlaws up in the Childress country, where I understand you made yourself a reputation. Steve was my father. Then there is Tom Holloway, who is a captain in the rangers. ‘Long Tom’ they call him. He’s an uncle. Then there’s Ben Holloway who owns the Ragged H down on Milk River, not so awful far from this neck of the woods. He’s a cousin of mine. There are other Holloways scattered here and there west of the Mississippi. Most any one of them would go a long way to shoot a skunk, especially of the two-legged variety. I’m something like that myself. You were sure hunting big game when you camped on my trail. Did you know it?”

“And Buck didn’t tell you? Maybe he didn’t know, himself,” Rock said. “Now, why did Buck Walters set you to kill me the way he got Doc Martin killed? Will you answer me that?”

“You got me foul,” Stack muttered. “I tried to get you, an’ you got me, instead. But I ain’t talkin’.”

“No?” Rock said very softly. “Well, I was raised in an Apache country, Stack. I expect I can make you talk.”

He turned away with a frown. No use wasting words. All about in the thicket were dry twigs, dead sticks. He gathered an armful of these, broke them up into short lengths, and dumped the lot by his prisoner. He took out his knife and whittled a lot of shavings. Once he stopped to roll another smoke.

Rock lit the fire with the same match he used for his cigarette. When it began to crackle briskly he laid hold of the boot on Stack’s free foot and jerked it off. The man’s face went livid. For a second he struggled in a momentary panic, then lay still, his face gradually turning ashy, little beads of moisture breaking out on his forehead.

“I want to know just why Buck Walters is so anxious to have me killed off. I want to know what sort of skin game he is working on the Maltese Cross, and how he works it. I want to know why he was so eager to hang Doc Martin when he thought he had failed at bushwhacking him. You know why, I am pretty sure. Cough up what you do know.”

“I don’t know nothin’ except that Buck offered me and Hurley five hundred dollars to put your light out. That’s all I know.”

With a jerk he drew the man close to the fire and thrust his foot at the small, hot blaze. Stack jerked his knee up. Rock put his spurred foot on that cocked knee, forced it down, and stood on it with all his weight. The heat made a singeing smell rise from the man’s sock. His eyes bulged. He set his teeth in his under lip. Rock stood over him, holding him helpless. Outwardly Rock was hard and merciless, but inwardly he felt his stomach turning. He hated the thing he had set his hand to. It was a contest of a sort between his fundamental humanity, his sense of decency, and the nerve of this cowardly assassin. And Stack weakened a trifle before Rock felt he could go no farther with that fiery ordeal.

“Spill it all,” he snarled. “I know enough to tab you if you try to stall.”

For the next ten minutes words tumbled out of Stack in short, jerky sentences. Here and there Rock put a question.

“It’s enough—plenty,” Rock said. “I’m tickled to death you waylaid me to-day.”

“What you goin’ to do with me?” Stack muttered, as Rock stood over him in brooding silence.

“If I were some people I know you’d never get out of this draw alive,” Rock said. “You certainly have it coming. I’m not just sure I ought to turn you loose.”

“All I want is a chance to get a long ways from this country now,” the man declared.

“I wonder what Buck Walters would do to you if you went to him and told him I pried all this out of you?”

“I ain’t crazy,” Stack protested. “You turn me loose, an’ neither you nor Buck Walters’ll ever see me for the cloud of dust I’ll raise foggin’ it to Idaho or Oregon, or some place a long ways from the Marias River. I know when I got enough.”

He bent over Stack and undid the rope. The man sat up, rubbed his foot gingerly, and drew on his boot.

“Now,” Rock said sternly, “people like you sometimes say one thing and do another. You may change your mind, once you get hold of a gun again and get a horse between your legs. You may figure you’d like to get even with me. I am not letting you go out of sympathy. I haven’t time to bother with you, or I would take you to Fort Benton and throw you in the calaboose and land you eventually in the pen. But I am after Buck Walters—not small fry. It is not going to be healthy for him nor any of his crowd around here very soon. So, I will make you an offer and give you a piece of advice. The offer is that if you will walk out in plain sight on the hill, in about an hour, I will give you back this horse. The advice is that you mount him, head south, and keep going.”

“That suits me down to the ground,” he said. “I don’t never play in a losin’ game if I get a chance to draw out. You needn’t worry about me changin’ my mind. I don’t want none of your game, no more. But I got stuff at the Maltese Cross I’d like to have.”

“Buck Walters is too clever for a man like you,” Rock declared. “He would get out of you what has happened before you knew where you were at. And I don’t want him to know. He’d probably end up by throwing a bullet into you.”

“I have only got a hunch,” Stack said slowly. “But I think he’s goin’ North for a spell, with a hand-picked crew.”

“Look,” Stack offered. “I ain’t hankerin’ to take a chance with Buck. I don’t see nothin’ in this country for me no more, nohow. Can’t you stake me to an extra horse, a bed, an’ some grub? Then I can light right out.”

“You’ve sure got gall,” Rock said coldly. “To ask me to stake you to anything after trying to kill me.”

“Well, long as I’m alive I got to eat,” the man retorted. “I got some money on me, but it might be quite a ways to another job.”

Rock regarded the man for a moment. He was not moved by any feeling of kindness. Stack was a gunman whose services were for sale to the highest bidder. He would kill for money, and he would kill for lack of it. There was nothing of loyalty in his make-up. He would embark on desperate undertakings without any personal rancor toward his victims. And he would desert with as little compunction if the game didn’t seem worth the candle.

Stack had had enough of Rock Holloway. To save his feet from being toasted, he had divulged information which made northern Montana no place for him. He had blood money in his pocket. With a horse under him, a dead running mate behind him, he would leave for new fields, where his peculiar talents might find suitable employment. Buck Walters would be a long time finding out what had become of his two thugs, if this one had a horse, a blanket, and a little food to start him on his journey.

“You don’t get no extra horse,” said Rock. “I’ll bring you back this one. A Maltese Cross horse is as good for you to ride out of the country as any. I’ll stake you to a blanket and a little grub. You can take it or leave it.”

“You’re the doctor,” Stack agreed indifferently. “I’d like another cayuse, but if you ain’t got one to spare——” He shrugged his shoulders in acceptance of those terms.

Rock swung into the saddle and left him. He had all the guns. He galloped down the ravine after Nona Parke’s work stock, picking them up where they had stopped to graze, half a mile below. He had to haze them into the ranch, catch a fresh mount, secure the things he had promised Stack, and return here.

After that—well, riding fast toward the Marias, with an ache beginning to make his temples throb, Rock could still smile with anticipation. It was worth a sore head. He would very soon have a weird tale to relay to Uncle Bill Sayre in Fort Worth. He would surprise that estimable banker. And it was not impossible that he might surprise Buck Walters even more in the immediate future.

CHAPTER XIII—ON THE WARPATH

Rock staved off Nona Parke’s agitated questions when he asked for food. He robbed his own bed reluctantly, but a promise was a promise, apart from his desire to have Stack out of the country between dusk and dawn. The blood on his face and the strange sight of him riding a Maltese Cross horse stirred Nona to a curious pitch. But Rock moved fast, told her nothing, and got away again.

He made the round trip in an hour. As he drew up on the brink of the ravine, Stack walked up to meet him, carrying on his back Rock’s saddle which he had stripped from the dead horse.

Rock sat on his own horse, watching the man ride away. Stack headed south. As far as Rock could see him, he bore straight for Fort Benton. He would never turn back, Rock felt assured. Stack had shot his bolt. There was a certain strange relief in that. He marveled at the queer compound of savagery, cupidity, cunning and callousness that characterized such a man. They were rare, but they did exist.

Stack admitted that Hurley had shot Doc Martin. He admitted that he and Hurley were to share five hundred dollars for ambushing Rock. He didn’t seem to have any emotion about it, except a mild shame over his failure. He didn’t seem to regard Rock with anything except a grudging admiration for beating him at his own game. Owning himself beaten, he withdrew. And, at that, Rock muttered to himself, Stack had nothing on Buck Walters when it came to vileness and treachery.

Rock turned his horse and rode homeward, reaching the TL about supper time. He was tired. His head ached intolerably, now that the bleeding had ceased. When he took off his hat and removed the handkerchief compress, he could feel the slash cut by that bullet. A quarter of an inch lower! By such narrow margins chance operates. Rock sat on the side of his bed, wondering if he should wash and bandage that wound. Now he began to fear that it might give him a good deal of trouble. He hoped not, because, unless he had guessed wrong, some rapid-fire action lay ahead of him. And while he pondered thus, Nona walked into the room.

He scarcely remembered how he had accounted to her for the crimson stains on his face. But her quick glance took in the discolored handkerchief and the matted brown hair. She stood over him with a worried look.

“Fellow took a shot at me—one of Buck Walters’ men. Keep that under your hat,” he warned. “It’s only a scratch.”

“It isn’t bad,” she murmured. “But it must be painful. And it ought to be cleaned. I’ll get some stuff and dress it.”

She returned in a minute with a basin, scissors and carbolic acid. Very deftly she snipped the hair away from about the wound, cleaned it with a solution that burned like fire, and drew the edges together with a patch of court-plaster. Then she sat down on the bed beside Rock and said earnestly:

“Not just now,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you, anyway. Buck seems to want me out of the way. I am quite a bit wiser about things than I was this morning, but I still have a few guesses coming. There’s nothing to worry about. Don’t let on to any one that I have been shot at. I will say a horse fell with me and cut my head.”

“But it does worry me,” she protested. “I feel uneasy. Something’s got to be done about this, if a man riding for me can’t go anywhere except in danger of his life.”

“Something is going to be done about it,” Rock assured her. “Darned quick, too! It isn’t because I am riding for you. It is because I am supposed to be dangerous, just as Doc was dangerous for something he knew or guessed. He was foolish enough to tip his hand to Buck. I am not going to talk. I’m going to get busy. All you can do is to wish me luck.”

“I do,” she murmured. “I wish the Maltese Cross had never come into this country.”

“In that case I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “And I’m darned glad I came.”

“Oh, lots of reasons.” Rock smiled. “I’ll tell you some of these days, when the dove of peace spreads her wings across this part of the world.”

“I wish you’d tell me,” she begged. “I hate mysteries. I’m getting so I go around here with my heart in my mouth, wondering what terrible thing will happen next.”

“I don’t think anything more will happen around this ranch,” Rock declared. “I’m the center of this trouble, and I’m going to take myself away from here—for a while. But I’ll be back.”

“I’ll be sorry to see you go,” she whispered. “But perhaps it’s best, if you are going to be ambushed at every turn.”

She looked down at the floor frowningly for a few seconds. Rock stared at the curve of her neck, the scarlet twist of her lips, the dark cloud of hair, and a queer breath-taking sensation stirred in him, an almost uncontrollable impulse to draw her up to him. He shook himself. Why the devil should a woman have that effect on a man? And Nona seemed to be unconscious of it—even to be irritated by the manifestation of a feeling she was the factor in arousing.

Nona got up. She looked at him with such frowning composure that Rock couldn’t meet those level gray eyes. It seemed to him they read him through and through.

Rock shook his head. “Don’t feel like eating,” he replied. “After a while I’ll have a cup of coffee, maybe; but not just now. Will Charlie be back to-night, I wonder?”

“I’m going to pull out at daylight,” he told her. “If I am gone before you get up, so long.”

“Didn’t see hide nor hair of him,” Charlie replied. “He took one of the wagons, about half his crew, a bunch of saddle stock, and pulled his freight as soon as they all got back from that session here this mornin’. So the boys told me.”

“I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut,” Rock said, “that he took with him only his special pets.”

“You’d win your bet,” Charlie growled. “I didn’t count noses, but the hard pills were among the missin’. How’d you guess?”

“‘Birds of a feather.’” Rock quoted the old proverb. “I’m leaving you, myself, in the morning, Charlie.”

“Well, for public consumption.” Rock smiled. “I’m pulling out because I find life here much too exciting. I don’t like vigilance committees and private wars. Privately, between you and me and the gatepost, I’ll be back before long. And I’m coming back with bells on.”

“Kinda hate to see you go,” he said. “But I guess you know your own business best.”

“Did Doc Martin ever tell you about finding a set of corrals with a branding chute, tucked away somewhere in the Sweet Grass?”

“No,” Charlie shook his head. “He didn’t tell me nothin’. If he’d kept as close a mouth to everybody as he did to me, he’d be alive yet, I guess. I know he did, that’s all.”

“And he made some sort of crack at Buck about this, didn’t he?” Rock hazarded. “After that the fireworks began.”

“Doc was awful outspoken when he got his back up about anything,” he said. “Buck tried to horn him away from the Maltese Cross on account of Alice, I guess. They had words about it. Nobody was around to hear what was said, but Doc told me he put a bug in Buck’s ear about range bosses with ambitions to get rich off the outfit they worked for. I asked him if he meant that Buck wanted to grab Alice an’ the outfit, with a parson’s assistance, an’ he just grinned. I told him if he knew anything he better keep his mouth shut where Buck Walters was concerned. Been better for him if he had.”

“I wish he had, too,” Rock said. “He’d be alive now, and he’d be darned useful. I got ideas about Mister Buck Walters, myself.”

“Better not be too curious, kid,” Rock advised. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Better you aren’t mixed up in anything. Nobody aims to hang you to a cottonwood, or bushwhack you in some lonely coulee. I only asked you about these mysterious pens to check up on something I found out. If you don’t know, of course you can’t put me wise.”

“Have they got anything to do with us bein’ shy a few calves this spring, d’you suppose?” Charlie asked thoughtfully. “Because, if it has, I might get mixed up in it yet. I don’t know as I’d sit tight an’ keep quiet if I thought anybody was rustlin’ off Nona. She needs all she’s got.”

“That I don’t know, yet,” Rock said frankly. “I can tell you this much, Charlie: If there is any connection between what I know and suspect and Nona’s missing calves, she’ll get ’em back with interest.”

“Don’t let it get away with you,” Rock told him. “Keep mum. I’ll be back here again, by and by. If anybody inquires about me, say I quit the Marias because there was too much high life around here to suit me.”

The boy grinned and said no more. In an hour the TL was severally and collectively asleep. It seemed to Rock that he had no more than closed his eyes before they opened again at the first streak of dawn. He had caught up his two horses the night before. Now he went down to the stable to feed them. A lot of miles lay ahead of those ponies. When he came back to the house, smoke streamed from the kitchen chimney, and Nona was making coffee and slicing bacon. The two of them were the only souls astir. It was still an hour and a half before the regular rising time.

“I heard you, and I didn’t want you to go away without your breakfast,” she said.

“For a fellow that has no use for men,” Rock teased, “you are awful darned good to them. You’d make an excellent wife for a ranchman.”

“I am a pretty darned good ranchman myself, without being a wife, thank you, Mister Holloway,” she retorted.

“You won’t escape forever,” he told her. “Some of these days somebody will spread a wide loop and snare you.”

Nona slid three strips of bacon on a hot plate and set it before him, with a toss of her head.

“Men,” she said disdainfully, “seem to think that a woman’s chief business in life is to be captured by some man.”

“Well,” Rock said between mouthfuls, “when you stop to consider it, isn’t it? It seems that way, when you think of it.”

“Fiddlesticks!” She laughed. “That may be some women’s ambition, but not mine.”

“It isn’t an ambition,” Rock murmured. “It’s just human nature. You ask Alice. When you get to be a cattle queen, you’ll find yourself a heap more interested in men than you are in cows. You’re darned haughty about this poor worm man, right now. Your father was a man, old girl, and I expect your mother was glad of it.”

“I don’t know whether you’re preaching,” she said artlessly, “or drumming up trade for a matrimonial bureau.”

He rode up to the house and, dragging out his bed, lashed it across the black horse. Sangre stood shaking his glossy head, with the white star. Rock swung up. He hesitated a second. He wanted to say good-by, and still—— Then Nona came out of the kitchen with a package in her hand.

“Here’s a lunch,” she said. “You didn’t say where you were going, but if it’s an all-day ride a bite will come handy.”

“Thanks!” He tucked it in a saddle pocket. “Well, here’s hoping there’s no more excitement around here till I come back, Nona. And if I don’t come back, you’ll know it’s because I can’t, not because I don’t want to.”

“You’re not going on the warpath after Buck Walters, are you, Rock?” she asked uneasily. “Please don’t. It isn’t worth while. A man like that always gets what’s coming to him. Let him be.”

“I’m going on the warpath, but not the way you mean,” Rock answered. “I am not going after anybody with a gun in my hand and blood in my eye. Not yet. Listen! Let me whisper something in your ear.”

Nona stood beside Sangre, one hand resting on the red horse’s curved neck. Rock bent down as if to whisper. And when Nona turned her face up, he kissed her lightly on the red mouth that was beginning to haunt him and to trouble him wherever he went, very much to his dismay.

And when she drew back with startled eyes, Rock touched his horse gently and rode away without a backward glance. If he looked back, he would turn back, whether to apologize or plead, he could scarcely say. For a young man who had always been rather egotistically sure of himself he found his breast filled with a strange commotion.

“That,” he sighed at last, with a backward look into the Marias Valley from the south bank, “is sure a hell of a way for a fellow to treat a girl that got up at daybreak to get him his breakfast. Well, I guess it’s either kill or cure.”

As the sun rose, a hot ball in the east, flinging its careless gold over the bleached grass, that rolled away to limitless horizons, and Rock gradually left that familiar, pleasant valley far behind, he thought less and less of that unpremeditated kiss and more and more of the business in hand. He had set out on what seemed a mad undertaking, but there was method in his madness.

He came down to the bed of the Missouri and into the streets of Fort Benton shortly after noon. He let his horses rest and munch hay in a livery stable for three hours. Then, with a little food tied on his pack, he embarked on the ferry and so gained the southern shore, whence ran the great freight trails to the Judith Basin and farther to towns along the Yellowstone, threaded like forlorn beads on that steel string which was the Northern Pacific Railway.

His specific destination was Billings, two hundred miles in an air line southeast. But first he turned aside into the rich grazing lands of the Judith Basin to find Al Kerr of the Capital K. It was a far cry to the Odeon and Clark’s Ford on the bleak plains of Nebraska. But Rock was riding into the Judith to draw on a promise the little man had made him that night under the stars.

He forged southeast all that afternoon, picketed his horses overnight by a rippling creek, wiped the dew off his saddle at dawn, and rode again—rode at a jog trot, hour after hour. He met a stage and held converse with the driver, passed on and came to a stage station on that rutted artery of travel to Lewistown. Here a hostler gave him specific directions. And at sunset he rode into the home ranch of the Capital K. The first man that hailed him was Kerr himself.

“Well, well, well,” Kerr said. “You have shore been a long time gettin’ around to pay a sociable call.”

“Can you stake me to two horses in the morning?” Rock asked, after they had exchanged greetings. “I got to hotfoot it on to Billings early.”

They sat up late that night, talking. The Capital K had taken over a lovely valley watered by a shining stream, bordered by natural meadows. Kerr had concentrated all his cattle there. They swarmed by tens of thousands over a radius of forty miles. The little man was well content. He would move no more. He had preëmpted a kingdom, and there were no more worlds to conquer. He had built a substantial house and brought his family from Texas for the summer. But, beyond these visible evidences of prosperity, he didn’t talk much about himself. Rock’s story engrossed all his attention. And to the tentative, provisional request with which Rock ended, he gave hearty assent.

“Sure, I will,” he declared. “Hell, I’d do it like a shot, just on your own account. As it happens, I know Uncle Bill Sayre darned well. He loaned me twenty thousand dollars on my unbacked note, one time. I had a speakin’ acquaintance with Dave Snell, too. You go on to Billings and get word to him. Once you get back here I can throw an outfit together for you in a matter of hours. I have saddle horses to burn. An’ I got men that’ll foller you to hell and back again. By gum, that’s some formation up there, if you got it figured right. Same old story—the beggar on horseback. What a fool that man is. Ain’t satisfied with a good thing. Tryin’ to grab the earth, regardless.”

“It may be covered up so that it’ll be hard to get at him personally,” Rock said. “But if I can make sure of the Steering Wheel, I can force his hand. It looks air tight, but there’s always a weak spot in that sort of undertaking you know.”

“You watch he don’t dynamite you. He may have a joker up his sleeve as well as an ace in the hole,” Kerr warned. “I have heard of Buck Walters plenty down South. He’s a smart man. He’s got to be that an’ a cattleman, besides, or he’d never got in so strong with Dave Snell. If you get the goods on him, don’t give him a chance—the dirty dog. Gosh, a man that hires his killin’ done is lower’n a snake in the bottom of a forty-foot well.”

CHAPTER XIV—HOT ON THE TRAIL

Rock chewed a pencil butt until it looked as if it had been mouthed by an earnest puppy. He wrote and erased the length and breadth of half a dozen telegraph forms before he evolved a suitable communication. And finally he thrust the lengthy message through the wicket at the operator. The man pawed over the sheets.

“Gee whiz, partner, that’ll cost you a young fortune,” he said in a tone compounded of surprise and awe. “That ain’t a telegram. It’s a letter.”

“Send her just the same,” Rock requested. “And get it on the wire as soon as you can. How long will it take to get an answer?”

“Depends. It’ll have to be relayed from St. Paul to Chicago and then to Fort Worth. With close connections and your man on the job at the other end, maybe four hours, maybe twelve, maybe longer.”

“Is there any way I can get quick action?” Rock asked. “It’s darned important. Time is money.”

“Gosh, money is certainly no objection to nobody that sends two-hundred-word telegrams,” the man replied. “I might ask the St. Paul office to rush it if they can.”

“Look!” Rock laid a ten-dollar gold piece on the counter. “That’s to grease your axles. Go as far as you like to get that message hurried. Shoot her quick. I’m going to the N. P. Hotel and turn in. The clerk can tell you my room number. You get the answer to me hot off the griddle when it comes. If I’m asleep, wake me up.”

The operator grinned, as he pocketed the ten. “I’ll get you all the action there is,” he promised.

Rock dragged himself across the street, too tired to seek a restaurant, despite his hunger. Within twenty minutes he was fast asleep, at three in the afternoon. Billings went about its daily affairs. The sound of rattling wagons in the street, the voices of men, the intermittent bang of carpenter’s hammers and the whine of saws floated in through his open windows on the hot summer air. These sounds receded and died away, powerless to break the deep slumber of weariness. Rock was really exhausted.

A pounding at his door wakened him. Dark had closed in. His room was like a cellar. For a second, in that subterranean gloom, Rock struggled to remember where he was, and why he was there. Then sleep fell away from him like a discarded garment, and he leaped up, opened the door to a man in shirt sleeves, with a green eye shade, a lantern in one hand, and a telegram in the other.

“Thanks. There’s no answer,” Rock told the operator, and the man left. Rock fumbled for a match, lit a lamp, and read the telegram again. It told him nothing, but it authorized him to act. Very well; he would act. He looked at his watch—ten thirty. He had slept seven hours. He felt fresh. He dressed. The clerk in the hotel office told him where he could find a night lunch counter. This Rock located. Fortified with ham and eggs and two cups of coffee and a cigarette, he sought the livery stable where his tired horses stood in stalls. No use depending on them to carry him back to the Capital K. He had ridden them too hard. But he had to go. Therefore, he routed out a sleepy proprietor and made a bargain with him for a rig and a driver. Twenty minutes later he was burrowing through the night, in a buggy behind a pair of slashing bays, his saddle and bed lashed on the back of the rig, and a cheerful youth driving.

Over rough roads and smooth, over stretches where no road at all marked the rolling land, nodding beside the driver, dawn found Rock looking down the northern slope toward the Judith country. They halted by a spring, grazed the team, fed them grain, and went on again. Mid-afternoon brought them to the Kerr Ranch, a hundred and ten miles in seventeen hours.

At sunrise the following morning Rock turned north once more. But this time he rode with a dozen men at his back, the pick of the Capital K, who, when Rock frankly asked them if they were willing to follow him and burn powder, if necessary, laughed and told him to lead them to it. Ahead on the trail rattled a chuck wagon drawn by a four-horse team, tooled by a capable cook. A hundred head of saddle horses, urged on by a wrangler, made an equine tail to the rolling wagon. And every man carried a rifle under his stirrup leather and a belt full of shiny brass cartridges, ready for action.

They reached Fort Benton in two days, swam their stock, and ferried the wagon. Twenty-four hours later Rock pointed his outfit down to the Marias Valley, a mile above the western end of Nona Parke’s upper fence. He sat on his horse on the rim and stared north to where the blue spires of the Sweet Grass stood like cones on the sky line. He gazed at those distant buttes with something akin to anticipation. Over there lay the solution of a problem. It might prove a battle ground, and he might draw a blank; but he did not think so. He sat there visualizing mentally what strange sights those insentient buttes had imperturbably beheld, what nefarious secrets lay darkly in some scarred ravine or mountain meadow. And, away beyond the Sweet Grass, the Steering Wheel crowd on the Old Man River had a finger in this devil’s pie. Or did they? That he would presently discover.

And, while he pondered, fretfully impatient because another night and day must elapse before he could breast the steep escarpments of the Sweet Grass, he saw a rider lope up along the river flat. His men were staking tents for the night and disposing their beds. Rock rode down the bank and crossed the flat. As he neared the camp, which already flung a blue pennant from the fire under the Dutch ovens, this rider drew near, a familiar gait and color to his mount. Presently he materialized into Charlie Shaw.

“Fine. Alice is still at the ranch. She ain’t so sad as she used to be. Mentions you quite frequent. Hopes you’ll blow back so she can get acquainted. You’re a brave man, she says, an’ it’s awful strange how much you look like poor old Doc. She makes Nona look at her sidewise sometimes. You was a wise man to pull out when you did.”

“I got other fish in the pan, right now,” he said. “I guess you’ll have to console Alice.”

“I wondered where a round-up blew in from,” Charlie said. “So I rode up to have a look. What outfit’s this?”

“There ain’t no such outfit this side of the Big Muddy, that I’ve ever seen,” Charlie remarked. “That’s the Kerr outfit from Buffalo Creek, ain’t it? What do you aim to round-up over here?”

“Oh, hidden branding pens and men that hire gun fighters to shoot up other people, and such.” Rock had lowered his voice discreetly.

“Uh-huh. Borrowed some men an’ horses from old Al, and came over here on a—— Oh, well, call it a prospecting tour.”

“I kinda suspected as soon as I seen your phiz,” Charlie murmured. “You’ll be goin’ up around the Sweet Grass for a spell, eh? You full-handed?”

“Do you crave excitement that much?” he bantered. “Don’t you reckon Nona needs you worse than I do?”

“Not for a few days. I might be darned useful to you, if you’re lookin’ for corrals in out-of-the-way places.”

“Oh, no!” Rock said. “A few days back you sung a different tune. You’re remembering things you’d forgotten. You do know something, then?”

The boy shook his head. He got down off his horse. Rock followed. There was a clear space of dusty clay by Charlie’s feet. He squatted on his spurred heels.

“Not the way you think,” he said in an undertone. His boyish face grew sober and intent. A trace of excitement warmed his eyes. “What you said that last night started me thinkin’. I got uneasy. I never did have much likin’ for Buck Walters. Too darned smooth and high-handed—too arbitrary. I got to thinkin’ that if anybody was puttin’ over somethin’ in the rustlin’ line, why should they overlook the TL? A little outfit is always safe to pick. So I organized myself the next day and whooped it up for the Sweet Grass. An’ I found that set of corrals with the brandin’ chute that Doc mentioned. I didn’t know where they were, but I worked on round-up all around the Sweet Grass last summer an’ this spring. I knew where not to look for such a thing.”

“And you found them? Did you find out anything else?” Rock questioned eagerly.

“Nothin’ to find out. The only two outfits that ever touches those hills is the Cross an’ the Seventy Seven. Neither outfit ever used those pens.”

“I rise to remark they been used,” Charlie declared. “Used plenty—used recent. I have a hunch they’re goin’ to be used again pretty pronto.”

“Well,” Charlie grinned, “Buck an’ six of his pet snakes are camped on a creek about five miles from them corrals—layin’ low and doin’ nothin’. An’ there’s heaps of cattle in their vicinity. An’ five riders with pack outfits an’ about forty loose horses joined ’em from the North yesterday afternoon.”

“Yesterday afternoon?” Rock took quick reckoning of the distance and the hour. “How do you know?”

“I seen ’em,” Charlie murmured. “I lay low, lookin’ at ’em. I rode all night to get home. I was out of grub, an’ between you an’ me an’ the gatepost, I didn’t want none of that outfit to catch me circulatin’ there alone. I don’t hanker to get caught in no lonely coulee all by my lonesome.”

“You couldn’t see what brand was on the horses those fellows rode in from the North?” Rock went on.

“Uh-uh. Too chancy. I pulled my freight. That bunch wasn’t there on no picnic.”

“Well, I’m going up there with these boys on a picnic party.” Rock smiled sardonically. “If you’re fond of picnics, you can come along. You’ll be welcome as the flowers in May. I may go farther North—plumb up into Canada. But first I would like to look at these mysterious corrals on the Sweet Grass. And I would like to know what Buck Walters is doing there.”

“Will I come? Say, watch my smoke!” Charlie grunted. “You might as well amble down to the ranch with me, while I collect my bed and three or four horses.”

“I don’t think I will,” Rock declined. A swift memory of the startled, indignant blaze in Nona Parke’s eyes when he stole that farewell kiss troubled him. “You can tell Nona anything you want. Better bring along your Winchester. There’s liable to be dirty work at the crossroads.”

Charlie laughed and swung up on his horse, declining Rock’s invitation to supper. He had an odd job or two to see about that evening, but he would join the Capital K with a string of horses by dusk. The two hay diggers, he told Rock, were good, reliable men, and, with Nona fortified by Alice Snell and Mary Vieux, it was all right to leave the ranch alone.

Rock smiled at Charlie’s air of responsibility when he said that. He couldn’t imagine Nona Parke being gratified at such manly solicitude for her welfare, nor of being in need of Charlie’s protection under any circumstances—according to her. But it was decent of the kid to feel that way about her, just the same. Loyalty untainted by sentimentalism. To Charlie wild horses, hard riding, moving herds, night guards, the trail, and all that vast panoramic sweep of the range, with its incidental excitements, crowded the importance of women as a part of life into the very background. And so far as Nona Parke was concerned, Rock half wished that he could say the same of himself. But he couldn’t truthfully. He was too fundamentally honest to deny the impulse behind that stolen kiss. He had ridden too much with Nona and watched her too often, with a clear consciousness of what was happening to himself. He couldn’t help it. Damn it! How could a man help his feelings?

And he shrugged his shoulders impatiently and joined his men, as the cook called, “Gru-u-b pi-i-le!” He loaded his plate with food and squatted on the ground to eat. But his mind grew busy with abstractions. Things sometimes worked curiously in harmony toward a given end, almost as if there were a design, a pattern of some sort, a definite impulse from some obscure source. He had expected to spend days seeking those hidden corrals. Joe Stack had known about them, too, but without knowing their location. They were not something Doc Martin had dreamed about. And here was Charlie Shaw prepared to lead him to the very spot.

Rock looked away to the north, coffee cup in hand, with a thrill of eagerness. He despised murder, theft and betrayal of a trust. He was hot on the trail of all three, unless he had made an error in deduction. If he were in error, he would be laughed out of Montana, and his name made a synonym for a fool, and his works would be derided on every range between the Marias and the Texas Panhandle.

But the laugh, Rock felt in his soul, would be on another man; if, indeed, any unseemly merriment should arise out of this matter, which had already cost two lives and bestowed upon him a hurt of which his chafing hatband still reminded him.

CHAPTER XV—POPPING GUNS

Viewed from the southern approach, the triple buttes of the Sweet Grass Hills rise like immense cones abruptly from the level of the plains. Gold Butte stands in the middle. West Butte looks toward the Rockies. East Butte faces the rising sun. Between each the prairie flowed in glades, carpeted with grass, dotted with sloughs, and threaded by aimless streams. It was, indeed, as if some whimsical giant had snatched three peaks off some distant mountain range and set them there for geologists to puzzle over.

Upon East Butte, the larger of the three and the most northerly, where the plains began to wrinkle and lift to foothills, like a grassy sea frozen into immobility, as it laved the shore of the peak, Rock camped his wagon. At daybreak, while the sun was yet merely a promise uttered by a golden haze in the east, he rode with all his men up that precipitous slope. An hour’s climbing brought them to the top, but not to the uttermost pinnacle; for that was a gray, rocky spire, where bands of mountain sheep took refuge against less sure-footed creatures. They had climbed to a shoulder that brought them under the rim rock, around to the head of the north slope.

Milk River lay a shining silver thread in its valley, with broken country extending on either hand, deep canyons and gray sage flats. They looked from this height into a foreign land, for the Canada line ran east and west, six miles below. Like a monument the Butte towered over the boundary and over a wilderness. In all the Sweet Grass country no man had as yet laid the foundation logs of a home. Within a radius of fifty miles the land was as it spread when Columbus brooded on the poop of his caraval, except that the buffaloes were gone, and wild cattle from Texas grazed where the bison had recently fed.

East Butte threw a long, westward shadow, away past its fellows. Its eastern declivities blazed yellow in the eye of a sun just clear of the horizon. The riders sat there, watching the sunbeams hunt slinking shadows out of every hollow. Birds twittered in thickets about them. The air was full of pine smells and the scent of the aromatic grass that gave the hills their name. It was cool and fresh at that sunrise hour, five thousand feet above the sea.

“Lord,” one rider drawled, “if you could marry this here grass and scenery to the Texas climate, you’d have a paradise to live in.”

Rock and Charlie Shaw had their heads together. Charlie was pointing at something.

“You can see where those three coulees come in,” he said. “There’s a peach of an open basin. A place like a park—maybe three-four hundred acres. The corrals are one side of that, under a bank, tucked in the edge of some pines. Down where you see that white clay bank, Buck Walters’ outfit was camped on a creek.”

“That depends on whether there is anybody on lookout,” Charlie told him. “If there is any monkey business goin’ on, they will have an eye peeled, you can gamble. Somebody could be lookin’ at us now, if he was rangin’ around. But we could go on a mile or so together by keepin’ in the bottom of that gulch. It’s timbered.”

They moved down into this hollow, quiet now, for Rock had explained to them that they might happen on men who would not welcome visitors. The gulch Charlie indicated made a screen for their passage. It was full of lodgepole pine, slender, graceful trees, with tufted tops like ostrich plumes. The earth was a litter of dried needles, a carpet for shod hoofs. The jingle of a spur, the faint clank of a loose-jawed bit mouthed by a fretful horse; a low squeaking of saddle leather—these were the only sounds, as they rode. Suddenly the draw ended. Grassy contours showed through a screen of timber. In the edge of that Charlie Shaw pulled up.

“I don’t want to show a squad of armed men around here till I know what we’re going up against,” Rock mused. “If we got to take action, it would better be a surprise party, with us doing the surprising. I think you and me had better scout a little, Charlie.”

“All right. You boys lay low here,” Rock ordered. “From the edge of this timber you can look down over the slope, without anybody seeing you or your horses. If we should happen to get in a mix-up, there will be guns popping. And if they pop too long and loud, you had better come running. I don’t want to stage any wild play, if it can be helped, but, if we have to throw lead to protect ourselves, we will. Otherwise, we will be back in a couple of hours at the outside. Now don’t show yourselves unless you have to. Use some judgment.”

The riders got down off their horses, stretched their legs, and rolled cigarettes. Rock and Charlie Shaw bore along in the edge of the timber. A narrow plateau, open, grassy, almost level, ran along under the low, pine-swathed ridge, where they left the riders. Off to the left a hillside lifted a stretch of jack pine and scrubby juniper. They darted across a narrow bit of open and trotted along under cover once more.

“Not far now—not so far as I thought it was,” Charlie said after a time. “I remember this place.”

“Say, we’re right on top of them corrals,” he whispered. “An’ I’d say they was populated. Smell that?”

“Wood smoke,” Rock muttered. But he knew that with the smell of burning wood there was mingled another, more pungent odor—the smell of burning hair. He had sweated around too many branding fires not to recognize that.

“We better leave our horses here,” Charlie suggested. “Only a few steps to where we can get a look from a bank right above the pens.”

Rock nodded. They took no chances of their mounts shifting, despite the fact that every cow horse is trained to stand on dropped bridle reins, as if he were anchored. They tied them to saplings. Carbines in hand, they stole warily to a point where the thicket inched out on the edge of a drop-off. They were on a narrow bench. Behind them, like a series of huge steps, other benches rose, one above the other, to a bare grassy ridge.

From the timber they could not quite see over the brow. They dropped on all fours, crawled a few yards, crept, then crawled on their stomachs and, at last, lay peering down a sharp slope.

Rock’s eyes lit up at the activity below. The corrals were right under them. He could have cast a stone into the fire where the irons glowed. The hidden pens were built the shape of a dumb-bell. Two circular inclosures made the knobs. A chute connecting the two was the grip. Either pen would hold fully five hundred head of stock. The one nearest them was jammed with cattle.

Three mounted men worked in this uneasy mass of horned beasts, forcing them, one by one, into the chute. There, at the most constricted part of the passage, an ingenious arrangement wedged each animal fast, while through an opening in the wall of poles an artist with a running iron sent up little puffs of smoke from scorching hair and hide.

Rock couldn’t read the brands, either the old or the new ones, at that distance. He had no need. He knew as well as if he had been sitting on that fence that the brand those cattle bore when they had passed through the chute was not the mark seared on when they were frisky calves. They carried a different mark—the mark of a different owner, deftly superimposed over the first. The old brand and the new could only be what he knew they must be, because he could recognize more than one man diligently laboring in the dust and the heat.

Buck Walters was there, unmistakable in his high-crowned hat with the silver band; also, Dave Wells, long, lean and efficient. Neither was a common-looking man. Rock knew every characteristic pose and action of Dave Wells. Buck Walters loomed as distinctive. He could swear to them.

A group of saddle horses stood outside the corrals. Rock counted. Three men mounted, three working at the fire—six. Out on the flat, where the grassy basin spread like a pocket in the vast skirt of the butte, two more riders rode herd on a bunch of cattle. Eight men in sight.

“That stuff on the flat isn’t worked yet, I don’t think,” Charlie whispered. He, too, was counting noses. “So they’ll probably have a herd of rebranded stuff down the canyon on the creek. Likely be two men on herd there.”

“No, it don’t, darn it,” Charlie said. “Buck had six riders besides himself. This hombre from the North joined him with five. That’s thirteen. Coupla more somewhere. What you goin’ to do about this, Rock? We got ’em red-handed.”

“I guess the best bet is to go back and get the boys,” Rock whispered. “We got here unseen. The bunch can make it, if we go careful. Then we’ll surround these festive stock hands and see just what all this secret industry means.”

Charlie’s wonder was cut short. He straightened out with a gasp, and the contortion of his body coincided with a sharp crack above, so close that it seemed in their very ears. Rock’s head twisted. He saw the upper half of a man’s body against the morning sky, on a bank above the brush that concealed their horses. He was drawing a careful bead on Rock with a rifle, and Rock rolled sidewise, thrusting up the muzzle of his carbine. Partly hidden in the long grass, Rock made a difficult target. Twice the lookout fired. Both bullets shaved Rock. He loosed two shots, himself, without effect, save to make the rifleman draw back. For the moment there was silence, while an echo went faintly back in the hills.

Lying flat, Rock parted the grass and looked over for Charlie Shaw. The boy had gone over the edge. His body had lodged against a cluster of wild cherry, twenty feet below. Another scalp for the enemy, Rock thought, with anger burning in him. But his wrath did not close his eyes. He saw that the men at the branding fire had dropped irons and were mounting, and that those in the corral were stepping their horses over lowered bars.

Of course they would have lookouts posted! And if that bunch of predatory thieves ever got on the bench above him, he was trapped. His own men couldn’t hear gunfire at that distance. It would be all off with him before they could buy into the game, anyway, if he had to face that bunch, single-handed, where he lay. Pretty fix! Rock gritted his teeth. He had been a little too sanguine—taken rather too long a chance. He had to move and move fast.

He began to worm himself hurriedly through the grass. Mount and ride; get out of gunshot and draw pursuit after him; decoy this enterprising aggregation right in under the guns of his own crew. Excellent! That would be a master stroke of retaliation. Rock’s nimble brain saw all this in illuminating flashes, while he moved.

The fellow above him kept firing at the quivering grass tops, shot after shot. Bullets bored into the mold beside him. He didn’t bother to shoot back. A kingdom for his horse—yes, two kingdoms! He could hear hoofs beating earth now. He found himself on the edge of the timber. Erect, four strides, a snatch at the tied macarte, the smack of his leg across the saddle, and he went crashing through the brush.

He was none too soon. The man above was yelling to those below. They were riding to head him off. Rock could hear the drum of their galloping. He laughed. He was above pursuit, ahead of it. Nothing, he felt confident, could gain on the rangy beast between his legs, bar accident—a badger hole, unseen in the grass, or a chance shot at long range.

The second was a chance. Because he meant to show himself—must show himself, to draw the pursuers hot on his trail right under that low ridge on which his riders lay. He did not mean to skulk in timber. They might lose him altogether, and they might possibly surround him. And he was hot with the memory of the agonized twist of Charlie Shaw’s face, as he slid over the bank.

So now he took a chance and bored into the open. Long, bare slopes slanted upward, contours that tried the wind and limb of stout horses. Behind, spread in open order, like skirmishing cavalry, riders drummed the turf. They were not so far behind that a bullet couldn’t reach him, but they were far enough to make shooting from the back of a plunging horse a futile business.

A yell arose at his appearance. Half a dozen guns barked at him. The bullets whined, as the wind whines in taut cordage. Rock kept his carbine in hand, not to shoot, but to hold safe. If his horse went down by a fluke, he wanted no broken gun stock to stand off these ugly customers.

They would kill him with a good deal of satisfaction and a certain amount of venom. For their own safety, they must. Rock looked over his shoulder. The lookout who had shot Charlie had come clear of the timber and was converging with his fellows. The day herders had quit their cattle to join the chase. The hunt was up strong. They would follow him to hell. He had spied upon their operations in that secluded hollow. Rock could imagine them confident of getting him. They had all that wild country to run him down, as hounds run down a wolf.

And when the bulk of that race was run, with a steep slope still to breast before he could thunder along that open plateau, overlooked by his own riders, Rock was not so sure that he would win. For a mile he had gained ground, had saved his mount a little, and still opened a gap. Now the gap was closing slowly, but inexorably. By the time he reached that bench, they would be close enough to throw lead. If he didn’t reach that level, they would have him on an open side hill, and they would riddle him before the firing drew his own crowd.

Very well, let the firing begin. Rock turned his carbine backward and fired repeatedly. They did not bother to reply. They were gaining, and they would shoot when they were ready. Their horses were fresh at the corrals. His mount had gone fifteen miles that morning. The brute was game. He did not falter. Head up, tail like a pennant, he took the short, steep slope with gallant leaps. But it slowed him.

The pursuit swept to the foot of the hill. It, too, slowed. Rock had reloaded his carbine. He fired at random now and drew reply, a fusillade that whistled close. Surely those Capital K riders would come alive and swoop down when they saw a dozen guns belching lead at one lone rider.

Rock’s horse scrambled panting over the brow, out on the level. Grass lifted yellow to the ridge above. Pines stood black against the sky, but never the shape of a horseman. And behind him, dangerously close, the heads and shoulders and horses of those angry thieves came over the lip of the hill. They were shooting now in a continuous stream.

Rock’s horse went out from under him, leaving him for a moment, it seemed, suspended in the air. He threw up one hand to protect that precious carbine, and fell limber, slack-muscled, by a great effort of will over instinct, ten feet ahead of his horse.

No badger hole had tripped that sure-footed beast. A bullet had done the work. He lay on his side with scarcely a quiver, a convenient bulwark to which Rock hastily crawled, and, flat on his stomach, he laid his carbine across the sweat-warm body.

A most astonishing thing happened. As his forefinger sought the trigger, that squad of riders jerked their mounts, each back on his haunches. For a moment, the extended hands holding six-shooters, seemed poised and uncertain. Two or three began to reel in their saddles. One man slid off slowly, headfirst. Then the gunfire broke loose again. But they did not charge down on Rock. He pulled, saw a man fall, drew down on another, deliberately and unhurried—smiling, in spite of the hot rage in his heart. For he knew his own men were in the fight now. Behind and above him a staccato burst of firing resounded above the nearer shooting. Pow! Pow! Rifles. Pow! Pow! Another man down. A horse spinning around and around on his hind legs, squealing with pain.

And then out of Buck Walters’ group of hesitant horsemen, who were shooting still, their horses plunging this way and that, one rider bent his head and came like a quarter horse off the mark. He didn’t shoot, and his gun hand was held stiffly straight before him. He had no great way to come—less than a hundred yards. He rode a coal-black horse with a white face, the same horse he had ridden the day he led his men to Nona Parke’s to hang Doc Martin to a cottonwood limb.

For a second, Rock held his fire. He could hear hoofbeats coming down from the pines. He saw those who had pursued him break and turn tail, shooting over their shoulders.

And this frenzied fool was coming straight at him, at Rock, at a man entrenched behind a dead horse, with a rifle in his hands.

The hate on Buck Walters’ face, the passion, and the sudden pang! pang! of his six-shooter fascinated Rock, even as he let the tip of the carbine sight settle on Buck’s heaving breast.

At twenty yards he fired. Walters straightened in his saddle. His mouth opened, as if in one last incredulous “Oh!” and he toppled sidewise.

But the black horse kept on, like a charging lion, like a cougar launched on its spring, like anything animate or inanimate that has acquired momentum beyond control. The brute was either blind or mad, or both. For one instant Rock hesitated. It seemed childish to shoot down a riderless horse. Surely the brute would see where he was going and turn aside. He had never seen anything like that. The black’s eyeballs were staring, his mouth foam-flecked with blood. Crazy. Hit perhaps. Running amuck. Rock flung up his carbine and fired. But he had waited a fraction of a second too long. The black horse loomed in the air right over Rock, and, as the bullet paralyzed him, came down in a heap, with crimson spurting from the hole Rock had drilled in the white blaze of his face.

One flying hoof struck Rock, and a tremendous weight smashed down on him. For a second or so, he seemed to be gifted with a strange, magnified awareness of all that was taking place. He could see his own men sweeping by on either side with exultant yells, firing. He could see figures prone on the grass, a couple of saddle horses galloping aimlessly, with stirrups flapping. It was all illuminated with an unearthly radiance, a light brighter and whiter than any sun that ever shone on the plains. In the midst of this transfigured reality, very strangely—wondering how that could be—he could see Nona Parke’s face, sad and troubled, but very alluring.

CHAPTER XVI—“CERTAINLY NOT SAD.”

On the plain slanting imperceptibly toward the Marias River, a herd grazed south in loose formation, nearly a thousand head of mature cattle. All these horned beasts bore on their ribs a freshly seared brand—the Maltese Cross. Also, rather strangely, considering that the Maltese Cross home ranch lay just out of sight in the valley, taken in conjunction with this foreign brand, the four riders loafing on the fringes of the herd rode horses with a Capital K gracefully curved on each glossy shoulder.

A mile from the leaders of this herd, now occasionally sniffing at water afar, the clustered buildings of the Maltese Cross stood beside the river. In a stout log bunk house, with one door and two windows, a group of sullen-faced men sat disconsolate. The door was shut. Each window was boarded to the top, so that the interior lay in a sort of gray gloom. And, outside, by the single door and by each window stood a bored cowpuncher, doing sentry duty with a rifle in the crook of his arm.

A pleasant, comfortably furnished house of several rooms stood apart from the lesser buildings. In the center room, occupying an armchair, Rock Holloway sat with an elderly, thin-faced gentleman, who stroked a long mustache, while Rock talked.

“I would like to have got them both alive,” Rock was saying. “But Buck must have gone loco when he saw what he was up against. I expect, he concluded he would get me then and there, if it was the last act of his life. Which, of course, it was. Wells fought ’em to the last, the boys say. So we got what was left, who didn’t feel like shooting it out to the last man. And while we were at it, we brought along all these cattle they worked over—come home from the wars bringing our trophies, you might say. If you know of any Indian fighting, going on anywhere, Uncle Bill, I wish you’d tell me. I think I’d go mingle into it, so I could lead a peaceful life for a while. This last two weeks has been much too hair raising for my taste.”

“You done well,” Uncle Bill muttered. “You done damn well. My hunch was right.”

“As it happens, it don’t matter whether Wells or Walters owned the Steering Wheel,” Rock said thoughtfully. “We caught ’em red-handed, with the goods on ’em. Funny, how things work out. If I hadn’t had trouble with Mark Duffy, I’d never have seen the Steering Wheel or known there was such an outfit across the Canada line. If Buck hadn’t been so eager to shut Doc Martin’s mouth first, and then transferred his attention to me, as soon as he found I’d been with this precious outfit up North, I would not have tumbled to his game. I began to smell a rat when I saw him and Wells together in Fort Benton. When I got Stack to talk, of course, it was simple to put the whole thing together, seeing that I’d wondered just where the Steering Wheel got a whole herd of fresh-branded steers so early in the spring. All I had to do was make a few marks, like those on a piece of paper to satisfy myself. It’s an old trick—almost as old as the crime of forgery which you bloated bankers are always hounding men for. But it was well thought out, just the same. Buck was a pretty brainy man. He would have stolen the Maltese Cross blind in two or three years.”

Uncle Bill stared at a piece of paper lying on the table. Rock had made certain marks on it a few minutes earlier. To a range man the meaning was as words of one syllable to an eighth-grade schoolboy. He had demonstrated in four figures how easy it was to transform a Maltese Cross into a steering wheel. The change was easy, as both men knew, when it was a finished product on the ribs of a steer. It was a suspicion-proof job, once the hair had grown out on the worked-over brand.

“Yes, sir, you done well,” Uncle Bill repeated. “I can tell you how it started—this Steering Wheel business. I found out before I left. Buck borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars a year ago last winter on the strength of his prospects as coadministrator of Snell’s estate. He used that money to buy twelve hundred head of cattle in the Panhandle. But I hadn’t connected him up with Dave Wells or the Steering Wheel brand. The how of it, as you say, don’t matter so much now. We got to get them cattle out of Canada. My idea would be to clean everything outa that country. If Wells or Buck Walters has any kin or creditors to put in a claim, we can settle with them. Eh?”

“I’d grab the Steering Wheel, lock, stock and barrel,” Rock advised. “They may have stolen that herd in the South, for all we know. No, hardly. I told you the brands, didn’t I? That’s how you found out he bought ’em?”

“There’s a heap to do,” he ruminated. “I have this whole darned thing on my shoulders now. Say, Rock, will you take hold here for me? You can name your own figure to run the Maltese Cross till this estate is cleaned up? Will you?”

“I’ll tell you ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to-morrow, Uncle Bill,” he said. “Right now, I don’t know——”

“I wonder if there’s a buggy around this ranch? I am too darned stiff and sore to fork a horse, and I want to go up to the Parke ranch.”

“There sure is,” Uncle Bill replied. “I drove one out from Benton. Say, Alice is up there, one of the men told me. How’d it be if I come along an’ drive you? I want to see that young woman.”

“Fine,” Rock agreed. “Kill two birds with one stone. Alice’ll be wanting to pin medals on us, I expect. She was death against Buck Walters. I don’t blame her much, seeing he killed off a boy she’d set her heart on.”

“Yes, I heard about him soon after I got here,” Uncle Bill observed. “They say he was a twin for you.”

“Maybe you could console Alice,” Uncle Bill suggested hopefully. “She’s a mighty fine girl, and she is going to be a mighty rich girl.”

“No, thank you, kind sir. I ain’t marrying for either good looks or riches,” Rock murmured. “Let’s get that buggy hitched and be on our way, Uncle Bill.”

“I think them boys around the ranch are all right,” he confided to Rock, as they went rolling across the river flats. “I don’t think they are the sort Buck would mix into his nefarious schemes. Swear they didn’t know he was crooked, anyhow. So I expect we got to give ’em the benefit of the doubt.”

“Probably,” Rock agreed, with more or less indifference. He had done his job, and he was ill at ease in mind and body for the doing. Let Uncle Bill or some one else fret about the welfare of the Maltese Cross and the loyalty of its riders. He had other things on his mind just then.

“Say, Uncle Bill, although there was not much mixed stock among these stolen cattle, there was some,” Rock said, after a long time. “And this girl I’ve been working for is shy sixty or seventy calves this spring.”

“We’ll brand a hundred for her on fall round-up,” Sayre said largely. “A couple of hundred, if you say so. We’ll treat our friends right and give our enemies their due. I listened to that towhead boy rave about Nona Parke this morning. Always did admire a woman with brains to undertake things and the spunk to see ’em through. You tell her I said so.”

They fell silent. A breeze from the west played on their faces, killing the sweltering heat in that valley. A little bunch of Nona Parke’s horses tore out of a low place, snorted, and wheeled to stand, with heads high, watching them pass. The river sang its ancient crooning song, white on the riffles, dark and still in the pools that mirrored overhanging willows. Beautiful, Rock thought, peaceful, tranquil beyond words. The last time he had crossed that flat—— It made him shiver a little to remember. He was still sick from building a fire at Stack’s feet, and his head swam sometimes from pain. But that was past. The bushwhackers and hanging squads would ride no more. There had been close shaves. Yes. Perhaps the gods had flung a protecting mantle about him so that he could come back and enjoy this in restful security. He had no great pride or joy in his success; only a mild satisfaction, a relief that it was over. And he found himself afflicted with a strange mixture of eagerness and nervousness, as they drove in to the TL.

Uncle Bill drew his team to a halt by the kitchen door. A saddled horse stood there—a Seventy Seven mare. Rock got out of the buggy. Perhaps he had disposed of one enemy only to encounter another. He did not want a feud with Elmer Duffy. But who could fathom another man’s moods and tenses? And Rock was not organized for war. Still, a man must do the best he could, always.

“I’ll drive this team down to the barn and tie ’em to the fence,” Uncle Bill said. “I don’t see no ranch hands around to take hold of ’em.”

“What do you think this is? A livery stable?” Rock scoffed. Uncle Bill grinned amiably and drove on.

Rock stood, uncertain. He suspected that was Elmer’s mount, and he hadn’t come there to exchange either civilities or animosities with Elmer. He was tempted to go on to the porch and the bunk house. He could hear voices in the kitchen. But he was instinctively direct. He hated subterfuge. If Elmer Duffy was there, what did it matter? He granted the man common sense equal to his own.

He stepped, hobbled rather, to the kitchen door, for he had a very sore leg, where Buck Walters’ frenzied horse had fallen across him. A stray bullet had furrowed a streak under one armpit. He had been fortunate, but these minor injuries crippled him and made his step uncertain. His actions were slow.

As once before he had approached Elmer Duffy unseen, from the rear, so it happened now. Elmer was talking. Rock didn’t catch the words—had no wish to—but the note in his voice was pleading. And Nona’s expression was of annoyance, even of worry. But her eyes lit up at sight of Rock. And that swift change on her face warned Duffy. He swung on his heel, just as Rock called: “Hello, people.”

A scowl formed on Duffy’s homely, angular face. He didn’t speak. His countenance spoke for him. A storm gathered in that look, Rock felt. What he could, he did, to ward that off.

“Like the cat, I came back,” he said easily. “Somewhat the worse for wear. Say, Elmer, you should have been in on the big doings up in the Sweet Grass with us. Did it ever strike you that Buck Walters was making some queer moves around here lately?”

“Stirring up a lot of agitation over petty rustling,” Rock said casually, “when he was stealing wholesale from his own outfit, the Maltese Cross.”

“They say you should never speak ill of the dead,” Rock went on, “but what I tell you is a solemn fact. Some of his crowd went over the divide with him. The rest of them are on their way to jail. We got them dead to rights, working over the brand in a set of hidden corrals on the slope of East Butte. There’s been some excitement, I wish to remark. Uncle Bill Sayre, the other executor of the Snell estate, came up from Texas. He’s tying up his buggy team down at the stable. You know Bill Sayre from Fort Worth, don’t you? You’ve heard of him, anyway.”

He addressed his remarks directly to Elmer who glanced out and saw a tall figure approaching the house.

“Well, by heck!” he said in frank astonishment. “That’s the darnedest thing I ever heard of. You say Buck is dead?”

“I was on his trail. He knew it, I guess. That’s why he was so anxious to put me away. He started a war, and he got what was coming to him. He had worked the brand on nearly two thousand Maltese Crosses that we know of already.

“I’ll be darned,” Elmer said again feebly. “I wonder if that was why he was sicking me onto you?”

“I expect,” Rock said coolly. “He made a dirty break that morning, here. He was pretty deep, Buck was.”

“No hard feelin’s about that hangin’ expedition?” He inquired diffidently.

“None whatever.” Rock shook his head. “You spoke for me like a man, Elmer, when you were satisfied who I was. I thank you for that.”

“Well, shake on it.” Duffy suddenly held out his hand. “You never bamboozled me, anyway. I respect you enough to admit I’d rather be friendly than fight.”

“Guess I’ll step out an’ say hello to Uncle Bill,” Duffy said quietly. “Then I guess I’ll split the breeze. So long. So long, Nona.”

So he went. As he stepped out, Alice Snell from somewhere about the house espied the elderly gentleman from Fort Worth and ran to meet him with welcoming shrieks. The three of them stood in a knot talking.

“Say, mind if I camp myself in a chair, Nona? I’ve got a game leg, and I’m more or less caved in otherwise.”

“Goodness, yes. Here.” Nona came around the table, dragging a chair to him against his protest. “What happened, anyhow?”

“Plenty.” Rock sank thankfully on the seat. “I went up to the Sweet Grass with that outfit, looking for something, and I found a heap.”

“Lots of it. What I really came up here to tell you, Nona, is that Charlie got shot,” Rock said wearily. “I’m sorry, because I partly got him into the mix-up. He knew where these hidden corrals were, and he went along to show us. But he has lived it out three days now, and he seems strong. He’s a nervy, husky kid. I think he will be all right. I sent him on to Benton in a wagon. He will have the best of everything that can do him good. He helped us clean up a dirty mess.”

Rock began at the beginning and told her briefly, but clearly, all that had happened since the day Uncle Bill Sayre called him into Fort Worth and laid a mission on his shoulders, down to the present. She sat staring at him, mute, impassive-faced, but with a queer glow in her eyes.

“I am glad that man is dead,” she said at last. “Now we can all go about our business, easy in our minds.”

“Can we?” Rock said. “I wonder? What was Elmer so earnest and so eloquent about when I came in?”

“Oh, pestering me to marry him, as usual,” she said. “He makes me tired.”

“Yes? And I have a sort of feeling in my bones that when I get all right again, if I should come back to work for you again, I’d make you tired like that, too,” Rock said dispiritedly.

“Eh?” He stared at her unbelievingly. She was smiling at him. A bit wistfully, it is true, but smiling. He couldn’t find any of that old imperious disdain. A ripple of amusement crossed her face and vanished.

Rock disregarded his game leg. Impetuously he rose. So did Nona. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked searchingly into the gray pools of her eyes. He could read nothing there. It seemed to him that his heart was coming up into his throat to choke him.

“To tell the truth,” she said, in a breathless sort of tone, “I like you a heap—and that’s saying a lot—for me.”

A minute or so later, Rock tilted her head away from his breast, to stare down at her with a strange misgiving. The gray eyes uplifted to his own were wet, shiny and filled with tears.”

“You silly thing,” she murmured. “Don’t you know that there are two times when every woman cries? When she’s very sad, and when she’s very happy. And I’m certainly not sad!”

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Out of the Blue

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