Out of the Wilderness Page 4

  At every jump the distance between the two riders was jerked to a greater and to a greater stretch. Shorty, screaming like a soul in torment, yelled: “You fool! You fool! Are you gonna beat the horse and the bet of your own boss?”

  The big man turned in the saddle, and Shorty had sight of a vague, uncomprehending face. No need to try this villainous temptation in a place where it would not even be understood. Shorty bowed his head with another groan and resigned himself to his fate—to come in eating the dust of this monstrous beast and his half-witted rider.

  Still the great blue roan drifted farther and farther away. He knew horses, did Shorty, and with an anxious eye he waited to see her pounding in weariness in her stride—waited to see her head go up. Many and many a time, as he stood in the stands, with his bets placed, had Shorty seen the thoroughbreds come storming down the stretch. Many times he had seen the head of the spent horse jerk up and begin to bob like a cork in a wild-running stream. For that sign he waited now—or to see the mare bear out to one side or another.

  There was not a hint of such a change. Suddenly Shorty knew definitely that there would not be such a change. There was an untapped well of incredible strength in her that had not yet been called upon. Sandy Sweyn sat, only slightly pitched forward in the saddle to break the wind of the galloping and to swing him with the swing of the mate. Yet with every drive of her massive haunches, she was running farther and farther away into the lead.

  There was nothing left for Shorty but disgrace. Knowing his master, he knew that he would not receive any pleasant greeting when he came in on the losing horse. Neither would there be any cheer for him from his companions as they saw him ride their money into the pockets of the hay balers.

  Just as that moment of bitterness swelled in the heart of Shorty, he saw the head of the gelding jerk high. At the same instant, there was a wrench and a horrible sinking of the body of the fine horse. He was halting and limping, a furlong from the finish line over which the great mare was soon bounding.

  The yell of despair from the throats of his fellow cowpunchers was like a dirge to the ears of Shorty, and the shout of joy from the hay balers was a knife thrust of agony.

  He slid from the saddle and walked gloomily on, leading the broken horse behind him. He would have been moved to the wildest curses, if there had not been something else that awakened a greater emotion than wrath and shame. That was a sense of superstitious awe.

  For the shoulder in which the gelding had gone lame was the one in which the half-wit had declared that he had found a weakness before the race even so much as began. Into that shoulder he had thrust his forefinger, and had seemed to find an over-sensitive spot. Shorty found this too much for him. He walked in with a face that was a picture of silent and gloomy awe.

  Into the uproar he walked. The checks had been handed over to the doctor. The balers had collected the cash of the cowboys. On the one side there was a wild rejoicing; on the other side there was a bitter gloom.

  The laughter and the cursing died away on both sides, as the limping gelding hobbled in among them. What a picture between the dancing creature that had started in the race and this that hobbled home at the finish of it.

  “If I had had a real rider…,” big Peter Dunstan said savagely.

  Shorty turned upon him with murder in his eye. “If you’d’ve had the sense of a half-wit,” he said, “you would never have started a cripple in a race like this.”

  Dunstan was a man of great passion, but there had never been a moment since his childhood when he had allowed a bad temper to decide his actions to his own harm. Now he merely looked Shorty steadily in the eye, and then he said: “You’re pretty hot, Shorty, and I’m not going to talk to you now. You run along and try to raise enough wind to cool yourself.”

  He could afford to talk like that. If you have killed four men in your day, you don’t have to worry about the manner in which your more gracious and gentle actions may be interpreted by a misunderstanding crowd of spectators. No one thought twice about this speech of the big boss, except to feel that it proved the good sense that he had often shown before.

  Now, however, he turned to the limping gelding. He had lost through the disappointing running of that animal. That was not what hurt him so bitterly. The matter that cut him to the soul was that a half-witted boy had pointed out in this same gelding a flaw that his own experienced eye had not been able to see.

  “Take that horse out and sink a chunk of lead through its brain, Harry,” he said to one of the cowpunchers. “It’ll never be any good to any other man. And it’s cost me enough money by going lame once. I won’t have it turn that trick on me again.”

  Harry took the reins—then paused to strip the saddle off the back of the tall horse, which stood with head hanging in weariness and in pain.

  “Look here,” said a voice from the distance, a drawling, slow, monotonous voice, “there is something that could be done for that shoulder.”

  They turned to find big Sandy Sweyn approaching—with the shadowy blue roan at his heels.

  “Are you a doctor, son?” asked the big rancher sternly.

  “Dunstan,” broke in Dr. Morgan, “remember that if he has cost you five thousand today, he may be the saving of ten times that much to you later on. Don’t throw him away.”

  Seven

  As has been pointed out, Dunstan never allowed his bad temper to carry him away into any excesses of tongue or of deed that might result in an injury to his pocketbook. On this day, though a thousand curses were crowding up into his throat, he choked them back and dwelt upon Sandy Sweyn’s blank face with less and less anger and more and more consideration.

  Finally he said: “Now I’m going to turn this horse over to you, kid. If you know where the lameness is in that leg, I’ll leave it to you to cure him of the limp, and do a good job of it, too.”

  After that, Peter Dunstan was busy riding about the place with Dr. Morgan and hearing from him the plans by which the good doctor had hoped to redeem a hundred acres here and five hundred there from the range to reduce them under the profitable sway of the plow. Dunstan had just enough kindness and diplomacy to listen to all of these explanations, and pretend to be gaining important knowledge through them. As a matter of fact, he was impatient and irritated. He did not want plowed ground, and he had never wanted it. As he rode, he was merely taking heed of the fences that he would break down to let in the wild, free life of the range again. Fences to Peter Dunstan were like a curse.

  Scarcely had the doctor departed for the train before the first destructive orders were being given by Dunstan. He dictated them to his cowpunchers from the front porch of the doctor’s house. While he gave the orders, the horse that he had taken from one of his men after the laming of the gelding was pastured on the lawn. There it tore at the thick blue grass and stamped great trenches into the soft black earth. In ten seconds it had done such irreparable damage that only the complete remaking of the lawn would have been sufficient to eradicate them. Every time that the horse stamped, the heart of Peter Dunstan waxed more and more joyous. It was the sign that the new order had failed, and the old order had triumphed. Peter Dunstan was most distinctly a man of the old order.

  * * * * *

  For a fortnight he did not leave the new place. There was much to be done there—very much indeed, if he wished to have good pasture for his cows that winter. Every day he was in the saddle from morning until the night. Every night he sat up until after the middle hour, writing letters in a swift, bold, illegible hand, while the moths fluttered in white showers around his lamp and cast upon his letter paper the oily dust from their wings.

  There was nothing but bitter hard labor in all of the changes that he had to initiate, but there was an infinite satisfaction to the rancher. He had one touch of amusement, too, three days after he arrived.

  He was out with two of his men to supervise the construction of an
artificial tank that might serve as a watering place for his cows. As they came over a hill, they heard the thunderous bellowing of two fighting bulls. Then they saw them in the hollow—one, the great red Durham of the doctor’s breeding, already with flanks withering from famine, the other a hardy range bull, with a front, scarred by many a hard conflict of a similar nature. He could not, for a moment, endure the plunging weight of the red bull, however. Back he went, staggering, his knees sagging.

  “He’s going down and out,” said one of Dunstan’s men.

  “Bah,” said the rancher, “he’s hardly started to fight. Wait till he gets warmed up, and he’ll make that hand-fed fatty grunt, I can tell you.”

  He was right. The range bull disengaged his horns, leaped to the side, and the red monster went floundering past. Before he could change the direction of his charge, the agile hero of the mountain desert had caught him full in the tender flank with ripping, goring horns.

  One touch of that pepper was enough for the Durham. He fled for his life, bellowing twice as loud with pain and fear, as he had ever done with rage before. After him went the range bull, far fleeter of foot, and plowing up the crimson flanks of the Durham with repeated thrusts.

  Peter Dunstan enjoyed the sight with a grim smile.

  “Shall I drive ’em apart?” asked one of the men, as the pair disappeared over the next swell of the land.

  “Let ’em go,” replied the rancher. “If you save that fat fool of a prize bull today, he’ll be butchered tomorrow. I wouldn’t have such stock on my range, I tell you.”

  He went on, content. He only wished, in his heart of hearts, that he could have had the doctor at hand to see that combat and its result.

  When the fortnight ended, and the rancher decided that it was time for him to hurry back to the home place, he came upon a most unpleasant spectacle. It was old Buck, the same range bull who had conquered the Durham on that other day—now lying on his side upon the plain, dead. He was terribly cut up, and the spot, where the horn of the victorious bull had plunged through his side and found the heart, was plainly visible.

  “But what bull could have done it?” Dunstan asked. “Unless one of the youngsters got in a lucky crack at Buck, I can’t explain it, because none of the old fellows is foolish enough to even lock horns with him. He’s given a lesson to all of them.”

  Indeed, he was the lord and the patriarch of the Dunstan herds, and he had carved the fear of himself with dreadful horns on all the thousands of cattle that roamed upon that section of the range. The explanation was not far to seek. They had not ridden on a mile and a half before they came upon a mighty bull, sunk to the belly in the cool wallowing mud at the verge of a tank. The red of battle was not yet washed away from his front. His horns were painted from the war, and his sides were covered and criss-crossed by the black markings of wounds, recently received.

  When he saw the riders, he backed from the mud and whirled upon them with the angry roar of a truly vicious bull. Lofty at the withers as a buffalo, ponderous of shoulder and of haunch, also, his eyes two balls of red fire, his flanks wrinkled, and his belly tucked up from the scant fare on which he had been living, who could have told that this was the great Durham bull of the doctor’s breeding?

  He charged them with a bellow of madness, and Peter Dunstan put spurs to his horse and rode away without a word. He did not like to have his predictions turn out so far from correct. Not one of the cowpunchers behind him dared to voice a comment. But when they came back to the ranch house they had quite an interesting story to tell.

  However, Dunstan was in a quandary. He had announced before all his best men that the red Durham bull was a worthless thing and that he did not want it on his range. Now he had changed his mind, but could he afford to cast aside dignity and infallibility, with his cowpunchers realizing it? He would not have done so had it not been for the loss of the famous Buck. That was a grand bull, a perfect type for the range, according to Dunstan. He could not very well accept that loss without taking some steps to replace it. Here was the red bull, growing thinner and thinner with the passage of every day. He had proved the might of his limbs, the courage of his heart, and the readiness with which he could learn the lessons of battle. Still, he was starving to death. He had lived too long in reach of all the hay he could eat and cool water to drink. He could not forage for himself. The thought of that great red bull haunted Dunstan all the way back to the old ranch house.

  He got there in the middle of afternoon and found, sitting on the corral fence, whittling, the bulky shoulders and the thoughtless face of Sandy Sweyn, his hat pushed far back on his head.

  “Well!” cried the boss. “Is that all that you can find to do? Hasn’t Steve sent you to do something?”

  The half-wit raised his dull, handsome face, and shook his head.

  It had been the rancher’s idea of an easy job for the simple fellow to make him roustabout to his formidable cook. Steve McGuire’s mulligan stew was famous across the width and up and down the length of the range. The length of his punching arm and the hardness of his fist were famous, also. It was never possible to keep an assistant with McGuire for more than a very short period, indeed. Surely it was more than wonderful if McGuire were not able to keep the half-wit busy from the dawn to the dark.

  “No,” Sandy Sweyn said, “he didn’t seem to need me none.”

  “He didn’t seem?” the rancher said. “Did you ask him?”

  “Sure,” Sandy Sweyn said with large and innocent eyes. “I asked him, and he said that he didn’t need me.”

  “Did he tell you to come out here and sit on the fence like a scarecrow?”

  Sandy Sweyn concentrated his faraway eyes in recollection. “He said that he didn’t give a hang what I did,” Sandy said, and then nodded, pleased with the flawless accuracy of his memory. “Yes, that’s what he said.”

  “I’m going to ask Steve,” the rancher declared, “and if you’re lying, you’ll regret it.” He got to the kitchen door in two bounds of his spur-tortured horse. He flung himself from the saddle and quickly strode through the kitchen door.

  “Hey!” yelled a giant voice. “What d’you mean by letting the dust in on this here coffee-cake, you long-legged shorthorn? Who asked you to step into this here kitchen, Dunstan?”

  Peter Dunstan, abashed, closed the door hastily behind him, and watched the last of the dust that he had admitted settle on the surface of the twisted rolls of coffee-cake. There was never a breakfast without those cakes. It sweetened all the life on the ranch for Dunstan and his men.

  He said mildly: “I only came to ask you, Steve, if you knew that your roustabout was sitting on the corral fence?”

  Eight

  With a glare Steve McGuire paused in his slicing of the coffee-cake, preparatory to strewing the sliced walnuts over its sticky surface.

  “Is he setting on the fence?” McGuire said. “All I wish is that he was setting on the edge of a cliff, instead, and that there was a wind strong enough to blow him over the edge. All I wish is that there was a thousand-foot drop on the offside of that cliff, and that the rocks was hard below with just enough river to wash away the dust from the spot where he landed. Outside of that, there ain’t much harm that I wish to him.”

  “He wouldn’t work?” Dunstan asked. “Then there are ways of making him work!”

  “Wouldn’t?” the cook echoed. “Oh, he would work, well enough. He was plumb willing. But he couldn’t work. Look yonder, I ask you, at what’s left of the best cleaver that a butcher ever swung. How many steers and how many deer had I broke up with that cleaver? And now look at it.” He took down from the wall a monstrous cleaver, larger and heavier than a woodsman’s axe. Behold, all the biting edge had been stripped from the face of the tool.

  “How the devil did that happen?” asked the rancher.

  “I dunno,” answered the cook sadly, turning the cleaver gloomily
from side to side. “Look at the balance that it’s got? And look at the make of it. That was the best German steel that was ever made. Why, you could stand all day long and bust up rocks with that cleaver, and it wouldn’t even have its edge turned. I gave it to Sandy Sweyn to cut up a quarter of beef. He give two whacks. Then I hear a sort of a terrible pounding begin that made the house fair shake. I yells out…‘What are you doing?’

  “He says…‘This here cleaver seems to be sort of broke.’

  “I didn’t believe that it was possible. I went in and I seen that he had smashed the edges of that cleaver like it was made of glass, not of steel at all. How he done it I dunno. But he ain’t human. He’s got the strength of ten mules locked up in that right arm of his and ten wild horses is in his left hand. And you never know, when you ask for something, if them twenty animals ain’t gonna come a-ragin’ out and trample right on over you.”

  The rancher took the cleaver, examined it, and passed it back, filled with wonder rather than with anger. He himself had swung that cleaver. He knew the strength of that steel. How dreadful, then, must have been the might of the man who had driven the cleaver with such force that it had shattered the entire edge upon the ox bone.

  “You could let him do something that takes no sense, Steve,” he suggested. “You could let him chop the wood for your fire for you. You’re always saying that it takes half of your time for the chopping of the wood, you know.”

  Steve McGuire strode to the wall. He took down from it three axes. The handle of one was splintered to match wood. Another was broken across. The handle of the third was wrapped around and around with linen tape. Even so, the fracture was visible through the bandaging.

  “All the finest kind of steel. You know the kind of axes that I’ve always made you buy for me, Dunstan. Them handles was the finest hickory that ever was grooved. I ain’t no baby when it comes to the swinging of an axe. Not me! I’ve had the picking of those handles myself, and I know wood. But this fool…this blockhead, that you sent to me…he took them three axes of mine, and he went out to cut me up some wood. He cut me up two big armfuls mighty quick. I looked out through the window after he brought in the first armful, and I seen him working on that wood. It was all oak. All twisted and seasoned scrub oak, just one mite harder and meaner than iron is to work up, but the way that feller was swingin’ that axe, he was just sinking it through that oak as though it was dough.