Bertrand W. Sinclair

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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?”
The vehemence in her voice made Rock smile.
“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. ”

“ 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.
“Buy a drink for the crowd, runt,” he commanded.
“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!” ”