Book: The Range Dwellers

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They were not in the suit-case--or, if they were, I had not run across
them. Rankin had a way of stowing things away so that even he had to do
some tall searching, and he had another way of filling up my suit-cases
with truck I'd no immediate use for. I yanked the case toward me, unlocked
it, and turned it out on the bed, just to prove Rankin's general
incapacity as valet to a fastidious fellow like me.

There was the suit I had worn on that memorable excursion to the Cliff
House--I had told Rankin to pitch it into the street, for I had
discovered Teddy Van Greve in one almost exactly like it, and--Hello!
Rankin had certainly overlooked a bet. I never caught him at it before,
that's certain. He had a way of coming to my left elbow, and, in a
particularly virtuous tone, calling my attention to the fact that I had
left several loose bills in my pockets. Rankin was that honest I often
told him he would land behind the bars as an embezzler some day. But
Rankin had done it this time, for fair; tucked away in a pocket of the
waistcoat was money--real, legal, lawful tender--m-o-n-e-y! I don't
suppose the time will ever come when it will look as good to me as it did
right then. I held those bank-notes--there were two of them, double
XX's--to my face and sniffed them like I'd never seen the like before and
never expected to again. And the funny part was that I forgot all about
wanting the gray trousers, and all about the faults of Rankin. My feet
were on bottom again, and my head on top. I marched down-stairs,
whistling, with my hands in my pockets and my chin in the air, and told
the landlord to serve dinner an hour earlier than usual, and to make it a
good one.

He looked at me with a curious mixture of wonder and amusement. "Dinner,"
he drawled calmly, "has been over for three hours; but I guess we can give
yuh some supper any time after five."

I suppose he looked upon me as the rankest kind of a tenderfoot. I
calculated the time of my torture till I might, without embarrassing
explanations, partake of a much-needed repast, and went to the door;
waiting was never my long suit, and I had thoughts of getting outside and
taking a look around. At the second step I changed my mind--there was that
deceptive mud to reckon with.

So from the doorway I surveyed all of Montana that lay between me and the
sky-line, and decided that my bets would remain on California. The sky was
a dull slate, tumbled into what looked like rain-clouds and depressing to
the eye. The land was a dull yellowish-brown, with a purple line of hills
off to the south, and with untidy snow-drifts crouching in the hollows.
That was all, so far as I could see, and if dulness and an unpeopled
wilderness make for the reformation of man, it struck me that I was in a
fair way to become a saint if I stayed here long. I had heard the
cattle-range called picturesque; I couldn't see the joke.

Frosty Miller sat opposite me at table when, in the course of human
events, I ate again, and the way I made the biscuit and ham and boiled
potatoes vanish filled him with astonishment, if one may judge a man's
feelings by the size of his eyes. I told him that the ozone of the plains
had given me an appetite, and he did not contradict me; he looked at my
plate, and then smiled at his own, and said nothing--which was polite of
him.

"Did you ever skip two meals and try to make it up on the third?" I asked
him when we went out, and he said "Sure," and rolled a cigarette. In those
first hours of our acquaintance Frosty was not what I'd call loquacious.

That night I took out the letter addressed to one Perry Potter, which dad
had given me and which I had not had time to seal in his presence, and
read it cold-bloodedly. I don't do such things as a rule, but I was
getting a suspicion that I was being queered; that I'd got to start my
exile under a handicap of the contempt of the natives. If dad had stacked
the deck on me, I wanted to know it. But I misjudged him--or, perhaps, he
knew I'd read it. All he had written wouldn't hurt the reputation of any
one. It was:

The bearer, Ellis H. Carleton, is my son. He will probably be
with you for some time, and will not try to assume any authority
or usurp your position as foreman and overseer. You will treat
him as you do the other boys, and if he wants to work, pay him
the same wages--if he earns them.

It wasn't exactly throwing flowers in the path my young feet should tread,
but it might have been worse. At least, he did not give Perry Potter his
unbiased opinion of me, and it left me with a free hand to warp their
judgment somewhat in my favor. But--"If he wants to work, pay him the same
wages--if he earns them." Whew!

I might have saved him the trouble of writing that, if I had only known
it. Dad could go too far in this thing, I told myself chestily. I had
come, seeing that he insisted upon it, but I'd be damned if I'd work for
any man with a circus-poster name, and have him lord it over me. I hadn't
been brought up to appreciate that kind of joke. I meant to earn my
living, but I did not mean to get out and slave for Perry Potter. There
must be something respectable for a man to do in this country besides
ranch work.

In the morning we started off, with my trunks in the wagon, toward the
line of purple hills in the south. Frosty Miller told me, when I asked
him, that they were forty-eight miles away, that they marked the Missouri
River, and that we would stop there overnight. That, if I remember,
was about the extent of our conversation that day. We smoked
cigarettes--Frosty Miller made his, one by one, as he needed them--and
thought our own thoughts. I rather suspect our thoughts were a good many
miles apart, though our shoulders touched. When you think of it, people
may rub elbows and still have an ocean or two between them. I don't know
where Frosty was, all through that long day's ride; for me, I was back in
little old Frisco, with Barney MacTague and the rest of the crowd; and
part of the time, I know, I was telling dad what a mess he'd made of
bringing up his only son.

That night we slept in a shack at the river--"Pochette Crossing" was the
name it answered to--and shared the same bed. It was not remarkable for
its comfort--that bed. I think the mattress was stuffed with potatoes; it
felt that way.

Next morning we were off again, over the same bare, brown, unpeopled
wilderness. Once we saw a badger zigzagging along a side-hill, and Frosty
whipped out a big revolver--one of those "Colt 45's," I suppose--and shot
it; he said in extenuation that they play the very devil with the range,
digging holes for cow-punchers to break their necks over.

I was surprised at Frosty; there he had been armed, all the time, and I
never guessed it. Even when we went to bed the night before, I had not
glimpsed a weapon. Clearly, he could not be a cowboy, I reflected, else
he would have worn a cartridge-belt sagging picturesquely down over one
hip, and his gun dangling from it. He put the gun away, and I don't know
where; somewhere out of sight it went, and Frosty turned off the trail and
went driving wild across the prairie. I asked him why, and he said, "Short
cut."

Then a wind crept out of the north, and with it the snow. We were climbing
low ridges and dodging into hollows, and when the snow spread a white veil
over the land, I looked at Frosty out of the tail of my eye, wondering if
he did not wish he had kept to the road--trail, it is called in the
rangeland.

If he did, he certainly kept it to himself; he went on climbing hills and
setting the brake at the top, to slide into a hollow, and his face kept
its inscrutable calm; whatever he thought was beyond guessing at.

When he had watered the horses at a little creek that was already skimmed
with ice, and unwrapped a package of sandwiches on his knee and offered
me one, I broke loose. Silence may be golden, but even old King Midas got
too big a dose of gold, once upon a time, if one may believe tradition.

"I hate to butt into a man's meditations," I said, looking him straight in
the eye, "but there's a limit to everything, and you've played right up to
it. You've had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough
more to keep you hustling the allotted span; you've been given an
opportunity to reconstruct the universe and breed a new philosophy of
life. For Heaven's sake, _say_ something!"

Frosty eyed me for a minute, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth
twitched. "Sure," he responded cheerfully. "I'm something like you; I hate
to break into a man's meditations. It looks like snow."

"Do you think it's going to storm?" I retorted in the same tone; it had
been snowing great guns for the last three hours. We both laughed, and
Frosty unbent and told me a lot about Bay State Ranch and the country
around it.

Part of the information was an eye-opener; I wished I had known it when
dad was handing out that roast to me--I rather think I could have made him
cry enough. I tagged the information and laid it away for future
reference.

As I got the country mapped out in my mind, we were in a huge capital H.
The eastern line, toward which we were angling, was a river they call the
Midas--though I'll never tell you why, unless it's a term ironical. The
western line is another river, the Joliette, and the cross-bar is a range
of hills--they might almost be called mountains--which I had been facing
all that morning till the snow came between and shut them off; White
Divide, it is called, and we were creeping around the end, between them
and the Midas. It seemed queer that there was no way of crossing, for the
Bay State lies almost in a direct line south from Osage, Frosty told me,
and the country we were traversing was rough as White Divide could be, and
I said so to Frosty. Right here is where I got my first jolt.

"There's a fine pass cut through White Divide by old Mama Nature," Frosty
said, in the sort of tone a man takes when he could say a lot more, but
refrains.

"Then why in Heaven's name don't you travel it?"

"Because it isn't healthy for Ragged H folks to travel that way," he said,
in the same eloquent tone.

"Who are the Ragged H folks, and what's the matter with them?" I wanted to
know--for I smelled a mystery.

He looked at me sidelong. "If you didn't look just like the old man," he
said, "I'd think yuh were a fake; the Ragged H is the brand your ranch is
known by--the Bay State outfit. And it isn't healthy to travel King's
Highway, because there's a large-sized feud between your father and old
King. How does it happen yuh aren't wise to the family history?"

"Dad never unbosomed himself to me, that's why," I told him. "He has
labored for twenty-five years under the impression that I was a kid just
able to toddle alone. He didn't think he needed to tell me things; I know
we've got a place called the Bay State Ranch somewhere in this part of the
world, and I have reason to think I'm headed for it. That's about the
extent of my knowledge of our interest here. I never heard of the White
Divide before, or of this particular King. I'm thirsting for information."

"Well, it strikes me you've got it coming," said Frosty. "I always had
your father sized up as being closed-mouthed, but I didn't think he made
such a thorough job of it as all that. Old King has sure got it in for the
Ragged H--or Bay State, if yuh'd rather call us that; and the Ragged H
boys don't sit up nights thinking kind and loving thoughts about him,
either. Thirty years ago your father and old King started jangling over
water-rights, and I guess they burned powder a-plenty; King goes lame to
this day from a bullet your old man planted in his left leg."

I dropped the flag and started him off again. "It's news to me," I put in,
"and you can't tell me too much about it."

"Well," he said, "your old man was in the right of it; he owns all the
land along Honey Creek, right up to White Divide, where it heads; uh
course, he overlooked a bet there; he should have got a cinch on that
pass, and on the head uh the creek. But he let her slide, and first he
knew old King had come in and staked a claim and built him a shack right
in our end of the pass, and camped down to stay. Your dad wasn't joyful.
The Bay State had used that pass to trail herds through and as the easiest
and shortest trail to the railroad; and then old King takes it up, strings
a five-wired fence across at both ends of his place, and warns us off.
I've heard Potter tell what warm times there were. Your father stayed
right here and had it out with him. The Bay State was all he had, then,
and he ran it himself. Perry Potter worked for him, and knows all about
it. Neither old King nor your dad was married, and it's a wonder they
didn't kill each other off--Potter says they sure tried. The time King got
it in the leg your father and his punchers were coming home from a breed
dance, and they were feeling pretty nifty, I guess; Potter told me they
started out with six bottles, and when they got to White Divide there
wasn't enough left to talk about. They cut King's fence at the north end,
and went right through, hell-bent-for-election. King and his men boiled
out, and they mixed good and plenty. Your father went home with a hole in
his shoulder, and old King had one in his leg to match, and since then
it's been war. They tried to fight it out in court, and King got the best
of it there. Then they got married and kind o' cooled off, and pretty soon
they both got so much stuff to look after that they didn't have much time
to take pot-shots at each other, and now we're enjoying what yuh might
call armed peace. We go round about sixty miles, and King's Highway is bad
medicine.

"King owns the stage-line from Osage to Laurel, where the Bay State gets
its mail, and he owns Kenmore, a mining-camp in the west half uh White
Divide. We can go around by Kenmore, if we want to--but King's Highway?
Nit!"

I chuckled to myself to think of all the things I could twit dad about if
ever he went after me again. It struck me that I hadn't been a
circumstance, so far, to what dad must have been in his youth. At my
worst, I'd never shot a man.




CHAPTER III.

The Quarrel Renewed.


That night, by a close scratch, we made a little place Frosty said was one
of the Bay State line-camps. I didn't know what a line-camp was, and it
wasn't much for style, but it looked good to me, after riding nearly all
day in a snow-storm. Frosty cooked dinner and I made the coffee, and we
didn't have such a bad time of it, although the storm held us there for
two days.

We sat by the little cook-stove and told yarns, and I pumped Frosty just
about dry of all he'd ever heard about dad.

I hadn't intended to write to dad, but, after hearing all I did, I
couldn't help handing out a gentle hint that I was on. When I'd been at
the Bay State Ranch for a week, I wrote him a letter that, I felt, squared
my account with him. It was so short that I can repeat every word now.
I said:

DEAR DAD: I am here. Though you sent me out here to reform me, I
find the opportunities for unadulterated deviltry away ahead of
Frisco. I saw our old neighbor, King, whom you may possibly
remember. He still walks with a limp. By the way, dad, it seems
to me that when you were about twenty-five you "indulged in some
damned poor pastimes," yourself. Your dutiful son, ELLIS.

Dad never answered that letter.

Montana, as viewed from the Bay State Ranch in March, struck me as being
an unholy mixture of brown, sodden hills and valleys, chill winds that
never condescended to blow less than a gale, and dull, scurrying clouds,
with sometimes a day of sunshine that was bright as our own sun at home.
(You can't make me believe that our California sun bothers with any other
country.)

I'd been used to a green world; I never would go to New York in the
winter, because I hate the cold--and here I was, with the cold of New York
and with none of the ameliorations in the way of clubs and theaters and
the like. There were the hills along Midas River shutting off the East,
and hills to the south that Frosty told me went on for miles and miles,
and on the north stretched White Divide--only it was brown, and bleak, and
several other undesirable things. When I looked at it, I used to wonder at
men fighting over it. I did a heap of wondering, those first few days.

Taken in a lump, it wasn't my style, and I wasn't particular to keep my
opinions a secret. For the ranch itself, it looked to me like a village of
corrals and sheds and stables, evidently built with an eye to usefulness,
and with the idea that harmony of outline is a sin and not to be
tolerated. The house was put up on the same plan, gave shelter to Perry
Potter and the cook, had a big, bare dining-room where the men all ate
together without napkins or other accessories of civilization, and a
couple of bedrooms that were colder, if I remember correctly, than
outdoors. I know that the water froze in my pitcher the first night, and
that afterward I performed my ablutions in the kitchen, and dipped hot
water out of a tank with a blue dipper.

That first week I spent adjusting myself to the simple life, and trying to
form an unprejudiced opinion of my companions in exile. As for the said
companions, they sort of stood back and sized up my points, good and
bad--and I've a notion they laid heavy odds against me, and had me down in
the Also Ran bunch. I overheard one of them remark, when I was coming up
from the stables: "Here's the son and heir--come, let's kill him!" Another
one drawled: "What's the use? The bounty's run out."

I was convinced that they regarded me as a frost.

The same with Perry Potter, a grizzled little man with long, ragged beard
and gray eyes that looked through you and away beyond. I had a feeling
that dad had told him to keep an eye on me and report any incipient growth
of horse-sense. I may have wronged him and dad, but that is how I felt,
and I didn't like him any better for it. He left me alone, and I raised
the bet and left him alone so hard that I scarcely exchanged three
sentences with him in a week. The first night he asked after dad's health,
and I told him the doctor wasn't making regular calls at the house. A day
or so after he said: "How do you like the country?" I said: "Damn the
country!" and closed _that_ conversation. I don't remember that we had any
more for awhile.

The cowboys were breaking horses to the saddle most of the time, for it
was too early for round-up, I gathered. When I sat on the corral fence and
watched the fun, I observed that I usually had my rail all to myself and
that the rest of the audience roosted somewhere else. Frosty Miller talked
with me sometimes, without appearing to suffer any great pain, but Frosty
was always the star actor when the curtain rose on a bronco-breaking act.
As for the rest, they made it plain that I did _not_ belong to their set,
and I wasn't sending them my At Home cards, either. We were as haughty
with each other as two society matrons when each aspires to be called
leader.

Then a blizzard that lasted five days came ripping down over that
desolation, and everybody stuck close to shelter, and amused themselves as
they could. The cowboys played cards most of the time--seven-up, or
pitch, or poker; they didn't ask me to take a hand, though; I fancy they
were under the impression that I didn't know how to play.

I never was much for reading; it's too slow and tame. I'd much rather get
out and _live_ the story I like best. And there was nothing to read,
anyway. I went rummaging in my trunks, and in the bottom of one I came
across a punching-bag and a set of gloves. Right there I took off my hat
to Rankin, and begged his pardon for the unflattering names he'd been in
the habit of hearing from me. I carried the things down and put up the bag
in an empty room at one end of the bunk-house, and got busy.

Frosty Miller came first to see what was up, and I got him to put on the
gloves for awhile; he knew something of the manly art, I discovered, and
we went at it fast and furious. I think I broke up a game in the next
room. The boys came to the door, one by one, and stood watching, until we
had the full dozen for audience. Before any one realized what was
happening, we were playing together real pretty, with the chilly shoulder
barred and the social ice gone the way of a dew-drop in the sun.

We boxed and wrestled, with much scientific discussion of "full Nelsons"
and the like, and even fenced with sticks. I had them going there, and
could teach them things; and they were the willingest pupils a man ever
had--docile and filled with a deep respect for their teacher who knew all
there was to know--or, if he didn't, he never let on. Before night we had
smashed three window-panes, trimmed several faces down considerably, and
got pretty well acquainted. I found out that they weren't so far behind
the old gang at home for wanting all there is in the way of fun, and I
believe they discovered that I was harmless. Before that storm let up they
were dealing cards to me, and allowing me to get rid of the rest of the
forty dollars Rankin had overlooked. I got some of it back.

I went down and bunked with them, because they had a stove and I didn't,
and it was more sociable; Perry Potter and the cook were welcome to the
house, I told them, except at meal-times. And, more than all the rest, I
could keep out of range of Perry Potter's eyes. I never could get used to
that watch-Willie-grow way he had, or rid myself of the notion that he was
sending dad a daily report of my behavior.

The next thing, when the weather quit sifting snow and turned on the balmy
breezes and the sunshine, I was down in the corrals in my chaps and spurs,
learning things about horses that I never suspected before. When I did
something unusually foolish, the boys were good enough to remember my
boxing and fencing and such little accomplishments, and did not withdraw
their favor; so I went on, butting into every new game that came up, and
taking all bets regardless, and actually began to wise up a little and to
forget a few of my grievances.

I was down in the corral one day, saddling Shylock--so named because he
tried to exact a pound of flesh every time I turned my back or in other
ways seemed off my guard--and when I was looping up the latigo I
discovered that the alliterative Mr. Potter was roosting on the fence,
watching me with those needle-pointed eyes of his. I wondered if he was
about to prepare another report for dad.

"Do yuh want to be put on the pay-roll?" he asked, without any preamble,
when he caught my glance.

"Yes, if I'm _earning_ wages. 'The laborer is worthy of his hire,' I
believe," I retorted loftily. The fact was, I was strapped again--and,
though one did not need money on the Bay State Ranch, it's a good thing to
have around.

He grinned into his collar. "Well," he said, "you've been pretty busy the
last three weeks, but I ain't had any orders to hire a boxing-master for
the boys. I don't know as that'd rightly come under the head of legitimate
expenses; boxing-masters come high, I've heard. Are yuh going on
round-up?"

"Sure!" I answered, in an exact copy--as near as I could make it--of
Frosty Miller's intonation. I was making Frosty my model those days.

He said: "All right--your pay starts on the fifteenth of next
month"--which was April. Then he got down from the fence and went off, and
I mounted Shylock and rode away to Laurel, after the mail. Not that I
expected any, for no one but dad knew where I was, and I hadn't heard a
word from him, though I knew he wrote to Perry Potter--or his secretary
did--every week or so. Really, I don't think a father ought to be so
chesty with the only son he's got, even if the son is a no-account young
cub.

I was standing in the post-office, which was a store and saloon as well,
when an old fellow with stubby whiskers and a jaw that looked as though it
had been trimmed square with a rule, and a limp that made me know at once
who he was, came in. He was standing at the little square window, talking
to the postmaster and waving his pipe to emphasize what he said, when
a horse went past the door on the dead run, with bridle-reins flying.
A fellow rushed out past us--it was his horse--and hit old King's elbow
a clip as he went by. The pipe went about ten feet and landed in a
pickle-keg. I went after it and fished it out for the old fellow--not so
much because I'm filled with a natural courtesy, as because I was curious
to know the man that had got the best of dad.

He thanked me, and asked me across to the saloon side of the room to drink
with him. "I don't know as I've met you before, young man," he said, eying
me puzzled. "Your face is familiar, though; been in this country long?"

"No," I said; "a little over a month is all."

"Well, if you ever happen around my way--King's Highway, they call my
place--stop and see me. Going to stay long out here?"

"I think so," I replied, motioning the waiter--"bar-slave," they call them
in Montana--to refill our glasses. "And I'll be glad to call some day,
when I happen in your neighborhood. And if you ever ride over toward the
Bay State, be sure you stop."

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