THE RUSTLER OF WIND RIVER

When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers’ Association, should sit there at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit.

Usually Saul Chadron was a man who picked his companions, and was a particular hand at the choosing. He could afford to do that, being of the earth’s exalted in the Northwest, where people came to him and put down their tribute at his feet.

The stranger was a tall, smoky man, hollow-faced, grim; adorned with a large brown mustache which drooped over his thin mouth; a bony man with sharp shoulders, and a stoop which began in the region of the stomach, as if induced by drawing in upon himself in times of poignant hunger, which he must have felt frequently in his day to wear him down to that state of bones; with the under lid of his left eye caught at a point and drawn down until it showed red, as if held by a fishhook to drain it of unimaginable tears.

There was a furtive look in his restless, wild-animal eyes, smoky like the rest of him, and a surliness about his long, high-ridged nose which came down over his mustache like a beak. He wore a cloth cap with ear flaps, and they were down, although the heat of summer still made the September air lively enough for one with blood beneath his skin. He regaled himself with fierce defiance, like a captive eagle, and had no word in return for the generous importunities of the man who was host to him in what evidently was a long-deferred meal.

Chadron paid the bill when the man at last finished packing his internal cavities, and they went together into the hotel office which adjoined the dining-room.

There was the smell of old pipes, old furs, old guns, in the place, and all of them were present to account for themselves and dispel any shadow of mystery whatever—the guns on their pegs set in auger-holes in the logs of the walls, the furs of wild beasts dangling from like supports in profusion everywhere, and the pipes lying on the mantel with stems hospitably extended to all unprovided guests. Some of them had been smoked by the guests who had come and gone for a generation of men.

The stranger stood at the manteltree and tried the pipes’ capacity with his thick-ended thumb, finding one at last to his requirements. Tall as Saul Chadron stood on his own proper legs, the stranger at his shoulder was a head above him. Seven feet he must have towered, his crown within a few inches of the smoked beams across the ceiling, and marvelously thin in the running up. It seemed that the wind must break him some blustering day at that place in his long body where hunger, or pain, or mischance had doubled him over in the past, and left him creased. The strong light of the room found pepperings of gray in his thick and long black hair.

Chadron himself was a gray man, with a mustache and beard like a cavalier. His shrewd eyes were sharp and bright under heavy brows, his brown face was toughened by days in the saddle through all seasons of weather and wind. His shoulders were broad and heavy, and even now, although not dressed for the saddle, there was an up-creeping in the legs of his trousers, and a gathering at the knees of them, for they were drawn down over his tall boots.

That was Chadron’s way of doing the nice thing when he went abroad in his buckboard. He had saddle manners and buckboard manners, and even office manners when he met the cattle barons in Cheyenne. No matter what manners he chanced to be wearing, one remembered Saul Chadron after meeting him, and carried the recollection of him to the sundown of his day.

“We can talk here,” said Chadron, giving the other a cigar.

The tall man broke the cigar and ground part of it in his palm, looking with frowning thoughtfulness into the empty fireplace as the tobacco crushed in his hard hand. He filled the pipe that he had chosen, and sat with his long legs stretched out toward the chimney-mouth.

“Well, go on and talk,” said he.

“You’re a business man, Mark—”

“Huh!” said Mark, grunting a little cloud of smoke from the bowl of his pipe in his sarcastic vehemence.

“And so am I,” continued Chadron, unmoved. “Words between us would be a waste of time.”

“You’re right; money talks,” said Mark.

“It’s a man’s job, or I wouldn’t have called you out of your hole to do it,” said Chadron, watching the man slyly for the effect.

“Pay me in money,” suggested Mark, unwarmed by the compliment. “Is it nesters ag’in?”

“Nesters,” nodded the cattleman, drawing his great brows in a frown. “They’re crowdin’ in so thick right around me that I can’t breathe comfortable any more; the smell of ’em’s in the wind. They’re runnin’ over three of the biggest ranches up here besides the Alamito, and the Drovers’ Association wants a little of your old-time holy scare throwed into the cussed coyotes.”

Mark nodded in the pause which seemed to have been made for him to nod, and Chadron went on.

“Money talks,” repeated Mark, still looking into the chimney.

“There’s about twenty of them that counts, the rest’s the kind you can drive over a cliff with a whip. These fellers has strung their cussed bob-wire fences crisscross and checkerboard all around there up the river, and they’re gittin’ to be right troublesome. Of course they’re only a speck up there yet, but they’ll multiply like fleas on a hot dog if we let ’em go ahead. You know how it is.”

There was a conclusiveness in Chadron’s tone as he said that. It spoke of a large understanding between men of a kind.

“Sure,” grunted the man Mark, nodding his head at the chimney. “You want a man to work from the willers, without no muss or gun-flashin’, or rough houses or loud talk.”

“Twenty of them, their names are here, and some scattered in between that I haven’t put down, to be picked up as they fall in handy, see?”

“And you’re aimin’ to keep clear, and stand back in the shadder, like you always have done,” growled Mark. “Well, I ain’t goin’ to ram my neck into no sheriff’s loop for nobody’s business but my own from now on. I’m through with resks, just to be obligin’.”

“Who’ll put a hand on you in this country unless we give the word?” Chadron asked, severely.

“How do I know who’s runnin’ the law in this dang country now? Maybe you fellers is, maybe you ain’t.”

“There’s no law in this part of the country bigger than the Drovers’ Association,” Chadron told him, frowning in rebuke of Mark’s doubt of security. “Well, maybe there’s a little sheriff here and there, and a few judges that we didn’t put in, but they’re down in the farmin’ country, and they don’t cut no figger at all. If you was fool enough to let one of them fellers git a hold on you we wouldn’t leave you in jail over night. You know how it was up there in the north.”

“But I don’t know how it is down here.” Mark scowled in surly unbelief, or surly simulation.

“There’s not a judge, federal or state, that could carry a bale of hay anywhere in the cattle country, I tell you, Mark, that we don’t draw the chalk line for.”

“Then why don’t you do the job yourselves, ’stead of callin’ a peaceable man away from his ranchin’?”

“You’re one kind of a gentleman, Mark, and I’m another, and there’s different jobs for different men. That ain’t my line.”

“Oh hell!” said Mark, laying upon the words an eloquent stress.

Chadron winked as he named that refuge of the hunted in the Northwest. Mark appeared to be considering something weightily.

“Oh, well, if they’re rustlers—nobody ain’t got no use for a rustler,” he said.

“There’s men in that bunch of twenty”—tapping the slip of paper with his finger—“that started with two cows a couple of years ago that’s got fifty and sixty head of two-year-olds now,” Chadron feelingly declared.

“How much’re you willin’ to go?” Mark put the question with a suddenness which seemed to betray that he had been saving it to shoot off that way, as a disagreeable point over which he expected a quarrel. He squinted his draggled left eye at Chadron, as if he was taking aim, while he waited for a reply.

“Well, you have done it for fifty a head,” Chadron said.

“Things is higher now, and I’m older, and the resk’s bigger,” Mark complained. “How fur apart do they lay?”

“You ought to get around in a week or two.”

“Look here, Mark”—Chadron opened the slip which he had wound round his finger—“this one is worth ten, yes, all, the others. Make your own price on him. But I want it done; no bungled job.”

Mark took the paper and laid his pipe aside while he studied it.

“Macdonald?”

“Alan Macdonald,” nodded Chadron. “That feller’s opened a ditch from the river up there on my land and begun to irrigate!”

“Irrigatin’, huh?” said Mark, abstractedly, moving his finger down the column of names.

“He makes a blind of buyin’ up cattle and fattenin’ ’em on the hay and alfalfer he’s raisin’ up there on my good land, but he’s the king-pin of the rustlers in this corner of the state. He’ll be in here tomorrow with cattle for the Indian agent—it’s beef day—and you can size him up. But you’ve got to keep your belly to the ground like a snake when you start anything on that feller, and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got him dead to rights. He’s quick with a gun, and he’s sure.”

“Five hundred?” suggested Mark, with a crafty sidelong look.

“You’ve named it.”

“And something down for expenses; a feller’s got to live, and livin’s high.”

Chadron drew out his wallet. Money passed into Mark’s hand, and he put it away in his pocket along with the list of names.

“I’ll see you in the old place in Cheyenne for the settlement, if you make good,” Chadron told him.

Mark waved his hand in lofty depreciation of the hint that failure for him was a possible contingency. He said no more. For a little while Chadron stood looking down on him as he leaned with his pipe over the dead ashes in the fireplace, his hand in the breast of his coat, where he had stored his purse. Mark treated the mighty cattleman as if he had become a stranger to him, along with the rest of the world in that place, and Chadron turned and went his way.

Fort Shakie was on its downhill way in those days, and almost at the bottom of the decline. It was considered a post of penance by enlisted men and officers alike, nested up there in the high plateau against the mountains in its place of wild beauty and picturesque charm.

But natural beauty and Indian picturesqueness do not fill the place in the soldierly breast of fair civilian lady faces, nor torrential streams of cold mountain water supply the music of the locomotive’s toot. Fort Shakie was being crept upon by civilization, true, but it was coming all too slow for the booted troopers and belted officers who must wear away the months in its lonely silences.

Within the memory of officers not yet gray the post had been a hundred and fifty miles from a railroad. Now it was but twenty; but even that short leap drowned the voice of the locomotive, and the dot at the rails’ end held few of the endearments which make soldiering sweet.

No, there was not much over at Meander, at the railroad’s end, to cheer a soldier’s heart. It was an inspiring ride, in these autumn days, to come to Meander, past the little brimming lakes, which seemed to lie without banks in the green meadows where wild elk fed with the shy Indian cattle; over the white hills where the earth gave under the hoofs like new-fallen snow. But when one came to it through the expanding, dusty miles, the reward of his long ride was not in keeping with his effort.

Certainly, privates and subalterns could get drunk there, as speedily as in the centers of refinement, but there were no gentlemanly diversions at which an officer could dispel the gloom of his sour days in garrison.

The rough-cheeked girls of that high-wind country were well enough for cowboys to swing in their wild dances; just a rung above the squaws on the reservation in the matter of loquacity and of gum. Hardly the sort for a man who had the memory of white gloves and gleaming shoulders, and the traditions of the service to maintain.

Nola kept the big house in a blaze of joy while she nested there through the summer days. The sixteen miles which stretched between it and the post ran out like a silver band before those who rode into the smile of her welcome, and when she flitted away to Cheyenne, champagne, and silk hats in the autumn, a grayness hovered again over the military post in the corner of the reservation.

Later than usual Nola had lingered on this fall, and the social outlet had remained open, like a navigable river over which the threat of ice hung but had not yet fallen. There were not lacking those who held that the lodestone which kept her there at the ranchhouse, when the gaieties of the season beckoned elsewhere, was in the breast of Major Cuvier King. Fatal infatuation, said the married ladies at the post, knowing, as everybody knew in the service, that Major King was betrothed to Frances Landcraft, the colonel’s daughter.

Beef day was an event at the agency which never grew old to the people at the post. Without beef day they must have dwindled off to acidulous shadows, as the Indians who depended upon it for more solid sustenance would have done in the event of its discontinuation by a paternal government.

There were phases of Indian life and character which one never saw save on beef day, which fell on Wednesday of each week. Guests at the post watched the bright picture with the keen interest of a pageant on the stage; tourists came over by stage from Meander in the summer months by the score to be present; the resident officers, and their wives and families—such as had them—found in it an ever-recurring source of interest and relief from the tedium of days all alike.

This beef day, the morning following the meeting between Saul Chadron and his mysterious guest, a chattering group stood on the veranda of Colonel Landcraft’s house in the bright friendly sun. They were waiting for horses to make the short journey to the agency—for one’s honesty was questioned, his sanity doubted, if he went afoot in that country even a quarter of a mile—and gayest among them was Nola Chadron, the sun in her fair, springing hair.

Nola’s crown reached little higher than a proper soldier’s heart, but what she lacked in stature she supplied in plastic perfection of body and vivacity of face. There was a bounding joyousness of life in her; her eager eyes reflecting only the anticipated pleasures of today. There was no shadow of yesterday’s regret in them, no cloud of tomorrow’s doubt.

On the other balance there was Frances Landcraft, taller by half a head, soldierly, too, as became her lineage, in the manner of lifting her chin in what seemed a patrician scorn of small things such as a lady should walk the world unconscious of. The brown in her hair was richer than the clear agate of her eyes; it rippled across her ear like the scroll of water upon the sand.

There was a womanly dignity about her, although the threshold of girlhood must not have been far behind her that bright autumnal morning. Her nod was equal to a stave of Nola’s chatter, her smile worth a league of the light laughter from that bounding little lady’s lips. Not that she was always so silent as on that morning, there among the young wives of the post, at her own guest’s side. She had her hours of overflowing spirits like any girl, but in some company she was always grave.

There were ambitions on both sides of that match, it was known—ambition on the colonel’s part to secure his only child a station of dignity, and what he held to be of consequence above all achievements in the world. Major King was a rising man, with two friends in the cabinet. It was said that he would be a brigadier-general before he reached forty.

On the major’s side, was the ambition to strengthen his political affiliations by alliance with a family of patrician strain, together with the money that his bride would bring, for Colonel Landcraft was a weighty man in this world’s valued accumulations. So the match had been arranged.

The veranda of the colonel’s house gave a view of the parade grounds and the long avenue that came down between the officers’ houses, cottonwoods lacing their limbs above the road. There was green in the lawns, the flash of flowers between the leaves and shrubs, white-gleaming walls, trim walks, shorn hedges. It seemed a pleasant place of quiet beauty that bright September morning, and a pity to give it up by and by to dust and desolation; a place where men and women might be happy, but for the gnawing fire of ambition in their hearts.

They were off, with the colonel and a lately-assigned captain in the lead. There was a keener pleasure in this beef day than usual for the colonel, for he had new ground to sow with its wonders, which were beginning to pale in his old eyes which had seen so much of the world.

“Very likely we’ll see the minister’s wife there,” said he, as they rode forward, “and if so, it will be worth your while to take special note of her. St. John Mathews, the Episcopalian minister over there at the mission—those white buildings there among the trees—is a full-blooded Crow. One of the pioneer missionaries took him up and sent him back East to school, where in time he entered the ministry and married this white girl. She was a college girl, I’ve been told, glamoured by the romance of Mathews’ life. Well, it was soon over.”

The colonel sighed, and fell silent. The captain, feeling that it was intended that he should, made polite inquiry.

“If she’s there, she’ll be squatting among the squaws, waiting to carry home her husband’s allotment of warm, bloody beef. She doesn’t have to do it, and it shames and humiliates Mathews, too, even though they say she cuts it up and divides it among the poorer Indians. She’s a savage; her eyes sparkle at the sight of red meat.”

They rounded the agency buildings and came upon an open meadow in which the slaughterhouses stood at a distance from the road. Here, in the grassy expanse, the Indians were gathered, waiting the distribution of the meat. The scene was barbarically animated. Groups of women in their bright dresses sat here and there on the grass, and apart from them in gravity waited old men in moccasins and blankets and with feathers in their hair. Spry young men smoked cigarettes and talked volubly, garbed in the worst of civilization and the most useless of savagery.

Colonel Landcraft led his party across the meadow, entirely unconscious of the cold disdain of the people whom he looked down upon from his superior heights. He could not have understood if any there had felt the trespass from the Indians’ side—and there was one, very near and dear to the colonel who felt it so—and attempted to explain. The colonel very likely would have puffed up with military consequence almost to the bursting-point.

Feeling, delicacy, in those smeared, smelling creatures! Surliness in excess they might have, but dignity, not at all. Were they not there as beggars to receive bounty from the government’s hand?

“Oh, there’s Mrs. Mathews!” said Nola, with the eagerness of a child who has found a quail’s nest in the grass. She was off at an angle, like a hunter on the scent. Colonel Landcraft and his guest followed with equal rude eagerness, and the others swept after them, Frances alone hanging back. Major King was at Nola’s side. If he noted the lagging of his fiancée he did not heed.

She was a short woman, growing heavy and shapeless now, and there was gray in her black hair. Her skin was browned by sun, wind, and smoke to the hue of her poor neighbors and friends. When she spoke in reply to the questions which poured upon her, she bent her head like a timid girl.

Frances checked her horse and remained behind, out of range of hearing. She was cut to the heart with shame for her companions, and her cheek burned with the indignation that she suffered with the harried woman in their midst. A little Indian girl came flying past, ducking and dashing under the neck of Frances’ horse, in pursuit of a piece of paper which the wind whirled ahead of her. At Frances’ stirrup she caught it, and held it up with a smile.

“Did you lose this, lady?” she asked, in the very best of mission English.

“No,” said Frances, bending over to see what it might be. The little girl placed it in her hand and scurried away again to a beckoning woman, who stood on her knees and scowled over her offspring’s dash into the ways of civilized little girls.

It was a narrow strip of paper that she had rescued from the wind, with the names of several men written on it in pencil, and at the head of the list the name of Alan Macdonald. Opposite that name some crude hand had entered, with pen that had flowed heavily under his pressure, the figures “$500.”

Frances turned it round her finger and sat waiting for the others to leave off their persecution of the minister’s wife and come back to her, wondering in abstracted wandering of mind who Alan Macdonald might be, and for what purpose he had subscribed the sum of five hundred dollars.

“I think she’s the most romantic little thing in the world!” Nola was declaring, in her extravagant surface way as they returned to where Frances sat her horse, her wandering eyes on the blue foothills, the strip of paper prominent about her finger. “Oh, honey! what’s the matter? Did you cut your finger?”

“No,” said Frances, her serious young face lighting with a smile, “it’s a little subscription list, or something, that somebody lost. Alan Macdonald heads it for five hundred dollars. Do you know Alan Macdonald, and what his charitable purpose may be?”

Nola tossed her head with a contemptuous sniff.

“They call him the ‘king of the rustlers’ up the river,” said she.

“Oh, he is a man of consequence, then?” said Frances, a quickening of humor in her brown eyes, seeing that Nola was up on her high horse about it.

“We’d better be going down to the slaughter-house if we want to see the fun,” bustled the colonel, wheeling his horse. “I see a movement setting in that way.”

Frances still carried the paper twisted about her finger, reserving her judgment upon Alan Macdonald, for she knew something of the feuds of that hard-speaking land.

“Anyway, I suppose he’d like to have his paper back,” she suggested. “Will you hand it to him the next time you meet him?”

Frances was entirely grave about it, although it was only a piece of banter which she felt that Nola would appreciate. But Nola was not in an appreciative mood, for she was a full-blooded daughter of the baronial rule. She jerked her head like a vicious bronco and reined hurriedly away from Frances as she extended the paper.

“I’ll not touch the thing!” said Nola, fire in her eyes.

Major King was enjoying the passage between the girls, riding at Nola’s side with his cavalry hands held precisely.

“If I’m not mistaken, the gentleman in question is there talking to Miller, the agent,” said he, nodding toward two horsemen a little distance ahead. “But I wouldn’t excite him, Miss Landcraft, if I were you. He’s said to be the quickest and deadliest man with a weapon on this range.”

“Oh, you delightful little savage!” she said. “I believe you’d like to take a shot at poor Mr. Macdonald yourself.”

“We never start anything on the reservation,” Nola rejoined, quite seriously.

Miller, the Indian agent, rode away and left Macdonald sitting there on his horse as the military party approached. He spurred up to meet the colonel, and to present his respects to the ladies—a hard matter for a little round man with a tight paunch, sitting in a Mexican saddle. The party halted, and Frances looked across at Macdonald, who seemed to be waiting for Miller to rejoin him.

Macdonald was a supple, sinewy man, as he appeared across the few rods intervening. His coat was tied with his slicker at the cantle of his saddle, his blue flannel shirt was powdered with the white dust of the plain. Instead of the flaring neckerchief which the cowboys commonly favored, Macdonald wore a cravat, the ends of it tucked into the bosom of his shirt, and in place of the leather chaps of men who ride breakneck through brush and bramble, his legs were clad in tough brown corduroys, and fended by boots to his knees. There were revolvers in the holsters at his belt.

They were talking around Miller, who was going to give them places of vantage for the coming show. Only Frances and Major King were left behind, where she had stopped her horse to look curiously across at Alan Macdonald, king of the rustlers, as he was called.

“It may not be anything at all to him, and it may be something important,” said Frances, reaching out the slip to Major King. “Would you mind handing it to him, and explaining how it came into my hands?”

“I’ll not have anything to do with the fellow!” said the major, flushing hotly. “How can you ask such a thing of me? Throw it away, it’s no concern of yours—the memorandum of a cattle thief!”

Frances drew herself straight. Her imperious chin was as high as Major King ever had carried his own in the most self-conscious moment of his military career.

“Will you take it to him?” she demanded.

“Certainly not!” returned the major, haughtily emphatic. Then, softening a little, “Don’t be silly, Frances; what a row you make over a scrap of blowing paper!”

“Then I’ll take it myself!”

“Miss Landcraft!”

“Major King!”

It was the steel of conventionality against the flint of womanly defiance. Major King started in his saddle, as if to reach out and restrain her. It was one of those defiantly foolish little things which women and men—especially women—do in moments of pique, and Frances knew it at the time. But she rode away from the major with a hot flush of insubordination in her cheeks, and Alan Macdonald quickened from his pensive pose when he saw her coming.

His hand went to his hat when her intention became unmistakable to him. She held the little paper out toward him while still a rod away.

“A little Indian girl gave me this; she found it blowing along—they tell me you are Mr. Macdonald,” she said, her face as serious as his own. “I thought it might be a subscription list for a church, or something, and that you might want it.”

“Thank you, Miss Landcraft,” said he, his voice low-modulated, his manner easy.

Her face colored at the unexpected way of this man without a coat, who spoke her name with the accent of refinement, just as if he had known her, and had met her casually upon the way.

“I have seen you a hundred times at the post and the agency,” he explained, to smooth away her confusion. “I have seen you from afar.”

“Oh,” said she, as lame as the word was short.

He was scanning the written paper. Now he looked at her, a smile waking in his eyes. It moved in slow illumination over his face, but did not break his lips, pressed in their stern, strong line. She saw that his long hair was light, and that his eyes were gray, with sandy brows over them which stood on end at the points nearest his nose, from a habit of bending them in concentration, she supposed, as he had been doing but a moment before he smiled.

“No, it isn’t a church subscription, Miss Landcraft, it’s for a cemetery,” said he.

“Oh,” said she again, wondering why she did not go back to Major King, whose horse appeared restive, and in need of the spur, which the major gave him unfeelingly.

At the same time she noted that Alan Macdonald’s forehead was broad and deep, for his leather-weighted hat was pushed back from it where his fair, straight hair lay thick, and that his bony chin had a little croft in it, and that his face was long, and hollowed like a student’s, and that youth was in his eyes in spite of the experience which hardships of unknown kind had written across his face. Not a handsome man, but a strong one in his way, whatever that way might be.

“I am indebted to you for this,” said he, drawing forth his watch with a quick movement as he spoke, opening the back cover, folding the little paper carefully away in it, “and grateful beyond words.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Macdonald,” said she, wheeling her horse suddenly, smiling back at him as she rode away to Major King.

Alan Macdonald sat with his hat off until she was again at the major’s side, when he replaced it over his fair hair with slow hand, as if he had come from some holy presence. As for Frances, her turn of defiance had driven her clouds away. She met the major smiling and radiant, a twinkling of mischief in her lively eyes.

The major was a diplomat, as all good soldiers, and some very indifferent ones, are. Whatever his dignity and gentler feelings had suffered while she was away, he covered the hurt now with a smile.

“And how fares the bandit king this morning?” he inquired.

“He seems to be in spirits,” she replied.

The others were out of sight around the buildings where the carcasses of beef had been prepared. Nobody but the major knew of Frances’ little dash out of the conventional, and the knowledge that it was so was comfortable in his breast.

“And the pe-apers,” said he, in melodramatic whisper, “were they the thieves’ muster roll?”

“He isn’t a thief,” said she, with quiet dignity, “he’s a gentleman. Yes, the paper was important.”

“Ha! the plot deepens!” said Major King.

“It was a matter of life and death,” said she, with solemn rebuke for his levity, speaking a truer word than she was aware.