CHAPTER IV

DAWN AND THE FOUR-FOOTED

The doctor had said that Mrs. Perry must go to the Rockies. She could not face another winter even in the Middle West. Her lungs were infected, and she needed altitude, ozone, sunshine, rare air. Mrs. Perry was pretty, spoiled, but somehow an appealing person.

She sat now on the veranda of the log cabin that squatted on the eastern slope of Amarillo Canyon. Before her reared the snowy peaks of the Coronado, rising above precipitous and wooded hills.

In front of the lodge a party was getting ready for a ride off over the mountains. Her husband, cigar in mouth, and dressed in the most correct of sports outfits, stood critically surveying the saddling of his horse. It gave him the feeling of a sportsman to run a finger under the cinch and tell young Benty to put a martingale on the obedient little mountain horse so it would not toss its head.

John Perry was a self-made man who believed firmly in development. He had developed the dump grounds south of the suburb in which he had lived, and why not the mountains? He had developed his business in Kansas City successfully enough to catch the attention of the big fellows higher up. Twelve-per cent. interest had, several years before, attracted his capital to the banks of the cattle state. But lately his investment hadn’t been doing so well. Since Mrs. Perry had been ordered west he had embraced the opportunity to take charge of his business personally, and had entered a bank of the metropolis of the state as president.

Young Jack was thoroughly enjoying the experience. An instinctive wholesomeness, the natural response of youth to outdoor pleasures, had survived the would-be fast pace set by his school crowd at home. Now he was artfully exhibiting his horsemanship before the group on the veranda, pulling viciously at his mild pony’s mouth, causing her to rear, on which he would pull her back smartly on her haunches, her front feet helplessly pawing the air.

“He’s a natural horseman,” Mrs. Perry observed with pride. “Do be careful of that brute, Jack.”

“Where are they going? The Rio Cascada! I’m no wiser than I was before.” Mrs. Perry laughed and shrugged, wondering if there would be any one left that evening with energy enough for a hand of auction. After an hour’s preparation the party was off, cantering up the canyon road.

The horses’ flying feet struck pebbles that bounded rattling down to the rocky gorge of the river beneath. As the road wound upward they slowed to a steady walk. Dean Benty, Old Man Benty’s son, rode ahead with Jack. Mr. Perry rode beside a large powerful-looking man, who slouched in his expensive but carelessly worn clothes. Perry was waving his arms about and arguing earnestly.

“It’s not been touched. Virgin, you might say. Needs development, that’s all, Gershwin. The country’s all right. Nothing to this hard times talk. They could get back all they’ve put into the cattle business if they’d just open up these mountain ranges to the full. There’s been more rainfall the last few years than formerly. Ask the forest service men; they know. What’s that?

“No-o. Not much range left down below. That’s true. Most of it’s been taken up. But up here—why look at it! Range for the world and to spare!” Mr. Perry saw no flaw in his arguments.

“Difficulty is in getting in. Only a certain amount of range supposed to be leased to each stockman, and under certain conditions. Although my bank has done so much for the state, extending loans to the cattlemen, I personally could get only a small per cent. of the cattle, from that Bar A ranch that I’ve been trying to save, up here for grazing!

“If you hadn’t got that motion by the committee to open up the Indian Reservation”—Mr. Perry had worked himself up into a state of indignation—“we’d have been up against it. The goats and the sheep we had to put over through Gonzales, an old homesteader up here, an old reliable. And that with the Indian Reservation shut away from the rest of us. Say, isn’t that an outrage!

“Why, they haven’t even cattle enough to fill a corner of it. Sure. I know you supported that bill all along. Going through next month for sure, you say? Fine.”

Gershwin, the big man, conversed chiefly in nods and monosyllabic grunts.

“Temporary injunction,” he observed, “opening reservation range to public. First come, first served. Think it’ll go through all right. They’re not sure of the boundaries anyway.”

They had come to the fork of the Cascada. Here the trail crossed the stream, and so did the horses. By clinging ignominiously to his horse’s neck Mr. Perry managed to do likewise.

“Don’t hang on that way, Dad,” shouted Jack from the other bank. “They’ll think you’re a tenderfoot.”

“He is,” Mr. Gershwin emitted succinctly.

When the crossing had been successfully accomplished Mr. Perry drew alongside Gershwin, who, in spite of his size, rode as easily and well as, one felt, he did anything that he attempted.

“We may have some trouble with these forest service fellows,” Perry said jocularly, although with a trace of concern in his manner. “Sticklers for regulations, you know.”

“I was born down yonder in Texas.” Gershwin thrust a spatulate thumb over his shoulder, indicating that he knew the ways of the country.

They were cantering along a level stretch of the trail that led up to the forest supervisor’s cabin. They could see Damon O’Neill from some distance, standing in his doorway with another man.

Damon looked down and saw them coming. He recognized in Gershwin a man born to the saddle, but Perry, by his insecure seat, he assumed to be one of the new city boarders down at Mountain Lodge. He turned to the tall Westerner at his side and resumed the conversation.

“I’m awfully sorry, James,” he said regretfully; “I want the worst way to see you pull through. But your range down below is sure gone, old man. It’s been grazed to the limit for twenty years; you know that. If you try to pull out of the hole by borrowing, expanding your herd, and renting more range, where will you be next winter?

“Even if you let your grass crop lie idle all summer, the range is cut up so bad, so little root or seed left, it’s going to take several years for grass to take hold. It ought to lie fallow till the roots have clamped some of that desert soil down again. You’ll get little hay off your range next fall. Certainly not enough for two thousand head.”

“I’ll sell enough of the two-year-olds and the old ones in the fall to make out if you’ll lease me an extra piece of mountain range for late fall,” James urged, his deep-set eyes burning anxiously under his shaggy brows. “A summer here’ll condition ’em into A-1 grade.”

Damon slowly shook his head. “You’d have to go in that much deeper to buy winter feed for the balance. It’s for your own good, James, I’m advising you. I can’t understand the Cattleman’s Loan offering to carry you for any more. I know the other banks are simply extending their old loans where necessary. Go slow till your range recuperates, till I can get further mountain pasture for you. As an owner of improved ranch property you’re entitled to preference.

“Let’s see—” Damon crossed to his map on the wall, consulting certain areas—“you’ve just brought your stock up from the oak-brush forage, eh? Salted them? Well, they can stay on the aspen-fir location till July 10. The season was so late this year we couldn’t let them up earlier. On July 10 you can move them up into the spruce-fir belt. Keep your salt away from the streams, James. And try to draw your stock up to the west slopes with it. The forage will be well developed up there by that time.

“Who’ve you got to herd for you till then?”

James flushed. “I’ll have to ride up every week myself, Mr. O’Neill. I’ve got a couple of kids, but I rightly need them down below, and I had to let two old hands and my foreman go this spring; the biz was too broke. It keeps me busy moving the other thousand around down below. I’ve lost a lot this spring too. About ten head already.

“Looks like the old Custer lobo got a few. Killed two mother cows and et the calves before they wuz born.” He spoke bitterly.

Dawn had come in quietly and had been straightening the papers on her father’s desk, sorting the mail. Now she spoke up quickly.

“Let me help herd Mr. James’ mountain bunch, Damon, if he’s willing.”

James looked with surprise at the girl, clad in the riding-breeches, shirt, and mountain boots of the men of the service. The forest ranger smiled at the stockman’s amazement.

“She’s as good a cow-hand, James, as she is assistant ranger. I’m willing, if you are. She usually rides over that range once a week anyway. If you want she can help your boy move the stock in units.”

“There’s a hundred to a salt-unit,” answered James a bit dubiously.

“All right. Dawn knows as well as any of us just how long a given meadow can support how many head of stock. She’ll salt them to stay put for a month, two weeks, whatever the range’ll stand.”

The ranchman’s face cleared. With a look of surprise and relief he turned to Dawn, slowly extending a hand.

“Well, young woman,” he drawled, “that sure would be pretty of you, if you mean it. It would sure set my mind at ease. Cattle has pesky tastes and appetites. Sometimes seems they just naturally _craves poison_. And they sure can demolish young leaves before the time comes.”

“Dawn is usually all for keeping the stock moving,” her father smiled. “I never heard her offer to tend cattle before.”

A swift attack of conscience had struck Dawn like summer lightning. Impulsively her sympathies went out to the man who had suffered from the animals of her mountain. She was partly to blame, springing traps, and all. What could she do? She must make amends.

The four who had been riding up the trail now pushed through the trees into the open space surrounding the cabin. They forded the eager little stream leaping before the ranger’s door and rode up to the stoop. James said a hasty farewell and rode off. Gershwin and Perry sat their horses, but Jack and Dean Benty dismounted.

Dean introduced his party to the ranger, Jack jumped up on the porch and held out his hand to Dawn. “Good morning, Miss O’Neill. You see, I did find my way up here.”

He was very smiling, sure of himself, spick and span. Dawn did not like his manner. She let go his hand and leaned back indifferently against the wall. Fresh pink and white thing. Did he have bear’s grease on his hair? No, most likely that perfumed stuff.

Their fathers were talking. Damon O’Neill listened gravely to the suave tones of John Perry. Surely they were at liberty to ride anywhere they wished. This was public domain. He was sorry he could not accompany them, but that would be impossible. He waved to the littered desk which could be seen from the door. A ranger’s duties were many, and as he was acting at present in the capacity of assistant supervisor there was correspondence to which he must attend. Range management was keeping him very busy just now.

Well, that was one of the very things they were wanting to talk to him about. Damon knew that very well; he had heard of Gershwin, of course. And John Perry was the new banker? He had banked with his bank for years.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Perry,” said Damon sincerely. “You big banking men have a great responsibility on you this year. I guess they’re all depending on the banks and on the forests.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” agreed Perry. “Wonderful country you’ve got up here. Wonderful. Don’t know why they call this a dry country, with almost fifty per cent. of the area in forests like this. Water enough, grass enough, to feed all the world, I’d think.”

Gershwin was, as usual, saying nothing. Time enough for talk. Orders would be received today or tomorrow notifying the forest supervisor of this section that the Indian Reservation was to be thrown open to the public, and by that time the rest of his cattle and sheep would be on the range. But he had other things in mind as well. Perry was talking to the ranger.

“No, much of the region is wild and very rocky,” O’Neill was explaining—“almost inaccessible. For that reason there are several million feet of mature timber that have not yet been taken out. The cost of getting them to a railroad would be almost prohibitive.

“The old silver mines? No one seems to have located them since the Indians abandoned their early workings when the Spanish came. Pasture? Well, there is no more left open at this season of the year. There will be some open, under regulation, for fall.”

Jack Perry spoke to the ranger. Couldn’t his daughter go with them this morning as guide? Dean Benty had to get back to haul wood for his father. Would she be willing? Although she had told herself in the first five minutes that she despised Jack Perry, Dawn agreed to go.

Either she could take them the way she had ridden yesterday, or they could cross the Cascada right here, go up through the forest straight west, above timber line, and see the whole country beyond spread before them. Her tone made the latter course seem more alluring; so they chose it. In three minutes Dawn was ready, a new blue kerchief knotted about her throat, a suède leather coat tied to her saddle. The white collie barked his delight at the prospect of running with them, but Damon called him back and he came with instant obedience, though he sat watching Dawn and Piñon till they were out of sight.

The trail led at once into the deep forest. There was a foot of springy tanbark beneath their horses’ feet. Before Damon and Hinray covered the trail it had been slippery with mud at this time of year. The forest closed about them and the trail grew steeper and steeper. They were in a dark green twilight, through which an occasional shaft of sunshine pierced.

There was no sign of wild life or game in these primeval depths, although in a thicket not thirty feet from the trail a pair of mule deer fawns froze motionless, their large beautiful ears pricked forward. The horses had gone about a quarter of a mile when Dawn stopped to rest. There was a hard climb ahead. A ten minutes’ rest, and they were at it again. Within five minutes they had entered the densest forest that the men had ever seen and were climbing almost at a seventy-five-degree angle.

The horses groaned, all but Piñon, and even he was shining with sweat and lathered where the cinch pinched his belly.

“Good heavens,” Perry gasped with awe, “think of all this timber going to waste!”

“Cut it,” Dawn replied crisply, “and most of the valley below would wash down to the sea.”

They emerged suddenly into the open and found themselves on a rocky tilted slope. With difficulty they picked their way across the sky table, which looked as though it had been strewn with giant stone building-blocks in all kinds of rectangular shapes. They were brought to a halt at the head of a sheer escarpment that dropped five hundred feet or more to a meadow of parklike beauty. Gershwin took off his hat, as though compelled, unconsciously, to uncover before a power so infinitely beyond his own.

The valleys below them were dotted with cattle. At their right rose a peak that still harbored in its shadows a glacial bank of blue-white snow. Occasionally a cold breath blew down across their faces, alternating with the sun-heated air.

“Whose cattle?” Gershwin inquired.

“Most of them, I think, belong to a Mexican homesteader, Gonzales,” Dawn replied. “Let the horses have their heads going down,” she warned.

Jack sat awkwardly. Dawn knew very well that he must be stiff. But he said nothing about it. “I give him credit for that,” she thought.

Jack followed close on her heels as Piñon led the way down the ledge to where the escarpment sloped into another upland meadow. It stretched as far as the eye could see.

“You say you haven’t enough range,” exclaimed Perry, Senior. “What’s wrong with this?”

“It’s not ready yet for grazing,” Dawn explained eagerly. “See, the ground is soft, and these flowers are not good graze. The forage cover is just breaking the ground—the bluegrass, the oats, the wheat you see here—and the browse plants are only in bud.

“We have to have deferred grazing here, because the cover needs reseeding. This range had been open for grazing for years, long before the Forest Service was established twenty years ago, and it’s been burned over again and again by lightning fires. It slopes right down into the valleys; so it’s an important drainage area into the Rio Grande.”

“Help, help!” Jack laughed. “School’s over for the year. You sound like a book. This is vacation, fun!”

Dawn looked at him witheringly. He must be feeble-minded. “I never went to school,” she said, “but three months in my life. This is my business and my fun too.”

Perry laughed outright. Mr. Gershwin grinned, and Jack echoed him sheepishly.

“What is the scrub hillside way down at the foot of this range?” asked Gershwin.

“Juniper, Mister, likely. But I can’t tell whether it’s monosperma or occidentals from California. They both grow round seven to eight thousand altitude. Both are durable light woods, used for fencing and—”

“You’d make a good witness, young lady!” Gershwin smiled. “Point is, it’s not good forage, eh?” Gershwin was beginning to understand the meaning of scientific grazing. He was not above learning from this young girl.

“No, sir. Not very. Take the oak-brush type range of the foothills; not much vegetation there, it’s been overgrazed so long. Snowberry, service berry, squaw apple, sagebrush, and a few wheat grasses, all hardy plants, with needle grass, butterweed, and bluebells.

“But in the aspen-fir”—she waved her hand—“lots of vegetation. I’ll spare you the names, but there’s all kinds of berries, flowers—see the sweet cicely, the wild roses and geraniums, the honeysuckle and clematis above?

“Last comes the spruce-fir range, up around our cabin, about nine thousand feet. There you find more herbaceous growth in the open parks and less bush browse.”

Jack was reduced to awed silence during this conversation. He had been filled with the importance of Mr. Gershwin anyway, and here was the big man listening respectfully to a girl, a mountain girl, and asking her questions.

Then he contributed a brilliant idea. “Let’s eat. Have you all forgotten we carried grub!”

“No”—Dawn ignored such a thing as a pang of hunger—“you’ll have to wait until we get down to water. There’s a little stream down in that canyon if it hasn’t dried up since the last fire here.

“Let your horse’s reins loose on his neck, can’t you?” she reminded Jack sharply, as they started down the trail that would lead them into the canyon. “You’ll be sailing right out over this precipice if you don’t stop pulling his mouth on the wrong side.”

Mr. Perry hastily and meekly dropped the tightly clutched reins he held. They did not speak again till they reached the bottom of the canyon. Dawn saw a covey of brilliant grouse in the piñon scrub but did not call attention to them. Jack produced from the various saddlebags the lunch Mrs. Benty had put up, and they sat down on the rocks to eat.

Afterward the men stretched themselves out with cigars, but Jack and Dawn wandered down the stream; at every turn it changed, now deep and swift, now shallow and sunny, with little flower-rimmed beaches.

“You’re a wonderful girl, do you know it?” Jack blurted suddenly. He really felt that she was wonderful. His weaker nature was impressed with her strength of mind, her independence and character.

Unconsciously Dawn was relenting to a certain sweetness in Jack; and then, he was young. She yearned unconsciously for the companionship of other young creatures. A look of blond delicacy about Jack stirred a motherliness within her, whereas with her father she had striven always to be a companion.

Jack had a nice expression, she thought. But he had seemed cocksure of himself with everything till it came to the mountain. She chuckled to herself.

What was she laughing at? he wondered uneasily. Jack had been spoiled in school by girls of a different mettle from this mountain girl. It had been too easy for him. The girls he knew were active, clever enough. But in the daughter of the mountain ranger there was a serenity, an absence of any attempt to charm or amuse, that was new. He could never have analyzed the vivid force of her, but he felt it as some strong electric current is felt.

Mr. Perry and Mr. Gershwin were hallooing to them, and they hurried back. The men had heard shots on the mountain side above and the baying of dogs.

“There must be a hunt on,” Dawn cried. “The Government hunters are after lion. They were rounding up this mountain to get the old Custer lobo too. Come on!” She was resaddling Piñon, whose back had been cooling while they ate lunch. “We’ve got to get out of here, and we may catch a glimpse of them.”

The men were delighted. This was something better than Perry had hoped for. They clambered up out of the canyon over a slope covered with russet pine needles, sparsely wooded and almost free of underbrush. The baying of the hounds came nearer.

Shots were closing in round the base of the hill. Dawn halted her party. “Get off. We’ll have to sit tight right here,” she told them, “if we don’t want to be blown to kingdom come by a stray shot. We’ve got right in the way of the hunt somehow.”

She led the horses quickly down behind an abutment of rock, where the men crouched in safety, peering excitedly over the top. Piñon nickered suddenly and began to tremble violently. Head up, tail out, he ran up to where Dawn lay stretched with her chin on her hands. Without warning, and so swiftly that his yellow length was gone before they could speak, a mountain lion came bounding through the trees. With a leap he sailed through the air and over the escarpment of rock, within fifteen feet of them. Swift as he was, they saw for a clear moment his grace, his cruel head. His tawny flanks, his long tail, were stretched their utmost. Then he was out of sight, but they could hear the falling of stones down into the canyon as his great weight struck. Evidently he had lit on a shelf of loose shaly rock.

“Driven into the open,” Dawn murmured. The words had hardly escaped her when a second shadow hurtled from the slight cover before them, a shadow that for a moment loomed but a few feet away, a grayish ghost with bared fangs and wide yellow eyes—and was gone.

Jack’s face was blank with incredulity and amazement. His father and Gershwin had flattened themselves against the rock, a shade paler, thrilled.

“It’s the great lobo.” Dawn nodded to herself with shocked calm. “They said they were going to get him if it took all summer. They’ve got twenty men and fifteen dogs and rounded them in a lion to boot.”

Her color had gone. Gershwin looked at her curiously. “Ain’t scared, girlie, surely?” His tone was kindly but bantering.

She looked at him swiftly, contemptuously. She mistrusted him, yet she liked him. His wide-set grayish eyes, with strange yellow lights about the pupils—why, they were like the lobo’s! A wolf’s eyes, and his cunning; that was it. Now Dawn understood Gershwin. She laughed back at him.

“You know better’n that,” she said.

“Gee, I want to get in on that hunting,” Jack sputtered, coming out from between the rocks where he had taken refuge.

“I expect you could if you wanted,” Dawn replied indifferently. “I expect Mr. Gershwin could manage that too.” He probably couldn’t shoot anyway; it wouldn’t make any difference.

“Great guns!” Mr. Perry’s teeth were chattering. “Those are the fellows that kill the sheep and cattle, eh? Why, they say a few years ago these predatory animals cost the state over two hundred thousand a year.”

“Gee, there’s the banker talking at a time like this!” interrupted Jack plaintively.

“Well, it costs fifteen hundred dollars to let one lion live a year,” insisted his father. “Much as a man would eat. Think of it. That’s gotta be stopped.”

“Don’t worry, Mister,” Dawn observed with grim impertinence, as she gathered Piñon’s reins and flung into the saddle. “Before long there won’t be any great game outside a museum. Except deer. Fifty thousand big wild animals have been killed in less than five years. Makin’ the world safe for mutton- and beef-eaters. Come on.”

“I want to chat with this young lady a bit,” said Gershwin, as he mounted heavily and followed after Dawn.

“Why, I’ve got friends who’d give a fortune just to get a look-in on one of these hunts,” Mr. Perry exclaimed, pressing along after them.

“Bring ’em on,” Gershwin rumbled. “I read that the skins alone have put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the U. S. Treasury in the last few years. Used to be the Government paid _us_ a bounty for ’em when I was a lad.”

“Well, I always did believe in private enterprise for developing rather than the Government,” Perry replied with a wink. “The Government makes us pay its price for the timber we buy up here.”

There was no chance for Gershwin to catch up with Dawn; she led them by a short cut that brought them out into the canyon of the Amarillo at some distance below Benty’s place. Gershwin caught up with her as they reached the road.

“I believe you’re tryin’ to run away from me, young lady,” he drawled, with a half-humorous glint in his eyes. “There’s so much up here we don’t half know about. It’s a revelation to get with folks like you and your father.” It was not without reason that Gershwin had become one of the suavest lobbyists of his political era. Dawn expanded, warmed unsuspiciously to one who thus showed appreciation for the mountain.

“Funny there’s no minerals up here in these rocks,” Gershwin rumbled along. “Plenty in the other ranges, and copper in the deserts. Funny they never found anything up here.”

“No one’s ever tried,” Dawn flashed. “Gold’s where you find it, you know.”

“I was just wondering, Miss Dawn, if there was anything to this rumor that there was silver-bearing quartz on the Indian Reservation?” It was worth trying out, to question the girl, he thought. Gonzales and others had shown him samples of first-rate ore from these mountains, but no one had been able to locate a body of ore. Maybe he could get something out of this girl. He’d make it his business to acquire the proper locations and claims no matter on what reservation ore was found. The girl’s face was perfectly noncommittal, however.

“It would make a great difference to the Indians,” Gershwin continued aloud. “The Government’s bound to protect the interests of its wards, you know.”

“And you bet it’ll do it too, Mister,” she retorted, “as far as the Forest Service is concerned.”

“Mm-m. What would you say, I wonder, if I told you—?” They were walking at a lazy amble up the road, Jack and his father following about a quarter of a mile behind, and Mr. Gershwin glanced sidewise at Dawn out of oblique eyes.

“What, Mister? Shoot!” Dawn turned her steady gaze on him and the wolf-like eyes turned aside.

“That your father”—he dwelt on the words—“had a claim staked on the Indian Reservation—what properly should be, and will be, the Indian Reservation when the correct survey is made.”

“I’d say you were a liar!” Dawn blazed. She pulled Piñon up on his haunches and looked straight at the big man slouching in the saddle. “It’s not on Indian ground; never was, and we’ll prove it! Though if it were it would be safe enough with _us_.

“But all that range you’re aimin’ to open up is Indian ground and always has been. They’re just tryin’ to give everybody a crooked deal.” Her voice shook; she was trembling with passion. A slap on Piñon’s flanks was enough to send him off racing up the road.

A pebble from his flying hoofs struck Gershwin in the cheek, its sharp edge drawing a fleck of blood. He brushed it off as a giant brushes a gnat. He was smiling.