CHAPTER V

THE WITNESS TREE

Dawn had never been spanked. Damon O’Neill had evaded that bitter duty. She had never even been beaten at anything she undertook, and was like a bull pup that has never lost a fight and thinks the world is his. Damon was proud of her daring; he envied it, but he feared for it. The experience of his young manhood had put a mark on him. Though of physical courage he had plenty and to spare, he was cautious and taciturn.

Damon was not afraid to trust Dawn to the mountain; he feared to trust her to the world. The world had not treated him any too well. Yet he knew that the day would come when Dawn too must undergo her trial. For that reason he welcomed the coming of the Perrys to the mountain. For more than a month now young Perry had been a visitor to the ranger’s cabin, his daughter’s constant companion in her comings and goings.

Dawn bullied Jack shamelessly. She made sport of him, teasing, harrying, showing him up. He took it all amiably enough, just as Shep took a poke in the belly from her teasing foot while he lay with his four paws up in the air.

“You’re so good at figures, Jack,” she bantered as they lolled on the cabin steps one afternoon, “and I don’t pretend to like ’em. What’s the rate of precipitation down into the Cascada when a cloudburst deposits an inch of water in ten minutes?”

They were watching Hinray laboriously trace red rings on a map to indicate to the Range Supervisor where the fire hazards were in their section.

“Ask him instead what makes Chiny a near treeless waste?” Hinray cackled spitefully. “Ask him w’y and w’ere Joseph said, ‘Every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.’ And w’y the Prophet Ezekiel balled out the shepherds of Israel?

“‘Woe unto ye,’ he says, says he, ‘shepherds of Israel. Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have eaten up the good pasture, but ye tread down with yore feet the residoo of yore pastures?’”

“What are you balling me out for?” Jack complained. “Is it my fault nothing grows on your ranges any more but cattle, and they’re dying? Whose fault is it anyway?”

“Well, the old-timers is mostly to blame, and that’s a fact,” said Hinray sternly. “They just spread out in the public domain and grazed it all to death. Then when they got confined down to their own pastures they just naturally let them git wore out too.”

“They’d like to make a Sahara of the whole state,” exclaimed Dawn hotly. “Who was that French author Damon was reading out of last winter? He said that the Sahara used to be well watered and well wooded, but it was made a desert by the folly of man. Many parts of the Arabian and African deserts, he said, too, would be covered by forests if man and domestic animals were banished from them for a while. He says trees spring all round the watercourses, just like they do down on the ranges here, Hinray; you know. And grasses grow there, but the cattle of the Bedouins chew ’em off before ever they can seed.”

“It’s sure the truth!” said Hinray. “Git me the Bible, Dawn.”

She darted into the cabin and came out with the worn old book. Hinray opened at a marked spot and read. “Second Kings, Chapter Three: ‘Mesha, King of Moab, was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the King of Israel an hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred thousand rams with wool.’ How’s that for a sizable herd? But wait!

“First Chronicles tells how Solomon, when he finished the Temple, sacrificed twenty-two thousand oxen and a hundred and twenty thousand head of sheep. So, Mister”—Hinray turned on Jack—“you see what expansion brought that country to!”

“Help, help!” Jack shouted. “Here endeth the second lesson! Hinray reads the almanac and quotes it to me from cover to cover, and then you both quote the Bible. But how is it,” he added with a warming spark of interest, “that the wild animals get off scot-free of these charges? Don’t they eat their share of the range too? Or is that why the Rocky Mountain sheep got killed off, because they were too tough for mutton and they crowded the range?”

“Now you’re talkin’ sense, boy,” Hinray nodded approvingly. “You got yore bean workin’. Fact is, though, wild animals _ain’t_ destructive. Their grazin’ habits is conservative. Nature and experience must ’a’ learned ’em.”

Hinray had finished his work and was smoking his pipe, leaning back against the cabin. Jack was no longer listening; he was idly absorbed in watching Dawn. He could sit for an hour and just watch her. Dawn was listening intently as she restrung her Indian leggings with new deer-hide thongs.

“The Injins never saw the buffalo returnin’ south,” Hinray droned on. “They used to think that they passed underground, or that a new lot come out o’ the south every spring. Fact is, they went back by a different route every autumn from the way they came up. No, they never harmed the range none, and there was more buffalo, too, than they ever will be cattle. An’ better eatin’. Men sure was foolish them days.—Looky here, Dawn, there’s a bad spot, a sure trap for lightnin’ fire. Show yore paw, will you?”

Hinray hung his unfinished map on the wall and was making ready to depart. There was fire in the forest, and Damon was putting down a rather bad blaze of uncertain origin. Dawn had been riding range on Hal James’s cattle for the past two days and was resting today. Taking care of James’s stock was an effort to make up, in part at least, for her responsibility in increasing his losses from wolves and bear.

Undoubtedly it was her fault, she felt, that his stock had fallen prey to the wild animals of her mountain. Pretty hard, she realized, with all the range troubles below. She herded his cattle with wisdom and skill, and with passionate fidelity to a task which was also a service to the mountain. She rode early and late, spending hours at a time in the saddle. Jack had gone with her several times. He rode much better now.

James’s cattle had thriven amazingly. They were fine stock and had fattened on the excellent pasture. Nor had the range suffered; as the season advanced Dawn had helped the herders move them up higher and higher into the mountains till now they were in the high parks on the upper Amarillo.

The weeks had dragged on and nothing had been heard of any action on the Reservation survey. The question was whether the new survey was to stand, or that made according to Ranger O’Neill’s interpretation of the old boundaries. While the question whether the Reservation range should be opened was held in abeyance through the summer months, Gershwin’s cattle fattened along with Gonzales’ stock on the homesteader’s leased range. It was range that he was entitled to if the cattle were his. But they were not.

Damon O’Neill was not blind to this, but there was nothing that he could do about it if his superiors could not. He would obey orders and save his scalp. It was unthinkable, but there were ways in which he might be removed! He would antagonize no one as he went about his duties.

Mr. Perry had arranged with the Predatory Animal Bureau to go on one of their hunts, and had brought down a cat, much to his delight. But he could not make a party of it and bring his friends out to share in the sport. He’d have to arrange that for himself, he was told, so he went ahead, preparing for a big hunting party that fall.

Damon and Dawn had twice ridden over to the great tree which Dawn had been so sure was the Silverstake pine, inspecting it, debating whether or not it was the boundary of the ancient grant. Damon’s survey brought the boundary some hundred feet north of the tree and there he had erected a stone witness, in default of a tree. Yet the lie of the land, and some doubt as to the interpretation of the old description of the grant, made him wonder. Damon’s reverence for the forest and for the rules of its administration was such that he would not have felled the suspected tree. Those things went so slowly. He had no idea how to press them.

But there were women down in the capital who did. White women who had become interested in the welfare of the Pueblo Indians; in their land and water rights. A bad summer for the pueblos of the Rio Grande had left many of them almost without crops. Before ever it reached their ditches the little water remaining to them was diverted by white settlers, Mexican squatters, homesteaders of both races.

But a voice had gone up out of the wilderness, and the power of press and of public sympathy had brought the matter of this new invasion of Indian rights very nearly to a head. Whose water was this? Whose land?

Meanwhile deep in the forest some great tree lifted its branches to the blue sky and bore silent witness of the source of water and the hidden wealth of the Rockies. Graven upon its heart wood was the testimony as to who should be owner of their treasure. Dawn was sure that she would find the witness tree.