Part 2

He shoved the book back into his pocket. Buck’s head was lowered as he fumbled with clumsy hands at a witch’s knot in his horse’s mane. His brain was working swiftly. Why had Horace lied? Why had the wagon boss told the sheriff that he, Buck Bell, was going into a line camp at Rocky Point?

“I wouldn’t be tellin’ this to everybody, understand,” continued the sheriff. “I know I kin trust you, Bell.”

If the sheriff had taken a sharp knife and struck the cowpuncher in the back he could not have hurt Buck Bell more than he did when he spoke those words.

They rode on in silence. Buck was chilled to the bone by the wind; it bit through his inadequate clothing. Dick urged the bottle on him to warm his blood.

“I got some stuff that’ll be driftin’ with the storms this winter, Bell. I spoke to the Old Gent about it. He said it’d be all right if you boys kinda kept an eye on ’em and feed a few if need be.”

“Shore,” mumbled Buck. “Shore thing.”

Their trails parted a little farther on. The sheriff made Buck take his overshoes and the bottle.

“I’ll be back home in a couple o’ hours. Don’t be a damn’ fool, Bell. So long. Good luck, old-timer. See you next spring when the chinook melts you outa the bad lands.”

When they had parted Buck rode on, the ache in his heart more bitter than before. The words of the sheriff’s song came drifting back out of the storm--the song of Sam Bass.

“. . . Sam he is a corpse and six foot under clay.”

Buck stayed that night at a line camp, and pushed on the next morning. He kept wondering why Horace had lied. It hung like a sand burr in his thoughts all that day. He stopped late the next afternoon at a horse camp; and because they were short handed, Buck worked there a week. Then he drifted on once more, refusing a cent for his labors. It was the ethics of the grub line that forbade his accepting payment. They had given him and his horse food and shelter. He asked no more, though the work had been hard and he had eaten but two meals each day. Breakfast before they rode away; supper when they came in after dark. He had made the biscuits, helped with the dishes, and split wood, to boot. And he had given them what was left of the whisky.

* * * * *

Because Rocky Point lay along his route to somewhere south, he rode up there one evening at dusk.

A saddled horse was humped in the lee of the shed. Hollow eyed cattle bawled in the corral. No smoke came from the little log cabin. Filled with grave misgivings, Buck Bell stepped into the cabin. The moan of a man in pain came out of its dark interior. He found Cotton Eye lying fully clothed in bed, his leg broken between the ankle and knee. He had been like that since the day before, he told Buck through set teeth.

“Horse fell on me, comin’ up the river.”

Buck built the fire and made the crippled man as comfortable as possible. Then he took care of the horses and scattered hay for the gaunt cattle. When he came back to the cabin, he hid his fears under a careless banter.

“I’ll throw some soup into you, Cotton Eye. And coffee. Now roll over on your back and cuss me while I git this boot cut off. I’ll be as gentle as a cow with her first calf, pardner.”

Those men of the frontier were steady of hand and ingenious of brain. Broken bones and gunshot wounds were not uncommon. A man needed to know the rudiments of crude surgery in those days when doctors were few and far between.

There was no sleep for either man that night. Buck fashioned a sling to hold the suffering man while he pulled the fractured bone into place. The erstwhile nighthawk groaned. Buck swore softly as he labored. He splinted the leg with stout willow sticks and strips of tanned rawhide saddle strings. Beads of sweat covered the drawn face of Cotton Eye. He lay back, whimpering a little through clenched teeth, sick and faint, but game enough. Buck held a cup of black coffee to his mouth.

“She’s all over but the knittin’, pard. Here’s a cigaroot. She’ll hurt like hell fer a spell, but it’s a clean break and orter heal fast. I’ll run the show till you git well.”

“I’d ’a’ died if you hadn’t come along, Buck.”

“Mebbe.”

Buck built up the fire. His chaps with their precious store of money hung on a wooden peg with his bridle. Now and then he glanced that way, his lips smiling without humor.

“You saved my life, Buck. I ain’t fergittin’.”

“You better try to sleep, feller,” grunted Buck.

Cotton Eye lay there, a little flushed with fever, his eyes brighter than they should have been.

“I wonder, Buck, if you’d be doin’ this fer me if you knowed.”

“Knowed what, Cotton Eye?”

“That money I won off you. That deck was marked.”

“Shore thing,” nodded Buck Bell, “I knowed that. But a man’s gotta have some kinda excitement around a cow camp, even if it’s playin’ poker with a marked deck. I was ketchin’ on to the markin’s about the time I went broke.”

Cotton Eye was delirious by morning. Buck was forced to tie the man down while he fed and watered the cattle. Because there was only one bed, Buck had made out with the saddle blankets and the sick man’s overcoat.

* * * * *

During the days that followed Buck Bell did the work of five men. He chopped wood, cooked, and nursed Cotton Eye, whose fever went down slowly. He rode out each day, gathering poor cows that were too weak to rustle. He hooked up the work team and hauled hay, scattering it in a wide circle outside the corral. He opened the water hole twice a day. He puttered about the cabin, fixing it for the long winter, and forced a cheerfulness into the chatter that he flung at Cotton Eye. When he finally crawled into his improvised bed, fully clothed save for hat and boots, he was too weary to mind the cold much.

He killed a beef one evening. That night he brought in a square piece of the hide and worked on it with his pocket knife.

“Let’s have that good leg o’ your’n, pardner.” Buck wrapped the hide about the leg, nodded, marked it with his knife and took the hide back to his seat by the fire.

“Them splints kin come off in a day er so. I’m fixin’ a sorter casin’ to fit around that game laig. This hide’ll be plenty hard and we’ll lace it, savvy? Padded with the felt from a man’s hat, she’ll make a cast that’ll be useful and right ornamental, with the hair on the outside. I’m stretchin’ it around this willer pole to make ’er smooth.”

Buck tanned the rest of the hide and made himself moccasins and a coat that was ill fitting but warm enough. He killed a blacktail buck and they feasted on venison. Buck spent his evenings tanning the hide. The rawhide cast, smooth and hard and padded with felt from Buck’s hat, now replaced the willow splints. Buck wore a cap made out of a piece of Hudson’s Bay blanket. He refused the offer of Cotton Eye’s clothes.

With December came real winter--the hardest winter the cowmen in Montana have ever known. The hay was giving out. Buck worked on a snowplow. The cattle in the field grew in number each day. Gaunt flanked, hollow eyed, bawling as they trained at a stubborn walk with the storm.

Gray days. White days. Bitter days. The cattle drifting down into the badlands. Even the big native steers were finding it hard to paw to feed under the crusted snow.

Buck’s black chaps no longer banked his stolen money. He had buried the stuff in a corner of the cow shed, wrapped carefully in his slicker. His daylight labors brought peace of mind. But sometimes he lay awake, far into the night, haunted by thoughts of the buried wealth. The dream of a cow outfit of his own was replaced by the black nightmare of his theft. He was tempted a hundred times to share the burden of his guilt with Cotton Eye who was now hobbling about on crutches made of forked sticks wrapped and padded with deerskin.

“Wish I could git word out to the ranch,” said Buck, “This hay ain’t gonna last. The only shot, if this keeps up, is to drift south o’ the river where the shelter is better. Mebbe train out from there. They could buy hay at Lewistown and Gilt Edge. I had to kill three more calves today. Cows didn’t have milk to feed the li’l beggars. Hear the cows a-bawlin’? Hell, ain’t it?”

The haystacks were becoming fewer. Buck and his crippled partner found it hard to fill the long silences that fell over them. Cotton Eye hobbled about now, getting the meals and washing dishes. He scraped the thick frost from the window and would sit there, smoking and watching Buck Bell pitch hay sparingly to the starving cattle. When Buck saddled his horse and rode back into the breaks to bring in more stumbling, gaunt steers and cows, Cotton Eye would curse with futile fury at his aching leg.

“Brung in three more o’ Dick Powell’s steers today. Weak as hell. Three-four Circle Diamond cows, another Square steer, one er two Bear Paw Pool strays, and the Widder Brown’s Jersey milk cow. The widder sets a heap o’ store by that cow. It must be shore a-stormin’ up on the ridges, to drift that stuff into the breaks. If this keeps up, there won’t be a cow left in the country.”

“You was sayin’ something about gettin’ word to the ranch, Buck. I kin make out to ride now. I’d like to tackle it. Ain’t doin’ no good here.”

“If you’re plumb sure you kin make it, pardner?”

“Shore thing, I kin. I’ll pull out in the mornin’.”

* * * * *

Buck wrapped the injured leg in a blanket and Cotton Eye rode away in the gray dawn. Buck grinned a farewell. When Cotton Eye was gone, Buck tried to whistle away the gnawing loneliness. He worked feverishly, not even taking a few minutes off at noon for his usual coffee and beans and meat. Now and then, when his chores took him past the corner of the shed where the stolen money had been buried, he would quicken his pace, as a man afraid of ghosts might pass with haste by a grave.

“Why did Horace lie?” he asked himself a thousand and one times.

“Because Horace knowed who done the robbery!” came the still answer out of each night’s darkness.

Cotton Eye had left his bed and his warsack filled with a few clothes and knicknacks. Delving into the sack for a needle and thread one day, a week or so after Cotton Eye’s departure, Buck came upon a large envelope of heavy paper. He emptied its contents of saddle wax and thread and harness needles and awl. He sat there, smiling softly, the worried frown momentarily gone from his forehead.

“I’ll do it. I’ll use this envelope to hold the money. Else I’ll be plumb crazy before spring. I’ll send the money to Horace, first man that passes along.”

He spent an evening composing a laborious letter to the Circle C wagon boss. That night he slept without tossing and dreaming. And with the first streak of dawn he was out in the shed with pick and shovel, digging in the corner. With hands that shook with eagerness, he undid the slicker. A choking cry broke from his pulsing throat. The money was gone. All of it. The slicker held nothing but some scraps of old newspaper, rudely cut and bundled in imitation of the banknotes.

For a long time Buck squatted there on the ground, staring with dazed eyes at the slicker and its mocking contents. A racking, horrible laugh rattled from his dry lips. Then he went on back to the cabin, his brain aching dully with milling thoughts.

Cotton Eye had taken the money. Cotton Eye was a thief as well as a crooked card sharp. It was hard to take--after what he’d done fer Cotton Eye.

“Well, the damn’ stuff is gone. Gone fer keeps. Too late now to send it back with that confession ... Cotton Eye would be headed south by now ... south ... with five thousand dollars.”

Then a slow grin spread across the mouth of Buck Bell. He chuckled, then laughed until the coffee boiled over and on to the stove.

“That’s shore one on me. Frettin’ and stewin’ around about that money. Him playin’ possum with that leg. Diggin’ ’er up, when I rode off yesterday. But how’d he know I had it? How’d he know where it was buried? Well, I got all winter to figger ’er out.”

* * * * *

Days slipped into weeks. Weeks of white isolation. The hay was about gone. No word from the ranch. And that eternal gray sky overhead like a shroud.

Came that morning when Buck Bell looked out at the empty hay corral. This was the end of the trail. All about the cabin the gaunt eyed cattle walked aimlessly, bawling. Buck went back into the cabin and began packing. When his grub was sacked and his bed rolled he went out to the barn and hooked the team to his crude snow plow. He tied his saddle horse to the off horse and loaded his bed and grub on the snow plow. Then he scrawled a note and laid it on the rawhide covered table, weighting it with a can of frozen tomatoes.

Closing the door of the log cabin, he picked up the lines and seated himself on the snow plow. As the team got under way, he grinned back over his shoulder.

“So long, cabin. Here goes nothin’.”

Behind him, bawling hungrily, trailed the cattle. Their dumb faith was pinned to the man and his horses.

South into the breaks across the frozen river. The sun was a dim white ball in a dead sky. The air was still and sharp. The snow plow creaked and groaned.

“Come on, dogies!”

A gaunt scarecrow of a man, riding his crazy plow. A beard covered his face up to the frost blackened cheekbones. His clothes were a patchwork of blanket, cowhide, and buckskin with the hair on. His hair came to his shoulders. Under the deerhide covering, his hands and feet were swollen and stiff from frostbite.

“Sam Bass was born in Indiana; it was his native home. And at the age of seventeen, young Sam begun to roam.”

The song blended crazily with the bawl of starving cattle, the creak of his covered plow runners and the click of hoofs.

South into the sheltering badlands where the snow was deep but soft. The plow cut through, clearing a ten foot path through the drifts. The cattle packed the trail, crowding and riding one another to get to the precious feed.

“Grass belly deep!” cried Buck, looking back. “Come on, you hungry dogies! Git the wrinkles outa your paunches. Mebbe so it’s come Christmas fer you.”

He unhooked the team at last and watered them at a hole cut in the ice. He camped at the edge of the cleared bottomland and his pitch fire sent its crimson shaft into the night. He had found feed for his cattle. There was more to be had for the plowing. He slept that night with a smile of tired happiness on his bearded, frost cracked lips.

In those days to come, Buck Bell found a measure of happiness and peace. He labored untiringly, a man of rawhide. A bearded, frost blackened scarecrow. And the haunting ache of that stolen money slipped into a forgetfulness, buried by the work he was doing.

He cleared huge patches of grass. He rode back across the river and trailed in more starving cattle to share his grass. Sometimes he came within a mile of the cabin at Rocky Point but always he was too busy to stop. Those short days were too brief to waste even a few minutes in idle pastime. The snow was too deep to tire his horse in breaking useless trail to the cabin to see whether any one had been there.

So he did not know that Horace had come and found that note on the table.

Hay’s played out. I’m pullin’ out. If I don’t die off before the chinook comes, I'll come in and give myself up. I taken that money that night in town. Then I lost it. So the law kin take it outa my hide. --BUCK BELL.

A frozen, wolf gnawed steer carcass lay near the cabin. Its ripped paunch held no grass. Only willow sticks, some of them almost the thickness of a man’s wrist.

* * * * *

This was the winter of ’86-’87, when the drift fences and cut coulees held the hide and bones of a hundred thousand steers. When the mercury hung below forty-five, and more than a few cowboys died for their outfits. When cowmen stared out across the blizzard swept hills, dry eyed, with aching lumps in their throats. Grim, silent, defeated.

The sun was a white ball inside its circle of gray, cold as the eye of a corpse. Sun dogs followed its passing, across a sky that knew no warmth. At night the patches of stars seemed frozen in a black agate sky.

And when the last of the hay was gone, the men sat about the bunkhouse stove. And the strings of staggering, bawling cattle drifted on down the wind to death.

At night the wolves and coyotes flung the death song toward the glittering stars.

That was the winter of ’86-’87. The winter that broke the back of the cow country.

South of the river, Buck Bell watched the last of the feed go. He had lost track of the days. He did not know what month it was. But he knew that the grass had played out and that the end of the trail lay just ahead. His grub was gone and he was living on meat and beans. Each day he felt of his teeth to test the coming symptoms of scurvy. His clothes were a mass of patches. His eyes were swollen almost shut, the lids scaled from frost, the eyeballs discolored by snow blindness. Only half a dozen matches remained in his pocket. He could not remember the taste of tobacco and coffee.

Half frozen, he lay in a knot under tarp and blankets, that night in early spring when a wind roared down out of the canons with a droning, rushing sound.

The scrub pines whispered; cattle got to their feet. Buck stirred a little under the tarp, hardly awake. Then the wind cut down the river and swept his forlorn camp. No man who has ever heard the voice of the chinook wind can ever forget its whimper. Buck threw back the tarp and the warm blast rushed down upon him.

A harsh, choking cry broke from his throat as he sat up in bed. His arms, ragged, aching, frost seared, flung out in a wide gesture. His face, bearded and scarred black, lifted. His eyes found the stars that seemed close overhead in a warm sky. Terrible sobs shook him. Tears streamed down from his aching eyes.

“God, oh, God!”

Over and over again.

“God!”

He could find no other word to fit into the prayer that sobbed and rattled and laughed in his throat.

The weary horses felt the blessing of that chinook wind. The cattle milled and bawled a restless chant. The melting snow in the tree branches dripped with increasing cadence. A golden moon rode across the sky toward the jagged skyline. The hard winter was over. The chinook had come. Its passage through the pines sang the requiem of cattle and horses and men that slept beneath the crusted drifts.

And when the coulees became rivers and the ridges lay bare, Buck Bell trailed his straggling herd up the ridge and on to the open prairie.

“Git along, little dogies, git along!”

He sang in a cracked voice as his horse patiently followed the drags.

* * * * *

And so they found him that day in the Spring of ’87. Horace and the little man with the white beard and puckered, sky blue eyes who owned the Circle C. Horace and the Old Gent.

They did not know him. Their eyes were dim with the miracle that lay before them. Cattle. Hundreds of cattle, grazing hungrily. And behind them a snow blind man who was all hair and rags, who sang in a crazy voice, the words of “Sam Bass.”

A phantom herd followed by a ghost. It was impossible to believe that so many cattle could have lived, while so many thousands of others had died. Buck’s herd filled the coulees and covered the ridges. The chain harness rattled on the work team that was hooked to a bull hide which held Buck’s bed and two young calves hog tied.

A dozen brands were represented in that gaunt herd. One of those calves belonged to the Widow Brown’s Jersey milk cow. Its father was the prize Circle Diamond bull that had strayed down from its Canadian range. Half of Dick Powell’s herd was there.

“Sam Bass was born in Indiana...”

Between them, the Old Gent and Horace got Buck Bell to the ranch. Somebody went for Doc Steele, fifty miles away. For Buck was blind and one foot so badly frozen that three toes had to come off.

“He’ll see again in ten days,” said the doctor. “Let him sleep. Give him warm food. Go slow on the whisky. He has a barb wire constitution and a rawhide carcass.” He was a little puzzled at Buck’s delirious babbling.

“He’s been worrying about something.”

Horace and the Old Gent exchanged glances. The owner of the Circle C thoughtfully stroked his whiskers and smiled down at the sleeping Buck Bell. Then he handed the doctor the note that Horace had found on the table at the deserted line camp at Rocky Point. Doc Steele knew cowboys. He understood. He handed back the note and blew his nose like a trumpet. The Old Gent fetched glasses and the bottle.

“Cotton Eye got here about New Year’s, Doc. He had five thousand dollars and said he’d stole it. Wanted to plead guilty and take his medicine. His story didn’t hold water. He’d been sitting in a poker game when the money was stolen at the depot. Horace knew Buck was the thief because the melting snow on Buck’s hat and clothes showed he’d been out in the storm about the time that depot man was robbed. Cotton Eye finally admitted he’d stolen the money from Buck. Buck had kept him awake nights, talking about the robbery in his sleep like a man gone loco. Buck saved Cotton Eye’s life and he wanted to return the favor.”

Doc Steele chuckled deep down in his muscular throat.

“Couple of sentimental old sage hens. It’s a damn’ shame, sir, that we haven’t more of such outlaws in this world.”

He lifted his glass.

“Here’s to ’em.”

“May their breed never die out.”