Part 15

“Sho!” Bart deprecated. “He couldn’t make that stick. You don’t imagine, now do you, that Freel’s fool enough to have us jailed? Not when I could spill what I know. He wouldn’t even consider it.”

“That’s what he wouldn’t!” Carver agreed. “He’s just creating a background. We’re not slated to languish in jail, you and me. We’re marked out for the slaughter.”

Bart brightened.

“No!” he exclaimed. “Surely you can’t mean that something is going to happen. It will provide me with a fresh interest in life if there’s a prospect that I might possibly lose it. And how will all this come to pass?”

“Killed while resisting arrest,” Carver stated.

“Sounds reasonable,” Bart admitted. “I’ll positively guarantee to resist.”

“Before you’re ever arrested you’ll be much too dead to make any protest,” Carver predicted. “Freel has planted the idea in folks’ minds that before long he’ll have to book you and me for that deal. It’s been whispered about and they’re sort of expecting it. Then some day he’ll drag in our corpses and announce that we’d been shot while resisting his efforts to take us.”

“Interesting but only part way convincing,” said Bart. “You’ve neglected to explain how he’s to gain possession of our corpses so he can start dragging ’em in. I’ll remonstrate with him considerable before I’ll let him have mine.”

“He won’t collect it in person,” Carver said.

“Maybe I’m supposed to send it to him,” Bart suggested. “But he don’t deserve any such favors from me. I consider his scheme a flat failure, myself.”

“That county-seat aggregation is a hard bunch to go up against, the way they’re sitting right now,” Carver said. “They’ve got influence and power behind ’em. This way of eliminating a troublesome party is time-tried and tested. It’s found favor with many a sheriff and chief of police before now and it’s an old favorite with Freel.”

“Then it appears that the clever thing to do is for us to organize too,” Bart volunteered. “You can act as the chief and send me out to get Freel. I’ll dry-gulch him so far from nowhere that even the coyotes won’t find him.”

“Some other time,” said Carver. “Not now. We could hardly ride into town and murder the mayor and the sheriff all in one day without some sort of excuse. It would create unfavorable comment. This deal down at Alvin bears the brand of Freel’s deep-seated planning. It’s likely they’ll come after us themselves the next time they try it, just so as to give it the earmarks of a lawful attempt to arrest. Meantime we’ll have to work up a background of our own. The county seat needs cleaning up wholesale. If a man’s going to live anywhere he might as well have decent conditions. Once folks get that in their minds we can defend ourselves and still render a patriotic service to the county as a whole.”

“All right,” Bart agreed. “After you’ve unfurled the flag I’ll lead the last desperate charge with the whole county cheering. But it still appears to me that it would be simpler for me to lay out behind the hedge somewheres and do a little bushwacking myself.”

“Meantime, just in case Freel sends out another hired killer, I wouldn’t lay myself open to any chance stranger that comes dropping along,” Carver advised.

“The first stranger that shows up anywhere within three hundred yards goes down in the smoke,” Bart assured.

Molly Lassiter came from the house as Carver turned to leave. He did not come often of late and she walked with him a short distance up the trail.

“We’ll start cutting next week,” Carver stated. Their talks were largely impersonal these days. “Harvest is crowding close to us now.”

“Bart expects to start cutting Monday,” she said. “How many bushels do you think your wheat will thresh out?”

“It’ll run close to twenty,” he estimated. “Maybe more. We ought to get fifteen thousand bushels or better.”

“And more next year,” she said. “You’ll put out more wheat this fall, won’t you?”

“Likely,” he answered. “I hadn’t quite made all my plans for next season.”

He had mentioned the fifteen thousand bushels of wheat casually and without elation. It would pay for the new farm machinery with which the Half Diamond H was now stocked but for which he still owed, leaving him a big margin for future operations. This first year’s crop would put him on a solid basis and well on his way toward the maturity of his original plan to buy all of the best land in the valley. By the time other homesteaders could prove up on their filings he would be in a position to buy out all who would sell. He had no present need even to avail himself of the assistance which both old Joe Hinman and Nate Younger were anxious to extend. Younger’s outfit had been the largest in the unowned lands in the old days and now Carver was building it up into the largest of the new day that had dawned. He had been top hand for both the Box Bar and the Half Diamond H under the old régime, a moving spirit among the riders of the Cherokee Strip, and now he had become a leader among the settlers. Both of his old employers, having taken a part in raising him, were duly proud of the fact; theirs still the loyalty that had always prevailed between an owner and the men who rode for his brand. The easy road to success now opened invitingly to Carver but he found no joy in the prospect. He had worked steadily toward his original aim but his initial enthusiasm was lacking.

The girl had observed this change and it troubled her. Of late Carver had exhibited a restlessness that was akin to Bart’s; and she wondered. He had gone so far; would he turn back now?

She accompanied him but a short distance and the conversation was confined to impersonal topics. She observed that for the first time in six months he was wearing his gun. As they parted he noted her troubled gaze resting upon it.

“Sho! This?” he said, tapping the weapon. “I someway don’t feel dressed up without it. I wear it as an ornament, kind of, the way a girl wears a ribbon,” and he moved on up the trail.

A few days later Molly mounted the ridge and watched the start of the harvesting. There was nothing to attract swarms of harvest hands such as crowded into the country farther north where the whole landscape seemed a solid body of wheat. Another year, when the acreage seeded to wheat would be increased fourfold, then they would come. But Carver had found no scarcity of hands to help him harvest his crop. From her point of vantage the girl could see tall-hatted, chap-clad men toiling in the fields. Later in the season, after the wheat had been stacked, she would see them plowing. They rode their horses out to their work as they had always done, and left them standing about.

She would see no other harvest such as this. Another season and the wheat fields of the Strip would be invaded by the riffraff that always came south for the harvest and followed it north. Then the tumbleweeds would be gone. Now they had rallied to lend a helping hand to one of their own kind, one man who had understood. And as she watched them toiling at these unfamiliar tasks she experienced a thrill of sympathy for the men who had helped to make homes possible for others and now found no place in the new scheme of things for themselves. For the riders of the waste places had ever been the vanguards of civilization. Fur traders had skimmed the riches of their calling from a vast territory and departed, leaving it no more habitable than before; gold seekers had prospected the hills and passed on but the cowhands had stayed to make the West habitable for those who should follow. And now that the followers had come there was no further use for the ones who had led the way.

As the summer advanced the girl observed how swiftly the ranks of the grub-liners were depleted as they were forced to realize the fact that spring work would never open up for their sort again. Families of Cherokees still prowled the countryside at will, pitching their teepees along the streams, the squaws begging incessantly from one homestead cabin to the next. The settlers, expecting nothing better from the Indians, were prone to tolerate this sort of nuisance but looked with increasing disfavor upon the nomadic white riders that drifted about in much the same aimless fashion. Yet they were not parasites, these men, even though the newcomers so viewed them. Rather they came from a proud fraternity. In grub-lining they had been merely following an ancient and respected custom of their kind and when they now found that this no longer prevailed they desisted.

It was only through Carver’s insistence that grub-liners still continued to drop in at the Half Diamond H. Their presence created the one break in the monotony that seemed closing in upon him. He made that clear to each comer and urged each one to return. But another old custom was dying and the number of grub-line riders who turned up for meals at the Half Diamond H was depleted by half before the summer was ended, as these jobless ones drifted into other lines.

One by one, the girl watched them go and she wondered how they would fare in these new pursuits which they adopted, not from choice but from necessity. The majority would sink to oblivion, drudging at tasks which they had always despised. But there were some whose names were slated for fame in the annals of this new Southwest.

Carl Mattison was destined to become one of the most-famed marshals of all time. Even now the fame of his reputation as a man hunter was mounting. The name of Crowfoot was slated to become synonymous with prestige and power, linked with perhaps the most impressive fortune in the whole Southwest. There would be many others who would attain high places. Milt Lassiter would create a place in history as one who would defy the law for a dozen years with a price on his head and with every officer in five States desirous of collecting it. And this last-named career was even now exerting its influence on Molly’s understanding of the conditions which prevailed in this new land.

In the main the old conventions were respected, old traditions upheld, but modified to fit conditions as they were, not as other communities decreed that they should be. Here actualities were everything, appearances nothing, and there was not yet that rigid adherence to minor banalities that were accepted as eternal verities in older communities where such details were considered the bulwark of smug respectability. Here a man was judged by what he stood for in his present environment, his daily relations with his neighbors, not by what his family had accomplished in generations past,--for the past had no part in this new land that lived in the present with an eye to the future. Ex-convicts were making a new start with their families; former wildlings were making good and the rising above past transgressions was considered a cause for congratulation, not one for reproach. Milt Lassiter’s ill fame did not react to the detriment of either Bart or the girl, their neighbors valuing the two for themselves alone.

This knowledge brought in a new doubt to Molly--a doubt which fostered a certain content. After all, in a land of new standards, was it right that her adherence to a moth-eaten tradition should keep Carver and herself apart? This thought, gradually crystallizing into a conviction, brought with it a measure of comfort, but Carver, not knowing, experienced a daily increase of restlessness and discontent.

Few times when the bunk house held more than three grub-liners and all too frequently it was unoccupied. Carver found time dragging slowly and days and nights were equally monotonous. He knew that he could sell his holdings for a considerable sum. Should he sell out and migrate to some point where there was still some open range available and buy out a small cow outfit? He debated this problem but lacked his usual gift of quick decision.

There came a night when several old friends rode up to the bunk house. Joe Hinman and Nate Younger dropped in for one of their frequent overnight visits and Bart Lassiter came across the ridge. A stud game was in order and Carver rose and went to the house, brought forth a silver dollar and addressed it.

“Little lonely dollar, you was to mount up to a million. You haven’t mounted that high yet but if I’d follow through it’s likely you’d attain it. But is that what we’re wanting after all? I’ll put you to the test--fair God or false--and let you decide it for me.”

He returned to the bunk house and took out a fifty-dollar stack of chips, tossing one red chip back and replacing it with the silver dollar.

Old Joe Hinman regarded the coin that crowned the stack of chips.

“Seems like I’ve seen the selfsame coin before,” he commented. “Surely now, you wouldn’t go and risk it. It’s led you quite a piece, that dollar has.”

“But maybe not in just the right direction,” Carver said. His thoughts reverted to the day he had acquired it.

“What depends upon the outcome?” old Joe inquired. “Which way will you leap?”

“Just this one stack,” said Carver. “If I double it I stay. If I lose I go. It means the difference between here and somewhere else; pumpkins or tumbleweeds, cows or crops--for one more year.”

An hour later he cashed in a double stack and the cards had decreed that he stay for another year.

Bart Lassiter leaned back in his chair and grinned sympathetically.

“My year has another six months to run,” he said. “I’ll be free before you regain your liberty. You’ll find me waiting for you somewhere out yonder when your sentence has expired.”

XIV

Two settlers stood in the saloon in Alvin. The proprietor lowered his voice and leaned across the bar.

“Look you, now--there’s going to be a killing,” he predicted. He jerked a thumb toward the rear door. “Right out there is where he left his horse and for two days he set there at that table waiting for Carver to come in.”

Jimmy had just recited the incident of the stranger’s attempt to take Carver unawares and was now merely adding a few conclusions of his own to lend an air of spice and mystery to the tale.

“He knows too much about folks that are running things in the county seat, Carver does; him and Bart Lassiter,” Jimmy stated. “A bartender hears things. Folks get to talking over their drinks. Most always they do. I’ve heard it said for a positive fact that Bart saw Wellman blow up the bridge out of Oval Springs the night the up-passenger was ditched and two men killed. Wellman was sheriff at the time.”

It seemed that the two homesteaders had also been hearing things.

“United States mail went up in smoke that night when the mail car burned,” said one. “I’ve heard that Mattison’s still making inquiries about that. He never quits, Mattison don’t.”

“Well, then, and who’s the two men that could convict Wellman and get him hung a mile high?” The saloon man pointed out triumphantly. “Who, now? Why, Bart Lassiter! And Carver! I’d never want it said that it come from me; it’s only between us three. But who is it that knows Freel led the shooting when some of Mattison’s men was killed at the same time Wellman was wrecking the bridge? Whoever knew that would be dangerous to Freel, wouldn’t he? See how it all works out?”

The two nodded agreement.

“There’s a dozen of Carver’s close neighbors that swear he was home the whole day of that Wharton business that Freel was trying to connect him up with,” one volunteered. “I guess Freel seen it wouldn’t do any good to have him put under arrest.”

“Arrest! Listen!” and Jimmy leaned farther over the bar. “That was months back. It’s no arrest that he wants. Didn’t I say there was due to be a killing? He was just paving the way for it. Mark me, now! Some day we all will hear that Carver and Bart has been arrested--dead!” He lowered his voice still farther. “The fellow that left his horse out there while he waited for Carver was wearing a deputy’s badge under his vest. But he didn’t appear anxious to arrest Carver alive.”

Jimmy sighed and passed the two men a drink on the house. Later he would charge that bit of hospitality against the sum Carver had left with him for the purpose.

“Of course I wouldn’t want to be quoted,” he concluded. “But a bartender hears things. Folks get to talking over their drinks. Most always they do.”

It was perhaps the hundreth time he had detailed his conclusions to different customers in the past two months. In various parts of the country others of Carver’s friends had been similarly occupied in breathing their suspicions into willing ears. It was being asked why no arrests were made in the county except for minor offences. The settlers, since their first crop was harvested and they had more leisure time to devote to affairs outside their own personal labors, were giving thought as to the manner in which the county seat was managed; and their opinions were being furnished ready made.

A quiet individual turned up in Oval Springs and made a few discreet inquiries, interviewing perhaps a dozen residents of the town, his queries in each case the same. He merely asked if they could state positively that Freel and the Ralstons had been in town on a certain date some months back; and if they were willing to testify that Milt and Noll Lassiter had been held in durance throughout that same day. The date was that of the Wharton hold-up. No man could swear positively to these facts. Whenever some party volunteered the information that he was equally unable to swear to the contrary, the inquirer merely nodded and replied that it would be quite unnecessary. Then, after three days in the county seat, he left town in the night and was seen no more. None had witnessed his departure; he had told no man his business and there was widespread conjecture as to whether or not he was in the employ of the Wharton bank.

He rode up to the Half Diamond H at daylight on the morning after the cards had decreed that Carver should remain for another year. He declined the money which Carver would have given him to cover expenses.

“Just for old times’ sake,” he said, and rode south to catch a train out of Enid for his home ranch in Texas.

And just across the ridge Bart Lassiter was recounting the outcome of the previous night’s poker session to his sister. The girl experienced a queer little pang when she heard that Carver had risked the silver dollar which he had treasured for so long a time. She knew its associations, also that it rested within her power, and hers alone, to reinstate them, vested with all their former meaning. A small thing perhaps, but relatively unimportant events are frequently more significant than the large and obvious, and this incident in some way served to fix the conviction that had been growing upon her for weeks past. After all, what did anything matter but her own viewpoint and Carver’s? But Hinman and Nate Younger were waiting to ride with her to Oval Springs for the first county fair, from which point she would accompany them to Caldwell for a few days before the opening of her school for the fall term. The two old cowmen had planned this trip for weeks and she could not disappoint them now. She would be more sure of herself before the day of her return; would have time in which to determine whether or not the new-found conviction was permanent. And suddenly she knew that she was sure of herself now,--very sure; but her two old friends were waiting. She drew Bart aside.

“Tell Don not to risk it again,” she said. “I want him to keep it always. Tell him that for me.”

And Bart, deciding that his sister’s whims had already imposed far too many restrictions upon both his own activities and Carver’s, carefully refrained from delivering the message. Instead, he registered a protest when he crossed the ridge to see Carver.

“I’m becoming downright weary of listening to warnings,” he fretfully declared. “Never a day goes by but what some friendly soul drops past to inform me that Wellman and Freel are scheming to play it low-down on me. Every man in the county must know it by now.”

“The most of them,” Carver agreed. “If anything was to happen to us now there’d be five hundred men rise up and point out to their friends that they’d been predicting that very thing--that they’d been telling ’em all along how Wellman and Freel was planning to murder us some night.”

“It’s nice to know that we’ll be vindicated after we’re dead,” said Bart. “But I was wondering if there maybe wasn’t some method by which we could go right on living even if we don’t get quite so much credit for our part in the affair. Personally I don’t approve of trifling round trying to set the whole county on their trail when one man could terminate their wickedness in two brief seconds.”

“But it’s paved the way for the clean-up of the county seat,” said Carver.

“Let’s you and me ride over and clean it up in the old wild way,” Bart urged.

“Only we’ll let them ride out here,” Carver substituted. “That background I was speaking about a while back is all arranged.”

“I’m glad you’re satisfied with the background,” Bart returned. “I still maintain that I ought to secrete myself behind a sprig of scrub oak and wait until Freel comes riding into the foreground. That way we’d take ’em front and rear. But anyway suits me, if only it transpires soon.”

“Real soon now,” Carver promised. He turned to a grub-liner who was saddling his horse in the corral.

“You’ll find Mattison waiting in the hotel at Casa,” he informed. “He’ll be expecting the message. Tell him just this: That my time has come to deputize him. He’ll know what to do. Then you forget it.” He turned back to Bart. “Real soon now,” he repeated. “That’s the chief reason why Hinman and old Nate insisted on taking Molly over to enjoy herself at the fair.”

The girl was, in all truth, enjoying herself at the fair. It was as old Joe Hinman remarked to a group of friends in the lobby of Wellman’s hotel.

“Nate and me are giving the little girl a vacation,” he said. “First time she’s been away from that homestead overnight since Bart filed on it. She thinks a lot of that little place, Molly does. Even now she won’t be persuaded to stay away but one night. We’ll take her up to Caldwell this evening to buy a few women’s fixings and show her the best time we can but she’ll come traipsing back home to-morrow. Can’t keep her away. Carver had to promise to go over and stay all night with Bart so no one could steal that homestead while she’s gone.”