"I figured on sixty or seventy cars," said Billy. Instinctively he had pulled himself straight in the saddle to meet this fresh emergency.

Dill, with a pencil and an old letter from his pocket, was doing some rapid figuring. "With beef so low, I fear I shall be obliged to ask you to hold this herd for two or three weeks. The price is sure to rise later. It is merely a juggling operation among the speculators and is not justified by the condition of the stock, or of the market.

In a couple of weeks the price should be normal again."

"And in a couple uh weeks this bunch would bring the lowest figure they name," Billy a.s.serted firmly. "Beef shrinks on the hoof like thunder when it's held up and close-herded on poor range. What yuh better do, Dilly, is let me work this herd and ship just the top-notchers--they're _all_ prime beef," he added regretfully, glancing through the fence at the milling herd. "I can cut out ten of twelve cars that'll bring top price, and throw the rest back on the range till we gather again. Yuh won't lose as much that way as yuh would by holding up the whole works."

"Well," Dill hesitated, "perhaps you are right. I don't pretend to know anything about this side of the business. To put the case to you plainly, we must clear forty thousand dollars on our beef this fall, for the mortgage alone--putting it in round numbers. We should also have ten thousand dollars for expenses, in order to run clear without adding to our liabilities. I rely upon you to help manage it. If you would postpone any more gathering of beef until--"

"It's just about a case uh now or never," Billy cut in. "There's only about so long to gather beef before they begin to fall off in weight.

Then we've got to round up the calves and wean 'em, before cold weather sets in. We can't work much after snow falls. We can pull through the first storm, all right, but when winter sets in we're done. We've got to wean and feed all the calves you've got hay for, and I can save some loss by going careful and taking 'em away from the poorest cows and leaving the fat ones to winter their calves. How much hay yuh got put up?"

"A little over five hundred tons on our place," said Dill. "And I sent a small crew over to the Bridger place; they have nearly a hundred tons there. You said for me to gather every spear I could," he reminded humorously, "and I obeyed to the best of my ability."

"Good shot, Dilly. I'll round up eight or nine hundred calves, then; that'll help some. Well, shall I cut the top off this bunch uh beef, or throw the whole business back on the range? You're the doctor."

Dill rode close to the high fence, stood in his stirrups and looked down upon the ma.s.s of broad, sleek backs moving restlessly in and out and around, with no aim but to seek some way of escape. The bawling made speech difficult at any distance, and the dust sent him coughing away.

"I think, William," he said, when he was again beside Billy, "I shall leave this matter to your own judgment. What I want is to get every cent possible out of the beef we ship; the details I am content to leave with you, for in my ignorance I should probably botch the job. I suppose we can arrange it so that, in case the market rises suddenly, you can rush in a trainload at short notice?"

"Give me two weeks to get action on the range stuff, and I can have a trainload on the way to Chicago so quick it'll make your head whirl.

I'll make it a point to be ready on short notice. And before we pull out I'll give yuh a kinda programme uh the next three or four weeks, so yuh can send a man out and he'll have some show uh finding us. And I won't bring in another herd till you send word--only yuh want to bear in mind that I can't set out there on a pinnacle till snow flies, waiting for prices to raise in Chicago. Yuh don't want to lose sight uh them nine hundred calves we've got to gather yet."

It was all well enough for Billy to promise largely and confidently, but he failed to take into account one small detail over which he had no control. So perfect was his system of gathering beef--and he gathered only the best, so as to catch the top price--that when Dill's message came, short and hurried but punctiliously worded and perfectly punctuated, that beef had raised to four-thirty and "Please rush shipment as per agreement," Billy had his trainload of beef in Tower, ready to load just three days after receiving notice. But here interfered the detail over which he had no control. Dill had remembered to order the cars, but shipping was heavy and cars were not to be had.

Two long, heartrending weeks they waited just outside Tower, held there within easy reach--and upon mighty short feed for the herd--by the promises of the railroad management and the daily a.s.surance of the agent that the cars might be along at any time within four hours. (He always said four hours, which was the schedule time for fast freight between Tower and the division point.) Two long weeks, while from the surrounding hills they watched long stock trains winding snakily over the prairie toward Chicago. During those maddening days and nights Billy added a fresh crease to the group between his eyebrows and deepened the old ones, and Dill rode three horses thin galloping back and forth between the ranch and the herd, in helpless anxiety.

At last the cars came and the beef, a good deal thinner than it had been, was loaded and gone, and the two relaxed somewhat from the strain. The market was lower when that beef reached its destination, and they did not bring the "top" price which Billy had promised Dill.

So the shipping season pa.s.sed and Dill made his payment on the mortgage by borrowing twelve thousand dollars, using a little over two thousand to make up the deficit in shipping returns and holding the remainder for current expenses. Truly, the disagreeable element which would creep in where Billy had least expected scored a point there, and once more the castle he had builded for himself and Dill and one other lay in shadow.

CHAPTER XVIII.

_When the North Wind Blows._

November came in with a blizzard; one of those sudden, sweeping whirls of snow, with bitter cold and a wind that drove the fine snow-flour through shack walls and around window casings, and made one look speculatively at the supply of fuel. It was such a storm as brings an aftermath of sheepherders reported missing with their bands scattered and wandering aimlessly or else frozen, a huddled ma.s.s, in some washout; such a storm as sends the range cattle drifting, heads down and bodies hunched together, neither knowing nor caring where their trail may end, so they need not face that bitter drive of wind and snow.

It was the first storm of the season, and they told one another it would be the worst. The Double-Crank wagons were on the way in with a bunch of bawling calves and cows when it came, and they were forced to camp hastily in the shelter of a coulee till it was over, and to walk and lead their horses much of the time on guard that they might not freeze in the saddle. But they pulled through it, and they got to the ranch and the corrals with only a few calves left beside the trail to mark their bitter pa.s.sing. In the first days of cold and calm that came after, the ranch was resonant day and night with that monotonous, indescribable sound, like nothing else on earth unless it be the beating of surf against a rocky sh.o.r.e--the bawling of nine hundred calves penned in corrals, their uproar but the nucleus for the protesting clamor of nine hundred cows circling outside or standing with noses pressed close against the corral rails.

Not one day and night it lasted, nor two. For four days the uproar showed no sign of ever lessening, and on the fifth the eighteen hundred voices were so hoa.r.s.e that the calves merely whispered their plaint, gave over in disgust and began nosing the scattered piles of hay. The cows, urged by hunger, strayed from the blackened circle around the corrals and went to burrowing in the snow for the ripened gra.s.s whereby they must live throughout the winter. They were driven forth to the open range and left there, and the Double-Crank settled down to comparative quiet and what peace they might attain. Half the crew rolled their beds and rode elsewhere to spend the winter, returning, like the meadowlarks, with the first hint of soft skies and green gra.s.s.

Jim Bleeker and a fellow they called Spikes moved over to the Bridger place with as many calves as the hay there would feed, and two men were sent down to the line-camp to winter. Two were kept at the Double-Crank Ranch to feed the calves and make themselves generally useful--the quietest, best boys of the lot they were, because they must eat in the house and Billy was thoughtful of the women.

So the Double-Crank settled itself for the long winter and what it might bring of good or ill.

Billy was troubled over more things than one. He could not help seeing that Flora was worrying a great deal over her father, and that the relations between herself and Mama Joy were, to put it mildly and tritely, strained. With the shadow of what sorrow might be theirs, hidden away from them in the frost-prisoned North, there was no dancing to lighten the weeks as they pa.s.sed, and the women of the range land are not greatly given to "visiting" in winter. The miles between ranches are too long and too cold and uncertain, so that nothing less alluring than a dance may draw them from home. Billy thought it a shame, and that Flora must be terribly lonesome.

It was a long time before he had more than five minutes at a stretch in which to talk privately with her. Then one morning he came in to breakfast and saw that the chair of Mama Joy was empty; and Flora, when he went into the kitchen afterward, told him with almost a relish in her tone that Mrs. Bridger--she called her that, also with a relish--was in bed with toothache.

"Her face is swollen on one side till she couldn't raise a dimple to save her life," she announced, glancing to see that the doors were discreetly closed. "It's such a relief, when you've had to look at them for four years. If _I_ had dimples," she added, spitefully rattling a handful of knives and forks into the dishpan, "I'd plug the things with beeswax or dough, or anything that I could get my hands on. Heavens! How I hate them!"

"Same here," said Billy, with guilty fervor. It was treason to one of his few principles to speak disparagingly of a woman, but it was in this case a great relief. He had never before seen Flora in just this explosive state, and he had never heard her say "Heavens!" Somehow, it also seemed to him that he had never seen her so wholly lovable. He went up to her, tilted her head back a little, and put a kiss on the place where dimples were not. "That's one uh the reasons why I like yuh so much," he murmured. "Yuh haven't got dimples or yellow hair or blue eyes--thank the Lord! Some uh these days, girlie, I'm going t'

pick yuh up and run off with yuh."

Her eyes, as she looked briefly up at him, were a shade less turbulent. "You'd better watch out or _she_ will be running off with _you_!" she said, and drew gently away from him. "There! That's a horrid thing to say, Billy Boy, but it isn't half as horrid as--And she watches me and wants to know everything we say to each other, and is--" She stopped abruptly and turned to get hot water.

"I know it's tough, girlie." Charming Billy, considering his ignorance of women, showed an instinct for just the sympathy she needed. "I haven't had a chance to speak to yuh, hardly, for months--anything but common remarks made in public. How long does the toothache last as a general thing?" He took down the dish towel from its nail inside the pantry door and prepared to help her. "She's good for to-day, ain't she?"

"Oh, yes--and I suppose it _does_ hurt, and I ought to be sorry.

But I'm not. I'm glad of it. I wish her face would stay that way all winter! She's so fussy about her looks she won't put her nose out of her room till she's pretty again. Oh, Billy Boy, I wish I were a man!"

"Well, _I_ don't!" Billy disagreed. "If yuh was," he added soberly, "and stayed as pretty as yuh are now, she'd--" But Billy could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

"Do you think it's because you're so pretty that she--"

Flora smiled reluctantly. "If I were a man I could swear and _swear!_"

"Swear anyhow," suggested Billy encouragingly. "I'll show yuh how."

"And father away off in Klond.y.k.e," she said irrelevantly, pa.s.sing over his generous offer, "and--and dead, for all we know! And she doesn't care--at _all!_ She--"

Sympathy is good, but it has a disagreeable way of bringing all one's troubles to the front rather overwhelmingly. Flora suddenly dropped a plate back into the pan, leaned her face against the wall by the sink and began to cry in a tempestuous manner rather frightened Charming Billy Boyle, who had never before seen a grown woman cry real tears and sob like that.

He did what he could. He put his arms around her and held her close, and patted her hair and called her girlie, and laid his brown cheek against her wet one and told her to never mind and that it would be all right anyway, and that her father was probably picking away in his mine right then and wishing she was there to fry his bacon for him.

"I wish I was, too," she murmured, weaned from her weeping and talking into his coat. "If I'd known how--_she_--really was, I wouldn't ever have stayed. I'd have gone with father."

"And where would _I_ come in?" he demanded selfishly, and so turned the conversation still farther from her trouble.

The water went stone cold in the dishpan and the fire died in the stove so that the frost spread a film over the thawed centre of the window panes. There is no telling when the dishes would have been washed that day if Mama Joy had not begun to pound energetically upon the floor--with the heel of a shoe, judging from the sound. Even that might not have proved a serious interruption; but Dill put his head in from the dining room and got as far as "That gray horse, William--"

before he caught the significance of Flora perched on the knee of "William" and retreated hastily.

So Flora went to see what Mama Joy wanted, and Billy hurried somewhat guiltily out to find what was the matter with the gray horse, and practical affairs once more took control.

After that, Billy considered himself an engaged young man. He went back to his ditty and inquired frequently:

"Can she make a punkin pie, Billy boy, Billy Boy?"

and was very nearly the old, care-free Charming Billy of the line-camp. It is true that Mama Joy recovered disconcertingly that afternoon, and became once more ubiquitous, but Billy felt that nothing could cheat him of his joy, and remained cheerful under difficulties. He could exchange glances of much secret understanding with Flora, and he could s.n.a.t.c.h a hasty kiss, now and then, and when the chaperonage was too unremitting she could slip into his hands a hurriedly penciled note, filled with important nothings. Which made a bright spot in his life and kept Flora from thinking altogether of her father and fretting for some news of him.

Still, there were other things to worry him and to keep him from forgetting that the law of nature, which he had before defined to his own satisfaction, still governed the game. Storm followed storm with a monotonous regularity that was, to say the least, depressing, though to be sure there had been other winters like this, and not even Billy could claim that Nature was especially malignant.

But with Brown's new fence stretching for miles to the south and east of the open range near home, the drifting cattle brought up against it during the blinding blizzards and huddled there, freezing in the open, or else plodded stolidly along beside it until some washout or coulee too deep for crossing barred their way, so that the huddling and freezing was at best merely postponed. Billy, being quite alive to the exigencies of the matter, rode and rode, and with him rode Dill and the other two men when they had the leisure--which was not often, since the storms made much "shoveling" of hay necessary if they would keep the calves from dying by the dozen. They pushed the cattle away from the fences--to speak figuratively and colloquially--and drove them back to the open range until the next storm or cold north wind came and compelled them to repeat the process.

If Billy had had unlimited opportunity for lovemaking, he would not have had the time, for he spent hours in the saddle every day, unless the storm was too bitter for even him to face. There was the line-camp with which to keep in touch; he must ride often to the Bridger place--or he thought he must--to see how they were getting on. It worried him to see how large the "hospital bunch" was growing, and to see how many dark little mounds dotted the hollows, except when a new-fallen blanket of snow made them white--the carca.s.ses of the calves that had "laid 'em down" already.