The Rustler of Wind River.

by G. W. Ogden.

CHAPTER I

STRANGE BARGAININGS

When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers' a.s.sociation, should sit there at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit.

Usually Saul Chadron was a man who picked his companions, and was a particular hand at the choosing. He could afford to do that, being of the earth's exalted in the Northwest, where people came to him and put down their tribute at his feet.

This stranger, whom Chadron treated like a long-wandering friend, had come down the mountain trail that morning, and had been hanging about the hotel all day. Buck Snellin, the proprietor--duly licensed for a matter of thirty years past by the United States government to conduct his hostelry in the corner of the Indian reservation, up against the door of the army post--did not know him. That threw him among strangers in that land, indeed, for Buck knew everybody within a hundred miles on every side.

The stranger was a tall, smoky man, hollow-faced, grim; adorned with a large brown mustache which drooped over his thin mouth; a bony man with sharp shoulders, and a stoop which began in the region of the stomach, as if induced by drawing in upon himself in times of poignant hunger, which he must have felt frequently in his day to wear him down to that state of bones; with the under lid of his left eye caught at a point and drawn down until it showed red, as if held by a fishhook to drain it of unimaginable tears.

There was a furtive look in his restless, wild-animal eyes, smoky like the rest of him, and a surliness about his long, high-ridged nose which came down over his mustache like a beak. He wore a cloth cap with ear flaps, and they were down, although the heat of summer still made the September air lively enough for one with blood beneath his skin. He regaled himself with fierce defiance, like a captive eagle, and had no word in return for the generous importunities of the man who was host to him in what evidently was a long-deferred meal.

Chadron paid the bill when the man at last finished packing his internal cavities, and they went together into the hotel office which adjoined the dining-room.

The office of this log hotel was a large, gaunt room, containing a few chairs along the walls, a small, round table under the window with the register upon it, a pen in a potato, and a bottle of ink with trickled and encrusted sides. The broad fireplace was bleak and black, blank-staring as a blind eye, and the sun reached through the window in a white streak across the mottled floor.

There was the smell of old pipes, old furs, old guns, in the place, and all of them were present to account for themselves and dispel any shadow of mystery whatever--the guns on their pegs set in auger-holes in the logs of the walls, the furs of wild beasts dangling from like supports in profusion everywhere, and the pipes lying on the mantel with stems hospitably extended to all unprovided guests. Some of them had been smoked by the guests who had come and gone for a generation of men.

The stranger stood at the manteltree and tried the pipes' capacity with his thick-ended thumb, finding one at last to his requirements.

Tall as Saul Chadron stood on his own proper legs, the stranger at his shoulder was a head above him. Seven feet he must have towered, his crown within a few inches of the smoked beams across the ceiling, and marvelously thin in the running up. It seemed that the wind must break him some bl.u.s.tering day at that place in his long body where hunger, or pain, or mischance had doubled him over in the past, and left him creased. The strong light of the room found pepperings of gray in his thick and long black hair.

Chadron himself was a gray man, with a mustache and beard like a cavalier. His shrewd eyes were sharp and bright under heavy brows, his brown face was toughened by days in the saddle through all seasons of weather and wind. His shoulders were broad and heavy, and even now, although not dressed for the saddle, there was an up-creeping in the legs of his trousers, and a gathering at the knees of them, for they were drawn down over his tall boots.

That was Chadron's way of doing the nice thing when he went abroad in his buckboard. He had saddle manners and buckboard manners, and even office manners when he met the cattle barons in Cheyenne. No matter what manners he chanced to be wearing, one remembered Saul Chadron after meeting him, and carried the recollection of him to the sundown of his day.

"We can talk here," said Chadron, giving the other a cigar.

The tall man broke the cigar and ground part of it in his palm, looking with frowning thoughtfulness into the empty fireplace as the tobacco crushed in his hard hand. He filled the pipe that he had chosen, and sat with his long legs stretched out toward the chimney-mouth.

"Well, go on and talk," said he.

His voice came smothered and hoa.r.s.e, as if it lay beneath all the oysters which he had rammed into his unseen hollow. It was a voice in strange harmony with the man, such a sound as one would have expected to come out of that surly, dark-lipped, thin mouth. There was nothing committal about it, nothing exactly identifying; an impersonal voice, rather, and cold; a voice with no conscience behind it, scarcely a soul.

"You're a business man, Mark--"

"Huh!" said Mark, grunting a little cloud of smoke from the bowl of his pipe in his sarcastic vehemence.

"And so am I," continued Chadron, unmoved. "Words between us would be a waste of time."

"You're right; money talks," said Mark.

"It's a man's job, or I wouldn't have called you out of your hole to do it," said Chadron, watching the man slyly for the effect.

"Pay me in money," suggested Mark, unwarmed by the compliment. "Is it nesters ag'in?"

"Nesters," nodded the cattleman, drawing his great brows in a frown.

"They're crowdin' in so thick right around me that I can't breathe comfortable any more; the smell of 'em's in the wind. They're runnin'

over three of the biggest ranches up here besides the Alamito, and the Drovers' a.s.sociation wants a little of your old-time holy scare throwed into the cussed coyotes."

Mark nodded in the pause which seemed to have been made for him to nod, and Chadron went on.

"We figger that if a dozen or two of 'em's cleaned out, quick and mysterious, the rest'll tuck tail and sneak. It's happened that way in other places more than once, as you and I know. Well, you're the man that don't have to take lessons."

"Money talks," repeated Mark, still looking into the chimney.

"There's about twenty of them that counts, the rest's the kind you can drive over a cliff with a whip. These fellers has strung their cussed bob-wire fences crisscross and checkerboard all around there up the river, and they're gittin' to be right troublesome. Of course they're only a speck up there yet, but they'll multiply like fleas on a hot dog if we let 'em go ahead. You know how it is."

There was a conclusiveness in Chadron's tone as he said that. It spoke of a large understanding between men of a kind.

"Sure," grunted the man Mark, nodding his head at the chimney. "You want a man to work from the willers, without no muss or gun-flashin', or rough houses or loud talk."

"Twenty of them, their names are here, and some scattered in between that I haven't put down, to be picked up as they fall in handy, see?"

"And you're aimin' to keep clear, and stand back in the shadder, like you always have done," growled Mark. "Well, I ain't goin' to ram my neck into no sheriff's loop for n.o.body's business but my own from now on. I'm through with resks, just to be obligin'."

"Who'll put a hand on you in this country unless we give the word?"

Chadron asked, severely.

"How do I know who's runnin' the law in this dang country now? Maybe you fellers is, maybe you ain't."

"There's no law in this part of the country bigger than the Drovers'

a.s.sociation," Chadron told him, frowning in rebuke of Mark's doubt of security. "Well, maybe there's a little sheriff here and there, and a few judges that we didn't put in, but they're down in the farmin'

country, and they don't cut no figger at all. If you _was_ fool enough to let one of them fellers git a hold on you we wouldn't leave you in jail over night. You know how it was up there in the north."

"But I don't know how it is down here." Mark scowled in surly unbelief, or surly simulation.

"There's not a judge, federal or state, that could carry a bale of hay anywhere in the cattle country, I tell you, Mark, that we don't draw the chalk line for."

"Then why don't you do the job yourselves, 'stead of callin' a peaceable man away from his ranchin'?"

"You're one kind of a gentleman, Mark, and I'm another, and there's different jobs for different men. That ain't my line."

"Oh h.e.l.l!" said Mark, laying upon the words an eloquent stress.

"All you've got to do is keep clear of the reservation; don't turn a card here, no matter how easy it looks. We can't jerk you out of the hands of the army if you git mixed up with it; that's one place where we stop. The reservation's a middle ground where we meet the nesters--rustlers, every muddy-bellied wolf of 'em, and we can prove it--and pa.s.s 'em by. They come and go here like white men, and nothing said. Keep clear of the reservation; that's all you've got to do to be as safe as if you was layin' in bed on your ranch up in Jackson's Hole."

Chadron winked as he named that refuge of the hunted in the Northwest.

Mark appeared to be considering something weightily.

"Oh, well, if they're rustlers--n.o.body ain't got no use for a rustler," he said.

"There's men in that bunch of twenty"--tapping the slip of paper with his finger--"that started with two cows a couple of years ago that's got fifty and sixty head of two-year-olds now," Chadron feelingly declared.