Guardians of the Sage (7 page)

“What in hell are you snoopin' around here for?” he snarled under his breath. His eyes were cold and fishy. “It ain't healthy to handle my stuff!”

“You might get a disease or something,” Montana taunted. He was armed. His left hand had closed over his gun. “Folks are beginning to look this way. If you want an audience, you can get one in a hurry. Let go of that wrist or I'll do a little irrigating on you!”

Quantrell hung on, trying to save his face. He laughed unpleasantly then. “What's the idea? What are you tryin' to pin on me?” he demanded as he dropped Jim's hand.

“I guess you get my drift. You were the last to get here. You're rifle's dirty——”

“What of it? That gun ain't been out of the scabbard since yesterday mornin' when I killed a coyote. It's gettin' so you got your nose in everywhere—and you're wrong as usual. Why should I bump that kid off? He didn't mean any thin' to me.”

“No?” Montana ground out between clenched jaws. “Let me tell you this, Clay—if I ever prove what I'm thinking I'll make that kid mean plenty to you. This happens to be something I aim to remember!”

L
ONG after the crowd had gone, Dan and Montana sat on the long bench beside the kitchen door. A candle flickered in the window of the log cabin beyond the barns that old Ben and Romero used as a bunkhouse. A gust of wind shook the tall poplars in the yard. The stars gleemed frostily.

“Goin' to blow to-night,” said Dan. “Cloudbank off to the northwest.”

Jim nodded. Even in July, windstorms were not unusual in that altitude. His thoughts were of Billy Sauls, the boy who had been killed.

From the cabin came a snatch of song:

“We rode the range together and had rode it side by side;

I loved him like a brother, I wept when Utah died——”

It was old Ben, singing “Utah Carroll”. His singing was lugubrious enough at any time, but to-night he seemed to hang onto every cracked note, as if loath to let them go. He was a lawless old Juniper to whom strife of any kind was welcome. His song drew a shiver from Montana.

“To shoot a man in the back and not give him a chance is nothing short of murder,” he said.

“No two ways about that,” Dan muttered glumly. “I guess it comes pretty hard to you, Jim. God knows it jest as well could have been Brent or Gene.”

“You got any idea who did it, Dan?”

“No, I ain't!” He was speaking the truth. “It wasn't my boys, I know. It puts you in a mean place. A friend of yourn gits killed. Naturally you want to know who done it. But mebbe it'll be better if you never find out. It's war to the finish now, and a man's either for you or ag'in you. This boy was on the other side. I ain't approvin' of killin' of that sort; but it looks like one of our side must'a got him; least we'll be blamed for it. And right or wrong, we cain't go gunnin' for the party that's responsible. It's gain' to be taken as a defy from us—and Jim, we got to back it up!”

“I reckon we do,” Montana had to agree. “You've stated the case exactly.”

They fell silent for a while. Dan puffed his pipe thoughtfully. Gene and Brent came out and sat down with them. A subtle change had taken place in their attitude toward Montana. It was nothing less than that they felt themselves under suspicion. Unconsciously, Montana's manner was restrained, too.

“I don't like to say it,” Dan declared gravely, “but it's a time for plain speakin'. Mebbe you feel you cain't go all the way with us now. We need you, Jim, but if you want to pull out—now's the time to do it.”

“No, I'm staying,” Montana answered with great deliberation. “I came into this fight because I thought you folks were getting a pretty raw deal. I reckon I'll see it through.”

The boys had little to say. The tumbleweeds began to bounce across the yard before the rising wind.

“Gettin' dusty out here,” Dan announced. He knocked the dottle from his pipe. “Might as well turn in, I guess.”

Jim closed his eyes, but sleep would not come. He was too busily turning over in his mind what answer the Bar S would make to the tragedy on Powder Creek. He surmised that Reb was undoubtedly under orders to make a pretense of staying inside the law.

“But he'll strike back, and he'll hit hard,” he told himself.

It was almost midnight when he sat up to find his watch. The wind was blowing a gale.

“Who's that?” Gene demanded fiercely.

“Just looking for my watch,” Jim explained. “Can't get to sleep.”

He paused to glance out the window. The sky was red to the north. A gasp of surprise was wrung from him.

“Gene, come here!” he whispered. “Look at that!”

“It's a fire, all right!” the boy cried. “Hey, Pap! Brent!”

Half a minute later the four of them rushed from the house, pulling on their clothes.

“It's Dave Morrow's place!” Brent exclaimed excitedly.

“No, it ain't the house,” his father argued. “Too many sparks for that. It's Dave's hay! By God, it didn't take the devils long to strike back, did it?”

“And you thought they wouldn't do anythin' like that!”

It was young Gene. Jim sensed his hostility.

“Some of us better ride over there,” he suggested. “It can't be two miles.”

“You and Gene go,” said Dan. “We'll keep a lookout here. I've only got about eighty tons of hay put up. I'll never be able to winter my stuff if I lose it!”

Scarcely a word passed between the boy and Jim as they rode. Each appeared to prefer his own thoughts. Montana had no reason to doubt that the fire was a Bar S reprisal. It thoroughly discredited his prediction, as Gene had already remarked.

When still some distance away from the blaze they saw it was Dave's hay. A number of others had come hurriedly. There was nothing anyone could do.

Most of those who had gathered there were young men or boys like Gene. Their talk was rife with threats of revenge and hatred.

The older heads had many opinions to offer about the route the raiders had taken, how many were in the party and what should be done in retaliation. Nobody bothered to ask Montana what he thought.

Dave, himself, tried to regard his loss philosophically.

“Better the hay than the house with half a dozen young-uns in it,” he declared stoically. “I jest happen to be the first to git it, thet's all. They'll put the torch to more than mine.”

“God a'mighty, man, you're right!” Joe Gault cried. “If they ain't another fire this minute over towards Jubal Stark's place I'm losin' the eyesight the Lord gave me! Turn yer back to the blaze and shield yer eyes!”

“And it ain't no hay this time!” Morrow shouted. “It's Jubal's house!”

An angry roar burst from the crowd. The burning hay was forgotten. Sanity had fled. In their present mood they would have torn old Slick-ear limb from limb.

Montana looked around for Gene. The boy had raced away already. In another minute all were raking their horses as they headed for the house on Powder Creek.

Furniture and bedding had been carried out by the time they arrived. Jim tried to organize a bucket brigade—the creek was near—but the high wind soon convinced him that the effort was useless. Indeed, they were fortunate to save the barn and corrals.

It was breaking day by the time the fire died down. Quantrell had not put in an appearance, although the blaze could have been noticed from his place.

Jim said nothing, nor did he think it particularly strange. Things had come to a pass where every man was for himself. The thing he couldn't understand was the strategy of the raiders in setting a second fire deeper into the enemy's country after the first fire had been discovered.

“You'd think they would have run into someone with half the valley up,” he mused.

And yet, their strategy seemed to have worked. Certainly they had made a clean get-away.

Dan was waiting for him when he returned to the Box C. Jim mentioned the matter to him.

“I'm going to catch an hour's sleep and then try to back track them,” he said. “We got to know how they're coming down from the North Fork. We'll be ready for them when they come again.”

By this arrangement, he left the ranch in the early morning and made his way over the rolling hills to Morrow's ranch. So many men had ridden over the ground during the night that it was impossible to pick up any sign that meant anything.

From there he shaped his course westward toward the smoking ruins on Powder Creek, keeping to the hills as a man might have done who was anxious to avoid being encountered. Once, where a spring drained away toward the creek, he found where a shod horse had crossed. The marks were fresh enough to have been made during the night. The horse had been walked across the wet ground.

“Certainly wasn't made by anyone rushing to the fire,” Jim decided.

It was no effort for him to follow the trail to within a few hundred yards of the house.

The Starks had moved their belongings into the barn. Old Jubal was poking about the smoldering ruins. One or two others were there. Jim said nothing about the reason for his presence. Ten minutes later he headed west and crossed the Big Powder.

Once out of sight of the house, he crossed and re-crossed the creek many times, hoping to pick up the trail he had followed to Jubal's place.

He covered a mile without finding it. The creek began to climb toward the cañon. If anyone had gone up the Big Powder they must of necessity have passed through the gorge.

There, on the smooth sand, he found what he was looking for, but to his surprise, the tracks turned west instead of north toward the Bar S line as he expected.

He couldn't understand it.

“A man trying to get back to the North Fork wouldn't be heading west,” he argued with himself. “First thing he knew he'd have the cañon of the Little Powder between him and where he was going.”

Nevertheless, Montana followed the tracks, losing and finding them repeatedly as the trail climbed. Presently he was able to look down on Squaw Valley and trace the pattern of its many creeks. He could see the Big Powder, heading toward the hills to the north. Facing him was the black cañon through which the Little Powder flowed for over a mile. To the west he located Quantrell's ranch-house, and perched in the hills above it, the old Adelaide mine, the tailings a great yellow scar in the sage-brush.

There were no fences or marks to say where one man's ranch ended and another's began. Billy Sauls had been killed at the forks of the Big and Little Powder. Joe Gault claimed everything as far north as the cañon's rim. From that, Montana knew he was not yet on Quantrell's range.

“I'll follow these tracks wherever they take me,” he thought, the conviction deepening in him that they were leading him either across the big fellow's range or to his house itself. “And one answer is as dumb as the other,” he grumbled. “Quantrell wouldn't draw the line at burning a man out if he stood to make a dollar by it, if I got him figured out at all. But this doesn't make sense. And I can't believe Reb would send a man all these Godawful miles out of his way to get back to safety when he could cover him all the way up the Big Powder.”

The climb became steeper. At last, he stood on the plateau that stretched away to the cañon rim. It was bare, save for a little dwarf sage. In fifty yards he lost the trail. Try as he would, he could not relocate it. The wind of the night before had scoured the high places clean.

“That stops me,” he muttered reluctantly. “I might have figured something of the sort would happen.”

The sun had climbed high. He got down from his saddle and squatted on his toes in the shade of his horse as he rolled a cigarette. A frown furrowed his brow as he smoked.

“Funny, losing the trail here within a mile of where Billy got washed out. Maybe it's a coincidence—and maybe it isn't.”

He had left the Box C with the secret intention of visiting the spot where the boy had been killed, in the hope that he might find some clue. It was still his chief purpose, and when he had finished his cigarette, he turned north toward the forks, following the rimrocks. Three hundred feet below him, the Little Powder broke white over its boulder-strewn course.

It was impossible to get a horse down to the floor of the cañon from the side on which he found himself. Half an hour later he reached the forks. He was looking down on the tops of a grove of aspens. A green park showed among them.

“I guess that's where they got him,” he thought. “Laid up here on the rimrocks and picked him off.”

On hands and knees, he crawled back and forth, trying to find an empty shell or any other tell-tale sign that might aid him.

It was a futile search. Undaunted, he began the dangerous descent into the cañon. The dead yearlings lay where they had fallen. Beyond them he located the spot where the Bar S had found Billy's body. The tender sweet-grass and wild timothy had been beaten down by their horses.

It was no more than he had expected. Reb had been very positive that the bullet had sped to its mark from the rimrocks. The wound should have left no doubt about that. On the other hand, the bottom was so choked with brush and cover that a man could have crept to within forty yards of the little park without being discovered.

Montana was still pondering the question when he sensed that he was being watched. Someone was hiding in the aspens behind him.

He felt his blood thin. He was a fair target where he stood. Whoever was stalking him could not miss at that distance, even if he succeeded in throwing himself to the ground before the other fired. Wisdom whispered that it would be suicide to reach for his guns if someone had him covered.

He listened without seeming to. It was still again—ominously still. Suddenly his jaws locked and his body tensed. As though on springs, he leaped into the air and whirled. When he came down his guns were in his hands.