Judith of the Godless Valley Part 39

"First of the month. We'll give 'em a party up here in the hall that Lost Chief will never forget. John, do you ride to-morrow?"

"Yes, Charleton. Everybody's reported but you."

"I'll be there. Start from your place, as usual?"

John nodded, and the rest of the evening was given over to a discussion of details of the round-up.

The fall round-up was always a long and arduous affair. The cattle were scattered all through the ranges covered by the Forest Reserve. Slowly and with infinite labor and skill, they were sought out and herded down into Hidden Gorge Canyon, below Fire Mesa. Thence, they were driven to the plains east of the post-office, where the riders cut out their own cattle.

The weather held for two weeks, star-brilliant at night, with the low of mother-cows separated from their calves from mountain to mountain, with the crisp wind bringing down the frosted leaves of the aspens, and at noon the hot dust swirling up from the horses' hoofs into the sweating faces of the riders.

Perhaps thirty men rode in the Lost Chief crowd. The work was more or less solitary by day, but at night over the camp-fires, there was society enough. Douglas enjoyed it all to the very tips of his being. He was coming now into the great strength that belonged to his height and could do his full share of the heavy work. He had thought that, rolled in his blankets, under the stars, he would find inspiration that would help him solve the problem of life. But long before the camp-fire was low, he would drop into slumber that ended only when his father shook him at dawn.

When the round-up reached the plains, the women set up a camp kitchen and served hot meals. The weather this year held clear to the last day, when a blizzard swept down from Dead Line Peak and the last of the cutting out was finished in blinding snow. Douglas and John, after putting the last of their yearlings into the cut over fields, staggered into the warm ranch kitchen half-perished with the cold.

CHAPTER X

WILD HORSES

"If I could believe in G.o.d and a heaven I'd ask nothing more of life except a good-saddle-horse."

_--Charleton's Wife_.

And so another long winter was upon Lost Chief. It was much like other winters for Douglas except for the fact that he began systematically to trap for pelts. It was a heavy winter and game was plentiful, with pelts of exceptionally fine quality for which there was a good market in St.

Louis. Douglas worked hard and began the acc.u.mulation of a sum of money which he planned to use eventually to start his own ranch on the old Douglas section, which was to be his when he came of age.

But although to the young rider the money earned seemed the main aspect of the winter's work, the important result really lay in the deepening it gave to his appreciation of the beauty and mystery of this mountain valley.

Lost Chief was lovely in the summer with its crystal glory of color on hill and plain. But Lost Chief in winter was awe-inspiring in its naked splendor. Dead Line Peak and Falkner's Peak, barren save for the great blue snows and for the black shadows that crept up and down their tremendous flanks, were separated from each other by a long, narrow, slowly rising valley. Down this valley rushed a tiny brook whose murmur the bitterest weather could not quite still. Along this brook grew quivering aspens, and beside it coyotes kept open a little trail. Along this trail, Doug set his traps, as well as up on the wall of the mountains where lynx-cats and wolverine were hid.

Each day at noon, mounted on the Moose, with Prince at heel, he rode the circuit of the traps, seldom reaching home until long after supper was cleared away. There were days when, on leaving the ranch for the long, bitter-cold ride, it seemed to Douglas that he never could come back again, that the pain of living in the same house with Judith in her girlish indifference was to be endured no longer. The primitive intimacy in which the family dwelt made every hour at home a sort of torture to him, a torture that he did not wish to forego yet that he scarcely could endure. One cannot say how much of Douglas' self-control was due to innate refinement, how much to expediency, how much to the male power of inhibition when fighting to win the love of a woman.

But, whatever the cause, Douglas was developing a power of self-control possessed by no other man in the valley. It made him, even at eighteen, a little grim, a little lonely, a little abstracted. And he rode his traps like a man in a dream. He thought much, but not constantly, of Judith; though she perfumed all his thoughts. For the most part he pondered on the blank mystery of life and on the enigma of love, which to him seemed far more productive of pain than of joy. Little by little, he found himself eager to get into the hills. Quite consciously he left the ranch each day with the thought that when he reached the crest of old Falkner's lower shoulder, where his lynx trap was set, and beheld the unspeakable strength and purity of the far-flung ranges, to whose vastness the Lost Chief peaks were but foothills, he would find a wordless peace.

And thus the winter slipped away and blue-birds dipped again in the spring beyond the corral. And again alfalfa perfumed the alkaline dust that followed the birds into the Reserve; and then again, frost laid waste the struggling gardens of high alt.i.tudes; and for another winter Doug followed traps, varying the monotony by getting out pine-logs for his ranch house.

The winter that Judith was twenty and Douglas twenty-two was one of the most severe ever known in Lost Chief country. It was preceded by a summer of drought and the alfalfa and wild hay fields failed. Feed could not be bought. Steers and horses died by the score. Doug did little trapping.

He and his father spent the bitter storm-swept days fighting to save their stock. By March they were cutting young aspens and hauling them to the famished herds to nibble. Coyotes moved brazenly by day across the home fields, stealing refuse from the very door-yards. Eagles perched on fence-posts near the chicken runs. Jack-rabbits in herds of many score milled about the wind-swept barrens, gnawing the gra.s.s already cattle-cropped to the roots. The cold and snow persisted till mid-April, and even then Lost Chief was only beginning to thaw on its lower northern edge.

It was a winter of tremendous nerve strain. There had been little opportunity for the neighbors to get together, and the battle with the cold never ceased. John Spencer, always at his best when great physical demands were being made upon him, came through the winter better than Douglas, whose profound restlessness was beginning to tell even on his youthful strength. It was almost as much of a relief to Doug's family as to Doug to have Charleton Falkner insist, late in April, that Doug go on a wild horse hunt with him.

It was like the opening of a prison door to the young rider. He had dwelt within himself too much, had seen too much of Judith, had been too deeply perplexed by his own relation to life. He resolved that during the week they were to be out on the hunt, he would not once permit himself a serious thought.

They left Charleton's ranch early one morning, driving a sheep wagon which trailed four saddle horses. On the tail-board of the wagon were a bale of alfalfa and several bags of oats, for which Charleton had sc.r.a.ped Lost Chief to the bottom of its bins.

The snow was running off the trail in roaring streams. There was brilliant sun. Magpies dipped across the blue. Charleton drove while Douglas lay across the bunk, his spurred boots resting on an embroidered sofa cus.h.i.+on which he had purloined from Mary for lack of a pillow. He lay thus all day, except at meal time, neither man caring to talk. All day long, they pushed north, over the hills, each hill and valley lower than the last. When they made their night camp, the snows were gone. The next day, too, they pursued ever-dropping trails, that disappeared toward noon, leaving Charleton to find his way through barren hills that were criss-crossed only by antelope and coyote tracks. At mid-afternoon, from the crest of one of these hills they beheld a winding, black river with a flush of green along its borders. They covered the miles to this at a trot and made their camp beside the rus.h.i.+ng waters. The eager horses almost rended harness and halter in their desire to taste the budding gra.s.s around the sage-brush roots.

They carried food and fodder only for a week, so they dared allow but two days for the actual hunting. At dawn they had finished breakfast and were riding up into the rolling hills to the west. Brown hills against a pale blue morning sky, then a sudden flood of crimson against a high horizon line. Against this crimson, a row of grazing horses!

"We'll separate now," said Charleton. "Do like we always do. Pick out one horse and ride him down. They will be awful soft after such a winter.

Don't get side-tracked from one horse to another. They'd kill the Moose off at that. He's getting pretty old for this kind of thing. I'll see you at camp to-night."

Douglas dropped into a valley which twisted under the hill where the wild horses were grazing. Here he dismounted and, leading his horse, began to snake his way upward through the sage-brush which covered the hillside.

When he was within a hundred yards of the herd, he paused. There were fifteen horses, of every kind and color. Douglas selected a jet black mare with a wonderful tail and mane. Then he turned to mount. Charleton, at this moment, appeared on the far side of the hill. The Moose nickered, and the herd tossed heads and broke.

The mare dropped over the east side of the hill as if she had been shot.

Douglas turned the Moose after her and they hurled down the steep slope with thundering hoofs. For some moments, the Moose sought to turn hither and yon as different horses flashed across his vision. But Doug held him to the black mare, and once the Moose realized that she alone was their quarry Douglas was able to give almost all his attention to watching her strategy.

She did not show fight nor did she double on her tracks. Fleet as a bird, she flew over the hills, dropping into canyons, leaping draws, jumping rock heaps, until little by little she drew ahead of the Moose until she became no larger than a black coyote against the yellow hills. But Douglas would not allow the Moose to break from his swift trot. As long as he could keep the mare in sight he was content.

The sun was sailing high and the Moose was winded when the mare, cantering painfully along the ridge of a hill, stumbled and fell. She was up again at once but her gait slowed, perceptibly. In less than a half-hour Doug was within roping distance of her. As the lariat sung above her head, she half turned, gave Doug a look of anguished surprise, leaped sideways and disappeared up a crevice in a canyon wall. Douglas spurred the Moose in after her. They were in a little valley, thick grown with dwarf willow. The mare was not to be seen.

Now began a search that persisted till the Moose's st.u.r.dy legs were trembling. Douglas threaded the valley again and again. There was no exit save through the one crevice by which they had entered. He had all but concluded that the mare had been swallowed up by the earth when he found her trail, turning up the south wall. He spurred the Moose upward, and there in a clump of cedars he found her hiding. With a laugh he again twirled his rope and it slipped over the tossing black head. As the Moose turned and the rope tightened, the mare gave a scream that was like that of a human being in dire agony. For a moment she dragged back, then, head drooping, trembling in every muscle, she followed in.

Dusk was falling when Douglas made the camp. Charleton already had started a fire in the little cook-stove. He came out and examined the mare as well as the failing light and her extreme timidity permitted.

"She's a beauty, Doug. Don't believe she's over four years old. Any brand on her?"

"No. From the looks of her hoofs, I'd say she'd been born with the herd.

What luck did you have, Charleton?"

"None at all. I took after a young stallion and he wore my horse out. I know where he's bedding down to-night and I'll get him to-morrow or shoot him."

"You'll get him," said Douglas.

Charleton chuckled. "Nice thing if the mare is all we bring in. Make some coffee, Doug. The biscuits are baking. I could eat one of Sister's coyotes to-night." Charleton jammed another sage-brush knot into the little stove.

They were off at dawn. Douglas rode this day a young bay horse he had recently broken and named Pard. But though Pard was strong and willing, he lacked the skill of the Moose in running this rough country, and by noon Douglas was obliged to give up the pursuit of a dapple gray he had selected. He was far out on the plains when he made the decision to turn campward. To the distant south, in the Lost Chief ranges, a snowstorm was raging; but Pard and Douglas were dripping with sweat, under a sweltering sun. Strange, thimble-shaped green hills, dotted the plains about them.

Douglas drew up at the base of one of these to rest his horse. Scarcely had he done so when a tiny herd of antelope trotted casually round the neighboring hillock. They halted, sniffed, and turned, but not before Douglas had drawn his saddle gun and fired at the leader. The creature went lame at once but disappeared with his fellows among the green hills.

Douglas followed and shortly found a spot of blood that was repeated at irregular intervals for a mile or so. Pard was grunting now, but Douglas rowelled him and pushed on until he saw the antelope kneeling in the lee of an outcropping of rock. It struggled to its feet and fell again, its beautiful head dropping against its crimsoned breast.

"Wonder if I can get you home alive to Judith?" said Douglas.

After a moment of thought, he loosened his lariat, swung and roped the antelope around the horns, dragging it from its futile sanctuary. Then he dismounted and removed the lariat. The antelope bleated but lay trembling, making no attempt to rise. Douglas examined the shattered shoulder.

"You poor devil!" he said. "Even if you weren't hurt so badly, you'd die of fright before I could get you home. Well, of course I'm sorry venison is out of season, but a man must eat!" He put his gun to the delicate head, and an hour later Pard was snorting under a gunny-sack of venison.

Douglas lighted a cigarette and, whistling gaily, started once more for camp.

But this, if not a day of what Lost Chief would call real adventure, was at least to be a day of episode. About mid-afternoon Doug heard the tinkle of a sheep-bell. He was not surprised, for he knew that he was well within sheep country. He followed the tinkle and came shortly to a wide draw where moved a mighty gray ma.s.s of sheep. The herder, on a bay horse, responded to Doug's halloo with a wave of his hand. Douglas made his way round the edge of the draw and waited for the herder, who rode slowly up to meet him. Then he stared at the stranger's gray-bearded face with the utmost surprise.

"Mr. Fowler!" he cried. "What are you doing out here?"

The older man, in shabby blue overalls and jumper, a black slouch hat pulled over his eyes, smiled grimly.