The Sagebrusher by Emerson Hough (first ebook reader txt) 📖

"You ought to hang!" said she. [Illustration: "You ought to hang!" said she.]

"You better look a little out, gal, I tell you that. You come along out to the camp, and I'll see how you like that!"

She felt his iron grasp fall upon her wrist. He dragged her across the floor as though she weighed nothing. She had been wholly helpless, even if in possession of all her faculties and all her senses. He flung her from him upon the grass, laughing as she rose and tried to run, bringing up in the willows, which she could not see. She could hear the flames crackling at the hay ricks on beyond. By this time the sounds from the burning barn mercifully had ceased, but she heard him now at some further work. He was trying to light the battered edge of the door with a match, but it would not burn.

"Where's the oil, gal?" he demanded.

"We've got none," said she, guessing his purpose of firing the house now.

He made no answer but a grunt, and finding the ax at the wood pile nearby, began to hack at the jamb of the door, so that a series of chips stood out from it, offering better food for flames. She heard him again strike a match—caught the faint smell of burning pine.

"Come on!" Again she felt his hand. He dragged her, her feet stumbling in the grass. She could hear horses snorting, so there was some vehicle here, she supposed. He flung her up to the seat, jerked loose the halters, and climbed in as the team plunged forward. Had any one seen the careening wagon, seen the upflung arm of a woman swaying in the grasp of the man who sat beside her in the seat—had any one heard the laugh of the man, the shrieks of the woman, struggling and calling,—he must have thought that two drunken human beings instead of one were endeavoring to show the astonished sky how bestial life may be even here in America in an undone day.

CHAPTER XIII THE SABCAT CAMP

To Mary Warren's ears, had she struggled in her captor's arms less violently, the sound of the wheels might have changed from the loam of the lane to the gravel of the highway as they passed. But she heard nothing, noted nothing, did not understand why, after a time, the driver pulled up, and with much profanity for his team, descended from his seat. Apparently he fastened the horses near the road. He came back. "Git down, and hurry," said he. "Here's where we change cars."

She heard the grind of a motor's starting crank, the chug of an engine. As its strident whirring continued her captor came again to her side, and with rudeness aided her to the seat of what she took to be a small car. She felt the leap of the car under his rude driving as he turned the gas on full, felt it sway as it set to its pace. She now knew that they were on some highway.

"Now we go better," laughed Big Aleck, his face at her ear. "They can't catch us now. These Johns 'll find what's what, heh? Look yonder—five fires in sight, besides plenty stock bumped off. They'll learn how the free brothers work. If you can't see, you can't tell. All the better!"

She shrank back into the seat, undertaking no reply to his maudlin boastings. She was passing away from the only place in all the world that meant shelter for her now, and already it felt like home, this place that she was leaving.

The car shifted and slowed down, apparently on a less used thoroughfare. "Where are you going?" she cried. "You've left the road!"

Big Aleck laughed uproariously after his fashion. "I should say we have," said he. "But any road's good enough just so it gets us up to our jungle. You don't know what iss a jungle? Well, it's where the sabcat brothers meets all by theirselves on the Reserve."

"Reserve?" asked Mary Warren. "What do you mean?"

"Where the timber is that them army scum is cutting for the Government. Pine, some spruce. This road was made to get timber out. I ought to know about it—I was foreman of the road gang! I know every tree that's marked for the Government. My old bunch of bundle stiffs and before-the-war wobblies is in there now. What chance has them Government cockroaches got against my bullies? Wait till the wheat clocks[1] get started and the clothes[2] begins. We ain't forgot what we knew when they tried to draft us. We're free men now, same as in Russia and Germany."

He laughed again and again at the vast humor of this situation as it lay before him, exulting in the mystification his thieves' jargon would create. His liquor made him reckless.

"It's a rough road, up Tepee Creek," said he, "but nobody comes. This is a Government car—the Cossacks would think I'm going up to work. They got to mark some trees. I'll mark 'em—so they can tell, when they come to saw 'em, heh?"

He said little more, but one hand cast over her shoulder was his answer to her panting silence, every time she edged over in the impulse to fling herself out of the car. He was a man of enormous strength.

Continually the jolting of the car grew worse and worse. She began to hear the rush of water. Twice she felt the logs of a rude bridge under the wheels as they crossed some stream. They were winding their way up the valley of a stream, into a higher country? Yes. As they climbed now, she could catch the scent of the forest as the wind changed from time to time. The profanity of her captor grew as the difficulty of the trail increased. They were climbing at a gradient as steep as the laboring car could negotiate.

At last, after interminable time, they seemed to strike a sandier soil, more level country—indeed, the trail was following the contour of a high sandy ridge among the pines.

On ahead she heard a shout. "Halt! Stop there! Who are you?"

"Don't shoot, John," replied the driver of the car, laughing. "It's Aleck."

"Well, I'll be damned!" was the reply. "Time you was back, Aleck. Who's that with you?"

"That's a friend of mine I brought along! She's come up to see how us wobblies lives!"

Again his coarse laugh, which made her shudder. Then more broken laughs, whispered words. She was obliged to take the arm of her rough captor to descend from the car.

"She don't see very well," said Aleck in explanation. "Maybe just as well she don't, heh?"

She stood looking about her vaguely, helpless. She could hear the high moaning of the wind above her, in the tops of pine trees. Some one led her to the front of a tent—she could hear the flapping of the fly in the wind. She sank down by chance upon a blanket roll. Her captor threw down the front flap of the tent. She heard voices of other men. They paid not too much attention to her at first. Big Aleck, their leader, went on with hurried orders.

"We got to get out of here in not more'n an hour or so," said he. "The Johns'll come. I fixed a couple dozen stacks of hay for them."

"See anybody down below, Aleck?" asked a voice which Mary Warren recognized as different from the others she had heard. And then some low question was asked, to which Big Aleck replied.

"Well, I'll take her along with me, when I go out, far as that's concerned," said he. "She says she's Sim Gage's housekeeper! Huh!"

"But suppose she gets away and squeals on us?" spoke a voice.

"She can't get away. Let's go eat."

She was close enough to where they sat eating and drinking to hear all that was said, and they spoke with utter disregard of her presence. She never had heard such language in her life, nor known that such men lived. Never yet had she so fully taken home to herself the actual presence of a Government, of a country, never before known what threats against that country actually might mean. An enemy? Why, here was the enemy still, entrenched inside the lines of victorious and peace-abiding America—trusting, foolish, blind America, which had accepted anything a human riff-raff sneeringly and cynically had offered her in return for her own rich generosity! Mary Warren began to see, suddenly, the tremendous burden of duty laid on every man and every woman of America—the lasting and enduring and continuous duty of a post-bellum patriotism, that new and terrible thing; that sweet and splendid thing which alone could safeguard the country that had fought for liberty so splendidly, so unselfishly.

"If they ever run across us in here with the goods on us—good-night!" hesitated a voice. "I don't like to carry this here cyanide—we got enough for all the sheep and cattle in Montana."

"Our lawyers'll take care of us if we get arrested," said Big Aleck indifferently.

"Yes, but we mightn't get arrested—these here ranch Johns is handy with rope and lead."

"Ach, no danger," argued Aleck. "It's safer than to blow up a armory or a powder mill, or even a public building—and we done all that, while the war was on. We'll give 'em Force! This Republic be damned—there is no republic but the republic of Man!"

These familiar doctrines seemed to excite the applause usual among hearers of this sort. There was a chorus of approval, so that their orator went on, much inspired.

"People in Gallatin offered a thousand dollars for one man catched putting matches in a threshing machine. Other ranchers was willing to give a thousand if they found out what made their hay get a-fire! Hah! They don't know how we set a bomb so the sun'll start it! They don't think that the very fellers running the threshing machine is the ones that drops the matches in! They don't think that the man running the mowing machine is the one that fixes the sickle bar! They don't think that the man in charge of this here road gang is the one that's a-doctoring trees!

"They're still eating all sorts of things for bread now," he resumed. "Folks in the cities pays more and more. Wheat'll go to four dollars before we're through. We're the farmer's friends, huh? Hay'll be worth fifty dollars a ton in this valley before we're through—but there won't be no horses left to haul it to town! There's thousands of right boes all across the country now. If fourteen thousand iron and steel people was out at one time in Cleveland, what couldn't we do, if we once got a good strike started all across the country, now the war is done? We've made 'em raise wages time and again, haven't we? I tell you, freedom's coming to its own."

Cleveland! Mary Warren pricked up her ears. She had reason; for now the voice went on, mentioning a name which Annie Squires had made familiar—Dorenwald, Charlie Dorenwald, the foreman in the rolling rooms!

"Charlie Dorenwald's the head of that bunch. He's a good man. You know what he pulled in Youngstown."

"Well, I don't know," said one voice, "they lynched a man in Illinois. America's getting lawless! Think about lynching people!