The Range Dwellers by B. M. Bower (best mystery novels of all time .txt) 📖

shock even his own countrymen. The ferry ducked and bobbed, now there was nothing to hold its nose steady to the current, and went careering down river with all hands aboard and looking for trouble.

We didn't do anything, though; there wasn't anything to do but stay right where we were and take chances. If she stayed right side up we would probably land eventually. If she flopped over—which she seemed trying to do, we'd get a cold bath and lose our teams, if no worse.

Soon as I thought of that, I began unhooking the traces of the horse nearest. The poor brutes ought at least to have a chance to swim for it. Frosty caught on, and went to work, too, and in half a minute we had them free of the wagon and stripped of everything but their bridles. They would have as good a show as we, and maybe better.

I looked back to see what King was doing. He was having troubles of his own, trying to keep one of his cayuses on all its feet at once. It was scared, poor devil, and it took all his strength on the bit to keep it from rearing and maybe upsetting the whole bunch. Pochette wasn't doing anything but lament, so I went back and unhooked King's horses for him, and took off the harness and threw it in the back of his wagon so they wouldn't tangle their feet in it when it came to a show-down.

I don't think he was what you could call grateful; he never looked my way at all, but went on cussing the horse he was holding, for acting up just when he should keep his wits. I went back to Frosty, and we stood elbows touching, waiting for whatever was coming.

For what seemed a long while, nothing came but wind and water. But I don't mind saying that there was plenty of that, and if either one had been suddenly barred out of the game we wouldn't any of us have called the umpire harsh names. We drifted, slippety-slosh, and the wind ripped holes in the atmosphere and made our eyes water with the bare force of it when we faced the west. And none of us had anything to say, except Pochette; he said a lot, I remember, but never mind what. I don't suppose he was mentally responsible at the time.

Then, a long, narrow, yellow tongue of sand-bar seemed to reach right out into the river and lap us up. We landed with a worse jolt than when we broke away from the cable, and the gray-blue river went humping past without us. Frosty and I looked at each other and grinned; after all, we were coming out of the deal better than we had expected, for we were still right side up and on the side of the river toward home. We were a mile or so down river from the trail, but once we were on the bank with our rig, that was nothing.

We had landed head on, with the nose of the scow plowed high and dry. Being at the front, we went at getting our team off, and our wagon. There was a four or five-foot jump to make, and the horses didn't know how about it, at first. But with one of us pulling, and the other slashing them over the rump, they made it, one at a time. The sand was soft and acted something like quicksand, too, and we hustled them to shore and tied them to some bushes. The bank was steep there, and we didn't know how we were going to make the climb, but we left that to worry over afterward; we still had our rig to get ashore, and it began to look like quite a contract.

We went back, with our boot tracks going deep, and then filling up and settling back almost level six steps behind us. Frosty looked back at them and scowled.

"For sand that isn't quicksand," he said, "this layout will stand about as little monkeying with as any sand I ever met up with. Time we make a few trips over it, she's going to be pudding without the raisins. And that's a picnic, with our rig on the main deck, as you might say."

We went back and sat swinging our legs off the free board end of the ferry boat, and rolled us a smoke apiece and considered the next move. King was somewhere back between our rig and his, cussing Pochette to a fare-you-well for having such a rotten layout and making white men pay good money for the privilege of risking their lives and property upon it.

"We'll have to unload and take the wagon to pieces and pack everything ashore—I guess that's our only show," said Frosty. We had just given up my idea of working the scow up along the bar to the bank. We couldn't budge her off the sand, and Pochette warned us that if we did the wind would immediately commence doing things to us again.

Frosty's idea seemed the only possible way, so we threw away our cigarettes and got ready for business; the dismembering and carrying ashore of that road-wagon promised to be no light task. Frosty yelled to Pochette to come and get busy, and went to work on the rig. It looked to me like a case where we were all in the same fix, and personal spite shouldn't count for anything, but King was leaning against the wheel of his buggy, cramming tobacco into his stubby pipe—the same one apparently that I had rescued from the pickle barrel—and, seeing the wind scatter half of it broadcast, as though he didn't care a rap whether he got solid earth beneath his feet once more, or went floating down the river. I wanted to propose a truce for such time as it would take to get us all safe on terra firma, but on second thoughts I refrained. We could get off without his help, and he was the sort of man who would cheerfully have gone to his last long sleep at the bottom of that boiling river rather than accept the assistance of an enemy.

The next couple of hours was a season of aching back, and sloppy feet, and grunting, and swearing that I don't much care about remembering in detail. The wind blew till the tears ran down our cheeks. The sand stuck and clogged every move we made till I used to dream of it afterward. If you think it was just a simple little job, taking that rig to pieces and packing it to dry land on our backs, just give another guess. And if you think we were any of us in a mood to look at it as a joke, you're miles off the track.

Pochette helped us like a little man—he had to, or we'd have done him up right there. Old King sat on the ferry-rail and smoked, and watched us break our backs sardonically—I did think I had that last word in the wrong place; but I think not. We did break our backs sardonically, and he watched us in the same fashion; so the word stands as she is.

When the last load was safe on the bank, I went back to the boat. It seemed a low-down way to leave a man, and now he knew I wasn't fishing for help, I didn't mind speaking to the old reprobate. So I went up and faced him, still sitting on the ferry-rail, and still smoking.

"Mr. King," I said politely as I could, "we're all right now, and, if you like, we'll help you off. It won't take long if we all get to work."

He took two long puffs, and pressed the tobacco down in his pipe. "You go to hell," he advised me for the second time. "When I want any help from you or your tribe, I'll let yuh know."

It took me just one second to backslide from my politeness. "Go to the devil, then!" I snapped. "I hope you have to stay on the damn' bar a week." Then I went plucking back through the sand that almost pulled the shoes off my feet every step, kicking myself for many kinds of a fool. Lord, but I was mad!

Pochette went back to the boat and old King, after nearly getting kicked into the river for hinting that we ought to pay for the damage and trouble we had caused him. Frosty and I weren't in any frame of mind for such a hold-up, and it didn't take him long to find it out.

The bank there was so steep that we had to pack my trunk and what other truck had been brought out from Osage, up to the top by hand. That was another temper-sweetening job. Then we put the wagon together, hitched on the horses, and they managed to get to the top with it, by a scratch. It all took time—and, as for patience, we'd been out of that commodity for so long we hardly knew it by name.

The last straw fell on us just as we were loading up. I happened to look down upon the ferry; and what do you suppose that old devil was doing? He had torn up the back part of the plank floor of the ferry, and had laid it along the sand for a bridge. He had made an incline from boat nose to the bar, and had rough-locked his wagon and driven it down. Just as we looked, he had come to the end of his bridge, and he and Pochette were taking up the planks behind and extending the platform out in front.

Well! maybe you think Frosty and I stood there congratulating the old fox. Frosty wanted me to kick him, I remember; and he said a lot of things that sounded inspired to me, they hit my feelings off so straight. If we had had the sense to do what old King was doing, we'd have been ten or fifteen miles nearer home than we were.

But, anyway, we were up the bank ahead of him, and we loaded in the last package and drove away from the painful scene at a lope. And you can imagine how we didn't love old King any better, after that experience.

CHAPTER XII. I Begin to Realize.

If I had hoped that I'd gotten over any foolishness by spending the fall and winter away from White Divide—or the sight of it—I commenced right away to find out my mistake. No sooner did the big ridge rise up from the green horizon, than every scar, and wrinkle, and abrupt little peak fairly shouted things about Beryl King.

She wasn't there; she was back in New York, and that blasted Terence Weaver was back there, too, making all kinds of love to her according to the letters of Edith. But I hadn't realized just how seriously I was taking it, till I got within sight of the ridge that had sheltered her abiding-place and had made all the trouble.

Like a fool I had kept telling myself that I was fair sick for the range; for range-horses and range-living; for the wind that always blows over the prairies, and for the cattle that feed on the hills and troop down the long coulée bottoms to drink at their favorite watering-places. I thought it was the boys I wanted to see, and to gallop out with them in the soft sunrise, and lie down with them under a tent roof at night; that I wanted to eat my meals sitting cross-legged in the grass, with my plate piled with all the courses at once and my cup of coffee balanced precariously somewhere within reach.

That's what I thought. When things tasted flat in old Frisco, I wasn't dead sure why, and maybe I didn't want to be sure why. When I couldn't get hold of anything that had the old tang, I laid it all to a hankering after round-up.

Even when we drove around the end of White Divide, and got up on a ridge where I could see the long arm that stretched out from the east side of King's Highway, I wouldn't own up to myself that there was the cause of all my bad feelings. I think Frosty knew, all along; for when I had sat with my face turned to the divide, and had let my cigarette go cold while I thought and thought, and remembered, he didn't say a word. But when memory came down to that last ride through the pass, and to Shylock shot down by the corral, at last to Frosty standing, tall and dark, against the first yellow