CHAPTER I
FLINGING THE GAUNTLET
“Then you insist on ruining me, Mr. Bissell?”
Bud Larkin, his hat pushed back on his head, looked unabashed at the scowling heavy features of the man opposite in the long, low room, and awaited a reply.
“I don’t want to ruin anybody,” puffed old “Beef” Bissell, whose cattle overran most of the range between the Gray Bull and the Big Horn. “But I allow as how them sheep of yours had better stay down Nebrasky way where they come from.”
“In other words,” snapped Larkin, “I had better give up the idea of bringing them north altogether. Is that it?”
“Just about.”
“Well, now, see here, Mr. Bissell, you forget one or two things. The first is, that my sheep ranch is in Montana and not Wyoming, and that I want to run my southern herds onto the northern range before fall sets in. The second is, that, while your homestead may be three hundred and twenty acres, the range that has made you rich is free. My sheep have as much right there as your cattle. It is all government land and open to everybody.”
“Possession is eleven points out here where there isn’t any law,” replied Bissell imperturbably. “It’s a case of your sheep against my cattle, and, you see, I stand up reg’lar for my cows.”
Bud rolled a cigarette and pondered.
He was in the rather bare and unornamental living-room of the Bar T ranch. In the center was a rough-hewn table supporting an oil-lamp and an Omaha newspaper fully six months old. The chairs, except one, were rough and heavy and without rockers. This one was a gorgeous plush patent-rocker so valued a generation ago, and evidently imported at great expense.
A square of carpet that had lost all claims to pattern had become a soft blur, the result of age and alkali. However, it was one of the proudest possessions of the Bar T outfit and showed that old Beef Bissell knew what the right thing was. A calico shroud hid a large, erect object against the wall farthest away from the windows; an object that was the last word in luxury and reckless expense – a piano. The walls were of boards whitewashed, and the ceiling was just plain boards.
It had not taken Bud Larkin long to discern that there was a feminine cause for these numerous unusual effects; but he did not for a minute suppose it to be the thin, sharp-tongued woman who had been washing behind the cook-house as he rode up to the corral. Now, as he pondered, he thought again about it. But only for a minute; other things of vaster importance held him.
Although but two men had spoken during the conversation, three were in the room. The third was a man of medium height, lowering looks, and slow tongue. His hair was black, and he had the appearance of always needing a shave. He was trained down to perfect condition by his years on the plains, and was as wiry and tough as the cow pony he rode. He was Black Mike Stelton, foreman of the Bar T.
“What do you think, Mike?” asked Bissell, when Larkin made no attempt to continue the argument.
“Same’s you, boss,” was the reply in a heavy voice. “I wouldn’t let them sheep on the range, not noways. Sheep is the ruination of any grass country.”
“There you see, Mr. Larkin,” said Bissell with an expressive motion of his hand. “Stelton’s been out here in the business fifteen years and says the same as I do. How long did you say you had been in the West?”
“One year,” replied Larkin, flushing to the roots of his hair beneath his tanned but not weather-beaten skin. “Came from Chicago.”
“From down East, eh? Well, my woman was to St. Paul once, and she’s never got over it; but it don’t seem to have spoiled you none.”
Larkin grinned and replied in kind, but all the time he was trying to determine what stand to take. He had expected to meet opposition to “walking” his sheep north – in fact, had met it steadily – but up to this point had managed to get his animals through. Now he was fifty miles ahead of the first flock and had reached the Bar T ranch an hour before dinner.
Had he been a suspected horse-thief, the unwritten social etiquette of the plains would have provided him with food and lodging as long as he cared to stay. Consequently when he had caught the reflection of the setting sun against the walls of the ranch house, he had turned Pinte’s head in the direction of the corral.
Then, in the living-room, though no questions had been asked, Larkin had brought up the much-dreaded subject himself, as his visit was partly for that purpose.
He had much to contend with. In the first place, being a sheepman, he was absolutely without caste in the cattle country, where men who went in for the “woolly idiots,” as someone has aptly called them, was considered for the most part as a degenerate, and only fit for target practice. This side of the matter troubled him not at all, however.
What did worry him was the element of right in the cattlemen’s attitude! a right that was still a wrong. For he had to acknowledge that when sheep had once fed across a range, that range was ruined for cattle for the period of at least a year.
