Читать книгу Points West - B.M. Bower - Страница 4

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MANY a man has attempted to outride his troubles, and few have ever succeeded; but who has ever yet been able to outstrip his own thoughts and the ruthless memory that calls others trooping up to harry the fugitive?

In those first few days of flight Cole Lawson would have been no more miserable had he stayed on the ranch or ridden in with the sheriff, as he had been invited to do. He was trying, for one thing, to outride the memory of that horrible minute when he had stood aghast beside the still quivering body of his father. Cole had loved his dad in an inarticulate, shy way that never found open expression. He had never suspected him of being in any deep trouble, and he could not account for the instant chill of apprehension which flashed over him when he had heard the shot in the room his father had used for an office. Gunshots were not so infrequent on the ranch, where target shooting was a popular sport and there were always hawks sailing up in the hope of pouncing upon a chicken and making off undetected. His father always had an eye out for these pests and never failed to send a shot after any hawk he discovered within range. Yet this particular report had sent Cole racing to the house with his heart pounding heavily in his throat, and so he would carry a gruesome picture indelibly painted in his mind; and ride as he would it flashed before him at unexpected moments when he thought he was thinking of something altogether different.

He rode out of the Black Rim country by way of Thunder Pass which sloped steeply up between Gospel Peak and Sheepeater Mountain, and so came down the steep trail into Burroback Valley which seemed remote, sufficient unto itself, a world apart from the range land across the mountains. Cole had heard rumors of Burroback country. It was said to be tough. But then, Black Rim county was no saints' rest, so far as that went, and the toughness did not trouble him in the least, save that it put him a bit on guard.

Burroback Valley was long and deep, with a creek running the entire length of it and many little gulches and canyons twisting back into the hills so that a map of it in detail would somewhat resemble the back and ribs of a great fish. The nearest railroad was miles away, and it seemed to Cole that he might safely ride up to some ranch and ask for work.

The place he chanced upon first was the Muleshoe, a bachelor establishment which lay just down the valley from Thunder Pass and seemed to hug close to the ribbed side of Gospel Mountain. A secluded looking ranch which looked as though it held itself purposely aloof from the rest of the world; sinister too, if a man were old enough and experienced enough to read the signs. But Cole was neither, and the entire absence of normal activity around the squalid ranch buildings served only to impress him further with the idea that here would be a sanctuary from his tragic past. Folks wouldn't know anything about what happened outside the valley, and would care less.

A hard-faced, shifty-eyed man with a high beak of a nose came forward to the gate, as Cole rode up, and leaned over it with his arms folded upon the top rail, one hand drooping significantly toward his left side where the brown butt of a .45 stood loosely in its holster. Afterward, Cole heard the owner of the Muleshoe called Bart Nelson, but now in the soft light of the afterglow he never dreamed that so unsavory a character as Bart Nelson confronted him. He had not lived his life among killers, and the sag of Bart's right hand went unnoticed, and he thought the man was squinting against the light of the western sky and so looked at him innocently through half-closed lids.

Cole asked for work bluntly, without preface, because he did not know how to go about it and wanted the distasteful question out and done with.

Bart Nelson studied him, studied the four horses—good-looking mounts they were too—and spat tobacco juice expertly at a white rock near by.

"What you doin' over in Burroback?" he asked in a flat, grating voice. "You're Cole Lawson's kid, I bet. Heard he went broke and blowed his brains out. Tryin' to sneak some horses out away from the sheriff?"

"Why, you go to hell! That's none of your damned business!" Cole retorted with quiet viciousness, and turned Johnnie away from that gate, the other horses swinging to follow him with the docility which tells of days on the trail together.

Bart Nelson straightened his shoulders and fingered his .45. No man had ever slapped back at him in that fashion and turned his back and ridden off without answer of sharp words or shots. Other Muleshoe men mysteriously appeared and stared after the boy, who never once deigned to look back.

"Now, what d'yuh think of that for gall?" Bart Nelson inquired of no one in particular. "Somethin' behind that play, I betcha." He watched Cole out of sight, his narrowed eyes vigilant.

When nothing developed, the Muleshoe men shook their heads and decided that the kid had been sent to spy around, in hope of not being recognized, but had discovered that they were not such fools after all, and so gave up his plan, whatever it had been. Four C Bar L horses and a look like old Cole Lawson, and he thought he could pass unrecognized! The darned fool; did he think they were blind? They all agreed with Bart that there must be something behind it, and they were all especially wary for several days thereafter.

As we all know, their uneasiness was without cause, for Cole had none of that boldness which his manner indicated. He rode away sick at heart over the unexpected jab at his wound just when he had believed he had out-ridden all knowledge of it. If his retort to Bart had been brutally direct, he had never been taught to set a guard over his tongue, but had been permitted to say what he thought when he thought it. The men of the C Bar L had always liked him and humored him from the time he could string words together into a sentence, and Cole did not dream that he had spoken to Bart Nelson in a manner that might well have started gun play. The chief thing was that he had been recognized.

Of course it was the brand on his horses that had given him away at the ranch back there. There was nothing about himself or his outfit that would give any one a clue to his identity, and as for his name, he had meant to tell folks it was Colman, and let it go at that. No, it was the C Bar L, and he was a fool for not thinking of that brand as a dead give-away. The C Bar L must be known all over the country, and gossip rides fast, even in this big empty country. Well, he would have to do something about it, he supposed.

As he rode on down the valley, Cole cast frequent dissatisfied glances back at his horses. The pick of the C Bar L horses they were, most of them given to him when they were yearlings, all of them pets which he had broken and taught. One was a two-year-old colt, round-hipped, straight-limbed, giving promise of speed and strength and wind, and a gentle thing with a disposition for nuzzling confidence. Cole thought fleetingly of selling them here in the valley; but that would be useless, and besides, horses weren't worth much nowadays. They were worth so little, in fact, that Cole had turned in a small bunch of horses which he might justly have claimed as his own, to help swell the number for the sale and make certain that the herd would bring enough to cover the debts which had driven his father to take the six-gun route out of the muddle. It was because these four were particular pets that he had kept them. He couldn't sell them now. There was another way.

That night, in a secluded little meadow ringed round with thick bushes and quaking aspen thickets, Cole took that other way of removing the last clue to his past. He built a little fire, heated a cinch ring in the manner he had heard described by his father's punchers, when they spun tales of the range on winter evenings, and proceeded to wipe out the last clue to his past. One by one he roped and tied down his horses and with the white-hot ring held firmly in the fork of two green willow sticks he marked out the C Bar L with crisscross burns set deep with unconscious savageness. What he wanted was to make that brand forever undecipherable, and he succeeded so well that one would need to skin a horse and look on the wrong side of the hide to tell what the original brand had been.

Several days elapsed before he could bring himself to the ordeal of riding out again to face the world he hated with all the fierceness of unhappy youth. The little glade seemed remote from the business of the valley and his horses fed contentedly there, switching at the flies which buzzed tormentingly around the fresh burns. Cole fished a little, but most of the time he spent lying on the ground under a tree with his hat pulled low over his eyes, thinking round and round in circles which always brought him to the central fact that he was alone in the world and that his life must start from that secluded little meadow.

It would be life on the range, because he had never learned to do hard manual labor and he had refused to spend the years in school which were necessary if he would get an education; so he was not fitted for the competitive life of the towns, either as an office man or even as a common laborer. He had sense enough to know that, and he had pride enough to want to live where he could hold his own with the best of them. He could ride—the C Bar L maintained that Cole could ride anything that wore hair; he could bounce tin cans off the ground with bullets while he galloped past and shot as he rode, and he had an uncanny skill with a rope. Also, he had four good horses and a deep-rooted love of freedom and the outdoors.

The range, then—or what little of it was left—was his natural field of achievement. As he lay there, he sometimes dreamed of owning a ranch—and you could bet he'd never go in debt for a dime's worth of anything! There was still government land to be taken up, and he was of age. He'd call himself Colman, which was his mother's maiden name, and forget the Lawson. He could file on a homestead and work part of the time, say during round-up, and gradually get together a little bunch of stock. By the time he was thirty or so, he ought to be fairly independent.

It was the foundation upon which many a ragged lad has built castles in the air, and in the summer tranquillity of that small meadow Cole sometimes forgot his bitterness long enough to fence and cultivate an imaginary homestead, build cabin and corrals and a stable or two, and watch his small herd of cattle grow to sizable proportions.

But the time came when the bacon and flour ran alarmingly low and Cole could not swallow another trout, especially when he had nothing to fry it in. The blotted brands had reached the stage of scabbing, and would not, he hoped, attract too much attention. So one morning Cole broke camp and moved reluctantly out to the road again, to face the world of which he secretly felt a bit afraid. As the three loose horses took last mouthfuls of grass and trotted after him, Cole twisted his body in the saddle and looked back. The little meadow was sunlit and peaceful. He knew the shape of every tree and bush that rimmed the grassland; the gurgling murmur of the brook had made words for him as he lay staring down at it where it curled and twisted among the stones. Even the clouds that floated lazily across the opening seemed friendly and familiar. There were the pressed places in the grass where the horses had lain down to sleep, the trampled nook where he had made his camp, the ashes of his small fires.

He hated to leave that meadow which seemed saturated with his thoughts, made homey with his days and nights of eating and sleeping there. But the grass was cropped short and his food pack swung nearly empty—man and horses must eat.

Cole heaved a long sigh and faced about to ride where the trail led him and to meet whatever lay upon it.