Читать книгу The Flying U Strikes - B.M. Bower - Страница 6

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BARR LANG stood in the doorway of his hotel dining room and eyed the little group of horses clustered about his hitch rail. Across the road at the blacksmith shop, Dave Burch, captain of the Vigilantes (also expert blacksmith between hangings) smoothed his grizzled beard and stared at Chip from under shaggy brows. No doubt he was thinking of the time he came near hanging that young fellow across the way, thinking those same horses had been stolen. Chip thought of it and hated himself for the crimply chill that went up his spine into the roots of his hair, when he saw Burch's cold gaze upon him. For that he walked a little straighter to the door of Lang's store, crowded in between hotel and saloon on the long platform.

Barr Lang came toward him with his fat-throated chuckle. "Well! Looks like you're pullin' your freight! Ain't quittin' the Flying U, are you?"

"Kinda looks that way, don't it?" Then Chip repented of his churlishness. "Yes, I'm heading south again, Mr. Lang. How about a little grub?"

"Sure, sure! Jim'll fix ya up, all right. So you're headin' back down the trail, ay? Colorado, I s'pose?"

Chip forced a grin. "Might, unless I land a job before I get there."

Lang followed him into the store, leaned an elbow on a showcase while Chip found the list he had in his pocket. "Well, now, if you'd of come along yesterday mebby you coulda drawed pay on the trip. Part of the way, anyhow. Butch sent a bunch of horses through here. Headin' for Cheyenne. That might of been a chance to work your passage." His little shrewd eyes studied Chip's profile, caught the pinching in of his mouth and drew down his own lip to head off a smile.

"Give me the sugar in a cloth bag, if you can, will you? And if you've got an extra gunny sack for the stuff—" At the clerk's nod, Chip turned and looked full at Lang, meeting the quizzical gleam in his eyes without a sign of understanding.

"I thought Butch was hauling beef this winter," he said carelessly. "What's the matter? Market play out on him?"

Barr Lang's eyes narrowed to slits, then opened their fullest. "Butch? First I heard of it. No, Butch's outfit has been gentlin' saddle horses all winter, far as I know. Got a nice bunch shaped up, from what Hec said. He seen 'em cross the river; said they looked like jim-dandies, every one of 'em." He paused. "The Hobble-O hauled out some beef. Took it out the other way, though. Where'd you hear Butch was sellin' beef?"

"Why, I don't know—somebody said something about it. Might have got things mixed."

"Yeah, I guess they did, all right." Lang gave a goodnatured chuckle. "Wasn't Butch, I'd bet on that. How's the river to-day?"

"Don't know," Chip answered. "I patronized the ferry. I wasn't sure just how the ford was, so I didn't try it. Quite a lot of slush ice along the bank."

"Butch forded yesterday, all right," Lang told him. "She won't be high for a month yet, unless they get a chinook up above here, or it comes on to rain. Got your same bunch of horses, I see."

"Yes, same bunch."

"Don't want to sell that mare, do yuh?"

"Not just yet I don't," Chip rebuffed him and paid for his supplies with a gold piece.

Again Lang chuckled. The whole country knew how Chip Bennett felt about those horses of his. He followed Chip to the door and stood on the porch while the sack of provisions was being tied on Jeff. "Well, if you overhaul Butch, mebby he'll give you a job," he called as Chip mounted. "Take care of yourself!"

With lifted hand Chip acknowledged the farewell and rode away from there, scowling thoughtfully at the trail ahead of Mike's nose. Just what had Barr Lang meant to convey? A warning? Or was it just his idea of a joke? He decided that Barr Lang, standing in with everybody as a good hotel-store-saloon keeper must, if he would prosper, merely wanted to let him know that Butch was on the trail ahead of him.

He did not loiter because of that fact. He rode hard, the silver-maned mare and her two colts, fleet as deer, traveling easily where Jeff, the lightly packed bay, puffed and grew gaunt under the pace Chip set, and even the hardy Mike sweated to his ears. Then, miles short of Billings, he turned sharply west in a drizzling rain, and rode to the gate of a snug ranch snuggled back in a coulee, the house hidden among trees.

The front door opened to his knock, lamplight streaming out upon his tall slickered figure and his young face looking old and hard and purposeful. His voice too was metallic with strain.

"Mr. Benton? I'm the fellow who owns the flaxen-maned chestnut mare and colts you wanted to buy in Billings last spring. I've decided to sell. Do you still want them?"

"Why, come in! Come in! I remember you—"

"Thanks. I'm in a hurry. Do you want to buy?"

"Well, if the mare's as good as she was last spring, and if the colts have shaped up the way they should, I'll buy, yes. Got them with you?"

"They're down by the gate. I want to make Billings before the stores close."

Benton gave him a sharp look. "In trouble, young man?"

Chip's nostrils flared affrontedly. "Nobody's after me," he retorted. "I need money, is all." But for all that, he drove a hard bargain and got his price. But at the last, when he had led up Silver and Rummy and the yearling, his young stoicism broke and he was just a boy seeing his beloved horses taken from him.

His arm went round little Silver's neck, pulling the colt's head close to his breast. "Knock off the price of this colt, Mr. Benton. I'm keeping him. I'll give you a bill of sale for the other two and get going."

With eyes hard as agates—they were so close to tears—and with his heart heavy in his chest, Chip rode away from Benton's ranch. Each lonesome whinny of the colt was like a knife in his chest, and once he stopped and hunted through all his pockets for a lump of cut-loaf sugar, and fed little Silver what solacing crumbs he could find, standing there in the drizzling rain, petting and comforting the orphan until Silver seemed to understand and left off straining at the lead rope and looking back along the trail.

In Billings, with the rain still falling dismally and the streets practically deserted, he left the horses at a livery stable just across from a general store that made a point of remaining open until midnight to accommodate late travelers such as he. Tired though he was, he wrote a short letter to J.G., folded it around the money he had received for the two horses, and got the storekeeper's promise to register and mail it first thing in the morning.

Three trips he made across the street, carrying his purchases into the livery-stable office where they would be safe until morning. The last load he carried was a sack of grain for his horses. He went back and looked them over to make sure they were well fed and comfortable, and fed little Silver more sugar from a fresh sack.

Then he hunted a rooming house close by and went to bed, and slept like one drugged until an hour or so before dawn.

At a little all-night lunch place near the depot he ate breakfast, not because he was hungry, but because he wanted to save time and he knew that with his stomach filled now he could ride for half a day without stopping to make camp. He had left orders for the horses to be grained at four o'clock, so they would be ready for the trail by the time he was and would have the heart for a hard day's travel, and now he packed swiftly and dexterously, adding all his supplies to Jeff's load. He was out of town before daylight, just as he had planned.

Two nights later—riding wide of the trail where he could, without losing too much time—he rode down across the willow flat in the teeth of wind and a sleety rain and approached the Missouri. Barr Lang's place showed no glimmer of light, not even in the saloon, which kept late hours. He did not attempt to strike a match and look at his watch, but he knew it must be close to three o'clock in the morning—and this too was as he had planned. Snubbed to its post beside Turk Bowles' squalid shack, the ferry showed its black bulk chuckling at the current, its planks probably a glare of ice.

But he wanted nothing of the ferry that night. With the horses roped together, he urged them into the sullen black water, their hoofs crunching ice at the brink. The next few minutes were a nightmare to Chip. This was the place where his brother Wane had met death in the night; some said by drowning, though Milt Cummings had told Chip it was a bullet from Cash Farley's gun that had sent Wane Bennett down the river. Whatever the cause of Wane's death, Chip always hated the Cow Island crossing, always felt a prickling of the scalp when he must ride into it.

To-night, with the storm beating in his face and his very bones crying out for rest, the river was a black monster sliding down upon him out of nowhere, pushing against Mike's legs, worrying and clutching, trying to pull him under. In the hissing of the sleet, it seemed that Wane was there beside him, whispering to him that he must not venture upon the trail he meant to ride; urging him back to the Flying U; telling him he had done all he could, selling Rummy and Silvia and sending the money to J.G. Two hundred dollars was quite a lot of money—hardly a drop in the bucket, though, when it was counted against J.G.'s loss. Still, it was all he could do; more than most cow-punchers would think of doing.

With his teeth clamped hard together and his face bowed to the storm, Chip rode doggedly ahead, letting Mike pick his way to suit himself. The horses came out shivering. Tired though they were, he forced them to a lope until the blood ran warm through their chilled bodies, and as they struck into the familiar trail, he could feel the new spring in Mike's stride. Thought he was going home, back to the Flying U. But presently Chip reined him short off the trail, into a long narrow valley leading off toward the Hobble-O and the Lazy Ladder farther down the river.

Neither place drew him, however. He turned again, this time to the left, and entered a brushy draw which opened, a half mile farther on, into a little high-walled basin filled with scrubby timber at its upper end, where a spring creek flowed sluggishly.

Here, in a fair-sized niche in the bluff that gave some shelter from the storm—where a fire, too, would not be seen unless a man rode right up to the place—he made camp, clawing in the dark amongst a thicket for dry wood that would burn. Mike and Jeff, even little Silver, stood close to the fire, snug under blankets Chip pulled from his own bedding. Their contented munching of oats from the feed bags Chip hung over their heads made a pleasant, homey sound within the whistlings of the wind. Their eyes shone green in the reflection of the blaze. When he turned to look at them, Chip saw that they were no longer trembling with cold and weariness.

For himself, he set up the little brown tent bought in Billings. A pup tent, the storekeeper had called it. It was so low that any patch of brush would hide it from view, but it held his bed and his belongings snug from the storm, and when he crawled into it and lay facing the crackling flames, Chip forgot a little of his misery and was almost satisfied with what he had so far accomplished.

There is a content that comes with doing what you have set out to do, however disagreeable the task. When he slept at last, it was his immediate future that had held his last waking thoughts, and not the things he had left behind him.