Читать книгу The Mustang Herder - Max Brand - Страница 5

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That was enough for young Sammy Gregg. He was looking for an opportunity, and here, it seemed, was one shoved under his very nose.

Horses cost ten dollars in Texas, in Crumbock they cost seventy-five. Ten from seventy-five left sixty-five dollars for clear profit. Allow fifteen dollars a head for transportation, and the profit was still fifty dollars a head. Very well. For the sake of caution, suppose that he invested only half of his available capital and turned twenty-five hundred dollars into horses. That would give him two hundred and fifty head at ten dollars a head. But fifty times two hundred and fifty was twelve thousand five hundred dollars!

Twenty-five hundred more than the profit he needed and already at hand! Fire began to burn in Sammy Gregg, but he masked it carefully from his face.

"I should think," said he, "that a lot of people would be in the business of buying Texas horses and selling them in the Crumbock mining region."

"You would think that," nodded the storekeeper, "unless you knowed."

"Knew what?"

"Knew what Texas mustangs is like, for one thing."

"Well?"

The storekeeper closed his eyes in strained thought, as he reached for a superlative. "Keeping hold of a herd of mustangs," he said at last, "is like trying to keep hold of a handful of quicksilver. The harder you try to hold it, the farther it spurts away."

"They're wild, I suppose."

"You suppose, son, but I know. I've rode 'em, I've broke 'em; and then they broke me!"

"Really?"

"I got a hip smashed as flat as a pancake. That's one thing. My ribs is mixed up worse'n a mess of eggs scrambled in a frying pan. And my head is set on crooked. All from mixing too long with them mustangs."

"But if one just herded them along?"

"Herded the devil!" said the storekeeper with a weary sigh. "I herded six of them twenty miles, once. It took me a month!"

"A month!"

"And then I only delivered seven of the twenty."

"Good heavens!" cried Sammy Gregg. "Did you lose the way?"

The storekeeper stared at him. "Lose my way traveling twenty miles? Son, I ain't that kind of a gazoop. Not me! I pack a sort of a compass in the back of my head. But lemme tell you about a mustang, that everything that you want to do is just what the mustang ain't got any idea of doing."

Sammy was amazed.

"They stampede," said the storekeeper, "from hell to breakfast and back ag'in. That's their nature. Promiscuous and free and easy. Where they want to be is always just over the edge of the sky away from where you want 'em to be. You can write that down. Besides, even if a herd was drove up here by good hoss hands like some of them Mexicans are, still what chance would there be of it getting safe to Crumbock."

"I can't see why not?"

"You're young, son, but I'll make you a little older in a minute. Lemme tell you that this ain't no open level plain around here."

"I can see that," said Sammy seriously.

"It's all gouged up and crisscrossed by gullies and canyons every which way, ain't it?"

"It is."

"And them gullies and ravines is all slithering with hoss thieves, old son!"

"You don't mean it!" cried Sammy.

"Don't I, though?"

"But why doesn't the law—"

"The law is a thousand miles away, son! Didn't I lose eight head of good hosses six weeks back?"

"And never could get a trace of 'em?"

"Trace of 'em? Sure I did! I brought four of 'em back!"

"Good heavens!" cried Sammy. "You knew the men who stole them and didn't—"

"Didn't what? Try to chase them?"

"Perhaps, with help."

"Where would you get the help? Besides, you chase these crooks away into the hills, and they're plumb gone. You could hide twenty thousand head in any square mile of them bad lands. And then after you've got back home, somebody all unbeknownst sneaks up to your window and puts a bullet into the small of your back.

"'Murder by men or man unknown,' says the jury.

"'Poor old Bill!' says my friends. 'He wouldn't let well enough alone!'

"No, sir, the best way is to keep hands off of them thieves. They's too many of them, and they got this advantage, they hang together and work together, and the honest folks don't!"

"But suppose that one hired a strong guard to herd the mustangs across the hill country?"

"Herd it across a hundred miles of mountains? A guard for a few hundred mustangs? Son, you're talkin' mad! You'd need a whole company of soldiers to watch every mustang, and even then you'd come in with only the tail of your hoss in your hands. Them thieves are that slick that they would steal your hoss right from under your saddle and leave you ridin' along on a one-eyed maverick that you never seen before!"

By this time Sammy began to wonder not that the price of horses in Crumbock was seventy-five dollars a head, but that it was not a hundred and seventy-five. He went off by himself and sat down for a cigarette and a think.

"The first idea is as good as the last!" said Sammy to himself. "As good as the last, most of the time! So lemme see what I can make out of the horse idea!"

He turned it back and forth. In the first place, it was plain that Mr. Storekeeper had exaggerated somewhat. According to him, a man was a fool who tried to drive horses to Crumbock, and yet horses were certainly there, great numbers of them. Some people, then, were making money by sending live stock there. How did they manage it? Simply by doing what his friend the storekeeper swore could not be done—guarding their horses through the mountains, and herding them successfully across the great Texas plains.

What others could do, Sammy could do, if he only knew where to hire the right men, the right Mexicans, if they were the best!

The thought of large profits will lead on like the thought of a promised land. And so it was that they led Sammy. For two long hours, with the map in his hands, he made his calculations.

Before that day ended, he was on board a train away from Munson, and the next morning he had changed trains and was shooting in a roundabout way toward the southland of cheap horses.

Six months to go when he left New York City. Five months and three weeks when he left Munson. Could he make it? Yes, confidence arose in Sammy as he computed the distance. A month, say, to gather the herd. That left four months and a half. Then an eight-hundred-mile drive. Suppose they journeyed only twenty miles a day. Still, at the end of forty days they would be at their destination.

It seemed simple. Allow a month for mistakes. Allow another month for unknown bad luck. Still he would have time to get back in Brooklyn under the wire of the six months with some twenty thousand dollars weighing down his pocket!

He was in San Antone now. He spent five desperate days trying to interview Mexican cow-punchers and getting no further than:

"Si, señor. Mañana!"

Always, they would meet him tomorrow, but tomorrow, they did not appear. What was wrong with him?

Finally, in a San Antone hotel, he confided his troubles to a sharp-eyed man with a fighting face. A man too stern to be trivial.

He said to Sammy: "You're bound for a losing game if you're bound to drive horses to Crumbock. But if you want a man to handle your herd, there's one now!" He pointed to a dark-faced man in a corner of the room.

"He!" gasped Sammy. "He looks like the king of Mexico more than like a cowpuncher."

"You go talk to him," said the stern-faced man. "And tell him that I sent you. He's a crook and a scoundrel. He'll either rob you or else he'll see that you don't get robbed. It's six of one and a half a dozen of the other. If you can trust Manuel, you can put your life in his hands with perfect safety. But if he decides to trick you, well, as good be done by him as by a dozen others."

So thought Sammy and, sitting beside the handsome young Mexican, he poured forth his plans and his desires, while Manuel, stiff with gold-laced jacket and collar, listened smiling, and dreamed over the idea, through a thin blue-brown cloud of smoke.

He said at last in good English, "I hire the right men—men who can ride and who know horses. I buy the right horses for you. I drive those horses to Crumbock. You pay me five hundred dollars. But if I can't drive those horses to Crumbock, you don't pay me a cent. Do you like this idea, señor?"

The thought of five hundred dollars in wages to a single man was a staggering thought to Sammy Gregg. And yet, the more he pondered, the more it seemed to him that this was his only solution for the problem.

So he closed with Manuel on the moment, and went up to his room and wrote out a careful contract and offered it to Manuel.

"Ah, no," said Manuel, still smiling through a mist of smoke. "I do not wish it in written words. If I fail, so! But if I succeed then I shall trust myself to get the money—not a piece of paper!"