Nevada (1995) Page 5

  "Jim, you knew Setter was shot over in California?" he queried, sharply.

  "I heard it from Lize," rejoined Nevada, matter-of-factly.

  "Killed by a wild-hoss hunter," went on Burridge, with emotion.

  "Jim, there are men who connect you with that gun-play."

  "Shore. I get blamed for a lot of things," returned Nevada, imperturbably.

  "Well, that's none of my business," spoke up Burridge, with more relief, "only I want to say that whoever killed Setter did me a good turn."

  "Me too. Setter did me dirt once, over on the Snake River."

  Burridge drew a long breath and laid aside his cigar.

  "Listen," he began, with tenseness. "I was in on several deals with Setter. After he left here he sent for me to meet him at Klamath Falls. I did it. He had gotten in with big cattlemen an' had more money than he knew how to spend. He told me he wouldn't risk settlin' down in Oregon. He'd sell out there pretty soon, an' he wanted a new an' safe place. No more rustlin' or sharp speculation with other ranchers' money. He might marry. Anyway, he was goin' in for honest ranchin', an' wanted me as a partner.

  Well, the upshot was that he gave me a hundred thousand dollars to buy a well-stocked ranch in Arizona. I was to own half, an' to help him develop cattle an' horses on a big scale. He had never been in Arizona an' only knew it by hearsay. He left the choice of place to me, makin' the provision that I find a wild an' unsettled range, where money would develop water."

  Burridge halted in his narrative, the recital of which manifestly stirred him deeply, and picking up his cigar he puffed on it a moment, and leaned back in his chair, with his light hard eyes intent upon his listener.

  "Well," he resumed, "I went to Arizona an' rode hossback from the New Mexico border clear to the White Mountains. Talk about wild an' beautiful country! Arizona has everythin' beat. I bought out a rancher who wasn't keen to sell. He owned a big ranch, had miles of grazin' range, an' ten thousand head of stock. I ain't tellin' you the location until you decide to accept my offer. After the deal was settled an' property turned over to me I began to get a few hunches. But I hustled back here an' sent word to Setter. He hadn't consummated his deals over there. I waited. No word came from him. I went back to Arizona--that was early last summer.

  Then I had my eyes opened. It was funny. Such a joke on ME, an' especially Setter. Well, I had been huntin' for wild country, an' you can gamble I'd hit on it. Our cattle were bein' rustled right an' left. I suspected the very cowmen I'd taken over with the property. It was a grand big country--desert, canyon, plateau.

  There were many more ranchers an' cattle than I'd suspected. Some of these ranchers were rustlers, thick with the worst of the outfits. You've heard of the Hash Knife gang an' the Pine Tree outfit. But nobody seemed to know just WHO belonged to them an'

  WHO didn't. Then there were some hard nuts known to everybody.

  This country around Lineville even in gold-rush days couldn't hold a candle to that neck of the woods in Arizona."

  Burridge made a final flourish with the cigar he had let go out.

  "Now when I got back here a few weeks ago I sent word to Setter an' waited. No reply. Then we heard Setter was dead. Hardy Rue brought the news. I've a hunch he's got somethin' up his sleeve.

  Anyway, he knew Setter, an' I'm not worryin'. That property in Arizona is mine. An' my job is to get back there to run it.

  Here's where you come in. Jim Lacy! That wouldn't sound so pleasant to those outfits. I'll make you foreman an' give you an interest. It'll take some fightin' to keep my cattle. I want a bunch of the hardest-ridin' an' hardest-shootin' boys that can be hired. An' you to lead them! . . . An' now a last word, Jim.

  You know that many an honest an' prosperous rancher was once a rustler. . . . What do you think an' what do you say?"

  "Wal, Cash, reckon I'll think more'n I say," returned Nevada, ponderingly. "You shore talked straight. I savvy when a man's tellin' me the truth. It's a darn interestin' story. What the courts might say aboot it I cain't guess. But I reckon half that hundred thousand Setter gave you is honestly yours. Maybe the other half, too. Nobody could tell just how much money Setter earned an' what he got speculatin'. He was always careful to get the other fellow to take the risks. Yes, sir, I reckon the Arizona ranch is yours, all right."

  "Good. I'm glad you see the deal that way," replied Burridge, rubbing his hands together. "An' you'll accept my offer?"

  "Cash, I cain't promise that yet," responded Nevada, slowly.

  "Reckon to be honest, the day might come when I'd be glad to take you up. But now I want time to think aboot it."

  "Take all the time you want," spoke up Burridge, heartily.

  "Wal, I might need a lot. There's a couple of points that'll shore be hard to get over."

  "What are they, Jim? I might help you."

  "Wal, the first is--your past deals might crop up any day."

  "I thought long about that," returned Burridge, earnestly. "An' at last I figured myself free of any worry. I'm not known in Arizona.

  Idaho never knew me as Cash Burridge. An' what do any two-bit deals here amount to? They'll be forgotten after I've gone."

  "Reckon you don't miss it far," replied Nevada. "But my second point is the serious an' important one. That is, so far as I am concerned."

  "Shoot!" replied Burridge, with good-natured impatience.

  "Wal, Cash, I don't mean any offense, but I'm just plain doubtful that you can EVER go straight."

  Burridge threw his cigar at the stove and the dark blood waved over his face in a tide. "By Heaven! that sticks in my craw, too! I wonder. But I'm no damn fool an' I'm not without some brains."

  "Shore. I admit that. But, Cash, you've asked my opinion an' heah it is. You've a weakness for women an' red liquor. An' the crux of the deal is--can you stand prosperity?"

  "Ha! I never had a chance to find out," replied Burridge, clenching his fist. "I've got it now. We'll see. I swear I want to make the best of it. An' I'd do better with my chance if I had you beside me. That's all."

  "Wal, I appreciate that, Cash, an' I'll think it over. What I hate aboot it is livin' up to my name."

  Nevada went downstairs with Burridge and amused himself by standing and walking in front of Cawthorne for a while. Lize did not put in an appearance. It was mid-week and business was slack. Nevada left the Gold Mine early, not forgetful that Mrs. Wood surely would wait up for him. The night was dark and cold, with a hint of snow in the air. The wind whistled through the leafless trees.

  Excitement and distraction had somehow been good for him. He found his landlady waiting up beside the kitchen fire.

  "Wal, Mother Wood, heah I am, standin' on both feet an' without any hole in my haid," he said, cheerily.

  "So I see, Mr. Lacy," she returned. "But that might be only a matter of luck. Did you run into Link?"

  "Shore. I stood around hours, but nothin' happened. So I reckon you got me all scared for nothin'."

  "Scared! Pooh! I wish I could put the fear of the Lord in you," she replied.

  "Wal, I'll agree to let you, if you will give me a piece of pie an' a mug of milk."

  The short days passed, the snow fell, adding to Nevada's work. In the evenings, if the weather was not stormy, he would drop in at the Gold Mine. Burridge had made another strong plea for Nevada to join him, and then had left for Arizona, intending to make a wide detour through Oregon and California to avoid the snow.

  Lize Teller had passed from jest to earnest in her mood toward Nevada. She was vain, willful, and malignant when under the influence of drink. Her life worked daily toward some final tragedy. During the early part of the winter she had made love to Nevada, more, he thought, to inflame Cawthorne than for any other reason. But the time came, which was coincident with Cawthorne's further bold attempt to force or aggravate Nevada into a fight, when she ceased wholly her flirting with Nevada. Soon after that she broke her engagement with Cawthorne and took to wild flirtations and drinking bouts with the g
amblers. She lost all restraint and began to fail in health.

  When Nevada at length took her to task, as if indeed he were a brother, he received an impression that gave him concern.

  "No decent man wants me and I'm slated for hell," she told him, bitterly.

  From this speech Nevada conceived the idea that somehow he had failed the girl. It could not have been otherwise, yet the fact hurt him. Another side of the situation was the peril she had incurred by jilting Cawthorne. There was, however, no use in talking to Lize about that. Whenever Cawthorne accosted her, whether humbly or harshly, or in a maudlin way, she flouted him as she would have a repulsive dog.

  Days and weeks went by, and this situation wore on, growing toward its climax.

  Nevada resisted his premonition of its outcome. Almost he yielded to the urge to leave Lineville even in the dead of winter. But the side of him that was Jim Lacy, brooding, augmenting, always in conflict with Nevada, would not let him run from a cheap bully and from a worthless girl whom he yet might help. Something held Nevada back from the easiest escape out of that dilemma.

  Always there was encroaching upon his gentle kindly mood, eating like a poison lichen into the sorrow and dream of his love for Hettie Ide, lost to him forever, that dark instinctive fire of spirit, that antagonism of the gunman.

  Nevada acquitted himself of any responsibility for what he had become. As a mere boy he had been thrown among brutal and evil men. He had worked himself above their influence time and time again, only to be thrown back, by accident, by chivalry in him to redress a wrong done some one, by passion to survive, into that character which fate had fastened upon him and to which he seemed unfortunately and wonderfully fitted.

  "Reckon it'll always be so for me," he soliloquized, somberly. "I cain't get away from myself. . . . I wonder if Hettie would believe me false to her faith. No! No! . . . I'll always know, even if I'm forced to be Jim Lacy again, that I'm true to her."

  One afternoon Nevada, actuated by an impulse beyond his ken, bent his steps toward the Gold Mine. All night an oppression had persisted through his slumbers, and all morning he had been restless, brooding.

  He entered the place by the side door, and paused in the hall before the entrance to the gambling room. The usual quiet of that den had been disrupted.

  With his left hand Nevada quickly opened the door and entered sidewise, his right arm crooked. The room was full of men, all standing. Cards, coins, chips, glasses on the tables showed evidence of having been violently abandoned. There followed whispers, a cough, shuffling of feet. The noise that had halted Nevada came from the saloon. Suddenly it augmented to a banging on the bar accompanied by the bellow of a harsh voice.

  "Rum! Hand it out--er I'll bust your head, too!"

  Nevada strode to the nearest group of men. Something terrible had happened. He saw it in their faces. Immediately he connected it with the raucous voice in the saloon.

  "What's happened?" he queried.

  "There's been a hell of a mess," replied one, wiping a moist face.

  "Jim, we was playin' our card games, quiet as usual," spoke up the gambler, Ace Black, "when we heerd an awful row in the hall there.

  Then a woman's screams, quick hushed, I'll tell you. An' after that a heavy fall. We all jumped up an' some one rushed out to see what it was. An' by Gawd--"

  "Wal?" broke in Nevada, cool and grim, as Black choked.

  "Lize Teller! She was layin' half naked, streamin' blood. Link Cawthorne had beat her over the head with his gun. She'll die! . . .

  An' listen to him!"

  In three long bounds Nevada had reached and split the beaded door- curtain. His swift eye swept all.

  "CAWTHORNE!" he yelled, in piercing voice that brought an instant breathless silence.

  Chapter five.

  It was springtime in northern California. Old Mt. Shasta stood up grandly and took the morning light, his vast snowslopes beginning to be ridged by black. From the Tule Lake depression the land waved upward in wide belts, brown and gray, and at last green as emerald.

  Honk! Honk! Honk! The wild geese were coming from the south.

  Great flocks in triangle formation, led by huge old honking ganders, came flying over the sage hills, to circle the grain fields and drop down among their fellows.

  The wide acres of the Ide ranch, mostly lake-bottom land that the draining of Tule Lake had made available, spread rich and fertile along the southern shore. The squares of brown soil but recently ploughed, the fields beginning to show a tinge of green, the pasture lands, running far up on the gray sage slopes, the droves of horses and herds of cattle, the hedge fences, the orchards, young and old, the neat sheds and the rambling red-roofed barn, and the white house half hidden in a grove of maples and pines--all these amply testified to the prosperity of the Ides.

  Hettie Ide had awakened this morning twenty years old. The wild geese that she had loved since childhood had come back from their pilgrimage to the south, and were honking as if they knew it was her birthday and that on this beautiful May day she must be joyous with young life.

  But Hettie had a secret sorrow, which she hid deep in her heart, while she ministered to her ailing mother, and shared with her brother Ben the one bitter drop in his cup of happiness.

  It wanted an hour yet before breakfast. As Hettie tripped down the stairs she heard Ina shrieking with laughter, no doubt at little Blaine's pranks. How happy they were and how blessed by God! But Hettie had no envy in her heart this birthday morning. She was closer to Ben than ever, and she loved Ina and the child as if indeed they were her own flesh and blood.

  Hettie went outdoors. What a glorious morning! Bright and warm was the sun; the birds were singing in the maples; violets lifted their sweet faces out of the green; the wild-lilac buds were bursting into pink.

  She knew where to find Ben. Down in the hedge-lined lane to the corrals she strolled, her heart full, yet with the old pang keener, listening to the hum of bees and the honk of wild geese, the bawl of calves and the twittering of the swallows.

  Above all these sounds, so sweet to her listening ears, she heard the shrill whistle of Ben's great wild stallion, California Red.

  He was trooping across the pasture in defiance of Ben, or venting his displeasure at the corral bars.

  Hettie found Ben sitting on top of the corral fence. California Red was inside, and indeed he did not like it. Hettie halted to peep through at him. She loved this wonderful horse, too, for his beauty, his spirit, and for another reason which only Ben would ever have suspected.

  California Red had been in captivity four years. He had been broken, yet never had lost his spirit. It took a halter to make him lower his ears and stop rolling his fine dark eyes. Red was never gentle, but, on the other hand, he had not one mean trait.

  He shone red, glossy, silken, beautiful, and his long mane was a flame. He was a big horse, yet so perfectly proportioned that most observers would not have judged his size. High and rangy, with body round as a barrel, a wonderful deep wide chest, legs powerful, yet not heavy, and an arching neck and noble head, he looked indeed what he had been for years, the wild stallion king of the sage hills of northern California.

  Hettie climbed to a seat beside her brother.

  "Mawnin', pard," she drawled, mimicking the Southern accent of one neither of them ever forgot.

  Ben gave a little start. He had been gazing out over the red stallion, over the corrals and fields and the sage slopes, to something beyond. Hettie did not often take such liberty with her brother. But this was her birthday and she meant to recall something of the past that might hurt them both.

  "Wal, howdy there, old girl!" replied Ben, surprising her with his answering drawl. Beneath the humor in his voice lay deep feeling.

  But as he reached for her with his gloved hand he did not look at her.

  "What're you doing, Ben?" she asked, brightly, as she took his hand in both hers.

  "I was just coaxing that red son-of-a-gun," he replied, nodding at t
he stallion.

  "Red doesn't seem to obey you very well."

  "I'd have to rope him before he'd lay down those ears."

  "Ben, you mustn't expect him to grow tame."

  "Tame? No, I only want him to love me."

  "Perhaps love was left out of Red's makeup," laughed Hettie. "Or perhaps he can't forgive you for taking him from his sage hills. I certainly wouldn't love you, if I were Red."

  "It's four years now," said Ben, thoughtfully. "What a long time!

  I couldn't ask a finer, gamer horse. Sure there isn't one in all California that can touch him. But I--I always seem to want something from Red--I never get."

  "Ben dear," replied Hettie, pressing his hand, "what you want is something--some one to tame Red."

  "I reckon. . . . The only man who ever could tame Red," muttered Ben, more to himself than to her.

  "Your old pard, Nevada," she whispered, leaning closer.

  Ben dropped his head, and his gloved hand closed tight on Hettie's.

  Not for a long time had Hettie dared to broach this subject and now that she had, she meant to follow it up in a way to help her, and perhaps Ben, too.

  "Ben, this is my birthday," she spoke up, softly.

  "Well, so it is," replied her brother, starting out of his reverie.

  "I plumb forgot. But I reckon I can dig you up a present of some kind. . . . Let's see, you must be eighteen--nineteen."

  "Twenty," she added, gravely.

  "How time flies! Why, you're a grown woman, and a darned fine handsome one, too. But you always seem my kid sister."

  And as he turned to kiss her cheek she saw tears in his dark eyes.

  There were threads of gray, too, in the hair over Ben's temples.

  That shocked Hettie. He, so young and strong and virile! But Ben, all those long years exiled from his home, outcast and wild-horse hunter, had led a lonely and hard life. It was Nevada who had saved him. And now, as so often in the past, she prayed God to bless Nevada, and keep him good and clean and brave as when she had known him.

  "Ben," she spoke up, "I don't want any present on my twentieth birthday. But I ask this. If I'm a woman now I'm old enough to be listened to. Let me talk to you as I want--as I need to."