Luther and Hirk rode off the ridge and headed down the steep trail. Here the pines were scattered and the bunch grass grew knee-high on Luther’s roan pony, Cochise. Real cow country, the stock they observed looked in good flesh. Several of them wore Burtle’s B Bar brand. The cowboy obviously had been busy. But most showed the looks of mavericks. Many were staggy steers cut as past yearlings. Wild-eyed heifers, some still with scabby brands, told Luther they hadn’t been worked as calves. Maverick law let anyone with stock on the range and a registered brand to claim such unmarked animals.
“Is this the way to Dikes’s place?” Luther turned in the saddle and asked his man. Both pack mules followed, the panniers under the diamond hitches going side to side as they shuffled off the mountain.
“Yeah. It’s in this valley.” Hirk pointed to the clearing far beneath them. “Could be some more of Burtle’s stuff down there.”
Luther agreed with a nod, grateful for an excuse to see the dead man’s layout.
Ben made a short bark at a squirrel who teased him from a few feet off the ground on a ponderosa trunk. After three stiff jumps, the bulldog stopped. His charge was enough that the squirrel raced upward and chattered at him from high limbs. With a sneeze at him, Ben marked the tree and quickly caught up with the roan horse.
“How many hands we going to need to gather them?” Luther asked over his shoulder. He leaned back as the sure-footed Cochise made his stiff-legged descent.
“Half dozen, if’n we got to hold them and round them up, too.”
“You’re right.” Luther’s thoughts were on all the work involved in gathering them. Perhaps Allen should have waited until fall roundup to collect them when the others worked theirs in a joint effort These mountains and forest would be worse than the brush he knew in the Texas hill country to gather cattle. Actually he should be grateful. This cattle drive made his cover up there that much better. What would they find at Dikes’s place? Hirk told him they’d be there in another half an hour.
When they reached the last slope, Luther could see a low-walled cabin of hewed logs nestled in a grove of jack pines. Several water tanks in a row dotted the flat valley, obviously fed by a strong source. Several resting cows and calves got up at their approach. A large white-faced bull made a deep bellow and pawed up dust on his shoulders to threaten any challengers to his harem.
“Ben,” Luther said sharply, and the bulldog ignored the cattle, trotting along beside the roan horse. Some of the cows, defensive of their calves, gave him a wary eye.
He and Hirk dismounted at the house.
“Pretty nice place,” Luther said, looking around.
“Yeah. Old man Manson built it. Him and his wife were workers. Him and her built this series of tanks from the big springs, too.”
“They sell this place to Dikes?”
“Yeah. The old man got himself hurt bad in a horse wreck. Finally he died, and she wanted to go back to Iowa to her people.”
“I guess we can look inside,” Luther said, and started for the door.
“Yeah. Teddy won’t care none.”
Luther pushed open the door; Ben charged past him in wild pursuit of a pack rat. The race ended in a collision with the wall and the angry Ben barking at the hole the rodent escaped through.
The room looked untouched. Dishes had been washed and stacked. An iron skillet wiped clean sat all greased and ready on the range. The bed was even made up. A six-point
elk rack hung over the fireplace and some working clothes hung on the wall pegs. It reminded Luther that Dikes had been headed for a dance, according to the major, and no doubt he wore a suit of his best clothes.
“Here’s something interesting, I bet, if you can read.” Hirk held up a leather bound book. “It’s got writing in it.”
Luther’s heart stopped. He couldn’t act too excited, but he needed an excuse to examine that book if it was Dikes’s diary. The killers’ names might be spelled out in those pages.
“Here, you can read it.” Hirk chuckled and handed it to him.
“Guess we should, and then be sure his relatives get it.”
“I’d kinda like to hear what he had to say.”
With a slow nod for the man, Luther agreed wholeheartedly. “I’ll put it in my saddlebags for safekeeping.”
“Yes, sir. Sure ain’t no sense in a pack rat eating it.”
A loud sneeze of approval from Ben drew a laugh from both men. The feel of the leather cover in Luther’s hands made his heart race as he opened the pages and turned them toward the light coming in the small window.
March 10th, cold crisp weather, rode over to T. G.’s. We shot a fat mule deer doe, dressed her, and split the meat. Spent the night at his place and I read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets to him. For a man with so little education, T. G. understands William better than I do.
Luther looked up and saw the half-dozen volumes of Shakespeare on the shelf.
“He say much?” Hirk asked.
“Killed a deer.”
“My, my, be plumb interesting.” Hirk said, making a clucking sound with his tongue.
“It’s late enough in the day. Let’s den up here,” Luther said.
“You’re the boss. Kind of hate to quit in mid-afternoon,”
Hirk said with a sly grin. “I’ll go put the horses in the corral and bring in our bedrolls.”
“I’ll start a fire and we can have some bread with our beans tonight.” Luther indicated the cooking range.
“Whew. Be like having a wife,” Hirk teased, and beat the side of his leg with his hat as he went out to tend to the horses.
Luther followed him outside. He scoped the mountains towering over the place. The ridges were covered in tall timber with some higher, craggier peaks to the north that formed the rim. Shame Dikes had not continued to live and enjoy the view.
In back of the cabin, he found the wood supply and busted up some kindling for the stove with the axe left in a stump. It was hard not to let everything go and simply read Dikes’s diary front to back, but he didn’t know yet where Hirk’s loyalties lay. The man was a good enough cowboy but also a resident of the country. His loyalties to the home folks might be too great for him not to inform them. Luther swung the axe again and again. Soon the supply of stove wood looked adequate.
“You’re a funny boss,” Hirk said, squatting down and gathering the fresh split pieces. “Ones I’ve had in the past would’ve left the wood splitting to me.”
“You ever work for McKean?” Luther asked, recalling the rancher’s brusque manner and the way he acted toward the man.
Hirk looked up and made a sour face. “One roundup was all. You got to be desperate to work for him. He flies off the handle at everything. Got mad at me over nothing, I swear.” He stood with his arms full. “I’ll herd sheep before I’d work for him again.”
“Sounds serious,” Luther said, and looked down the canyon. More cattle moved in to water. He wondered what brand they wore. Maybe more of T. G.’s. But maybe there were McKean cattle here, too. More water in this valley than he’d seen since they forded Alma Creek, where Hirk
pointed out the thick tree limb supposed to have been the gallows.
There had been no need for him to check the scene out. The necktie party had been held over six weeks earlier, so as not to draw any suspicion, they’d ridden on. He looked once more at the series of water tanks that gleamed in the sun like full moons, and the circles went far down the valley. Dikes owned something here. Yet the peril of all small ranchers was that they never had enough income; then the difference between mavericking and rustling became a thin line. Maybe the diary would answer some of his questions.
“You read that book of his out loud and I’ll make supper,” Hirk said, on his knees, placing wood in the fire box. “I make mean biscuits, big as a cat’s head. Sides, I’m dying to hear what he said.”
“Sounds fair enough.”
The first pages Luther read aloud were about Teddy coming west.
“I found the ranch in the valley. I have enough money of my own to buy it. Oh, if heaven ever had a place on earth, I am certain it would look like this ranch. The widow woman acts grateful I am buying it. The house is small, but well-built …”
“Hmm,” Hirk snorted, and looked up from sorting the small rocks and sticks out of the dried beans spread on the tabletop. “I’d smile, too, if I’d been her. He paid her twice what folks thought the place was worth. Lordy, I could smile over that.”
Luther set the book down. “Who thought it was worth that much?”
“I knowed McKean offered her five thousand.”
“She didn’t take it?”
“No. She didn’t like him either. Been some bad blood there. I ain’t certain.”
“So Dikes paid her what? He don’t say in here.”
“I heard seven thousand.”
“Cattle, brand, and this place.”
“Yeah. They’d proved up on three-sixty acres. It’s a dry land homestead.”
“Don’t look dry to me.”
“The rest of it is,” Hirk said, and used the side of his hand to grade the good beans off the tabletop into his kettle.
“How many she-stuff did he get with the place?”
“She claimed three hundred plus, but there wasn’t that many. Maybe two or two fifty, and then three calf crops. Never sell them till they’re three.”
“You worked for Dikes?”
“No. I worked for the stockmen’s association on the roundups.”
“Dikes belonged to that?” Luther asked as the man rose to put the beans on to cook.
“Nope. Only four men belong to it. McKean, Reed Porter, Chaboneau, and Crain. Of course, all the small outfits ride along at roundup time.”
“Maybe those three had formed their own association?”
Hirk shrugged. “Maybe we’ll know if they did by the time you finish reading that book.”
Luther took the hint and went back to reading aloud.
“I went to Fortune today for supplies. Met a neighboring rancher by the name of McKean. Rather blunt man. Right on the street, he told me I was a damn fool for buying the place and that I would never survive in this country. Oh, well, Mr. McKean doesn’t know how determined I am.”
Luther glanced over at Hirk. “Bad blood?”
“Naw. It was McKean’s way of welcoming him. He ain’t ever nice unless it’s a-going to favor him.”
Satisfied, Luther went back to reading about Dikes being bucked off a tame horse, getting run over by an angry momma cow when he worked her calf, several rope wrecks. One took place on a hillside that Dikes claimed came within a hair’s breadth of being his last, but he miraculously came out unscathed. Too sore to walk, he crawled home that night.
They ate supper and enjoyed Hirk’s biscuits. Luther wished for some butter, but he still savored the treat of fresh
bread. Even their brown beans tasted better. No way to have a meat source for two of them. Anything they butchered like a calf, deer, or elk carcass would spoil in the daytime heat before they even started to eat very much of it.
Luther read on. They learned about Dikes meeting the other two men, as well as Charboneau and Crain. But several of the next pages became flowered with Miss Margie Porter’s presence. Obviously, Dikes became infatuated with her on first sight. Some of it sounded intimate enough that Hirk shifted around uncomfortably in his chair under the lamplight.
“Nice girl?” Luther asked, looking over at Hirk’s whisker-stubbled face and his snow-white forehead shining in the lamp’s glare.
“Pretty.” Hirk gave a jerk of his head. “A man’d be a fool not to like her.”
“Guess Dikes really liked her.”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“It bothering you?” Luther asked.
Hirk made a sour face. “It bothers me to be within a hundred yards of that girl.”
“Why, don’t you do something about it?”
“Huh?” He scrubbed his bristled mouth with his hand and shook his head. “Why, I’d not stand a chance in hell with her.”
“Why, cleaned up and little prodding, you’d be surprised.” Luther leaned back and nodded in approval at his notion.
“Don’t tease me.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh, God almighty, Luther, I’d never sleep again if I even thought I could hold her hand. My knees would buckle.”
“She affects you that bad, you better do something about it.”
“Go on reading about Teddy.” He waved at him with
his hands as if to shoo him away from the notion of him and her.
The next morning, they ate reheated beans and cold biscuits. Hirk repacked the mules, while Luther finished the dishes.
“Ben,” Luther said, wanting to make a tour of the place on horseback, “you stay here. I’ve got cows to check.”
The bulldog looked blank as he scratched his ear. With another finger shake to remind him, Luther set out on his roan. He trotted past several sets and noticed many of the cows wore Dikes’s TK. But McKean had cattle there. Most of them carried longhorn blood, obviously out of stock he brought up from Texas. The calves showed to be three quarters Hereford or Durham, enough to block them out. He also noticed a few red Durham bulls, their polished white short horns glinting in the sunlight.
A couple of good white-faced sires hung around the tanks with their own harems ready to argue about territory. The bulls deep bellowing echoed across the valley. He looked up and saw Hirk coming with the mules and Ben.
Hirk suggested they ride on east. His plan was to make Burtle’s place by dark. Luther noted a few B Bar stock there, too. Those six tanks had to be the main water source for the area, pivotal for all the livestock. How badly did the other ranchers need it? He booted Cochise after Hirk and the mules. Ben gave the place his final sneeze of approval and they headed for the next range.
At noon they paused to water their animals at a water hole in an intermittent creek Hirk called Beaver. Luther looked up from undoing his cinch to see a rider coming off the mountain, a rifle across his lap.
“We’ve got company,” he said to Hirk, and jerked loose the cinch.
Mopping his forehead with a wet kerchief, Hirk straightened and frowned. “Looks like Charboneau, and he looks on the prod.”
“We ain’t done nothing to him.”
“Don’t have to. Watch him. He’s got a bad temper.”
Luther could see the rancher forcing the big gray horse downhill.
He shifted the Colt around. Be a good time to meet another one of the big ranchers, mad or not. He had enough high-handed business from his meeting with McKean—this one, too? The sounds of the rocks rolling downhill grew louder from under the gray’s feet.