“Get out or we’ll run you out!” Stangle had shouted.
“Then why waste time talking?” Merrano suggested. “Why don’t you start your running?”
With an oath, Stangle had reached for his gun, but his hand got no farther than the butt, then very, very carefully he moved his hand away. Not one of them saw where Merrano had held the shotgun, but suddenly it was there, in Merrano’s hands.
“Sorry, gentlemen, but I don’t like being shot at. I am not a man of violence, but I’ve several thousand rounds of ammunition and I hit what I shoot at.
“I’ve noticed that a shotgun has a depressing effect on violent men, as nobody can tell just who is going to get himself ripped open. Now, gentlemen, I’ve a lot of work to do. Do you go cheerfully or do I have to start a graveyard?”
They went, and Joe Stangle was not the last to leave.
Three days later they built The Fence. They built it across the draw that led from Merrano’s adobe in the basin to town. They built it horse-high, hog-tight, and bull-strong. Then six men waited with rifles for somebody to try cutting The Fence.
Barry Merrano came down the draw in his buckboard, and they picked up their rifles for a killing. Before he came to The Fence, Barry pulled up and tumbled a roll of barbed wire from the back of the buckboard. Then, as they watched, suddenly feeling very foolish, Barry Merrano built his own fence, higher, stronger, and tighter. In place of their nine strands of wire he put up fourteen. In the forty feet of width across the draw he put up nine posts to their five. Then he got into his buckboard and drove away.
Cab Casady, forty-five, and accounted one of the toughest men in the valley, laughed. Just as suddenly as he began laughing, he stopped. “We’re a pack of fools I” he said with disgust. “And for one, I’m ashamed of myself! I’m going home!”
Avoiding each other’s eyes the others went to their horses, mounted up and rode away. The Fence was a topic no longer mentioned in conversation.
Yet all wondered what Merrano would do, for there was no way out of the basin unless one walked. For three weeks they waited, and then one day Barry Merrano drove into town for supplies. When they rode out to see, The Fence was still intact.
Jim Hill, although he would not admit it, was relieved. Yet like the others, he was curious. He mounted up and scouted around the country. It was almost a month after that he rode into town. He had a drink in the Faro House and said, “Do you know what that Mex did? He’s bored him a hole through the Neck!”
Anybody but Jim Hill they would have called a liar. The Neck was a wall of rock that joined the bulk of Table Mountain to the rest of the range, yet when they rode out to see it, there was a black hole in that red wall of rock.
How could it have been done? It was impossible, yet it had been done.
Nobody mentioned fencing the tunnel mouth.
A few days later when he passed Willow Springs, Barry Merrano saw a rider emerge from the shabby little grove and start across the trail. When she saw him, she pulled up.
It was Candy Drake.
He stopped the buckskins when he drew close. “How are you, ma’am?” He touched his hat. He started to comment on the heat and the drouth but thought the better of it. Instead he indicated the pinto’s leg. “I see that leg is coming along all right.”
“Yes, it got well just like you said it would.”
He wanted to talk, yet wanted to avoid anything that might give offense. Candy Drake was the prettiest girl in Mirror Valley. He had talked to no one in almost three months, and he admitted to himself that he had been in love with Candy Drake for three years.
“The drouth came the way you said it would, too,” she said almost accusingly. “Everything seems to turn out the way you say it will.”
He flushed slightly. “Anybody who took the time to look could see this country was in trouble,” he said. “This country had been so overgrazed there was no grass to hold what moisture we got. Most of it could have been prevented if work had been started a couple of years ago.”
He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his thick, dark hair. “Nobody would listen to me when I offered to help. I was just that damned greaser son of Molly O’Brien’s, so what could I know?”
There was a bitterness in his voice that came through no matter how hard he tried to hold it back. He had lived too close to this for too long a time.
Mirror Valley had been outraged when pretty Molly O’Brien had married Miguel Merrano. He had been a top-hand, hired only for the roundup. Pete Drake had his eyes on Molly, and so had others, but she had made promises to no one until she met Merrano.
Miguel bought the Table Mountain place and for four bitter years struggled against the hatred and the prejudice directed against them. Finally, when young Barry was almost two, they had gone away.
Surprisingly, they prospered. Barry heard many tales of Mirror Valley as he was growing up but nothing of the reason for leaving until he was fifteen. He determined then to return and fight it out if it took twenty years.
“My father certainly should know how to run cattle,” Candy protested. “He’s raised more cattle than you have ever seen.”
“I’m twenty-six,” Barry said, “and I’ve a lot to learn, but simply growing old doesn’t make one wise. Your father came into a rich, new country and nothing could convince him it would not always stay rich.”
“The others were the same. They ran more cattle than the range could support. Once when I was visiting at your place I tried to suggest some changes, but he just thought me a fool.”
“But Barry,” she protested, “millions of buffalo used to run on these plains, so how could they be spoiled by a few thousand cattle?”
“Your father said the same thing,” Barry said, “but you both forget that the buffalo never stopped moving as they grazed. They were constantly moving and as they moved on, the grass had a chance to grow back before they returned again. Now the range is fenced and the cattle are continually feeding over the same ground.”
Candy was exasperated. “We always have the same argument,” she protested. “Can you talk of anything else?”
“Many things, if you’ll listen. Candy, why don’t you come over to my place and see for yourself?”
“To your place?” She was shocked, yet as the idea took hold, she was intrigued. Like all in the valley she was curious. What was he doing back there? Nobody had visited the basin since he took over, and they all knew Barry Merrano paid cash for everything. How could he do it?
That he ran cattle, they all knew. He had driven cattle into Aragon to sell and Aragon was out of the way for people from the valley. They knew he did it to avoid meeting them.
“It wouldn’t be proper,” she said, but as she said it she knew it was a feeble excuse. She had done many things that were often considered improper. “Anyway, that dark tunnel would frighten me. However did you make it?”
“It was not hard. Want to come?”
Her father’s disapproval and what might be considered proper was opposed to her curiosity, which resulted in a sweeping victory … for her curiosity.
Interested in spite of herself, she followed along. He drove the buckskins into the dark tunnel, and she fell in behind them. The buckskins trotted along undisturbed by the darkness until rounding a small curve they saw light before them. When she emerged from the tunnel she pulled up with a gasp.
The first impression was of size. She had thought of the basin as a small place, yet there must have been thousands of acres within that circle of hills. When she looked again she saw nothing was as it had been.
The basin, in contrast to the country she had left, was green and lovely. A winding road led to a stone cottage that stood on a wide ledge and on either side of the road there were fenced fields, the one on the right of clover, on the left of corn, and the corn was shoulder high as she rode past it on her horse.
The old trees she remembered from a time she had come here as a child, when it was abandoned, but there were younger trees, including a small orchard, carefully set out. The valley of .the basin itself was green, with here and there a small pool that caught the sunlight.