They had gone back to the ranch once, all of them, driving in a buckboard. “There it is, Helen,” Pa had said, “fifteen years of brutal hard work and a lot of dreams, all gone in one freeze.”
Tom Chantry remembered the tall old cottonwoods around the house, the log cabin his father had built, then added to … the cold water from the hand-dug well. “I planned all this for you, Tom,” his father had said, “but I reckoned without the snow and the cold.”
The old ranch had been somewhere east of here, he believed. A boy doesn’t have much sense of location when he is six.
Suddenly, he remembered The Hole. At least, that was what he called it.
There had been a small spring about a mile from the ranch, and he had ridden over there once when he was about six. The spring came down from under an overhang of rock, about two feet off the ground, and the water fell into a rock basin, trickled over its lip and down into the meadow below, where it was again swallowed up.
Some dirt had fallen into the spring from one of the overhanging banks, and he was scooping it out with his hands when at the back of the spring where the water ran down from the darkness under the rock, he saw The Hole.
Actually, it was where the water came from, but the opening was much bigger than the space taken up by the trickle of water. Peering back into the deepest shadow, he could see the hole was about three feet across and almost that in height. He stood barefooted in the cold water, and could look back into the hole, but could make out nothing. Looking down at his feet, he could just see the light across the water.
Evidently spring rains had shot out of the hole with some force and had gradually worn the rock back until there was space enough for a boy to stand. With a long stick he poked into the darkness. There was a pool of water where it trickled over the edge, but his stick could not reach either wall or roof. Later, with a longer stick he probed the darkness and succeeded in touching rock on the right side of the stream. Overhead he could find nothing, but there was a rock floor on the left of the stream.
From outside there was no indication of anything like the cave. There was only a dip in the prairie, a natural runoff for water, and a slab of rock was exposed from under which the water ran. Anyone stopping by for a drink would suspect nothing. Although a man might enter the opening once he knew of it, only a child or a small animal would be likely to find it.
He named the place The Hole, and told his father about it.
All that was long ago … he had not thought of The Hole for twenty years that he could recall.
Tom Chantry gave no orders. If he saw anything that needed doing he did it himself, or reported it to French. He had no friends in the outfit, although French talked to him occasionally. Chantry was puzzled by him. Of French’s background he knew nothing, but somehow the man gave him the impression that he had education, and a better background than most of the men in the outfit, but French volunteered nothing, and Tom Chantry knew better than to ask.
In general, the men ignored him. Oddly enough, when he did begin to make a friend it was Dutch Akin, of all people.
It began casually enough. He was riding back to the chuck wagon when he saw another rider following a route that would bring them together. Not until they were too close to turn aside did either recognize the other. It was Dutch.
“Beautiful country, Dutch,” Chantry said.
Dutch merely grunted, then after a few minutes of silence he said, “You better not rest too easy. French is a holy terror. He’s a good man to work for, gen’rally speakin’, but he’d rather stir up trouble than eat. You let down one minute an’ he’ll be all over you.”
“Thanks. He’s not an easy man to understand.”
“That he ain’t,” Dutch agreed dryly, “but
he knows cows and no man alive is better on a trail than him.” Then he said, “Mr.
Chantry, I ain’t one to stick my nose in, but if we all come up to trouble, you’d best run it. French will shoot you right into a range war … he’s quick and he goes hog-wild an’ mean. I’ve seen it.”
“Thanks again.” The horses walked a dozen yards before Chantry spoke again. “Dutch, do you think I’m yellow? I’m asking a question, not trying to invite a fight.”
Dutch grinned, and then he said soberly, “No, I don’t think nothin’ of the kind. I might have. But not after the way you come up to me back there. I’d say you used better judgment than me back in Las Vegas.
“The only thing is,” he added, “you not carryin’ a gun makes a lot of them think you’re scared … and believe me, it won’t keep you out of trouble.”
“But we’re both alive, Dutch.”
“Uh-huh, and if it wasn’t for you one of us
would be dead, but that cuts no ice. You just plain lucked out with the Talrim boys … they’d shoot you soon as look at you.”
When they rode into camp together several heads turned, but there was no comment. French noticed it, without smiling. He gave the impression of being coiled, ready to lash out.
He was eating when suddenly he put his plate down. “We got twenty-two hundred head, Chantry. You want more?”
“No … let’s move ‘em out.”
“Daybreak?”
“Yes.”
“For Dodge?”
“No.”
They all looked up then, surprised. French was the most surprised of all, Chantry thought, for until that time Chantry had left all the handling of the cattle to him.
“We’ll take the longer route,” Chantry said, “by way of Clifton House.”
He realized he could not hope to compare his information about the area with that of French Williams, but they would not know how much or how little he knew, and must proceed accordingly.
“Have it your way,” French said mildly. “There’s more water, easier drives.” He grinned at him. “And it will take longer.”
Tom Chantry lay that night, looking up at the stars, and, tired as he was, there was little sleep in him. The way they would follow had been traveled by cattle herds occasionally, more often by pack trains, army commands, and mountain men, but every foot of it was alive with danger and trouble.
The men with whom he rode were silent toward him. They did not trust his courage, and were not prepared to respect his leadership. Most important, perhaps, he had a partner in whom he must trust to some extent, but who had everything to gain by not getting the cattle through on time, or at all.
Lying there in the darkness, he felt suddenly very much alone, but he remembered something his father had said. “Don’t ever be afraid of being alone, boy. The strongest man is he who stands alone.”
And then Pa had added, “To just that extent that you lean on somebody, or rely on them, to that extent you are a weaker man.”
Chapter 5
When the herd moved out in the morning Tom
Chantry rode on ahead.
The stars were still in the sky, and the cattle were a bobbing mass of black without shape or substance. Then as the gray sky grew paler, here and there a horn glistened in reflected light, or a balky steer moved out from the herd and had to be shoved back.
Slowly a few of the cattle moved out ahead and the herd strung out along the trail, not an impressive sight to anyone who had seen buffalo in their great masses on this same grass, but this slim north-pointing finger was a symbol of change in the West.
The cattle could not exist here until the buffalo were gone, but in their time many of the cattle would go, too. Even as they displaced the buffalo, the forerunners of their own replacements were building shacks and stringing fences west of the Mississippi. Lone cabins appeared, with occasionally a barn, and a field plowed up.
Better than the others, Chantry knew what that meant, for he had lived in the East. The buffalo had to give way to cattle to feed the growing population of eastern cities; in their turn the cattle would go because farmers wanted to grow crops, they wanted to plant corn, wheat, and rye on the ground where the grazing grass grew.
Nor could the Indian, free-roving as he was, compete in his hunting and food-gathering existence with the farmer, for the Indians needed thousands of acres for even a small group to exist, and on much less ground the farmer could grow crops for himself and for shipment east.