Hidden Gold, Wilder Anthony [best fiction books to read TXT] 📗

From his seat on the top of a high ridge, Gordon Wade looked into the bowl-shaped valley beneath him, with an expression of amazement on his sun-burned face. Pouring through a narrow opening in the environing hills, and immediately spreading fan-like over the grass of the valley, were sheep; hundreds, thousands of them. Even where he sat, a good quarter mile above them, the air was rank with the peculiar smell of the animals he detested, and their ceaseless "Ba-a-a, ba-a-a, ba-a-a," sounded like the roar of surf on a distant coast. Driven frantic by the appetizing smell of the sweet bunch-grass, the like of which they had not seen in months, the sheep poured through the gap like a torrent of dirty, yellow water; urged on from the rear and sides by barking dogs and shouting herders.

Straightening his six feet of bone and muscle, the cattleman stood up and stepped to the extreme edge of the rim-rock, with hardened countenance and gleaming eyes. A herder saw him standing there, in open silhouette against the sky line, and with many wild gesticulations pointed him out to his companions. With a quick motion, Wade half raised his rifle from the crook of his arm toward his shoulder, and then snorted grimly as the herders scrambled for shelter. "Coyotes!" he muttered, reflecting that constant association with the beasts that such men tended, seemed to make cowards of them all.

With an ominous shake of his head, he went back on the ridge to his waiting horse, eager to bear word of the invasion to Santry, his ranch foreman and closest friend. Thrusting the short-barreled rifle into its scabbard beneath the stirrup leather, he mounted and rode rapidly away.

Dusk was gathering as he pushed his way through the willows which fringed Piah Creek and came out into the clearing which held his ranch buildings. Nestling against the foot of a high bluff with the clear waters of the creek sparkling a scant fifty yards from the door, the log ranch house remained hidden until one was almost upon it. To the left, at the foot of a long slope, the corrals and out-buildings were situated, while beyond them a range of snow-capped mountains rose in majestic grandeur. Back of the house, at the top of the bluff, a broad tableland extended for miles; this, with Crawling Water Valley, comprising the fine range land, on which fattened three thousand head of cattle, carrying the Wade brand, the Double Arrow. Barely an hour before, the owner had surveyed the scene with more than satisfaction, exulting in the promise of prosperity it seemed to convey. Now all his business future was threatened by the coming of the sheep.

After putting his horse in the corral, the ranch owner turned toward the house. As he walked slowly up the hill, he made a fine figure of a man; tall, straight, and bronzed like an Indian. His countenance in repose was frank and cheerful, and he walked with the free, swinging stride of an out-door man in full enjoyment of bodily health and vigor. Entering the cabin by the open door, he passed through to the rear where a rattling of pots and pans and an appetizing smell of frying bacon told that supper was in progress.

Bill Santry was standing by the stove, turning the bacon in its sizzling grease, with a knack which told of much experience in camp cookery. The face which the lean and grizzled plainsman turned toward his friend was seamed by a thousand tiny wrinkles in the leathery skin, the result of years of exposure to all kinds of weather.

"Hello, Gordon!" he exclaimed. His pale blue eyes showed like pin points under the shaggy, gray brows. "You're back early, just in time for me to remark that if we don't get a pot-wrastler for this here outfit pretty durn quick, the boys'll be cookin' their own chuck. I'm blamed if I'll herd this stove much longer."

Wade smiled as he passed into the adjoining room to remove his spurs and chaps. "There's a Chinese coming up from town to-morrow," he said.

Santry peered across the stove to watch him as he moved about his room. The week before, a large picture of an extremely beautiful girl, which she had sent to Wade and which at first he had seemed to consider his most precious ornament, had fallen face downward on the table. Santry was curious to see how long it would be before Wade would set it up again, and he chuckled to himself when he saw that no move was made to do so. Wade had presented Santry to the girl some months before, when the two men were on a cattle-selling trip to Chicago, and the old plainsman had not cared for her, although he had recognized her beauty and knew that she was wealthy in her own right, and moreover was the only child of a famous United States Senator.

"There's thunder to pay over in the valley, Bill." Wade had produced "makings," and rolled himself a cigarette as he watched the foreman cooking. "Sheep—thousands of them—are coming in."

"What?" Santry straightened up with a jerk which nearly capsized the frying pan. "Sheep? On our range? You ain't kiddin' me?"

"Nope. Wish I was, but it's a fact. The sheep are feeding on the grass that we hoped to save against the winter. It's the Jensen outfit, I could make that out from where I stood."

"Hell!" Stamping angrily across the floor, Santry gazed out into the twilight. "That dirty, low-lived Swede? But we'll fix him, boy. I know his breed, the skunk! I'll...." The veins in the old plainsman's throat stood out and the pupils of his eyes contracted. "I'll run his blamed outfit out of the valley before noon termorrer. I'll make Jensen wish...."

"Steady, Bill!" Wade interposed, before the other could voice the threat. "Violence may come later on perhaps; but right now we must try to avoid a fight."

"But by the great horned toad...!"

Santry stretched out his powerful hands and slowly clenched his fingers. He was thinking of the pleasure it would give him to fasten them on Jensen.

"The thing puzzles me," Wade went on, flecking his cigarette through the window. "Jensen would never dare to come in here on his own initiative. He knows that we cowmen have controlled this valley for years, and he's no fighter. There's lots of good grass on the other side of the mountains, and he knows that as well as we do. Why does he take chances, then, on losing his stock, and maybe some of his herders by butting in here?"

"That's what I want to know," Santry immediately agreed, as though the thought were his own. "Answer me that! By the great horned toad! If I had my way...."

"This country isn't what it was ten years ago, Bill. We're supposed to have courts here now, you know." Santry sighed heavily. "To-morrow," Wade continued, "I'll ride over and have a talk with whoever's in charge of the outfit. Maybe I can learn something. You stay here and keep Kelly and the rest quiet if they get wind of what's going on and seem inclined to show fight. I've been, in a way, looking for trouble ever since we refused to let that fellow, Moran, get a foothold in the valley. If he's back of this, we've got a clever man to fight."

"There's another hombre I'd like awful well to get my hands on to," declared Santry belligerently. "Damned oily, greedy land shark! All right, all right! Needn't say nothin', Don. You're the brains of this here outfit, an' 'thout you say the word, I'll behave. But when the time comes and you want a fightin' man, just let me at him! When you want to run some of these here crooks outer the country, you whisper quiet like to old Bill Santry. Until then, I'll wait. That is—" He waved a warning finger at Wade.—"That is, up to a certain point! We don't want war, that is to say, to want it, you understand me! But by the great horned toad, I ain't a-goin' to let no lousy, empty headed, stinkin', sheepherdin' Swede wipe his feet on me. No, siree, not by no means!"

Wade made no reply to this, and with a further admonitory shake of his grizzled head, the old man resumed his cooking.

"You're sure that Chink'll be over in the mornin'?" he asked anxiously, after a little; and Wade nodded abstractedly. "Cookin' ain't no job for a white man in this weather. Breakin' rock in Hell would be plumb cool alongside of it." He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Say, do you remember them biscuits you made over in the Painted Rock country? The batch I et ain't digisted yet.

"Every time I cook a meal," he went on, chuckling, "I think about the time Flour Sack Jim hired out to wrastle grub for that Englishman. Flour Sack was one of your real old timers, rough and ready, with a heart as big as a bucket, but he wouldn't bend his knee to no man livin'. The English jasper was all kinds of a swell, with money enough to burn a wet dog. For family reasons, he'd bought him a ranch and started to raise hosses. He wore one of these here two-peaked hats, with a bow on top, and he always had an eyeglass screwed into one eye.

"The first night after Flour Sack come on his job, he got up a mess of jack-rabbit stew, and stickin' his