Harold Bindloss - The Cattle-Baron's Daughter

Hetty’s voice was curiously quiet as she asked, “Was nothing done to provoke them?”

“Yes,” said Clavering, with a dry smile, “Gordon shot one of them; but is it astonishing? What would you expect of an American if a horde of rabble who held nothing sacred poured into his house at night? Oh, yes, he shot one of them, and would have given them the magazine, only that somebody felled him with an axe. The Dutchman was only grazed, but Gordon is lying senseless still.”

There was an impressive silence, and the man sat still with the veins on his forehead a trifle swollen and a glow in his eyes. His story was also accurate, so far as it went; but he had, with a purpose, not told the whole of it.

“You are sure there were Americans among them?” asked Hetty, very quietly.

“They were led by Americans. You know one or two of them.”

“No,” said Hetty, almost fiercely. “I don’t know. But Larry wasn’t there?”

Clavering shook his head, but there was a curious incisiveness in his tone. “Still, we found out that his committee was consulted and countenanced the affair.”

“Then Larry wasn’t at the meeting,” said Miss Torrance. “He couldn’t have been.”

Clavering made her a little and very graceful inclination. “One would respect such faith as yours.”

Miss Schuyler, who was a young woman of some penetration, deftly changed the topic, and Clavering came near to pleasing her, but he did not quite succeed, before he took his departure. Then Hetty glanced inquiringly at her companion.

Flora Schuyler nodded. “I know just what you mean, and I was mistaken.”

“Yes?” said Hetty. “Then you like him?”

Miss Schuyler shook her head. “No. I fancied he was clever, and he didn’t come up to my expectations. You see, he was too obvious.”

“About Larry?”

“Yes. Are you not just a little inconsistent, Hetty?”

Miss Torrance laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I am, of course, quite angry with Larry, but nobody else has a right to abuse him.”

Flora Schuyler said nothing further, and while she sat in thoughtful silence Clavering walked down the hall with Hetty’s maid. He was a well-favoured man, and the girl was vain. She blushed when he looked down on her with a trace of admiration in his smile.

“You like the prairie?” he said.

She admitted that she was pleased with what she had seen of it, and Clavering’s assumed admiration became bolder.

“Well, it’s a good country, and different from the East,” he said. “There are a good many more dollars to be picked up here, and pretty women are quite scarce. They usually get married right off to a rancher. Now I guess you came out to better yourself. It takes quite a long time to get rich down East.”

The girl blushed again, and when she informed him that she had a crippled sister who was a charge on the family, Clavering smiled as he drew on a leather glove.

“You’ll find you have struck the right place,” he said. “Now I wonder if you could fix a pin or something in this button shank. It’s coming off, you see.”

The girl did it, and when he went out found a bill lying on the table where he had been standing. The value of it somewhat astonished her, but after a little deliberation she put it in her pocket.

“If he doesn’t ask for it when he comes back I’ll know he meant me to keep it,” she said.

Miss Schuyler had conjectured correctly respecting the rifle-shot which announced the arrival of a messenger; a few minutes after the puff of white smoke on the crest of the rise had drifted away, a mounted man rode up to Grant at a gallop. His horse was white with dust and spume, but his spurs were red.

“Railroad district executive sent me on to let you know the Sheriff had lost your man,” he said.

“Lost him,” said Grant.

“Well,” said the horseman, “put it as it pleases you, but, as he had him in the jail, it seems quite likely he let him go.”

There was a growl from the teamsters who had clustered round, and Grant’s face grew stern. “He was able to hold the two homesteaders Clavering’s boys brought him.”

“Oh, yes,” said the other, “he has them tight enough. You’ll remember one of the cattle-boys and a storekeeper got hurt during the trouble, and our men are not going to have much show at the trial Torrance and the Sheriff are fixing up!”

“Then,” said Grant wearily, “we’ll stop that trial. You will get a fresh horse in my stable and tell your executive I’m going to take our men out of jail, and if it suits them to stand in they can meet us at the trail forks, Thursday, ten at night.”

The man nodded. “I’m tolerably played out, but I’ll start back right now,” he said.

He rode off towards the homestead, and Grant turned to the rest. “Jake, you’ll take the eastern round; Charley, you’ll ride west. Give them the handful of oats at every shanty to show it’s urgent. They’re to be at Fremont in riding order at nine to-morrow night.”

In another ten minutes the men were riding hard across the prairie, and Grant, with a sigh, went on with his ploughing. It would be next year before he could sow, and whether he would ever reap the crop was more than any man in that region would have ventured to predict. He worked however, until the stars were out that night and commenced again when the red sun crept up above the prairie rim the next day; but soon after dusk mounted men rode up one by one to Fremont ranch. They rode good horses, and each carried a Winchester rifle slung behind him when they assembled, silent and grim, in the big living-room.

“Boys,” said Grant quietly, “we have borne a good deal, and tried to keep the law, but it is plain that the cattle-men, who bought it up, have left none for us. Now, the Sheriff, who has the two homesteaders safe, has let the man we sent him go.”

There was an ominous murmur and Grant went on. “The homesteaders, who only wanted to buy food and raised no trouble until they were fired on, will be tried by the cattle-men, and I needn’t tell you what kind of chance they’ll get. We pledged ourselves to see they had fair play when they came in, and there’s only one means of getting it. We are going to take them from the Sheriff, but there will be no fighting. We’ll ride in strong enough to leave no use for that. Now, before we start, are you all willing to ride with me?”

Again a hoarse murmur answered him, and Grant, glancing down the row of set faces under the big lamps, was satisfied.

“Then we’ll have supper,” he said quietly. “It may be a long while before any of us gets a meal again.”

It was a silent repast. As yet the homesteaders, at least in that district, had met contumely with patience and resisted passively each attempt to dislodge them, though it had cost their leader a strenuous effort to restrain the more ardent from the excesses some of their comrades farther east had already committed; but at last the most peaceful of them felt that the time to strike in turn had come. They mounted when supper was over and rode in silence past willow bluff and dusky rise across the desolate waste. The badger heard the jingle of their bridles, and now and then a lonely coyote, startled by the soft drumming of the hoofs, rose with bristling fur and howled; but no cow-boy heard their passage, or saw them wind in and out through devious hollows when daylight came. Still, here and there an anxious woman stood, with hazy eyes, in the door of a lonely shanty, wondering whether the man she had sent out to strike for the home he had built her would ever ride back again. For they, too, had their part in the struggle, and it was perhaps the hardest one.