Samuel Merwin - 10 Classics Western Stories

Gene Wasson came in and slammed the door emphatically shut after him. "She's sure coming," he complained, while he pulled the icicles from his mustache and cast them into the fire. "She's going to be a real, old howler by the signs. What yuh doing, Bud? Writing poetry?"

Thurston nodded assent with certain mental reservations; so far the editors couldn't seem to make up their minds that it was poetry.

"Well, say, I wish you'd slap in a lot uh things about hazy, lazy, daisy days in the spring—that jingles fine!—and green grass and the sun shining and making the hills all goldy yellow, and prairie dogs chip-chip-chipping on the 'dobe flats. (Prairie dogs would go all right in poetry, wouldn't they? They're sassy little cusses, and I don't know of anything that would rhyme with 'em, but maybe you do.) And read it all out to me after supper. Maybe it'll make me kinda forget there's a blizzard on."

"Another one?" Thurston got up to scratch a trench in the half-inch layer of frost on the cabin window. "Why, it only cleared up this morning after three days of it."

"Can't help that. This is just another chapter uh that same story. When these here Klondike Chinooks gets to lapping over each other they never know when to quit. Every darn one has got to be continued tacked onto the tail of it the winter. All the difference is, you can't read the writing; but I can."

"I've got some mail for yuh, Bud. And old Hank wanted me to ask yuh if you'd like to go to Glasgow next Thursday and watch old Lauman start the Wagner boys for wherever's hot enough. He can get yuh in, you being in the writing business. He says to tell yuh it's a good chance to take notes, so yuh can write a real stylish story, with lots uh murder and sudden death in it. We don't hang folks out here very often, and yuh might have to go back East after pointers, if yuh pass this up."

"Oh, go easy. It turns me sick when I think about it; how they looked when they got their sentence, and all that. I certainly don't care to see them hanged, though they do deserve it. Where are the letters?" Thurston sprawled across the table for them. One was from Reeve-Howard; he put it by. Another had a printed address in the corner—an address that started his pulse a beat or two faster; for he had not yet reached that blase stage where he could receive a personal letter from one of the "Eight Leading" without the flicker of an eye-lash. He still gloated over his successes, and was cast into the deeps by his failures.

He held the envelope to the light, shook it tentatively, like any woman, guessed hastily and hopefully at the contents, and tore off an end impatiently. From the great fireplace Gene watched him curiously and half enviously. He wished he could get important-looking letters from New York every few days. It must make a fellow feel that he amounted to something.

"Gene, you remember that story I read to you one night— that yarn about the fellow that lived alone in the hills, and how the wolves used to come and sit on the ridge and howl o' nights—you know, the one you said was 'out uh sight'? They took it, all right, and—here, what do you think of that?" He tossed the letter over to Gene, who caught it just as it was about to be swept into the flame with the draught in Thurston, in the days which he spent one of the half-dozen Lazy Eight line-camps with Gene, down by the river, had been writing of the West—writing in fear and trembling, for now he knew how great was his subject and his ignorance of it. In the long evenings, while the fire crackled and the flames played a game they had invented, a game where they tried which could leap highest up the great chimney; while the north wind whoo-ooed around the eaves and fine, frozen snow meal swished against the one little window; while shivering, drifting range cattle tramped restlessly through the sparse willow-growth seeking comfort where was naught but cold and snow and bitter, driving wind; while the gray wolves hunted in packs and had not long to wait for their supper, Thurston had written better than he knew. He had sent the cold of the blizzards and the howl of the wolves; he had sent bits of the wind-swept plains back to New York in long, white envelopes. And the editors were beginning to watch for his white envelopes and to seize them eagerly when they came, greedy for what was within. Not every day can they look upon a few typewritten pages and see the range-land spread, now frowning, now smiling, before them.

"Gee! they say here they want a lot the same brand, and at any old price yuh might name. I wouldn't mind writing stories myself." Gene kicked a log back into the flame where it would do the most good. His big, square-shouldered figure stood out sharply against the glow.

Thurston, watching him meditatively, wanted to tell him that he was the sort of whom good stories are made. But for men like Gene—strong, purposeful, brave, the West would lose half its charm. He was like Bob in many ways, and for that Thurston liked him and, stayed with him in the line-camp when he might have been taking his ease at the home ranch.

It was wild and lonely down there between the bare hills and the frozen river, but the wildness and the loneliness appealed to him. It was primitive and at times uncomfortable. He slept in a bunk built against the wall, with hard boards under him and a sod roof over his head. There were times when the wind blew its fiercest and rattled dirt down into his face unless he covered it with a blanket. And every other day he had to wash the dishes and cook, and when it was Gene's turn to cook, Thurston chopped great armloads of wood for the fireplace to eat o' nights. Also he must fare forth, wrapped to the eyes, and help Gene drive back the cattle which drifted into the river bottom, lest they cross the river on the ice and range where they should not.

But in the evenings he could sit in the fire-glow and listen to the wind and to the coyotes and the gray wolves, and weave stories that even the most hyper-critical of editors could not fail to find convincing. By day he could push the coffee-box that held his typewriter over by the frosted window—when he had an hour or two to spare—and whang away at a rate which filled Gene with wonder. Sometimes he rode over to the home ranch for a day or two, but Mona was away studying music, so he found no inducement to remain, and drifted back to the little, sod-roofed cabin by the river, and to Gene.

The winter settled down with bared teeth like a bull-dog, and never a chinook came to temper the cold and give respite to man or beast. Blizzards that held them, in fear of their lives, close to shelter for days, came down from the north; and with them came the drifting herds. By hundreds they came, hurrying miserably before the storms. When the wind lashed them without mercy even in the bottom-land, they pushed reluctantly out upon the snow-covered ice of the Missouri. Then Gene and Thurston watching from their cabin window would ride out and turn them pitilessly back into the teeth of the storm.

They came by hundreds—thin, gaunt from cold and hunger. They came by thousands, lowing their misery as they wandered aimlessly, seeking that which none might find: food and shelter and warmth for their chilled bodies. When the Canada herds pushed down upon them the boys gave over trying to keep them north of the river; while they turned one bunch a dozen others were straggling out from shore, the timid following single file behind a leader more venturesome or more desperate than his fellows.

So the march went on and on: big, Southern-bred steer grappling the problem of his first Northern winter; thin- flanked cow with shivering, rough-coated calf trailing at her heels; humpbacked yearling with little nubs of horns telling that he was lately in his calfhood; red cattle, spotted cattle, white cattle, black cattle; white-faced Herefords, Short-horns, scrubs; Texas longhorns—of the sort invariably pictured in stampedes—still they came drifting out of the cold wilderness and on into wilderness as cold.