The Settling of the Sage Part 17

Harper looked up at him in silence. He carefully tilted up the corner of his hole-card and peeked at it, then turned his other cards face down on the table.

"Pa.s.s," he said, and rose to face Harris. "Lead the way."

Harris moved over to another table and the two men sat down, facing each other across it. He motioned to Evans and Lanky joined them.

Harris plunged abruptly into what he had to say.

"First off, Harper, I want you to get it straight that I'm not fool enough to threaten you--for I know you're not any more afraid of me than I am of you. This is just a little explaining, a business talk, so we'll both know where we stand. It's up to you whether we let each other alone or fight."

"Good start," the albino commented. "Go right on."

"All right--it's like this," Harris resumed. "I'm going to have my hands full without you hiring out to pester us. I'm not out to reform the country. They set the fas.h.i.+on of dog eat dog and every man for himself; so the Three Bar is all that interests me. You keep out of my affairs and I'll let you go your own gait. If you mix in I'll have your men hunted down like rats."

Harper glanced toward the group at the bar.

"You were prudent enough to pick a time when you're three to one to tell me about that," he said. "If I'd kill you in your chair I might have some trouble getting out the door."

"Of course I'd take every chance to play safe," Harris admitted. "But that is beside the point. I'd have told you the same thing if the odds had been reversed."

"Would you?" the albino pondered. "I wonder."

"You know I would," Harris stated. "You've got brains, or you'd have been dead for twenty years. If I thought you were a haphazard homicide I wouldn't be sitting here. But you wouldn't kill a man without looking a few weeks ahead and making sure it was safe."

"Go ahead--Let's hear the rest of it," Harper urged. "You've got an original line of talk."

"You're playing one game and I'm playing mine," Harris said. "You're in the saddle now--like you have been once or twice before. But you know that the sentiment of a community reverses almost overnight.

You've stepped out just ahead of a clean-up a time or two in the past.

You know how it goes--your friends drop off like you had the plague.

Every man's out after your scalp. I've got a hard bunch of terriers over at the Three Bar and you couldn't raid us without a battle big enough to go down in history as the Three Bar war. Either way you'd lose for it would stir folks up--and when they're stirred you're through. Do you remember what Al Moody did up on the Gallatin and what old Con Ristine sprung on the Nations Trail? That will happen again right here."

The two men were leaning toward each other, elbows resting on the table. Harper relaxed and leaned back comfortably in his chair as he twisted a smoke. Evans propped his feet on the table and Harris hung one knee over the arm of his chair. The men at the bar knew that some crisis had been safely pa.s.sed.

"You talk as if I was running an outfit of my own and had a bunch of riders that could swarm down on you," Harper objected. "I don't even run a brand of my own or have one man riding for me."

"The wild bunch is riding for you," Harris stated.

"Suppose that was true," Harper said. "Then what?"

"In one country after the next they've hit the toboggan whenever they got to feeling too strong. If you line up against me that time has come again. If I get potted from the brush I've hedged it so that those boys that filed over there won't be left in the lurch. There'll be a reward of a thousand dollars hung up for the scalp of each of fifteen men whose names I gathered while I was prowling round--reliable men to carry on what I've begun; and marshals thicker than flies to protect the homestead filings on the Three Bar."

"Then it might be bad policy to bushwhack you," Harper observed.

"You can go your own gait," Harris said. "As long as you lay off Three Bar cows. You invited me one time to come down to your hangout in the Breaks. I won't ever make that visit unless you call on the Three Bar first; then, just out of politeness, I'll ride over at the head of a hundred men."

"Then it don't look as if we'd get anywhere, visiting back and forth,"

Harper said.

"Now don't think I'm throwing a bluff or threatening; I'm just telling you. You could recite a number of things that could happen to me in return--all of 'em true. I'm just counting that you've got brains and can see it's not going to help either one of us to get lined up wrong.

What do you say--shall we call it hands off between the Three Bar and you?"

The albino half-closed his eyes, the pale eyeb.a.l.l.s glittering through the slit of his lids as he reflected on this proposition, tapping a careless finger on his knee. He glanced absent-mindedly toward the bar, his thoughts wholly occupied with the matter in hand. A pair of eyes that gazed back at him drew his own and he found himself looking at Bentley, the man who repped with the Three Bar for Slade. The albino's suspicions were as fluid and easily roused as those of a beast of prey in a dangerous neighborhood. With one of those quick s.h.i.+fts of which his mind was capable he concentrated every mental effort toward linking Bentley with some unpleasant episode of the past. The man had turned away and Harper could only sense a vague feeling that he was dangerous to him, without definite point upon which to base his suspicions. At the sound of Harris's voice his mind made another lightning s.h.i.+ft back to the present.

"Well?" Harris asked.

"Why, if I had anything to do with it, like you seem to think, I'd advise against our bucking each other," Harper said. "I'd try to get along--and declare hands off." He rose, nodded to the two men and returned to the stud game.

"He'll do it too," Evans predicted. "There's that much fixed anyway--not a bad piece of work."

The two men returned to the bar and Brill moved close to Harris. For fifteen years he had stood behind that bar and observed the men of the whole countryside at their worst--and best; and he knew men. As well as if he had heard the words of the three at the table he knew that Harris and Harper had reached an agreement of some sort that was satisfactory to both.

"Take the boys over a drink on me," Harris said, and Brill slid a bottle and five whisky gla.s.ses on to a tray and moved over to the table.

"Here's a drink on the Three Bar boss," he announced.

Lang scowled, remembering the recent occasion when Harris had ordered them off.

"To h.e.l.l with----" he commenced, but the albino cut him short.

"Drink it," he said.

Ten minutes later the five men rose to go. Harris looked at his watch.

"I'm off," he said to Evans. "Try and get the boys home by to-morrow morning if it's possible."

He went outside and mounted as the five rustlers swung to their saddles.

"I'm going your way as far as the forks," he said to Harper.

The Three Bar men were treated to the sight of their foreman riding down the road beside Harper at the head of four of the worst ruffians in the State.

And behind the bar Brill moved softly back and forth when not serving drinks, pausing opposite first one group and then the next to dab at the polished wood with his cloth, listening carefully to the conversation and gauging it to determine whether the apparent sentiment toward the squatter foreman was sincere or would prove different when the men, flushed with undiluted rye, were unrestrained by his presence.

At one end of the bar Evans and Bentley conversed together in low tones but whenever Brill strolled casually to their end the conference lagged. The few sentences which reached his ears were of trivial concern.

IX

There was a new contentment in the eyes of the Three Bar girl as she sat her horse beside Carlos Deane and looked off down the bottoms. A haze of smoke drifted above the little valley of the Crazy Loop. Three mule outfits were steadily ripping up the sage flats. Men lifted the uprooted brush on forks and piled it for the burning. The two rode down to the fields with the pungent sage smoke drifting in their faces.

Harris joined them, a smudge of fire-black across his forehead, and swept his arm across the stretch of plowed ground.

"Can you picture that covered with a stand of alfalfa hay?" he asked.

The girl nodded.

"Yes--and cut and cured and in the stack yards," she said. "And a straight red run of Three Bar cows wintering under fence."

Harris wondered if her new contentment came wholly from the progress the Three Bar was making or was derived partly from the presence of Carlos Deane. Each man had recognized the other as a contender for the love of the Three Bar girl and during the two days of Deane's stay each one had been covertly sizing and estimating the caliber of the other man.

"The opposite faction hasn't succeeded in wrecking the Three Bar up to date," Deane said. "It's probable they see you're too strong for them."