it lay beneath all the oysters which he had rammed into his unseen hollow. It was a voice in strange harmony with the man, such a sound as one would have 5 expected to come out of that surly, dark-lipped, thin mouth. There was nothing committal about it, nothing exactly identifying; an impersonal voice, rather, and cold; a voice with no conscience behind it, scarcely a soul.
“You’re a business man, Mark—”
“Huh!” said Mark, grunting a little cloud of smoke from the bowl of his pipe in his sarcastic vehemence.
“And so am I,” continued Chadron, unmoved. “Words between us would be a waste of time.”
“You’re right; money talks,” said Mark.
“It’s a man’s job, or I wouldn’t have called you out of your hole to do it,” said Chadron, watching the man slyly for the effect.
“Pay me in money,” suggested Mark, unwarmed by the compliment. “Is it nesters ag’in?”
“Nesters,” nodded the cattleman, drawing his great brows in a frown. “They’re crowdin’ in so thick right around me that I can’t breathe comfortable any more; the smell of ’em’s in the wind. They’re runnin’ over three of the biggest ranches up here besides the Alamito, and the Drovers’ Association wants a little of your old-time holy scare throwed into the cussed coyotes.”
Mark nodded in the pause which seemed to have been made for him to nod, and Chadron went on.
“We figger that if a dozen or two of ’em’s cleaned out, quick and mysterious, the rest’ll tuck tail and sneak. It’s happened that way in other places more 6 than once, as you and I know. Well, you’re the man that don’t have to take lessons.”
“Money talks,” repeated Mark, still looking into the chimney.
“There’s about twenty of them that counts, the rest’s the kind you can drive over a cliff with a whip. These fellers has strung their cussed bob-wire fences crisscross and checkerboard all around there up the river, and they’re gittin’ to be right troublesome. Of course they’re only a speck up there yet, but they’ll multiply like fleas on a hot dog if we let ’em go ahead. You know how it is.”
There was a conclusiveness in Chadron’s tone as he said that. It spoke of a large understanding between men of a kind.
“Sure,” grunted the man Mark, nodding his head at the chimney. “You want a man to work from the willers, without no muss or gun-flashin’, or rough houses or loud talk.”
“Twenty of them, their names are here, and some scattered in between that I haven’t put down, to be picked up as they fall in handy, see?”
“And you’re aimin’ to keep clear, and stand back in the shadder, like you always have done,” growled Mark. “Well, I ain’t goin’ to ram my neck into no sheriff’s loop for nobody’s business but my own from now on. I’m through with resks, just to be obligin’.”
“Who’ll put a hand on you in this country unless we give the word?” Chadron asked, severely.
7
“How do I know who’s runnin’ the law in this dang country now? Maybe you fellers is, maybe you ain’t.”
“There’s no law in this part of the country bigger than the Drovers’ Association,” Chadron told him, frowning in rebuke of Mark’s doubt of security. “Well, maybe there’s a little sheriff here and there, and a few judges that we didn’t put in, but they’re down in the farmin’ country, and they don’t cut no figger at all. If you was fool enough to let one of them fellers git a hold on you we wouldn’t leave you in jail over night. You know how it was up there in the north.”
“But I don’t know how it is down here.” Mark scowled in surly unbelief, or surly simulation.
“There’s not a judge, federal or state, that could carry a bale of hay anywhere in the cattle country, I tell you, Mark, that we don’t draw the chalk line for.”
“Then why don’t you do the job yourselves, ’stead of callin’ a peaceable man away from his ranchin’?”
“You’re one kind of a gentleman, Mark, and I’m another, and there’s different jobs for different men. That ain’t my line.”
“Oh hell!” said Mark, laying upon the words an eloquent stress.
“All you’ve got to do is keep clear of the reservation; don’t turn a card here, no matter how easy it looks. We can’t jerk you out of the hands of the army if you git mixed up with it; that’s one place 8 where we stop. The reservation’s a middle ground where we meet the nesters—rustlers, every muddy-bellied wolf of ’em, and we can prove it—and pass ’em by. They come and go here like white men, and nothing said. Keep clear of the reservation; that’s all you’ve got to do to be as safe as if you was layin’ in bed on your ranch up in Jackson’s Hole.”
Chadron winked as he named that refuge of the hunted in the Northwest. Mark appeared to be considering something weightily.
“Oh, well, if they’re rustlers—nobody ain’t got no use for a rustler,” he said.
“There’s men in that bunch of twenty”—tapping the slip of paper with his finger—“that started with two cows a couple of years ago that’s got fifty and sixty head of two-year-olds now,” Chadron feelingly declared.
“How much’re you willin’ to go?” Mark put the question with a suddenness which seemed to betray that he had been saving it to shoot off that way, as a disagreeable point over which he expected a quarrel. He squinted his draggled left eye at Chadron, as if he was taking aim, while he waited for a reply.
“Well, you have done it for fifty a head,” Chadron said.
“Things is higher now, and I’m older, and the resk’s bigger,” Mark complained. “How fur apart do they lay?”
“You ought to get around in a week or two.”
“But that ain’t figgerin’ the time a feller has to 9 lay out in the bresh waitin’ and takin’ rheumatiz in his j’ints. I couldn’t touch the job for the old figger; things is higher.”
“Look here, Mark”—Chadron opened the slip which he had wound round his finger—“this one is worth ten, yes, all, the others. Make your own price on him. But I want it done; no bungled job.”
Mark took the paper and laid his pipe aside while he studied it.
“Macdonald?”
“Alan Macdonald,” nodded Chadron. “That feller’s opened a ditch from the river up there on my land and begun to irrigate!”
“Irrigatin’, huh?” said Mark, abstractedly, moving his finger down the column of names.
“He makes a blind of buyin’ up cattle and fattenin’ ’em on the hay and alfalfer he’s raisin’ up there on my good land, but he’s the king-pin of the rustlers in this corner of the state. He’ll be in here tomorrow with cattle for the Indian agent—it’s beef day—and you can size him up. But you’ve got to keep your belly to the ground like a snake when you start anything on that feller, and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got him dead to rights. He’s quick with a gun, and he’s sure.”
“Five hundred?” suggested Mark, with a crafty sidelong look.
“You’ve named it.”
“And something down for expenses; a feller’s got to live, and livin’s high.”
10
Chadron drew out his wallet. Money passed into Mark’s hand, and he put it away in his pocket along with the list of names.
“I’ll see you in the old place in Cheyenne for the settlement, if you make good,”