the battle was won. The maverick was given up, the quarrel was dropped, the brand was allowed, and the accusation died on its maker’s lips if Emerson Mead, Tom Tuttle and Nick Ellhorn were present or came galloping to the scene.
The look of smiling good nature seldom left Mead’s face, but his lips were closely shut in a way that brought out lines of dogged resolution. He was determined that the cattle company should recognize as their right whatever claims he and his neighbors should make. Tuttle and Ellhorn talked over the situation with him many times, and they were as determined as he, partly from love of him and partly from lust of fight, that the cattle company should be vanquished and compelled to yield whatever was asked of it. But they took the situation less seriously than did Mead, looking upon the whole affair as something of a lark well spiced with the danger which they enjoyed.
Ellhorn heard one day that Jim Halliday was at the Fillmore ranch house, and they decided at once that his business was to lay hands upon Mead. It was also rumored that several people from Las Plumas had been riding over the Fernandez plain and the foothills of the Fernandez mountains trying to find Will Whittaker’s body or some clue to his disappearance. The three friends learned that all these people had been able to discover was that he had left the ranch on the morning of his disappearance with a vaquero, a newly hired man who had just come out of the Oro Fino mountains, where he had been prospecting, in the hope of making another stake. A man had seen them driving down through the foothills, but after that all trace of them was lost. Old Juan Garcia and his wife, past whose house the road would have taken them, had been away, gathering firewood in the hills, but Amada, their daughter, had been at home all day, and she declared she had seen nothing of them, and that she did not think they could have gone past without her seeing them. It was accordingly argued that whatever had happened must have taken place not far from the junction of the main road with the road which led to Emerson Mead’s ranch, and all that region was searched for traces of recent burial.
CHAPTER VIII
The round-up was almost finished, and, so far, Emerson Mead had won the day. Backed always by his two friends, he had compelled the recognition of every general claim which had been made, and in most of the daily quarrels his side had come out victor.
Toward the end of the round-up, Mead and two vaqueros, accompanied by Tuttle and Ellhorn, had worked all day, getting together a scattered band of cattle, and at night had them bunched at a water hole near the edge of his range. The next day they were to be driven a few miles farther and joined with the droves collected by the Fillmore Company’s men and by two or three of his neighbors for the last work of the spring round-up. In the evening one of the cow-boys was sent to the ranch house with a message to the foreman, and a little later the other was seized with a sudden illness from having drunk at an alkali spring during the day. Mead, Tuttle and Ellhorn then arranged to share the night in watches of three hours each with the cattle. Mead’s began at midnight. He saddled and mounted his horse and began the monotonous patrol of the herd.
There were some three hundred steers in the bunch of cattle. They lay, sleeping quietly, so closely huddled together that there was barely room for them to move. Occasionally, one lying at the outer edge got up, stretched himself, nibbled a few bunches of grass, and then lay down again. Now and then, as one changed his position, a long, blowing breath, or a satisfied grunt and groan, came out of the darkness. When Mead started his horse on the slow walk round and round the sleeping herd the sky was clear. In its violet-blue the stars were blazing big and bright, and he said to himself that the cattle would sleep quietly and he would probably have an uneventful watch. He let the horse poke round the circle at its own pace, while his thoughts wandered back to his last visit to Las Plumas and hovered about the figure of Marguerite Delarue as she stood beside her gate and took little Paul from his hands. With a sudden warming of the heart he saw again her tall figure in the pink gown, with the rose bloom in her cheeks and the golden glimmer in her brown hair and the loving mother-look in her eyes as she smiled at the happy child. But with a sigh and a shake of the head he checked his thoughts and sent them to the mass-meeting and the days he had spent in the jail.
Presently it occurred to him that his watch must be nearly over and he looked up at the Great Dipper, swinging on its north star pivot. Then he smiled at himself, for it seemed scarcely to have changed position since he had mounted his horse. “Not an hour yet,” was his mental comment. Clouds were beginning to roll up from the horizon, and he could hear low mutterings of thunder and among the mountain tops see occasional flashes of lightning. Soon the sky was heavily overcast, and the darkness was so dense that it seemed palpable, like an enveloping, smothering cover, which might almost be grasped in the hands, torn down and thrown away. Mead could not see the horse’s head, so, letting the reins lie loosely on its neck, he allowed the animal to pick its own way around the circle.
The cattle began to show signs of nervousness, and from the huddled mass there came sounds of uneasy movements. Mead urged his horse into a quicker walk and with one leg over its neck as they went round and round the herd, he sang to them in a crooning monotone, like a mother’s lullaby to a babe that is just dropping into dreamland. It quieted the incipient disturbance, the rumbling thunder ceased for a time, and after a little moving about the cattle settled down to sleep again.
Suddenly, without forerunner or warning, a vivid flash of lightning cleft the clouds and a roar of thunder rattled and boomed from the mountain peaks. And on the instant, as one animal, hurled by sudden fright, the whole band of cattle was on its feet and plunging forward. There was a snorting breath, a second of muffled noise as they sprang to their feet, and the whole stampeded herd was rushing pell-mell into the darkness. They chanced to head toward Mead, and he, idling along with one leg over his saddle horn, with a quick jab of the spur sent his pony in a long, quick leap to one side, barely in time to escape their maddened rush. A second’s delay and he and his horse would have been thrown down by the sheer overpowering mass of the frenzied creatures and trampled under their hoofs, for the horn of a plunging steer tore the leg of his overalls as the mad animals passed. Away went the herd, silent, through the dense blackness of the night, running at the top of their speed. And Mead, spurring his horse, was after them without a moment’s loss of time, galloping close beside the frightened beasts, alertly watchful lest they might suddenly change their course and trample him down. They ran in a close mass, straight ahead, paying heed to nothing, beating under their hoofs whatever stood in their way.
They rushed crazily on through the darkness which was so intense that Mead’s face seemed to cleave it as the head cleaves water when one dives. He galloped so close to the running band that by reaching out one arm he could almost touch one or another heaving side. But he could see nothing, not a tossing horn nor a lumbering back of the whole three hundred steers, except when an occasional flash of lightning gave him a second’s half-blinded glimpse of the plunging mass. By hearing rather than by sight he could outline the rushing huddle at his right hand. And watching it as intently as if it had been a rattlesnake ready to strike, he galloped on by its side in a wild race through the darkness, over the plain, up and down hills, through cactus and sagebrush, over boulders and through treacherous, tunneled prairie dog towns, plunging headlong into whatever might be in front of them.
From the rushing herd beside him there came the muffled roar of their thousand hoofs, overtoned by the constant popping and scraping of their clashing horns. The noise filled his ears and could not quite be drowned even by the rattling peals of thunder. Swift drops of rain stung his face and the water of a pelting shower dripped from his hat brim and trickled from his boot heels. The beating rain, the vivid flashes of lightning and the loud peals of thunder drove the maddened creatures on at a still faster pace. Mead put frequent spurs to his horse and held on to the side of the mob of cattle, bent only on going wherever they went and being with them at the dawn, when it might be possible to get them under control.
They plunged on at a frenzied gallop through the darkness and the storm, and when at last the sky brightened and a wet, gray light made the earth dimly visible, Mead could see beside him a close huddle of lumbering, straining backs and over it a tangle of tossing and knocking horns. The crowding, crazy
