The Duke Of Chimney Butte Page 6

  CHAPTER VI

  ALLUREMENTS OF GLENDORA

  In a bend of the Little Missouri, where it broadened out and took on theappearance of a consequential stream, Glendora lay, a lonely littlevillage with a gray hill behind it.

  There was but half a street in Glendora, like a setting for a stage, therailroad in the foreground, the little sun-baked station crouching byit, lonely as the winds which sung by night in the telegraph wirescrossing its roof. Here the trains went by with a roar, leaving behindthem a cloud of gray dust like a curtain to hide from the eyes of thosewho strained from their windows to see the little that remained ofGlendora, once a place of more consequence than today.

  Only enough remained of the town to live by its trade. There was enoughflour in the store, enough whisky in the saloon; enough stamps in thepost office, enough beds in the hotel, to satisfy with comfort thedemands of the far-stretching population of the country contiguousthereto. But if there had risen an extraordinary occasion bringing ademand without notice for a thousand pounds more of flour, a barrel moreof whisky, a hundred more stamps or five extra beds, Glendora would havefallen under the burden and collapsed in disgrace.

  Close by the station there were cattle pens for loading stock, with twolong tracks for holding the cars. In autumn fat cattle were driven downout of the hidden valleys to entrain there for market. In those daysthere was merriment after nightfall in Glendora. At other times it wasmainly a quiet place, the shooting that was done on its one-sided streetbeing of a peaceful nature in the way of expressing a feeling for whichsome plain-witted, drunken cowherder had no words.

  A good many years before the day that the Duke and Taterleg came ridinginto Glendora, the town had supported more than one store and saloon.The shells of these dead enterprises stood there still, windows anddoors boarded up, as if their owners had stopped their mouths when theywent away to prevent a whisper of the secrets they might tell of the oldriotous nights, or of fallen hopes, or dishonest transactions. So theystood now in their melancholy, backs against the gray hill, giving toGlendora the appearance of a town that was more than half dead, and soonmust fail and pass utterly away in the gray-blowing clouds of dust.

  The hotel seemed the brightest and soundest living spot in the place,for it was painted in green, like a watermelon, with a cottonwood treegrowing beside the pump at the porch corner. In yellow letters upon thewindowpane of the office there appeared the proprietor's name, doubtlessthe work of some wandering artist who had paid the price of his lodgingor his dinner so.

  ORSON WOOD, PROP.

  said the sign, bedded in curlicues and twisted ornaments, as if acarpenter had planed the letters out of a board, leaving the shavingswhere they fell. A green rustic bench stood across one end of the longporch, such as is seen in boarding-houses frequented by railroad men,and chairs with whittled and notched arms before the office door, nearthe pump.

  Into this atmosphere there had come, many years before, one of thoseinnocents among men whose misfortune it is to fall before thebeguilements of the dishonest; that sort of man whom the promoters ofschemes go out to catch in the manner of an old maid trapping flies in acup of suds. Milton Philbrook was this man. Somebody had sold him fortythousand acres of land in a body for three dollars an acre. It began atthe river and ran back to the hills for a matter of twenty miles.

  Philbrook bought the land on the showing that it was rich in coaldeposits. Which was true enough. But he was not geologist enough to knowthat it was only lignite, and not a coal of commercial value in thosetimes. This truth he came to later, together with the knowledge that hisland was worth, at the most extravagant valuation, not more than fiftycents an acre.

  Finding no market for his brown coal, Philbrook decided to adopt thecustoms of the country and turn cattleman. A little inquiry into thatbusiness convinced him that the expenses of growing the cattle and thelong distance from market absorbed a great bulk of the profitsneedlessly. He set about with the original plan, therefore, of fencinghis forty thousand acres with wire, thus erasing at one bold stroke thecost of hiring men to guard his herds.

  A fence in the Bad Lands was unknown outside a corral in those days.When carloads of barbed wire and posts began to arrive at Glendora mencame riding in for miles to satisfy themselves that the rumors werefounded; when Philbrook hired men to build the fence, and operationswere begun, murmurs and threats against the unwelcome innovation wereheard. Philbrook pushed the work to conclusion, unmindful of thethreats, moved now by the intention of founding a great, baronial estatein that bleak land. His further plan of profit and consequence was toestablish a packing-house at Glendora, where his herds could beslaughtered and dressed and shipped neat to market, at once assuring hima double profit and reduced expense. But that was one phase of his dreamthat never hardened into the reality of machinery and bricks.

  While the long lines of fence were going up, carpenters were at workbuilding a fit seat for Philbrook's baronial aims. The point he chosefor his home site was the top of a bare plateau overlooking the river,the face of it gray, crumbling shale, rising three hundred feet inabrupt slope from the water's edge. At great labor and expense Philbrookbuilt a road between Glendora and this place, and carried water in pipesfrom the river to irrigate the grass, trees, shrubs and blooming plantsalien to that country which he planted to break the bleakness of it andmake a setting for his costly home.

  Here on this jutting shoulder of the cold, unfriendly upland, a houserose which was the wonder of all who beheld it as they rode the wilddistances and viewed it from afar. It seemed a mansion to them, itswalls gleaming white, its roof green as the hope in its builder'sbreast. It was a large house, and seemed larger for its prominenceagainst the sky, built in the shape of a T, with wide porches in theangles. And to this place, upon which he had lavished what remained ofhis fortune, Philbrook brought his wife and little daughter, as strangeto their surroundings as the delicate flowers which pined and drooped inthat unfriendly soil.

  Immediately upon completion of his fences he had imported well-bredcattle and set them grazing within his confines. He set men to riding bynight and day a patrol of his long lines of wire, rifles under theirthighs, with orders to shoot anybody found cutting the fences inaccordance with the many threats to serve them so. Contentions and feudsbegan, and battles and bloody encounters, which did not cease throughmany a turbulent year. Philbrook lived in the saddle, for he was a manof high courage and unbending determination, leaving his wife and childin the suspense and solitude of their grand home in which they found nopleasure.

  The trees and shrubs which Philbrook had planted with such care andattended with such hope, withered on the bleak plateau and died, inspite of the water from the river; the delicate grass with which hesought to beautify and clothe the harsh gray soil sickened and pinedaway; the shrubs made a short battle against the bleakness of winter,putting out pale, strange flowers like the wan smile of a woman whostands on the threshold of death, then failed away, and died. Mrs.Philbrook broke under the long strain of never-ending battles, and diedthe spring that her daughter came eighteen years of age.

  This girl had grown up in the saddle, a true daughter of her fightingsire. Time and again she had led a patrol of two fence-riders along oneside of that sixty square miles of ranch while her father guarded theother. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to anyman on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since herearly girlhood.

  All this information pertaining to the history of Milton Philbrook andhis adventures in the Bad Lands, Orson Wood, the one-armed landlord atthe hotel in Glendora told Lambert on the evening of the travelers'arrival there. The story had come as the result of questions concerningthe great white house on the mesa, the two men sitting on the porch inplain view of it, Taterleg entertaining the daughter of the hotelacross the show case in the office.

  Lambert found the story more interesting than anything he ever hadimagined of the Bad Lands. Here was romance looking down on him from thelonely walls of t
hat white house, and heroism of a finer kind than thesepeople appreciated, he was sure.

  "Is the girl still here?" he inquired.

  "Yes, she's back now. She's been away to school in Boston for three orfour years, comin' back in summer for a little while."

  "When did she come back?"

  Lambert felt that his voice was thick as he inquired, disturbed by theeager beating of his heart. Who knows? and perhaps, and all the rest ofit came galloping to him with a roar of blood in his ears like the soundof a thousand hoofs. The landlord called over his shoulder to hisdaughter:

  "Alta, when did Vesta Philbrook come back?"

  "Four or five weeks ago," said Alta, with the sound of chewing gum.

  "Four or five weeks ago," the landlord repeated, as though Alta spoke aforeign tongue and must be translated.

  "I see," said Lambert, vaguely, shaking to the tips of his fingers witha kind of buck ague that he never had suffered from before. He wasafraid the landlord would notice it, and slewed his chair, getting outhis tobacco to cover the fool spell.

  For that was she, Vesta Philbrook was she, and she was Vesta Philbrook.He knew it as well as he knew that he could count ten. Something had ledhim there that day; the force that was shaping the course of their twolives to cross again had held him back when he had considered sellinghis horse and going West a long distance on the train. He grew calmerwhen he had his cigarette alight. The landlord was talking again.

  "Funny thing about Vesta comin' home, too," he said, and stopped alittle, as if to consider the humor of it. Lambert looked at him with asudden wrench of the neck.

  "Which?"

  "Philbrook's luck held out, it looked like, till she got through hereducation. All through the fights he had and the scrapes he run intothe last ten years he never got a scratch. Bullets used to hum aroundthat man like bees, and he'd ride through 'em like they _was_ bees, butnone of 'em ever notched him. Curious, wasn't it?"

  "Did somebody get him at last?"

  "No, he took typhoid fever. He took down about a week or ten days afterVesta got home. He died about a couple of week ago. Vesta had him laidbeside her mother up there on the hill. He said they'd never run him outof this country, livin' or dead."

  Lambert swallowed a dry lump.

  "Is she running the ranch?"

  "Like an old soldier, sir. I tell you, I've got a whole lot ofadmiration for that girl."

  "She must have her hands full."

  "Night and day. She's short on fence-riders, and I guess if you boys arelookin' for a job you can land up there with Vesta, all right."

  Taterleg and the girl came out and sat on the green rustic bench at thefarther end of the porch. It complained under them; there was talk andlow giggling.

  "We didn't expect to strike anything this soon," Lambert said, hisactive mind leaping ahead to shape new romance like a magician.

  "You don't look like the kind of boys that'd shy from a job if it jumpedout in the road ahead of you."

  "I'd hate for folks to think we would."

  "Ain't you the feller they call; the Duke of Chimney Butte?"

  "They call me that in this country."

  "Yes; I knew that horse the minute you rode up, though he's changed forthe better wonderful since I saw him last, and I knew you from thedescriptions I've heard of you. Vesta'd give you a job in a minute, andshe'd pay you good money, too. I wouldn't wonder if she didn't put youin as foreman right on the jump, account of the name you've got up herein the Bad Lands."

  "Not much to my credit in the name, I'm afraid," said Lambert, almostsadly. "Do they still cut her fences and run off her stock?"

  "Yes; rustlin's got to be stylish around here ag'in, after we thought wehad all them gangs rounded up and sent to the pen. I guess some of theirtime must be up and they're comin' home."

  "It's pretty tough for a single-handed girl."

  "Yes, it is tough. Them fellers are more than likely some of the oldcrowd Philbrook used to fight and round up and send over the road. Hekilled off four or five of them, and the rest of them swore they'd salthim when they'd done their time. Well, he's gone. But they're not abovefightin' a girl."

  "It's a tough job for a woman," said Lambert, looking thoughtfullytoward the white house on the mesa.

  "Ain't it, though?"

  Lambert thought about it a while, or appeared to be thinking about it,sitting with bent head, smoking silently, looking now and then towardthe ranchhouse, the lights of which could be seen. Alta came across theporch presently, Taterleg attending her like a courtier. She dismissedhim at the door with an excuse of deferred duties within. He joined histhoughtful partner.

  "Better go up and see her in the morning," suggested Wood, the landlord.

  "I think I will, thank you."

  Wood went in to sell a cowboy a cigar; the partners started out to havea look at Glendora by moonlight. A little way they walked in silence,the light of the barber-shop falling across the road ahead of them.

  "See who in the morning, Duke?" Taterleg inquired.

  "Lady in the white house on the mesa. Her father died a few weeks ago,and left her alone with a big ranch on her hands. Rustlers are runnin'her cattle off, cuttin' her fences----"

  "Fences?"

  "Yes, forty thousand acres all fenced in, like Texas."

  "You don't tell me?"

  "Needs men, Wood says. I thought maybe----"

  The Duke didn't finish it; just left it swinging that way, expectingTaterleg to read the rest.

  "Sure," said Taterleg, taking it right along. "I wouldn't mind stayin'around here a while. Glendora's a nice little place; nicer place than Ithought it was."

  The Duke said nothing. But as they went on toward the barber-shop hegrinned.