Cavanaugh-Forest Ranger Read online

  Lize perceived all these attacks on her daughter, and was infuriated by them. She snapped and snarled like a tigress leading her half-grown kitten through a throng of leopards. Her brows were knotted with care as well as with pain, and she incessantly urged Virginia to go back to Sulphur. “I’ll send you money to pay your board till you strike a job.” But to this the girl would not agree; and the business, by reason of her presence, went on increasing from day to day.

  To Redfield Lize one day confessed her pain. “I ought to send for that doctor up there, but the plain truth is I’m afraid of him. I don’t want to know what’s the matter of me. It’s his job to tell me I’m sick and I’m scared of his verdict.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied; “you can’t afford to put off getting him much longer. I’m going back to-night, but I’ll be over again to-morrow. Why don’t you let me bring him down? It will save you twelve dollars. And, by the way, suppose you let me take Lee Virginia home with me? She looks a bit depressed; an outing will do her good. She’s taken hold here wonderfully.”

  “Hasn’t she! But I should have sent her away the very first night. I’m getting to depend on her. I’m plumb foolish about her now—can’t let her out of my sight; and yet I’m off my feed worryin’ over her. Gregg is getting dangerous—you can’t fool me when it comes to men. Curse ’em, they’re all alike—beasts, every cussed one of them. I won’t have my girl mistreated, I tell you that! I’m not fit to be her mother, now that’s the God’s truth, Reddy, and this rotten little back-country cow-town is no place for her. But what can I do? She won’t leave me so long as I’m sick, and every day ties her closer to me. I don’t know what I’d do without her. If I’m goin’ to die I want her by me when I take my drop. So you see just how I’m placed.”

  She looked yellow and drawn as she ended, and Redfield was moved by her unwonted tenderness.

  “Now let me advise,” he began, after a moment’s pause. “We musn’t let the girl get homesick. I’ll take her home with me this afternoon, and bring her back along with a doctor to-morrow.”

  “All right, but before you go I want to have a private talk—I want to tell you something.”

  He warned her away from what promised to be a confession. “Now, now, Eliza, don’t tell me anything that requires that tone of voice; I’m a bad person to keep a secret, and you might be sorry for it. I don’t want to know anything more about your business than I can guess.”

  “I don’t mean the whiskey trade,” she explained. “I’ve cut that all out anyway. It’s something more important—it’s about Ed and me.”

  “I don’t want to hear that either,” he declared. “Let bygones be bygones. What you did then is outlawed, anyway. Those were fierce times, and I want to forget them.” He looked about. “Let me see this Miss Virginia and convey to her Mrs. Redfield’s invitation.”

  “She’s in the kitchen, I reckon. Go right out.”

  He was rather glad of a chance to see the young reformer in action, and smiled as he came upon her surrounded by waiters and cooks, busily superintending the preparations for the noon meal, which amounted to a tumult each day.

  She saw Redfield, nodded, and a few moments later came toward him, flushed and beaming with welcome. “I’m glad to see you again, Mr. Supervisor.”

  He bowed profoundly. “I’m delighted to find you well, Miss Virginia, and doubly pleased to see you in your regimentals, which you mightily adorn.”

  She looked down at her apron. “I made this myself. Do you know our business is increasing wonderfully? I’m busy every moment of the day till bedtime.”

  “Indeed I do know it. I hear of the Wetherford House all up and down the line. I was just telling your mother she’ll be forced to build bigger, like the chap in the Bible.”

  “She works too hard. Poor mother! I try to get her to turn the cash-drawer over to me, but she won’t do it. Doesn’t she seem paler and weaker to you?”

  “She does, indeed, and this is what I came in to propose. Mrs. Redfield sends by me a formal invitation to you to visit Elk Lodge. She is not quite able to take the long ride, else she’d come to you.” Here he handed her a note. “I suggest that you go up with me this afternoon, and to-morrow we’ll fetch the doctor down to see your mother. What do you say to that?”

  Her eyes were dewy with grateful appreciation of his kindness as she answered: “That would be a great pleasure, Mr. Redfield, if mother feels able to spare me.”

  “I’ve talked with her; she is anxious to have you go.”

  Virginia was indeed greatly pleased and pleasantly excited by this message, for she had heard much of Mrs. Redfield’s exclusiveness, and also of the splendor of her establishment. She hurried away to dress with such flutter of joyous anticipation that Redfield felt quite repaid for the pressure he had put upon his wife to induce her to write that note. “You may leave Lize Wetherford out of the count, my dear,” he had said. “There is nothing of her discernible in the girl. Virginia is a lady. I don’t know where she got it, but she’s a gentlewoman by nature.”

  Lize said: “Don’t you figure on me in any way, Reddy. I’m nothing but the old hen that raised up this lark, and all I’m a-livin’ for now is to make her happy. Just you cut me out when it comes to any question about your wife and Virginia. I’m not in their class.”

  It was hot and still in the town, but no sooner was the car in motion than both heat and dust were forgotten. Redfield’s machine was not large, and as he was content to go at moderate speed, conversation was possible.

  He was of that sunny, optimistic, ever-youthful nature which finds delight in human companionship under any conditions whatsoever. He accepted this girl for what she seemed—a fresh, unspoiled child. He saw nothing cheap or commonplace in her, and was not disposed to impose any of her father’s wild doings upon her calendar. He had his misgivings as to her future—that was the main reason why he had said to Mrs. Redfield, “The girl must be helped.” Afterward he had said “sustained.”

  It was inevitable that the girl should soon refer to the ranger, and Redfield was as complimentary of him as she could wish. “Ross hasn’t a fault but one, and that’s a negative one: he doesn’t care a hang about getting on, as they say over in England. He’s content just to do the duty of the moment. He made a good cow-puncher and a good soldier; but as for promotion, he laughs when I mention it.”

  “He told me that he hoped to be Chief Forester,” protested Virginia.

  “Oh yes, he says that; but do you know, he’d rather be where he is, riding over the hills, than live in London. You should see his cabin some time. It’s most wonderful, really. His walls are covered with bookshelves of his own manufacture, and chairs of his own design. Where the boy got the skill, I don’t see. Heaven knows, his sisters are conventional enough! He’s capable of being Supervisor, but he won’t live in town and work in an office. He’s like an Indian in his love of the open.”

  All this was quite too absorbingly interesting to permit of any study of the landscape, which went by as if dismissed by the chariot wheels of some contemptuous magician. Redfield’s eyes were mostly on the road (in the manner of the careful driver), but when he did look up it was to admire the color and poise of his seat-mate, who made the landscape of small account.

  She kept the conversation to the desired point. “Mr. Cavanagh’s work interests me very much. It seems very important; and it must be new, for I never heard of a forest ranger when I was a child.”

  “The forester is new—at least, in America,” he answered. “My dear young lady, you are returned just in the most momentous period in the history of the West. The old dominion—the cattle-range—is passing. The supremacy of the cowboy is ended. The cow-boss is raising oats, the cowboy is pitching alfalfa, and swearing horribly as he blisters his hands. Some of the rangers at the moment are men of Western training like Ross, but whose allegiance is now to Uncle Sam. With others that transfer of allegiance is not quite complete, hence the insolence of men like Gregg, who think the
y can bribe or intimidate these forest guards, and so obtain favors; the newer men are college-bred, real foresters. But you can’t know what it all means till you see Ross, or some other ranger, on his own heath. We’ll make up a little party some day and drop down upon him, and have him show us about. It’s a lonely life, and so the ranger keeps open house. Would you like to go?”

  “Oh, yes indeed! I’m eager to get into the mountains. Every night as I see the sun go down over them I wonder what the world is like up there.”

  Then he began very delicately to inquire about her Eastern experience. There was not much to tell. In a lovely old town not far from Philadelphia, where her aunt lived, she had spent ten years of happy exile. “I was horribly lonely and homesick at first,” she said. “Mother wrote only short letters, and my father never wrote at all. I didn’t know he was dead then. He was always good to me. He wasn’t a bad man, was he?”

  “No,” responded Redfield, without hesitation. “He was very like the rest of us—only a little more reckless and a little more partisan, that’s all. He was a dashing horseman and a dead-shot, and so, naturally, a leader of these daredevils. He was popular with both sides of the controversy up to the very moment when he went South to lead the invaders against the rustlers.”

  “What was it all about? I never understood it. What were they fighting about?”

  “In a sense, it was all very simple. You see, Uncle Sam, in his careless, do-nothing way, has always left his range to whomever got there first, and that was the cattle-man. At first there was grass enough for us all, but as we built sheds and corrals about watering-places we came to claim rights on the range. We usually secured by fraud homesteads in the sections containing water, and so, gun in hand, ‘stood off’ the man who came after. Gradually, after much shooting and lawing, we parcelled out the range and settled down covering practically the whole State. Our adjustments were not perfect, but our system was working smoothly for us who controlled the range. We had convinced ourselves, and pretty nearly everybody else, that the State was only fit for cattle-grazing, and that we were the most competent grazers; furthermore, we were in possession, and no man could come in without our consent.

  “However, a very curious law of our own making was our undoing. Of course the ‘nester’ or ‘punkin roller,’ as we contemptuously called the small farmer, began sifting in here and there in spite of our guns, but he was only a mosquito bite in comparison with the trouble which our cow-punchers stirred up. Perhaps you remember enough about the business to know that an unbranded yearling calf without its mother is called a maverick?”

  “Yes, I remember that. It belongs to the man who finds him, and brands him.”

  “Precisely. Now that law worked very nicely so long as the poor cowboy was willing to catch and brand him for his employer, but it proved a ‘joker’ when he woke up and said to his fellows: ‘Why brand these mavericks at five dollars per head for this or that outfit when the law says it belongs to the man who finds him?’”

  Lee Virginia looked up brightly. “That seems right to me!”

  “Ah yes; but wait. We cattle-men had large herds, and the probabilities were that the calf belonged to some one of us; whereas, the cowboy, having no herd at all, knew the maverick belonged to some one’s herd. True, the law said it was his, but the law did not mean to reward the freebooter; yet that is exactly what it did. At first only a few outlaws took advantage of it; but hard years came on, the cattle business became less and less profitable, we were forced to lay off our men, and so at last the range swarmed with idle cow-punchers; then came the breakdown in our scheme! The cowboys took to ‘mavericking’ on their own account. Some of them had the grace to go into partnership with some farmer, and so claim a small bunch of cows, but others suddenly and miraculously acquired herds of their own. From keeping within the law, they passed to violent methods. They slit the tongues of calves for the purpose of separating them from their mothers. Finding he could not suck, bossy would at last wander away from his dam, and so become a ‘maverick.’ In short, anarchy reigned on the range.”

  “But surely my father had nothing to do with this?”

  “No; your father, up to this time, had been on good terms with everybody. He had a small herd of cattle down the river, which he owned in common with a man named Hart.”

  “I remember him.”

  “He was well thought of by all the big outfits; and when the situation became intolerable, and we got together to weed out ‘the rustlers,’ as these cattle-thieves were called, your father was approached and converted to a belief in drastic measures. He had suffered less than the rest of us because of his small herd and the fact that he was very popular among the cowboys. So far as I was concerned, the use of violent methods revolted me. My training in the East had made me a respecter of the law. ‘Change the law,’ I said. ‘The law is all right,’ they replied; ‘the trouble is with these rustlers. We’ll hang a few of ’em, and that will break up the business.’”

  Parts of this story came back to the girl’s mind, producing momentary flashes of perfect recollection. She heard again the voices of excited men arguing over and over the question of “mavericking,” and she saw her father as he rode up to the house that last day before he went South.

  Redfield went on. “The whole plan as developed was silly, and I wonder still that Ed Wetherford, who knew ‘the nester’ and the cowboy so well, should have lent his aid to it. The cattle-men—some from Cheyenne, some from Denver, and a few from New York and Chicago—agreed to finance a sort of Vigilante Corps composed of men from the outside, on the understanding that this policing body should be commanded by one of their own number. Your father was chosen second in command, and was to guide the party; for he knew almost every one of the rustlers, and could ride directly to their doors.”

  “I wish he hadn’t done that,” murmured the girl.

  “I must be frank with you, Virginia. I can’t excuse that in him. It was a kind of treachery. He must have been warped by his associates. They convinced him by some means that it was his duty, and one fine day the Fork was startled by a messenger, who rode in to say that the cattle-barons were coming with a hundred Texas bad men ‘to clean out the town,’ and to put their own men into office. This last was silly rot to me, but the people believed it.”

  The girl was tingling now. “I remember! I remember the men who rode into the town to give the alarm. Their horses were white with foam; their heads hung down, and their sides went in and out. I pitied the poor things. Mother jumped on her pony, and rode out among the men. She wanted to go with them, but they wouldn’t let her. I was scared almost breathless.”

  “I was in Sulphur City, and did not hear of it till it was nearly all over,” Redfield resumed, his speech showing a little of the excitement which thrilled through the girl’s voice. “Well, the first act of vengeance was so ill-considered that it practically ended the whole campaign. The invaders fell upon and killed two ranchers—one of whom was probably not a rustler at all, but a peaceable settler, and the other one they most barbarously hanged. More than this, they attacked and vainly tried to kill two settlers whom they met on the road—German farmers, with no connection, so far as known, with the thieves. These men escaped, and gave the alarm. In a few hours the whole range was aflame with vengeful fire. The Forks, as you may recall, was like a swarm of bumblebees. Every man and boy was armed and mounted. The storekeepers distributed guns and ammunition, leaders developed, and the embattled ‘punkin rollers,’ rustlers, and townsmen rode out to meet the invaders.”

  The girl paled with memory of it. “It was terrible! I went all day without eating, and for two nights we were all too excited to sleep. It seemed as if the world were coming to an end. Mother cried because they wouldn’t let her go with them. She didn’t know father was leading the other army.”

  “She must have known soon, for it was reported that your father was among them. She certainly knew when they were driven to earth in that log fort, for they were oblig
ed to restrain her by force from going to your father. As I run over those furious days it all seems incredible, like a sudden reversal to barbarism.”

  “How did it all end? The soldiers came, didn’t they?”

  “Yes; the long arm of Uncle Sam reached out and took hold upon the necks of both parties. I guess your father and his band would have died right there had not the regular army interfered. It only required a sergeant wearing Uncle Sam’s uniform to come among those armed and furious cowboys and remove their prisoners.”

  “I saw that. It was very strange—that sergeant was so young and so brave.”

  He turned and smiled at her. “Do you know who that was?”

  Her eyes flashed. She drew her breath with a gasp. “Was it Mr. Cavanagh?”

  “Yes, it was Ross. He was serving in the regular army at the time. He has told me since that he felt no fear whatever. ‘Uncle Sam’s blue coat was like Siegfried’s magic armor,’ he said; ‘it was the kind of thing the mounted police of Canada had been called upon to do many a time, and I went in and got my men.’ That ended the war, so far as violent measures went, and it really ended the sovereignty of the cattle-man. The power of the ‘nester’ has steadily increased from that moment.”

  “But my father—what became of him? They took him away to the East, and that is all I ever knew. What do you think became of him?”

  “I could never make up my mind. All sorts of rumors come to us concerning him. As a matter of fact, the State authorities sympathized with the cattle-barons, and my own opinion is that your father was permitted to escape. He was afterward seen in Texas, and later it was reported that he had been killed there.”

  The girl sat still, listening to the tireless whir of the machine, and looking out at the purpling range with tear-mist eyes. At last she said: “I shall never think of my father as a bad man, he was always so gentle to me.”