Cord 2, page 4
French held silent until Jim was out of earshot, staring thoughtfully after him. Then he turned back to lean again on the fence, watching his cows and belaboring his straw with his teeth. When he finally spoke it was in a low, almost expressionless voice.
“My wife lives in California,” French said. “She’s never seen this country. Some years back she got as far as Winnemucca but changed her mind and took the next train back. She lives in a two-story house on Market Street in San Francisco. I bought it for her. Most every night she goes out to the theater or some dance or dress ball. She writes to tell me how droll Packard was in Our Singular Friend and how she danced until her shoe leather wore thin as Irish lace. She does not lack for escorts.
“When I came here,” Peter French said, “there was no one in the country but some Bannock and Paiute and once in a while some nester train lost and trying to make it west of the mountains. There was troops up at Fort Harney and that was it. It was a wilderness country, and maybe it still is, but I’ve put order to it. I’ve made this land sensible, and my way works.
“I think about my wife,” French said, “more than I would wish. I see her with a man who wears a mustache thin as his lips—slicked-back hair. He talks and she laughs and just brushes his hand with her fingertips, and I wonder if later that night she will be alone, and if she even thinks of me when she is. On nights when those sorts of thoughts come to me I take some whiskey, because I know I’ll not sleep without it.”
Peter French looked up at Cord. “Once in a while she will ask me to put this life behind me and come out to San Francisco. It seems a gesture of habit. She could never understand that giving up this life would be sentencing myself to a defeat I have neither earned nor would deserve. Do you see that?”
Cord shrugged. “I travel light,” he said. “I have no room for other men’s miseries.”
“You ride with a woman, so they tell me,” Peter French said. His voice had gone a little softer. “That would be a fine way to travel.”
Cord stiffened with surprise. This man quite obviously knew him, and there was nothing Cord liked about that.
“I have an awful lot of money in the vault in that Burns Security Bank,” French said. “If you had tried to take any of it, I would have had you killed. I had men watching you, rifles across the street. In my business rustling is a killing crime.”
“Are you calling down on me?”
“No. Just explaining things. There will be no desperado shenanigans in my territory. Not at my expense.”
Cord saw Jim coming out of the big house carrying some papers. “You knew,” Cord said to Peter French. “You had some people in town who put a name to my face, and you are the one they come to in these parts, not the law.”
“The law doesn’t pay as well as I do.”
“Why didn’t you do something about it?”
Peter French scratched at the back of his neck. “I don’t rightly know. I guess I don’t see any reason to trouble a man who hasn’t troubled me. It seems a way to buy into something that won’t yield much profit in the end.”
“Well,” Cord said. “Thanks.”
“You can thank me by getting those Texas cows out of my country. You can show me your back.”
Jim came up in time to hear the last. He looked from one man to the other questioningly, and saw the stony look on his brother’s face.
“I’m not pushing, Cord,” Peter French said. “Just suggesting.”
“That’s fine,” Cord said in a hard voice.
“The boys tell me she’s a Mexican,” French said. “They tell me she’s dark and looks dangerous. They tell me a man might get a notion anyway—she looks that much like trouble—because a man would shake his head for times to come if he never tried.”
Peter French was making Cord uncomfortable. There was a thread of sense in the man’s meandering talk, although French himself seemed to be having some trouble unraveling it. It had to do with his coming into the wilderness and imposing order on it, and then afterward looking on what he had done and feeling restless and a little let-down, knowing his wilderness was gone. Then Cord felt a little better. All that past week or so, especially when Cord was up in the Steens Mountain high country looking down on this “P” spread, envy for the man’s power and empire nagged at the back of Cord’s mind. Yet he had never guessed that at the same time Peter French was thinking of him, coveting his free way of living. It was nice to know that.
Peter French looked away suddenly, as though he had said more than he intended. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m obliged to you for pulling that calf.”
“Common courtesy,” Cord said. “I don’t like listening to living things crying out their woes.”
Jim frowned, trying to get a sense of the direction this talk was taking. Peter French bit at his upper lip. “Let’s get those cows,” Cord said.
“Let’s do just that,” Peter French agreed. “It’s always a good thing to be horseback before the sun is too high.”
They made good time from the first day. They started up over the rimrock on the western edge of the P Ranch Valley and out onto the wide expanse of Catlow Valley, then along the western edge of Steens Mountain. Each day they worked farther south, stopping at the little meadows where creeks came down from the highlands, Roaring Springs and Three Mile. They hurried the cows over the low dry pass to Fields Station and east through the Trout Creek Mountains, stopping to rest a few days on the meadows at the Whitehorse Ranch, where old man Devine had come into the country even before Peter French, then moved out toward the Owyhee country. The last days across the Owyhee Desert were the hardest going, one of them all the time out in the lead ten or twenty miles scouting for water.
But now, as Cord sat his horse, he mused about the fine choice of country. Jim was right. This was cattle range, where a man still stood a chance of getting started in the old way. Along the plains they had crossed there was plenty of water, once you knew where it was, and the grass was strong and tall in the spring. On east, there was the high country at the foot of the Independence Mountains for fall grazing. A man could keep the river-bottom pastures fenced for winter, and so long as the cold months didn’t turn truly hellacious, his cows would winter strong and healthy, ready to quickly lay on flesh when the new grass came.
Cord was proud of Jim for the life he would make in this country, but he did not wish it for himself, not really. Somebody had told him long ago: You better be careful, a man like you, because you’re probably going to get what you want. Cord smiled at himself. One thing he did not want was a homestead rancher’s hard life.
After the run they had watered the stock and given them time to cool down before pushing on. By Jim’s reckoning his new place was only a few miles farther upstream, and they hoped to reach it by nightfall. The place was now owned by a man named Miller.
As he cut up over a point, Cord spotted a homestead house and a fenced horse pasture reaching up away from the river, and he rode down to help turn the cattle around the property. A man in suspenders and a tattered straw hat was resetting posts in the fence, down near the willows along the water. Cord rode within shouting distance and called, “How far to the Miller place?”
The man looked quickly over his shoulder. Two small children—from the distance Cord could not tell if they were boys or girls—were playing in the dirt in front of the man’s sod-walled house. The man hollered something at them Cord did not catch, and a very thin woman wearing woolen trousers came out and hustled the children inside, following them and shutting the door behind her.
The man at the fence put down the shovel he was working with and picked up a rifle from where it had been lying in the grass close to his feet. He held it in both hands, aimed at the ground in front of him, and squinted at Cord as if he hadn’t heard his question. Cord turned his horse away. He had no intention of getting into gunplay over asking directions. Some of these outlanders got crazy from the isolation. They were best left alone.
“They got some strange notions about being neighborly in this country,” Chi said, grinning at him when he rode up.
“There’s something more than just spookiness gone bad around here,” Cord said. “First that yahoo running the cattle, and then this.”
They had covered another half mile when Cord made out a wagon coming toward them. Its bed was heaped with sacks and cases and belongings to the point where its springs were bottoming out. There was a wooden rocking chair tied to the top. Kitchen pots and pans hung from one side and a big tick mattress was strapped to the other.
The wagon pulled to a stop as they got closer. The man holding the reins sat looking at them with an open mouth. The woman beside him wore a dress of gray homespun and no bonnet, and she was staring straight ahead. A little girl, maybe ten years old, sat on the hard seat between them. As Cord rode closer he saw the little girl was snuffling away tears into the hem of an old blanket.
The woman looked at Cord. “Does this please you?” she said. “Does it cheer you to see how well your tyranny is working?”
“Hush up, Catherine,” the man said. He would not look straight at Cord.
“We are going back to Independence, Missouri,” the woman said, ignoring her husband. “They have law there, and your kind are put in cages, where you belong.”
“Rein up, lady,” Cord said. “Whatever is nettling at you has nothing to do with us.”
Jim rode up beside him. “Now what?”
“Drive on, Miller,” the woman said. “We’ll not profit by talking to these scum.”
“Did you call him Miller?” Jim said.
The man looked up for the first time and nodded timidly. He’d been whipped by worse things than his wife.
“Well, howdy,” Jim said. He dismounted and went over to stand by the wagon. The woman looked away quickly, as if she did not want to be a party to these goings-on. “I’m James Cord.”
The man named Miller stared for a moment at Jim’s outstretched hand, then shook it without much enthusiasm. The woman’s angry expression had turned thoughtful.
“You folks are moving on a mite early, aren’t you?” Jim said. “If it wasn’t for this luck I wouldn’t have known how to pay you for the property.”
Miller shook his head. “I won’t try to cheat you,” he said. “I won’t say you ain’t four-square if you want to call the deal quits.”
“Why would he want to call it quits?” Cord asked.
“Because they’ll run you off. Just like they did me and most of the others, just like they’re going to do with all the homesteaders who come into this country.”
“Then they’ll own it, all of it,” Catherine Miller said, her anger bursting from her. “McQuire will have the bottom land and the range that goes with it, and those of us who were here and made to run, all we’ll have is bile-sour memories.”
She stopped abruptly and looked at Cord more closely, more directly. From the corner of his eye Cord saw Chi easing up beside him. The grimace of distaste with which most women reacted to Chi crossed Catherine Miller’s face, but at the same time she was interested.
“Maybe you won’t run, though,” Catherine Miller said slowly. “Maybe you are the kind who will stand and fight.” She shot her husband a withering glance. He did not look at her, just sat bound by his shame and defeat, head bowed.
“They’ll kill you,” he said to the ground. “It’s real simple. When you don’t run, McQuire will kill you.”
McQuire was a name Cord was already sick of hearing. “So,” he said, “who is this bogeyman?”
“McQuire is the foreman at the LD Ranch,” the woman said. “It’s the biggest spread in these parts, and they don’t care for small homesteaders moving in. They start by cutting fences. Then they run their cattle through your yard and your kitchen garden, or they drive off what little stock you got, your milk cows. They shoot your sheep and your goats like they was pests. From there they move to threatening. They hold a gun on you for a long time, and ask you how you’d like to be dead. They did it to him.” She nodded her head toward her husband and looked from Cord to Chi to Jim.
“Then me,” she said. “Three days ago McQuire rode in while Miller was patching fence, and he caught me unawares in my own front room. He told me that he would take Martha if we weren’t gone inside the week.”
The girl on the seat beside her began sniffling again. “Do shut up, Catherine,” Miller said, suddenly sitting up. “You’re scaring the girl out of her wits again, to no purpose.”
“You see how it is,” the woman went on, paying her husband no attention. “You see what you’ll be taking on.”
Cord caught Jim looking at him, and then he saw Chi was eyeing him as well. This fight looked bad, going against ranchers with time and guns and property and numbers on their side. It was the kind of showdown best avoided; common sense told a man that. There were some fights you could not hope to win, though that was news it took a long time to swallow.
The reason of that was unarguable, and yet ... there was, Cord knew, this problem: with pride there was no way out. So he sat quiet and kept his own counsel, waiting for Jim and knowing damned well he might be easing into deadly error.
“The thing of it is,” Jim said slowly, “there’s no good way around it.” Jim was looking in Cord’s direction, but his eyes were unfocused, as if he was rolling the situation around and studying it from all the angles he could find. “Not for me. There’s nothing else I want to do, and nowhere else I want to go. And I’ve got these goddamned cows.” He grinned faintly, then sat as if waiting for confirmation. But no one said anything.
“But most of all,” Jim said, “if I turned up my tail and ran, there would be no good way of living with it, not ever.”
“Well,” Chi said, “we know that one, don’t we, chico?” She was speaking to Cord, her voice faintly mocking. Cord gave no notice he heard.
“I reckon I’ll stick,” Jim said.
Miller’s face was red with humiliation as he took the money Jim gave him. He looked physically unable to meet his wife’s icy stare as he clucked at his team and they moved away.
Cord and Jim and Chi looked at one another. No one spoke, and then they turned away toward gathering their cattle and getting them moving again. They were well lined out when Chi spurred her horse and came up alongside where Cord was riding the point. Jim was behind, harrying the stragglers.
“There’s still time to pull out,” Cord said.
“Suit yourself.”
“Not me,” Cord said, startled. “I meant you. He’s not your brother.”
“I’ll stay.”
“Why?”
Chi reined up, and Cord stopped beside her. “I like him, Cord. I like him pretty much.” She paused, considering. “For one reason, he’s your brother.”
Cord stared at her. It was as close as she would come to putting any feelings into words. “You know,” Cord said slowly, “back there in Burns I got to wondering ... maybe things had changed too much ...”
“You forget about Burns. You put it out of your mind.”
Cord looked away. “Yeah, Burns, and the Second Reliance Bank in Pocatello.”
Chi laughed. “Cord,” she said, “will you shut up?” She roweled her mare in the ribs and trotted forward again, Cord moving with her.
“I know about these range wars,” Cord said. “It’s funny, when you think about it, men dying over a piece of ground. That’s not something I ever thought of wanting, a plot of ground and being able to say it’s mine.”
“Some men want to own it all,” Chi said.
“Yeah,” Cord said. “And there’s the trouble.”
“Going right down the road,” Chi said, “with us.”
Chapter Four
On to the south they came on a wagon trace which struck east through a break in the rimrock and then curved over the sage-gray ridgeline on the horizon. It was the first semblance of a road they had seen since leaving the Whitehorse Ranch in Oregon eight days before. Jim left the drag and came galloping forward to catch Cord.
“We got to rest these animals,” he said. “Maybe you and me could check down that road, if the lady don’t object.”
“We’ll ask her,” Cord said.
Chi looked at them and grinned. “You boys,” she said. “Get you near to some sign of a town and see what happens. But you go ahead.”
They pushed the longhorns into a wide deep bend in the river where they could feed and hole up some of the hot hours in the shade of willows, and left Chi to stand watch, sidesaddle on her mare and smoking a cigarette she had rolled for herself.
Once over the horizon they came on scrub-brush rangeland that stretched in flat and mostly featureless undulations nearly twenty miles to the east where the rise of foothills toward the Independence Mountains began. The mountains themselves, still snowcapped, looked far off as the moon in the flat light of early afternoon.
But the thing that stopped them was the cluster of incongruous buildings about a half mile ahead, sitting there in the middle of nothing as though they had strayed from where they belonged some years before. A maverick town, Cord thought.
“Adelle,” Jim said. “Miller wrote me there was a town in the valley. No school or nothing, but a town.”
“Yeah,” Cord said. “Maybe town is putting it a little strong. But let’s go take a look.”
The place consisted of three buildings, two of them attached, with a rough-plank canopied boardwalk in front of them. One was the Mercantile, and the other had the bat-wing doors of a saloon. Behind them was a corral, fronting on the livery barn. Four horses drifted lazily in its shade.
Two men came out on the walk in front of the saloon as they passed, men who looked accustomed to the country. Jim lifted his hand in greeting. Neither of the men responded.
Cord reined up and looked at Jim. “Ride on,” he said, “is my vote.”
Jim nodded and they spurred their horses, taking a wide sweep to the north, thinking they would take a look at the country upstream along the Owyhee before rejoining Chi.
