Max Brand

King of the Range

Warsaw 2017

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER I

UNDOUBTEDLY Colonel Clisson was angry. All through the first day of the rodeo his anger grew, and on the second day it waxed mightily. He represented the whole of Texas and all of Texas ways, and it cut him to the very heart when he saw dally men from California and Nevada come into his territory and at his own pet rodeo, where he himself offered most of the prizes, carry away the glory and the hard cash.

The invaders had won at the shooting contest on the morning of the first day, distinguishing themselves with both rifle and revolver; on foot, kneeling, prone, or in the saddle on a moving horse, they had excelled the tie men in every respect.

Some said that this half dozen of center-fire riders were professionals, and not real cowpunchers at all. That is to say, they were a group who went from rodeo to rodeo throughout the country, splitting between them the prizes that they won. Such men, with none of the full and aimless hours on the range to burden them, were able to devote all their attention to the points that were most likely to count in a contest. They could bulldog, for instance, for a month at a time, and work up their skill close to perfection. Some of these men went into circuses, in the end, and traveled East and amazed the thousands.

But, professionals or not, Colonel Clisson was enraged by the successes of the invaders. After their victory in the shooting, they had been victorious in bulldogging, in riding wild steers, in roping, fancy and for time, in all the contests, and, when it came to the riding of the horses, which was the concluding portion of the entertainment, they stood well together at the top.

“They are professionals,” said the colonel’s foreman. “In that there grama country, they don’t learn to scratch their hosses none when they’re pitchin’ around. But look at that buckaroo now… look how tight he’s settin’ and swingin’ his spurs mighty fine. I wouldn’t hate to lay my bet that he ain’t drawed a paycheck off a ranch inside of five year. Look at the color of him. He’s as pale as a dude gambler.”

The colonel snorted. “There was a time,” he said, “when this country of mine was filled with ’punchers who would climb up the side of anything that called itself a hoss. But that time is gone, and I’m glad, sir, yes, I’m glad to see strangers come in and put our people in their place. Not one man, Pete, has dared to so much as ask to have a look at my mare, here.”

Pete Logan, the foreman, felt that there was a cut intended in this speech, and he scratched his chin for an instant and with thoughtful eyes watched the contest progressing between the center-fire buckaroo and the wrong-headed roan. It was a prize bucking horse, that roan. It fought like a pair of wildcats thrown over the shoulder of Old Nick. But, nevertheless, the stranger was flapping his hat and working his cruel, scraping spurs and taking the heart out of the roan rapidly and surely.

Pete turned his head and looked at the mare in the pen. The walls of that pen were nine feet high, because it was said that over a smaller barrier she would either leap or scramble, and up and down behind the bars she swung back and forth, like a panther walking at its cage screen. She was a fury, a thorough and educated bad one. When she felt the eye of the foreman resting upon her, she paused in her pacing to and fro and looked back at him, flattening her ears.

Pete Logan was upset and turned his head hastily away from her. He knew horses from beginning to end, but this was a very different matter. To enter a contest with her would be like entering the cage of a tiger. Even her beauty made her more terrible. For she was clad in chestnut silk, dappled over with leopard-like markings of shadow, and the gloss of her flank was as bright as burnished metal. She had had five years of glorious freedom on the range. Three times she had been stolen by roving horse thieves whose eyes were taken by her glory.

The first one had left a small scar on her back and a confirmed hatred of the human race in Excuse Me’s proud heart. The second had been pitched into a dreadful nest of Spanish bayonet, where even Excuse Me would not follow, and where he would have died like a tortured wildcat, with the mare prowling on guard about him, had not a range rider found him the next day and cut him free, and carried him off to the ranch house to wait for a doctor, and jail. The third would-be horse thief must have been a magnificent rider, for he had stuck to Excuse Me until his spurs had deeply scored her sides. But his fate had been the worst of all, for they had found him where he fell and where the demoniac mare had pounced on him. He was battered to a rag, literally beyond recognition.

When the colonel heard of that, he went out with a rifle to shoot her. But when he looked down the sights, and the round of them held the perfect beauty of her head, he relented. Instead, he ordered her to be caught up and gentled with the utmost care.

She was accordingly brought in. They said that she fought like a beast of prey, rather than a horse, rushing at the ’punchers instead of away from them, and biting at the ropes that restrained her. Then, for six months, the colonel himself supervised her training. There was nothing in the shape of a horse that could not be gentled and trained, he said, and he knew how to do it. But at the end of six months he was wearing a plaster on his right temple, and he walked with a limp. She was like fluid fire, said the colonel, and no precautions could make the handling of her safe. So he brought her to his rodeo to be given to the man who rode her.

That man never would come over the horizon, he was sure, but, nevertheless, it would be a beautiful and terrible thing to see Excuse Me perform.

However, he had brought her in vain. The ’punchers, when they asked for horses in the contest, paused only for one glance through the bars at lovely Excuse Me. Then they went hastily on, some with a visible shudder. For, in fact, as has been said, her beauty made her only grimmer to behold.

“Not even asked to try a saddle on her?” exclaimed the colonel with increasing savagery. “They ain’t a man of ’em that wouldn’t rather get on top of a tank of nitroglycerine.”

“Why, sir,” said Pete, with a rather lopsided grin, “I feel the same way about it.”

“You do? And ain’t you got no shame, Pete, to stand here, a strappin’ young feller like you, and confess that to my face?”

“The fact is,” said Pete, “that the nitroglycerine might not go off, but Excuse Me you damn’ well know would bust every time.”

The colonel snorted, which was his habit when he was cornered past the rescue of words. “Young man, young man,” he said, “I’ve seen the day that no hoss in this country would go unchallenged. I’ve seen men that have walked fifty mile’, for the sake of tryin’ their hands at a man-killin’ hoss. What you got that fool smile on your face for?”

“I was recollectin’ of the day,” said Pete Logan, “when we ties the sack of crushed barley onto the back of Excuse Me and turns her loose. Maybe you disremember that day, sir?”

“Bah!” said the colonel.

“I was smilin’,” said Pete Logan, “to think that she bucked so hard that she split open the side of that sack and sent the barley squirtin’ out like water.”

“I remember,” said the colonel dreamily, “that on that day she then spent a long time smashin’ that good barley into the mud of her corral.”

“Yeah,” drawled Pete, “she’s a lamb, I reckon.” He raised his hat. “How d’ye, Miss Furneaux?”

The colonel hastily followed the example of his foreman and removed his hat to a woman of middle age who now rode up to them. She had a handsome, sun-browned face, lean and clean-looking, and the most honest gray eyes in the world. She smiled at them both.

“Our boys are not having much luck,” she said.

“I would rather have us represented by the women, Elizabeth,” said the colonel. “I would rather have the girls of this country represent us than the spineless, weak-hearted, chicken-livered rascals who are out there now, lettin’ themselves be bucked off like so many sacks of wheat… half-filled sacks, at that.” He ended by pointing with a stiff arm. “Look!” he said.

At that moment, aptly to illustrate what the colonel had been saying, one of the Texas contenders was seen to leave the bowed back of his pony and fly upward without wings from his saddle, then drop like a plummet to the ground. The impact was audible.

“I hope he’s broken his neck,” said the colonel.

Miss Furneaux looked at Clisson without a smile, but also without malice, for she understood thoroughly the bigness of his heart.

“Why, that’s Archie Hunter,” she said.

“Archie Hunter?” repeated the colonel. “Why, then, I must say that he sticks in my mind, in some way connected with your name, Elizabeth. What is it?”

“He was the dearest friend of Rod,” she answered.

“Ah?” said the colonel. He began to add other words, but checked himself, seemed half choking, and turned a violent crimson.

Elizabeth Furneaux looked at him with the same faint smile of understanding. “You meant to ask me what the latest news is about Rod, I suppose?” she said.

“Why, Elizabeth, my dear child,” said the colonel, putting out a hand toward her, “I never want you to speak a word that will hurt you. I never want that.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “I had a letter from him not long ago, but, as usual, he says nothing about what he’s really doing. Except that he’s found a girl in the mountains. Something too exquisite to be human, I gather. Also… you probably know that they’ve attributed another shooting scrape to Rod?”

“The man near Denver, do you mean?”

“Yes. The man is dead. I’ve just heard. That’s all the recent news. Good-bye, Colonel. I’ll see you again before the rodeo breaks up.”

She rode off, and the colonel looked at his foreman with bared teeth, and Pete Logan looked back at him in the same fashion.

“I wish,” said the colonel, after a moment of sustaining this vicious grimace, “I wish that Rodman Furneaux were thrown in the pen with Excuse Me. Confound him, I wish no better than that.”

“They might get on fine,” said Pete Logan. “They’d be birds of a feather, after all.”

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