Guardians of the Sage

HARRY SINCLAIR DRAGO

M. EVANS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by M. Evans

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright © 1932 by the Macaulay Company

Renewed in 1960 by Harry Sinclair Drago

First paperback edition 2014

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014947819

ISBN: 978-1-59077-474-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN: 978-1-59077-475-5 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Bob, you used to work for old Slick-ear—only you had another name for him. Today you go to town in an automobile. You've traded the jingling of spur chains for the rattling of a Ford truck. You speak learnedly of tractors and Diesel engines.

Well, it was not always so. You knew that big sweep of country between Quinn River and the Steen Mountains when it
was
country and a pair of chaps didn't make a man a top-hand.

Maybe I've scrambled my geography a little—maybe I've taken some liberties with the names of men and places; but you'll be able to correct that and to understand why it was necessary.

It is September. The aspens in the little parks above the ranger's cabin must be all gold and yellow now. Old National and Buckskin will be looming up as though they were only a stone's throw away. The deer will be moving toward the rimrocks. The memory is still sharp with me.

I'd like to be back there with you and young Hank. I want to see the high places again, Bob; I want to smell the sage.

GUARDIANS OF THE SAGE

T
HE long twilight of late June was fading rapidly into night as a horseman crested the low hills to the east of the Willow Vista Ranch. Momentarily, man and beast were silhouetted against the skyline, for behind them the moon was already tipping the mountain-desert with silver.

Both bore evidence of a slashing ride.

A tight-lipped grunt of satisfaction escaped the man as he caught his first glimpse of the distant lights that marked the ranch-house—pale, buttery daubs of yellow, glowing dimly against the black bulk of the Steen Mountains beyond.

“Old Slick-ear better be there,” he grumbled desperately as he raked his horse with his spurs.

The big dun, obviously winded, was heaving violently, its distended nostrils blood-flecked. The spurs bit cruelly. The horse trembled and tried to hold back, eyes rolling wildly. Heart and lungs were bursting, and fear—not unlike that known to humans—was clamping its icy fingers on the animal.

The man realized that the end was not far away. By choice, he was not a killer of horses; but the business on which he rode was urgent enough to make him reckless of horseflesh as well as himself. The news he brought was important, and in the end, minutes would spell the difference between success and failure.

The way was down hill now, a scant two miles.

The horse plunged onward in a last gallant effort. The man's eyes were alert, as though expecting the animal to go down any moment. Danger to himself was great, unless he managed to jump clear. He was not unmindful of it, nor was he unmoved by the dun's gameness. Since late afternoon, they had covered the fifty long, desert miles that lay between the Bar S on the South Fork of the Owyhee and the home ranch on Rebel Creek.

The man had come even farther. He had been in the saddle since morning. The horse he rode now was the fourth that had served him that day. He was not an emotional man, but the dun happened to belong to him. Maybe that made a difference.

“I reckon if there's a horse heaven you'll just about reach it, Baldy,” he muttered grimly, a tortured look in his eyes. But of course a man gets to know a horse rather well in four years.

Suddenly the wooden bridge at Rebel Creek loomed out of the darkness at him. A tattoo of flying hoofs rang out sharp and pregnant with alarm as the dun thundered across the planks. In the stillness of the early evening the drumming echoed and re-echoed across the valley until it reached the house.

Supper was over, but two men and a girl sat at the long table in the dining-room, memorandum books and a pile of freight bills spread out before them. All three looked up sharply.

“What was that?” the girl asked apprehensively. Her father, seated across the table, was busy with his note-books again. He smiled to himself over her anxiety.

“Just somebody crossing the bridge, Letty,” he said.

“Whoever it is, he ain't losin' no time,” the other man remarked. He was Joe Tracey, the foreman of Willow Vista. “He's sure comin' fast,” he added to himself. His thin face was hawk-like in the lamplight.

Letty Stall went to the open window and peered out, but she could not see anything. The moon was just beginning to peep over the hills to the east. Even as she tarried at the window, it grew lighter. Presently, she could make out a moving smudge of blackness in the dark. Recognition was still impossible.

Just why a madly driven horse at this hour of the evening should tighten her throat with a premonition of trouble, she could not say. Usually it meant sickness or possibly the death of one of her father's men—something that had been happening ever since Old Henry had brought her up from San Francisco to spend her first summer on one of the Bar S ranches.

But that was years ago. She was twenty now, and if San Francisco regarded her only as a charming debutante, she was quite used to the exigencies of ranch life, with doctors and hospitals miles away. Still, it in no way explained the feeling that gripped her to-night.

Eastern Oregon was a new country. Stall and Matlack had done well in Harney and Malheur counties. They owned no less than eleven ranches in that big sweep of country between the Steen Mountains and the Snake, an empire unto themselves. Their brand, the Bar S, was as well-known—and hated—there as it long had been in Nevada and certain parts of California.

Steve Matlack was no longer active in the affairs of Bar S. In the truest sense, he never had been active. From the beginning, Henry Stall had been the moving force behind their success. He had led the invasion into Nevada, and later into Oregon.

He had been in the Steen Mountain country for twelve years now—a period in which he had never failed to arrogate to himself all the rights and privileges of a reigning monarch. What he wanted, he took; and he managed to keep it, too—either with the aid of the courts or without them. It was his boast that he had never vented a brand of his on horse or steer, nor sold an acre of land once he had acquired it.

Letty knew the feeling against her father often ran high. Cowmen called him a range hog. Threats had been made against his life. Only a few days back, over in Harney Valley, he had been fired on from ambush. If the bullet had missed him it was because the shot had been intended only as a warning.

It had not deterred him. She knew nothing could change her father. He would go on grabbing land and water rights, running more and more cattle, until he died. Trouble was sure to come of it, sooner perhaps than he supposed, and as she stood at the window, her blood thinning, she could not throw off the depressing feeling that, whoever the rider was, his business there brought that day nearer.

The moon hung low above the hills now, bathing the valley with its soft glow. Barns and corrals gleamed whitely. The oncoming horse splashed across the shallow irrigation ditch that supplied the ranch truck-patch, lashing the water to spray. As it fell back, the moonlight touched it and it glistened like tiny particles of silver tinsel drifting on the air.

“Who is it?” old Henry asked.

“Can't make out,” Tracey answered, his eyes screwed into a piercing squint. Across the yard, someone came to the door of the bunkhouse and held up a lighted lantern. “We'll know in a minute who it is.”

The old man leaned over the table and peered out with the others, his face, ruddy against the gray of his closely-cropped hair, as stolid as usual.

It was only a moment or two before the horse galloped into the ranch-yard. Then, before anyone could speak, the animal crashed to earth, throwing its rider headlong.

“Rode him till he dropped!” Tracey exclaimed. “Whoever he is he got a good shakin' up.” He put a leg through the window to hurry to the stranger's aid. Men were running from the bunkhouse, too. The man who had been thrown had not moved.