Authors: Clifford D. Simak
“You’ll be riding back this way?”
Cornish nodded.
“Going to a meeting down in Cottonwood valley. Make me or break me.”
“Wonder would you do something for me,” asked the preacher.
“If I can, I will,” said Cornish.
“Keep an eye peeled for a little bucket, will you? Must of bounced out of the wagon. Looked all over and I can’t find it. Used it to cook my oatmeal in.”
“Sure will.”
“Wouldn’t want to step down and have a cup of coffee?”
“Can’t stop,” said Cornish.
He reined the horse around. Back on the trail, he looked behind him, saw the ragged old man standing outlined against the fire, with one arm raised in farewell.
Cornish kept watch for the bucket that had fallen from the wagon, but his thoughts were on other thing, were running along the trail ahead of him to the meeting down at Russell’s cabin, where the nesters of Cottonwood valley would decide whether or not they would buy the wire to fence in their valley against the ranging herds of the Tumbling K.
Swiftly Cornish ran over in his mind the men he could depend on. Billings and Hobbs and probably Goodman. Russell was for it, but not as enthusiastic as he might be. Old Bert Hays was against it because he said it would only stir up trouble with the Tumbling K. And a lot of the men would listen to what Bert had to say.
Molly might have helped, but she wouldn’t listen to him, Cornish thought. She had a way with Bert. Orneriest man in the whole dang valley, his neighbors said of Bert, but that gal of his’n can twist him around her finger.
Selling wire was tough work—and dangerous, at least out here where the big cattle outfits regarded wire as the devil’s doings, looked upon it as something that barred the way to watering places, cut off pasturage they had called their own by the right of usage. Wire was the thing that would doom free range and the cattlemen weren’t having any of it when they could do anything about it.
Sometimes they did unpleasant things, thought Cornish. Unpleasant things had happened to Anderson and Melvin. And not only them alone, but other barb wire men who had run up against the antagonism of the cattle barons.
The horse trotted down a slope and Cornish heard the sound of trickling water—a little unnamed stream that ran into the Cottonwood five miles or so below.
The trail leveled off and ran beside the stream. Bunches of cottonwoods loomed up, their bushy tops black against the stars. The horse’s hoofs clopped through the trail dust with a muffled, drumming thud. On the hills above a coyote yapped and far off an owl chuckled over some quiet joke.
A dark shape moved beside a cottonwood and Cornish pulled the horse to a halt, half swung across the trail.
“Make a move,” said a voice from the shadow, “and I’ll plug you sure as hell.”
For a moment dark panic swirled inside Cornish’s brain, then smoothed out. No use of running. No use of trying to fight back, for he had no gun. Just wait and see what happened.
Horses moved from beneath the cottonwood and blocked the trail. Metal gleamed in the starlight and the men were black shapes watching him.
“Going to a meeting?” one of them asked and Cornish, remembering the voice back in the saloon, recognizing the angular shadow that sat upon the horse, knew that it was Titus. The other two riders sat silently.
Titus chuckled viciously. “There ain’t going to be no meeting, Cornish.”
“Nice of you,” said Cornish, “to ride out and tell me.”
“You’re too damn smart,” snarled Titus. “We’ll take that out of you.”
“With a rope,” said one of the other men as he moved behind Cornish and forced his hands behind his back.
“Steady,” snapped Titus. “Stay right where you are.”
His gun made a threatening motion.
The ropes bit into Cornish’s wrists, bit and burned with the savage strength of the man who pulled them tight and tied them.
“Titus,” said Cornish, half in a whisper.
“Yes,” said Titus, “but it won’t do you any good to squall. We’re going to haul you up and leave you hanging there. You can crawl all you want to and it won’t help you none.”
Cornish fought for calmness, made his tongue move in a mouth that suddenly was dry as cotton.
“You can hang me,” he said, “and a dozen others like me, Titus, but you won’t stop the wire. It’s coming, sure as God made green apples, it’s coming out into this country to hold your cows where they belong. It’s going to mark the land that’s yours and the land that’s the other fellow’s and when it comes guns won’t be worth a damn against it.”
A harsh, biting loop was flung out of the darkness behind him, brushed his face and settled on his shoulders.
“You talk too much,” rasped Titus savagely.
The rope jerked tight and for a single instant Cornish felt the blind rush of overwhelming fear. His muscles tensed and his feet moved swiftly, but the gun that Titus held jammed itself into his belly and he stopped, stood rigid—rigid with a night-born terror talking in the wind-rustling of the cottonwood above him, in the murmur of the creek that hurried down its stream bed.
He clamped his teeth and felt the muscles of his jaws go stiff. He wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t beg or whine. That was what these men wanted—a show before they hanged him. A little laughter before they strung him up.
The rope jerked tight again for an instant, eased up for a second and then tightened into a steady pull that was tugging at his body. They had thrown the rope over the lowest limb of the cottonwood, he knew, and were holding it taut.
A voice asked. “Shall we let ‘er rip?”
Titus holstered his gun. “Swing him up,” he said.
The rope tightened with a savage yank and Cornish tried to cry out as a band of fire burned around his throat, as his neck and shoulder muscles screamed with wrenching pain—but his tongue was leaden and there was no breath to yell with and the world was spinning in a giddy dance of stars and tree tops.
His unbound feet danced on empty air and he strained for an instant to tear his hands free of the rope that held them, his body twitching and quivering, mind fighting against the strangling black mist that rolled in from the stars. His lungs burned and his mouth gulped air that could not reach the lungs.
The mists of darkness rolled in wispily and clung to him and seeped into his mind, so that his thoughts were dull and he knew that his body was twirling slowly on the rope that held it off the ground.
The stars blinked out and the wind in the cottonwood was a roaring sound that thundered in his brain—a roaring sound that suddenly was staccato, like a series of explosions.
The ground came up and hit him and the rope loosened about his neck and his starving lungs drew in great gulps of air. Slobbering, whimpering, dazed, he crawled along the ground, hitching himself along like a twisting snake, one thought only in his mind—to get away from the tree that had held the rope.
The moaning of the wind in the cottonwoods came back and his eyes came open. He flopped over on his back and saw the stars burning in the sky, burning with an impish, flickering light that made a glittering dance.
A footstep crunched nearby and he tried to crawl, but he was too tired.
A voice said: “Where are you, Charley? Where the hell have you gone to?”
Cornish sat bolt upright and croaked, his battered throat refusing to form words.
The man moved through the night, scuffing through the grass, his figure looming darkly.
“Steve!” croaked Cornish.
The bartender knelt down, loosened the rope, flung it over Cornish’s head.
“Nicked one of the dirty sons,” he said, “but they got away.”
“That was you shooting, then,” squeaked Cornish. “Heard something that sounded like shots just before they dropped me.”
Steve’s knife sawed through the ropes that bound Cornish’s hands.
“Yeah,” said Steve, “I quit the job. Figured I might as well. Tumbling K boys would be out after my hide for what I done this afternoon.”
Cornish massaged his throat, trying to work out the burn and fever where the rope had been.
“Manage it down to the creek?” asked Steve. “Drink of water would do you good.”
“Got to get down to the Cottonwood,” said Cornish. “Something’s happened down there. Titus said there wasn’t going to be a meeting.”
“Seems you should have had enough for one night,” protested Steve, “without asking for any more.”
“They got me sore,” Cornish explained. “They tried to rough me up and they tried to hang me. Now there’re trying to mess up my wire deal.”
“O.K.,” agreed Steve. “O.K., I’ll let you have my horse to get down there and lend you a gun. And you use that gun—don’t hold back a minute if you get backed into a tight.”
Cornish rose shakily to his feet. “Guess you’re right, Steve. About time to start using a gun.”
He headed for the creek. “I’ll get that drink,” he said.
The bartender’s horse was waiting when he came back to the trail.
“Here’s the gun,” said Steve. “Buckle it around you and keep it handy.”
“Guess I owe you some thanks,” said Cornish.
“Not a one,” protested Steve. “Glad of the fun. Figured I’d better trail along behind you just to sort of check up. Them human rattlers out at the Tumbling K are liable to do most anything. Can’t trust them for a minute.”
Cornish swung into the saddle, headed down the trail. His throat still burned with a throbbing ache and it was a torture to turn his head. His brain still buzzed with a keening pain and his mouth was dry as the bitter dust that lay along the trail.
But within him a rage was growing—a cold and twisted rage against the Tumbling K, against Titus, against the old system of free range that said a man could keep all the land he could seize and hold.
Once wire fenced in the valley of the Cottonwood, the Tumbling K would be barred from the pasture and the water its herds had used for more than twenty years. Used by custom rather than by right, by six-gun power rather than by legal status.
The nesters hadn’t bothered them so much at first, for the punchers still threw the herds down into the valley despite the scattered cabins, bluffing their way in and out with the six-guns they packed. But the wire would make if different. Wire was a definite thing, a deadline, a sign of legal possession—something that marked off one man’s land from another man’s.
The trail broke free of the shaggy hills, came out into the wide valley of the Cottonwood, forked north and south. Cornish took the south fork.
A mile beyond he drew up before the huddled group of buildings that belonged to old Bert Hays. The place was silent and lightless.
A dog came tearing out of the barn, barking savagely. It reached Cornish’s horse and circled it, yapping viciously.
The cabin door slammed open and a man with a rifle stepped out—a man barefooted and clad only in his underwear.
“Hello, Bert,” yelled Cornish to make himself heard above the barking of the dog.
The gun muzzle, trained at his head, never wavered.
“So it’s you,” spat Hays. “Come down to raise some more hell in the valley.”
“Come down to see what happened,” declared Cornish. “Understand the meeting was called off.”
Hays yelled at the dog. “Shut up! Shut up before I take a club to you!”
The dog fell silent, trotted off, tail between its legs, sat down to watch from a safe distance.
Hays spat into the dust. “Yeah, it was called off.”
“Called off by the Tumbling K,” said Cornish.
“Don’t matter who called it off,” the nester bellowed. “None of your damn business who called it off. It’s been called off. We don’t want no wire. That’s all you need to know.”
Cornish leaned forward in his saddle. “They bluffed you out. They threatened you and you folded up. Every last one of you put your tail between your legs and crawled.”
The old man hauled back the hammer of the rifle. “Cornish,” he warned, “I’ve shot men for less than that.”
“You should have started on the Tumbling K,” said Cornish.
“All you care about is selling wire,” yelled Hays. “You don’t care what happens after that. You don’t care how many men get shot across that wire after you have sold it.”
“They sent three men to run me out of town this afternoon,” said Cornish, hotly, “and I ran them out instead. They just tried hanging me and that didn’t work either. You’re not the only one taking the risk in this deal of ours.”
“We’re the ones that got to go on living here,” yelled Hays. “We’re the ones that have to protect that wire after it is up. We decided we’d rather live at peace without no wire.”
“Live at peace!” Cornish shouted. “Man, don’t you know there’ll never be any peace along the Cottonwood until you call the Tumbling K—call them and make it stick. As long as you have the grass and water that they want, wire or no wire, you’ll never have any peace. You’re going to have to fight and you may as well fight over wire as anything else.”
“Get out of here,” screamed Hays. “Get out of here before I put a bullet in you!”
A swift figure stepped from the cabin door, reached out a hand, wrenched the rifle away from Hays with one quick motion.
Cornish lifted his hat. “Good evening, Miss Hays,” he said.
Her face was a white blur in the starlight, but he could tell from the poise of her body, the tilt of her head, that she was angry.
Her words bit like the swift lash of a snarling whip.
“I’m ashamed of you,” she said. “Ashamed of the both of you. Two grown men, standing here, yelling at one another like two alley cats.”
“I’m sorry, miss,” said Cornish.
“By God, I’m not,” Hays bellowed. “He can’t come riding in in the middle of the night and tell me my own business. He can’t make me buy his fence if I don’t want to buy it. He don’t care a hang about what happens after the fence is sold …”
“Father,” yelled Molly Hays. “Father you be still!”
The old man suddenly fell silent. The dog sat watching, ears cocked forward.
“You better go,” Molly said to Cornish. “All the others feel the same way my father does. The only way to keep the peace along the Cottonwood is to get along without your wire.”
“Jim Titus decided that for you,” Cornish told her, bitterly.