When A Man's A Man Part 2

The cowboy watched him curiously; then in a musing tone added the suggestion, "Some lonesome up here on foot."

"But there are times, you know," returned the other desperately, "when a man prefers to be alone."

The cowboy straightened in his saddle and lifted his reins. "Thanks," he said dryly, "I reckon I'd better be moving."

But the other spoke quickly. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton, I did not mean that for you."

The horseman dropped his hands again to the saddle horn, and resumed his lounging posture, thus tacitly accepting the apology. "You have the advantage of me," he said.

The stranger laughed. "Everyone knows that 'Wild Horse Phil' of the Cross-Triangle Ranch won the bronco-riding champions.h.i.+p yesterday. I saw you ride."

Philip Acton's face showed boyish embarra.s.sment.

The other continued, with his strange enthusiasm. "It was great work--wonderful! I never saw anything like it."

There was no mistaking the genuineness of his admiration, nor could he hide that wistful look in his eyes.

"Shucks!" said the cowboy uneasily. "I could pick a dozen of the boys in that outfit who can ride all around me. It was just my luck, that's all--I happened to draw an easy one."

"Easy!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the stranger, seeing again in his mind the fighting, plunging, maddened, outlawed brute that this boy-faced man had mastered.

"And I suppose catching and throwing those steers was easy, too?"

The cowboy was plainly wondering at the man's peculiar enthusiasm for these most commonplace things. "The roping? Why, that was no more than we're doing all the time."

"I don't mean the roping," returned the other, "I mean when you rode up beside one of those steers that was running at full speed, and caught him by the horns with your bare hands, and jumped from your saddle, and threw the beast over you, and then lay there with his horns pinning you down! You aren't doing that all the time, are you? You don't mean to tell me that such things as that are a part of your everyday work!"

"Oh, the bull d.o.g.g.i.n'! Why, no," admitted Phil, with an embarra.s.sed laugh, "that was just fun, you know."

The stranger stared at him, speechless. Fun! In the name of all that is most modern in civilization, what manner of men were these who did such things in fun! If this was their recreation, what must their work be!

"Do you mind my asking," he said wistfully, "how you learned to do such things?"

"Why, I don't know--we just do them, I reckon."

"And could anyone learn to ride as you ride, do you think?" The question came with marked eagerness.

"I don't see why not," answered the cowboy honestly.

The stranger shook his head doubtfully and looked away over the wild land where the shadows of the late afternoon were lengthening.

"Where are you going to stop to-night?" Phil Acton asked suddenly.

The stranger did not take his eyes from the view that seemed to hold for him such peculiar interest. "Really," he answered indifferently, "I had not thought of that."

"I should think you'd be thinking of it along about supper time, if you've walked from town since morning."

The stranger looked up with sudden interest; but the cowboy fancied that there was a touch of bitterness under the droll tone of his reply. "Do you know, Mr. Acton, I have never been really hungry in my life. It might be interesting to try it once, don't you think?"

Phil Acton laughed, as he returned, "It might be interesting, all right, but I think I better tell you, just the same, that there's a ranch down yonder in the timber. It's nothing but a goat ranch, but I reckon they would take you in. It's too far to the Cross-Triangle for me to ask you there. You can see the buildings, though, from here."

The stranger sprang up in quick interest. "You can? The Cross-Triangle Ranch?"

"Sure," the cowboy smiled and pointed into the distance. "Those red spots over there are the roofs. Jim Reid's place--the Pot-Hook-S--is just this side of the meadows, and a little to the south. The old Acton homestead--where I was born--is in that bunch of cottonwoods, across the wash from the Cross-Triangle."

But strive as he might the stranger's eyes could discern no sign of human habitation in those vast reaches that lay before him.

"If you are ever over that way, drop in," said Phil cordially. "Mr.

Baldwin will be glad to meet you."

"Do you really mean that?" questioned the other doubtfully.

"We don't say such things in this country if we don't mean them, Stranger," was the cool retort.

"Of course, I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton," came the confused reply. "I should like to see the ranch. I may--I will--That is, if I--" He stopped as if not knowing how to finish, and with a gesture of hopelessness turned away to stand silently looking back toward the town, while his face was dark with painful memories, and his lips curved in that mirthless, self-mocking smile.

And Philip Acton, seeing, felt suddenly that he had rudely intruded upon the privacy of one who had sought the solitude of that lonely place to hide the hurt of some bitter experience. A certain native gentleness made the man of the ranges understand that this stranger was face to face with some crisis in his life--that he was pa.s.sing through one of those trials through which a man must pa.s.s alone. Had it been possible the cowboy would have apologized. But that would have been an added unkindness. Lifting the reins and sitting erect in the saddle, he said indifferently, "Well, I must be moving. I take a short cut here. So long! Better make it on down to the goat ranch--it's not far."

He touched his horse with the spur and the animal sprang away.

"Good-bye!" called the stranger, and that wistful look was in his eyes as the rider swung his horse aside from the road, plunged down the mountain side, and dashed away through the brush and over the rocks with reckless speed. With a low exclamation of wondering admiration, the man climbed hastily to a higher point, and from there watched until horse and rider, taking a steeper declivity without checking their breakneck course, dropped from sight in a cloud of dust. The faint sound of the sliding rocks and gravel dislodged by the flying feet died away; the cloud of dust dissolved in the thin air. The stranger looked away into the blue distance in another vain attempt to see the red spots that marked the Cross-Triangle Ranch.

Slowly the man returned to his seat on the rock. The long shadows of Granite Mountain crept out from the base of the cliffs farther and farther over the country below. The blue of the distant hills changed to mauve with deeper ma.s.ses of purple in the shadows where the canyons are.

The lonely figure on the summit of the Divide did not move.

The sun hid itself behind the line of mountains, and the blue of the sky in the west changed slowly to gold against which the peaks and domes and points were silhouetted as if cut by a graver's tool, and the bold cliffs and battlements of old Granite grew coldly gray in the gloom. As the night came on and the details of its structure were lost, the mountain, to the watching man on the Divide, a.s.sumed the appearance of a mighty fortress--a fortress, he thought, to which a generation of men might retreat from a civilization that threatened them with destruction; and once more the man faced back the way he had come.

The far-away cities were already in the blaze of their own artificial lights--lights valued not for their power to make men see, but for their power to dazzle, attract and intoxicate--lights that permitted no kindly dusk at eventide wherein a man might rest from his day's work--a quiet hour; lights that revealed squalid shame and tinsel show--lights that hid the stars. The man on the Divide lifted his face to the stars that now in the wide-arched sky were gathering in such unnumbered mult.i.tudes to keep their sentinel watch over the world below.

The cool evening wind came whispering over the lonely land, and all the furred and winged creatures of the night stole from their dark hiding places into the gloom which is the beginning of their day. A coyote crept stealthily past in the dark and from the mountain side below came the weird, ghostly call of its mate. An owl drifted by on silent wings.

Night birds chirped in the chaparral. A fox barked on the ridge above.

The shadowy form of a bat flitted here and there. From somewhere in the distance a bull bellowed his deep-voiced challenge.

Suddenly the man on the summit of the Divide sprang to his feet and, with a gesture that had he not been so alone might have seemed affectedly dramatic, stretched out his arms in an att.i.tude of wistful longing while his lips moved as if, again and again, he whispered a name.

CHAPTER III.

IN THE BIG PASTURE.

In the Williamson Valley country the spring round-up, or "rodeo," as it is called in Arizona, and the s.h.i.+pping are well over by the last of June. During the long summer weeks, until the beginning of the fall rodeo in September, there is little for the riders to do. The cattle roam free on the open ranges, while calves grow into yearlings, yearlings become two-year-olds, and two-year-olds mature for the market.

On the Cross-Triangle and similar ranches, three or four of the steadier year-round hands only are held. These repair and build fences, visit the watering places, brand an occasional calf that somehow has managed to escape the dragnet of the rodeo, and with "dope bottle" ever at hand doctor such animals as are afflicted with screwworms. It is during these weeks, too, that the horses are broken; for, with the hard and dangerous work of the fall and spring months, there is always need for fresh mounts.

The horses of the Cross-Triangle were never permitted to run on the open range. Because the leaders of the numerous bands of wild horses that roamed over the country about Granite Mountain were always ambitious to gain recruits for their harems from their civilized neighbors, the freedom of the ranch horses was limited by the fences of a four-thousand-acre pasture. But within these miles of barbed wire boundaries the brood mares with their growing progeny lived as free and untamed as their wild cousins on the unfenced lands about them. The colts, except for one painful experience, when they were roped and branded, from the day of their birth until they were ready to be broken were never handled.

On the morning following his meeting with the stranger on the Divide Phil Acton, with two of his cowboy helpers, rode out to the big pasture to bring in the band.