Shoe-Bar Stratton. Ames Joseph Bushnell
brief training and the longer interval overseas, the foreman’s letters had come with fair regularity and been answered promptly and in detail. What had Bloss done when the break came? What had he been doing ever since?
A fresh wave of troubled curiosity sent Stratton swinging briskly across the street. Keeping inside the long hitching-rack, he crossed the sagging porch and stepped through the open door into the store. For a moment he thought it empty. Then a chair scraped, and over in one corner a short, stout, grizzled man dropped his feet from the window-sill and shuffled forward, yawning.
“Wal! Wal!” he mumbled, his faded, sleep-dazed eyes taking in Buck’s bag. “Train come in? Reckon I must of been dozin’ a mite.”
“Looks to me like the whole place was taking an afternoon nap,” smiled Stratton. “Not much doing this time of day, I expect.”
“You said it,” yawned the stout man, supporting himself against the rough pine counter. “Things is liable to brisk up in a hour or two, though, when the boys begin to drift in. Stranger around these parts, ain’t yuh?” he added curiously.
For a tiny space Buck hesitated. Then, moved by an involuntary impulse he did not even pause to analyze, he shrugged his shoulders slightly.
“I was out at the Shoe-Bar a couple of times about two years ago,” he answered. “Haven’t been around here since.”
“The Shoe-Bar? Huh?” Pop Daggett looked interested. “You don’t say so! Funny I don’t recollect yore face.”
“Not so very. I only passed through here to take the train.”
“That was it, eh? Two years ago must of been about the time the outfit was bought by that Stratton feller from Texas. Yuh know him well?”
“Joe Bloss, the foreman, was a friend of mine,” evaded Stratton. “He’s the one I stopped off now to see.”
Pop Daggett’s jaw sagged, betraying a cavernous expanse of sparsely-toothed gums. “Joe Bloss!” he ejaculated. “My land! I hope you ain’t traveled far fur that. If so, yuh sure got yore trouble for yore pains. Why, man alive! Joe Bloss ain’t been nigh the Shoe-Bar for close on to a year.”
Stratton’s eyes narrowed. “A year?” he repeated curtly. “Where’s he gone?”
“You got me. I did hear he’d signed up with the Flying-V’s over to New Mexico, but that might have been jest talk.” He sniffed disapprovingly. “There ain’t no doubt about it; the old Shoe-Bar’s changed powerful these two years. I dunno what we’re comin’ to with wimmin buttin’ into the cattle business.”
Buck stared at him in frank amazement. “Women?” he repeated. “What the dickens are you talking about, anyway?”
“I sh’d think I was plain enough,” retorted Pop Daggett with some asperity. “Mebbe female ranchers ain’t no novelty to yuh, but this is the first time I ever run up ag’in one m’self, an’ I ain’t much in love with the idear.”
Stratton’s teeth dug into his under lip, and one hand gripped the edge of the counter with a force that brought out a row of white dots across the knuckles.
“You mean to tell me there’s a – a – woman at the Shoe-Bar?” he asked incredulously.
“At it?” snorted the old man. “Why, by cripes, she owns it! Not only that, but folks say she’s goin’ to run the outfit herself like as if she was a man.” He paused to spit accurately and with volume into the empty stove. “Her name’s Thorne,” he added curtly. “Mary Thorne.”
CHAPTER II
CROOKED WORK
Stratton suddenly turned his back and stared blankly through the open door. With the same unconscious instinct which had moved him to conceal his face from the old man, he fumbled in one pocket and drew forth papers and tobacco sack. It spoke well for his self-control that his fingers were almost steady as he deliberately fashioned a cigarette and thrust it between his lips. When he had lighted it and inhaled a puff or two, he turned slowly to Pop Daggett again.
“You sure know how to shoot a surprise into a fellow, old-timer,” he drawled. “A woman rancher, eh? That’s going some around this country, I’ll say. How long has she – er – owned the Shoe-Bar?”
“Only since her pa died about four months back.” Pop Daggett assumed an easier pose; his tone had softened to one of garrulous satisfaction at having a new listener to a tale he had worn threadbare. “It’s consid’able of a story, but if yuh ain’t pressed for time – ”
“Go to it,” invited Buck, leaning back against the counter. “I’ve got all the time there is.”
Daggett’s small, faded blue eyes regarded him curiously.
“Did yuh ever meet up with this here Stratton?” he asked abruptly.
“I – a – know what he looks like.”
“It’s more’n I do,” grumbled Pop regretfully. “The only two times he was here I was laid up with a mean attack of rheumatiz, an’ never sot eyes on him. Still an’ all, there ain’t hardly anybody else around Paloma that more ’n glimpsed him passin’ through. He bought the outfit in a terrible hurry, an’ I thinks to m’self at the time he must be awful trustin’, or else a mighty right smart jedge uh land an’ cattle. He couldn’t of hardly rid over it even once real thorough before he plunks down his money, gets him a proper title, an’ hikes off to the war, leavin’ Joe Bloss in charge.”
He paused, fished in his pocket, and, producing a plug, carefully bit off one corner. Stratton watched him impatiently, a faint flush staining his clear, curiously white skin.
“Well?” he prodded presently. “What happened then? From what I know of Joe, I’ll say he made good all right.”
“Sure he did.” Pop spoke with emphasis, though somewhat thickly. “There ain’t nobody can tell Joe Bloss much about cattle. He whirled in right capable and got things runnin’ good. For a while he was so danged busy he’d hardly ever get to town, but come winter the work eased up an’ I used to see him right frequent. He’d set there alongside the stove evenings an’ tell me what he was doin’, or how he’d jest had a letter from Stratton, who was by now in France, an’ all the rest of it. Wal, to make a long story short, a year last month the letters stopped comin’. Joe begun to get worried, but I told him likely Stratton was too busy fightin’ to write, or he might even of got wounded. Yuh could have knocked me down with a wisp uh bunch-grass when one uh the boys come in one night with a Phoenix paper, an’ showed me Stratton’s name on a list uh killed or missin’!”
“When was that?” asked Buck briefly, seeing that Daggett evidently expected some comment. If only the man would get on!
“’Round the middle of September. Joe was jest naturally shot to pieces, him knowin’ young Stratton from a kid an’ likin’ him fine, besides bein’ consid’able worried about what was goin’ to happen to the ranch an’ him. Still an’ all, there wasn’t nothin’ he could do but go on holdin’ down his job, which he done until the big bust along the end of October.”
He paused again expectantly. Buck ground the butt of his cigarette under one heel and reached for the makings. He had an almost irresistible desire to take the garrulous old man by the shoulders and shake him till his teeth rattled.
“It was this here Thorne from Chicago,” resumed Daggett, a trifle disappointed. Usually at this point of the story, his listener broke in with exclamation or interested question. “He showed up one morning with the sheriff an’ claimed the ranch was his. Said Stratton had sold it to him an’ produced the deed, signed, sealed, an’ witnessed all right an’ proper.”
Match in one hand and cigarette in the other, Buck stared at him, the picture of arrested motion. For a moment or two his brain whirled. Could he possibly have done such a thing and not remember? With a ghastly sinking of his heart he realized that anything might have been possible during that hateful vanished year. Mechanically he lit his cigarette and of a sudden he grew calmer.