The Rustler of Wind River. George W. Ogden

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      Mark took the paper and laid his pipe aside while he studied it.

      “Macdonald?”

      “Alan Macdonald,” nodded Chadron. “That feller’s opened a ditch from the river up there on my land and begun to irrigate!”

      “Irrigatin’, huh?” said Mark, abstractedly, moving his finger down the column of names.

      “He makes a blind of buyin’ up cattle and fattenin’ ’em on the hay and alfalfer he’s raisin’ up there on my good land, but he’s the king-pin of the rustlers in this corner of the state. He’ll be in here tomorrow with cattle for the Indian agent—it’s beef day—and you can size him up. But you’ve got to keep your belly to the ground like a snake when you start anything on that feller, and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got him dead to rights. He’s quick with a gun, and he’s sure.”

      “Five hundred?” suggested Mark, with a crafty sidelong look.

      “You’ve named it.”

      “And something down for expenses; a feller’s got to live, and livin’s high.”

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      Chadron drew out his wallet. Money passed into Mark’s hand, and he put it away in his pocket along with the list of names.

      “I’ll see you in the old place in Cheyenne for the settlement, if you make good,” Chadron told him.

      Mark waved his hand in lofty depreciation of the hint that failure for him was a possible contingency. He said no more. For a little while Chadron stood looking down on him as he leaned with his pipe over the dead ashes in the fireplace, his hand in the breast of his coat, where he had stored his purse. Mark treated the mighty cattleman as if he had become a stranger to him, along with the rest of the world in that place, and Chadron turned and went his way.

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CHAPTER II

       BEEF DAY

       Table of Contents

      Fort Shakie was on its downhill way in those days, and almost at the bottom of the decline. It was considered a post of penance by enlisted men and officers alike, nested up there in the high plateau against the mountains in its place of wild beauty and picturesque charm.

      But natural beauty and Indian picturesqueness do not fill the place in the soldierly breast of fair civilian lady faces, nor torrential streams of cold mountain water supply the music of the locomotive’s toot. Fort Shakie was being crept upon by civilization, true, but it was coming all too slow for the booted troopers and belted officers who must wear away the months in its lonely silences.

      Within the memory of officers not yet gray the post had been a hundred and fifty miles from a railroad. Now it was but twenty; but even that short leap drowned the voice of the locomotive, and the dot at the rails’ end held few of the endearments which make soldiering sweet.

      Soon the post must go, indeed, for the need of it had passed. The Shoshones, Arapahoes, and Crows had forgotten their old animosities, and were traveling with Buffalo Bill, going to college, and raising alfalfa under the direction of a government farmer. 12 The Indian police were in training to do the soldiers’ work there. Soon the post must stand abandoned, a lonely monument to the days of hard riding, long watches, and bleak years. Not a soldier in the service but prayed for the hastening of the day.

      No, there was not much over at Meander, at the railroad’s end, to cheer a soldier’s heart. It was an inspiring ride, in these autumn days, to come to Meander, past the little brimming lakes, which seemed to lie without banks in the green meadows where wild elk fed with the shy Indian cattle; over the white hills where the earth gave under the hoofs like new-fallen snow. But when one came to it through the expanding, dusty miles, the reward of his long ride was not in keeping with his effort.

      Certainly, privates and subalterns could get drunk there, as speedily as in the centers of refinement, but there were no gentlemanly diversions at which an officer could dispel the gloom of his sour days in garrison.

      The rough-cheeked girls of that high-wind country were well enough for cowboys to swing in their wild dances; just a rung above the squaws on the reservation in the matter of loquacity and of gum. Hardly the sort for a man who had the memory of white gloves and gleaming shoulders, and the traditions of the service to maintain.

      Of course there was the exception of Nola Chadron, but she was not of Meander and the railroad’s end, and she came only in flashes of summer 13 brightness, like a swift, gay bird. But when Nola was at the ranchhouse on the river the gloom lifted over the post, and the sour leaven in the hearts of unmarried officers became as sweet as manna in the cheer of the unusual social outlet thus provided.

      Nola kept the big house in a blaze of joy while she nested there through the summer days. The sixteen miles which stretched between it and the post ran out like a silver band before those who rode into the smile of her welcome, and when she flitted away to Cheyenne, champagne, and silk hats in the autumn, a grayness hovered again over the military post in the corner of the reservation.

      Later than usual Nola had lingered on this fall, and the social outlet had remained open, like a navigable river over which the threat of ice hung but had not yet fallen. There were not lacking those who held that the lodestone which kept her there at the ranchhouse, when the gaieties of the season beckoned elsewhere, was in the breast of Major Cuvier King. Fatal infatuation, said the married ladies at the post, knowing, as everybody knew in the service, that Major King was betrothed to Frances Landcraft, the colonel’s daughter.

      No matter for any complications which might come of it, Nola had remained on, and the major had smiled on her, and ridden with her, and cut high capers in the dance, all pending the return of Frances and her mother from their summering at Bar Harbor in compliance with the family traditions. 14 Now Frances was back again, and fortune had thrown a sunburst of beauty into the post by centering her and Nola here at once. Nola was the guest of the colonel’s daughter, and there were flutterings in uniformed breasts.

      Beef day was an event at the agency which never grew old to the people at the post. Without beef day they must have dwindled off to acidulous shadows, as the Indians who depended upon it for more solid sustenance would have done in the event of its discontinuation by a paternal government.

      There were phases of Indian life and character which one never saw save on beef day, which fell on Wednesday of each week. Guests at the post watched the bright picture with the keen interest of a pageant on the stage; tourists came over by stage from Meander in the summer months by the score to be present; the resident officers, and their wives and families—such as had them—found in it an ever-recurring source of interest and relief from the tedium of days all alike.

      This beef day, the morning following the meeting between Saul Chadron and his mysterious guest, a chattering group stood on the veranda of Colonel Landcraft’s house in the bright friendly sun. They were waiting for horses to make the short journey to the agency—for one’s honesty was questioned, his sanity doubted, if he went afoot in that country even a quarter of a mile—and gayest among them was Nola Chadron, the sun in her fair, springing hair.

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