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"Checkers," observed Joe Breedlove, "is a pastime from which due observations regardin' life might be made. Yuh advance, then yuh stop. Mebbe yuh are taken. But yuh don't go back unless yuh reach the king row. Same in a man's life—only they ain't no king row."
"Mr.," said Lancelot Stubbins. "D'ye know, you're a queer cuss."
"It's been told me before," replied Joe, "only in less elegant terms. Don't I hear hawsses?"
He abandoned his game and went to the door. And when he saw Jill and Tom advancing out of the night he began to smile that rare, sweet smile. He saw them dismount and observed the careful manner in which Lilly lifted down the girl. At that he turned back. "Guess JIB will have good management from now on."
The pair came into the room. Tom Lilly walked straight over to Stubbins. "I'll keep my promise, amigo. Yore free as the air. But I'm yore nex' door neighbor from now on and you'll shoot square with the JIB."
"I guess," said Joe, "us boys won't have much more to do in these parts."
"Oh yes, you will," replied Tom. "Yore goin' to conduct a roundup on 3Cross an' ketch JIB critters. Also I'll be needin' a man to go to Powder an', have the sher'ff come out. He'll find Trono in the line rider's cabin."
"Is that all?" asked Joe.
"No, you son o' Satan, it ain't. Yore hired permanent as foreman o' the JIB. I'd like the boys to stay with us, too. We got to run the present crew off the range. Then we got to make a skookum ranch of it. What'd you do with Mr. Stubbins' men?"
Stubbins slammed down the handful of checkers he carried and rose, exploding a brief word. "Ran them to the county line, by Gad!"
"Fair enough."
"Is that all?" persisted Joe, smiling.
Tom Lilly looked to Jill soberly; she had nothing to say. "Well, you can be best man," he replied.
Joe's arm fell across his partner's shoulder. Nothing was said, but a glance passed between the two of them such as only loyal abiding friends would exchange.
CHAFFEE OF ROARING HORS
Table of Contents
XII. The Jaws of Roaring Horse
XIV. The Beginning of a Tragedy
XVI. The Shadow of Catastrophe
I. JIM CHAFFEE TAKES A LOSS
When Jim Chaffee walked out of his homestead for the last time in three long years of struggle, it was with his senses sharpened to the pleasantness of the place he was losing. The cabin sat on the south bank of a small creek that crossed the desert diagonally from the white and hooded peaks of Roaring Horse range to the dark, dismally deep slash of Roaring Horse Canyon. Cottonwoods bunched about the log house, the lodgepole corrals, the pole-and-shake barn. The morning's sun, brilliant but without warmth, streamed through the apertures of the trees; the sparkle of frost was to be seen here and there in the shadowed crevices of the creek bank. Standing so, Jim Chaffee could look up along the course of the creek and through the lane of trees to see the distant bench fold and hoist itself some thousands of feet until it met the sheer and glittering glacial spires of the range. A solitary white cloud floated across the serene blue; the broad, yellowing cottonwood leaves bellied gently down around him, and there was the definite threat of winter in the sharp air, reminding Jim of the nights he had spent beside a glowing stove, listening to the blizzard howl around the stout eaves, dreaming his dreams. He could never step inside the cabin again; those three years had gone for nothing.
Before closing the door he ranged the room with a last wistful glance, a last reluctant appraisal of those household gods with which he had lived for so long a time. Everything was neat and clean on this eventful morning; the dishes were washed and stacked in the cupboard, the floor swept, the fire drawn. Nothing was out of place, nothing removed excepting one small article, a bright blue-patterned mush bowl that he carried under an arm. Even the bed was made up. All this he studied, as well as the pictures tacked to the walls—pictures cut from old magazines—and the odds and ends of furniture that he had so laboriously created. He looked at these things gravely, regretfully, and then closed the door, turned the lock, and dropped the key in his pocket. As the lock clicked СКАЧАТЬ