LITMIR.BIZ

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be hell to pay."

      Sudden Ben nodded, having already learned as much from Mike Danahue in the saloon. "Think you can keep Weiser safe until the trial?"

      The marshal was touchy about that. "I never lost a man out of my jail yet and I'm too old to begin the habit. The hoemen won't free him and the cattle boys won't lynch him."

      "I'll be back for the trial," Sudden Ben assured him and went into the smoking car. Settled deeply in the plush seat he watched the dun earth scud by. Ashes fell on his vest and he seemed asleep. Yet his shrewd mind, packed with the lore of the land and the ways of its men, was closely analyzing the imponderables of Con Weiser's arrest. The cattlemen, he knew, were making a test of their strength against the rising tides of settlers. It didn't make any difference whether Con Weiser was guilty or not. Con Weiser was only a symbol. Trouble would come of it as Bulow had said.

      The train took him away from Prairie City at three o'clock. At four o'clock Tip Mulvane, with a thousand miles of riding behind him, came into Prairie and put up his horse at Orlo Torvester's stable.

      As a stranger in a distant land, Tip Mulvane followed his instincts and his long training in trouble. He kept still. Sleeping and eating and idling out the days on the shaded hotel porch, his eyes saw and his ears heard. He was a long-shaped man and it was plain to see that he belonged on a horse; for even when he walked there was that faint straddling gait of the rider. His eyes were a gunpowder gray, sometimes almost black when the sun didn't touch them, and his bones were flat and big, and weather had smoothed his face and disciplined it to a saddle-brown inexpressiveness. He was not more than twenty-five but Emerett Bulow, who had watched him with a growing interest from his first appearance, knew that somewhere he had been seasoned and toughened beyond his years. It was to be seen in the slow, careful way Tip Mulvane looked at this town.

      So when the trial of Con Weiser took up, Tip Mulvane knew all he needed to know.

      The story was clear and the ending already foretold. Standing in the back of the crowded courtroom on the second day of debate, he understood what the verdict would be. He had only to look at the double row of faces in the jury box and guess it; for those were the faces of range riders and not of hoemen, and he knew their kind to the very core. One of the Durbin riders sat in the witness seat and was wearily answering the questions of Con Weiser's young and fretful lawyer. Con Weiser rested in a camp chair beneath the judge, with his hands folded, showing no interest at all. Weiser, Tip Mulvane decided, knew the answer, too. Heat filled the room. Emerett Bulow and the county's sheriff, Sudden Ben, stood at the far edge of the judge's bench.

      The trial had dragged its way through the morning without excitement, yet Tip Mulvane could feel the quality of trouble growing. It was like the pressure of an arm against him; and when Howard Durbin, one of the three great ranchers in the valley and the employer of the dead rider, got up to leave the room that pressure stiffened and an unspoken rage whirled up from the homesteaders crowded so gauntly and bitterly against the back wall of the room. They blocked the door and when Durbin got there they didn't move. Tip Mulvane's gray eyes registered that little scene attentively. Durbin stopped, a slim and arrogant man with the sense of power written in every gesture, and he looked at those nesters blocking his way until at last some of them stirred and let him through. Tip Mulvane said to himself, with a touch of admiration, "He's nervy," and then heard the judge's gavel announce noon recess. He shuffled out of the courthouse with the crowd.

      Sunlight laid its hard and yellow flash all along Prairie's street. The hitch racks were crowded with teams and saddle ponies and people now rolled in a slow tide beneath the board awnings, not talking much. The feeling had been bad all morning; it was getting worse, with more homesteaders crowding into town and collecting in small groups up and down the dusty way. Durbin's punchers and the riders of Hugh Dan Lake and of the Custer Land and Cattle Company made their headquarters in Mike Danahue's saloon—strictly aloof from the hoemen.

      Tip Mulvane stopped opposite the courthouse, watching all this with a cool and attentive eye. The sudden, acute hunger of an active man was upon him, but he waited there, not quite knowing why until Katherine Weiser came out of the courthouse door and turned toward the porch of the hotel where other homesteaders' women had collected. There was, at once, some meaning to his standing so idly in the hot summer's sun. A tall young German settler with very blond hair was with her, but she seemed to Tip Mulvane just then to be alone on this dusty street. It was in the swing of her slim body and the straight and proud turning of her shoulders. Once she looked over the street and he caught the fair, composed glance that touched him for a brief moment and passed on.

      There were hoemen behind Tip Mulvane and he heard one of them say: "If Kitty Weiser was a man I'd be sorry to be in Howard Durbin's shoes."

      Somebody said quietly: "There's other men to do it."

      Tip Mulvane sauntered indolently along the dust, not knowing he made a puzzle to Emerett Bulow and Sudden Ben Drury standing under the gallery of Mike Danahue's saloon. Sudden Ben's eyes followed Tip Mulvane with a narrowing brightness. He said to Emerett Bulow: "Who's that?"

      "Stranger come to town."

      "Like a man I might have seen somewhere," murmured Sudden Ben and watched Tip Mulvane turn into the little restaurant down by the depot.

      Tip Mulvane ate his meal and sat a moment at the stool, shaping himself a cigarette and listening to the talk that ran its brief, half-sullen undertone around him; and later he went back up the street and laid the edge of his shoulder against a street post, and so stood there. A line of hoemen blackened by the prairie sun sat at the edge of the walk, their talk low and brief—and more and more bitter. It was a constant tone in Tip Mulvane's ears while he watched people return to the courthouse. Howard Durbin came from the hotel and stopped to light up a cigar. Old Hugh Dan Lake, the valley's most powerful cattleman, strolled up and stopped to talk to Durbin; and then Durbin beckoned with a finger and two Durbin riders came from the saloon and listened to what he said, and walked back again. A spray of fine wrinkles appeared at each corner of Tip Mulvane's eyes to indicate the quality of his interest just then; and his glance measured Howard Durbin from top to toe and found something that sent a faint constricting motion across the breadth of his lips.

      Sudden Ben Drury appeared from the courthouse and went directly to where Durbin and Hugh Dan Lake stood. Sudden Ben spoke to them, and Howard Durbin shook his head instantly, as though the sheriff's talk had been presumptuous. There was, Tip Mulvane could see, no thought of concession in Howard Durbin; the man was driving on for a fight, very certain of its outcome.

      A homesteader left the courthouse and advanced on the homesteaders gathered in front of Tip Mulvane. This man's stringy shoulders were hiked up and his eyes looked a little wild. "It won't get to the jury today." A puncher whirled into town and passed the grouped homesteaders with a sidewise stare that was openly insolent, and dismounted in front of the saloon; and suddenly the cattle hands made a silent group yonder and the hoemen made a sullen crowd opposite—with a gulf as deep and as wide as the ocean lying between.

      At the head of the street, beyond the courthouse, a few men began idly firing at a target to pass the time, the gunfire echoes riving the heated air like huge wedges. Katherine Weiser walked from hotel to courthouse, her black hair shining in the sullen light. She passed Howard Durbin without glancing at him, but Durbin's head wheeled around and his stare followed her boldly and with a frank appraisal. Tip Mulvane's long body stirred and his lids crept more closely together while he watched Howard Durbin's face. Faint anger turned him restless. He pivoted from the hoemen, his spurs jingling along the boardwalk. All the cattle hands were in front of Mike Danahue's and they watched him advance upon the saloon, their expressions inscrutably blank. His own glance raked them indolently and then he passed into the saloon, got a bottle and a glass and walked to a table and sat down.

      He had his drink and sat with his shoulders sliding down against the chair's back, waiting for the whisky to cut the edge of that hard and careful alertness which had guarded his life for so long. Certain things he saw here with the over-distinct vision of a man who knew the ways of trouble too well. Howard Durbin and the other big cattle owners were riding this affair hard. They had Con Weiser, the chief man of the homesteaders, in jail and they seemed to feel that the homesteaders would not rise to fight

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