In the Bad Lands

Author of “Out of the Blue,” “Easy Money,” Etc.

“Bad Land” Bill, the new rider, was a likable kid, but he was a mystery to the bunch at the Wineglass range. And when another strange individual stumbled into the light of the camp fire one night, the mystery deepened.

Against a window that faced the west bank of Plentywater, Charlie Shaw flattened his nose for a minute. April showers bring May flowers. Charlie grinned--because the April shower had become a snowstorm. The morning rain had turned into wet flakes the size of a thumb nail, eddying out of a darkened air. Now the ground lay six inches under a coat of arctic down. Tough on the sheepmen with lambing in full swing. Charlie grinned again. Cattle could stand it. The tougher the better. Sheep were a thorn in the rangeman’s tenderest side. They were becoming too plentiful for cow outfits to regard them with indifference. Shaw was not vindictive--but the less lambs the more grass for cattle.

Most of the stuff floating through his brain was idle thought. But his looking was not idle. The Benton trail skirted the rim of the plateau that flowed up to the hollow of Plentywater, and one of his riders was due from the stage road with mail. Bad weather had penned Charlie close for days. He was bored. Lacking action, he craved something to read. There might be letters. He stared through a brief let-up in the ballet of the snowflakes. Then the white curtain closed so that looking was vain. Charlie went back to the fireplace and yawned over a cigarette.

Boots thumped on the porch. Jerry Smith came in with the mail, cursed the water, clanked his spurs out again. Charlie looked over a letter or two, and buried himself in a Fort Benton newspaper until the cook called him to supper.

He marked a new face at the long table. A slim, dark youngster, thin faced, thin lipped, neatly dressed. He had white, even teeth that shone when he opened his mouth. But he only opened it for the purpose of stowing food. Charlie looked him over once. Riders came and went at all seasons. In the spring they drifted, and restless ones, from one range to another, looking for a job, looking for variety, looking for horses--genial nomads.

But as he sat before his fireplace, toasting his stockinged feet and studying a letter from the Sutherland range boss, a knock sounded at his door.

“Come in,” he grunted.

The slim, dark stranger faced him. His words were as spare as his frame.

“Full handed?” he asked.

Now Charlie Shaw had a full crew of able riders--the only kind suffered on the Wineglass pay roll. Ordinarily, he would have said: “Yeah. Full up, unless somebody breaks his neck.” That would have ended it. But something about this youngster caught Charlie’s fancy. Neat, but not gaudy. Slender and keen--like a new sword. So he asked a question.

“Where you from?”

“Bad Lands.”

“That’s a lot of territory,” Charlie remarked. “All kinds of people use it.”

The boy smiled slightly.

“Oh, I’m no outlaw. My folks has a one-horse outfit down on a fork of Sand Coulee. Nothin’ much for me at home, so I ride round-up. I been up in the Sun River Basin breakin’ horses all winter.”

“Sand Coulee, eh.” Charlie glanced at the letter in his hand. It was a friendly suggestion from the Block S that the Wineglass come down and work with them and the Picador, as northwesterly blizzards had drifted several thousand Wineglass cattle to the heart of that range. And there was mention of this place in the letter. “That the Sand Coulee down on the Sutherland range?”

“Uh-huh. I worked for the Block S two seasons back,” the boy answered.

“Good outfit,” Charlie commented.

“Sure. They say the Wineglass is a good outfit to ride for, too,” the other said. “I could go to work for Sutherland again, I guess. Thought I’d try you.”

“I guess I can use you,” Charlie said on impulse. He could. A good man always fitted in, and somehow this boy in three sentences and a look impressed him as being more than capable. Horses did fall on men. Occasionally a rider yearned for distant pastures and left. “What’s your name?”

“Bill Mather.”

“All right, Bill,” Charlie nodded. “I guess you know how to make yourself at home in a bunk house.”

Mather nodded and withdrew.

At ten o’clock Charlie looked out before he went to bed. All white, and more falling. A foot of snow in mid-April. Erratic weather.

It continued to be erratic. The Wineglass floundered in a white world for thirty-six hours. A touch of frost. Then warm rain. Dirty slush. More rain, like ice water on the bare face, slashing out of a lowering sky. Then the sun, smiling wanly, as if conscious of some seasonal aberration, and new grass slowly thrusting up green blades to surround the blue windflowers that spread petals bravely before the snow was fairly gone.

The Wineglass gathered the last of its saddle stock, and moved across the sodden plains to join the Block S south of the Bear Paws by the tenth of May, in a spring the like of which none of the old-timers recalled. Snow, rain, hail and sunshine--all in a twenty-four-hour day. Riders were crabbed, horses fractious. The plains wind whipped their faces and their tempers raw. But while a wheel could roll from one creek to another and cattle be bunched on a round-up ground, work went on.

Bill Mather lived up to Charlie Shaw’s first estimate. He more than held up his end. Did it with a peculiar sort of concentration on the job. For a youngster he was uncommonly self-contained. He would answer with a nod or a smile rather than a word. The rough joking of a round-up crew slid off him as rain off a slicker. In camp he would sit staring at nothing, chin in hand, his lean, dark face as impassive as a Buddha’s.

Charlie learned more about him from the Block S.

“Nice kid,” their range foreman said. “Made a good hand for me one season. Folks ain’t much. Old man’s no account. Got a brother that’s slick as hell at a lot of things, but lazy. Girl down there, sister or something, wild as a hawk. Keep their ranch like a boar’s nest. Got a few stock in the edge of the breaks. Scrap among themselves all the time. Bill’s all right. He’ll amount to somethin’. ‘Bad Land,’ we used to call him.”

Bad Land Bill. The Block S had christened him that. The Wineglass revived it. The name fitted the boy. He was like some wild, dynamic creature out of that desolate and distorted region which lies like a barrier on both sides of the Missouri River. The round-up moved its wagons along the edge of this sinister jumble of canyons, gullies, washouts, sagebrush, thickets of scrub pine, cut banks banded with layers of varicolored earth, like stripes of Indian paint. They reached down long, narrow plateaus winding through a network of impassable crevices, driving range cattle out ahead of them. It was like a vast maze, the Bad Land country. Yet it had its good points for a cattleman--also for others whose business was not so legitimate. There lay pasture and shelter for winter-driven stock. Aridity and bitter water kept sheep out in summer, and left a heavy stand of bunch grass where grass could grow. If, now and then, some sheriff cursed the country because he had to hunt a lawbreaker fruitlessly, it was no matter. It was a hard country to get about in on horseback, impossible for wheeled traffic.

In the edge of the Bad Lands, on a fork of Birch Creek, a furious rainstorm tied up the round-up. After twelve hours of downpour the gumbo soil softened so that a horse sank ankle-deep in stuff like putty, withdrawing his hoof with a curious sucking plop! The wagon tires cut inch by inch into the earth where they stood. It was like the Flood, with the Bear Paws a distant Ararat on the north, hidden in the murk, and not for their saving. They had to stay in the flats and take it. Day-herders on the cattle herd, the horse wrangler with his saddle bunch, in slicker and chaps, humped backs to the storm and endured their hours on watch. The rain grew colder, became sleety squalls. The second evening snow drove thick and fast, hard, stinging particles, out of the northwest. Overnight it piled fourteen inches deep. Noon laid two feet of this unwelcome white purity on the levels. The two round-up bosses held confab and turned their herds loose. It was too much to ask men to face day and night the blast of that untimely storm, to grow numb in their saddles on night guard. Their saddle stock they had to hold--they were the tools of their trade. They marshaled the cowboys into regular watches with the horse wranglers, standing two-hour shifts. There was no fenced pasture within thirty miles to relieve them of that necessity.

“What the hell’s the country comin’ to?” Bud Cole complained to Bill Mather. “The world musta slipped a couple of cogs north.”

“Maybe,” Bad Land agreed. “Tough on cowboys.”

The others slept, killed time with penny ante, cursed the weather, swapped range lore. Charlie Shaw brooded in the cook tent. It would clear with a hard frost. New-born calves dying in snowbanks in the last of May. April showers bring May flowers! Damn such weather!

Upon a convenient hillock a dozen riders laid ropes on a varied collection of dead-pine snags, dragged them down before the bed tent. They were saturated with pitch. One father of roots would burn for three days. They made bets on its duration. Once ignited, neither snow, wind, rain nor buckets of water could extinguish that pitch-fed flame. It made a pleasant glow between the opened flaps of the tent. Also it made a serviceable beacon in the dark, a mark for the relief men on night guard, a wavering yellow tongue like a lighthouse on a rocky coast.

The third night of the deep snow, when the fall had ceased, when the blustering northwest wind sank to a murmur, and sharp frost was setting a crust on the damp drifts, a man staggered into the circle of light. He had on overalls and a short sheepskin coat. He was an oldish man, with a tangled beard extending fanwise from his chin, a black beard like those of the prophets.

All but two of the Wineglass crew were in their blankets. These two were Charlie Shaw and Bud Cole, squatting between the bed tent and the glowing pine snag, talking in undertones. They looked at this apparition, wavering on its feet. He didn’t belong in either outfit.

“Hello,” Charlie greeted. “This is tough weather to be runnin’ around loose. You lost, or are you just goin’ some place?”

“Both, I guess. What outfit is this?”