The Range Dwellers by B. M. Bower (best life changing books .TXT) 📕

a minute, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched. "Sure," he responded cheerfully. "I'm something like you; I hate to break into a man's meditations. It looks like snow."

"Do you think it's going to storm?" I retorted in the same tone; it had been snowing great guns for the last three hours. We both laughed, and Frosty unbent and told me a lot about Bay State Ranch and the country around it.

Part of the information was an eye-opener; I wished I had known it when dad was handing out that roast to me—I rather think I could have made him cry enough. I tagged the information and laid it away for future reference.

As I got the country mapped out in my mind, we were in a huge capital H. The eastern line, toward which we were angling, was a river they call the Midas—though I'll never tell you why, unless it's a term ironical. The western line is another river, the Joliette, and the cross-bar is a range of hills—they might almost be called mountains—which I had been facing all that morning till the snow came between and shut them off; White Divide, it is called, and we were creeping around the end, between them and the Midas. It seemed queer that there was no way of crossing, for the Bay State lies almost in a direct line south from Osage, Frosty told me, and the country we were traversing was rough as White Divide could be, and I said so to Frosty. Right here is where I got my first jolt.

"There's a fine pass cut through White Divide by old Mama Nature," Frosty said, in the sort of tone a man takes when he could say a lot more, but refrains.

"Then why in Heaven's name don't you travel it?"

"Because it isn't healthy for Ragged H folks to travel that way," he said, in the same eloquent tone.

"Who are the Ragged H folks, and what's the matter with them?" I wanted to know—for I smelled a mystery.

He looked at me sidelong. "If you didn't look just like the old man," he said, "I'd think yuh were a fake; the Ragged H is the brand your ranch is known by—the Bay State outfit. And it isn't healthy to travel King's Highway, because there's a large-sized feud between your father and old King. How does it happen yuh aren't wise to the family history?"

"Dad never unbosomed himself to me, that's why," I told him. "He has labored for twenty-five years under the impression that I was a kid just able to toddle alone. He didn't think he needed to tell me things; I know we've got a place called the Bay State Ranch somewhere in this part of the world, and I have reason to think I'm headed for it. That's about the extent of my knowledge of our interest here. I never heard of the White Divide before, or of this particular King. I'm thirsting for information."

"Well, it strikes me you've got it coming," said Frosty. "I always had your father sized up as being closed-mouthed, but I didn't think he made such a thorough job of it as all that. Old King has sure got it in for the Ragged H—or Bay State, if yuh'd rather call us that; and the Ragged H boys don't sit up nights thinking kind and loving thoughts about him, either. Thirty years ago your father and old King started jangling over water-rights, and I guess they burned powder a-plenty; King goes lame to this day from a bullet your old man planted in his left leg."

I dropped the flag and started him off again. "It's news to me," I put in, "and you can't tell me too much about it."

"Well," he said, "your old man was in the right of it; he owns all the land along Honey Creek, right up to White Divide, where it heads; uh course, he overlooked a bet there; he should have got a cinch on that pass, and on the head uh the creek. But he let her slide, and first he knew old King had come in and staked a claim and built him a shack right in our end of the pass, and camped down to stay. Your dad wasn't joyful. The Bay State had used that pass to trail herds through and as the easiest and shortest trail to the railroad; and then old King takes it up, strings a five-wired fence across at both ends of his place, and warns us off. I've heard Potter tell what warm times there were. Your father stayed right here and had it out with him. The Bay State was all he had, then, and he ran it himself. Perry Potter worked for him, and knows all about it. Neither old King nor your dad was married, and it's a wonder they didn't kill each other off—Potter says they sure tried. The time King got it in the leg your father and his punchers were coming home from a breed dance, and they were feeling pretty nifty, I guess; Potter told me they started out with six bottles, and when they got to White Divide there wasn't enough left to talk about. They cut King's fence at the north end, and went right through, hell-bent-for-election. King and his men boiled out, and they mixed good and plenty. Your father went home with a hole in his shoulder, and old King had one in his leg to match, and since then it's been war. They tried to fight it out in court, and King got the best of it there. Then they got married and kind o' cooled off, and pretty soon they both got so much stuff to look after that they didn't have much time to take pot-shots at each other, and now we're enjoying what yuh might call armed peace. We go round about sixty miles, and King's Highway is bad medicine.

"King owns the stage-line from Osage to Laurel, where the Bay State gets its mail, and he owns Kenmore, a mining-camp in the west half uh White Divide. We can go around by Kenmore, if we want to—but King's Highway? Nit!"

I chuckled to myself to think of all the things I could twit dad about if ever he went after me again. It struck me that I hadn't been a circumstance, so far, to what dad must have been in his youth. At my worst, I'd never shot a man.

CHAPTER III. The Quarrel Renewed.

That night, by a close scratch, we made a little place Frosty said was one of the Bay State line-camps. I didn't know what a line-camp was, and it wasn't much for style, but it looked good to me, after riding nearly all day in a snow-storm. Frosty cooked dinner and I made the coffee, and we didn't have such a bad time of it, although the storm held us there for two days.

We sat by the little cook-stove and told yarns, and I pumped Frosty just about dry of all he'd ever heard about dad.

I hadn't intended to write to dad, but, after hearing all I did, I couldn't help handing out a gentle hint that I was on. When I'd been at the Bay State Ranch for a week, I wrote him a letter that, I felt, squared my account with him. It was so short that I can repeat every word now. I said: