"Hah!" snorted the perplexed Steve. "There's another item. How in hell do I know? Listen, you got a great experience Comin' to yuh, Dave. Before you pop the question yore high card. Nothin's too good. You sit in the best parlor chair, the old man hands out his best cigars, and the lady leans on yore arm as if she couldn't do without yore big, handsome carcass. But afterward—then what? All of a sudden you ain't nothin' but a future husband. The girl gets a far-off cast to her eyes and considers clothes and etiquette and such stuff; the old man considers the expenses and don't pass out no more cigars. The parlor chair's sent back to the attic, and nobody's got time to talk to yuh atall. I don't know nothin' about it. I suppose I'll get a notice some day to appear at such and such a church for the event—and otherwise I'm just hangin' out on a limb waitin' to be sawed down."
Denver spoke rather gently at his partner. "I wouldn't want you to think I was casting any cold water on matrimony, and I think Debbie Lunt's a fine girl. But I recall when you and I used to ride fifty miles to a dance and have a pretty sizable time. Also I recall the occasion when you and I switched all the teams at Fee's barn raisin'. You seem to have lost some starch lately, Steve."
"I ain't had an idea of my own since I proposed," reflected Steve, weltering in gloom. "I thought that was sure a bright idea at the time. I ain't so sure any more."
"Then why get married?" grunted Denver.
"Well, I figgers it out this way. How will life be thirty years from now with Debbie? Terrible—awful. I shudders to think of it. A bath every week, no smokin' in the house, no liquor, no poker, no roamin'. No nothin'. It'll be, come here, Steve, and go there, Steve, and, Steve, mind the mud on yore shoes. Likewise, Steve, put a muffler on yore neck against the cold and, Steve, dear, I will take care of yore month's pay, so shell it over and don't bat them eyes on me like that. Oh, my Gawd!"
"If that's the way you feel," stated Denver, "why not bunch the proposition?"
"Well," sighed Steve, "I figgers that thisaway. How will life be thirty years from now if I ain't got her? Hell, Dave, there ain't any other woman who wants me. I'd be a single galoot. Batchin' in a shanty full of holes. Mendin' my own socks and cookin' my own beans. Nobody to talk to and nobody who gives a damn what happens to me. Bein' old and useless without a fambly is shore a sorrowful thing. So I considers. I shudders to think of bein' married to Debbie and I shudders to consider I'll lose her. Upon mature reflection I calculate I shudder hardest when I think of losin' her. Therefore, marriage is the ticket."
"Ought to be glad you got it fought to a standstill," offered Denver dryly.
"Yeah," muttered Steve and stared across the room. There was an enormous lack of enthusiasm in his answer, a kind of mortal weariness. "Oh, yeah. Uhuh."
"Let's go," said Denver, leading out. They got their horses and turned back on the trail. Beyond the poplars Denver stopped. "Listen, I sort of want to get a little information for my own personal use. Let's split here. You take the short way into town. I'll go round by the toe of Starlight."
Steve Steers was alert. "Lookin' for anybody in particular?"
"No, but I'd like to know if the population of Yellow Hill County is shiftin' across the Copperhead tonight. Stinger Dann has sort of put a bug in my bonnet."
"It's an idea," mused Steve, "and might bear fruit."
"Said fruit, if any, is for our own nourishment exclusively," warned Dave.
"I heard yuh the first time," stated Steve. "Let's slope. And better hurry, or yuh won't get to show that shave."
He spurred on down the trail. Denver cut around his ranch quarters, ascended a stiff pathway, and plunged into the sudden gloom of a pine belt. The lights from D Slash winked and were cut off; the pines spread away before an upland meadow swimming with fog, and this tilted into a narrow ravine that struck straight for leveler land to the south. Denver, with a comparatively free trail in front, urged a more rapid pace.
As he traveled he reviewed the affair at Copperhead crossing. Ever since that remote boyhood day when he became conscious for the first time that the placid world held a thousand threats he had been fighting savagely against the dominant elements. His whole life had been fashioned and tempered by these struggles and so now in manhood David Denver looked on the wild forces of nature as a pagan would, endowing these forces almost with living personalities. He had been fighting them too long to regard them any other way. Thus he felt a grim sort of satisfaction in knowing that he had whipped the river and won another engagement in that everlasting skirmish with the earth. Yet when he considered that but for the swift accuracy of Lou Redmain's lariat he would now be nothing more than a bit of senseless rubbish rolling along the turbid stream, all the rebellious instincts in him rose up, and he scowled at the night.
"No man can survive a thousand chances," he thought to himself, "and I've taken a great many already. Some day this country will get me. Like it got my dad. Like it's got others. I reckon I'll always be battling, and one of these times my foot is going to slip. When that happens I'm gone."
But he knew he would never quit, never fail to throw his strength into the contest.
He galloped down the incline with a slumbering shoulder of Starlight Canyon on his left. The stage road came sweeping past, and he turned into it, the gray gelding stretching out to a long free gallop. Below and beyond the prairie lay like a calm ocean, surface overlain with the misting fog. There was a moon somewhere above, but its pale light refracting against the heaving banks of atmosphere made only a shimmering corona that revealed nothing. The thick air cut through his shirt, and all the dampened incense of the countryside slid sluggishly across the highway. A coyote barked, and away below the road the bell of some homesteader's milk cow tinkled. Unconsciously Dave Denver's mood softened under the spell of a world fermenting with new life.
He crossed an open bridge, the boom of his pony's shod hoofs echoing away. Down a long and level grade he traveled, and up another rise. At the throat of some dim gully he stopped, dismounted, and applied a match to the wet side trail. But it was blank of riding signs, and he went on; past Dead Axle Hill, along the hairpin descent into Sundown Valley, and beside the foreboding wall of Shoshone Dome. Somewhere in the distance he caught the tremor of hasting riders; instantly he left the road and paused in a black crevice of the dome. The sound swelled out of the western side of the valley and suddenly dropped off.
"Comin' through the soft meadow stretch," he decided.
Presently the party achieved the sharper underfooting of the road and swept forward. Denver leaned over and placed his hand across the gelding's muzzle. Shadow and shadow flashed by, a bare twenty feet removed; silent shadows riding two abreast and swaying with the speed of their passage. Fire glinted from a flailing hoof, and then these nocturnal birds of passage had melted into the distance, and the reverberation was absorbed by the vast night. Denver regained the road.
"They started from the Wells," he reflected, "not from Sundown. And they're hell-bent for somewhere, as they usually are. My guess was wrong. Redmain's already pulled them out of the Sky Peak country. As always, when lightnin' strikes he's miles away. A wise man if not a good one." So plunged in thought, he let the gelding go and in a half hour picked up the lights of Sundown. Music came from the opera house; the show already had begun. He racked his horse in front of Grogan's and entered to find Steve at the bar.
A GENTLEMAN'S GAME
"Nothin'," said Steve softly.
"I had better luck," was Denver's rejoinder. Grogan himself, an overbearing man with a spurious smile of good humor, came down the bar, and Steve changed the subject.
"Well, go see the show, and what do I care? I'll play poker." Then, remembering this was also one of those pastimes an engaged man should not participate in, he hastily qualified. "I mean I can spend a large evenin' lookin' on.
"It certainly sounds violent," jeered Denver and strolled out. Instead of going directly across