The blazing, blood-red sun dropped over the western rim and left the valley to a twilight peace. Tom Lilly riding his weary buckskin toward the distant huddle of buildings that formed the isolated town of Powder, felt the first of the evening's breeze. It had all the effect of a cold shower on man and beast; Lilly wiped the crusted sweat from his face and washed his parched throat with a drink.
"Another day, another dollar. Buck, you got a restless, homeless no-account for a rider."
The pony raised its ears and quickened the pace Dust rose behind in swirling eddies. Night threw successive darkening cobalt shadows across the land, through which twinkled here and there the light of a homesteader's shack; eastward the high mesa became nothing but a stark outline against the sky.
It was new country to Tom Lilly. For that reason and no other was he here. The lure of the unknown, the unseen drew him like a magnet. Beyond the hill was always the promise of fairer fields, the hint of great adventure. And as tired as he was, a small excitement burned in his blue eyes and compressed the muscles of his lean, sun-blackened face as he drew upon Powder and beheld the lights shining out of the windows into the rutty, dusty street. This was the whole story of Tom Lilly and explained the wistfulness of his features, the temper that slumbered fitfully beneath the sorrel-red thatch of hair. He was a wanderer, a seeker of something that could never come to pass; Joe Breedlove, his partner back on the H-H, had said this in plain blunt language—though rather sorrowfully—when Tom was on the point of moving.
"Yuh ain't foolin' me, old-trapper, with that poker face o' yourn. I reads you mos' clearly. Yore a red-haired gent with misbegotten idears o' romance. All red-heads is the same, which is a fact. Yuh have traveled a hell of a lot o' trails before yuh camped here, without findin' anything to please yuh. Better stick to these diggin's, amigo. Yuh won't locate any better. All you'll do is grow gray an' mis'ble. Ain't I seen how these roamers end up? Usually over a bar'l o' spuds in some town restaurant. Yeah, a broken-down old codger washin' dishes fer a livin'. Ain't that a fine end fer an A-l top hand?"
But Tom Lilly tightened his cinches and tied down his blanket roll, smiling in a faint sheepish way. "Lots of country I ain't seen, Joe. If I don't like it I'll mosey back."
Joe Breedlove shook his head. "Yore kind don't back track." Then the man's big paw gripped his friend's arm. "Well, yuh know best. If yuh ever git in a jam, drop a line or send up a smoke signal. I'll come-a-runnin'."
"Sho'," muttered Tom, losing his grin. He had ridden off with a very brief farewell. Now, as he entered this straggling town street, he was recalling those words. "The hardest part about movin'," he said to himself "is leavin' a good Joe like that behind." He had said goodbye often, yet never with quite the same depression of spirit. "He was shore a square gent. Well, here we are, and where are we?"
Powder was just another desert town. Tom Lilly had seen a hundred built in the same loose-jointed shackling fashion, with a dozen or more false-fronted frame buildings abutting a dirt street. There would be two or three saloons with their kerosene lights beckoning through the swinging doors, a general store, a restaurant, a jail and, somewhere near the edge of town, a livery stable. Lilly rode slowly, looking for this latter establishment. Men moved in the shadows, their cigarette tips gleaming. Dishes rattled in the restaurant and from the nearest saloon came the flat, unmelodious notes of a piano. Powder was tuning up for the night, given a new lease on life by the evening breeze. Lilly, turning his horse into the stable, felt depressed. It was the same old story over again; Joe Breedlove was right—he would travel the long trail until he could no longer sit in the saddle, looking for something not to be found. How could he find it when he didn't know what he looked for? Just another stray critter never thrown and branded. He slipped off the buckskin, seeing the stable roustabout amble through the door.
"This pony," said he, "gets oats. Where's yore brush and currycomb?"
He led the animal to a stall, slipped off the gear and set to work with the implements the roustabout produced. The latter, displaying the indirect curiosity of his kind, spoke casually.
"Hope it ain't this hot where you come from."
"We had rain there in 1903," opined Tom gravely. "Where's a good place to eat?"
"They's only one place, which is the Star. You won't mind it too much if yore hungry, I might add they's usually a gentleman's game o' poker in progress at Jake Miner's place. Mos' stranger like to know, so I'm a-tellin' you. Mama Ringo runs the hotel if it's your desire to sleep on a real four-bit bed. The sher'ff an' marshal are both tol'rant to'rds ord'nary misdemeanors o' the peace. I might add the likker here abouts is thirty proof an' the cards entirely without marks. Which constitutes the whole story o' this hole in the ground. It's a nice leetle place—if you don't stay long."
"You shore are a compendium of useful knowledge," averred Lilly, strolling out. "Civic pride is a jewel of great renown."
The roustabout's retort was a short and emphatic word that exploded in the darkness. Tom Lilly, smiling slightly, crossed to the Star and had his supper in solitary state. Powder had unanimously eaten and departed to its pleasures, leaving the latest arrival to finish his steak and onions among a debris of dishes. It was a meal, nothing more than that and Tom paid his bill and walked out, hungry; not for food, but for the palaver of his own kind, for the rough joke and the twang of a familiar voice. It was always thus when restlessness drove him onward and away from friends. He was forever an alien in a strange land, left to his own sober, wistful thoughts. Under the impulse of this loneliness, he built himself a cigarette and headed for Jake Miner's.
But before he reached the door the jingling of the piano, the rattling of chips and the hum of voices suddenly ceased. A silence, uneasy and expectant, pervaded the place and when he pushed through the swinging portals he became a witness to a scene that jerked at his nerves and sent a warning down his right arm. There was something going on here out of the ordinary, something that made him brush the butt of his gun with careful fingers and move quickly to a rear wall. It was such a little drama as he had often seen before and within thirty seconds his quick-acting, partisan temper was thoroughly engaged on the side of a man who appeared to be the under dog. And of a man not of his own kind or profession.
He was a nester, this fellow. That was obvious from a glance at the shabby overalls and the sallow, bewhiskered face. He had a gaunt, weather-beaten frame and a pair of hands warped out of shape by hard labor. A very homely man, who leaned uneasily against the mahogany bar and gripped a glass of whisky that had not been touched. He was perhaps forty, but he looked older, and from beneath bushy sun-bleached brows a pair of faded blue eyes stared out in mixed defiance and fear. Lilly leaned against the wall, hearing a faint whisper float across a near table. "Trono'll shore kill 'im. He shore will." And Lilly, growing angry on the instant, turned his attention to the second party at the bar.
Trono was smiling in the tight malevolent way of a man enjoying himself over a victim. He was a short and burly creature with immense shoulders and arms; a thick, columnar neck supported a face that was as swart as any Indian's; but here the resemblance stopped, for his chin was of the outthrust, cleft kind and he had bulging green eyes. Somewhere he had been engaged in desperate fighting, one mark of which ran across the high bridge of his nose and up in to the half-bald bullet head. Undeniably he was of the cattle range, and he was taking a cowman's attitude toward the nester. He lifted his own whisky glass, speaking in a rumbling, husky voice.
"We'll drink to the sudden death o' all nesters. Down she goes."
"Well, I dunno's that's perlite," protested the other. "I'm a peaceable feller, a-mindin' my own business."
"Mean to say yuh won't drink with a man?" roared Trono. "That's the sorta insult that don't go down in this country! Why, you—"
"Oh, I'll drink if it'll soothe yer feelin's any," said the nester, raising his glass.
Trono was grinning. And when the nester was about to drink, one massive arm swept across the intervening space and slapped the glass to the floor. The nester spewed the