The Spook Hills Mystery/Chapter 8

Vida Williams, hard of eye and lips, hot from hard riding, and looking ready to fight the whole Sunbeam outfit, rode up to the cabin and pulled her right foot out of the stirrup, ready to dismount. But when she saw Spider and Shelton coming toward her from the stable—they having seen her ride by—she stayed in the saddle and waited glumly till they came up.

"Where's Goliath?" she demanded shortly, with never a greeting.

"In the cabin, I guess. Good morning, Miss Vida. Will you meet—well, Spider is all the name I know that belongs to him. This is Miss Williams, Spider."

Miss Williams gave Spider a glance and a nod far from cordial. "I want to see Goliath—and I want to see him quick," she said. "I wish you'd call him out."

Spider went at once to the cabin and opened the door. "There's a lady wants to see you, Burney," he called within, and turned back. Shelton was asking Vida what was the matter, and wouldn't she get off her horse and rest a while. And Vida was giving him short answers that told him nothing except that her mood was villainous and her time limited.

Burney, bending his shoulders forward to save his head a bump, appeared in the doorway, stared at Vida for a minute with his little, deep-set, twinkling eyes, and came up to her. He was so big that Vida's horse was afraid of him, and when he saw that he stopped, and came forward more slowly. When he stood finally within ten feet of her their eyes were nearly on a level.

"You wanted to see me?" he asked her in his high, falsetto voice.

"I wanted to ask you what's your object in killing off our sheep the way you're doing," Vida stated harshly, not one whit abashed by the size of him. "You may have poppy buffaloed, and Uncle Jake, but you can't scare me. And I've come over to tell you, Mr. Goliath, that if you kill another sheep of ours I'm going to watch my chance and plant a bullet where it will do the most good. You ain't easy to miss, you know!"

"I ain't killed any sheep of yours," Burney denied, reddening perceptibly under her angry gaze. "I didn't know there'd been any sheep killed. When was it?"

"Last night and night before last, and you needn't try to make me believe you don't know! Who else could grab up a sheep and wring its neck and break its ribs just by squeezing? Night before last it was Uncle Jake's band, and last night it was ours—and last night you killed twenty before I got out where I could take a shot at you. In the dark I missed"

"It wasn't me," Burney told her again. "I've never been near your camp except the other day—in the morning. I told your father to keep away from Piute Hills, Miss Williams. If you're sensible you'll get your father to move his sheep back the other way. I can't"

"We ain't going to move, and you can't make us move!" Vida's voice sharpened almost to shrewishness. "Poppy might get scared out—but I won't let him move. That's open range over there, and we're going to have our share. You needn't think you can hog all the grass in the country, and you needn't think you can come sneaking into our band at night and kill sheep till you're tired, and not get some of your own medicine. I—oh, I wish I could take you and wring your neck just like you done to the sheep!" Tears of rage were in her voice. "Just because you're big as all outdoors, you think you can run us out, but you can't—you've got another think coming. If you was twice as big"

Burney took a step nearer. The crimson had left his face, so that he looked actually pale. "Miss Williams, I never killed your sheep. I don't want to have any trouble with your father unless he drives me to it. I ain't a quarrelsome man when I'm left alone. But I can't afford to buy your folks out again—I done that once, and lost money on the deal. I lost a lot of money. And I can't afford to lose no more. Miss Williams, I'm in debt as it is. I've got to make my cattle pull me out, or else I'm liable to go under. And it ain't fair for your father to bring in sheep on me. I need the range for my own stock. I—don't want to act mean about it, Miss Williams, but—you better talk your father into moving back"

"Sure, I will—not!" Burney's apologetic manner might astonish the boy, but it failed altogether to impress Vida. "We're in just as bad a fix as you are—and there's three of us to think of, and only one of you. We're in debt ourselves, and we've got to make the sheep pull us out. And we need the range. You know just as well as I do that the feed's poor back toward Pillar Butte. We ain't going to back off for you or anybody else. And we ain't going to set down and suck our thumbs while you kill off our sheep just to be mean. I said before, and I'll say it again—and I want you to remember it, all of you: If you kill another single, solitary sheep I'll take a shot at you—in daylight, when I can see where to shoot." She swung her horse away from the giant. "So if you think you're going to make anything off us that way, go to it. I'm taking a hand in this killing game myself. But I ain't like you; I ain't going to sneak up on you after dark; I'll play my hand on top of the table. You kill our sheep, and I'll kill you—and take chances on the jury."

She looked at Shelton, and then at Spider, turned her face away, and then faced them grimly. "You both hear—I mean it," she said defiantly to them. "Maybe it ain't ladylike, but I can't help that; I've got to be human first. And if somebody in our outfit has got to wade in and fight, I'd rather it would be me than poppy or Uncle Jake—I'll stand more show in court if it comes to that."

"Making capital out of your sex?" Shelton reproved mildly. "You wouldn't do that, Miss Vida!"

"Oh—wouldn't I?" Vida curled her lip at him in a way to crimple his vanity. "Why not? Women never do get a square deal anyway. You men don't show any squeamishness about making capital of our sex, do you? You take every advantage of us that you can get. So when we know where to hit your weak points, I believe in aiming for them. And if it came to working a bunch of mutts in the jury box in order to get a square deal, you can bet your hat I'd work them to a fare-you-well. Men are the limit, anyway." She laughed at him in a way to redden his whole face. "Look at you, for instance. You'd like to flirt a little and make me think you were It, just because you're lonesome and I'm the only girl in the country. You wouldn't give a whoop for my feelings, just so you were amused. Isn't that straight? And is it fair? Isn't that making capital out of my sex? And Mr. Burney here—because he's big and strong and can lord it over common men—he thinks I don't count. Just because I'm a girl he passes me up as if I didn't have any interest in them sheep over there. Oh, you all—every darned one of you—think I'm a white chip in the game—less than a white chip. I'm a girl—so all I can do is talk! Well—you go ahead the way you've started out, and see!"

She sent them a cold, gray glance all round, antagonistic, with the bitter antagonism of the consciously weak; gave her head a little, defiant toss, and struck her horse down the rump with her quirt. So she rode away from the Sunbeam, and the three turned and watched her in dead silence.

"She'd shoot, all right—believe me!" Spider commented when she was no more than a bobbing black object against the sunlit sage.

"I never killed their sheep," Burney muttered complainingly. "But if they keep crowding up on my range" He turned sullenly, and went back into the cabin and left the two standing there in that passive attitude which is the natural reaction after a high-tensioned incident.

"Well, come on, Shep. Let's go out after Dutch." Spider turned away toward the stables. "Looks like things are beginning to tighten."

"Shall we take candles?" Shelton fell into pace beside him, and found that the pace required long strides and swift.

"Sure, we'll take candles. Might as well make a clean sweep, Shep—if you ain't scared to go back."

"I'd go, whether I'm scared or not," Shelton declared firmly. "But I'm not—as far as I can feel any symptoms—oh, shucks!" he added impatiently. "What's the use of hedging? What do you think of Vida's stand? Pretty nervy for a girl to face Burney that way, don't you think? And she"

"Yeah—skate a little closer, Shep. What about them sheep?"

Shelton, however, did not care to skate over that particular bit of ice. He said he didn't know, and changed the subject. Whereat Spider grinned to himself and then became much occupied with his own thoughts.

"Well, right over behind that cut-off butte is the cañon where the cave is." Shelton drew up on the east side of a pinnacle and pointed. "We can get down into the big cañon"

"Yeah—I know that big cañon. I've been in it. That's where I was trailing a lion when—something commenced to foller me." Spider cupped his palms around a match blaze. "Might have been a link," he conceded when his cigarette was lighted and he had blown out the match. "These hills is full of animals a man never sees. I've been thinking maybe it was a link you heard in the cave or a lion. Didn't you happen to notice any round tracks—like a great big cat? Tracks about that big, say?" With his bent fingers he inclosed a circle larger than a cup, just by way of encouragement.

"No. But I did see a bear's track. And I saw Burney's tracks, too," he added doggedly. "I hate to"

"I don't know why Burney wouldn't have as much license to go into a cave as you had," Spider cut in dryly..

"Well, I suppose he has got. But he don't want any one to come over here—and then comes himself. And then—there are those sheep Vida claims were killed."

"And that's why," said Spider calmly, "I'm going to ride over that way and take a look. No telling which way Dutch went, seeing he didn't come back to the ranch—and that's mighty funny, too. We're liable to find him over that way. Darn it," Spider went on in a tone of complete bafflement, "there ain't one solitary fact that lines up with any other fact. That's what gets me. You saw bear tracks in that cave—and you heard something scream, you claim; and only a mountain lion or a link would make the kinda noise you say you heard. Vida says Burney killed their sheep—and Burney ain't that kinda man as I know him; and I've worked for him over two years now. Burney says he never went near their camp except one morning—and he was gone last night somewhere. I got up about one o'clock and his horse and saddle was missing, and I went down again at three and they was there. And he was gone when I went out just before we went to bed. And I can't figure out any errand that would take him out all night. And I never knowed Burney to lie. Gosh! He's so ungodly big he don't have to lie. His say-so comes pretty near going as she lays.

"And to pile the agony up still higher, there's Dutch. There ain't no reason why, if he was scairt off from where you left him, he wouldn't come straight on home—and he never come. Oh, thunder!" said Spider as a brief way of summing up his perplexities. "Come on, Shep. We'll go take a look at them dead sheep for a starter; I know about where old Williams would be camped. And after that we'll take a look at the cave."

To look at the dead sheep was easy. The Williams camp had moved since daylight, but when they saw the white-topped wagon moving in leisurely fashion up nearer the hills, and farther away the moving patch of gray which was the sheep, they swung in on the trail and followed it back to where Spider knew was a spring.

There they found the dead sheep, lately skinned for their pelts, and left to fatten the coyotes. Spider forced his horse close to the fly-blackened carcasses, and sat there looking down with frowning brows. Every sheep had its neck twisted to dislocation, and nearly every sheep had been squeezed flat—squashed, Vida had called it. He raised his head, and studied the low ridges and correspondingly shallow gullies of that vicinity. He scowled down again at the skinned carcasses. He looked across at Shep, who was hovering agitatedly in the immediate background because of his horse's distaste for dead sheep, and he hunched his shoulders and rode away.

"Well, what was it—a bear?" Shelton quizzed him after an expectant silence.

"Ask the sheep," suggested Spider, and added: "They can tell you as much about it as I can."

"But what do you think?" Shelton, remember, was of the persistent type of individual.

"I'm thinkin' damns, right now, mostly," said Spider.

Shelton did not cover himself with honor that day. To begin with, he could not find the cañon that ended in the crude amphitheater where was the cave. He led Spider into two blind pockets in the hills, and in each instance he discovered only, after a prolonged search, that it was not the right cañon. He persisted in riding with too loose a rein in spite of Spider's repeated warnings and profane instructions, and the horse shied unexpectedly and violently and threw Shelton into a patch of brush, and bolted while Shelton thrashed around in there trying to get out. Spider chased the horse a quarter of a mile over some nasty rocks and washouts before he caught him and led him back—and you can judge what his temper was like after that.

Being unable to find the cañon that held the cave, Shelton could not find the gulch in which he had seen the old squaw. He had scraped the skin off one forearm in falling, and had hurt his knee so that he found walking painful, and he was not enthusiastic over riding, either. The sun blazed down upon them more pitilessly than it had done before that spring—there were plenty of reasons for the sulky silence that held the two at last.

And then, just when they were picking their way gingerly across a steep sidehill to where a bare ridge gave promise of a precarious trail into the cañon they must cross if they would reach the Sunbeam without riding an extra ten miles, Spider's sharp eyes caught a glimpse of something moving along the opposite side of the cañon. He pulled up, and stared steadily, shading his eyes with his hand like the pictures of Indian chiefs gazing out to the setting sun.

When Shelton, looking also and seeing far less than did Spider, asked what it was, Spider told him that Shelton could search him, and went on in the same moody silence.

Shelton waited a minute longer.

"It looked to me like a bear," he volunteered when he overtook Spider. "Or else maybe it was a cow. Did you see it go behind those rocks?"

Spider grunted, and let Shelton interpret the sound to please himself. It was not until they descended into the cañon bottom that Spider was surprised into speech. They came full upon Dutch, feeding dispiritedly upon the scanty grass there. Dutch had neither saddle nor bridle, or anything upon him save the marks of hard riding and a twisted rope that hobbled his front feet so that he must hop if he would move forward.

Spider got off his horse and went up and examined closely the hobble. "Well, I'll be" he began, and, leaving the sentence unfinished, squatted on his heels that he might pick the knots loose and free poor Dutch.

"Did somebody try to steal him?" Shelton was looking on, round-eyed, from a respectful distance. "Why, that isn't rope—what is it?"

Spider stood up with the thing in his hands. "Don't you know what that is?" he demanded, more humanly than he had spoken to Shelton for three hours. "That there is a strip cut from a fresh sheep pelt, with the wool hacked off with a knife."

Shelton had a gleam of understanding. "He couldn't get far with his feet tied together," he said. "Don't you suppose, if we looked all around here, we might find some tracks?"

"I expect we might."

With that encouragement Shelton dismounted awkwardly because of his knee, and went limping back and forth where the soil gave promise of receiving and holding tracks. It was Spider who discovered some trace, and he puzzled over the tracks—there were three, close beside a crumbling washout where the bank was sandy—much longer than Shelton, who limped up, thought was necessary.

"Oh, say!" he jubilated. "That's the bear whose track I saw the other day. If we could just follow it up"

Spider turned and looked at him sarcastically. "You sure are an observative cuss," he commented dryly. "Take another look at them three tracks. How high do you figure a bear would have to be to step as long as that?" He placed one foot beside the first track and stepped out with the other toward the next track. Spider was not a small man by any means, yet his longest stride fell short of the second bear track.

Shelton watched him, and grasped his meaning. "Then—what the deuce do you think it is if it isn't a bear?" he wanted to know when Spider stood off looking again at the tracks.

Spider looked up at him, and hesitated. "Just between you and me and the gatepost, Shep, I'll tell yuh what it is. It's a man trying to make out like he's a bear. Wearing bear fixin's on his feet, I take it," he explained further, "to hide his own tracks—and making a dern poor stagger at it, if you ask me!"

Shelton looked long at Spider, and then down at the tracks. He followed Spider's example. He placed his foot alongside the first track, and measured the stride with the other. Shelton, you know, was six feet two, and at that he had to step) as far as he could reach in order to place his foot alongside that second track. He looked up quickly.

"Well, there's only one"

Spider stopped him with a gesture and a look. "Some things is better off inside your head," he told Shelton bluntly. "We can't help what we think, but we needn't go around shooting off our faces. Call it a bear track and let it go at that. I ain't going to build up nothing on a few marks in the sand, and you ain't." He glanced moodily toward Dutch. "We've found what we was hunting. Let's be drifting toward home."

He stopped first and scraped the edge of his boot sole carefully over the tracks until they were quite obliterated. Then he took his rope and tied an end around the neck of the brown horse Shelton had been riding. "I guess you might as well ride Dutch back," he observed. "You're a heap safer on him." And he changed the saddle quickly, as if he were in haste to be gone.

Shelton was studying the mystery that had enveloped him in the last week while they rode a mile or so. Then it had to come out—some of it—in speech.

"What I can't see," he said suddenly, "is what object he'd have. Aside from scaring off Williams and his sheep, it looks—well, childish to go around the country"

"I don't know," quelled Spider, "as you're expected to see any object in it. I don't know as any one is."

That did not settle the other, however. "Well, it doesn't account for my being followed"

"If you was followed."

"Nor that screaming and running in the cave"

"If you didn't just imagine it."

"Oh, say!" Shelton protested. "What do you think I"

"Aw," cried Spider impatiently, "can't you get some kinda gait on that old skate? And if you don't keep your face shut," he added unkindly, "you're liable to get sunstruck on your insides."

As you may guess, there was little conversation between them after that. Spider seemed to be revolving some intricate puzzle in his mind, and Shelton, I think, was sulking because of Spider's bluntness of speech.

They came slowly down the hill and up to the high pole corral beside the stable. And when they dismounted Burney himself came out of the corral, carrying his saddle in one hand.

"I've got to go to Pocatello," he told them querulously. "I may not be back for three or four days. You kinda keep things moving, Spider" Then he seemed to notice Dutch for the first time. "Oh, you found him," he said, with feeble interest. "Where was he at?"

"Over in the Spook Hills," said Spider distinctly, looking up into Burney's little twinkling eyes. "In a gulch, hobbled with a strip of sheep hide. We couldn't find the saddle and bridle."

Burney looked down at him sharply before he turned away toward his own horse. "Some of them sheep-herders caught him up, most likely," he said carelessly. "Might as well let the saddle go; didn't amount to much—and we don't want to have any trouble with 'em if we can help it. Don't want any trouble with anybody," he muttered, while he saddled hastily. "The girl thinks I killed their sheep." He mounted, and without farewell or further orders he rode away, while Spider stared after him meditatively.