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We had traveled only some twenty miles a day coming down, and our horses had fared well. But as soon as we received any cattle, night-herding the remuda would cease, and we must either hobble or resort to other measures. John Levering was my horse-wrangler. He had made two trips over the trail with Fant's herds in the same capacity, was careful, humane, and an all-round horseman.
In the break of the poop there showed the light of Mr. Fant's window, where he lay in his bunk, relaxing his grisly official personality with a book and a cigar. In deft haste Goodwin stepped to the fore side of the fo'c'sle, where he would be hidden should the watchman take a fancy to look out of his galley. In him a single emotion was constant: he had a need to find Tom Mowbray.
Fant whirled on his heel, and a fist took Goodwin on the edge of the jaw and sent him gasping and clucking on to his back; while, with the precision of a movement rehearsed and practiced, Mr. Fant's booted foot swung forward and kicked him into the scuppers. He lay there on his back, looking up in an extremity of terror and astonishment at the unmoved face of the mate.
I want to go ashore." Mr. Fant turned to go aft. "You get yer head into a bucket," he counselled. "Hurry up, now. There's work waitin' to be done." "I won't!" shouted Goodwin. "Eh!" Mr. Fant's voice was still mild as he uttered the exclamation, but before Goodwin could repeat himself he had moved. As if some spring in him had been released from tension, the mild and prim Mr.
Straw, not to be outdone in encouragement, cheered his man with promises of reward, and his faction of supporters raised such a din that Fant's man arose, and demanded quiet so the contest could proceed. Though boisterous, the crowd was good-tempered, and after the second number was disposed of, the final test was announced, which was to be in sacred music.
The Etna had absorbed him into her system; he was initiated already to his role of a driven beast; but tenacious as an altar fire there glowed yet within him the warmth of his anger against Tom Mowbray. It was secret, beyond the reach of Mr. Fant's fist; the fist was only another item in Tom Mowbray's debt. From his place on the crossjack-yard, to which Mr.
Finally, Joe Stallings went to Nat Straw and told him that I was a fiddler, whereupon he instantly appointed me as judge, and the other side selected a redheaded fellow belonging to one of Dillard Fant's herds. Between the two of us we selected as the third judge a bartender whom I had met the night before.
This ain't." He paused under the daunting compulsion of Mr. Fant's eye. "You've signed on all right," said Mr. Fant. "Your name's John Smith an' you signed on yesterday. You don't want to make any mistake about that, Smith." He spoke as mildly as ever and yet was menacing and terrible. But Goodwin was insistent. "My name's Goodwin," he persisted. "Tom Mowbray drugged me and shoved me on board.
Late that fall word came down from Fant's pasture up west on the Salt Fork to send a man or two up there, as Coldwater Pool cattle had been seen on that range. Larkin and another lad went up to a beef round-up, and almost the first steer Bold Richard laid his eyes on was an under-bit, line-back, once a bar-circle-bar but now a pilot-wheel beef.
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