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By Root 675 0

of that blue gaze was hypnotic as he told it all. “The money men threw a fit, said if it happened again they’d sell the place out from under me. They were town men, they didn’t have a fig of a notion about how you have to let the good years carry you through the bad ones in the livestock business. I had to do something to keep the herd count up or lose the ranch.” Trickles of sweat from under his hat into his beard retraced that predicament of long ago. “My riders told me they’d seen some of the squatters up in those hills”—he indicated across the valley to coulees that must have held shanties at that time—“acting funny around our stock. And there were always drifters riding through, you could bet they’d about as soon rustle your cattle as look at them. Try tell that to a sheriff who’d rather sit with his boots up on his desk than chase after rustlers with a couple of days’ head start, though.” His gaze at me never wavered. “Now, you know what my answer to that was, don’t you?”

I was afraid I did. The Montana necktie had a reputation to the far ends of the world, ever since frontier times when vigilantes in the untamed gold camps took the law, along with a noose, into their own hands.

“My riders knew how to handle a rope in more ways than one,” he was saying in that voice terrible to hear. “Anybody they caught in the vicinity of a cow or calf with a Triple S brand on it had some hard answering to do.” The man who had been lord of this valley turned ponderously, broad back to me now, toward the line of sturdy cottonwoods. “We hung them like butchered meat. Right here.” Facing around to me again, he lifted those thick hands. “Many a time I tied the noose myself.”

The old saying could not have been more right: my blood ran cold.

Had I gambled wrong, in coming with him to this desolate patch of earth? Was I about to be murdered, for knowing too much? The pistol stayed glued to me where it rode in my pocket; I realized, for once and all, that I could not bring myself to use it. Sandison’s stare had my fate in it, but I could not read those icy eyes. I tried to speak and couldn’t.

He stared at me that way long moments more, then his words came slowly.

“What gets into a man, Morgan, to set himself up as an executioner? I made those dim-witted rustlers pay far too high a price.” He shook his head. “Cows are just cows.” Turning from me, he gazed at the gray old trees as if looking a long way back. His shoulders slumped. As I watched, the Earl of Hell was deposed, by himself.

After some moments, I found words.

“Section 37 is off the face of the earth.”

“That’s where I sent them, on a length of rope,” Sandison was speaking huskily. “Now you know why I brought you here, eh?”

I thought so, but said nothing, watching the same shrewd expression come over him as when he found a bargain in a rare books catalogue. “You’re a learned man,” he said in that husky tone, “you know a little something about how to read a life. But there’s always more. I know what they say about me behind my back, but they miss half the story.” One more time he shook his head. “ ‘The music of men’s lives’ isn’t as easy to recognize as the average fool thinks, you were right about that. Back then”—he pointed his beard to the cottonwood grove—“I let the money men call the tune on me and did more than any man should, to hold on to the best ranch in Montana. And then poison came out of the air and I lost the Triple S anyway.”

Now he looked hard at me, nodding as if making sure to himself. “It takes a collector to know a collector, even if you do stack your treasures in your head instead of out on a shelf. You’ll remember this, fair and square, there’s that about you. Not like the ones who only gossip, which is almost everybody.” He set his face as if into a prevailing wind. “I goddamn well know I could turn Butte into a city of gold, and still the one thing I’ll take with me to my grave is the reputation for stringing people up.”

Monumental and weary, Samuel Sandison cast a last glance at the hanging tree, then turned away to where our horses stood. Over his