CHAPTER XXXV

HAUNTING MEMORIES

It was many days before Lawler was strong enough to ride Red King to the Circle L; and many more days joined the regiments that have marched into the ages, before he forgot what he saw in Blackburn’s eyes when one day, soon after his return to the Circle L, he listened to the range boss relate the story of the fight on the plains.  Blackburn’s cynical eyes had changed expression.  They had become tragic, strained, as though the man was striving to blot out mental pictures that were detailed there—­pictures that memory persisted in drawing.

He rode with Lawler to the scene of the fight, and showed him where the Circle L outfit had brought the rustlers to bay.

“After Shorty left,” said Blackburn; “me insistin’ on him goin’, an’ him blackguardin’ me for sendin’ him, there was a little time when nothin’ happened.  Then the day broke, an’ everything seemed to happen at once.

“They rushed us, Lawler.  There was more of ’em than there was of us, an’ they circled around us, howlin’ an’ shootin’ like Indians.  They got us between ’em.  But we fought ’em—­Lawler, we fought ’em till there wasn’t a man left standing.  But there was too many of ’em.  We planted twenty—­afterward.  But about that number got away.  I was hit sort of hard, but I watched ’em scutterin’ towards Kinney’s canon.  They’d been gone some time when Caldwell’s outfit—­an’ Shorty—­come up.  Caldwell’s outfit lit out after ’em; but Caldwell’s men had rode pretty hard gettin’ to us, an’ it wasn’t no go.  Sigmund’s men, though; an’ Lester’s an’ the rest of ’em, had took a gorge trail that cuts into the big basin from the south, away the other side of Kinney’s canon; an’ they run plumb into the rustlers over at the edge of the basin on Sigmund’s side.

“An’ they brought back your cattle; though Slade an’ twenty or thirty of his men got away, clean.  I reckon you’ve heard about enough, an’—­Well, Lawler, that’s about all—­exceptin’ to tell you how the boys—­an’ I don’t seem to want to go over that when I’m awake; I keep seein’ it enough of nights.”

But something of the deep emotion Blackburn felt was reflected in Lawler’s eyes from the time he heard the story.

During the many days he had spent in the little hotel room recovering from his wound—­and in the long interval of convalescence that followed—­a small army of workmen had been engaged in rebuilding the Circle L ranchhouse, the bunkhouses, and the other structures.  On the second day following his return to consciousness Lawler had called in a contractor and had made arrangements for reconstruction.

A temporary cabin—­to be used afterward by Blackburn—­had been erected near the site of the bunkhouses, and into this Lawler and his mother moved while the ranchhouse and the other buildings were being rebuilt.  Blackburn was slowly engaging men to fill the depleted complement, and the work went on some way, though in it was none of that spirit which had marked the activities of the Circle L men in the old days.