XIVTHE SLAYER OF MASTODONS
Dora and Susie had planned to botanize one fine Saturday morning, and Susie, dressed for a tramp in the hills, was playing with a pup in the dooryard, waiting for Dora, when she saw Smith coming toward her with the short, quick step which, she had learned, with him denoted mental activity.
“This is the day for it,” he said decisively. “I had that notorious feelin’ take holt of me when I got awake. How’s your heart, girl?”
It had given a thump at Smith’s approach, and Susie’s tawny skin had paled under its tan, but by way of reply she gave the suggestive Indian sign of strength.
“Good!” he nodded. “You’ll need a strong heart for the ridin’ you’ve got to do to-day; but I’m not a worryin’ that you can’t do it, kid, for I’ve watched you close.”
“Guess I could ride a flyin’ squirrel if I had to,” Susie replied shortly, “but Teacher wanted me to go with her to get flowers. She doesn’t like to go alone.”
“There’s no call for her to go alone. I’ll go with her. It’s no use for me to get to the plant before afternoon. I’ll go on this flower-pickin’ spree, and be at the mouth of the canyon in time to hold the first bunch of horses you bring in. They’re pretty much scattered, you know. What for an outfit you goin’ to wear? You don’t want no flappin’ skirts to advertise you.”
Susie answered curtly:
“I got some sense.”
“You’re a sassy side-kicker,” he observed good-humoredly.
She pouted.
“I don’t care, I wanted to pick flowers.”
Smith said mockingly, “So do I, angel child. I jest worships flowers!”
“From pickin’ flowers to stealin’ horses is some of a jump.”
“I holds a record for long jumps.” As a final warning Smith said: “Now, don’t make no mistake in cuttin’ out, for we’ve picked the top horses of the range. And remember, once you get ’em strung out, haze ’em along—for there’ll be hell a-poppin’ on the reservation when they’re missed.”
Susie had disappeared when the Schoolmarm came out with her basket and knife, prepared to start, and Smith gave some plausible excuse for her change of plan.
“She told me to go in her place,” said Smith eagerly, “and I know a gulch where there’s a barrel of them Mormon lilies, and rock-roses, and a reg’lar carpet of these here durn little blue flowers that look so nice and smell like a Chinese laundry. I can dig like a badger, too.”
Dora laughed, and, looking at him, noticed, as she often had before, the wonderful vividness with which his varying moods were reflected in his face, completely altering his expression.
He looked boyish, brimming with the buoyant spirits of youth. His skin had unwonted clearness, his eyes were bright, his face was animated; he seemed to radiate exuberant good-humor. Even his voice was different and his laugh was less hard. As he walked away with the Schoolmarm’s basket swinging on his arm, he was for the time what he should have been always. He had long since made ample apology to Dora for his offense and there had been no further outbreak from him of which to complain.
The day’s work was cut out for Ralston also, when he saw Yellow Bird and another Indian ride away, each leading a pack-horse, and learned from Ling that they had gone to butcher. They started off over the reservation, in the direction in which the MacDonald cattle ranged; with the intention, Ralston supposed, of circling and coming out on the Bar C range. He thought that by keeping well to the draws and gulches he could remain fairly well hidden and yet keep them in sight.
He heard voices, and turned a hill just in time to see Smith take a flower gently from Dora’s hand and, with some significant word, lay it with care between the leaves of a pocket note-book.
Though it looked more to Ralston, all that Smith had said was, “It might bring me luck.” And Dora had smiled at his superstition.
Ralston would have turned back had it not been too late: his horse’s feet among the rocks had caused them to look up. As he passed Dora replied to some commonplace, with heightened color, and Smith stared in silent triumph.
Ralston cursed himself and the mischance which had taken him to that spot.
“She’ll think I was spying upon her, like some ignorant, jealous fool!” he told himself savagely. “Why, why, is it that I must always blunder upon such scenes, to make me miserable for days! Can it be—can it possibly be,” he asked himself—“that she cares for the man; that she encourages him; that she has a foolish, Quixotic notion that she can raise him to her own level?”
Was there really good in the man which he, Ralston, was unable to see? Was he too much in love with Dora himself to be just to Smith, he wondered.
“No, no!” he reiterated vehemently. “No man who would abuse a horse is fit for a good woman to marry. I’m right about him—I know I am. But can I prove it in time to save her?—not for myself, for I guess I’ve no show; but from him?”
With a heartache which seemed to have become chronic of late, Ralston followed the Indians’ lead up hill and down, through sand coulees and between cut-banks, at a leisurely pace. They seemed in no hurry, nor did they make any apparent effort to conceal themselves. They rode through several herds of cattle, and passed on, drifting gradually toward the creek bottom close to the reservation line, where both Bar C and I. D. cattle came to drink.
Ralston wondered if they would attempt to stand him off; but his heart was too heavy for the possibility of a coming fight to quicken his pulse to any great extent. He believed that he would be rather glad than otherwise if they should make a stand. The thought that the tedious waiting game which he had played so long might be ended did not elate him. The ambition seemed to have gone out of him. He had little heart in his work, and small interest in the glory resulting from success.
He thought only of Dora as he lay full length on the ground, plucking disconsolately at spears of bunch-grass within reach, while he waited for the sound of a shot in the creek bottom, or the reappearance of the Indians.
He had not long to wait before a shot, a bellow, and another shot told him that the time for action had come. He pulled his rifle from its scabbard, and laid it in front of him on his saddle. It was curious, he thought, as he rode closer, that one Indian was not on guard. Still, it was probable that they had grown careless through past successes. He was within a hundred yards of the butchers before they saw him.
“Hello!” Yellow Bird’s voice was friendly.
“Hello!” Ralston answered.
“Fat cow. Fine beef,” vouchsafed the Indian.
“Fine beef,” agreed Ralston. “Can I help you?”
The MacDonald brand stood out boldly on the cow’s flank!
Ralston watched them until they had loaded their meat upon the pack-horses and started homeward. One thing was certain: if Running Rabbit had butchered the Bar C cattle, he had done so under a white man’s supervision. In this instance, with an Indian’s usual economy in the matter of meat, he had left little but the horns and hoofs. The Bar C cattle had been butchered with the white man’s indifference to waste.
Any one of the bunk-house crowd, except McArthur, Ralston believed to be quite capable of stealing cattle for beef purposes. But if they had been stealing systematically, as it would appear, why had they killed MacDonald cattle to-day? Ralston still regarded the affair of the fresh hide as too suspicious a circumstance to be overlooked, and he meant to learn which of the white grub-liners had been absent. He reasoned that the Indians had a wholesome fear of Colonel Tolman, and that it was unlikely they would venture upon his range for such a purpose without a white man’s moral support.
Smith had been missing frequently of late and for so long as two days at a time, but this could not be regarded as peculiar, since the habits of all the grub-liners were more or less erratic. They disappeared and reappeared, with no explanation of their absence.
In his present frame of mind, Ralston had no desire to return immediately to the ranch. He wanted to be alone; to harden his heart against Dora; to prepare his mind for more shocks such as he had had of late. It was not an easy task he had set himself.
After a time he dismounted, and, throwing down his bridle-reins, dropped to the ground to rest, while his horse nibbled contentedly at the sparse bunch-grass. As he lay in the sunshine, his hands clasped behind his head, the stillness acted like a sedative, and something of the tranquillity about him crept into his soul.
Upon one thing he was determined, and that was, come what might, to be aman—a gentleman. If in his conceit and eagerness he had misunderstood the softness of Dora’s eyes, her shy tremulousness, as he now believed he had, he could take his medicine like a man, and go when the time came, without whimpering, without protest or reproach. He wanted to go away feeling that he had her respect, at least; go knowing that there was not a single word or action of his upon which she could look back with contempt. Yes, he wanted greatly her respect. She inspired in him this desire.
Ralston felt very humble, very conscious of his own shortcomings, as he lay there while the afternoon waned; but, humble as he was, resigned as he believed himself to be, he could not think of Smith with anything but resentment and contempt. It hurt his pride, his self-respect, to regard Smith in the light of a rival—a successful rival.
“By Gad!” he cried aloud, and with a heat which belied his self-abnegation. “If he were only adecentwhite man! But to be let down and out by the only woman I ever gave a whoop for in all my life, for a fellow like that! Say, it’s tough!”
Ralston’s newly acquired serenity, the depth of which he had reason to doubt, was further disturbed by a distant clatter of hoofs. He sat up and watched the oncoming of the angriest-looking Indian that ever quirted a cayuse over a reservation. It was Bear Chief, whom he knew slightly. Seeing Ralston’s saddled horse, the Indian pulled up a little, which was as well, since the white man was immediately in his path.
As the Indian came back, Ralston, who had rolled over to let him pass, remarked dryly:
“The country is getting so crowded, it’s hardly safe for a man to sit around like this. What’s the excitement, Bear Chief?”
“Horse-thief steal Indian horses!” he cried, pointing toward the Bad Lands.
Ralston was instantly alert.
“Him ridin’ my race-pony—fastest pony on de reservation. Got big bunch. Runnin’ ’em off!”
Fast moving specks that rose and fell among the hills of the Bad Lands bore out the Indian’s words.
“Did you see him?”
Ralston was slipping the bit back in his horse’s mouth and tightening the cinch.
“Yas, I see him. Long way off, but I see him.”
“Did you know him?”
“Yas, I know him.”
“Who was it?” Ralston was in the saddle now.
“Little white man—what you call him ‘bug-hunter’—at de MacDonald ranch.”
“McArthur!” Their horses were gathering speed as they turned them toward the Bad Lands.
“Yas. Little; hair on face—so; wear what you call dem sawed-off pants.”
From the description, Ralston recognized McArthur’s English riding-breeches, which had added zest to life for the bunk-house crowd when he had appeared in them. The deputy-sheriff was bewildered. It seemed incredible, yet there, still in sight, was the flying band of horses, and Bear Chief’s positiveness seemed to leave no room for doubt.
“Oh, him one heap good thief,” panted Bear Chief, in unwilling admiration, as their horses ran side by side. “He work fast. No ’fraid. Cut ’em out—head ’em off—turn ’em—ride through big brush—jump de gulch—yell and swing de quirt, and do him all ’lone! Dat no easy work—cut out horses all ’lone. Him heap good horse-thief!”
What did it mean, anyhow? Ralston asked himself the question again and again. Was it possible that he had been deceived in McArthur? That, after all, he was a criminal of an extraordinary type? He found no answer to his questions, but both he and Bear Chief soon realized that they were exhausting their horses in a useless pursuit. It was growing dark; the thief had too much start, and, with the experience of an old hand, he drove the horses over rocks, where they left no blabbing tracks behind. Once well into the Bad Lands, he was as effectually lost as if the earth had opened and swallowed him.
So they turned their tired horses back, reaching the ranch long after sundown. Ralston was still unconvinced that it was not a case of mistaken identity, and, hoping against hope, he asked some one loafing about while he and Bear Chief unsaddled if McArthur had returned.
“He’s been off prowlin’ all day, and ain’t in yet,” was the answer; and Bear Chief grunted at this confirmation of his accusation.
The Indian woman was waiting in the doorway when they came up the path.
“You see Susie?” There was uneasiness in her voice.
It was an unheard-of thing for Susie not to return from her rides and visits before dark.
“Not since morning,” Ralston replied. “Has any one gone to look for her? Is Smith here?”
“Smith no come home for supper.”
“There seems to have been a general exodus to-day,” Ralston observed. “Are you feeling worried about Susie?”
“I no like. Yas, I feel worry for Susie.”
It was the first evidence of maternal interest that Ralston ever had seen the stoical woman show.
“If Ling will give me a bite to eat, I’ll saddle another horse and ride down below. She may be spending the night with some of her friends.”
“She no do that without tell me,” declared the woman positively. “Susie no do that.”
She brought the food from the kitchen herself, and padded uneasily from window to window while they ate.
What was in the wind, Ralston asked himself, that Susie, McArthur, and Smith should disappear in this fashion on the same day? It was a singular coincidence. Like her mother, Ralston had no notion that Susie was stopping the night at any ranch or lodge below. He, too, shared the Indian woman’s misgivings.
He had finished and was reaching for his hat when footsteps were heard on the hard-beaten dooryard. They were slow, lagging, unfamiliar to the listeners, who looked at each other inquiringly. Then the Indian woman threw open the door, and Susie, like the ghost of herself, staggered from the darkness outside into the light.
No ordinary fatigue could make her look as she looked now. Every step showed complete and utter exhaustion. Her dishevelled hair was hanging in strands over her face, her eyes were dark-circled, she was streaked with dust and grime, and her thin shoulders drooped wearily.
“Where you been, Susie?” her mother asked sharply.
“Teacher said,” she made a pitiful attempt to laugh, to speak lightly—“Teacher said ridin’ horseback would keep you from gettin’ fat. I—I’ve been reducin’ my hips.”
“Don’t you do dis no more!”
“Don’t worry—I shan’t!” And as if her mother’s reproach was the last straw, Susie covered her face with the crook of her elbow and cried hysterically.
Ralston was convinced that the day had held something out of the ordinary for Susie. He knew that it would take an extraordinary ride so completely to exhaust a girl who was all but born in the saddle. But it was evident from her reply that she did not mean to tell where she had been or what she had been doing.
Although Ralston soon retired, he was awake long after his numerous room-mates were snoring in their bunks. There was much to be done on the morrow, yet he could not sleep. He was not able to rid himself of the thought that there was something peculiar in the absence of Smith just at this time, nor could he entirely abandon the belief that McArthur would yet come straggling in, with an explanation of the whole affair. He could not think of any that would be satisfactory, but an underlying faith in the little scientist’s honesty persisted.
Toward morning he slept, and day was breaking when a step on the door-sill of the bunk-house awakened him. He raised himself slightly on his elbow and stared at McArthur, looming large in the gray dawn, with a skull carried carefully in both hands.
“Ah, I’m glad to find you awake!” He tiptoed across the floor.
His clothing was wrinkled with the damp, night air, and his face looked haggard in the cold light, but the fire of enthusiasm burned undimmed behind his spectacles.
“Congratulate me!”
“I do—what for?”
“My dear sir, if I can prove to the satisfaction of scientific sceptics that this cranium is not pathological, I shall have bounded in a single day—night—bounded from comparative obscurity to the pinnacle of fame! Undoubtedly—beyond question—a race of giants existed in North America——”
“Pardon me,” Ralston interrupted his husky eloquence; “but where have you been all night?”
“Ah, where have Inotbeen? Walking—walking under the stars! Under the stimulus of success, I have covered miles with no feeling of fatigue. Have you ever experienced, my dear sir, the sensation which comes from the realization of a life-dream?”
“Not yet,” Ralston replied prosaically. “Where was your horse?”
“Ah, yes, my horse. Whereismy horse? I asked myself that question each time that I stopped to remove one of the poisonous spines of the cactus from my feet. Whether my horse lost me or I lost my horse, I am unable to say. I left him grazing in a gulch, and was not again able to locate the gulch. I wandered all night—or until Fate guided me into a barbed wire fence, where, as you will observe, I tore my trousers. I followed the fence, and here I am—I and my companion”—McArthur patted the skull lovingly—“this giant—the slayer of mastodons—whose history lies concealed in ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’!”
As he looked into Ralston’s non-committal eyes with his own burning orbs, he realized that great joy, like great sorrow, is something which cannot well be shared.
“Forgive me,” he said with hurt dignity; “I have again forgotten that you have no interest in such things.”
“You are mistaken. I wanted to hear.”
After McArthur had retired to his pneumatic mattress, Ralston lay wide-eyed, more mystified than before. Had Bear Chief’s eyes deceived him, or was McArthur the cleverest of rogues?
Breakfast was done when Ralston said:
“Will you be good enough to step into the bunk-house, Mr. McArthur?”
Something in his voice chilled the sensitive man. Ralston, whom he greatly admired, always had been most friendly. He followed him now in wonder.
“You are sure this is the man, Bear Chief?”
The Indian had stepped forward at their entrance.
“Yas, I know him,” he reiterated.
McArthur looked from one to the other.
“Bear Chief accuses you of stealing his horses, Mr. McArthur,” explained Ralston bluntly.
“What!”
“You slick little horse-thief, but I see you good. Where you cache my race-pony?” The Indian’s demand was a threat.
For reply, McArthur walked over and sat down on the edge of a bunk, as if his legs of a sudden were too weak to support him.
“Bear Chief swears he saw you, McArthur.” Ralston’s tone was not unfriendly now, for something within him pleaded the bug-hunter’s cause with irritating persistence.
“Me a horse-thief? Running off race-ponies?” McArthur found himself able to exclaim at last: “But I had no horse of my own!”
“Have you any credentials—anything at all by which we can identify you?”
“Not with me; but certainly I can furnish them. The name of McArthur is not unknown in Connecticut,” he answered with a tinge of pride.
“Where are your riding-breeches? Bear Chief says you were wearing them yesterday. Can you produce them now?”
McArthur, with hauteur, walked to the nails where his wardrobe hung and fumbled among the clothing.
They were gone!
His jaw dropped, and a slight pallor overspread his face.
Susie, who had been listening from the doorway, flung a flour-sack at his feet.
“Search my trunk, pardner,” she said with her old-time impish grin.
McArthur mechanically did as she bade him, and his riding-breeches dropped from the sack.
“I hope you’ll ’scuse me for makin’ so free with your clothes, like,” she said, “but I just naturally had to have them yesterday.”
A light broke in upon Ralston.
“You!”
“Yep, I did it, me—Susie.” Her tone and manner were a ludicrous imitation of Smith’s. She added: “I saw you all pikin’ in here, so I tagged.”
“But why”—Ralston stared at her in incredulity—“why shouldyousteal horses?”
“It’s this way,” Susie explained, in a loud, confidential whisper: “I’ve been playin’ a little game of my own. When the right time came, I meant to let Mr. Ralston in on it, but when Bear Chief saw me, I knew I’d have to tell, to keep my pardner here from gettin’ the blame.”
“But the beard,”—Ralston still looked sceptical.
“Shucks! That’s easy. I saw Bear Chief before he saw me, and I just took the black silk hankerchief from my neck and tied it hold-up fashion around the lower part of my face. Bear Chief was excited when he saw his running horse travelling out of the country at the gait we was goin’ then.”
“I don’t see yet, Susie?”
She turned upon Ralston in good-natured contempt.
“Goodness, but you’re slow! Don’t you understand? Smith’s my pal; we’re workin’ together. He cooked this up—him takin’ the safe and easy end of it himself. He sprung it on me that day I had a sull on. Don’t you see his game? He thinks if he can get me mixed up in something crooked, he can manage me. He’s noticed, maybe, that I’m not halter-broke. So I pretended to fall right in with his plans, once I had promised, meanin’ all the time to turn state’s evidence, or whatever you call it, and send him over the road. I wanted to show Mother and everybody else what kind of a man he is. I don’t want no step-papa named Smith.”
The three men stared in amazement at the intrepid little creature with her canny Scotch eyes.
“And do you mean to say,” Ralston asked, “that you’ve held your tongue and played your part so well that Smith has no suspicions?”
“Hatin’ makes you smart,” she answered, “and I hate Smith so hard I can’t sleep nights. No, I don’t think he is suspicious; because I’m to pack grub to him this morning, and if he was afraid of me, he’d never let me know where he was camped. He’s holdin’ the horses over there in a blind canyon, and when I go over I’m to help him blotch the brands.”
“We want to get the drop on him when he’s using the branding-iron.”
“And you want to see that he shoves up his hands and keeps them there,” suggested Susie further, “for he’ll take big chances rather than have the Schoolmarm see him ridin’ to the Agency with his wrists tied to the saddle-horn.”
“I know.” Ralston knew even better than Susie that Smith would fight like a rat in a corner to avoid this possibility.
“My!” and Susie gave an explosive sigh, “but it’s an awful relief not to have that secret to pack around any longer, and to feel that I’ve got somebody to back me up.”
A lump rose in Ralston’s throat, and, taking her brown little paws in both of his, he said:
“To the limit, Susie—to the end of the road.”
“And my pardner’s in on it, too, if he wants to be,” she declared loyally, slipping her arm through McArthur’s.
“To be sure,” Ralston seconded cordially. “It will be an adventure for your diary.” He added, laying his hand upon McArthur’s shoulder: “I’m more than sorry about the mistake this morning, old man. Will you forgive Bear Chief and me?”
In all McArthur’s studious, lonely life, no person ever had put his hand upon his shoulder and called him “old man.” The quick tears filled his eyes, and a glow, tingling in its warmth, rushed over him. The simple, manly act made him Ralston’s slave for life, but he answered in his quiet voice:
“The mistake was natural, my dear sir.”
“Smith will be gettin’ restless,” Susie suggested, “for his breakfast must have been pretty slim. We’d better be startin’.
“Now, I’ll take straight across the hills in a bee-line, and the rest of you keep me in sight, but follow the draws. When I drop into the canyon, you cache yourselves until I come up and swing my hat. I’ll do my best to separate Smith from his gun, but if I can’t, I’ll throw you the sign to jump him.”
“I shall arm myself with a pistol, and, if the occasion demands, I shall not hesitate to use it,” said McArthur, closing his lips with great firmness.
Bear Chief was given a rifle, and then there was a scurrying about for cartridges. When they were saddled, each rode in a different direction, to meet again when out of sight of the ranch. With varied emotions, they soon were following Susie’s lead, and it was no easy task to keep the flying figure in sight.
McArthur, panting, perspiring, choking his saddle-horn to death, wondered if any person of his acquaintance ever had participated in such a reckless ride. The instructor in Dead Languages, it is true, frequently had thrilled his colleagues with his recital of a night spent in a sapling, owing to the proximity of a she-bear, and McArthur always had mildly envied him the adventure, but now, he felt, if he lived to tell the tale, he had no further cause for envy.
Bear Chief’s eyes were gleaming with the fires of other days, while the faded overalls and flannel shirt of civilization seemed to take on a look of savagery.
Only Ralston’s eyes were sombre. He had no thought of weakening, but he had no feeling of elation; though, for the sake of his own self-respect, he was glad to know that his suspicions of Smith were not inspired by jealousy or malice. Now that the opportunity for which he had hoped and waited had come, his strongest feeling was one of sorrow for Dora. With the tenderness of real love, he shrank from hurting her, from mortifying her by the exposé of Smith.
In no other way were the natures of the two men more strongly contrasted than in this. When Smith flamed with jealousy he wanted to hurt Dora and Ralston alike, and when he had the advantage he shoved the hot iron home. Ralston could be just, generous even, and, though he believed she had unreservedly given her preference to Smith, he still yearned to shield her, to spare her pain and humiliation.
Susie finally disappeared, and when she did not come in sight again they knew she had reached the rendezvous. Dismounting, they tied their horses in a deep draw, and crawled to the top, where they could watch for her signal.
“She’ll give him plenty of time,” said Ralston.
He had barely finished speaking when they saw Susie at the top of the canyon wall waving her hat.
“Something’s gone wrong,” said Ralston quickly.
With rifles ready for action, the three of them ran toward Susie.
Ralston and Bear Chief reached her together. Without a word she pointed into the empty canyon, where a dying camp-fire told the story. Smith had been gone for hours.
XVWHERE A MAN GETS A THIRST
While the four stood staring blankly at the trampled earth and the thin thread of smoke rising from a smouldering stick on a bed of ashes, Smith, miles away, was watching the skyline in the direction from which he had come, and gulping coffee from a tin can. He had slept—the print of his body was still in the sand—but his sleep had been broken and brief. He had ridden fast and all night long, but he was not yet far enough away to feel secure. There was always a danger, too, that the horses would break for their home range, although he kept the mare who led the band on the picket rope when they were not travelling. His own horse, always saddled, was picketed close.
“I’ll never make a turn like this alone again,” he muttered discontentedly. “It’s too much like work to suit me, and I ain’t in shape to make a hard ride. I’ve got soft layin’ around the ranch.” He stretched his stiff muscles and made a wry face. Then he smiled. “I’d like to see that brat’s face when she comes with my grub this mornin’.” He looked off again to the skyline.
“I ketched her eyein’ me once or twice in a way that didn’t look good to me; and I had that notorious strong feelin’ take holt of me that she wasn’t on the square. I’d better be sure nor sorry;—that’s no josh. I takes no chances, me—Smith; I tips my hand to no petticoat.”
He noted with relief that the wind was rising. He was glad, for it would obliterate every print and make tracking impossible. He had kept to the rocks, as the unshod and now foot-sore horses bore evidence, but, even so, there was always a chance of tell-tale prints.
“I can take it easy after I get to water,” he told himself. “This water business is ser’ous”—he looked uneasily at the stretch of desolation ahead of him—“but unless the Injuns lied, they’ssome.
“I hope the boys are to home,” he went on, “for if they are it won’t take us long to work these brands over. When they take ’em off my hands and I gets my wad, I’ll soak it away, me—Smith. I’ll hand it in at the bank, and I’ll say to the dude at the winder, ’Feller,’ I’ll say, ‘me and a little Schoolmarm are goin’ to housekeepin’ after while, so just hang on to that till I calls.’” Smith grinned appreciatively at the picture.
“His eyes will stick out till you could snare ’em with a log-chain, for I ain’t known as a marryin’ man.” His face sobered. “I’ve got to get to work and get a wad—she shot that into me straight; and she’s right. I couldn’t ask no woman like her to hang out her own wash in front of a two-roomed shack. I got to get thedinero, and between man and man, Smith, like you and me, I’m nowise particular how I gets it, so long as she don’t know. I’ll take any old chance, me—Smith. And dead men’s eyes hasn’t got the habit of follerin’ me around in the dark, like some I’ve knowed. She’d think I was a horrible feller if—but shucks! What’s done’s done.”
He lifted his arms and stretched them toward the skyline, and his voice vibrated:
“I love you, girl! I love you, and I couldn’t hurt you no more nor a baby!”
Before he coiled the picket-ropes and started the horses moving, he got down on his knees and took a mouthful of water from a lukewarm pool. He spat it upon the ground in disgust.
“That’s worse nor pizen,” he declared with a grimace. “You bet I’ve got to strike water to-day somehow. The horses won’t hardly touch this, and they’re all ga’nted up for the want of it. There ought to be water over there in some of them gulches, seems-like”—he looked anxiously at the expanse stretching interminably to the northeast—“and I’ll have to haze ’em along until we hit it.”
His tired horse seemed to sag beneath his weight as he landed heavily in the saddle; and the band of foot-sore horses, the hair of their necks and legs stiff with sweat and dust, bore little resemblance to the spirited animals that Susie had driven from the reservation. It was now no effort to keep up with them, and Smith herded them in front of him like a flock of sheep. He wondered what another day, perhaps two days more, of constant travel would do, if fifty miles or so had used them up. There was not now the fear of capture to urge him forward, but the need of reaching water was an equally great incentive to haste.
Smith travelled until late in the afternoon without an audible complaint at the intense discomforts of the day. He found no water, and he ate only a handful of sugar as he rode. He journeyed constantly toward the northeast, in which direction, he thought, must be the ranch which was his destination. At each intervening gulch a hope arose that it might contain water, but always he was disappointed. Between the alkali dust and the heat of the midday sun, which was unusually hot for the time of year, his lips were cracked and his throat dry.
“Ain’t this hell!” he finally muttered fretfully. “And no more jump in this horse nor a cow. I can do without grub, but water! Oh, Lord! I could lap up a gallon.”
The slight motion of his lips started them bleeding. He wiped the blood away on the back of his hand and continued:
“This is a reg’lar stretch of Bad Lands. If them blamed Injuns hadn’t lied, I could have packed water easy enough. They don’t seem to be no end to it, and I must have come forty mile. You’re in for it, Smith. It’s goin’ to be worse before it’s better. If I could only lay in a crick—roll in it—douse my face in it—soak my clothes in it! God! I’m dry!”
He spurred his horse, but there was no response from it. It was dead on its feet, between the hard travel of the previous day and night and another day without water. He cursed the horses ahead as they lagged and necessitated extra steps.
He rode for awhile longer, until he realized that at the snail’s pace they were moving he was making little headway. A rest would pay better in the long run, although there was some two hours of daylight left.
The dull-eyed horses stood with drooping heads, too thirsty and too tired to hunt for the straggling spears of grass and salt sage which grew sparsely in the alkali soil.
After Smith had unsaddled, he opened the grain-sack which contained his provisions. Spreading them out, he stood and eyed them with contempt.
“And I calls myself a prairie man,” he said aloud, in self-disgust. “Swine-buzzom—when I’m perishin’ of thirst! If only I’d put in a couple of air-tights. Pears is better nor anything; they ain’t so blamed sweet, they’re kind of cool, and they has juice you can drink. And tomaters—if only I had tomaters! This here dude-food, this strawberry jam, is goin’ to make me thirstier than ever. No water to mix the flour with, nothing to cook in but salt grease. Smith, you’re up against it, you are.”
He built a little sage-brush fire, over which he cooked his bacon, and with it he ate a dry biscuit, but his thirst was so great that it overshadowed his hunger. Chewing grains of coffee stimulated him somewhat, but the bacon and glucose jam increased his thirst tenfold, if such a thing were possible. His thoughts of Dora, and his dreams of the future, which had helped him through the afternoon, were no longer potent. He could now think only of his thirst—of his overpowering desire for water. It filled his whole mental horizon. Water! Water! Water! Was there anything in the world to be compared with it!
His face was deep-lined with distress as he sat by the camp-fire, trying in vain to moisten his lips with his dry tongue. One picture after another arose before him: streams of crystal water which he had forded; icy mountain springs at which he had knelt and drank; deep wells from which he had thrown whole bucketfuls away after he had quenched what he then called thirst. Thirst! He never had known thirst. What he had called thirst was laughable in comparison with this awful longing, this madness, this desire beside which all else paled.
In any other than an alkali country, the lack of water for the same length of time would have meant little more than discomfort, but the parching, drying effect of the deadly white dust entailed untold suffering upon the traveller caught unprepared as was Smith.
He rolled and smoked innumerable cigarettes, rising at intervals to pace restlessly to and fro. His lips and tongue were so parched that both taste and feeling seemed deadened. Had he not seen the smoke, it is doubtful if he could have been sure he was smoking.
He wandered away from the fire after a time, walking aimlessly, having no objective point. He desired only to be moving. Something like a half-mile from his camp he came into a shallow cut which appeared to have been made during bygone rainy seasons, but which now bore no evidence of having carried water for many years. He followed it mechanically, stumbling awkwardly in his high-heeled cowboy boots over the rocks which had washed into its bed from the alkali-coated sides. Suddenly he cried aloud, with a shrill, penetrating cry that was peculiar to him when surprised or startled. He had inadvertently kicked up a rock which showed moisture beneath it!
He began to run, with his mouth open, his bloodshot eyes wide and staring. There was a bare chance that it might come from one of those desert springs which appear and disappear at irregular intervals in the sand. As he ran, he saw hoof-tracks in what had once been mud, and his heart beat higher with hope. He had a thought in his half-crazed brain that the water might disappear before he could reach it, and he ran like one frenzied with fear. The world was swimming around him, his heart was pounding in his breast, yet still he stumbled on at top speed.
IT MEANT DEATH—BUT IT WAS WET!—IT WAS WATER!
IT MEANT DEATH—BUT IT WAS WET!—IT WAS WATER!
The cut grew deeper, and indications of moisture increased. He saw a growth of large sage-brush, then a clump or two of rank, saw-edged grass. These things meant water! He turned a bend and there, beneath a high bank, was a pool crusted to the edge with alkali!
Smith knew that it was strongly alkali; that it meant certain illness—enough of it, death. But it was wet!—it was water!—and he must drink. He fell, rather than knelt, in it. When taste came back he realized that it was flat and lukewarm, but he continued to gulp it down. At any other time it would have nauseated him, but now he drank to his capacity. When he could drink no more, he sat up—realizing what he had done. He had swallowed liquid poison—nothing less. The result was inevitable. He was going to be ill—excruciatingly, terribly ill, alone in the Bad Lands! This was as certain as was the fact that night had come.
“I was so dry,” he whimpered, “I couldn’t help it! I was so dry!” He scrambled to his feet.
“I gotta get back to camp. This water’s goin’ to raise thunder when it begins to get in its work. I gotta get back to my blankets and lay down.”
Before he reached the heap of ashes which he called camp, the first symptoms of his coming agony began to show themselves. He felt slightly nauseated; then a quick, griping pain which was a forerunner of others which were to make him sweat blood.
Many of these springs and stagnant pools carry arsenic in large quantities, and of such was the water of which Smith had drunk. In his exhaustion, the poison and accompanying impurities took hold of him with a fierceness which it might not have done had he been in perfect physical condition; but his stomach, already disordered from irregular and improper food, absorbed the poison with avidity, and the result was an agony indescribable.
As he writhed on his saddle-blankets under the stars, he groaned and cursed that unknown God above him. His face and hands were covered with a cold sweat; his forehead and finger-tips were icy. The night air was chill, but he was burning with an inward fever, and his thirst now was akin to madness. With all his strength of will, he fought against his desire to return to the pool.
Smith did not expect to die. He felt that if he could keep his senses and not crawl back to drink again, he would pull through somehow. The living hell he now endured would pass.
He wallowed and threshed about like a suffering animal, beating the earth with his clenched fists, during the paroxysms of cutting, wrenching pain. His suffering was supreme. All else in the world shrank into insignificance beside it. No thoughts of Dora fortified him; no mother’s face came to comfort him; nor that of any human being he had ever known. He was just Smith—self-centred—alone; just Smith, fighting and suffering and struggling for his life. His anguish found expression in the single sentence:
“I’m sick! I’m sick! Oh, God! I’m sick!” He repeated it in every key with every inflection, and his moans lost themselves in the silence of the desert.
Yet underneath it all, when his agony was at its height, he still believed in himself. In a kind of subconscious arrogance, he believed that he was stronger than Fate, more powerful than Death. He would not die; he would live because he wanted to live. Death was not for him—Smith. For others, but not for him.
At last the paroxysms became less frequent and lost their violence. When they ceased altogether, he lay limp and half-conscious. He was content to remain motionless until the flies and insects of the sand roused him to the fact that another day had come.
He was incredibly weak, and it took all his remaining strength to throw his forty-pound cow-saddle upon his horse’s back. His knees shook under him, and he had to rest before he could lift his foot to the stirrup and pull himself into the seat.
Before he rode away he turned and looked at the hollow in the sand where his blankets had been.
“That was a close squeak, Smith,” was all he said.
He had no desire for breakfast; in fact, he could not have eaten, for his tongue was swollen, and his throat felt too dry to swallow. His skin was the color of his saddle-leather, and his inflamed eye-balls had the redness of live coals. Smith was far from handsome that morning.
His own recent sufferings had in nowise made him more merciful: he spurred his stiff and lifeless horse without pity, but he spurred uselessly. It stumbled under him as he drove the spiritless band toward the hopeless waste ahead of him.
“Unless I’m turned around, we ought to get out of this to-day,” he thought. The effort of speaking aloud was too great to be made. “Unless I’m lost, or fall off my horse, we ought to make it sure.”
Distance had meant nothing to him during the first evening and night of his ride. He had fixed his eye upon the furthermost object within his range of vision and ridden for it—buoyant, confident, as his horse’s flying feet ate up the intervening miles. Now he shrank from looking ahead. He dreaded to lift his eyes to the interminable desolation stretching before him. The minutes seemed hours long; time was protracted as though he had been eating hasheesh. He felt as if he had ridden for a week, before his horse’s shadow told him that noon had come. The jar of his horse hurt him, and it all seemed unreal at times, like a torturing nightmare from which he must soon awake. He rode long distances with closed eyes as the day wore on. The world, red and wavering, swung around him, and he gripped his saddle-horn hard. The only real thing, the agony of which was too great to be mistaken for anything else, was his thirst. This was superlatively intense. There were moments when he had a desire to slide easily from his horse into the sand and lie still—just to be rid for a time of that jar that hurt him so. He viewed the distance to the ground contemplatively. It was not great. He would merely crumple up like a drunken person and go to sleep.
But these moments soon passed: the instinct of self-preservation was quick to assert itself. Each time, he took a fresh grip on the slack reins and kept his horse plodding onward, ever onward, through the heavy sand and blistering alkali dust, and always to the northeast, where somewhere there was relief which somehow he must reach.
Mile after mile crept under his horse’s lagging feet. The midday sun beat down upon him, drying the very blood in his veins, scorching him, shrivelling him, and yet there seemed no end to the waterless gulches, to the sand, the cactuses, the stunted sage-brush. His horse was stumbling oftener, but he felt no pity—only irritation that it had not more stamina. A sort of numbness, the lethargy of great weakness, was creeping over him; his heart was sagging with a dull despair. He believed that he must be lost, yet he was past cursing or complaining aloud. Only an occasional gasp or a fretful, inarticulate sound came when his horse stumbled badly.
He thought he saw a barbed wire fence. A barbed wire fence meant civilization! He swung his horse and rode toward it. The dark spots he had thought were posts were only sage-brush. The smarting of his eye-balls and eyelids aroused him to an astonishing fact: he was crying in his weakness, crying of disappointment like a child! But he was astonished most that he had tears to shed—that they had not dried up like his blood.
Tears! He remembered his last tears, and they kept on sliding down his cheek now as he recalled the occasion. His father had given him a colt back there where they slept between sheets. He had broken it himself, and taught it tricks. It whinnied to him when he passed the stable. The other boys envied him his colt, and he meant to show it at the fair. He came home one day and the colt was gone. His father handed him a silver dollar. He had thrown the money at his father and struck him in the face, and while the tears streamed from his eyes he had cursed his father with the oaths with which his father had so frequently cursed him; and he had kept on cursing until he was beaten into unconsciousness. There had been no love between them, ever, but he had not expected that. Since then there had been no time or inclination for tears, for it was then he had “quit the flat.” The rage of his boyhood came back to Smith as he thought of it now. He swore, though it hurt him to speak.
His eyes were still smarting when he raised them to see a horseman on a distant ridge. The sight roused him like a stimulant. Was he friend or foe? He reined his horse, and, drawing his rifle from its scabbard, waited; for the stranger had seen him and was riding toward him down the ridge.
“If he ain’t my kind, I’ll have to stop him,” Smith muttered.
The strength of excitement came to him, and once more he sat erect in the saddle, fingering the trigger as the horseman came steadily on.
“He rides like a Texican,” Smith thought. There was something familiar in the stranger’s outlines, the way he threw his weight in one stirrup, but Smith was taking no chances. He put out a hand in warning, and the other man stopped.
The swarthy face of the stranger wore a comprehending grin. No honest man drove horses across the Bad Lands. He threw the Indian sign of friendship to Smith, and they each advanced.
“How far to water, Clayt?”
“Well, dog-gone me! Smith!”
“How far to water?” Smith yelled the words in hoarse ferocity.
The stranger glanced at the barebacked horses, and then at the shimmering heat waves of the desert.
“Just around the ridge,” he answered. “My God, man, didn’t you pack water?”
But Smith was already out of hearing.