CHAPTER IIITHE ORPHAN OF DEL SOL
BLANCOCITO had dozed in the sun for a considerable interval. Hearing a sound at the front door, he turned an idle eye, and sprang back with a snort at sight of the unusual apparition which now descended the gallery steps—Anastasie Lockhart, no longer in male apparel, and by the merest accident coming out of the house as the two men would now have entered.
Jim Nabours was not accustomed to social formulas.
“Miss Taisie, this here is Mr. McMasters, of Gonzales, below. He’s sher’f down there. I reckon you know who he is.”
“I saw you when you came in, sir,” said the mistress of Del Sol demurely, extending her hand. “Why did you not come up to breakfast?”
While McMasters, his eyes fixed on hers, was explaining his travel-worn condition, Jim Nabours was wondering how and why in the name of all the saints of the Southwest Taisie had managed in so short a time to change from her daily ranch costume to this feminine marvel of fresh lawn, with ruffled flounces and great belled skirt. She even had white mitts—yellow-white with age. But Taisie saw no reason to explain that much of her apparel once had been her mother’s, and was now fresh resurrected. Jim did not know the mysteries of a certain rawhide chest so well as old black Milly, who had served in the Burleson Lockhart family before they moved into the border country. Had he known he might also have had a guess at the miracle of Taisie’s heavy hair, no longer banded like an Indian woman’s but done up in some sort of high twisted mass that left visible the milk-white nape of a neck not always otherwise protected against the sun.
In good truth Anastasie—such was her mother’s Louisiana name in baptism, and her own—was not unmindful of the ways of woman in older lands, in spite of the surroundings into which fate had cast her. And truly she was beautiful—rarely, astonishingly, confusingly beautiful. The man did not live who could have seen her now and not have felt his heart leap to joy in the universe and its ways.
She led them back into the house. Her very presence filled the low-ceiled room, one of the two at the right of the four corners made by the right-angled double halls. The adobe ranch house of Del Sol was built like others of the Saxon Southwest, so that each breath of air might be caught from any direction of the wind; an arrangement cooler than a patio for a house surrounded on two sides by a grove of giant live oaks draped heavily in Spanish moss.
The interior gave a rude setting for a picture such as this young woman made. The ease and luxury of lower Louisiana, for a wealthy generation of sugar-cane planters the repository of Europe’s best art and last luxuries, were not reflected in the first Saxon generation of the Texas border. True, the furniture in part was traceable to earlier days. Two paintings, three framed samplers, told of a mother’s hands. There was a heavy claw-foot table. A few mismated chairs of the Empire stood in a row. But a rawhide settee and four splat-bottom chairs frankly admitted the limit of such supplies; the prevailing flavor of the borderland could not be denied. Not so much of a marvel, for at that time there was not a hundred miles of railroad within the boundaries of Texas, and everything from the East must survive the toil and danger of wagon freighting.
In one corner of the room was a conical upright Mexican fireplace. Opposed to this and covered with soft tanned baby-calfskins of varied colors, stood the one thing which had saved the soul of Anastasie Lockhart the first, as of Anastasie the second—the piano, regarded with awe by all the cattle hands. On the piano stood, now, a vase of flowers. They were very fresh flowers. Jim Nabours knew they had not been there an hour earlier, for he had called before breakfast and they were not there then; though he knew Taisie’s garden had some blossoms.
What shall escape the eye of a maiden? Tapered conchas on a bridle strap, neat boots, a well-shaped hat, a way of sitting in a saddle, the air of a family that had once come down from Tennessee on the Natchez Trace and the Old River Road, to Louisiana, to Texas? Nay, not so easily are a maid’s eyes baffled, though she shall have had but a single look at a newcome young man opening her gate a hundred yards away. Hence these flowers, hence this frock, the reason for which Jim Nabours could not analyze.
Mr. Dan McMasters, new sheriff of Gonzales, mighty young for that job, was a proper man. A vague sense of uneasiness came to the soul of Foreman Jim as he saw his comeliness and ease of manner. He felt he had been betrayed—did not feel familiar with these new little ways.
“You see, Miss Lockhart,” went on McMasters when he had taken his own seat on the cowhide settee, “I’ve been north, up the Indian roads. As I was only fifty miles away, I thought I would ride in.”
“You are very welcome, sir. Our families always have been friends.”
The voice of Anastasie Lockhart was the color of her hair. Almost, you could call her hair vibrant.
“Yes, my family always has known your family. I wanted to see you once more. That must have been my main reason. You—you have grown, Miss Lockhart. I’d not have known you. But just now I was talking with your segundo. He thought you might like to hear some word I am bringing down to Texas from the North.”
“He means they’ve started a cattle market up North on the railroad, Miss Taisie,” broke in Jim Nabours.
“Market? There’s going to be a shipping point—do you mean that, sir?” The girl turned swiftly.
“I think so, yes,” replied Dan McMasters. “It’s at Abilene, in Kansas, right north of Wichita. You see, Wichita’s not far across the Kansas line, above the Nations.”
“Abilene?”
“No one ever heard of it. It’s head of the rails on the Kansas Pacific, the new road that’s building west. They want cattle. They are promising a market.”
The girl’s eyes kindled.
“That’s news!”
He nodded.
“Yes. The railroads are planning to run up the Arkansas the same as up the Platte—and that’s done, now. That whole country north of here, from all I can hear about it, is a thousand by two thousand miles of natural cow land. Grass? They tell me that farther on west there’s millions of acres of what they call buffalo grass—short, like our grama. Maybe it won’t carry cows, but some say it will. It certainly fattens the buffalo. And there isn’t a cow in it all; it’s empty and waiting for range stock—to say nothing of the Eastern demand.”
Nabours broke in.
“We know we could herd as far as Wichita. Shore we could get from there to Aberlene.”
“Yes,” said this prophet of a new day; “and we would find Eastern buyers—farmers and feeders and beef men—waiting to buy our stuff as fast as we drove it through.”
“Really?” Taisie Lockhart almost forgot her morning’s troubles. “Really?”
“Why, yes, I reckon it’s true, from what the men told me that came down to cut the trail in the Nations. They declare there’ll be buyers for all we can drive, up to a hundred thousand head—yes, two-three hundred thousand!”
Inarticulate sound came in Anastasie’s throat. She cast a triumphant glance at her foreman.
“Well, now, ma’am, how was I to know?” defended Jim. “I never did hear of no Aberlene, not in my whole life, till this young gentleman rid in here this morning.”
“Well, you ought to have heard of it!” rejoined his employer with a woman’s logic. “Why, man, that’s what all Texas has been starving for for years! Didn’t I tell you? Haven’t I been telling you? Haven’t I been begging you to make a herd and drive north, somewhere, and trust to God to find buyers there, since there’s no hope here, south or east? Haven’t I told you, Jim?”
“I reckon you did, ma’am,” admitted her aid. “Same time, you didn’t know a damned thing about it.”
“Oh, you!” Taisie turned to him. “Do you expect to have people show you what’s in their hands before you draw cards? Can’t you take a chance?”
“For my own self, yes, Miss Taisie. For you—we all was scared. Especial we was scared when you said you was going along.”
“But I am going along! And I am going to put up a herd!”
“Now, Miss Lockhart,” ventured Dan McMasters, “you couldn’t do that. Your men can put up a herd and drive north for you, but no woman ever has gone north of the Red, or ever ought to try it. There’s no real trail—it’s all wild north of here for fifteen hundred miles or more. There’s not a bridge—I’ve swum ten rivers and forded a hundred. There are Indians. There are storms—and no shelter for you. Miss Lockhart, there’s not a man in Texas ever would let you go.”
“There’s not men enough in all Texas to keep me from going!”
Taisie’s grief was entirely forgotten now.
“Even your father——” Jim began.
“Don’t!” Sudden tears came to the girl’s eyes.
“She allus bogs down—about her father,” explained Nabours.
“I’ll not bog down! I’ll get over this some day. Why, the reason I want to go north is to find the man that did it! He’s somewhere up there.”
McMasters, captain in the Rangers, looked at her with a sudden kindling of his own cool eyes; but he said nothing. The mistress of Del Sol stamped her foot in its cross-banded slipper.
“Always you treat me like a girl. I’m not!”
“Yes, you are, Miss Taisie,” rejoined Jim Nabours. “You’re a girl, and I’m your mother and your father both, till you get a new segundo.”
“Listen at him!” Taisie turned to the young stranger. “The whole state of Texas is dying on its feet, and the men of Texas scared to drive, with maybe five dollars a head waiting for them at the railroad! That’s riches!
“How long would it take?” she demanded of her informant.
“All season, practically,” replied McMasters. “I rode about forty miles a day, coming south, and I was eleven hundred miles away at one time. Cows could go ten miles a day, maybe, if you could keep the herd going; say two-three hundred miles a month. Say three-four months—that would cover a heap of trail.”
“All the distance between here and heaven! All the difference between poverty and self-respect! Oh!”—she looked him fair in the face—“it’s no use to pretend! Do you know what I did this very morning, sir, just before you rode in? Do you know why I’m crying now? I can’t help it. Why, I was down there to tell my men that I’d turned them all loose this morning. I discharged them all. I told them I was broke, that I couldn’t pay my hands.
“Poor? Don’t I know! Go back to Gonzales and tell your people that the last Lockhart’s down in the dust. I’ve got no pride left at all, because I’m broke. Do you wonder that I cry?”
“She did!” said Jim Nabours. “She is!”
McMasters turned away and looked out the window. The tears of such a woman made one thing no man could face.
“But, of course,” added the foreman, “I taken all that in my own hands. I just sont the hands out like usual. Seems like I can hear the irons sizzling on about a dozen long ears by now already.”
“And the lot not worth a pinch of old Milly’s snuff!” commented Taisie. “The market—that’s the one thing! Mr. McMasters has brought news!”
“I almost hesitate over it,” said the young man. “I can’t bring it free of risk and danger.”
“You don’t know my men!” broke out Taisie proudly.
“Oh, yes, I do! I know us all, ma’am. They—we would all die first. But suppose that was not enough?”
“And if I’m a woman, at least I’m not an old woman. I’ll drive the first Texas herd to the railroad with my own men if it takes our last horse and last man! It’s north for me, or I’m gone. When you rode in, sir, I was at the lowest ebb of all my life.”
“I wish the tide may turn, Miss Lockhart,” said young Dan McMasters quietly.
“It will—I believe it has!” She was on her feet, her eyes bright, her color up. “Why, listen! I’ll take Anita and Milly both along. We’ve two carretas left. Jim, you old coward”—her hand was on his shoulder affectionately—“you know you told me you could make a herd of five thousand fours in our brand inside of a day’s ride from Del Sol. Even if it was beeves——
“Tell me, what ages?” She turned suddenly to McMasters.
“I can’t say yet,” was his reply. “Fours and long threes would do best for shipping East. But the talk I heard is that there’ll be use for stockers—even yearlings, too, because the range is open all in north and west of there. People are crowding out to the buffalo range, following the railroads. It’s unbelievable how crazy they are. It seems as though they felt they just have got to get West. They’ll all need cattle.”
A new expression came to his face as he went on:
“There’s millions of acres of unbroken land up there, north of the old slavery line of 36-30. It will take North and South both to make it. It will be the West! It will be the heart of America!”
“We’ll be the first to see it! There’s no age from calf to fifty years Del Sol can’t drive!” said Taisie Lockhart decisively. “How many?”
“That depends on your force of hands. Some said three thousand head was around what a herd should be. A dozen hands could drive it—say fifteen-twenty. Each man ought to have at least six or eight horses in his string. There’ll be riding.”
“Well, what of that? I can turn out twenty men who can talk to cows in their own language. We wouldn’t miss thirty-five hundred fours, Jim says. When shall we start?”
She still was smiling, eager; but the look in her eyes was one of resolution; and as Jim had said, a Lockhart never changed.
“Jesse Chisholm just followed the grass,” answered McMasters presently. “It’s green here in March, and it’s February now. Once across the Colorado and the Brazos, we’d go clean to the Red, easy—I know my father always said that. He said a driver could go in west of Austin and Fort Worth, and get to the north edge of Texas and be almost sure not to see an Indian. The Comanches are away west of that line. We’re about on the ninety-eighth meridian here, and near the thirtieth parallel. My father said that it was a new world north of thirty-six degrees north latitude. That land is all unmapped. No one lives there but the Indians.”
“She eats Comanches,” said Jim Nabours. “Little thing like them don’t bother her none. As for swimming a herd acrost a spring fresh, with quicksand on both sides, why, she don’t mind that none a-tall!”
An ominous silence and a heightened color did not impress him. At length his employer went on, addressing the visitor:
“Very well. Say fifteen men and a wrangler and a cook, with me and black Milly, my cook, and Anita, my Spanish woman. We’d take the two carretas, with oxen for them and the cook’s wagon. Sixteen riders by six or eight horses is a hundred or a hundred and fifty for the remuda—we’d do it easy.”
“Plumb easy!” came Jim’s solemn comment. “A thousand miles in a carreta without a spring, right over a crooked mesquite ex, is right simple. About one week and Milly’d die, her going three hundred net right now; and Anita’d die of homesickness for her jacal she’s used to living in.
“Besides, ma’am”—here the foreman’s voice changed—“I may as well talk plain. Not joking, we can’t live on beef straight. Three-four months of meal and beans and molasses for twenty men is more than we have got, though meal and beans and molasses and side meat we’d have to have, and coffee if we could. The hands work better for coffee, mornings, and after rains or hard rides.”
The color on poor Taisie’s cheeks grew deeper in humiliation. She spread out her hands.
“I’m broke! I’ve said that!”
There was silence for some time. At length the young sheriff of Gonzales spoke quietly.
“Miss Lockhart,” said he, “I don’t like to hear that word in Texas.”
“Truth is the simplest!”
“Yes, I know. But what one ranch in Texas doesn’t happen to have the neighbors do have—they always have had. Take in one or two neighbors with you for the drive—say a thousand head, each brand. They’d be glad to put up the wagon and the remuda. You must not push away your neighbors. This is Texas.”
A cold rage met his sincerity and friendliness.
“I’ll have help from no one! Del Sol will drive a lone herd north, win or lose. I’ll take it all back, Jim—you’re all hired on again, the last man of you. You’ll stand by me? I’ll sell my cows and pay my men; and then I’ll see if there’s any law in the North or any men in the South to help me find a murderer.”
“Ma’am,” said Jim Nabours, “you’ve put it now so’s’t not one of us can help hisself. We got to go. When hell freezes we’ll all walk out on the ice together.
“But you got to thank Mr. McMasters for what he’s done told us, Miss Taisie,” he added. “I reckon he’s our best neighbor.”
“I do thank you, sir!” The girl rose and held out her hand frankly. The young man bent over it. He did not seat himself again. “But you’ll stop a day or so with us?”
“No, I must be riding now,” he answered.
He found his hat, bowed, passed out the door with no dallying or indecision; nor said a word about return. He was abrupt to coldness, if not to rudeness.
Anastasie Lockhart looked through the window shades so intently that her hand remained not fallen after it had drawn them; so intently that she did not hear old Milly as she entered.
“Laws, Miss Taisie, is that young gemman gone? I done brung in some likker fer him. He’s quality, Miss Taisie! Who is he, an’ whah he come from? Is he done ask you about marryin’ yit?”
“Not yet, Milly,” answered Anastasie.
She sat down in the one rocking-chair, staring at the uncarpeted floor. She was older now than she had been an hour ago. Why had this neighbor not promised an early return? And was he not a strangely stiff and silent young man? Were the honors of sheriff and captain so much as to render him superior to a girl with red hair who wore her mother’s clothes, years old?
Anastasie Lockhart, astonishingly vital, astonishingly beautiful, rose to find a mirror so that she could read an answer. As she did so she recognized, standing at the end of the rawhide settee, where her visitor could not have failed to see the sudden disorder of its interior, the rawhide trunk which long had served alike as wardrobe and safety vault for her. Vexed at the revelation of her first untidiness in housekeeping, she bent now to close the heavy lid once more. Suddenly she went to her knees beside it, her eyes wet once more at what she saw of silk and lace gone to bits. She caught up the fragments to her cheeks.
A daguerreotype in its disintegrating frame lay to her hand. She opened it. Her mother. Yes, she had been beautiful. And this frame was the twin of it—her father. She turned it to catch the light so that the likeness would show. A bold, bearded face, aquiline, high. She sighed as she looked at the picture of a man cut down by an assassin in the full of his strength and resolution.
Below these things and others lay to half the depth of the old chest a mass of papers, all similar. Contemptuously she thrust in her hands, her arms, to the elbows.
“Scrip!” she murmured to herself. “Scrip for more Texas land, to raise more Texas cows! He was mad about it—scrip, scrip was all he thought! I only hope that he did not see it!” She meant Dan McMasters. “But of course he did—he couldn’t help it, where he sat.
“Well, it’s no matter,” she added mentally. “He’s not coming back again. If I’d known how cold he was I’d not have troubled!”
She spread out her long brown hands over her mother’s frock as, still kneeling, she sat back on her heels, in her mother’s cross-banded shoes.
CHAPTER IVTHE FOOT OF THE TRAIL
THE sun-drenched landscape of the Southwest lay warm, indolent, full of somber fire. The home buildings rested in the arm of a great live-oak grove, opposite whose opening appeared a wide land of rolling contours, now almost in the thin green of coming spring. Six miles away the tree lines showed a stream, and beyond that, as most folk knew, lay the great lake which originally had led Burleson Lockhart to take up this range. This side and that ran miles of mesquite, stretching south, tall cactuses showing betimes among the twisted thorny trees.
It was a little-known corner of America, in what one day was to be known as the great breeding range, last of the holdings above the Rio Grande to fall from the lax hand of Spain. The lack of rain left the vegetation anguished. A thousand distorted souls in torment lived in these gray trees. Soon the direct sun rays would again be searing into brown the new and tender grass, though it scarce had had its one annual chance to gasp in green.
A lizard scuttled across the dust of the dooryard. A road-runner sped along the fence of poles and rawhide, bent on its own mission. War was marked in every sign and token of Texas from its very first. No manner of pest and curse ever lacked in its cynically indifferent confines. Starvation, thirst, filled these mud-thickened bayous every year with hundreds of dead horses. The bones of cattle lay uncounted for a thousand miles, each dried hide and rack of whitening bones enriching soil that had no answer to its own fecundity in animal life. To live, to breed and to die—that was all that animal life there could do. Nothing to the dead creature that it had never known the shambles. The rack of bones was good enough for Spain.
But now had come Saxon men. Texas, savage, abounding, multiplying undisturbed, was now for the first time seeking outlet for her superabundant life, which for fifty years had increased undisturbed. Texas owned millions of worthless cattle; how many, no owner knew, nor could any man tell how far his cows ranged. He did not care. Unbranded cattle still ran in thousands. No one hunted strays, and the increase of strays belonged without reservation to the land that fed them. There was no cattle association, no general rodeo; and the home gatherings never claimed to be complete. Title, whether in land or cattle, was much a matter of indifference.
Of law there was little. A vast and unknown empire was controlled by a rude baronry whose like the world has never seen; who later were vastly to extend that empire and its ways.
These men set up the one great law of custom. The custom of the range was based on the natural habits of the cattle and the natural peculiarities of the grazing lands. The accepted brand, the right of the finder to an unowned range or water front, the tendency of cattle to cling to home, the law of natural probability in all things—such were rigid natural laws which no man might ignore with safety. As animal life ran wild, so also did human life, one no more restrained than the other. Only the saving grace of the Saxon instinct for some sort of law brought Texas, literally born in the wilderness, up to what she is to-day.
There was no market. At least, rambling and unconcerted attempts had found none till now. After the Civil War a seething unrest passed over all Texas. The demand for some sort of market was first in the thought of all men who owned nothing but cows and reasoned only in terms of cows.
“She’s going to drive!” said Jim Nabours to his new-found friend as they crossed the Del Sol dooryard. “That’s her pap’s old idee. What you’ve said cinches it!”
“Yes? When can you begin the herd?”
The old cowman’s face clouded.
“Listen here! Keep what I tell you. That girl knows a lot about cows, but a heap of things about her own cows she don’t know. She knows how many her father had and she thinks she’s got more. She hain’t.”
“Combed?”
“Yes, combed! We’re too close to Austin! Hide hunters and calf hunters and plain thieves and politics—that’s since the war. The damn Yankees are trying to run a country they don’t know nothing about. All Central Texas has took to hunting cows. This here’s a good place for thieves—or for men who can see ahead a little ways.
“We didn’t know it till just now, but there must of been a band of skinners and slick hunters working our range all last winter and winter afore. She ain’t got one cow now where she thinks she’s got fifty. What could we do? We didn’t know, and don’t know, who done it; but we didn’t durst to let her really know it was did. Now, she’s going to find out.”
“But surely you can make up a mixed herd anyhow!”
“Oh, yes, maybe. But if we do hit a market, where’ll we round up the next herd for her? Some one else has got our cows. There’s a big steal been going on in Central Texas.
“You see, we done our damnedest to take care of her and not let her know. God ha’ mercy on me! I’m the worstest perjured liar in Texas, and that’s a big claim. We’ve had a rodeo now and then, here at the home place, but she didn’t know how fur we driv some of them cows!
“But how could we fool her if we put up a big herd? She kin read a brand as well as us. We’d road brand, I reckon—yes; but that wouldn’t change the facts none. She’d ketch on. She ain’t no fool, that girl. What do you say, then?”
“Why, I say start your round-up to-morrow! Keep in the T. L., the Del Sol brand, or do the best you can. It will come to a show-down anyhow before long, so why wait? Let hers be the first herd north of the Red this spring. While the others are thinking it over, let’s be up the trail! Believe me, all Texas will be moving north before long!”
“She pops!” said Jim Nabours suddenly. He had decided.
“How long to make the herd?” McMasters also kindled.
“Two weeks. We could brand out within another two, only we’ll have to rope and throw. Our pens won’t hold. We got no chute.”
“Build one to-day. It will pay you.”
Nabours looked at the newcomer curiously with an eye not free of suspicion.
“You taken a mighty interest.” He spoke slowly.
“I have! I want to go up the trail with you-all. I’ve reason for going north again. My business there wasn’t settled.”
“But what’s your reasons for being so brash about coming in with us? I dunno’s I’ve give you leave, and I know the boss didn’t.”
“Two reasons. One I’ve told you—the business that took me north and brought me south will take me north again. Never mind what that is. I’m a captain of Rangers, and we can’t talk. The other reason you can guess.”
“I reckon I do guess.”
“Muy bien!Our families both came in with Stephen Austin. They both had men massacred with Fannin at Goliad. They both had men in the Alamo. Her father and mine were both killed up the trail. Do you think any McMasters would let any Lockhart starve? Listen! You say she’s poor; say her range is skinned. Tell her nothing—but please let a McMasters help a Lockhart. Let me send you fifty horses and two wagonloads of grub. You needn’t let her know. Make it a loan or gift, either way you please. And let me ride with you.”
A surprising irrelevancy marked Jim Nabours’ next remark.
“That girl can marry twenty-seven men to-morrow morning. She ain’t going to marry no one until she knows who killed Burleson Lockhart. ‘Bring me the man that finds my father’s murderer,’ says she, ‘and I believe I’d marry him.’ ”
“She said that?”
“Si, señor.Maybe meant it, or thought she did. You can’t tell much about no woman, and least of all about Burleson Lockhart’s daughter. One thing, she’ll be slow to quit anything she starts. She’s sot now on driving. I reckon she will.”
By now they had approached the cook house and the corral. McMasters had his bridle from the saddle that straddled the pole near the bunk-house door. Soon he had his horse under saddle. His pistol belt was now in place again.
The foreman looked at it curiously as the two walked toward the rawhide gate. Nabours pushed it open. As he did so a warning rattle sounded almost underfoot. He sprang back with an oath. With the word came a shot, not from his own weapon. The brown body of the serpent was flung writhing, headless. McMasters’ pistol was back at its belt when Nabours turned.
“Who done that?” he demanded.
“I did,” said McMasters. “You’d have stepped on him.”
“Well, if I want to step on a rattler, that’s my business, ain’t it? Maybe I like to step on them. You shooting made me jump. Still, quick work, huh?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you a good shot?”
“I was elected sheriff of Gonzales. I am a captain in the Texas Rangers.”
His face was grave as he spoke, sad rather than boastful.
“What’s that?” suddenly exclaimed Jim Nabours. “Listen!”
The sound of hoofs had come suddenly from around the bend of the trail that wound through the mesquite thicket screening the gate; hoofs of more than one animal, not coming but going.
“Wait!”
The sound of the young man’s voice deterred Nabours as much as his hand. He stood, absorbed, frowning, listening to the receding hoof beats. The rhythm told him the horses had riders. At last he beckoned to Nabours. The two set out down the trail.
“Look here!” said Dan McMasters at length as they rounded the bend.
At a clump of huisache the tracks of six horses could be seen making a trampled spot back of the bushes. It all was plainly visible to eyes experienced as these.
“They was tied!” said Jim Nabours.
McMasters nodded, bending over the bruised stems which the reins had covered.
“They must have closed up a lot last night,” said Dan McMasters cryptically, as though to himself. “They couldn’t have been far off this morning.
“Thank you, Mr. Rattler!” He smiled grimly as he kicked at a crooked stick for substitute of the dead snake. “You served me a good turn!”
CHAPTER VMARRIAGE, COWS AND CARPETBAGS
THE foreman of Del Sol stood, hands in pockets, for some time, looking down the trace whither the late visitor had disappeared. His head was dropped forward, as one in studious distrust of his own judgment; a frown yet more wrinkled his forehead. At length he turned and found his way, not to the corrals, but to the house.
Blancocito still stood dozing in the sun. The mistress of Del Sol was not riding this morning. Jim knocked at the front door.
“Come!”
He entered. Taisie was sitting at the end of the rawhide settee, still in her bravest finery. Her hands lay in her lap; her eyes were somber, clouded; doubt, distrust appeared her portion also.
She had looked about her with appraising eye; had reflected also. All about, in every token, she saw evidences of lapse, of retrogression, of decay, indeed of poverty rapidly running to seed. The lack of a strong hand was not to be denied. Moreover, the conditions of this property were reflected all over a state, where not even the strongest hand or the clearest mind had been able to achieve solution. It was the hour of travail for a great, unknown, forgotten country. Taisie Lockhart might have known that the travail of a country is only the multiple of many individual pains.
She looked now at her faithful henchman, silent for a time.
“Now, ma’am——”
“Yes, Jim?”
Nabours dropped into a chair, gripping the legs with twining spurred feet.
“I was going to ast you how you liked this Gonzales man, ma’am. He’s went now.”
“Were you taking a shot at him for luck, Jim? I heard a shot.” She tried to smile.
“No’m. It was him. A rattler was by the gate. He shot its head off. I must say he done it quick and easy too.”
“Well, he can ride.”
“Uh-huh—and shoot. Yes, I reckon. Fact is, he’s got a reputation now, for a young man. He’s the youngest sher’f in Texas, like enough. He’s only in six months, and in that time his county has done shrunk more’n a thousand population. He ain’t killed that many, ma’am—no; but he has done killed four or five, and them bad. Then when the Rangers was pulled together again and him put in as a captain, a good many of them people taken the hint and moved. It was time. Down there and in Uvalde there was plenty of men that didn’t own a head or a acre, who’d agree to put you up a herd of five thousand head on a month’s notice.
“I tell you, ma’am, the times is bad. The cow business in this state is in one hell of a fix. . . . Well, it takes good shooting to be a sher’f, let alone a Ranger.”
“Four? Four men? He killed them?” A sort of horror was in her voice, her eyes.
“In duty, ma’am. It don’t hardly count.”
“He did not look—like that!”
“Huh! He didn’t? Well, I’d say he did! When he put on his guns they was two, and he wore his right-hand gun pointing back and his left-hand one pointing forward. I never seen no man do that before. If that don’t look perfessional killer I ain’t no jedge. Now, which gun he done use to kill the rattler I never could tell.
“He makes me study, ma’am. His eye is cold as ice. He don’t talk and he don’t laugh. He’s got something on his mind. Somehow——”
“You’d trust him, Jim?”
“Ef he was on my side. But how in hell can you tell by looking at him whose side he is on?”
“Four men! Yes”—her voice trailed off—“I thought he was—well, cold. He never did—start.”
“No; and most does, Miss Taisie. And you that was dressed up your best for him; and him a stranger you hadn’t saw sence he was a boy, and hadn’t spoke to now till he come in and seen you. And he didn’t start!
“Miss Taisie, I’ve set in some games, but I can’t read that feller’s game. He’s friendly, but he’s so damned mysterious I can’t get no line on him.”
“What brought him here, Jim?”
“You, Miss Taisie! You bring ’em all here. Trouble is, all that comes is dead broke; no more’n a saddle and a pair of spurs to their name. But the McMasters family ain’t broke.
“Now, one thing is shore, Miss Taisie: This here can’t go on forever. I ain’t no good at advice to womenfolks; all I can advise is cows and caballos. But it looks plain to me that before long, you being a orphant, you got to be married to some kind of a man. Peaceable ef we can, by force ef we must, it looks plain to me, which am both yore paw and maw, Miss Taisie, we got to get you-all married. It can’t no ways run on this way much furder’n what it has.”
A dimple came in each of Anastasie Lockhart’s brown cheeks.
“Well, Jim?”
“But not to this man, no matter what he do, Miss Taisie! Not till I can clean up my own mind. I’m oncertain on him somehow. Friends and neighbors he ought to be—shore he ought. But Calvin McMasters, his dad, was agin slavery and secession, and your paw was with the South he was raised in. Them two was friends. I wouldn’t call the McMasterses damn Yankees. But I can’t place him yet.
“Now, how about Del Williams? You know he’s been waiting and hoping. He went to the war because you wouldn’t. He hung on with old Kirby Smith to the last, wondering ef you would. He’s come back after the surrender, hoping you would. He’s a good honest boy, that wears one gun one way and saves his money, when he gets any. He’s a good segundo and he knows cows.”
“Is that all I may ask?”
The girl’s voice was almost wistful. True, she was of the border. But she had seen the wider world. There were books on shelves in that very room. The portraits of her father and her mother were faces of aristocrats. Their lives had been those of adventurers. To know cows? Was that all the husband of the daughter of these two needed to possess?
“Miss Taisie, cows is all we got—and we ain’t got them.”
“I know it, Jim. I told you this morning, I’m broke. I was going to sell out, move out. I was going to try to teach school, or something, over East somewhere. Jim, it’s awful to be poor.”
“It’s awfuler when you ain’t been always, Miss Taisie.”
“But I’ll not be, now! We’re going to drive!”
“You say so, ma’am. It sounds so easy!”
“Why can’t we? Tell me? Haven’t I got cow hands working for me? Haven’t I got fifty thousand cows in the T. L.? You say sixty-five thousand. Isn’t the world full of grass and water north of here? Didn’t you hear what he told you—hasn’t my father told you—that there’s a whole other world waiting up north, not a man nor a cow nor a horse in it, hardly; just waiting? Jim, the time to make money is when times are bad. If we haven’t got cash we’ve got sand. This may be a time of despair or a time of opportunity. It’s always been that way, all over the world. When some despair others win—if they’ve sand to do it.”
“You talk like a book I read oncet, ma’am. It was full of maximuns.”
Taisie stamped her foot.
“We’ll put up a herd and trail it! I’ll go along! We’ll be utterly broke—or else we’ll win!”
“You can’t go along, Miss Taisie. No woman could.”
“But I will!”
“You make things right hard for yore segundo, Miss Taisie.”
“Jim! Jim! Don’t talk that way! Don’t you think I know? Isn’t all this hard for me too? But if we have luck I’ll make it easier for you-all.”
“You’re just a girl, Miss Taisie. Let’s get married first, huh? I don’t mean me. How about you and Del?”
The girl rose, a native imperiousness in her gesture.
“Leave those things to me!”
“Oh, all right, all right,” sighed Nabours. “But maybe you’ll leave some things to me?”
“What?”
The old range man rose and spread his hands.
“Miss Taisie,” said he, “fire me! I’m the damnedest liar in Texas!”
“What do you mean, Jim?”
“I am. I been lying to you. You ain’t got no cows left, hardly. Our range has been combed and skinned; for two years it’s been going on—I don’t know how long before. You ain’t got no sixty-five nor fifty thousand cows. You’re lucky if you can put up a herd of four thousand. We’ve all lied to you. We couldn’t tell you the truth. Ma’am, this outfit would all lay down and die for you. They’d do almost anything but tell you the truth. We couldn’t do that. We didn’t have the nerve.”
The girl sank back, her face pale.
“Why, Jim! I didn’t really know!”
“No, ma’am. Some gang’s at work in here, and north and west of here—far north as Palo Pinto. We’ve been away, enduring the war and after the war. We’re all broke, us Texans. But in Austin is plenty people ain’t broke none a-tall. We don’t know nothing, can’t prove nothing. All I say is, in Austin is plenty people ain’t broke a-tall.”
“You mean the Yankee treasurer?”
“I don’t say out loud what I do mean. All I know is, our range is skinned; and I know we’re up against a strong game. That’s why, ma’am, looking for the best of Del Sol and what yore paw meant for her, and looking for yore own good interests, too, I been advising you to get married. That’d simple up a lot of things.
“You see, then we could settle down and raise cows. We could build up the range again. They ain’t going to be so brash about things when they know they’s a real man in charge of Del Sol. But a orphant is easy picking for a man like Rudabaugh and his gang of carpetbagging thieves.”
“You mean Rudabaugh?”
“I shore do. In Austin, we don’t know what’s going on. In office and out, there’s a new gang in there. They’re organized fer to steal this here whole state, lock, stock and barrel. They don’t stop at nothing. They allow the war ain’t never done; that us Texans ain’t never surrendered; that Lee’s still a enemy; and that all this state is fair picking fer men that wasn’t never borned nor raised in Texas, orphants and all. They got wide idees, yes. But they ain’t idees that was borned in Texas, ma’am.”
“And are we helpless, Jim?”
“Damn nigh it, ma’am.”
“But surely we could raise two or three thousand head, of some sort, to drive north this spring. Leave them the empty house, Jim! Leave them the Del Sol round pen without a horse in it! Leave them our range—empty! But by the Lord——”
She smote fist in palm, walked. Her foreman’s fighting blood kindled at the flame of the old courage that had brought families into this wilderness.
“Yes, by the Lord! Taisie, child, ef ever we do get on our feet, us Texans, we’ll line up against them people and we’ll see it through!”
“Then we’ll drive, Jim?”
“Yes, we’ll drive! Ef it takes the last hoof, we’ll drive this spring, come grass. I don’t know nothing about the country; I never driv a herd so fur, and no one else never has. But ef you’ll let us do our very best, we’ll bust north inside of thirty days!”
He caught both her long brown hands in his own gnarled and crooked ones, his stubbled face grave, his gray eyes troubled; a figure not impressive in his broken boots, his torn checked trousers, but with a sincerity proved these years since his boyhood under this girl’s father.
“You’ll take it fair, child, ef we do the best we can fer you! You’ll never holler?”
“You know I never will, Jim. And you know I’ll go along and I’ll go through.”
“Lord help you, Miss Taisie! And Lord help us too! There’s been times when my job seemed a heap easier than what it does right now!”
Author’s Note.—There is no Gregg, no Parkman, no Chittenden for the lost and forgotten cattle trail. Although almost as important as the east-and-west railroads in the early development of the trans-Missouri, it has no map, no monument, no history, almost no formulated condition. There is a comprehensive literature covering our westbound expansion, but of the great north-and-south pastoral road almost the contrary must be said, such is the paucity of titles.
The classic of the cattle trade of the West is a crude book, now rare, by Joseph G. McCoy, calledHistoric Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest.It is upon this book that the author has rested most largely in endeavoring to restore the feel of the early cattle drives. It was printed in 1874.
Within the past two years Mr. George W. Saunders, of San Antonio, Texas, has printed a book,The Trail Drivers of Texas, containing brief life stories from the pens of more than a hundred men who trailed cattle before and after the railroad days. These sketches are human documents. The author wishes to acknowledge obligations to this work, which he has used almost literally in many passages for the sake of known accuracy.
The books of Andy Adams—The Log of a Cowboy;Wayne Anthony, Cow Man;Wells Brothers;A Texas Matchmaker; The Outlet—make the most authentic fiction or quasi fiction of the trail days. Mr. Adams made trips on northern drives, his experience beginning in 1882. His books are storehouses of later trail data. The author makes acknowledgment to that source of information. Records of army exploration also have been useful.
The quasi biography of Chas. A. Siringo,A Lone Star Cowboy, is still another, and very useful record of life in the early Southwest. It abounds in facts as well as in thrilling incidents. The author can personally testify to its accuracy in many details of the bloody history of New Mexico. Mr. Siringo’s boyhood dates back into the Texas that existed before the northern trails began.
The author himself went to the Southwest in 1881; has lived and traveled in the West all his life; and has followed or crossed the old cattle trail at perhaps fifty points between the Gulf and Northern boundary lines. The term of years thus indicated covers many changes. The future will bring yet swifter change. As to the great pastoral days of the West, it is high time for a fiction that may claim to be faithful and reverent.
Fiction cannot be exact, else it would be history and not fiction. That it should fairly reflect the spirit of its chosen day goes without saying. To lurid writers who never could have known the West, the author has found himself unable to contract any debt, but would make full acknowledgment to all who have aided from a wider information or experience.