CHAPTER XLIVTHE LOST SCRIP
JIM NABOURS, his shirt front bulging, approached the door of the Drovers’ Cottage, near which he found a man tinkling a steel triangle, which one day soon would boom a summons thrice a day.
“How are you, sir?” began Nabours. “Can you tell me if Miss Taisie Lockhart is in here? She come up on that herd with us.”
The husband of Lou Gore indicated the rear of the building. Unannounced, Nabours pushed on through the rear hall, beyond whose door he heard sounds of culinary conflict.
“Law, mister, ain’t you in a sort of hurry?” said Lou Gore, a large spoon in one hand. “This is the kitchen. You go on out.”
“But I want to see my boss,” remonstrated the old foreman. “I’ve got five thousand dollars in my shirt for her.”
Lou Gore wiped her hands on her apron.
“Well,” said she, “if you’ve got five thousand dollars come on in. I’ll let you see her if I can.” She approached the bedroom door.
“Jim! Jim!” called a voice he knew very well, a voice full of eagerness now. The door flung open. Taisie, shrouded in blankets, broke out, her radiant face framed in its mass of glowing hair. She flung an arm about the grizzled foreman’s neck. He seemed almost the one friend in all the world for her. “I’m so glad you’ve come!”
“Miss Taisie,” said Jim Nabours succinctly, “here is five thousand dollars. I reckon you’d better put on your pants—if you got nothing else.”
But Taisie sank into a chair, enveloping herself in her blankets. Her eyes were startled.
“Five thousand dollars?”
“Yes, ma’am. I done sold the cows at twenty straight. There’ll be about three thousand head. That’s sixty thousand dollars, ma’am. This here, now, is only part of it. It’ll be in and around sixty thousand. We can get the rest any time we want. I reckon we done right well for you, Miss Taisie.”
Taisie Lockhart looked up at him with sudden tears in her eyes, weak in the reaction from the strain of years.
“I could kiss you, Jim!” said she.
“I wish you wouldn’t, ma’am; not until I get shaved. Yes, ma’am, we done right well, all things considered. Now, I think you better get about five thousand worth of more clothes.”
“She’s got all the clothes she needs, she told me,” remarked Lou Gore; “a whole trunk of clothes out there on the cart. We haven’t had time to fetch it in yet.”
“Why, shore she has, ma’am! We brung that trunk all the way from Texas. You can’t ride a cow horse in them kind of clothes, ma’am. So Lord Lovel he mounted his milk-white steed. Ain’t she pretty, ma’am? Prettier’n any spotted pup ever was!
“But say, Miss Taisie,” he went on to the girl who still sat huddled in her blankets, “I got to tell you all the news. Dan McMasters has throwed in with the man we sold our cows to. They’re going to start a ranch up North here. We-all are a-goin’ to drive cows up to their ranch next year. Dan, he’s a partner in that; he’s going to be plumb rich. I heard him say he was going to leave Texas, him sher’f and all.
“Far as that goes, if it hadn’t of been for Dan, we maybe wouldn’t have traded. He bid up for all the light stuff, at the same price the other man offered for fours—twenty straight through. Now, Dan——”
“For mercy sake, man, how you run on!” broke in Lou Gore. “You go help this black woman to bring in that trunk from the cart. This is the Fourth of July, and we may have some sort of dance here if them band people ain’t too drunk. Go fetch that trunk.”
“Well, all right, all right,” said Jim Nabours. “I was just trying to tell the boss a few things she’d orter know.”
But in three minutes Jim Nabours was back in the room, gray under his grime and tan.
“Miss Taisie,” said he dully, “your trunk’s gone! It ain’t in the cart at all. The scrip in there was worth maybe five times as much as sixty thousand dollars. Lands’ll go up in Texas now. And here I’ve lost all the scrip that yore paw give you!
“Miss Taisie, it was all my fault. I never did once think of that trunk a-tall; I was only thinking of cows.”
“Why, Jim, who could have taken it?”
“I don’t know,” said Jim Nabours. “It’s gone oncet more.”
He stumbled into a chair.
“I reckon I’m too old now. I’ve let you get robbed oncet more.”
CHAPTER XLVTHE MAN HUNT
THE sun sank gently back of the grasslands encircling Abilene. The night chill came, the quavering wail of the coyotes crept closer to the outskirts of the town, the unbelievably brilliant stars came out to illuminate a many-splendored night. But to these things Abilene paid little heed. She held festival on her day of triumph.
The fumes of liquor, the reek of packed humanity filled each insignificant room along Liquor Lane in Abilene. Especially crowded were the two more ambitious places, where dancing was obtainable in connection with strong drink. Here the scene was such as might best be forgotten as a part of the record of the outlands. There were a dozen or more women, or those who once had been women; and with these, in an obscenity that should balk any pen, a hundred or two hundred men danced.
A general confusion, many voices arising continuously, passed out of the open windows and open doors. The stamp of feet, shoutings, senseless laughter, shrill hysteria of females excited by drink, the coarser basso of males excited likewise, joined in a curious roar whose sensuous undertone resembled no other sound or blend of sounds in all the world. In no corner of the world have the primitive instincts of man found fuller loosing than in the border capitals of the cow trails.
It was the etiquette—unvarying in Saxon outlands—that he who danced with a damsel must lead her to the bar after they twain had trod a measure, else lack in a decent respect for the opinion of mankind. Of actual sets, of any measured cæsura, there was none. The music was furnished by rum-soaked men who sat apart on barrels, the same who had welcomed that morning the first Texas herd ever seen in Abilene. Such as it was, and supported by fiery stimulant, the concord was continuous, the floors were always full. Men danced in hats and boots and spurs. The voice of a submerged set caller droned on: “Dolcie do! Allemand left! Swing your partner! Lift her high!” It was festival in Abilene.
McMasters and Wild Bill Hickok passed from door to door, the quietest and soberest men in all the town. There approached them a man in uniform, a sergeant of the United States Army. He recognized McMasters.
“I’ve been looking for you, sir,” said he. “I am up from the Wichita Mountains, from Colonel Griswold. I’ve got two ambulances and an escort of five men for each. I was to offer you any help you required, sir, and to put the ambulances under your order if any of your people wished to travel south. The colonel could not come. He sends his compliments and hopes you are quite well. He thinks it would be much safer for you to travel south across the Nations under military escort. He hopes the young lady will occupy one ambulance for her own in case you sell out, and start south, sir.”
“All right, sergeant,” replied McMasters; “that’s very fine of Colonel Griswold. The young lady has sold her herd to-day and will be starting south before long. Where are your ambulances and your men?”
The sergeant grinned, somewhat embarrassed.
“The ambulances are at the Twin Star Barn,” said he. “I put my mules and horses in there too. I guess my men may be scattered.”
“Stop your drinking,” said Dan McMasters. “You may be needed to-night. Go get your men together. Be at the Silver Moon half an hour from now.”
“Very good, sir,” said the man, and saluted again. He cast a longing eye through windows as he passed down the street.
Near the door of the Silver Moon Dance Hall a man pushed by them, anxious; Nabours, looking around him, not hurrying to the bar.
“Dan!” he exclaimed as he caught sight of McMasters. His granite agitation, his naïve disregard of all the post, bridged any gap remaining between them. “Look here! Hell’s to pay!”
“What’s up?” asked McMasters, startled by the look on his face. “Anything gone wrong with—her?”
“Yes! Miss Taisie’s trunk is gone; it’s been stole out of the cart right in front of the door. All her scrip was in it—you know what.”
A sudden flush came to Dan McMaster’s face.
“You are rather a fine foreman, aren’t you, Jim?” said he. “Was that the best you could use that girl?”
“Call me anything you like. I’m a damned old fool. I’ve quit her hire. I gave her the money and quit her hire right here.”
“Don’t you know that Sim Rudabaugh and some of his gang are in town right now? They’ve beat us, after all; they’ve got the scrip, even if they couldn’t stop the herd. Rudabaugh can get his lands now in spite of you and me. He’ll own all the state of Texas, west of the Double Mountain Fork. He’ll get what Miss Lockhart’s father left her, her fortune in lands. We have been making money for him, not her! You let that thing happen right now, when I have almost got my hand on his collar!” He spoke with greater bitterness than any man had ever known of him. At length the indomitable side of his nature took sway again. “But we’ll comb out the town first. Go get McCoyne.”
They did get McCoyne, and solicited his aid in such general search for the missing treasure chest as they hurriedly could contrive. It all was hopeless. No one had seen two men carrying a trunk. The cart was precisely where it had been left. No vehicle had left town, no train. The Del Sol treasure trunk simply had disappeared.
The allies, discomfited, met at last in the open street, Hickok having joined them by this time, and having heard the story.
“Hark!” said the latter, raising a hand.
His keen ears had caught the sound which presently became obvious to them all—the pounding of hoofs, yelling of riders in concert. Sweeping over the prairies at top speed, the herdsmen of Del Sol were coming in to have their share in the Fourth of July celebration. But as they stood looking to the north there came the sound of a heavy rifle shot, close at hand. A red streak came from the window near the kitchen of the Cottage. Two men came running. On general principles Hickok halted them.
“What was that shot?” he demanded.
“That?” panted one of the runners. “That old negro woman. She got scared and shot through the window.”
But by now Hickok thought he had recognized the speaker as one of the men he had seen talking with Rudabaugh earlier in the day. The two fugitives turned into the door of the Silver Moon Dance Hall just before the Del Sol riders swept up and cast down their bridle reins. All the overflow population of Abilene seemed to be packed into or on one side or other of the door of the Silver Moon. Hickok, Nabours, McMasters pushed in through the crowd hard after the Del Sol men, unkempt, ragged, wild, troubled with no false modesty as to their own place in the world. They pushed on up to the bar, Len Hersey leading them.
“Come on, men!” called the high voice of that lusty youth. “I got enough dinero for one little time, and I’m going to have more. Set ’em up, mister, and do it quick. You come in here, Sanchez—come on, Sinker!”
Then pushed forward from among them the thin figure of a boy, ragged, unshorn, his hair through his hat, his lower extremities pushed through a pair of leather leggings a world too large for him. It was Cinquo’s first appearance at a public bar, part of his education for his calling. At his shoulder was the thin figure of a dark man, old, grizzled, imperturbable—Sanchez, the only Mexican on the Del Sol herd. Unsmilingly Sanchez drew from under his coat the object which had had a place on his saddle horn. He set down upon the bar a much bedraggled, entirely dilapidated gamecock—nothing less than Gallina, whom he had cherished for a thousand miles. And Gallina now repaid him. He cast a red eye over the multitude and bade defiance to the world in a long and lusty crow. A peal of laughter broke from the crowd. Again the voice of Len Hersey arose.
“This here rooster can lick ary chicken in the state of Kansas, five hunderd a battle. This here boy and his horse can outrun ary outfit in this town, ary distance, for five hunderd a race. I can whip ary man in this here room myself. We’re just from Texas and we’re wild and woolly. Our steers has longer horns than anybody’s. Del Sol has came to town!”
The not ill-natured rioters crowded about him and his fellows, accosting him partly in jest and partly in earnest. The Del Sol orator leaned against the bar and faced them.
“Come on, men!” said Hersey, sweeping a wide arm. “Here goes all the money I’ve got—couple of hunderd! Say, mister, is our credit good when that runs out?”
“There ain’t no man’s credit good here when his money runs out,” replied the barman sullenly. “Take that hen off my bar. Go ask your owner that dresses in pants why she hasn’t paid off her men earlier.”
A sort of squealing yell arose above the tumult. The boy Cinquo had wheeled like a flash, his heavy revolver in hand. His sweeping blow struck the bartender on the top of the head and dropped him motionless as a log.
“You can’t say her name in no saloon!” shrilled the boy. “That’s no way to treat us folks from Texas. If there’s any of you-all looking for trouble you can git it right here!”
“That’s what you can!” cried Len Hersey, touching elbows. The men of Del Sol edged close together. “Take a drink, Sinker—we’ll owe it to this house if you haven’t got no money.”
The boy reached out his hand, thin, freckled, unwavering, toward the bottle which stood near. It was his first drink at a bar. Well, he had to begin.
“You hear me!” again called out Len Hersey. “This kid gits his drink free right now. We bar any talk against our boss.”
But a tall figure pushed through the crowd directly up to Hersey.
“Look here, my friend,” said Wild Bill Hickok, “I know who you are and it’s all right, but you’re making too much noise. Just keep quiet now. Son, you don’t get any drink—it wouldn’t do you any good.”
He reached out and took the glass which Cinquo Centavos had filled for himself. Whether or not even Wild Bill could have done so much as this without trouble happily did not come into question. McMasters, Nabours, now appeared at his side.
“Shut your mouth, Len,” said Nabours. “Somebody’s liable to fill you full of holes. You know mighty well we’ve got to trail the bulk of the herd to-morrow over to the Smoky Hill and Junction City. Take a drink or so, and then keep your hand off the liquor till you get done your work.”
No one seemed to pay any attention to the prone figure of the barkeeper, who lay on the floor beyond the bar. A sort of hush in the maudlin manifestations came upon the closely packed assemblage at the sight of the unmistakable figure of Wild Bill, whose reputation was known over all the borderlands.
It was in this hush, at this dead center, that there came a sudden flash and roar from the back of the crowded hall. Dan McMasters, turning to look over the bar at the fallen man, felt a sudden flick at the collar of his coat. A bottle on the shelf beyond crashed to bits. A lamp toward the rear of the hall went out under the concussion.
McMasters wheeled, both weapons in hand, looking out over the surging mass of men and women. He was just a second later than the future marshal of Abilene, who had not turned. The tall figure of Hickok straightened like a flash to his full height. His arm rose high, pointing a red line of flame. At the rear of the room a man dropped. He had been shot squarely through the forehead, the bullet passing just above the heads of the others.
What happened then no man knew. There was a mad rush towards the door. Women screamed and sought to escape by the windows. A score of guns were drawn. No man knew where stood his enemy.
Midway of the mad rush in the rear of the room three men came crouching, crowding, each with a gun in his hand. They endeavored to keep together; and thus, being recognized as a source of danger, certain of the crowd pushed away from them, left them more readily visible.
“Let them out!” The command came high and clear. McMasters laid a hand on Hickok’s arm. “Let them get out on the street!”
He had recognized, as one of the three men, the man he had come so far to meet—his arch enemy Rudabaugh. But he did not fire.
Hickok stayed his hand. He did not look toward the rear of the room, now cleared, for he knew his work there was done. He never was known to look at the effect of any shot he ever made; he always knew. There stood now at his side a man as dangerous as himself. But the two best pistol men on all that wild border now dared not shoot, had they so desired, for the men had shrugged down below the level of the crowd.
“That’s Rudabaugh in front!” called McMasters. “Don’t shoot him! Let him alone! Let him get out!”
He himself began to edge toward the door, Wild Bill pushing through the crowd at his elbow. The Del Sol men for the time were jostled back.
It was Rudabaugh who had sought to end at any cost the life of his worst enemy, Dan McMasters. He had missed, across the room, but now intended to kill McMasters at short range. But always some other man intervened, caught down his arm.
He made a sudden last plan—often a deadly one—stepped outside the door and waited for his man to follow—an old border trick which very often worked. The shooter would be in the darkness, his target in the light.
But the wily bandit leader had reckoned ill with the men he now was meeting. Even as he passed over the threshold Hickok suddenly fired over McMasters’ shoulder. His bullet struck the barrel of Rudabaugh’s revolver and hurled it from his hand. An instant later the two officers broke out the door. Rudabaugh, wringing his hand, was stooping for his revolver, his two companions making off at top speed in the moonlight.
As for the latter, they both fell face forward, shot through the back. Neither of their two executioners had time to look at them. Both covered Rudabaugh as he half rose.
“Don’t shoot!” cried McMasters once more. “Leave him to me!”
An instant later and he was locked in grips with the ruffian he had sought so long to meet in precisely this fashion. Hickok stood back, his elbows at the door jamb, a revolver in either hand.
“Easy, gentlemen!” said he. “Easy now! Don’t come out! Just stay right where you are!”
Every man who heard heeded the advice of Wild Bill and set back his shoulders against the thrust behind him.
The combat on the beaten ground in front of the Silver Moon did not long endure. McMasters had borne down his man at the first leap. Rudabaugh’s right hand was still numb from the impact of the ball which had struck his weapon. Moreover, he was much older than his antagonist, soft with drink and excess of every imaginable sort, little more than the shell of a man; whereas his enemy was young, sound, hard and lithe as a panther. One fought a battle with the result foreordained, the other sought to postpone the end. McMasters was absolutely merciless when finally he twisted Rudabaugh’s arm behind him and flung him face down on the ground.
Handcuffs were unknown in that land. McMasters pushed his knees up under Rudabaugh’s elbows, gripped his hands together and twisted a silk handkerchief around them, tying it into a knot.
“Get up!”
He kicked Rudabaugh into obedience, caught him by the collar when he stood, hated him so bitterly that he was much of the mind to shoot him even now. But at length his calmness came back to him as Hickok approached once more, McCoyne also pushing forward.
“Where am I going to keep this man?” demanded McMasters. It was McCoyne who answered.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “I certainly apologize. I might have known we’d need a jail, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to fix up a lot of things. Give me a day or so, and I’ll show you that Abilene has got the best jail in Kansas. I’ve been so busy——”
Wild Bill turned back to Len Hersey, who now had got out at the door.
“Go get your rope and help this officer,” said he. “Now go home, all of you.” He turned toward the crowd. “You’ve had enough to drink and you’ve got enough Fourth of July for one day.”
He grinned as he turned once more toward McMasters.
“If you should happen to take your friend out of town,” said he, “I don’t see how I could help myself. There don’t seem to be any courts here, or any place to hold a prisoner.”
Rudabaugh broke out in blasphemy.
“You damned outlaws, you cutthroats!” he began. “You can’t take me without any warrant, and you can’t hold me without process of law. I demand counsel. I’m going to have my trial. Is this America, I want to know?”
“You said it,” remarked Bill Hickok. “That’s just what it is.”
Now came running the men of the military escort. McMasters addressed the sergeant.
“Help me get this man over to the livery barn.”
They led Rudabaugh away. He was cursing, struggling, sobbing. Wild Bill stood looking after them, with no apparent concern. He evinced no interest in the victims of the night affray. He had known worse scenes of violence all his life, been in many encounters of greater danger. To him these matters were much in the day’s work sometimes, always tempered with the killer’s fatalism, which valued nothing save the fact that he found himself still alive.
“Well, Joe,” said he, turning to McCoyne, who stood near, “it seems like the law of habeas corpus hasn’t got quite as far west as the Twin Livery Barn. If it has I’ll suspend habeas corpus in this town until Captain McMasters gets his prisoner out of town and headed south.”
A Paramount Picture.North of 36.“HANDS OFF, RUDABAUGH!” ROARS BIG JIM.
A Paramount Picture.North of 36.“HANDS OFF, RUDABAUGH!” ROARS BIG JIM.
CHAPTER XLVIFAIR EXCHANGE
ALL day alone, a stranger, almost a prisoner in Lou Gore’s little room, Taisie Lockhart for once in her life was now almost in a condition of hysteria. The strain and stress of the long trail journey, the anxiety of her hazard of fortunes, the relaxation of success—and now all these scenes and sounds of violence in combination so worked upon her worn nerves that she no longer was herself. Lou Gore was much put to it to comfort her, and, indeed, was glad enough to welcome Jim Nabours and the boy Cinquo, who later in the evening came in to tell the news of the affair at the Silver Moon. These two paused in the outer room, not daring to ask once more to see their mistress.
“You tell her, ma’am,” said Jim Nabours. “Tell her we got Rudabaugh safe and his gang busted wide open—three of them killed. Dan McMasters, he taken Rudabaugh prisoner hisself in a fair stand-up fight.”
“Well, all right, all right,” responded Lou Gore; “I’ll tell her anything. Nobody in town has had any supper yet. We can’t have no dance now. This is the beatingest Fourth of July ever I did see. I declare, you cowboys give me more trouble than my gamblers.
“I don’t want to be nasty to you,” she went on. “But you’ve got to keep out of my kitchen. Here, take a couple of keys and go on upstairs and go to bed. I declare, I am right tired my own self.”
Meekly obedient, although reluctant not to see the mistress of Del Sol before he slept, Jim Nabours clumsily climbed the stairs, the boy close at his heels.
“What’s wrong, Mister Jim?” asked Cinquo solicitously. “Ain’t we sold out all right?”
“Yes,” said his foreman gruffly. “We’ve won out on the cows. But we’ve lost out on the land. You know that trunk?”
“Shore. I do. It was always getting in the road everywheres.”
“It won’t be no more! It’s gone—lost—stole. It was worth ten times as much as all our cows. Old Rudabaugh knows where it is, but he ain’t so apt to tell.”
As he spoke he flung open the door of a room, one of many precisely alike on either side of the upper hall. But he paused.
“Hello!” said he. “There’s some one in here now, and he’s gone to bed.”
The bed indeed was occupied—occupied by a long and motionless figure, a pillow slip drawn across his face, the hands folded on the breast.
“I’ll be——” Jim Nabours halted as something caught his eye. He stepped forward, drew back the face covering.
“Why, it’s Cal Dalhart!” said he. “He’s dead all right—but they done told me he was buried! McCoyne told me he seen it done hisself!”
The boy came and stared down in awe at the long and motionless figure, the white face.
“Him and Del, now——”
But Nabours took him by the arm. The two went down the stairs once more into the office room.
“Mister,” said Nabours to the gloomy occupant, handing over his key, “you’d better give me another room.”
“What’s the matter with the one you’ve got?” demanded the landlord of the Drovers’ Cottage.
“Somebody in it now,” replied Nabours, “and he’s dead. They told me that you-all got a couple of men to bury that man that got shot. Is that right? It was Mr. McCoyne told me that. Where is he?”
Sounds of voices came through the open door. A group of men were talking excitedly in the moonlight. The landlord summoned in one of these—McCoyne, ubiquitous and sleepless. To him Nabours repeated his query.
“Certainly, sir,” replied McCoyne. “I saw the two men carrying the coffin between them. I saw them bury him as plain as I ever saw anything in all my life! Of course, I wasn’t right out there with them. I been so busy——”
“Well, he ain’t buried now,” said Jim Nabours. “Cal Dalhart’s up there, upstairs.”
“Don’t that beat anything you ever heard!” exclaimed McCoyne. “It seems like everything goes wrong unless a man does it his own self, don’t it now?”
“You come along with me,” said Nabours, moved by a sudden thought of his own. “You get two men—new ones. I believe them two folks that buried Cal Dalhart is both dead theirselfs. Bring a couple of shovels. Hurry up!”
A little group of men departed in the moonlight on a certain gruesome errand. It was Jim Nabours himself who began at the loose dirt of the mound at whose head there had been erected a little headboard: “C. Dalhart, of Texas. Died July 4, 1867. May he rest in peace.”
“He couldn’t never rest in peace thisaway,” said Jim Nabours a half hour later. His shovel struck something hard.
“Here, lend us a hand,” said he. “Sinker, get hold the other handle of this trunk. It’s heavy. Huh! It’s got a half million acres of Texas land into it!”
“And we’ve got Sim Rudabaugh over in the livery stable,” he added after a time thoughtfully, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. “This ain’t no bad day’s work a-tall. You people go on back and bring Cal over here and we’ll bury him right. A fair exchange ain’t no robbery.”
CHAPTER XLVIITHE COURT OF THE COMANCHES
FOUR days later the transient population of Abilene began to scatter. No one knew when another herd would come, if ever. The great Del Sol herd now was split up, a portion coming into the yards to try for an Eastern market, a greater portion driven east to the crude packing plant at Junction City. The remainder, under Len Hersey and a half dozen of the best men of the Del Sol herd, was driven north to the new range on the Smoky Hill. All the details of Abilene’s first transaction in cows now were closed. The bill of sale, the record of the tally, the passing of the final bank draft—all details soon to become familiar in the northern-range towns—now were completed. The Del Sol horse band was sold north. Remained only the two carts, each with its double yoke of oxen, and two horses each for eight of the hands who had concluded to return to Texas. The two Army ambulances offered transport for the remainder of those who had come north in the saddle. Taisie’s horse, Blancocito, was left to trot alongside, unsaddled.
Lou Gore kissed Taisie Lockhart for the last time, tears in the eyes of both; then wiped her hands and eyes upon her apron and turned back to build up her reputation as the biggest-hearted woman on the Plains. What friend she was to the wild men of the trail, countless wounded, crippled, ill and helpless cowmen learned in the years to come; years of swift changes on the upper range. A good soul, a strong heart of the frontier, she left a beloved and covetable memory.
The ambulances, each drawn by four sleek mules, stood in the street waiting, flanked by stalwart troopers. In the foremost vehicle, on a middle seat, hidden from view, sat Sim Rudabaugh, and gyves were on his wrists. Thongs of rawhide, right and left, bound his hands to the seat ends. Other thongs fastened his ankles and passed back under the seat to a cross pole. In the seat behind sat Dan McMasters and the boy Cinquo, both armed. Rudabaugh could never have escaped. The ruthless trail bandit, who never took a prisoner, himself was a prisoner at last. To all his sobbings, his expostulations, his execrations and his questions, no one made any answer. Of friends he had none in all the world. He was at the end of the trail of the transgressor.
This ambulance, of course, must drive faster than the others, which would hold back with the Del Sol carts. In the second ambulance, well escorted, Taisie was to ride with her foreman, Nabours. In this was stowed a certain trunk covered with rawhide.
But as this little cavalcade stood halted in midstreet of the cloudless morning, most of the remaining men of Abilene came clamoring for the privilege of one more farewell to the Texas girl. Taisie leaned forward to greet them as they came, herself beautiful as the dawn, in spite of the new droop at the corners of her mouth.
Dan McMasters had said his own good-bys briefly, coldly—the coldest man in all the world, she thought. He never once had met her for a moment alone. Of that swift brief fire of two earlier times only ashes remained, unblown of any gust of passion.
McCoyne flitted from one vehicle to the other, excitedly making his adieus.
“Come back again!” said he. “We’ll be waiting for you next year. Tell every ranch in Texas to send up their herds. You’ll see Abilene with a jail and a church and a school and a graveyard the next time you come. I have been so busy——”
Came among the very last a woman of the Silver Moon, young in years but weary and old at this hour of the morning. Timidly she reached out her hand through the curtains of the ambulance and Taisie took it.
“Good-by,” said the girl; “good-by, my dear. You’re the first woman ever came to Abilene. Don’t come back again,”—and so departed to the Silver Moon, herself once a woman, and seeing Taisie’s eyes following the tall young man.
Pattison, the Northern stockman, spent some time in final conversation with Mr. Dan McMasters.
“Believe me, son,” said he, with a final farewell, “when you marry and settle down with me up here I’ll make you richer than you ever dreamed of being. Go back home and put up a herd of stockers for next spring. Tell the Texas drovers to come along. There’s going to be money in cows now.”
McMasters reached out and took his hand.
“I’ll be back next season with a herd,” said he. “So long!”
Among all these others also came Wild Bill Hickok, future town marshal of Abilene. By odd chance, partly due to his own shyness, he had never in all these days met Taisie Lockhart. He did not mean to intrude now, but inadvertently peered in at the curtains of her ambulance. She saw him push back the curtain, reached out her hand, smiling. He took it, held it, stood awed at her very beauty, pondering for a time sadly, her hand in his, in one of the fits of melancholy which came to him at times. As he knew his life of the past, so he read all his future.
“You remind me of Agnes,” said he simply. “That’s my wife. She’s back home. Be good. Good-by.”
With McMasters he spoke at first hardly so much even as that. They shook hands, each looking into the eyes of the other.
“Good luck!” said Hickok. “Don’t say I didn’t help you with the habeas corpus. If you run into any one down below kill this man first.”
He nodded at Rudabaugh. The latter broke out blasphemously once more. But the blue eye of the man who had killed the last of the Rudabaugh gang of border thieves paid him not even a contemptuous attention. He turned away.
Now came the parting crack of a whip on the air of the morning, rumble of wheels on the streets of Abilene, already growing dustier. Abilene, center of revolutionary changes soon to be, lay behind them presently. The Del Sol folk were homeward bound.
On the long journey to the South, after the first hour, the leading ambulance vehicle never again was sighted. From day to day, from camp to camp, at one river crossing after another, the slower travelers found proof of attempts to make their progress as safe and easy as possible. There were rafts and boats, each left on the north bank of the stream. Fords were marked out with poles. What with the passing of Jesse Chisholm’s wagon trail to the Arbuckle Mountains, and the additional care of McMasters and the Army men, the passage southward, thus well equipped, was child’s play compared with the long and dangerous journey northbound with the herd. The lead ambulance easily did forty and fifty miles a day, the ox carts twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty.
Again and again Taisie Lockhart felt growing upon her her sense of indebtedness to a man with whom she could never come to terms. One thing seemed certain—they now had parted company forever. He was leaving Texas, going North to live. Bitterly the girl resolved that all material obligations between them, at least, should one day be discharged, though it should take her last dollar.
Not once on all the long journey did McMasters ever accost his prisoner. Cold as a tourmaline, his green-gray eyes looked Rudabaugh straight in the face when occasion came. But that was all. At night the prisoner had chance to sleep, no chance to escape. If McMasters himself caught a continuous hour or two of sleep, the boy Cinquo took his place, his weapon across his knee. Men fed Rudabaugh with no more ceremony than had he been a captive animal.
Thus, on one morning, two days’ march south of the Washita, McMasters and his men raised the rough highlands of Medicine Bluff Creek, where sat Camp Wichita which not long thereafter was to be known as Fort Sill, thanks to the earlier and long-forgotten efforts of that great soldier of the West, R. B. Marcy, captain of the Fifth Infantry; the first explorer for the Army in those parts, and a wise man in Indian matters in his day. He had predicted the savage campaign of two years later, of Sheridan, Custer, which proved needful to chastise the upper tribesmen, of Black Kettle, on the Washita.
As to the reservation which later was to hold the Comanches, subsequent to the series of tribal defeats wrought by Custer along the Washita, nothing was consummated until the following year. The main body of the Quahrada Comanches—those who had the Staked Plains as their hunting grounds—had traveled on back home. But here in the Wichita Mountains sturdy Sandy Griswold still held old Yellow Hand and his select band of warriors, waiting for word from north of the Arkansas. He had told Yellow Hand to wait until his young men came. Then they could go back home. And Yellow Hand himself was the first to announce the coming of men from the north.
The welcome between McMasters and Griswold was brief. The latter looked inside the ambulance.
“You’ve got your man!” said he grimly. “How about the others?”
“They resisted arrest, sir,” replied Dan McMasters. “I had the help of Wild Bill Hickok at Abilene. I have kept my word and brought in Rudabaugh for you. Here’s your man.”
“Get out, you!” He spoke to Rudabaugh the first time, and cut his bands.
The prisoner climbed stiffly down and looked about him. He faced a row of Army tents, a few rough huts. A clump of Indian tepees stood not far distant. A strong shudder came across the body of Sim Rudabaugh. His face went white in sudden premonition.
The Comanches were waiting for the man who had killed their women.
“Oh, my God!” moaned the prisoner, now really contrite. “Oh, my God, have mercy!” Even then he knew.
Griswold called for his interpreter, ordered the Comanches to come before his tent. They sat in council, the pipe passed. The beady eyes of the Comanches were fixed on the prisoner, but they sat in silent dignity until the proper time. At length Griswold arose, addressing Yellow Hand and pointing to Rudabaugh, whom he kept standing, his hands again bound.
“Tell him,” said Griswold, nodding to his interpreter, and speaking to Yellow Hand, “this is the man who shot down your women when they were bathing over there by the Arbuckle Hills. You Quahradas, of the Staked Plains, were visiting here. You had not harmed this man. He was not at war with you. You had not harmed him. He killed your women. He did not seek out your warriors.
“I said to you that I would bring this man back to you for you to try. You can punish him as you like. I give him to you. You do not know this man. You only know that the men who wear a yellow stripe on their leggings never have lied to you. This is the man who killed your women. I say it.”
He raised his hand as Yellow Hand started forward, his face convulsed.
“But I have your promise also, Yellow Hand. You shall not lie to me. When I give him to you in place of your two women you must do as you have promised.
“Will you now go back to your people and tell them to sit down? Will you tell them to leave the war trail on the Staked Plains, to leave our white towns and ranches alone, and the cattle they drive north?
“Will you come here, all of you, and join the northern Comanches and your brothers the Kiowas and sit down forever, here on your land, where the buffalo are many and the deer are running in the thickets as many as the leaves on the trees? Here the sun is warm, the grass is good, the water is sweet and cool.
“Will you do all these things, Yellow Hand? Are you done fighting with the white man? I promise you that next year, and the year after, the white soldiers will take the winter trail against the villages of the Cheyennes and their friends. No matter how cold it is, no matter how deep the snow is, our men will find their village and wipe them out. You Indians must stop stealing horses and cattle and killing our men on the ranches.
“Will you Quahradas, who are wise men, make your peace first and save your women and your children? If I give you this man will you open the trails for the cows that want to go north? Will you come in here and sit down? Promise me that, Yellow Hand! Speak only the truth to me! I know how to punish men who lie.”
The face of the old savage still worked with rage; his eyes still were riveted on the miscreant who stood bound before him, tragic pledge for the future safety of the Trail. But now Yellow Hand knew himself to be the leader of his people. He rose with his arms folded.
“I speak the truth, now, here, even as the chief of the white men speaks it,” said he. “You have done as you have said you would do. Give us that man that you said you would give us. We will do with him as your people would do with us. We will try him in our way. I will talk with my men. We will punish him in our way. Then when we have done that we will wrap our robes about us. We will come in here and sit down in this land, which we know is good.
“I can see that the white people are too many. They are making roads across the grass. Some day the buffalo will be gone. Over their trails will walk these new cattle—have we not seen them come? I can hear their hoofs coming, as many as the wind can count among the trees. It is done. I have said all I want to say.”
“Rudabaugh,” said Griswold, turning to him at length, with no pity in his eye, “get ready to die. God may have no mercy on your soul. You’ve shown none—not once in all your life. Take what you’ve earned!”
Rudabaugh broke out with denunciation of the utter illegality of all this.
“I know it,” said Griswold. “But this court carries no records. No one will ever know.”
He pushed forward the man, who now so trembled he scarce could stand. The sinewy fingers of Yellow Hand gripped his shoulder like eagle talons. A warrior caught him on the opposite side. He was dragged away, fighting, to the door of the largest lodge.
For an hour there came through the distance only the sound of savage singing. At length the white men, sitting solemnly awake in their own encampment, saw a group of the Comanches come out from the lodge and start toward a little thicket which lay perhaps a hundred yards or so away. They dragged with them something which scarce stood erect, held back with palsied feet.
“My God, Mister Dan,” broke out the voice of a boy all too young for such a scene, but taking one more lesson in border ways, “what are they goin’ to do to him now?”
But the savage justice of the tribesmen was done in such fashion as only these fiends of the lower border could have devised. No pen should specify as to this.
For a time, for five minutes perhaps, or more, there came from the thicket shrieks of a man in torture, such sounds as left these hardened men unable to look one another in the face, though not one of them wavered in his own savage decision. Now it was too late. The word of the white men had been given.
No smoke, no sign of fire arose above the top of the little thicket. There was no sound but that of the shrieking victim. The Comanches had devised some new way of punishment.
Yellow Hand came back after a long time, a smile contorting his great mouth.
“Him run little way,” said he, wiping his hands on his leggings. “No skin on him—he can’t run far.”
And for reason of that which had gone on in yonder thicket by the little stream—by reason of what one time was found flung across the bush tops there—that bloody stream came to be called the Rawhide.
The Comanche reservation, thus purchased, later established, was close to that spot. Far to the west, above Doan’s Crossing, over the high country where soon a dozen trails were to blend—seeking Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Dodge, Great Bend, Ogalalla, all the Army posts and all the empty upper range—the Comanches fought no more.
The day of the northbound hegira of the cows had come. The immortal gods, trickling through their fingers grasses of grama, mesquite, redtop, buffalo, bluestem, watched a new land spring lustily into being. It was born of blood. But it was born of South and North, which never again were to know war one with the other. Both shared in sending old customs to a new land. A new language came to it. New industries grew in it. More rapidly than any tract of all our country or of any country ever was settled, the Great West of America became great and strong indeed. It wrote its story—whose beginnings almost have faded now—on the pages of the world’s history; or more splendidly still, on the lips of a country’s envying tradition of Homeric deeds.