CHAPTER XXXVIIABILENE
IN THE front room of a raw board building, on which carpenters still were laboring noisily, sat a tall man at a table, pleasantly humming a tune to himself as he bent over his task.
In appearance he was a Viking; a very strong man, bulky, above six feet in height, and yet lithe, easy, graceful, with perfect coördination of physical faculties. His eye was very blue. His yellow hair was long, like that of ancient warriors; so long that it fell in ripples on his shoulders; and, as hair of any warrior should be, it was admirably kept.
The garb of this striking-looking man—one of the handsomest men that ever crossed the Missouri in the days of the frontier, which is much to say of males—was on the whole devoid of pretentiousness. His dark clothing was ready-made, but his boots never were ready-made. He showed the influence of the South, where a man may be slouchy in all things save as to his feet. This man’s boots were of fine calf, closely cut to cover a small foot. A pair of gloves lay on the table, the best of buckskin. His hat, of the finest felt, was wide of brim and low of crown—the hat of the upper range, distinct from the steeple-crown Mexican sombrero.
Had the entire border been combed, a finer example of the better type of border man could not at that time have been found than this one. In any corner of the world his appearance would have called attention. Two or three men sitting across from him against the wall in the hotel office—for this building was no less than the Drovers’ Cottage of Abilene, soon to be famous across the Western world—eyed him with silent respect as he sat busy, humming his carefree melody. They very well knew Wild Bill Hickok, whom rumor reported to be sought for as the new town marshal of Abilene, first of the cow camps.
The famous marshal of Hays City—as he then was—now was engaged in the daily task which he never neglected and never gave to hands other than his own—that of cleaning his two heavy revolvers. No hand but his ever had been allowed to touch one of these weapons, even in the slightest or most friendly way. He himself never failed to examine them every morning.
They were very long-barreled revolvers, and their owner’s artistic fancy was indulged in them to the extent of ivory handles. The metal work was dark. The front sight on each had been filed down low. That was just before the day of fixed ammunition, and all revolvers still were muzzle-loaders as to the cylinders. Under the barrel of each piece worked a hinged ramrod, and the backs of the cylinders were indented and tubed to permit admission of the percussion caps. They handled a large round ball. Some of these, with the small flask of fine rifle powder, lay on the table near at hand. With a short, well-polished round stick of hickory, Mr. Hickok was now engaged in cleaning barrel and cylinder so thoroughly that not a speck of dust remained. His boots and gloves were clean; his shirt was clean; his face and hands were clean; and, be sure, his guns were clean.
He finished his task at length, replaced each cylinder and pushed down the pin on which it revolved. Then, with eyes narrowing and lips pursed, he poured into each cylinder barrel an exact—very exact—charge of the fine powder, gently jolting each charge home, and on top, with the utmost care, seating the round ball and pushing it home with the hinged ramrod. Each load was precisely like every other load. Then he capped each nipple of the cylinder, held back each hammer and rolled the cylinder with ear intent to see that the click of the lock came absolutely even. After this he slipped the long weapons into the greased holsters at his heavy belt. His coat tails unobtrusively covered the equipment. He walked to the new washbasin at the new sink, cleansed and wiped his hands on a towel not absolutely new; and so was ready for the duties of the day, whatever these might be.
“Well, Bill, going to get somebody to-day?” one of the loafing skin hunters against the wall guffawed, trying to be offhand, friendly and humorous. The tall man looked at him steadily, his own face absolutely emotionless, and made no reply at all. His dignity was that of a lion among small animals. He was a man of few confidences and no familiarities.
When Wild Bill Hickok stepped out into the street he saw coming across the railroad track a stranger, a young man tall as himself, though not so heavy of build. The newcomer was clad much like himself, in dark clothing, with neat boots. His coat swung easily free, but to the specialized eye of Wild Bill it covered something on either side. Moreover, he presently noted that the young man wore his guns in an odd way—the right-hand stock pointing back, the left-hand one pointing forward. This peculiarity he had never seen in the equipment of any man, cowman, gambler or professional bad man. He asked himself, if this man should happen to be left-handed, or if he were a two-handed man, which gun would be used first? That constituted, as Wild Bill admitted then and there, a sort of mental problem which it might take the thousandth of a second to decide.
There was no pretentiousness about the newcomer, more than there was about Wild Bill Hickok. They both were simple, quiet men, low of voice, pleasant of address. Two more typical killers did not then stand west of the Missouri stream, although they were from widely separated countries. The range, north and south, upper and lower, ran well-nigh two thousand miles in its longer dimension, and covered wide variations in all types.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the young man, advancing. “I know this is Marshal Hickok. I am McMasters, sheriff of Gonzales County, down in Texas.”
The blue-eyed man put out his hand readily.
“I know about you,” said he. “You are in the Rangers, too, down there. That’s a good body of men. I reckon they need to be good.
“Well, it’s a lovely morning,” he continued. “I’ve not had a drink yet this morning.”
They walked down the ragged street, if street it could be called, passing over the railroad track, whose rails as yet hardly had been burnished by any wheels; a track which ran but a few hours’ journey west of Abilene at that time. There was a switch which would accommodate perhaps twenty cars, some pens which would hold perhaps five hundred head of cattle, some chutes which never yet had been used. Like all the rest of Abilene, the yards presented an aspect of raw newness. The residential portion of the city consisted largely of sod houses, dugouts and canvas tents, although it did not lack unpainted pine in its more ambitious structures. The broken expanse of high-fronted wooden buildings along its single main street offered the appearance conventional in the new railroad town of the frontier of the West. There was a Golden Eagle Clothing Store; two or three offering general merchandise. There was no drug store, but there were two barber shops and the Twin Livery Barn. There was no church or school. But, as the apostle of Abilene had said, there were many saloons and free dance-halls, each in its way openly advertising its wares.
Toward the saloon of his choice—which also apparently offered dance-hall accommodations at seasonable hours—Wild Bill bent his steps. The interior still presented a certain dishabille. A sleepy negro was sweeping out the corks. A barrel in a corner held empty bottles in careless profusion. The chairs presented an order apparently not preconcerted, and the legs of some were broken. There was no billiard table in all Abilene, and mahogany was not yet known in any bar of Abilene. None the less, here was a goodly plank, and back of it were arranged shelves still holding bottles of liquid contents in spite of the late obvious demand. The interior was not, to any imagination, howso violent, a lovely thing to see in the ghastly light of day. The light now was rather dim. Two or three kerosene lamps still were burning, yellow and sickly, not devoid of fumes, which joined the other fumes.
“I usually come here for my liquor,” said Wild Bill, “because I know Henry Doak has a barrel of real bourbon, besides what he sells. It ain’t poison. I never go against the liquor game very hard myself.”
“It isn’t best,” said McMasters. “Still, the oldest man I ever knew told me he’d lived so long because every morning before breakfast he took two or three fingers of bourbon—when he could get it—and rubbed his chest with a fresh corncob.”
“As good a way as any,” said Hickok. “A man never dies till his time comes—and then he does.”
He was humming to himself as he searched for the bottle which suited him.
“No three or four fingers for me,” said he. “Too much, especially if you have got anything particular to do.”
A short gray man with white mustache and goatee shuffled in, not vouchsafing any speech at all. He brought them glasses and motioned Bill to a quiet corner of the room, where at the hour they found themselves quite alone.
“Well, Mr. McMasters,” said Bill, “I am glad to see you in Abilene, and I wish you were going to live here. It’s not just the healthiest place for a peace officer. It maybe won’t be any healthier if the Texas herds ever do begin to come in.”
“I know of one on the way,” said McMasters. “It will be in now almost any day.”
Hickok nodded.
“They used to drive up the Neosho in towards Sedalia, a few years ago. Those toughs in there used the trail men mighty rough. Dougherty, Ellison, Hunter, McMasters, Lockhart—they were all good men that tried to drive in there from Texas. It would have paid St. Louis to have sent her whole police force down there and cleaned up that gang of cattle bandits. They’ve just headed off all the Texas cattle that came up that way.”
“Yes, I know about that pretty well,” assented Dan McMasters. “You say McMasters. Calvin McMasters was my father. They killed him. He was a friend of Colonel Burleson Lockhart. They killed Lockhart too. I’ve been in there since, once or twice, on business of my own. That gang were very largely friends of Dave Tutt.”
Their eyes met silently. Dave Tutt was a man whom Wild Bill Hickok killed in a street duel on the public square of Springfield, Missouri, in the presence of his friends, all of whom had threatened to kill Hickok on sight.
“Well, those people couldn’t seem to make a living any way except by robbing folks,” said the border man after a while. “The real brains of that outfit was a fellow called Rudabaugh—Sim Rudabaogh. I heard that he went South; to Austin, I think.”
“Yes, he got some sort of Northern political pull back of him I don’t just know how. He has given us a fine example of organized Reconstruction politics. He has put on foot the biggest plan of wholesale cow stealing and land stealing and general highway robbery that ever was started even in Texas.”
“Using his old trade, eh? Working large?”
“Yes. Just now he’s getting hold of all the land scrip the state ever issued—you know Texas retained her own lands when she came in. His plan is to get hold of about all of Texas north of the Buffalo gap, and then to steal cows enough east of that to stock the whole Staked Plains.”
“That sounds like a pretty large order!” smiled Hickok.
“It is a large order. The man is crazy who would ever think of it. I don’t doubt that Sim Rudabaugh is crazy—crazy with his own egotism and his success in deeds that no sane man ever could have thought of doing.”
“Have you got any personal quarrel?” asked Hickok of him quietly.
“That word doesn’t cover it, sir! Mr. Hickok, I have said that Rudabaugh killed my father and Colonel Lockhart. That is, I am practically sure of it. My father was sheriff of Gonzales before they put me in. I could not refuse. I knew I was elected to end the Rudabaugh gang.
“Quarrel? I can’t call it by so small a name. For every reason in the world I have got to have that man dead or alive. And you’ll think I am crazy myself,” he added, “when I tell you I want him alive. He is worth much more to Texas alive than dead. The fact is, the whole peace of Texas—and the whole end of the big steal in Texas—depends on my bringing that man in, not dead but alive.”
Hickok looked at him in silence for a time.
“You have had to shoot sometimes.”
“Several times. I have made a good many arrests as sheriff in my county and as a captain in the Rangers in other counties.”
Hickok shook his head. A light drinker, he pushed his glass aside not much more than tasted.
“No good in making arrests. There is only one way with a man like that—let him make his break.”
McMasters went on to explain the circumstances of Colonel Griswold’s talk with Yellow Hand, below the Washita, giving the details of the fight.
“We put a pretty stiff crimp into them there,” he said. “I don’t think Rudabaugh has more than two of his best warriors with him—Baldy Collins and Ben Estill. He got Estill at Caldwell. He’ll maybe pick up some more recruits over toward the Missouri line. He’s been trailing our herd ever since we started out, maybe a thousand miles and he’ll never quit if he can help it. As I have explained to you, it has been all to his interest to break up this herd. If word of its success got back to Texas this season, that would end his dream of cheap land and cheap cows. All Texas would be on its guard. You see why I want to arrest Rudabaugh. You will see, too, I’ve got to have him alive if possible.”
“Then why do you want to see me? I’m not living in this town, though I may later. Besides, my specialty is not taking people alive.” Wild Bill’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “I don’t believe in arrests for that kind of people.”
“I’m not so particular about any of those men being alive except Rudabaugh,” replied McMasters. “I haven’t got any warrant for him, and can’t get one, and couldn’t stop to prosecute him if I had. I couldn’t prove that he killed any of the drovers of the old Shawnee Trail. I don’t want to prove anything. I’ve got no warrant and no requisition papers. All I want is to get my hands on him.
“But I can prove that he killed the two Indian women down near the Arbuckle Mountains. There is no white jurisdiction down there, and in Kansas it’s no crime to kill Indians. But there won’t be any habeas corpus if he is ever brought before the court of the Comanches. That’s the court I want! That’s what Griswold wants, and he wants that because it means peace with the Comanches. Don’t you see? It means that they’ll come in out of Texas and go on their reservation. That will open up everything. There’ll be any number of cattle cross at Doan’s Store, and even further west, as quick as the drovers know it is safe against the Comanches, in further west than where this herd crossed the Red.
“So you see, Mr. Hickok, just why I want Sim Rudabaugh alive. That’s why I came to Abilene. I heard you were here, and I thought maybe Rudabaugh’d come here. If you don’t mean the law here, there’s going to be no law in Abilene.”
Hickok sat for a time in silence.
“Well,” said he at length, “I suppose I am generally intended to keep the peace. If I help you to get Rudabaugh in Kansas I am helping keep the peace in Kansas. And if they want me for town marshal here maybe I’d better give them a sample of the goods. Every town marshal in the world ought to help a Texas Ranger.
“But listen, friend,” he continued; “when two men go into a business of this kind each puts his life in the other man’s hands. Mostly I’d rather risk my life in my own hands. Are you a married man?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you a good shot with a revolver?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hickok rose lazily, leaving the liquor in his glass.
“Let’s take a walk out of doors,” he said.
They stepped to the front of the saloon and stood looking up and down the street. Some forty yards away a sign hung out over the walk: “Dance Hall and Saloon.”
“I’ll take the right-hand O,” said Hickok quietly.
With the ease of great practice and native genius—and all the Army men rated Hickok as the best shot with rifle or revolver that the West ever saw—he raised one of his weapons to a high level and fired the six shots of the single-action piece with unspeakable rapidity. He carefully returned the gun to its place. He did not look at the sign. He knew!
“That’s fine work, sir,” said Dan McMasters with undisguised enthusiasm. “Your reputation is deserved. Quite often I doubt a man’s reputation as a shot until I see him shoot.”
“How about your own?” demanded Hickok. “I myself never shoot in public. I don’t want anybody to know how I shoot.”
“Nor I. My reputation? I haven’t any this far north.”
“Well, there’s the left-hand O. Can you see the one I shot?”
“Perfectly,” smiled McMasters.
“You’ve a good eye. Can you hit it one time out of six?”
“I can hit it six times out of six, sir.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t think so—I know it.”
“Cut loose!” said Bill succinctly.
For an instant McMasters stood facing his mark, both hands poised above his heavy guns after his invariable fashion, which had swiftly become a tradition on the lower range. Hickok did not really see which gun he chose, his own eye for the time being fixed on the signboard. But a gun did rise in Dan McMasters’ right hand. And once more, with perfect spacing, came six reports.
By this time a crowd had poured out in the streets. Men were at their heels as the two walked close to the signboard. Wild Bill saw the six bullets grouped close, splintering one into the other at times, not one touching the outer rim of black.
His own eyes narrowed. He looked curiously, studiously, at the face of the first man he had ever been obliged to credit with pistol work approaching his own. The face had changed. It had not lost its concentration. It was a mask, expressionless. Hickok studied the mask for a moment. He saw in it his own face also. He put a hand on McMasters’ shoulder.
The two turned down the street, Hickok flinging back his long yellow hair in a gesture habitual with him.
“Take a good look at the work on them two signs, men,” said he, accosting the curious followers. “You ain’t apt to see better. This man and I are going to see peace and quiet in Abilene. He’s my friend and my deputy.
“I didn’t think the man lived that could do it,” said he to McMasters as they walked away together. “Your six are bunched as good as mine, and your time is perfect. Come on down to the Cottage and let’s sit around for a while.
“Hello, what’s that?” he added. A group of men was coming up at a fast gait from the southern edge of the town. Among them was one, apparently a leader, whose rapid discourse occasionally was broken by wild whoops. “Who’s that?” laughed Hickok. “Some more wild men from down the trail?”
In effect, it was Mr. McCoyne, explaining to the citizens of Abilene that beyond a peradventure he had met and traveled with an actual herd of cattle, actually bound for Abilene. Moreover, the said herd was then and there camped just below the Solomon, within easy reach of town.
This certainly was news of interest to McMasters as well as to Wild Bill Hickok. McCoyne was too much excited to identify any one, did not remember McMasters, whom he had not recently seen and never had known well.
“Listen, men!” he shouted. “We’ve got to have a celebration. Get all the Eastern men together. Go see if our new band is sober enough to play any sort of tune. Get ’em down on the portico at the Drovers’ Cottage in an hour or so. When I bring the herd into town, and we get right opposite the Cottage, tell ’em to strike up. We’ve got to show these people what a real live town is.
“Now, come on,” he resumed. “I own a interest in the Spread Eagle Saloon”—it chanced to be the one whose sign had served for a target just now, later a matter of much pride to the owner—“but I’m going to change the name to Lone Star. Come on and have a drink with McCoyne, president of the Abilene Stockyards!”
By magic, from their tents and dugouts, their sod huts and log hovels and their residences of raw pine board, the men of Abilene assembled—border men, skin hunters, loafers, gamblers, thieves, citizens and aliens, merchants and cattle buyers; a throng sufficiently motley for a total population of a very hundred. They crowded into the saloon, formed an overflow meeting upon the outside; primitive men in a primitive day.
Around this primitive scene stretched a wide and primitive world. The blue sky, flecked with fleecy clouds, bent over an endless sea of grasses growing to the very edge of Abilene. The flowers nodded and beckoned in the gentle wind. Not a furrow of plow was there. These rude men of Abilene were forerunners of an inland empire soon to come but not yet over the horizon.
Hickok and McMasters did not go beyond the edge of the crowd. The former seemed now, as so often he was, absorbed in the sheer beauty of the prairies.
“It’s pretty,” said he, waving his hand. “I hate to think of its changing.” A tinge of his occasional melancholy fell upon him. “Of course, it will change and change fast,” said he. “Well, I was a part of this.”
Without affectation, he spoke in the past tense. There never was a killer who gave himself a long life.
Inside the saloon, mounted on a chair, McCoyne, president of the Abilene Stockyards, was addressing the multitude.
“They’re a strange-looking people, them Texans,” he was saying. “They’ve got no wagons; only some carts, each with two yoke of oxen. There ain’t a whole pair of breeches in the outfit, nor a decent hat. Every morning when a fellow wants a horse, where his rope lands, that’s his—and he has to ride to stay with it. They can ride any horse in the world. They’ve got a fighting chicken on top of one cart and they say they’ll bet the herd on that rooster—and here us folks ain’t got a single one in Abilene! They’ll bet anything you like they’ve got the fastest horses in Kansas. They say they’ve got a man they’ll back in a shooting match against anybody in the world.”
“They must mean Wild Bill,” said a voice.
“No, his name is McMasters—Dan McMasters. But he ain’t with them now. Besides that, they got something else; you can’t guess. They’ve got a woman!”
“Aw, go on!” A voice.
“Yes, they have. Young woman, too, and prettier’n any picture you ever saw in a frame. She owns all the herd. She’s rich as she is pretty. Her name’s Lockhart, Miss Lockhart from Caldwell, County, Texas, but not Caldwell, Kansas, gentlemen. She owns the Del Sol ranch down there. They raised this whole herd on that ranch; or anyhow that’s what they say. Men, here’s to Miss Anastasie Lockhart, the finest girl in the world and the first one up the Texas trail!”
Two men of the crowd who had been listening quietly stepped out at the door, looking at one another but not speaking. They passed close at hand; the future town marshal of Abilene and his deputy.
A Paramount Picture.North of 36.RUDABAUGH (NOAH BEERY) AND DAN McMASTERS (JACK HOLT).
A Paramount Picture.North of 36.RUDABAUGH (NOAH BEERY) AND DAN McMASTERS (JACK HOLT).
CHAPTER XXXVIIIALAMO ARRIVES
FOR the last two hundred miles of the long trail up from Texas, life was less eventful for the Del Sol men. The cattle now were shaken down to the daily routine of marching and gave little or no trouble. They took the smaller streams almost in their stride; and as to the last large waterway, no problem of note existed, for at the Arkansas River, the trail maker, Jesse Chisholm, again had provided passage in the scow he had left moored not far from Wichita after it had served his own purposes. It was merely a procession north of the Arkansas to Abilene, across beautifully undulating country whose attractiveness would have been hard to match in all America.
Arrived now at the Solomon River, however, almost at the environs of Abilene, they found that civilization had prepared a bridge—the first and only bridge of the entire journey of perhaps a thousand miles. It was a structure of raw pine, well meant enough, but done by men in ignorance of the actual nature of Texas steers. It served well enough for the carts, but the herd would have none of it and insisted on swimming, as they had crossed so many other streams. It was after they had crossed that, yielding to the supplications of McCoyne, a halt was called until the latter could go into town and complete certain arrangements of his own. He asked Nabours to bring on the herd later.
For some anxious moments the apostle of Abilene stood in the street looking southward. At last he waved his hat.
“Here they come!” he cried.
Tears ran down his face, perhaps alcoholic tears, but not unworthy, and pulled up in his straggly beard. He had verified his prediction. Here came the cows!
A cloud of dust approached, blown by the prairie wind. By and by the men could see the heads of the herd advancing steadily, a mingling sea of longhorns in a procession interminably long. The word passed now and even the saloons were emptied. All Abilene came to see and welcome the first herd up the trail. It seemed a large event to them. Not a man of them, not the wildest dreamer of them all, ever guessed that it was the opening of one of the greatest epochs in American history. Men even would have scoffed at the assertion that thirty-five thousand cattle would reach Abilene that year, seventy-five thousand the year following; that soon the state of Texas would be trailing north over a million head a year.
Ahead and alongside, mounted on wiry little horses, rode men ragged, coatless, long of hair, bearded; tall men, sinewy, insouciant. The saddles of these men had double girths, wide low horns and deep leather flaps hanging low over the feet of the riders. Each man had a thin hide reata coiled at his saddle horn. Each man wore a heavy belt at which hung a heavy revolver, and a few carried rifles under their legs. They came easily, steadily, ahead, their own eyes full of wonder but not of fear.
Well to the front and paralleling the column to windward came the great wheeled carts with white tops, each drawn by two yoke of oxen. On the front seat of one sat a black woman, with a long musket across her lap. Upon yet another was an old woman, dark, wrinkled of face, attending strictly to her own business.
The tilt flaps of the lead cart were closed. The cattle which drew it followed the horseman who rode just ahead—an old man, of face also dark and wrinkled, who wore a very tall conical sombrero, the first of the like ever seen in Abilene, the only one of all his company. His cotton clothing was meager, he himself was meager, his horse was meager. Upon his saddle horn there was perched what proved to be a bird whose plumage bore a luster of its own; a bird somewhat battered and bedraggled, with certain feathers of wing and tail missing and a crest somewhat torn and dragging; which none the less raised its head from time to time and emitted a loud and defiant crow. At times Sanchez ran a thin brown hand over Gallina, his sole surviving fighting cock.
Back of this cart marched, saddled and bridled, a singular horse, beautiful of head and crest, its dark yellow body coat broken by white markings, a broad band of white from side to side across its hips.
In the vanguard of the herd proper marched a great gaunt steer, a giant in stature, long of limb and wide of horn, a yellow dun in color. It now was coming on with a rapid sidewise shuffle, not dissimilar to the fox trot of a Southern riding horse, alertly looking from side to side. Back of him the wide sea of other longhorns showed, tossing in the dust. It might all have been some circus caravan, so wholly out of human experience it all seemed to the observers.
At the points of the herd rode two stalwart men, one at either side, men who never looked at one another. Back of them at long intervals, every four or five hundred cattle, came the swing men; and at last the dust of the drag—the weak, the maimed and the halt. Back of these yet again showed the darker colors of the remuda—some scores of horses easily handled by a ragged, thin-shouldered, tallow-faced boy, who wore the only pair ofchaparajosin the company, for sake of trousers no longer fit to see.
In all their lives these Texas cattle never had seen a town even so great as embryonic Abilene. It took a quarter of an hour to get them to enter the cross street. As McCoyne had admitted that the new corrals would hold only a fraction of the cattle, it was the new intention to drive through the town and hold the herd a mile or two to the north; Nabours himself assenting thus much to the idea of a triumphal entry merely to oblige his guide. He rode back to the lead cart and leaned over.
“For God’s sake, Miss Taisie, get on Blancocito and ride in front, why don’t you? Get on your own horse and ride in front of your own cows.”
But Taisie was not for triumphal entry. She stood out for closed curtains on her cart. Through a narrow crack she gazed out. There were countless men, but not a single woman.
Once headed for the cross street and crowned up by the riders, the head of the herd, with much clacking of horns and cracking of hoofs, advanced until it came opposite the gallery of the Drovers’ Cottage. Now came climax in welcome. Here the town band of Abilene lay in ambush.
Came a sudden blare of brass—a cataclysmic thing in its results, generously intended and not lacking precedent in welcomes, but failing in all understanding of a herd of Texas cattle.
Probably each musician was playing the air which pleased him best. It made no difference. With one tremendous rush and roar the herd surged, broke, ran. The wildly rolling tails betokened one of the sharpest stampedes of the entire trail. Simultaneously the great majority of the saddle ponies began efforts to disencumber themselves of their riders, in whom they now apparently had lost all confidence. Had the population of Abilene sought a circus, they needed now no more than to look about them.
The band played on, as those having engaged in an undertaking which they did not like to discontinue. But they played on to an empty house. The Del Sol herd was gone!
The riders leaned once more into the work, headed by Nabours, profoundly cursing all brass bands, in a run the worst they had seen, even in their abundant experience. The men of Abilene had the first and finest opportunity of their lives to see a herd of wild Texas cattle handled as no men other than these could have done the work. Even for these it took time and distance.
The sudden burst of melody had left the cattle without concertedness. They broke into different bands, even deserting their vanguard. Of the latter, old Alamo, the giant steer that had paced the herd for a thousand miles, alone held to the proper course. Alamo laid back his horns and raised his muzzle like some wild elk. He dashed past the mob, past the band at the Drovers’ Cottage, past everything of Abilene except the railroad and the stockyards.
“Pore old Alamo!” said Jim Nabours later. “He shore knowed which way was north, but he didn’t seem to know nothing else.”
The head of old Alamo with its immense sweep of horns in later years long was known in the general freight office of a Western railroad, where, had he then retained his faculties, he might at every hour of the day and night have noted sight and sound of railway activities. But at the time then current, Alamo had never seen a bit of railroad iron in all his life. Perhaps to his startled gaze the two twisting lines of steel were two giant snakes. In any event, Alamo swerved suddenly, trying to evade them. His hard hoofs slipped on the metals and he fell. His right foreleg, doubled under him, snapped below the knee under his own weight and that of two other steers which had made bold to follow him. So there he lay, much like other figures in completed destiny.
Engaged in opposite directions, not many of the men of Abilene or of Del Sol noted what happened. There came out of the dust, spurring forward, only one slim ragged rider—who even had left his beloved horses—the boy Cinquo Centavos who, so it seemed, had some sort of admiration and understanding of the lead steer of Del Sol.
Excited, tears streaming down his dusty face as always in his moments of tension, Cinquo spurred up to the railroad track and sprang down where the great steer lay struggling. His was the first rope that ever sang in Abilene streets. It caught the great steer over the horns and laid him flat, the pony setting back even as his rider left the saddle.
“Oh, Alamo!” wept Cinquo, seating himself on the steer’s muzzle to quiet his plunging. “You done busted that laig plumb off!”
“Now, ain’t that too bad!” said one of the more sober musicians, who now strolled over from the Drovers’ Cottage.
“Here, you!” commanded Cinquo. “You go back to that cart where the nigger woman is at and get her to give you the hide of that yearlin’ we killed yesterday.
“Gentlemen,” continued Cinquo, drawing himself up to his full height, after he had the victim properly strung out, “this may be a cow town, but you-all don’t know nothing about cows. Now look at that! Just because it’s Fourth of July, you think you got any right to bust the best damn steer that ever come out of Texas?”
Alamo and Cinquo were to take the first curtain call. The boy was no theorist. Under his direction they brought him some pieces of barrel staves. Around these he wound again and again strips of the green hide, stretching it tight—perhaps the first surgery on a Texas steer, if not the last, ever known on the long trail up from the Southern lands.
“Rawhide,” explained Cinquo to the gathering group, “is the holdin’est thing there is. Once that dries, that steer’s laig will be a lot better’n new—if it don’t dry too tight. Is them the pens over yon?” he continued. “Well, swing a pole acrost the sides of the chute. Some of you-all go and git some grass or hay. We’ll make a belly-band o’ the rest of the hide and swing him up offen the ground so it won’t hurt his sore laig.
“This here steer’s name is Alamo,” he explained to his audience. “He’s the onliest Texas cow or horse I ever knowed to have a name. But he started through. What us Texans starts we finishes. Git back now and leave me if he can stand up.”
Old Alamo, relieved of rope and with no weight on his neck, proved his mettle by springing to his feet as though nothing had happened, and only the strange feeling in his foreleg prevented his charging the crowd as an evidence of good faith. But Cinquo impressed Sanchez, who was visible coming up, and Alamo yielded to the force of numbers and of skill. A man flung open the gate of the Abilene Stockyards. Alamo entered in.
“He’s one game steer,” said McCoyne, when later he found him there in place, in solitary grandeur. “If five hundred dollars will buy that steer he’s mine right now, and I’ll keep him as long as he lives. Hurrah for old Alamo, the first steer up the trail! Strike up some more music again, fellows; he can’t get away now. Show my friends from Texas what a Fourth of July can be in Abilene.”
But a certain thought came to the mind of Mr. McCoyne upon the instant.
“We’ve forgot about that young lady in the cart,” said he. “Anyhow, she ain’t stampeded. I told you we had a woman along, and now I’ll prove it. Come on, men, march in front and play your damnedest. I’m going to fetch her up to the Cottage.”
The landlord and manager of the Drovers’ Cottage was an Eastern man imported for this special purpose of running a hostelry devoted to trail men, and now on his trial trip. His name—which so far as he is concerned is of no consequence—was Gore. His wife’s name, which for years was of very great consequence in all Kansas, was Lou Gore. A portly woman she was, with a heart as large as that of any ox that ever came up the trail. Of Lou Gore’s countless acts of charity, of her unceasing ministrations to the ill and the afflicted, the wounded and the impoverished men of the old trail, history has written all too little. She was known sometimes as the Mother of Abilene, sometimes as the Mother of Kansas; more often as the Mother of the Cowboys.
As yet Lou Gore had small acquaintance of those mad scenes which so soon were to become a regular experience with her. But now the carpenters had her new hotel almost completed, nearly ready for occupancy. Somewhat flustered that she had not quite finished sweeping out after the carpenters, not quite put up all her curtains—for curtains she insisted upon at the cottage—the landlady of that edifice came to the front door in time to see some of the incidents above recorded. Therefore, duly, as she hid her hands under her apron, she heard the reassembled musicians once more essaying sweet sounds, saw the procession of pedestrians advancing toward her door.
And then Lou Gore saw, after a second and more careful look, what she had not expected to see—a tall and beautiful young girl, an astonishingly and strikingly beautiful young girl, who now for the first time parted the curtains of her conveyance and sprang lightly to the ground.
Taisie Lockhart, in men’s clothing—a thing then almost equivocal for a woman—stood looking about her as though about to fly. She seemed so much alone, so helpless, so appealing, that the only other real woman of Abilene ran to her and took her into her hospitable arms.
“Why, you poor dear!” said she. “You poor dear! You’re a girl, ain’t you! Of course, I knew! Now you come right on in!”
So Taisie Lockhart, the first woman ever to cross the doorstep of the Drovers’ Cottage, with the exception of Lou Gore herself, came right on in. And as she passed the door and started toward the hall which opened from the front-office room she saw standing before her the man she had hoped and feared she would never see again—Dan McMasters.
CHAPTER XXXIXTHE WOMAN
ON the flat prairie, whose solid turf offered good footing to the ponies, the Del Sol riders, cursing their luck, finished rounding up their stampeded cattle.
“I’m willing to admit there is such a place as Aberlene now,” grumbled Nabours, “but it ain’t inhabitated by no human beings. This here idea of meeting a herd of cows with a brass band ain’t no ways according to no kind of Hoyle.”
“I ain’t taking no more chances about going through town,” he added. “We’ll throw them around the town and stop about three mile north. Ef anybody wants to see them cows they’ve got to come out there to our camp, and not bring no brass band neither.”
Wherefore, with exception of the few head already penned in the Abilene Stockyards, the Del Sol herd circumvented Abilene and all its attractions, and finally turned out on good grazing ground north of town. When at length the cattle were quiet and grazing the men pulled up with a feeling of vast relief, which each expressed in his own way.
“Well, boys,” said the trail boss to those nearest him, “here’s where we lean our saddles on the ground for a while. Tell Buck to pitch about here. The other cart’ll likely stay in town.”
It was the last camp at the end of the road, farthest north for any Texan longhorn at that hour. The long days and nights of trail work now were over.
Anita helped the cook to unload the cart which nominally was his, although he rarely had driven it. Strange and complex seemed the cargo as it was heaped up on the prairie. The three saddles of the lost men, their bridles and others; bed rolls and saddle blankets, kettles, pots and pans; ox yokes and trace chains; spurs, hair ropes and hide reatas; collapsed sacks of meal and flour and beans; some slabs of side meat, a mess box and a coffee mill, sections of several dried rawhides—all mingling with the meager war bags of a score of men. There were even a pair of horns of giant size, detached from the head of an aged steer whose neck had not proven able to withstand the pull of two reatas when it was attempted to haul him out of a quicksand crossing where he had bogged down. Len Hersey had chopped them off and put them in the cart, declaring that he wanted them for a “soo-vee-ner.”
“We got all the comforts o’ home now,” remarked that insouciant soul as he rode by. “Maybe I kin trade them horns fer a shirt.”
Nabours waited until he saw the cattle well scattered and disposed to feed, and until he saw the dust of the remuda coming in at a run, Cinquo Centavos and Sanchez by this time having completed their surgery on Alamo. He straightened in his saddle and drew tighter his belt, pushing his hat back on his furrowed forehead. Even now the burden of his responsibility was on his shoulders, and would be until the herd was sold; and the proximity of town brought certain problems.
“Del”—he turned to his point man, whom he found seated on the ground engaged in wiping and reloading his revolver—“you ride on down to the hotel and tell Miss Taisie I want her to stay in town to-night at the hotel. She’ll be safe with Milly along. The rest of us will come in when we can; maybe some to-night. This is the Fourth of July by the almanac, but there ain’t going to be no Fourth of July so long as there is any chance of this here bunch of cows taking another run; and, of course, we can’t tell just when we’ll make any kind of sale.”
Some of the men were disposed to grumble at the restriction of their range liberties, but the trail boss remained firm. Del Williams, quiet as usual, mounted and rode off toward town. He looked over his shoulder as he rode off alone toward the town, whose smoke was distinguishable across the prairies. Most of the other men were off at edges of the herd, all of them intent on gentling them down, with the exception of one.
Cal Dalhart knew that an agreed truce now had terminated. Up to this time both he and Williams had stood by their promise to let their quarrel wait until they had reached Abilene; and, truth to say, both scrupulously had refrained from word or act of hostility till now. But at the suspicion that his rival intended to forestall him, the pent-up wrath of Dalhart blazed high upon the instant. Without asking consent of any one he spurred out from his own place on the herd a quarter of a mile away. Nabours saw him, but could not or did not attempt to call him back. He shook his head; a sense of impending trouble came to him.
“Who was that man rid off yan just now, boy?” Dalhart demanded of Buck the cook.
“Who dat? Why dat’s Mister Del. He rid pint wif you all summer—you doan know him?”
Dalhart spurred off, but did not overtake his man outside the town limits. He saw Williams’ horse standing with the reins down in front of the door of the Drovers’ Cottage, near to Taisie’s cart; a sight which filled him with rage. A few moments later he himself flung off and also entered.
Williams had found the office room empty. Hearing voices, as he thought on the floor above, he passed upstairs, ignorant of the ways of hotels and looking for some one who might tell him where he might find Miss Taisie Lockhart.
He exulted in the success of their experiment as though the herd were all his own. His eyes were filled with a glorious picture. In fancy he saw her triumphant, as though swimming upon a cloud, radiant, scarce touching the earth. He had seen her thus in camp a hundred times, himself standing apart, distant, hungrily regarding. No actual interview between them had taken place since they had left the home ranch of Del Sol. He never had declared himself actually, never had spoken a word of his love. She had seemed always a divinity too far off for his aspirations. But now he was about to see her. He swore now he would touch her hand, would stand face to face with her alone. The thought of this was too much for Del Williams. Suddenly he began to tremble in his fear of her and his great and terrible love for her, as reverent and as loyal as any love man ever bore a woman. His courage left him. His limbs grew weak. Seeking a temporary truce with the situation, he turned into one of the little rooms which made off from the narrow hall and seated himself upon the bed, intending to pull himself together before he sought her further.
Dalhart, following up his quarry, also found the office empty. Hearing footfalls on the floor above, he also ran up the stair, looking for the man whom he knew to be somewhere in the house—the hotel was not yet really fully open for business. He found himself also in the upper hall, a long Marathon course between rows of doors all just alike, leading into rooms all just alike, all furnished just alike and each divided from the others by a shackling raw board partition, of ceiling loosely tongued and grooved. In each room was a single chair, a single washbowl, a single towel, a single bar of soap, a single coat hook on the back of the door. In each room sat a single bed, in each precisely at the same place—against the partition near the single window and facing the single door. Hotel making and hotel keeping still were in their infancy in Kansas.
Seeing no one in the hall, and still seeking for the sound he had heard, Dalhart, moody and blood mad—a more ruthless and dangerous man than Williams—entered one of these rooms to peer about. He found no one, flung himself down upon the bed. He leaned against the partition, causing it to rock somewhat.
Del Williams heard him but did not know who he was. He sat up, listening, his hand on his revolver, for a situation of doubt was usually one of danger in that border country.
The two men now were but a few yards apart, though separated by three of the thin board partitions.
Dalhart called aloud, “You Williams! Where are you? You are hiding, you damned sneak! Come on out if you dare!”
Williams heard his call. He rose eagerly to meet the challenge, fear of any man unknown in his heart, his weapon in his hand ready to meet this man. A swift thought came to him that he had been riding hard, so that the caps on the cylinder tubes might have become disengaged. He pulled up the revolver and overran the cylinder rapidly to see that the piece was in perfect order, as now it needed to be.
Dalhart heard the movement somewhere beyond him. He stepped to his own door just as Williams was about to emerge at his. Then came a report. Immediately upon it came a grunt or groan, the fall of the body of a man upon the floor.
Del Williams was himself in a flash. He fully had intended to shoot Dalhart deliberately. Now he had shot him practically by accident. The barrel, which happened to be just at the level of the man’s body as Williams whirled the cylinder, discharged the heavy ball as fatally as though by intent. The hammer must have been hit with his thumb. He never knew how it happened; no man ever does know how these things happen. The bullet pierced one partition after another. It had force enough left, driven by the heavy charge of fine rifle powder, to penetrate also the chest wall of a man’s body.
Dalhart fell, nor was it given to him to see the man who had killed him. If ever he heard the running feet of that man, or saw his glance cast into the room as he ran, no one ever could tell. He was dead the instant after the ball struck him.
A man met Williams in the front room, at the foot of the stair.
“What was that?” he demanded. “Who shot?”
Williams smiled.
“I reckon some fellow up there must have let off his gun by mistake. Maybe he has got too much liquor on board. Leave him go; he won’t hurt nobody.”
He passed out deliberately; deliberately gathered the reins of his horse; deliberately swung into the saddle and turned down the street.
Dan McMasters and Wild Bill Hickok, a block away, both had heard the sound of the shot and were walking toward the door.
“How are you, Del!” called McMasters. “I’m glad you got through all right.”
Del Williams stopped, leaned over and shook hands with McMasters, whom he had not seen north of the Washita crossing.
“Why, everything’s fine,” said he. “We’re holding the herd about three miles north. Come on out and see us. So long. I got to be going now.”
He waved his hand, passed on at a gentle trot.
But Del Williams did not hold his trot. He did not ride to a saloon, neither did he swing northward out of town to join the herd. To the contrary, he jerked his horse’s head around to the south, sunk home the spurs and left town, heading south, as fast as a good cow horse could carry him.
Many men saw him cross the town of Abilene at speed, but a cowman on a running horse was no new sight on that busy day. Liquor was flowing at every bar. Del Williams, coatless, penniless, ragged, bearded, unkempt, not a dollar in a pocket and without a morsel of food, had no one to say him nay as he headed back down the long trail which just now had found its end. Plenty of men remembered how he looked. But no man, friend or stranger, ever looked on him again in that part of the world. He disappeared as though some quicksand had engulfed him.
So passed poor Del Williams, as good a cowman as ever crossed the Red River. Poor Del Williams, for after all he had not seen the face of the woman whom he adored, had not touched her hand, had never spoken to her a word of the love he had given her since his own boyhood. He knew that a murderer might never look into her face. True, he knew that the record of the shot, piercing the several partitions, would have been a perfect alibi as an accidental case of homicide. But he knew also that he had been a murderer in his heart. So he never looked into Taisie Lockhart’s eyes and never touched her hand at all. And to this day no man knows what ever became of Del Williams, for no word ever came back from him. Perhaps he got into Old Mexico; perhaps he disappeared somewhere in the Indian Nations; perhaps he lived to old age and perhaps he did not live twenty-four hours.
Dan McMasters and Wild Bill Hickok, quasi officers of the law, after their hurried investigation, looked one into the other’s eyes and agreed that it would have been absolutely impossible for a man to kill another man in that way except by accident. In that case, and in Abilene at that time, there remained no need to question the killer or to pursue him. Neither of them asked or mentioned the name of the rider heading south, and if either had a suspicion, neither voiced it.