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The Sunset Trail

by Alfred Henry Lewis · English · Gutenberg #41235 · 528,186 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Sunset Trail

Author: Alfred Henry Lewis


        
Release date: October 30, 2012 [eBook #41235]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUNSET TRAIL ***

[Illustration: The Crack of the Winchester.]




THE SUNSET TRAIL

By

ALFRED HENRY LEWIS

Author of “The Boss,” “The President,” “Wolfville Days,”
“Black Lion Inn,” “Peggy O’Neal,” etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

A. L. BURT COMPANY, Publishers

New York




Copyright. 1905 BY A. S. BARNES & CO.

Published April, 1905

Second Printing July, 1905

Third Printing January, 1906

Fourth Printing July, 1906




To William Barclay Masterson

This Volume Is Inscribed

By His Friend

The Author




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I—HOW IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT
  CHAPTER II—THAT TRANSACTION IN PONIES
  CHAPTER III—INEZ OF THE ’DOBE WALLS
  CHAPTER IV—THE WILD ROSE OF THE CANADIAN
  CHAPTER V—THE STRATEGY OF MR. MASTERSON
  CHAPTER VI—THE FATAL GRATITUDE OF MR. KELLY
  CHAPTER VII—WHY THE WEEKLY PLANET DIED
  CHAPTER VIII—AN INVASION OF DODGE
  CHAPTER IX—THE MEDICINE OF LONE WOLF
  CHAPTER X—THE INTUITIONS OF MR. ALLISON
  CHAPTER XI—HOW TRUE LOVE RAN IN DODGE
  CHAPTER XII—DIPLOMACY IN DODGE
  CHAPTER XIII—THE RESCUE OF CIMARRON BILL
  CHAPTER XIV—THE WORRIES OF MR. HOLIDAY
  CHAPTER XV—HOW MR. HICKOK WENT INTO CHEYENNE
  CHAPTER XVI—THE LAST VISIT TO DODGE




INTRODUCTION.

It was in my thoughts, as I wrote these chapters and arranged their
sequence, to fix in types a phase of American existence that, within the
touch of present time, has passed away. The West has witnessed more
changes than has the East. The common impression, and one to which all
Americans are bred, leaves paleface Western occupation to a modern day.
Whenever one’s thought wanders to what is old in this country one
inevitably sets his face towards the East.

None the less, this feeling of an Eastern as an earlier settlement is
error. In New Mexico and Arizona, while exploring an ancient Spanish
church or considering some palace of sun-dried mud with a
sixteenth-century origin, it will begin to press upon one how the East,
after all, is but the younger theatre of European endeavour in this
continent. Also, an odd feeling will grow, as one reflects that more
than a half century before Winthrop and Standish and Bradford and Alden
and those other stern and solemn ones, came ashore on Plymouth Rock,
Santa Fé was a bustling capital—a centre of agriculture, of mining, of
flocks and of herds.

St. Augustine is said to be the first founded town within the frontiers
of this country, as the same are made and laid to-day. And yet it is in
warm dispute, with a deal to tell on the New Mexican side of the
question, if Santa Fé be not the age equal of her sister of the
Everglades. Certainly, and say the most disappointing thing for Santa
Fé, there was a no greater space than two or three years to fall
between.

Considered as regions, Florida versus New Mexico, the latter should be
the older. In its settlement, that stretch lying between Santa Fé and
San Francisco, and south to the Rio Grande and the now North Mexican
line, was in a fairly populous and flourishing condition three centuries
and more ago. To say “New Mexico” or “Arizona” hath a far-off savage
sound, and yet both were dominated of European influences and
polka-dotted with many a white man’s town long years before Salem went
hanging her witches or Pocahontas interfered to save the life of Smith.
It was over three and one-half centuries ago that Coronado ransacked
Colorado and Kansas for those “seven cities” and the gold he could not
find.

In 1803 the first American trading expedition broke across the plains
and entered Santa Fé. The expedition was planned by William Morrison,
the grandfather of that Colonel William Morrison who, following Civil
War, won fame as a House leader, and proposed to reform the tariff by
horizontally reducing it. Until the Morrison trade invasion of New
Mexico, the West in its European complexion had been furnished by the
Spanish. Also, about this time the English and Scotch, with the Canadian
French to aid them, came pushing southward and westward from British
Columbia in a search for furs.

The fur trade grew apace. Beavers were first the purpose, then
buffaloes, with such peltry folk as bears and wolves and foxes and
otters and muskrats to be their incident. For fifty years the beaver was
the great source of Western wealth; then came the buffalo to roundly
cover twenty-five years. After that, the cattle; to be followed by the
railway and the farm.

If one were to catalogue those human influences that have dealt with the
West, the count in its procession would run somewhat like this: There
was the Indian occupation—an occupation that has never wholly given way.
In the sixteenth century, say in 1550, came the Spaniard with what we
call “civilisation” and the Indians call “devilry,” to colour the
control, and hold a West’s directing rein, for two hundred and
seventy-five years. Then befell the English-speaking invasion from the
sunrise side of the Mississippi. There was a beaver day, a buffalo day;
and, covering both the beaver and the buffalo days, there was also a
trader day, with its Santa Fé and Oregon trails.

On the heels of all these came the cattle day and the day of the herds,
with the farm day slowly dawning. It is with that latter day, the cattle
day, that I have dealt. In doing this I have seized on a real man and,
in its tragedy at least, told what really happened. Speaking for its
broader lines, this book is true, and there be scores who will recognise
its incidents.

                                                     Alfred Henry Lewis.
                                          New York City, February, 1905.




CHAPTER I

HOW IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT


His baptismal name was William Barclay, but before the corn-coloured
pencilling on his upper lip had foretold the coming of a moustache, he
was known throughout that wide-flung region lying between the Platte and
the Rio Grande, the Missouri and the Mountains, as Bat. This honour fell
to the boyish share of Mr. Masterson because his quick eye, steady hand,
and stealthy foot rendered him invincible against bears and buffaloes
and other animals, _ferae naturae_, and gray oldsters of the plains were
thereby reminded of a Batiste Brown who had been celebrated as a hunter
in the faraway heroic days of Chouteau, Sublette, Bridger, and St.
Vrain.

There is no such season as boyhood on the plains, folk are children one
day, men the next, and thus it befell with Mr. Masterson. He owned,
while yet his cheek was as hairless as an egg, primeval gravities and
silences, and neither asked nor answered questions, neither took nor
gave advice. Among his companions of the range he gained the reputation
of one who “attends strictly to his own business”; and this contributed
to his vogue and standing, and laid the bedplates of a popular
confidence in Mr. Masterson.

Also, Mr. Masterson, being few of years and not without a dash of the
artistic, was in his way a swell. His spurs were of wrought steel traced
with gold, the handkerchief—an arterial red for hue—knotted about his
brown throat was silk, not cotton, while his gray sombrero had been
enriched with a bullion band of braided gold and silver, made in the
likeness of a rattlesnake, fanged and ruby-eyed. This latter device cost
Mr. Masterson the price of one hundred buffalo robes, and existed a
source of wondering admiration from Dodge to the Pueblos.

[Illustration: Told Him to “Vamos.”]

As a final expression of dandyism, Mr. Masterson wore a narrow crimson
sash wound twice about his waist, the fringed ends descending gallantly
down his left leg. The sash had come from Mexico, smuggled in with a
waggon load of Chihuahua hats, and when Mr. Masterson donned it, being
privily a-blush to find himself so garish, he explained the same as
something wherewith he might hogtie steers when in the course of duty he
must rope and throw them. Doubtless the sash, being of a soft, reluctant
texture and calculated to tie very tight into knots that would not slip,
was of the precise best material with which to hogtie steers; but since
Mr. Masterson never wore it on the range and always in the dance halls,
it is suspected that he viewed it wholly in the light of a decoration.

Mr. Masterson’s saddle, as exhibiting still further his sumptuous
nature, was of stamped leather; while his war-bags and leggings were
faced with dogskin, the long black fell warranted to shed rain like a
tin roof. The one thing wanting a least flourish of ornament was Mr.
Masterson’s heavy, eight-square buffalo gun—a Sharp’s 50-calibre rifle.

And yet this absence of embellishment was not because of Mr. Masterson’s
want of respect for the weapon; rather he respected it too much. A rifle
was a serious creature in the eyes of Mr. Masterson, and not to be
regarded as jewelry; to mount it with silver or inlay its stock with
gold would have been as unbecoming as to encrust a prayer-book with
diamonds. Mr. Masterson’s rifle’s name was Marie; and when abroad on the
range he made remarks to it, and took it into his confidence, apropos of
events which transpired as part of the day’s work.

When Mr. Dixon, for whom Mr. Masterson was killing buffaloes along the
Canadian, told that young gentleman how his visiting sister and niece
would pass a fortnight at the ’Dobe Walls, the better to realise a
virgin wilderness in all its charms, Mr. Masterson made no comment.
Behind his wordlessness, however, Mr. Masterson nourished a poor opinion
of this social movement. At its best, the ’Dobe Walls, as well as the
buffalo range of which it lived at once the centre and the ragged
flower, was rude beyond description, and by no means calculated—so Mr.
Masterson thought—to dovetail with the tastes of ladies fresh from
Beacon Hill. Besides, Mr. Masterson was not satisfied as to the depth
and breadth of what friendships were professed by certain Cheyennes, who
hunted buffaloes in the neighbourhood of the Canadian, for their
paleface brothers and sisters.

Mr. Masterson’s opinions on this point of Cheyenne friendship was not
the offspring of surmise. Within the month, eight Cheyennes, supposed by
the authorities in Washington to be profoundly peaceful, had come upon
him while busy with both hands husking the hide from a buffalo bull.
Full of the Washington impression of a Cheyenne peace, at least so far
as deeds done of daylight and on the surface were concerned, Mr.
Masterson paid no mighty heed to the visitors. Indeed, he paid none at
all until one of them caught up his rifle from the grass, and smote him
with it on the head. The Cheyenne, cocking the gun and aiming it, told
him in English learned at Carlisle, and, with epithets learned at the
agencies, to _vamos_ or he’d shoot him in two. With the blood running
down his face, Mr. Masterson so far accepted the Cheyenne suggestion as
to back slowly from the muzzle of the rifle until he reached the edge of
a ravine, upon which he had had his mind’s eye from the beginning. Then
he suddenly vanished out of harm’s way.

Once in the ravine, Mr. Masterson flew for his camp, distant not a
quarter of a mile. Getting a second rifle, Mr. Masterson bushwhacked
those vivacious Cheyennes at the mouth of Mitchell’s Canyon, and killed
four, among them the violent individual who had so smote upon him with
his own personal gun. The lost rifle, which was as the honour of Mr.
Masterson, was recovered; and inasmuch as the four scalps were worth one
hundred dollars in Dodge—for which amount they were a lien upon funds
heaped together by public generosity to encourage the collection of such
mementoes—it might be said that Mr. Masterson was repaid for his wound.
He thought so, and in the language of diplomacy regarded the incident as
closed.

For all that, the business was so frankly hostile in its transaction
that Mr. Masterson, young of years yet ripe of Western wisdom, went more
than half convinced that the Panhandle, at the time when Mr. Dixon
decided to have his fair relatives pay it a visit, did not offer those
conditions of a civilised safe refinement for which ladies of culture
would look as their due. Mr. Masterson was right. Mr. Dixon’s approval
of his sister and her daughter in their descent upon the ’Dobe Walls was
weakly foolish. Still, neither Mr. Masterson nor any one else felt free
to show this truth to Mr. Dixon, and preparations for the tender
invasion went briskly forward.

As Mr. Masterson was buying cartridges in the outfitting store, which
emporium was one of the mud structures that constituted the ’Dobe Walls,
he observed that Mr. Wright was clearing away the furniture from the
office, this latter being a small room to the rear of the store.

“Going to give it to Billy Dixon’s sister and her girl,” explained Mr.
Wright.

“When do they hit camp?” asked Mr. Masterson, mildly curious.

“Day after to-morrow, I reckon; they’re coming over in a buckboard.
Billy says there’s a French party, a Count or something, who is coming
with them. It looks like he’s going to marry Billy’s niece. If he shows
up, he’ll have to bunk in with you buffalo killers over in Hanrahan’s
saloon.”

“Just so he don’t talk French to us,” said Mr. Masterson, “I won’t care.
I’ve put up with Mexican and Cheyenne, but I draw the line at French.”


There were a score of men at the ’Dobe Walls, and Ruth Pemberton
confessed to herself that Mr. Masterson was the Admirable Crichton of
the array. She secretly admired his powerful shoulders, and compared
him—graceful and limber and lithe as a mountain lion—with the tubby
Count Banti to that patrician’s disadvantage. Also, Mr. Masterson’s
hands and feet were smaller than those of Count Banti.

Ruth Pemberton and Count Banti made brief saddle excursions up and down
the banks of the Canadian. Mr. Wright, using sundry ingenious devices to
that end, had trained one of the more sedate of the ’Dobe Walls’ ponies
to carry a lady without going insane. The training was successful, and
the bronco thus taught to defy the dread mysteries of skirts and
sidesaddle, had been presented to Ruth Pemberton. While Ruth Pemberton
and Count Banti rode abroad, Madam Pemberton uplifted herself with
George Eliot’s novels, and the sermons of Theodore Parker.

Ruth Pemberton and her noble escort never traveled far from camp, for
Mr. Wright had convinced them that Cheyennes were not to be trusted. The
several specimens of this interesting sept whom they saw about the ’Dobe
Walls, trading robes for calico and cartridges, served by their
appearance to confirm the warnings of Mr. Wright.

When not abroad in the saddle, Ruth Pemberton developed a surprising
passion to know intimately the West and its methods, rude and rough. She
asked Mr. Masterson if she might go to school to him in this study so
near her pretty heart. That young gentleman, looking innocently into her
slumberous brown eyes, said “Yes” directly. Or rather Mr. Masterson,
lapsing into the Panhandle idiom, said,

“Shore!”

Being thus permitted, Ruth Pemberton, when Mr. Masterson galloped in
from his buffalo killing and the Mexican skinners had brought home the
hides in a waggon, would repair to the curing grounds, the latter being
a flat, grassy stretch within two hundred yards of Mr. Wright’s store.
Once there, she looked on while Mr. Masterson pegged out the green
hides. It interested her to see him sprinkle them, and the nearby grass,
with poisoned water to keep off hidebugs. The hidebug, according to Mr.
Masterson, must have been an insect cousin of the buffalo, for he came
and went with the robe-hunters, and lived but to spoil hides with the
holes that he bored in them.

Ruth Pemberton asked Mr. Masterson questions, to which he replied in one
syllable. Also she did not pay sufficient attention to Count
Banti—giving her whole bright-eyed time to Mr. Masterson. Whereat Count
Banti sulked; and presently deserting Ruth Pemberton he withdrew to Mr.
Hanrahan’s saloon, where he was taught draw-poker to his detriment.
Count Banti, when he left Ruth Pemberton, expected that she would call
him back; she did not, and the oversight made him savage.

One morning, while they were riding among the riverside cottonwoods,
Count Banti became hysterical in his reproaches; he averred that Ruth
Pemberton tortured in order to try his love. Proceeding to extremes, he
said that, should she drive him desperate, he would destroy Mr.
Masterson. At this, Ruth Pemberton’s rice-white teeth showed between
roseleaf lips; she smiled in half admiration upon Count Banti.

“Oh!” thought Ruth Pemberton, “if only he would kill somebody I might
love him from my heart!”

The soul of Ruth Pemberton of Beacon Hill and Vassar, having been west
of the Missouri one month and at the ’Dobe Walls two days, was slipping
into savagery—so friendly is retrogression, so easy comes reversion to
type! She had supposed she loved Count Banti; and here was her soul
going out to Mr. Masterson! How she dwelt upon him, when, bronzed of
brow, cool of eye, alert, indomitable, he rode in from the day’s kill!
The rattle of his spurs as he swung from the saddle was like a tune of
music!

Not that Ruth Pemberton wore these thoughts on her face. She hid them
from others, she even concealed them from herself. Had one told her that
she was beginning to love Mr. Masterson, she would have stared. Count
Banti himself never thought of so hideous a possibility; his jealous
petulance arose solely from her calm neglect of himself. Ruth Pemberton
asked Mr. Masterson how old he was, and it pleased her to hear that he
was several months her superior.

Civilisation is a disguise, and in travel one loses one’s mask. One’s
nature comes out and basks openly in new suns. This is so true that the
West, when a compliment is intended, says of a man: “He’ll do to cross
the plains with.” What the West means is that on such an expedition,
what is treacherous or selfish or cowardly in a man will appear.
Wherefore, to say of one that he will do to cross the plains with, is a
most emphatic declaration that the one thus exalted is unmarked of
vices.

Ruth Pemberton, who on Beacon Hill would have paled at a pin-prick and
the red bead of blood it provoked, now thought kindly of mere slaughter,
and insisted on riding ten miles with Mr. Masterson to the buffalo
grounds to witness the day’s work.

“But, my child!” cried Madam Pemberton.

“It’s the only chance, mamma, I’ll ever have to see a buffalo killed.”

Madam Pemberton was not a deep mind, but exceeding shallow; to say that
any chance was an only chance struck her as a reason for embracing it.

Ruth Pemberton was to journey to the buffalo grounds in the buckboard;
Count Banti might accompany her, a Mexican would drive. Mr. Masterson,
when told of the good company he would have on his next day’s hunt, made
no objection. To the direct question as to whether the country were
possible for buckboards, he said it was.

“What do you think yourself, Bob?” asked Mr. Masterson, when that
evening he met Mr. Wright in Mr. Hanrahan’s bar, and they discussed this
feminine eagerness to see dead buffaloes. “If we cross up with a bunch
of Cheyennes, there may be trouble. It’s a chance they’d try to capture
the girl. Besides, they’ve got it in for me about that hair on my
bridle.”

“There’s no Cheyennes about,” said Mr. Wright. “When they drift within
twenty miles of us, they are sure to show up at the store, and I haven’t
seen an Indian for two days.”

Count Banti took a Winchester rifle with him. There were two seats in
the buckboard; Ruth Pemberton and Count Banti occupied the rear seat,
the front seat being given over to the Mexican, and a basket flowing
with a refection prepared by Mr. Hanrahan’s darky cook. Mr. Masterson,
on his buckskin pony, Houston, rode by Ruth Pemberton’s side of the
buckboard. Madam Pemberton remained behind with The Mill on the Floss.

The expedition skirted the suburbs of a prairie dog village, and the
shrill citizens were set a-flutter, or pretended to be, and dived into
their houses. The polite diminutive owls, the prairie dogs’ companions,
stood their ground and made obeisances. Ruth Pemberton’s cheek flushed
with an odd interest as she gazed at the prairie dogs and the little
polite ground owls.

Off to one side a dozen coyotes loafed along, not unlike a dozen loafing
dogs, keeping abreast of the buckboard. Ruth Pemberton pointed to them:

“Isn’t it strange,” she asked, “that they should accompany us?”

There was the emphasis of a half alarm in her tones; a coyote was not,
to her eyes, without formidable characteristics. Mr. Masterson
explained.

“They go with us to the kill. When we leave, there will be a battle
royal between them and the buzzards for the beef.”

Mr. Masterson pushed forward to show the buckboard Mexican his way
across a piece of broken ground. Count Banti took note of the parted
lips, and that soft sparkle of the brown eyes, as Ruth Pemberton
followed him with her glances. Count Banti made no criticism of these
dulcet phenomena; he was too much of a gentleman and she too much of an
heiress.

Count Banti, moved of a purpose to recall Ruth Pemberton from her train
of fancy, did say that since a waggon, with the skinners, must go and
come every day to bring in the buffalo hides, he was surprised that Mr.
Masterson didn’t ride in that waggon. It was superfluous, nay foolish,
to saddle a pony under such waggon circumstances.

This idiotic conversation earned the commentator on buffalo hunters and
their ways immediate grief. Ruth Pemberton wheeled upon Count Banti like
a little lioness, that is, a little lioness subdued of Vassar and Beacon
Hill. Ruth Pemberton said that she had never been treated to a more
preposterous remark! It was unworthy, Count Banti! Mr. Masterson in a
waggon! One might as easily conceive of Sir Launcelot or Richard the
Lion Heart in a waggon.

When Mr. Masterson returned to the buckboard, Ruth Pemberton deftly lost
her handkerchief overboard. Mr. Masterson brought Houston to the right
about, and riding back stooped from the saddle and swept up the scrap of
cambric from the short grass.

“Because you are so good,” said Ruth Pemberton, with a smile, “you may
keep it for your reward.”

Count Banti ground his teeth; he expected that Mr. Masterson would bind
the sweet trophy in his sombrero. Count Banti gasped; instead of tucking
the dainty guerdon behind that gold and silver rattlesnake, the favoured
dull one continued to offer it to Ruth Pemberton.

“I’ve no place for it,” said Mr. Masterson; “I’d lose it.”

Ruth Pemberton’s brow was red as she received her property; for one
wrathful moment a flame showed in the brown eye like a fire in a forest.
Mr. Masterson’s own eye was as guileless as an antelope’s. Was he a
fool? Was he deriding her? Ruth Pemberton decided that he was merely a
white Indian. She appeased her vanity by turning her shoulder on the
criminal and giving her conversation to Count Banti. Under these direct
rays of the sun, our Frenchman’s noble soul expanded like a flower; as
the fruit of that blossoming he began to brag like a Sioux.

Having caught some glint of the lady’s spirit, Count Banti told of
adventures in India and Africa. He was a hero; he had haunted
water-holes by night and killed black-maned lions; he had stalked tigers
on foot; he had butchered Zulus who, moved of a tropical venom, assailed
him with battle axes.

Count Banti, pressing forward, set forth that he had been sustained as
he crossed the Atlantic by a hope that he might war with America’s red
natives. Alas, they were broken and cowed; their spirit had been beaten
down! He must return wrapped in disappointment.

Still—and now Count Banti became tender—it had been the most fortunate
journey of his career. If not Mars then Venus! Count Banti had found the
most lovely and most lovable woman in the world! And, by the way, would
Ruth Pemberton make Count Banti delirious with joy by presenting him the
handkerchief which the aborigine on the pony had had neither the wit nor
the gentle fineness to accept?

For reply, Ruth Pemberton furtively wadded the poor rejected cambric
into a ball about the size of a buckshot, and dropped it overboard
again. And, because neither Mr. Masterson nor Count Banti saw its fall,
there it lies among the buffalo grasses on the flat banks of the
Canadian to this day.

Count Banti repeated his request and backed it with a sigh. Thereupon
Ruth Pemberton opened both small hands to show how that desirable
cambric had disappeared. Count Banti made rueful eyes rearward as though
contemplating a search.

Mr. Masterson halted the buckboard; they had arrived within a mile of
the buffaloes; he pointed where hundreds of them were grazing or
reposing about the base of a gently sloping hill. The heavy
dust-coloured creatures looked like farm cattle to the untaught Ruth
Pemberton.

There was a bowl-like depression a few yards from where the buckboard
came to a stop. It was grassed and regular, and one might have imagined
that it had been shaped and sodded by a gardener. Mr. Masterson defined
it as a buffalo wallow; he tried to make clear how, pivoting on one
horn, a buffalo bull, shoulder to the ground, had excavated the
cup-fashioned hollow they beheld.

While the Mexican was slipping free the team’s traces, and making the
few camp arrangements required for their stay, Count Banti began a
lively talk with Mr. Masterson.

How long would it take Mr. Masterson to complete his day’s kill?

Mr. Masterson, it seems, would kill thirty buffaloes; that would take an
hour.

And then they would return? Yes; or if the visitors tired, they might
hook up and start at any moment. It was not worth while to sit through
the slaughter of thirty buffaloes. The killing of one would be as the
killing of another; to see the first was to see all.

Ruth Pemberton interposed; she would wait and return with Mr. Masterson.

Count Banti said he could see that killing buffaloes was slow, insipid
sport. Now there might be a gallant thrill in fighting Indians—painted
and perilous! Count Banti would have summoned up an interest for
Indians. Had Mr. Masterson ever slain an Indian? Probably not; Mr.
Masterson was a young man.

Mr. Masterson bent a cold eye upon Count Banti. Saying never a word, he
sauntered over to Houston, and began twisting a pair of rawhide hopples
about his fetlocks, for Mr. Masterson, like all professional buffalo
hunters, killed his game on foot. As Count Banti was ruffling over Mr.
Masterson’s want of courtesy, the Mexican plucked him by the sleeve.

“See!” said the Mexican, pointing to the four braids of black hair
hanging from Mr. Masterson’s bridle. “Cheyenne skelps; four!” And the
Mexican held up four fingers.

“Scalps!” returned Count Banti, the burgundy colour deserting his heavy
face. “Where did he get them?”

“Killed ’em here—anywhere!” vouchsafed the Mexican, waving a vague paw.
“Killed ’em twelve weeks ago—mebby eight—no?”

What Count Banti might have thought concerning the sinister character of
the region into which he had stumbled, he was given no chance to
divulge, for Mr. Masterson came up, rifle in hand, and speaking to Ruth
Pemberton, said:

“Make yourself comfortable; you will be able to follow all that goes on,
should you be interested in it, from the buckboard. You’ve brought a
pair of field glasses, I see. Lucky we’re down the wind! I can go
straight to them.”

As the ground between him and the buffaloes on the slope lay flat and
open, with not so much as a bush to act as a screen, Mr. Masterson’s
remark about going straight to his quarry appeared a bit optimistic.
However, Mr. Masterson did not think so, but seemed the sublimation of
certainty; he started off at a slow, careless walk directly towards the
herd.

Mr. Masterson had covered half the distance, that is to say, he had
approached within a half mile of his game, before the buffaloes
displayed a least excitement. When he had travelled thus far, however,
those nearest began to exhibit a slow, angry alarm. They would paw the
grass and toss a threatening horn; at times one would throw up his nose
and sniff the air. The wind being from the buffaloes to Mr. Masterson,
these nose experiments went without reward.

Yielding to the restless timidity of the perturbed ones, who if set
running would infallibly stampede the herd, Mr. Masterson threw himself
on his face and began to creep. His brown right hand gripped the stock
of his rifle, and he dragged it over the grass, muzzle to the rear.
Also, he was careful to keep his face hidden from the buffaloes behind
the wide brim of his sombrero.

The herd’s interest was sensibly abated when Mr. Masterson forsook the
perpendicular. So long as they were granted no terrifying glimpses of
his face, the buffaloes would believe him some novel form of wolf, and
nobody to fly from. Acting upon this wolf theory, they watched the
creeping Mr. Masterson curiously; they stood their ground, and some even
walked towards him in a threatening mood, disposed to bully.

As Mr. Masterson, eyes to the grass, crept slowly forward, a dry
“Bzz-z-z-z-z!” broke on his ear from a little distance in advance.
Cautiously he lifted his eyes; the rattlesnake lay, coiled and
open-mouthed, in his path. Mr. Masterson pushed the Sharp’s towards the
reptile; at that it uncoiled and crawled aside.

For twenty minutes Mr. Masterson continued his slow, creeping advance.
When he was within four hundred yards of the herd he rose on one knee.
There was a big bull, evidently an individual of consequence, who,
broadside on, stood furthest up the wind. Deliberately and without
excitement, the Sharp’s came to Mr. Masterson’s shoulder and his steady
eye brought the sights to bear upon a spot twelve inches square, just
behind the foreshoulder.

For the sliver of a second Mr. Masterson hung on the aim; then the heavy
buffalo gun, burning one hundred and twenty grains of powder and
throwing a bullet eight to the pound, roared, and the bull leaped
heavily forward, shot through the lungs. With forefeet spread wide,
blood pumping from both nostrils, the buffalo fought desperately for
breath and for strength to stand. The battle was against him; he
staggered, caught himself, tottered, stumbled, and then with a sigh of
despair sank forward on his knees to roll at last upon his side—dead.

At the roar of the buffalo gun, the herd, fear at their hearts’ roots,
began to run. Instantly a change came over them. The dying bull was to
windward gushing blood, and the scent of that blood swept down upon them
in a kind of madness. Their wits forsook them; they forgot their peril
in the blood-frenzy that possessed them, and charged ferociously upon
their dying comrade. When he fell, they gored him with crazy horns—a
herd of humped, four-legged, shaggy, senseless, bellowing lunatics!

“Bang!” from the big buffalo gun, and another bull stood bleeding out
his life. The herd, wild and frantic, fell upon him.

“Bang!” spoke the buffalo gun; a third, shot through and through, became
the object of the herd’s crazy rage.

Killing always to windward, Mr. Masterson might have stood in his tracks
and slain a dozen score; the scent of the new blood would hold the
fury-bitten buffaloes like a spell.

Knowing this to be the nature of buffaloes, Mr. Masterson felt profound
surprise when after his third fire, and while still the last stricken
bleeding buffalo was on his feet, the whole band seemed suddenly
restored to their senses, and went lumbering off at a right angle.

“Cheyennes!” exclaimed the sophisticated Mr. Masterson; “they are over
the brow of the hill!” Then he turned, and started for Ruth Pemberton
and the others at a sharp trot.

While Mr. Masterson was creeping on the buffaloes, Ruth Pemberton from
her buckboard perch, followed him through the field glasses. She saw him
pause, and push forward with his rifle at the rattlesnake; while she
could not see the reptile, by some instinct she realised it—coiled and
fanged and venomous—and shuddered. She drew a breath of relief as Mr.
Masterson re-began his stalk. She saw him when he rose to his knee; then
came the straight, streaky puff of white smoke, and the dying bull stood
staggering and bleeding. Next there drifted to her on the loitering
breeze the boom of the buffalo gun, blunted by distance and direction.
Her glasses covered the herd when in its blood-rage it held furious wake
about the dying ones.

And, what was most strange, Ruth Pemberton took a primal joy therein.
She was conscious of the free, original sweep of the plains about her,
with the white shimmer of the Canadian beyond. And sensations claimed
her, to flow in her veins and race along her nerves, which archery and
tennis had never called up. There abode a glow in her blood that was
like a brightness and a new joy. If the handkerchief-declining Mr.
Masterson were a white Indian, what now was she? Only she never once
thought on that.

Mr. Masterson came up at top speed, and said something in Spanish to the
Mexican. That hare-heart became pale as paper; instead of bringing in
his team, as Mr. Masterson had commanded, he cut the hopples of the
nearest horse, and went powdering away towards the ’Dobe Walls. Mr.
Masterson tossed up his Sharp’s with a half-notion of stopping him; then
he shook his head cynically.

“He’s only a Mexican,” said he. Helping Ruth Pemberton from the
buckboard, where she sat in startled ignorance, he remarked: “Get into
the buffalo wallow; you’ll be safer there.”

“Safe?” whispered Ruth Pemberton.

Mr. Masterson pointed to eleven Cheyennes on the far crest of the hill.
Then he led Ruth Pemberton to the buffalo wallow, where Count Banti was
already crouching.

“You’ve left your Winchester on the buckboard,” said Mr. Masterson.

Count Banti stared glassily, the purple of his face a dingy gray. The
man was helpless; the nearness of death had paralyzed him.

Mr. Masterson shifted his glance to Ruth Pemberton. Her eyes, shining
like strange jewels, met him squarely look for look; there was a heave
to her bosom and a red in her cheek. His own eyes were jade, and his
brows had come sternly forward, masking his face with the very spirit of
war. The two looked upon one another—the boy and the girl whose rearings
had been so far apart and whose natures were so close together.

“I’ll get it,” she said, meaning the Winchester.

Mr. Masterson made her crouch down in the bottom of the buffalo wallow,
where neither bullet nor arrow might reach her. Then, walking to the
buckboard, he got the Winchester and the cartridge belt that belonged
with it.

“It’s Baldy Smith’s,” remarked Mr. Masterson, as though Ruth Pemberton
might be interested in the news. “It’s a good gun—for a Winchester.”

One of the Cheyennes, glimpsing the recreant Mexican, started in
pursuit; the others rode down the slope for a closer survey of the trio
in the buffalo wallow. Mr. Masterson threw the loop of a lariat over the
head of Houston and fastened him, hopples and all, to the buckboard.

Understanding that no surprise was possible, the Cheyennes began at a
sweeping gallop to circle the garrison in the buffalo wallow, their
dainty little war ponies a-flutter of eagle feathers and strips of red
cloth. As they circled, they closed in nearer and nearer; at less than
six hundred yards they opened fire.

Each attacking buck kept his pony between himself and Mr. Masterson,
firing from beneath the pony’s neck. The shooting was bad; the bullets
struck the grass and kicked up puffs of dirt one hundred yards in front,
and then came singing forty feet overhead. Count Banti heard the zip!
zip! zip! and groaned as he lay on his face.

Mr. Masterson, who—being on his feet—was head and shoulders above the
level of the flat, paid no heed to the terror-ridden Count Banti. Once
he cast a look at Ruth Pemberton, making sure she was below the danger
level. She, for her side, watched his expression as he stood, rifle in
hand, observing the attack. She felt no fear, felt nothing only a sweep
and choke of exultation. It was as though she were the prize for which a
battle was being fought—a battle, one against ten! Also, she could read
in the falconed frown of Mr. Masterson somewhat of that temper wherewith
he had harvested those scalps on his bridle.

While Ruth Pemberton gazed in a kind of fondness without fear, the heavy
Sharp’s came to the sudden shoulder of Mr. Masterson. The roar of it
fell upon her so close and loud that it was like a fog to her senses.
Mr. Masterson threw open his gun, and clipped in a second cartridge. The
brass shell flirted over his shoulder by the extractor, struck Count
Banti’s face. That hero—who had hunted lions by night and tigers on
foot—gave a little scream, and then lay mute.

“It was this!” said Ruth Pemberton, holding up the empty shell to Mr.
Masterson.

Mr. Masterson’s bullet had gone through pony and rider as though they
were papier-mâché. What life might have been left in the latter was
crushed out by the falling pony who smashed chest and ribs beneath his
heavy shoulder.

The nine other circling bucks gathered about the one who had died.
Clustered as they were, there could be no thought of missing, and Mr.
Masterson emptied another saddle. With that, the others swooped on the
slain and bore them off beyond the hill.

As they did so, far away to the right a single Cheyenne came riding; he
was yelping like twenty wolves at once, and tossing something and
catching it in his hand. The single Cheyenne was he who had followed the
craven Mexican, and the thing he tossed and played with was the
Mexican’s scalp. When he had joined the others, and they had laid their
dead in a safe place, the whole party again came riding—open order—down
the long slope towards the fatal buffalo wallow.

Mr. Masterson picked up the Winchester and forced cartridges into the
magazine until it would hold no more.

“They’re going to charge,” said Mr. Masterson, apologising for the
Winchester. “It’ll come handy to back up my Sharp’s in a case of quick
work. There won’t be time to load, and a Sharp’s is only a single-shot
gun, you know.”

Ruth Pemberton did not know, and her mind was running on other matters
than guns, single-shot or magazine.

“They’re going to charge?” she asked.

“Yes; but don’t lose your nerve. They’ll make a heap of hubbub, but it’s
two for one I stand them off.”

The assurance came as coolly as though Mr. Masterson considered the
possibilities of a shower, and was confident of the integrity of Ruth
Pemberton’s umbrella.

“One thing!” said Ruth Pemberton wistfully.

“Yes?” said Mr. Masterson, his eye on the Cheyennes, his ear on Ruth
Pemberton.

“Don’t let them take me! Kill me first!”

“I’ve intended to from the beginning,” said Mr. Masterson steadily.
“First you, then me! You know the Western saying for an Indian fight:
Always save your last shot for yourself!”

There was nothing of despair or lack of resolution; he spoke as speaks
one who but gives a promise to one who has reason to receive it. He
offered it without fear to one who accepted it without fear, and when he
had spoken Ruth Pemberton felt as cheerfully light as a bird. She had a
desire to seize on the Winchester and take her stand with Mr. Masterson.
But her ignorance of Winchesters was there to baffle her; moreover Mr.
Masterson, as though he read her impulse, interfered.

“Stay where you are!” he commanded. From where she crouched in the
buffalo wallow, Ruth Pemberton heard a whirl of yells, and the
grass-muffled drumming of many hoofs; and the yells and the hoof-beats
were bearing down upon her with the rush of a tempest. There came a
rattle of rifles, and the chuck! chuck! of bullets into the soft earth.
In the midst of the din and the clamour she heard the bold roar of the
buffalo gun. Then she saw Mr. Masterson snatch up the Winchester, and
spring clear of the buffalo wallow to the flat, grassy ground in front.
Feeling nothing, knowing nothing beyond a resolution to be near him,
live or die, she was out of the buffalo wallow as soon as was he, and on
her knees at his feet. She could seize on no one element as distinct and
separate from a whirling whole, made up of blur and smoke and yell and
rifle crash, with feathers dancing and little ponies charging like
meteors! She was sure only of the rock-bound fact to which she clung
that Mr. Masterson never moved from where he stood. She heard the
spitting, whip-like crack of the Winchester, so different from the
menacing voice of the buffalo gun, as working it with the rapidity of a
bell-punch he fired it faster than she could count.

The thing was on and by and over in a moment; the charging Cheyennes
went to right and left, unable to ride up against that tide of death
which set so fiercely in their faces. Nine Cheyennes made that charge
upon the buffalo wallow; Ruth Pemberton counted but four to flash to the
rear at the close. The four never paused; their hearts had turned weak,
and they kept on along the river’s bank, until at a low place they rode
in and went squattering across. Five riderless ponies, running wild and
lost, gave chase with neighs of protest at being left behind.

Out in front, one of the five Cheyennes who had been shot from his
saddle in the charge raised himself, wounded, on his elbow. Mr.
Masterson, who had recovered his Sharp’s, sent a bullet into his head.
Ruth Pemberton, even through the tingling trance of battle that still
wrapped her close, turned cold.

“What else?” inquired Mr. Masterson. “We don’t run any Red-Cross outfit
in the Panhandle.”

Ruth Pemberton made no reply: her fascinated eyes saw where a trickle of
blood guttered the cheek of Mr. Masterson. She thought no more on dead
or living Cheyennes, but with a great sob of horror came towards him,
eyeing the blood.

“Only a nick,” said he. “You can’t fight all day without a scratch or
two.”

Count Banti began to stir. He sat up in a foolish way and looked at Ruth
Pemberton. She turned from him, ashamed, and let her gaze rove to where
the Cheyennes, far beyond the river, were rounding the corner of a hill.
There was nothing she could say to Count Banti.

Mr. Masterson loosened and mounted Houston, which seasoned pony had
comported himself throughout the mêlée with the steadiness which should
go with his name. Presently he rode back to the buffalo wallow, and
instead of four, there were eleven scalps on his bridle rein.

“A man should count his _coups_,” he vouchsafed in explanation.

There was no need of defence; Ruth Pemberton, without understanding the
argument which convinced her own breast, looked upon those scalps as the
fitting finale of the morning’s work.

Mr. Masterson caught up the buckboard horse, mate to the one upon which
the Mexican had fled, and strapped a blanket on its back for the use and
behoof of Count Banti—still speechless, nerves a-tangle. Then Mr.
Masterson, taking a spare cinch from his war-bags, to the disgust of
Houston, proceeded with more blankets to construct a pillion upon which
Ruth Pemberton might ride behind him. Houston, as he felt the cinch
drawing, pointed his ears resentfully.

“Well?” threatened Mr. Masterson.

Houston relaxed the resentful ears and acquiesced with grace, fearing
worse.

Mr. Masterson from the saddle held out his hand; Ruth Pemberton took it
and, making a step of the stirrup which he tendered, sprang to the
pillion.

“You can hold on by my belt,” quoth Mr. Masterson.

And so they came back to the ’Dobe Walls; Ruth Pemberton’s arms about
Mr. Masterson, her cheek against his shoulder, while her soul wandered
up and down in a world of strange happinesses, as one might walk among
trees and flowers, with birds singing overhead.

Four days; and the buckboard bearing Ruth Pemberton, Madam Pemberton and
Count Banti drew away for the North. A lieutenant with ten cavalrymen,
going from Fort Elliot to Dodge, accompanied them by way of escort.

“And so you hate the East?” Ruth Pemberton had asked Mr. Masterson that
morning before the start, her eyes dim, and her cheeks much too pale for
so innocent a question.

“No, not hate,” returned Mr. Masterson, “but my life is in the West.”

As the buckboard reached the ridge from which would come the last
glimpse of the Canadian, off to the south and west, outlined against the
sky, stood a pony and rider. The rider waved his sombrero in farewell.
Ruth Pemberton gazed and still gazed; the hunger of the brown eyes was
as though her love lay starving. The trail sloped sharply downward, and
the picture of the statue horseman on the hill was snatched away. With
that—her life turned drab and desolate—Ruth Pemberton slipped to the
floor of the buckboard, and buried her face in her mother’s kindly lap.




CHAPTER II

THAT TRANSACTION IN PONIES


Aunt Nettie Dawson, because of her tenderness of heart and the hard
acridities of her tongue, had made for herself a place in the popular
esteem. The well-to-do and healthy feared her for her sarcasms, while
upon the sick she descended in the guise of an unmixed blessing. Those
who mourned, and by whose hearths sat trouble, found in her the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.

Cimarron Bill was the personal nephew of Aunt Nettie, the other
inhabitants of Dodge being nephews and nieces by brevet, and it was to
Cimarron Bill that Mr. Masterson was indebted for the advantage of Aunt
Nettie’s acquaintance.

“She’s some frosty, Bat,” explained Cimarron Bill, in apology for the
frigid sort of Aunt Nettie’s reception, “she’s shore some frosty. But if
you-all was ever to get shot up, now, for mebby holdin’ four aces, or
because you had become a drawback to a quadrille, she’d nacherally jump
in an’ nuss you like you was worth savin’.”

Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill had met for the first time the Autumn
before, and their friendship came about in this fashion. Sun City, a
thriving metropolis, consisting of a tavern and a store, lay far to the
south of Dodge and close against the Indian Territory line. Mr.
Masterson, coming north from the buffalo range, rode into Sun City late
one October afternoon, and since his affairs were not urgent decided to
remain till morning.

Mr. Stumps, proprietor of the Palace Hotel, being the tavern aforesaid,
wore an uneasy look when Mr. Masterson avouched his intention to tarry,
and submitted that his rooms were full.

“Leastwise,” observed the doubtful Mr. Stumps, “all three beds is full
but one; an’ that is took by Cimarron Bill.”

“Is this Bill person here?” queried Mr. Masterson.

“Well he ain’t exactly here none just now,” responded Mr. Stumps, “but
he’s liable to come pirootin’ in. He p’inted out this mornin’ for
Tascosa; but he’s a heap uncertain that a-way, an’ it wouldn’t surprise
me none if he was to change his mind. All I know is he says as he rides
away, ‘Don’t let no shorthorn have my room, Mr. Stumps, as I may need it
myse’f a whole lot; an’ in case I do I don’t want to be obleeged to
bootcher no harmless stranger for its possession.’”

“All the same,” said Mr. Masterson with asperity, “I reckon I’ll take
that room.”

“Thar’ll be an uprisin’ if Cimarron Bill comes back,” said Mr. Stumps,
as he led Mr. Masterson to the second floor.

“You won’t be in it,” replied Mr. Masterson confidently. “I won’t ask
you to help put it down.”

Mr. Masterson was searching his war-bags for a clean blue shirt, meaning
to do honour to Sun City at its evening meal. Suddenly a youth of his
own age appeared in the door. So cat-foot had been his approach that
even the trained ear of Mr. Masterson was given no creaking notice of
his coming up the stair. The youthful stranger was equipped of a dancing
eye and a Colt’s-45, and Mr. Masterson by some mighty instinct knew him
for Cimarron Bill. The question of identity, however, was instantly made
clear.

“My name’s Cimarron Bill,” remarked the youthful stranger, carefully
covering Mr. Masterson with his weapon, “an’ I’d like to ask whatever be
you-all doin’ in my apartments?” Then, waiving reply, he went on: “Thar,
don’t answer; take the short cut out of the window. I’m fretted, an’ I
wants to be alone.”

Mr. Masterson, to facilitate those proposed improvements in his garb,
had unbuckled his pistol and laid it on the bed. Cimarron Bill, with
militant genius, stepped in between Mr. Masterson and his artillery.
Under these convincing circumstances the suggested window seemed the one
solution, and Mr. Masterson adopted it. The twelve-foot leap to the soft
prairie grass was nothing; and since Cimarron Bill, with a fine contempt
for consequences in nowise calculated to prove his prudence, pitched Mr.
Masterson’s belt and pistol, as well as his war-bags, after him, the
latter was driven to confess that erratic personage a fair and fearless
gentleman. The tacit confession, however, served as no restraint upon
his movements, and seizing his weapon Mr. Masterson in his turn went
cat-foot up the stair. As had Cimarron Bill before him, he towered
presently in the narrow doorway, his steady muzzle to the fore.

“Jump!” quoth Mr. Masterson, and Cimarron Bill leaped from the same
window which so lately had been the avenue of Mr. Masterson’s departure.

Cimarron Bill did not have the luck which had attended the gymnastics of
Mr. Masterson, and sprained his ankle. Whereupon, Cimarron Bill sat up
and called for a glass of liquor, solacing himself the while with evil
words. Following the drink, Mr. Stumps negotiated a truce between his
two guests, and Mr. Masterson came down and shook Cimarron Bill by the
hand. “What I like about you,” said Cimarron Bill, as he met Mr.
Masterson’s courtesy halfway, “is your persistency. An’ as you seem sort
o’ took with them apartments of mine, on second thought we’ll ockepy ’em
in yoonison.”

Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill became as Damon and Pythias. In the
months that followed they were partners, killing buffaloes and raiding
Indians for ponies, share and share alike. Mr. Masterson came finally to
know Aunt Nettie. And because Cimarron Bill loved her, he also loved
her, and suffered in humble silence from her caustic tongue as did his
mate. For was not the fortune of one the fortune of the other? and were
they not equal partners in all that came their way?

Cimarron Bill’s most glaring fault was a complete inaptitude for
commerce. It was this defect that taught him, while at play in Mr.
Webster’s Alamo saloon, to place a value on “queens-up” so far in
advance of their merits, that in one disastrous moment he was swept
clean of his last dollar and his last pony. For a buffalo hunter thus to
be set afoot was a serious blow; more, it smelled of disgrace. Your
Western gentleman, dismounted and obliged to a painful pedestrianism,
has been ever a symbol of the abject; also his standing is shaken in
what social circles he affects. These several truths were abundantly
known to Cimarron Bill, and on the morning after his bankruptcy he
begged the use of a pony from Mr. Masterson with a purpose of
straightening up his prostrate destinies.

“I’ll ride down,” explained Cimarron Bill, easily, “to the divide between
Medicine Lodge Creek an’ the Cimarron, an’ the first Cheyenne who comes
teeterin’ along on a proper pony ought to fit me out. I won’t be afoot
long enough to wear out my moccasins; you can bet a blue stack on that!”

Cimarron Bill’s plan to remount himself was one feasible enough. True,
as stated in a previous chapter, there existed an official peace between
the Cheyennes and their paleface brothers. Unofficially, it was the
quenchless practice of both sides to kill and scalp each other, whenever
an opportunity linked with secrecy and safety was presented. It was the
pleasure of the Cheyennes to fall upon isolated camps of buffalo hunters
and exterminate them; the broad prairies, had they spoken, would have
told a hundred such red stories. By way of reprisal, the enterprising
paleface wiped out what Cheyennes crossed his path. Moreover, it was the
delight of the paleface, when not otherwise engaged, to raid a Cheyenne
village, and drive off the ponies. The ponies, saleable as hot cakes,
went at thirty dollars the head in Dodge; wherefore the practice, apart
from the thrill and joy thereof, was not without its profit. Cimarron
Bill, however, did not contemplate a raid; what he aimed at was a single
pony, and there were safer, even if more sanguinary methods by which a
single pony might be arrived at.

Bear Shield’s band of Cheyennes had pitched their tepees on the
Cimarron, thirty miles to the south of Sun City. The region was a fair
hunting ground, rife of buffalo. The attraction to Bear Shield’s people,
however, was Sun City itself. What was a thirty-mile ride to a Cheyenne,
with nothing upon his mind but firewater? The latter refreshment abode
privily to his call in Sun City, and he might purchase at the rate of a
pint for a buffalo robe. So brisk was trade that every day from one to a
dozen Cheyennes, whose hearts were low and thirsty, rode into Sun City,
each with a modest pack of robes, to presently ride forth robeless but
rapturous.

Southward from Sun City ran the trail for that point on the Cimarron
where Bear Shield and his tribesmen, their squaws and pappooses and dogs
and ponies, lived and moved and had their aboriginal being. As the trail
crossed Medicine Lodge Creek it crowded the base of a thickly wooded
knoll, at the back of which a bald precipice fell away for a sheer two
hundred feet.

It was the wont of that paleface, who felt pressed upon by the need of a
Cheyenne scalp or pony or both, to lie in hopeful ambush on the wooded
knoll. He would not grow weary with much watching; his reward was sure
to appear within the hour, in the shape of a drunken Cheyenne, reeling
in his saddle with the robe-bought hospitality of Sun City fifteen miles
away. The sullen Sharp’s would speak, and the bibulous Cheyenne go
headlong. Then the paleface who had sniped him would mount his own pony
with speed, and round up the riderless pony of that Cheyenne who had
been. Once the Cheyenne’s pony was secured, the paleface would scalp and
strip his victim; then, using his lariat, he would drag what he didn’t
want to the precipice adverted to, and toss it over.

Full two hundred leading citizens of Bear Shield’s village had been
blotted out, before the Cheyennes became aware of their fate and the
grim manner of it; for the paleface never exposed his ambush by letting
any Cheyenne get away. If the census of the Cheyenne party exceeded the
count of rifles on the knoll, they were permitted to ride by in innocent
drunkenness, unconscious of the death they had grazed. As for what dead
Cheyennes went over the cliff, certain coyotes and ravens, educated of a
prevailing plenty to haunt the spot, would in an hour remove the last
trace of their taking off. Full two hundred Cheyennes, the flower of
Bear Shield’s band, were sent to the happy hunting grounds, at the base
of the wooded knoll on Medicine Lodge Creek, before their wondering
relatives solved the puzzle of their disappearance. Once the gruesome
riddle was read, the Cheyennes as a nation painted for war. It was then
that Bear Shield drove North like a storm, leaving Sun City a memory,
and killing out the last injurious paleface for forty miles around.
That, however, is to one side of our narrative, which has to do with
Cimarron Bill, about to re-establish himself as a mounted and therefore
reputable member of society.

Mr. Masterson sought to dissuade Cimarron Bill from his enterprise. It
was not that he objected to the other’s vigorous scheme of gaining a
remount; he wasn’t so tenderly given towards Cheyennes as all that. The
government, in favor of appearances, might pretend to preserve the
Cheyenne; but Mr. Masterson knew that in reality no close season for
Cheyennes existed more than it did for gray wolves. But the wooded knoll
on Medicine Lodge Creek was distant; to go and come meant days; the
profit, one pony, was slight for so much effort and time and travel. Mr.
Masterson, in comparison with the investment, pointed out the meagre
sort of the reward. Also he offered to give Cimarron Bill a pony.

Mr. Masterson’s arguments availed nothing; Cimarron Bill was in that
temper of diligent virtue, common with folk who have just finished a
season of idleness and wicked revelry. He declined Mr. Masterson’s pony;
he would win a pony for himself.

“No se’f-respectin’ gent,” observed Cimarron Bill, “can accept gifts
from another gent. As you sow so shall you reap; havin’ recklessly lost
my pony, I must now win out another by froogality an’ honest industry.
Besides it ain’t jest the pony; thar’s the skelp—worth twenty-five
dollars, it is, at the Dodge Bank. That’s a bet you overlooks. With that
pony, an’ them twenty-five dollars for the skelp, I can begin life
anoo.”

“Then,” returned Mr. Masterson, disgustedly, “if you’re going to play
the fool, and waste five days and ride seventy-five miles and back to
get a thirty-dollar pony and a twenty-five-dollar scalp, I might as well
be a fool mate to you, and go along.”

“No, you stay here,” expostulated Cimarron Bill. “I might get downed; in
which event it’ll be for you to look after Aunt Nettie.”

Cimarron Bill, despite his restless ways and careless want of
forethought, always provided for Aunt Nettie. This was no work of
difficulty; Aunt Nettie’s needs were neither numerous nor expensive,
and, since a gentleman of the lively accuracy of Cimarron Bill could in
the season kill and cure for his share fifty dollars’ worth of buffalo
robes a day, they were readily overcome.

“One hundred shots,” Cimarron Bill was wont to say, “from my old
eight-squar’, an’ Aunt Nettie is fixed for one plumb year.”

Mr. Masterson was about to remonstrate against remaining in Dodge, but
Cimarron Bill interrupted.

“As a favor to me, Bat,” he said, “merely as a favor to me. I won’t be
gone a week; an’ I’ll feel easier thinkin’ you’re left to look after
Aunt Nettie in case of accidents. It’s inside o’ the possible, d’ye see,
for this B’ar Shield outfit to get me; an Injun, now an’ then, does win
a pot, you know.”

Mr. Masterson made over to the use of Cimarron Bill a chestnut broncho,
famous for bottom and bad habits. After he had cantered away, Mr.
Masterson reflected uneasily on Cimarron Bill’s anxiety over Aunt
Nettie, the same being out of common. Mr. Masterson thought this a
portent of bad luck. The notion made Mr. Masterson nervous; when
Cimarron Bill had been absent a fortnight and no news of him, the
nervousness grew into alarm.

“I wonder,” mused Mr. Masterson, gloomily, “if those Bear Shield
outcasts have bumped him off. He was that careless, Bill was, some such
turn might have been waiting in the deck for him any deal at all,” and
Mr. Masterson sighed.

Mr. Trask’s freight teams came sauntering into Dodge from Fort Elliot;
they might have cut the trail of the missing Cimarron Bill, and Mr.
Masterson sought the Trask mule-skinners for information. They had
freighted through Sun City, indeed their route ran by the wooded knoll
so fatal to Cheyennes; not one, however, had heard sound or beheld sign
of the vanished Cimarron Bill. At that, Mr. Masterson buckled on his
six-shooter, thrust his rifle into the scabbard that garnished his
saddle, and while the frost was on the short dry buffalo grass one
December morning, sped southward for news.

At Sun City, Mr. Stumps of the Palace Hotel bore testimony that Cimarron
Bill had passed one night at his caravansary, making merry, and departed
full of confidence and Old Jordan in the morning.

“But he didn’t pack no outside liquor with him,” observed the
experienced Mr. Stumps, who was capable of a deduction, “an’ what jag he
carried would have been worn plumb away long before ever he reached
Medicine Lodge Creek.”

Mr. Stumps averred that this was the last and all he knew of Cimarron
Bill.

Mr. Masterson might have gone thirty miles further and interviewed Bear
Shield himself. That befeathered chieftain, however, was a savage of
prudence and counsel, and no one to boast of paleface scalps, though a
thousand were drying in the lodges of his people. No, nothing could be
gathered from the Cheyennes themselves. It was less trouble, and quite
as sagacious, for Mr. Masterson to believe that Cimarron Bill had fallen
a Cheyenne sacrifice, and abandon investigation. Adjusting it,
therefore, in his own mind that Cimarron Bill had perished, Mr.
Masterson started for Dodge, cogitating vengeance.

Mr. Masterson, while sad, was not to be shocked by a thing so
commonplace as death, even though the one fallen had been his own
blanket-mate. And he blamed no one—neither Cimarron Bill nor the
Cheyenne who had taken his hair. Such events were as the certain
incidents of existence, and might be counted on in their coming.
Yesterday it had been the fate of Cimarron Bill; it might be his own
to-morrow. Meanwhile, by every Western rule, it was his instant business
to take a price from the Cheyennes, in scalps and ponies, for the lost
life.

And there was Aunt Nettie. Mr. Masterson recalled the final urgency of
Cimarron Bill’s exhortations to look after her in case he never
returned.

“And I surely will,” ruminated Mr. Masterson. “When he said that, Bill
must have felt, even if he couldn’t see, the cloud that hung over the
future.”

Mr. Masterson deemed it his duty to acquaint Aunt Nettie with the demise
of Cimarron Bill; at the terror of such a mission he shook in his
saddle. Slowly he rode up to the little three-room cottage where Aunt
Nettie made her home.

“Miss Dawson,” began Mr. Masterson, for while the lady was “Aunt Nettie”
in the conversation of Dodge, she was invariably “Miss Dawson” to her
face, “Miss Dawson, I’m afraid Bill’s dead.” Mr. Masterson faltered as
he spoke these words. “If I knew how,” he went on, “to break the
information soft, I’d do it; but such delicate plays are beyond my
reach. All I can do is ride in and say that in my judgment Bear Shield’s
outfit has downed him.”

“Oh!” retorted Aunt Nettie, retaining, with hand on hip, that attitude
of scorn which she had assumed as she listened to Mr. Masterson, “oh,
all you can do is ride in an’ say that in your jedgment”—the word came
off Aunt Nettie’s tongue most witheringly—“B’ar Shield’s outfit has
downed my Billy! Well then let me tell you this, Bat Masterson; thar
ain’t no Cheyenne ever painted his face who could corral my Billy. Thar,
_vamos_; I ain’t got no time to waste talkin’ to children in their
teens—which you ain’t seen twenty none as yet, Bat Masterson—who can’t
think of nothin’ better to do than come pesterin’ into camp with a
theery that them B’ar Shield felons has bushwhacked my Billy.”

“But, Miss Dawson,” urged Mr. Masterson, “what I wanted——”

“No matter what you wanted,” interrupted Aunt Nettie. “You get yourself
together an’ pull your freight! If, as you says, in your jedgment
Billy’s gone, what be you doin’ in Dodge, I’d like to ask? Why ain’t you
back on the Cimarron gatherin’ ha’r an’ ponies, an’ gettin’ even for
Billy? Thar, line out o’ here! While I’m throwin’ away time on you-all,
my bread’s burnin’. I can smell it plumb here.”

“Aunt Nettie,” thought Mr. Masterson, as he withdrew, “is goin’ to be a
difficult lady to take care of. It’s four for one, when I have to offer
her money, or try to hang up a hindquarter of buffalo in her kitchen,
she’ll chunk me up with stove-wood, or anything else that’s loose and
little, and handy at the time. However, it’ll have to be gone through
with; Cimarron Bill is dead, and his last word was for me to look out
for Aunt Nettie.”

As he swung into the saddle, following his visit to Aunt Nettie, a flush
of shame and anger, which even the terrors of that formidable spinster
could not suppress, showed through the bronze on Mr. Masterson’s face.
The taunt about being in Dodge when he ought to be over on the Cimarron,
harvesting a vengeance, had stirred him deeply. To have it intimated
that his courage was slow, and his friendship cool, wore sorely on the
soul of Mr. Masterson. It was the harder to bear when flung from the
tongue of a woman; for his hands were tied, and his mouth was closed
against resentment. “One thing,” thought Mr. Masterson, by way of
self-consolation, “the man never made a moccasin track in Dodge who
could have said as much and got away. Aunt Nettie’s right though; I
ought to be evening up for Billy right now.”

Time stood a week later, and along the shallow Cimarron—as in every
other region civilised or savage—it was Christmas night. The weather was
mild, the bare earth without frost, while on the slow wind creeping in
from the north there rode the moist odour of snow. The moon, old and on
the wane, was swinging low in the western sky, and what dim lights it
offered were made more dim by a constant drift of clouds across its
yellow face.

Scattered along the north bank of the Cimarron, a straggling mile or
more, stood the tepees of Bear Shield’s people. It was well beyond
midnight, and nothing vocal about the camp save the occasional short
yelp of a dog, made melancholy by the hour’s lonesomeness. Now and then
an ember of some dying fire burned for a fierce moment, and then blinked
out. Mr. Masterson, riding slowly down the opposite bank, and taking
shrewd care to keep deep within the shadow of the woods, counted
seventy-two lodges—a probable population of seven hundred and twenty,
for a plainsman’s census argues ten to a lodge.

Mr. Masterson had located the band of ponies, which made up the riches
of Bear Shield, late in the dull gray afternoon, while he lay hidden in
a dry arroyo. As it grew darker, he had crept nearer, keeping ever the
location of the ponies which, in a rambling, ragged herd, were grazing
up the wind. Mr. Masterson, on the south bank of the Cimarron, was
heedfully to leeward of the herd; a proper piece of caution, for an
Indian pony, at the earliest paleface taint to alarm the breeze, will
scream like a wronged panther.

Arriving at the place where he meant to ford the river and begin his
drive, Mr. Masterson halted for a cloud of unusual size and thickness to
blanket the blurred radiance of the dwindling moon. Such a cloud was on
its way; from where it hung curtain-wise on the horizon it should take
ten minutes before its eclipse of the interfering moon began.

While he waited Mr. Masterson removed his sombrero and fastened it back
of the cantle by a saddle-string. Also, he unstrapped his blanket and
wrapped it about his shoulders, for it was part of Mr. Masterson’s
strategy to play the Cheyenne for this raid. It was among the chances
that he would run across an Indian herder or meet with some belated
savage coming into camp. The latter was not likely, however, since the
last journey an Indian will make is a night journey. The night is sacred
to spirits, and he hesitates to violate it by being abroad; in the day
the spirits sleep.

While Mr. Masterson waited deep beneath the cottonwoods, a splash from
the river’s brink would now and again show where the bank was caving, or
the crackling of branches, and the profound flapping of great wings
overhead, mark how some wild turkey—a heavy old gobbler, probably—had
broken down a bough with sheer stress of fat, and was saving himself
from a fall. Far away could be heard the faltering cry of a coyote,
bewailing a jackrabbit which he had not caught.

That thick cloud, waited for, began to encroach on the moon, and Mr.
Masterson, his pony stepping as though walking on a world of eggs,
headed for the river. The place had been well considered; there was no
tall bank off which to plump, but instead a gradual sandy descent.

The pony walked into the water as silently as a ghost. The current
rippled and rose in petulant chuckles of protest about the pony’s legs;
but, since its deepest was no more than to the hocks, Mr. Masterson
honoured it with scant attention.

Among Bear Shield’s ponies was a giant mule, renegade and runaway from
some government train. This long-eared traitor remembered his days of
burden, and the thing to please him least was the sight or sound or
scent of a paleface. The paleface was the symbol of thralldom and sore
stripes, and the old bellsharp desired none of his company.

By stress of brain, which counts among mules as among men, the old
bellsharp had risen to the rank of herd leader, and the Bear Shield
ponies would drill and wheel and go charging off at his signal. As Mr.
Masterson and his pony scrambled up the bank a flaw in the wind befell,
and a horrifying whiff of the stealthy invader reached the old
bellsharp. Thereupon, he lifted up his voice in clangorous condemnation,
after the manner of his species. The harsh cry echoed up and down the
slumbrous Cimarron like an outcry of destruction.

With that cry for his cue, Mr. Masterson drove home the spurs and began
a rapid round-up of the startled ponies. At the warning call of the old
bellsharp, the herd members came rushing towards him. Placing himself at
their head, his “hee-haw” of alarm still ringing like a bugle, he bore
them away at a thunderous gallop for the tepees.

Hard at the hocks of the flying battalion came Mr. Masterson. The outfit
swept through Bear Shield’s village for its entire length, Mr. Masterson
lying low along his pony’s neck and letting his blanket flap in the wind
bravely, for purposes of deception. After the ponies, charged Mr.
Masterson; after Mr. Masterson, charged a riotous brigade of dogs; the
uproar might have been heard as far as Crooked Creek.

As the mad stampede swept on, ever and anon a pony more blind or more
clumsy than his fellows would bump into a lodge. At that, an indignant
Cheyenne would tear aside the lodge-flap, protrude his outraged head,
and curse the ponies aboriginally. Observing the blanketed Mr.
Masterson, the savage would go back to bed, gratefully taking him for
some public-spirited neighbour who was striving to return the ponies to
their grazing ground and inspire them with normal peace.

The flying ponies—the vociferous old bellsharp having fallen to the
rear, through lack of speed—wheeled against a thick clump of cottonwood,
and then broke north into the open. Their fever of fear was subsiding,
they were taking a more modest pace, and Mr. Masterson began turning in
the corners, and closing up the flanks, of the retreating band. He made
no effort to crowd or press, but gave them every encouragement to regain
their confidence, and moderate their flight. Presently the herd was
jogging comfortably; and because the wind was in their faces they were
furnished no disquieting notice of Mr. Masterson’s paleface identity
through the medium of their noses.

The ponies had traveled twenty minutes, and were cleverly bunched, when
Mr. Masterson made a discovery. Off to the right in the dull half-dark
he beheld a figure, blanketed, mounted, riding like the wind, and busy
with the stragglers as they pointed out of the herd. Like a flash, Mr.
Masterson whipped his rifle from its scabbard. Throwing the blanket
aside, to free his hands and arms, he fell a trifle to the rear, and
began edging towards the stranger.

From his riding, and because he seemed so willingly bent on sending the
ponies northward, Mr. Masterson felt assured that the stranger was a
white man. The expiring moon threw a last parallel ray along the surface
of the plains, and Mr. Masterson saw that the stranger’s pony was a
chestnut. Also it had the hard and bitter gait of Alazan, the bronco
wherewith he had equipped Cimarron Bill when that lost one issued south
from Dodge to his wiping out.

Mr. Masterson drew nearer; of a truth the jolty pony was Alazan! Who
then was the stranger? Could he, by some miracle of heaven, be Cimarron
Bill? Mr. Masterson gave a curlew’s whistle, which had been a signal
between him and Cimarron Bill. At the sound the stranger wheeled upon
him.

Mr. Masterson pulled up his pony; the sharp cluck! cluck! of the buffalo
gun clipped the night air as he cocked it, for Mr. Masterson was a
prudent man. The stranger, sitting fearlessly straight in his stirrups,
bore down upon him with speed. Mr. Masterson watched him with the
narrowed gaze of a lynx; as much as he might tell in the night, there
was no weapon in the stranger’s hands.

“Howdy, Bat!” cried the stranger, as he came up with a great rush. “I’ve
knowed you for an hour.”

Then Mr. Masterson let down the hammer of his Sharp’s, slammed it back
in its scabbard beneath his saddle-flap, and taking the stranger in a
bear-hug, fairly tore him from the saddle. The stranger was Cimarron
Bill; and in his youth Mr. Masterson was sentimental.

“Where have you been these weeks?” cried Mr. Masterson.

“I’ll tell you later,” returned Cimarron Bill. “We’d better clot up
these ponies an’ begin the drive, or they’ll get our wind an’ stampede
for B’ar Shield’s village.”

It was beginning to snow—great soft clinging flakes, and each like a wet
cold pinch of wool! The snow storm was both good and bad; it made it
difficult to handle the ponies, but it subtracted from the chances of
Bear Shield’s successful pursuit.

Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill, one on the right and one on the left
flank of the herd, riding to and fro like setter dogs quartering for
birds, drove on throughout a hard four hours. They broke eastward to
avoid Sun City; for it would have been impolite to bring those ponies
through hamlet or ranch, and so threaten it with Bear Shield’s anger.

With the first of dawn the tired riders, having brought the bunch into a
stretch of country choice for that purpose, halted to make an
inspection. The snow had ceased to fall, and the sun coming up gave them
light enough to tell good from evil as presented in the shape of ponies.
While Mr. Masterson held the herd, Cimarron Bill commenced cutting out
the spent and worthless ones. When the weeding was over, there remained
one hundred and thirty head, and the worst among them worth thirty
dollars in the Dodge corrals. Throwing the riff-raff loose, Mr.
Masterson and Cimarron Bill again took up their travels at a stiff road
gait. They were forty-five miles from Dodge; worn as they were, they
should still reach the Arkansas and Dodge by nightfall.

“And now,” quoth Mr. Masterson, when they were straightened away for the
north, “what have you been doing? Aunt Nettie was scared speechless. She
thought the Cheyennes had run their brand on you.”

Cimarron Bill’s adventures were laid open. Ten miles out from Sun City
he had crossed up with Red River Tom of the Bar-8-bar ranch. That
well-informed boy had told him of a dance to be given three nights away,
in the new camp-house of the B-in-a-Box outfit. “No common fandango,”
explained Cimarron Bill, “but the real thing, with people comin’ from as
far away as Tascosa an’ Fort Sill. Nacherrally, I decided to attend.
That Cheyenne I was after, an’ his pony, could wait; the dance
couldn’t.”

Cimarron Bill, continuing, told how he had cut across country for the
home ranch of the B-in-a-Box. He arrived in good time, that is to say
four hours prior to the fiddlers, which, as he expressed it, gave him
space wherein “to liquor up” and get in proper key for the festival
impending. While engaged upon these preliminaries he was shot in the leg
by a fellow-guest with whom he disagreed.

“You see,” explained Cimarron Bill, “this outlaw was a Texas ranger, an’
after about six drinks I started to tell him what I thought of a prairie
dog who would play policeman that a-way, for thirty dollars a month an’
furnish his own hoss. One word leads to another an’ the last one to the
guns, an’ the next news is I get plugged in the off hind laig. I
wouldn’t have cared so much,” concluded Cimarron Bill, in mournful
meditation over his mishap, “only he shot me before the first dance.”

Cimarron Bill had been laid up in the new camp-house of the hospitable
B-in-a-Box. Being able to mount and ride away, three days before Mr.
Masterson encountered him, he had deemed it expedient to make a driving
raid on Bear Shield’s village on his journey home, and carry off a
handful of ponies. Thus, by a coincidence of pony-raiding impulse, the
two had been restored to one another.

“For you see,” said Cimarron Bill, “I was still shy a hoss, the same as
when I started out of Dodge.”

“All the same,” observed Mr. Masterson, severely, “you ought to have
sent word to Aunt Nettie.”

“Send Aunt Nettie word!” exclaimed Cimarron Bill. “I wasn’t that locoed!
Aunt Nettie would have been down on me like a fallin’ star! Shore! she’d
have deescended on that B-in-a-Box outfit like a mink on a settin’ hen!
I saveyed a heap better than to send Aunt Nettie word.”

Vast was the joy of Dodge as Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill rode in
with those Bear Shield ponies; prodigious was the trade-hubbub when,
over at Mr. Trask’s corrals—Mr. Wright officiating as auctioneer—one by
one the herd was struck down to the highest bidder. Under the double
stimulation of the holidays and the ponies, commerce received a boom,
the like of which had not before been known in the trade annals of
Dodge. In proof whereof, not alone Mr. Short at the Long Branch but Mr.
Kelly at the Alhambra declared that never since either of them last saw
the Missouri, had so much money been changed in at roulette and farobank
in any similar space of time. Mr. Wright of the outfitting store
confirmed these tales of commercial gorgeousness, and Mr. Masterson and
Cimarron Bill were greeted and treated as public benefactors. Meanwhile,
far away on the ravished Cimarron, Bear Shield was making wrathful
medicine, and dancing the dances and singing the songs of him who has
been robbed.

“Thar, you Bat Masterson!” exclaimed Aunt Nettie, as she heaped high the
banquet board before him and her prodigal nephew. “Which it goes to show
how feeble-witted you be. Yere you comes ghost-dancin’ ’round with a
yarn about my Billy bein’ killed an’ skelped! I told you then, what you
now have the livin’ sense to see, I hope, that thar was never the
Cheyenne painted his face who could down my Billy, B’ar Shield himse’f
not barred.”




CHAPTER III

INEZ OF THE ’DOBE WALLS


Inez was a mustang—a small, wild-born thing, and the pet of the ’Dobe
Walls. Those Indians who came calling at the ’Dobe Walls sniffed
suspiciously at Inez and said she was the “White Man’s Medicine.” When
put on the scales and weighed, Inez kicked the beam at seventy pounds,
or about one-eighth of what she might have weighed had she lived out the
life designed for her by Providence, and escaped the dwarfing influences
of bread and milk as furnished by Mr. Hanrahan’s black cook.

Inez’s share in the life of the ’Dobe Walls began in this way. The
horse-hustler had found Inez and her little mustang mother visiting
among the ponies when he went to make his morning round-up. The mother
fled like a shadow, but Inez, then in her babyhood and something the
size of a jackrabbit, fell into the hands of the horse-hustler. That
personage of ponies rode into camp with Inez in his arms, and presented
her as a common charge. She was adopted and made much of, and soon
forgot her griefs and her little mother whinnying among the hills.

Except that she ceased to grow, civilization agreed with Inez. Whether
from the fright of capture or the menu of the ’Dobe Walls, and although
with time she slimmed and shaped up to be the silken image of a
full-grown mustang, Inez stood no higher than nine hands. One might pick
her up and carry her under one’s arm like a roll of blankets; and
occasionally, for the fun of the thing, one did. To be thus transported,
threw Inez into a temper; she was a petulant mustang, and when again on
her four small hoofs—as black as jet and as shiny—she ran open-mouthed
after her tormentor.

If time hung heavy Mr. Wright or Mr. Masterson would cinch a small
saddle-tree onto Inez. Thereat, our peevish one arched her small spine,
dropped her velvet muzzle between her fetlocks—as slender as a woman’s
wrists—and sunfished about the scene. Inez did not have to be trained to
this trick; it was in her blood and she “bucked” by instinct.

The ’Dobe Walls consisted of Mr. Wright’s store, Mr. Kimball’s
blacksmith shop, and Mr. Hanrahan’s saloon. This latter mart, of course.
The West without a barroom would be London without a club. The ’Dobe
Walls was a casual camp of prairie commerce, pitched on the banks of the
Canadian, and meant for trade with the buffalo hunters, taking skins for
calico, flour, fire-water, sugar, coffee, cartridges and guns. It lay
two hundred miles to the back of no-where, and Dodge, ten days’ journey
away on the Arkansas, called itself the nearest civilization. The fixed
population counted eleven at roll-call; but what with the coming and
going of the buffalo hunters there were few moments of any day or night
when a count of noses would not have shown more than a score. The public
ate its meals in the saloon, which Mr. Hanrahan turned into a restaurant
three times a day.

Inez came with the rest to these repasts, and stood about behind the
benches and looked over the shoulders of her feeding friends. This she
did because it was her privilege, and not by virtue of any tooth of
hunger. If by design or accident the door were closed, Inez wheeled
indignant tail and testified to a sense of injury with her heels. Since
she broke a panel on one of these spiteful occasions, Mr. Hanrahan had
been taught to open his portals with speed. The door being opened, Inez
would enter, snorting her small opinion of him who had sought to bar her
from her rights.

When it rained, Inez took shelter in the saloon. Also, she passed her
hours of leisure there, for while Inez declined intoxicants and went
committed to water as much as any temperance lecturer, the company she
found in Mr. Hanrahan’s was to her liking, being more unbuckled and at
ease than were those busy ones of the stores—deep with their foolish
barter.

This was in the year when the Panhandle coyote rolled in fat from much
buffalo meat, and a buffalo’s skin brought five dollars. The June night
had been sweltering hot. In the store and about the clay floor of Mr.
Hanrahan’s saloon, blanket-bedded and sound asleep, lay twenty-one men.
Most of them were buffalo hunters, all were equal to death at four
hundred yards with one of their heavy guns. There were no pickets since
there were no suspicions; for were not the Comanche, the Arrapahoe, the
Cheyenne, and the Kiowa their friends; and had not delegations of these
aboriginal clans been smilingly about the ’Dobe Walls but the day
before? The snores and deep-lunged breathings told of a sense of sure
security.

Suddenly a pattering racket of rub-a-dub-dub broke on the sleeping ears.
It was Inez beating an ecstatic longroll with the door for a drum.

“Who shut that mustang out?” growled Mr. Masterson.

Mr. Masterson sat up and rubbed his eyes. He glanced towards the door;
it was not closed. Inez, standing inside, continued to beat it with her
hoofs by way of tocsin. Mr. Masterson through the open door could see by
the blue light on the eastern-southern sky that the sun was coming up.

“What’s the matter with the baby?” thought Mr. Masterson. The “baby” was
one of many titles given Inez. “What’s she kicking about? That Congo
hasn’t fed her something that gives her a colic, has he?” Mr. Masterson
arose to talk it over with Inez, and learn and locate her aches.

As Mr. Masterson drew near the door, his quick eye caught a movement
under the cottonwoods that a half mile away fenced the Canadian. There
were five layers of tan on Mr. Masterson’s face, each the work of a
Panhandle summer. A moment was all he required to solve the mystery of
that move beneath the cottonwoods.

“Indians!” shouted Mr. Masterson.

Then Mr. Masterson closed and barred the door. The door closed, he
blazed away from a window with a six-shooter by way of general notice.

Every man jack of the twenty-one in store and bar-room was on his feet
like magic. In that Western day, rather from habit than apprehension,
one would as soon think of going to bed without his blankets as without
his guns. Once aroused, the ’Dobe Walls was instantly an armed fort.

The Indians made a gorgeous charge. There was a red line of them, five
hundred strong—picked fighters of the Cheyennes, the Arrapahoes, the
Kiowas, and the Comanches. To give them spirit and add éclat to the
fray, two hundred of their friends from the Pawnees and the Osages, had
come to see the fight. These copper gentlemen of peace and curiosity
were seated upon a near-by hill, like an audience at a bull fight.

It was a pageant to remember—that swoop of the red five hundred over the
half mile of grassy flat between the cottonwoods and the ’Dobe Walls.
Great war-bonnets of eagles’ feathers floated from every head. The manes
and tails of the ponies streamed with ribbons. On they swept, each buck
managing with his knees his saddleless, bridleless little war horse.

For a fortnight, the medicine man of the Comanches had starved and
danced himself into a frenzy. He had burned “medicine” tobacco, and
occult grasses, and slips of sacred cedar. Coming forth of his trances
and his songs, he brought word that the Great Spirit would fight on the
side of His red children. His medicine told him they might ride into the
’Dobe Walls and kill the palefaces in their sleep with clubs. There
would be no resistance; it was no more than just riding in and stripping
off the scalps.

Also, there were rifles and tons of cartridges which the Great Spirit
designed for His red children. These would be as make-weight with the
scalps, and pay His red children for the work of waging war. Thus
preached the medicine man; and his hearers were prompt with their
belief. And thereupon they made stealthy tryst on the Canadian that June
morning, and without yelp or outcry or war-shout, swept down upon their
prey as softly silent as spectres.

The medicine man’s medicine would have been true medicine, had not the
counter medicine of the white man been hard at work. Inez was so wholly
of the palefaces that she disdained an Indian. Let one but cross her
ladyship to windward, and with squeal of protest she furnished notice of
her displeasure. Inez had gotten the taint of that line of copper
battle, and fled for refuge to Mr. Hanrahan’s saloon. It was her
contempt for Indians, expressed on Mr. Hanrahan’s door, that brought out
the ’Dobe Walls to defend its hair.

There was no such Eastern foolishness as a pane of glass in any of the
buildings. The mud walls were perforated with openings eighteen inches
square. These let in light and air. Also, they made portholes from which
to shoot. Ten seconds after Mr. Masterson’s warning fusillade, two
lynx-eyed gentlemen with buffalo guns were ready at each of those
openings. They were a committee of reception likely to prove as warm as
one might wish.

It is the vanity of the paleface to hold that he can whip twentyfold his
weight in any alien race. He will prove this on the teeth of men red or
yellow or black. No disaster drives this notion from his vainglorious
pate. He believes it, and thereon he transacts his wars. Upheld by it,
his steady, cool ferocity of heart, makes his enemies believe it also;
and in the end they abandon him as the creature indomitable and above
defeat. That cocky conceit of himself has gotten the paleface into
uncounted trouble; and then brought him victoriously through it.

The twenty-one who waited with the buffalo guns were full-breathed
specimens of their race. Wherefore, the fear of being beaten at the old
game of war, which their fathers had played for a thousand years, never
once crossed their slope of thought. They would cord up those
flambuoyant savages; they would have a scalp to show and a new yarn to
tell about their camp-fires. That was the most the coming trouble
promised; looked on in that light, to repulse those savages was
relaxation.

The charging Indians were a minute covering the space between those
river cottonwoods and the ’Dobe Walls where the buffalo guns so
hopefully awaited them.

Every charging buck wore on his bow arm a round shield of double buffalo
hide. It had been stripped from the shoulder of a bull, and would stop
the bullet from a common rifle. The oncoming buck covered himself with
this bull’s-hide buckler. His quiver of arrows stood up above his left
shoulder. As he charged, he would whip his right hand toward the quiver.
Each time he brought away an arrow by the feather-end. With one motion
the arrow was thrown across the bow; drawing it to the head, he sent it
singing on like a hornet. The charging line of five hundred was preceded
by an arrow-flight as thick as stubble, for these red experts shot so
fast that the seventh arrow would leave the bow while yet the first was
in the air. In that opening charge they did not employ rifles. At ranges
not to run over one hundred yards the arrow would do as well. Every one
of those missiles came twanging off the bowstring with a vengeful force
that would have sent it smoothly, cleanly through a buffalo calf. And
they must save their rifles for long range, should the war take on that
shape.

“Billy,” said Mr. Masterson to Mr. Dixon, his comrade of the loophole,
“I’m going to hive that big one on the pinto pony.” This to the end that
Mr. Dixon pick out another target.

On came Mr. Masterson’s selection, shield held forward and arrows
streaming from his bow like splinters of white light. Mr. Masterson’s
finger, trained to wait instantly on his eye, unhooked his rifle the
moment the shield showed through both sights. The great bullet struck
the shield where the bunch of painted feathers floated. It went through
bull’s-hide, arm, and savage shoulder behind the arm. The stricken one
seemed to rise in the air like a kite; and then he struck the grass in a
half-stunned heap to roll and clutch, and at last to lie still. Mr.
Masterson snapped in another cartridge, and laughed cheerfully.

“Did you see the look of surprise, Billy,” asked Mr. Masterson, “on my
Indian’s face? That was because he found his shield no good. The bullet
went through as though the shield were brown paper, and disturbed that
Comanche’s military theories.”

Mr. Dixon, whom Mr. Masterson addressed, made no response. He had piled
up an Indian of his own, and was watching him with the keenest interest,
with intent to send another bullet into him if he moved, which he
didn’t.

As Mr. Masterson peered forth on the heels of the charge, he counted a
round dozen of the Indians, scattered carelessly about, not one of whom
would ride again. The buffalo hunters had been sedulous to aim low and
to see their hind-sights before they pressed the trigger. With the dozen
Indians were half as many ponies, kicking and tossing in the
death-heave.

The volley broke the teeth of that charge; the Indians split on the
buildings to right and left, as the stone piers of a bridge split the
river’s ice in the spring. They flashed by and ran into the low hills, a
third of a mile to the rear. After the charge, those Osage-Pawnee
spectators, on their hill of curious peace, lighted pipes; they saw that
the fight was to be a long one.

“Bat,” exclaimed Mr. Dixon, pointing to where Mr. Masterson’s Indian lay
waving his one good hand for a sign, “your buck ain’t dead. Why don’t
you drill him ag’in?”

“Let him alone,” returned Mr. Masterson. “It’s like baiting a trap. If
he lives long enough, you and I by being sharp can kill a dozen over
him, for his people will swoop down and try to carry him off.”

The big double door was the weak point. To strengthen it, Mr. Hanrahan
tore loose the tall rum counter, and piled it across. This uncovered
Inez, who for all her hot temper was timid and had crept behind the
counter, regarding it as a cave of refuge in this trying hour. Stripped
of her defences, Inez, who felt the peril though she might not
understand, scuttled to the rear of the room and pushed in among a
thicket of stools and poker tables, which had been thrown there to have
them out of the way.

There was a lull, the Indians still hugging the hills. Taking advantage
of it, Mr. Hanrahan sent round their morning whiskey to the people at
the openings.

“After the next charge,” observed Mr. Hanrahan, who was not without
wisdom concerning Indians, “they’ll be so sick they’ll give us time for
breakfast.”

Then a thing occurred that struck the colour from more than one brown
cheek. It was the clear, high note of a bugle, sounding a rally, then a
charge.

“This ain’t a band of whites painted up, is it?” said Mr. Wright. “If
it’s another Mountain Meadow racket, boys, if we’re up against white
men, we’re gone fawnskins!”

“One thing sure,” returned Mr. Masterson, “no Indian blew that bugle.
Why, an Indian can’t even whistle.”

White or red, again came the swoop of the enemy. Again the buffalo guns
broke them and crumpled them up. They flew on, however, and took
position under the cottonwoods from which they had first charged. As Mr.
Masterson foretold, two riding side and side had made a dash for the
wounded Indian, who still lifted up his arm. They would have gone to
right and left of him and picked him up.

“Take the one to the left, Billy,” said Mr. Masterson.

Mr. Masterson and Mr. Dixon carefully added the rescue party to that one
whom they came to save. “What did I tell you!” exulted Mr. Masterson, as
he clicked in a fresh cartridge and closed the breech of his Sharp’s.

“Which you called the turn!” said Mr. Dixon, who having been three years
from Boston, now spoke with a Brazos accent.

Again the mysterious bugle sang the tan-ta-ra-ra of a rally. The sound
came from down in the fringe of cottonwoods; the bugler, whoever he
might be, had charged each time with the others.

As the bugle sounded, a big Osage, one of the pacific audience on the
hill, started to ride over to the warriors forming their third line of
battle beneath the trees. Doubtless he had thought of a word of advice
to give his fighting friends, whereof they stood in need. He was gravely
walking his pony across the space that lay between the red audience and
the red actors in this drama of blood.

“It would be a good thing,” remarked Mr. Wright, who was the Ulysses of
the ’Dobe Walls, “to break that Osage of his conversation habit right
here. And yet, it won’t do to hurt him and bring the Osages upon us.
Can’t you down his pony, Bat, and send him back on foot? You’re the best
shot; and it would be a warning to the others, smoking on the hill, that
we won’t tolerate foreign interference in this fight.”

Mr. Masterson notched up his hindsight for seven hundred yards. The
rifle flashed; the Osage pony made a forward jump and fell. At that, the
owner picked himself up, rearranged his blanket, and soberly strutted
back to his tribal friends whom he had quitted. His said friends took
their pipes out of their mouths and laughed widely over his
discomfiture. They were pleased thus to have his officiousness rebuked.
He should have kept his nose out of this scrimmage, which was not an
Osage scrimmage.

The bugle called down the third charge. There came the low, thick patter
of the hoofs, and soon the hail of steel-tipped arrows set in. The
arrows broke against the mud walls of the building, and fell to the
harmless ground. One glanced through an opening, lifting the long locks
of a defender.

“Tryin’ to cut your ha’r, Jim,” jested his window mate. “Don’t blame
’em; it needs trimmin’.”

“All the same,” retorted the one of the locks, “I nacherally trimmed the
barber a lot;” and he pointed to a savage who was twisting out his life
on the grass.

The arrow grazed Inez as it came clattering into her covert of stools
and tables. Inez being dislodged, ran screaming to Mr. Masterson for
protection. She knocked against that excellent marksman in time to spoil
his shot, and save the life of a Kiowa on whose destruction he had set
his heart.

Mr. Masterson, a bit disgusted with the timorous Inez, picked her up and
put her in a great empty bin, wherein shelled corn had been kept. Inez
became instantly engaged with the stray kernels which she found in the
bottom, fumbling them and tasting them with her lips, half guessing they
were good to eat.

There were no more swoops; the Indians had lost faith in the charge as a
manoeuvre of war. They leaped off their ponies, the most of them, and
from the hills popped at the palefaces, looking from those openings in
the ’Dobe Walls, with their rifles. The distance was a fair third of a
mile, and the chance of a bullet finding its way to anyone’s disaster
was as one in one thousand.

After the lapse of fifteen minutes Mr. Hanrahan’s black cook began
tossing up a bacon and flap jack breakfast for the garrison. Water was
at hand; Mr. Hanrahan’s well had been dug cautiously inside the building
for just such a day as this. While the garrison were at breakfast, a
sentinel went through the manhole and watched from the roof. There was
no disturbance; the Indians kept discreetly to the hills, and put in
time with a breakfast of their own. Fighting is hungry work, and will
give folk white or red an edge.

After breakfast, Mr. Masterson lighted one of Mr. Hanrahan’s cigars, and
took a look from a rear window. It was well into the morning. A long six
hundred yards away a score or more of the younger savages, restless with
a lack of years and sore to be thus knocked about on their first warpath
by a huddle of buffalo hunters, were galloping hither and yon. Their
war bonnets still flaunted, and their ponies still streamed with
ribbons; but where was that hot courage which had brought them a trio of
times up to the muzzles of those buffalo guns? Mr. Masterson counted the
distance with his eye; then he shook his head.

“Bob,” said he to Mr. Wright, “I can’t be sure at that range with my
gun. It’s got buckhorn sights—coarse enough to drag a dog through ’em.
Where’s that closed-sight gun you brought out last week, the one with
the peep sight in the grip?”

“It’s here,” returned Mr. Wright, “but there’s no cartridges nearer than
the store.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Masterson. “You boys cover me, and I’ll
make a dash for the store. I want to see how they’re getting on over
there, at that.”

Mr. Masterson went through one of the eighteen-inch openings. The
distant Indians saw him, but appeared indifferent. There was a tall wall
of mud between the store and Mr. Hanrahan’s saloon. There was a gate,
but that had been closed and locked by Baldy Smith. Mr. Masterson’s plan
was to crawl under the gate, being invited by an open space of at least
a foot. It was better than climbing; were he to do the latter some
far-off lucky savage might manage a cock-shot of him as he went over the
top.

As Mr. Masterson stooped to dive beneath the gate, he shouted loudly to
those in the store. He had no desire to be mowed down by his friends,
upon a notion that he was some enterprising Indian, piercing their
defences. At Mr. Masterson’s shout, a wounded Indian, who was lying low
in a clump of weeds, sat up and with the utmost good will pumped three
bullets at him from a Spencer seven-shooter. The bullets chucked into a
pile of chips, heaped up where the cook was wont to chop his fire wood.
They buried the crawling Mr. Masterson beneath a shower of bark and
chips and splinters, but did no harm.

Mr. Masterson’s feelings were ruffled by the shower of chips. On
reaching the store, his first care was to borrow a rifle, poke a hole in
the mud wall and quiet that uneasy personage in weedy ambuscade.

“I don’t want him whanging away at me on my return,” explained Mr.
Masterson.

There were five in the store. Young Thurston had been shot through the
lungs. His days were down to minutes; parched with the death-fever, he
lay calling for water.

There was no well in the store as in the forethoughtful Mr. Hanrahan’s
saloon. The store pump was fifty yards away in the stark, undefended
open.

“I reckon now,” said Daddy Keeler, “I’ll go fetch a bucketful. I’m the
gent to go, because my eyes are too old and dim to do anything at six
hundred yards. I’d just waste cartridges.”

Daddy Keeler was called Daddy Keeler for two reasons. For one matter, he
had passed sixty years; and for another, everybody loved him. In the
West when a man is loved they give him a nickname.

Also, there are no struggles for precedence in the West. Each man plays
his part in peace or war as best dovetails with his pleasure. Not one in
the beleaguered store would have hesitated to run the gauntlet of those
savage rifles to bring water to young Thurston as he died. Yet not one
would offer to take the place of Daddy Keeler. To do so would have been
in violation of Panhandle proprieties, and Daddy Keeler would have
resented it to the death.

Daddy Keeler took a bucket and tossed it through an opening. For all his
years and hair of gray, he was as active as a cat. He made no task of
sliding through the opening after the bucket. The four who remained
stood ready, should the sight of him cause a rush to cut him off. As,
bucket in hand, he started for the pump, a frightened dog, in hiding
behind a heap of lumber, came forth and followed whiningly.

The savages were not slow in getting to work. They didn’t charge; their
stomachs were too weary for that. But their rifles cracked by twos and
tens and twenties. The bullets zipped and whistled as thick as twilight
bats.

The pump was sun-dried and slow; it cost two minutes to start the water
from the cracked spout, and five to fill the bucket. Smack! smack! the
pump was struck a dozen times, while in twenty places the well-platform
was rasped or whitely splintered by the flying lead.

Daddy Keeler pumped doggedly, and never raised his head; the creaking of
the pump-handle matched with the low howling of the frightened dog.
Daddy Keeler’s sombrero went whirling, the dog was shot down at his
feet; still he pumped on. The bucket at last was filled. Daddy Keeler
picked up his hat and fixed it on his head. Then he brought the bucket
and passed it through the opening without spilling a drop. The next
moment he had followed it, and never a mark upon him.

“It’s some hot out thar in the sun,” said Daddy Keeler, apologetically,
wiping the great drops from his forehead. Then taking off his sombrero,
and considering the double hole the bullet had left: “It was a
forty-four did that; some of ’em’s shootin’ Winchesters.” For fourteen
long, hot days the fight went on; now and then a charge, more often
long-range shooting, whereat the buffalo hunters excelled. When the
fight flagged the garrison played poker, leaving one to watch.

Every night one-half the garrison must dig graves for the dead—pony and
Indian alike. The argument for these sexton labours was sanitary, not
sentimental. In the blinding height of a Panhandle summer it is no good
thing to be cordoned about with dead ponies and dead Indians. There was
never a danger; your savage lies close, and will not move in the dark
unless one crowd him. He is so much the Parthian that it is against his
religion to fight in the night.

Before the burial parties tumbled an Indian into his sepulchre, they
were at pains to have his scalp as an incontestable method of keeping
accounts. On the fifteenth day, when the troops from Dodge relieved the
siege, there were eighty topknots to tell the loss of the enemy.

Inez, when the fighting fell to long-range, cried to be lifted from her
box. Inez did not fear bullets; arrows were a different commodity and
set her nerves on edge. She could see them; besides, they smelled
fearfully of Indians. As long as no arrow came spitting and splintering
through the openings, Inez was without a care. She would have been
content were it not for her rations of merely bread and water. This she
thought squinted at parsimony, and it aroused her spleen.

When the cavalry came riding down from Dodge the beaten remnant of that
war party went squattering through the shallow reaches of the Canadian,
and headed south for the Staked Plains. Then the visiting Osages and
Pawnees, pipe in hand and blankets wrapped about them, came beamingly
from their audience hill to offer congratulations.

“How!” said Black Feather, the Osage chief, extending his hand to Mr.
Wright “How! Heep big fight!”

Then Black Feather went over the four score scalps, and whether by tint
of plume or mark of braid, hidden to the white man, confidently told the
tribe of each.

“Comanche!” grunted Black Feather, picking up a scalp; and then: “Kiowa,
Cheyenne, Arrapahoe,” as he pawed the others over one by one.

“Who were right in this shindy?” asked the captain of cavalry.

That officer was curious to hear what Black Feather would say to the
question. Black Feather, who believed firmly in the equities of force,
did not hesitate.

“White man right,” said he. “The longest lance is right.”

What of that mysterious bugle, whereof the music so shook the men of
buffaloes? It was blown by a caitiff negro, a deserter from Uncle Sam’s
swart cavalry. The third charge was the black bugler’s last. Striped and
painted like the others, the burial party might never have known the
race or colour of him had it not been for his want of a scalp lock. They
took his bugle instead, and rolled him into the trench with the others.

“By the way, Bat,” remarked Mr. Wright, when two days after the fight,
life at the ’Dobe Walls had gone back to old-time lines, “we forgot to
thank you for seeing those Indians that time. They’d have cinched us,
sure, if you hadn’t; killed us, as it were, on the nest. It ain’t too
late to take a drink on it, is it?”

“The drink goes,” returned Mr. Masterson, drawing up to Mr. Hanrahan’s
counter, which was again happily in its place; “the drink goes, but it
ought to be for Inez. It was she who gave warning. If it hadn’t been for
Inez every man of us would have gone with Thurston, and those eighty
bucks might be riding yet. It was pretty work, Bob, to stand off five
hundred Indians fourteen days, and only lose one man against their
eighty.” Here Inez came mincingly through the door, like a fine lady
thinking on her skirts. She nosed up to Mr. Masterson for a caress.
“That’s right,” said Mr. Masterson, patting her satin neck, “you’re just
in time, Ladybird. We’re going to drink to the White Man’s Medicine,
Inez, of the ’Dobe Walls.”




CHAPTER IV

THE WILD ROSE OF THE CANADIAN


The town’s name was Mobeetie and, for the expansive suddenness of its
springing up, might better have been Mushroom. A Cheyenne killed a
buffalo in the flats that stretch from the Canadian, and as he peeled
the husk from that buffalo the nearest paleface was thirty miles away.
The next day came engineers, and ran lines and mapped out town lots on
the ground where that buffalo was slain; within a week thereafter
Mobeetie buzzed and bustled.

Mr. Masterson, ever full of the spirit of progress, gave up buffalo
hunting for the nonce, and carried “chain” and pegged corners, and did
what other deeds an amateur might do towards aiding the surveyors in
laying out Mobeetie. Later, he aided the public in laying out certain
predatory characters who from time to time rode into Mobeetie with a
purpose of spoil. These latter intermittent lifts to law and order
endeared Mr. Masterson to Mobeetie; the more since he was not, speaking
strictly, a resident of that hamlet, having his roofless habitat on the
buffalo range, with a home-camp at the ’Dobe Walls.

All folk, whether they be white or black or red or wheat-hued, are
idolators in their hearts, and those of Mobeetie worshipped Mollie
Brennan. The women worshipped her because her little feet took hold on
innocence, the men for the beauty of her face—for brown of cheek, and
red of lip, and with eyes as softly, gently deep as are those of an
antelope, Mollie Brennan was beautiful. To her worshippers Mollie
Brennan was known as The Wild Rose, and the name had been given her
after this fashion:

Misled by drink, a chance-blown poet once upon a time invaded the
Panhandle. Beholding Mollie Brennan, he fell in love, as poets will, and
sighed on her obdurate trail for a wasted twelve-month. Because she
would not listen, the poet poured forth his soul in sonnets, in which
vehicle of verse he identified Mollie Brennan as “The Wild Rose of the
Canadian.” There were no wild roses along the Canadian, at least in any
near vicinity of Mobeetie, but the love-wrung bard, more moved of the
whiskey than the flora of the region, refused to be bound by that
barrenness. “The Wild Rose” he made it; and, since his stanzas were
granted local hearing, the Wild Rose it became, and Mollie Brennan
accepted and wore the title pleasantly enough.

But the Wild Rose resolutely declined the hand of that poet; and because
she would not hear him and he must tell some one, he was wont, after the
fifth cup, to sob forth his soul and its defeat to the frequenters of
the Lady Gay saloon. The defeat gave general satisfaction, for Mobeetie
distrusted if it did not disapprove of poets, and in that harsh hour the
Panhandle thought better of a Sharp’s rifle than of a sonnet. The poet,
in a lucid moment, perceived as much, and, every hope of conquering the
callous fancy of the Wild Rose having died, he got aboard the
stage-coach for Dodge, bearing with him a bottle and a broken heart. His
going was regretted at the Lady Gay, but the Wild Rose felt relieved.

Sergeant King was so early in his coming to Mobeetie as to be almost
entitled to fame as one of its founders. Nor did the fact go without a
value, since nothing but that residential antiquity had saved him from
being warned to quit the town a dozen times.

Mobeetie confessed to no love for Sergeant King. He was dark of brow,
with cruel mouth and furtive secret eye. He had been run out of Abilene,
as the upshot of an enterprise wherein he combined a six-shooter with a
deck of cards—the latter most improperly marked—and which resulted in
the demise of a gentleman then and there playing draw-poker against him.
Also, he was that creature—most detested and soonest to die in the
West—a blusterer and a bully; and when a bit unbuckled of rum he would
boast of the blood he had spilled.

This latter relaxation is exceeding bad form. Mobeetie could have
overlooked the marked cards, since it is understood in the West that
every gentleman, in what games of chance engage his interest, must be
equal to his own protection or suffer those forfeits which nature
everywhere imposes upon ignorance gone astray; it might have condoned
the homicide, because, technically, it was a killing rather than a
murder, and the departed wore his hardware at the time; even those
hang-dog facial marks of an innate treachery would have passed
unchallenged, for who may help his looks? but that braggart trick of,
orally, reviewing what scalps he had taken, and exulting thereat, set
public sentiment flowing against Sergeant King to such a height of
disfavour that no one wanted his company and but few his gold. This
last should be the measure of an utter public disregard for, however
blackly hated your outlaw villain may be, his gold, as a rule,
partakes in no wise of his unpopularity. For what says Vespasian? “The
smell of all money is sweet.”

Following her inadvertent conquest of the poet, and his broken-hearted
dismissal to Dodge, Sergeant King was that one who gave to the Wild Rose
what he would have called his heart. The gift bred an alarm in her bosom
beyond any induced by the rhyming passion of the sonneteer. Whereas the
poet had only annoyed her, she drew back frightened in the base instance
of Sergeant King. He saw and understood, and the bitterness which lay
like poison at the bottom of his evil heart was stirred.

Every resident of Mobeetie, in an hour devoid of convention, was the
acquaintance, if not the friend, of every other resident of that
metropolis by dint of a citizenship common to both, and Sergeant King
was therefore an acquaintance of the Wild Rose. However, what few words
he addressed to her never went beyond the commonplace; warned as by
intuition of her aversion, he offered no syllable of love. But his eyes,
black, and burning with a hungry fire—half-hidden, half-bursting into
flame—made no secret of those sentiments that had swept down Sergeant
King; the Wild Rose could feel their glances play about her like a
tongue of fire. There it stopped; if he possessed a hope of winning her,
he never made it manifest—coming near her only with his eyes!

You are not to suppose that the Wild Rose went untouched of love. When a
maiden refuses one man, it is a reason for believing she has given
herself to some one else. Mobeetie had grown up a brisk three hours’
canter from the ’Dobe Walls, and Mr. Masterson was frequently about its
causeways. Buffalo hunting would wax monotonous betimes, and in what
moments it palled upon him Mr. Masterson unbent in visits to Mobeetie.
Thus the Wild Rose caught frequent glimpses of him, and the heart which
had refused the poet, and was closed fast and fear-locked against
Sergeant King, went following Mr. Masterson with its love. The Wild Rose
learned to know the very jingle of his spurs, and their melody about the
board sidewalks of Mobeetie would bring her face to the pane.

Once, the Wild Rose met Mr. Masterson as he emerged from the Santa Ana
restaurant, to which place of refection he had been drawn in favour of
flapjacks, and the blush that spread redly over her cheek would have
told tales to one more gifted of self-conceit. The tender truth missed
fire; Mr. Masterson, if he nursed opinions on the point at all, held by
a theory that love ought to be confined to the East as a region endowed
of what leisure was demanded by its pursuit. When the Wild Rose swept
him softly, and then let fall those lids in fear lest the modest hazel
depths give up their blissful secret, his mind was on Cheyennes, and how
far his raid on Bear Shield’s ponies one Christmas Eve might have been a
source of the recent uprising of that peevish people. He escaped news of
the sweet story told by those deep fringed eyes, and the Wild Rose had
the romance to herself.

And yet, while her soul’s cry went unheard by Mr. Masterson, it was not
to die unnoted. Jealousy is more alert than love, and Sergeant King,
lounging in the doorway of the Lady Gay, surprised the look of the Wild
Rose, and read its truth. The knowledge shone in upon him with a red
hatefulness that was as a ray from the pit. The love which had fled from
him would follow another—unsought and uninvited!

Like an icicle the thought pierced through and through the soul of
Sergeant King. Wanting the touch of a jealous spur, he might have loved
on for unresentful years, passively enduring the coldness which was his
reward. But that Mr. Masterson should have the Wild Rose aroused in him
a mindless fury that was like unto the blind anger of an animal. Even
his vanity arose to edge the sense of loss and sharpen him for
retaliation.

At the rough seminary wherein Sergeant King had been reared blood was
taught as that one reprisal worth the while of a man, and death and
vengeance were set side by side as synonyms. To determine on the taking
off of Mr. Masterson was the one thing natural. It called for no motion
of the intelligence; the resolution leaped instantly into being as the
fruit of what he saw and what he felt. His enemy must die, and the sole
question that invited pause was: How might that enemy be blotted out
with least risk to himself? He retired into an uttermost corner of the
Lady Gay to consider and lay out his dark campaign.

Such as Sergeant King are unequal to sure bloodshed unless their nerves
are stiffened by alcohol, and he caused a bottle to be brought to his
elbow to assist his cogitations. He put away glass after glass, for—as
those mule-skinners freighting between Mobeetie and Dodge would have
phrased it—he “wasn’t able to start such a load as Bat Masterson on a
cold collar.”

While Sergeant King was thus employed in bringing about that needed
temperature, as though Fate were delivering his victim into his clutch,
Mr. Masterson with Mr. Dixon came into the Lady Gay. The two sat at a
table just across from Sergeant King.

It was a big day for the Lady Gay; the tides of custom had risen to
unusual heights. There were a busy dozen about the faro table, which
stood at the end of the bar; an equal number bent noisily over monte,
the latter diversion being dealt by a careworn Mexican, who looked as
though luck were against him. In the far end a sedate poker game
prevailed.

To every man his interest; with two-score folk in the Lady Gay, no one
observed the sombre Sergeant King, brooding schemes of blood. A Mexican
lost his last _peso_ at monte, and drew out of the eager fringe about
the table. Sergeant King called him with a motion of his hand. The
Mexican approached, received the whispered directions, took the gold
piece tendered, and disappeared. By the time Sergeant King had taken
another drink the Mexican led up his pony, saddled and bridled, to the
door of the Lady Gay and stood holding it by the bits, awaiting the
murderous convenience of its owner. Plainly Sergeant King was opening a
gate for final flight.

There be many species of courage; there are day courage and night
courage, water courage and land courage, gun courage and knife courage,
with forty further courages beside. And, when you have settled its sort,
there remains the matter of comparison. There is a courage born of
caution; it is fed and led by caution, and runs by its side like a calf
by the side of the mother-cow. There is another courage, whitely
desperate, which owns no element of prudence, and against which no odds
prevail.

Once in the Panhandle—he may be there to-day—there lived a personage of
cows whose name was Old Tom Harris. I have referred to this worthy man
before. He numbered but thirty years, and the epithet of “Old” was a
title of endearment which his mates of rope and running-iron had
conferred upon him to mark their admiration of his arctic dauntlessness
of heart. Mr. Willingham, sheriff, having official reason so to do,
aimed his six-shooter at Old Tom Harris when the latter’s back was
turned. Then he called upon him to hold up his hands. Old Tom Harris
came ’round on his heel, but he did not throw up his hands. Looking into
the point-blank mouth of the Willingham pistol, he pulled his own. Then
he laid it, muzzle for muzzle, with the opposing piece of ordnance, and
defied Mr. Willingham to begin his blazing work.

“You haven’t the sand to shoot!” said Old Tom Harris.

And Mr. Willingham hadn’t.

It might bear suggestion that the courage of Sergeant King was
caution-born. With seven chances in his favour where his enemy possessed
but three he would offer battle. With chances even he would be more
discreet. Mr. Masterson’s courage was of the Old Tom Harris stamp.

The Mexican stood at the door of the Lady Gay, holding the pony of
Sergeant King. Suddenly, above the hubbub of the games, arose the voice
of that unworthy.

“Thar’s a hoss thief here I’d like to kill!”

In the hush that followed every eye went nervously seeking the speaker.
He stood erect, his six-shooter in his right hand and hanging by his
side.

It would have been wiser, from the standpoint of his enterprise, you
will say, had Sergeant King gone instantly and wordlessly to work; you
will condemn the oratory as marking a lack of military intelligence.

There was a reason for the rhetoric of Sergeant King. The rules to
govern Western gun-play do not permit the shooting of one’s enemy in the
back. It is one’s notifying duty to arouse him. Once he be on his guard,
and reaching for his artillery, one is licensed to begin his downfall. A
violation of these laws leads to a vigilance committee, a rope, and a
nearest tree.

Sergeant King was aware of these courtesies of the gun and what public
resentment would attend their violation. Wherefore, and that the
proprieties related might be appeased, he shouted:

“Thar’s a hoss thief here I’d like to kill.”

Mr. Masterson was in no wise a friend of Sergeant King, and yet he would
not have called himself that person’s enemy. He quietly distasted, and
as quietly failed, to be on nearer than nodding terms with him. Also, he
distrusted the fortitude of Sergeant King as neither granite-bedded nor
iron-bound.

“I once,” observed Mr. Masterson, in later exposition of that courage of
Sergeant King, and his estimate thereof; “I once saw him jump over a
counter to get at a party, when he might as well have gone ’round, and
the episode struck me as too dramatic. From that moment I knew the
Sergeant wasn’t clean strain game.”

There is a telepathy of the guns. This was once shown when Clay
Allison—but that comes later; let us return to the Lady Gay. With the
first war-shout, the experienced intuition of what portion of the
Mobeetie public was then gathered in the Lady Gay, went wholly aware
that the feud of Sergeant King was addressed solely to Mr. Masterson.
Not a whit behind the public in the feather-edged character of his
apprehension, Mr. Masterson was likewise made aware of it. In logical
retort and with the promptness of light, he kicked his chair from
beneath him and arose to his feet.

“I reckon I’m the horse thief you refer to,” said Mr. Masterson, and
when he said it his six-shooter was pointing squarely at the plotting
head of Sergeant King.

You have read of such a commodity as fascination, and that a sure
nearness of death induces trance. It is the bird with the serpent, the
mouse with the cat. It is also the palsied truth of divers men when
brought within touch of cold eternity.

Of those who congeal at sight of death was Sergeant King. He had
performed with reckless valour, as he would have held it, on twenty
smoke-swept fields, and more than once had killed his man. What was it
now that froze him motionless? As he looked into the mouth of that
Colt’s-45, and beheld the gray fire in the eye beyond, for the earliest
time he felt the clutch of the grave upon him. It left him still as
stone; his heart became water, his cheek clay.

There was a chill pause—a silence as of the tomb! You might have heard
the heart-beats of the Mobeetie public as, strung like a bow, it waited
on the fatal crash.

Four seconds went ticking into the past; their passing was as the
passing of four ages. Mr. Masterson, with unwavering muzzle and
unblinking eye, began slowly closing in on Sergeant King, who remained
as though planet-struck.

The slow advance continued until the pistol of Mr. Masterson was within
an inch of the transfixed face. Then, with the abruptness of a shot, Mr.
Masterson let down the hammer of his weapon, and with it smote the other
on the head. It was a downright, crushing blow, and only the good
thickness of the skull of Sergeant King saved him from annihilation. He
dropped like some log of wood—his pistol falling from his fingers and
rattling on the board floor of the Lady Gay. As Mr. Masterson replaced
his own weapon in his belt, he kicked that of Sergeant King into a nook
of safety. “It’s the notion of Mobeetie,” explained Mr. Dixon to
Sergeant King, when thirty minutes later the latter was mentally fit to
grasp a warning, “it’s the notion of Mobeetie that you’d better pull
your freight. Here’s your gun, thar’s your hoss; an’ if you’ve got a
lick of savey, by noon to-morry you’ll be either in Tascosa, Fort Elliot
or Fort Sill. Any one of ’em’s a heap healthier than Mobeetie, which for
you at least might be deescribed as a mighty sickly camp.”

It has been explained that although from Boston Mr. Dixon had fallen
from those heights of strictest English to which he had been lifted by
education into the slipshod accent of the Brazos.

The long speech of Mr. Dixon’s, however, was not thrown away; without a
word, and reeling a bit in the saddle with the blur that still hung like
a cloud across his faculties, Sergeant King rode off to the west. As he
disappeared where the trail led over a low hill Mr. Dixon nodded a
foreboding head.

“Bat ought to have downed him,” observed Mr. Dixon to those several
members of the body politic assembled to witness the exodus of Sergeant
King; “Bat ought to have downed him. However, he’s makin’ for Tascosa,
an’ if he’ll only open his system on that outfit, you can bet Bob Pierce
or Jim East’ll bump him off.”

“That’s whatever!” assented one of Mr. Dixon’s hearers.

The incident was over, and with frank accord, one and all, they returned
to the Lady Gay, and by second drink-time in the evening—to employ a
Panhandle method of marking the flight of time—the affair, as being dull
and commonplace in its finale, was quite forgot. Had Mr. Masterson
emptied his Colt’s-45 into the head or the heart of Sergeant King the
public would have talked of it for a day.

It was nine of the moonless night and Mobeetie’s citizens for the
greater part were gathered in store or bar or what other emporium best
attracted their favour. There were no street lamps and the streets were
almost deserted, since no one cared at risk of shin to blunder and
stumble in the dark.

One figure there was, however, which, avoiding the glare from front
windows, stood watching in the shadows of the Lady Gay. The Lady Gay
occupied the corner of two streets, and the lurking one was leaning
against the side of that temple of chance. Within stretch of his hand
was a small door, meant to supplement the front doors in event of a
crowd.

Now the situation had its peculiar, not to say suspicious, side. Had you
entered the Lady Gay you might have seen that Mr. Masterson, with two or
three about him, was sitting within touch of that small door. Had you
returned to the lurking one without, and struck a match, you would have
identified him as Sergeant King. From where he stood, with ear pressed
close to the thin board wall of the Lady Gay, he could hear the voice of
Mr. Masterson. It was by ear he had located him.

Sergeant King had returned for that revenge now twice his due. He lacked
the chilled-steel courage to invade the Lady Gay; to shoot through the
pasteboard side of the structure, and try to kill by ear, was nothing
sure; the best that Sergeant King might do was wait and watch. Mayhap in
the chapter of accidents it had been written that Mr. Masterson would
open the little door and furnish him the opportunity for which his black
soul panted.

Mr. Kimball, the blacksmith, had discounted his social position by
marrying a Mexican woman; that was years before. Now Mr. Kimball’s
Mexican wife was ill, and the Wild Rose, who cared nothing for caste
under circumstances of sympathy, was nursing her. Something was wanted
from the drug store, not two blocks away, and the Wild Rose went in
quest of it. She took a lantern to guide her little feet.

Sergeant King, ambushed in the shadows of the Lady Gay, saw the Wild
Rose coming down the walk and knew her as the lantern-flare shone once
upon her pretty face. There was enough of cynic humour in the sinister
depths of Sergeant King to half curl his lips with a smile. Here was a
two-edged vengeance! He would have the Wild Rose call forth Mr.
Masterson and then slay him before her eyes that loved him.

Sergeant King went sauntering to meet the Wild Rose. When she beheld him
she started; he, on his part, made a motion as of gratified surprise.

“Oh, Miss Brennan,” said he, “I was in the Lady Gay. Mr. Masterson said
he wished to see you. He’s just inside the door. If you’ll rap and call
to him, he’ll open it.”

The doubtful strangeness of the suggestion and its source would have
occurred even to the innocence of the Wild Rose had the name involved
been any other than that of Mr. Masterson. The mention of him swallowed
up her wits, and, in a fashion of love-flutter, the Wild Rose hesitated
before the little door.

“Are you sure he wanted me?” she faltered.

“That’s what he said,” returned Sergeant King, as, standing a little to
the left and rear, he drew his six-shooter from its scabbard. There
would be no oratory this time; he was not to talk away another chance.

The Wild Rose tapped timidly at the door.

“Well?” cried a voice inside.

“Mr. Masterson, it’s I. You said you wanted me.” The blushes of the Wild
Rose were visible in the dark.

The door was locked. There was a turning of the key; the bolt was shot,
and the door swung open.

“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Masterson, to whom the voice and words of
the Wild Rose had come but faintly.

At the opening of the door Sergeant King thrust aside the Wild Rose.
Next came a flash and a roar! There could be no talk of missing; the
pistol was pressed against the side of Mr. Masterson. He staggered with
the awful shock of it as the lead tore through his body; but he kept his
feet, holding by the door.

There came a second roar, a kind of double roar, and this time there
were two flashes instead of one. The trained senses inside the Lady Gay
averred later that the space to elapse between the roar and the double
roar was less than the tenth part of a second.

However brief that measure of time, it was crimson with multiplied
tragedy. With the thought of defending her love, the Wild Rose, uttering
a cry of horror, and clutching at the murderous pistol, threw herself
between Sergeant King and Mr. Masterson. She was a breath too late for
the first; the second, meant also for her idol, drove its way into her
young breast. The Wild Rose fell; at her side fell Sergeant King,
snuffed out by the unfailing six-shooter of Mr. Masterson.

Hard hit as he was, Mr. Masterson raised the Wild Rose in his arms. She
opened her brown eyes, swimming with love.

“He said you wanted me,” whispered the Wild Rose.

Mr. Masterson, looking into the soft depths, saw that love and knew it
for his own. Even as he gazed, the warm lights failed and faded; the
rose flush deserted the cheek. In the arms of Mr. Masterson the Wild
Rose lay dead.




CHAPTER V

THE STRATEGY OF MR. MASTERSON


This came long after the battle at the ’Dobe Walls, and was of the year
next before Dull Knife, that Red Richard of the Cheyennes, with one
hundred and forty-eight followers, two-thirds of whom were squaws and
pappooses, broke from the soldiers and fought his way to his old home in
the North, whipping the cavalry once, twice, thrice; yielding only and
at last to the lying treachery of Red Cloud and his Sioux police. It was
a great trail that last long running fight of Dull Knife, and proved his
heart good and his “medicine” strong. Some one some day ought to write
the story high among the gallant deeds of men. However, here is not the
place nor this the time; for what comes after is to be a tale of
stratagem, not battle; politics, not war.

Commonly the face of Dodge was as open and frank and care-free as the
face of a Waterbury watch. On the occasion in hand it wore a look of
occupation and serious business. This business expression was fairly
founded; a sheriff for Ford County must be selected, the gentleman who
had filled that post of trust being undeniably dead.

The passing of that sheriff was curious. One morning he rode forth, and
fording the Arkansas at the Cimarron Crossing, made south and west for
Sand Creek. And thereafter he never rode back. It was understood that he
bore official papers to serve upon a certain miscreant who dwelt on Sand
Creek. The Sand Creek miscreant having bought goods of Mr. Wright, later
jeered at the suggestion that he pay, and Mr. Wright had been driven to
ask aid of the law.

Three days after the sheriff splashed through the Cimarron Crossing his
pony was picked up by cow people, saddled, bridled, and in the best of
spirits, close by the river where the lush grass grows most to a pony’s
taste. It did not escape experienced eyes that, when the pony was thus
recovered, the bridle reins were properly upon its neck and had not been
lifted over its head, to hang by the bits and drag about its hoofs.
Later, the missing one’s six-shooter and belt, the latter tooth-marked,
together with shreds of clothing, scraps of leather leggings, and sundry
bones gnawed white, were found an hour’s ride out on the trail. The
pistol possessed a full furnishment of six unexploded cartridges. Also,
the tooth-marked belt and those fragmentary reminders, scattered here
and there and all about for the round area of a mile, offered much to
support a belief that the late officer, in his final expression, had
become of gustatory moment to coyotes, which grey beggarmen of the
plains were many and hungry in those parts.

When the evidence recounted was all in, the wisdom of Dodge made divers
deductions. These found setting forth in the remarks of Mr. Wright, the
same being delivered to Mr. Short and others in the Long Branch saloon.

“Those bridle reins on the pony’s neck,” observed Mr. Wright, inspired
to the explanation by Old Jordan and a local curiosity which appealed to
him as among the best intelligences in camp, “those bridle reins on the
pony’s neck shows that Dave went out o’ the saddle a heap sudden. If
Dave had swung to the grass of his own will he’d have lifted the reins
over the pony’s head, so’s to keep that equine standin’ patient to his
call.”

“Don’t you reckon, Bob,” broke in Mr. Short, “your Sand Creek bankrupt
bushwhacks Dave?”

“No; Dave wasn’t shot out o’ the saddle, the six loads in his gun bein’
plenty on that point. It’s preposterous that an old hand like Dave, in
an open country, too, could have been rubbed out, an’ never get a shot.
Dave wasn’t that easy. Besides, if the Sand Creek hold-up had bumped
Dave off, he’d have cinched the pony. Gents, the idea I entertain is
that Dave, in a fit of abstraction, permits himself to be bucked off.
Landin’ on his head that a-way, his neck naturally gets broke.”

The Wright theory having been adopted, Dodge, in addition to the serious
business look, took on an atmosphere of disappointment which trenched
upon the mournful. Not that the late sheriff’s death preyed upon Dodge.
Dodge was aware of sheriffs in their evanescence. They were as grass;
they came up like the flowers to be cut down. What discouraged Dodge was
the commonplace character of that officer’s exit, as so convincingly
explained by Mr. Wright. Nothing had been left wherewith to gild a story
and tantalize the envious ears of rivalry. To be chucked from a careless
saddle to the dislocation of an equally careless neck was not a proud
demise.

By Western tenets the only honourable departure would have been the one
usual and official. The sheriff who would quit his constituents under
noblest conditions must perish in the smoke of conflict, defending
communal order and the threatened peace of men. Obviously he must not be
pitched from his own pony to fatten coyotes.

“For,” as Cimarron Bill was moved to observe, “to be bucked into a
better life, inadvertent, is as onromatic as bein’ kicked to glory by an
ambulance mule.”

Had the late sheriff gone down before the lawless muzzle of some
desperate personage, bent, as runs the phrase, on “standing Dodge on its
head,” what exhilarating ceremonies would have been the fruit! The
desperate personage, on the hocks of that snuffing out, would have been
earnestly lynched. The slain sheriff, his head pillowed in his saddle,
his guns by his side, would have lain in state. Dodge, crape on its
sombrero and with bowed head, would have followed the catafalque, while
a brass band boomed the dead march; the rites, conducted in a mood of
gloomy elevation, would have aroused the admiration of an entire border.
All these good advantages were denied Dodge, and it was that funeral
loss which clouded the public brow. The possibilities would now be
exhausted when the fate of the once sheriff was officially noticed, and
the vacancy thus arranged had been filled.

And now a new sheriff must be chosen. Dodge, politically speaking, was
all there was of Ford County. Politics, in the sinister sense of party,
had never reared its viper head in Dodge; there existed no such
commodity of misrule. Also, the station of sheriff was of responsible
gravity. Thus, indeed, thought Dodge; and went upon that
sheriff-mongering with care.

“My idea of a sheriff,” vouchsafed Mr. Short, “is one who, while he does
not wear his six-shooters for ornament, can be relied on not to go
shootin’ too promiscuous. The prosperity of Dodge swings and rattles on
the boys who drive the herds. It isn’t commercially expedient to put a
crimp in one of ’em for trivial cause. Of course, should the most
free-handed consumer that ever tossed his _dinero_ across a counter pull
his hardware for blood, it is obvious that he must be downed. The demand
of the hour is for a sheriff who can discriminate on the lines I’ve laid
down.”

This and more was said. When discussion had been exhausted Mr. Trask,
with a view of focussing suggestion, advanced the name of Mr. Masterson.
Mr. Wright, as well as Mr. Short, was prompt with his support.

“For,” said Mr. Wright, “where can you find a cooler head or a quicker
gun than Bat’s?”

“But Bat ain’t here none,” explained Cimarron Bill. “He’s down on the
Medicine Lodge, killin’ buffalo; his camp’s in Walker’s Timber.”

It was apparent that the better element, that is to say, the better
shots, favoured Mr. Masterson. An informal count displayed among his
supporters such popular towers as Mr. Wright, Mr. Trask, Mr. Short, and
Mr. Kelly. Mr. Short was emphatic in his partisanship.

“Not only,” explained Mr. Short, “is Bat cool an’ steady, but, bar Mike
Sutton, he’s the best educated sharp in Dodge.”

Cimarron Bill, who seemed born to ride bad ponies, saddled a bronco
whose studied villainy of disposition was half atoned for by an ability
to put one hundred miles between himself and his last feed. Cimarron
Bill had been directed to bring in Mr. Masterson.

“An’ don’t tell him what’s in the wind,” warned Mr. Wright. “Bat’s
modest, an’ if you spring this on him plumb abrupt it might shock him so
he wouldn’t come.”

“What’ll I tell him, then?” demanded Cimarron Bill. “I shore can’t rope
up Bat without a word an’ drag him yere with my pony.”

“Here’s what you do,” said Mr. Short. “Tell him I’m goin’ to run, with
Updegraffe up for the opp’sition. Tell him that Walker of the Cross K,
an’ B’ar Creek Johnson are ag’in me. That would fetch Bat from the Rio
Grande.”


On the south bank of the Medicine Lodge was a horseshoe bend, and the
enclosed forty acres, thick-sown of trees, were known as Walker’s
Timber. Here was pitched the buffalo camp of Mr. Masterson, and
therefrom, aided and abetted by his brother Ed and Mr. Tighlman, he
issued forth against the buffaloes, slaying them serenely, to his profit
and the fullfed joy of sundry coyotes and ravens that attended
faithfully his hunting.

It was in the earlier darkness of the evening, and Mr. Masterson was
sitting by his campfire, peering into a little memorandum book by the
dancing light of the flames. In this book, with a stubby pencil, he
soberly jotted down a record of the day’s kill.

“We’ve made eight hundred and thirty-three robes, Billy,” observed Mr.
Masterson to Mr. Tighlman, who was busy over a bake-kettle containing
all that was mortal of two hen turkeys—wild and young and lively the
night before. “And,” concluded Mr. Masterson, with just a shade of pride
in his tones, “I fetched them with precisely eight hundred and
thirty-three cartridges, the nearest bull four hundred yards away.”

Mr. Tighlman grunted applause of the rifle accuracy of Mr. Masterson.
Mr. Tighlman was the camp’s cook, having a mysterious genius for
biscuits, and knowing to a pinch what baking-powder was required for a
best biscuit result.

Mr. Tighlman presently announced supper by beating the side of the
bake-kettle with the back of a butcher-knife. The challenge brought Ed
Masterson from the drying-grounds, where he had been staking out and
scraping, with an instrument that resembled a short-handed adz, the
fresh hides of that day’s hunt. Mr. Masterson put away his roster of
buffalo dead and made ready to compliment Mr. Tighlman in the way in
which cooks like best to be praised.

Suddenly there came a sound as of some one crossing the little river.
Each of the three seized his rifle and rolled outside the circle of
firelight. It was as one hundred to one there abode no danger; the
Cheyennes had not yet recovered from the calmative influences of the
Black Kettle war. Still, it was the careful practice of the plains to
distrust all things after dark.

“Go back to your fire,” shouted a voice from out the shadows. “Do
you-all prairie dogs reckon that, if I was goin’ to jump your camp, I’d
come walloppin’ across in this egregious style?”

“It’s Cimarron Bill,” exclaimed Mr. Masterson, discarding his rifle in
favour of renewed turkey.

Cimarron Bill tore the saddle off the malevolent bronco and hobbled him.

“Whoopee!” he shouted softly, as he pushed in by the fire and pulled the
bake-kettle towards him; “I’m hungry enough to eat a saddle cover.”

Cimarron Bill, being exhaustively fed, laid forth his mission
mendaciously. He related the vacancy in the office of sheriff, and said
that it was proposed to fill the same with Mr. Short. Cimarron Bill,
seeing a chance to tell a little truth, explained that the opposition
would put up Mr. Updegraffe.

“Who’s behind Updegraffe?” asked Mr. Masterson.

The veracious Cimarron Bill enumerated Mr. Webster of the Alamo, Mr.
Peacock of the Dance Hall, Mr. Walker of the Cross-K, and Bear Creek
Johnson.

This set Mr. Masterson on edge.

“We’ll start by sun-up,” quoth Mr. Masterson. “Ed and Billy can pick up
the camp.”


When Mr. Masterson discovered how he had been defrauded into Dodge, and
learned of those honours designed for him, his modesty took alarm.

“I didn’t think, Cimarron,” said Mr. Masterson, in tones of reproach,
“that you’d cap me up against a game like this!” Then he refused
squarely to consider himself a candidate.

“But it’s too late, Bat,” explained Mr. Short. “You’ve already been in
the field two days, with Updegraffe in opposition. If you refuse to run
they’ll say you crawfished.”

Mr. Short spoke with sly triumph, for it was his chicane which had
announced Mr. Masterson as a candidate. He had foreseen its value as an
argument.

The sagacity of Mr. Short was justified; Mr. Masterson was plainly
staggered. His name had been used; his opponent was in the field; Mr.
Masterson could find no avenue of retreat. It was settled; Mr. Masterson
must be a candidate for sheriff of Ford.

The great contest of Masterson against Updegraffe had occupied the
public four days when Mr. Peacock, Mr. Webster and Mr. Walker, acting
for Mr. Updegraffe, waited upon Mr. Wright, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Short, who
received them on behalf of Mr. Masterson. Mr. Peacock, for the
Updegraffe three, made primary explanation. He and his fellow
commissioners had observed a falling off in trade. The Alamo was not
taking in one-half its normal profits; the same was true of the Dance
Hall. The Updegraffe committee asked Mr. Short if an abatement of
prosperity had not occurred at the Long Branch, and put the same
question concerning the Alhambra to Mr. Kelly. Mr. Kelly and Mr. Short,
being appealed to, confessed a business slackness.

“But you know,” observed Mr. Kelly, philosophically, “how it is in
business; it’s a case of come-an’-go, like the old woman’s soap.”

Mr. Webster believed the falling off due to an election interest which
engulfed the souls of folk.

“It takes their minds off such amusements as roulette an’ farobank an’
rum,” explained Mr. Webster. “Besides, the people of Dodge are a mighty
cautious outfit. Dodge won’t take chances; an’ at a ticklish time like
this Dodge sobers up.”

“There may be something in that,” mused Mr. Short. “But, coming down to
the turn, what was it you jack-rabbits wanted to say?”

“This is the proposition,” said Mr. Webster, “an’ we make it for the
purpose of gettin’ the racket over without delay. Our idea is to set the
time for a week from now, round up the votin’ population in the Plaza,
say at eight o’clock in the evenin’, an’ count noses, Masterson ag’in
Updegraffe, high man win. That’s the offer we make. You gents will need
an hour to look it over, an’ we’ll return at the end of that time an’
get your answer.”

“How do you figure this?” asked Mr. Wright of his fellow committeemen
when the Updegraffe delegation had departed. “Is it a deadfall?”

“Strange as it may sound,” responded Mr. Short, “considerin’ what liars
that outfit is, I’m obliged to admit that for once they’re on the
squar’.”

Mr. Kelly coincided with Mr. Short, and it was finally agreed that the
proffer of the Updegraffe contingent should be accepted.

“We’re with you,” said Mr. Short when Mr. Webster and the others
returned, “but not on selfish grounds. We base our action on the bluff
that the peace of Dodge requires protection, an’ that the office of
sheriff, now vacant, should be promptly filled.”

“Then the election is settled,” said Mr. Webster, who was a practical
man, “for eight o’clock in the evenin’, one week from to-day, to be
pulled off in the Plaza?”

“That’s the caper,” retorted Mr. Short, and the commissions adjourned.

The canvass went forward in lively vein, albeit, as Mr. Webster had
complained, there was a notable falling away in the local appetite for
rum. Plainly, Dodge had turned wary in a day that wore a six-shooter,
and under circumstances which tested the tempers of men. Evidently, it
had determined that while this election crisis lasted, its hand should
remain steady and its head cool.

It was five days before the one appointed for, as Mr. Webster called it,
“a count of noses” in the Plaza. The friends of Mr. Masterson developed
an irritating fact. There were, man added to man, four hundred and
twelve votes in Dodge; of these a careful canvass betrayed two hundred
and twelve as being for Mr. Updegraffe—a round majority of twelve.

This disquieting popular condition was chiefly the work of Bear Creek
Johnson. The malign influence of that disreputable person controlled
full forty votes, being the baser spirits; and these now threatened the
defeat of Mr. Masterson.

Cimarron Bill, when he grasped the truth, was for cleansing Dodge of
Bear Creek with a Colt’s-45. These sanitary steps, however, were
forbidden by Mr. Masterson; at that the worthy Cimarron tendered a
compromise. He would agree to do no more than mildly wing the offensive
Bear Creek.

“No,” said Mr. Masterson, “don’t lay hand to gun. I’m not going to have
Abilene and Hays pointing fingers of scorn at Dodge as being unable to
elect a peace officer of the county without somebody getting shot.
Besides, it isn’t necessary; I’ll beat ’em by strategy.”

Cimarron Bill, withheld from that direct aid to Mr. Masterson which his
simple nature suggested, groaned in his soul. Observing his grief, Mr.
Masterson detailed Mr. Tighlman to be ever at Cimarron Bill’s elbow,
ready to repress that volatile recruit in case his feelings got beyond
control and sought relief in some sudden bombardment of the felon Bear
Creek.

That profligate, thus protected, pursued his election efforts in behalf
of Mr. Updegraffe cunningly, being all unchecked. His methods were not
unmarked of talent; this should be a specimen:

“What party be you for?” Bear Creek demanded of an Ishmael who lived
precariously by chuck-a-luck. The one addressed was of so low a caste
that he would accept a wager of ten cents. This put him beneath the
notice of such as Mr. Short, whose limit was one hundred and two
hundred, and in whose temple of fortune, the Long Branch, white chips
were rated at fifty dollars a stack. “Which is it? Masterson or
Updegraffe?”

“Well,” returned the Ishmael of chuck-a-luck, doubtfully, “I sort o’
allow that Bat Masterson’s the best man.”

“You do!” retorted the abandoned Bear Creek, disgustedly. “Now listen to
me. What does a ten-cent hold-up like you want of the best man? You want
the worst man, an’ so I tell you! Make it Updegraffe,” concluded Bear
Creek, convincingly, “an’ you stay in Dodge. Make it Masterson, an’
he’ll make you an’ every other tinhorn hard to find.”

It was in that fashion the industrious Bear Creek piled up the majority
of twelve. Unless something was done Mr. Masterson would sup disaster,
and even the conservative Mr. Kelly whispered that he really thought the
plan of Cimarron Bill, for the abatement of Bear Creek, possessed a
merit.

“Let me think this over a bit,” said Mr. Masterson to Mr. Kelly.

That night Mr. Masterson met Mr. Kelly, Mr. Wright and Mr. Short at the
Long Branch and laid bare a plan. Its simplicity impressed Mr.
Masterson’s hearers; Mr. Wright even waxed enthusiastic.

“It’ll win!” he cried, smiting the poker table about which the four were
gathered.

“It shore looks it,” coincided Mr. Short. “In any event we lose nothin’;
we can always fall back on the guns.”

At the latter intimation Mr. Kelly nodded solemnly. While not mercurial,
Mr. Kelly was in many of his characteristics one with Cimarron Bill.
There were questions over which their honest natures met and
sympathised.

Acting on the plan of Mr. Masterson, Mr. Wright and Mr. Short and Mr.
Kelly craved in their turn a conference with the Updegraffe three.

“It is this, gents, that troubles us,” began Mr. Wright, when the
committees found themselves together for the second time. “There are hot
and headlong sports on our side as there are on yours. If we convene in
the Plaza, as we’ve arranged, there’ll be bloodshed. I’m afraid we
couldn’t restrain some of the more violent among us; indeed, to be
entirely frank, I’m afraid I couldn’t even restrain myself. And yet,
there’s a way, gents, in which danger may be avoided. Let us abandon
that clause which provides for a count of noses in the Plaza. The end in
view can be attained by having it understood that at eight o’clock the
Masterson forces are to rally in the Long Branch, and the Updegraffe
people in Mr. Peacock’s Dance Hall. Thus the two sides may be counted
separately and the chance of deadly collision eliminated. We will set
our watches together so that the count shall occur at eight o’clock
sharp. Mr. Kelly for our side will be at the Dance Hall to act with Mr.
Peacock in a count of the Updegraffe votes, while Mr. Webster for your
interests is welcome to come to the Long Branch to aid Mr. Short in a
round-up of the strength of Mr. Masterson. The two forces being out of
gunshot of each other, the attendance will be freer and more
untrammelled. Following the count Mr. Short and Mr. Kelly, Mr. Webster
and Mr. Peacock will come together and declare the result. There of
course will be no appeal, unless those appealing aim at civil war.”

As Mr. Wright talked on, suavely, smoothly, laying down each feature of
his design, a slow look of relief stole into the faces of Mr. Webster
and Mr. Peacock. Even the more hardy features of Mr. Walker were not
untouched.

There had been doubts tugging at the Updegraffe three. True, the
majority of twelve was theirs, but the weight of valour stood
overwhelmingly with Mr. Masterson. The offer of a safe separation of
forces was a relief, and Mr. Peacock, Mr. Walker and Mr. Webster lost no
time in accepting. Notices were posted proclaiming an election after the
scheme laid down by Mr. Wright.

It was election night; only the enterprising and those with votes and
guns were abroad in Dodge. The rival clans of Masterson and Updegraffe
began to gather, respectively, at the Long Branch and the Dance Hall.
There was never a ripple of disorder; nothing could be finer than that
peace which was. Ten minutes before eight o’clock, the hour fixed for
the count, the strength of each had convened.

The Updegraffe people were jubilant; every man belonging to them being
in the Dance Hall, that majority of twelve was sure. The minutes went
ticking themselves into eternity, and the watches of Mr. Kelly and Mr.
Peacock registered one minute before eight. In sixty seconds the count
in the Dance Hall would take place.

At the Long Branch, where the followers of Mr. Masterson filled the
rooms, conditions were much the same. There Mr. Webster and Mr. Short
would make the tally. Watch in hand they stood waiting for the moment.

It was at this crisis that Mr. Tighlman pulled his pistol and fired
through the Long Branch floor. The report was as a joyful signal.
Instantly one hundred shots rang out. Indeed, it was a noble din! The
room filled with smoke; excitement mounted! Cimarron Bill, a six-shooter
in each faithful hand, was in the midst of the hubbub, blazing like a
piece of fireworks, whooping like a Comanche.

The night breeze carried the stirring story of riot and uproar to the
waiting multitude in the Dance Hall. Those waiting ones looked first
their amazement, then their delight. As by one impulse they tore through
the door and made, hotfoot, for the Long Branch. By conservative
estimates, founded upon the whole number of shots, there should be at
least five dead and fifteen wounded.

As the advance guard arrived at the Long Branch they found Mr. Short
outside.

“Bat’s downed Bob Wright,” remarked Mr. Short; “plugged him plumb
centre.”

Inside went the hilarious Dance Hallers. The astute Mr. Short followed,
closed the door and set his back against it.

“It’s eight o’clock, Mr. Webster,” remarked Mr. Short. “We must begin to
count.” It was observable that in the hand that did not hold the watch
Mr. Short held a six-shooter.

Mr. Webster was in a flutter of nerves; he had been the only one in the
Long Branch who did not understand and had not anticipated those frantic
excesses of Mr. Tighlman, Cimarron Bill and others of that heroic firing
party. Mr. Webster was in no wise clear as to what had happened. Borne
upon by a feeling of something wrong he made a protest.

“Stop!” he cried, “there’s a lot of Updegraffe men in here.”

“No, sir,” responded Mr. Short, coldly, while a gray glimmer, a kind of
danger signal it was, began to show in his eye. “Every gent inside the
Long Branch is for Bat Masterson or he wouldn’t be here. Also, to
suggest fraud,” concluded Mr. Short, as Mr. Webster seemed about to
speak, “would be an attack upon my honour, me ownin’ the joint.”

Now the honour of Mr. Short, next to Mr. Short’s six-shooter, was the
most feverish thing in Dodge. The mere mention of it sent a shiver
through Mr. Webster. Without parley he surrendered tamely, and the count
at the Long Branch began. The total proved satisfactory; the returns
gave Mr. Masterson two hundred and sixty votes.

“Let us go over to the Dance Hall,” said Mr. Wright, “and see what Kelly
and Peacock have to report.”

They were saved the journey; Mr. Kelly and Mr. Peacock, the latter
bewildered and fear-ridden in the face of the unknown, just then came
into the Long Branch. “Only thirty-three for Updegraffe,” said Mr.
Kelly. “That’s correct, ain’t it, Peacock?”

Mr. Peacock gasped, but seemed to nod assent.

“Mr. Masterson, it would appear, is elected,” observed Mr. Wright,
benignantly, “by a majority of two hundred and twenty-seven. It is a
tribute to his popularity. The whole vote, however, is much smaller than
I looked for,” and Mr. Wright beamed.

“I think,” said Mr. Kelly, judgmatically, “that thar’s a passel of
Updegraffe people stampedin’ about the streets. But, of course, since
they weren’t in the Dance Hall, me an’ Peacock had no authority to
incloode ’em; did we, Peacock?”

Mr. Peacock mopped his moonlike countenance and shook his head in
forlornest fashion. He was too much cast down to oppose the word of Mr.
Kelly.

Bear Creek Johnson, eye aflame, a-bristle for trouble, pushed through.
Cimarron Bill, who was the soul of business at a time like this, met the
outraged Bear Creek in the door.

“Whatever do you reckon you’re after?” queried Cimarron Bill,
maintaining the while a dangerous eye.

Bear Creek Johnson surveyed Cimarron Bill, running him up and down with
an uneasy, prudent glance. He smelled disaster off him as folk smell
fire in a house.

“Me?” he returned, mildly. “Which I simply comes pirootin’ over to move
we make the ’lection of Bat Masterson yoonanimous.”

Thus did the _ruse de guerre_ of Mr. Masterson result in victory; thus
was he made sheriff of Ford.




CHAPTER VI

THE FATAL GRATITUDE OF MR. KELLY


It was at the election following the one which made Mr. Masterson
sheriff of Ford County that Mr. Kelly, proprietor of the Alhambra,
became mayor of Dodge. Mr. Masterson, aside from being a natural captain
of men, had had his genius for strategy ripened as a scout-pupil of the
great Ben Clark during the Cheyenne wars, and on this ballot occasion
contributed deeply to the victory of Mr. Kelly. Mr. Masterson came
forward and withstood certain Mexicans, who otherwise would have
exercised the ballot to Mr. Kelly’s disadvantage. The Mexicans belonged
with the Cross-K brand, which had its range across the river; and since
Mr. Walker, proprietor of the Cross-K, was an enemy of Mr. Kelly, they
were rightfully regarded by Mr. Masterson as tools of the opposition.

Mr. Masterson urged, and with justice, that an extension of the
franchise to Mexicans would be subversive of good morals, and offensive
to the purer sentiment of Dodge.

“This is, or should be,” said Mr. Masterson, “a white man’s government,
and how long, I ask, will it survive if Mexicans be permitted a voice in
its affairs? If we are going to take the limit off in this ridiculous
fashion we might as well send for Bear Shield’s band of Cheyennes and
tell them to get into the game. To grant Mexicans the right to vote is
to make preposterous that freedom for which our fathers fought and bled
and died, and should republican institutions be thus trailed in the
dust, I see nothing for it but an appeal to arms.”

This long speech was made to the judges of election, who were fair men
and friends of Mr. Kelly. There were ten of the Mexicans and the contest
was close; the judges remembered these things, and the position taken by
Mr. Masterson, in defence of an unsullied suffrage, was sustained.

“It wasn’t worth a battle,” explained Mr. Walker in later comment on Mr.
Masterson’s oration, “or I might have called that bluff of Bat’s about
an appeal to arms.”

When Mr. Kelly was inaugurated in the discharge of his high trust, his
earliest feeling was one of favour to Mr. Masterson; for his majority
had been but five, and Mr. Kelly was a grateful man. The situation at a
first blink baffled the friendship of Mr. Kelly. What could he do for
Mr. Masterson? The latter, as sheriff of Ford, already held an office
superior even to that of Mr. Kelly’s. Clearly, Mr. Masterson was beyond
and above the touch of his gratitude, as though it stood on tiptoe; he
must sit down and suffer a sense of obligation which he could not
discharge. These truths came home to him after hours of profound
thought, and he sighed as he reflected on his helplessness.

But Mr. Kelly was enterprising, and gratitude is as apt as necessity
itself to sharpen the edge of invention. That debt he owed Mr. Masterson
had not borne upon him two days before he began to see a way in which he
might return the other’s friendly deeds upon his head. As mayor Mr.
Kelly, under the State law just passed, could construct the post of
marshal. The town had never had such an officer. Thus far it had needed
none; Mr. Masterson, in his good-natured way, had stepped outside the
strict duties of his place as sheriff and, without money and without
price, acted the part of marshal. In the latter rôle, as honourable as
it was perilous, Mr. Masterson’s six-shooters were already looked upon
by Dodge as the local paladium.

Mr. Kelly, mayor, decided that he would create the post of marshal at a
round stipend to him who should hold it. Also, he would name as such
functionary Mr. Masterson’s brother Ed. When Mr. Kelly had completed
this plan he rewarded himself with four fingers of Old Jordan; a glow
overspread his countenance as he considered that he might thus requite
the generous interference of Mr. Masterson concerning those Cross-K
Mexicans, who, if their pernicious purpose had not been frustrated,
would have defeated him of his mayoralty.

Mr. Masterson was not in Dodge when this kindly resolution was reached
by Mr. Kelly, being over on Crooked Creek in quest of stolen mules. It
thus befell that Mr. Kelly could not consult with him touching that
marshalship, and the exaltation of his brother. On second thought Mr.
Kelly did not regret the absence of Mr. Masterson; that marshalship
would be a pleasant bit of news wherewith to greet him when, weary and
saddle-worn, he rode in with those lost mules and the scalp of that
criminal who had cut their hobbles and feloniously taken them to
himself.

Still, Mr. Kelly would seek advice; this was only caution, for the
jealous West is prone to resent a novelty in its destinies which
descends upon it as a surprise. The word, therefore, was sent throughout
Dodge by our careful magistrate that he meditated a marshal, with Ed
Masterson as the man.

Mr. Wright approved the scheme; likewise did Mr. Short and Mr. Trask.
Mr. Webster and Mr. Peacock were understood to disparage the design. As
for Mr. Walker of the Cross-K, his condemnation became open and he was
heard to loudly proclaim it to Mr. Webster across the Alamo bar.

“And,” concluded the bitter Mr. Walker, replacing his empty glass on the
counter, “if the Masterson family is goin’ to be sawed onto this
community in a body, I for one am ready to pull my freight.”

“Well,” casually observed Mr. Short, who had dropped in from the Long
Branch to note how a rival trade progressed, “I’ve always held that
pullin’ your freight was safer than pullin’ your gun.”

“Perhaps I’ll pull both,” retorted Mr. Walker.

Mr. Walker, however, did not press the conversation to extremes. Mr.
Short was a warm adherent of Mr. Masterson; moreover, he had killed a
gentleman in Tombstone for merely claiming the privilege of counting the
cards. True, that person of inquiring mind had set forth his desire for
information with a six-shooter, and as Mr. Short was back of the box at
the time, and the bullets were addressed to him personally, his retort
was upheld by all impartial men. None the less, the ready completeness
of the reply made for the dignity and western standing of Mr. Short, and
Mr. Walker, who knew the story, felt no ambition to go with him to the
bottom of Mr. Kelly’s new policy of a marshal.

When Mr. Kelly heard how Mr. Wright and Mr. Short and Mr. Trask
applauded, he said that the affair was settled; those gentlemen were his
friends. Messrs. Walker and Webster and Peacock were of the opposition,
and Mr. Kelly was too good an executive to listen to his enemies. He
would name Ed Masterson marshal; in order that Mr. Masterson might
witness his brother’s elevation he would defer it as a ceremony until
Mr. Masterson’s return.

It was four days later when Mr. Masterson came in with those wandering
mules and the particulars concerning the last moments of the bandit that
stole them, and who had opposed a Winchester to Mr. Masterson in the
discharge of his duty. Following his return Mr. Masterson strode into
the Alhambra with the purpose of restoring himself and conquering a
fatigue incident to his labours. It was then that Mr. Kelly laid open
those changes contemplated in the official list of Dodge, which were to
work advantage for his brother. To his amazement Mr. Masterson, on
receipt of the information, became the picture of dismay.

“Why, Bat,” exclaimed Mr. Kelly, alarmed by Mr. Masterson’s evident
disturbance, “ain’t the idee all right?”

“Worst in the world,” groaned Mr. Masterson. “Has Ed heard?”

“Shore,” replied Mr. Kelly; “I nacherally told him the first flash out
o’ the box. Bob Wright says it’s a beautiful scheme; so does Short.”

“I know, Kell,” said Mr. Masterson, wearily, “and no doubt Bob and Luke
believe it’s the thing to do. But they don’t know Ed; he’s no more fit
to be marshal than I am to join the church.”

“Oh come, Bat,” cried Mr. Kelly, evincing a critical disbelief, “no
gamer hand than Ed ever buckled on a gun!”

“That’s it,” returned Mr. Masterson, “Ed’s too game. He’s so game it
obscures his judgment. Those outlaws from below will study him, and in
the wind-up they’ll outwit him. If you make Ed marshal he won’t last the
year. Some of those murderers will get him sure.”

“I can’t understand, Bat; you told me yourself that when you an’ Ed was
killin’ buffalo down on the Canadian for Billy Dixon, Ed was the best
shot that ever went on the range; an’ the quickest.”

“Quick and as dead to centres with either a Sharp’s or a Colt’s as you
could put your finger. There’s no discount on Ed’s gun play, and so I
tell you now. The trouble lies inside Ed; he’s too easy, too ready for a
talk. And he can’t read his man. Indians and Mexicans? yes; I’d trust Ed
to take a six-shooter and report favourably on twenty of ’em at a
clatter. But a white man is too cunning; those Texas killers that come
over the Jones and Plummer trail will throw him off his guard. There’s
the loose screw, he’s guileless; if it’s a case of white man, he doesn’t
know when to shoot. As I tell you, make Ed marshal, and he’ll never see
another summer.”

“But what can I do? I’ve already told him.”

“Yes,” returned Mr. Masterson with a sigh, “and he’s as obstinate as a
badger. You’ve got the notion planted in Ed’s head, and you couldn’t
shoot it out with a buffalo gun! The way you’ve put the cards in the
box, Kell, there’s nothing to do but appoint him. I can see the finish,
though!”

Within the fortnight following Mr. Kelly’s investment of Ed Masterson
with authority as Marshal of Dodge there arose an incident which went
far to uphold the fears of Mr. Masterson. It was made plain, even to the
dullest, that Marshal Ed was too thoughtless to secure a best and, for
himself, a safest result in the discharge of his official duties.

The proof came in the broad glare of an afternoon, when the unblinking
sun was still four hours high. A lonesome stranger had sought the Dance
Hall; finding that theatre of mirth deserted, the desolation of the
place weighed heavily upon him.

Smitten of the hope of adding vivacity to the scene and rendering it
more cheerful, the lonesome stranger pulled his pistol and shot into the
upright piano which reposed at the far end of the room. The lonesome
stranger put three bullets through and through the instrument; and, as
each cut a string, the deficiencies thus arranged were found later to
mar the production of those gallops and quicksteps and mazurkas upon
which Dodge depended in hours of revelry.

Mr. Peacock, who took to the sidewalk when the lonesome stranger
produced his pistol, called aloud upon Marshal Ed for aid. That officer
responded, and stepped into the Dance Hall just as the lonesome one
fired the third shot.

“Here, here!” exclaimed Marshal Ed, his thumbs jauntily in his belt, and
never a move toward his weapon, “here, you horse-thief! what do you
figure now you’re doing?”

By way of reply the lonesome one sent the fourth bullet into the left
shoulder of Marshal Ed. The latter, upon this hint, got his own
artillery to bear and, while the shot in his shoulder knocked him off
his feet, the lonesome one also went to the floor with a bullet in his
hip.

Marshal Ed was up in a flash; the lonesome one was making an effort to
rise. At this, Marshal Ed fell upon him in the most unofficial spirit
and beat him with his pistol. When Mr. Masterson came upon the field his
lively relative, weapon back in its scabbard, was surveying the lonesome
one where he lay bleeding on the floor.

“Two of you pack that party to the doctor,” quoth Marshal Ed, addressing
the concourse of citizens that arrived with Mr. Masterson. Then, in
reply to the latter’s inquiry: “No, he didn’t do anything in particular;
he was simply shaking up the joint, I reckon, under the head of good of
the order.”

Nothing could exceed the indignation of Mr. Masterson when, fifteen
minutes later, he learned of the bullet in Marshal Ed’s shoulder. It was
then that the outrageous scandal of it began to break upon him.

“You find a bandit shooting up the Dance Hall,” cried the discouraged
Mr. Masterson, “and all you do is enter into conversation with him!
Then, when he’s plugged you, and you on your side have dropped him with
a bullet in his leg, you beat him over the head!—him, with two
cartridges left in his gun! What do you reckon those other five shots
were put in your own six-shooter for? And you call yourself Marshal of
Dodge!”

The doctor, having repaired the lonesome one, began a hunt for the
bullet in Marshal Ed’s shoulder, while Mr. Masterson, after freeing his
mind as recorded, retired to the Long Branch to hide his chagrin.

“Ed’s new to the game, Bat,” observed Mr. Short, as he joined his
depressed friend at the bar. “Give him time; he’ll make the round-up all
right. What he went ag’inst to-day will be proper practice for him.”

“It won’t do, Luke,” responded Mr. Masterson, hopelessly, “Ed never’ll
last to go the route. Did you ever hear of such a thing? A party has
plugged him, and lies there organised with two more loads. Ed, with five
shots in his gun, can’t think of anything better to do than beat him
over the head. If I wasn’t so worried I’d feel ashamed.”

Dating from that uprising of the lonesome stranger there befell a season
of serenity, the peace whereof was without its fellow in the memory of
Dodge. The giddy and the careless paid no heed, but pessimists and ones
grown old on the sunset side of the Missouri took on brows of trouble.
The latter, counting on that inevitable equilibrium which nature
everywhere and under all conditions maintains, looked forward to an era
of extraordinary explosiveness, when bullets would fly as thick as
plover in the fall. These folk of forecast could not tell when this
powder-burning would take place, but they felt that it was on its smoky
way.

True, that period of deep quiet was occasionally rippled by some
tenderfoot who, made foolish of whiskey and the liberal lines laid down
by Dodge for the guidance of visitors, was inclined to go too far. Or
now and again a Mexican became boisterous beyond what a judicious public
sentiment permitted to his caste, and offered a case where the dignity
of Dodge required that he be moderately “buffaloed.” These slight
ebuillitions, however, were as nothings, and came under the caption of
child’s play. It was not until the taking place of what stirring events
are to be recounted that those pessimists and ones of prophecy, being
justified of their fears, gathered at the Long Branch, the Alhambra and
the Alamo, and over their liquor reminded one another how they had
foretold the same.

It was brown October; the fat beef herds came winding in from the
lowing, horn-tossing south, and Dodge in its shirtsleeves was busy with
prosperity. The genial boys of cows, their herds disposed of, were eager
to dispense their impartial riches upon monte, whiskey and quadrilles,
and it was the chosen duty of Dodge to provide those relaxations.

On the fateful day which this history has in mind, Mr. Walker of the
Cross-K brought in a bunch of nine hundred steers. They came trooping
and bellowing through the Arkansas with the first dull lights of
morning, and, before Dodge sat down to its prandial meal—which with a
simplicity inherited of the fathers it took at noon—had been turned over
to certain purchasing gentlemen from the East, for whom they had been
gathered. Their task performed, the weary riders who brought them up the
trail gave themselves freely to those metropolitan delights which Dodge
arranged for them. They went about with liberal hands, and Dodge
rejoiced in profits staggering.

Among those who rode in with the Cross-K herd was Mr. Wagner. In moments
of sobriety no danger had its source in Mr. Wagner. Endowed of strong
drink and a Colt’s pistol in right proportions, he was worth the
watching. Indeed, within the year Mr. Wagner, while thus equipped, had
shot himself into such disrepute in the streets of Mobeetie that he
defeated a popular wish to hang him only by the fleetness of his pony.
It was then he came north and attached himself to Mr. Walker and the
Cross-K.

Throughout those daylight hours which fell in between that transfer of
the Cross-K herd and the lighting of what kerosene lamps made gay the
barrooms of Dodge, nothing could have been more commendable than the
deportment of Mr. Wagner. He imbibed his whiskey at intervals not too
brief, and distributed his custom with an equal justice between the
Alhambra with Mr. Kelly, the Alamo with Mr. Webster, and the Long Branch
with Mr. Short. Also, he drifted into the outfitting bazaar of Mr.
Wright and spent fifty dollars upon an eight-inch Colt’s six-shooter,
calibre-45, the butt of which was enriched and made graceful with carved
ivory. This furniture Mr. Wagner would later swing to his hip by means
of a belt, the same corrugated of cartridges.

It was not observed that his drinks had begun to tell upon Mr. Wagner
invidiously until the hour of eight in the evening when, from the family
circle of the Dodge Opera House, he roped the first violin of a dramatic
organisation called the Red Stocking Blondes. It was during the overture
that Mr. Wagner pitched the loop of his lariat into the orchestra, and
as the first violin played vilely the interruption was well received by
the public.

The management, however, came before the curtain and said that the show
would not proceed while Mr. Wagner remained. With that, Marshal Ed led
the disturber forth, took a drink with him to prove that his removal was
merely formal and nothing personal meant, and bid him return no more.
Mr. Wagner, acting on the suggestion of Marshal Ed, at once surrendered
every scrap of interest in the drama, as expounded by the Red Stocking
Blondes. It should be remembered that at this moment Mr. Wagner, in
deference to the taste of Dodge, which frowned upon pistols in places of
public entertainment as superfluous and vulgar, was not wearing that
brand-new Colt’s with the ivory butt.

It was roundly the hour of midnight, and Mr. Peacock’s Dance Hall shone
with the beauty and the chivalry of Dodge. Marshal Ed had come over to
the Dance Hall to hold the chivalry adverted to in decorous check and
keep it to paths of peace.

Mr. Wagner arrived and took his place in a quadrille. It was observed
that the belt of Mr. Wagner now upheld that Colt’s pistol of the ivory
butt. Aroused by this solecism, Marshal Ed descended upon Mr. Wagner and
captured his unlawful embellishments. He was holding the six-shooter in
one hand and Mr. Wagner in the other when Mr. Walker, sober and suave,
drew near.

“If you’ll give him to me, Ed,” remarked Mr. Walker, “I’ll take care of
him.”

Since the proposal provided for the peace of Dodge, Marshal Ed accepted
it. He made over Mr. Wagner and the weapon of ivory butt to the
soft-speaking Mr. Walker. Thereupon Mr. Walker conducted Mr. Wagner
outside.

Taking Mr. Wagner to the rear of the Dance Hall, where no ear might
listen and no eye look on, Mr. Walker perfidiously readorned him with
that ivory-butted treasure of a Colt’s-45.

“Now,” observed Mr. Walker, as he buckled the belt and its dependent
ordnance where they would do the most harm, “if I was you I’d go surgin’
back into the Dance Hall an’ if any jimcrow marshal tried to pounce on
my gun I’d blow his lamp out.”

Marshal Ed had emerged from the Dance Hall into the glare of light which
issued from its front windows when Mr. Wagner, walking deviously, his
broad-rimmed hat cocked at an insulting angle, the offensive six-shooter
flapping ostentatiously against his leg, brushed by. Mr. Wagner wore a
challenging glance and was snorting defiance of the law.

It was now that Marshal Ed displayed that want of caution and
indifference to precedent whereof Mr. Masterson had warned Mr. Kelly.
Under the conditions presented _vide licet_ the sudden, not to say
warlike, return of Mr. Wagner, it was officially the business of Marshal
Ed to shove the muzzle of his own gun into the face of Mr. Wagner and,
to quote the words of Dodge as it digged the graves next day, “stand him
up.” In case Mr. Wagner did not hold his hands above his head, Marshal
Ed was to officially unhook his gun and put a period to Mr. Wagner’s
career.

So far from following this rule of conduct, Marshal Ed reached out with
both hands and seized Mr. Wagner by the shoulders. Thereupon Mr. Wagner
yanked the Colt’s pistol of ivory butt from its scabbard; as a
counter-move, Marshal Ed, while retaining a right-hand grip on Mr.
Wagner’s shoulder, grabbed the pistol with his left hand and held the
muzzle to one side. There the two stood, Mr. Wagner powerless to bring
his weapon to bear, and Marshal Ed unable to wrest it from his grasp.

At this juncture Mr. Walker, who, in anticipation of what might occur,
had privily provided himself with a pistol, came out of the darkness to
the rear of the Dance Hall and thrust the weapon in the face of Marshal
Ed. Mr. Walker pulled the trigger, the hammer descended, but instead of
the expected report there came nothing more lethal than a sharp click.
The cartridge, ashamed of the treachery in which it found itself
employed, had refused to explode.

Before Mr. Walker could cock his weapon for a second trial three
splitting flashes burned three holes in the night. Bang! bang! bang! The
three reports were crowded as close together as the striking of a Yankee
clock. Mr. Masterson, from sixty feet away, had put three bullets into
Mr. Walker before the latter could fall. It was like puffing out a
candle. Mr. Walker of the Cross-K was dead.

Mr. Masterson, from where he stood, would not chance a shot at Mr.
Wagner; Marshal Ed was too much in the line of fire. Acting a next best
part, he came up to the two on the run. But he came late. While he was
still ten feet away Mr. Wagner, in the twists and turns of conflict,
felt the muzzle of that new ivory-mounted Colt’s pistol press for one
insignificant moment against the other’s breast; he pulled the trigger
and Marshal Ed fell, shot through the lungs, his clothes afire from the
burning powder. As Marshal Ed went down, Mr. Wagner followed
him—dead—with a bullet in his temple from the revengeful pistol of Mr.
Masterson.

Mr. Wright and Mr. Short carried Marshal Ed into the Long Branch. Mr.
Masterson, who with unfluttered pulse had looked death in the eye a
score of times, began to cry like a woman. Mr. Kelly, mayor, united his
tears to Mr. Masterson’s.

“It was my fault, Bat,” wept Mr. Kelly; “I only wish I might have
stopped that bullet myself.”

“It has turned out like I told you, Kell,” said Mr. Masterson; “those
murderers out-managed him!”

Mr. Short reappeared and laid a sympathetic hand on Mr. Masterson’s
shoulder.

“Bat,” said Mr. Short, “do you want to see Ed? He’s dyin’; he’s down to
the last chip!”

“Poor Ed! No; I don’t want to see him!” said Mr. Masterson, tears
falling like rain.




CHAPTER VII

WHY THE WEEKLY PLANET DIED


The Weekly Planet, founded and edited during its brief existence by
Higginson Peabody, and issued every Saturday to the hebdomadal joy of
Dodge, might have flourished unto this day if it hadn’t been for Jack.
It was a circulation scheme proposed by Jack, and adopted by Higginson
Peabody, which undid the destinies of the _Weekly Planet_ to such a
degree that, in the quicksands of a bottomless trouble into which they
were thereby betrayed, a trouble, as Higginson Peabody averred, “so
vast, that against it no human ingenuity could prevail,” they bogged
down and disappeared.

Not but what Jack was wholly true to the _Weekly Planet_ and its
fortunes. Indeed it was Jack, in his intense loyalty to the paper and
those that gave it the aid and comfort of their countenance, and despite
the fact that Mr. Masterson’s recommendation had originally paved his
way into journalism, who misled that officer as to the flight-direction
taken by Rattlesnake Sanders on the occasion of his winging Mr. Kelly.
Perhaps, in defence of Jack, that episode should be briefly told.

Rattlesnake Sanders played a cold hand, being four kings and an ace,
against a quartette of queens, the then armament of Mr. Kelly. Mr. Kelly
pointed out the frigid character of those four kings, and thereupon
Rattlesnake, in a feeling of chagrin natural to one who finds himself
detected in a wrong, shot Mr. Kelly in the arm. Following this
ebuillition of temper, Rattlesnake mounted his pony and spurred away into
the dark.

The office of the _Weekly Planet_ was on the northern fringe of Dodge.
It was ten o’clock of the night when Rattlesnake expressed his
dissatisfaction with Mr. Kelly in manner and form set forth. The
editorial and mechanical forces of the _Weekly Planet_, made up of
Higginson Peabody, Jack, and a trio of printers, were hard at work at
the time and knew nothing of Rattlesnake and his exploits. Indeed, the
earliest word which they received of Rattlesnake was when that impulsive
cowboy pulled up at their door.

The cause of Rattlesnake’s pulling up was simple. When he and Mr. Kelly
sat down to that friendly game, which in its finale was so
disappointing, Rattlesnake, the evening being warm, had cast aside his
coat and hat. Being more or less preoccupied when ready to leave, he
forgot to reassume those garments. His halt at the _Weekly Planet_ was
with a purpose of repairs.

Bare of head and coatless, Rattlesnake called from the saddle to
Higginson Peabody. The latter, with Jack at his elbow, appeared in the
door.

“Got a hat and coat you don’t want?” asked Rattlesnake.

There were two six-shooters in the belt of Rattlesnake and a Winchester
in its saddle-scabbard under his left leg, and it may have been this
stock of ironware that awoke the generosity of Higginson Peabody.
Whatever it was to move his benevolence, the truth remains that he took
his own hat and coat from their peg and conferred them on Rattlesnake.

As he picked up the bridle reins to ride away Rattlesnake ran his hand
into his pocket.

“What’s the damage?” he queried.

“Nothing,” returned Higginson Peabody; “they are freely yours.”

“What’s the subscription to this rag?” asked Rattlesnake, pointing up at
the sign above the door. “How much does she cost for a year?”

“Two dollars,” broke in Jack, who was the circulating agency of the
_Weekly Planet_.

“Thar’s a saw-buck,” quoth Rattlesnake, bringing up a ten-dollar
goldpiece and tossing it to Jack. “Put down Rattlesnake Sanders for five
years.” Then, as he buried a spur in his pony’s flank and fled like an
arrow: “I’ll send th’ address as soon as I settle down.”

When Rattlesnake Sanders injured Mr. Kelly’s arm Mr. Masterson was at
the other end of town. It was ten minutes before he heard of the gay
doings of Rattlesnake. When word reached him he threw a saddle onto a
pony and started in pursuit. Mr. Masterson also halted at the open door
of the _Weekly Planet_, only he was after information, not apparel.

“Did you see a cowboy without coat or hat go by?” asked Mr. Masterson,
on the bare chance that the phenomenon had caught the eye of Higginson
Peabody.

“I just gave one my coat and hat,” replied Higginson Peabody.

“It was Rattlesnake Sanders,” said Mr. Masterson, settling himself in
his stirrups for a run. “He’s creased Kelly. Which way did he go?”

Before Higginson Peabody could answer, Jack took reply from his mouth.

“I’ll show you, Mr. Masterson,” observed the eager Jack, pointing
westward towards the Cimarron Crossing. “He lined out in that direction.
An’ say, he was simply hittin’ the high places!”

Now, be it known that Rattlesnake had fled away to the north and east,
as though heading for Hays—a course the reverse of that given by Jack.
The intervention, and the brisk falsehoods so cheerfully fulminated,
took away the breath of Higginson Peabody. Before he regained it Mr.
Masterson was a mile on his way to the Cimarron Crossing.

“How could you lie like that?” demanded Higginson Peabody, regarding
Jack with wondering horror; “how could you lie like that, and you but
fourteen! That Rattlesnake man went east, not west; and Mr. Masterson is
an officer of the law!”

“What of it?” retorted Jack, indignantly; “d’you think I’d throw down a
subscriber?” Then, as he reached for his cap: “I reckon I’d better go
over to the Alhambra an’ see how hard old Kell got plugged. It ought to
be good for a column. Say!” and Jack beamed on Higginson Peabody, “if
he’d only beefed old Kell, wouldn’t it have been hot stuff?”

Higginson Peabody, when he graduated from Harvard, had been invited into
the counting-room of his father’s State Street bank. But the old
migratory instinct of his puritan ancestry was rife within him, and he
hungered to go abroad into the land. The expanding West invited him;
also, he distasted a bank and liked the notion of a paper.

“Well,” said the elder Peabody, “I don’t blame you. Massachusetts and
Boston aren’t what they were. New England to-day is out in Kansas and
Nebraska.”

Higginson Peabody resolved to start a paper. Dodge occurred to him; a
friend returning had told him that newsy things were prone to happen in
Dodge. The soil, by the friend’s word, was kindly; Higginson Peabody
thought it would nourish and upbuild a paper. Wherefore, one bright
autumnal morning, he dropped off at Dodge. Going over to the hotel he
took a room by the month and confided to Mr. Wright that he would found
the _Weekly Planet_.

Mr. Wright squeezed the hand of Higginson Peabody until it hung limp as
a rag.

“It was an inspiration when you decided to come to Dodge,” said Mr.
Wright.

“Do you think,” asked Higginson Peabody, painfully separating each
finger from its fellows, “do you think your city ready for the birth of
a great paper?”

“Ready? Dodge’ll sit up nights to rock its cradle and warm its milk!”
quoth Mr. Wright.

Mr. Wright went down to the Long Branch and told Mr. Short. As
information radiated from the Long Branch the extremest corner of Dodge
was filled with the news in an hour.

When Mr. Wright withdrew to the Long Branch he left Higginson Peabody
sitting on the hotel porch. The costume of Higginson Peabody culminated
in a silk hat that would have looked well on Boston Common. The tall,
shiny hat excited the primitive interest of Cimarron Bill, who lightly
shot it from the head of its owner. Then, with bullet following bullet,
he rolled it along the sidewalk. Several gentlemen joined Cimarron Bill
in this sprightly pastime of the hat. Full twenty took part, and
Higginson Peabody’s headgear, to quote Cimarron Bill as he reported the
episode later to Mr. Masterson, was:

“A heap shot up.”

“He’s an editor,” warned Mr. Masterson, “and going to start a paper.
Mind, you mustn’t hurt him!”

“Hurt him!” retorted Cimarron Bill. “If I do I hope to go afoot the
balance of my life—I do, shore!”

Mr. Wright returned from the Long Branch, bringing Mr. Short. Higginson
Peabody mentioned the adventures of his hat.

“It’s my fault,” said Mr. Wright; “I’d ought to have told you. That
breed of war-bonnet is ag’inst the rules of our set.”

“That’s right,” coincided Mr. Short; “only sooicides wear ’em in Dodge.”

“We’ll fix it,” observed Mr. Wright, who noticed that Higginson Peabody
looked cast down. “What’s the size of your head?”

“Seven and an eighth,” returned Higginson Peabody, doubtfully.

“Seven and an eighth!” repeated Mr. Wright: “It’ll grow in Dodge. See if
it ain’t two sizes larger in a month.”

Mr. Wright sent over to that mart whereof he was proprietor, and
presently a pearl-gray sombrero appeared.

“There you are!” exclaimed Mr. Wright. “As good a Stetson as ever rode
in a round-up! Price? Not a word! I’ll take it out in advertising.”

Mr. Wright became as an elder brother to Higginson Peabody. On the
morning following the latter’s advent the two sat convenient to the
hotel bar and talked of Indians. That is, Mr. Wright talked of Indians,
and Higginson Peabody gulped and listened, pale of cheek.

Mr. Wright said a Cheyenne was as full of the unexpected as a career in
Wall Street. He hoped the Cheyennes wouldn’t kill and scalp anybody
about Dodge between then and Christmas. Mr. Wright set his limit at
Christmas because that was three months away, and three months was as
long as even an optimist was licensed to hope anything of a Cheyenne.

No, Mr. Wright did not think the Cheyennes would immediately bother
Dodge. They were busy with the buffaloes at that season. Moreover, there
were a number of buffalo hunters along the Medicine Lodge and the
Cimarron whom they, the Cheyennes, might capture and burn at the stake.
This would, so Mr. Wright argued, slake the Cheyenne thirst for
immediate amusement. Later, when they had burned up that year’s stock of
buffalo hunters and were suffering from ennui, the Cheyennes would
doubtless visit Dodge.

“But,” declared Mr. Wright, triumphantly, “we generally beat ’em off.
They never capture or kill more’n fifty of us before we have ’em routed.
Sure; we down three times as many of them as they do of us. Which
reminds me: come down to Kelly’s Alhambra and let me show you the
head-dresses and bead jackets we shucked from the last outfit we wiped
out.”

Mr. Wright exhibited to Higginson Peabody what trophies had been brought
north from the ’Dobe Walls and were then adorning the walls of the
Alhambra. Also, he had Mr. Kelly, who was their custodian, bring out the
eighty scalps, and counted them into the shrinking fingers of Higginson
Peabody, who handled them gingerly. They were one and all, so Mr. Wright
averred, stripped from slaughtered Cheyennes in the streets of Dodge.

“Isn’t that so, Kell?” asked Mr. Wright, appealing to Mr. Kelly.

“Shore!” assented Mr. Kelly. Then, by way of particular corroboration
and picking out a brace of scalps whereof the braided hair was unusually
long and glossy, “I killed an’ skelped these two right yere in the
s’loon.”

Higginson Peabody was impressed and said he would one day write up what
he had heard for the _Weekly Planet_.

Mr. Wright invited Higginson Peabody to explore the region lying back of
Dodge. They would make the trip on ponies. Mr. Wright held that the
exploration was requisite to the right editing of a local paper.

“For how,” demanded Mr. Wright, plausibly, “can you get out a paper and
know nothing of the country you’re in? As for Cheyennes, you need
entertain no fear. You’ll have a pony under you that can beat an
antelope.”

Higginson Peabody, with Mr. Wright as guide, philosopher and friend,
broke into the gray rolling desert to the north of Dodge. At the end of
the first mile Dodge dropped out of sight behind a swell and Higginson
Peabody found himself surrounded by naught save the shadowless plains—as
grimly stark as when they slipped from the palm of the Infinite! The
very picture of loneliness, the scene pressed upon the unsophisticated
sensibilities of Higginson Peabody like a menace. He wanted to return to
Dodge, but he didn’t like to say so.

Mr. Wright became replete of reminiscences. He showed Higginson Peabody
where a party of emigrants had been butchered by the Cheyennes only
eight weeks before.

By the side of a water hole Mr. Wright pointed to the ashes of a fire.
The Cheyennes had there grilled a victim on the coals.

“You see,” explained Mr. Wright, in apology for the Cheyennes, “they
didn’t have any stake. The best they could do was tie him, wrist and
heel, toss him in the fire and then keep him there with their lances.”

“Was he from Dodge?” faltered Higginson Peabody.

“No,” said Mr. Wright, carelessly, “if my memory serves, he was a sot
from Abilene.”

Ten minutes later they were winding along a dry arroya.

“What’s that?” exclaimed Mr. Wright, and he leaped from his pony.

Mr. Wright held up a moccasin which, apparently, he had taken from the
ground.

“Cheyenne,” said Mr. Wright, sinking his voice to a whisper. “Warm, too;
that moccasin was on its owner not five minutes ago!”

Higginson Peabody took the buckskin footgear in his hands, which shook a
little. The moccasin _was_ warm. It could hardly have been otherwise
since Mr. Wright had carried it in an inside pocket.

Mr. Wright glanced furtively about.

“We’d better skin out for Dodge,” said he.

Higginson Peabody wheeled, being quite in the humour for Dodge. He was
on the threshold of saying so when a medley of yelps and yells broke
forth. Higginson Peabody cast a look to the rear; a score of befeathered
and ochre-bedabbled demons were in open cry not a furlong away.

Mr. Wright had made no idle brag when he said the pony bestrode by
Higginson Peabody could outstrip an antelope. The latter gave that
animal its head and the scenery began racing rearward in a
slate-coloured blur. Mr. Wright’s pony was panting on the flank of its
flying mate.

“Ride hard!” shouted Mr. Wright. “To be captured is death by torture!”

Higginson Peabody did ride hard. There was a rattle of rifles and
six-shooters; the high lead ripped and whined and whistled—new sounds to
the shrinking ears of Higginson Peabody! Now and again a bullet
scuttered along the ground to right or left and threw up ominous pinches
of dust. Suddenly Mr. Wright reeled in the saddle.

“Save yourself!” he gasped. “Tell Masterson and the boys——”

The rest was lost to Higginson Peabody, for Mr. Wright’s pony, evidently
as badly wounded as its rider, began falling to the rear.

On tore Higginson Peabody. Dodge at last! Drawing a deep breath he swept
down the main street like a tornado.

“Indians! Indians!” yelled Higginson Peabody.

Arriving opposite its home corral the pony set four hoofs and skated;
recovering, it wheeled to the left. Higginson Peabody, by these abrupt
manoeuvres, was spilled from the saddle “like a pup from a basket,”
according to Mr. Kelly, who watched the ceremony from the Alhambra door.

Higginson Peabody reached the grass in a convenient ball. After a
prolonged roll of twenty feet he scrambled up uninjured.

“Get your guns!” he cried to Mr. Kelly, and then began to run.

It was afterward a matter of regret in Dodge that no arrangements had
been made for timing Higginson Peabody. He had only covered one hundred
yards when he ran into the arms of Mr. Masterson, but it was the
dispassionate judgment of both Mr. Kelly and Mr. Short, who, from their
respective houses of entertainment, reviewed the feat, that he did those
one hundred yards in better than ten seconds. Indeed, so much was
popular admiration excited by the winged work of Higginson Peabody that,
in commemoration thereof, Dodge renamed him the “Jackrabbit,” by which
honourable appellation he was ever afterward known to its generous
inhabitants.

“Get your guns!” shouted Higginson Peabody when stopped by the outspread
arms.

“What’s the trouble?” asked Mr. Masterson.

“Indians!” yelled the fugitive, making an effort to resume his flight.

“Come,” said Mr. Masterson, refusing to be shaken off, “it’s only a
joke. What you need now is a drink. Let’s push for Luke Short’s.”

While Higginson Peabody stood at the Long Branch bar and restored that
confidence in his fellow-men which a two-days’ stay in Dodge had done
much to shake, Cimarron Bill and a select bevy, clad in full Cheyenne
regalia, faces painted, blankets flying, feathers tossing, came whooping
down the street. They jumped from their steaming ponies and joined Mr.
Masterson and their victim.

“The drinks is on me!” shouted Cimarron Bill, giving the counter a
resounding slap. “Which I’m as dry as a covered bridge!”

“The drinks is on the house,” said Mr. Short, severely. Then to
Higginson Peabody, “Here’s to you, stranger! An’ let me say,” concluded
Mr. Short, while a colour of compliment showed through his tones, “that
if ever you do run a footrace I’ll string my money on you.”

As he considered the incident, Higginson Peabody was inclined to refuse
the boon of Mr. Wright’s further acquaintance, but Mr. Masterson and Mr.
Kelly explained that to do so would be regarded, by the liberal
sentiment of Dodge, as churlish in the extreme.

“That scamper into camp,” urged Mr. Kelly, “oughtn’t to count. It’s only
folks we like an’ intend to adopt into our midst on whom we confer them
rites of initiation.”

“That’s whatever,” observed Cimarron Bill, who came up. “Which we shore
wouldn’t take that much trouble with any gent onless we liked him.”

During his last year at Harvard Higginson Peabody edited the college
paper, and that, when he landed in Dodge, had been the whole of his
journalistic experience. While he conducted that vehicle of college
information his one notable triumph was an article on Bible reading, in
which he urged that all Bibles be bound in red. He pointed out an
inherent interest to abide in red and quoted its effect on turkey
gobblers. On the other hand, black, the usual cover-colour of Bibles,
was a hue sorrowful and repellant; so far from inviting human interest,
it daunted it. Higginson Peabody insisted that were every copy of the
scriptures bound in red a score would read where only one perused them
in their black uniform of gloom. This article gained him the compliment
of a reprimand from the university heads and an accusation on the part
of rivals that he was trying to promote an importance for his college
colours.

Notwithstanding this meagre apprenticeship in journalism Higginson
Peabody, from its initial issue, made the _Weekly Planet_ a highly
readable paper. This was peculiarly the case after he, on Mr.
Masterson’s endorsement, had added Jack to his staff. It was Jack who
brought in those spicy personal items which told in complimentary
fashion the daily or rather nightly doings at Mr. Kelly’s Alhambra, Mr.
Short’s Long Branch, Mr. Webster’s Alamo, and Mr. Peacock’s Dance Hall,
to say nothing of the Dodge Opera House and Mr. Wright’s store, and
which caused every reader to pick up the paper with pleasure and lay it
down with regret. Also, it was Jack who taught Higginson Peabody the
money value of a line of advertising that published cattle brands and
set forth the boundaries of ranges, so that round-up outfits might
intelligently hold the herds and cut out each ranchman’s cattle in what
regions they belonged. Indeed, with Jack at his elbow Higginson Peabody
carried the _Weekly Planet_ to a point where it almost paid.

It was when the _Weekly Planet_ had counted its thirteenth issue that
Higginson Peabody took up the question of a circulation. At that time
the paper owned but thirty-four subscribers. Dodge was small; the paper
could be passed from hand to hand; those thirty-four copies, during the
seven days when they were fresh, were read and appreciated by every eye
in Dodge. Under such circumstances thirty-four copies would be enough;
the demands of Dodge did not call for any more. Clearly, some argument
beyond the argument of mere news was required to build up a _Weekly
Planet_ circulation.

Higginson Peabody, in conference with Jack, said that he thought of
starting a baby contest. The paper would offer a prize for the most
beautiful baby in Dodge.

Jack stood like a rock against this proposition. He showed how in all
Dodge there were but two babies, and that the mother in each marvellous
instance held her darling to be a cherub fresh descended from on high.
That mother would make trouble for the _Weekly Planet_ and all connected
therewith if any rival infant were pitched upon as that cherub’s
superior.

“The mother,” said Jack, ominously, “who

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