The Girl at the Halfway House Part 4

Says it'll make 'em _loco_, so'st you kin go right up an' rope 'em. Now, ain't that the d----dest fool thing yet? Say, some o' these pilgrims that comes out here ain't got sense enough to last over night."

"Battersleigh is fond of horses," said Franklin, "and he's a rider, too."

"That's so," admitted Curly. "He kin ride. You orter see him when he gits his full outfit on, sword _an_' pistol by his side, uh-huh!"

"He has a horse, then?"

"Has a boss? Has a hoss--has--what? Why, o' course he has a boss. Is there anybody that ain't got a hoss?"

"Well, I haven't," said Franklin.

"You got this one," said Curly.

"How?" said Frank, puzzled.

"Why, you won him."

"Oh, pshaw!" said Franklin. "Nonsense! I wasn't wrestling for your horse, only for a ride. Besides, I didn't have any horse put up against yours. I couldn't lose anything."

"That's so," said Curly. "I hadn't thought of that. Say, you seem like a white sort o' feller. Tell you what I'll just do with you. O' course, I was thinkin' you'd win the whole outfit, saddle an' all. I think a heap o' my saddle, an' long's you ain't got no saddle yet that you have got used to, like, it don't make much difference to you if you get another saddle. But you just take this here hoss along. No, that's all right. I kin git me another back to the corral, just as good as this one. Jim Parsons, feller on the big bunch o' cows that come up from the San Marcos this spring, why, he got killed night before last. I'll just take one o' his hosses, I reckon. I kin fix it so'st you kin git his saddle, if you take a notion to it."

Franklin looked twice to see if there was affectation in this calm statement, but was forced, with a certain horror, to believe that his new acquaintance spoke of this as a matter of fact, and as nothing startling.

He had made no comment, when he was prevented from doing so by the exclamation of the cowboy, who pointed out ahead.

"There's Batty's place," said he, "an' there's Batty himself. Git up, quick; git up, an' ride in like a gentleman. It's bad luck to walk."

Franklin laughed, and, taking the reins, swung himself into the saddle with the ease of the cavalry mount, though with the old-fashioned grasp at the cantle, with the ends of the reins in his right hand.

"Well, that's a d----d funny way gittin' on top of a hoss," said Curly.

"Are you 'fraid the saddle's goin' to git away from you? Better be 'fraid 'bout the hoss.--Git up, Bronch!"

He slapped the horse on the hip with his hat, and gave the latter a whirl in the air with a shrill "Whoooop-eee!" which was all that remained needful to set the horse off on a series of wild, stiff-legged plunges--the "bucking" of which Franklin had heard so much; a manoeuvre peculiar to the half-wild Western horses, and one which is at the first experience a desperately difficult one for even a skilful horseman to overcome. It perhaps did not occur to Curly that he was inflicting any hardship upon the newcomer, and perhaps he did not really antic.i.p.ate what followed on the part either of the horse or its rider. Had Franklin not been a good rider, and accustomed to keeping his head while sitting half-broken mounts, he must have suffered almost instantaneous defeat in this sudden encounter. The horse threw his head down far between his fore legs at the start, and then went angling and zigzagging away over the hard ground in a wild career of humpbacked antics, which jarred Franklin to the marrow of his bones. The air became scintillant and luminously red. His head seemed filled with loose liquid, his spine turned into a column of mere gelatine. The thudding of the hoofs was so rapid and so punishing to his senses that for a moment he did not realize where he actually was. Yet with the sheer instinct of horsemanship he clung to the saddle in some fashion, until finally he was fairly forced to relax the muscular strain, and so by accident fell into the secret of the seat--loose, yielding, not tense and strung.

"Go it, go it--whooop-e-e-e!" cried Curly, somewhere out in a dark world.

"Ee-eikee-hooo! Set him fair, pardner! Set him fair, now! Let go that leather! Ride him straight up! That's right!"

Franklin had small notion of Curly's locality, but he heard his voice, half taunting and half encouraging, and calling on all his pluck as he saw some hope of a successful issue, he resolved to ride it out if it lay within him so to do. He was well on with his resolution when he heard another voice, which he recognised clearly.

"Good boy, Ned," cried out this voice heartily, though likewise from some locality yet vague. "R-ride the divil to a finish, me boy! Git up his head, Ned! Git up his head! The murdering haythin' brute! Kill him!

Ride him out!"

And ride him out Franklin did, perhaps as much by good fortune as by skill, though none but a shrewd horseman would have hoped to do this feat. Hurt and jarred, he yet kept upright, and at last he did get the horse's head up and saw the wild performance close as quickly as it had begun. The pony ceased his grunting and fell into a stiff trot, with little to indicate his hidden pyrotechnic quality. Franklin whirled him around and rode up to where Battersleigh and Curly had now joined. He was a bit pale, but he pulled himself together well before he reached them and dismounted with a good front of unconcern. Battersleigh grasped his hand in both his own and greeted him with a shower of welcomes and of compliments. Curly slapped him heartily upon the shoulders.

"You're all right, pardner," said he. "You're the d----dest best pilgrim that ever struck this place, an' I kin lick ary man that says differ'nt.

He's yore horse now, sh.o.r.e."

"And how do ye do, Ned? G.o.d bless ye!" said Battersleigh a moment later, after things had become more tranquil, the horse now falling to cropping at the gra.s.s with a meekness of demeanour which suggested innocence or penitence, whichever the observer chose. "I'm glad to see ye; glad as ivver I was in all me life to see a livin' soul! Why didn't ye tell ye was coming and not come ridin' like a murderin' Cintaur--but ay, boy, ye're a rider--worthy the ould Forty-siventh--yis, more, I'll say ye might be a officer in the guards, or in the Rile Irish itself, b'gad, yes, sir!--Curly, ye divvil, what do ye mean by puttin' me friend on such a brute, him the first day in the land? And, Ned, how are ye goin' to like it here, me boy?"

Franklin wiped his forehead as he replied to Battersleigh's running fire of salutations.

"Well, Battersleigh," he said, "I must say I've been pretty busy ever since I got here, and so far as I can tell at this date, I'm much disposed to think this is a strange and rather rapid sort of country you've got out here."

"Best d----n pilgrim ever hit this rodeo!" repeated Curly, with conviction.

"Shut up, Curly, ye divvil!" said Battersleigh. "Come into the house, the both of you. It's but a poor house, but ye're welcome.--An' welcome ye are, too, Ned, me boy, to the New World."

CHAPTER VIII

THE BEGINNING

Franklin's foot took hold upon the soil of the new land. His soul reached out and laid hold upon the sky, the harsh flowers, the rasping wind. He gave, and he drank in. Thus grew the people of the West.

The effect upon different men of new and crude conditions is as various as the individuals themselves. To the dreamer, the theorist, the man who looks too far forward into the future or too far back into the past, the message of the environment may fall oppressively; whereas to the practical man, content to live in the present and to devise immediate remedies for immediate ills, it may come sweet as a challenge upon reserves of energy. The American frontier subsequent to the civil war was so vast, yet so rapid, in its motive that to the weak or the unready it was merely appalling. The task was that of creating an entire new world. So confronted, some sat down and wept, watching the fabric grow under the hands of others. Some were strong, but knew not how to apply their strength; others were strong but slothful. The man of initiative, of executive, of judgment and resource, was the one who later came to rule. There was no one cla.s.s, either of rich or of poor, who supplied all these men. The man who had been poor in earlier life might set to work at once in bettering himself upon the frontier; and by his side, equally prosperous, might be one who in his earlier days had never needed to earn a dollar nor to thrash a fellow-man.

Civilization at its later stages drives the man into a corner. In its beginning it summons this same man out of the corner and asks him to rely upon himself for the great and the small things of life, thus ultimately developing that st.u.r.dy citizen who knows the value of the axiom, "_Ubi bene, ibi patria_." The great deeds, the great dreams become possible for nation or for individual only through the constant performance of small deeds. "For it must be remembered that life consists not of a series of ill.u.s.trious actions or elegant enjoyments.

The greater part of our time pa.s.ses in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstructions and frequent interruptions."

Such philosophy was for Franklin unformulated. Care sat not on his heart. There were at first no problems in all the world for him. It was enough to feel this warm sun upon the cheek, to hear the sigh of the wind in the gra.s.ses, to note the nodding flowers and hear the larks busy with their joys. The stirring of primeval man was strong, that magnificent rebellion against bonds which has, after all, been the mainspring of all progress, however much the latter may be regulated by many intercurrent wheels. It was enough for Franklin to be alive. He stood straight, he breathed deep. This infection was in his blood.

"Think you, Ned, me boy," said Battersleigh, one day, as they stood at the tent door--"think you, this old gray world has been inhabited a million years, by billions of people, and yet here we have a chance to own a part of it, each for himself, here, at this last minute of the world's life! Do you mind that, what it means? Never you think a chance like that'll last forever. Yet here we are, before the law, and almost antedatin' the social ijee. It's the beginning man, it's the very beginnin' of things, where we're standin' here, this very blessed day of grace. It's Batty has travelled all his life, and seen the lands, but never did Batty live till now!"

"It's grand," murmured Franklin, half dreamily and unconsciously repeating the very words of his friend, as he had done before.

Yet Franklin was well bitten of the ambition germ. It would serve him to run only in the front rank. He was not content to dream. He saw the great things ahead, and the small things that lay between. In a week he was the guiding mind in the affairs of the odd partnership which now sprang between him and his friend. Battersleigh would have lived till autumn in his tent, but Franklin saw that the need of a house was immediate. He took counsel of Curly, the cowboy, who proved guardian and benefactor. Curly forthwith produced a workman, a giant Mexican, a half-witted _mozo_, who had followed the cow bands from the far Southwest, and who had hung about Curly's own place as a sort of menial, bound to do unquestioningly whatever Curly bade. This curious being, a very colossus of strength, was found to be possessed of a certain knowledge in building houses after the fashion of that land--that is to say, of sods and earthen unbaked bricks--and since under his master's direction he was not less serviceable than docile, it was not long before the "claim" of Battersleigh was adorned with a comfortable house fit for either winter or summer habitation. Franklin meantime selected the body of land upon which he proposed to make settlers' entry, this happily not far from his friend, and soon this too had its house--small, crude, brown, meagre, but not uncomforting to one who looked over the wide land and saw none better than his own.

Then, little by little, they got precious coal from the railroad, this land having but scant fuel near at hand, and they built great stacks of the _bois des vaches_, that fuel which Nature left upon the plains until the railroads brought in coal and wood. Each man must, under the law, live upon his own land, but in practice this was no hardship.

Each must of necessity cook for himself, sew for himself, rely upon himself for all those little comforts which some men miss so keenly, and which others so quickly learn to supply. To these two this was but comfortable campaigning.

There remained ever before the minds of the settlers the desirability of laying this land under tribute, of forcing it to yield a livelihood.

Franklin had no wish to depart from his original plans. He looked to see all the ways of the civilization he had left behind come duly hither to search him out. He was not satisfied to abandon his law books for the saddle, but as yet there was no possibility of any practice in the law, though meantime one must live, however simply. It was all made easy. That wild Nature, which had erected rude barriers against the coming of the white man, had at her reluctant recession left behind the means by which the white man might prevail. Even in the "first year" the settler of the new West was able to make his living. He killed off the buffalo swiftly, but he killed them in numbers so desperately large that their bones lay in uncounted tons all over a desolated empire. First the hides and then the bones of the buffalo gave the settler his hold upon the land, which perhaps he could not else have won.

Franklin saw many wagons coming and unloading their cargoes of bleached bones at the side of the railroad tracks. The heap of bones grew vast, white, ghastly, formidable, higher than a house, more than a bowshot long. There was a market for all this back in that country which had conceived this road across the desert. Franklin put out a wagon at this industry, hauling in the fuel and the merchandise of the raw plains. He bought the grim product of others who were ready to sell and go out the earlier again. He betimes had out more than one wagon of his own; and Battersleigh, cavalryman, became Batty, scouter for bones, while Franklin remained at the market. It was Franklin who, bethinking himself of the commercial difference between hard black horn and soft, spongy bone, began the earliest shipments of the tips of the buffalo horns, which he employed a man to saw off and pack into sacks ready for the far-off b.u.t.ton factories. Many tons of these tips alone he came to ship, such had been the incredible abundance and the incredible waste; and thus thriving upon an industry whose cause and whose possibility he deplored, he came to realize considerable sums and saw the question of subsistence pa.s.s rapidly into unconcern. Thus he had gone to work in his new and untried world with a direct and effective force. He dropped from him as a garment the customs and standards of the world he had left behind, and at once took his place as a factor in a new order of things.

Meantime the little town added building after building along its straggling street, each of these houses of a single story, with a large square of board front which projected deceptively high and wide, serving to cover from direct view the rather humiliating lack of importance in the actual building. These new edifices were for the most part used as business places, the sorts of commerce being but two--"general merchandise," which meant chiefly saddles and firearms, and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the Cowboy's Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature. Of fourteen business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous.

Money was in the hands of all. The times had not yet come when a dollar seemed a valuable thing. Men were busy living, busy at exercising this vast opportunity of being prehistoric.

One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents of the railroad labourers vanished, pa.s.sing on yet farther to the West, only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line. The place of the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons, the creaking cook carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man. It was the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they were transient. At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living. The frontier was yet but one vast camp. It was, as Battersleigh had said, the beginning of things.

Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway the railroad took for its own. Some of these wagons pa.s.sed still onward, uncontent. Others swerved and scattered over the country to the south and southwest, from which the Indian tribes had now been driven, and which appeared more tempting to the farming man than lands farther to the west and higher up that gradual and wonderful incline which reaches from the Missouri River to the Rockies. One by one, here and there, these new men selected their lands and made their first rude attempts at building for themselves the homes which they coveted and had come far to win.

Ellisville lay at an eddy in the Plains, and gathered toll of the strange driftwood which was then afloat. Though the chutes at the railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle pa.s.sed Ellisville and wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the pa.s.sing Indians, who now began to see their own cattle to be doomed. The main herd of the buffalo was now reported to be three or four days' drive from Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud complaints. The skin-hunting still went on. Great wagons, loaded with parties of rough men, pa.s.sed on out, bound for the inner haunts, where they might still find their prey. The wagons came creaking back loaded with bales of the s.h.a.ggy brown robes, which gave the skin-hunters money with which to join the cowmen at the drinking places. Some of the skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless beginning of a permanent society. Not sinless was this society at its incipiency. In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary concomitants. Sinless men would form a community at best but perishable. Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, brotherly love so named--all these things were to come later, as they have ever done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence.

Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of such a beginning of our prosperity. Having become slaves, we scoff at the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was a master. Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own. There were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its pa.s.sing, yet they were happy. Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.

CHAPTER IX