The Sunset Trail Part 18

Mr. Masterson lay out of view and kept his gla.s.ses on a strip five miles away, where the trail ribboned over a swell. There, in the end, he found what he sought; he made out the Tomcat, a bobbing speck in the distance.

Mr. Masterson put aside his gla.s.ses and planted himself where he would do the most good. While concealed he still commanded the approach to the ford. To give his presence weight Mr. Masterson had his sixteen-pound buffalo gun.

"As I remember this party," soliloquised Mr. Masterson, "I don't reckon now he's got sense enough to surrender when he's told. And when I think of that little lady dead in Dodge I don't feel like taking many chances.

I'll hail him, and if he hesitates, the risk is his."

Thirty minutes had come and gone since Mr. Masterson, through his gla.s.ses, followed the Tomcat down the far-off slope. Shylock, staunch as whalebone though he was, had found the clip a killer. He was not covering ground as in the beginning. There they were at last, the weary pony and the hunted man, both showing the wear and tear of pace.

Ballard ready on his hip, the Tomcat, giving a nervous over-shoulder look, brought Shylock to a walk. The broken pony came stumbling down to the ford. Mr. Masterson, with his mighty buffalo gun, aroused himself for official business.

"Drop that rifle!" said Mr. Masterson.

It was like a bolt from the blue to the spent and shaken Tomcat. He caught his breath in a startled way. Then, despair standing in the stead of courage, he tossed the Ballard into his left hand and fired, point-blank, at Mr. Masterson's face where it showed above the bank. The bullet tossed the dust a yard to the left. Mixed bloods and Indians at their best are but poor hands with a rifle, and the Tomcat was at his worst.

With the crack of the Ballard came the bellow of the Sharp's. The great bullet, which would have torn its way through the vitals of a buffalo-bull at eight hundred yards, brought the Tomcat whirling from the saddle like a stricken wild duck. What with sheer weariness and an inadvertent yank at the Spanish bits as the Tomcat went overboard, poor Shylock crossed his tired forelegs, tripped, blundered, and fell. He came down on the Tomcat; in the scramble to get to his feet Shylock fell upon the Tomcat again.

Mr. Masterson slipped another cartridge into the buffalo gun. Then he warily approached the Tomcat, muzzle to the fore, finger on the trigger.

A dying man will sometimes pull a six-shooter with the last flicker of his failing strength, and s.n.a.t.c.h a vengeance as he quits the earth.

Mr. Masterson seized the Tomcat by the shoulders and dragged him from under Shylock-still heaving and plunging to regain his feet. There was no call for a second look; the experienced Mr. Masterson could tell by the ash-colour struggling through the brown that the death-draw was on the Tomcat at the very moment.

The Tomcat, hiccoughing and bleeding, lay on the short stiff gra.s.s and rolled a hateful eye on his executioner. Mr. Masterson, thinking on the girl who died in Dodge, gave back a look as hateful. And this, in the midst of the lonesome plains, is what these two spoke to one another-these, the slayer and the slain, to show how bald is truth!

"You blank-blanked-blankety-blank! you ought to have made a better shot than that!" said the Tomcat. "Well, you blank-blanked murderer, I did the best I could," said Mr. Masterson.

Mr. Masterson, as he walked his horse over the hill upon which he had first beheld the coming of the Tomcat, halted and looked back. Shylock of the empty saddle nosed up to Mr. Masterson's horse in a friendly way.

Five miles to the south, on the banks of the Medicine Lodge, a raven wheeled and stooped. Away to the west a coyote yelped; another yelped an answer, and then another. Mr. Masterson shrugged his wide shoulders. The coyote by daylight makes gruesome melody.

"The ground was too hard to dig a grave," said Mr. Masterson, as he turned his horse's head again towards Dodge, "even if I'd had the tools.

Besides, I wasn't elected undertaker, but sheriff."

CHAPTER IX

THE MEDICINE OF LONE WOLF

The Lone Wolf had lost his "medicine," and that was a most serious disaster. To lose one's "medicine" among the Indians is equivalent to losing one's money among the Whites, and means just as bad a mess in one's social and business affairs. One's smell-feast friends of the day before go by one with averted or unseeing eye, while everything and everybody give evidence that one is beneath the notice of a self-respecting world.

Thus it was with the Lone Wolf when now his "medicine" had left him.

Bear Shield, his chief, looked over him or through him without sign or word that might be construed into an admission of his existence. Fellow Cheyennes who had sat with him in the council or rode knee to knee with him in the charge no longer knew him by mark of face or sound of name.

His squaws moped over the camp-fire with bowed heads; his pappooses whimpered with the shame of what they felt but did not understand; his dogs, cowed and dispirited, crept about with craven tails clewed close between their legs; even his ponies made a disgraced band by themselves, cropping dejected gra.s.s apart, as though unfit to mingle with the reputable mustangs of mankind.

This situation was all the more a jolt to the sensibilities of the Lone Wolf, since he had been a personage of eminence and place. His voice had been high in tribal powwow, his strong hand resistless in war. He was rich in robes and ponies, in pappooses and dogs and wives. The records of the "medicine" lodge showed him ent.i.tled to sing of the conquest of four scalps-one p.a.w.nee, two Sioux, and one the former headwear of a drunken teamster of Sun City-which four topknots were drying on his tepee pole. By these one may know how to measure the heights from which the melancholy Lone Wolf had been hurled.

The Lone Wolf had lost his "medicine" without fault, that is fault from the standpoint of a paleface. He came down to the ford at the Beaver, when storms to the west had rendered it boiling and bank full. By reason of the boil and swirl, and the shifting quicksands under hoof, his pony lost its foothold and went down. In the splash and water-scramble that ensued, the Lone Wolf and his half-choked pony reached the sh.o.r.e; but his "medicine," torn from his neck in the struggle, was swept away.

There was no argument for a search. In the turbid toss of that ten-mile current the "medicine" was as hopelessly lost as though it had exhaled.

And yet, while the Lone Wolf could relate this blameless story of his vanished "medicine," it availed him naught. There is no such word as accident where one's "medicine" is concerned. One's separation from it, no matter by what means brought about, is neither to be honourably accounted for nor condoned. One has lost one's "medicine"; and one is thereby and therefore destroyed. It would be a stain, as even the half-opened paleface eye may see, were it taken from one by the conquering arm of a foe. It is as deep a stain to part with it, as the Lone Wolf parted with his. Such manner of loss makes plain that, because of crimes or cowardices unknown, the justice-loving ghosts have interfered to strip a villain of this basic requisite of a warrior and an honest man. Only in this way can the ghosts of good Cheyennes gone before, having the honour of their tribe in dearest mind, furnish word to their children of him in their midst, so flagrantly vile that a least a.s.sociation with him provides disgrace, while bordering narrowly on actual sin itself.

In a far day a leper cloaked his head and hung a tinkling bell at his girdle, so that hale men might have warning of his evil case and hold aloof. For kindred reasons the Lone Wolf, when now his "medicine" was lost, killed his pony, broke his pipe-stem, and blackened his face. In this sorrowful guise he went afoot the long journey to his home village on the Cimarron, and all who met him by the way knew him at sight and turned their backs upon him, for that thing below a caste, a man who has lost his "medicine."

The Lone Wolf's "medicine" had been an exceeding strong "medicine," and this served to give his loss an emphasis. He had worn it through a dozen battles, and it so cunningly protected him that, while others fell about him knocked over like ninepins, nothing save and except one bullet from a Gatling was able to leave its mark upon him. The Gatling had nicked him; and the furrow it turned was visible on the cheek of Lone Wolf.

This untoward scratch was solvable only upon a theory that the "medicine" of what paleface fired the shot must likewise have possessed uncommon potentialities.

When boyhood ceased for the Lone Wolf and he trembled on the threshold of existence as a full-blown buck, in deference to Cheyenne custom he had wandered abroad and alone upon the blizzard-whipped plains, and frozen and starved and prayed and mourned for seven nights and days. In the end, cold and hunger and self-hypnotism did their work, and the Lone Wolf began to see shapes and hear voices. These told him how to compound his "medicine," so that thereafter he should be wise as the owl in peace, fierce as the eagle in strife.

The "medicine" bag was to be sewed from the skin of an otter, dressed with claws and tail and head and teeth as though filled with grinning life. Inside the otter-pelt "medicine" bag were to be hidden charmed tobacco, slips of sacred cedar, a handful of periwinkle sh.e.l.ls, as well as twenty other occult odds and ends, the recondite whole, together with the otter-skin pouch, to be and remain his "medicine" forevermore.

The Lone Wolf followed, religiously, the ghostly directions. He caught and skinned and tanned and sewed his otter, and then invested the precious bag with those chronicled weird fragments of matter. To these latter, as all must admit, the lip of bat, and toe of toad, and eye of newt-so valuable in witchcraft-or the negro necromancer's dried snake's head, and left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit killed in the dark of the moon, are as children's toys; and so thought the Lone Wolf. When complete, he hung his "medicine" about his neck, and felt himself a proud, big warrior and a man. He had never been parted from it, were it day or night, or war or peace. He had even worn it during his school days at Carlisle, saving it from curious professors, who might have decried it as some heathen fetish, by wearing it under his calico shirt.

Now it was gone, eaten up by the hungry Beaver, and the name of the Lone Wolf had been dropped from all the aboriginal roll calls of good repute.

Not alone among the Cheyennes, but in the estimation of every Indian that yelped between the Yellowstone and the Rio Grande, the unlucky Lone Wolf, with a lost "medicine" bag to his discredit, was utterly abandoned and undone.

And the worst feature of the case was that the Lone Wolf could not make a new "medicine." Since the Great Spirit invented the inst.i.tution of "medicine" and placed it upon earth, all men have known that one may create his "medicine" but once. Any second attempt serves only to introduce one to a covey of malevolent spirits, whose power will be exercised to wet one's bowstring, blunt one's arrow, lame one's pony, and break one's lance. No, the Lone Wolf could not make another "medicine."

Was there no hope for the Lone Wolf?

About an even century before the Lone Wolf slumped into that quicksand crossing of the Beaver, and was robbed by the waters of his otter-skin "medicine," Mr. Goldsmith wrote a three act oratorio, called it "The Captivity" and sold it to Dodsley for ten guineas. Among other tuneful commodities in said oratorio contained, Mr. Goldsmith penned the following:

The wretch condemned with life to part, Still, still on hope relies; And every pang that rends the heart Bids expectation rise.

Hope, like the gleaming taper's light, Adorns and cheers our way; And still as darker grows the night, Emits a brighter ray.

Since he knew neither the one nor the other, it is fair to a.s.sume that when Mr. Goldsmith wrote the above he was thinking as deeply on the Lone Wolf as on you. Certainly the habit of hope therein set forth is as prevalently sweeping among savages as among civilised folk. The Indian does not hope for the same things, but to what extent and in what direction his antic.i.p.ations stray he hopes as industriously as ever hoped any white man of you all. And so it was with the unhappy Lone Wolf. In this, his darkest hour, there remained the glimmer of a hope.

When the Great Spirit fixed his commands against making a second "medicine," a fiat necessary lest a "medicine" easily replaced degenerate to be a trivial gewgaw creature of small moment, he left open, should one lose one's "medicine," a single gateway of relief. One might conquer, in such pinch, an enemy, strip him of his personal "medicine," and thus redeem one's self. The "medicine" of that dead foe would take the place of the lost "medicine," and by its virtues rehabilitate the victor and restore him unto what tribal place was his before his own original "medicine" had disappeared.

In this black hour of his fortunes, the Lone Wolf upheld his heart with this. He might go north, and knock over some casual p.a.w.nee or inadvertent Sioux. Hundreds of these at this season would be met with among the buffaloes. True, it would be a long, hard trail; but not so long nor so hard as the life-trail of the Lone Wolf when now he was without caste or tribal countenance.

Stripping himself of feathers and hawk-bells and bearclaw necklace and every form of ornament, wrapped in his raggedest blanket, with a daub of mud in his hair as one who mourns, without word or sign to any concerning his purpose, the Lone Wolf turned his back on the Cimarron and wended northward. His face paints were black, for his heart was sad.

The only matters about him that did not tell of woe and bankruptcy, and warn one of an Indian without fortune or future, were his pony and his arms. These showed of the best, and this weapon-care was not without a reason. More than ever would the Lone Wolf require a pony tireless as the storm and as swift, and lance and bow and knife without flaw or fault; for now when he had lost his "medicine," he was singularly undefended and weak. No one knew better these latter helpless truths than did the Lone Wolf. It was by no means sure that a child might not overcome him-he who, but a fortnight before with his otter-skin "medicine," had been a thunderbolt of war. Wherefore, with his heart little, his courage water, his bow an arc of weakness, his arrows no better than windle-straws, and his lance as forceless as a cornstalk-for losing one's "medicine" means all these grievous conditions of undefence and inability to smite-it behooved the Lone Wolf to provide as much as he might, with prudence and farsighted care, in favour of a possible success.

The Lone Wolf would have no help from the good ghosts, for these had left him with the lost "medicine." What ghosts might still be riding in his disgraceful company, were bad ghosts. So far as they did anything they would do harm, not good, and the best he might look for at their hands was a sort of ghostly non-interference.

There was a least slant ray to encourage the latter hope. If the Lone Wolf had the luck to cross up with a p.a.w.nee or a Sioux as contemptible as himself, the ghosts would not choose between them. In such miserable coil of coyote-snap-coyote, the disgusted ghosts would stand afar off.

They would be content with the outcome, whatever it was, and refuse to contaminate their vapourish hands by mixing in the business.

That was the one favouring chance that lay before the Lone Wolf. To have full advantage of it, he wore his best weapons and rode his best war pony. If he happened upon a p.a.w.nee or Sioux, disreputable in the eyes of G.o.ds and men, he might yet be saved from out those fires of disgrace that were consuming him. He would kill that p.a.w.nee or Sioux, and wash himself free of stain with his victim's "medicine."

On the other and more likely hand-since good is more rife than evil-were he to encounter an Indian, tribally eminent and high, one who stood well with his people and of whose company therefore the most exactingly exclusive ghost need not feel ashamed, the Lone Wolf knew the upcome.

His fate was written; he was no better than a dead Cheyenne. To these poor conditions the Lone Wolf tacitly agreed. And wherefore no? What death was not preferable to a life of endless ignominy-the life of one who has lost his "medicine?" Such indeed were the thoughts to skulk in the mind of the Lone Wolf like quails in corn, as he rode forward on his quest.

The Lone Wolf could not expect to find that required p.a.w.nee or needed Sioux short of the Platte or perhaps the Yellowstone. He resolved to go thither by way of Dodge. The Lone Wolf was not wanting in a kind of sapiency. Now that his own weapons were undeniably weak-he could only know how weak when he had tried them, and the news might come too late-he decided to purchase a rifle of the palefaces. Such a weapon would not have been sapped of its powers by any former possession of his own, and he might possibly corral that "medicine" he sought before it had been long enough in his hands to have degenerated. With this wisdom in mind, the Lone Wolf drove before him two pack ponies, laden to the ears of robes and furs. This sumpter stuff would buy that rifle, with its accompanying belts and cartridges.

The Lone Wolf knew Mr. Masterson, and liked him. They had both fought at the 'Dobe Walls and gained a deal of respect for one another. Also they had met since at sundry agencies; and in good truth it was the Lone Wolf who told Mr. Masterson how many of those charging savages went under in that hot fortnight of fight.

"How many of you did we blink out?" asked Mr. Masterson, who had his statistical side.