The Sunset Trail Part 7

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.xton 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 p.a.w.nees, 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 t.i.tle 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 ent.i.tled 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 bl.u.s.terer 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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, pa.s.sively 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 a.s.sist his cogitations. He put away gla.s.s after gla.s.s, 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."