Cherokee Trails/Chapter 1
When men went up to Kansas City to market their cows, they rode in what certain stylish conductors called the way-car, cowboys and cattlemen the caboose, or sometimes the calaboose. That is, they rode there to vary riding on top, which they preferred in good weather, and catch a few winks of sleep between proddings-up along the way.
Going home was another thing. Then everybody rode in the smoking-car on one long, blue, much-punched, all-inclusive shipper's pass, with plenty of greasy grub in paper sacks, much bottled cheer, and usually an assortment of prod-poles which they clung to as carefully as if saplings no longer grew, or these seasoned and tried ones had some especial quality which no amount of search through the forests of the earth could replace.
These prod-poles they stood around to tumble down, in the violent agitation of stopping and starting, and crack passengers on the heads, or stowed beneath seats to impede passengers' feet, cluttering things up in a general way to the disgust of trainmen and testy gentlemen who frequented smoking-cars. But trainmen were a wise generation—from experience—in those days, and passengers more tolerant and democratic, perhaps, than now, when prod-poles in day coaches are unknown.
Things went along serenely as a general thing when an outfit was going home from Kansas City, its fancily labelled bottles passing around without stint from lip to lip. There were outbursts of hilarity and a little shooting now and then; once in a while a bunch went wild and had things its own way, but taken in the main these home-going excursions were comfortable, friendly, full of genial appreciation of what had been seen and keen anticipation of telling about it in cow-camps by and by.
Such a good-natured gang was that of the Bar-Heart-Bar, starting home from escorting a thousand-odd grass-fattened cattle to market. The four of them had gone aboard the minute the train was placed, where they had taken possession of the front end of the smoker, turned two seats to face, stowed their prod-poles and squared off for the practically all-day ride to Wellington, where they would change trains for Drumwell on the Cherokee Nation border, fifty miles from home.
The party was one short, either through desertion or mischance, a matter that gave them some concern. Waco Johnson was the delinquent person. He had strayed in his hobble during the night from the Stockyards Hotel, lured away, perhaps, by the familiar sounds of cattle in the pens close under the windows, and had failed to show up. Now they were due to roll out in fifteen minutes, leaving Mr. Johnson facing the problem of paying his own fare back to the starting-point if he had the desire in his gizzard to keep his job with the Bar-Heart-Bar. It was altogether unlikely, they knew, that he would have enough money to meet that contingency as a gentleman should.
"Well, I guess I'll take another look around for him," Sid Coburn said, more vexed than anxious, hoisting himself up on his long legs, which were singularly straight for a saddle-bred man.
"Don't you git tangled up and not come back with that ticket," Pete Benson admonished him. "We'd be in a one-hell of a fix if you didn't come back."
Wallace Ramsey and Joe Lobdell added their solemn asseveration that they sure would be in a one-hell of a fix if the boss got tangled up in the crowd on Union Avenue and lost his points of direction. None of them considered the little old handbag under the boss' seat, kicked around carelessly, impatiently sometimes, when it got persistently in somebody's way, whiclr contained thirty-five thousand and odd dollars in currency, the net proceeds of the shipment. It was altogether inconsiderable to them; it wasn't their money. They'd have piled off the train at the first stop and walked back to Kansas City if the boss had lost his points in the whirl of humanity and missed the train with that long blue ticket, carrying the old handbag and all with them, red-necked and resentful of the imposition.
"Don't you worry—I'll be back on the dot," Sid assured them.
"I wouldn't resk it for no old booze-skimmin' muskeeter like Waco," Wallace protested. "Let him hoof it, dang him."
No chance of the boss straying off; he scarcely let go the handrail when he gingerly stepped down in his tight new boots with three-inch heels. He stood there so close to the step that one hop would have landed him safely aboard at the first turning of a wheel, combing the confusing stream of people which ran in and out among the waiting trains with sharp eyes, looking for Waco's familiar brand. Waco was not there, stampeding around as he should have been, trying to locate that train. Let him go, said the boss; dang his old melt, let him burn it back, or walk.
Cowboys were not so much a sight in Kansas City then—or now, for that matter—as they were in some parts of this cultured land. Nobody paid any attention to the thin-featured, anxiously peering, long-shanked man in bronze-topped new boots, black silk shirt, scarlet necktie and gray moleskin vest. The brakeman ignored him with haughty carriage, knowing he was going back to the benighted place he came from on a hog-train ticket, as the elite of railroads spoke of cattlemen's passes.
Sid climbed back into the car after a few minutes, returning rather gloomily to his companions, who were talking animatedly, already beginning to relax from the strain of hopping and dodging out of the track of cable cars and carriages. They wondered again, their vexation growing, over Waco's plight, taking it for granted that he was somewhere involved in the bewildering machinery of that roaring town, dropping him presently to go on with the recounting of experiences from which they were still warm, as a man just rolled out of the blankets on a frosty morning. The boss took the pass from his wallet and sat staring at it in gloomy abstraction.
"Well, sir, as I was sayin', fellers, I never was up agin one of them fancy joints," Wallace went on with his narrative which the boss' return had interrupted, "and I stopped there lookin' in that winder like a horse with its head over the fence. I says 'Feller, you've got money to burn; go on in and burn it.'"
"Where was that at?" Sid looked across at Wallace with a sort of patronizing, kindly interest in his adventure.
"The caff up at the Coates House."
"Hell! You didn't break in there, did you?" Sid inquired, a big grin working a surprising transformation in his long, solemn face.
"I'm tellin' you," said Wallace, twisting his head in portentous expression of revelations to come.
Wallace paused there with the true dramatist's valuation of suspense. Joe Lobdell laid a slap that measured his appreciation on his friend's rounded shoulders, and Wallace, who was a light-eyed man with large protruding teeth, looked around his little circle with the warm glow of a man who had much to bestow and was going to pass it out with liberal hand.
"You was lucky they didn't pitch you out on your neck," said the boss.
"Maybe I was," Wallace agreed, "but that bouncer was as nice as a come-on man. He tolled me off to a feed-box in one corner of the krel and sent a he-waiter to see what I was eatin'. Well, I thinks I'm in, and I'll go the limit. I looked over that chuck list a minute and I says to him 'Come totin' it all in, son,' I says, and I lent back and hooked my arm over m' cheer like money wasn't no objection to me."
"The hell you did!" said the boss. "Did he fetch you all of it?"
"No, he didn't," Wallace confessed, but without resentment, humor gleaming in his pale eyes. "That feller renigged on me, boss-man; he picked 'em out here and there down the line, thinkin' I didn't have the money to stand it all, I guess. But he started at the top, anyhow. The first thing he fetched me was a horse de over."
"A horse which?" Sid inquired, leaning forward curiously.
"De over." Wallace glanced around in well-simulated manner of surprise. "Mean to tell me none of you fellers ever et a horse de over?"
"I bit a mule's neck one time, though," Joe Lobdell said.
"They start off with 'em in them copper-bottomed caffs," Wallace explained.
"They can keep goin' on with 'em," Pete Benson said, with comfortable superiority.
"What's it made out of?" the boss inquired.
"I'm here to tell you!" Wallace replied fervently. "A horse de over is a plain sardine."
"Sardine?" said everybody, genuine in their surprise that such a familiar article of diet should figure on a fancy bill of fare.
"One sardine," Wallace solemnly averred, "laid out in the middle of a deesh with a olive at his head and a reddish at his tail, and little pieces of pickle all around him. That's a horse de over, men, if anybody asks you."
Wallace politely restrained himself at the climax of his revelation, joining in the big laugh after it was well under way. The boss was so diverted by the explanation of this dish that he took off his hat to give his head air, looking around with the blue pass for five men between his fingers, his big ears red in the heat of his mirth.
Across the aisle a somewhat moody-looking young man was smoking a straight-stemmed pipe, his eyes on the ceiling of the grimy car as if immersed in some problem or contemplation that insulated him against all the laughter loose in the world that day. But he seemed to feel Sid's look, which was in effect an appeal to get in on that rare piece of humor and have his laugh. He turned his head, nodded affably, his face still as solemn as Sid Coburn's own at its worst.
"Very good," said he, with intonation strange to their ears; "very-very good."
He enunciated the "very-very" as one word, a queer little stress on the first part, speaking quickly, a roundness and resonance in his tone as alien to their ears as culture in any form. But there was no more mirth in him than in Wallace's sardine.
"Did you eat him?" Pete wanted to know.
"No, I never," Wallace said, studiously reminiscent. "He looked so much like a corpse laid out for the grave I took some of them little pieces of green stuff from around the aidge of the deesh and I covered him up with 'em, and when that he-waiter come back I says 'You can bury that old feller—he's all ready,' I says."
They whooped louder than before at this, even the young man across the aisle breaking his face in a hard-come little grin that looked as if it hurt.
"Here she goes!" Joe Lobdell announced shrilly, his hat-brim doubled back against the window. "He's givin 'im the high-sign—here she goes!"
The train started with a jerk, as if the engineer had a spite against it and wanted to snap it in two. Sid Coburn got up, leaned with hand on the arm of the young man's seat and peered out through his window, that being on the station side.
"Lost one of my men," Sid explained.
"Unfortunate," said the young man.
"Unfortunate for him, the derned fool! And here I've got a goin'-home pass callin' for five men and only four to ride on it."
Sid spoke resentfully, as if he faced the liability, through the defalcation of Waco Johnson, of being called to answer for some grave dereliction.
"At least you're one better off than I am," the young man remarked, very quietly, not greatly interested, it appeared.
"How do you mean better off? For men, do you mean?"
Sid straightened from peering out of the window to throw a glance around at his three cow-valets among their prod-poles, bundles and paper bags, as if to make sure he had no more.
"For tickets," the solemn young man replied. "You have one too many; I have none at all."
"You ort 'a' got you one," Sid told him, interested but unmoved. "They sock you for excess fare if you don't buy a ticket."
"It would be very-very difficult to collect," said the solemn young man.
"Broke, and travellin' on your nerve, heh?"
"Broke, and starting out to travel on my nerve. I don't know how far along I'll get with it."
The young man looked up at the tall cowman, his face as grave as before, but the glimmer of a smile in his shrewd gray eyes. He moved over: Sid Coburn, suddenly and keenly interested in the traveller's method, accepted the invitation, noting, as he seated himself, that the adventurer was going without sack, satchel or paper bag.
"I reckon you're only goin' a station or two—I see you're travellin' light," Sid ventured.
"I rather expect a station will be as far as I'll get on this train. Luggage would be such a nuisance, you know, when they come to chuck me off."
"Well, you take it purty easy," Coburn said, looking at him with the crude, direct impertinence of his kind, up and down and all over, taking in the details so thoroughly he would be able to describe his marks a year from that day.
Between twenty-five and thirty, Coburn judged him to be, a man who would stand medium height, and weigh about a hundred and fifty-seven. Looked like an out-doors man, and was dressed in a sort of half-and-half style, like a country banker or a brand-inspector, or one of that kind, ready to hop a horse and take a sashay out on business any time. Good-looking, clean-heeled chap, an indefinable air about him that made a man feel he'd had something in his time, or was going to come into it after a while. Black hair, cut short; complexion fair where he wasn't tanned; good-sized nose, thin in the nostrils and flaring, like a blood-horse. A hard-mouthed man, Coburn judged, and a proud one, from the way he lifted his chin and carried it high, like a headstrong horse under a check-rein.
"Conductor'll be along in a minute," Coburn said, having got no answer to his last remark.
"I'm rather expecting him," the imperturbable adventurer replied.
"Where you headin' for?"
"Panhandle."
"That's a long ways to try to make it without a ticket," Sid reflected. "Why don't you take a freight? they're easier to bum."
"Out on the line a freight has its advantages," the young man said, nodding confirmation gravely, "But not when you're starting from a town like this. They arrest a chap here if he swings on to a freight."
"I git your scheme," Sid beamed on him admiringly. "You figger they'll not stop this train to put you off between here and Argentine, and you don't give a cuss if they do chuck you off there."
"It's so much more pleasant than walking it," the self-possessed deadbeat explained, diffidently, so diffidently, indeed, that he seemed almost apologetic.
Coburn sat ruminating this extraordinary traveller's case, the blue pass for five men rolled around his finger. He had the cowman's caution about asking or offering favors, and he naturally was a deliberative person in a business deal as well. Before the conductor made his appearance Sid had reached the conclusion that he didn't stand to lose anything by taking this man on the pass in Waco Johnson's place. A man was a man when no names were mentioned; they couldn't hold him for the fare even if they should discover the deceit.
"I could help you along as far as Wellington if you want to pass as one of my men," Coburn finally proposed. "I've got a pass for five men, and only four of us in the bunch since we lost Waco Johnson."
The young man accepted the offer with dignity, quietly grateful, no effusion of thanks in his mouth. He wasn't any man's greenhorn, whatever his line might be; Coburn was certain of that. He introduced himself as Thomas Simpson, shaking hands solemnly all around when Coburn presented him to the gang, explaining that, as far as the pass was concerned, he was as much one of them as the lost Waco Johnson ever had been.
Coburn sat by his substitute for Johnson and politely inquired into his past activitives in a business way, calling him Tom with the fraternal equality of a man who is unaware of any superior among his kind. For one man was as good as another as long as he behaved himself, as they used to say on the range. It developed that Tom's last contact with a money-making job had been as a mine guard in Colorado. Before that time he had skirmished around some, he said, without going into details.
It came out finally that Tom's skirmishing had been among various cow-camps and outfits in Wyoming and Colorado; that he had been over from England about seven years, having come with high ambitions toward learning the cattle business as conducted on the western ranges, with a view of going into it himself if fortune should roll his number out of the box. It hadn't rolled out yet, it seemed, and Tom laughed over it when he made the confession, a short little laugh, somewhat hard and cynical, Coburn thought, saying a good deal more of disappointment and hard times than his high pride ever would permit his tongue to utter in words.
How he came to be so entirely strapped at that time, and what had led up to the condition, Simpson did not explain. Coburn let that alone, not out of delicacy or sympathy, but because he knew quite well how far a man ought to go in certain affairs without laying himself open to being told where to get off. Tom Simpson was a man who would not hesitate to put an impertinent fellow in his place; Coburn could see that without any kind of glasses at all.
Coburn had his measure, at any rate, and was satisfied with the result. Young Englishmen of that type were not scarce on the range in those days, when a great deal of British capital was invested in the big cattle companies. Young fellows who had been wild, most of them, sent over to the cattle range where they might blow off their spirits without further compromising the folks at home. It was a long distance between the cattle ranges and England, and what would be naughty, naughty conduct in the standards of the older land was accepted as only the natural expression of lively young manhood in the new.
They got money from home every three months, most of these young chaps, burned a big red streak with it while it lasted, and took their hardships between remittances like the real men they were at foundation. Some of them made good to sensational degree; Coburn knew of some in the Panhandle country of Texas, where he had got his own start as a cowpuncher, who had enough silver dishes on their tables to found a mint. Quiet-spoken men, too, like this Tom Simpson; educated men from old colleges, wise in the accumulated knowledge of mankind.
So it was thought, at any rate. There never was a place where education was more venerated than in the cow-camps of the west. College men, from England and from home places, were not rare in those times; it was a sort of catch-all for college men, indeed, that wide-open country west of the Arkansas. No matter for their dissipations and utter worthlessness of character—and some of them were about as bad as men ever get to be—they always were more or less hallowed by that glamour of a college education.
"That man's got a college education," was at once the palliation and the absolution for his excesses and follies. His comrades boasted it in pride of reflected consequence and superiority. It seemed to be the general belief among the unlettered that a college education gave a man some kind of subtle advantage over all men less fortunate, which he had only to exercise to elevate himself into riches and power. That he did not employ this talisman to his own profit usually was taken as proof of his humane and generous spirit. His associates were hopelessly trammelled by ignorance: why should he desire to rise above them? So his friends and companions believed, in the face of all evidence that an educated sot is the most depraved and disgusting creature that shames the shape of man.
Tom Simpson rode along with his new companions that day, playing poker with them, winning a few dollars of their money, to which they unreservedly felt that he was welcome, considering his financial state, eating out of their paper sacks, taking a nip with the rest when the bottle went round, to all appearances entirely comfortable and in his proper place. Sid Coburn studied him from this angle and from that, finally making the proposal that, if Tom had nothing definite at the end of the trail in the Panhandle, he go on to Drumwell with them and take a job on the Bar-Heart-Bar in case Waco Johnson did not stray back in due time.
Of course there was not anything certain about it, Coburn said. Waco might ramble in on the next train, in which case Tom would be pretty sure to hook up with somebody else. He could stick around in Drumwell a few days, and Coburn would let him know.
Simpson accepted the proposal calmly, as if it made little difference to him where the railroad ended, Panhandle or on the southern Kansas border, which probably was the case. Coburn liked him better for his undemonstrative way, no glib talk on his tongue, nothing at all that a man could read in his inscrutable poker face. The cowman thought more and more as he studied that mouth clamped on its secrets—rather grimly for a young man's mouth—that here was a lad for a particular job, chance it that a respectable cowman like himself had something of the kind to be done.