Cherokee Trails/Chapter 10
Sheriff Treadwell came around next day while Tom was greasing the wagons and making ready to go into the business of transporting bones. The sheriff had taken his own time about making a start to investigate Coburn's appeal for help in recovering his money, and had been stimulated to push his investigations that far only by the the vague report of a fight at the Ellison ranch. A homesteader had heard the shooting and seen the defeated party pass by carrying a man across a saddle. He had told a neighbor, who had passed the news along until it finally reached the sheriff.
The sheriff was a small solemn man of clerical appearance. He arrived in a buckboard drawn by two horses, more in the state of a judge than a sheriff, no arms buckled on him, his badge of office carefully concealed under his short double-breasted black coat. He wore a narrow-brimmed derby hat and shoes with large black buttons, and he was altogether a trim and spick, metropolitan appearing man, about as far removed from the general type of Kansas cow-county sheriff as well could be imagined. He had a sharp and wide-awake look about him which was sufficient evidence to Tom Simpson that if he didn't break a hamestring in his efforts to catch the thieves who plagued the borders of his jurisdiction it was for very good reasons of his own.
Mrs. Ellison recounted the incidents attending Simpson's arrival at her home, growing almost epical in her praise of his conduct in recovering their property and his own. The sheriff did not laugh when Tom explained the mixup in Drumwell that had led to his riding off on Coburn's horse with the cowman's money tied on the saddle, but an appreciation of the situation glimmered in his quick blue eyes when he heard how the horse had returned to the pastures of his colthood days. He asked to see the horse. Eudora led the animal out of the barn.
Yes, he remembered the horse perfectly and could identify him anywhere. Coburn's brand didn't cut any ice, beyond the proof of dishonest intention on his part. He must have known it was a stolen horse, even if he never had seen the posters advertising its loss. If he ever had the gall to come there laying claim to the horse, take a shot at him. That was the only answer to make to such a demand: take a shot at him.
The sheriff didn't appear at all surprised to learn that Simpson had delivered the money to its owner. He had more interest in the description of the men who had followed Tom to the ranch under the pretense of being a legal posse. He nodded as if fully enlightened when Tom described the long-legged leader.
"Wade Harrison," he said.
Mrs. Ellison's face grew white when the sheriff pronounced the name. She made a little gasping sound, her ready tongue momentarily incapable under the stress of her consternation. Eudora was scarcely less shocked by the revelation. She stared breathlessly at the sheriff, as if he had spoken the most surprising and shocking words that had ever reached her ears.
"That man!" Mrs. Ellison said, looking from one to the other in fearful amazement. "I might have known, I might have known!"
The sheriff nodded again, his broad mouth shut so close it made a line across his face.
"No doubt about it," he said. "He was quite an eminent bank robber," he explained, seeing the question in Simpson's eyes. "He'd held up several trains, and robbed a government paymaster or two, and killed more men than he had fingers and toes, I guess. He had his hangout down in the hills along the Salt Fork in the Nation. We all knew that. But nobody ever tracked him to it. If he did he never come back. Ye-es, he was quite an eminent man."
Simpson did not appear to be greatly impressed. He had a wagon jack under a hind axle, and had been smearing the thimble with grease when the sheriff arrived. He resumed smoothing the grease with a wooden paddle after a little "Um-m-m," which seemed adequately to express his full appreciation of the border character's importance.
Sheriff Treadwell seemed somewhat affronted at the apparent indifference or plain dumbness of this stranger. He turned a sharp, frowning look on Simpson, who had picked up the lynch-pin of the old-time prairie freight wagon and was scraping the caked grease off with his paddle.
"You may not be able to throw in another lucky shot like that, kid, next time you meet that bunch," the sheriff said. "If you ain't got no special business around this part of the country my tip to you'd be to hit the grit."
"Mr. Simpson's going in with me on the bone business," Eudora said, somewhat high in her manner, resenting the sheriff's imputation of luck rather than marksmanship and valor in the recent encounter with the border's eminent outlaw.
"It'd pay you to keep a gun hangin' around handy, anyhow, pardner," the sheriff hinted, a hard edge on the words that meant a great deal more than he really said.
"Oh, very well," Simpson replied, with what seemed light, almost lofty, indifference.
"That's a bad outfit down around Drumwell," the sheriff continued reading his lecture; "they'll hang around and gang a man they've got it in for when he's least expectin' it. I've been keepin' hands off, lettin' 'em work the froth off like a Dutchman does his wine, but I'll have to clean up on 'em one of these days. The trouble is if a man started in on 'em he wouldn't know who to take and who to leave."
The sheriff inquired whether Simpson was certain Wade Harrison was dead when his companions of the road loaded him on his horse and carried him away. Eudora was quick to answer for him.
"Oh, I'm sure he was, Mr. Treadwell. They wouldn't handle a live man that way—slingin' him around like a sack of bran."
"You'd better come along with me, Simpson," Sheriff Treadwell said, giving the women a start, but easing their fears before they could protest. "We'll track 'em a ways and see if we can find where they dumped him. If he was dead they wouldn't carry him far. You'd better bring your gun along."
Simpson preferred a rifle for such scouting expeditions, it appeared, a choice of weapons which met the sheriff's approval and lifted the stranger a notch in his esteem. The sheriff said a buckboard would be somewhat out of order for such business, and requested the loan of a horse. It happened that Simpson had a number of animals in the corral, with the purpose in mind to try some of them out in harness, few on the place having been broken to work. He saddled two likely ones, using the saddle he had borrowed from Coburn for himself.
As they started down the road in the direction the raiders had gone three days before, the sheriff said they'd make inquiries of the homesteaders in the valley below the Ellison place, meantime keeping an eye on the road to see if they could discover where the gang had turned out of it. If Harrison had been wounded and not killed they would head right on to Drumwell and a doctor. Otherwise they would leave the road to dispose of their burden somewhere.
"If we can find that feller's carcase you're in for a handy little piece of money," he said. "There's twenty-five hundred to three thousand dollars reward out for that man. But we've got to find the corpus delicti; you can't prove a thing without the corpus delicti."
The sheriff was proud of his coroner's Latin, and was evidently innocent of any misapplication of the term in the present case. Although it was not exactly complimentary to Simpson, he knew the sheriff did not mean to imply that a crime had been committed in the removal of Wade Harrison from the scene. The body of Harrison would be the principal evidence, and that was what the sheriff was driving at.
As they rode that afternoon through the languorous October haze, Sheriff Treadwell told many a story of the outlaw who had fallen before Simpson's gun, in a good many of which a certain "feller" figured in the capacity of peace officer here and there in the famous cow-towns of Kansas. This feller, always nameless, had crossed lines with Harrison in more than one battle, when wounds had been given and taken, and the sheriff made it plain that an undying enmity had grown up between that peace officer and the lanky outlaw, who had carried a charmed piece of money in his pocket that had brought him through these various battles with his life.
But this unnamed feller, this peace officer, who had followed that business as faithfully as his enemy had stuck to his lawless trade, had gradually edged Harrison off the map of Kansas. He had taken refuge in the Nation four or five years ago, married a squaw and made himself solid with the chiefs, who were about as rascally a set of politicians as could be found. From his lair in the Nation Harrison raided the Kansas border, confining his activities of late exclusively to horses. These he found unquestioning market for among his Indian neighbors, and even in Texas when the local demand was slack.
The sheriff spoke slightingly of Drumwell, where Harrison and his gang were welcomed on account of the money they spent. More than once when the feller, pursuing his ancient enemy, was about to close in on Harrison while at his carousals in Drumwell, the crooks of that town had hidden the scoundrel under their beds and saved his skin.
They were a low breed, the sheriff said; nothing like the old-timers of Abilene, Wichita and McPherson. There was a certain kind of honor among the thieves and gamblers of those once-happy places. Not so in Drumwell. They were a bunch of tin-horn sports and handkerchief gamblers, and the meanest sneak among them was the city marshal, who was Wade Harrison's chief scout.
The little sheriff certainly enlarged mightily in Tom Simpson's regard that sunny afternoon. Not once through that long recital of battles, plots and breathless escapes did he ever identify himself outright as the "feller," or connect himself with any of the moving events by one egotistical upper-case I. The evasion was made with the delicacy of true modesty, not uncommonly the harmonious companion of temperate valor.
The two men left the ranch-house strangers; at dusk they returned to it friends. Each had been given the opportunity to look under the case of the other, at the inner works; each finding there the full-jewelled movement of a man. But they had not discovered the trail of Wade Harrison's band, nor the hiding-place of the notorious scoundrel's body, living or dead. Two homesteaders about three miles from the Ellison ranch had seen them pass, carrying a limp and apparently lifeless man across the saddle. From that point all trace of them was lost.
After the sheriff had driven away on his long journey to the county seat, there was another conference around the big dining-table in the kitchen. Mrs. Ellison was in a pessimistic mood, oppressed by a fear of revengeful reprisals by the outlaw's followers. She expected them to return, burn the buildings, drive off every hoof of livestock on the place and take bloody revenge for the defeat they had suffered there.
She did not reveal these fears emotionally, but the cloud of apprehension made her words seem almost prophetic. Under the shadow of this overhanging dread everything looked dark, even the proposed venture on the business of collecting bones.
"It seemed to me, as I thought it all over this afternoon, that you children just as well expect to make your fortune buyin' eggs as sellin' bones," she said.
"We don't expect to make a fortune, mother," Eudora set her right gently. "Only to lay the foundation of it." This she tacked on brightly, smiling across at Tom Simpson, who nodded, and made a little stair-step building movement with his hand, as if to illustrate how their fortune would grow from the small beginning of bones.
"Just so," he said heartily. "There are plenty of historical precedents for fortunes founded on bones. Very auspicious beginning, I should say."
"You can laugh about it, you two young ones," Mrs. Ellison said, shaking her head sadly, "but I've seen more fortunes turn to bones on this range than ever started out of them."
"But things have changed, mother," Eudora argued. "We're down to bones, nothing but bones, and when you can market your misfortune, I say hop to it."
"Yes, we've got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars layin' out there on the range represented by bones," Mrs. Ellison sighed. "They're scattered all the way from here to the Cimarron, and you two couldn't find enough of them to pay back one percent on what that herd of living cattle represented."
"We're not going to confine oureslves to the Block E brand when it comes to bones, mother," Eudora said with her big, boyish grin. "All bones look alike to us."
"Let these poor, good-for-nothing homesteaders have 'em," Mrs. Ellison counseled, with a flash of the old range enmity against farmers. "Bless your innocent hearts, you two couldn't make a hundred dollars between now and Christmas, picking up bones and haulin' them down to Drumwell at five dollars a ton."
"We'll get more than that," Eudora declared. "Tom knows a man in Kansas City who buys them; we're going to sell them direct."
"A hide man," Tom nodded. "I got to know him through the affinity of the craft."
"I guess you mean the smell, Tom," Mrs. Ellison said, smiling in spite of the clouds when she remembered the tan-yard of her youth. "Even if you got twice that much you'd be a long time gettin' rich. It's a good two-days' haul from here to Drumwell, and you can't take more than a jag over these roads. Besides, it will be plain murder for us to let Tom go down to that nest of thieves, with old Wade Harrison's gang layin' for him. I'll not be guilty of it; I'm not going to let him go."
The two young ones knew she had come to the core of her objection with that. Both of them had thought of that menace to their undertaking, but both had minimized it, in the confident way of youth with what seems insuperable obstacles to the old. For youth is the fortune-builder; earth's singing pioneer.
"There'll be no difficulty in that quarter," Tom assured her with cheerful face. "That sheriff is a very competent little man; he'll be keeping the road clear."
"Yes, any time you look to the sheriff, or anybody else, to clear the road for you!"
Mrs. Ellison discounted the implication of protection, knowing it was as far from Simpson's thoughts as her own.
In spite of her high opinion of his valor and sufficiency, Mrs. Ellison said she would feel like an accomplice in case anything happened to him while engaged in their purely selfish business. For Tom was not stopping there to enter into any such onery traffic as selling bones on his own account, she knew, but out of his generous desire to give two lone women a hand.
To this Tom made denial with a show of injury. His motives were entirely selfish, he declared; and as far as being a mere accessory to the bone business, he was going to be the prime mover. He was going to assume entire responsibility for it, and the sole management, from that moment, so that nobody could feel answerable for him. If there were risks on the road, they would be his risks; or rows, they would be his affairs, let them end as they might.
Eudora heard him with glowing cheeks and admiraation in her eyes, which was not dimly reflected in her mother's face. Mrs. Ellison shook her head and sighed, making a poor pretense of yielding against her judgment, proud to have a man around the place again who could put his foot down and stand on it where he planted it.
"You'll have your way, Tom Simpson," she said, shaking her head more in proud approval than distant censure of his determination.
Fear seemed to be a weak and unfounded thing in the force of this young stranger's masterful way, and if Mrs. Ellison's heart was quickened by the hope that her fortune might, indeed, rise again from its bones, it was not the only heart that was going fast, and leaping hurdles of time and trouble, beside the big table in the Block E ranch-house that October night.