Cherokee Trails/Chapter 18
"Where's the feller that belongs to that horse?" the sheriff asked, indicating the saddled animal, which had retreated discreetly beyond the zone of danger and was grazing calmly.
"Over there," Simpson replied, indicating the direction. "His name's Noah. That's all the particulars I can give you of him, Mr. Sheriff."
The sheriff and Wallace rode over to investigate the condition of Noah, who could be seen lying almost hidden in the tall grass. They approached him cautiously, guns out. Almost immediately the sheriff turned back, Wallace going after the horse, which was shy of his approach, and ran. Wallace was tight after it, swinging his rope, when the sheriff joined Simpson.
"It looks like you shot them horses on up the trail," said the sheriff, his eyes on the signs.
"One of them, a chap named Dan, got by," Simpson explained briefly. "He's after them."
"You and that boy come on when he ketches that horse," the sheriff directed. With the words he was off, hot on the trail of the man who was following the horses.
Wallace was not long in bringing up the horse, which appeared to be a very good animal, but not in the class with the one Simpson had lost. Tom transferred his rifle-scabbard, saddle-roll and captured belt and pistol to the remount, hopped into the saddle and started after the sheriff.
"One of them got by me, the sheriff's gone after him," he explained.
Wallace demurred about rushing off like that.
"Say, Tom," he said in astonishment, "you ain't a-goin' to leave your good saddle on that dead horse, air you?"
"It don't belong to me—I don't want to burden myself with it."
"Well, if it's all the same to you, then," said Wallace, one leg tentatively over the saddle, a polite request for permission in his ingenuous face.
"Help yourself," Tom granted, curbing his impatience to be away after the sheriff.
Wallace had the saddle off in two jerks of a lamb's tail and was up again with it in front of him.
"I hate to see a good saddle throwed away," said he, frugally reflective as if he had seen it done in his time. "This here one's worth sixty dollars, cold money. But that's a Block E horse, Tom,"—quizzically puzzled; "how come your horse and somebody else's saddle?"
"I stole it," Tom explained, directly to the point.
"The hell you did! From that gang down on the Salt Fork?"
"But I'll give you a bill of sale for it if your conscience"
"Conscience hell! I ain't got no conscience. That saddle's worth a million dollars to me now!"
Carrying the saddle didn't appear to encumber Wallace in the least. He loped on beside Simpson, silent quite a little while, so overcome by the flock of thoughts set flying in his head by Simpson's explanation, which was more a confession than a boast, he hadn't words enough to go with them. But that was not a state that endured long with Wallace, who was, above all, a wordy man.
"Me and the sheriff we struck your trail at daylight this morning, away back there at the edge of the woods. We knew you'd got away with them horses, but we couldn't figger how in the hell you done it, Tom."
Wallace turned his sharp eye questioningly, with such an inquisitive look that Simpson could see curiosity was hurting him.
"Blind luck," said Tom. "We'd better hit it up—one of that gang got by me."
"Oh, he'll be all right," Wallace replied with comfortable assurance. "One man ain't goin' to keep Sheriff Treadwell busy more'n a minute or two. That's the speediest little feller with a gun in seven states."
"More speed to him!" Tom said fervently, thinking with a surge of gratitude of that moment when the sheriff galloped up and began to shoot. "How did you two come to be together on this job, Wallace?"
"I was down here scoutin' after some strays. He was headin' hell-bent after you, and I ast him to depytize me and let me go along. It don't do no good to be a dep'ty down here, but if a feller had a conscience, you know it might set easier if he had to fork out his iron and plug somebody. You remember I had a grudge agin that gang myself, Tom."
"You sure had, old feller."
"The sheriff he was skirtin' the timber, aimin' to take a cut through by an old loggin' road he knew, but it got so damn dark he couldn't find it. We camped there, and started on at daylight. A little way along we hit your trail."
"But how in the seven kingdoms did you know it was mine?"
"The sheriff knew by the tracks it was the same bunch of horses them fellers run off, and he knew they wouldn't be headin' 'em north, not all together and right away, anyhow. He said you'd got 'em away from them fellers, and we knew by the tracks made since the rain that they was after your skelp, old feller. Simple as the snoot on your face. So we bucked into 'er and come on hell-bent, I'm here to say!"
"You were damn well welcome!" Tom said fervently.
"Don't mention it," Wallace requested lightly, dismissing all thought of obligation with the words.
They overtook Sheriff Treadwell about five miles from the scene of the skirmish, as he called it. He was waiting for them, holding a riderless horse by the reins. There was nobody else around. Off a little way the horses grazed beside the trail, all of them there, according to Tom's hasty estimate. Sheriff Treadwell said they were still about three miles inside the Nation.
"It's nice to ketch them fellers over the line this way," he said. "It saves the county a lot of expense."
Wallace said they'd hit one of Coburn's cow-camps about nine or thirteen miles north of the line; they could make it there by chuck-time, which would be a handy hour, as far as he was concerned, personal and private, to arrive.
They got the horses under way, the sheriff's weather eye on the saddled one running with them. He asked no questions about the animal, and Wallace, restrained by the delicacy that most men of his calling felt in those perilous days about prying into another's purely personal affairs, held his tongue, although Simpson saw it was bulging in his mouth like a bale of hay.
"That's the horse I rode down," he explained. "It belongs to a man by the name of Waco Johnson. I'd been down to Drumwell on it, so it escaped the raid."
"Oh, that's the one," said the sheriff. "The feller they shot in the leg."
"I was wonderin' if that old cuss rambled down here and you had to take a gun to him," Wallace said. "Is he over at the Block E?"
"I left him there," Tom replied.
"Yes," the sheriff said, "he'll hang up there some time. He hadn't come to when I was past there day before yesterday evening."
Wallace was greatly interested in Waco Johnson's adventures since Coburn fired him, and pleased to learn that he had found a harbor in such kind hands as Mrs. Ellison and her daughter.
"Coburn missed it a mile when he thought that feller was crooked," Wallace declared, although he had not been above suspecting Waco himself not two minutes before. "Some of the boys suspicioned him, but I said hell! if a man's crooked because he goes on a toot and misses the train I ort 'a' been hung ten years ago and severial times since."
Wallace chuckled, but not at the review of these many deserved hangings for his train delinquencies, as it was speedily revealed.
"Coburn thought him and you framed it up to rob him of that dang money, Tom. He swore you and Waco was old trail pardners; said you framed it for him to miss the train and you to take his place so you could git away with that fool gripsack. He's kind of huffy yit 'cause it didn't turn out that way."
"Damn fool!" said Sheriff Treadwell, spitting contemptuously as only a sheriff can.
"He turned me a high compliment, thinking I had brains enough to plot out a thing like that," Tom said, but looking so grim and humorless that Wallace thought he saw trouble ahead for Sid Coburn.
"Well, you know it's natural for a man to suspicion a stranger when he hops the wrong horse and rides off with thirty-five thousand dollars," Wallace explained placatively. "I guess it's cowman nature to feel kind of sore, too, when he rides home and finds a feller's beat him there with that money, down to the last bal'-facted dime. Well sir, even Sid's wife had the laugh on him over the way you beat him home with that money, Tom. And I'm here to tell you when you make that woman laugh, you've done somethin', pardner."
"I believe you," Tom agreed solemnly.
"You can make a skinned cow laugh easier 'n you can that woman."
"She's got a streak of Cherokee in her," the sheriff remarked significantly. He said it as he might have disclosed the fact that she was afflicted with epilepsy, or some unfortunate ailment that cast a continual shadow over her days. Knowing it, one must excuse her faults.
"She's got a streak of sompin' a foot wide," Wallace said. "Ever I marry a woman I'll marry me a simple one, but what I git one that can laugh."
"Plenty of 'em to be had," the sheriff said.
"Simple ones, or laughin' ones?" Tom inquired, perking up as keenly all on a sudden as if he might be interested in the market.
"Both," the sheriff replied sententiously. "Take Eddie Kane's wife, down at Drumwell. When that woman opens her mouth to laugh you can see her lights. Her and Coburn's wife they're the limit of their kind, and between 'em—well, I guess there's some sensible ones between. You take Eudora Ellison: she grins, something like a man. I never heard a ha-ha out of that girl as long as I've knew her, and that's just about all her life."
Which would have made that young lady about five years old if it had been true. Sheriff Treadwell measured time by events, instead of years.
"I've never saw her," Wallace said, a little wistfully, a bit regretfully, as for something passed out of his province for good and all.
"You've got my permission to go and call on her," the sheriff bantered.
"She'd burn a brand on my old hide I couldn't git off with lye," Wallace said. "No big cowman's daughter ain't trainin' around with no bobtailed puncher the same as me."
"She was redheaded over the way that gang raided their place,"—the sheriff addressed himself to Tom—"I thought I'd have to hog-tie that girl to keep her from comin' with me. She certainly was redheaded and a rairin'."
"Um-m-m," said Simpson, his lips clamped hard around the stem of his empty pipe.
Sheriff Treadwell, seeing how it was, offered a red tobacco box. Doubtless it was not any higher grade than sheriffs usually smoke, but to Tom Simpson's palate and hard-pulled nerves it was equal to the best that ever came from old England with the king's warrant on the can. The grimness of his features relaxed; his eyes beamed so friendly and appreciative of his company that Sheriff Treadwell thought for a little while he was going to grin.
They made Coburn's camp a little after noon, just as the cowboys and the boss were licking their tin plates. Coburn was so surprised to see that big band of horses coming up from the direction of the Nation that his eyes could have been scraped off his face with a shingle. He didn't give Simpson what could have been called a brotherly greeting, not knowing what part he had taken in the enterprise, whatever it was. While the cook was frying a fresh batch of steak in a pot of grease the sheriff enlightened the cowman. Wallace, meantime, was putting the story into the ears of his comrades, Tom Simpson sitting apart on the saddle he had taken from his horse, smoking that delectable plug-cut out of the sheriff's red box.
So up bounced Sid Coburn and came stalking over to where Tom sat smoking, direct as a man who had a crow to pick. He stuck out his hand while yet ten feet away. Tom rose and met him with a demonstration no more reserved.
"Simpson, I take off my hat to you," Coburn said, and he took it off with the declaration, jerking it as if it had long offended him and he was done with the imposition. "I done you wrong—I was as mean as a yeller dog—but, by God!"—looking Tom hard in the eye—"I didn't steal that horse!"
"You couldn't make me believe you did if you swore to it," Tom returned, with earnest and sympathetic expression, although rather equivocal words.
The point of that joke, intended or unintended, hit the spot in that camp at once. The men roared, and Coburn roared, but Tom Simpson stood as solemn and hard-featured through the gust of merriment as if his face had frozen that way, beyond the hope of any warming ray of laughter ever to thaw it out again.
Coburn looked the horses over, the cowboys looked them over, as if they were strange creatures brought from unknown lands. To their questions on how he came to get away with them, right from under that gang's noses, Tom replied that it was a greenhorn's luck, he guessed. They looked at him queerly, letting it go at that.
It was not until after he had been on the road with the sheriff some time, after a good rest at camp, that Simpson told how chance had rushed his plans to a head in the horsethieves' stable and forced his hand. He described the place, and the sheriff said yes, he knew that ranch. It was Henry Werner's place, and Henry Werner was married to a half-breed squaw, sister of Wade Harrison's wife. Harrison's hangout was farther down the river, somewhere back in the hills, just where no peace officer from Kansas ever had been able to find out. But it didn't matter now; that would be the end of the gang. Wade Harrison was dead and in hell; old Noah Hays, his chief lieutenant, was dead and in hell; Dan Vinson, sneaking cut-throat—and he was a literal cut-throat, the sheriff declared—was dead and in hell. Hell was pretty well full of horsethieves that day.
There was an end of it, the way it looked to Sheriff Treadwell, and Tom Simpson said he hoped so, and that he could have peace now to go on hauling bones. They jogged on until evening, and made camp, feeling secure and fairly happy, although Tom was troubled by the thought of old Noah Hays lying down there in the grass unburied. He asked the sheriff if he had sent anybody back to attend to Hays and Vinson, at which inquiry the sheriff appeared to be a little indignant.
"No, that's out of my jurisdiction," he said. "The county wouldn't pay for it, and who in the hell would? Oh well,—" a shade more humanely—"don't worry over them fellers, somebody'll find 'em. I don't care about anybody's carcase but old Wade Harrison's. If we could find that feller's carcase you'd have twenty-five hundred to three thousand dollars reward money comin' to you, Tom. But you never could collect it without the corpus delecti, and them fellers they've made sure nobody'll ever be able to prove that. Without the corpus delecti you couldn't do a thing, Tom—not a damn thing."