Cherokee Trails/Chapter 19
Next morning early, while they were still miles from the Ellison ranch, Sheriff Treadwell parted company with Simpson. There was where he turned off, the sheriff said; it was a short cut to the county seat. Simpson, more disturbed by the prospect of driving that band of horses into the neighborhood alone than he had been concerned over the desperate business of recovering them, protested vehemently at being deserted this way.
"Oh, I say now!" he expostulated, feeling hurt at the sheriff's slipping out of it. "You can't leave me with all this business on my hands this way, Treadwell."
"I didn't recover 'em," the sheriff disclaimed bluntly, as if some taint of disgrace attended the exploit, "and I ain't goin' to go paradin' through that settlement like the credit was even part mine. I didn't have a damn thing to do with it."
"Oh, I say, now!" Tom protested, feeling as weak and abandoned as if the sheriff had closed the door on his very last hope. "I only started something I couldn't finish. You know very well"
"You'd 'a' cleaned 'em out in five minutes more if me and that cowboy had 'a' kep' out of it," the sheriff declared. "You go on home with them horses, Tom. Hand 'em around among the people they belong to, and if you have any left over let me know. I'll advertise for the owners, and if they don't come forward in due time, they're yours."
"Oh, very well," said Tom, with that little toss of the head, that high and indifferent air, as if he accepted the situation only because it could not be evaded without coming down to the contemptible level of a cad.
They shook hands and parted. Before noon Tom was in the home neighborhood, keeping a sharp lookout for the red-eyed veteran, by whom he desired to spread the news among the homesteaders who had lost in the raid. He did not encounter anybody, however, until passing the home of the lanky neighbor who had been the first to report loss the morning Tom was trailing the thieves.
This man was sitting on the tongue of his useless wagon, which was drawn up in the dooryard of his miserable home, when Tom suddenly rounded a bend in the road, coming from behind a little swell of land, with the horses. The homesteader jumped out of his melancholy brooding, standing dumb with amazement for a moment. Then he let out a whoop that seemed to jar his loose-jointed shack open, releasing a vast number of tow-headed children and an anxious, slatternly flat woman, who came pouring out into the yard.
"He's got 'em! he's got 'em!" the settler yelled, starting in a long lope for the road, where Tom was rounding up the horses to a stop.
The homesteader dashed among the horses without a word, wild-eyed and eager, cutting out the animals which belonged to him. He worked about the business as desperately as if his opportunity hung on seconds, and one blunder would cost him all. He was panting and sweating when he got them cut out; his lank body was trembling, his face was white. This great and unexpected fortune had unnerved him completely; in a moment he had been elevated from the depths of despair to a plane of independence. He had no words; he could only stare and gasp, one hand on the shaggy withers of a tall, buckskin-colored mare.
He came slowly over to where Simpson sat on his horse looking as stern as if he had caught the homesteader at some unlawful deed. Only the gleam of a smile that played in the young man's eyes assured the settler. He knew this man read his profound gratitude in the very trembling of his hand.
"God A'mighty!" the homesteader said, breathing the exclamation with gasping relief. "If there's ever anything I can do for you, neighbor, let me know. I'd wade through fire to pay the debt I'm under to you for bringin' back them colts."
Tom assured him there was no obligation, and asked him to let the neighbors know that a number of the stolen horses had been recovered, theirs probably among them. The homesteader pointed out several which he recognized, especially those belonging to his neighbor, who was an old soldier with a pension, and could have made it through the winter without his horses.
"But I ain't got any pension, neighbor," the lank man said, lifting his solemn, hollow, worried eyes. "I was with Jo Shelby."
While Simpson was not acquainted with that particular hero of the late civil war, he gathered from the man's way of confessing his past commander that Jo Shelby had been on the losing side. Tom suggested that the pensioner's colts, as the homesteader called them, be left there. The grateful man was glad to assume the responsibility for their delivery, and cut them out accordingly. The beasts were quite willing, even relieved, to stop, worn down to the last strain of endurance as they were by the longest and hardest drive they ever had experienced in their burdened lives.
Not so the Block E mare which had led the band on the homeward trip. She was off at the word, head up, tail out, stepping high and eagerly. She led the herd in at the open gate, as much pride in her bearing as if fully conscious of the dramatic situation, although there was nobody around to witness the triumphant arrival but the wheezy old dog.
He came bounding off the kitchen porch with a show of hostility not at all complimentary to the mare's pride in her achievement, not knowing his own among so many strange ones. The noise he made, together with the trampling of so many hoofs, brought Eudora out of the house like a bumblebee after a haymaker. Mrs. Ellison was a good second. They stopped in amazement at sight of the parade, Eudora poised like a dove on a bough ready to plunge off into flight.
But she had no hesitancy over her course. She flashed to the gate, where Tom Simpson sat the horse that lately had belonged, at least according to the equity of thieves, to Noah Hays, herding the hesitant animals and the strange ones into the barnyard.
"My-y heavens! it's Tom!" Mrs. Ellison exclaimed.
Then she went flying, not so much like a dove, perhaps, as a trim and motherly hen, her arms outspread to welcome the adventurer whom neither ever had expected to see return from the perilous Cherokee trails.
"Why, Tom Simpson! Where on earth did you get all them horses?" Mrs. Ellison asked, unbounded admiration in her animated face for the prowess of this quiet, solemn-featured young man.
Eudora had not spoken. She was standing by the gatepost staring at Tom, the joy and relief pictured so plainly in her face not sufficient to erase the pallor of long watching and heart-breaking anxiety. Tears were tumbling out of her big dark eyes, and she clenched her lips with that queer little puckering look that came into them when she held them hard against a laugh.
"Sheriff Treadwell and a cowboy named Ramsey—Wallace Ramsey, the chap that had the detective badge, you know—helped me out of it. I couldn't have done a thing without their help. As it was, I lost the best one of your horses, Mrs. Ellison."
"Lost your granny!" said Mrs. Ellison. "As long as you're back safe and sound"
"Tom! Tom!" Eudora sprang forward, the ring of pain in her voice, of reproachful alarm. "You're hurt! Look at his hand—look at his hand!"
Tom started, flushing guiltily, and turned the member that had moved Eudora's pitiful alarm to conceal its wounds.
"Scratched it," he said, lamely insufficent in his explanation, which the honest flinching of his eyes made worse. "Excuse me while I unsaddle these beasts."
But Eudora had hold of the hot, swollen hand, which was in a serious condition between neglect and incipient infection. She looked from the wounds to Tom Simpson's eyes, hurting more by her pitying reproach for his attempted deceit than the horsethief's splintered bullet ever had done. Mrs. Ellison was beside her in a moment. She held Tom sternly when, with a confused "Oh, I say, now," he tried to withdraw his hand from their examination.
"Scratched your granny!" Mrs. Ellison said, that female relative always figuring largely in her exclamations of scoffing and depreciation. "You light right down off of that horse, Tom Simpson, and come in and let me get the lead out of them places. If you don't attend to that hand you're in for a peck of trouble with it. Scratched it! Yes, I've seen scratches of that kind too often to be put on that way."
"I'll take care of the horses, Tom; you go on in," Eudora said.
"I couldn't permit it," he replied, so high and mighty it seemed as if they had given him mortal offense.
Nor would he permit it, nor any further argument in the case at all. When he had the horses properly cared for he joined them at the corral gate, actually grinning as if he had accomplished more in overriding their tender concern than in restoring the animals to their rightful owners. But his embarrassment was almost overwhelming when Eudora jerked Noah Hays' belt and gun from under the saddle where he had tried to hide them when he hung it on the fence. He stammered something about a chap losing them, and would not say another word.
To make matters worse for him, Mrs. Ellison, with the stern manner of a prosecutor hunting for evidence, drew the rifle out of the scarred old scabbard and saw where the horsethief's bullet had struck and jammed the trigger. She handed it to Eudora without a word. The two women stood staring at each other, white-faced, speechless, each constructing according to her imaginative capability the story that unimpeachable evidence suggested.
After that they did not question Tom on his adventure or the perils involved. They knew he had been hand to hand with death, and neither of them put the slightest credence in his evasive explanation of the sheriff and cowboy. While Mrs. Ellison probed the wounds in his hand, picking out the slivers of lead with pincers, Tom inquired of Waco Johnson. He was all right. Mrs. Ellison said. He had recovered his senses and his appetite; in about three weeks he would be the same as if nothing had happened to him.
Mrs. Ellison extracted the last bit of lead, squeezed the wounds and applied turpentine without stint. When she had the hand neatly bandaged she said Waco Johnson might be interviewed if Tom desired. He was in a bedroom just off the kitchen, more than likely reading Alice in Wonderland, which Eudora had lent him, and which he declared to be the beatinest book that ever came his way.
"And he's just about the beatinest man I ever run across," Mrs. Ellison declared. "He always asks you how you'd like to be a whale. It's a pleasantry of his, I guess, but it's past me where anybody's complimented by such a fool question as that."
Waco was bolstered up in bed with an overturned kitchen chair and several pillows under his long back. He had not been doing much reading since the first commotion attending Tom's arrival, but he had done more listening than any invalid ought to, considering the result of such fragments as he had caught. He was flushed with excitement when Mrs. Ellison opened the door. She declared on her conscience she believed his fever was coming up, due to smoking.
Waco did not refute the charge against tobacco immediately, nor say anything whatever. He was gripping Tom Simpson's hand, looking at him with the straight eye of a man who understands far more than he has seen or heard. So the two of them remained a moment, in a sort of speechless hand-to-hand embrace. Then Waco:
"No ma'am, it ain't smokin'. I'm bilin' over havin' to lay here like a blame old lady while another man goes out to pay my debts. I couldn't help hearin' you talkin' about Tom's hand. Did they git you anyways bad, pardner?"
"Not at all," Tom said as lightly as his embarrassment could make the words. "Just a few little nicks, due to an awkward accident."
"There was a feller named Noahy, a tall, rangy, ganglin' cuss that looked a good deal like me," Waco said.
He put it more as a question than a flat statement of fact, slanting his words up at the end of it, a bid, hedged with the greatest delicacy at his command, for information on what had happened to Noah.
"Just so," said Tom. He was looking hard out of the window at the side of Waco's bed.
"He's the feller that slammed me with that gun," said Waco, putting his hand up with rueful reminiscence to touch the bandaged hurt.
"I thought he'd be the one," said Tom in abstracted undertone.
Waco looked at him hard again, and put out his hand.
"I wish I could 'a' been along, old feller," he sighed. "But you know how I was fixed."
Waco was too wise to ask questions, knowing there were certain passages of amours and battles in a man's career which the proper kind never discussed. Tom Simpson was of that kind, and Waco had learned all he wanted, for the present at least, to know.
They were not to learn the inside of Tom's exploit until the sheriff came over next day, ostensibly to find out if there were any unclaimed horses, but mainly to unburden himself of any undue credit which he feared Simpson had set down to his account. Even after that the women did not talk to Tom about it: only they looked at him with great tenderness in their eyes, and once in passing him as he sat smoking after the supper dishes were cleared away, Mrs. Ellison laid her hand on his head with a caress so like the touch of kinship that a watery film came suddenly between Tom Simpson's eyes and the lamp.