Cherokee Trails/Chapter 2
That was the best word one could say for Drumwell: it was railroad leavings. In those days the accretions which settled down after the flood of railroad building had passed and quieted, were not the choicest screenings of the earth. They were graduates of one of the roughest schools of experience that men and women ever attended, but a university whose doors closed long ago, its advantages no longer offering to the unsophisticated of the world.
Drumwell flourished in the days of the Cherokee leases, when Kansas and Texas cattlemen first began to feel keenly the encroachment of agriculture upon the range in their own states, a condition which the pioneers of the industry never believed would curtail the unrestricted exercise of their ancient privileges. But that condition had come to pass, squeezing many an old-timer to face the alternative of either quitting business or paying out hard money for the use of grazing-lands, to them an imposition that seemed as unjust as it was unprecedented.
A branch railroad had been built southward from one of the big lines crossing Kansas east and west, down to the Cherokee Nation line. Like a nodule on the root of a legume, Drumwell formed at the end of this crooked line of hastily built railroad, and rose to a peculiarly notorious eminence in its day.
A local fame, to be sure; never so wide-spread as the notoriety of Abilene, Dodge City and Wichita in their formative rawness, nor approaching in any measure the far-spreading fame that came to the town, years and years after the last cowboy had gone his way into the mists, when it elected a woman mayor to rule over it.
The railroad had reached down there after cattle, pausing at the line only because it could not secure a franchise to pass through the Indian lands. It required more of a pull than this particular railroad had, even in those free and easy days, to obtain a grant through the Indian country, so the little branch line sprangled down to the very edge of the forbidden territory and stopped, waiting its day, which came, duly, but not until the fires of adventure had dulled and deadened out of Drumwell's window-panes.
The railroad finished, the construction-gangs went on to other conquests, leaving certain of the camp-followers behind. These people, dropped there like foul settlings out of the turgid, hurrying stream of railroad life, saw prospect of good picking that had begun to pour in from the south even before the loading-pens were completed. It was a big saving in time, and wear and tear, to the cattlemen, that little branch line wandering down to the Nation's edge. There was not much grazing along the trails to the old shipping-points in Kansas; farmers were fencing the country, leaving only dusty streaks.
So it came about that Drumwell's importance descended upon it in a single day, bringing a prosperity to the railroad leavings such as they never had fattened on before. This easy fortune made them arrogant, even though it did not appease the long hunger of their lean years in shifting railroad camps. He was a wise man who left his money behind him when he visited Drumwell, but wise men were few in that time where vice displayed its glittering lure, as they are wanting under the same conditions in this.
At the time of these doings Drumwell was an unlovely hamlet of one street, and that not a long one, which took its beginning from the railroad station, as such towns always have their beginning at the railroad and their ending where unrealized expectations desert them and leave them empty, like an eggshell dropped by a crow when he has sucked it dry. There was always the noise of cattle in it, the smell of cattle, the drift of dust from moving herds.
Drumwell had been fulfilling its primarily useful mission as a loading point for cattle five or six years when the events to be recorded here were shaken out of the handbag of adventure. Its little houses, mainly unpainted, were beginning by this time to appear pitch-drawn, gray; their vertical planking warped by the sun. A few rods back from the railroad the town presented its front, which was assuring to a stranger, the Windsor Hotel on one hand, the Drumwell State Bank on the other.
The hotel was one of the painted exceptions in the town. To be exact, it had been primed for painting, the work stopping there, whether through lack of paint or loss of painter nobody of record ever was curious enough to inquire. This white priming had a streaked appearance where it had been absorbed in places by the softer wood, giving the effect of antiquity so much strived after in these sophisticated times of ours. It was a two-storied structure; large, loose-jointed, altogether unlovely.
On the other hand, the bank was thoroughly, even lavishly, painted, although it needed paint less than any structure in town, being built of sheetiron nailed to studding, flat, squat, with a swaggering square front where the character of the institution was announced in broad letters which could be read half a mile away. The material of which its exterior shell was formed was pressed to resemble solid masonry laid in regular courses. The painter had treated it a granite-gray to further credit this illusion, pencilling in the joints between the hardware stones with white. The pretense was not convincing. It was a bank that would have tempted a burglar with a can-opener. That pleasantry was often directed against its doubly pretentious walls, indeed. For all the present historian knows, the joke may have had its beginning there.
Along the street between its beginning at bank and hotel and its gradual dwindling out to sod huts, tents and open prairie, small business undertakings were established, such as are to be found in any raw little town to-day, except that eating-places outnumbered all the rest. Range men were a hungry tribe; they required flapjacks and oyster stews at all hours of the day and night.
In every town such as Drumwell was at that time, there always was a dominating figure. Here it was not the banker, as one might assume from the prominence of his sign and the meticulous humbug of his tin walls, but Eddie Kane, proprietor of the Windsor Hotel. Kane had come to Drumwell with the other railroad camp-followers. In those days he was a young man in his early thirties, engaged in the innocuous business of running a game known as a baby board. It was an arrangement of blackfaced figures on hinges, familiar even to this day at country fairs, which the player endeavored to knock over with baseballs for a prize, as well as a price. The award was a cigar or cigars, according to the player's success, the price a dime, the number of chances three. And that was the beginning of Eddie Kane's consequence in that place.
The diminutive name which his popularity in the days of his small beginning had won for him, stuck to Kane in the state of his new importance, perhaps because his power was without dignity. He was familiarly addressed by it, spoken of by no other, from the Red River to the Kaw.
Kane was a middle-size, lithe man, suffering from a deformity of some unknown origin—it looked as if from strong acid—that had all but put out his eyes and wried his neck until his head almost rested on his left shoulder. But such sight as there was left to his red-lidded, lashless eyes appeared to be sharpened and concentrated. He could see more devious ways to a dollar than the crookedest cattleman that ever beat the Cherokee chiefs on a lease.
He kept his face cleanly shaved, a thin-featured face, cheeks flaccid against his teeth, outstanding, straining tendons in his stocky strong neck. He was a fair-skinned man, although his hair was black as concentrated pigmentation could make it. He wore it cut short, except for a combing forelock which he parted low over his left eyebrow with carefully turned ends, vain adornment in a countenance as crafty as mischance and inborn disposition ever set upon a man.
All the time the baby board was bringing him in dimes, a jug under his counter was bringing Kane dollars. The laws of the state prohibited the sale of intoxicants, but the law blended out weakly, and fell away to little force, before it reached the Cherokee border. By the time the first herd was driven into the new pens for loading, Kane had a regular bar in the little plank building from which his hotel presently grew.
Kane had married a railroad woman, daughter of a tent-boarding-house keeper, a work-worn gaunt woman who also had prospered on the jug. This boarding-tent daughter was no finer in any particular than her mother, and no better than she should have been, without a doubt. But she was no worse than Kane in her frailest particular, a big-eyed woman, roughly handsome, much loud, raucous laughter in her big Irish mouth. Josie Meehan her name had been. The old hen that brooded her had given up her railroading way and taken root in Drumwell, where she ran a short-order house to catch as many as she might who missed her son-in-law's more thorough mill.
At this historic period of Drumwell's day, the Windsor Hotel was the casino of the town. All of its amusements were centered there, for Eddie Kane was a man who would not countenance competition as long as there was any way of cutting it off, and he was singularly proficient in his ways. There was in his place a long bar of dark polished wood, brass-fitted, mirror-backed, equal to anything to be found between Kansas City and Fort Worth, at which two deft men, aided by Kane himself in a rush, served the nightly throngs. Faro and keno were to be met there, and poker without end.
This bar, with the gambling furniture, occupied one end of the ground floor, the dining-room the other. Between them the entrance hall extended, the front door at one end of it, the staircase at the other. Near this chute of a staircase there was a stubby little counter where the clerk shared duty with Mrs. Kane in receiving and dispatching guests. Capacious folding doors opened from bar to hallway, from hallway to dining-room. At night these were thrown open, tables were removed to the edges of the dining-room floor, and the place became a dance-hall, where a gent might sit down with a lady when he felt leg weary, and sop up as many drinks as his money could pay for and his skin would hold.
This was a spacious room, a row of stocky posts down its center upholding the overhead structure in security against the vibrations set moving by hard-pounding range heels. There were splintered corners on some of them, where the bullets of old rows renewed, and fresh ones springing out of rivalries and jealousies had struck. Human gore is not difficult to remove from the planks of a floor; its dye is not fast and everlasting, in spite of traditions which fix it as unfading. If that had been true, Eddie Kane's floor would have shown its blots from end to end.
Kane held his customers down to a decorum far greater than appeared possible, taking into account the character of these border herdsmen. He was on the watch always, his cocked head over on his shoulder as if he tried to listen to his own heart in the suspicion that it was plotting something against him, his slit-eyes leering through the smoke.
Wildcat never was bred that was quicker on the spring than Eddie Kane; few men came his way who were anything near a match for him in strength. He was his own bouncer, his methods were bare-handed, his execution swift. He went around always in a stiff-breasted white shirt, collarless, without a coat, his vest open, a heavy gold watch-chain swinging in a loop.
A spider of a man, Eddie Kane. He would throw himself into a fracas, grab an aggressor by the neck and waistband of his trousers, rush him to the door and slam him out, contemptuous of his wild-swinging gun. His fame was far-reaching, the respect that it brought him not the least valuable asset in a business where a tough repute was worth more to a man than capital.
The livestock industry was being rapidly pushed off the map in that part of Kansas by the encroachment of the plow, although a few drovers were still holding out in the neighborhood of Drumwell. Westward from that point to the Colorado line things were pretty much as they had been for years. Right around Drumwell homesteaders were filling in rapidly; school and railroad lands, and such of the government domain as remained open between these two divisions, were being bought up, that being a region of deep soil, abundant rain, excellent agricultural possibilities.
Not from these incoming settlers Kane's long bar and boisterous dance-hall drew their support. The big cattle companies and individual drovers holding Cherokee leases, and lying to the west of the little line of railroad that struck southward from the main trunk to end at Drumwell, employed hundreds of riders to care for their herds. There always was a good representation of them in town during the months of cattle activity, either with cattle to load or from long rides after payday with their little wads to squander in one brief riot which exemplified the highest ambition of their barren lives.
These were not the kind of cowboys that are to be met, for example, on the streets of Hollywood to-day, or seen frisking through chivalrous adventures in that romantic shadowland where beauty is ever in distress and virtue continually on the perilous edge of despair. They were slouchy, rancid, unwashed, foul-mouthed, lewd, lascivious, unlettered men. They came to Drumwell as they had come to Abilene, Wichita, McPherson and other Kansas frontier towns in their day, to drink whiskey and dawdle around with parasitical females until they had been parted from their money in the good old way of separating fools from that encumbrance.
There were good men among them, and chivalrous spirits, but taking them as they came they were light chaff of humanity, serving well enough in their time and place. They were no more the intelligence of the cattle business of the old range days than the men who drove the spikes and tamped the ties were the brains of railroad building. Mainly they were men of obscene tongues and shameful lusts, served by despicable panderers among whom Eddie Kane was not notable except in his own little sphere.
On this patronage the little town, which had its beginning in railroad leavings, grew into a lively, flourishing place within a few months of its start. With the coming of a stable population in that vicinity, other business besides that of refreshment took hold in Drumwell until several concerns were thriving, but it is quite safe to say that the combined daily revenues of these establishments did not equal the sum spent over Eddie Kane's bar, and through the solicitation of the "ladies" attached to his house, and in fatuous bets placed on his gambling tables.
Drumwell was a mean place, and proud of its hard distinction. If not everybody in it was jealous of its reputation and tried to live to uphold its peculiar standard, then the exceptions were few. It was a place that timid people shunned unless driven to it through necessity, far away from the seat of the county's authority, a dot on the rim of the map.
The sheriff of the county was under a handicap of many miles, there being scarely one mile between Drumwell and the line of the Cherokee Nation, where federal jurisdiction, only, was recognized. Thieves and murderers always had the bulge on the sheriff; they could get safely down into the Indian country before he could throw a leg over a horse to go after them. It must be admitted that he never was in much of a sweat about making a start.
The official policy with Drumwell, as it had been with other Kansas towns of its kind, was to leave its affairs to the town marshal and itself, to boil out its own wickedness and simmer down to respectability at last. They knew how to handle such towns in Kansas in the good old days.
So it was toward this place that the Bar-Heart-Bar contingent was travelling on the train that day, certain of a good warm welcome when they got to rails' end. And Tom Simpson was sitting with them, smoking his straight-stemmed briar pipe, chin up and sufficient for emergencies, his past behind him, and that nobody's business but his own.