Cherokee Trails/Chapter 23
For all the advice Waco had given on methods of handling half-broken draft animals, Simpson found himself lacking in a most essential one on the road that day, namely: a prescription for the cure of a balky horse.
Undoubtedly there is no more vexatious animal living than a balky horse, especially one that is swift and eager at times but stops short in the most critical situations and stands meanly unresponsive to force and persuasion alike. Such a horse Tom found he had in his team, a comely, chunky roan gelding with that facial distinction described among horses as well as men as a roman nose.
Due to the eccentricities of this beast, Simpson covered little more than half the distance between the ranch and Drumwell the first day. According to the inscrutable rules of balky horses the world over, among which there appears to be a close brotherhood, with rules and regulations like any labor union, this animal frequently did his share, and more, on hills, leaning to the collar manfully, only to stop in stubborn defiance when he reached the top. Again, he would come up short on level ground, where the pressure of the collar on his shoulders would not have mashed a fly.
Tom tried out all the remedies he ever had heard of, such as strapping up a fore leg, leaving the fellow only three to stand on, which appeared to be quite sufficient for his purpose. Sometimes he went on when released from this mild punishment, more often he shook his head in haughty defiance, not at all unlike Tom Simpson's own expression of high aloofness from the petty things of life. Then Tom stuffed the striker's ears with grass, and cinched his belly hard with a rope, which he might as well have tied around himself for all the effect it had on the refractory beast. When it got ready to go, it went, always with a headlong suddenness that upset the balance of all concerned, in a manner bolting, with ears back, teeth clenched on the bit, and a general expression of desperation.
Frequently the horse held the load up half an hour before taking a notion to go on. Owing to these many delays Simpson found himself a good fifteen miles from town when he made camp, although he had pushed on until after dark. The balky horse's method had kept the horses fresh, at any rate, trying as it was to the patience of the driver.
Next morning things started off happily, that being, apparently, the day set aside by the balky horse for labor without protest. It was one of those bright, invigorating mornings which lifts a man's spirits until he minimizes his liabilities and frequently puts an unlawful valuation on his prospects. All hopes take on the color of the day at such times, perhaps due to the present physical comfort and beauty which autumn lavishes upon the travail-eased earth. A man is beguiled from speculation upon the worst phases of his existence by luxurious dreams of things to come.
So it was with Tom Simpson riding on his load of bones, although he did not allow himself to believe the balky horse had experienced a reformation that would hold a great while. Every hour gained without a stop was at least three miles more on the way. At the rate he was going, Tom calculated on reaching town about noon.
In gratifying variance of his form, the troublesome horse kept steadily on. When he set to it earnestly that way there was not a better animal in the team. Tom forgave him much of yesterday's annoyance on account of the gratifying willingness to today. It was a little past noon when he came in sight of town, the southern end of the road being the rougher, a sight which dispelled the pleasant speculations of the morning and brought him straight down to the ground.
Yet Tom Simpson had seen trouble sufficient to know that it will come along fast enough without running ahead, even speculatively, to encounter it. What was to come, if anything, in that shape, would be the contrivance of somebody else. He had not driven there hunting trouble, although he had come heeled to meet it. His plan was to drive to the unloading place, leave his bones, pull up before a store like a man with a clear conscience and well within his rights, make his purchases and get out of town as quickly and quietly as dignity would permit.
There was a stretch of road, half a mile or more, leading into Drumwell as straight as the surveyor's transit could draw it, designed, one might believe, as a special straightaway for cowboys to put on a spurt and make a demonstration of speed and racket as they rode into the place of refreshment. This piece of road had a slight downhill tip into town, where it met the main and only street at right angles in front of Eddie Kane's hotel and bar. Simpson let the horses swing along at a brisk trot down this finishing stretch while he buckled on the guns which had hung on the dashboard up to that time.
The balky horse was the liveliest stepper in the team, as he had been all morning. It appeared as if he knew he was approaching the end of the journey and desired to make a favorable impression on all beholders, after the manner of hypocrites everywhere. So Simpson came bowling into town rather gallantly, perched high on the spring seat, a gun on each hip-bone, the rifle beside him, a shining mark for anybody who might have the mean inclination to take a shot at him.
Nobody appeared to be so inclined, although his arrival was not without spectators. It seemed as if he was to go on his way unmolested. Certainly he knew nothing of the prowlers from the Nation, his only conceivable source of trouble lying in the city marshal and such friends as might step out in his behalf. The marshal was not in sight, nor anybody else who appeared to have more than a passing interest, such as might rest on any bone man with a good lively team.
To come to the unloading place the agent had assigned him beside the house track, as that particular switch is called in railroad parlance, Simpson had to make a right turn when entering the street and drive across the main line of railroad. All went as smoothly as a greased slide until the wagon was squarely across the main-line track, where the balky horse was taken with the notion of showing the town how mean he could be, and what a spectacle he could make of the creature who posed as his master on the load of bones.
Tom knew there was nothing he could do to make the stubborn cuss move on. The best thing, he decided, was to take him out, tie his mate's end of the double-tree and drive the short distance without him. Accordingly he got down and began to unhitch the rebel.
At that point in the balky horse's act the station agent entered. He came on with spirit, adding considerably to the entertainment of the small crowd of men and boys who had collected out of the town's apparently barren possibilities in surprisingly short time. They wondered why a man would want to unhitch his team and leave his wagon straddle of an active piece of railroad like that.
"Git that wagon off of there!" the agent yelled, his voice cracked by what seemed to be a sense of outrage against his dignity. "Don't you see that board? Git 'em to hell off of there!"
He pointed to the semaphore signal, a red sheetiron contrivance at the end of a rod protruding to the edge of the platform from above the depot's bay window. Tom looked at it, curiously interested, it seemed.
"Very pretty," he said.
The bystanders laughed, a derisive haw-haw directed at the agent like a volley of excrement, station agents being almost invariably unpopular men in towns the size and stamp of Drumwell. This set the agent at Tom with redoubled charge of authority.
"She's due in less 'n a minute," he said, his shallow passion splitting about equally between anger and fear. "He's got to git to that tank,"—apparently making a change in the sex of the approaching or impending thing which might have been confusing to anybody but a railroader, who would have known he was speaking of the train in one instance, the engineer in the other—"and how in the hell's he goin' to do it with that damn wagon on the track? Git 'em to hell off of here, I tell you—git 'em off!"
Tom was calmly, unhurriedly, unhitching the balky horse. He looked up with humorous twinkle in his eyes.
"Send it along," he said. "Maybe a locomotive could move this horse; I've tried about everything else."
The crowd laughed again, a note of friendliness in the sound for this calm young man who didn't hop any faster for all the agent's wrath. Some of the older men offered suggestions, some help, the latter quite in order, the former wasted wind. Tom gave one of them a rope and asked him to tie the end of the double-tree back to the axle, threw the tugs across the balky animal's back and started to lead him out.
But no; the horse had other plans. He braced his legs and set back against the pull on his bit. The crowd slapped him with hats, jabbed him in the belly with thumbs, twisted his tail, and the frantic agent, his eyes as big as eggs, got behind him and pushed. Wasted effort, all. The horse stood there maliciously stubborn, and the train against which the red board was turned came around a curve a quarter of a mile or so north of the station, with such a head of speed it looked as if nothing could save that load of bones, to say nothing of adding those of four pretty good horses to the collection.
The crowd broke, clearing the track, and the agent, flapping his arms in terrified signal to stop, went galloping down the road to meet the train. The engine came to a stop, Tom Simpson standing at the horse's head, hand on its bridle, with nicely calculated thrill for all beholders, about five feet from the wagon, the engineer leaning haughtily out of the cab, crabbed as if he regretted there was anything in law or morals which restrained him from making a mess of the whole affair.
It was beneath his station to speak to a man so low as a driver of a bone wagon, or any wagon whatever, there being a deep jealousy among railroad engineers against all people who guide the course of anything that moves on wheels. Not so the conductor, who came jogging forward in that little goat-trot peculiar to passenger train conductors, the gesticulating agent with him. The agent was almost wordless at this awful sacrilege in blocking the way of Number Five, or Five, as he called it, which was a prince among railroad trains in his eyes, although only a little plug of three coaches to everybody else. But there was that granger with his load of bones, blocking the way to the water tank and the station, and the agent and conductor were as vindictive against him as if the train had a thousand miles to go to get to its journey's end instead of a hundred yards.
"Git to hell out o' there! git—tohellout o'there!" the conductor ordered, spacing his words farther as they ran out to the end of his command. "Don't stand there holdin' up this train!"
"Oh, very well," said Tom, understanding the horse's view of force and duress that moment better than ever before.
But how to get to hell out of there, or to anywhere else out of there, was the question. The passengers were leaving the train, not caring much where it stopped, many of them gathering around to enjoy the spectacle of a balky horse holding up a train. Tom had tried everything he knew on that horse; if anybody had a remedy to offer that would move him before his time, suggestions were then in order.
The conductor said here, some of you fellers—speaking to all assembled—git a hold of this damn wagon and roll it to hell off of this damn track. But conductors were even less popular than agents in Drumwell, where most of the male inhabitants had memories of high-handed dealings over fares and excess fares, and the question of taking dogs on board. They gave him cold looks and no assistance.
It looked as if the conductor would have to stoop to common labor himself to remove that obstruction, when Tom Simpson, nonchalantly striking a match on the sole of his boot, held the little flame to the balky horse's belly and moved him with a grunt and much twisting of the tail, and a look of wide-awake surprise on his romannosed countenance.
Tom had much pleasure in his discovery as he climbed to the seat and drove his bones clear of the track, and on to his unloading place, without a look behind to see the engineer range up to the water tank or the agent go hopping along the platform to get a truck for the trunks and express.
Tom was not greatly surprised to find the place where he had left his first load empty. There was not a bone, not a horn, nor even a tooth out of a jawbone. The mark of them was there in the soft ground, as well as man tracks and wagon tracks. A cattle car, partly loaded with bones, stood up the track a little way, its freight showing between its slatted siding. All evidence bore out the suspicion that his bones had been appropriated to help out that load not many hours before his arrival.
This time Tom did not take the seat off the wagon, but pushed it up near the dashboard, ready to move in an emergency without leaving it behind. He unloaded quickly, unhampered by even an onlooking citizen, public interest in him having passed on when he cleared the track. By the time he had emptied the wagon the train had pulled down below the station, where it lay on the dead end of track like a little chunky lizard in the sun. Everybody had gone from the depot, and the town had lapsed into its usual daytime state, the plaintive yelling of cowboys mingling with the lonesome lowing of cattle where the noisy work of loading was going on at the pens. These loading pens were on the other side of the lumber yard, not visible from Simpson's situation behind the depot. He had not one spectator of his homely activities.
Leaving his team standing, Tom went to the car which he had very good reason to believe had gobbled up his first jag of bones, as Mrs. Ellison had called the load. The car was only partly loaded; its side door stood open to receive additional freight. Waiting for him to bring it, Tom thought. Tom examined several skulls in the pile that blocked the door, then returned hastily to his wagon, drove up to the car and began loading it from the heap that lay within arm's reach.
Tom's indignation rose with every bone that he threw into the wagon. There was little use asking the agent who was loading that car, for the splay-footed coward would shield the thief, but it was due to him, Tom Simpson, to proclaim to the skulking citizenry of that town that his property must rest there untouched. He was in the car, throwing out bones with a clatter equal to that of the living cattle marching into the chutes not far away, when the one man above all others whom Simpson desired to meet that day appeared.
Simpson had heard him coming from the direction of the lumber yard, his feet noisy on the cinders of the roadbed, his manner of coming betraying his interest in that car of bones. Tom was in the door when he appeared. He was a large man, coatless, a wide brown hat shading his scowling eyes. From the little canvas apron he wore Tom knew he was the lumber dealer, the bone monopolist of the town.
There was an expression of petulant injury, rather than anger or surprise, on the man's harsh-featured brown face. He stood a moment chewing his tobacco, running a quick eye over Tom's accouterments, taking in the rifle standing inside the door.
"What in hell do you think you're doin' in that car?" he inquired, with all the sarcasm he could lay on the words, as if he would have it sound like a mistake had been made when he knew he was being robbed.
"Recovering stolen property," Simpson replied bluntly.
"You're talkin' kind of careless, it seems to me, pardner. You git to hell out of that car and put them bones back, and you do it damn quick!"
"I left a load of bones beside the track a few days ago, and I come back to find them in your car," Tom told him, not greatly moved by the blustering order. "When I've loaded that wagon I'll come out—unless you get too damn nasty about it."
"You'll have a sweet time provin' title to a load of bones!"
"Not at all," Tom corrected him. "I expected some damn thief would try to get away with them, and I marked a lot of them—here—look at that, you bloomin' pirate!"
Tom tossed a skull across the wagon. On the forehead it bore the pencilled brand of the Block E ranch. The lumberman threw it down with a sneer, but a flush that was not all due to virtue overspread his face.
"You've had time to mark a hundred of 'em," he said. "You can't git away with that in this man's town!"
The man's manner was portentous of trouble. He spoke with that big threat, that bullying certainty, of a boy who knows his parent will take up his row. Tom did not stop to argue the case any longer. He resumed the job of filling his wagon with bones, the lumberman watching him with malignant scowl a little while. He appeared to be standing there to get his resentment up to the fighting pitch by witnessing this high-handed work of a man who would not conform to the established usage of that town, under which a man pocketed his loss and rode away, charging it up to the expense of a sucker's education.
Presently the lumberman went away, perhaps to get his gun, maybe to summon his friends, Tom thought. Whatever his intention, it was not a pacific one. He would not throw down his hand and confess himself a thief and a coward before the ribald citizens of that town. Trouble was coming, and it would be there pretty soon. This would be the final show-down for him, Tom Simpson knew.
Simpson finished his load quickly, piling the bones high as indemnity for the labor he had spent in their recovery, drove to his heap beside the track and began to unload. He kept a wary eye out for the first hostile approach, surprised that they were so long in coming.
This surprise gave way to troubled conjecture when nothing happened. He worked down to the bottom, rearranged his seat, left the horses standing and went to the depot to order his car. The agent received the order sulkily, as if to imply that the railroad didn't want his business any more than the lumberman relished his rivalry in the merry market of osseous remains.
As matters stood, Simpson didn't see much future to that business just then. He believed the lumberman would clean up his pile of bones the minute he left town. The only way to meet such competition would be for him or Waco to remain there all the time, which would not be profitable unless they could work up a bigger trade among the homesteaders than promised.
True, they had enough bones contracted for, with what he had on the ground and would bring the next trip, when Waco would be able to handle a load, to fill a car. His customers were to deliver to Drumwell on the day he had ordered the car set, but he had grave doubts now whether that bald-faced agent intended to place the order at all. It looked like a hopeless prospect for bones.
Thus turning the several obstacles of discouragement in his mind, Tom went back to the wagon and drove across the track into the street, the gap in his wheel-team unfilled, the balky horse in tow at the endgate. For the trip home he intended to rearrange the horses, move the lead-team back and hitch the willing horse by a singletree to the end of the tongue, with a rope around the balky fellow's neck behind. There he could travel with the rest of them or drag, according to his perverse inclination. If he hung back and got his fool head pulled off it would be a good riddance of the pestiferous pelter.
Tom was puzzled, but not betrayed into any feeling of false security, by the disappearance of the lumberman and the apparent indifference of everybody in town to his presence. The marshal had not come forward to display the authority he was fonder of asserting than he was successful in enforcing, in Tom Simpson's case, at least.
Many horses were hitched in front of stores and restaurants, cowboys were jangling up and down the board sidewalks with spurs on their heels, but a few moments out of their saddles, their sweating horses close by, while mixed groups of cowpunchers and farmers chatted amiably here and there.
The cowboys laughed at this granger's queer way of hitching a harnessed horse behind his wagon and leaving that comical gap in his wheel-team. Some of them guyed him goodnaturedly as he drove down the street looking for a place to hitch, but drew in their horns quickly when they got a nearer look at the face of the driver and the two guns under his elbows. They stopped to discuss him in speculative wonder, watching him as he drove slowly along looking for a space between horses and wagons to accommodate his lengthy outfit.
There was space in front of the Railroad Restaurant, the place conducted by Eddie Kane's more or less estimable mother-in-law, a family tie of which Simpson was wholly unaware. He was firmly fixed on steak and potatoes, and that joint looked about as good as any. There he drew up along the edge of the sidewalk with his cumbersome wagon, ponderously, like a steamboat making its berth, and as he threw his leg over the side to get down and hitch, the lumberman and the city marshal popped suddenly around the corner of the calaboose and began to shoot.
It was no time for argument, or consideration of legal aspects of his situation; it was the pinch between life and death. Simpson grabbed the rifle from the seat beside him, the bullets of the pair slapping the planks of the restaurant's high false front. He heard somebody squeal inside the place, the front door slam violently, as he cut loose.
The two men were diagonally across the broad street, about two hundred feet away. At Simpson's first shot the city marshal dropped in his tracks, and went rolling a little way as if he had fallen on a hillside. The lumberman ran behind the calaboose when his companion fell, and the gust of shooting ended as suddenly as it had begun.