Cherokee Trails/Chapter 25
Waco Johnson was right about it: Eudora Ellison would not let Tom Simpson die. Mrs. Ellison arrived in Drumwell while the alcoholic bottled goods were still burning blue in the ruins of Eddie Kane's bar, having hitched a team of wild young horses to the buckboard when Eudora failed to return home, making the drive in six hours.
By that feat Mrs. Ellison won Waco's unspeakable admiration. He was utterly unable to express himself. All he could do was make a hissing noise through his teeth, like a gander, and stare at the wild team with a great amount of white showing in his eyes.
In the rooms back of Mrs. Meehan's restaurant, where she lodged certain respectable trade, being a stickler for morality outside her traffic with the jug, the two women set up their camp to raise the siege that death had laid against Tom Simpson's life. He lay unconscious four days, from a blood clot formed by the concussion of the bullet that had "creased" his temple. When his senses slowly cleared as the clot was absorbed, the doctor said he was over the hill.
The coroner, attended by Sheriff Treadwell, came to Drumwell and held inquest in due form over the Indian who had fallen before Simpson's gun at the corner of the hotel, and three others who went down in the volley that Waco and his friends slammed into the mob. As the coroner brought jurymen from the county seat, the verdict was foregone. Simpson and the others were not alone absolved from all blame, but highly commended for their service to the public. And there the matter ended.
The city marshal of Drumwell was not among the coroner's cases, nor anywhere around that town. Some said he was seen to cut a horse loose when Waco and his party appeared, and ride furiously southward. He never was seen in Drumwell, or that part of the country, again.
Kane hung around a few days, moping and sullen over his loss, threatening legal proceedings against Waco and the others for burning his property. But he had lost face with the county attorney, who saw that the old order in Drumwell was overthrown for good. Kane was told he had no legal recourse, having been engaged in an outlawed business. There was no protection under the law for a saloon keeper's property, as many another one learned years later when Carry Nation and her disciples went smashing and destroying liquor joints up and down the state.
Kane had money enough stacked away in other banks than that at Drumwell, which his business sagacity did not permit him to trust unduly, to start life over again without much worry. But his way was not a straight one, give him all the rope he wanted. He took his sad-eyed wife and baby girl away from Drumwell within a week after his fiery cleaning up, to follow the railroad camps in New Mexico.
Contrary to the expectations of everybody but himself, the lumberman made a slow recovery against odds that would have overwhelmed a snake. They were a hardy breed in Drumwell; the seat of their intelligence was confined to a very small area, but their vitality spread to the utmost fiber of their bodies.
But, as Waco Johnson said he hoped, if the lumber dealer wasn't killed he was cured of his crooked ways. While it would not have been advisable to leave one's pocket-book beside the track in Drumwell after his recovery, any more than it would be the wisest way to dispose of that repository of treasure at the present day, it was entirely safe to leave bones.
At a great price, with little to gain but the vindication of his manhood and the upholding of a principle, Tom Simpson had brought order and respect for the security of others to that border terminus of the Cherokee trails. He had only hastened the process of time, as most men do who correct injustices and oppressions which flourish in their day. Wisely or unwisely he had stood against the stream of popular inclination there and turned it back upon itself, and now he was suffering the pangs which are too frequently the only reward of principle upheld against the contumely of men.
Mrs. Meehan, mother of Eddie Kane's wife, was no strong partisan of her son-in-law. Eddie was too free with his fists when in his cups; she had carried many a piece of beefsteak under her eye to repair the discoloration of his blows. For that she could have forgiven him, as she had gone through a long training with Meehan and accepted such usage as a male prerogative as long as he had even a remote connection with the family. A man on the outside trying such a method of emphasis would have found a butcher-knife pinned between his shoulders.
So Mrs. Meehan could and would have borne these occasional taps under the eyes as a matter of family fellowship, but she could not forgive Eddie for bringing her daughter down to association with unspeakable women that he enforced upon her. "Blisters" she called them, in the railroad designation of ladies who pursued that ancient way of moral weakness and mental deficiency. They waited on the tables, danced with the cowboys, and took a commission on the drinks they were instrumental in selling, treating Mrs. Kane as one no better than themselves, her authority in that establishment being limited to watching the stairs for outgoing guests who might overlook the score.
Mrs. Meehan rejoiced, therefore, in the downfall of Eddie Kane and the fiery purgation of his house. She gave expression of her feelings with uncurbed tongue, and was kind to Tom Simpson for his indirect part in her daughter's deliverance. She made Mrs. Ellison and Eudora welcome, putting a room at their disposal, in addition to the one occupied by their patient, which was no small concession in view of the sharp increase in her business after Kane's establishment came down to ashes.
With all their nursing it was three weeks before Tom was mended enough to bear the journey home. His wounded arm had given them the greatest concern after it was found no serious result would come from the searing track of the bullet along the side of the head. The doctor believed the arm would have to come off, but he tinkered along day after day, at last declaring it would heal.
But it never would be an arm for quick work with a gun again, the doctor said. It would be shortened a little, very likely with a permanent crook, but for riding or driving, or even holding the handle of a plow, it would be as good an arm as any man could want. The wound in Simpson's side was not serious. A bullet had nicked his ribs and gone on. It was the shattered arm that brought on the fever and made his mending slow.
They took him out to the Block E ranch in the liveryman's spring wagon, on a bed of fresh, jolt-breaking hay, starting early in the morning, taking the whole day for it. He came through stronger than he started, cheered and invigorated by the bright sun and blue distances of that untramelled land in which he never had expected to stretch his eyes again.
During the days of Tom's convalescence Waco Johnson had been doing a lively business in bones, getting off no less volume than two carloads a week. Waco had taken the bits of the business in his teeth and was showing himself to be a competent trader, even though he had made such a late beginning in life. He hired a man to drive the extra wagon, and stimulated the homesteaders to greater efforts. He was becoming such a figure in the business world that even the station agent called him Mr. Johnson.
It was after the Christmas holidays before Tom was able to mount a wagon again and bear his part in this merry adventure among the bones. The winter was favorable to their operations, dry, clear and frosty, with occasional wild outbursts of storm and snow which blocked all vehicular operations. But these blizzards were of few days' duration, and with clearing weather the bone men were on the road, eager to drive the trade to the limit of their resources before spring rains made the prairie roads impassable.
Tom Simpson's arm hung as the doctor had predicted, at an angle from the elbow of about forty degrees. This gave him the appearance of always keeping his hand hovering over his gun, although he never buckled one on again after the historic cleanup of Drumwell that day.
In Drumwell there was an air of quiescence, of stagnation, those winter days. Nobody attempted to establish a saloon and profit by the economic slack Eddie Kane's exit had brought in certain phases of the town's life. There was not a great movement of cattle in winter, very few coming to the pens for shipment, and those lean ones, feeders forced on the market by the financial pinch some drover felt.
Cowboys did not make the long rides in winter that were pleasure jaunts when the weather was soft and fair; even in Kane's prosperous days there were two winter months when the wheels stood still. Now there was nothing in Drumwell but a change of fare to tempt the most frost-proof cowpuncher out of his winter hole.
Other great changes were pending for Drumwell, in addition to the drouth of ardent spirits which had overtaken it. A bill opening the Cherokee Nation, or Strip, as it was known, to settlement, had passed congress. A few years before, Oklahoma, bordering the Strip on the south, had been similarly opened. This opening of the new country might make Drumwell or might break it, snuffing it out like a cinder under the foot. The railroad, at any event, was going on down into the Cherokee country ahead of the opening, which would await the proclamation of the president, and might not come for several months.
Already the graders were gathering again at Drumwell in those late winter days, waiting the word of the engineers to go. There was a little acceleration of business with the establishment of the graders' camp, making it seem as of old, when Eddie Kane had his baby-board in front of the stretched canvas, and the jug from which his fortunes had enlarged beneath the goods box that did him for a counter.
There was some bootlegging—the term had its origin from liquor peddlers among the Indians, who smuggled half-pint bottles into the forbidden territory in their bootlegs—going on among the graders, as always. There were sordid cutting scrapes, the graders being no men for guns, and a good deal of moral depravity in general, graders being the scum of railroad life, take them where found.
But there was no great revival of hilarity in Drumwell. It seemed as if its life had been put out with the lights of Eddie Kane's hotel and bar. Mrs. Meehan had revived the jug trade of her railroading days, but that was such an unsatisfactory way of firing up as to carry little appeal to riders of the lonely places, to whom the greatest attraction was the sociability and lights, and strange phases of life attendant upon their far-spaced days of refreshment. Nobody but a soak could enjoy whisky passed out to him in a tin cup, with suspicions and misgivings.
So the days were slack in Drumwell, where the sharp lonesome yelping of lit-up cowboys was heard no more. Those who rode in now came to buy gloves and overalls, tobacco and boots. It is true that much more of their money was spent for useful things than went into the channels of respectable trade when Kane's games and bar were there, but even so there were some merchants who cursed the day that shooting Englishman brought trouble to town with his load of bones.
Drumwell was safe and respectable, and business was good, but it was dead as a doughnut.