Cherokee Trails/Chapter 3
It was long after dark when the Bar-Heart-Bar party reached Drumwell along with a miscellaneous assortment of cow-country travellers, some bound for the Nation, others to ride westward into the grazing lands of Kansas bordering thereon. That extension of railroad down to the line was such a luxury to the cattle country that everybody was taking advantage of it to go somewhere all the time. Cowboys took trips to Wellington and back for no other purpose than standing on the end of the train and looking off. It had become the vogue to stand on the end.
There was no disposition in the Bar-Heart-Bar party, from the boss downward, to move any farther along on the journey home that night. To them Drumwell was the kind of a place for having a good time in; it suited their limitations of enjoyment far better than Kansas City, which was big and bewildering, and full of wiles for taking a man's money away from him in strange and incompensative ways. A man was pretty certain to be parted from his roll in Drumwell, but he usually got a comfortable skinful first.
So they clumped off the train and into Eddie Kane's place for a snort all around before supper, toward which they had been yearning with ravenous anticipation. While the Bar-Heart-Bar men feasted happily on roast pork, a delicacy seldom enjoyed in their long rounds of beef and bacon, Sid Coburn told Tom Simpson a little, and a very little, about the ranch.
It lay a matter of fifty-odd miles west of Drumwell, on the Medicine Lodge River, which was not much of a river, when all was said, Coburn informed his provisional herdsman, as if to spare him in advance any disappointment the promise of such a romantic name might carry. The Bar-Heart-Bar wasn't a very big outfit, nothing like as big as the Bar-Heart-J of Texas, with which it was sometimes confused. He was hiring about twelve men that season, and would be able to get along with fewer next, as the encroachment of homesteaders was cutting down the range year by year.
Their main job, Coburn said, was to keep the cattle from crossing into the Cherokee Nation, or Cherokee Strip as it was called locally. There were a good many brand-burners down there, put out of open rustling by the cattlemen's association, who did business in strays that way, changing brands or not changing them, as the purchaser might desire, and selling to the Indians. Not much of a business, but the leak was considerable in the course of a year.
No, there was no more cattle rustling, in the old sense, down that way. The association had so perfected its organization that a man on the outside of it stood marked for just about what he was. They had brand-inspectors at all the big markets, and if one man's cattle got mixed with another's and shipped, the inspector asked for a bill of sale covering them. If such a bill of sale was not forthcoming, the odd cattle were told off, collection made for the sale, and the check sent to the rightful owner.
No chance for rustlers to get by with the goods any more. Oh, there were a few onery little fellers that butchered stolen cattle and sold the beef to the meat markets in Drumwell and such towns, but they were so low-down and entirely onery they were not worth spending the time on to run down and shoot.
But there were a lot of horsethieves roaming around down in the Strip. They raided over into Kansas, driving away whole herds of horses at a time, which they sold among the cowboys on the Cherokee leases. Horses were not the same as cattle when it came to stealing and selling them down there in the cow-camps of the lessees of the Indian pastures. They kept them down there and used them. A brand made mighty little difference on a horse among the cattlemen and punchers in the Strip.
Well, it was a pretty hard matter to stop that sort of traffic, seeing there were so many brands among horses, the present owners, in more than half the cases, ignorant of their animals' former ownership and caring nothing about it. Take the cowboys of the Bar-Heart-Bar, for example: they'd always risk a bargain horse, passing over the particular of a bill of sale. Coburn said he'd nearly gamble there were no two brands alike among his cowboys' mounts.
On the subject of horses, if Waco Johnson did not come back Simpson would be free to use Waco's until he could buy some of his own. Waco probably was in jail on account of some devilment he'd got into, and he could stay there for all Coburn would turn a hair to get him out. One of his horses was in the livery barn with the others of the outfit. Coburn said he'd leave it there and let it eat its dang head off. If Waco didn't show up in a reasonable time, Simpson could buy it for its board bill. A horse was about as much one man's as another's, anyhow, in those uncertain times.
To all of which Tom Simpson nodded when a nod was coming, and kept a tight tongue. He didn't feel like a man with a job ahead of him, when all was simmered down, for he had more faith in the return of Waco Johnson than the boss. He hoped Waco would come back. There was something in his name that appeared promising.
After supper they went to the big barroom for a game of cards, everybody feeling fine and at peace with the world. The boss was carrying the little handbag around with him, standing it down casually when he stopped to chat with some friend of the range. Tom Simpsom, certainly, had no more notion of what it contained than the brakeman on the train, who had kicked it contemptuously, if not vindictively, every time he passed through the car.
It was a common practice for cattlemen to lug money around with them that way in those days. The custom came down from the old time when cattlemen lived in the isolation of vast uninhabited places, where checks were as useless as they were unknown. Nothing but money went on the range then, and a cattleman always had considerable loose change kicking about, or none at all.
Even when banks came into the cattle country along with the railroads and other business, cowmen for a long time stuck to the old habit of cashing in on their sales and carrying the proceeds home in currency. They usually trusted it to their home banks after getting there, although there were some who never had any use for banks except when they wanted a loan.
Sid Colburn had carried the cash instead of a draft partly because he was old-style, principally because he enjoyed the feeling of opulence attending the possession of much currency. There was a sense of wealth in a gripsack full of bills, that no draft, no matter how well engraved, could impart. In the morning Sid would deposit most of the money in the Drumwell bank, with a large feeling of satisfaction as he stacked the bills in the teller's window, thousand by thousand, with calculative deliberation, each packet bound by the little strip of paper as it had come from the big institution at the stockyards in Kansas City.
There were several men in the barroom when the Bar-Heart-Bar gang strolled in picking pork out of their teeth in genteel and comfortable style; more were arriving from near and far, promising a merry night and a long one, for it was raining, one of those drizzling autumn rains which might hold on for two or three days. One could pretty well judge the distance each new arrival had come by the state of his humidity, which ranged from damp to dripping.
Coburn said, as he viewed the slickers of the newcomers glistening under the lights, that they were in a good place for a night like that. The rest of them concurred to the boss' opinion, unanimously, for once, and paired off for a game of old sledge. Wallace Ramsey declined to disconcert the balance of the table, preferring to circulate around and see who he could bump into, his acquaintance on the range running far.
Wallace was a sort of self-appointed comedian, a harmless, unaggressive man as humorists of that type usually are. He had bought a bright nickeled badge at a pawnshop in Kansas City, with the word detective engraved on it, picking it out from a wide selection covering the various executive branches of civil government—constable, police, sheriff—grinning his big horse teeth with inward satisfaction as he pinned it on his shirt and buttoned it out of sight under his vest.
There promised to be more fun in a detective badge than any other. Going on a long and wide experience, Wallace knew that the simple word "detective" would raise more hair in the general run of cow-camps than anything ever put up in bottles.
Not that anybody in the Bar-Heart-Bar outfit was hiding out as far as Wallace knew. He hadn't a thought of probing any man's conscience when he polished up the badge and hid it away under his vest, only of flashing it and playing mysterious until the time for the big laugh came. He had pulled the trick on his comrades coming down on the train, even nonchalantly exposing the badge to the brakeman's eye and leaving that eminent railroad official swinging between wonder and doubt to the parting.
Now Wallace went circulating around, grinning away to himself like a beaver, planning to expose his badge in a sort of accidental, unthinking way when he had a bunch of the boys around him, and get his laugh out of the various expressions of alarm, consternation and curiosity that would sweep across their old leather faces when that potent word flashed in their eyes. It would be worth more drinks than unlimited credit at Eddie Kane's bar.
Kane was in high feather that night, bustling around clearing the tables out of the dining-room, slapping shoulders, shaking hands, passing jokes and laughing in his thigh-slapping loud raucous way, stretching his big flexible fish mouth to let his merriment out, bending and contorting himself as if it gave him a twisting internal agony. He knew Wallace for a harmless good spender, and one of the best callers on the range. It looked like a big night for Eddie Kane. He had them there, and the weather wouldn't let them get away.
There were a lot of strangers in town that night, Wallace remarked as he went pegging around the big room—from group to group looking for familiar faces and not finding any. It didn't look as if it was going to be a very good night for the badge, after all.
There were four glum felows standing around the bar, never circulating very, far away from it, who drew Wallace's attention and speculation from the first, giving him a little uneasiness and clouding the natural gayety of his spirits. What troubled him was that he couldn't seem to place the tall slab-sided man with a nine-inch mustache under his long mean nose that seemed to have melted and run down. He was herding the bunch, whoever he was. They must be from the Nation, although Wallace felt sure he had known that crane-shanked man somewhere. The cloud of that perplexing doubt followed Wallace as he went over to the faro table and stood watching the game.
Wallace had recollections of twenty-two dollars won on that game once, on one of his rare excursions into the realm of chance. A man might risk a few bucks on it and not be much poorer. If he never risked anything he never won anything; that was a cinch. He stood teetering in his mind, on the verge of going after his wad and trying his luck, watching a fellow whom he astutely took to be a come-on man raking in a handsome profit on his bets.
Others were drawn into the game, some of them winning, as it always runs, Wallace edging a little nearer, the itch of adventure tingling in his fingers. Almost unconsciously he unbuttoned his vest to come to the money in his shirt pocket, and stood that way, hand on his wad, in a sort of trance of indecision, his shining badge laid bare to the bright light of the overhanging lamp.
In that intense moment Wallace had forgotten all about the badge. He stood there with his left thumb hooked in his belt, right hand on the comfortable little roll in his shirt pocket, nothing at all dramatic about his pose, yet something in it that seemed an intentional display, as a real officer, jealous of his importance, might thrust himself into the notice of indifferent strangers.
Wallace was brought out of his trance by the slab-sided man whose identity had troubled him, whom he had forgotten in the deep concentration of trying to make up his mind whether to bet or keep his money to hole up on next winter. Now the fellow was so close to him he nearly shoved that long-horn mustache in Wallace's eye when he craned his mean old buzzard neck to look at the badge.
"Tin-can detective!" he said, his voice sounding as mean and sullen as he looked. "You couldn't detect a skunk under the house, you dam' snake-feeder!"
"I ain't no detective," Wallace said, trying to speak lightly, although he felt trouble as plainly as a caterpillar down his neck. "I'm just a wearin' it to have some fun with the boys."
"You couldn't 'rest a rabbit!"
"Sure I couldn't," Wallace admitted cheerfully.
"I'll take it off of you and make you chaw it, you dough-faced purp!"
"I ain't out for trouble, pardner," Wallace said, backing away from the aggressive citizen whose dignity he seemed to have offended by inadvertently displaying the badge.
It might have been better for Wallace if he had made a front of it, for with each little pulling in of his horns the fellow's insolence increased. Everything had come to a pause while everybody looked on, this pass between the cowpuncher wearing a detective's badge and the man whose feelings seemed so deeply hurt by the sight of it promising a rare piece of entertainment.
Wallace backed off a little farther, the injured party, as he appeared to hold himself, glaring after him in savage threat. Wallace wished he had stuck to the gang, and not gone projec'in' around that way; he wished he never had bought that dang badge, and he wished he was fourteen miles out on the range that minute instead of there in Eddie Kane's saloon facing that red-eyed old horsethief who looked mean enough to eat baled hay.
"I ain't out for no trouble, pardner," Wallace repeated, trying to make it sound like he'd set his claws in its boot-heels if it crowded him and give jit the best he had, but only succeeding in giving the other fellow greater confidence to push his trick.
"Any man wearin' one of them things meets trouble when he meets me," the stranger declared.
Wallace never had pulled a gun on a man in his life, but he had a half-made feeling that the time had come when the inviolability of person and the defense of dignity called for such a move. He looked around to see if the boss or any of the boys was rising to his support, an appealing, questioning, doubtful look in his simple eyes.
Joe Lobdell started up as if to come over and take a hand, but the boss restrained him.
"It's that damn fool badge," Coburn said. "I told him it'd git him in trouble. Let him hoe his own row out of it—maybe it'll learn him some sense."
Wallace was well enough acquainted with the habits of dogs to know that, if a man turned his back and acted as if he intended to run when confronted by a hesitating mean one, he'd have to hit it up pretty lively to save damage to his raiment and his hide, yet he didn't calculate with this man as he would have managed with a dog. While he turned his face toward the boss and the boys that moment, the rangy cuss jumped him. The next thing old Wallace knew he was, hopelessly overwhelmed by the sensitive gentleman's companions, the leader twisting a bony grip in his shirt collar, his other hand busy with the offending badge.
Wallace kicked and scrambled and clawed for his gun, but he was as helpless as a hogtied calf under the branding iron. Over at the card table Tom Simpson jumped up, all set to pile in and take a hand, unarmed as he was. Coburn laid hold of him and told him to keep hands off.
"The damn' fool run into it—let him"
A howl from Wallace in the middle of the struggling bunch broke the boss's words off short. There was a heave away from Wallace, a kick by the mustached man that sent him spinning, a roar of laughter out of those nearest the scene, Eddie Kane dancing and doubling with merriment, slapping his thigh as if a hornet had gone up his leg.
The kicker had faced Wallace toward his friends before applying his foot. The simple cowpuncher almost pitched over the table around which the Bar-Heart-Bar gang stood before he got control of his legs, then he straightened up, one hand to his ear, the other raking for his gun. The gun wasn't there, but the detective badge was pinned to the gristle of Wallace's ear, blood from the puncture running down his neck. A little way in front of the Bar-Heart-Bar gang the four jokers who had carried the little pleasantry to such hilarious finish stood lined up as if inviting trouble. Wallace's gun was lying on the floor.
Tom Simpson jumped for the gun, his legs like springs, his movement so unexpected and quick that even Eddie Kane was caught by surprise. Joe Lobdell and Pete Benson pulled out their weapons to cover their nimble friend's designs, while Sid Coburn turned white around the gills and yelled:
"Put up them guns, I tell you! Put up"
Guns were pulled on the other side, and it looked to the crowd like a pretty good time to hunt the air. There was a surge for the doors, one of which let out directly into the street, at the end of the bar farthest from the table where Coburn and his men stood. Simpson bobbed up with Wallace's gun out of the scramble of feet and legs which had tried to defeat his intention. He returned it to Wallace, then faced round to the tall bony humorist who had pinned the badge on Wallace's ear.
"If you'll put up that gun I'll trim you!" Simpson proposed. He was bristling with indignation over the affront that had been put upon his friend.
Wallace had the badge off, handkerchief to his bleeding ear, but the boss had taken possession of his gun. Wallace came boring in, reckless in his fury, wild-eyed and frothing.
"Let me at him—damn his gun!" he said.
The boss jumped out and grabbed him, cinching him with his long arms, holding him in spite of his earnest and valiant struggles to rush up against the long man's gun.
Tom Simpson stood looking the fellow through and through, plenty of floor space around them for whatever operations his contemptuous challenge might set going.
"You're a rotten damned coward!" said Simpson. "You're a dirty sneak!"
The challenged man raised his long black pistol and wavered the muzzle of it back and forth before Simpson's face, not four inches from his nose.
"Smell that! It'll clabber your blood," he said.
Simpson was about a foot shorter than the fellow, but Sid Coburn saw in the way Tom gathered himself that he was getting ready to climb him like a tree, gun or no gun. Eddie Kane was struck with the same intelligence at that moment. He interfered between the two, pushing Tom back with one arm, the lengthy citizen with the other.
"Can't you take a joke?" said Kane, contemptuously severe, turning his malevolent red-edged eyes on Simpson. "Damn fool! can't you take a joke?"
"No, you bloody little crab, not if that's what you call a joke," Simpson replied.
Kane's anger was up in a flash. He ducked and rushed, grabbing Simpson by his effective, if not entirely original, bouncer hold, rushing him toward the door. But there was where Eddie Kane made one of the greatest miscalculations of his career.
Simpson slipped the hold with a wrench. He sidestepped and crouched, and shot out a fist that clipped Kane at the hinge of the jaw, flooring him as if he had been tapped with a bung-starter, that famous weapon once in such wide favor among bartenders up and down this undoubtedly cultured land.
Kane was a tough man, and a rough and ready man. He was floored flatter than he had been stretched in many a day, but he came out of it with steel-legged spring, white in his fury, and his friends moved back to give him room. Simpson took him on as he came, so nimble on his feet, so bewildering in his movements that Kane rushed from one stiff punch to another, roaring and cursing, every blow baffled, every trick of his railroad strategy vain.
The lookout at the faro game came down from his high seat, the bartenders edged each around his end of the counter, but they kept hands off, knowing Kane too well to interfere as long as he could stand on his pins. That was not long. At about the time of one round Simpson made an end of it. He drove a straight clincher to Kane's windpipe and put him down for good.
The town marshal was coming in through the latticed half-doors at the end of the bar at that moment. He quickened out of the cautious, curious, peering attitude that was his habit when putting his nose into trouble—for he was an indifferently valiant marshal, to say the best—and ran forward, yanking out his gun.
"You the feller that's been 'personatin' a officer around here?" he demanded, coming up short in front of Simpson, gun wavering around like the wits of a waking man, to sort of include the whole Bar-Heart-Bar party.
The marshal was a little bow-legged cowpuncher-looking man, with a shallow chin and milky blue eyes. Simpson looked at him curiously, as he might have regarded some extraordinary insect flying in out of the night.
"It's about time somebody was doing it," he said.
"I can 'personate all the damn officers that's needed in this damn town!" the marshal blustered, feeling his dignity touched by Simpson's cool and contemptuous rating. "You come along with me, pardner; you're arrested."
"Oh, very well," Simpson agreed, carelessly, giving the "oh" a queer little stress with rising inflection. His way of saying the word, the nonchalant ease of his bearing, the quick lifting of his chin, all contributed to that expression of superiority that got through the marshal's hide like a cocklebur under a saddle blanket.
"I'll take you down, and I'll take you down right, 'personatin' a officer in this man's town!" the marshal threatened.
"He never done it, Mr. City Marshal," Wallace interposed. "I'm the feller that done the 'personatin' if they was any 'personatin' 'personated."
Wallace pulled the dectective badge out of his pocket and offered it as evidence of his guilt.
"Seein' you're itchin' to be locked up, come along," the marshal ordered, shifting his heels and his gun to include Wallace in the net of the law.
"Now, look a here, marshal; them boys belong to my outfit, and neither one of them's to"
"Make your speech in court, cowman," the marshal cut Coburn off.
"You'll have to let 'em out on bail, and I'm ready to put up any amount," Coburn insisted.
Kane had recovered his wind, together with the pouring of water over his head by his wife, who had come running in, white-faced, big-eyed and silent, from her place at the desk in the hall, and the pouring down of something stronger by the bartender. Kane was leaning weakly against the bar, where his astonished and dumbfounded men had assisted him, his head lopping sickly, his face gashed and bruised. He brisked up at the mention of bail.
"He slugged me with knucks!" he charged. "Lock him up for murder!"
The marshal waved his two prisoners out ahead of him with his gun, opening a way through the crowd that had come back almost as quickly as it had dispersed. Sid Coburn and his two cowboys backed into a corner where they gravely considered the plight of Wallace and Simpson. They were full of indignation at Kane's charge, which they knew to be nothing but malicious lying in an attempt to save his reputation.
Coburn said he'd hunt up the judge—he was nothing more than a justice of the peace—and try to get them out on bail. He wouldn't put it past that weak-stomached marshal, he declared, to fish up a pair of knucks and swear he took them off Simpson. Joe and Pete were for cracking the calaboose and delivering the prisoners, which would not have been much of a job, as it was only a little board box with bars made of old wagon tires over the window and door.
The boss was against any more kicking up, saying they had started enough trouble for one outfit that night. They were milling it over, and getting nowhere, when Wallace stuck his face cautiously in between the leaves of the swinging doors through which he so lately had disappeared under the disgrace of arrest. A big grunt of relief went up from the chests of the Bar-Heart-Bar at sight of Wallace's homely inquiring face. He spotted them, and beckoned them out.
"Well, he turned you loose, did he?" the boss inquired, peering around in the gloom of the drizzling night for Simpson.
"No, he changed places with us for the time bein'," Wallace chuckled. "Tom slammed him in his own private little jail and locked him up. His keys is on the roof."
"The hell he did!" said the boss. "Where's Tom?"
"Waitin' down at the barn."
The boss made a noise similar to a ruminating cow. The Bar-Heart-Bar gang, who had been with him a long time, knew he was swallowing his surprise.
"Time we was hittin' the breeze out of this man's town," he said.