Cherokee Trails/Chapter 5
Romance is not here: it is over the river, it lies beyond the hills. No person is conscious of living it in his own life; its iridescence always sparkles on some distant shore. The world across youth's eyes are lifted in the straining, heart-drawing hunger to be away on the always-beginning, never-ending, roaming quest for romance. For romance is not here: it is far away along world-old trails which the feet of men have worn in their search after it, a treasure that no man is conscious of when he holds it in his hand.
Eudora Ellison, for example, could not understand why people came to that part of Kansas seeking the romance of adventure, the romance of fortune—which amounts to the same thing, fortune being the ultimate in any case—when she knew neither was to be encountered there. If they found adventure, it was the cutting and shooting kind, the sordid, brawling kind, to be encountered at Drumwell; or fortune, it could be only the commonplace, colorless kind that rose from cattle. A man must follow such a barbaric life in the open, facing all winds and weather, to come to prosperity in the livestock business that he had all the faculty of enjoying it blown out, and frozen out, and washed out of him by the rain, long before it came.
No, that was not the place for romance, give it the best color loyalty might paint. It was only a land of false promises, although it seemed fair as the heart could desire that bright October morning, its blue distances renewed by last night's rain, giving them a fresh allurement, a sad, on-drawing beauty of their own. No romance there, in spite of golden-rod at the roadside, and purple gentian and blue asters growing tall; or billowing sodland yet untouched by the plow stretching away until the eye faltered in its gray-green immensity.
It was all a deceitful lure, this girl thought bitterly, to draw men on to greater hazards and break them unmercifully as in the past. There was a lonely emptiness in the green grazing lands as the girl looked over them which made her heart drag with the hopeless lagging of defeat. Where the Ellison herds once had fed the pastures lay empty, the thousands of acres, once her father's baronial pride, only a tax burden now. For all the beauty of that land, once their hope of affluence and consequence, it was nothing but an impoverishing weight, ten sections of it in unbroken continuity, but only a small patch in the leagues-bounded range over which their sovereignty once fell.
If only she had been left in ignorance of any other life, she reflected, more sad than resentful, she might have taken the heartbreak of it with better grace. If she never had been sent away to graze in other pastures, and return almost an alien, in sympathy at least, the adjustment to this downfall would not have been so hard.
Poverty and ignorance consorted best together. It was a well-intended, but mistaken policy for people like her parents to educate their daughters on the hazards of the cattle business. Better to keep them at home, marry them to some range cavalier and harden them early in the disappointments which almost certainly would overwhelm them in the end.
So Eudora Ellison thought that bright October morning as she flung bones out of her wagon where it stood by a great heap of bones in the spacious barnyard beside the house. She was dressed in blue overalls and cowboy boots, neither fitting her with any particular grace; a gray woolen shirt not cut for any maidenly form, the extra length of its sleeves taken up in several turns from the wrists, and a broad-brimmed brown hat that had seen service on the range for many a year. She had pinned up the lopping brim of this headgear on one side, which gave both hat and wearer a kind of battered, brave jauntiness. Her hair was short, its unconfined curls brushing her cheek when she stooped.
Gathering a pitiful profit out of the wreckage of their past consequence, as many another was doing on the Kansas range that year, Eudora had driven in from her scavaging of bones too late last night to unload. It always made her sad to handle the bones of her old friends who had perished in the great winter kill of three years past. But sentiment could not be permitted to stand in the way of common sense, especially when much-needed money was involved. The bone market was active; more trainloads of bones had gone out of that range the past summer than live cattle. They were grinding them and using them to fertilize their fields in the east, she had heard, the market price at Drumwell being a little more for a ton than one hide of the lost thousands would have brought.
Eudora had not been at home the winter of the disastrous kill on the Kansas range, but she had heard the story so often, she knew the savage harshness of those winter storms so well, the picture of the great tragedy was as plain in her vision as if she had witnessed it.
For weeks the range had been buried under snow. Cattle had been held in such shelter as ravines and creeks offered in that peculiarly unsheltered country until the urge of starvation drove them to break restraint and drift before the bitter wind. Slowly they had marched in their misery, devouring every shrub that protruded above the drifts, lean and staggering, shaggy with icicles, the hollows of their gaunt bodies filled with snow.
Southward the great drift of starving cattle had moved, herd merged with herd, out of all human bounds; windlashed, snow-harried, dim, gaunt figures in the greatest tragedy that ever had devastated the Kansas range. They lodged against railroad fences and died, heaped like tumbleweed that scurries before the autumn wind; staggered against wire fences of homesteads and died; plodded grimly, despairingly, silently, into villages, where they stood in the shelter of houses and died, their carcases so attenuated, so fleshless and dry, that even the wolves refused the banquet which the elements spread abroad with such cruel prodigality.
Matt Ellison had lost above forty-five hundred head. By heroic effort he had hauled hay to a few hundred head which his cowboys held in the valley of the little river that ran through the home place. These he had saved for a new beginning, but the exposure of his efforts to rescue his cattle cost his own life, leaving his wife and daughter in worse case than they would have been if the last head had perished in the storm.
Neither of the women—Eudora was nineteen then—knew anything about cattle, and they soon were to find that indifference working for ignorance is a wasteful combination. The seed saved from the wreckage at such great cost did not increase as it should have done. There were leaks somewhere which kept the herd down, and Mrs. Ellison, after two years of disappointment, wisely decided to sell what cattle remained before all of them leaked away.
She cleaned them out, to the last living hoof, and put the money aside for taxes and living expenses, Ellison having been a thrifty man and leaving no debts. But that fund from the sale of the remainder of the herd could not last a great while with nothing coming in to help. The fields which Ellison had tilled, growing his own corn, lay fallow, the encroaching prairie sod around their borders closing in on them like growing ice upon a lake.
Now the bone market had opened, and Eudora was gathering the dried skeletons, heaping a vast mound of them in the barnyard, her intention being to collect several carloads and then have them hauled to Drumwell, the nearest railroad point, some forty miles away. It was a melancholy business at the best, doubly so when every horned skull was a counter in the tale of their ruinous loss. If she had been picking up the bones of somebody else's cattle it would not have been so bad, even though sympathy must have clouded the hope of gain in any case.
Eudora had posted notices warning homesteaders and roaming bone pickers to keep clear of their property. Such bones as were scattered along the little river and its tributary creeks and washes were her bones, no matter whose cattle had carried them around under happier conditions, and she intended to have them all. Surely there were bones enough for everybody if they would spread out over the country and find them.
So Eudora Ellison was unloading her bones that bright October morning after the rain, thinking, in the way of youth, that life is mainly hard and useless, and full of disappointment and defeat; thinking that it was a hopeless groping in a maze of difficulties out of which they never would find their way, and that it was an isolated and lonely land in which youth and romance would never meet. She looked up quickly at the neigh of a horse at the gate, and jumped down out of the wagon, running forward as eagerly as if romance had come riding, against all expectation, and she must hasten to tie it up to the hitching-rack before it changed its mind and galloped away.
The horse whinnied again when it saw her coming, stretching its neck, its ears set forward in eagerness, as plainly a hail of joyful greeting as horse ever uttered in this world. The girl's long legs twinkled like the spokes of a wagon wheel, she ran so fast. She bounded to the gate, her brown face flushed, where the horse thrust its head over to greet her with a little squeal almost like a sob of joyful relief. She threw the gate open and flung her arms around the animal's neck, drawing its head to her bosom, fondling it, murmuring and exclaiming, as she might have caressed a lost child.
"You've got your nerve," she flashed up at the mudspattered rider, "coming here on my horse!"
"It would seem so," Tom Simpson replied. "But my intentions are honorable, miss, in spite of my appearance. I got separated from Mr. Coburn and the others during a little—a little mêlée in Drumwell last night. By inadvertence I took his horse. I am a stranger in this country, miss; I trusted the horse to come home, which he appears to have done."
The girl looked at him, the color fading out of her face, her eyes widening, her mouth standing open, amazement on every feature, as he calmly told this little story. She was holding the horse by the bit, so firmly her knuckles were white in their grip, and her breath was coming fast.
"Yes, he came home all right," she said, so coldly, so severely, so accusingly, that Tom Simpson began to think something had gone wrong.
"Then this is the Bar-Heart-Bar ranch?" Simpson said hopefully, more hopefully than he felt, throwing his stiff leg over, coming down out of the saddle like a wooden man.
"This is the Block E," she put him right with cold contumely.
"It's the horse's mistake, ma'am—miss—, not mine," said Simpson, feeling very much like the thief she doubtless took him for, or at least an accessory after the fact.
"It's no mistake—he's my horse, this is his home. I raised him from a colt, he's my horse!"
"I don't understand a bit of it," Simpson declared in honest bewilderment, "but I thought he was blood—bloomin' keen for a tired nag the last two or three miles."
"He's no nag!" she corrected him indignantly. "He's a blood-horse, he's a Hambletonian. I raised him from a colt and they stole him—they stole him!"
"The devil!" said Simpson. "Does he carry your brand?"
"I never would have him branded, except on the hoof, and that's grown out. Oh, but they did!" she said, following Simpson's eyes to the animal's left shoulder, a pang in her tone as if the iron had touched her own flesh.
"I noticed it," he said, "but didn't look for another brand. How long since you lost him?"
"About four months."
"Yes, that's a new brand," he said thoughtfully. "No doubt Coburn was an innocent purchaser?"
"Innocent! He knew it was my horse."
"Awkward for me," Simpson cogitated.
The girl was busy with the throatlatch of the bridle, which she stripped from the horse's head and threw to the ground.
"Get that saddle off, and be quick about it, mister!" she ordered him harshly.
"Dev-lish awkward for me!" Simpson muttered, making no start to carry out her command. "How far is it to Coburn's place, if you don't mind?"
"Twenty-five or thirty miles southwest of here," she told him ungraciously, bristling with suspicion, watching him sharply, having already satisfied herself, as he could see, that he was unarmed.
"Oh, very well," said he, with a light stress on the "oh," giving it a care-free, indifferent, although somewhat lofty sound, as if to say such trifles as horses and their ownership were beneath him, and that he would not stoop to question a lady's word, let her be right or wrong.
Which was very much his mental state that moment. It was Coburn's business to prove his title to the horse, and no disinterested person would say the girl hadn't made her case so far. At least the horse had made it. The animal was looking at her with as loving expression as creature ever put into its eyes, following every movement she made, sticking to her as if it feared another separation. The horse had belonged there, no matter how it came to leave, and subsequent owners, honest or otherwise, would have to establish their claims and get possession of it without any help from him.
Simpson unsaddled the horse, his studious, serious face revealing nothing of his thoughts, which were galloping along at a pretty fair rate, in fact. While his chin was up in the soldierly way Sid Coburn had liked, his gray eyes had a shadow of perplexity in them, due to the double problem before him of getting Coburn's saddle, and the articles in the sack behind it, to the ranch and explaining the loss of the horse when he got there.
The relieved horse shook himself and began trampling around looking for a place to roll. Simpson stood just inside the gate holding the heavy saddle, wondering what next, running his eye over the place.
He saw a neat homestead, for Ellison had been as good farmer as range cattleman. The original part of the house was built of barked cottonwood logs which had gathered lint and turned a soft gray. It was low, long, comfortable and solid, with a good shingle roof. Flanking this older unit was an extension at right angle built of weatherboards, gray-painted to conform with the weathered logs, single-storied, with a wide porch running its entire length. The whole structure, old and new, was topped by a row of lightning rods with bright metal balls which gleamed in the sun, conspicuous enough to tempt any bolt, it would appear, that might be looking for a shining mark.
A thriving, but neglected, orchard grew up to the dooryard, which was a tangle of uncut bluegrass. A white picket fence fronted the house and ran along the side, dividing it from the shed-like barn and numerous corrals.
It was plain to Simpson's quick perception that Ellison had chosen his location as an agriculturist rather than stockman. The homestead lay in a fair valley through which a little river flowed, the land broadening out with the course of the stream toward the south, in which direction fenced and fallow fields were to be seen. These lands, once cultivated, were weed-grown now and desolate, further evidence of the slack-handed management in everything about the place.
While Simpson was making this quick, unobtrusive survey of a few seconds, the girl in her mannish attire stood watching the horse, which was kicking its heels to the blue sky as it rolled in the luxury of soft earth. It scrambled up, shook itself, and headed for the barn. The girl laughed, well pleased to see it had not forgotten the usage of other days. She turned to Simpson, triumphant over him as if this last piece of evidence had put the rope around his neck.
"Now you see!" she said.
Simpson was spared the embarrassment of trying to answer with any kind of defense by the appearance of a woman on the sunny porch.
"Why, that looks like Frank!" she said.
"It is Frank, mother," Eudora assured her, that pitch of triumph still in her voice, her suspicious, accusing eyes resting a moment on Simpson where he stood encumbered with his load as if he intended to saddle himself and go.
"Well, of all things!" the elder woman marvelled. She came through the gate in the side picket fence and joined them, shading her eyes against the sun as she looked after the horse. "Did this man bring him home?"
"No, he brought this man home," Eudora replied, too indignant to grin over the undignified situation of the man, standing there with a muddy wet saddle under his arm.
"Of all things!" Mrs. Ellison wondered, looking now at Tom Simpson, an unfriendly question in her eyes.
Simpson touched his hat with his disengaged hand.
"Quite remarkable," he said.
"Who is he, Eudora?" Mrs. Ellison inquired, speaking over Simpson's head as completely as if he did not stand in plain sight.
"He's a green man belonging to Coburn's outfit, he says, mother. They got into some kind of a row down at Drumwell last night—what was it you got into down there?"
Simpson put down the saddle and told the story, beginning with his encountering Coburn on the train and accepting the provisional offer of a job, and ending with the adventure of Wallace Ramsey and his detective badge in Eddie Kane's saloon. He did not recount that story in detail, telling only as much as he did not figure in, and as he fancied would be agreeable to their ears. It had ended up with the row responsible for their hasty exit, and the confusion in horses, he explained.
"Why, it sounds reasonable, Eudora," Mrs. Ellison declared. "I believe he's telling the truth. So Sid Coburn had Frank all the time, did he?"
"I don't know whether he's had him all the time, but he had him," the girl replied, still sour and suspicious.
"And you've been ridin' all night in the rain, and without a slicker, as I live!" Mrs. Ellison said, looking Simpson over with motherly concern. "You come right in and get your breakfast—I'll rummage around and find you a change of clothes. Why, you're so soaked you wouldn't dry out all day!"
Eudora joined her mother, but somewhat coldly, in this offer of hospitality, a concession for which Simpson was not as grateful to her as he might have been under happier conditions. He was a bit scuffed in his tenderest place—that thin skin overlying his honor—by the girl's silly persistence, implied if not outright spoken, that he had borne a hand in the sequestration of her horse. Just as if a thief would ride a horse up to its owner's gate. Silly little hobble-de-hoy that she looked like, strutting around that way in man's pants, damn it all!
"Put your saddle over there on the end of the porch in the sun," Mrs. Ellison directed, "and I'll look you up some dry clothes."
"I'll be grateful for the breakfast, madam," Simpson said, rather high-horse and formal in his manner, "but the present clothing will serve me very-very well. I'm rather used to being rained on, you know,—I'll dry out in a little while. If you don't mind, I'll stand in the sun until you're ready for me."
"It wouldn't be any trouble, and you'd be welcome," Mrs. Ellison said, regarding him with puzzled eyes. "You don't talk like a cowboy," she blurted out what was in her mind, "any more than you look like one. Why, I haven't seen a pair of shoes on a man's feet before in I don't know when."
"Perhaps it's because I'm only an occasional cowboy," Simpson replied, not very much to the point of her plain bid for information, certainly, but sufficient for the moment, it seemed to all.
"Yes, go on in and eat," Eudora said, with something nearer the warmth of genuine welcome. "I've got to go back to my bones."