Cherokee Trails/Chapter 6

by George Washington Ogden

Chapter VI

Four Rogues

Eudora did not go back directly to her bones. She ran off instead to serve the horse Frank a generous breakfast of oats, which she put in one of the feed boxes in the corral near the house. Then she got a gunny sack and rubbed him down, touching the brand, not yet calloused, on the animal's left shoulder with tender fingers, moaning over it, growing hot with resentment against the Bar-Heart-Bar and its owner, and all it represented.

The Bar-Heart-Bar brand was a device like this:

The brand was fully two hands' height, heavy in its outline, an easy one to read. It was a popular device in the southwest, and registered by various owners in several states, as was the case with many others. Ellison's brand, the Block E, did not signify a block letter, such as college athletes prize so highly on sweaters in these times, but a simple arrangement in this manner:

While Eudora never had suffered any pangs at seeing the family brand on cattle, she had stood flat-footed against it for her pet colt. The breed of the animal was its own identification, there being no other like it on that range. It was a present from an uncle in Missouri, a breeder of fine horses. To meet the requirements of custom on the range, which was equal to law, Ellison had made with his own hands a tiny replica of his brand, which he burned into the colt's hoof, close down toward the toe where it wouldn't hurt, renewing it from time to time as the hoof grew.

Without a brand or clipping mark, or crop, as it usually was called, in the ear it was next to impossible to establish a claim of ownership in those times. This rule extended even to hogs, and is still in full observance in the Ozark mountain regions of Missouri and Arkansas, and perhaps elsewhere in the south where hogs run wild.

Now Eudora's pet, stolen early in the summer from the fenced pasture where the household cattle grazed, had come home bearing their neighbor's brand, and it would be a hard matter for her, she fully realized, to prove the horse ever had belonged to her if Coburn should take it to law. She could prove easily enough that she had owned a similar horse, but without her brand on it, not that particular one.

But Coburn must have known when he bought it from the thief—she did not believe for a moment he had come by it any other way—that it was her horse. She had paid for posters the sheriff had put up and mailed around, and distributed over the range. Everybody on that range knew she had lost her pet Hambletonian.

Coburn likely would say he never had heard of her loss, as he lived in another county, and his word would go as far as her own. He had the reputation of an honest man, but cattle honesty and bank honesty stood in different sections of the range moral code from horse honesty, she knew too well. Now her horse bore Coburn's brand. If he wanted to be mean about it, she didn't know where she'd come out. Maybe he'd replevin the horse, standing on his brand, with perhaps a bill of sale from the thief, whom nobody ever would see again.

But any honest observer would say the actions of the horse proved its ownership. That stranger with the queer, quick, deep-sounding voice could speak for Frank. Lost in the night, he had given Frank the reins, and Frank had come home, put his head over the gate and called her, as he used to call her on a hot day when he came up, thirsty and fly-plagued, asking her to put him away from his pestering little enemies in the cool dark barn.

So Eudora reflected, the unloaded bones put out of mind while she rubbed the mud from her pet's long slender legs. She had fed him in a corral manger where her father used to finish off his picked cattle on corn, wanting him out in the light so she could look him over for other marks of cruelty he must have suffered aside from the resented brand.

Meantime, Tom Simpson had been called in to breakfast by Mrs. Ellison, who sat at the table with him, as much through her desire to learn something about him, it must be owned, as through a sense of hospitality. Simpson had washed the mud off and combed his hair at the bench on the kitchen porch where many a cowboy before him had sloshed and snorted in his ablutions, and his wet clothes were steaming on his back when he sat down to his meal.

At Mrs. Ellison's suggestion he had hung his coat in the sun and come to breakfast in shirt sleeves, as he had done in more or less notable company before that day. It was a conventional gray woolen shirt, such as range men wore from the Nueces to the Little Missouri, adorned by a narrow blue necktie, the ends of it tucked into his bosom.

Mrs. Ellison looked him over swiftly, keenly, with an eye to his good points, having come from a horse-breeding family. She noted his small, well-set head, his thin nostrils, his nose somewhat out of proportion in the general meagerness of his face and, withal, the somber, self-communing look of him which seemed to tell of hardships and penances which had refined him down from something of different type and made him a man.

That he was a man, in the range sense of the word, she was sure. However Sid Coburn had picked him up, she was certain he had not done it to give him sanctuary from the consequence of any misdeed by which man or woman had suffered. Plainly he was beneath his capabilities in a hired man's capacity on the range. That any man lost dignity in such pursuit she hardly would have admitted, not having the enlarged outlook upon life that her daughter had gained by broader contact with the world. Due to this narrowness of outlook, Mrs. Ellison was entirely satisfied with her lot.

She was a placid, deliberate woman of fifty, who bore her years well, with much of the grace of youth still on her. She was slender, tall, with a certain aristocratic refinement of features, not too pronounced, but traceable, which told of good lineage. Her hair, rippled and dark like her daughter's, was slightly touched with gray.

"So you picked Sid Coburn up on the train, did you?" she said, the inquiry sharpened by her curiosity to know something of what had gone before that chance meeting.

Tom Simpson seemed to read her desire, which required no sharp intellect to reach, indeed.

"I was on my way to the Panhandle, where I have friends," he replied. "But I had nothing definite ahead of me, so I considered one chance as good as another. Coburn had lost one of his men in Kansas City, Waco Johnson by name. On the condition that the said Waco didn't show up in due time, I was to have his job. It was just a chance shot, you see."

"I don't know much about Coburn," she said, speaking in a manner of reserve; "he hasn't been down in this part of the country long—eight or ten years. Came from up around Wichita somewhere, I believe. Are you from the east?"

"Wyoming, and out that way, madam."

"The reason I asked you if you were from the east was we had a man workin' for us some years ago who came from Boston. He had the same twang to his voice you have, only he was a little mushy and nosey. He was Harvard educated, he claimed, always blowin' about it like it was something big. I never could see where it had done him any good, anyhow. He was out here for experience, and he got it, all right, a little more of it than he could pack. They shot him in the leg up at Wellington."

"Experience is a queer sort of thing that way," Tom Simpson said reflectively. "It flies up and hits a chap when he isn't looking, oftener than not."

"It sure does," she agreed, looking at him shrewdly, not at all surprised to hear him talk that way. "Was you born out there in Wyoming?"

"Far from it. I was born in Manchester, England. My father is a tanner there, a very good tanner as tanners go, madam."

"Is that so? Well, you don't tell me! And you didn't like the tannin' business, I guess. I don't blame you—I don't blame you. I used to pass a tanyard on my way to school back in Lexington, Missouri. I don't blame you a bit."

This piece of confidence about his beginning, which Mrs. Ellison did not question or doubt in any particular, put her on almost a confidential footing with Tom Simpson at once. It wasn't everybody in that country who would tell where he came from with the undoubted sincerity of that young man. He was far from home and kindred, and she began to have a motherly feeling for him, especially since his folks had something to do with a by-product of the livestock industry.

She went at once into a lively history of the Ellison ranch, its past prosperity and recent losses, to all of which he listened with genuine interest. Mainly on account of that extraordinary girl in man's pants. He had met plenty of cattle-ranch ladies in his wide roaming, but never one like her. There was something in the shading of her speech, there was something in her eyes—a look of impatience, of a spirit curbed—that set a man's fancy moving.

Simpson stole a look out of the window to see if the girl was at her bones, and started, coming to his feet with that springy movement of the legs that had been Eddie Kane's undoing the night before. The girl was standing with one hand on the horse's withers, half straightened from her grooming, looking with every indication of alarm at four men who had ridden into the enclosure and were swinging from their travel-splashed mounts.

"My lands!" said Mrs. Ellison, getting quickly to her feet, peering anxiously through the uncurtained window, "somebody's come. I wonder what in the world them men are after, comin' in here that way."

Before Simpson could answer three of the men came running toward the kitchen door, stiff-legged and heavy from their saddles, guns out, with grim and hostile demonstration.

"They're after you!" Mrs. Ellison said. "What have you done?"

"You're as wise as I am, madam," Simpson replied.

Which was true as far as it went. There was no time to explain that these were the four rascals who had mistreated the innocent joker in Kane's place last night, for the long man with the big mustache was at the porch, his feet on the step. Simpson started for the door, but Mrs. Ellison interposed, being nearer, stretching her arm to bar him. The fourth man was coming along after his companions, leading the horse Frank, the girl protesting vehemently.

"What do you want rushin' around here with them fool guns that way?" Mrs. Ellison inquired, indignantly severe, entirely cool, taking in every detail of the rude trespass.

"We're the sheriff's posse, we're after the horse that man in there behind you stole from Sid Coburn last night," the lanky leader replied.

One of them already had grabbed up the saddle and was cutting loose the bulky roll done up in the slicker. He dumped the contents of the sack on the porch as Eudora came running ahead of the fellow who was leading her horse.

"Look-a here!" said the man who had dumped the sack's contents. He was holding up the little handbag that Simpson had seen the cowman carrying around.

Simpson pushed past Mrs. Ellison, deliberate and unflurried, although he was raging inwardly at the high-handed robbery he knew it to be, still as innocent of the little brown bag's contents as Mrs. Ellison.

"What're you up to, you bloomin' pirates?" he asked, head up, chin out, eyes as steady as if he challenged a pack of thieving boys instead of four night-riding scoundrels with guns in their fists.

"Back up, and stay backed, little feller," the chief of the party said, boring the muzzle of his gun against that part of Simpson's anatomy which lately had become the receptacle of ham and eggs.

One of the others stopped Eudora on the steps; another edged around behind Mrs. Ellison and cut her off from the door.

"Stay right where you're at, children," the tall fellow said with sardonic gentleness. "Open the damn thing and see if it's there, Noahy."

"You'll not take that horse!" Eudora panted, flushed and furious, making a start to break away.

Her guard intercepted the break, catching her arm, shaking her correctively.

"Won't we, britches? You just wait and see," he laughed. "If you don't behave yourself I'll turn you up and spank you!"

Simpson stiffened like a pointer in scent of the game. Mrs. Ellison, watching everything with cool, calculative eyes, read his intention of springing to the girl's defense and laid a detaining hand on his arm. The man addressed as Noahy was fussing with the lock of the little handbag, swearing not altogether under his breath.

"Oh, cut the damn thing open—cut it open!" the leader chafed impatiently. "See if it's there!"

The fellow called Noahy got the bag open just then. He gave a little whoop, and snapped the jaws of the bag shut again.

"It's there, all right!" he said.

"Then saddle up that horse," the leader directed. "Take a look inside there—" jerking his head to the one at the door—"and see if anybody's hangin' around. Step out there to the krel, you folks," with a directive motion of his gun.

Simpson knew words would be useless. Any protest, any argument, would only make his situation worse in the eyes of the two women, and perhaps provoke the rogues to violence. Any dealing that gang ever had with a sheriff was at as long range as they could make it. They were thieves who had heard of Coburn's loss, and it must be considerably more than the horse, he knew, to set them so keenly on his trail.

It flashed to him that it was Coburn himself who had raced after hinr shooting last night. The damn fool must have been carrying money in that battered old brown bag.

This he summed up as two of the gunmen marched him with mother and daughter to the corral, which was fifty yards or more from the kitchen door. Eudora looked back dumbly to where they were throwing Coburn's saddle on her horse. The packages were scattered on the porch, but the leader had taken charge of the little handbag. He was standing by with the evident design of riding away on her horse.

"Git in there, and stay there till you see us ride out of that gate!" their guard ordered, herding them into the corral with his gun. He pulled the gate shut and stood by on guard.

Simpson was thinking a lot but getting nowhere. He saw the tall, mustached villain put the handbag in the grain sack, as Coburn had done last night. He was lashing it to the back of his saddle, the rest of the packages ignored.

"I'll not let them take my horse! They can kill me before I'll let them take my horse!"

Eudora pushed at the gate, which the fellow held laughing at her vehemence. She ran along the fence, defiant of his gun, threw a long leg to the top and scrambled over, heedless of her mother's sharp call to come back, but landed in the grasp of another man who ran up as she struck the ground.

"I'll shake you out of your britches, you little hellion, if you try any more breaks like that!" he said. He thrust her back into the corral, his companion opening the gate.

Simpson had lived long enough in the proper sort of company for such an education, to know when it was time for a man without a gun to rush one that had. That hogeyed man at the gate was aching for him to make a jump; that was not the time.

Satisfied there was nobody lurking in the house who might take a shot at them as they rode away, the leader and the man whom he had sent to explore the interior joined the other two at the corral. Their horses stood by, heads down, jaded and dejected, for they had been ridden hard since Simpson's trail had been struck at dawn. Simpson looked for them to demand fresh horses, which they probably would have done if there had been any in sight. But from their eagerness to take the thoroughbred he reasoned they were not far from a refuge among friends.

With a parting caution to the three penned in the corral to stay where they were, the bandits mounted, the long fellow swinging up on Eudora's horse with a malicious grin. They started off, the spare horse running free with them, slamming back a jagged round of shots to give edge to their commands.

But while the long man's leg was in the air swinging over the saddle Eudora was off on a skulking run along the side fence of the corral, making for the long shed like building in the rear, which Simpson knew to be the bunk-house of the ranch's old cattle days. He caught the motive of her move in a breath: she was going after a gun. Stooping, running swiftly, he was off after her, the parting shots of the robbers from the gate rattling the planks above his head.

Simpson heard them laugh as they rode away, feeling so safe they did not consider it worth while to turn back and stop this dash for arms as they must have known it to be. The girl was through the back gate and into the bunk-house before he could overtake her. She met him at the door with a rifle in her hands. He snatched it and started in a desperate, hopeless run, burning for a shot at them, one shot, before they disappeared over the hill beyond the corral.

"Cut through the orchard!" Eudora yelled.

"Through the orchard—through the orchard!" Mrs. Ellison shrieked, her voice breaking high in the vengeful passion that had mastered her cold self-control at last.