Cherokee Trails/Chapter 7
The audacious rogues were in no hurry to get off, doubtless because they did not care to urge their winded horses away from no apparent danger when they might need all that was in them in case they should meet up with a true posse later on. Taking things as they appeared around the Ellison place there was little chance of anybody pursuing them in time to make trouble. There wasn't a horse around the place except the one they had taken, and nobody there that seemed very formidable.
The man who had used his dukes so effectively in the encounter with Eddie Kane seemed to go into a daze with the prod of gun in the tank. A fist man was not a gun man, as a usual thing. They rode off laughing loudly, well satisfied that they had nothing to fear from him. The little wildcat in boots and overalls had supplied them a pleasant diversion.
Their horses sank to the fetlocks in the road outside the Ellison gate, for it was bottom land, the rain had soaked it deep. The lucky retrievers of Sid Coburn's fortune, of which he stood slim chance of ever smelling a dollar again, rode boisterously toward the south, happy in their good luck, allowing their horses to take their own gait as the orchard trees cut them from view of the house and the discomfited three left penned in the corral. That was the easiest turn of fortune ever made in their adventurous career. Good times were ahead of them; the border of the Nation was less than forty-five miles away.
They did not know that a man, whose naturally swift feet were urged on by the double desire to strike a vengeful blow and retrieve his toppled honor at one stroke, was cutting through the weed-grown forest of orchard trees with a high-powered repeating rifle in his hand. They probably would have welcomed the prospect of a little excitement and fun if they had known.
Simpson was careless whether they saw or heard him as he broke through the tangle of horseweeds and morning-glory vines still wet with rain. He angled to cut the road at the farther corner of the orchard, beyond which he could see where it topped the remembered rise. He could hear them, loud-mouthed in their feeling of security, happy over the easy way their ruse had worked. Their horses' feet were noisy in the mud as they trotted heavily on.
When Simpson broke through the wilderness of overgrown orchard the raiders were riding up the foot of the long slope, the top of which he had seen as he scrambled through branches and weeds. He was hot with blue-blazing wrath, which was based not so much on the outrage he had suffered as the affront and obscene familiarity of the scoundrels toward the girl in pants—as his disordered senses still designated her. He had been obliged to stand by and take it, humiliated by his impotency, ramming up against a gun every time he stiffened a muscle to interfere. Dying wouldn't have done either the girl or himself any good. It was one of those times in a fellow's life when he had to clinch his teeth and swallow.
Now there they rode, secure in their rascality, the bright sun glistening on the little puddles in the black road. Three hundred yards, he estimated it, picking the tall man on the stolen horse and letting drive. Too far; he overshot his mark. The raiders jumped and scattered at the crack of his gun, wheeled and began pitching lead in his direction. He stood in plain view beside the wire fence bordered with a growth of sunflowers and tall weeds; their shots came whining over his head, spattering among the orchard leaves.
They had pulled up, surprise in their attitude, which gave place quickly to contempt when they recognized him. Now they came riding back, pitching a rattling fire, yelping derisively. Once more, with steady hand, steady eye, Simpson picked the tall man and fired.
It was a true shot: the rascal weaved a moment, and slumped rather foolishly off into the muddy road. The horse Frank, free of his unwelcome rider, cut a streak for his home gate, two of the thieves, seeing their trickily won treasure galloping away, tight after him as they could urge their horses, banging away at him trying to kill or cripple him before he made the gate. Simpson crowded through the hedge of tall weeds nearer the fence, pumping away to cover the loyal animal's retreat, and there was the sound of battle in that quiet homestead such as had not echoed there in many a year.
Simpson pumped several quick shots between that streak of bay horse and the two rascals who were trying to kill him to get the handbag, and whatever unlucky stuff it contained, from the saddle. He did not try to hit anybody, having accomplished the greater end of his design; only to keep them back, to frustre them, and make their shooting wild.
He was pretty well doing this when his gun went dry. He pumped and pumped, thinking it might have jammed, but there wasn't a kick out of it. The last cartridge was gone, and he had run off without asking that girl in pants for a handful to carry him over such an emergency. He was backing off to get under cover, for Frank was almost opposite him, the two pursuers hot behind, but a good distance behind, for Frank was fresh after his little rest and grooming, and he was heading home.
It was all off now, Simpson thought, wondering what chance he had to make it to the house, reload and get into the game before those fellows closed in on the horse at the corral, where he would run, shoot him, strip him of the stuff behind the saddle, and go. As he backed away from the fence, keeping under cover of the weeds, Frank dashed by, and somebody poked Simpson in the back with something that felt like a gun.
Simpson jumped, his hair as stiff as wire, something cold crawling over him, thinking one of them had got behind him, as such foolishly impossible things will flash into a man's thoughts when something jolts him off balance that way. It was a gun: Eudora Ellison was handing it to him, her eyes big and luminous, her hand pressed to her panting breast.
A long-barreled pistol with a rough rubber grip. Simpson grabbed it as a drowning man would have caught a float flung to him in the moment of his extremity. The two men who were chasing Frank turned and flung mud higher than the orchard trees at the first shot.
The man who had remained near their fallen leader was off his horse. He signaled to his comrades as they galloped back toward him; one of them caught the spare horse and took it back, while the other wheeled and faced Simpson to cover their operations. Simpson stopped shooting, not caring to do any further damage since Frank had made it safely through the gate.
They were loading the fallen man on the riderless horse. From the way they handled him Simpson judged he was through. They slung him across the saddle as they would have thrown the carcase of a calf, lashing him on with a rope. Simpson allowed them to depart without a shot to quicken them when they started away driving the horse with its limber burden ahead. In a few moments they were out of sight beyond the hill.
Simpson turned, meeting the girl face to face. She had picked up the rifle and had been cramming cartridges into its magazine. Now she stopped, seeing there was no further call for arms. Her eyes were still bright with the fire of combat, and she was breathing with a jerky little sound of hysteria as if about to cry.
"It will be all right, I fancy," Simpson said, in the fatuous way of one speaking when nothing that can be said will quite come up to the emergency.
"You saved my horse!" she said, the quaver of unexpressed gratitude in her tone. "I never could have got here in time."
"It will be quite all right, I am sure," he said, but not very convincingly, for he was far from sure whether it would be so.
"They didn't want you at all—they wanted that little satchel and my horse. No sheriff ever deputized that gang to hunt anybody!"
"They're a set of bullying scoundrels," he said, this time with conviction, there being no reservation whatever in his opinion on that score. "I saw them in Drumwell last night."
Mrs. Ellison came up breathlessly, her composure greatly disturbed.
"Thank mercy! you're not hurt!" she said, vastly relieved to see Simpson on his feet. "They're gone—they're gone!"
"Yes, mother, they're gone," the girl said assuringly, gazing hard down the road, perhaps thinking of the limp burden across the saddle. "We've got Mr. Simpson to thank for saving Frank—I never could have done it—I never could!"
"We do thank you, Mr. Simpson—I can't tell you how much."
"You're under no obligation of thanks to me, madam. I brought the trouble with me."
"I couldn't see you—I couldn't see a thing through these trees and weeds—while all that shootin' was going on, my heart was in my mouth! When Frank came back I knew you'd got one of them, the thievin' scoundrels!"
"It was the one that took Frank," Eudora said, still gazing in that fixed stare of what emotion Simpson was not schooled enough in the subtleties of the human mind to read.
"He deserved it! If I ever saw murder, and worse than murder, in a man's face I saw it in his. I don't often tremble, Mr. Simpson, but I shook to think what would happen if that man killed you and came back!"
"Never mind, mother; they'll never come back."
Eudora drew a long breath as she turned from gazing down the road; a flush of color came into her face, and she gave Tom Simpson such an open look of gratitude and admiration that embarrassment almost choked him.
Far from a hero in his own eyes Tom Simpson stood that moment. He had made a most distressing muddle of it all around, he thought, taking the wrong horse and getting himself hunted as a thief. For Coburn must have gone yelping around pretty loud over his loss to set the whole community, honest men and thieves alike, on his trail. And only the thieves had found it, apparently. It would have paid the stupid ass off properly if he had lost his money, taking it for granted that the bag contained money, carrying it around in that loose fashion.
"I'll go and unsaddle your horse again, miss," he proposed, thinking of the brown handbag in the grain sack behind the saddle, and the other packages, including the box of candy, thrown around on the porch.
They returned to the house, Mrs. Ellison turning many an uneasy look behind to see if the thieves had rallied and were coming back.
"I'm going to have this orchard cleared out and trimmed, so I can see down the road," she said.
Better as it was for a flanking movement such as he had carried out that morning, Simpson thought, but profoundly hopeful it might never be used as covert for anybody on such a mission again, himself last of all. He gathered up Sid Coburn's scattered possessions and returned them to the sack.
Mrs. Ellison was frankly curious about the contents of the brown bag. It must be money, she said, or those rapscallions wouldn't have been so hot after it and nothing else. Not unlikely. Some cattlemen were as simple as children over money, packing it around as if nobody ever had been robbed in that country, when robbery had been the principal industry for a long time, and was pretty well followed yet. Ellison had kept as much as twenty thousand dollars in the house at times, making her so uneasy that it would have been a relief, she declared, if somebody had come and stolen it.
Simpson was not so much concerned over the contents of the bag. He was pretty well satisfied the thieves had not taken anything out of it, as it still was weighty and appeared to be fairly well filled. He did not take so much as a peep into it. He balanced the sack by putting the little bag in one end, the box of candy in the other, rolled it all up in the slicker as Coburn had done, and lashed it to the cantle rings.
He said he'd like to borrow a horse, if they felt they could trust him, to take the stuff on over to Coburn's ranch. He said nothing about the awkward fix he expected to find himself in there when it came to explaining what had become of the horse he had ridden away from Drumwell. Coburn might take it reasonably, and he might be mean. It would have to wait the issue, and no use worrying over it in advance.
If Coburn had any gratitude in him he'd gladly let the return of the other stuff, granting that it had any value, offset the loss of the horse. At any rate, it was Coburn's business to come around and make his talk to that girl. And she was pretty certain not to be very far away from a gun for a good while to come.
Mrs. Ellison said he could have a horse, and welcome, although she advised against starting to Coburn's while those rascals were in the neighborhood. Eudora had little to say. She appeared to have become self-conscious and ill at ease, keeping in the background, although she offered to drive up the horses for Simpson to take his pick of them.
To this he would not agree, insisting on going on the errand himself. He'd find them in the fenced pasture, Mrs. Ellison said, indicating the direction, which in a general way was back of the barn. They were very likely to be over by the river among the trees.
But she would feel safer, Mrs. Ellison said, if he would stay around the house a while to see if that gang was coming back. Maybe that long-hungry wolf-eyed man was only nipped, and not badly hurt, for it took a lot to kill one of his kind. If so he was sure to rest up a little and return. While she and Eudora might do pretty well in a pinch, being forewarned and forearmed this time, a woman was not equal to a man in a fight. She seemed to come in so much better, so much more in her proper place, after the fighting was over and the hurts of it to be relieved. She sighed, as with many memories, when she spoke of that.
Simpson said she placed an estimate on his valor far in excess of his assets, yet he felt pleased at the confidence, as any man is gratified by the respect and reliance of entirely competent people. He consented to wait around a while.
Eudora slipped away into the house while they were talking; Simpson went presently to the gate to take a survey of things. The road was empty; the broad landscape did not reveal a living soul. Ellison's ranch was miles from any other habitation, although homesteaders were edging up along its borders. Its own extent was so vast as to hold them in a manner isolated.
An alluring spread of land, thought Simpson; a land of fertility and rich agricultural promise. How much more profitable to turn it over to the plowman instead of the cowboy, whose contributions to society were so evanescent and insecure. What romance there was in it, lying there with its fecund breast to the sky, waiting the furrow and the sower. It was a land that seemed to offer the fulfillment of the heart's desire.
Just so, said he; when a man's desire was to leave off his roaming way of aimless seeking and make a home with elm trees beside it and broad chimneys at its lowgabled ends. He was not greatly concerned over the man who had fallen before his gun in the muddy road. No doubt the fellow was dead, which was just as well. He was not the kind that coroners' inquests were concerned with in the cattle country.
Confounded ugly fellow he was, as Mrs. Ellison had said, and a cunning rogue, as well. Think of him making that virtuous pretense of being a sheriff's man, and convicting himself for a rascal at once by taking the plunder and allowing the supposed thief to go to the devil if he liked. Quite a joke; damned funny, for a fact, when a man looked at it that way.
Eudora came out to take a squint down the road, ostensibly; more than likely with the first and greater purpose of displaying herself in her proper garb, which she had assumed while Simpson stood speculating at the gate over many things. It was refreshing to behold the transformation, for no woman is made to look well, even the homeliest and roughest of them, in man's unlovely dress.
She had put on a checked something, very becoming to her, perhaps gingham, maybe something else. Tom Simpson, although from Manchester, was not learned in fabrics, being a tanner's son. Whatever it was it suited her admirably, and gave her a girlish grace which the baggy trousers, boots and all, had suggested, rather than revealed. She gave Simpson a broad, questioning, but altogether timid grin, as if she had come out on probation and stood doubtful of his approval.
"Good!" said he. "Very-very good."
He admired her frankly, a smile in his eyes, but his lips as hard-set as if they never had been broken in to bend. She was a comely brown lass, taller by a hand, it appeared, for her girlish dress, which was daringly short for that conventional age, reaching only to the tops of her buttoned shoes.
"When I work around picking up bones a dress is in the way," she explained.
"Just so," said he, full absolution for her masquerade in his warm friendly tone.
Her excitement over the recovery of her horse had subsided. She was nervous now, and apprehensive of reprisal.
"I think they'll come back," she said, her anxious watch upon the road resumed. "That man must have been—he must have been pretty badly hurt, don't you think?"
Tom Simpson had loaded his pipe. He had it clamped in his teeth now with an expression of deep determination rather than anticipation of enjoyment, his metal match-case in his hand. He nodded, lighting a match on the end of the box with a quick little dig.
"Very likely"—puffing hard to get the damp tobacco started, a cloud of smoke enlarging around his head—"very-very likely."
There was a sort of detached indifference in his words, as if he spoke of something he had witnessed but had no direct concern in, a passing incident of his day. The girl looked at him strangely, a volume of unsatisfied curiosity in her wondering dark eyes.
"There are a lot of bad men over in the Nation," she said. "I think that gang came from down there."
"I'm not acquainted with the lairs of such gentry in this part of the country, Miss Ellison, but I dare say you're right. This is a beautiful home-setting you have here; there's a feeling of comfort in the atmosphere I've seldom found in western ranches—they're generally so raw, you know, so confounded bare. They take everything out of tins in Wyoming, even onions, if you will believe me, Miss Ellison."
He looked at her so seriously, so steadily, that Eudora was obliged to laugh in spite of the gloom that had succeeded the exultation of victory. It was as if he had laid a serious indictment against the habits of Wyoming ranchers before a high court of appeal.
"I never heard of canned onions," she admitted, "but nearly everything else is canned in this country. Mother never could stand the stuff. That's why we've got the only orchard—and we had the only garden before the homesteaders came—anywhere in this part of the country. But we're degenerating into farmers, Mr. Simpson; we're not regular cowmen now. We haven't got a head of stock left over from the big winter kill three years ago. We're out of the game."
"It looks more like a farmstead than a cow-ranch," he said, but with undisguised approval. "This looks like excellent wheat land to me. Why don't you plow up this valley and seed it?"
"Some of the homesteaders are trying it out," she said, plainly not greatly interested in the experiment, "but the old-timers say they'll fail. What do you suppose they'll do with that man if he's—if—if a doctor can't do him any good?"
"Um-m?" Simpson grunted it with surprised inflection, pipestem clenched tightly in his teeth, as if some extraneous subject had been interposed, the meaning of it not clear. "Oh, that chap. Put him in a wash somewhere and kick the banks in on him, I fancy. Convenient way to bury a fellow. I've known—at least I've heard it said they do it right along in places."
Simpson smoked along calmly, a humorous glimmer in his far-seeing gray eyes, as though he might be such a hardened rascal that death by violence, even dealt by his own hand, offered only a slight diversion, not sufficient, indeed, to provoke a laugh. Eudora Ellison looked at him again with unfathomable astonishment in her not altogether unsophisticated eyes. She had heard many tales of violent deeds, she had known men who had taken the lives of others in more or less fair combat as such things were considered in the ethics of the range, but she never had imagined a man who could turn from shooting even a thief and put it out of his mind as easily as this strange Englishman.
She wondered if he had killed so many men that he had grown hardened to it, like the town marshal of Dodge City, who had been known to rise in the middle of his dinner to remove one or more discordant members of his wild society, and return to his steak with appetite unshaken. It was said he was a mild-spoken man, such as this one, with a humane and kindly smile.
Certainly the man who had fallen before Simpson's gun—or rather her gun in Simpson's hands—had stolen her horse, insulted her and her mother and treated the stranger with a contempt that only blood would atone. She was not sorry for the thief, but in cooler mind now she regretted the necessity that had forced this mild-mannered stranger to such hard measure.
If it had been one of the cowboys of the range her concern would have been slight. They were of the type who could slay and sheathe their guns with a laugh. They were crude unlettered men, schooled in the hard usages of frontier life, their sensibilities so embryonic or so atrophied from disuse as to be proof against remorse. Not so this thin-visaged stranger who bore the stamp of refinement in his serious face. It would seem that killing a man, even under the pressure of necessity, with every legal and moral justification, should oppress him somberly.
She admired him for his courage, his aggression, and she was thankful beyond words for his defense of her rights along with his own, but she was mystified, she was troubled, she was even not a little saddened, to see him pass it off with such apparent lightness, that glimmer of a smile in his shrewd, wise eyes.
Mrs. Ellison joined them at the gate, where the shadow of an elm tree fell across the uncut lawn. She was still much disturbed by the expectation of some venegeful stroke by the routed thieves, being of the opinion, as her daughter, that they had come from the Nation, where all manner of refugees from the law skulked among the hills. It was their custom to raid banks and steal horses along the Kansas border. She feared her place would be especially plagued by their depredations now, but thank goodness they hadn't much to lose, even if the rascals drove off everything.
There was not much for Simpson to say in the way of assurance. She knew the country, and the kind of men who rode in it, and while she was concerned for the future she was not afraid. She suggested that Eudora saddle Frank when he had rested a while, and drive up the horses, as she would know just about where to look for them in the pasture, which embraced several hundred acres. Simpson agreed to this after some protest. Eudora said she would drive such animals as they possessed up to the corral, and he could take his pick of them to carry him on his way to Sid Coburn's ranch.