Cherokee Trails/Chapter 8
Simpson reached the Coburn ranch about sundown, where he was greeted by a sudden irruption of tow-headed children who wheeled and surged back into the house to announce him with the cry:
"Mother, mother! here's a man!"
They made such a noisy demonstration over it, they were so excitedly jubilant, one might have thought some long expectation of their mother, or some family prophecy, had been fulfilled by the coming of a man. Mrs. Coburn came to the door winding an alarm clock, a slow, cautious curiosity evident in her face. She returned an indifferent greeting to Simpson's polite salute, and stood looking the visitor over with the bold boorishness of one who saw the shadows of few strange men at her door.
She was a large-boned young woman, tall and ordinary, her light hair frowsy, her face not overly clean. She spoke with a nasal drawl. Apparently a slow, small-thinking creature whose interest in life did not extend beyond her door, and was not very lively even within its confines. She told Simpson her husband had not come home yet, and asked him bluntly who he was and what he wanted.
Simpson's news that he had left Drumwell with her husband and become separated from him on the road pricked her to considerable show of interest. Her languid eyes opened wide; signs of trouble appeared on her shallow forehead.
"Well, he ain't come," she said, with a twang of vindictive meanness. "I guess he's foolin' along somewhere on the road. You said he give you a job?"
Simpson explained again the condition on which he had hooked up with Coburn's outfit on the train. He thought it best to leave all other explanations to Coburn, saying nothing at all about the fight or the trouble he unwittingly had run himself into by taking the wrong horse.
No doubt Coburn was tearing around over the country looking for him, Simpson thought, contemptuous of the cowman's wild belief that he had been robbed. How would he take it when he came home and found his handbag and everything else in the sack? That remained to be seen. Mrs. Coburn said if he wanted to wait around until her husband came he could stay "back there," vaguely indicating the region behind the house.
From experience Simpson knew about what he would find. The men's quarters were neither better nor worse than he had expected. The bunk-house was in keeping with the rest of the place, which was bare, trodden, rundown and slovenly. Coburn was a cattleman, first and last; not a home-maker in any sense. His house was a low, gloomy sod affair, little more than a hut, witha lean-to of vertical planks slammed hit-or-miss up against one end. A smoking stovepipe sticking through the roof of this apartment identified it as the kitchen. Where that woman and her five children kept themselves when they were not eating, Simpson wondered as he unsaddled his borrowed horse before the bunk-house door.
This bunk-house was a small log pen with a roof over it. The floor was original earth; the door, hung on leather hinges, had torn loose at the bottom. It swung crankily out of plumb, half blocking the entrance. There were bunks along the walls for ten or twelve men, their hay mattresses thrown around untidily. But it was no worse than many a cowman's home that Tom Simpson had seen during his years in the west, and little below his expectations of Coburn.
Simpson rummaged around till he found hay in a shed, put his horse in a corral, of which there were several, threw Coburn's saddle with its supposedly precious roll into a bunk, propped the crazy door out of the way with a board and sat down to have a smoke. There had been quite a violent smell of something burning on the stove as he talked with Mrs. Coburn at the front door, mingling with the unmistakable savor of fried ham. Supper was either getting or got. Taking the faces of the children as the foundation for a guess, Simpson guessed no. They were uniformly dirty all over. There would have been some high lights around their mouths if they had been fed.
He was sitting in the bunk-house door, twilight creeping around him, speculating on whether Mrs. Coburn would invite him to supper or expected him to apply, when the largest of the children, a boy of about seven, a swaggering, freckled, slit-eyed little replica of the cowboy type, came shooting out of the kitchen door, heading for, the visitor. He pulled up short a few rods away, where he stood with hands in the pockets of his long, barrel-legged overalls, legs spraddled, impertinent and challenging.
"Say, kid; you got anything to eat?" he inquired.
"Not a smell," Simpson replied.
"Well, mother said you'd better come on in and eat what's left, then," the kid announced.
It was an ungracious invitation, but a welcome one. Simpson sat at a corner of the table in the kitchen where his supper had been assembled out of the leavings, as the boy had frankly said. There was no indignity intended, no affront of inferiority implied. Mrs. Coburn would have treated her husband in exactly the same indifferent way.
There were beans and biscuits, and potatoes in the jackets—which had boiled dry, accounting for the smell of burning rags—with fried ham and coffee. There was a yellow bowl of preserves, made especially for railroaders and cowmen out of apple cores, coal tar and gelatin, ringed around by a rim of flies. The boy who had carried the dubious invitation pushed it along the oilcloth-covered table out of the stranger's reach, and stood pursing his mouth and drawing his brows belligerently as if inviting remarks on the hospitality of that house. Mrs. Coburn had disappeared. Simpson could hear her moving around in the other part of the house, and wondered whether she was morose and resentful of his intrusion, or merely dumb.
The children stood around looking at the stranger in their kitchen, every mother's son of them—they all appeared to be boys—upright on his own proper legs, although tthe smallest could not have been two years old. Nature had equipped them well for their environment. Simpson wondered if they hadn't struck the ground running and kept it up ever since. They didn't say a word; Simpson made no effort to engage them in talk, knowing the breed very well. They stood eyeing him like wild creatures ready to pitch into him at the first unfriendly movement, as untidy and mean-looking mess of brats as ever came his way.
Simpson returned to the bunk-house when he had finished supper and, there being nothing else to engage him, picked out the cleanest-smelling bunk and went to bed. He was pretty thoroughly beaten out by last night's cold ride and to-day's experiences. It was unlikely his adventures would pursue him to that place, he thought, although he tied the cinch of Coburn's saddle, the roll still behind it, around the pole that formed the foundation of his bunk, and thrust the big black-handled revolver which Mrs. Ellison had pressed him to take, under the end of his hay-stuffed pillow.
The smell of ham was in the air when he woke, and the sun was shining in at the open door. He gave his horse more hay, that being the only animal provender to be found, or expected to be found, around Coburn's shiftless sheds, made his ablutions in the trough and was looking hungrily toward the house when Coburn drove up in a muddy buggy, accompanied by a youngster who had come to take the rig back to the livery stable at Drumwell.
Coburn got out of the buggy slowly, letting himself down cautiously, keeping his eyes on Simpson with a dumbfounded, astonished expression on his face that went farther than anything he could have said. Simpson realized at once that the cowman felt himself sold, and in a ridiculous situation.
The children came racing out of the house, swooping down on the buggy, stopping as abruptly as a flock of blackbirds a little way off, where they stood silently expectant. Mrs. Coburn appeared in the kitchen door, wiping a dish, a little more towsled than she had looked the evening before. She said nothing. Coburn did not greet her, but he put out his hand towards his tow-headed flock in a sort of benedictory motion of recognition, then advanced on Simpson with suspicious caution, evidently hardly crediting his own eyes. Simpson was drying his hands on a big red handkerchief in front of the bunk-house door.
"When did you git here?" Coburn asked.
He was looking Simpson up and down and through and through, stern displeasure displacing his astonishment, a surly challenge in his voice.
"Last evening," Simpson replied. "It was an unfortunate mixup—I blundered around all night."
"Where's my saddle?"
"Inside."
Coburn made a break for it, unfastened it from the bunk with nervous haste and came carrying it out into the sun. He threw it down and stood looking at the bundle in the slicker behind it.
"That's been opened! them ain't my knots," he said.
He whirled on Simpson with a look that charged conversion of property and larceny by night at the very mildest interpretation. The young man in the buggy drove a little nearer to get in on everything. Simpson went on drying his hands.
"No, they're not your knots," he replied calmly; "they're mine. A bunch of men claiming to be a sheriff's posse overhauled me yesterday morning. They said they'd been sent to recover the property I'd stolen from you, which was the first news I had that you thought I'd jumped with your stuff. They got hold of your handbag and I had a little brush with them before I got it back. I don't believe they took anything, but you'll find it jumbled up a bit."
Coburn had stooped over the saddle and was cutting the bundle loose while Simpson made his unhurried explanation.
"Who in the hell was they?" he asked, looking up sharply.
"The four gentlemen who put over the joke on your man Wallace in the saloon."
"Like hell you'd ever git it back from them fellers!" Coburn scoffed. "You're slick, all right, but you ain't slick enough to put a yarn like that over on me. If you've hid that out thinkin' you'll go back and"
Coburn had the sack open; eagerness to come at its contents cut off his ignoble innuendoes. He dumped the stuff on the ground, grabbed the brown bag, took a hurried squint into it and turned threateningly to Simpson, who was standing by filling his pipe.
"Don't make a break to leave this place till I check up on this," he warned.
Coburn poled off to the house, his tribe at his heels, the rest of the sack's contents scattered about as they had fallen. The young man in the buggy put his foot out on the little iron step, his face a lively reflection of completely baffled understanding. He looked at Coburn's retreating figure, screwing around slowly then to stare at Simpson. He didn't have enough sense left in one place to make up a word.
What would that remarkable ass of a cowman say when he learned he was out a horse? Simpson wondered. Coburn had not seen the animal Mrs. Ellison had supplied him on his word that he would return it as soon as possible. There was money in that fool bag; Simpson had a glimpse of it when the cowman tore it open and thrust his hand into it, turning the bundles of banknotes to make sure no substitution had been effected. If he had it in him to be so meanly suspicious when his money was in his hands, he doubtless was small enough to kick up a rumpus over the horse.
Working for a man like that was out of the question, even though Coburn would want him after that experience, which was not likely. Simpson dismissed the possibility of a job on that ranch then and there. He went in and got the belt and holster of his borrowed gun from under the bunk where he had slept. When he came out the livery driver was unharnessing the weary team.
"Hell! That damn gripsack was full of money!" the young man said.
"Was it?" said Simpson, unmoved and unconcerned.
"It sure was! I seen it when he was rammin' his hand down in it. Sa-a-y man!"
The young fellow looked at Simpson as he made that explosive utterance of astonishment, as if to say it was beyond him to understand why a man with that much cash in hand didn't keep right on going. Which would have been in accord with the ethics of Drumwell, in which the stripling had been thoroughly schooled.
"He's in there countin' it—got it spread all over the table—him and the old woman. I bet you he's got fifty thousand dollars in that pile!"
"Lucky dog," said Simpson. "Did you see a cowboy named Wallace, who works for this outfit, over at Drumwell?"
"Yeah, him and the rest of the gang come in with the boss last night. Stayed over to rest their horses—comin' on out to-day. That was a hell of a good joke they pulled on that tin-horn detective, pinnin' his damn badge to his damn ear."
"Um-m-m," a noncommittal grunt. "Did one of Coburn's men named Waco Johnson come in?"
"Waco? Yeah, I know Waco. He come in last night. Say! You're the feller that beat up Eddie Kane, ain't you?"
"So, Waco arrived?"
"Well, I tell you, kid, you'd better be hittin' the high places out of this damn country! Eddie Kane's got a double-handed gunman standin' around waitin' for you to show your snoot in Drumwell."
"Well, well," said Simpson, apparently about as much interested in the news as he would have been in the most remote gossip of the town.
Coburn was coming out, his money-counting quickly disposed of, his weather eye on the horse that was taking its deliberate breakfast in the corral beside the bunk-house. Simpson turned to him questioningly.
"Estimatin' by bundles, it's all there, lucky for you, pardner," Coburn announced. "What in the hell did you do with that horse of mine?"
"I gave him his head when I lost you, and he carried me home. But it turned out that he knew the road to the Ellison ranch better than here."
"If you're hintin' I stole that horse"
Simpson lifted a warning hand.
"That's a matter you'll have to discuss with Miss Eudora Ellison. She laid claim to the horse as stolen property, and held it. She loaned me that one to bring your possessions on to you, and as our business seems to be concluded, I'll be on my way back."
"You don't take that horse out of that krel, pardner, till you fetch me back my own!"
Coburn laid it down forcefully, red and raging, shaking a fist at Simpson, his humor not sweetened any by the loud whoop of laughter that burst from the livery stable driver when he heard about the horse carrying its rider to the wrong place.
That laugh was the first in a roar of merriment that would roll over the range at his expense, Coburn knew, for it was a joke such as a cowman would appreciate above all others. The man whom he had raised the hue and cry against as a thief had turned out honest as far as the money was involved, but the horse he had ridden had laid a charge of thievery at the cowman's own door. It was a joke that Sid Coburn would not hear the end of for many a hilarious day.
"You can't steal no horse of mine and git away with it!" Coburn blustered foolishly, put to it hard to save his own face before that ribald witness from the seat of scoffing Drumwell, the debauched.
Simpson stepped quickly up to the cowman when he made that fighting remark, so close his eyelashes almost brushed his face.
"When you talk that way, talk low!" he said.
Coburn dropped his hand to his gun, white to the gills. He felt iron in his ribs before he had snaked the gun an inch. Simpson relieved him of it with deftness that told of considerable practice at that art.
"Throw a saddle on that horse, and be damn quick about it!" Simpson ordered, his words so cold and hard that the threat behind them struck even the driver, sending a little crinkle of chill along his backbone.
Coburn wisely realized that the place for words had passed and he had been too careless with them while he had his chance. He headed for one of the sheds, Simpson tight at his heels taking no risk of a gun that might be hanging around. The cowman reached in from the door and grabbed a saddle and blanket at random, it appeared, and quickly completed his enforced job.
Simpson broke the gun he had taken from Coburn, throwing out the charge, swung into the saddle, looked hard at the ungenerous cowman, and said:
"I'll not promise to return this saddle, Coburn, but you'll find it at the Ellison ranch when you come after your horse."
With that Simpson gave the horse rein and started on his way at a gallop, which he checked momentarily as he passed Coburn's door to throw the empty revolver at the threshold, as if he unburdened himself of his contempt for a being of such poor and despicable heart.