The Trail Rider/Chapter 1
ALL that Boley Drumgoole had gathered in his long grazing across the range of life was an armful of old white whiskers. They were not much to behold, small adornment to wear; for they were beginning to turn yellow, like a weathered marble tombstone, or wool that has a rust in it, or old, dusty whiskers, indeed, that have strained tobacco smoke for more than fifty years.
"Uncle Boley," he was called, and he was not troubled at all over the things which he had missed in this world while his talents were being bent to the production of that beard, the biggest ever seen between the Missouri and the Cimarron. It was his mantle and his comforter; it would be his shroud. He buttoned it under his vest to keep the pleurisy out of his chest when the wind stood northeast and the wintry days were gray, turning it out with the first warm sun of March, like a crocus, vain of its endeavor to make a dun world bright.
Uncle Boley had been an unwilling widower for upward of eighteen years, a circumstance that vexed him and hurt his pride. He deplored the immorality of a society in which women laughed at long, white whiskers, and swore in the same breath that if matrimony demanded the sacrifice of them he would march on to the grave a single man. No woman in the world was worth it.
While he waited in hope for the reformation of society, Uncle Boley supplemented his pension by the manufacture of boots for the cowboys and cattlemen, who were thick on the Arkansas Valley range of Kansas in those early days. His shop was no larger than the front room of his little house in Cottonwood, and that was not much bigger than a bedstead; his only machinery the primitive tools of the bench-worker at his trade.
He had followed the frontier from Westport, on the Missouri line, where he began in the old freighting days, and had brought up in Cottonwood for his last stand. His fame as a contriver of high heels and quilted tops reached as far as New Mexico, borne up and down the cattle world by the far-riding vaqueros, who held him in the first esteem.
In those days Cottonwood was not so much of a town as in time it grew to be, for it was only the beginning, indefinite and broad-sown on the treeless prairie beside the sandy stream. There had been a tree on the site of the town at one time, remembered for the hangings which had been carried to perfection by the assistance of its friendly boughs. From that tree, no trace of which now remained, the town had taken its name, and it was a new and altogether unlovely place, bleak alike under summer sun and winter storm.
Sod houses with sere grass standing on their roofs, as it had begun to grow with the spring rains and withered to sapless brown by the summer sun, stood in scattered irregularity, like a grazing herd, forming the outskirts of the town. Tin cans were sown thickly around them, but never vegetable nor flower sprung from the willing soil beside their walls.
In the business section the houses were arranged with more regularity, as if a future had been planned. Most of these buildings were of planks, with stubby fronts, appearing as if they had been slapped in the face and flattened for their threatened trespass upon the road.
There was no distinction in living in a sod house in Cottonwood, for anybody who could borrow a spade might have one. If a man was affluent or consequential in any degree, he bought lumber and built himself a more aristocratic abode. On this account there was a continual sawing and hammering going on in Cottonwood in those times, for money poured into the place from the great herds on the rich prairie lands around.
The town had been built on cattle, and on cattle its hope of future greatness rested. The railroad had reached out to it across the sea of prairie like the needle of a compass to its pole, and was building on into the West to open new worlds for canned goods to overcome. Out of Cottonwood supplies went into this new country, and into Cottonwood the wild-eyed herds were driven for shipment, all combining to make it a busy place. No restriction had been put on the traffic in alcoholic liquor at that time in that part of the country, and in Cottonwood there was a good deal of lurid life, a right smart of shooting and slashing around. Uncle Boley Drumgoole had seven pairs of boots, standing on the little shelf at his back, which had been ordered and paid for by men who did not live to enjoy them.
So it was in this atmosphere, if you can sense it hurriedly from the little sniff that has been given to you here, that Uncle Boley was sewing a bootleg on a calm autumn morning, his beard tucked out of the way under his left suspender. He was thinking on marriage and taking in marriage, as he usually occupied his thoughts when alone, and of the correspondence that he had struck up with a lively widow in Topeka, when the frame of a man darkened in the door between him and the bright, glaring day. Uncle Boley looked up from his seam, sighing as he relinquished the sweet thoughts of the distant widow whom he had never seen, nodded to the man, who had paused in his door as if for permission to enter, worked his chin rapidly in short chops to dislodge the chew of tobacco between his jawbone and his cheek. This operation gave an aspect of menace to the venerable bootmaker's otherwise placid face, which a stranger was very likely to interpret as a prelude to a volley of invective, in keeping with the customs of Cottonwood and the wild men who rode that untrammeled land.
"Come in," said Uncle Boley, a little thickly on account of the waxed-end that he held in his mouth. The man stretched out his arm and, with palm against the jamb of the door, stood as one does when he has been on his feet a long time, shifting his weight from leg to leg, and grinned dustily at Uncle Boley.
Telling about it afterward, when there was reason for it and distinction in it, Uncle Boley always said that grin reminded him of the way a strange dog stops to wag its tail and looks up at you. There was something half-timid, wholly uncertain, in the unspoken salutation, yet an appeal of friendliness that made a man want to shake hands with him and push him out a cheer. That's the way Uncle Boley always told it; he had felt just like he wanted to shake hands with him and push him out a cheer.
"I wonder if I could get a shoe fixed here?" the stranger asked.
Uncle Boley looked him over before replying, the waxed-end hanging down his beard. He saw that the young fellow was tall and lanky, with steady, dark eyes which had a sparkle of humor in them, and dark hair that looked as if it needed cutting so badly that it must give him pain. But, Uncle Boley concluded in the same breath, they'd have to rope and hobble that chap to do it, more than likely, he looked so skittish and shy. He seemed a grave man for his years, which the bootmaker estimated at twenty-five or thirty, long-jointed, big-nosed, big-handed. Uncle Boley looked at his feet; they were made to carry a man.
"Shoe," said Uncle Boley, with plain disparagement of that sort of footgear. "Nobody but the women and kids around here wears shoes."
"I'm a stranger; I'll get into the customs of the country when I learn them."
"Yes, you likely will. Now, if you want a good pair of boots, dog cheap"—Uncle Boley turned to the shelf behind his bench and took down a pair that he estimated might fit—"I can fix you up."
"I'd like to have a pair, but I haven't got the money to buy them."
Uncle Boley put them back without a word, an expression of loftiness coming over his hairy face.
"Well, I don't reckon I can fix your shoe. I ain't got time to fool with shoes."
Uncle Boley took his dangling threads and gave them the three little jerks which he always employed in tightening a stitch. "Where you from?"
"Topeka, and—Topeka, sir."
"Topeky?" Uncle Boley looked up with the word, a gleam of eagerness in his sharp, blue eyes. "Topeky, heh? Let me see that there shoe."
It had cast a heel, as a horse throws a shoe, and the stranger had it in his pocket. Uncle Boley said it was useless, for it was worn down to nothing but the shadow of a heel. He demanded to see the other one, and found it just as bad. He bent over his work again a little while, as if the case of the heels was beyond salvation and he had put it out of his mind.
"Take 'em off," said he, sewing away, not lifting an eye. "I'll fix 'em for you."
But the young man hesitated. He was concerned about the cost.
"Well, it won't make me and it won't break you," said Uncle Boley, with the largeness of a man to whom trifles are annoying.
"I'm not so sure about the last part of it, sir."
"Well, if you're that nigh busted, you can stand me off till you git a job. I never took the last cent out of a man's pocket in my life."
"It must be a comfortable reflection at your age, sir."
"Well, I ain't as old as some," said Uncle Boley tartly, "and I'm a danged sight better man 'n many a one not half my age!"
"I didn't mean to imply that you had reached your dotage, sir." The stranger's grave, sensitive face reddened at the old man's heat. The flush appeared to increase his homeliness. For he was undoubtedly homely, but with a good plainness, Uncle Boley thought, like a man who would be kind to a horse or a woman.
"I'm as good as any man of forty-seven you can find in this country!"
Uncle Boley jerked his threads a bit sharply as he spoke, watching the stranger's face with sly, upward glancing of his wise old eyes which belied his apparent ill temper.
"Yes, and most of them at forty, I'll bet you a purty, sir."
There was a softness in the stranger's speech, a drawl in his words, that had marked him from the moment that he opened his mouth as somewhere from the South, primarily, even though Topeka just now. Uncle Boley nodded.
"From Texas, I 'low?"
"Yes, sir; I was bornd and raised in Taixas."
"What might they call you where you come from, son?"
"Why, they call me Taixas, sir—Taixas Hartwell, James or Jim christened, if you prefer it, sir."
"Texas suits me all right. Them two names goes together handy, too—easy to say—Texas Hartwell. Jimses and James is too thick already in this man's country; yes, and jim-jamses, too."
"Yes, sir."
Uncle Boley worked at the seam until he had used up the thread in the leather, then took the extra waxed-end out of his mouth and put the boot aside. He took up one of the crippled shoes, turned it, examined it, as if he had come across some curiosity in the shoemaker's art.
"You must 'a' done a sight of walkin' in them shoes."
"I have walked a right smart little stretch in 'em, sir."
"I don't reckon all the way from Topeky?"
"Not all the way, sir."
Uncle Boley hammered at the new lift of heel that he was laying on, brads in his mouth, a smudge of neat's foot oil on his bald head. The stranger sat reading a bill that hung on the wall at the ancient bootmaker's back.
This poster was an advertisement of an event that was going forward in Cottonwood that very day—a three days' fair celebrating the annual convention of the Cattle Raisers' Association. It was a modest announcement, in small type, but it seemed to draw the stranger into it as if it held matter of the first importance.
"Don't reckon you know anybody name of Gertie Moorehead up there in Topeky, do you?"
Uncle Boley spoke in casual manner, as if he might be inquiring after a distant relative, or somebody who owed him money that he never expected to collect. He pretended to be altogether centered in fitting another lift on the heel, keeping his eyes on it, making a little hissing noise through his teeth.
The young man started, reddened, took his eyes off the advertisement of the fair, as if he had been caught stealing leather.
"Who, sir?"
"Lady name of Gertie Moorehead," Uncle Boley repeated, still too busy to lift his eyes.
"No, sir; I can't say that I do, sir. I'm not very largely acquainted in that city, scarcely acquainted at all, sir."
"Oh, I reckon you just passed through," said Uncle Boley, plainly disappointed. He was, in a measure, indignant, too, having been taken in that way by the expectation, the hope, that this stranger raised in his breast. He had been all of a tremble in his eagerness to hear a first-hand description of the lady whose photograph was in the drawer right there in the shop that moment, and to learn whether her representation of property, real and personal, was true, or colored for matrimonial purposes. He had been drawn into mending a pair of shoes, and for a man who had no money, on that hope. But instead of being a resident of Topeka, this man had only passed through—tramped through, Uncle Boley was ready to bet money—and didn't know Gertie from Gilderoy's goose.
Uncle Boley knocked away at the heel with vindictive blows, his whiskers working from the anchorage of his suspender in his vehemence. He stopped to tuck them back again and roll his eyes sourly at Texas Hartwell, who sat there with his gaze glued on the bill advertising the fair as if he had discovered the rarest piece of literature on the globe.
"What kind of a job're you lookin' for?"
Another jump away from the poster, another swift flame of blood in the bleak and bony face of Texas Hartwell.
"Sir?"
"I said what kind of a job're you lookin' for, if you're lookin' for any?"
"'Most any kind."
"Can you tend bar?"
"Well, I never did, sir."
"Maybe you can deal faro?"
"I'm afraid I'd fail to give satisfaction at it, sir."
"Huh!" said Uncle Boley, in the manner of a man who had so little faith that it almost amounted to contempt. Presently he brightened a bit and looked up hopefully.
"Can you cook or carpenter?"
Texas smiled, a smile that illuminated his face like a light within. He shook his head slowly, fighting the smile back to the corners of his mouth, the corners of his dark eyes.
"No, sir. I wouldn't be a bit of good at either of them."
"Huh!" said Uncle Boley, with a little more stress on it than before.
He returned to his work with the air of a man who knew himself to be in for a bad job, and determined to have it off his hands as soon as possible. Uncle Boley had canvassed the list of possibilities in Cottonwood for a man who wore shoes. Outside of the arts and crafts named nobody went around in shoes; and if a man who wore them could neither deal, tend bar, cook, nor carpenter, there was no place for him in the activities of the town. Even the lawyers and doctors wore boots like regular men.
"I was thinkin' I might get something to do around the cattle ranches, sir."
"Huh! Did you ever see a horse?"
"Yes, sir; I've seen 'em, sir."
"Well, was you ever on one?"
"I've had some little ex-perience around 'em, sir."
"In a livery barn, I reckon." Uncle Boley was at no pains to conceal his contempt.
"I was raised up on a cattle ranch, sir," Texas said gravely, rather loftily, "and I can ride a horse and throw a rope with any man between Taixas and Montana, sir. If it's the shoes—"
"Well, it was the shoes!" Uncle Boley smote the one on his knee a disdainful blow. "No man that ever rode after cattle ain't got no right to lower hisself down to shoes!"
"A man can't always choose what he'll put on his feet, sir, any more than he can select the road they're to follow."
Uncle Boley sat a little while, his eyes on the unfinished heel. When he spoke it was with a new note of respect, a gentleness and softness more becoming to the wisdom of his years.
"You're right; you're mighty right. A man can be a man and wear shoes, but"—forcefully—"he ort to git out of 'em as quick as he can!"
"I was just a readin' on that bill, sir, that they're goin' to have a ropin' contest for both men and ladies at the fair here this afternoon. I never heard of ladies bein' admitted to that rough sport before."
"This is the first time they've ever had 'em mixed up in it here. Ain't a woman's place to go straddlin' around on a horse ropin' and hog-tyin' steers. I had a wife or daughter tried it, I'd turn her over m' knee, that's what I'd do!"
"They're not to compete against the men, sir, it says."
"Don't make no difference; they ain't got no business competin' around at all. Well, I will make one exception—but I grudge that one."
"Is there any entrance fee for contestants, or do you know?"
"It's as free as air. Anybody that's got a horse and a rope— Why don't you try it, if you're a roper?"
"I've been sittin' here tryin' to study up some plan to do it. The bill says first prize for men is two hundred and fifty dollars. Do you reckon they mean it?"
"Well, I wouldn't advise you to go down there to the fair grounds and ask 'em that!"
"I was just thinkin' that if I had a horse I might try my hand."
Uncle Boley looked him over again, this time more carefully than at the first inventory.
Except for the shoes, he wasn't materially different from the general run of cowboys. He had the slender, pliant waist and lean hams of the saddleman; and long, strong arms, which looked as if they could swing and throw a lariat. Indeed, he wore the conventional hat of a cowboy, and the gray' laced flannel shirt. His trousers seemed to be a little odd, but that was, perhaps, on account of no boots. Boots to the knees make a great difference in a man's legs, as Uncle Boley knew.
"What kind of a job did you work at last?"
"I never had a job in my life, sir."
"I thought you said you was raised on a ranch?"
Uncle Boley looked at him sharply.
"My father's ranch."
Uncle Boley seemed to take a new and deep interest in his work. He pegged away for fully ten minutes with never a word, and scarcely a look in the direction of his doubtful customer. By pressure of habit he had taken up the waxed-end and put it in his mouth, and when he spoke, at length, he mumbled around it, as if he communed to himself.
"I guess every man knows why he left and where he's bound for. I know I left Mezoury one time 'cause I killed a feller's dog. Yes, sir, that dang man was goin' to shoot me."
"I never killed anybody's dog in my life," said Texas.
He was looking out into the street, but with that in his eyes eyes which told the old man his thoughts were far away from the scene before him. People were passing, afoot and on horse, and the dust of their coming and going was blowing lazily on the soft, autumn wind; but Texas could not have told whether they were men or cattle, and Uncle Boley would have bet a handful of tacks on that.
"A man don't have to kill a dog," the old man suggested.
"Sir?" said Texas, with that peculiar start, that unaccountable mounting of color, to his brown, tough face.
"I said a man might run off with some other feller's wife," said Uncle Boley, very sarcastically, speaking loudly, as if to a deaf person.
"He might," Texas allowed, his all-transforming smile moving the corners of his eyes again, "but I assure you, sir, I never did."
Uncle Boley looked at him comically a moment, bent over his work, and laughed, his old high-keyed, dry-leather laugh. It was no small triumph, if Texas had known it, to pull a laugh out of cynical old Uncle Boley. He didn't say a word more until he had the last tack driven, the newness of the repaired heels duly disguised by blacking, after the ancient custom of his craft. Then he handed the shoes over to their owner, shook his head, took the waxed-end out of his mouth.
"No, I'll bet a button you never did!" said he, and laughed again, with such deep gusto it made him cough.
Texas put on his shoes, stood to try them, stamped this foot and that, thrust his hand into his pocket, and inquired how much it was.
"Dollar," said Uncle Boley, turning his head as if ashamed of mentioning such a trifle.
Texas produced it, but Uncle Boley pretended to be absorbed in something transpiring in the street. Texas put it on the bench before him, apology in his movement, and started for the door.
"How much does that leave you?" Uncle Boley asked.
"Sufficient for immediate needs, sir, thank you."
"Yes, and I'll bet you couldn't match it if your neck depended on it!"
Which was true, and Uncle Boley knew it was true by the signs that came into the lanky Texan's face.
"Here"—handing out the dollar—"I said I'd trust you till you struck a job. You take this money, and go and spend it over there at the Buffalo Waller café for something that'll stick to your ribs, and when you've done that, come back here and we'll see about a horse for that there ropin' doin's this afternoon."
"If you could help me to a horse, sir!" said Texas, brightening so wonderfully that he seemed like another man.
"Well, maybe I can."
"And if I win the purse—"
"Wouldn't be surprised if you did."
"I'll split it with you, sir!"
"Yes, an' you won't do no such a dam' thing! Go on over there and put something under your shirt to work on. It takes beefsteak and taters to give a man the stren'th to throw a steer."