The Trail Rider/Chapter 12
Wherev-er you may be,
I'll tell you of a sto-ry
That hap-pen-ed un-to me."
THE cowboy was directly ahead of Hartwell as he rode through the southern herd, singing in high, wavering voice to quiet the cattle, which were milling restlessly. Here and there the plaintive tenor of a steer's lowing joined the herder's doleful melody; here and there sounded a rush of hoofs as the cattle crowded, huddling together for comfort in the face of dangers which they imagined filled the night.
Over all the great herd this uneasiness was apparent. There was a sound of shuffling bodies, of clashing horns, as the beasts pressed together in confusion. The cowboy was going on with his song in his endeavor to lull the fear of his charges. Texas could picture him, young and slim as his voice indicated, riding slowly among the shadowy beasts. A sister fond and true,
Or maybe-so a dear wife
To weep and mourn for you."
So he carried his song along; that almost interminable song that has been sung by countless cowboys from the Rio Grande to the Little Missouri, carrying Texas back with it to the days of his own boyhood when he had stood many a lonesome watch like that.
Away over to the left of him another high-pitched singer could be heard in the long pauses between the nearer cowboy's stanzas. He was too far off to catch his words, but Texas could supply them to the tune, which came across the night over the sighing herd as clear as a bugle call.
And play the fife lowly,
And drink to my health as you bear me along—"
That was the way it began. The ways in which it ended were varied, according to locality, tradition, and the personal taste of the singer. Only in all of them they buried him as he longed to be laid down, and the wolves howled over him, and the snows of winter fell, all in the melancholy cadence that was sadder than any dirge when it came on the night wind and the rain from the lips of some singer watching beside his straining herd.
It was plain to the schooled ear of Hartwell that the leaven of stampede was working in the dull brains of those cattle, evident that it needed but some little thing to set them off, as the shifting of a rock precipitates the avalanche. But a man on a horse was hardly the needed element in their almost complete panic, for they were accustomed to looking to men on horses for protection, assurance, guidance, through all the adventures of the long road and the range. A coyote might do it; a bat flying in the face of an animal might do it; but it was a long chance against a man on a horse.
Texas was ready and willing enough on his own account to make as much trouble for the southern drovers, and cause them as much damage as he could to balance in some measure the tortures he had suffered at their hands. The night favored any reprisal that he might be able to devise. It was so dark there was no sky-line; the cattle floundering up from their uneasy rest in front of his horse, or moving aside, almost indifferent to his presence in their steaming midst, were indistinct the length of his horse's neck, invisible a few feet away.
He rode through the herd, keeping the wind in his face to hold his direction, for without it he would have been like a cat in a sack. He wanted to draw as far away from the singing cowboy as possible before starting any commotion among the cattle.
Texas was feeling his way through to find, if possible, the place where the cattle were most uneasy. He could sense this spot in the night as well as in the day the moment that he rode into it, for the cattle would be milling like a slow whirlpool. From this trampling swirl of cattle a leader would break away now and then, followed by others, and start off on the aimless run of stampede. This little offthrowing from the revolving wheel of the herd was called a "point" in the tongue of the range, and it was to turn these points back into the herd, and confuse and submerge the leaders, that the cowboys stood alert on the borders of the drove. If Texas could luckily ride into one of these incipient stampedes the cattle could be urged on in spite of the herders' efforts to turn the point.
Over there, where that young-voiced cowboy was singing his long song of the man who left his dear wife and numerous relations to go to the thorny wastes of the Rio Grande and join the Texas Rangers, the sound of the greatest disquietude came. For that spot Texas headed, the rain blowing in his face.
He could not recall ever having ridden in a darker night. As he rode he felt the pressure against his legs of the bodies of cattle which he could not see. Great perils would lie ahead of and around a man riding blindly with a stampeding herd that night. Ordinarily it was a situation of aggravated dangers, but in such darkness the risks were multiplied many times. The first unseen ravine would be a trap, the first wash across the prairie—some of them with banks twenty feet deep—would mean a trampled, mangled, smothering death.
But all this had to be faced and dared, for his honor's sake. He was there to stampede that herd, or a part of it at least—he had very little hope that all of it could be drawn into the flight—and prove his loyalty to the men who had put their interests into his trust. He could hear the cowboy talking to his horse between snatches of his song, and he knew that it was an anxious hour for that lone sentinel there in that strange black land.
Here the cattle were milling in their distracted, senseless way, held back by the herder, whose voice and presence partly assured them, but could not entirely calm their fears. Texas had difficulty in forcing his way among them, his aim being to reach the outer edge.
Suddenly his horse, floundering impatiently through the dull stream of beasts, landed almost on top of an animal which, through fatigue or indifference, had lain down in the midst of all the excitement and unrest. The creature came to its feet with a snort, giving Hartwell's horse such a start that it reared and squealed. Instantly there came a challenge from the cowboy, who could not have been, by the distinctness of his voice, more than ten rods away. Hartwell bent low to blot himself into the blackness of the herd, caution unnecessary, for he could not have been seen if he had stood twenty feet tall. The commotion caused by riding upon the sleeping animal almost precipitated the panic that Hartwell hoped to complete.
The cowboy, whose sharp ears told him that some enemy had entered the herd, was coming that way, shooting as he advanced. Texas could see him in imagination, his horse rearing against the surging stream of cattle as if it battled with a flooded river. He was shouting his mightiest, a cry high-pitched and tremulous, like the howl of a coyote. Others were answering him, coming to him, Hartwell knew, as fast as they could gallop.
Hartwell had no intention of discovering himself to them by replying to the cowboy's shots, for he was in no danger from that source. He could hear the bullets go splitting high over his head, and knew very well that the herder would not risk killing his own cattle to shoot at a presence only suspected. He urged his horse forward, and that creature, scornful of the cattle in his superior wisdom, and out of patience with their indifference to its efforts to force a passage, bit them in the little charges that it now and then had room to make.
Adding to this stimulation, Texas began beating them with his heavy wet hat, careless now about keeping his location or his intentions concealed. The cowboy was looking for him, cursing and yelling. Near at hand others were whooping and shooting, and out of the herd the confused noise of clashing horns, hoofs beating the sodden earth, rose and grew with every breath.
There was no longer any lowing, nor that indescribable sad moaning such as they make before they lift their voices in the long plaint of homesickness. Panic was among them now; they were snorting to be away. Confusion, blackness, the scent of rain-wet, steaming beasts; a struggle, a scramble of his horse's feet as if it lunged up a steep bank, and Hartwell broke through. His horse ran on, unable to check itself under the force that it had put into its labor to get clear, and after it came the point of the stampede.
Hartwell heard the sudden change in the slow soft trampling of hoofs. It rose suddenly into a muffled roar, which grew like flood water, filling the night. He rode hard ahead of the stampede, hoping that he could draw off to one side and avoid being swept away. All around him he could hear the cattle, their horns clashing as they pressed together with a sound like hail in a field of corn.
Hartwell had lost his direction. The wind was no longer his guide, for he was riding faster than any wind except a hurricane. The cattle were bearing him along like a leaf in a freshet. Behind him the roar increased as the fury of flight possessed them, the pressure of that vast body of charging beasts beyond the power of any man to check. If his horse should fall, or its endurance prove unequal to the flight, they would be crushed together, as men and horses had been trampled in stampedes of his recollection.
There was only one thing to do, and that bear ahead with the cattle in their furious blind race. They were poisoned with the great fear which the understanding of man could not compass nor sound. The sound of their own flight increased the terror which their unreasoning brains had hatched. They would run on until their tongues lolled out from thirst, their eyes glazed, their heads hung between their legs.
That horse of Duncan was a sound-winded animal. In spite of the strain he held his own with the beasts, to which panic had lent speed and endurance not ordinarily their own.
It seemed to Hartwell that the stampede lasted for hours. Fortunately, the prairie had not yet been crossed by a creek or gully, and now the cattle were beginning to thin around him, the sound of their running to fall away. He checked his horse and began to work his way through the straggling beasts. Dawn was breaking when he at last rode clear of them. Ahead of him was the dark fringe of timber along a stream. As far as he could see through the breaking darkness the prairie was filled with cattle. The fright outrun, these had fallen to grazing, or had dropped wearily to rest, the cause of their late panic forgotten, if it was ever known.
Hartwell believed, from the appearance of things, that the whole herd had stampeded. It must be scattered for miles by now, he knew, for the habit of the beasts was to spread as the terror wore out of them. The Texans might have weeks of work collecting the cattle again to resume the drive.
He had no idea where he was, and cared little. He had accomplished what had seemed the impossible; the herd was stampeded, the sincerity of his purpose had been proved. He unsaddled his fagged horse, hobbled it, and turned it to graze and rest, then threw himself down on the sogged turf to sleep, for he was weary to the marrow. The day then dawning would have to take care of itself in its own way, as it would do anyway, no matter for all the worry that he might expend on it in advance.
It was the pleasant sensation of the sun feeling through his wet garments that woke Hartwell. He found himself on a knoll close by the creek, but the locality was strange to him. As for that, any locality in that part of the country would have been strange, except the few miles with which he had become familiar as he rode the trail. There were no cattle very near him now, and nobody in sight. He concluded that the Texans had not yet arrived, due, very likely, to having followed some other branch of their stampeding herd. He did not want to meet any of them that morning, either, for they would not be in any amicable mood.
Food was his first thought, for the need of it was insistent above all others. He hadn't a scrap with him, and he didn't know which way to face to find a habitation. He knew it would be a safe undertaking to follow the creek, in either direction. Somebody in that country of ranches would be located on it, and no matter if the cattle had run clear down into the Nation, there would be something for a hungry rider. This course he pursued, turning toward the east, for that direction lay on his right hand, and Hartwell was a right-handed man, morally as well as physically, and it was the direction that suited him best.
Cattle were spread over miles of country, and at last he sighted the Texans making some effort to gather them up again. But there seemed to be a sort of dazed heartlessness in their work, as of men stunned by the task that confronted them. Hartwell found a good deal of satisfaction in that. It was something, at least, on account of what he owed them for that night of torture in the rawhide rope.
He kept close to the creek, skirting along in the brush. Until midday he followed the stream, hardly out of sight of cattle all the way. That herd had stampeded to the last animal, he believed, with broadening satisfaction. The knowledge of his complete success was like the scent of broiling steak. It made him sit up in the saddle and feel rather keen and eager, in spite of the mauling in body and mind which the past three days had given him.
It began to be impressed on him about that time, dimly and not quite understood at first, that he was coming into a country where he had been before. There was something familiar in the sweep of the creek here, something—and there ahead of him, in the elbow of the stream as he rose the ridge, was Malcolm Duncan's ranch.
There it was, as peaceful to behold in the midday sun of that autumn day as a picture in a frame upon the wall. Several horses were hitched in front, and even at that distance he could tell by the way they stood that they had been ridden hard and far. Around him on the prairie, grazing and lying about as if it belonged to them, were the Texas cattle, scattered far and wide.
He had stampeded them, beyond any doubt. But he had stampeded them in the wrong direction!
The humor of the situation struck him first. He leaned back in his saddle and almost laughed. They had sent him to stampede the herd, with directions that he stampede it toward Texas. He wondered how many of them ever had gone out on a dark night and stampeded a herd of eight or ten thousand half-wild cattle according to directions. The wonderful thing, as he saw it, was that he had set them off at all.
But those Kansas drovers would see neither the humor nor the marvel of it. That he understood very well. What they would say, what they would do, he could conjecture without a strain, for there was ruin standing in their very doors, delivered by his hand.
Still, his own conscience was easy. He had gone about the business honestly, and he had done as much as any man among them could have done, and more than any one of them would have attempted. He didn't owe any of them anything, and his duty lay straight ahead to report to Malcolm Duncan on the result of his night's work.
The situation was not without its satisfaction. Those cattlemen had been quick to jump to his condemnation; they had planned this task for him, and the work of their own scheming had fallen and buried them. He had a sardonic pleasure in the anticipation of their various expressions of face when they should see him riding up to the corral.
Hartwell saw that they had recognized him while he was half a mile away. They came out of the house bareheaded, leaving the dinner-table he suspected, to look at him. Then they ducked in again, for their hats and vests and guns.
This picture of their preparation to receive him provoked a smile. A cow-man couldn't do anything but eat without his vest. He must have it on for any serious business, as a Freemason his ceremonial-apron. They would come out buttoning themselves up in corduroy and duck and velveteen in a minute, ready to take him right when he arrived.
But it was a serious matter for him, about as serious as a man ever faced, and he knew that, too. Yet there was that background of humor in the fact that he had stampeded the herd fifteen or twenty miles in the very direction that its owners wanted it to go, which he could not altogether dismiss. If Duncan, or even Dee Winch, could get a glimpse of it he would come out of that queer adventure without a fight.