CHAPTER XIII

“BRING AN IRON!”

THE cow hunter lost little time in settling down to work in his new capacity. He had initiative, seemed masterful, independent.

“Let me bring two or three of my boys down and help you-all throw back a lot of these cows and calfs. I’ll leave couple boys to hold our stuff. Come on up again and look it over.”

They rode together until they reached the edge of the wild range herd—literally the loot of a land untenanted—animals wild as buffalo. Nabours gave the herd the quick glance of the practiced cowman.

“Yore stuff’s fatter’n ours,” said he; “yet you’ve driv further.”

“Shore,” replied the other. “We’ve been on a eight-hundred-mile circle, like enough. Way out west, it’s high and dry, and the vine mesquite grass, or the grama north o’ that, curls down like nigger wool. There’s cows here been raised on vine mesquite, fat as Christmas ducks right now.

“I hearn tell that away fur up north, thousand miles er so, they got bunch grass and buffler grass that fats cows the same way; though, o’ course, no cow critter could live through them winters up north.”

“Shore not—nor no man, neither, I reckon.”

“Well, now, here’s the layout,” resumed Dalhart. “Here’s two-three thousand to pick from. As I said, you’ll find plenty T.L.’s. We got maybe three hunderd slicks here and there, fer ourselves. Ef we got a dollar a head straight through we’d be rich on the hunt. Yet beeves at Sumner and north o’ there is fotchin’ fifteen a head and up’ards.”

“Ef we got half that at the railroad my boss’d be rich on one drive,” said Jim Nabours. “Then we’d have money enough to locate the gang that’s been pushing stuff off this range. I don’t think we’ll need to scrape Austin very damn deep.”

“I ain’t sayin’,” replied the cow hunter quietly. “Now what I segest is that you-all cut yore light stuff and let our boys throw it back on yore range. Take out’n our herd as many head o’ good fours and drive ’em all north under the Fishhook, T.L.’s and all the rest. When you sell allow us a dollar a head for findin’ and tradin’. Does that sound fair?”

“More’n such,” said Jim Nabours. “This first herd is a expeariment for all of us. Let’s get the girl on her feet fer sake of her father. And him oncet rich!” he added. “As square a cowman as ever crossed leather. I tell you, that bunch of shorthorns that’s come into Austin done him dirt. Politics, that’s what’s under it—Reconstruction politics. They think they can steal this state because they win the war. Reconstruction? I’ll bet one thing, ef I ever lay eye on the man that’s been riding our range I’ll take him apart so’s’t he’ll be damned hard ever to reconstruck again!”

Now in the glare and heat and dust of the frank Southern spring days, two dozen lank, lithe riders split the two great herds, combed them both, blended them both. Nabours’ face began to lighten as he saw forming a real trail herd of marketable beeves and mature cows. Of the unknown potential market at the rails he really knew nothing. It might demand beef and might ask stocking cattle. The discards of each herd, the yearlings, the cows with calves, the lame and halt, were to be cut back south for the later distribution on their own home ranges.

The whole enterprise in which these two pastoral chiefs now by chance were engaged was one of a day now gone by forever, and it was conducted under standards not understandable to-day. There was no law but range custom. Texas was but thirty years this side the time when twenty enormous land grants, given to Americans, had covered practically all of her vast territory. No scale of cattle values ever had been known. On a strip of twenty-five miles here, not that many miles from the capital of the state, now were assembled almost ten thousand head of cattle. Had a buyer from the North appeared he could have bought the lot at three dollars and a half the head, and at the tally-out he would as a matter of course have been asked to accept the count as it ran, dogies, cows and ancient steers, head for head. In those days a cow was a cow. All horned kine, of any age or sex, were cows.

Again, as to the question of ownership, the gesture of the day was alike close and hard, or large and lenient. No man argued with his neighbor, since a cow was only a cow. A man gave his cloak also to his neighbor if asked—though woe to the man who laid hand on coat, uninvited!

In the herd of these wild-cow gatherers were many unbranded cattle—their own now by virtue of discovery, the custom being “finders, keepers,” as to an unmarked animal. For the mixed lot of the branded strays from widely scattered herds a dollar a head seemed then a fair pay for finding and herding for a hundred miles or more. The adventurers who had taken on this speculation of saddle and rope had rather considered a dollar a head profit than range the find into the second year—after which the increase of the strays would be their own without possible contest. And a dollar a head, payable perhaps next fall, was a thing large and golden to the eye of the bearded, half-clad fighting men who now, with no plan on their own part, had uncovered a large plane of contact of the old with the new, of the late past with a new and crowding present. But for both parties, cow hunters and trail drivers, it was all a speculation. The country north of them was an unknown land. No values yet were established either here or there. The West was yet in embryo.

But all the time, as Nabours and Dalhart, respective leaders, rode at their work, their wonder increased at what each learned from the other. Some malign intelligence, outrunning the apathy of the South in the post-bellum period, had worked on more than a local horizon. There had been a general pushing of the range product into unsettled West Texas, as far as the Comanches would admit. The trail to the Pecos River, up which cattle had been driven to Army posts, the pioneer work of Loving and Goodnight, the casual Western drives of the half-breed Jesse Chisholm to the Pecos crossing, must have been watched and known by certain powerful groups of the new and avid carpetbag politicians then crowding South.

That a covert range ring was working in Austin—as a beef ring later was to work in Washington—as well as a river-improvements ring which was hastening to sell or take over all the state lands at a few cents the acre; and that this sinister gang of far-sighted and unscrupulous men had visions of a day of a vast empire of their own, stocked with cattle which had cost no more than the stealing, branding and driving, could then be no more than suspected by Nabours or Dalhart. But both men were shrewd. Both knew wild ways and wild lands, and both knew cows, though neither had any real vision as to the swift future of cows. They knew that crooked work had been going on, of so large and so vicious an extent as to violate all the ancient and sacred law of custom, as well as the written law. Both men were sober as they rode at their work.

“And to think,” said the old foreman of Del Sol, “they wouldn’t spare even a girl like her!”

Dalhart, lean and bearded adventurer in cows, nodded.

“But there ain’t none like her!”

Nabours paused for a time.

“You been on our string three hours.”

“Three hours is enough, _amigo_. Three minutes was enough. I’ve never knowed such a woman could ever be in all the world.”

“There’s others think so.”

“I’m sorry for them.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to marry that girl ef hit’s the lastest thing I do.”

“Others has told me such,” replied Jim Nabours, not so much concerned. “It’s right funny about women. Now, I tried for all my early life to marry a girl down in San Felipe. I done right well, and was going to ast her; but another man done married her first. All right, he done it fair, and I didn’t kick. I set down to wait him out, and shore enough, he done die in about ten year and she was a widder. I begin to save up enough to git me new spurs and hat and saddle blankets, and allow to begin courting of Sarah right after branding time—and damn me, ef a Dutch colonist don’t up and marry her afore I git around to it! He last four year, and Sam Doan shot him one day over around Round Rock. I was in debt to Sam fer that, fer now Sarah was a widder oncet more.

“This time I didn’t lose no time. I rid over and told Sarah how it laid. ‘Why, law!’ says she. ‘Why Jim, I never knowed you choose to marry me, er of course I’d of married you rather’n ary one of them others! Why didn’t you say so?’

“‘Well, I say so now,’ says I. ‘Even ef I’m crowding forty-eight, I say so.’

“So we done set the day. And right then the war bust in our face and I rid off to the war. I sort of forgot to git married to Sarah, in the excitement. Well, when I come back I was apast fifty, and broke. When I came to look things up I find Sarah has married a Arkansaw widower with eight children over on the Brazos!

“That settled me with women. The game’s too damn rapid fer a man like me.”

“Well, it ain’t going to be too rapid fer me.”

“No? Now look here! Let me ast you something—and let me tell you something. I ast you—likewise I tell you.

“I’m that girl’s maw. I realize how much she owes every man on these both two herds right now, but I allow that the real men in this outfit has got to think of her cows and not her—first, last and all the time, till the said cows is sold.

“You willing to take left point on them grounds and with that understanding? No love making on this trail—not a damned word! Besides, you’ll tell me who you are, after we get done driving and settle down to courting?”

His keen eye sought that of Dalhart, whose own met it as fearlessly.

“It’s a trade!” said he. “I’ll keep my word on that.”

“Well, that’s settled. Now, let’s set off the branding gangs. We got to get at least four hunderd of these fours in the Fishhook before night day after to-morrow. That’ll keep us all from making love, I reckon. Blest be the tie that binds! But you’re a T.L. hand now, and not no more’n that. You got a naturalized citizen’s right to love the boss, but you ain’t reached no years of majority ner discretion this side of Aberlene.”

Jim Nabours rode back in the twilight and flung off from a foam-streaked horse at Taisie’s fire. The tall girl came and seated herself beside him on a bed roll, a hand laid on his knee.

“What’s wrong now?”

His quick eye noted her paleness. He knew she had been weeping. A large gnarled brown hand of his own stroked gently the slender brown hand on his knee.

“Why, Miss Taisie, ain’t nothing wrong, I’d say. Fact is, everything is too damned right, that’s all.”

He went on to tell her of the developments of the day; how more than richly their exchange of discards for beeves was working out; how well the herd was developing. Then he came to what was on his mind.

“Now, see here, Miss Taisie,” he went on, breaking a bit of bark between his fingers, “when we started out we thought we had stripped the Del Sol range. We taken all ages. Only a act of God could of kept us from having a plumb thousand calfs riding in yore carts. But now looky here! We’re going to cut back all that stuff and throw in fours instead. The cut is going back to Del Sol. But who’s going to take care of Del Sol while we go north?”

“Well, who could?”

“You could. Yes, Miss Taisie, you! We can git along damn well without you, and Del Sol can’t get along alone. Don’t you think you’d be safer back home that way than what you will be going north up to the sixth princerpul meridjun with sixteen pirates and God knows what kind of weather?

“You’re only a girl, Miss Taisie—the damnedest finest girl ever borned in Texas; but girls is girls. I can handle cows, Miss Taisie. I can’t handle girls. You go on back home, please ma’am. We’ll pull in afore Thanksgiving with a wagonload of Yankee money.”

The girl straightened up.

“I’ll not go back! I closed the doors when I started up the trail. How could I live there alone?”

“I ain’t ast you to live there alone. What I say is, we’ll be inside of ten miles of Austin when we cross the Colorado. I want you and Del to ride in to Austin and get married. Then I want you both to take charge of this cut and ride on back to Del Sol.”

The old man turned his gray grim eye to her.

“Can’t you leave me be yore maw, Taisie, child?”

“No—no—no, Jim!” Both her hands were on his. “Don’t ask me! I’ve nothing to live for outside of what’s here on the ground. Everything I own I’ve got with me, and all my friends. No, Jim, I’m going through. No use to argue—no use to argue, Jim!”

“I reckon not, ma’am,” said the old foreman, sighing. “All I say is, God ha’ mercy, that’s all! I got a dream there’s going to be hell on this herd.”

* * * * *

So was the genesis of Anastasie Lockhart, cow hand. To-morrow came a creature who rode unconscious of the horse beneath her, scornful of heat and dust as any of these dust-screened figures, scarf over mouth, legs clinging, body rhythmic, hands swift at the test moment; a creature of incredible fascination, with all the velocity and vitality of youth and strength. And before her, seeking respite of her in violent activities, passed vague, flitting, heroic figures, each of whom rode his best for her—and each of whom eke left to the tears of the recording angel crimes in cattle brands they would have lost a hand before committing for their own gain or that of any man.

A vast picture, and a noble, that of the remaking of the Del Sol trail herd. A shrouded yellow sun, hot and again hot. The dulled green of a landscape of timber and grass, of hill and valley, a wild land even then, though under the eaves of the state’s capitol; a land partly settled here, but tenanted under no real acceptance of a social compact. Eager, early, primeval it was—all. Youth of the world!

A tossing sea of wide-pointed horns, overhung with a cloud of dust. Rattling and clacking inside the dust. Rock of Ages; Jesus, Lover; Home, Sweet Home, where lean riders held the mill. And always, cutting through the cloud, one remorseless rider after another edged his chosen victim out for the final rush and the relentless sweep of the thin hide rope. Over and over again, more than five hundred times before that cut was done—twenty times, twenty-five in an hour, counting them all—the little Southern horses sat down and quarter-faced their quarry, each taking his own weight and more in one wrench at his saddle horn and saddle cinches, his gleaming eyes noting the hurled horned creature, his victim also, at the other end of the rope.

Calls of “Bring an iron!” And men sweating at a half dozen fires were ready for that. Till his trembling sides could no longer hold his great heart’s purpose, each savage little horse went back into the dust under a savage man. Two ropes for the heavy steers, two sweating horses; twenty-five brands run in an hour, perhaps—a task for four days done in two.

A vast and splendid picture, and of a great day. Since then two million men and women have mated thereabouts. Yet now, center of that picture—and its cause—there passed, hour after hour, gray, dusty, flitting, tireless, the unmistakable and unconcealable figure of a young woman. . . . Yes, a creature of incredible vitality and velocity, of life and youth.

Youth of the world!