CHAPTER XIX

THE CATTLE RIEVER

OF THE mysterious night marauders who—to their own sorrow—had invaded the Del Sol trail camp, no further trace was gained or sought. They had vanished as though into thin air, and left behind no more than surmise and suspicion. To their dead, left on the field, no soldier’s honors were accorded. The embittered cowmen let them lie unburied.

The last gatherings of the scattered cattle having been concluded with such subtractions and additions as left old Jim Nabours not too ill satisfied, the great caravan passed on to the northward, day by day, like some vast millepede edging across the green surface of the unbroken sod—cows, horses, carts, flanking riders and keepers of the drag, all acting in their busy daily drama as though on a stage set upon some vast moving platform of the idle gods.

Perhaps two hundred miles, as nearly as they could guess at an unmapped and unfamiliar portion of their own state—a land by no means yet redeemed from savagery—still lay between them and the Red River, the Rubicon of that day, the northern boundary of Texas. Ten miles, twelve, once in a while fifteen miles a day, the great herd grazed and strolled, north and yet northward, unhurried by its guardians. Not so far ahead, now, the wholly unsettled Indian Nations; and at any time the chance of yet other depredations at the hands of the determined white savages, whom they dreaded more, and whose work, they felt sure, was not yet done. As they approached the Red River, still unmolested, their anxiety grew less. Could they have seen into the unsettled land ahead of them it might well have been more.

* * * * *

A wild enough scene it was, that made by Rudabaugh and his score of hard-bitten men in their own encampment the first night after they themselves, pushing swiftly on ahead of the Del Sol herd, which still made their objective, pulled up on a bit of broken ground at the naturally strategic point, the south bank of the boundary river. For a time they roughly had known or guessed what the trail herd had made in northering; but their own forced march to the Red had gained them nothing.

It was time, but the Del Sol herd had not appeared or left any trace of its whereabouts. The men in the rude bivouac—they had, in their haste, brought little with them beyond what their saddle horses carried—began to grumble.

“Well, how could I tell where they’d cross?” demanded Sim Rudabaugh irritably, in answer to some query. “They ought to cross here. This is right on the old Whisky Trail, due north of Worth and Bolivar. This is where Jess Chisholm used to cross when he headed for the Canadian. That’s why I pushed on in here.”

“Well, they didn’t. When they come to Bolivar last week they must have swung up the Elm towards the Spanish Fort, away in west. Good cowmen, they sure are. Anyways, they’ve give us the slip.”

“They’ve done nothing of the sort, Hanson,” retorted the leader of the band. “There’s nobody gives Sim Rudabaugh the slip.”

“Well, they’re north of the Red by now, like enough.”

“Don’t you think it! The Red’s up, almost bank full. No herd could ford it. Besides, even if they was north of the Red, I reckon we know the Nations better than they do, and can do more with the tribes. If they get too far west they’ll hit the Comanches. They’re not done with this trail yet.

“Not that I want their damned cows now,” he added. “We’d make more by going back to Palo Pinto and working up the Brazos. But it’s not every herd that has a hundred miles of scrip along with it in a box. Once word comes down that a herd’s been sold at Abilene, that scrip’ll go up, and go up fast.”

“And then besides!” grinned another man.

“And then besides, yes! There never was a man I hated worse than Burleson Lockhart. I’ll follow him beyond the grave. Scrip I take from him now, or from his family, is worth to me five times over, even now he’s dead. And his daughter——”

Followed some low obscenities from his followers which did not abash the ruffian chief.

“Follow me and you’ll see yet,” he resumed. “I’ve never yet quit. It’s easy to cross here if we have to, and follow the Arbuckle Trail along the Washita. They go twelve miles a day. We can go fifty. We can head them when we please. I don’t intend that herd shall ever see Abilene. No, nor I don’t aim that any man on that herd’ll ever cross south of the Red again!”

The cold-blooded ferocity of the man silenced his followers, as always it did. They were all in one way or another allied in a vast and unscrupulous border conspiracy in a land to which little actual law yet had come. The dullest of them knew that their heyday would be brief, that events were moving fast. The swiftest horse and the surest hand, the boldest and most ruthless leadership—these were their hope. So they followed Rudabaugh, the real leading spirit of the predacious drifters who had seen in the disordered post-bellum political conditions a vast opportunity for gain in a dulled and disorganized land which did not yet suspect its own riches. Rudabaugh had imagination, saw far ahead.

“I swear!” he broke out in one of the half-epileptic fits of choler which sometimes marked him—he was only a pirate of old reborn in the blood of the Civil War—“I swear, some one’s got to suffer for some of this! Last night four Indians rode right into our camp and drove off six horses, and us needing every head we’ve got. You all hear me, now! I swear I’m going to shoot the first Indian I see north of the Red, I don’t give a cuss what sort it is. We’ve gone palavering along and letting a lot of longhorns shoot us up, and then we have the Chickasaws run circles around us.”

At first no one made reply, though a wild band they made, such as no other land, no other conditions, could have produced.

“Do you mean that, Sim?” asked one of them presently.

“You know damned well I do,” rejoined the leader. “You needn’t put it past me.”

To Rudabaugh, subterranean politician, soldier of fortune and renegade, no title or description could more nicely have been fitted than the one word “ruffian.” Of nondescript figure, perhaps of middle height, his body as well as his face showed dissipation written indelibly even for his age of forty-odd. His hair was dark, not yet much thinned, and had a reddish cast as though reflected from the deep floridity of his complexion. His eyes also were hazel to the point of redness, smudged and flecked in the pupils and evil to look at. His lips, thick and astonishingly red, carried out the misprized plan of his other features; he was coarse, common. Yet the inordinate personal conceit, confidence, vanity of the man had mirror in his clothing. Even on the trail he might have been made up for the stage villain, with the high boots, the velvet coat, the gaudy tie—in a borderland where tie or collar was not customary. Excess as much as daring was stamped on him, flamboyance, aberration; yet even at middle age he by no means had outgrown his earlier faith in his own invincibility with women; nor had his other activities put woman from his mind. His camp talk, not to be hinted, always gave proof of that.

To his unquestionable mental boldness, his daring imagination in material matters, Rudabaugh added the callous and ruthless indifference to the rights or sufferings of others which often secures precedence in a band of criminals. The bad eminence of Rudabaugh was conceded as of merit.

Of Rudabaugh’s earlier and possibly criminal record there was little known. Only a very few in his newly chosen home knew he had been border outlaw for many a year in a time when border outlaws really existed. His field lay in the shady confines of a circle comprising parts of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and the unknown Indian Nations, always refuge for bad men and those restive under the law. Leader of an organized band of herd cutters on the Missouri-Arkansas border, on the very earliest cattle drives, before the railroads came, he had of late got visions of wider things. He had followed south, back-trailing, to the origin of the cows that first dribbled north. Credit him with conservative business sense; he had caught scent of profits to come in cows.

Working from these beginnings, Rudabaugh later had planned the most extensive range rieving ever known. No better nor worse than many a later man of large instincts and few principles who operated in trail beef, he had found in politics the most powerful agency possible in banditry. Once established as the covert boss of a wide state machine, he did not lack followers. If his activities and those of his like had much to do with the sudden stiffening and increase of the border constabulary of the Texas Rangers, his shrewd notion of tremendous effects on Texas of any valid railroad market also had weight in certain widespread Texas circles.

No doubt pique, baffled vanity, had much to do with the presence of Rudabaugh’s gang this far north; but as he had said just now, persistence was a characteristic of the man. One thing he did not share with any man. The image of Taisie Lockhart was in his blood. Whether he planned to rob her and flout her, to rob her and humble her, to rob her and then try to impress her with some large gesture of generosity, who could tell of a mind so insanely blurred and vague? At least, he remained resolved to follow the Del Sol herd and the Del Sol owner to the last mile of the trail unless sooner satisfied in one or more purposes of his own. Another quality of leadership—he could keep his own counsel.

“Well,” Rudabaugh vouchsafed at last, helping himself again to food at the fire, “they’ve only postponed things. So far, they’ve got two of us, and one of them Sam Barclay, my office deputy, and as good a man as I had.”

“Good on the books, maybe,” volunteered a voice, “but no good as a cowman. The Del Sol men rid it through and gathered, like enough, every cow except what landed on top of Sam. And they never dug a spade of dirt to cover him!” he added virtuously. “No way to treat a man. Why, them people is outlaws! And I’ll bet they’re crowing now over shooting Bentley!”

“They’re good cowmen,” commented Rudabaugh, after a long time. “We can’t take any chances with them, day or night. But I’ve got a few red friends between here and the Canadian that’ll help pickle their goose, I’m thinking. No white man yet ever scared a Comanche very bad, least of all old Yellow Hand, and I’ll bet he’s in the Nations right now. If we can find his band and show them four thousand beeves and two hundred picked horses I don’t think that herd’ll get much further north. Talk of a Cherokee outlet west to the buffalo lands—the Comanches’ll have something to say about a Texas outlet north! I think I’ll show something to our Del Sol friends.”

“You?” smiled a hearer. “Thought you said you’d kill the first Indian you saw north of the Red!”

“So I shall. I don’t throw a bluff and forget it. That’s only my private matter. I’m going to kill that Indian just as a matter of conscience.” He grinned.

“But before we move out of here,” he added, “we ought to get some word from our man McMasters. I’ve not seen hide or hair of him since he got run out of the Del Sol camp and came pretty near getting shot. He said he’d go on in alone and get the trunk out of the girl’s tent. Well, he didn’t. Anyhow he disappeared.”

“He’s always disappearing,” remarked another man. “He won’t work with us. I can’t line that fellow out.”

“Well, he told me he had to play both ends against the middle,” grumbled Rudabaugh. “But he ought to come in and report. I don’t mind a man being mysterious, but I don’t want him too damned mysterious. All I could do to trade with him, after that Ranger run-in on the Del Sol, before he moved north with the herd.”

* * * * *

Had it been known, the bandit camp was not alone beset with puzzles and problems. That very week, a few nights earlier, in the encampment of the Del Sol herd, old Anita at dawn brought to her mistress in her own little tent a note, folded, addressed to no one, in the handwriting of an educated man—a handwriting she had never seen.

“_El caballero vien’ aqui, señorita_,” said Anita calmly, as she handed over the folded paper. “_Esta noche, heem vien’ aqui._”

“He came to-night, Anita? Who came—what man? And what is this?”

“_Yo no sais_,” replied Anita. “I dunno. He’s tall-a man, _si_. He come-a my _carreta_, shake-a me soft, while Sanchez he’s on da herd. He say, give-a dis to _la Señorita_. But s’pose-a I make-a some holler, he goin’ choke-a me sure! I dunno some more.”

Anita said nothing of a coin at that time tied in the corner of her underskirt. Indeed, she thought it just as well Sanchez should not know. As for her mistress, she might do her own guessing; she could read Americano, whereas, herself, Anita, could not.

The communication was impersonal, detached, as Anastasie Lockhart found. She hurried at once to her trail boss; and if she had any guess in her own mind she kept it there.

Above Fort Worth village, head due north, to Bolivar. Then don’t go on to the Station—swing northwest up the Elm. Cross near the Spanish Fort. Feel west then for the Beaver. Then run by the North Star six hundred miles. Good water and grass. You can make all crossings. Time about two months. Keep west of the Whisky Trail. Herd cutters and thieves. Watch out all the time for Indians.

Which, to a trail boss wholly without map, guide or knowledge of the far and unknown country of the north on ahead, must have seemed a godsend, even lacking authenticity or origin.