CHAPTER XXVII

THE GAME OF THE GODS

ONCE upon a time the immortal gods, desirous of playing their favorite game, in which mortals are used as pawns, cast down upon the surface of the earth their great chessboard. It was simple, having but four squares. They traced a wandering and wavering line two thousand miles in length along the indefinite line between the tall grass of the prairies and the bunch grass of the plains. It lay somewhere near what men afterwards came to call the one-hundredth meridian.

Across this line at right angles they put down yet another indefinite line to finish off their board. Since they knew nothing of geography or mathematics or politics, they did not call this line the parallel of thirty-six north. For them it was enough that it loosely divided the land of winter snows from that of winter suns. They cared not that at some time it might be the indefinite line between corn and cotton, between lean beef and fat, between breeding and feeding. They knew nothing of quarantine. It was nothing to them that had they gone one degree further north they would have established the south line of a land called by men the state of Kansas. They had never heard of the state of Kansas; or of the Missouri Compromise; or of slavery. They dealt with a great land which then and now has been forever free. Men came to call it the West.

The great east-and-west line, like the great north-and-south line, one day was to be broken down and forgotten, after the immortal gods had kept their chessboard sufficiently long to themselves and had wearied of their game. They left the chessboard to their pawns and sat back, idly watching them, smiling that the pawns knew so little of great games.

* * * * *

When the early herds pushed up into that unknown land from the straggling half-Spanish settlements of the Southwest men ignorantly walked over wealth which they then did not heed and did not need—the wealth that lay under the tall grasses and the short grasses. Of the bunch grass, the vine mesquite grass, and the redtop and the Eastern bluestem, they could talk understandingly. They lived in a day and land as yet pastoral. But their cattle walked over unsuspected millions of millions of gallons of oil that one day later would be needed. The rude white bandits of the nation, men even of Rudabaugh’s shrewd type, themselves did not suspect the measureless measures of coal and other minerals that lay under their feet. The immortal gods smiled at them, knowing that in time they would give their pawns everything they needed, equal to their changed requirements, as age succeeded age.

Now, pawns on the great chessboard of the gods where not even pawns ever had been placed before, the ragged crew of Del Sol was pushing up, two degrees eastward of the north-and-south dividing line. They had been traveling somewhere near the ninety-eighth meridian, of which not one of them ever had heard. Not many of them ever had heard of thirty-six-thirty, or of the Missouri Compromise. They fought a war without much history, for the rank and file, as always is the case, had but narrow horizons. They were simply cowmen; and now they were driving north. To them Abilene, their objective, was as vague a thing as had been the cities of Cibola to Coronado’s men when they also once crossed the great chessboard of the immortal gods, caring not even for the grasses, so good for buffalo and cows, and also missing all the minerals that lay beneath their feet, although it was one mineral they sought.

That was in the past. The immortal gods had decided that now it was time for men to move north. There was to be a great new constructive day.

But it seems that there is implanted in Nature and in the universe the law of two opposing forces; centrifugal and centripetal; good and evil; constructive and destructive; that which feeds and is preyed upon by that which fattens; that which produces and creates, countered by that which destroys and tears down; that which sows to reap, and that which reaps where it has not sown. Therefore it was quite as much foreordained that Rudabaugh and his men should pass north to prey on the Del Sol herd as that the Del Sol herdsmen should be driving north into a new day.

* * * * *

Be all these things assigned such causes as they may in each man’s philosophy, at the end of his nose or farther, a new epoch was at hand for the vast unsettled West. Rudabaugh and his men had discussed that daily and nightly as they pushed on up the Washita River of the Indian Nations. They finally camped at the ford of the Washita, well in advance of the Del Sol men and directly north of them, although neither knew the proximity of the other.

The ruffian leader had no more than twenty men in his band. He had recruited these from classes naturally unscrupulous and restless under any law. But all criminal tendency is in its way a sort of individual initiative, self-assertiveness, after all; so that Rudabaugh found his men not always wholly submissive to any man’s will. They were less so now than ever. Repeatedly Rudabaugh had to explain to them again and over again that they were after large game, that the division would be large per capita. They were more like Coronado’s men—wanted mineral in hand; minted mineral.

“Well, I don’t mind saying,” remarked one of the bolder of his men at the second night of encampment at the Washita crossing—a city lies near there to-day—“I’ll be free to say that I don’t noways like the look of things.”

Rudabaugh turned to him savagely.

“Why don’t you? What’s the matter with you, Baldy?”

“There wasn’t no cause to kill them Indian women. If we don’t keep moving, them Comanches may run into us any time.”

“Where’d we move?” sneered Rudabaugh. “What are we after up here? Have I got to make a picture-block map to show you? Don’t you see, you damned numskull, if that herd gets to the railroad the whole jig is up for us? We’ve got to make our clean-up right now, this season or not at all, I keep telling you. We’ve got to get our scrip and get our lands, and get our surveyors out to locate them; and we’ve got to do it all now. Next year will be too late if that herd gets through. I’ve told you all this a dozen times. Now if you don’t like my way of leading, you know what you can do. If I hear any more grumbling I know what I’ll do.”

None the less this spreading doubt and dissatisfaction on the part of his followers did begin to make impression upon even so hardened a soul as Rudabaugh’s. He could do nothing if left alone. Looters always organize. In spite of his bravado, in spite of the quantities of fiery liquor which he had consumed, he began to feel a sudden uncontrollable chill creeping over his heart. Just now he began to pace up and down, restlessly endeavoring to work himself into one of his berserk rages. But he looked over his shoulder once in a while. No one knew what he saw, unless they themselves also saw the picture of the two naked women lying in their blood at a bathing pool.

“Damn it!” said Rudabaugh now, petulantly. “I don’t see why that bunch of buzzards should pick a tree so close to light on!”

He caught up his rifle. A great black bird dropped dead from a limb a hundred yards away. The others rose clumsily, wheeled in dark caravan; but they alighted on another tree not even so far away.

“That ain’t luck, I tell you,” repeated the first speaker of Rudabaugh’s men. “Me, I don’t like the look of things.”