CHAPTER XXXVI
ROLL ALONG, LITTLE DOGIES!
LATE at night the leaders of the herd sat talking, but the start on the next day was early. The country ahead was now open and free of buffalo. Once more the great herd trailed out. They left the camp of Jesse Chisholm with his wagon train a little at one side, but the leaders rode over to say farewell to the taciturn old half-breed. McCoyne promised him many things if he would load his next cargo at Abilene instead of Wichita. And so they parted, as ships sailing seas but little known.
Thence on there was no need for the wagon tongue or the North Star. One Chisholm Trail, of many mythical ones, was now really begun. The marks of the wagon wheels were unmistakable. The giant steers of the Del Sol vanguard swung out along the main traveled road as though this was what they long had sought. McCoyne expressed wonderment at seeing so few men handle thousands of great animals.
“You’ve been doing ten or twelve miles a day?” said he. “We can make fifteen or twenty. Push them along. All Abilene is waiting for them.”
It was plain sailing and the weather was good. No tribute-seeking Indians appeared, and the cattle were as peaceable as though they never had dreamed of a run. The Del Sol outfit put mile after mile behind it, rapidly, steadily, the work oxen on the carts sometimes almost on a trot, the sore backs exempt in the remuda, every man feeling that trail’s end was not so far.
Between them and the Arkansas River now ran only one considerable stream—the Salt Fork, spoken of with respect by drovers, for quite customarily it offered swimming water. But now, even if the advanced season had not left the water low, the Salt Fork would have been by no means an insuperable obstacle, for Jesse Chisholm had left here a good raft which he had built for his own purposes. It was better than a bridge. The cattle swam the stream readily, confidently, and in brief order the carts were jerked across at the ends of spliced reatas. The entire crossing went forward methodically and without the loss of a single head.
“So that’s the way you do it?” commented the man of Abilene. “You had some rivers below here too?”
“Almost. This here is play compared to it,” said Nabours. “But you can go anywheres with cows if you know how. That’s the only thing us Texans does know. Yes, we got sever’l cows down in Texas. And I don’t see why this country here wouldn’t raise cows—in the summer anyhow.”
They advanced through the Osage country, over as beautiful grassland as a man ever saw, the prairie covering wavering knee-deep and spotted with many flowers. Wild game was in sight much of the time. There was not a weed. No plow had been here.
“Roll along, little dogies!” came the lazy voice of a swing man. “Roll along, roll along!”
Fifty miles more of happy, lazy, carefree loafing along the trail, and they left the straggling village of Caldwell on the right, just at the Kansas line. Nabours would not let his men go into town, but headed twenty miles to the westward across the grasslands of lower Kansas, making for the crossing of the Arkansas which Chisholm had established with his wagons.
Heretofore the advance had been happily and singularly free from annoyance at the hands of the Indian tribes whose great domain had been crossed. When well over the Kansas line, however, they were caught up by a little band of Osages who had followed along their trail, ignoring reservation limits for reasons of their own. In stature they were gigantic men, their heads partly shaved, leaving a high roach of dense, stiff hair after the traditional Osage custom. They were painted bravely enough in red and ocher, and all were armed with fine buffalo bows of _bois d’arc_. Their leader and his band seemed friendly enough and disposed to parley. Not caring for such hangers-on, Nabours and a few other men stopped for a conference. The chief began with a request soon to become usual along the trail.
“You got plenty wohaw,” he began. “This Injun country. You give wohaw.”
He held up all the fingers of his hand.
“Give you ten cows?” exclaimed Jim Nabours. “I ain’t give a cow to nobody all the way up the trail, and I won’t give one to you. You go on back.”
“Good Injun!” said the leader of the Osages. He handed out a folded piece of paper. “Caldwell. Him send.”
He was a message bearer. Nabours took the letter.
“Why, this is from Dan McMasters!” said he. “Five days ago he was in Caldwell. Says he has gone on now to Wichita,” explaining to McCoyne and the others. “He may be at Aberlene by the time we get there.”
“Say, you, here!” he remarked to the chief. “We’ll give you one wohaw. You set down and wait a while. We’ll ride on up to the wohaws.”
“All right,” said the Osage partisan in good humor. “Him say you give wohaw. We bring you paper.”
They disposed themselves on the grass, their bows unstrung.
“You seem to be all the time hearing from this man McMasters,” said McCoyne. “How come he’s on ahead of you so far?”
“That’s a long story,” said Jim Nabours. “He did ride with us for a while.”
“I knew that man over at Baxter and on the Missouri border,” ruminated the man from Abilene. “Quiet sort of fellow—mysterious—never did say much. I was figuring on a market over there for Texas cattle. But I learned about a gang of raiders in there that had been cutting every herd that came up from Texas bound for Missouri or Iowa or Illinois. Those border ruffians killed probably a dozen men altogether. They tied up and whipped maybe a dozen more. They terrorized every trail outfit that came through there, and the natural result was that they kept off St. Louis from ever becoming a real cow town. Nothing could get through. A little thing sometimes makes a heap of difference later on in big things.
“The leader of that gang was a ruffian by name of Rudabaugh,” he added. “The Missourians finally run him south.”
“Yes,” said Nabours quietly. “The Texans have finally run him north again.”
“And this man McMasters was after him?” McCoyne turned suddenly.
“He might be. He is now. He’s been keeping ahead of us, and that’s the reason.”
He now explained at length the machinations of the trail pirates and the untimely end of them in the night battle on the Washita.
“He mostly plays a lone hand,” Nabours concluded. “He’s an officer in the Rangers. That’s putting law into Texas—the Rangers.”
“Well, we’ve only got one man to put law into Abilene. I’m going to hire Wild Bill Hickok for our town marshal. Wild Bill has got these bad people buffaloed. Counting in his work as a Union sharpshooter, under Curtis, in the Missouri country, he’d have to have a long gun stock to carry all his notches. It’s sure he’s killed somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred men. In 1860, when he was taking care of the stage stock over in east of Abilene, he was jumped by McCandless and his gang—ten men there were in all. You’ve heard of that fight? They were going to run off the stage stock for the Confederate Army. They tackled Bill in his shack, ten of them, and he was alone. He killed nine out of the ten by himself. Not so bad, eh? I don’t know as I ever knew Bill to serve a warrant or make an arrest. But I’ll bet one thing—if we get him for town marshal, Abilene will be first in graveyards, the same as she is first in everything else.”
“It shore looks like Dan McMasters has a pleasant time a-waiting for him,” commented Nabours. “But he’s usual able to take care of hisself.
“Now, I’ll have to cut out a beef for these yellow-bellied friends of ours,” he added. “We’ve picked up a shorthorn stray or so a couple of days ago, and put a Fishhook on him to keep him from catching cold. Like enough it was a Osage steer, anyhow, so I reckon I’ll let ’em have that one. Go cut it out, Len, when we come up with the herd.”
Osages and all, they rode along. Easily, lazily, as though he knew precisely where the animal was, Len Hersey found it, rode it out of the herd and drove it back close to the Indian group.
“Here’s your wohaw,” he said.
The Osage chieftain smiled amiably. A bow twanged. In five minutes the ribs of the beef were broiling on a prairie Osage fire. The dust of the great herd of spotted cattle was lessening to the north.