CHAPTER XXXVII

ABILENE

IN THE front room of a raw board building, on which carpenters still were laboring noisily, sat a tall man at a table, pleasantly humming a tune to himself as he bent over his task.

In appearance he was a Viking; a very strong man, bulky, above six feet in height, and yet lithe, easy, graceful, with perfect coördination of physical faculties. His eye was very blue. His yellow hair was long, like that of ancient warriors; so long that it fell in ripples on his shoulders; and, as hair of any warrior should be, it was admirably kept.

The garb of this striking-looking man—one of the handsomest men that ever crossed the Missouri in the days of the frontier, which is much to say of males—was on the whole devoid of pretentiousness. His dark clothing was ready-made, but his boots never were ready-made. He showed the influence of the South, where a man may be slouchy in all things save as to his feet. This man’s boots were of fine calf, closely cut to cover a small foot. A pair of gloves lay on the table, the best of buckskin. His hat, of the finest felt, was wide of brim and low of crown—the hat of the upper range, distinct from the steeple-crown Mexican sombrero.

Had the entire border been combed, a finer example of the better type of border man could not at that time have been found than this one. In any corner of the world his appearance would have called attention. Two or three men sitting across from him against the wall in the hotel office—for this building was no less than the Drovers’ Cottage of Abilene, soon to be famous across the Western world—eyed him with silent respect as he sat busy, humming his carefree melody. They very well knew Wild Bill Hickok, whom rumor reported to be sought for as the new town marshal of Abilene, first of the cow camps.

The famous marshal of Hays City—as he then was—now was engaged in the daily task which he never neglected and never gave to hands other than his own—that of cleaning his two heavy revolvers. No hand but his ever had been allowed to touch one of these weapons, even in the slightest or most friendly way. He himself never failed to examine them every morning.

They were very long-barreled revolvers, and their owner’s artistic fancy was indulged in them to the extent of ivory handles. The metal work was dark. The front sight on each had been filed down low. That was just before the day of fixed ammunition, and all revolvers still were muzzle-loaders as to the cylinders. Under the barrel of each piece worked a hinged ramrod, and the backs of the cylinders were indented and tubed to permit admission of the percussion caps. They handled a large round ball. Some of these, with the small flask of fine rifle powder, lay on the table near at hand. With a short, well-polished round stick of hickory, Mr. Hickok was now engaged in cleaning barrel and cylinder so thoroughly that not a speck of dust remained. His boots and gloves were clean; his shirt was clean; his face and hands were clean; and, be sure, his guns were clean.

He finished his task at length, replaced each cylinder and pushed down the pin on which it revolved. Then, with eyes narrowing and lips pursed, he poured into each cylinder barrel an exact—very exact—charge of the fine powder, gently jolting each charge home, and on top, with the utmost care, seating the round ball and pushing it home with the hinged ramrod. Each load was precisely like every other load. Then he capped each nipple of the cylinder, held back each hammer and rolled the cylinder with ear intent to see that the click of the lock came absolutely even. After this he slipped the long weapons into the greased holsters at his heavy belt. His coat tails unobtrusively covered the equipment. He walked to the new washbasin at the new sink, cleansed and wiped his hands on a towel not absolutely new; and so was ready for the duties of the day, whatever these might be.

“Well, Bill, going to get somebody to-day?” one of the loafing skin hunters against the wall guffawed, trying to be offhand, friendly and humorous. The tall man looked at him steadily, his own face absolutely emotionless, and made no reply at all. His dignity was that of a lion among small animals. He was a man of few confidences and no familiarities.

When Wild Bill Hickok stepped out into the street he saw coming across the railroad track a stranger, a young man tall as himself, though not so heavy of build. The newcomer was clad much like himself, in dark clothing, with neat boots. His coat swung easily free, but to the specialized eye of Wild Bill it covered something on either side. Moreover, he presently noted that the young man wore his guns in an odd way—the right-hand stock pointing back, the left-hand one pointing forward. This peculiarity he had never seen in the equipment of any man, cowman, gambler or professional bad man. He asked himself, if this man should happen to be left-handed, or if he were a two-handed man, which gun would be used first? That constituted, as Wild Bill admitted then and there, a sort of mental problem which it might take the thousandth of a second to decide.

There was no pretentiousness about the newcomer, more than there was about Wild Bill Hickok. They both were simple, quiet men, low of voice, pleasant of address. Two more typical killers did not then stand west of the Missouri stream, although they were from widely separated countries. The range, north and south, upper and lower, ran well-nigh two thousand miles in its longer dimension, and covered wide variations in all types.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the young man, advancing. “I know this is Marshal Hickok. I am McMasters, sheriff of Gonzales County, down in Texas.”

The blue-eyed man put out his hand readily.

“I know about you,” said he. “You are in the Rangers, too, down there. That’s a good body of men. I reckon they need to be good.

“Well, it’s a lovely morning,” he continued. “I’ve not had a drink yet this morning.”

They walked down the ragged street, if street it could be called, passing over the railroad track, whose rails as yet hardly had been burnished by any wheels; a track which ran but a few hours’ journey west of Abilene at that time. There was a switch which would accommodate perhaps twenty cars, some pens which would hold perhaps five hundred head of cattle, some chutes which never yet had been used. Like all the rest of Abilene, the yards presented an aspect of raw newness. The residential portion of the city consisted largely of sod houses, dugouts and canvas tents, although it did not lack unpainted pine in its more ambitious structures. The broken expanse of high-fronted wooden buildings along its single main street offered the appearance conventional in the new railroad town of the frontier of the West. There was a Golden Eagle Clothing Store; two or three offering general merchandise. There was no drug store, but there were two barber shops and the Twin Livery Barn. There was no church or school. But, as the apostle of Abilene had said, there were many saloons and free dance-halls, each in its way openly advertising its wares.

Toward the saloon of his choice—which also apparently offered dance-hall accommodations at seasonable hours—Wild Bill bent his steps. The interior still presented a certain dishabille. A sleepy negro was sweeping out the corks. A barrel in a corner held empty bottles in careless profusion. The chairs presented an order apparently not preconcerted, and the legs of some were broken. There was no billiard table in all Abilene, and mahogany was not yet known in any bar of Abilene. None the less, here was a goodly plank, and back of it were arranged shelves still holding bottles of liquid contents in spite of the late obvious demand. The interior was not, to any imagination, howso violent, a lovely thing to see in the ghastly light of day. The light now was rather dim. Two or three kerosene lamps still were burning, yellow and sickly, not devoid of fumes, which joined the other fumes.

“I usually come here for my liquor,” said Wild Bill, “because I know Henry Doak has a barrel of real bourbon, besides what he sells. It ain’t poison. I never go against the liquor game very hard myself.”

“It isn’t best,” said McMasters. “Still, the oldest man I ever knew told me he’d lived so long because every morning before breakfast he took two or three fingers of bourbon—when he could get it—and rubbed his chest with a fresh corncob.”

“As good a way as any,” said Hickok. “A man never dies till his time comes—and then he does.”

He was humming to himself as he searched for the bottle which suited him.

“No three or four fingers for me,” said he. “Too much, especially if you have got anything particular to do.”

A short gray man with white mustache and goatee shuffled in, not vouchsafing any speech at all. He brought them glasses and motioned Bill to a quiet corner of the room, where at the hour they found themselves quite alone.

“Well, Mr. McMasters,” said Bill, “I am glad to see you in Abilene, and I wish you were going to live here. It’s not just the healthiest place for a peace officer. It maybe won’t be any healthier if the Texas herds ever do begin to come in.”

“I know of one on the way,” said McMasters. “It will be in now almost any day.”

Hickok nodded.

“They used to drive up the Neosho in towards Sedalia, a few years ago. Those toughs in there used the trail men mighty rough. Dougherty, Ellison, Hunter, McMasters, Lockhart—they were all good men that tried to drive in there from Texas. It would have paid St. Louis to have sent her whole police force down there and cleaned up that gang of cattle bandits. They’ve just headed off all the Texas cattle that came up that way.”

“Yes, I know about that pretty well,” assented Dan McMasters. “You say McMasters. Calvin McMasters was my father. They killed him. He was a friend of Colonel Burleson Lockhart. They killed Lockhart too. I’ve been in there since, once or twice, on business of my own. That gang were very largely friends of Dave Tutt.”

Their eyes met silently. Dave Tutt was a man whom Wild Bill Hickok killed in a street duel on the public square of Springfield, Missouri, in the presence of his friends, all of whom had threatened to kill Hickok on sight.

“Well, those people couldn’t seem to make a living any way except by robbing folks,” said the border man after a while. “The real brains of that outfit was a fellow called Rudabaugh—Sim Rudabaogh. I heard that he went South; to Austin, I think.”

“Yes, he got some sort of Northern political pull back of him I don’t just know how. He has given us a fine example of organized Reconstruction politics. He has put on foot the biggest plan of wholesale cow stealing and land stealing and general highway robbery that ever was started even in Texas.”

“Using his old trade, eh? Working large?”

“Yes. Just now he’s getting hold of all the land scrip the state ever issued—you know Texas retained her own lands when she came in. His plan is to get hold of about all of Texas north of the Buffalo gap, and then to steal cows enough east of that to stock the whole Staked Plains.”

“That sounds like a pretty large order!” smiled Hickok.

“It is a large order. The man is crazy who would ever think of it. I don’t doubt that Sim Rudabaugh is crazy—crazy with his own egotism and his success in deeds that no sane man ever could have thought of doing.”

“Have you got any personal quarrel?” asked Hickok of him quietly.

“That word doesn’t cover it, sir! Mr. Hickok, I have said that Rudabaugh killed my father and Colonel Lockhart. That is, I am practically sure of it. My father was sheriff of Gonzales before they put me in. I could not refuse. I knew I was elected to end the Rudabaugh gang.

“Quarrel? I can’t call it by so small a name. For every reason in the world I have got to have that man dead or alive. And you’ll think I am crazy myself,” he added, “when I tell you I want him alive. He is worth much more to Texas alive than dead. The fact is, the whole peace of Texas—and the whole end of the big steal in Texas—depends on my bringing that man in, not dead but alive.”

Hickok looked at him in silence for a time.

“You have had to shoot sometimes.”

“Several times. I have made a good many arrests as sheriff in my county and as a captain in the Rangers in other counties.”

Hickok shook his head. A light drinker, he pushed his glass aside not much more than tasted.

“No good in making arrests. There is only one way with a man like that—let him make his break.”

McMasters went on to explain the circumstances of Colonel Griswold’s talk with Yellow Hand, below the Washita, giving the details of the fight.

“We put a pretty stiff crimp into them there,” he said. “I don’t think Rudabaugh has more than two of his best warriors with him—Baldy Collins and Ben Estill. He got Estill at Caldwell. He’ll maybe pick up some more recruits over toward the Missouri line. He’s been trailing our herd ever since we started out, maybe a thousand miles and he’ll never quit if he can help it. As I have explained to you, it has been all to his interest to break up this herd. If word of its success got back to Texas this season, that would end his dream of cheap land and cheap cows. All Texas would be on its guard. You see why I want to arrest Rudabaugh. You will see, too, I’ve got to have him alive if possible.”

“Then why do you want to see me? I’m not living in this town, though I may later. Besides, my specialty is not taking people alive.” Wild Bill’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “I don’t believe in arrests for that kind of people.”

“I’m not so particular about any of those men being alive except Rudabaugh,” replied McMasters. “I haven’t got any warrant for him, and can’t get one, and couldn’t stop to prosecute him if I had. I couldn’t prove that he killed any of the drovers of the old Shawnee Trail. I don’t want to prove anything. I’ve got no warrant and no requisition papers. All I want is to get my hands on him.

“But I can prove that he killed the two Indian women down near the Arbuckle Mountains. There is no white jurisdiction down there, and in Kansas it’s no crime to kill Indians. But there won’t be any habeas corpus if he is ever brought before the court of the Comanches. That’s the court I want! That’s what Griswold wants, and he wants that because it means peace with the Comanches. Don’t you see? It means that they’ll come in out of Texas and go on their reservation. That will open up everything. There’ll be any number of cattle cross at Doan’s Store, and even further west, as quick as the drovers know it is safe against the Comanches, in further west than where this herd crossed the Red.

“So you see, Mr. Hickok, just why I want Sim Rudabaugh alive. That’s why I came to Abilene. I heard you were here, and I thought maybe Rudabaugh’d come here. If you don’t mean the law here, there’s going to be no law in Abilene.”

Hickok sat for a time in silence.

“Well,” said he at length, “I suppose I am generally intended to keep the peace. If I help you to get Rudabaugh in Kansas I am helping keep the peace in Kansas. And if they want me for town marshal here maybe I’d better give them a sample of the goods. Every town marshal in the world ought to help a Texas Ranger.

“But listen, friend,” he continued; “when two men go into a business of this kind each puts his life in the other man’s hands. Mostly I’d rather risk my life in my own hands. Are you a married man?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you a good shot with a revolver?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hickok rose lazily, leaving the liquor in his glass.

“Let’s take a walk out of doors,” he said.

They stepped to the front of the saloon and stood looking up and down the street. Some forty yards away a sign hung out over the walk: “Dance Hall and Saloon.”

“I’ll take the right-hand O,” said Hickok quietly.

With the ease of great practice and native genius—and all the Army men rated Hickok as the best shot with rifle or revolver that the West ever saw—he raised one of his weapons to a high level and fired the six shots of the single-action piece with unspeakable rapidity. He carefully returned the gun to its place. He did not look at the sign. He knew!

“That’s fine work, sir,” said Dan McMasters with undisguised enthusiasm. “Your reputation is deserved. Quite often I doubt a man’s reputation as a shot until I see him shoot.”

“How about your own?” demanded Hickok. “I myself never shoot in public. I don’t want anybody to know how I shoot.”

“Nor I. My reputation? I haven’t any this far north.”

“Well, there’s the left-hand O. Can you see the one I shot?”

“Perfectly,” smiled McMasters.

“You’ve a good eye. Can you hit it one time out of six?”

“I can hit it six times out of six, sir.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t think so—I know it.”

“Cut loose!” said Bill succinctly.

For an instant McMasters stood facing his mark, both hands poised above his heavy guns after his invariable fashion, which had swiftly become a tradition on the lower range. Hickok did not really see which gun he chose, his own eye for the time being fixed on the signboard. But a gun did rise in Dan McMasters’ right hand. And once more, with perfect spacing, came six reports.

By this time a crowd had poured out in the streets. Men were at their heels as the two walked close to the signboard. Wild Bill saw the six bullets grouped close, splintering one into the other at times, not one touching the outer rim of black.

His own eyes narrowed. He looked curiously, studiously, at the face of the first man he had ever been obliged to credit with pistol work approaching his own. The face had changed. It had not lost its concentration. It was a mask, expressionless. Hickok studied the mask for a moment. He saw in it his own face also. He put a hand on McMasters’ shoulder.

The two turned down the street, Hickok flinging back his long yellow hair in a gesture habitual with him.

“Take a good look at the work on them two signs, men,” said he, accosting the curious followers. “You ain’t apt to see better. This man and I are going to see peace and quiet in Abilene. He’s my friend and my deputy.

“I didn’t think the man lived that could do it,” said he to McMasters as they walked away together. “Your six are bunched as good as mine, and your time is perfect. Come on down to the Cottage and let’s sit around for a while.

“Hello, what’s that?” he added. A group of men was coming up at a fast gait from the southern edge of the town. Among them was one, apparently a leader, whose rapid discourse occasionally was broken by wild whoops. “Who’s that?” laughed Hickok. “Some more wild men from down the trail?”

In effect, it was Mr. McCoyne, explaining to the citizens of Abilene that beyond a peradventure he had met and traveled with an actual herd of cattle, actually bound for Abilene. Moreover, the said herd was then and there camped just below the Solomon, within easy reach of town.

This certainly was news of interest to McMasters as well as to Wild Bill Hickok. McCoyne was too much excited to identify any one, did not remember McMasters, whom he had not recently seen and never had known well.

“Listen, men!” he shouted. “We’ve got to have a celebration. Get all the Eastern men together. Go see if our new band is sober enough to play any sort of tune. Get ’em down on the portico at the Drovers’ Cottage in an hour or so. When I bring the herd into town, and we get right opposite the Cottage, tell ’em to strike up. We’ve got to show these people what a real live town is.

“Now, come on,” he resumed. “I own a interest in the Spread Eagle Saloon”—it chanced to be the one whose sign had served for a target just now, later a matter of much pride to the owner—“but I’m going to change the name to Lone Star. Come on and have a drink with McCoyne, president of the Abilene Stockyards!”

By magic, from their tents and dugouts, their sod huts and log hovels and their residences of raw pine board, the men of Abilene assembled—border men, skin hunters, loafers, gamblers, thieves, citizens and aliens, merchants and cattle buyers; a throng sufficiently motley for a total population of a very hundred. They crowded into the saloon, formed an overflow meeting upon the outside; primitive men in a primitive day.

Around this primitive scene stretched a wide and primitive world. The blue sky, flecked with fleecy clouds, bent over an endless sea of grasses growing to the very edge of Abilene. The flowers nodded and beckoned in the gentle wind. Not a furrow of plow was there. These rude men of Abilene were forerunners of an inland empire soon to come but not yet over the horizon.

Hickok and McMasters did not go beyond the edge of the crowd. The former seemed now, as so often he was, absorbed in the sheer beauty of the prairies.

“It’s pretty,” said he, waving his hand. “I hate to think of its changing.” A tinge of his occasional melancholy fell upon him. “Of course, it will change and change fast,” said he. “Well, I was a part of this.”

Without affectation, he spoke in the past tense. There never was a killer who gave himself a long life.

Inside the saloon, mounted on a chair, McCoyne, president of the Abilene Stockyards, was addressing the multitude.

“They’re a strange-looking people, them Texans,” he was saying. “They’ve got no wagons; only some carts, each with two yoke of oxen. There ain’t a whole pair of breeches in the outfit, nor a decent hat. Every morning when a fellow wants a horse, where his rope lands, that’s his—and he has to ride to stay with it. They can ride any horse in the world. They’ve got a fighting chicken on top of one cart and they say they’ll bet the herd on that rooster—and here us folks ain’t got a single one in Abilene! They’ll bet anything you like they’ve got the fastest horses in Kansas. They say they’ve got a man they’ll back in a shooting match against anybody in the world.”

“They must mean Wild Bill,” said a voice.

“No, his name is McMasters—Dan McMasters. But he ain’t with them now. Besides that, they got something else; you can’t guess. They’ve got a woman!”

“Aw, go on!” A voice.

“Yes, they have. Young woman, too, and prettier’n any picture you ever saw in a frame. She owns all the herd. She’s rich as she is pretty. Her name’s Lockhart, Miss Lockhart from Caldwell, County, Texas, but not Caldwell, Kansas, gentlemen. She owns the Del Sol ranch down there. They raised this whole herd on that ranch; or anyhow that’s what they say. Men, here’s to Miss Anastasie Lockhart, the finest girl in the world and the first one up the Texas trail!”

Two men of the crowd who had been listening quietly stepped out at the door, looking at one another but not speaking. They passed close at hand; the future town marshal of Abilene and his deputy.