CHAPTER XLVII

THE COURT OF THE COMANCHES

FOUR days later the transient population of Abilene began to scatter. No one knew when another herd would come, if ever. The great Del Sol herd now was split up, a portion coming into the yards to try for an Eastern market, a greater portion driven east to the crude packing plant at Junction City. The remainder, under Len Hersey and a half dozen of the best men of the Del Sol herd, was driven north to the new range on the Smoky Hill. All the details of Abilene’s first transaction in cows now were closed. The bill of sale, the record of the tally, the passing of the final bank draft—all details soon to become familiar in the northern-range towns—now were completed. The Del Sol horse band was sold north. Remained only the two carts, each with its double yoke of oxen, and two horses each for eight of the hands who had concluded to return to Texas. The two Army ambulances offered transport for the remainder of those who had come north in the saddle. Taisie’s horse, Blancocito, was left to trot alongside, unsaddled.

Lou Gore kissed Taisie Lockhart for the last time, tears in the eyes of both; then wiped her hands and eyes upon her apron and turned back to build up her reputation as the biggest-hearted woman on the Plains. What friend she was to the wild men of the trail, countless wounded, crippled, ill and helpless cowmen learned in the years to come; years of swift changes on the upper range. A good soul, a strong heart of the frontier, she left a beloved and covetable memory.

The ambulances, each drawn by four sleek mules, stood in the street waiting, flanked by stalwart troopers. In the foremost vehicle, on a middle seat, hidden from view, sat Sim Rudabaugh, and gyves were on his wrists. Thongs of rawhide, right and left, bound his hands to the seat ends. Other thongs fastened his ankles and passed back under the seat to a cross pole. In the seat behind sat Dan McMasters and the boy Cinquo, both armed. Rudabaugh could never have escaped. The ruthless trail bandit, who never took a prisoner, himself was a prisoner at last. To all his sobbings, his expostulations, his execrations and his questions, no one made any answer. Of friends he had none in all the world. He was at the end of the trail of the transgressor.

This ambulance, of course, must drive faster than the others, which would hold back with the Del Sol carts. In the second ambulance, well escorted, Taisie was to ride with her foreman, Nabours. In this was stowed a certain trunk covered with rawhide.

But as this little cavalcade stood halted in midstreet of the cloudless morning, most of the remaining men of Abilene came clamoring for the privilege of one more farewell to the Texas girl. Taisie leaned forward to greet them as they came, herself beautiful as the dawn, in spite of the new droop at the corners of her mouth.

Dan McMasters had said his own good-bys briefly, coldly—the coldest man in all the world, she thought. He never once had met her for a moment alone. Of that swift brief fire of two earlier times only ashes remained, unblown of any gust of passion.

McCoyne flitted from one vehicle to the other, excitedly making his adieus.

“Come back again!” said he. “We’ll be waiting for you next year. Tell every ranch in Texas to send up their herds. You’ll see Abilene with a jail and a church and a school and a graveyard the next time you come. I have been so busy——”

Came among the very last a woman of the Silver Moon, young in years but weary and old at this hour of the morning. Timidly she reached out her hand through the curtains of the ambulance and Taisie took it.

“Good-by,” said the girl; “good-by, my dear. You’re the first woman ever came to Abilene. Don’t come back again,”—and so departed to the Silver Moon, herself once a woman, and seeing Taisie’s eyes following the tall young man.

Pattison, the Northern stockman, spent some time in final conversation with Mr. Dan McMasters.

“Believe me, son,” said he, with a final farewell, “when you marry and settle down with me up here I’ll make you richer than you ever dreamed of being. Go back home and put up a herd of stockers for next spring. Tell the Texas drovers to come along. There’s going to be money in cows now.”

McMasters reached out and took his hand.

“I’ll be back next season with a herd,” said he. “So long!”

Among all these others also came Wild Bill Hickok, future town marshal of Abilene. By odd chance, partly due to his own shyness, he had never in all these days met Taisie Lockhart. He did not mean to intrude now, but inadvertently peered in at the curtains of her ambulance. She saw him push back the curtain, reached out her hand, smiling. He took it, held it, stood awed at her very beauty, pondering for a time sadly, her hand in his, in one of the fits of melancholy which came to him at times. As he knew his life of the past, so he read all his future.

“You remind me of Agnes,” said he simply. “That’s my wife. She’s back home. Be good. Good-by.”

With McMasters he spoke at first hardly so much even as that. They shook hands, each looking into the eyes of the other.

“Good luck!” said Hickok. “Don’t say I didn’t help you with the habeas corpus. If you run into any one down below kill this man first.”

He nodded at Rudabaugh. The latter broke out blasphemously once more. But the blue eye of the man who had killed the last of the Rudabaugh gang of border thieves paid him not even a contemptuous attention. He turned away.

Now came the parting crack of a whip on the air of the morning, rumble of wheels on the streets of Abilene, already growing dustier. Abilene, center of revolutionary changes soon to be, lay behind them presently. The Del Sol folk were homeward bound.

* * * * *

On the long journey to the South, after the first hour, the leading ambulance vehicle never again was sighted. From day to day, from camp to camp, at one river crossing after another, the slower travelers found proof of attempts to make their progress as safe and easy as possible. There were rafts and boats, each left on the north bank of the stream. Fords were marked out with poles. What with the passing of Jesse Chisholm’s wagon trail to the Arbuckle Mountains, and the additional care of McMasters and the Army men, the passage southward, thus well equipped, was child’s play compared with the long and dangerous journey northbound with the herd. The lead ambulance easily did forty and fifty miles a day, the ox carts twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty.

Again and again Taisie Lockhart felt growing upon her her sense of indebtedness to a man with whom she could never come to terms. One thing seemed certain—they now had parted company forever. He was leaving Texas, going North to live. Bitterly the girl resolved that all material obligations between them, at least, should one day be discharged, though it should take her last dollar.

Not once on all the long journey did McMasters ever accost his prisoner. Cold as a tourmaline, his green-gray eyes looked Rudabaugh straight in the face when occasion came. But that was all. At night the prisoner had chance to sleep, no chance to escape. If McMasters himself caught a continuous hour or two of sleep, the boy Cinquo took his place, his weapon across his knee. Men fed Rudabaugh with no more ceremony than had he been a captive animal.

Thus, on one morning, two days’ march south of the Washita, McMasters and his men raised the rough highlands of Medicine Bluff Creek, where sat Camp Wichita which not long thereafter was to be known as Fort Sill, thanks to the earlier and long-forgotten efforts of that great soldier of the West, R. B. Marcy, captain of the Fifth Infantry; the first explorer for the Army in those parts, and a wise man in Indian matters in his day. He had predicted the savage campaign of two years later, of Sheridan, Custer, which proved needful to chastise the upper tribesmen, of Black Kettle, on the Washita.

As to the reservation which later was to hold the Comanches, subsequent to the series of tribal defeats wrought by Custer along the Washita, nothing was consummated until the following year. The main body of the Quahrada Comanches—those who had the Staked Plains as their hunting grounds—had traveled on back home. But here in the Wichita Mountains sturdy Sandy Griswold still held old Yellow Hand and his select band of warriors, waiting for word from north of the Arkansas. He had told Yellow Hand to wait until his young men came. Then they could go back home. And Yellow Hand himself was the first to announce the coming of men from the north.

* * * * *

The welcome between McMasters and Griswold was brief. The latter looked inside the ambulance.

“You’ve got your man!” said he grimly. “How about the others?”

“They resisted arrest, sir,” replied Dan McMasters. “I had the help of Wild Bill Hickok at Abilene. I have kept my word and brought in Rudabaugh for you. Here’s your man.”

“Get out, you!” He spoke to Rudabaugh the first time, and cut his bands.

The prisoner climbed stiffly down and looked about him. He faced a row of Army tents, a few rough huts. A clump of Indian tepees stood not far distant. A strong shudder came across the body of Sim Rudabaugh. His face went white in sudden premonition.

The Comanches were waiting for the man who had killed their women.

“Oh, my God!” moaned the prisoner, now really contrite. “Oh, my God, have mercy!” Even then he knew.

* * * * *

Griswold called for his interpreter, ordered the Comanches to come before his tent. They sat in council, the pipe passed. The beady eyes of the Comanches were fixed on the prisoner, but they sat in silent dignity until the proper time. At length Griswold arose, addressing Yellow Hand and pointing to Rudabaugh, whom he kept standing, his hands again bound.

“Tell him,” said Griswold, nodding to his interpreter, and speaking to Yellow Hand, “this is the man who shot down your women when they were bathing over there by the Arbuckle Hills. You Quahradas, of the Staked Plains, were visiting here. You had not harmed this man. He was not at war with you. You had not harmed him. He killed your women. He did not seek out your warriors.

“I said to you that I would bring this man back to you for you to try. You can punish him as you like. I give him to you. You do not know this man. You only know that the men who wear a yellow stripe on their leggings never have lied to you. This is the man who killed your women. I say it.”

He raised his hand as Yellow Hand started forward, his face convulsed.

“But I have your promise also, Yellow Hand. You shall not lie to me. When I give him to you in place of your two women you must do as you have promised.

“Will you now go back to your people and tell them to sit down? Will you tell them to leave the war trail on the Staked Plains, to leave our white towns and ranches alone, and the cattle they drive north?

“Will you come here, all of you, and join the northern Comanches and your brothers the Kiowas and sit down forever, here on your land, where the buffalo are many and the deer are running in the thickets as many as the leaves on the trees? Here the sun is warm, the grass is good, the water is sweet and cool.

“Will you do all these things, Yellow Hand? Are you done fighting with the white man? I promise you that next year, and the year after, the white soldiers will take the winter trail against the villages of the Cheyennes and their friends. No matter how cold it is, no matter how deep the snow is, our men will find their village and wipe them out. You Indians must stop stealing horses and cattle and killing our men on the ranches.

“Will you Quahradas, who are wise men, make your peace first and save your women and your children? If I give you this man will you open the trails for the cows that want to go north? Will you come in here and sit down? Promise me that, Yellow Hand! Speak only the truth to me! I know how to punish men who lie.”

The face of the old savage still worked with rage; his eyes still were riveted on the miscreant who stood bound before him, tragic pledge for the future safety of the Trail. But now Yellow Hand knew himself to be the leader of his people. He rose with his arms folded.

“I speak the truth, now, here, even as the chief of the white men speaks it,” said he. “You have done as you have said you would do. Give us that man that you said you would give us. We will do with him as your people would do with us. We will try him in our way. I will talk with my men. We will punish him in our way. Then when we have done that we will wrap our robes about us. We will come in here and sit down in this land, which we know is good.

“I can see that the white people are too many. They are making roads across the grass. Some day the buffalo will be gone. Over their trails will walk these new cattle—have we not seen them come? I can hear their hoofs coming, as many as the wind can count among the trees. It is done. I have said all I want to say.”

“Rudabaugh,” said Griswold, turning to him at length, with no pity in his eye, “get ready to die. God may have no mercy on your soul. You’ve shown none—not once in all your life. Take what you’ve earned!”

Rudabaugh broke out with denunciation of the utter illegality of all this.

“I know it,” said Griswold. “But this court carries no records. No one will ever know.”

He pushed forward the man, who now so trembled he scarce could stand. The sinewy fingers of Yellow Hand gripped his shoulder like eagle talons. A warrior caught him on the opposite side. He was dragged away, fighting, to the door of the largest lodge.

For an hour there came through the distance only the sound of savage singing. At length the white men, sitting solemnly awake in their own encampment, saw a group of the Comanches come out from the lodge and start toward a little thicket which lay perhaps a hundred yards or so away. They dragged with them something which scarce stood erect, held back with palsied feet.

“My God, Mister Dan,” broke out the voice of a boy all too young for such a scene, but taking one more lesson in border ways, “what are they goin’ to do to him now?”

* * * * *

But the savage justice of the tribesmen was done in such fashion as only these fiends of the lower border could have devised. No pen should specify as to this.

For a time, for five minutes perhaps, or more, there came from the thicket shrieks of a man in torture, such sounds as left these hardened men unable to look one another in the face, though not one of them wavered in his own savage decision. Now it was too late. The word of the white men had been given.

No smoke, no sign of fire arose above the top of the little thicket. There was no sound but that of the shrieking victim. The Comanches had devised some new way of punishment.

Yellow Hand came back after a long time, a smile contorting his great mouth.

“Him run little way,” said he, wiping his hands on his leggings. “No skin on him—he can’t run far.”

And for reason of that which had gone on in yonder thicket by the little stream—by reason of what one time was found flung across the bush tops there—that bloody stream came to be called the Rawhide.

The Comanche reservation, thus purchased, later established, was close to that spot. Far to the west, above Doan’s Crossing, over the high country where soon a dozen trails were to blend—seeking Ellsworth, Newton, Wichita, Dodge, Great Bend, Ogalalla, all the Army posts and all the empty upper range—the Comanches fought no more.

* * * * *

The day of the northbound hegira of the cows had come. The immortal gods, trickling through their fingers grasses of grama, mesquite, redtop, buffalo, bluestem, watched a new land spring lustily into being. It was born of blood. But it was born of South and North, which never again were to know war one with the other. Both shared in sending old customs to a new land. A new language came to it. New industries grew in it. More rapidly than any tract of all our country or of any country ever was settled, the Great West of America became great and strong indeed. It wrote its story—whose beginnings almost have faded now—on the pages of the world’s history; or more splendidly still, on the lips of a country’s envying tradition of Homeric deeds.