Trail's End Read online

  TRAIL'S END

  by

  G. W. OGDEN

  Author ofThe Duke of Chimney Butte,The Flockmaster of Poison Creek,The Land of Last Chance, Etc.

  Frontispiece by P. V. E. Ivory

  Morgan, grim as judgment, stood among the crowd ofwastrels and women of poisoned lips (Page 229)]

  Grosset & DunlapPublishers New YorkMade in the United States of America

  CopyrightA. C. McClurg & Co.1921Published September, 1921Copyrighted in Great Britain

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER PAGE

  I The Unconquered Land 1 II The Meat Hunter 11 III First Blood 23 IV The Optimist Explains 36 V Ascalon Awake 54 VI Riders of the Chisholm Trail 65 VII A Gentle Cowboy Joke 77 VIII The Atavism of a Man 87 IX News from Ascalon 101 X The Hour of Vengeance 111 XI The Penalty 124 XII In Place of a Regiment 141 XIII The Hand of the Law 157 XIV Some Fool With a Gun 165 XV Will His Luck Hold? 176 XVI The Meat Hunter Comes 187 XVII With Clean Hands 199 XVIII A Bondsman Breathes Easier 216 XIX The Curse of Blood 223 XX Unclean 234 XXI As One That Is Dead 241 XXII Whiners at the Funeral 245 XXIII Ascalon Curls Its Lip 259 XXIV Madness of the Winds 277 XXV A Summons at Sunrise 290 XXVI In the Square at Ascalon 299 XXVII Absolution 315 XXVIII Sunset 325

  TRAIL'S END

  CHAPTER I

  THE UNCONQUERED LAND

  Bones.

  Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. Thetribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, asepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in itstreasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterilewastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched inthe dimming furrows which the grasses were reclaiming for their own.

  A land of desolation and defeat it seemed to the traveler, indeed, as hefollowed the old trail along which the commerce of the illimitable Westonce was borne. Although that highway had belonged to anothergeneration, and years had passed since an ox train toiled over it on itscreeping journey toward distant Santa Fe, the ruts of old wheels weredeep in the soil, healed over by the sod again, it is true, but seamedlike scars on a veteran's cheek. One could not go astray on that broadhighway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where newones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.

  Present-day traffic had broken a new trail between the old ones; itwound a dusty gray line through the early summer green of the prairiegrass, endless, it seemed, to the eyes of the leg-weary traveler whobent his footsteps along it that sunny morning. This passenger, afoot ona road where it was almost an offense to travel by such lowly means, wasa man of thirty or thereabout, tall and rather angular, who took theroad in long strides much faster than the freighters' trains hadtraveled it in the days of his father. He carried a black, dingy leatherbag swinging from his long arm, a very lean and unpromising repository,upon which the dust of the road lay spread.

  Despite the numerous wheel tracks in the road, all of them apparentlyfresh, there was little traffic abroad. Not a wagon had passed him sincemorning, not a lift had been given him for a single mile. Now, mountinga ridge toward which he had been pressing forward the past hour, whichhad appeared a hill of consequence in the distance, but now flattenedout to nothing more than a small local divide, he put down his bag,flung his dusty black hat beside it, and stood wiping his face with alarge turkey-red handkerchief which he unknotted from about his neck.

  His face was of that rugged type common among the pioneers of the West,lean and harsh-featured, yet nobly austere, the guarantee of a soulabove corruption and small trickery, of a nature that endures patiently,of an anger slow to move. There were bright hues as of glistening metalin his close-cut light hair as he stood bareheaded in the sun.

  Sheep sorrel was blooming by the wheel tracks of the road, purple andyellow; daisy-like flowers, with pale yellow petals and great wonderinghearts like frightened eyes, grew low among the short grass; countlessstrange blooms spread on the prairie green, cheering for their brief daythe stern face of a land that had broken the hearts of men in itsunkindness and driven them away from its fair promises. The travelersighed, unable to understand it quite.

  All day he had been passing little sod houses whose walls werecrumbling, whose roofs had fallen in, whose doors beckoned in the wind asad invitation to come in and behold the desolation that lay within.Even here, close by the road, ran the grass-grown furrows of anabandoned field, the settler's dwelling-place unmarked by sod or stone.What tragedy was written in those wavering lines; what heartbreak ofgoing away from some dear hope and broken dream! Here a teamster wascutting across the prairie to strike the road a little below the pointwhere the traveler stood. Extra side boards were on his wagon-box, asthey used to put them on in corn-gathering time back in the traveler'sboyhood home in Indiana. The wagon was heaped high with white, drybones.

  Bones. Nothing left to haul out of that land but bones. The young mantook up his valise and hat and struck off down the road to intercept thefreighter of this prairie product, hoping for an invitation to ride,better pleased by the prospect of resting living bones on dead dry onesthan racking them in that strain to reach the town on the railroad, hisjourney's end, on foot before nightfall.

  The driver's hat was white, like his bones; it drooped in weather-beatenlimpness about his ears, hiding his face, but he appeared to have anhospitable heart in spite of the cheerlessness of his pursuit. Coming tothe road a little before the traveler reached the point of conjunction,he drew the team to a stand, waiting his approach.

  "Have a ride?" the freighter invited, edging over on the backless springseat as he spoke, making room.

  The bone-wagon driver was a hollow-framed man, who looked as if he hadstarved with the country but endured past all bounds of hardship anddiscouragement. He looked hungry--hungry for food, hungry for change,hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below hisstubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in hisskin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly onhis broken seat, sagging forward with forearms across his thighs.

  "Footin' it over to Ascalon?" he asked, as the traveler mounted besidehim.

  "Yes sir, I'm headin' that way."

  "Come fur?"

  "Well, yes," thoughtfully, as if he considered what might be counted farin that land of unobstructed horizons, "I have come a considerablelittle stretch."

  "I thought maybe you was one of them new settlers in here, goin' over toAscalon to ketch the train," the bone man ventured, putting his inquiryfor further particulars as politely as he knew how.

  "I'm not a settler yet, but I expect to try it here."

  "You don't tell me?"

  "Yes sir; that's my intention."

  "Where you from?"

  "Iowa."

  The bone man looked his passenger over with interest, from his feet intheir serviceable shoes, to his head under his round-crowned,wide-brimmed black hat.

  "A good many of 'em used to come in here from Ioway and Newbrasky in theearly days," he said. "You never walked plumb from there, did you?"

  "I thought of stopping at Buffalo Creek, back fifteen or twenty miles,but I didn't like the country around ther
e. They told me it was betterat Ascalon, so I just struck out to walk across the loop of the railroadand take a close look at the land as I went along."

  "You must be something of a walker," the bone man marveled.

  "I used to follow a walking cultivator across an eighty-acre cornfield,"the traveler replied.

  "Yes, that'll stretch a feller's legs," the bone man admitted,reminiscently. "Nothing like follerin' a plow to give a man legs andwind. But they don't mostly walk around in this country; they kind ofsuspicion a man when they see him hoofin' it."

  "There doesn't seem to be many of them to either walk or ride," thetraveler commented, sweeping a look around the empty land.

  "It used to be full of homesteaders all through this country--I seen 'emcome and I seen 'em go."

  "I've seen traces of them all along the railroad for the last hundredmiles or more. It must have been a mighty exodus, a sad thing to see."

  "Accordin' to the way you look at it, I reckon," the bone man reflected."They're comin' to this country ag'in, flocks of 'em. This makes thethird time they've tried to break this part of Kansas to ride, and Idon't know, on my soul, whether they'll ever do it or not. Maybe I'llhave more bones to pick up in a year or two."

  "It seems to be one big boneyard; I saw cars of bones on every sidetrackas I came through."

  "Yes, I tell folks that come here and try to farm that bones was thebest crop this country ever raised, and it'll be about the only one. Icome in here with the railroad, I used to drive a team pickin' up thebuffaloes the contractors' meat hunter killed."

  "You know the history of its ups and downs, then," the young man said,with every evidence of deep interest.

  "I guess I do, as well as any man. Bones was the first freight therailroad hauled out of here, and bones'll be the last. I follered therailroad camps after they built out of the buffalo country and didn'tneed me any more, pickin' up the bones. Then the settlers begun to comein, drawed on by the stuff them railroad colonization agents used to putin the papers back East. The country broke their backs and drove 'em outafter four or five years. Then I follered around after _them_ and pickedup the bones.

  "Yes, there used to be some familiar lookin' bones among 'em once in awhile in them times. I used to bury that kind. A few of them settlersstuck, the ones that had money to put in cattle and let 'em increase onthe range. They've done well--you'll see their ranches all along theArkansaw when you travel down that way. This is a cattle country, son;that's what the Almighty made it for. It never can be anything else."

  "And there was another wave of immigration, you say, after that?" thepassenger asked, after sitting a while in silence turning over what theold pioneer had said.

  "Yes, wave is about right. They come in by freight trainload, cars ofhorses and cattle, and machinery for farmin', from back there in Ohioand Indiany and Ellinoi--all over that country where things a man plantsin the ground grows up and comes to something. They went into thispe-rairie and started a bustin' it up like the ones ahead of 'em did.Shucks! you can turn a ribbon of this blame sod a hundred miles long andnever break it. What can a farmer do with land that holds together thatway? Nothin'. But them fellers planted corn in them strips of sod,raised a few nubbins, some of 'em, some didn't raise even fodder. It runalong that way a few years, hot winds cookin' their crops when they didgit the ground softened up so stuff would begin to make roots and grow,cattle and horses dyin' off in the winter and burnin' up in the firesthem fool fellers didn't know how to stop when they got started in thisgrass. They thinned out year after year, and I drove around over thecountry and picked up their bones.

  "That crowd of settlers is about all gone now, only one here and therealong some crick. Bones is gittin' scarce, too. I used to make morewhen I got four dollars a ton for 'em than I do now when they pay meten. Grind 'em up to put on them farms back in the East, they tell me.Takin' the bones of famine from one place to put on fat in another.Funny, ain't it?"

  The traveler said it was strange, indeed, but that it was the way ofnature for the upstanding to flourish on the remains of the fallen. Thebone man nodded, and allowed that it was so, world without end,according to his own observations in the scale of living things fromgrass blade to mankind.

  "How are they coming in now--by the trainload?" the traveler asked,reverting to the influx of settlers.

  "These seem to be a different class of men," the bone man replied, hisperplexity plain in his face. "I don't make 'em out as easy as I did theones ahead of 'em. These fellers generally come alone, scoutin' aroundto see the lay of the country--I run into 'em right along drivin' liveryrigs, see 'em around for a couple or three weeks sometimes. Then they goaway, and the first thing I know they're back with their immigrant carfull of stuff, haulin' out to some place somebody went broke on back inthe early days. They seem to be a calculatin' kind, but no man ain'tdeep anough to slip up on the blind side of this country and grab it bythe mane like them fellers seems to think they're doin'. It'll throw'em, and it'll throw 'em hard."

  "It looks to me like it would be a good country for wheat," the travelersaid.

  "Wheat!"

  The bone man pulled up on his horses, checking them as if he would stopand let this dangerous fellow off. He looked at the traveler withincredulous stare, into which a shading of pity came, drawing hisnaturally long face longer. "I'd just as well stop and let you startback right now, mister." He tightened up a little more on the lines.

  There was merriment in the stranger's gray eyes, a smile on his homelyface that softened its harsh lines.

  "Has nobody ever tried it?" he inquired.

  "There's been plenty of fools here, but none that wild that I ever heardof," the bone man said. "You're a hundred miles and more past thedeadline for wheat--you'd just as well try to raise bananers here.Wheat! it'd freeze out in the winter and blow out by the roots in thespring if any of it got through."

  The traveler swept a long look around the country, illusive, it seemed,according to its past treatment of men, in its restful beauty and securefeeling of peace. He was silent so long that the bone man looked at himagain keenly, measuring him up and down as he would some monstrosityseen for the first time.

  "Maybe you're right," the young man said at last.

  The bone man grunted, with an inflection of superiority, and drove on,meditating the mental perversions of his kind.

  "Over in Ascalon," he said, breaking silence by and by, "there's afeller by the name of Thayer--Judge Thayer, they call him, but he ain'tnever been a judge of nothin' since I've knowed him--lawyer and landagent for the railroad. He brings a lot of people in here and sells 'emrailroad land. He says wheat'll grow in this country, tells themsettlers that to fetch 'em here. You two ought to git together--you'dsure make a pair to draw to."

  "Wouldn't we?" said the stranger, in hearty humor.

  "What business did you foller back there in Ioway?" inquired the boneman, not much respect in him now for the man he had lifted out of theroad.

  "I was a professional optimist," the traveler replied, grave enough forall save his eyes.

  The bone man thought it over a spell. "Well, I don't think you'll domuch in Ascalon," he said. "People don't wear specs out here in thiscountry much. Anybody that wants 'em goes to the feller that runs thejewelry store."

  The stranger attempted no correction, but sat whistling a merry tune ashe looked over the country. The bone man drove in silence until theyrose a swell that brought the town of Ascalon into view, a passengertrain just pulling into the station.

  "Octomist! Wheat!" said the bone man, with discount on the words thatleft them so poor and worthless they would not have passed in themeanest exchange in the world.