Trail's End Page 9

  CHAPTER IX

  NEWS FROM ASCALON

  "Down here in the river bottom, where the water rises close to the topof the ground, you can raise a little corn and stuff, but take it backon the prairie a little way and you can't make your seed back, year inand year out. Plenty of them have come here from the East and triedit--I suppose you must 'a' seen the traces of them scattered around asyou come through the country east of Ascalon."

  Morgan admitted that he had seen such traces, melancholy records offailure that they were.

  "It's all over this country the same way. It broke 'em as fast as theycame, starved 'em and took the heart out of 'em and drove 'em away. Youcan't farm this country, Morgan; no man ever learnt anything out ofbooks that will make him master of these plains with a plow."

  So spoke Stilwell, the cattleman, sitting at night before his long, low,L-shaped sod house with his guest who had been dragged into hishospitality at the end of a rope. Eight days Morgan had been sequesteredin that primitive home, which had many comforts in spite of the crudityof its exterior. His soreness had passed from the green andsuperficially painful stage to the deeper ache of bruised bones. Hewalked with a limp, stiff and stoved in his joints as a foundered horse.But his hands and arms had recovered their suppleness, and, like anovergrown fledgling at the edge of the nest, he was thinking ofprojecting a flight.

  During the time Morgan had been in the Stilwell ranchhouse no news hadcome to him from Ascalon. Close as they lived to the town, the Stilwellshad been too deeply taken up with their own problem of pending ruin dueto the loss of their herd from Texas fever infection, to make a tripeven to the post-office for their mail. Violet, the daughter, was on therange more than half the time, doing what she could to drive the sickcattle to the river where they might have a better chance to fight thedread malady.

  Morgan's injuries had turned out to be deeper seated and more seriousthan he had at first supposed. For several days he was racked with afever that threatened to floor him, due to the mental torture of thatterrible night. It had passed, and with it much of his pain, and hewould have gone to Ascalon for his reckoning with the men from theNueces two days ago if Stilwell had not argued the folly of attemptingan adjustment under the handicap of his injuries.

  Wait a few days longer, the rancher sagely advised, eat and rest, andrub that good fiery horse liniment of his on the sore spots and swollenjoints. Even if they were gone, which Stilwell knew would not be thecase for Drumm would not have made it back from Kansas City yet, Morgancould follow them. And to do that he must be sound and strong.

  Stilwell had put off even his own case against the Texas stockman, hehad been so urged for time in getting his sick cattle down to the shadeand water along the river. Now the job seemed over, for all he coulddo, and was taking his ease at home this night, intending to go early inthe morning and put his case for damages against Drumm into JudgeThayer's hands.

  Through Morgan's days of sickness and waiting for strength, he wasattended tenderly by Mrs. Stilwell, and sometimes of an afternoon, whenViolet came in from the hot, dry range, she would play for him on hernew piano. She played a great deal better than he had any reason toexpect of her, self-taught in her isolation on the banks of the shallowArkansas.

  Violet was a girl of large frame, large bones in her wrists, largefingers to her useful, kindly ministering hands. Her face was somewhattoo long and thin to be called handsome, but it was refined by awistfulness that told of inner striving for something beyond the horizonof her days there in her prairie-circled home. And now as the two mentalked outside the door, the new moonlight white on the dust of thetrampled yard, Violet was at her piano, playing a simple melody with asoft, expressive tenderness as sweet to him as any music Morgan ever hadheard. For he understood that the instrument was the medium ofexpression for this prairie girl's soul, reaching out from its shelterof sod laid upon sod to what aspirations, following what longings,mounting to what ambitions, none in her daily contact ever knew.

  Stilwell was downcast by the blow he had received in the loss of morethan half his herd through the Texas scourge. It had taken years ofhardship and striving, fighting drouth and winter storm, preying wolvesand preying men, to build the herd up to the point where profits wereabout ready to be enjoyed.

  Nothing but a frost would put an end to the scourge of Texas fever; inthose days no other remedy had been discovered. Before nature could sendthis relief Stilwell feared the rest of his cattle would die, althoughhe had driven them from the contaminated range. If that happened hewould be wiped out, for he was too old, he said, to start at the bottomand build up another herd.

  It was at this point that Morgan suggested Stilwell turn to the soilinstead of range cattle as a future business, a thing that called downthe cattleman's scorn and derision, and citation of the wreckage thatcountry had made of men's hopes. He dismissed that subject very soon asone unworthy of even acrimonious debate or further denunciation, todwell on his losses and the bleakness of the future as it presenteditself through the bones of his dead cattle.

  As they sat talking, the soft notes of Violet's melody soothing to theears as a distant song, the young man Fred came riding in from Ascalon,the bearer of news. He began to talk before he struck the ground,breathlessly, like a man who had beheld unbelievable things.

  "That gang from Texas has took the town--everybody's hidin' out," hereported.

  "Took the town?" said Stilwell, incredulously.

  "Stores all shut up, post-office locked and old man Flower settin' inthe upstairs winder with his Winchester across his leg waitin' for themto bust in the door and steal the gover'ment money!"

  "Listen to that!" said Stilwell, as the young man stood there hat off,mopping the sweat of excitement from his forehead. "Where's thatman-eatin' marshal feller at?"

  "He's killin' off everybody in town but his friends--he's killed eightmen, a man a day, since he's been in office. He's got everybody lookin'for a hole."

  "A man a day!" said Morgan, scarcely able to believe the news.

  "Who was they?" Stilwell inquired, bringing his chair down from its easyslant against the sod wall, leaning forward to catch the particulars ofthis unequaled record of slaughter.

  "I didn't hear," said Fred, panting faster than his hard-ridden horse.

  "I hope none of the boys off of this range around here got into it withhim," Stilwell said.

  "They say he's closed up all the gamblin' joints and saloons butPeden's, and the bank's been shut four or five days, Judge Thayer and abunch of fellers inside of it with rifles. Tom Conboy told me the judgehad telegraphed to the governor asking him to send soldiers to restorelaw and order in the town."

  "Law and order!" Stilwell scorned. "All the law and order they ever hadin that hell-hole a man'd never miss."

  "Where's the sheriff--what's he doing to restore order?" Morganinquired.

  "The sheriff ain't doin' nothing. I ain't been over there, but I knowthat much," Stilwell said.

  "They say he's out after some rustlers," Fred replied.

  "Yes, and he'll stay out till the trouble's over and come back without ahide or hair of a rustler. What else are they doin'?"

  "Rairin' and shootin'," said Fred, winded by the enormity of thisoutlawry, even though bred in an atmosphere of violence.

  "Are they hittin' anybody, or just shootin' for noise?" Stilwell asked.

  "Well, I know they took a crack at me when I went out of Conboy's to gitmy horse."

  Mrs. Stilwell and Violet, who had hastened out on Fred's excitedarrival, exclaimed in concern at this, the mother going to her boy tofeel him over as for wounds, standing by him a little while with armaround him.

  "Did you shoot back?" Stilwell wanted to know.

  "I hope I did," Fred replied.

  Stilwell got up, and stood looking at the moon a little while as ifcalculating the time of night.

  "They need a man or two over there to clean that gang up," he said."Well, it ain't my business to do it, as long as they didn't hit you."


  Mrs. Stilwell chided him sharply, perhaps having history behind her tojustify her alarm at these symptoms.

  "Let them fight it out among themselves, the wolves!" she said.

  Morgan had drawn a little apart from the family group, walking to thecorner of the house where he stood looking off toward Ascalon, still andtense as if he listened for the sounds of conflict. He was dressed inStilwell's clothes, which were somewhat too roomy of body but nothingtoo large otherwise, for both of them had the stature of proper men.His feet were in slippers, his ankles bandaged and soaked with thepenetrating liniment designed alike for the ailments of man and beast.

  Violet studied him as he stood there between her and the moon, his facesterner for the ordeal of suffering that had tried his manhood in thattwo-mile run beside the train, where nothing but a sublime defiance ofdeath had held him to his feet.

  He had told her of his seven-years' struggle upward from the cowboy'ssaddle to a place of honor in the faculty of the institution where hehad beaten out the hard, slow path to learning; she knew of his purposein coming to the western Kansas plains. Until this moment she hadbelieved it to be a misleading and destructive illusion that would breakhis heart and rive his soul, as it had the hearts and souls of thousandsof brave men and women before him.

  Now she had a new revelation, the moonlight on his face, bright in hisfair hair, picturing him as rugged as a rock uplifted against the dimsky. She knew him then for a man such as she never had met in the narrowcircle of her life before, a man strong to live in his purpose andstrong to die in it if the need might be. He would conquer where othershad failed; the strength of his soul was written in his earnest face.

  "I think I'll go over to Ascalon," Morgan said presently, turning tothem, speaking slowly. "Will you let me have a horse?"

  "Go to Ascalon! Lands save us!" Mrs. Stilwell exclaimed.

  "No, no--not tonight!" Violet protested, hurrying forward as if shewould stay him by force.

  "You wait till morning, son," Stilwell counseled calmly, so calmly,indeed, that his wife turned to him sharply. "Maybe I'll go with you inthe morning."

  "You've got no business there--let them kill each other off if they wantto, but you keep out of it!" said his wife.

  "If you'll let me have a horse--" Morgan began again, with theinsistence of a man unmoved.

  "You forgot about our cattle, Mother," Stilwell chided, ignoringMorgan's request. "I'm goin' to sue Sol Drumm, I'm goin' to have thepapers ready to serve on him the minute he steps off of the train. Ifthere's any way to make him pay for the damage he's done me I'm goin' todo it."

  "There's more than one way," said Fred. "If the law can't----"

  "Then we lose," his father finished for him, in the calm resignation ofa just man.

  Morgan's intention of going to Ascalon to square accounts with hispersecutors as soon as he had the strength to warrant such a move was nosecret in the Stilwell family. Fred had offered his services at thebeginning, and the one cowboy now left out of the five but recentlyemployed by Stilwell had laid his pistol on the table and told Morganthat he was the man who went with it, both of them at his service whenthe hour of reckoning should arrive. Now Stilwell himself was beginningto show the pistol itch in his palm.

  Morgan was grateful for all this uprising on the part of his newfriends in his behalf, to whom his suffering and the cruelty of hisordeal appealed strongly for sympathy, but he could not accept anyassistance at their hands. There could be no satisfaction in justiceapplied by any hand but his own. If otherwise, he might as well go tothe county attorney, lodge complaints, obtain warrants and send hisenemies to jail.

  No, it was a case for personal attention; it was a one-man job. Whatthey were to suffer for their great wrong against him, he must inflictwith his own weapon, like the savage Comanche whose camp fires werescarcely cold in that place.

  So Morgan spoke again of going that night to Ascalon, only to be setupon by all of them and argued into submission. Eager as Fred was to goalong and have a hand in the fray, he was against going that night.Violet came and laid her good wholesome, sympathetic hand on Morgan'sarm and looked into his face with a plea in her eyes that was strongerthan words. He couldn't bear his feet in the stirrups with his anklesall swollen and sore as they were, she said; wait a day or two--wait aweek. What did it matter if they should leave in the meantime, and goback down the wild trail to Texas? So much the better; let them go.

  Morgan smiled to hear her say it would be better if they should getaway, for she was one of the forgiving of this world, in whose breastthe fire of vengeance would find no fuel to nurse its hot spark andburst into raging flame. He yielded to their entreaties and reasoning,agreeing to defer his expedition against his enemies until morning, butnot an hour longer.

  When the others had gone to bed, Morgan went down to the river throughthe broad notch in the low bank where the Santa Fe Trail used to cross.This old road was brush-grown now, with only a dusty path winding alongit where the cattle passed to drink. The hoof-cut soil was warm and softto his bruised feet; the bitter scent of the willows was strong on thecooling night as he brushed among them. Out across the broad golden barshe went, seeking the shallow ripple to which the stream shrunk in thesummer days between rains, sitting by it when he came to it at last,bathing his feet in the tepid water.

  There he sat for the cure of the water on his bruised, fevered joints,raking the fire of his hatred together until it grew and leaped withinhim like a tempest. As the Indian warrior watches the night out withsong of defiance and dance of death to inflame him to his grim purposeof the dawn, so this man fallen from the ways of gentleness into theabyss of savagery spurred himself to a grim and terrible frenzy byvisiting his wrath in anticipation upon his enemies.

  Unworthy as they were, obscure and trivial; riotous, ignorant, bestialin their lives, he would lower himself to their level for one blood-redhour to carry to them a punishment more terrible than the noose. As fromthe dead he would rise up to strike them with terror. In the morning,when the sun was striking long shadows of shrub and bunched bluestemover the prairie levels; in the morning, when the wind was as weak as ayoung fawn.