flat on the soggy earth, wormed their way through the tall, rank
grass. On the crest of a steep ascent the leading figures halted
cautiously, and one by one the men came to a standstill, each with a
hand on the foot of the man ahead. A light was beginning to streak
the east when the captain consulted the native guide in a soundless
colloquy.
“What does he say?” asked Wilcox, the subaltern. He was wallowing in
the mud like a carabao, and his clothes were coated with dirt.
“The _hacienda_ of the _insurrecto comandante_ is just below us,”
returned the captain. “They’ll be perfectly unsuspecting, and unless
they’ve had time to move on, it’s likely we’ll find our men hidden
there.”
In the gray dawn the Americans drew their lines about the little
plantation, and lay in an unseen circle a stone’s throw from the
brown nipa-hut. The subaltern saw a frowsy woman with two naked
children go into the shack. A tall man in ragged white was putting
out the wash to dry.
“By the eternal,” whispered the captain, excitedly, “if it isn’t a
Spaniard! We’ve had rumors that the Gugus were keeping some
prisoners up here as slaves.”
The tall man glanced toward the jungle and saw a line of blue and
khaki-clad figures spring into view. His eyes bulged from his head,
and he stood motionless with amazement. Suddenly, with a shout of
“Vivan los Americanos! Viva la Libertad!” he dashed forward,
open-armed. A burly sergeant met him with a knock-out blow on the
chin, and the Spaniard staggered back, rubbing his face without
resentment. He understood that silence was demanded.
“Over the hill!” he cried, dancing about with pain and excitement.
“They’ve just left here with three _Americano_ prisoners. Hurry and
you will catch them! Hurry, hurry, but take me with you.”
Once more they dashed into the forest. The subaltern, running beside
the rescued man, noticed that his shirt was stained with blood, and
the fluttering rags gave glimpses of the raw, flayed skin beneath.
“What does that mean?” he asked in his school-boy Spanish.
The man smiled. Past sorrows were nothing to him now.
“I have been two years a prisoner,” he said. “One receives many
beatings.”
“Have you never tried to escape?”
“What was the use? My friend tried, but they caught him and cut off
his head--after roasting his legs.”
Wilcox said nothing, but there was a strained look about his eyes.
To him the last twenty-four hours had been horribly unreal. Stopping
only for food and drink, the troop had followed the track of the
_insurrectos_ deeper and deeper into the hills. He had seen his men
surprise and shoot down a native in sight of his wife, and as excuse
the captain had said that the man was a war traitor, a leader of
insurgents, and a persecutor of _Americanistas_. But Wilcox felt
sickened. The captain and the men became repulsive to him. They were
like a lower order of beings to which he refused to be degraded. The
army was his only outlook, but could he ever be in sympathy with
such things as he was experiencing every day?
Suddenly a man in the ranks cried out, and the column came to a
jolting halt. The subaltern looked, and turned pale. By the trunk of
a moss-grown tree, his arms bound above his head, a rope about his
half-naked body, stood an American soldier. Across his mouth from
corner to corner a _bolo_ had slashed, and the bleeding flesh hung
loosely over the jaw. His head was sunk forward, but he was not dead
as his captors had intended he should be after a few days’
lingering.
His “bunkie,” who had first seen the pitiful figure, cut the heavy
hemp with his bayonet, but the column waited only a moment. A
hospital corps man was left behind with a detail, and the troop took
up its march the more cautiously for knowing that it was hot on the
trail.
The subaltern felt that his nerves were strained to the breaking
point. Through the throbbing whirl of his brain came a sickening
thought. If the natives were capable of such a deed as this, how
would they treat the other two prisoners? Surely they would not dare
to harm an American officer. His mind refused to comprehend the
thought of Ellard cold and lifeless. The image of his classmate and
chum was too fresh, too vividly active to be rendered null. No, the
natives could not be so cruel, they could not be so inhuman. And yet
that bound figure by the tree! How slowly the men moved! Why did
they linger when every minute might mean life or death to the
prisoners?
The men passed over another spur and dropped into the valley below.
With every step they moved more cautiously. Tense and alert, the
subaltern crept onward, braced for he knew not what. He saw the
captain, crawling on all fours, become entangled in a trailing vine,
and felt an uncontrollable desire to laugh. It was broad day now,
and the heat grew stifling in the breathless woods.
A shout and distant laughter echoed across the valley, and the
captain halted abruptly. After a moment’s consultation, the troop
divided, and at the head of his creeping file, the subaltern turned
to the right. Nearer and nearer sounded the native voices, and the
men knew that they were close to the insurgent camp. For ten
heartbreaking minutes they wormed their way over the damp, brown
loam, now and again catching a glimpse of the little clearing, until
they had made a complete half circle.
Slowly they drew near the edge of the trees, and the subaltern heard
the sound of hasty digging. A strange look appeared on the set faces
of the men, but Wilcox did not notice. He wondered what the natives
were doing, fearing to look for dread of what he might have to see,
and yet impatient to know if Ellard was alive. He moved his body
until, dirt-color himself, he could watch unseen.
Thank God! At the opposite end of the clearing stood Ellard, upright
and unharmed. Before him, in the centre of the field, was a
rectangular hole like a grave, and the natives were throwing the
earth clods into it. Evidently they were burying some one who had
died, but why did they seem amused? Brady was nowhere in sight. Was
it his body they were burying?
Yelling like an army of blue fiends, the captain’s detachment burst
into the clearing. Surprised and confused, the _insurrectos_ turned
to flee, and met the fixed bayonets of the subaltern’s men.
As soon as he could break away, Wilcox ran to one side. Ellard was
standing as before, still bound hand and foot. His face was half
averted, but on it the subaltern saw a look of the most intense
horror and dread. With a cry of dismay, he dashed forward, but a
naked, brown figure was before him. Twice the shining _kris_ flashed
in the air as the defenseless prisoner toppled backward. Then,
dodging the subaltern’s bullet, the native turned and fled. Two
privates cornered and disarmed him, but before they could put in a
finishing blow, Wilcox had shouted: “Hold on there! Wait till I
come!”
“As you have mercy, put me out of this life!” moaned Ellard.
The tall, strong, young athlete of a moment before lay helpless on
the ground, a bleeding, legless trunk. Sobbing, the subaltern
dropped to his knees beside his friend, and beat passionately at the
earth with clenched fists.
“Don’t, don’t!” almost shrieked the wounded man. “I stood here
powerless to move while they first cut up and then buried Brady
alive, but I didn’t cry! Kill me, shoot me, have mercy on me for
Christ’s sake, but don’t cry!”
A hospital sergeant came running, the captain, white with horror, at
his heels. The fight was over, and a group of men were working at
the grave.
Wilcox staggered to his feet, a strange curse on his lips. The beads
of sweat plowed deep courses through the grime on his cheeks.
Slowly, with infinite deliberation, he reloaded his revolver and
strode to where the troopers held the _insurrecto_ on the ground. As
he went, he muttered, like a man searching for some forgotten
thought, “The measures used are adopted as circumstances arise, and
must be cruel or barbarous as the necessity calls for ... as the
necessity calls for....”
Three times he fired into the prostrate body. “One for Brady, one
for Wright, and one for Ellard!” and then he began to laugh.
UNDER FLYING HOOFS
By Bertrand W. Sinclair.
“Mormon Jack” stretched his generous length in the shade of the
bed-wagon, thereby disturbing the sonorous slumbers of Johnny
Layton, who muttered imprecations as he rolled over to make room.
“You blasted Mormon renegade,” he growled.
“Why don’t you go and lie down where you won’t be disturbin’ a
fellow that has to stand guard to-night?”
“You’re a cantankerous cuss,” Mormon Jack calmly returned. “If I
wasn’t a stranger in a hostile camp I’d climb your carcass for them
insultin’ observations. Besides, it aint good for a kid to sleep too
much. I don’t see how you got the heart to lay here snorin’ like a
cayuse chokin’ down, when you could be sittin’ up enjoyin’ this here
beautiful scenery that’s bein’ desecrated with bawlin’ cows and
buckin’ bronks and greasy, old round-up wagons. You aint got no
sense of nacheral beauty, Kid. You’re just about as ornery a varmint
as old man Hartley, what once inhabited this same flat.”
“I’ve heard of him,” answered the now thoroughly awakened Layton.
“He happened before my time, though. Were you in the country when
they cleaned him out?”
“You bet I was!” Mormon Jack replied. “I knew him before he came
over here, and I was here and saw his finish. There was high old
jinks on this little green bottom that day.”
“So I’ve heard. He wanted to make a sheep-feedin’ ground of the east
bench, didn’t he? How was it?” Layton propped himself up on his
elbow to listen.
Mormon Jack settled his head comfortably against a rolled-up bed. He
rolled a cigarette daintily and inhaled many breaths of smoke before
replying.
“Old man Hartley was a bone-headed cuss,” he began, at length, “that
wouldn’t learn better--even by experience. He was like a fool
buck-sheep that persists in buttin’ everything that gets in his way,
no matter how much he hurts his head. It aint the sheep’s fault;
it’s the breed of him, and the way he was raised--and I guess that
was the trouble with old Hartley.
“I come across him, first time, over in the Hash-Knife country, a
little while after they quit drivin’ herds up the Long Trail. The
railway come in, and you could bring a bunch of cattle from the
Panhandle up there in a week--it took five months on the trail.
Likewise, the railway brought farmers and pilgrims and woolly-backs
by the train-load, and turned ’em loose promiscus on the country,
where they made more trouble with their homestead rights and
barb-wire fences than all the Injuns that ever run buffalo or lifted
hair.
“It wasn’t long till there was heaps of trouble on the range. A
tenderfoot would file on a claim, prove up, and as soon as he got
his papers a big sheep outfit would own the land--you know how they
do. Pretty soon the big sheepmen began to fence the water-holes,
claim or no claim, and hell broke loose. After considerable killin’
and burnin’ and layin’ for each other, they patched up a peace; the
sheepmen that didn’t get killed off stayed on the creeks where they
was settled, and the cow outfits held what was left of the open
range.
“That was where old Hartley got in his work. He had a bunch of
sheep, and stay where he belonged he wouldn’t. He’d slip out on good
grass and fence up a spring or little lake that might be waterin’ a
thousand head of cattle. If a bunch of cows come in to water, he’d
sic his dogs on ’em till they’d quit the earth. If a round-up swung
his way he’d knock down his fence and move out. It was a big country
and hard to watch, but they caught him once or twice, and drove him
back where he belonged. They give him all the show in the world to
be on the square, but he wouldn’t--he wasn’t built that way. He
swore ‘by God’ that he had as much right to drive his blatin’,
stinkin’ woolly-backs all over the range as the cowmen had to turn
their longhorns loose on the country. He was a big, burly,
noisy-mouthed cuss, with the muscle of a pack-mule and the soul of a
prairie-dog. He was game, for all his low-down ways, but he went up
against the cowmen once too often; a round-up headed him north one
day with his sheep and a camp-wagon, and sent a couple of riders
along to see that he kept a-goin’. Then they swung around to his
home ranch and made a bonfire of it, to show the rest of the
ca-na-na’s that there’d be no monkey business on the Hash-Knife
range.
“I didn’t see nor hear of him no more till that fall. Then the
layout I was workin’ for bought a bunch of cattle over here and sent
me to rep for ’em--same as I’m doin’ now. I was huntin’ for the Big
Four wagon, which was supposed to be workin’ on the upper part of
the White Mud, when I struck his trail. Comin’ north along the creek
one day I turned a bend and come on a fellow talkin’ to a girl. It
was Stella Hartley. I met her once at a dance on Powder River, and I
knowed her the minute I laid eyes on her. She was about as nice a
little girl as ever struck Custer County.
“I rode up and says ‘Howdy’ to her, and then I see it was Bobby
Collins she was talkin’ to. I knew him, too--one of the whitest boys
on earth, and the swiftest woddy that ever turned a cow. ‘Hash-Knife
Bob’ they called him, over in Custer.
“‘M’ son,’ says I, ‘I’m sure glad to see you. But how’d you come to
stray off into this wilderness?’
“He told me, then, the whole deal, Stella sittin’ on her horse
tryin’ to smile, though she was nearer cryin’ than anything else;
she’d been sheddin’ tears pretty considerable, as it was. Away along
in the winter Stella ’d promised to marry him, but when the old man
got to hear of it he just tore up the earth and swore he’d rather
see her dead than married to a cowpuncher. Hash-Knife was for
tellin’ him to go to the devil and gettin’ married anyway, but
Stella wouldn’t have it that way. His wife bein’ dead, she was the
only womankind the old man had, and she couldn’t bear to leave him
like that. She said to wait awhile and the old man would come
around. So in the spring Bob goes to the head of Powder River, and
while he was gone the cow outfits put the run on the old man. When
Hash-Knife comes back, Stella and the whole Hartley outfit had
vanished plum off the earth.
“But Hash-Knife Bob was no quitter. He followed ’em up and located
’em on Milk River. Then he got a job with the Big Four, so’s to be
near the girl. He had it figured out that when round-up was over
that fall he’d take up a ranch on Milk River, marry Stella, and
settle down. But he hadn’t more’n made his plan when old man Hartley
breaks out in a fresh place.
“As I said before, old Hartley was a bull-headed old bucko. He was
worse’n that; he was pig-headed and sheep-headed; he had the
contrary stubbornness of all the no-account animals on God’s green
earth. You’d ’a’ thought he’d ’a’ taken a tumble to himself after
livin’ so long in a sagebrush country, and ’specially after bein’
run out of one part of it. But, no, sir! his way was _the_ way. He
wasn’t content on Milk River--he wanted a whole blamed county to
graze over. So he went pokin’ around on the north side, and stumbled
onto the Crossin’ here. It looked good to him, and without sayin’ a
word to anybody but his herder--who was a knot-head like himself and
crazy after Stella--he picks up his traps and sashays in here.
“There was probably seven or eight big cow outfits rangin’ east of
the White Mud then, and they’d just got through havin’ a scrap with
the sheep-wranglers, alongside of which the fuss in Custer County
was about knee-high. Both of ’em had lots of men and money, but the
advantage was on the cowmen’s side, for their boys was fightin’ for
their livin’, for outfits they’d been raised with, and the
sheepherders was in it for coin and because they didn’t know any
better. Anyway, the sheepmen backed off after awhile and made
peace--said they’d be good, they’d had enough. The cowmen made the
White Mud the dead line; there was to be no sheep-camps on the creek
or east of it. And the cowpunchers rode the high pinnacles to see
that no sheep crossed the line.
“This here, Hash-Knife explained to me, was the way things stood:
Hartley was located on the Crossin’ with a bunch of sheep--about
twenty-five hundred head. He’d built him a cabin, and had likewise
strung a four-strand barb-wire fence across the coulée that led down
to the flat. And he was goin’ to stay there, he said. He had a
squatter’s right, and if he wanted to live there and fence his place
he’d do it. It was government land, and to hell with the cow
outfits! He was from Missouri, he was! And up on the bench, about
six or seven miles back, the Big Four and the Ragged H was swingin’
up to the Crossin’ with a beef herd apiece, and the wagon-bosses was
mad, for they’d heard of old man Hartley.
“‘Old “Peek-a-Boo” Johnson’s runnin’ the Big Four,’ Hash-Knife told
me. ‘I got him to let me ride ahead and see if I couldn’t talk some
sense into the old man. But it’s no go. He’s got his neck bowed, and
he’s fool ’nough to try and run a whizzer on Peek-a-Boo’s riders;
they’ll clean him out if he does. I saw Stella ride off as I was
comin’ down to the ranch, and when I got through with him I rambled
down this way and found her. I want her to stay away from the flat
for two or three hours, till the thing is settled one way or the
other, but she’s bound to go home. So I guess we’d better be goin’.
The wagons ought to hit the Crossin’ pretty soon.’
“We went up on the bench. Stella and Hash-Knife and me, and loped
along toward the Crossin’. Pretty soon we could see the two sets of
wagons and a bunch of riders headin’ for the creek, the two
herds--big ones--trailin’ along behind, about a mile apart. At the
head of the coulée I turned my string loose for the horse-wrangler
to pick up. With Stella cryin’ and Hash-Knife tryin’ to comfort her,
we swung down the coulée to the shack.
“When we got there we found the herder had brought the sheep in to
water. They’d moved back off water and was bedded down, bunched
close, about half-way between the cabin and the creek. There was
three of ’em at the cabin; old Hartley, the herder, and a pilgrim
that’d come out to work on the ranch.
“Old Hartley looked pretty black at us as we rode up, but he didn’t
have time to say much before the wagons come rollin’ out the mouth
of the coulée. They was almost at the house before he knowed it.
Then he ducked into the cabin and come out with a Winchester across
his arm. The outfit went past without battin’ an eye at him. They
went round the sheep and started to pitch camp on the creek-bank.
Then Peek-a-Boo and Tom Jordan, the Ragged H boss, come a-ridin’ up
to the cabin.
“They was nice and polite about it. They told old Hartley that
seein’ he was a stranger they thought he’d probably made a mistake
and got over on the wrong side of the ridge. They didn’t want to
make any trouble for him, but he’d have to take his sheep off the
creek. Sorry to bother him, but it was range law.
“‘You can’t bluff _me_,’ says Hartley. ‘This here’s government land.
I got as much right here as anybody. You dassent run me out.’
“Then old Tom Jordan tells him about the big scrap they’d had with
the sheepmen, and how they’d agreed to stay the other side of the
ridge, but the old bonehead kept a-shootin’ off about his rights,
and how they couldn’t bluff _him_, till Tom got mad and rode off,
sayin’ that he’d see his blasted sheep was across the ridge by
sundown.
“Peek-a-Boo stayed talkin’ to him, tryin’ to persuade him to be
reasonable, and showin’ him how foolish he was to run up against the
cowmen after they’d fought a dozen big sheep outfits to a standstill
and whacked up the range fair and square. They talked and talked,
old Hartley gettin’ more and more on the peck. Neither of ’em
noticed that the lead of the first herd had strung down the
coulée--the cowpunchers had done business with the fence. There was
probably a thousand head of big, rollicky steers bunched on the
flat, and the rest of the herd was pourin’ out the mouth of the
draw. Two point-riders was holdin’ ’em up so they wouldn’t scatter.
“Old Hartley saw ’em first. The sight of that big bunch of longhorns
on what he called his land made him see red, I reckon. He shoved the
lever of his gun forward and back, clickity-click, and started on a
run for the bunch, hollerin’ as he went: ‘You can’t drive them
cattle across my flat! I’ll kill you, by God, if you do!’
“Peek-a-Boo stuck the spurs in his horse, and started after him,
callin’ to him to keep away from the herd. Hartley kept a-goin’ till
Peek was about twenty feet from him, then he whirled with his gun to
his shoulder, and cut loose, bang--bang! and Peek-a-Boo tumbled off
his horse.
“Things happened then. Stella had started after the old man, but
Hash-Knife grabbed her and made her stop. When old Hartley dropped
Peek-a-Boo, Bob says to me: ‘Mormon, take Stella over to camp. I got
to get Peek out of there. Maybe he aint killed, and them steers’ll
be a-runnin’ over him in about ten seconds.’
“Hash-Knife had the situation sized up correct. I helped Stella onto
her horse and started for the wagons. A lot of riders come like hell
across the flat toward the herd, but they was too late to do any
good. Just as Hash-Knife picked old Peek-a-Boo up and flopped him
across his horse, Hartley begin to smoke up the two riders that was
holdin’ the herd--which was bunched tight, ready to run. But he
missed first shot, and when he fired the second time they was
scuddin’ for the tail-end of the herd, layin’ low along the backs of
their horses. As they run they jerked the slickers off the backs of
their saddles, swingin’ ’em round their heads, and, yellin’ like
Gros Ventre braves strikin’ the war-post, they rode into the herd.
“When them cattle surged first one way and then the other, and then
swept across the flat, tramplin’ old Hartley down like he was a lone
stalk of bunch-grass stickin’ up out of the prairie, Stella
screeched and hid her face in her hands. But I watched; it was
horrible and fascinatin’. You’ve seen the ice gorge in the Big
Muddy, when it breaks up in the spring; it jams at some narrow place
and piles up and piles up till the river below is bone dry. Then the
weight of the water’ll bust the jam and there’ll be a grindin’,
smashin’ uproar for a minute, and all of a sudden the river is
flowin’ peaceful again.
“That was the way them cattle did. They passed over old Hartley like
he was nothin’, and struck that bunch of slumberin’ sheep like a
breakin’ ice jam. Two thousand strong they was, runnin’ like scared
antelope, packed shoulder to shoulder, with horns and hoofs
clatterin’ like a Spanish dancer’s castanets, and the gallopin’
weight of ’em made the flat tremble. This wise they passed over the
band of sheep, wipin’ ’em out like the spring floods wipe out the
snow in the low places, and thunderin’ by the round-up camp hit the
creek with a rush that knocked it dry for a hundred yards. The lead
of ’em had hardly got to the level before the riders was turnin’
’em. In fifteen minutes them cattle was standin’ bunched on the
flat, puffin’ and blowin’, the big steers starin’ round as if they
were wonderin’ what had scared ’em. But they’d done the trick. There
was no sheep left to quarrel over--nary one. It was an Alamo for the
woolly-backs!
“After we’d found and buried what was left of old man Hartley, we
moved up the creek to camp. The herder and the pilgrim hit the trail
for Milk River. Poor little Stella sure felt bad on account of the
old man, and the boys was all sorry for her. But she had Hash-Knife,
and Peek-a-Boo--who wasn’t hurt bad enough to make him cash in--said
he’d brand a hundred calves for her on the spring round-up. So I
guess she was winner on the deal.
“That’s been eleven years,” Mormon Jack concluded, reminiscently,
“and I aint been here since. I didn’t make no protracted visit the
first time, but I want to tell you, m’ son, it was sure excitin’.”
THE COLONEL AND “THE LADY”
By Kathleen Thompson
About an hour before sunset, Colonel Jerry rode furiously into the
post. Her sweating pony was streaked with dust, and the colonel was
covered with it from head to foot. Except for the rumpled and brief
little corduroy skirt and bloomers, her clothing was an exact, if
miniature, copy of her father’s. Her wide felt hat had its
regulation cord and tassels, there were gauntlets on her small
hands, and gaiters on her small legs. The sleeve of her boyish skirt
carried its device, and she wore a cartridge belt, a little pistol,
and a sword.
She drew her dancing pony sharply up before the group on the porch,
and saluted severely.