safety; but they swung off about a hundred feet from camp and raced by
us like the wind, horns clashing, hoofs rattling, and the earth fairly
shaking with the mighty tread.
Riding well to the front between us and the herd was Tom trying to turn
the leaders. As he flew by he shouted in his daredevil way, "Here's
trouble, cowboys!" and was lost in the dust and night. Of course all
this took but a moment. We quickly recovered ourselves, pulled on boots,
flung ourselves into the saddle, and tore out into the dark with the
wagon boss in the lead. I was neck and neck with him as we caught up
with the end of the herd, and called to him: "Jack, they are headed for
the 'cracks.' If we get into them, some of us will get hurt." Just then,
"Bang, bang, bang," went a revolver ahead of us, and we knew that Tom
had realized where he was going, and was trying to turn the leaders by
shooting in their faces.
These cracks are curious phenomena and very dangerous. The hard adobe
soil has cracked in every direction. Some of them are ten feet wide and
fifty deep, others half a mile long and only six inches or a foot wide.
The grass hides them, so a horse doesn't see them 'til he is fairly into
them, and every cowboy dreaded that part of the valley.
Jack and I soon came to what, in the dust and darkness, we took to be
the leaders. Drawing our revolvers, we began to fire in front of them,
and quickly turned them to the left, and by pressing from that side
crowded them round more and more, until we soon had the whole herd
running round and round in a circle, or "milling," as it's called, and
in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes got them quieted down enough
to be left again in charge of the regular guard.
Jack sent me around the herd to tell the second-guard men to take
charge, as it was their time, and for the rest of us to go to camp,
which was nearly a mile distant and visible only, because "Dad," the
cook, had built up the fire, well knowing we wouldn't be able to find
camp without it.
Before we got there the rain began, and we were all wet to the skin; but
we tied up our ponies again, and five seconds after I lay down I was
sound asleep and heard nothing till the cook started his unearthly yell
of "Roll out, roll out, chuck away." I threw back the heavy canvas, that
I had pulled over my head to keep the rain out of my face, and got up.
The storm was over. In the East the morning star was just beginning to
fade, and the sky was taking that peculiar gray look that precedes the
dawn and sunrise. The night-horse wrangler was working his horses up
toward camp, and the three or four bells in the bunch jingled merrily
and musically in the cool, fresh, morning air.
We were all sleepy and cold, and as we gathered around the fire to eat,
some one said, "Where's Flowers?" The foreman glanced around the circle
of men, set down his plate and cup, and strode over to where Tom had
rolled out his bed the evening before. It was empty, and, what was
more, hadn't been slept in at all. A hasty questioning developed the
fact that none of us had noticed him after we had come in from the
stampede.
"Well," said Jack, "it's one of two things: either he has run into one
of those blamed cracks and is hurt, or else he has a bunch of steers
that got cut off from the herd in the rain and has had to stay with 'em
all night, because he got so far from camp he couldn't work 'em back
alone." As this was not an unusual thing we all felt sure it was the
case, and after a hasty breakfast, all of us but the men just off guard,
struck out to look for him.
Some way I felt a premonition of trouble as I rode out into the prairie,
and leaving the rest to scatter out in different directions I rode
straight for the cracks. It was an easy matter to trail up the herd, and
as I loped along I couldn't get the song out of my head. As I drew near
the crack country I saw by the trail that we had not been at the leaders
when we thought we were, but had cut in between them and the main herd.
I could see our tracks where we had swung them around, leaving probably
one hundred head out.
I hurried along their trail, and as the daylight got stronger and the
sun began to peep over the hills, I could make out, about a couple of
miles from me, a bunch of cattle feeding. I knew this was the bunch I
was trailing, and already some of the other boys had seen them also and
were hurrying toward them. But, between me and the cattle was, I knew, a
dangerous crack. It was some six feet wide and ten deep, and probably
half a mile long. If Tom had ridden into that he was either dead or
badly hurt. As I neared the crack my heart sank, for I saw the trail
would strike it fairly about the widest place, and my worst fears were
realized when I reached it, for there lying under a dozen head of dead
and dying steers was poor Tom. The trail told the whole story. He had
almost turned them when they reached the crack, and he had ridden into
it sideways or diagonally, and some twenty steers had followed, crushing
him and his horse to death, and killing about a dozen of them. The
balance were wandering about in the bottom of the crack trying to get
out, but its sides were precipitous everywhere.
Drawing my six-shooter, I fired two shots, and rode my pony in circles
from left to right, which in cowboy and frontier sign language means,
"Come to me." The boys quickly rode over to where I was, and we, with
great work, managed to get his body out from under his horse and up on
top. He still held his pearl-handled Colts in his hand, every chamber
empty, and his hat was hanging round his neck by the leather string.
Tenderly we laid his body across a saddle, lashed it on with a rope, and
taking the boy thus dismounted up behind me, we led the horse with its
sad burden back to camp.
I think death, when it strikes among them, always affects rough men more
than it does men of finer sensibilities and breeding. They get over it
more quickly, but for the time the former seem to be fairly overwhelmed
with the mystery of death, and seem dazed and helpless, where the latter
would not for a moment lose their heads.
But Jack quickly pulled himself together. It was fifty miles to the
nearest town. With our heavy mess-wagon and slow team over a sandy
road, it would take two days to get the body there. Packing it on a
horse in that hot Arizona sun was out of the question, and so we decided
to bury him right there.
Tom had no relatives in Arizona, nor any nearer friends than us rough
"punchers," so that no wrong would be done any one by burying him there.
[Illustration: "_Some pre-historic people had carved hieroglyphics on
it_"]
We laid his crushed form under a cedar tree near by, while Jack and I
went out to find a place to dig a grave. About half a mile from camp was
a big black rock that stood up on end in the prairie as if it had been
dropped from the clouds. Some prehistoric race of people had carved deep
into its smooth face dozens and scores of queer hieroglyphics which no
man today can decipher or understand. Snakes, lizards, deer, and
antelope, turtles, rude imitations of human figures, great suns with
streaming rays, human hands and feet, and odd geometrical designs, all
drawn in a rude, rough way as if the rock had been the gigantic slate of
some Aztec schoolboy which hundreds of years of storm and weather had
not rubbed out. This rock was called the "Aztec Rock." It was a landmark
for miles around, and as Jack remarked: "It was a blamed sight better
headstone than they'd give him if we put him in the little Campo
Santo,[C] in the sand at the foot of the mesa, back of town."
[C] Campo Santo, the Mexican term for graveyard.
So here we dug his grave, and then we wrapped him in a gorgeous Navajo
Indian blanket, and laid poor Tom Flowers away as carefully and tenderly
as in our rough way we knew how.
The day-herders had grazed the herd up close to the rock, so that they
could be at the grave, the cattle were scattered all around us, and the
cook had taken out the mess-box and used the mess-wagon to bring the
body over in.
When the last sods were placed on the mound, Jack with tears running
down his sunburned face, which he vainly tried to stay with the back of
his glove, looked around and said: "Boys, it seems pow'ful hard to plant
poor Tom and not say a word of Gospel over him. Can't some of ye say a
little prayer, or repeat a few lines of Scripter?"
We all looked at one another in a hopeless sort of way, and no one spoke
a word until the youngest there, the "horse-wrangler," a boy from
Indiana, whom we had named the "Hoosier Kid," spoke up and said: "I kin
say the Lord's Prayer, ef that'll be any good."
"Kneel down, fellers, and take off your hats," said Jack; and there in
the bright sunshine of an Arizona day, with a thousand long-horned
steers tossing their heads and looking at us with wondering and
suspicious eyes, with no sound save the occasional hoarse "caw, caw" of
a solitary desert raven idly circling above, that dozen of rough cowboys
knelt down, their heads reverently bared, while the "Hoosier Kid" with
streaming eyes, slowly recited that divinely simple prayer which we had
all learned at our mother's knee, "Our Father who art in Heaven,
hallowed be Thy name."
As we rode slowly back to camp the words of the last song that poor Tom
ever sang would come to me again in spite of all I could do.
Ah, me. Poor Tom. It's little religious training you got on the
prairies, or the trail, or in the cow camp; but if that "Great Owner"
looks into the heart, I am sure He found you worthy to wear His brand,
and to be cut into the herd that goes up the "trail that is narrow and
dim."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THE NAVAJO TURQUOISE RING
By permission _The Argonaut_, San Francisco, Cal.
"I tell you, Miss Nell, it's not safe for you to ride over the range so
much all alone. That Navajo's plumb crazy about you now, and he's liable
to do you some mischief."
The speaker, a handsome, blue-eyed young fellow, clad in the rough garb
of a cowboy, with broad sombrero, "chaparejos," his buckskin gloves
thrust through his cartridge belt, stood leaning against the door-post
of a typical Arizona ranch house. In one hand he held the end of a long
hair rope, the other end being fast to his pony, which, all saddled,
stood pawing and restless, eager to be away on the range. Slung on the
near side of the saddle was a Winchester carbine, for, between white and
red thieves, the cowboys had to be ready for all sorts of emergencies,
and besides, the big gray wolves were beginning to show up on the range,
and a wolf scalp was worth twenty dollars at the county seat.
The person to whom these remarks were addressed stood idly switching her
riding-habit with her "quirt," a handsome piece of cowboy work, over
which one of her many admirers had spent hours by the light of a
campfire plaiting and decorating it with "Turk's heads" and other fancy
knots known to cowboy quirt-makers. She was all ready for a ride and
waiting only for her pony to be brought up from the corral, where Juan,
the Mexican, was saddling him.
There was a pleading, pathetic tone in the man's voice that spoke the
lover, even had his eyes shown no sign of passion; but his words seemed
to rouse all the perversity of her sex. Her red lips curled and her
brown eyes snapped. "Oh, pshaw, Mr. Cameron, you're always worrying
about some imaginary danger. Please return me my ring--that is, if you
have finished examining it."
A red wave swept over Cameron's face, like the shadow of a cloud across
the prairie on a bright day, and he stood for a full minute idly turning
the ring in question upon the very tip of the little finger of his own
sun-browned hand. It was a splendid specimen of the Navajo silversmith's
art. Now, the Navajo Indians' blankets have made them famous, but they
deserve quite as much fame for their cunning as workers in silver.
This ring was indeed a gem. It was wide, as most of their rings are, cut
in two on the inner side so that it could be made larger or smaller by
"springing" it to fit any finger, and in the top was set a turquoise as
blue as a summer sky--a stone precious to the Navajos--that among the
tribe would have bought twenty ponies, a hundred sheep, and squaws
galore. Around the ring ran the most intricate and delicate carving, and
the whole effect was at once unique and barbaric.
The girl's hand was outstretched for the ring, and almost mechanically
the man turned and dropped it into the upturned palm. "Well, Miss Nell,
I've warned you, and I'm sure if Mr. Hull were here that he'd feel just
as I do." His voice grew tense. "I can't go with you today, for I've got
to go over the other side of the mountain to see if I can find those
lost horses, and won't be back till dark."
The girl, scarcely heeding his words, took the ring, and in a
mock-heroic sort of way kissed and slipped it on to her engagement
finger, a gleam of mischief in her eyes, at which action Cameron, stung
almost to madness, smothered a groan, and strode across the porch, his
spurs clanking on the floor, gathering up his hair rope as he went. With
one hand on the pommel of the saddle and the other on the pony's mane,
he leaped lightly into his seat without aid of stirrup and, bringing the
coil of rope down on the animal's flank, went off down the line of wire
fence on a dead run, and soon turned out of sight around a low hill in
the valley.
The girl watched him in silence until he was lost to view, and then,
with a gay laugh, turned into the room, saying, "Poor Cam, what fun it
is to tease him!"
A moment later, when Juan appeared at the door with her horse, she
pulled on her pretty buckskin gloves, and with a "Goodbye, Mary, I'll be
home by noon," to the heavy-faced cook, who stood watching her from the
door of the log kitchen, she rode off almost as fast as Cameron, but in
a different direction.
Three months before these happenings George Hull had gone down to the
little railroad station, some thirty miles from the ranch, to meet his
wife's only sister, who was coming to spend the summer with them in
Arizona, and from her first day she had taken to the life like a duck
to water. She was a fearless horsewoman, and never so happy as when out
on the range riding with the cowboys, if they were there, or alone if
they were not. Nell Steele was a warm-hearted, impulsive girl, but she
could no more help making a slave of every man she met than she could
stop breathing.
It was an easy task for her, too, and it mattered not whether it was
some high-bred, educated gentleman, or a rough Texas "puncher" who had
never in all his life spoken a dozen words to a woman of her class. And
naturally with such surroundings, with men unused to women's wiles, she
soon had the whole country at her feet.
Of them all, however, young Cameron had by far the worst case of it, and
the girl, while in her heart greatly pleased with his attentions, seemed
to delight in keeping him in a state of absolute misery by alternately
raising him to the very highest pinnacle of happiness, and again
dropping him into the bottomless pit of despair. Deep in her heart she
knew he was her ideal, but she could not resist the temptation to
coquette with and tease him.
Cameron had come west for his health some years before. Too hard
application at college had seriously impaired his strength, and he had
been ordered to live in the open air for several years. Letters of
introduction to George Hull had brought him to this ranch in the high
mountain country of northern Arizona, and he had taken to the cowboy
life from the very first, until now he was looked upon as one of the
most trusted and satisfactory "boys" on the place.
The ranch to which George Hull brought his pretty sister-in-law was
located near the line of the Navajo Indian Reservation, and, as the
Navajos are great roamers, it was nothing unusual to have them hanging
round. One day a party of them came, bringing in some horses the boys
had missed for some time. It was Miss Steele's first sight of the
Navajo, and she came down to the corral, where they were all gathered,
to see them. Among them was a young chief named Chatto, who had attended
an Indian school at Albuquerque, and could therefore speak fairly good
English. He was a picture of savage finery. Around his waist was buckled
a costly belt made of great plates of solid silver; in his ears hung
huge silver rings; each arm was clasped by bracelets of the same
precious metal; around his neck were yards of the precious silver,
turquoise and shell beads so dear to the Navajo heart; and his moccasins
and leggings were thickly studded with buttons fashioned from dimes,
quarters, and half-dollars. Across his shoulders hung a gaudy Navajo
blanket, and his horse's bridle was fairly weighted down with glittering
trophies of the Indian silversmith's skill.
[Illustration: "_He was a picture of savage finery_"]
[Illustration: "_Now the Navajos are famous silversmiths_"]
It was but a few moments before Miss Steele was bartering with him for a
bracelet; but it was of no avail, he would not sell it at any price.
However, when the other Indians left, he stayed behind, until, as the
dinner-hour was nearing, the boys asked him to eat with them. It was
soon evident that he had eyes only for Miss Steele; and after dinner she
spent an hour talking to him of his school experience and trying to
learn a few words of the Navajo tongue.
The next day he returned, and the next, until it was plainly to be
seen that the gay laugh and brown eyes of the girl had completely
bewitched him.
One day he came bearing the ring I have described, and shyly offered it
to her, insisting that she must place it on her engagement finger, which
she did, never dreaming that the boys, keenly watching from the
bunk-house, had put him up to it, telling him that that was the way
white lovers did, and that once she put on his ring she was his by all
the laws and customs of the white man.
When Cameron, who was away at the time, heard of it, he was furious, and
went straight to Miss Steele and urged her to return the ring and banish
the Indian from the ranch. But she, seeing that back of his lover's
eagerness for her safety was a lover's jealousy as well, affected not to
believe him, and declared her intention of keeping and wearing the ring.
It was this ring that she had kissed so tragically and replaced on her
hand.
On leaving the ranch, the girl gave her pony an almost free rein for the
first two or three miles. It was a glorious morning in September, when
the sun had lost its greatest power, and the air was fairly intoxicating
in its freshness. The range never looked finer than it did now, after
the summer rains had covered it with a wonderful growth of grass dotted
with millions of daisies, black-eyed Susans, purple lupines, and dozens
of other varieties of prairie flowers, which, in places, fairly made the
air heavy with their perfume. The trail led her over a wide mesa, and at
its highest point she stopped her pony and drank in the wondrous scene.
Away off to the north the great tablelands, or mesas, where live the
snake-loving Moqui Indians, hung in an almost indescribable grandeur,
blue and misty against the sky, more like a mirage than a reality. A
couple of saucy prairie dogs barked shrilly at her from their adjacent
village; a coyote, disturbed by her coming, skulked hastily away from
where he had been trying to surprise a little calf, left lying under a
sagebush while its mother went on down the trail to water. Above
her, high in the heavens, idly circled half a dozen heavy-winged
turkey-buzzards, those scavengers of the prairies, a sure sign that
somewhere below them an animal lay dead and they were gathering for a
feast. As far as the eye could reach were rolling hills, with here and
there parks of cedars, while scattered over the prairie were hundreds of
cattle and horses, for George Hull was one of the heaviest cattle-owners
in northern Arizona, and this was the heart of his range.
Across the valley below her she could see the figure of a solitary
horseman, which, after a few moments she decided to be Cameron, although
she had thought him miles away from there by this time. Her pony having
recovered his wind, she started down the mesa toward the approaching
figure, glad to see some human being in all that waste of loneliness
around her. As she drew nearer, she saw that it was no white man, but an
Indian, the red sash tied around his head being plainly visible at quite
a distance, but undaunted, she kept on her course, presuming him to be
the Indian mail-carrier who came in from the agency twice a week with
the mail-sack tied behind his saddle.
As the distance between them lessened, she saw with great uneasiness
that it was her admirer, Chatto, and, with a sort of guilty fear in her
heart, she turned off the trail and pushed her pony into a lope toward
a bunch of horses grazing near, as if she wanted to look at them closer.
A glance over her shoulder showed her that the Indian had also turned
and was following her, and the girl, now thoroughly alarmed, urged her
pony to his fullest speed. The Indian called to her to stop, but she
only rode the harder. Chatto, however, was well mounted and slowly
gained on the flying figure; her cowboy hat had blown from her head, but
was held by the string around her neck as she urged her pony with voice
and quirt.
"Stop, I shoot!" called the Navajo, but she rode the faster, expecting
every instant to hear the crack of his Winchester. At last he was within
thirty feet of her, and she felt that her pony had done his utmost and
there was no escape. Another look over her shoulder showed her that the
Indian had taken down his long rawhide reata and was swinging it round
and round his head preparatory for a throw at her. She remembered
hearing Hull tell of Mexican and cowboy fights, where the victim was
roped and pulled off his horse and across the prairie, until every
semblance of human shape was dragged out of it, and her heart sank
within her, for she knew by some woman's instinct that he had realized
she had been fooling him, and was thirsting for revenge.
Faster and faster they rode, and nearer and nearer he drew, till she
could hear the "swish" of the rope through the air; she crouched low
over the saddle to offer as small a mark as possible, meantime praying
for deliverance, which in her heart she little thought would come.
Cameron found his horses but a few miles out from the ranch, and,
quickly rounding them up, started the bunch toward home on a sharp run,
arriving there not long after Miss Steele had left. Questioning Mary as
to the direction she had taken, he struck off again on the range in a
course that he shrewdly judged would enable him, as if by accident, to
meet Miss Steele on her homeward way.
Some three or four miles from the ranch the mesa he was crossing ended
abruptly in a cliff some two hundred feet high, which extended for
several miles in an unbroken line with but one or two places where an
animal could get up or down. The view from the edge of this cliff or
"rim rock," as it was more commonly called, over the wide valley spread
out below it for miles and miles was unexcelled, and Cameron, knowing
that Miss Steele must come up this cliff at one of two places, headed
for the one he felt she would be most likely to take. As he drew near
the edge of the mesa he left the trail and rode over to the cliff; and
thinking perhaps to surprise a bunch of antelope feeding quietly in the
valley below him, as well as to prevent Miss Steele from first seeing
him, should she chance to be below, he left his pony under a cedar and,
taking his Winchester in his hand, carefully walked up to the edge of
the cliff.
The road leading down to the valley ran close under the cliff and was
lost to sight around a point of the mesa but a short distance to his
right. Carefully scanning the prairie, he could see no one, but, from
the way three or four bunches of wild horses were tearing across the
valley below him, he felt satisfied, that either she or some one else
had started them, and concluded to wait a few moments.