THAT TRANSACTION IN PONIES
Aunt Nettie Dawson, because of her tenderness of heart and the hard
acridities of her tongue, had made for herself a place in the popular
esteem. The well-to-do and healthy feared her for her sarcasms, while
upon the sick she descended in the guise of an unmixed blessing. Those
who mourned, and by whose hearths sat trouble, found in her the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land.
Cimarron Bill was the personal nephew of Aunt Nettie, the other
inhabitants of Dodge being nephews and nieces by brevet, and it was to
Cimarron Bill that Mr. Masterson was indebted for the advantage of Aunt
Nettie’s acquaintance.
“She’s some frosty, Bat,” explained Cimarron Bill, in apology for the
frigid sort of Aunt Nettie’s reception, “she’s shore some frosty. But if
you-all was ever to get shot up, now, for mebby holdin’ four aces, or
because you had become a drawback to a quadrille, she’d nacherally jump
in an’ nuss you like you was worth savin’.”
Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill had met for the first time the Autumn
before, and their friendship came about in this fashion. Sun City, a
thriving metropolis, consisting of a tavern and a store, lay far to the
south of Dodge and close against the Indian Territory line. Mr.
Masterson, coming north from the buffalo range, rode into Sun City late
one October afternoon, and since his affairs were not urgent decided to
remain till morning.
Mr. Stumps, proprietor of the Palace Hotel, being the tavern aforesaid,
wore an uneasy look when Mr. Masterson avouched his intention to tarry,
and submitted that his rooms were full.
“Leastwise,” observed the doubtful Mr. Stumps, “all three beds is full
but one; an’ that is took by Cimarron Bill.”
“Is this Bill person here?” queried Mr. Masterson.
“Well he ain’t exactly here none just now,” responded Mr. Stumps, “but
he’s liable to come pirootin’ in. He p’inted out this mornin’ for
Tascosa; but he’s a heap uncertain that a-way, an’ it wouldn’t surprise
me none if he was to change his mind. All I know is he says as he rides
away, ‘Don’t let no shorthorn have my room, Mr. Stumps, as I may need it
myse’f a whole lot; an’ in case I do I don’t want to be obleeged to
bootcher no harmless stranger for its possession.’”
“All the same,” said Mr. Masterson with asperity, “I reckon I’ll take
that room.”
“Thar’ll be an uprisin’ if Cimarron Bill comes back,” said Mr. Stumps,
as he led Mr. Masterson to the second floor.
“You won’t be in it,” replied Mr. Masterson confidently. “I won’t ask
you to help put it down.”
Mr. Masterson was searching his war-bags for a clean blue shirt, meaning
to do honour to Sun City at its evening meal. Suddenly a youth of his
own age appeared in the door. So cat-foot had been his approach that
even the trained ear of Mr. Masterson was given no creaking notice of
his coming up the stair. The youthful stranger was equipped of a dancing
eye and a Colt’s-45, and Mr. Masterson by some mighty instinct knew him
for Cimarron Bill. The question of identity, however, was instantly made
clear.
“My name’s Cimarron Bill,” remarked the youthful stranger, carefully
covering Mr. Masterson with his weapon, “an’ I’d like to ask whatever be
you-all doin’ in my apartments?” Then, waiving reply, he went on: “Thar,
don’t answer; take the short cut out of the window. I’m fretted, an’ I
wants to be alone.”
Mr. Masterson, to facilitate those proposed improvements in his garb,
had unbuckled his pistol and laid it on the bed. Cimarron Bill, with
militant genius, stepped in between Mr. Masterson and his artillery.
Under these convincing circumstances the suggested window seemed the one
solution, and Mr. Masterson adopted it. The twelve-foot leap to the soft
prairie grass was nothing; and since Cimarron Bill, with a fine contempt
for consequences in nowise calculated to prove his prudence, pitched Mr.
Masterson’s belt and pistol, as well as his war-bags, after him, the
latter was driven to confess that erratic personage a fair and fearless
gentleman. The tacit confession, however, served as no restraint upon
his movements, and seizing his weapon Mr. Masterson in his turn went
cat-foot up the stair. As had Cimarron Bill before him, he towered
presently in the narrow doorway, his steady muzzle to the fore.
“Jump!” quoth Mr. Masterson, and Cimarron Bill leaped from the same
window which so lately had been the avenue of Mr. Masterson’s departure.
Cimarron Bill did not have the luck which had attended the gymnastics of
Mr. Masterson, and sprained his ankle. Whereupon, Cimarron Bill sat up
and called for a glass of liquor, solacing himself the while with evil
words. Following the drink, Mr. Stumps negotiated a truce between his
two guests, and Mr. Masterson came down and shook Cimarron Bill by the
hand. “What I like about you,” said Cimarron Bill, as he met Mr.
Masterson’s courtesy halfway, “is your persistency. An’ as you seem sort
o’ took with them apartments of mine, on second thought we’ll ockepy ’em
in yoonison.”
Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill became as Damon and Pythias. In the
months that followed they were partners, killing buffaloes and raiding
Indians for ponies, share and share alike. Mr. Masterson came finally to
know Aunt Nettie. And because Cimarron Bill loved her, he also loved
her, and suffered in humble silence from her caustic tongue as did his
mate. For was not the fortune of one the fortune of the other? and were
they not equal partners in all that came their way?
Cimarron Bill’s most glaring fault was a complete inaptitude for
commerce. It was this defect that taught him, while at play in Mr.
Webster’s Alamo saloon, to place a value on “queens-up” so far in
advance of their merits, that in one disastrous moment he was swept
clean of his last dollar and his last pony. For a buffalo hunter thus to
be set afoot was a serious blow; more, it smelled of disgrace. Your
Western gentleman, dismounted and obliged to a painful pedestrianism,
has been ever a symbol of the abject; also his standing is shaken in
what social circles he affects. These several truths were abundantly
known to Cimarron Bill, and on the morning after his bankruptcy he
begged the use of a pony from Mr. Masterson with a purpose of
straightening up his prostrate destinies.
“I’ll ride down,” explained Cimarron Bill, easily, “to the divide between
Medicine Lodge Creek an’ the Cimarron, an’ the first Cheyenne who comes
teeterin’ along on a proper pony ought to fit me out. I won’t be afoot
long enough to wear out my moccasins; you can bet a blue stack on that!”
Cimarron Bill’s plan to remount himself was one feasible enough. True,
as stated in a previous chapter, there existed an official peace between
the Cheyennes and their paleface brothers. Unofficially, it was the
quenchless practice of both sides to kill and scalp each other, whenever
an opportunity linked with secrecy and safety was presented. It was the
pleasure of the Cheyennes to fall upon isolated camps of buffalo hunters
and exterminate them; the broad prairies, had they spoken, would have
told a hundred such red stories. By way of reprisal, the enterprising
paleface wiped out what Cheyennes crossed his path. Moreover, it was the
delight of the paleface, when not otherwise engaged, to raid a Cheyenne
village, and drive off the ponies. The ponies, saleable as hot cakes,
went at thirty dollars the head in Dodge; wherefore the practice, apart
from the thrill and joy thereof, was not without its profit. Cimarron
Bill, however, did not contemplate a raid; what he aimed at was a single
pony, and there were safer, even if more sanguinary methods by which a
single pony might be arrived at.
Bear Shield’s band of Cheyennes had pitched their tepees on the
Cimarron, thirty miles to the south of Sun City. The region was a fair
hunting ground, rife of buffalo. The attraction to Bear Shield’s people,
however, was Sun City itself. What was a thirty-mile ride to a Cheyenne,
with nothing upon his mind but firewater? The latter refreshment abode
privily to his call in Sun City, and he might purchase at the rate of a
pint for a buffalo robe. So brisk was trade that every day from one to a
dozen Cheyennes, whose hearts were low and thirsty, rode into Sun City,
each with a modest pack of robes, to presently ride forth robeless but
rapturous.
Southward from Sun City ran the trail for that point on the Cimarron
where Bear Shield and his tribesmen, their squaws and pappooses and dogs
and ponies, lived and moved and had their aboriginal being. As the trail
crossed Medicine Lodge Creek it crowded the base of a thickly wooded
knoll, at the back of which a bald precipice fell away for a sheer two
hundred feet.
It was the wont of that paleface, who felt pressed upon by the need of a
Cheyenne scalp or pony or both, to lie in hopeful ambush on the wooded
knoll. He would not grow weary with much watching; his reward was sure
to appear within the hour, in the shape of a drunken Cheyenne, reeling
in his saddle with the robe-bought hospitality of Sun City fifteen miles
away. The sullen Sharp’s would speak, and the bibulous Cheyenne go
headlong. Then the paleface who had sniped him would mount his own pony
with speed, and round up the riderless pony of that Cheyenne who had
been. Once the Cheyenne’s pony was secured, the paleface would scalp and
strip his victim; then, using his lariat, he would drag what he didn’t
want to the precipice adverted to, and toss it over.
Full two hundred leading citizens of Bear Shield’s village had been
blotted out, before the Cheyennes became aware of their fate and the
grim manner of it; for the paleface never exposed his ambush by letting
any Cheyenne get away. If the census of the Cheyenne party exceeded the
count of rifles on the knoll, they were permitted to ride by in innocent
drunkenness, unconscious of the death they had grazed. As for what dead
Cheyennes went over the cliff, certain coyotes and ravens, educated of a
prevailing plenty to haunt the spot, would in an hour remove the last
trace of their taking off. Full two hundred Cheyennes, the flower of
Bear Shield’s band, were sent to the happy hunting grounds, at the base
of the wooded knoll on Medicine Lodge Creek, before their wondering
relatives solved the puzzle of their disappearance. Once the gruesome
riddle was read, the Cheyennes as a nation painted for war. It was then
that Bear Shield drove North like a storm, leaving Sun City a memory,
and killing out the last injurious paleface for forty miles around.
That, however, is to one side of our narrative, which has to do with
Cimarron Bill, about to re-establish himself as a mounted and therefore
reputable member of society.
Mr. Masterson sought to dissuade Cimarron Bill from his enterprise. It
was not that he objected to the other’s vigorous scheme of gaining a
remount; he wasn’t so tenderly given towards Cheyennes as all that. The
government, in favor of appearances, might pretend to preserve the
Cheyenne; but Mr. Masterson knew that in reality no close season for
Cheyennes existed more than it did for gray wolves. But the wooded knoll
on Medicine Lodge Creek was distant; to go and come meant days; the
profit, one pony, was slight for so much effort and time and travel. Mr.
Masterson, in comparison with the investment, pointed out the meagre
sort of the reward. Also he offered to give Cimarron Bill a pony.
Mr. Masterson’s arguments availed nothing; Cimarron Bill was in that
temper of diligent virtue, common with folk who have just finished a
season of idleness and wicked revelry. He declined Mr. Masterson’s pony;
he would win a pony for himself.
“No se’f-respectin’ gent,” observed Cimarron Bill, “can accept gifts
from another gent. As you sow so shall you reap; havin’ recklessly lost
my pony, I must now win out another by froogality an’ honest industry.
Besides it ain’t jest the pony; thar’s the skelp—worth twenty-five
dollars, it is, at the Dodge Bank. That’s a bet you overlooks. With that
pony, an’ them twenty-five dollars for the skelp, I can begin life
anoo.”
“Then,” returned Mr. Masterson, disgustedly, “if you’re going to play
the fool, and waste five days and ride seventy-five miles and back to
get a thirty-dollar pony and a twenty-five-dollar scalp, I might as well
be a fool mate to you, and go along.”
“No, you stay here,” expostulated Cimarron Bill. “I might get downed; in
which event it’ll be for you to look after Aunt Nettie.”
Cimarron Bill, despite his restless ways and careless want of
forethought, always provided for Aunt Nettie. This was no work of
difficulty; Aunt Nettie’s needs were neither numerous nor expensive,
and, since a gentleman of the lively accuracy of Cimarron Bill could in
the season kill and cure for his share fifty dollars’ worth of buffalo
robes a day, they were readily overcome.
“One hundred shots,” Cimarron Bill was wont to say, “from my old
eight-squar’, an’ Aunt Nettie is fixed for one plumb year.”
Mr. Masterson was about to remonstrate against remaining in Dodge, but
Cimarron Bill interrupted.
“As a favor to me, Bat,” he said, “merely as a favor to me. I won’t be
gone a week; an’ I’ll feel easier thinkin’ you’re left to look after
Aunt Nettie in case of accidents. It’s inside o’ the possible, d’ye see,
for this B’ar Shield outfit to get me; an Injun, now an’ then, does win
a pot, you know.”
Mr. Masterson made over to the use of Cimarron Bill a chestnut broncho,
famous for bottom and bad habits. After he had cantered away, Mr.
Masterson reflected uneasily on Cimarron Bill’s anxiety over Aunt
Nettie, the same being out of common. Mr. Masterson thought this a
portent of bad luck. The notion made Mr. Masterson nervous; when
Cimarron Bill had been absent a fortnight and no news of him, the
nervousness grew into alarm.
“I wonder,” mused Mr. Masterson, gloomily, “if those Bear Shield
outcasts have bumped him off. He was that careless, Bill was, some such
turn might have been waiting in the deck for him any deal at all,” and
Mr. Masterson sighed.
Mr. Trask’s freight teams came sauntering into Dodge from Fort Elliot;
they might have cut the trail of the missing Cimarron Bill, and Mr.
Masterson sought the Trask mule-skinners for information. They had
freighted through Sun City, indeed their route ran by the wooded knoll
so fatal to Cheyennes; not one, however, had heard sound or beheld sign
of the vanished Cimarron Bill. At that, Mr. Masterson buckled on his
six-shooter, thrust his rifle into the scabbard that garnished his
saddle, and while the frost was on the short dry buffalo grass one
December morning, sped southward for news.
At Sun City, Mr. Stumps of the Palace Hotel bore testimony that Cimarron
Bill had passed one night at his caravansary, making merry, and departed
full of confidence and Old Jordan in the morning.
“But he didn’t pack no outside liquor with him,” observed the
experienced Mr. Stumps, who was capable of a deduction, “an’ what jag he
carried would have been worn plumb away long before ever he reached
Medicine Lodge Creek.”
Mr. Stumps averred that this was the last and all he knew of Cimarron
Bill.
Mr. Masterson might have gone thirty miles further and interviewed Bear
Shield himself. That befeathered chieftain, however, was a savage of
prudence and counsel, and no one to boast of paleface scalps, though a
thousand were drying in the lodges of his people. No, nothing could be
gathered from the Cheyennes themselves. It was less trouble, and quite
as sagacious, for Mr. Masterson to believe that Cimarron Bill had fallen
a Cheyenne sacrifice, and abandon investigation. Adjusting it,
therefore, in his own mind that Cimarron Bill had perished, Mr.
Masterson started for Dodge, cogitating vengeance.
Mr. Masterson, while sad, was not to be shocked by a thing so
commonplace as death, even though the one fallen had been his own
blanket-mate. And he blamed no one—neither Cimarron Bill nor the
Cheyenne who had taken his hair. Such events were as the certain
incidents of existence, and might be counted on in their coming.
Yesterday it had been the fate of Cimarron Bill; it might be his own
to-morrow. Meanwhile, by every Western rule, it was his instant business
to take a price from the Cheyennes, in scalps and ponies, for the lost
life.
And there was Aunt Nettie. Mr. Masterson recalled the final urgency of
Cimarron Bill’s exhortations to look after her in case he never
returned.
“And I surely will,” ruminated Mr. Masterson. “When he said that, Bill
must have felt, even if he couldn’t see, the cloud that hung over the
future.”
Mr. Masterson deemed it his duty to acquaint Aunt Nettie with the demise
of Cimarron Bill; at the terror of such a mission he shook in his
saddle. Slowly he rode up to the little three-room cottage where Aunt
Nettie made her home.
“Miss Dawson,” began Mr. Masterson, for while the lady was “Aunt Nettie”
in the conversation of Dodge, she was invariably “Miss Dawson” to her
face, “Miss Dawson, I’m afraid Bill’s dead.” Mr. Masterson faltered as
he spoke these words. “If I knew how,” he went on, “to break the
information soft, I’d do it; but such delicate plays are beyond my
reach. All I can do is ride in and say that in my judgment Bear Shield’s
outfit has downed him.”
“Oh!” retorted Aunt Nettie, retaining, with hand on hip, that attitude
of scorn which she had assumed as she listened to Mr. Masterson, “oh,
all you can do is ride in an’ say that in your jedgment”—the word came
off Aunt Nettie’s tongue most witheringly—“B’ar Shield’s outfit has
downed my Billy! Well then let me tell you this, Bat Masterson; thar
ain’t no Cheyenne ever painted his face who could corral my Billy. Thar,
_vamos_; I ain’t got no time to waste talkin’ to children in their
teens—which you ain’t seen twenty none as yet, Bat Masterson—who can’t
think of nothin’ better to do than come pesterin’ into camp with a
theery that them B’ar Shield felons has bushwhacked my Billy.”
“But, Miss Dawson,” urged Mr. Masterson, “what I wanted——”
“No matter what you wanted,” interrupted Aunt Nettie. “You get yourself
together an’ pull your freight! If, as you says, in your jedgment
Billy’s gone, what be you doin’ in Dodge, I’d like to ask? Why ain’t you
back on the Cimarron gatherin’ ha’r an’ ponies, an’ gettin’ even for
Billy? Thar, line out o’ here! While I’m throwin’ away time on you-all,
my bread’s burnin’. I can smell it plumb here.”
“Aunt Nettie,” thought Mr. Masterson, as he withdrew, “is goin’ to be a
difficult lady to take care of. It’s four for one, when I have to offer
her money, or try to hang up a hindquarter of buffalo in her kitchen,
she’ll chunk me up with stove-wood, or anything else that’s loose and
little, and handy at the time. However, it’ll have to be gone through
with; Cimarron Bill is dead, and his last word was for me to look out
for Aunt Nettie.”
As he swung into the saddle, following his visit to Aunt Nettie, a flush
of shame and anger, which even the terrors of that formidable spinster
could not suppress, showed through the bronze on Mr. Masterson’s face.
The taunt about being in Dodge when he ought to be over on the Cimarron,
harvesting a vengeance, had stirred him deeply. To have it intimated
that his courage was slow, and his friendship cool, wore sorely on the
soul of Mr. Masterson. It was the harder to bear when flung from the
tongue of a woman; for his hands were tied, and his mouth was closed
against resentment. “One thing,” thought Mr. Masterson, by way of
self-consolation, “the man never made a moccasin track in Dodge who
could have said as much and got away. Aunt Nettie’s right though; I
ought to be evening up for Billy right now.”
Time stood a week later, and along the shallow Cimarron—as in every
other region civilised or savage—it was Christmas night. The weather was
mild, the bare earth without frost, while on the slow wind creeping in
from the north there rode the moist odour of snow. The moon, old and on
the wane, was swinging low in the western sky, and what dim lights it
offered were made more dim by a constant drift of clouds across its
yellow face.
Scattered along the north bank of the Cimarron, a straggling mile or
more, stood the tepees of Bear Shield’s people. It was well beyond
midnight, and nothing vocal about the camp save the occasional short
yelp of a dog, made melancholy by the hour’s lonesomeness. Now and then
an ember of some dying fire burned for a fierce moment, and then blinked
out. Mr. Masterson, riding slowly down the opposite bank, and taking
shrewd care to keep deep within the shadow of the woods, counted
seventy-two lodges—a probable population of seven hundred and twenty,
for a plainsman’s census argues ten to a lodge.
Mr. Masterson had located the band of ponies, which made up the riches
of Bear Shield, late in the dull gray afternoon, while he lay hidden in
a dry arroyo. As it grew darker, he had crept nearer, keeping ever the
location of the ponies which, in a rambling, ragged herd, were grazing
up the wind. Mr. Masterson, on the south bank of the Cimarron, was
heedfully to leeward of the herd; a proper piece of caution, for an
Indian pony, at the earliest paleface taint to alarm the breeze, will
scream like a wronged panther.
Arriving at the place where he meant to ford the river and begin his
drive, Mr. Masterson halted for a cloud of unusual size and thickness to
blanket the blurred radiance of the dwindling moon. Such a cloud was on
its way; from where it hung curtain-wise on the horizon it should take
ten minutes before its eclipse of the interfering moon began.
While he waited Mr. Masterson removed his sombrero and fastened it back
of the cantle by a saddle-string. Also, he unstrapped his blanket and
wrapped it about his shoulders, for it was part of Mr. Masterson’s
strategy to play the Cheyenne for this raid. It was among the chances
that he would run across an Indian herder or meet with some belated
savage coming into camp. The latter was not likely, however, since the
last journey an Indian will make is a night journey. The night is sacred
to spirits, and he hesitates to violate it by being abroad; in the day
the spirits sleep.
While Mr. Masterson waited deep beneath the cottonwoods, a splash from
the river’s brink would now and again show where the bank was caving, or
the crackling of branches, and the profound flapping of great wings
overhead, mark how some wild turkey—a heavy old gobbler, probably—had
broken down a bough with sheer stress of fat, and was saving himself
from a fall. Far away could be heard the faltering cry of a coyote,
bewailing a jackrabbit which he had not caught.
That thick cloud, waited for, began to encroach on the moon, and Mr.
Masterson, his pony stepping as though walking on a world of eggs,
headed for the river. The place had been well considered; there was no
tall bank off which to plump, but instead a gradual sandy descent.
The pony walked into the water as silently as a ghost. The current
rippled and rose in petulant chuckles of protest about the pony’s legs;
but, since its deepest was no more than to the hocks, Mr. Masterson
honoured it with scant attention.
Among Bear Shield’s ponies was a giant mule, renegade and runaway from
some government train. This long-eared traitor remembered his days of
burden, and the thing to please him least was the sight or sound or
scent of a paleface. The paleface was the symbol of thralldom and sore
stripes, and the old bellsharp desired none of his company.
By stress of brain, which counts among mules as among men, the old
bellsharp had risen to the rank of herd leader, and the Bear Shield
ponies would drill and wheel and go charging off at his signal. As Mr.
Masterson and his pony scrambled up the bank a flaw in the wind befell,
and a horrifying whiff of the stealthy invader reached the old
bellsharp. Thereupon, he lifted up his voice in clangorous condemnation,
after the manner of his species. The harsh cry echoed up and down the
slumbrous Cimarron like an outcry of destruction.
With that cry for his cue, Mr. Masterson drove home the spurs and began
a rapid round-up of the startled ponies. At the warning call of the old
bellsharp, the herd members came rushing towards him. Placing himself at
their head, his “hee-haw” of alarm still ringing like a bugle, he bore
them away at a thunderous gallop for the tepees.
Hard at the hocks of the flying battalion came Mr. Masterson. The outfit
swept through Bear Shield’s village for its entire length, Mr. Masterson
lying low along his pony’s neck and letting his blanket flap in the wind
bravely, for purposes of deception. After the ponies, charged Mr.
Masterson; after Mr. Masterson, charged a riotous brigade of dogs; the
uproar might have been heard as far as Crooked Creek.
As the mad stampede swept on, ever and anon a pony more blind or more
clumsy than his fellows would bump into a lodge. At that, an indignant
Cheyenne would tear aside the lodge-flap, protrude his outraged head,
and curse the ponies aboriginally. Observing the blanketed Mr.
Masterson, the savage would go back to bed, gratefully taking him for
some public-spirited neighbour who was striving to return the ponies to
their grazing ground and inspire them with normal peace.
The flying ponies—the vociferous old bellsharp having fallen to the
rear, through lack of speed—wheeled against a thick clump of cottonwood,
and then broke north into the open. Their fever of fear was subsiding,
they were taking a more modest pace, and Mr. Masterson began turning in
the corners, and closing up the flanks, of the retreating band. He made
no effort to crowd or press, but gave them every encouragement to regain
their confidence, and moderate their flight. Presently the herd was
jogging comfortably; and because the wind was in their faces they were
furnished no disquieting notice of Mr. Masterson’s paleface identity
through the medium of their noses.
The ponies had traveled twenty minutes, and were cleverly bunched, when
Mr. Masterson made a discovery. Off to the right in the dull half-dark
he beheld a figure, blanketed, mounted, riding like the wind, and busy
with the stragglers as they pointed out of the herd. Like a flash, Mr.
Masterson whipped his rifle from its scabbard. Throwing the blanket
aside, to free his hands and arms, he fell a trifle to the rear, and
began edging towards the stranger.
From his riding, and because he seemed so willingly bent on sending the
ponies northward, Mr. Masterson felt assured that the stranger was a
white man. The expiring moon threw a last parallel ray along the surface
of the plains, and Mr. Masterson saw that the stranger’s pony was a
chestnut. Also it had the hard and bitter gait of Alazan, the bronco
wherewith he had equipped Cimarron Bill when that lost one issued south
from Dodge to his wiping out.
Mr. Masterson drew nearer; of a truth the jolty pony was Alazan! Who
then was the stranger? Could he, by some miracle of heaven, be Cimarron
Bill? Mr. Masterson gave a curlew’s whistle, which had been a signal
between him and Cimarron Bill. At the sound the stranger wheeled upon
him.
Mr. Masterson pulled up his pony; the sharp cluck! cluck! of the buffalo
gun clipped the night air as he cocked it, for Mr. Masterson was a
prudent man. The stranger, sitting fearlessly straight in his stirrups,
bore down upon him with speed. Mr. Masterson watched him with the
narrowed gaze of a lynx; as much as he might tell in the night, there
was no weapon in the stranger’s hands.
“Howdy, Bat!” cried the stranger, as he came up with a great rush. “I’ve
knowed you for an hour.”
Then Mr. Masterson let down the hammer of his Sharp’s, slammed it back
in its scabbard beneath his saddle-flap, and taking the stranger in a
bear-hug, fairly tore him from the saddle. The stranger was Cimarron
Bill; and in his youth Mr. Masterson was sentimental.
“Where have you been these weeks?” cried Mr. Masterson.
“I’ll tell you later,” returned Cimarron Bill. “We’d better clot up
these ponies an’ begin the drive, or they’ll get our wind an’ stampede
for B’ar Shield’s village.”
It was beginning to snow—great soft clinging flakes, and each like a wet
cold pinch of wool! The snow storm was both good and bad; it made it
difficult to handle the ponies, but it subtracted from the chances of
Bear Shield’s successful pursuit.
Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill, one on the right and one on the left
flank of the herd, riding to and fro like setter dogs quartering for
birds, drove on throughout a hard four hours. They broke eastward to
avoid Sun City; for it would have been impolite to bring those ponies
through hamlet or ranch, and so threaten it with Bear Shield’s anger.
With the first of dawn the tired riders, having brought the bunch into a
stretch of country choice for that purpose, halted to make an
inspection. The snow had ceased to fall, and the sun coming up gave them
light enough to tell good from evil as presented in the shape of ponies.
While Mr. Masterson held the herd, Cimarron Bill commenced cutting out
the spent and worthless ones. When the weeding was over, there remained
one hundred and thirty head, and the worst among them worth thirty
dollars in the Dodge corrals. Throwing the riff-raff loose, Mr.
Masterson and Cimarron Bill again took up their travels at a stiff road
gait. They were forty-five miles from Dodge; worn as they were, they
should still reach the Arkansas and Dodge by nightfall.
“And now,” quoth Mr. Masterson, when they were straightened away for the
north, “what have you been doing? Aunt Nettie was scared speechless. She
thought the Cheyennes had run their brand on you.”
Cimarron Bill’s adventures were laid open. Ten miles out from Sun City
he had crossed up with Red River Tom of the Bar-8-bar ranch. That
well-informed boy had told him of a dance to be given three nights away,
in the new camp-house of the B-in-a-Box outfit. “No common fandango,”
explained Cimarron Bill, “but the real thing, with people comin’ from as
far away as Tascosa an’ Fort Sill. Nacherrally, I decided to attend.
That Cheyenne I was after, an’ his pony, could wait; the dance
couldn’t.”
Cimarron Bill, continuing, told how he had cut across country for the
home ranch of the B-in-a-Box. He arrived in good time, that is to say
four hours prior to the fiddlers, which, as he expressed it, gave him
space wherein “to liquor up” and get in proper key for the festival
impending. While engaged upon these preliminaries he was shot in the leg
by a fellow-guest with whom he disagreed.
“You see,” explained Cimarron Bill, “this outlaw was a Texas ranger, an’
after about six drinks I started to tell him what I thought of a prairie
dog who would play policeman that a-way, for thirty dollars a month an’
furnish his own hoss. One word leads to another an’ the last one to the
guns, an’ the next news is I get plugged in the off hind laig. I
wouldn’t have cared so much,” concluded Cimarron Bill, in mournful
meditation over his mishap, “only he shot me before the first dance.”
Cimarron Bill had been laid up in the new camp-house of the hospitable
B-in-a-Box. Being able to mount and ride away, three days before Mr.
Masterson encountered him, he had deemed it expedient to make a driving
raid on Bear Shield’s village on his journey home, and carry off a
handful of ponies. Thus, by a coincidence of pony-raiding impulse, the
two had been restored to one another.
“For you see,” said Cimarron Bill, “I was still shy a hoss, the same as
when I started out of Dodge.”
“All the same,” observed Mr. Masterson, severely, “you ought to have
sent word to Aunt Nettie.”
“Send Aunt Nettie word!” exclaimed Cimarron Bill. “I wasn’t that locoed!
Aunt Nettie would have been down on me like a fallin’ star! Shore! she’d
have deescended on that B-in-a-Box outfit like a mink on a settin’ hen!
I saveyed a heap better than to send Aunt Nettie word.”
Vast was the joy of Dodge as Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill rode in
with those Bear Shield ponies; prodigious was the trade-hubbub when,
over at Mr. Trask’s corrals—Mr. Wright officiating as auctioneer—one by
one the herd was struck down to the highest bidder. Under the double
stimulation of the holidays and the ponies, commerce received a boom,
the like of which had not before been known in the trade annals of
Dodge. In proof whereof, not alone Mr. Short at the Long Branch but Mr.
Kelly at the Alhambra declared that never since either of them last saw
the Missouri, had so much money been changed in at roulette and farobank
in any similar space of time. Mr. Wright of the outfitting store
confirmed these tales of commercial gorgeousness, and Mr. Masterson and
Cimarron Bill were greeted and treated as public benefactors. Meanwhile,
far away on the ravished Cimarron, Bear Shield was making wrathful
medicine, and dancing the dances and singing the songs of him who has
been robbed.
“Thar, you Bat Masterson!” exclaimed Aunt Nettie, as she heaped high the
banquet board before him and her prodigal nephew. “Which it goes to show
how feeble-witted you be. Yere you comes ghost-dancin’ ’round with a
yarn about my Billy bein’ killed an’ skelped! I told you then, what you
now have the livin’ sense to see, I hope, that thar was never the
Cheyenne painted his face who could down my Billy, B’ar Shield himse’f
not barred.”