THE FATE OF ONE-EYED ED.
From the cross-tree of a telegraph pole hung the body of a man when the
9:30 Union Pacific Overland Express stopped for a "slow" order across a
bridge that a band of Comanche Indians had tried to burn.
A Massachusetts woman enroute to 'Frisco stuck her head out of a car
window and exclaimed, "How awfully terrible!"
Yes, it was.
Ed Preston was a one-eyed man. I don't know how he lost the other one,
but I do know that he was a dead shot with the one eye that he slanted
along the barrel of his pistol or buffalo rifle, the latter a sawed-off
Springfield and the first mentioned an old-time army Remington.
Preston's marksmanship cost him his life. They hung Preston, the boys
did, because he killed a man just for the meanness of it, or, as one of
them said, because he was spoiling for trouble.
One day as we were camped on the north bank of the North Platte near the
eastern line of Wyoming, Preston, full of liquor, lurched up to a bunch
of bullwhackers and asked if anyone present thought he was a "dead
shot." Of course, all hands admitted that his reputation was
unquestioned.
"But you never saw me shoot," he said, "so what the ---- do you know
about it?" Then he pulled his gun and backed off, saying, as he pointed
to a heap of discarded tomato cans:
"Hey, you Charley, heave one o' them cans in the air--hurry up."
Observing his apparent quarrelsome attitude, Charley Snow, a youthful
member of the outfit, obeyed without protest. Snow had been assigned by
Martin, the wagon-boss, to help the cook and the cook had made him
responsible for the proper boiling of a pot of beans. Snow left the
beans and threw a can as far away from himself as he could, and before
it hit the ground it was perforated by a bullet.
"Now throw one straight up in the air," commanded Preston, and Snow
obeyed. Preston put two shots into that "on the wing." Snow attempted to
resume his duties at the mess fire, but Preston's shooting had drawn a
dozen or more of the men of the outfit to the scene, and he was in the
humor to show off; therefore as Snow was the youngest and possibly the
most inoffensive man in the party, Preston decided to eliminate the bean
question by ordering Snow, with a flourish of his gun, to remove the
beans from the fire. This done, he continued:
"Now you throw the cans and be lively about it."
Snow did as ordered. One, two, three, ten cans went into the air.
Preston missed none. Finally the boy threw, at Preston's command, two at
a time and both were plugged before they came down. Then as Snow picked
up another one Preston shot it out of his hand, and he tried to quit and
return to the bean kettle, whereupon Preston bored a hole through Snow's
sombrero without cutting off a hair or bruising his scalp, although it
was plain to see that while Snow was no fresh tenderfoot from the effete
East, but a seasoned young bullwhacker and plainsman, he was more than
uneasy. The boy said afterward that while he had a whole lot of
confidence in Preston's marksmanship he knew he had drunk at least a
pint of whisky--the worst of the squirrel variety at that--for had he
not taken the last swig out of a flask, thrown it almost at Snow and
sent its splinters in every direction by a shot from his Remington?
Sober, said Snow, Preston would not have been so bad, but drunk--he
objected to further participation in the William Tell business and he
entered his protest. When he discovered that the chambers of Preston's
revolver were temporarily empty, Snow quietly took a rifle from its
leather fastenings on the side of a prairie schooner. His move looked
ominous to his tormentor.
Preston was a coward, as were all of that class of killers in those
days. He was an engineer of a bull team of seven yokes and a good man at
his business, but a bully, a braggart and a coward, whose victims
usually were known to be peaceful and who were unarmed or unprepared to
defend themselves. He was not the heroic figure of the almost forgotten
wild west--the brave and big-hearted fellow who fought sometimes for his
rights or what he considered his rights. Preston was just a plain
murderer, who had taken a place among rough but honest frontiersmen,
chased from an orderly community somewhere in God's country--then east
of the Missouri, now anywhere from the Atlantic to the Pacific--because
of some dark crime he had committed, no doubt.
All day long we had been fording the North Platte at this point--Sidney
crossing--a distance of at least a half a mile, including a small island
of sand and a few bushes. It was the last trainload of provisions for
the season we were taking north to the government's beneficiaries--the
Ogalala Sioux and the Cheyennes. We had seventy teams, each of seven
yokes, and two wagons, and as the Platte is a swift-running stream at
this point and there is quicksand between the south shore and the
island, it was necessary to "jack up" on blocks some of our loads on the
wagons and double and treble teams, sometimes using as many as
twenty-five yokes of oxen on one wagon and a half dozen men, belly deep
in the mush ice, punching the bulls. The water was in places up to the
tops of the wheels. It was a sun-up to sun-down job from corral to
corral.
Someone had whisky, but it was not apparent until late in the afternoon,
when the target shooting incidents began. The boys were a sober lot--the
good, honest kind, and not a desperado among them, barring One-Eyed Ed.
Others there were, sure enough, who might be considered hardly fit for
even the most humble society, for they looked like pirates--all of
them--hair long, clothes weather-beaten and rough, faces unshaven and
grizzled, and language or topics of conversation not what would be
called cultured by any means. Yet there was in this outfit a
predominance of good, honest hearts, most of them measuring life from a
standard never understood if ever known in "God's Country." These
sailors of prairie schooners, these pioneer transportation men of the
virile, virgin West, knew little law or order or justice, as we know
them; they frequently violated what is known as the law, but they didn't
know it. They had but one degree of murder. It wasn't murder for them to
fight and kill with pistols. It was the custom. Murder was something
else. It was to kill a man who was not "heeled" or when his back was
turned, or to mount another man's horse and ride away. This was murder
in the first degree--the same as if the owner of the horse had been shot
to death while asleep. In those days some things were as necessary, as
indispensable as life--a horse, a saddle, a pair of blankets, a gun and
ammunition and a butcher knife--perhaps a small bag of salt. The last,
however, would be termed a luxury, although nearly every man in those
days had a little salt stored away in a weather-proof pocket or saddle
bag for the sage hen, antelope, deer, or buffalo beef he might have for
dinner or breakfast.
But let me tell you how Preston spent the rest of his day. It was early
in the afternoon when he perforated Snow's sombrero, but it was sun-down
when he shot and killed Tom Sash, the boss herder, a splendid Texan, who
had charge of an Indian contract beef herd which had come up the trail
from the Lone Star state to the Platte Valley guided by a half dozen
range men in charge of Sash, and were being grazed along the Platte
bottoms previous to being doled out as per agreement with Uncle Sam to
the clouted redskins at the White River Agency at Red Cloud.
All during the previous summer, as the wagon trains passed to and from
Sidney and the northern forts and agencies, Sash had told the wagon
bosses not to go hungry for lack of veal. "We are anxious to fatten
these cattle," he would say, "and you are welcome to a calf or two any
time you want it." Sash was all right and the bullwhackers couldn't sing
his praises loud enough.
It was at the close of Snow's engagement with Preston that the wagon
boss told Preston to try his hand on some Indian veal. So Preston
disappeared down the river, returning at suppertime with the admission
that he had not only veal but "yearling steak." And he had some of it
with him.
The beans had been boiled and eaten, the tin dishes and cups, pots and
kettles and iron ovens dumped into the mess wagon, and two crews of men
were at work jacking up wagons and greasing axle skeins, when the space
at the north mouth of the corral was suddenly filled by as fine a
horseman as ever galloped over the plains. It was Sash, dressed in the
costume of the real cowboy of the long-horn cattle day--sombrero, chaps,
Rowell spurs, a Mexican lariat properly adjusted over the horn of his
elaborate double-cinched cutting-out saddle--everything was perfection.
He was astride a fine big black American horse--not a regulation cow
pony--a shiny, deep bay charger with a white left ankle half way to the
knee from the fetlock, and a spot of white the size of a hand on the
face.
He came on a gallop and stopped so short at the corral mouth that, had
he not known his business, he would have been thrown over the chains.
But that was the style of riding. Plunge ahead to the object or point
desired--then stop short. He waved his hat to Martin, our wagon boss, to
come to the corral chains.
"Someone from your outfit," shouted Sash, "has been out in one of our
herds and shot a half dozen yearlings and two three-year-old steers.
Aren't you satisfied with veal? Say, old man, who did this mean trick?"
The acts of a coward are preceded by a queer train of thought, the
kingpin of which is fear. Preston knew his disreputable work of
butchering among the herd of cattle had been discovered. He knew that
Sash, a Texan, was a man of action, and that Sash was fortified with the
right on his side, and if justice were meted out it would be some kind
of punishment. The revolver in his holster was close to his hand and
fear--cowardly fear--overpowered his weak mind.
Martin had no time to reply, and the first indication that the coward
was to act upon the impulse that would move him was the cry from a
bullwhacker:
"Don't shoot--don't."
Sash, who was looking straight over his horse's head, turned at hearing
this just in time to receive a bullet in the hollow spot under his left
ear. It passed clean through his head. Both arms flew into the air, his
horse sprang forward, and Sash laid upon the ground flat on his back,
with arms spread out from his body--dead. His face was ashen white, eyes
and mouth closed, both fists clinched.
It was young Snow who tied the black charger to a wagon wheel, replacing
the bridle with a halter. The horse whinnied, pawed the dirt, and for a
time spun around as far as the halter strap would allow, and looked at
his prostrate master with what seemed to be almost human intelligence;
in fact, his body was soon in a white lather, necessitating a rub-down
and then a blanket. He trembled like a leaf and snorted and pawed the
earth for an hour.
Sash's camp was on the south bank of the Platte. There Preston was
delivered by Wagon Boss Martin and a delegation of the bull outfit
fellows after he had tried to escape.
That night, together with a negro boy, Snow stood guard over Sash's body
to protect it from the coyotes, for they were numerous, close at hand
and howled mournfully until break of day.
None touched the body, as it had been determined to follow what was
believed to be the law, for this time the outfit was only fifty miles
from where at least a pretense of regularity was observed.
A rider was dispatched to Sidney, then a scattered lot of board shanties
on the south side of the Union Pacific Railroad track.
The second night there came to the bullwhacker camp two men in a light
road wagon. They took the body away.
At the same time a dozen bullwhackers and nearly all the men from the
cow camp rode away to the south. Preston, silent as the Sphynx, sat
astride a horse, his hands tied behind him. They told him he was going
to Sidnev to have a trial. He smiled, but said nothing. It was just an
effort to appear brave. His life had been one of crime. He was a pest
of the plains, of the trails, of the camps--and he was on the way to the
end of a rope. He knew it, and did not plead for mercy or ask for
quarter; he did not in the long ride across the sand hills utter a word
of regret for what he had done. He was heartless, cruel, brutal, even in
the valley of the shadow. And he was silent even as death itself. He
showed no fear as we would describe fear.
Entering Sidney the posse and the prisoner took the center one of three
coulees that ran down into the town, all three meeting at the level. It
was here that One-Eyed Ed met the court that was to try him, together
with the populace. The court consisted of fifty horsemen, half of whom
rode down the east coulee, the other half down the other, meeting the
prisoner and his escort as abruptly as one meets a person sometimes in
whirling around the corner of a city block.
One long yi, yi, yi, yi, ye! was the "hear ye" of the plainsman court
crier--the signal understood by all the horsemen, and especially those
comprising the posse just emerging from the center coulee. As if by
magic the escort faded away and the prisoner, bareheaded, long hair
waving in the wind, his hands securely tied, sat upright--alone.
Then from the east and west coulees dashed horsemen led by Jim Redding
swinging his lariat over and over and over his head until he was in the
right spot to spin it out. Preston's horse stood like a piece of
statuary, and to give the man on his back his proper meed of credit let
it be recorded that he had the appearance of a man bravely facing death,
for he sat erect and made no effort to dismount, which he might have
done, for he had not been fastened to the saddle, as that would have
made impossible the program mapped out to the minutest detail.
When Redding spun his lariat for Preston's head--after he had ridden
past him two or three times while the horsemen lined up like a company
of cavalry and looked on--it landed around his shoulders. Redding
planted a spur into his cow pony, there was a jump and Preston's body
shot up and away from his mount and to the ground.
[Illustration: Copyright by American Colortype Co., Chicago
Track-Layers Fought Redskins--Chapter VIII.]