THE TRAIL OF THE COFFEE
"You done right to come to the mission after me, for I'd ride to the
gatepost of hell to turn a trick agin Saul Chadron!"
Banjo's voice had a quaver of earnestness in it that needed no
daylight to enforce. The pitchy night made a bobbing blur of him as he
rode his quick-stepping little horse at Frances Landcraft's side.
"Yes, you owe him one," Frances admitted.
"And I'll pay him before mornin' or it won't be no fault of mine. That
there little ten-cent-size major he'd 'a' stopped you if he'd 'a'
known you was goin', don't you suppose?"
"I'm sure he would have, Mr. Gibson."
"Which?" said Banjo.
"Banjo," she corrected.
"Now, that sounds more comfortabler," he told her. "I didn't know for
a minute who you meant, that name's gittin' to be a stranger to me."
"Well, we don't want a stranger along tonight," said she, seriously.
"You're right, we don't. That there horse you're ridin' he's a good
one, as good as any in the cavalry, even if he ain't as tall. He was
an outlaw till Missus Mathews tamed him down."
"How did she do it--not break him like a bronco-buster?"
"No, she done it like she tames Injuns and other folks, by gentle
words and gentler hands. Some they'll tell you she's sunk down to the
ways of Injuns, clean out of a white man's sight in the dirt and
doin's of them dead-horse eatin' 'Rapahoes. But I know she ain't. She
lets herself down on a level to reach 'em, and git her hands under 'em
so she can lift 'em up, the same as she puts herself on my level when
she wants to reach me, or your level, or anybody's level, mom."
"Her eyes and her soft ways tell you that, Banjo, as plain as any
words."
"She's done ten times as much as that big-backed buffalo of a preacher
she's married to ever done for his own people, or ever will. He's clim
above 'em with his educated ways; the Injun's ironed out of that man.
You can't reach down and help anybody up, mom, if you go along through
this here world on stilts."
"Not very well, Banjo."
"You need both of your hands to hold your stilts, mom; you ain't got
even a finger to spare for a low-down feller like me."
"You're not a low-down fellow, Banjo. Don't be calling yourself
names."
"I was low-down enough to believe what they told me about Macdonald
shootin' up Chance Dalton. I believed it till Missus Mathews give me
the straight of it. One of them Injun police fellers told her how that
job was put up, and how it failed to work."
"A man named Lassiter told me about it."
They rode along in silence a long time after that. Then Banjo--
"Well, I hope we don't bust out onto them cavalry fellers too sudden
and meet a flock of bullets. I'd never forgive the man that put a
bullet through my fiddle."
"We'll go slowly, and keep listening; I can tell cavalry from cowboys
as far as I can hear."
"I bet a purty you can, brought up with 'em like you was."
"They'll not be able to do anything before daylight, and when we
overtake them we'll ride around and get ahead while they're waiting
for morning. I don't know where the homesteaders are, but they'll be
sending out scouts to locate them, and we can watch."
They were following the road that the cavalry had taken an hour in
advance of them. Listening now, they rode on without words. Now and
then a bush at the roadside flipped a stirrup, now and again Banjo's
little horse snorted in short impatience, as if expressing its
disapproval of this journey through the dark. Night was assertive in
its heaviness, but communicative of its mysteries in its wild
scents--the silent music of its hour.
There are those who, on walking in the night, can tell the hour by the
smell, the taste, the elusive fine aroma of the quiet air. Before
midnight it is like a new-lit censer; in the small hours the smell of
old camp fires comes trailing, and the scent of rain upon embers.
But Frances Landcraft was not afraid of the night as she rode silently
through it with Banjo Gibson at her side. There was no shudder in it
for her as there had been on the night that Nola was stolen; it could
not have raised up a terror grim enough to turn her back upon the
road.
Her one thought was that she must reach Macdonald before Chadron and
King could find him, and tell him that the troops were coming, and
that he was to be trapped into firing upon them. She knew that many
lives depended upon her endurance, courage, and strategy; many lives,
but most of all Alan Macdonald's life. He must be warned, at the cost
of her own safety, her own life, if necessary.
To that end the troops must be followed, and a desperate dash at
daylight must be made into Macdonald's camp. Perhaps it would be a
race with the cavalry at the last moment.
Banjo said it was beginning to feel like morning. An hour past they
had crossed the river at the ford near Macdonald's place, and the
foothills stood rough and black against the starry horizon. They were
near them now, so near that the deeper darkness of their timbered
sides fell over them like a cold shadow.
Suddenly she checked Banjo with a sharp word.
"I heard them!" she whispered.
Banjo's little horse, eager for the fellowship of its kind as his
master was for his own in his way, threw up its head and whinnied.
Banjo churned it with his heels, slapped it on the side of the head,
and shut off the shrill call in a grunt, but the signal had gone
abroad. From the blackness ahead it was answered, and the slow wind
prowling down from the hills ahead of dawn carried the scent of
cigarettes to them as they waited breathlessly for results.
"They're dismounted, and waiting for daylight," she said. "We must
ride around them."
They were leaving the road, the low brush rasping harshly on their
stirrups--as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances--when a dash
of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate.
Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to
know what they should do.
"Keep that little fool horse still!" she said.
Now the patrol, which had stopped to hail, was coming on again.
Banjo's horse was not to be sequestered, nor his craving for
companionship in that lonesome night suppressed. He lifted his shrill
nicker again, and a shot from the outriders of cavalry was the
answer.
"Answer them, tell them who you are Banjo--they all know you--and I'll
slip away. Good-bye, and thank you for your brave help!"
"I'll go with you, they'll hear one as much as they'll hear two."
"No, no, you can help me much better by doing as I tell you. Tell them
that a led horse got away from you, and that's the noise of it running
away."
She waited for no more words, for the patrol was very near, and now
and then one of them fired as he rode. Banjo yelled to them.
"Say, you fellers! Stop that fool shootin' around here, I tell you!"
"Who are you?" came the answer.
"Banjo, you darned fool! And I tell you right now, pardner, the first
man that busts my fiddle with a bullet'll have to mix with me!"
The soldiers came up laughing, and heard Banjo's explanation of the
horse, still dimly heard, galloping off. Frances stopped to listen.
Presently she heard them coming on again, evidently not entirely
satisfied with Banjo's story. But the parley with him had delayed
them; she had a good lead now.
In a little swale, where the greasewood reached above her head, she
stopped again to listen. She heard the troopers beating the bushes
away off to one side, and knew that they soon would give it up. When
they passed out of her hearing, she rode on, slowly, and with
caution.
She was frontiersman enough to keep her direction by the north
star--Colonel Landcraft had seen to that particular of her education
himself--but Polaris would not tell her which way to go to find Alan
Macdonald and his dusty men standing their vigil over their cooped-up
enemies. Nothing but luck, she knew, could lead her there, for she was
in a sea of sage-brush, with the black river valley behind her, the
blacker hills ahead, and never a mark of a trail to follow anywhere.
She had rounded the cavalry troop and left it far behind; the silence
which immersed the sleeping land told her this. No hoof but her own
mount's beat the earth within sound, no foot but hers strained
saddle-leather within reach of her now, she believed.
There was only one thing to do; ride slowly in the direction that she
had been holding with Banjo, and keep eyes, ears, and nose all on the
watch. The ways of the range were early; if there was anybody within a
mile of her to windward she would smell the smoke of his fire when he
lit it, and see the wink of it, too, unless he built it low.
But it was neither the scent of fire nor the red eye of it winking on
the hill that at length gave her despairing heart a fresh handful of
hope--nothing less indeed than the aroma of boiling coffee. It had
such a feeling of comfort and welcome, of domesticity and peace in it
that she felt as if she approached a door with a friend standing ready
to take her horse.
Her horse was not insensible to the cheer that somebody was brewing
for himself in that wild place. She felt him quicken under her, and
put up his head eagerly, and go forward as if he was nearing home. She
wondered how far the smell of coffee would carry, and subsequent
experience was a revelation on that point.
She had entered the hills, tracking back that wavering scent of
coffee, which rose fresh and sudden now, and trailed away the next
moment to the mere color of a smell. Now she had it, now she lost it,
as she wound over rugged ridges and through groves of quaking-asp and
balm of Gilead trees, always mounting among the hills, her eager horse
taking the way without guidance, as keen on the scent as she.
It must have taken her an hour to run down that coffee pot. Morning
was coming among the fading stars when she mounted a long ridge, the
quick striding of her horse indicating that there was something ahead
at last, and came upon the camp fire, the coffee, and the cook, all
beside a splintered gray rock that rose as high as a house out of the
barrenness of the hill.
The coffee-maker was a woman, and her pot was of several gallons'
capacity. She was standing with the cover of the boiler in one hand, a
great spoon in the other, her back half bent over her beverage, in the
position that the sound of Frances' coming had struck her. She did not
move out of that alert pose of suspicion until Frances drew rein
within a few feet of her and gave her good-morning. When the poor
harried creature saw that the visitor was a woman, her fright gave
place to wonder.
Frances introduced herself without parley, and made inquiry for
Macdonald.
"Why, bless your heart, you don't aim to tell me you rode all the way
from the post in the night by yourself?" the simple, friendly creature
said. "Well, Mr. Macdonald and most of the men they've left to take
them scoun'rels sent in here by the cattlemen to murder all of us over
to the jail at Meander."
"How long have they been gone?"
"Why, not so very long. I reckon you must 'a' missed meetin' 'em by a
hair."
"I've got to catch up with them, right away! Is there anybody here
that can guide me?"
"My son can, and he'll be glad. He's just went to sleep back there in
the tent after guardin' them fellers all night. I'll roust him out."
The pioneer woman came back almost at once, and pressed a cup of her
coffee upon Frances. Frances took the tin vessel eagerly, for she was
chilled from her long ride. Then she dismounted to rest her horse
while her guide was getting ready, and warm her numb feet at the fire.
She told the woman how the scent of her coffee had led her out of her
groping like a beacon light on the hill.
"It's about three miles from here down to the valley," the woman said.
"Coffee will carry on the mornin' air that way."
"Do you think your son--?"
"He's a-comin'," the woman replied.
The boy came around the rock, leading a horse. He was wide awake and
alert, bare-footed, bareheaded, and without a coat. He leaped nimbly
onto his bare-backed beast, and Frances got into her saddle as fast as
her numb limbs would lift her.
As she road away after the recklessly riding youth, she felt the hope
that she had warmed in her bosom all night paling to a shadow. It
seemed that, circumstances were ranging after a chart marked out for
them, and that her own earnest effort to interfere could not turn
aside the tragedy set for the gray valley below her.
Morning was broadening now; she could see her guide distinctly even
when he rode many rods ahead. Dawn was the hour for treacherous men
and deeds of stealth; Chadron would be on the way again before now,
with the strength of the United States behind him to uphold his
outlawed hand.
When they came down into the valley there was a low-spreading mist
over the gray sage, which lent a warmth to the raw morning wind. There
was a sense of indistinctness through the mist which was an ally to
Chadron. Ten rods away, even in the growing morning, it would have
been impossible to tell a cowboy from a cavalryman.
Here a haystack smoldered in what had been a farmstead yard; its thin
blue smoke wavered up in the morning, incense over the dead hope of
the humble heart that had dreamed it had found a refuge in that spot.
At the roadside a little farther on the burned ruins of a cabin lay.
It had stood so near the wheel track that the heat of its embers was
warm on Frances' face as she galloped by. The wire fence was cut
between each post, beyond splicing or repair; the shrubs which some
home-hungry woman had set in her dooryard were trampled; the well curb
was overthrown.
Over and over again as they rode that sad picture was repeated.
Destruction had swept the country, war had visited it. Side by side
upon the adjoining lines many of the homesteaders had built their
little houses, for the comfort of being near their kind. In the corner
of each quarter section on either side of the road along the fertile
valley, a little home had stood three days ago. Now all were gone,
marked only by little heaps of embers which twinkled a dying glow in
the breath of the morning wind.
Day was spreading now. From the little swells in the land as she
mounted them Frances could see the deeper mist hovering in the low
places, the tops of tall shrubs and slender quaking-asp showing above
it as if they stood in snow. The band of sunrise was broadening across
the east; far down near the horizon a little slip of lemon-rind moon
was faltering out of sight.
But there was no sight, no sound, of anybody in the road ahead. She
spurred up beside her guide and asked him if there was any other way
that they might have taken. No, he said; they would have to go that
way, for there was only one fordable place in the river for many
miles. He pointed to the road, fresh-turned by many hoofs, and clamped
his lean thighs to his bare horse, galloping on.
"We'll take a cut acrosst here, and maybe head 'em off," he said,
dashing away through the stirrup-high sage, striking close to the
hills again, and into rougher going.
The ache of the most intense anxiety that she ever had borne was upon
Frances; hope was only a shred in her hand. She believed now that all
her desperate riding must come to nothing in the end.
She never had been that long in the saddle before in her life. Her
body was numb with cold and fatigue; she felt the motion of her horse,
heard its pounding feet in regular beat as it held to its long,
swinging gallop, but with the detached sense of being no party to it.
All that was sharp in her was the pain of her lost struggle. For she
expected every moment to hear firing, and to come upon confusion and
death at the next lift of the hill.
In their short cut across the country they had mounted the top of a
long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger.
Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on
stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale.
"You'd better go back--there's goin' to be a fight!" he said, a look
of shocked concern in his big wild eyes.
"Do you see them? Where--"
"There they are!"--he clutched her arm, leaning and pointing--"and
there's a bunch of fellers comin' to meet 'em that they don't see! I
tell you there's goin' to be a fight!"