THE VANISHING ACT, AND THE FRUITS THEREOF.
Being aware that it was near the time Goodell had named for starting, I
returned to the stables, and, getting my horse, rode to the commissary.
There I found Goodell engineering the final preparations. Four men,
besides myself, made up the party: the sergeant, Hicks the
hairy-wristed, another private, and a half-breed scout. They were
lashing an allowance of food and blankets on a pack-horse, and two other
horses with bare _aparejos_ on their backs were tied to the horn of the
breed's saddle--for what purpose I could easily guess.
While I sat on my _caballo_ waiting for them to tie the last hitch a
rattle of wheels and the thud of hoofs drew near, and presently a blue
wagon, drawn by four big mules and flanked by half a dozen Mounted
Policemen, passed by the commissary building. The little cavalcade
struck a swinging trot as it cleared the barracks, swung down into the
bed of Battle Creek, up the farther bank, and away to the west. And a
little later we, too, left the post, following in the dusty wake of the
paymaster's wagon and its mounted escort.
For ten or twelve miles we kept to the MacLeod trail at an easy pace,
never more than a mile behind the "transient treasury," as Goodell
facetiously termed it. He was a pretty bright sort, that same Goodell,
quick-witted, nimble of tongue above the average Englishman. I don't
know that he was English; for that matter, none of the three carried the
stamp of his nationality on his face or in his speech. They were men of
white blood, but they might have been English, Irish, Scotch or Dutch
for all I could tell to the contrary. But each of them was broke to the
frontier; that showed in the way they sat their horses, the way they
bore themselves toward one another when clear of the post and its
atmosphere of rigidly enforced discipline. The breed I didn't take much
notice of at the time, except that when he spoke, which was seldom, he
was given to using better language than lots of white men I have known.
At a point where the trail seemed to bear north a few degrees, Goodell
angled away from the beaten track and headed straight across country for
Pend d' Oreille. At noon we camped, and cooked a bite of dinner while
the horses grazed; ate it, and went on again.
About three o'clock, as nearly as I could tell, we dipped into a wooded
creek bottom some two hundred yards in width. The creek itself went
brawling along in a deep-worn channel, and when my horse got knee deep
in the water he promptly stopped and plunged his muzzle into the stream.
I gave him slack rein, and let him drink his fill. The others kept on,
climbed the short, steep bank, and passed from sight over its rim. I
swung down from my horse on the brink of the creek, cinched the saddle
afresh, and rolled a cigarette. If I thought about them getting the
start of me at all, it was to reflect that they couldn't get a lead of
more than two or three hundred yards, at the gait they traveled. Judge
then of my surprise when I rode up out of the water-washed gully and
found them nowhere in sight. I pulled up and glanced about, but the
clumps of scrubby timber were just plentiful enough to cut off a clear
view of the flat. So I fell back on the simple methods of the plainsman
and Indian and jogged along on their trail.
Not for many days did I learn truly how I came to miss them, how and why
they had vanished from the face of the earth so completely in the few
minutes I lingered in the gulch. The print of steel-rimmed hoofs showed
in the soft loam as plainly as a moccasin-track in virgin snow. Around a
grove of quaking-aspens, eternally shivering in the deadest of calms,
their trail led through the long grass that carpeted the bottom, and
suddenly ended in a strip of gravelly land that ran out from the bed of
the creek. I could follow it no farther. If there was other mark of
their passing, it was hidden from me.
Wondering, and a bit exasperated, I spurred straight up the bank, and
when I had reached the high benchland loped to a point that overlooked
the little valley a full mile up and down. Cottonwood and willow,
cut-bank and crooning water, lay green and brown and silver-white
before, but no riders, no thing that moved in the shape of men came
within the scope of my eyes. But I wasn't done yet. I turned away from
the bank and raced up a long slope to a saw-backed ridge that promised
largely of unobstructed view. Dirty gray lather stood out in spumy rolls
around the edge of the saddle-blanket, and the wet flanks of my horse
heaved like the shoulders of a sobbing woman when I checked him on top
of a bald sandstone peak--and though as much of the Northwest as one
man's eye may hope to cover lay bared on every hand, yet the quartet
that rode with me from Fort Walsh occupied no part of the landscape. I
could look away to the horizon in every direction, and, except for one
little herd of buffalo feeding peacefully on the westward slant of the
ridge, I could see nothing but rolling prairie, a vast undulating spread
of grassland threaded here and there with darker lines that stood for
creeks and coulées, and off to the north the blue bulk of the Cypress
Hills.
I got off and sat me down upon a rock, rolled another cigarette, and
waited. The way to Pend d' Oreille led over the ridge, a half mile on
either side of me, as the spirit moved a traveler who followed an
approximately straight line. Whatever road they had taken, they could
not be more than three or four miles from that sentinel peak--for there
is a well-defined limit to the distance a mounted man may cover in a
given length of time. And from my roost I could note the passing of
anything bigger than a buffalo yearling, within a radius of at least six
miles. Therefore, I smoked my cigarette without misgiving, and kept
close watch for bobbing black dots against the far-flung green.
I might as well have laid down and gone to sleep on that pinnacle for
all the good my waiting and eye-straining did me. One hour slipped by
and then another, and still I did not abandon hope of their appearance.
Naturally, I argued with myself, they would turn back when I failed to
overtake them--especially if they had thoughtlessly followed some
depression in the prairie where I could not easily see them. And while I
lingered, loath to believe that they were hammering unconcernedly on
their way, the sun slid down its path in the western sky--slid down till
its lower edge rested on the rim of the world and long black shadows
began to creep mysteriously out of the low places, while buttes and
ridges gleamed with cloth of gold, the benediction of a dying day. Only
then did I own that by hook or by crook--and mostly by crook, I was
forced to suspect--they had purposely given me the slip.
A seasoned cowpuncher hates to admit that any man, or bunch of men, can
take him out into an open country and shake him off whenever it is
desired; but if I had been a rank tenderfoot they couldn't have jarred
me loose with greater ease. It was smooth work, and I couldn't guess the
object, unless it was a Mounted Policeman's idea of an excellent
practical joke on a supposedly capable citizen from over the line.
Anyway, they had left me holding the sack in a mighty poor snipe
country. Dark was close at hand, and I was a long way from shelter. So
when the creeping shadows blanketed pinnacle and lowland alike, and all
that remained of the sun was the flamboyant crimson-yellow on the
gathering clouds, I was astride of my dun _caballo_ and heading for Pend
d' Oreille.
But speedily another unforeseen complication arose. Before I'd gone five
miles the hoodoo that had been working overtime on my behalf got busy
again. The clouds that were rolling up from the east at sundown piled
thick and black overhead, and when dark was fairly upon me I was, for
all practical purposes, like a blind man in an unfamiliar room. It
didn't take me long to comprehend that I was merely wasting the strength
of my horse in bootless wandering; with moonlight I could have made it,
but in that murk I could not hope to find the post. So I had no choice
but to make camp in the first coulée that offered, and an exceeding lean
camp I found it--no grub, no fire, no rest, for though I hobbled my
horse I didn't dare let his rope out of my hands.
About midnight the combination of sultry heat and banked clouds produced
the usual results. Lightning first, lightning that ripped the sky open
from top to bottom in great blazing slits, and thunder that cracked and
boomed and rumbled in sharps and flats and naturals till a man could
scarcely hear himself think; then rain in flat chunks, as if some
malignant agency had yanked the bottom out of the sky and let the
accumulated moisture of centuries drop on that particular portion of the
Northwest. In fifteen minutes the only dry part of me was the crown of
my head--thanks be to a good Stetson hat. And my arms ached from the
strain of hanging onto my horse, for, hobbled as he was, he did his best
to get up and quit Canada in a gallop when the fireworks began. To make
it even more pleasant, when the clouds fell apart and the little stars
came blinking out one by one, a chill wind whistled up on the heels of
the storm, and I spent the rest of that night shivering forlornly in my
clammy clothes.
Still a-shiver at dawn, I saddled up and loped for the crest of the
nearest divide to get the benefit of the first sun-rays. But alas! the
hoodoo was still plodding diligently on my trail. I topped a little
rise, and almost rode plump into the hostile arms of a half-dozen
breech-clout warriors coming up the other side. I think there were about
half a dozen, but I wouldn't swear to it. I hadn't the time nor
inclination to make an exact count. The general ensemble of war-paint
and spotted ponies was enough for me; I didn't need to be told that it
was my move. My spurs fairly lifted the dun horse, and we scuttled in
the opposite direction like a scared antelope. The fact that the average
Indian is not a master hand with a gun except at short range was my
salvation. If they'd been white men I would probably have been curled in
a neat heap within two hundred yards. As it was, they shot altogether
too close for comfort, and the series of yells they turned loose in that
peaceful atmosphere made me feel that I was due to be forcibly separated
from the natural covering of my cranium if I lost any time in getting
out of their sphere of influence.
The persistent beggars chased me a good ten miles before they drew up,
concluding, I suppose, that I was too well mounted for them to overhaul.
But it might have been a lot worse; I still had my scalp intact; the
chase and its natural excitement had brought a comfortable warmth to my
chilled body; and I had made good time in the direction I wished to go.
On the whole, I felt that the red brother had done me rather a good
turn. But I kept on high ground, thereafter, where I could see a mile or
two, for I was very much alive to the fact that if another of those
surprise-parties jumped me now that my horse was tired they would have a
good deal of fun at my expense; and an Indian's idea of fun doesn't
coincide with mine--not by a long shot!
I made some pointed remarks to my horse about Mr. Goodell and his
companions, as I rode along. If Pend d' Oreille hadn't been the nearest
place, I'd have turned back to Walsh and made that bunch of exhumers
come back after me, if it were absolutely necessary that I should pilot
them to the graves. Personally, I thought those two old plainsmen
wouldn't thank Major Lessard or any one else for disturbing their last,
long sleep; the wide, unpeopled prairies had always been their choice in
life, and I felt that they would rather be laid away in some quiet
coulée, than in any conventional "city of the dead" with prim headstones
and iron fences to shut them in. A Western man likes lots of room; dead
or alive, it irks him to be crowded.
I fully expected to find the four waiting for me at Pend d' Oreille, and
I was prepared to hear a good deal of chaffing about getting lost. What
of my waiting on the ridge that afternoon, and bearing more or less away
from the proper direction at night, I did not reach the post till noon;
and I was a bit puzzled to find only the men who were on duty there. I
was digesting this along with the remains of the troopers' dinner, when
Goodell and his satellites popped over the hill that looked down on Pend
d' Oreille, and, a few minutes later, came riding nonchalantly up to the
mess-house.
"Well, you beat us in," Goodell greeted airily. "Did you find a short
cut?"
"Sure thing," I responded, with what irony I could command.
"Where the deuce _did_ you go, anyway, after you stopped in that
creek-bottom?" he asked, eying me with much curiosity. "We nearly played
our horses out galloping around looking for you--after we'd gone a mile
or so, and you didn't catch up."
"Then you must have kept damned close to the coulée-bottoms," I retorted
ungraciously, "for I burnt the earth getting up on a pinnacle where you
could see me, before you had time to go very far."
"Oh, well, it's easy to lose track of a lone man in a country as big as
this," he returned suavely. "We all got here, so what's the odds? I
guess we'll stick here till morning. We can't make the round trip this
afternoon, and I'm not camping on the hills when it's avoidable."
It struck me that he was uncommonly philosophical about it, so I merely
grunted and went on with my dinner.
That evening, when we went to the stable to fix up our horses for the
night, I got a clearer insight into his reason for laying over that
afternoon. They had been doing some tall riding, and their livestock was
simply unfit to go farther. The four saddle-horses looked as if they had
been dragged through a small-sized knothole; their gauntness, and the
dispirited droop of their heads, spelled complete fatigue to any man who
knew the symptoms of hard riding. By comparison, my sweat-grimed dun was
fresh as a morning breeze.