THE ORPHAN OF DEL SOL
BLANCOCITO had dozed in the sun for a considerable interval. Hearing a
sound at the front door, he turned an idle eye, and sprang back with a
snort at sight of the unusual apparition which now descended the gallery
steps—Anastasie Lockhart, no longer in male apparel, and by the merest
accident coming out of the house as the two men would now have entered.
Jim Nabours was not accustomed to social formulas.
“Miss Taisie, this here is Mr. McMasters, of Gonzales, below. He’s
sher’f down there. I reckon you know who he is.”
“I saw you when you came in, sir,” said the mistress of Del Sol
demurely, extending her hand. “Why did you not come up to breakfast?”
While McMasters, his eyes fixed on hers, was explaining his travel-worn
condition, Jim Nabours was wondering how and why in the name of all the
saints of the Southwest Taisie had managed in so short a time to change
from her daily ranch costume to this feminine marvel of fresh lawn, with
ruffled flounces and great belled skirt. She even had white
mitts—yellow-white with age. But Taisie saw no reason to explain that
much of her apparel once had been her mother’s, and was now fresh
resurrected. Jim did not know the mysteries of a certain rawhide chest
so well as old black Milly, who had served in the Burleson Lockhart
family before they moved into the border country. Had he known he might
also have had a guess at the miracle of Taisie’s heavy hair, no longer
banded like an Indian woman’s but done up in some sort of high twisted
mass that left visible the milk-white nape of a neck not always
otherwise protected against the sun.
In good truth Anastasie—such was her mother’s Louisiana name in
baptism, and her own—was not unmindful of the ways of woman in older
lands, in spite of the surroundings into which fate had cast her. And
truly she was beautiful—rarely, astonishingly, confusingly beautiful.
The man did not live who could have seen her now and not have felt his
heart leap to joy in the universe and its ways.
She led them back into the house. Her very presence filled the
low-ceiled room, one of the two at the right of the four corners made by
the right-angled double halls. The adobe ranch house of Del Sol was
built like others of the Saxon Southwest, so that each breath of air
might be caught from any direction of the wind; an arrangement cooler
than a patio for a house surrounded on two sides by a grove of giant
live oaks draped heavily in Spanish moss.
The interior gave a rude setting for a picture such as this young woman
made. The ease and luxury of lower Louisiana, for a wealthy generation
of sugar-cane planters the repository of Europe’s best art and last
luxuries, were not reflected in the first Saxon generation of the Texas
border. True, the furniture in part was traceable to earlier days. Two
paintings, three framed samplers, told of a mother’s hands. There was a
heavy claw-foot table. A few mismated chairs of the Empire stood in a
row. But a rawhide settee and four splat-bottom chairs frankly admitted
the limit of such supplies; the prevailing flavor of the borderland
could not be denied. Not so much of a marvel, for at that time there was
not a hundred miles of railroad within the boundaries of Texas, and
everything from the East must survive the toil and danger of wagon
freighting.
In one corner of the room was a conical upright Mexican fireplace.
Opposed to this and covered with soft tanned baby-calfskins of varied
colors, stood the one thing which had saved the soul of Anastasie
Lockhart the first, as of Anastasie the second—the piano, regarded with
awe by all the cattle hands. On the piano stood, now, a vase of flowers.
They were very fresh flowers. Jim Nabours knew they had not been there
an hour earlier, for he had called before breakfast and they were not
there then; though he knew Taisie’s garden had some blossoms.
What shall escape the eye of a maiden? Tapered conchas on a bridle
strap, neat boots, a well-shaped hat, a way of sitting in a saddle, the
air of a family that had once come down from Tennessee on the Natchez
Trace and the Old River Road, to Louisiana, to Texas? Nay, not so easily
are a maid’s eyes baffled, though she shall have had but a single look
at a newcome young man opening her gate a hundred yards away. Hence
these flowers, hence this frock, the reason for which Jim Nabours could
not analyze.
Mr. Dan McMasters, new sheriff of Gonzales, mighty young for that job,
was a proper man. A vague sense of uneasiness came to the soul of
Foreman Jim as he saw his comeliness and ease of manner. He felt he had
been betrayed—did not feel familiar with these new little ways.
“You see, Miss Lockhart,” went on McMasters when he had taken his own
seat on the cowhide settee, “I’ve been north, up the Indian roads. As I
was only fifty miles away, I thought I would ride in.”
“You are very welcome, sir. Our families always have been friends.”
The voice of Anastasie Lockhart was the color of her hair. Almost, you
could call her hair vibrant.
“Yes, my family always has known your family. I wanted to see you once
more. That must have been my main reason. You—you have grown, Miss
Lockhart. I’d not have known you. But just now I was talking with your
segundo. He thought you might like to hear some word I am bringing down
to Texas from the North.”
“He means they’ve started a cattle market up North on the railroad, Miss
Taisie,” broke in Jim Nabours.
“Market? There’s going to be a shipping point—do you mean that, sir?”
The girl turned swiftly.
“I think so, yes,” replied Dan McMasters. “It’s at Abilene, in Kansas,
right north of Wichita. You see, Wichita’s not far across the Kansas
line, above the Nations.”
“Abilene?”
“No one ever heard of it. It’s head of the rails on the Kansas Pacific,
the new road that’s building west. They want cattle. They are promising
a market.”
The girl’s eyes kindled.
“That’s news!”
He nodded.
“Yes. The railroads are planning to run up the Arkansas the same as up
the Platte—and that’s done, now. That whole country north of here, from
all I can hear about it, is a thousand by two thousand miles of natural
cow land. Grass? They tell me that farther on west there’s millions of
acres of what they call buffalo grass—short, like our grama. Maybe it
won’t carry cows, but some say it will. It certainly fattens the
buffalo. And there isn’t a cow in it all; it’s empty and waiting for
range stock—to say nothing of the Eastern demand.”
Nabours broke in.
“We know we could herd as far as Wichita. Shore we could get from there
to Aberlene.”
“Yes,” said this prophet of a new day; “and we would find Eastern
buyers—farmers and feeders and beef men—waiting to buy our stuff as
fast as we drove it through.”
“Really?” Taisie Lockhart almost forgot her morning’s troubles.
“Really?”
“Why, yes, I reckon it’s true, from what the men told me that came down
to cut the trail in the Nations. They declare there’ll be buyers for all
we can drive, up to a hundred thousand head—yes, two-three hundred
thousand!”
Inarticulate sound came in Anastasie’s throat. She cast a triumphant
glance at her foreman.
“Well, now, ma’am, how was I to know?” defended Jim. “I never did hear
of no Aberlene, not in my whole life, till this young gentleman rid in
here this morning.”
“Well, you ought to have heard of it!” rejoined his employer with a
woman’s logic. “Why, man, that’s what all Texas has been starving for
for years! Didn’t I tell you? Haven’t I been telling you? Haven’t I been
begging you to make a herd and drive north, somewhere, and trust to God
to find buyers there, since there’s no hope here, south or east? Haven’t
I told you, Jim?”
“I reckon you did, ma’am,” admitted her aid. “Same time, you didn’t know
a damned thing about it.”
“Oh, you!” Taisie turned to him. “Do you expect to have people show you
what’s in their hands before you draw cards? Can’t you take a chance?”
“For my own self, yes, Miss Taisie. For you—we all was scared. Especial
we was scared when you said you was going along.”
“But I am going along! And I am going to put up a herd!”
“Now, Miss Lockhart,” ventured Dan McMasters, “you couldn’t do that.
Your men can put up a herd and drive north for you, but no woman ever
has gone north of the Red, or ever ought to try it. There’s no real
trail—it’s all wild north of here for fifteen hundred miles or more.
There’s not a bridge—I’ve swum ten rivers and forded a hundred. There
are Indians. There are storms—and no shelter for you. Miss Lockhart,
there’s not a man in Texas ever would let you go.”
“There’s not men enough in all Texas to keep me from going!”
Taisie’s grief was entirely forgotten now.
“Even your father——” Jim began.
“Don’t!” Sudden tears came to the girl’s eyes.
“She allus bogs down—about her father,” explained Nabours.
“I’ll not bog down! I’ll get over this some day. Why, the reason I want
to go north is to find the man that did it! He’s somewhere up there.”
McMasters, captain in the Rangers, looked at her with a sudden kindling
of his own cool eyes; but he said nothing. The mistress of Del Sol
stamped her foot in its cross-banded slipper.
“Always you treat me like a girl. I’m not!”
“Yes, you are, Miss Taisie,” rejoined Jim Nabours. “You’re a girl, and
I’m your mother and your father both, till you get a new segundo.”
“Listen at him!” Taisie turned to the young stranger. “The whole state
of Texas is dying on its feet, and the men of Texas scared to drive,
with maybe five dollars a head waiting for them at the railroad! That’s
riches!
“How long would it take?” she demanded of her informant.
“All season, practically,” replied McMasters. “I rode about forty miles
a day, coming south, and I was eleven hundred miles away at one time.
Cows could go ten miles a day, maybe, if you could keep the herd going;
say two-three hundred miles a month. Say three-four months—that would
cover a heap of trail.”
“All the distance between here and heaven! All the difference between
poverty and self-respect! Oh!”—she looked him fair in the face—“it’s
no use to pretend! Do you know what I did this very morning, sir, just
before you rode in? Do you know why I’m crying now? I can’t help it.
Why, I was down there to tell my men that I’d turned them all loose this
morning. I discharged them all. I told them I was broke, that I couldn’t
pay my hands.
“Poor? Don’t I know! Go back to Gonzales and tell your people that the
last Lockhart’s down in the dust. I’ve got no pride left at all, because
I’m broke. Do you wonder that I cry?”
“She did!” said Jim Nabours. “She is!”
McMasters turned away and looked out the window. The tears of such a
woman made one thing no man could face.
“But, of course,” added the foreman, “I taken all that in my own hands.
I just sont the hands out like usual. Seems like I can hear the irons
sizzling on about a dozen long ears by now already.”
“And the lot not worth a pinch of old Milly’s snuff!” commented Taisie.
“The market—that’s the one thing! Mr. McMasters has brought news!”
“I almost hesitate over it,” said the young man. “I can’t bring it free
of risk and danger.”
“You don’t know my men!” broke out Taisie proudly.
“Oh, yes, I do! I know us all, ma’am. They—we would all die first. But
suppose that was not enough?”
“And if I’m a woman, at least I’m not an old woman. I’ll drive the first
Texas herd to the railroad with my own men if it takes our last horse
and last man! It’s north for me, or I’m gone. When you rode in, sir, I
was at the lowest ebb of all my life.”
“I wish the tide may turn, Miss Lockhart,” said young Dan McMasters
quietly.
“It will—I believe it has!” She was on her feet, her eyes bright, her
color up. “Why, listen! I’ll take Anita and Milly both along. We’ve two
carretas left. Jim, you old coward”—her hand was on his shoulder
affectionately—“you know you told me you could make a herd of five
thousand fours in our brand inside of a day’s ride from Del Sol. Even if
it was beeves——
“Tell me, what ages?” She turned suddenly to McMasters.
“I can’t say yet,” was his reply. “Fours and long threes would do best
for shipping East. But the talk I heard is that there’ll be use for
stockers—even yearlings, too, because the range is open all in north
and west of there. People are crowding out to the buffalo range,
following the railroads. It’s unbelievable how crazy they are. It seems
as though they felt they just have got to get West. They’ll all need
cattle.”
A new expression came to his face as he went on:
“There’s millions of acres of unbroken land up there, north of the old
slavery line of 36-30. It will take North and South both to make it. It
will be the West! It will be the heart of America!”
“We’ll be the first to see it! There’s no age from calf to fifty years
Del Sol can’t drive!” said Taisie Lockhart decisively. “How many?”
“That depends on your force of hands. Some said three thousand head was
around what a herd should be. A dozen hands could drive it—say
fifteen-twenty. Each man ought to have at least six or eight horses in
his string. There’ll be riding.”
“Well, what of that? I can turn out twenty men who can talk to cows in
their own language. We wouldn’t miss thirty-five hundred fours, Jim
says. When shall we start?”
She still was smiling, eager; but the look in her eyes was one of
resolution; and as Jim had said, a Lockhart never changed.
“Jesse Chisholm just followed the grass,” answered McMasters presently.
“It’s green here in March, and it’s February now. Once across the
Colorado and the Brazos, we’d go clean to the Red, easy—I know my
father always said that. He said a driver could go in west of Austin and
Fort Worth, and get to the north edge of Texas and be almost sure not to
see an Indian. The Comanches are away west of that line. We’re about on
the ninety-eighth meridian here, and near the thirtieth parallel. My
father said that it was a new world north of thirty-six degrees north
latitude. That land is all unmapped. No one lives there but the
Indians.”
“She eats Comanches,” said Jim Nabours. “Little thing like them don’t
bother her none. As for swimming a herd acrost a spring fresh, with
quicksand on both sides, why, she don’t mind that none a-tall!”
An ominous silence and a heightened color did not impress him. At length
his employer went on, addressing the visitor:
“Very well. Say fifteen men and a wrangler and a cook, with me and black
Milly, my cook, and Anita, my Spanish woman. We’d take the two carretas,
with oxen for them and the cook’s wagon. Sixteen riders by six or eight
horses is a hundred or a hundred and fifty for the remuda—we’d do it
easy.”
“Plumb easy!” came Jim’s solemn comment. “A thousand miles in a carreta
without a spring, right over a crooked mesquite ex, is right simple.
About one week and Milly’d die, her going three hundred net right now;
and Anita’d die of homesickness for her jacal she’s used to living in.
“Besides, ma’am”—here the foreman’s voice changed—“I may as well talk
plain. Not joking, we can’t live on beef straight. Three-four months of
meal and beans and molasses for twenty men is more than we have got,
though meal and beans and molasses and side meat we’d have to have, and
coffee if we could. The hands work better for coffee, mornings, and
after rains or hard rides.”
The color on poor Taisie’s cheeks grew deeper in humiliation. She spread
out her hands.
“I’m broke! I’ve said that!”
There was silence for some time. At length the young sheriff of Gonzales
spoke quietly.
“Miss Lockhart,” said he, “I don’t like to hear that word in Texas.”
“Truth is the simplest!”
“Yes, I know. But what one ranch in Texas doesn’t happen to have the
neighbors do have—they always have had. Take in one or two neighbors
with you for the drive—say a thousand head, each brand. They’d be glad
to put up the wagon and the remuda. You must not push away your
neighbors. This is Texas.”
A cold rage met his sincerity and friendliness.
“I’ll have help from no one! Del Sol will drive a lone herd north, win
or lose. I’ll take it all back, Jim—you’re all hired on again, the last
man of you. You’ll stand by me? I’ll sell my cows and pay my men; and
then I’ll see if there’s any law in the North or any men in the South to
help me find a murderer.”
“Ma’am,” said Jim Nabours, “you’ve put it now so’s’t not one of us can
help hisself. We got to go. When hell freezes we’ll all walk out on the
ice together.
“But you got to thank Mr. McMasters for what he’s done told us, Miss
Taisie,” he added. “I reckon he’s our best neighbor.”
“I do thank you, sir!” The girl rose and held out her hand frankly. The
young man bent over it. He did not seat himself again. “But you’ll stop
a day or so with us?”
“No, I must be riding now,” he answered.
He found his hat, bowed, passed out the door with no dallying or
indecision; nor said a word about return. He was abrupt to coldness, if
not to rudeness.
Anastasie Lockhart looked through the window shades so intently that her
hand remained not fallen after it had drawn them; so intently that she
did not hear old Milly as she entered.
“Laws, Miss Taisie, is that young gemman gone? I done brung in some
likker fer him. He’s quality, Miss Taisie! Who is he, an’ whah he come
from? Is he done ask you about marryin’ yit?”
“Not yet, Milly,” answered Anastasie.
She sat down in the one rocking-chair, staring at the uncarpeted floor.
She was older now than she had been an hour ago. Why had this neighbor
not promised an early return? And was he not a strangely stiff and
silent young man? Were the honors of sheriff and captain so much as to
render him superior to a girl with red hair who wore her mother’s
clothes, years old?
Anastasie Lockhart, astonishingly vital, astonishingly beautiful, rose
to find a mirror so that she could read an answer. As she did so she
recognized, standing at the end of the rawhide settee, where her visitor
could not have failed to see the sudden disorder of its interior, the
rawhide trunk which long had served alike as wardrobe and safety vault
for her. Vexed at the revelation of her first untidiness in
housekeeping, she bent now to close the heavy lid once more. Suddenly
she went to her knees beside it, her eyes wet once more at what she saw
of silk and lace gone to bits. She caught up the fragments to her
cheeks.
A daguerreotype in its disintegrating frame lay to her hand. She opened
it. Her mother. Yes, she had been beautiful. And this frame was the twin
of it—her father. She turned it to catch the light so that the likeness
would show. A bold, bearded face, aquiline, high. She sighed as she
looked at the picture of a man cut down by an assassin in the full of
his strength and resolution.
Below these things and others lay to half the depth of the old chest a
mass of papers, all similar. Contemptuously she thrust in her hands, her
arms, to the elbows.
“Scrip!” she murmured to herself. “Scrip for more Texas land, to raise
more Texas cows! He was mad about it—scrip, scrip was all he thought! I
only hope that he did not see it!” She meant Dan McMasters. “But of
course he did—he couldn’t help it, where he sat.
“Well, it’s no matter,” she added mentally. “He’s not coming back again.
If I’d known how cold he was I’d not have troubled!”
She spread out her long brown hands over her mother’s frock as, still
kneeling, she sat back on her heels, in her mother’s cross-banded shoes.