THE INDIAN NATIONS
NO blue smoke rose against the far horizon of the wild paradise
through which these pioneers of a new industry were passing. Civilized,
semi-civilized, even savage mankind lacked then in the Nations. The
country was unsettled and unknown. The men of Del Sol neither followed
nor intersected any trail of hoof or wheel. Only the deep paths of the
buffalo, immemorial, marked the green carpet of unbroken sod. There
never had been hoof of any domestic creature here. The bands of horses
that swept away were wild horses. Wild deer, wild antelope made their
only neighbors. There was not a weed. There was not a bee. The white man
had not come.
Of them all, not one Del Sol man had any idea of the country ahead. They
were only holding to the easiest way, the ridges that separated the
heads of divergent streams.
Nabours held his silence as long as he could, but at length spurred up
to the morose and solitary man who rode without a word regarding the
herd, himself or his own plans.
“Mr. McMasters,” said he, “I don’t know where we are right now. I don’t
know where we’re going. We haven’t got no map. I don’t know when
Rudabaugh may jump us. It’s time you and me got plumb serious.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“For instance, we ain’t on no Chisholm Trail?”
“No, that’s over in east, if it can be called a trail. Fort Sill—that’s
what they call the camp where the soldiers stop, in west toward the
Wichita Mountains—is the nearest white settlement. It’s only a camp;
there is no actual Army post there yet.”
“My notion, soldiers mostly ride around and don’t do nothing much.”
“They’d do more if they were let alone by the Indian Department. Those
men are doing what Captain Marcy advised fifteen years ago—figuring on
an Army post north of the Red, to watch the Comanches.
“The worst Comanches, as you know, are the Quahrada bands—that’s old
Yellow Hand. Their right range is north of the Buffalo Gap and west into
the Staked Plains; that’s their big buffalo country. But I think word
has gone out for some kind of a council between them and the Kiowas, and
that’s what has brought Yellow Hand in here.
“The policy of the Indian Department now, as you may know,” he went on
explaining, “is to round up all these Indian tribes and get them on
reservations. That’s going to mean war, next year probably. This whole
country in here is just as like as not to be on foot right now. The best
hope we’ve got is that none of them get together with Rudabaugh.”
“That’s fine, ain’t it? And you done told me that Rudabaugh was heading
in ahead to meet us.”
“He doesn’t know where we are any more than we know where he is. If we
keep on north and he keeps on up the Washita we’d naturally intersect at
the crossing of the Washita, two or three days’ drive north of here. I
don’t know which will get there first. He travels light.”
“What d’you think I’d ought to do?” demanded Nabours, after a time.
“There is not much you can do. When you go into camp every night set
your wagon tongue so that it points toward the North Star. Line out on
that course the next morning. Keep on going north for a month. What
comes, comes. But keep your herd closed up.”
“Well, I done sont my cook cart on ahead a ways,” admitted Nabours. “I
told Sam to kill a buffalo and pick out a good camping place, if it
looked anything like a bed ground.”
“What comes, comes,” said McMasters once more.
They separated, since he would talk no more. He rode apart from the
herd, would accept no duties, no friendships, never cast a glance toward
the closed cart where Taisie had taken refuge.
* * * * *
Nabours hardly had resumed his place at the head of the column before he
found cause enough for actual alarm. On ahead there was coming toward
him the white top of the cook cart, its oxen lashed to a gallop by the
negro driver. Buck made no attempt to stop his vehicle, but thundered by
with the evident intention of getting as far to the rear as possible.
The shrieks of Milly, who had gone on in the cart, rose continuously.
Nabours was obliged to ride ahead to bring the cart to a halt.
“What in hell do you mean by this?” demanded he of the frightened negro.
“Fo’ Gawd, Massa Jim, don’t go up dah! Dey’s five thousand Injuns right
up dah! Dey’s a million buffaloes not two mile ahead, beyant the woods,
and them Injuns is a cuttin’ and a chargin’!”
“Go on down to the other cart and pull up close!” commanded the trail
boss. “Hurry, now!” He spurred off to the point of the herd.
“Throw ’em off the trail, men!” he called out. “Make the herd right
here! Injuns! Get your rifles out!”
In ten minutes the strip of prairie was covered a half mile deep with a
mass of cattle, and the remuda was closed up at the rear. The men made a
rude laager of the bed rolls in front of the carts and ordered the women
to keep hid. So far as might be, they were ready for what must come.
It came soon. The cattle shuffled as they stood, turned, raised their
heads. A thunder of countless hoofs grew loud, louder. And now became
visible, close at hand, one of the wild spectacles of the tribesmen’s
country. A vast black mass of running buffalo appeared, strung out in
little clumps as far as the eye could reach. Heads down, their beards
sweeping the grass tops, they ran, an endless series of black, rolling
forms, in a tremendous momentum that shook the very sod—the wildest
picture of a wild world.
The men who immemorially owned that world were here. Naked horsemen
clung on the flank of the herd. It was the Comanches, at the savage
trade which the Comanches most loved and best practiced—that of lancing
the wild buffalo.
A half hundred, perhaps a hundred riders, stretched out in a long
line—in fact a line two miles or more in length. The savages, stripped
to the waist, rode their bareback horses alongside and into the detached
masses of black which stretched west and north out as far as the
horizon. Even in the distance and in the dust they might have been known
to be Comanches, since they thus were at work with the lance. That was
always the favorite Comanche weapon in the buffalo hunt.
Nothing imaginable could be more cruel or more efficient than their
trade as these wild riders now were practicing it. Each spearman rode
even with his chosen quarry. It was not his purpose to strike it in the
vitals, but only to disable it. A hunter leaned sideways suddenly,
plunging, both his arms raised. A lunge, a heave backward to wrench the
point clear, and the great beast fell, cut through the loins; not killed
at once, but sure to fall; which was enough for the savage workman. The
old men or squaws following after with their bows and arrows would
finish what the long lances had begun. To the rear a mile-long line of
black struggling blots lay on the grass. But the blood lust of the
riders had not yet been glutted.
Their chase was now to end. Their attention, rapt as they had been in
the pursuit they loved above all others, could not now escape the sudden
sound which broke upon their ears even over the hoof roar of the
buffalo.
In a vast rush of crackling hoofs and rattling horns the entire Del Sol
herd was now off in the wildest stampede any of the men had ever seen.
Worst of all, they were not undertaking to evade but to join the
stampede of the buffalo.
Always there was a sort of affiliation between the wild and the domestic
cattle of the Plains; and all old plainsmen knew how difficult it was to
separate the two, once they were commingled. This commingling of wild
and half wild, with the attendant rumbling and trembling under the hoofs
of all these thousands of running creatures, made a swift climax to the
scene. The black mass, lengthened and strung out by the impact of the
line of hunters, now was joined by a vast influx of lighter colored
animals, coming in at an angle. Red men might take toll of this. White
men could not control it. No men could stop it now.
The savages had ridden long. There was an endless line of black blots
rising and falling on the prairies back of them. The stampede of the Del
Sol herd was sufficient to break the trance of slaughter.
Spears in hand, naked, their arms red to the shoulders, their bodies red
to the waist, a group of the riders broke away from their chase and came
up, grinning and shouting, to where they saw the white men huddled. They
had taken their time. The Comanches entertained but little fear of the
whites. They were insolent lords of the far Southwest, raiding the
feeble Mexicans as they liked and even imperiously telling the
Anglo-Saxon frontiersman when he must cease advancing or even pull back
his frontier lines. They always had held the best of the cattle range as
well as the best of the buffalo range of Texas, and had kept the cowman
out.
These had no fear now of the whites. They carried with them proof of
that. Repeating their own tribal history of grim sense of humor, at some
sutler’s store looted far to the west they had practiced one of the
jests they had been known to employ in early border times. They had
gathered bolts of flannel, bales of gaudy calico, from which they had
liberally taken decorations for their horses. Not one of the latter that
did not have attached to his mane and tail such strips of calico as long
and rough riding had left him. It was the pleasant Comanche practice to
tie one end of a bolt of cloth or calico to the tail of a horse and then
to ride off, leaving the fabric to unwind as it listed and the horse to
run as it chose. These wild decorations, unknown of origin, still clung
in colored fragments to the blood-stained ponies which they rode. The
ends of the prints fluttered in the prairie wind, mocking the flowers in
their own remaining hues.
No herd of cattle could have withstood the sight of this wild
phantasmagoria. The men who owned these felt that their own time had
come. Without command, each man dropped low behind his bed roll, his
rifle resting above his bent arm.
“Don’t let than in, men—but don’t shoot yet! They’ve got nothing but
spears!”
It was the voice of Dan McMasters which arose. He alone of them all was
standing, rifle in hand. He threw up his hand in the command to halt as
the Red men came on in, slapping his rifle stock.
The Comanches paid little attention to any command, but made no
immediate motion of hostility. Their leader was a great-chested man with
wide chin and mouth and narrow eyes. Jabbering in his own tongue,
two-thirds Spanish, he grinned as he came on close up to the rifles
which covered him and his men. At length he threw up his own hand
carelessly, indifferently, curiously, as though he now would see what
was to be found hereabouts.
“How, _amigo_! How, _amigo_!” called out McMasters. No one had chosen
him as leader, but none now denied him the place. “_Usted_ Yellow Hand?”
The leader rode out carelessly.
“_Si_,” said he. “Me Yellow Han’. _Habla Español?_”
“_Si_,” replied McMasters, and went on in that tongue.
After a few moments of rapid talk he turned.
“He says they are Quahradas, but are riding through, going home. Says he
wants some spotted buffaloes. Says they are on Indian land and we have
got to get out. Says we will have to give him half our horses and all
our tobacco. Says he knows we have got something in the wagons because
we keep the covers tight. Says we can’t go on through, but have got to
go back.”
“You tell him to go to hell!” broke out Jim Nabours. “Tell him I know
who he is. Yellow Hand has got no right in here. Tell him the soldiers
will be after him for chasing the Chickasaws’ buffalo.
Flour—beef—tobacco? Tell him we won’t give him a damned thing! Tell
him if he rides ten feet further in we’ll open fire and clean ’em
out—our rifles shoot a week and we don’t have to load.”
He patted the stock of the rifle which he held up before him in
defiance—one of the Henry repeating rifles, first of repeating arms
seen in the Southwest after the Civil War; and already the Comanches
knew what these repeating rifles meant. Old Yellow Hand also knew that
his men had nothing but their spears. He traded Comanche lives as dear
as possible always. No doubt it occurred to him that he could get all
the beef he wanted by following the stampede. Perhaps he figured that
night time would be a better hour for an attack—when all his warriors
were on hand.
“Heap shoot!” called out Jim Nabours, again slapping the side of his
rifle. Yellow Hand grinned pleasantly.
“How! How! Heap _amigo_,” said he. He advanced a foot or so, his hand
outstretched. “What you got in _carreta_? _Que tienez?_”
He motioned toward the closed fronts of the cart covers, pointing with
his spear. McMasters’ rifle barrel struck up the spear shaft. Yellow
Hand could see the hammers of the rifles lying down like the heads of so
many rattlesnakes. He could see the light shining on the brass plates of
these Henry rifles. Comanches on the Concho had told him that a rifle
which had this yellow spot on it would keep on shooting forever without
any need for loading again.
“_Si, seguro!_” he now said calmly. “Heap shoot!” He waved a hand
towards the rifles. “_Muy grande escopetas._ Heap swap. _Uno caballo por
uno escopeta_!” He meant he would trade a horse for a repeating rifle.
“_Nada_, damn your soul!” broke out Jim Nabours: “You vamose pretty damn
_pronto_! I’m sorry I ever learned your damned language, but you hear me
now. _A doondey usted_—where’d you come from here?”
“_Nos vamenos, si._” said Yellow Hand ingratiatingly. “_Poco tiempo._
Swap?”
“You’ve got a gall,” rejoined Nabours, whose blood now was up as he
began to think of what had happened to his herd. “Git on out or I’ll
kill you for luck!”
The chieftain turned towards McMasters, whom he again addressed in
Spanish. McMasters replied quietly, evenly, evidently arguing and
pointing out certain facts which ought to be observed; which facts had
to do with spears as against repeating rifles; with buffalo as against
beef.
After a time Yellow Hand turned back to his followers, who had sat their
horses impatiently. He spoke a few words in explanation. Then, without
paying any more attention whatever to the whites, they all turned and
rode away.
For the time safe, the white men arose and looked at one another, still
almost too much strained for speech.
“Look yonder!” said Nabours at length.
Off to the west and north other Indians were appearing, group after
group, evidently the followers who did the butchering of the fallen
buffalo. With spears and bows and arrows they were finishing the work
which had been begun. Obviously there must be some considerable village
not far away, for many or most of these advancing figures were those of
squaws engaged in the butchering work.
“They are in no hurry,” said McMasters after a time. “They are willing
to wait. Bows and arrows. They don’t seem to have any guns.”
The Del Sol men looked around them for the horses which they had
picketed, broke the front before the carts, where now could be heard
women’s lamentations. The boy, Cinquo Centavos, was disclosed sitting
with his back against the cart front of his mistress, a Sharpe rifle
across his knees. Tears were running down his cheeks—not tears of fear.
“My horses is all gone!” said he, sobbing.
“Hell, the cows is gone, too!” commented Dalhart. “It’s lucky we ain’t!”
McMasters, once banished, had now without election been received back
into the ranks of the Del Sol men. Indeed, he was now their leader.
Before the stripped trail drovers made any move they held council.
“Yellow Hand knows he don’t have to swap,” said McMasters. “He knows he
can choose between dead buffalo and dead cattle. Our horses—they know
what we’ve got in that line. They know all they want to know, except
what’s in there.” He nodded toward the carts. “They’ll come back to find
that out.”
The men all looked at him in silence. He spoke again, to Nabours.
“There’s only one good thing about this whole thing,” he said.
“Rudabaugh has not seen these men. They haven’t heard of the killing of
those two Comanche women. If they had they’d have rushed us long ago.
The women must have been in a visiting village, over toward the Arbuckle
hills.”
Nabours was silent for a moment.
“The jig’s up. We’d just as well leave the herd,” said he at length. “We
can’t spare men to send after them. It looks like our only hope is to
push on ahead with the carts and find a place to fight for what we’ve
got left.”
McMasters nodded.
“I think that’s best. They know they’ve got only bows and arrows against
our repeating rifles. Horses they like more than anything else. Maybe
they’ll be contented with rounding up our remuda if we slip away. Maybe
we can come back again and pick up what they leave us. At least, they
don’t yet know what we have in there.”
Once more he nodded toward the close-drawn flaps of the carts, to which
not a man had yet ventured. They did not want the women to know. “We’d
better be on our way before anything worse happens.”
Nabours nodded. The broken cavalcade closed in and soon was moving north
once more, now convoying nothing but the shrouded carts, around which
they formed a cordon.
Unencumbered with the herd, they made a dozen miles in their hurried
march, and finally chose a camping place upon a little eminence crowned
with a few straggling trees, which gave them good sight of the
surrounding country. They made their camp with the carts inside the
circle of guards; hobbled and picketed their remaining saddle horses and
put up such barricade as they could. They now had done the last that
remained within their power. Nabours told the women to come to the men’s
camp. A fire was built, but was kept low.
Taisie Lockhart joined her men, her face exceedingly pale.
“It’s the Comanches!” she broke out at last. “I have brought you into
this!”
“Ma’am,” said Nabours at length, “that’s hardly a fair way of speaking.
It’s us has brought you. We all throwed in together in this.”
“I told you I was broke and couldn’t pay you,” sobbed the girl, “and you
wouldn’t quit. Oh, if you only had!”
She missed one figure in the gathering of rough-clad hard-bitten men. A
trifle apart, McMasters paid no attention either to her or any one else.
Nabours caught the direction of her glance and nodded.
“We done taken him on the herd, full, now,” said he. “We need men that
can shoot. Go on back to sleep.”
But Taisie Lockhart no more slept than did the others. There was no
shoulder against which she could lean. The voice of the cricket was no
more. In its stead came the raucous roar of the gray wolves scenting
blood.