BUFFALO BILL’S RUSE
OR,
Won By Sheer Nerve
BY
Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
Author of the celebrated “Buffalo Bill” stories published in the
BORDER STORIES. For other titles see catalogue.
[Illustration: Colophon]
STREET & SMITH CORPORATION
PUBLISHERS
79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York
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| Copyright, 1906 and 1907 |
| By STREET & SMITH |
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| Buffalo Bill’s Ruse |
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(Printed in the United States of America)
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian.
CONTENTS
PAGE
IN APPRECIATION OF WILLIAM F. CODY 1
I. PIZEN KATE. 5
II. READY TO GO. 10
III. AN UNEXPECTED MEETING. 14
IV. PIZEN KATE FINDS HER HUSBAND. 19
V. MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES. 25
VI. INDIAN TREACHERY. 31
VII. THE ATTACK OF THE MEXICAN 39
VIII. THE MYSTERIOUS YOUNG WOMAN. 43
IX. THE REDSKIN ROVERS. 51
X. SURROUNDED AND CAPTURED. 59
XI. ESCAPE. 66
XII. A DESPERATE VENTURE 73
XIII. THE FLIGHT OF THE FUGITIVES. 78
XIV. STRANGE HAPPENINGS. 83
XV. A DESPERATE BATTLE. 91
XVI. AT THE HOUSE ON THE MESA. 97
XVII. THE MYSTERY SOLVED. 107
XVIII. THE MYSTERIOUS NUGGET. 111
XIX. AT THE FORT. 121
XX. BRUTALITY. 129
XXI. ON THE BORDERS OF DISGRACE. 132
XXII. OUTSIDE THE WALLS. 141
XXIII. DRIVEN BY DESPERATION. 146
XXIV. THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS. 153
XXV. A VILLAIN IN FLIGHT. 159
XXVI. STARTLING NEWS. 163
XXVII. THE SKY MIRROR. 169
XXVIII. BARLOW AND THE GIRL. 181
XXIX. A DARING RUSE. 192
XXX. THE CHEYENNE STAMPEDE. 200
XXXI. THE THEFT OF THE NUGGETS. 208
XXXII. ALCOHOL AND ELOQUENCE. 216
XXXIII. A KINDLY WARNING. 223
XXXIV. LURED INTO DANGER. 230
XXXV. MOBBED AND THREATENED. 239
XXXVI. THE WESTERN DEAD SHOT. 245
XXXVII. THE MAN WHO INTERFERED. 249
XXXVIII. DENTON AND DELAND. 253
XXXIX. IN A WEB OF LIES. 259
XL. THE RAIN MAKER. 272
XLI. A GIRL’S HEROISM. 284
XLII. ANOTHER STOOL PIGEON. 292
XLIII. THE CAPTURE OF PANTHER PETE. 297
XLIV. THE GIRL’S FLIGHT. 304
XLV. THE FLAG OF TRUCE. 311
IN APPRECIATION OF WILLIAM F. CODY
(BUFFALO BILL).
It is now some generations since Josh Billings, Ned Buntline, and
Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, intimate friends of Colonel William F.
Cody, used to forgather in the office of Francis S. Smith, then
proprietor of the _New York Weekly_. It was a dingy little office on
Rose Street, New York, but the breath of the great outdoors stirred
there when these old-timers got together. As a result of these
conversations, Colonel Ingraham and Ned Buntline began to write of
the adventures of Buffalo Bill for Street & Smith.
Colonel Cody was born in Scott County, Iowa, February 26, 1846.
Before he had reached his teens, his father, Isaac Cody, with his
mother and two sisters, migrated to Kansas, which at that time was
little more than a wilderness.
When the elder Cody was killed shortly afterward in the Kansas
“Border War,” young Bill assumed the difficult rôle of family
breadwinner. During 1860, and until the outbreak of the Civil War,
Cody lived the arduous life of a pony-express rider. Cody volunteered
his services as government scout and guide and served throughout
the Civil War with Generals McNeil and A. J. Smith. He was a
distinguished member of the Seventh Kansas Cavalry.
During the Civil War, while riding through the streets of St. Louis,
Cody rescued a frightened schoolgirl from a band of annoyers. In true
romantic style, Cody and Louisa Federci, the girl, were married March
6, 1866.
In 1867 Cody was employed to furnish a specified amount of buffalo
meat to the construction men at work on the Kansas Pacific Railroad.
It was in this period that he received the sobriquet “Buffalo Bill.”
In 1868 and for four years thereafter Colonel Cody served as scout
and guide in campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. It was
General Sheridan who conferred on Cody the honor of chief of scouts
of the command.
After completing a period of service in the Nebraska legislature,
Cody joined the Fifth Cavalry in 1876, and was again appointed chief
of scouts.
Colonel Cody’s fame had reached the East long before, and a great
many New Yorkers went out to see him and join in his buffalo hunts,
including such men as August Belmont, James Gordon Bennett, Anson
Stager, and J. G. Heckscher. In entertaining these visitors at Fort
McPherson, Cody was accustomed to arrange wild-West exhibitions. In
return his friends invited him to visit New York. It was upon seeing
his first play in the metropolis that Cody conceived the idea of
going into the show business.
Assisted by Ned Buntline, novelist, and Colonel Ingraham, he started
his “Wild West” show, which later developed and expanded into “A
Congress of the Rough Riders of the World,” first presented at Omaha,
Nebraska. In time it became a familiar yearly entertainment in the
great cities of this country and Europe. Many famous personages
attended the performances, and became his warm friends, including Mr.
Gladstone, the Marquis of Lorne, King Edward, Queen Victoria, and the
Prince of Wales, now King of England.
At the outbreak of the Sioux, in 1890 and 1891, Colonel Cody served
at the head of the Nebraska National Guard. In 1895 Cody took up the
development of Wyoming Valley by introducing irrigation. Not long
afterward he became judge advocate general of the Wyoming National
Guard.
Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill) died in Denver, Colorado, on January
10, 1917. His legacy to a grateful world was a large share in
the development of the West, and a multitude of achievements in
horsemanship, marksmanship, and endurance that will live for ages.
His life will continue to be a leading example of the manliness,
courage, and devotion to duty that belonged to a picturesque phase
of American life now passed, like the great patriot whose career it
typified, into the Great Beyond.
BUFFALO BILL’S RUSE.
CHAPTER I.
PIZEN KATE.
The ungainly female who came roaring into Eldorado in search of the
husband who “run away” from her contrived to draw a crowd about her
in a remarkably short time.
“I’m Pizen Kate, from Kansas City!” she yelled. “Git out of my
way, er I’ll jab yer eye out with my umbreller. I’m lookin’ fer my
husband, and you ain’t him. Think I’d take up with a weasel-faced,
bow-legged speciment like you? Not on your tintype. I wouldn’t! So,
git out o’ my way!”
The man had tried to “chaff” her and had roused her ire, but he fell
back before the angry jabs of her “umbreller.”
She looked about, glaring.
She was “homely as sin.” Her features were not only irregular; they
were twisted, gnarled, and seamed. A few thin hairs of an attempted
beard floated from a mole on her chin, and on her upper lip there
was a faint trace of a mustache. She was dressed in a soiled cotton
garment, and on her head was a shapeless hat, with a faded red rose
for ornament. In her muscular right hand she flourished an ancient
umbrella.
“I heard my husband had come here, and I’m lookin’ fer him,” she
declared. “He run away from me in Kansas City, and I set out to
foller him; and I’ll foller him to the end o’ the earth but that I
git him.”
“I’m bettin’ on you, all right!” called out some irreverent
individual.
She fixed him with a glassy stare.
“Was I ’specially directin’ my langwidge to you?” she demanded. “I
hate to hear a horse bray out that way. It’s sickenin’.”
“And I hate to hear the blather of a nanny goat!”
She lifted her umbrella.
“Say that ag’in, you red-headed son of a scarecrow, and I’ll ram this
umbreller down yer neck and open it up inside of ye! I’d have you
know that I’m a lady, and don’t allow no back talk.”
“What kind o’ lookin’ feller is your husband?” another asked.
“Well, he’s better-lookin’ than them that slanders him, if he is
little and runty! He’s a small man, slim as a blacksnake, and wiry as
a watch spring, and he’s a bit oldish. He was in this town less’n a
week ago.”
“Kate, I reckon we ain’t met up with him.”
“Wot’s his name?” said another.
“What’s that got to do with it, if ye ain’t seen him?” she demanded.
She fixed her eyes on a man who had, a moment before, descended the
steps of the Golconda Hotel, and who came now toward the crowd that
hedged her in.
The man was Buffalo Bill; handsome, muscular, dressed in his border
costume, and towering a full head over the other men in the street.
“That’s him, I reckon, Katie--there comes yer husband, I’m bettin’.
You said he was little and runty, slim as a blacksnake, and wiry as a
watch spring. I guess you hit his trail here, all right.”
It was the sort of humor this crowd could understand, and they roared
hilariously.
Pizen Kate ignored them with fine scorn, and moved toward the great
scout, the men falling back before her jabbing umbrella and giving
her ample room. She pranced thus up in front of Buffalo Bill, and
stood eying him, umbrella in one hand and the other hand on her hip.
“I think I seen you onct,” she announced, as the scout politely
lifted his big hat to her.
“Possibly,” he said, smiling.
“You’re Persimmon Pete, the gazeboo what run away with my old man.”
The crowd snickered, and then roared again.
“Hardly,” said Buffalo Bill.
“Oh, I know ye!” was her vociferous assertion. “You come to Kansas
City with an Injun medicine company, and lectured and sold medicine.
And my old man went to your show and seen ye; and then he got
magnetized by ye, somehow, and wandered off after you when you went
away. He was dead gone on big men. I suppose that was because he was
so durn little and runty himself. It made him like big men. And so he
follered you off when you left town. Now, ain’t that so? I know ye.
You’re Persimmon Pete.”
The scout lifted his hat again, flushing slightly, for he heard the
roars of the crowd.
“Madam,” he said amiably, “I must deny the gentle insinuation. I
never saw your husband, nor Persimmon Pete.”
“You deny it?” she shrieked.
“Certainly. I am compelled to doubt your word.”
“And you never seen my man?”
“I assure you that I never had that pleasure. What is his name?”
“If you’re goin’ to start in by lyin’, it don’t make no difference
what his name is!” she declared.
“It might help in his identification,” he suggested.
“Well, then, it’s Nicholas Nomad.” She faced toward the snickering
crowd. “Now laugh!” she yelled. “It’s his name, and it fits him; fer
if he ain’t about next to no man I dunno it. Think of him leavin’ me
in the suds there in----”
“Was ye washin’?” some one yelled.
“Well, yes, I was, though how you know it I can’t guess. I was
washin’ that day fer Mrs. McGinniss and her six children, and so I
had to stay at home and couldn’t watch him. He took advantage of it
and skun out. But I’ll git him yit, and when I do----” She shook her
red fist at the crowd.
“You’ll wallop him?”
“Wallop him? He’ll think he’s been mixed up in a barbed-wire cyclone;
I won’t leave an inch of hide on him.” She turned back to Buffalo
Bill. “Ye ain’t seen him, you’re sure?” she said anxiously.
“I’m sorry to say that I haven’t, madam.”
“You ain’t lyin’ to me?”
“No.”
She gave him a fierce glare, and then turned to hurl back some words
of defiance to the shouting and laughing crowd.
“Don’t git too clost to me!” she warned. “I’m a lady, and I won’t
stand it.”
Then she moved on up the street, looking for her husband, the crowd
of amused men and boys streaming after her. Buffalo Bill followed her
movements with an amused smile.
“Cody,” said the hotel clerk, who had come down into the street,
“I’ve seen all sorts of females in my day, but she takes the cake.”
Buffalo Bill laughed and turned back toward the hotel.
“A bit peculiar, to say the least,” he agreed. “I don’t think I ever
saw another just like her. But we’re likely to meet all kinds of
queer characters out here in the West.”