ABANDONED.
When Pool Clayton came to himself, with the darkness about him,
except where it was lightened by the dying camp fire, he saw that he
was alone--that he had been abandoned.
His horse, grazing close by, tearing noisily at the grass, was the
only thing of life near him; but he shuddered when he heard, afar
off, the howl of wolves.
“The men have left me!” he said, staggering to his feet.
There was caked blood on his face, and on his shirt, for that blow in
the face had caused his nose to bleed freely. He was stiff and sore,
and he felt dizzy and wretchedly sick and miserable.
As full recollection came to him, his whole body burned with
uncontrollable rage against Snaky Pete and the men who constituted
his band of road-agent outlaws.
Clayton glanced round, looked at the sky, and then at the nearly
extinct fire.
“They’ve been gone some time,” he said. “And have left me out here,
thinking maybe the wolves would get me.”
Then he swore violently, raging against Snaky Pete, whom he loaded
with opprobrious names and noisy abuse. By and by he became saner and
cooler, though his new hatred of Snaky Pete did not abate.
He lighted a torch of grass at the fire, and looked for the trail of
the outlaws, finding it soon.
“Gone on,” he said; “and they’ll camp about morning at the Poplar
Bluffs.”
He knew the place, and was sure he could find the outlaws in camp
there; but he did not know whether to follow them or not.
In his searching he expected to come upon the body of the old
trapper, being fully persuaded that Snaky Pete meant his death.
“They’ll shoot him, and leave him by the trail for the wolves to
eat,” he said. “Maybe that’s what the wolves are howling over now.”
He shuddered, as when Snaky Pete commanded him to shoot the old man.
“I couldn’t do that!” was his thought. “I couldn’t do it!”
He stirred the fire into new life, for its light drove away a certain
lonely feeling that troubled him. And he began to think of what he
should now do.
“I was a fool for ever joinin’ ’em,” he assured himself, groaning
over the memory of Snaky Pete’s brutal blow. “He’ll kill me, mebbe,
if I foller ’em; and the boys will make sport of me.”
He was beginning to realize that he was not, after all, cut from the
same cloth as these outlaws.
He had been wild in the town, had gambled, and got into bad company;
and, being tempted one night, he had gone with an acquaintance and
joined Snaky Pete’s band of road agents; being assured by his new
friend--one of Snaky Pete’s men--that the life led by this band was
one long and gay carouse, with plenty of fun--altogether a desirable
life for a young man of courage and spirit; who felt the chafing
restraint of law and order.
Pool Clayton had been with the band less than a week, and was finding
the life anything but what he had pictured it. The men were rougher
and coarser and more brutal than he had imagined; and altogether the
delightful stir and excitement had not been what he anticipated.
Snaky Pete, whom he knew only too well, had been cruelly harsh, and
had told him he was a coward and a milksop, and needed “hardening.”
Already there had been several attempts to “harden” him; that is,
to brutalize him, from which he had shrunk. This last attempt,
however, had gone beyond anything he had dreamed of; when he was
ordered to kill a man in cold blood, just as if that man were no more
than a wolf. Clayton had not been able to do it; and this was the
result--struck senseless to the ground, and abandoned on the lonely
prairie.
“Mebbe I’d better go back to the town,” he said; “I ain’t fit for
this.”
But back in the town officers were watching for him for some small
offense against the law; and he abandoned the thought of doing that
when he recalled the fact.
There seemed nothing he could do except follow the outlaws and rejoin
them. He believed that long before he could overtake them the old
trapper would be murdered and put out of the way, and that murder, at
least, would not be forced on him.
“I s’pose I can bear the boys chaffing and joking me,” he mused.
“And I reckon I do need hardening, if I’m to keep with ’em, and lead
this life. I reckon I am a sort of milksop and weak.”
Yet he could not feel right toward Snaky Pete. A feeling that was
murderous burned in his very soul against the brutal outlaw leader.
“That he should treat me that way--he!--when he’d ought to be my best
friend! I wouldn’t joined ’em, but fer the fact that I learned he was
the leader; and now to have him treat me that way!”
After a while, when he felt better and stronger, he rose from the
fire and got his horse. Then he mounted, and rode away in the
direction of Poplar Bluffs, the camping place of which he knew.
His evil tendencies, and evil surroundings and past, had conquered
again; he meant to rejoin the road agents, and “face the music,”
whatever it might be.