On the Trail
The convalescents rode away into a desert green with spring. The fragrant
chaparral thickets were bursting into flower. Spanish bayonets studded
the plains. Everywhere about them was the promise of a new life not yet
burnt by hot summer suns to a crisp.
During the day they ran into a swamp country and crossed a bayou where
cypress knees and blue gums showed fantastic in the eerie gloom of the
stagnant water. From this they emerged to a more wooded region and made
an early camp on the edge of a grove of ash trees bordering a small
stream where pecans grew thick.
Shortly after daybreak they were jogging on at a walk-trot, the road gait
of the Southwest, into the treeless country of the prairie. They nooned
at an arroyo seco, and after they had eaten took a siesta during the heat
of the day. Night brought with it a thunderstorm and they took refuge in
a Mexican hut built of palisades and roofed with grass sod. A widow lived
alone in the jacal, but she made them welcome to the best she had. The
young men slept in a corner of the hut on a dry cowskin spread upon the
mud floor, their saddles for pillows and their blankets rolled about
them.
While she was cooking their breakfast, Prince noticed the tears rolling
down her cheeks. She was a comely young woman and he asked her gallantly
in the bronco Spanish of the border if there was anything he could do to
relieve her distress.
She shook her head mournfully. "No, señor," she answered in her native
tongue. "Only time can do that. I mourn my husband. He was a drunken
ne'er-do-well, but he was my man. So I mourn a fitting period. He died in
that corner of the room where you slept."
"Indeed! When?" asked Billie politely.
"Ten days ago. Of smallpox."
The young men never ate that breakfast. They fled into the sunlight and
put many hurried miles between them and their amazed hostess. At the
first stream they stripped, bathed, washed their clothes, dipped the
saddles, and lay nude in the warm sand until their wearing apparel was
dry.
For many days they joked each other about that headlong flight, but
underneath their gayety was a dread which persisted.
"I'm like Doña Isabel with her grief. Only time can heal me of that scare
she threw into Billie Prince," the owner of that name confessed.
"Me too," assented Clanton, helping himself to pinole. "I'll bet I lost a
year's growth, and me small at that."
Prince had been in the employ of Webb for three years. During the long
hours when they rode side by side he told his companion much about the
Flying V Y outfit and its owner.
"He's a straight-up man, Homer Webb is. His word is good all over Texas.
He'll sure do to take along," said Billie by way of recommendation.
"And Joe Yankie--does he stack up A 1 too?" asked the boy dryly.
"I never liked Joe. It ain't only that he'll run a sandy on you if he can
or that he's always ridin' any one that will stand to be picked on. Joe's
sure a bully. But then he's game enough, too, for that matter. I've seen
him fight like a pack of catamounts. Outside of that I've got a hunch
that he's crooked as a dog's hind leg. Mebbe I'm wrong, I'm tellin' you
how he strikes me. If I was Homer Webb, right now when trouble is comin'
up with the Snaith-McRobert outfit, I'd feel some dubious about Joe. He's
a sulky, revengeful brute, an' the old man has pulled him up with a tight
rein more'n once."
"What do you mean--trouble with the Snaith-McRobert outfit?"
"That's a long story. The bad feelin' started soon after the war when
Snaith an' the old man were brandin' mavericks. It kind of smouldered
along for a while, then broke out again when both of them began to bid
on Government beef contracts. There's been some shootin' back an' forth
an' there's liable to be a whole lot more. The Lazy S M--that's the
Snaith-McRobert brand--claims the whole Pecos country by priority. The
old man ain't recognizin' any such fool title. He's got more 'n thirty
thousand head of cattle there an' he'll fight for the grass if he has to.
O' course there's plenty of room for everybody if it wasn't for the beef
contracts an' the general bad feelin'."
"Don't you reckon it will be settled peaceably? They'll get together an'
talk it over like reasonable folks."
Billie shook his head. "The Lazy S M are bringin' in a lot of bad men
from Texas an' the Strip. Some of our boys ain't exactly gun-shy either.
One of these days there's sure goin' to be sudden trouble."
"I'm no gunman," protested Clanton indignantly. "I hired out to the
old man to punch cows. Whyfor should I take any chances with the
Snaith-McRobert outfit when I ain't got a thing in the world against
them?"
"No, you're no gunman," grinned his friend in amiable derision.
"Jimmie-Go-Get-'Em is a quiet little Sunday-go-to-meetin' kid. It was
kinder by accident that he bumped off four Apaches an' a halfbreed the
other day."
"Now don't you blame me for that, Billie. You was hell-bent on goin' into
the Roubideau place an' I trailed along. When you got yore pill in the
laig you made me ride up the gulch alone. I claim I wasn't to blame for
them Mescaleros. I wasn't either."
Prince had made his prophecy about the coming trouble lightly. He could
not guess that the most terrible feud in the history of the West was to
spring out of the quarrel between Snaith and Webb, a border war so grim
and deadly that within three years more than a hundred lusty men were to
fall in battle and from assassination. It would have amazed him to know
that the bullet which laid low the renegade in Shoot-a-Buck Cañon had set
the spark to the evil passions which resulted in what came to be called
the Washington County War. Least of all could he tell that the girl-faced
boy riding beside him was to become the best-known character of all the
desperate ones engaged in the trouble.