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TRAIL'S END
by
G. W. OGDEN
Author of
The Duke of Chimney Butte,
The Flockmaster of Poison Creek,
The Land of Last Chance, Etc.
Frontispiece by P. V. E. Ivory
[Illustration: Morgan, grim as judgment, stood among the crowd of
wastrels and women of poisoned lips (Page 229)]
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Made in the United States of America
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1921
Published September, 1921
Copyrighted in Great Britain
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Unconquered Land 1
II The Meat Hunter 11
III First Blood 23
IV The Optimist Explains 36
V Ascalon Awake 54
VI Riders of the Chisholm Trail 65
VII A Gentle Cowboy Joke 77
VIII The Atavism of a Man 87
IX News from Ascalon 101
X The Hour of Vengeance 111
XI The Penalty 124
XII In Place of a Regiment 141
XIII The Hand of the Law 157
XIV Some Fool With a Gun 165
XV Will His Luck Hold? 176
XVI The Meat Hunter Comes 187
XVII With Clean Hands 199
XVIII A Bondsman Breathes Easier 216
XIX The Curse of Blood 223
XX Unclean 234
XXI As One That Is Dead 241
XXII Whiners at the Funeral 245
XXIII Ascalon Curls Its Lip 259
XXIV Madness of the Winds 277
XXV A Summons at Sunrise 290
XXVI In the Square at Ascalon 299
XXVII Absolution 315
XXVIII Sunset 325
TRAIL'S END
CHAPTER I
THE UNCONQUERED LAND
Bones.
Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. The
tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a
sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its
treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile
wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in
the dimming furrows which the grasses were reclaiming for their own.
A land of desolation and defeat it seemed to the traveler, indeed, as he
followed the old trail along which the commerce of the illimitable West
once was borne. Although that highway had belonged to another
generation, and years had passed since an ox train toiled over it on its
creeping journey toward distant Santa Fé, the ruts of old wheels were
deep in the soil, healed over by the sod again, it is true, but seamed
like scars on a veteran's cheek. One could not go astray on that broad
highway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where new
ones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.
Present-day traffic had broken a new trail between the old ones; it
wound a dusty gray line through the early summer green of the prairie
grass, endless, it seemed, to the eyes of the leg-weary traveler who
bent his footsteps along it that sunny morning. This passenger, afoot on
a road where it was almost an offense to travel by such lowly means, was
a man of thirty or thereabout, tall and rather angular, who took the
road in long strides much faster than the freighters' trains had
traveled it in the days of his father. He carried a black, dingy leather
bag swinging from his long arm, a very lean and unpromising repository,
upon which the dust of the road lay spread.
Despite the numerous wheel tracks in the road, all of them apparently
fresh, there was little traffic abroad. Not a wagon had passed him since
morning, not a lift had been given him for a single mile. Now, mounting
a ridge toward which he had been pressing forward the past hour, which
had appeared a hill of consequence in the distance, but now flattened
out to nothing more than a small local divide, he put down his bag,
flung his dusty black hat beside it, and stood wiping his face with a
large turkey-red handkerchief which he unknotted from about his neck.
His face was of that rugged type common among the pioneers of the West,
lean and harsh-featured, yet nobly austere, the guarantee of a soul
above corruption and small trickery, of a nature that endures patiently,
of an anger slow to move. There were bright hues as of glistening metal
in his close-cut light hair as he stood bareheaded in the sun.
Sheep sorrel was blooming by the wheel tracks of the road, purple and
yellow; daisy-like flowers, with pale yellow petals and great wondering
hearts like frightened eyes, grew low among the short grass; countless
strange blooms spread on the prairie green, cheering for their brief day
the stern face of a land that had broken the hearts of men in its
unkindness and driven them away from its fair promises. The traveler
sighed, unable to understand it quite.
All day he had been passing little sod houses whose walls were
crumbling, whose roofs had fallen in, whose doors beckoned in the wind a
sad invitation to come in and behold the desolation that lay within.
Even here, close by the road, ran the grass-grown furrows of an
abandoned field, the settler's dwelling-place unmarked by sod or stone.
What tragedy was written in those wavering lines; what heartbreak of
going away from some dear hope and broken dream! Here a teamster was
cutting across the prairie to strike the road a little below the point
where the traveler stood. Extra side boards were on his wagon-box, as
they used to put them on in corn-gathering time back in the traveler's
boyhood home in Indiana. The wagon was heaped high with white, dry
bones.
Bones. Nothing left to haul out of that land but bones. The young man
took up his valise and hat and struck off down the road to intercept the
freighter of this prairie product, hoping for an invitation to ride,
better pleased by the prospect of resting living bones on dead dry ones
than racking them in that strain to reach the town on the railroad, his
journey's end, on foot before nightfall.
The driver's hat was white, like his bones; it drooped in weather-beaten
limpness about his ears, hiding his face, but he appeared to have an
hospitable heart in spite of the cheerlessness of his pursuit. Coming to
the road a little before the traveler reached the point of conjunction,
he drew the team to a stand, waiting his approach.
"Have a ride?" the freighter invited, edging over on the backless spring
seat as he spoke, making room.
The bone-wagon driver was a hollow-framed man, who looked as if he had
starved with the country but endured past all bounds of hardship and
discouragement. He looked hungry--hungry for food, hungry for change,
hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below his
stubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in his
skin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly on
his broken seat, sagging forward with forearms across his thighs.
"Footin' it over to Ascalon?" he asked, as the traveler mounted beside
him.
"Yes sir, I'm headin' that way."
"Come fur?"
"Well, yes," thoughtfully, as if he considered what might be counted far
in that land of unobstructed horizons, "I have come a considerable
little stretch."
"I thought maybe you was one of them new settlers in here, goin' over to
Ascalon to ketch the train," the bone man ventured, putting his inquiry
for further particulars as politely as he knew how.
"I'm not a settler yet, but I expect to try it here."
"You don't tell me?"
"Yes sir; that's my intention."
"Where you from?"
"Iowa."
The bone man looked his passenger over with interest, from his feet in
their serviceable shoes, to his head under his round-crowned,
wide-brimmed black hat.
"A good many of 'em used to come in here from Ioway and Newbrasky in the
early days," he said. "You never walked plumb from there, did you?"
"I thought of stopping at Buffalo Creek, back fifteen or twenty miles,
but I didn't like the country around there. They told me it was better
at Ascalon, so I just struck out to walk across the loop of the railroad
and take a close look at the land as I went along."
"You must be something of a walker," the bone man marveled.
"I used to follow a walking cultivator across an eighty-acre cornfield,"
the traveler replied.
"Yes, that'll stretch a feller's legs," the bone man admitted,
reminiscently. "Nothing like follerin' a plow to give a man legs and
wind. But they don't mostly walk around in this country; they kind of
suspicion a man when they see him hoofin' it."
"There doesn't seem to be many of them to either walk or ride," the
traveler commented, sweeping a look around the empty land.
"It used to be full of homesteaders all through this country--I seen 'em
come and I seen 'em go."
"I've seen traces of them all along the railroad for the last hundred
miles or more. It must have been a mighty exodus, a sad thing to see."
"Accordin' to the way you look at it, I reckon," the bone man reflected.
"They're comin' to this country ag'in, flocks of 'em. This makes the
third time they've tried to break this part of Kansas to ride, and I
don't know, on my soul, whether they'll ever do it or not. Maybe I'll
have more bones to pick up in a year or two."
"It seems to be one big boneyard; I saw cars of bones on every sidetrack
as I came through."
"Yes, I tell folks that come here and try to farm that bones was the
best crop this country ever raised, and it'll be about the only one. I
come in here with the railroad, I used to drive a team pickin' up the
buffaloes the contractors' meat hunter killed."
"You know the history of its ups and downs, then," the young man said,
with every evidence of deep interest.
"I guess I do, as well as any man. Bones was the first freight the
railroad hauled out of here, and bones'll be the last. I follered the
railroad camps after they built out of the buffalo country and didn't
need me any more, pickin' up the bones. Then the settlers begun to come
in, drawed on by the stuff them railroad colonization agents used to put
in the papers back East. The country broke their backs and drove 'em out
after four or five years. Then I follered around after _them_ and picked
up the bones.
"Yes, there used to be some familiar lookin' bones among 'em once in a
while in them times. I used to bury that kind. A few of them settlers
stuck, the ones that had money to put in cattle and let 'em increase on
the range. They've done well--you'll see their ranches all along the
Arkansaw when you travel down that way. This is a cattle country, son;
that's what the Almighty made it for. It never can be anything else."
"And there was another wave of immigration, you say, after that?" the
passenger asked, after sitting a while in silence turning over what the
old pioneer had said.
"Yes, wave is about right. They come in by freight trainload, cars of
horses and cattle, and machinery for farmin', from back there in Ohio
and Indiany and Ellinoi--all over that country where things a man plants
in the ground grows up and comes to something. They went into this
pe-rairie and started a bustin' it up like the ones ahead of 'em did.
Shucks! you can turn a ribbon of this blame sod a hundred miles long and
never break it. What can a farmer do with land that holds together that
way? Nothin'. But them fellers planted corn in them strips of sod,
raised a few nubbins, some of 'em, some didn't raise even fodder. It run
along that way a few years, hot winds cookin' their crops when they did
git the ground softened up so stuff would begin to make roots and grow,
cattle and horses dyin' off in the winter and burnin' up in the fires
them fool fellers didn't know how to stop when they got started in this
grass. They thinned out year after year, and I drove around over the
country and picked up their bones.
"That crowd of settlers is about all gone now, only one here and there
along some crick. Bones is gittin' scarce, too. I used to make more
when I got four dollars a ton for 'em than I do now when they pay me
ten. Grind 'em up to put on them farms back in the East, they tell me.
Takin' the bones of famine from one place to put on fat in another.
Funny, ain't it?"
The traveler said it was strange, indeed, but that it was the way of
nature for the upstanding to flourish on the remains of the fallen. The
bone man nodded, and allowed that it was so, world without end,
according to his own observations in the scale of living things from
grass blade to mankind.
"How are they coming in now--by the trainload?" the traveler asked,
reverting to the influx of settlers.
"These seem to be a different class of men," the bone man replied, his
perplexity plain in his face. "I don't make 'em out as easy as I did the
ones ahead of 'em. These fellers generally come alone, scoutin' around
to see the lay of the country--I run into 'em right along drivin' livery
rigs, see 'em around for a couple or three weeks sometimes. Then they go
away, and the first thing I know they're back with their immigrant car
full of stuff, haulin' out to some place somebody went broke on back in
the early days. They seem to be a calculatin' kind, but no man ain't
deep anough to slip up on the blind side of this country and grab it by
the mane like them fellers seems to think they're doin'. It'll throw
'em, and it'll throw 'em hard."
"It looks to me like it would be a good country for wheat," the traveler
said.
"Wheat!"
The bone man pulled up on his horses, checking them as if he would stop
and let this dangerous fellow off. He looked at the traveler with
incredulous stare, into which a shading of pity came, drawing his
naturally long face longer. "I'd just as well stop and let you start
back right now, mister." He tightened up a little more on the lines.
There was merriment in the stranger's gray eyes, a smile on his homely
face that softened its harsh lines.
"Has nobody ever tried it?" he inquired.
"There's been plenty of fools here, but none that wild that I ever heard
of," the bone man said. "You're a hundred miles and more past the
deadline for wheat--you'd just as well try to raise bananers here.
Wheat! it'd freeze out in the winter and blow out by the roots in the
spring if any of it got through."
The traveler swept a long look around the country, illusive, it seemed,
according to its past treatment of men, in its restful beauty and secure
feeling of peace. He was silent so long that the bone man looked at him
again keenly, measuring him up and down as he would some monstrosity
seen for the first time.
"Maybe you're right," the young man said at last.
The bone man grunted, with an inflection of superiority, and drove on,
meditating the mental perversions of his kind.
"Over in Ascalon," he said, breaking silence by and by, "there's a
feller by the name of Thayer--Judge Thayer, they call him, but he ain't
never been a judge of nothin' since I've knowed him--lawyer and land
agent for the railroad. He brings a lot of people in here and sells 'em
railroad land. He says wheat'll grow in this country, tells them
settlers that to fetch 'em here. You two ought to git together--you'd
sure make a pair to draw to."
"Wouldn't we?" said the stranger, in hearty humor.
"What business did you foller back there in Ioway?" inquired the bone
man, not much respect in him now for the man he had lifted out of the
road.
"I was a professional optimist," the traveler replied, grave enough for
all save his eyes.
The bone man thought it over a spell. "Well, I don't think you'll do
much in Ascalon," he said. "People don't wear specs out here in this
country much. Anybody that wants 'em goes to the feller that runs the
jewelry store."
The stranger attempted no correction, but sat whistling a merry tune as
he looked over the country. The bone man drove in silence until they
rose a swell that brought the town of Ascalon into view, a passenger
train just pulling into the station.
"Octomist! Wheat!" said the bone man, with discount on the words that
left them so poor and worthless they would not have passed in the
meanest exchange in the world.