Trail Dust Read online

  “Lord, but he’s quick!” he muttered.

  “You just findin’ that out?” asked Pete. “Hey, cook: where’s th’ oil?”

  “Right where you can put yore hand on it,” retorted the cook.

  XXVI

  The sun beat down, and the heat was punishing. Here the trail was wider, with wider, trampled margins; and in places its course was lost, as the course of a brook is lost in ponds and lakes of its own making: herd after herd had lost momentum along this homestretch of the beef highway, to be drifted off and grazed while their trail bosses rode hopefully on to town, there to busy themselves with inquiries about buyers, about empty cars on the siding at the shipping pens, and about many and sundry other matters; while south of them or west of them on the range their crews waited impatiently for time off in which to taste the liberty and license to be found in the town. But all through the trampled side trails, all divergencies, past miles of ruined grazing, and grazing herds far from the beaten welts across the prairie, the main line trail pushed ever on, heading almost like an arrow for the Platte and the vast regions beyond; for while Bulltown was a shipping point, the shipping point for a while, it was not for all herds the end of trail. Only for those animals bound for the stockyards of the Middle West was it the end of the cattle highway; but other thousands of cattle were pushed on past this turbulent cattle center, bound north, and then north–northeast, northwest and west to stock that great empire of grass and to put back the wealth taken out by every previous era. Instead of being drained, now the West was being stocked.

  Hopalong Cassidy loped along the great trail, his herd far behind him, for he was now alone, with neither cattle, outfit, nor chuck wagon under his watchful eye. Behind him, at this moment two full days’ drive away, plodded his Circle 4s under a competent outfit and a canny second boss. Before him, still miles away, lay Bulltown with its memories of buffalo slaughter, with its cattle pens, its railroad, its rough and turbulent population; Bulltown, for him and the Circle 4s, the end of the trail. He, too, had business to attend to: somewhere in town was the buyer of his herd, ready to count, to receive, and to pay if the cattle came up to the specifications mentioned in the agreement. Bulltown, with its shantyville south of the tracks and its famed Boot Hill north of them.

  He followed up the little creek, its narrowing valley almost devoid of grass. It had been trampled and pounded by thousands upon thousands of hoofs. Some trail drivers felt that they had left the South behind them when Red River had been crossed; but the mouth of this little creek and the river it poured into left no uncertainty in that regard. Once across this prairie river, this boundary line of the old Spanish territory, one was truly in the North.

  The trail climbed the slope, angling up it, and forsook the little creek as if impatient to get over the little watershed and reach that pounded flattening of the low cut–banks of the river, where the narrow belt of cottonwood trees and willows revealed a gap which was noticeable for as far as the eye could see it. One might regard this flattened place as a funnel through which poured the cattle from thousands of square miles of southern range, cattle pointed here and funneled from the South into the North.

  At the top of the watershed Hopalong drew up and stopped, sitting quietly in the saddle while he scanned the country under his eyes. Cattle. Grazing cattle, herd after herd of them, loosely herded but herds no less, occupied those areas where the grass sufficed. It would not suffice them long, nor would it need to, because the end of trail for them was the shipping pens. Back of these and beyond them and north of them and east of them there were others, herds which neither waited for cars on the siding nor for canny buyers, herds summer grazing.

  Hopalong pressed his knees against the horse, but checked the animal almost instantly, his gaze flashing back to something north of him. It was something tenuous and faint, something so faint that only its background had revealed it to a plainsman’s eye; something so far away that, by watching it, it did not seem to move; but glance away and back again, and its position had shifted by a hair. Had he been closer, up on the edge of the right of way, that faint plume would have dusted him with ashes; and the roar and the clangor, the hiss of steam and the clicking of pounded rail joints would have sent his horse into a frenzy of terror. At last the cook would see a locomotive instead of the picture of one. For perhaps a full minute he watched that faint smudge and then, sighing for no known reason, rode on again.

  The river was low, and this was in the days before the irrigation ditches of the next state on the west had robbed the stream of water and turned it into a mere trickle. That country got rid of its storm waters quickly, for swiftly they poured down slopes where nothing interposed to check them, and quickly they rolled away.

  The gap in the cottonwood fringe came nearer. The roan trotted down the gentle incline to the river’s edge and paused to flick the water with its nose. Across the river lay another gentle incline where the trail left the stream, this one soft and wet from the water which had dripped from bovine bellies and rolled down bovine legs. Hopalong noticed this difference between the two slopes and smiled: nothing seemed to be southbound in this part of the country, except perhaps the stagecoach into the Nations, and small groups of cowmen riding homeward. To the right and the left of the gap were the low cut–banks, backed by the eternal cottonwoods and willow brush of prairie streams.

  He sent the horse into the river, raised his feet and the stirrups with them, and rode up the farther bank dry–shod. The little incline led to ground which, although several feet higher than the level of the stream, and free from springs, was wet and deeply puddled by hoofs which had cut in to a depth of several inches. He rode on again.

  Ahead of him at some distance was a horizontal line, without a dip or break in it, and it stretched from far on his right to still farther on his left. Such a thing in nature as a long, straight line was strange to his experience; and suddenly he knew it for what it was and marveled at the progress in the westward pushing of this railroad. It had not been there last season. Well, when it got to Raton Pass it would not push on so swiftly! He rode up to it, and as he crossed over it to gain the old wagon trail on the other side he looked westward along the rails and could not see the end of them. The heat waves made them shimmy and writhe, contorting them out of parallel.

  He rode eastward along the deeply rutted and multiple–rutted dusty highway, which once had led to a foreign land. Here it was very wide, a series of roads, each new pair of tracks made when the ruts of the older had grown too deep. Along these tracks heavily laden mules had plodded, great wagons had creaked and strained as they clacked and rattled behind the straining ox teams. Here along this beaten baldness had ridden and trudged an army of conquest, call it what else you will; over this hammered highway had rolled the intermittent stagecoaches to and from the land of adobe; and later the great bull teams of the professional freighters had kept the dust aloft. Here Kiowa, Comanche, Pawnee, and other red tribes had killed their buffalo and one another. He glanced at the twin rails just south of him and frowned.

  He was now riding with the sun at his back, and its rays were hot enough to make him shift his neckerchief. He passed the wreck of a great freight wagon, thriftily stripped of iron: time was when its timbers would not have been left, but would have been eagerly gleaned for campfires. Again he glanced at the rails, and his frown had grown. A rusty scraper, worn out and abandoned, lay bottom up just beyond the wagon, setting the air above it aquiver with reflected heat. What it was, he did not know or greatly care to know. He hoped it would be many years before the railroads ruined his part of the country, and he became busy with his thoughts; but the roan loped on, not cheating.

  The plume of smoke he had seen from the crest of the little watershed between Mulberry Creek and the river was now streaming upward, not now so faint and tenuous, from in front of a curious structure of vertical posts and horizontal boards. This affair was divided into sections, and each section had a runway slanting upward on the side ne
arest the track, and to a height even with the floor of a cattle car. In the fence on the opposite side were gates opening into each section; and along the tops of the dividing fences between the pens were narrow footwalks, the width of a wide board. A man in high–heeled boots would not feel any too secure when prodding cattle from such a precarious footing. Each section was as wide as the length of an empty car, and the door of each car on the siding was even with its own runway. It might even be that this train of empty cattle cars was the one which would carry the Circle 4 cattle on to the stockyards.

  The plume of smoke broke suddenly into jerky, coughing movement, jetting upward furiously, and the bell–stacked engine forsook its cars and drew away with a fussy clanking, its bell ringing clangorously. Hopalong came out of his reverie as the saddle suddenly smashed upward under him, and for several moments he had his hands so full of terrified horse that he was oblivious of everything else. When the flurry was over he relaxed and looked around him and discovered that he was, indeed, in Bulltown; but during his fight with the frightened horse he had not noticed one of Bulltown’s citizens who had taken a swift, deep, and furtive interest in him; and who had taken quick advantage of the pitching of the horse to slip out of sight behind a pile of boards and rubbish, only the top of his head showing above the pile.

  This citizen wore a full beard and was only now enjoying the restored use of right arm and shoulder, both of which had been put out of commission by Hopalong himself many miles down the great cattle trail. This bearded gentleman was the only survivor of the outfit which had been led by the fake trail cutter south of Waggoner’s, and he yearned for revenge. He yearned for it so much that for an instant he held a Colt leveled across the rubbish pile, and only the glimmering inspiration of avarice kept his finger from tightening on the trigger; this horseman was a trail boss and evidently bound for the pens. That meant, perhaps, sale and delivery of his herd; and this, in turn, meant money received: money in an amount amazing to a shiftless man. Revenge could wait and perhaps, by waiting, grow fuller, sweeter, and very profitable. The bearded gentleman crouched lower behind the rubbish pile and sheathed his gun; and, when the way was open, scurried swiftly roundabout toward the center of the town. He knew where a trail boss would go to meet a buyer; and, better still, he himself was an habitué of the bar in that hostelry.

  Hopalong rode past the barn of the Fort Sill stage, a few corrals, a line of false–fronted buildings which extended along only one side of the street, and stopped in front of a two–story frame structure across the face of which was a faint legend in sun–bleached paint: TRAIL HOTEL. Tossing the reins across the tie rail, he left the roan to itself, crossed the narrow porch, and slowly entered the open door.

  The clerk looked up, nodded, and spoke:

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Has John Babson got here yet?” mildly asked the trail boss.

  “Yes, sir. You’ll find him in th’ bar.”

  Hopalong nodded and moved on again. He stepped through another open door and found himself in a long narrow room, cluttered up with a bar, tables, chairs, two cold stoves of the big–bellied type, sand boxes on the floor and chromos on the walls. One of the latter portrayed Julius Cæsar in a stagy posture, and right through the center of the Emperor’s right eye was a neat round hole a little under half an inch in diameter. It gave the noble Roman a most peculiar expression, which became much more peculiar at certain hours of the day when sunlight stole in to shine through that optic. Hopalong fairly itched to balance the Emperor’s eyes, but put the whim from him and gave his attention to a group of men talking and smoking at a far table. He moved on again, his gaze on the group, and stopped at the side of one chair.

  “Hello, Babson,” he said quietly and smiled.

  The well–dressed man leaned quickly back in the chair, looking up curiously at the dusty and booted newcomer. Then he smiled suddenly and stood up, his right hand going out in greeting.

  “Hello, Cassidy!” he cried. “Here I’ve been expecting you almost every day, and yet I didn’t recognize you for a moment. How are you?”

  “All right, I reckon, an’ a year older,” replied the trail boss, shaking hands heartily.

  “Huh! So you are: so am I; but a year don’t show on young fellers like you. I should have known you as you stepped through the door. Here: meet the boys,” and the introductions were properly made and acknowledged.

  “Have a drink,” invited one of the men and waved toward a chair.

  To refuse would be a discourtesy, and Hopalong knew that one round must grow until it was all square before the idiotic amenities were complied with. He did not particularly want a drink, unless it was water, but he went through with the ritual, serenely careless as to the number of drinks involved, for even then he was comforted by the knowledge that he had an amazing capacity for hard liquor. He could go farther and stay more sober than any other man in the group. The rounds followed one another in due course, and the talk was idle and got nowhere. After a little while of this, Babson slowly pushed back from the table.

  “If you gentlemen will excuse us, Cassidy and I have a little matter of business to talk over which would only bore you,” he said. “We won’t be long.”

  The two men passed through the office and sought chairs on the narrow board porch, and as the chairs creaked with their weight, a bearded gentleman walked swiftly through the rear door of the barroom and entered the office. He nodded to the idle clerk, bought a cigar, picked up a Harper’s Monthly, and sauntered toward the front door; but just before he got that far he became so deeply engrossed in the pages of the magazine that he stopped suddenly, leaned lazily against the frame of a window, and read intently. The voices from the porch could be clearly heard.

  Hopalong reached for his tobacco sack, but found a cigar pushed under his nose.

  “Try this,” invited the cattle buyer with a smile.

  Hopalong abandoned the quest for the tobacco sack, took the cigar, turned it curiously in his fingers, and read the band. He handled it gingerly, for already the dry prairie air had sucked the moisture from it.

  “Reckon he was a right smart man,” he gravely observed.

  “Who?” demanded the buyer.

  “Henry Clay,” explained Hopalong, glancing again at the band. “I’ve heard about him.”

  “Guess he was. He was so smart that us Northerners could only find one man to match him,” laughed the buyer, and held out a lighted match after waiting for the stinking sulphur to sizzle and burn away. Then he touched the match to his own cigar and flipped it into the street. “Well,” he said, “you’re about on time.”

  “I figgered to be,” replied the trail boss. “Trail drivin’ is right oncertain, an’ I left myself a little give–an’–take. Th’ herd’ll be here day after tomorrow. When it gets here I’m comin’ in after you.”

  “You’re coming in after me?” repeated the buyer in some surprise. “Aren’t you going to stay in town until it gets here?”

  “No, reckon not: as I just said, trail drivin’s right oncertain, what with one thing an’ another. There’s plenty of two–laigged scum hangin’ ’round cow towns,” explained the trail boss, smiling a little. “Gosh, but this cigar stings considerable.”

  “Havana always stings the nose. Nobody’ll bother your herd when it’s so close to town.”

  “No?” drawled Hopalong. “Where you find th’ most humans you’ll mebby find th’ most thieves.” He glanced at the roan, lazily switching flies. “I just rode in to see if you was here an’ ready to receive. I didn’t aim to drive th’ herd too near to town until you was. Anyhow, I wouldn’t–a done so because of th’ poor grazin’. Now I’ll go back an’ keep it comin’.”

  “Well, I’m here, and I’m ready,” replied the buyer. “The money’s in the safe, and the bill of sale is in my pocket ready for signing. I suppose the herd’s up to specifications?”

  “Anythin’ with Bar 20 burned onto its hide allus is,” answered Hopalong. He was looking at h
is companion rather curiously. “You just said th’ money’s in th’ safe: last time it was a draft, which is a lot better. What kinda money, for Gawd’s sake: hard or soft?”

  “Soft,” answered Babson and laughed outright. “Man, you don’t suppose I’d be carrying hard money in that amount? At twenty dollars a head at the pens, a thousand head would run into weight, even in gold; in silver it would take a wagon to carry it: it would be, let’s see: well, over thirteen hundred pounds.”

  “Why didn’t you bring a draft?” persisted Hopalong, bothered by the responsibility of carrying so much cash and guarding it.

  Babson laughed again and leaned forward in the chair.

  “You remembered my face, the first look, although you’d only seen it once, and that a year ago,” he said earnestly; “but you’ve forgotten what you thought about that piece of bank paper I gave you at that time. Why, it took the assurance of a dozen men in this town to convince you to sign away your herd for that draft. It was just a piece of paper to you: what you wanted was money, real money—something you were familiar with. Remembering that little session, I thought I’d ease your mind this time.”

  “Oh, hell!” laughed Hopalong, his face red under its coats of tan. “I was green then. Why, I worried all th’ way home about that draft, an’ was almost scared to give it to Buck. It shore was a load off my mind when he took it and seemed right glad to get it.” He stood up and held out his hand. “Well, I’ll drift back to th’ boys.” He stopped suddenly as a loud crash sounded from the railroad siding, and his eyes flashed to the nervous roan. “What th’ hell’s that?”

  “Engineer tryin’ to smash up my string of empties, I guess,” said Babson with a laugh. “Anyhow, I believe they’re mine: station agent said they were due today. If they are, then that’s one worry off my mind. Usually I have a hell of a time getting cars at this time of the year. They usually roll in anywhere from three days to a week late.” He stood up and shook hands with his companion. “Sorry you can’t stay over with us. There’ll be a nice game of draw running almost all night.”