Read Ebook: North of 36 by Hough Emerson

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Ebook has 2563 lines and 119229 words, and 52 pages

Jim Nabours' great fist fell with the force of a gavel on the breakfast table, till the tin plates rattled under their two-tined forks and the nicked cups brought added antiphony. Frowning, he looked savagely at the young woman. He was no better than her peon for life, for her father had given her to his care. She was the very apple of his eye.

"But what are we going to do, Jim?" Taisie's tears now were less open and unashamed.

"What makes you ask that of me, ma'am? I ain't got that fur along yet. I don't know what we're going to do. But I do know, for first, we ain't going to quit. Fire us? Why, good God!"

The grizzled beard of Jim Nabours to some extent concealed the Adam's apple, now again on its travels. There was not a man in the embarrassed group who did not wish himself in the chaparral precisely then, but every man of them nodded in assent. Of them all only old Sanchez, thin, brown and wrinkled, spoke at first--an old, old Mexican, born on Del Sol under its second transfer from the crown of Spain.

"Shore it's the truth!" broke out a freckled youth of seventeen, the soft beard just showing on his cheeks. But then, as he later confessed, he plumb bogged down. And the youngest of them all--Cinquo Centavas, they called him, since he had but five copper pennies when he rode in, twelve years of age; he was now fourteen--stood with his blue eyes wet with tears, unashamed in his rags.

"Give me time to think, men!" said Anastasie Lockhart, immeasurably touched by all this. "Let me see. Wait--I don't know!"

She rose and went to the door, framed once more gloriously against the sun; and sixteen pairs of eyes of silent men went with her.

A sudden baying of the ranch pack of foxhounds arose. It was not directed toward her. The dogs were streaming toward the pole gate of the yard fence. A rider was coming in.

IT WAS not the custom of the young mistress of Del Sol to ride out to meet strangers at her gate. She received callers in her own rude office or her almost ruder parlor. To meet any caller on this morning was distasteful to her every thought. She gave the incomer only a glance as she walked to her horse, which stood, head drooping, anchored by the long bridle reins thrown down.

A peculiar animal, Taisie's favorite mount, so marked as to be distinguished anywhere. No doubt descended from Blanco, the great white wild horse whose menada ran on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos, Blancocito's dam must have been a buckskin, for he himself was a dark claybank, with the coveted black stripe along his back. But Blanco--said by some range men to be not many removes from Arabian, though of unknown origin--had given his son a white face, four white stockings and a singular harnesslike stripe of clean white, four inches wide, across both hips, running down almost to the white stockings of the hind legs. He could be told a mile away. It would have been of no use to steal him, and his shoulder brand was but perfunctory. Jim Nabours and most of the hands scoffed at any pinto, and selected solid colors--any color so only it was not black; but Blancocito put all their horsely wisdom to shame. He never tired and never quit. No trail was too long for him. Gentled when a three, he never wholly had surrendered even to Taisie or the best of Taisie's top riders his inalienable Texas right to life, liberty and the pursuit of pitching, though these tendencies he usually held in abeyance in the case of his mistress. When he liked, he could be "mean to set," according to some others.

Just now Blancocito bit at the arm of his rider as she flung the reins over his neck and facing back, got foot in the stirrup and right hand on the horn of the cow saddle, true vaquero fashion. As she swung up to the seat his forefeet left the ground.

"Quit it!" said Taisie to him, and slapped his neck.

Then Blancocito bit at the tapaderos--gently, for he meant no harm; pitched just a little, with no malice in his heart; and so settled down to the springiest jog trot of any and all the horses in the T.L. brand; a gait which he could keep all day, and did keep now for two or three hundred yards, till his rider swung out of saddle at her own door and threw down the reins again.

Distrait as she was, Taisie Lockhart had not failed to note from the corner of an eye the young man who had entered the gate. He had hesitated an instant before choosing the cook house as his objective. She let him take the cook house, though with a swift doubt that he would stay there.

A tall man he was, perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty; slender, brown, with dark hair a trifle long, as so many men of that land then wore their hair. His face, contrary to the custom of the country, was smooth shaven, save for a narrow dark mustache. His eyes, could Taisie have seen them, were blue-gray, singularly keen and straight, his mouth keen and straight, unsmiling. He left the impression of a nature hard, cold; or at least much self-contained.

These last details the mistress of Del Sol could not at the time note, but she was schooled to catch the brand of his horse, the fashion of his equipment. His saddle was deeply embossed, not lacking silver, and the light and thin ear bridle, above the heavy hand-wrought bit, was decorated along the cheek straps with tapering rows of silver conchas polished to mirror brightness. The long reins he held high and light, and rode as though he did not know that he was riding, his close-booted feet light in the tapaderos. His horse, a silver-tail sorrel, was a trifle jaded. If so, at early morning, the coat rolled at the cantle most likely must have been his blanket the night preceding; for it was far from Laguna del Sol to the next open door of the range.

None of these matters escaped Taisie Lockhart, used to reading and remembering men, cows and horses at a glance. Her range education had taught her much, but it was rather instinct told her that this man was neither fop nor plain cow hand. He had an air about him, a way with him, an eye in his head thereto; for Taisie knew that, even as she had made inventory of him, he had done as much or more with her, though he did not salute as he jogged off to the door near which the ranch hands now were standing. In sooth, Taisie had forgotten for the time that, garbed as she was, she looked like some long-limbed foppish boy who wore his hair long down his shoulders.

"Light, stranger!" Nabours gave the arrival the usual greeting of the land. A dozen pairs of eyes gave him appraisal of the range. But the etiquette of the range was custom with this visitor. Though he was forced to wheel his horse quite about to do so, he dismounted on the same side of his horse as that which his hosts held, and not upon the opposite, or hostile, side. Moreover, he unbuckled his revolver belt and hung it over the horn of his saddle before entering the door. So! He had good manners. He was welcome.

"How, friends?" he said briefly, in return to the greeting. "McMasters is my name. I'm from Gonzales."

Nabours nodded.

"I know you," said he. "You're the new sher'f down there."

He was asked no questions. Some of the men already were saddling. The young horse wrangler was shaking up the remuda in the round pen, men were roping their mounts. Jim Nabours, foreman, and responsible for hospitality, no more than moved a hand of invitation. The newcomer seated himself at the long table, just abandoned. The negro cook appeared, bearing renewals. The guest ate in silence. Had Taisie seen him she would have noted some indefinable difference in his table manners from those of the cattle hands who but now had left this same rude board; but he ate with no shrug of criticism.

Nabours awaited his pleasure. Silence was the custom. There were some silent moments before the stranger pushed back and turned.

"I had to lie out last night at the river," said he. "Fresh javelina isn't bad if you like it. I rather prefer your bacon here."

Nabours grinned.

"You'd orto have rid on in."

"The trail has changed since I was here. Of course, I used to know Del Sol. My father, Calvin McMasters--you've heard of him?--was a friend of Colonel Burleson Lockhart forty years back. They died together, and in the same way--you know how. But I was away three years with my regiment, and lately I've never got around to ride up the hundred miles from the south."

"You're riding back from north now?"

"Yes."

"Far?"

"From Arkansas."

"So?"

"Yes. I came down the Washita and crossed the Red at the Station, in from the Nations."

"How's that country up in there for cows?" asked Jim Nabours, with the cowman's invariable interest in new lands. "I never been acrost the Red. Palo Pinto's about the limit I make for hunting our cows on the north."

"Good range all the way through the Nations; good all the way from here across the Red and clean up to what they call the Kansas line--that's above the Cherokee Outlet. I was in east, along the Arkansas line."

"Water?"

"Plenty."

Nabours remained silent for a time.

"Tell me, friend," said he at length. "How about Colonel Lockhart's old notion? He worked some cows north, like, on the Jess Chisholm Trail, up along the Washita, north of the Red somewheres. Arkansaw was where he went, and the last time he went he didn't never come back."

The faces of both men were grave. The murder of Burleson Lockhart and Calvin McMasters by the ruffians of the Arkansas border was an open wound for all Central Texas.

"The Chisholm Trail isn't any trail," said the stranger. "I came down that way myself, west of Wichita, but Jesse never did herd anything much over it. He did drive two-three little bunches from the Red River to Little Rock, Arkansas, not over a thousand head in all; but like as not he got the idea from my father and Colonel Lockhart. They both always said that Texas would have to find a market north.

"You see, they all had the good old Texas idea about starting a beef cannery to market our surplus cows. Some folks called Fowlers started to pack at Little Rock. Their meat all spoiled and it broke the whole outfit. Jess Chisholm didn't drive to Little Rock again. And you know my father and Burleson Lockhart paid their lives for their experiment. They wanted to do something for Texas."

"Several men has tried driving cows into Arkansaw, even Illinois, even Missoury and Ioway," commented the foreman of Del Sol. "Bad stories comes down--herds stole by bushwhackers and desperadoes, drovers robbed, stripped, tied up and whipped, drove out of the country, sent home broke or else left dead like them two good men. It's bad along the Arkansaw and Missoury border. Plenty others has been killed up there. Bad business. Us Texans ought to even up a lot of things."

"Yes!" A sudden strange flash came into the gray eye of the young stranger. "I ought to know!"

Nabours' own keen eye narrowed.

"It's not safe to drive that way? Don't you think that's all foolishness?"

"It has been, so far."

"But then, men has done told me that Chisholm had a right good road, grass and water, clean north."

"No, he didn't do much. He only had an idea that's old in Texas--a beef market."

"If Texas had a market for her beef! Eh? We'd all be rich."

Nabours tried to remain calm. The thought was by no means new to him or to many other Texans, broad-minded and farseeing men like those two early martyrs of the trail.

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