by Zane Grey
“Couldn’t be settlers,” soliloquized Latch. “But I’ll not borrow trouble. I’ll wait.”
Nevertheless, the unexpected edged the first vague uneasiness into his joy. He gazed no more, and toiled back to camp, to rest and eat, to lie wide-eyed for hours, to await another interminable day.
That other day ended with the sun gone down behind the bluffs when Latch’s caravan of two wagons rolled to a halt under a great walnut at the head of the valley.
For the last hour Latch had sat out upon the driver’s seat, his whole being vibrating like a strung wire.
Peeled logs and picked stones lay around in piles near where the long rambling picturesque ranch-house was in course of construction. He smelled smoke. Indians and ponies showed off under the trees below. Latch spied a white man who stared at the wagons and then ran for a cabin. The atmosphere of the place seemed strange.
Keetch hobbled out on his crutch. “Wal, by Gawd! if it ain’t the boss!” he boomed, with a depth that left no doubt of welcome.
In the gathering dusk the old outlaw’s features were not distinct, but they appeared the same.
“Howdy, Keetch,” replied Latch, in a curiously halting voice. “I’m glad—to be home.”
“Boss, it took you long to come. An’ you shore look peaked.”
“Man, I lay five months on my back, out of my head. And after that my recovery was slow. God! I thought I’d die getting well…. But I’ve pulled through, and here I am.”
“Boss, it’s a—a pity—” began Keetch, hoarsely.
“No. I paid. And I’m glad,” replied Latch, misunderstanding the other. “No more now. Tell me—how’s Cynthia?”
“Latch, didn’t you get my letter?”
“Letter!… No.”
“Wal, I sent one by an Injun rider.”
“Where?”
“To Fort Bent. Aw, boss, don’t look skeered. I was shore careful what I wrote…. An’ you never got it?”
“When did you send it?”
“Last fall. November, I reckon. Jest after…” Here Keetch drew Latch away from the listening Cornwall and others of the outfit.
“When were you up the canyon last?” demanded Latch, quickly. His impatience made him stem. And suddenly he felt cold. The one-legged Keetch hobbled along on his crutch, dragging Latch to the great walnut tree closer to the ranch-house.
“Not since then,” replied Keetch.
“What!… Snowed out? High water?”
“No. Wasn’t any need, boss,” replied Keetch, hurriedly. “You see—I fetched your wife down hyar last fall…. She was sick—an’ it was best. Settler named Benson located across the crick. Good fellar, an’ his woman advised…”
“Cynthia sick—you moved her!” demanded Latch, incredulously, and gave Keetch a violent blow on his chest.
“Yes. An’ it was damn lucky, too,” rejoined Keetch, testily. “If only you’d got my letter!”
“Hell’s fire!” shouted Latch. “What are you drivin’ at?”
“Boss—it ain’t so easy!” panted the old outlaw. “I’m tryin’ to tell you—aboot Cynthia—thet we couldn’t save her—but did save the——”
Latch scarcely heard. Savagely he ordered Keetch to take him to Cynthia.
“Boss—by Gawd, I’m sorry!… She’s gone—an’ hyar’s—her grave,” whispered Keetch, huskily, then hobbled away in the dusk.
Stunned by a horrible fear, Latch gazed down at that to which Keetch had directed his attention. A long mound, grassed over, with a white headstone!—A grave!—Then Cynthia was dead. He grasped the fact in a gathering might of agony. With an awful cry, with death in his vitals, Latch flung himself upon that grave.
The long night hours wore away. Coyotes wailed on the levels. Wolves mourned on the heights. The wind whispered through the walnut leaves. Nothing else broke the solitude of the prairie.
In the gray melancholy dawn Latch got up, a broken, desolate man.
CHAPTER
9
DURING the last year of the Civil War there was less travel across the Great Plains, and as a consequence fewer disasters to wagon trains. Nevertheless, caravans left Westport (later Kansas City) and Independence for the West. The regular freighters could not have been turned back from the Old Trail. But since before the Mexican War in 1846 these adventurers had been learning and had handed down their method to those who succeeded them. When they had escort of soldiers little or no peril attended their travel. Indians of various tribes had from time to time attacked escorted wagon trains, but had seldom caused any considerable loss of life and property.
However, the wagon trains of another kind of adventurer, the pioneer, often left Independence as had John Bowden, in a spirit of irresistible call to the great West. These pioneers were really the men who built the West. The trappers and freighters opened up the vast area; the buffalo-hunters, who fought the Indians to a standstill, made possible the settling of the West, but it was the pioneer who built it. And they wheeled westward, with their trenchant slogan: “Catch up! Catch up!” in ever-increasing numbers.
The Old Trail had three routes from Fort Dodge, the Mountain Trail, the Middle Trail along the Cimarron to Santa Fe, and the Journada del Muerto (Journey of Death) across the desert of the Cimarron. Despite the tragic stories that never failed to greet the ears of the traveler passing through Independence, there were always men, like John Bowden, who were reckless or daredevil or ignorant, and pushed on, risking all for the sake of a few days saved in heart-breaking toil across the plains. Many of these had good fortune along with their indomitable spirit and fighting ability, and got across, a wiser, sadder, and depleted caravan. There were many that suffered loss. And there were a few, like Bowden’s lost wagon train, that were never heard of again.
They simply vanished. They were not even mentioned in history, nor did they attract the interest and romance which somehow attended Bowden’s caravan. With the war coming to a close and chaos everywhere, with the red man steadily increasing in hostility, what was the vague vanishing of a wagon train now and then?
That year there were plainsmen, however, who talked around their buffalo-chip camp fires, about these known wagon trains that had attempted the Journado del Muerto across the Cimarron, never to be heard of again. Jim Waters, grown to be a famous trail scout, was one of these. Buff Belmet, who sat his first wagon-seat when he was ten years old, who lost his mother and father in savage raids, was still another. Kit Carson, the best informed of plainsmen, failing to solve the mystery of Bowden’s lost wagon train, threw up his hands at the mention of a new tragedy.
But plains rumor kept on. Satana, the Kiowa chief, remained in his retreat in the mountains beyond the Cimarron, yielding the palm of deviltry to his brother chief, Satock, and to Nigger Horse and Soronto of the Comanches, and to warriors of Cheyennes, Apaches, and Pawnees, known to be in active war against the white invasion.
Old plainsmen talked with one another, when they met at a watering-place along the trail; and they had their doubts about Satana. The old rumor of his association with the Bowden tragedy, and with some mysterious dominating white man, did not down. They questioned one another. Why was Satana not on the war-path? Why was he so seldom seen at the frontier forts? What could this wily old devil tell about the vanishing of the caravans on the Journado del Muerto during the close of the Civil War? What, particularly, had become of one eastbound wagon train, small in number of men and wagons, but rich in gold from California and beaver fur from Colorado?
“Dog-gone-it!” said Waters, shaking his grizzled head and favoring the leg that had an Indian bullet in the hip joint. “I jest got a hunch Satana is at the bottom of these Cimarron lost caravans.”
“Wal,” replied Belmet, “your hunch won’t fetch them back. All we can do is to roar at Santa Fe an’ Independence ag’in’ these small unprotected wagon trains ever startin’ out.”
* * *
The end of the Civil War, however, let loose upon the West a flood of penniless, ruine
d, broken soldiers, many of whom naturally gravitated to wild and vicious life. They came from the South and from the North; and many who had worn the gray and the blue took to the dusty-booted, gun-hipped, hard-eyed riders of the plains. The frontier band of desperadoes became something to be reckoned with in the settling of the West. In fact, these outlaw organizations flourished increasingly for nearly twenty years after the Civil War. The Lincoln County War, a fight between outlaws and cattlemen, culminating in the death of three hundred men, including the notorious Billy the Kid, was the climax of the desperado regime on the frontier.
At the close of 1865 the gun was might and right. Soon the forts and posts from Taos, New Mexico, to Council Grove, Kansas, were crowded with foot-loose men. Unprepossessing strangers arrived on each stage, and in small bands on horseback. Robbery of stage-coaches grew to be a common thing. The saloon, the dance-hall, the gambling-hall began their bloody era on the border.
Jim Blackstone’s gang sprang from obscurity to prominence about this time. He was a huge black-bearded man, formerly one of Quantrell’s guerrillas, who had turned robber, and from operating with a few allies he graduated to leadership of a dozen or more of the most hardened outlaws of the plains. Blackstone and his gang had wintered at the various forts during the early stages of the war. At its close, however, it would not have been safe for him to show his black-bearded face at any of them. No doubt Blackstone was accused of many crimes which he never perpetrated. Kit Carson was authority for this opinion: “Jim is black enough,” averred the noted plainsman, “but thar’s bigger an’ more dangerous outlaws that you don’t hear so much about.”
But for the mass of travelers across the plains these leaders Carson hinted of were mythical characters. They never showed themselves to a large and escorted wagon train. They were heard of but never seen.
Late in the ’60’s another era had its inception and tremendous advance—the era of the traii-driver and his herds of long-horn cattle from Texas.
The war left Texas penniless and ruined except for the thousands of cattle that roamed her vast ranges. An intrepid Texas cattleman, John Chisholm by name, conceived an idea which, when put into execution, changed the fortunes of the Lone Star State. And that idea was to drive great herds of cattle north from below the Brazos River and even from as far south as the Rio Grande, to Dodge City and Abilene, Kansas, The Chisholm Trail soon marked its rut north over the rolling prairie once traveled only by the buffalo. A wonderful breed of young fighting riders, learning their trade of horsemanship from the Mexican vaquero, and developing their own spirit of fire and dexterity with, guns, developed to do their part in the empire-building of the West.
A continuous stream of long-homed cattle poured into Kansas. The driving of herds took from three to five months; and was accompanied by all the hazard that attended the freighters across the plains, in addition to the crossing of flooded rivers, the terrible electric storms, the stampedes by buffalo herds, the raids of the Comanches, and many lesser obstacles to travel. But the herds kept coming in ever-increasing numbers.
Dodge City had a marvelous mushroom growth. Almost overnight this frontier post, for many years just an important stop along the Old Trail, whooped into the busiest, noisiest, bloodiest town that ever burst to fame on the border.
During daylight the long, wide, dusty main street, lined by its motley buildings, presented a scene of incessant activity—streams of dusty-booted men, of lithe fire-eyed trail-drivers, of travelers, pioneers, soldiers, adventurers, negroes, Mexicans, Indians, foreigners—all kinds and conditions of men jostling along the crowded thoroughfare. By night and the yellow lamplights the same scene was singularly heightened by strains of music, by half-naked, hawk-eyed dance-hall girls, by the black-frocked gamblers with their pale faces and intent eyes.
It was an enormous floating population, coming and going, owing the majority of its stress to the hundreds of thousands of cattle in the corrals and pastures outside the town.
It was a night in late October at Dodge. A cold raw wind blew from the north down the level Kansas ranges, whipping up such a dust on the main street that the jostling streams of humanity on both sides of the wide avenue could not distinguish each other through the yellow murk. The many lights shone dim and blurred.
Stephen Latch and Lester Cornwall sat in the lobby of the Trail-Drivers Hotel, watching the throng pass. The years of hard life sat lightly upon the handsome head of the younger man. He still held that glow and glaze of youth and that something so marvelously cold and aloof about him. Cornwall seemed a strange combination of eagle and vulture.
But Latch had vastly changed. Maturity sat upon him, markedly in his graying hair, in the sloping lines of his iron, mask-like face, in his heavier frame.
They sat apart from other men in the lobby, and as ever, from long habit, they talked low.
“Colonel, let’s hit for the South,” said Cornwall, thoughtfully.
“South!” ejaculated Latch.
“I don’t mean Texas or Louisiana,” replied the younger man, quickly. “God! / never want to see that South again…. But I mean let’s go south where the winter won’t be cold. For years now we’ve spent the winters in these hell-hole posts and forts. Santa Fe and Maxwell’s were not so bad, even in winter. We can’t go back there. ’Most all the Western forts are closed to us. We’re pushed east farther every winter. This Kansas prairie is a blizzard-swept country where you can’t keep warm even in bed or on top of a stove…. It’s been in my mind for days. Let’s go, Colonel.”
Latch shook his heavy head as if the idea would not stay before his consciousness.
“What’s the sense in this gambling night after night, all winter long?” demanded Cornwall.
“No sense in it, I reckon.”
“Is it to amass more money?”
“No.”
“Man alive, you have won thousands! You had a fortune hidden in Spider Web long ago. And if your Kiowa riders can be trusted they have safely hidden another fortune for you in that canyon.”
“Hawk Eye can be trusted,” replied Latch. “I have sent him back six times with packs of gold and currency and jewels to hide. Always he has returned. Lester, if you befriend Indians, especially these Kiowas, they will be true to you.”
“I believe that,” returned Cornwall, without his usual serenity. “But I was never sure of Keetch. And Leighton’s return to Latch’s Field—that has never sat well upon my stomach.”
“Keetch is all right. He has grown old. He likes the ranch life. His reports make me eager to see the field—when I dare think of—of—… But Leighton is a snake in the grass. If he suspected that I was sending booty to be hidden in Spider Web he would search every nook and cranny of the canyon.”
“Well, that’s another reason for us to go back.”
“Heaven! you don’t mean to go back—there?”
“I do. It’s high time. That last raid of ours—the only failure we ever had—marked you on the frontier. It established your relation to Satana. Jim Waters saw you, Colonel.”
“Yes. It was bad. I never wanted to tackle that caravan. The east-bound freighters are stronger. They fight harder. But Satana was ugly. He had waited so long! So I gave in to our misfortune—Still, Waters can’t prove we were with the Indians.”
“Humph! Don’t you believe that. His word would go at any post from Leavenworth to Taos…. We’ve skated on thin ice for so many years. Colonel, this is going to break!”
“Why this right about face of yours?” inquired the older man, with scorn. “You used to laugh in the teeth of death.”
“I can still laugh. But lately I’ve weakened or softened. I want to go back to our lovely canyon—and spend the rest of my life remembering…. And besides, Colonel, I don’t want to see you dangle at the end of a rope.”
“Lester, you’ve been a true friend—a son to me. True as steel! You have killed men in my defense. You have been the fox of my band. Without you I would have been gone long ago. I appreciate
all this. You are all I have left in the world…. Still, I’m afraid I can’t go back—just yet.”
“Why, Colonel? It’s high time.”
“This gambling life helps me to forget,” returned Latch, thickly.
“But, Colonel, after all these years it won’t hurt you to remember. I never told you my story. It’s sadder than yours…. Let’s go back to the lonely life. I’d like to raise horses. I’d like to hunt and fish. To live away from these vile rum-holes with their smoke and crazy men and hussies! It’s been growing on me.”
“Suppose I refuse, Lester?” queried Latch, moved by this transformation in his lieutenant.
Cornwall pondered a long moment, his dark marble-smooth face bent.
“I will never desert you,” he replied, finally.
“That decides me. We will go, Lester,” flashed Latch, unaccountably inspired by Cornwall’s fidelity. “Quien sabe? You have guided me right many a time. …And after all, I am tired of life. Perhaps Latch’s Field. … Come, we will buck the tiger a last time!”
The Palace of Chance, a drinking, dancing, gambling den, was not felicitously named except in its intimation of the uncertainty of life. It was one of the worst places in Dodge City, where they were ail bad.
At midnight that November night Latch and Cornwall sat in a game of poker with a cattle-buyer from St. Louis, a stranger from the East, a manager of one of Tullt and Co.’s stores, and a lean-faced trail-driver from Texas.
The stakes were low, considering what Latch usually played for, and most of them had gravitated to his side of the table.
“Wal, I’m cleaned,” drawled the Texan, coolly, as he sat back. “It was shore fleecin’ lambs.”
“What is?” spoke up Cornwall.
“The way you two Southern gents grab all the coin.”
“What do you mean by grab?” queried Cornwall, dropping his cards. His right hand quivered on the table. Latch saw it and interposed.
