The Lost Wagon Train

by Zane Grey

  “Cut his guts out!” shrilled Kennedy, standing bent and stiff, his face working.

  “Break loose, Latch. Let me bore him!” yelled the traitor, dancing around with his gun low.

  Leighton heard. He screamed like a madman. Here, instead of satiation of a life-long lust, loomed death. It worked upon him as horribly as had his ultimatum to Latch. He fought mightily. But he was in the hands of a superman to whom life was nothing. Both Leighton’s clutching hands on that blade arm, with all his weight, could not stop its movement. Latch dragged him off the ground, and suddenly reaching up with his left hand he seized the knife out of his right. The blade gleamed down. Flashed up! It caught Leighton low in the abdomen—lifted him as he let out an awful cry—flung him to his knees.

  Blue sprang out of his ambush, his gun shoved forward. But not one of the three standing men saw him. Their eyes were riveted on the spectacle of Leighton, disemboweled, gory-handed, trying to stop the flood of life blood.

  The sight held Blue only for a glance. He leaped aside to get Breese and Kennedy in satisfactory alignment, then he vented his intense restraint in one shrill yell. Breese whirled, his gun describing a half circle, and at Blue’s shot he buckled, firing into the ground. Kennedy was slower in turning, somehow obstructed in action, his hand halting at his hip.

  “Howdy, Bruce,” drawled the trail driver.

  “Blue!” whispered the outlaw.

  “I reckon. An’ tolerable accommodatin’. I should have shot you in the back.”

  Kennedy’s nerve failed even as it drove him to draw. He never pulled trigger, but sank under Blue’s fire, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, failing at the last in the desperate spirit by which he had lived.

  Blue strode over to the gory Leighton, now prostrate, dying fast. Latch joined him, to gaze down with a stifled gasp. The Kiowa, last to line up, exclaimed gutturally: “Uggh!”

  Leighton was wholly conscious as he looked up. Where were his driving passions now? He was in the shadow and felt it.

  “Leighton, I’m tellin’ you thet Jacobs an’ Manley never got the girl,” said Blue, deliberately.

  The outlaw understood, but the failure of his great coup mattered little now. His convulsive face smoothed. His unfathomable eyes swerved from Blue to Latch, then rolled and set.

  CHAPTER

  20

  NEAR sunset next day Latch saw home again, as a man in a dream sees the scene of his boyhood.

  Blue and Hawk Eye had packed him down out of Spider Web Canyon. Benson, Mizzouri, the lawyer Bowden, the freighters, Bradley and the vaqueros, flocked from house and corrals. Latch seemed far gone, but was still conscious. They carried him to his room and laid him on the bed near the big west window. Whisky revived his failing strength.

  “Blue, am I going to cash?” he asked, weakly.

  “Dog-gone if I know, boss,” replied the trail driver. “If you do, it cain’t be from loss of blood. Thet gun-shot of yours wouldn’t keep me from ridin’ trail. But you’re acting damn funny.”

  “I have no pain—no sensations whatever. I feel dead.”

  “Wal, I’ll ride over to fetch Estelle,” replied Blue. “Benson, call your wife. Get his boots an’ clothes off. You’ll have to cut that blood-caked shirt. Dress his wound. I couldn’t dig the bullet oot. Shave him an’ spruce him up…. Rest of you men rustle. You’ll heah all aboot it in the mawnin’.”

  “Blue… look!” whispered Latch, indicating with weak hand a great pillar of smoke rising far away, to obscure the sunset.

  “Awful pretty. Thet’s a big fire, boss,” said the trail driver, peering out.

  “You set fire—to the wagon pile?”

  “Shore did. Lot of dry wood there. Been no rain for weeks. Thet fire’ll be so hot it’ll melt every bit of iron … Nothin’ left but a patch of ashes an’ thet’ll soon grow over.”

  “The last—trace destroyed!”

  “Yes, boss, an’ your last enemy daid,” rejoined Blue. “You’re a lucky hombre.”

  “God did not forsake—her!”

  “Wal, I don’t know aboot Gawd,” drawled Blue, with his dry smile.

  “Blue, I misjudged you.”

  “Natural. I’m a hard gazabo to figure. But the hell’s over now. Let’s never speak of thet again. It’s range life—cain’t be helped…. I’ll go now to fetch Estelle. See that you air her old Dad!”

  Latch lay quiet, watching the far-distant rolling clouds of smoke, shining red and gold against the black mountains. He was happy. At the last he had asked only one thing of fate and of life—to spare his daughter. But he had been granted many things.

  * * *

  Dusk had mantled the valley scene and the plateau to the west when, an hour later, Mrs. Benson lighted the lamps and propped Latch up on pillows.

  “I hear horses,” she said, suddenly.

  Indeed, Latch had already heard the tearing beat of swift hoofs. They grew louder. With scrape and pound they came to a stop under his window. Rapid footsteps pattered up the stairs. Then a lovely face, pale but radiant, flashed in the doorway.

  “Estie!…My girl—my girl!”

  “Oh, Dad!” she cried, and rushed to the bed, to fall upon her knees, to enclose him in loving embrace and lay her face against his.

  When Blue clinked up the stairs a little later Latch was holding Estelle’s hand as she sat beside him.

  “Wal, how aboot it?” he drawled.

  “Slim, darling, I was afraid you had lied—again,” she replied. “But if you did, Dad swears to it.”

  “Slim, darling?” asked Latch, with smile and show of surprise.

  “Yes, Dad,” she answered, with a vivid blush. “That is something he must explain when you are well again.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Boss, nothin’ much to explain,” interposed Blue, far removed from his cool, nonchalant self. “Thet very first day I went crazy aboot her. It fetched me heah an’ kept me heah.”

  “No explanation is necessary, Blue. The Latch family owes you more than it can ever repay.”

  “Aw!… Say, but my name’s not Blue.”

  “No, Dad, it’s not. I just liked the name he gave himself here. Slim Blue is pretty.”

  “Well, then, if I give my consent, what will your name be instead of Mrs. Blue?”

  “If!… Daddy! You couldn’t refuse.”

  “Estie, I couldn’t indeed. But I’m happy to give you my consent and blessing. Slim’s name might be Red, White, or Blue. It wouldn’t matter. Names are of little account on this frontier. What counts is what a man is. I always wanted you to marry a Westerner. You will be rich. You will inherit a great ranch. And I have never known a boy—except perhaps one—to whom I would have given you as willingly as I give you to Blue.”

  “Except perhaps one!” exclaimed Estelle. “I never guessed that. Who was this wonderful boy, Dad?”

  “He was like a son to me. Saved my life more than once. Blue reminds me of him…. He, too, was a Texan. His name was Lester Cornwall.”

  “My Gawd!… Boss, what you—sayin’?” burst out the trail driver, his lean face turning pale.

  “Daddy!” cried Estelle, in great excitement. “Slim’s name is Cornwall, too. And he had a brother called Lester.”

  “Shore, boss, I’m Lester’s kid brother,” interposed Blue, huskily. “Years ago I took the trail—huntin’ for him. An’ I never stopped huntin’ until I met your daughter. Thet changed my life…. If you can tell me anythin’ aboot Lester——”

  “Son, I can tell you all,” replied Latch, swiftly. “Lester came to me in 1863—during the war. He joined my band of rebel guerrillas. He was the coldest, most reckless boy I have ever met on the plains. I doubt if even Billy the Kid had more nerve—After the war I drifted—from one fort to another—from trading-post to cattle town. Lester stuck to me. He did not care to settle down. But when at last I decided to develop Latch’s Field into a great ranch, he agreed to come with me—work for me…Alas! that was never to be…. He was killed.”
/>
  “Would you mind tellin’ me how, boss,” asked Cornwall, huskily, his face bowed in his hands.

  Latch caught his loosened tongue in time. He saw again that vile gaming-hall in Dodge—the girl with the eyes of a hawk—the scornful Lester.

  “Son, he died as so many Westerners have died,” replied Latch, with a ring in his weak voice. “Back to the wall—a gun in each hand…. In my defense!”

  “Wal, now—I’m glad to heah—at last,” quavered Cornwall.

  “Oh, Dad, you’ve seen such terrible times,” murmured Estelle, sadly. “I do hope they’re over…. Corny, don’t grieve. He was brave. He never drifted into dishonor. He was with my father.”

  “Estie, go into my closet,” directed Latch. “In the corner. That old leather valise…. Search under things to the bottom. You will find two belts. One holding two guns. Fetch them out.”

  When Estelle came forth carrying the belts, Latch resumed.

  “Give them to him…. There son, is all I saved of Lester’s outfit. One belt contains money. It has never been opened. Take it and the guns. I’m glad to have these keepsakes for you. Happy that the boy who loved me like a father was the brother of the boy who is to be my son.”

  * * *

  Latch was out and around in a few days, walking with a cane. In answer to solicitude about the bullet left in his shoulder he replied that he would let it remain, to keep company with the one already in his hip, and also to remind him of something.

  “Corny, what’s your idea about running this ranch?” Latch inquired, returning from the corrals to find him and Estelle on the porch.

  “Wal, I shore got a good idee,” drawled the trail driver.

  “Say idea, darling,” interposed Estelle.

  “All right… ideea, darlin’.”

  Estelle threw up her hands in despair.

  “What is it, son?”

  “Wal, I don’t know, but I reckon it’s good. You say Estie an’ I have to go East to corral this dog-gone inheritance of hers. Wal, suppose we ketch thet caravan bound south in a few days. At Santone I’ll pick the best trail drivers I ever trailed with…. Bim Weaver, Gawd bless him! an’ Reddy Westfall an’ Long Tim Archer an’ Fox Huggins an’—dog-gone it yes! Gunsight Sharpe. I can make him go straight. I’ll make a deal for life with thet ootfit an’ send them heah with the five thousand haid of long-horns you wanted.”

  “Corny, I like your idea,” declared Latch.

  “They’re a wild lot. But, boss, we’ll need ’em. Rustlin’ has just come into its own. Cattle-stealin’ as a business has got to be contended with. For years, I reckon…. Wal, Estie an’ I will come back quick…”

  “We will not,” interrupted that young lady, spiritedly. “Let Dad and your wild outfit run the ranch. This trip is our honeymoon, Mister Cornwall. And I’m going to make the most of it. You should be thrilled, instead of wanting to hurry back here to shoot rustlers.”

  “Estie, I’m shore thrilled, but also scared stiff,” replied Corny, humbly. “Only can I wear my boots an’ pack my gun?”

  “I should smile you can’t.”

  “Dog-gone!—Wal, if I can wear my sombrero I’ll

  “You can wear a new one, as wide as this porch. I don’t want you to lose your Western look altogether. … Dad, have you ever been to Boston?”

  “Yes, lass. That is where I met your mother and fell in love with her.”

  “Oh! But I thought you saved mother from Indians.”

  “Indeed I did. I’d met her before, however.”

  “You must tell me all about her some day…. Are there lots of beautiful girls in Boston?”

  “Thick as hops.”

  “Corny is such a fickle, no-good trail driver,” she said, demurely. “Do you think I can hold him, Daddy?—after we’re married, I mean.”

  “Lass, I rather think so.”

  “Then perhaps we’d better settle it—and him,” she went on, her eyes bright, her cheeks rosy. “We’ll ride south with that caravan. Get married in San Antonio. Go to New Orleans. See my school friends there. Take the boat up the Mississippi to St. Louis. Then the train to Boston. Corral that dog-gone inheritance! Then try to spend it all in New York before starting west again. How’s that idea, Dad?”

  “Great!” ejaculated Latch.

  “Wal, Lady, I don’t know aboot you,” added Cornwall, dubiously, his wonderful eyes flashing their light upon her. “But whatever you want goes with me.”

  * * *

  After they left Latch endeavored to get back in the rut of his old work. But he soon discovered that his working-days were past. He could not stick at anything. He loved the ranch; still the old interest and industry were lacking.

  In due time the great herd of long-horns arrived, in charge of the finest, wildest sextet of young Texans that Latch had ever met in a bunch. Weaver, however, was no longer a boy. Latch took to him at once and the interest seemed mutual.

  Weaver and all the boys had a story to tell about the wedding of Corny and Estelle, which they had attended. Estelle’s letter to her father was long, loving, poignant, and incoherent, especially where it dwelt upon these infernal cowboys and their tricks. But she was safely married and inexpressibly happy, and on her way.

  This letter marked a crucial time for Latch. It seemed to be the end of some phase of his life. He took no more active interest in anything, unless the current events of the frontier, to which he lent a strange and eager ear.

  He walked about the ranch most of the cooler parts of the day, and spent hours in favorite spots, one of which was the shady bench at the first lake. He liked to walk out under the huge walnut trees where the Kiowas had been wont to camp, or across the meadows where he had seen the herds of buffalo graze. Little things held his attention for long, birds and bees and rabbits, and the live stock about the ranch. He dreamed a great deal, and always in the dusk he sat beside Cynthia’s grave.

  He never invited guests to the ranch-house again. The hospitable dining-room that had sheltered so many famous and infamous characters of the West, red and white alike, knew them no more.

  More travel than ever passed through Latchfield that summer. The town grew apace. The burned block soon boasted of showy new edifices, not all of which were a credit to the community. Hard-eyed, hard-lipped men still rode to Latchfield.

  Events of the period possessed extraordinary interest for Latch. He drove to town often, always to meet the stages or an incoming caravan or troop of soldiers. The hanging of Black Hand, the fight at Adobe Walls where Texas Rangers held off repeated charges of hundreds of Comanches, the strange disappearance of a small wagon train somewhere between Fort Larned and Apache Pass, the rise to notorious border fame of the killer, Billy the Kid, and the forecast of the terrible Lincoln County War, the duel of Wild Bill Hickok with five cowboys at Hays City, the gossip that old Kesse Chissum had once been a cattle thief, and that the Old Trail Chisholm could confess to a few pilfered longhorns in early days, the hanging of the rich rancher Settlee at Laramie, to the horror of a community who had held him high—these rumors of range happenings, and many more as news drifted in from week to week, seemed to obsess Stephen Latch and remain in his memory, where already was stored a vast lore of the border. But Latch was one of the frontiersmen who did not talk.

  The fact was that he grasped to his broken heart every stray bit of fact or rumor connected with the making of frontier history. How wild men at a wild period, in a wild country contributed to the progress of the western movement of civilization! He never condoned or excused his past, but as the days multiplied he grew to understand it. Not all was he to blame! The fur-trappers, the discovery of gold in California, the freighting caravans across the plains, the Civil War, the white invasion of Indian territory, the massacre of the buffalo, the cattle-driving—all these had contributed their share to the evil of the West.

  Moreover, Latch was haunted. He had a sleepless and eternal remorse. Agony indeed had died of its own stupendous force that inevitable day in
Spider Web Canyon. But as he drifted and dreamed on toward what he divined was dissolution more and more did he live in the past. In the dark hours of night he lay awake—not alone in that chamber. In the gray dawn when the birds first twittered, he remembered his awakenings in Spider Web Canyon with Cynthia by his side. Those days so brief were all of happiness he had to remember. Days that could be no more here or in the hereafter! For in the spirit world he would be denied the companionship and love of his wife. He had transgressed laws that even God could not forgive. In his prayers for Estelle he had bartered even divine salvation and he had to pay. His must be the lonely naked shingle of a darkened shore, the winged demons overhead, the twining rocks beneath, the fiery thorns, and always, forever, the mournful blast driving him with the horde of evil spirits onward in the gloom.

  Estelle’s first letter from the East cheered him, made him happy for many a day. It had been written in midsummer. And now it was frosty autumn. How the days passed! The letter read:

  HANOVER HOUSE,

  BOSTON

  July 21

  DARLING DAD:

  We’ve been here two weeks and I’ve been so rushed I haven’t had a minute to write. I’m so happy I can write now. Just look! But I think of you often, love you always, pray for you every night.

  We have been a sensation to our relatives, most of whom have been nice, I’m bound to admit. But there’s one Bowden who’s a cat. It’s a niece of Uncle John Bowden, who has been so lovely to us. She is a tall brunette—simply gorgeous, and a dog-gone flirt (as Corny says), and hell-bent on breaking my heart. She would have inherited the Bowden fortune if I had never been found.

  Well, Dad, Corny is some one to be proud of…. But I must tell you important things. The matter of my income has been determined. The principal is held in trust until I am twenty-one. I get the income—some forty-odd thousand dollars a year. And I can draw what I like. Hurrah! The legal documents are all in the hands of the administrator, but duplicate copies will be given to me to bring home.