Buffalo Stampede

by Zane Grey

  Yet she did not at once seek the apparent security of her bed in the wagon. She walked about, though close by. She peered into the gathering shadows. She listened. The silence had been relieved by crickets and frogs. Slowly the black night mantled the river bottom and the trains of stars twinkled in the blue dome.

  The presence of the horses, as they grazed near, brought something of comfort, if not relief. She remembered a dog she had loved. Rover—if she only had him now! Then she climbed into the wagon, and, without removing even her boots, she crawled into the blankets. They had been disarranged in the rough ride. She needed them more to hide under than for warmth. The soft night seemed drowsily lulling.

  Her body cried out with its aches and pains and weariness, with the deep internal riot around her heart, with throb of brain. Not all at once she could lie still. But gradually began a slow sinking, as if she were settling down, down, and all at once she lay like a log. It was too warm under the blanket, yet, when she threw it back and saw the white stars, so strange, watchful, she grew more aware of her plight, and covered her face again. At length her body relaxed to the point where it was no longer dominating with its muscular sensations. Then her mind grew active—reverted to the terrible tragedy of Jett’s outfit. Catlee . . . ! All the time he had watched over her. He had killed for her—and died for her. A man who confessed he had never been anything else than bad! Something great loomed in Molly’s simple mind. Could Jett have had any good in him? She prayed for their souls.

  They had left her alone, and she must find her way—whither? And into that dark gulf of mind flashed the thought and the vision of Tom Doan. . . . Molly began to weep. It was too terrible, the remembrance of him, of his love and kisses, of his offer of marriage and his plan for their home. Terrible to dwell upon when she was lost on the prairie. She might never see him again! But she must try as no girl had ever tried before to find her way out.

  “I . . . will try . . . for him!” she sobbed, and remembered her prayers. Then grief and worry succumbed to exhaustion; she drifted into slumber.

  * * * * *

  The singing of birds awakened Molly. The sun had risen; the green leaves were fluttering with a silken rustle. It took a moment for realization of her situation to rush into thought. Yet the darkness of mind, the old reluctance to return to consciousness, was absent this morning.

  When she got to her knees, and knelt there stretching her bruised and cramped muscles, she looked over the wagon to see the white horses grazing nearby under the cottonwoods. Sleek gray deer were grazing with them, as tame as cattle. A rabbit crossed the aisle of green. The morning held a strange bright beauty and peace.

  Molly brushed out her tangled short curls. Her face was burned from the wind and sun of yesterday’s ride. Then she climbed out of the wagon, ready for the day. She did not have to dress, and she thought bathing her face might make the sunburn worse.

  First she put a quart of water in each nose bag and carried them out to the horses. She did not need to go far. Both horses saw her and came to meet her, and, slipping the nose bags in place, she led them to the wagon, and haltered them. Breakfast did not take long to prepare and eat. Then she cleaned the utensils, packed them away in the box, shook out her blankets, and rolled them. This left the task that worried her—that of hitching up.

  But when she came to undertake it, she found that she remembered where every part of the harness belonged, and a few attempts found the right place. To lift the heavy wagon tongue and hold it while she snapped the hooks into rings, required all her strength.

  “There,” she muttered, with something of pride and wonder. “Now what?”

  Was the wagon all right? She walked around it, as she had seen Jett do. One spoke had been broken out of the left-hand wheel; other than that she could not see any damage. Jett had greased the wagon wheels the day before his intended departure. Nothing more to do but start! Molly was almost overcome at the thought. It seemed incredible that she would dare to drive across the prairie.

  “I can’t stay here. I’d be as bad off as on the move,” she burst out desperately. “Oh, I must go . . . but where . . . how?”

  She wrung her hands and fought her fears. A terrible problem confronted her. Yet was it as perilous as when she was practically a prisoner in Jett’s outfit? Again she remembered that her prayers had been answered. Suppose she was only a timid weak girl? Could she not make herself do what any boy might do? Once and for all she drove herself passionately into a spirit of daring and faith. She resolved to feel these, even though she had to endure agonies of dread.

  Then she plumped to her knees before a little bare spot of sand, and, gazing down at it, she thought with all her might. Not for nothing had she been keen to observe men in camp, when they talked about roads, trails, places. Jett had been poor at direction and location, but Follonsbee had the whole buffalo country in his mind. Molly had seen him draw maps in the dirt. To this end she took up a stick.

  “The west is there,” she said thoughtfully. “I saw the sun set. Then the north is there. Northwest is my direction. . . . It was ten days’ travel from Pease River to Sprague’s Post. . . . Here’s the Pease.” And she drew a line in the sand. “Yesterday I came thirty miles . . . maybe forty, almost due north, to this stream. Then I’m here.” She made a dot in the sand, and another line representing this stream. “I don’t dare try to find my way back to the buffalo camps. I might meet the Comanches. I must not follow this stream west. I must cross it, and head northwest. I must cross every stream I meet. When I reach one too deep to ford, I must follow along it till I find a place.”

  Molly’s reasoning was the result of her experience with the Jett outfit. It took no particular degree of intelligence to calculate about where she was on the prairie and what to do to get out. The great task was to accomplish what her judgment dictated. She had traveled enough over the untrodden prairie to have some faint conception of the enormity of what faced her. Thought of meeting with buffalo hunters persistently flaunted hopes. They encouraged her, but she could not trust to them. This Texas prairie covered a vast space, and in it she was lost.

  “That’s all,” she said blankly.

  The moment of decision had come. Molly drew a deep breath and flung wide her arms, with hands clenching. How she hated to leave the apparent protection of these friendly cottonwoods! Then, with a great throb in her breast, she turned to mount the wagon.

  Not reluctant indeed were the horses. They had grazed and drank their fill, and they knew their noses were to be pointed homeward, away from the buffalo fields. Molly had all she could do to hold them. She drove out of the grove, to the right where the buffalo had worn a wide trodden belt down to the stream. The last fifty yards were quite downhill. Molly reined in to scrutinize her first obstacle of the day.

  Thousands of buffalo had forded the stream here. Far as she could see the banks on both sides were trodden fresh and dark with tracks. The stream was perhaps three feet deep there and forty feet wide; nothing for strong and nimble buffalo to ford. But these buffalo had not been hampered with a wagon. Still the crossing was not especially bad. Jett would not have given it a second glance. He would have plunged across. The sandy bottom would assuredly be hard packed. Molly had only to start right, not too carefully, and to keep the horses going.

  She threw off the brake and called to the horses. “Get up! Whity! Specks . . . easy now!”

  They trotted down the slope—faster—faster. Molly leaned back on the reins. Her face blanched. Her teeth clenched. It was fearful, yet it roused defiance. She could drive them. They were eager, unafraid. The wagon propelled them. Plunge! The water crashed and splashed high. And the wagon bounced after them, to souse into the stream, over the front wheels. Molly was deluged. For an instant she could not see for water in her eyes, for the flying spray. But she called to the horses. They took the stream at a trot. It was no deeper than their knees, and they sent sheets of muddy water ahead of them. The opposite bank was low, easy for them, and Molly
, before she realized it, pulled up on the level open prairie.

  “Easy, and I got a bath!” she cried exultantly. “Oh, Whity and Specks, I love you.”

  She searched for her scarf to wipe her wet face and hair. But it, too, like her little gun was gone. She had lost it. No! She recalled that she had left it tied on the hoop of the wagon cover in Jett’s camp. The memory startled her. Suppose Tom Doan should at last find Jett’s camp and see her red scarf. But that misery for him could never be. The Indians would have made blackened embers of that camp.

  Molly took her direction from the sun and drove out upon the prairie. It was a gray, beautiful plain, luxuriant with ripened grass, sloping very gently to the north. Far to the eastward she espied the black horizon—wide line of buffalo. They had grazed down the stream. In the bright sunlight the whole panorama was splendid and stirring to Molly.

  The horses started at a trot and in the thick grass slowed to a steady brisk walk. The wagon was light, the ground level, and this powerful team had no serious task ahead of them, if they were only guided aright. Molly was excited, thrilled, and yet troubled. The adventure was tremendous, but the responsibility too great except for moments of defiance or exaltation. She could not all the time stay keyed up with a spirit that was unquenchable.

  Several miles of travel brought her to the summit of the gradual slope of valley, and here, as on the side from which she had come, she obtained commanding view of the surrounding country. It was grand, but she had only eyes for the northwest. Across the leagues of billowy prairie, so gray and monotonous and lonely, there stood a purple escarpment remote and calling. It was the Llano Estacado. Molly recognized it, and seemed for an instant to forget the sense of being lost. But it was far away, and the northern end disappeared in purple haze. On the other hand it was a landmark ever present from high points, and somewhere between it and her position now ran the road of the buffalo hunter.

  To her left meandered the green line of trees, like a fringed ribbon on the soft gray of prairie, and it headed for the Staked Plains, where she knew all these Texas streams had their source.

  “I could reach the road today or tomorrow, if I drove straight west,” soliloquized Molly.

  It was a sore temptation, but her good sense forbade her to take much added risk. The Comanches were between her and the buffalo camps. She must aim diagonally across the prairie, toward the extreme northwest corner of the escarpment, and perhaps in four or five days she would strike the road. Then she would know the camping grounds, and would surely fall in with oncoming hunters or outgoing freighters. To find water at night, and to cross such streams as she met—these were her present problems.

  Meanwhile, as she drove on, thinking only of this incredible journey, she could not help seeing and being momentarily thrilled by the wild creatures of the prairie.

  Sleek gray, white-rumped antelope scarcely bothered to trot out of her path, and with long ears erect they watched her pass. Wild? These beautiful prairie deer were not wild; Molly believed she could in time have had them eating out of her hand, like she had the squirrels and birds at the Pease River camp. It was men who made animals wild.

  She ranged the wide gray expanse for sight of buffalo. There was none. She saw a band of coyotes sneaking around the antelope. Farther on she espied a gaunt wolf, almost white, watching her from a ridge top. Rabbits were always scurrying from before the horses and prairie birds flitted out of the grass. Once Molly saw a red hawk poised in mid-air, fluttering its wings with marvelous rapidity, and then it shot down like a streak, to strike the grass, and rise with a tiny animal in its talons. Always beauty and life present, and with them, cruelty—death!

  * * * * *

  Molly drove from early morning until an hour before sunset, when she reached the only water of the day. It was a pond in a sandy streambed. There were fringes of hackberry brush along the banks, but no sheltering trees. Farther west some six or eight miles she thought she espied the green of timber, but that was far away, and off her line of direction. She must take what afforded, and to this end she unhitched, turned the horses loose, and made the simple preparations for her own wants.

  Whity and Specks, as she had christened the horses, after drinking at the pond, returned to linger near the wagon. They manifested extraordinary interest in Molly and even got in her way.

  “What’s the matter with you white-faced beggars?” she asked. “It’s oats you want, yes? Well, I’m not going to let you eat all the oats right away.”

  Yet she was not proof against their nosing around her. Long had she been gentle and kind to these horses—the more so because of Jett’s brutality. They knew her well, and now that she was master they began to prove the devotion of dumb brutes. Molly gave them sparingly of the oats, and petted them, and talked the more because solitude had begun to infringe upon her mind.

  This sunset hour found her tired after the long day’s drive. With change of action, followed by food and drink she needed, there came a rally of spirits. Darkness soon hid the lonely limitless expanse from Molly’s gaze, and then it seemed the night was lonelier. Only a faint murmur of insects! She would have welcomed a murmur of wolf, or even a cry of panther. A slight breeze fanned the red embers of the meager fire. She went to bed afraid of the silence, the night, afraid of sleep, yet she could not keep her eyes open, or stay the drowsy fading away of senses.

  * * * * *

  Next morning Molly was up early, and on the way before sunrise. She started well. But at the end of the first hour she ran into rough prairie, hindering travel. The luxuriant prairie grass failed, and the gray earth carried only a scanty covering. The horses plowed up dust that rose and blew back upon her; the sun grew hot and glaring, and there was a wide area of shallow washes, ditches, gullies, like the depressions of a washboard. Having plodded miles into this zone, she could not turn back, unless absolutely balked, so she applied herself to careful driving, and kept on, true as possible to the distant purple landmark.

  The strong horses, used to a heavy hand, could not be held by Molly, and they plunged into many places without her sanction. What with holding the reins as best she could, and constant heed to brake and distance, and worry lest she would damage a wheel, she was in grievous straits the most of that day. It passed swiftly, swallowed up in miles of hard going, and left no time for scanning the prairie, or fearful imaginings. It was work.

  Toward evening she drew out of this zone and came presently to good grass once more, and just at dusk hauled up to a timber belt that bordered water. The thirsty horses stamped to get down to it. Molly labored to unhitch them, and, when the task was done, she sank to the ground to rest. But she was driven to secure firewood while there was light enough. She felt too tired to eat, yet she knew she must eat, or else fail altogether of strength. The long hanging to the reins was what had exhausted Molly. Her hands hurt, her arms ached, her shoulders sagged. Driving that iron-mouthed team was a man’s job. Molly was no weakling, but her weight and muscular force were inadequate to the demand made by such driving.

  Supper, bed, night, sleep—they all passed swiftly, and again the sun rose. Molly could not find a place to ford the stream. It was not a depth of water that prevented, but high banks unsafe to attempt. For miles she drove along it, glad of the green foliage and singing birds and wild creatures, and especially glad that its course for most of the morning ran on little west of north. When, however, it made an abrupt turn to the west, she knew she must cross. She essayed the best ford she could find, made it safely, wet, shaken, frightened, and nearly pulled apart. On that far side she rested in the shade, and wept while she ate.

  When about to start again, she remembered that the men had never passed a stream or pond without watering the horses. Whereupon she took the bucket and went down to fill it. Four trips were necessary to satisfy their thirst of Whity and Specks. She had done well.

  “We had two dry camps between Sprague’s and the Pease,” she said, and thought she must not forget that.

 
; The afternoon drive began, and favorably. The sun was somewhat hazed over, reducing the heat; a level prairie afforded smooth travel; the horses had settled down into steady stolid work. The miles came slowly, but surely.

  Molly’s courage had not failed, but she was beset by physical ills, and the attendant moods, fancies, thoughts that could not everlastingly be overcome. She grew to hate the boundless prairie land, so barren of life, of any color but gray, of things that might mitigate the deceit of distance. Nothing save gray level and purple haze! It wore on her, ever flinging at her the attributes of the prairie—openness, a windy vastness, empty of sound, movement, the abode of solitude, the abode of loneliness. Lonely, lonely land! She was as much lost as ever. There was no road, no river, no camp, no mountain; only the dim upflung false Llano Estacado, unattainable as ever.

  But while Molly succumbed to her ills and her woes the horses plodded on. They knew what they had to accomplish, and were equal to it. They crowded the hours and miles behind them, and bore Molly to another watercourse, a wide flag-bordered enlargement of a stream, where ducks and cranes and kingfishers gave life to the melancholy scene.

  While she performed her tasks, the lake changed from blue to gold, and at last mirrored the rose of sunset sky. Then dusk fell sadly, and night came, dark, lonely, pierced by the penetrating trill of frogs, and the dismal cry of a water fowl. They kept Molly awake, and she could not shake the encroachment of morbid thoughts. Where was she? What would become of her? The vast gloomy prairie encompassed her, held her a prisoner, threatened her with madness. She had feared Indians, rivers, accidents, but now only the insupportable loneliness. Would she not die of it and be eaten by buzzards? The stars that had been so beautiful, watching, helpful, now seemed pitiless, remote, aloof, with their pale eyes on her, a girl lost on the endless prairie,. What was beyond those stars? Not a soul, no kindly great spirit to guide her out of this wilderness! Molly prayed no more.