North of 36 E-Book

Emerson Hough

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

„North of 36” is another magnificent novel by the author of „The Covered Wagon”. This is just a good old-fashioned western about the first cattle drive from Texas to Abilene. Emerson Hough (1857-1923) was an American author best known for writing western stories and historical novels. Hough’s literary career grew out of his taking camping trips and writing about them for publication. His body of work eventually included 27 novels and hundreds of short stories and articles. Hough’s early works included „The Singing Mouse Stories”, for children, and the nonfiction „The Story of the Cowboy”. He had his first major success in 1902 with his novel „The Mississippi Bubble”, which became a bestseller. Several of his works were adapted for film, including „North of 36” which was first published in 1923.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I. IN THE MORNING

CHAPTER II. A NEW WORLD

CHAPTER III. THE ORPHAN OF DEL SOL

CHAPTER IV. THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL

CHAPTER V. MARRIAGE, COWS AND CARPETBAGS

CHAPTER VI. THE LONE HERD

CHAPTER VII. THE HERD CUTTERS

CHAPTER VIII. THE FISHHOOK

CHAPTER IX. THE TRAIL

CHAPTER X. IN DAYS OF OLD

CHAPTER XI. THE COURT ON THE TRAIL

CHAPTER XII. THE COW HUNTERS

CHAPTER XIII. “BRING AN IRON!”

CHAPTER XIV. A STRANGE ERRAND

CHAPTER XV. NORTHWARD HO!

CHAPTER XVI. IN THE NIGHT

CHAPTER XVII. MR. DALHART DECLARES

CHAPTER XVIII. FLOTSAM

CHAPTER XIX. THE CATTLE RIEVER

CHAPTER XX. TAKING TOLL

CHAPTER XXI. THE RUBICON

CHAPTER XXII. “TILL ABILENE”

CHAPTER XXIII. UNDER WHICH FLAG?

CHAPTER XXIV. THE MURDER

CHAPTER XXV. THE KILLER

CHAPTER XXVI. THE INDIAN NATIONS

CHAPTER XXVII. THE GAME OF THE GODS

CHAPTER XXVIII. A COLONEL OF CAVALRY

CHAPTER XXIX. A MAID’S MISTAKE

CHAPTER XXX. MANY TRANSACTIONS

CHAPTER XXXI. THE JONAH

CHAPTER XXXII. LAZYING ALONG

CHAPTER XXXIII. THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER XXXIV. THE TRAIL MAKER

CHAPTER XXXV. IN THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER XXXVI. ROLL ALONG, LITTLE DOGIES!

CHAPTER XXXVII. ABILENE

CHAPTER XXXVIII. ALAMO ARRIVES

CHAPTER XXXIX. THE WOMAN

CHAPTER XL. MR. RUDABAUGH APPEARS

CHAPTER XLI. EASTERN CAPITAL

CHAPTER XLII. TWENTY STRAIGHT ON THE PRAIRIE

CHAPTER XLIII. LOU GORE

CHAPTER XLIV. THE LOST SCRIP

CHAPTER XLV. THE MAN HUNT

CHAPTER XLVI. FAIR EXCHANGE

CHAPTER XLVII. THE COURT OF THE COMANCHES

CHAPTER XLVIII. THE GREAT LODESTONE

CHAPTER I. IN THE MORNING

“MEN–” Taisie meant to say “Good morning, men,” as usually she did if she came to the cook house door before they had finished breakfast. But this morning she hesitated, halted.

There had been the usual mealtime silence of the cattle hands, broken only by rasp or chatter of steel on tin; but as the tall girl’s shadow fell at the door of the log house Jim Nabours, foreman of Del Sol, rose at his place. Fifteen other men pushed back their chairs nervously, staring at the boss as though caught in some overt criminal act. In the occupation of eating a regulation breakfast of beef and beans, cattle hands, time out of mind, have asked no aid and invited no company.

But Taisie Lockhart was their hereditary chieftainess. Her father, Colonel Burleson Lockhart, these two years deceased–a strong man in his day, and a poignant–had owned the Laguna del Sol range, of unknown acreage. Likewise, he had owned no man knew how many thousand head of long-horned cattle, from calves to mossy horns; owned yonder branching and rambling building of log and adobe called the big house; owned the round pens and the live-oak groves, the mast-fed range hogs and the nuts that fed them; owned bunk houses and cook house and corrals. Yes, and owned faith of body and soul of every man that lived on Del Sol, from old Salazar to the gawkiest ranch boy to put his saddle under the shed.

Heiress to all this, as her father had owned lands and herds and men, so did Taisie Lockhart. But to her, orphaned and alone, came an added fealty from her men that amounted almost to fanaticism. Most of them had known and loved her from her childhood. In her young womanhood they enshrined her.

The boss of Laguna del Sol now stood framed in the doorway, in man’s garb of shirt and trousers–an assumption shocking in that land and day. This costume she deliberately had assumed when she took on a man’s duties in a business preëminently masculine. Obviously now, she was tall, slender, supple, rounded to a full physical inheritance of womanly charm unhardened by years of life in the saddle and under the sun. More; she was an actual beauty. Anywhere else she would have been a sensation. Here, she spoiled each unfinished breakfast.

Against the morning light the freckles of Anastasie Lockhart could not be seen. No matter. Every man of these could have told you the number and contour of them each and all. In a way, too, they could have told you that her freckles went with her hair. The light that shone through the mass of dark red hair–long and unconfined she wore it, clubbed between her shoulders with a shoestring–lighted a thousand fronds into a sort of aureole, halo, crown. Not that this, either, was needed. For long, Taisie Lockhart, orphan owner of Laguna del Sol–just south of Stephen Austin’s first settlement in old Texas it lay–had been traditional saint, angel, to every creature that bore boots and spurs within a hundred miles. Nay, more than that; across two states–old Texas and old Louisiana–so far as interchange of information then went, before the day of telegraph and rails, men, and even women, spoke in hushed tones of Taisie Lockhart; the former out of awe at her beauty, the latter out of pity for her fate.

An orphan, left alone at twenty, just as she came home from her convent schooling at the ancient city of New Orleans, with no woman relative and no female companions other than her servants, what could be the fate of such a girl, seventy-five miles from the nearest town, twenty-five from the nearest rancho, and the rumor of her beauty continually spreading league by league? On her shoulders rested all the responsibilities of what was or had been one of the largest and richest ranches of Central Texas, and thereto was the responsibility for what manner of beauty sets mad the hearts of men.

Every woman in all Texas, at least in all the Texas of Bexar, Guadalupe, Comal, Gonzales and Caldwell counties, was sorry for Taisie Lockhart. She was trying to hold together the property left her by the sudden death–through murder–of her father, Burleson Lockhart, frontiersman on the bloody borders of the Southwest since 1831. And every woman wondered what man she would marry. Every woman also demanded that she marry soon.

An Alabama man Burleson Lockhart’s father had been; he himself was Louisianian up to his young manhood; and since then Texan, from a time before the Texas Republic was born. Add to Burleson Lockhart’s six feet of fighting manhood the tender beauty of Anastasie Brousseau, gentle and beautiful Louisiana girl, willing to leave her own plantation home among the moss-hung bayou lands for the red borders of Comanche land–and behold Taisie, present mistress of Del Sol, motherless since six, educated by her father in compliance with her mother’s steady wish, and now owner of a vast property that to-day would mean many millions.

But to-day in Texas is not the day of 1867. Yonder was a country wild, almost lawless, unfettered, savage; moreover just then roughened and wholly disheartened by the Civil War. In truth, taking her as she stood, within half a foot of six feet, beautiful despite her boots and trousers, Taisie Lockhart was no more than a dead-broke heiress to a potential but wholly dormant wealth, or to possessions which but now had vanished.

And that was why she now broke down in her morning salutation, even when all her men arose and joined Jim Nabours in silent attention.

“Men–” began the tall girl once more, and once more failed.

Then Taisie Lockhart ignominiously leaned her red head on her brown hand against the gray cook house door jamb and shed genuine feminine tears. Which act made every man present wish that he could do violence to something or somebody.

The boss was crying! Well, why? Had anything–had anybody–The eye of each looked to his wall nail, where, in ranch etiquette, he had hung his gun before taking up his knife and fork.

Jim Nabours cleared his throat. His Adam’s apple struggled convulsively, walking up and down his brown and sinewy neck. Taisie knew he wanted to speak.

“Men,” she began yet again, at last desperately facing them with undried eyes, and stepping fully into the long room, “I’ve come to say good-by to you. I’ve–we’ve–you’ve got to go!”

The men stood, shocked. What could she mean? Go? Where? What? Quit the brand? Leave Laguna del Sol? Leave her, the boss? What did that mean? Not even Jim Nabours could break the horrified silence, and he had been foreman these five and twenty years.

“Boys,” said Taisie Lockhart at last, suddenly spreading out her hands, “I’m done! I’m broke! I–I can’t pay you any more!”

And then Taisie Lockhart, owner of perhaps fifty thousand acres of land and what had once been fifty thousand cows, broke down absolutely. She cast herself on the board bench at one side of the clothless table, sunk her glorious head on her flung arms and wept; wept like a child in need of comfort. And there was none in all the world to comfort her, unless sixteen lean and gawky cow hands could do so; which, now patently, they could not.

“Miss Taisie, what you mean?” began Jim Nabours, after a very long time.

“Broke!” whispered Anastasie Lockhart collegiately. “Broke at last! Boys, I’m clean busted and for fair!”

“That ain’t no ways what I mean, Miss Taisie!” went on the anguished foreman. “Broke ain’t nothing. Yore paw was broke; everybody in all Texas is and always has been. Pay? He didn’t; nobody does. But what I–now, what I mean is, what do you mean when you say we got to go? What have we done? What you got against us?”

“Nothing, Jim.”

“Why, good Lord! There ain’t a man here that wouldn’t–that wouldn’t–indeed, ma’am, there ain’t, not one of us that wouldn’t–So now then, you say we got to go? Why? You’d ought to tell us why, anyways, ma’am. That’s only fair.”

The girl’s somber eyes looked full into his as she raised her head, one clenched hand still on the table top, the quirt loop still around the wrist. She faced business disaster with the courage many a business man has lacked.

“That’s what makes me cry,” said she simply. “It’s because you won’t go easy when I tell you. It’s because you’ll be wanting to keep on working for me for nothing. I can’t stand that. If I can hire you I’ve got to pay you. When I can’t, I’m done. Well, I can’t any more. I’d sell my piano for this month’s pay. I’ve tried to, but I can’t.”

“What? You’d sell the Del Sol pianny? Why, Miss Taisie, what you mean? I helped freight her up here from Galveston. That’s the onliest pianny in Middle Texas, far’s I know. That’s branded T. L., that pianny! And you’d sell her to pay a lot of measly cow hands wages they didn’t no ways ever half earn? Why, ma’am!”

Again sundry evolutions of the Adam’s apple of Mr. Nabours.

“Oh, I don’t doubt you’d stay on, because you’ve all worked around here so long. You’d all be careless about your wages; you’d do anything for me, yes. That’s because you think I’m a girl. You think you have to. I’m not–you don’t. I’m a business man, like any one else. If I can’t make Del Sol pay I’ve got to give it up; that’s all.

“I’m four months behind now,” she added, “and not one of you has whimpered. The store’s naked and you know it. Some of you even may be out of tobacco, but you don’t complain. That’s what cuts me. You’re the finest bunch of hands that ever crossed leather, and I can’t pay you. All right! If I can’t, you can’t work for me.”

“But, Miss Taisie, ma’am,” struggled her foreman, “ ’tain’t nothing a-tall. What’s a few pesos one way or other? We can’t buy nothing, nohow, even if we had money, and don’t want to, noways.

“Besides, what’d become of us? Besides, what’d become of you? Have you ever thought of that? Didn’t I promise yore paw, and yore maw, too, that I’d look after you and yore interests long as we was both alive? Well, then?

“I ain’t got much savvy outside of cows, ma’am,” he went on; “but cows I do know well as the next. It’s all cows, this part of Texas, and we all know it. There ain’t no market and never will be. We can’t sell cows at six bits a head, or a hide, neither, and we all know that–everybody’s got cows that ain’t worth a damn, ma’am, of course. But what I mean is, if the T. L. can’t make a living there ain’t no ranch in Texas can. I don’t put my hands back of no outfit in the world, ma’am. We’ve run the T. L. on over twelve hundred head of loose stuff this winter, and I told the boys to pick the yearlings and twos careful.”

His eyes shifted, he perspired.

“We got plenty of water and all outdoors. We didn’t lose one per cent last summer, and winters was when we didn’t lose nothing. The increase is a crime, ma’am. If we’d hold a rodeo in our band–which we’d ought to–God knows how many we’d find in the T. L. I’d bet sixty-five thousand! And the mesquite full of long ears that no man claims. If we can’t do well no stockman in Texas can.”

His eyes avoided hers as he gave these Homerically mendacious figures. But he went on stoutly:

“Yet you talk of quitting! Why should you? The old Laguna is the richest range in Texas. Our grass sets ’em out a hundred and fifty a head heavier than them damned coasters from below, ma’am.

“And if you talk of turning off us men, where’d we go? What’d we do? I ask you that, anyways, ma’am.”

“If there was any market,” began Taisie, “it would be different. As it is, the more we brand the poorer we get.”

“Well, all right; we ain’t any poorer than our neighbors. Market? Of course there ain’t no market! Rockport has failed–canning cows don’t pay. Hides is low. There’s nothing in the steamship trade, and no use driving East since the war is over. Besides, with such good water and range as we got on Del Sol, why, nothing ever dies; so there ain’t no hides no more.

“As for long ears, slicks, we’re as good off as old Sam Maverick, that wouldn’t never bother to brand nothing hardly, and so found hisself swamped when the war was over. We got less unworked long-ear range west of us than anybody, but nobody tries to sell hides or cows now. The New Orleans market costs more to get a cow to than the cow comes to when he’s there. The steamships has us choked off of everything east of us; we can’t ship nothing and break even on it. Every one of us knows that, of course.”

“Too many cows!” Taisie’s head shook from side to side.

“Yes! Enduring the war, cows just growed like flies in here and all over Texas. Market? No, that’s so. But when you once get to raising cows, ma’am, and branding cows that no one else has raised, and seeing the herds roll up and roll up–why, it’s no use! No cattleman can do no different. If we had a market–why, yes. We hain’t, and ain’t going to have; but what’s the use crying over that? Shall every stockman in Texas lay down and quit cows just because he can’t sell cows and ain’t got no market? If he does the state might as well quit being a state. It might as well, anyhow, since the damn Yankees taken it over to run since the war.”

The shadow of Reconstruction was on Jim Nabours’ face. And what he said covered the whole story of the general destitution of an unmeasured empire tenanted by uncounted millions of Nature’s tribute to life when left alone. This was Texas after the Civil War, impoverished amid such bounty of wild Nature as no other part of this great republic ever has known. The first Saxon owner of Laguna del Sol paid for some of it in Texas land scrip that had not cost him two and a half cents an acre. His original land grant had cost him less. Scrip went in blocks and bales, held worthless. Men laughed at those who owned it. Land? It could never fail. The world was wide; the sun was kind; life was an easy, indolent, certain thing.

Nothing less than a section of land was covered by scrip. It was nothing to own a thousand sections, if one liked to fad it. And, since a hundred thousand cattle might roam there unmolested and uncounted, it literally was true that every man in Texas was land poor and cow poor–if he was so ignorant and foolish as to buy land scrip at two to five cents an acre when he might have all the range he liked for nothing at all, and all the cows he cared for without the bother of counting them.

It was genesis. It was still in the beginning, in the Texas of 1867, where the Americans had just begun to extend the thin antennæ of the Saxon civilization. Here was a life for a bold man, rude, careless, free, independent of law and government. A world unbounded, inestimable, lay in the making.

But any who could have read fully this little drama at the cook house would have known that world to be tenanted by folk embittered by the war and ready to say that their world now was made and done. Of these, Taisie Lockhart, orphan loaded with riches that could not be rendered portable or divisible, made one more unhappy unit. She was, naturally, far the more unhappy because through her education she had found a wider outlook on life and the world than had these others. Somewhere, too, in her stern ancestry had been a sense of personal honor which left her still more sensitive.

But the immortal gods take pity on the sorrows of youth and beauty, it may chance. They have their own ways, employ agents of their own selecting. This orphan heiress, keen to pay her debts, became one of the first factors in one of the most Homeric epochs in the history of all the world. Not so long after this woebegone meeting of bankrupt cattle folk at the Del Sol cook house there was to appear a phenomenon that set at naught all customs, that asked no precedent, that defied even the ancient laws of section and of latitude. All of which did not just now develop.

“Set down, Miss Taisie,” said the gray old foreman, awkwardly, gently, flushing at asking the owner of Del Sol to be seated in her own cook house. She had arisen, and, hands at her eyes, was about to leave the place. Now she dropped back and looked at him dumbly, suddenly no more than a weak girl at her wits’ end.

“Now listen to me, Miss Taisie,” began old Jim Nabours with sudden firmness. “You know I’ve worked for yore folks all my life, ever since I come down from the Brazos forty years ago. I come back here when the war stopped–Kirby Smith’s men on the Lower Red was the last to surrender. This is my place, that’s all.

“Now, I got a right to talk plain to you. I’m a-going to. When you say you’re going to turn off a bunch of the best cow hands in Texas, just because you can’t pay their wages no more, why, then you ain’t showing reason ner judgment I’m foreman for the T. L. brand. What I say goes. When you say we’re turned loose you’re talking foolish. We ain’t! What’s wages to us? I’d like for you to tell me. Did we get any in the Army? Does anybody pay wages now, in all Texas? How can they?

“Miss Taisie, I went with yore paw to Austin, when he was a member, and in the big Assembly Room was a man at a desk with a hammer, and says he, ever oncet in a while, “Motion done overruled!’ Then he soaks the table with the hammer. And now, ma’am, yore motion about firing sixteen good cow hands is done overruled!”

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.

“Si, señorita,” said he. “Es verdad!”

“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.

CHAPTER II. A NEW WORLD

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.

“Well, Jesse only followed the road that crossed the Canadian at Roberts’ Ferry–the old Whisky Trail. He headed west instead of north, after a while. He went up the Brazos and west across to the Concho with a bunch of cows. He knew there was a military market at Fort Sumner, on the Pecos, over in New Mexico. So he made the big two-day dry drive west of the Concho. He hit the Pecos at the Horsehead Crossing and worked up to Sumner. Loving and Goodnight had a trail north of Sumner–clean up into Colorado. Army posts and reservations all have got to have beef, and a lot of it. Yes, that’s going to make a market some day. If we herd the Indians they’ve all got to eat.”

“Seguro! Shore they have! They feed the damned Comanches, and the Comanches shoot up and murder every outfit that tracks west to the Pecos–every drive out there means a half dozen Indian fights. No money in that.

“No, nor no money in anything that has anything to do with cows,” Nabours continued. “Look at the record. Rockport, Indianola, Galveston, Mobile, New Orleans, Little Rock, Illinois, Ioway–all them foreign countries, full of damn Yankees and thieves. What ghostly chance has a Texas stockman got? I’d as soon eat javelin’ as beef–it ain’t so common, and it costs more. There’s cows thicker’n lizards all the way from Matagorda to Doan’s Store on the Red, and west far’s the Staked Plains. We’re busted, friend. The South is licked. We’ve got a carpetbag government and no hope of any change. If all Texas was worth one solitary whoop in hell do you reckon you could buy a mile square of vine-mesquite grass land for fourteen dollars? Not that I would, or could–I haven’t got the fourteen dollars. No, nor it don’t look like any stockman in this whole state ever will have fourteen dollars, the whole caboodle, from Santone to the Sabine. This is the poorest place in the whole damned world, Texas is, and I’m here for to prove it.”

Jim Nabours’ long-pent dissatisfaction had led him into the longest speech of his entire life. He knew he had an understanding hearer in this grave young man from Gonzales, who nodded, noncommittal as heretofore. Nabours went on.

“And yet,” said he vehemently, “why, now, Miss Taisie, that owns this ranch brand, now, she wants to try it again, north! Would you believe that? Wasn’t her father murdered by them damned people that beat up pore Jimmy Dougherty on the Missoury border two years ago? Huh! He was crazy to drive north. What did it bring him? His death, and the ruin of Del Sol!

“That girl’s been wanting, all this month, to make up a herd and drive north! Can you figure that out? Her a child, you might say, wanting to do what her father couldn’t do, and take chances that cost him his life! Crazy, that’s all. But who ever changed a Lockhart?

“And now, right here, this very morning”–Nabours beat on the table with his fist–“she comes in and declares herself. Says she’s broke and can’t pay her hands. Turns us all loose–every man! Her a girl only twenty-two, a orphant at that, and not a soul to take care of her! Great God! Well, that’s what cows comes to in Texas.”

The young man nodded, still silent, his face grave.

“Of course,” resumed Nabours, “we wouldn’t go. Shore, we ain’t had no wages for a spell; but who has? And what has wages got to do with it, us working for a orphant, and that particular orphant being the Del Sol boss? Quit? Why I’ve worked on the brand forty years, man and boy! I couldn’t quit nohow, if I tried. She ought to know that. Makes me mad.”

“Perhaps she thought of how her father always paid. She has his sense of honor.”

“Well, we didn’t go. I just told the boys to go on out and brand long ears, like we been doing since the war. There ain’t no money in it. I did hope we’d have a hard winter, to kill off some of the range stock. What do we get? Two soft winters when the flies didn’t die! Not a half of one per cent loss, and the whole ungodly world getting so damned full of calves that a man couldn’t make a living skinning dead stock on the water fronts, not if he had twelve pairs of hands! Dead? There ain’t no dead–they’re all alive! What’s worse, they keep getting aliver. This whole state, come couple more mild winters, ‘ll turn into tails and horns. And if I needed a new saddle or a pair of boots I’d have to steal them. Yet that girl, she’s made life miserable for me to drive three thousand head north and get some money to pay us hands. You and me know that’s foolish.”

“Is it, though?”

Nabours looked at him suddenly.

“How else?”

“Well, I’ve just come down from that country. To-day there’s something new up north.”

“New?”

“Yes, plumb new. I don’t mean Baxter Springs or Little Rock.”

“You don’t mean a real market north!”

“That is what I do mean! There’ll be money in driving north after this spring.”

Nabours looked at him for a time in silence.

“You’ll have to show me how, Mr. McMasters. I ain’t never been north of the Red, nor west of the Concho, though south of the Rio Grande, plenty. What I’ve learned is, a cow ain’t worth a damn, and any cow man’s a idjit, and he can’t help keeping on being one.”

“Very well, listen! The Kansas Pacific Railroad is building west across Kansas this spring as fast as they can lay rails. At the last town–that’s Abilene–some men pat their heads together on precisely this question that’s got us all guessing. A cow is worth four dollars–three–nothing down here. At the railroad he’s worth ten, maybe more. East, he’s worth twenty, maybe more. They need beef, and we’ve got beef, or the making of it. It needs no watchmaking to figure that this deadlock has got to break.

“Now, they’ve taken a chance at Abilene; they’ve put up shipping pens–so they told me at Wichita. They said you could follow up the Washita and cross the Canadian and go north; then hit in west of Wichita and swing north across the Arkansas to Abilene. And there’s the market, man!

“That’s the biggest news that ever came to Texas. It’s bigger than San Jacinto. You know what that means, if you could get a herd through? Well, I’d say your boss had a good head on her shoulders.”

Nabours sat silent, stupefied.

“I came in here through Caldwell,” the visitor went on now, explanatory. “I’ve ridden over a perfectly practical trail for nearly a thousand miles so far as grass and water are concerned. I thought I’d bring this news in to Del Sol. I’ve known the Burleson Lockhart family all my life, of course, and of the hard place Colonel Lockhart’s daughter has been forced into by his death. I wanted to ride in and see her, the first time since we were children.”

The young man colored just a trace as he went on. “I wanted to bring her, as owner of a Texas brand, the news of the new market,” said he. “Is she at home?”

“Didn’t you see her when you came in?”

McMasters hesitated.

“I saw a young man. I didn’t just know–”

The foreman smiled.

“I couldn’t blame you. Well, I’m the only mother that girl has got left. I’m one hell of a mother! But still, I don’t see why you didn’t ride on up to the front door.”

The young man’s face flushed rather hotly, but he was guilty of no nervousness, did not even smile.

“No man could come on better business,” said he. “It was not her fault. She did not know me, nor I her.”

“You must go on up to the house,” said Nabours. “First tell me, what took you north?”

McMasters looked at him in his cold way.

“Well,” said he finally, “I’m a peace officer. I’ve been sheriff of Gonzales for six months. Perhaps you haven’t heard the latest news about the Rangers. In spite of our carpetbagging friends, they’re organized again, stronger than before the war, and with more to do. They gave me the honor of electing me a captain. I’ve been up north on a certain business.”

Nabours nodded now silently.

“There’s not a man here or in Central Texas that ain’t sworn to kill the murderer of them two men, if ever he is found. You know that, Mr. McMasters.”

“Yes! Nor is your oath more strong than mine.”

McMasters turned to the silent negro, who had brought in a pan of water and a towel. As he turned up his sleeves, the cuffs of his linen shirt–as the rolled soft collar also might before then have disclosed–showed a dull red, not white. He laughed.

“A superstition,” said he, nodding. “Sort of oath of the family. In the war my mother had to dye her own clothing with pokeberry. She dyed a few of my father’s shirts that way by mistake once. My father was so proud of our sacrifices to the cause–though he didn’t think Texas should have seceded–that he swore he’d never have collars or cuffs any other color. Well, a new sheriff in Gonzales hasn’t so many shirts. This one was once my father’s. Yes, we’re poor–poor, we Texans.

“Turn my horse in the round pen, please, sir,” he concluded, when he had made himself neat as possible. “Would you please ask Miss Lockhart if she will see Mr. Dan McMasters, the son of her father’s friend?”

CHAPTER III. THE ORPHAN OF DEL SOL

BLANCOCITO had dozed in the sun for a considerable interval. Hearing a sound at the front door, he turned an idle eye, and sprang back with a snort at sight of the unusual apparition which now descended the gallery steps–Anastasie Lockhart, no longer in male apparel, and by the merest accident coming out of the house as the two men would now have entered.

Jim Nabours was not accustomed to social formulas.

“Miss Taisie, this here is Mr. McMasters, of Gonzales, below. He’s sher’f down there. I reckon you know who he is.”

“I saw you when you came in, sir,” said the mistress of Del Sol demurely, extending her hand. “Why did you not come up to breakfast?”

While McMasters, his eyes fixed on hers, was explaining his travel-worn condition, Jim Nabours was wondering how and why in the name of all the saints of the Southwest Taisie had managed in so short a time to change from her daily ranch costume to this feminine marvel of fresh lawn, with ruffled flounces and great belled skirt. She even had white mitts–yellow-white with age. But Taisie saw no reason to explain that much of her apparel once had been her mother’s, and was now fresh resurrected. Jim did not know the mysteries of a certain rawhide chest so well as old black Milly, who had served in the Burleson Lockhart family before they moved into the border country. Had he known he might also have had a guess at the miracle of Taisie’s heavy hair, no longer banded like an Indian woman’s but done up in some sort of high twisted mass that left visible the milk-white nape of a neck not always otherwise protected against the sun.

In good truth Anastasie–such was her mother’s Louisiana name in baptism, and her own–was not unmindful of the ways of woman in older lands, in spite of the surroundings into which fate had cast her. And truly she was beautiful–rarely, astonishingly, confusingly beautiful. The man did not live who could have seen her now and not have felt his heart leap to joy in the universe and its ways.

She led them back into the house. Her very presence filled the low-ceiled room, one of the two at the right of the four corners made by the right-angled double halls. The adobe ranch house of Del Sol was built like others of the Saxon Southwest, so that each breath of air might be caught from any direction of the wind; an arrangement cooler than a patio for a house surrounded on two sides by a grove of giant live oaks draped heavily in Spanish moss.

The interior gave a rude setting for a picture such as this young woman made. The ease and luxury of lower Louisiana, for a wealthy generation of sugar-cane planters the repository of Europe’s best art and last luxuries, were not reflected in the first Saxon generation of the Texas border. True, the furniture in part was traceable to earlier days. Two paintings, three framed samplers, told of a mother’s hands. There was a heavy claw-foot table. A few mismated chairs of the Empire stood in a row. But a rawhide settee and four splat-bottom chairs frankly admitted the limit of such supplies; the prevailing flavor of the borderland could not be denied. Not so much of a marvel, for at that time there was not a hundred miles of railroad within the boundaries of Texas, and everything from the East must survive the toil and danger of wagon freighting.

In one corner of the room was a conical upright Mexican fireplace. Opposed to this and covered with soft tanned baby-calfskins of varied colors, stood the one thing which had saved the soul of Anastasie Lockhart the first, as of Anastasie the second–the piano, regarded with awe by all the cattle hands. On the piano stood, now, a vase of flowers. They were very fresh flowers. Jim Nabours knew they had not been there an hour earlier, for he had called before breakfast and they were not there then; though he knew Taisie’s garden had some blossoms.

What shall escape the eye of a maiden? Tapered conchas on a bridle strap, neat boots, a well-shaped hat, a way of sitting in a saddle, the air of a family that had once come down from Tennessee on the Natchez Trace and the Old River Road, to Louisiana, to Texas? Nay, not so easily are a maid’s eyes baffled, though she shall have had but a single look at a newcome young man opening her gate a hundred yards away. Hence these flowers, hence this frock, the reason for which Jim Nabours could not analyze.

Mr. Dan McMasters, new sheriff of Gonzales, mighty young for that job, was a proper man. A vague sense of uneasiness came to the soul of Foreman Jim as he saw his comeliness and ease of manner. He felt he had been betrayed–did not feel familiar with these new little ways.

“You see, Miss Lockhart,” went on McMasters when he had taken his own seat on the cowhide settee, “I’ve been north, up the Indian roads. As I was only fifty miles away, I thought I would ride in.”

“You are very welcome, sir. Our families always have been friends.”

The voice of Anastasie Lockhart was the color of her hair. Almost, you could call her hair vibrant.

“Yes, my family always has known your family. I wanted to see you once more. That must have been my main reason. You–you have grown, Miss Lockhart. I’d not have known you. But just now I was talking with your segundo. He thought you might like to hear some word I am bringing down to Texas from the North.”

“He means they’ve started a cattle market up North on the railroad, Miss Taisie,” broke in Jim Nabours.

“Market? There’s going to be a shipping point–do you mean that, sir?” The girl turned swiftly.

“I think so, yes,” replied Dan McMasters. “It’s at Abilene, in Kansas, right north of Wichita. You see, Wichita’s not far across the Kansas line, above the Nations.”

“Abilene?”

“No one ever heard of it. It’s head of the rails on the Kansas Pacific, the new road that’s building west. They want cattle. They are promising a market.”

The girl’s eyes kindled.

“That’s news!”

He nodded.

“Yes. The railroads are planning to run up the Arkansas the same as up the Platte–and that’s done, now. That whole country north of here, from all I can hear about it, is a thousand by two thousand miles of natural cow land. Grass? They tell me that farther on west there’s millions of acres of what they call buffalo grass–short, like our grama. Maybe it won’t carry cows, but some say it will. It certainly fattens the buffalo. And there isn’t a cow in it all; it’s empty and waiting for range stock–to say nothing of the Eastern demand.”

Nabours broke in.

“We know we could herd as far as Wichita. Shore we could get from there to Aberlene.”

“Yes,” said this prophet of a new day; “and we would find Eastern buyers–farmers and feeders and beef men–waiting to buy our stuff as fast as we drove it through.”

“Really?” Taisie Lockhart almost forgot her morning’s troubles. “Really?”

“Why, yes, I reckon it’s true, from what the men told me that came down to cut the trail in the Nations. They declare there’ll be buyers for all we can drive, up to a hundred thousand head–yes, two-three hundred thousand!”

Inarticulate sound came in Anastasie’s throat. She cast a triumphant glance at her foreman.

“Well, now, ma’am, how was I to know?” defended Jim. “I never did hear of no Aberlene, not in my whole life, till this young gentleman rid in here this morning.”

“Well, you ought to have heard of it!” rejoined his employer with a woman’s logic. “Why, man, that’s what all Texas has been starving for for years! Didn’t I tell you? Haven’t I been telling you? Haven’t I been begging you to make a herd and drive north, somewhere, and trust to God to find buyers there, since there’s no hope here, south or east? Haven’t I told you, Jim?”

“I reckon you did, ma’am,” admitted her aid. “Same time, you didn’t know a damned thing about it.”

“Oh, you!” Taisie turned to him. “Do you expect to have people show you what’s in their hands before you draw cards? Can’t you take a chance?”

“For my own self, yes, Miss Taisie. For you–we all was scared. Especial we was scared when you said you was going along.”

“But I am going along! And I am going to put up a herd!”

“Now, Miss Lockhart,” ventured Dan McMasters, “you couldn’t do that. Your men can put up a herd and drive north for you, but no woman ever has gone north of the Red, or ever ought to try it. There’s no real trail–it’s all wild north of here for fifteen hundred miles or more. There’s not a bridge–I’ve swum ten rivers and forded a hundred. There are Indians. There are storms–and no shelter for you. Miss Lockhart, there’s not a man in Texas ever would let you go.”

“There’s not men enough in all Texas to keep me from going!”

Taisie’s grief was entirely forgotten now.

“Even your father–” Jim began.

“Don’t!” Sudden tears came to the girl’s eyes.

“She allus bogs down–about her father,” explained Nabours.

“I’ll not bog down! I’ll get over this some day. Why, the reason I want to go north is to find the man that did it! He’s somewhere up there.”

McMasters, captain in the Rangers, looked at her with a sudden kindling of his own cool eyes; but he said nothing. The mistress of Del Sol stamped her foot in its cross-banded slipper.

“Always you treat me like a girl. I’m not!”

“Yes, you are, Miss Taisie,” rejoined Jim Nabours. “You’re a girl, and I’m your mother and your father both, till you get a new segundo.”

“Listen at him!” Taisie turned to the young stranger. “The whole state of Texas is dying on its feet, and the men of Texas scared to drive, with maybe five dollars a head waiting for them at the railroad! That’s riches!

“How long would it take?” she demanded of her informant.

“All season, practically,” replied McMasters. “I rode about forty miles a day, coming south, and I was eleven hundred miles away at one time. Cows could go ten miles a day, maybe, if you could keep the herd going; say two-three hundred miles a month. Say three-four months–that would cover a heap of trail.”

“All the distance between here and heaven! All the difference between poverty and self-respect! Oh!”–she looked him fair in the face–“it’s no use to pretend! Do you know what I did this very morning, sir, just before you rode in? Do you know why I’m crying now? I can’t help it. Why, I was down there to tell my men that I’d turned them all loose this morning. I discharged them all. I told them I was broke, that I couldn’t pay my hands.

“Poor? Don’t I know! Go back to Gonzales and tell your people that the last Lockhart’s down in the dust. I’ve got no pride left at all, because I’m broke. Do you wonder that I cry?”

“She did!” said Jim Nabours. “She is!”

McMasters turned away and looked out the window. The tears of such a woman made one thing no man could face.

“But, of course,” added the foreman, “I taken all that in my own hands. I just sont the hands out like usual. Seems like I can hear the irons sizzling on about a dozen long ears by now already.”

“And the lot not worth a pinch of old Milly’s snuff!” commented Taisie. “The market–that’s the one thing! Mr. McMasters has brought news!”

“I almost hesitate over it,” said the young man. “I can’t bring it free of risk and danger.”

“You don’t know my men!” broke out Taisie proudly.

“Oh, yes, I do! I know us all, ma’am. They–we would all die first. But suppose that was not enough?”

“And if I’m a woman, at least I’m not an old woman. I’ll drive the first Texas herd to the railroad with my own men if it takes our last horse and last man! It’s north for me, or I’m gone. When you rode in, sir, I was at the lowest ebb of all my life.”

“I wish the tide may turn, Miss Lockhart,” said young Dan McMasters quietly.

“It will–I believe it has!” She was on her feet, her eyes bright, her color up. “Why, listen! I’ll take Anita and Milly both along. We’ve two carretas left. Jim, you old coward”–her hand was on his shoulder affectionately–“you know you told me you could make a herd of five thousand fours in our brand inside of a day’s ride from Del Sol. Even if it was beeves–

“Tell me, what ages?” She turned suddenly to McMasters.

“I can’t say yet,” was his reply. “Fours and long threes would do best for shipping East. But the talk I heard is that there’ll be use for stockers–even yearlings, too, because the range is open all in north and west of there. People are crowding out to the buffalo range, following the railroads. It’s unbelievable how crazy they are. It seems as though they felt they just have got to get West. They’ll all need cattle.”

A new expression came to his face as he went on:

“There’s millions of acres of unbroken land up there, north of the old slavery line of 36-30. It will take North and South both to make it. It will be the West! It will be the heart of America!”

“We’ll be the first to see it! There’s no age from calf to fifty years Del Sol can’t drive!” said Taisie Lockhart decisively. “How many?”

“That depends on your force of hands. Some said three thousand head was around what a herd should be. A dozen hands could drive it–say fifteen-twenty. Each man ought to have at least six or eight horses in his string. There’ll be riding.”

“Well, what of that? I can turn out twenty men who can talk to cows in their own language. We wouldn’t miss thirty-five hundred fours, Jim says. When shall we start?”

She still was smiling, eager; but the look in her eyes was one of resolution; and as Jim had said, a Lockhart never changed.

“Jesse Chisholm just followed the grass,” answered McMasters presently. “It’s green here in March, and it’s February now. Once across the Colorado and the Brazos, we’d go clean to the Red, easy–I know my father always said that. He said a driver could go in west of Austin and Fort Worth, and get to the north edge of Texas and be almost sure not to see an Indian. The Comanches are away west of that line. We’re about on the ninety-eighth meridian here, and near the thirtieth parallel. My father said that it was a new world north of thirty-six degrees north latitude. That land is all unmapped. No one lives there but the Indians.”

“She eats Comanches,” said Jim Nabours. “Little thing like them don’t bother her none. As for swimming a herd acrost a spring fresh, with quicksand on both sides, why, she don’t mind that none a-tall!”

An ominous silence and a heightened color did not impress him. At length his employer went on, addressing the visitor:

“Very well. Say fifteen men and a wrangler and a cook, with me and black Milly, my cook, and Anita, my Spanish woman. We’d take the two carretas, with oxen for them and the cook’s wagon. Sixteen riders by six or eight horses is a hundred or a hundred and fifty for the remuda–we’d do it easy.”

“Plumb easy!” came Jim’s solemn comment. “A thousand miles in a carreta without a spring, right over a crooked mesquite ex, is right simple. About one week and Milly’d die, her going three hundred net right now; and Anita’d die of homesickness for her jacal she’s used to living in.

“Besides, ma’am”–here the foreman’s voice changed–“I may as well talk plain. Not joking, we can’t live on beef straight. Three-four months of meal and beans and molasses for twenty men is more than we have got, though meal and beans and molasses and side meat we’d have to have, and coffee if we could. The hands work better for coffee, mornings, and after rains or hard rides.”

The color on poor Taisie’s cheeks grew deeper in humiliation. She spread out her hands.

“I’m broke! I’ve said that!”

There was silence for some time. At length the young sheriff of Gonzales spoke quietly.

“Miss Lockhart,” said he, “I don’t like to hear that word in Texas.”

“Truth is the simplest!”

“Yes, I know. But what one ranch in Texas doesn’t happen to have the neighbors do have–they always have had. Take in one or two neighbors with you for the drive–say a thousand head, each brand. They’d be glad to put up the wagon and the remuda. You must not push away your neighbors. This is Texas.”

A cold rage met his sincerity and friendliness.

“I’ll have help from no one! Del Sol will drive a lone herd north, win or lose. I’ll take it all back, Jim–you’re all hired on again, the last man of you. You’ll stand by me? I’ll sell my cows and pay my men; and then I’ll see if there’s any law in the North or any men in the South to help me find a murderer.”

“Ma’am,” said Jim Nabours, “you’ve put it now so’s’t not one of us can help hisself. We got to go. When hell freezes we’ll all walk out on the ice together.

“But you got to thank Mr. McMasters for what he’s done told us, Miss Taisie,” he added. “I reckon he’s our best neighbor.”