"Uncle Billy," interrupting, ignoring, the tiny bit of femininity nestled close, "Uncle Billy, where's papa and mamma! I want them."

Closer and closer the big bachelor arms clasped their burden; unashamed, there with the others watching him, he kissed her.

"Never mind now, Kiddie. Tell me how you came here, and who this is with you."

About the great neck crept two arms, clinging tightly.

"He just came, Uncle Billy. I was calling for papa. Papa put me to sleep and forgot me. The boy heard me and took me out. I was afraid at first, but--but he's a nice boy, only he won't talk and--and--" The narrative halted, the tousled head buried itself joyously. "Oh, I'm so glad you came, Uncle Billy!"

In silence Landor's eyes made the circle of interested watching faces, returned to the winsome brown face so near his own.

"Aren't you hungry, Kid?" he ventured.

On his shoulder the dark poll shook a negative.

"No. We had corn to eat. The boy roasted it. He made a big fire. He's a nice boy, only--only he won't say anything."

Again Landor's eyes made the circle, halted at the intrepid brown waif who, that first word of greeting spoken, had silently stared him back.

"You're sure you don't know anything more, baby? You didn't hear anything until the boy came?"

"No, Uncle Billy. I was asleep. When I woke up it was dark, and I was hungry and--and--" At last it had come: the spattering, turbulent tear storm. Her small body shook, her arms clasped tighter and tighter. "Oh, Uncle Billy, I want my papa and mamma. I tried to find them, and I couldn't. Please find them for me, Uncle Billy, Please! Please!"

It was well past midnight. The big full moon, high now in the sky, cast their shadows almost about their feet when, their labour complete, the party took up the homeward trail. But there were twenty no longer. At their head as before rode Landor, in his arms not a rifle but a blanket; a blanket from which as they journeyed on came now and anon a sound that was alien indeed: the sobs of a baby girl who wept as she slept.

Back of him, likewise as when they had come, rode hatchet-faced Crosby; but he, too, was not as before. His saddle had been removed and, in front of him, astride the horse's bare back, warmed by the animal heat, was a brown waif of a boy; not asleep or even drowsy, but wide awake indeed, silently watchful as a prairie owl of every movement about him, every low-spoken word. What whim of satirist chance had put him there, what fate for good or evil, they could only conjecture, could not know, could never know; yet there he was, strangest figure in a land that knew only the bizarre, with whom the unbelievable was the normal. Slowly now, weary to death with the long, long day, depressed with the inevitable reaction from the excitement of the past hours, they moved away, to the south, to the west. In front of them, glittering in the moonlight, seemingly infinite, stretched the waves of the rolling prairie, bare as the sea in a calm. Behind them, growing lesser and lesser minute by minute, merging into the infinite white, were three black dots like tiny boats on the horizon's edge. On they went, a half mile, a mile, looked behind; and, with an awe no familiarity could prevent, faced ahead anew.

Back of them now as well as before, uniformly endless, uniformly magnificent, stretched that giant ocean: silent, serene, as mother nature, as nature's master, G.o.d himself.

CHAPTER IV

RECONSTRUCTION

The day of the Indian terror had pa.s.sed. No longer did the name of Little Crow carry stampede in its wake. The battles of Big Mound, of White Stone Hill, and of the Bad Lands had been fought, had become mere history; dim already to the newcomer as Lexington or Bull Run. Still in the memory, to be sure, was the half-invited ma.s.sacre of Custer at the Little Big Horn; but the savage genius of Sitting Bull, of Crazy Horse, and of Gall, who had made the last great encounter bloodily unique in the conflict of the red man and the white, was never to be duplicated.

Rightly or wrongly deprived of what they had once called their own, driven back, back on the crest of the ever-increasing wave of settlement, facing the alternative of annihilation or of submergence in that flood, the Sioux had halted like a wild thing at bay, with their backs to the last stronghold, the richest plot of earth on the face of the globe, the Black Hills country, and as a cornered animal ever fights, had battled ferociously for a lost supremacy. But, robbers themselves, holding the land on the insecure t.i.tle of might alone, fighting to the end, they had at last succ.u.mbed to the inevitable: the all-conquering invasion of the dominant Anglo-Saxon. Here and there a name stood out: "Scarlet Point," "Strikes-the-Ree," "Little Crow,"

"Sitting Bull," "Crazy Horse," "Spotted Tail," "Red Cloud," "Gall,"

"John Gra.s.s," names that in multiple impressed but by their fantastic suggestion; but their original pulse-accelerating meaning had long since pa.s.sed. Now and then a prairie mother, driven to desperation, might incite temporary rect.i.tude in the breast of an incorrigible by a harrowing reference to one or to another; yet to the incoming swarms of land-hungry settlers they were mere supplanted play actors, fit heroes for fiction, for romance perhaps; but like the bison to be kept in small herds safe in the pasture of a reservation, preserved as a relic of a species doomed to extinction.

A thing at which to marvel was the growth of the eastern border of Dakota Territory in this, the time of the great boom. History can scarcely find its parallel. In the s.p.a.ce of a decade the census leaped from two-score thousand to nearly a half million. New towns sprang up like fungi in a night. Railroads reached out like the tentacles of an octopus, where a generation before the buffalo had tramped its tortuous trail. Prosperous farms came into being in the meadows where the antelope had pastured. Artesian wells, waterworks, electric lights, street railways, colleges, all the adjuncts of a higher civilisation, blossomed forth under the magic wand of Eastern capital. Doomed to reaction, as an advancing pendulum is doomed to retrace its cycle, was this premature evolution; but temporarily, as a springtime freshet bears onward the driftwood in its path, it carried its predecessor, the unconventional, fighting, wild-loving adventurer, before. On it went, on and on until at last, fairly blocking its path, was the big, muddy, dawdling Missouri. Then for the first time it halted; halted in a pause that was to last for a generation. But it had fulfilled its mission.

High and dry on the western side of the barrier, imbued as when they had settled to the east, with the restless spirit of the frontier, unsubdued, unchanged, it cast its burden. There, as they had done before, the newcomers immediately took root, and, after the pa.s.sage of a year, were all but unconscious of the migration. Over their heads was the same blue prairie sky. Around them, treeless, trackless, was the same rolling, illimitable prairie land. In but one essential were conditions changed; yet that one was epoch-making. Heretofore, surrounded by a common, an alien danger, compelled at a second's warning to band together for life itself, all men were brothers. Now, with the pa.s.sing of the red peril, with eradication of necessity for any manner of restraint, an abandon of licence, of recklessness, born of the wild life, of overflowing animal vitality insufficiently employed, swept the land like a contagion. Unique in the history of man's development was this the era of the cowboy, as fantastic now as the era of the red peril, its predecessor; yet vital, bizarre, throbbing, unconsciously human, as no other period has ever been, as in all probability none will ever be again. Generous, spendthrift, murderous when crossed, chivalrous, fearless, profane, yet fundamentally religious, inebriate, wilful and docile by turns, ceaselessly active, eternally discontented, seeking they knew not what, they were their own evil genius; as certainly as nature surrounded them with Heaven, they supplied their own h.e.l.l and, impartial, chose from each to weave the web of their lives.

Of this period, life of this life, was Colonel William Landor; colonel no longer, plain Bill, from the river to the Hills, husband these ten years now, but not father, Cattle King of an uncontested range. Of this life likewise, bred in it, saturated in it, was a dark young woman, his adopted daughter, two years past her majority, Elizabeth Rowland Landor by name. Of it most vitally of all, born of it, rooted in it through unknown centuries of ancestral domicile, was a copper-brown young man, dest.i.tute as a boy of twelve of a trace of beard, black as a prairie crow of hair and eyes, deep-lunged like a race-track thoroughbred, wiry as a mustang, garbed as a white man, but bearing the liquid name of a Teton Sioux, "Ma-wa-cha-sa, the lost pappoose," yet known wherever the Santee Ma.s.sacre and the tale of his appearance was known, as "How"

Landor. Of this period, last of all, was the great B.B.--Buffalo b.u.t.te--ranch, giant among the giants, whose brand was familiar as his own name to every cowboy west of the Missouri, whose hospitable ranch house, twenty-odd miles from the vest pocket metropolis of Coyote Centre, which in turn, to quote Landor himself, was "a hundred miles from nowhere," was the Mecca of every traveller whom chance drew into this wild, of every curious tenderfoot seeking a glimpse of the reverse side of the coin of life, of every desperate "one lunger," who, with gambler instinct, staked his all on prairie sun and prairie air.

CHAPTER V

THE LAND OF LICENCE

For twenty-four hours the two cowmen from the distant Clay Creek ranch had owned Coyote Centre. An hour before sunset on the day previous they had suddenly blown in from the north; a great cloud of yellow dust, lifting lazily on the sultry air, a mighty panting of winded bronchos, a single demoniacal dare-man whoop heralding their coming, a groaning of straining leather, a jingle of great spurs, and an otherwise augmented stillness even in this silent land, marking their arrival. Pete it was, Pete Sweeney, "Long Pete," who first dismounted. Pete likewise it was who first entered the grog shop of Red Jenkins. Pete again it was who, ere ten words had pa.s.sed, drew cold-blooded, point blank at the only man who saw fit to question the invader's right of absolute ownership. Pete it was once again who, when the smoke had cleared away, a.s.sisted in laying out that same misguided citizen, in decent fellowship, beneath the cottonwood bar, and thrust an adequate green roll in the stiffening hand for funeral expenses.

"It's Bill's own fault," he commented lucidly the while. "I don't visit you very often; but when I do I've got the dough to make it square, and this town's my sausage, skin, curl, and all. D'ye understand?" and from Manning, the greybearded storekeeper, to Rank Judge, the one-legged saddler, there was no one to say him nay, none to contest his right of authority.

By no means without an officer of the law was Coyote Centre. Under ordinary conditions its majesty was ably, even aggressively, upheld by its representative, Marshal Jim Burton. Likewise there was no lack of pilgrims, who by devious and circuitous routes sought his residence on this occasion, with tales of distress and pet.i.tions for succour; but one and all departed with their mission unfulfilled. The doughty James was not to be found. Urgent business of indefinite duration, at an even more indefinite destination, had called him hence. No one regretted the mischance so much as stalwart Mrs. Burton, who imparted the information, no one deplored the lost opportunity for distinction so much as she; but nevertheless the fact remained. For the time being, Coyote Centre was thrown upon its own resources, was left to work out its own salvation as best it might.

Thus it came about that for a long, long dragging day, and the beginning of a second, the gunpowder had intermittently burned, and that more than intermittently, all but continuously, the red liquor had flowed; to the alternate aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of Red Jenkins and his straw-haired Norwegian rival across the street--Gus Ericson. Unsophisticated ones there were who fancied that ere this it would all end, that Mr. Sweeney's capacity for absorption had a limit. Four separate gentlemen, with the laudable intention of hastening that much to be desired condition, had sacrificed themselves for the common weal; but to the eternal disgrace of the town, all of them were now down and out, and in various retired spots, where they had been deposited by their sympathising friends, were snoring in peaceful oblivion. Even Len Barker, game disciple of the great master, had reached his limit and, no longer formidable, had, without form of law, been deposited for safekeeping, and with a sigh of relief, in the corporate Bastile; but Mr. Sweeney himself, Mr. Sweeney of the hawk eye and the royal tread, despite a lack of sleep and of solid sustenance, was, to all visible indications, as fresh and aggressive as at the beginning.

Now for the second time night was coming on. Neither up nor down the single business thoroughfare did a street lamp show its face. One and all had succ.u.mbed long before to the G.o.d of gunpowder. Not a stray dog, and Coyote Centre was plethoric of canines, raised its voice nor showed even a retreating tail near the area of disturbance. Wisdom and a desire for deepest obscurity had come to the many, swift and sudden annihilation to the few. Temporarily, yet effectively as though a cyclone were imminent, business and social life were paralysed. They were a tolerant breed, these citizens of Coyote Centre; repeated similar experience had not been without its effect; moreover, the object lesson of the day before was still vivid in their minds; but at last patience was reaching its limit. In the closed doorway of the town hall a tiny group of men were gathered, a group who spoke scarcely above a whisper, who kept a sharp lookout all surrounding, who stood ready at the twitch of an eyelash to disperse to the four winds. This was revolt incipient.

In the single room of Bob Manning's general store was open revolt and plotting. Manning himself, grizzled, grey of hair, s.h.a.ggy bearded, had the floor.

"You're a bunch of measly cowards," he included indiscriminately. "You come here with your stories and croak and croak, and still not one of you would dare say a word to Pete's face, not one of you but would stand and let him twist your nose if he saw fit." He glowered from one horn of the silent, listening semicircle to the other, with all-including disdain. "If you don't like it, why don't you put a stop to it? If Jim Burton has sneaked, why don't you elect a new marshal? You're d.a.m.ned cowards, I say."

In his place on the cover of a barrel of dried apples, Bud Smith, the weazened little land man, shifted as though the seat hurt him.

"P'raps you're right, dad," he commented imperturbably, "and agin p'raps you're not. It's all well enough to say appoint a new marshal, but as fer's I've been able to discover there's no one hereabouts hankerin' fer the job." He spat at a crack in the cottonwood floor meditatively, struck true, and seemed mildly pleased. "Our buryin' patch is growin'

comfortably rapidly as it is, without adding any marshals to the collection. I've known Pete Sweeney fer quite a spell, and my private advice is to let him alone. There ain't coffins enough this side the river to supply the demand, if you was to try to arrest him when he's feelin' as he's feelin' now."

"Who mentioned arresting?" broke in Walt Wagner, the lanky Missourian, who drove the stage. "Pot him, I say. Pot him the first time he isn't looking."

For a long half minute Bud observed the speaker; a.n.a.lytically, meditatively.

"Evidently you ain't been a close observer, my boy," he commented at last, impersonally, "or you wouldn't be talkin' of Pete not lookin'. I ain't no weather prophet, but I'd hint to the feller who tackles that job to say his prayers before he starts. He won't have much time afterwards." With a swifter movement than he had yet made, the speaker slid from his place to the floor, involuntarily cast a glance into the street without. "I ain't perticularly scared, boys," he explained, "and I ain't lookin' fer trouble neither. Between yourselves and myself, it ain't at all healthy to sit here discussin' the matter. Someone's bound to peach on you, and then there's sure to be a call. You better scatter and let it blow over."

"Scatter nothing," exploded Wagner, belligerently. "Slide if you want to, if you've got cold feet. I for one intend staying here as long as I see fit, Sweeney or no Sweeney."

"You do, do you?" It was Manning this time who spoke, Manning with his deep-set eyes flashing over his high cheek bones. "Well, maybe I've got something to say about that." He came out from behind the counter, faced the lanky figure before him, with deliberate contempt. "You're a mighty stiff-backed boy in the daytime, you are, Walt Wagner, but in the dark--" He halted and his mouth curled in bitterest sarcasm. "Why, if you're so anxious for a sc.r.a.p, don't you run for marshal? Why don't you take the job right now and put Pete out of business?" And his mouth curled again.

Beneath its coat of tan Wagner's face reddened; then went white.

Involuntarily his lip curled back like that of a cornered dog, and until it showed the lack of a prominent front tooth.

"Seeing you are so free with your tongue," he retorted, "I might ask you the same question. I ain't no property interest here being destroyed like you have. Why don't you do the trick yourself, dad?"

For a moment there was silence, inaction; then of a sudden the old man stiffened. With an effort almost piteous, he attempted to square his shoulders; but they remained round as before.

"Why don't I?" He held up his right hand--minus the index and middle fingers. He held up his left, stiffened and shrivelled with rheumatism.

"Why don't I?" He clumped the length of the tiny storeroom and back again; one crippled leg all but dragging. "Why don't I?" repeated for the third time. "Do you imagine for the fraction of a second, Walt Wagner, that if I was back twenty years and sound like you are, I'd be asking another man why he didn't do the job?" Terrible, almost ghastly, he stood there before them, the picture of bitter rage, of impotent, distorted senility. "Have you got the last spark of manhood left in you, and ask that question of me?"

In the pockets of his trousers Wagner's hands worked nervously. His face went red again, but he gave no answer. Bud Smith it was, Bud Smith, five-feet-two, with a complexion prairie wind had made like a lobster display in a cafe window, who had halted at the door, but who now came back, he it was who spoke.

"And while you're in the talkin' business," he suggested slowly, "you might elab'rate what you meant a bit ago by intimatin' that I had cold feet. We'll listen to that, too, any time you see fit to explain, pardner."

"You want to know, do you?" Wagner's countenance had become normal again, and with an effort at nonchalance he leaned his elbows back against the gla.s.s showcase, glancing the while down at the small man, almost patronisingly. "Well, then, for your benefit, I was merely observing that you filled the bill of what dad here said a bit ago we all were." He smiled tantalisingly; again showing the vacancy in his dental arch. "You remember what that was, don't you?"