The Lure of the Dim Trails
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7 The Lure of the Dim Trails by B. M. Bower
Etext prepared by Simon Page, s.page@netcom.co.uk
THE LURE OF THE DIM TRAILS
By B. M. Bower
CHAPTER I
IN SEARCH OF THE WESTERN TONE
"What do you care, anyway?" asked Reeve-Howard philosophically.
"It isn't as if you depended on the work for a living. Why
worry over the fact that a mere pastime fails to be financially
a success. You don't need to write--"
"Neither do you need to slave over those dry-point things,"
Thurston retorted, in none the best humor with his comforter
"You've an income bigger than mine; yet you toil over
Grecian-nosed women with untidy hair as if each one meant a meal
and a bed"
"A meal and a bed--that's good; you must think I live like a
king."
"And I notice you hate like the mischief to fail, even though."
"Only I never have failed," put in Reeve-Howard, with the amused
complacency born of much adulation.
Thurston kicked a foot-rest out of his way. "Well, I have. The
fashion now is for swashbuckling tales with a haze of powder
smoke rising to high heaven. The public taste runs to gore and
more gore, and kidnappings of beautiful maidens-bah!"
"Follow the fashion then--if you must write. Get out of your
pink tea and orchid atmosphere, and take your heroines out West-
-away out, beyond the Mississippi, and let them be kidnapped.
Or New Mexico would do."
"New Mexico is also beyond the Mississippi, I believe," Thurston
hinted.
"Perhaps it is. What I mean is, write what the public wants,
since you don't relish failure. Why don't you do things about
the plains? It ought to be easy, and you were born out there
somewhere. It should come natural."
"I have," Thurston sighed. "My last rejection states that the
local color is weak and unconvincing. Hang the local color!"
The foot-rest suffered again.
Reeve-Howard was getting into his topcoat languidly, as he did
everything else. "The thing to do, then," he drawled, "is to go
out and study up on it. Get in touch with that country, and
your local color will convince. Personally though, I like those
little society skits you do--"
"Skits!" exploded Thurston. "My last was a four-part serial. I
never did a skit in my life."
"Beg pardon-which is more than you did after accusing my studies
of having untidy hair. Don't look so glum, Phil. Go out and
learn your West; a month or so will put you up to date--and by
Jove! I half envy you the trip."
That is what put the idea into Thurston's head; and as
Thurston's ideas generally bore fruit of one sort or another, he
went out that very day and ordered from his tailor a complete
riding outfit, and because he was a good customer the tailor
consented to rush the work. It seemed to Thurston, looking over
cuts of the very latest styles in riding clothes, that already
he was breathing the atmosphere of the plains.
That night he stayed at home and dreamed, of the West. His
memory, coupled with what he had heard and idealized by his
imagination, conjured dim visions of what he had once known had
known and forgotten; of a land here men and conditions harked
back to the raw foundations of civilization; where wide plains
flecked with sage-brush and ribboned with faint, brown trails,
spread away and away to a far sky-line. For Phil Thurston was
range-born, if not range-bred, His father had chosen always to
live out on the edge of things--out where the trails of men are
dim and far apart-and the silent prairie bequeaths a heritage of
distance-hunger to her sons.
While he brooded grew a keen longing to see again the little
town huddled under the bare, brown hills that shut out the
world; to see the gay-blanketed Indians who stole like painted
shadows about the place, and the broad river always hurrying
away to the sunrise. He had been afraid of the river and of the
bare hills and the Indians. He felt that his mother, also, had
been afraid. He pictured again--and he picture was blurred and
indistinct-the day when strange men had brought his father
mysteriously home; men who were silent save for the shuffling of
their feet, and who carried their big hats awkwardly in their
hands.
There had been a day of hushed voices and much weeping and
gloom, and he had been afraid to play. Then they had carried
his father as mysteriously away again, and his mother had hugged
him close and cried bitterly and long. The rest was blank. When
one is only five, the present quickly blurs what is past, and he
wondered that, after all these years, he should feel the grip of
something very like homesickness--and for something more than
half forgotten. But though he did not realize it, in his veins
flowed the adventurous blood of his father, and to it the dim
trails were calling.
In four days he set his face eagerly toward the dun deserts and
the sage-brush gray.
At Chicago a man took the upper berth in Thurston's section, and
settled into the seat with a deep sigh- presumably of
thankfulness. Thurston, with the quick eye of those who write,
observed the whiteness of his ungloved hands, the coppery tan of
cheeks and throat, the clear keenness of his eyes, and the four
dimples in the crown of his soft, gray hat, and recognized him
as a fine specimen of the Western type of farmer, returning home
from the stockman's Mecca. After that he went calmly back to
his magazine and forgot all about him.
Twenty miles out, the stranger leaned forward and tapped him
lightly on the knee. "Say, I hate to interrupt yuh," he began in
a whimsical drawl, evidently characteristic of the man, "but I'd
like to know where it is I've seen yuh before."
Thurston glanced up impersonally, hesitated between annoyance
and a natural desire to, be courteous, and replied that he had
no memory of any previous meeting.
"Mebby not," admitted the other, and searched the face of
Thurston with his keen eyes. It came to Phil that they were
also a bit wistful, but he went unsympathetically back to his
reading.
Five miles more and be touched Thurston again, apologetically
yet insistently. "Say," he drawled, "ain't your name Thurston?
I'll bet a carload uh steers it is--Bud Thurston. And your home
range is Fort Benton."
Phil stared and confessed to all but the "Bud."
"That's what me and your dad always called yuh," the man
asserted. "Well, I'll be hanged! But I knew it. I knew I'd run
acrost yuh somewheres. You're the dead image uh your dad, Bill
Thurston. And me and Bill freighted together from Whoop-up to
Benton along in the seventies. Before yuh was born we was chums.
I don't reckon you'd remember me? Hank Graves, that used to
pack yuh around on his back, and fill yuh up on dried prunes--
when dried prunes was worth money? Yuh used to call 'em
'frumes,' and--Why, it was me with your dad when the Indians
pot-shot him at Chimney Rock; and it was me helped your mother
straighten things up so she could pull out, back where she come
from. She never took to the West much. How is she? Dead? Too
bad; she was a mighty fine woman, your mother was.
"Well, I'll-be-hanged! Bud Thurston little, tow-headed Bud that
used to holler for 'frumes' if he seen me coming a mile off.
Doggone your measly hide, where's all them pink apurns yuh used
to wear?" He leaned back and laughed--a silent, inner convulsion
of pure gladness.
Philip Thurston was, generally speaking, a conservative young
man and one slow to make friends; slower still to discard them.
He was astonished to feel a choky sensation in his throat and a
stinging of eyelids, and a leap in his blood. To be thus taken
possession of by a blunt-speaking stranger not at all in his
class; to be addressed as "Bud," and informed that he once
devoured dried prunes; to be told " Doggone your measly hide"
should have affronted him much. Instead, he seemed to be swept
mysteriously back into the primitive past, and to feel akin to
this stranger with the drawl and the keen eyes. It was the
blood of his father coming to its own.
From that hour the two were friends. Hank Graves, in his
whimsical drawl, told Phil things about his father that made his
blood tingle with pride; his father, whom he had almost
forgotten, yet who had lived bravely his life, daring where
other men quailed, going steadfastly upon his way when other men
hesitated.
So, borne swiftly into the West they talked, and the time seemed
short. The train had long since been racing noisily over the
silent prairies spread invitingly with tender green- great,
lonely, inscrutable, luring men with a spell as sure and as
strong as is the spell of the sea.
The train reeled across a trestle that spanned a deep, dry gash
in the earth. In the green bottom huddled a cluster of pygmy
cattle and mounted men; farther down were two white flakes of
tents, like huge snowflakes left unmelted in the green canyon.
"That's the Lazy Eight--my outfit," Graves informed Thurston
with the unconscious pride of possession, pointing a forefinger
as they whirled on. "I've got to get off, next station. Yuh
want to remember, Bud, the Lazy Eight's your home from now on.
We'll make a cow- puncher of yuh in no time; you've got it in
yuh, or yuh wouldn't look so much like your dad. And you can
write stories about us all yuh want--we won't kick. The way
I've got the summer planned out, you'll waller chin-deep in
material; all yuh got to do is foller the Lazy Eight through
till shipping time."
Thurston had not intended learning to be a cow-puncher, or
following the Lazy Eight or any other hieroglyphic through 'till
shipping time--whenever that was.
But facing Hank Graves, he had not the heart to tell him so, or
that he had planned to spend only a month--or six weeks at most-
-in the West, gathering local color and perhaps a plot or two?
and a few types. Thurston was great on types.
The train slowed at a little station with a dismal red section
house in the immediate background and a red- fronted saloon close
beside. "Here we are," cried Graves, "and I ain't sorry; only I
wisht you was going to stop right now. But I'll look for yuh in
three or four days at the outside. So-long, Bud. Remember, the
Lazy Eight's your hang-out."
CHAPTER II
LOCAL COLOR IN THE RAW
For the rest of the way Thurston watched the green hills slide
by--and the greener hollows--and gave himself up to visions of
Fort Benton; visions of creaking bull-trains crawling slowly,
like giant brown worms, up and down the long hill; of many
high-piled bales of buffalo hides upon the river bank, and
clamorous little steamers churning up against the current; the
Fort Benton that had, for many rushing miles, filled and colored
the speech of Hank Graves and stimulated his childish
half-memory.
But when he reached the place and wandered aimlessly about the
streets, tile vision faded into half-resentful realization that
these things were no more forever. For the bull-trains, a
roundup outfit clattered noisily out of town and disappeared in
an elusive dust-cloud; for the gay-blanketed Indians slipping
like painted shadows from view, stray cow-boys galloped into
town, slid from their saddles and clanked with dragging rowels
into the nearest saloon, or the post-office. Between whiles the
town cuddled luxuriously down in the deep little valley and
slept while the river, undisturbed by pompous steamers, murmured
a lullaby.
It was not the Fort Benton he had come far to see, so that on
the second day he went away up the long hill that shut out the
world and, until the east-bound train came from over the
prairies, paced the depot platform impatiently with never a
vision to keep him company.
For a long time the gaze of Thurston clung fascinated to the
wide prairie land, feeling again the stir in his blood. Then,
when a deep cut shut from him the sight of the wilderness, he
chanced to turn his head, and looked straight into the clear,
blue-gray eyes of a girl across the aisle. Thurston considered
himself immune from blue-gray --or any other-eyes, so that he
permitted himself to regard her calmly and judicially, his mind
reverting to the fact that he would need a heroine to be
kidnapped, and wondering if she would do. She was a Western
girl, he could tell that by the tan and by her various little
departures from the Eastern styles--such as doing her hair low
rather than high. Where he had been used to seeing the hair of
woman piled high and skewered with many pins, hers was brushed
smoothly back-smoothly save for little, irresponsible waves here
and there. Thurston decided that the style was becoming to her.
He wondered if the fellow beside her were her brother; and then
reminded himself sagely that brothers do not, as a rule, devote
their time quite so assiduously to the entertainment of their
sisters. He could not stare at her forever, and so he gave over
his speculations and went back to the prairies.
Another hour, and Thurston was stiffing a yawn when the coaches
bumped sharply together and, with wheels screeching protest as
the brakes clutched them, the train, grinding protest in every
joint, came, with a final heavy jar, to a dead stop. Thurston
thought it was a wreck, until out ahead came the sharp crackling
of rifles. A passenger behind him leaned out of the window and
a bullet shattered the glass above his head; he drew back
hastily.
Some one hurried through the front vestibule, the door was
pushed unceremoniously open and a man--a giant, he seemed to
Thurston--stopped just inside, glared down the length of the
coach through slits in the black cloth over his face and bawled,
"Hands up!"
Thurston was so utterly surprised that his hands jerked
themselves involuntarily above his head, though he did not feel
particularly frightened; he was filled with a stupefied sort of
curiosity to know what would come next. The coach, so far as he
could see, seemed filled with uplifted, trembling hands, so that
he did not feel ashamed of his own. The man behind him put up
his hands with the other-- but one of them held a revolver that
barked savagely and unexpectedly close against the car of
Thurston. Thurston ducked. There was an echo from the front,
and the man behind, who risked so much on one shot, lurched into
the aisle, swaying uncertainly between the seats. He of the
mask fired again, viciously, and the other collapsed into a
still, awkwardly huddled heap on the floor. The revolver
dropped from his fingers and struck against Thurston's foot,
making him wince.
Thurston had never before seen death come to a man, and the very
suddenness of it unnerved him. All his faculties were numbed
before that terrible, pitiless form in the door, and the limp,
dead body at his feet in the aisle. He did not even remember
that here was the savage local color he had come far a-seeking.
He quite forgot to improve the opportunity by making mental note
of all the little, convincing details, as was his wont.
Presently he awoke to the realization of certain words spoken
insistently close beside him. He turned his eyes and saw that
the girl, her eyes staring straight before her, her slim, brown
hands uplifted, was yet commanding him imperiously, her voice
holding to that murmuring monotone more discreet than a whisper.
"The gun--drop down--and get it. He can't see to shoot for the
seat in front. Get the gun. Get the gun!" was what she was
saying.
Thurston looked at her helplessly, imploringly. In truth, he
had never fired a gun in all his peaceful life.
"The gun--get it--and shoot!" Her eyes moved quickly in a
cautious, side-long glance that commanded impatiently. Her
straight eyebrows drew together imperiously. Then, when he met
her eyes with that same helpless look, she said another word
that hurt. It was " Coward!"
Thurston looked down at the gun, and at the huddled form. A tiny
river of blood was creeping toward him. Already it had reached
his foot, and his shoe was red along the sole. He moved his foot
quickly away from it, and shuddered.
"Coward!" murmured the girl contemptuously again, and a splotch
of anger showed under the tan of her cheek.
Thurston caught his breath and wondered if he could do it; he
looked toward the door and thought how far it was to send a
bullet straight when a man has never, in all his life, fired a
gun. And without looking he could see that horrible, red stream
creeping toward him like some monster in a nightmare. His flesh
crimpled with physical repulsion, but he meant to try; perhaps
he could shoot the man in the mask, so that there would be
another huddled, lifeless Thing on the floor, and another
creeping red stream.
At that instant the tawny-haired young fellow beside the girl
gathered himself for a spring, flung himself headlong before her
and into the aisle; caught the dead man's pistol from the floor
and fired, seemingly with one movement. Then he sprang up, still
firing as fast as the trigger could move. From the door came
answer, shot for shot, and the car was filled with the stifling
odor of burnt powder. A woman screamed hysterically.
Then a puff of cool, prairie breeze came in through the
shattered window behind Thurston, and the smoke-cloud lifted
like a curtain blown upward in the wind. The tawny- haired young
fellow was walking coolly down the aisle, the smoking revolver
pointing like an accusing finger toward the outlaw who lay
stretched upon his face, his fingers twitching.
Outside, rifles were crackling like corn in a giant popper.
Presently it slackened to an occasional shot. A brakeman,
followed by two coatless mail-clerks with Winchesters, ran down
the length of the train calling out that there was no danger.
The thud of their running feet, and the wholesome mingling of
their shouting struck sharply in the silence after the shooting.
One of the men swung up on the steps of the day coach and came
in.
"Hello, Park," he cried to the tawny haired boy. "Got one, did
yuh? That's good. We did, too got him alive. Think uh the
nerve uh that Wagner bunch! to go up against a train in broad
daylight. Made an easy getaway, too, except the feller we
gloomed in the express car. How's this one? Dead?"
"No. I reckon he'll get well enough to stretch a rope; he
killed a man, in here." He motioned toward the huddled figure in
the aisle. They came together, lifted the dead man and carried
him away to the baggage car. A brakeman came with a cloth and
wiped up the red pool, and Thurston pressed his lips tightly
together and turned away his head; he could not remember when
the sight of anything had made him so deathly sick. Once he
glanced slyly at the girl opposite, and saw that she was very
white under her tan, and that the hands in her lap were clasped
tightly and yet shook. But she met his eyes squarely, and
Thurston did not look at her again; he did not like the
expression of her mouth.
News of the holdup had been telegraphed ahead, and all
Shellanne--which was not much of a crowd--gathered at the
station to meet the train and congratulate the heroes. Thurston
alighted almost shamefacedly into the midst of the loud-voiced
commotion. While he was looking uncertainly about him,
wondering where to go and what to do, a voice he knew hailed him
with drawling welcome.
"Hello, Bud. Got back quicker than you expected, didn't yuh?
It's lucky I happened to be in town--yuh can ride out with me.
Say, yuh got quite a bunch uh local color for a story, didn't
yuh? You'll be writing blood-and-thunder for a month on the
strength of this little episode, I reckon." his twinkling eyes
teased, though his face was quite serious, as was his voice.
She of the blue-gray eyes turned and measured Thurston with a
deliberate, leisurely glance, and her mouth still had that
unpleasant expression. Thurston colored guiltily, but Hank
Graves lifted his hat and called her Mona, and asked her if she
wasn't scared stiff, and if she were home to stay. Then he
beckoned to the tawny-haired fellow with his finger, and winked
at Mona--a proceeding which shocked Thurston considerably.
"Mona--here, hold on a minute, can't yuh? Mona, this is a friend
uh mine; Bud Thurston's his name. He's come out to study us up
and round up a hunch uh real Western atmosphere. He's a
story-writer. I used to whack bulls all over the country with
his father. Bud, this is Mona Stevens; she ranges down close to
the Lazy Eight, so the sooner yuh git acquainted, the quicker."
He did not explain what would be the quicker, and Thurston's
embarrassment was only aggravated by the introduction.
Miss Stevens gave him a chilly smile, the kind that is worse
than none at all and turned her back, thinly pretending that she
heard her brother calling her, which she did not. Her brother
was loudly explaining what would have happened if he had been on
that train and had got a whack at the robbers, and his sister
was far from his mind.
Graves slapped the shoulder of the fellow they had called Park.
"You young devil, next time I leave the place for a week--yes,
or overnight--I'll lock yuh up in the blacksmith shop. Have yuh
got to be Mona's special escort, these days?"
"Wish I was," Park retorted, unmoved.
"Different here--yuh ain't much account, as it is. Bud, this
here's my wagon-boss, Park Holloway; one of 'em, that is. I'm
going to turn yuh over to him and let him wise yuh up. Say, you
young bucks ought to get along together pretty smooth. Your
dads run buffalo together before either of yuh was born. Well,
let's be moving--we ain't home yet. Got a war-bag, Bud?"
Late that night Thurston lay upon a home-made bed and listened
to the frogs croaking monotonously in the hollow behind the
house, and to the lone coyote which harped upon the subject of
his wrongs away on a distant hillside, and to the subdued
snoring of Hank Graves in the room beyond. He was trying to
adjust himself to this new condition of things, and the new
condition refused utterly to be measured by his accepted
standard.
According to that standard, he should feel repulsed and annoyed
by the familiarity of strangers who persisted in calling him
"Bud" without taking the trouble to find out whether or not he
liked it. And what puzzled Thurston and put him all at sea was
the consciousness that he did like it, and that it struck
familiarly upon his ears as something to which he had been
accustomed in the past.
Also, according to his well-ordered past, he should hate this
raw life and rawer country where could occur such brutal things
as he had that day witnessed. He should dislike a man like Park
Holloway who, having wounded a man unto death, had calmly
dismissed the subject with the regret that his aim had not been
better, so that he could have saved the county the expense of
trying and hanging the fellow. Thurston was amazed to find
that, down in the inner man of him, he admired Park Holloway
exceedingly, and privately resolved to perfect himself in the
use of fire-arms, he who had been wont to deplore the thinly
veneered savagery of men who liked such things.
After much speculation he decided that Mona Stevens would not do
for a kidnapped heroine. He could not seem to "see" her in such
a position, and, besides, he told himself that such a type of
girl did not attract him at all. She had called him a coward-
-and why? simply because he, straight from the trammels of
civilization, had not been prepared to meet the situation thrust
upon him-which she had thrust upon him. She had demanded of him
something he had not the power to accomplish, and she had called
him a coward. And in his heart Thurston knew that it was
unjust, and that he was not a coward.
CHAPTER III
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Thurston, dressed immaculately in riding clothes of the latest
English cut, went airily down the stairs and discovered that he
was not early, as he had imagined. Seven o'clock, he had told
himself proudly, was not bad for a beginner; and he had smiled
in anticipation of Hank Graves' surprise which was fortunate,
since he would otherwise have been cheated of smiling at all.
For Hank Graves, he learned from the cook, had eaten breakfast
at five and had left the ranch more than an hour before; the
men also were scattered to their work.
Properly humbled in spirit, he sat down to the kitchen table and
ate his belated breakfast, while the cook kneaded bread at the
other end of the same table and eyed Thurston with frank
amusement. Thurston had never before been conscious of feeling
ill at ease in the presence of a servant, and hurried through
the meal so that he could escape into the clear sunshine,
feeling a bit foolish in the unaccustomed bagginess of his
riding breeches and the snugness of his leggings; for he had
never taken to outdoor sports, except as an onlooker from the
shade of a grand stand or piazza.
While he was debating the wisdom of writing a detailed
description of yesterday's tragedy while it was still fresh in
his mind and stowing it away for future "color," Park Holloway
rode into the yard and on to the stables. He nodded at Thurston
and grinned without apparent cause, as the cook had done.
Thurston followed him to the corral and watched him pull the
saddle off his horse, and throw it carelessly to one side. It
looked cumbersome, that saddle; quite unlike the ones he had
inspected in the New York shops. He grasped the horn, lifted
upon it and said, "Jove!"
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