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Bucky O\'Connor

W >> William MacLeod Raine >> Bucky O\'Connor



Scanned by Mary Starr of Glendale, California.





Bucky O'Connor
A Tale of the Unfenced Border

by William MacLeod Raine



To My Brother

EDGAR C. RAINE

MY DEAR WANDERER:

I write your name on this page that you may know we hold you not
less in our thoughts because you have heard and answered again
the call of the frozen North, have for the time disappeared,
swallowed in some of its untrodden wilds. As in those old days of
59 Below On Bonanza, the long Winter night will be of
interminable length. Armed with this note of introduction then,
Bucky O'Connor offers himself, with the best bow of one
Adventurer to another, as a companion to while away some few of
those lonely hours.

March, 1910, Denver.



BUCKY O'CONNOR


CONTENTS

1. Enter "Bear-Trap" Collins
2. Taxation Without Representation
3. The Sheriff Introduces Himself
4. A Bluff is Called
5. Bucky Entertains
6. Bucky Makes a Discovery
7. In the Land of Revolutions
8. First Blood!
9. "Adore Has Only One D"
10. The Hold-Up of the M. C. P. Flyer
11. "Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make"
12. A Clean White Man's Option
13. Bucky's First-Rate Reasons
14. Le Roi Est Mort; Vive Le Roi
15. In the Secret Chamber
16. Juan Valdez Scores
17. Hidden Valley
18. A Dinner for Three
19. A Villon of the Desert
20. Back to God's Country
21. The Wolf Pack
22. For a Good Reason


CHAPTER 1. ENTER "BEAR-TRAP" COLLINS

She had been aware of him from the moment of his spectacular
entrance, though no slightest sign of interest manifested itself
in her indolent, incurious eyes. Indeed, his abundant and
picturesque area was so vivid that it would have been difficult
not to feel his presence anywhere, let alone on a journey so
monotonous as this was proving to be.

It had been at a water-tank, near Socorro, that the Limited,
churning furiously through brown Arizona in pursuit of a lost
half-hour, jarred to a sudden halt that shook sleep from the
drowsy eyes of bored passengers. Through the window of her
Pullman the young woman in Section 3 had glimpsed a bevy of angry
train officials eddying around a sturdy figure in the center,
whose strong, lean head rose confidently above the press. There
was the momentary whirl of a scuffle, out of the tangle of which
shot a brakeman as if propelled from a catapult. The circle
parted, brushed aside by a pair of lean shoulders, muscular and
broad. Yet a few moments and the owner of the shoulders led down
the aisle to the vacant section opposite her a procession whose
tail was composed of protesting trainmen.

"You had no right to flag the train, Sheriff Collins, and you'll
have to get off; that's all there is to it," the conductor was
explaining testily.

"Oh, that's all right," returned the offender with easy good
nature, making himself at home in Section 4. "Tell the company to
send in its bill. No use jawing about it."

"You'll have to get off, sir."

"That's right--at Tucson."

"No, sir. You'll have to get off here. I have no authority to let
you ride."

"Didn't I hear you say the train was late? Don't you think you'd
arrive earlier at the end of your run if your choo-choo got to
puffing?"

"You'll have to get off, sir."

"I hate to disoblige," murmured the owner of the jingling spurs,
the dusty corduroys, and the big, gray hat, putting his feet
leisurely on the cushion in front of him. "But doesn't it occur
to you that you are a man of one idea?"

"This is the Coast Limited. It doesn't stop for anybody--not even
for the president of the road."

"You don't say! Well, I ce'tainly appreciate the honor you did me
in stopping to take me on." His slight drawl was quite devoid of
concern.

"But you had no right to flag the train. Can't you understand
ANYTHING?" groaned the conductor.

"You explain it again to me, sonny. I'm surely thick in the
haid," soothed the intruder, and listened with bland good-humor
to the official's flow of protest.

"Well--well! Disrupted the whole transcontinental traffic, didn't
I? And me so innocent, too. Now, this is how I figured it out.
Here's me in a hurry to get to Tucson. Here comes your train
a-foggin'--also and likewise hittin' the high spots for Tucson.
Seemed like we ought to travel in company, and I was some dubious
she'd forget to stop unless I flagged her. Wherefore, I aired my
bandanna in the summer breeze."

"But you don't understand." The conductor began to explain anew
as to a dull child. "It's against the law. You'll get into
trouble."

"Put me in the calaboose, will they?"

"It's no joke."

"Well, it does seem to be worrying you," Mr. Collins conceded.
"Don't mind me. Free your mind proper."

The conductor, glancing about nervously, noticed that passengers
were smiling broadly. His official dignity was being chopped to
mince-meat. Back came his harassed gaze to the imperturbable
Collins with the brown, sun-baked face and the eyes blue and
untroubled as an Arizona sky. Out of a holster attached to the
sagging belt that circled the corduroy trousers above his hips
gleamed the butt of a revolver. But in the last analysis the
weapon of the occasion was purely a moral one. The situation was
one not covered in the company's rule book, and in the absence of
explicit orders the trainman felt himself unequal to that
unwavering gaze and careless poise. Wherefore, he retreated,
muttering threats of what the company would do.

"Now, if I had only known it was against the law. My thick haid's
always roping trouble for me," the plainsman confided to the
Pullman conductor, with twinkling eyes.

That official unbent. "Talking about thick heads, I'm glad my
porter has one. If it weren't iron-plated and copper-riveted he'd
be needing a doctor now, the way you stood him on it."

"No, did I? Ce'tainly an accident. The nigger must have been in
my way as I climbed into the car. Took the kink out of his hair,
you say? Here, Sam!" He tossed a bill to the porter, who was
rolling affronted eyes at him. "Do you reckon this is big enough
to plaster your injured feelings, boy?"

The white smile flashed at him by the porter was a receipt for
indemnity paid in full.

Sheriff Collins' perception of his neighbor across the aisle was
more frank in its interest than the girl's had been of him. The
level, fearless gaze of the outdoors West looked at her
unabashed, appreciating swiftly her points as they impinged
themselves upon his admiration. The long, lithe lines of the
slim, supple body, the languid grace missing hauteur only because
that seemed scarce worth while, the unconscious pride of self
that fails to be offensive only in a young woman so well equipped
with good looks as this one indubitably was the rider of the
plains had appraised them all before his eyes dismissed her from
his consideration and began a casual inspection of the other
passengers.

Inside of half an hour he had made himself persona grata to
everybody in the car except his dark-eyed neighbor across the
way. That this dispenser of smiles and cigars decided to leave
her out in the distribution of his attentions perhaps spoke well
for his discernment. Certainly responsiveness to the geniality of
casual fellow passengers did not impress Mr. Collins as likely to
be an outstanding, quality in her. But with the drummer from
Chicago, the young mining engineer going to Sonora, the two shy
little English children just in front of him traveling to meet
their father in California, he found intuitively common ground of
interest. Even Major Mackenzie, the engineer in charge of the
large irrigation project being built by a company in southern
Arizona, relaxed at one of the plainsman's humorous tales.

It was after Collins had half-depopulated the car by leading the
more jovial spirits back in search of liquid refreshments that an
urbane clergyman, now of Boston but formerly of Pekin, Illinois,
professedly much interested in the sheriff's touch-and-go manner
as presumably quite characteristic of the West, dropped into the
vacant seat beside Major Mackenzie.

"And who might our energetic friend be?" he asked, with an
ingratiating smile.

The young woman in front of them turned her head ever so slightly
to listen.

"Val Collins is his name," said the major. "Sometimes called
'Bear-trap Collins.' He has always lived on the frontier. At
least, I met him twelve years ago when he was riding mail between
Aravaipa and Mesa. He was a boy then, certainly not over
eighteen, but in a desperate fight he had killed two men who
tried to hold up the mail. Cow-puncher, stage-driver, miner,
trapper, sheriff, rough rider, politician--he's past master at
them all."

"And why the appellation of 'Bear-trap,' may I ask?" The smack of
pulpit oratory was not often missing in the edifying discourse of
the Reverend Peter Melancthon Brooks.

"Well, sir, that's a story. He was trapping in the Tetons about
five years ago thirty miles from the nearest ranch-house. One
day, while he was setting a bear-trap, a slide of snow plunged
down from the tree branches above and freed the spring, catching
his hand between its jaws. With his feet and his other hand he
tried to open that trap for four hours, without the slightest
success. There was not one chance in a million of help from
outside. In point of fact, Collins had not seen a human being for
a month. There was only one thing to do, and he did it."

"And that was?"

"You probably noticed that he wears a glove over his left hand.
The reason, sir, is that he has an artificial hand."

"You mean--" The Reverend Peter paused to lengthen his delicious
thrill of horror.

"Yes, sir. That's just what I mean. He hacked his hand off at the
wrist with his hunting-knife."

"Why, the man's a hero!" cried the clergyman, with unction.

Mackenzie flung him a disgusted look. "We don't go much on heroes
out here. He's game, if that's what you mean. And able, too.
Bucky O'Connor himself isn't any smarter at following a trail."

"And who is Bucky O'Connor?"

"He's the man that just ran down Fernendez. Think I'll have a
smoke, sir. Care to join me?"

But the Pekin-Bostonian preferred to stay and jot down in his
note-book the story of the beartrap, to be used later as a sermon
illustration. This may have been the reason he did not catch the
quick look that passed without the slightest flicker of the
eyelids between Major Mackenzie and the young woman in Section 3.
It was as if the old officer had wired her a message in some code
the cipher of which was known only to them.

But the sheriff, returning at the head of his cohorts, caught it,
and wondered what meaning might lie back of that swift glance.
Major Mackenzie and this dark-eyed beauty posed before others as
strangers, yet between them lay some freemasonry of understanding
to which he had not the key.

Collins did not know that the aloofness in the eyes of Miss
Wainwright--he had seen the name on her suit-case--gave way to
horror when her glance fell on his gloved hand. She had a swift,
shuddering vision of a grim-faced man, jaws set like a vise,
hacking at his wrist with a hunting-knife. But the engaging
impudence of his eye, the rollicking laughter in his voice, shut
out the picture instantly.

The young man resumed his seat, and Miss Wainwright her listless
inspection of the flying stretches of brown desert. Dusk was
beginning to fall, and the porter presently lit the lamps.
Collins bought a magazine from the newsboy and relapsed into it,
but before he was well adjusted to reading the Limited pounded to
a second unscheduled halt.

Instantly the magazine was thrown aside and Collins' curly head
thrust out of the window. Presently the head reappeared,
simultaneously with the crack of a revolver, the first of a
detonating fusillade.

"Another of your impatient citizens eager to utilize the
unspeakable convenience of rapid transit," suggested the
clergyman, with ponderous jocosity.

"No, sir; nothing so illegal," smiled the cattleman, a whimsical
light in his daredevil eyes. He leaned forward and whispered a
word to the little girl in front of him, who at once led her
younger brother back to his section.

"I had hoped it would prove to be more diverting experience for a
tenderfoot," condescended the gentleman of the cloth.

"It's ce'tainly a pleasure to be able to gratify you, sir. You'll
be right pleased to know that it is a train hold-up." He waved
his hand toward the door, and at the word, as if waiting for his
cue, a masked man appeared at the end of the passage with a
revolver in each hand.



CHAPTER 2. TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

"Hands up!"

There was a ring of crisp menace in the sinister voice that was a
spur to obedience. The unanimous show of hands voted "Aye" with a
hasty precision that no amount of drill could have compassed.

It was a situation that might have made for laughter had there
been spectators to appreciate. But of whatever amusement was to
be had one of the victims seemed to hold a monopoly. Collins, his
arm around the English children by way of comfort, offered a
sardonic smile at the consternation his announcement and its
fulfillment had created, but none of his fellow passengers were
in the humor to respond.

The shock of an earthquake could not have blanched ruddy faces
more surely. The Chicago drummer, fat and florid, had disappeared
completely behind a buttress of the company's upholstery.

"God bless my soul!" gasped the Pekin-Bostonian, dropping his
eyeglass and his accent at the same moment. The dismay in his
face found a reflection all over the car. Miss Wainwright's hand
clutched at her breast for an instant, and her color ebbed till
her lips were ashen, but her neighbor across the aisle noticed
that her eyes were steady and her figure tense.

"Scared stiff, but game," was his mental comment.

"Gents to the right and ladies to the left; line up against the
walls; everybody waltz." called the man behind the guns, with
grim humor.

The passengers fell into line as directed, Collins with the rest.

"You're calling this dance, son; it's your say-so, I guess," he
conceded.

"Keep still, or I'll shoot you full of holes," growled the
autocrat of the artillery.

"Why, sure! Ain't you the real thing in Jesse Jameses?" soothed
the sheriff.

At the sound of Collins' voice, the masked man had started
perceptibly, and his right hand had jumped forward an inch or two
to cover the speaker more definitely. Thereafter, no matter what
else engaged his attention, the gleaming eyes behind the red
bandanna never wandered for a moment from the big plainsman. He
was taking no risks, for he remembered the saying current in
Arizona, that after Collins' hardware got into action there was
nothing left to do but plant the deceased and collect the
insurance. He had personal reasons to know the fundamental
accuracy of the colloquialism.

The train-conductor fussed up to the masked outlaw with a
ludicrous attempt at authority. "You can't rob the passengers on
this train. I'm not responsible for the express-car, but the
coaches--"

A bullet almost grazed his ear and shattered a window on its way
to the desert.

"Drift, you red-haired son of a Mexican?" ordered the man behind
the red bandanna. "Git back to that seat real prompt. This here's
taxation without representation."

The conductor drifted as per suggestion.

The minutes ticked themselves away in a tense strain marked by
pounding hearts. The outlaw stood at the end of the aisle,
watching the sheriff alertly.

"Why doesn't the music begin?" volunteered Collins, by way of
conversation, and quoted: "On with the dance. Let joy be
unconfined."

A dull explosion answered his question. The bandits were blowing
open the safe in the express-car with dynamite, pending which the
looting of the passengers was at a standstill.

A second masked figure joined his companion at the end of the
passage and held a hurried conversation with him. Fragments of
their low-voiced talk came to Collins.

"Only thirty thousand in the express-car. Not a red cent on the
old man himself."

"Where's the rest?" The irritation in the newcomer's voice was
pronounced.

Collins slewed his head and raked him with keen eyes that missed
not a detail. He was certain that he had never seen the man
before, yet he knew at once that the trim, wiry figure, so clean
of build and so gallant of bearing, could belong only to Wolf
Leroy, the most ruthless outlaw of the Southwest. It was written
in his jaunty insolence, in the flashing eyes. He was a handsome
fellow, white-toothed, black-haired, lithely tigerish, with
masterful mouth and eyes of steel, so far as one might judge
behind the white mask he wore. Alert, cruel, fearless from the
head to the heel of him, he looked the very devil to lead an
enterprise so lawless and so desperate as this. His vigilant eyes
swept contemptuously up and down the car, rested for a moment on
the young woman in Section 3, and came back to his partner.

"Bah! A flock of sheep--tamest bunch of spring lambs we ever
struck. I'll send Scott in to go through them. If anybody gets
gay, drop him." And the outlaw turned on his heel.

Another of the highwaymen took his place, a stout, squat figure
in the flannel shirt, spurs, and chaps of a cow-puncher. It took
no second glance to tell Collins this bandy-legged fellow had
been a rider of the range.

"Come, gentlemen, get a move on you," Collins implored. "This
train's due at Tucson by eight o'clock. We're more than an hour
late now. I'm holding down the job of sheriff in that same town,
and I'm awful anxious to get a posse out after a bunch of
train-robbers. So burn the wind, and go through the car on the
jump. Help yourself to anything you find. Who steals my purse
takes trash. 'Tis something, nothing. 'Twas mine; 'tis his.
That's right, you'll find my roll in that left-hand pocket. I
hate to have you take that gun, though. I meant to run you down
with that same old Colt's reliable. Oh, well, just as you say.
No, those kids get a free pass. They're going out to meet papa at
Los Angeles, boys. See?"

Collins' running fire of comment had at least the effect of
restoring the color to some cheeks that had been washed white and
of snatching from the outlaws some portion of their sense of
dominating the situation. But there was a veiled vigilance in his
eyes that belied his easy impudence.

"That lady across the aisle gets a pass, too, boys," continued
the sheriff. "She's scared stiff now, and you won't bother her,
if you're white men. Her watch and purse are on the seat. Take
them, if you want them, and let it go at that."

Miss Wainwright listened to this dialogue silently. She stood
before them cool and imperious and unwavering, but her face was
bloodless and the pulse in her beautiful soft throat fluttered
like a caged bird.

"Who's doing this job?" demanded one of the hold-ups, wheeling
savagely on the impassive officer "Did I say we were going to
bother the lady? Who's doing this job, Mr. Sheriff?"

"You are. I'd hate to be messing the job like you--holding up the
wrong train by mistake." This was a shot in the dark, and it did
not quite hit the bull's-eye. "I wouldn't trust you boys to rob a
hen-roost, the amateur way you go at it. When you get through,
you'll all go to drinking like blue blotters. I know your
kind--hell-bent to spend what you cash in, and every mother's son
of you in the pen or with his toes turned up inside of a month."

"Who'll put us there?" gruffly demanded the bowlegged one.

Collins smiled at him with confidence superb "Mebbe I will--and
if I don't Bucky O'Connor will--those of you that are left alive
when you go through shooting each other in the back. Oh, I see
your finish to a fare-you-well."

"Cheese it, or I'll bump you off." The first out law drove his
gun into the sheriff's ribs.

"That's all right. You don't need to punctuate that remark. I
line up with the sky-pilot and chew the cud of silence. I merely
wanted to frame up to you how this thing's going to turn out.
Don't come back at me and say I didn't warn you, sonnie."

"You make my head ache," snarled the bandy-legged outlaw sourly,
as he passed down with his sack, accumulating tribute as he
passed down the aisle with his sack, accumulating tribute as he
went.

The red-kerchiefed robber whooped when they came to the car
conductor. "Dig up, Mr. Pullman. Go way down into your jeans.
It's a right smart pleasure to divert the plunder of your bloated
corporation back to the people. What! Only fifty-seven dollars.
Oh, dig deeper, Mr. Pullman."

The drummer contributed to the sack eighty-four dollars, a
diamond ring, and a gold watch. His hands were trembling so that
they played a tattoo on the sloping ceiling above him.

"What's the matter, Fatty? Got a chill?" inquired one of the
robbers, as he deftly swept the plunder into the sack.

"For--God's sake--don't shoot. I have--a wife--and five
children," he stammered, with chattering teeth.

"No race suicide for Fatty. But whyfor do they let a sick man
like you travel all by his lone?"

"I don't know--I--Please turn that weapon another way."

"Plumb chuck full of malaria," soliloquized the owner of the
weapon, playfully running its business end over the Chicago man's
anatomy. "Shakes worse'n a pair of dice. Here, Fatty. Load up
with quinine and whisky. It's sure good for chills." The man
behind the bandanna gravely handed his victim back a dollar.
"Write me if it cures you. Now for the sky-pilot. No white chips
on this plate, parson. It's a contribution to the needy heathen.
You want to be generous. How much do you say?

The man of the cloth reluctantly said thirty dollars, a Lincoln
penny, and a silver-plated watch inherited from his fathers. The
watch was declined with thanks, the money accepted without.

The Pullman porter came into the car under compulsion of a
revolver in the hand of a fourth outlaw, one in a black mask. His
trembling finger pointed out the satchel and suit-case of Major
Mackenzie, and under orders he carried out the baggage belonging
to the irrigation engineer. Collin observed that the bandit in
the black mask was so nervous that the revolver in his hand
quivered like an aspen in the wind. He was slenderer and much
shorter than the Mexican, so that the sheriff decided he was a
mere boy.

It was just after he had left that three shots in rapid
succession rang out in the still night air.

The red-bandannaed one and his companion, who had apparently been
waiting for the signal, retreated backward to the end of the car,
still keeping the passengers covered. They flung rapidly two or
three bullets through the roof, and under cover of the smoke
slipped out into the night. A moment later came the thud of
galloping horses, more shots, and, when the patter of hoofs had
died away--silence.

The sheriff was the first to break it. He thrust his brown hands
deep into his pockets and laughed--laughed with the joyous,
rollicking abandon of a tickled schoolboy.

"Hysterics?" ventured the mining engineer sympathetically.

Collins wiped his eyes. "Call 'em anything you like. What pleases
me is that the reverend gentleman should have had this diverting
experience so prompt after he was wishing for it." He turned,
with concern, to the clergyman. "Satisfied, sir? Did our little
entertainment please, or wasn't it up to the mark?"

But the transported native of Pekin was game. "I'm quite
satisfied, if you are. I think the affair cost you a hundred
dollars or so more than it did me."

"That's right," agreed the sheriff heartily. "But I don't grudge
it--not a cent of it. The show was worth the price of admission."

The car conductor had a broadside ready for him. "Seems to me you
shot off your mouth more than you did that big gun of yours, Mr.
Sheriff."

Collins laughed, and clapped him on the back. "That's right. I'm
a regular phonograph, when you wind me up." He did not think it
necessary to explain that he had talked to make the outlaws talk,
and that he had noted the quality of their voices so carefully
that he would know them again among a thousand. Also he had
observed--other things--the garb of each of the men he had seen,
their weapons, their manner, and their individual peculiarities.

The clanking car took up the rhythm of the rails as the delayed
train plunged forward once more into the night. Again the clack
of tongues, set free from fear, buzzed eagerly. The glow of the
afterclap of danger was on them, and in the warm excitement each
forgot the paralyzing fear that had but now padlocked his lips.
Courage came flowing back into flabby cheeks and red blood into
hearts of water.

At the next station the Limited stopped, and the conductor swung
from a car before the wheels had ceased rolling and went running
into the telegraph office.

"Fire a message through for me, Pat. The Limited has been held
up," he announced.

"Held up?" gasped the operator.

"That's right. Get this message right through to Sabin. I'm not
going to wait for an answer. Tell him I'll stop at Apache for
further instructions."

With which the conductor was out again waving his lantern as a
signal for the train to start. Sheriff Collins and Major
Mackenzie had entered the office at his heels. They too had
messages to send, but it was not until the train was already
plunging into the night that the station agent read the yellow
slips they had left and observed that both of them went to the
same person.

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