Part 5 (1/2)
”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