Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 10
THE shipping was going on.
The cars were on the sidetrack. In the caboose the conductor sat most of the day by the stove reading a newspaper and waiting for the coffee pot to boil. Slim had set up his tent a quarter of a mile up the line, and back behind the buttes the final cutting and working were taking place. The cattle huddled together, milled and roared, and into the mass of heaving backs and tossing horns the cow ponies made their way. Once they knew which animal was wanted nothing could stop them.
Off by themselves were the cuts, the two-year olds already sold and going to Omaha, the mature beef for Chicago, and the throw backs, that had drifted into the herd and had now to be separated again. The wind roared over the vast expanse of empty country, so suddenly awake and alive, cattle ran with horses and riders pursuing them, and down on the line the engine whistled shrilly.
Tom was in his element. Jake had gone in to Ursula, and he was again in charge. The infernal racket was music to his ears, the prosperous condition of the cattle soothed his sore spirit. After all, if this was his life, it was a good life. The weather, although still cold, was bright and clear; when he changed horses the Miller's great muscles under him responded with new vigor. Even the knowledge that it was his last round-up for the L. D. could not entirely depress him. He was young, young and strong and whole, and soon the cars would be loaded and he would be on his way to Chicago.
Chicago!
It was evening, and they were loading at the track, when Jake came back from Ursula and called him aside.
"I've got kinda bad news for you, Tom. Allison has a warrant out for you."
"What for?"
"That Indian business. Weasel Tail's still alive, but he's pretty bad."
"What the hell do they want me for?" Tom demanded, aggrieved. "The ornery devil tried to murder me!"
"I know that, but"
"Besides which," said Tom, raising his voice, "he killed one good beef animal and got away with it. I went back and saw the carcass that morning. I'm telling you, Jake, if Allison thinks any jury in this country would convict me for what I did, he's welcome to try. But he's got to get me first."
He was furiously angry; his voice rose, his jaw was thrust forward. Jake took him by the arm and led him further from the pens.
"Look here, Tom," he said pacifically. "I'm kinda in a hole about this. If I let you out of the state now I'm in trouble. I was thinking"
"Give me my ticket. The rest's up to me, isn't it?"
But Jake would not give him his ticket, and in a savage temper he turned and went back to the pens. That was the last Jake was to see of him for some time; the flickering flares, the timid milling of the cattle at the foot of the chute, the incredibly slow ascent, a pandemonium of noise and great terrified bodies, and Tom, sullen but efficient, prodding them and at intervals staring down the road.
When the Sheriff finally came he was not to be found.
Allison left his car in the road, and came heavily across to the pens. A big man, an ex-puncher of the old days who had come up from Texas with the early herds, Allison was popular with all the cowboys in his county. But he was not a soft man, and they knew it. They guessed his errand when they saw him, and after the manner of their kind, tacitly united against him. And because he knew them, he smiled grimly as he surveyed their expressionless faces.
"Tom McNair here?"
"No. What's Tom been doing?"
"I guess you know all right. Where is he, if he isn't here?"
"I ain't seen him since just about sundown," said Bill, glibly. "Any you fellows seen Tom?"
Nobody had. They stood around Allison, politely interested. Maybe he'd gone to town to see a girl.
"I thought he was in charge here?"
"Well, that wouldn't worry Tom none, if he wanted to see a girl."
Allison was suspicious, but he could do nothing. Tom knew every back trail of the neighborhood, every gate in the wire.
He refused Slim's offer of coffee and stood around for a few minutes with his coat collar turned up against the freezing night wind, then he turned and lunged back through the darkness to the road and his car, the warrant still in his pocket.
But as a matter of fact, he was very near success once on his way back to Ursula, had he only known it.
Tom had no idea of being cheated out of his trip. Long before the lights of Allison's car appeared down the road, he had made a plan and prepared for his escape. True, the horse he roped in the darkness turned out to be a green horse, but the Miller was weary and he needed speed. He managed to saddle it and tie it up, and to slip off into the night when Allison appeared was a simple matter.
But from that time on he was in difficulty. The horse was kinky from the start; even holding him while opening gates in the wire was a test for Tom's long lean body, and every time he was mounted he threatened to break again. And seven miles out of Ursula Tom rode unseeing under a sagging telephone wire and was neatly pitched off backwards, with a cut across his forehead which blinded him with blood. When he picked himself up the animal was gone.
He swore furiously and tried to bind up his head. The blood froze almost as soon as it ran. But his anger only made him more determined, and in his high-heeled boots he set out to walk the seven miles remaining. That was when Allison almost had him. He passed within thirty feet of where Tom had dropped down into a swale when he saw the headlights.
But with the Sheriff out of the way, Tom's problem was only partially solved. Time was passing while he plodded through the mud, and he was exhausted not only from his fall, but from the hard work preceding it. His head needed attention, too.
He finally fixed on Clare. The Hamels had a car, and Clare could be trusted not to talk. He was more cheerful after he thought of that, even faintly amused. Clare would like it; she would like to think she was saving him. He grinned at the thought, and made better progress as he reached the better roads. Outside the Hamel house he reconnoitered. The houses all about were dark, and Clare's window was raised an inch or two. He put his face close to it and called her.
"Clare!"
He could hear her stirring.
"Clare. Come here, It's Tom."
She slid out of bed, trembling.
"What's the matter?"
"Get something on and come out to the shed. And don't wait to fix up. Be yourself!"
When she got out to the shed where the car was stabled, he had rolled a cigarette and was lighting it, and by the match flare she saw the blood on his face. He put a hand over her mouth before she could scream.
"Wire cut, that's all," he said. "You run in and get some warm water and adhesive, like a good girl, and then I'll talk to you."
But when, his wound cleaned and plastered, he told her what he wanted, he found her less amenable than he had expected.
"That's easy to say," she said. "What about me? They'll lock me up. And you know pop. He'd"
"You can get back by daylight."
"With these roads? You know I can't. I'll be lucky to get back at all."
"What's all this fuss you've been making about me, if you won't take a chance?"
"Why should I take a chance? You threw me over for that Dowling girl. Do you know what they're saying here in town? They say you were crazy about her, and she just laughed at you."
"Oh, they do, do they?" He flung his cigarette away angrily. "Well, to hell with them. Will you do what I want, or won't you?"
"You couldn't take the car and leave it?"
"And have them telegraph ahead and grab me off the train?"
She was silent, and the next moment he picked up his hat and started out.
"Tom!"
"That's all right. I know when I'm up against it."
"Listen, Tom. You do like me a little, don't you?"
"That depends," he said guardedly.
"You know I care, Tom. I'm crazy about you."
"You act like it!"
"Listen, Tom. If I do it you'll owe me something. If I'm found out, the way this place talks"
"Well?"
"I'm going to say we're engaged."
"So that's the little game, is it?"
"It isn't a game. You'd want to act square, wouldn't you? And that Dowling girl's gone; you'll never see her again." And when he still hesitated her voice rose shrewishly. "I'll be taking a chance, even at that. I'm not fooled about you. Not for a minute. You won't make any girl happy. You're too hard."
"Is that so!" he said. "Then what's all the fuss about?"
"You're the sort who will take all they can get, without paying for it," she told him bitterly. "I've heard that before about you, but I never believed it."
"I haven't run up any bill yet," he said stiffly. But nevertheless the drift of her argument was telling on him. After all, what difference did it make? Kay was gone; he would never see her again. What had he to look ahead to? Three or four more years of riding, and he would be through. A man couldn't ride forever; his joints got stiff. There came a day, if he kept on too long, when he couldn't get out of the way and the horse came down on him, and it was only the horse that got up again.
He was very weary, very cold. His head ached, the blood drummed in his ears.
"All right," he said. "Have it your own way. Now let's get out of here."
It was only later on in the little car, sliding along the greasy roads; that his conscience began to bother him. He took one hand from the wheel and put his arm around her, and she moved closer to him, relaxed and happy.
"I'm crazy about you, Tom."
And when she held up her face to be kissed, he stopped the car and took her into his arms with a gesture of pure passion.
Back at the siding the loading had ceased for the night. The new empties had not come up, and the men had laid their beds in the warm cook tent and were snoring heavily. From the loaded cars came occasional wails and the heavy ammoniacal odor of great bodies closely confined; and in the caboose the train crew slept on their leather couches, in the glow from a red-hot stove.
It was afternoon the next day before the last of the weary cattle had filed wearily into the cinder-bedded cars, lifting heavy heads now and then to cry out against this new and dreadful procedure, and against their masters, the sweating weary men who drove, cursed and cajoled.
But although two deputy sheriffs watched the train and the pens, and made a final careful inspection of it before it pulled out, Tom McNair had not appeared.
The locomotive took up the slack carefully, the cattle braced themselves against the strange and disquieting motion, and in the caboose Bill and Gus, the Swede who was traveling on Tom's contract ticket, settled their gear and proceeded to catch up on long arrears of sleep.
It was about midnight that night that the cattle train, having puffed and snorted up the long divide, stopped by a water tank to shift off the extra locomotive, and Bill, wakening, looked up into a face which was faintly familiar under a bandage. And the face was grinning cheerfully and pointing at Gus.
"What'll we do with that?" it said. "Throw it off?"
"By God! Tom!"
"You bet you."
He turned to Gus's coat, hanging from a hook, and calmly took the contract ticket from'a pocket.
"Do you suppose he'd listen to reason?"
"Depends on what you mean by reason."
"Two reasons, then; you and me!"
"We can try, but he's sure aimin' to get to the big city."
Voices outside warned them that they had not much time. They had wakened the Swede, too, and he sat up and yawned.
"I yust got asleep," he complained.
"Shall we fling him off, or give him a chance to go peaceable, Bill?"
"Yust try it," said the Swede, wide awake now and getting up. But there was no time for parley; already the long train was giving premonitory symptoms of departure, and at any time the rear brakeman would swing up onto the step of the caboose. Before Gus had time to square off for a fight he was caught by the elbows and hustled off the train, and Bill was throwing after him the black valise which contained his change of clothing.
Tom had only time to call out a word of warning.
"You lay low until I get to Chicago," he said. "If you don't something's going to happen to you that'll surprise you. After that you can blow the top off of hell and spit in the hole."
When the brakeman came running up with his lantern he saw a stupefied figure picking up a black valise from beside the track. But he had no time to ask questions. When he got into the caboose he found the two men he had left still apparently sleeping.
If he sensed some small drama, if he realized that a change had taken place in the personnel of the two contract men, he said nothing about it to them. And the conductor, when spoken to, only chuckled dryly. He knew Tom. If Tom was smart enough to outwit Allison, that was his business. His ticket was all right.
The long journey continued, broken only by the stops every twenty-eight hours, when the cattle were taken out of the cars and at the pens beside the track were watered and given hay. Meal time was a casual matter of way stations and the end: of the division.
There the crews changed, and the cabooses and engines. But the interminable game of stud poker with a pack of swollen filthy cards went on. Sometimes the conductor took a hand, again the brakeman would descend his ladder from the cupola above, or the forward brakeman would wander back over the tops of the swaying cars and sit in for a while.
Tom was happy, after a fashion. He was physically comfortable, rested, and warm. In the morning he bathed with water from the open butt marked "Wash water" and he had managed to buy some underclothes and socks. His injury was healing, too. He looked neither ahead nor behind. Clare was as though she had never existed. He meant to come back from Chicago, of course; where else could he go? But he anticipated no serious trouble from Allison, or did not care to think about it if he did.
Now and then he thought of Kay, but there was heartache there, and he tried to forget her.
Occasionally he would look up from the game to glance out the window. As the bare treeless plains began to rise into the wooded hills of Iowa and Wisconsin he was conscious of beauty he was unable to express.
"That's sure pretty," he would say.
"Prettiest country in America," the brakeman might observe. "Look at them hills. Trees right to the top."
"Hills? You call them hills? You come out our way and let me show you something!"
But the towns began to daunt him, as they grew in size; the lines of automobiles drawn up, the well-dressed swiftmoving people; and cowboy fashion both he and Bill expressed their discomfiture in jeers. "Look at him, Tom! I'll bet they'd pay a bounty on him back home."
"No! Not enough hair on his hide."
They became gradually conscious of their clothing and their big hats. And undeniably—oh, very undeniably—there clung to them both the odor of the cattle cars. Once a pretty girl at their table in a restaurant sniffed and then moved away, and Tom was indignant.
"What's the matter with us?" he asked, aggrieved. "The way she acted, we might be a pair of skunks."
"Well, we aren't a couple of perfume bottles at that," said Bill philosophically, and went on with his meal.
There were others, of course, who stared at the big cowboy in his wide hat, with his swaggering walk, his broad shoulders and slim waist. Now and then a girl made some signal to them—or to Tom, rather—and they would fall into step beside her, one on each side.
"I didn't know the circus was in town. Where'd you fellows come from?"
"Out of the West, where men are men," they would chant in unison.
But these little dalliances were necessarily brief. They would saunter back to the track, swing into the caboose, and go back to the poker game again; the floor was littered with the stumps of endless cigarettes. One brakeman produced a bottle of moonshine, but there was not enough liquor to cause any trouble, or to interfere with Tom's luck at the cards.
He was a hundred dollars to the good when they reached Chicago.