McPhail wondered grimly who the hell his help could be coming from. At any rate he—or they—savvied how to shoot. It wouldn’t be long now. Just three of them left and—
All at once bullets began to spang into the rocks from behind him. McPhail’s right leg went suddenly out from under him. He felt a sickish sensation at the pit of his stomach. They’d get him now—got him already, maybe. He shook his head violently as if to clear it of its foggishness, and raised himself to his elbow. The crouching figure of a man, a familiar figure, appeared from up the draw. McPhail knew him well enough. Behind him came another. McPhail knew him, too. There was no doubt which side of the fight they were on. One of them had furnished him a bullet wound already. But evidently, seeing him go down, they thought they had him.
Swiftly they edged in behind a brush clump. McPhail eased up his carbine, centered the brush clump in his sights and pulled the trigger. A man leapt out like a shot rabbit and fell prone.
McPhail felt a grim satisfaction at the success of his blind shot. But he knew now that, for him, the jig was up. They would be closing in on him in a jiffy from both directions. If he could have gotten up he would have preferred to take it standing, but he couldn’t. A bullet spurted up the sand at his very nose.
Like a suddenly loosened log on a steep hillside, McPhail rolled over and over. In a jiffy he was over the edge of a pebbly little pothole in the arroyo, and down he went. Of course, they’d get him sooner or later, but from here he might well crack down one more of them first as they came.
Even in this last-minute pinch that seemed to promise him certain death, McPhail felt strangely relieved in one respect: at any rate, he had been saved the painful duty of reporting suspicion of one of his own comrades for treachery.
Then another thought occurred to him: the smugglers might get him in another minute or two, but he wasn’t dead yet. And as long as he lived duty was duty. Grimly he fished for notebook and pencil, found them and started to write. Maybe some of the boys would find the notebook when they checked up on this battle—which they would be bound to do within the next few hours—or days. He would make his report and stick the whole notebook under a rock. He began to write, hurriedly.
The sounds of shooting, lulled for a moment, broke out anew up in the draw. McPhail felt himself getting dizzy again.
“Attacked smuggler train,” he scrawled. “Think Hennepin, Solano outfit. Check up close on Patrolman Johns, because—”
There was a sudden movement up beyond the edge of the pothole. McPhail dropped pencil and notebook and tried to grip his forty-five. It wobbled in his hand. The end of a rifle barrel appeared over the edge of the bank. But Patrolman McPhail did not see it. A dancing wall of dizziness seemed to spring up before his eyes. The world went black. The forty-five dropped from his hand. He did not even hear the pow of a forty-five somewhere up over the bank, perhaps not two dozen yards away.
When Patrolman McPhail came to, somebody was mopping his forehead with a wet bandanna. The face that bent over him was grizzled, weather-lined. It was haggard and streaked with blood. There were other streaks down from the eyes, too, that looked like tears might have made them. It was the face of old Silent Hank Johns. He grinned a sort of wry, twisted grin as McPhail opened his eyes, and patted him gently on the back. But he said nothing.
“Hank? Hank? You—you—I thought you—” McPhail’s puzzlement showed plainly through the grime on his face.
“Yeah, I did. Ditched yuh. Then I seen frum a ridgetop back aways how yuh flew into ’em all by yerself an’ it kinder got me. So I circled south an’ headed ’em off here. Aimed to hold ’em, drive ’em back or go to hell tryin’. When you showed up, I figgered we had ’em—till ol’ Bat an’ Tito come bustin’ in back of yuh frum up the draw. Then I seen yuh go down. That’s when I started crawl in’ up on ’em. Jest in time, too, I reckon. Ol’ Tito was jest pokin’ his gun over the edge here to pot yuh, when I plugged him. He was the last ’un. We cleaned ’em out, Mac—all seven of ’em!”
There was a strange mournful note in old Hank’s voice.
He helped McPhail out of the sinkhole, set him up against some rocks and dressed his wound. Then he went shuffling, stoop-shouldered, among the dead smugglers. Six of the bodies he let lie. One, that of the first smuggler McPhail had brought down, he picked up and placed tenderly under the shade of a brush clump. He took off his own shirt and spread it gently over the dead boy’s face. Then he came back to McPhail. He looked older and more haggard than ever, but his bloodshot eyes looked his fellow patrolman square in the eye.
“Listen, Mac,” he said. “I seen what you wrote in your notebook. Yuh had it figgered right, Mac. I’ve been tippin’ off to Bat an’ Tito. Twice. Throwed ’em the word on Macho Gully, last evenin’. Soon’s you kin ride, yuh better take me in to the Chief. I was goin’ in today myself to resign. But now I’ll take my medicine. You’ll git a promotion outa this an’—”
“Damn the promotion!” McPhail’s eyes were steady, too, now, and beginning to clear. “What I want to know is why the hell yuh done it? You ain’t the kind that’d—”
“Mac,” interrupted Hank Johns, “if you had a son that’d growed up wrong, took to outlawin’, smugglin’, maybe shot a man or two, an’ somebody—say, like Bat Hennepin—was goin’ to deliver him in if yuh didn’t come through with a snitch or two fer him, an’ you knowed it’d mean hangin’ fer the kid if yuh didn’t come through, then—”
“You mean that’s him—that you just covered up?” McPhail nodded gravely toward the dead smuggler lying under old Hank’s shirt.
Silent Hank nodded.
McPhail reached for the notebook that Hank had stuck back in his pocket. He ripped out the leaf he had written on down in the sinkhole. Facing almost certain death, Patrolman McPhail had considered duty above his own personal feelings. Now he tore the little sheet of paper into bits. Somehow, now that he understood, now that the cause of Silent Hank’s defection lay dead here on the sands of the Border, now that Hank Johns stood ready to go in and take his medicine like a man, Patrolman McPhail changed his mind. He did not believe that there would be any more smuggler tips from this man who, knowing his own son was among them, had, in the pinch, headed off these smugglers, stepped out into the midst of their smoking guns and wiped them out.
Patrolman McPhail decided to take this matter of his duty into his own hands.
THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN, by Zane Grey
PREFATORY NOTE
Buffalo Jones needs no introduction to American sportsmen, but to these of my readers who are unacquainted with him a few words may not be amiss.
He was born sixty-two years ago on the Illinois prairie, and he has devoted practically all of his life to the pursuit of wild animals. It has been a pursuit which owed its unflagging energy and indomitable purpose to a singular passion, almost an obsession, to capture alive, not to kill. He has caught and broken the will of every well-known wild beast native to western North America. Killing was repulsive to him. He even disliked the sight of a sporting rifle, though for years necessity compelled him to earn his livelihood by supplying the meat of buffalo to the caravans crossing the plains. At last, seeing that the extinction of the noble beasts was inevitable, he smashed his rifle over a wagon wheel and vowed to save the species. For ten years he labored, pursuing, capturing and taming buffalo, for which the West gave him fame, and the name Preserver of the American Bison.
As civilization encroached upon the plains Buffalo Jones ranged slowly westward; and to-day an isolated desert-bound plateau on the north rim of the Grand Canyon of Arizona is his home. There his buffalo browse with the mustang and deer, and are as free as ever they were on the rolling plains.
In the spring of 1907 I was the fortunate companion of the old plainsman on a trip across the desert, and a hunt in that wonderful country of yellow crags, deep canyons and giant pines. I want to tell about it. I want to show the color and beauty of those painted cliffs and the long, brown-matted bluebell-dott
ed aisles in the grand forests; I want to give a suggestion of the tang of the dry, cool air; and particularly I want to throw a little light upon the life and nature of that strange character and remarkable man, Buffalo Jones.
Happily in remembrance a writer can live over his experiences, and see once more the moonblanched silver mountain peaks against the dark blue sky; hear the lonely sough of the night wind through the pines; feel the dance of wild expectation in the quivering pulse; the stir, the thrill, the joy of hard action in perilous moments; the mystery of man’s yearning for the unattainable.
As a boy I read of Boone with a throbbing heart, and the silent moccasined, vengeful Wetzel I loved.
I pored over the deeds of later men—Custer and Carson, those heroes of the plains. And as a man I came to see the wonder, the tragedy of their lives, and to write about them. It has been my destiny—what a happy fulfillment of my dreams of border spirit!—to live for a while in the fast-fading wild environment which produced these great men with the last of the great plainsmen.
—Zane Grey.
CHAPTER 1.
THE ARIZONA DESERT
One afternoon, far out on the sun-baked waste of sage, we made camp near a clump of withered pinyon trees. The cold desert wind came down upon us with the sudden darkness. Even the Mormons, who were finding the trail for us across the drifting sands, forgot to sing and pray at sundown. We huddled round the campfire, a tired and silent little group. When out of the lonely, melancholy night some wandering Navajos stole like shadows to our fire, we hailed their advent with delight. They were good-natured Indians, willing to barter a blanket or bracelet; and one of them, a tall, gaunt fellow, with the bearing of a chief, could speak a little English.
“How,” said he, in a deep chest voice.
“Hello, Noddlecoddy,” greeted Jim Emmett, the Mormon guide.
“Ugh!” answered the Indian.
“Big paleface—Buffalo Jones—big chief—buffalo man,” introduced Emmett, indicating Jones.
“How.” The Navajo spoke with dignity, and extended a friendly hand.
“Jones big white chief—rope buffalo—tie up tight,” continued Emmett, making motions with his arm, as if he were whirling a lasso.
“No big—heap small buffalo,” said the Indian, holding his hand level with his knee, and smiling broadly.
Jones, erect, rugged, brawny, stood in the full light of the campfire. He had a dark, bronzed, inscrutable face; a stern mouth and square jaw, keen eyes, half-closed from years of searching the wide plains; and deep furrows wrinkling his cheeks. A strange stillness enfolded his feature the tranquility earned from a long life of adventure.
He held up both muscular hands to the Navajo, and spread out his fingers.
“Rope buffalo—heap big buffalo—heap many—one sun.”
The Indian straightened up, but kept his friendly smile.
“Me big chief,” went on Jones, “me go far north—Land of Little Sticks—Naza! Naza! rope musk-ox; rope White Manitou of Great Slave Naza! Naza!”
“Naza!” replied the Navajo, pointing to the North Star; “no—no.”
“Yes me big paleface—me come long way toward setting sun—go cross Big Water—go Buckskin—Siwash—chase cougar.”
The cougar, or mountain lion, is a Navajo god and the Navajos hold him in as much fear and reverence as do the Great Slave Indians the musk-ox.
“No kill cougar,” continued Jones, as the Indian’s bold features hardened. “Run cougar horseback—run long way—dogs chase cougar long time—chase cougar up tree! Me big chief—me climb tree—climb high up—lasso cougar—rope cougar—tie cougar all tight.”
The Navajo’s solemn face relaxed.
“White man heap fun. No.”
“Yes,” cried Jones, extending his great arms. “Me strong; me rope cougar—me tie cougar; ride off wigwam, keep cougar alive.”
“No,” replied the savage vehemently.
“Yes,” protested Jones, nodding earnestly.
“No,” answered the Navajo, louder, raising his dark head.
“Yes!” shouted Jones.
“Big lie!” the Indian thundered.
Jones joined good-naturedly in the laugh at his expense. The Indian had crudely voiced a skepticism I had heard more delicately hinted in New York, and singularly enough, which had strengthened on our way West, as we met ranchers, prospectors and cowboys. But those few men I had fortunately met, who really knew Jones, more than overbalanced the doubt and ridicule cast upon him. I recalled a scarred old veteran of the plains, who had talked to me in true Western bluntness:
“Say, young feller, I heerd yer couldn’t git acrost the Canyon fer the deep snow on the north rim. Wal, ye’re lucky. Now, yer hit the trail fer New York, an’ keep goin’! Don’t ever tackle the desert, ‘specially with them Mormons. They’ve got water on the brain, wusser ‘n religion. It’s two hundred an’ fifty miles from Flagstaff to Jones range, an’ only two drinks on the trail. I know this hyar Buffalo Jones. I knowed him way back in the seventies, when he was doin’ them ropin’ stunts thet made him famous as the preserver of the American bison. I know about that crazy trip of his’n to the Barren Lands, after musk-ox. An’ I reckon I kin guess what he’ll do over there in the Siwash. He’ll rope cougars—sure he will—an’ watch ’em jump. Jones would rope the devil, an’ tie him down if the lasso didn’t burn. Oh! he’s hell on ropin’ things. An’ he’s wusser ‘n hell on men, an’ hosses, an’ dogs.”
All that my well-meaning friend suggested made me, of course, only the more eager to go with Jones. Where I had once been interested in the old buffalo hunter, I was now fascinated. And now I was with him in the desert and seeing him as he was, a simple, quiet man, who fitted the mountains and the silences, and the long reaches of distance.
“It does seem hard to believe—all this about Jones,” remarked Judd, one of Emmett’s men.
“How could a man have the strength and the nerve? And isn’t it cruel to keep wild animals in captivity? it against God’s word?”
Quick as speech could flow, Jones quoted: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, and give him dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, over all the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’!”
“Dominion—over all the beasts of the field!” repeated Jones, his big voice rolling out. He clenched his huge fists, and spread wide his long arms. “Dominion! That was God’s word!” The power and intensity of him could be felt. Then he relaxed, dropped his arms, and once more grew calm. But he had shown a glimpse of the great, strange and absorbing passion of his life. Once he had told me how, when a mere child, he had hazarded limb and neck to capture a fox squirrel, how he had held on to the vicious little animal, though it bit his hand through; how he had never learned to play the games of boyhood; that when the youths of the little Illinois village were at play, he roamed the prairies, or the rolling, wooded hills, or watched a gopher hole. That boy was father of the man: for sixty years an enduring passion for dominion over wild animals had possessed him, and made his life an endless pursuit.
Our guests, the Navajos, departed early, and vanished silently in the gloom of the desert. We settled down again into a quiet that was broken only by the low chant-like song of a praying Mormon. Suddenly the hounds bristled, and old Moze, a surly and aggressive dog, rose and barked at some real or imaginary desert prowler. A sharp command from Jones made Moze crouch down, and the other hounds cowered close together.
“Better tie up the dogs,” suggested Jones. “Like as not coyotes run down here from the hills.”
The hounds were my especial delight. But Jones regarded them with considerable contempt. When all was said, this was no small wonder, for that quintet of long-eared canines would have tried the patience of a saint. Old Moze was a Missouri hound that Jones had procured in that State of uncertain qualities; and the dog had grown old over coon-trails. He was black and white, grizzled and battlescarred; and if ever a dog had an evil ey
e, Moze was that dog. He had a way of wagging his tail—an indeterminate, equivocal sort of wag, as if he realized his ugliness and knew he stood little chance of making friends, but was still hopeful and willing. As for me, the first time he manifested this evidence of a good heart under a rough coat, he won me forever.
To tell of Moze’s derelictions up to that time would take more space than would a history of the whole trip; but the enumeration of several incidents will at once stamp him as a dog of character, and will establish the fact that even if his progenitors had never taken any blue ribbons, they had at least bequeathed him fighting blood. At Flagstaff we chained him in the yard of a livery stable. Next morning we found him hanging by his chain on the other side of an eight-foot fence. We took him down, expecting to have the sorrowful duty of burying him; but Moze shook himself, wagged his tail and then pitched into the livery stable dog. As a matter of fact, fighting was his forte. He whipped all of the dogs in Flagstaff; and when our blood hounds came on from California, he put three of them hors de combat at once, and subdued the pup with a savage growl. His crowning feat, however, made even the stoical Jones open his mouth in amaze. We had taken Moze to the El Tovar at the Grand Canyon, and finding it impossible to get over to the north rim, we left him with one of Jones’s men, called Rust, who was working on the Canyon trail. Rust’s instructions were to bring Moze to Flagstaff in two weeks. He brought the dog a little ahead time, and roared his appreciation of the relief it to get the responsibility off his hands. And he related many strange things, most striking of which was how Moze had broken his chain and plunged into the raging Colorado River, and tried to swim it just above the terrible Sockdolager Rapids. Rust and his fellow-workmen watched the dog disappear in the yellow, wrestling, turbulent whirl of waters, and had heard his knell in the booming roar of the falls. Nothing but a fish could live in that current; nothing but a bird could scale those perpendicular marble walls. That night, however, when the men crossed on the tramway, Moze met them with a wag of his tail. He had crossed the river, and he had come back!
The Second Western Megapack Page 89