by Zane Grey
He took a liking to Cherry Hazelton. The boy was a strapping youngster, freckle-faced and red-headed, and, like all healthy youths of the Middle West during the ’Seventies, he was a wor-shipper of the frontiersman and Indian fighter. He and his young comrades, brothers named Dan and Joe Newman, spent what little leisure time they had hanging round Pilchuck and Tom, hungry for stories as dogs for bones.
Two days at this camp did not suffice Pilchuck. Buffalo were not excessively numerous, but they were scattered into small bands under leadership of old bulls, and for these reasons offered the conditions best suited to experienced hunters.
The third day Tom took Cherry Hazelton with him to carry canteen and extra cartridges while getting valuable experience.
Buffalo in small numbers were in sight everywhere, but as this country was rolling and cut up, unlike the Pease prairie, it was not possible to locate all the herds that might be within reaching distance.
In several hours of riding and stalking, Tom had not found a position favorable to any extended success, though he had downed some buffalo, and young Hazelton, after missing a number, had finally killed his first, a fine bull. The boy was wild with excitement, and this brought back to Tom his early experience, now seemingly so long in the past.
This incident happened no more than two miles from camp, on a creek that ran through a wide stretch of plain, down to the tributary. Following it, a large herd of buffalo trooped out of the west, coming fast under a cloud of dust. They poured down into the creek and literally blocked it, crazy to drink. Tom had here a marked instance of the thirst-driven madness now common to the buffalo. This herd, numbering many hundreds, slaked their thirst, and then trooped into a wide flat in the creek bottom, where trees stood here and there. Manifestly they had drunk too deeply, if they had not floundered, for most of them lay down.
“We’ll cross the creek and sneak close on them,” said Tom. “Bring all the cartridges. We might get a stand.”
“What’s that?” whispered Cherry excitedly.
“It’s what a buffalo hunter calls a place and time where a big number bunches, and can be kept from running off. I never had a stand myself. But I’ve an idea what one’s like.”
They crept on behind trees and brush, down into the wide shallow flat, until they were no farther than a hundred yards from the resting herd. From the way Cherry panted, Tom knew he was frightened.
“It is sort of skittish,” whispered Tom, “but if they run our way, we can climb a tree.”
“I’m not . . . scared. It’s . . . just . . . great,” rejoined the lad, in a tone that hardly verified his words.
“Crawl slow now, and easy,” said Tom. “A little farther . . . then we’ll bombard them.”
At last Tom led the youngster yards closer, to a wonderful position behind an uprooted cottonwood, from which they could not be seen. Thrilling indeed was it even for Tom, who had stalked Comanches in this way. Most of the buffalo were down, and those standing were stupid with drowsiness. The heat, and long parching thirst, then an overcharged stomach, had rendered them loggy.
Tom turned his head to whisper instructions to the lad. Cherry’s face was pale, and the freckles stood out prominently. He was trembling with wild eagerness, fear, and delight combined. Tom thought it no wonder. Again he smelled the raw scent of buffalo. They made a magnificent sight, an assorted herd of all kinds and ages, from the clean, glossy, newly shedded old bulls down to the red calves.
“Take the bull on your right . . . farthest out,” whispered Tom. “And I’ll tend to this old stager on my left.”
The big guns boomed. Tom’s bull went to his knees and, grunting loudly, fell over; Cherry’s bull wagged his head as if a bee had stung him. Part of those buffalo lying down got up. The old bull, evidently a leader, started off.
“Knock him,” whispered Tom quickly. “They’ll follow him.” Tom fired almost simultaneously with Cherry, and one or both of them scored a dead shot. The buffalo that had started to follow the bull turned back into the herd, and this seemed to dominate all of them. Most of those standing pressed closer in. Others began to walk stolidly off.
“Shoot the outsiders,” said Tom quickly. And in three seconds he had stopped as many buffalo. Cherry’s gun boomed, but apparently without execution.
At this juncture Pilchuck rushed up behind them.
“By golly, you’ve got a stand,” he said in excited tones for him. “Never seen a better in my life. . . . Now, here, you boys, let me do the shootin’. It’s tough on you, but, if this stand is handled right, we’ll make a killin’.”
Pilchuck stuck his forked rest stick in the ground, and knelt behind it, just to the right of Tom and Cherry. This elevated him somewhat above the log, and certainly not hidden from the buffalo.
“Case like this a fellow wants to shoot straight,” said the scout. “A crippled buff’ means a bolt.”
Choosing the bull the farthest outside of the herd, Pilchuck aimed with deliberation, and fired. The animal fell. Then he treated the next in the same manner. He was far from hurried, and that explained his deadly precision.
“You mustn’t let your gun get too hot,” he said. “Over-expansion from heat makes a bullet go crooked.”
Pilchuck picked out buffalo slowly walking away and downed them. The herd kept massed, uneasy in some quarters, but for the most part, not disturbed by the shooting. Few of those lying down rose to their feet. When the scout had accounted for upward of two dozen buffalo, he handed his gun to Tom.
“Cool it off an’ wipe it out,” he said, and, taking Tom’s gun, returned to his deliberate work.
Tom threw down the breechblock, and poured water through the barrel, once, and then presently again. Taking up Pilchuck’s ramrod, Tom ran a greasy patch of cloth through the barrel. It was cooling rapidly and would soon be safe to use.
Meanwhile the imperturbable scout was knocking buffalo down as if they had been tenpins. On the side toward him there was soon a corral of dead buffalo. He never missed; only seldom was it necessary to take two shots to an animal. After shooting ten or twelve, he returned Tom’s gun and took up his own.
“Best stand I ever saw,” he said. “Queer how buffalo act sometimes. They’re not stupid. They know somethin’ is wrong. But you see I keep knockin’ down the one that leads off.”
Buffalo walked over to dead ones, and sniffed a them, and hooked them with such violence that the contact could be heard. An old bull put something apparently like anger in his actions. Why did not his comrade, or perhaps his mate, get up and come? Some of them looked anxiously around, waiting. Now and then another would walk out of the crowd, and that was fatal for him. Boom! And the heavy bullet would thud solidly; the buffalo would sag or jerk, and then sink down, shot through the heart. Pilchuck was a machine for the collecting of buffalo hides. There were hundreds of hunters like him on the range. Boom! Boom! Boom! resounded out the Big Fifty.
At last after more than an hour of this incredible lack of reason, or stolidity to the boom of gun and the fall of one of their number, the resting buffalo got up, and they all moved around uneasily, uncertainly, each one following another. Then Pilchuck missed dead center of a quartering shot at a bull that led out. The bullet made the beast frantic, and with a kind of low bellow it bounded away. The mass broke, and a stream of shaggy brown poured off the flat and up the gentle slope. In a moment all the herd was in motion. The industrious Pilchuck dropped four more while they were crowding behind, following off the flat. A heavy trampling roar filled the air; dust, switching tufted tails, woolly bobbing backs, covered the slope. And in a few moments they were gone. Silence settled down. The blue smoke drifted away. A gasp of drying buffalo could be heard.
“Reckon I never beat this stand,” said the scout, wiping his wet, black hands. “If only I hadn’t crippled that bull.”
“Gosh! It was murder . . . worser’n butcherin’ cows!” ejaculated the boy Cherry. Drops of sweat stood out on his pale face, as marked as the freckles. He lo
oked sick. Long before that hour had ended, his boyish sense of exciting adventure had been outraged.
“Lad, it ain’t always that easy,” remarked Pilchuck. “An’ don’t let this make you think huntin’ buffalo isn’t dangerous. Now we’ll make a count.”
One hundred and twenty-six buffalo lay dead in space less than three acres, and most of them were bulls.
“Yep, it’s my record,” declared the scout, with satisfaction. “But I come back fresh to it an’ shore that was a grand stand. Boys, we’ve got skinnin’ for the rest of today, an’ all of tomorrow.”
* * * * *
The two outfits, gradually hunted down the tributary toward its confluence with the Brazos. As the number of buffalo increased, other outfits were met with, and, when they arrived, they were on the outskirts of the great herd and a swarm of hunters’ camps.
Hide thieves were numbered among these hunters, and this necessitated the consolidation of camps, and the need of one or more men to be left on guard. Thus Tom and Cherry often had a day in camp, most welcome change, though tasks were endless. Their camp was at a point where the old Spanish Trail from the Llano Estacado crossed the Brazos, and therefore was in line of constant travel. Hunters and freighters, tenderfeet and old-timers, soldiers and Indians passed that camp, and seldom came a day when no traveler stopped for an hour.
Cherry liked these days in camp more than those out on the range. He was being broken in to Pilchuck’s strenuous method and the process was no longer enticing.
Once it happened that Cherry and Dan Newman were left together. Tom had ridden off to take up his skinning in which he had soon regained all his old-time skill, but he did not forget to admonish the boys to keep out of mischief. Wrong-Wheel Jones, who had been recovering from one of his infrequent intemperate spells, had also been left behind. When Tom returned, he found Jones in a state of high dudgeon, raving what he would do to those infernal boys. It was plain that Wrong-Wheel had very recently come out of the river, which at this point ran under a bank close to camp. Tom concluded the old fellow had fallen in, but, as the boys were not to be found, a later conclusion heaped upon their heads something of suspicion. At last Tom persuaded him to talk.
“Wal, it was this way,” began Wrong-Wheel, with the air of a much injured man. “Since I lost them two hundred hides . . . an’ I know darn’ well some thief got them . . . I been drinkin’ considerable. Jest got to taperin’ off lately, an’ wasn’t seein’ so many queer things. . . . Wal, today I went to sleep thar in the shade on the bank. Sumthin’ woke me, an’, when I opened my eyes, I seed an orful sight. I was scared terrible, an’ I jest backed off the bank an’ fell in the river. Damn’ near drowned!. . . . Reckon when I got out I was good an’ sober. . . . An’ say, what d’ye spose them boys done?”
Wrong-Wheel squinted at Tom and squirted a brown stream of tobacco into the campfire.
“I haven’t any idea,” replied Tom, with difficulty preserving a straight face.
“Wal,” went on Jones, “ya know that big panther Pilchuck shot yestiddy. Them boys hed skinned it, shot-pouched it . . . as we say . . . an’ then they had stuffed it with grass, an’ put sticks in fer legs, an’ marbles fer eyes. An’ I’m a son-of-a-gun if they didn’t stand the dummy right in front of me, so, when I woke, I seed it fust, an’ I jest nat’rally went off my nut.”
* * * * *
Another day an old acquaintance of Tom’s rode in, and halted on his way to Fort Worth.
“Roberts!” exclaimed Tom, in glad surprise.
The pleasure was mutual. Roberts had been the Texan who had found Jett’s camp destroyed by Indians, and later had been with Pilchuck’s band of buffalo hunters, when they had trailed the murderers of Hudnall and had finally found their hiding place up in the Llano Estacado.
“Just come from Fort Sill,” said Roberts, “an’ I have shore some news for you. Do you remember Old Nigger Horse, the chief of that band of Comanches we fought . . . when I had this heah arm broke.”
“I’m not likely to forget,” replied Tom.
“Wal, the Comanches that are left are slowly comin’ in to Fort Sill an’ goin’ on the reservation. An’ from some of them we got facts aboot things we never was shore on. The soldiers lately had a long runnin’ fight with old Nigger Horse. Some sergeant killed the old chief an’ his squaw, an’ that shore was a good job.”
“Nigger was a bad Comanche,” agreed Tom. “Did you ever hear any more about Hudnall’s gun?”
“Shore. We heerd all aboot it, an’ from several bucks who were in our fight where I had my arm broke, an’ other fights after-ward. . . . I reckon you remember Hudnall had a fine gun, one shore calculated to make redskins want it. An’ possession of that rifle was bad medicine to every consarned Indian who got it. Nigger Horse’s son had it first. He was the brave who led that ride down to cañon to draw our fire. He shore had spunk. Wal, I reckon he was full of lead. Then an Injun named Five Plumes got it. ’Pears we killed him. After that every redskin who took Hudnall’s rifle an’ cartridges got his everlastin’. Finally they quit usin’ it, thinkin’ it was bad medicine. Now the fact is, those Comanches who used Hudnall’s gun got reckless because they had it, an’ laid themselves open to our fire. But they thought it had a spell of the devil.”
* * * * *
It chanced that Cherry Hazelton had heard Roberts talking to Tom, and had imparted the exciting content to Dan and Joe Newman. Thereafter Tom had no peace, either on the field or in the camp. The boys had heard of the buffalo hunters whipping the Comanches—a matter of record and pride now from one end of the range to the other—and they wanted to hear about it from one who had lived through the campaign. Pilchuck never took time to talk, and so it seemed that Tom must.
These eager-eyed boys reminded Tom of his early days in the buffalo fields, of his own thirst for adventure, of his first hunt, and then of other things that hurt to recall. That night, after the last of the day’s hides had been pegged out, and the campfire was replenished, Tom heartened to the appeal of these youngsters. He seemed so much older than they were: the frontier life thronged with events had multiplied the years.
Tom told of the hunting on the Pease River Divide, and of Hudnall’s murder, which was the incident that had roused the long-suffering hunters, and of the fifty-two who joined Pilchuck’s band. He described the personnel of this band, the outfit they had, the way they had traveled with scouts in front and behind, and how they had trailed Hudnall’s wagon up on to the Staked Plains.
“I learned in the hard months after that first pursuit just what the Staked Plains is,” went on Tom, finding the revived memory somehow poignant. “It’s a great high naked and rough country that only the Indians know. You think of it as a plain because that’s its name. But it’s the roughest country in places in all this wild Texas. Sand dunes and cañons, wide levels bare as rock and then grassy plains. Groves of cottonwoods, patches of mesquite, thickets of plum. Many beautiful streams in the gullies opening on the prairie and lakes on top and poison springs and sulphur ponds. Then no water at all. It is a strange land, and white men will never know it as the Indians do.
“We had an Indian scout we called Bear Claws, and also a Mexican who had some knowledge of the few trails and hidden places. We were days getting track of the Comanches who had murdered Hudnall. We did not know then that they belonged to the big force under the chief, Nigger Horse. Well, at last we located Comanches riding down into a wild place. Our Osage Indian saw them first, and then we all had a look through the glasses.
“Next morning before daylight we rode and crawled right on top of a big camp. It was in an oval cañon with narrow outlets at each end, a wonderful hiding place, but hard to get out of once discovered. Pilchuck divided us into three bands . . . and he placed one below the camp, one above. The largest band, which I was in, had a position even with the camp, within rifle range. It was on a slope of boulders.
“When the fight began we saw at once that we’d tackled more than we could han
dle. But we stood our ground until a nervy bunch of Comanches . . . my, how they could ride! . . . dashed under cover of volleys from a big force behind, and made for our slope. Once they reached the rocks, they spilled off their horses and disappeared.
“We had to crawl back to the top of the slope, and this was more a hair-raising job for me then. I didn’t get hit, but I had flying gravel sting my face so bad I thought I’d been shot. A young fellow named Ory Jacks was behind me. He got shot through the hips. He had more nerve than I. He told Roberts and me not to mind him. But we went back and dragged him up on top to where the rest of the men were. Roberts had his arm broken by a bullet.
“Our troubles really began there. The Comanches who had crawled among the rocks began to shoot, and bullets whistled close, zipped off the rocks, dusted our faces. I was scared, but after a while got so I could shoot at crawling Comanches. I don’t think I hit any of them. It grew hot there, both from Indian bullets, and the sun. Pilchuck was shot through the shoulder. And just before that another man was hurt. His name I never knew.
“I tied Pilchuck up and he went to look over our wounded. It turned out they were bad off for water. So was Pilchuck. And I’d been spitting cotton. Pilchuck said if Ory didn’t have water, he’d die. Then I offered to sneak back to where we’d left the canteens on our saddles. Pilchuck sent me.
“Luck must have been with me, for I disregarded orders, except laying a trail of little stones so I’d know where to crawl back. I went fast. It was the darnedest kind of work. I didn’t dare rest. I had to keep going. And I was so out of breath and tired that I got reckless. Besides I thought I was beyond the danger zone.
“I’d been instructed to crawl toward a bluff, and I had to keep in line with it. The last time I raised myself to have a look, I must have showed my back first. Something whipped by me, burning my back. As I fell, I saw a Comanche standing in the open, red and black, a wicked-looking cuss, just lowering his gun. He looked as though he’d get me sure. His bullet knocked me flat. I never had such whirl of mind. Out of it then, like lightning, came the thought . . . I must leap up . . . kill him. . . . It seems I sprang and shot in the same motion. I didn’t see him clear till I’d shot. He had his gun half leveled. My bullet hit the breach of his gun and glanced. He gave an awful gasp . . . and blood gushed out of his mouth. He sort of pushed the gun away from him, and dropped it. Then he fell. I ran to look down at him. His face was terrible. He was a young brave, about my age then, and I’ve never seen such hate as glared at me from his black eyes. He whispered . . . ‘No weyno’ . . . and then he died. . . . I suppose he meant I was no good. My bullet had glanced off his rifle to take him in the neck. . . . Lucky shot!