Buffalo Stampede

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by Zane Grey


  Tom and Pilchuck were on that level between the moving dust above and the moving buffalo below. All view back toward the prairie whence the herd rolled was soon obliterated. Likewise the front ranks of the great mass disappeared on the opposite side, under this accompanying mantle. But the river, for a while, lay clear to their gaze, miles up and miles down, and all visible space of water and ground was covered with buffalo. Buffalo like a black band of ants on the march!

  Tom sank down, overcome by the spectacle, by the continuous trembling of the earth under him, by the strangulation that threatened, by the terrible pressure on his eardrums.

  Suddenly night seemed to intervene. A gale swooped the dust away across the river, and in place of yellow curling curtain of dust there came a slanting gray pall of rain. It blackened as the light grew less. Blazing streaks of lightning played through the gray gloom. But if there was thunder above, it could not be heard in the thunder below.

  Pilchuck drew Tom under a narrow shelf of rock, where half protected from the deluge they crouched in the semi-darkness. What seemed hours passed. Yet was there no end to the passing of the great herd? The rain ceased, the sky lightened, and clearer and clearer grew the black mantling of prairie and river. All was buffalo, except the sky. Then the sun broke out of clouds.

  Tom’s stunned senses rallied enough for him to appreciate the grandeur and beauty suddenly given the scene by a glorious sheen of gold and purple, streaming down from the rifts between the clouds. The dust was gone. The thousands of shining black backs moved on and on, rapidly, ponderously, swallowed up by the haze of the disappearing storm. And still the buffalo came over the prairie, obscuring the ground.

  But at last the time came when the mass showed breaks in the ranks, and then, the rear line, more ragged than had been the fore. Tom’s hearing seemed to be restored. That, he realized, was only the diminishing of the vast volume of sound to the point where it was no longer deafening. It was a blood-deadening thunder that gradually lessened as the end of the herd rolled on from the prairie, down over the bank, and across the river. The end was as swift as the front, but sight and sound were not so confounding.

  The thundering herd swept on out of sight. And the thunder became a roar, the roar a rumble, and the rumble died away.

  Pilchuck rose to his lofty height and peered across the river, into the gray haze and purple distance that had swallowed up the buffalo. He seemed to be a man who had lived through something terrible.

  “The last herd!” he said, with pathos. “They’ve crossed the Brazos an’ they’ll never come back. . . . The storm of rain was like the storm of lead that’ll follow them.”

  Tom also got dizzily to his feet, and faced the south. What he felt about the last herd could not be spoken. He had been spared a death he felt he deserved, and he had seen a mighty spectacle, incalculable in its spiritual effect. All in vain was the grand stampede of that thundering herd. It must drink, it must graze—and behind would troop the ruthless hunters of hides. But Tom had seen and felt its overpowering vitality, its tremendous life, its spirit. Never would he kill another buffalo! And a great sadness pervaded his mind. As he stood there, trying to form in words something to say to Pilchuck, a huge old buffalo bull, one of the many that had been mired in the sand, floundered and wallowed free, and waddled to the opposite shore. Stupidly he gazed about him; forlorn, alone, lost, a symbol of the herd that had gone on without him, he headed south out into the melancholy gray of the prairie.

  “Jude, I’m . . . going . . . north!” exclaimed Tom haltingly, full of words that would not come.

  “Shake!” replied the old scout, quick as a flash, as he extended his brawny hand.

  Chapter Eighteen

  From the crest of the long prairie slope, beginning to color brown and gold in the September sun, Tom Doan gazed down at the place that had been Sprague’s Post. It had grown so as to be almost unrecognizable. Ranches dotted the beautiful sweep of fertile land. Near at hand the river wound away, hidden in green foliage, and far out on the plain it glistened in the sunlight.

  Despite the keen pang in Tom’s heart, and the morbid reluctance to return that had abided with him, strangely he found he was glad. The wildness of the buffalo range, loneliness and silence and solitude, and the loss that he felt was irreparable—these had dwarfed his former kindliness and hopefulness, and his old ambition to know the joy of his own ranch. Something of the wrong he did himself, and the memory of Molly, occurred to him then. Might there not be left usefulness, and comforts of a home, even though love could never be his, or children gladden his eye?

  The long wagon train of hides and camp outfits lumbered across the prairie to enter the outskirts of the post, and haul up on the green square between the town and the river. Huts and cabins had taken the place of tents. Still there were new wagons and outfits belonging to hunters bound for the buffalo range. Tom wanted to cry out about the pains and blunders they were so cheerfully and ignorantly traveling to meet.

  Big wagon trains such as this one were always met at the post. News always traveled ahead of such large caravans, and there was a crowd on the green. There were half a dozen wagons ahead of the one Tom drove, and the last of these was Pilchuck’s. The lean old scout was at once surrounded by hunters eager to learn news of the buffalo range.

  Tom saw Burn Hudnall and Dan Stronghurl before they saw him. How well they looked—fuller of face and not so bronzed as when they had ridden the open range! Eager and excited also they appeared to Tom. They would be glad to see him. If only he could avoid meeting their womenfolk! Then Burn espied him and made at him. Tom dropped the knotted reins over the brake with an action of finality, and stepped down out of the wagon.

  “Howdy, boys. It’s sure good to see you,” he said heartily.

  They grasped him with hands almost rough, so forceful were they, and they both greeted him at once, in a kind of suppressed joy, incoherent and noisy, all the more welcoming for that. Then they hung onto him, one at each side.

  “Say, have you boys taken to drink?” retorted Tom, to conceal how their warmth affected him. “I haven’t just come back to life.”

  “Tom, I . . . we . . . all of us was afraid you’d never come,” burst out Hudnall. “You look fine. Thin, mebbe, an’ hard. . . . My Gawd, I’m glad.”

  “Tom . . . I’ve got a baby . . . a boy!” beamed Dave, his strong smug face alight.

  “You don’t say! Dave, shake on that. . . . I’m sure glad. How time flies! It doesn’t seem so long. . . .”

  “We’ve other news, but the best of it’ll keep till we get to the ranch,” interrupted Burn. “Tom, I’ve got that five hundred acres Father liked so well. Remember? You can buy next to me, along the river. Dave has thrown in with Sprague. The town’s boomin’. We’ve a bank, a church, and a school. An’ wait till you see the teacher! She’s. . . .”

  He rambled on, like a boy, to be silenced by Tom’s look. Then Dave began, and being more practical he soon got out Tom’s bag and gun and roll of blankets.

  “You’re comin’ with us this hyar very minnit,” he concluded as Tom tried to make excuses. “Burn, grab some of his outfit. Reckon this team an’ wagon belongs to Pilchuck?”

  “Yes, it does,” replied Tom.

  “Come along, then, you buffalo-chasin’, Comanche-ridin’ Llaner Estacador,” went on Dave. “We’ve orders to fetch you home before these hyar town girls set eyes on you.”

  They dragged Tom and his belongings out of the crowd, pushed him up into a spring wagon, and, while Burn piled his baggage in the back, Dave climbed up beside him and started a team of spirited horses out along the river road.

  * * * * *

  If the welcome accorded Tom by Burn and Dave had touched him, that given by their womenfolk reached deeply to his heart. They were all at the front of Burn’s fine ranch house. Burn’s wife was weeping, it seemed for joy, and Sally Hudnall, now Dave’s wife and not changed in the least, gave Tom a resounding kiss, to his consternation. Mrs. Hudnall, whose m
otherly face showed the ravages of grief, greeted him in a way that made Tom ashamed of how he had forgotten these good people. She took possession of him and led him indoors, ahead of the others. They all seemed strange, hurried, suppressing something. They were not as Tom remembered. Alas! Had he grown away from wholesome simplicity? They wanted to welcome him to their home, which he was to consider his.

  Mrs. Hudnall shut the door. Tom had a sense that the room was large, lighted by windows at each end. Clearing his throat, he turned to speak. But Mrs. Hudnall’s working face, her tear-wet eyes, made him dumb. There was something wrong here.

  “Tom, you’re changed,” she began hurriedly. “No boy any more. I can see how it hurts you to come back to us.”

  “Yes, because of . . . of Molly,” he replied simply. “But you mustn’t think I’m not glad to see you all. I am. You’re my good friends. . . . I’m ashamed I never appreciated you as I should have. But that hard life out there. . . .”

  “Don’t,” she interrupted huskily. “You know how it hurt me. . . . But, Tom, never mind the past. Think of the present.”

  “My heart’s buried in that past. It seems so long ago. So short a time to remember. I. . . .”

  “Didn’t you ever think Molly might not have been lost?” she asked.

  “Yes, I thought that . . . till hope died,” replied Tom slowly.

  “My boy . . . we heard she wasn’t killed . . . or captured . . . or anything,” said Mrs. Hudnall softly.

  “Heard she wasn’t? My God! That would only torture me,” replied Tom poignantly. He felt himself shaking. What did these people mean? His mind seemed to encounter that query as a wall.

  “Tom, we know she wasn’t,” flashed the woman, with all of ecstasy in face and voice.

  He staggered back suddenly, released from bewilderment. He realized now. That had been the secret of their excitement, their strangeness. His consciousness grasped the truth. Molly Fayre was not dead. For an instant his eyes closed, and his physical and spiritual being seemed to unite on a tremendous resistance against the shock of rapture. He must not lose his senses. He must not miss one word or look of this good woman who had given him back love and life. But he was mute. A strong quiver ran over him from head to foot. Then heart and pulse leaped in exquisite pain and maddening thrill.

  “Molly is here,” said Mrs. Hudnall. “She has lived here . . . ever since she escaped from Jett . . . and the Indians. She has grown. She’s taught the school. She is well . . . happy. She has waited for you . . . she loves you dearly.”

  Voice was wrenched from Tom: “I see truth in your face,” he whispered huskily. “But I can’t believe. . . . Let me see her!”

  Mrs. Hudnall pushed back the door and went out. Someone slipped in. A girl—a woman, white of face, with parted lips and great, radiant black eyes! Could this be Molly Fayre?

  “Oh . . . Tom! ” she burst out, in broken voice, deep and low. She took a forward step, with hands extended, then swayed back against the door. “Don’t you . . . know me?”

  “I’d lost all hope,” whispered Tom as if to himself. “It’s too sudden. I can’t believe. . . . You ghost! You white thing with eyes I loved!”

  “It’s your Molly, alive . . . alive!” she cried, and ran to envelop him.

  * * * * *

  Later they stood by the open window watching the sun set gold over the dim dark line of the Llano Estacado. She had told her story. Tom could only marvel at it, as at her, so changed, so wonderful, yet sweet and simple as of old.

  “You shall never go back to the buffalo range,” she said in what seemed both command and appeal.

  “No, Molly,” he replied, and told her the story of the stampede of the thundering herd.

  “Oh, how wonderful and terrible,” she replied. “I loved the buffalo.”

  Mrs. Hudnall called gaily to them from the door. “Tom . . . Molly, you can’t live on love! Supper is ready.”

  “We’re not hungry,” replied Molly dreamily.

  “Yes, we are,” added Tom forcefully. “We’ll come. . . . Molly, I’m starved. You know what camp grub is. A year and a half on hump steak.”

  “Wait. I was only fooling,” she whispered as, with downcast eyes, like midnight under their lashes, she leaned a little closer to him. “Do you remember my . . . my birthday?”

  “I never knew it,” he replied, smiling.

  “It’s tomorrow.”

  “You don’t say. Well, I did get back at the right time. Let’s see, you’re eighteen years old.”

  “Ah, you forget. I am nineteen. You lost me for over a year.”

  “But Molly, I never forgot what was to have been on your eighteenth birthday, though I never knew the date.”

  “What was to have been?” she asked shyly, with a slow blush mantling her cheek.

  “You were to marry me.”

  “Oh, did I promise that?” she questioned in pretended wonder.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that was for my eighteenth birthday. You never hunted for me . . . you hunted only buffalo. You might have had me. . . . But now you shall wait till . . . till I’m twenty.”

  “Molly, I hunted for you all through summer, fall, winter. And my heart broke.”

  “But . . . but I can only marry you on a birthday,” she replied, shaken by his words, and looked up at him with dusky eloquent eyes.

  “Dear, I’m so happy to find you alive . . . to see you grown into a beautiful woman . . . to know you love me, that I could wait on ten birthdays,” he said earnestly. “But why make me wait? I’ve had a lonely hard life out there in the buffalo fields. It has taken something from me that only you can make up for. I must go back to my dream . . . a ranch . . . a home, cattle, horses, tilling the soil. . . . Have you forgotten how we planned when we met in secret under the cottonwoods? Those moonlight nights!”

  “No, I never forgot anything,” she whispered, her head going down on his shoulder.

  “Well . . . since tomorrow is your nineteenth birthday, and I’ve lost you for an endless hateful year . . . marry me tomorrow.”

  “Yes!”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Gray at Zanesville, Ohio in 1872. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 with a degree in dentistry. He practiced in New York City while striving to make a living by writing. He married Lina Elise Roth in 1905 and with her financial assistance he published his first novel himself, Betty Zane (1903). Closing his dental office, the Greys moved into a cottage on the Delaware River, near Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. Grey took his first trip to Arizona in 1907 and, following his return, wrote The Heritage of the Desert (1910). The profound effect that the desert had had on him was so vibrantly captured that it still comes alive for a reader. Grey couldn’t have been more fortunate in his choice of a mate. Trained in English at Hunter College, Lina Grey proofread every manuscript Grey wrote, polished his prose, and later she managed their financial affairs. Grey’s early novels were serialized in pulp magazines, but by 1918 he had graduated to the slick magazine market. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune and, with 109 films based on his work, Grey set a record yet to be equaled by any other author. Zane Grey was not a realistic writer, but rather one who charted the interiors of the soul through encounters with the wilderness. He provided characters no less memorable than one finds in Balzac, Dickens, or Thomas Mann, and they have a vital story to tell. “There was so much unexpressed feeling that could not be entirely portrayed,” Loren Grey, Grey’s younger son and a noted psychologist, once recalled, “that, in later years, he would weep when re-reading one of his own books.” Perhaps, too, closer to the mark, Zane Grey may have wept at how his attempts at being truthful to his muse had so often been essentially altered by his editors, so that no one might ever be able to read his stories as he had intended them. It may be said of Zane Grey that, more than mere adventure tales, he fashioned psycho-dramas about the odyssey of the human soul. If his stories seem not al
ways to be of the stuff of the mundane world, without what his stories do touch, the human world has little meaning—which may go a long way to explain the hold he has had on an enraptured reading public ever since his first Western novel in 1910.

 

 

 


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