Trail\'s End

G >> George W. Ogden >> Trail\'s End

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TRAIL'S END

by

G. W. OGDEN

Author of
The Duke of Chimney Butte,
The Flockmaster of Poison Creek,
The Land of Last Chance, Etc.

Frontispiece by P. V. E. Ivory

[Illustration: Morgan, grim as judgment, stood among the crowd of
wastrels and women of poisoned lips (Page 229)]

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Made in the United States of America

Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1921
Published September, 1921
Copyrighted in Great Britain

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Unconquered Land 1
II The Meat Hunter 11
III First Blood 23
IV The Optimist Explains 36
V Ascalon Awake 54
VI Riders of the Chisholm Trail 65
VII A Gentle Cowboy Joke 77
VIII The Atavism of a Man 87
IX News from Ascalon 101
X The Hour of Vengeance 111
XI The Penalty 124
XII In Place of a Regiment 141
XIII The Hand of the Law 157
XIV Some Fool With a Gun 165
XV Will His Luck Hold? 176
XVI The Meat Hunter Comes 187
XVII With Clean Hands 199
XVIII A Bondsman Breathes Easier 216
XIX The Curse of Blood 223
XX Unclean 234
XXI As One That Is Dead 241
XXII Whiners at the Funeral 245
XXIII Ascalon Curls Its Lip 259
XXIV Madness of the Winds 277
XXV A Summons at Sunrise 290
XXVI In the Square at Ascalon 299
XXVII Absolution 315
XXVIII Sunset 325

TRAIL'S END

CHAPTER I

THE UNCONQUERED LAND

Bones.

Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. The
tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a
sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its
treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile
wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in
the dimming furrows which the grasses were reclaiming for their own.

A land of desolation and defeat it seemed to the traveler, indeed, as he
followed the old trail along which the commerce of the illimitable West
once was borne. Although that highway had belonged to another
generation, and years had passed since an ox train toiled over it on its
creeping journey toward distant Santa Fe, the ruts of old wheels were
deep in the soil, healed over by the sod again, it is true, but seamed
like scars on a veteran's cheek. One could not go astray on that broad
highway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where new
ones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.

Present-day traffic had broken a new trail between the old ones; it
wound a dusty gray line through the early summer green of the prairie
grass, endless, it seemed, to the eyes of the leg-weary traveler who
bent his footsteps along it that sunny morning. This passenger, afoot on
a road where it was almost an offense to travel by such lowly means, was
a man of thirty or thereabout, tall and rather angular, who took the
road in long strides much faster than the freighters' trains had
traveled it in the days of his father. He carried a black, dingy leather
bag swinging from his long arm, a very lean and unpromising repository,
upon which the dust of the road lay spread.

Despite the numerous wheel tracks in the road, all of them apparently
fresh, there was little traffic abroad. Not a wagon had passed him since
morning, not a lift had been given him for a single mile. Now, mounting
a ridge toward which he had been pressing forward the past hour, which
had appeared a hill of consequence in the distance, but now flattened
out to nothing more than a small local divide, he put down his bag,
flung his dusty black hat beside it, and stood wiping his face with a
large turkey-red handkerchief which he unknotted from about his neck.

His face was of that rugged type common among the pioneers of the West,
lean and harsh-featured, yet nobly austere, the guarantee of a soul
above corruption and small trickery, of a nature that endures patiently,
of an anger slow to move. There were bright hues as of glistening metal
in his close-cut light hair as he stood bareheaded in the sun.

Sheep sorrel was blooming by the wheel tracks of the road, purple and
yellow; daisy-like flowers, with pale yellow petals and great wondering
hearts like frightened eyes, grew low among the short grass; countless
strange blooms spread on the prairie green, cheering for their brief day
the stern face of a land that had broken the hearts of men in its
unkindness and driven them away from its fair promises. The traveler
sighed, unable to understand it quite.

All day he had been passing little sod houses whose walls were
crumbling, whose roofs had fallen in, whose doors beckoned in the wind a
sad invitation to come in and behold the desolation that lay within.
Even here, close by the road, ran the grass-grown furrows of an
abandoned field, the settler's dwelling-place unmarked by sod or stone.
What tragedy was written in those wavering lines; what heartbreak of
going away from some dear hope and broken dream! Here a teamster was
cutting across the prairie to strike the road a little below the point
where the traveler stood. Extra side boards were on his wagon-box, as
they used to put them on in corn-gathering time back in the traveler's
boyhood home in Indiana. The wagon was heaped high with white, dry
bones.

Bones. Nothing left to haul out of that land but bones. The young man
took up his valise and hat and struck off down the road to intercept the
freighter of this prairie product, hoping for an invitation to ride,
better pleased by the prospect of resting living bones on dead dry ones
than racking them in that strain to reach the town on the railroad, his
journey's end, on foot before nightfall.

The driver's hat was white, like his bones; it drooped in weather-beaten
limpness about his ears, hiding his face, but he appeared to have an
hospitable heart in spite of the cheerlessness of his pursuit. Coming to
the road a little before the traveler reached the point of conjunction,
he drew the team to a stand, waiting his approach.

"Have a ride?" the freighter invited, edging over on the backless spring
seat as he spoke, making room.

The bone-wagon driver was a hollow-framed man, who looked as if he had
starved with the country but endured past all bounds of hardship and
discouragement. He looked hungry--hungry for food, hungry for change,
hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below his
stubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in his
skin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly on
his broken seat, sagging forward with forearms across his thighs.

"Footin' it over to Ascalon?" he asked, as the traveler mounted beside
him.

"Yes sir, I'm headin' that way."

"Come fur?"

"Well, yes," thoughtfully, as if he considered what might be counted far
in that land of unobstructed horizons, "I have come a considerable
little stretch."

"I thought maybe you was one of them new settlers in here, goin' over to
Ascalon to ketch the train," the bone man ventured, putting his inquiry
for further particulars as politely as he knew how.

"I'm not a settler yet, but I expect to try it here."

"You don't tell me?"

"Yes sir; that's my intention."

"Where you from?"

"Iowa."

The bone man looked his passenger over with interest, from his feet in
their serviceable shoes, to his head under his round-crowned,
wide-brimmed black hat.

"A good many of 'em used to come in here from Ioway and Newbrasky in the
early days," he said. "You never walked plumb from there, did you?"

"I thought of stopping at Buffalo Creek, back fifteen or twenty miles,
but I didn't like the country around there. They told me it was better
at Ascalon, so I just struck out to walk across the loop of the railroad
and take a close look at the land as I went along."

"You must be something of a walker," the bone man marveled.

"I used to follow a walking cultivator across an eighty-acre cornfield,"
the traveler replied.

"Yes, that'll stretch a feller's legs," the bone man admitted,
reminiscently. "Nothing like follerin' a plow to give a man legs and
wind. But they don't mostly walk around in this country; they kind of
suspicion a man when they see him hoofin' it."

"There doesn't seem to be many of them to either walk or ride," the
traveler commented, sweeping a look around the empty land.

"It used to be full of homesteaders all through this country--I seen 'em
come and I seen 'em go."

"I've seen traces of them all along the railroad for the last hundred
miles or more. It must have been a mighty exodus, a sad thing to see."

"Accordin' to the way you look at it, I reckon," the bone man reflected.
"They're comin' to this country ag'in, flocks of 'em. This makes the
third time they've tried to break this part of Kansas to ride, and I
don't know, on my soul, whether they'll ever do it or not. Maybe I'll
have more bones to pick up in a year or two."

"It seems to be one big boneyard; I saw cars of bones on every sidetrack
as I came through."

"Yes, I tell folks that come here and try to farm that bones was the
best crop this country ever raised, and it'll be about the only one. I
come in here with the railroad, I used to drive a team pickin' up the
buffaloes the contractors' meat hunter killed."

"You know the history of its ups and downs, then," the young man said,
with every evidence of deep interest.

"I guess I do, as well as any man. Bones was the first freight the
railroad hauled out of here, and bones'll be the last. I follered the
railroad camps after they built out of the buffalo country and didn't
need me any more, pickin' up the bones. Then the settlers begun to come
in, drawed on by the stuff them railroad colonization agents used to put
in the papers back East. The country broke their backs and drove 'em out
after four or five years. Then I follered around after _them_ and picked
up the bones.

"Yes, there used to be some familiar lookin' bones among 'em once in a
while in them times. I used to bury that kind. A few of them settlers
stuck, the ones that had money to put in cattle and let 'em increase on
the range. They've done well--you'll see their ranches all along the
Arkansaw when you travel down that way. This is a cattle country, son;
that's what the Almighty made it for. It never can be anything else."

"And there was another wave of immigration, you say, after that?" the
passenger asked, after sitting a while in silence turning over what the
old pioneer had said.

"Yes, wave is about right. They come in by freight trainload, cars of
horses and cattle, and machinery for farmin', from back there in Ohio
and Indiany and Ellinoi--all over that country where things a man plants
in the ground grows up and comes to something. They went into this
pe-rairie and started a bustin' it up like the ones ahead of 'em did.
Shucks! you can turn a ribbon of this blame sod a hundred miles long and
never break it. What can a farmer do with land that holds together that
way? Nothin'. But them fellers planted corn in them strips of sod,
raised a few nubbins, some of 'em, some didn't raise even fodder. It run
along that way a few years, hot winds cookin' their crops when they did
git the ground softened up so stuff would begin to make roots and grow,
cattle and horses dyin' off in the winter and burnin' up in the fires
them fool fellers didn't know how to stop when they got started in this
grass. They thinned out year after year, and I drove around over the
country and picked up their bones.

"That crowd of settlers is about all gone now, only one here and there
along some crick. Bones is gittin' scarce, too. I used to make more
when I got four dollars a ton for 'em than I do now when they pay me
ten. Grind 'em up to put on them farms back in the East, they tell me.
Takin' the bones of famine from one place to put on fat in another.
Funny, ain't it?"

The traveler said it was strange, indeed, but that it was the way of
nature for the upstanding to flourish on the remains of the fallen. The
bone man nodded, and allowed that it was so, world without end,
according to his own observations in the scale of living things from
grass blade to mankind.

"How are they coming in now--by the trainload?" the traveler asked,
reverting to the influx of settlers.

"These seem to be a different class of men," the bone man replied, his
perplexity plain in his face. "I don't make 'em out as easy as I did the
ones ahead of 'em. These fellers generally come alone, scoutin' around
to see the lay of the country--I run into 'em right along drivin' livery
rigs, see 'em around for a couple or three weeks sometimes. Then they go
away, and the first thing I know they're back with their immigrant car
full of stuff, haulin' out to some place somebody went broke on back in
the early days. They seem to be a calculatin' kind, but no man ain't
deep anough to slip up on the blind side of this country and grab it by
the mane like them fellers seems to think they're doin'. It'll throw
'em, and it'll throw 'em hard."

"It looks to me like it would be a good country for wheat," the traveler
said.

"Wheat!"

The bone man pulled up on his horses, checking them as if he would stop
and let this dangerous fellow off. He looked at the traveler with
incredulous stare, into which a shading of pity came, drawing his
naturally long face longer. "I'd just as well stop and let you start
back right now, mister." He tightened up a little more on the lines.

There was merriment in the stranger's gray eyes, a smile on his homely
face that softened its harsh lines.

"Has nobody ever tried it?" he inquired.

"There's been plenty of fools here, but none that wild that I ever heard
of," the bone man said. "You're a hundred miles and more past the
deadline for wheat--you'd just as well try to raise bananers here.
Wheat! it'd freeze out in the winter and blow out by the roots in the
spring if any of it got through."

The traveler swept a long look around the country, illusive, it seemed,
according to its past treatment of men, in its restful beauty and secure
feeling of peace. He was silent so long that the bone man looked at him
again keenly, measuring him up and down as he would some monstrosity
seen for the first time.

"Maybe you're right," the young man said at last.

The bone man grunted, with an inflection of superiority, and drove on,
meditating the mental perversions of his kind.

"Over in Ascalon," he said, breaking silence by and by, "there's a
feller by the name of Thayer--Judge Thayer, they call him, but he ain't
never been a judge of nothin' since I've knowed him--lawyer and land
agent for the railroad. He brings a lot of people in here and sells 'em
railroad land. He says wheat'll grow in this country, tells them
settlers that to fetch 'em here. You two ought to git together--you'd
sure make a pair to draw to."

"Wouldn't we?" said the stranger, in hearty humor.

"What business did you foller back there in Ioway?" inquired the bone
man, not much respect in him now for the man he had lifted out of the
road.

"I was a professional optimist," the traveler replied, grave enough for
all save his eyes.

The bone man thought it over a spell. "Well, I don't think you'll do
much in Ascalon," he said. "People don't wear specs out here in this
country much. Anybody that wants 'em goes to the feller that runs the
jewelry store."

The stranger attempted no correction, but sat whistling a merry tune as
he looked over the country. The bone man drove in silence until they
rose a swell that brought the town of Ascalon into view, a passenger
train just pulling into the station.

"Octomist! Wheat!" said the bone man, with discount on the words that
left them so poor and worthless they would not have passed in the
meanest exchange in the world.

CHAPTER II

THE MEAT HUNTER

There was one tree in the city of Ascalon, the catalpa in front of Judge
Thayer's office. This blazing noonday it threw a shadow as big as an
umbrella, or big enough that the judge, standing close by the trunk and
holding himself up soldierly, was all in the shade but the gentle swell
of his abdomen, over which his unbuttoned vest gaped to invite the
breeze.

Judge Thayer was far too big for the tree, as he was too big for
Ascalon, but, scholar and gentleman that he was, he made the most of
both of them and accepted what they had to offer with grateful heart.
Now he stood, his bearded face streaming sweat, his alpaca coat across
his arm, his straw hat in his hand, his bald head red from the
parboiling of that intense summer day, watching a band of Texas drovers
who had just arrived with three or four thousand cattle over the long
trail from the south.

These lank, wide-horned creatures were crowding and lowing around the
water troughs in the loading pens, the herdsmen shouting their
monotonous, melancholy urgings as they crowded more famished beasts into
the enclosures. Judge Thayer regarded the dusty scene with troubled
face.

"And so pitch hot!" said he, shaking his head in the manner of a man who
sees complications ahead of him. He stood fanning himself with his hat,
his brows drawn in concentration. "Twenty wild devils from the Nueces,
four months on the trail, and this little patch of Hades at the end!"

The judge entered his office with that uneasy reflection, leaving the
door standing open behind him, ran up his window shades, for the sun had
turned from the front of his building, took off his collar, and settled
down to work. One could see him from the station platform, substantial,
rather aristocratic, sitting at his desk, his gray beard trimmed to a
nicety, one polished shoe visible in line with the door.

Judge Thayer's office was a bit removed from the activities of Ascalon,
which were mainly profane activities, to be sure, and not fit company
for a gentleman even in the daylight hours. It was a snubby little
building with square front like a store, "Real Estate" painted its width
above the door. On one window, in crude black lettering:

WILLIAM THAYER
ATTORNEY

NOTARY

On the other:

MAYOR'S OFFICE

The office stood not above two hundred feet from the railroad station,
at the end of Main Street, where the buildings blended out into the
prairie, unfenced, unprofaned by spade or plow. Beyond Judge Thayer's
office were a coal yard and a livery barn; behind him the lots which he
had charted off for sale, their bounds marked by white stakes.

Ascalon, in those early days of its history, was not very large in
either the territory covered or the inhabitants numbered, but it was a
town of national notoriety in spite of its size. People who did not live
there believed it to be an exceedingly wicked place, and the farther one
traveled from Ascalon, in any direction whatever, the faster this ill
fame increased. It was said, no farther off than Kansas City, that
Ascalon was the wickedest place in the United States. So, one can image
what character the town had in St. Louis, and guess at the extent of its
notoriety in Pittsburg and Buffalo.

Porters on trains had a holy fear of Ascalon. They announced the train's
approach to it with suppressed breath, with eyes rolling white in fear
that some citizen of the proscribed town might overhear and defend the
reputation of his abiding-place in the one swift and incontrovertible
argument then in vogue in that part of the earth. Passengers of
adventurous nature flocked to the station platform during the brief
pause the train made at Ascalon, prickling with admiration of their own
temerity, so they might return home and tell of having set foot in the
wickedest town in the world.

And that was the fame of Ascalon, new and raw, for the greater part of
it, as it lay beside the railroad on that hot afternoon when Judge
Thayer stood in the shade of his little catalpa tree watching the Texans
drive their cattle into the loading pens.

Before the railroad reached out across the Great Plains, Ascalon was
there as a fort, under another name. The railroad brought new
consequence, new activities, and made it the most important loading
place for Texas cattle, driven over the long route on their slow way to
market.

It was a cattle town, living and fattening on the herds which grazed the
vast prairie lands surrounding it, and on the countless thousands which
came northward to its portal over the Chisholm Trail. As will have been
gathered from the scene already passed, agriculture had tried and failed
in that land. Ascalon was believed to be, in truth, far beyond the limit
of that gentle art, which was despised and contemned by the men who
roamed their herds over the free grass lands, and the gamesters who
flourished at their expense.

Not that all in Ascalon were vicious and beyond the statutory and moral
laws. There was a submerged desire for respectability in the grain of
even the worst of them which came to the front at times, as in defense
of the town's reputation, and on election day, when they put in such a
man as Judge Thayer for mayor. With a man like Judge Thayer at the head
of affairs, all charges of the town's utter abandonment to the powers of
evil seemed to fall and fade. But the judge, in reality, was only a
pillar set up for dignity and show. They elected him mayor, and went on
running the town to suit themselves, for the city marshal was also an
elective officer, and in his hands the scroll of the law reposed.

Now, in these summer days, there was a vacancy in this most important
office, three months, only, after election. The term had almost two
years to run, the appointment of a man to the vacancy being in the
mayor's hands. As a consequence there was being exerted a great deal of
secret and open pressure on the mayor in favor of certain favorites. It
was from a conference with several of the town's financial powers that
the mayor had returned to his office when you first beheld him under his
catalpa tree. The sweat on his face was due as much to internal
perplexity as outward heat, for Judge Thayer was a man who wanted to
please his friends, and everybody that counted in Ascalon was his
friend, although they were not all friends among themselves.

No later than the night before the vacancy in the marshalship had
fallen; it would not do to allow the town to go unbridled for even
another night. A strong man must be appointed to the place, and no fewer
than three candidates were being urged by as many factions, each of
which wanted its peculiar interests especially favored and protected. So
Judge Thayer was in a sweat with good reason. He wished in his honest
soul that he could reach out and pick up a disinterested man somewhere,
set him into the office without the strings of fear or favor on him, and
tell him to keep everybody within the deadline, regardless of whose
business prospered most.

But there were not men raining down every day around Ascalon competent
to fill the office of city marshal. Out of the material offered there
was not the making of one side of a man. Two of them were creatures of
the opposing gambling factions, the other a weak-kneed fellow with the
pale eyes of a coward, put forward by the conservative business men who
deplored much shooting in the name of the law.

How they were to get on without much shooting, Judge Thayer did not
understand. Not a bit of it. What he wanted was a man who would do more
shooting than ever had been done before, a man who would clean the place
of the too-ready gun-slingers who had gathered there, making the town's
notoriety their capital, invading even the respectable districts in
their nightly debaucheries to such insolent boldness that a man's wife
or daughter dared not show her ear on the street after nightfall.

Judge Thayer put the town's troubles from him with a sigh and leaned to
his work. He was preparing a defense for a cattle thief whom he knew to
be guilty, but whose case he had undertaken on account of his wife and
several small children living in a tent behind the principal
gambling-house. Because it seemed a hopeless case from the jump, Judge
Thayer had set his beard firmer in the direction of the fight. Hopeless
cases were the kind that had come most frequently his way all the days
of his life. He had been fronting for the under pup so long that his own
chances had dwindled down to a distant point in his gray-headed years.
But there was lots of satisfaction behind him to contemplate even though
there might not be a great deal of prosperity ahead. That helped a man
wonderfully when it came to casting up accounts. So he was bent to the
cattle thief's case when a man appeared in his door.

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