West of the Pecos Read online

  The Mexicans, the teamsters, the soldiers, the endless hurrying, colorful throng of men, gave Terrill a vague and wonderful impression. These were men of the open, and according to her father they had come from everywhere. Buffalo-hunters on their way out to the plains to catch the buffalo herds on their spring migration north; horse-dealers and cattlemen in from the ranches; idle, picturesque Mexicans with their serapes, their tight-legged flared-bottom trousers, their high-peaked sombreros; here and there a hard-eyed, watching man whom Lambeth designated as a Texas Ranger; riders on lean, shaggy, wild horses; tall men with guns in their belts; black-coated, black-hatted gamblers, cold-faced and usually handsome; and last, though by far not least, a stream of ragged, broken, often drunken men, long-haired, unshaven, hard and wretched, whose wolfish eyes Terrill did not want to meet. These, according to Lambeth, were the riffraff left of the army, sacrificed to a lost cause. He also remarked emphatically that he desired to put such men and such reminders far behind him.

  “Rill, I’ve an hour now,” said her father, on their third day at San Antonio. “Reckon I won’t let you miss the Alamo. As long as Texas exists the Alamo will be sacred. Every boy should stand once on that bloody altar of heroism and country.”

  Terrill knew the story as well as any Texas boy. She tripped along beside her father, whose strides covered a good deal of ground. And soon they were on the threshold of the historic edifice. Lambeth had been there before. A distant relative of his had fallen in that battle. He took Terrill around and showed her where and how the besiegers had been repelled so long and with such deadly loss.

  “Santa Ana had four thousand Mexican soldiers under him,” explained Lambeth. “They surprised the Americans by charging before daylight. But twice they were repulsed with terrific loss, and it looked as if the greasers would retreat. But Santa Ana drove them to another attack. They scaled the walls, and finally gained the top, from which they poured down a murderous fire. Then the Alamo doors were forced and a breach opened in the south wall. Hell broke loose. … In this room heah Bowie, who was ill, was murdered on his bed. … Over heah Travis died on his cannon. … And heah Davy Crockett went down with a ring of daid aboot him. … Rill, I could ask no more glory than that for my son. … The Texans perished to a man. One hundred and eighty-two of them. They killed sixteen hundred of Santa Ana’s soldiers. Such were Texans of that day.”

  “Oh, how splendid!” cried Terrill. “But it horrifies me. I can see them fighting. … It must be in our blood, Dad.”

  “Yeah. … Never forget the Alamo, Rill. Never forget this heritage to Texans. We Southerners lost the Civil War, but we can never lose the glory of freein’ Texas from Spanish rule.”

  Pensive and roused by turns, Terrill went back uptown with her father. Later that day she experienced a different kind of stimulation—something intimate and exciting. Lambeth took her to the large outfitting store, where he purchased a black Mexican saddle with tapadores, a silver-mounted bridle and spurs, riata, gauntlets, bandanas, and a sombrero so huge that when Terrill donned it she felt under a heavy cloud.

  “Now you will be a vaquero,” said Lambeth, proudly.

  Terrill observed that he bought guns and ammunition, though he had brought along his English arms; also knives, belts, axes, a derringer for her, and in fact so many things that Terrill had her doubts that the wagon would carry them all. But she was to learn, presently, that he had acquired another and larger wagon which Sambo was to drive with two teams.

  “Rill, I may as well tell you now,” announced her father, “that I’ve given up the plan of followin’ the stage road. Too many travelers, not healthy to meet west of Santone! We’ll start out with some buffalo-hunters I’ve met and travel with them for a while. You’ll get to hunt buffalo with me. We’ll see the country.”

  Two days later Terrill rode out with a fair-sized cavalcade, there being six wagons besides her father’s, and eight men, none of whom, however, were mounted. They were experienced buffalo-hunters, knew the country, and hunted buffalo for meat and hides. Much to Terrill’s relief, there was not a young man in the party.

  They traveled in a northwesterly direction, along a stream where beautiful pecan trees lined the banks. These Texans were hard drivers. When sunset came the first day they must have made thirty miles. Sambo with his heavy wagon did not get in until after dark, a fact that had worried Lambeth.

  The hunters took good-natured notice of Terrill, but she was sure none of them suspected her secret. This night she had courage to sit back at the edge of the camp-fire circle, and listen. They were a merry lot, mostly ranchers and horse-raisers. One of them had been a Texas Ranger, and he told bloody tales which made Terrill’s flesh creep. Another of the group, a stockman from the Brazos River, talked a good deal about the L’lano Estacado and the Comanche Indians. On a former hunt he, with comrade hunters, had been camping along the Red River, and had narrowly missed losing their scalps.

  “Them Comanches air shore gettin’ bad,” he said, shaking a shaggy head. “An’ it’s this heah buffalo-huntin’ thet’s rilin’ them. Some day Texas will have to whip off not only the Comanches, but the Arapahoes, the Kiowas, the Cheyennes, mebbe all the Plains Injuns.”

  “Wal, I reckon we’re too early an’ too fer south fer the Comanches at this time of year,” remarked another. “Buffalo herds comin’ up from the Rio Grande won’t be as far as the Red River.”

  “We’ll strike them this side of Colorado,” replied the red-faced hunter. “Which is a darn good thing, fer thet river ain’t no slouch to cross. Our friend Lambeth heah would have hell.”

  “No, he could haid the Colorado. Fair to middlin’ road. But I don’t know the country west.”

  Terrill might indeed have been a boy, considering the sensations aroused in her by this casual talk of hostile Indians, the Staked Plains, dangerous rivers, stampeding buffalo, and the like. But sometimes the lamentable fact that she was a girl forced itself upon her when she lay in bed unable to sleep, prey to feminine emotions that she could never dispel, yet all the while tingling with the wonder and zest of her existence.

  Several days later, Terrill, riding with Sambo, somewhat behind the other wagons, imagined she heard something unusual.

  “Listen, Sambo,” she whispered, turning her ear to the south. Had she only imagined that she heard something?

  “I doan heah nuffin’,” replied the black.

  “Maybe I was wrong. … No! There it comes again.”

  “Lud, Massa Rill, I sho hopes yo doan heah somethin’ like thunder.”

  “That’s just it, Sambo. … Rumble of low thunder. Listen!”

  “I doan heah it yet. Mebbe storm down dat way.”

  “Sambo, it cain’t be ordinary thunder,” cried Terrill, excitedly. “It doesn’t stop. It keeps right on. … It’s getting louder.”

  “By gar! I heahs it now, Massa Rill,” returned the negro. “I knows what dat is. Dar’s de buffalo! Dat’s de main herd, sho as I’se born.”

  “Main herd!—Oh, that hunter Hudkins was wrong, then. He said the main herd was not due yet.”

  “Dey’s comin’ an’ dey’s runnin’, Massa Rill.”

  The rumble had grown appreciably louder, more consistent and deeper, with a menacing note. Lambeth and the saddle-horses had vanished in a dusty haze. Terrill thought she noted a quickening in the lope of the buffalo passing, closer pressing together of the lines, a gradual narrowing of the space around the wagons.

  “Oh, Sambo, is it a stampede?” cried Terrill, suddenly seized by fright. “What has become of Dad? What will we do?”

  “I dunno, Missy. I’se heahed a stampede, but I nebber was in one. Dis is gittin’ bad. It sho is. We’se gotta be movin’.”

  Sambo ran and turned Mauree’s team in the direction the buffalo were moving. Then he yelled for Terrill to get off her horse and climb into Mauree’s wagon.

  “What’ll I do with Dixie?” screamed Terrill, as she dismounted.

  “Lead him so long’s yu can,
” yelled Sambo, and ran for his wagon.

  Terrill thought she would have to mount Dixie again to catch up with Mauree. But she made the wagon, and vaulting high she got on, still hanging to the bridle. Fortunately it was long. Dixie loped behind, coming close so that Terrill could almost reach him. Then she saw Sambo’s team gaining at a gallop. He did not pull them to accommodate Mauree’s gait until at the heels of Dixie.

  Then fearfully Terrill gazed from one side to the other. The streams of buffalo had closed in solid and were now scarcely a hundred yards from the wagons. The black and tawny beasts appeared to bob up and down in unison. Dust rolled up yellow and thick, obscuring farther view. Behind, the gap was filling up with a sea of lifting hoofs and shaggy heads. It was thrilling to Terrill, though her heart came up in her throat. The rumble had become a trampling roar. She saw that Sambo’s idea was to keep his big wagon behind Mauree’s smaller one, and try to run with the beasts, hoping they would continue to split behind it. But how long could the horses keep that gait up, even if they did not bolt and leave the wagons to be crushed? Terrill had heard of whole caravans being flattened out and trodden into the plain. Dixie’s ears were up, his eyes wild. But for Terrill’s presence right close, holding his bridle, he would have run away.

  Soon Terrill became aware that the teams were no longer keeping up with the buffalo. That lumbering lope had increased to a gallop, and the space between the closing lines of buffalo had narrowed to half what it had been. Terrill saw with distended eyes those shaggy walls converging. There was no gap behind Sambo’s wagon—only a dense, gaining, hairy mass. Sambo’s eyes rolled till the whites stood out. He was yelling to his horses, but Terrill could not hear a word.

  The trampling roar seemed engulfed in deafening thunder. The black bobbing sea of backs swallowed up the open ground till Terrill could have tossed her sombrero upon the shaggy humps. She saw no more flying legs and hoofs. When she realized that the increased pace, the change from a tame lope to a wild gallop, the hurtling of the blind horde, meant a stampede and that she and the two negroes were in the midst of it, she grew cold and sick with terror. They would be lost, smashed to a pulp. She shut her eyes to pray, but she could not keep them shut.

  Next she discovered that Mauree’s team had bolted. The wagon kept abreast of the beasts. It swayed and jolted, almost throwing Terrill out. Dixie had to run to keep up. Sambo’s team came on grandly, tongues out, eyes like fire, still under control. Then Terrill saw the negro turn to shoot back at the charging buffalo. The red flame of the gun appeared to burst right in the faces of the maddened beasts. They thundered forward, apparently about to swarm over the wagon.

  Clamped with horror, hanging on to the jolting wagon, Terrill saw the buffalo close in alongside the very wheels. A shroud of dust lifted, choking and half blinding her. Sambo blurred in her sight, though she saw the red spurt of his gun. She heard no more. Her eyes seemed stopped. She was an atom in a maelstrom. The stench of the beasts clogged her nostrils. A terrible sense of being carried along in a flood possessed her. The horses, the wagons, were keeping pace with the stampede. Dixie leaped frantically, sometimes narrowly missing the wagon. Just outside the wheels, rubbing them, swept huge, hairy, horned monsters that surely kept him running straight.

  The agony of suspense was insupportable. Terrill knew she soon would leap out under the rolling hoofs. It could not last much longer. The horses would fall or fail, and then—. Sambo’s gun burned red through the dust. Again the wall on each side moved ahead, faster, and appeared to draw away. Little by little the space widened. Terrill turned to gaze ahead. The herd had split. Dimly she saw an X-shaped space splitting, widening away from a high gray object.

  Terrill lost the clearness of her faculties then and seemed clutched between appalling despair and hope. But surely the wagon slowed, careened, almost upset. Then it stopped and Terrill closed her eyes on the verge of collapse.

  But nothing happened. There was no crash—no pounding of her flesh. And again she could hear. Her ears registered once more the fearful trampling roar. She felt the wagon shaking under her. Then she opened her eyes. The wagon stood on a slant. Mauree had driven into the lea of a rocky knoll. Sambo’s team, in a lather of froth and dust, heaved beside her, while Sambo, on foot, was holding Dixie. To Terrill’s left the black woolly mass swept on. To the right she could not see for the knoll. But she sensed that the obstruction had split the herd and saved them. Terrill fell back spent and blind in her overwhelming reaction.

  The roar rolled on, diminishing to thunder, then gradually lessening. The ground ceased to shake. In an hour the stampede was again a low rumble in the distance.

  “De good Lawd was wif us, Missy Rill,” said Sambo, leading Dixie to her. Then he mounted to the seat of his wagon and calling to Mauree he drove back through the settling dust along the great trail. It was long, however, before Terrill got into the saddle again. At last the dust all blew away, to disclose Lambeth far ahead with the horses.

  Chapter III

  THE Colorado River from the far eastern ridge top resembled a green snake with a shining line down the center of its back, crawling over rolling, yellow plains. In this terrain ragged black streaks and spots, and great patches stood out clearly in the morning sunlight. Only a few were visible on the north side of the river; southward from the very banks these significant and striking contrasts to the yellow and gray of plain extended as far as the eye could see, dimming in the purple obscurity of the horizon.

  These black patches were buffalo. There were thousands in the scattered head of the herd, and in that plain-wide mass far to the south there were millions. The annual spring migration north was well on its way.

  The hunters yelled lustily. Lambeth rode back to speak to Terrill, his black eyes shining. He seemed a changed man. Already sun and wind and action had begun to warm out the havoc in his face.

  “Rill, they’re heah,” he called, exultantly. “What do you think of that sight?”

  “Glorious!” replied Terrill, under her breath. She was riding beside Sambo on the wagon seat. Dixie had fallen lame, and Terrill, after riding two of the harder-gaited horses, had been glad of a reprieve from the daily saddle.

  “Missy Rill, yo sho will kill yo’ first buffalo today,” declared the negro.

  “Sambo, I’m not crazy aboot firing that Henry rifle again,” laughed Terrill.

  “Yo didn’t hold it tight,” explained Sambo. “Mighty nigh kick yo flat.”

  Despite a downhill pull the wagons did not reach the Colorado until late in the afternoon. Hudkins, the leader of the expedition, chose a wooded bend in the river for a camp site, where a cleared spot and pole uprights showed that it had been used before. The leaves on the trees were half grown, the grass was green, flowers on long stems nodded gracefully, and under the bank the river murmured softly.

  “Wal, you fellars fix camp while I go after a buffalo rump,” ordered Hudkins, and strode off with what Terrill had heard him call his needle gun. She wondered what that meant, because the gun was almost as big as a cannon.

  Terrill sat on the wagon seat and watched the men. This arriving at a new camp and getting settled had a growing attraction for her. Even if this life in the open had held no appeal for her, she would still gladly have accepted it because of the change it wrought in her father’s health and spirits. How resolutely had he turned his back upon ruin and grief! He was not rugged, yet he did his share of the work. Sambo, however, was the one who had changed most. On the plantation he had not seemed different from the other negroes, except when on horseback. Here he appeared to be in his element and the laziness of a cotton-picker had departed. He wore boots and overalls. There was a gun belted around his lean hips. When he swung an ax and carried the heavy picks his splendid physique showed to advantage. He whistled as he worked, and like Mauree had fallen happily into this new way of life.

  Presently Terrill’s father came to her, carrying the Henry rifle.

  “Rill, from now on you pack this on yo
ur hoss, in the wagon, by your bed, and everywhere.”

  “But, Dad, I’m afraid of the darned thing,” expostulated Terrill.

  Colonel Lambeth laughed, but he was inexorable. “Rill, farther west we’ll hit the badlands. Indians, outlaws, bandits, Mexicans! And we may have to fight for our lives. Red Turner has been across the Pecos. He told me today what a wild country it was. Cattle by the thousand and just beginnin’ to be worth somethin’. … So come out and practice a little. Stuff a towel inside your shirt aboot where the gun kicks your shoulder.”

  Terrill accompanied Lambeth down to the river bank, where he directed Terrill how to load, hold, aim, and fire the big Henry. Terrill had to grit her teeth, nevertheless there was a zest in the thing her father insisted upon—that she fill the boots of a son for him. Five shots from a rest she fired, squeezing the rifle with all her might. The first shot was not so terrible, after all, but the bullet flew wide of the target. She did better on the second and third. And the last two she hit the black across the river, to her father’s sober satisfaction. How seriously he took all this! It was no game to him.

  “Sambo will clean the rifle for you,” he said. “But that you should learn also. Familiarize yourself with the gun. Get used to handlin’ it. Aim often at things without shootin’. You can learn to shoot as well that way without wastin’ too many bullets.”

  Hudkins returned with the hump of a buffalo, from which were cut the steaks these hunters praised so much. Lambeth appeared as greedy as any of them. They made merry. Some one produced a jug of liquor which went the rounds. For a moment Terrill’s heart stood still. She feared her father might ask her to take a drink. But he did not overstep the bounds of reason in his obsession to see in Terrill a son.