The Girl at the Halfway House by Emerson Hough (good fiction books to read TXT) 📕

Backed by a crowd of men whose resolution was as firm as their own, these three fell back in front of the door. Franklin felt his heart going fast, and knew that more was asked of him here than had ever been upon the field of battle; yet he was exultant at the discovery that he had no thought of wavering. He knew then that he had been proved. With equal joy he looked upon the face of Curly, frowning underneath the pushed-back hat, and upon that of Battersleigh, keen-looking, eager, as though about to witness some pleasurable, exciting thing. Yet he knew the men in front were as brave as they, and as desperately resolved. In a moment, he reflected, the firing would begin. He saw Curly's hands lying lightly upon the butts of his revolvers. He saw Battersleigh draw his revolver and push with the side of the barrel against the nearest men as though to thrust them back. He himself crowded to the fore, eager, expectant, prepared. One shot, and a score of lives were done, and dark indeed would be this night in Ellisville.

Suddenly the climax came. The door was thrust irresistibly open, not from without, but from within. Stooping, so that his head might clear its top, the enormous figure of Juan, the Mexican, appeared in the opening. He looked out, ignorant of the real reason of this tumult, yet snuffing conflict as does the bear not yet assailed. His face, dull and impassive, was just beginning to light up with suspicion and slow rage.

A roar of anger and excitement rose as the prisoner was seen standing there before them, though outlined only by the dim light of the sky. Every man in the assailing party sprang toward the building. The cries became savage, beastlike. It was no longer human beings who contended over this poor, half-witted being, but brutes, less reasonable than he.

Juan left the door. He swept Franklin and Curly and Battersleigh aside as though they were but babes. It was his purpose to rush out, to strike, to kill. It was the moment of opportunity for the leader of the assailants. The whistle of a rope cut the air, and the noose tightened about the giant's neck with instant grip. There was a surge back upon the rope, a movement which would have been fatal for any other man, which would have been fatal to him, had the men got the rope to a horse as they wished, so that they might drag the victim by violence through the crowd.

But with Juan this act was not final. The noose enraged him, but did not frighten or disable him. As the great bear of the foothills, when roped by the horseman, scorns to attempt escape, but pulls man and horse toward him by main force, so the giant savage who was now thus assailed put forth his strength, and by sheer power of arm drew his would-be captors to him, hand over hand. The noose about his own neck he loosened with one hand. Then he raised his hand and let it fall. The caster of the rope, his collar bone broken and his shoulder blade cracked across, fell in a heap at his feet as the swaying crowd made way. Once again there was silence, one moment of confusion, hesitation. Then came the end.

There came, boring into the silence with horrible distinctness, the sound of one merciful, mysterious shot. The giant straightened up once, a vast black body towering above the black mass about him, and then sank gently, slowly down, as though to curl himself in sleep.

There was a groan, a roar, a swift surging of men, thick, black, like swarming bees. Some bent above the two prone figures. Others caught at the rope, grovelling, snarling.

They were saved the last stage of their disgrace. Into the crowd there pressed the figure of a new-comer, a hatless man, whose face was pale, whose feet were unshod, and who bore one arm helpless in a dirty sling which hung about his neck. Haggard and unkempt, barefooted, half-clad as he had stumbled out of bed at his ranch six miles away, Bill Watson, the sheriff, appeared a figure unheroic enough. With his broken arm hanging useless and jostled by the crowd, he raised his right hand above his head and called out, in a voice weak and halting, but determined:

"Men, go—go home! I command you—in the name—of the law!"

The Cottage Hotel of Ellisville was, singularly enough, in its palmy days conducted by a woman, and a very good woman she was. It was perhaps an error in judgment which led the husband of this woman to undertake the establishment of a hotel at such a place and such a time, but he hastened to repair his fault by amiably dying. The widow, a large woman, of great kindness of heart and a certain skill in the care of gunshot wounds, fell heiress to the business, carried it on and made a success of it. All these wild range men who came roistering up the Trail loved this large and kind old lady, and she called them all her "boys," watching over the wild brood as a hen does over her chickens. She fed them and comforted them, nursed them and buried them, always new ones coming to take the places of those who were gone. Chief mourner at over threescore funerals, nevertheless was Mother Daly's voice always for peace and decorum; and what good she did may one day be discovered when the spurred and booted dead shall rise.

The family of Mother Daly flourished and helped build the north-bound cattle trail, along which all the hoof marks ran to Ellisville. There was talk of other cow towns, east of Ellisville, west of it, but the clannish conservatism of the drovers held to the town they had chosen and baptized. Thus the family of Mother Daly kept up its numbers, and the Cottage knew no night, even at the time when the wars of the cowmen with the railroad men and the gamblers had somewhat worn away by reason of the advancing of the head of the rails still farther into the Great American Desert.

There was yet no key to the Cottage bar when there came the unbelievable word that there was no longer a buffalo to be found anywhere on the range, and that the Indians were gone, beaten, herded up forever. Far to the north, it was declared, there were men coming in on the cow range who had silver-mounted guns, who wore gold and jewels, and who brought with them saddles without horns! It was said, however, that these new men wanted to buy cows, so cows were taken to them. Many young men of Mother Daly's family went on up the Trail, never to come back to Ellisville, and it was said that they were paid much gold, and that they stole many cows from the men who had silver-mounted guns, and who wore strange, long knives, with which it was difficult to open a tin can.

Mother Daly looked upon this, and it was well. She understood her old boys and loved them. She was glad the world was full of them. It was a busy, happy, active world, full of bold deeds, full of wide plans, full of men. She looked out over the wide wind-swept plains, along the big chutes full of bellowing beeves, at the wide corral with its scores of saddled Nemeses, and she was calm and happy. It was a goodly world.

It was upon one day that Mother Daly looked out upon her world; upon the next day she looked again, and all the world was changed. Far as the eye could reach, the long and dusty roadway of the cows lay silent, with its dust unstirred. Far, very far off, there was approaching a little band of strange, small, bleating, woolly creatures, to whose driver Mother Daly refused bed and board. The cattle chutes were silent, the corral was empty. At the Cottage bar the keeper had at last found a key to the door. Up and down the Trail, east and west of the Trail, all was quiet, bare, and desolate. At some signal—some signal written on the sky—all the old life of Ellisville had taken up its journey into a farther land, into another day. The cowman, the railroad man, and the gambling man had gone, leaving behind them the wide and well-perforated Cottage, the graveyard with its double street, the cattle chutes with well-worn, hairy walls.

Now there came upon the face of the country faint scars where wheels had cut into the hard soil, these vagrant indices of travel not pointing all one way, and not cut deep, as was the royal highway of the cattle, but crossing, tangling, sometimes blending into main-travelled roads, though more often straying aimlessly off over the prairie to end at the homestead of some farmer. The smokes arose more numerously over the country, and the low houses of the settlers were seen here and there on either hand by those who drove out over the winding wagon ways in search of land. These new houses were dark and low and brown, with the exception that each few miles the traveller might see a small frame house painted white. Sometimes, in the early morning, there might be seen wandering toward these small white houses, no man knew whence, small groups of little beings never before seen upon the range. At nightfall they wandered back again. Sometimes, though rarely, they needed to turn aside from the straight line to go about the corner of a fence. Sometimes within such fences there might be seen others of these dirty, bleating creatures which Mother Daly hated. Here and there over the country were broken rows of little yellow, faded trees struggling up out of the hard earth. The untiring wheels of windmills could be seen everywhere at their work.

Here and there at the trodden, water holes of the broken creeks there lay carcasses of perished cattle, the skin dried and drawn tight over the bones; but on the hillsides near by grazed living cattle, fatter and more content to feed than the wild creatures that yesterday clacked and crowded up the Trail. Now, it is known of all men that cattle have wide horns, broad as the span of a man's arms; yet there were men here who said they had seen cattle whose horns were no longer than those of the buffalo, and later this thing was proved to be true.

Mother Daly knew, as all persons in the past knew, that by right the face of the plains was of one colour, unbroken; gray-brown in summer, white in winter, green in the spring. Yet now, as though giants would play here some game of draughts, there came a change upon the country, so that in squares it was gray, in squares green. This thing had never been before.

In the town of Ellisville the great heap of buffalo bones was gone from the side of the railroad track. There were many wagons now, but none brought in bones to pile up by the railway; for even the bones of the buffalo were now gone forever.

Mother Daly looked out upon the Cottage corral one day, and saw it sound and strong. Again she looked, and the bars were gone. Yet another day she looked, and there was no corral! Along the street, at the edge of the sidewalks of boards, there stood a long line of hitching rails. Back of these board sidewalks were merchants who lived in houses with green blinds, and they pronounced that word "korrawl!"

The livery barn of Samuel Poston grew a story in stature, and there was such a thing as hay—hay not imported in wired bales. In the little city there were three buildings with bells above them. There was a courthouse of many rooms; for Ellisville had stolen the county records from Strong City, and had held them through Armageddon. There were large chutes now at the railway, not for cattle, but for coal. Strange things appeared. There was a wide, low,