BORDEN
BY
GEORGE C. SHEDD
ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER BIGGS
One rainy afternoon I was sitting with my friend Carter, in his log house. Through the open door we could see the road, all cut up by wagon-tracks, running with water; lumps of mud thrust their black heads up in it everywhere; the bordering grass was wet and heavy. And down by the creek the fringe of trees made only a gray blur.
We had talked ourselves pretty near out when a rider splashed up to the door. His ragged beard stuck out stiff, full of rain-drops, and his slouch hat had an unpleasant tilt forward. To Carter's invitation to enter he shook his head, asked if such-and-such a person had passed within the hour, and, receiving an affirmative reply, pulled his hat down tighter and galloped away west. "Who is that?" I inquired.
"That! Why, that's Borden. It's easy to see you're new out here. His hand holds the river from Saint Joe to Omaha, and men think twice before trying to break his grip." He drew out his pipe and tobacco, stuffed the bowl thoughtfully, and struck a match. "If you want to hear about the first time I saw him at work, I'll tell you."
I nodded.
"Eh? Well, this was the way of it":
At the end of the war I settled here—that was five years ago. Borden lived a mile up the creek, and so, as times went, we were neighbors. By the people yonder in Kinton he was not liked, being grim, rough, savage, altogether unsociable and short of word. Besides, they remembered '57. In that year he appeared from no one knew where, took his claim, and proceeded to live after his own fashion. Then the high-handed Claim Club of the village went about it to drive him "in or over the river"—a bad night for them. They rode back to Kinton with three dead men laid across saddles. That was in the rough days of the Territory, the days when men in the Nebraska hills along the Missouri were a law unto themselves.
"THEY CROWDED HIS HORSE UNTIL IT HUNG BACK FROM THE OTHERS"
Once he tied up on his own deck a steamboat captain who was drunk and bent on murder; single-handed he ran down two horse-thieves; and another time he choked the money out of a river-gambler who had robbed a boy. Oh, they knew Borden up and down the river in those days! Then he went to war as one of Thayer's sharpshooters, returning at the end of it to be appointed United States marshal. And he had been riding that saddle six months when I came.
One day he and another pulled rein at my door.
"Come with me," he said abruptly. "I want you to look after this fellow—you're my deputy till further notice." He did not waste time over oaths or official nonsense.
"Now, see here—" the man started to say. But Borden cut him off with a scowl.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"Him?—Fitch. You've heard of him, I guess."
Heard of him, of course, as everyone had; of his sly, petty legal tricks by which he grabbed land here and land there until his titles spotted the country about Nebraska City; of his rent-squeezing that smelled over the whole town; of these, and other things. He was a lean, dark, uneasy fellow, wearing a rumpled tile and a shiny coat, riding all crouched up, and pulling his horse away from everybody we met.
After we started, Borden told me that Fitch had brought him notice to serve on Dempster—old John Dempster, his friend. Now, that made a bad job for the Marshal. I saw it from the way he answered not a word to Fitch, who now and then pressed up—intent on the business—to make him talk. Once Borden pulled out his heavy wrinkled boot from the stirrup and kicked the other's horse in the belly until it reared on its haunches. For Borden was the law's officer, but no man's servant.
Our way ran three miles up from Kinton. There was no road, and we followed along the edge of the bluffs as best we were able, until finally we dipped down into a ravine and so came to our destination. It was a wooded flat on the bank of the river, made by a sudden retreat of the hills—a sort of pocket. The space was not large, a handful of acres, and it looked smaller than it really was. The bluffs curved around it on three sides in a yellow, crumbling wall; on the fourth flowed the muddy waters of the Missouri. The house was in the center of a small clearing, and when we came in sight of it Fitch pulled up behind a small thicket of scrub. Borden, as if he never saw the fellow halt, rode straight up to the door where John Dempster sat shaping an axe-haft.
"Jack," said Borden, swinging down from his saddle, "I've come to have a talk with you."
Dempster shaved the haft a minute, laid it aside, and gazed off toward the clump of scrub. The two men were something alike, though the man seated on the door-sill was the older, both past the prime, both spare of words, both come to the West in the same year. They had lain side by side behind a sleety log before Fort Donelson, and each in his three years of service had felt the touch of hot lead.
"How d'you come—friend or enemy?"
"The first, and always, I hope. It depends on you. Why did you kick him off of here yesterday, Jack? He's full of poison over it."
"Let him keep off then," was the gruff response.
Both looked again at the clump where Fitch could be seen through the thin screen of bushes. After a while Dempster took out his tobacco, cut off a piece, and passed the rest to us.
"You're in a dirty way of business when you're mixed up with him," he said slowly. "An' I 'spose you've come to run me out."
"What's at the bottom of this trouble?" returned Borden, evading the point. "'Tain't the land—what is it he's after?"
Dempster spat. "He's gettin' even. I knocked him down last spring when I was at Nebraska City, for lyin' about—never mind. That's all. So he sneaked around an' hunted out where I live an' filed on the land." A dull fire lighted up under his bushy eyebrows.
"Why didn't you file long ago?"
"Does the gover'ment take away a man's home when he's fought in the war?"
"You know how I feel about it," replied Borden, and he laid his hand on the other's shoulder. "But it's too late for you to try to keep it now. You'd better look up another place."
"No, I'm goin' to stay here, I guess, or nowhere."
Borden knew that the decision was inflexible. As he rose, put his foot in the stirrup, and raised himself into the saddle, he determined, however, to have another try.
"Come and settle up along the creek by me. There's an open claim just beyond mine, better than this piece."
"'YOU GOT THE BEST O' ME, DICK; I'LL GO'"
Dempster shook his head; maybe he was thinking of the clearing back in Indiana and the boughs under which he had drawn his first breath, maybe this poor fringe of woods along the river was dearer to him than all the treeless prairie.
"We've lived here near ten years now," he said at last, "the old woman an' Joe—an' me, 'ceptin' when I was at war. I guess if we go, you'll have to use your gun."
"I'm sorry, Jack, but you've got to go. And I give you a week. It's not me that says so, it's the law."
"Law!" answered Dempster, with sudden rising fierceness. "Does the law drive a man off his own?"
It was the law, not justice, that was driving him. Without replying a word, Borden, and I by his side, rode away. When we reached the lean, eager face behind the scrub, the Marshal broke out, "You vulture, keep behind us! If you try to ride even, I'll sink your carcass in the river." And in that order, with him trailing us, we came back to Kinton.
Well, during the next week the more I turned the thing over on my tongue the less I liked the taste of it, but Borden was not one to consider dislikes—neither another man's nor his own—when he was riding the law's saddle. So I resolved to go through with it, and was ready Thursday morning. He came out from Nebraska City, accompanied by six deputies, men he had tried, who would not back off from the mouth of a gun, for he knew the door he must enter that day. Fitch was among them; oh, he was yellow over it! Borden had dragged him along to the whole end of the dirty business. The tale, too, was out among the deputies, and Fitch saw plainly what rope they would have swung him by. Grim looks were his every mile; when he pushed up among them, they crowded his horse to the withers until it hung back from the others; one cursed him fully and foully. They intended that he should earn that bit of ground before the day was done.
In the ravine at the edge of the flat we tied our horses. The men unslung their rifles, hitched their revolvers about, and waited, while Borden went down the hollow to reconnoiter. Perhaps half an hour had passed when he climbed down the bank above our heads and dropped into our midst.
"Quick! The boy's gone for water to the spring. Straight ahead there. No shooting till I give the word."
The men nodded, we filed down the ravine single-file, and the next minute were advancing noiselessly through the trees, spreading out gradually as we crossed the flat toward the clearing where stood the log house. The deputies went ahead, alert, silent, with an eye on Borden, who walked a little before them, each keeping a tree in line with the door.
Perhaps things were no different that morning than they were at any time; yet the little flat seemed possessed of a very great quiet, broken only by the slight swish of our boots through the dry grass. As we neared the cabin, we saw that its windows and door were shut. Fitch, who clung to me as though he found more comfort in my company, occasionally wiped drops of sweat from his yellow forehead, and removed his high hat to let the wind blow through his hair.
The other men went ahead unconcerned enough. One big fellow dropped his gun into the crook of his arm, pulled out a piece of tobacco, and carefully picked the lint off it. When he had had a bite, he tossed it to a comrade, who caught it handily, buried it for a moment under his mustache, and then held up the remnant to the other's sight, grinning. He tossed it back; neither had lost his place in the advancing line.
Fifty yards from the house Borden signaled a halt. Rifle-butts slipped to the ground, and the men leaned with backs against their trees—all except two, who handed their guns to others and veered off towards the bluffs, the direction Borden indicated, to the spring. A brown, grizzled fellow, sheltered behind an elm a few feet from me, turned his attention to Fitch, whom he examined curiously and at leisure, concluding his inspection by spitting his way. Then his look strayed south. After a little he began to sing softly:
The flat-boats 'r in an' the bull-boats 'r a-stoppin'
An' licker runnin' free,—oh, hell is a-poppin'!
Down on the river, down on——
He broke off suddenly, turning his head a little way towards where the two men had entered the bushes, listening. Directly he finished the lines:
Down on the river, down on the river,
Down on the Misser-ee when the boats come in.
The man must have had ears like an Indian's. He folded his arms across the muzzle of his rifle and began watching the bushes that fringed the base of the hill; the other men also were looking that way. A minute passed. All at once a young fellow slipped out from nowhere, running and carrying a full bucket. He was bare-headed, his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He ran a few steps toward the house, quickly slanted off, and kept going, while turning his head this way and that. I saw the cause of his sudden change in direction, for there was one of the deputies running parallel with him, but between him and the door. The second came in sight a minute later, farther down, and from behind a thicket, abreast of the other two. They had the young fellow between them.
The rest of us were strung about before the house in a half-circle, the three runners being on the outside of the circle. Everything was quiet, for Borden's hounds don't hunt with their mouths open. Young Dempster carried his bucket of water with scarcely a slop or a splash; the inner deputy gradually moved out and behind him. Two men at the tail of the line fell away from their trees to meet him—and there he was in a ring. The man nearest me, still leaning on his rifle, gave a cluck of his tongue as if it were all over. But it was not. A shot cracked from the door, and the deputy who was on the outside flipped his hand in the air as if he had been stung. His fingers were all bloody. That was a pretty shot, I tell you; old Jack Dempster ticked the button on his son's shirt to make it, for the men were running breast and breast from the door.
The boy saw the trap he was in. Just as he came even with me, he whirled and took his chance through the line. It was quick—oh, quick as a cat! Three of us met him. But he was in moccasins and light-footed, jumping this way and that, and though my neighbor flung his rifle between his legs, he skipped it and was nearly through. He sprang to one side, leaped at Fitch—the water was splashing now—and swerved past him. Maybe it was the nasty look on his face that made Fitch shoot, anyway the fellow fired his revolver. It did not seem as if he could miss; Joe ran straight for the cabin. Half way there the bucket slipped from his hand; then he began to stagger a little. Near the door he went to his knees and, with a look over his shoulder at us while fumbling for his revolver, crawled behind the chopping-log.
"I got him before he got me," said Fitch, fairly green about the mouth, "He was going to kill me."
Borden took a step toward him, paused for the time of a single breath, whirled around, and was behind his tree. As for the other men, I never want to see such faces as they wore.
After that it seemed to me as if our business had come to a standstill. It was little shelter we had, just a tree apiece. We might as well have been tied to them with cords, for the old man was watching from his lair, and that with his boy's blood red in his eyes, ready to catch us either advancing or retiring. Nor was the young fellow so badly hurt but what he could pull a trigger. And Borden never retired that I ever heard of—that wasn't his way. Any instant I expected to hear a bullet snip the bark on my tree. I never felt so big before or since, big as a hill, and I drew myself together mighty small, I can tell you.
While I was wondering what would come next, Borden stepped out into the open. He walked toward the door, calm and steady, and without particular haste, his revolver in its holster. It all happened so quickly it took me by surprise; the Dempsters, man and boy, must have been struck by it, for not a shot was fired. But to advance that way, to clasp hands with death! Maybe you've heard soldiers tell about charging in the face of cannon, how they felt—I know I felt worse just to see him go straight toward the house. I got dizzy, dizzy sick. Then it had all fallen so still, the little wind in the trees and the leaves stirring over the ground. I looked at the other men, thinking they could somehow change it; the grizzled old chap was chewing his tobacco as fast as he could, and the man with the bloody fingers had finished tying them up in his handkerchief. First thing I knew I was half out from behind my tree, watching him.
"Keep back, Dick Borden," warned the man in the house—I swear his voice shook as he said it—"keep back, or, by God, I'll shoot!"
"I'm coming into that door, Jack Dempster," was Borden's reply.
He never flinched, never stopped. Then the rifle sounded, and, like an echo, the boy's revolver echoed it. Borden was hit—how could they fail at that distance and such a mark? But he managed to win the log where young Dempster lay. He stood there an instant, then slowly sat down upon it. A second time the young fellow lifted his weapon, and every man of us could see the Marshal looking into the muzzle. Orders or no orders, that was too much for even the deputies; the click of their rifle hammers ran along the trees. Borden heard it.
"Don't shoot, men!"
His voice was not loud, but harsh, and keyed high, as if his throat was dry. I think the next sound was a groan from the boy, and his revolver wavered and slipped in his fingers.
"It's the gun you gave me," he said, "an' I can't kill you with it."
Borden turned his head painfully from side to side, saw a stick, bent down laboriously, got it at last, and by its aid raised himself to his feet. That seemed to exhaust him. He stood for a moment, inert and useless, like an old man. Then he began to hoist himself forward step by step to the door. Iron will, just iron, it was. And it was terrible to see him—one shoulder and arm swinging low and limp, his knees lifting high as if knotted with stiffness, his head protruding in intense effort. The distance was short, but long, long for him.
"Keep back! keep back!" cried Dempster. He himself was half out of the door, gripping his gun with one hand, warding the relentless Marshal off with the other.
Borden answered nothing, another step.
"You've got to stop!" begged Dempster. "Don't make me kill you, an' I can't let you in. Go back, go back! We fought together, we marched together, we ate and slept together, Dick—for God's sake, don't come nearer!"
One step at a time, putting his stick forward bit by bit and dragging himself to it with his queer uplifting knees, Borden moved himself ahead. There was something stern and inhuman in this persistence. So it went to the last bitter inch. Then Borden's breast touched the rifle's muzzle. The two men stood looking into each other's eyes, measuring life and death.
That is a minute in my mind forever. The young fellow had dragged himself a little way from behind his log—half-following, fascinated, supporting himself by his two hands—and was staring at them. The empty bucket lay on its side in the sunshine. The wind whined and whined through the trees. And the wife's haggard face peered over Dempster's shoulder in the door.
"I arrest you!"
The stick dropped from his fingers, he clutched at the man's sleeve and fell across the door-sill. All I remember is that we were all crowding about the door, with the boy cursing from the ground behind us for someone to help him. Even Fitch had come, twisting and pushing among the rest.
Borden was white and still, but he came around directly and stared at us a little. We laid him on a blanket outside the door, along with Joe, who carried his lead just below the knee. The Marshal was pretty bad, having a bullet through his collar-bone and another through his side, this one a big ugly hole. There were plenty of us to help, some to cut and to strip their clothes, some to fetch water, some to wash the wounds, some to tear bandages. One had already started south for a doctor. Dempster was on his knees by his old comrade.
"You got the best o' me, Dick; I'll go."
Borden smiled a little. It was good to look at their two faces then.
Fitch, who was rubbing his hands evilly, put in, "Yes, you get off here within an hour. And I'll have the law on you, too, for the kicking you gave me."
One of the men struck him across the mouth.
"Tie him," said Borden, "and hang him."
Well, there was a noisy to-do, the fellow screeching that it was against the law, that he shot the boy for trying to kill him, that it was on his own land, and the like. He kept it up until his screech fell into a quaver, and terror came into his eyes. Borden smiled again at sight of him, this time with lips that made a straight white line.
"The law!" he said, at last. "I am the law."
He let the matter go as far as the rope around the wretch's neck; then it seemed as if Fitch was dead already. No, Borden didn't hang him; he had another idea, the claim. He waited until Fitch had his senses once more and told him he would be taken to Nebraska City and tried for attempted murder. Fitch began to beg, while Borden listened with grim satisfaction. He would let the claim go, he would start down the river, quit the country. The rope was thrown off and Borden ordered him away; and with a sudden fierce oath that made him gasp from pain, Borden swore he would shoot him with his own hand if he caught sight of him again.
Fitch knew that Borden meant what he said, and he wasn't seen again in Nebraska. Six months or so fetched Borden round, and let him into the saddle again. It must be lead in the heart or brain to kill men of his fiber—and Dempster had been shaky with his gun. Things got a little loose while the Marshal was on his back up there in the cabin, but he tightened them up again soon. We'll ride up there some day and see the spot. Yes, the Dempsters have the title to the place now.
