“Ah got a load in my gun fer dat triflin’ nigger Jim, Miss Taisie,” she declared; “but Ah done put another load down on top o’ hit. Ef ary man come snoopin’ roun’ yere in de dark agin Ah’m gwine to bust him wide open—Ah suttenly will!”
CHAPTER XIX
THE CATTLE RIEVER
OF THE mysterious night marauders who—to their own sorrow—had invaded the Del Sol trail camp, no further trace was gained or sought. They had vanished as though into thin air, and left behind no more than surmise and suspicion. To their dead, left on the field, no soldier’s honors were accorded. The embittered cowmen let them lie unburied.
The last gatherings of the scattered cattle having been concluded with such subtractions and additions as left old Jim Nabours not too ill satisfied, the great caravan passed on to the northward, day by day, like some vast millepede edging across the green surface of the unbroken sod—cows, horses, carts, flanking riders and keepers of the drag, all acting in their busy daily drama as though on a stage set upon some vast moving platform of the idle gods.
Perhaps two hundred miles, as nearly as they could guess at an unmapped and unfamiliar portion of their own state—a land by no means yet redeemed from savagery—still lay between them and the Red River, the Rubicon of that day, the northern boundary of Texas. Ten miles, twelve, once in a while fifteen miles a day, the great herd grazed and strolled, north and yet northward, unhurried by its guardians. Not so far ahead, now, the wholly unsettled Indian Nations; and at any time the chance of yet other depredations at the hands of the determined white savages, whom they dreaded more, and whose work, they felt sure, was not yet done. As they approached the Red River, still unmolested, their anxiety grew less. Could they have seen into the unsettled land ahead of them it might well have been more.
A wild enough scene it was, that made by Rudabaugh and his score of hard-bitten men in their own encampment the first night after they themselves, pushing swiftly on ahead of the Del Sol herd, which still made their objective, pulled up on a bit of broken ground at the naturally strategic point, the south bank of the boundary river. For a time they roughly had known or guessed what the trail herd had made in northering; but their own forced march to the Red had gained them nothing.
It was time, but the Del Sol herd had not appeared or left any trace of its whereabouts. The men in the rude bivouac—they had, in their haste, brought little with them beyond what their saddle horses carried—began to grumble.
“Well, how could I tell where they’d cross?” demanded Sim Rudabaugh irritably, in answer to some query. “They ought to cross here. This is right on the old Whisky Trail, due north of Worth and Bolivar. This is where Jess Chisholm used to cross when he headed for the Canadian. That’s why I pushed on in here.”
“Well, they didn’t. When they come to Bolivar last week they must have swung up the Elm towards the Spanish Fort, away in west. Good cowmen, they sure are. Anyways, they’ve give us the slip.”