“Believe me, son,” said he, with a final farewell, “when you marry and settle down with me up here I’ll make you richer than you ever dreamed of being. Go back home and put up a herd of stockers for next spring. Tell the Texas drovers to come along. There’s going to be money in cows now.”
McMasters reached out and took his hand.
“I’ll be back next season with a herd,” said he. “So long!”
Among all these others also came Wild Bill Hickok, future town marshal of Abilene. By odd chance, partly due to his own shyness, he had never in all these days met Taisie Lockhart. He did not mean to intrude now, but inadvertently peered in at the curtains of her ambulance. She saw him push back the curtain, reached out her hand, smiling. He took it, held it, stood awed at her very beauty, pondering for a time sadly, her hand in his, in one of the fits of melancholy which came to him at times. As he knew his life of the past, so he read all his future.
“You remind me of Agnes,” said he simply. “That’s my wife. She’s back home. Be good. Good-by.”
With McMasters he spoke at first hardly so much even as that. They shook hands, each looking into the eyes of the other.
“Good luck!” said Hickok. “Don’t say I didn’t help you with the habeas corpus. If you run into any one down below kill this man first.”
He nodded at Rudabaugh. The latter broke out blasphemously once more. But the blue eye of the man who had killed the last of the Rudabaugh gang of border thieves paid him not even a contemptuous attention. He turned away.
Now came the parting crack of a whip on the air of the morning, rumble of wheels on the streets of Abilene, already growing dustier. Abilene, center of revolutionary changes soon to be, lay behind them presently. The Del Sol folk were homeward bound.