For three weeks we were in the drive (the journey could have been made in one week if the cattle had been in trim), seeing nothing new—nothing but dead animals and a prairie that looked as hard as the road. During all this time there was a little party of us that were kept in a state of suspense, and it was all the more painful to us because we could not say anything about it. Mr. Davenport was failing rapidly; anybody could see that, and now and then some cowboy looked pityingly at Bob. And Bob knew it all the while, and took pains to keep it from his father, and from us, too. He would joke and laugh with him all day, and when night came would roll over and cry himself to sleep. No son ever tried harder to make a parent’s last days happy.
“I tell you I’d like to see that Clifford Henderson about now,” said Tom Mason. “That boy has cried himself to sleep again. Bob hasn’t got anything here anyway, and I’d like to see somebody come up and take away his last cent from him. He shouldn’t get away with it.”
Things went on in this way until the wooded shores of Trinity were in plain sight, and that brown-whiskered farmer came out in company with a deputy sheriff to hold a consultation with Mr. Chisholm—“the boss,” he called him. You all know what that “consultation” amounted to. It was defiance on one side and threats to have our cattle shot on the other. That brown-whiskered man must have been crazy, if he thought that our small force of sixty men could turn those beeves back when they had got “a sniff of that water” that was flashing along on the other side of the willows, for they were already bearing down upon it with the irresistible power of an avalanche. All the cowboys in the State could not have turned them from their purpose. I looked at Mr. Davenport to see what he thought about it.
“Well, boys, this begins to look like war,” said he, with an attempt at a smile. He was very pale, but he clutched his rifle with the hand of one who had made up his mind to die right there. “Two hundred against sixty is big odds, but we must face the music. Our cattle must have water, or we shall lose more than half we’ve got left before morning. Go and water your horses, and then come back and see if you can’t arouse some of these beeves. If you can only induce them to go ahead a mile further they will have water enough.”
“You will remain close by the wagon?” enquired Bob.
“I will stay right here,” returned his father. “When you want me come right back to the wagon.”
The events of the next quarter of an hour proved one of two things: either that the farmers, when they saw the immense herd approaching their ambush, realized how utterly impossible it was to stop them, and that the attempt to do so would only result in a useless waste of life, or else that the sheriff, acting upon Mr. Chisholm’s advice, had prevailed upon them to fall back and give the famishing cattle a chance at the water. At any rate, to Bob’s great relief, the shot for which he was waiting and listening was not fired, and the cattle dashed through the willows and almost buried themselves in the stream. When Bob and his friends reached the bank,—and they were obliged to ride at least a mile up the bayou before they could find a place to water their horses,—the stream being literally filled with the thirsty beeves,—they saw the farmers gathered in a body five hundred yards away, and Mr. Chisholm and some of the other wealthy cattle-owners were talking to them.
CHAPTER VI.
MR. DAVENPORT’S POCKET-BOOK.
“It is too late for them to begin a fight now,” said Bob, with a long-drawn sigh of satisfaction. “Here’s water enough in abundance and grass enough to last the stock for a day or two; but where shall we go and what shall we do after that? Who are those over there? More farmers, I suppose, for if they were cattlemen they would not come from that direction.”