It was as ghastly as those waxwork figure murders. I sweat plenty. It was worse than if we’d been in earnest, by the whole dum multiplication table.
I reckon Brown and the rest got worrying, too, for Brown forced his part. “Let me speak to him for a minute,” says he. Under pretense of talk he unlocked the handcuffs.
“I can’t stand this,” he whispered. “Horses is all over yonder, and guns mostly empty—cut. Quit the railroad and slide across the Jornada. If you make the bushes maybe you can break clean.”
People are curious. Harris had been braced to die, but the minute he saw a chance he flew. I think I’d acted in that curious way myself, maybe.
We took after him, yelling “Catch him!” and “Get your horses!” and firing scattering shots. We run him a half-mile, then we came back, laughing and screeching.
But when we got together—a houseful of us—and begun to talk about that poor cuss hiding and trembling in the dark, Neighbor Jones blew a smoke-ring in the air and stuck his finger through it. The ring disappeared. “Where’s that joke gone?” says he. And we all looked cross-eyed at our drinks.
But there wasn’t a hobo on the Jornada the next morning.
A lot of us felt mean next day. But a good half was too young to have sense; the men that had been on guard hadn’t seen it, and a lot more were used to being part of a crowd; otherwise the first night of the Dundee comedy would have ended its run.
Probably it would have been that way, anyhow, if “Aforesaid” Smith hadn’t got too many aboard. For a week after our hanging-bee tramps passed Dundee—probably warned by their underground telegraph. Then hobos straggled in. The young—and therefore hard-hearted—wanted another court at once. Wiser counsel prevailed, however, until the tenth day.
The sidings were full of cars, the buyers had cut the herds, and a few train-loads had pulled out. All the “culls” were thrown together, to be cut again when shipping was done, and driven back to their respective ranches. And—all of the boys had been paid.