MY friend, the old frontiersman, poked an extra supply of cobs into the stove, meditatively watched the sudden flame lick about the husks, then began this monologue after his usual manner:
Yes, I’ve got a nice place here—nice ranch. Didn’t work for it either—lied for it!
Now, I’m not given much to that sort of thing, as you will grant; but when I see a place where a good manly twisting of the truth can sweeten matters up a bit, I’m not so scrupulous.
Back in the late fifties I was living in St. Louis, pretty nigh broke, for all I’d lived a hard, industrious life up and down the river. One day I got a note bearing the postmark of some California mining town, and it informed me that I had a considerable credit with a certain St. Louis bank. I never heard directly where the money came from, but I thought I knew. I bought this place with some of that money, you see. And there’s a little story attached to this.
For a number of years I was employed by the American Fur Company as expressman. Every winter I made the trip from St. Louis to Fort Pierre, a distance of about a thousand miles. Carried messages from headquarters to the posts and from the posts back to headquarters. From St. Louis to Pierre the trip was made on horseback, and from there up, other expressmen carried the mail on dog sleds.
Great days, those! Sometimes when I get to thinking over old times, I wonder if the railroads haven’t taken some of the iron out of the blood of men.
In the winter of ’50—that was the year the gold fever was raging, you know—I got to Pierre about the middle of February. When I had delivered the mail and was making ready to start south again with the returns, old Choteau, the factor of the post, called me into the hut he called his office, and made an unusual request of me. “We’ve got a half-breed here,” said he, “who’s got to be elevated. Understand? Killed a man in the most atrocious manner. He’s due at a necktie party down at St. Louis about next spring, and I’d rather not keep him at the post; can you take him down?”
I was somewhat younger in those days, and ready for most anything new. Also, I had found the trail a little lonesome at times. Riding a preoccupied broncho through hundreds of miles of white silence, hearing the coyotes yelp, dodging Indians, and bucking blizzards weren’t ever calculated to be social functions, you know. So I was glad to have company on the trail, even if it had to be the company of a criminal. Anyway, I had been so taught in the great rough school of primitive men, that I had not that loathing for a killer of his kind that is felt by this generation.
“Certainly,” said I to the factor. “Put him on a mule, and I’ll see him into the government corral at St. Louis.” So it was arranged that I should take the man to the authorities.
I did not hear his name spoken and I didn’t take the trouble to ask. It seemed to me that a man who was being shipped out with a tag on him reading “Nowhere,” had little use for a name. No one was apt to dispute his identity.