Tales from the X-bar Horse Camp: The Blue-Roan "Outlaw" and Other Stories

by Will C. Barnes

Before we got there the rain began, and we were all wet to the skin; but we tied up our ponies again, and five seconds after I lay down I was sound asleep and heard nothing till the cook started his unearthly yell of "Roll out, roll out, chuck away." I threw back the heavy canvas, that I had pulled over my head to keep the rain out of my face, and got up. The storm was over. In the East the morning star was just beginning to fade, and the sky was taking that peculiar gray look that precedes the dawn and sunrise. The night-horse wrangler was working his horses up toward camp, and the three or four bells in the bunch jingled merrily and musically in the cool, fresh, morning air.

We were all sleepy and cold, and as we gathered around the fire to eat, some one said, "Where's Flowers?" The foreman glanced around the circle of men, set down his plate and cup, and strode over to where Tom had rolled out his bed the evening before. It was empty, and, what was more, hadn't been slept in at all. A hasty questioning developed the fact that none of us had noticed him after we had come in from the stampede.

"Well," said Jack, "it's one of two things: either he has run into one of those blamed cracks and is hurt, or else he has a bunch of steers that got cut off from the herd in the rain and has had to stay with 'em all night, because he got so far from camp he couldn't work 'em back alone." As this was not an unusual thing we all felt sure it was the case, and after a hasty breakfast, all of us but the men just off guard, struck out to look for him.

Some way I felt a premonition of trouble as I rode out into the prairie, and leaving the rest to scatter out in different directions I rode straight for the cracks. It was an easy matter to trail up the herd, and as I loped along I couldn't get the song out of my head. As I drew near the crack country I saw by the trail that we had not been at the leaders when we thought we were, but had cut in between them and the main herd. I could see our tracks where we had swung them around, leaving probably one hundred head out.

I hurried along their trail, and as the daylight got stronger and the sun began to peep over the hills, I could make out, about a couple of miles from me, a bunch of cattle feeding. I knew this was the bunch I was trailing, and already some of the other boys had seen them also and were hurrying toward them. But, between me and the cattle was, I knew, a dangerous crack. It was some six feet wide and ten deep, and probably half a mile long. If Tom had ridden into that he was either dead or badly hurt. As I neared the crack my heart sank, for I saw the trail would strike it fairly about the widest place, and my worst fears were realized when I reached it, for there lying under a dozen head of dead and dying steers was poor Tom. The trail told the whole story. He had almost turned them when they reached the crack, and he had ridden into it sideways or diagonally, and some twenty steers had followed, crushing him and his horse to death, and killing about a dozen of them. The balance were wandering about in the bottom of the crack trying to get out, but its sides were precipitous everywhere.

Drawing my six-shooter, I fired two shots, and rode my pony in circles from left to right, which in cowboy and frontier sign language means, "Come to me." The boys quickly rode over to where I was, and we, with great work, managed to get his body out from under his horse and up on top. He still held his pearl-handled Colts in his hand, every chamber empty, and his hat was hanging round his neck by the leather string. Tenderly we laid his body across a saddle, lashed it on with a rope, and taking the boy thus dismounted up behind me, we led the horse with its sad burden back to camp.

I think death, when it strikes among them, always affects rough men more than it does men of finer sensibilities and breeding. They get over it more quickly, but for the time the former seem to be fairly overwhelmed with the mystery of death, and seem dazed and helpless, where the latter would not for a moment lose their heads.

But Jack quickly pulled himself together. It was fifty miles to the nearest town. With our heavy mess-wagon and slow team over a sandy road, it would take two days to get the body there. Packing it on a horse in that hot Arizona sun was out of the question, and so we decided to bury him right there.

Tom had no relatives in Arizona, nor any nearer friends than us rough "punchers," so that no wrong would be done any one by burying him there.