A thing at which to marvel was the growth of the eastern border of Dakota Territory in this, the time of the great boom. History can scarcely find its parallel. In the space of a decade the census leaped from two-score thousand to nearly a half million. New towns sprang up like fungi in a night. Railroads reached out like the tentacles of an octopus, where a generation before the buffalo had tramped its tortuous trail. Prosperous farms came into being in the meadows where the antelope had pastured. Artesian wells, waterworks, electric lights, street railways, colleges, all the adjuncts of a higher civilisation, blossomed forth under the magic wand of Eastern capital. Doomed to reaction, as an advancing pendulum is doomed to retrace its cycle, was this premature evolution; but temporarily, as a springtime freshet bears onward the driftwood in its path, it carried its predecessor, the unconventional, fighting, wild-loving adventurer, before. On it went, on and on until at last, fairly blocking its path, was the big, muddy, dawdling Missouri. Then for the first time it halted; halted in a pause that was to last for a generation. But it had fulfilled its mission. High and dry on the western side of the barrier, imbued as when they had settled to the east, with the restless spirit of the frontier, unsubdued, unchanged, it cast its burden. There, as they had done before, the newcomers immediately took root, and, after the passage of a year, were all but unconscious of the migration. Over their heads was the same blue prairie sky. Around them, treeless, trackless, was the same rolling, illimitable prairie land. In but one essential were conditions changed; yet that one was epoch-making. Heretofore, surrounded by a common, an alien danger, compelled at a second's warning to band together for life itself, all men were brothers. Now, with the passing of the red peril, with eradication of necessity for any manner of restraint, an abandon of licence, of recklessness, born of the wild life, of overflowing animal vitality i nsufficiently employed, swept the land like a contagion. Unique in the history of man's development was this the era of the cowboy, as fantastic now as the era of the red peril, its predecessor; yet vital, bizarre, throbbing, unconsciously human, as no other period has ever been, as in all probability none will ever be again. Generous, spendthrift, murderous when crossed, chivalrous, fearless, profane, yet fundamentally religious, inebriate, wilful and docile by turns, ceaselessly active, eternally discontented, seeking they knew not what, they were their own evil genius; as certainly as nature surrounded them with Heaven, they supplied their own Hell and, impartial, chose from each to weave the web of their lives.
Of this period, life of this life, was Colonel William Landor; colonel no longer, plain Bill, from the river to the Hills, husband these ten years now, but not father, Cattle King of an uncontested range. Of this life likewise, bred in it, saturated in it, was a dark young woman, his adopted daughter, two years past her majority, Elizabeth Rowland Landor by name. Of it most vitally of all, born of it, rooted in it through unknown centuries of ancestral domicile, was a copper-brown young man, destitute as a boy of twelve of a trace of beard, black as a prairie crow of hair and eyes, deep-lunged like a race-track thoroughbred, wiry as a mustang, garbed as a white man, but bearing the liquid name of a Teton Sioux, "Ma-wa-cha-sa, the lost pappoose," yet known wherever the Santee Massacre and the tale of his appearance was known, as "How" Landor. Of this period, last of all, was the great B.B.—Buffalo Butte—ranch, giant among the giants, whose brand was familiar as his own name to every cowboy west of the Missouri, whose hospitable ranch house, twenty-odd miles from the vest pocket metropolis of Coyote Centre, which in turn, to quote Landor himself, was "a hundred miles from nowhere," was the Mecca of every traveller whom chance drew into this wild, of every curious tenderfoot seeking a glimpse of the reverse side of the coin of life, of every desperate "one lunger," who, with gambler instinct, staked his all on prairie sun and prairie air.
CHAPTER V
THE LAND OF LICENCE
For twenty-four hours the two cowmen from the distant Clay Creek ranch had owned Coyote Centre. An hour before sunset on the day previous they had suddenly blown in from the north; a great cloud of yellow dust, lifting lazily on the sultry air, a mighty panting of winded bronchos, a single demoniacal dare-man whoop heralding their coming, a groaning of straining leather, a jingle of great spurs, and an otherwise augmented stillness even in this silent land, marking their arrival. Pete it was, Pete Sweeney, "Long Pete," who first dismounted. Pete likewise it was who first entered the grog shop of Red Jenkins. Pete again it was who, ere ten words had passed, drew cold-blooded, point blank at the only man who saw fit to question the invader's right of absolute ownership. Pete it was once again who, when the smoke had cleared away, assisted in laying out that same misguided citizen, in decent fellowship, beneath the cottonwood bar, and thrust an adequate green roll in the stiffening hand for funeral expenses.
"It's Bill's own fault," he commented lucidly the while. "I don't visit you very often; but when I do I've got the dough to make it square, and this town's my sausage, skin, curl, and all. D'ye understand?" and from Manning, the greybearded storekeeper, to Rank Judge, the one-legged saddler, there was no one to say him nay, none to contest his right of authority.
By no means without an officer of the law was Coyote Centre. Under ordinary conditions its majesty was ably, even aggressively, upheld by its representative, Marshal Jim Burton. Likewise there was no lack of pilgrims, who by devious and circuitous routes sought his residence on this occasion, with tales of distress and petitions for succour; but one and all departed with their mission unfulfilled. The doughty James was not to be found. Urgent business of indefinite duration, at an even more indefinite destination, had called him hence. No one regretted the mischance so much as stalwart Mrs. Burton, who imparted the information, no one deplored the lost opportunity for distinction so much as she; but nevertheless the fact remained. For the time being, Coyote Centre was thrown upon its own resources, was left to work out its own salvation as best it might.
Thus it came about that for a long, long dragging day, and the beginning of a second, the gunpowder had intermittently burned, and that more than intermittently, all but continuously, the red liquor had flowed; to the alternate aggrandisement of Red Jenkins and his straw-haired Norwegian rival across the street—Gus Ericson. Unsophisticated ones there were who fancied that ere this it would all end, that Mr. Sweeney's capacity for absorption had a limit. Four separate gentlemen, with the laudable intention of hastening that much to be desired condition, had sacrificed themselves for the common weal; but to the eternal disgrace of the town, all of them were now down and out, and in various retired spots, where they had been deposited by their sympathising friends, were snoring in peaceful oblivion. Even Len Barker, game disciple of the great master, had reached his limit and, no longer formidable, had, without form of law, been deposited for safekeeping, and with a sigh of relief, in the corporate Bastile; but Mr. Sweeney himself, Mr. Sweeney of the hawk eye and the royal tread, despite a lack of sleep and of solid sustenance, was, to all visible indications, as fresh and aggressive as at the beginning.
Now for the second time night was coming on. Neither up nor down the single business thoroughfare did a street lamp show its face. One and all had succumbed long before to the god of gunpowder. Not a stray dog, and Coyote Centre was plethoric of canines, raised its voice nor showed even a retreating tail near the area of disturbance. Wisdom and a desire for deepest obscurity had come to the many, swift and sudden annihilation to the few. Temporarily, yet effectively as though a cyclone were imminent, business and social life were paralysed. They were a tolerant breed, these citizens of Coyote Centre; repeated similar experience had not been without its effect; moreover, the object lesson of the day before was still vivid in their minds; but at last patience was reaching its limit. In the closed doorway of the town hall a tiny group of men were gathered, a group who spoke scarcely above a whisper, who kept a sharp lookout all surrounding, who stood ready at the twitch of an eyelash to disperse to the four winds. This was revolt incipient. In the single room of Bob Manning's general store was open revolt and plotting. Manning himself, grizzled, grey of hair, shaggy bearded, had the floor.