Knights of the Range. Zane Grey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ solemnly. “I always feared, but I drove fear from my mind. Let us grant, then, that the worst times of the frontier are to come. Tell me what they are and how they will work.”

      “Wal, it’s as simple as when Carson seen through it. But only been long in comin’. . . . Fust, take the buffalo. The huntin’ of buffalo fer their hides has begun. We old Texans always feared this. It means such war with the Indians as has never been seen on this frontier. Yore friends the Utes, the Kiowas, the Comanches, the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, the Pawnees, all the tribes will go on the war-path. Thet means turrible bloody times, fer the settlers have come pourin’ oot West thick. Texas will see the wust of thet, because the buffalo on their rangin’ from south to north an’ back again air most on the Texas plains. The hide hunters will concentrate in the Pan Handle, or under the Llano Estacado or between the Brazos an’ the Rio Grande. An’ the plains Indians will fight to the death fer their meat. They live on buffalo. It will be a fight to the finish between the buffalo hunters an’ the Indian tribes. The Yankee army could not lick the red men. Not in a million years! Look at the Custer campaigns. I heahed thet Carson, an’ Buff Belmet, an’ other scouts have advised these army men to lay off the Indians. But they will blunder right on to be massacred. . . . The pioneers you talk aboot cain’t lick the Indians. An’ if the buffalo hunters don’t lick them this West will shore become unhealthy damn pronto.”

      “I gather that, Britt. All the same I’d say the hide-hunters will break the power of the allied tribes and drive them off the plains.”

      “My guess, too. When this hide-huntin’ movement gets goin’ strong there’ll be many thousands of hunters. An’ all keen, hard-fightin’ men, armed with heavy rifles an’ with wagon-loads of ammunition. They’ll do fer the Indians, I reckon. But it will be a hell of a fight with the chances not all agin the Indians.”

      “Agreed. We’ll pass, however, on to that future period when the red men’s power will be gone. What is the next catastrophe you predict?”

      “Wal, no less than the hey-day of the rustlers.”

      “Cattle thieves!” exclaimed the Colonel, contemptuously. “We’ve always had them, Britt. Texas before the Civil War had her cattle raids. Mexicans, Indians ran off cattle. And the white raider developed. You had him when you were trail drivin’ the herds up to Dodge an’ Abilene. But what did that ever amount to? Hardly any more than the beef every cattle outfit appropriates wherever it happens to camp. We lose some cattle heah, so the boys say, but not a tenth—not a hundredth of the yearly increase.”

      “Right, Kurnel, so far as you go,” drawled the foreman. “Listen, boss, an’ I’ll tell you how I figger. Durin’ the last year a lot of tight-lipped, cold-eyed strangers have rode into New Mexico. Mebbe you haven’t seen this much. But I have talked with men who have seen it an’ who didn’t like it. Jesse Chisum is one. Thet old Texan with his Jingle-bob brand has a far eye fer everythin’ aboot cattle. If you rode to San Marcos or Fort Union or Sumner, or over Pecos way to Roswell an’ Lincoln, you’d shore get a hunch. Wyomin’, Nebraska, West Kansas, East Colorado, an’ of course Texas, air sendin’ a good many riders oot our way. Riders thet don’t give names an’ don’t ask questions an’ don’t take kind to curious Westerners! Some of these may be what you called the cowboys—salt of the earth—but the most of them air bad. Thet is to say hawse-thieves, rustlers, bandits, desperadoes, the genuine bad men an’ genuine four-flushers, ootlaws, all of them, an’ thet ain’t countin’ the riff-raff from the East an’ the ruined rebels from the South.”

      “Britt, I’m not so blind as you think,” protested Colonel Ripple. “I’ve noticed somethin’ of what you say. However only what might be expected with this westward movement.”

      “It’s more than might be expected. New Mexico is as wild as Texas west of the Pecos. There is no law, except the law of the six-shooter. It has a bad reputation. Please observe, Kurnel, thet most of these pioneers keep right on travellin’. New Mexico will be the last of the states frontin’ on the Great Plains thet will be settled. This in spite of the finest grazin’ lands in the West. . . . Wal, heah is what’s goin’ to happen. Cattlemen like you an’ Chisum, followin’ in the footsteps of Maxwell an’ St. Vrain, air goin’ to grow powerful rich in cattle. In three years the Ripple brand will show on the sides of eighty thousand haid of cows. Think of thet! An’ thet ain’t countin’ what you sell. Wal, this will give rise to such rustlin’ of cattle as was never dreamed of before on the ranges. It is inevitable. It will last ten years or more. You see this government buyin’ of beef fer Indians on the reservations, an’ thousands more thet must be counted in as time goes on, will furnish a market thet rustlers cain’t resist an’ cattlemen cain’t stop fer a long time. Then there’s the railroads. It ain’t no hell of a drive to Dodge from heah or Las Animas either. The longer the drive the shorer the market. . . . An’ there it is, Ripple, all in a nutshell.”

      “So help me heaven, you are right!” ejaculated the rancher, in concern. “Hey-day of the rustler! . . . Britt, with your usual perspicuity you have seen ahead to an unprecedented and dubious future for the cattleman who operates on a large scale. . . . All right, suh! If you see that clearly you will be equal to meetin’ such a situation when it comes. I’ll never see it, worse luck. But Holly will be in the thick of it—perhaps unmarried. That freezes me inside. . . . Britt, you’ve been Texas Ranger and Trail Driver, both of which callings, peculiar to the great Lone Star State, should fit you to deal with bad men at a bad time. You have always been a genius handlin’ cowboys. . . . How do you aim to meet this situation?”

      “Wal, I’ll admit thet’s been a stumper,” replied Britt, with a dry laugh.

      It was something he had pondered over during many a lonely ride on the range and many an hour in the darkness of the bunk-house while the wind moaned in the cedar trees outside.

      Britt gazed thoughtfully down over the green-gray terraces to the far ribbon of silver meandering across the plains to blue obscurity, and he knew that that scene was good, always soothing and strengthening to the lover of the open. He always looked to this southward scene when the one to the westward had given rise, as now, to a troubled mind. He loved the spur of cedared ground from which this unparalleled view lay open, and likewise he loved the gray escarpment walls as they widened and heightened toward the plain below, and the aloof mesas and the sandy arroyos and the dark canyons, and all that wild and rugged beauty which at length softened into the vast blue prairie. But even if this eastern steppe of New Mexico had not been inspiring and all-satisfying, Britt would have loved it for Holly Ripple’s sake.

      When he looked back at the cattle empire, however, he was actuated by mingled feelings of pride, of achievement, of dismay, and over all a sense of fatality in the sublime reach and sweep of the range. The insulating mountains might temper the winter winds and send down never-failing streams upon the grazing lands, and protect the rich bunch-grass and gramina-grass which were so fattening for the herds, but no rock walls could ever keep out the parasites of the rangeland. For a cattleman that scene had a pastoral and intimate beauty wholly dissociated from the wilder one to the south. A hundred thousand cattle dotted the endless pastures. A winding yellow road led down to San Marcos, a green circle of foliage from which the white and gray houses of the town gleamed in the spring sunlight. Far across and leagues away showed the dark patch that was Fort Union. Lincoln was a tiny speck in the distance. But northward the red spot which marked Santa Fe shone plainly over a hundred miles away. With its color and legend of three centuries of occupancy by the dons and padres it had power to cover this broad land with the drowsy languorous atmosphere of the Spaniards.

      But all that had only a momentary charm for Britt. With his hawk-eyes he was seeing the deeds of the day at hand. San Marcos would lose the sleepy tenor of its way. The saloon, the dance-hall, the gambling den would soon ring with the revelry attendant upon the pay-day of the cow-hand. Half-nude girls with pretty faces and shadowy eyes СКАЧАТЬ