The Prairie Schooner Part 5

From the cross-tree of a telegraph pole hung the body of a man when the 9:30 Union Pacific Overland Express stopped for a "slow" order across a bridge that a band of Comanche Indians had tried to burn.

A Ma.s.sachusetts woman enroute to 'Frisco stuck her head out of a car window and exclaimed, "How awfully terrible!"

Yes, it was.

Ed Preston was a one-eyed man. I don't know how he lost the other one, but I do know that he was a dead shot with the one eye that he slanted along the barrel of his pistol or buffalo rifle, the latter a sawed-off Springfield and the first mentioned an old-time army Remington.

Preston's marksmans.h.i.+p cost him his life. They hung Preston, the boys did, because he killed a man just for the meanness of it, or, as one of them said, because he was spoiling for trouble.

One day as we were camped on the north bank of the North Platte near the eastern line of Wyoming, Preston, full of liquor, lurched up to a bunch of bullwhackers and asked if anyone present thought he was a "dead shot." Of course, all hands admitted that his reputation was unquestioned.

"But you never saw me shoot," he said, "so what the ---- do you know about it?" Then he pulled his gun and backed off, saying, as he pointed to a heap of discarded tomato cans:

"Hey, you Charley, heave one o' them cans in the air--hurry up."

Observing his apparent quarrelsome att.i.tude, Charley Snow, a youthful member of the outfit, obeyed without protest. Snow had been a.s.signed by Martin, the wagon-boss, to help the cook and the cook had made him responsible for the proper boiling of a pot of beans. Snow left the beans and threw a can as far away from himself as he could, and before it hit the ground it was perforated by a bullet.

"Now throw one straight up in the air," commanded Preston, and Snow obeyed. Preston put two shots into that "on the wing." Snow attempted to resume his duties at the mess fire, but Preston's shooting had drawn a dozen or more of the men of the outfit to the scene, and he was in the humor to show off; therefore as Snow was the youngest and possibly the most inoffensive man in the party, Preston decided to eliminate the bean question by ordering Snow, with a flourish of his gun, to remove the beans from the fire. This done, he continued:

"Now you throw the cans and be lively about it."

Snow did as ordered. One, two, three, ten cans went into the air.

Preston missed none. Finally the boy threw, at Preston's command, two at a time and both were plugged before they came down. Then as Snow picked up another one Preston shot it out of his hand, and he tried to quit and return to the bean kettle, whereupon Preston bored a hole through Snow's sombrero without cutting off a hair or bruising his scalp, although it was plain to see that while Snow was no fresh tenderfoot from the effete East, but a seasoned young bullwhacker and plainsman, he was more than uneasy. The boy said afterward that while he had a whole lot of confidence in Preston's marksmans.h.i.+p he knew he had drunk at least a pint of whisky--the worst of the squirrel variety at that--for had he not taken the last swig out of a flask, thrown it almost at Snow and sent its splinters in every direction by a shot from his Remington?

Sober, said Snow, Preston would not have been so bad, but drunk--he objected to further partic.i.p.ation in the William Tell business and he entered his protest. When he discovered that the chambers of Preston's revolver were temporarily empty, Snow quietly took a rifle from its leather fastenings on the side of a prairie schooner. His move looked ominous to his tormentor.

Preston was a coward, as were all of that cla.s.s of killers in those days. He was an engineer of a bull team of seven yokes and a good man at his business, but a bully, a braggart and a coward, whose victims usually were known to be peaceful and who were unarmed or unprepared to defend themselves. He was not the heroic figure of the almost forgotten wild west--the brave and big-hearted fellow who fought sometimes for his rights or what he considered his rights. Preston was just a plain murderer, who had taken a place among rough but honest frontiersmen, chased from an orderly community somewhere in G.o.d's country--then east of the Missouri, now anywhere from the Atlantic to the Pacific--because of some dark crime he had committed, no doubt.

All day long we had been fording the North Platte at this point--Sidney crossing--a distance of at least a half a mile, including a small island of sand and a few bushes. It was the last trainload of provisions for the season we were taking north to the government's beneficiaries--the Ogalala Sioux and the Cheyennes. We had seventy teams, each of seven yokes, and two wagons, and as the Platte is a swift-running stream at this point and there is quicksand between the south sh.o.r.e and the island, it was necessary to "jack up" on blocks some of our loads on the wagons and double and treble teams, sometimes using as many as twenty-five yokes of oxen on one wagon and a half dozen men, belly deep in the mush ice, punching the bulls. The water was in places up to the tops of the wheels. It was a sun-up to sun-down job from corral to corral.

Someone had whisky, but it was not apparent until late in the afternoon, when the target shooting incidents began. The boys were a sober lot--the good, honest kind, and not a desperado among them, barring One-Eyed Ed.

Others there were, sure enough, who might be considered hardly fit for even the most humble society, for they looked like pirates--all of them--hair long, clothes weather-beaten and rough, faces unshaven and grizzled, and language or topics of conversation not what would be called cultured by any means. Yet there was in this outfit a predominance of good, honest hearts, most of them measuring life from a standard never understood if ever known in "G.o.d's Country." These sailors of prairie schooners, these pioneer transportation men of the virile, virgin West, knew little law or order or justice, as we know them; they frequently violated what is known as the law, but they didn't know it. They had but one degree of murder. It wasn't murder for them to fight and kill with pistols. It was the custom. Murder was something else. It was to kill a man who was not "heeled" or when his back was turned, or to mount another man's horse and ride away. This was murder in the first degree--the same as if the owner of the horse had been shot to death while asleep. In those days some things were as necessary, as indispensable as life--a horse, a saddle, a pair of blankets, a gun and ammunition and a butcher knife--perhaps a small bag of salt. The last, however, would be termed a luxury, although nearly every man in those days had a little salt stored away in a weather-proof pocket or saddle bag for the sage hen, antelope, deer, or buffalo beef he might have for dinner or breakfast.

But let me tell you how Preston spent the rest of his day. It was early in the afternoon when he perforated Snow's sombrero, but it was sun-down when he shot and killed Tom Sash, the boss herder, a splendid Texan, who had charge of an Indian contract beef herd which had come up the trail from the Lone Star state to the Platte Valley guided by a half dozen range men in charge of Sash, and were being grazed along the Platte bottoms previous to being doled out as per agreement with Uncle Sam to the clouted redskins at the White River Agency at Red Cloud.

All during the previous summer, as the wagon trains pa.s.sed to and from Sidney and the northern forts and agencies, Sash had told the wagon bosses not to go hungry for lack of veal. "We are anxious to fatten these cattle," he would say, "and you are welcome to a calf or two any time you want it." Sash was all right and the bullwhackers couldn't sing his praises loud enough.

It was at the close of Snow's engagement with Preston that the wagon boss told Preston to try his hand on some Indian veal. So Preston disappeared down the river, returning at suppertime with the admission that he had not only veal but "yearling steak." And he had some of it with him.

The beans had been boiled and eaten, the tin dishes and cups, pots and kettles and iron ovens dumped into the mess wagon, and two crews of men were at work jacking up wagons and greasing axle skeins, when the s.p.a.ce at the north mouth of the corral was suddenly filled by as fine a horseman as ever galloped over the plains. It was Sash, dressed in the costume of the real cowboy of the long-horn cattle day--sombrero, chaps, Rowell spurs, a Mexican lariat properly adjusted over the horn of his elaborate double-cinched cutting-out saddle--everything was perfection.

He was astride a fine big black American horse--not a regulation cow pony--a s.h.i.+ny, deep bay charger with a white left ankle half way to the knee from the fetlock, and a spot of white the size of a hand on the face.

He came on a gallop and stopped so short at the corral mouth that, had he not known his business, he would have been thrown over the chains.

But that was the style of riding. Plunge ahead to the object or point desired--then stop short. He waved his hat to Martin, our wagon boss, to come to the corral chains.

"Someone from your outfit," shouted Sash, "has been out in one of our herds and shot a half dozen yearlings and two three-year-old steers.

Aren't you satisfied with veal? Say, old man, who did this mean trick?"

The acts of a coward are preceded by a queer train of thought, the kingpin of which is fear. Preston knew his disreputable work of butchering among the herd of cattle had been discovered. He knew that Sash, a Texan, was a man of action, and that Sash was fortified with the right on his side, and if justice were meted out it would be some kind of punishment. The revolver in his holster was close to his hand and fear--cowardly fear--overpowered his weak mind.

Martin had no time to reply, and the first indication that the coward was to act upon the impulse that would move him was the cry from a bullwhacker:

"Don't shoot--don't."

Sash, who was looking straight over his horse's head, turned at hearing this just in time to receive a bullet in the hollow spot under his left ear. It pa.s.sed clean through his head. Both arms flew into the air, his horse sprang forward, and Sash laid upon the ground flat on his back, with arms spread out from his body--dead. His face was ashen white, eyes and mouth closed, both fists clinched.

It was young Snow who tied the black charger to a wagon wheel, replacing the bridle with a halter. The horse whinnied, pawed the dirt, and for a time spun around as far as the halter strap would allow, and looked at his prostrate master with what seemed to be almost human intelligence; in fact, his body was soon in a white lather, necessitating a rub-down and then a blanket. He trembled like a leaf and snorted and pawed the earth for an hour.

Sash's camp was on the south bank of the Platte. There Preston was delivered by Wagon Boss Martin and a delegation of the bull outfit fellows after he had tried to escape.

That night, together with a negro boy, Snow stood guard over Sash's body to protect it from the coyotes, for they were numerous, close at hand and howled mournfully until break of day.

None touched the body, as it had been determined to follow what was believed to be the law, for this time the outfit was only fifty miles from where at least a pretense of regularity was observed.

A rider was dispatched to Sidney, then a scattered lot of board shanties on the south side of the Union Pacific Railroad track.

The second night there came to the bullwhacker camp two men in a light road wagon. They took the body away.

At the same time a dozen bullwhackers and nearly all the men from the cow camp rode away to the south. Preston, silent as the Sphynx, sat astride a horse, his hands tied behind him. They told him he was going to Sidnev to have a trial. He smiled, but said nothing. It was just an effort to appear brave. His life had been one of crime. He was a pest of the plains, of the trails, of the camps--and he was on the way to the end of a rope. He knew it, and did not plead for mercy or ask for quarter; he did not in the long ride across the sand hills utter a word of regret for what he had done. He was heartless, cruel, brutal, even in the valley of the shadow. And he was silent even as death itself. He showed no fear as we would describe fear.

Entering Sidney the posse and the prisoner took the center one of three coulees that ran down into the town, all three meeting at the level. It was here that One-Eyed Ed met the court that was to try him, together with the populace. The court consisted of fifty hors.e.m.e.n, half of whom rode down the east coulee, the other half down the other, meeting the prisoner and his escort as abruptly as one meets a person sometimes in whirling around the corner of a city block.

One long yi, yi, yi, yi, ye! was the "hear ye" of the plainsman court crier--the signal understood by all the hors.e.m.e.n, and especially those comprising the posse just emerging from the center coulee. As if by magic the escort faded away and the prisoner, bareheaded, long hair waving in the wind, his hands securely tied, sat upright--alone.

Then from the east and west coulees dashed hors.e.m.e.n led by Jim Redding swinging his lariat over and over and over his head until he was in the right spot to spin it out. Preston's horse stood like a piece of statuary, and to give the man on his back his proper meed of credit let it be recorded that he had the appearance of a man bravely facing death, for he sat erect and made no effort to dismount, which he might have done, for he had not been fastened to the saddle, as that would have made impossible the program mapped out to the minutest detail.

When Redding spun his lariat for Preston's head--after he had ridden past him two or three times while the hors.e.m.e.n lined up like a company of cavalry and looked on--it landed around his shoulders. Redding planted a spur into his cow pony, there was a jump and Preston's body shot up and away from his mount and to the ground.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by American Colortype Co., Chicago

Track-Layers Fought Redskins--Chapter VIII.]

CHAPTER VIII

TRACK-LAYERS FOUGHT REDSKINS.

When the Union Pacific Railroad was being built the Indians were wild and hostile. The appearance of the locomotive was unwelcome. Surveyors, track-layers, bridge-builders and others if not properly guarded by details of United States troops were attacked from ambush and often killed.

It was indeed an adventurous calling to be a railroader in those days, no matter in what capacity; for if it wasn't Indians it was something else that made it so in the then wilderness. Towns were built in a day along the South Platte River and the populations were first made up largely by the sc.u.m of the earth, consisting of criminals of all kinds from all quarters of the globe, either engaged in gambling, highway robbery or running saloons that were the toughest ever known in America.

Dance halls and dives followed the work of railroad building from Omaha to Ogden, and if the earth could speak it would tell a story of murder that would make one shudder. Hundreds of men were shot either in brawls or by robbers and their bodies buried in unmarked graves.

At Julesburg alone, the story was told, after the temporary terminus was moved on west 100 miles, there were 417 graves in one sidehill, and among the lot not one grave in the so-called cemetery was filled by a man who died a natural death. This may be an exaggeration--perhaps it is--but it was not an uncommon thing for a man to be shot and killed in a brawl while a dance was in progress without for a moment stopping the festivities.

But the "n.o.ble" Indian, so often represented in heroic portraits--and always called a "brave" by writers who never saw an Indian of that period--was not there, at least not numerously. He was a sneaking sniper, hiding behind a sand hill or concealed in a clump of bushes in a creek or river bottom, with a good chance to get away if attacked. He seldom came out into the open to fight even a lone surveying party, but waited for the cover of night, hid behind a rock and took a pot shot and then rode his horse at top speed to a safe distance. He was a miserable coward, and dirty. Perhaps the next day he would come meekly into some camp where there were several hundred men, begging for sugar or bacon.

Artists have painted him in all his glory in sight of his enemy discharging his arrows or his gun. Don't believe it. He didn't do it more than a half dozen times, and when he outnumbered the white from 50 or 100 to 1. It is too bad, I know, to destroy such beautiful fiction; but it is necessary in order to keep these chronicles straight.