Pony Tracks
by
Frederic Remington

THE LAST STAND

PONY TRACKS

WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY
FREDERIC REMINGTON

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE

Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE FELLOWS WHO
RODE THE PONIES THAT MADE THE TRACKS

BY THE AUTHOR

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PONY TRACKS

[CHASING A MAJOR-GENERAL]

The car had been side-tracked at Fort Keough, and on the following morning the porter shook me, and announced that it was five o’clock. An hour later I stepped out on the rear platform, and observed that the sun would rise shortly, but that meanwhile the air was chill, and that the bald, square-topped hills of the “bad lands” cut rather hard against the gray of the morning. Presently a trooper galloped up with three led horses, which he tied to a stake. I inspected them, and saw that one had a “cow saddle,” which I recognized as an experiment suggested by the general. The animal bearing it had a threatening look, and I expected a repetition of a performance of a few days before, when I had chased the general for over three hours, making in all twenty-eight miles.

Before accepting an invitation to accompany an Indian commission into the Northwest I had asked the general quietly if this was a “horseback” or a “wagon outfit.” He had assured me that he was not a “wagon man,” and I indeed had heard before that he was not. There is always a distinction in the army between wagon men and men who go without wagons by transporting their supplies on pack animals. The wagon men have always acquired more reputation as travellers than Indian fighters. In a trip to the Pine Ridge Agency I had discovered that General Miles was not committed to any strained theory of how mounted men should be moved. Any settled purpose he might have about his movements were all locked up in a desperate desire to “get thar.” Being a little late in leaving a point on the railroad, I rode along with Lieutenant Guilfoil, of the Ninth, and we moved at a gentle trot. Presently we met a citizen in a wagon, and he, upon observing the lieutenant in uniform, pulled up his team and excitedly inquired,

“What’s the matter, Mr. Soldier?”

Guilfoil said nothing was the matter that he knew of.

“Who be you uns after?”

“No one,” replied the lieutenant.

“Well, I just saw a man go whirling up this ’ere valley with a soldier tearin’ after him fit to kill” (that was the general’s orderly), “and then comes a lot more soldiers just a-smokin’, and I sort of wondered what the man had done.”

We laughed, and remarked that the general must be riding pretty hard. Other citizens we met inquired if that man was a lunatic or a criminal. The idea of the soldiers pursuing a man in citizen’s clothes furthered the idea, but we assured them that it was only General Miles going somewhere.

All of these episodes opened my eyes to the fact that if I followed General Miles I would have to do some riding such as I had rarely done before. In coming back to the railroad we left the Pine Ridge Agency in the evening without supper, and I was careful to get an even start. My horse teetered and wanted to gallop, but I knew that the twenty-eight miles would have to be done at full speed, so I tried to get him down to a fast trot, which gait I knew would last better; but in the process of calming him down to a trot I lost sight of the general and his orderly as they went tearing like mad over a hill against the last gleam of the sunset. I rode at a very rapid trot over the hills in the moonlight for over three hours, but I never saw the general again until I met him at dinner. Then I further concluded that if I followed the general I would have no time to regait my horses, but must take them as I found them, gallop or trot. So on this cool morning at Keough I took observations of the horses which were tied to the post, with my mind full of misgivings.

GENERAL MILES AND HIS ESCORT

Patter, patter, patter—clank, clank, clank; up comes the company of Cheyenne scouts who are to escort the general—fine-looking, tall young men, with long hair, and mounted on small Indian ponies. They were dressed and accoutred as United States soldiers, and they fill the eye of a military man until nothing is lacking. Now the general steps out of the car and hands the commission into a six-mule ambulance. I am given a horse, and, mounting, we move off over the plain and into the hills. The sun comes streaming over the landscape, and the general is thinking about this old trail, and how years before he had ploughed his way through the blinding snow to the Lame Deer fight. I am secretly wishing that it would occupy his mind more fully, so that my breakfast might settle at the gentle gait we are going, but shortly he says, “It’s sixty miles, and we must move along.” We break into a gallop. The landscape is gilded by the morning sun, and the cool of the October air makes it a perfect thing, but there are elements in the affair which complicate its perfection. The “bad lands” are rough, and the general goes down a hill with even more rapidity than up it. The horses are not the perfect animals of the bridle-path, but poor old cavalry brutes, procured by the government under the old contract system, by which the government pays something like $125 for a $60 horse. This could be remedied by allowing the officers of each regiment to buy their own horses; but in our army nothing is remedied, because a lot of nice old gentlemen in Washington are too conservative to do anything but eat and sleep. There is a bit of human nature at the bottom of our army organization, and where is the man who can change that? Men who were the very jewels of the profession years ago have reached in due time the upper grades of rank, and occupy the bureaus of the department. These men who have acquired rank, years, and discretion naturally do nothing, and with sedate gravity insist that no one else shall do anything. The ambitious young men have to wait patiently for their retirement, and in process of waiting they, too, become old and conservative. Old soldiers are pardonable rubbish, since soldiers, like other men, must age and decay, the only distinction being that youthful vigor is of prime importance to a soldier, while in the case of the citizen any abatement of vigor is rewarded by being shelved. What to do with old soldiers is a problem which I will hand over to the economists as being beyond my depth. But to return to the going downhill. General Miles has acquired his knowledge of riding from wild Indians, and wild Indians go uphill and downhill as a matter of course at whatever gait they happen to be travelling. He would make his horse climb a tree with equal gravity if he was bound that way. The general has known Indians to ride for two days and a night at a rapid gallop, and it never occurs to him that he cannot do anything which any one else can; so he spurs along, and we go cutting around the coulies and bluffs like frightened antelopes or mad creatures. The escort strings out behind. This is observed with a grim humor by the general, who desires nothing so much as to leave his escort far in the rear. He turns in his saddle, and seeing the dust of the escort far behind, says: “Shake up the young men a little; do ’em good. They get sleepy;” and away we go.

It is over thirty miles to the first relay station, or courier’s camp, and another problem looms up. The general’s weight is over two hundred pounds, and I confess to two hundred and fifteen avoirdupois, and, as I have before remarked, my horse was not an Irish hunter, so my musing took a serious vein. It is all very well for a major-general to ride down a cavalry horse, but if such an accident were to happen to me, then my friends in the cavalry would crown me with thorns. Two hundred and fifteen pounds requires a great deal more careful attention than a one-hundred-and-forty-pound wasp-waisted cavalryman. What the latter can do with impunity would put me on foot—a thing that happened some ten years since in this very State of Montana, and a thing I have treasured in mind, and will not have repeated. So I brought the old horse down to a trot, and a good round trot eats up a road in short order. Your galloper draws away from you, but if the road is long enough, you find that you are at his heels.

After a good day’s ride of something like sixty miles, we met a troop of the Eighth Cavalry near its camp on the Tongue River, and the general is escorted in. The escorts draw into line, salute, and the general is duly deposited in a big Sibley tent; and I go away on the arms of some “cavalry kids” (as young lieutenants are called) to a hole in the ground (a dugout) where they are quartered. On the following morning I am duly admonished that if my whereabouts could have been ascertained on the previous evening, the expedition would have continued to the camp of the First Cavalry. I do not think the general was unduly severe, desiring simply to shift the responsibility of the procrastination on to other shoulders, and meanwhile being content to have things as they were. I was privately thanked by the citizen members of the commission for the delay I had caused, since they had a well-grounded conviction that sixty miles a day in an army ambulance was trouble enough. After some sarcasm by a jolly young sub, to the effect that “if one wants to call a citizen out of a tent, one must ring a dinner-bell,” we were again mounted and on the way. I was badly mounted that day, but able to participate in the wild charge of forty-five miles to the Lame Deer camp, near the Cheyenne Agency. The fifty Cheyenne scouts and a troop of the Eighth were in escort.

By a happy combination I was able to add greatly to my equestrian knowledge on this ride. It happened in this way; but I must explain. Some years ago I had occasion to ride a stock saddle (the cowboy article), and with all the positiveness of immature years, I held all other trees and all other methods of riding in a magnificent contempt. Later on I had to be convinced that a great many young cavalry officers in our service were the most daring and perfect riders, and that the McClelland saddle was the proper thing. I even elaborated a theory in explanation of all this, which I had duly shattered for me when I came East and frequented a New York riding-academy, where a smiling professor of the art assured me that cowboys and soldiers were the worst possible riders. Indeed, the sneers of the polite European were so superlative that I dared not even doubt his statements. Of course I never quite understood how my old champions of the cattle range and the war trail could pick things off the ground while in full career, or ride like mad over the cut banks and bowlders, if they were such desperately bad riders; and I never was able to completely understand why my European master could hardly turn in his saddle without tumbling off. But still he reduced me to submission, and I ceased even to doubt. I changed my style of riding, in deference to a public sentiment, and got my legs tucked up under my chin, and learned to loose my seat at every alternate footfall, and in time acquired a balance which was as secure as a pumpkin on the side of a barrel. Thus equipped with all this knowledge and my own saddle, I went out to the Northwest with the purpose of introducing a little revolution in cavalry riding. Things went swimmingly for a time. The interpreters and scouts watched my riding with mingled pity and scorn, but I knew they were unenlightened, and in no way to be regarded seriously. The general was duly amused by my teetering, and suggested to the smiling escort officers that “he has lived so long abroad, you know,” etc., all of which I did not mind, for my faith in the eternal art of the thing was complete. Now to tell how I discovered that I was riding a seat which was no seat at all, and was only retained by a series of happy accidents, I will continue. While at the head of the column, where I could see the deep ruts in the road and the bowlders, and could dodge the prairie-dog holes, it was simple enough; but my horse being a very clumsy galloper, and beginning to blow under the pace, I began to pull up, calculating to get a sharp trot, and overhaul the column when it slowed down. The column of soldiers dashed by, and the great cloud of dust rose up behind them which always follows a herd of animals in the West. Being no longer able to see, the only thing to do under the circumstances was to give my horse his head, and resign myself to the chances of a gopher hole, if it was foreordained that my horse should find one. True to his instincts, my old cavalry horse plunged into the ranks. You cannot keep a troop horse out of the ranks. They know their place, and seek it with the exactitude of water. If the cavalry tactics are ever changed, the present race of horses will have to be sold, because, while you can teach a horse anything, you cannot unteach him.

THE SUPPLY TRAIN

In front I could see two silhouettes of soldiers tearing along, and behind could hear the heavy pounding of the troop horses, the clank of arms, the snorts and heavy breathings. I could hardly see my horse’s head, to say nothing of the ground in front. Here is where the perfect grip with the thighs is wanted, and here is where the man who is bundled up like a ball on his horse’s back is in imminent danger of breaking his neck. I felt like a pack on a government mule, and only wished I had some one to “throw the diamond hitch over me.” The inequalities of the road make your horse plunge and go staggering sidewise, or down on his knees, and it is not at all an unusual thing for a cavalryman to upset entirely, though nothing short of a total turn-over will separate a veteran soldier from his horse. After a few miles of these vicissitudes I gained the head of the column, and when the pace slackened I turned the whole thing over in my mind, and a great light seemed to shine through the whole subject. For a smooth road and a trotting horse, that European riding-master was right; but when you put a man in the dust or smoke, over the rocks and cut banks, on the “bucking” horse, or where he must handle his weapons or his vieta, he must have a seat on his mount as tight as a stamp on an envelope, and not go washing around like a shot in a bottle. In a park or on a country road, where a man has nothing to do but give his undivided attention to sticking on his saddle, it has its advantages. An Indian or a cowboy could take the average park rider off from his horse, scalp him, hang him on a bush, and never break a gallop. I do not wish to seem intolerant, because I will say that the most beautiful horse and the most perfect horseman I have ever seen was the bay gelding Partisan and his rider in the high-school class at the recent Horse Show in New York; but I do insist that no one shall for a moment imagine that the American style of riding is not the firmest of all seats.

UNITED STATES CAVALRY IN WINTER RIG

With a repetition of the military forms, we reached the cavalry camp on the Lame Deer Creek. This is an old battle-ground of the general’s—his last fight with the Cheyennes, where, as the general puts it, we “kicked them out of their blankets in the early morning.” These Indians recognize him as their conqueror, and were allied with him in the Nez Percé campaign. One old chief pointed to the stars on his shoulder-strap, and charged him to remember that they helped to put them there.

That night was very cold, and I slept badly, so at an early hour I rolled out of my blankets and crawled into my clothes. I stepped out of my tent, and saw that the stars were yet visible and the light of the morning warming up to chase the gray shadows over the western hills. Three tight little cavalry soldiers came out on the parade, and blew three bugles as hard as ever they could to an unappreciative audience of sleepy soldiers and solemn hills. I walked down past the officers’ row, and shook the kinks out of my stiffened knees. Everything was as quietly dismal as only a sleeping camp can be. The Sibley containing General Miles showed no signs of life, and until he arose this little military solar system would not revolve. I bethought me of the irregulars. They were down in the river bottom—Lieutenant Casey and his Indian scouts. I knew that Casey had commanded Indian scouts until his temper was as refined as beaten gold, so I thought it safer to arouse him than any one else, and, walking down, I scratched at his tent—which is equivalent to knocking—and received a rather loud and surly inquiry as to what I wanted. My sensitive nature was so shocked by this that, like the bad actor, I had hopes for no more generous gift than a cigarette. I was let into the Sibley, and saw the ground covered with blanketed forms. One of the swathed forms sat up, and the captain allowed he wanted to get up in the night, but that ever since Lieutenant Blank had shot at the orderly he was afraid to move about in the gloom. Lieutenant B. sat up and denied the impeachment. Another officer arose and made some extended remarks on the unseemly disturbance at this unseasonable hour. To pass over these inequalities of life, I will say that the military process of stiffening a man’s backbone and reducing his mind to a logarithm breeds a homogeneous class whom we all know. They have small waists, and their clothes fit them; they are punctilious; they respect forms, and always do the dignified and proper thing at the particular instant, and never display their individuality except on two occasions: one is the field of battle and the other is before breakfast. Some bright fellow will one day tell in print the droll stock anecdotes of the United States army, and you’ll all agree that they are good. They are better, though, if you sit in a Sibley on a cold morning while the orderly boils the coffee; and are more fortunate if you have Ned Casey to embellish what he calls the international complications which arose from the bombardment of Canada with paving-stones by a drunken recruit at Detroit.

After the commission had talked to a ring of drowsy old chiefs, and the general had reminded them that he had thrashed them once, and was perfectly willing to do it again if they did not keep in the middle of the big road, the commission was loaded into the ambulances.

UNITED STATES INFANTRY IN WINTER RIG

The driver clucked and whistled and snapped his whip as a preliminary which always precedes the concerted movement of six mules, and we started. This time I found that I had a mount that was “a horse from the ground up,” as they phrase it in the red-blooded West. Well it was so, for at the relay camp I had issued to me a sorrel ruin which in the pristine vigor of its fifth year would not have commanded the value of a tin cup. After doing a mile of song and dance on this poor beast I dismounted, and shifting my saddle back to my led horse of the morning, which was led by a Crow scout, made the sixty-mile march of that day on the noble animal. Poor old chap, fit for a king, good for all day and the next, would bring six hundred dollars in the New York Horse Exchange, but condemned to pack a trooper in the ranks until a penurious government condemns and sells him to a man who, nine times out of ten, by the law of God, ought not to be intrusted with the keeping of the meanest of his creatures, to say nothing of his noblest work—a horse. “Such is life,” is the salve a good soldier puts on his wounds.

During the day we went all over the battle-field of the Little Big Horn. I heard a good deal of professional criticism, and it is my settled conviction that had Reno and Benteen gone in and fought as hard as they were commanded to do, Custer would have won his fight, and to-day be a major-general. The military moral of that affair for young soldiers is that when in doubt about what to do it is always safe to go in and fight “till you drop,” remembering that, however a citizen may regard the proposition, a soldier cannot afford to be anything else than a “dead lion.”

We were nearing the Crow Agency and Fort Custer, and it is against all my better impulses, and with trepidation at the impropriety of unveiling the truth, that I disclose the fact that the general would halt the column at a convenient distance from a post, and would then exchange his travel-worn garb for glittering niceties of a major-general’s uniform. The command then advanced into the fort. The guns bellowed and the cavalry swung into line, while numerous officers gathered, in all the perfection of neat-fitting uniforms, to receive him. At this time the writer eliminated himself from the ceremonial, and from some point of vantage proceeded to pull up his boots so as to cover as much as possible the gaping wounds in his riding-trousers, and tried vainly to make a shooting-jacket fit like an officer’s blouse, while he dealt his hat sundry thumps in a vain endeaver to give it a more rakish appearance. He was then introduced and apologized for in turn. To this day he hopes the mantle of charity was broad enough to cover his case.

What a contrast between soldiers in field and soldiers in garrison! Natty and trim—as straight as a sapling, with few words and no gestures—quite unlike those of two days, or rather nights, ago, when the cold froze them out of their blankets, and they sat around the camp-fires pounding tin cans and singing the Indian medicine song with a good Irish accent. Very funny that affair—the mixture of Cheyenne and Donnybrook is a strange noise.

The last stage from Custer to the railroad is thirty-five miles and a half, which we did with two relays, the latter half of it in the night. There was no escort—only two orderlies and the general—and I pattered along through the gloom. The clouds hung over the earth in a dense blanket, and the road was as dim as a Florentine fresco; but night nor cold nor heat can bring General Miles to a walk, and the wild charge in the dark was, as an experience, a complete thing. You cannot see; you whirl through a cañon cut in the mud; you plough through the sage-brush and over the rocks clatter and bang. The general is certainly a grim old fellow—one of the kind that make sparks fly when he strikes an obstacle. I could well believe the old Fifth Infantryman who said “he’s put many a corn on a dough-boy’s foot,” and it’s a red-letter day for any one else that keeps at his horse’s heels. You may ride into a hole, over a precipice, to perdition, if it’s your luck on this night, but is not the general in front? You follow the general—that’s the grand idea—that is the military idea. If the United States army was strung out in line with its general ahead, and if he should ride out into the broad Atlantic and swim to sea, the whole United States army would follow along, for that’s the idea, you know.

But for the headlong plunge of an orderly, we passed through all right, with due thankfulness on my part, and got to our car at the siding, much to the gratification of the Chicago colored man in charge, who found life at Custer Station a horrid blank. Two hundred and forty-eight miles in thirty-six hours and a half, and sixty miles of it on one horse, was not bad riding, considering everything. Not enough to make a man famous or lame, but enough for the time being.

[LIEUTENANT CASEY’S LAST SCOUT]
ON THE HOSTILE FLANKS WITH THE CHIS-CHIS-CHASH

The train bearing the Cheyenne scout corps pulled into Rapid City somewhat late. It is possible you may think that it was a train of Pullman palace cars, but you would be mistaken, for it was a freight train, with the horses in tight box-cars, the bacon and Chis-chis-chash[1] on flat gravel cars, and Lieutenants Casey and Getty in the caboose. Evidently the element of haste was woven into this movement. We were glad to meet again. Expansive smiles lit up the brown features of the Indian scouts as they recognized me. Old Wolf-Voice came around in his large, patronizing way and said, “How?—what you do out here?” Wolf-Voice was a magnificent type of the Indian, with a grand face, a tremendous physique, and enough self-containment for a High-Church bishop. High-Walking nudged Stump-Horn and whispered in his ear, and they both smiled as they looked at me. Lieutenant Casey walked out in the road and talked with General Miles, who sat on his beautiful sorrel horse, while two scouts and a young “horse-pusher”[2] from St. Louis helped me to load one strawberry-roan horse, branded “52” on the nigh front foot, into a box-car with a scrawny lot of little ponies, who showed the hard scouting of the last month in their lank quarters.

[1] The name the Cheyennes apply to themselves.

[2] Boy who travels with horses on the cars.

The quartermaster came down and asked Lieutenant Casey for a memorandum of his outfit, which was “70 horses, 49 Indian scouts, 1 interpreter, 2 white officers, 1000 pounds of bacon, so many crackers, 2000 pounds forage, 5 Sibley tents, and 1 citizen,” all of which the quartermaster put down in a little book. You are not allowed by United States quartermasters to have an exaggerated estimate of your own importance. Bacon and forage and citizens all go down in the same column, with the only distinction that the bacon and forage outnumber you.

We were pulled down the road a few miles to the town of Hermoso, and there, in the moonlight, the baggage was unloaded and the wild little ponies frightened out of the cars, down a chute, into the stock corrals. The Sibleys were pitched, and a crowd of curious citizens, who came down to feast their eyes on the Chis-chis-chash, were dissipated when a rather frugal dinner was prepared. This was Christmas night, and rather a cheerless one, since, in the haste of departure, the Sibley stoves had been forgotten. We never had stoves again until the gallant Leavenworth battalion came to the rescue with their surplus, and in the cold, frosty nights in the foot-hills there can be no personal happiness where there are no stoves. We brewed a little mess of hot stuff in a soldier’s tin cup, and, in the words of Private Mulvaney, we drank to the occasion, “three fingers—standing up!”

The good that comes in the ill wind where stoves are lacking is that you can get men up in the morning. Sun-worship must have originated in circumstances of this kind. The feeling of thankfulness at the sight of the golden rays permeates your soul, and your very bones are made glad.

A few ounces of bacon, some of those accursed crackers which are made to withstand fire, water, and weevil, a quart of coffee blacker than evil, then down come the Sibleys, the blankets are rolled and the saddles adjusted, and bidding adios to the First Infantry (which came in during the night), we trot off down the road.

These, then, are the Cheyenne scouts. Well, I am glad I know the fact, but I never can reconcile the trim-looking scout corps of Keogh with these strange-looking objects. Erstwhile their ponies were fat, and cavorted around when falling in ranks; now they paddle along in the humblest kind of a business-like jog-trot. The new overcoats of the corps metamorphose the scouts into something between Russian Cossacks and Black Crooks. Saddle pockets bulge out, and a thousand and one little alterations in accoutrement grow up in the field which are frowned down in garrison. The men have scouted hard for a month, and have lost two nights’ sleep, so at the halts for the wagons they lop down in the dust of the road, and sleep, while the little ponies stand over them, ears down, heads hanging, eyes shut, and one hind foot drawn up on its toe. Nothing can look so dejected as a pony, and doubtless few things have more reason to feel so. A short march of twenty-five miles passes us through the Seventeenth Infantry camp under Colonel Offley, and down to the Cheyenne River, where we camp for the night. There is another corps of Cheyenne scouts somewhere here on the river, under Lieutenant L. H. Struthers, of the First Infantry, and we expect to join them. On the other side of the Cheyenne rise the tangled masses of the famous Bad Lands—seamed and serrated, gray here, the golden sunset flashing there, with dark recesses giving back a frightful gloom—a place for stratagem and murder, with nothing to witness its mysteries but the cold blue winter sky. Yet we are going there. It is full of savage Sioux. The sun goes down. I am glad to cease thinking about it.

CHIS-CHIS-CHASH SCOUT ON THE FLANKS

It is such a mere detail that I will not waste time on it, but this freezing out of your blankets four or five times every night, and this having to go out and coax a cooking fire into a cheerful spirit, can occupy a man’s mind so that any words not depraved do not seem of any consequence. During one of the early hours I happened to sleep, and in this interval Mr. Struthers came into our tepee. He had been on a night’s ride to the colonel for orders, and in passing, dropped in for a chat with Casey. When about to go, he said,

“Oh, by-the-way, I met Remington.”

“Do you want to renew the acquaintance?” replied Casey.

“Why—how—why—yes.”

“Well, he’s there, on the other side of this tent.” And Mr. Struthers passed out in the gloom, and his muttered expressions of astonishment were presently lost in the distance. I had ridden and camped with Mr. Struthers a few days since in the up country, while on the way to “the galloping Sixth.”

The next day we passed down the river, and soon saw what to inexperienced eyes might be dark gray rocks on the top of yellow hills. They were the pickets of the Cheyennes, and presently we saw the tepees and the ponies, and then we rode into camp. The men from Tongue River greeted the men from Pine Ridge—the relatives and friends—with ki-yis of delight. The corps from Pine Ridge was organized from the Cheyennes on that reservation, and was as yet only partially disciplined, and in no way to be compared with Casey’s Old Guard from Tongue River. Some two nights before, the Sioux had fired into their camp, and they had skirmished with the enemy. The vermilion of the war-path was on every countenance, and, through sympathy, I saw that our men too had gone into this style of decorative art; for faces which had previously been fresh and clean now passed my vision streaked and daubed into preternatural ferocity.

It grew late and later, and yet Lieutenant Struthers did not return from his scouting of the day. We were alarmed, and wondered and hoped; for scouting through the Bad Lands to the stronghold was dangerous, to state it mildly. A few shots would not be heard twelve miles away in the hills. We pictured black objects lying prone on the sand as we scouted next day—little masses of clay which had been men and horses, but would then be as silent as the bare hillocks about them.

“Ki-yi-yip—a-ou!” and a patter in the gloom.

“That’s Struthers.” We fall over each other as we pile out of the hole in the Sibley, and find Struthers and Lieutenant Byrom, of the Eighth Cavalry, all safe and sound.

“We have been on the stronghold; they are all gone; rustle some coffee,” are words in the darkness; and we crawl back into the tent, where presently the big, honest, jolly eyes of Mr. Struthers look over a quart cup, and we are happy. Byrom was a fine little cavalryman, and I have good reason to know that for impudent daring of that desperately quiet kind he is distinguished in places where all men are brave.

Away goes the courier to the colonel for orders, and after a time back he comes—a wild dash of twelve miles in the dark, and of little moment here, but a life memory to an unaccustomed one.

“We go on the stronghold in the morning,” says Casey; “and now to bed.” A bed consists of two blankets spread on the ground, and all the personal property not otherwise appropriated piled on top. A luxury, mind you, is this; later it was much more simple, consisting of earth for a mattress and the sky for a counterpane.

The sun is not up when in comes the horse herd. My strawberry roan goes sneaking about in the frosty willows, and after sundry well-studied manœuvres I get a grip on the lariat, and am lugged and jerked over the brush until “52 on the nigh front foot” consents to stand still. I saddle up, but have lost my gun. I entreat Mr. Thompson, the interpreter, to help me find it. Mr. Thompson is a man who began fighting for the Union in East Tennessee about thirty years long gone, and he has continued to engage in that work up to date. Mr. Thompson has formed a character which is not as round as a ball, but much more the shape of horn-silver in its native state. He is humorous by turns, and early in my acquaintance he undertook the cultivation of my mind in the art of war as practised on the frontier. On this occasion he at last found my Springfield, and handed it to me with the admonition “that in times like these one warrior can’t look after another warrior’s gun.”

The wagons were to go—well, I never knew where, but they went off over the hills, and I never saw them again for some miserable days and dreary nights. Five Pine Ridge Cheyennes and Mr. Wolf-Voice were my party, and we filed away. At Battle Creek we watered, and crossed the Cheyenne a mile above. My horse was smooth shod, and the river frozen half-way over, so we slid around on the ice, and jumped into the icy waters, got wet, crawled out, slid around some more, and finally landed. Mr. Wolf-Voice looked me over, and smilingly said, “Me think you no like ’em”; wherein his conclusion was eminently correct. Who does like to have a mass of ice freeze on him when naturally the weather is cold enough to satisfy a walrus?

It was twelve miles through the defiles of the Bad Lands to the blue ridge of the high mesa where the hostiles had lived. The trail was strewn with dead cattle, some of them having never been touched with a knife. Here and there a dead pony, ridden to a stand-still and left nerveless on the trail. No words of mine can describe these Bad Lands. They are somewhat as Doré pictured hell. One set of buttes, with cones and minarets, gives place in the next mile to natural freaks of a different variety, never dreamed of by mortal man. It is the action of water on clay; there are ashes, or what looks like them. The painter’s whole palette is in one bluff. A year’s study of these colors by Mr. Bierstadt, Professor Marsh, and Mr. Notman might possibly convey to the Eastern mind an idea; so we’ll amble along after Mr. Wolf-Voice, and leave that subject intact.

“Hark!” My little party stops suddenly, and we all listen. I feel stupid.

“You hear ’em?” says Wolf-Voice, in a stage-whisper.

“Hear what?” I say.

“Shots.”

Then we all get out our guns and go galloping like mad. I can’t imagine why, but I spur my horse and perform equestrian feats which in an ordinary frame of mind I should regard as insane. Down a narrow trail we go, with the gravel flying, and through a coulée, up a little hill, on top of which we stop to listen, and then away we go. The blue wall grows nearer, and at last we are under it. A few cotton-wood trees, some frozen water, a little cleft on the bluffs, and I see a trail winding upward. I know these warriors are going up there, but I can’t understand precisely how. It is not the first perilous trail I have contemplated; but there are dead cattle lying at the bottom which had fallen off and been killed in the ascent. We dismount and start up. It tells on your wind, and tries the leg muscles. Up a steep place a horse wants to go fast, and you have to keep him from running over you. A bend in the trail where the running water has frozen seems impassable. I jump across it, and then pull the bridle and say, “Come on, boy!” If I were the horse I would balk, but the noble animal will try it. A leap, a plunging, and with a terrible scrabble we are all right. Farther up, and the incline is certainly eighty-five degrees. My horse looses his front feet, but a jerk at the headstall brings him down, and he plunges past me to be caught by an Indian at the top of the trail. For a moment we breathe, and then mount.

"TWO GHOSTS I SAW"

Before us is a great flat plain blackened by fire, and with the grass still burning. Away in the distance, in the shimmer of the air waves, are figures.

“Maybe so dey Sioux,” says Wolf-Voice. And we gallop towards them.

“What will you do if they are?” I ask.

“Stand ’em off,” replies the war-dog.

Half an hour’s ride showed them to be some of our Cheyennes. All about the plain were strewn the remains of dead cattle (heads and horns, half-butchered carcasses, and withal a rather impressive smell), coyotes, and ravens—all very like war. These Brulés must have lived well. There were lodge poles, old fires, and a series of rifle pits across the neck of land which the Sioux had proposed to defend; medicine poles, and near them the sacrifices, among which was food dedicated to the Great Spirit, but eventually consumed by the less exalted members of Casey’s command. I vandalized a stone pipe and a rawhide stirrup.

The less curious members of our band had gone south, and Wolf-Voice and I rode along together. We discussed war, and I remember two of Wolf-Voice’s opinions. Speaking of infantry and their method of fighting, he said:

“Dese walk-a-heap soldiers dey dig hole—get in—shoot heap—Injun can’t do nothin’ wid ’em—can’t kill ’em—can’t do nothin’ but jes go ’way.”

Then, explaining why the Sioux had shown bad generalship in selecting their position, he turned in his saddle, and said, “De big guns he knock ’em rifle pit, den de calavy lun pas’ in column—Injun no stop calavy—kill ’em heap, but no stop ’em—den de walk-a-heap dey come too, and de Sioux dey go ober de bluffs.” And with wild enthusiasm he added, “De Sioux dey go to hell!” That prospect seemed to delight Mr. Wolf-Voice immensely.

It was a weary ride over the black and smoking plain. A queer mirage was said by my Indian to be the Cheyenne scouts coming after us. Black figures of animals walking slowly along were “starving bronchos abandoned by the hostiles.”

“Cowboy he catch ’em,” said Wolf-Voice.

I explained that Colonel Offley had orders not to allow any citizens to cross the Cheyenne River.

“Cowboy he go give um dam; he come alle samee.”

And I thought Wolf-Voice was probably right.

On the southern edge of the bluffs of the mesa we halted, and found water for man and beast. The command gradually concentrated, and for half an hour we stood on the high points scanning the great flats below, and located the dust of the retiring hostile column and the back lying scouts. Lieutenant Casey had positive orders not to bring on an engagement, and only desired to hang on their flanks, so as to keep Miles familiar with the hostile movements. A courier started on his lonely ride back with a note for the major-general. Our scouts were flying about far down the valley, and we filed off after them. Presently a little column of dust follows a flying horseman towards us. On, on he comes. The scouts grow uneasy; wild creatures they are, with the suspicion of a red deer and the stealth of a panther.

WATCHING THE DUST OF THE HOSTILES

The Sioux have fired on our scouts. Off we go at a trot, scattering out, unslinging our guns, and the air full of fight. I ride by Casey, and see he is troubled. The orders in his pocket do not call for a fight. Can he hold these wild warriors?

“Struthers, we have got to hold these men,” said Casey, in a tone of voice which was full of meaning. To shorten the story, our men were at last gotten into ranks, and details made to cover the advance. The hostiles were evidently much excited. Little clouds of dust whirling hither and thither showed where the opposing scouts were shadowing each other. The sun was waning, and yet we spurred our weary horses on towards the enemy. Poor beasts! no food and too much exercise since daylight.

The Cheyennes were uneasy, and not at all pleased with this scheme of action. What could they know about the orders in Lieutenant Casey’s pocket, prompted by a commanding general thinking of a thousand and one interests, and with telegrams from Washington directing the avoidance of an Indian war?

Old-soldier Thompson even, with all his intelligence and knowledge of things, felt the wild Berserker battle valor, which he smothered with difficulty, and confined himself to potent remarks and spurring of old Piegan. He said: “This is a new kind of war. Them Injuns don’t understand it, and to tell you the truth, I don’t nuther. The Injuns say they have come all the way from Tongue River, and are going back poor. Can’t get Sioux horses, can’t kill Sioux,” and in peroration he confirmed his old impression that “this is a new kind of war”; and then relapsed into reveries of what things used to be before General Miles invented this new kind of war.

In our immediate front was a heavy body of Sioux scouts. Lieutenant Casey was ahead. Men broke from our ranks, but were held with difficulty by Struthers and Getty. Back comes Casey at a gallop. He sees the crisis, and with his hand on his six-shooter, says, “I will shoot the first man through the head who falls out of the ranks.” A mutiny is imminent in the Pine Ridge contingent, but the diplomat Struthers brings order at last, and we file off down the hills to the left, and stop by a stream, while Casey goes back and meets a body of Sioux on a high hill for a powwow. I watched through a glass, and the sun went down as they talked. We had orders not to remove our saddles, and stood in the line nervously expecting anything imaginable to happen. The daring of Casey in this case is simply an instance of a hundred such, and the last one cost him his life. By his prompt measures with his own men, and by his courage in going among the Sioux to powwow, he averted a bloody battle, and obeyed his orders. There was one man between two banks of savage warriors who were fairly frothing at the mouth—a soldier; the sun will never shine upon a better.

At last, after an interminable time, he came away. Far away to the right are two of our scouts driving two beeves. We see the bright blaze of the six-shooters, the steers tumble, and hunger is no longer one of our woes.

THE HOTCHKISS GUN

The tired horses are unsaddled, to eat and drink and roll. We lay dry cotton-wood limbs on the fires, heavy pickets are told off, and our “bull meat” is cooked in the primitive style. Old Wolf-Voice and another scout are swinging six ribs on a piece of rawhide over a fire, and later he brings me a rib and a little bit of coffee from a roll in his handkerchief. I thought him a “brick,” and mystified him by telling him so.

Three or four Brulés are let in through our pickets, and come “wagging their tails,” as Two-Moons says, but adding, “Don’t you trust the Sioux.” They protest their good intentions, borrow tobacco, and say Lieutenant Casey can send in a wagon for commissaries to Pine Ridge, and also that I can go through their lines with it. Were there ever greater liars on earth?

I sat near the fire and looked intently at one human brute opposite, a perfect animal, so far as I could see. Never was there a face so replete with human depravity, stolid, ferocious, arrogant, and all the rest—ghost-shirt, war-paint, feathers, and arms. As a picture, perfect; as a reality, horrible. Presently they go away, and we prepare for the night. This preparing for the night is a rather simple process. I have stolen my saddle blanket from my poor horse, and, with this laid on the ground, I try my saddle in four or five different positions in its capacity of pillow. The inventor of the Whitman tree never considered this possible use of his handiwork, or he might have done better. I next button the lower three buttons of my overcoat, and thus wrapped “I lie down to pleasant dreams”—of rheumatism.

An hour later and the fires go down. Black forms pass like uneasy spirits, and presently you find yourself thrashing around in the underbrush across the river after branches to feed that insatiable fire. One comrade breaks through the ice and gets wet, and inelegant remarks come from the shadowy blackness under the river-banks. I think a man shouldn’t use such language even under such circumstances, but I also think very few men wouldn’t. A chilling wind now adds to the misery of the situation, and the heat of the fire goes off in a cloud of sparks to the No Man’s Land across the river. After smoking a pipe for two hours your mouth is raw and your nervous system shattered, so nothing is left but to sit calmly down and just suffer. You can hate the Chinese on the other side of the world, who are now enjoying the rays of the sun.

And morning finds you in the saddle. It always does. I don’t know how it is—a habit of life, I suppose. Mornings ought to find me cosily ensconced in a good bed, but in retrospect they seem always to be in the saddle, with a good prospect of all day ahead, and evening finds me with a chunk of bull meat and without blankets, until one fine day we come to our wagons, our Sibleys, and the little luxuries of the mess chest.

The next morning I announced my intention of going to Pine Ridge Agency, which is twenty-five miles away. Mr. Thompson, two scouts, and a Swedish teamster are to go in for provisions and messages. Mr. Thompson got in the wagon. I expressed my astonishment at this and the fact that he had no carbines, as we expected to go through the hostile pickets and camp. He said, “If I can’t talk them Injuns out of killin’ me, I reckon I’ll have to go.” I trotted along with Red-Bear and Hairy-Arm, and a mile and a half ahead went the courier, Wells. Poor man! in two hours he lay bleeding in the road, with a bullet through the hips, and called two days for water before he “struck the long trail to the kingdom come,” as the cowboys phrase it.

We could see two black columns of smoke, which we did not understand. After we had gone eight or ten miles, and were just crossing a ravine, we saw a Sioux buck on a little hill just ahead, out of pistol-shot. He immediately rode the “danger signal.” Red-Bear turned his horse in the “peace sign,” and advanced. We drove over the ravine, and halted. I dismounted. Six young Brulé Sioux rose out of the ground, and rode up to Red-Bear, and the hills were full of pickets to the right and left. We waited to hear the result of Red-Bear’s conversation, when he presently came back and spoke to Thompson in Cheyenne. I looked at him; his eyes were snapping, and his facial muscles twitched frightfully. This was unusual, and I knew that things were not well.

“Red-Bear says we will have to go back,” explained Thompson; and turning to Red-Bear he requested that two Sioux might come closer, and talk with us. Things looked ominous to me, not understanding Cheyenne, which was being talked. “This is a bad hole, and I reckon our cake is dough right here,” said Thompson.

Hairy-Arm’s face was impassive, but his dark eyes wandered from Brulé to Brulé with devilish calculation. Two young bucks came up, and one asked Thompson for tobacco, whereat he was handed a package of Durham by Thompson, which was not returned.

“It’s lucky for me that tobacco ain’t a million dollars,” sighed Thompson.

Another little buck slipped up behind me, whereat Mr. Thompson gave me a warning look. Turning, I advanced on him quickly (I wanted to be as near as possible, not being armed), and holding out my hand, said, “How, colah?” He did not like to take it, but he did, and I was saved the trouble of further action.

“We’ll never get this wagon turned around,” suggested Mr. Thompson, as the teamster whipped up; but we did. And as we commenced our movement on Casey’s camp, Mr. Thompson said, “Go slow now; don’t run, or they’ll sure shoot.”

“Gemme gun,” said the little scout Red-Bear, and we all got our arms from the wagon.

There was no suspense now. Things had begun to happen. A little faster, yet faster, we go up the little banks of the coulée, and, ye gods! what!—five fully armed, well-mounted cowboys—a regular rescue scene from Buffalo Bill’s show.

“Go back!” shouted Thompson.

Bang! bang! bang! and the bullets whistle around and kick up the dust. Away we go.

Four bucks start over the hills to our right to flank us. Red-Bear talked loudly in Cheyenne.

Thompson repeated, “Red-Bear says if any one is hit, get off in the grass and lie down; we must all hang together.”

We all yelled, “We will.”

A well-mounted man rode like mad ahead of the laboring team horses to carry the news to the scout camp. The cowboys, being well mounted, could easily have gotten away, but they stuck like true blues.

Here is where the great beauty of American character comes out. Nothing can be taken seriously by men used to danger. Above the pounding of the horses and the rattle of the wagon and through the dust came the cowboy song from the lips of Mr. Thompson:

“Roll your tail,

And roll her high;

We’ll all be angels

By-and-by.”

A RUN TO THE SCOUT CAMP

We deployed on the flanks of the wagon so that the team horses might not be shot, which would have stopped the whole outfit, and we did ten miles at a record-breaking gallop. We struck the scout camp in a blaze of excitement. The Cheyennes were in war-paint, and the ponies’ tails were tied up and full of feathers. Had the Sioux materialized at that time, Mr. Casey would have had his orders broken right there.

After a lull in the proceedings, Mr. Thompson confided to me that “the next time I go to war in a wagon it will put the drinks on me”; and he saddled Piegan, and patted his neck in a way which showed his gratification at the change in transport. We pulled out again for the lower country, and as our scouts had seen the dust of Colonel Sanford’s command, we presently joined them.

Any remarks made to Mr. Thompson on the tobacco subject are taken seriously, and he has intimated to me a quiet yearning for a shot at “the particular slit-mouthed Brulé who got away with that Durham.”

How we awoke next morning with the sleet freezing in our faces, and how we made camp in the blizzard, and borrowed Sibley stoves of the soldiers, and how we were at last comfortable, and spent New-Year’s Eve in a proper manner, is of little interest.

I was awakened at a late hour that night by Captain Baldwin, of General Miles’s staff, and told to saddle up for a night’s ride to Pine Ridge. This was the end of my experience with Lieutenant Casey and his gallant corps. We shook hands cheerily in the dim candle-light of the tepee, and agreeing to meet in New York at some not distant day, I stepped out from the Sibley, mounted, and rode away in the night.

Three days later I had eaten my breakfast on the dining-car, and had settled down to a cigar and a Chicago morning paper. The big leads at the top of the column said, “Lieutenant E. W. Casey Shot.” Casey shot! I look again. Yes; despatches from head-quarters—a fact beyond question.

A nasty little Brulé Sioux had made his coup, and shot away the life of a man who would have gained his stars in modern war as naturally as most of his fellows would their eagles. He had shot away the life of an accomplished man; the best friend the Indians had; a man who did not know “fear”; a young man beloved by his comrades, respected by his generals and by the Secretary of War. The squaws of another race will sing the death-song of their benefactor, and woe to the Sioux if the Northern Cheyennes get a chance to coup!

“Try to avoid bloodshed,” comes over the wires from Washington. “Poor savages!” comes the plaintive wail of the sentimentalist from his place of security; but who is to weep for the men who hold up a row of brass buttons for any hater of the United States to fire a gun at? Are the squaws of another race to do the mourning for American soldiers? Are the men of another race to hope for vengeance? Bah!

I sometimes think Americans lack a virtue which the military races of Europe possess. Possibly they may never need it. I hope not. American soldiers of our frontier days have learned not to expect sympathy in the East, but where one like Casey goes down there are many places where Sorrow will spread her dusky pinions and the light grow dim.

[THE SIOUX OUTBREAK IN SOUTH DAKOTA]

We discussed the vague reports of the Wounded Knee fight in the upper camps of the cordon, and old hands said it could be no ordinary affair because of the large casualty. Two days after I rode into the Pine Ridge Agency, very hungry and nearly frozen to death, having ridden with Captain Baldwin, of the staff, and a Mr. Miller all night long. I had to look after a poor horse, and see that he was groomed and fed, which require considerable tact and “hustling” in a busy camp. Then came my breakfast. That struck me as a serious matter at the time. There were wagons and soldiers—the burial party going to the Wounded Knee to do its solemn duty. I wanted to go very much. I stopped to think; in short, I hesitated, and of course was “lost,” for after breakfast they had gone. Why did I not follow them? Well, my natural prudence had been considerably strengthened a few days previously by a half-hour’s interview with six painted Brulé Sioux, who seemed to be in command of the situation. To briefly end the matter, the burial party was fired on, and my confidence in my own good judgment was vindicated to my own satisfaction.

I rode over to the camp of the Seventh United States Cavalry, and met all the officers, both wounded and well, and a great many of the men. They told me their stories in that inimitable way which is studied art with warriors. To appreciate brevity you must go to a soldier. He shrugs his shoulders, and points to the bridge of his nose, which has had a piece cut out by a bullet, and says, “Rather close, but don’t amount to much.” An inch more, and some youngster would have had his promotion.

I shall not here tell the story of the Seventh Cavalry fight with Big Foot’s band of Sioux on the Wounded Knee; that has been done in the daily papers; but I will recount some small-talk current in the Sibley tepees, or the “white man’s war tents,” as the Indians call them.

Lying on his back, with a bullet through the body, Lieutenant Mann grew stern when he got to the critical point in his story. “I saw three or four young bucks drop their blankets, and I saw that they were armed. ‘Be ready to fire, men; there is trouble.’ There was an instant, and then we heard sounds of firing in the centre of the Indians. ‘Fire!’ I shouted, and we poured it into them.”

“Oh yes, Mann, but the trouble began when the old medicine-man threw the dust in the air. That is the old Indian signal of ‘defiance,’ and no sooner had he done that act than those bucks stripped and went into action. Just before that some one told me that if we didn’t stop that old man’s talk he would make trouble. He said that the white men’s bullets would not go through the ghost shirts.”

Said another officer, “The way those Sioux worked those Winchesters was beautiful.” Which criticism, you can see, was professional.

Added another, “One man was hit early in the firing, but he continued to pump his Winchester; but growing weaker and weaker, and sinking down gradually, his shots went higher and higher, until his last went straight up in the air.”

IN THE TRENCHES

“Those Indians were plumb crazy. Now, for instance, did you notice that before they fired they raised their arms to heaven? That was devotional.”

“Yes, captain, but they got over their devotional mood after the shooting was over,” remonstrated a cynic. “When I passed over the field after the fight one young warrior who was near to his death asked me to take him over to the medicine-man’s side, that he might die with his knife in the old conjurer’s heart. He had seen that the medicine was bad, and his faith in the ghost shirt had vanished. There was no doubt but that every buck there thought that no bullet could touch him.”

“Well,” said an officer, whose pipe was working into a reflective mood, “there is one thing which I learned, and that is that you can bet that the private soldier in the United States army will fight. He’ll fight from the drop of the hat anywhere and in any place, and he’ll fight till you call time. I never in my life saw Springfield carbines worked so industriously as at that place. I noticed one young fellow, and his gun seemed to just blaze all the while. Poor chap! he’s mustered out for good.”

I saw the scout who had his nose cut off. He came in to get shaved. His face was covered with strips of court-plaster, and when informed that it would be better for him to forego the pleasure of a shave, he reluctantly consented. He had ridden all day and been in the second day’s fight with his nose held on by a few strips of plaster, and he did not see just why he could not be shaved; but after being talked to earnestly by a half-dozen friends he succumbed.

“What became of the man who did that?” I asked of him.

He tapped his Winchester and said, “Oh, I got him all right!”

I went into the hospital tents and saw the poor fellows lying on the cots, a little pale in the face, and with a drawn look about the mouth and eyes. That is the serious part of soldiering. No excitement, no crowd of cheering comrades, no shots and yells and din of battle. A few watchful doctors and Red Cross stewards with bottles and bandages, and the grim spectre of the universal enemy hovering over all, and ready to dart down on any man on the cots who lay quieter and whose face was more pale than his fellows.

I saw the Red Cross ambulances draw up in line, and watched the wounded being loaded into them. I saw poor Garlington. His blond mustache twitched under the process of moving, and he looked like a man whose mustache wouldn’t twitch unnecessarily. Lieutenant Hawthorne, who was desperately shot in the groin while working the little Hotchkiss cannon, turned his eyes as they moved Garlington from the next cot, and then waited patiently for his own turn.

I was talking with old Captain Capron, who commanded the battery at the fight—a grim old fellow, with a red-lined cape overcoat, and nerve enough for a hundred-ton gun. He said: “When Hawthorne was shot the gun was worked by Corporal Weimert, while Private Hertzog carried Hawthorne from the field and then returned to his gun. The Indians redoubled their fire on the men at the gun, but it seemed only to inspire the corporal to renewed efforts. Oh, my battery was well served,” continued the captain, as he put his hands behind his back and looked far away.

This professional interest in the military process of killing men sometimes rasps a citizen’s nerves. To the captain everything else was a side note of little consequence so long as his guns had been worked to his entire satisfaction. That was the point.

THE ADVANCE GUARD—A MILITARY SACRIFICE

At the mention of the name of Captain Wallace, the Sibley became so quiet that you could hear the stove draw and the wind wail about the little canvas town. It was always “Poor Wallace!” and “He died like a soldier, with his empty six-shooter in his right hand, shot through the body, and with two jagged wounds in his head.”

I accosted a soldier who was leaning on a crutch while he carried a little bundle in his right hand. “You bet I’m glad to get out in the sunlight; that old hospital tent was getting mighty tiresome.”

“Where was I shot?” He pointed to his hip. “Only a flesh wound; this is my third wound. My time is out in a few days; but I’m going to re-enlist, and I hope I’ll get back here before this trouble is over. I want to get square with these Injuns.” You see, there was considerable human nature in this man’s composition.

The ambulance went off down the road, and the burial party came back. The dead were for the time forgotten, and the wounded were left to fight their own battles with stitches and fevers and suppuration. The living toiled in the trenches, or stood out their long term on the pickets, where the moon looked down on the frosty landscape, and the cold wind from the north searched for the crevices in their blankets.

[AN OUTPOST OF CIVILIZATION]

The hacienda San José de Bavicora lies northwest from Chihuahua 225 of the longest miles on the map. The miles run up long hills and dive into rocky cañons; they stretch over never-ending burnt plains, and across the beds of tortuous rivers thick with scorching sand. And there are three ways to make this travel. Some go on foot—which is best, if one has time—like the Tahuramaras; others take it ponyback, after the Mexican manner; and persons with no time and a great deal of money go in a coach. At first thought this last would seem to be the best, but the Guerrero stage has never failed to tip over, and the company make you sign away your natural rights, and almost your immortal soul, before they will allow you to embark. So it is not the best way at all, if I may judge from my own experience. We had a coach which seemed to choose the steepest hill on the route, where it then struck a stone, which heaved the coach, pulled out the king-pin, and what I remember of the occurrence is full of sprains and aches and general gloom. Guerrero, too, is only three-fourths of the way to Bavicora, and you can only go there if Don Gilberto, the patron of the hacienda—or, if you know him well enough, “Jack”—will take you in the ranch coach.

After bumping over the stones all day for five days, through a blinding dust, we were glad enough when we suddenly came out of the tall timber in the mountain pass and espied the great yellow plain of Bavicora stretching to the blue hills of the Sierra. In an hour’s ride more, through a chill wind, we were at the ranch. We pulled up at the entrance, which was garnished by a bunch of cow-punchers, who regarded us curiously as we pulled our aching bodies and bandaged limbs from the Concord and limped into the patio.

THE HACIENDA SAN JOSÉ DE BAVICORA

To us was assigned the room of honor, and after shaking ourselves down on a good bed, with mattress and sheeting, we recovered our cheerfulness. A hot toddy, a roaring fireplace, completed the effect. The floor was strewn with bear and wolf skin rugs; it had pictures and draperies on the walls, and in a corner a wash-basin and pitcher—so rare in these parts—was set on a stand, grandly suggestive of the refinements of luxury we had attained to. I do not wish to convey the impression that Mexicans do not wash, because there are brooks enough in Mexico if they want to use them, but wash-basins are the advance-guards of progress, and we had been on the outposts since leaving Chihuahua.

Jack’s man William had been ever-present, and administered to our slightest wish; his cheerful “Good-mo’nin’, gemmen,” as he lit the fire, recalled us to life, and after a rub-down I went out to look at the situation.

Jack’s ranch is a great straggling square of mud walls enclosing two patios, with adobe corrals and out-buildings, all obviously constructed for the purposes of defence. It was built in 1770 by the Jesuits, and while the English and Dutch were fighting for the possession of the Mohawk Valley, Bavicora was an outpost of civilization, as it is to-day. Locked in a strange language, on parchment stored in vaults in Spain, are the records of this enterprise. In 1840 the good fathers were murdered by the Apaches, the country devasted and deserted, and the cattle and horses hurried to the mountain lairs of the Apache devils. The place lay idle and unreclaimed for years, threatening to crumble back to the dust of which it was made. Near by are curious mounds on the banks of a dry arroyo. The punchers have dug down into these ruins, and found adobe walls, mud plasterings, skeletons, and bits of woven goods. They call them the “Montezumas.” All this was to be changed. In 1882 an American cowboy—which was Jack—accompanied by two companions, penetrated south from Arizona, and as he looked from the mountains over the fair plain of Bavicora, he said, “I will take this.” The Apaches were on every hand; the country was terrorized to the gates of Chihuahua. The stout heart of the pioneer was not disturbed, and he made his word good. By purchase he acquired the plain, and so much more that you could not ride round it in two weeks. He moved in with his hardy punchers, and fixed up Bavicora so it would be habitable. He chased the Indians off his ranch whenever he “cut their sign.” After a while the Mexican vaqueros from below overcame their terror, when they saw the American hold his own with the Apache devils, and by twos and threes and half-dozens they came up to take service, and now there are two hundred who lean on Jack and call him patron. They work for him and they follow him on the Apache trail, knowing he will never run away, believing in his beneficence and trusting to his courage.

I sat on a mud-bank and worked away at a sketch of the yellow sunlit walls of the mud-ranch, with the great plain running away like the ocean into a violet streak under the blue line of the Peña Blanca. In the rear rises a curious broken formation of hills like millions of ruins of Rhine castles. The lobos[3] howl by night, and the Apache is expected to come at any instant. The old criada or serving-woman who makes the beds saw her husband killed at the front door, and every man who goes out of the patio has a large assortment of the most improved artillery on his person. Old carts with heavy wooden wheels like millstones stand about. Brown people with big straw hats and gay serapes lean lazily against the gray walls. Little pigs carry on the contest with nature, game-chickens strut, and clumsy puppies tumble over each other in joyful play; burros stand about sleepily, only indicating life by suggestive movements of their great ears, while at intervals a pony, bearing its lithe rider, steps from the gate, and, breaking into an easy and graceful lope, goes away into the waste of land.

[3] Wolves.

EL PATRON

I rose to go inside, and while I gazed I grew exalted in the impression that here, in the year of 1893, I had rediscovered a Fort Laramie after Mr. Parkman’s well-known description. The foreman, Tom Bailey, was dressed in store clothes, and our room had bedsteads and a wash-basin; otherwise it answered very well. One room was piled high with dried meat, and the great stomachs of oxen filled with tallow; another room is a store full of goods—calicoes, buckskin, riatas, yellow leather shoes, guns, and other quaint plunder adapted to the needs of a people who sit on the ground and live on meat and corn-meal.

“Charlie Jim,” the Chinese cook, has a big room with a stove in it, and he and the stove are a never-ending wonder to all the folks, and the fame of both has gone across the mountains to Sonora and to the south. Charlie is an autocrat in his curious Chinese way, and by the dignity of his position as Mr. Jack’s private cook, and his unknown antecedents, he conjures the Mexicans and damns the Texans, which latter refuse to take him seriously and kill him, as they would a “proper” man. Charlie Jim, in return, entertains ideas of Texans which he secretes, except when they dine with Jack, when he may be heard to mutter, “Cake and pie no good for puncher, make him fat and lazy”; and when he crosses the patio and they fling a rope over his foot, he becomes livid, and breaks out, “Damn puncher; damn rope; rope man all same horse; damn puncher; no good that way.”

The patron has the state apartment, and no one goes there with his hat on; but the relations with his people are those of a father and children. An old gray man approaches; they touch the left arm with the right—an abbreviated hug; say “Buenos dias, patron!” “Buenos dias, Don Sabino!” and they shake hands. A California saddle stands on a rack by the desk, and the latter is littered with photographs of men in London clothes and women in French dresses, the latter singularly out of character with their surroundings. The old criada squats silently by the fireplace, her head enveloped in her blue rebozo, and deftly rolls her cigarette. She alone, and one white bull-dog, can come and go without restraint.

The administrador, which is Mr. Tom Bailey, of Texas, moves about in the discharge of his responsibilities, and they are universal; anything and everything is his work, from the negotiation for the sale of five thousand head of cattle to the “busting” of a bronco which no one else can “crawl.”

The clerk is in the store, with his pink boy’s face, a pencil behind his ear, and a big sombrero, trying to look as though he had lived in these wilds longer than at San Francisco, which he finds an impossible part. He has acquired the language and the disregard of time necessary to one who would sell a real’s worth of cotton cloth to a Mexican.

THE ADMINISTRADOR OF SAN JOSÉ DE BAVICORA

The forge in the blacksmith’s shop is going, and one puncher is cutting another puncher’s hair in the sunlight; ponies are being lugged in on the end of lariats, and thrown down, tied fast, and left in a convulsive heap, ready to be shod at the disposition of their riders.

On the roof of the house are two or three men looking and pointing to the little black specks on the plain far away, which are the cattle going into the lagunas to drink.

The second patio, or the larger one, is entered by a narrow passage, and here you find horses and saddles and punchers coming and going, saddling and unsaddling their horses, and being bucked about or dragged on a rope. In the little doorways to the rooms of the men stand women in calico dresses and blue cotton rebozos, while the dogs and pigs lie about, and little brown vaqueros are ripening in the sun. In the rooms you find pottery, stone metates for grinding the corn, a fireplace, a symbol of the Catholic Church, some serapes, some rope, and buckskin. The people sit on a mat on the floor, and make cigarettes out of native tobacco and corn-husks, or rolled tortillas; they laugh and chat in low tones, and altogether occupy the tiniest mental world, hardly larger than the patio, and not venturing beyond the little mud town of Temozachic, forty miles over the hills. Physically the men vacillate between the most intense excitement and a comatose state of idleness, where all is quiet and slothful, in contrast to the mad whirl of the roaring rodeo.

In the haciendas of old Mexico one will find the law and custom of the feudal days. All the laws of Mexico are in protection of the land-owner. The master is without restraint, and the man lives dependent on his caprice. The patron of Bavicora, for instance, leases land to a Mexican, and it is one of the arrangements that he shall drive the ranch coach to Chihuahua when it goes. All lessees of land are obliged to follow the patron to war, and, indeed, since the common enemy, the Apache, in these parts is as like to harry the little as the great, it is exactly to his interest to wage the war. Then, too, comes the responsibility of the patron to his people. He must feed them in the famine, he must arbitrate their disputes, and he must lead them at all times. If through improvidence their work-cattle die or give out, he must restock them, so that they may continue the cultivation of the land, all of which is not altogether profitable in a financial way, as we of the North may think, where all business is done on the “hold you responsible, sir,” basis.

The vaqueros make their own saddles and reatas; only the iron saddle-rings, the rifles, and the knives come from the patron, and where he gets them God alone knows, and the puncher never cares. No doctor attends the sick or disabled, old women’s nursing standing between life and death. The Creator in His providence has arranged it so that simple folks are rarely sick, and a sprained ankle, a bad bruise from a steer’s horn or a pitching horse, are soon remedied by rest and a good constitution. At times instant and awful death overtakes the puncher—a horse in a gopher-hole, a mad steer, a chill with a knife, a blue hole where the .45 went in, a quicksand closing overhead, and a cross on a hill-side are all.

Never is a door closed. Why they were put up I failed to discover. For days I tried faithfully to keep mine shut, but every one coming or going left it open, so that I gave it up in despair. There are only two windows in the ranch of San José de Bavicora, one in our chamber and one in the blacksmith’s shop, both opening into the court. In fact, I found those were the only two windows in the state, outside of the big city. The Mexicans find that their enemies are prone to shoot through these apertures, and so they have accustomed themselves to do without them, which is as it should be, since it removes the temptation.

A HAIR-CUT À LA PUNCHER

One night the patron gave a baile. The vaqueros all came with their girls, and a string band rendered music with a very dancy swing. I sat in a corner and observed the man who wears the big hat and who throws the rawhide as he cavorted about with his girl, and the way they dug up the dust out of the dirt floor soon put me to coughing. “Candles shed their soft lustre—and tallow” down the backs of our necks, and the band scraped and thrummed away in a most serious manner. One man had a harp, two had primitive fiddles, and one a guitar. One old fiddler was the leader, and as he bowed his head on his instrument I could not keep my eyes off him. He had come from Sonora, and was very old; he looked as though he had had his share of a very rough life; he was never handsome as a boy, I am sure, but the weather and starvation and time had blown him and crumbled him into a ruin which resembled the pre-existing ape from which the races sprang. If he had never committed murder, it was for lack of opportunity; and Sonora is a long travel from Plymouth Rock.

Tom Bailey, the foreman, came round to me, his eyes dancing, and his shock of hair standing up like a Circassian beauty’s, and pointing, he said, “Thar’s a woman who’s prettier than a speckled pup; put your twine on her.” Then, as master of ceremonies, he straightened up and sang out over the fiddles and noise: “Dance, thar, you fellers, or you’ll git the gout.”

In an adjoining room there was a very heavy jug of strong-water, and thither the men repaired to pick up, so that as the night wore on their brains began to whirl after their legs, and they whooped at times in a way to put one’s nerves on edge. The band scraped the harder and the dance waxed fast, the spurs clinked, and bang, bang, bang went the Winchester rifles in the patio, while the chorus “Viva el patron” rang around the room—the Old Guard was in action.

We sat in our room one evening when in filed the vaqueros and asked to be allowed to sing for the patron. They sat on my bed and on the floor, while we occupied the other; they had their hats in their hands, and their black, dreamy eyes were diverted as though overcome by the magnificence of the apartment. They hemmed and coughed, until finally one man, who was evidently the leader, pulled himself together and began, in a high falsetto, to sing; after two or three words the rest caught on, and they got through the line, when they stopped; thus was one leading and the others following to the end of the line. It was strange, wild music—a sort of general impression of a boys’ choir with a wild discordance, each man giving up his soul as he felt moved. The refrain always ended, for want of breath, in a low, expiring howl, leaving the audience in suspense; but quickly they get at it again, and the rise of the tenor chorus continues. The songs are largely about love and women and doves and flowers, in all of which nonsense punchers take only a perfunctory interest in real life.

These are the amusements—although the puncher is always roping for practice, and everything is fair game for his skill; hence dogs, pigs, and men have become as expert in dodging the rope as the vaqueros are in throwing it. A mounted man, in passing, will always throw his rope at one sitting in a doorway, and then try to get away before he can retaliate by jerking his own rope over his head. I have seen a man repair to the roof and watch a doorway through which he expected some comrade to pass shortly, and watch for an hour to be ready to drop his noose about his shoulders.

THE MUSIC AT THE "BAILE"

The ranch fare is very limited, and at intervals men are sent to bring back a steer from the water-holes, which is dragged to the front door and there slaughtered. A day of feasting ensues, and the doorways and the gutter-pipes and the corral fences are festooned with the beef left to dry in the sun.

There is the serious side of the life. The Apache is an evil which Mexicans have come to regard as they do the meteoric hail, the lightning, the drought, and any other horror not to be averted. They quarrel between themselves over land and stock, and there are a great many men out in the mountains who are proscribed by the government. Indeed, while we journeyed on the road and were stopping one night in a little mud town, we were startled by a fusillade of shots, and in the morning were informed that two men had been killed the night before, and various others wounded. At another time a Mexican, with his followers, had invaded our apartment and expressed a disposition to kill Jack, but he found Jack was willing to play his game, and gave up the enterprise. On the ranch the men had discovered some dead stock which had been killed with a knife. Men were detailed to roam the country in search of fresh trails of these cattle-killers. I asked the foreman what would happen in case they found a trail which could be followed, and he said, “Why, we would follow it until we came up, and then kill them.” If a man is to “hold down” a big ranch in Northern Mexico he has got to be “all man,” because it is “a man’s job,” as Mr. Bailey, of Los Ojos, said—and he knows.

Jack himself is the motive force of the enterprise, and he disturbs the quiet of this waste of sunshine by his presence for about six months in the year. With his strong spirit, the embodiment of generations of pioneers, he faces the Apache, the marauder, the financial risks. He spurs his listless people on to toil, he permeates every detail, he storms, and greater men than he have sworn like troopers under less provocation than he has at times; but he has snatched from the wolf and the Indian the fair land of Bavicora, to make it fruitful to his generation.

There lies the hacienda San José de Bavicora, gray and silent on the great plain, with the mountain standing guard against intruders, and over it the great blue dome of the sky, untroubled by clouds, except little flecks of vapor which stand, lost in immensity, burning bright like opals, as though discouraged from seeking the mountains or the sea whence they came. The marvellous color of the country beckons to the painter; its simple, natural life entrances the blond barbarian, with his fevered brain; and the gaudy vaquero and his trappings and his pony are the actors on this noble stage. But one must be appreciative of it all, or he will find a week of rail and a week of stage and a week of horseback all too far for one to travel to see a shadow across the moon.

[A RODEO AT LOS OJOS]

The sun beat down on the dry grass, and the punchers were squatting about in groups in front of the straggling log and adobe buildings which constituted the outlying ranch of Los Ojos.

Mr. Johnnie Bell, the capitan in charge, was walking about in his heavy chaparras, a slouch hat, and a white “biled” shirt. He was chewing his long yellow mustache, and gazing across the great plain of Bavicora with set and squinting eyes. He passed us and repassed us, still gazing out, and in his long Texas drawl said, “Thar’s them San Miguel fellers.”

I looked, but I could not see any San Miguel fellows in the wide expanse of land.

“Hyar, crawl some horses, and we’ll go out and meet ’em,” continued Mr. Bell; and, suiting the action, we mounted our horses and followed him. After a time I made out tiny specks in the atmospheric wave which rises from the heated land, and in half an hour could plainly make out a cavalcade of horsemen. Presently breaking into a gallop, which movement was imitated by the other party, we bore down upon each other, and only stopped when near enough to shake hands, the half-wild ponies darting about and rearing under the excitement. Greetings were exchanged in Spanish, and the peculiar shoulder tap, or abbreviated embrace, was indulged in. Doubtless a part of our outfit was as strange to Governor Terraza’s men—for he is the patron of San Miguel—as they were to us.

My imagination had never before pictured anything so wild as these leather-clad vaqueros. As they removed their hats to greet Jack, their unkempt locks blew over their faces, back off their foreheads, in the greatest disorder. They were clad in terra-cotta buckskin, elaborately trimmed with white leather, and around their lower legs wore heavy cowhide as a sort of legging. They were fully armed, and with their jingling spurs, their flapping ropes and buckskin strings, and with their gay serapes tied behind their saddles, they were as impressive a cavalcade of desert-scamperers as it has been my fortune to see. Slowly we rode back to the corrals, where they dismounted.

Shortly, and unobserved by us until at hand, we heard the clatter of hoofs, and, leaving in their wake a cloud of dust, a dozen punchers from another outfit bore down upon us as we stood under the ramada of the ranch-house, and pulling up with a jerk, which threw the ponies on their haunches, the men dismounted and approached, to be welcomed by the master of the rodeo.

A few short orders were given, and three mounted men started down to the springs, and, after charging about, we could see that they had roped a steer, which they led, bawling and resisting, to the ranch, where it was quickly thrown and slaughtered. Turning it on its back, after the manner of the old buffalo-hunters, it was quickly disrobed and cut up into hundreds of small pieces, which is the method practised by the Mexican butchers, and distributed to the men.

In Mexico it is the custom for the man who gives the “round-up” to supply fresh beef to the visiting cow-men; and on this occasion it seemed that the pigs, chickens, and dogs were also embraced in the bounty of the patron, for I noticed one piece which hung immediately in front of my quarters had two chickens roosting on the top of it, and a pig and a dog tugging vigorously at the bottom.

COMING TO THE RODEO

The horse herds were moved in from the llano and rounded up in the corral, from which the punchers selected their mounts by roping, and as the sun was westering they disappeared, in obedience to orders, to all points of the compass. The men took positions back in the hills and far out on the plain; there, building a little fire, they cook their beef, and, enveloped in their serapes, spend the night. At early dawn they converge on the ranch, driving before them such stock as they may.

In the morning we could see from the ranch-house a great semicircle of gray on the yellow plains. It was the thousands of cattle coming to the rodeo. In an hour more we could plainly see the cattle, and behind them the vaqueros dashing about, waving their serapes. Gradually they converged on the rodeo ground, and, enveloped in a great cloud of dust and with hollow bellowings, like the low pedals of a great organ, they begin to mill, or turn about a common centre, until gradually quieted by the enveloping cloud of horsemen. The patron and the captains of the neighboring ranches, after an exchange of long-winded Spanish formalities, and accompanied by ourselves, rode slowly from the ranch to the herd, and, entering it, passed through and through and around in solemn procession. The cattle part before the horsemen, and the dust rises so as to obscure to unaccustomed eyes all but the silhouettes of the moving thousands. This is an important function in a cow country, since it enables the owners or their men to estimate what numbers of the stock belong to them, to observe the brands, and to inquire as to the condition of the animals and the numbers of calves and “mavericks” and to settle any dispute which may arise therefrom.

All controversy, if there be any, having been adjusted, a part of the punchers move slowly into the herd, while the rest patrol the outside, and hold it. Then a movement soon begins. You see a figure dash at about full speed through an apparently impenetrable mass of cattle; the stock becomes uneasy and moves about, gradually beginning the milling process, but the men select the cattle bearing their brand, and course them through the herd; all becomes confusion, and the cattle simply seek to escape from the ever-recurring horsemen. Here one sees the matchless horsemanship of the punchers. Their little ponies, trained to the business, respond to the slightest pressure. The cattle make every attempt to escape, dodging in and out and crowding among their kind; but right on their quarter, gradually forcing them to the edge of the herd, keeps the puncher, until finally, as a last effort, the cow and the calf rush through the supporting line, when, after a terrific race, she is turned into another herd, and is called “the cut.”

One who finds pleasure in action can here see the most surprising manifestations of it. A huge bull, wild with fright, breaks from the herd, with lowered head and whitened eye, and goes charging off indifferent to what or whom he may encounter, with the little pony pattering in his wake. The cattle run at times with nearly the intensity of action of a deer, and whip and spur are applied mercilessly to the little horse. The process of “tailing” is indulged in, although it is a dangerous practice for the man, and reprehensible from its brutality to the cattle. A man will pursue a bull at top speed, will reach over and grasp the tail of the animal, bring it to his saddle, throw his right leg over the tail, and swing his horse suddenly to the left, which throws the bull rolling over and over. That this method has its value I have seen in the case of pursuing “mavericks,” where an unsuccessful throw was made with the rope, and the animal was about to enter the thick timber; it would be impossible to coil the rope again, and an escape would follow but for the wonderful dexterity of these men in this accomplishment. The little calves become separated from their mothers, and go bleating about; their mothers respond by bellows, until pandemonium seems to reign. The dust is blinding, and the puncher becomes grimy and soiled; the horses lather; and in the excitement the desperate men do deeds which convince you of their faith that “a man can’t die till his time comes.” At times a bull is found so skilled in these contests that he cannot be displaced from the herd; it is then necessary to rope him and drag him to the point desired; and I noticed punchers ride behind recalcitrant bulls and, reaching over, spur them. I also saw two men throw simultaneously for an immense creature, when, to my great astonishment, he turned tail over head and rolled on the ground. They had both sat back on their ropes together.

WAVING SERAPE TO DRIVE CATTLE

The whole scene was inspiring to a degree, and well merited Mr. Yorick’s observation that “it is the sport of kings; the image of war, with twenty-five per cent. of its danger.”

Fresh horses are saddled from time to time, but before high noon the work is done, and the various “cut-offs” are herded in different directions. By this time the dust had risen until lost in the sky above, and as the various bands of cowboys rode slowly back to the ranch, I observed their demoralized condition. The economy per force of the Mexican people prompts them to put no more cotton into a shirt than is absolutely necessary, with the consequence that, in these cases, their shirts had pulled out from their belts and their serapes, and were flapping in the wind; their mustaches and their hair were perfectly solid with dust, and one could not tell a bay horse from a black.

Now come the cigarettes and the broiling of beef. The bosses were invited to sit at our table, and as the work of cutting and branding had yet to be done, no time was taken for ablutions. Opposite me sat a certain individual who, as he engulfed his food, presented a grimy waste of visage only broken by the rolling of his eyes and the snapping of his teeth.

We then proceeded to the corrals, which were made in stockaded form from gnarled and many-shaped posts set on an end. The cows and calves were bunched on one side in fearful expectancy. A fire was built just outside of the bars, and the branding-irons set on. Into the corrals went the punchers, with their ropes coiled in their hands. Selecting their victims, they threw their ropes, and, after pulling and tugging, a bull calf would come out of the bunch, whereat two men would set upon him and “rastle” him to the ground. It is a strange mixture of humor and pathos, this mutilation of calves—humorous when the calf throws the man, and pathetic when the man throws the calf. Occasionally an old cow takes an unusual interest in her offspring, and charges boldly into their midst. Those men who cannot escape soon enough throw dust in her eyes, or put their hats over her horns. And in this case there were some big steers which had been “cut out” for purposes of work at the plough and turned in with the young stock; one old grizzled veteran manifested an interest in the proceedings, and walked boldly from the bunch, with his head in the air and bellowing; a wild scurry ensued, and hats and serapes were thrown to confuse him. But over all this the punchers only laugh, and go at it again. In corral roping they try to catch the calf by the front feet, and in this they become so expert that they rarely miss. As I sat on the fence, one of the foremen, in play, threw and caught my legs as they dangled.

TAILING A BULL

When the work is done and the cattle are again turned into the herd, the men repair to the casa and indulge in games and pranks. We had shooting-matches and hundred-yard dashes; but I think no records were broken, since punchers on foot are odd fish. They walk as though they expected every moment to sit down. Their knees work outward, and they have a decided “hitch” in their gait; but once let them get a foot in a stirrup and a grasp on the horn of the saddle, and a dynamite cartridge alone could expel them from their seat. When loping over the plain the puncher is the epitome of equine grace, and if he desires to look behind him he simply shifts his whole body to one side and lets the horse go as he pleases. In the pursuit of cattle at a rodeo he leans forward in his saddle, and with his arms elevated to his shoulders he “plugs” in his spurs and makes his pony fairly sail. While going at this tremendous speed he turns his pony almost in his stride, and no matter how a bull may twist and swerve about, he is at his tail as true as a magnet to the pole. The Mexican punchers all use the “ring bit,” and it is a fearful contrivance. Their saddle-trees are very short, and as straight and quite as shapeless as a “saw-buck pack-saddle.” The horn is as big as a dinner plate, and taken altogether it is inferior to the California tree. It is very hard on horses’ backs, and not at all comfortable for a rider who is not accustomed to it.

They all use hemp ropes which are imported from some of the southern states of the republic, and carry a lariat of hair which they make themselves. They work for from eight to twelve dollars a month in Mexican coin, and live on the most simple diet imaginable. They are mostly peoned, or in hopeless debt to their patrons, who go after any man who deserts the range and bring him back by force. A puncher buys nothing but his gorgeous buckskin clothes, and his big silver-mounted straw hat, his spurs, his riata, and his cincha rings. He makes his teguas or buckskin boots, his heavy leggings, his saddle, and the patron furnishes his arms. On the round-up, which lasts about half of the year, he is furnished beef, and also kills game. The balance of the year he is kept in an outlying camp to turn stock back on the range. These camps are often the most simple things, consisting of a pack containing his “grub,” his saddle, and serape, all lying under a tree, which does duty as a house. He carries a flint and steel, and has a piece of sheet-iron for a stove, and a piece of pottery for boiling things in. This part of their lives is passed in a long siesta, and a man of the North who has a local reputation as a lazy man should see a Mexican puncher loaf, in order to comprehend that he could never achieve distinction in the land where poco tiempo means forever. Such is the life of the vaquero, a brave fellow, a fatalist, with less wants than the pony he rides, a rather thoughtless man, who lacks many virtues, but when he mounts his horse or casts his riata all men must bow and call him master.

The baile, the song, the man with the guitar—and under all this dolce far niente are their little hates and bickerings, as thin as cigarette smoke and as enduring as time. They reverence their parents, they honor their patron, and love their compadre. They are grave, and grave even when gay; they eat little, they think less, they meet death calmly, and it’s a terrible scoundrel who goes to hell from Mexico.

JOHNNIE BELL OF LOS OJOS

The Anglo-American foremen are another type entirely. They have all the rude virtues. The intelligence which is never lacking and the perfect courage which never fails are found in such men as Tom Bailey and Johnnie Bell—two Texans who are the superiors of any cow-men I have ever seen. I have seen them chase the “mavericks” at top speed over a country so difficult that a man could hardly pass on foot out of a walk. On one occasion Mr. Bailey, in hot pursuit of a bull, leaped a tremendous fallen log at top speed, and in the next instant “tailed” and threw the bull as it was about to enter the timber. Bell can ride a pony at a gallop while standing up on his saddle, and while Cossacks do this trick they are enabled to accomplish it easily from the superior adaptability of their saddles to the purpose. In my association with these men of the frontier I have come to greatly respect their moral fibre and their character. Modern civilization, in the process of educating men beyond their capacity, often succeeds in vulgarizing them; but these natural men possess minds which, though lacking all embellishment, are chaste and simple, and utterly devoid of a certain flippancy which passes for smartness in situations where life is not so real. The fact that a man bolts his food or uses his table-knife as though it were a deadly weapon counts very little in the game these men play in their lonely range life. They are not complicated, these children of nature, and they never think one thing and say another. Mr. Bell was wont to squat against a fireplace—à la Indian—and dissect the peculiarities of the audience in a most ingenuous way. It never gave offence either, because so guileless. Mr. Bailey, after listening carefully to a theological tilt, observed that “he believed he’d be religious if he knowed how.”

The jokes and pleasantries of the American puncher are so close to nature often, and so generously veneered with heart-rending profanity, as to exclude their becoming classic. The cow-men are good friends and virulent haters, and, if justified in their own minds, would shoot a man instantly, and regret the necessity, but not the shooting, afterwards.

Among the dry, saturnine faces of the cow punchers of the Sierra Madre was one which beamed with human instincts, which seemed to say, “Welcome, stranger!” He was the first impression my companion and myself had of Mexico, and as broad as are its plains and as high its mountains, yet looms up William on a higher pinnacle of remembrance.

We crawled out of a Pullman in the early morning at Chihuahua, and fell into the hands of a little black man, with telescopic pantaloons, a big sombrero with the edges rolled up, and a grin on his good-humored face like a yawning barranca.

“Is you frens of Mista Jack’s?”

“We are.”

“Gimme your checks. Come dis way,” he said; and without knowing why we should hand ourselves and our property over to this uncouth personage, we did it, and from thence on over the deserts and in the mountains, while shivering in the snow by night and by day, there was Jack’s man to bandage our wounds, lend us tobacco when no one else had any, to tuck in our blankets, to amuse us, to comfort us in distress, to advise and admonish, until the last adios were waved from the train as it again bore us to the border-land.

On our departure from Chihuahua to meet Jack out in the mountains the stage was overloaded, but a proposition to leave William behind was beaten on the first ballot; it was well vindicated, for without William the expedition would have been a “march from Moscow.” There was only one man in the party with a sort of bass-relief notion that he could handle the Spanish language, and the relief was a very slight one—almost imperceptible—the politeness of the people only keeping him from being mobbed. But William could speak German, English, and Spanish, separately, or all at once.

WILLIAM IN ACTION

William was so black that he would make a dark hole in the night, and the top of his head was not over four and a half feet above the soles of his shoes. His legs were all out of drawing, but forty-five winters had not passed over him without leaving a mind which, in its sphere of life, was agile, resourceful, and eminently capable of grappling with any complication which might arise. He had personal relations of various kinds with every man, woman, and child whom we met in Mexico. He had been thirty years a cook in a cow camp, and could evolve banquets from the meat on a bull’s tail, and was wont to say, “I don’ know so much ’bout dese yar stoves, but gie me a camp-fire an’ I can make de bes’ thing yo’ ever threw your lip ober.”

When in camp, with his little cast-off English tourist cap on one side of his head, a short black pipe tipped at the other angle to balance the effect, and two or three stripes of white corn-meal across his visage, he would move round the camp-fire like a cub bear around a huckleberry bush, and in a low, authoritative voice have the Mexicans all in action, one hurrying after water, another after wood, some making tortillas, or cutting up venison, grinding coffee between two stones, dusting bedding, or anything else. The British Field-Marshal air was lost in a second when he addressed “Mister Willie” or “Mister Jack,” and no fawning courtier of the Grand Monarch could purr so low.

On our coach ride to Bavicora, William would seem to go up to any ranch-house on the road, when the sun was getting low, and after ten minutes’ conversation with the grave Don who owned it, he would turn to us with a wink, and say: “Come right in, gemmen. Dis ranch is yours.” Sure enough, it was. Whether he played us for major-generals or governors of states I shall never know, but certainly we were treated as such.

On one occasion William had gotten out to get a hat blown off by the wind, and when he came up to view the wreck of the turn-over of the great Concord coach, and saw the mules going off down the hill with the front wheels, the ground littered with boxes and débris, and the men all lying about, groaning or fainting in agony, William scratched his wool, and with just a suspicion of humor on his face he ventured, “If I’d been hyar, I would be in two places ’fore now, shuah,” which was some consolation to William, if not to us.

In Chihuahua we found William was in need of a clean shirt, and we had got one for him in a shop. He had selected one with a power of color enough to make the sun stand still, and with great glass diamonds in it. We admonished him that when he got to the ranch the punchers would take it away from him.

“No, sah; I’ll take it off ’fore I get thar.”

William had his commercial instincts developed in a reasonable degree, for he was always trying to trade a silver watch, of the Captain Cuttle kind, with the Mexicans. When asked what time it was, William would look at the sun and then deftly cant the watch around, the hands of which swung like compasses, and he would show you the time within fifteen minutes of right, which little discrepancy could never affect the value of a watch in the land of mañana.

MOUNTING A WILD ONE

That he possessed tact I have shown, for he was the only man at Bavicora whose relations with the patron and the smallest, dirtiest Indian “kid,” were easy and natural. Jack said of his popularity, “He stands ’way in with the Chinese cook; gets the warm corner behind the stove.” He also had courage, for didn’t he serve out the ammunition in Texas when his “outfit” was in a life-and-death tussle with the Comanches? did he not hold a starving crowd of Mexican teamsters off the grub-wagon until the boys came back?

There was only one feature of Western life with which William could not assimilate, and that was the horse. He had trusted a bronco too far on some remote occasion, which accounted partially for the kinks in his legs; but after he had recovered fully his health he had pinned his faith to burros, and forgotten the glories of the true cavalier.

“No, sah, Mister Jack, I don’ care for to ride dat horse. He’s a good horse, but I jes hit de flat for a few miles ’fore I rides him,” he was wont to say when the cowboys gave themselves over to an irresponsible desire to see a horse kill a man. He would then go about his duties, uttering gulps of suppressed laughter, after the negro manner, safe in the knowledge that the burro he affected could “pack his freight.”

One morning I was taking a bath out of our wash-basin, and William, who was watching me and the coffee-pot at the same time, observed that “if one of dese people down hyar was to do dat dere, dere’d be a funeral ‘fo’ twelve o’clock.”

William never admitted any social affinity with Mexicans, and as to his own people he was wont to say: “Never have went with people of my own color. Why, you go to Brazos to-day, and dey tell you dere was Bill, he go home come night, an’ de balance of ’em be looking troo de grates in de morning.” So William lives happily in the “small social puddle,” and always reckons to “treat any friends of Mister Jack’s right.” So if you would know William, you must do it through Jack.

It was on rare occasions that William, as master of ceremonies, committed any indiscretion, but one occurred in the town of Guerrero. We had gotten in rather late, and William was sent about the town to have some one serve supper for us. We were all very busy when William “blew in” with a great sputtering, and said, “Is yous ready for dinner, gemmen?” “Yes, William,” we answered, whereat William ran off. After waiting a long time, and being very hungry, we concluded to go and “rustle” for ourselves, since William did not come back and had not told us where he had gone. After we had found and eaten a dinner, William turned up, gloomy and dispirited. We inquired as to his mood. “I do declar’, gemmen, I done forget dat you didn’t know where I had ordered dat dinner; but dere’s de dinner an’ nobody to eat it, an’ I’s got to leave dis town ’fore sunup, pay for it, or die.” Unless some one had advanced the money, William’s two other alternatives would have been painful.

The romance in William’s life even could not be made mournful, but it was the “mos’ trouble” he ever had, and it runs like this: Some years since William had saved up four hundred dollars, and he had a girl back in Brazos to whom he had pinned his faith. He had concluded to assume responsibilities, and to create a business in a little mud town down the big road. He had it arranged to start a travellers’ eating-house; he had contracted for a stove and some furniture; and at about that time his dishonest employer had left Mexico for parts unknown, with all his money. The stove and furniture were yet to be paid for, so William entered into hopeless bankruptcy, lost his girl, and then, attaching himself to Jack, he bravely set to again in life’s battle. But I was glad to know that he had again conquered, for before I left I overheard a serious conversation between William and the patron. William was cleaning a frying-pan by the camp-fire light, and the patron was sitting enveloped in his serape on the other side.

A MODERN SANCHO PANZA

“Mist’ Jack, I’s got a girl. She’s a Mexican.”

“Why, William, how about that girl up in the Brazos?” inquired the patron, in surprise.

“Don’t care about her now. Got a new girl.”

“Well, I suppose you can have her, if you can win her,” replied the patron.

“Can I, sah? Well, den, I’s win her already, sah—dar!” chuckled William.

“Oh! very well, then, William, I will give you a wagon, with two yellow ponies, to go down and get her; but I don’t want you to come back to Bavicora with an empty wagon.”

“No, sah; I won’t, sah,” pleasedly responded the lover.

“Does that suit you, then?” asked the patron.

“Yes, sah; but, sah, wonder, sah, might I have the two old whites?”

“All right! You can have the two old white ponies;” and, after a pause, “I will give you that old adobe up in La Pinta, and two speckled steers; and I don’t want you to come down to the ranch except on baile nights, and I want you to slide in then just as quiet as any other outsider,” said the patron, who was testing William’s loyalty to the girl.

“All right! I’ll do that.”

“William, do you know that no true Mexican girl will marry a man who don’t know how to ride a charger?” continued the patron, after a while.

“Yes; I’s been thinking of dat; but dar’s dat Timborello, he’s a good horse what a man can ’pend on,” replied William, as he scoured at the pan in a very wearing way.

“He’s yours, William; and now all you have got to do is to win the girl.”

After that William was as gay as a robin in the spring; and as I write this I suppose William is riding over the pass in the mountains, sitting on a board across his wagon, with his Mexican bride by his side, singing out between the puffs of his black pipe, “Go on, dar, you muchacos; specks we ever get to Bavicora dis yar gait?”