University of Virginia Library

2. II

"TEDDY" COLLINS, who rode range for the "2 O & E" Ranch, had come north toward the head-waters of the Creek of the Rotten Grass to head off a bunch of strays that had persisted in running off the range and was wandering far north toward the reservation. Collins had the herd headed southward again, and was driving it with language that was picturesque and vigorous down the river-trail, when Young Moon came with a gallop and a whoop over the ridge.

Collins was greatly surprised and very little pleased. Threescore fat steers bearing the 2 O & E brand were directly in the path of the redskins, and in the traditions of the range it is told that this is not good for steers. The tough little cow-pony came around on his hind legs to face the Indians.

One man sat quietly in the middle of the trail with his right hand raised and empty, but the score that came over the ridge swerved to one side and stopped before they came to the one. Collins wondered curiously where the Indians had procured the whisky, for to him it was very evident that they were happily drunk. Young Moon he recognized easily; he had won a lame pony from him at the big poker game after the round-up last fall. But at the poker game Young Moon was attired in a cheap black suit of store clothes instead of a bonnet of feathers and a gaudy apron.

Young Moon rode up to within easy-speaking distance and dismounted. Collins gathered himself up firmly in the saddle.

"How," greeted the Indian.

"How," returned the cow-boy.

"You better go 'way," said Young Moon, with a decisive sweep of the arm.

"Go 'way h—," replied Collins, laconically. "What yuh driving at, anyhow?"

"We going down the creek," said Young Moon. "You and your people go away—back to where you come from."

"Oh, so that's the game, eh?" said Collins, cheerily. "Well, yuh'd better not do anything rough, ol' pigeon-toe, or they'll have a slue of those stiff-necks from Fort Custer down here an' shoot yuh good an' plenty."

Young Moon laughed. The poor mortal "stiff-necks" attempting to contend with the Great Spirit—truly it was amusing. Eloquently and with many gestures he hastened to inform Collins that before long the Indian would pitch his tepee on the parade-ground at the fort. The regime of the white man was at an end in the land; Young Moon, he whom the spirits had rendered invulnerable, said it.

Collins would have laughed gleefully if Young Moon attired in the ordinary raiment of civilization had given utterance to such fanciful language. But here was Young Moon, more than half naked, entirely sober, and with a score of bucks at his back, calmly saying that the white man was to be driven out of the valley. It was evident that Young Moon and his bucks were not on a drunk, but on the war-path. This sort of thing, Collins felt, was distinctly out of place now. Such things had passed into the school-history stage.

"Old man, lemme tell yuh something," he said confidingly, leaning over the saddle pommel. "Yuh're trying to run your bluff away too late. Don't yuh go for to buck the brass-buttons now; they're too strong for yuh. Yuh jest mosey 'long back to yer reserve an' act decent. Sabe? I'm only a-telling yuh for yer own good."

Again Young Moon laughed scornfully.

"We go down there. Sabe?" he said positively, pointing down the trail behind Collins. Then the flash of savage rage, the wild, blinding desire to slay, came to him, and he whipped the well-worn short-barreled Winchester from beneath his blanket and fired from the hip point-blank into the herd. Collins's six-shooter came out and up with a jerk. He was no longer the suave diplomat and benevolent Indian adviser;

this Indian was killing the cattle under his charge.

"Hol' on there, yuh — — low-lived —, yuh!" he called fiercely. "Don't yuh try any more o' that funny work, or I'll let — into yuh so quick yuh'll never know what hit yuh. Yuh can go to Fort Custer, or yuh can go to —, if yuh want to; but I tell yuh right here, if yuh ever get past here, it'll be after yuh an' me an' a whole lot of yer friends have cashed in. Sabe?"

Young Moon understood fully. The cow-puncher was mad. Mad cow-punchers with big blue six-shooters in their hands are not objects to fuss lightly with. Young Moon hesitated.

For a moment the two faced each other silently, the Indian and the cow-puncher, the gaudy, picturesque savage and the commonplace utilitarian, the old and the new. Both had much to think of in that moment. Young Moon tried hard to conceive some manner in which he could get a good shot at Collins without danger to himself.

Collins was thinking of the property under his charge, the herd running wildly back and forth in the trail below, and the new home of Peterson the "newcomer," which lay farther down the valley, the first of the houses in the path of Young Moon and his followers. Collins suddenly remembered that there was a young wife in the home of the newcomer; also a little red-cheeked, yellow-haired baby, who had played in the dooryard when he passed there in the morning on his search for the strays.

"I suppose these rowdies 'u'd scare — out o' that little woman if they ever get that far," he thought. "They might even— No; they'll never get a chance for that; I'm here to see they don't get—"

"Here, yuh!" It was Collins who cried out. Young Moon was deliberately throwing the empty shell out of his rifle. "Hol' on the—"

The words were cut short in Collins's mouth. Action, swift, sure, terrible, had taken their place. Young Moon was down on his face in the bunch-grass, and dust and a tiny thread of blue smoke wreathed upward from Collins's pistol. A dozen shoulders hunched into shooting position and a dozen black rifle-barrels focused on Collins. But Young Moon began to rise to his feet slowly, hesitatingly, as a drunken man rises. His bonnet was off, the feathers were awry, the hot, stale dust was thick upon a face gray with terror, and a look of awful, unutterable surprise was in his small black eyes. He stretched his arms outward—the gesture of a chief commanding quiet, peace.

"You see now that I am the Great Spirit," he said boastfully. "The white man's bullet slays the flesh, but the spirit still lives." He stood up straight and virile in the sunlight and shouted, "I cannot die!"

Deliberately he turned to take aim at Collins.

No quick snap-shot this time. Young Moon fell prone on his face, his limbs out-stretched in the rigidity which tells unquestionably of death, sudden and violent.

His followers waited silently and expectantly for him to rise, and Collins deliberately turned his back on the band and rode down the trail.

"Oh, Young Moon! Arise, arise, Young Moon!" called the bucks.

The wind that waved the prairie-grass stirred slightly some of the war-feathers; otherwise there was no motion.

"Speak! Oh, speak, Great Spirit!" they cried as they rode up to him. But the spirit failed to respond.

"So, so he is dead," said one who dismounted and turned him on his back.

The band glanced as one man down the valley, where Collins was driving the herd before him at a gallop. It seemed an easy matter to overtake him, but—Young Moon, their wonderful medicine-man, the invulnerable, was dead.

His brother, with the aid of another, silently placed the body securely on a pony, and the band silently followed as the pony turned his nose north toward the reservation.

"Uh, so only Young Moon is dead?" queried the old men sneeringly when they saw the laden pony.

The young men said naught, but with hanging heads accepted the sneers due them as stoically as the old men had received the taunts of a few nights ago. The old squaw had the body brought to her tepee, for his kin would not own him, and a breed-dog sat outside and howled long and loud in the night. Otherwise the camp would have slept quite peacefully.

Collins, as he rode past Peterson's with the herd, saw the woman holding the yellow-haired baby by the hands, while the little one, gurgling with laughter, tottered around in a somewhat uncertain circle.

"Hallo, Meester Cohlenss!" called the woman, cheerily. "Ai see you got t'ose cows oll right."

"Oh, yes," said Collins; "yes, I got the cows all right."