Lahoma

CHAPTER XXII

JOURNEY'S END

The snow, that morning, lay in drifts from five to eight inches across the trail, and to the height of several feet up against those rock walls raising, as on vast artificial tables, the higher stretches of the Kiowa country. But by noon the plain was scarcely streaked with white and when the sun set there was nothing to suggest that a snowflake had ever fallen in that sand-strewn world. The interminable reaches, broken only by the level uplands marked from the plain by their perpendicular walls, and the Wichita Mountains, as faint and unsubstantial to the eye as curved images of smoke against the sky—these dreary monotonies and remotenesses naturally oppress the traveler with a sense of his insignificance. The vast silences, too, of brooding, treeless wastes, sun-baked river-beds, shadowless brown squares standing for miles at a brief height above the shadowless brown floor of the plain—silences amidst which only the wind finds a voice—these, too, insist drearily on the nothingness of man.

But Wilfred and Lahoma were not thus affected. The somethingness of man had never to them been so thrillingly evident. They saw and heard that which was not, except for those having eyes and ears to apprehend—roses in the sand, bird-song in the desert. And when the rude cabins and hasty tents of the last stage-station in Greer County showed dark and white against the horizon of a spring-like morning, Wilfred cried exultantly:

"The end of the journey!"

And Lahoma, suddenly showing in her cheeks all the roses that had opened in her dreams, repeated gaily, yet a little brokenly:

"The end of the journey!"

The end of the journey meant a wedding. The plains blossom with endless flower-gardens and the mountains sing together when the end of the journey means a wedding.

Leaving Lahoma at the small new hotel from whose boards the sun began boiling out resin as soon as it was well aloft, Wilfred hurried after a fresh horse to carry him at once to the cove, ten miles away. Warning must be given to Brick Willock first of all. Lahoma even had a wild hope that Brick might devise some means whereby he could attend the wedding without danger of arrest, but to Wilfred this seemed impossible.

He had gone but a few steps from the hotel when he came face to face with the sheriff of Greer County. Cutting short his old friend's outburst of pleasure:

"Look here, Mizzoo," said Wilfred, drawing him aside from the curious throng on the sidewalk, "have you got a warrant against Brick Willock?"

Mizzoo tapped his breast. "Here!", he said; "know where he is?"

Wilfred sighed with relief: "At any rate, YOU don't!" he cried.

"No—'rat him! Where're you going, Bill?"

"I want a horse..."

"No use riding over to the cove," remarked his friend, with a grin. "That is, unless you want to call on some friends of mine—deputies; they're living in the dugout, just laying for Brick to show himself."

"But, MIZZOO!" expostulated Wilfred, "why are you taking so much trouble against my best friend? The warrant ought to be enough; and if you can't get a chance to serve it on him, that's not your fault. Your deputies haven't any right in that cove, and I'm going to smoke 'em out."

Mizzoo chewed, with a deprecatory shake of his head. "See here, old tap," he murmured, "don't you say nothing about being Brick Willock's friend. The whole country is roused against him. Heard of them three bodies?"

Wilfred explained that he had just come to town.

"Well, good lord, then, the pleasure I'm going to have in telling you something you don't know, and something that's full of meat! Let's go wheres we can sit down—this ain't no standing news." The lank red-faced sheriff started across the street without looking to see if he were followed.

He did not stop till he was in his room at the hotel. "Now," he said, locking the door, "sit down. Yes, you BET. I got a warrant against Brick Willock! It was sworn out by a fellow named Jeremiah Kimball—you know him as 'Red.' The form's regular, charges weighty. Brick Willock was once a member of Red Kimball's gang; he's the only one that didn't come in to get his amnesty. See? Well, he killed Red's brother—shot 'im. Gledware's coming on to witness to it. Willock will claim he done the deed to save Gledware's life—his and his little gal's. But Gledware will show it was otherwise. Red told me all about it. Brick's a murderer, and worst of all, he's a murderer without an amnesty—that's the only difference between him and Red. Well, old tap, I took my oath to do my duty. You know what that signifies."

"But there's no truth in all this rot. Brick HAD to shoot Kansas Kimball—"

"Well, let him show that in court. My business is to take him alive. That ain't all, that's just the preface. Listen! If you'll believe me, the stage that Red and his pards was in—coming here to swear out the warrant, they was—that there stage was set on by this friend of yours—yes, Brick has gathered together some of his old pards and is a highwayman—why, he shot one of Red's witnesses, and he shot the driver!"

"I know something about that holdup," cried Wilfred scornfully. "It must have been done by Indians."

"Red SAW Brick amongst the gang. He RECOGNIZED him. Well, Red and his other pard gets on horses they cuts loose, and comes like lightning, and gets here, and tells the story—and maybe you think this community ain't a-rearing and a-charging and a-sniffing for blood! There'd be more excitement against Brick Willock if there was more community, but such as they is, is concentrated."

"Mizzoo, listen to reason. Don't you understand that Red wants revenge, and has misrepresented this Indian attack to tally with his other lies?"

"I wouldn't say nothing against Red, old tap. It ain't gentlemanly to call dead folk liars."

"Dead folk!" echoed Wilfred, starting up.

"I KNOWED you didn't understand that Red's off the trail forever," Mizzoo rejoined gently. "I knowed you wouldn't be accusing him so rancid, had you been posted on his funeral."

Wilfred felt a great relief, then a great wonder.

"He's dead. I don't say he's better off, I don't know; but I guess the world is. I don't like to censure them that's departed. Brick Willock is still with us, and him the county can't say enough against. His life wouldn't be worth two bits if anybody laid eyes on 'im. Consider his high-handed doings. Wasn't it enough in the past to kill Red's brother, but what he must needs collect his pals, stop the stage-coach, shoot two men trying to get Red, and one of 'em the innocent driver? You say, yes. But hold on, that ain't all he done. No, sir. The very next day after Red swore out that warrant—and it was yesterday, if you ask ME—what is saw, when we men of Mangum comes out of our doors? Three corpses lying on the sidewalk, side by side. You say, what corpses? Wait. I'm coming to that. One was that driver; one was the pard that got shot with the driver. The other was Red Kimball his own self."

"I knew the bodies had been carried away from the trail," exclaimed Wilfred in perplexity. He related his discoveries of the stormy night.

"But you didn't know they had been brung to town all this distance to be laid beside Red. You didn't know Red had been stabbed so he could be added, too. You didn't know the three of them had been left on the street to rile up every man with blood in his veins. Why, Wilfred, it's an insult to the whole state of Texas, Such high-handed doings ain't to be bore. If Brick Willock don't want to be tried in court, is that an excuse for killing off all that might witness against him? It might of been ONCE. But we're determined to have a county of law-abiding citizens. Such free living has got to be nipped in the bud, or we'll have another No-Man's Land. We're determined to live under the laws. This is civilization. The cattle business is dead, land is getting tied up by title-deeds, the deer's gone, and there's nothing left but civilization. And I am the—er—as sheriff of Greer County I am a—I am the angel of civilization, you may say."

Mizzoo started up, too excited to notice Wilfred's suddenly distorted face. It was no time to display a sense of the ludicrous; the young man hotly burst into passionate argument and reasonable hypothesis.

"We've got civilization," Mizzoo declared doggedly, "and we aim to hold on to her, you bet! There's going to be no such doings as three corpses stretched out on the sidewalk for breakfast, not while I'm at the helm. How'd that look, if wrote up for the New York papers? That ain't all—remember that ghost I used to worry my life out over, trying to meet up with on the trail? Him, or her or it, that haunted every step of the way from Abilene to the Gulf of Mexico? It's a flitting, that ghost is! Well, I don't claim that no ghost is in my jurisdiction. Brick's flesh and blood, there's bone to him. As my aunt (Miss Sue of Missouri) used to say, 'he's some MAN.'"

Waving aside Mizzoo's ghost, Wilfred elaborated his theory of an Indian attack, described Brick's peaceable disposition, his gentleness to Lahoma—then dwelt on the friendship between himself and Brick, and the relations between himself and Brick's ward.

"It all comes to this," Mizzoo declared: "if you could make me think Willock a harmless lamb and as innocent, it wouldn't change conditions. This neighborhood calls for his life and'd take it if in reach; and my warrant calls for his arrest. All I can promise is to get him, if possible, behind the bars before the mob gets him in a rope. As my aunt, whom I have oft-times quoted my aunt (Miss Sue of Missouri, a woman of elegant sense)—'that's the word,' she used to say, 'with the bark on it!'"

Wilfred permitted himself the pleasure of taunting Mizzoo with the very evident truth that before Willock was hanged or imprisoned, he must first be caught.

Mizzoo grinned good-naturedly. "Yap. Well, we've got a clew locked up in jail right now that could tell us something, I judge, and will tell us something before set free; its name is Bill Atkins. He's a wise old coon, but as sour as a boiled owl,—nothing as yet to be negotiated with him than if he was a bobcat catched in a trap. We're hoping time'll mellow him—time and the prospect of being took out and swung from the nearest limb—speaking literary, not by nature, as you know trees is as scarce about here as Brick Willock himself."

Wilfred insisted on an immediate visit to Bill. "Brick declared he wouldn't tell Bill his hiding-place," he said, "for he didn't want to get him into trouble. He'll tell me if he knows anything—and if he doesn't, it's an outrage to shut him up, old as he is, and as rheumatic as he's old."

On the way to the rudely improvised prison, Mizzoo defended himself. "He wasn't too old and rheumatic to fight like a wildcat—why, he had to be lifted up bodily and carried into his cell. Not a word can we get out of him, or a bite of grub into him. I believe that old codger's just too obstinate to die!"

When they reached the prison door, the crowd gathered about them, eager for news, watching Mizzoo unfasten the door as if he were unlocking the secret to Willock's whereabouts. There were loud imprecations on the head of the murderer, and fierce prophecies as to what would happen to Bill if he preserved his incriminating silence. It seemed but a moment before hurrying forms from many directions packed themselves into a mass before the jail.

The cells were in the basement. The only entrance to the building was by means of a flight of six steps leading to an unroofed platform before the door of the story proper. Mizzoo and Wilfred, standing on this platform, were lifted above the heads of perhaps a hundred men who watched eagerly the dangling bunch of keys. Mizzoo had stationed three deputies at the foot of the steps to keep back the mob, for if the excited men once rushed into the jail nothing could check their course. The deputies, tall broad-shouldered fellows, pushed back the threatening tide, always with good-natured protests,—words half bantering, half appealing, repulsive thrusts of the arms, rough but inflicting no hurt. So peaceful a minute before had been the Square, it was difficult to comprehend the sudden spirit of danger.

Mizzoo whispered to Wilfred, "We'd better get in as quick as possible."

The words were lost in the increasing roar of voices. He spoke again:

"When I swing open the door, that bunch will try to make a run for it. You jump inside and I'll be after you like a shot.... We'll lock ourselves in—"

"Hey, Mizzoo!" shouted a voice from the crowd, "bring out that old cuss. Drag him to the platform, we want to hear what he's got to say.

"Say, Mr. Sheriff! Tell him if he won't come to us, we'll go to him. We've got to know where Brick Willock's hiding, and that's all about it."

"Sure!" growled a third. "What kind of a town is this, anyway? A refuge for highwaymen and murderers?"

A struggle took place at the foot of the stairs, not so good-naturedly as heretofore. A reasoning voice was heard: "Just let me say a word to the boys."

"Yes!" called others, "let's hear HIM!"

There was a surging forward, and a man was lifted literally over the heads of the three deputies; he reached the platform breathless, disheveled, but triumphant. It was the survivor of Red Kimball's band.

Mizzoo, mistaking his coming for a general rush, had hastily relocked the door, and he and Wilfred defended themselves with drawn revolvers.

"I ain't up here to do no harm," called the ex-highwayman. "I ain't got the spirit for warfare. My chief is killed, my pards is dead. Even that innocent stage-driver what knew nothing of us, is killed in the attack that Brick Willock made on us in the dark and behind our backs. How're you going to grow when the whole world knows you ain't nothing but a den of snakes? You may claim it's all Brick Willock. I say if he's bigger than the town, if he murders and stabs and you can't help it, then the town ain't as good as him. My life's in danger. I don't know if I'll draw another breath. What kind of a reputation is that for you to send abroad? There's a man in this jail can tell you where Willock's hiding. Good day!"

The speaker was down the steps in two leaps, and the deputies drew aside to let him pass out. Civic pride, above all, civic ambition, had been touched to the quick. A hoarse roar followed the speech, and cries for Bill grew frantic. Mizzoo, afraid to unlock the door, stared at Wilfred in perplexity.

"I told you they had civilization on the brain," he muttered. "The old times are past. I daresn't make a move toward that lock."

"Drop the keys behind you—I'll get 'em," Wilfred murmured. "Step a little forward. Say something to 'em."

"Ain't got nothing to say," growled Mizzoo, glaring at the mob. "These boys are in the right of it, that's how I feel—cuss that obstinate old bobcat! it's his own fault if they string him up."

"Here they come!" Wilfred exclaimed.

"Steady now, old Mizzoo—we've whipped packs of wolves before today—coyotes crazy with hunger—big gray loafers in the rocks—eh, Mizzoo?" He shouted to the deputies who had been pushed against the railing: "Give it to 'em, boys!"

But the deputies did not fire, and the mob, though chafing with mad impatience, did not advance. It was a single figure that swept up the steps, unobstructed, aided, indeed, by the mass of packed men in the street—a figure slight and erect, tingling with the necessity of action to which every vein and muscle responded, tingling so vitally, so electrically, that the crowd also tingled, not understanding, but none the less thrilled.

"Lahoma!" Wilfred was at her side. "You here!"

"Yes, I'm here," she returned breathlessly, her face flaming with excitement. "I'm going to talk to these people—let me have that—" She took the revolver from his unresisting hand, uncocked it, and slipped it into her bosom. Then she faced the mob and held up her empty hand.