years; and for another, everybody loved him. In the West when a man is loved they give him a nickname.
Also, there are no struggles for precedence in the West. Each man plays his part in peace or war as best dovetails with his pleasure. Not one in the beleaguered store would have hesitated to run the gauntlet of those savage rifles to bring water to young Thurston as he died. Yet not one would offer to take the place of Daddy Keeler. To do so would have been in violation of Panhandle proprieties, and Daddy Keeler would have resented it to the death.
Daddy Keeler took a bucket and tossed it through an opening. For all his years and hair of gray, he was as active as a cat. He made no task of sliding through the opening after the bucket. The four who remained stood ready, should the sight of him cause a rush to cut him off. As, bucket in hand, he started for the pump, a frightened dog, in hiding behind a heap of lumber, came forth and followed whiningly.
The savages were not slow in getting to work. They didn’t charge; their stomachs were too weary for that. But their rifles cracked by twos and tens and twenties. The bullets zipped and whistled as thick as twilight bats.
The pump was sun-dried and slow; it cost two minutes to start the water from the cracked spout, and five to fill the bucket. Smack! smack! the pump was struck a dozen times, while in twenty places the well-platform was rasped or whitely splintered by the flying lead.
Daddy Keeler pumped doggedly, and never raised his head; the creaking of the pump-handle matched with the low howling of the frightened dog. Daddy Keeler’s sombrero went whirling, the dog was shot down at his feet; still he pumped on. The bucket at last was filled. Daddy Keeler picked up his hat and fixed it on his head. Then he brought the bucket and passed it through the opening without spilling a drop. The next moment he had followed it, and never a mark upon him.
“It’s some hot out thar in the sun,” said Daddy Keeler, apologetically, wiping the great drops from his forehead. Then taking off his sombrero, and considering the double hole the bullet had left: “It was a forty-four did that; some of ’em’s shootin’ Winchesters.” For fourteen long, hot days the fight went on; now and then a charge, more often long-range shooting, whereat the buffalo hunters excelled. When the fight flagged the garrison played poker, leaving one to watch.
Every night one-half the garrison must dig graves for the dead – pony and Indian alike. The argument for these sexton labours was sanitary, not sentimental. In the blinding height of a Panhandle summer it is no good thing to be cordoned about with dead ponies and dead Indians. There was never a danger; your savage lies close, and will not move in the dark unless one crowd him. He is so much the Parthian that it is against his religion to fight in the night.
Before the burial parties tumbled an Indian into his sepulchre, they were at pains to have his scalp as an incontestable method of keeping accounts. On the fifteenth day, when the troops from Dodge relieved the siege, there were eighty topknots to tell the loss of the enemy.
Inez, when the fighting fell to long-range, cried to be lifted from her box. Inez did not fear bullets; arrows were a different commodity and set her nerves on edge. She could see them; besides, they smelled fearfully of Indians. As long as no arrow came spitting and splintering through the openings, Inez was without a care. She would have been content were it not for her rations of merely bread and water. This she thought squinted at parsimony, and it aroused her spleen.
When the cavalry came riding down from Dodge the beaten remnant of that war party went squattering through the shallow reaches of the Canadian, and headed south for the Staked Plains. Then the visiting Osages and Pawnees, pipe in hand and blankets wrapped about them, came beamingly from their audience hill to offer congratulations.
“How!” said Black Feather, the Osage chief, extending his hand to Mr. Wright “How! Heep big fight!”
Then Black Feather went over the four score scalps, and whether by tint of plume or mark of braid, hidden to the white man, confidently told the tribe of each.
“Comanche!” grunted Black Feather, picking up a scalp; and then: “Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arrapahoe,” as he pawed the others over one by one.
“Who were right in this shindy?” asked the captain of cavalry.
That officer was curious to hear what Black Feather would say to the question. Black Feather, who believed firmly in the equities of force, did not hesitate.
“White man right,” said he. “The longest lance is right.”
What of that mysterious bugle, whereof the music so shook the men of buffaloes? It was blown by a caitiff negro, a deserter from Uncle Sam’s swart cavalry. The third charge was the black bugler’s last. Striped and painted like the others, the burial party might never have known the race or colour of him had it not been for his want of a scalp lock. They took his bugle instead, and rolled him into the trench with the others.
“By the way, Bat,” remarked Mr. Wright, when two days after the fight, life at the ’Dobe Walls had gone back to old-time lines, “we forgot to thank you for seeing those Indians that time. They’d have cinched us, sure, if you hadn’t; killed us, as it were, on the nest. It ain’t too late to take a drink on it, is it?”
“The drink goes,” returned Mr. Masterson, drawing up to Mr. Hanrahan’s counter, which was again happily in its place; “the drink goes, but it ought to be for Inez. It was she who gave warning. If it hadn’t been for Inez every man of us would have gone with Thurston, and those eighty bucks might be riding yet. It was pretty work, Bob, to stand off five hundred Indians fourteen days, and only lose one man against their eighty.” Here Inez came mincingly through the door, like a fine lady thinking on her skirts. She nosed up to Mr. Masterson for a caress. “That’s right,” said Mr. Masterson, patting her satin neck, “you’re just in time, Ladybird. We’re going to drink to the White Man’s Medicine, Inez, of the ’Dobe Walls.”
CHAPTER IV – THE WILD ROSE OF THE CANADIAN
The town’s name was Mobeetie and, for the expansive suddenness of its springing up, might better have been Mushroom. A Cheyenne killed a buffalo in the flats that stretch from the Canadian, and as he peeled the husk from that buffalo the nearest paleface was thirty miles away. The next day came engineers, and ran lines and mapped out town lots on the ground where that buffalo was slain; within a week thereafter Mobeetie buzzed and bustled.
Mr. Masterson, ever full of the spirit of progress, gave up buffalo hunting for the nonce, and carried “chain” and pegged corners, and did what other deeds an amateur might do towards aiding the surveyors in laying out Mobeetie. Later, he aided the public in laying out certain predatory characters who from time to time rode into Mobeetie with a purpose of spoil. These latter intermittent lifts to law and order endeared Mr. Masterson to Mobeetie; the more since he was not, speaking strictly, a resident of that hamlet, having his roofless habitat on the buffalo range, with a home-camp at the ’Dobe Walls.
All folk, whether they be white or black or red or wheat-hued, are idolators in their hearts, and those of Mobeetie worshipped Mollie Brennan. The women worshipped her because her little feet took hold on innocence, the men for the beauty of her face – for brown of cheek, and red of lip, and with eyes as softly, gently deep as are those of an antelope, Mollie Brennan was beautiful. To her worshippers Mollie Brennan was known as The Wild Rose, and the name had been given her after this fashion:
Misled by drink, a chance-blown poet once upon a time invaded the Panhandle. Beholding Mollie Brennan, he fell in love, as poets will, and sighed on her obdurate trail for a wasted twelve-month. Because she would not listen, the poet poured forth his soul in sonnets, in which vehicle of verse he identified Mollie Brennan as “The Wild Rose of the Canadian.” There were no wild roses along the Canadian, at least in any near vicinity of
