the Thundering Herd (1984) (13 page)

"Milly!" He was incredulous, and as if to make sure of his good fortune he fell to caressing her.

Later then, sitting against one of the trees, with his arm round her waist, Milly told him the story of her life. She did not dwell long on the poverty and hard work of her childhood, nor the vanishing hopes and ideals of her school days, nor the last sordid months that had been so hard to endure.

"You poor girl! Well, we must have been made for each other," he replied, and briefly told his own story. Life had been hard work for him, too, full of loss, and lightened by little happiness.

Evidently it hurt him to confess that his father had been a guerilla under Quantrill.

"I always was a farmer," he concluded. "I dreamed of a fine ranch, all my own. And I'm going to have it. Milly, I'm making big money in this buffalo-hide business. I'll be rich. I'll have you, too!"

Milly shared his rapture and did not have the heart to speak of her disapproval of his killing buffalo, nor of her fear of Jett. She embraced joy for the first time.

The night hours wore on and the moon soared high in the heavens, full, silvery white, flooding the plain with light. Out there coyotes were yelping their sharp wild notes. From the river bottom came the deep bay of a wolf. An owl hooted dismally. All of this wildness and beauty seemed part of Milly's changed and uplifted life.

"Come, you must go back to your camp," said Doan at length.

"Oh--must I? I may never see you again!" she whispered.

"Plague me with my own words, will you?" he retorted, and his kisses silenced her. "Will you meet me here to-morrow night, soon as your folks are asleep?"

"Yes."

"Come then. It grows late. Lead the way, down, for I'm going as far as I dare with you."

Within sight of the pale gleam of the tents he bade her good-by and silently stole back into the shadow of the slope. Milly as stealthily reached her tent and slipped into it, full of heart and wide awake, to lie in her bed, realizing that in gratefulness for the changed world and the happiness she would now never relinquish, she must go back to the prayers of her childhood.

Chapter
VII

At dawn the singing of wild canaries awakened Milly Fayre. There must have been a flock of them that had alighted on the elm tree which sheltered her tent. She listened, finding in the sweet treble notes an augury for her future. How good to awaken to such music and thought.

A loud hoarse yawn from the direction of camp proclaimed the rising of one of the men. Soon after that a sharp ring of Jett's ax drove away the canaries. Rays of rosy light penetrated the slit of Milly's tent, final proof that another day had come. Milly felt a boundless swell of life within her. Never before had any day dawned like this one! She lingered in her bed long after the crackling of the camp fire and the metallic clinking of Dutch oven and skillet attested to the task of breakfast.

"Hey, Milly, you're gettin' worse than the old lady!" called out Jett, in voice for once without gruffness. "Are you dead?"

"I'm very much alive," replied Milly, almost in glee at the double meaning of her words.

"Pile out, then," added Jett.

Milly did not hurry so much as usual; a subtle courage had stirred in her; she felt inspired to outwit Jett. Yet she meant to pretend submission to his rule. Her hope was strong that the arduous toil of hunting and skinning buffalo would continue to leave Jett little time in camp, and none to molest her with evil intentions. He was too obsessed to make money to spare time for drinking.

"Wal, the bombardin' has begun," Follonsbee was heard to say.

"Some early birds that's new to buffalo huntin'," replied Jett.

"My experience is you get only so much shootin' in a day. I reckon, though, with the stragglin' bunches of this big herd rompin' to an' fro, we'll hear shootin' all day long."

The men were gone when Milly presented herself at the camp fire.

She ate so little that Mrs. Jett noted the absence of her usual appetite.

"Are you sick?" she asked, with something of solicitude.

"No. I just don't feel hungry," replied Milly.

"You've got a high color. Looks like a fever," said the woman, her bright bold eyes studying Milly's face. "Better let me mix you a dose of paregoric."

"Thanks, no. I'm all right," returned Milly. But despite her calm assurance she was intensely annoyed to feel an added heat in her flushed cheeks. It might not be so easy to fool this woman. Milly divined, however, that it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for Mrs. Jett to be sympathetic regarding Tom Doan. Still, Milly dare not trust such impulsive premonition. She performed her accustomed tasks more expeditiously and even better than usual, then repaired to her tent.

After that the interminable hours faced her. How many till moonrise! They seemed everlasting and insupportable. She could neither read nor sew; all she could do was to sit with idle hands, thinking. At length, however, she discovered that this very thinking, such as it had come to be, was happiness itself. She had only the short morning and evening tasks now, and all the hours to wait here in this permanent camp for the stolen meetings with Tom Doan. Hours that would become days and weeks, even months, all to wait for him! She embraced the fact. Loneliness was no longer fearful. She had a wonderful secret.

The morning was still and warm, not so hot as on other days, by reason of a cloudily hazed sky. The birds had gone away, and there was not a sound close at hand. But from the plain above and from across the stream that flowed into the Red River, and from all around it seemed, when she concentrated her attention, there came the detonations of guns. None were close by, and most appeared very distant. They had no regularity, yet there were but few intervals of perfect silence. On the other hand, sometimes a traveling volley of reports would begin away in the distance and apparently come closer and then gradually withdraw to die away. A few shots together appeared a rare occurrence.

"At every shot perhaps some poor buffalo falls--dead--or dying like that great crippled bull I saw. Augh!" exclaimed Milly, in revulsion at the thought. "I'd hate to have Tom Doan grow rich from murdering buffalo. . . . But he said he did not kill many-- that he was a skinner."

Then her ears seemed to fill with a low murmur or faint roar, like the rumble of distant thunder. At first she thought a storm was brewing out toward the Staked Plain, but the thunder was too steady and continuous. In surprise, she strained her hearing. Long low roar! What could it be? She had heard about the rumble of an earthquake and for a moment felt fear of the mysterious and unknown force under the earth. But this was a moving sound that came on the still summer air. It could be made only by buffalo.

"The thundering herd!" exclaimed Milly in awe. "That's what Jett called it."

She listened until the roar very slowly receded and diminished and rolled away into silence. Still the shooting continued, and this puzzled Milly because it was reasonable to suppose that if the hunters were pursuing the herd the sound of their guns would likewise die away.

Milly wandered round the camp, exploring places in the woods, and several times resisted a desire to go up the trail to the edge of the plain. Finally she yielded to it, halting under cover of the last trees, gazing out over the green expanse. It was barren as ever. The banging of guns appeared just as far away, just as difficult to locate. Milly wished she could climb high somewhere so that she might see over the surrounding country.

Near by stood a tree of a kind she did not know. It had branches low down and rose under one of the tall elms. Milly decided she would be much less likely to be seen up in a tree; besides, she could have her desire gratified. To this end she climbed the smaller tree, and from it into the elm, working to a high fork not easily attained. Then she gazed about her, and was so amazed and bewildered by the panorama that she had to exert her will to attend to any particular point of the compass.

Westward the green prairie rose in a grand fan-shaped slope of many leagues, ending in the horizon-wide upheaval of bold gray naked earth which the hunters called the Staked Plain. It was as level- topped as a table, wild, remote, austere, somehow menacing, like an unscalable wall.

In the middle of that vast stretch of green plain there were miles and miles of black patches, extending north and south as far as eye could see. Though they seemed motionless at that distance Milly recognized them as buffalo. Surely they could not be parts of the herd whence came the low, thundering roar.

Far to the left, along the shining green-bordered river, there appeared a belt of moving buffalo, moving to the southwest, and disappearing in what seemed a pall of dust. By turning her ear to that direction and holding her breath Milly again caught the low roar, now very faint. Much banging of guns came from that quarter.

Out on the plain from this belt were small herds of buffalo, hundreds of them, dotting the green, and some were in motion.

Then Milly espied thin threads of black moving across the river.

Buffalo swimming to the southern bank! These were several miles away, yet she saw them distinctly, and line after line they extended, like slender bridges, across the river until they, too, vanished in the curtain of dust. South of the river the boundless plain showed irregular ragged areas of black, and meandering threads, leading into the haze of distance. Eastward Milly gazed over a green river-bottom jungle, thick and impenetrable, to the level prairie blackened with buffalo. Here were straggling lines moving down toward the river. Altogether, then, the surrounding scene was one of immense openness, infinite waving green prairie crossed by widely separated streams, and made majestic by the domination of buffalo--everywhere buffalo, countless almost as the grasses of the prairie.

"What a pity they must die!" murmured Milly. For in the banging of the guns she heard the death knell of this multiplicity of beasts.

She had seen the same in the hard, greedy, strong faces of Jett, and buffalo-hunters like him. Nature with its perfect balance and adjustment of the wild beasts was nothing to Jett. He would kill every buffalo on the plains for the most he could get, if it were only a bottle of rum.

Milly pondered over vague ideas in her developing mind. God might have made the buffalo to furnish the Indians and white men with meat and fur, but surely not through the sordidness of a few to perish from the earth.

Above Milly, in the blue sky, and westward till her sight failed, were huge black birds, buzzards, sailing high and low, soaring round and round, till the upper air seemed filled with them.

Buzzards! Birds of prey they were--carrion-eaters, vultures that were enticed from their natural habits, from the need for which nature created them, to fall foul on this carnage left by the hunters.

Some of these uncanny birds of prey swooped down over Milly, and several alighted in a tree not far distant. Solemn, repulsive, they inspired in Milly a fear of the thing called nature. Were they necessary?

She did not long remain up there in her perch, and she discovered that descent was not so easy as climbing. Nevertheless she got by the worst of it without mishap, and then she breathed easier.

The thud of hoofs below caused her to stop abruptly. Horsemen were somewhere close at hand. Owing to the thick foliage she could not see what or where they were. Circling the trunk of the tree with her arm she leaned against it, making sure of her balance. She was still thirty feet from the ground, adequately hidden by bushy leaves, unless some one looked upward from directly beneath her.

It was natural to suppose these riders were buffalo-hunters.

Presently she espied them, indistinctly through the network of branches. They were riding from the north, evidently having come along the stream. To Milly's consternation they halted their horses almost directly under her. Then she made out that they were soldiers. She need have no fear of them, yet she did not like the idea of being discovered.

"Captain," spoke up one, "there's a good spring down this trail.

I'd like a drink of fresh cold water.--Here, one of you men take some canteens down and fill them. The trail leads to the spring."

One of the half dozen soldiers dismounted, and collecting several canteens from his companions he lounged off out of sight.

"Ellsworth, you know this Red River country?" spoke up another soldier.

"Reckon I do, though not very well down this far," came the reply.

"This is God's country compared to the Staked Plain. I know that well enough."

"Well, I figure we're on a wild-goose chase," said another, evidently an officer. He had dismounted to fling himself under one of the trees. He removed his sombrero to reveal a fine, strong, weather-beaten face, with mustache slightly gray. "We can never persuade these hide-hunters to go to the fort on account of Indian raids."

"Reckon not. But we can persuade them to send their women to a place of safety. Some of the fools have their women folk. For my part, I'd like to see these hunters band together against the Indians."

"Why?"

"Well, they're a hard lot and Lord only knows how many there are of them. They'll do what we soldiers never could do--whip that combination of redskin tribes."

"Better not say that in the colonel's hearing," said the officer, with a laugh.