The kid and I had to run out to the edge of the prairie. We always did when they started to scrap.
She came out, hooked up the team and began dumping in her things and the kid's.
"Johnny, get your duds; we're going to leave," she said.
I never felt so isolated in my life. The kid didn't want to leave me. I started to cry. It was getting terribly dark. The woman came back. "Honey, I can't take you," she said.
I was afraid of the dark, afraid of the silence. I caught hold of her. She pushed me away, climbed up on the wagon and drove off, leaving me alone on the
prairie with the man she thought she had murdered.
CHAPTER II.
Failure as a bootblack; a friendly foreman; the only kid on the range; flogged at the wagon-tongue; slaying of the foreman; vengeance on the assassin.
I sat there until the night, pulsing and heavy, seemed to fold in on me like a blanket. Then I rolled over on my face and groped along to the embers where Al Brown lay. I wanted company. I crouched down at his side and lay there. I was almost asleep when a queer thumping sent a shivering terror through me. I lay still and listened. It was Al Brown's heart beating against my ear.
The bells and whistles of all New York thundering to the New Year sent me crazy with delight the first time I heard them—the prison gate clanging to on me made me insolent with joy—but never was there a sound so good to hear as the pumping of Al Brown's heart.
I grabbed his hat and ran to the big buffalo wallow. Again and again I dashed the hatful of water in his face. Finally he lolled over to one side and struggled to his knees. "Which way'd she go?" He asked quietly enough, but I was suspicious. I pointed in the opposite direction. Al rubbed the blood from the side of his face. "Let her go," he said amiably, and went stumbling off toward the creek. I followed him. He turned about. "Go 'long, sonny," he said.
I waited till he took a few paces and then I sneaked after him. If Al Brown or his wife had stuck by me then I don't believe I'd be Al Jennings, the outlaw, today. It made him angry to have me trailing him. "See here, sonny, you go long hustle for yourself!"
It was a mile across the curly mesquite flats to the town of La Junta. My heels were my only horses then, but the bullets of a sheriff's posse never set me sprinting the way that prairie darkness did. I reached the town just in time to catch special apartments where the hay was clean and soft on a west-going train. It trundled into Trinidad, Colo., at 3 a. m., and I hung around the depot until morning casting about for a business opening.
My opportunity came with a Mexican kid of my own age. He carried a bootblack kit. I had a quarter. We swapped and I set out with my brushes ready to clean all the boots in the State. But the Mex swindled me. The people in Trinidad never blacked their shoes. I shouted "Shine, shine" until my throat ached and my stomach hooted with neglect. I felt like a menial.
At last I collared a patron. A giant in a white hat with a string hanging down in front and another in back, a gray shirt, and sloppy, check trousers that seemed to stick by a miracle to his hips, slouched my way.
It was Jim Stanton, foreman of the 101 Ranch. He had the longest nose, the hardest face and the warmest heart of any man I ever knew. Three years later, when I was 14, Stanton was murdered. I'd like to have died that day.
My prospective patron wore boots with the long, narrow heels, sloping toward the instep, that the cowboys of that time wore. I wanted a closer squint at them.
I stood in his way and asked insultingly, "Shine?"
"Lo, Sandy, never had no paste on them yet; try it."
He didn't like my methods. The black stuck in mealy spots.
"Reckon you didn't daub it right, bub," he said.
"Go to hell, damn you," I told him.
"Pow'ful bad temper, sonny," he drawled. "How'd you like to be a cowboy?"
It was kid heaven opened to me. That night I took my first long ride. Jim Stanton fitted me out from head to foot. I had never sat a horse, but we went 60 miles without a stop. There wasn't a kid on the range. They gave me a man's work and a man's responsibilities. They made me the wrangler, and when I took to running the fifty horses over the hills they used cowboy discipline to teach me that horses should be walked in. They strung me out across the wagon tongue and beat me into insensibility.
After that beating I was an outcast. Nobody so much as noticed me. I longed for the Prairie Kid. I would have run away, but there was no place to go. The resentment that always riled me when the law went against me was burning my heart out. I hated them all.
I was sitting down by the corrals one day when Stanton came along. "Lo, Sandy, here's a new bridle with tassels on it. Get your horse." It was the first thing any one had said to me in three days and I just busted out crying.
I was Jim Stanton's man Friday after that. He came to trust me like the toughest man on the range. He treated me like a pal. Stanton taught me cowboy law and, except for the running of the horses in my early days, I never violated it. I was square as any fellow and was reckoned a valuable hand, though I was ten years younger than most of them.
Then came the tragedy that made me a "wild one." Some steers from the O-X ranch got mixed with ours. There was a dispute over the brands. Jim won his point, and the O-X peelers left without any particular ill-feeling.
Jim went down to the branding pen to look over the steers. I was standing about two hundred feet away when I heard a shot fired, and an instant later caught sight of Pedro, one of the O-X men, galloping off at a mad speed.
Villainy had been done. I knew it. I ran down to the pens. Jim was crouched over on his knees with a bullet hole in his back.
It was as though everything went dead within me. It was the first real grief I had ever known. I sat there holding Jim's hand when I should have been out after Pedro. I sat there mopping his blood off with a bandana when I should have been yelling for help. Jim was the only friend I had ever had—he was all but God to me.
To shoot a man from behind is crime in the cowboy code. The man who does it is a coward and a murderer. He is pursued and his punishment is death.
Pedro vanished from the face of the earth for a few months. We gave up the chase for him. One day Chicken, a kid of eighteen, came back from the hills. He had been watching our cattle to keep the steers from following a trail herd going north.
"Get your horse," he said. "I know where Pedro is—Presidio county on the Rio Grande."
We left that night with four horses and fifty dollars from Jim's successor. We rode six hundred miles and we got to Uncle Jimmy Ellison's on the Rio Grande just as the peelers were coming back from gathering horses for the spring work. They were running them into the corrals. I rode up and stood at the fence. Pedro came galloping up and into the corrals from the opposite side. He didn't see me.
Like a flash I spurred in between the horses. They went wild and broke from the corral. Pedro turned, recognized me, and shouted to the men. I fired and caught him clean between the eyes.
CHAPTER III.
Chuck-buyer for the Lazy Z; last journey to Las Cruces; shooting up a saloon; in the calaboose; arrival of the father.
In the code of the cowboy, it was right that Pedro should die. I felt that I had done a magnificent thing to kill him. Kidlike I had a notion that Jim Stanton had watched and approved.