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Trail's End

77 <h2>CHAPTER VII</h2><h3>A GENTLE COWBOY JOKE</h3> As Morgan's faculties cleared out of their turgid whirl, and the stars began to leave off their frivolous capers and stand still, he heard voices about him in the dark, and they were discussing the very interesting question of whether he should be hung like a horse thief or loaded upon a train and shipped away like sheep. Morgan's bruised senses assembled and righted at the first conscious grasp of this argument, as a laboring, buffeted ship rights when its shifted cargo is flung back to place by the shock of a mighty surge. Nature was on guard again in a moment, straining and tense in its sentry over the habitation of a soul so nearly deserted but a minute before. Morgan listened, sweating in the desperation of his plight. They had taken him away from the main part of town, as he was aware by the sound of its revelry in the near distance. Close at hand a railroad engine was frying and gasping; farther off another was snorting impatiently as it jerked the iron vertebrae of a long freight train. And these men whom he could not see around him in the darkness were discussing the expediency of hanging him while unconscious, against the morality of waiting for him to come to himself so he might have the felon's last appeal of prayer. One maintained that it was against all precedent to78 hang an unconscious man and send him off to perdition without a chance to enter a plea for his soul, and he argued soberly, in the manner of a man who had a spirit of fairness in him, and a little gleam of reason and morality left. To Morgan's relief and hope this man went further as he put his view of the case, even so far as to question their right to hang the granger at all. They clamored against him and tried to scoff him down, moving with drunken, scuffing feet near the spot where Morgan lay, as if to put the sentence into immediate execution. "Wait a minute now, boys," this unknown, unseen champion pleaded, "let's me and you talk this thing over some more. That kid put up a man's fight, even if he is a granger—you'll have to give him credit for that. I didn't find no knucks on him, and you didn't. He couldn't 'a' dropped 'em on the floor, and he couldn't 'a' swallered 'em. He didn't have no knucks, boys—that hard-hoofed granger just naturally tore into the Dutchman with his bare hands. I know he did, his hands is all cut and swelled up—here, wait till I strike a match and show you." Morgan thought it wise to feign insensibility while this apparently sober man among the crew struck a match and rolled his body over to show the granger's battered hands. The others were not convinced by this evidence, nor softened in the least. He was a granger, anyhow, a fencer of the range, an interloper who had come into their ancient domain like others of his grasshopper tribe to fence up the grazing lands and drive them from the one calling that they knew. If for no79 other reason, he deserved hanging for that. Ask anybody; they'd say the same. "That ain't no kind of talk," said the defender, reprovingly, "your daddies and mine was grangers before us, and our kids'll have to be grangers or nothin' after a while—if any of us ever has any. I was in for havin' a little fun with this feller; I was in on it with the rest of you to see the Dutchman hammer him flat, but the Dutchman wasn't a big enough feller for the job. Where's he at?" "Layin' up there on the depot platform," somebody said. "This feller flattened him out, done it like he had him on a anvil," the granger's advocate chuckled. "That there freight's goin' to pull out in a little while—let's look along till we find a empty car and chuck him in it. By morning he'll be in La Junta. He's had his lesson out of the cowman's book, he'll never come back to plow up this range." Morgan thought that, perhaps by adding his own argument to this unknown friend's, he might move the rest of the bunch from their cruel determination to have his life. He moved, making a breathing like a man coming to his senses, and struggled to sit up. There were exclamations of satisfaction that he had revived in time to relieve them of the responsibility of sending a man out of the world without a chance to pray. The man who had championed Morgan's cause helped him to sit up, asking him with a curious rough kindness if he wanted a drink. Morgan replied that he did. A bottle was put to his lips, bruised and swollen80 until they stood open by the rough usage his captors had given him while unconscious. He took a swallow of the whisky, shutting the rest out with tongue against teeth when the fellow insisted that he take a man's dose. They drew close around Morgan where he sat, back against this kind fellow's knee. Morgan could see them plainly now, although it was too dark to trace their features. One of them dropped the noose of a rope over his head as the one who stood behind him took the flask from his lips. Morgan knew by the feel of it against his neck that it was a platted rawhide, such as the Mexicans term reata. "Granger, if you got anything to say, say it," this one directed. Morgan recognized him as the one who had opened the trouble in Peden's hall. Morgan had considerable to say, and he said it without whimper or tremor, his only appeal being to their fairness and sense of justice between man and man. He went back a little farther in his simple history than he had gone with Judge Thayer that afternoon, telling them how he once had been a cowboy like themselves on the Nebraska and Wyoming range, leading up briefly, so they might feel they knew him, to his arrival in Ascalon that day, and his manner of incurring Seth Craddock's enmity, for which they were considering such an unreasonable punishment. Inflamed as they were by liquor, and all but insensible to reasonable argument, this simple story, enforced by the renewed plea of the one who befriended him, turned two or three others in Morgan's favor. They probably would have set him free if it had not been for81 the Dutchman, who joined them, apparently sober and bitterly vindictive, as they were considering that step. The Dutchman was for vengeance on his own account, Seth Craddock out of the consideration entirely. The granger had slugged him, he maintained; no man that ever walked on the grass was able to lay him out with bare hands. If they didn't hang the granger he'd shoot him, then and there, even though he would have to throw ashes on his stinking blood to keep it from driving everybody out of town. Wait a minute, the young man with the straddle suggested, speaking eagerly, as if he had been struck by an inspiration. The freight train was just pulling out; suppose they put the rope around the granger's body instead of his neck, leave his hands tied as they were, and hitch him to a car! In that way he'd hang himself. It would be plain suicide, as anybody with eyes could see. The innocence and humor of this sportful proposal appealed to them at once. It also satisfied the Dutchman, who seconded it loudly, with excited enthusiasm. The protests of the granger's defender and friend were unavailing. They pushed him back, even threatening him with their guns when he would have interfered to stay the execution of this inspired sentence. The train was getting under way; three of the gang laid hold of the reata and ran, dragging Morgan against his best efforts to brace his feet and hold them, the others pushing him toward the moving train. The long freight was bound westward. Morgan and his tormenters were beyond the railroad station, not far from82 Judge Thayer's little white office building, which Morgan could see through the gloom as he vainly turned his eyes about in the hope of some passing stranger to whom he could appeal. Luckily for Morgan, railroad trains did not get under way as quickly in those days of hand brakes and small engines as now. Added to the weight of the long string of empty cattle cars which the engine was laboring to get going was a grade, with several short curves to make it harder where the road wound in and out among small sand hills. By the time Morgan's captors had attached the rope to the ladder of a car, the headway of the train had increased until they were obliged to trot to keep up with it. Not being fleet of foot in their hobbling footgear when sober, they were at a double disadvantage when drunk and weaving on their legs. They made no attempt to follow Morgan and revel in his sufferings and peril, but fell back, content to enjoy their pleasantry at ease. Morgan lurched on over the uneven ground, still dizzy and weak from the bludgeoning he had undergone, unable to help his precarious balance by the use of his arms, doubly bound now by the rope about his middle which the Texans had drawn in running noose. It was Morgan's hope in the first few rods of this frightful journey that a brakeman might appear on top of the train, whose attention he might attract before the speed became so great he could no longer maintain it, or a lurch or a stumble in the ditch at the trackside might throw him under the wheels. A quick glance forward and back dispelled this hope;83 there was not the gleam of a lantern in sight. But somebody was running after him, almost beside him, and there were yells and shots out of the dark behind. Now the runner was beside Morgan, hand on his shoulder as if to steady himself, and Morgan's heart swelled with thankful gratitude for the unknown friend who had thus risked the displeasure of his comrades to set him free. The train was picking up speed rapidly, taxing Morgan's strength to hold pace with it trussed up as he was, the strain of the hauling rope feeling as if it would cut his arms to the bone. The man who labored to hold abreast of Morgan was slashing at the rope. Morgan felt the blade strike it, the tension yield for a second as if several strands had been cut. But not severed, not weakened enough to break it. It stiffened again immediately and the man, clinging desperately to Morgan's shoulder to hold his place in the quickening race, struck at it again and missed. There came more shots and shouts. Morgan's heroic friend stumbled, lost his hold on the shoulder of the man he was trying to save, fell behind out of sight. Morgan's poor hope for release from present torture and impending death now rested in the breaking of the rawhide rope where it had been weakened by that one desperate slash of the knife. He tried lunging back against the rope, but the speed of the train was too great; he could not brace a foot, he could not pause. There were gravel and small boulders in the ditch here. Morgan feared he would lose his footing and be dragged to his miserable end. But onward through the dark he struggled and84 stumbled, at a pace that would have taxed an unhampered man to maintain, the strain of the cutting rope about his body and arms like a band of hot iron. Should a brakeman appear now on top of the car to which he was tied, Morgan knew he had little chance of making himself heard through the noise of the train, spent as he was already, gasping short breaths which he seemed unable to drive into his burning lungs. How long could human strength and determination to cling to life endure this punishment! how long until he must fall and drag, unable to regain his feet, to be pounded at that cruel rope's end into a mangled, abhorrent thing! On, the grind of wheels, the jolt of loose-jointed cars over the clanking track drowning even the noise of the engine laboring up that merciful grade; on, staggering and swaying, flung like a pebble on a cord, shoulder now against the car, feet now flying, half lifted from the ground, among the stones of the ditch, over the uneven earth, across gullies, over crossings where there paused no traveler in the black despair of that night to give him the help for which he perished. On, the breath that he drew in gasping stridulation like liquid fire in his throat; on, the calm stars of the unemotional universe above his head; on, the wind of the wide prairie lands striking his face with their indefinable sweet scents which even clutching death did not deny his turbulent senses; on, pain in every nerve; on, joints straining and starting in their sockets; on, dragged, whipped, lashed from ditch to ties' end, flung from rocking car to crumbling bank, where jagged rocks85 cut his face and freed his blood to streak coldly upon his cheek. There was no likelihood that the train would stop in many miles—even now it was gaining speed, the engine over the crest of the grade. Only for a post that he might snub that stubborn strand of leather upon! only for a bridge where his swinging weight might break it! Faster—the train was going faster! The pain of his torture dulling as overcharged nerves refused to carry the growing load, Morgan still clung to his feet, pounding along in the dark. He was growing numb in body and mind, as one overwhelmed by a narcotic drug, yet he clung to the desperate necessity of keeping on his feet. How far he had come, how long he might yet endure, he had no thought to measure. He lived only for the insistent, tenacious purpose of keeping on his feet, rather than of keeping on his feet to live. He must run and pant, under the lash of nature that would not let him drop down and die, as long as a spark of consciousness remained or flying limbs could equal the speed of the train, helped on by the drag of that rawhide strand that would not break. No thought of death appalled him now as at first; its revolting terror at that rope's end had no place in his thought this crowded, surging moment. Only to live, to fight and live, to run, unfeeling feet striking like wood upon the wayside stones, and run, as a maimed, scorched creature before a fire, to fall into some cool place and live. And live! and live! In spite of all, to live!86 And presently the ground fell away beneath his feet, a swish of branches was about him, the soft, cool touch of leaves against his face. A moment he was flung and tangled among willows—it was a strange revelation through a chink of consciousness in that turmoil of life and death that swept the identifying scent of willows into his nostrils—and then he dropped, striking softly where water ran, and closed his eyes, thinking it must be the end. <hr class="major" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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