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THE LONESOME TRAIL


[Illustration: _Drawn by F. E. Schoonover_
THE RACE WITH THE FIRE
_See “The Nemesis of the Deuces,” page 300_]


THE LONESOME TRAIL

by

JOHN G. NEIHARDT

   “_In the fell clutch of circumstance
   I have not winced nor cried aloud._”







New York: John Lane Company, MCMVII
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head

Copyright, 1907,
by
John G. Neihardt


                                  TO

                            VOLNEY STREAMER

                      “_Friend of my Yester-age_”




_The stories in this volume have appeared in the following magazines:
Munsey’s, The American Magazine, The Smart Set, The Scrap Book,
The All-Story, Watson’s, Overland Monthly. The author gratefully
acknowledges permission to republish._




  CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                         PAGE

      I. THE ALIEN                                  11

     II. THE LOOK IN THE FACE                       31

    III. FEATHER FOR FEATHER                        45

     IV. THE SCARS                                  58

      V. THE FADING OF SHADOW FLOWER                75

     VI. THE ART OF HATE                            93

    VII. THE SINGER OF THE ACHE                    110

   VIII. THE WHITE WAKUNDA                         123

     IX. THE TRIUMPH OF SEHA                       143

      X. THE END OF THE DREAM                      151

     XI. THE REVOLT OF A SHEEP                     168

    XII. THE MARK OF SHAME                         182

   XIII. THE BEATING OF THE WAR DRUMS              194

    XIV. DREAMS ARE WISER THAN MEN                 204

     XV. THE SMILE OF GOD                          219

    XVI. THE HEART OF A WOMAN                      229

   XVII. MIGNON                                    239

  XVIII. A POLITICAL COUP AT LITTLE OMAHA          255

    XIX. THE LAST THUNDER SONG                     276

     XX. THE NEMESIS OF THE DEUCES                 288




_THE OLD CRY_


  _O Mourner in the silence of the hills,
  O Thing of ancient griefs, art thou a wolf?
  I heard a cry that shook me—was it thine?_

  _Low in the mystic purple of the west
  The weird moon hangs, a tarnished silver slug:
  Vast, vast the hollow empty night curves down,
  Stabbed with the glass-like glinting of the stars,
  And, save when that wild cry grows up anon,
  No sound but this dull murmur of the hush—
  The winter hush._

                _Hark! once again thy cry!_
  _Thy strange, sharp, ice-like, tenuous complaint,
  As though the spirit of this frozen waste
  Pinched with the cruel frost yearned summerward!_

  _I know thou art a wolf that criest so:
  Though hidden in the shadow, I can see
  Thy four feet huddled in the numbing frost,
  Thy snout, breath-whitened, pointing to the sky:
  Poor pariah of the plains, I know ’tis thou._

  _And yet—and yet—I heard a kinsman shout!
  Down through the intricate centuries it came,
  A far-blown cry! From old-world graves it grew,
  Up through the tumbled walls of ancient realms,
  Up through the lizard-haunted heaps of stone,
  Up through the choking ashes of old fanes,
  The pitiful debris where Grandeur dwelt,
  Out of the old-world wilderness it grew—
  The cry I know! And I have heard my Kin!_




I

THE ALIEN


THROUGH the quiet night, crystalline with the pervading spirit of the
frost, under prairie skies of mystic purple pierced with the glass-like
glinting of the stars, fled Antoine.

Huge and hollow-sounding with the clatter of the pinto’s hoofs hung the
night above and about—lonesome, empty, bitter as the soul of him who
fled.

A weary age of flight since sunset; and now the midnight saw the
thin-limbed, long-haired pony slowly losing his nerve, tottering,
rasping in the throat. With pitiless spike-spurred heels the rider
hurled the beast into the empty night.

“Gwan! you blasted cayuse! you overgrown wolf-dog! you pot-bellied
shonga! Keep up that tune; I’m goin’ somewheres. What’d I steal you
fer? Pleasure? He, he, he, ho, ho, ho! I reckon; pleasure for the
half-breed! Gwan!”

Suddenly rounding a bank of sand, the pinto sighted the broad,
ice-bound river, an elysian stream of glinting silver under the stars.
Sniffing and crouching upon its haunches at the sudden glow that
dwindled a gleaming thread into the further dusk, the jaded beast
received a series of vicious jabs from the spike-spurred heels. It
groaned and lunged forward again, taking with uncertain feet the
glaring path ahead, and awakening dull, snarling thunder in the under
regions of the ice. Slipping, struggling, doing its brute best to
overcome fatigue and the uncertainty of its path, the pinto covered the
ice.

“Doin’ a war dance, eh?” growled the man with bitter mirth, and
gouging the foaming bloody flanks of the animal. “Gwan! Set up that
tune; I want fast music, ’cause I’m goin’ somewheres—don’t know
where—somewheres out there in the shadders! Come here, will you? Take
that and that and _that_! Now will you kick the scen’ry back’ards? By
the——!”

The brutal cries of the man were cut short as he shot far over the
pommel, lunging headlong over the pinto’s head, and striking with head
and shoulders upon the glare ice. When he stopped sliding he lay very
still for a few moments. Then he groaned, sat up, and found that the
bluffs and the river and the stars and the universe in general were
whirling giddily, with himself for the dizzy centre.

With uncertain arms he reached out, endeavouring to check the sickening
motion of things with the sheer force of his powerful hands. He was
thrown down like a weakling wrestling with a giant. He lay still,
cursing in a whisper, trying to steady the universe, until the motion
passed, leaving in his nerves the sickening sensation incident to the
sudden ending of a rapid flight.

With great care Antoine raised himself upon his elbows and gazed about
with an imbecile leer. Then he began to remember; remembered that
he was hunted; that he was an outcast, a man of no race; remembered
dimly, and with a malignant grin, a portion of a long series of crimes;
remembered that the last was horse-stealing and that some of the
others concerned blood. And as he remembered, he felt with horrible
distinctness the lariat tightening about his neck—the lariat that the
men of Cabanne’s trading post were bringing on fleet horses, nearer,
nearer, nearer through the silent night.

Antoine shuddered and got to his feet, looming huge against the
star-sprent surface of the ice, as he turned a face of bestial
malevolence down trail and listened for the beat of hoofs. There was
only the dim, hollow murmur that dwells at the heart of silence.

“Got a long start,” he observed, with the chuckle of a man whom
desperation has made careless. “Hel-_lo_!”

A pale, semicircular glow, like the flare of a burning straw stack
a half day’s journey over the hills, had grown up at the horizon of
the east; and as the man stared, still in a maze from his recent
fall, the moon heaved a tarnished silver arc above the mystic rim of
sky, flooding with new light the river and the bluffs. The man stood
illumined—a big brute of a man, heavy-limbed, massive-shouldered, with
the slouching stoop and the alert air of an habitual skulker. He moved
uneasily, as though he had suddenly become visible to some lurking foe.
He glanced nervously about him, fumbled at the butt of a six-shooter
at his belt, then catching sight of the blotch of huddled dusk that was
the fallen pinto, the meaning of the situation flashed upon him.

“That cussed cayuse! Gone and done hisself like as not! Damn me! the
whole creation’s agin me!”

He made for the pony, snarling viciously as though its exhausted,
lacerated self were the visible body of the inimical universe. He
grasped the reins and jerked them violently. The brute only groaned and
let its weary head fall heavily upon the ice.

“_Get up!_”

Antoine began kicking the pony in the ribs, bringing forth great hollow
bellowings of pain.

“O, you won’t get up, eh? Agin me too, eh? Take that, and that and
_that_! I wished you was everybody in the whole world and hell to
oncet, I’d make you beller now I got you down! Take _that_!”

The man with a roar of anger fell upon the pony, snarling, striking,
kicking, but the pony only groaned. Its limbs could no longer support
its body. When Antoine had exhausted his rage, he got up, gave the pony
a parting kick on the nose, and started off at a dogtrot across the
glinting ice towards the bluffs beyond.

Ever and anon he stopped and whirled about with hand at ear. He heard
only the sullen murmur of the silence, broken occasionally by the whine
and pop of the ice and the plaintive, bitter wail of the coyotes
somewhere in the hills, like the heartbroken cry of the lonesome
prairie, yearning for the summer.

“O, I wouldn’t howl if I was you,” muttered the man to the coyotes;
“I wished I was a coyote or a grey wolf, knowin’ what I do. I’d be a
man-killer and a cattle-killer, I would. And then I’d have people of
my own. Wouldn’t be no cur of a half-breed runnin’ from his kind. O, I
wouldn’t howl if I was you!”

He proceeded at a swinging trot across the half mile of ice and halted
under the bluffs. He listened intently. A far sound had grown up in the
hollow night—vague, but unmistakable. It was the clatter of hoofs far
away, but clear in faintness, for the cold snap had made the prairie
one vast sounding-board. A light snow had fallen the night before, and
the trail of the refugee was traced in the moonlight, distinct as a
wagon track.

Antoine felt the pitiless pinch of the approaching lariat as he
listened. Then his accustomed bitter weariness of life came upon the
pariah.

“What’s the use of me runnin’? What am I runnin’ to? Nothin’—only more
of the same thing I’m runnin’ from; lonesomeness and hunger and the
like of that. Gettin’ awake stiff and cold and half starved and cussin’
the daylight ’cause it’s agin me like everything else, and gives me
away. Sneakin’ around in the brush till dark, eatin’ when I can like
a damned wolf, then goin’ to sleep hopin’ it’ll never get day. But
it always does. It’s all night somewheres