The Last of the Plainsmen | Page 5

All that my well-meaning friend suggested made me, of course, only
the more eager to go with Jones. Where I had once been interested in
the old buffalo hunter, I was now fascinated. And now I was with him
in the desert and seeing him as he was, a simple, quiet man, who fitted
the mountains and the silences, and the long reaches of distance.
"It does seem hard to believe--all this about Jones," remarked Judd, one
of Emmett's men.
"How could a man have the strength and the nerve? And isn't it cruel to

keep wild animals in captivity? it against God's word?"
Quick as speech could flow, Jones quoted: "And God said, 'Let us
make man in our image, and give him dominion over the fish of the sea,
the fowls of the air, over all the cattle, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth'!"
"Dominion--over all the beasts of the field!" repeated Jones, his big
voice rolling out. He clenched his huge fists, and spread wide his long
arms. "Dominion! That was God's word!" The power and intensity of
him could be felt. Then he relaxed, dropped his arms, and once more
grew calm. But he had shown a glimpse of the great, strange and
absorbing passion of his life. Once he had told me how, when a mere
child, he had hazarded limb and neck to capture a fox squirrel, how he
had held on to the vicious little animal, though it bit his hand through;
how he had never learned to play the games of boyhood; that when the
youths of the little Illinois village were at play, he roamed the prairies,
or the rolling, wooded hills, or watched a gopher hole. That boy was
father of the man: for sixty years an enduring passion for dominion
over wild animals had possessed him, and made his life an endless
pursuit.
Our guests, the Navajos, departed early, and vanished silently in the
gloom of the desert. We settled down again into a quiet that was broken
only by the low chant-like song of a praying Mormon. Suddenly the
hounds bristled, and old Moze, a surly and aggressive dog, rose and
barked at some real or imaginary desert prowler. A sharp command
from Jones made Moze crouch down, and the other hounds cowered
close together.
"Better tie up the dogs," suggested Jones. "Like as not coyotes run
down here from the hills."
The hounds were my especial delight. But Jones regarded them with
considerable contempt. When all was said, this was no small wonder,
for that quintet of long-eared canines would have tried the patience of a
saint. Old Moze was a Missouri hound that Jones had procured in that
State of uncertain qualities; and the dog had grown old over coon-trails.

He was black and white, grizzled and battlescarred; and if ever a dog
had an evil eye, Moze was that dog. He had a way of wagging his
tail--an indeterminate, equivocal sort of wag, as if he realized his
ugliness and knew he stood little chance of making friends, but was
still hopeful and willing. As for me, the first time he manifested this
evidence of a good heart under a rough coat, he won me forever.
To tell of Moze's derelictions up to that time would take more space
than would a history of the whole trip; but the enumeration of several
incidents will at once stamp him as a dog of character, and will
establish the fact that even if his progenitors had never taken any blue
ribbons, they had at least bequeathed him fighting blood. At Flagstaff
we chained him in the yard of a livery stable. Next morning we found
him hanging by his chain on the other side of an eight-foot fence. We
took him down, expecting to have the sorrowful duty of burying him;
but Moze shook himself, wagged his tail and then pitched into the
livery stable dog. As a matter of fact, fighting was his forte. He
whipped all of the dogs in Flagstaff; and when our blood hounds came
on from California, he put three of them hors de combat at once, and
subdued the pup with a savage growl. His crowning feat, however,
made even the stoical Jones open his mouth in amaze. We had taken
Moze to the El Tovar at the Grand Canyon, and finding it impossible to
get over to the north rim, we left him with one of Jones's men, called
Rust, who was working on the Canyon trail. Rust's instructions were to
bring Moze to Flagstaff in two weeks. He brought the dog a little ahead
time, and roared his appreciation of the relief it to get the responsibility
off his hands. And he related many strange things. most