The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier | Page 9

fatigue, the
doctor, unused to the plains, alert and watchful, they suddenly turned
the hill and came out upon the immediate head of the cañon, when
suddenly the doctor cried, seizing Scot's arm:
"Good God, Scott, look! For God's sake, look!"
And it was time. There on either hand, to their right and to their left,
tied by their lariats to drooping piñon bough, stood fifty or sixty Navajo
ponies. The ponies were bridled and saddled. Upon some were tied
lances and on others arms. All were dripping with sweat and heaving of
flank, their knife-marked ears drooping with fatigue; not more than five
minutes could have elapsed since their murderous riders had left them.
Apparently it was an ambush laid for them, and they were already
surrounded. Even the cool Scot shook himself in surprise to find that he
was still alive.
Overcome with terror, the doctor cried: "Turn, Scot! Turn, for Heaven's
sake! It's our only chance to pull for Vegas."
But Scot had been reflecting. With wits sharpened by a thousand perils
and trained in scores of desperate encounters, he answered: "Doc,

you're wrong; dead wrong. We're safe as if we were in Fort Union. If
they were laying for us we'd be dead now. No, they are after bigger
game. They have sighted a big freight outfit coming up from the Pecos,
and are laying for that in the cañon. We can slide through without
seeing a buck or hearing a shot. We'll go right on down Entoros, old
boy."
"Scot, you're crazy," said the doctor. "I will not go a step. Let's run for
Vegas. Any instant we may be attacked. Why, damn your fool soul,
they've no doubt got a bead on us this minute."
With a sharp stroke of his whip, Scot started the team into a smart trot
down into the cañon. Then he turned to the doctor and quietly answered:
"Doc, you seem to forget that Joe Loving is dying, and that I promised
to fetch you. Reckon you'll have to go!" And down they went into what
seemed the very jaws of death.
But Scot was right. It was a triumph of logic. The Navajos were indeed
lying for bigger game.
And so it happened that, come safely through the cañon, out two miles
on the plain they met a train off eight freight teams travelling toward
Vegas. They stopped and gave the freighters warning, told what they
had seen, begged them to halt and corral their wagons. But it was no
use. The freighters thought themselves strong enough to repel any
attack, and drove on into the cañon.
None of them came out.
And to this day the traveller through Enteros may see pathetic evidence
of their foolhardiness in a scattered lot of weather-worn and rusted
wheel tires and hub bands.
Before midnight Scot and the doctor reached Sumner, having changed
teams twice at Mexican placitas. Covering two hundred and sixty miles
in less than thirty hours, Scot Moore had kept his word! Unhappily,
however, Joe Loving had become so weak that he died under the shock
of the operation.

Now Scot Moore himself is dead and gone, but the memory of his
heroic ride should live as long as noble deeds are sung.
CHAPTER II
A COW-HUNTERS' COURT
The recent death of Shanghai Rhett, at Llano, Texas, makes another
hole in the rapidly thinning ranks of the pioneer Texas cow-hunters.
Cow-hunting in early days was the industry upon which many of the
greatest fortunes of the State were founded, and from it sprang the great
cattle-ranch industry that between the years 1866 and 1885 converted
into gold the rich wild grasses of the tenantless plains and mountains of
Texas, New Mexico, the Indian Territory, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado,
Wyoming, Dakota, and Montana.
The economic value of this great industrial movement in promoting the
settlement and development of that vast region of the West lying
between the ninety-eighth and one hundred and twentieth meridians,
and embracing half the total area of the United States, is comprehended
by few who were not personally familiar with the conditions of its rise
and progress. There can be no question that the ranch industry hastened
the occupation and settlement of the Plains by at least thirty years.
Farming in those wilds was then an impossibility. Remote from
railways, unmapped, and untrod by white men, it was under the sway
of hostile Indians, before whose attacks isolated farming settlements,
with houses widely scattered, would have been defenceless,--alike in
their position and in their inexperience in Indian warfare. Then,
moreover, there was neither a market nor means of transportation or the
farmer's product. All these conditions the Texas cow-hunters changed,
and they did it in little more than a decade.
In Texas were bred the leaders and the