The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier | Page 9

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 ca?on. 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 ca?on. 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 ca?on, 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 ca?on.
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 rank and file of that great army of cow-hunters whose destiny it was to become the pioneers of this vast region. Pistol and knife were the treasured toys of their childhood; they were inured to danger and to hardship; they were expert horsemen, trained Indian-fighters, reckless of life but cool in its defence; and thus they were an ideal class for the pacification of the Plains.
Shanghai Rhett's death removed one of the comparatively few survivors of this most interesting and eventful past.
In Texas after the war, when Shang was young, a pony, a lariat, a six-shooter, and a branding iron were sufficient instruments for the acquisition of wealth. A trained eye and a practised hand were necessary for the effective