Full two hundred leading citizens of Bear Shield’s village had been blotted out, before the Cheyennes became aware of their fate and the grim manner of it; for the paleface never exposed his ambush by letting any Cheyenne get away. If the census of the Cheyenne party exceeded the count of rifles on the knoll, they were permitted to ride by in innocent drunkenness, unconscious of the death they had grazed. As for what dead Cheyennes went over the cliff, certain coyotes and ravens, educated of a prevailing plenty to haunt the spot, would in an hour remove the last trace of their taking off. Full two hundred Cheyennes, the flower of Bear Shield’s band, were sent to the happy hunting grounds, at the base of the wooded knoll on Medicine Lodge Creek, before their wondering relatives solved the puzzle of their disappearance. Once the gruesome riddle was read, the Cheyennes as a nation painted for war. It was then that Bear Shield drove North like a storm, leaving Sun City a memory, and killing out the last injurious paleface for forty miles around. That, however, is to one side of our narrative, which has to do with Cimarron Bill, about to re-establish himself as a mounted and therefore reputable member of society.
Mr. Masterson sought to dissuade Cimarron Bill from his enterprise. It was not that he objected to the other’s vigorous scheme of gaining a remount; he wasn’t so tenderly given towards Cheyennes as all that. The government, in favor of appearances, might pretend to preserve the Cheyenne; but Mr. Masterson knew that in reality no close season for Cheyennes existed more than it did for gray wolves. But the wooded knoll on Medicine Lodge Creek was distant; to go and come meant days; the profit, one pony, was slight for so much effort and time and travel. Mr. Masterson, in comparison with the investment, pointed out the meagre sort of the reward. Also he offered to give Cimarron Bill a pony.
Mr. Masterson’s arguments availed nothing; Cimarron Bill was in that temper of diligent virtue, common with folk who have just finished a season of idleness and wicked revelry. He declined Mr. Masterson’s pony; he would win a pony for himself.
“No se’f-respectin’ gent,” observed Cimarron Bill, “can accept gifts from another gent. As you sow so shall you reap; havin’ recklessly lost my pony, I must now win out another by froogality an’ honest industry. Besides it ain’t jest the pony; thar’s the skelp – worth twenty-five dollars, it is, at the Dodge Bank. That’s a bet you overlooks. With that pony, an’ them twenty-five dollars for the skelp, I can begin life anoo.”
“Then,” returned Mr. Masterson, disgustedly, “if you’re going to play the fool, and waste five days and ride seventy-five miles and back to get a thirty-dollar pony and a twenty-five-dollar scalp, I might as well be a fool mate to you, and go along.”
“No, you stay here,” expostulated Cimarron Bill. “I might get downed; in which event it’ll be for you to look after Aunt Nettie.”
Cimarron Bill, despite his restless ways and careless want of forethought, always provided for Aunt Nettie. This was no work of difficulty; Aunt Nettie’s needs were neither numerous nor expensive, and, since a gentleman of the lively accuracy of Cimarron Bill could in the season kill and cure for his share fifty dollars’ worth of buffalo robes a day, they were readily overcome.
“One hundred shots,” Cimarron Bill was wont to say, “from my old eight-squar’, an’ Aunt Nettie is fixed for one plumb year.”
Mr. Masterson was about to remonstrate against remaining in Dodge, but Cimarron Bill interrupted.
“As a favor to me, Bat,” he said, “merely as a favor to me. I won’t be gone a week; an’ I’ll feel easier thinkin’ you’re left to look after Aunt Nettie in case of accidents. It’s inside o’ the possible, d’ye see, for this B’ar Shield outfit to get me; an Injun, now an’ then, does win a pot, you know.”
Mr. Masterson made over to the use of Cimarron Bill a chestnut broncho, famous for bottom and bad habits. After he had cantered away, Mr. Masterson reflected uneasily on Cimarron Bill’s anxiety over Aunt Nettie, the same being out of common. Mr. Masterson thought this a portent of bad luck. The notion made Mr. Masterson nervous; when Cimarron Bill had been absent a fortnight and no news of him, the nervousness grew into alarm.
“I wonder,” mused Mr. Masterson, gloomily, “if those Bear Shield outcasts have bumped him off. He was that careless, Bill was, some such turn might have been waiting in the deck for him any deal at all,” and Mr. Masterson sighed.
Mr. Trask’s freight teams came sauntering into Dodge from Fort Elliot; they might have cut the trail of the missing Cimarron Bill, and Mr. Masterson sought the Trask mule-skinners for information. They had freighted through Sun City, indeed their route ran by the wooded knoll so fatal to Cheyennes; not one, however, had heard sound or beheld sign of the vanished Cimarron Bill. At that, Mr. Masterson buckled on his six-shooter, thrust his rifle into the scabbard that garnished his saddle, and while the frost was on the short dry buffalo grass one December morning, sped southward for news.
At Sun City, Mr. Stumps of the Palace Hotel bore testimony that Cimarron Bill had passed one night at his caravansary, making merry, and departed full of confidence and Old Jordan in the morning.
“But he didn’t pack no outside liquor with him,” observed the experienced Mr. Stumps, who was capable of a deduction, “an’ what jag he carried would have been worn plumb away long before ever he reached Medicine Lodge Creek.”
Mr. Stumps averred that this was the last and all he knew of Cimarron Bill.
Mr. Masterson might have gone thirty miles further and interviewed Bear Shield himself. That befeathered chieftain, however, was a savage of prudence and counsel, and no one to boast of paleface scalps, though a thousand were drying in the lodges of his people. No, nothing could be gathered from the Cheyennes themselves. It was less trouble, and quite as sagacious, for Mr. Masterson to believe that Cimarron Bill had fallen a Cheyenne sacrifice, and abandon investigation. Adjusting it, therefore, in his own mind that Cimarron Bill had perished, Mr. Masterson started for Dodge, cogitating vengeance.
Mr. Masterson, while sad, was not to be shocked by a thing so commonplace as death, even though the one fallen had been his own blanket-mate. And he blamed no one – neither Cimarron Bill nor the Cheyenne who had taken his hair. Such events were as the certain incidents of existence, and might be counted on in their coming. Yesterday it had been the fate of Cimarron Bill; it might be his own to-morrow. Meanwhile, by every Western rule, it was his instant business to take a price from the Cheyennes, in scalps and ponies, for the lost life.
And there was Aunt Nettie. Mr. Masterson recalled the final urgency of Cimarron Bill’s exhortations to look after her in case he never returned.
“And I surely will,” ruminated Mr. Masterson. “When he said that, Bill must have felt, even if he couldn’t see, the cloud that hung over the future.”
Mr. Masterson deemed it his duty to acquaint Aunt Nettie with the demise of Cimarron Bill; at the terror of such a mission he shook in his saddle. Slowly he rode up to the little three-room cottage where Aunt Nettie made her home.
“Miss Dawson,” began Mr. Masterson, for while the lady was “Aunt Nettie” in the conversation of Dodge, she was invariably “Miss Dawson” to her face, “Miss Dawson, I’m afraid Bill’s dead.” Mr. Masterson faltered as he spoke these words. “If I knew how,” he went on, “to break the information soft, I’d do it; but such delicate plays are beyond my reach. All I can do is ride in and say that in my judgment Bear Shield’s outfit has downed him.”
“Oh!” retorted Aunt Nettie, retaining, with hand on hip, that attitude of scorn which she had assumed as she listened to Mr. Masterson, “oh, all you can do is ride in an’ say that in your jedgment” – the word came off Aunt Nettie’s tongue most witheringly – “B’ar Shield’s outfit has downed my Billy! Well then let me tell you this, Bat Masterson; thar ain’t no Cheyenne