I said it was dangerous living in that part of the country even though you kept to your cabin and cornfield, for gangs of the foregoing was always riding about and murdering people. It was a specially good place to practice that profession, for there wasn’t any local law to speak of. Generally, if you rubbed out a person you hadn’t nobody to get after you but a Federal marshal out of Fort Smith or Van Buren over in Arkansas, where the court was, and they wasn’t active much at this time because the court people had all been Rebel and thus got the boot with the war. A saying went “There ain’t no Sunday west of St. Louie and no God west of Fort Smith.”
Now the center for the rough element was a town in the eastern Creek Nation called Mooskokee, which was where I proceeded upon leaving that family what had befriended me, with a view to getting the stage there and so travel up to Kansas and thence take the Union Pacific out to end-of-track, find Caroline and Frank Delight and cash in my third of our hauling business, for as I have said I needed money. In any event, I could always borrow a bundle off of Frank, for he would now be my brother-in-law.
I walked it to Mooskokee, about forty mile. I didn’t have a cent for stage fare, but over my shoulders I was toting a pack of raccoon skins that I expected to sell once in town, for they make a serviceable cap. Indeed I was wearing one. Well sir, I had reached what I took to be the outlying suburbs, a long muddy hog wallow, lined with ramshackle sties, and I saw an old colored man there, looking for his pigs, and says: “Uncle, could you direct me to the city of Mooskokee?”
He scratches through the sweat-rag on his head and answers: “You has already got almost clear through it.”
“I was just a-looking for the stage line.”
“The station,” he says, “is up the street and around the corner. But if I was you I’d hold off going there at present, for it is in the process of getting robbed, I do believe.”
Sure enough, no sooner had he spoke than a volley of shots sounded from where he pointed and directly a body of men on horseback come tearing around the corner and galloped towards us and would have run us down had we not rolled into a slough alongside the road. I don’t know what was their hurry, for they had nobody chasing them. Somebody had shot the sheriff yesterday, my acquaintance pointed out as we drug ourselves from the mud.
I thanked him and went down to the stage station, which I figured was safe enough now. The agent was lying in a pool of gore, and great holes gaped in the thin board walls where a fellow had been mighty free with a shotgun. Well, I was standing just inside what was left of the place, thinking how it didn’t make much difference to me, on account of I didn’t have the price of a ticket yet anyway, when I heard the noise of horses outside and in busts three very nasty-looking customers, bristling with firearms.
These fellows glare at me with their red eyes and then take in that body of the dead agent, and the one who seemed their leader says to the others: “Told you we was goin’ to be late. Now this no-good bastard has done beat us.”
Then he says to me with hurt pride: “We got the one before, and we would of beat you here this evenin’ hadn’t we been occypied down the road a piece with the stage itself. We robbed it and we burned it and we kilt the driver, we kilt the guard, we kilt the passengers, but one of them was a gal, and so we all _____ her before we kilt her.”
As I say, I never had the price of a fare, anyway. What concerned me at the moment, however, was my lack of a gun, which these skunks would soon notice and then I would join the stiff on the floor. I had to make the most of my time while they was still jealously admiring how they thought I had rubbed out the agent.
“My boys won’t like that,” I says. “They was fixing to get that stage themselves, and I reckon have found it by now and turned back and will want to meet them who stole their thunder.”
“How many boys you got?” says the leader. If he ever would introduce a drop of water to his face, he might have come out fairly good-looking. He was a breed of Indian and white, with fairish hair and thin features but walnut-colored skin. Another was almost black, with straight raven hair gathered in a knot behind. The third looked pure white but was the ugliest mortal I ever seen: had a bad eye, and an old knife cut that when healing had lifted his lip on the right side so you could see his teeth there even when he wasn’t grinning or snarling though it seemed as if he always was.
“Nineteen or twenty,” says I, and turned away right insolent, upon which I knowed they would make up their mind to shoot me in the back or knuckle under. It turned out they was bluffed, for the leader commences to boast.
