Produced by Al Haines
[Transcriber's note: Extensive research found no evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kid Wolf Of Texas
A Western Story
By
WARD M. STEVENS
CHELSEA HOUSE
79 Seventh Avenue, New York, N. Y.
PUBLISHERS
Kid Wolf Of Texas
Copyright, 1930, by CHELSEA HOUSE
Printed in the U. S. A.
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE LIVING DEAD II. A THANKLESS TASK III. THE GOVERNOR'S ANSWER IV. SURPRISES V. THE CAMP OF THE TERROR VI. ON THE CHISHOLM TRAIL VII. MCCAY'S RECRUIT VIII. ONE GAME HOMBRE IX. THE NIGHT HERD X. TUCUMCARI'S HAND XI. A BUCKSHOT GREETING XII. THE S BAR SPREAD XIII. DESPERATE MEASURES XIV. AT DON FLORISTO'S XV. GOLIDAY'S CHOICE XVI. A GAME OF POKER XVII. POT SHOTS XVIII. ON BLACKSNAKE'S TRAIL XIX. THE FANG OF THE WOLF XX. BATTLE ON THE MESA XXI. APACHES XXII. THE RESCUE XXIII. TWO OPEN GRAVES XXIV. PURSUIT XXV. BLIZZARD'S CHARGE
KID WOLF OF TEXAS
CHAPTER I
THE LIVING DEAD
"Oh, I want to go back to the Rio Grande! The Rio! That's where I long to be!"
The words, sung in a soft and musical tenor, died away and changed to aplaintive whistle, leaving the scene more lonely than ever. For a fewmoments nothing was to be seen except the endless expanse ofwilderness, and nothing was to be heard save the mournful warble of thesinger. Then a horse and rider were suddenly framed where the sparsetimber opened out upon the plain.
Together, man and mount made a striking picture; yet it would have beenhard to say which was the more picturesque--the rider or the horse.The latter was a splendid beast, and its spotless hide of snowy whiteglowed in the rays of the afternoon sun. With bit chains jingling, itgracefully leaped a gully, landing with all the agility of a mountainlion, in spite of its enormous size.
The rider, still whistling his Texas tune, swung in theconcha-decorated California stock saddle as if he were a part of hishorse. He was a lithe young figure, dressed in fringed buckskin,touched here and there with the gay colors of the Southwest and ofMexico.
Two six-guns, wooden-handled, were suspended from a cartridge belt ofcarved leather, and hung low on each hip. His even teeth showed whiteagainst the deep sunburn of his face.
"Reckon we-all bettah cut south, Blizzahd," he murmured to his horse."We haven't got any business on the Llano."
He spoke in the soft accents of the old South, and yet his speech wascolored with just a trace of Spanish--a musical drawl seldom heard farfrom that portion of Texas bordering the Rio Bravo del Norte.
Wheeling his mount, he searched the landscape with his keen blue eyes.Behind him was broken country; ahead of him was the terrible land thatmen have called the Llano Estacado. The land rose to it in a longseries of steppes with sharp ridges.
Queerly shaped and oddly colored buttes ascended toward it in apuzzling tangle. Dim in the distance was the Llano itself--a mesa witha floor as even as a table; a treeless plain without even a weed orshrub for a landmark; a plateau of peril without end.
The rider was doing well to avoid the Llano Estacado. Outlaw Indianbands roamed over its desolate expanse--the only human beings who couldlive there. In the winter, snowstorms raced screaming across it, fromTexas to New Mexico, for half a thousand miles. It was a country ofextremes. In the summer it was a scorching griddle of heat dried outby dry desert winds. Water was hard to find there, and food stillharder to obtain. And it was now late summer--the season of mockingmirages and deadly sun.
The horseman was just about to turn his steed's head directly to thesouthward when a sound came to his ears--a cry that made his eyes widenwith horror.
Few sounds are so thrillingly terrible as the dying scream of a mangledhorse, and yet this was far more awful. Only the throat of a humanbeing could emit that chilling cry. It rose in shrill crescendo, todie away in a sobbing wail that lifted the hair on the listener's head.Again and again it came--a moan born of the frightful torture of mortalagony.
Giving his mount a touch of spur, the horseman turned the animalwestward toward the Llano Estacado. So horrible were the sounds thathe had paled under his tan. But he headed directly toward thedirection of the cries. He knew that some human being was sufferingfrightful pain.
Crossing a sun-baked gully, he climbed upward and onto a flat-topped,miniature butte. Here he saw a spectacle that literally froze him withhorror.
Although accustomed to a hundred gruesome sights in that savage land,he had never seen one like this. Staked on the ground, feet and armswide-stretched, and securely bound, was a man. Or rather, it was athing that had once been a man. It was a torture that even thediabolical mind of an Indian could not have invented. It was theinsane creation of another race--the work of a madman.
For the suffering wretch had been left on his back, face up to the sun,with his eyelids removed!
Ants crawled over the sufferer, apparently believing him dead. Fliesbuzzed, and a raven flapped away, beating the air with its startledwings. The horseman dismounted, took his water bag from his horse, andapproached the tortured man.
The moaning man on the ground did not see him, for his eyes wereshriveled. He was blind.
The youth with the water bag tried to speak, but at first words failedto come. The sight was too ghastly.
"Heah's watah," he muttered finally. "Just--just try and stand thepain fo' a little longah. I'll do all I can fo' yo'."
He held the water bag at the swollen, blackened lips. Then he poured agenerous portion of the contents over the shriveled eyes andskeletonlike face.
For a while the tortured man could not speak. But while his rescuerslashed loose the rawhide ropes that bound him, he began to stammer afew words:
"Heaven bless yuh! I thought I was dead, or mad! Oh, how I wantedwater! Give me more--more!"
"In a little while," said the other gently.
In spite of the fact that he was now free, the sufferer could not movehis limbs. Groans came from his lips.
"Shoot me!" he cried. "Put a bullet through me! End this, if yuh'vegot any pity for me! I'm blind--dying. I can't stand the pain. Yuhmust have a gun. Why don't yuh kill me and finish me?"
It was the living dead! The buckskin-clad youth gave him more water,his face drawn with compassion.
"Yo'll feel bettah afta while," he murmured. "Just sit steady."
"Too late!" the tortured man almost screamed, "I'm dyin', I tell yuh!"
"How long have yo' been like this?"
"Three-four days. Maybe five. I lost count."
"Who did this thing?" was the fierce question.
"'The Terror'!" the reply came in a sobbing wail. "'The Masked Terror'and his murderin' band. I was a prospector. A wagon train wasstartin' across the Llano, and I tried to warn 'em. I never reached'em. The Terror cut me off and left me like this! Say, I don't knowyore name, pard, but----"
"Call me 'Kid Wolf,'" answered the youth, "from Texas." His eyes hadnarrowed at the mention of the name "The Terror."
"Somethin' on my mind, Kid Wolf. It's that wagon train. The Terrorwill wipe it out. Promise me yuh'll try and warn 'em."
"I promise, old-timah," murmured the Texan. "Only yo' needn't to haveasked that. When yo' first mentioned it, I intended to do it. Whereis this wagon train, sah?"
In gasps--for his strength was rapidly failing him--the prospector gavewhat directions he could. Kid Wolf listened intently, his eyesblazing-blue coals.
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sp; "I'm passin' in my checks," sighed the sufferer weakly, when he hadgiven what information he could. "I'll go easier now."
"Yo' can be sure that I'll do all I can," the Texan assured him. "Fo'yo' see, that's always been mah business. I'm just a soldier ofmisfohtune, goin' through life tryin' to do all I can fo' the weak andoppressed. I'll risk mah life fo' these people, and heah's mah hand onthat!"
The prospector groped for his hand, took it, and tried to smile. In afew moments he had breathed his last, released from his pain. Kid Wolfremoved the bandanna from his own throat and placed it over the deadman's face. Then he weighted it down with small rocks and turned to go.
"Just about the time I get to thinkin' the world is good, Blizzahd," hesighed, addressing his white horse, "I find somethin' like this. Well,seems like we hit out across the Llano, aftah all. Let's get a moveon, amigo! We've got work to do."
The Texan's face, as he swung himself into the saddle, was set and hard.
"Oh, I'm goin' back to the Rio Grande! The Rio! For most a yeah, I've been away, And I'm lonesome now fo' me Old Lone Stah! The Rio! Wheah the gila monsters play!"
It was Kid Wolf's second day on the Llano Estacado, and his usual goodspirits had returned. His voice rose tunefully and cheerily above thesteady drumming of Blizzard's hoofs.
Surely the scene that lay before his eyes could not have aroused hisenthusiasm. It was lonely and desolate enough, with its endless sweepsdim against each horizon. The sky, blue, hot and pitiless, came downto meet the land on every hand, making a great circle unbroken by hillor mountain.
So clean-swept was the floor of the vast table-land that each milelooked exactly like another mile. There was not a tree, not a shrub,not a rock to break the weary monotony. It was no wonder that theSpanish padres, who had crossed this enormous plateau long before, hadnamed it the Llano Estacado--the Staked Plains. They had had a goodreason of their own. In order to keep the trail marked, they had beencompelled to drive stakes in the ground as they went along. Althoughthe stakes had gone long since, the name still stuck.
The day before, the Texan had climbed the natural rock steps that ledupward and westward toward the terrible mesa itself, each flat-toppedtable bringing him nearer the Staked Plains. And soon after reachingthe plateau he had found the trail left by a wagon train.
From the ruts left in the soil, Kid Wolf estimated that the outfit mustconsist of a large number of prairie schooners, at least twenty. TheTexan puzzled his mind over why this wagon train was taking such adangerous route. Where were they bound for? Surely for the Spanishsettlements of New Mexico--a perilous venture, at best.
Even on the level plain, a wagon outfit moves slowly, and the Texangained rapidly. Hourly the signs he had been following grew fresher.Late in the afternoon he made out a blot on the western horizon--a blotwith a hazy smudge above it. It was the wagon train. The smudge wasdust, dug up by the feet of many oxen.
"They must be loco," Kid Wolf muttered, "to try and cut across TheTerror's territory."
The Texan had heard much of The Terror. And what plainsman of that dayhadn't? He was the scourge of the table-lands, with his band of ahundred cutthroats, desperadoes recruited from the worst scum of theborder. More than half of his hired killers, it was said, were Mexicanoutlaws from Sonora and Chihuahua. Some were half-breed Indians, and afew were white gunmen who killed for the very joy of killing.
And The Terror himself? That was the mystery. Nobody knew hisidentity. Some rumors held that he was a white man; others maintainedthat he was a full-blooded Comanche Indian. Nobody had ever seen hisface, for he always was masked. His deeds were enough. No torture wastoo cruel for his insane mind. No risk was too great, if he couldobtain loot. With his band behind him, no man was safe on the StakedPlains. Many a smoldering pile of human bones testified to that.
As the Texan approached the outfit, he could hear the sharp crack ofthe bull whips and the hoarse shouts of the drivers. Twenty-twowagons, and in single file! Against the blue of the horizon, they madea pretty sight, with their white coverings. Kid Wolf, however, was notconcerned with the beauty of the picture. Great danger threatenedthem, and it was his duty to be of what assistance he could. Touchinghis big white horse with the spur, he came upon the long train's flank.
Ahead of the train were the scouts, or pathfinders. In the rear wasthe beef herd, on which the outfit depended for food. Behind that wasthe rear guard, armed with Winchesters.
The Texan neared the horseman at the head of the train, raising his armin the peace signal. To his surprise, one of the scouts threw up hisrifle! There was a puff of white smoke, and a bullet whistled over KidWolf's head.
"The fools!" muttered the Texan. "Can't they see I'm a friend?"
Setting his teeth, he rode ahead boldly, risking his life as he did so,for by this time several others had lifted their guns.
The six men who made up the advance party, eyed him sullenly as he drewup in front of them. The Texan found himself covered by half a dozenWinchesters.
"Who are yuh, and what do yuh want?" one of them demanded.
"I'm Kid Wolf, from Texas, sah. I have impo'tant news fo' the leaderof this outfit."
One of the sextet separated himself from the others and came so closeto the Texan that their horses almost touched.
"I'm in command!" he barked. "My name's Modoc. I'm in charge o' thistrain, and takin' it to Sante Fe."
The man, Modoc, was an impressive individual, bulky and stern. Hisface was thinner than the rest of his body, and Kid Wolf was ratherpuzzled to read the surly eyes that gleamed at him from under the bushyblack brows. He was more startled still, however, when Modoc whisperedin a voice just loud enough for him to hear:
"What color will the moon be to-night?"
Kid Wolf stared in astonishment. Was the man insane?