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Once, in a thickety wet tract where the still air was suffocating and a sluggish runlet meandered widely, Hardy was forced, after long hinderance, to drop the trail and recover it on a rising ground beyond. There once more we were making good speed when we burst into an open grove where about a small, unpainted frame church a saddle-horse was tied under every swinging limb.
But we had approached them at an angle, for directly over head and across the river was a brake overgrown with thick brush, a splendid cover in which Indians might be lurking in the hope of ambushing any one who attempted to drive out the beeves. Two men were left with a single mattock to cut out and improve the exit, while the rest of us reconnoitered the thickety motte across the river.
The kill was made late in the day, in a bend of the river, about fifteen miles above the Vaux ranch, forming a jungle of several thousand acres. In this thickety covert the fugitive made his final stand, taking refuge in an immense old live-oak, the mossy festoons of which partially screened him from view.
As I growed up, the bar had become scacer in them parts, and it wan't every day you could scare up such a varmint, but now and then one ud turn up. There war tracks o' the bar's paws in this mud, an' I follered them along the water edge for nearly a mile then the trail turned into about as thickety a bottom as I ever seed anywhar. It would a baffled a cat to crawl through it.
A thickety motte of chaparral which grew back from the scattering timber on the river afforded him the shelter and seclusion he wanted, for he dared not trust himself where the grown cattle congregated for the day's siesta.
The cowmen had suffered so severely in time past from this enemy of cattle that the Cherokee Strip Cattle Association had that year offered a bounty of twenty dollars for wolf scalps. The lay of the land was extremely favorable. The Walnut Grove was a thickety covert on the north first bottom of the Cimarron, and possibly two miles wide by three long.
The road soon was among the hills; rough, thickety, wild; from one glen into another, down and up steep ridge sides, always mounting of course by degrees. Rough as it all was, there were olives and vineyards sometimes to be seen; often terraced hillsides which spoke of what had been. At last we came up out of a deep glen and saw at a distance the white line of wall which tells of Jerusalem.
From the aide-de-camp and the color-bearer came the first whole story of how Kincaid, with his picked volunteers, barely a gun detachment, and with Mandeville, who had brought the General's consent, had stolen noiselessly over the water-soaked leaves of a thickety oak wood in the earliest glimmer of a rainy dawn and drawn off the abandoned gun by hand to its waiting horses; also how, when threatened by a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and Charlie had hurried back on foot into the wood and hotly checked the pursuit long enough for their fellows to mount the team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel and flounder away with the prize.
There were two rifles, and had the chance come to my father, I think he would have killed him easily; but the opportunity came to a neighbor, who overshot, merely causing a slight wound. The next instant the stag charged at me from the cover of the thickety fence corner.
There were several thickety groves, extending from the main chaparral out for considerable distance on the prairie, but not of as rank a growth as on the alluvial river bottoms. These thickets were composed of thorny underbrush, frequently as large as fruit trees and of a density which made them impenetrable, except by those thoroughly familiar with the few established trails.
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