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Updated: June 20, 2025
"Give me a white shirt number fifteen," he said to the clerk; "and be blamed sure it's the right size they ain't worth a cuss if they're too big!" A lone rider guided his horse in the early night, among the black lavas, on the desolate desert near Capaline, the dead volcano. He rode to the south, in the direction of the Cimarron.
Suddenly some awakened instinct in the numbed brain of the scout told him of a change in their surroundings. He felt rather than saw the difference. They had crossed the sand belt, and the contour of the prairie was rising. Then the Cimarron was near! Even as the conviction took shape, the ghostly outline of a small elevation loomed through the murk.
He stared at it scarce believing, imagining a delusion, and then sent his cracked voice back in a shout on the wind. "We 're thar, 'Brick'! My God, lad, here 's the Cimarron!" He wheeled about, shading his mouth, so as to make the words carry through the storm. "Do you hear? We're within a half mile o' the river. Stir Carroll up! Beat the life inter him! There 's shelter and fire comin'!"
Cimarron River, sluggish and yellow, bounded the town on the south. The dominant note of Eagle Butte was a pathetic mixture of regret for glories of other days and clumsy ambition to assume the ways of a city. Striving hard to be modern it succeeded only in being grotesque. The western plains are sprinkled with towns like that.
The marks on his face had all disappeared, except an ugly gash under his right eye which still showed a slight discoloration and a smaller cut on the chin. The Cimarron doctor had told him that the wound under his eye would leave a permanent scar the wound had been deep and in spite of the doctor's care, had drawn together queerly, affecting the eye itself and giving it an odd expression.
"It may have run far that stormy morning when it broke out of the corral, and possibly some party coming over the Cimarron Trail picked it up and roved on this way. There is no telling how it got here, since it keeps still itself about the matter. Losing and finding and losing again is the law of events on the plains." "But why should it find us right here to-night, like it had been led back?"
Nellie Hazelton had given him what care she could out of her limited knowledge and now nothing more could be done until the arrival of the Cimarron doctor.
The maps were all wrong, and in the trackless wastes and silent sand-dunes of the Cimarron country gaunt Starvation was waiting to clutch our vitals with its gnarled claws; while with all our nakedness and famine and peril, the winter blizzard, swirling its myriad whips of stinging cold came raging across the land and caught us in its icy grip.
"Our girl was called to Santa Fé, and Daniel here goes with her. I couldn't stay behind, of course," my uncle said. "The Comanches are making trouble all along the Cimarron, and we will go up the Arkansas by the old trail route. It is farther, but the soldiers say much safer right now, and maybe just as quick for us. There is no load of freight to hinder us two wagons and our mounts.
They were at once pursued by General Sully with a small force, but by the time he reached the Cimarron the war-party had finished its raid on the upper Arkansas, and so many Indians combined against Sully that he was compelled to withdraw to Fort Dodge, which he reached not without considerable difficulty, and after three severe fights.
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