We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh
morning out we found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie
Peak at our elbow (apparently) looming vast and solitary—a deep,
dark, rich indigo blue in hue, so portentously did the old
colossus frown under his beetling brows of storm-cloud. He was
thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he only seemed
removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right. We
breakfasted at Horse-Shoe Station, six hundred and seventy-six
miles out from St. Joseph. We had now reached a hostile Indian
country, and during the afternoon we passed Laparelle Station,
and enjoyed great discomfort all the time we were in the
neighborhood, being aware that many of the trees we dashed by at
arm’s length concealed a lurking Indian or two. During the
preceding night an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through the
pony-rider’s jacket, but he had ridden on, just the same, because
pony-riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things
except when killed. As long as they had life enough left in them
they had to stick to the horse and ride, even if the Indians had
been waiting for them a week, and were entirely out of patience.
About two hours and a half before we arrived at Laparelle
Station, the keeper in charge of it had fired four times at an
Indian, but he said with an injured air that the Indian had
“skipped around so’s to spile everything—and ammunition’s blamed
skurse, too.” The most natural inference conveyed by his manner
of speaking was, that in “skipping around,” the Indian had taken
an unfair advantage.
The coach we were in had a neat hole through its front—a
reminiscence of its last trip through this region. The bullet
that made it wounded the driver slightly, but he did not mind it
much. He said the place to keep a man “huffy” was down on the
Southern Overland, among the Apaches, before the company moved
the stage line up on the northern route. He said the Apaches used
to annoy him all the time down there, and that he came as near as
anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance, because
they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he “couldn’t hold
his vittles.” This person’s statement were not generally believed.
We shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the
hostile Indian country, and lay on our arms. We slept on them
some, but most of the time we only lay on them. We did not talk
much, but kept quiet and listened. It was an inky-black night,
and occasionally rainy. We were among woods and rocks, hills and
gorges—so shut in, in fact, that when we peeped through a chink
in a curtain, we could discern nothing. The driver and conductor
on top were still, too, or only spoke at long intervals, in low
tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible dangers. We
listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the grinding of
the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of the
wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us,
inseparable from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle,
the sense of remaining perfectly still in one place,
notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of the vehicle, the
trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels. We
listened a long time, with intent faculties and bated breath;
every time one of us would relax, and draw a long sigh of relief
and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a
sudden “Hark!” and instantly the experimenter was rigid and
listening again. So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes
dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a
dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a
condition by so strong a name—for it was a sleep set with a
hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird
and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams—a
sleep that was a chaos. Presently, dreams and sleep and the
sullen hush of the night were startled by a ringing report, and
cloven by such a long, wild, agonizing shriek! Then we heard—ten
steps from the stage—
“Help! help! help!” [It was our driver’s voice.]
“Kill him! Kill him like a dog!”
“I’m being murdered! Will no man lend me a pistol?”
“Look out! head him off! head him off!”
[Two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of
many feet, as if a crowd were closing and surging together around
some object; several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice
that said appealingly, “Don’t, gentlemen, please don’t—I’m a
dead man!” Then a fainter groan, and another blow, and away sped
the stage into the darkness, and left the grisly mystery behind
us.]
What a startle it was! Eight seconds would amply cover the
time it occupied—maybe even five would do it. We only had time
to plunge at a curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an
awkward and hindering flurry, when our whip cracked sharply
overhead, and we went rumbling and thundering away, down a
mountain “grade.”
We fed on that mystery the rest of the night—what was left of
it, for it was waning fast. It had to remain a present mystery,
for all we could get from the conductor in answer to our hails
was something that sounded, through the clatter of the wheels,
like “Tell you in the morning!”
So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a
chimney, and lay there in the dark, listening to each other’s
story of how he first felt and how many thousand Indians he first
thought had hurled themselves upon us, and what his remembrance
of the subsequent sounds was, and the order of their occurrence.
And we theorized, too, but there was never a theory that would
account for our driver’s voice being out there, nor yet account
for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were
Indians.
So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably
away, our boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by
the real presence of something to be anxious about.
We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence.
All that we could make out of the odds and ends of the
information we gathered in the morning, was that the disturbance
occurred at a station; that we changed drivers there, and that
the driver that got off there had been talking roughly about some
of the outlaws that infested the region (“for there wasn’t a man
around there but had a price on his head and didn’t dare show
himself in the settlements,” the conductor said); he had talked
roughly about these characters, and ought to have “drove up there
with his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him,
and begun business himself, because any softy would know they
would be laying for him.”
That was all we could gather, and we could see that neither
the conductor nor the new driver were much concerned about the
matter. They plainly had little respect for a man who would
deliver offensive opinions of people and then be so simple as to
come into their presence unprepared to “back his judgment,” as
they pleasantly phrased the killing of any fellow-being who did
not like said opinions. And likewise they plainly had a contempt
for the man’s poor discretion in venturing to rouse the wrath of
such utterly reckless wild beasts as those outlaws—and the
conductor added:
“I tell you it’s as much as Slade himself want to do!”
This remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity. I
cared nothing now about the Indians, and even lost interest in
the murdered driver. There was such magic in that name, SLADE!
Day or night, now, I stood always ready to drop any subject in
hand, to listen to something new about Slade and his ghastly
exploits. Even before we got to Overland City, we had begun to
hear about Slade and his “division” (for he was a
“division-agent”) on the Overland; and from the hour we had left
Overland City we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only
three things—"Californy,” the Nevada silver mines, and this
desperado Slade. And a deal the most of the talk was about Slade.
We had gradually come to have a realizing sense of the fact that
Slade was a man whose heart and hands and soul were steeped in
the blood of offenders against his dignity; a man who awfully
avenged all injuries, affront, insults or slights, of whatever
kind—on the spot if he could, years afterward if lack of earlier
opportunity compelled it; a man whose hate tortured him day and
night till vengeance appeased it—and not an ordinary vengeance
either, but his enemy’s absolute death—nothing less; a man whose
face would light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe
and had him at a disadvantage. A high and efficient servant of
the Overland, an outlaw among outlaws and yet their relentless
scourge, Slade was at once the most bloody, the most dangerous
and the most valuable citizen that inhabited the savage
fastnesses of the mountains.
