THE END OF THE TRAIL

The Cottage Hotel of Ellisville was, singularly enough, in its palmy days conducted by a woman, and a very good woman she was.  It was perhaps an error in judgment which led the husband of this woman to undertake the establishment of a hotel at such a place and such a time, but he hastened to repair his fault by amiably dying.  The widow, a large woman, of great kindness of heart and a certain skill in the care of gunshot wounds, fell heiress to the business, carried it on and made a success of it.  All these wild range men who came roistering up the Trail loved this large and kind old lady, and she called them all her “boys,” watching over the wild brood as a hen does over her chickens.  She fed them and comforted them, nursed them and buried them, always new ones coming to take the places of those who were gone.  Chief mourner at over threescore funerals, nevertheless was Mother Daly’s voice always for peace and decorum; and what good she did may one day be discovered when the spurred and booted dead shall rise.

The family of Mother Daly flourished and helped build the north-bound cattle trail, along which all the hoof marks ran to Ellisville.  There was talk of other cow towns, east of Ellisville, west of it, but the clannish conservatism of the drovers held to the town they had chosen and baptized.  Thus the family of Mother Daly kept up its numbers, and the Cottage knew no night, even at the time when the wars of the cowmen with the railroad men and the gamblers had somewhat worn away by reason of the advancing of the head of the rails still farther into the Great American Desert.

There was yet no key to the Cottage bar when there came the unbelievable word that there was no longer a buffalo to be found anywhere on the range, and that the Indians were gone, beaten, herded up forever.  Far to the north, it was declared, there were men coming in on the cow range who had silver-mounted guns, who wore gold and jewels, and who brought with them saddles without horns!  It was said, however, that these new men wanted to buy cows, so cows were taken to them.  Many young men of Mother Daly’s family went on up the Trail, never to come back to Ellisville, and it was said that they were paid much gold, and that they stole many cows from the men who had silver-mounted guns, and who wore strange, long knives, with which it was difficult to open a tin can.

Mother Daly looked upon this, and it was well.  She understood her old boys and loved them.  She was glad the world was full of them.  It was a busy, happy, active world, full of bold deeds, full of wide plans, full of men.  She looked out over the wide wind-swept plains, along the big chutes full of bellowing beeves, at the wide corral with its scores of saddled Nemeses, and she was calm and happy.  It was a goodly world.