Читать книгу Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier - W. B. (Bat) Masterson - Страница 7

WAS KNOWN AS A “WHITE INDIAN”

Luke was a little fellow, so to speak, about five feet, six inches in height, and weighing in the neighborhood of one hundred and forty pounds. It was a small package, but one of great dynamic force. In this connection it will not be out of order for me to state that, though of small build, it required a 7⅛ hat to fit his well-shaped, round head. At the time he left his father’s ranch in Western Texas, where he had been occupied as a cowboy in the middle seventies, for the Red Cloud Agency in North Dakota, he was nothing more than a white Indian. That is, he was an Indian in every respect except color. And as nearly all of our American Indians living west of the Missouri River in those days were both wild and hostile and on the war path most of the time, a fair idea of Luke Short may be gleaned from this statement. Luke had received none of the advantages of a school in his younger days; he could hardly write his name legibly. It was, indeed, doubtful if he had ever seen a school house until he reached man’s estate. But he could ride a bronc and throw a lariat; he could shoot both fast and straight, and was not afraid.

He had no sooner reached the northern boundary line of Nebraska, hard by the Sioux Indian Reservation, than he established what he was pleased to call a “trading ranch.”

His purpose was to trade with the Sioux Indians, whose reservation was just across the line in North Dakota. Instinctively he knew that the Indians loved whiskey, and as even in those days he carried on his shoulder something of a commercial head, he conceived the idea that a gallon of whiskey worth ninety cents was not a bad thing to trade an Indian for a buffalo robe worth ten dollars. Accordingly Luke proceeded to lay in a goodly supply of “Pine Top,” the name by which the whiskey traded to the Indians in exchange for their robes was known.