The brain of Soapy cleared a little as he heard that murderous shout. When he looked down to the utterly flaccid form of the defeated boxer, he knew that there was some reason for the anger of the mob. He had been a little rough. And now he most sincerely hoped that he had not killed the man. However, he had wit enough to know that, for the moment, the chief concern was not the condition of Canuck, but the loss of the sundry bets that had been placed so liberally upon Soapy when once his fighting prowess was beginning to be revealed.
They had wagered much money, and now they saw the rich odds, which they had been about to collect, snatched from their hands by the reckless fury of this yellow fighting man. They wanted to make trouble; they were most sincerely bent upon making it.
Here and there a scattering of voices shouted something in the favor of the mulatto. A doctor near the ringside had leaped in and clapped his ear to the heart of the fallen boxer. Then he had leaped up, shouting that Canuck was not seriously injured—only stunned. And there were others—chiefly those who wanted to collect the bets that they had placed upon Canuck—who called to the crowd that Soapy must have a fair deal.
But the others were deaf. They proceeded from
shouts and cursing and fist shaking to more vigorous efforts. Presently a dozen hands reached for Soapy. But he turned himself about, and their hands slipped from his perspiring body.
There was no handier person than the referee—and there was hardly anyone for whom Soapy had so great a grudge. He picked that touchy little gentleman up by the ankles and flung him in the face of that wave of angry cattlemen.
Half a dozen went crashing to the floor. A revolver exploded. “He’s coming, shooting!” yelled someone, and instantly the entire crowd was thrown into the greatest confusion.
But Soapy, his fighting temper roused, did the very best thing that he could have attempted. Instead of running away from this attack, he turned and ran straight through it. He had knocked a hole through the head of the attacking wave. Now he leaped into that hole found the ropes, and catapulted himself through the air at the heads of those beneath.
An ever-ready gun exploded, sending a bullet whistling near his body. But those in the distance foolishly attributed that bullet to a gun in the hand of the mulatto. And there was a fresh wail of fear, rage, and nervousness.
Soapy, like a hard-flung projectile, crashed through the crowd and found the ground. He recoiled from it and waded ahead. In the confusion before him, he was hardly seen before he was striking. Yonder in the ring he had been at a disadvantage. He had had to attend a dancing lesson, with a man close by to make sure that all his steps were according to law and custom. But this was far different. Here were men wedged so closely together that they could not escape. And Soapy smote with a tireless zeal.
His very elbows, as he drew back those ponderous arms, brushed against bystanders and toppled them backward. He cut through that mass like red-hot iron through butter, followed and surrounded by a stream of oaths.
The confusion grew worse and worse. Here, there, and again, guns exploded in that overarmed mob, and with every explosion there was a fresh shout that the Negro was killing mad. That confusion caused a great horde to rush toward the gates and through them as fast as they could push away from the danger point. All could not escape at once. More backs than faces were turned toward Soapy, however, and perhaps he would have been quickly away to freedom, across the fence, had it not been for a most unlucky accident.
Yonder in that crowd were a dozen woodsmen who, in their time, had worked in Canadian lumber. Moreover, everyone of them had seen some of the earlier battles of Canuck, and all looked upon him with an immense pride, as a sort of shining glory brought forth out of the shadowy glooms of the Northern forest. He helped them to respect themselves a little more. He was like money in the pocket or a drink under the belt.
So they had come to this prize fight, not to see a battle, but to see big Canuck win again. They placed a few dollars apiece on the strength of what Canuck would do to that rough fellow, Bud. Afterward they watched Canuck step lightly forth and smite big Bud into nothingness, exactly as they had desired. They saw a fresh victim brought forth to the slaughter, and they settled back in their places, chuckling and nodding and talking with a good deal of unnecessary warmth about their days
in the Northern woods with Canuck.
And then they were forced to grow silent. All was not going quite so well with Canuck. He was striking his blows at a creature of rubber from whom all punishment slipped away. They stood amazed, a mute and stricken row of beholders, while Canuck was felled. Finally, in the concluding round, they saw him taken as in the embrace of a bear. They saw the dreadful right hand of Soapy raised and they saw it fall. They saw their fellow woodsman raised like a helpless child and dashed violently against the floor.
While other people yelled and shrieked with excitement, they said not a word, merely drew instinctively together and stood shoulder to shoulder. They had come from the land where war is war, and they would not flinch from the consequences of it. Their favorite, their pride, and their chief had fallen. The luster was stolen away from the Canadian timberland, but, nevertheless, they were determined that they should stay and see what this thing would come to in the end.
Something should be done. They hardly knew what. In a deep silence they stood their ground while the crowd pushed for the narrow gate. They did not have to shoulder and fight that crowd away, either, but from before their stern faces and their wide and lofty shoulders the turmoil of men divided at once, washing about them like water around a strong rock.
In the meantime, it happened that, the progress of Soapy was taken in a line that led directly toward them, and the tallest of the Canadians noted this fact with a little flare of inspiration.
“Boys,” he said, “you might notice that there
seems to be a need for somebody to stop Soapy…if that’s his name. Now, suppose that we hold him and see what he’s wanted for.”
Grim, glad faces looked back to him from either side and thanked him in silence for this suggestion.
The next moment a lurching, low, vast-shouldered form appeared before them, brushing through the last skirts of the crowd. He saw the group of lumbermen and lurched for them.
Two of them went down, one crushed by the hammer fist of Soapy, and the other involved in the fall of his friend. But Soapy, leaping into the breach, found hands like iron vises closing on him—and more hands were vindictively reaching.
He tore himself away, and half of his clothes came off in rags under their clutches. Attacking them again, left and right, he downed them, made a staggering path through them, and lurched away toward the fence once more.
Two of that stalwart company were down and would not rise again in a hurry, but the others had tasted vengeance, and they wheeled like a hunting pack and rushed after the fugitive.
It was well for Soapy that he possessed speed of foot along with his other virtues, but it takes a rare engine to give wings to 250 low-built pounds. Soapy began to fail in that race. They were drawing up on him fast when, luckily, he saw that the fence was just before him. He leaped for it, drawing his heels up just clear of their reaching hands. A gun flashed in the grip of one of the group, but a comrade struck it down.
“We’ll tear him to bits, but we’ll do it with our hands!”
They swarmed across that fence and rushed into
the mounting dust cloud that masked the roadway. They could see Soapy just ahead of them, jogging along, with the crowd giving ready way to him upon either hand. After him they went in a compact charge. It seemed to Soapy almost like the charge of horses. He turned around his head with an owlish ease and regarded them with a fierce eye.
He recognized that group. Anyone who had seen them together before was not likely to forget, and now he knew that a grave danger was come upon him. However, he was still confident. He had beaten a fine prize fighter on this night, and then he had cut his way through a whole hostile crowd. Why, then, should he fear this single group?
So argued Soapy. When he turned about to strike down the leader of that flying wedge, he beat that man down and out of sight, to be sure, but the others came rushing in like a moving wall of stone. He was battered before them and carried back to the side of the street. He fought like a lion. Again and again those mighty fists of his brought down a foe. But still they drove him. His foot slipped, and he was down in a cloud of dust.
The first who dropped upon him declared afterward that it was like dropping upon a crouched tiger. He was fairly twisted into a knot the instant that he came within the grip of the fallen mulatto. But there were still others in that formidable group. And they caught Soapy with many hands. Legs and body and head and terrible, twisting arms, like two great pythons, were grappled—and he was ground back into the dust.
Some fifteen hundredweight of brawny muscle had been cast upon Soapy, and therefore it was no wonder that he struggled more or less in vain. But
fight he would and did until the last gasp, although there was dust in his eyes and a cloud of it stifling his lungs—and this vast burden of hands tearing at him.
Then across his blurred vision something like a great sword flashed. He heard howls and yells. Hands released their grips. He twisted to his knees.
“Get up, Soapy, and come with me,” said the voice of Peter Hale.
Soapy looked up, and above him he saw the cripple standing, braced upon his ruined legs and upon one crutch that was propped under his armpit. The other crutch, rimmed with strong steel as it was, had become a formidable flail in the ample grasp of Peter. With it he had beaten some of the grain of discretion from the chaff of the lumbermen’s fury. Still, as he flourished the long crutch about his head, the crowd drew farther back, like a ripple spreading from a stone cast into the pool. And like the running ripple, so the awe and the wonder rushed through the mind of Soapy.
He himself was a man of might and a man without fear, and yet this power of numbers had overcome him, at the last. How dreadful a fate might have been in store for him he dared not even guess, yet here was the crippled white man who had ventured forth and with a single stroke had scattered the assailants, releasing Soapy from the vast peril.
It was not mere power of heart and hand. Of course, it was much more. It was the touch of the magic hand, the enchanter’s way of solving a difficulty. The old belief in those occult powers of Peter rushed back upon the brain of Soapy. He feared those powers as much as ever, but now,
in the place of naked dread alone, there was an added something of love.
In a heat of doglike devotion, he could have thrown himself in the dust and embraced the knees of his rescuer. For Peter had been exalted from hell to heaven. He was no longer an evil genius. He was both divine and good. So thought Soapy, but he found a more useful way of showing a bit of his devotion. Behind his idol a crouched monster of a man lurched out to take Peter from the rear, dodging under the dreadful sweep of the crutch.
Of course, he could have warned Peter, but words were ever slower than deeds to the mulatto. He leaped from his crouched position. The other man flung up his arms to guard the threatened blow, and vain was that guard. Home crashed the mighty fist of Soapy, and the other lay motionless in the dust.
From the upper regions of calm and mercy he heard the voice of Peter Hale: “Turn the poor fellow over, Soapy. He might choke in the dust.”
Soapy obeyed, trembling with wonder. How clear it was to him, now, that this man was a veritable god. Certainly he was the master preordained for Soapy’s guidance through this world. With wisdom, with gentleness and charity, with a dreadful might, also, he ruled and reigned. And the heart of the mulatto confessed his power in every way. He followed at the back of the cripple, to guard him from any attack from the rear.
But there was no danger of this—for there had been quite enough fighting to satisfy even the crowd this evening. There had been enough bloodshed and broken ribs and noses. And here
and there one could hear a groaning or a snarling from the rear.
Peter and Soapy were left to go slowly on toward the hotel.
“Walk beside me, Soapy. I want to talk to you.”
“Some son-of-a-gun might jump you from behind, Mister Hale.”
“Why would they jump me and not you, Soapy?”
“Why, what good would it do them to get me down, as long as you was left, sir?”
Peter turned with a little laugh. “Don’t take that too seriously, Soapy. I simply took those fellows by surprise and clubbed them away from you. They weren’t expecting anything like that.”
Soapy merely smiled, and a light glistened fitfully in his eyes, for he understood it all perfectly. When a god performed a deed of heroism or of might, he referred to it thereafter not at all, or else with easy modesty. So it was with Peter Hale. To have scattered those raging Canadians—that was a mere nothing.
A sort of dizzy joy flooded the childish heart and soul of the mulatto. For, having lunged about the world from the days of his childhood from one mischief to another, he now felt that he had found a haven and a refuge. Thereafter he need fear nothing. For he had met with a savior and with a guide. Indeed, when he looked back upon his first meeting with Peter, he could remember that there had been a singular gentleness in the manner of the white man, always.
Only he, Soapy, had forced on the contest. He fairly shuddered when he thought of it. How well it was for him that the mighty man of wisdom had not chosen to blast him and shame him forever.
Poor Soapy, having entered into this trance mood, hardly knew where they were wandering, until they arrived at the flare of the big gasoline lamp in front of the hotel.
“Now,” said Peter, “suppose that you go back to the horses…and get the buckboard ready…and get the saddle horses ready, too. I’ll find the governor and bring him out as fast as I can. But be ready, Soapy.”
“Mister Hale, I’m gonna be right on the spot, now and always.”
“I’ll tell you this one reason to make you hurry…the thing that made me start down the street was just a breath of rumor that Mike Jarvin’s Soapy was in town and raising the devil. If they have coupled you and Jarvin together…and if some people are guessing that Jarvin is in town, this may be a very serious affair. Jarvin is not supposed to risk taking the air so far away from his home,” He said this with another smile.
Soapy blinked and ran away toward the stable. He was beginning to see the other sides of this unlucky matter, and there were so many of those sides that it fairly made his head spin to contemplate them. They had linked him with Jarvin, then. They had recognized him. He recalled some of the ringside shouts. Yes, they had accused him of throwing the fight away on a foul, so that his master could win crooked bets.
It seemed that one could fall into other dangers than those which one actually deserved, and, for the first time in his life, a feeling of innocence went through the soul of the mulatto.
He found the boy he had paid to watch the horses soundly asleep at the edge of the fence,
with the horses almost trampling upon him. Some of the new-found virtue melted from Soapy, and he raised the boy by the nape of the neck and kicked him into outer darkness. Then he secured the heads of the team, which had so luckily been kept from falling into some mischief or other, and he went to the saddle horses.
They were refreshed enough by their few hours of rest, to all appearance. Larribee was lying down—a sure sign that he would be practically as strong as ever when wanted. He prepared them hastily for immediate use and returned to the buckboard to find that the cripple was waiting for him there.
“Have you seen Jarvin?” he asked.
“Not here,” said Soapy.
“He’s not at the hotel,” Peter said in some trouble.
“Let him go and be cursed,” said Soapy. “This here is a time for us to be saving our own hides, Mister Hale.”
He saw the hand of Peter raised to check him, and therefore he pointed anxiously toward the street.
“What’s that crowd of folks gathering out yonder for, Mister Hale?”
“I understand you,” replied Peter. “But I won’t budge from the town without another search for Jarvin. Perhaps the old scoundrel has got into some new trouble and had to vanish suddenly.”
He went back to the hotel, and the mulatto waited in great concern at the heads of the horses. For the crowd that he had pointed out in the street had now grown. And yonder was someone on a bench, making a speech to them. Only an
occasional word reached the ears of Soapy, but he knew that, when a crowd stands patiently to be harangued by a leader, there is danger in the air. So it seemed to be gathering now, and he could hardly watch them without turning cold with bitter fear.
Meanwhile, Peter had found a clue as he was turning onto the verandah of the hotel again. “Have you seen,” he began, addressing a passing cowpuncher, “a fat fellow, rather oldish, with big…”
“You mean Jarvin, don’t you?” asked the other, turning upon him with a cold eye. “You’re one of Jarvin’s men, ain’t you?”
“Perhaps,” Peter said, growing a little red. “Do you know where he is?”
The cattleman had already turned away, letting fall over his shoulder: “No, I dunno that I know where he is.”
The hand of Peter caught his shoulder, and he spun around—and did not draw his Colt. He was very near to the verge of drawing his gun, but he changed his mind, for certain wild rumors were now flying thick and fast about the manner in which the cripple had rescued the giant mulatto from the hands of numbers. One of those rumors had lodged in the ears of the cowpuncher. So, although he hated Jarvin with the clean man’s loathing of the unclean, yet he looked upon Jarvin’s man with more respect.
“He’s back yonder at the other hotel. He’s sitting in at a poker game…but maybe he won’t be sitting long.” As he spoke he pointed with a somewhat malicious grin in the direction of a cluster of men who were hurrying down the street.
Others trailed behind them and well to the rear
came the less aggressive element in the crowd. Just what they were headed for Peter did not know for certain, but he very shrewdly guessed. He knew that this pack had been already fought and rebuffed. So he feared for the worst, if a crash came.