Dorn Of The Mountains (26 page)

“Hurry now…grab that pack…an’ follow me.” Again Riggs laid hold of the two saddles. A desperate gleam, baleful and vainglorious, flashed over his face. He was living his one great adventure.

The girl’s eyes dilated. They looked beyond him. Her lips opened.

“Scream again an’ I’ll kill you!” he cried hoarsely and swiftly. The very opening of her lips had terrified him.

A step sounded behind Riggs.

“Reckon one scream was enough,” spoke a voice, slow, but without the drawl, easy and cool, yet incalculable in some terrible sense.

Riggs wheeled with inarticulate cry. Wilson stood a few paces off with his gun half leveled, low down. His face seemed as usual, only his eyes held a quivering light intensity, like boiling molten silver.

“Girl, what made thet blood in your mouth?”

“Riggs hit me,” she whispered. Then at something she feared or saw or divined, she shrank back, dropped on her knees, and crawled into the spruce shelter.

“Wal, Riggs, I’d invite you to draw if thet’d be any use,” said Wilson. This speech was reflective, yet it hurried a little.

Riggs could not draw or move or speak. He seemed turned to stone, except his jaw, which slowly fell.

“Harve Riggs, gunman from down Missouri way!” continued the voice of incalculable intent. “Reckon you’ve looked into a heap of gun barrels in your day.…Shore. Wal, look in this heah one!” Wilson deliberately leveled the gun on a line with Riggs’s starting eyes. “Wasn’t you heard to brag in Turner’s saloon…thetyou could see lead comin’…an’ dodge it? Shore you must be swift! Dodge this heah bullet!”

The gun spouted flame and
boomed.
One of Riggs’s starting, popping eyes—the right one—went out, like a lamp. The other rolled horribly, then set in blank dead fixedness. Riggs swayed in slow motion until a lost balance felled him heavily, an inert mass.

Wilson bent over the prostrate form. Strange violent contrast to the cool scorn of the preceding moment! Hissing, spitting, as if poisoned by passion, he burst with the hate that his character had forbidden him to express on a living counterfeit. Wilson was shaken as if by a palsy. He choked over passionate incoherent invective. It was class hate first, then the hate of real manhood for a craven bastard, then the hate of disgrace for a murder. No man so fair as a gunfighter in the Western creed of an “even break”!

Wilson’s terrible cataclysm of passion passed. Straightening up, he sheathed his weapon and began a slow pace before the fire. Not many moments afterward he jerked his head high and listened. Horses were softly
thudding
through the forest. Soon Anson rode into sight with his men, and one of the strayed horses. It chanced, too, that young Burt appeared on the other side of the glade. He walked quickly as one who anticipated news.

Snake Anson, as he dismounted, espied the dead man.

“Jim! I thought I heard a shot.”

The others exclaimed and leaped off their horses to view the prostrate form with that curiosity and strange fear common to all men confronted by sight of sudden death.

That emotion was only momentary.

“Shot his lamp out!” ejaculated Moze.

“Wonder how gunman Riggs liked thet plumb center peg!” exclaimed Shady Jones with a hard laugh.

“Back of his head’s all gone!” gasped young Burt. Not improbably he had not seen a great many bullet-marked men.

“Jim! Damn if the long-haired fool didn’t try to draw on you!” exclaimed Snake Anson, astounded.

Wilson neither spoke nor sensed his pacing.

“What was it over?” added Anson curiously.

“He hit the gurl,” replied Wilson.

Then there were long drawn exclamations all around and glance met glance.

“Jim, you saved me the job,” continued the outlaw leader. “An’ I’m much obliged…. Fellars, search Riggs an’ we’ll divvy…. Thet all right, Jim?”

“Shore, an’ you can have my share.”

They found banknotes in the man’s pocket and considerable gold worn in a money belt around his waist. Shady Jones appropriated his boots and Moze his gun. Then they left him as he had fallen.

“Jim, you’ll have to track them lost horses. Two still missin’ an’ one of them’s mine!” called Anson as Wilson paced to the end of his beat.

The girl heard Anson, for she put her head out of the spruce shelter and said: “Riggs said he’d hid two of the horses. They must be close. He came that way.”

“Howdy, kid. Thet’s good news,” replied Anson. His spirits were rising. “He must hev wanted you to slope with him?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t go.”

“An’ then he hit you?”

“Yes.”

“Wal, recallin’ your talk of yestiddy, I can’t see as Mister Riggs lasted much longer hyar than he’d hev lasted in Texas…. We’ve some of thet great country right in our outfit.”

The girl withdrew her white face.

“It’s break camp, boys,” was the leader’s order. “A couple of you look up them horses. They’ll be hid in some thick spruces. The rest of us’ll pack.”

Soon the gang was on the move, heading toward the height of land, and swerving from it only to find soft and grassy ground that would not leave any tracks.

They did not travel more than a dozen miles during the afternoon, but they climbed bench after bench until they reached the timbered plateau that stretched in sheer black slope up to the peaks. Here rose the great and gloomy forest of firs and pines, with the spruce overshadowed and thinned out. The last hour of travel was tedious and toilsome, a zigzag, winding, breaking, climbing hunt for the kind of campsite suited to Anson’s fancy. He seemed to be growing strangely irrational about selecting places to camp. At last, for no reason that could have been manifest to a good woodsman, he chose a gloomy bowl in the center of the densest forest that had been traversed. The opening, if such it could have been called, was not a park or even a glade. A dark cliff, with strange holes, rose to one side, but not so high as the lofty pines that brushed it. Along its base babbled a brook, running over such formation of rock that from different points near at hand it gave forth different sounds, some singing, others melodious, and one at least of a hollow weird deep sound, not loud, but strangely penetrating.

“Damn’ spooky, I say,” observed Shady sentiently.

The little uplift of mood, coincident with the rifling of Riggs’s person, had not won over to this evening camp. What talk the outlaws indulged in was necessary and conducted in low tones. The place enjoined silence.

Wilson performed for the girl very much the same ser vice as he had the night before. Only he advised her not to starve herself; she must eat to keep up her strength. She complied at the expense of considerable effort.

As it had been a back-breaking day in which all of them, except the girl, had climbed miles on foot, they did not linger awake long enough after supper to learn what a wild, weird, and pitch-black spot the outlaw leader had chosen. The little spaces of open ground between the huge-trunked pine trees had no counterpart up in the lofty spreading foliage. Not a star could blink a wan ray of light into that Stygian pit. The wind cutting down over abrupt heights farther up sung in the pine needles as if they were strings vibrant with chords. Dismal
creaks
were audible. They were the forest sounds of branch or tree rubbing one another, but which needed the corrective medium of daylight to convince any human that they were other than ghostly. Then, despite the wind and despite the changing murmur of the brook, there seemed to be a silence insulating them, as deep and impenetrable as the darkness.

But the outlaws, who were fugitives now, slept the sleep of the weary, and heard nothing. They awoke with the sun, when the forest seemed smoky in a golden gloom, when light and bird and squirrel proclaimed the day.

The horses had not strayed out of this basin during the night, a circumstance that Anson was not slow to appreciate.

“It ain’t no cheerful camp, but I never seen a safer place to hole up in,” he remarked to Wilson.

“Wal, yes…if any place is safe,” replied that ally dubiously.

“We can watch our back tracks. There ain’t any other way to git in hyar thet I see.”

“Snake, we was tolerable fair sheep rustlers, but we’re no good woodsmen.”

Anson grumbled his disdain of this comrade who had once been his mainstay. Then he sent Burt out to hunt fresh meat and engaged his other men at cards. As they now had the means to gamble, they at once became absorbed. Wilson smoked and divided his thoughtful gaze between the gamblers and the drooping figure of the girl. The morning air was keen, and she, evidently not caring to be near her captors beside the campfire, had sought the only sunny spot in this gloomy dell. A couple of hours passed; the sun climbed high; the air grew warmer. Once, the outlaw leader raised his head to scan the heavy timbered slopes that enclosed the camp.

“Jim, them hosses are strayin’ off,” he observed.

Wilson leisurely rose and stalked off across the small open patches in the direction of the horses. They had grazed around from the right toward the outlet of the brook. Here headed a ravine, dense and green. Two of the horses had gone down. Wilson evidently heard them, although they were not in sight, and he circled somewhat so as to get ahead of them and drive them back. The invisible brook ran down over the rocks with murmur and babble. He halted with instinctive action. He listened. Forest sounds, soft, lulling, came on the warm pine-scented breeze. It would have taken no keen ear to hear soft and rapid padded footfalls. He moved on cautiously and turned into a little open mossy spot, brown-matted and odorous, full of ferns and bluebells. In the middle of this, deep in the moss, he espied a huge round track of a cougar. He bent over it. Suddenly he stiffened, then straightened guardedly. At that instant he received a hard prod in the back. Throwing up his hands, he stood still, then slowly turned. A tall hunter in gray buckskin, gray-eyed and square-jawed, had him covered with a cocked rifle. And beside this hunter stood a monster cougar, snarling and blinking.

“Howdy, Dorn,” drawled Wilson. “Reckon you’re a little previous on me.”

“
Shsssh!
Not so loud,” said the hunter in low voice. “You’re Jim Wilson?”

“Shore am…. Say, Dorn, you showed up soon. Or did you jest happen to run acrost us?”

“I’ve trailed you…. Wilson, I’m after the girl.”

“Hell, I knowed thet when I seen you.”

The cougar seemed actuated by the threatening position of his master, and he opened his mouth, showing great yellow fangs, and spat at Wilson. The outlaw apparently had no fear of Dorn or the cocked rifle, but that huge snarling cat occasioned him uneasiness.

“Wilson, I’ve heard you spoken of as a white outlaw,” said Dorn.

“Mebbe I am. But shore I’ll be a scared one in a minnit…. Dorn, he’s goin’ to jump me.”

“The cougar won’t jump you unless I make him…. Wilson, if I let you go, will you get the girl for me?”

“Wal, lemme see…. supposin’ I refuse?” queried Wilson shrewdly.

“Then, one way or another, it’s all up with you.”

“Reckon I ain’t got much choice. Yes, I’ll do it…. But, Dorn, are you goin’ to take my word for thet an’ let me go back to Anson?”

“Yes, I am. You’re no fool. An’ I believe you’re square. I’ve got Anson an’ his gang corralled. You can’t slip me…not in these woods. I could run off your horses…pick you off one by one…or turn the cougar loose on you at night.”

“Shore. It’s your game. Anson dealt himself this hand.…Betweenyou an’ me, Dorn, I never liked the deal.”

“Who shot Riggs?”

“Wal, yours truly was around when thet come off,” replied Wilson with an involuntary little shudder. Some thought made him sick.

“The girl? Is she safe…unharmed?” queried Dorn hurriedly.

“She’s shore jest as safe an’ sound as when she was home…. Dorn, she’s the gamest kid thet ever breathed. Why, no one could hev ever made me believe a girl, a kid like her, could hev the nerve she’s got…. Nothin’s happened to her ‘cept Riggs hit her in the mouth…. I killed him fer thet…. An’ so help me God, I believe it’s been workin’ in me to save her somehow. Now it’ll not be so hard.”

“But how?” demanded Dorn.

“Lemme see…. Wal, I’ve got to sneak her out of camp an’ meet you. Thet’s all.”

“It must be done quick.”

“But, Dorn, listen,” remonstrated Wilson earnestly. “Too quick’ll be as bad as too slow. Snake is sore these days, gittin’ sorer all the time. He might savvy somethin’, if I ain’t careful, an’ kill the girl, or do her harm. I know these fellars. They’re all ready to go to pieces. An’ shore I must play safe. Shore it’d be safer to have a plan.”

Wilson’s shrewd light eyes gleamed with an idea. He was about to lower one of his upraised hands, evidently to point to the cougar, when he thought better of that.

“Anson’s scared of cougars. Mebbe we can scare him an’ the gang so it’d be easy to sneak the girl off…. Can you make thet big brute do tricks? Rush the camp at night an’ squall an’ chase off the hosses?”

“I’ll guarantee to scare Anson out of ten years’ growth,” replied Dorn.

“Shore it’s a go then,” resumed Wilson, as if glad. “I’ll post the girl…give her a hunch to do her part…. You sneak up to night jest before dark. I’ll hev the gang worked up. An’ then you put the cougar to his tricks…what ever you want. When the gang gits wild, I’ll grab the girl an’ pack her off down heah or somewheres aboot, an’ whistle fer you…. But mebbe thet ain’t so good. If thet cougar comes pilin’ into camp, he might jump me, instead of one of the gang. An’ another hunch. He might slope up on me in the dark when I was tryin’ to find you. Shore thet ain’t appealin’ to me.”

“Wilson, this cougar is a pet,” replied Dorn. “You think he’s dangerous, but he’s not. No more than a kitten. He only looks fierce. He has never been hurt by a person an’ he’s never fought anythin’ himself but deer an’ bear. I can make him trail any scent. But the truth is, I couldn’t make him hurt you or anybody…. All the same he can be made to scare the hair off anyone who doesn’t know him.”

“Shore thet settles me. I’ll be havin’ a grand joke while them fellars is scared to death…. Dorn, you can depend on me. An’ I’m beholdin’ to you fer what’ll square me some with myself…. Tonight, and if it won’t work then, tomorrow night shore!”

Dorn lowered the rifle. The big cougar spat again. Wilson dropped his hands and, stepping forward, split the green wall of intersecting spruce branches. Then he hurried up the ravine toward the glen. Once there, in sight of his comrades, his action and expression changed.

“Hosses all there, Jim?” asked Anson as he picked up his cards.

“Shore. They act awful queer, them hosses,” replied Wilson. “They’re afraid of somethin’?”

“Ahuh! Silvertip mebbe,” muttered Anson. “Jim, you jest keep watch on them hosses. We’d be done if some tarnal varmint stampeded them.”

“Reckon I’m elected to do all the work now,” complained Wilson, “while you cardsharps cheat each other…. Rustle the hosses…an’ water an’ firewood. Cook an’ wash. Hey?”

“No one I ever seen can do them camp tricks any better’n Jim Wilson,” replied Anson.

“Jim, you’re a lady’s man an’ thar’s our pretty hoodoo over thar to feed an’ amoose,” remarked Shady Jones with a smile that disarmed his speech.

The outlaws guffawed.

“Git out, Jim, you’re breakin’ up the game,” said Moze, who appeared loser.

“Wal, thet gurl would starve if I wasn’t fer me,” replied Wilson genially, and he walked over toward her, beginning to address her, quite loudly, as he approached. “Wal, miss, I’m elected cook, an’ I’d shore like to heah what you…fancy fer dinner.”

The outlaws heard, for they guffawed again. “Damn if Jim ain’t funny!” exclaimed Anson.

The girl looked up amazed. Wilson was winking at her, and, when he got near, he began to speak rapidly and low.

“I jest met Dorn down in the woods with his pet cougar. He’s after you. I’m goin’ to help him git you safe away. Now you do your part. I want you to pretend you’ve gone crazy. Savvy? Act out of your head. Shore I don’t care what you do or say, only act crazy…. An’ don’t be scared. Understand? No matter what you heah or see don’t you be scared. We’re goin’ to scare the gang, so I’ll hev a chance to sneak you away. Tonight or tomorrow…shore.”

Before he began to speak, she was pale, sad, dull of eye. Swiftly with his words she was transformed, and, when he had ended, she did not appear the same girl. She gave him one blazing flash of comprehension and nodded her head rapidly.

“Yes, I understand. I’ll do it,” she whispered.

The outlaw turned slowly away with the most abstract air, confounded amidst his shrewd acting, and he did not collect himself until halfway back to his comrades. Then, beginning to hum an old darky tune, he stirred up and replenished the fire, and set about preparation for the midday meal. But he did not miss anything going on around him. He saw the girl go into her shelter and come out with her hair all down over her face. Wilson, back to his comrades, grinned his glee, and he wagged his head as if he thought the situation was developing well.

The gambling outlaws, however, did not at once see the girl preening herself and smoothing her long hair in a way calculated to startle.

“Busted!” ejaculated Anson with a curse, as he slammed down his cards. “If I ain’t hoodooed, I’m a two-bit of a gambler!”

“Sartin’ you’re hoodooed,” said Shady Jones in scorn. “Is that jest dawnin’ on you?”

“Boss, you play like a cow stuck in the mud,” remarked Moze laconically.

“Fellars, it ain’t funny,” declared Anson with pathetic gravity. “I’m jest gittin’ on to myself. Somethin’s damn’ wrong. Since my last fall, no luck…nothin’ but the wurst end of everythin’. I ain’t blamin’ anybody. I’m the boss. It’s me thet’s off.”

“Snake, shore it was the girl deal you made,” rejoined Wilson, who had listened. “I told you. Our troubles hev only begun. An’ I can see the wind up…. Look!”

Wilson pointed to where the girl stood, her hair flying wildly all over her face and shoulders. She was making most elaborate bows to an old stump, sweeping the ground with her tresses in her obeisance.

Anson stared. He grew utterly astounded. His amaze was ludicrous. And the other two men looked to stare, to equal their leader’s bewilderment.

“What’n hell’s come over her?” asked Anson dubiously. “Must hev perked up…. But she isn’t feelin’ thet gay!”

Wilson tapped his forehead with a significant finger. “Shore I was scared of her this mornin’,” he whispered.

“Naw!” exclaimed Anson incredulously.

“If she hain’t queer, I never seen no queer wimmin’,” vouchsafed Shady Jones, and it would have been judged, by the way he wagged his head, that he had been all his days familiar with women.

Moze looked beyond words and quite alarmed.

“I seen it comin’,” declared Wilson, very much excited. “But I was scared to say so. You-all made fun of me aboot her…. Now I shore wish I had spoke up.”

Anson nodded solemnly. He did not believe the evidence of his sight, but the facts seemed stunning. As if the girl were a dangerous and incomprehensible thing, he approached her step by step. Wilson followed, and the others appeared drawn irresistibly.

“Hey, thar…kid!” called Anson hoarsely.

The girl drew her slight form up haughtily. Through her spreading tresses, her eyes gleamed unnaturally upon the outlaw leader. But she deigned not to reply.

“Hey, thar…you, Rayner girl,” added Anson lamely. “What’s ailin’ you?”

“My lord. Did you address me?” she asked loftily.

Shady Jones got over his consternation and evidently extracted some humor from the situation, as his dark face began to break its strain.

“Aww,”
breathed Anson heavily.

“Ophelia awaits your command, my lord. I’ve been gathering flowers,” she said sweetly, holding up her empty hands as if they contained a bouquet.

Shady Jones exploded in convulsed laughter. But his merriment was not shared. And suddenly it brought disaster upon him. The girl flew at him.

“Why do you croak, you toad? I will have you whipped and put in irons, you scullion!” she cried passionately.

Shady underwent a remarkable change, and stumbled in his backward retreat. Then she snapped her fingers in Moze’s face.

“You black devil! Get hence! Avaunt!”

Anson plucked up courage enough to touch her.

“
Aww!
Now Opheyar….”

Probably he meant to try to humor her, but she screamed and he jumped back as if she might burn him. She screamed shrilly in wild staccato notes.

“You! You!” She pointed her finger at the outlaw leader. “You brute to women! You ran off from your wife!”

Anson turned plum color, and then slowly white. The girl must have sent a random shot home.

“And now the devil’s turned you into a snake. A long scaly snake with green eyes!
Uugh!
You’ll crawl on your belly soon…when my cowboy finds you. And he’ll tramp you in the dust.”

She floated away from them and began to whirl gracefully, arms spread, and hair flying, and then, apparently oblivious of the staring men, she broke into a low sweet song. Next she danced around a pine, then danced into her little green enclosure. From which presently she sent out the most doleful moans.

“
Aww!
What a damn’ shame!” burst out Anson. “Thet fine healthy nervy kid! Clean gone! Daffy! Crazier’n a bedbug!”

“Shore it’s a shame,” protested Wilson. “But it’s wuss for us…. Lord! If we was hoodooed before, what will we be now? Didn’t I tell you, Snake Anson? You was warned. Ask Shady an’ Moze…they see what’s up.”

“No luck’ll ever come our way ag’in,” predicted Shady mournfully.

“It beats me, boss, it beats me,” muttered Moze.

“A crazy woman on my hands! My God, if thet ain’t the last straw!” broke out Anson, tragically, as he turned away. Ignorant, superstitious, worked upon by things as they seemed, the outlaw imagined himself at last beset by malign forces. When he flung himself down on one of the packs, his big red-haired hands shook. Shady and Moze resembled two other men at the end of their ropes.

Wilson’s tense face twitched and he averted it, as apparently he fought off a paroxysm of some nature. Just then Anson swore a thundering oath. “Crazy or not I’ll git gold out of thet kid!” he roared.

“But, man, talk sense. Are you gittin’ daffy, too? I declare this outfit’s been eatin’ loco…. You can’t git gold fer her,” said Wilson deliberately.

“Why can’t I?”

“ ‘Cause we’re bein’ tracked. We can’t make no dickers. Why, in another day or so, we’ll be dodgin’ lead.”

“Tracked! Whar’d you git thet idee? As soon as this?” queried Anson, lifting his head like a striking snake. His men, likewise, betrayed sudden interest.

“Shore it’s no idee. I ain’t seen anyone. But I feel it in my senses. I hear somebody comin’…a step on our trail…all the time…night in particular…. Reckon there’s a big posse after us.”

“Wal, if I see or hear anythin’, I’ll knock the girl on the head an’ we’ll dig out of hyar,” replied Anson sullenly.

Wilson executed a swift forward motion, violent and passionate, so utterly unlike what might have been looked for from him that the three outlaws gaped.

“Then you’ll shore hev to knock Jim Wilson on the haid first,” he said in a voice as strange as his action.

“Jim! You wouldn’t go back on me?” implored Anson, with uplifted hands, in a dignity of pathos.

“I’m losin’ my haid, too, an’ you shore might as well knock it in, an’ you’ll hev to before I’ll stand your murdurin’ thet poor little gurl you’ve drove crazy.”

“Jim, I was only mad,” replied Anson. “Fer thet matter, I’m growin’ daffy myself….
Aw!
We-all need a good stiff drink of whiskey.”

So he tried to throw off gloom and apprehension, but he failed. His comrades did not rally to his help. Wilson walked away, nodding his head.

“Boss, let Jim alone,” whispered Shady. “It’s orful the way you buck ag’in’ him…when you seen he’s stirred up. Jim’s true blue. But you gotta be careful.”

Moze corroborated this statement by gloomy nods.

When the card playing was resumed, Anson did not join the game, and both Moze and Shady evinced little of that wholehearted obsession that usually attended their gambling. Anson lay at length, his head in a saddle, scowling at the little shelter where the captive girl kept herself out of sight. At times a faint song or laugh, very unnatural, was wafted across the space. Wilson plodded at the cooking and apparently heard no sounds. Presently he called the men to eat, which office they surlily and silently performed as if it was a favor bestowed upon the cook.