The Max Brand Megapack (102 page)

As that living wall shut solidly, Jacqueline leaped forward, shouting, like a man, words of hope and rescue; Pierre caught her barely in time—a precarious grasp on the wrist from which she nearly wrenched herself free and gained the entrance to the fire. But the jerk threw her off balance for the least fraction of an instant, and the next moment she was safe in his arms.

Safe? He might as well have held a wildcat, or captured with his bare hands a wild eagle, strong of talon and beak. She tore and raged in a wild fury.

“Pierre, coward, devil!”

“Steady, Jack!”

“Are you going to let him die?”

“Don’t you see? He’s already dead.”

“You lie. You only fear the fire!”

“I tell you, McGurk has been here before us.”

Her arm was freed by a twisting effort and she beat him furiously across the face. One blow cut his lip and a steady trickle of hot blood left a taste of salt in his mouth.

“You young fiend!” he cried, and grasped both her wrists with a crushing force.

She leaned and gnashed at his hands, but he whirled her about and held her from behind, impotent, raging still.

“A hundred McGurks could never have killed him!”

There was a sharp explosion from the midst of the fire.

“See! He’s fighting against his death!”

“No! No! It’s only the falling of a timber!”

Yet with a panic at his heart he knew that it was the sharp crack of a firearm.

“Liar again! Pierre, for God’s sake, do something for him. Father! He’s fighting for his life!”

Another and another explosion from the midst of the fire. He understood then.

“The flames have reached his guns. That’s all, Jack. Don’t you see? We’d be throwing ourselves away to run into those flames.”

Realization came to her at last. A heavy weight slumped down suddenly over his arms. He held her easily, lightly. Her head had tilted back, and the red flare of the fire beat across her face and throat. The roar of the flames shut out all other thought of the world and cast a wide inferno of light around them.

Higher and higher rose the fires, and the wind cut off great fragments and hurried them off into the night, blowing them, it seemed, straight up against the piled thunder of the clouds. Then the roof sagged, swayed, and fell crashing, while a vast cloud of sparks and livid fires shot up a hundred feet into the air. It was as if the soul of old Boone had departed in that final flare.

It started the girl into sudden life, surprising Pierre, so that she managed to wrench herself free and ran from him. He sprang after her with a shout, fearing that in her hysteria she might fling herself into the fire, but that was not her purpose. Straight to the black horse she ran, swung into the saddle with the ease of a man, and rode furiously off through the falling of the night.

He watched her with a curious closing of loneliness like a hand about his heart. He had failed, and because of that failure even Jacqueline was leaving him. It was strange, for since the loss of the girl of the yellow hair and those deep blue eyes, he had never dreamed that another thing in life could pain him.

So at length he mounted the mare again and rode slowly down the hill and out toward the distant ranges, trotting mile after mile with downward head, not caring even if McGurk should cross him, for surely this was the final end of the world to Pierre le Rouge.

About midnight he halted at last, for the uneasy sway of the mare showed that she was nearly dead on her feet with weariness. He found a convenient place for a camp, built his fire, and wrapped his blanket about him without thinking of food.

He never knew how long he sat there, for his thoughts circled the world and back again and found all a prospect of desert before him and behind, until a sound, a vague sound out of the night startled him into alertness. He slipped from beside the fire and into the shadow of a steep rock, watching with eyes that almost pierced the dark on all sides.

And there he saw her creeping up on the outskirts of the firelight, prone on her hands and knees, dragging herself up like a young wildcat hunting prey; it was the glimmer of her eyes that he caught first through the gloom. A cold thought came to him that she had returned with her gun ready.

Inch by inch she came closer, and now he was aware of her restless glances probing on all sides of the camp-fire. Silence—only the crackling of a pitchy stick. And then he heard a muffled sound, soft, soft as the beating of a heart in the night, and regularly pulsing. It hurt him infinitely, and he called gently: “Jack, why are you weeping?”

She started up with her fingers twisted at the butt of her gun.

“It’s a lie,” called a tremulous voice. “Why should I weep?”

And then she ran to him.

“Oh, Pierre, I thought you were gone!”

That silence which came between them was thick with understanding greater than speech. He said at last:

“I’ve made my plan. I am going straight for the higher mountains and try to shake McGurk off my trail. There’s one chance in ten I may succeed, and if I do then I’ll wait for my chance and come down on him, for sooner or later we have to fight this out to the end.”

“I know a place he could never find,” said Jacqueline. “The old cabin in the gulley between the Twin Bears. We’ll start for it to-night.”

“Not we,” he answered. “Jack, here’s the end of our riding together.”

She frowned with puzzled wonder.

He explained: “One man is stronger than a dozen. That’s the strength of McGurk—that he rides alone. He’s finished your father’s men. There’s only Wilbur left, and Wilbur will go next—then me!”

She stretched her hands to him. She seemed to be pleading for her very life.

“But if he finds us and has to fight us both—I shoot as straight as a man, Pierre!”

“Straighter than most. And you’re a better pal than any I’ve ever ridden with. But I must go alone. It’s only a lone wolf that will ever bring down McGurk. Think how he’s rounded us up like a herd of cattle and brought us down one by one.”

“By getting each man alone and killing him from behind.”

“From the front, Jack. No, he’s fought square with each one. The wounds of Black Gandil were all in front, and when McGurk and I meet it’s going to be face to face.”

Her tone changed, softened: “But what of me, Pierre?”

“You have to leave this life. Go down to the city, Jack. Live like a woman; marry some lucky fellow; be happy.”

“Can you leave me so easily?”

“No, it’s hard, devilish hard to part with a pal like you, Jack; but all the rest of my life I’ve got hard things to face, partner.”

“Partner!” she repeated with an indescribable emphasis. “Pierre, I can’t leave you.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid to go. Let me stay!”

He said gloomily: “No good will come of it.”

“I’ll never trouble you—never!”

“No, the bad luck comes on the people who are with me, but never on me. It’s struck them all down, one by one; your turn is next, Jack. If I could leave the cross behind—”

He covered his face, and groaned: “But I don’t dare; I don’t dare! I have to face McGurk. Jack, I hate myself for it, but I can’t help it. I’m afraid of McGurk, afraid of that damned white face, that lowered, fluttering eyelid, that sneering mouth. Without the cross to bring me luck, how could I meet him? But while I keep the cross there’s ruin and hell without end for every one with me.”

She was white and shaking. She said: “I’m not afraid. I’ve one friend left; there’s nothing else to care for.”

“So it’s to be this way, Jack?”

“This way, and no other.”

“Partner, I’m glad. My God, Jack, what a man you would have made!”

Their hands met and clung together, and her head had drooped, perhaps in acquiescence.

CHAPTER XXVI

A GAME OF SUPPOSE

Dick Wilbur, telling Mary how Pierre had cut himself a
drift, did not even pretend to sorrow, and she listened to him with her eyes fixed steadily on his own. As a matter of fact, she had shown neither hope nor excitement from the moment he came back to her and started to tell his message. But if she showed neither hope nor excitement for herself, surely she gave Dick still fewer grounds for any optimistic foresights.

So he finished gloomily: “And as far as I can make out, Pierre is right. There’s some rotten bad luck that follows him. It may not be the cross—I don’t suppose you believe in superstition like that, Miss Brown?”

She said: “It saved my life.”

“The cross?”

“Yes.”

“Then Pierre—you mean—you met before the dance—you mean—”

He was stammering so that he couldn’t finish his thoughts, and she broke in: “If he will not come to me, then I must go to him.”

“Follow Pierre le Rouge?” queried Wilbur. “Miss Brown, you’re an optimist. But that’s because you’ve never seen him ride. I consider it a good day’s work to start out with him and keep within sight till night, but as for following and overtaking him—ha, ha, ha, ha!”

He laughed heartily at the thought.

And she smiled a little sadly, answering: “But I have the most boundless patience in the world. He may gallop all the way, but I will walk, and keep on walking, and reach him in the end. I am not very strong, but—”

Her hands moved out as though testing their power, gripping at the air.

“Where will you go to hunt for him?”

“I don’t know. But every evening, when I look out at the sunset hills, with the purple along the valleys, I think that he must be out there somewhere, going toward the highest ranges. If I were up in that country I know that I could find him.”

“Never in a thousand years.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s on the trail—”

“On the trail?”

“Of McGurk.”

She started.

“What is this man McGurk? I hear of him on all sides. If one of the men rides a bucking horse successfully, some one is sure to say: ‘Who taught you what you know, Bud—McGurk?’ And then the rest laugh. The other day a man was pointed out to me as an expert shot. ‘Not as fast as McGurk,’ it was said, ‘but he shoots just as straight.’ Finally I asked some one about McGurk. The only answer I received was: ‘I hope you never find out what he is.’ Tell me, what is McGurk?”

Wilbur considered the question gravely.

He said at last: “McGurk is—hell!”

He expanded his statement: “Think of a man who can ride anything that walks on four feet, who never misses with either a rifle or a revolver, who doesn’t know the meaning of fear, and then imagine that man living by himself and fighting the rest of the world like a lone wolf. That’s McGurk. He’s never had a companion; he’s never trusted any man. Perhaps that’s why they say about him the same thing that they say about me.”

“What’s that?”

“You will smile when you hear. They say that McGurk will lose out in the end on account of some woman.”

“And they say that of you?”

“They say right of me. I know it myself. Look at me now? What right have I here? If I’m found I’m the meat of the first man who sights me, but here I stay, and wait and watch for your smiles—like a love-sick boy. By Jove, you must despise me, Mary!”

“I don’t try to understand you Westerners,” she answered, “and that’s why I have never questioned you before. Tell me, why is it that you come so stealthily to see me and run away as soon as any one else appears?”

He said with wonder: “Haven’t you guessed?”

“I don’t dare guess.”

“But you have, and your guess was right. There’s a price on my head. By right, I should be out there on the ranges with Pierre le Rouge and McGurk. There’s the only safe place; but I saw you and I came down out of the wilds and can’t go back. I’ll stay, I suppose, till I run my head into a halter.”

She was too much moved to speak for a moment, and then: “You come to me in spite of that? Dick, whatever you have done, I know that it’s only chance which made you go wrong, just as it made Pierre. I wish—”

The dimness of her eyes encouraged him with a great hope. He stole closer to her.

He repeated: “You wish—”

“That you could be satisfied with a mere friendship. I could give you that, Dick, with all my heart.”

He stepped back and smiled somewhat grimly on her.

She went on: “And this McGurk—what do you mean when you say that Pierre is on his trail?”

“Hunting him with a gun.”

She grew paler and trembled, but her voice remained steady. It was always that way; at the very moment when he expected her to quail, some inner strength bore her up and baffled him.

“But in all those miles of mountains they may never meet?”

“They can’t stay apart any more than iron can stay away from a magnet. Listen: half a dozen years ago McGurk had the reputation of bearing a charmed life. He had been in a hundred fights and he was never touched with either a knife or a bullet. Then he crossed Pierre le Rouge when Pierre was only a youngster just come onto the range. He put two bullets through Pierre, but the boy shot him from the floor and wounded him for the first time. The charm of McGurk was broken.

“For half a dozen years McGurk was gone; there was never a whisper about him. Then he came back and went on the trail of Pierre. He has killed the friends of Pierre one by one; Pierre himself is the next in order—Pierre or myself. And when those two meet there will be the greatest fight that was ever staged in the mountain-desert.”

She stood straight, staring past Wilbur with hungry eyes.

“I knew he needed me. I have to save him, Dick. You see that? I have to bring him down from the mountains and keep him safe from McGurk. McGurk! somehow the sound means what ‘devil’ used to mean to me.”

“You’ve never traveled alone, and yet you’d go up there and brave everything that comes for the sake of Pierre? What has he done to deserve it, Mary?”

“What have I done, Dick, to deserve the care you have for me?”

He stared gloomily on her.

“When do you start?”

“To-night.”

“Your friends won’t let you go.”

“I’ll steal away and leave a note behind me.”

“And you’ll go alone?”

She caught at a hope.

“Unless you’ll go with me, Dick?”