The Max Brand Megapack (380 page)

It was only for a moment, however; then they emerged, the horse with courageously pricking ears and snorting nostrils just above the flood. Mac Strann swung clear, gripping the horn of the saddle with one hand while with the other he hastily divested himself of all superfluous weight. His slicker went first, ripped away from throat and shoulders and whipped off his body by one tug of the current. Next he fumbled at his belt and tossed this also, guns and all, away; striking out with his legs and his free arm to aid the progress that now forged ahead with noticeable speed.

The current, to be sure, was carrying them farther down the stream, but they were now almost to the centre of the arroyo and, though the water boiled furiously over the back of the horse, they forged steadily close and closer to the safe shore.

It was chance that defeated Mac Strann. It came shooting down the river and he saw it only an instant too late—a log whipping through the surface of the stream as though impelled by a living force. And with arrowy straightness it lunged at them. Mac Strann heaved himself high—he screamed at the horse as though the poor brute could understand his warning, and then the tree-trunk was upon them. Fair and square it struck the head of the horse with a thud audible even through the rushing of the stream. The horse went down like lead, and Mac Strann was dragged down beneath the surface.

He came up fighting grimly and hopelessly for life. For he was in the very centre of the stream, now, and the current swept him relentlessly down. There seemed to be hands in the middle of the arroyo, and when he strove to battle his way to the edge of the water the current tangled at his legs and pulled him back. Yet even then he did not fear. It was death, he knew, but at least it was death fighting against a force of nature rather than destruction at the hands of some weird and unhuman agency. His arms began to grow numb. He raised his head to pick out the nearest point on the shore and make his last struggle for life.

What he saw was a black head cutting the water just above him, and beside the horse, one hand upon the beast’s mane, swam a man. At the same instant a hand fastened on his collar and he was drawn slowly against the force of the river.

In the stunning surprise of the first moment he could make no effort to save himself, and as a result, all three were washed hopelessly down the current, but a shrill warning from his rescuer set him fighting again with all the power of his great limbs. After that they forged steadily towards the shore. The black horse swam with amazing strength, and breaking the force of the current for the men, they soon passed from the full grip of the torrent and forged into the smoother shallows at the side of the stream. In a moment firm land was beneath the feet of Mac Strann, and he turned his dull eyes of amazement upon Dan Barry. The latter stood beside the panting black horse. He had not even thrown off his slicker in the fording of the stream—there had been no time for even that small delay if he wished to save Strann. And now he was throwing back the folds of the garment to leave free play for his arms. He panted from the fierce effort of the fording, but his head was high, a singular smile lingered about the corners of his mouth, and in his eyes Mac Strann saw the gleam of yellow, a signal of unfathomable danger.

From his holsters Barry drew two revolvers. One he retained; the other he tossed towards Mac Strann, and the latter caught it automatically.

“Now,” said the soft voice of Barry, “we’re equally armed.—Down, Bart!—” (for the wolf-dog was slinking with ominous intent towards the giant) and there’s the dog you shot. “If you drop me, you can send your next shot into Bart. If I drop you, the teeth of Bart will be in your throat. Make your own terms; fight in the way you want; knives, if you like ’em better than guns, or—” and here the yellow flamed terribly in Barry’s eyes—“bare hand to hand!”

The grim truth sank slowly home in the dull mind of Mac Strann. The man had saved him from the water to kill him on dry land.

“Barry,” he said slowly, “it was your bullet that brung down Jerry; but you’ve paid me back here. They’s nothin’ left on earth worth fightin’ for. There’s your gun.”

And he threw the revolver into the mud at Barry’s feet, turned on his heel, and lumbered off into the rain. There was no voice of answer behind him, except a shrill whine of rage from Black Bart and then a sharp command: “Down!” from the master. As the blanket of rain shut over him, Mac Strann looked back. There stood the strange man with the wolf crouched at his feet, and the teeth of Bart were bared, and the hum of his horrible snarling carried to Strann through the beat of the rain. Mac Strann turned again, and plodded slowly through the storm.

And Dan Barry? Twice men had stood before him, armed, and twice he had failed to kill. Wonder rose in him; wonder and a great fear. Was he losing the desert, and was the desert losing him? Were the chains of humanity falling about him to drag him down to a tamed and sordid life? A sudden hatred for all men, Mac Strann, Daniels, Kate, and even poor Joe Cumberland, welled hot in the breast of Whistling Dan. The strength of men could not conquer him; but how could their very weakness disarm him? He leaped again on the back of Satan, and rode furiously back into the storm.

CHAPTER XLI

THE FALLING OF NIGHT

It had been hard to gauge the falling of night on this day, and even the careful eyes of the watchers on the Cumberland Ranch could not tell when the greyness of the sky was being darkened by the coming of the evening. All day there had been swift alterations of light and shadow, comparatively speaking, as the clouds grew thin or thick before the wind. But at length, indubitably, the night was there. Little by little the sky was overcast, and even the lines of the falling rain were no longer visible. Before the gloom of the darkness had fully settled over the earth, moreover, there came a change in the wind, and the watchers at the rain-beaten windows of the ranch-house saw the clouds roll apart and split into fragments that were driven from the face of the sky; and from the clean washed face of heaven the stars shone down bright and serene. And still Dan Barry had not come.

After the tumult of that long day the sudden silence of that windless night had more ill omen in it than thunder and lightning. For there is something watching and waiting in silence. In the living room the three did not speak.

Now that the storm was gone they had allowed the fire to fall away until the hearth showed merely fragmentary dances of flame and a wide bed of dull red coals growing dimmer from moment to moment. Wung Lu had brought in a lamp—a large lamp with a circular wick that cast a bright, white light—but Kate had turned down the wick, and now it made only a brief circle of yellow in one corner of the room. The main illumination came from the fireplace and struck on the faces of Kate and Buck Daniels, while Joe Cumberland, on the couch at the end of the room, was only plainly visible when there was an extraordinarily high leap of the dying flames; but usually his face was merely a glimmering hint in the darkness—his face and the long hands which were folded upon his breast. Often when the flames leapt there was a crackling of the embers and the last of the log, and then the two nearer the fire would start and flash a glance, of one accord, towards the prostrate figure on the couch.

That silence had lasted so long that when at length the dull voice of Joe Cumberland broke in, there was a ring of a most prophetic solemnity about it.

“He ain’t come,” said the old man. “Dan ain’t here.”

The others exchanged glances, but the eyes of Kate dropped sadly and fastened again upon the hearth.

Buck Daniels cleared his throat like an orator.

“Nobody but a fool,” he said, “would have started out of Elkhead in a storm like this.”

“Weather makes no difference to Dan,” said Joe Cumberland.

“But he’d think of his hoss—”

“Weather makes no difference to Satan,” answered the faint, oracular voice of Joe Cumberland. “Kate!”

“Yes?”

“Is he comin’?”

She did not answer. Instead, she got up slowly from her place by the fire and took another chair, far away in the gloom, where hardly a glimmer of light reached to her and there she let her head rest, as if exhausted, against the back of the seat.

“He promised,” said Buck Daniels, striving desperately to keep his voice cheerful, “and he never busts his promises.”

“Ay,” said the old man, “he promised to be back—but he ain’t here.”

“If he started after the storm,” said Buck Daniels.

“He didn’t start after the storm,” announced the oracle. “He was out in it.”

“What was that,” cried Buck Daniels sharply.

“The wind,” said Kate, “for it’s rising. It will be a cold night, to-night.”

“And he ain’t here,” said the old man monotonously.

“Ain’t there things that might hold him up?” asked Buck, with a touch of irritation.

“Ay,” said the old rancher, “they’s things that’ll hold him up. They’s things that’ll turn a dog wild, too, and the taste of blood is one of ’em!”

The silence fell again.

There was an old clock standing against the wall. It was one of those tall, wooden frames in which, behind the glass, the heavy, polished disk of the pendulum, alternated slowly back and forth with wearisome precision. And with every stroke of the seconds there was a faint, metallic clangor in the clock—a falter like that which comes in the voice of a very old man. And the sound of this clock took possession of every silence until it seemed like the voice of a doomsman counting off the seconds. Ay, everyone in the room, again and again, took up the tale of those seconds and would count them slowly—fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three—and on and on, waiting for the next speech, or for the next popping of the wood upon the hearth, or for the next wail of the wind that would break upon the deadly expectancy of that count. And while they counted each looked straight before him with wide and widening eyes.

Into one of these pauses the voice of Buck Daniels broke at length; and it was a cheerless and lonely voice in that large room, in the dull darkness, and the duller lights.

“D’you remember Shorty Martin, Kate?”

“I remember him.”

He turned in his chair and hitched it a little closer to her until he could make put her face, dimly, among the shadows. The flames jumped on the hearth, and he saw a picture that knocked at his heart.

“The little bow-legged feller, I mean.”

“Yes, I remember him very well.”

Once more the flames sputtered and he saw how she looked wistfully before her and above. She had never seemed so lovely to Buck Daniels. She was pale, indeed, but there was no ugly pinching of her face, and if there were shadows beneath her eyes, they only served to make her eyes seem marvelously large and bright. She was pallid, and the firelight stained her skin with touches of tropic gold, and cast a halo of the golden hair about her face. She seemed like one of those statues wrought in the glory and the rich days of Athens in ivory and in gold—some goddess who has heard the tidings of the coming fall, the change of the old order, and sits passive in her throne waiting the doom from which there is no escape. Something of this filtered through to the sad heart of Buck Daniels. He, too, had no hope—nay, he had not even her small hope, but somehow he was able to pity her and cherish the picture of her in that gloomy place. It seemed to Buck Daniels that he would give ten years from the best of his life to see her smile as he had once seen her in those old, bright days. He went on with his tale.

“You would have busted laughin’ if you’d seen him at the Circle Y Bar roundup the way I seen him. Shorty ain’t so bad with a rope. He’s always talkin’ about what he can do and how he can daub a rope on anything that’s got horns. He ain’t so bad, but then he ain’t so good, either. Specially, he ain’t so good at ridin’—you know what bowed legs he’s got, Kate?”

“I remember, Buck.”

She was looking at him, at last, and he talked eagerly to turn that look into a smile.

“Well, they was the three of us got after one two year old—a bull and a bad ’un. Shorty was on one side and me and Cuttle was on the other side. Shorty daubed his rope and made a fair catch, but when his hoss set back the rope busted plumb in two. Now, Shorty, he had an idea that he could ease the work of his hoss a whole pile if he laid holts on the rope whenever his hoss set down to flop a cow. So Shorty, he had holt on this rope and was pulling back hard when the rope busted, and Shorty, he spilled backwards out’n that saddle like he’d been kicked out.

“Whilst he was lyin’ there, the bull, that had took a header when the rope busted, come up on his feet agin, and I’ll tell a man he was rarin’ mad! He seen Shorty lyin’ on the ground, and he took a run for Shorty. Me and Cuttle was laughin’ so hard we couldn’t barely swing our ropes, but I made a throw and managed to get that bull around both horns. So my Betty sits down and braces herself for the tug.

“In the meantime little Shorty, he sits up and lays a hand to his head, and same time he sees that bull come tarin’ for him. Up he jumps. And jest then the bull come to the end of the line and wonk!—down he goes, head over heels, and hits the sand with a bang that must of jostled his liver some, I’ll be sayin’!

“Well, Shorty, he seen that bull fly up into the air and he lets out a yell like the world was comin’ to an end, and starts runnin’. If he’d run straight back the other way the bull couldn’t of run a step, because I had him fast with my rope, but Shorty seen me, and he come tarin’ for my hoss to get behind him.

“That bull was like a cat gettin’ to his feet, and he sights Shorty tarin’ and lights out after him. There they went lickety-split. That bull was puffin’ on the seat of Shorty’s trowsers and tossin’ his horns and jest missin’ Shorty by inches; and Shorty had his mouth so wide open hollerin’ that you could have throwed a side of beef down his throat; and his eyes was buggin’ out. Them bow-legs of his was stretchin’ ten yards at a clip, most like, and the boys says they could hear him hollerin’ a mile away. But that bull, stretch himself all he could, couldn’t gain an inch on Shorty, and Shorty couldn’t gain an inch on the bull, till the bull come to the other end of the forty-foot rope, and then, whang! up goes the heels of the bull and down goes his head, and his heels comes over—wonk! and hits Shorty right square on the head.