by Max Brand
The night was coming on crisp and cold, for the elevation was great. But in spite of his long ride Carney postponed his sleep. He wrapped himself in his blankets and sat up to see. Not much for anyone to see except a poet, for both earth and sky were a pale, bright silver, and the moon was the only living thing in heaven or on earth. His horse, a wise old gelding with an ugly head and muscles of leather, seemed to feel the silence, for he came from his wretched hunt after dead grass and stood behind the master. But the master paid no attention. He was squinting into nothingness and seeing. He was harkening to silence and hearing. A sound that the ear of a wolf could hardly catch came to him. He knew that there were rabbits. He listened again, a wavering pulse of noise, and far off was a coyote. And yet both those sounds combined did not make up the volume of a hushed whisper. They were unheard rhythms that are felt.
But what Lew Carney saw no man can say, no man who has not been stung with the fever of the desert. Perhaps he guessed at the stars behind the moon haze. Perhaps he thought of the buzzards far off, all-seeing, all-knowing, the dreadful prophets of the mountain desert. But whatever it was that the mind of Lew Carney perceived, his face under the moon was the face of a man who sees God. He had come from the gaming tables of Bogle Camp; tomorrow night he would be at the gaming tables in Cayuse; but here was an interval of silence between, and he gave himself to it as devoutly as he would give himself again to chuck-a-luck or poker.
Some moments went by. The horse stirred and went away, switching his tail. Yet Carney did not move. He was like an Indian in a trance. He was opening himself to that deadly hush with a pleasure more thrilling than cards and red-eye combined. Time at length entirely ceased for him. It might have been five minutes later. It might have been midnight. He seemed to have drifted on a river into the heart of a new emotion.
And now he heard it for the first time.
Into the unutterable silence of the mountains a pulse of new sound had grown. He was suddenly aware that he had been hearing it ever since he first made camp, but not until it grew into an unmistakable thing did he fully awaken to it. He had not heard it because he did not expect it. He knew the mountain desert as a student knows a book, as a monk knows his cell, as a child knows its mother. It was the one thing on earth that he truly feared, and it was probably the only thing on earth that he really loved. The moment he made out the new thing, he stiffened under his blankets and canted his head down. The next instant he lay prone to catch the ground noise. And after lying there a moment, he started up and walked back and forth across a diameter of a hundred yards.
When he had finished his walk, he was plainly and deeply excited. He stood with his teeth clenched and his eyes working uneasily through the moon haze and piercing down the valley in the direction of Bogle Camp, far away. He even touched the handles of his gun and he found a friendly reassurance in their familiar grip. He went restlessly to the gelding and cursed him in a murmur. The horse pricked his ears at the well-known words.
But here was a strange thing in itself: Lew Carney lowering his voice because of some strange emotion.
The sound of his own voice seeming to trouble him, he started away from the horse and walked again in the hope of catching a different angle of the sound. He heard nothing new. It was always the same.
Now the sound was unmistakable, and unquestionably it approached him. And to understand how the sound could approach for so long a time without the cause coming into view, it must be remembered that the air of the mountains at that altitude is very rare, and sound travels a long distance without appreciable diminution.
In itself the noise was far from dreadful. Yet the lone rider eventually retired to his blankets, wrapped himself in them securely, for fear that the chill of the night should numb his fighting muscles, and rested his revolver on his knee for action. He brushed his hand across his forehead, and the tips of his fingers came away wet. Lew Carney was in a cold perspiration of fear! And that was a fact that few men in the mountain desert would have believed.
He sat with his eyes glued through the moon haze down the valley, and his head canted to listen more intently. Once more it stopped. Once more it began, a low, chuckling sound with a metallic rattling mixed in. And for a time it rumbled softly on toward him, and then again the sound was snuffed out as though it had turned a corner.
That was the gruesome part of it, the pauses in that noise. The continued sounds that one hears in a lonely house by night are unheeded, but the sounds that are varied by stealthy pauses chill the blood. That is the footstep approaching, pausing, listening, stealing on again.
The strange sound stole toward the waiting man, paused, and stole on again. But there are motives for stealth in a house. What motive was there in the open desert?
It was the very strangeness of it that sent the shudder through Lew. Presently he could feel the terror of that presence that was coming slowly down the valley. It went before, like the eye of a snake, and fascinated life into motionlessness. Before he saw the thing that made the sound, while the murmur itself was but an undistinguished whisper, before all the revelations of the future, Lew Carney knew that the thing was evil. Just as he had heard the voices of certain men and hated them before he even saw their faces.
He was not a superstitious fellow. Far from it. His life had made him a canny, practical sort in the affairs of men, but it had also given him a searching alertness. He could smile while he faced a known danger, but an unknown thing unnerved him. Given an equal start, a third-rate gunfighter could have beaten Lew Carney to the draw at this moment and shot him full of holes.
Afterward, he was to remember his nervous state and attribute much of what he saw and heard to the condition of his mind. In reality he was not in a state when delusions possess a man, but in a period of super-penetration.
In the meantime the sound approached. It grew from a murmur to a clear rumbling. It continued. It loomed on the ear of Carney as a large object looms on the eye. It possessed and overwhelmed him like a mountain thrust toward him from its base.
But for all his awareness the thing came upon him suddenly. Looking down the valley, he saw, above a faint rise of ground, the black outline of a topped wagon between him and the moonlight horizon. He drew a great sobbing breath and then began to laugh with hysterical relief.
A wagon! He stood up to watch its coming. It was rather strange that a freighter should travel by night, however, but in those gold rush days far stranger things had come within his ken.
The big wagon rocked fully into view. The chuckling was the play of the tall wheels on the hubs; the rattling was the stir of chains. Carney cursed and was suddenly aware of the blood running in old courses and a kindly warmth. But his relief was cut short. The wagon stopped in the very moment of coming over the rise.
Then he remembered the pauses in that sound before. What did it mean, these many stops? To breathe the horses? No horses that ever lived, no matter how exhausted, needed as many rests as this. In fact it would make their labor all the greater to have to start the load after they had drawn it a few steps. Not only that, but by the way the wagon rocked, even over the comparatively smooth sand of the desert, Carney felt assured that the wagon carried only a skeleton load. If it were heavily burdened, it would crunch its wheels deeply into the sand and come smoothly.
But the wagon started on again, not with a lurch, such as that of horses striking the collar and thrusting the load into sudden motion, but slowly, gradually, with pain, as though the motive power of this vehicle were exerting the pressure gradually and slowly increasing the momentum. It was close enough for him to note the pace, and he observed that the wagon crept forward by inches. Give a slow draft horse two tons of burden and he would go faster than that. What on earth was drawing the wagon through this moon haze in Silver Cañon?
If the distant mystery had troubled Lew Carney, the strange thing under his eyes was far more imposing. He sat down again as though
he wished to shrink out of view, and once more he had his heavy gun resting its muzzle on his knee. The wagon had stopped again.
And now he saw something that thrust the blood back into his heart and made his head swim. He refused to admit it. He refused to see it. He denied his own senses and sat with his eyes closed tightly. It was a childish thing to do, and perhaps the long expectancy of that waiting had unnerved the man a little. But there he sat with his eyes stubbornly shut, while the chuckling of the wagon began again, continued, drew near, and finally stopped close to him.
Then at last he looked, and the thing that he guessed before was now an indubitable fact. Plainly silhouetted by the brilliant moon, he saw the tall wagon drawn by eight men, working in teams of two, like horses. And behind the wagon was a pair of heavy horses pulling nothing at all. No, they were idly tethered to the rear of the vehicle. Weak horses, exhausted by work? No, the moon glinted on the well-rounded sides, and when they stepped, the sand quivered under their weight. Moreover they threw their hoofs as they walked—a sure sign by which the draft horse can always be distinguished. He plants his hoofs with abandon. He cares not what he strikes as long as he can drive his iron-shod toes down to firm ground and, secure of his purchase, send his vast weight into the collar. Such was the step of these horses, and when the wagon stopped, they surged forward until their breasts struck the rear of the schooner. Not the manner of tired horses, which halt the instant the tension on the halter is released. Not the manner of balky horses, either, this eagerness on the rope.
But there before the eyes of Lew Carney stood the impossible. Eight forms. Eight black silhouettes drooping with weariness before the wagon, and eight deformed shadows on the white sand at their feet, and two ponderous draft horses tethered behind.
It is not the very strange that shocks us. We are readily acclimated to the marvelous. But the small variations from the commonplace are what make us incredulous. How the world laughed when it was said that ships would one day travel without sails, or that the human voice would carry three thousand miles! Yet those things could be understood. And later on there was little interest when men actually flew. The world was acclimated to the strange. But an unusual handwriting, a queer mark on the wall, a voice-like sound in the wind will startle and shock the most hard-headed. If that wagon had been seen by Lew Carney flying through the air, he probably would have yawned and gone to sleep. But he saw it on the firm ground drawn by eight men, and his heart quaked.
Not a sound had been spoken when they halted. And now they stood without a sound.
Yet Lew’s gelding stood plainly in view, and he himself was not fifty feet away. To be sure they stood in their ranks without any head turning, yet beyond a shadow of a doubt they had seen him. They must see him. Still they did not speak.
In the mountain desert when men pass in the road, they pause and exchange greetings. It is not necessary that they be friends or even acquaintances. It is not necessary that they be reputable or respectable. It is not necessary that they have white skins. It suffices that a human being sees a human being in the wilderness and he rejoices in the sight. The sound of another man’s voice can be a treasure beyond the price of gold.
But here stood eight men, weary, plainly in need of help, plainly scourged forward by some dreadful necessity, yet they did not send a single hail toward Lew.
No man among them spoke. The silence became terrible. If only one of them would roll a cigarette. At that moment the smell of burning tobacco would have taken a vast load off the shoulders of Lew Carney.
But the eight stirred neither hand nor foot. And each man stood as he had halted, his hands behind him, grasping the long chain.
II
How long they stood there Lew Carney could not guess. He only knew that a pulse began to thunder in his temple and his ears were filling with a roaring sound. This thing could not be, and yet there it was before his eyes.
It flashed into his mind that this might be some sort of foolish practical jest. Some wild prank of the cattlemen. But a single glance at the figures of the eight robbed him of this last remaining clue. Every line and angle of their bent heads and sagging bodies told of men taxed to the limit of endurance. The pride that keeps chins up was gone. The nerve force that allows a last few springy efforts of muscles was destroyed. Without a spoken signal, like dumb brute beasts, the eight leaned softly forward, let the weight of their bodies come gently on the chain and remained slanting forward until the wagon stirred, the wheels turned, and the big vehicle started on. The sand was whispering as it curled around the broad rims of the wheels, and that was the only sound in Silver Cañon.
Stupefied, Carney watched it go without relief. Another man might have been glad to have the mystery pass on, but, after the first chill of fear, Lew began to hunger to get under the surface of this freak. Yet he did not move until there was a sudden darkening of the moonlight. Then he looked up.
As he did so he saw that the moon was obscured by a gray tinge, and he felt a sharp gust of wind in his face. Up the cañon toward Cayuse the air was thick with a dirty mist, and he knew that it was the coming of a sandstorm.
That dismal reality brushed the thought of the wagon from his mind for a moment. He found a bit of shrubbery a hundred yards away and entrenched himself behind it to wait until the storm should pass over, and he might snatch some sleep. The horse, warned by these preparations, came close.
They were hardly finished before the blast of the wind had a million edges of flying sand grains. And a moment later the sandstorm was raging well over them. Lew Carney, comfortable in his shelter except for the grit that forced itself down his neck, thought of the eight men and the wagon. Even in the storm he knew that they had not stopped, but were trudging wearily on. And if the wagon were halted and dragged back by the weight of the wind, still they would lean against the chain and struggle blindly. The imagined picture of them became more vivid than the picture as they had stood in the moonlight.
It was not a really heavy blow. In two hours it was over, but it left the air dim, and when Lew peered up the valley, the wagon was out of sight. For a time he banished the thought of it, wrapped himself again in the blankets, and was instantly asleep.
The first brightness of morning wakened him, and, tumbling automatically out of his blankets, he set about the preparation of breakfast with a mind numbed by sleep. Not until the first swallow of scalding coffee had passed his lips did he remember the wagon, and then he started up and looked again at the valley. He rubbed his eyes, but it was nowhere in sight.
Ordinarily it would not seem strange that a night’s travel, even at the slowest pace, should take a wagon out of sight, but Silver Cañon was by no means ordinary. Through the thin, clear air the eye could look from the place where Lew stood clear up the valley to the cleft between the two mountains thirty miles away, where Cayuse stood. There were no depressions to conceal any object of size, but the floor of the valley tilted gradually and smoothly up. To understand the clearness of that mountain air and the level nature of the valley, it may be remarked that men working mines high up of the sides of the mountains toward the base of Silver Cañon could see the campfires of freighters on four successive nights, dwindling into stars on the fourth night, but plainly discernible through the four days of the journey. And a band of wild horses could be watched every moment of a fifty-mile run to the water holes, easily traced by the cloud of dust.
Bearing these things in mind, it can be understood why Lew Carney gasped as he stared up the valley and saw—nothing!
The big schooner had vanished into thin air or else it had reached Cayuse. This thought comforted him, but after a moment of thought he shook his head again. They could not have covered the thirty miles. Two hours’ travel had been impossible against the storm. Deducting that time, there remained well under three hours. Certainly the eight men pulling the wagon could not have covered a quarter of that distance in three hours or double
three hours. And even if they had harnessed in the two big horses, the thing was still impossible. An hour of sharp trotting would have broken down those lumbering hulks of animals. And as for keeping up a rate of ten miles an hour for three hours with a lumbering wagon behind them and through soft sand, why it was something that a team of blooded horses, drawing a light buckboard, could hardly have accomplished.
The rest of Lew’s breakfast was tossed away untasted. He packed his tins with a rattle and tumbled into the saddle, and presently the gelding was cantering softly toward Cayuse.
As he expected, the storm had blotted out all traces. There was not a sign of wheels. The sand, perfectly smooth except for long wind riffles, scrawled awkwardly here and there. Little hummocks had been tossed up around shrubs, but otherwise all was plainly in view, and the phantom wagon was nowhere on the horizon.
Of course, one possibility remained. They might have turned out of the main course of the valley and gone to one side, ignorant of the fact that those mountains were inaccessible to wagons. It required a horse with tricky hoofs, unhampered with any load, to climb those sliding, steep, sand surfaces. For the draft animals to attempt it with a wagon behind them was ludicrous. Yet he kept sweeping the hills on either side for some trace of the schooner, and always there was nothing.
As has been said, Lew was by no means superstitious, and now he had broad daylight to help steady his nerves and sharpen his faculties. Yet, in spite of broad daylight, he began to feel once more the eerie thrill of the unearthly, and he felt that even if he had stepped out to examine the tracks of the wagon as soon as it passed him, he would have found nothing.