by Max Brand
And presently he stamped into the shed, saddled his pony, and after a moment was scattering the pebbles on the way down the ravine.
The dark and silence gathered over Andrew Lanning. He had little warmth of feeling for Hank Rainer, to be sure, but in the hush of the cabin, he looked forward to many a long evening and many a long day in a silence like this, with no man near him. For the man who rides outside the law rides alone, and the thought of that loneliness made the heart of Andrew ache.
He could have embraced the big man, therefore, when Hank finally came back, and Andrew could hear the pony panting in the shed, a sure sign that it had been ridden hard.
“It ain’t much,” said Hank, “but it’s yours, and I hope you get a chance to use it in a pinch.” And he dumped down a case of .45 cartridges.
After all, there could have been no gift more to the point, but it gave Andrew a little chill of distaste, this reminder of the life that lay ahead of him. And in spite of himself, he could not break the silence that began to settle over the cabin again. Finally Hank announced that it was bedtime for him, and preparing himself for the blankets by the simple expedient of kicking off his boots and then drawing off his trousers, he slipped into his blankets, twisted them tightly around his broad shoulders with a single turn of his body, and was instantly snoring. Andrew followed that example more slowly.
Not since he left Martindale, however, had he slept soundly. Take a tame dog into the wilderness, and he learns to sleep like a wolf quickly enough, and Andrew, with mind and nerve constantly set for action like a cocked revolver, had learned to sleep like a wild thing in turn. And accordingly, when he wakened in the middle of the night, he was alert on the instant. He had a singular feeling that someone had been looking at him while he slept.
Chapter Twenty-One
First of all, naturally, he looked at the door. It was now a bright rectangle, filled with moonshine, and quite empty. There might, of course, be something or someone just outside the door. It might even be that a wild animal had looked in. But Andrew knew that the mere falling of an eye upon him would not waken him. There must have been a sound, and he glanced over to the trapper for an explanation. But Hank Rainer lay twisted closely in his blankets.
Andrew raised up on one elbow and thought. It troubled him—the insistent feeling of the eyes that had been upon him. They had burned their way into his dreams with a bright insistence.
He looked again, and having formed the habit of photographing things with one glance, he compared what he saw now with what he had last seen when he fell asleep. It tallied in every detail except one. The trousers that had lain on the floor beside Hank’s bed were no longer there. It was a little thing, of course, but Andrew closed his eyes to make sure. Yes, he could even remember the gesture with which the trapper had tossed down the trousers to the floor.
Andrew sat up in bed noiselessly. He slipped to the door and flashed one glance up and down. Below him the hillside was bright beneath the moon. The far side of the ravine was doubly black in shadow.
But nothing lived, nothing moved. And then again he felt the eye upon him. He whirled. “Hank,” he called softly. And he saw the slightest start as he spoke. “Hank,” he repeated in the same tone, and the trapper stretched his arms, yawned heavily, and turned. “Well, lad?” he inquired.
But Andrew knew that he had been heard the first time, and he felt that this pretended slow awakening was too elaborate to be true. He went back to his own bed and began to dress rapidly. In a moment he was equipped. And the trapper was staring stupidly at him and asking what was wrong.
“Something mighty queer,” said Andrew. “Must have been a coyote in here that sneaked off with your trousers, unless you have ’em on.”
Just a touch of pause, then the other replied through a yawn: “Sure, I got ’em on. Had to get up in the night, and I was too plumb sleepy to take ’em off again when I come back.”
“Ah,” said Andrew, “I see.”
He stepped to the door into the horse shed and paused; there was no sound. He opened the door and stepped in quickly. Both horses were on the ground, asleep, but he took the gelding by the nose, to muffle a grunt as he rose, and brought him to his feet. Then, still softly and swiftly, he lifted the saddle from its peg and put it on the back of the chestnut. One long draw made the cinches taut. He fastened the straps and then went to the little window behind the horse, through which had come the vague and glimmering light by which he did the saddling. Now he scanned the trees on the edge of the clearing with painful anxiety. Once he thought that he heard a voice, but it was only the moan of one branch against another as the wind bent some tree. He stepped back from the window and rubbed his knuckles across his forehead, obviously puzzled. It might be that after all he was wrong. So he turned back once more toward the main room of the cabin to make sure. Instead of opening the door softly, as a suspicious man will, he cast it open with a sudden push of his foot; the hulk of Hank Rainer turned at the opposite door, and the big man staggered as though he had been struck.
It might have been caused by his swift right about-face, throwing him off his balance, but it was more probably the shock that came from facing a revolver in the hand of Andrew. The gun was at his hip. It had come into his hand with a nervous flip of the fingers as rapid as the gesture of the card expert.
“Come back,” said Andrew. “Talk soft, step soft. Now, Hank, what made you do it?”
The red hair of the other was burning faintly in the moonlight, and it went out as he stepped from the door into the middle of the room, his fingertips brushing the ceiling above him. And Andrew, peering through that shadow, saw two little, bright eyes, like the eyes of a beast, twinkling out at him from the mass of hair. A twitch of cold went among the muscles of his back as he saw the thing.
“When you went after the shells for me, Hank,” he stated, “you gave the word that I was here. Then you told the gent that took the message to spread it around… to get it to Hal Dozier if possible… to have the men come back here. You’d go out, when I was sound asleep, and tell them when they could rush me. Is that straight?”
There was no answer.
“Speak out! I feel like shovin’ this gun down your throat, Hank, but I won’t if you speak out and tell me the truth.”
Whatever other failings might be his, there was no great cowardice in Hank Rainer. His arms remained above his head, and his little eyes burned. That was all.
“Well,” said Andrew, “I think you’ve got me, Hank. I suppose I ought to send you to death before me, but to tell you the straight of it, I’m not going to, because I’m sort of sick. Sick, you understand? Tell me one thing… are the boys here yet? Are they scattered around the edge of the clearing, or are they on the way? Hank, was it worth five thousand to double-cross a gent that’s your guest… a fellow that’s busted bread with you, bunked in the same room with you? And even when they’ve drilled me clean, and you’ve got the reward, don’t you know that you’ll be a skunk among real men from this time on? Did you figure on that when you sold me?”
The hands of Hank Rainer fell suddenly, but no lower than his beard. The fingers thrust at his throat—he seemed to be tearing his own flesh.
“Pull the trigger, Andy,” he said. “Go on. I ain’t fit to live. I don’t want to live. But if I had it to do over again.”
“Why did you do it, Hank?”
“I wanted a new set of traps, Andy… that was what I wanted. I’d been figurin’ and schemin’ all autumn how to get my traps before the winter come on. My own wasn’t any good. Then I seen that fur coat of yours. It set me thinking about what I could do if I had some honest-to-goodness traps with springs in ’em that would hold… and… I stood it as long as I could.”
While he spoke, Andrew looked past him, through the door. All the world was silver beyond. The snow had been falling, and on the first great peak, there was a glint of the white, very pure and chill against the sky. The very air was keen and sweet. Ah, it was a world to live
in, and he was not ready to die.
He looked back to Hank Rainer. “Hank, my time was sure to come sooner or later, but I’m not ready to die. I’m… I’m too young, Hank. Well, good-bye.”
He found gigantic arms spreading before him.
“Andy,” insisted the big man, “it ain’t too late for me to double-cross ’em. Let me go out first, and you come straight behind me. They won’t fire… they’ll think I’ve got a new plan for givin’ you up. When we get to the circle of ’em, because they’re all ’round the cabin, we’ll drive at ’em together. Come on.”
“Wait a minute. Is Hal Dozier out there?”
“Yes. Oh, go on and curse me, Andy. I’m cursin’ myself.”
“If he’s there, it’s no use. But there’s no use two dyin’ when I try to get through. Only one thing, Hank… if you want to keep your self-respect don’t take the reward money.”
“I’ll see it burn first, and I’m goin’ with you, Andy.”
“You stay where you are… this is my party. Before the finish of the dance I’m going to see if some of those sneaks out yonder, lyin’ so snug, won’t like to step right out and do a caper with me.”
And before the trapper could make a protest, he had drawn back into the horse shed. There he led the chestnut to the door, and looking through the crack, he scanned the surface of the ground. It was sadly broken and chopped with rocks, but the gelding might make headway fast enough. It was a short distance to the trees—twenty-five to forty yards perhaps. And if he burst out of that shed on the back of the horse, spurred to full speed, he might take the watchers, who perhaps expected a signal from the trapper before they acted, quite unawares, and he would be among the sheltering shadows of the forest while the posse was getting up its guns. There was an equally good chance that he would ride straight into a nest of the waiting men, and even if he reached the forest, he would be shot.
Now all these thoughts and all this weighing of the chances occupied perhaps half a second, while Andrew stood looking through the crack. Then he swung into the saddle, leaning far over to the side so that he would have clearance under the doorway, kicked open the swinging door, and sent the chestnut leaping into the night.
Chapter Twenty-Two
If only the night had been dark, if the gelding had had a fair start, but the moon was bright, and in the thin mountain air, it made a radiance almost as keen as day and just sufficiently treacherous to delude a horse, which had been sent unexpectedly out among rocks by a cruel pair of spurs. At the end of the first leap, the gelding stumbled to his knees with a crash and snort among the stones. The shock hurled Andrew forward, but he clung with spurs and hand, and as he twisted back into the saddle, the gelding rose valiantly and lurched ahead again.
Yet that double sound might have roused an army, and for the keen-eared watchers around the clearing, it was more than an ample warning. There was a crash of musketry so instant and so close together that it was like a volley delivered by a line of soldiers at command. Bullets sang shrill and small around Andrew, but that first discharge had been a burst of snap-shooting, and by moonlight it takes a rare man indeed to make an accurate snap shot. The first discharge left both Andrew and the horse untouched, and for the moment the wild hope of unexpected success was raised in his heart. And he had noted one all-important fact—the flashes, widely scattered as they were, did not extend across the exact course of flight toward the trees. Therefore, none of the posse would have a point-blank shot at him. For those in the rear and on the sides, the weaving course of the gelding, running like a deer and swerving agilely among the rocks, as if to make up for his first blunder, offered the most difficult of all targets.
All this in only the space of a breath, yet the ground was already crossed, and the trees were before him when Andrew saw a ray of moonlight flash on the long barrel of a rifle to his right, and he knew that one man at least was taking a deliberate aim. He had his revolver on the fellow in the instant, and yet he held his fire. God willing, he would come back to Anne Withero with no more stains on his hands.
And that noble, boyish impulse killed the chestnut, for a moment later a stream of fire spouted out, long and thin, from the muzzle of the rifle, and the gelding struck at the end of a stride, like a ship going down in the sea; his limbs seemed to turn to tallow under him, and he crumpled on the ground.
The fall flung Andrew cleanly out of the saddle. He staggered from his knees and leaped for the woods, but now there was a steady roar of guns behind him. He was struck heavily behind the left shoulder, staggered. Something gashed his neck like the edge of a red-hot knife; his whole left side was numb.
And then the merciful dark of the trees closed around him.
For fifty yards he raced through an opening in the trees, while a yelling like wild Indians rose behind him, and then he leaped into cover and waited. One thing favored him still. They had not brought horses, or at least they had left their mounts at some distance for fear of the chance noises they might make when the cabin was stalked. And now, looking down the lane among the trees, he saw men boil into it.
All his left side was covered with a hot bath, but balancing his revolver in his right hand, he felt a queer touch of joy and pride at finding his nerve still unshaken. He raised the weapon, covered their bodies, and then something like an invisible hand forced down the muzzle of his gun. He could not shoot to kill.
He did what was perhaps better; he fired at that mass of legs, and even a child could not have failed to strike the target. Once, twice, and again. The crowd melted to either side of the path, and there was a shrieking and forms writhing on the ground.
Someone was shouting orders from the side; he was ordering them to the right and left to surround the fugitive; he was calling out that Lanning was hit. At least they would go with caution down his trail after that first check. He left his sheltering tree and ran again down the ravine.
By this time the first shock of the wounds and the numbness were leaving him, but the pain was terrible. It gathered in his shoulder and shot with hot-and-cold fingers up and down his side. Yet he knew that he was not fatally injured if he could stop that mortal drain of his wounds.
He heard the pursuit in the distance more and more. Every now and then there was a spasmodic outburst of shooting, and Andrew grinned in spite of his pain. They were closing around the place where they thought he was making his last stand, shooting at shadows that might be the man they wanted.
Then he stopped, tore off his shirt, and ripped it with his right hand and his teeth into strips. He tied one around his neck, knotting it until he could only draw his breath with difficulty. Several more strips he tied together and then wound the long bandage around his shoulder and pulled. The pain brought him close to a swoon, but when his senses cleared, he found that the flow from his wounds had eased. But not entirely. There was still some of that deadly trickling down his side, and with the chill of the night biting into him, he knew that it was life or death to him if he could reach some friendly house within the next two miles. Some friendly house—in 2,000 miles even. There was only one dwelling straight before him, and that was the house of the owner of the bay mare. They would doubtless turn him over to the posse instantly. But there was one chance in a hundred that they would not break the immemorial rule of mountain hospitality. For Andrew there was no hope except that tenuous one.
The rest of that walk became a nightmare. Such was the singing in his ears that he was not sure whether he heard the yell of rage and disappointment behind him as the posse discovered that the bird had flown or whether the sound existed only in his own ringing head. But one thing was certain—they would not trail Andrew Lanning recklessly in the night, not even with the moon to help them.
So he plodded steadily on. If it had not been for that ceaseless drip, he would have taken the long chance and broken for the mountains above him, trying through many a long day ahead to cure the wounds and in some manner sustain his life. But the drain continued. It was hardly more t
han drop by drop, but all the time a telltale weakness was growing in his legs, as if he were drunk, and making his knees buckle more and more at every step. In spite of the agony he was sleepy, and he would have liked to drop on the first mat of leaves that he found. That crazy temptation he brushed away and went on until surely, like a star of hope to Andrew, he saw the light winking feebly through the trees and then came out on the cabin.
He remembered afterward that even in his dazed condition he was disappointed because of the neat, crisp appearance of the house. There must be women there, and women meant screams, horror, betrayal.
But there was no other hope for him now. Twice, as he crossed the clearing before he reached the door of the cabin, his foot struck a rock, and he pitched weakly forward, with only the crumbling strength of his right arm to keep him from striking on his face. Then there was a furious clamor, and a huge dog rushed at him.
It was like a picture of a dog rather than a reality to Andrew. He heeded it only with a glance from the corner of his eye. And then, his dull brain clearing, he realized that the dog no longer howled at him or showed his teeth, but was walking beside him, licking his hand and whining with sympathy.
Oh, Lord, thought Andrew, if I could find one human being with a heart as kind as this dog’s.
He dropped again, and this time he could never have regained his feet had not his right arm flopped helplessly across the back of the big dog, and the beast cowered and growled, but it did not attempt to slide from under his weight.
He managed to get erect again, but when he reached the low flight of steps to the front door, he was reeling drunkenly from side to side. He fumbled for the knob, and it turned with a grating sound.
“Hold on! Keep out!” shrilled a voice inside. “We got guns here. Keep out, you dirty bum!”
The door fell open, and he found himself confronted by what seemed to him a dazzling torrent of light and a host of human faces. He drew himself up beside the doorway.