by Max Brand
She recognized it, now—the white flag of snow dust that flies at the stern of a slide. Too, she heard a faint rumbling. She guessed that it would be a mighty avalanche before it spent itself against some intervening rock ridge.
It came down with a constantly increasing front, a constantly heightening flag of smoke in its rear. As it gathered weight and speed, it crossed the white snows, leaving a wedge-shaped mark upon the opposite mountain. It was like a thinking thing, a great, blunt-headed snake, winding here and there to follow contours of the ground that she could not make out, at that distance. Then, twisting sharply to the left, she saw that it would spend itself in a thick belt of trees that stretched like a great shadow across the slope.
When it reached the trees she could not mark any abatement of its speed. No, it rushed on through them, and they went down like grass. A huge, raw gash was cut through that forest, and the slide that had entered the trees, as a child, came out as a giant, with a tossing, bristling front. The stripped trunks of pines were flung like javelins high into the air.
It was no longer a white forehead of snow but something like a wave of muddy water, except that she knew the darkness was not mud, but snow, boulders, pebbles, sand, the whole surface soil, and the trees themselves, roots and all, that had been gathered in the arms of the monster. A distant roaring reached her, like the clatter of 1,000 carts across a hollow bridge.
Still the creature gathered power and speed. It was fleeter than a locomotive, staggering down the track, with no train of cars to check its flight. So this heap of ruin lunged down the valley wall. A strong ridge of rocks lay in its way. She waited, breathless for the shock. Then she was aware, again, of the solitary horseman who journeyed down the valley straight in the path of the flying danger. It seemed as though the thundering avalanche behind him had robbed him of power to stir, as a snake fascinated a bird. Yet, he did move, although compared to the lightning flashes of fear that fled up and down her nerves, he seemed to be standing still. He moved at the same steady dog-trot of his horse, quietly down the broad ravine.
She looked up again. He had known, evidently, that the ridge of rocks above would check the course of the slide. Probably he was some wise old head among the mountaineers, skillful in these wild matters.
The cataract of rolling snow and rock and soil struck the rock ridge. It flung its head high into the air like water, one hundred feet aloft. Then it crashed down upon the mountainside beneath and rushed on, with all of its train leaping and flowing across the rocks behind—not over them, now, but through them! She saw ten-ton boulders wrenched off and brought leaping like devils with the rest of the wreckage.
The noise sounded nearer. It seemed as if thunder were roaring in the heavens just above her, or that the ground was being torn to pieces beneath her feet. It seemed to her that she felt a trembling of the great rock mountain shoulder on which she sat her horse, and the mustang itself cringed as though a whip was shaken in its eyes.
And the single rider? He still jogged his horse quietly down the slope, heading for the river.
III
THE CRUEL SNAKE
The heart of the girl stood still. Of all dreadful things in the world, there is nothing that so paralyzes all the mind of man as the sight of some inexplicable horror. But it was not inexplicable to her long; she decided that the man was deaf. That was undoubtedly the explanation. The thundering tumult behind him was as nothing to him, and he would not be disturbed until the very shadow of that towering river of destruction was above him. Then, one frightened upward glance, and he would be swallowed.
She turned to her mustang, and he whirled gladly about to escape the sight of this thing. But before she had ridden off the shoulder of the mountain, pity and hysteria made her check the horse and turn again.
Straight down the slope the avalanche was careening wildly. It struck and demolished a stout grove of trees.
Still the deaf man jogged his horse patiently downhill.
She snatched out her field glasses and trained them on the spot. What she saw was no old mountaineer, but a young one, riding a little atilt in his saddle, with most of his weight upon one leg, and his attention now occupied entirely by the serious business of—rolling a cigarette! His horse seemed to be nervous and twitching—yet held in check by his master’s one hand.
It was perhaps better that the thing should be like this; far better that he should have no serious thought in his mind, and certainly no fear when the blow struck him. For it was now too late to flee, even if he were to be warned.
And warned he was, at that very instant, for she saw his head twist around over his shoulder. Her hands shook so that her vision was blurred a little. Finally she could see that he had turned toward the front again. The horse was not brought to a gallop. It still dog-trotted leisurely down the slope, and its rider was lighting his newly made smoke.
She lowered the glasses to look with her naked eye, as though what she had seen magnified, could not have been the truth. To her naked eye it seemed now as though the great front of the slide was already upon the doomed rider. She caught up the glasses again with a murmured word. One meager hope appeared for the fugitive. Just behind him, there was a deep swerve of the floor of the slope and it might be that this would turn the current of the slide. Stop it, it could not, but ward it into another direction perhaps it might.
The rider had barely ridden across this gully when the storm struck upon the other side. She saw the whole front of the landslide dip, the great head of the monster stagger, turn, and rush wildly off down this new channel.
The mustang, too frightened now to heed his rider, was striving violently to race away from destruction, but his rider merely sat upon his back, pulling strongly upon the reins, with danger showering all around him, for the great rocks that had been picked up by the avalanche were not so easily diverted to a new course as was the more liquid mass of the remainder. Mighty boulders were tossed straight ahead, bounding past the horseman with power and size enough to blot out a whole troop of cavalry, let alone a single man and horse.
The force of a miracle still surrounded this fellow. He rode through the storm unscathed, so far as she could see, until the whole length of the slide had twisted into the gully, which it was plowing deeper and deeper as it went.
It lurched on toward the bottomlands of the valley, pouring like water across them. Not so big as formerly, it reached the river and cleft it in two, with a white leaping of foam. From bank to bank the river’s chasm was filled with hundreds of thousands of tons of detritus in which massive pine trunks bristled, no larger in proportion than bristles on the back of a boar. On the nearer side of the stream toward the girl, a huge overwash of the wreckage flowed far out across the land, lodging, at last, even against the foot of her own mountain.
The course of this cruel snake was ended. That its trail would be marked for 10,000 years in the vast rent that was gouged out of the valley slope, that the river was dammed completely, and much of its upper valley probably flooded, did not matter. All that was worth heeding—was that yonder lone rider had escaped from destruction.
She stared at him, aghast. He had ridden into her innermost thoughts. For she had heard of bravery before, but this utter contempt of life was a thing that she could not fathom.
He did not pause in his course to get down from his saddle and, upon his knees, give thanks to God for his deliverance. He simply dog-trotted the mustang along the course from which he had never turned since the beginning of this little tragedy a few minutes before.
He came to the wall of detritus across the river, and he sent the mustang across it, the wise brute working daintily, testing the tree trunks and the rocks before stepping upon them, and so making to the nearer shore again with no mishaps beyond a stagger or two.
The stranger was riding straight up the trail toward her. Louise Berenger waited on the trail, spellbound. He was a young man; she had seen that much in the glasses. But what else he might be, she had been too exci
ted to observe, and now he was hidden under the steep face of the cliff. Presently she heard his whistle rising to her, a sweet, high-pitched whistle that seemed to flow from his lips as easily as the song of a bird. She liked that. He whistled not like a boy, but like a musician. She had never heard that song. But at least it was no cheap, foolish popular song. As he came closer, she heard him speaking to his horse.
“Steady, Rob, you old fool! If you got to have your lunch, jest you aim for the grass on the inside of the trail, will you? Because it makes my eyes ache a lot to be hung over the edge of nothing, like this.”
Made his eyes ache! Louise Berenger, feeling rather weak and ridiculously happy, found herself chuckling softly. No matter what sort of a fellow he might turn out to be, in appearance she was at least certain that there was not his like in the whole world.
Then, taking her almost by surprise, he turned the next corner of the trail, and she found herself looking into a brown, handsome face and a pair of good-humored eyes equipped with a continual smile. She saw that he was a well-made man, tall, strong-shouldered. To give additional proof of his madness, he had been riding that twisting, desperate trail with his arms folded across his breast and his reins looped carelessly over the horn of the saddle, letting the horse pick his own way and take his own time.
For an example of what chances that meant, even now as the gelding sighted the stranger just before him, he flung up his head and leaped aside and backward, faltering on the very brink of the precipice, or so it seemed to Louise Berenger, who was too startled even to scream a warning.
But the stranger was not perturbed. “Rob,” he asked, “is that manners, and to a lady?”
He took off his hat, and Louise saw that his forehead was even as lofty and nobly made as the forehead of her father had been.
“Ma’am,” said the rider, “it’s a lucky thing that we met here at this good passing place, ain’t it?”
There was a good passing place on the level surface of the mountain shoulder from which she had turned her horse before, as she was fleeing from the sight of a dreadful catastrophe to the lone rider. But the present diameter of the trail seemed to her not more than wide enough for a single animal.
“If you’ll rein back to the wide place and . . . ,” she began.
But it was apparent at once that he had not been sarcastic. He sent Rob straight on, along the terrible outer edge of the path.
“Wait!” cried the girl. “There’s no sense in taking such a fearful chance on . . .”
She could not complete the sentence. Rob was already beside her, and, as Louise reined her own mustang closer in against the wall of the mountain, it seemed to her that the other swayed out over dizzy nothingness. Then Rob came back into the trail again.
“Will you stop one moment?” called the girl.
He turned instantly in the saddle. Rob paused and, planting his hoofs on the crumbling outer edge of the trail, strained far out toward a tuft of grass that sprouted from the face of a rock.
“Is there anything that I might be able to do for you?” asked the stranger.
“Only tell me this,” said Louise Berenger. “Why did you take that last terrible chance in passing me on this trail?”
“Was it a chance?” said the other, leaning from his saddle and looking calmly down the side of the precipice. “Well, lady, I’ll tell you how it is. The way this here life is arranged, there’s nothing but chances, all the time. And if you ain’t killed by the chance of falling off a mountain trail, maybe you’ll be scared to death by the chance of a bad dream at night. So what’s the use of bothering?”
IV
THE THINGS THAT ARE FATED
Of all the things in life that Louise Berenger detested, there was nothing she loathed more than braggadocio. But this was something more than bragging, as she could very easily see. This man spoke as he felt, no more, no less. She was as delighted as she was amazed. And she said, laughing: “Will you please tell me your name?”
“I will”—he grinned—“if you’ll tell me why you laugh.”
“I laugh because I’m tickled,” Louise Berenger said inelegantly, “and I want to know your name so that it’ll help me to remember you.”
“Thanks,” said the brown man. “Would you want to know the whole name?”
“Why, I suppose so,” she said.
“My name is Pedro Emmanuel Melendez,” he said.
She could not help laughing again; the contrast between his totally Western-American personality and his pale-blue eyes—with his intensely Latin name quite unbalanced her self-control.
“I know.” Pedro Emmanuel Melendez nodded, with his usual smile shining out of his eyes. “It sounds like it was out of a poem in some dago language, don’t it? Don’t sound like a real name, at all.” He sat sidewise in the saddle, making himself at ease in much the same fashion as when he had been dog-trotting his horse away from the thundering pursuit of the landside.
“I’ve tried that name backwards and forwards,” said Pedro Melendez. “I’ve tried calling myself . . . Pedro E. And I’ve wrote myself down plain . . . P. E. Melendez. But it all sounds queer. Even when I worked it up fancy into P. Emmanuel Melendez, it was no good. So, generally, the folks call me Pete, and let it go at that. But why I was hitched up to a name like that, I’ll tell you the reason. I was brung up by an old gent that wore that moniker of Melendez. And would I switch from his name back to my own? No, lady. I would not, though that there name has cost me more trouble in the way of avoiding fights than any other one thing.”
“Trouble in avoiding fights, exactly,” said the girl. “And how many fights that you couldn’t avoid?”
“The fact is,” said Pedro Melendez, “that I’m very much of a peace-loving gent.” She smiled, but he insisted: “No, that’s the fact. I hate fighting. I just naturally loathe having to stand up and look into the eyes of a gent that is mad at me.” He sighed and shook his head. “But I got to be getting on,” he said. “This here hoss is needing a feed before long. Ain’t you, Rob?”
Rob, at the sound of his name, flattened his ears and reached back to snap at the toe of Pete’s right boot; a jab of the said boot made him swing back his head with a grunt.
“Are you going for the gulch?” asked the girl.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll go along with you, if I may.”
“There ain’t anything that I’d like better.”
The trail remained narrow for only a little time, and then it widened enough to allow them to ride side-by-side. She looked up out of her thoughts and found him watching her with a frank admiration and interest.
“You’re in trouble about something,” he suggested, and there was something so extremely frank and open in his tone that she could not help answering:
“Yes . . . about you, just now.”
“And how come?” he queried.
“Why,” said Louise Berenger, “I have a lot of cousins. I watched them grow up. I played with them, climbed trees with them, and knew them better than I knew any girls. I got to know boys fairly well, and by the look of you, Mister Melendez, I should say that when you were their age, if they had seen you coming, they would have doubled up their fists and said . . . ‘Here’s trouble coming!’”
“Well,” he admitted, “you got a pretty accurate eye, at that. When I was a boy there was nothing but fighting for me.” He sighed and shook his head, and then brought himself out of that dim haze of memory into the present again. “I was always whanging somebody and getting whanged, but, after a while, I growed up, and I lost all sorts of taste for fighting. No, ma’am,” he said, repeating his thought with a soft emphasis to himself, “when I hear voices raised up loud and high, I just back up right away, and, when you draw a line, you can bet that I don’t cross it!”
She studied him. Certainly he would never be guilty of false modesty. He meant what he said.
“No,” he said, “about this fighting business . . . but I seem to be talking a lot about myself
.”
“It’s a long way to camp,” she said. “And I’m interested.”
“So am I,” Melendez said, with his unfailing grin, and, as they jaunted down the trail, side-by-side, he told her the story of his life with perfect simplicity, enjoying all that he remembered fully as much as any auditor could have done.
She, turning to watch him from time to time, or looking before her down the trail, heard the tale carry Melendez back to his boyhood. It was easy to summon up the picture of the handsome face of that other self in the old days. No wonder the old Mexican had chosen to adopt this striking youngster. The blue eyes of that other and younger Melendez gleamed out at her from the cool shadows beside a pool on the mountain slope beneath them. There was stamped on her mind forever pictures of Melendez in his story, and pictures of the mountains through which they were riding came home to Louise Berenger.
They had been troublesome times almost from the first, because old Melendez lost almost at once the prosperity that had induced him to adopt a son. He had taken Pedro wandering here and there, and wherever they made a new home there was, of course, a new set of boys to be fought.
“My eyes,” he said reflectively, “were always either black or purple, when along would come another fight, and I would get whacked again. And so, you see, when I grew up to be man-sized, I was sort of in the habit of having trouble come my way. Trouble is like a pet dog. It gets used to you and keeps following you around at your heels. It was that way with me. The first time that I got into a serious mess was this.” He pointed to a thin, white line that ran across his cheek. “That was Mexican style, with knives,” he added. “And then this came, while I was still wearing bandages around my head.” He touched a place on his left arm. “And a lucky thing for me that day”—Pedro Melendez sighed—“that it was the left arm that they drilled, and that I could keep right on shooting with my other hand. But after that, it was just the same thing over and over again. There was always some part of me patched with iodine that hadn’t yet scrubbed off. I got knives through my right side, and down this here shoulder, and one of ’em jammed into my neck. I got bullets through both legs a couple of times, and one right through me, finally, that laid me up for nigh onto six months, while the doctor every day said . . . ‘Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t.’ And the nurse, every time I looked up, had a tear in her eye. However, I pulled through, but I had a lot of time lying on the flat of my back and studying the ceiling and thinking back. By the time that I could walk, I was sure it was no use.”