by Max Brand
In the meantime he came to a river twisting among the hills, a swift, straight stream, save where it now and then dodged the knees of a hill and plunged on again. Macdonald looked upon that river with a careful eye, but he could not remember having seen it before.
He went on up its bank, glorying in the brown rushing of the waters with streaks and riffles of yellow foam upon the surface. On either side the banks were being gouged away. Here and there trees were toppling on the edges of the banks, with half their foothold torn away. And even the hills of rock, which the stream dodged perforce, were rudely assaulted and carved by the currents.
And, just as this dashing and thundering torrent was different from other peaceful rivers full of quiet, of pauses and starts, was not he, also, equally different from other men? Did he not bear down those who opposed him? A thousand crimes might be laid to his account, but who was strong enough or cunning enough to call him to a reckoning?
At length he came to a turn of the river, so that its main body was removed to some distance from him, as he drove on straight up the valley and, as the waters were withdrawn, it seemed to Macdonald that their voice was gathered in great, thick accents: “Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!” repeated over and over.
So startling was the clearness of that phrase that he shook his head and thundered out a fragment of a song to thrust the thought from his head, but, when he listened to the river again, it was calling as clearly as ever: “Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”
He halted Sunset and looked about him. As he stared about him now, it seemed to Macdonald that he had indeed seen this river before. He had ridden that way, but he must have looked only casually about him. He could recall no single landmark, but he remembered the whole effect, as one remembers the sound of a human voice without being able to identify it with descriptive words.
Now he followed the stream again as it dwindled swiftly. He crossed a fork, where another creek joined it. He went on, and in another half mile he was at the big spring that gave the river birth. A little farther on he came to the divide, a ragged crest that overlooked to the east a rich plain, dotted with trees, spotted here and there with houses, and in the distance the gathered roofs of a town with a few clusters of spires above it. And, as he paused, the wind blew to him faintly the lowing of cattle made musical with distance. Another sound was forming behind him, the small voice of the creek, and again it seemed to be building words: “Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”
Macdonald grew cold in his sleep. A heaviness of foreboding depressed him. But he reached for his guns, and they were all safe. They were all loaded. He looked again upon the plain below. It was bright with sun, spotted with shadow as before, and all was wrapped in a misty noonday of content and prosperity.
There could be nothing to fear in this, he told himself, and straightway he gave Sunset the rein. Down the slope they went in a wild gallop. They started across the fields with Sunset jumping the fences like a bird on the wing dipping over them. And so they came suddenly to a long avenue of black walnut trees, immense and wide-spreading, trees that interlaced their branches above the head of Macdonald.
He stopped Sunset. It was more than familiar, this long double file of trees. He had seen it before. He closed his eyes. He told himself that if he turned his head he would see a section behind him, where three trees had died, and where three smaller and younger trees had been planted. He turned his head. He looked. And, behold, it was exactly as he had guessed.
It was very mysterious. He had never seen that plain before, he told himself, and yet here he was remembering an exact detail. Macdonald swallowed with difficulty. He looked hastily around him. But there was nothing to justify that warning voice that he had seemed to hear from the river among the hills. There was only the whisper of the wind among the big branches above him, and the continual shifting and interplay of the shadows on the white road, and lazy cows, swelling with grass, had lain down in the neighboring field to chew their cuds. No, nothing could be less alarming than this, unless the rattle of approaching hoof beats bore some unsuspected danger toward him.
In a moment the rider was in view, swinging around a bend in the road. But fear? It was only a girl of eighteen or twenty on a speedy bay mare, borne backward in the saddle a little by the rate of the gallop and laughing her delight at the boughs of the walnut trees and the glimpses of the deep blue sky beyond them.
And as her face grew out upon him, Macdonald turned cold. For on the one hand he knew that he had never seen her or, at least, he had certainly never heard her voice, never heard her name, but as for her face, it was more familiar to him than his own. He had come into a ghostly land, with voices speaking from rivers and with roads on which familiar strangers journeyed,
She came straight on, and he searched her face with his stare. She was by no means like the girls he was familiar with. They rode astride like men in loosely flowing garments of khaki, but this one was clad in a tightly fitted jacket, with long tight sleeves, bunched up at the shoulders, and she was perched gracefully in a sidesaddle, with the skirt of her riding habit sweeping well down past the stirrup.
When she saw him, she threw up a hand in greeting, and he heard her cry out in a high, sweet, tingling voice that went through and through him. The bay mare flung back and came to a halt with half a dozen stiff-legged jumps, then she busied herself touching noses with Sunset. But the girl in the sidesaddle? She had thrown her hands to Macdonald, and she was laughing, but her eyes were filled with tears.
“Oh,” she cried to him, “I have been waiting so long … so long! I have ridden here every day for you to come, and here you are at last. I thought my heart would break with the long waiting, Gordon, but now it’s breaking with happiness.”
Was it from this that that voice from the river had bidden him turn back? His heart was thundering.
“Do I know you then?” he was asking her. “Have I really met you before?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“I try to remember, but there’s a door shut in my mind, and I can’t open it.”
“We have met in our dreams, Gordon. Don’t you remember now?”
“I almost remember. But your name is just around the corner and away from me.”
“I’ve never had a name … for you,” she said. And then her face clouded. “But if I should tell you my name, it would spoil everything. You aren’t going to ask me for that, dear?”
“How can a name spoil anything?”
“If I showed you my father’s house, you would understand.”
“If I should lose you, how could I trail you and find you again, if I did not know your name?”
“You could find the river, and the river will always bring you to me, you know. But we never can leave one another now. If we turn together and ride fast, they’ll never overtake us … if we once get to the hills and ride down the valley road beside the river, just the way you came.”
“I have never run away from any man or men,” he answered sternly. “How can I run away now? Who will follow?”
“My father and all his men. Have you forgotten that?”
Fear grew up in Macdonald, but at the same time there was a wild desire to ride on to the end of that road. And as for “father and all his men,” he was consumed with a perverse eagerness to see them. It was from this, then, that the river had bidden him turn back. But on he went, with the girl riding close beside him, beseeching him to stop.
When they came to the great avenue of walnut trees, they entered a village and passed through it until they came into a deep garden and straight under the facade of a lofty house, one of the largest he had ever seen, he thought, with great wooden turrets and gables. To Macdonald it looked like a castle.
“Is this your father’s house, where he lives with all his men?” he asked of the girl.
But no voice answered him and, when he turned, the girl was gone. He look
ed on all sides, but she was nowhere to be seen.
They have stolen her away from me, he thought to himself. They have taken her into the house and, if I follow her there, they will kill me, but if I do not follow her, I shall never see her again. And it seemed to Macdonald that, if he never saw her again, it would be worse, far worse than death. For the sound of her voice he would have crossed a sea. And there was a soft slenderness to her hand, like the hand of a child, that took hold on his heart.
“If I follow her into the house,” Macdonald said softly to himself, “I am no better than a dead man, but if I do not follow her, I am worse than dead.”
So he marched resolutely up the winding path. He strode up the wide steps, but when he came before the door of the house, though he had not heard a sound of a footfall following him, a strong hand clutched him by the shoulder.
Swiftly he turned around, but there was nothing behind him save the empty air, and the grip of the hand held him by the shoulder, ground into the strength of his big muscles, and seemed biting him to the bone like a hand of fire.
Here Macdonald awoke. There was a hand indeed upon his shoulder, and over his bed a dim figure was leaning. Instantly he grappled with the other, found his throat, dashed him to the floor.
“For Lord’s sake,” groaned the voice of the other, “don’t kill me … it’s only Jenkins.”
V
So real had been the dream, so vivid had been the sunshine that he had seen in it, so clear the flowers and the trees and the shrubs in that great garden and the looming house above him, that for a moment the black darkness in the room seemed to stifle the big man.
Macdonald recalled himself and raised the groveling form of Jenkins to his feet.
“A fool thing to wake a man like that … in the middle of the night,” he growled at Jenkins. “Wait till I light a lamp.”
“Not a lamp, in the name of reason,” panted the gambler. “Somebody might be watching … somebody might guess …”
“Guess what?”
“That you put me up to the work.”
“What work?”
“Playing with Rory Moore and breaking him.”
The whole story rolled back upon the mind of Macdonald, and for a moment the face of the girl in his dream was dim. “Ah, yes,” he said. “And tell me what happened?”
“You seen just what would happen, Macdonald. Moore played like a crazy man. I won so fast it had me dizzy. Finally he was broke. He put up his watch … he put up everything he had.”
“Even the ranch?”
“Nope, it seems that he made that over to his sister. It’s in her name.”
“But he lost everything else?”
“Everything! And finally he put up Sunset. You’d have thought that he was staking his soul on them cards. And when he lost, he put his head between his hands and groaned like a sick kid.”
“But you got the horse, Jenkins?”
“It’s in the stable behind the hotel. I’m leaving the first thing in the morning. I’m going to tell them at the stable that I sold the horse to you. Then I light out for Canada.”
“Why that?”
“Rory Moore may find out what I am, that some folks think I don’t always play square with the cards. And if he thinks that he’s been cheated out of that horse, he’ll kill me, Macdonald! Why, he’d follow me around the world to sink a bullet into me.”
“Shut up! You’re talking like a woman, not a man. Be quiet, Jenkins. Go wherever you please, but let me have the horse. Good bye.”
“Will you shake hands and wish me luck, Macdonald?”
“You card-juggling rat! I’ve used you, and I’m done with you. You have the money, and I have the horse. Now get out and never come back!”
He could feel Jenkins shrinking away from him through the darkness, and from the door he heard the stealthy whisper of the gambler.
“I dunno that I’m any worse than you. You put me up to this game. I dunno that I’m any worse than you.”
“Bah!” sneered the big man. “Get out!” Then the door shut quickly behind the other.
After he had gone, the strangeness of the dream returned upon Macdonald. He lighted a lamp and sat down with his face between his hands, but he found that his heart was still beating wildly, and the face and the form of the girl still stayed in his thoughts more vividly, so it seemed, than when he had first seen her in the vision. There was none of the usual mistiness of dreams about her. He could remember the very texture of the sleeve of her riding habit. He could remember the way a wisp of hair, blown loose from beneath her stiff black hat, fluttered and swayed across her cheek. He could remember how her bay mare had danced and sidled, coming back down the avenue of the walnut trees. And, above all, he still held the quality of her voice in his ear. How she had pleaded with him not to approach that house behind the garden. And how mysteriously she had disappeared, when at last he had called to her. What might have happened had he not persisted in going on? And, above all, what was it that made him persist? What was the pull and the lure that drove him so irresistibly ahead?
At this he started up out of his chair with a stifled exclamation of disgust with himself. Of course anything was possible in a dream. There was no real existence except in his thoughts alone.
He stared around the room. It seemed to Macdonald that, if he could rest his eyes on some familiar daylight object, his nerves would quiet. But what his glance first encountered was the dark and faded portrait of an old gentleman with a white muffler—turned gray with age—around his throat, and one hand thrust pompously into the bosom of his coat. He smiled, and the smile was a grotesque caricature done in cracked paint. And the blue of his eyes was dim with time.
Daylight reality? There was more in one second of the dream than in an age of such pictures. And the whole room exuded a musty aroma of the past. Yonder dust, which lay in the corner, seemed to have lain there for a generation, and the footprint within it had been made by the foot of one long dead.
In vain Macdonald strove to rally from this obsession. In vain he told himself that this was no more than an old family mansion long used as a hotel—every room occupied many times in the course of each year. But the more he used his reason, the more it failed him.
The panic was growing momently in him, and it was a strange sensation. Not on that day, when the five men had cornered him in an Australian desert and held him, more dead than living, in a group of rocks for forty-eight hours, without water—not even in the worst of those hours had he felt this clammy thing called fear. There was a weakness in his stomach and in his throat. He felt that if a knock were to come at his door, there would hardly be in his knees sufficient strength to answer it. Suppose that in this condition some enemy were to find him and reach for a gun?
He shuddered strongly at that thought. Then, driven by a peculiar curiosity, he forced himself to go to the mirror and to hold above his head with shaking hands the lamp. What he saw was like the face of another man. The pupils of his eyes were dilated. His lips were drawn. His bronzed cheeks had turned a sickly yellow, and his forehead was glistening with perspiration. He put down the lamp with a muffled oath, then glanced sharply over his shoulder to the window, for it seemed to him as though his eyes, a moment before, had been watching him from its black rectangle, with the high light from the lamp thrown across it, blurring the outer dark.
After this he consulted his watch. It was half past two, and at this hour he certainly could not start his day’s journey. But the very thought of remaining in that room was unspeakably horrible to him.
He dressed at once. There was Sunset, at least, waiting for him in the stable. At that thought half of the nightmare fears left him. He hurried through the packing of his bedroll, then left the room and went down the stairs. On the desk in the deserted little lobby he left more than enough to pay his bill. Then he started out for the stable.
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nbsp; It was deserted like the lower floor of the big house. Even the stable, which the Moores had built behind their home, was lofty and mansion-like, finished at the top with sky-reaching gables and adorned at the upper rim of the roof with an elaborate cornice of carved wood, half of whose figures had cracked away with the passage of the years and the lack of paint.
As he stepped through the great arch of the central door, he found a single lamp burning behind a chimney black with smoke. This he took as a lantern and examined the horses in the stalls. There were only five kept there for the night. The rest were in the corrals behind the building, and in the first of these corrals he found Sunset.
The stallion had been placed by himself and, the moment the lamp from the light struck on him, he came straight for the bearer, his big eyes as bright as two burning disks, and the lamplight was quivering and running along the silk of his red flanks
Macdonald uttered a faint exclamation of delight. It was the first time in his wild life that he had secured anything through fraud. Treachery had never been one of his mental qualities. But, as the horse nosed at his shoulder and whinnied softly, as though they had been friends for many a year, his heart leaped. Every man, he had always felt, will commit one crime before his life was over, and this must be the crime of Macdonald. How much bloodshed, how many deaths could be laid to his score did not matter. He had risked his own life in taking the life of another. But here he had gone behind another man and cheated him with hired trickery.
It was very base. The whole soul of Macdonald revolted at the thought of Jenkins and the part he had played. But he would use Sunset as tenderly as any master could use him. That, at least, was certain.
In five minutes his saddle was on the back of the stallion, his roll was strapped to it, and he had vaulted into the stirrups and jogged out onto the main street of the town. There were no noises. The town slept the sleep of the mountains, black and stirless. The great stars were bright above him. And under him the stallion was dancing with eagerness to be off at full speed, dancing and playing lightly against the bit, but as smooth of action as running water.