by Max Brand
“Suppose he killed with poison?”
“Do you mean to say that he does that?” cried Macdonald.
“Just as bad as that. He’s such a good shot, and his nerves are so plumb steady, that he knows he ain’t running no real risk when he faces another man. There ain’t one chance in a hundred that he’ll get so much as scratched. That’s why I say he might as well use poison for his killings. And to think that a horse like Sunset …”
But Macdonald heard no more. He had listened to too much already, as a matter of fact, and he climbed back to his room with a heavy heart. And on the way he fought over the truth about himself. It had not occurred to him to look at the matter from this new viewpoint. He had always felt that it was fair fighting. But now that he thought of it, how clearly he saw the new idea. His skill, he had to confess, was far greater than the skill of the average man. Just how much chance did the other fellow have, when matched against the practiced hand and the familiar gun of Macdonald?
He thought back to many of his conflicts. In the old days he had been often wounded. His body was still ripped and dotted with scars. Yes, he had been wounded almost as often as he had wounded others. Finally he had gone into a fight almost expecting to have his own body wounded, or the life shot out of him. But, as time went on, he learned new things, and among the rest he learned to practice with his weapons assiduously every day. How long had it been now, since an enemy had wounded him in a fair fight, face to face? And what did that mean?
It meant that the old man standing by the corral had been right. He might as well have killed by poison.
He threw himself down upon his bed and, staring up into the darkness, his mind filled with two thoughts—the girl of whom he had dreamed, and the men who had fallen before him in his life of fighting. And so fiercely did he concentrate that in another moment he was riding up a river among the mountains, a river whose voice gathered into human words: “Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”
X
So sudden had been that sleep that even in his dream he was acutely conscious of something left behind him, of a change just made. One half of his mind was trying to turn back to what he had been, while the other half was listening to the shouting of the river. At length he gave all his attention to the road before him.
It was all as it had been before. He rode to the top of the divide, where the water dwindled to a little spring. He looked over the plain onto a great sweep of sunshine and shadow, with browsing cattle, and the faint sounds of their lowing was blown to him upon the height. And, as before, even while looking at that pleasant and warm scene, a chill of distress passed into the heart of Macdonald with a wild misgiving of something that was to come. For the voice which God or a demon had put into that river could not be wrong. This was the third time he had ridden up that river to its rising, and on this third time there was certain to be a revelation of the catastrophe.
Yet turn back he could not. A nameless eagerness filled him, far overbalancing his fear. And down the hill he swept and over the meadow at the long-reaching gallop of the red stallion. So he came in due time to the same avenue of the walnut trees, under which he had passed before. And down that avenue he rode, with the growing dread that he had felt when he galloped there before, and yet with a wild desire to hear the beat of approaching hoofs and to see once more the girl riding around the sweep of the trees.
He reached that turn, but she did not come. He went on more slowly. He came again to the town, all quiet under the sun. He came again to the garden. And he stood once more before the great castle of a house where, as he remembered, a hand had fallen upon his shoulders, and the girl had disappeared. Perhaps she would come to him again now.
Slowly he went up the steps, and the great house before him was wonderfully silent. There was a flutter of wings, as a bird darted under the roof of the porch, brushed close to his face, and darted out again. Then he knocked at the door. It was opened so quickly that it was obvious that his approach had been noted, and that there was someone ready to let him in.
Yet he saw no one inside the dark, high hall of the place. He stepped in and, the moment he did so, he discovered who had opened the door for him. It was a man whose hand was still on the knob, and he was standing flat against the wall. And the pale face was the face of Anthony Legrange, as he had been on that night eight years before, when he died in Cheyenne with a bullet from the gun of Macdonald through his heart. He had not altered by a single shade, save that he had been a gloomy man in those days, and now he was smiling, a calm smile of mockery and scorn, as though he had a knowledge before which Macdonald was as helpless as a child.
Macdonald reached hastily for his gun, but the smile of Anthony Legrange merely deepened and suddenly Macdonald knew that a gun would be of no avail to him in this house.
“Anthony,” he said, “I thought that you were dead eight long years ago. But I’m a thousand times glad to see that I was wrong. A thousand times glad, old man!”
But the smile of Anthony merely deepened again. He closed the door and leaned his shoulders against it, facing Macdonald once more, as though he defied him to try to break out.
“Why,” Macdonald said, frowning, “if you think that you’ve trapped me here, it makes no difference to me. Do you imagine that I’m afraid of you, Anthony? No, nor of a thousand like you.”
At once he turned his back on Anthony, stepped into the next room, and passed through this to a great dining hall. There he found a long table set, the longest table he had ever seen, and all around it men were seated, and before them food was placed. Some were eating, and some were drinking, and some were smoking, so that the air was blue with smoke. Yet, though Macdonald walked through a cloud of it, he smelled not the least taint of tobacco.
He noted, too, that though they seemed all to be laughing and talking, they were not making any sound, and the fall of knives and forks upon the plates made no sound. It was very strange, but stranger than anything they did were their faces. For there were men from a dozen nations, and everyone, he saw, was a man who he had killed.
Yes, just before him sat young Jack Gregory, and with no mark of the mortal wound upon his forehead. And at the side of Gregory sat a great Negro, a giant of his kind, naked to the waist, just as he had been on that night, so many years before, when he had grappled with Macdonald in the fire room of the tramp freighter. That had been a grim battle. And it rushed back clean and clear upon the mind of Macdonald. He saw the Negro, blood streaming down his face, tear himself away. He saw the big fellow snatch up a great bar of iron used for trimming the fires. He saw himself catch up a lump of coal and with a true aim knock down the big stoker. He saw them grapple again, and his big hands had found a firm grip upon the throat of the black man.
And beside the Negro sat a hideous Malay, with a split upper lip, rolling his wild eyes, as he talked. That was the human devil who had leaped upon him from behind in an alley in Bombay.
Yonder was the burly English mate who had striven to enforce obedience by the weight of his fists. They had grappled and gone over the rail together. Macdonald had come up, but the mate had sunk.
Sitting side by side, yellow of skin and dark of eyes, were the Arizona Kid and his two brothers. Macdonald had trailed them when he was a Ranger, and he had killed them all in one glorious and bloody battle. Now the Arizona Kid pointed him out, and his two brothers laughed in the face of their slayer. Indeed, the whole table was laughing and pointing, until the perspiration rolled down the face of Macdonald.
He stepped to the table and struck upon it. The dishes jumped beneath the vibration of the stroke, but there was no jingling sound.
“You rattle-headed fools!” cried Macdonald. “Why do you laugh and point? I’ve sent you to damnation, every one of you, and I’d send you there again and think nothing of it! What are you doing here? What right have you in this place? I had no fear of you living. Do you think for an instant that I’l
l be afraid of you because you come back after death and gibber at me?”
The Negro giant leaned across toward him and extended a long, black arm, and along the naked skin the highlights glimmered. Macdonald could see the bull throat expand and quiver, he could see the chest of the monster rise, and he waited for the immense voice which, on a day, had been strong enough to stun the ears of men. But, instead, there ran forth only the faintest of faint whispers, hardly discernible.
“We’re laughing at you, Macdonald, because we have gone to hell, every one of us, but a worse man than any one of us killed us. You saved us, Macdonald, with your gun, and that’s why we laugh at you.”
“You lie!” thundered Macdonald. “Half of you were good men, and hell had no claim on that many of you. There’s Jack Gregory at your side. What wrong had he ever done?”
He saw Jack Gregory convulsed with soundless laughter. Then he half rose and pointed an exultant arm at Macdonald.
“I was damned black until you saved me,” he cried, and this time the sound that reached Macdonald was as faint as the ghost of an echo. “I’d forsworn myself to a girl that I got with a false marriage, and then I left her to take care of herself and her child. But I was killed by a worse man than I am, Macdonald, and that’s why I laugh.”
Macdonald stood back from the table, sick at heart.
“What have I done, then?” he cried to them. “I’ve fought every man of you fairly, squarely, face to face. I took no advantage. I never struck a man that was down. I never shot a man that wasn’t fighting back. I never harmed a man that asked for mercy. Why am I worse than you?”
But instead of answering, they fell into a hearty convulsion of that shadowy laughter, and Macdonald strode from the room. At the very threshold of the next apartment he was greeted by the delicate sweetness of flowers, and now he saw that they were banked everywhere about the room. There were flowers of every kind, little wild flowers and crimson roses and great smudges of violets. The air was alive with their fragrance. He could not decipher one scent from another, for all was a blended sweetness.
And with the fragrance went a profound silence. It was like that weighty quiet that lies in the high regions of the mountains, when no noise seemed strong enough to break it. For no matter how loud, the sound comes deadened upon the ear, and the thick silence rolls in swiftly behind it and drowns the echoes, as they come flocking from the distant peaks. Such was the quiet in that room, a bewildering and awful thing.
In the center of the apartment stood an open coffin on a flower-clad pedestal, and in that coffin lay the dead. The profile was clearly to be seen, and it was the face of Rory Moore—Rory Moore dead before he had been struck! Rory Moore dead, and above him leaned the lady of the vision, still in her riding costume. Her lips trembled, and though no sound came from them, the tears streamed steadily down her face.
But that was not all Macdonald saw in that room of sorrow, for he made out that the face of the girl and the face of Rory Moore were wonderfully alike. They could not be more similar, save that what was drawn on a large and manly scale in Rory’s dead face, was made small and exquisitely beautiful in the living face of the girl.
“It was not I!” cried Macdonald. “I swear to heaven that I have not touched him!”
At his voice she looked up. There was one glimpse for him of the horror and hatred in her eyes, and then with her raised eyes she shut out the sight of him.
And Macdonald wakened and found himself on his knees in the darkness of his room, with his arms stretched out before him, and his voice moaning vague words.
XI
Instantly Macdonald hurried down to Sunset. He only paused to sweep his pack together before he was gone, and on the way he looked at the time. He noted with a shudder that it was half past two, the exact hour at which he had last left his chamber. Beyond a doubt a curse had fallen upon this house.
In the corral he roused the stallion with a word, and led him into the stable, and in the light of a lantern put on the saddle. While his swift fingers worked, he made up his mind. To leave the town would make it seem that he had lost his nerve at last, and that he dared not wait for the coming of Rory Moore. But let that be as it might. He must go nevertheless. For, if he met Rory Moore, nothing could keep him from killing the younger man, and kill Rory he must not. No, all the superstition in his strange soul urged him against it. He had received a warning, and that warning must be heeded.
Plunging into the darkness he headed away from the town, and he rode on until morning came. It was no sooner light than he camped by the way. By midmorning his sleep was ended, and Sunset was rested. He went on again. All that day he struck blindly ahead, and by nightfall he came into the heart of the mountains.
He had paid not the least heed to direction. He only knew that he was covering many miles, and that was sufficient. He went on from the second camp before the next day had well begun. By this time Rory Moore would have heard of his coming to the town, would have returned, found him gone, and would have published him abroad as a coward. But that was still a small thing in the mind of Macdonald. For the girl of his dreams was more to him now than all the rest of the living world. She had lived in his mind and in his very heart. She was never absent from him. And he found himself, a hundred times in the day, grown tense with waiting for her voice. And he found himself hurrying Sunset toward the rise of every hill in eagerness to see her coming.
It was just after he had camped to make coffee at noon and had gone on again that he found the place. He had come over a ridge, and journeying down to the sound of the waters he came suddenly upon the river up which he had ridden three times in his sleep.
There was no mistaking it. It was the very place. Yonder ran the swift brown waters, streaked with creamy foam. There hung the willow on the edge of the bank, with half of its roots exposed. And, above, the round hills tumbled away against the sky.
Macdonald covered his aching eyes with his hands. The devil had brought him at last to the road of his death. He had no more doubt of that than though he had seen it written across the sky in letters of gold. He had no more doubt of it than though a voice had whispered it at his ear.
With a groan he surrendered to that feeling of fate. He turned Sunset up the stream and rode slowly on. In a sort of mute agony he watched the happy head of Sunset tossing, with his sharp ears quivering forward. Ah, to be a mere joyous brute like the big horse, to be freed from all these tortures of the mind that went with manhood.
He passed among the hills and came again to the ridge. With a sick heart he looked down upon that landscape which he had three times seen in his dream—the bright sun falling, the spotting shadows from the trees, and the far voices of the cattle. And who could struggle against such manifest destiny as this?
Riding down the slope, he twisted over the undulating surface of the plain, and so he came at last to the place where that avenue of walnut trees should have been. But here he found, for the first time, a difference between the dream and the reality. For the trees were gone, nor was there any semblance of them standing on either side of the road, but only a few wretched shrubs here and there. He had passed down the road for a mile or more, when he saw a buggy approaching with an old man driving it. He hailed the driver and stopped him.
“Friend,” Macdonald said, “I want to ask you a few questions about this country. Have you been living around here long?”
“Not more’n about fifty years,” said the old man, laughing with some importance.
“And you’ve known this road all that time?”
“Yep.”
“Do you mind telling me if there were ever walnut trees growing along the sides of it?”
The other started. “How did you know that if you’re a stranger in this here country, the way you say?”
But Macdonald rode to the side of the buggy and, leaning over, laid his hand on the shoulder of the other. “In the nam
e of God,” he said solemnly, “tell me the truth. There have been walnut trees planted here?”
“There have!” gasped the other, overwhelmed by the question and the manner in which it was put to him.
“Then God have mercy on my soul,” groaned Macdonald, and spurred furiously down the road.
It was not long after this that he came upon the town itself, but he had hardly entered it before he began to recognize it, not as the thing he had seen in his dream—there was no silence here—but as a place where he had been before. Suddenly rounding a corner he came upon a blighting proof. For this was the town that he had left two days before. Fortune had led him in a circle. He had come back by a new approach, and yonder, straight before him, was the very hotel itself, big and towered like a castle. He looked closer at it, with all the freshness of the dream weighing upon him. Yes, this was the castle of his vision. It was only the town house of the Moore family.
He stretched out his arms and laughed in the sunshine. A thousand tons of dread seemed to have been removed from his mind. There were still other things to be explained. He must find where he had seen that row of walnut trees other than in the dream. He must find where he had seen the girl.
At least he was now startled out of that absent-mindedness which, as a rule, plagued him and closed his eyes to things that were most familiar around him. He would see whatever was to be seen. As for Rory Moore, let him take heed to himself, or one portion of that dream would at least come true.
He went again to the hotel, again he asked for a room, and again he was assigned to the same chamber. There needed no explanation of the frightened eyes that men turned upon him, as he crossed the lobby and went up the stairs. They knew he had come back to kill Rory Moore. Well, their knowledge was doubly right.
Once in that room where the dream had twice come to him, he looked sharply around him, and it was as though the scales had fallen from his eyes. He could see it all at a glance. Mystery? There was none at all. What he had half seen and left unnoted by his conscious mind, he was now keenly aware of, and here was all the substance of his dream.