by Zane Grey
But no! He thought he must be insane not to be overcome in spirit. Yet he was not. He would beat the flame to Lucy. He felt the loss of something, some kind of a sensation which he ought to have had. Still he rode that race to kill his sweetheart better than any race he had ever before ridden. He kept his seat; he dodged the snags; he pulled the maddened horse the shortest way, he kept the King running straight.
No horse had ever run so magnificent a race! Wildfire was outracing wind and fire, and he was overhauling the most noted racer of the uplands against a tremendous handicap. But now he was no longer racing to kill the King; he was running in terror. For miles he held that long, swift, wonderful stride without a break. He was running to his death, whether or not he distanced the fire. Nothing could stop him now but a bursting heart.
Slone untied his lasso and coiled the noose. Almost within reach of the King! One throw—one sudden swerve—and the King would go down. Lucy would know only a stunning shock. Slone’s heart broke. Could he kill her—crush that dear golden head? He could not, yet he must! He saw a long, curved, red welt on Lucy’s white shoulders. What was that? Had a branch lashed her? Slone could not see her face. She could not have been dead or in a faint, for she was riding the King, bound as she was!
Closer and closer drew Wildfire. He seemed to go faster and faster as that wind of flame gained upon them. The air was too thick to breathe. It had an irresistible weight. It pushed horses and riders onward in their flight—straws on the crest of a cyclone.
Again Slone looked back and again the spectacle was different. There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke. The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird. Slone saw fire shoot from the tree-tops down the trunks, and he saw fire shoot up the trunks, like trains of powder. They exploded like huge rockets. And along the forest floor leaped the little flames. His eyes burned and blurred till all merged into a wide, pursuing storm too awful for the gaze of man.
Wildfire was running down the King. The great gray had not lessened his speed, but he was breaking. Slone felt a ghastly triumph when he began to whirl the noose of the lasso round his head. Already he was within range. But he held back his throw which meant the end of all. And as he hesitated Wildfire suddenly whistled one shrieking blast.
Slone looked. Ahead there was light through the forest! Slone saw a white, open space of grass. A park? No—the end of the forest! Wildfire, like a demon, hurtled onward, with his smoothness of action gone, beginning to break, within a length of the King.
A cry escaped Slone—a cry as silent as if there had been no deafening roar—as wild as the race, and as terrible as the ruthless fire. It was the cry of life—instead of death. Both Sage King and Wildfire would beat the flame.
Then, with the open just ahead, Slone felt a wave of hot wind rolling over him. He saw the lashing tongues of flame above him in the pines. The storm had caught him. It forged ahead. He was riding under a canopy of fire. Burning pine cones, like torches, dropped all around him. He had a terrible blank sense of weight, of suffocation, of the air turning to fire.
Then Wildfire, with his nose at Sage King’s flank, flashed out of the pines into the open. Slone saw a grassy wide reach inclining gently toward a dark break in the ground with crags rising sheer above it, and to the right a great open space.
Slone felt that clear air as the breath of deliverance. His reeling sense righted. There—the King ran, blindly going to his death. Wildfire was breaking fast. His momentum carried him. He was almost done.
Slone roped the King, and holding hard, waited for the end. They ran on, breaking, breaking. Slone thought he would have to throw the King, for they were perilously near the deep cleft in the rim. But Sage King went to his knees.
Slone leaped off just as Wildfire fell. How the blade flashed that released Lucy! She was wet from the horse’s sweat and foam. She slid off into Slone’s arms, and he called her name. Could she hear above that roar back there in the forest? The pieces of rope hung to her wrists and Slone saw dark bruises, raw and bloody. She fell against him. Was she dead? His heart contracted. How white the face! No; he saw her breast heave against his! And he cried aloud, incoherently in his joy. She was alive. She was not badly hurt. She stirred. She plucked at him with nerveless hands. She pressed close to him. He heard a smothered voice, yet so full, so wonderful!
“Put—your—coat—on me!” came somehow to his ears.
Slone started violently. Abashed, shamed to realize he had forgotten she was half nude, he blindly tore off his coat, blindly folded it around her.
“Lin! Lin!” she cried.
“Lucy—Oh! are y-you—” he replied, huskily.
“I’m not hurt. I’m all right.”
“But that wretch, Joel. He—”
“He’d killed his father—just a—minute—before you came. I fought him! Oh!… But I’m all right.… Did you—”
“Wildfire ran him down—smashed him.… Lucy! this can’t be true.… Yet I feel you! Thank God!”
With her free hand Lucy returned his clasp. She seemed to be strong. It was a precious moment for Slone, in which he was uplifted beyond all dreams.
“Let me loose—a second,” she said. “I want to—get in your coat.”
She laughed as he released her. She laughed! And Slone thrilled with unutterable sweetness at that laugh.
As he turned away he felt a swift wind, then a strange impact from an invisible force that staggered him, then the rend of flesh. After that came the heavy report of a gun.
Slone fell. He knew he had been shot. Following the rending of his flesh came a hot agony. It was in his shoulder, high up, and the dark, swift fear for his life was checked.
Lucy stood staring down at him, unable to comprehend, slowly paling. Her hands clasped the coat round her. Slone saw her, saw the edge of streaming clouds of smoke above her, saw on the cliff beyond the gorge two men, one with a smoking gun half leveled.
If Slone had been inattentive to his surroundings before, the sight of Cordts electrified him.
“Lucy! drop down! quick!”
“Oh, what’s happened? You—you—”
“I’ve been shot. Drop down, I tell you. Get behind the horse an’ pull my rifle.”
“Shot!” exclaimed Lucy, blankly.
“Yes—Yes.… My God! Lucy, he’s goin’ to shoot again!”
It was then Lucy Bostil saw Cordts across the gulch. He was not fifty yards distant, plainly recognizable, tall, gaunt, sardonic. He held the half-leveled gun ready as if waiting. He had waited there in ambush. The clouds of smoke rolled up above him, hiding the crags.
“Cordts!” Bostil’s blood spoke in the girl’s thrilling cry.
“Hunch down, Lucy!” cried Slone. “Pull my rifle.… I’m only winged—not hurt. Hurry! He’s goin’—”
Another heavy report interrupted Slone. The bullet missed, but Slone made a pretense, a convulsive flop, as if struck.
“Get the rifle! Quick!” he called.
But Lucy misunderstood his ruse to deceive Cordts. She thought he had been hit again. She ran to the fallen Wildfire and jerked the rifle from its sheath.
Cordts had begun to climb round a ledge, evidently a short cut to get down and across. Hutchinson saw the rifle and yelled to Cordts. The horse-thief halted, his dark face gleaming toward Lucy.
When Lucy rose the coat fell from her nude shoulders. And Slone, watching, suddenly lost his agony of terror for her and uttered a pealing cry of defiance and of rapture.
She swept up the rifle. It wavered. Hutchinson was above, and Cordts, reaching up, yelled for help. Hutchinson was reluctant. But the stronger force dominated. He leaned down—clasped Cordts’s outstretched hands, and pulled. Hutchinson bawled out hoarsely. Cordts turned what seemed a paler face. He had difficulty on the slight footing. He was slow.
Slone tried
to call to Lucy to shoot low, but his lips had drawn tight after his one yell. Slone saw her white, rounded shoulders bent, with cold, white face pressed against the rifle, with slim arms quivering and growing tense, with the tangled golden hair blowing out.
Then she shot.
Slone’s glance shifted. He did not see the bullet strike up dust. The figures of the men remained the same—Hutchinson straining, Cordts.… No, Cordts was not the same! A strange change seemed manifest in his long form. It did not seem instinct with effort. Yet it moved.
Hutchinson also was acting strangely, yelling, heaving, wrestling. But he could not help Cordts. He lifted violently, raised Cordts a little, and then appeared to be in peril of losing his balance.
Cordts leaned against the cliff. Then it dawned upon Slone that Lucy had hit the horse-thief. Hard hit! He would not—he could not let go of Hutchinson. His was a death clutch. The burly Hutchinson slipped from his knee-hold, and as he moved Cordts swayed, his feet left the ledge, he hung, upheld only by the tottering comrade.
What a harsh and terrible cry from Hutchinson! He made one last convulsive effort and it doomed him. Slowly he lost his balance. Cordts’s dark, evil, haunting face swung round. Both men became lax and plunged, and separated. The dust rose from the rough steps. Then the dark forms shot down—Cordts falling sheer and straight, Hutchinson headlong, with waving arms—down and down, vanishing in the depths. No sound came up. A little column of yellow dust curled from the fatal ledge and, catching the wind above, streamed away into the drifting clouds of smoke.
CHAPTER XX
A darkness, like the streaming clouds overhead, seemed to blot out Slone’s sight, and then passed away, leaving it clearer.
Lucy was bending over him, binding a scarf round his shoulder and under his arm. “Lin! It’s nothing!” she was saying, earnestly. “Never touched a bone!”
Slone sat up. The smoke was clearing away. Little curves of burning grass were working down along the rim. He put out a hand to grasp Lucy, remembering in a flash. He pointed to the ledge across the chasm.
“They’re—gone!” cried Lucy, with a strange and deep note in her voice. She shook violently. But she did not look away from Slone.
“Wildfire! The King!” he added, hoarsely.
“Both where they dropped. Oh, I’m afraid to—to look.… And, Lin, I saw Sarch, Two Face, and Ben and Plume go down there.”
She had her back to the chasm where the trail led down, and she pointed without looking.
Slone got up, a little unsteady on his feet and conscious of a dull pain.
“Sarch will go straight home, and the others will follow him,” said Lucy. “They got away here where Joel came up the trail. The fire chased them out of the woods. Sarch will go home. And that’ll fetch the riders.”
“We won’t need them if only Wildfire and the King—” Slone broke off and grimly, with a catch in his breath, turned to the horses.
How strange that Slone should run toward the King while Lucy ran to Wildfire!
Sage King was a beaten, broken horse, but he would live to run another race.
Lucy was kneeling beside Wildfire, sobbing and crying: “Wildfire! Wildfire!”
All of Wildfire was white except where he was red, and that red was not now his glossy, flaming skin. A terrible muscular convulsion as of internal collapse grew slower and slower. Yet choked, blinded, dying, killed on his feet, Wildfire heard Lucy’s voice.
“Oh, Lin! Oh, Lin!” moaned Lucy.
While they knelt there the violent convulsions changed to slow heaves.
“He run the King down—carryin’ weight—with a long lead to overcome!” Slone muttered, and he put a shaking hand on the horse’s wet neck.
“Oh, he beat the King!” cried Lucy. “But you mustn’t—you can’t tell Dad!”
“What can we tell him?”
“Oh, I know. Old Creech told me what to say!”
A change, both of body and spirit, seemed to pass over the great stallion.
“Wildfire! Wildfire!”
Again the rider called to his horse, with a low and piercing cry. But Wildfire did not hear.
The morning sun glanced brightly over the rippling sage which rolled away from the Ford like a gray sea.
Bostil sat on his porch, a stricken man. He faced the blue haze of the north, where days before all that he had loved had vanished. Every day, from sunrise till sunset, he had been there, waiting and watching. His riders were grouped near him, silent, awed by his agony, awaiting orders that never came.
From behind a ridge puffed up a thin cloud of dust. Bostil saw it and gave a start. Above the sage appeared a bobbing, black object—the head of a horse. Then the big black body followed.
“Sarch!” exclaimed Bostil.
With spurs clinking the riders ran and trooped behind him.
“More hosses back,” said Holley, quietly.
“Thar’s Plume!” exclaimed Farlane.
“An’ Two Face!” added Van.
“Dusty Ben!” said another.
“Riderless!” finished Bostil.
Then all were intensely quiet, watching the racers come trotting in single file down the ridge. Sarchedon’s shrill neigh, like a whistle-blast, pealed in from the sage. From, fields and corrals clamored the answer attended by the clattering of hundreds of hoofs.
Sarchedon and his followers broke from trot to canter—canter to gallop—and soon were cracking their hard hoofs on the stony court. Like a swarm of bees the riders swooped down upon the racers, caught them, and led them up to Bostil.
On Sarchedon’s neck showed a dry, dust-caked stain of reddish tinge. Holley, the old hawk-eyed rider, had precedence in the examination.
“Wal, thet’s a bullet-mark, plain as day,” said Holley.
“Who shot him?” demanded Bostil.
Holley shook his gray head.
“He smells of smoke,” put in Farlane, who had knelt at the black’s legs. “He’s been runnin’ fire. See thet! Fetlocks all singed!”
All the riders looked, and then with grave, questioning eyes at one another.
“Reckon thar’s been hell!” muttered Holley, darkly.
Some of the riders led the horses away toward the corrals. Bostil wheeled to face the north again. His brow was lowering; his cheek was pale and sunken; his jaw was set.
The riders came and went, but Bostil kept his vigil. The hours passed. Afternoon came and wore on. The sun lost its brightness and burned red.
Again dust-clouds, now like reddened smoke, puffed over the ridge. A horse carrying a dark, thick figure appeared above the sage.
Bostil leaped up. “Is thet a gray hoss—or am—I blind?” he called, unsteadily.
The riders dared not answer. They must be sure. They gazed through narrow slits of eyelids; and the silence grew intense.
Holley shaded the hawk eyes with his hand. “Gray he is—Bostil—gray as the sage.… An’ so help me god if he ain’t the king!”
“Yes, it’s the King!” cried the riders, excitedly. “Sure! I reckon! No mistake about thet! It’s the King!”
Bostil shook his huge frame, and he rubbed his eyes as if they had become dim, and he stared again.
“Who’s thet up on him?”
“Slone. I never seen his like on a hoss,” replied Holley.
“An’ what’s—he packin’?” queried Bostil, huskily.
Plain to all keen eyes was the glint of Lucy Bostil’s golden hair. But only Holley had courage to speak.
“It’s Lucy! I seen thet long ago.”
A strange, fleeting light of joy died out of Bostil’s face. The change once more silenced his riders. They watched the King trotting in from the sage. His head drooped. He seemed grayer than ever and he limped. But he was Sage King, splendid as of old, all the more gladdening to the riders’ eyes because he had been lost. He came on, quickening a little to the clamoring welcome from the corrals.
Holley put out a swift hand. “Bostil—the girl’s alive—she’s
smilin’!” he called, and the cool voice was strangely different.
The riders waited for Bostil. Slone rode into the courtyard. He was white and weary, reeling in the saddle. A bloody scarf was bound round his shoulder. He held Lucy in his arms. She had on his coat. A wan smile lighted her haggard face.
Bostil, cursing deep, like muttering thunder, strode out. “Lucy! You ain’t bad hurt?” he implored, in a voice no one had ever heard before.
“I’m—all right—Dad,” she said, and slipped down into his arms.
He kissed the pale face and held her up like a child, and then, carrying her to the door of the house, he roared for Aunt Jane.
When he reappeared the crowd of riders scattered from around Slone. But it seemed that Bostil saw only the King. The horse was caked with dusty lather, scratched and disheveled, weary and broken, yet he was still beautiful. He raised his drooping head and reached for his master with a look as soft and dark and eloquent as a woman’s.
No rider there but felt Bostil’s passion of doubt and hope. Had the King been beaten? Bostil’s glory and pride were battling with love. Mighty as that was, it did not at once overcome his fear of defeat.
Slowly the gaze of Bostil moved away from Sage King and roved out to the sage and back, as if he expected to see another horse. But no other horse was in sight. At last his hard eyes rested upon the white-faced Slone.
“Been some—hard ridin’?” he queried, haltingly. All there knew that had not been the question upon his lips.