by Brand, Max
Bill Gary was tired of sitting there. If it were better to meet death sitting down than lying down, it was still better to meet death in action than in repose, so he began to act.
He crawled out of the clearing, out of the strip of trees, and to the verge of the treeless waste of snow. He was a mile above the cabin, and he started for it, not because he thought that he had strength to get there, but because he despised inactive waiting for the end.
It was easier than he expected. It was the sort of a thing that one can do more easily than think. To crawl a mile would have been totally impossible, and he could not have gone a hundred yards up a slope, but this was different. He had snow under him all the way, and there was a continually declining slope to the ground. He could half roll and half slide. He moved his body like a fish wriggling through slime rather than like a land animal. He received a heavy battering before he got to the bottom of the rise among the trees that shrouded his shack. He half rolled and half crawled to the cabin, and fainted on the threshold of it.
When he wakened again, a few minutes later, he found himself much weaker. There was a hurrying pulse in his temples like a clock ticking all out of time. Everything that his eyes looked on shuddered as though an earthquake were shaking the ground.
He said to himself: “Bill, you’re going to die, you old fool!”
Then he thought of the mine again, and he was sorry that he had inclosed the news of it in the collar of the wolf. If he had only known that he could reach his cabin, he would have waited and written a letter. Then, with his pair of smokes, he could have called up Warner and confided the letter to him to be mailed, a month or so later, when Warner went to town.
He would still be able to write the letter, he told himself. He was going to die, all right, but not immediately. There was the sort of metal in him that rubs out only after long and constant friction.
He dragged himself to his knees and got to the table of soft pine, which he had made himself. He had built a drawer under that table. He was prouder of that drawer than of almost anything he had ever done, because it was a homemade luxury such as most men of the wilderness would not have considered worthy of thought. It was this drawer that he drew open, and then he worked himself up onto the bench that ranged beside the table.
Then he lay across the table for a moment, nauseated more than ever, his brain whirling. He wished that he could die without being sick at the stomach.
He pushed himself erect. The top of the table was new and white because it was only recently made, and planed down. Now there was blood on it. In his rolling, sliding descent, his clothes had been caught and torn in many places; his flesh had been caught and torn, also. The blood stood out on the top of the table as on a field of snow.
He got out of the drawer a sheet of letter paper and an envelope. In indelible pencil he wrote the address first:
MR. ALEXANDER GARY,
Newlands.
Then he started on the sheet of paper:
DEAR ALEC: I’m done for. I got Frosty, and Frosty got me.
I’ve tapped open the biggest vein of gold, to-day, that you ever seen. Then I caught Frosty in a trap, and he chawed me almost to death.
I took and wrote out the description of where to find the mine and put one of my dogs’ Red Cross collars on Frosty and put the description in the collar and turned Frosty loose, because I thought that I sure never would —
His hand paused.
It was hard work pushing the pencil, because it bit not only into the paper, but also into the softness of the wood on which the paper smoothly rested.
There was a cloud before his eyes. This time it was not whirling, but it was thickening and moving up on him, little by little. He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, but that did not help very much. The darkness kept on growing.
He got out the flask of whisky.
“Hell,” said Bill Gary, “it’s like as though there was a kind of a night in the middle of the day.”
He could not uncork the flask with his numb fingers, but he worried it out with his teeth. He drank the rest of what was in the flask, holding the neck of the bottle between his teeth. It slewed out of his mouth, when it was emptied, and bumped on his shoulder on the way to the floor.
He was no longer nauseated, and he was glad of that. He told himself that perhaps he would not die. He wanted to go to sleep for a minute, and after that, he would wake up and finish writing the letter. Alec Gary was a good kid, and Alec ought to have the mine — if Bill Gary died.
Bill Gary put his forehead on his right arm. Everything was confused, and red lights began to move in his darkness, not whirling about, but wavering toward him like lanterns swinging at the sides of walking men. He closed his eyes harder. The darkness grew complete. He slept.
That was the way Barry Christian and Duff Gregor found him. It is hard to say that blind chance brought Barry Christian, the greatest of all criminal brains and hands, through the mountains at exactly the right time to find Bill Gary dead with the news of the finding of the gold mine written out on a piece of paper. It is easier and more convenient to say that there was a malice in Fate which had designed this happening with malignant care.
For many miles now, Barry Christian and Duff Gregor had been fleeing. They had had almost a dozen men about them in the beginning; they had only themselves now. For Jim Silver had hounded them closely all the way. He was still hounding them, perhaps, unless the strength had finally departed out of the tireless limbs of Parade, the golden stallion.
A great, bright ghost, Parade had stridden over the leagues behind them. All the others among the pursuers, gradually, had dropped away. All the others of the fugitives had been worn out and turned to this side or to that.
Only Barry Christian kept on, with Duff Gregor. Gregor himself, big and strong as he was, would have fallen away with the rest, except that Christian gave him extra support and help, the reason being that the resemblance of Gregor to Jim Silver had been helpful to Barry before and might prove helpful again. So Christian kept him along.
They had worn out one set of horses after another. Where they could buy horses, they bought them. Where they could not buy horses, they stole them. They crossed the Bull’s Head Range on foot, a hundred terrible miles that Christian forced Duff Gregor to travel. He walked behind Gregor.
The last twenty miles, he beat Gregor like a beast, with his quirt. When Gregor fell from exhaustion, Barry Christian kicked him to his feet again and forced him to travel on.
They got horses on the other side of the range. Christian tied Duff Gregor into the saddle and led the horse ahead, while Gregor lay senseless with sleep. That was the way they had managed to keep out of the grasp of Jim Silver on Parade. That was the only way.
It might be that on the edge of the Blue Waters they had shaken the great Silver off the trail. It was more likely that Silver was somewhere behind them, either reading their sign or else guessing with his accustomed uncanny accuracy what was going on inside their minds. Duff Gregor, for his part, felt that death itself was almost better than being pursued any longer in this fashion. The pain of death could bite him to the bone only once, whereas now he was dying every day of his life, a hundred times over.
The big body of Duff Gregor looked more like that of Jim Silver than ever before, for the immense labor of the flight had taken away all excess flesh and left him with his shoulders broad and heavy and the rest of the body tapering off.
His face looked more like the face of Silver than ever, also. It, too, had been refined by agony. Only his forehead was different, for the brow of Silver always held a sort of gloomy serenity, and the brow of Duff Gregor was heavily contracted.
As they came up the hillside, this day, it was Gregor who first noticed the hint of a trail and said:
“Somebody lives not far from here.”
“We’ll find ‘em all right,” said Christian.
“So that we can leave our trail posted for Silver?” asked Gregor satirically.
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The pale, handsome face of Barry Christian turned toward his companion, and he smiled. His gentle and musical voice answered: “We need fresh horses, partner.”
“Not likely to be horses, where we’re heading. This isn’t a horse trail, you can see.”
“This isn’t a horse trail, but there may be horses, and if there are not horses, there may be burros. Anything will be useful. Even a dog.”
“You mean,” said Duff Gregor, looking about the tips of the trees at the blue-white of the sea above timber line that extended into the sky, “you mean that you’re really going to cross the Blue Waters in one march?”
“Not in one march,” said Christian. “We’ll camp for one night up yonder, and freeze and chatter our teeth till the morning. And then we’ll go on again and try to finish the crossing to-morrow.”
“I’d rather turn around and face Jim Silver,” cried out Duff Gregor, in a passion. “I’d rather face him and have it out with him. Look! We’re two men, and he’s only one!”
Barry Christian looked not at Gregor, but down at his long, graceful hands.
Many a man said, and was willing to swear to it, that those famous hands of Barry Christian were even more dreadful with weapons than were the hands of Jim Silver. Even if they were not, there could not be very much actual difference between the prowess of the two men.
“You can beat him all by yourself, Barry!” cried Duff Gregor. “You can beat anybody in the world, if you make up your mind to it.”
Barry Christian slowly shook his head. Sorrow came into his face and made it handsomer than ever — like the face of one suffering spiritual pain beyond the concerns of this earth of ours.
“Silver’s beaten me,” he said. “He’s beaten me with his bare hands and he’s beaten me with guns. He’s outtricked and he’s outfought me. Sometimes I even think that the only reason I’m permitted to be alive is so that the young men of the world can have the spectacle of Barry Christian being kicked around the world by the great Jim Silver, the upholder of the law. That’s a moral sight. Deters the youth of the country from crime.”
Duff Gregor suddenly grinned. When he smiled, all the brute in him came out, and his entire resemblance to Jim Silver flickered and then went out.
“By thunder, Barry,” he said, “when I hear you talk like that, it’s as good as reading a book. You say the queerest things!”
“Do I?” asked Christian softly.
No one could tell what he meant, when he looked and spoke like this. Sometimes Duff Gregor half expected to have his throat cut and be left by the trail. That would be the instant that Christian decided that Gregor was more of a present encumbrance than a future assistance. In any case, he would not want Gregor to fall alive into the hands of his enemies. Gregor knew too much.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Christian. “Perhaps I should have been a teacher or a minister, or some such thing, leading a secluded life, and trying to help other men toward a vision of the truth.”
Big Duff Gregor filled the woods with his bawling laughter.
“There you go again. You sure beat me. You beat anybody. You’re a scream, Barry! Hey, there’s the house!”
Through the tree trunks they saw the broken picture of the little house. Falling snow obscured it, also. The sky was filled with deep miles of gray that promised a soft ocean of snow to descend upon the earth.
CHAPTER VII
Outlaw’s Plan
CHRISTAIN went in first. He was always first, when Gregor was his companion, because he profoundly distrusted everything that Gregor was apt to do in an emergency. He detested Gregor with all his soul, as he would have detested a false coin. But still, the resemblance between the man and the famous Jim Silver was too great to permit him to be discarded. Counterfeit he was, but even so he might be of immense use in the future.
At the door of the shack, Christian saw the great body of Bill Gary spilled across the table. He called, got no answer, and stepped to the table. His head was still bent above the still figure when Gregor asked calmly: “That mug is dead, isn’t he?”
Christian slowly lifted his head and looked toward Gregor.
“Yes, he’s dead.”
Big Gregor stepped to the table and stared calmly down at the body. He had seen plenty of death — since he had joined the forces of Barry Christian.
“Look at — His left wrist is all torn.”
“I see it,” said Barry Christian.
He picked up the loose weight of Bill Gary, grasping him under the armpits, and dragged him toward the bunk that was built against the wall. A paper fluttered from the top of the table to the floor.
Gregor picked up the feet of the dead man and helped lay him on the bunk.
“Torn all to the devil,” said Gregor.
“Something got at him. Dogs — wolves,” said Christian. He looked around the shack at the extra traps. “A trapper, and the wolves got him. That’s rather pretty.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty,” said Gregor.
He picked up the fallen paper. Christian was pulling a blanket over the face of the dead man, and, turning, he asked:
“What was that?”
“That? What?” asked Gregor.
“That thing you picked up.”
“Oh, nothing.”
“You certainly wouldn’t pick up nothing.”
“What could a gent pick up in a place like this?”
“There was a piece of paper.”
“Yeah. With some stuff scribbled over it,” said Gregor. “Let’s see it.”
“Ain’t worth seeing.”
Christian held out his left hand. Their eyes met, and those of Gregor fell away.
“All right,” he said. “Just a crazy idea out of a dead man’s head.”
“Dead men tell the truth, if they talk at all,” said Christian.
He took the paper which Gregor had crumpled, thrusting it into his pocket. Christian spread it out and read the contents aloud.
DEAR ALEC: I’m done for. I got Frosty, and Frosty got me.
I’ve tapped open the biggest vein of gold, to-day, that you ever seen. Then I caught Frosty in a trap, and he chawed me almost to death.
He paused and looked at Gregor. Gregor hung his head.
“I thought it was just a crazy lot of drool,” said Gregor.
Christian said nothing. He continued to hold Gregor with his eye, like a fish dangling, dying at the end of a line. Then he went on with the remaining few lines, reading them aloud, quietly.
He lowered the paper and then he said:
“Nerve. That’s what that dead man had. He traveled quite a distance on that ruined hand and spoiled leg. He crawled and rolled and slid. See how his clothes were torn to pieces?”
“Yeah, I seen,” said Gregor. “Think that there’s anything in that drool?”
“You know there’s something in it,” answered Christian. “You’re dead certain that there’s something in it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have planned to hold out the paper, duck away from me, and finally come back to this part of the world and look up Frosty.”
“Hey, listen, Barry — ” began Gregor in a pleading voice.
Christian bit his lip as though to keep it from curling with contempt.
“I understand,” he said. “I know you pretty well, Gregor. But I hoped that I didn’t know you as well as all this.”
“You take it pretty hard,” said Gregor, “when all I meant was — ”
“Quit it,” said Christian.
Gregor was gloomily silent.
Barry Christian picked up the envelope.
“This letter ought to go,” he said, “to the hands of one Alexander Gary, in the town of Newlands. Unfortunately for him, however, he’ll never see it. The letter has come into better hands than his, and those hands will find the gold mine, I imagine.”
“It’s a dog-gone queer thing,” muttered Gregor. “I never heard of anything like it.”
“Neither have I,” said Christian.
“It means several things,” he said. “One is, that you’re going to have your wish, Gregor.”
“What wish?” asked Gregor, half frightened by the tone and the cold, calm manner of Christian.
“It means,” said Christian, “that we’re going to run no longer. We’re going to stand our ground, and if Jim Silver overtakes us, we’re going to fight it out with him. Does that suit you?”
Gregor closed his eyes and shuddered. Then, looking up again, he muttered:
“We were running for our lives a minute ago. There wasn’t hardly anything to live for. But, now we’ve as good as got a gold mine, things look different, Barry. Why should we go and chuck ourselves away on a fight with Jim Silver, just for the fun of it?”
He waited with a puckered brow, as one who is reasonably sure of receiving a reproof, but the pale, handsome face of Christian merely smiled in return.
“I can understand that state of mind, too,” he answered. “After all, Gregor, it’s a pleasure to be with you. Whatever you do, you’ll never surprise me. It’s like listening to a twice-told tale. Well, here we are in the Blue Water Mountains, and here we stay until we find the wolf called Frosty. And on the neck of Frosty there’s an iron collar, and somewhere in that collar there is the description of the location of the vein of gold. Is that clear?”
“That’s clear,” muttered Gregor. “Sure it is.”
He added: “And Jim Silver?”
“Jim Silver,” said Christian, “may have had enough hunting to suit even him. He’s followed this trail until even his best friend, Taxi, was worn out and had to quit the job. And Taxi has the strength and the endurance of a wild beast, when it comes to following a blood trail. It may be that Jim Silver is not following us into these mountains. If he is following us, he expects us to try to cut straight across the summits.”
“Through a storm like this?” queried Gregor.
“He knows that we’ve gone through worse than this, to get away from him,” said Christian. “He knows that we’ve gone through hot hell and cold hell to get away from him, and a little feathery snowstorm like this could never stop us, I imagine he’ll think. No, he’ll drive straight through the mountains, and try to catch us on the other side.”