by Brand, Max
As his eyes grew more used to the broken starlight, he could make out the details more clearly. Above all, he could see the double-barreled shotguns whose big charges of buckshot could be sent home without much light to aim by. Sometimes all three of the men on watch were pooled together for a few moments, and on those occasions there was most of the talk that he was able to hear. The voices were kept low, but the face of the rock was hollowed and curved in such a way that it gathered the noises like a sounding board.
At one of those times, Silver heard Thurston say: “This may be a rotten business. People are going to ask a lot of questions if Jim Silver disappears. The other one, here — I don’t suppose that he’ll count so much.”
“People won’t have any questions to ask. Not for years,” said Christian. “No one is likely to show up in this neck of the woods for a long time. We’re pretty far back in the tall timber, you know. The main thing is to realize that Silver often disappears for months at a time. Every one realizes that.”
“What does he do when he disappears?” asked Thurston.
“Nobody knows. Some people say that he has a mine staked out somewhere, and when he runs out of funds, he goes back to the place and grinds up more ore in his coffee mill and washes out some more dust,” said Christian.
“What does he need money for, when he lives worse than a wild Indian most of the time?” asked Thurston.
“He needs it to throw away,” said Christian. “The fool can’t keep money in his pocket. Any fellow with half a brain about him can wheedle every penny out of the hand of Jim Silver. But I don’t think he spends his lost time at any mine.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would be beneath him. That’s one of his poses. Pretends to despise gold and everything that it will do. He probably just goes out into the woods and gets close to nature.”
“How close?”
“Well, he can whistle like any bird you name; he can chatter like a squirrel and hoot like an owl and growl like a bear. He knows the look of every tree and blade of grass. That’s why he knows how to follow a trail. He can almost see in the dark.”
“I hope not,” said Thurston. “That might be bad business for us.”
Christian merely laughed.
“Not so bad,” he said. “He won’t shoot you in the back, no matter what happens. There’s no Indian in him. He’ll give you as much warning as a rattlesnake before he starts spraying lead.”
That was the brief picture of Silver that Christian painted, and as it ended, Thurston asked:
“Why does he hate you, Christian? What good would it do him to nail you down?”
“Newspaper space,” said Christian. “He wants glory. And he thinks that there isn’t room enough in the world for the two of us.”
“Well,” said Thurston, “if he’s as clever as you say, and can work in the dark so well, it’s pretty certain that he won’t run into the trap that you’ve laid for him.”
“It doesn’t matter what he sees,” answered Christian. “The fool has a sort of a code that he lives by. If he has a partner, he has to get the other fellow out of trouble every time. He knows that if we have young Gary, we’ll make a dead man of him by the time the day commences. Sometime before the dawn, he’s sure to try his hand. He may do anything he can think of that’s clever, but cleverness won’t help him now. There’s only one way for him, and that’s to rush the camp!”
“Aye,” exclaimed Gregor, exultantly, “and that will mean one Colt against three shotguns. But can’t he work some trick here?”
“Look around for yourself,” said Christian. “What can he do? If he had wings, he might drop down out of the air and carry Gary off in his talons. That’s about all that he could manage, I take it.”
Then he commanded: “Keep on the stir. The best way to handle him is to meet him on the way and get in the first shot. He’ll sneak up through the trees probably, on one side or the other. Keep sifting in and out. Use your eyes and use your ears. This storm that’s blowing up makes everything a lot harder for us.”
The trio broke up again. Thurston and Gregor moved off to the trees, and Christian remained walking up and down in front of the prisoner.
The sky was now almost totally covered with clouds. The stars whirled through the rents, now and again. The wind struck in quickening gusts, with a louder roaring, and when the lightning played in the northwest, it showed a hood of rain lowered over the higher mountains. Sometimes the lightning seemed to set all the rain on fire, like a gas, and against that dull flare the big trees stood out. There was one thunder-blasted giant with a half-naked head that remained seared forever upon the memory of Jim Silver.
Rain began to rattle around him, big drops that splashed from the polished rock against his face in fine spray. The weight and sting of the drops he could feel against the back of his neck. He had taken off his hat. The wind cuffed his head from behind and pulled almost painfully at the roots of his hair.
He was cold, he was wet, but he remained in his place, motionless, watchful as a cat beside a mouse hole.
Then, at last, he had his chance.
All three of the watchers had, for the moment, stepped out of sight. Rain was falling in sheets now. It would ease away in a moment, he felt sure. But the lightning flash that fell jagged out of the heart of the sky just overhead showed him the polished, wet green of the trees, the cowering she-wolf in the clearing, the bowed form of the captive, and not even a glimmer of any of the guards. They were effectively carrying out Barry Christian’s doctrine of watching in the trees for the approach of the rescuer.
Instantly he dropped the noose of his rope — and missed the figure below him!
He jerked up on the rope and got nothing. The wind must have blown the noose awry to spoil his cast.
He tried again, though in a misty darkness that shut out view of his target. Through the smother of the rain he cast with a wider noose, and hauled in, and again he caught nothing.
The rain, instead of letting up, fell now with a mightier violence than ever. It struck on his back with ten million little hammer beats. Then the lightning cleaved the watery air again and showed him a scene covered with dark or glistening pencil strokes of rain, like a photograph taken in a dim room. He could see the target, that instant, and as he threw the noose of the rope again, he saw something else — a vaguely outlined figure not far away, coming out from the trees. The man was Gregor, walking with his shotgun sheltered under his arm, his head down to the rush of the rainfall.
The thunder burst over the head of Silver like a load of rocks on a tin roof. He pulled in on the rope, half despairingly. He could not believe his fortune when he found a weight attached to it!
He rose to his feet. Already, long before, he had selected the small jags of rock on which he would brace his feet. He planted himself accordingly and hauled. He had feared that it was merely an outthrust of rock at the base of the cliff that he might have snared, but he found a ponderous, loose weight at the bottom of his line.
He could not get a free haul on the weight. He had to lean back to get his full strength at the work, and that meant that the rope ground against the edge of the cliff, and the friction used up a large part of his effort.
He took short arm hauls, giving himself half a second of rest between the efforts, his right fist braked against his hip. The weight grew heavier and heavier, or so it seemed.
He prayed that there might not be another flash of lightning. In the extremity of his labor, his head jerked back with each swing of his body, and that was how he saw the clouds breaking above him, the stars showing through like a whirl of bright golden bees.
The weight came closer. He could tell that by the shorter oscillations of the rope. Then the greatest of his efforts failed to budge the rope.
Fear made his eyes swell suddenly in his head. He took a breath, made ready, and hauled with all his might.
There was not the slightest give!
Had the body or the clothes of Gary c
aught against a sharp projection of the rock? He leaned and made the free end of the rope fast to a knob of rock. As he finished the knot, the rope slacked out a little. And then, again, the lightning split the heavens, and the thunder shouted at his ear, filled his brain with deafness.
Not total deafness, however, for as he crawled to the side of the ledge, he heard a wild voice, the voice of Gregor, shouting from below:
“Silver’s here! Silver! He’s hauling Gary — ”
Before the words ended, a shotgun roared, and a whistling blast of the buckshot tore the air just in front of Silver. If he had leaned out from the rock an instant sooner, that discharge would have knocked out his brains, he knew.
As it was, he found that his first guess had been right. It was a projecting rock that had halted the upward progress of Gary. It was, in fact, the very edge of the cliff itself! He groaned at his folly in not calculating, accurately, just how much slack he would have to draw in to bring the body to the lip of the rock, for here was the prisoner, pressed close against the ledge, in easy arm reach.
Silver gripped the other’s coat at the nape of the neck with a mighty hand and lifted until the springing tendons on his back and shoulder threatened to snap — but he managed to sway Gary up and over the ledge.
They sprawled flat, side by side, as two more shotguns belched in the lower darkness, and the terrible, ringing voice of Christian began to shout revilings at Gregor.
“The horses!” shouted Christian. “Get the horses! We’ll cut ‘em off in the woods. This is going to be our night before it finishes!”
Silver, with one hand, drew his hunting knife to cut the bonds of Gary. With the other hand he fumbled at the ropes. And the first thing that he found was that his lariat was around the head of the captive! In his effort to free the man, had he hanged him?
He removed the noose, cut the bonds, tore the gag from the mouth of Gary, and jerked him to his feet. A loose figure sagged against him. A dead, limp weight remained in his arms.
CHAPTER XXI
The Trap Is Sprung
LIGHTNING played again. By the thrusting flash of it, Silver saw the face of his friend. It looked like death, and horrible death. The mouth sagged wide open, and there was blood about the corner of it. The rope mark was pressed into the flesh still, as though Gary had bitten at the rope and tried to keep it in place in that manner, when he first felt the noose slipping up around his body after the last cast of Silver. The earlier casts must have brushed him and warned him of the manner in which his friend was fishing to save his life from above.
Perhaps the pressure of the rope alone had been enough to strangle Gary. Perhaps the effect of the gag which had been wedged inside the teeth of Gary plus the rope had turned the trick.
Silver moved the body. The head fell limply back. The eyes were partly open. Another flare of the lightning showed that.
He stood there with a helpless bulk in his arms — and terrible Barry Christian and his men were coming on horses to comb the woods for prey!
Silver threw the body of Alec over his shoulder and ran stumblingly back to Parade. Over the withers of the horse he bent the burden, mounted, and made the loose hulk sit up before him.
Now he was ready for flight, at least, if Christian should sight him. And at the same time he heard what was a sweet music to his ears — a faint, gasping sound from the throat of Alec Gary.
Silver instinctively threw upward one look of gratitude. Then he sent Parade swiftly through the darkness down the slope. It might be that he would encounter the enemy on either one side of the way or the other, but he took the chance because already another idea had come to his mind.
Alec Gary was fighting hard for breath now, groaning and gasping, and life was returning rapidly into his inert body. He was able to maintain himself erect by the time Silver had circled back through the woods to the point which he desired.
Then from the mountain slope just above, he heard the crackling of guns, a brief burst, silence, a distant shouting.
Had they mistaken one another in the darkness, and opened fire blindly? Silver could not help smiling as he thought of that possibility. He was out of the saddle. Gary had slid down to the ground, still gasping for breath.
“Stay here — move if the horse wants to move,” Silver warned him, and glided straight ahead toward the clearing.
Lightning showed it to him through the trees. He saw the open space and the chained she-wolf. Straight to her he went. She lay flat, as though to be exposed to the lightning without any shelter over her head had left her senseless.
In one moment the flying fingers of Jim Silver had loosed the collar from her neck. As he stood up, he heard a faint whine that diminished along the ground. And the mate of Frosty was gone like a streak away from his feet.
With her went the nearest chance of capturing Frosty and the secret of the lost gold mine. But at least she had been taken from the hands of Christian; she would no longer serve as a lure to drag back the great Frosty into a trap.
Silver rejoined Gary.
What he wanted, and what he hoped, was to find Gary sufficiently well to take care of himself; instead, he discovered Gary lying on the ground, softly groaning. And that ended his chance of taking Barry Christian and Gregor and Thurston in hand that night. His duty would be to Gary first. Once more the heir of Bill Gary was a load tied to his neck.
So he got Gary back on Parade and rode behind him down the slope of the valley and up the farther side.
He regained the old camping ground. He could trust that Barry Christian would hardly hunt for him that far afield, to find him with his helpless man. Therefore he ventured on building a fire well screened about by rocks and trees so that the only strength of it rose straight upward in the air. He stretched his sick man by that fire and covered him with a slicker. Gradually the warmth restored the tied-up circulation of Gary, though still for a long time every breath he drew was a muffled groan.
When he could speak, he said: “They would have murdered me by morning. They would have done me in. I heard Christian say so.”
“I heard the same thing,” said Silver. “But they missed you — forget about it!”
“Forget about hell and the chief devil on the job!” muttered Gary. He stared at the fire with great eyes, and then rubbed his battered, torn mouth. He spat blood. His whole body was trembling.
“I felt the rope brush me two or three times,” he said. “If I could have moved, I would have rolled away. If I could have yelled, I would have called for help. I began to strangle with fear. I had a crazy idea in my head that I must be blocking the entrance to some snake’s den, and that some big, poisonous rattler was about to sock his fangs into me. It didn’t occur to me that a rattler would have sounded off first. And then the rope caught around me. I understood then. I knew that you were up there fishing for me, Jim. But I didn’t see how it could work. I didn’t see how you’d have strength to pull me up.”
“I was a half-wit,” said Silver. “Otherwise I would have brought up Parade and hitched the rope to him. I would have hauled you up with Parade instead of with my arms.”
He paused. Gary nodded. Then he went on:
“Then I felt the cursed noose slipping up around me little by little. It wouldn’t catch hold around my body. It wouldn’t catch me around the shoulders. When it slipped off my shoulders, I leaned my head forward. My mouth was held gaping — wide open — by the gag that Gregor had shoved into it. I couldn’t bite on the rope, but I could hook my teeth over it. Then came a big strong pull that lifted me right off the ground. The noose froze in on my head. The ring of it ground into the base of my skull. I thought it was smashing the bone. The fore part of it crushed back into my mouth. I thought I’d be strangled, or that my head would smash in.
“I tried to get the rope out of my mouth. It seemed better to die the way Christian would kill me than the way I was dying then. But I couldn’t get the rope out of my mouth. The noose was freezing into me deeper and deeper. It
shoved the gag back into my mouth until I couldn’t breathe any more. I was strangling. All the time I was being hauled up higher and higher, and all the time the noose was biting into me, constricting, tearing at the flesh, threatening to smash in my skull. But the strangling was the worst. There was blackness with spinning red lights across it. Then there was just the blackness and no lights at all. And after that — I died. I mean I thought it was death. It was just the same as death. Just the same agony.
“But afterward I saw the whirled lights and the blackness. I was on Parade, and your hands were holding me up.”
He had talked himself back into a full realization of life, and how near he had come to losing it. Now he sat up suddenly and stared at Silver.
“Nobody else would have thought of that,” he said. He measured the heavy shoulders of Silver with his eyes. “And nobody else would have had the strength to do it, even if he had thought about the trick. But if I can get my chance at Barry Christian and Gregor, maybe I could partly pay you back that way, Jim!”
“Steady,” said Silver.
He had stripped off his clothes and wrung them in his powerful hands, the water spurting out in strong, muddy jets. Now he pulled on the damp things again. The wind still was blowing in gusts, not steadily. The rain rushed downward in great volleys. Sometimes drops fell hissing into the fire around which Silver had begun again to roast rabbit meat.
“We’re comfortable enough here,” said Silver. “And Christian is groaning now. He’s lost you. His trap has been sprung, and the she-wolf is gone. Whisper, they call her. She’s gone, and Frosty and she are hitting it for the tall timber somewhere, side by side. That means that Christian is as far as ever from your uncle’s gold mine. He’s lost Whisper, and that means that he’s lost his first real chance at Frosty.”
“What turned the she-wolf loose? I know they call her Whisper. What turned her loose?”