Silvertip's Chase

by Brand, Max

  Man was coming — and for Frosty there was no further flight! He lifted his fore quarters, but the agony that ran through his hind legs was so great that he had to lie down again. His red eyes commenced to blink, as though he were facing a powerful light; death was, in fact, what he was confronting.

  He lost sight of the swimmers when they were close to the island; presently Whisper, with a whimper, slunk away through the brush. Noises of cracklings through the shrubbery approached. The wind brought the odor of man, of the man. With it was the smell of the wet horse, of gunpowder, and of steel. Shudderings went through Frosty. He lifted his head, turned it toward the enemy, and waited. His short ears pricked up. There was nothing to tell that he was in a panic of terror. There was nobility in Frosty, and therefore, when the pinch came, he knew how to face death.

  And so, through the brush, came the image of the man, shadowy, broken across by the small branches, and at last standing in clear day before Frosty. Frosty locked his jaws.

  “A dead one!” said Jim Silver. Then he added: “Poor devil!”

  He walked around the great wolf, staring at the ground. Frosty disdained to turn his head to watch. He would not even strain to look out of the corners of his eyes. For, of course, the man would do what Frosty would have done — go behind and take a helpless enemy from the blind rear.

  It was better to lie like that, head up and neck rigid, pretending not to see or hear, pretending all was a pleasant daydream. Presently a gun would speak.

  “Where’s your mate, Frosty?” said the voice of the man. “Has she run off?”

  It was a strange sound. The vibration of the human voice ran all through the body of Frosty, along with his pain. He had heard human voices many a time before, but never a voice with such a quality in it. There was in it something that he vaguely recognized as kindness. When his mother spoke in the cave in the ancient days, or when she had scolded and warned in the days of his cub hunting, there had been a touch of the same quality in the tone. Frosty recognized it only vaguely. There is no kindness from an enemy. For enemies one has a sharp tooth. It is the law of the wild. And no tooth is as sharp as the tooth of man, no mercy is so small as his.

  Well, the end was coming.

  “Bleeding very fast — bleeding to death!” said Jim Silver.

  He walked around to the front of Frosty, pulled out a revolver, and leveled it. Silver was wet and wringing with water. It coursed down him in small rivulets, and the sun, looking out from between a pair of clouds, turned him to a form of fire bright as the flame of a hearth, bright as the sun on still water.

  But Frosty did not blink his eyes at the brightness or at the death which was leveled at him. He kept his head high. His great heart was swelling in him. His jaws were locked. He had turned himself into steel to meet the end.

  “I can’t do it,” said Jim Silver.

  His voice had been like a hiss. He lowered the gun.

  Now, if Whisper had brains and courage together, she might steal out of the brush where she lurked and take the man from behind, cutting him down by the legs or striking at the back of the neck. But Whisper would not do that!

  It was strange to see the gun lower in the hand of the man. Perhaps, of course, man intended to play with him, prolonging the agonies of his death.

  Well, that was permitted, also. That was another law of the realm. And Frosty remained like a rock.

  “I don’t think you’ll even fight,” said Jim Silver. “I think the fight’s out of you, because you won’t make a fool of yourself in a lost cause.”

  He walked around behind Frosty and came right up to his hind quarters. Frosty didn’t move. He might wrench himself around with a great effort and strike with his fangs at the enemy, but it was likely to be a futile blow.

  He lay still. There was a rending sound, loud and sharp in the air. Jim Silver was tearing clothes into long strips for a bandage. Under a thick bush he found some deep, dry dust. He came back with some of the dust and crouched right over Frosty; and Frosty would not turn his head. Pain had nailed him to the ground — pain and helplessness. Oh, if the four feet were under him, how quickly he would have slashed for the softness of the throat of terrible man — and then how he would have rushed away for safety! How he would have whipped through the brush to rejoin Whisper, to plunge again into the water!

  But the voice of man kept on speaking. It was like the flowing of a stream. A strange kindness kept soaking out of it and into the mind and heart of Frosty. It was the caress before the death stroke, no doubt!

  Then a bandage was worked under Frosty’s hind quarters. A handful of dust was laid over the mouth of one wound to clot the blood. The bandage was drawn tight and tighter. It was painful only in the first moment. After that the pressure was soothing. It pulled the lips of the wound together. And Frosty knew that the blood was no longer flowing from that open mouth, dribbling his life away.

  Then the wise hands of man turned him. Ah, that was an agony, to be sure. Frosty dropped his head suddenly and let it rest on his paws. The second bandage was passed under him, the second handful of dust was laid over the mouth of that more gaping wound where the bullet had issued from the flesh. The bandage drew tight with a pang that seemed to split the very heart of Frosty. His head whipped around like the head of a snake, at inescapable speed, and he caught the arm of Jim Silver in his teeth.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  A Partner

  IT was that famous right hand of Silver that was endangered. But it was not yet lost. A wolf usually strikes with his teeth as a man strikes with a sword — a gashing blow with the point, or the edge. But something had checked Frosty in the last instant, and he only gripped the arm in a vice, without breaking the skin. Red hatred blurred his eyes, but still they could see clearly enough, and if Jim Silver had moved a hand or twitched so much as a muscle, the fangs of Frosty would have crunched against the bone. There would have been an end of Silver indeed, a crippled wreck that his enemies could have devoured soon with consummate ease.

  But all that Silver stirred was his voice, that kept on in the steady stream, and softened the fighting rage of Frosty, and sank again into his brain, into his heart.

  There was neither fear nor anger in the eyes of Jim Silver. Those were calm, all-watchful, brooding eyes, considering the wolf and understanding him.

  He was not even calling himself a fool for taking the chance. He had had no rope with him to tie down the brute, and unless something were done, the life would rapidly leak out of that great body.

  Why not let the life run away? Well, that would be an easy question to ask. It would have been easily answered, also, Jim Silver felt, by any man who had seen Frosty fighting for his mate, by any man who saw him waiting calmly, head high, for his death.

  Big shudders of weakness ran through the body of Frosty. Suddenly he relaxed his hold and let the right hand of Jim Silver go, but he kept his head turned and ready, and waiting to strike one of those wise hands to the bone.

  Yes, with a tooth he had scratched the skin, and not for the first time the taste of the blood of man was sweet in his mouth. A hot slaver overflowed the lips of Frosty and drooled down from his mouth. The green devil was bright in his eyes once more. Urges kept rushing over him in waves, and a thin thread was all that held him back. And the voice of man continued gently in the ears and in the brain of Frosty.

  The sound of it or the memory of it would never leave him. It would be present in his soul from that day forward, and make of the neighborly mountains a solitude for him where he had always reigned supreme as a king.

  But Frosty could not know that. Such things were working in him as never had troubled him before. And always there was the emotion that had never been in him since the days when his mother ran with her litter, giving them gentleness and care. But this? It was beyond all the laws of kind!

  The hands of man pressed the dust over the wound again slowly. The red blood soaked into it, clotted it, appeared through it as a thin stain. More dust was
heaped on. It was incredibly soft on the raw flesh. As the bandages were drawn again there was, as before, one thrust of pain, and after that there followed such a release from torment that the breathing of Frosty began to make a steady sound, like snoring.

  The second bandage was drawn tight in that manner. The pain continued, but only a ghost of its old self. The bleeding had stopped. The life drain no longer carried away the strength of Frosty on a steady ebb.

  The hand of man moved out to him. He smelled it with a keenly critical nose. The scent of his own blood and hair and hide was thick on it. He had suddenly no desire to strike that hand.

  Good had been done him. He could not understand. He could only feel and know that good had flowed out to him from those hands. The gentleness of the voice was not a liar. There was other tenderness in this world than in the care of a mother wolf.

  The hand went straight on toward his eyes. Frosty snarled so that his entire body vibrated. The hand hung suspended in the air. He stopped snarling. The hand moved toward him again. Once more he snarled. A wild burst of savagery almost mastered him, weakened, ebbed away from its full tide.

  What is there to fear or hate in a thing that can be stopped by a mere growl?

  He let the hand touch him, and it rested with weight and with warmth on the top of his head.

  If it covered his eyes, he would rend the arm. He would catch it in the softness of the flesh beneath the elbow, and he would tear it. He would slash through the big blood vessels, and with his wrenching tug of head and shoulders he would jerk the man closer and then get at the tenderness of the throat.

  The whole body of man was tender, easily rent by teeth. Frosty could tell that. Jim Silver was naked to the waist now, after turning his clothes into bandages. The teeth of Frosty tingled with eagerness as he saw game so easy. And if his eyes were covered for an instant —

  He waited, teeth bared, silent. But his eyes were not covered. The hand passed down his head, softly, steadily. The voice went on, always running through the heart of Frosty as the sound of running water passes into the heart of a thirsty wolf on a summer’s day.

  But the thirst which was beginning in Frosty on this day might never be assuaged.

  The voice of Jim Silver was saying softly: “Now that I’ve got my hand on your head you’re mine. I’ll have you coming to my voice, watching me at night, following my shadow, waiting for my step, listening for my voice. I’ll make you mine from the tip of your tail to the light in your eyes. Frosty, you’ve found a partner. I’ll belong to you from my toes to my brain. We’ll work together, travel together, hunt together and fight the same enemies. Oh, it’ll be a wise man who can keep his trail from me now. I won’t have to trust my eyes, but your nose. I won’t have to see in the dark, because I’ll have you with me. You to show me the way, Parade to carry me — and Barry Christian has come very close to his last day!”

  He slipped his hand down the neck of the wolf to the collar and unbuckled it. As he was withdrawing the bright weight, impulse made Frosty grip the arm of the man again.

  But this time he retained his hold for only a moment. He let that arm go free, and saw the man stand up and away from him.

  Consider this with the brain of a wolf. All men in the world shoot bullets at wolves — all saving one.

  All men try to run them down with horses and catch them in ropes — all men save one.

  All men seed the earth with traps, so that the fleshless jaws may grip a wolf by the leg — all men save one.

  But from the hands of one man there comes the easing of pain, the sound of a voice that causes courage and confidence to course through the heart.

  Frosty lay still, with his head stretched on the ground. All that he was aware of it would be impossible to say, but most of all he knew that strange eyes had been on him, taking hold of his brain.

  Big Jim Silver had the little compartment of the collar open now. He took out a twist of stained, oiled silk. He spread out the paper that it contained and commenced reading:

  Thunder Mountain on the right; Chimney Peak on the left. I face Mount Wigwam. A ledge of black rock —

  There was blood on the paper. That was the blood of Bill Gary, and it was still red.

  Silver read the directions again, printed them deep in his mind. But in the meantime there was Alec Gary to be considered, for to him the gold should belong.

  He took from a pocket of his torn coat a bit of pencil and wrote beneath the sprawling writing of the dead man:

  Go and get men to help you. I inclose two hundred dollars to pay them their hire. Go to the spot that your uncle described, locate the mine, and register your claims. I am staying on here. Don’t ask me why. I’ll see you when I have a chance. Don’t wait for me until the flood sinks. I’m not leaving this spot for a good many days.

  JIM SILVER.

  After he had written that, he got his water-soaked wallet, counted out the money, wrapped it with the note inside the oiled silk, and found that he was barely able to inclose the whole within the compartment in the collar.

  Then he walked down through the trees to the edge of the river and waved his hand. There was an instant signal from behind a rock on the farther shore, some thirty yards away. For here the secondary channel of the stream deepened and narrowed. It was Alec Gary who ventured to show himself, though cautiously. For the men of Barry Christian were beyond the island.

  Jim Silver took a step forward, swung his arm, and hurled the heavy collar high and far. It flattened out in the air. It spun around and around, flashing like a straight sword. And it fell actually beyond Alec Gary.

  Alec ran back to it, leaned over it.

  A moment later he was dancing like a madman, flinging up his arms.

  Silver, smiling a little, turned slowly back through the brush. He felt that the proper half was being fitted to that interrupted day which had been broken through by the death of Bill Gary. And once again fortune had evaded the skillfully grasping hands of Barry Christian.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Flood Waters

  SILVER carried on his saddle a small hand ax with an adjustable and folding handle of steel tubing. He used that ax to fell some boughs and saplings. He made a deep bed, piled it beside the wounded wolf, leaned over Frosty, and lifted him onto the bed.

  That is one way of telling it.

  Another way is to admit that it took him twenty-four hours of persuading, stroking, talking, trying, before he was permitted to take the massive, loose weight of the big wolf in his arms and lift it onto the evergreen boughs.

  Once he had that bed under Frosty he had some assurance that the big fellow might get well eventually.

  In the meantime he had to get food. But that was not a hard task. There were plenty of rabbits on the island. Before flood time it was twenty times as large as the surface now above water, and therefore twenty times as much life as usual was crowded onto its face. There were plenty of rabbits. There were plenty of snakes, too. After he discovered the numbers of them, Silver dared not venture into the woods except by day, and then only with the very greatest care.

  But he got a rabbit for the wolf and another for himself the first day.

  The great Frosty would not even sniff at meat killed by another than himself. He merely turned his head and looked at the glorious figure of Parade, where the stallion grazed at the side of the clearing. This was the sort of fodder that Frosty had a taste for.

  Jim Silver brought up water in his hat. Frosty would not even glance at it, though terrible thirst burned him.

  So Silver waited another day. He understood the thing perfectly, but there was nothing to do about it.

  He waited three days before Frosty, lying faint and dying, deigned to accept water from the hat.

  He waited another whole day, though famine made the ribs of the wolf stare, before Frosty, with snarling, disgusted lips, bared his teeth and bit into a rabbit.

  But he ate one rabbit that day and two the next — rabbits freshly killed, warm with l
ife still, as a proper wolf demands to have his food. And so he passed that important event — the taking of food which he had not killed with his own fangs.

  The days went on. The bandages were changed, re-changed, again and again. Water was heated in the hollow of a rock and the wounds washed. They were healing swiftly, but still Frosty was too wise to attempt to move, for deep inside him there were torn tendons, ripped flesh, and grazed bones. He lay still and accepted the attendance of the man.

  Silver used to come and put a hand on his head and look straight down into his eyes.

  “I serve you to-day, and you serve me to-morrow,” he would say.

  But there was never much sign from Frosty. He had the forbidding exterior which is fitting for a king. It was a startling revelation to Jim Silver when the first token of affection was given.

  He had torn his hand on a thorn, a deep and ragged wound, and as he was offering the great wolf a freshly killed rabbit that day, Frosty turned from the meat to the raw wound on the hand of Silver and licked it carefully, gently, with his eyes half closed.

  Not until he seemed to think that that small hurt had received sufficient attention would Frosty start eating. To Silver it was like a miracle. He knew from that moment how strong his hold on the wolf had become.

  Then bad luck struck at them again. The storm no longer touched the island even with its outer fringe. There had been days of clear, open weather. But up in the higher mountains of the northwest, still the thick haze of the rains continued. A flood piled up, rushed out of the smaller canyons, and raised the Purchass River five feet in five minutes. That water sent down a solid wall that traveled as fast as a trotting horse. It hit the island and literally tore away the head of it. The big trees were ripped out by the roots with a sound like thunder-clouds tearing in two. And a shooting wave of water came up over the hillock on which Parade and Silver and the wounded wolf had been living.