by Max Brand
A month to give a horse perfect manners.
But Torridon would not be contented with that. He worked by day and he worked by night. A nervous horse would have gone mad under the coaching that this one received, but the nerves of Ashur were as steady as steel. He could have lessons for endless hours, and still take them with lightness as though they were a game.
So, one month from that first riding of the colt, John Brett and twenty others turned out to see the riding. They expected to see a fairly broken horse; they saw, instead, a masterpiece of manners.
Torridon sat the saddle with shining eyes. He had groomed Ashur until the black velvet of his skin seemed black no longer, but flashing silver metal wherever the sun touched. Moreover, there was a change in the very physique of Ashur. A month of steady work had taken the foolish colt look out of his eyes, and the muscles were beginning to show like ropes along his thighs and shoulders. His belly was stiff with heavy power; his quarters were beginning to be defined more square and precise. From just behind, he looked strong enough to pull a plow.
With an audience to look on, Torridon rode Ashur up and down. There was no tugging at the reins, until he asked the stallion for a burst of speed that needed a bit of a pull for steadying. Ashur walked, trotted, cantered, raced. He was drawn from one pace down to another, flung from one pace into high speed again.
When Torridon checked him at last, John Brett laughed with pleasure.
“Stove polish couldn’t finish him no finer, Paul,” he admitted. “Now let one of the boys take him.”
“There’s something more,” urged Torridon.
And, looping the reins over the pommel, he folded his arms and controlled the stallion by the mere sound of his voice. He started, stopped, increased speed, slowed, swerved right and left slowly, dodged right and left as though confronted by sudden danger.
Again he halted. And a good hearty shout of applause was sweet in the ears of Torridon. Even the young men joined in. For although they would have been envious of most feats of horsemanship, they felt that this youngster had risen to a class so high that he could be admired from a distance. They raised a whoop with the others, so that a crowd of crows, startled from the trees, flapped heavily away into the distance.
“There’s something more,” said Torridon, bursting with his pride.
Once more the reins were dropped upon the pommel, and this time Ashur went through his paces guided neither by hand nor voice. Pressure of heel or hand or sway of body accomplished all those effects. Indeed, it was not so very unusual an accomplishment. More than one plainsman had taught his favorite mount to leave his hands and voice free in the time of need. But the manners of Ashur were such a vivid contrast to those which he had possessed only a few weeks before that the watchers hardly could believe their eyes.
And to crown all, bringing the stallion back before John Brett, at an unseen signal, Torridon made him kneel, then fling himself prostrate on his side, while the rider stepped easily to the ground.
There was no need to explain the advantage of that last trick. All who might have to use their horses as breastworks in the desert against Indian attack appreciated it.
A single gesture, and Ashur sprang to his feet, shaking himself like a dog, while his bridle rang.
“Mount Charlie,” said John Brett. “We’ll see how Ashur goes with another.”
Charlie Brett came with shining eyes, pleased to be mentioned even by his father, and eager to show how he could sit the saddle.
The stirrups were altered a little to suit him, then he sprang up.
Ashur stood like stiff iron, his ears flattened.
“Get down,” said Torridon anxiously. “Get down, Charlie! He means trouble! He means trouble! Get down!”
“Stand away from his head,” answered Charlie Brett with perfect assurance. “If I can’t ride this hoss now, I can’t ride a stick. He’s broke as smooth as silk.”
“Uncle John,” begged Torridon, for so they all termed the head of the clan, “make him get down. Ashur looks dangerous.”
“Stand away,” answered John Brett. “It ain’t any shame to you if somebody else can ride the hoss that you’ve trained so slick. Let’s see him run, Charlie!”
Charlie, nothing loath, leaned in the saddle, gripped hard with his knees, and tightened the reins. He had no time or need to give a starting touch of his heels. As Torridon stepped back, Ashur leaped. He was in the middle of the pasture before the first gasp of the spectators began.
Then something happened. Even Torridon, watching every instant in fear, could not be sure. The black horse seemed suddenly to be in two places at once, so swiftly did he dodge and double, and Charlie sailed from the saddle and rolled over and over on the ground.
He came to his feet again with a shout of terror, running for his life, and with good reason, for the stallion was about and after him with tigerish eagerness.
“Shoot!” screamed a woman.
The whistle of Torridon went like a needle through the air. The stallion tossed his head and, swerving from the fugitive, came back in a broad sweep toward the crowd. They scattered with cries of fear as though they expected him to crash straight through them.
But Torridon was his goal, and before his master he stopped, mischief still hot and bright in his eyes, stamping and dripping from exercise.
John Brett lowered the rifle that he had just raised. He turned to Torridon with a grave face.
“Paul,” he said, “I’ll not forgive you if you been making that a one-man hoss.”
Torridon could not answer. The peril in which Charlie had been placed, and his own astonishment, stifled him, and he stared helplessly back at the patriarch.
“Jack!” called John Brett. “We’ll make this thing sure, now. Jack, will you take a chance in that saddle?”
Jack, pale but determined, came from the crowd, settling his hat more firmly on his head.
“Go with him,” cautioned John Brett.
But as Jack mounted, Torridon already was hurrying to the side of his friend.
“Take him easily . . . talk to him,” he cautioned. “I don’t know what’s in him. He’s never tried anything like this with me.”
Jack spoke, indeed, but his quiet voice had no effect on the big black. Ashur stood trembling, ready to spring into the air. He kept turning his proud, fierce head to Torridon, thrusting at his shoulder with his nuzzle as though asking impatiently why this indignity should be.
“I’ll try him now,” said Jack, and turned the head of the colt well away from its teacher.
The trial lasted not half a second. Two whiplash leaps and stops dropped Jack as though he had been struck from the saddle by a club, and the stallion wheeled at him furiously, always intent to kill.
The horrified cry of Torridon stopped him; he came back to Paul and danced like a savage panther behind him, looking over his shoulder at the world and champing foam from his bit.
Jack staggered to his feet and stood straight. “He turned into a steel cable on springs,” he said quietly. “And then somebody got hold of the far end of the cable and cracked it a couple of times under me.”
He smiled, but his eyes were still blank with the shock that he had received.
Back they went to John Brett and the murmuring, horror-stricken crowd.
“I’ll teach somebody to handle him,” protested Torridon eagerly. “I know that with time I can do it.”
John Brett smiled bitterly.
“I spent half my life at the breeding of that hoss,” he said with unbreakable gloom. “And now it sort of looks like I’d done all of that work for a Torridon.”
He turned on his heel and walked toward the house, and for the first time in many months Torridon felt the gulf open at his feet. He was a Torridon; they were Bretts. Nothing on earth could heal the breach.
X
Autumn and the school year were at hand now, but Torridon worked feverishly through the interim to try to teach one member of the household to back the stall
ion with safety. Charlie was the willing pupil. To Charlie he taught the whistle, the call; to Charlie he taught the tricks of guiding without reins, by voice, by gesture and signal, by sway of the body.
It was utterly of no avail.
Released from the hand of his master, the black colt was a tiger instantly. Twice a serious mauling of Charlie was barely averted, and Charlie gave up the effort. John Brett, when this was explained to him, smiled, half sadly, and half in anger. But he spoke no more about the colt. One might have thought that Ashur was no more to him than a shadow of a horse.
But Torridon knew better, and, watching that stern, cold face, he saw that he had outworn his welcome among this clan of his enemies. The court takes its tone from the king; all eyes fell coldly upon him, except the eyes of Nancy and those of Jack.
Those two, stanch as oak, did not alter. One day Jack stopped at the house with word that Nancy wanted to see him.
“She’s gone out riding up Bramble River. You’d catch her along that road, Paul, if you rode Ashur.”
Paul saddled Ashur in haste and started out.
The way to the Bramble River led through a semicircle of trails and roads, but with Ashur it was possible to go cross-country like a bird. There was sadness in the heart of Torridon as he went, for it might be the last day he backed the stallion. At any moment he expected from John Brett the command never to go near the black colt again.
They reached the river road at last. It was not really a road. No one ever had leveled it, but strong wagons had been dragged along its course more than once, and, where wheels once had traveled, it was the custom to speak of a road. It was in reality merely a winding hint of a trail, twisting back and forth among the trees. Then Paul saw a rider before him, a woman. He called to Ashur, and the stallion swept up to her like the wind.
She had turned back to face them, laughing with pleasure at the speed of the horse. Laughing more than a little, felt Torridon, at his own eagerness.
“You wanted me, Nancy?”
“Let’s sit down,” said Nancy. “There’s a rock by the water. And Ashur’s such a silly fool. He’s always dancing.”
They tethered Nan’s gelding to a tree. Ashur, certain not to stray, was turned loose, and the two sat on a table-topped rock at the verge of the river. Their feet were on sand as clean and white as the sand of a sea beach. The broad river swept before them. Moving water hypnotizes. Torridon began to feel that they were on an island together—then that the island had broken adrift and was sweeping out into the stream.
Nancy had not spoken. He looked at her presently, startled. He found that she was smiling with thoughtful eyes.
“You’d forgotten that I was with you, I think,” she said.
“Oh, no,” he said, and turned a brilliant red, thereby confessing.
“Well,” said Nancy, nodding. “That’s books. They take you away from things.”
He looked at her with frightened eyes. She was so practical and so full of common sense, often, that he was in awe of her. She differed from the others of her clan. They simply could understand nothing but the earth and things of the earth. That vague, cloudy universe in which he lived they never entered. But Nancy could enter it, if she chose. She knew all about it, he felt, and she wanted none of it. She preferred facts, it seemed. He respected Nancy, and her beauty delighted him, but he was afraid of her. He always had been afraid of her, from the first day when he met her judicial eyes in the school.
“Yes,” he said vaguely.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I wanted to talk to you about yourself,” said Nancy.
Paul sat up straight. He had a stick which he had picked up and he jabbed it nervously into the strip of white sand.
“Don’t do that,” said Nancy. “You’re making the mud show through.”
He threw the stick away with a nervous gesture and clasped his hands together.
She went on: “What are you going to do with yourself, Paul?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean, exactly.”
“Just what I say. For instance, what are you going to do this winter?”
“Teach the school, of course.”
“How old are you, Paul?”
“I’m nineteen. That makes you eighteen, doesn’t it?”
“Do you know that much about me?”
She laughed a little, nodding to herself, laughing at him. And he flushed again. Color always was coming and going in his pale face with every emotion.
“You won’t teach the school, though,” she said, “if you’re wise.”
“And why, Nan?”
“Because you’re a Torridon,” she said bluntly. She frowned, driving home her point with cruelty.
“I’ve always been a Torridon.”
“Different, though.”
“Just as much before.”
“You were only a boy. Children don’t count so much.”
“I’m not so very old now,” said Torridon anxiously.
“You’re a great deal older than you think.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re always looking forward, thinking that you’re going to grow bigger . . .”
“I didn’t think you’d taunt me with that,” said Torridon, straightening his shoulders and growing crimson with shame and sorrow.
“Don’t be silly. I don’t mean your size. You’re big enough. I only mean . . . in your mind. You keep thinking that you’ll change. Perhaps you will. You feel like a child, now, compared to what you hope to be. But the Bretts don’t see things that way. When a boy has his height, he’s a man. Well, you’re a man to us.”
He was silent. There was so much truth in what she said that he could not answer. He was depressed. One always is down-hearted when it appears that another knows the truth about one. Conversation flows out of mysteries, half knowings, partial revealings of what is kept securely hidden, more securely hidden because it is half revealed.
“I’m just the same as I was last year,” he said.
“You’re not, though,” she replied with her usual assurance.
“What’s made the difference?”
“That!” She pointed to Ashur. “Speak to him,” she said.
“Ashur,” he said.
The stallion jerked up his head and looked on his master with bright eyes of love and trust.
“That’s made the difference,” said the girl.
He shook his head, bewildered.
“I mean, when you were a boy, it didn’t matter. But after you mastered the school, and big Jack . . .”
“I didn’t master Jack.”
“What did happen, then?” she asked sharply, still frowning at him. “Don’t talk small, Paul, to make me talk big about what you’ve done.”
“I think you’re a little rude,” said Paul Torridon, so angry and proud that he was about to spring to his feet and leave her.
“Nonsense,” said the girl. “You’re very hard to handle. You’re just like . . . a girl.”
He did leap up, then. “I think I’ll go home,” he said.
She answered calmly: “What home?”
“Why, to Uncle John’s place, of course.”
“He’s not your uncle.”
Torridon tried to answer. He could not, and because he was unable to find a word, he began to hate Nancy.
“And his house isn’t your home, Paul.”
“Is that what you brought me here to tell me?”
“Just exactly,” said Nancy. “When you were a child, that was different. Then you changed into a youngster. You showed that you had something in you when you turned Jack into a sort of . . . slave to you.”
“Slave? What are you talking about, Nancy? You’re just . . . you’re just trying to make me angry.”
“What else is he?” said the girl. “Does he do anything without coming to you for advice? Does he ever think anything out for himself? Look at last year. He wanted to marry Charlotte. He went to you, and you told him he
’d better save a lot of money first, and build a cabin before he married her. So she got tired of waiting and married Will Morgan.”
The dreadful truth of this was dropped upon him, a load that bowed his shoulders.
“I thought it was best,” he said stiffly.
“Perhaps it was best. That’s not the point at all. You’d better sit down, Paul.”
“I think maybe I’m needed back at the house,” replied Paul.
“No, you’re not.”
“See here, Nancy. Don’t you talk like this any more!” he cried at her. “I won’t listen. You’re just trying to upset me.”
Nancy stamped lightly on the sand. It made a crisp sound under her foot. “You . . . you baby!” cried Nancy. “You won’t dare to open your eyes and see facts. You’re afraid of the truth!”
He braced himself, actually planting his feet to withstand the shock. “What truth?” he asked her.
“That you’ve turned into a man . . . that the whole lot of us knew it the day you saved Roger Lincoln. Saved Roger Lincoln . . . think of that. And then you rode Ashur yourself. We knew that day that you were a man. We knew that you were a Torridon. We began to hate you from that minute, and you’re afraid to see it. You won’t see it or admit it till somebody shoots you through the back!”
XI
He sat down, not because he felt more kindly toward the girl, or because he was more prepared to listen to the truths that she was telling him, but because her last words had tapped him behind the knees and unstrung the sinews, so to speak.
He began to fumble at his cold face with one hand, flashing glances at her, and then at the brightness of the river.
She sat bolt upright, with her head high, looking straight at him.
“You do hate me, I see,” said Torridon.
“Is your lip trembling?” she asked coldly and sternly.
“Oh, Nancy,” he exclaimed, “how can you be so brutal?”
“I can’t be brutal to you,” she said. “I’m only a weak girl. And you’re a strong man.”
He opened his eyes at her. He parted his lips at her. “A strong man?” he repeated. Then he laughed bitterly and added: “You’re wicked enough to keep taunting me, too.”