by Max Brand
These were the ideas of Cyclone Ed, and in them the manager saw the wreck of all his schemes for a bright pugilistic future for his protégé. Poor Cyclone, in becoming the genesis of a good citizen, had become, also, the genesis of a failure in the ring.
First Vince Munroe discovered that fact when, as Cyclone Ed made a rush, Vince dared to stand up to him and soon discovered that he could block the swinging blows that came toward him, and then that he could return them with at least equal force. He kept up that savage rally until Sparrow beckoned him wildly away, and he broke ground and retreated, like a well-trained sparring partner—as though he had the heart taken out of him by the punches of Cyclone.
Afterward Sparrow had to take both sparring partners to one side.
“Look here,” he said. “The Cyclone is a little off, just now. But after a while he’ll swing into shape again.”
“Good enough shape to get licked!” exclaimed Vince Munroe. “He never was good enough to stand up to Pierre Lacoste. I tell you, I know. I was in London when Lacoste fought Pete Riley. Lacoste is a tiger. Damned if he ain’t. He’ll swaller this here little hand-raised Cyclone of ours!”
“Well,” snapped out Sparrow, “who wouldn’t get swallered, if he could come out again with twenty-five thousand dollars? Ain’t that worthwhile? And ain’t the kid a married man, now?”
After that, the two sparring partners understood perfectly. Sparrow had no hope of Cyclone’s winning the fight. He merely wished to keep the poor fellow in sufficient heart to enter the ring. After that, he could sit back and watch Ed Morgan crushed in a miserable round or two. It made no difference. He, Sparrow, would have his share of the fat purse and of the accompanying position in the limelight of publicity.
If the sparring partners thought it was dishonorable business, they did not say so. They merely shrugged their shoulders and decided that they need not put in too much of their attention upon the training of Ed Morgan, who was slipping daily in his work. Instead, they spent most of their time dancing attendance upon pretty Nan Pearson.
They watched over her daily with the most brooding care but were incapable of preventing new presents from showering in upon her. It was most remarkable. The silent man of the forest carried in another saddle of venison every two days, to make sure that his dear was properly fed. He carried in lovely fawn skins, exquisitely dappled in color like the bright sunshine spotting a carpet of brown leaves. He brought in other pelts. There was a mountain lion, a hide that showed no wound, except for a narrow knife slit in the skin of the side over the heart, and which Sparrow and the rest concluded must have been slain by a bullet shot though its eye. There was a lobo’s pelt, once, and at another time simply the head of one of those dangerous beasts, cunningly sun dried.
The game went on for a full week, and the camp of Cyclone Ed Morgan was stricken more and more deeply with wonder. But now matters of another nature began to come upon the camp. The escorts of the lady appeared to be less welcome to the silent hunter of the forest than was the lady herself. In the first place he dropped thirty feet out of a tree and struck his knees on the back of Bert Kenny.
Bert was so terribly stunned and bruised that they had to carry him back to the camp, after they had been attracted by the screams of Nan Pearson. But although Nan seemed terribly frightened and terribly concerned for the sake of poor Bert Kenny, yet she insisted upon going forth into the woods the very next day. She no longer seemed to hunt for the weed. At least, she no longer talked about the strange herb. She seemed to love the forest for its own sake.
That next day, Vince Munroe fell behind the girl. She passed on not more than fifty yards. Then she called for Vince, received no answer, and hurried back down the path. She found him, lying crumpled in the path, his face black and swollen with blood, his mouth still gaping for breath. At her cry, they came from the camp and carried Munroe back, also.
When he recovered enough to speak, he told them, faintly, how he had been attacked from behind, and how a sinewy arm had wound around his throat, and how he had been brought to the ground in silence, how he had struggled vainly and briefly, and how the battle had ended in death, as he felt. Certainly all the pangs of death had been his.
COWPUNCHERS ENGAGED
Although two strong men had been struck down by the terrible stranger in the woods, still Nan Pearson continued to go forth every day with the most singular disregard of danger.
“He will carry you away, child!” cried Jenny Morgan in the greatest alarm.
“He won’t dare,” Nan Pearson said, and tossed her head. “I don’t think that there’s such a person. I’ve never seen any sign of him, at any rate.”
“But you’ve seen the things that he brings to you?”
“Well, that may be a joke. . . .”
Jenny did not pursue the subject. Women have a singular understanding of one another. As for men, they persist, most foolishly, in arguing with the ladies. With one another, women seem to understand that, after a certain point is reached, it will be foolish to continue talking. So Jenny Morgan, staring rather sadly at her friend, changed the subject of their talk.
“Don’t you think,” said Ed Morgan, “that Nan is sort of interested in what this gent might be like?”
At this Jen grew violently red and stamped her feet. “How can you talk so, Ed?” she cried at him.
As a matter of fact, she agreed with Ed entirely, and that was the cause for her anger. She did not like to see a comrade of the huntress sex tracked down by mere stupid man.
Sparrow was watching the girl like a hawk, and every day he said to himself, as he observed her: “Has she seen him today? Or has she not?” Sometimes he was sure that she had, because she would come into camp with her eyes languid and dreamy and her manner careless, like one who has large and important thoughts to take all of their attention. Sometimes she was a little nervous, secretly worried. About what?
Once she came sadly to Jen Morgan and told her that she must leave the camp. She could not stay there any longer. When Jen pressed her for reasons, she confessed quite freely. She had gone from day to day in the hope of seeing the stranger in the forest. Every day, when she went out through the woods, she knew that he was near her. But she could not see him. He was always like a shadow, breathing at a little distance, a thing guessed among the trees but never discovered. If she sat with a book on the ground, she could be sure that he was crouched somewhere near, listening, waiting, watching. Sometimes, afterward, by hunting through the brush nearby, she could even find some slight traces of where he had been. As for sight or sound of the creature himself, there was never either glimpse or whisper of him.
To all of this Jen listened, fascinated. Her eyes were shining with envy and with fear.
“It might be some monster!” said Jen. “Some man so very ugly that he doesn’t dare to show himself for fear that you’ll be taken with a horror at the sight of him. Or,” she added, “perhaps it’s a real wild man, a fellow who’s never been with other men. Oh, Nan, d’you think that might be?”
“A great ugly monster of a wild man,” sighed Nan Pearson. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think that it may be. But . . . I can’t tell . . . I don’t know. Oh, what a queer thing it is, Jen.”
A very queer thing, indeed. The very next day there was a revelation of the stranger to Nan. She had walked far away from the camp and come at last, suddenly, to a blackthroated cave into which she adventured partly from mere curiosity, and partly because a sound of trickling water reached her ears from the heart of the tunnel, and, she was very thirsty. But caves are not always safe to venture into.
She had not gone twenty steps down the cavern when she heard a faint rumbling noise, then the unmistakable noise of a growl. She had no time to turn or to flee. She was frozen in her place, watching two luminous eyes slide toward her along the floor of the cave. At the same moment she was caught from behind and whipped around. Powerful arms lifted her. She heard a quick-taken breath of a man straining at a great weight and
running at full speed at the same time. Then she was whisked into the sunlight and dropped down the face of a rock to soft, level sand beneath. As she was dropped, she looked up and had a glimpse of the stranger of the forest.
But so contorted was his face, so purpled and swollen with blood from his effort in sweeping her away from the danger of the cave, that she saw in it simply a glimpse of horror. One thing more, however, she saw without fail, and that was a pair of strange, amber-colored eyes, like the eyes of a beast of prey, at once terribly vacant and terribly filled with fires.
So much she saw. Then, very foolishly and very helplessly, she fainted and lay like dead upon the sand. When she wakened a moment later, it was to hear a terrible snarling from the cave, and then mingled with that snarling was the voice of a man—a shout that was a roar of fury, and then a cry of battle as man and beast closed. There could not be any doubt of that. Since they closed without the sound of a gun discharged, she knew that her rescuer was now attacking the monster of the den—whatever it might be—with no weapon more deadly than knife or club or, perhaps, his bare hands only!
So she crouched by the mouth of the cavern, trembling. Sometimes she started up and made a step or two into the darkness, half determined to rush in and help in the battle. But every time she shrank back again, as though realizing that her strength would be futile in such an encounter. The shouting and snarling increased. There was a shrill screeching. Then silence.
Was that the death cry of the beast? Or was it the cry of triumph? Did the man stand with his foot planted on the warm body of his enemy, or had the man fallen and were the fangs of the destroyer fixed in his flesh?
Such a wave of fear and horror passed over the girl at this thought that she whirled away and ran as fast and as far as she could. Since she was a lithe-limbed mountain girl, that furious burst of running carried her almost to the camp before she was exhausted. She hurried on to the camp, turning all that had happened in her bewildered brain. This much was clear, that the stranger of the forest had entered the cave to attack the beast that sheltered in it simply because she had been for a moment in peril of the brute. At the thought of such wild chivalry, the breath of the girl was taken.
The first person she met was Sparrow, and she told him all that had happened, to which he listened with his scrawny head cocked upon one side.
“Do one thing for me,” he said.
She nodded, breathless, her eyes brilliant.
“Stay in the camp. Don’t go out of it for a minute till I give you word,” said Sparrow, and she agreed.
After that, he went down to Juniper, and in that stirring town he found two cowpunchers that had come to try their luck in the mines. They were quite willing to undertake a more congenial work than the pick and the shovel. The proposition of Sparrow was very liberal. They were to wait near the Ed Morgan shack at the fighter’s camp, and, if the wild man approached the place, they were to endeavor to snare him with their ropes. If they succeeded, each would receive a hundred dollars in cash at the moment the stranger was subdued.
They came at once, and that very night they began their vigil. The shack stood a little removed from the clearing that was used as training quarters, and in the brush before it Sparrow and his two ropers took up their position and watched.
Until the gray of the morning they lurked there without hearing a strange sound except the rustling of the wind through the trees. But in the first light of the dawn, Sparrow saw something glimmer behind some nearby bushes. He ground an elbow into the ribs of his nearest companion cowpuncher and made that drowsy fellow raise his head with a jerk. The next instant, out of the trees glided noiselessly the stranger of the forest. But how different from the imaginings of Sparrow! His dream of the champion heavyweight went flickering away into nothingness. Here was a slender boy, not more than eighteen or twenty at the most, naked except for a deerskin that was made into a rude garment and gathered around his waist and held up by a thong that passed over one brown shoulder. Tawny hair crowned his head, rudely sawed off at the nape of the neck. At his waist a narrow strip of belt sustained a knife in a sheath, and under one arm he carried a large, folded pelt.
He stood for a moment in the clearing, turning his head restlessly from side to side, with a frown of suspicion, as though he guessed at the nearness of a danger that he could not see. Then he slipped on toward the house.
He was almost at the door when the first cow-puncher half rose and flicked the noose of his rope forward. At the whisper of the rope in the air, the stranger whirled around. It was only to receive over his head and shoulders the coil of the descending noose.
He made no sound, no outcry, but Sparrow saw his face wrinkle into such an expression of angry malice and fear that it made the blood of the man run cold. The wild man reached for his knife, but at the same instant the rope was jerked taut with a shout, and the pull snapped him forward upon his face. He was up in an instant and charged straight at Sparrow Roberts. As he charged, the rope of the second ’puncher darted through the air, swooped like a bird, and the stranger was knocked to the ground again.
As he attempted to struggle to his feet, the coils of both ropes whipped into action. In a second he was swathed in strong hemp from head to heel. Still ripples of violent effort ran through his body. It was utterly in vain, and after another moment he lay still, breathing hard through lips that curled up, beast-like, from his teeth. Sparrow stood over his prey.
A BARGAIN IS STRUCK
He could see the secret of the lad’s power at once. To be sure, the captive was not huge of thews and sinews, but legs and arms were covered with an inter-twisted network of ropy muscles. Whenever he stirred, the big muscles swelled and seemed about to start through the shining brown skin. A sure sign of the strong man, his neck was large and perfectly symmetrical. So much for the body of the youth. The face was the next concern of Sparrow.
His prisoner was handsome, in a sort of savage way. His nose was cruelly arched; his jaw was square-tipped and broad at the base; his brown cheeks were lean; but all his soul lay in the strange, amber eyes. Once before Sparrow had seen those eyes—in the body of a jaguar that lay crouched behind the bars of a Manhattan zoo. Here they were again, blank, expressionless, with small points of fire forming and dying in their depths.
“Pick him up, boys,” said Sparrow, “and take him over to the scales.”
They lifted the prostrate form and bore it to the scales. A brief shifting of the weights, and then Sparrow stepped back and looked from the balancing beam at the roped figure.
“A hundred and fifty-five pounds,” murmured Sparrow. “A middleweight just the way he stands. A hundred and fifty-five pounds! Now take him over to the big shack, boys.”
They lifted him and carried him again to the appointed place. The cook, just beginning his work to prepare breakfast, came clamoring to see the thief of so many of his choicest provisions, but Sparrow sent him sharply about his business. Into his own small, private office he had them take the youth. There he was put into a chair, his hands secured strongly behind his back, and his ankles lashed together. He was quite helpless, and now the pelt that had been under his arm, when he came to the house, was unrolled upon the floor. It was the pelt of a big mountain lion. There was no bullet mark, but, as upon another occasion, only a narrow slit, as of an entering knife, through the skin just over the place that once must have sheltered the heart.
After this, Sparrow sent his ’punchers away. He locked the door in the face of Kenny and Munroe, who had come eagerly with the first rumor of the great event. Then he turned back to his captive.
The latter had composed himself perfectly. Upon his face there was no expression of fear or anger more than on a countenance of stone. The big, somber, amber eyes failed entirely to see Sparrow, but looked straight before him.
“Now, pal,” said Sparrow, “you and me are gonna have a nice, quiet little talk. We’ll start off by getting introduced. I’m Sparrow Roberts. What’s your name?”
&nb
sp; There was not a flicker of light in the amber eyes.
“You can’t talk, eh?” asked Sparrow. “Dumb, maybe?”
Still the eyes of the prisoner were blank.
Sparrow went into the big room outside, and there he found Kenny and Munroe, chattering busily with the two ’punchers, getting as close a description as possible of the stranger of the woods.
“They say he ain’t so very big,” said Kenny.
“He’s big enough, kid,” answered Sparrow.
“I’d like to get at him,” said big Bert.
“Maybe you’ll have a chance,” answered the manager. “Now I’m gonna go back into that room, and after I get the door closed, I want you to come runnin’up to the door and holler . . . ‘Hey, Sparrow, here’s Nan Pearson come. . . .’”
“What for?” asked Kenny.
“Put your questions in your pocket, kid, will you? Just do what I tell you to do.”
Kenny grunted, and Sparrow hastened back into the room that he had just left. He had hardly locked the door behind him when a heavy footfall approached it and a hand was laid upon the doorknob.
“Hey, Sparrow!” called Kenny. “Here’s Nan Pearson. . . .”
Sparrow stared at the eyes of the wild man, and at the sound of the girl’s name there was an indescribable change, a softening of the expression.
It was all that Sparrow wanted. “Let Nan wait,” he called in response. Then he sat down and drew his chair close in front of the prisoner.
“Look here, kid,” he said, “you ain’t such a fool. You know how to play a gag pretty well. But it ain’t gonna work right this first time. It ain’t gonna work at all. I want to hear you open up and do a little talkin’. Understand? First place, what’s your moniker? What’s your name, blondy?”
Blondy stared curiously at him, then looked through him.
In spite of himself, Sparrow flushed. Just above the knee, there is a deep-seated nerve buried in the leg. Into the flesh of the prisoner, the knuckle of Sparrow ground the nerve against the bone. He looked up into the face of the captive and saw him turn a shade pale. Perspiration started upon his face, and the long muscles of the thigh leaped up and grew hard and rigid as iron.