by Max Brand
“Your cowpunchers will all be riding stake horses in three seasons,” said the complimentary Mr. Mervin.
“Hardly that! Hardly that!” chuckled the colonel. “Back go his ears! What an ugly devil is in the heart of that brute.”
Harry Camden, in his hiding place, drew in his breath softly. A fifty-thousand-dollar horse! He might search half a lifetime before he found another opportunity of doing such harm as was put within his grasp on this day. Fifty thousand dollars at a stroke.
“Lock him in, Joe,” said the colonel. “No, I imagine there’s no end of locking the door. The scoundrel who tried to ride the horse away will probably not be in a hurry to repeat his attempt to ride Crusader, eh?”
Joe Tracy smiled sourly.
“If that blood in the corral is any evidence,”suggested Charles Mervin,“the thief was bucked off for his pains.”
“The only mystery is, how he could have managed to get the surcingle on the animal.”
“Well,” said Charles Mervin, “I have seen men who have a way with dogs and horses. Very odd. Someone of that cut must have tried his hand.”
“His hypnotism failed him when he was on the back of Crusader, then,” said the colonel, and they went out.
No one thought of searching through the loft of the barn. They scoured the country around the corral. There was no sign of blood on any trail. Then they swarmed back where Joe Tracy, having closed the stallion into the dark, warm stall, met them and told them to go back to the bunkhouse, for the colonel did not propose to conduct a wild-goose trail during the night.
In another ten minutes, all was quiet, and Camden, opening the door, slipped quietly down and stood beside the stallion, the man-killer. That white magic of which Mervin had spoken was his in the most ample share. At his whisper, Crusader turned his head and rested his inquiring muzzle in the broad palm of Camden’s hand. There could be no greater proof of trust than this.
It set Camden scowling blackly in the shadows. It started something of an insistent ache in his heart, and he could not be rid of it. It closed his throat; it made him breathe hard. Nothing could relieve that pain except to stroke the sleek neck of the stallion and whisper in his ear words of no meaning whatever, yet they were words that brought a murmuring little whinny from the horse.
A step sounded nearby, softly. Camden shrank into a corner as Joe Tracy pulled the door open and stood there a moment with a glimmer of something in his hand.
“By the heavens,” he said to himself rather than aloud, “I almost thought I heard. . . .”
He closed the door again, muttering, and Camden set about the bridling of Crusader again. He found the same light bridle. He slipped the straight bit between the teeth of the horse. Upon his back he bound the blanket once more. Other men might want saddles, but saddles meant weight, care, slowness in saddling. Indians had been content to ride bareback. To Camden even the surcingle was a luxury.
So prepared for the theft, he pushed open the door softly. There was an instant challenge.
“Who’s there?” came the snarling voice of Joe Tracy.
Apparently the little ex-jockey was determined to watch half the night over his precious charge. In place of answering, Camden slipped onto the back of the horse, and, bending far to one side to avoid the low door, he sent the great stallion out into the corral.
“Hello!” shouted Tracy, hurrying toward them. “What the devil . . . stop there, or I’ll shoot . . . !”
Shoot so near to a fifty-thousand-dollar horse? Something told Camden that could never be. He laughed as he cantered the horse across the paddock, kicked open the staple that fastened the gate, and then rushed away into the night. Behind him, the jockey was screaming with grief and furious helplessness, and shooting into the air. Behind him, the swirl of answering voices took up the alarm.
He heeded them not. He was mounted on the wind. Camden had teeth that could slay near or far. He had wits that could serve him. Now the last necessity was added. He had at his command, matchless speed. Now let the world match him if it could!
LOOKING FOR MISCHIEF
Nothing that runs upon four feet can match the speed of a Thoroughbred race horse. Of all other running things an antelope is the speediest. It can turn off a mile in a minute and fifty seconds. But a race horse, with even the handicap of a man on its back, has covered the same distance in a minute and thirty-four seconds, or a little more—a sixteen-second advantage, plus the weight of the rider.
No jockey, of course, even weighed what Camden’s bulk of muscle and bone amounted to. But he had other advantages. What a jockey has to learn by years of experience, having been born for his work in the first place, big Harry Camden knew by instinct. He was not on the horse; he was an integral part of it. His reins were loose. They were an almost needless luxury. He had other methods of telegraphing his will to the brain of his mount. The sway of his body seemed enough.
And Crusader? He had learned in the days of his childhood that men are creatures who insist on being burdens to the back and tyrants over the minds of horses. But here was one who merely accented his freedom, whose will seemed merely a pleasant part of his own desire. If the sheer weight of the rider were great, yet it was lightened by the marvelous skill of the rider.
Such was the way of Camden with his horse. He let Crusader rush across a hollow like the wind; he charged the fine animal up a hill straight at the round yellow moon that rested on the crest. This was not riding—this was to be gifted with wings. On the crest of the hill with a word and a touch on the reins, he checked the horse and surveyed the country beneath him. By tomorrow the countryside would be swarming with pursuers. But, in the meantime, he had a night of absolute freedom. Then, across the brow of the next hill, he saw a ghostly pale form gliding.
He knew that outline of old. It was a timber wolf, a great gray lobo that had come down to hunt in the lowlands, some grizzled veteran of a cattle killer, no doubt. By day they are never seen, for by day they know that the guns of men can reach them. But by night the guns of men are charmed to helplessness, and that is the time when they dare to come down even to the campfires.
They are slow runners, these gray wolves. They have been roped by cowpunchers on range ponies. They have one stupid habit, among all of their wisdom, that makes them an easier prey for hunters: when they run, they run in a straight line. It is only their exquisite knowledge of a countryside, together with their ways of using rough terrain to embarrass a pursuer, that keeps more of them from being sighted and captured in the same way. Now there was only dull moonshine in which Camden could follow that elusive creature. But he had no doubts.
He called to Crusader, and they were off down the slope like mad. Up the farther slope they went with a lurch that took the breath of the rider. There from the crest he saw the great wolf again—not a hundred yards away—a magnificent specimen of a full six score pounds.
He had taken the alarm before this, getting on the edge of the wind the scent of a horse, which was pleasant—of man, which was disgusting—and of iron and powder, which was terrible. Now he was running hard, the loose mane along his neck ruffling forward and bristling until his forequarters seemed each time he landed heavily to be twice the weight of the rear. He was running hard, but, compared with the terrific gait of the stake horse, he seemed to be standing still. With rough rocks to course through or running among thick bracken, the chances might still have favored the lobo, but this was a rolling plateau tableland, and Crusader clipped off six yards a second from the distance between him and the wolf.
It was not the sort of a race he was accustomed to, this plunge through the night. Crusader was used to oval tracks of dirt or turf, a lightweight jockey on his back like a flashing flower of many colors, beside him the straining, shining bodies of other Thoroughbreds—in the distance the grandstands, smudged with humanity and their beast-like mumblings. Such were the races he knew. But here he was required to run full-tilt at a creature that every sense and every instinct told him w
as a deadly foe and a murderous one.
Had he been by himself, he would never have dared so much as to face it from a distance of half a mile, but this man on his back had changed him. This mighty intelligence that now ruled him could gather him together and sweep him along into the fight and through it. It was the only man that Crusader had not tried to measure. Other men he had felt ridiculously puny and disgusting in their efforts to control him. Joe Tracy he endured on his back and at his head for the sake of long familiarity, but he despised the ex-jockey. In Camden, Crusader met something else. It was not strength of hand or sting of whip that imposed upon the great stallion. It was an inexplicable thing that the stallion had felt when first the strange man came into his paddock—a fierce spirit as wild and as untamable as his own.
A horse does not need to be raised in the wilderness in order that it may recognize the danger that lies in the tawny, supple body of a cougar. Neither did Crusader need more than a glance and a sniff to guess at something in this man that was different from all other men. When Camden, with a shout, struck the flank of the horse with the flat of his hand, Crusader did not resent a blow that would have made him pitch any other human in the world over his head. Instead, he leaped away with a final grand effort, and swooped on the gray wolf like a hawk dropping out of the air.
Grappling the straining body of the horse with his legs, one hand twisted into the mane, Camden swung himself low, and, as the wolf swerved from the trampling hoofs of Crusader, Camden’s bright knife flashed, and its light went out in the body of the loafer wolf. It still had strength to vault straight into the sky at the moon with a wild yell that died suddenly, in mid-air. Camden, as he shot past, heard the loose thud of the body as it struck the ground again and did not need to use his eyes to know that his stroke had killed.
He went back to the slaughter and skinned it. The ripping of a hide from a lobo is not the work of an instant, but in the powerful fingers of Camden that labor was a trifle. He plucked the pelt away, and, as he cleaned it, he noticed with a touch of horror that Crusader had come close to the bleeding body from which other horses would have bolted in mad flight. He sniffed with ears flattened to his neck. Once he struck the red body with a fore hoof until Camden drove him away with a shout. Then, with the pelt rolled into a secure bundle, he struck away for the upper mountains. In his first invasion he felt that he had done enough. Other things might be accomplished later on when the pursuit began.
He had ridden across a gully and was jogging Crusader up the farther slope when he caught the scent of frying bacon, and he drew Crusader to a halt. There is an appeal in that fragrance that never fails to touch a hungry man. Camden was not hungry. He had eaten his fill that night with roasted flesh, and one meal a day was all that he needed for strength and happiness. But the fragrance of the cooking bacon wakened a new appetite. It was like a voice calling to him in the heart of the wilderness, and he turned the head of Crusader up the wind.
After all, it was not so much the desire for the bacon; it was the hungry hope that this trail might lead him to new mischief before the night was over, and in that hope he hurried on. He came on the place at once, an unpretentious little shack in a hollow, with a shed behind it, housing a few plows and harrows. Nearby he saw the black face of plowed ground and scowled at it. When men came to herd their cows and their flocks, it was bad enough, but when they came to plow the ground, it was a certain sign that the wilderness was at the end of its tether. After that came towns springing up, many roads, and presently the iron hand of the law had the district by the throat. What had been mischievous curiosity changed to settled and destructive anger in the heart of Camden. By the size of the house and the shed, he judged that this was some poverty-stricken settler, but his poverty hardly served to soften the heart of Camden. All those who pushed the frontiers of civilization deeper into the mountains were his personal enemies, with whom he was at the bitterest feud.
He tethered Crusader in a cluster of lodgepole pines nearby. Then he stole to the house on foot. The first lighted window through which he looked was a small living-dining room with two men at a table. But there was food before the younger of the pair only—set forth on the oilcloth cover whose dazzling whiteness was certain proof to the judicious eye of Camden that there was a woman in the house. He curled himself up beside the low window to wait and to watch, for here were men, he told himself, worthy of his steel. They were burly giants, wide-shouldered, tall. Their hands were as large as the hands of two. The elder, and from their facial resemblance he was probably the father, was perhaps in his fiftieth year, but time seemed to have hardened and perhaps slowed his strength rather than snapped it. His square jaw was set and his eyes glistening as he watched the younger man talking.
The woman came whirling in from the kitchen, bringing a coffeepot. Camden could not see her face, at first, but he had sight of a slender, round, brown wrist as she poured out the coffee into the great tin cup. She poured it with that careless dexterity that amazed Camden. For his own part, the opposite sex had interested him only once. In men, there was often enough strength to make a respectable fight if they were attacked. But in women there was neither courage nor coolness or adroitness, to say nothing of sheer power of hand. They only excelled in this useless jugglery around the house. So Camden watched the coffee poured and saw her rest her hands on the top of the table and lean forward toward the youth. She was his wife, without doubt.
Now he took up the thread of a story that seemed to have been interrupted. Camden lost his contemptuous unconcern at once, and in the very act of rising to go to the kitchen—whose larder he could plunder now that the girl was gone from the room—two or three gestures of the narrator showed plainly that he was telling a story of the trail. Camden squatted again and listened with a light in his clouded amber eyes, until, at the climax, the son of the house leaped from his chair so heedlessly that his stool fell with a clatter behind him upon the floor, while he jerked open a roll that he had brought with him and exposed to the eyes of the family, and to the eyes of Camden where he watched from the outer night, the pelt of a silver fox.
MIDNIGHT DEPREDATION
That peerless fur, what a beauty it was! The legs were richest black, watered with highlights as though the surface were silk. The head was black, also, but all the body of the fur was frosted over with white tippings of the hairs. Even the stolid father of the house started up at the sight. As for the girl, she clasped her hands at her breast and turned at the pelt with tears of joy in her eyes. For Camden could see her face plainly now. No, she was not the wife of the youth—she was his sister, for the family likeness was printed plainly on every face. Not that her features were bold and bluff like theirs, but everything that appeared in them in the rough appeared in her, also, drawn with a more precise and delicate pencil.
Then Camden saw a gracious thing for so primitive a settler’s family. He saw the youth put the fur in the hands of the girl—saw him kiss her, and make her the present with a smiling gesture. And she? She sat in a chair with the treasure on her knees, rocking back and forth over it, laughing back at her brother in a full-hearted ecstasy. But Camden sneered at the pleasant picture. First, he wanted a side of that same bacon that he had smelled from the stove where it fried. Then he wanted that same frosted beauty of a fur. He prepared to get it.
It was plain that it would be some time before the talk ended and the family went to bed. The great prize that had brought the hunter down from his traps in the upper mountains so late in the night would be sufficient to keep them all awake for some time longer. But Camden was not prepared to waste his moments. He made a thrifty disposal of his time, always. When he was not busy, he slept. He prepared to sleep now.
In the lodgepole pine thicket, where Crusader was tethered, he lay down. The night was turning sharp and cold, but that made no difference to Camden. The chill in the air would simply make him sleep lightly, and that was what he wanted, for when the ray from the distant window no longer struck acros
s his face, he wished to waken.
He had no sooner laid down than he was asleep; out of that sleep he wakened suddenly and glanced across the hollow. As he had expected, the light was out and the house was a squat, black shadow in the moonlight.
It was a three-room shack. He had made sure of that before leaving the place. The kitchen was one apartment. In corners of the living-dining room were bunks for the two men. At the side of this was a tiny room where the girl slept. To that went Camden, and, standing beside the open window, he peered into the thick blackness of the chamber. He waited there until he made sure of the hushed breathing of the girl, quite inaudible to normal human ears, but clear as spoken words to him. With this fact determined, he went around to the kitchen and there located the bacon he wanted at once. There was half a side. It would be enough. There were other food supplies, in some quantity, but Camden wanted that one article and no other.
This prize, when he returned to the girl’s room, he left outside. Then he climbed through the window with no precaution whatever, it seemed, so swift were his movements, but swift though they were, he made not a sound, not even of cloth rubbing against cloth, and stepped noiselessly at last to the side of the sleeper’s bed.
Even his keen eyes could make out nothing but shapeless mounds of shadows in this deep night. Sense of touch must supply the lack of light. His hands became exquisitely delicate instruments at once. His fingertips strolled over the bedding—even touched an exposed hand. But it was a touch as light as the touch of a dry leaf when it falls without wind to the ground, thin as spider silk. Such was the touch of Camden until, at last, under the pillow of the sleeper, he reached the fur. He could tell it by the rich, deep silk into which his hand fell. It was the silver fox!