Crusader

by Max Brand

  He had a problem now that taxed even his matchless skill of hand. He had to raise the pillow together with the head of the girl resting upon it, raise them the necessary trifle so that he could slip the fur noiselessly forth. To do this, he must hush his own breathing, still the very action of his brain, and listen for a stir from the girl as the mother wolf listens when it hears the puma prowling near the cave.

  Once she sighed. The fur was then half withdrawn, and he checked the motion, waiting. He had hardly begun again when she moaned in her sleep, and, obeying an instinctive impulse, that great hand of his flew out and hovered in the black of the night above her face. One crunch of those fingers and there would be an end of trouble from her. But something held him back—the memory, perhaps, of the soft curves of that young throat, so brown, so warm, so pulsing with happiness when he had last seen it. So, frowning, wondering at himself, he lowered the hand again, waited until the sleeper was stilled again, and then began to draw the fur softly forth.

  At length it was free in his hand. At the same moment the girl sat bolt erect in the bed and, fumbling in the dark beneath the pillow, touched instead the hard hand of Camden. He felt the jump of her own hand, heard the catch of her breath. With a gesture he found both her hands and caught them fast in one of his.

  “No talkin’ . . . no yellin’,” Camden said in a voice lower than a whisper, “or I’ll crack you in two so’s they’ll never put you together again.”

  Her answer was in the same tone, but, instead of trembling and hysterical terror, he was astonished to hear burning anger only.

  “Jed Buttrick, you coward, you’ve come to steal what Ned beat you in getting.”

  He waited a moment, recovering the wits that had been scattered by this retort, scattering, at the same time, all of his long-prized prepossessions concerning women. A woman, to him, was a thing that fainted at the sight of blood and screamed at the sight of a mouse. A woman, indeed, was so far beneath contempt that she was almost a mystery. This, however, was shockingly different.

  “Leave go my hand,” went on the fierce whisper in the dark of the night. “Or I’ll holler.”

  His free hand slipped up and set itself about her throat. “You wouldn’t yip more’n once,” he said almost thoughtfully.

  “You daren’t do it,” she defied him.

  He tested himself, pressing his thumb against the hollow of her throat, and all the warmth of her young life flowed up his arm to his stern heart, and melted it. Dizzily, bewildered, he realized that she was right, and that, indeed, he dared not do this thing. Yet how very simple it was!

  “If I holler, Dad and Ned’ll be here in a jiffy. They’ll blow you to bits, Jed Buttrick, you yaller coward, and you know it. Now gimme back that there fur and get out . . . before I get tired of havin’ you so close to me. And keep your hands off’n me. It makes me sick, just the touch of ’em. Bah!”

  All of this was in a discreetly whispering voice. He began to see that there was some artifice in this very great assumption of courage.

  “You ain’t scared?” he asked faintly.

  “Of you, Jed?” she sneered.

  “I ain’t Jed.”

  “You can’t lie out of it!” she asserted. “I give you till I count ten to get through that window.”

  “Before you holler?”

  “Before I call them.”

  He waited a moment. New warm waves were passing through him—from the touch of her hands, imprisoned in his, from the sensation of her breath that fanned his face softly, from a pure small fragrance that came from her and entered his mind like the scent of the pine woods, but striking deeper, more resistless.

  “I’m countin’,” she said through her teeth.

  “Don’t holler,” he said.

  “Will you gimme back that fur and get out?”

  “If you was to holler,” he said judiciously, “I’ll tell you what’d happen. I ’d tear your pa to bits. And I’d smash the young gent to bits.”

  “Ah,” breathed the girl. “All cowards brag.”

  “I don’t brag,” Camden replied slowly. “I don’t ever brag. What I say . . . them are the facts.”

  “You . . . ,” began the girl, and then her voice died. His grip had slackened a little on her wrists, and now he could feel a quickened pulse and the beginning of a tremor. If her courage had been sweet to him, her fear was strangely sweeter. He was stuffing the fur, automatically, with quick motions, inside his belt.

  Then she said, with the terror beginning to creep into her voice as well: “What . . . what d’you mean to do . . . ?”

  “With what?”

  “With . . . me.”

  “I dunno. If I let you go, you’ll holler the minute I get away from you. Them two fool men of yours might sink a slug in me, by accident. They look like they’d shoot straight. Would you tell me, maybe, that you wouldn’t yell?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that?”

  “I dunno. I’ll see. Come over here to the window, will you?”

  He half lifted her from the bed by her hands as he spoke, and she followed whether she would or no. In a moment she stood before him in the dull glow of the moonshine that shaved down the side of the house and made the window sill brilliant as metal. In her bare feet, she was very small before him, and her hair, in two long, dark braids, ran shimmering over each shoulder and flowed before her to her waist. Above the brown throat was her face, rather guessed at than seen, except for the light in her great eyes.

  “I dunno,” Camden said slowly, “I dunno . . . I guess that I might trust you if you was to promise. . . .”

  “That I won’t call?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll promise,” she gasped out. “Now go, quick!”

  “You’re sort of weakenin’,” he said.“You ain’t so chipper right now. Not the same’s you was. Are you scared?”

  “Will you go?” she breathed. “Or I. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Let me go!” pleaded her whisper with a desperate sob in it, and suddenly she flung her whole weight back from him.

  As well have flung herself back against shackles of steel. But in the effort she slumped to the floor, and now, plainly, he felt the trembling of her hands, as she cowered. Panic seemed to be overwhelming her more and more.

  “Don’t touch me,” she moaned. “For heaven’s sake, don’t come near me.”

  Camden listened, amazed. That strange warm joy that had been rising in him stopped and ebbed away. He stared gloomily down at her for a moment, then, muttering, he flung her hands roughly from him.

  She made no effort to raise an alarm as he slipped through the window; he heard only one sound from her—the whimper of unnerving terror. It stabbed and chilled the very soul of Camden. It roused a frantic anger in him, too. But he felt that it was hardly so much a passion directed against her as it was a fury at something else. It surely could not be himself.

  But he had remained there long enough. He picked up the fallen bacon and shot off around the house and away at full speed, and his speed was that of an Indian running for life. He had reached the pine trees before the house wakened, a light fluttered from a window, and voices rolled dimly toward him. But he gave no heed to them. What were they and what mattered their pursuit compared with the speed of Crusader?

  He loosed the great stallion. For five minutes the rush of wind, the gradual sweep of the hills past him, was an intoxicating joy that blotted out everything else. But a little later he found himself letting the stallion fall to a walk, while the rider was frowning blankly at the ground beneath him.

  THE LONG TOOTH OF THE WASTES

  Camden lay flat on his back in the forest; it was a favorite diversion of his. His arms were thrown wide, and his body relaxed. Nothing about him lived except his eyes, and they, very soon, were sure to find plenty to occupy them. For when a man walks through the woods, the warning runs before him. The sentinel birds call, the path is cleared, and he goes through a belt of s
ilence. But Camden, turning himself into a log of wood, so to speak, ceased to be a factor in the forest. Every wild thing gave him a glance, cocked an ear toward him, and then decided that, while he must be watched, he might, after all, be merely an inanimate thing. Moreover, from this particular place, where he lay, he could look through the trees toward the glistening black body of Crusader, grazing in the sunshine in a patch of nutritious grama grass. He assured himself of the well-being of the horse. Letting the same glances run down the long funnel between the hills, he assured himself, also, that horsemen were not working themselves into the mountains in that direction. For the rest, his attention was occupied by the teeming life in the upper branches.

  It was not crowded. Wild things almost never crowd, if they can possibly avoid it, except those animals in which the social instinct is immensely developed, like the bison. But there was a constant procession of life before the eyes of the motionless Camden. Sometimes he picked out an individual as, for instance, a little gray squirrel that was crying her love call from the side of a great pine and being answered from afar by one voice, and then another. Now they came, the two suitors. They frisked their tails and glared at each other from the base of the pine, as though demanding whether each had come on the same errand that brought the other. Then up the tree they darted—to the very side of the lady squirrel, that ran out on a long branch. They did not follow at once. Instead, they clinched in murderous battle, writhed and twisted in their struggle for a moment, and then tumbled from the branch into space.

  A fall to death? No, for they separated at once, and each fluffed out its great tail. This is one reason for tails, then—those gorgeous, burled tails of squirrels. They turn the little animals into astronauts. Down they sail, with the bristling tails cutting so much wind that that force is taken from the fall. Now on the ground they whisked back to the tree again and raced up the trunk to where madam had posted herself, able to watch all the fighting that was in her honor.

  Once more they dove for her. She ran to the very tip end of the branch, the vixen, and dove through air toward the neighboring monarch of the forest, gained a heavily tufted branch, and was presently in view, scurrying up a great shaft of naked pine trunk high above. The males had leaped after her, gained the same precarious foothold, and now they raced toward her again.

  That race was never finished. There came a dark streak through the sky, a flash of striking talons, and a great hen hawk shot at the lady, missed her by a hair’s breadth, whirled with beating wings, and leaped back through the air again with talons and cruel beak presented—a treble threat. She whipped around to the farther side of the tree just in time to escape that terrible danger and just in time, also, to run into the teeth of a horror fully as great. For the hawk hunted with its partner that lagged a little behind to view the game before it took part in the deadly play. Now it came with a rush. One clip of the strong talons caught the squirrel and killed it in the same stroke. Then away they sailed together, triumphant.

  A full five minutes—then two frightened little gray squirrels scampered down the tree and made away, each in a different direction.

  Here was the path of true love laid bare to the eyes of Camden. He observed it with a grunt of satisfaction. Bloodshed was ever to his liking, and to see those monarchs of the sky sweep out of the blue, make a prize, and away again, pleased him mightily. He had only one regret—that a rifle had not been at hand so that he might have given still another turn to the tragic story.

  After that, a growing unrest possessed the mind of Camden. He watched the sun shimmering brilliantly on that beautiful and wicked gossip of the woods, the blue jay; he saw a terrible weasel, tinier than a squirrel, but infinitely more dreadful as a warrior, go rippling up the trunk of a tree in search of young life to destroy. Anything living would satisfy that voracious savage, that fearless and wily fighter. Camden was an old admirer of the weasel and of all his tribe. But now he regarded the hunter with only a side glance. His mind was elsewhere.

  He sat up and frowned at the long, smooth outlines of the hills as they spilled away down the valley. For that which was in him was very like one of those stirring premonitions of evil that many a time during his wilderness life had warned him of approaching danger in the very nick of time. The unrest grew so great in him that at last he stood up and cut away through the forest in search of the danger that he breathed out of the air. But there was no sign to be found. He found where a broken-clawed grizzly had raked the trunk of a tree—a new grizzly, and therefore a young one, hunting out a different home in a new range, no doubt. He found the four-pointed track of a whitetail deer. But still he went on and discovered nothing that he need regard. No mere animal presence could account for this uneasy feeling in his breast.

  It was like homesickness, but, having never known a home, Camden could not know what that meant. He climbed a tree, at length, a huge, high-towering monster on the edge of the forest, working up its thick trunk with a skill that even a squirrel need not have scorned. Propped on his legs, which were twisted around the trunk, with one hand fixed on a small, brittle branch above his head, he looked anxiously around the landscape. Behind him, the dark pine forest went back among the mountains. Beneath him, toward three cardinal points of the compass, and more, the hills rolled away to the green lowlands and to the gray-yellow desert beyond. Somewhere beyond the haze of the atmosphere, among those softly outlined lowlands, it seemed to Camden that the forest, that was his ordinary home, grew empty and filled with a threatening spirit of desolation.

  He descended from the tree, frowning and in thought. This falling of the heart, he ascribed to the approach of some terrible danger against which even his strength would be as nothing. It was unlike anything he had ever known. For, instead of counseling him to flee, that same instinct warned him that miles would make no difference—he could never escape from the sorrow that was within him.

  Squatting on the ground at the base of the tree that he had just descended, he took out for the hundredth time the priceless pelt of the silver fox that he had stolen from the girl. For the hundredth time, he closed his eyes and ran his exquisitely sensitive fingers through the silk of the fur. At this, the ache in his heart became an outrageous pain. He could not understand it. He opened his eyes again and examined the fur. Once he was tempted to hurl the thing away from him, since its possession gave him so much pain. Out of his strange childhood he could remember much talk and many warnings about hoodoos, evil eyes, and such matters. He was half inclined to feel that there was some mysterious power wrapped up in the pelt of the silver fox. He banished that thought from his mind with a grunt. Even in his youngest childhood there had been present in his mind something that pointed a finger of doubt at the superstitions of the Indians. Now he forced himself to fold up the skin once more, against his will.

  As he did so, he thought again of the anguish that must have fallen upon the home of the girl and the two men when that loss was made known. For the price of the fur must have meant to them new seed for the land, new horses to plow it, new blood in the ranch work. It had been a capital stroke, the winning of that fur. The loss of it was a bitter thrust, indeed.

  Considering this, Camden tried to force back into his heart the original thrill of happiness in such mischief. But the joy would not return.

  When a man is tormented by the unknown, he has an irresistible desire to go back on his trail and examine the mystery, face to face. There swept over Camden, now, a vast urge to return to the house and to see the man who lived in it. He called the stallion with a whistle—a signal that was already agreed upon between them, and, after lingering for an instant to bite a tough bunch of grama close to the root, Crusader made up for this delay by coming at a round gallop. Around and around the master he frolicked when he arrived, flicking his heels high in the air with force enough driven from the thighs to have shattered stone images, then rearing and beating the air with his fore-hoofs, or ripping the throat of an imaginary enemy with a lunge of his wicke
d teeth.

  After this, suddenly, he came to a pause just in front of his new master with head raised, with one ear cocked forward and the other sloped back, as though to say: “I have worked some of the deviltry out of my system. Now, if you please, what can we do for sport together?”

  Camden clapped blanket and surcingle on the stallion and on him dropped down out of the hills. It would have taken three hours for ordinary riders to have covered what Camden and his horse covered in one. They drove straightaway. When they came to a cliff-faced hill, he whisked off the back of Crusader, and the good horse found a clever way to the bottom of the hill face with the master clambering down by himself, nimble as a mountain sheep. They climbed other and equally steep impediments in the same fashion—the horse working his own way up, the man working his own, and even pausing in his labors to cheer on Crusader over some special difficulty. Indeed, he never sat on the back of the stallion while Crusader had difficult country to go through. Up and down hill the stallion had only his own weight to carry. When they worked through badly broken land, full of twists and chopped with rocks and with brush, Camden ran into the lead, and he picked the way along which the big horse followed with the least friction. Only when the hills smoothed away to a procession of easy hummocks, and when the rough land grew more level, then did he leap onto the back of Crusader, lightly, without forcing the horse to break its stride, and they flew away like the wind. This was the reason that Camden and Crusader moved as the bird flies, straight across country, laughing at gorges, scoffing at broken woods and thickets.

  They came swiftly, too swiftly from the mountains to suit with the plan of Camden, which was never to be near the habitations of men except during the dusk, the gray dawn, or the black of night. He waited, now, at the edge of a thicket until the dusk had thickened. By that time he was hungry. At that time a whitetail buck, young, supple, sleek as a tawny puma, came gliding out into the open and looked about him.

  Before he was aware of the slightest danger, for the wind was blowing strongly from him and to the man, a black bolt shot out of the woods carrying a man on his back, and the buck had barely time to swerve away before the first rush carried the horse past it.