Carney’s nerves were of steel, his brain worked with exquisite precision. When it told him there was nothing to fear, that his precautions had made all things safe, his mind rested, untortured by jerky nerves; so in five minutes he slept.
The Wolf mastered his weariness and lay awake, waiting to carry out the something that had been in his mind. Six hundred dollars was a stake to play for; also clad once again in the police suit, with the buckskin to carry him to the railroad, he could get away; money was always a good thing to bribe his way through. Never once had he put his hand in the pocket where lay the knife he had secreted at the time he had changed clothes with Carney, as he trailed hour after hour in front of the buckskin. He knew that Carney was just the cool-nerved man that would sleep—not lie awake through fear over nothing.
In the way of test he shuffled his feet and drew from the half-dried grass a rasping sound. It partly disturbed the sleeper; he changed the steady rhythm of his breathing; he even drew a heavy-sighing breath; had he been lying awake watching the Wolf he would have stilled his breathing to listen.
The Wolf waited until the rhythmic breaths of the sleeper told that he had lapsed again into the deeper sleep. Slowly, silently the Wolf worked his hands to the side pocket, drew out the knife and cut the cords that bound his wrists. It took time, for he worked with caution. Then he waited. The buckskin, his nose deep in the grass, blew the pollen of the flowered carpet from his nostrils.
Carney stirred and raised his head. The buckskin blew through his nostrils again, ending with a luxurious sigh of content; then was heard the clip-clip of his strong teeth scything the grass. Carney, recognizing what had waked him, turned over and slept again.
Ten minutes, and the Wolf, drawing up his feet slowly, silently, sawed through the rope on his ankles. Then with spread fingers he searched the grass for a stone the size of a goose egg, beside which he had purposely lain down. When his fingers touched it he unknotted the handkerchief that had been part of Carney’s make-up and which was now about his neck, and in one corner tied the stone, fastening the other end about his wrist. Now he had a slung shot that with one blow would render the other man helpless.
Then he commenced his crawl.
A pale, watery, three-quarter moon had climbed listlessly up the eastern sky changing the sombre prairie into a vast spirit land, draping With ghostly garments bush and shrub.
Purposely Carney had tethered the buckskin down wind from where he and the Wolf lay. Jack had not read anything out of this action, but Carney knew the sensitive wariness of his horse, the scent of the stranger in his nostrils would keep him restless, and any unusual move on the part of the prisoner would agitate the buckskin. Also he had only pretended to drive the picket pin at some distance away; in the dark he had trailed it back and worked it into the loose soil at his very feet. This was more a move of habitual care than a belief that the bound man could work his way, creeping and rolling, to the picket-pin, pull it, and get away with the horse.
At the Wolf’s first move the buckskin threw up his head, and, with ears cocked forward, studied the shifting blurred shadow. Perhaps it was the scent of his master’s clothes which the Wolf wore that agitated his mind, that cast him to wondering whether his master was moving about; or, perhaps as animals instinctively have a nervous dread of a vicious man he distrusted the stranger; perhaps, in the dim uncertain light, his prairie dread came back to him and he thought it a wolf that had crept into camp. He took a step forward; then another, shaking his head irritably. A vibration trembled along the picket line that now lay across Carney’s foot and he stirred restlessly.
The Wolf flattened himself to earth and snored. Five minutes he waited, cursing softly the restless horse. Then again he moved, so slowly that even the watchful animal scarce detected it.
He was debating two plans: a swift rush and a swing of his slung shot, or the silent approach. The former meant inevitably the death of one or the other—the crushed skull of Carney, or, if the latter were by any chance awake, a bullet through the Wolf. He could feel his heart pounding against the turf as he scraped along, inch by inch. A bare ten feet, and he could put his hand on the butt of Carney’s gun and snatch it from the holster; if he missed, then the slung shot.
The horse, roused, was growing more restless, more inquisitive. Sometimes he took an impatient snap at the grass with his teeth; but only to throw his head up again, take a step forward, shake his head, and exhale a whistling breath.
Now the Wolf had squirmed his body five feet forward. Another yard and he could reach the pistol; and there was no sign that Carney had wakened—just the steady breathing of a sleeping man.
The Wolf lay perfectly still for ten seconds, for the buckskin seemingly had quieted; he was standing, his head low hung, as if he slept on his feet. Carney’s face was toward the creeping man and was in shadow. Another yard and now slowly the Wolf gathered his legs under him till he rested like a sprinter ready for a spring; his left hand crept forward toward the pistol stock that was within reach; the stone-laden handkerchief was twisted about the two first fingers of his right.
Yes, Carney slept.
As the Wolf’s finger tips slid along the pistol butt the wrist was seized in fingers of steel, he was twisted almost face to earth, and the butt of Carney’s own gun, in the latter’s right hand, clipped him over the eye and he slipped into dreamland. When he came to workmen were riveting a boiler in the top of his head; somebody with an augur was boring a hole in his forehead; he had been asleep for ages and had wakened in a strange land. He sat up groggily and stared vacantly at a man who sat beside a camp fire smoking a pipe. Over the camp fire a copper kettle hung and a scent of broiling bacon came to his nostrils. The man beside the fire took the pipe from his mouth and said: “I hoped I had cracked your skull, you swine. Where did you pick up that thug trick of a stone in the handkerchief? As you are troubled with insomnia we’ll hit the trail again.”
With the picket line around his waist once more Jack trudged ahead of the buckskin, in the night gloom the shadowy cavalcade cutting a strange, weird figure as though a boat were being towed across sleeping waters.
The Wolf, groggy from the blow that had almost cracked his skull, was wobbly on his legs—his feet were heavy as though he wore a diver’s leaden boots. As he waded through a patch of wild rose the briars clung to his legs, and, half dazed he cried out, thinking he struggled in the shifting sands.
“Shut up!” The words clipped from the thin lips of the rider behind.
They dipped into a hollow and the played-out man went half to his knees in the morass. A few lurching steps and overstrained nature broke; he collapsed like a jointed doll—he toppled head first into the mire and lay there.
The buckskin plunged forward in the treacherous going, and the bag of a man was skidded to firm ground by the picket line, where he sat wiping the mud from his face, and looking very all in.
Carney slipped to the ground and stood beside his captive. “You’re soft, my bucko—I knew Sergeant Heath had a yellow streak,” he sneered; “boasters generally have. I guess we’ll rest till daylight. I’ve a way of hobbling a bad man that’ll hold you this time, I fancy.”
He drove the picket-pin of the rope that tethered the buckskin, and ten feet away he drove the other picket pin. He made the Wolf lie on his side and fastened him by a wrist to each peg so that one arm was behind and one in front.
Carney chuckled as he surveyed the spread-eagle man: “You’ll find some trouble getting out of that, my bucko; you can’t get your hands together and you can’t get your teeth at either rope. Now I will have a sleep.”
The Wolf was in a state of half coma; even untethered he probably would have slept like a log; and Carney was tired; he, too, slumbered, the soft stealing gray of the early morning not bringing him back out of the valley of rest till a glint of sunlight throwing over the prairie grass touched his eyes, and the warmth gradually pushed the lids back.
He rose, built a fire, and finding water
made a pot of tea. Then he saddled the buckskin, and untethered the Wolf, saying: “We’ll eat a bite and pull out.”
The rest and sleep had refreshed the Wolf, and he plodded on in front of the buckskin feeling that though his money was gone his chances of escape were good.
At eight o’clock the square forms of log shacks leaning groggily against a sloping hill came into view; it was Hobbema; and, swinging a little to the left, in an hour they were close to the Post.
Carney knew where the police shack lay, and skirting the town he drew up in front of a log shack, an iron-barred window at the end proclaiming it was the Barracks. He slipped from the saddle, dropped the rein over his horse’s head, and said quietly to the Wolf: “Knock on the door, open it, and step inside,” the muzzle of his gun emphasizing the command.
He followed close at the Wolf’s heels, standing in the open door as the latter entered. He had expected to see perhaps one, not more than two constables, but at a little square table three men in khaki sat eating breakfast.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Carney said cheerily; “I’ve brought you a prisoner, Bulldog Carney.”
The one who sat at table with his back to the door turned his head at this; then he sprang to his feet, peered into the prisoner’s face and laughed.
“Bulldog nothing, Sergeant; you’ve bagged the Wolf.
The speaker thrust his face almost into the Wolf’s. “Where’s my uniform—where’s my horse? I’ve got you now—set me afoot to starve, would you, you damn thief—you murderer! Where’s the five hundred dollars you stole from the little teacher at Fort Victor?”
He was trembling with passion; words flew from his lips like bullets from a gatling—it was a torrent.
But fast as the accusation had come, into Carney’s quick mind flashed the truth—the speaker was Sergeant Heath. The game was up. Still it was amusing. What a devilish droll blunder he had made. His hands crept quietly to his two guns, the police gun in the belt and his own beneath the khaki coat.
Also the Wolf knew his game was up. His blood surged hot at the thought that Carney’s meddling had trapped him. He was caught, but the author of his evil luck should not escape.
“That’s Bulldog Carney!” he cried fiercely; “don’t let him get away.”
Startled, the two constables at the table sprang to their feet.
A sharp, crisp voice said: “The first man that reaches for a gun drops.” They were covered by two guns held in the steady hands of the man whose small gray eyes watched from out narrowed lids.
“I’ll make you a present of the Wolf,” Carney said quietly; “I thought I had Sergeant Heath. I could almost forgive this man, if he weren’t such a skunk, for doing the job for me. Now I want you chaps to pass, one by one, into the pen,” and he nodded toward a heavy wooden door that led from the room they were in to the other room that had been fitted up as a cell. “I see your carbines and gunbelts on the rack—you really should have been properly in uniform by this time; I’ll dump them out on the prairie somewhere, and you’ll find them in the course of a day or so. Step in, boys, and you go first, Wolf.”
When the four men had passed through the door Carney dropped the heavy wooden bar into place, turned the key in the padlock, gathered up the fire arms, mounted the buckskin, and rode into the west.
A week later the little school teacher at Fort Victor received through the mail a packet that contained five hundred dollars, and this note:—
DEAR MISS BLACK:—
I am sending you the five hundred dollars that you bet on a bad man. No woman can afford to bet on even a good man. Stick to the kids, for I’ve heard they love you. If those Indians hadn’t picked up Sergeant Heath and got him to Hobbema before I got away with your money I wouldn’t have known, and you’d have lost out.
Yours delightedly,
BULLDOG CARNEY.
DUST, by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius
CHAPTER I
The Dust Is Stirred
Dust was piled in thick, velvety folds on the weeds and grass of the open Kansas prairie; it lay, a thin veil on the scrawny black horses and the sharp-boned cow picketed near a covered wagon; it showered to the ground in little clouds as Mrs. Wade, a tall, spare woman, moved about a camp-fire, preparing supper in a sizzling skillet, huge iron kettle and blackened coffee-pot.
Her husband, pale and gaunt, the shadow of death in his weary face and the droop of his body, sat leaning against one of the wagon wheels trying to quiet a wailing, emaciated year-old baby while little tow-headed Nellie, a vigorous child of seven, frolicked undaunted by the August heat.
“Does beat all how she kin do it,” thought Wade, listlessly.
“Ma,” she shouted suddenly, in her shrill, strident treble, “I see Martin comin’.”
The mother made no answer until the strapping, fourteen-year-old boy, tall and powerful for his age, had deposited his bucket of water at her side. As he drew the back of a tanned muscular hand across his dripping forehead she asked shortly:
“What kept you so long?”
“The creek’s near dry. I had to follow it half a mile to find anything fit to drink. This ain’t no time of year to start farmin’,” he added, glum and sullen.
“I s’pose you know more’n your father and mother,” suggested Wade.
“I know who’ll have to do all the work,” the boy retorted, bitterness and rebellion in his tone.
“Oh, quit your arguin’,” commanded the mother. “We got enough to do to move nearer that water tonight, without wastin’ time talkin’. Supper’s ready.”
Martin and Nellie sat down beside the red-and-white-checkered cloth spread on the ground, and Wade, after passing the still fretting baby to his wife, took his place with them.
“Seems like he gets thinner every day,” he commented, anxiously.
With a swift gesture of fierce tenderness, Mrs. Wade gathered little Benny to her. “Oh, God!” she gasped. “I know I’m goin’ to lose him. That cow’s milk don’t set right on his stomach.”
“It won’t set any better after old Brindle fills up on this dust,” observed Martin, belligerency in his brassy voice.
“That’ll do,” came sharply from his father. “I don’t think this is paradise no more’n you do, but we wouldn’t be the first who’ve come with nothing but a team and made a living. You mark what I tell you, Martin, land ain’t always goin’ to be had so cheap and I won’t be living this time another year. Before I die, I’m goin’ to see your mother and you children settled. Some day, when you’ve got a fine farm here, you’ll see the sense of what I’m doin’ now and thank me for it.”
The boy’s cold, blue eyes became the color of ice, as he retorted: “If I ever make a farm out o’ this dust, I’ll sure ’ave earned it.”
“I guess your mother’ll be doin’ her share of that, all right. And don’t you forget it.”
As he intoned in even accents, Wade’s eyes, so deep in their somber sockets, dwelt with a strange, wistful compassion on his faded wife. The rays of the setting sun brought out the drabness of her. Already, at thirty-five, grey streaked the scanty, dull hair, wrinkles lined the worn olive-brown face, and the tendons of the thin neck stood out. Chaotically, he compared her to the happy young girl—round of cheek and laughing of eye—he had married back in Ohio, fifteen years before. It comforted him a little to remember he hadn’t done so badly by her until the war had torn him from his rented farm and she had been forced to do a man’s work in field and barn. Exposure and a lung wound from a rebel bullet had sent Wade home an invalid, and during the five years which had followed, he had realized only too well how little help he had been to her.
It is not likely he would have had the iron persistency of purpose to drag her through this new stern trial if he had not known that in her heart, as in his, there gnawed ever an all-devouring hunger to work land of their own, a fervent aspiration to establish a solid basis of self-sustentation upon which their children might build. From the day a letter had come
from Peter Mall, an ex-comrade in Wade’s old regiment, saying the quarter-section next his own could be bought by paying annually a dollar and twenty-five cents an acre for seven years, their hopes had risen into determination that had become unshakable. Before the eyes of Jacob and Sarah Wade there had hovered, like a promise, the picture of the snug farm that could be evolved from this virgin soil. Strengthened by this vision and stimulated by the fact of Wade’s increasing weakness, they had sold their few possessions, except the simplest necessities for camping, had made a canvas cover for their wagon, stocked up with smoked meat, corn meal and coffee, tied old Brindle behind, fastened a coop of chickens against the wagon-box and, without faltering, had made the long pilgrimage. Their indomitable courage and faith, Martin’s physical strength and the pulling power of their two ring-boned horses—this was their capital.
It seemed pitifully meager to Wade at that despondent moment, exhausted as he was by the long, hard journey and the sultry heat. Never had he been so taunted by a sense of failure, so torn by the haunting knowledge that he must soon leave his family. To die—that was nothing; but the fears of what his death might mean to this group, gripped his heart and shook his soul.
If only Martin were more tender! There was something so ruthless in the boy, so overbearing and heartless. Not that he was ever deliberately cruel, but there was an insensibility to the feelings of others, a capacity placidly to ignore them, that made Wade tremble for the future. Martin would work, and work hard; he was no shirk, but would he ever feel any responsibility toward his younger brother and sister? Would he be loyal to his mother? Wade wondered if his wife ever felt as he did—almost afraid of this son of theirs. He had a way of making his father seem foolishly inexperienced and ineffectual.
“I reckon,” Wade analysed laboriously, “it’s because I’m gettin’ less able all the time and he’s growing so fast—him limber an’ quick, and me all thumbs. There ain’t nothing like just plain muscle and size to make a fellow feel as if he know’d it all.”
The Second Western Megapack Page 17