by Max Brand
“Quick, Joe!” pleaded the girl. “What can we do?”
“They’s only one way out,” said Joe Norman sullenly, “and that’s to go back. We’ve had our work for nothing.”
“I tell you, there has to be a way!”
“None in the world. Straight yonder — there’s the direction for us. But we’ll never get there.”
She swung her horse around with a cry of grief and impatience and rode him along the ridge, desperately close to the edge of the landslide. Her shout brought Norman beside her. She was pointing down through the moonlight.
“Don’t you think if we put our horses back on their haunches, they’d go down that sliding all the way to the bottom?”
He looked over, and shuddered as he craned his head to look, for she was much nearer the edge on Gray Tom than he had dared to ride.
At this place the landslide had not ripped away the soil to the sheer face of the rock. There was no right-angle face of stone, but a skirting of the raw dirt came up to the edge of the ridge and swept away down to the floor of the gulley at a dizzy angle. Halfway down, it veered out toward a more generous angle.
“Mary,” he said, lifting his head, “you got a pile of courage even to think of it. I’ll tell you what. It’d be just the same as jumping a hoss over a cliff. Except that a cliff would kill him a little quicker.”
“But if we had luck?”
“No kind of luck could save us, Mary. Plain suicide. Suppose a hoss could keep upright sliding down, he wouldn’t be able to pick his way. All he could do would be to sit back on his haunches and slide. And if he struck a big rock or a tree stump — or anything to knock him over — why, he’d keep right on rolling over and over till he hit the bottom with a smash. He’d be dead long before that, and his rider would just be a red smear trailing out behind him.”
The moonlight somehow helped to paint the picture vividly. She saw herself on Gray Tom shooting down the slope — the rock lifting suddenly out of the moon haze — the crash, the toppling of the horse upon his side — and then death.
Then she heard the noise of the pursuer coming up the slope, terribly near now. Fear of something behind, unknown, balanced the fear of what lay before her.
“Joe,” she cried, “good-by. I’m going.”
“No, no! Mary!”
He flung himself from the mustang and strove to reach the head of Gray Tom, but she had swung the stallion straight out to the edge of the ridge, and as Joe sprang forward, he saw the ground tremble, quake, and sink down.
He whirled about; he was barely in time to spring back to solid ground, and when he looked again, Gray Tom, with a snort of terror, was plunging down the slope.
One thing favored Mary, and that was the very fall of the ground, for it launched her smoothly and slowly on the downward journey. The chief trouble was that the rush of earth and stones around him maddened Gray Tom. He tried to straighten and spring away from that senseless confusion, but the girl flung herself far back in the saddle, and throwing all her weight on the reins, managed to pry him back on his haunches — far back. He was almost sitting down. Then the impetus of the drop caught them, and they shot down.
The ridge was whipped away from behind them; she looked far ahead. The distance to the floor of the gulch seemed treble as far as it had been from the top of the ridge above her. Nor was the ground half as smooth as it had appeared, viewed at the close angle. There were patches of muddy clay; there were streaks of gravel which, when they struck them, sent a raging avalanche pouring before them.
But the danger was not in the speed of the slide. It lay in the projections which jagged up and back at them like shark teeth. The end of a tree stump jumped at them from the night. A ragged edge caught her shoulder and ripped the sleeve away to the wrist, and when this was past, she saw a certain doom before them in the form of a big rock. There was no dodging it, and it was far too bulky to sway away from. Chance entered there and saved them.
The slide had swerved on either side of the boulder, and Gray Tom, in turn, was swerved along the path of least resistance and whipped by the rock.
Now they struck the apron of more level going. It spread out flatter. Gray Tom had lurched to his feet and was going at a mad gallop, floundering through loose soil, rushing on so that the air sung in the ears of Mary Valentine, and then, how, she did not know, the floor of the gulch was flat before her and Gray Tom had drawn down to a rocking canter.
He was trembling like an aspen through all his bulk, but he was unhurt. Her own blood had turned to ice, but looking back to the sickening height, she saw a tiny figure gesticulating. Then exultation swept over Mary. Her blood ran warm again. If there had been a chance before, there was a double chance now.
She put the spurs to Gray Tom and rushed for the next hillside.
CHAPTER 40
AT THE TOP she turned for a last look at the slide, and pausing an instant at the crest, she saw a tiny, dark figure slip over the edge and go downward with bulletlike speed.
Her heart rose. Was it Joe Norman? Had he taken courage by her example? The moment the thought came into her brain, she knew that it was impossible. After all, it was not in Joe’s nature to rise to great emergencies. He had done his utmost in guiding her so far through the night on that dangerous course, and now he would turn back with the adventure half accomplished. In all his life he would never rise to a greater thing than that.
It was Sheriff Caswell who had taken the slide; now his horse was a dim streak crossing the floor of the gulch. Sheriff Caswell! He was one of those bulldog men who make great risks seem small and who turn the impossible into the commonplace.
She turned Gray Tom straight ahead and began to ride like mad. Strangely enough, the fear for Jess Dreer had grown small in her mind. The one thing which she most dreaded was the man who relentlessly followed on her trail, and to get clear of him, she rode the stallion without care, without caution. She flung him at heartbreaking slopes. She rushed him down precipitous hillsides; but always, looking back from crest to crest, she could see the dark figure following. But growing smaller, to be sure. Then, at length, the pursuer had disappeared.
For the first time in several miles she thought of Gray Tom, and the moment she looked to him she saw that he was in a serious condition. His breath came with alarming harshness; his neck and shoulders were lathered, and he staggered under the burden of his rider. Yet he kept gallantly to his work up the slope, and when she reined him, he came up on the bit and fought her to get ahead.
Only a moment of this, then his hindquarters sank. He stopped. She thought for an instant that he had stepped in a hole, until the great shuddering of his body told her what had happened. Then she sprang from the saddle, but it was far too late. Gray Tom had crumpled helplessly to the earth.
She caught his head in her arms, and as if he thought that this was a signal for him to stand up, he pricked his ears, tossed his head, and lurched forward. It was the last effort, and it broke his heart. When he struck the ground again, he was dead.
Beside him the girl kneeled, and seeing his eyes dim in the moonlight, she closed the lids as though he had been a man. And truly Gray Tom had died a man’s death.
She was helpless now, but in spite of her helplessness a great assurance was filling her mind. One death had been paid for Jess Dreer, and surely there must be some reward for that great effort. In her first frenzy she even dreamed that she might complete the journey in time on foot, and she ran stumbling to the next hilltop.
There she paused with a cry of joy, for in the low, wide valley below her she saw the dark, huddled outlines of a ranch house and its outlying buildings.
Back to the body of Gray Tom again, running now as she had never run before. She untied the girths and after a fierce struggle was able to draw them through under the body of the horse. Then, drawing the stirrups over her shoulders and pulling the saddle high on her back, she began climbing again at a shuffling run.
A thirty-five-pound saddle is the clumsi
est burden ever invented. Even a man would have groaned under it before the walk was over, but Mary Valentine was staggering with exhaustion before she reached the door of the house.
In answer to her knock and her shouting, footsteps at length ran toward her from within, and the door opened on a man in his shirt, a lantern in his hand, his feet not yet worked down in his boots. He was one of those black-haired fellows whose beards grow up to their eyes. Another time she would have been terrified by that face; now she minded it no more than if he had been a painted thing.
She told him swiftly, briefly, how her horse had dropped. She must have another. She had money to pay any price he asked. But speed was the thing she needed. The man was maddeningly slow.
“Selling a hoss by night,” he declared, “is like marrying a girl whose face you ain’t never seen.”
“Don’t you see,” she cried, “that I don’t care if I’m cheated? But I want the best thing on four legs that you can give me.”
“The best thing I got comes high, lady. I wouldn’t take a penny under three hundred for my Jerry; and I wouldn’t be hungry to sell him at that.”
She assured him that she would add another hundred to the price if he would throw the saddle on the horse quickly and let her be off, and with this assurance the rancher came to life. Five minutes later he came out of the corral with a long, low-built brown horse with Mary’s saddle on its back. She thrust the money into his hand, and without waiting for him to count it, she was off again at full speed.
Her new mount had not the reach of Gray Tom, had not the same elastic spring in his gait, but before she had gone up the first slope, she was delighted with her purchase. Jerry was raised among these hills and trained to the work in them. He seemed to have eyes in his feet, and he wove among the shrubbery and trees and over the loose rocks with hardly ever a pause or a stumble.
The hill ended in a broad plateau, the first level going in many a mile, and she leaned over and gave Jerry his head. He did surprisingly well in spite of his short legs, and with every jump the heart of Mary rose. It was not dawn yet. There was not even a glimmer of light in the east; surely Windville could not be so far away.
At the edge of the broad clearing she heard a neigh behind her, which Jerry answered as he ran, and looking back, she saw again the same stalwart figure pursuing her, the same sidewise seat in the saddle. Sheriff Caswell!
It was easy to tell what had happened. He had come upon Gray Tom; he had followed down into the valley and arrived at the house of the rancher on her very heels. There he had changed his horse for one of the farmer’s, and now he was measuring strides with her again, but on an equal basis, as fresh as the Jerry that stretched out under her.
During the next half mile she made a trail of speed, but her follower kept the pace and even gained. It told Mary Valentine, more plainly than words, that she must do something more than stretch the legs of her horse if she wished to shake off this bulldog of the trail. And she made up her mind with the cold quickness of a desperate man.
She swung Jerry from the trail on which he was running at that moment, and pulling him into a thicket of brush, she drew from its case the light rifle which she always carried when she rode. With the butt snuggled into the hollow of her shoulder and her left hand at the balance, she waited, hearing the sheriff come crashing after her. She wondered, as she sat the saddle in the patch of heavy shadow, at the steadiness of her nerves. There was not a quiver of fingers or arms.
Now the head of the sheriff’s horse shot snakelike from among the trees, and a second later the whole group was in view. She snapped the muzzle of her rifle up, steadied it, caught her bead, and let the rifle swing easily, following the speed of the moving horse. When she fired, the animal sprang straight up, came down with a lurch and stagger, and then sank to the earth; the sheriff was already clear of the stirrups. She saw him run a step or two toward her, his revolver in hand, but then he paused abruptly.
She had twitched Jerry around and sent him flying up the trail again. No enemy behind now; and since the sheriff was out of the way, her mind fell back on the great duel in which she was engaged. She had a horse under her, fresh, strong, willing; she had against her the inevitable rising of the sun and the rough tract of hills and valley. One stumble might ruin her chances in the race.
Yet she dared not ride with caution. A gathering chill in the air, a depression of mind, a general relaxation of nerve force, and an aching pair of eyes warned her that the dawn was coming. Looking up from a hollow, there was only the blackness of the forest above her. But, topping a rise of ground, she saw that the trees on the rolling horizon were jagged as teeth reaching up. They were outlined by a light from behind. It was dawn!
It brought her heart up behind her teeth, knocking. Into her mind surged pictures of Jess Dreer by the fire in her home; of Jess at her window; and of the outlaw behind the bars in the Salt Springs jail, nonchalant in spite of his manacles, smiling his assurance at her. It came to her that he had never spoken to her of such things as now went hot and thick through her blood. He had remained aloof, yet she had read in his mind the unspoken things.
She had raised Jerry to a murderous pace. Would he stand it?
The stout mustang ran with his head well down, like a cattle horse running a dodging cow. For a horse cannot dodge well when his head is high in the air. He spread out along the ground as he gathered speed, but never once did he miss footing. Once a rotted log crushed under his heels; once a pebble rolled and staggered him; but not once was Jerry at fault. Toiling up the steep slopes, or zigzagging heavily down the precipitous mountainsides, he never once flinched from the labor.
She could have blessed that honest brute heart, and she began, with the light to aid her, to help him with all her power of hand and eye. She kept well forward in the saddle to throw the weight an inch or so more toward Jerry’s withers. Keeping as near as possible to the direction which Joe Norman had plotted for her, she yet was able to cut off vital angles here and there, and often swerved from the straight line to give Jerry the advantage of better ground for running.
And still the light increased with terrible rapidity. She topped a rise of ground. To the right a point of flame startled her like a rising forest fire, but when she looked again, she saw a regular semicircle of red. And still nothing but ragged ranges ahead of her. When would they split apart and reveal Windville? And from Windville, how far to the lonely cabin?
In a sudden burst of grief she clasped her hands against her breast, and the tears broke from her eyes.
CHAPTER 41
FROM THE BROKEN door of the ruinous shack Gus Norman looked up to the hills. Behind them his men were gathering, drifting slowly toward the hollow between the hills and the double-eared peak which rose like a mule’s head. It was a black mountain now, with the rising light of the day behind it. The sun was well up; in a few minutes, now, he could ride to that hollow and find his men waiting, all the proven twenty who had started on the ride. Now that he was in the place, he was more satisfied with it than ever. The shack lay in a roughly cut bowl, with a rim of higher ground all around that would give perfect protection to his riflemen in point-blank range of their target. Even if Dreer sought protection in the hut, having avoided the first volley, he would be a lost man. Through those rotten walls a rifle bullet would range from side to side. They could honeycomb the shack in five minutes of concentrated fire, half of them aiming breast-high and half shooting at the level of the floor, in case he tried to lie down.
No wonder, then, that Gus was smiling when he turned back into the hut. Dreer had kindled a fire and was warming his hands over it. He kept his face religiously toward Gus Norman. Early in the night Gus Norman had noted this. Indeed, he had had flashes of hope that events would turn out so that he could take this celebrity single-handed and gain the glory all for himself. One moment of carelessness, and his gun would flash and speak.
But that moment never came. If Dreer had to turn his head, it was only for the split
part of a second before he had his eyes on the other once more. And Gus Norman began to respect his companion as much as he hated him. Just as a dog, say, might respect a wolf.
“The time’s almost here,” he said, turning from the hills. “The boys will be waiting for me up yonder, pretty soon.”
“Rainier,” answered Dreer, “the thing I don’t understand is why you didn’t have ’em meet here in the cabin.”
“Because I don’t like to have ’em meet until I’m with ’em. Each one of them boys, Dreer, knows that he’s to ride to the hollow yonder, and that he’s going to meet me there, but about three of ’em don’t know the others in the crowd. That’s my system. I play a lone hand. I let in the other boys, one by one, on part of the game, but I keep everything dark except just the part each one is going to play.”
“Not a bad idea. I suppose Hank is one of the new men?”
“Yep, he’s new, right enough.”
“And raw, Rainier. I’m surprised that you use a boy like that.”
“I’ll tell you what, Dreer. I was a fool to send him to you with that letter. I might of knowed that he’d try to talk too much or something like that. But he’d been on my hands for a long time without doing nothing. He wanted to earn his salt. So I told him to go along and fetch that letter to you.”
“He told me it was that way. But he looked like a rat in a trap. Couldn’t meet my eye.”
“You scared him, Dreer. Same as you scare most of ’em. Tell you what, when I told a couple of the boys that I was aiming to get you in on my next job, they acted like a cyclone had hit ’em. Acted as though you ate men alive.”