Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  A new thought came to Themis as he watched. She might be the influence which would keep the whole party cheerful on the trail, and men who laugh at their work can work three times as well as in a gloom of serious endeavor. Laughter clears the brain. For the rest, she would be as safe among these chosen villains as among men of her own kin.

  She insisted on making her own camp fire and cooking her own food, and she roasted her single portion and ate it before the others were half finished. Then she came over to join their circle.

  It was a most formal crowd. Every man there had been accustomed to lord it over his fellows in whatever society he found himself, but here were four with equally sinister reputations, and a fifth not far behind them.

  “If it ain’t too much trouble,” terrible Red Norton would say, “I’ll have to be bothering you for that salt, Dick.”

  “Here you are,” Dick would answer. “Just watch your plate, will you, Si? I’m going to get up, and I don’t want no dust to be blowing into your chuck.”

  They would forget some of this formality later on, but in the meantime it was stilted conversation until Gloria threw in a bomb by asking how long they thought it would be before the Indian was run down. Straightway, each man raised his head with a grim smile. There was not one of the crew who did not feel that he could run any human being to the ground. But, now that five formidable trailers were assembled on fast horses, to say nothing of Themis himself, and with the assistance of that pack of dogs, they regarded their outfit as an irresistible juggernaut. And they said so freely, each handing the praise deftly to the others.

  “If a gent was to ask me,” said Hank Jeffries, “how long it would take gents like Dude Wesson and Dick Walker to run down their man, I’d say it would be pretty pronto. But when you got Red Norton throwed in, and when you got Si Bartlett on top of all them, I say that the Indian ain’t going to keep a whole skin more’n tomorrow about sunset time.”

  But Gloria shrugged her shoulders.

  “I can’t help doubting,” she said. “If I could follow you so easily, why can’t the Indian get away from you just as easily?”

  It was a disagreeable and new phase of the subject, and it was promptly abandoned for more cheerful viewpoints. And, half an hour later, the whole party was rolled in blankets.

  For every member of the hungry crew, the night passed like a second. Suddenly, they heard the deep, bass voice of Dude Wesson grumble: “Turn out, everybody. It’s pretty near sunup. Is this a picnic, maybe? Are we going to get started about noon? Hook onto an ax, a couple of you, and gimme some wood. I can’t cook with air. Bartlett, are you too proud to peel potatoes? This ain’t a hunting party, it’s a rest camp!”

  Those sullen exhortations began the day with a rush. Gloria saddled Mary Anne and cantered over the crest of the hill to a stream on the farther side. There she made her toilet and gave the men freedom to start the day with the customary groans and curses. By the time she came back, all was cheerful bustle, and the breakfast fire was blazing bright. The east was red with sunrise. The upper mountains were gleaming with light. And Paris, for the first time since she left New York, was banished from the mind of Gloria.

  CHAPTER XXII

  THERE FOLLOWED THREE hours of serious labor through the mountains, and then the bloodhounds came to the bank of a creek and were silenced by the failure of the scent. They ran whining here and there. One of them swam across to the farther bank, but even there the trail could not be gained.

  “He knows we’re after him,” said Hank Jeffries briefly. “Here’s where the fun begins.”

  “No trouble at all,” called Themis cheerily. “He might cover his own trail, but he can’t cover the trail of his horse and a grizzly bear. Impossible! Take the bloodhounds across. You send a pair of them upstream, and I’ll take another pair down, and we’ll pick up the trail directly.”

  It was done, but no trail developed. They had been a mile upstream and a mile or more down it, and there was no result! Hank Jeffries shook his head, cursing softly. The others were equally amazed.

  “But, Dad,” cried Gloria, “he can’t have made the trails disappear into thin air!”

  “Don’t talk, please,” snapped her father. “We have work to do. We’ll try this bank of the creek, Hank.”

  So up the nearer bank of the creek they worked the hounds until, as on the farther side, they were stopped by waterfalls where the fugitives could not have gone. They reassembled at the starting place, the point where horse and bear had entered the water.

  “And in the meantime,” groaned Themis, “the Indian has all this time gained. We’ll never run him down today! Bartlett, what do you suggest?”

  He shook his head. It was Dick Walker who offered the only possible advice.

  “He’s taken some way out of the water where he wouldn’t leave a trail,” he said. “Put out the dogs on each side of the creek a hundred yards away from it, and see what you strike.”

  That was done, and half an hour later one of the hounds raised the familiar wail and headed back into the mountains at a place five hundred yards up the stream. The Indian had doubled back into the higher ground. All the party scurried to the spot. There were the trails leading out of a clump of bushes. And, now that the scent was located, the track of the hunted man was instantly evident.

  He had gone up the creek to a broad, flat-topped rock which was close to the shore. From this he had made a long leap, clearing the bank of the creek and landing seven or eight feet away in the center of a clump of shrubbery, the outer part of which still stood up and revealed no break. From that place he had jumped onto a similar clump, and so to another, until he cleared a considerable distance from the water. And then he had struck out. In the meantime, he had called the horse and the bear, and these animals, marvelously trained, must have followed in his exact footsteps. Here he had mounted again, and the trail went off up the slope.

  But a full hour had been wasted in picking up the broken trail, and in that time the pursued man, even if he chose to go leisurely, could have placed five miles of mountain going between himself and the hunters. It was plain that only the greatest good luck could bring them up with the fugitive that day. But they struck out resolutely. All of them were too seasoned to the trail to be greatly cast down by a single disappointment, and, though Gloria felt at once that the task was hopeless, she could not but admire the way the rest of them went ahead.

  “The point is,” said her father, falling back beside her, “that this is a campaign, not a pursuit. And we’re going to stick to the campaigning until we’ve cornered him.”

  They dipped over the next ridge and into a valley. Rather, it was a gorge, sloping easily down the side from which they had come, but cut to a cliff on the opposite wall. The hounds were heading up the valley along this wall when there came a sharp spat of a bullet on a rock before them, and, as they recoiled, half a dozen shots followed, crowding them back, though all went scatheless. Their mellow voices fell away to sharp squeals of terror overcome by the sounds of the reports of the rifle as these came lagging behind the swift bullets. For a moment the air was thick with the echoes of the gun, the voices of the dogs, and the angry and astonished shouts of the men as they scattered for cover behind the boulders.

  And there they cowered, anxiously searching the top of the cliff for the marksman. No sign of him was there. Five or ten minutes of worry followed. Suddenly, Gloria stood up from behind her rock.

  “Don’t you see?” she explained. “He isn’t shooting to kill. It was beautiful marksmanship. But he sent the bullets just ahead of the dogs each time. He didn’t want to kill even the dogs, and it stands to reason that he wouldn’t touch human beings. He simply wanted to show us that we were at his mercy!”

  The posse came out, one by one, and resumed their places in the saddle in a sullen silence. Plainly, Gloria was right. And, having run into such an ambush, they were ashamed to continue the trail after being at the mercy of their enemy. But the shame wore off and was s
ucceeded by hot anger. He had been playing with them, declared Red Norton, pushing his horse into the lead at the heels of the bloodhounds. And he, Red Norton, would go ahead and prove that no man in the universe could make a fool of him once without living to be sorry for it.

  And the others declared that this was the right attitude, and they went on more vigorously than ever through the rough country, pushing the dogs with an ever increasing energy. Gloria took the first opportunity to have a serious talk with her father.

  “For my part,” she said, “I think the best thing would be to let him go his way. For one thing, he has a sense of humor.

  Imagine him lying up there among the rocks and laughing when we heard his bullets and tumbled off our horses to get behind the rocks! And a man who has a sense of humor can’t be really bad.”

  “He has an educated sense of humor, then,” said Themis, who was irritated in soul and body by a badly sunscorched neck. “He has a sense of humor which makes me want to force him to laugh on the other side of his face.”

  “I admit,” and Gloria chuckled, “that you weren’t exactly an heroic figure when you tumbled in behind that boulder.”

  “Confound it, Glory,” he protested, “you’ll never forget that. If I ever talk of hunting between this and my death day, you’ll trot out the story of how I ran for cover. This bit of work has been laid out, and it has to be completed.”

  “But he has made fools of all of us,” said Gloria.

  “He has had luck,” admitted her father grudgingly, “but it’s nonsense to think that one man, no matter how well he may know these mountains, can dodge such a crew as I have brought together - at least, for any length of time.”

  “And when he’s cornered, what crime will he be tried for?”

  “Horse stealing.”

  “A horse he paid for!”

  “Ask Hank Jeffries if he agreed to take any payment. No, my dear, a man can’t go about taking what he pleases and paying what he pleases. And how will he account to the man whose dogs he killed?”

  “But I say,” said Gloria, summing up in a woman’s fashion, “that he’s done nothing wrong. I pity him!”

  Themis did not care to argue. Two hours later, they ran into another trail problem which had been neatly constructed around a creek, and, even though they had already had a symptom of the tactics of the fugitive, it took another hour to unravel the difficulty.

  Yet they struck into the trail again through the late afternoon, and when they camped at sunset it was a disgruntled, weary party. Gloria, however, had enjoyed the day thoroughly, for she rode carelessly along, with no thought of the fugitive in her brain, with no desire to overtake him. Her mind was simply filled with the beauty of the mountains through which they were traveling. And those rough-headed peaks against the tender blue of the sky, those thickly forested little valleys, with the white crash of a waterfall streaking the mountainside, and the pure sapphire of a still lake below - these were the things which filled up her eyes so that sometimes she broke into song. And, as they climbed closer to the huge, naked region above timber line, with a colder and purer air, and with the horses laboring more heavily, her spirits rose.

  To be happy is a wearying thing. And when she fell asleep that night, it was to fall into a profound slumber. Yet even that slumber was stirred with dreams, and they were dreams of the purest delight - of walking through meadows where strange and delicately scented flowers bloomed, flowers whose names she could not tell; of listening to the liquid voices of streams; of breathing an air which was an intoxication of enjoyment.

  She wakened to find that one part of her dream lingered into the daylight as a truth. Yonder was the tall form of Dude Wesson booming out his call to rise for the work of the day. But her blanket and the ground around her head were covered with flowers from the summits - forget-me-nots and daisies and goldenrod and silver and blue columbine and other flowers of delicate colorings and exquisite fragrances which were new to her. She swept up an armful of them. They were already slightly withered where they had lain on the dry blanket, but, where they had been placed on the ground about her head, there was first a layer of damp moss so that they might be preserved. She gazed in wonder and delight.

  Which of the men could have done this thing? Which of the strange and apparently hard-hearted fellows could have been capable of that dainty tribute? Which of them, apparently all fast asleep before she closed her eyes, could have risen and worked for an hour or even more to collect these prizes? For there was no sign of a blossom near the camp.

  There was only one possibility - Dick Walker. But, even as her glance fastened upon Dick, she saw him tilting a flask to his lips. He was taking his regular morning bracer before he could gain the strength to open his eyes and begin the day’s work. No, such a man as Walker could not have done it.

  And who else was there? The sunburned neck and the hard ride certainly removed her father from the list of possibilities, even if he could ever have been suspected. She sat amazed while the deep voice of the cook suddenly thundered: “Those dogs, Jeffries - you got to watch ’em, or I quit as a cook. They’ve swiped a whole side of bacon - or pretty near a whole side!”

  That announcement brought the other men in a cluster about him. Furiously, he pointed out where the meat was taken.

  “But look here, Wesson,” said Themis at last, “is it like a hungry pack of dogs to steal one piece of meat out of a hamper and leave another behind? And do dogs ordinarily close a cover they have lifted?”

  All stood aghast. And the girl drew the flowers closer, breathless with a wild surmise.

  “A man stole it? But what use would any of us have for bacon?” began Si Bartlett. Suddenly, he cried in a shrill voice: “Good Lord, you don’t mean to say that the Indian came right down to our camp last night? That he was here among us?”

  “However,” said Themis, “we’ll find out. Start the hounds, Hank.”

  Jeffries loosed the bloodhounds. They nosed the old trail carelessly, circled away, and suddenly struck a fresh one which darted straight up a steep slope covered with shrubs.

  “By the gods!” roared Red Norton, who had gone to explore. “Here’s where the hound came, and here’s where he crouched down and looked us over, right behind the boulder near where Miss Themis was sleeping. And - how come all these flowers?”

  “I found them all around me when I woke up,” said the girl. “And - oh, Dad, what a strange and beautiful thing it was for him to do!”

  “Strange and beautiful nonsense!” exclaimed her father.

  “Indian foolishness is what I’d call it. But, good heavens, how did he get into camp among all these dogs? Did he turn himself into a ghost?”

  One by one, the men came and took up the flowers. Hank Jeffries was away whistling in the hounds.

  “When I get him,” said Dick Walker softly, “I’ll take these flowers out of his back.”

  He darted at the girl a keen side glance - no more. Yet it was eloquent of the truth that poor Dick was a victim where many another man had fallen before him, and where many a one would fall in the time to come. And Gloria saw and knew and understood. What girl, innocent as she may be, does not? She was more interested, however, in the black frown which had overclouded the brow of her father. He stared at her with a sort of terror.

  “Now,” he said, “I’ll stay by this trail if it leads down to Hades. This nonsense has to be stopped. And after this we’ll keep a watch around our camp.”

  But the others said nothing at all. And breakfast was eaten in silence, for this last trick had been too much for the hardiest of them. They had been made fools of the day before. But to have their camp visited in the middle of night, to have food stolen from under their noses, to have a sort of silent flirtation started with a girl who was under their protection, and all this by the very man whose life they were hunting - that, indeed, was too much!

  CHAPTER XXIII

  COMPARED TO THIS third day, the work of the preceding days was a mere not
hing. In the first place, the trail led straight to a cliff, or what was almost a sheer rise of rock. The dogs could make it easily enough, and so could the men, but it was folly to attempt to get the horses up that murderous ascent. Yet up that very place Peter had been brought! Themis and Si Bartlett climbed far enough up the rocks to make sure. They saw the marks which the hoofs of the big horse had made as, with a daring and nimbleness unaccountable in a horse, he had worked to the top. He had made use of ledges and small footholds which even a mountain sheep might have considered twice before using.

  There was nothing for it but to marvel at the prowess of Peter and to take their own horses around a four-mile trail in order to come to the top of the summit. And there, to their consummate fury, they found that the daring fugitive had waited until they were well committed to the roundabout way, and men he had traveled down the edge of the cliff and taken another and easier course to the ground. Even so, it was incredible that a horse should have made the descent. And it had been done at considerable risk. Thrice they saw marks, which proved that he had slid into the danger of death in getting down to the bottom of the gorge beneath. But down he had gone, while the saddle and the pack, perhaps - since nothing seemed impossible to this miraculous trainer of wild beasts - had been carried by the grizzly.

  But, no matter how the riddle was explained, it remained necessary for them to retrace their steps and to take the roundabout way down to the level going once more. Two precious hours had been consumed by the climb and the descent and the unraveling of that trail problem before the bloodhounds struck onto the trail again.

  But now they followed it with utter indifference. Indeed, ever since the morning they had done their work as though weary of it, and as for the mongrels and the big, fighting hounds, they lagged in the rear or coursed rabbits and would not pay the slightest attention to the work in hand.