by Max Brand
The evening went rapidly into the twilight, the prairie dogs came out to watch, the bull bat sat silently on the fence post. Then the unrhythmic beat of hoofs ceased.
“It’s true,” gasped out Baldy. “I seen it — with my own eyes.”
The line rider came back, passed the driver of the chuck wagon without a word, brushed the perspiration from his forehead, sat down, sighed, and picked up his book as one in a dream. Baldy gaped at him, and then he walked away so softly that one might have said he went tiptoe over the sand.
When he started on the homeward journey, he took the brown outlaw back with him.
III. JOHN RAMPS
THE LANTERN BURNED clearly, and Garrison was content. Before him stretched a lengthy maze of adventures, jousts, waylayings, challenges — half a dozen full evenings of readings before he came to the quests for the Holy Grail and the breaking of that peerless fellowship of the Round Table. So Lee, rich in the prospect, stretched himself at the loaded board. He could never see in the Grail a sufficient cause for the ruin of the Round Table. Therefore, he always approached that section of Malory with a fallen heart, but tonight he was reading of the crisp early days when Camelot was a new name. He raised his head from the book only once, and it was only to feel the settling down of utter night.
For he had learned that there is an instant of white magic just at the end of the evening. Perhaps it is the time when the creatures that see in the dark come into their own. That moment had come, when Lee lifted his head. The silence that camped on the Staked Plains became a listening thing with a heartbeat somewhere in it. The breeze lifted the corner of the page like an invisible finger. So ended the dull day, and the night began with a breathless pause as when a door opens, but those within are not yet seen. The world died with the day, and the people of the books sprang into life. Ladies who, in the day, were bland names, became on such a night brilliant realities with infinite lives of smiles and glances. About the lonely castle he now saw the wilderness sweeping in green waves like a sea, covering the walls with a spray of vines. So solemn became the illusion of that moment that the figure that loomed in the doorway and stood there, swaying, seemed only an intruder in the dream.
Between an American Indian and an Arthurian legend, however, there existed a gap sufficient to shock Garrison into wakefulness. It was a broad-shouldered, bowlegged fellow in moccasins, with a hickory shirt, a hat set so far toward the back of his head that it pushed his ears forward, and, dangling to his shoulders, were two plaits of hair wrapped in red flannel, with a red snapper at each end. He supported himself with his hands against the door, glaring at the white man and leaning in as though he were about to leap on the prostrate figure. That illusion lasted long enough to bring Lee Garrison to his feet with the speed of a snake uncoiling. Then he saw that the poor fellow had braced himself against a staggering weakness. His arms shook under the weight they supported, and the glare of his eyes was that inward light of suffering long endured.
Among the few established facts about Lee Garrison was an aversion to both Mexicans and Indians, but after a single glance at this man he caught him under the armpits and swung him down to the floor of the dugout. It was a dead weight that he lifted. The shoulders of the Indian gave under the pressure of an ugly limpness, and he remained in exactly the position in which Garrison deposited him — shouldering against the wall with one leg twisted oddly to the side and his right hand doubled against the floor, the weight of the arm falling against the back of the wrist. In spite of the fiery eyes of the Indian, Lee knew that the man was dying. He ripped away a stack of cans from a corner. They tumbled with a prodigious racket across the floor and revealed the hidden treasure, a half-emptied flask of whiskey, that he handed to the Indian.
But the fingers in which the man tried to grasp it slipped from the glass as though numb with cold, and his arm fell. Garrison, shuddering at the sight of that mortal weakness, placed the flask at the lips of the Indian, and, when he took it away, the bottle was empty.
“Good,” sighed the other, and he had strength enough to take the cup of water that Lee poured.
“I have stayed too long,” said the Indian in an English so perfectly enunciated that Lee started. “I must go on again.”
He spread his hands on either side of him and strove to raise his body. There was no result, and a shadow dropped across his eyes. Perspiration glistened on his coppery forehead, but he smiled at the white man.
“For heaven’s sake, lie down and take it easy,” said Lee.
The other shook his head. There was a bubbling huskiness in his voice in which he explained gravely: “I am hollow inside and filled with fire. If I lie down, it will run into my head and burn me up.”
“A very good idea,” said Lee quietly. “A fellow can fool fire that way, now and then. Give me your hand, will you?”
He took the languid wrist. The skin was hot. The pulse ran faint and fast as the ticking of a clock. The Indian was dying of pneumonia.
“I’m sorry I’ve finished your whiskey stock,” he said. “I’ll bring you out a new supply, when I come back this way. My name is John Ramps.”
Lee mumbled his own name in acknowledgment of the introduction. It would be morning before he could go to the ranch and return with help, and long before morning John Ramps would be dead.
“Moonshine will think I’ve left his trail,” said the Indian. “But though Moonshine is clever, one can’t expect a horse to know what goes on inside the brain of a man. He could run faster than my horses ran, and naturally he doesn’t think I can overtake him on foot.”
The feet of John Ramps were clad in moccasins, worn to shreds.
“Is Moonshine a horse?” asked Lee.
“You don’t know him? Well, this is far from his home country. There were eight of us with horses, when we took the trail of Moonshine in the Diamond Star Desert.”
“But that’s in Idaho, Ramps!” cried Garrison.
“Yes, a long trail. However, I’m surprised that you don’t know of Moonshine, Mister Garrison. He’s a silver-gray mustang. You’ve seen moonlight running on water? That’s his color. Fire in a wind, galloping across a stubble field, that’s the way he runs. Now I must go. All the others who have tried have lost. Even Handsome Harry Chandler lost. He took his best horse. And last he rode his black mare. But even Laughter could not turn Moonshine. So he thinks that John Ramps, too, has failed. He does not know that I can still run as fast as the wind.”
He lurched to his feet, but at the first step he crumpled into the arms of the white man, and Lee laid him on the blanket. He thought, then, that the end had come, for there was no perceptible breathing, but he found, at length, a faint flutter of the heart. He sponged the face and breast and hands of the man, and then sat beside John Ramps to wait for the final rattle of breathing. Literally, the dying man was a frame of bones loosely covered with skin. His mouth was fallen ajar, but to Lee Garrison there was nothing repulsive in the face. It took him back to the quests of Arthur’s paladins after the Holy Grail. They must have ridden like this, day and night, wasting themselves to shadows, burned by their desire for one glimpse of salvation. Even so, the Indian and his eight companions had ridden a thousand miles, killing their horses under them, no doubt, until only this man remained of the eight. He had spurred his last mount until it died, and, then, half mad with weariness and the hysteria of fever, he had gone on by foot.
The Indian spoke. It was not the death rattle, but a harsh phrase of Indian dialect. The voice went on, detached, broken, but now it spoke English.
“Who stays to throw water, when the forest burns? John Ramps is burning for the horse.” There followed a burst of rapid chatter in his own tongue. The next English words made only a few phrases: “Let her go to another wickiup — I cannot stay.” Here he fell into inaudible mutterings, rolling his head from side to side, and plucking aimlessly at his breast. Then: “Be not afraid. It is not Tahquits, pounding the bones of a victim. The hoofs of Moonshine make the thun
der, and John Ramps is on his back.”
Was it weeks, months, even years, perhaps, since John Ramps started on the trail of the stallion? The chase was as strange to Lee as the story of the Grail. It was stranger, for in the years of his riding on the ranges he had found in horses only creatures to be subdued by force, whipped into obedience, crushed with the stronger hand. A sullen anger came in him at the thought that a dumb beast had been able to kill this man. He felt a pang that one of the human race could have responded to a spark that had never touched him, could have risked his life with so open a hand for the sake of a beast.
The Indian spoke again, and his voice was lower and harsher. The breath seemed to die between every dragging syllable.
“Brothers, it was no fault in the trap — the trap was good, but he is like his name — he is like moonshine, and he eludes us. A man can take fire on two sticks and carry it through the wind — or he can gather water in his hands — or he can even put the wind in a bag and keep it — but who can gather moonshine?”
The picture Lee Garrison saw was the narrow, yellow triangle of a campfire and eight swarthy faces, glittering by that light. A sudden shout from John Ramps made his hair bristle. The Indian had jerked himself to a sitting posture, and his face was a frenzy.
“Ho! We have him. My mountain sheep, my red beauty, faster, faster! Hei!”
Over his head he swung one arm, a gesture so vivid that the whirling loop of the lasso flashed like a shadow across the eyes of Lee. The hand fell, and the body pitched back, and Lee, leaning close over a face that was contorted in the last agony, heard a whisper: “He is gone!”
The same whisper, it seemed, drained the last life from John Ramps, for almost at once a mist brushed across the fiery eyes as though the lamp that shone down on them had grown suddenly dim, and a gradual smile stole across the lips of John Ramps. Perhaps, thought the cowpuncher, the soul of the Indian was already flying down the trail of Moonshine and saw the fugitive.
IV. THE FIRST SIGHT
IT SEEMED TO Lee, as he looked down to the eternal triumph of that smile, that the most opulent cattle kings did not build as well as John Ramps, for their names would last only as long as their fortunes held together. But John Ramps, building nothing, had left a thing that would never die, a story of which he was a part. He died for the sake of it, and, as long as men loved horses, they would not cease to thrill when they heard how the Indian trailed the gray stallion a thousand miles across the mountains. Here, in a bronze skin, was the type of a Galahad. Lee went to the door of the dugout. The moonlight lay in pale waves over the rolling ground outside. There was not a sound. He thought back a little. The cattle range had been a joyless place to him, a drab region, but it had at least given him escape from people and provided him with a great blessing — silence. As he stood there, he grew sad with the desire to be among men. He had lived among them with his eyes closed, for there must be others in whom burned the fire of John Ramps. Perhaps, with patient searching, he could find one such and buckle that man to him for a friend.
In the meantime, he must bury the Indian. Here on the plains was the place for him, lying face up, not too far away from this same moonlight.
He picked up the body of John Ramps, a withered body of bones and skin, and fifty yards from the dugout he placed it in a deep crevice among the rocks. Prying against the keystone of the overhanging boulders, he loosed and sent down a ponderous shower of rock. The roar of the fall filled his ears for a moment longer, and then the peace of the desert washed like a wave about him. In a nearby Spanish dagger the wind was whispering; that was the end. All trace of John Ramps was gone from the face of the earth, and only one man knew his monument.
Then, as though a voice from behind bade him turn, he swung sharply and saw what seemed a cloud of moonlight gathered into a moving form. It glided over a hilltop, disappeared in the wash of shade that filled a gully, and slipped into view again over a closer rise of ground. It was Moonshine.
If he had never heard of the stallion before, the name would have burst from his lips as it did now in a shout. Moonshine stopped with a suddenness that sent his mane tumbling forward in a flurry of silver, and stood fast, a creature of light.
He neighed like a challenge, or a gloating over the dead man, then whirled and fled. Oh, the swing and lightness of that stride — like a wave in the free ocean! Perhaps the soft surface sand buried the noise of hoofs. Like a phantom the wild horse drifted over the hill and faded into the shadow below.
He came into view again on a farther rise. Then Moonshine was absorbed in the heart of the night. The face of Lee Garrison was like that of one who struggled to keep alive in his memory a dying music.
It was hard to turn back, for a power drew him down the trail of the horse. He closed his eyes. At once against the black of his vision the form of Moonshine stood out, luminous silver.
He had found his passions so entirely inside the covers of books that this reality, taking him by the throat, bewildered him. Had the soul of John Ramps come into his body? It was the memory of the mustang’s gallop that maddened him — to sit on that back would be to sit like a leaf in a level wind. Between his knees he could sense the lithe, strong barrel of Moonshine, and his face was hot with longing to feel the wind of Moonshine’s galloping.
He found himself in the dugout with his head between his hands. His face was hot. The fingers against his face were cold. His heart fluttered in a strange, airy manner, but, when he sprang up, his mind at least was clear.
This note he scrawled: I got a hurry call, and I am gone. This, with some perishables that could not be trusted without guard in the dugout, he put into the saddlebags, after cinching up Pinto. When he had cut the hobble ropes, the little horse, true to his homing instinct, darted toward the ranch house. So with the bridges burned, Lee turned back to the dugout and swept together the necessaries. Since he had to travel on foot, he cut his list of essentials to the bone. In a minute, at most, he was striding across the sand.
A cartridge belt slung over his shoulder carried his ammunition, and it supported at the lower end of the loop the heavy Colt .45. To catch a horse without a rope is nearly impossible. Lee bore thirty feet of it. A saddle blanket for shelter at night, some sulphur matches, a small package of salt, a great, powerful knife with one razor edge and another blade that defied the thickest tin can — these made up his pack, together with some odds and ends which included that prime essential of the cattle country, pliers, the key to the barbed-wire region.
It would not have been too much to carry over even fairly firm roads, but the sand melted like quicksilver under his feet, for he wore the small-soled, sharp-heeled boots of the cattleman, that give the smallest walking surfaces. The heels sank deep, and in the midst of each stride there was a giving and slipping back. His eye had formed the horseman’s habit of wandering forward across the landscape at the pace of a lope, and now his glances pulled him forward as though he were leaning against the wind. There is a quick, soft step for sand, barely breaking the surface as the foot falls, Indian fashion, but Lee was fighting ahead, slipping, stumbling.
The night was cool, yet Lee in ten minutes was dripping, and he sighed in ardent relief as the sand shelved to a shore of firm ground. He had reached the Capped Rock, where, the ground having settled on one side of a fissure, a ridge of broken stone protrudes along a fault, and great boulders tumble from the plateau to the lower level. From the upper ridge he scanned anxiously the dimmer regions below him.
Something winked far off like a bit of water exposed to the moon. The silvery shape dissolved in the shadows of another hollow. It seemed a mad thing for a man to start out to walk down a horse — and such a horse as Moonshine, above all. Indeed, the stallion might shake off all pursuit by one great burst across the country, fifty miles of running, say, that would effectually destroy all hopes of keeping the trail. Yet there was small fear that Moonshine would be so full of heart after a thousand-mile hunt across the mountains. The Indians had serve
d one purpose by their long trailing — they had taken the edge off the mustang’s wildness, and they had blunted his fear of man.
Many times, lately, he must have had the scent of man in his wide nostrils, and many times he must have shaken off his horror with a small burst of galloping. Probably he would do the same with Lee, just keeping out of the danger distance. In that case there was one chance in three, the cowpuncher thought, of success, for the stallion would hardly have shaken off his pursuer and settled down to graze, when once more the man would plod within sight, and Moonshine must be off again, and hardly would he lie down to sleep when again the man scent would drift close. The gray must have slept on his feet, and even then he would only have an opportunity for brief dozes. As for Lee, he could choose his time for rest and make his sleep brief. He had all the advantage of the general who takes the offensive and keeps the opponent guessing. All of this went swiftly through the mind of the cowpuncher, and then he started down among the rocks.
V. GUADALUPE
FOR ALL THE pleasant ease of the first few steps on the firm ground, he quickly discovered that even the sand was preferable to this going, for sharp-edged rocks bruised his feet through the thin soles, and his spurs caught and clanked on every projecting stone. Moreover, the scrupulously shop-made boots gave no play at heel or instep, and he lumbered and halted in his stride. A sensation of prickling heat about the heel told him that the skin was chafing away. But a snug shoe and a horse with a long rein, these had been his two dominant requirements for so long that he had come to think of his body as necessarily terminating in boots. The yipping of a coyote mocked him as he paused, and the barking made him think of the coyote’s fluffy fur and how it would feel against his aching feet. The cry of the little hunter was coming down the wind, for otherwise Lee could never have come within a mile of the wanderer’s acute nose, but now Lee took covert in a brake of scrub cedar and heard the yelping coming straight at him.