by Max Brand
A flash of gray disappeared over the next ridge. Suppose the stranger had seen and guessed the identity of that hollow-ribbed horse?
“I’m due over yonder,” said Lee. “I gotta start on!”
“Oh,” grunted the prospector, and his glance dropped to the polished surface where the discarded holster had played against the trousers. There is only one thing that ordinarily sends a man into the mountains without horse or weapon. “Oh,” repeated the prospector. “If that’s the way of it, I won’t bother you, but, when a gent wants to make speed, he’ll save time by eatin’ along the way. Speaking personal, which here’s hoping you don’t take it the wrong way, you look like the devil. Damned if you don’t make me think of a pore old rambledly shaklety gray hoss that went dragging himself across my trail a while back. By heaven, I looked at that old skeleton and fingered my gun. I come near putting him out of his pain. You’re like him—” He broke off with an enormous laugh that set Lee’s nerves jumping. “Not that I was figuring on pulling a gun on you, too!”
Far off the sun glimmered again on the stallion. He was gaining mortal ground every moment. Lee would not stay for food, but tobacco? He closed his fingers over the quartz rock that he still carried until his hand ached.
“If you can give me a handful of tobacco?”
The prospector flushed to the eyes.
“If you’re short,” said Lee, “don’t bother about me.”
“Wait,” said the other huskily. He caught Lee by the shoulder as the latter started to turn away. “Wait a minute.” He was panting in his anxiety. “Three days I been nursing this here pipe along, without lighting it, because it’s all burned out, and because I got just one pipeful left. I been chewing the pipe stem and drawing on it, kind of fooling myself.”
He dug into his pocket and brought out a palm half filled with gold and silver coins. “I got fifty dollars here that ain’t doing me no good. Here’s half for you. You can fit yourself out the first dump you come to, but just leave me the bit of tobacco. Is that square?”
“Sure,” said Lee, “but I don’t want your money.”
The flush of the other turned to a deep purple. “My name’s Olie Guttorm,” he said. “You ask about me in these parts, and they’ll tell you that I’m square. I’ll split the tobacco with you fifty-fifty!” He dragged out a battered sack, secured by many wrappings of string.
“Never mind,” said Lee, and, to show his indifference, he tossed up the quartz and caught it again. “Never mind, Guttorm, I can get along.”
But as he turned, Guttorm caught him back and froze Lee’s wrist in a mighty grasp, while he stared at the rock in his hand.
“Rose quartz,” he murmured, “and hematite of iron, and gold in the hematite!” His little pale-blue eyes flared at Lee. “I can see why you’re in a hurry. I been bursting my heart over a quartzite, breaking four inches a day, and here you come with this!” He added humbly: “Is there much in sight?”
“A whole hill of it.” Lee spoke with his eyes on the faint horizon toward which the stallion must be moving. Only that wild hunger for tobacco auctioned him.
“Guttorm, I’ll give you this sample, partner, and I’ll tell you where to find the rest of it. Will you hand me over that tobacco?”
Guttorm cradled the rock in both his hard hands. The tobacco had fallen to the ground. “D’you mean it” he cried. “D’you mean it?”
Lee stooped and picked up the tobacco. He said: “You see that hill away back yonder with the mountain with white rocks on top to the left? That’s the place.”
A thread of doubt held Guttorm. “Are they following you that close?” he asked, “and you without a gun? You can’t even stop for this? A whole hill of this?”
“The sun is red on it, Guttorm.”
The prospector struck the burro a tremendous thwack that sent it scampering over the ridge. He himself followed as fast, paused on the crest, and waved to Lee with a shout, then dropped out of sight.
VIII. THE BATTLE
BEFORE THE HEAD of Guttorm sank from sight, Lee was filling his pipe in such trembling haste that he dropped precious shreds of tobacco in the gravel. He heeded it not, for now the pipe was lighted and the first life-giving breath of smoke drawn into his lungs. It went so deep that hunger was forgotten, his brain cleared, and new energy vitalized his flaccid muscles. He started again in the pursuit.
From the second ridge he sighted Moonshine in the hollow. With forelegs sprawled wide, the stallion was tearing at a bunch of sun-faded grass, and, when it came up by the roots, he staggered loosely. The mustang was weak as a fever-stricken child, and Lee Garrison grinned with a cruel satisfaction. He walked straight on, leisurely, until the pipe was smoked to the last cinder. Then, his body light with the strength of that stimulus, he cut around the stallion at a swift run, keeping out of sight beyond the next hill, and finally dropping down in a perfect covert among rocks that seemed to be directly in the line of the gray’s march.
He had barely reached shelter, when the mustang topped the ridge above and paused there, looking back down the trail, as if he sought for the familiar form of his tormentor. Moonshine was a skeleton, indeed, but his head was still proud. Then he came down the slope. Halfway along the descent he began to trot, because the steep pitch of the ground forced him forward, and he lacked the strength to brace back. Striking the level floor of the valley, he staggered drunkenly, and then he headed toward the rocks where his enemy lay.
Lee went sick with excitement. He forced himself to look away until his heart stopped rioting. It was a shallow valley with the bright streak of a river in its midst, a river that pitched out of view in the distance and sent back the dull mumbling of a waterfall.
A snort from the gray made the watcher look back to the horse. The stallion had stopped very nearby. His shoulders, once so smoothly, powerfully muscled, were now sharp ridges. The broad chest was hung with flabby skin. But now, as some alarm was brought vaguely to his mind, his neck arched, his ears pricked, and his eyes shone with the old unconquerable fire.
Garrison waited until those drawling feet went by — an eternity of waiting. He had even time to close his eyes and pour forth his soul in prayer. The next instant he started to his feet and threw the rope, quickly, before the tremor in his heart spread to his hand.
There was still a mysterious well from which the ruined horse drew strength. As the rope leaped past him, he started into a plunging gallop. How different from that neat-footed and lightning stride that had once been his! Once he would have twisted and dodged and darted away as a snipe flies, but now he could only pound straight ahead. The noose struck the ground, and his forefoot landed inside it — Moonshine was flung heavily on his side. He whirled to scramble again, working the rope. The lariat writhed around every leg, and Moonshine lay hopelessly entangled. One great struggle and then he was still — the quest was ended. Moonshine was captured.
Lee looked down at his brown hands with a deep wonder that there had been strength enough in them to win such a battle. A thousand pains that had tortured him on the trail now burned through him again. And a thousand hopes were now transformed into a kingdom of victory.
He stepped back to look at his prize. It was a captive body, but the spirit — ah, that was a different thing. The eye that he turned upon the man was as steady and bright as a star. For a long time they stared at one another before the glance of the beast wavered from the glance of the man. Then the gaze neither dropped nor turned, but plunged straight past and far off into the pale blue of the sky. A chill quivered through Lee Garrison. He followed that glance and saw a wavering black speck in the sky. He knew by the flight that it was an eagle.
“Dear God,” sighed Lee. “If I could make you my hoss, Moonshine!”
With the shirt from his back he made a bandage for the eyes of the mustang. Next, he loosened the rope on the legs and allowed the horse to rise. Moonshine merely shook his head a little at the clinging darkness, and Lee cut the rope in two, using part of it
for a cinch, with bits of cloth fastened at the sides by way of stirrups. The rest he fashioned into a halter with a slip noose, so that, with a strong pull, he could choke the horse. A rock nearby gave him a step, from which he easily swung into place on the back of the stallion. But Moonshine merely shuddered and was still.
The time had come. Lee fixed his feet in the stirrups and tore the bandage away. For a moment Moonshine did not stir, then he shot from springs, straight up. He came down with his head lowered, his feet bunched closely together, and whirled like a spinning top. Only a chance kept Lee from being slung to the ground. Thereafter, he found himself not on a horse, but on a great cat, so swift, deft-footed, and serpentine was the twisting course of Moonshine. Clinging as he could, while the shocks numbed his brain and the circling sickened him, he knew that had the mustang possessed a tithe of his ordinary strength, no man could have stayed on his back.
And Moonshine fought with the power of nervous convulsion. He reared and threw back. Lee flung himself clear and rolled away barely in time. The forehoofs of the stallion, as he twisted to his side, missed the face of Lee by a scant fraction of an inch. Lee ran in and scrambled to the back of the horse as Moonshine lurched up again. The rope had been pulled high above his nose — he could not be choked down.
He passed in a frenzy of bucking, straightened out of a dizzy circling, and raced down the valley. It was incredible that this pitiful skeleton could run with a man on his back, yet run he did, though with a stagger in his gallop. He plunged into a cedar brake, and Lee, flattening himself along the back of the mustang, was whipped and cut by the flying branches, but he was still in place when they reached the open. Another scheme came to the horse. He bore to the left and galloped close to the wall of the cliff. A projecting rock edge caught Lee’s trousers at the hip and ripped off a leg as cleanly as the bark slides from a willow twig. Providentially it did not reach his flesh, and he hooked his leg in front of the shoulder. But Moonshine now veered from the cliff and halted short with his breath coming like the wind through an old bellows. It was not yet surrender. His head was high, and his ears were pricked, as if he had lost all interest in the conflict and was regarding some pleasant form among the clouds. In the pause the hoarse murmur of the waterfall floated up the valley, and Lee remembered with a shudder the voice of dead John Ramps.
In that direction the head of the stallion was turned, and, as Lee strove to drop the noose lower over the nose of the stallion, Moonshine lunged into a rickety gallop again. Almost at once Lee understood. He knew strange tales of horses who had preferred death to submission. Twice, Lee threw his weight back against the rope. It staggered the horse, but did not stop him. He held straight on where the bright rushing of the water dropped into thin air. The voice had grown to a deep, steady chorus.
Still no thought came to Lee of throwing himself from the back of the gray, although he knew that this was no sham charge such as that with which the wise horse had striven to frighten him from the throat of the oxbow loop on the Rio Grande. For Moonshine, despite rickety gallop and heaving sides, had pricked his ears as though safety lay close before him. To him it was better, far better, to die than to yield at the end of the battle, and, as the man understood the mind of the horse, he dropped the rope so that it swung wildly from side to side, and, throwing up his hands, he shouted wildly above the rushing of the waters.
A steel-bright curve like the bend of a scimitar, the river dropped over the cliff. Moonshine flung himself into bodiless air. It whirred past the ears of Lee as they fell. He looked up to the blurred blue of the sky. He looked down to the flash of the water beneath them, not in sorrow, but crazy joy, so that the cataract that drowned his senses with noise was like a thunderous burst of music into the heart of which they were hurtling.
He gave a last look to the beautiful, brave head of the horse. Then they struck.
He felt a stinging clap on hands and face. He shot deeply into the pool, thrusting farther and farther into the cushioning waters. Still he lived, and the rocks had not crushed him. He struck upward and lay on the surface, gasping, with a shower of spray in his face. A moment more and he had swum to the shallows, and, standing up in water no deeper than his thighs, he looked about him. The leap he had thought was death was beggarly small. It was not the distance that it fell, but the volume of the river that kept the valley so full of talking echoes.
The stallion was far down the pool, where the current boiled out of the pit, and there the white form whirled in an eddy, lying on its side, and flashing in the sun at each revolution. Lee pushed to the shore and ran stumblingly over the rocks. The eyes of the stallion were closed, the tongue lolled out, and the swift water was carrying away thick streaks of crimson. Plunging into the stream again up to his waist, he caught the head of Moonshine in both his arms, and, inch by inch, he drew his prize from the thousand hands of the currents. His heel struck a shelving bank. They were in shoal water, but dizziness began to seize his brain. With the help of Providence he would give one last outpouring of his strength. The effort sent the blood out of his head, and a wave of darkness began at his feet, sapped the nerves of his knees, and swept up. He felt himself collapsing and struck the air with his open hands as if at an enemy. Then, with a last motion of consciousness, he caught at and found the head of Moonshine. He sank into black unconsciousness.
IX. THE GREATER BATTLE
HALF HIS BODY was immersed in the icy water, and this helped to call back his senses. He opened his eyes and found the head of Moonshine lifted above him. Moonshine living! Yes, fiercely alive, for, when he rolled away, the stallion snapped at him like a wolf. Sitting wearily on the bank, Lee watched the struggles of the gray to climb.
They were helpless efforts. Moonshine was trying to drag himself out by one foreleg only, and naturally each effort merely toppled him heavily on the opposite side. Yet, he had worked himself high enough to expose the reason why the other foreleg hung idle. The bony outer casing of the hoof was torn loose from the tender flesh and the million nerves within. Exhaustion stopped the stallion. He lay clumsily upon one side, rearing his head up with indomitable courage, and defying the man with great, bright eyes, although his nostrils quivered with pain.
Heavy-limbed, down-headed with exhaustion, Lee studied the case. Here was a wild mustang, willing to die rather than surrender, and, moreover, here was a horse so injured that even the finest doctor might not be able to heal that dreadful wound.
He looked up and down the valley in search of help. Above them, west and north, ran the line of cliffs over which the river tumbled, but eastward, beginning with the course of the stream, a broad meadow grew up into rolling land and hills behind. Willows straggled along the water edge, and farther back were quaking aspen, cedar, and big firs and spruce as a dark background. Some day it would catch a settler’s eye, but at the present there was no hope of succor, and the greatest mercy for the stallion would be quick death. He drew his knife, but looked upward before he opened the blade.
Over the eastern hills great clouds, white and blue and shadowy, came tumbling up into the sky; a bird whistled near him; the world was full of cheer. But in that happy sky he saw half a dozen specks, floating in circles. The buzzards had already marked the fall of the horse. So all the heartbreaking labors of that trail had been to give one more victory to the scavengers. He started to his feet. The hot revolt gave him strength anew, and he hurried down to begin the battle to save Moonshine.
First of all, he must give him a dry bed, and, since he could not draw the gray from the waters, he must draw the waters from the horse. It was not so very hard to do. He rolled down big stones from the bank and made a wide circle around the stallion. He filled the larger interstices with smaller stones and smooth-edged pebbles. Over the outer surface he next strewed water plants, and, using a section of the outer rind torn from a stump whose heart was pulpy and rotten, he shoveled sand and mud over all the dam until it was watertight. With the same rude shovel he scooped out the water within t
he dam until at last Moonshine lay on gravel and sand from which the last moisture was swiftly draining away in little rivulets.
He was so exhausted by this time that, when he strove to speak a hearty word to the horse, he could only stammer out a thick-throated groan. He must find food at once. In the nearest cedar brake he knocked over a mountain grouse and roasted it hastily. While he ate, he could look down through the open woods to Moonshine by the river. His head had fallen, now, and no doubt he gave himself up for lost. He knew the meaning of the black shapes that circled low and lower from the sky. Perhaps he had seen others of his herd drop in the race, and a month later passed the whitening bones. Lee looked again at cliffs, trees, water, and sky, and accepted the chance quietly.
He went down through the meadows where the long, rich grass was growing, and he tore up armfuls of it, as much as he could carry, and brought it back to Moonshine. But the stallion disdained food rank with the man scent. He lifted his head and studied a flight of clouds. But there was endless patience in Lee. He had not been schooled in the long agony of the trail for nothing.
For ten minutes he sat with a tuft of succulent, white-rooted grass presented. And at last, with swift, sensitive lips, his eyes fixed guiltily upon the man, Moonshine stole a shred of the grass and gathered it into his mouth, jerking his head high with a snort. He even trembled in fear of the retribution that might overtake him, but the man, in the wealth of his deep and secret wisdom, smiled. He knew how great a victory had just been won. And to be sure, in a little time, the horse was eating neatly from the palm of his open hand.
The next step in that struggle was far more difficult. It was to bandage the torn hoof, and Lee approached the task with infinite diplomacy. He excavated a small hole on the edge of which he wished to rest the fetlock joint and so suspend the injured hoof where no pressure would grind against the raw nerves. But when the hole was dug, how was he to move that hoof save by bringing his hand within reach of teeth that might crush the bones to a pulp? But even that terrible risk he was willing to take. He advanced, little by little, the hand from which the horse had eaten, and all the while his steady voice brought a thousand glittering lights playing and softening in the eyes of the stallion. When, at length, his fingers touched the slender leg, the gray head darted down like a striking snake, and the teeth fastened over Lee’s forearm.