by Max Brand
He called himself forcibly to the attention of Circle City and, having stepped to the center of the stage, he remained there. He turned himself into a frightful plague through his appetite which was for dogs. He would eat anything with no more conscience than fire, but his regular diet was dogs. Even for wolves a diet of Eskimo Huskies seems rather tough, for Huskies are themselves nine-tenths wolf. In the dog teams working from Circle City, there were more than a few pure-blood wolves pulling at the lines. However, the Lightning Warrior did not spare them. Anything which had been tainted by the hand of man was especially delightful to him. He cared not so long as the animal was large enough to make him a few mouthfuls.
There were in Circle City some Mackenzie Huskies that were twice the size of the average wolf and that were twice as hardy as well, for they were kept in the pink of condition by hard labor and spare feeding. A Mackenzie Husky will hamstring a horse or a cow as neatly as ever a wolf could do the same job. A Mackenzie Husky fights like a wolf, fencing for an opening, cutting and slashing as with a saber. Nevertheless, Joe Frazer saw two Huskies of the biggest type, weighing well over a hundred and fifty pounds apiece, slaughtered by that white plague, the Lightning Warrior.
At the time, Joe carried no gun. He could merely shout and run toward the fight from a distance, but long before he arrived the throats of the two dogs were cut. Joe said that the wolf seemed twice the size of the dogs. We knew this could not be. I suppose it was action which magnified the apparent size of the monster, that and the results of his daring play. He fought right on until Joe Frazer was almost on the spot. Then the Lightning Warrior gave the coup de grâce to the second of the Huskies, standing with a forepaw on each of the dead bodies and defying Joe with a look to come on.
Joe was not a fool. When he saw the silent snarl of that brute, he started backing up, and the infernal creature at once came stalking after him, sliding along on its stomach. Joe had only a hunting knife. He drew this out, but he said he would just as soon have faced a lion, armed with a stiletto, as to face that white beast with a mere hunting knife in his hand. He began to shout. Every time he yelled, the wolf paused a little and looked off at Joe’s house in the distance.
Finally, the shouts of Joe got to the ear of Jim Bridger, who was Joe’s partner, and Bridger came running out with a rifle in his hands. When the Lightning Warrior saw the rifle, he turned and went for distance and more air. Joe Frazer said that the animal started so fast and worked so hard to get into the middle of the horizon that he left a moan of effort in the air behind him. Certainly he faded out so fast that Bridger could not even attempt to shoot. At any rate Bridger was a strange fellow, and he did not shoot on principle. I heard him talk the thing over with Joe Frazer.
“You might have winged him,” Frazer insisted.
Bridger answered: “Nothing told me to shoot at him.”
“Nothing told you?” shouted Frazer. “Wasn’t I there howling my head off to make you shoot at that white lump of murder?”
“No voice inside of me told me to shoot,” said Bridger. “There’s no good in taking a crack at any wolf unless you’ve got guidance.”
“You talk like a crazy man,” said Frazer.
Perhaps Bridger was a little touched on the subject, but he remained as sober as you please and swore that nobody in Circle City would get a bullet into the Lightning Warrior until it pleased the beast to permit the shooting. People laughed at Bridger, and very rightly after he had said this. When Bridger saw people laugh, he grew hot with anger. He actually made a standing bet that nobody in Circle City would shoot or trap the Lightning Warrior. He bet a hundred ounces of gold dust on the proposition.
A hundred ounces, at seventeen dollars an ounce, made pretty good pay for a small job. When people heard that Bridger was in earnest and actually had put up the sack at the saloon, they started to work their heads off to get that wolf. For a few days they burned up ammunition, but none of the bullets grazed the Lightning Warrior. Bridger used to hear the stories with a faint sneer.
“None of you will ever get him,” he swore.
He began to grow complacent. I think that the wolf had been half a joke to him at the first, but now it more than justified all that he ever had claimed for it. So Bridger erected the thing into a mystery. He no longer smiled when the Lightning Warrior was mentioned, but he would put on a profound and understanding air and shake his head a few times, and he was apt to leave the room if people persisted in the subject. Then came the Morrissey affair, and after that the subject of the wolf was taboo with everyone.
IV. TRAILED BY A GHOST
MORRISSEY, A BIG, powerful Irishman, had gone out from Circle City with a string of eight dogs, practically a double freight team. The Lightning Warrior went with him. He ate dogs one by one, killing them in the night. At last, Morrissey slept with the remaining in a huddle about him, the four wedging closely together. He did not need to tell them why he wanted them there. They seemed to know. The dread of the monster was in the air, and they had breathed it.
A dog was killed that very night. Poor Morrissey heard the crunching of its neck bones under the teeth of the beast as he awakened from a sound sleep and saw the Lightning Warrior go off, bearing the body of the Husky trailing from his jaws. After that Morrissey tried to keep awake all the way back to Circle City, but he was eight days out and, of course, he failed. He dropped all but one sled, and he put out at full speed with his remaining three dogs. Two days later, he dropped into a brief slumber after a halt. He was wakened by a wild outburst and saw his three dogs banded valiantly together, facing the white killer. They might as well have tried to escape from death itself. The Lightning Warrior stopped playing when he saw the man waken. He broke the neck of the leader and, when the other dogs backed away, the wolf went off with its profits. This all had happened far too rapidly for Morrissey to intervene.
A day or two later, the Lightning Warrior no longer kept out of sight. He was always to the right and a little ahead of the sled team. He seemed to poor Morrissey as big as a lion, and a thousand times more diabolical. As Morrissey was staggering along, half dead for the lack of sleep, that infernal brute ran in and killed his seventh victim right under the eyes of the driver! Then Morrissey had only one dog, and he lightened the sled to skeleton proportions and made the burst of the last two days toward Circle City.
The first day the last remaining sled dog was struck down by the white lightning. On the final march which he made without a pack of any kind, with nothing to eat except a few tea leaves to crumble between his teeth, that fiend of a Lightning Warrior followed him closely, followed him with an increasing interest, until Morrissey felt sure that the diet list of the Lightning Warrior would be soon varied with flesh other than that of dogs. He managed to keep his eyes open but, when he pushed open the door of the saloon and staggered in among us, I can assure you that Morrissey was a very sick-looking man.
He was white and shaking, and he poured off three shots of that stifling whiskey, one after the other. Somebody asked Morrissey why he was so pale, and Morrissey asked the other how he would look if he had been jogging across country with a demon to dog his steps? Morrissey went quite out of his head when he talked about it. It was a month before he was sound mentally, and we used to have to sit and listen to him raving in the wildest way.
Poor Morrissey! He recovered his mental balance, finally, but he had been very hard hit. From being the most openhearted, cheerful fellow imaginable, he became sullen and morose nor would he have anything to do with his oldest friends. After the Morrissey business, the hunting of the white plague became a passion with everyone. The town combined. Rifles, poison, traps of all kinds, lures and baits of all descriptions were employed. The townsmen worked together. I helped during the hunting on many a bitter day and night.
This whole episode made a terrific impression upon all of us in Circle City. Men had carried weapons before in the hope of getting a chance at the Lightning Warrior and the hundred ounces. Now, when we wen
t armed, I think that none of us really wanted to encounter the brute, no matter how good the light for shooting. I won’t go so far as to say that a single wolf had terrorized the entire community, but it was something very akin to a panic that gripped the men of the town. I can look back clearly to my own emotions of the moment and remember that the last thing I wanted was an opportunity to win the hundred ounces of the reward.
If it had not been for the Lightning Warrior, we would have talked about nothing but Cobalt and Sylvia Baird until the following season, but the Lightning Warrior first divided our attention, and then he practically monopolized it. We had to rub our eyes when Cobalt suddenly turned up one day with five of his crew at his side. He had brought twelve hundred pounds of nuggets and dust from the diggings!
The few of us who were not at the mines at the moment went half mad when we heard of this bonanza. Cobalt gave up his claims now that he had his money. He said that three mule packs of gold dust were enough for any man, and I suppose that he was right. At any rate other people went out to work on the very spot where Cobalt had found his fortune, and they collected exactly nothing at all. It had been more luck than skill. He had struck some rich pockets. When they were emptied, there was little more than a trace of the right color remaining.
One can imagine the excitement in Circle City now. For here was Cobalt back among us, his pockets filled with gold. Yonder was lovely Sylvia Baird who had told him, in jest or in madness, that she would marry him when he could give her certain things. To be sure, he was not rich now, but he had enough assured him to make certain of a pleasant home.
I remember that we looked upon Cobalt with a gasp of new surprise. We talked the matter over among us, and we decided that, if the girl had asked for a crown of diamonds, Cobalt would have ripped open the earth with his bare hands until he found it. We had faith in him before. We had an infinite faith in him now.
He spent two days in resting, that is to say in drinking! The two terms were synonymous with Cobalt as with most of the other miners, but he had a head of well riveted armor-plate, and there was no addling him with alcohol. At the end of the two days he went to call on Sylvia Baird.
She was ready for him. At least she was as well prepared as a human being can be before meeting a giant like Cobalt. She told him how wonderful he was. When he named the weight of the dust he had brought in from the mines, she considered it and decided that the income from such a sum, well invested, would just about do to house her wonderful husband properly.
On this day snow was falling. The flakes whirled with a stifling thickness outside the window, and it seemed that the world had been clapped into a flour sack and well shaken with the dust. Sylvia kept poking at the window and scratching designs on it. Cobalt sat in the opposite corner of the room and watched her like a wolf. He knew perfectly well what she was thinking, and she knew that he knew. Their conversations were the oddest games in the world.
For instance, when her father came in, Sylvia said: “Look, look, Father! Here’s Cobalt back from the mines and quite a rich man now. Have you met my father, Cobalt? Oh, yes, on the day you asked him if you could marry me. Sit down, Father, and talk to Cobalt a little and feast your eyes on him. He’s looking a little thinner, don’t you think, the poor dear! You’ve had some frostbite in that poor red nose of yours, Cobalt.”
Henry Baird tried to break through the air of banter and mockery between that pair. “Look here, Sylvia,” he said, “I want to know how seriously you are taking this whole affair?”
“Seriously?” cried Sylvia. “Good heavens, Father, of course I can’t be anything but serious. Not considering the opportunity that’s been cast in my path. Father, you don’t suppose — oh, this will amuse Circle City. This will fairly dissolve Cobalt with laughter — to think that any woman could even dream for a single moment of refusing to marry him!”
Cobalt stuck out his jaw more than a trifle, but he did not answer this scoffer. Henry Baird looked sharply at the younger man.
“Cobalt,” he said, “is this a game with you, too? Or are you really serious?”
“Mister Baird,” Cobalt stated, “I’m going to play it the way she wants. If she wants to laugh at me, she can keep right on laughing up the steps to the altar because that’s where I’ll lead her one of these days.”
“Of course you will,” said that little imp of a Sylvia. “Of course, you’ll lead me to the altar, if you want to. Oh, Cobalt, when I think of the number of girls whose hearts will break that day. When you think of it, Cobalt, how can you be so cruel to them all? Oh, the poor things! They can’t help loving you, Cobalt. They can’t help it any more than I can help it. You ought to know that.”
“Go on. Go right on, Sylvia,” said Cobalt. “I like the taste of you today better than ever. I like to sit down and close my eyes and just listen and pretend to myself that you’re a man, after all, and big enough for me to put my hands on you.”
“That’s what I call real love, Father,” commented the girl. “He cares for me so much that sometimes he thinks I’m as important as a man. Oh, Cobalt, what a delightful flatterer you are. Did you ever hear anything like it, Father?”
“I never heard anything like you, Sylvia,” replied her father sternly.
“It’s Cobalt who inspires me,” said Sylvia. “You can’t expect me to remain ordinary when such a man as Cobalt has noticed me. You can’t expect that, can you?”
“Sylvia,” returned her father, “you ought to be whipped and put to bed without supper. Cobalt, I don’t know exactly your attitude, but I’m ashamed of the way Sylvia is acting.”
“Yeah,” agreed Cobalt, “she’s acting, all right, but one of these days she’ll find that I’m up there on the stage with her and signed for life in the same company. That’s what I’m waiting for. Sylvia, what do you want for an engagement ring?”
She held out one of her lovely hands. “I never wear rings, my dear,” she said, “but I’ll tell you what I’d simply adore.”
“Tell me then,” said Cobalt.
“I’d be charmed to have the skin of the Lightning Warrior, Cobalt, without the marks of trap teeth, or knife, or bullet on any part of him,” stated the girl.
V. STALKING
SOME IMP MUST have stolen into the mind of Sylvia. Otherwise, she never could have conceived such an idea. To capture the Lightning Warrior was almost fabulously difficult. The best hunters and trappers of Circle City, where all men could hunt and trap a little, had tried in vain, tempted by that offer of the two thousand dollar reward. But, to capture him without either traps or bullets or knives, this was preposterous!
Cobalt, as he listened to her, watched her deep blue eyes intently. He stood there like a stone, staring, while Baird was saying: “That’s a foolish remark, Sylvia. As if a man could go out into the wilderness and capture the white beast bare-handed!”
“Oh, Father,” said Sylvia, clasping her hands together in mock admiration of Cobalt, “you don’t know what he can do. He himself hardly knows. No other man can match the things that he does. Do you think that he will shrink from a little thing like this?”
Cobalt asked: “Is that the price mark on the tag?”
She half closed her eyes. I imagine she was thinking fast and hard, and there was no doubting the direction of his last remark. Everything had been a jest. Even the ripping of that fortune out of the earth was a part of the joke. This was different. If he went out with his bare hands to do this marvel, their mutual jest would have drawn to an end. She did not answer the last remark directly, therefore, but merely said: “I’ve always wanted a big white fur.”
So Cobalt said good bye and left her the second time and heard her father saying angrily that she should not press a jest as far as this. It was a joke, but Cobalt intended to turn it into earnest. That same day he went out from Circle City with his dog team, his half-wild string of savage brutes, and traveled up the Yukon slowly. His load was chiefly dried fish for his team, and the goal of his journey was the Lightning
Warrior. The dogs were bait. The weapon and the trap consisted merely in a strong rope.
He was no expert with a lariat, so he practiced on the way, making a thousand casts a day to get the hang of the thing. Suppose that he managed to get the rope over the head of the brute, how would he proceed? His hands would have to be the clubs that beat it senseless. Or did he even think of what he would do when the crisis came? Perhaps not. His was a simple plan. To the execution of it, he would trust patience and his superhuman power of arm and body.
On the second day he saw the Lightning Warrior, the first time his eyes had rested on the beast. He had trusted that his team would be followed as Morrissey’s was followed. He was right. When he saw the big silhouette of the monster, standing on a white hummock against the sky, the old superstition thrust into his mind that this might be a man-wolf, a loup-garou.
The brute seemed to know perfectly that the man carried no gun. He stood there on the top of the hummock and allowed the dog team to pass him at a distance of fifty feet.
That savage team should have become wildly excited at the sight of the wolf. They should have tried with all their might to get at him. Instead, they hung their heads and seemed oppressed with fear. Cobalt stopped them and went out with his rope toward the brute that remained on the hummock. When he was six strides from him, he yawned at Cobalt like a cat, showing his red gullet and the teeth gleaming like pearls. Then he bounded to the side and was gone into a thicket.
Even Cobalt’s heart beat fast, and he hesitated before entering the underbrush. But enter it he did. He walked cautiously. He was an excellent woodsman, and he knew how to step so that his feet made no noise that a human ear at least could hear. Before he had gone ten paces, he heard the terrified yelling of his team and rushed back to see what had happened. It was the Lightning Warrior that had happened. He had come out of the shrubbery and, giving his shoulder to the leader, had killed that dog with a single slash across its throat. Now the team cowered together. They did not seem to have offered the slightest resistance to the white thunderbolt which now sat at a little distance and licked the blood from his snowy breast and from his forelegs.