by Max Brand
No, it was not the body or the soul of the beast that Cobalt had mastered. It was only the brain. He left the body un-crippled and strong. He had not overwhelmed the hidden soul of the great animal and won his love. He simply had subdued the brain until the monster felt helpless in the grip of his master’s will.
How was all this finally accomplished? Cobalt would never say. He could be persuaded to say a little about the days when he used to sit and fix his eyes upon the wolf, and how they had stared at one another, but there he ended.
I remember how the bartender leaned across the bar, his eyes like two moons, and asked: “How did you do it, Cobalt?”
We all listened, as for the voice of a prophet, but Cobalt simply said: “Why, look here, boys, it’s not the first time that a man has caught a wild wolf and tamed it. And he’s tame, isn’t he? Look at him. Gentle as a lamb.”
Gentle as a chained demon, he should have said. Someone verged too close to the brute and got a silent snarl that made him jump ten feet. Yes, the Lightning Warrior was gentle to the hand and the will of his master, but in reality his very soul was plunged deeper in revolt and rage against all men. We thought that we could read one extra page in the story. Beside the right eye of Cobalt and running down his cheek, there was a thin red line. It was a scar such as a knife stroke might have left. It would whiten in time, but at this very moment it looked just like a little stream of fresh blood.
Yes, other men had caught wild wolves and taken them. They had caught the wolves with cunning traps, and they had taken them with a whip. But one glance at the face of Cobalt told us other things. We knew, in a flash, that his bare hands were the weapons with which he had schooled the beast.
For my part, as I looked at them, I realized another thing: that there was tragedy in the offing. It seemed that Cobalt felt my gaze for presently he said to me: “Chalmers, will you walk out with me? I want to talk to you a little.”
I went out with him into the arctic sun, which is not like the sun of more southerly places. There is always some trace of a dream about it. It is a thing seen with the mind rather than something felt by the body, though in all conscience I have seen it hot enough even in that Far North.
We went out, with me stepping rather short and keeping half an eye or more upon that white monster. I think he was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. The whiteness of a polar bear was tawny compared with him, and the whiteness of the most brushed and bathed, combed and fluffed lap dog was dull compared with the pure brightness of the Lightning Warrior.
“Now, Chalmers, you’re older than I am,” said Cobalt, facing about and giving me his eye in that direct and almost intolerable fashion of his.
“I’m a good deal older, as years go, Cobalt,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Cobalt, for he always hated the half answers which make up the talk of most of us. “What do you mean by older as years go?”
“I mean,” I said, hunting through my mind, “that time is a thin effect with a lot of us, thin as arctic sunshine. I’ve seen men, Cobalt, who can age more in a year than others can in ten.”
“Age how?” he asked.
“Ideas, thoughts, accomplishments.”
“And trouble?” he finished off.
“Yes, trouble,” I admitted, uncomfortably.
“Do you think that I’ve raised trouble now?” he asked me.
I hesitated.
“Oh, you know. Everybody knows about it,” he said.
“Perhaps that’s the chief trouble,” I said.
“Why?” he demanded sharply.
“Well, you can see for yourself,” I responded.
“Don’t tell me what I can see for myself, man,” said Cobalt. “Tell me what you see.”
I saw that he was under a strain. He was at the breaking point and, if he broke, the explosion would shake Circle City.
“I’ll tell you something,” I parried. “Once when I was a youngster, there was a marriage advertised in a side show in a circus. The tallest man in the world was to marry the fattest lady in the world. They sold admissions for fifty cents. I was only a boy, and I went and saw the marriage.”
“What has that got to do with me?” he asked. “What has that got to do with me and — well, with me and Sylvia Baird?”
He challenged me with his hard, bright eye, which was turning from gray to a pale, luminous blue. I think that the Scandinavian warriors of another age must have looked like that when they ran naked into the dance of the swords, the banquet of the blades as they used to call it.
“I mean,” I said, “that it was a pretty public thing — the engagement, the marriage, and all in that circus tent.”
He pointed a finger at me like a gun. “You really mean that I’ve dragged Sylvia too much out into the light of publicity.”
I nodded.
“All right,” he said. “All right! I see what you mean. And what do you think? That I’m going to back down?”
“Back down?” I echoed quite vaguely.
“You know, throw up the game, just because she’s a little sensitive?” He tried to smile. It was only a grimace. Then he broke out: “You come along with me to the Baird house, will you? I want to talk some more to you.”
I knew that he did not mean that. He wanted me there in the hope that my presence would help him to keep from doing some wild, absurd thing. I went, unwittingly and very much afraid, at his side up the street.
VIII. STRAIGHT TALK
BEFORE WE QUITE came to the Baird house, we could hear Sylvia’s violin singing and soaring over the voices of a couple of men. When she opened the door to us, flushed and happy and smiling, I saw Tom Benton and Jay von Acker there in the dimness of the room with her. It was one of her favorite amusements. There was mighty little music in Circle City, and Sylvia’s fiddle accompanied anyone who had enough of a voice to attempt a song. She saw me first and gave me her usual smile, behind which I don’t think there was any real design but which radiated in such a way that, wherever she looked, she seemed to have found something that peculiarly and particularly pleased her. I was a good deal older than most of the boys who flocked around Sylvia, and I should have known better, but now and again she pulled at the strings of my heart in such a way that a little pang of melancholy pleasure would be stirring within me all the rest of the day.
That was the smile she gave me and her hand asking me in. Then she saw two other things, Cobalt and the Lightning Warrior. She would have fallen, I think, or else she would have jumped back into the room. But she got a good grip on the edge of the door and held herself in place. I saw the scream come into her eyes, swell in her throat, and die out again as she mastered herself. All in a moment she was herself again, and actually she went a step past the threshold and gave Cobalt her hand. She gave him her smile, too. I turned about and saw this. The smile was so perfect that no one except Cobalt would have noticed her pallor.
Then came two yells from inside the house. Benton and von Acker came tumbling out to see the great white brute and admire and exclaim over it. Cobalt gave them the smallest half of a smile and no answer at all. So they pulled in their heads and got themselves off down the street.
Sylvia gave me an inquiring look, and I saw that she wanted to be alone on the field of battle, but Cobalt said: “I asked him to come along because I wanted someone to see how you’d get along with the wolf.”
“Why should I get along with the Lightning Warrior?” she asked him. “I only wanted his skin.”
“There’s his skin on him,” said Cobalt, “without the mark of a knife or a bullet or the teeth of a trap.”
“Goodness!” Sylvia gasped. “How did you manage to do it? But, of course, I knew that you would!”
“Did you?” answered Cobalt, with a little hard ring in his voice that sent tingles up my spine and a weakness down my legs. “Well, there’s the skin exactly as you asked for it, Sylvia. Chalmers, she wanted the skin of the Lightning Warrior instead of an engagement ring —
without a mark or a break on it. So you’re a witness that she has what she asked for.”
I hated this being used as a witness. He was going to drive her into a corner.
“Do come in, both of you,” she said.
“You wouldn’t leave the poor old-timer outside, would you?” asked Cobalt, patting the head of the wolf.
She looked at the Lightning Warrior very much as one might look at incarnate evil. “Well,” she commented, “I suppose you think it’s safe to have him in the house?”
“Why isn’t it?” asked Cobalt. “Look at this!”
He spoke and, at his command, that white murderer sat down, lay down, gave his paw, fetched the hat which Cobalt threw on the snow, and finally stood up on his hind legs, put his forepaws on the shoulders of the man, and looked at him with eyes that were on a level. Their faces were not inches apart. I saw the Lightning Warrior begin to shake and tremble all over, while his lips twitched and blood seemed to flow into his eyes. It was not fear, mind you, that made him quiver. It was a frightful desire to have the life blood of the man, and that impulse was mastered only by a deep-rooted awe.
For my own part, I never saw a picture that chilled me more thoroughly. Poor Sylvia looked on with a sick face. Cobalt would not say a word about the year he had spent in the wilderness, working to get this animal and to subdue it so perfectly. Rather he chose this way of giving one an insight into what he had accomplished. I stared at the face of the wolf and the face of the man, and upon my honor I found them strongly similar, even to the sneering expression. The scar stood out on the face of Cobalt like a thin line of blood. Sylvia saw all these things with eyes at least as sharp as mine.
“If he’s so gentle as that,” she said, “of course he’s welcome in the house. What a beauty he is!”
The Lightning Warrior dropped to the ground and followed his master into the house. There he backed into a corner of the room where the shadow was deepest but through which we still could see the red glint of his eye and the strange blue of its iris, like the blue of Cobalt’s own eye. We sat down, and she offered us tea.
“I never drink tea when I’m not on the march,” said Cobalt.
We were all silent for a moment. I suppose it was Sylvia’s duty to carry on the conversation in some way, but she had to pause and gather her strength for the trial. Just then Sylvia’s father came in. He had already heard about the coming of Cobalt, and he was puffing from his rapid walking, returning to his home. He gave us both an eager, worried, half-frightened look before he shook hands and sat down with us.
“A marvelous thing, Cobalt,” he said. “Extraordinary! I don’t see how you’ve accomplished it, and I—” His voice trailed away. His eyes had found the red mark on the face of Cobalt.
“Nothing at all,” said Cobalt. “Sylvia didn’t want an engagement ring. She wanted the skin of the Lightning Warrior. There it is, you see.”
Baird tried to laugh, but his voice shook a bit. “You have a sense of humor, Cobalt,” he said.
“I hope that I have,” said Cobalt, “and a memory, too. I try to laugh when my turn comes. Did you say there was a joke somewhere in this, Mister Baird?”
“Why, Cobalt,” said Baird, “of course you understand, man — you know that a girl — on one meeting — you know that a girl couldn’t possibly — ?” He got altogether stuck.
Sylvia, leaning a bit forward in her chair, watched the two of them with an eager white face. Her hands were clasped hard together in her lap.
“I see what you mean,” said Cobalt, appearing very easy in his manner. “Naturally at a first meeting a girl wouldn’t send a man off to do a job like that unless she was dead serious. No right-minded girl would let him take his life in his hands and throw away the best dog team that ever hauled sleds out of Circle City and chuck a year of his life into the bargain. Why, Mister Baird, you don’t suppose that I think Sylvia would take me as lightly as that? Or you either, for that matter?”
Baird got out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “Not lightly, Cobalt,” he said with eagerness. “No one would take you lightly. Only, you understand that a casual remark in a casual conversation — you understand that a girl might casually say something to which she wouldn’t actually wish to commit herself.”
“Why, then I’ll find out,” said Cobalt, cool as could be. “Tell me, Sylvia, did you say the thing casually? Did you expect that I would try to do what you suggested, or did you not?”
I never saw grief and ghostly fear more vividly drawn than in the face and the staring eyes of poor Sylvia. My heart ached for her, and I wanted to break in with a few words, but I could find none. One can’t jest with the owner about the architecture of his burning house, and one could not be light with Cobalt about his year of labor. He had given himself to the utmost. Something in the drawn lines of his face showed that. Now what would be his reward?
Perhaps a sheer spirit of perversity had driven him onto the thing, but was there some justification, after all? Had he, on the day a year before, seen something in the face, heard something serious in the voice of Sylvia when she made the proposal about the wolf skin instead of an engagement ring?
“Sylvia!” broke out her father suddenly, “we’re waiting for you to speak. Were you serious when you spoke to him? Will you answer?”
She seemed about to speak when her father cut in again:
“But take your time. Think it over. Remember everything in that conversation. I’ve heard it from you before, but I never guessed that there was anything serious in what you and he had said to one another.”
She took a breath, then she said: “You can’t help me now, Father. I’m thinking back to that day. It was a pretty light conversation, Cobalt, wasn’t it?”
“As light,” said Cobalt, “as eagle feathers. As light as the feathers that they put on arrowheads. Isn’t that about it?”
She stared at him. “You mean,” she said, “that we both felt seriously about what we said?”
“I mean,” he said, “that I asked you to marry me.”
“No,” she said, correcting him, “but you did tell me that you were going to marry me. There’s a difference.”
He nodded. “Did you think I was serious?”
She did not answer for a second or two. My heart counted ten in a roll of thunder during the interval.
Then she replied simply. “Yes, I thought you were serious.”
IX. THE LOVE COURT
HER FATHER GOT out of his chair with a lurch and a jump, like a protesting lawyer at a trial. In a sense, this was a trial, with vital issues hanging upon the outcome. “Sylvia,” he cried, “think what you’re saying, will you? Think how you’re putting yourself into his hands!”
Then Cobalt said an astounding thing. “No, no, Mister Baird. That’s not the right angle and that’s not the way to look at the thing at all. As a matter of fact I don’t want to follow my own blind conviction. I want to do something with my eyes open and my head up. For my part I’m willing to take the opinion of you and Chalmers here to decide the case between me and Sylvia.”
I thought Baird would choke, such was the violence of his conflicting emotions. He cleared his throat once or twice and then began to blink and nod, his colorless brows going up and down, his pink face reddening. “Of course, Cobalt,” he conceded, “you’re a gentleman. Tut, tut, my dear lad, the whole north country knows that. There is only one way in which a gentleman can act at such a time. Tut, tut, I know all of that beforehand.”
“No, you don’t,” answered Cobalt, not violently but perfectly matter of fact. “You know what I’ll do. Nobody else does, because I’m in the dark myself.”
This was a considerable conversational snag, and no one could say a thing for a moment. It was Sylvia at last who remarked: “Let me try to understand, Cobalt. You want to convince yourself that you’re right, and then you’ll go ahead. You want to find out if, in the opinion of Dad and Mister Chalmers, I really committed myself. Then, no matter what my own opinion is
, you’ll go ahead?”
“You can put it that way,” said Cobalt.
“I don’t want to put it that way,” she responded. “I want to hear you put it in your own words.”
“Words are not what count from my side of the fence. Now then, Chalmers, what have you to say about the thing?”
“How can I say anything, Cobalt?” I asked him. “I don’t know what passed between you and Sylvia. I only know that of course no man can hold a woman against her will to an engagement so — well, so extraordinary.”
“Do you really think that?” he asked. “Then I’ve lost before the trial begins. Because I want a unanimous vote of yourself and Mister Baird on one side or the other as to whether or not you think Sylvia committed herself.”
He was wonderfully calm as indeed he remained throughout the interview, except for a flush now and again. When I heard these last words of his, you may believe that I pricked up my ears again. I saw that this was even a more serious matter than it had seemed before far more serious.
“What happened, exactly, from your own point of view?” asked Baird, mopping his face again. For that matter I was getting pretty moist myself.
“Do you mean,” said Cobalt, “from the very first?”
“Yes, tell us that,” said the father, nodding and setting his jaw.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you — from my viewpoint,” replied Cobalt. “The moment I saw her, I wanted her.”
“Say that more clearly,” I suggested. “You loved her?”
“I wanted her,” he insisted. “I wanted her the way a boy wants a knife that he sees in a window, or a horse in a circus, or an air rifle on a store rack. Love her? I don’t know. I wanted her. I heard a yegg one day telling how he saw an emerald pendant at the throat of a woman. He couldn’t get at it that night while she was wearing it, but he traced it to the bank vault in which it was kept. He blew the vault, sifted through the stuff it contained, and got his hands on the emerald. He turned around, and there were five cops with a dead bead on him. They sent him up for ten years or so. He got out, went back to the same bank, blew another vault, and was caught again. He went back to prison a second time for a longer spell. When I saw him, he was a gray-headed man. I asked him what had happened to the emerald. He took a piece of chamois out of his pocket and unwrapped it, and there was the emerald lying in the palm of his hand. He had a peaceful look in spite of his years in jail.”