by Max Brand
I asked him one day what had given him his leads and where he had learned prospecting.
He replied: “I never learned anything, Chalmers. I’m stupid about it. I just throw in where other fellows are digging and trust to luck. Well, just now I’m having some luck.”
“You’ve got your luck, and you’re turning it into gold, all right.”
“I’ve got my luck,” he agreed, “but I’ll need the hard cash. What does a good hunter cost?”
“A hunter?” I asked, not following him.
“I mean, a horse, a good hunter. One of the best.”
“Anywhere from five hundred to fifty thousand, I suppose. Well, fifteen hundred for a bang-up good horse.”
He whistled. “She’s going to be expensive,” he said. “She wants to hunt. She wants three or four hunters unless I really am generous. Great Scott, what would generous be translated into horseflesh?”
“Oh, some people keep a string of a dozen or more.”
He groaned. “She’s expensive, all right. But I don’t mind that. I want to see her on a horse. She’d look pretty good in the saddle, wouldn’t she?”
“She’d be wonderful on the back of a horse.”
“She’d be something to look at — ,” he observed and fell into a day dream about her, so that I forbore talking to him any longer on this occasion.
It was a hard summer for me. The labor was all that I could stand, and the bad food and the worse cooking gradually wore me down. I did not wait for the winter freeze to come with its full force. I packed up and lugged all the way to Circle City a few days before the rush back began.
I arrived in time to see the beginning of the Yukon freeze. One could hear the noise of the ice miles and miles away, like a great and irregular cannonade. When I came up, I found the big yellow flood scumming across with glass in the shallows, and white piles and ruined marble masonry came crashing and heaping upon the sand banks.
I was glad to see the winter beginning. I did not care how much white iron there was on it, for I was tired, very tired. I promised myself, after one more year I could get out of the white North and back to my own land. A whole winter’s rest did not seem sufficient to get the ache out of the small of my back. Yet, as a matter of fact, one good sleep was enough to set me up. The very next day I ran into Baird. There was a fine, seasonable sharpness in the air and a whirl of snowflakes which melted out of sight as they touched the ground, but the winter was approaching.
“Coming up this way, all right,” I said to Baird.
“Is he?” asked Baird, giving me a wild look. “When does he arrive?”
I examined the man. He was much changed. He had grown thinner during the summer, and his eyes had receded into his head. He had the appearance of one just risen from a sick bed, in fact.
“I meant the winter,” I said, frowning at him.
He gasped, only gradually arriving at my meaning. “Yes, yes!” he nodded. “The winter, of course, the winter!”
Off in the distance the ice just then gave a grumble and a grating like a thousand carts unloading in a single instant. Baird jerked about and looked in the direction of the river. I remember how the snow whirled about his head in a sudden flurry just then. He looked as hopeless and desperate as a tame beast in a howling wilderness.
I said: “Look here, Baird, what’s the matter with you?”
“What’s the matter with me? Why, nothing’s the matter with me,” he answered.
He began to look away from me, but I tapped him on the shoulder.
“How’s Sylvia?” I asked him.
“Well, she’s alive,” he answered. “Why do you ask about Sylvia? How do you expect her to be?”
I disregarded his testiness. He was sick either in body or mind, perhaps in both. Certainly he could not be worried about his business. He had ripped a big fortune out of the earth and was still ripping it. Sylvia must be his worry, and Sylvia alone.
At last I said: “Baird, don’t talk like a sulky baby. Be a man.”
“Ah!” he said, “you can talk. You have no children!”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I have two of ’em back home.”
This appeared to be a startling revelation to him. He caught me by the arm and looked searchingly at me. “You have two children back home, and yet you’re up here? You’ve got a wife and a pair of youngsters, and yet you are up here?” He spoke in a most excited tone.
“In one more season I’ll have enough piled up,” I answered. “At least, that’s what I’m betting. Then I go back.”
He paid no attention to this last answer. He exclaimed merely: “If you have children, you can understand. You can understand how a man’s heart can be broken, I mean.”
“Is your heart breaking about Sylvia?” I asked him. Then: “Yes — I suppose it is.”
“Come home with me. I want you to see her. You have to see her in order to understand.”
“I don’t want to see her,” I answered. “I don’t want to understand, either. I’ll tell you what, Baird — I’m sorry, but I don’t want to have anything to do with you and Sylvia and Cobalt. I don’t want to think about it, even. It makes me too sick.”
He looked somberly at me, half occupied with his own misery. “Well, you’ll come home with me, all right,” he persisted. “I want to ask you a question.”
“Ask it here in the street. I’m ready.”
“You can’t answer it till you’ve seen Sylvia.”
“I don’t want to see Sylvia. Is she taking it hard? — don’t answer that either! Good bye.”
I tried to get away from him, but I could not. He held me as the ancient mariner held the wedding guest. He simply took me by the arm.
“Come along,” he said. “We’re just wasting time standing around here.”
He must have seen the surrender in my face long before. Now I gave up, muttering and mumbling in vain protest, and walked beside him to the house. When we were near to the house, I heard Sylvia’s violin.
“That’s good,” I said. “That shows that she’s keeping her spirits up, all right.”
“Does it?” asked Baird despondently.
He knocked at the door. There was a scratching of feet inside, then the horrible, throat-tearing snarl of a wolf inside.
“Who is it?” called Sylvia.
“Great Scott, man,” I said, “don’t tell me that Sylvia’s in the same room with the Lightning Warrior, and the beast on the loose?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You’ll see,” was all he said. Then: “It’s I, Sylvia. I’ve got Chalmers here with me.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she returned. “Wait till I get King by the scruff of his neck. Now it’s all right. Come on in, Dad!”
He turned around and gave me a good, long look, then he pushed up on tiptoes, I stopped so short. There was the Lightning Warrior, do you see, looking bigger and fiercer than ever, and the only thing that kept him from jumping at my throat was the little, childish hand of Sylvia which held him by a bit of the mane. He snarled again.
“Idiot!” said Sylvia, and with her other hand she aimed to slap him lightly between the eyes, just where the brow of a lobo wrinkles with such deep wisdom. “Idiot,” she repeated once she had struck that terrible head.
The Lightning Warrior stopped growling and licked her hand. He gave her a furtive, upward glance of deepest love and then once more turned the full weight of his hostile attention toward me.
“Come in,” invited Sylvia. “Come right in and don’t worry about him. Only, don’t touch him. That’s all.”
“I won’t touch him,” I assured her. “I don’t need the warning.”
I squeezed against the wall, trying to keep my distance as I edged through the door. That wolf looked to me like naked lightning about to strike, and there was only the restraining touch of that young woman to keep him quiet.
“That’s what I wanted you to see,” said Baird. “That’s why I wanted you to come home with me, old fellow.”
> XII. GETTING IN DEEP
IT WAS WORTH a long trip, of course, just to see the way that loup-garouhad been tamed by the girl. It seemed to me that there was no trace of red about the eyes, and that the very iris of the eyes was a darker, deeper blue now. He had become the very shadow of Sylvia Baird, so moving that his head was always under her hand. Nevertheless, it was not to see the wolf that Baird had brought me. He had carried me home so that I could see Sylvia herself.
I’ve said that Baird was much changed, but his alteration was as nothing compared with the new look of his daughter. Poor Sylvia! The joy and the sting had gone out of her. She was as white and still as a cut flower, and sometimes in talking the blank expression accompanying a far-off vision crossed her eyes. Yet her courage kept her head high. As I looked at her, I cursed Cobalt, then Baird for persuading me to come to the house, then myself for having been such a gull as to be dragged along. I had known that there would be nothing but pain inside those walls, and I was right. There was only one pleasant subject apparently, and you may be sure that I jumped at that and clung to it.
“How in the world did you do it, Sylvia? It’s a miracle. That white fiend! I still can’t believe it. He’s dangerous.
He’ll get you one day when your back is turned.”
“No. He won’t attack her,” said Baird. “She’s turned her back on him a thousand times.”
“Tell me, Sylvia,” I insisted. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “We had him there in the back yard for a week or so, held by a regular horse chain, and he spent half his time trying to tear out the staple that held the chain and the other half would be grinding away at it until you could hear the sound of his teeth on the steel links all through the house. It put my nerves on edge, and so I decided to stop it. I went out and took off his collar.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Then he must have had a chance to slash you.”
“Well, he had a chance, but he didn’t.”
“Go on, Sylvia,” urged her father. “You never told me just what you did. Go on and tell us exactly.”
“Why, I did nothing. I just unbuckled the collar.”
“Didn’t he attempt to tear your throat?” I asked her.
“He looked as though he would, for a minute.”
“And then?”
“When I got my hand on the collar, he seemed to realize in a way that I was there to help him and not to make him more miserable.”
I did not need to close my eyes in order to see that picture of the girl leaning over the fighting head of the Lightning Warrior. I could hear the vibration of his snarling and see the demon in his eyes. What had made her do it? And what silken tissue of mental power had kept the big wolf in restraint during that instant? No one who loved life would have taken such a chance. In fact, she must have hardly cared whether she fell to Cobalt or to the teeth of the wolf. So, even by way of the pleasanter topic of the wolf, I was forced back again to the thought of Cobalt. He filled the whole mental horizon in that house.
We had some tea with brandy in it, Russian style, and Sylvia sat up as hold as you please and told me the town chatter how many log rafts had come down the river in the last month, how the Pickering boys had brought down the biggest raft ever seen only to have it swept on a swift current past the city. It went to pieces, and their summer’s work went out to sea to make driftwood another day for the fires of the Eskimos. That was the summer when Judge Colfax was killed by Sidney Rice, and she told about that, while I watched her in pain and admiration, hearing little of her words but seeing her effort, most of all when she forced herself to smile.
When she got up to bring more hot water for the tea, I turned to Baird and abused him to his face. “You couldn’t keep it to yourself, could you?” I said. “You had to invite me in so that I can have bad dreams the rest of my life, too. Confound you, Baird, if you want to keep her out of the hands of Cobalt, it’s your own business. Go ahead with it. But it’s rotten to drag me in here. Poor Sylvia! What a brick she is!”
Baird sighed. “She’s not a brick. She’s an angel. She’s all blue and gold as a cloud. I love her. You love her. Everybody loves her. But she goes to Cobalt!” He bowed his head. There was no doubt that his hair had turned quite a bit grayer during the summer. “There’ll be children, too,” he went on bitterly. “More of the wolf breed, the wolf strain. Chalmers, tell me what I’m to do about it?”
“That’s enough. Another word, and I leave the house. Don’t you try to drag me into the business!”
“Ah, man,” said poor Baird, “don’t talk to me like that. You know that you were in on it the day the hand was dealt all around. You were here. You helped to make the decision. Now, you can’t dodge that. Dig down into your deepest pocket, and for Sylvia’s sake tell me what I’m to do!”
I fell into a perspiration, but just then Sylvia came back, carrying the pot of steaming water and with the head of the great wolf just under her hand. After she’d refilled our cups, she sat down, with one arm around the shoulders of the huge fellow. When she was sitting beside him, his head was almost on a level with hers.
“He’s crazy about you, Sylvia,” I observed. “I can see that. You make a grand picture there, my dear, with that cannibal beside you.”
“Do I?” queried Sylvia, scratching the wisdom wrinkle between his eyes until he turned his great head and looked fixedly in adoration at her.
“Was it this way from the start?” I asked. “From the minute that you leaned over him, like a suicide, and took his collar off?”
When I said that about suicide, I kept a straight eye on her and had my reward. For her head tipped up suddenly, and she gave me a frightened glance. I had been right in my guess. It was as if she had tried a revolver that day, and the gun had misfired. I grew a little sick. I thought of that delicate body lying still and the crimson welling at the throat. I had to shrug my shoulders and so bring myself back to common sense and the things of the day.
She went on to explain: “He kept slinking away and snarling when I came near. But every day I spent a long time in the yard. Perhaps he got used to me. Then there was a time when I came up behind him as he was snapping at a bone. He whirled about, snapped at me, and got my arm in his mouth. He seemed to remember while his teeth were in the air, as it were, and he didn’t even break the skin. He just held onto my arm, and his eyes were on fire, let me tell you. He sort of dared me to budge, and you can bet that I didn’t stir. I just talked to him until he got quieter. He let go my arm and licked my hand.”
“I wish I had seen that,” I said. “You’re a brave girl, Sylvia.”
“Look, look!” scoffed Sylvia. “He’s admiring my self portrait. Now, don’t you be so silly.”
“You are a brave girl,” I insisted, “and now, by heaven, something is going to be done!”
She just rubbed the head of the Lightning Warrior and looked thoughtfully at me. At last she began to shake her head. “What could be done?”
“We’ll cut and run for it,” I suggested.
“I’ve thought of the same thing,” put in Baird.
“You bet you’ve thought of it,” I told him bitterly. “You just wanted me to bolster up your courage a little. Well, I forgive you. Sylvia, we’ve got enough time. Cobalt won’t be in from the creek for a week. We’ll make tracks. There’s going to be snow by tomorrow morning. Listen to that wind! You feel the fingertips of it beginning to poke under the door and through the cracks? Yes, there’ll be plenty of snow in the morning, and we’ll get out and travel. That’s settled.”
The girl only wagged her lovely head at me, without a smile, without a gleam. “You know what would happen?” she asked.
“Well, what would happen?”
“He’d catch us. He might not hurt Dad very much, but he’d kill you, Tom Chalmers. He’d kill you as sure as sin. You know it, too.”
I didn’t need to have her say so. Of course, he would kill me, but I said: “Oh, don’t you b
e so sure. After all, guns are guns and bullets don’t pick and choose.”
“I’m not so sure,” she said. “I don’t think that a bullet would choose Cobalt.”
“Why not?” I asked her. I was curious to hear her explanation for such a belief.
“I’ll tell you why. I think that a bullet won’t stop him until he’s done some other things that he’s meant to do,” she said.
“Oh,” I responded, “you’re feeling fatalistic about him, are you?”
“Yes, I am. Aren’t you?” she queried.
“If I hear his name again, I won’t sleep all night,” said her father.
“You bet you won’t,” I said. “You’re going to sit up all night anyway, while we plan things and get our outfit together. It won’t be the easiest thing in the world to get out tomorrow morning, making as late a start as this.”
“Do you mean that you’d go through with it?” asked Baird.
“Wait, wait!” cried the girl. “It won’t do. You’re both quite mad. He’d overtake us so easily, and then what would we do? Even if you’re mad enough to try the thing, I wouldn’t go along. Not I! I wouldn’t let Tom Chalmers be thrown away. Father, what in the world are you thinking of? I’m going to get us some more brandy. You wild people really need another drink.”
When she was out of the room, the white ghost stalking beside her, I leaned a bit toward her father and the thing I did not want to say but had to finally came out: “She won’t go peaceably, so we’ll kidnap her, man. We’ll take her along by force!”
XIII. A SCREECHER
LIKE SOME ANIMAL that hears the clang of the trap and the bite of its teeth at the same instant, I realized that I was caught in the thing for good and all. Baird would hold me to it. I could see that by the joy in his face, but we could not talk any longer as Sylvia came back at that instant. We pretended to have dropped the matter, persuaded by her, but afterward, when I left the house, Baird found an excuse for going along with me. He was frightened and excited, and the moment we were outside, bending our heads against the wind, he shouted to know whether or not I had been in earnest. I told him that I was, so we went down to the saloon and found a quiet corner for talking.