The Max Brand Megapack

by Max Brand

  Someone, as he crossed the room, whirled to follow him with a glance. Andy heard, for his ears were sharpened: “I thought for a minute—But it does look like him!”

  “Aw, Mike, I seen that gent in the barroom the other day. Besides, he’s just a kid.”

  “So’s this Lanning. I’m going out to look at the poster again. You hold this gent here.”

  “All right. I’ll talk to him while you’re gone. But be quick. I’ll be holdin’ a laugh for you, Mike.”

  Andrew paid his bill, but as he reached the door a short man with legs bowed by a life in the saddle waddled out to him and said: “Just a minute, partner. Are you one of us?”

  “One of who?” asked Andrew.

  “One of the posse Hal is getting together? Well, come to think of it, I guess you’re a stranger around here, ain’t you?”

  “Me?” asked Andrew. “Why, I’ve just been talking to Hal.”

  “About young Lanning?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the way, if you’re out of Hal’s country, maybe you know Lanning, too?”

  “Sure. I’ve stood as close to him as I am to you.”

  “You don’t say so! What sort of a looking fellow is he?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Andrew, and he smiled in an embarrassed manner. “They say he’s a ringer for me. Not much of a compliment, is it?”

  The other gasped, and then laughed heartily. “No, it ain’t, at that,” he replied. “Say, I got a pal that wants to talk to you. Sort of a job on him, at that.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Andy calmly. “Take him in to the bar, and I’ll come in and have a drink with him and you in about two minutes. S’long.”

  He was gone through the door while the other half reached a hand toward him. But that was all.

  In the stables he had the saddle on the chestnut in twenty seconds, and brought him to the watering trough before the barroom.

  He found his short, bow-legged friend in the barroom in the midst of excited talk with a big, blond man. He looked a German, with his parted beard and his imposing front and he had the stern blue eye of a fighter. “Is this your friend?” asked Andrew, and walked straight up to them. He watched the eyes of the big man expand and then narrow; his hand even fumbled at his hip, but then he shook his head. He was too bewildered to act.

  At that moment there was an uproar from the upper part of the hotel. With a casual wave of his hand, Andy wandered out of the barroom and then raced for the street. He heard men shouting in the lobby.

  A fighting mass jammed its way into the open, and there, in the middle of the square, sat Hal Dozier on his gray stallion. He was giving orders in a voice that rang above the crowd, and made voices hush in whispers as they heard him. Under his direction the crowd split into groups of four and five and six and rode at full speed in three directions out of the town. In the meantime there were two trusted friends of Hal Dozier busy at telephones in the hotel. They were calling little towns among the mountains. The red alarm was spreading like wildfire, and faster than the fastest horse could gallop.

  But Andrew, with the chestnut running like a red flash beneath him, had vanished.

  Buried away in the mountains, one stiff day’s march, was a trapper whom Uncle Jasper had once befriended. That was many a day long since, but Uncle Jasper had saved the man’s life, and he had often told Andrew that, sooner or later, he must come to that trapper’s cabin to talk of the old times.

  He was bound there now. For, if he could get shelter for three days, the hue and cry would subside. When the mountaineers were certain that he must have gone past them to other places and slipped through their greedy fingers he could ride on in comparative safety. It was an excellent plan. It gave Andrew such a sense of safety, as he trotted the chestnut up a steep grade, that he did not hear another horse, coming in the opposite direction, until the latter was almost upon him. Then, coming about a sharp shoulder of the hill, he almost ran upon a bare-legged boy, who rode without saddle upon the back of a bay mare. The mare leaped catlike to one side, and her little rider clung like a piece of her hide. “You might holler, comin’ around a turn,” shrilled the boy. And he brought the mare to a halt by jerking the rope around her neck. He had no other means of guiding her, no sign of a bridle.

  But Andrew looked with hungry eyes. He knew something of horses, and this bay fitted into his dreams of an ideal perfectly. She was beautiful, quite heavily built in the body, with a great spread of breast that surely told of an honest heart beneath a glorious head, legs that fairly shouted to Andrew of good blood, and, above all, she had that indescribable thing which is to a horse what personality is to a man. She did not win admiration, she commanded it. And she stood alert at the side of the road, looking at Andrew like a queen. Horse stealing is the cardinal sin in the mountain desert, but Andrew felt the moment he saw her that she must be his. At least he would first try to buy her honorably.

  “Son,” he said to the urchin, “how much for that horse?”

  “Why,” said the boy, “anything you’ll give.”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” said Andrew sternly. “I like her looks and I’ll buy her. I’ll trade this chestnut—and he’s a fine traveler—with a good price to boot. If your father lives up the road and not down, turn back with me and I’ll see if I can’t make a trade.”

  “You don’t have to see him,” said the boy. “I can tell you that he’ll sell her. You throw in the chestnut and you won’t have to give any boot.” And he grinned.

  “But there’s the house.” He pointed across the ravine at a little green-roofed shack buried in the rocks. “You can come over if you want to.”

  “Is there something wrong with her?”

  “Nothin’ much. Pop says she’s the best hoss that ever run in these parts. And he knows, I’ll tell a man!”

  “Son, I’ve got to have that horse!”

  “Mister,” said the boy suddenly, “I know how you feel. Lots feel the same way. You want her bad, but she ain’t worth her feed. A skunk put a bur under the saddle when she was bein’ broke, and since then anybody can ride her bareback, but nothin’ in the mountains can sit a saddle on her.”

  Andrew cast one more long, sad look at the horse. He had never seen a horse that went so straight to his heart, and then he straightened the chestnut up the road and went ahead.

  CHAPTER 19

  He had to be guided by what Uncle Jasper had often described—a mountain whose crest was split like the crown of a hat divided sharply by a knife, and the twin peaks were like the ears of a mule, except that they came together at the base. By the position of those distant summits he knew that he was in the ravine leading to the cabin of Hank Rainer, the trapper.

  Presently the sun flashed on a white cliff, a definite landmark by which Uncle Jasper had directed him, so Andrew turned out of his path on the eastern side of the gully and rode across the ravine. The slope was steep on either side, covered with rocks, thick with slides of loose pebbles and sand. His horse, accustomed to a more open country, was continually at fault. He did not like his work, and kept tossing his ugly head and champing the bit as they went down to the river bottom.

  It was not a real river, but only an angry creek that went fuming and crashing through the cañon with a voice as loud as some great stream. Andrew had to watch with care for a ford, for though the bed was not deep the water ran like a rifle bullet over smooth places and was torn to a white froth when it struck projecting rocks. He found, at length, a place where it was backed up into a shallow pool, and here he rode across, hardly wetting the belly of the gelding. Then up the far slope he was lost at once in a host of trees. They cut him off from his landmark, the white cliff, but he kept on with a feel for the right direction, until he came to a sudden clearing, and in the clearing was a cabin. It was apparently just a one-room shanty with a shed leaning against it from the rear. No doubt the shed was for the trapper’s horse.

  He had no time for further thought. In the open door
of the cabin appeared a man so huge that he had to bend his head to look out, and Andrew’s heart fell. It was not the slender, rawboned youth of whom Uncle Jasper had told him, but a hulking giant. And then he remembered that twenty years had passed since Uncle Jasper rode that way, and in twenty years the gaunt body might have filled out, the shock of bright-red hair of which Jasper spoke might well have been the original of the red flood which now covered the face and throat of the big man.

  “Hello!” called the trapper. “Are you one of the boys on the trail? Well, I ain’t seen anything. Been about six others here already.”

  The blood leaped in Andrew, and then ran coldly back to his heart. Could they have outridden the gelding to such an extent as that?

  “From Tomo?” he asked.

  “Tomo? No. They come down from Gunter City, up yonder, and Twin Falls.”

  And Andrew understood. Well indeed had Hal Dozier fulfilled his threat of rousing the mountains against this quarry. He glanced westward. It was yet an hour lacking of sundown, but since mid-morning Dozier had been able to send his messages so far and so wide. Andrew set his teeth. What did cunning of head and speed of horse count against the law when the law had electricity for its agent?

  “Well,” said Andrew, slipping from his saddle, “if he hasn’t been by this way I may as well stay over for the night. If they’ve hunted the woods around here all day, no use in me doing it by night. Can you put me up?”

  “Can I put you up? I’ll tell a man. Glad to have you, stranger. Gimme your hoss. I’ll take care of him. Looks like he was kind of ganted up, don’t it? Well, I’ll give him a feed of oats that’ll thicken his ribs.”

  Still talking, he led the gelding into his shed. Andrew followed, took off the saddle, and, having led the chestnut out and down to the creek for a drink, he returned and tied him to a manger which the trapper had filled with a liberal supply of hay, to say nothing of a feed box stuffed with oats.

  A man who was kind to a horse could not be treacherous to a man, Andrew decided.

  “You’re Hank Rainer, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “That’s me. And you?”

  “I’m the unwelcome guest, I’m afraid,” said Andrew. “I’m the nephew of Jasper Lanning. I guess you’ll be remembering him?”

  “I’ll forget my right hand sooner,” said the big, red man calmly. But he kept on looking steadily at Andrew.

  “Well,” said Andrew, encouraged and at the same time repulsed by this calm silence, “my name is one you’ve heard. I am—”

  The other broke in hastily. “You are Jasper Lanning’s nephew. That’s all I know. What’s a name to me? I don’t want to know names!”

  It puzzled Andrew, but the big man ran on smoothly enough: “Lanning ain’t a popular name around here, you see? Suppose somebody was to come around and say, ‘Seen Lanning?’ What could I say, if you was here? ‘I’ve got a Lanning here. I dunno but he’s the one you want.’ But suppose I don’t know anything except you’re Jasper’s nephew? Maybe you’re related on the mother’s side. Eh?” He winked at Andrew. “You come along and don’t talk too much about names.”

  He led the way into the house and picked up one of the posters, which lay on the floor.

  “They’ve sent those through the mountains already?” asked Andrew gloomily.

  “Sure! These come down from Twin Falls. Now, a gent with special fine eyes might find that you looked like the gent on this poster. But my eyes are terrible bad mostly. Besides, I need to quicken up that fire.”

  He crumpled the poster and inserted it beneath the lid of his iron stove. There was a rush and faint roar of the flame up the chimney as the cardboard burned. “And now,” said Hank Rainer, turning with a broad smile, “I guess they ain’t any reason why I should recognize you. You’re just a plain stranger comin’ along and you stop over here for the night. That all?”

  Andrew had followed this involved reasoning with a rather bewildered mind, but he smiled faintly in return. He was bothered, in a way, by the extreme mental caution of this fellow. It was as if the keen-eyed trapper were more interested in his own foolish little subterfuge than in preserving Andrew. “Now, tell me, how is Jasper?”

  “I’ve got to tell you one thing first. Dozier has raised the mountains, and I could never cross ’em now.”

  “Going to turn back into the plains?”

  “No. The ranges are wide enough, but they’re a prison just the same. I’ve got to get out of ’em now or stay a prisoner the rest of my life, only to be trailed down in the end. No, I want to stay right here in your cabin until the men are quieted down again and think I’ve slipped away from ’em. Then I’ll sneak over the summit and get away unnoticed.”

  “Man, man! Stay here? Why, they’ll find you right off. I wonder you got the nerve to sit there now with maybe ten men trailin’ you to this cabin. But that’s up to you.”

  There was a certain careless calm about this that shook Andrew to his center again. But he countered: “No, they won’t look specially in houses. Because they won’t figure that any man would toss up that reward. Five thousand is a pile of money.”

  “It sure is,” agreed the other. He parted his red beard and looked up to the ceiling. “Five thousand is a considerable pile, all in hard cash. But mostly they hunt for this Andrew Lanning a dozen at a time. Well, you divide five thousand by ten, and you’ve got only five hundred left. That ain’t enough to tempt a man to give up Lanning—so bad as all that.”

  “Ah,” smiled Andrew, “but you don’t understand what a stake you could make out of me. If you were to give information about me being here, and you brought a posse to get me, you’d come in for at least half of the reward. Besides, the five thousand isn’t all. There’s at least one rich gent that’ll contribute maybe that much more. And you’d get a good half of that. You see, Hal Dozier knows all that, and he knows there’s hardly a man in the mountains who would be able to keep away from selling me. So that’s why he won’t search the houses.”

  “Not you,” corrected the trapper sharply. “Andy Lanning is the man Dozier wants.”

  “Well, Andrew Lanning, then,” smiled the guest. “It was just a slip of the tongue.”

  “Sometimes slips like that break a man’s neck,” observed the trapper, and he fell into a gloomy meditation.

  And after that they talked of other things, until supper was cooked and eaten and the tin dishes washed and put away. Then they lay in their bunks and watched the last color in the west through the open door.

  If a member of a posse had come to the door, the first thing his eyes fell upon would have been Andrew Lanning lying on the floor on one side of the room and the red-bearded man on the other. But, though his host suggested this, Andrew refused to move his blankets. And he was right. The hunters were roving the open, and even Hal Dozier was at fault.

  “Because,” said Andrew, “he doesn’t dream that I could have a friend so far from home. Not five thousand dollars’ worth of friend, anyway.”

  And the trapper grunted heavily.

  CHAPTER 20

  It was a truth long after wondered at, when the story of Andrew Lanning was told and retold, that he had lain in perfect security within a six-hour ride from Tomo, while Hal Dozier himself combed the mountains and hundreds more were out hunting fame and fortune. To be sure, when a stranger approached, Andrew always withdrew into the horse shed; but, beyond keeping up a steady watch during the day, he had little to do and little to fear.

  Indeed, at night he made no pretense toward concealment, but slept quite openly on the floor on the bed of hay and blankets, just as Hank Rainer slept on the farther side of the room. And the great size of the reward was the very thing that kept him safe. For when men passed the cabin, as they often did, they were riding hard to get away from Tomo and into the higher mountains, where the outlaw might be, or else they were coming back to rest up, and their destination in such a case was always Tomo. The cabin of the trapper was just near enough to the town to escape bein
g used as a shelter for the night by stray travelers. If they got that close, they went on to the hotel.

  But often they paused long enough to pass a word with Hank, and Andrew, from his place behind the door of the horse shed, could hear it all. He could even look through a crack and see the faces of the strangers. They told how Tomo was wrought to a pitch of frenzied interest by this manhunt. Well-to-do citizens, feeling that the outlaw had insulted the town by so boldly venturing into it, had raised a considerable contribution toward the reward. Other prominent miners and cattlemen of the district had come forward with similar offers, and every day the price on the head of Andrew mounted to a more tempting figure.

  It was a careless time for Andrew. After that escape from Tomo he was not apt to be perturbed by his present situation, but the suspense seemed to weigh more and more heavily upon the trapper. Hank Rainer was so troubled, indeed, that Andrew sometimes surprised a half-guilty, half-sly expression in the eyes of his host. He decided that Hank was anxious for the day to come when Andrew would ride off and take his perilous company elsewhere. He even broached the subject to Hank, but the mountaineer flushed and discarded the suggestion with a wave of his hand. “But if a gang of ’em should ever hunt me down, even in your cabin, Hank,” said Andrew one day—it was the third day of his stay—“I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me, and one of these days I’ll see that Uncle Jasper finds out about it.”

  The little, pale-blue eyes of the trapper went swiftly to and fro, as if he sought escape from this embarrassing gratitude.

  “Well,” said he, “I’ve been thinkin’ that the man that gets you, Andy, won’t be so sure with his money, after all. He’ll have your Uncle Jasper on his trail pronto, and Jasper used to be a killer with a gun in the old days.”

  “No more,” smiled Andrew. “He’s still steady as a rock, but he hasn’t the speed any more. He’s over seventy, you see. His joints sort of creak when he tries to move with a snap.”