She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking, as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold, outlandish petition.
* * *
CHAPTER VII
THROWING THE SCARE
Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald’s place the following day, from Sam Hatcher’s ranch across the river, bringing news that three homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give any further particulars; he did not know the victims’ names.
Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new procedure in the cattle barons’ land; this scourge had been fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given him.
The word had gone out to them to be on guard. Now death had begun to leap upon them from the roadside grass. Perhaps his own turn would come tonight or tomorrow. He could not be more watchful than his neighbors had been; no man could close all the doors.
The price of life in that country for such men as himself always had been unceasing vigilance. When a man stood guard over himself day and night he could do no more, and even at that he was almost certain, some time or other, to leave a chink open through which the waiting blow might fall. After a time one became hardened to this condition of life. The strain of watching fell away from him; it became a part of his daily habit, and a man grew careless about securing the safeguards upon his life by and by.
“Them fellers,” said Banjo, feeling that he had lowered himself considerably in carrying the news involving their swift end to Macdonald, “got about what was comin’ to ’em I reckon, Mac. Why don’t a man like you hitch up with Chadron or Hatcher, or one of the good men of this country, and git out from amongst them runts that’s nosin’ around in the ground for a livin’ like a drove of hogs?”
“Every man to his liking, Banjo,” Macdonald returned, “and I don’t like the company you’ve named.”
They never quarreled over the point, but Banjo never ceased to urge the reformation, such as he honestly believed it to be, upon Macdonald at every visit. The little troubadour felt that he was doing a generous and friendly turn for a fallen man, and squaring his own account with Macdonald in thus laboring for his redemption.
Banjo was under obligation to Macdonald for no smaller matter than his life, the homesteader having rescued him from drowning the past spring when the musician, heading for Chadron’s after playing for a dance, had mistaken the river for the road and stubbornly urged his horse into it. On that occasion Banjo’s wits had been mixed with liquor, but his sense of gratitude had been perfectly clear ever since. Macdonald’s door was the only one in the nesters’ colony that stress or friendship ever had constrained him to enter. Even as it was, with all the big debt of gratitude owing, his intimacy with a man who had opened an irrigation ditch was a thing of which he did not boast abroad.
Banjo made but a night’s stop of it with Macdonald. Early in the morning he was in the saddle again, with a dance ahead of him to play for that night at a ranch twenty miles or more away. He lingered a little after shaking hands with his host, trying the violin case as if to see that it was secure, and fidgeting in his saddle, and holding back on the start. Macdonald could see that there was something unsaid in the little man’s mind which gave him an uneasiness, like indigestion.
“What is it, Banjo?” he asked, to let it be known that he understood.
“Mac, did you ever hear tell of a feller named Mark Thorn?” Banjo inquired, looking about him with fearful caution, lowering his voice almost to a whisper.
“Yes, I’ve heard of him.”
“Well, he’s in this country.”
“Are you sure about that, Banjo?” Macdonald’s face was troubled; he moved nearer the musician as he made the inquiry, and laid his hand on his arm.
“He’s here. He’s the feller you’ve got to watch out for. He cut acrosst the road yisterday afternoon when I was comin’ down here, and when he seen me he stopped, for I used to know him up north and he knew it wasn’t no use to try to duck and hide his murderin’ face from me. He told me he was ranchin’ up in Montany, and he’d come down here to collect some money Chadron owed him on an old bill.”
“Pretty slim kind of a story. But he’s here to collect money from Chadron, all right, and give him value received. What kind of a looking man is he?”
“He’s long and lean, like a rail, with a kind of a bend in him when he walks, and the under lid of his left eye drawed like you’d pulled it down and stuck a tack in it. He’s wearin’ a cap, and he’s kind of whiskered up, like he’d been layin’ out some time.”
“I’d know him,” Macdonald nodded.
“You couldn’t miss him in a thousand, Mac. Well, I must be rackin’ along.”
Banjo scarcely had passed out of sight when three horsemen came galloping to Macdonald’s gate. They brought news of a fresh tragedy, and that in the immediate neighborhood. A boy had been shot down that morning while doing chores on a homestead a little way across the river. He was the son of one of the men on the death-list, and these men, the father among them, had come to enlist Macdonald’s aid in running down the slayer.
The boy’s mother had seen the assassin hastening away among the scant bushes on the slope above the house. The description that she gave of him left no doubt in Macdonald’s mind of his identity. It was Mark Thorn, the cattlemen’s contract killer, the homesteaders’ scourge.
It was a fruitless search that day, seeking old Mark Thorn among the hills which rose brokenly a few miles back from the river and climbed to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil’s darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.
As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him dead at the handles of his plow.
Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an institution of destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power strong enough to circumvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.
There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, bloody-muzzled great beasts of dark forests, that struck deeper fear into the hearts of primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer, from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.
Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage, combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five remained on the evening of the third.
It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads. When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the backing of the Drovers’ Association, which had an arm as long in that land as the old Persian king’s. He would strike there, like the ghost of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows’ blood, and slink away as
silently as a wolf out of the sheepfold at dawn when his allotted task was done.
Better to go home and guard what was left, they said. All of them were men for a fight, but it was one thing to stand up to something that a man could see, and quite another to fight blindfolded, and in the dark. Catching Mark Thorn was like trying to ladle moonlight with a sieve. The country wasn’t worth it, they were beginning to believe. When Mark Thorn came in, it was like the vultures flying ahead of the last, devastating plague.
The man whose boy had been shot down beside the little grass-roofed barn was the last to leave.
“I’ll stick to it for a year, Alan, if you think it’s any use,” he said.
He was a gaunt man, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes; gray, worn, unwashed, and old; one of the earth’s disinherited who believed that he had come into his rood of land at last. Now the driving shadow of his restless fate was on him again. Macdonald could see that it was heavy in his mind to hitch up and stagger on into the west, which was already red with the sunset of his day.
Macdonald was moved by a great compassion for this old man, whose hope had been snatched away from him by the sting of a bullet in the dawn. He laid his hand on the old homesteader’s sagging thin shoulder and poured the comfort of a strong man’s sympathy into his empty eyes.
“Go on back, Tom, and look after the others,” he said. “Do your chores by dark, morning and night, and stick close to cover all days and watch for him. I’ll keep on looking. I started to get that old hyena, and I’ll get him. Go on home.”
The old man’s eyes kindled with admiration. But it died as quickly as it had leaped up, and he shook his long hair with a sigh.
“You can’t do nothin’ agin him all alone, Alan.”
“I think I’ll have a better chance alone than in a crowd, Tom. There’s no doubt that there were too many of us, crashing through the brush and setting ourselves up against the sky line every time we rode up a hill. I’ll tackle him alone. Tell the neighbors to live under cover till they hear I’ve either got him or he’s got me. In case it turns out against me, they can do whatever seems best to them.”
* * *
CHAPTER VIII
AFOOT AND ALONE
Mark Thorn had not killed anybody since shooting the man at the plow. There were five deaths to his credit on that contract, although none of the fallen was on the cattlemen’s list of desirables to be removed.
Five days had passed without a tragedy, and the homesteaders were beginning to draw breath in the open again, in the belief that Macdonald must have driven the slayer out of the country. Nothing had been seen or heard of Macdonald since the evening that he parted company with Tom Lassiter, father of the murdered boy.
Macdonald, in the interval, was hard on the old villain’s trail. He had picked it up on the first day of his lone-handed hunt, and once he had caught a glimpse of Thorn as he dodged among the red willows on the river, but the sight had been too transitory to put in a shot. It was evident now that Thorn knew that he was being hunted by a single pursuer. More than that, there were indications written in the loose earth where he passed, and in the tangled brushwood where he skulked, that he had stopped running away and had turned to hunt the hunter.
For two days they had been circling in a constantly tightening ring, first one leading the hunt, then the other. Trained and accustomed as he was to life under those conditions, Thorn had not yet been able to take even a chance shot at his clinging pursuer.
Macdonald was awake to the fact that this balance in his favor could not be maintained long. As it was, he ascribed it more to luck than skill on his part. This wild beast in human semblance must possess all the wild beast’s cunning; there would be a rift left open in this straining game of hide and seek which his keen eyes would be sure to see at no distant hour.
The afternoon of that day was worn down to the hock. Macdonald had been creeping and stooping, running, panting, and lying concealed from the first gleam of dawn. Whether by design on the part of Thorn, or merely the blind leading of the hunt, Macdonald could not tell, the contest of wits had brought them within sight of Alamito ranchhouse.
Resting a little while with his back against a ledge which insured him from surprise, Macdonald looked out from the hills over the wide-spanning valley, the farther shore of which was laved in a purple mist as rich as the dye of some oriental weaving. He felt a surge of indignant protest against the greedy injustice of that manorial estate, the fair house glistening in the late sun among the white-limbed cottonwoods. There Saul Chadron sat, like some distended monster, his hands spread upon more than he could honestly use, or his progeny after him for a thousand years, growling and snapping at all whose steps lagged in passing, or whose weary eyes turned longingly toward those grassy vales.
There had been frost for many nights past; the green of the summerland had merged into a yellow-brown, now gold beneath the slanting sunbeams. A place of friendly beauty and sequestered peace, where a man might come to take up his young dreams, or stagger under the oppression of his years to put them down, and rest. It seemed so, in the light of that failing afternoon.
But the man who sat with his back against the ledge, his ears strained to find the slightest hostile sound, his roaming eyes always coming back with unconscious alertness and frowning investigation to the nearer objects in the broken foreground, had tasted beneath the illusive crust of that land, and the savor was bitter upon his lips. He questioned what good there was to be got out of it, for him or those for whom he had taken up the burden, for many a weary year to come.
The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft: “There must be millions behind the cattlemen.” He felt that he never had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never to overturn.
There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a lion for the bounty upon his head. And in the event that a lucky shot should rid the earth of that foul thing, how much would it strengthen his safety, and his neighbors’, and fasten their weak hold upon the land?
Little, indeed. Others could be hired out of those uncounted millions of the cattlemen’s resources to finish what Mark Thorn had begun. The night raids upon their fields would continue, the slanders against them would spread and grow. Colonel Landcraft believed him to be what malicious report had named him; there was not a doubt of that. And what Frances thought of him since that misadventure of the glove, it was not hard to guess.
But that was not closed between them, he told himself, as he had told himself before, times unnumbered. There was a final word to be said, at the right time and place. The world would turn many times between then and the Christmas holidays, when Frances was to become the bride of another, according to the colonel’s plans.
Macdonald was weary from his night vigils and stealthy prowlings by day, and hungry for a hot meal. Since he had taken the trail of Mark Thorn alone he had not kindled a fire. Now the food that he had carried with him was done; he must turn back home for a fresh supply, and a night’s rest.
It did not matter much, anyway, he said, feeling the uselessness of his life and strife in that place. It was a big and unfriendly land, a hard and hopeless place for a man who tried to live in defiance of the established order there. Why not leave it, with its despair and heart-emptiness? The world was full enough of injustices elsewhere if he cared to set his hand to right them.
But a true man did not run away under fire, nor a brave one block out a task and then shudder and slink away, when he stood off and saw the immensity of the thing that he had undertaken. Besides all these considerations, which in themselves formed insuperable reasons against retreat, there had been some big talk into the ear of Frances Landcraft. There was no putting down what he had begun. His dream had taken root there; it would be cruel cowardice to wr
ench it up.
He got up, the sun striking him on the face, from which the west wind pressed back his hat brim as if to let the daylight see it. The dust of his travels was on it, and the roughness of his new beard, and it was harsh in some of its lines, and severe as an ashlar from the craftsman’s tool. But it was a man’s face, with honor in it; the sun found no weakness there, no shame concealed under the sophistries and wiles by which men beguile the world.
Macdonald looked away across the valley, past the white ranchhouse, beyond the slow river which came down from the northwest in toilsome curves, whose gray shores and bars were yellow in that sunlight as the sands of famed Pactolus. His breast heaved with the long inspiration which flared his thin nostrils like an Arab’s scenting rain; he revived with a new vigor as the freedom of the plains met his eyes and made them glad. That was his place, his land; its troubles were his to bear, its peace his to glean when it should ripen. It was his inheritance; it was his place of rest. The lure of that country had a deep seat in his heart; he loved it for its perils and its pains. It was like a sweetheart to bind and call him back. A man makes his own Fortunate Isles, as that shaggy old gray poet knew so well.
For a moment Mark Thorn was forgotten as Macdonald repeated, in low voice above his breath:
Lo! These are the isles of the watery miles
That God let down from the firmament.
Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man’s trust;
Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust—
Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining soul. Its fight was his fight, and there was gladness in the thought.
His alertness as he went down the slope, and the grim purpose of his presence in that forbidden place, did not prevent the pleading of a softer cause, and a sweeter. That rare smile woke in his eyes and unbent for a moment the harshness of his lips as he thought of brown hair sweeping back from a white forehead, and a chin lifted imperiously, as became one born to countenance only the exalted in this life. There was something that made him breathe quicker in the memory of her warm body held a transitory moment in his arms; the recollection of the rose-softness of her lips. All these were waiting in the world that he must win, claimed by another, true. But that was immaterial, he told his heart, which leaped and exulted in the memory of that garden path as if there was no tomorrow, and no such shadow in man’s life as doubt.
The Rustler of Wind River Page 7