by Max Brand
“Be still,” hissed Barney Dwyer. “Come with me down here while I get the mare.”
She was in a frenzy of excitement, rearing, stamping, pulling back on the rope that tethered her to the manger. But when Barney came near, she was quiet at once, her whinny no more than a whisper of greeting.
He sighed with happiness as his hand touched the silk of her flank. That battered saddle that Daniel Peary had given with her he recognized by the rough tatters of leather. It hung almost directly behind her, and quickly it was on her back, and the bridle over her head. He led her to the first two, and untied their lead ropes. He was at the door of the barn, with Peary beside him, when the great voice of McGregor rang through the night.
“Peary! Len Peary! What’s come of you, man?”
Instantly the cry of Peary answered, pitched wild and high by desperation: “Here! Quick . . . the devil’s got me helpless in his hands. Dwyer . . . ”
The grip of Barney strangled that shouting voice. He picked up the struggling bulk of Peary like a sack of bran, threw it across the saddle of the gray horse, and himself sprang onto the back of the tall gelding that had been second in the line.
With the grip of his knees he had to hold his place. With one hand he guided the gray. With the other hand, he mastered Peary and kept him in place, while the horses broke into a trot. A glance to the side showed a dim figure racing from the house. A gun spoke, sending the whir of a bullet high above his head.
“He’s on the left horse!” yelled the voice of Peary. “Stop him, Mack! I’m tied! I’m tied!”
The gun spoke again, and this time the shot cut close to Barney’s head. He swung the horses clumsily around the end of a haystack and brought them to a gallop, while the red mare ranged ahead, dancing, leaping, pitching in her joy of freedom and of motion.
Side-by-side the horses cantered.
“You’ll have no good of it in the end,” groaned Peary. “You may win today, but, before the finish, you’ll be cursing. I’m going to kill you for this, Dwyer. I’m going to kill you inch by inch.”
But Barney was too busy to answer. He was tying another length of twine that passed from the wrists of Leonard Peary across his body and was fastened at the other end to the horn of the saddle. After that, and only now, he remembered weapons. Under each of Peary’s armpits he fumbled for and found a revolver held by a spring holster. These he transferred to the two empty holsters that were attached to the saddle in which he was himself sitting. Lastly he fastened the reins to the pommel of his saddle, and now he was ready for riding at full speed.
The horses, unguided, had slanted across to the trail that pointed toward the town of Timberline, whose lights were scattered in irregular groupings before them; now Barney urged them to a full gallop down that road. For behind him he knew that the swift hands of McGregor must by this time be whipping saddle and bridle onto the fastest horse in the barn. And perhaps already Big Mack was on the road, and rushing in pursuit.
“D’you hear me?” shouted Peary. “If you try to take me into Timberline, if you let the people see me tied up like a bundle of laundry, I’ll throw myself off the horse. There’ll be nothing but a dead rag of me, and be damned to you!”
“Where else can I take you?” called Barney in answer.
“There’s a draw to the left that you can ride down. D’you see it now?” urged Peary. “Turn down it. He’ll never guess you’ve gone that way around the town.”
It opened like a wide shallow trench, and into it rode Barney, for he knew that his captive was desperate enough to commit suicide rather than allow himself to be made into a public spectacle.
Thick turf muffled the beating hoofs of their horses, instantly, and so he was able to hear the ringing gallop of the pursuer, flying straight down the trail toward Timberline.
IX
If that were Big Mack, his horse kept on raising the echoes all the way into Timberline, while Barney, beginning to breathe again, put the horses into a trot.
They went steadily on out of the big hollow in which the town stood. From the brim of the slope, Barney looked back on the keen lights of Timberline, and so passed on among the hills until the darkness of the forest began around him. He had not the slightest idea of his place or of the proper direction.
So at last he said to his companion: “Peary, can you tell me the way back to your father’s ranch?”
“You mean that you’d really take me there?” demanded Peary.
“Yes,” answered Barney.
A rage of groaning and of curses broke from the lips of Peary. “What’ll you gain by that?” he demanded. “You mean to say that my father offered you enough coin to make it worth your while to risk your neck, taking me back home?”
“No, not for your father, so much.”
“For what, then?”
“Sue Jones thinks you ought to go home,” said Barney.
“I’m going crazy!” exclaimed Len Peary. “She thinks that I ought to go home? By God, Dwyer, is she the one that persuaded you?”
“She didn’t persuade me. But she seemed to think that it would be best.”
“I see it all, now,” said young Peary. “You want her. She says that you can have her, once I’m brushed out of the way. So you cart me away like a watch dog that’s a nuisance . . . Dwyer, when I first saw your smooth mug and your round eyes, I thought that I’d have the killing of you, someday, and enjoy it. Now I know that I will.”
“Have her?” cried Barney. “D’you think that she’d so much as look at a simple fellow like me?”
“A simple fellow like you, eh? So simple that you make a fool of McGregor and take me off under your arm like a bit of firewood? So simple that you walk through Timberline scaring the town to death? You are a fool, though, if you think that other people can’t see through all your pretending. But Sue . . . oh, God . . . she’s through with me and she’s told you to get me out of the way . . . ”
Such a helpless fury came over Barney that, seeing the uselessness of explanations, he leaned from his a saddle and struck Peary across the mouth with the back of his hand.
Peary gasped and reeled.
“Keep the dirty talk off your tongue and out of your throat,” said Barney in such a voice as never had issued before from his lips. “Or else I’ll . . . ” He stopped himself before the last words were spoken. But he knew what he had intended to say, and that intention amazed and shocked him. He was ashamed of the blow he had struck a helpless man. Yet he could not apologize. He felt, in fact, that, if he so much as spoke another word to Leonard Peary, he might lose control of himself and finish with the terrible strength of his hands what he could not put into speech—a vast loathing for this youth who was, he knew, the chosen man, the hero of Sue.
In the meantime, he could not ride on blindly, perhaps going in exactly the wrong direction. So he made a halt in a glade beneath the trees that was like a great hall, with the brown trunks for pillars, and the green of the spreading branches for a roof.
There he unsaddled and tethered the two horses, lashed the right arm of Peary to his left arm, kicked the pine needles into a deep bed, and lay down.
He had not spoken to Peary since the blow he struck. And Peary attempted no speech on his side. In silence, Barney lay for a moment, staring up at the darkness. A single star of the first magnitude gleamed down at him for a time. Then this moved eastward and was lost. He fell asleep.
The squirrels wakened him. Profound gloom covered the lower stretches of the forest, still, but the gray of the morning had reached the higher branches, and the nut gatherers were chattering. Barney turned his head, and looked into the dark eyes of young Peary, brilliant with hatred. That was the way they began the second day.
He shared the last of the raisins with his captive, then saddled and bridled the horses and took an upward slope that brought them out of the trees on the high shoulder of a mountain. From that point he took his bearings, located in the distance the flashing face of the water that had been his
guide toward Timberline, and struck out in this direction.
The mare still followed, or ran ahead, or came back to prance at the side of her master, or raced off until trees or hummocks concealed her. She was such a beauty as she frolicked, that Peary seemed to forget his own gloomy thoughts; with a hungry eye he watched her come and go.
“She’s better than a passport to get a man across danger lines!” exclaimed Peary, at last, as they came out from the thick of the trees into that open, pleasant valley where Barney had ridden before. “No wonder you save her up for the pinches.”
Barney looked calmly on his companion. “I’ll tell you one thing . . . you try to believe it. I never rode her half a mile in my life.”
“You keep her for company, eh?” said Peary.
“That’s all,” said Barney. “I don’t expect you to believe it. The truth about me is something that nobody is willing to believe, just now . . . nobody that I’ve met in Timberline. The rest of the world knows the facts well enough, though.”
Peary stared back at him. For the first time a doubt, a new inquiry was in his eye. And now the red mare, which had disappeared around the edge of a dark grove of trees, flashed back into view with a loud neigh, and fled as if for her life toward them. She had come in this manner before, however, except that her ears had never been flattened quite so close to her neck.
“Is there something in that wood?” asked Barney only half aloud.
“She saw a shadow, that’s all,” answered Peary. “When a horse or a man starts in making a fool of itself, it enjoys jumping when it sees even the wind in the grass.”
The mare cast a rapid loop around them and halted in the rear, whinnying again, like a trumpet call.
“There’s something wrong,” said Barney. “She means something by that.”
“You know horse language, eh?” sneered Peary. His upper lip was swollen and purpled by the blow that he had received the night before; his whole mouth twisted a little to the side as he stared in contempt and disgust at Barney.
“She’s calling us back,” insisted Barney, staring at the green shadows of the woods as he came up to it. They were close to it, now, and he drew rein, halting both horses.
“Maybe she sees a ghost,” said Peary in scorn.
And as he spoke, out from under the branches of the trees rode four men, each with a rifle balanced across the pommel of the saddle. And he who was in the lead was none other than the sheriff who had spoken to Barney the evening before.
It was far too late to cut the twine that tied Peary and Barney Dwyer together, and then to flee. With a twitch of his fingers, Barney snapped that tough, hard-twisted cord, but the four, fanning out into a wide semicircle, were close on them.
“It’s Jim Elder,” groaned Peary. “Don’t try to run. He doesn’t know how to miss with a rifle. I don’t know what game you were trying to play, Dwyer, but he’s going to finish it for you. Damn you, you’ve sewed me up in a sack, and made me a present to him. You knew he wanted me.”
The sheriff shifted his rifle until he was carrying it at the ready. Close by, he spoke to his horse, and halted it. “Something told me that I’d find you again, Dwyer,” he said. “And I even guessed the sort of company that you’d be in. But how do your hands happen to be tied, Peary?”
Peary took a great breath, and said nothing. He was white with shame.
“Get behind ‘em, Mike,” said the sheriff to one of his men. “Mind you, if you see any queer moves, don’t stop to ask for orders, but shoot, and shoot to kill.”
“I’m only aching for the chance,” answered Mike. “I won’t need telling to take my share out of ‘em.”
“Get off those horses!” commanded the sheriff. “Pete and Harry, fan ’em. Get everything down to the skin.”
“Are you aiming to arrest me, Sheriff Elder?” asked Peary.
“I’m aiming to arrest you, and I’m aiming to hang you, too, when the time comes,” said the sheriff.
Peary, dismounting clumsily because of his tied hands, answered: “You can’t arrest me without a charge.”
“I would have arrested you any time the last three months, without a charge,” declared the sheriff. “I would have arrested you and taken my chance of digging up the right sort of evidence, once I had a grip on you. But now I’ve got you and the evidence, all at once. You’re a slippery lad, Peary, but I think that a good hemp rope could be fitted to your neck tight enough to stay.”
“What’s the charge?” asked Peary firmly enough.
“Robbery, and murder,” said the sheriff.
“It’s a faked lot of evidence that you have, then,” said Peary.
“You never killed a man, eh, boy?” asked the sheriff.
“Not unless it was self-defense.”
“You stuck up the Coffeeville stage, last week, and you killed Buddy Marsh on the driver’s seat,” said the sheriff.
At that, a big fellow, who was searching Peary, grabbed him suddenly by the lapels of the coat and shook him violently, while he yelled at the top of his voice: “And you’re gonna hang for it, you snake! You’re gonna hang for it by the law, or by me!”
“Steady, Pete, steady,” said the sheriff. “He’ll hang for it, all right, without any help from you. We’ve got the evidence on you, Peary.”
“You bought it, and you bought a lie, then!” cried Peary.
“That may all be true,” said the sheriff. “We have judges and juries to find out the truth of things. Our job is just to find the bloodsuckers and bring them in when we can.” He turned on Dwyer. “Now, who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Barney Dwyer. I was working on the Peary Ranch. I was fired. But Daniel Peary told me that, if I could bring back his son, he’d be glad to see me again. I came up here. I found Peary. He and McGregor thought there was something strange about me. They shut me into the cellar and put handcuffs on me. They were going to starve me until I confessed what had brought me up to Timberline. I managed to get away, took Peary and a couple of horses from the barn, and got this far, when I met you.”
Mike, who held a rifle and kept surveillance over the entire group, began to chuckle softly. “I’ve heard my share of lies, soft and loud,” he said,” but a more fool lie than that, I never did hear in all my days.”
“They put you in handcuffs in the cellar, eh?” said the sheriff. “How did you get away?”
“First I kicked a hole in the wall and got out, but they put me back in again . . . ”
“That’s a heavy stone wall, up yonder, in the cellar of Bunny’s house,” put in Mike.
“I don’t expect anyone to believe me,” said Barney. “But I’m telling you because you asked. The second time, they chained me to the stone post in the center of the room, so I broke the chain off the handcuffs and crawled out, and got Peary, and came away, just as I’ve told you.”
The sheriff smiled, and touched both sides of his short-clipped mustache. He looked toward his men, and they grinned in turn. “I think you can rest in jail with the story for a while,” he said. “Any proofs of that yarn?”
“The hole is still there in the cellar wall, I suppose,” said Barney. “And here are the handcuffs, still on my wrists.”
The sheriff gave a faint grunt of surprise. He stepped forward and examined the steel bracelet that still covered the wrist of Barney, the dangling links of the steel chain being tucked inside the metal circlet. The mere stretching forward of Barney’s arms caused the cuffs of his sleeves to rise and expose the handcuffs. The wrists were chafed. The backs of the hands were swollen and discolored.
The sheriff stepped back again, and shook his head. “That pair of hands looks as though you were telling the truth,” he said. “But that’s a new steel chain. No man could snap it the way you say you have. It would hold a horse. Besides, your whole story is a funny thing to listen to. Is Daniel Peary an old friend of yours?”
“No,” said Barney.
“Did he offer you a lot of money to bring back Len Peary?”
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“No,” said Barney.
“Do you expect me to believe you?”
“No,” repeated Barney. “It’s the truth, but nobody would believe it, I suppose.”
Two or three of the men guffawed at this, but the sheriff stepped a little closer.
“It’s a queer tale, Dwyer,” he said. “Down in my heart, I think that you’re a thug. But you brought me Len Peary with his hands tied, and that may have saved some bloodletting all around. Besides, I haven’t anything against you. To do what you’ve done, you’d have to have the strength of a horse. Can you show me some of that strength, Dwyer?”
“I’ve heard of a strong man that could bend a horseshoe,” said Mike. “Wait a minute. I’ve got the shoe that my horse cast this mornin’. Let him try to bend that one.” He chuckled as he spoke, and, hurrying to his horse, he brought from the saddlebag a quite new horseshoe, the iron thick for wear on the mountain rocks.
Barney took it in his hands and made an effort. He merely hurt his fingers, and stopped a moment to look down at the insides of the where the flesh was bruised.
“He’s a fake,” said Mike. “You bring him along, Elder.”
Once more Barney put his hands on the heavy semicircle. All the twisting strength of his hands came into play. His forearms swelled until the sleeves of his shirt were filled solidly. There was a faint cracking sound, then a distinct snap.
“I’m sorry,” said Barney. “I guess I’ve spoiled that horseshoe.” And he held out the two broken fragments to Mike.
A more than churchly silence fell over that group. Mike received the broken horseshoe with both hands reverently.
“It must’ve had a flaw,” said Pete, leaning nearer.
“No,” muttered Mike. “Look for yourself. That’s a clean break in good iron. Dog-gone my eyes!” He lifted those eyes toward Barney, slowly shaking his head.