If I did not entirely participate in this roseate view, it may have been because Enriquez, although a few years my senior, was much younger-looking, and with his demure devilry of eye, and his upper lip close shaven for this occasion, he suggested a depraved acolyte rather than a responsible member of a family. Consuelo had also confided to me that her father—possibly owing to some rumors of our previous escapade—had forbidden any further excursions with me alone. The innocent man did not know that Chu Chu had forbidden it also, and that even on this momentous occasion both Enriquez and myself were obliged to ride in opposite fields like out-flankers. But we nevertheless felt the full guilt of disobedience added to our desperate enterprise.
Meanwhile, although pressed for time, and subject to discovery at any moment, I managed at certain points of the road to dismount and walk beside Chu Chu (who did not seem to recognize me on foot), holding Consuelo’s hand in my own, with the discreet Enriquez leading my horse in the distant field. I retain a very vivid picture of that walk—the ascent of a gentle slope towards a prospect as yet unknown, but full of glorious possibilities; the tender dropping light of an autumn sky, slightly filmed with the promise of the future rains, like foreshadowed tears; and the half-frightened, half-serious talk into which Consuelo and I had insensibly fallen.
And then, I don’t know how it happened, but as we reached the summit Chu Chu suddenly reared, wheeled, and the next moment was flying back along the road we had just traveled, at the top of her speed! It might have been that, after her abstracted fashion, she only at that moment detected my presence, but so sudden and complete was her evolution that before I could regain my horse from the astonished Enriquez she was already a quarter of a mile on the homeward stretch, with the frantic Consuelo pulling hopelessly at the bridle.
We started in pursuit. But a horrible despair seized us. To attempt to overtake her, to even follow at the same rate of speed, would not only excite Chu Chu, but endanger Consuelo’s life. There was absolutely no help for it—nothing could be done. The mare had taken her determined, long, continuous stride, the road was a straight, steady descent all the way back to the village, Chu Chu had the bit between her teeth, and there was no prospect of swerving her. We could only follow hopelessly, idiotically, furiously, until Chu Chu dashed triumphantly into the Saltellos’ courtyard, carrying the half-fainting Consuelo back to the arms of her assembled and astonished family.
It was our last ride together. It was the last I ever saw of Consuelo before her transfer to the safe seclusion of a convent in Southern California. It was the last I ever saw of Chu Chu, who in the confusion of that rencontre was overlooked in her half-loosed harness, and allowed to escape through the back gate to the fields. Months afterwards it was said that she had been identified among a band of wild horses in the Coast Range, as a strange and beautiful creature who had escaped the brand of the rodeo and had become a myth.
There was another legend that she had been seen, sleek, fat, and gorgeously caparisoned, issuing from the gateway of the Rosario, before a lumbering Spanish cabriole in which a short, stout matron was seated but I will have none of it. For there are days when she still lives, and I can see her plainly still climbing the gentle slope towards the summit, with Consuelo on her back, and myself at her side, pressing eagerly forward towards the illimitable prospect that opens in the distance.
7
A Chestnut Pony
by S. Carleton Jones
Susan Morrow Jones was an enigma. Her novels and short stories appeared under so many pseudonyms, including a masculine-sounding version of her married name, that her career remains difficult to trace. The pen names carefully hid the fact that her subjects were highly unsuitable for a society woman from Nova Scotia during the first decades of the twentieth century. Jones wrote of divorce, a scandalous topic for a woman of her time and place. She wrote of the West, to her a region of crime and menace inhabited by rough and dangerous men.
Out of Drowning Valley, published under the name of S. Carleton Jones, is filled with violence and peril, greed and longing. In chapter 12 there also appears a beautiful chestnut pony who holds the key to a mystery.
Charles Edgerley Scarlett and his companion Billy Halliday have discovered the legendary gold deposits of Drowning Valley, knowing they must work fast before the spring rain causes a deadly river rise. There’s a good reason for the valley’s name.
Scarlett pays a brief visit to the mining town of Janesville to sell the first of his newly acquired nuggets, carefully telling the people in town that they came from a well-known and nearly played-out site named Tabeak. But Scarlett attracts the attention of three old enemies: a bandit named Eldon, a French-Canadian adventurer known as Sabarin, and a thief named Inkster. They follow him back to the caves of Drowning Valley.
The criminals are convinced that Scarlett has discovered a significant gold deposit and they will stop at nothing to get to it. Scarlett’s return trip to Drowning Valley is hampered by the sudden illness of the chestnut pack pony he had acquired in town. He knows that he should simply leave the pony to die, or shoot it to put it out of its misery. But it’s a beautiful pony and he finds himself unable to destroy it. At a roadhouse between the town and Drowning Valley, Scarlett meets a blond woman named Athol who agrees to care for the chestnut pony, hiding him from anybody who comes along asking questions.
Scarlett correctly assumes his pursuers will make a wrong turn and he reaches Drowning Valley safely, reuniting with Halliday. But, as they prepare to resume digging, they hear what sounds like fighting deep in the caves at their site. It must, Halliday thinks, be members of the Eldon gang who have found another entrance to the treacherous caves of Drowning Valley.
But as it happened, Halliday, climbing and sweating after Scarlett in the darkness of Drowning Valley caves, was wrong. If any one were fighting in the depths of that tortuous place, it was not Eldon, nor any of his gang.
At the precise moment Inkster and the Frenchman sat in the one tent of their outfit, dead beat from an exhausting—and useless—search of the road to Tabeak. Scarlett’s guess about their overshooting the turn into the pasture had been right; they had not even glanced at so simple and open a place as they thundered past it to Tabeak. Coming back in the early morning their luck had been no better, and they sat now in sullen silence—Inkster in a black rage, and Sabarin subdued to cringing.
Hope was dead in both of them. There was not likely to be another chance to track Scarlett to his gold, and, on Inkster’s part, the Frenchman’s story of having seen him at the roadhouse seemed apparently a plain lie. Yet both men, hearing the tramp of a leg-weary horse through the willows, pricked their ears. It could only be Eldon coming back from Janesville, and it was not Eldon’s way to return empty-handed when he went out for news. But neither his face nor his manner invited inquiry.
For a moment he sat motionless in his saddle in the natural clearing where his camp was set, and his string of horses hobbled, taking in the faces of the two men awaiting him. Then he swung himself down.
“I needn’t ask what luck you’ve had,” he remarked contemptuously. “So you didn’t even see Scarlett!”
“No,” Inkster snarled, “nor smell him, either. It’s my opinion that he was never here. We’ve been all the way to Tabeak, and he hadn’t been there, either; and, what’s more, there wasn’t a track leading off the road anywhere between here and there that he could have gone off by.”
“Not that a grown man could find!” Eldon threw his saddle on the ground and let his horse go loose, without so much as a glance at its mired legs and spurred sides. “I’ll send a child next time.”
“You’d better preach about your own luck before you take to sneering,” retorted Inkster darkly. “P’r’aps you shook hands with Scarlett in Janesville!”
“He hadn’t been there,” answered Eldon slowly.
“How d’ye know?”
Eldon made no reply b
ut a scowl. Janesville had been interested neither in him, nor his inquiries for a friend named Scarlett. The whole town had gone mad over the rumor of some gold brought in by a man from Tabeak, and every soul in it who had the use of his legs was getting ready to go over there. None of them had ever seen such gold. Harris’s assayer had been given more drinks than any one man had a use for, so long as it pleased him to hold forth on its purity, its color, and its worth.
No one seemed to have seen or noticed the man who had brought it in. He had sold his gold, bought a bay and a chestnut pack pony, and departed to Tabeak without so much as mentioning his claim there: it was the assayer who had done that. The man himself he, too, did not happen to have seen, but Janesville cared little for the man. It was gold like his its citizens wanted, and they talked of nothing else.
Eldon, in the back of the hotel bar, listened with a curious, growing excitement. He knew Tabeak—lock, stock, and barrel—and the gold that was setting Janesville agog had never come out of it. There was but one place in the country where such gold could have been found, and that was Drowning Valley. It was just possible, taking the Frenchman’s story for truth, that the strange man who had been in Janesville was Scarlett; and that he had crept, under Eldon’s very nose in the dark, back to whence he came—which was certainly not Tabeak. Yet the two pack ponies bought in Janesville were against it.
Sabarin had sworn to seeing Scarlett that very morning, but he had also sworn he was riding a buckskin horse. The stories did not tally, yet a biting hope gnawed at Eldon. He turned abruptly from the assayer and the citizens of Janesville, and repaired to the bank, with a face that was calm enough if his nostrils had not quivered.
The bank must know if Scarlett had been in Janesville. No one knew better than Eldon that Scarlett and Halliday had been down to their last six cents when they left Blaze Creek, and, if Scarlett had been the strange man who paid in money for two pack ponies, he must have gone to the bank to do it. But at the bank Eldon got his first check.
The almost forgotten name of Edgerley had served Scarlett better there than he knew. To Eldon’s inquiry, as to a friend named Scarlett, the teller merely jerked his head towards the ledger keeper, who snapped that he knew no such person. Mr. Harris, happening to stand in the door of his own office, had cared neither for the too-guileless countenance of Mr. Eldon nor for the way in which he was inspecting the physical geography of the bank. He announced stiffly that no one named Scarlett was a customer of his, nor had sold him any gold; and that if his questioner had any business of his own he could state what it was.
But Eldon had none, except to turn and go out. And to his further inquiries round a preoccupied Janesville as to a man having ridden a buckskin out of it the day before, he got nothing but profane denials. No such man or no such horse had been seen, and the only person who had left that center had been the Tabeak man with his recently acquired pack ponies.
Eldon had cursed and spurred all the way home. For all that he had discovered the Tabeak man might be real, and the Frenchman’s story of Scarlett a lie, and the latter seemed the more likely.
“Well,” said Inkster, driven desperate by his silence, “I suppose you know if Scarlett was there or he wasn’t! Get it out.”
Eldon turned on him and the Frenchman with the fury he had been obliged to repress all day. “The United Bank staff told me he hadn’t been there, and nobody had even seen a man on a buckskin. By heaven, Sabarin,” he cried thickly, “if you’ve brought me here all the way from Blaze Creek with a lie, and you’ve lied again about having seen Scarlett yesterday morning, I’ll put a bullet through your head!” And he meant it: the Janesville road would tell no tales.
Sabarin sprang to his feet, but Eldon’s hard fist sent him down again. “I tell no lies,” he screeched from the ground. “I did see Scarlett! If he doesn’t go to Janesville, is that my fault? He was here, at the roadhouse!”
“Riding a buckskin, I suppose?” Eldon sneered into the glaring, terrified eyes, and Ba’tiste Sabarin knew suddenly that death stood at his elbow. Terror lent him coherence and instinct told him to make time.
“Can I help it that you miss him?” he asked hoarsely. “I track Scarlett into the lower end of Drowning Valley like you say,” summing up his case like a man tried for his life, “I hear him arrange with that Indian how he’d come out at this end, between Tabeak and Janesville. I see him ride out of that roadhouse yard with my own eyes yesterday morning. That accursed young cat of a girl over there locked me up till the road was tramped all over the tracks of him and his pack pony, but . . . ”
“His what?” snapped Eldon. “You didn’t say he’d pack ponies!” His hand came out of his hip pocket. “What were they like?”
“There was only one,” answered the Frenchman sullenly. “It was a bay.”
Eldon’s strong nerves jerked incontinently through his body. One of the ponies sold at Janesville had been a bay, the other a chestnut with two white legs. If he could find the pack ponies, he had found Scarlett in the man all Janesville had thought came from Tabeak.
“His other horse?” he roared.
“I told you—it was a buckskin.”
“Get out what’s in your head, Eldon,” Inkster cut in impatiently. But when he heard it his face fell.
“P’r’aps Sabarin’s Ethel-girl lent him the buckskin,” he observed doubtfully.
The Frenchman would have lied, but he did not dare. “She had no buckskin,” he said.
Eldon cut him off with an uplifted finger. “Was it that girl you meant when you said some one had tramped up all the road?” he asked.
“There was nobody else to do it! Nobody passed. She knew Scarlett. He and she stood whispering—whispering—yesterday morning,” the Frenchman answered viciously.
Eldon, for a long minute, sat absolutely still. “I met a girl on the road just now,” he said at last, “kind of yellow about the head, and talking to an old vegetable on a saddle that was held together with packthread. She looked at me as if I were dirt. Was that your Ethel-girl?”
“Yes. She talked to the uncle come back from Tabeak. We passed them on the road.”
“So that’s her”—Eldon gave a sudden jerking laugh—“that’s her! And she was whispering to Scarlett. By heaven,” irrelevantly, “she had eyes!”
Inkster cast down the pipe he was smoking, in a sudden access of rage. “There you go,” he said bitterly, “running off on girls when we’ve come all the way from Blaze Creek for nothing! There’s not one thing to say that Scarlett was the man who took that gold to Janesville; bay ponies are as common as dirt! Whether Ba’tiste’s lied about seeing him here or not doesn’t matter, either, as far as we’re concerned. What does is that we’re not a foot nearer the gold he’s stealing—and that’s what I’m after if you’re not! I don’t care a darn for something that happened ’way back when you were colts, and fool revenges on Scarlett. I want to get after his mine!”
Eldon laughed in his face. “He and his mine are in Drowning Valley,” he said, “and if he was the man that girl I saw was whispering to, we’ve got both of them!”
“I don’t see how we’ve got them,” growled Inkster. “I guess for all we’ll ever see of Scarlett and his gold—if it was Scarlett here and in Janesville, and not some fool from Tabeak—we may as well go home. Where are you going?” he added sharply. For Eldon had risen and was turning away.
“Visiting,” returned the other sententiously. “You sit here till I come back, and if Sabarin’s got any intention of leaving you snick a bullet through him. He’s seeing this thing through till I find out if he’s lied, and make up my mind,” with a sneer, “to go home! If the trail’s false, it’s false; but, if it isn’t, I bet I’m on Scarlett’s heels.”
He grinned enigmatically in Inkster’s stupid face, and disappeared in the willows that hid his camp from the Janesville road. The Frenchman’s “Ethel-girl” had acquired a new sig
nificance for him since he had seen her.
“Kind of yellow about the head” he had called her, when, in sober truth, the molten gold of her hair in the sun had burned into his senses; the cold eyes she had lifted for one moment to his started the fierce passion that stood for attraction with him. He was a man to whom every girl was fair game, till he had tired of her, a man, too, who had usually only to hold up his finger to any woman of the kind he was wont to meet. Beauty like the “Ethel-girl’s”—at a roadhouse—would probably not even require that lifted finger. It was not the first time Eldon had used a girl to track a man, yet he walked slowly toward the roadhouse, and thought hard.
This girl was his only chance, of course, of finding out whether the man who had left her house in the red dawn had or had not been Scarlett; but, though to make love to her might be the quickest way to discover it, there might be—others!
“If Scarlett hadn’t been burned to a char by a woman he’d be back to see this kind of a girl,” he thought coarsely, “but Scarlett won’t even remember her. If it’s another man, he’ll”—and he swore over it—“come back! I would, if she’d whispered to me. But I guess I won’t have to wait long to find out which it was—from a roadhouse girl!”
His grin and his thoughtful progress stopped dead. From the roadhouse yard had come the crack of a rifle. It was so unexpected, and Mr. Eldon knew so little about the inhabitants that he could not be blamed for thinking it might have a personal significance. He took cover abruptly behind a gatepost, peered round it, and laughed sheepishly.
In the yard, with their backs toward him, stood a tall, slack-jointed man apparently trying a new rifle, and beside him was the “Ethel-girl”! Eldon heard her laugh as Welsh fired again at something, and missed. Then he stepped casually forward and hailed the shooter. He explained glibly that he and a friend were camping across the road, resting up a string of horses for Janesville, and that they were out of salt.
Great American Horse Stories Page 6