by Max Brand
The editors, rubbing their hands, printed the pictures one by one. On each day, in some manner, to justify the successive stories, they raked up new material—something about Diego Mirandos and the angle of Mexican politics that had made him move north of the Río Grande, or something about the famous white mare, which had been sighted and run here, and only sighted there—or something. Best of all, were the stories about the girl herself, this last entirely out of the imaginations of the editors. They really agreed upon one point only—which was that the lovely girl was the only human being in all the world who could ride the spirited mare. That to her touch the strength and fire of White Helen responded instantly, and she became as a lamb.
On the whole, it was what even a metropolitan paper, in the daily hunt for “human interest” would have accepted with open arms and open columns.
As for the thousands of strong men who were at all near to the region through which the mare was wandering, those who were unmarried saddled their best horses, and those who were married looked down impatiently and scowled at the left hands of their wives.
Here and there, in a thousand places, the written stories opened the hearts of men. Then came the pictures, and a thousand men sat up at rigid attention, saying: “This is the girl.”
For they were all hunting, of course—children and old men, single and married. Back in the mind of each, there is lodged a hunger and a hope. So that many men, as they stared at the picture of the girl, said— “If only I were young.”—or “If only I were free.” But many more said—“I shall go and do my best.”
To no one did the sight of the girl come with a greater shock than to Peter Dunstan, owner of the great Dunstan Ranch that, during the last years, had spread wider and wider, eating up the adjoining cattle places. It struck him like the surprise of a midnight attack. A sudden rush, a whispering of many rapid feet—and then the voices of triumph are sounding over the great fortress before it is well roused from the drowsy content of its impregnability. So it was with Peter Dunstan.
It was fifteen years since he had what could be termed a foolishly light thought. Back yonder in the days when he was no more than twenty-five, he was still in the habit of riding a little out of his path for the sake of fun or fighting, each of which he liked equally well. Now it was a different matter.
Fifteen years ago, he had happened to overhear an old rancher say: “There go the rags and tatters of the old Dunstan place. It’ll be on the auction block in another six months if that young spender keeps up his work.”
In his fierce heart, Dunstan swore that he would make the prophet eat his words. He fixed his keen eye on the dollar that can be made to roll to one’s feet even through the alkali dust that the trampling herds raise on the mountain desert. Then he strode toward his goal with an irresistible might. Nothing could stay him.
He went, not by sudden leaps and bounds. For five years, he accumulated stock, borrowed money, and bided his time. Then he sold when the market was at a peak, cleared a great profit, watched a neighbor foolishly wait until the peak was passed—and scooped in that neighboring place at the sale that followed.
For another five years he toiled, cut corners sharply, did the work of five men, and gathered a flock of devil-may-care cowpunchers. He drove them like pirates, underfed and overworked them. At the end of the five-year struggle, he sold again, and gained a return more enormous than before.
He was thirty-five, then. He had no money in the bank, but his credit was based on a foundation stronger than rock—of multiplying herds and spreading lands. The first ten years were the bitterest. After that, his fortune rolled on under its own headway. He had tried men to rely on; he had established rigid policies that often saved him the expense and pain of thought.
From thirty-five to forty he felt the taste of power, ranker and ranker in his throat, like a strong liquor. The more he drank of it, the sterner grew his soul, and the more his appetite raged. Now, at forty, he was an established figure on the range. Bankers knew him; other cattlemen looked up to him.
If men did not love him for himself, they loved him for the cause that he represented. He was one of the representatives of a class that grew smaller in numbers from year to year—the lovers of freedom, the independent cattleman. He looked like an older type. Men said that he was a generation after his proper time, when the range had been owned and manipulated by giants like himself.
Now, at the beginning of his fullest prime, with his mind occupied by the leaping visions of the greater things that lay at his hand, at a moment when he had relaxed on a visit to town just long enough to glance over an evening paper, his eye caught on a pretty face.
A picture actress…or a divorcee, thought Peter Dunstan. Then his swiftly moving glance entered the tangle of words.
Ten minutes later he had made up his mind that there was nothing that really mattered, after all, so much as the establishment of a home—a family. He formed his plan on the spot. The others had failed in spite of the numbers that they had employed—like the rich lumberman from Montana, who had come down with twenty men and whole trains of fleet horses to capture the white mare. Peter Dunstan did not intend to work with numbers. He intended to use only one person. That was one whose skill was without a duplicate in all the world.
Eighteen
On the very day on which Peter Dunstan set forth, a rumor came in that Elena Blanca was caught. So many other rumors of the same effect had been circulated before, that no one took this seriously. Yet the truth was that on this day, the lariat, darting from the hand of big José Rézan, had swished dangerously close to the head of the mare. Had she not been shod with air and muscled with watch springs that day, she would have been entangled in the meshes of the rope. However, she whirled, and with a frightened squeal fled away like a white arrow across the sun-faded hills of the mountain desert. So the goal remained free for Peter Dunstan’s attempt.
He took with him, of all of his band of hard riders and trained cowpunchers, only the redoubtable retainer, Shorty. For, except the cook, Steve McGuire, Shorty was the only one of the band who had ever dared to speak his free mind in the presence of his chief. Like all tyrants, Peter Dunstan valued an independent mind as much as he hated it.
They rode north. They crossed the belt of the sun-scorched desert. They crossed the region of the scrub cedar and lodgepole pines. They rode on north, where the trees grew thicker and bigger. Then they entered upon a region of plentiful rainfall. Here they began to make their inquiries.
Shorty said, scratching his red head: “This here is the sort of a country that you’ll be sure to find him in. There ain’t any doubt but that he likes a country where there’s trees and water, because in them parts he’ll find the animals.”
“And the birds,” Peter Dunstan said.
Shorty turned sharply about in the saddle and peered at his companion. “Birds,” he said in a gasping voice, “birds, too?”
“Birds, too,” Dunstan said with the calm of superior knowledge.
“Aye,” Shorty said, after he had considered this tiding for a time. “Anything that ain’t got human speech, I suppose.”
So they came to a little crossroads town, and Shorty asked the blacksmith, who sat upon his rusting anvil, if there had been any sight in that region of a man who rode a blue horse and lived in the woods.
“A blue horse?” the blacksmith said. “Might you have been drinking, partner?”
“All right,” Shorty said to his chief not deigning to answer this remark. “He ain’t been around here.”
They journeyed on, a wild, rough way, sometimes finding a ranch house or a little town to stay in at night, sometimes never coming to shelter, but sleeping out in the raw mountain winds, with the naked stars close and bright above their heads. Wherever they went, they asked the same question: “Have you seen a gent around these parts, riding on a blue horse? A blue mare?”
And everywher
e, they were met with gaping mouths and staring eyes and no information.
“But,” Dunstan said, “it begins to seem to me that we’ll never find him. He may have had the claws of a mountain lion ripping through his innards before this, Shorty.”
“Him?” Shorty said. “Nope, he ain’t the kind that’ll ever die by no wild animal. No varmint will ever sink a tooth into him, I guess.”
“Aye,” Dunstan said, “that seems likely, too. But why haven’t we heard some word of him, then? He’s strange enough, and different enough to be known pretty widely. I should think that anybody who had ever seen him would never stop talking about him.”
“Look at the boys right there at home on our own ranch,” Shorty said, who had worked on the place for so long that he looked upon it with an air of possession. “Look at them. We’ve had him right there among us. And et at the same table with him. We’ve rode with him and watched him. And we’ve seen him in action. But what have the boys got to say? Sure, they’re thinking about him a whole lot, but they don’t talk, and they won’t talk. Why? Because when you run up ag’in’ something so plumb out of the ordinary, so different from the way other folks are and act, you don’t want to talk. You just set and think it over, till a chill runs up your spine. Ain’t you felt that way, chief, when you thought about him before?”
Peter Dunstan had to nod. It was true. The rider of the blue horse was not a man to be talked of in a chatty fashion.
They came, in the bleak evening of a windy day, with the gale whipping volleys of rain against the roofs, upon the sight of the little village where a stream of lumber wagons crossed another stream of wagons from the nearest silver mine. The village had come into existence as a way station and a depot, where supplies for the neighboring ranchers could be stored. Into this straggling place they rode, putting up at the one-story hotel.
Because they were tired, and because they were beginning to despair of success, they delayed their inquiries until supper had been finished. Then Peter Dunstan said, as usual: “Have any of you fellows seen a man riding a blue horse in these parts?”
There was the usual blank silence, but, before the voices of wonder could break in and ask what was meant, a man said sharply from the foot of his table, lowering his coffee cup with a click: “What might you know about a gent with a blue horse?”
“I’m asking you if he’s been seen,” Dunstan said.
“Might you be a friend of his?” the other asked with gathering wrath masked under a gentle voice.
“No,” Dunstan said truthfully enough.
“Well,” said the other, letting his anger break through restraint, “next to layin’ my hands on that ornery, good-for-nothin’ sneak, I’d like nothin’ better than to get hold of any friend of his and bust him in two and see what there is so funny on the insides of him.”
“I see,” Dunstan said, nodding, “that you know the man that I’m after.”
Here the chorus of questions from the others at the table broke in: “A man on a blue horse? A blue horse? Who ever heard of such a thing?”
“Why,” exclaimed the angry man at the foot of the table, “you all have seen a blue roan? But this here is bluer than that. A blue roan, right enough, but more the color of a shadow in the belly of a valley, betwixt afternoon and evening, if you get what I mean. A right fine-looking horse. If it hadn’t been for the speed of it, I would’ve got up close enough to sink a chunk of lead in his back while he was running away from me.”
“What might he have of done?” Shorty asked.
The stranger broke into a violent torrent of oaths. “What might he not have done!” he roared. “But the main part of it is that he’s a plain horse thief! Here I was out disciplining a right mean four-year-old gray gelding. The damned horse laid me on my back and knocked most of the wind out of me, when I climbed into the saddle on him. But I had him on a long rope, tied to a tree. So I got up and dragged him up closer to the tree trunk with that rope and snubbed him up right short. Then I got hold of my quirt and give him a good lambasting.”
There were nods and grunts of assent.
“And just then, as I stepped back to give myself a breath of air and sort of wipe my face, in comes a gent riding on a big blue roan mare…kind of a heavy-looking horse, like she could’ve pulled her share in a plow team, you might say, but finished off extra strong and slender in the lower legs. Below the knees, she looked like a real racer, and for all I know maybe she is a racer, that he stole from somewheres. The gent that was riding her, didn’t look like nothing in particular. Just stupid. He had the face of a man and the eye of a kid that ain’t never gonna grow up. He sits there looking at the gelding sort of sad, with his head to one side.
“‘What might you be wanting, stranger?’ I says when he don’t offer to speak up none.
“‘I was only thinking,’ he says.
“‘About what?’ says I.
“‘That it ain’t the beating that’ll do the gray any good.’
“I sort of looked at him.
“‘What would do him good?’ I says.
“‘A mite of talking to, maybe,’ he says.
“‘Step up,’ I says, ‘and try your hand on him. I ain’t stopping you none.’
“Well, he slid off his mare and didn’t bother to throw the reins, even. She followed him along and stood right behind him, all of the time. He went up to the head of the gray, and when the gray begun to prance and dance, damn me if this blank-faced young feller didn’t just stand there holding out his hand to him, talking so soft and low that I couldn’t make out what he was saying to the gelding.”
Shorty broke in with conviction: “Aye, that’s the man, and that’s his way.”
“This sort of talk,” went on the stranger, “seemed to surprise the horse, after a while. He begun to stamp and step nearer, and then jump back as far as the rope would let him. The young chap, he just stood. It seemed like he just stood there for half an hour. Just when I was about to yell out that there wasn’t any more use in making a fool out of himself like that and wasting my own time…just when I was about to holler that out, what should I see but that gelding come a step closer and stick out his nose and snuff at the hand of the gent. Then he give a shudder and jumped back. But he come in again, and in a minute there was that young gent stroking the neck of that horse.
“The gelding had never done nothing but want to eat every man that he ever seen…now he seemed tickled almost to death…and he kept his ears up and acted all around like he had just met one of the old folks from home…y’understand what I mean? Then the big young chap…he looked bigger and more solid…he got into the saddle, and he rode the horse up and down, and got him used to the pull of the bit, teaching him how to rein across the neck. He done it just as easy as I’m talking now.
“When he got down, I said…‘Why, you got that horse gentled already, and if you want a job, son, I’ve got some more mustangs of the same mean breed to home, and you can try out your hand on them.’
“‘No,’ he says, ‘all I would like is you to take it easy with this horse and not beat him no more.’
“And he rode off through the trees. Well, I walked right up and jumped into the saddle of the gelding, because I figured that the battle was all over. But it wasn’t. I hadn’t no more than touched him with my spurs than that horse, which had seemed so gentle, tried to hit the center of the sky. It missed, but it heaved me right in the same general direction. When I come down, I landed on my head.”
The stranger paused to rub his neck in affectionate commiseration of the shock that it had endured.
He went on: “When I come to, I dressed that fool horse down and led him home. The next day I had it out with him again. That night I had a note shoved under my front door, reading like this…‘Please don’t beat the gray horse no more, because it don’t do no good.’
“That only made me mad, of course. I
gave it the same medicine the next day. Because who wouldn’t kill a horse sooner than to be beat by it? What good is a damned outlaw horse, I ask you? I dressed him down proper, and the next morning when I went out to find him, he was gone.
“Finally, I guessed what had happened. I hunted around till I found his trail. Sure enough, there was two horses there that had made that trail. I saddled my best pony and lit out. I had a glimpse of the gray and the blue as they went into the trees, and I lit out after them. But the gray was a fast devil, and the blue, even carrying the load of this gent, still faster. So they both faded out on me, and I done nothing but pump lead into the air for a mile, without coming into real shooting distance.”
Nineteen
When the stranger had finished this most odd narration that was attended by the others with the most breathless interest, one or two heads were shaken. Big Peter Dunstan at once put the seal of his approval upon the story.
“It’s exactly the sort of a thing that I would’ve expected him to do,” he said, “and that’s just the reason that I would like to get hold of him. How long ago did you have him at your place?”
“Three weeks,” said the other, “and he’s a long distance away from my ranch, now. I hunted for him, and there ain’t been a shadow of a sign of him.”
“That don’t mean a lot,” Shorty said. “He’s the kind that can make his sign fade out mighty quick, if he feels that way about it. The danger that he ain’t able to dodge is a new kind of danger, as far as I know. Give us the layout of your home place, and we’ll start hunting for him…because we know some of his ways.”
The stranger seemed to have small faith, indeed, in their ability to locate his man for him, but such an invitation so freely expressed could not be at once refused. Therefore he laid out for them the straightest route toward his own neighborhood.
“But you won’t find him,” he concluded. “It ain’t possible. Me and my friends give the place a pretty good combing to find him, and we didn’t raise nothing at all.”