by Max Brand
True to the spot, as though he had had the most accurate means of estimating the distance, Sandy Sweyn came upon a narrow gap among the pines. Now he saw the hunter straight before him—not a bear, but an enemy indeed terrible enough to make the blue jay flutter screaming away across the trees. It was a crouched man, stealing forward foot by foot through the trees, his rifle in his hand.
Twenty-Eight
The slow mind of Sandy turned heavily upon this important discovery. What bewildered him was the reason that could have induced the hunter to approach his camp fire with such consummate care and skill. There could not be a doubt in anyone’s mind as to what lay in the clearing, just beyond the next barrier of the trees, for the smell of the wood smoke from Sandy’s fire blew plainly across the woods. Now, as a pitch-filled twig caught the flames, there was a very distinct crackling. This stalking fellow, therefore, must know that it was a man who was yonder. What, except mischief, could make him wish to get to the spot with such secrecy?
He was a most expert hunter. Sandy, who had often marveled at the clumsiness of other men in the woods, was all the more amazed by the silken smoothness with which this adept made his way. Once—with a sharp turn of head and body, though soundless as ever—the hunter whirled and showed Sandy Sweyn an evil, suspicious face and two bright eyes bent upon the very thicket where Sandy was hidden.
There was no doubt in the mind of Sandy, now. He knew little of men and their ways. He knew enough of beasts to tell those that preyed from those that were preyed upon. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this was one who lived upon the prey that he could capture.
It was the more exciting, then, to steal forward along his path. If the hunter was soft in his movements, those of Sandy Sweyn’s were like the mere trailing of a shadow. To the ear of owl or bear, the noises he made might have been intelligible enough, but to the human ear, they were nothings.
He gained fast. As the stranger came to the very edge of the clearing and began to straighten to his knees behind a comfortably wide pine trunk, which would give him shelter while he spied upon the place more deliberately, something caught on the butt of his rifle as he drew it up. Without turning his head, he increased the pressure a trifle to free it from the root that must have caught in it. He increased the pressure to a tug. Suddenly the rifle was flicked from his grasp. As he turned with a gasp, he saw Sandy Sweyn in the act of rising to his feet with a smile.
There was little real mockery in that smile, rather the natural amusement that Sandy felt on a trail thus followed to a successful ending. To the hunter, it was like a grimace of a fiend. He uttered a faint groan of terror and of rage and jerked the revolver from its holster on his right hip.
No doubt Sandy could have pulled the trigger of the rifle and sent a bullet plunging through the body of this enemy. Such a thing did not even occur to him. He cast the gun itself against the other. The shock of it made the revolver bullet go wide. When the Colt sent out its second shot, the grip of Sandy was on the gun hand of his foe. The revolver was twisted helplessly to the side.
By loosing his grip on the gun, the stranger managed to free his fingers from a grip that bruised his flesh like the steel of a machine. He drove his fist into the face of Sandy, but it was like striking a heavy India-rubber pad. It did not seem even to jar the head of the other. The next moment the grip of Sandy fell where the teeth of a fighting animal fall—upon the throat of his victim. There was no resistance. A single pressure, and the hunter hung limply, gasping with wide-opened mouth. Sandy trussed him under one arm and carried him out to the open light of the day in the clearing, beside the blazing fire. He put him down where the stranger could sit on a fallen log, while Sandy squatted on a rock and began to munch his roasted meat, all the while eying the other curiously from head to toe.
He saw the rising of a desperate hope in the eyes of this hunter, marking that there was no weapon leveled at him. Sandy shook his head to discourage flight.
“If you was to run away,” he said, “I could run after you and catch you. Or, if I didn’t feel like running, I could just stop you with this, d’you see?” He drew a revolver from his belt.
Though it seemed to the stranger that the weapon exploded without more than the most casual upward flash of the eyes of Sandy, yet so carefully was the bullet aimed that before the echoes of the explosion had finished, rushing away among the big trees, there was a rustling and light crashing above them. The limp body of a headless squirrel fell, with a loose thud, upon the bare ground of the clearing.
The hunter buttoned his leathered coat a little more securely around him. Then he shuddered. For, a tenth of a second before, he had actually been considering flight—flight from such a marksman as this. As well might a pigeon strive to flee from an eagle in the high regions of the sky, with cover dreary, dreary miles away. He fingered his terribly bruised throat and looked downward to the ground.
“What might you have against me?” asked Sweyn.
“Me?” muttered the other. “Nothing.”
Sandy shook his head. For the first time he frowned. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“My name is…Coudray,” said the other, stiffening just a trifle as a man will do when he expects that his name will have some effect upon another.
The eyes of Sandy remained blank, except for the cloud of his frown. “Coudray,” he said, “it’s not the truth, and I know it. You have got something against me. You were hunting me. I ain’t smart, but I know you were hunting me.”
Coudray attempted a smile. “It was only a joke,” he said. “I smelled the wood smoke. And I thought that I’d sneak up and surprise the gent that built the fire….”
Again the head of Sandy was shaken vigorously in denial. “I’ve seen a mountain lion hunting for fun,” he said. “I’ve seen cubs stalking each other. And, also, I’ve seen them stalking because their bellies was empty and they wanted food. But you ain’t hungry, Coudray, and I ain’t ever harmed you none. But still, you was trying to get at me…to murder me, Coudray.”
In all the forest of Chorleywood, next to Simonides himself, there was no one man with a reputation like that of Coudray. Whether for strength of hand or ferocity of courage or skill with weapons, he stood by himself, dreaded even by the fiercest of the outlawry. Now he shrank before the youth who watched him.
“Murder?” Coudray said. “What could I want to murder you for?”
“I dunno. I ask you that.”
Perspiration poured down the face of Coudray. “Man,” he said, “you’re talking foolishness.”
“I ain’t bright, Coudray, but I know when a man hunts to kill. I’ve never harmed you none.”
Coudray was silent, but his bright, keen eyes wandered desperately back and forth from one side of the clearing to another, hunting for a lie that might serve him, but finding nothing. To lie to other men was easy enough, but to lie to this strange fellow was quite a different matter.
“If you ain’t gonna talk out,” Sandy said with a sudden ferocity, “I’ll make you talk. When I find that a grizzly is stalking me through the woods…I turn back and I kill that bear if I have to trail him for a month. I’ve done it, and I’d do it again. If a mountain lion comes sneaking behind me down my trail, I go back and I kill that mountain lion, if I got to follow him right into his cave, in the end. Why should I act any different to you, Coudray? You talk, and you talk quick, or I’ll finish you now…the same as if you was a bear or a lion. And I’ll never have to worry about you afterward. But I’m mighty curious, Coudray. I’m so dog-gone’ curious, that I’ll let you go. I’ll give you your guns, too, before I turn you lose, if you’ll tell me why you come out here to hunt for me.”
The hope of life took Coudray by the throat. “Sweyn,” he said, “I’ll tell you the truth and the whole truth, if you’ll promise, when I’m through, to tell me how you spotted me in the woods.”
“I’ll tell you that,” Sandy sa
id. “If you’d kept your eyes and your ears open, you would’ve knowed how I found out where you were. Now you start talkin’.”
“They’re set and ready for you in the whole of Chorleywood,” Coudray said, talking for his life. “They’re waiting for you, and they’re gonna get you if you don’t turn back. All the reasons that they’ve got, I dunno. But this here gent, this Peter Dunstan, he’s mixed up in it, somewhere. What the rest of us know is that Simonides himself has sent around the word that you’re to be fixed so’s you won’t be a bother to anybody…and the white mare is to be took away from you….”
“Elena Blanca!” gasped out Sandy Sweyn. “It’s for her that they want me dead? For Elena?”
“I dunno. I tell you what I know. I figured that, if they wanted you bumped off, they must have a good reason for it. So I started along and decided that I’d lie out and try to nab you when you come into Chorleywood. Others started along to do the same thing…only it was me that had the luck and spotted you with my field glass a long ways off. So I come down to get at you…and now, tell me what showed me to you?”
Without a word, Sandy Sweyn handed rifle and revolver across to his prisoner. “You’ve told me the truth,” he said. “I can see that you told me the whole truth. And you’re free. But how I found you…why, a blue jay told me where you was. That was all there was to it. You must’ve heard him talking over your head?”
Twenty-Nine
To the formidable Coudray, it seemed at first that he must be listening to a fairy tale, and not a very interesting one at that. When he searched Sandy’s face, he was astonished to be met by the wide-open and frank eye of the truth-teller. Here was a man into whose brain the thought of falsehood had not so much as entered.
Coudray stood up and backed toward the trees. When he saw that there was no hindrance proposed to his exit, he turned and made off at good speed. Many a shiver went down his spine until he was sure that an ample screen of pines had closed in between him and the enemy. He got to the horse that he had left at a distance, and then rode with hard-driven spurs. Where he went, he hardly knew, and he hardly cared, so long as he was carried away from the spot where he had encountered young Sandy Sweyn.
Halfway up the next slope, a voice dashed at him out of a thicket. He turned in the saddle and had a fleeting glimpse of Lawrie, coming through the trees, rifle in hand.
“What’s up, Coudray?”
“The devil is up!” Coudray yelled in return, and spurred on his horse more vigorously than ever.
It was enough to root Lawrie to the place. It must be remembered that the reputation of Coudray was a thing founded as firmly as the roots of the hills in Chorleywood.
* * * * *
Sandy Sweyn had shifted his camp. His mind was in a complete whirl. All that he had been able to gather from the confession of his captured man was that there was danger afloat for him in Chorleywood, that Peter Dunstan was connected in some vague way with that danger. However, since one man had found him here, he decided that he would be on the look-out with the greatest of care.
When he moved there was no trace left, either of his own footsteps or the hoof steps of his two horses, for he took them over a devious way, where he found certain outcroppings of rock that would not show sign of their passing. So, winding up a narrow little ravine, stern with boulders, he came suddenly, at a turn of the cañon, upon the very man of his search—Peter Dunstan.
One instant of doubt burned in the mind of Sandy—and then passed away. When Dunstan came up to him, frankly and happily, shook hands with him, and called him the most wonderful fellow in the world for having captured the mare when so many others had tried and failed, it seemed to simple Sandy that such heartiness could not possibly be linked with dissimulation. He returned the pressure of Dunstan’s hand and smiled in turn.
“Aye,” he said, “here’s the mare. And if you’ll turn the dog over to me…why, I’ll put a rope on her, and you can take her away, Mister Dunstan.”
Dunstan nodded, and, cupping both hands at his lips, he called loudly: “Chris! O-o-h, Chris!” Then he listened. He called again, listened, and finally, impatiently he said: “You’ll have to do some training of that fool dog, Sandy, because whenever he gets out of my sight, he runs back to the house….”
“That’s queer,” Sandy said meditatively. “Because he wasn’t that sort of a dog when I last seen him. He was the sort of a dog that would cotton onto a man and not leave him, unless he was drove away. But you can’t tell how a dog is gonna turn out, any more than you can tell how a boy will turn out. They pick up wrong ways. Maybe this’ll fetch him.” And raising his voice to thunder, which yet had a mellow and inviting note in it, he sent the name of Chris booming across the trees.
Dunstan, remembering how poor Chris lay dead in the grave on the ranch, felt all his nerves stand on end. What he next remembered was that Simonides’s first prediction had been falsified.
“The easiest way,” Simonides had said, “is simply to bump off this half-wit. Nobody will care what has become of him. Bury him under some rocks, take the mare, and ride north with her to old Mirandos and his girl. That’s the way that we’ll manage it. I’ll just pass the word around to some of the boys.”
Yet here was the mare and here was Sandy. He had not yet been bumped off. However, there was more than one string to the bow of Simonides. In case Sandy was not shot, he was to be brought up to the old prospector’s shanty among the upper hills where Simonides himself and a few of his best men lived in such times as these.
“He’s gone back to the house,” Dunstan suggested with a note of regret in his voice. “But we’ll go up that way and get him for you.”
“Aye,” Sandy said, “but I don’t hardly like it. And I’ll tell you why, Mister Dunstan. There’s danger for me here in Chorleywood.”
“Danger?” Dunstan said with a more emphatic enunciation simply because he felt his very flesh crawl. “Danger? Why, lad, you’re mad to say so.”
“Listen to what’s happened,” Sandy said, “and then you’ll agree with me.”
He told in detail, word for word, all that he had heard and seen in Chorleywood, and how he had seen the last of Coudray. By the time he finished, Dunstan had mustered his nerve force again.
“I’ll tell you how things are,” he said. “There are a lot of bad actors in this neck of the woods. A lot of crooked fellows, Sandy. Regular law breakers. Besides, there are some of a good sort who are fiddling around at one thing or another. Some of them have come here to do some prospecting, like a friend of mine whose shack I’m going to take you to. Some of them come here to get the good shooting…like myself. I came up here with Chris for a vacation…to get into the woods, you know…because I never dreamed that you could possibly catch the mare and come back so soon.”
“Vacation,” Sandy echoed, opening his eyes with wonder at the rancher. “I never guessed that you was interested in things like that. But the mare wasn’t much trouble. She’s been used wrong. That’s about all that you could say about her. Soon as she got with somebody that understood her, she tamed right down. You see?” He whistled, and the white beauty danced up to him and snuffed at the hand that he held out to her. “Here’s sixty feet of rope,” he said. “When you take her, keep her on this, and give her time to play herself out, if she gets rambunctious.”
The very soul of Dunstan ached to get his hands on a rope that was tied to the neck of Elena Blanca. “Show me what you mean, Sandy,” he said.
Obediently Sandy tossed the noose over the head of the little mare and gave the farther end into the hand of Dunstan. Behold! The instant that the rope had changed from one hand to the other, Elena Blanca tossed her head and sprang back, bringing the rope taut with a jerk. Had not Dunstan looped it over the pommel of his saddle, it would have been snatched out of his hands. Even as it was, the shock of Elena Blanca’s weight made the big horse, caught unawares, stagger. In anothe
r moment, there was a fighting, plunging, bucking streak of knotted lightning at the end of the rope, and the hands of the rancher were full.
The voice of Sandy rang—and the little white mare ran suddenly to the big, blue roan and crowded against it, her nostrils expanded like transparent crimson silk, her body trembling with her fear and her hate.
“You see,” Sandy said, “it’ll take a little time. Go along, girl. There’s no danger. Steady, honey. We’ll come out straight as a string. He ain’t gonna ride you.”
It seemed to the bewildered Dunstan that the beautiful creature actually understood the words of Sandy. She grew quieter; in another moment she submitted to being led by Dunstan up the valley and then through the broken hills toward the shack of Simonides. What a joy was in the heart of big Peter Dunstan, and the hand that held the rope seemed to him to be closing upon the heart of Señorita Catalina. The picture in his pocket was turning into real flesh and blood.
So they came to the gap in the woods and to the shack of the Greek. There sat Simonides himself in front of the door, smoking a vile cigarette.
“Here we are!” Dunstan called. “Here’s Sandy and Elena. Have you seen the dog around the house, here?”
“Ten minutes ago,” said the ready tongue of Simonides, “the pup was playing with that tin can, yonder, but he saw a rabbit and took away after it….”
“Where?” Sandy asked.
“Yonder,” Simonides answered. “Between that stump and the big pine. That’s where he disappeared. Come in and….”
“I’ll get Chris,” said Sandy, “and then I’ll come back and have a cup of coffee off of you, if you got it to spare. So long.”