by Max Brand
That told the tale. With a wild snort—half grunt and half neigh—that was a true stampede signal, the off-leader hit his collar with a weight that made the fifth chain groan, and the rest of the clan, true to their breed, answered the stampede signal by stretching their heads forth and striving to squeeze through their collars.
In another instant the coach was shooting down the street of Munson. The dust cloud rose high behind it. It swung out of sight, cutting the first corner on two wheels, and the dust cloud, still rising, spread broad, moth-like wings behind and still soared dimmer and dimmer above the roofs of Munson.
“There’ll be eleven dead men and one dead woman before that trip is finished,” Rendell opined.
“No,” said another. “She’ll get to Crumbock if she has to make it riding bareback on that devil of an off-leader.” Which was the general opinion in Munson.
The first mile of that journey was enough to turn hair white, even on the head of a hero. Six flying, straining, wild horses whirled the stage over what was called a road in that part of the country. There were rocks like great teeth ready to spike the stage as it passed. And there were ruts eager to break wheels, and hummocks guaranteed to overturn the wagon. But still Alec managed to shave the edge of these dangers one after another until the first steep grade was reached.
Then there was a different story. For behind the heels of the wild horses there were two tons of weight, living and dead. A trifle on the level, but a very great deal to whip up a sharp gradient. So the six slowed abruptly from a gallop to a trot, and from a trot to a walk. And then they would willingly have stopped altogether, but the whip in the hands of Alec was a sword of fire, and when they tried to jump out of the way, their collars were hands of steel. So the stage lurched heavily on its way.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The six wild horses that had been harnessed to the stage at Munson were only the pick of the whole lot. There were other sets to be hitched to the stage before it was rolled into the dirty streets of Crumbock. And the other sets were a sketchy lot—the first that came to hand at any of the stations of relay along the way.
Needless to say, the stage on its first run was not on time. They averaged exactly one hour of time to make each change of horses. And, when the change was made, there was a fearful rushing through the hills. But still the stage rolled on its way, and no matter what else happened, it was not again overturned.
At two relay points from Munson they came to the rougher region of mountains, and there, at the second relay from Munson, Sammy Gregg had arranged an escort of honor, so to speak. Because the progress of this first stage through the mountains was apt to be a dangerous affair.
The outlaw who first stuck up the new stage was apt to be remembered long, and for that very reason there was apt to be a good deal of crowding for the post. In the stage itself there were means of defense. In the first place, there was hardly a passenger, outside of Sammy, who did not carry a gun, and most of them were supposed to know how to use their weapons—while old Alec on the driver’s seat had a sawed-off shotgun hanging in a leather noose by his leg. It was a monstrous old brute of a weapon, fit to have served as an elephant gun, and in its two enormous barrels there was poured a fair double handful of slugs of various sizes.
“From toothpicks to marbles,” Alec was fond of saying, “this here old gun don’t much care what it shoots.”
Of course such a weapon was of no more use than a hand sling at any distance. But at short range, it was accurate enough. No great degree of accuracy, indeed, can be demanded of a hose. And like a hose was that historic weapon of Alec’s. Its great sluicing discharge had been of proved usefulness, also. Three times in his career the stages that Alec drove had been stopped by desperadoes, and it was the glorious record of Alec that he had beaten off every attack. Three dead men had been left behind him, filled with sundry queer fragments that had been belched from the muzzles of his mighty weapon.
“It’ll cover the whole width of the road,” Alec would say “and sweep a whole company clean away. I’d walk up to a regiment of tigers with this here gun and sass ’em back right in their own language, boss.”
That was not all. There were many valuables in the cargo aboard that stage, and the temptation to stop it was apt to prove too much for the gentlemen of the road. So, at the second relay, Sammy had hired two men of wide repute for their skill with shooting irons of all kinds.
Lester and Andrew Gunn were men who had stayed within the limits of the law for only one good reason—which was that the law had never happened to be looking very hard their way during certain interesting moments in their lives. Ten years before they were on the way to making quite a reputation for themselves and decorating the noose of a lynching party’s rope, someday, when a certain famous sheriff took the trouble to read them a lecture on the law, its ways and means. They took that lecture so much to heart, that they had decided upon the spot to follow his good advice, and, from that time forth, they became strict adherents to the party of peace. Because, as some cruelly said, they already had had their fun.
But they could shoot just as straight as ever, and at various times, always side-by-side in every pinch, they had demonstrated their willingness to support the nearest sheriff as deputies. Such men were sure to be known and dreaded. And so, by reputation, they had become known to Sammy Gregg.
You may be sure that he did not hire them because he liked them. There was not a man in the mountains, for that matter, who would have owned himself a friend to the Gunn brothers. Their narrow, swarthy faces and little animal-like black eyes warned all beholders that they were brutes of the lowest type—without nerves or consciences to trouble them. They looked, in short, exactly what they were—hired gunfighters.
Even the steady composure of Anne Cosden was shaken not a little when she was told that this dismal couple was to act as guards to the stage. But they jogged on ahead of the coach and most of the time they did not spoil the view with their presence. They were always just around the next curve of the trail that the freighters had carved deep, even in the rocks. A very efficient couple, no doubt, and their services for this single day had cost Sammy Gregg $50, heart-felt.
“For one day?” he had cried at them in surprise.
“You never can tell,” Lester Gunn had answered. “It might be our last day. And a gent’s last day is worth something extra . . . for funeral expenses, you might say.”
That grim joke settled the question. “If someone tackles them . . . we hear the trouble and can get ready,” Sammy explained to Miss Cosden, “and if they tackle us first, the Gunn brothers will hear the racket and they can come back to us. You see, it works both ways.”
Miss Cosden looked him fairly in the eye. “Yes,” she said, “if all the men on the stage are willing to fight.”
Sammy turned a bright crimson. But his eye did not flinch from hers. “I’m no hero,” he said. “And I don’t know anything about guns. But the other men on the stage have weapons and they can use them well enough.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know,” Anne Cosden said, “but I’ve heard that a rifle has a very quieting effect . . . if the man behind it has the drop. However, we won’t have any trouble. The old days of road agents are done with. This is modern life.”
It is usually that way. All evil belongs to the dark days of the past. The present lies in a white sunlight of innocence and freedom from wrong.
The afternoon wore out. The sun was no longer an intolerable lump of white fire. It was a dazzling golden ball dropping little by little toward the blue tops of the western peaks. A little more, and the evening was coming on them. Have you seen the evening come over the mountains, ever? It is a thing to see and never to forget. For in the mountains, the evening seems to come in two ways. First, it is cropping out of the sky. Secondly, it is rising out of the deep valleys like a dark, cool mist.
Every time the stage dipped into a hollow the world seemed already more than half lost to the night, and every time it rock
ed up onto a high point, the world seemed saved to a beautiful part of the day, still. So they wavered up and down the trail, between darkness and light.
It was as the stage mounted to the top of one of these many knolls that Andrew Gunn was heard to cry out in a sharp, snarling voice, and then there was a loud, rapid blur of shots. Just an instant of gunfire, you understand—a single second packed with the crackle of musketry. And then a dizzying silence.
“Jiminy!” Old Alec grinned as his hand relaxed from the reins that he had begun to draw taut, and as he lowered again the terrible muzzle of the sawed-off shotgun that he had jerked up at the first alarm. “I thought for just a minute that it was . . . but I suppose the boys just seen a rabbit or something like . . .”
And just then Sammy, looking half worried ahead of the nodding ears of the leaders of the stage, saw a beautiful big gray horse covered with a mottling of large dapples step into view around that corner of the road where the Gunn brothers had disappeared. And next he saw big Chester Ormonde Furness.
There was no mask upon Furness this time. Perhaps he had decided that he and his horse and his ways were becoming so well known that it was useless to try the masking game any more. Perhaps he was tired of it. Perhaps, and this is indeed the most likely of all, he simply wanted a new thrill, and therefore he was letting himself be identified with that sort of a crime that hangs the criminal when he is caught. The old way was so safe, so dull, that it would not serve any longer.
But, most significant detail of all—and the first detail for everyone on that stagecoach to see—there was a beautiful, long-barreled repeating rifle cuddled into the hollow of the shoulder of Furness and his head was leaned a little to one side, as though he were whispering loving words to the breech of his gun. He was steady as a veritable rock. There was not a glimmer of waving light as the barrel of that gun steadied upon the top of the stagecoach.
Those practiced eyes that beheld this tableau understood the meaning of that steadiness. Instantly there was a forest of arms upon the top of the vehicle—a stiff-standing forest raised just as high as possible above the heads of the travelers, and the arms of Sammy Gregg were almost the first up.
Even old Alec knew that he had been beaten at last, and he did not more than half raise the shotgun that was his pride. Instead, he let the muzzle sink by degrees while he moaned: “Oh, my Lord, if I’d only taken the first think more serious . . . if I’d only played that first hunch . . . the first hunch always bein’ the only good one when it comes to guns.”
The last part of this remark was torn from his lips by the explosion of a revolver just behind his head. For there was one person in the stage who had not thrust up hands at the summons. And now there was one revolver leveled at big, handsome Chester Furness. Not a big black Colt .45. This was a more refined .32-caliber pistol with a pearl pair of handles and a beautifully burnished octagonal barrel.
“One of them kind that pricks you pretty bad, but mostly never does no killing,” as a Westerner would have expressed it. Whereas a blunt-nosed .45, if it does not kill the victim, will probably knock him quite flat like the blow of a fist.
Now, however, this little .32 was thrust out and twice it exploded. And the broad-brimmed hat leaped from the head of Furness and exposed his fine features to the light of the late day. She had shot the sombrero fairly from its place.
Then one of Gregg’s hands descended, brutally hard, and the thin, hard edge of his palm struck her wrist and turned all the nerves in her hand dead, and made the six-shooter and its four unfired bullets drop into the dust.
“You idiot!” the girl cried to him. “How did you dare . . . ?”
She did not complete the sentence. For just then big Furness spoke, and the sound of his voice made all other things seem unimportant.
“Madame,” he said, “I thought you were about to do a murder, but I’m glad that it is not to be on your conscience. Thank you, Sammy.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cool? Yes, it was very cool, and he looked fully as calm as his words, and about ten times handsomer and bigger and stronger and more deadly than anything that had ever come across the path of anyone in that stage—including Miss Anne Cosden among the rest.
His gun, you see, had not wavered for an instant. And yet neither of her bullets had missed him. Her second shot, obviously, had torn the hat from his head. And now it was seen that her first slug had touched his cheek, which, when you come down to it, is not half bad practice for a girl doing snap shooting from the wavering top of a big, lumbering stage.
One could not tell how badly he was hurt. Just scratched, perhaps. But there was a visible stream of crimson working its way down the side of his face. It was a staggering thing to her. It was even more staggering to the rest of the men on the coach, for they all had heard of this man and most of them had seen him. There had been talk about him, rather naturally, during this very journey toward the hills. By a common assent, he was put down as the cruelest, coldest-hearted devil that ever threw a leg over a saddle west of the Mississippi. Which is another way of saying that a worse man was never born, for other men could commit crimes and live unplagued by any conscience, but it required a perfect uniqueness to revel in his work and dare to appear in a town, as the big fellow had done, and expose two of his latest victims to the public gaze, together with a sneering story of his own manufacture.
However, here he was now, allowing a woman to nick his head with one bullet and knock his hat off with another, without making a movement to fire back at her. And I think, for all the boasted chivalry in the West—and certainly there is plenty of it there—there is no record of a man laying down his life so that a girl may have the convenience of his head as a target for her practice.
Yes, it took the breath from every man on the stage, and it took the breath of Anne Cosden’s own fierce self, the moment she heard him speak. I suppose it made it a little more poignant to her—the fact that he spoke in a pure grammar with the voice of a cultivated man. He was one of her own class. A villain, beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, he was nevertheless a gentleman and a hero as well. He had just demonstrated that fact twice over.
Anne Cosden sank into her place, and she was trembling. Almost for the first time in her life she was trembling. And it was fear, too, that made her tremble—not the thought that she had almost taken this man’s life. Indeed, I think there was a hot wish in her heart that she had killed him. Because now he had filled her with a chilly dread unlike anything she had ever dreamed of before. And she leaned a little forward, gaping at him in a most unromantic and ungraceful way—and the beauty of that fine face and head of his sank upon her eyes and upon her heart—and his smile—and the dark shining of his eyes as he looked up to her—and the quiet music of his voice . . .
Yes, she wished that one of those bullets had gone a little lower, or a little more to one side. Poor Anne Cosden.
Then, from beyond the curve of the road, for the first time, she and the rest heard a low-pitched, stifled groaning. Not one voice, but two—the sick, weak, bubbling groaning of a very badly wounded man.
Have you ever heard that sound? It will make a hospital ward turn pea-green in an instant; it makes even a doctor need a drink. And it drained the very last thought of resistance—if they had any in the first place—out of the systems of the men in that stage.
They obeyed in the most perfectly regular fashion, doing as he directed them to do. They climbed down to the road and stood there in the gathering chill of the evening, listening.
He said to the girl as she got to the ground. “Will you run to take a look at those two poor fellows? I don’t think they’re as badly hit as they sound.”
She gave him a nod. And as she went by, he trailed his glance quietly over her—and her eyes went wide under the touch of his, and how far he looked into her heart she dared not guess. But she ran down the road, and there she found her hands filled with work—gruesome work enough, at that.
Furness carried
his rifle carelessly tucked under one arm. And yet it was held as lightly and as firmly and as surely, it seemed, as though he had gripped it in both strong hands. Also, his right forefinger was curled constantly about the trigger, and everyone in the group knew perfectly well that that finger was not there for nothing.
He lined up the passengers with their faces to the side of the road. Then he went behind them and frisked their pockets. A neat little haul even for a Furness. Not so much as he would have taken, you would think, from a crowd coming back from the mines. But, as a matter of fact, there were no fewer than three professional gamblers in that shipment, and from them alone, on their way to work the rich gold diggings in their own peculiar fashion, he took more than $14,000 in cash. There was that much more taken from the rest of the group. And now he paused behind Sammy Gregg.
“I suppose,” he said, “that you have a pretty considerable wad of money in your pocket, for a payroll, and what not. But I really don’t see how I can take from a man who brings me so many excellent customers. It would hardly be considered good etiquette, on the road. Do you think?” And he laughed, did Furness, and swung onto his gray horse with a movement so swift that even if they had had eyes in the backs of their heads, they would hardly have been able to seize the right moment to whirl and shoot. Also, their guns had been thrown in the middle of the road by his foresight.
He backed his gray stallion up the road. How beautiful and proudly disdainful that glorious creature seemed as he pranced in that fashion, backward, obeying the will of his master, but not his hand. “After I am around the corner,” he advised the party, “it will be safe for you to move, but not before, if you please. And remember, my friends, that this is a rifle that I carry under my arm . . . not a revolver, you know. So . . . if you want to hunt me up . . . don’t tread too close upon my heels, because you might have your toes barked.”
And then, there he was at the corner, and around it in a flash with the big horse. He paused beside the girl. And she was a changed sight.