by B. M. Bower
Behind her she heard the chuck-chuck of the loaded wagon. Far ahead she heard some one whistling a high, sweet melody which had the queer, minor strains of some old folk song. For just a few bars she heard it, and then it was stilled, and the road dipping steeply before her seemed very lonely, its emptiness cooling her brief anger to a depression that had held her too often in its grip since that terrible night of the storm. For the first time she looked back at her father lurching along on the load and at the team looking so funny with the collars pushed up on their necks with the weight of the load behind.
With a quick impulse of penitence she waved her hand to Brit, who waved back at her. Then she went on, feeling a bit less alone in the world. After all, he was her dad, and his life had been hard. If he failed to understand her and her mental hunger for real companionship, perhaps she also failed to understand him.
They had left the timber line now and had come to the lip of the canyon itself. Lorraine looked down its steep, rock-roughened sides and thought how her old director would have raved over its possibilities in the way of “stunts.” Yellowjacket, she noticed, kept circumspectly to the centre of the trail and eyed the canyon with frank disfavour.
She did not know at just what moment she became aware of trouble behind her. It may have been Yellowjacket, turning his head sidewise and abruptly quickening his pace that warned her. It may have been the difference in the sound of the wagon and the impact of the horses’ hoofs on the rock trail. She turned and saw that something had gone wrong. They were coming down upon her at a sharp trot, stepping high, the wagon tongue thrust up between their heads as they tried to hold back the load.
Brit yelled to her then to get out of the way, and his voice was harsh and insistent. Lorraine looked at the steep bank to the right, knew instinctively that Yellowjacket would never have time to climb it before the team was upon them, and urged him to a lope. She glanced back again, saw that the team was not running away, that they were trying to hold the wagon, and that it was gaining momentum in spite of them.
“Jump, dad!” she called and got no answer. Brit was sitting braced with his feet far apart, holding and guiding the team. “He won’t jump—he wouldn’t jump—any more than I would,” she chattered to herself, sick with fear for him, while she lashed her own horse to keep out of their way.
The next she knew, the team was running, their eyeballs staring, their front feet flung high as they lunged panic-stricken down the trail. The load was rocking along behind them. Brit was still braced and clinging to the reins.
Panic seized Yellowjacket. He, too, went lunging down that trail, his head thrown from side to side that he might watch the thing that menaced him, heedless of the fact that danger might lie ahead of him also. Lorraine knew that he was running senselessly, that he might leave the trail at any bend and go rolling into the canyon.
A sense of unreality seized her. It could not be deadly earnest, she thought. It was so exactly like some movie thrill, planned carefully in advance, rehearsed perhaps under the critical eye of the director, and done now with the camera man turning calmly the little crank and counting the number of film feet the scene would take. A little farther and she would be out of the scene, and men stationed ahead would ride up and stop her horse for her and tell her how well she had “put it over.”
She looked over her shoulder and saw them still coming. It was real. It was terribly real, the way that team was fleeing down the grade. She had never seen anything like that before, never seen horses so frantically trying to run from the swaying load behind them. Always, she had been accustomed to moderation in the pace and a slowed camera to speed up the action on the screen. Yellowjacket, too—she had never ridden at that terrific speed down hill. Twice she lost a stirrup and grabbed the saddle horn to save herself from going over his head.
They neared a sharp turn, and it took all her strength to pull her horse to the inside and save him from plunging off down the canyon’s side. The nose of the hill hid for a moment her dad, and in that moment she heard a crash and knew what had happened. But she could not stop; Yellowjacket had his ears laid back flat on his senseless head, and the bit clamped tight in his teeth.
She heard the crash repeated in diminuendo farther down in the canyon. There was no longer the rattle of the wagon coming down the trail, the sharp staccato of pounding hoofs.
CHAPTER XI
SWAN TALKS WITH HIS THOUGHTS
Lorraine, following instinct rather than thought, pulled Yellowjacket into the first opening that presented itself. This was a narrow, rather precipitous gully that seamed the slope just beyond the bend. The bushes there whipped her head and shoulders cruelly as the horse forged in among them, but they trapped him effectually where the gully narrowed to a point. He stopped perforce, and Lorraine was out of the saddle and running down to the trail before she quite realised what she was doing.
At the bend she looked down, saw the marks where the wagon had gone over, scraping rocks and bushes from its path. Fence posts were strewn at all angles down the incline, and far down a horse was standing with part of the harness on him and with his head drooping dispiritedly. Her father she could not see, nor the other horse, nor the wagon. A clump of young trees hid the lower declivity. Lorraine did not stop to think of what she would find down there. Sliding, running, she followed the traces of the wreck to where the horse was standing. It was Caroline, looking very dejected but apparently unhurt, save for skinned patches here and there where she had rolled over rocks.
A little farther, just beyond the point of the grove which they seemed to have missed altogether, lay the other horse and what was left of the wagon. Brit she did not see at all. She searched the bushes, looked under the wagon, and called and called.
A full-voiced shout answered her from farther up the canyon, and she ran stumbling toward the sound, too agonised to shed tears or to think very clearly. It was not her father’s voice; she knew that beyond all doubt. It was no voice that she had ever heard before. It had a clear resonance that once heard would not have been easily forgotten. When she saw them finally, her father was being propped up in a half-sitting position, and the strange man was holding something to his lips.
“Just a little water. I carry me a bottle of water always in my pocket,” said Swan, glancing up at her when she had reached them. “It sometimes makes a man’s head think better when he has been hurt, if he can drink a little water or something.”
Brit swallowed and turned his face away from the tilted bottle. “I jumped—but I didn’t jump quick enough,” he muttered thickly. “The chain pulled loose. Where’s the horses, Raine?”
“They’re all right. Caroline’s standing over there. Are you hurt much, dad?” It was a futile question, because Brit was already going off into unconsciousness.
“He’s hurt pretty bad,” Swan declared honestly; looking up at her with his eyes grown serious. “I was across the walley and I saw him coming down the road like rolling rocks down a hill. I came quick. Now we make stretcher, I think, and carry him home. I could take him on my back, but that is hurting him too much.” He looked at her—through her, it seemed to Lorraine. In spite of her fear, in spite of her grief, she felt that Swan was reading her very soul, and she backed away from him.
“I could help your father very much,” he said soberly, “but I should tell you a secret if I do that. I should maybe ask that you tell a lie if somebody asks questions. Could you do that, Miss?”
“Lie?” Lorraine laughed uncertainly. “I’d kill!—if that would help dad.”
Swan was folding his coat very carefully and placing it under Brit’s head. “My mother I love like that,” he said, without looking up. “My mother I love so well that I talk with my thoughts to her sometimes. You believe people can talk with their thoughts?”
“I don’t know—what’s that got to do with helping dad?” Lorraine knelt beside Brit and began stroking his forehead softly, as is the soothing way of women with their sick.
“I coul
d send my thought to my mother. I could say to her that a man is hurt and that a doctor must come very quickly to the Quirt ranch. I could do that, Miss, but I should not like it if people knew that I did it. They would maybe say that I am crazy. They would laugh at me, and it is not right to laugh at those things.”
“I’m not laughing. If you can do it, for heaven’s sake go ahead! I don’t believe it, but I won’t tell any one, if that’s what you want.”
“If some neighbours should ask, ‘How did that doctor come so quick?’——”
“I’d rather lie and say I sent for him, than say that you or any one else sent a telepathic message. That would sound more like a lie than a lie would. How are we going to make a stretcher? We’ve got to get him home, somehow——”
“At my cabin is blankets,” Swan told her briskly. “I can climb the hill—it is up there. In a little while I will come back.”
He started off without waiting to see what Lorraine would have to say about it, and with some misgivings she watched him run down to the canyon’s bottom and go forging up the opposite side with a most amazing speed and certainty. In travel pictures she had seen mountain sheep climb like that, and she likened him now to one of them. It seemed a shame that he was a bit crazy, she thought; and immediately she recalled his perfect assurance when he told her of sending thought messages to his mother. She had heard of such things, she had even read a little on the subject, but it had never seemed to her a practical means of communicating. Calling a doctor, for instance, seemed to Lorraine rather far-fetched an application of what was at best but a debatable theory.
Considering the distance, he was back in a surprisingly short time with two blankets, a couple of light poles and a flask of brandy. He seemed as fresh and unwinded as if he had gone no farther than the grove, and he wore, more than ever, his air of cheerful assurance.
“The doctor will be there,” he remarked, just as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “We can carry him to Fred Thurman’s. There I can get horses and a wagon, and you will not have to carry so far. And when we get to your ranch the doctor will be there, I think. He is starting now. We will hurry. I will fix it so you need not carry much. It is just to make it steady for me.”
While he talked he was working on the stretcher. He had a rope, and he was knotting it in a long loop to the poles. Lorraine wondered why, until he had lifted her father and placed him on the stretcher and placed the loop over his head and under one arm, as a ploughman holds the reins, so that his hands may be free.
“If you will carry the front,” said Swan politely, “it will not be heavy for you like this. But you will help me keep it steady.”
Lorraine was past discussing anything. She obeyed him silently, lifting the end of the stretcher and leading the way down to the canyon’s bottom, where Swan assured her they could walk quite easily and would save many detours which the road above must take. At the bottom Swan stopped her so that he might shorten the rope and take more of the weight on his shoulders. She protested half-heartedly, but Swan only laughed.
“I am strong like a mule,” he said. “You should see me wrestle with somebody. Clear over my head—I can carry a man in my hands. This is so you can walk fast. Three miles straight down we come to Thurman’s ranch, where I get the horses. It’s funny how hills make a road far around. Just three miles—that’s all. I have walked many times.”
Lorraine did not answer him. She felt that he was talking merely to keep her from worrying, and she was fairly sick with anxiety and did not hear half of what he was saying. She was nervously careful about choosing her steps so that she would not stumble and jolt her father. She did not believe that he was wholly unconscious, for she had seen his eyelids tighten and his lips twitch several times, when she waiting for Swan. He had seemed to be in pain and to be trying to hide the fact from her. She felt that Swan knew it, else he would have talked of her dad, would at least have tried to reassure her. But it is difficult to speak of a person who hears what you are saying, and Swan was talking of everything, it seemed to her, except the man they were carrying.
She wondered if it were really true that Swan had sent a call through space for a doctor; straightway she would call herself crazy for even considering for a moment its possibility. If he could do that—but of course he couldn’t. He must just imagine it.
Many times Swan had her lower the stretcher to the ground, and would make a great show of rubbing his arms and easing his shoulder muscles. Whenever Lorraine looked full into his face he would grin at her as though nothing was wrong, and when they came to a clear-running stream he emptied the water bottle, dipped up a little fresh water, added brandy, and lifted Brit’s head very gently and gave him a drink. Brit opened his eyes and looked at Swan, and from him to Lorraine, but he did not say anything. He still had that tightened look around his mouth which spelled pain.
“Pretty quick now we get you fixed up good,” Swan told him cheerfully. “One mile more is all, and we get the horses and I make a good bed for you.” He looked a signal, and Lorraine once more took up the stretcher.
Another mile seemed a long way, light though Swan had made the load for her. She thought once that he must have some clairvoyant power, because whenever she felt as if her arms were breaking, Swan would tell her to stop a minute.
“How do you know a doctor will come?” she asked Swan suddenly, when they were resting with the Thurman ranch in view half a mile below them.
Swan did not look at her directly, as had been his custom. She saw a darker shade of red creep up into his cheeks. “My mother says she would send a doctor quick,” he replied hesitatingly. “You will see. It is because—your father he is not like other men in this country. Your father is a good man. That is why a doctor comes.”
Lorraine looked at him strangely and stooped again to her burden. She did not speak again until they were passing the Thurman fence where it ran up into the mouth of the canyon. A few horses were grazing there, the sun striking their sides with the sheen of satin. They stared curiously at the little procession, snorted and started to run, heads and tails held high. But one wheeled suddenly and came galloping toward them, stopped when he was quite close, ducked and went thundering past to the head of the field. Lorraine gave a sharp little scream and set down the stretcher with a lurch, staring after the horse wide-eyed, her face white.
“They do it for play,” Swan said reassuringly. “They don’t hurt you. The fence is between, and they don’t hurt you anyway.”
“That horse with the white face—I saw it—and when the man struck it with his quirt it went past me, running like that and dragging—oh-h!” She leaned against the bluff side, her face covered with her two palms.
Swan glanced down at Brit, saw that his eyes were closed, ducked his head from under the looped rope and went to Lorraine.
“The man that struck that horse—do you know that man?” he asked, all the good nature gone from his voice.
“No—I don’t know—I saw him twice, by the lightning flashes. He shot—and then I saw him——” She stopped abruptly, stood for a minute longer with her eyes covered, then dropped her hands limply to her sides. But when the horse came circling back with a great flourish, she shivered and her hands closed into the fists of a fighter.
“Are you a Sawtooth man?” she demanded suddenly, looking up at Swan defiantly. “It was a nightmare. I—I dreamed once about a horse—like that.”
Swan’s wide-open eyes softened a little. “The Sawtooth calls me that damn Swede on Bear Top,” he explained. “I took a homestead up there and some day they will want to buy my place or they will want to make a fight with me to get the water. Could you know that man again?”
“Raine!” Brit’s voice held a warning, and Lorraine shivered again as she turned toward him. “Raine, you——”
He closed his eyes again, and she could get no further speech from him. But she thought she understood. He did not want her to talk about Fred Thurman. She went to her end of the stretche
r and waited there while Swan put the rope over his head. They went on, Lorraine walking with her head averted, trying not to see the blaze-faced roan, trying to shut out the memory of him dashing past her with his terrible burden, that night.
Swan did not speak of the matter again. With Lorraine’s assistance he carried Brit into Thurman’s cabin, laid him, stretcher and all, on the bed and hurried out to catch and harness the team of work horses. Lorraine waited beside her father, helpless and miserable. There was nothing to do but wait, yet waiting seemed to her the one thing she could not do.
“Raine!” Brit’s voice was very weak, but Lorraine jumped as though a trumpet had bellowed suddenly in her ear. “Swan—he’s all right. But don’t go telling—all yuh know and some besides. He ain’t—Sawtooth, but—he might let out——”
“I know. I won’t, dad. It was that horse——”
Brit turned his face to the wall as if no more was to be said on the subject. Lorraine wandered around the cabin, which was no larger than her father’s place. The rooms were scrupulously clean—neater than the Quirt, she observed guiltily. Not one article, however small and unimportant, seemed to be out of its place, and the floors of both rooms were scrubbed whiter than any floors she had ever seen. Swan’s housekeeping qualities made her ashamed of her own imperfections; and when, thinking that Swan must be hungry and that the least she could do was to set out food for him, she opened the cupboard, she had a swift, embarrassed vision of her own culinary imperfections. She could cook better food than her dad had been content to eat and to set before others, but Swan’s bread was a triumph in sour dough. Biscuits tall and light as bread can be she found, covered neatly with a cloth. Prunes stewed so that there was not one single wrinkle in them—Lorraine could scarcely believe they were prunes until she tasted them. She was investigating a pot of beans when Swan came in.