by Max Brand
In that confused maneuver of turning they lost a few precious seconds, but what else could they do? The outlaw was between two parties, and a shot aimed at him would be more than likely to miss and take effect on one of the townsmen on the opposite side. They could only turn and wait for a chance to shoot from behind.
That chance came at once. The two parties revolved and faced in the opposite direction, and then, as they raised their guns, they saw Meg slip like a phantom among the trees. They fired, but the only result was the crashing of the bullets among the branches. Then they pressed in to make another trial of speed with Meg.
She was nearly done, poor Meg, but answered that new challenge with a courage and heart worthy of another cause. Straightaway she burst into a gallop well nigh as light and as sweeping as the step with which she had darted down among the boulders of the hillside early that same day. It was a delusive lightness, to be sure, supplied by strength of spirit rather than strength of muscle, but the first three miles were dizzy miles to follow, and sent the sweat pouring and dripping down the shoulders of the horses from Elmira.
Still they pressed on. Sheriff Nance, mounted freshly by courtesy of an Elmira citizen, continued to lead, heartening his men at every step. They circled around from the end of the spoon-handle of the narrow valley and up through the rougher and higher mountains again. Speed of foot was the least requirement for progress now. There was needed to a far greater degree the leathery endurance and the climbing ability of a mountain sheep. Here the horses of the cowpunchers excelled. Even when fresh, Meg would not have had a great advantage over them. Half exhausted as she was, they now gained upon her at a deadly rate.
Still the Red Devil pressed on in what seemed to the sheriff and his companions an insane direction. He was not heading for a stretch of level land where he might use the speed of Meg to vital advantage again. Instead, he was driving her remorselessly into the rough going, and up steeper and steeper grades.
“We’ll get him now, lads!” called one of the men as they saw the figure of the Red Devil sketched against the moon haze in the sky at the top of a tall cliff. “We’ll get him now! He can’t ride Meg down through thin air, I reckon!”
So, indeed, he could not, and that impossibility was not his intention.
“It’s the end of him!” cried the sheriff in great excitement. “He’s cornered, and he ain’t going to let his hoss live after him. He’s going to jump Meg over the cliff and die with her. Look at him!”
Charlie Mark had turned in the saddle and was shaking his fist at the small blots that were the signs of men swarming in pursuit of him across the ground below. Then he swung out of the stirrups and landed lightly on the ground beside Meg and was seen to step to the edge of the precipice.
For the first time his purpose became clear to the sheriff, and with a yell he warned his companions. “Ride, boys, ride! He’s going to leave Meg! Who’d ever believe that? He’s going to leave Meg behind him, after all the times she’s saved him. Feed the hosses the spur!”
He set the example, rushing his horse at the grade, while the form of Charlie Mark was lost to view. They stormed up to the height, and there they found Meg standing with her head down and her legs spread and braced, so great was her exhaustion. When they swept around her, she merely tossed up her head, but she made no move to escape them.
When they leaned over the cliff, however, they received a different greeting. It was the ringing explosion of a rifle far down the precipice, which drove them quickly back. Their hands were tied so far as the Red Devil was concerned. They had taken his horse, but at that price he had escaped them. To climb down the cliff after him, in face of his rifle fire, was impossible. To make the long detour on either side would require too much time. He had simply slipped through their fingers. Nevertheless, they had a feeling of triumph that the sheriff very aptly phrased.
“He’s been beat for the first time,” he said. “We have chased him a pile of times before, but we never so much as touched a hair of him. Now we have his horse. And what’s more, we’ve nicked the Red Devil himself enough to see red. Look there!”
Even by moonlight they could see it. Crimson from the wounded left wrist of Charlie Mark had stained the horn of the saddle, the shoulder of Meg, and her flank.
“We’ve got his horse,” continued the sheriff grimly, “and he’s got away with the work of my life in money. Well … I guess it’s a fair exchange.”
VII
From the room in the house of Henry Mark, Jim Curry had watched the glimmering shape of Meg begin her flight. Then he had waited while the shrill voice of Little Billy alarmed the house and started the cowpunchers from the bunkhouse into the quiet air of the night. In a few seconds more he was able to watch the whole cavalcade thundering off into the night and sweeping up toward the broad end of the valley. But he shrugged his shoulders, quite indifferent to the fate of the riders.
Whatever betided, they would not capture the rider of Meg. He had bestrode her too often to dream that the best horses on the Mark place could so much as force her into a sweat on a hot day. Besides, they were probably taking the wrong direction. They rode toward the broad end of the valley, because they took it for granted that the robber would not dare ride toward the town. But would not this be the reason Charlie Mark would prefer that direction for his flight? He himself, had he been playing his old role, would not have fled at all, but, having bolted toward the trees, he would have reined Meg to one side or the other, waited for the manhunters to crash by him, and then he might have cantered a little distance in their rear to watch the proceedings.
Charlie Mark no doubt lacked the coolness to do such a thing, but he might very well have sense enough to take the least-suspected road and ride toward the town. So in a mood of perfect indifference Jim Curry watched the riders stream off into the night, among them Little Billy himself—Little Billy riding valorously to take his place in the manhunt. Jim Curry grinned at the thought, but his smile did not wear well. He was sober again in a moment.
After all, they were riding in pursuit of a fiend in human shape who he, Jim Curry, had raised and given identity. Driven out from among his fellow men by a combination of hard luck and youthful hot-headedness years ago, he himself had created the role that Charlie Mark was now playing to the tune of murder and outrage. And he felt as though he had made a new Frankenstein and turned it loose on a suffering world.
In that gloomy mood he leaned at the window and pondered. He had done many a bad thing, but never had he done so wicked a deed as when he allowed Charlie Mark to take his place, accept the disguise and the horse of the Red Devil, and turn the ruthless fellow loose on the mountain desert.
After a time, he roused himself and went slowly down the back stairs. Walking slowly, noiselessly, as he always walked, he passed through the lower floor of the house and came to the parlor, where the light announced the presence of Ruth Mark. He parted the stiff folds of the curtain and looked inside.
She sat by the window on the far side of the room, her profile, cut clear as a chisel cuts white marble, against that background of darkness, her hands fell idly into her lap. She was looking at the ceiling and beyond the ceiling into gloomy thoughts of her own.
He knew by the true voice of instinct that, if he entered, she would start up with a smile. But he did not enter. He had no right, he told himself bitterly, to make her smile in that manner. Later on some of the truth about his past would begin to leak out, in spite of himself, and then she would loathe him. It was inevitable. He was enjoying in this home the rest of a traveler who reaches an oasis, but who knows that in a short space he must go on again and face the blinding heat and the storms of the desert. Staring at her, Jim Curry knew that she was all to him that the green tops of the palms are to the Bedouin when he sights them far away, with a pale-blue sky behind and a white-hot desert in front. But he let the stiff curtain fold fall slowly, softly together and drew back with
the same noiseless footfall into the hall.
However noiseless his footfall, however, it seemed that the stir of the curtain had attracted her attention. Presently there was a rush of tapping slipper heels, the curtains were flung wide apart, and framed in the triangle of drapery was Ruth Mark, peering eagerly into the darkness before her. The hall lamp had been turned down too low; it was a glowing spot in the solid dark rather than a point of illumination.
“Jim,” called the girl softly. “Jim, was that you?” She waited. Her head was canted.
He could see her smile of expectancy, and he wanted with all his heart to go toward her, but he dared not trust himself. It was too easy to talk to her. It would be too easy to say too much. He waited until, with a faint exclamation of disappointment, she let the curtain fall together again and was gone.
Then he turned and continued his retreat, wondering. How quick her ear was. Out of profoundest meditation, how swiftly she had run toward him. If he should go back to her now, ask her why she had called, sit near her, begin to tell her all those things that were swelling and stirring in his heart—how would she answer him? He could not doubt what that answer would be. And suppose that, after he had roused and wakened her heart toward him, he were then to tell her the truth about his past and all of his doings as the Red Devil? After all, they were not so very black. He had robbed, but he had never robbed the poor. He had shot men down, but he had never killed. And although they loaded his reputation with a hundred grim murders, attributing to the mysterious rider of the white horse all the unexplainable crimes in the mountains, he could persuade her that force of circumstance had compelled him to what he had done, and that it had never driven him to take life or oppress the weak.
Yes, he could make her believe all of this, and no doubt he could, in the impulse and the great-heartedness of the moment, make her give him a promise that afterward she would keep holy. But would it not be spoiling her life? Would it not be a thing against which she would writhe and revolt later on? Yes, assuredly it would. It would blast her life as well as his own should the truth ever come out. It would drive him into the heart of the mountains again, an outlaw. It would ostracize her as the outlaw’s wife.
He closed the rear door of the house softly behind him, full of this thought, and, going to the corral, he caught a horse, saddled, and jogged the nag down the road toward town.
The placid village where he had expected to cant back in a chair whose back rested against the wall of the hotel lobby was, however, in a swirl of excitement. Armed men were mounting and galloping as fast as their horses could carry them toward the far end of the valley. Women and even children were gathered here and there, gossiping. And on every side he heard the name of the Red Devil mixed with breathless exclamations of wonder from the women and deep-throated oaths from the old men.
One of these, wagging his long-bearded head from side to side, he accosted as the veteran was making his way from one cluster to another.
“What’s happened?” asked Jim Curry.
“The Red Devil’s happened,” said the old man. “That’s enough. He’ll be murdering us in our beds before long. He’s held up the sheriff in the sheriff’s own house, and he’s opened the sheriff’s own safe with the sheriff’s own key, and doggone me if he ain’t taken the sheriff’s own money and got scat-free away!”
This amazing recital left Jim Curry gasping, and a thrill of excitement went prickling up his spine. In his own most palmy days he had never performed a more hair-raising and successful coup than this. After all, there must be something more in Charlie Mark than the mere instinct for murder. Perhaps such talents, had they been given a chance to develop in the right line, might have made him a man of good influence in society. But the thought had no sooner formed in the brain of Jim Curry than he shook his head. From all he could learn, the nature of Charlie Mark was bad. He had been a sneak and a bully in his childhood. He had been a gambler and a fighter in his manhood. He had begun young, and he was simply continuing the same tactics. That was all there was to it, and it was foolish to take the blame for his present crimes on his own shoulders.
A loud-voiced lamenter now attracted his attention, and he saw two women standing in the center of a group of excited listeners. A hard-faced creature of middle-age made the noise; a withered, kind-eyed old lady was supported on the arm of the virago.
“If it was only part gone, we could stand it,” said the declaimer. “But it’s all gone … all gone. Every cent that ma and me has in the world. I say, speaking personal, that the sheriff and the Red Devil come to an agreement. Why not? The Red Devil comes and scoops up everything. Then he gives back the sheriff’s money and part of mine, too. But it ain’t me. Not me alone. It’s the babies mostly. Why did the sheriff come telling us we’d ought to put everything in his safe where he could keep his eye on it for us? It was only yesterday …”
“Hush, hush,” said her old mother. “Come along, honey, and don’t be wringin’ your hands about spilt milk. We’ll live some way. And we’ll take care of the babies, Lord bless ’em.”
Jim Curry spurred his horse out of hearing of the wail, and with a black face he turned down the street and rode again into the dark valley beyond.
VIII
He rode with an angry determination now, pushing his mount to the limit of its speed, and quite regardless of the occasional twinge of pain in his wounded thigh. That wound, however, was weak rather than still open, and in his present state of mind the pain meant nothing to him. He only allowed the pace to abate when they reached the steep upgrades of the hills.
Once among them, he was at home. He knew every path and pass among the rolling crests. This was his hole-in-the-wall country, in which he had baffled pursuit times beyond number. This was the country of twisting cañons and dry creekbeds, where the blow-sand sifted together and washed out the trace of a hoof print almost as soon as the hoof was withdrawn. Every hill had for Jim Curry a separate story and even a separate character. When he first entered the district he had thought it barren and hard enough. But long acquaintance had made it a kindly place to him.
The darkness did not matter. He knew every stone in every trail, and he pushed the horse remorselessly uphill and down until he came in the vicinity of that well-known hillside where was the entrance to the cave in which he had spent four long years of his life, and where, he had no doubt, Charlie Mark was still dwelling. He would not waste time in looking up another retreat. He would prefer to take it for granted that the original dweller in the cave would never return to disturb his solitude.
In a comparatively short time he reached a steep-sided gorge littered with enormous boulders, each magnified now by shadow in the dimness of the moon shine. Winding among these stones with the precision of old usage, he came to one of the largest of the rocks, swung down from the saddle, threw the reins over the head of his horse, and approached the great stone.
He circled behind it, and, where it leaned against the side of the hill he stooped over, worked a moment at a corner of the rock as though he expected to tear the whole enormous mass from its bed, and then actually succeeded in moving a great slab. This turned inward beneath his pressure and revealed a narrow passage partly natural and partly cleared out by hammer and chisel through the stone.
Down this passage he crept, turned to the right at a narrow elbow bend, and in this manner entered a long, low cave, in the center of which there was the sputtering and uneven light of a small fire whose flames were thrown back and forth and up and down by the action of a random draft. Beside that fire sat Charlie Mark with a rudely improvised table before him, and on the table were little stacks of money that he had arranged in neat piles. And as he contemplated it, he rocked backward and forward, singing softly to himself.
Jim Curry contemplated this figure and his occupation through a moment of silence. Then he stepped boldly into the interior.
“It’s me, Charlie!” he called
.
At the first sound of his voice there was a remarkable change in the attitude of Charlie Mark. He leaped like an acrobat from his seat, hurled himself sidewise from the fire and into shadow, and whipped out his revolver. But even as he brought it out, he seemed to realize first that the greatest speed in the world could not save him if an enemy had entered the cave and taken him by surprise, also that this was not an enemy at all.
He straightened, therefore, and shoved the revolver back into the holster, and he made himself smile, although his face was still pale as he came toward Jim Curry, who all this time had remained with his nervous right hand resting on his hip, frowningly intent on the movements of Charlie Mark, but disdaining to draw his own gun until the last instant of safety. He approached Charlie in turn, coming into the firelight.
“Hello!” called Charlie Mark. “Seems that you and I are to see a good deal of each other this evening, eh?” And he extended his hand cordially, although all the time, with a flickering side glance, he was observing his hoard of money spread out so enticingly on the little table, each stack with the pebble placed on top to keep a single bill from blowing away. That extended hand, however, was not taken by Jim Curry. And it dropped sharply back to the side of Mark, where it lingered near the butt of his revolver. He was grinding his teeth with rage, but pretended not to have noticed the slight.
“Sit down and make yourself at home,” he said. “You see, I’m just counting over the proceeds of the day’s work, Jim. Sit down and have a cup of coffee … and something to eat with it, if you’re hungry.”