by Max Brand
“Put your boys to sleep and go to sleep yourself,” the Lamb assured him. “There isn’t going to be a step taken toward your place until the early part of the dawn. It may not be tomorrow. It might be next month. But I don’t reckon on that long.”
“But suppose,” the colonel asked softly, “that we was to round ’em up between the mouth of the valleys and the house, and pepper ’em from both sides?”
“Then,” said the boy calmly, “there’d be only a lot of dead Montagues left under our noses, and a lot of live Montagues running like scared dogs down the valley.”
The colonel drew in a very long and slow breath. “I can sort of taste it,” he said huskily. Then he began to laugh, and there was also a husky noise beneath that laughter that made the boy think of the sound a dog makes in his throat when its teeth are fixed in the flesh of an enemy. “I’ve had it a long, long time,” explained the colonel, ashamed. “They’ve had their knives in me. If I only had a chance to get back at ’em …”
“Work steady, and mind the law,” the Lamb said. “That’s the best way, I take it.”
“What care have they for the law?”
“Not much. But always to play safe.”
The colonel jerked up his head. “It stands this way … if they do what you tell me they’ll do, I’m gonna bag ’em, and make them remember this day. And then … you and me will have something to talk about together, son.”
“That’s the finish,” the Lamb said. “I’m due back.”
“Does anybody suspect you there?”
“They’ve all been suspecting me. But there’s only one that still won’t believe that I’m with them. That’s Jack McGuire.”
“Be careful. Be mighty careful of that breed,” said the colonel.
“You know him?”
“Oh, I know him … but a long ways back. He’s a cross between a carrion buzzard and a bloodhound. There never was a better man on the trail, son … keep him off of yours.”
The Lamb touched the handles of his Colt instinctively. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind, Colonel.”
“If they get a doubt about you,” explained the colonel, “you’re dead. And I’m ruined. If you can keep the wool over their eyes until they tackle me in the way they’ve planned, then we’ll bucket ’em to pieces without any trouble at all.”
“It’ll be a barbecue,” said the Lamb.
“Then good night, son.”
“Good night,” the Lamb said. He paused and added, “You couldn’t drop a word in the ear of Muldoon, could you? He’s pretty hard on me, just now.”
“There’s nothing I’d rather do. If he and the rest of the boys knew that you were down there working for me, they’d be greatly bucked up. But as sure as one of ’em knew, the rest would all know, and as sure as they all knew, then the word would get straight down to the Montagues.”
The Lamb agreed. They parted at once, and, as the colonel started back for his ranch, the Lamb turned up the valley, keeping close to the edge of the trees, where their steep shadows would cover him. However, he saw nothing in the open, and he came straight back to the Montague house without hearing human sound. He crossed the bridge unchallenged, only at the rear door of the house a voice barked out of the darkness suddenly, and Jack McGuire stood beside him.
Chapter Thirty-One
The warning that the colonel had given him fitted exactly with the Lamb’s own sense of things, and, therefore, he did not doubt a most pointed danger from McGuire. Moreover, from the first, he felt an absolute repulsion for this dark-browed fellow.
“Where’ve you been?” from McGuire.
“Walking.”
“Walkin’ where?”
“Where I felt like going.”
“Is that any answer?”
“It’s all you’ll get.”
From the hand of McGuire a flare of light sprang into the face of the Lamb. Then the lantern was slowly lowered, so that it shone on the clothes of the wanderer. “You’ve been in the brush,” said McGuire.
“Of course I have.”
“What for?”
“Walking the idea of Lefty Fargo out of my head.”
“Hey?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Pork and beans is about as far as you could get. I had Fargo on my mind. I wanted to walk him out of it, so’s I could get some sleep.”
“Bah!” McGuire said. “That’s likely, ain’t it?”
“What’s likely?”
“That you’d be nervous about anything. There ain’t any nerves in you.”
“Are you through?” the Lamb asked suddenly. “Because if you ain’t, I am.”
“I’m night watch,” said Jack McGuire, and he grinned with triumphant pleasure.
“You’re crazy,” the Lamb said.
“Am I?” answered McGuire. “I’m the crazy kind that’s gonna toast you on the coals, kid. I’m tellin’ you that. Go on in. I’m tired of talkin’ to you.”
With that, the Lamb was released, and he went into the house with a gloomy and downward head. All was far from what he could have wished it to be.
The door of the big dining room was open. He saw blue wisps of cigarette smoke mixed with heavy clouds from many pipes. Some of the boys were in there talking over the day, and he paused to listen, for he had an idea that he might hear something of importance about himself.
A drawling, nasal voice was saying, “She was about four years old. She was layin’ down in a bare path, and the heat of her belly was turnin’ the dirt to mud under her feet. The snow and the sleet was caked across the hollows of her back and I seen that her vitals would be freezin’, the first thing she knew. I was dead fagged … I’d been tailin’ ’em up all day till my arms was about pulled out at the sockets. My pony was gettin’ a little smoky, too. There’d been several pairs of horns throwed his way, that day.
“But I got down and got after that old fool of a cow. I worked like the dickens. Her tail cracked … I thought I was pullin’ it in two. But, finally, with her bawlin’ her head off, I heaved up the rear end of her. She stumbled onto her feet, and swung around on me. That spilled her down on her knees ag’in. But she was so ornery mean and mad that she come up ag’in and after me. I dived for the pinto. Doggone him, but he sidestepped me, and then bolted. I lit out for the next tree. It was about five miles off, seemed to me, and that doggone cow run like a greyhound after me. I was more greyhounder than her, though. I got so all-fired light that just her breath was enough to blow me along ahead of her. I didn’t weigh no more than a dead leaf. So when I come under that tree, I heaved myself up and caught hold of a branch about thirty feet off’n the ground, just as the critter’s horns split the seat of my trousers.
“The bawlin’ that cow done then was more’n I ever heard the like of before. She horned the tree. Her bellowin’ shook the snow off the branches. But pretty soon the pinto come wanderin’ along that way, pawin’ off the crust of the snow and chawin’ at the grass. He seen me and started laughin’, and when the cow seen him with his mouth open, she hilted her tail and tore after him. I climbed down out of the tree and started for …”
“I remember a time when I was down in the Big Bend,” broke in another voice, “and while I was there, I met up with a gent by name of Cozy Dolan.”
“Was that Dolan of the Double Bar Y?”
“Naw, that was his cousin. This gent had a broken nose. Come to think of it, Fargo was the gent that busted his nose. Dropped him, and then stepped on his face. Polite, was Fargo.”
“He ain’t gonna use no more bad manners.”
“Nope. The Lamb seen to that when he wrapped the barrel of that Colt around his head. I seen it sink right in. If Fargo ain’t brained, his skull is made of India rubber.”
“Why didn’t the kid blow the roof off’n his head?”
“Why? I dunno.”
The Lamb moved on. There was a rough friendliness in this conversation that was all that he could ask. So he went to his room, lit the lamp, and sat down on the edge of his bed, to think. The crisis was gradually approaching, now. In this one day, he had met and beaten Lefty Fargo and had thereby established himself in the esteem of the Montagues. He had heard the careful plans of big Jimmy for the attack. He had told those plans to Colonel Loring. But, most of all, he had learned that Will Dunstan had not fallen to the black rocks in the manner by which he was supposed to have met his death. Yet report had it that the body had been found there, and the horse of Dunstan had been discovered grazing along the edge of the trail above just as if nothing had happened.
It seemed a perfect deduction that Dunstan had been bucked from the saddle, or in some manner lost his seat, and then had fallen to the big rocks below. That deduction was wrong, as the Lamb had proved. And even if Will Dunstan had leaped with all his might from the trail straight out into the air, his falling body must have struck the bank and shelved either to the right or to the left.
The Lamb pondered upon the mystery gravely. But there was one inevitable conclusion that seemed to stare him in the face. If Dunstan could not have fallen there from the trail, then either he had fallen to some other place and been dragged there, or else he had fallen from his horse upon the rocks, and the horse afterward had gone grazing up the mountain to the trail just above the accident.
But that hypothesis was not tenable by any except the wildest chance. The slope was sheer. The way around to the trail was both long and difficult, leading up through thick trees at the end, and it was asking too much of the most agreeable imagination to think that it could see the pony climbing of its own will.
The remaining deduction was the most interesting of all. If the horse did not get up to the trail of its own volition, then it was led there by some human hand. And it would not have been placed there except to cover murder. Murder had been done, and Will Dunstan had died by the hand of some man.
The Lamb stood up straight and glared fiercely before him. Then, mastering himself, he began to undress, pulling off coat and shirt automatically, frowning all the while. His wet boots stuck to his socks, but at last, after much soft swearing, he was ready for bed, and picked up his coat to take his watch out and wind it—the last act of every day.
The coat felt a shade light to his touch—and the watch was not in the watch pocket. He tried the side pocket. It was not there. With an exclamation of annoyance, he began a systematic search through his trouser pockets, through his coat and vest, even the shirt breast pocket in which he kept his sack of tobacco.
The watch was not there, and suddenly the Lamb’s eyes widened and filled with fear. He shook his shoulders, like a dog getting out of water, then he rolled a smoke and took a turn up and down the room, whistling noiselessly, forcing his thoughts to other things. Only when the cigarette was finished, he sat down again, folded his arms, and looked straight before him with a piercing concentration. And with all this direct effort, he could recall nothing, except that he had noted the time in the woods on the mountainside.
He picked up his clothes to dress again, but then dropped them. After all, he dared not risk another expedition into the night, when the first one had been performed at such extreme cost of danger. When he had determined upon this, he brushed the affair from his mind, rolled himself in his blankets, and stretched upon the bed.
Sleep came slowly down upon him. He heard the creaking of the old house in the wind; he heard the voice of the wind itself in a lonely monologue that passed continually from the north to the south. And still from time to time the electric spark leaped in his mind—Will Dunstan had been murdered, foully murdered, and only he, of all men in the world, knew it.
At last, the darkness of sleep closed over his mind, and not a dream visited him from that moment until the full light of the day dropped in through his window. It was no very strong light. The sky was sheeted across, again. The snow fell slowly, wavering down in almost perpendicular lines. And when he looked out the window, the lightest puff of wind was strong enough to raise a white cloud, like a cloud of dust, and drive it far away. The woods smoked with that flying snow powder, and all the hills were pure and soft with new white. He dressed in haste. He was overdue, he felt, on the mountainside.
Overdue, indeed, for Jack McGuire was long before him at that post.
Chapter Thirty-Two
To Jack McGuire had been given the one talent that he despised. He could follow a trail almost like a wild animal. If the nose of a dog and the sight of a hawk had been combined, that union hardly would have produced more flawless work upon the trail than was exhibited by McGuire.
But he knew that the Indian is in this respect incomparably beyond the white. He knew that his own talent was directly derived from his Indian ancestry, and he felt that every exhibition of skill that he made upon the trail really was a confession of the baser mixture in his blood.
Therefore, he refused to do work that required a continual exhibition of his special talent. It was only on special occasions that he would draw upon his peculiar skill, as he drew upon it now. For McGuire had learned to hate the Lamb, as inferior and spiteful natures are bound to hate those who are above them. The half-breed usually inherits the faults of the races that are united in him. And, whatever may be his other virtues, he never is magnanimous.
So it was with Jack McGuire.
He had to dress the wound on his head once a day, and the time he chose for that work was naturally the morning. So that every day was given a bitterly unpleasant beginning. He never lay down at night or rose in the morning without promising to himself a cruel and a lasting satisfaction for the wrong that the Lamb had worked upon him.
Sometimes, in the earlier days, he had told himself that when he could take the Lamb at a serious disadvantage, then, with knife, rope, or gun, he would attack him and destroy him, and gain both glory and sweet revenge by that action. But after he witnessed the fall of Lefty Fargo, he confessed that the man was beyond his reach.
It was malice deeply felt for the Lamb that awakened McGuire long before the dawn began on this morning. The pain of that envious hatred throbbed in his heart, and he got up half stifled from his bed and sat in the dark, smoking a cigarette, and scowling as the glow of the fire ate up the tobacco to the butt. Then he pinched out the coal, and, looking through the window, he saw the first pencil stroke of gray in the east. Or, rather, he saw what the mountains had turned to a more visible blackness.
When he was sure of this, McGuire went outdoors, where it was easier to breathe. Houses were to him prisons. The fullest arch of the sky was necessary to enable him to be his best.
It was long, long before the day’s work would begin. He scowled at the thought. And then he remembered how he had seen the double eye of fire upon the side of the mountain the night before, and how that double eye had suddenly gone out.
Utter malice against the Lamb had roused him so early. Mere chance sent him out to examine the fires. But how his heart would have leaped, had he guessed that the two impulses were working together to the end that he prized most dearly.
He went to the corral. Most of the horses were up. The last of those who remained lying, now pitched to their feet and lurched around the enclosure, while he spread his loop. He ro
ped a gray that belonged in the string of Milligan, first of all. Finally he caught a tough little roan, his proper horse, and, saddling that wicked mustang, he led him into the open, then mounted. The roan was full of kinks, and they had to be worked out, but Jack McGuire could have ridden a mountain lion without a saddle, and he warmed up the roan with whip and spur in the semidarkness of the dawn. Then he rode out across the bridge and journeyed down to the valley.
The snow was beginning to fall slowly, fluttering down so softly, indeed, that it felt like the touch of feathers on his leathery face, on his hands. McGuire hated it. It was covering up any trail.
He went straight to the point at which he first had seen the two bright eyes of the fire. Then he worked into the woods. The dimness was altered. The gray morning was there, and although the light was not good, still it was sufficient for the half-breed to begin his work. Just as an eager scholar strains his eyes late in the evening, too intensely drawn on to pause and make a light.
McGuire scouted up the valley and down a little way. Then he entered the woods, leaving the horse with thrown reins in the open. He moved in a little circle, scanning the snow, the trunks of the trees, the branches around him. He worked slowly, for the light was insufficient, but he worked with all his senses.
His step was as light as the step of a hunting cat. His foot came down toe first, in a gliding movement, and now and again he paused, while his dark, bright eyes flashed from side to side. He was smiling. In the intense joy that this occupation gave him, every faculty was aroused to a tingling delight, so that the dark ugliness of McGuire left him, and he appeared beautiful.
He stole through the first circle. He went halfway through the third when, under the verge of the trees, he found tracks in the snow. He dropped upon his heels instantly, and leaned above them. The fresh snow almost had filled the hollows. He blew, and the white fluff was driven out. The impression that remained was wonderfully fresh and clear, with the snow crumbling a little at the upper edges, as a mold in coarse sand will do. The delight of the half-breed in this discovery was such that he stretched out his hands to it, like a miser over his gold, like a frozen man to the heat, like a child to a pet.