Lightning of Gold

by Max Brand

  As the horse swung alongside, there happened a stranger thing than ever was seen by all that fascinated crowd. Even Ranger, though he knew a good deal about the cunning physical mechanism of the boy, was amazed. For he saw Oliver Crosson, bending, pick up two hundred pounds of solid muscle and bone and throw the weight easily into the saddle!

  A gasp of admiration came from the watchers.

  Big Winnie Dale, landing half in and half out of the saddle, sprawled forward upon the neck of the horse, and the horse reared in great excitement, striking out at the empty air with its forehoofs.

  “Now,” said Oliver Crosson, “if I come across you again, or any of your pack, I’m going to hunt you like deer. I’m going to chase you until I’ve found you and peeled off your hide as I’d skin a blacktail. Get out of my sight, and get fast.”

  A quirt was hanging at the pommel of the Dale saddle. This the boy took, and, giving it a good swing around his head, he brought it down with a loud crack upon the quarters of the horse. Off went the mustang. He scratched like a frightened cat to get his footing in the slippery dust, and then away he went, scooting. Big Winnie Dale, topping first to this side and then to the other, his head flopping, his brain stunned, was like a helpless drunkard. Luck and some traces of the normal riding instinct kept him in his place. But he furnished the comic touch that he had tried to provide at the expense of the stranger.

  A yell of joy went up from the crowd of Shannonites. Two of Dale’s followers, heading frantically after their master to catch his horse before he had a bad fall, were presently followed by the rest. Perhaps they were riding to catch up with Winnie Dale, but it had all the appearance of the most ignominious rout, and the whooping of the crowd filled the very zenith of the sky.

  Under the cover of that confusion, young Crosson turned to Ranger and took his hand. He stepped very close. His face was only inches away, and, as with his hand, so with his eyes he held Lefty Bill Ranger.

  “Ranger,” he said, “you stood by me in the pinch. If I ever fail you, if I ever keep you for anything but the best of friends, may I rot like a weed. Ranger, I’ll never forget.”

  And he would not. No, it seemed to Ranger that he never before had heard any man speak so solemnly as the boy did now.

  Then the crowd, forgetting the Dale outfit, swarmed about them. They were full of congratulations, amusement, joy. A good many of them had suffered from the pranks of Winnie Dale. A good many had been forced to laugh, at one time or another, because they dared not offer resistance to such a known young ruffian and hoodlum. Now they could laugh in earnest, and they were full of praise for the conqueror.

  He endured it calmly, but with a faint frown. He was busy shaking the dust out of his long hair, and knocking it out of his clothes, and, while the others spilled about him, he ran his eye over them with deliberation.

  Ranger was used to that cold and deliberate regard. He knew how it checked the easy flow of the blood. And now he could afford to be amused as he saw the temper of the crowd dampened and chilled. One or two hands had reached to slap the strange youth on the shoulder, but in each case a quick turn of the head and a single glance had made the rough congratulations hang suspended in the air.

  “Let’s walk on. Let’s get out of this,” said the boy to Ranger. He whistled, and his cream-colored horse came trotting to him, head high, gay and light of hoof. No matter how far he traveled, his master gave him such care, it appeared, that he was ever in fine fettle. But Ranger could understand this. He had seen Crosson leave the saddle and run on foot over the steep of the valley trail. And now, as he watched the horse come up, with the most speaking thrust and brightness in the eye that met its master, he could not help smiling with pleasure.

  But Crosson merely turned his back and walked off through the crowd. And the crowd did not follow.

  They slipped away from Oliver Crosson as water slips away from the back of a duck. And so they came through the verge of the mob, and there was Nan Lyons before them.

  She came hurrying up to Ranger. “That was a mighty fine, foolish, useless, brave thing that you did, Lefty,” she said. “That was a grand thing. Shake hands on it. I’ll bet you were quaking when you went in there.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet I was,” said Ranger. “And I got a quick roll in the dust for my pay, right off . . . but it’s all right. It’s all behind us. Nan, you know Oliver Crosson? You’ve seen him before?”

  She stepped back a little. She was as calm, as cold, as hostile as a stone. Ranger was amazed by her lack of perturbation.

  “I’ve seen him,” she said. “I’ve seen him in the moonlight . . . at a distance. I never saw him as close as this, before.”

  “Have you seen me?” said Crosson. “I don’t remember you, though. I ought to. I would remember you, I think, if I’d seen you as far away as one of those pines on the rim of the mountain shoulder. I’d remember you, if you’d as much as spoken to me in the dark. No, I never saw you before.”

  “Hold on, Oliver,” said Ranger. “You’ve seen her before, all right. Oh, yes, you’ve seen her.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Crosson. He came closer to her with a stealthy, imperceptible movement. His eyes never left her face. He stood entranced, his lips a little parted, bewilderment and joy seeming to choke him.

  It was the very thing that Ranger had prophesied would happen in that town. But to have it happen to Oliver Crosson. Who could have foreseen such a coincidence?

  “You’re wrong,” went on young Oliver. “If I ever had seen her, I don’t think I could have left . . .” He paused and went on: “Why are you sneering at me, Nan? Why are you looking as though you despise me? Is it my clothes? I’ll get a fresh lot. Is it my long hair, like a woman’s? I’ll cut it off. I’ll wear store boots and spurs and bells. I’ll do anything you say. Is that why you’re sneering at me, Nan?”

  She looked for one dismayed moment at Ranger.

  The latter, half startled, wholly amazed, began to grin a little, biting his lips to keep it back.

  “Lefty,” she said, “you’d better tell him who I am.”

  She turned on her heel and went quickly up the street toward the hotel.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The boy hesitated for a moment, and then started to follow her, but Ranger caught him powerfully by the arm and stopped him. Then, giving up his will, Oliver Crosson looked at his companion with a sort of mute agony.

  At last he said: “Why did she hate me so, Lefty? She couldn’t hate me like that for nothing. I’ve never harmed her. I’ve never touched her. Do you think that she hated me, Lefty?”

  “The way of it is . . .” began Ranger.

  “The way of a woman. They say that’s a lot different from the way of a man,” said Oliver Crosson. “Tell me, Lefty. You’ve been out into the world a lot. Did you ever see a woman like her before?”

  “No, not exactly,” the trapper admitted.

  “I didn’t dream that there was ever such a thing,” said the boy. “She was as fresh as the morning. There was dew in her eyes. She was beautiful, Lefty.”

  “Now you hold on and wait a minute,” said Ranger. “Don’t you go getting excited too much about this girl. She’s pretty. She’s mighty pretty. But there are others that are prettier.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said the boy, plainly incredulous. “I don’t think that there could be another woman in the world at all like her.”

  “Couldn’t there?” muttered Ranger. He let the eye of his mind look back into his past, and in that past what he saw was framed between a row of poplars going up a hill and the quick turn and flash of a surprising little stream in the heart of the valley. Down the path to the stream, down the stepping-stones carrying a bucket of water, a girl came slowly, singing—a mountain girl, straight and strong. Her head was tilted up to the sky, and her throat rounded and filled with music.

  “I’ve seen a girl,” said Ranger, swallowing hard, “that would’ve made this one look like nothing at all.”

&nbs
p; “I don’t believe it,” answered the boy instantly. “I mean,” he explained, “she may have been very lovely. But this girl, this Nan, touched me, Lefty. She touched me at the hollow of my throat. She took my breath away.” He added: “I don’t know her last name. I’ve got to know that. Can you tell me, Lefty? And where does she live? Does she always live in Shannon? Who is her father? Has she any brothers? Will she be here long? Is she poor like me? Or is she so rich that that was why she sneered at me? Why don’t you say something, Lefty? I can’t wait to know. I’m on fire to know all about her!”

  “I can see that you’re all on fire,” said the trapper. “But how can I answer when you don’t give me a chance to speak? Before you finish with one question, you start in on another.”

  “I won’t do that any more,” said the boy. “I won’t interrupt you for a second. Only . . . tell me what you know about her.”

  “I’m afraid that I know mighty little about her.”

  “Then tell me where I can go to find out more. I want to know everything about her. I would like to read all about her in a book, so that I could memorize it.”

  “What I know will be enough for you, I’m mighty afraid,” said Ranger. “Why, you don’t remember a lot that you might know, son. Who was it that you chased across the hills, last night?”

  “You mean Lyons and the boy with him? I missed them in the rocks above Shannon. I was coming up fast, but the last upslope stopped me a little. I would have had to kill my poor horse to catch them. And even the killing of Lyons . . . that wasn’t worth the death of the horse, was it?”

  “No, of course, it wasn’t,” said the trapper, looking oddly at the boy.

  “And when I started down the slope, I saw Shannon below me, flickering in the moonlight, and I saw that they were so close that I wouldn’t have a chance to catch up with them.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “But what has that to do with her? I’ll finish off Lyons. He ran away from me once. He’ll never get away the second time. He’ll have no men to delay me. I’ll catch him. And what he gave to the black wolf I’m going to give to him. Isn’t that justice?” He seemed on fire with the idea. His eyes flashed. He walked on tiptoes of eagerness.

  “Maybe that’s justice in your sense of it,” said the trapper, “but, mostly, other folks say that animals are worth money when they’re killed . . . but him that kills another man gets hanging.”

  “Why should he?” the boy asked sharply. “An animal can’t fight back. But a man can. It’s ten times as bad to kill a helpless animal as it is to kill a man. But that has nothing to do with the thing. It’s the girl that I want to know about. Won’t you please tell me everything about her?”

  Words flowed from him like a river in the spate of spring. He trembled with his emotion, as a flame trembles in a strong draft.

  “I was going to tell you only one thing. I was going to tell you that the boy, the second rider that you chased last night, was not a boy. It was a girl, and the girl’s name was Nan Lyons.”

  The fire went out of the boy at a stroke. He no longer walked on his tiptoes. Instead, he sagged weakly and supported himself with one hand against a hitching post that they happened to be passing at that moment.

  “Nan Lyons,” he said. “Nan Lyons? God be good to me. Of all the names in the world, it had to be that one.” He was so hard hit that he remained there for a long moment with a sick look of pain on his face. Then he stood up, and idly, mechanically put out his hand and laid it on the shining, silver mane of his horse.

  “I feel blasted . . . like lightning had struck me . . . as if a lightning of gold had struck me, Lefty. She was like that. Sky blue, and golden lightning that went right through me.”

  The trapper was startled and amazed. The very phrase that he had used had come back to his ears upon the tongue of this lad. He looked at the boy with a curious feeling of brotherhood and understanding.

  “A girl like that,” he said, “she’s going to strike through and through a good many hearts of men, before she’s caught like a bird out of the air and held in some man’s hand. And the worst of it is, when she’s caught, she’ll likely feel that the man is God Almighty . . . and the man himself, he’ll think that she’s just no more than any of the other little birds in the air. That’s the way of it. You never like nothing except what you ain’t got. And her . . . well, you ain’t likely to have her for yourself, are you? You don’t see your way to that, I suppose, Oliver.”

  Oliver Crosson walked on again. The agony had made him pale. It made him sweat. It doubled him forward a little, as though a hand of ice or fire were gripping his vitals.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “My brain is full of smoke. I can’t think. I don’t seem able to see my way through this trouble. Will you try to help me, Lefty? Show me the way through the woods, will you?”

  Lefty Ranger laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. They went on at a snail’s pace. It was the most beautiful of brilliant mountain mornings, and only in the mountains are the mornings really beautiful. In all other places they are dull things comparatively. The windows flashed; smoke went up in translucent silver streams above the tops of the houses; the trees gleamed on the western hills, and to the east the poplars were glittering like fluttering bits of metal. A glorious morning, and yet there was such a shadow cast from the boy’s suffering, that the trapper saw little of all that was around him. He yearned over the lad as if over his own flesh and blood.

  “I’ll try to show you how it stands,” he said. “I suppose that you like the girl better than almost anything else in the whole world, don’t you?”

  “Ah,” said the boy, “if everything else were to be rolled into one, all the mountains and trees, the beautiful deer and the wolves, the hunting lions and the birds in the air, the fish in the streams and the streams themselves, with all the gold that is washing in their sands, I’d not change the whole of it for five minutes of sitting and looking at her. Do you hear me, Lefty?”

  “I hear you.”

  “But believe me, too. Only to sit and look at her. She wouldn’t have to talk. She wouldn’t have to know that I was near her. If only I could be where I could watch her. Did you notice how she walked, Lefty?”

  “She steps out good and free,” said Ranger.

  “Why, she steps over the ground the way that a swallow steps over the air . . . with a dip and a swing to it.”

  “Well, you see her that way, and so she’s that way to you,” said Lefty Ranger. “But then it’ll be easy for you to go and make up with her cousin, and tell Lyons that you’re sorry you treated him like a wild beast, chasing him through the hills.”

  “Tell him I’m sorry? Make friends with him?” echoed the boy, a separate breath of astonishment to every word. “Why, I’ve sworn an oath to God Almighty that I’ll do to him what he did to the timber wolf. Ah, I see what you mean. You think that it was only to me like the death of a dog. But you weren’t with me to see the thousand days I worked over him. He was a sick puppy. I got him well again. I trained him. He could read my mind. He could lie at my feet and read my face. If I frowned, he dropped his head. If I smiled, he raised it.

  “Once when I closed in on a puma, my foot slipped and the big black fellow went in and slashed the mountain lion and turned it on himself. He was cut to pieces before I could get up and finish the thing. It took me three months to make him whole again. But he saved my life that day. So he was all to me that a man could be. What more can a man do than offer to die for you? And then he was murdered . . . and you ask if I can shake hands with the man who murdered him?”

  He laughed, a sudden, short, broken laughter. And the heart of Lefty Ranger stirred in him.

  “Well, son, you see how it points,” he said.

  “I don’t see. Only that it’s like a thundercloud ahead of me. That’s all that I see. Nothing but a lot of blackness.”

  Ranger sighed. “Try to look at it this way, too,” he said. “From her side, I mean. Suppose that she even likes you a lot and for
gets that you’re the man who hunted her with wolves through the mountains, even suppose that she forgets that, how would she feel toward the man who killed her own blood . . . Chet Lyons?”

  “Would she feel it so much?” said the boy, his mouth twisting, his eyes dim with pain and with fear.

  “So much? She’d want to see you hanged. That’s about all, I guess, that she would want of you.” He turned suddenly on Oliver Crosson. “Son,” he said, “you’ve got to give up this murder idea. You’ve got to step off the trail of Lyons, and then you can try to get the girl. Maybe you’ll succeed.”

  The other drew a groaning breath, but slowly he shook his head. “I’ve sworn it,” he said. “I couldn’t change. I’ve sworn it higher than the sky and deeper than hell. I’ve got to do it, now.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  At the corner table in the hotel, Menneval and Chester Lyons, when the other two had left, remained for a moment watching one another. Then Menneval smiled a little and nodded slightly.

  “You’re about the same, Chet,” he said.

  “Do I look the same?” asked Lyons curiously.

  “Yes. You look about the same.”

  “I’m not the same,” said Lyons.

  “Tell me how that is?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Lyons. “I don’t know that there’s much good in talking about it. You’re here today, Menneval, and you’re gone tomorrow. Why do you care to hear about me?”

  “Why, for old times’ sake. And for the new time, too. Young Crosson is on your trail. And I’m interested in him.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s he to me?”

  “I knew his father when he was a schoolmaster in the hills. I knew the boy when he was a baby. The Crossons have struck a root in my mind. That’s why.” Then he added: “But I can guess why you think that you’ve changed.”

  “Tell me, then.”