Lightning of Gold

by Max Brand

  Gloomily Ranger faced the danger and considered it with care, while he tightened the cinches on his horse. It grunted and rolled back an eye reddened with evil thoughts and malice. Then he mounted.

  A dozen hard riders on chosen mounts were making thunder over the rocks or dashing up the dust as they fled in pursuit of young Crosson. Well, might they have luck—might they have luck. But Ranger doubted this very much.

  The pack was silent now. Without a sound the wolves were hunting forward through the woods.

  Lefty Bill Ranger did not leave Shannon with the explosive, gallant rush and roar of the other mounted men. He took things easily. He opened gates and even lingered to shut and bolt them behind him. Then he put the mustang to a steady canter, and it rocked smoothly forward over the level, dipped down the slopes at a trot, and, when it came to the upgrades, it took them at a trot, with its rider running beside.

  He had taken one leaf from the infinite book of Oliver Crosson, and the wind and strength of the mustang that were saved would be well used later on, he had no doubt, when there was a chance to close on the boy in a final spurt.

  The trail seemed simple enough at first. There were keen eyes among those mountain hunters. Besides, half a dozen heavy-footed wolves, a horse, and a rider do not get over the ground without leaving some imprint behind them.

  So for three hours Lefty Bill Ranger followed the way, slugging in the blinding heat, pushing through choking dust clouds now and again, and toiling through difficult tangles of brush in other places. For three hours he saw neither horse nor man. Then he began to go by some of the gallant volunteers from Shannon.

  One man was down and halted by a bad fall. He sat nursing a twisted ankle, and gave Ranger no more than a single black glance as the latter went by.

  Then he passed another whose horse had pulled a tendon and stood with a foreleg delicately, painfully raised. The man loved his horse. He stood, lamenting beside it, shaking his head in utter grief. His eyes were blank with trouble as he looked at old Ranger. And the latter went riding silently by.

  He was more pleased with his mustang every moment. When he picked out that ugly-headed roan the day before from half a hundred sturdy range horses, he had trusted its strong legs and the demon in its eyes. It had a gait like the thudding of a springless dray cart over rough cobblestones. The gallop of a mule would have been the sweetest music compared with the gallop of this beast. But it went on through the three hours of drudgery until the sprinters from Shannon town began to come back to it by degrees, and still it showed not the slightest signs of faltering.

  Old Lefty Bill himself was far more troubled than the horse. Dismounting and walking at the upward slants when they were really steep—this was by no means a mere joke or a flourish. It was a constant drag that turned his face purple and filled his lungs with fire. It was a lug that brought a black mist over his eyes. But every time he came to a grade he got down and struck up it like an Indian runner, and the mustang drifted lightly behind him on the lead rope.

  Well, it cost Ranger much to make those efforts, but the horse was being saved, and that terrible three hours of labor saw the mustang comparatively fresh, while the best and the costliest mounts in Shannon came back one by one.

  He found a group of three sitting beside a stream, bathing the legs of their horses, swearing softly, disgusted with their labor and the failure of it. They eyed Ranger sourly as he went by on his hundred-dollar misfit of a mustang.

  Said one man: “I raised that brute myself and sold it for fifty bucks. And it’s passed up this seven hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of trouble.”

  Ranger was soothed as he overheard that speech faintly echoing behind him in the distance. And the rest came back, all of those fine flyers. If they had joined him in taking that leaf from the book of young Oliver Crosson, they would not have been there, lagging in the rear.

  Then, though he was not sure, he felt that he was alone. He had been riding for five hours steadily. He thought that the last of those brilliant young riders from Shannon was behind him, and still he was going ahead, the good mustang working with the patience of a mule.

  It was at the end of five hours that the trail went out completely. He cut for sign in a circle. Before he had made one round, well ahead, in the far distance to the north and west, he heard the cry of a wolf, a single cry, cut short in the middle. He closed his eyes, analyzed the direction from which he was sure that the sound had come, and then pointed with his right hand. When he opened his eyes, he sighted along his extended arm and found that he was pointing straight at a sheer wall of rock. He shook his head. The floating echo of the wolf’s bay might, of course, have deceived him. But he had to trust to a trick that he had used more than once before with accuracy.

  He rode up to the bottom of that wall, and suddenly it was no longer sheer. It gave back in unexpected small ridges, like stepping-stones, irregularly laid. It was a perilous bit of work. Only a daredevil, in the first place, would have tried to get up the face of such a rock—at least, with a horse under him. But Ranger put his mustang on a long lead and made the effort, and, like a mountain goat, it followed him up, stepping wisely where its master had put down foot, studying its way with the most consummate care. They had to zigzag from side to side, but finally they came to the top, and amid plenty of sign that had disappeared on the face of the stone, he saw the tracks of two horses. He saw the places where the wolves had scampered through the grass, and the trail pointed straight up a mountain ravine. He was in the saddle at once. He gave the word to the mustang, and it struck out at a good clip.

  The going remained fairly level, but it grew so rough that they were forced to proceed at a walk. But the horse worked well, dog-trotting where it could, coolly making the best of every difficulty until they came to a thing that stopped their way, and that almost stopped the heart of Lefty Bill.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  What he saw was a ravine, narrow at the lips, with sheer walls of rock spotted green and brown with moss and lichens, dead and living. In the bottom the water ran with a sound that was hollow and far off, like the sounds that come up from the shaft of a mine. There was a three- or four-hundred-foot drop to those walls, but at this point they leaned in, and the distance from edge to edge was only maybe forty feet. Looking down, it seemed a vast distance, and the stream was contracted by perspective and ran white and brown, alternately. It ran with a terrible speed. If one should fall down from that height, even if there were a little life left in the bruised and beaten body, the stream would quickly devour all that was left of the mortal spark.

  Ranger had dismounted. He stood at the edge of the chasm now and looked down at the picture and shivered a little. Then he looked at the bridge. It was not really a bridge. It looked more like an accident. A great tree trunk had fallen across the ravine. Or had some man purposely felled it, making the cut deep on the stream side of the tree, and then watching for the favorable wind to topple it? And someone had leveled off the trunk of that tree for a width of perhaps two feet. That was the bridge.

  Ranger took hold of the edges of the log and shifted it back and forth from side to side. It was so uncertainly poised that it stirred in either direction. Then he stood back and looked at his horse, and the ugly roan mustang pricked its ears and seemed to consider. Ranger faced back to the stream once more. He wondered why he was there. He had been hired by Menneval, but not for such a purpose as this. He had been hired to go up the trail to Shannon with him; he had no orders to march across country on a death trail, in this fashion. And then he remembered.

  It was a son who was pursuing a father, and the father would not strike back in self-defense. Old Crosson had said that, and old Crosson must be right. He had spoken with the dreadful assurance of a man close to death. Crosson was right, and Menneval was fleeing from the boy merely to lead him away from Lyons—offering his own life so that Oliver Menneval would not kill Lyons, and therefore become a victim of the law or an outcast from the ways of law-abid
ing people.

  And he thought of Menneval as the white North thought of him—the stranger to the ways of other men, the lone wolf, the secret malefactor, the utterly daring and contemptuous desperado. Men said that Menneval could do such terrible things because he cared not a whit about two things. One was his own life; the other was the life of other men.

  And yet here he was offering his life to the boy and for the boy.

  Then it seemed to Ranger that he remembered, not accurately but dimly out of legend, out of hearsay, other stories of men who had slain their children or had been slain by them. He could recall nothing clearly. He only knew that these terrible things had been, and here it was about to be again. Even with all his best will, how could he get to them in time to avert the tragedy? Even with all of his straining, he would surely be late.

  So he told himself, shaking his head. As he stared at the bridge, it seemed to narrow, like the edge of a knife blade. But then he knew that he would make the venture. He had not given his word for this. He was not hired for such a thing. It was beyond and above hire. But he grasped the lead rope in his hand and advanced to the edge of the log. He mounted it and felt it tremble beneath him. He went on. He came to the end of the lead rope and pulled upon it. He could not pull hard without running the redoubled danger of casting himself into the void beneath him. Into that void he dared not look. He dared not think of it. Its voice, the imprisoned roaring of the waters, rushed up and thundered wildly about his ears.

  The bronco held back against the rope. It gave a jerk of the head, and Ranger staggered. He sank down, his knees weakening, growing unstrung, but, when he pulled again, he felt the mustang yield.

  Then he ventured a backward glance, and he saw the horse mounting the end of the log, carefully, nimbly like a dog or a wild goat. Suddenly an emotion of kindness rushed out from his breast toward the dumb beast. It could know none of his impulses, none of his reasons. Its mind must stop with the mere knowledge that its master commanded, and therefore it would obey. It came onto the top of the log and went along, putting its hoofs down carefully, one by one, feeling its way along like a creature in utter night.

  The man went before it, still crouching, looking sometimes ahead toward the distant ledge. The log trembled and wavered with tenfold violence under the massive weight and the less yielding step of the animal behind him. Then he found himself in the very center. He thought that the tree bent under him. It seemed a limitless distance to go, a limitless distance to return. He glanced down involuntarily. And so far did his eye fall to the white bottom of the cañon and the angry rushing of the waters that he felt he was losing balance and toppling. The uproar made him dizzy, also.

  I am going to die, Ranger thought to himself. I’ve got to try to die fighting.

  He forced himself to go ahead. The bridge wobbled more uncertainly behind him. Suddenly he had a picture of how young Crosson must have crossed this bridge, running lightly across it, with the horse, perhaps, trotting behind him, until the long log bounced and jerked through all of its length.

  Poor Menneval. How could he escape from such a creature as this son of his? But Ranger forced himself on. He stood upright. When there were such men and ways in the world, it was a folly to deign to fear. He strode firmly across, with a long, elastic step, and he felt prouder and stronger when he stood safely on the farther bank. The horse followed him, making a jump of it at the end. Then it turned its head and looked back, snorting at the danger that was behind them.

  Whatever came of this venture, Ranger told himself that he would not return as he had come. He mounted. The floor of the upper ravine grew smoother. The trees receded. He was riding over a gently rolling terrain, and the mustang was making good time of it, holding gallantly to that soft, chopping stride of the lope, which Western horses learn by instinct.

  As he went on they began to climb again. The trees were diminishing quite rapidly in height. Sometimes, through gaps in the foliage, through openings in the ranks of the evergreens, he could see the naked upper mountains rising beyond timberline.

  It was beginning to grow dusky in the woods, but in those loftier, more naked regions, a rosy light began to glow. The sun was out of sight, but it had not yet sunk below the rim of the world. Its color had changed, its fierce whiteness was dimmed, rose and gold were pouring over the world. It seemed to Ranger as though God were fiercely rejoicing in the tragedy that must be impending before him. Perhaps the man was already dead there among the high places.

  The climbing grew so difficult that he dismounted again. He was very tired now. He felt as though he never had done such work in the white North, certainly never at such a speed. But he forced himself forward. He told himself that he had not much strength left, but that he must burn it up to the last ounce in order to give himself a proper chance of interfering in time. He could speak two words that would wither the fury in the boy’s nerves: Your father. He gulped in a deep breath as he thought of this. It was not merely Menneval that he was serving. It was all humanity that would be his debtor if he should be enabled to come up to the two in time, for he would save the world from the blackest of crimes—a thing not to be thought of.

  He had labored up a sharp, steep slope. Above him he saw the trees dwindling, thinning, and at that moment he heard from behind the snort of a horse. His heart jumped. Had he, by some chance, worked ahead of the fugitives? For some time he had been journeying not by trail, but by instinct, taking it for granted that they would have gone in this direction, the pursuer and the pursued.

  He looked back, staring into the dimness of the ravine, and he saw a rider mount, a slender and boyish figure, unwearied, jaunty. The horse was of the best. The rider was of the best, also. Perhaps it was some youngster pushing across a short cut, aiming to descend into one of the western valleys before the night closed its icy hand over the upper mountain passes?

  A thin, sweet-voiced call reached him from the rider. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He stared until his eyes started out of his head as he remembered the fierce labor of that march, the precipitous wall of rock that he had climbed, and the peril of the log across the chasm. But then he no longer needed to doubt. There, beyond a doubt, came the girl. There was Nan Lyons, riding straight up to him and holding out her hand with a smile of quick welcome.

  He took the hand. He held it with a long pressure while he wondered up at her. “Nan,” he said. “Nan, how in heaven’s name? Nan, how did you get here without wings?” He looked more closely. Her clothes were rent and dust-covered. The horse was scratched and cut to bleeding in twenty places.

  “We’ve had a couple of tumbles, but here we are,” said the girl. “That bridge is no highway, eh? Come on, Lefty. I’ve been praying all the way. Let’s see if there’s going to be any answer.” And she rode straight past him, forcing her fine horse up the remaining distance of the slope.

  He followed her as fast as the mustang would go. But it was badly spent, and in the other horse fine blood and a light burden were telling the story.

  The ravine ended. The trees stopped at the same time. Before them was the last rosy-gold of the day, the incredible beauty of the mountain tops before the actual setting of the sun beneath the horizon of the sea, far to the west.

  They were now well above timberline, but for certain scrawny, wind-blown hedges of low-leaning willows and such hardy trees. They scanned the heights above them with quick, eager eyes.

  “There!” called the girl.

  But her hope had been surer than her vision.

  “There!” called Ranger.

  He pointed, and far above them they could see a stream of wolves running across the shoulder of the mountain, and behind the wolves a rider on a horse whose mane and tail flashed like silver metal.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  It was the last upward push to the top of the pass. Once the ridge was gained beyond, the fugitive would be able to make better time, and the boy would not gain so much. In spite of all his power, his speed of foot, h
is matchless way of covering country, it was marvelous that he had been unable to gain more on Menneval. Aye, but did not Menneval still make such trips through the wastes of the Arctic that some men considered him a wizard, in touch with the unclean spirits who accomplish magic?

  But there they were, struggling on the mountain, and he, Ranger, had overtaken them both. He became like a madman. Success was here before him. If only he could gain a little more, a precious distance from which his voice would carry to young Oliver.

  With all his might he forced himself. And still the girl was with him, shoulder to shoulder. And the light gilded the rocks. The mountains burned with it. From their heads the blowing mists turned to sheets and masses of purest fire, golden fire stained with red. There was something unearthly about this. It was like riding through an upper world. Only there was always that hideous, human toil of climbing, ever climbing.

  Nan gained. Suddenly, as she was ten yards ahead, her horse slipped on the treacherous, rolling rocks. Down went horse and rider, and the trapper groaned, closing his eyes. But when he came closer, he threw the noose of his rope over the pommel of the saddle of the fallen animal. It lay perfectly still, rather from exhaustion than the hurt of the fall, it seemed. The girl was pinned among the rocks, under its side, and she lay still, her face upturned, looking at the sky, making no complaint. The heart of Ranger stirred and leaped in him. Here was one woman in a million. Was her delicate body bruised, crushed, ruined forever?

  With the rope made fast, he urged the roan ahead. The good little horse pulled until it grunted, and the fallen gelding stirred, then pawed and stumbled up. It stood with hanging head, utterly beaten, its knees trembling, and Ranger, leaping down, leaned above the girl.

  She did not stir, but lay on her back and looked straight up at him. “I’m all right. I’m a little flat, and that’s all,” she said. “The rocks kept most of the weight from reaching me. I’m all right. Don’t you worry. Maybe I’ve a sprained ankle. That fool of a horse . . . but go on, Lefty. Go on, and God help you to go fast.”