Grim Lands

by Robert E. Howard

  He ducked behind the thicket that masked the horse, tore the animal free, leaped into the saddle – and then the rain came. It did not come as it comes in less violent lands. It was as if a flood-gate had been opened on high – as if the bottom had been jerked out of a celestial rain barrel. A gulf of water descended in one appalling roar.

  The wind was blowing now, roaring through the fire torn night, bending the trees, but its fury was less than the rain. Reynolds, clinging to his maddened horse, felt the beast stagger to the buffeting. Despite his slicker, the man was soaked in an instant. It was not raining in drops, but in driving sheets, in thundering cascades. His horse reeled and floundered in the torrents which were already swirling down the gulches and draws. The lightning had not ceased; it played all around him, veiled in the falling flood like fire shining through frosted glass, turning the world to frosty silver.

  For a few moments he saw the light in the farm house behind him, and he tried to use it as his compass, riding directly away from it. Then it was blotted out by the shoulder of a hill, and he rode in fire-lit darkness, his sense of direction muddled and confused. He did not try to find a path, or to get back to the road, but headed straight out across the hills.

  It was bitter hard going. His horse staggered in rushing rivelets, slipped on muddy slopes, blundered into trees, scratching his rider’s face and hands. In the driving rain there was no seeing any distance; the blinding lightning was a hindrance rather than a help. And the bombardment of the heavens did not cease. Reynolds rode through a hell of fire and fury, blinded, stunned and dazed by the cataclysmic war of the elements. It was nature gone mad – a saturnalia of the elements in which all sense of place and time was dimmed.

  Nearby a dazzling white jet forked from the black sky with a stunning crack, and a knotted oak flew into splinters. With a shrill neigh, Reynolds’ mount bolted, blundering over rocks and through bushes. A tree limb struck Reynolds’ head, and the man fell forward over the saddle horn, dazed, keeping his seat by instinct.

  It was the rain, slashing savagely in his face, that brought him to his full senses. He did not know how long he had clung to his saddle in a dazed condition, while the horse wandered at will. He wondered dully at the violence of the rain. It had not abated, though the wind was not blowing now, and the lightning had decreased much in intensity.

  Grimly he gathered up the hanging reins and headed into the direction he believed was north. God, would the rain never cease? It had become a monster – an ogreish perversion of nature. It had been thundering down for hours, and still it threshed and beat, as if it poured from an inexhaustible reservoir.

  He felt his horse jolt against something and stop, head drooping to the blast. The blazing sky showed him that the animal was breasting a barbed wire fence. He dismounted, fumbled for the wire clippers in the saddle pocket, cut the strands, mounted, and rode wearily on.

  He topped a rise, emerged from the screening oaks and stared, blinking. At first he could not realize what he saw, it was so incongruous and alien. But he had to believe his senses. He looked on a gigantic body of water, rolling as far as he could see, lashed into foaming frenzy, under the play of the lightning.

  Then the truth rushed upon him. He was looking at Bisley Lake! Bisley Lake, which that morning had been an empty basin, with its only water that which flowed along the rocky beds of Locust Creek and Mesquital, reduced by a six months’ drouth to a trickle. There in the hills, just east of where the streams merged, a dam had been built by the people of Bisley with intent to irrigate. But money had run short. The ditches had not been dug, though the dam had been completed. There lay the lake basin, ready for use, but, so far, useless. Three years would be required to fill it, the engineers said, considering average rainfall. But they were Easterners. With all their technical education they had not counted on the terrific volume of water which could rush down those postoak ridges during such a rain as had been falling. Because it was ordinarily a dry country, they had not realized that such floods could fall. From Lost Knob to Bisley the land fell at the rate of a hundred and fifty feet to every ten miles; Locust Creek and Mesquital drained a watershed of immense expanse, and were fed by myriad branches winding down from the higher ridges. Now, halted in its rush to the Gulf, this water was piling up in Bisley Lake.

  Three years? It had filled in a matter of hours! Reynolds looked dazedly on the biggest body of water he had ever seen – seventy miles of waterfront, and God only knew how deep in the channels of the rivers! The rain must have assumed the proportions of a water-spout higher up on the heads of the creeks.

  The rain was slackening. He knew it must be nearly dawn. Glints of daylight would be showing, but for the clouds and rain. He had been toiling through the storm for hours.

  In the flare of the lightning he saw huge logs and trees whirling in the foaming wash; he saw broken buildings, and the bodies of cows, hogs, sheep, and horses, and sodden shocks of grain. He cursed to think of the havoc wrought. Fresh fury rose in him against the people of Bisley. Them and their cursed dam! Any fool ought to know it would back the water up the creeks for twenty miles and force it out of banks and over into fields and pastures. As usual, it was the hill dwellers who suffered.

  He looked uneasily at the dark line of the dam. It didn’t look so big and solid as it did when the lake basin was empty, but he knew it would resist any strain. And it afforded him a bridge. The rain would cover his tracks. Wires would be down – though doubtless by this time news of his killings had been spread all over the country. Anyway, the storm would have paralyzed pursuit for a few hours. He could get back to the Lost Knob country, and into hiding.

  He dismounted and led the horse out on the dam. It snorted and trembled, in fear of the water churned into foam by the drumming rain, so close beneath its feet, but he soothed it and led it on.

  If God had made that gorge especially for a lake, He could not have planned it better. It was the south eastern outlet of a great basin, walled with steep hills. The gorge itself was in the shape of a gigantic V, with the narrow bottom turned toward the east, and the legs or sides of rocky cliffs, towering ninety to a hundred and fifty feet high. From the west Mesquital meandered across the broad basin, and from the north Locust Creek came down between rock ledge banks and merged with Mesquital in the wide mouth of the V. Then the river thus formed flowed through the narrow gap in the hills to the east. Across the gap the dam had been built.

  Once the road to Lost Knob, climbing up from the south, had descended into that basin, crossed Mesquital and led on up into the hills to the north west. But now that road was submerged by foaming water. Directly north of the dam was no road, only a wild expanse of hills and postoak groves. But Reynolds knew he could skirt the edge of the lake and reach the old road on the other side, or better still, strike straight out through the hills, ignoring all roads and using his wire cutters to let him through fences.

  His horse snorted and shied violently. Reynolds cursed and clawed at his gun, tucked under his dripping rain coat. He had just reached the other end of the dam, and something was moving in the darkness.

  “Stop right where you are!” Some one was splashing toward him. The lightning revealed a man without coat or hat. His hair was plastered to his skull, and water streamed down his sodden garments. His eyes gleamed in the lightning glare.

  “Bill Emmett!” exclaimed Reynolds, raising his voice above the thunder of the waters below. “What the devil you doin’ here?”

  “I’m here on the devil’s business!” shouted the other. “What you doin’ here? Been to Bisley to get bail for John?”

  “Bail, hell,” answered Reynolds grimly, close to the man. “I killed Saul Hopkins!”

  The answer was a shriek that disconcerted him. Emmett gripped his hand and wrung it fiercely. The man seemed strung to an unnatural pitch.

  “Good!” he yelled. “But they’s more in Bisley than Saul Hopkins.”

  “I know,” replied Reynolds. “I aim to get some of them befor
e I die.”

  Another shriek of passionate exultation cut weirdly through the lash of the wind and the rain.

  “You’re the man for me!” Emmett was fumbling with cold fingers over Reynolds’ lapels and arms. “I knowed you was the right stuff! Now you listen to me. See that water?” He pointed at the deafening torrent surging and thundering almost under their feet. “Look at it!” he screamed. “Look at it surge and foam and eddy under the lightnin’! See them whirlpools in it! Look at them dead cows and horses whirlin’ and bangin’ against the dam! Well, I’m goin’ to let that through the streets of Bisley! They’ll wake up to find the black water foamin’ through their windows! It won’t be just dead cattle floatin’ in the water! It’ll be dead men and dead women! I can see ’em now, whirlin’ down, down to the Gulf!”

  Reynolds gripped the man by the shoulders and shook him savagely. “What you talkin’ about?” he roared.

  A peal of wild laughter mingled with a crash of thunder. “I mean I got enough dynamite planted under this dam to split it wide open!” Emmett yelled. “I’m goin’ to send everybody in Bisley to hell before daylight!”

  “You’re crazy!” snarled Reynolds, an icy hand clutching his heart.

  “Crazy?” screamed the other; and the mad glare in his eyes, limned by the lightning, told Reynolds that he had spoken the grisly truth. “Crazy? You just come from killin’ that devil Hopkins, and you turn pale? You’re small stuff; you killed one enemy. I aim to kill thousands!

  “Look out there where the black water is rollin’ and tumblin’. I owned that, once; leastways, I owned land the water has taken now, away over yonder. My father and grandfather owned it before me. And they condemned it and took it away from me, just because Bisley wanted a lake, damn their yellow souls!”

  “The county paid you three times what the land was worth,” protested Reynolds, his peculiar sense of justice forcing him into defending an enemy.

  “Yes!” Again that awful peal of laughter turned Reynolds cold. “Yes! And I put it in a Bisley bank, and the bank went broke! I lost every cent I had in the world. I’m down and out; I got no land and no money. Damn ’em, oh, damn ’em! Bisley’s goin’ to pay! I’m goin’ to wipe her out! There’s enough water out there to fill Locust Valley from ridge to ridge across Bisley. I’ve waited for this; I’ve planned for it. Tonight when I seen the lightnin’ flickerin’ over the ridges, I knew the time was come.

  “I ain’t hung around here and fed the watchman corn juice for months, just for fun. He’s drunk up in his shack now, and the flood-gate’s closed! I seen to that! My charge is planted – enough to crack the dam – the water’ll do the rest. I’ve stood here all night, watchin’ Locust and Mesquital rollin’ down like the rivers of Judgment, and now it’s time, and I’m goin’ to set off the charge!”

  “Emmett!” protested Reynolds, shaking with horror. “My God, you can’t do this! Think of the women and children –”

  “Who thought of mine?” yelled Emmett, his voice cracking in a sob. “My wife had to live like a dog after we lost our home and money; that’s why she died. I didn’t have enough money to have her took care of. Get out of my way, Reynolds; you’re small stuff. You killed one man; I aim to kill thousands.”

  “Wait!” urged Reynolds desperately. “I hate Bisley as much as anybody – but my God, man, the women and kids ain’t got nothin’ to do with it! You ain’t goin’ to do this – you can’t–” His brain reeled at the picture it evoked. Bisley lay directly in the path of the flood; its business houses stood almost on the banks of Locust Creek. The whole town was built in the bottoms; hundreds would find it impossible to escape in time to the hills, should this awful mountain of black water come roaring down the valley. Reynolds was only an anachronism, not a homicidal maniac.

  In the urgency of his determination he dropped the reins of his horse and caught at Emmett. The horse snorted and galloped up the slope and away.

  “Let go me, Reynolds!” howled Emmett. “I’ll kill you!”

  “You’ll have to before you set off that charge!” gritted Reynolds.

  Emmett screamed like a tree cat. He tore away, came on again, something glinting in his uplifted hand. Swearing, Reynolds fumbled for his gun. The hammer caught in the oilcloth. Emmett caromed against him, screaming and striking. An agonizing pain went through Reynolds’ lifted left arm, another and another; he felt the keen blade rip along his ribs, sink into his shoulder. Emmett was snarling like a wild beast, hacking blindly and madly.

  They were down on the brink of the dam, clawing and smiting in the mud and water. Dimly Reynolds realized that he was being stabbed to pieces. He was a powerful man, but he was hampered by his long slicker, exhausted by his ride through the storm, and Emmett was a thing of wires of rawhide, fired by the frenzy of madness.

  Reynolds abandoned his attempts to imprison Emmett’s knife wrist, and tugged again at his imprisoned gun. It came clear, just as Emmett, with a mad howl, drove his knife full into Reynolds’ breast. The madman screamed again as he felt the muzzle jam against him; then the gun thundered, so close between them it burnt the clothing of both. Reynolds was almost deafened by the report. Emmett was thrown clear of him and lay at the rim of the dam, his back broken by the tearing impact of the heavy bullet. His head hung over the edge, his arms trailed down toward the foaming black water which seemed to surge upward for him.

  Reynolds essayed to rise, then sank back dizzily. Lightning played before his eyes, thunder rumbled. Beneath him the tumultuous water roared. Somewhere in the blackness there grew a hint of light. Belated dawn was stealing over the postoak hills, bent beneath a cloak of rain.

  “Damn!” choked Reynolds, clawing at the mud. Incoherently he cursed; not because death was upon him, but because of the manner of his dying.

  “Why couldn’t I gone out like I wanted to? – fightin’ them I hate – not a friend who’d gone bughouse. Curse the luck! And for them Bisley swine! Anyway –” the wandering voice trailed away – “died with my boots on – like a man ought to die – damn them –”

  The blood-stained hands ceased to grope; the figure in the tattered slicker lay still; parting a curtain of falling rain, dawn broke grey and haggard over the postoak country.

  Musings

  The little poets sing of little things:

  Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;

  Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,

  And modest flowers waving in the sun.

  The mighty poets write in blood and tears

  And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.

  They reach their mad blind hands into the night,

  To plumb abysses dead to human sight;

  To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,

  Mad monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.

  Son of the White Wolf

  I

  THE BATTLE STANDARD

  The commander of the Turkish outpost of El Ashraf was awakened before dawn by the stamp of horses and jingle of accoutrements. He sat up and shouted for his orderly. There was no response, so he rose, hurriedly jerked on his garments, and strode out of the mud hut that served as his headquarters. What he saw rendered him momentarily speechless.

  His command was mounted, in full marching formation, drawn up near the railroad that it was their duty to guard. The plain to the left of the track where the tents of the troopers had stood now lay bare. The tents had been loaded on the baggage camels which stood fully packed and ready to move out. The commandant glared wildly, doubting his own senses, until his eyes rested on a flag borne by a trooper. The waving pennant did not display the familiar crescent. The commandant turned pale.

  “What does this mean?” he shouted, striding forward. His lieutenant, Osman, glanced at him inscrutably. Osman was a tall man, hard and supple as steel, with a dark keen face.

  “Mutiny, effendi,” he replied calmly. “We are sick of this war we fight for the Germans. We are sick of Djemal Pasha and those other
fools of the Council of Unity and Progress, and, incidentally, of you. So we are going into the hills to build a tribe of our own.”

  “Madness!” gasped the officer, tugging at his revolver. Even as he drew it, Osman shot him through the head.

  The lieutenant sheathed the smoking pistol and turned to the troopers. The ranks were his to a man, won to his wild ambition under the very nose of the officer who now lay there with his brains oozing.

  “Listen!” he commanded.

  In the tense silence they all heard the low, deep reverberation in the west.

  “British guns!” said Osman. “Battering the Turkish Empire to bits! The New Turks have failed. What Asia needs is not a new party, but a new race! There are thousands of fighting men between the Syrian coast and the Persian highlands, ready to be roused by a new word, a new prophet! The East is moving in her sleep. Ours is the duty is to awaken her!

  “You have all sworn to follow me into the hills. Let us return to the ways of our pagan ancestors who worshiped the White Wolf on the steppes of High Asia before they bowed to the creed of Mohammed!

  “We have reached the end of the Islamic Age. We abjure Allah as a superstition fostered by an epileptic Meccan camel driver. Our people have copied Arab ways too long. But we hundred men are Turks! We have burned the Koran. We bow not toward Mecca, nor swear by their false Prophet. And now follow me as we planned – to establish ourselves in a strong position in the hills and to seize Arab women for our wives.”

  “Our sons will be half Arab,” someone protested.

  “A man is the son of his father,” retorted Osman. “We Turks have always looted the harims of the world for our women, but our sons are always Turks.