Outlaw's Pursuit

by Max Brand

  Andy Barnes sat cross-legged on the ground inside the rock circle of an old Indian camp on a hilltop, picking the grass, chewing it, spitting it out. He had grown much fatter and redder of face and the fat had got into his eyes, leaving them a little dull and staring.

  Lindsay sat down beside him.

  “You know something, Bob?” said Andy.

  “Know what?” asked Lindsay.

  “My wife’s kid sister is over to the house,” said Andy. “She’s just turned twenty-three and she’s got enough sense to cook a man a steak and onions. As tall as your shoulder and the bluest damn’ pair of eyes you ever seen outside a blind horse. Never had bridle or saddle on her and I dunno how she’d go in harness but you got a pair of hands. What you say? She’s heard about Bob Lindsay for ten years and she don’t believe that there’s that much man outside of a fairy story.”

  “Shut up, will you?” said Lindsay. “Seems like ten cents ain’t much to pay for the difference between two thousand dead steers and two thousand dogies, all picking grass and fat and happy.”

  “Look up at that sky,” said Andy.

  “I’m looking,” said Lindsay.

  “Look blue?”

  “Yeah. Kind of.”

  “Who put the blue in it?”

  “God, maybe.”

  “Anybody ever pay him for it? And who put the water in the ground and made it leak out again? And why should I pay for that?”

  “There’s a lot of difference,” said Lindsay, “between a dead steer on the range and a live steer in Chicago.”

  “Maybe,” dreamed Andy, “but I guess they won’t all be dead. You see that yearling over yonder, standing kind of spray-legged, with its nose pretty near on the ground?”

  “I see it,” said Lindsay.

  “When that yearling kneels down,” said Andy, “there’s gonna be something happen. Ain’t that old Mustard?”

  “Yeah, that’s Mustard,” said Lindsay, rising.

  “If you ever get through with him,” said Andy, “I got a lot of pasture land nothing ain’t using where he could just range around and laugh himself to death. I ain’t forgot when he was bucking the saddle off his back and knocking splinters out of the stars, that night. He must’ve looked like a mountain to them steers, eh?”

  Lindsay got on Mustard and rode over the hill. He went straight up to the fence that divided the two estates and dismounted before it with a wire pincers in his hand. He felt scorn and uttermost detestation for the thing he was about to do. Men who cut fences are dirty rustlers and horse thieves and every man jack of them ought to be strung up as high as the top of the Powder Mountains, but the thirsty uproar of the cattle drove him on to what he felt was both a crime and a sin.

  It had been a far easier thing, eleven years ago, to save Barnes and Street from the stampeding herd than it was to save them now from the petty hatred that had grown up between them without cause, without reason. The posts stood at such distance apart that the wires were strung with an extra heavy tension. When the steel edges cut through the topmost strand it parted with a twang and leaped back to either side, coiling and tangling like thin, bright metallic snakes around the posts.

  Yelling voices of protest came shouting through the dusty wind. Lindsay could see men dropping off their horses and lying prone to level their rifles at him, and all at once it seemed to him that the odor of frying bacon grease was thickening in his nostrils again and that this was the true savor of existence.

  He saw the Powder Mountains lifting their sides from brown to blue in the distant sky with a promise of better lands beyond that horizon, but the promise was a lie, he knew. No matter what he did, he felt assured that ten years hence he would be as now, a poor unrespected squatter on the range, slaving endlessly not even for a monthly pay check but merely to fill his larder with—bacon and Irish potatoes! Hope, as vital to the soul as breath to the nostrils, had been subtracted from him, and therefore what he did with his life was of no importance whatever. He leaned a little and snapped the pincers through the second wire of the fence.

  He did not hear the sharp twanging sound of the parting strand, for a louder noise struck at his ear, a ringing rifle report full of resonance, like two heavy sledge-hammers struck face to face. At his feet a riffle of dust lifted; he heard the bullet hiss like a snake through the grass. Then a whole volley crashed. Bullets went by him on rising notes of inquiry, and just behind him a slug spatted into the flesh of Mustard. Sometimes an axe makes a sound like that when it sinks into green wood.

  He turned and saw Mustard sitting down like a dog, with his long, mulish ears pointing straight ahead and a look of pleased expectancy in his eyes. Out of a hole in his breast blood was pumping in long, thin jets.

  Lindsay leaned and cut the third and last wire.

  When he straightened again, he heard the body of Mustard slump down against the ground with a squeaking, jouncing noise of liquids inside his belly. He did not lie on his side but with his head outstretched and his legs doubled under him as though he were playing a game and would spring up again in a moment.

  Lindsay looked toward the guns. They never should have missed him the first time except that something like buck fever must have shaken the marksmen. He walked right through the open gap in the fence to meet the fire with a feeling that the wire clipper in his hand was marking him down like a cattle thief for the lowest sort of a death.

  Then someone began to scream in a shrill falsetto. He recognized the voice of big John Street, transformed by hysterical emotion. Street himself broke over the top of the hill with the black horse at a full gallop, yelling for his men to stop firing.

  The wind of the gallop furled up the wide brim of his sombrero and he made a noble picture, considering the rifles of Andy Barnes that must be sighting curiously at him by this time, then a hammer-stroke clipped Lindsay on the side of the head. The Powder Mountains whirled into a mist of brown and blue; the grass spun before him like running water; he dropped to his knees, and down his face ran a soft, warm stream.

  Into his dizzy view came the legs and the sliding hoofs of the black horse, cutting shallow furrows in the grass as it slid to a halt, and he heard the voice of John Street, dismounted beside him, yelling terrible oaths. He was grabbed beneath the armpits and lifted.

  “Are you dead, Bob?” yelled Street.

  “I’m gonna be all right,” said Lindsay. He ran a finger up through the bullet furrow in his scalp and felt the hard bone of the skull all the way. “I’m gonna be fine,” he stated, and turned toward the uproar that was pouring through the gap he had cut in the fence.

  For the outburst of rifle fire had taken the attention of Barnes’s men from their herding and the cattle had surged past them toward water. Nothing now could stop that hungry stampede as they crowded through the gap with rattling hoofs and the steady clashing of horns. Inside the fence, the stream divided right and left and rushed on toward water, some to the noisy white cataract, some to the wide blue pool.

  “I’m sorry, John,” said Lindsay, “but those cows looked kind of dry to me.”

  Then a nausea of body and a whirling dimness of mind overtook him and did not clear away again until he found himself lying with a bandaged head on the broad top of a hill. John Street was one side of him and Andy Barnes on the other. They were holding hands like children and peering down at him anxiously.

  “How are you, Bob, old son?” asked Andy.

  “Fine,” said Lindsay, sitting up. “Fine as a fiddle,” he added, rising to his feet.

  Street supported him hastily by one arm and Barnes by the other. Below him, he could see the Barnes cattle thronging into the shallow water of the creek.

  “About that ten cents a head,” said Andy, “it’s all right with me.”

  “Damn the money,” said Street. “I wouldn’t take money from you if you were made of gold. . . . I guess Bob has paid for the water like he paid for our two hides eleven years ago. Bob, don’t you give a hang about nothing? Don’t you car
e nothing about your life?”

  “The cows seemed kind of dry to me,” said Lindsay helplessly.

  “You’re comin’ home with me,” said Street.

  “I got two females in my place to look after him,” pointed out Andy Barnes.

  “I got a cook that’s a dog-gone’ sight better than a doctor,” said Street.

  “I don’t need any doctor,” said Lindsay. “You two just shut up and say good bye to me, will you? I’m going home. I got work to do, tomorrow.”

  This remark produced a silence out of which Lindsay heard, from the surrounding circle of cowmen, a voice that murmured: “He’s gonna go home.” And another said: “He’s got the chores to do, I guess.”

  Andy looked at John Street.

  “He’s gonna go, John,” he said.

  “There ain’t any changing him,” said John Street sadly. “Hey, Bob, take this here horse of mine, will you?”

  “Don’t-cha do it!” shouted Barnes. “Hey, Mickie, bring up that gray, will you? Look at that piece of gray sky and wind, Bob, will you?”

  “They’re a mighty slick pair,” said Lindsay. “I never seen a more upstanding pair of hellcats in my life. It would take a lot of barley and oats to keep them sleeked up so’s they shine like this. . . . But if you wanna wish a horse on to me, how about that down-headed, wise-lookin’ cayuse over there? He’s got some bottom to him and the hellfire is kind of worked out of his eyes.”

  He pointed to a brown gelding that seemed to have fallen half asleep.

  Another silence was spread by this remark. Then someone said: “He’s picked out Slim’s cuttin’ horse. . . . He’s gone and picked out old Dick.”

  “Give them reins to Bob, Slim,” commanded Andy Barnes, “and leave the horse tied right on to the reins, too.”

  Lindsay said: “Am I parting you from something, Slim?”

  Slim screwed up his face and looked at the sky.

  “Why, I’ve heard about you, Lindsay,” he said, “and today I’ve seen you. I guess when a horse goes to you, he’s just going home . . . and this Dick horse of mine, I had the making of him and he sure rates a home. . . . If you just ease him along the first half hour, that horse’ll be ready to die for you all the rest of the day.”

  “Thanks,” said Lindsay, shaking hands. “I’m gonna value him, brother.”

  He swung into the saddle and waved his adieu.

  John Street followed him a few steps, and so did Andy Barnes.

  “Are you gonna be comin’ over? Are you gonna be comin’ back, Bob?” they asked him.

  “Are you two gonna stop being damn’ fools?” he replied.

  They laughed and waved a cheerful agreement and they were still waving as he jogged Dick down the hill. The pain in his head burned him to the brain with every pulse of his blood but a strange feeling of triumph rose in his heart. He felt he never would be impatient again, for he could see that he was enriched forever.

  * * * * *

  The twilight found him close to home and planning the work of the next days. If he put a drag behind the two mules, he could sweep back the dust where it thinned out at the margin and so redeem from total loss a few more acres. With any luck, he would get seed for the next year, and as for food he could do what he had scorned all his days—he could make a kitchen garden and irrigate it from the windmill.

  It was dark when he came up the last slope and the stars rose like fireflies over the edge of the hill. Against them he made out Jenny and Lind waiting for him beside the door of the shack. He paused to stare at the vague silhouettes and remembered poor Mustard with a great stroke in his heart.

  Cæsar came with a shrill howl of delight to leap about his master and bark at the new horse, but Dick merely pricked his ears with patient understanding as though he knew he had come home indeed.

  Inside the shanty, the hand of Lindsay found the lantern. Lighting it brought a suffocating odor of kerosene fumes, but even through this Lindsay could detect the smell of fried bacon and potatoes in the air. He took a deep breath of it, for it seemed to him the most delicious savor in the world.

  Outlaw’s Pursuit

  All but two of Frederick Faust’s nine serials and seventeen short novels published in 1925 appeared in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, his major market until the mid thirties. “Outlaw’s Pursuit” appeared in four parts in Western Story Magazine beginning in the issue dated August 15 and ending in the issue dated September 5. Published under Faust’s most common pseudonym, Max Brand, the story is told from the point of view of the outlaw, Hugo Ames, who decides to avenge the murder of an old prospector he barely knows.

  I

  I had seen the cabin before, two or three times. It had been thrown up within the last six months, by an old sourdough prospector who had located a rift of pay dirt on the face of a mountain of quartzite. There he had been pegging away ever since. I suppose that his coffee mill ground out $3 or $4 a day, but that was enough for him. Every two months or so, he went down from the mountainside, herding his burro before him. He came into the town and there he always managed to discover whiskey and drank enough of it to reach a fairly mellowed condition—that is to say, he put away a quart or more of raw stuff. After that, he bought what he needed to float him through the next two months—powder, caps, fuse, molasses, flour, and bacon. There were not many essentials in the life of such a man as Truck Janvers. But the taste of pone and molasses was like a sweet dream leading me on as I struggled ahead for the cabin.

  I say that I was struggling, and I was. It did not make much difference that I had beneath me the surest-footed mule that ever cat-jumped up the face of a precipice, hanging on by the toes of his hoofs. Spike would have had to be a mind-reader and a prophet combined to make anything out of the trail that we were trying to follow.

  The reason was that the upper mountains were blanketed in the dark of the night and in smoke-thick fog. All that I could do was to keep Spike near the big wall of the upper mountain, and then simply trust to luck to bring me right at the end of the trail.

  There is nothing so baffling as mountain fog—which is simply a cloud that floats no higher than the elevation at which one happens to be traveling. For the very reason that we of the mountains generally expect crystal-clear weather, a fog is an almost unnerving nuisance.

  Now and again I got my head above the level of the sea of white. It was not a thick stratum of cloud, but what there was of it was as opaque as clouded quartz. And when my head was above the smoke, I could see the bright cold stars above me and the blue-black of the midnight sky.

  Cold stars, and cold fog. How under heaven that fog could have been so cold without turning into snow and falling I cannot understand. My nose and chin were almost frozen and the breath I drew into my lungs seemed to congeal and turn to ice there. My hands grew numb. I wrapped the reins around the pommel of the saddle—though I knew very well that that is a dangerous expedient—and I let Spike do pretty much as he pleased.

  After all, that mule had about as much sense as most mountain-wise men. I had only one thing to guide me. I knew that the cabin lay in the neighborhood of 100 yards above the edge of the trees. My plan was simply to zigzag back and forth, covering 100 yards or more out, and then combing carefully back to the trees and starting once more.

  That sounds like a simple proceeding, and under ordinary conditions it would have been. But with the feeling that I was freezing to death and that I had to make haste—and with the knowledge that unless I came actually blundering upon the cabin I should miss it altogether—and above all with a wild sense of confusion owing to the fog, I suppose that I must have traced and retraced my steps a dozen times in the next hour and a half. In fact, I had direct evidence that I had done so when I looked about me the next day.

  I wondered, however, that I did not see some token of a light breaking through the blind wall of the fog, for on other occasions before this, as I had sent Spike swinging over the lower lands of the valley beneath, I had looked up even at
midnight and seen the ray of light from the miner’s cabin like a thin wand of yellow pointed down to me. Probably Truck Janvers was one of those who stayed up late at night to read yarns in the magazines. However, although it was now not more than half past eight, there was no sign of a light near me.

  All sorts of illusions come into the mind of a man in a fog, just as they come into the mind of a man in a waiting room. I felt that that infernal cabin must have slid off the face of the mountain and smashed to bits in the ravine beneath. I almost hoped that it had, in my vexation.

  And then, with a thud and a snort, Spike found the log wall. I swung myself down from the saddle with more groans than any rusted door.

  “Hey, Janvers!” I called.

  And then I paused. I had never spoken to this fellow. One never could tell. It was true that the reputation of Hugo Ames stood fairly high among the outlying dwellers of those high places, and I knew that Janvers could not help having heard of me—also that he could never have heard that I had ever injured or stuck up any lonely shepherd, miner, or trapper. They were not my meat. On the whole, therefore, I was reassured. But truly assured I could not be, any more than any man upon whose head the price of $15,000 hangs, alive or dead.

  $15,000!

  Well, I was not shivering with the cold long before I finished that train of thought. Yet I decided that this night was too horribly wet and cold to attempt to make a camp in the dripping forest if I could possibly avoid it. I blundered on toward the shack and found that I had come to the rear of it. I had to feel my way around two corners before I reached the front—with Spike following obediently behind me.

  Then I came to the door, and I found it closed. I rattled the latch and called: “Janvers! Hey, Truck!”