by Max Brand
Bill Dozier led on his men for three hours at a steady pace until they came to Sullivan’s ranch house in the valley. The place was dark, but the deputy threw a loose circle of his men around the house and then knocked at the front door. Old man Sullivan answered in his bare feet. Did he know of the passing of young Lanning? Not only that, but he had sold Andrew a horse. It seemed that Andrew was making a hurried trip, that Buck Heath had loaned him his horse for the first leg of it, and that Buck would call later for the animal. It had sounded strange, but Sullivan was not there to ask questions. He had led Andrew to the corral and told him to make his choice.
“There was an old pinto in there,” said Sullivan. “All leather in that hoss. You know him, Joe. Well, the boy runs his eye over the bunch and then picks the pinto right off. I said he wasn’t for sale, but he wouldn’t take anything else. I figured a stiff price and then added a hundred to it. Lanning didn’t wink. He took the horse, but he didn’t pay cash. Told me I’d have to trust him.”
Bill Dozier bade Sullivan farewell, gathered his five before the house, and made them a speech. Bill had a long, lean face, a misty eye, and a pair of drooping, sad mustaches. As Jasper Lanning once said: “Bill Dozier always looked like he was just away from a funeral or just goin’ to one.” This night the dull eye of Bill was alight.
“Gents,” he said, “maybe you all is disappointed. I heard some talk comin’ up here that maybe the boy had laid over for the night in Sullivan’s house. While he may be a fool, he sure ain’t a plumb fool. But, speakin’ personal, this trail looks more and more interestin’ to me. Here he’s left Buck’s hoss, so he ain’t exactly a hoss thief… yet. And he’s promised to pay for the pinto, so that don’t make him a crook. But when the pinto gives out, Andy’ll be in country where he mostly ain’t known. He can’t take things on trust, and he’ll mostly take ’em, anyway. Boys, looks to me like we was after the real article. Anybody weakenin’?”
It was suggested that the boy would be overtaken before the pinto gave out; it was even suggested that this waiting for Andrew Lanning to commit a crime was perilously like forcing him to become a criminal. To all of this the deputy listened sadly, combing his mustaches. The hunger for the manhunt is like the hunger for food, and Bill Dozier had been starved for many a day. When he stood before the saloon, with his arms held above his head like the rest of the crowd, he had sensed many possibilities in young Lanning, and he was more and more determined as the trail wore on to develop the chances to the uttermost.
“Partner,” said Bill to the last speaker, “ain’t we makin’ all the speed we can? Ain’t it what I want to come up to the fool kid and grab him before he makes a hoss thief or somethin’ out of himself? You gents feed your hosses the spur and leave the thinkin’ to me. I got a pile of hunches.”
There was no questioning of such a known man as Bill Dozier. The five went rattling up the valley at a smart pace. Yet Andy’s change of horses at Sullivan’s place changed the entire problem. He had ridden his first mount to a stagger at full speed, and it was to be expected that, having built up a comfortable lead, he would settle his second horse to a steady pace and maintain it.
All night the five went on, with Bill Dozier’s long-striding chestnut setting the pace. He made no effort toward a spurt now. Andrew Lanning led them by a full hour’s riding on a comparatively fresh horse, and unless he were foolish enough to indulge in another wild spurt, they could not wear him down in this first stage of the journey. There was only the chance that he would build a fire recklessly near to the trail, but still they came to no sign of light, and then the dawn broke, and Bill Dozier found unmistakable signs of a trotting horse that went straight up the valley. There were no other fresh tracks pointing in the same direction, and this must be Andy’s horse. And the fact that he was trotting told many things. He was certainly saving his mount for a long grind. Bill Dozier looked about at his men in the gray morning. They were a hard-faced lot; he had not picked them for tenderness. They were weary now, but the fugitive must be still wearier, for he had fear to burden him.
And now they came to a surprising break in the trail. It twisted from the floor of the valley up a steep slope, crossed the low crest of the hills, dipped into a ravine and out again, and finally came out above a broad and open valley.
“What does he mean,” said Bill Dozier aloud, “by breakin’ for Jack Merchant’s house?”
Chapter Five
The yell with which Andrew Lanning had shot out of Martindale, and which only Jasper Lanning had recognized, was no more startling to the men of the village than it was to Andrew himself. Mingled in an ecstasy of emotion, there was fear, hate, anger, grief, and the joy of freedom in that cry, but it froze the marrow of Andy’s bones to hear it.
Fear, most of all, was driving him out of the village. Just as he rushed around the bend of the street, he looked back to the crowd of men tumbling upon their horses; every hand there would be against him. He knew them. He ran over their names and faces. Thirty seconds before, he would rather have walked on the edge of a cliff than rouse the anger of a single one among these men, and now, by one blow, he had started them all after him.
Once, as he topped the rise, the folly of attempting to escape from their long-proved cunning made him draw in on the rein a little, but the horse only snorted and shook his head and burst into a greater effort of speed. After all, the horse was right, Andy decided. For the moment he thought of turning and facing that crowd, but he remembered stories about men who had killed the enemy in fair fight, but who had been tried by a mob jury and strung to the nearest tree.
Any sane man might have told Andrew that those days were some distance in the past, but Andy made no distinction between periods. He knew the most exciting events that had happened around Martindale in the past fifty years, and he saw no difference between one generation and the next. In fact, he was not given to sifting evidence. With Uncle Jasper to manage his affairs, he had had little to do with men and their ways, and his small contact with people, in the blacksmith shop, outside of purely business dealings, had all gone to convince him that men near Martindale were a bad lot.
Was not Uncle Jasper himself continually dinning into his ears the terrible possibilities of trouble? Was not Uncle Jasper, even in his old age, when no one but a greaser would dream of lifting a hand against him, religiously exacting in his hour or more of gun exercise each day? Did not Uncle Jasper force Andy to go through the same maneuvers for twice as long between sunset and sunrise? And why all these precautions and endless preparations if Martindale men were not killers?
It might have occurred to Andy that no one had been killed in recent months, but it did not occur. He was thinking back to the stories of Jasper, when Martindale, through a period of one bloody six months, had averaged over two killings a day. That was in a period when a gold-rush population clogged the streets and made the saloons bulge with people. But still Andy was unable to distinguish between past and present. It might seem strange that he could have lived so long among these people without knowing them better, but Andy had taken from his mother a little strain of shyness. He never opened his mind to other people, and they really never opened themselves to Andy Lanning. The men of Martindale wore guns, and the conclusion had always been apparent to Andy: they wore guns, because in a pinch, they were ready to kill men.
And Andy Lanning, with a sob in his throat and his eyes drawn to glinting points, sent his horse rushing down the valley.
The fear of wild beasts is terrible enough, and there are few horrors as great as the terror that the criminal feels when he hears the bloodhounds crying down his trail, but of all fears, there is none like the fear of man for man. Because it is intelligence following intelligence. If the pursued conceives the most adroit plan with his hardworking imagination, he can never be sure that one of his enemies may not reach a similar conclusion.
To Andy Lanning, as fear whipped him north out of Martindale, there seemed no pleasure or safety in the world, exce
pt in the speed of his horse and the whir of the air against his face. When that speed faltered, he went to the quirt. He spurred mercilessly. Yet he had ridden his horse out to a stagger before he reached old Sullivan’s place. Only when the forehoofs of the mustang began to pound did he realize his folly in exhausting his horse when the race was hardly begun. He went into the ranch house to get a new mount.
He had seen old Sullivan many times before, but he had never seen him with such eyes. The pointed face of the old man held a wealth of cunning and knowledge. When he opened the door, he stood for a long moment simply looking at Andy and saying nothing, and for the space of one or two sickening heartbeats, it seemed to Andy that the news must have already reached the ranch house. Knowing that this was impossible, he steadied himself with a great effort. It was simply the habitual silence of Sullivan and not a suspicion. After a moment they were out in the corral, looking over the horses with the aid of a lantern.
There was nothing dangerous in that adventure, but when Andy turned his back on the house and started again up the valley, his nerves were singing. He rehearsed the cock-and-bull story he had stammered out to Sullivan. What if the shrewd, old fellow had read everything between the lines?
The muscles of Andy’s back quivered in hysterical expectation of the bullet that might strike among them. And then darkness settled around him.
When he was calmer, he would rebuild the scene with Sullivan with more truth. He realized that he had played his part well—astonishingly well. His voice had not quivered. His eye had met that of the old rancher every moment. His hand had been as steady as iron.
Something that Uncle Jasper had said recurred to him, something about iron dust. He felt now that there was indeed a strong, hard metal in him; fear had put it there—or was it fear itself? Was it not fear that had brought the gun into his hand so easily when the crowd rushed him from the door of the saloon? Was it not fear that had made his nerves so rock-like as he faced that crowd and made his getaway?
He was on one side now, and the world was on the other. He turned in the saddle and probed the thick blackness with his eyes; then he sent the pinto on at an easy, ground-devouring lope. Sometimes, as the ravine narrowed, the close walls made the creaking of the saddle leather loud in his ears, and the puffing of the pinto, who hated work. Sometimes the hoofs scuffed noisily through gravel, but usually the soft sand muffled the noise of hoofs, and there was a silence as dense as the night around Andy Lanning.
Thinking back, he felt that it was all absurd and dream-like. He had never hurt a man before in his life. Martindale knew it. Why could he not go back, face them, give up his gun, wait for the law to speak?
But when he thought of this, he thought a moment later of a crowd rushing their horses through the night, leaning over their saddles to break the wind more easily, and all ready to kill on this man trail.
All at once, a great hate welled up in him, and he gritted his teeth. It was out of this anger, oddly enough, that the memory of the girl came back to him. She was like the falling of this starlight, pure, aloof, and strange and gentle. It seemed to Andrew Lanning that the instant of seeing her outweighed the rest of his life, but he would never see her again. He began to think with the yearning of a boy—foolish thoughts. If he could make a bargain with those who followed him. If he could make them let him have time to see her for a moment, he would go on, and he would attempt no trick to get away. But how could he see her, even if Bill Dozier and his men allowed it? If he saw her, what would he say to her? It would not be necessary to speak. One glance would be enough. He felt that he could carry away a treasure to last a lifetime in another glance.
But, sooner or later, Bill Dozier would reach him. Why not sooner? Why not take the chance, ride to John Merchant’s ranch, break away to the room where the girl slept, smash open the door, look at her once, and then fight his way out? Another time, such a thing would have made him shudder. But what place has modesty when a man flees for his life?
He swung out of the ravine and headed across the hills. From the crest, the valley was broad and dark below him, and on the opposite side, the hills were blacker still. He let the pinto go down the steep slope at a walk, for there is nothing like a fast pace downhill to tear the heart out of a horse. Besides, it came to him after he started, were not the men of Bill Dozier apt to miss this swinging trail?
In the floor of the valley he sent the pinto again into the stretching canter, found the road, and went on with a thin cloud of the alkali dust about him, until the house rose suddenly out of the ground, a black mass whose gables seemed to look at him like so many heads above the treetops.
Chapter Six
The house would have been more in place on the main street of a town than here in the mountain desert, but when the first John Merchant had made his stake and could build his home as it pleased him to build, his imagination harked back to a mid-Victorian model, built of wood, with high, pointed roofs, many carved balconies and windows, and several towers. These houses habitually seem in need of new paint, and looking on them, one pities the men and women who have lived and died there. Such was the house that the first John Merchant built, a grotesque castle of wood. And here the second John Merchant lived with his son Charles, whose taste had quite outgrown the house.
But to the uneducated eye of Andrew Lanning, the Merchant house was a great and dignified building, something of which the whole countryside was proud. They would point it out to strangers: “There’s the Merchant house. Can you raise that in your home town?”
The way to the house led for a short distance through a grove of trees, then, rounding an elbow turn, revealed the full view of the house. Andrew reined the pinto under the trees to look up at that tall, black mass. It was doubly dark against the sky, for now the first streaks of gray light were pale along the eastern horizon, and the house seemed to tower up into the center of the heavens. Andy sighed at the thought of stealing through the great halls within. Even if he could find an open window, or if the door were unlatched, how could he find the girl?
Another thing troubled him. He kept canting his ear with eternal expectation of hearing the chorus of many hoofs swinging toward him out of the darkness. After all, it was not a simple thing to put Bill Dozier off the trail. When a horse neighed in one of the corrals, Andy started violently and laid his fingertips on his revolver butt.
That false alarm determined him to make his attempt without further waste of time. He swung from the stirrups and went lightly up the front steps. A board creaked slightly beneath him, and Andy paused with one foot raised. He listened, but there was no stir of alarm in the house. Thereafter his footfall was a feathery thing that carried him like a shadow to the door. It yielded at once under his hand, and stepping through, he found himself lost in utter blackness.
He closed the door, taking care that the spring did not make the lock click, and then stood perfectly motionless, listening, probing the dark.
After a time the shadows gave way before his eyes, and he could make out that he was in a hall with a lofty ceiling. Opposite him there was a faint glimmer; that was a big mirror. Something wound down from above at a little distance, and he made out that this was the stairway. Obviously the bedrooms would be in the second story.
Andy began the ascent.
He had occasion to bless the thick carpet before he was at the head of the stairs; he could have run up, if he had wished, and never have made a sound. At the edge of the second hall he paused again. The sense of people surrounded him. That indescribable odor of a house was thick in his nostrils; the scent of cooking, which will not out the taint of tobacco smoke. Then directly behind him, a man cleared his throat. As though a great hand had seized his shoulder and wrenched him down, Andy whirled and dropped to his knees, the revolver in his hands pointing uneasily here and there, like the head of a snake seeking its enemy.
But there was nothing in the hall. The voice became a murmur, and then Andy knew that it had been some man speaking in his sle
ep.
At least that room was not the room of the girl. Or was she, perhaps, married? Weak and sick, Andy rested his hand against the wall and waited for his brain to clear. “She won’t be married,” he whispered to himself in the darkness.
But of all those doors up and down the hall, which would be hers? There was no reasoning that could help him in the midst of that puzzle. He walked to what he judged to be the middle of the hall, turned to his right, and opened the first door. A hinge creaked, but it was no louder than the rustle of silk against silk.
There were two windows in that room, and each was gray with the dawn, but in the room itself, the blackness was unrelieved. There was the one dim stretch of white, which was the covering of the bed; the furniture, the chairs, and the table were half merged with the shadows around them, and they were as vague as reflections in muddy water. Andy slipped across the floor, evaded a chair by instinct rather than by sight, and leaned over the bed. It was a man, as he could tell by the heavy breathing, yet he leaned closer in a vain effort to make surer by the use of his eyes.
Then something changed in the face of the man in the bed. It was an indescribable change. It was in effect like the change that comes in the face of one we are talking to when we feel the thought in his mind without noting a single change of muscles, but Andrew knew that the man in the bed had opened his eyes. Before he could straighten or stir hands were thrown up. One struck at his face, and the fingers were stiff; one arm was cast over his shoulders, and Andy heard the intake of breath that precedes a shriek. Not a long interval—no more, say, than the space required for the lash of a snapping blacksnake to flick back on itself—but in that interim, the hands of Andy were buried in the throat of his victim.
His fingers, accustomed to the sway and quiver of eight-pound hammers and fourteen-pound sledges, sank through the flesh and found the windpipe. And the hands of the other grappled at his wrists, smashed into his face. Andy could have laughed at the effort. He jammed the shin of his right leg just above the knees of the other, and at once, the writhing body was quiet. With all of his blood turned to ice, Andy found what he had discovered when he faced the crowd in Martindale: that his nerves did not jump and that his heart, instead of trembling, merely beat with greater pulses. Fear filled him as wine fills a cup, but it cleared his brain; it sent a tremendous, nervous power thrilling in his wrists and elbows. All the while he was watching mercilessly for the cessation of the struggles. And when the wrenching at his forearms ceased, he instantly relaxed his grip.
