by Max Brand
“You don’t have to see him,” said the boy. “I can tell you that he’ll sell her. You throw in the chestnut, and you won’t have to give any boot.” And he grinned. “But there’s the house.” He pointed across the ravine at a little, green-roofed shack buried in the rocks. “You can come over if you want to.”
“Is there something wrong with her?”
“Nothin’ much.”
“She looks sound. She stands well.”
“Sure. Pop says she’s the best hoss that ever run in these parts. And he knows, I’ll tell a man.”
“Son, I’ve got to have that horse.”
“She’s yours.”
“How much?”
“Mister,” said the boy suddenly, “I know how you feel. Lots feel the same way. You want her bad, but she ain’t worth her feed. A skunk put a bur under the saddle when she was bein’ broke, and since then anybody can ride her bareback, but nothin’ in the mountains can sit a saddle on her.”
Andrew cast one more long, sad look at the horse. He had never seen a horse that went so straight to his heart, and then he straightened the chestnut up the road and went ahead.
Chapter Nineteen
He had to be guided by what Uncle Jasper had often described—a mountain whose crest was split like the crown of a hat divided sharply by a knife, and the twin peaks were like the ears of a mule, except that they came together at the base. By the position of those distant summits, he knew that he was in the ravine leading to the cabin of Hank Rainer, the trapper.
Presently the sun flashed on a white cliff, a definite landmark by which Uncle Jasper had directed him, so Andrew turned out of his path on the eastern side of the gully and rode across the ravine. The slope was steep on either side, covered with rocks, thick with slides of loose pebbles and sand. Altogether it was by no means favorable territory for an average horse, and although Andrew felt that the cat-footed bay mare might have kept a fair rate of speed, even through these rocks and bushes, his own horse, accustomed to a more open country, was continually at fault. He did not like his work and kept tossing his ugly head and champing the bit as they went down to the river bottom.
It was not a real river, but only an angry creek that went fuming and crashing through the cañon with a voice as loud as some great stream. Andrew had to watch with care for a ford, for although the bed was not deep, the water ran like a rifle bullet over smooth places and was torn to a white froth when it struck projecting rocks. He found, at length, a place where it was backed up into a shallow pool, and here he rode across, hardly wetting the belly of the gelding. Then up the far slope, he was lost at once in a host of trees. They cut him off from his landmark, the white cliff, but he kept on with a feel for the right direction, until he came to a sudden clearing, and in the clearing was a cabin. It was apparently just a one-room shanty with a shed leaning against it from the rear. No doubt the shed was for the trapper’s horse. Also an ancient buckboard stood with sagging wheels near the cabin, and if this were indeed the house of Hank Rainer, he used that wagon to carry his pelts to town. But Andrew was amazed at the sight of the buckboard. He did not see how it could be used in the first place, and in the second place he wondered how it was ever drawn to that place through the forest and over the rocks.
He had no time for further thought. In the open door of the cabin appeared a man so huge that he had to bend his head to look out, and Andrew’s heart fell. It was not the slender, raw-boned youth of whom Uncle Jasper had told him, but a hulking giant. And then he remembered that twenty years had passed since Uncle Jasper rode that way, and in twenty years the gaunt body might have filled out; the shock of bright-red hair of which Jasper spoke might well have been the original of the red flood that now covered the face and throat of the big man. Where his hat covered it from the sun, the hair fairly flamed; where the beard and side whiskers had been reached it was a faded bronze. It was a magnificent beard, sweeping across the chest of the man, and Andrew wondered at it.
“Hello!” called the trapper. “Are you one of the boys on the trail? Well, I ain’t seen anything. Been about six others here already.”
The blood leaped in Andrew and then ran coldly back to his heart. Could they have outridden the gelding to such an extent as that?
“From Tomo?” he asked.
“Tomo? No. They come down from Gunter City up yonder, and Twin Falls.”
And Andrew understood. Well indeed had Hal Dozier fulfilled his threat of rousing the mountains against his quarry. He glanced westward. It was yet an hour lacking of sundown, but since mid-morning Dozier had been able to send his messages so far and so wide. Andrew set his teeth. What did cunning of head and speed of horse count against the law when the law had electricity for its agent?
“Well,” said Andrew, slipping from his saddle, “if he hasn’t been by this way, I may as well stay over for the night. If they’ve hunted the woods around here all day, no use in me doing it by night. Can you put me up?”
“Can I put you up? I’ll tell a man. Glad to have you, stranger. Gimme your hoss. I’ll take care of him. Looks like he was kind of ganted up, don’t it? Well, I’ll give him a feed of oats that’ll thicken his ribs. Barley don’t do nothin’ but heat up a hoss… oats is the thing.”
Still talking, he led the gelding into his shed. Andrew followed, took off the saddle, and having led the chestnut out and down to the creek for a drink, he returned and tied him to a manger that the trapper had filled with a liberal supply of hay, to say nothing of a feed box stuffed with oats. A man who was kind to a horse could not be treacherous to a man, Andrew decided.
“You’re Hank Rainer, aren’t you?” he asked.
“That’s me. And you?”
“I’m the unwelcome guest, I’m afraid,” said Andrew. “I’m the nephew of Jasper Lanning. I guess you’ll be remembering him?”
“I’ll forget my right hand sooner,” said the big-red man calmly. But he kept on looking steadily at Andrew.
“Well,” said Andrew, encouraged and at the same time repulsed by this calm silence, “my name is one you’ve heard. I am…”
The other broke in hastily. “You are Jasper Lanning’s nephew. That’s all I know. What’s a name to me? I don’t want to know names.” It puzzled Andrew, but the big man ran on smoothly enough: “Lanning ain’t a popular name around here, you see? Suppose somebody was to come around and say… ‘Seen Lanning?’ What could I say, if you was here… ‘I’ve got a Lanning here. I dunno but he’s the one you want.’ But suppose I don’t know anything except you’re Jasper’s nephew? Maybe you’re related on the mother’s side. Eh?” He winked at Andrew. “You come along and don’t talk too much about names.”
He led the way into the house and picked up one of the posters, which lay on the floor.
“They’ve sent those through the mountains already?” asked Andrew gloomily.
“Sure. These come down from Twin Falls. Now a gent with special-fine eyes might find that you looked like the gent on this poster. But my eyes are terrible bad mostly. Besides, I need to quicken up that fire.” He crumpled the poster and inserted it beneath the lid of his iron stove. There was a rush and faint roar of the flame up the chimney as the cardboard burned. “And now,” said Hank Rainer, turning with a broad smile, “I guess they ain’t any reason why I should recognize you. You’re just a plain stranger comin’ along, and you stop over here for the night. That all?”
Andrew had followed this involved reasoning with a rather bewildered mind, but he smiled faintly in return. He was bothered, in a way, by the extreme mental caution of this fellow. It was kindly enough, but it was not altogether honest. It was as if the keen-eyed trapper were more interested in his own foolish little subterfuge than in preserving Andrew.
“Now, tell me, how is Jasper?”
“I’ve got to tell you one thing first. Dozier has raised the mountains.”
“He’s done just that.”
“And I could never cross ’em now.”
“Goin
g to turn back into the plains?”
“No. The ranges are wide enough, but they’re a prison just the same. I’ve got to get out of ’em now or stay a prisoner the rest of my life, only to be trailed down in the end. No, I want to stay right here in your cabin until the men are quieted down again and think I’ve slipped away from ’em. Then I’ll sneak over the summit and get away unnoticed.”
“Man, man. Stay here? Why, they’ll find you right off. I wonder you got the nerve to sit there now with maybe ten men trailin’ you to this cabin. But that’s up to you.”
There was a certain careless calm about this that shook Andrew to his center again. But he countered: “No, they won’t look, ’specially in houses. Because they won’t figure that any man would toss up that reward. Five thousand is a pile of money.”
“It sure is,” agreed the other. He parted his red beard and looked up to the ceiling. “Five thousand is a considerable pile, all in hard cash. But mostly they hunt for this Andrew Lanning a dozen at a time. Well, you divide five thousand by ten, and you’ve got only five hundred left. That ain’t enough to tempt a man to give up Lanning… so bad as all that.”
“Ah”—Andrew smiled—“but you don’t understand what a stake you could make out of me. If you were to give information about me being here, and you brought a posse to get me, you’d come in for at least half of the reward. Besides, the five thousand isn’t all. There’s at least one rich gent that’ll contribute maybe that much more. And you’d get a good half of that. You see, Hal Dozier knows all that, and he knows there’s hardly a man in the mountains who would be able to keep away from selling me. So that’s why he won’t search the houses.”
“Not you,” corrected the trapper sharply. “Andy Lanning is the man Dozier wants.”
“Well, Andrew Lanning, then.” The guest smiled again. “It was just a slip of the tongue.”
“Sometimes slips like that break a man’s neck,” observed the trapper, and he fell into a gloomy meditation.
And after that they talked of other things, until supper was cooked and eaten and the tin dishes washed and put away. Then they lay in their bunks and watched the last color in the west through the open door.
If a member of a posse had come to the door, the first thing his eyes fell upon would have been Andrew Lanning lying on the floor on one side of the room and the red-bearded man on the other. But though his host suggested this, Andrew refused to move his blankets. And he was right. The hunters were roving the open, and even Hal Dozier was at fault.
“Because,” said Andrew, “he doesn’t dream that I could have a friend so far from home. Not five thousand dollars’ worth of friend, anyway.”
And the trapper grunted heavily.
Chapter Twenty
It was a truth long after wondered at, when the story of Andrew Lanning was told and retold, that he had lain in perfect security within a six-hour ride from Tomo, while Hal Dozier himself combed the mountains and hundreds more were out hunting fame and fortune. To be sure, when a stranger approached, Andrew always withdrew into the horse shed, but beyond keeping up a steady watch during the day, he had little to do and little to fear.
Indeed, at night he made no pretense toward concealment, but slept quite openly on the floor on the bed of hay and blankets, just as Hank Rainer slept on the farther side of the room. And the great size of the reward was the very thing that kept him safe. For when men passed the cabin, as they often did, they were riding hard to get away from Tomo and into the higher mountains, where the outlaw might be, or else they were coming back to rest up, and their destination in such a case was always Tomo. The cabin of the trapper was just near enough to the town to escape being used as a shelter for the night by stray travelers. If they got that close, they went on to the luxurious beds of the hotel.
But often they paused long enough to pass a word with Hank, and Andrew, from his place behind the door of the horse shed, could hear it all. He could even look through a crack and see the faces of the strangers. They told how Tomo was wrought to a pitch of frenzied interest by this manhunt. For the story of how Andrew Lanning had written the message on the bar and drunk with the man who suspected him had gone the rounds. It had received an embroidery of delightful conversation, over which Andrew chuckled many a time behind the door. Besides, a dozen well-to-do citizens of Tomo, feeling that the outlaw had insulted the town by so boldly venturing into it, had raised a considerable contribution toward the reward. Other prominent miners and cattlemen of the district had come forward with similar offers. It was determined to crush this career of crime before it was well started, and every day the price on the head of Andrew mounted to a higher and more tempting figure.
It was a careless time for Andrew. After that escape from Tomo, he was not apt to be perturbed by his present situation, but the suspense seemed to weigh more and more heavily upon the trapper. Hank Rainer was so troubled, indeed, that Andrew sometimes surprised a half-guilty, half-sly expression in the eyes of his host. He decided that Hank was anxious for the day to come when Andrew would ride off and take his perilous company elsewhere. He even broached the subject to Hank, but the mountaineer flushed and discarded the suggestion with a wave of his hand.
“But if a gang of ’em should ever hunt me down, even in your cabin, Hank,” said Andrew one day—it was the third day of his stay—“I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me, and one of these days I’ll see that Uncle Jasper finds out about it.”
The little, pale-blue eyes of the trapper went swiftly to and fro, as if he sought escape from this embarrassing gratitude.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinkin’ that the man that gets you, Andy, won’t be so sure with his money, after all. He’ll have your Uncle Jasper on his trail pronto, and Jasper used to be a killer with a gun in the old days.”
“No more,” Andrew said, and smiled. “He’s still steady as a rock, but he hasn’t the speed any more. He’s over seventy, you see. And his muscles are shriveling up, and his joints sort of creak when he tries to move with a snap.”
“Ah,” muttered the trapper, and again, as he started through the open door: “Ah.” Then he added: “Well, son, you don’t need Jasper. If half what they say is true, you’re a handy lad with the guns. I suppose Jasper showed you his tricks?”
“Yes, and we worked out some new ones together.”
“Now you’re in a pinch, ain’t it a shame that you ain’t got a chance to keep in practice?”
“To tell the truth… don’t think I’m bragging… I don’t need much practice. Uncle Jasper raised me with a gun in my hand, you might say, and I don’t think I’ll ever lose the feel of a gun. You know what I mean?”
“Hmm,” said Hank Rainer.
When they were sitting at the door in the semi-dusk, he reverted to the idea. “You been seein’ that squirrel that’s been runnin’ across the clearin’?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to see you work your gun, Andy. It was a sight to talk about to watch Jasper, and I’m thinkin’ you could go him one better. S’pose you stand up there in the door with your back to the clearin’. The next time that squirrel comes scootin’ across, I’ll say ‘now,’ and you try to turn and get your gun on him before he’s out of sight. Will you try that?”
“Suppose someone hears it?”
“Oh, they’re used to me pluggin’ away for fun over here. Besides, they ain’t anybody lives in hearin’.”
And Andrew, falling into the spirit of the contest, stood up in the door, and the old tingle of nerves, which never failed to come over him in the crisis, was thrilling through his body again. Then Hank barked the word—“Now!”—and Andrew whirled on his heel. The word had served to alarm the squirrel as well. As he heard it, he twisted about like the snapping lash of a whip and darted back for cover, three yards away. He covered that distance like a littlegray streak in the shadow, but before he reached it, the gun spoke, and the .45-cailber slug struck him in the middle and tore him in two. Andrew, heari
ng a sharp crackling, looked down at his host and observed that the trapper had bitten clean through the stem of his corncob.
“That,” said the red man huskily, “is some shootin’.”
But he did not look up, and he did not smile. And it troubled Andrew to hear this rather-grudging praise. That moment he wanted very much to have a fair look into the eyes of his host. Afterward he remembered this.
In the meantime, three days had put the gelding in very fair condition. He was enough mustang to recuperate swiftly, and that morning he had tried with hungry eagerness to kick the head from Andrew’s shoulders. This had decided the outlaw. Besides, in the last day there had been fewer and fewer riders up and down the ravine, and apparently the hunt for Andrew Lanning had journeyed to another part of the mountains. It seemed an excellent time to begin his journey again, and he told the trapper his decision to start on at dusk the next day.
The announcement brought with it a long and thoughtful pause.
“I wisht I could send you on your way with somethin’ worthwhile,” said Hank Rainer at length. “But I ain’t rich. I’ve lived plain and worked hard, but I ain’t rich. I’ve lived and worked hard, but I’ve got not so much as a wife nor a child. So what I can give you, Andy, won’t be much.”
Andrew protested that the hospitality had been more than a generous gift, but Hank Rainer, looking straight out the door, continued: “Well, I’m goin’ down the road to get you my little gift, Andy. Be back in an hour maybe.”
“I’d rather have you here to keep me from being lonely,” said Andrew. “I’ve money enough to buy what I want, but money will never buy me the talk of an honest man, Hank.”
The other started. “Honest enough maybe,” he said bitterly. “But honesty don’t get you bread or bacon.”
