by Max Brand
He rode back around the bend, and there, down the road, he saw the buckboard bouncing, with the two horses pulling it at a dead gallop and the driver leaning back in the seat.
But the other man, the big man with the beard, had picked a rifle out of the bed of the wagon, and now he sat turned in the seat, with his blond beard blown sidewise as he looked back. Beyond a doubt Andrew had been recognized, and now the two were speeding to Tomo to give their report and raise the alarm a second time. Andrew, with a groan, shot his hand to the long holster of the rifle that Pop had insisted he take with him if he rode out. There was still plenty of time for a long shot. He saw the rifle jerk up to the shoulder of Mike; something hummed by him, and then the report came barking up the ravine.
But Andrew turned Sally and went around the bend; that old desire to rush on the men and shoot them down, that same cold tingling of the nerves, which he had felt when he faced the posse after the fall of Bill Dozier, was on him again, and he had to fight it down. He mastered it and galloped with a heavy heart up the ravine and to the house of Pop. The old man saw him; he called to Jud, and the two stood in front of the door to admire the horseman and his horse. But Andrew flung himself out of the saddle and came to them sadly. He told them what had happened, the meeting, the recognition. There was only one thing to do—make up the pack as soon as possible and leave the place, for they would know where he had been hiding. Sally was famous all through the mountains; she was known as Pop’s outlaw horse, and the searchers would come straight to his house.
Pop took the news philosophically, but Jud became a pitiful figure of stone in his grief. He came to life again to help in the packing. They worked swiftly, and Andrew began to ask the final questions about the best- and least-known trails over the mountains. Pop discouraged the attempt.
“You seen what happened before,” he said. “They’ll have learned their lesson from Hal Dozier. They’ll take the telephone and rouse the towns all along the mountains. In two hours, Andy, two hundred men will be blocking every trail and closin’ in on you.”
And Andrew reluctantly admitted the truth of what he said. Even if he had started before any warning had been given, it would have been perilous work to get across the belt of towns and mountain-grazing lands unrecognized, but now that the warning would go out from Tomo in a few hours, it would be a manifest folly. He resigned himself gloomily to turning back onto the mountain desert, and now he remembered the warning of failure that Henry McAllister had given him. He felt, indeed, that the great outlaw had simply allowed him to run on a long rope, knowing that he must travel in a circle and eventually come back to the band.
Now the pack was made—he saw Jud covertly tuck some little mementoes into it—and he drew Pop aside and dropped a weight of gold coins into his pocket.
“You tarnation scoundrel…,” began Pop huskily.
“Hush,” said Andrew, “or Jud will hear you and know that I’ve tried to leave some money. You don’t want to ruin me with Jud, do you?”
Pop was uneasy and uncertain.
“I’ve had your food these weeks and your care, Pop,” said Andrew, “and now I walk off with a saddle and a horse and an outfit all yours. It’s too much. I can’t take charity. But suppose I accept it as a gift… I leave you an exchange… a present for Jud that you can give him later on. Is that fair?”
“Andy,” said the old man, “you’ve double-crossed me, and you’ve got me where I can’t talk out before Jud. But I’ll get even yet. Good-bye, lad, and put this one thing under your hat… it’s the loneliness that’s goin’ to be the hardest thing to fight, Andy. You’ll get so tired of bein’ by yourself that you’ll risk murder for the sake of a talk. But then hold hard. Stay by yourself. Don’t trust to nobody. And keep clear of towns. Will you do that?”
“That’s plain common sense, Pop.”
“Aye, lad, and the plain things are always the hardest things to do.”
Next came Jud. He was very white, but he approached Andrew with a careless swagger and shook hands firmly. “When you bump into that Dozier, Andy,” he said, “get him, will you? S’long.”
He turned sharply and sauntered toward the open door of the house. But before he was halfway to it, they heard a choking sound. Jud broke into a run, and once past the door, slammed it behind him.
“Don’t mind him,” said Pop, clearing his throat violently. “He’ll cry the sick feelin’ out of his insides. God bless you, Andy. And remember what I say… the loneliness is the hard thing to fight, but keep clear of men, and after a time they’ll forget about you. You can settle down, and nobody’ll rake up old scores. I know.”
“D’you think it can be done?”
There was a faint, cold twinkle in the eyes of Pop. “I’ll tell a man it can be done,” he said slowly. “When you come back here, I may be able to tell you a little story, Andy. Now climb on Sally, and don’t hit nothin’ but the high spots.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Even in his own lifetime a man in the mountain desert passes swiftly from the fact of history into the dream of legend. The telephone and the newspaper cannot bring that lonely region into the domain of cold truth. In the time that followed, people seized on the story of Andrew Lanning and embroidered it with rare trimmings. It was told over and over again in saloons and around family firesides and at the general merchandise stores and in the bunkhouses of many ranches. Each retelling emphasized something new and added to the vividness of the yarn. They not only squeezed every available drop of interest out of the facts, but they added quite imaginary details, for Andrew had done what many men failed to do in spite of a score of killings—he struck the public fancy. People realized, however vaguely, that here was a unique story of the making of a desperado, and they gathered the story of Andrew Lanning to their hearts.
On the whole, it was not an unkindly interest. In reality the sympathy was with the outlaw. For everyone knew that Hal Dozier was on the trail again, and everyone felt that in the end he would run down his man, and there was a general hope that the chase might be a long one. For one thing, the end of that chase would have removed one of the few vital, current bits of news. Men could no longer open conversations by asking the last tidings of Andrew. Such questions were always a signal for an unlocking of tongues around the circle.
Many untruths were told. For instance, the blowing of the safe in Allertown was falsely attributed to Andrew, while in reality he knew nothing about soup and its uses. And the running of the cows off the Circle O Bar range toward the border was another exploit that was wrongly checked to his credit or discredit. Also the brutal butchery in the night at Buffalo Head was sometimes said to be Andrew’s work, but in general the men of the mountain desert came to know that the outlaw was not a red-handed murderer, but simply a man who fought for his own life.
The truths in themselves were enough to bear telling and retelling. The tale of how he wrote the message on the bar in Tosco was a dainty bit for spinners of yarns, and the breaking through the circle around Hank Rainer’s cabin was another fine section, to say nothing of that historic occasion when he routed the posse and killed Bill Dozier. Yet these things were nothing to what had followed. Andrew’s Thanksgiving dinner at William Foster’s house, with a revolver on the table and a smile on his lips, was a pleasant tale and a thrilling one as well, for Foster had been able to go to the telephone and warn the nearest officer of the law. There was the incident of the jammed rifle at The Crossing, and the tale of how a youngster at Tomo decided that he would rival the career of the great man—how he got a fine bay mare and started a blossoming career of crime by sticking up three men on the road and committing several depredations that were all attributed to Andrew, until Andrew himself ran down the foolish fellow, shot the gun out of his hand, gave him a talking that recalled his lost senses, and then turned him gently over to his family. Out of his own pocket he made a contribution so that young Lasker could return to the victims the money he had stolen. The Lasker family had tried to hus
h up the tale, but it had leaked out and gone the rounds, and it made a famous yarn.
All these and other things would make volumes and volumes if they were narrated in full. Particularly there was the story of Sandy Macintosh. He came from the far south with a reputation as a man hunter that chilled the blood even of the lawful. His list of victims was as long as a man’s arm, and Sandy determined to finish the job that was apparently too big for even the capable hands and the fast horse of Hal Dozier. Hal took a vacation and left an empty stage for the celebrated Sandy. And Sandy Macintosh established relays of horses and ran the bay mare in a circle, but after thirty-six hours of furious riding, the outlaw broke out of the circle and cantered away, and Sandy rode back, leaving three dead horses behind him. Then, frantic with shame, he issued a challenge to Andrew Lanning, and Andrew Lanning came out of the hills and met Sandy and beat him to the draw and shot him twice through the right shoulder. This story of Sandy Macintosh became an epic; men were never tired of retelling it. Go out into the mountain desert today, and in any of a hundred villages broach the name of Lanning, and nine chances out of ten some man will say: “I suppose you know how Sandy Macintosh came up to get Andy?” In such a case it is always wise to pretend ignorance and listen, for the tale is sure to be interesting—and new.
But all other details fell into insignificance compared with the general theme, which was the mighty duel between Andrew and Hal Dozier—the inescapable man hunter and the trap-wise outlaw. Hal did not lose any reputation because he failed to take Andrew Lanning at once. The very fact that he was able to keep close enough to make out the trail at all increased his fame. He had been a household word in the mountain desert before; he became a daily topic of conversation now. He did not even lose his high standing because he would not hunt Andrew alone. He always kept a group with him, and people said that he was wise to do it. Not because he was not a match for Andrew Lanning single-handed, but because it was folly to risk life when there were odds that might be used against the desperado. But everyone felt that eventually Lanning would draw the deputy marshal away from his posse, and then the outlaw would turn, and there would follow a battle of the giants. The whole mountain desert waited for that time to come and bated its breath in hope and fear of it.
But if the men of the mountain desert considered Hal Dozier the greatest enemy of Andrew, he himself had quite another point of view. It was the loneliness, as Pop had promised him. It was the consuming loneliness that ate into his heart. There were days when he hardly touched food, such was his distaste for the ugly messes that he had to cook with his own hands; there were days when he would have risked his life to eat a meal served by the hands of another and cooked by another man. That was the secret of that Thanksgiving dinner at the Foster house, although others put it down to sheer, reckless mischief. And today, as he made his fire between two stones—a smoldering, evil-smelling fire of sagebrush—the smoke kept running up his clothes and choking his lungs with its pungency. And the fat bacon that he cut turned his stomach. At last he sat down, forgetting the bacon in the pan, forgetting the long fast and the hard ride that had preceded this meal, and stared at the fire.
Rather, the fire was the thing that he kept chiefly in the center of his vision, but his glances went everywhere, to all sides, up and down. Hal Dozier had hunted him hotly down the valley of the Little Silver River, but near the village of Los Toros the fagged posse and Hal himself had dropped back and once more given up the chase. No doubt they would rest for a few hours in the town, change horses, and then come after him again.
It was a new Andrew Lanning that sat there by the fire. He had left Martindale, a clear-faced boy; the months that followed had changed him to a man; the boyhood had been literally burned out of him. The skin of his face, indeed, refused to tan, but now, instead of a healthy-and-crisp white, it was a colorless sallow. The rounded cheeks were now straight and sank in sharply beneath his cheekbones, with a sharply incised line beside the mouth. And his expression at all times was one of quivering alertness—the mouth a little compressed and straight, the nostrils seeming a trifle distended, and the eyes as restless as the eyes of a hungry wolf. The old, blank, dull look was gone from them; the uneasy glitter that had come into them when he fled from Martindale on that age-long day had never died from them since. Sometimes, when his glance steadied on one object, the light became a point, but usually it was a continual shifting. Take a candle and pass it from side to side before the eyes of a man, and the same gleam will come into them that was never out of the eyes of Andrew Lanning. Two things might have been said about that expression of his eyes—that it was the glimmer of danger or the light of fear that turns into danger.
Moreover, all of Andrew’s actions had come to bear out this same expression of his face. If he sat down, his legs were gathered, and he seemed about to stand up. If he walked, he went with a nervous step, rising a little on his toes as though he were about to break into a run or as though he were poising himself to whirl at any alarm. He sat in this manner even now, under that dead, gray sky of sheeted clouds and in the middle of that great, rolling plain, lifeless and colorless—lifeless except for the wind that hummed across it, pointed with cold. Andrew, looking from the dull glimmer of his fire to that dead waste, sighed. He whistled, and Sally came instantly to the call and dropped her head beside his own. She, at least, had not changed in the long pursuits and the hard life. It had made her gaunt. It had hardened and matured her muscles, so that now along the shoulders there were ridges and ripples, iron hard, and her thighs were twining masses of strength, but her head was the same, and her changeable, human eyes, the eyes of a pet, had not altered.
She stood there with her head down, silently, and Andrew, his hands locked around his knees, neither spoke to her nor stirred. But by degrees the pain and the hunger went out of his face, and as though she knew that she was no longer needed, Sally tipped his sombrero over his eyes with a toss of her head, and having given this signal of disgust at being called without a purpose, she went back to her work of cropping the grama grass, which of all grasses a horse loves best. Andrew straightened his hat and cast one glance after her. Words, indeed, were almost unnecessary between them now. By a pressure of his knees he could guide her; by a gesture he could call her.
A shade of thought passed over his face as he looked at her. By this time the posse was probably once more starting on out of Los Toros and taking his trail. It would mean another test; he did not fear for her, but he pitied her for the hard work that was coming, and he looked almost with regret over the long-racing lines of her body. And it was then, coming out of the sight of Sally, the thought of the posse, and the disgust for the greasy bacon in the pan, that Andrew received a quitenew idea. It was to stop his flight, turn about, and double like a fox straight back toward Los Toros, making a detour to the left. The posse would plunge ahead, and he could cut in toward Los Toros. For he had determined to eat once again, at least, at a table covered with a white cloth, food prepared by the hand of another. Sally was known; he would leave her in the grove beside the Little Silver River. For himself, weeks had passed since any man had seen him, and certainly no one in Los Toros had met him face-to-face. He would be unknown except for a general description. And to disarm suspicion entirely, he would leave his cartridge belt and his revolver with Sally in the woods. For what human being, no matter how imaginative, would possibly dream of Andrew Lanning going unarmed into a town and sitting calmly at a table to order a meal?
Chapter Thirty
People in telling that story long afterward, and it became one of the favorite tales connected with Andrew Lanning, attributed the whole maneuver to an outbreak of madness. Just as there seemed to be madness in the campaign of Napoleon when he dropped over the Alps into Italy. While Melas was taking Genoa, heroic Masséna appeared quietly on that unfortunate general’s communications and then blotted him out at Marengo. And that campaign would have been judged madness instead of genius if it had not worked.
&
nbsp; Retrospection made Andrew Lanning’s coming to Los Toros a mad freak, whereas it was in reality a very clever stroke. Hal Dozier would have been on the road five hours before if he had not been held up in the matter of horses, but this is to tell the story out of turn.
Andrew saddled the mare and sent her back swiftly out of the plain, over the hills, and then dropped her down into the valley of the Little Silver River, until he reached the grove of trees just outside Los Toros—some 400 yards, say, from the little group of houses. He then took off his belt, hung it over the pommel, fastened the reins to the belt, and turned away. Sally would stay where he left her—unless someone else tried to get to her head, and then she would fight like a wildcat. He knew that, and he therefore started for Los Toros with his line of communications sufficiently guarded.
He instinctively thought first of drawing his hat low over his eyes and walking swiftly; a moment of calm figuring told him that the better way was to push the hat to the back of his head, put his hands in his pockets, and go whistling through the streets of the town. And this was actually the manner in which he made his entry to Los Toros. It was not much of a place—say 500 people—but its single street looked as large and as long as a great avenue to Andrew as he sauntered carelessly toward the restaurant. It was the middle of the gray afternoon; there were few people about, and the two or three who Andrew passed nodded a greeting. Each time they raised their hands, the fingers of Andrew twitched, but he made himself smile back at them and waved in return.
He went on until he came to the restaurant. It was a long, narrow room with a row of tables down each side, a little counter and cash register beside the door, some gaudy posters on the wall, a screen at the rear to hide the entrance to the kitchen, faded green sackcloth tacked on the ceiling to cover the bare boards, and a ragged strip of linoleum on the narrow passage between the tables.
