by Max Brand
There was another purpose for which those dogs could be used. While the bloodhounds were dawdling along the trail, untangling it slowly, but with the surety of death, these swift hounds would kill enough food for the entire pack. So long as there were rabbits in the mountains through which they trailed, there would be no need of worrying about the food of the pack.
Such was the outfit with which Themis stood prepared to start on his journey. As for horses, there were two of the finest sort for each man. Hank Jeffries had his own mounts, and each of the other four had a fast horse. Their auxiliary mounts alone had to be furnished by Themis, and he bought them regardless of expense. Altogether, he had invested a pretty penny in that expedition before the news came that started it on the trail.
That news came suddenly by night. Into the very town of Turnbull itself the marauder had come, opened the store, and taken out a new and fine saddle. On this occasion, he left no payment of furs. It might be that he had run short in his supply. It might be that he had decided that it was nonsense to pay for what he would take without making an exchange. The probability was that, before the year was out, he would bring down something in payment. The storekeeper was willing to wait. He had already done profitable business with this strangely generous being. But the community was not willing to wait. These dips out of the mountains by the Indian, so often repeated, had made the town a laughingstock. The next morning three distinct parties started on the trail.
The sheriff and his posse made up one. There was another, consisting of independent, irate citizens who had nothing better to do. The third party was that of Themis himself. On the floor of the store was found a crudely made pair of moccasins that had been discarded in favor of a shop-made brand. Those discarded moccasins were given to the dogs to establish the scent, and straightway the bloodhounds raised their mellow call and started away. They wound around behind the village where the prints showed that the marauder had walked leisurely. They came to the open, where he had begun to run with an amazingly long and regular stride. From that point he had darted across to the hills behind the Jeffries place. In the trees they found the spot where he had left his horse. Through the steep hills the three parties worked in unison, these grim and silent men. But presently the fugitive had descended into the more open and rolling country and had fled north.
On that section of the trail the better horses of the Themis party quickly told the tale of their worth. All day they raced north, and long before nightfall, as the trail veered sharply to the left and entered the mountains again, the sheriff’s posse and the group of townsmen were left far out of sight to the rear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FIRST CAMP
At the first steep hillside they noticed a peculiarity. The man had dismounted from the horse and had struggled up the ascent on foot. Among those ragged rocks, he had evidently figured that he could climb far better than his horse, and he took the burden of his weight out of the saddle. Themis gave his order instantly, and his men came grumbling out of the saddle. They were fellows who lived in the stirrups, every one of them. But, when they had struggled to the top of the incline, they appreciated the value of that order, for their horses were in good condition, not half so winded as if they had been under the pull of the reins with a weight in the saddle during the labor.
It was a comparatively freshened lot of horses that now took up the journey across a rough, broken, upper plateau. But here another trail joined that of the horse. Hitherto, the bloodhounds had run steadily in the lead. But now the entire pack surged into the lead and left the bloodhounds far behind.
“Bear!” cried Hank Jeffries. “They’ve picked up a bear trail.”
Sure enough, as they crossed a damp place near a natural spring that welled out of the ground, they saw the huge prints of a grizzly, the largest prints that Themis had ever seen. His heart leaped. All the story rushed back upon his brain, and here was the proof of it. Horse tracks and bear tracks went side-by-side. But now the twilight was beginning, and he ordered a halt. It might well be that with a single drive tomorrow they could run down the fugitive, but for that purpose it was far better that they should be rested, man and beast. So they camped beside a brook.
Hank Jeffries took the hounds, hardly touched with fatigue by the day’s work, to run down what he could in the hills nearby. For the rest of the men, Dude Wesson took command and began giving orders sharply as soon as their horses had been hobbled and turned out to graze. With brief, sharp words he ordered one to arrange stones for the fire, he commissioned two to cut wood, and another was directed to help with the preparation of the food. All obeyed without a murmur, for who does not stand in terror of the cook?
Themis himself made a point of taking up his share of the work, although it was long since he had spent such a day in the saddle, and he was thoroughly fagged. In a few moments, the fire was blazing, and food began to steam. Suddenly Dude Wesson straightened beside the fire and pointed a stiff arm down the slope, then turned to his work again without a word. Themis, looking in the designated direction, saw Gloria come riding toward them.
He was mute with wonder and anger. On she came! Where the upward pitch began, she dismounted, just as he had made his men dismount. Up the slope she climbed as briskly as any youth could have done. On the edge of the plateau she mounted and came to them at a swinging canter. She dismounted at a little distance, unstrapped a pack behind her saddle, and unsaddled and hobbled her horse and turned it to graze with the rest. Then she came in, carrying the pack slung over her shoulder, the heavy saddle on the other arm.
“Glory!” cried her father, finding his tongue at last. “What on earth has come into your head? Have you gone mad?”
“Never used better headwork,” said Gloria mildly. “If I’d started out with you from town, you’d have sent me back by force, so I simply trailed you at a distance. It was very easy and perfectly safe. Not one of your entire gang looked behind during the trip. If the Indian had wanted to, he could have come in behind you and traveled along in perfect safety. I was in plain view twenty times. And now that I’m this far away from civilization, Dad, you certainly can’t send me back through mountains infested with wild men.”
Themis groaned as the truth of what she had said came home to him.
“Glory,” he said bitterly, “I’ve spoiled you all your life. And this is the reward of my labor. But . . . don’t you see? I hired these fellows for a
man trail. Do you think they can be bothered taking care of a woman in the midst of their other work?”
She jerked up her chin. “Have I asked to be cared for?” she said hotly. “Not by any means. I’ve made up my own pack. I haven’t taken a thousand pounds of tinned stuff along, as you’ve done, to kill your horses. I’ve cut myself down to essentials. I have a rifle and matches and salt and flour. I’ll kill my own meat.” As she spoke, she threw down a newly killed and cleaned rabbit. “I’ll make my own living and I’ll carry my own burdens. And if Mary Anne can’t hold up her end with my weight on her back, I’ll walk home.” She turned and whistled to Mary Anne. The dainty-footed chestnut tossed up her head and whinnied a soft response.
“Heaven help me!” and Themis sighed. “The man was never born who could talk you down.”
“Besides,” said Gloria suddenly, “I don’t think the men are so disgusted with me. Are you, Mister Wesson?”
The unexpected appellation of “Mister” was a shock to Dude Wesson. He looked up with a scowl from his cookery. He found Gloria walking straight toward him. He got up and removed his hat—to rub his head. Suddenly the scowl melted from his face. A smile trembled like a frightened stranger on his lips, and he nodded.
“I guess you ain’t going to be much in the way,” said Dude graciously, and returned to his work, with a slightly heightened color.
John Hampton Themis simply filled his pipe and sat down to think and to watch. He had become a great deal of a philosopher since Gloria reached young womanhood. He had even referred to her as
a “boiled-down education, hard to swallow but good for the insides.” He thought of that now as he watched her go down the slope to join the wood gatherers. There she wasted no time in greetings but picked up a discarded axe and presently was swinging it with a fine and supple strength. Even the abysmal brute, Red Norton, paused to observe her workmanship. He found no fault with her. She was like Si Bartlett. She made up in skill what she lacked in power of body. She could send the axe home within a hair’s-breadth of her aim. Red grunted with approval. In fact, in sheer hand magic, there was only one member of the party who excelled her, and that was the smiling and amiable young man-killer, Dick Walker.
A new thought came to Themis as he watched. She might be the influence that would keep the whole party cheerful on the trail, and men who laugh at their work can work three times as well as in a gloom of serious endeavor. Laughter clears the brain. For the rest, she would be as safe among these chosen villains as among men of her own kin.
She insisted on making her own campfire and cooking her own food, and she roasted her single portion and ate it before the others were half finished. Then she came over to join their circle.
It was a most formal crowd. Every man there had been accustomed to lord it over his fellows in whatever society he found himself, but here were four with equally sinister reputations, and a fifth not far behind them.
“If it ain’t too much trouble,” terrible Red Norton would say, “I’ll have to be bothering you for that salt, Dick.”
“Here you are,” Dick would answer. “Just watch your plate, will you, Si? I’m going to get up, and I don’t want no dust to be blowing into your chuck.”
They would forget some of this formality later on, but, in the meantime, it was stilted conversation until Gloria threw in a bomb by asking how long they thought it would be before the Indian was run down. Straightway, each man raised his head with a grim smile. There was not one of the crew who did not feel that he could run any human being to the ground. But, now that five formidable trailers were assembled on fast horses, to say nothing of Themis himself, and with the assistance of that pack of dogs, they regarded their outfit as an irresistible juggernaut. They said so freely, each handing the praise deftly to the others.
“If a gent was to ask me,” said Hank Jeffries, “how long it would take gents like Dude Wesson and Dick Walker to run down their man, I’d say it would be pretty pronto. But when you got Red Norton throwed in, and, when you got Si Bartlett on top of all them, I say that that Indian ain’t going to keep a whole skin more’n tomorrow about sunset time.”
But Gloria shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t help thinking,” she said, “if I could follow you so easily, why can’t the Indian get away from you just as easily?”
It was a disagreeable and new phase of the subject, and it was promptly abandoned for more cheerful viewpoints. Half an hour later, the whole party was rolled in blankets.
For every member of the hungry crew, the night passed like a second. Suddenly they heard the deep, bass voice of Dude Wesson grumble: “Turn out, everybody. It’s pretty near sunup. Is this a picnic, maybe? Are we going to get started about noon? Hook onto an axe, a couple of you, and gimme some wood. I can’t cook with air. Bartlett, are you too proud to peel potatoes? This ain’t a hunting party, it’s a rest camp!”
Those sullen exhortations began the day with a rush. Gloria saddled Mary Anne and cantered over the crest of the hill to a stream on the farther side. There she made her toilet and gave the men freedom to start the day with the customary groans and curses. By the time she came back, all was cheerful bustle, and the breakfast fire was blazing bright. The east was red with sunrise. The upper mountains were gleaming with light. Paris, for the first time since she left New York, was banished from the mind of Gloria.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
PATIENCE SORELY TRIED
There followed three hours of serious labor through the mountains, and then the bloodhounds came to the bank of a creek and were silenced to the failure of the scent. They ran whining here and there. One of them swam across to the farther bank, but even there the trail could not be gained.
“He knows we’re after him,” said Hank Jeffries briefly. “Here’s where the fun begins.”
“No trouble at all!” called Themis cheerily. “He might cover his own trail, but he can’t cover the trail of his horse and a grizzly bear. Impossible! Take the bloodhounds across. You send a pair of them upstream, and I’ll take another pair down, and we’ll pick up the trail directly.”
It was done, but no trail developed. They had been a mile upstream and a mile down it, and there was no result. Hank Jeffries shook his head, cursing softly. The others were equally amazed.
“But, Dad,” cried Gloria, “he can’t have made the trails disappear into thin air!”
“Don’t talk, please,” snapped her father. “We have work to do. We’ll try this bank of the creek, Hank.”
So up the nearer bank of the creek they worked the hounds until, as on the farther side, they were stopped by waterfalls where the fugitives could not have gone. They reassembled at the starting place, the point where horse and bear had entered the water.
“In the meantime,” groaned Themis, “the Indian has all this time gained. We’ll never run him down today. Bartlett, what do you suggest?”
He shook his head. It was Dick Walker who offered the only possible advice.
“He’s taken some way out of the water where he wouldn’t leave a trail,” he said. “Put out the dogs on each side of the creek a hundred yards away from it and see what you strike.”
That was done, and half an hour later one of the hounds raised the familiar wolf wail and headed back into the mountains at a place 500 yards up the stream. The Indian had doubled back into the higher ground. All the party scurried to the spot. There were the trails leading out of a clump of bushes. Now that the scent was located, the track of the hunted man was instantly evident. He had gone up the creek to a broad, flat-topped rock that was close to the shore. From this he had made a long leap, clearing the bank of the creek and landing seven or eight feet away in the center of a clump of shrubbery, the outer part of which still stood up and revealed no break. From that place he had jumped into a similar clump, and so to another, until he cleared a considerable distance from the water. Then he had struck out. He had called the horse and the bear, and these animals, marvelously trained, must have followed in his exact footsteps. Here he had mounted again, and the trail went off up the slope.
But a half hour had been wasted in picking up the broken trail, and in that time the pursued man, even if he chose to go leisurely, could have placed five miles of mountain going between himself and the hunters. It was plain that only the greatest good luck could bring them up with the fugitive that day. But they struck out resolutely. All of them were too seasoned to the trail to be greatly cast down by a single disappointment, and, although Gloria felt at once that the task was hopeless, she could not but admire the way the rest of them went ahead.
“The point is,” said her father, falling back beside her, “that this is a campaign, not a pursuit. And we’re going to stick to the campaigning until we’ve cornered him.”
They dipped over the next ridge and into a valley. Rather, it was a gorge, sloping easily down the side from which they had come, but cut to a cliff on the opposite wall. The hounds were heading up the valley along this wall when there came a sharp spat of a bullet on a rock before them, and, as they recoiled, half a dozen shots followed, crowding them back, although all went scatheless. Their mellow voices fell away to sharp squeals of terror overcome by the sounds of the reports of the rifle as these came lagging behind the swift bullets. For a moment the air was thick with the echoes of the gun, the voices of the dogs, and the angry and astonished shouts of the men as they scattered for cover behind the boulders.
There they cowered, anxiously searching the top of the cliff for the marksman. No sign of him was there. Five or ten minutes of worry followed. Su
ddenly Gloria stood up from behind her rock.
“Don’t you see?” she explained. “He isn’t shooting to kill. It was beautiful marksmanship. But he sent the bullets just ahead of the dogs each time. He didn’t want to kill even the dogs, and it stands to reason that he wouldn’t touch human beings. He simply wanted to show us that we were at his mercy.”
The posse came out, one by one, and resumed their places in the saddle in a sullen silence. Plainly Gloria was right. Having run into such an ambush, they were ashamed to continue the trail after being at the mercy of their enemy. But the shame wore off and was succeeded by hot anger. He had been playing with them, declared Red Norton, pushing his horse into the lead at the heels of the bloodhounds. And he, Red Norton, would go ahead and prove that no man in the universe could make a fool of him once without living to be sorry for it.
The others declared that this was the right attitude and they went on more vigorously than ever through the rough country, pushing the dogs with an ever increasing energy. Gloria took the first opportunity to have a serious talk with her father.
“For my part,” she said, “I think the best thing would be to let him go his way. For one thing, he has a sense of humor. Imagine him lying up there among the rocks and laughing when we heard his bullets and tumbled off our horses to get behind the rocks. A man who has a sense of humor can’t be really bad.”
