by Max Brand
Her father shrugged his shoulders. “Besides,” he said, “even if he dodges the law for a time, he’ll eventually be captured.”
“They’ve failed for six years.”
“What’s six years to the law? It will wait a lifetime. Eventually it wins. It has forever. It uses a million hands. One man cannot stand against it, particularly since Parks has become notorious. Manhunters will come from all parts of the West. They’ll run his trail through every month of the years. Finally he’ll go down. Gloria, if you were to attach yourself to him, you’d attach yourself to a doomed cause.”
He saw, by the way her head went back, that he had made a wrong step.
“Dad!” she exclaimed. “Do you want me to leave the ship because the rats have left it? Do you want me to be a coward?”
He gritted his teeth. “Think of your friends, Gloria.”
“He’s worth all of them.”
“How could he meet them?”
“They would be honored by a syllable from him, or else they’re not worthy to speak with him. But don’t you see, Dad, I only want to meet him once more and make sure? Perhaps it will be different when I see him again. The glamour will be gone.”
He shook his head sadly. “Not with you, Gloria. It needs more time than you’ll have between meetings. No man has ever meant anything to you. And now you’ll cling to this first enthusiasm. . . .” Suddenly he stopped talking. He went to her and took her in his arms. “My dear,” he said, “if I were a religious man, I should pray God to help us both do right in this thing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TACTICS OF THE TRAIL
When Tom Parks, well before sunup, reached that cleft in the hills where he would find the stallion and big Jerry, he sent a long screaming whistle over the trees and listened until he heard faintly a whinny in the distance. After that, he did not wait for either the horse or the bear to come. They would find him and wait.
The good men of Turnbull were mustering and making ready for another hunt. But it would still be a short interval before sunup and their start, so Tom lay down in a corner behind a rock, where the wind could not get at him, and was instantly asleep.
For two hours he lay without stirring, and, when he wakened, the fresh light of dawn filled the sky. Beside him was Peter, cropping the grass. In the near distance was the bulk of Jerry, paying his attention to a colony of ants. He had already devoured the contents of half a dozen ant hills. Now he was demolishing a seventh nation, but, at the voice of Tom, he whirled and came with his thundering but swift stride across the clearing.
Peter began to sweep around the returned master in swift loops, flirting his heels into the air and shaking his head, bucking and gamboling more in air than on firm ground. As for Jerry, he stood upon his hind legs, viewed the master carefully, then went around him, sniffing the strange man scents that he found, and growling terribly all the while. Eventually he decided that all was well and allowed his head to be rubbed for a moment. But there was only a moment to be spared. In ten minutes Tom had taken out the saddle from the place where he had cached it, and the journey of the day was started. Before he had gone two miles, he looked back to a height and saw them coming, the stream of a score of dogs and fully as many riders.
He climbed into the rougher country, for it was there that Jerry could make progress that defied the imitation of men on horseback. From another eminence he stared down and saw that two other packs were out, two other groups of hard riders were following them.
These things, however, he viewed with only a dim concern. He would break their hearts before the day had ended. But he had more to do than simply avoid a few posses. Far away was the place where Dick Walker had ended his evil life and been buried. Thither he must go and hunt around the place for the trail of the murderer. If he could find that trail, if it would lead him to the man, if he could extract the confession from him, then he was free to ride down into Turnbull and meet Gloria unafraid. But how many ifs lay between!
All that day he worked swiftly through the mountains. Among the rocks, he descended the steep places on foot, at a run. He climbed the difficult ridges seated on the back of Jerry, and he covered the open stretches on the back of the stallion. Here and there he stopped, in favorable places, to lay out trail problems that occupied him five minutes, but which would take the pursuit ten times that long to unravel. In the twilight he found and shot a deer, which provided amply for himself and Jerry. And it was still the dark before dawn when he started on the trail again. In the mid-afternoon, he found the heap of rocks that marked the grave of Dick Walker.
As for the trail of the true murderer—it was like hunting for a needle in a haystack. In the first place, days had intervened since the murder, and rains had washed down the soil. In the second place, the party of Themis had trampled all the region around the grave.
So, while Peter grazed and Jerry dug for roots, Tom cast a corkscrew trail around the place, cutting for signs with an eager diligence. Darkness closed on him, and still he had not succeeded. With the dawn, he was up again and at it, hunting feverishly now, for the posse must be close upon his heels. In the mid-morning he found the first thing that might be of assistance.
It was the empty shell of a .45-caliber bullet, such as had been fired into the head of Walker. It lay a full mile from the place of the shooting in the direction of the eastern mountains. Of course, it ight have been thrown there by anyone. Any member of the Themis party might have gone out this far and taken a shot at a rabbit and then thrown the empty shell out of his gun. But there was a chance in ten that it was the shell belonging to the slug that had killed Walker, and in that case the place where it lay meant something to Tom.
He calculated exactly a line between that spot and the site of Walker’s grave. If that line were projected into the mountains, it might give him the course that the slayer had taken. But the projection pointed straight at a mountainside, and certainly it was not probable that a fugitive would take that steep ascent instead of sticking to the cañons where he could have made far better time.
But Tom could not stay to argue probabilities. Possibilities were all that he could work on. He struck ahead, aiming his course with nicety for the very peak of the mountain, riding in just the course that a horseman would have been most likely to take if he had ridden in that direction.
By noon he was halfway up the side of the mountain, but there had not been the ghost of a sign to encourage him along the trail. Here he paused while Jerry busied himself with a chipmunk’s burrow. After half an hour’s rest he went on again until he reached the mountaintop early in the afternoon.
There he found a small spring welling out of the ground. The sight of it excited Tom. Since dawn, he had covered a stretch of ground that would have made a good day’s march for an ordinary horse and man. Even Peter was a little wearied by his efforts. If the murderer had in fact taken that trail, the sight of running water must have been too great a temptation to him. Here he would surely have camped, even if he did not build a fire.
But there was no sign, still. From the pine saplings no tips had been cut to make a bed. If deadwood had been cut, it was impossible for Tom to find the place. Although some of the little, dead shrubs might have been pulled up by the roots, the rains would have washed the holes full of sediment. He looked uneasily at the tumble of stones around the spring, and his stanch heart began to fail him. To be sure, he had learned patience in an incomparable school, but he felt that the trail had vanished into thin air if, indeed, it had ever been a trail at all.
Jerry came lumbering from his root digging and began to tumble the stones over. Under some he found grubs that were licked up by that restless, red tongue. Under others he found nothing. But he went on carelessly until a great, 200-pound boulder was tugged over for the mere sake of showing his strength, perhaps, and he began sniffing at the dark undersurface, all sweating with moisture. His growl drew Tom nearer. He looked down to the bottom of the rock for the want of something better to
do. It was very dark, indeed. The moisture alone could barely account for its blackness. All the rest of the boulder was a dull gray. Suddenly he leaned and drew a fingertip across the surface of the stone. The tip was blackened by the contact, and Tom straightened with an exclamation of satisfaction.
There was only one way to account for that thin layer of soot. A fire had been built near the stone, which had later fallen upon its face. It must have been a recent campfire that had done the work, no matter if other traces of the fire were lacking. The heavy winds and the rains might have washed all other symbols of it away. This one was enough to set the heart of Tom on fire with hope.
He went back to the head of the mountain to reconnoiter the hollows and the valleys beneath, and there, to be sure, he saw them. The wind fanned his face gently, and it carried to him a faint echo of the clamoring dogs. There they streamed, small as ants in the distance, and behind them was the little army of the hunters. Tom frowned and shrugged his shoulders. It was not for fear of them, to be sure. But how could he follow and untangle the mysteries of this dim trail while these men followed on his trail? His hand tightened grimly upon the barrel of his rifle, but he restrained himself. After all, that was not what he must do. There were strange movements of repulsion in his heart of hearts at the very thought of firing upon a human being. He turned his back on the scene with a murmur of disgust and headed for Peter.
Once in the saddle, he struck out along the hillside at a fast clip. It would have been difficult going for another horse at a run, but Peter negotiated the rough ground at a round gallop. He had not spent six years following the wild trails where Tom and the grizzly led him without gaining some of the instincts and the powers of foot of a mountain sheep. He knew by the back of the soil where it would slide and where the apparently loose gravel would hold fast. He knew how to weave among the trees without diminishing his pace. He knew how to conserve his strength in the climbs, how to go deftly in a serpentine course down abrupt slopes, and then to whirl in a wild gallop through the valley.
That was what he did now as they cut across the mountain slope, then doubled back over the peak, went down the farther slope, opened up at a terrific speed across the more level going in the lowlands, and climbed again, toward evening, into the rugged cliffs, as though they were heading definitely north after the feint of the day before into the east.
As the early twilight came, still bright on the upper mountains, they reached a swift, shallow, snow-fed stream. Into that icy water he rode Peter, with Jerry grunting behind. Although the grizzly had been distanced across the low country, he had more than made up for the lost ground when it came to climbing in the rough hills. Up the stream they waded for a distance, came out on the same side of the stream on which they had entered, and circled back toward the creek, which they entered close to the first point, then crossed to the farther side, Jerry following behind the stallion, and made another swift semicircle on the farther shore. Around they went again in a larger circle, then followed with weaving in and out, and finally dropped straight into the stream, stumbling over the boulders, passed up a branching runlet hardly large enough for them to walk in, and came out again at the head of the runlet upon some great, flat slabs of granite where no visible print of their trail could be left, and where the thin and wandering current of snow waters would probably wipe out most of the scent for a considerable distance.
Over these rocks they went for some distance and at length struck off again through the broken-ridge country. It might take an hour, it might take a day before the trailers located the solution to that puzzle, although by this time they knew many of his tactics by heart.
He had traveled from the peak of the mountain, where he found the sooty stone, over a long, loosely irregular arc. Now he headed, on the almost level plateau, straight across the short cord of that arc and pressed on remorselessly, in spite of the growls and grumblings of the grizzly, until, in the utter dark, he reached the place where, so he felt, the murderer of Dick Walker must have camped before him. There he ventured on his fire. There, after a time, he took a turn in his blankets and fell soundly asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE END OF THE TRAIL
There was no sign of sunrise when he wakened suddenly and rose to his feet the next morning. But the iron will had roused him after a scant four hours of rest. It was enough. Where the spring water collected in a deep, black-faced pool a little farther down the mountainside, he took his morning plunge. He came back to his own new-kindled campfire, surrounded by rocks, and started the coffee. Then he tended to his shaving. It was the one habit that he had learned from men, for, when his beard began to grow, he had envied the smooth faces of the men he saw, and finally, spying on a campfire in the early morning, he had seen a man shaving. That same razor and strap and brush and soap were mysteriously stolen from the unlucky prospector’s kit that night, while he slept. In its place there was left a bundle of four fine fox skins. So it was that Tom learned shaving. He had envied the short hair of men, also, but he could not cut his own unless he hacked it off close to the roots with his knife and left a ragged mass covering his head.
Bathed and shaved and breakfasted, he was still too early to take the trail. But in a few moments the quickly coming mountain dawn began, and he looked about him. All around the place were the trails of men and dogs and horses. The pursuers had rested for a time at this point in the trail, well wearied by the labors of that day, as they might have reason to be. But what would they feel when they discovered that that long loop to the side was merely a detour? Tom smiled as he thought of their faces. His ears rang in imagination with their profound oaths. Then he headed down the mountain slope.
He went on until noon, still carefully maintaining that line that he had cast ahead from the crest of the mountain toward the higher peaks. Another deer fell to his rifle then, with a long-range shot. He paused to cook and eat, and let Jerry feed his full. It was a two-hour halt, but two hours of rest in the middle of the day is an excellent measure on a long trail. When he began again in the middle of the afternoon, it was at a pace as brisk as that of his morning spurt. An hour more, and he came on what seemed to him another proof that he was following the correct trail. It was the indubitable sign of a campfire that had spread into the surrounding brush and almost started a forest fire, save that the camper had beaten it out in the nick of time before it spread to the trees.
No rains could hide the scars of that fire. So on went Tom, confident now that he was running in the right direction. He struck up above timberline, crossed a great range of gleaming stone cliffs, and dropped onto the farther side. Was he still on the line, he wondered, as he camped that evening?
Next day he went on again, and it was in the middle of the morning that he came on the first continuous trail. Well worked in along the moist bank of a stream, he found the print of a horse and a dog, and yonder was still the dent of a man’s knee where he had stopped to fill his canteen. Of course, it might not be the man he wanted, but from that point he ran on snatches of the trail repeatedly. As a matter of fact, he had traveled in two days as far as the other had traveled in four, and the trail was freshening every moment. Now Jerry began to take an interest, and Tom welcomed his assistance, for there is no more able trailer than a clever grizzly. Men have worked to follow them for the sake of a photograph for two weeks or a month at a time, and never sighted them. More often than not, they have turned back to dog the hunter’s steps. At the end of the trail puzzle he finds that the great brute has spent half the day working trail problems for the man to solve, and the other half has perched himself in a safe lookout to enjoy the labors of his enemy.
So it was that Jerry regarded the tracks of the man, the horse, and the dog, got their faint scent in his sensitive nostrils, and finally forged ahead, showing the way to Tom. It was far surer to follow Jerry’s lead, but it was slower. Yet Tom, full of anxiety lest the posses overtake him again, allowed the bear to take his own course, only urging him on now a
nd again.
Another day went over his head, and now the trail was so clear that even an amateur could have deciphered it. The horse was shod on three feet. The fourth was bare, and a chunk was broken out of one side of the overgrown hoofs—the right fore. The man wore boots with high heels, sloping to a rather meager supporting surface like modification of cowboy boots, well nigh. Wherever he got down from the saddle, he left prints that showed that both heels were badly turned over and leaned to the outside.
He was a big man, Tom observed by the length of the stride. He was a heavy man, as he could tell by the depth of the impression. That it was a horse as small as the rider was large was an equally clear deduction and taken from similar testimony. Moreover, it was an expert shot in whose trail Tom rode. He could tell by scars that he had found on a slender sapling at one side of the trail. The tree had been carefully cut in two with five shots, placed so nicely, side by side and in a perfectly straight line, that each orifice neatly touched the next.
Tom examined the tree with care. The caliber of the bullets was .45. He had done that shooting at thirty yards with a Colt then. Even Tom himself could not have improved upon it. Still more, they must have been quick, casual shots such as a man aims to make, such that hand and eye are in faultless practice.
No sooner did the trail become clear than Tom increased his pace, and the fear of the mellow-tongued voices of the dogs of the posse began to disappear when, on the middle of a sunshiny afternoon, he came on indisputable proofs that the trail that he was following through a pine forest had been made only an hour or so before, at the most. If this were indeed the man who had killed Dick Walker, he must be essentially lazy, for, after the first spurt away from the site of the murder, he had gone ahead with marches so short that a child could have made them on foot from day to day. Tom could have covered four times the average distance and never been hard pressed by the labor. But here were the pine needles recently pressed down and unlifted by any wind since the footprints were made. Surely the goal would not be far off.
