Old Carver Ranch

by Max Brand

  His dreams, however, were by no means smooth. He passed through a confusion of dangers in that hurried sleep. Once more he wakened, and this time he opened his eyes with the certainty that, a moment before, a shaft of light had been playing upon his face. At least, the certainty was so great that he lay motionlessly upon the bed, stirring not so much as a single hand, but waiting, waiting, while his heart pounded with a foolish violence that startled and puzzled him. Then gradually, watching himself every inch of the way, he turned his head.

  He knew, by the current of air that swept across his face and his bared right arm above the bedclothes, that the door to the room was open and the wind was whirling down the hall of the old house. The work of the storm might easily account for this, since he never locked that door. But a strange and profound instinct told him also that there was another human being in the room.

  Slowly he began to gather himself, drawing up his legs and heaving himself by imperceptible degrees upon his left elbow. At the same time he recalled that he had not left his revolver anywhere near the bed. And at this instant there was a long, loud squeak from the floor of the room near its center.

  He waited for no more. There was such a blind panic rising in him that he feared that, if he waited longer, he would be too paralyzed to move. Therefore, he flung himself out of the bed as he was, bare-handed, diving headfirst like a football tackler, and sending the bed sliding across the room with the back thrust of his long legs.

  He was in mid-air from that leap when he heard fierce, quick, surprised voices—not one, but what seemed to him a dozen. The room must be full of men.

  Then his shoulder and the side of his head struck a heavy man just below the hips, and the latter toppled instantly forward upon him. A revolver exploded, and by the flash Tom caught a glimpse almost too fast for the senses to register what they perceived. Four other men—men of gigantic stature—were in the room, and steel gleamed in the hand of every one of them.

  But that fierce, low dive catapulted the fifth man ahead of him, and they smashed against the wall. He thought he felt the bones of the man’s body crush with the impact. At least he heard the thud of his head against the wall. And then the form of the big fellow relaxed.

  At the same time, with a storm of curses, the others rushed at him. He heard and felt their heavy feet coming. They would drive low, grappling to find him on the floor. Accordingly he jerked himself up and leaped out, throwing his body as high as he could.

  His knees smashed against the head of a man leaning exactly as Tom had imagined he would. There was a scream of pain and rage from the other. Tom himself was sent tumbling headlong over the floor.

  Luckily he rolled in the direction of the door, and, springing to his feet, he lunged for it. But at the same time three men converged in a terrific rush at that spot. They struck Tom. He felt himself wrenched and torn by mighty hands and went down under a loading, a reaching, gripping, writhing, cursing humanity. Yet they dared not, in the dark, strike with a weapon for fear of injuring one another.

  Then a great voice called, “We’ve got him! Get a light! Show the lantern somebody!”

  Under the stimulus of that threat Tom gathered himself and rose to his knees, pitching that load of three heavy men up from him. They flattened to him with shouts, and he tore his right arm loose. He struck up—there was a gasp and a groan of rage and pain. He clubbed fiercely to either side. Then he sprang to his feet, and the three pairs of arms slid from him. They were not altogether harmless, however. At least they caught his nightclothes and stripped most of them from his body.

  Half naked, and drunk with the sense of his strength unloosed for the first time in his life—a strength unknown even to himself—he forgot to flee. He merely lunged out, seeking a new prey. He smashed against a man in the dark. A gun exploded, and a pain jabbed through the left thigh of the big man. He barely felt it. The flash of the gun had revealed the other for an instant. Tom reached for the image that had been printed black in the instant’s light.

  He found it. He found, also, a swinging fist that hurtled through the air with power enough to have felled an ox. It landed fairly on the side of Tom’s face. It slashed the skin and flesh like a knife, and a warm trickle ran down his cheek. But the next instant he was in on the foeman. He lifted him up—a writhing, heaving giant—and then dashed him to the floor. There was a shout that was instantly stifled in the crash.

  Then a bit of circular, cold metal was jabbed against his back—they had seen his shining body in the light of other flashes—and the gun exploded. He had whirled so that, instead of driving through his body, the bullet merely raked along his outer ribs after plowing through the fleshy part of his back. For an instant it turned him sick. Then he struck out wildly with both fists, felt his left connect solidly, and the man went down.

  Here there came the grate of metal on metal, a quick sound like the scratching of a cat’s paw against a window glass, and light spurted across the room. It showed the reddened body of Tom. It showed a big, bearded man in the corner, smashed against the wall and even now barely in the act of raising himself in a bewildered fashion. It showed another lying face down upon the floor with his arms outstretched and a pool of crimson around his head.

  Another was doubled up and writhing in agony. A fourth was a black silhouette, leaning over the lantern. And the fifth man stood back against the wall with a revolver in either hand. He blazed away with both weapons at the shining target.

  Tom felt something like the edge of a red-hot razor slash across his forehead, and another ripped his throat. Hot trickles poured out with the touches. Then he flung himself back. He seized on the man who lay writhing, and with a huge upward lift he wrenched the man to his feet in time to meet another fusillade from the gunman.

  The stream of bullets that the man with the guns had started could not be instantly stopped, it seemed. He had splashed lead through the mirror, sending a tinkling and crashing shower of glass to the floor. He had scarred the planking and broken the window and cracked the bed, but now, as he got the range for the second time, the shining body was obscured by a darkness that was the form of the man who was picked up from the floor. It did not matter. The bullet drove home. There was a loud shriek and a convulsive struggle of the unfortunate fellow who served Tom as a shield. Against his chest struck a heavy blow as a slug that had torn through the body of the victim and been half flattened by the resistance of flesh and bone, now spent the very last of its force against Tom. But it made only a small cut and fell to the floor.

  In the meantime, the two gunfighters, maddened at what they saw they had done, came charging in, intent on digging the muzzles of their weapons against the body of Tom before they pulled a trigger.

  There was a strength of madness in Tom. He had felt the body of his victim grow limp. Now he swayed the body back and hurled it in the faces of the onrushing assailants. But even as he did so, and sprang forward to follow up the charge, he saw the big bearded man, who had fallen beneath his first blind attack, reaching for his revolver that had fallen close at hand.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  In the cottage behind the big house, the first of the roaring gunfire from the ranch house brought all the three inmates to their doors, quivering with the cold. Mrs. Carver carried a lamp that she shielded so that the light fell only on the wild face of her husband and the pale face of Mary at an opposite door, as she gathered her bathrobe more closely around her.

  “It’s Swain,” groaned John Carver. “It’s the hired murderers of Swain at work. Lizzie, our troubles with him are over, but the devil burn Swain. Look! There’s a whole army of ’em!”

  They had hurried to the side window. They could see, in the windows of the upper room where Tom Keene slept, the quivering flash of guns exploding at intervals, and a huge shouting and trampling, and the shocks of heavy bodies, until it seemed that the wall of the house must be torn out by the impacts.

&
nbsp; “Father!” cried Mary. “Take help to him. Here … here’s the revolver …”

  Her mother knocked down her hand. “Are you mad, Mary? D’you dream that I’d let him go up there to be murdered?”

  “But can we stand here and watch it? Oh!”

  The last was a shriek. A light had showed in the room, and a swirl of silhouettes of many struggling men passed across the window. It seemed, in the flurry of many shadowy bodies, that the room was literally packed with men shouting and cursing, and over the uproar came the great booming voice of Tom Keene as he battled.

  “Then I’ll go!” Mary Carver cried suddenly. “It’s murder!” She started for the door.

  Her mother caught at her, but her stiff hands were utterly incapable of stopping the girl. She slipped through them and hurried on. There was a shout of dismay from her father, but, before he could get clear of the door of the cottage, she was away and had raced half of the distance to the house, clutching the great revolver.

  As she whipped through the door, she saw her father halting behind her. Then she rushed for the stairs leading to the upper story, knowing that she would have to carry help alone. And she had never fired a weapon in her life, even at a mark, to say nothing of a human being. How she could be of the slightest assistance, she did not know, but she knew that in some way, when she got there, she would try to help, even if it were only with the strength of her hands.

  So she flew to the head of the stairs and down the hall. Through the open door she saw a strange picture that in a flash was printed deeply in her mind to haunt her the rest of her life. One man lay face down on the floor, his limbs twisted strangely, and she knew at a glance that he was dead, though she had never seen death before. Another man was picking himself up from a corner of the room, a mighty, bearded man whose clothes were half torn from his back, and who seemed to have been bodily flung to the place where he was now staggering to his feet.

  Two others were locked in a fierce embrace with a half-naked giant whose body was a mass of open gashes. And she saw the mighty lift and knotting of his muscles as he strained at the two. He had fixed the fingers of his right hand on the throat of one, and, as the fingers dug deeper and deeper, the throttled man wrenched his head far back, his features convulsed and blackened, though he still persisted in grappling with the giant. The second of those locked with the seminude warrior had twined his legs with the legs of the other and was attempting to wrench him to the floor. Indeed, he had fallen to one knee, and there he hung braced. And above that sinister group of three stood a fourth man, with his wide-shouldered back turned to the door, and in his hands he was swinging up a heavy chair to batter out the brains of the defendant.

  These things, which take so long in the telling, had been perceived by the girl in one flash of the mind, and in the next she knew that the wounded fighter who was about to be crushed was the man known to her as Timothy Kenyon, cruel, implacable, strangely delighting in torturing others. But above and beyond his cruelty she saw now that prodigious strength battling for life, and with that strength a dauntless courage that filled her to the throat with wonder and with admiration.

  She jerked up the heavy Colt, seizing it in both her hands, but at the thought of discharging the weapon she shrank far back into the shadow of the hall. She saw the chair heaved up to full height in the hands of the assailant, and then the eyes of the victim turned up and saw the impending ruin, not with terror, but with a shout of furious defiance.

  That shout gave strength to Mary Carver. She thrust the revolver before her, and, knowing that she had no time to aim, or not even thinking of that somewhat essential feature, she pulled the trigger.

  The bullet struck the ceiling exactly in the center where the old chandelier, with all its tinkling and shining fixtures of glass, was attached to the plaster above by a narrow chain. That chain was severed. The chandelier hurtled down.

  But the sound of the exploding gun had made the man with the chair leap back to avoid the attack, and the blow that would have killed Tom Keene did not fall. All four of the assailants who were now capable of seeing, looked toward the door, and they saw a revolver flash and explode twice in rapid succession, very much like the firing of two guns.

  The figure of the holder of the weapon was shrouded from them. What they knew was that the lantern near the door had been unhooded so as to cast a flare of light over the room while it left the hallway in darkness. In a word, they were made perfect targets, while the new assailants could shoot safely from the dark into the light. In the meantime, the chandelier had splintered upon the floor with a terrific crash. And there is nothing so appalling to excited nerves as an unexpected noise. Moreover, on the outside, John Carver, half out of his senses, was shouting to Mary to come back, and then swearing in a thunderous voice that he was coming for her.

  No wonder, in that critical moment, that it seemed to the four that the hall was filled with rescuers, and that more waited in the night outside the house. They stood not upon the order of their going, but they went, and the father led the way. Straight through the high windows they plunged, then raced down over the shelving roof below, dropped to the ground, and made for their horses.

  Mary Carver found herself, after all the confusion of sound, suddenly standing in a silent room with a dead man lying a step in front of her, and against the far wall the crimson form of Tom Keene sinking down and propping himself feebly upon one shaking hand. She ran to him and dropped upon her knees before him, striving to peer into his face, and feeling that in his eyes she could read whether or not he were mortally hurt.

  “Mister Kenyon!” she shrilled at him. “Mister Kenyon!”

  He seemed to be falling to sleep. His head dropped down with a jerk, and he was sagging toward the floor. She reached out and gripped his shoulders, shining with crimson. Under her fingers the great muscles slipped and rolled. She cared not for the stains, and, indeed, she did not even seem to see them.

  “Mister Kenyon!” she cried again. “Are you … have they … the cowards … have they killed you?”

  He did not answer. He only sank lower.

  A moment later, John Carver, at the door of the room, saw his daughter, having pulled the arm of the wounded man across her shoulders and around her neck, attempting to lift him to his feet, quite regardless of the stains that dripped and were smeared upon her. He ran to her aid. Between them they half dragged and half carried the staggering bulk to the bed, and there they laid him.

  “I’ll … I’ll get to Porterville,” stammered Carver. “I’ll bring out the sheriff. I’ll prove that I ain’t had any hand in this, and, heaven above, he stood off five of ’em.”

  “You can’t go to Porterville!” cried his daughter sternly. “You’ve got to help me here. He isn’t dying. He isn’t going to die. A man like him … why, cowards couldn’t kill him.”

  He was so overcome with wonder that he obeyed without a word. The blood from a scratch had been too much for her to look at. Now all this carnage seemed to mean nothing to her. She managed everything, working with a sort of frenzy until the wounds were tended, the bleeding stopped. Under her directions, her father, having helped as he could, now removed the body of the dead man with great effort and cleared the wreckage from the room.

  “It’s Young Si Landers!” he confided to his wife in a whisper of awe. “It must have been all of them Landers … the whole five of them. And the five of them giants wasn’t enough to beat Tom Keene. What a man! And don’t go near Mary. She’s in a sort of frenzy. She won’t talk. She just works. She ain’t like herself.”

  But when the mother came to the head of the stairs and looked in, while her husband now rode for the doctor, she found Mary Carver sitting with folded hands beside the bed, her face calm, and a smile of strange happiness just on the verge of appearing on her lips.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  It was the middle of the next morning that Jerry Swain
came again to old Carver Ranch, spurred on by the mingled admonitions and threats of his father. Though the attack on which the elder Swain had counted so much had failed, at least it had temporarily crippled Tom Keene. It would be a month, said the doctor, before he could walk again. None of the wounds had been of a vital nature. Loss of blood was the main thing that held him back, that and the shock of the long struggle maintained when he had only nerve-power to buoy him. Therefore, young Jerry Swain sneaked to the house and sought Carver.

  His greeting was strangely unenthusiastic. “I’ll get the wife to take care of Keene and send Mary down to you,” he said. “But she’s gone plumb queer about this. I never seen nobody wrapped up in a job as much as she’s wrapped up in taking care of him.”

  “You start in and give reasons to persuade her, then,” Jerry suggested angrily.

  But the other shook his head. He seemed to have grown much younger and happier in the past day.

  “Now that Mary has saved him … well, I ain’t worrying so much,” he said. “Mary can decide what she wants to do for herself.”

  “There’s only one thing,” Jerry said eagerly as the rancher turned away. “Does she know that Kenyon is Tom Keene?”

  “She don’t. And she ain’t going to learn it from you, Swain.”

  * * * * *

  She did not learn it from Jerry Swain. Indeed, she learned very, very little from him. She descended to the hall and walked straight up to him with infinite contempt in her eyes.