by Brand, Max
And Whisper crawled out from the brush, more afraid of the raging water than of man. She lay down at the side of Frosty, crouching herself small against him, and showing her needle-sharp teeth to Silver. She was not the only thing that came. Half a dozen rattlesnakes came sliding and slipping away from the flood, and never sounded the alarm once when they came to other living things.
The water was deep, and had a current. Silver saddled Parade, got on him, and then hauled up Frosty to keep him from the wet. Silver would never forget that moment. For it was the real introduction of Parade to Frosty. The loathing between them was perfect. And now the wolf lay on the back of the stallion, snarling with hate, and shivering with the blood lust, while Parade quaked with horror under the weight of the beast of prey.
The wall of water receded. It left the island pretty well ruined, and very much smaller. Whisper sneaked first of all away from the hillock to go back to her rabbit hunting, and her noisy mourning for the fellowship of Frosty by night. The rattlesnakes slithered away through the brush, and Silver was able to continue his life as before.
There were no dull moments. It was true that Frosty could not move his hind quarters, but his head was free. He might never rise and walk again, but he was able to use his mind. And Silver worked it constantly. With all of Frosty’s wisdom and savage cunning and myriad cruelties, he had the heart of a happy puppy. He liked a game as well as a murder.
He learned to catch a rock or a stick. He got so that he could catch a ten-pound chunk of wood thrown from short range about as hard as Silver could fling it. Frosty’s snaky head would dart out to meet the flying weight, and with a side twist of his head and his supple, strong neck, he would break the shock of the impact. He could catch the same lump when it was tossed high in the air above his head. He learned, also, a complicated vocabulary of signs and gestures and words and whistles.
Sometimes, as Silver ran through their antics together, the eyes of Frosty would brighten and dance, his head went high, and he looked like a dog about to bark. But when his throat swelled and his body shook with the desire to utter some pleasant sound, all he could bring out was a horrifying growl.
Frosty lay there for many long days before Silver saw him stand. There was no preparation; there was no warning, no elaborate approach to the feat. But Silver opened his eyes one morning and saw the great wolf on his feet and tottering toward the brush. He started as Silver stood up, and Frosty looked around at him green-eyed, with a hideous snarl.
Silver merely laughed at him. He went up to Frosty and patted his head. He got to work on the hind legs and massaged them carefully. And in three more days Frosty was walking freely and easily. After that his strength came back to him with a rush.
He was with Whisper at night, but all the day long he was with Silver. The reason was that there was always something to occupy his attention when he was with the man. There were endless games. Among the trees, high in the branches, or in some nest of rocks, Silver would hide himself and give the signal for the hunt with one thin whistle. And always Frosty worked out the most complicated trail problem in a few moments and sat down with his red laughter in front of his man.
Frosty learned how to flush game, how to work through the brush to make the rabbits come scattering out before the gun of man, where they would surely fall. He learned how to take the reins of Parade and lead him, Parade shuddering with horror, and the wolf with fighting rage. He learned how to fetch and carry, how to hear a whisper and obey it.
When Frosty seemed to have four strong legs under him at last, Jim Silver got on Parade and forded the river at the shallows, for the water had sunk far after the last flood. Frosty followed him over. Frosty followed him right on to the town of Blue Waters, and there he sat down on a hill and canted his head to one side as Silver continued into the place. Whisper came sneaking out and tried to draw her mate back into the woods, away from the fatal and strange trail of man, and Jim Silver, glancing over his Shoulder, saw her trying her wiles.
But he let her have her way and went on into the town.
The news of Alec Gary’s gold strike would be in everybody’s mouth, of course. There had been plenty of time for Alec to reach the mine, locate it, file his claim, and start taking out the dust from the rock. There had been plenty of time for Alec to do all of these things and finally to go back up the Purchass River to a certain island where he had last seen Jim Silver — the Jim Silver who had placed a fortune in his hands.
Perhaps Alec would be glad to forget all about Jim Silver’s aid. There was grim curiosity in the heart of Silver as he started to make inquiries.
But in five minutes he was something more than curious. For Alec Gary had never got to the town of Blue Waters on the day when he left Jim Silver. Not a man in the town had seen him; certainly he had not appeared to hire men or to file a claim!
What had become of him? Silver knew the answer. Barry Christian had blocked the way!
CHAPTER XXVI
The Search
SILVER went back to the hill where he had left Frosty, and found the great wolf lying exactly where he had been at first; off through the brush, with a thin sound of rustling, went Whisper.
Silver, looking Frosty in the eye, wondered how long the charm would last. Wolves, most people said, could never be tamed. They would revert to the wild. But for the short time that this companionship might endure — so long, perhaps, as the memory of his recent wounds was fresh in the head of Frosty — it was a wonderful thing to Silver. And he sat there by the wolf, smoking a cigarette and working out his plan.
Alec Gary had been in a frenzy of excitement when he received the words of his uncle. No doubt he had mounted his horse and ridden like mad straight for the town of Blue Waters. He could not have had any other destination. He would have gone on a straight line. And what would that straight line have been?
Silver charted it in his mind, and then rode it on Parade, with Frosty running on ahead, hunting sights and sounds, reading the scents that traveled the wind.
The way from Blue Waters to the island on the Purchass River cut straight across high land, and skirted the head of a box canyon where a creek tumbled noisily over a sheer wall of rock. Or if Gary were not familiar with the country, he might have cut straight across the canyon without skirting the head of it; the slopes on either side were not at all difficult. So Silver rode down into the canyon.
There was nothing in the little valley worth looking at except the scattered bones of a horse that were whitening in the sun. Silver would have ridden on, except that Frosty poked into a patch of thick shrubbery and turned back to eye his master until Silver came to the place.
There he found something that was worth while indeed. It was the battered wreckage of a range saddle which was ripped and torn as if it had been passed through a mill. A mill with water in it, to judge by the way the sun had curled and warped the tattered fragments of the leather. But what mattered most to Jim Silver was the way some of the saddle strings had been knotted. By those knots, he knew that it was the saddle of Alec Gary that he was seeing!
Those bones, then, were the bones of Alec’s horse; and Alec himself? — well, his body could have been concealed anywhere about the valley. There were a thousand rock piles in any one of which he might have been buried, while Barry Christian, and Gregor, and Thurston, armed with the secret of the mine, went straight to their quarry!
Silver went there, too. He spent a day getting to Thunder Mountain, and locating, by means of Chimney Peak and Mount Wigwam, the ledge of black stone. He found the broken place where Bill Gary had blasted away the outer part of the ledge. He saw the rich glistening of the gold itself, but there was no token that any one had been working the mine.
Alec Gary might be as dead as his horse, but apparently Christian had not stolen his secret!
Back to the ravine of the dead horse and the saddle went Jim Silver, and spent another day going over it from the bottom to the head. Frosty helped him hunt, not that Frosty knew what
was wanted, but because it was plain to him that man was hunting; so, while Frosty worked here and there, calling attention to a dead bird here, and a nest of mice there, Whisper lurked on the edge of the horizon all day, and came close at night with mournful howlings.
It was on the evening of the last day of the search that Frosty himself howled short and sharp from the head of the valley, and Silver saw him sitting on a ridge just under the waterfall. He climbed to the place. There was not much to be seen — just one spot staining the whiteness of the rock, and one little sparkling point of metal from which Frosty lifted the foot he had placed on it. Silver picked the thing up and started, for it was the rowel of a spur that had been broken from its wheel.
That stain on the rock, to judge by the bristling of the wolf as he sniffed it, might be blood. Then, had horse and rider fallen here from the edge of the height above? Had the rider struck on the ledge while the horse, toppling farther out, had dashed down onto the boulders of the creek and been swept along in the water to the point where unknown hands had pulled it out from the stream, stripped off the saddle, and dropped the saddle for hiding into the brush?
What people would have done those things? Who except Barry Christian and his crew; and might not their rifle bullets have been the cause of the fall in the first place?
Frosty had run off down the ledge, sniffing here and there at a dabbling of other spots on the rock. Silver followed. The trail led up from the ledge to the level above, and worked a short distance over the gravel before Frosty had to give it up. After all, it was many days old.
Silver could merely take the general direction and follow it. For perhaps Alec when he was hurt by his fall, had managed to get rid of the paper that contained the secret of the mine’s position. Perhaps he had been picked up by Christian and carried to some spot where he could be properly “persuaded” to talk about the situation of the mine.
At any rate, Silver rode a mile into the trees, paused, circled widely and vainly for sign, and then was forced to camp for the night. He was up with the dawn, and searching again. And in the bright, cool prime of the morning he came out into a clearing before a little trapper’s shack and saw a grizzled old fellow seated in a chair that had been rudely fashioned out of the stump of a tree. He puffed at a clay pipe and greeted Silver with a grunt.
He had seen nothing of any stranger, he said. He knew nothing. He wanted to know nothing.
While he was still uttering his denials, a strained voice cried inside the shack: “Chimney Peak — I face Mount Wigwam — ”
“That’s the man I want!” said Silver.
The trapper stood up with a shotgun in his hands.
“There’s been some mean skunks on his trail, whoever he is,” he said. “Maybe you’re one of ‘em. Back up, son. I ain’t slaved over that kid all these days to chuck him away to the first gent that comes askin’ for him. Who are you?”
“Jim Silver,” he answered.
“The devil you are,” said the trapper. “And I’m Napoleon, eh? Pull off your hat, if you’re Jim Silver.”
His glance shifted, at the same moment, to the shining beauty of that famous horse, Parade. Then, as Silver obediently removed his hat, the trapper stared at the little gray spots above the temples, like incipient horns. And he exclaimed:
“By thunder, you are Jim Silver. Come on inside this place and see what we can do for the kid. He’s better, but he ain’t well!”
Not well? No, he lay like a pale ghost of himself, all the upper part of his face bone-white and frightfully thin, and all the lower half of his face black with beard. But he heard the voice of Silver, and it made him sit up suddenly and throw out both hands in a great gesture of appeal. Silver took hold of one of those hands and sat down beside the bed. And there he remained day after day until the fever wore out of Alec Gary.
When he could tell his story, it was very simple. He had, as Silver suspected, ridden like a madman, straight for Blue Waters to get good men and take them to the mine. And on the way, as he climbed his horse up the highlands, Barry Christian and Gregor had appeared in his rear, riding hard. Gary had fled. His mustang had held out well, but as he was passing near the head of the box canyon, a rifle bullet had knocked the mustang sprawling. Right over the edge of the cliff it had fallen, while Gary, with broken bones and torn body, lay by the grace of chance on the ledge close to the falls.
Christian and Gregor, riding down into the valley, had dragged the body of the horse out of the stream; perhaps had taken for granted that the body of the rider had simply disappeared in the water, lodged under some projecting rock. Perhaps, like Jim Silver, they had not even seen the little cross-ledge near the falls.
All that day, after his fall, Gary had not dared to move, though he felt himself dying. But in the night he had dragged himself up from the ledge and managed to get into the trees. There the trapper had found him, quite out of his wits with fever, the morning after.
It had been a hard job to pull him through. But cracked ribs will mend; mountain air breathes strength into the blood; and it was not many days after that before Jim Silver sat on a fallen tree and looked down a great slope to the place where the black ledge crossed the mountain, and where men were now moiling and toiling with a great clangoring of single jacks and double jacks against the drill heads. Young Alec Gary was in charge, walking here and there, by far the happiest man in the world.
Not that he claimed all the mine for himself. No; he wanted to give to Jim Silver half of the place, at least. Whatever Jim Silver would take was his. All of it, Gary swore, really should go to the only man in the world who could have checkmated Barry Christian.
But Silver, staring down the mountainside, found himself not altogether pleased by the clamoring that broke the gigantic peace of the uplands.
He whistled softly, and something stirred in the brush behind him. Without turning his head, he smiled. For he knew perfectly well that it was Frosty.
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scribbled on the back of it:
DEAR ALEC: I’m going on. I have Frosty, and you have the mine. I can’t take any part of it because there’s blood on it — Bill Gary’s blood. He died trying to pass the mine on to you, not to me. Now you have what he wanted you to have. It would only be bad luck for me, if I should take a slice.
I’m saying good-by this way because otherwise I know that I’d have an argument with you. So long and good luck.
JIM SILVER.
He put the envelope on a rock, weighted it with a stone, and climbed on Parade. Frosty jumped out of the brush, and, with a meaning toss of the head, led the way across the mountain to a small clearing, where Jim Silver saw the bones of huge dogs, or wolves, scattered on the pine needles. There were several rusted traps, and the teeth of one still held the hind leg bone of one of the dead.
Frosty, sitting down on the edge of the clearing, could not be persuaded even by all the coaxing of his master to put foot inside the place. So at last Silver rode on with Parade.
His way led north and west, through those mountains from which the floods had been rolling down so steadily not long before. As he rode, the big wolf, Frosty, took the way before him and seemed to guess at the direction in which his master was traveling.
Right through the day they journeyed, and in the evening, as they went down a valley, the voice of Whisper cried sadly from the height behind them.
Frosty put himself right across the trail and faced Silver. And Silver understood in this an ultimatum — that the bounds of Frosty’s range had been crossed; that his mate would not leave the right domain; that Jim Silver, if he wished to keep the wolf, must stay in the wolf’s land.
Silver understood, and without one word of persuasion, one call, one appeal, he rode Parade straight past Frosty and down into the thickening darkness of the lower valley.
There he camped in a thicket of big trees, and it seemed to him for the first time in years that it was a lonely thing to live with a horse alone in the wilderness. It
seemed to him, as he sat dozing by the small fire, his chin on his fist, that he would give a great deal to have the wise head and the hazel eyes of the wolf to look at again. However, he felt that it was better this way. The wolf could not leave his kind. And after all, to live with any man was to live in bondage.
Then, lifting his heavy eyes, Silver saw a monstrous form sitting opposite him, with the firelight making a sheen of the eyes.
“Frosty!” he exclaimed. “Have you left her, son? Have you come to me?”
And Frosty looked up into the mysterious face of man and laughed his red laughter. For he was content.
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Copyright © 1944 by Dodd, Mead. Copyright © renewed 1972 by the Estate of Frederick Faust. The name Max Brand® is a registered trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and cannot be used for any purpose without express written permission. Published by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency. All rights reserved.
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This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
