Superlatives cannot be used in connection with the boys of the second generation of Cavendishes. So instead of stating that Mort was the most courageous, it is more accurate to record that Jeb, Vince, and Wallie were even less courageous than Mort.
It was Mort who, as a pimpled adolescent, suggested meekly that he and his brothers leave the Basin. It took three days for the flames of rage that exploded from Bryant Cavendish to die down, and their embers smoldered for weeks thereafter. It took several years for Mort to build up the spunk to assert himself again. He married Rebecca and brought her to the Basin. The hurricane blasts from Uncle Bryant made all previous Cavendish tirades seem like the babblings of brooks that inspire poets.
Bryant was an old man, and even his iron will could no longer ignore the rheumatism that made his legs almost useless. As it became increasingly necessary for the nephews to assume responsibility, his resentment toward them grew proportionately.
Cool water, piped from a mountain spring, gurgling and splashing into a trough…a sheltered basin, blanketed with grass…sturdy, comfortable houses…contented cattle, growing fat…the song of a girl…the laughter of a child…clumping hoofs…lazy smoke from cowboy cigarettes.… “Yew got the makin’s?” … “Ain’t Mort’s wife startin’ t’git big again?” … “I heered a doggoned funny story las’ week, it’ll bust yer sides.” … “Gimme the lend of a chaw, will yuh?” … “My feet’re killin’ me.” … “I gotta git me some boots next payday.” … “Thunderstorm due about t’morra.”
In the Basin, normalcy.
But in Bryant’s Gap, majestic in height, gorgeous in color like the rattlesnake, six men sprawled on rockstrewn ground, and buzzards circled overhead.
CHAPTER II
The Gap
The lifeless forms that littered the floor of Bryant’s Gap had but recently been men who lived a vital, hard life in the outdoors; men who could shoot fast and straight, whose every sense was tuned to a pitch that made them aware of any danger that lurked. The dead men had been Texas Rangers.
In a roundabout way, these riders had been told that men they sought as outlaws could be found in Bryant’s Basin. To reach the Basin they had ridden through the Gap—almost through the Gap—but Death had cut their journey short. Killers, waiting behind protecting rocks, had fired without warning. Half of the small band had spilled from the saddle, either dead or wounded, at the first fusillade of bullets. The others, with the intuitive action of men who live and often die by the gun, had leaped to the ground to fight from behind the scant protection of fallen horses. Empty cartridge cases gave mute evidence of their gallant stand.
The Rangers all had fallen, but in one a tiny spark of life still glowed. The man, wounded in several places, looked dead. Even the buzzards, circling ever lower, experts at recognizing death, were deceived. The gaunt birds seemed to dart away in surprise when the lone survivor moved. A dazed sort of consciousness came slowly to him. At first he was aware of heat—heat from the sun overhead and the rocks surrounding him. Then the heat became a frightful burning, concentrated in his right leg and left shoulder. Blood, seeping from a gash across his forehead, blinded him. He tried to move, but the effort made him giddy. He fell back to rest, while he fought to gather his scattered senses.
As the mists lifted from his mind he remembered sudden shots—his comrades falling—stabbing pain shooting through his left side from the shoulder down—left hand useless—a bullet in his foot—falling to the ground—oblivion. Ambush—treachery—must live—must bring the killers in!
Sheer courage, and the will to ignore the pains that racked his entire body, brought the wounded man to a sitting position. At the time, the thought that murderers might still be lurking close at hand did not occur to him.
His first thought was to see if any of the others needed help, but when he tried to rise he was amazed at his own weakness. He realized that he was beyond the point of helping others.
He could barely move. He wiped the blood from his eyes, but his vision was fogged. Only large objects could be discerned, and these not clearly. He tried to locate the horses, but all except his own had died or disappeared. The white stallion that he himself had ridden stood a short distance away, as if waiting for the next command of its master. He tried to give the familiar whistle, but no sound issued from his dry, bloodless lips. He called to the horse, and his own voice startled him. It was an unfamiliar voice, one that he had never heard before—almost croaking. But the stallion heard it and came obediently to the side of the sitting man.
The big horse lowered its head at a whispered command. The reins fell close to the hands of the man on the ground. He clutched for them and had to grope before he found them. Then, clinging to the bridle, he finally gained an unsteady footing. With the instinct of the hunted he sought for his means of defense. His right hand fumbled at his waist for the familiar cartridge belt and the brace of heavy guns. The belt was missing. This discovery should have been cause for alarm, but in his desperate condition, the loss of the weapons seemed of small consequence to the Texas Ranger. He did, however, wonder vaguely where it had gone. He couldn’t remember taking the belt off, but there were many details of the short battle that had escaped his recollection. He felt about his waist once more before he would believe that his weapons were not in their familiar place. Convinced then, he knew that but one hope remained—flight.
Sensing that his master was in difficulty, knowing that something unusual had taken place, the big horse stood motionless while the Ranger dragged his body to the saddle. It called for an almost superhuman effort to mount the horse. He made no attempt to sit erect. Instead he leaned far forward, fighting desperately against the constantly increasing nausea that threatened to deprive him of consciousness. He nudged the horse with one heel, and Silver trotted forward. Direction was a thing far out of the question, and the rider made no effort to guide his horse. He clung to the saddle, fighting every moment of the time to stay alive, while the horse carried him from the scene of sudden death where buzzards circled lower, ever lower.
When he could gather the strength to speak, he whispered in a husky voice, close to the ear of the horse, “Away, Silver—away.” A trail of red that continually dripped from his right boot warned the Texas Ranger that he must stop soon and try to make some sort of inventory of his condition. But he could inventory nothing. He could remember next to nothing. He could not see fifty feet ahead or behind.
He knew, however, that the wound in his right foot was the one most in need of attention. He managed to examine this without slackening his speed. The sight inside his blood-soaked boot was anything but reassuring. He rode on, sparing neither his horse nor his own condition. Spells of dizziness, recurring with increasing frequency, made him realize that he could not continue much further without stanching the flow of blood from the boot. He pulled the white horse to a halt and slid to the ground. With relief he found that his vision had improved, and he could scan the Gap behind him. There was no sign of pursuit.
He cut open the boot and found that a bullet had severed a small artery. Making a rude tourniquet, he succeeded in checking, to some extent, the spurting flow that was sapping his strength.
He bandaged the wound as best he could with dressings torn from his shirt. He tried to stand, and found that the loss of so much blood had sapped his strength to a surprising degree. He could, however, support his weight by the aid of his horse. His mind was clearer. He found himself trying to analyze the events that had led up to the massacre, while his eyes studied the Gap. Why had the Texas Rangers been sent for? If they were not wanted in Bryant’s Basin, it would have been a simple matter to have ignored them as had always been done in the past. Someone had sent for the Texas Rangers. Someone had objected with bullets to their coming.
Did outlaws actually live in Bryant’s Basin? If so, why were they there? Why had the Rangers been sent for? What could possibly happen in the Cavendish domain that the stern old man could not handle himself? These, and countle
ss other questions, raced through the Ranger’s brain while he continued to observe the Gap.
He noted that the sun was gone, and it was growing dark. This left him in less danger of capture, but increased the difficulty of the ride. The rocky footing was hazardous under the best of conditions. In the dark, this peril was increased tenfold.
He remounted after a struggle with weakness. At first he tried to guide the horse away from Bryant’s Basin, but this seemed only to confuse the beast, so he gave up the attempt and let Silver have his head. At intervals he was compelled to steady himself like a drunken man.
A starless night fell into the Gap, and with its coming the danger of pursuit was ended. A chance encounter was all the rider had to fear, and there was little likelihood of this. For a while his mind went blank. He was roused from a sort of stupor by the sound of running water. The horse had halted, while the Texas Ranger dozed, and was drinking from a creek. A sudden uncontrollable thirst assailed the man. Once more he climbed painfully from the saddle. Slumping to the ground, he crawled toward a stream that gurgled over stones.
Cold water had never tasted sweeter. He sipped slowly, then raised his head to let the cool draft quench the burning in his throat. About to drink again, he paused and grew tense. The sound he heard might have been a night bird, but the trained ear of the Ranger detected a peculiar quality in it.
“Odd,” he thought. “That sounded as if it came from a human throat.”
He waited to catch the next call if it were repeated. He didn’t see that Silver, too, was tense. The birdlike trill sounded again, nearer this time. The horse reacted unexpectedly to the call. Silver jerked back, and the reins slipped from the wounded man’s hand. While he watched in consternation, the white horse scampered off in the direction of the sound.
Stunned by this new misfortune, the wounded man listened to the hoofbeats until they were swallowed by the night. Not until then did he try to call. His voice was barely a whisper. Desertion by Silver was the worst possible thing that could have happened. Pursuit of the horse was out of the question. The wounded man couldn’t even stand alone. With such philosophy as he could muster, he turned and finished the drink that might cost him his life. Then he dashed water over his face, which had become caked with blood, sweat, and alkali dust. The wound on his forehead was a minor one, but it smarted frightfully as the water touched it.
He determined to make himself as comfortable as possible while he had the opportunity and plenty of water. He turned his attention to his other wounds. Removing his shirt, he felt gingerly of his left shoulder. His left arm had been useless to him. Now he knew why. The bullet was embedded in the flesh. He realized that this might cause considerable trouble later on, but there was little he could do there in the darkness, other than to wash the wound and bandage it clumsily. The bullet was sunk deep, probably to the bone. He rightly reasoned that some of the force had been lost by the bullet’s first striking a rock, and entering his arm on a ricochet. Otherwise the bone would have been broken.
His shoulder fixed to the best of his ability, he looked at his wounded foot again. It was difficult to determine much about the wound in the darkness, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. When he had bathed and redressed the foot, he found that he could stand. He had to support himself by clinging to a rock, and most of his weight was taken on the uninjured leg, but he was definitely stronger.
One thought remained uppermost in the Texas Ranger’s mind. “Must live,” he breathed, “must fight through somehow so I can tell what happened to the others. Come back with more men—learn what’s going on at the Cavendish place.”
If he could stay in the stream, he’d leave no trail. He started slowly, working his way along against the current, clinging to rocks when they were within reach, crawling on his stomach when his wounded leg gave out. Frequently he paused to rest, still remaining in the stream. He was soaked through, but the cold water was pleasant. It chilled the burning of his wounds and made the pain more tolerable.
The stream took him close to one wall of the canyon, the wall on his left. Against the current, his progress was painfully slow, but it was progress.
Somewhere in the darkness ahead, he heard the sound of falling water. This animated him. A falls might mean some sort of gorge, a tiny cave perhaps, in which a man might hide until his wounds were healed. By resting frequently, the wounded man kept going longer than he thought possible. At length he reached the falls.
The water dropped a scant four feet from a ledge. With his one good hand, the wounded Ranger pulled himself up on the ledge, and there his strength abandoned him. He slumped half in the stream, half out of it, and sank, completely spent, into a dense void of unconsciousness.
CHAPTER III
The Cave
When he awakened, the wounded Texas Ranger realized that it was well past daybreak; the sun was high in the cloudless sky and beating down on the ledge. It must have been the sun, shining directly into the man’s eyes, that had roused him. When he moved he felt a new torment of pain in every fiber of his being. His wounds had stiffened. His right foot and leg, and left shoulder and arm, were utterly useless. Movement of these limbs made stabbing pains shoot the entire length of his body. He lay quietly for some time, experimenting with the slightest movements until he had managed to turn so that he could look about him.
The ledge that had served as a resting place at night was a dangerous refuge in the daytime. A discovery buoyed his hope. He saw that the water came from an opening a few yards back on the ledge. The opening was large enough for a man to enter standing up, with room to spare. Inside he would be sure of concealment and a plentiful supply of water. Unless someone actually entered the cave, he would be comparatively secure. His only considerations would be hunger, weakness, and complications that might set in from the wounds.
Food would be the problem. Even with a good horse it would take more riding than he could do in his present state to reach the nearest food. Without weapons of any sort, he could scarcely hunt, even if there were game to be found in the barren sun-baked Gap. Food therefore was out of the question. He must content himself with water until he was strong enough to travel far on foot.
He crawled painfully toward the cave and stopped just beyond the entrance. Inside, it widened out surprisingly. Torrents of water in some ages past must have churned furiously, seeking exit through the portal, to carve away the heavy stone in such a manner. The stream came from somewhere in the deep, dim recesses of the cave. Gravel and shale lined the water’s edge. This hard ground would serve the Texas Ranger as a rough couch, perhaps for many days to come.
The outlook was desperate, yet the man felt that there must be some reason why his life had been spared thus far. It wasn’t that he was afraid to die. At any time during the past few hours death would have been a welcome relief to the pain of living. Some voice deep within him kept telling him that he must live, must fight for life so that he might see justice done. And so he fought. None of the events seemed logical to him, yet he sensed that in some manner everything would dovetail into a finished pattern in which he himself would play a prominent part.
Every element of his life during the past day and night had been a new experience. Even the Gap and the cave were new to him. Strange, random thoughts kept intruding on his efforts to make plans for the future. Thoughts of his life in the past; the silver mine inherited from his father, but never worked because he had never wanted riches.
He was tired, despite the recent sleep. He lay back, right hand beneath his head. Perhaps he dozed; he couldn’t tell afterward whether he had slept or not. His senses played such pranks that his thoughts might have been dreams or mere hallucinations. At any rate those thoughts were vivid and oddly assorted. Against the roaring background of the water in the cavern, he seemed to hear a voice. First it was the voice of a boy, an Indian boy whom the wounded man had known long years ago. He too had been a boy at that time. The Indian was alone, a child who was the sole survivor of a furi
ous Indian war. The son of a chief, the lad had remained, sorely wounded, at the side of his dead parents. It was there that the white boy found him, and took him as a friend. The two traveled together for some time until their trails separated. Now he heard the voice of this boy again. Against the blackness of the cavern’s depths he seemed to see a re-enactment of the past, in rapidly changing kaleidoscopic scenes.
He saw himself as a hunter, riding in pursuit of bison, to feed starving white folks in a village and Indians on the plains. He saw himself riding through the hills in preference to gathering wealth as the operator of a silver mine. And then a reunion with the Indian he’d known as a boy. Together the two rode for a time, and Tonto helped the Ranger capture his white horse.
The day he joined the Texas Rangers was a vivid recollection. His pride in wearing the Ranger badge was tempered by the loss of Tonto’s companionship.
Somewhere in the background of his visions there was a vague memory of a night bird’s call.
He wondered at the scenes in a detached sort of way. Was this what dying was like? He’d heard that one’s past went by in review as a man’s soul departed. He no longer felt the wounds. The rumbling stream became a distant murmur that finally resolved itself into the call of a night bird. Odd, how the night bird’s call continued to intrude. He fumbled with his right hand at the pocket of what was left of his shirt. He could feel the small square object there, and wished that he had the strength to take it out. He would have liked to read the little inscription in the book that had been his mother’s gift.
Now even the last of sounds had ceased, and once more the tall man slept. His breathing was labored, and his hand upon his breast rose and fell as fingers that had been so strong and capable clutched the little black book in his pocket.
The Second Western Megapack Page 137
