Trailin

by Brand, Max

  "Then I ordered the men to keep him at all costs within the room. He saw that they were prepared to obey me, and then he took a desperate chance and shot down the gasoline lamp which hung over the table. In the explosion and fire which resulted he made for the door. One man blocked the way, levelled a revolver at him, and then Bard shot in self-defence and downed Calamity Ben. I ask you, Glendin, is that self defence?"

  The other drummed his finger-tips nervously against his chin; he was thinking hard, and every thought was of Steve Nash.

  "So far, all right. I ain't askin' your reasons for doin' some pretty queer things, Mr. Drew."

  "I'll stand every penalty of the law, sir. I only ask that you see that punishment falls where it is deserved only. The case is clear. Bard acted in self-defence."

  Glendin was desperate.

  He said at length: "When a man's tried in court they bring up his past career. This feller Bard has gone along the range raisin' a different brand of hell everywhere he went. He had a run-in with two gunmen, Ferguson and Conklin. He had Eldara within an ace of a riot the first night he hit the town. Mr. Drew, that chap looks the part of a killer; he acts the part of a killer; and by God, he is a killer."

  "You seem to have come with your mind already made up, Glendin," said the rancher coldly.

  "Not a bit. But go through the whole town or Eldara and ask the boys what they think of this tenderfoot. They feel so strong that if he was jailed they'd lynch him."

  Drew raised a clenched fist and then let his arm fall suddenly limp at his side.

  "Then surely he must not be jailed."

  "Want me to let him wander around loose and kill another man—in self-defence?"

  "I want you to use reason—and mercy, Glendin!

  "From what I've heard, you ain't the man to talk of mercy, Mr. Drew."

  The other, as if he had received a stunning blow, slipped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. It was a long moment before he could speak, and when his hands were lowered, Glendin winced at what he saw in the other's face.

  "God knows I'm not," said Drew.

  "Suppose we let the shootin' of Calamity go. What of hoss-liftin', sir?"

  "Horse stealing? Impossible! Anthony—he could not be guilty of it!"

  "Ask your man Duffy. Bard's ridin' Duffy's grey right now."

  "But Duffy will press no claim," said the rancher eagerly. "I'll see to that. I'll pay him ten times the value of his horse. Glendin, you can't punish a man for a theft of which Duffy will not complain."

  "Drew, you know what the boys on the range think of a hoss thief. It ain't the price of what they steal; it's the low-down soul of the dog that would steal it. It ain't the money. But what's a man without a hoss on the range? Suppose his hoss is stole while he's hundred miles from nowhere? What does it mean? You know; it means dyin' of thirst and goin' through a hundred hells before the finish. I say shootin' a man is nothin' compared with stealin' a hoss. A man that'll steal a hoss will shoot his own brother; that's what he'll do. But I don't need to tell you. You know it better'n me. What was it you done with your own hands to Louis Borgen, the hoss-rustler, back ten years ago?"

  A dead voice answered Glendin: "What has set you on the trail of Bard?"

  "His own wrong doin'."

  The rancher waved a hand of careless dismissal.

  "I know you, Glendin," he said.

  The deputy stirred in his chair, and then cleared his throat.

  He said in a rising tone: "What d'you know?"

  "I don't think you really care to hear it. To put it lightly, Glendin, you've done many things for money. I don't accuse you of them. But if you want to do one thing more, you can make more money at a stroke than you've made in all the rest."

  With all his soul the deputy was cursing Nash, but now the thing was done, and he must see it through.

  He rose glowering on Drew.

  "I've stood a pile already from you; this is one beyond the limit.

  Bribery ain't my way, Drew, no matter what I've done before."

  "Is it war, then?"

  And Glendin answered, forcing his tone into fierceness: "Anything you want—any way you want it!"

  "Glendin," said the other with a sudden lowering of his voice, "has some other man been talking to you?"

  "Who? Me? Certainly not."

  "Don't lie."

  "Drew, rein up. They's one thing no man can say to me and get away with it."

  "I tell you, man, I'm holding myself in harder than I've ever done before. Answer me!"

  He did not even rise, but Glendin, his hand twitching close to the butt of his gun, moved step by step away from those keen eyes.

  "Answer me!"

  "Nash; he's been to Eldara."

  "I might have known. He told you about this?"

  "Yes."

  "And you're going the full limit of your power against Bard?"

  "I'll do nothin' that ain't been done by others before me."

  "Glendin, there have been cowardly legal murders before. Tell me at least that you will not send a posse to 'apprehend' Bard until it's learned whether or not Ben will die—and whether or not Duffy will press the charge of horse stealing."

  Glendin was at the door. He fumbled behind him, found the knob, and swung it open.

  "If you double-cross me," said Drew, "all that I've ever done to any man before will be nothing to what I'll do to you, Glendin."

  And the deputy cried, his voice gone shrill and high, "I ain't done nothin' that ain't been done before!"

  And he vanished through the doorway. Drew followed and looked after the deputy, who galloped like a fugitive over the hills.

  "Shall I follow him?" he muttered to himself, but a faint groan reached him from the bedroom.

  He turned on his heel and went back to Calamity Ben and the doctor.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CRITICISM

  After the first burst of speed, Bard resigned himself to following Sally, knowing that he could never catch her, first because her horse carried a burden so much lighter than his own, but above all because the girl seemed to know every rock and twist in the trail, and rode as courageously through the night as if it had been broad day.

  She was following a course as straight as a crow's flight between the ranch of Drew and his old place, a desperate trail that veered and twisted up the side of the mountain and then lurched headlong down on the farther side of the crest. Half a dozen times Anthony checked his horse and shook his head at the trail, but always the figure of the girl, glimmering through the dusk ahead, challenged and drove him on.

  Out of the sharp descent of the downward trail they broke suddenly onto the comparatively smooth floor of the valley, and he followed her at a gallop which ended in front of the old house of Drew. They had been far less than five hours on the way, yet his long detour to the south had given him three days of hard riding to cover the same points. His desire to meet Logan again became almost a passion. He swung to the ground, and advanced to Sally with his hands outstretched.

  "You've shown me the short cut, all right," he said, "and I thank you a thousand times, Sally. So-long, and good luck to you."

  She disregarded his extended hand.

  "Want me to leave you here, Bard?"

  "You certainly can't stay."

  She slipped from her horse and jerked the reins over its head. In another moment she had untied the cinch and drawn off the saddle. She held its weight easily on one forearm. Actions, after all, are more eloquent than words.

  "I suppose," he said gloomily, "that if I'd asked you to stay you'd have ridden off at once?"

  She did not answer for a moment, and he strained his eyes to read her expression through the dark. At length she laughed with a new note in her voice that drew her strangely close to him. During the long ride he had come to feel toward her as toward another man, as strong as himself, almost, as fine a horseman, and much surer of herself on that wild trail; but now the laughter in an instant rubbed all this aw
ay. It was rather low, and with a throaty quality of richness. The pulse of the sound was like a light finger tapping some marvellously sensitive chord within him.

  "D'you think that?" she said, and went directly through the door of the house.

  He heard the crazy floor creak beneath her weight; the saddle dropped with a thump; a match scratched and a flight of shadows shook across the doorway. The light did not serve to make the room visible; it fell wholly upon his own mind and troubled him like the waves which spread from the dropping of the smallest pebble and lap against the last shores of a pool. Dumfounded by her casual surety, he remained another moment with the rein in the hollow of his arm.

  Finally he decided to mount as silently as possible and ride off through the night away from her. The consequences to her reputation if they spent the night so closely together was one reason; a more selfish and more moving one was the trouble which she gave him. The finding and disposing of Drew should be the one thing to occupy his thoughts, but the laughter of the girl the moment before had suddenly obsessed him, wiped out the rest of the world, enmeshed them hopelessly together in the solemn net of the night, the silence. He resented it; in a vague way he was angry with Sally Fortune.

  His foot was in the stirrup when it occurred to him that no matter how softly he withdrew she would know and follow him. It seemed to Anthony that for the first time in his life he was not alone. In other days social bonds had fallen very lightly on him; the men he knew were acquaintances, not friends; the women had been merely border decorations, variations of light and shadow which never shone really deep into the stream of his existence; even his father had not been near him; but by the irresistible force of circumstances which he could not control, this girl was forced bodily upon his consciousness.

  Now he heard a cheery, faint crackling from the house and a rosy glow pervaded the gloom beyond the doorway. It brought home to Anthony the fact that he was tired; weariness went through all his limbs like the sound of music. Music in fact, for the girl was singing softly—to herself.

  He took his foot from the stirrup, unsaddled, and carried the saddle into the room. He found Sally crouched at the fire and piling bits of wood on the rising flame. Her face was squinted to avoid the smoke, and she sheltered her eyes with one hand. At his coming she smiled briefly up at him and turned immediately back to the fire. The silence of that smile brought their comradeship sharply home to him. It was as if she understood his weariness and knew that the fire was infinitely comforting. Anthony frowned; he did not wish to be understood. It was irritating—indelicate.

  He sat on one of the bunks, and when she took her place on the other he studied her covertly, with side glances, for he was beginning to feel strangely self-conscious. It was the situation rather than the girl that gained upon him, but he felt shamed that he should be so uncertain of himself and so liable to expose some weakness before the girl.

  That in turn raised a blindly selfish desire to make her feel and acknowledge his mastery. He did not define the emotion exactly, nor see clearly what he wished to do, but in a general way he wanted to be necessary to her, and to let her know at the same time that she was nothing to him. He was quite sure that the opposite was the truth just now.

  At this point he shrugged his shoulders, angry that he should have slipped so easily into the character of a sullen boy, hating a benefactor for no reason other than his benefactions; but the same vicious impulse made him study the face of Sally Fortune with an impersonal, coldly critical eye. It was not easy to do, for she sat with her head tilted back a little, as though to take the warmth of the fire more fully. The faint smile on her lips showed her comfort, mingled with retrospection.

  Here he lost the trend of his thoughts by beginning to wonder of what she could be thinking, but he called himself back sharply to the analysis of her features. It was a game with which he had often amused himself among the girls of his eastern acquaintance. Their beauty, after all, was their only weapon, and when he discovered that that weapon was not of pure steel, they became nothing; it was like pushing them away with an arm of infinite length.

  There was food for criticism in Sally's features. The nose, of course, was tipped up a bit, and the mouth too large, but Anthony discovered that it was almost impossible to centre his criticism on either feature. The tip-tilt of the nose suggested a quaint and infinitely buoyant spirit; the mouth, if generously wide, was exquisitely made. She was certainly not pretty, but he began to feel with equal certainty that she was beautiful.

  A waiting mood came on him while he watched, as one waits through a great symphony and endures the monotonous passages for the sake of the singing bursts of harmony to which the commoner parts are a necessary background. He began to wish that she would turn her head so that he could see her eyes. They were like the inspired part of that same symphony, a beauty which could not be remembered and was always new, satisfying. He could make her turn by speaking, and knowing that this was so, he postponed the pleasure like a miser who will only count his gold once a day.

  From the side view he dwelt on the short, delicately carved upper lip and the astonishingly pleasant curve of the cheek.

  "Look at me," he said abruptly.

  She turned, observed him calmly, and then glanced back to the fire. She asked no question.

  Her chin rested on her hands, now, so that when she spoke her head nodded a little and gave a significance to what she said.

  "The grey doesn't belong to you?"

  So she was thinking of horses!

  "Well," she repeated.

  "No."

  "Hoss-lifting," she mused.

  "Why shouldn't I take a horse when they had shot down mine?"

  She turned to him again, and this time her gaze went over him slowly, curiously, but without speaking she looked back to the fire, as though explanation of what "hoss-lifting" meant were something far beyond the grasp of his mentality. His anger rose again, childishly, sullenly, and he had to arm himself with indifference.

  "Who'd you drop, Bard?"

  "The one they call Calamity Ben."

  "Is he done for?"

  "Yes."

  The turmoil of the scene of his escape came back to him so vividly that he wondered why it had ever been blurred to obscurity.

  She said: "In a couple of hours we'd better ride on."

  CHAPTER XXXV

  ABANDON

  That was all; no comment, no exclamation—she continued to gaze with that faint, retrospective smile toward the fire. He knew now why she angered him; it was because she had held the upper hand from the minute that ride over the short pass began—he had never once been able to assert himself impressively. He decided to try now.

  "I don't intend to ride on."

  "Too tired?"

  He felt the clash of her will on his, even like flint against steel, whenever they spoke, and he began to wonder what spark would start a fire. It made him think of a game of poker, in a way, for he never knew what the next instant would place in his hands while the cards of chance were shuffled and dealt. Tired? There was a subtle, scoffing challenge hidden somewhere in that word.

  "No, but I don't intend to go any farther from Drew."

  Her smile grew more pronounced; she even looked to him with a frank amusement, for apparently she would not take him seriously.

  "If I were you, he'd be the last man I'd want to be near."

  "I suppose you would."

  As if she picked up the gauntlet, she turned squarely on the bunk and faced him.

  "You're going to hit the trail in an hour, understand?"

  It delighted him—set him thrilling with excitement to feel her open anger and the grip of her will against his; he had to force a frown in order to conceal a smile.

  "If I do, it will be to ride back toward Drew."

  Her lips parted to make an angry retort, and then he watched her steel herself with patience, like a mother teaching an old lesson to a child.

  "D'you know what you'd be like,
wanderin' around these mountains without a guide?"

  "Well?"

  "Like a kid in a dark, lonesome room. You'd travel in a circle and fall into their hands in a day."

  "Possibly."

  She was still patient.

  "Follow me close, Bard. I mean that if you don't do what I say I'll cut loose and leave you alone here."

  He was silent, enjoying her sternness, glad to have roused her, no matter what the consequences; knowing that each second heightened the climax.

  Apparently she interpreted his speechlessness in a different way. She said after a moment: "That sounds like quittin' cold on you. I won't do it unless you try some fool thing like riding back toward Drew."

  He waited again as long as he dared, then: "Don't you see that the last thing I want is to keep you with me?"

  There was no pleasure in that climax. She sat with parted lips, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, staring at him. He became as vividly conscious of her femininity as he had been when she laughed in the dark. There was the same sustained pulsing, vital emotion in this silence.

  He explained hastily: "A girl's reputation is a fragile thing, Sally."

  And she recovered herself with a start, but not before he saw and understood. It was as if, in the midst of an exciting hand, with the wagers running high, he had seen her cards and knew that his own hand was higher. The pleasant sense of mastery made a warmth through him.

  "Meaning that they'd talk about me? Bard, they've already said enough things about me to fill a book—notes and all, with a bunch of pictures thrown in. What I can't live down I fight down, and no man never says the same thing twice about me. It ain't healthy. If that's all that bothers you, close your eyes and let me lead you out of this mess."

  He hunted about for some other way to draw her out. After all, it was an old, old game. He had played it before many a time; though the setting and the lights had been different the play was always the same—a man, and a woman.