The Quest

by Max Brand

  “One week from today, folks!” he called to them cheerfully. He took off his hat and waved it at Molly Drayton. “I hope that you’ll be here laughing, Molly,” he said.

  Her head jerked up a little. “I’ll be here to cry on your shoulder, Al Pendleton,” she said, “if you’re here to ride red Sullivan.”

  “Will you cry on my shoulder?” said Paradise Al, sneering.

  “I will,” she said.

  “Will you wear my ring, too?” he said.

  “Your key ring?” she asked.

  “Stop this nonsense, Molly!” said an angry woman’s voice.

  “I’ll mind my own affairs,” retorted Molly. “I’ll see the day when a Pendleton dares to try to bluff a . . . ”

  “One week from today,” mocked Paradise Al, “little Molly Drayton will be my sweetheart.” And he sang the words of an old happy tune with a sudden ring to them, and his laughter followed the singing. “Is that right, Molly?” he said.

  “Why,” said the girl, “if you can ride Sullivan . . . honestly, fairly, and squarely, with all the lot of us here to see it . . . I’ll marry you. I’ll squaw for you, darn your socks, pack your grip, and follow you over the hills, Al Pendleton. But if you don’t ride him a week from today, I’m going to blow myself to a party and tell you what I think of you.”

  “That won’t be all you’ll hear,” said Red Rourke. “When you come back here with that hoss, you’re comin’ back alone, Al Pendleton.” He laughed, a sound like the cawing of a crow.

  “I’ll come back alone. Sullivan will be my company then,” said Paradise Al.

  “Here, come along!” exclaimed Ray Pendleton curtly.

  And they were off on the return journey.

  A grimness had come over Ray Pendleton, so that he rode most of the way back with his jaw thrust out, set in a rock-like, beetling formation of muscle and bone.

  Just before they came to the Pendleton Ranch, he merely said: “Look here, Al. I’m for you. I want to be behind you and help. But if you’re only staging a big bluff, then . . . ” His voice had mounted high, but now it gradually died out.

  But Paradise Al could fill in the interval that had followed well enough. It meant that once before the whole Pendleton clan had been shamed by the antics of Paradise Al, but they would not endure being shamed twice by any living man.

  Well, that was a threat worth hearing; there was a certain weight and substance behind it, of course. Still Paradise Al smiled. He had smiled in just this way more than once before, with an unconcealed and real joy, on certain occasions when his last dollar or the safety of his neck hung upon the turn of a card.

  Life was a flat and dull and unprofitable thing to him, except when it was a great game of chance. He gave no answer to Ray Pendleton, and the other seemed shamed into adding: “That was a mighty fine shot you made. A fine trick shot. It shut them up for a minute, too, all of those Draytons. If it were as easy for you to . . . ” He paused once more.

  And again Paradise Al knew perfectly what had remained unsaid: If he could shoot a man as easily as he could shoot a bird, that would be a different matter. And again Paradise Al smiled. Horses were not his province. Guns and men distinctly were another matter.

  He put the stallion in a small pasture behind the barn and unsaddled him. It was a nervous moment, and he wondered if the beast would lose his temper and try to destroy him. Try to destroy him? Why, this sleek, shining thing under his hand, from which he dragged the saddle, was a machine made as much for battle as for speed, it seemed to him. When the ears were flattened, that was the bony head of a dragon, equipped with teeth that could crush the skull of a man like an egg. And those irondark hoofs were so provided with driving force that they might easily punch holes through a human frame.

  Force—that was the thing. Sullivan oozed and shone with it. In the glint of his eye was electric power. Standing flat-footed, he looked capable of jumping over the roof of the barn, and there was something in the carriage of his head that made one feel that Sullivan himself realized all of his powers.

  Paradise Al backed toward the corral gate, and Sullivan put down his royal, ugly head, and quietly began to feed on the good grass of that field.

  “Now what?” asked Ray Pendleton.

  “I’ll leave him there to ripen for a while,” said Paradise Al.

  He was aware of the darkening of his companion’s face. They went back to the house in silence.

  He spent the rest of that day strictly by himself, brooding. He took a pencil and a piece of paper and made upon the paper little scrawlings, little jottings, for he had found of old that out of random words ideas will often spring. Still, when the night came, he had blundered on no good ideas for the taming of the great horse.

  His mind had ranged from starving the monster to using some sort of drug to turn the edge of that destructive temper until someone could ride the stallion for a few turns, proving to the beast that there was nothing dangerous in having the weight of a man upon his back.

  Of course, the talk at supper was all about the horse. The Pendletons were looking with a solemn eye of doubt upon Paradise Al, but in those eyes there was also a faint glimmering of hope. For there was one chance in a hundred, or perhaps in a thousand, that the wanderer might perform a miracle.

  “He seems quiet enough when there’s no rider on his back,” said Paradise Al.

  “He’s as quiet as a house pet, when there’s nobody trying to ride him,” replied Thomas Pendleton. “That’s the way with a lot of mustangs. There was Bill Dekker’s cream-colored mare that was the toughest and fastest thing that ever rattled a buggy over the mountain roads. She was a lamb in harness, but, when you tried a saddle on her back, she turned into a devil and tried to eat you.”

  That was all the information that Paradise Al received from the family, and it could hardly be called useful information at that.

  They were simply waiting, with more or less bated breath, for the moment when he, the tramp, would come into action with the famous horse.

  Paradise Al vowed to himself that, when he tried to ride the horse, he would make it a matter of mystery. So, early in the evening, after dinner, he went up to his room and waited there until the lights were out in the rest of the house and the place quiet. Then he departed by the window route, which he had tried before, and went out to the pasture field.

  When he stood by the fence, before him loomed the bulk of the stallion against the stars, and the ugly head reached across the topmost bar and sniffed at him. He laid a hand gingerly between the eyes; Sullivan playfully nibbled at his sleeve, and all the fear that had been building up in the tramp like a thunderhead in the sky suddenly vanished and left his mind clear and assured. There was no evil in the horse; there was simply something wrong in the way in which it had been handled.

  XI

  But if Sullivan had been wrongly handled by experts, who was he to strive to find a better way? Grimly he acknowledged that truth. One thing at least he could do, and that was to become better acquainted with the stallion. So he slipped through the bars of the fence and walked up and down the field. Where he walked, the horse followed like a dog.

  This animal a man-killer? He would not believe it. He had known killers before, men and dogs, and he knew that they all possessed one trait in common, which was a sullen malice that might work quietly, but which was always present. Yet, there was no malice in the stallion, so far as he could see. He tried walking and he tried running. When he ran, the big fellow broke into a canter and threw circles around Paradise Al, flipping his tail in the air and kicking up his heels.

  It was not that he was very fond of Paradise Al. That much was clear. But it was simply that the stallion had grown accustomed to human society and, therefore, had to have it. Killer? No, there was some mysterious reason behind this thing.

  Paradise Al brought out the big, heavy saddle from the shed, the saddle that had been specially fitted to this horse. He strapped it on Sullivan and found that the stallion made n
ot the slightest resistance. He stood with perfect good nature while the tramp went back into the barn and carried out a ninety-pound sack of barley. Al reasoned if once he could get the horse into the habit of carrying any sort of a lifeless burden in the saddle, he would be quicker to endure the weight of a man in the same way. That sack he slid, therefore, onto the saddle, but no sooner did the horse feel the added poundage than he fairly exploded under the nose of Paradise. The sack went one way sailing into the air, and Sullivan went another. All over the face of that field he bucked and raged in a constant fury, snorting and groaning as a horse will do when it is being spurred beyond its strength.

  It was a full hour before Paradise Al could get close enough to take the saddle from the big fellow’s back. Then, for another full hour he remained with Sullivan, petting him, talking to him.

  Killer? There seemed to be nothing of the killer in Sullivan. Yet, it was true that in the past he had killed three men, all of whom had needed killing, according to Ray Pendleton.

  Very tired, very troubled, and confused, Paradise Al went back to the house and gained his room by the window again. And again he slept late.

  “Working on Sullivan today, Al?” asked Sally.

  “I’m going to go out and give him some treatment,” said Paradise Al.

  That was what he did. He simply got some old magazines and sat with them under the tree in the middle of the pasture field. In the heat of the day, the horse came and stood beside him in the shadow. Once he came over and nipped the hat off the head of the tramp and raced off with it, exactly like a playful child.

  Killer, said the tramp to himself. And he laughed a little. He found himself reading very little in the pages of the magazines, but very much in the glorious body of Sullivan. When he walked, a ripple of shining strength passed over his polished skin, and even when he stood still, he always looked as though he had just lighted from the sky and was about to leap back into it again.

  Suppose that, on a certain day, he were to sit in the saddle on the stallion and let him go, turn him loose at full speed, jockey him forward. What of that? Why, it would be like being hitched to a kite that was flung loose in a great storm. It would be like that, except that this storm he might be able to control, turning it this way and that with the touch of his hands.

  The heart of Paradise Al leaped up into this throat. He had raced across the continent many a time, but always on the trains, and they were confined to their steel roadbeds. But to have at his command such an animal as the stallion would be to have freedom to go where he pleased, free from danger of pursuit, to soar among those ragged mountains, for instance, almost like a winged eagle. Why, a man who had such a horse as Sullivan was able to do as he pleased. He could live according to his own law.

  A grim joy thrilled through the nerves of the tramp. There was a predatory soul in him that was savagely contented by such a prospect. But, at the end of the day, he had attempted no more with the stallion.

  “What’s the game? Hypnotism?” asked the older Pendleton sourly as they sat together at the supper table.

  “That’s the idea . . . hypnotism,” said Al lightly.

  But that night, under the stars, once more he tried the saddle on the back of the stallion, and once more he slid the barley sack into place. He was prepared for the explosion again, and he saw one worth ten of the first. The big horse went up into the air with a squeal of pain, hurling the sack far off. Then, whirling, Sullivan went for that fallen burden and beat it to pieces with his hoofs, seized it with his teeth, and carried the empty rag of a sack around and around the pasture, shaking it violently.

  Paradise Al looked on with horror. Suppose it had been his body that had been cast from the saddle.

  It was a full two hours later before he could get close enough to Sullivan to strip away the saddle, and, as the flap of the saddle dragged across the back of the stallion, the horse winced and grunted. Paradise Al moved his hand gingerly down the back and found a spot that he pressed upon lightly. The horse winced suddenly and jerked about that ugly, snaky head, with mouth gaping.

  The tramp went thoughtfully back to the barn with his burden. Something was decidedly wrong. In his room again, he lay awake for a time and stared into the darkness, puzzled, until sleep closed his eyes. The first glimmer of the dawn was enough to waken him, so uneasy was his mind, and straight out to the barn he went, and to that peg from which hung the made-to-order saddle of the stallion. He took it down, laid it upside down on top of the barley bin, and examined it.

  What he had dreamed of was there, in the form of two small spots of blood on the inner face of the heavy, folded saddle blanket. He jerked up his head and stared straight before him. A very ugly expression distorted his handsome features now, and what he was seeing in his mind was the strange face of Rourke and the leering evil in the eyes of that man.

  He tossed the blanket aside and carried on his examination of the padded under part of the saddle. There was nothing to be seen. No matter how old the saddle might be, it had been used so little that the strong, woolly cloth of the lining was almost as white as the day it left the shop of the maker. That was not very strange, for the saddle had probably never been used except on the back of Sullivan, and very few unfortunates had dared to try their luck with the famous stallion.

  With both thumbs, he began to press on the thick padding just over those points where the bloodstains had dimly appeared on the saddle blanket. Suddenly he was stung to the thumb bone. His hands leaped away and he cursed, looking down at the drop of blood that was welling up on the surface of his finger. But there was no anger in his heart, only a bubbling happiness.

  He could understand very well why Rourke had insisted on sending the saddle with the horse. This was the reason. This had caused the pain that had turned Sullivan into a raging devil. It was perfectly clear, all except the mind of Rourke, who had devised such a malicious scheme. Three men had died. Well, it was not the horse, but Rourke who had killed them.

  With his pocket knife, he cut the stitching of the outer cover, removed the inner covering also, and then pulled out the padding. There, affixed to the strong frame of the saddle, were two points of steel. A man’s weight in the saddle must have driven them deeply down into the back of the tormented horse, and there followed one of those fiendish explosions of temper, not temper at all, properly termed, but rather torment. He removed the stings, replaced the padding, and, securing needle and thread, sewed down the inner and the outer cover.

  What should he do now? Let the world know about the villainy of Rourke, or continue with the working of his miracle? The latter was a temptation too great to be passed over.

  They saw him in the field that day as before, and once again, in the night, he brought out the saddle. It was no easy matter, this time, to persuade the stallion to stand for it. Once it was cinched in place, however, Paradise Al, without fear, climbed into the stirrups.

  It was as though he had sat down on the top of a volcano, for he was hurled suddenly toward the whirling stars, and landed on the flat of his back in the pasture grass with a thud that knocked all the breath and half the wits out of him.

  Then he saw above him a darkness sweeping over the stars. It was Sullivan, rearing aloft, to descend with battering forehoofs on the body of his persecutor.

  For that half second, the nerves of Paradise Al refused to react. He lay still, and his leaping mind was struggling with the clear truth. It was simply the pressure of the saddle on the sore back that had caused the horse to buck—that and the anticipation of the thrusting agony. Now would he, Paradise Al, pay the cost of his folly?

  The forehoofs dropped down straight at his head and landed beside it, making the ground tremble, while Sullivan bounded away to the farther side of the field.

  Gasping, trembling, the tramp rose to hands and knees. All his pain was as nothing to him. He had hurried the work a little too much, but that did not mean that he had definitely failed. Little by little and step by step he must go sy
stematically about this work, but he was assured of his success in the end.

  XII

  It was a week of such satisfaction as the wanderer best understood and appreciated. For he was sitting in at a game where the rest of the players paid him very little heed, indeed, but in which he knew that he held the best cards up his sleeve.

  As that week wore on, the nervousness of the entire Pendleton family increased. Hardly a word was spoken, except a bit of forced conversation, when Paradise Al was present.

  The morning of the fatal day, when he was to ride the stallion back to the Drayton place, found a dozen other members of the clan present. They were all big men, these Pendletons. When they gathered in force, they made Paradise Al seem more of a stranger and an outcast than ever. He said aside, to Sally Pendleton, from whom he got most of his intimate information about what was passing in the mind of the family: “Why has the clan gathered and brought all of their guns along?”

  She looked narrowly at him, for her frankness in speaking to him never sprang from any liking she had for him.

  “The Pendletons have come together,” she said, “because if you disgrace us today . . . well, something has to be done about it.”

  “Shooting, eh?” he said.

  She shrugged her shoulders, turned, and left him.

  Watching her height, her suppleness, the fine swing of her stride, he forgot her insulting demeanor in his admiration of her as a woman. In fact, he continually found himself at ease among these people, even when they most showed that they were suspecting or despising him. He felt that they were a superior race, better bred, molded in a purer air and under a stronger sun than any that he had known.

  He had never been a rogue who excused his own roguery. He knew that he was a knave, and he looked at good people as one looks at actors upon a stage, with admiration, but not with a real envy. He felt that he was fallen too low ever to rise again.

  That was the mood of Paradise Al, on this morning, when he went out toward the pasture in which the stallion was grazing; the entire clan followed him, men and women, children and farm hands as well. About thirty people stood at the fence with him.