Frontier Feud
Page 21
Sometimes Rusty seemed dead, sometimes he seemed merely to sleep; but whenever life came into him he would begin to speak, and the first word that he said was always:
“Brother—”
Then the life would slide out of him again.
* * * *
The hounds got the trail and ran it down in the middle of the day. Captain Dell found the dead man on the floor of the valley.
“One less Lavier in the world,” he said, and thanked God audibly.
Then he went on behind the dogs, to the place where the other three men lay dead. Rusty’s knife was by the major’s body. After that, he came to the spot where Bill Tenney lay like a giant, with a ragged bandage about his face and his body dripping with blood.
Tenney stood up and barred the way, a rifle in his hands. But the captain merely said:
“I’m putting down my arms, you see, Tenney? Tell me what’s happened.—Tenney, is it murder—God help your soul? You see I’ve got twenty men behind me. There’s no use resisting.”
“Murder!—Aye, it’s murder!” cried Tenney. “The Laviers and the major—they’ve murdered Rusty Sabin.—They’ve killed the only man in the world. They’ve murdered him that’s a brother to me!”
Swift help was coming from the town, also. The word went wide and far, like the running of quicksilver. Men saddled their horses rapidly, but none so swiftly as Maisry Lester. Swift horses and keen riders rushed out along the river trail, but none as swift as Maisry and her pony.
She rode it with a merciless heel and hand, for it seemed to her that the beast stood still, running on a treadmill, and that the only movement was the terrible, hour-slow drifting of the hills along the horizon.
She had no hope, as she raced, that she might come to him in time to save him. But the prayer that left her lips in ragged fragments of words was only that she might reach him in time to see the last brightness of life in his eyes. For she felt that that light would come into her like a new soul into her body.
Of the townspeople, she was first in the valley—she was first up its hot sands—she was first to reach the group of soldiers who moved clumsily here and there, trying to help and not knowing what to do.
When Bill Tenney saw her, he lifted up his blood-stained hands in a gesture of surrender.
“He won’t live for me,” said Tenney, “but maybe he’ll come back for you, Maisry.—By his way of thinking, murder ain’t as strong as love.”
* * * *
Rusty Sabin was not murdered, after all. He was not going to die. The doctor, who came out from the fort, said so at the end of the long examination and the agony of probing that turned Rusty Sabin green. He would not die. He would live—if he could be kept quietly where he was and not moved for at least a fortnight.
Keep him where he was? The Lesters, mother and father, smiled. Already, they had sent back for two tents. Already, Maisry was installed as chief nurse. Richard Lester was taking charge.
And later, while Rusty lay flat on his back on a soft cot, he said:
“I can see your head in the middle of the sky, Maisry—all blue around you. It’s mighty sweet medicine for me!—And you are happy?”
She merely smiled. It would have been foolish for her to try to say it in words.
“Where’s Bill?” asked Rusty.
The big man came near and leaned slowly over the bunk.
“Aye, Rusty?” said he, tenderly.
“There was never any chance of me dying,” said Rusty. “Sweet Medicine wouldn’t let me, because he knew that I could never tell you about yourself, Bill. He knew that it would take years more living before I could make you understand, brother!”
He put his hand in Tenney’s, and Bill Tenney held it softly, saying nothing. . . .