The Winged Horse

by Max Brand

“I wanted him.”

  She stepped back a little, not in fear, but the better to survey that dripping, mud-splashed form.

  He explained, “In my section of the country, they don’t shoot down a man’s horse when they want to get the man on it.”

  “They’re coming,” she said, and she put the lamp back on the table.

  He could hear the heavy tramping of feet; a corner had been turned and they were swinging closer. He stepped to the one window in the chamber, and, looking out, while the wind cut at him like a knife, he saw a sheer drop of a hundred feet, down the west side of the house, and the face of the rock beneath, and to the boiling waters of the creek. It was plain why that careful cowpuncher, Dan Burns, had brought him to this room of all others in the house—there was no retreat.

  He turned back, and the girl stood by the table, her hands behind her, her face tilted a little down in thought.

  “They will surely murder you here,” she said in the most matter-of-fact manner.

  “They will,” he agreed. “But though they have me sealed, they haven’t yet got me delivered.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “They’ll have reason to remember this day.” She hesitated. There was a roar of voices in the outer hallway, like the noise of water crammed into the narrow throat of a flume. Then she ran to a corner of the room and waved to the Lamb.

  He followed her with eagerness, catching at hope before he saw what chance remained to him, or possibility of a chance. She flung back a rag rug and pointed to the floor.

  “Can you lift that?” she asked.

  An edge of boards projected a bit above the level of the flooring, and instantly he had his grip upon it. The tips of his fingers slipped, taking the skin. He tried again, in a sudden rush of terror, now that there was some hope before him, and the whole broad section of boards tipped easily up, and a gust of damp air rose into his face. He stood back and looked dubiously at the girl, and at the beginning of the steps.

  “You’d better hurry,” she said. “The man who brought you here thought that there was no way out for you. But the older men of the house will know better, and they’ll be running to block your way.”

  It might be that she was actually giving him his life. And it might be that she was inviting him deeper into the trap that already was closing upon him. He could not tell. Her face was as cold as stone, and she seemed to be almost as pale. Suddenly he caught her hand. Wild thoughts, wild words leaped into the brain of the Lamb, but all that he could say was, “Clean bred, by gravy.” Then he sprang into the dark and the damp and ran down the steps.

  Her voice followed him, “Straight ahead till you find a door. From that, turn left and …” Then her voice was drowned by a great crashing, and trampling, and shouting, and he made out, distinctly, a thundering tone that called, “Where is he?”

  She would have something to do facing the rush and the questions of those angry men, but, for some reason, he did not fear for her. She who cured their wounded would have a right to stand up against them even on this occasion, perhaps.

  He came in pitch darkness to the bottom of the flight, and stumbled heavily as he struck the flat. Almost at once his outstretched hand struck wood. Fumbling, he reached a latch, and the door, yielding instantly, was snatched outward and he with it by a sucking tentacle of the wind. He staggered against a wall of stonework, turned left, and went with difficulty up a flight of steps, more than half blinded, but aware that the moon was working somewhere behind stifling clouds, and that he was again under the open sky.

  So he came to level ground and looked back. Only then he saw clearly what he had passed, for the moon broke out from the clouds at this instant, and sailing through only a creamy mist it showed to the Lamb a flight of steps hewn out of rock, uneven, slippery with rain and moss. At one time it had been a commodious stairway, no doubt, but now a fall of the cliff face had stripped away two-thirds of its necessary width and he had come up a slender ladder of steps not a foot and a half wide. The great god of good luck had stood with him during that passage.

  Well for him, too, that the moon had not suddenly looked down upon him during that climb and shown him the dripping side of the cliff along which he was working. It was almost better that the girl had had no chance to warn him in any great detail. He thought of this as he gave that single backward glance, and then he turned and ran at full speed, with one naked gun in his hand. He turned the corner of the house, slipped on a flat-surfaced granite slab, and rolled headlong into a thicket of dead shrubs to which some straggling brown leaves adhered. The water from them soaked him instantly to the skin over every inch of his body, yet he lay as still as though he had fallen upon the warmest, driest lamb’s wool, for voices rang about an angle of the house at that moment. By lifting his head, he was able to see through the branches five men, half dressed, and armed to the teeth, who ran furiously along, the water starting out in silver spray beneath their feet. And he who led them on was Jimmy Montague. He could not see the face of the man, but instantly he knew him, as one animal knows another—by the shock upon some extra sense. He felt that he should have known the man in the deepest darkness by the crawling of his flesh.

  It was an easy shot, and afterward perhaps an easy escape through the brush, so that the Lamb was grimly tempted—he actually took his gun hand with his left and forced down the gun. Thus conscience mastered him with his own muscle, and he turned and writhed away through the bushes, constant showers dripping down upon him, soaking him over and over again. Then he stood up in the shelter of the trees. He threw off his slicker and his coat. He pulled off his boots, in which the water was sopping and squelching loudly. Draining the books of water, he put them on again. Now he was free from encumbrance, light, half frozen, but ever ready to fight, if fight there were.

  Behind him he heard a sudden fusillade of guns; he distinguished rifles and revolvers by the bark of the one and the longer, more metallic clangor of the other. Some sway of shadows beneath the wind perhaps had made them think they saw him. Perhaps one of their own number had been mistaken for him, and after the outburst he listened in cruel expectation. There was no cry of pain, however.

  After this, he went on through the trees until the vague, dark loom of a building rose before him. The wind sifted through it, blowing toward him, and he recognized the half-sweet, half-musty odor of hay. It was the barn, and no place in the world is more welcome, more suggestive of warm comfort to a cold and tired man than a barn, with its mow into which a refugee can burrow deep. He hurried to the side of it just as the clouds shut the moon away and the heavens opened in a torrent of rain. He was sheltered a little by the overhang of the roof, but, listening to the steady thunder of the rain that sounded like the crashing of a dozen mighty rivers, he felt his way along the wall until he came to the gap of a window, and behind the window he heard human voices in the dark.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nothing that he ever had known appeared to the Lamb so eternally comfortable, secure, and peaceful as the sound of those voices drifting lazily out of the warm darkness of the barn. Outside, the cold lanced him through and through, and the wind catching a drift of rain beat it through the clothing of the Lamb to his already drenched skin. He shuddered, but he remained at the window, unmoving, for the first words he distinguished were enough to stiffen him in his place.

  “Why doesn’t the boss stir up a mite more action, then?”

  “This is all what he’s gotta watch,” said the other. “When you’ve landed a horse in the corral, why you gonna bother except to see the gate is barred? And this is the gate, ain’t it? He sent me out here.”

  “How you make this out the gate?”

  “Listen, cowboy, the brain you got wasn’t made to ride on or to rope with … but it was made to think with. How’s he gonna get out of here, unless he breaks his neck down the rocks?”

  “Have they swung the bridge?”

 
“Sure. What else would they’ve done first? And the only way he could break out would be to slam down the drive and try to jump the creek.”

  “That ain’t possible,” said the other.

  “Did I say that it was? I didn’t. I said the only way … I didn’t say the possible way.”

  “What else would that be meaning, then? Damn me if you don’t talk like a scholar.”

  “Do I?”

  “You do.”

  “Son, we gotta little job on our hands tonight, but when the mornin’ comes, I’ll give you my whole argument, if you’re man enough to stand up and take it.”

  “You dried-up bundle of weed,” said the other, “I’d meet you day or night.”

  The Lamb went rapidly back along the stable wall until he reached the next window, and through this he wriggled like a snake through a hole. He paused close to the wall to listen, but high debate went on before him.

  A long line of stalls ran down the side of the big building. The aisle turned a corner, and here a dull glimmer of light was showing. The Lamb slipped about that angle and found a lantern hanging from a peg on the wall, blinking slowly as the draft sucked down the flame or let it rise again. That light let him see the pinched rumps of the mustangs lined up on either side of the aisle, and now and then the squarer quarters of an animal of better breeding. As a learned man walks hastily down a bookshelf, dismissing one title after another, so the Lamb went hurriedly past these horses and could not find the one for which he was eagerly seeking.

  He carried the lantern with him to the farther corner of the barn and there the open stalls ended and the box stalls began. There were only half a dozen of them. Two were unoccupied. In the remaining four he looked in on a chestnut mare with all the signs of a thoroughbred, a big gray gelding of the Irish hunter type with a head worthy of a draft animal and enough bone to carry even the weight of Jimmy Montague, a slender bay colt that was not past its second year, beautiful as a stag, and then a black head and wild eyes and flaring forelock were thrust out an open door. It was the big black that had trampled down the mare that day.

  Straight into his stall went the Lamb. The big fellow heaved himself up on his haunches until he looked like a winged horse about to take flight or, more than this, a monster swooping out of the air to crush the Lamb. But the latter looked up unafraid. He was beginning to grow tense with hate for this great brute, and with admiration of him.

  Down pitched the black with driving forehoofs that cut the air scant inches from the head of the boy. Yet in striking the floor those pile-driving hoofs were muffled in the fall as though striking wet sawdust. He spun about with his tail lashing like the tail of a black leopard, and struck out, but his heels shot harmlessly over the shoulders of the man. Then the stallion twitched about and stood in a corner, his ears pricked, looking with a great deal of interest at this calm stranger. For whether a horse is wise or foolish, there is one thing he instantly understands—courage or the lack of it. He was now sufficiently intrigued to let the stranger step closer and pat his neck—it was like fingering a mold of hard rubber, covered with silk. He made no protest, either, when the bridle was offered to him, but accepted the bit, and then the saddle and blanket that were tossed over him.

  The Lamb measured the withers of the stallion against his nose. This giant was seventeen hands if he was an inch, and, in stooping to gather up the cinches, the Lamb took note of such a girth as he never had seen in a blooded horse. From the points of his shoulders to behind the cinches he was like a plow horse, and behind that he was cut away like the fine run of the lines of a clipper hull. His flanks were as hard as tough leather, sheathed in loose silk, but the quarters behind them were as square as a carpenter’s rule could have made them. Here was the mechanism of power for running. The Lamb looked to the long and tapering neck, and to the long and powerful legs, with knees and hocks and all below naked of flesh and feeling like well-worked iron. Seen close up, felt and handled, the stallion seemed too huge for action at great speed, but rather might he have served as a charger for a knight of those old days when a fighting man was always overweighted with rattling ironware. But, seen on a distant hill, the Lamb knew that this fellow would look all the part of an English racer.

  He went out hastily from the stall and replaced the lantern on the peg, and as he did so, he heard a rumbling and scraping sound such as a heavy door makes when it is pushed back on a slide. He slipped to the corner, and, looking up the aisle, he was met by the cut of the night wind, which blew in through the open entrance with the wet of the rain spray hanging in it. Two lanterns and four men were coming. One paused and began hastily saddling while another fell in at a different stall.

  “There ain’t gonna be any riding,” he heard one of them say, “but we gotta get things ready. Get out the black for Jimmy, Dan. If there’s to be a chase, he’ll want nothing else.”

  The Lamb fled back to the box stall, thrust the door wide, and whipped into the saddle. The reins slid through his fingers as the black felt for the bit, and he rode out into the narrow aisle between the stalls.

  “Where’s Jimmy’s saddle?” he heard a voice call in the distance. And then a shouted answer, which he could not distinguish, only the ripple of the usual oath.

  A hurrying cowpuncher rounded the corner, and the Lamb opened fire. He shot not at the coming man, but at the lantern. There was a crash of glass, and in the darkness that followed the Lamb went by at a trot, with the excited yell of the greatly dismayed cowboy in his ear.

  A gun coughed behind the Lamb. A bullet thudded against the heavy log wall, and then the stallion turned the corner. Before him, up the aisle, the Lamb could see two horses being backed out from their stalls by swearing cowboys, and very small the mustangs looked to one mounted on the black stallion, or compared with the lofty height of the beams above them. Nonetheless, they and their riders would be hornets in his flesh, he knew.

  The men were jerking their horses around with one hand, and dragging at their guns with the other, and shouting furiously in excitement and anger. The Lamb tickled the stallion’s flank with his spurs, and the result was a forward lurch that brought them into full speed at a single bound. The head of the Lamb went back, and out of his throat welled up a wild cry that sounded like the yell of a wolf at the kill, and the sob of a puma far off in the night. The war cry of a red Cheyenne was the shout of a child compared to that weird note, the mourning of the owl was in it, and an edge like the eagle’s shrill scream.

  He was shooting while his throat still swelled with his cry. Through the humid air of the barn the two lanterns hanging from the tall posts shone like two broad, soft, golden moons. These were his targets rather than the armed men before him, for he well knew that had he twice his speed in action and twice his accuracy with a revolver, he never could shoot down those hardy fellows while they had light by which to see him. Yonder in a stall mouth, for instance, was one dropping to his knee, and throwing his Colt into the bend of his left arm to get a perfect rest for it. Such a man would shoot like a rifle expert at short range.

  So the Lamb sent a .45-caliber slug through the first lantern. It was not dislodged from the nail, but the flame was dashed out and the wick and wick holder with it were snatched away. Glass tinkled. Two guns roared vainly beside the Lamb, and he fired at the second light, and missed.

  He fired again and again, thumbing back the hammer and shooting by instinct rather than by careful aim, for who can aim in any settled fashion from the back of a running horse? With the last bullet in that gun he smashed the second lantern, and the tinkling of the glass was music in his ears. But now he was riding in almost utter darkness except that he could see before him the door of the barn where, behind the slanted shadows of the rain, the moon kept a ghost of light.

  The stallion sprawled on the wet floor, recovered, plunged on, but the dim square of the door was half blotted out by the silhouette of a horse that had backed square
ly into the way. There was no room to swerve past it on either side, and the Lamb, despairing, drew back on the reins. He might as well have drawn against a leaping avalanche. The stallion gathered himself, reared, and the Lamb, clinging instinctively, was carried across the obstacle, his head sweeping close to the rafters above.

  He heard, behind him and beneath, a yell of wonder. The crack of a gun seemed a small sound, without meaning, and then he was through the open door of the barn and dashing into the million cold threads of the rain. Wild shouting rose from the barn, beaten down and blanketed by the steady roar of the storm. The curves of the roadway leaped past beneath him like a swaying snake. A yell rang before him, the black gap of the creek was there, and the bridge across the chasm. They soared again. He saw beneath him the white face of the creek made narrow by the speed of their flight, and then the ponderous hoofs struck the bridge. It reeled with the shock upon its pivot, and reeled again as the great horse sprang on. The farther bank shot up before them, impossibly high, but, striking it solidly, the stallion scrambled like a cat, tipped over the brim, and, behold, they were free, and the flooded road was now rapidly shooting back beneath them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ten strides of that mighty creature down the road dropped all the Lamb’s past behind him, as a sailor’s past is dropped below the horizon when he sets sail in the ship of ships. But all that he had done and all that he had been seemed to the Lamb nothing, and his life began here. For the first time he breathed, and his heart beat with the rhythm of a song, and to him it was as though he was riding a wave that pitched forever forward with a sway more magic than the beat of the wings of a bird.

  What men had he known then, or what women, in all his days? For never had there been man or woman worthy to sit the back of this flying giant. What horse had he known, also? The good mare was forgotten, her grace, her beauty, her gentle, wise ways, and her speed that had floated him so many a time out of peril of his life. He had ridden out of his boyhood on her back. Upon her he had grown old while she was still young. But what was she compared to this monster, blasting a hole through the wind?