by Max Brand
He looked up. The lowest tufts and streamers of mist reached at his head, and were jerked behind him by the speed of that gallop. He looked to the side, and the dark trees were blurred into solid night. He looked down, and the tarnished silver of the flooded roadway was dashed into milky spray, so that it seemed to the half-dizzy mind of the Lamb that he was galloping through the heart of the sky, with the snowy breasts of the clouds smitten by the hoofs of his horse.
He was a thing of ice. His soul was frosted through and through. In his knees and hands there still was a sense of riding, but the rest of him was gone numb. It did not exist. The wind of the gallop blew utterly through him, and for that very reason he rejoiced.
He told himself that this ride would kill him. No, he did not care for that, but only to see whether or not he could gather the strength of the pride of this animal into his hand. One other man had ridden the black and made him his own, and if he were worthy of calling himself the peer of Jimmy Montague, he must do as much. He freshened his grip. He wrenched and tugged at the reins. As well have tugged at a stone wall. He tried again, and pricked the flank of the stallion with his spurs.
That brought a result, but not what he had hoped. As though scorning to run longer upon the mundane roadway, the stallion flung himself up as if to climb the sky. The heart of the Lamb rose and knocked mightily against his teeth. Then the stallion dropped dizzily down the height, and landed upon one foreleg, rigid and strong as a bar of iron. The chin of the Lamb struck his cold breast and bruised the flesh to the bone, and a cloud of bursting red sparks flew up and exploded before his eyes.
That red shower had hardly dissolved when the black hurled himself backward, and the Lamb barely had time to throw his numbed body from the saddle. He came to his feet with a lurch, as the black, raising himself, snapped tigerishly and nearly caught the man by the shoulder. But when the big horse was up again, the Lamb was in the saddle, getting both stirrups as the black lurched upward.
They began to fence with one another. The stallion used the dizzy heights of the air, and the hard face of the earth. He wove and fencerowed and sunfished. He lunged like a flung stone upward, shook himself, and swooped down again to the earth with head dropped between his front legs, and his back humped so that man and saddle were perched upon a narrow and lofty pinnacle. There was no letup in the fury of this attack, no slowing of exhaustion, but always the whiplash cracking and the smiting of the hoofs upon the roadway. And against this furious assault the rider matched wit, and craft, and old experience—the experience of the born fighter, the experience of the rider of hundreds of cunning, bucking mustangs. The great stallion seemed to shed his bulk. There was no weight to him. He was light as a spirit rising, and plunging then like a plummet downward.
So dreadful were those shocks that the Lamb, in spite of all his experience, never had known such a thing before. As a rock breaks when dashed down, so he expected the stallion to break, but his bones seemed of finest steel, and of iron from his heart. If his strength decreased in the slightest degree, it was not apparent to the Lamb, whose head was beginning to spin, and darkness floated in vague clouds before his eyes.
The changing wind now smote the clouds and tore them apart, and the white flood of moonlight rushed through, but that light could not reach to the darkness that was besetting the brain of the Lamb. Only, in flashes, the white radiance flowed in upon him, and the dimness followed, like a bright landscape over which cloud shadows are trailing. So that sometimes, in a dream, he was detached, and far away looked down upon himself dueling, struggling eternally with the horse, and, again in the clear moonshine, he knew he was committed, body and soul, to that strife.
Again the black was down, flinging purposely back and then rolling catlike to regain his legs. Back into the saddle struggled the Lamb, and kicked away the muzzle of the stallion as he reached around to seize the leg of his rider. But the man knew that he was far gone, and that there was only one sensible thing to do—to draw his Colt and shoot the great brute, for, otherwise, he would be flung and trampled and stamped to death while he lay on the rocks of the roadway.
Twice he reached for the handle of his Colt, and twice he snatched his hand away, and, gripping leather, strove to keep his place in the saddle. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth. It trickled from his ears. He had been battered into warmth and comfort; he had been battered into another sort of numbness again. Now the stallion, which had striven in all other ways to dislodge the man, used that last and most fatal of all the tricks known to a pitching demon of a bronco. He began to buck and whirl at the same time until, having gained momentum, a buckjump punctuated the spin, and he revolved with equal speed in the opposite direction.
At that reversal of direction, the Lamb lost a stirrup and spilled out to the left. He fought with all his might to drag himself back into the saddle. If he had had his original strength he could have done so in an instant, but now instinct could not take the place of muscles weary to agony and dead.
He spilled farther from the saddle, all balance was gone. For another moment he clung as a runner clings to his race after all sense has gone from his pounding legs, and in that moment the Lamb saw the moon flash in a solid circle around the sky, and saw the white foam flying from the gaping mouth of the stallion. Then he was cast violently through the air and crashed into a thick bush.
The stinging cold of the shower of drops that fell upon him restored some of his wits, shocked back some clearness to his mind, though it left his body inert, and in that strange brightness of thought he knew that he had been beaten, utterly and sadly defeated for the first time in his life.
And the victor came at him like a tiger with flattened ears and gaping mouth. Dimly the Lamb wondered how his death would come—whether from the crunch of those great jaws, or the pile-driving strokes of the forehoofs, smashing in the frame of his body utterly.
The stallion, at that instant, skidded on the iced face of a broad, flat rock and fell headlong, and the sight of him was blotted from the eyes of the man.
That fall raised the Lamb to such a strength that he was able to break from the entangling brush and stagger weakly forward. The stallion, sprawling desperately upon the icy surface, twice again fought to rise. The third time he won to his feet, but only with the Lamb once more clinging to the saddle—but how feebly, now, with sagging head, with nerveless knees, and with hands that seemed broken at the wrists.
He was no longer himself. He was a limp rag of humanity cast into the saddle, and the stallion sprang up as lightly, as powerfully as ever, with the quiver of strength working beneath the saddle, and with his head high and dangerous.
Yet the black was changed. It was as though he had felt the intervening of a magic hand that had cast him down to the earth at the very moment of his victory. Suddenly the man knew that the horse was afraid, and was waiting.
Then the Lamb laughed, a foolish, droning laughter, and drove his spurs cruelly deep into the flanks of the horse. The stallion sprang forward in no fiercely fighting lunge, but with a light, rhythmic gallop, like the forward flinging of a wave, and as he galloped, his rider swayed drunkenly in the saddle, and laughed, and his laughter was half a sob and half a groan.
Suddenly he saw before him great trees, whose limbs glistened with white streaks of rime, the moonlight full upon them. Beneath the trees there stretched a long, low house of logs, and above the house rose a chimney from which smoke twisted up slowly into the air, for the wind had died away, there were no clouds in heaven, and only the silent burden of the frost settled upon the face of the earth.
The Lamb wanted to ride on, and yet the horse had stopped, as though he felt that this should be the end of the journey, and when his rider made no move, the stallion walked straight up to the nearest door and smote against it with his forehoof.
The Lamb suddenly understood and remembered. It was the ranch house of Colonel Loring.
The door
opened and the face of the cook appeared. “Jimmy Montague!” he shouted. Then he heard the foolish, droning laughter of the boy, and he looked up again. “Love o’ Mike!” cried the cook, and, in spite of his stump of a leg, he pulled the Lamb out of the saddle and half dragged, half carried him into the house. There he placed him in a chair and bellowed. In answer to his shout, men flooded in from the bunk room. The colonel and the superintendent came in haste from their bedrooms. The cook pointed to the figure of the Lamb seated before the stove, his clothes rent to tatters, naked and streaked with blood to the waist, torn by brambles, sagging in his place like a drunken man, and foolishly, feebly laughing. At this strange picture the cook pointed, and then turned around and indicated, through the open door, the great front of the black stallion
First there were shouts, and then there were murmurs of wonder so soft that the voice of Shorty could be heard calling plaintively from the bunk room, “Lemme see! Boys, help me out to see! If it’s true, it’ll make me a well man pronto!”
Chapter Fifteen
The colonel brought out a new man. He had driven out through the heaped white snows of the midwinter, with the horses knocking the dry drifts to powder as they trotted gingerly forward. When he reached the log house, which looked more than half buried in the white heaps around it, he merely said, “Cook, here’s a new man for you. His name is Ray Milligan. I hope that you can please him better than you’ve pleased some of the others.”
He marched on across the kitchen and disappeared into his own quarters at the rear of the building, while the cook, with lowered head, scowled bitterly after his employer. But the words would not come to him until the door was actually closing behind the fat colonel.
Then the man of the kitchen shouted, “Hey! Wait, will you? Hey, Colonel! If you don’t like the way that I throw up the chuck to the boys, I’ll tell you what you can go and do! If you’re a man, come back and talk to me.”
Plainly they could hear the steps of the colonel departing deeper into his sanctum, but he did not reappear at the door.
Even while pouring forth these violent challenges, however, the one-legged cook was picking up a tin cup of great dimensions and filling it from the huge coffee pot that, night and day, often having the weak grounds bailed out and fresh dippers of coffee poured in, simmered upon the back of the stove. It was not really coffee. Or what coffee appeared in the flavor was drowned in the quantities of cheap chicory and other adulterants, but, nevertheless, this was the drink most favored upon the range, and the purest java, or the rarest mocha from Arabia, prepared by a master, would have been snorted at by any cowboy. This dreadful black potion the cook ladled into the cup, filled it automatically, and, without glancing at it, passed it to the new man.
Milligan accepted it. He took it with a hand that went all around the cup, and disdaining the handle, as though to prove the asbestos-like toughness of his skin, he drained half the coffee at the first swallow. He paused, put down the cup, and rolled a cigarette.
The cook was still talking to the closed door. He luridly described a man for whom, he said, he slaved by day and slaved by night. In the whole length and breadth of the great range, let another cook be found who set forth such prime feed as he, and yet the colonel had nothing but harsh words for him, and he was through.
“Are you gonna pull out for town?” asked Milligan.
The cook turned suddenly toward him again. “He knows that I won’t quit in the middle of the scrap.”
“What scrap?” asked Milligan.
The cook opened his eyes. “You don’t know?”
“Why should I?”
“How long was you in town before the colonel signed you on?”
“Why, a couple of hours.”
“You never heard of the Montagues, or Jimmy Montague, or nothin’?”
“I heard of Jimmy Montague. Everybody’s heard of him. He’s the one that had the black horse that was stole.”
The cook smiled. “And this is the outfit that stole the black horse.”
Milligan hastily took refuge behind his coffee cup. He set it down, empty, and inquired if it were not a shade on the side of irregularity for an outfit to replenish its strings of horses by—borrowing?
“Borrowin’?” the cook said, his yellow teeth showing almost white against the thick, dark stubble of his beard. “Borrowin’? Sure. You dunno how things is worked in this part of the range. Folks don’t care so long as you got friendly intentions. You take the Montagues. Suppose they get hard up for some young cows. What do they do? Go to town and buy some stuff? No, they just up and cut out fifteen hundred head of weaners that the boys are drivin’ home from the range for Colonel Loring to get ’em under fence and feed. They borrow fifteen hundred head, as you might say, you see? Well, along comes one of our boys and says, if the Montagues are so doggone liberal, he’ll sure go over and borrow a new horse for himself, him havin’ lost the best you ever seen in the fight in the cañon. So over he goes, and he borrows Jimmy Montague’s black.”
Milligan whistled. “The sheriff must be a pretty old man in these parts,” he suggested.
“The sheriff is all fair and square, but the Montagues don’t go botherin’ him none. If he rode out this way, he might get too interested in seein’ the funny-lookin’ new brands that some of the Montague beef is wearin’ … run all over their sides from their shoulders back to their hips. And the colonel ain’t askin’ the sheriff in, because he don’t figger that he has enough money to take this kind of a talk into court. He ain’t half as rich as the Montagues. He ain’t had as many hands ready for … borrowin’. He never took to it so quick and nacheral, as you might say. He wants to settle this little job right up here in the mountains, the same way that it was started … without botherin’ no judges and no juries. Maybe just a coroner’s inquest would be heard, now and then, when the spring had thawed out the winter snows and turned up some of the winter graves. Outside of that, he don’t want to bother no law. The colonel, kid, is a white man.” He paused in the act of slicing bacon, and poised his great, sharp knife aloft to emphasize his point.
“A white man.” Milligan nodded knowingly. “He pays a white man’s wages, right enough.”
“He’s gotta pay high. He’s gotta pay through the nose. I’ll tell you why. It’s because the breed of punchers that they got on the range these days ain’t a breed of men, mostly, but a breed of ornery coyotes. He brings out one man, and two men quits him. And them that stay, they loll around and look at the floor and wisht they was back in town. I’m gonna buy me a cork foot and go out and ride the range, and show ’em that half a man with a whole heart is better than a whole man that’s got no nerve.”
Milligan nodded again. He was a big man with sharp little eyes that wrinkled up and almost disappeared in mirth every little while, though his lips were hardly more than touched at the corners by these smiles. And this trick of expression gave him the very look of a fox, seeing far into others and revealing nothing of himself.
He received another cup of coffee from the cook. “I don’t aim to be so high, wide, and handsome, when it comes to sashaying around with a gun,” he declared. “But maybe I could stand my watch out. I wouldn’t mind seeing the black horse, though.”
“You’ll see it when the Lamb comes in.”
“How come they call him the Lamb?”
“Because he ain’t,” the cook said shortly. “You peel your eye out over the hills and you’ll see him come driftin’ along, maybe, along about the time that the day gets dirty. Even him has gotta ride range for this outfit.”
“Even him?” Milligan echoed with interest. “Is he too good to ride range, speaking ordinary?”
The cook paused in his work and smiled faintly upon the other. “After you’ve been here a while, you’ll begin to understand. You’ll have a chance to see the Lamb, but you ain’t gonna see him the way that we’ve seen him.”
“What I’d like to know,” demanded Milligan, “is what a man could be doing here if he didn’t ride to work?”
“I’ll tell you what he could be out here,” said the cook. “He could be the margin around the page that keeps the print from gettin’ rubbed out and the page tattered. He could be the gun handle by which you hold the gun. He could be the lock on the door and the key that’s in it. He could be the dog that runs the sheep and the iron point on the shepherd’s stick. He could be the edge of the knife and the fire of the match. Maybe that gives you a kind of an idea?”
“You need his guns,” translated the other shortly.
“We need his guns, and the eye behind his guns,” the cook affirmed. “And, by gravy, I say, would you have hands like his cramped up with the cold, and fingers like his thickened and stiffened with the rope work and the tailin’ up of waterlogged steers? Hands like his that might one day be fishin’ to keep our lives out of the current, when it’s runnin’ downhill?”
Milligan drained his second cup and stood up. “I follow that drift,” he said, and went outside.
It was the hour that the cook had recommended for seeing the return of the Lamb. It was the dirty time of the day. One would have thought that a train had just passed around the wide rim of the western horizon, sweeping with an equal speed up shaggy mountains, down vertical cliffs, and leaving behind it a dissolving cloud of smoke that stained the pure white of the snow like a thin smudge of soot on the purest of white paper. The winter night was coming quickly down. Already the lamplight through the kitchen window was turning yellow and holding out a dim promise of the warmth and content within, and the half-buried walls of the house seemed a haven of profoundest refuge.
Milligan walked up to the top of the first knoll, and, looking down the valley, he saw a tall rider on a tall black horse come up the rise straight toward him. He dropped his left hand to his hip. He raised his right hand above his head.
