The Winged Horse

by Max Brand

  By degrees, the wonder of the colonel diminished, and he began to smile again, all his features losing their strangeness and returning to their usual expression of content with life.

  “You had me bluffed, son,” he said. “What drove you the way I was going?”

  “You’ll know when my job is finished,” the boy said rather gloomily. “There’s no good talking now.”

  “I thought you were so bad,” the colonel smiled, “that you couldn’t get anyone bad enough to travel with you. I thought you were so hot that you could be trailed by your own smoke.”

  “I ain’t on ice,” the Lamb said dryly. “Anyway, that’s on the side. The main job, and the only real job, is how can we get at their hearts? The dogs have sent money to buy me. Well, I’m gonna be bought. And when I’m on their side, I’m gonna squeeze myself right into the top circle and learn all of their plans. You savvy?”

  “Aye … if you could do that.”

  “Not many times. But once I’m there, I could arrange with you for one grand bust. That’s pretty simple, I guess. I could slope all the Montague gunmen right into your hands, and you could close the top of the bag with a bit of string and drop it on the fire. All that I want would be to hear the sizzling.”

  The colonel looked far off. He wiped his brow. “When you first came in, kid,” he said, “I thought that you meant what you said. I thought that they really had bought you, except that you wanted to see if I’d overbid.” “Why wouldn’t you think that?” Alfred Lamb said. “But how would we get in touch with each other?”

  “That’s up to you. There’s smoke by day and there’s fire by night, for instance.”

  “There is,” the Lamb said, “and there’s Montagues spread all over the face of the range, with brains like the brains of a wild Indian. But I’ll tell you. You can see the shoulder of Patient Mountain from here, and it’s turned away from the Montague house. Two smokes side-by-side on Patient Mountain, or two fires side-by-side by night, mean that I want to see you. Would you come?”

  “I’d come to the bottom of the sea, kid.”

  “Suppose it was a double-cross?” suggested the Lamb.

  “I know, I know. I ain’t a judge of men, and you’re a hard nut, but, by hickory, I can’t help trusting to you, kid.”

  The Lamb stretched forth his hand, which was briskly taken. The colonel walked slowly to the door of the room, gripping the arm of his new confederate.

  “Suppose they’re baiting you, kid? Suppose they simply want the black horse back? And think of how the boys here will hate you when they suppose that you’ve double-crossed us all. And I’ll have to cuss you as loud as the rest … it’s a pretty damn tangled way you’re gonna jog, kid. That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “I got two horses to ride,” the Lamb said grimly, “and there’s six steps in each one of ’em.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Through the bunkhouse that night there was one predominant sound, and that was the groaning snore of the great Muldoon. That big man, who had labored like ten all the day in the driving of exhausted dogies toward the fences and the feeders, now lay with both his arms cast wide and the blanket pushed back from his chest. All the other sleepers in that bunkhouse were restless, but none gave such nasal and guttural voice to it as Muldoon. Like a giant he had labored, and like a giant now he rested, and to listen to him was almost to feel the departing of the pangs of numbness from his great limbs.

  Beside him, the Lamb paused, and even leaned a little, so as to stare deeper into the face that was clouded over with unshaven whiskers. Then he straightened and went on again to the door, and, unbarring it with the greatest care and softness, he stepped out into the snow, with Milligan behind him.

  The air was wonderfully gentle and warm. It had softened the brittle upper crust of the snow so that their boots sank deeply into it with a squashing sound like the fall of a snow shower dislodged from the bent bough of a pine.

  It was deepest night, without a moon. But there was starlight to show the loom of the big, dark evergreens up and down the hillsides, and there was the loom of the big barn before them.

  They walked on without a sound, side by side, Milligan crouching a little as he stepped, until his companion said, “Stand up, Milligan. The wind ain’t hard enough to blow down the tall trees tonight.”

  Milligan, ashamed, stood up again. He muttered, “I dunno how we get past the guards at the barn, do you?”

  “No,” the Lamb answered.

  “You don’t,” gasped Milligan. “Then we’d better stop and think it out, hadn’t we?”

  “If we stopped to think out every little thing like that,” the Lamb said, “we’d never get any place in this here world. Leastwise, we wouldn’t make the Montague house tonight.”

  “But, what will we do?”

  “I’ll think of something when the time comes. I always do. It’s only the big jobs that need the big think.”

  Ray Milligan hesitated, turning his head toward his companion, but then, suddenly admitting the superiority of the other, he walked on at his side, and they came to the big sliding door of the barn, which swayed ever so gently back and forth in the pressure and the release of the wind. The Lamb thrust the door back with a great loud rattling that froze Milligan in his tracks. Out of the dark of the interior a long rifle barrel gleamed at them like a moonbeam.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s me, Shorty,” the Lamb responded.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  The Lamb burst forth in a great rage. “What d’you think is the matter with me, you sawed-off runt?” he said. “Am I up at this time of the night for fun, d’you reckon? I never heard such a fool question in my life! Why am I up? Because I got dirty work to do, and that’s the reason. And I got a green hand to take along, that don’t know one side of the place from the next!”

  “Runt?” Shorty said. “Did I hear you say runt?”

  The other raged on, “Why am I up? Because I couldn’t sleep. I don’t seem to get tired enough in this here dude ranch to get no proper sleep at night. So I come out to sashay around through the lovely white snow and breathe the beautiful air. Is that a good enough answer for you?”

  “Runt,” Shorty repeated. “Did you call me runt?”

  “Aw, shut up!” the Lamb hissed, and strode past him, followed by Milligan.

  They found their horses, and led them out.

  Shorty stepped before them. “Runt, you called me,” he said. “You’re takin’ something on yourself to call me that. I’m gonna give you some information that ain’t been asked. The average height of a man is five feet six and a half. I got pretty near a whole half inch over that. You called me a runt. I say there’s some that needs education. By gosh, all I can do is to pity the kind of ignorance that you show, kid.”

  “Get out of my way,” the Lamb declared.

  “I won’t get out of your way,” said Shorty.

  “You little chump!”

  Shorty threw his rifle to one side. It sank from sight in the snow. “Am I little? Then you’re a big chump to think that you can call me a little one and get away with it. I’m here tellin’ you … and you listen to me … you can’t get away with nothin’ from me.”

  The Lamb looked distantly down upon him.

  “The bigger they are, the harder they fall!” Shorty raged. “You can take that and swaller it, if you got a big enough gullet. You hear me? You couldn’t push nothin’ over on me, nohow, because I ain’t made that way!”

  “You want me to bust down and cry and beg your pardon?” the Lamb asked dryly. “I didn’t mean to call you a runt, Shorty. I take it back, if that pleases you more. You’d better pick your gun out of the snow.”

  Shorty fairly groaned with relief. “I thought I’d have to sock you one,” he admitted, “and then the beating up I would’ve got would’ve made me
look like a poster painted in red. I’m sure sorry that you gotta ride out tonight, kid. But the Chinook is blowin’ for fair, ain’t it?”

  “Aye,” said the Lamb, “and there’ll be a lot of beef down before morning. We’ll have to be tailing ’em up again, Shorty, there’s that to look forward to.”

  “Ah,” sighed Shorty, “this is the life for a cowboy. I dunno what I done with my wages last summer. So long, boys. You ain’t ridin’ the black ag’in tonight, after havin’ him out today, are you, Lamb?”

  But the Lamb returned no reply other than a wave of the hand, and, with Milligan beside him, he rode across the brow of the hill.

  They were no sooner out of sight than Milligan breathed, “That was drawing it pretty fine. The little wildcat … I thought that he’d go at your throat, any minute.”

  “He would,” the Lamb confirmed. “He’s all skin and bone and gristle, is Shorty.” He looked back. The top edge of the roof of the colonel’s house, and the chimney above it, showed in a black wedge against the sky. It looked like the silhouette of a broad-shouldered man wearing a top hat. The Lamb began to whistle and waved his hand to this sinking picture.

  “It ain’t hard for you to leave?” Milligan asked.

  “Well, why should it be?” asked the Lamb. “I never seen a harder worked camp than that. Besides, no matter what sort of coffee they hand out at the Montague dump, I know that I’m gonna have enough sugar to stir into it. I’ve had my hand filled with the sugar, first.”

  Milligan looked away to conceal his sneer of disgust, but he added, “Some of those boys are pals of yours?”

  “Pals? Oh, sure. You know how it is. In a camp like that, you gotta talk. But a cowboy’s a fool that wastes time picking up friends. Them that you make in the fall, you gotta chuck in the spring. I take things the way I find ’em, and my neighbors … they can keep the change. But there most generally ain’t much left over.”

  Milligan cleared his throat. Then he said quietly, tentatively, “I was just wondering. Suppose this was all framed on you just to get the black horse away from you?”

  “What good would it do ’em?” the Lamb asked with a loud laugh. “Nobody on the range’ll ever ride the black ag’in but me. I got two thousand dollars that says that nobody on the range can sit this horse for ten minutes, and that includes Jimmy Montague.”

  “I dunno what you mean,” Milligan said in wonder.

  “Why,” murmured the Lamb, “it oughta be easy to work out. Look at it this way … that was an educated pitching horse from the start. But he picked up his ideas all by himself. Now he’s got some of mine, and a man’s ideas are apt to be neater than a horse’s.”

  They worked around the shoulder of the hill until starting off in a direction opposite to that in which they had ridden from the barn. They headed on to the snow-covered trail to the Montague house.

  The Chinook breathed against their faces, carrying with it the humidity of the melting snow, and bearing also the fragrance of the pines, from whose branches it was stripping the loads of white and thawing all the small resinous twigs. And there was other life abroad than the life of the wind, for out of the south they heard a wolf cry, and the bay of a lobo answered from the north.

  “They’ll have what they want before long,” commented Milligan. “They’ve gone for a good long time with their bellies sticking against their backbones, but now they’ll have enough to make ’em fat, all right.”

  “They’ll pick up a lot of beef that’s laid down to sleep,” answered the Lamb.

  “Damn ’em,” Milligan said with an honest indignation. “I’d like to camp on the trail of those brutes. I’ve never seen why the ranchers didn’t put a trigger bounty on wolves. You take what they eat … why, it’s beef. And what’s the price of beef? That’s the way to figure out a decent bounty that’d make a cowboy want to rustle all winter, collecting the scalps.”

  Up from the dark of the valley just beside them a wolf howled with sudden violence, as though to answer and defy those human words, and Milligan shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds like he’d almost heard me,” he said, uneasy in spite of himself.

  “Maybe he has,” the Lamb commented. “They’ve eaten better stuff than beef, before this.”

  At this sharp speech, Milligan jerked his head about. Next, with a start, he sent his horse into a gallop. That rapid pace was not followed by the Lamb, who lingered in the rear, laughing and making not another sound.

  Chapter Nineteen

  They came to the bridge, at last, which had so nearly been the entrapping of the Lamb before. He could not help checking the great black horse at the edge of it, and looking critically down the dark avenue of trees beyond.

  “I know,” chuckled Milligan. “You had your scare before. And this looks like putting your head in the lion’s mouth, I suppose?”

  “Why not?” the Lamb argued aloud. “They’ve paid over two thousand, and for that price they get back the horse, and they get me.”

  However, with a shake of his head, like one resigned to his fortune, whatever it might be, he suddenly gave the black the rein, and the stallion bounded across to the farther side. Milligan had no sooner joined him than the bridge they had just left creaked, and their end of it swung away with a lurch. The Lamb turned the stallion about with a touch, but though the bridge was half removed, it now swung slowly back and once more made a perfect roadway out of the Montague house. The Lamb sighed. There had been a murderous suddenness about that first lurch of the bridge. There was a hesitating change of mind apparently represented by the next movement. That change of mind might have been caused by the reflection that this rider and this horse already had vaulted that chasm.

  But the Lamb, looking down into the shadowy heart of the creek, astir with the lines of white water, realized that only the sweeping rush down the driveway that night, only the desperation that he had felt, and the hum of the bullets that so narrowly had missed him, had given him the courage to attempt that leap with the stallion. Yet now he faced the entering drive, and went slowly down it.

  “You’ve got sense,” Milligan said with an air of relief.

  The Lamb could understand why. For if Milligan had spent the two thousand dollars and returned without his fish, he most assuredly would have had some trouble explaining the size of his bill for bait.

  At the stable, they found one man. He was a dark-browed and forbidding fellow with a beard long unshaven, so that his features were hardly distinguishable. Only his mouth seemed a white gap, the mustache having been brushed back on the upper lip.

  He stood gravely aside, a double-barreled gun upon his arm. His manner was not as forbidding as that of Shorty, but there was something about him that made the Lamb understand that this sentinel would shoot him down without hesitation, as one shoots at an animal. The very air of the Montague establishment differed from that of the colonel’s outfit, where there were plenty of rough characters spoiling for a fight, but only wishing to fight fairly and squarely in the open.

  The sentinel wore a bandage about his head, and this bandage suddenly took on significance, when Milligan said, “Here’s your friend, Al Lamb, come to stay with us, Jack.”

  The sentinel instinctively touched the bandage that surrounded his head.

  “This is Jack McGuire, kid,” went on Milligan.

  “Glad to know you,” said the Lamb, and extended his hand.

  The other stepped back a little. “You think that I’d set and take it!” he snarled. “Which I won’t do it. You’re gonna have another idea about me, young feller, before we’re quit.”

  The Lamb paid no heed, but shrugged his shoulders and went on into the barn. As he finished putting the black into its big box stall, Milligan rejoined him.

  “He’s bad medicine?” the Lamb suggested as he rubbed the nose of the big horse.

  Milligan looked on at this performance with narrowed eyes
of wonder. “That horse loves you,” he said understandingly.

  “He does,” the Lamb agreed quietly.

  “He’d’ve ate a man quicker than a quart of barley, when he was here before,” said Milligan.

  “Him and me, we talked things out together, and neither side should’ve won,” said the Lamb. “But I had the luck.” He sighed a little, and then he turned his back with a jerk upon the stallion, for he felt that he was leaving the only friendly presence that he was likely to find in this place. “That McGuire,” he said. “What’s wrong between him and me?”

  Milligan touched his forehead. “It sort of riles him to think that he was dropped by you.”

  “By me?”

  “Two weeks ago, when you sashayed over the hills and rounded up a bunch of the Montague dogies. You and Muldoon and the other pair, I mean. McGuire was with the gents that tried to cut you off, and when you stopped the party by dropping one with a fifteen-hundred-yard shot … it was him that fell. Luck, you understand, on your part, and bad luck on his. But he don’t see it that way. He figures that you saw him and wanted special to down him. Low-down and ignorant, that’s the kind McGuire is.”

  With this sort of talk, he passed the time until they reached the house. At the rear door, the Lamb paused for a moment. Perspiration stood out on him.

  Then he said to Milligan, “I figure that probably I’ve been a chump, letting myself be delivered like this. But I gotta say that I’m full of guns and meanness, and watching for the wrong step on the part of anybody.”

  “Don’t talk that way, son,” urged Milligan gently. “You go ahead in. There’s the door wide open. It never was wider for anybody than it is for you right this minute. I’ll bet you that old Monty and young Jimmy never seen any man come through their door that they was so glad to see.”

  “I bet they didn’t,” sneered the Lamb. “That’s the way the wolf feels when he sees the sheep stray out of the flock. But go ahead. And you walk first, Milligan, and I’ll be close behind you, with a gun held steady in my hand. That’s the way that we’ll go inside.”