by Max Brand
Chapter Eight
Ranger had no memory, the next morning, of how he had cooked his supper or of what he had eaten. His mind was in such a whirl that he went only automatically about the preparation of his food and the eating of it. The only thing that he could recall with certainty was the care with which he had arranged a circle of large stones that acted as a screen to the fire to shut in its gleaming light.
But when he fell asleep, he had a series of dreams that were clear in his mind the next day and forever after. The nightmare came to him over and over again. It was always the same. He would be sitting on a stone at the bank of a river, fishing, watching the line, that appeared to break at a sharp angle where it fell into the water, and seeing the tiny wake that the broken current made below the string.
Then a feeling of eyes fastened upon him from behind would give him a numbness in the small of his back. He would resist and fight against this foolish sensation, but it recurred with such force that at last he would be compelled, instinctively, to turn his head, when he always saw, stalking behind him, a slender youth naked to the waist, black, shining hair streaming over his shoulders, and his body bronzed mulatto dark by long exposure to the sun. But his eyes were bright and red-stained, reminding the trapper of some wild beast, but what the wild beast might be he never could tell.
The stalking man, when discovered, would straighten and smile and nod ingratiatingly, but, when he was very close to the fisherman, he would suddenly disappear, and in his place there would be a great timber wolf, crouched for a spring, slavering white hate and with red-stained eyes gleaming with hunger. At that point the dream would go out, and poor Ranger, weak with sweat, would awake, turn, and fall asleep again, only to have the same horrible dream over again.
When the morning came, the sun was already up before he awoke and found his head heavy and his eyes dim, exactly as though he had not slept at all throughout the night.
He cooked a small breakfast, and he ate it without appetite, forcing down the mouthfuls. Not once did he look down toward the Crosson place, or toward the brake in which the puma had been slaughtered the night before. It was a thing about which he did not want to think. The impossibility of it maddened him. He flushed as he realized that he never could tell this even to an old friend. He would be laughed at as a creator of wild yarns.
What had happened there in the brush? How had the wolves been used by this singular boy to bait the lion? How had the boy himself avoided the lightning spring of the catamount that even wild beasts are not swift enough in reaction to avoid? Had he remained standing, and at the last instant, swerving, buried his knife in the creature’s heart as the bulk shot past him with hideous fangs showing and with deadly claws unsheathed and ready? Bullfighters could do such things with the clumsy, blind, charging bull. But a puma is neither clumsy nor blind, and it can think in mid-air as well as when it is on the ground.
But Ranger gave up the problem and refused to be bothered by it. The thing was incredible. It was to be pushed to the back of his mind, together with the fairy stories that amuse a child but cannot occupy a grown man.
The stumbling point here—the sweating point for Ranger—was that he knew something like this must have happened. And now he could believe what he had heard. There were no firearms on the Crosson place. Well, if the evil one had given men such powers as this, what need was there for powder and shot?
He rushed away from his camp to walk the trap line, gritting his teeth and wishing more than ever that he never had committed himself to such a task. Compared with the mystery that gathered around him, Arctic hurricanes with the temperature below zero, a failing dog team, short rations, and a long journey seemed to poor Lefty Ranger as nothing at all. The great white North was a comfortable and familiar land, and he yearned to be back in it. Here in the Southland there were worse things—spiritual torments, eerie problems that no ordinary man could fathom—such as fourteen wolves used as a hunting pack!
So he strode out along the line of his traps, and he took very little pleasure in his catch of the day. It was not large for one thing. He caught three bobcats whose pelts were in such a condition that they were hardly worth the trouble of skinning, and then threw the naked pink bodies onto brush where the buzzards could find them the more readily. The single shrinking fox he looked at more in disgust than in pleasure. But in the last trap of all, that one that was nearest to his camp, he found a prize of another sort. It was a yearling wolf, big for its age, but still not grown to the size of its feet. He looked at it with the strangest of sensations.
It was his. He had caught fairly the cattle killer, in embryo, the butcher of colts and veal and mutton. There was a bounty for the scalp as well. And yet he hesitated. He drew his rifle to his shoulder, and three distinct times he took the bead for the head. And three times he allowed the muzzle of the gun to sink slowly down, overpowered by the thoughts that were his.
At last, with an exclamation, he stepped in toward the beast. It leaped at him, snarling terribly, but he stunned it with a blow from the heavy butt of the gun, and, as it lay limply, he loosed the teeth of the steel trap from the hind leg by which the wolf was imprisoned.
He barely had stood back when the ungainly youngster scrambled to its feet, tucked its tail between its legs, and scampered away as hard as it could go. He watched it curiously. Would it go up among the higher rocks or would it turn and skid away toward the Crosson place? He could not tell. It disappeared among the rocks, and afterward there was no trace of it across the green fields that stretched away toward the Crosson Ranch. Even then, he told himself, he could not regret what he had done. Wolves began to haunt his mind. The short ears and the wise brows of the monsters walked in his thoughts all day and all night. And he could not regret that he had failed to take revenge on this half-schooled youngster. He was thoroughly ashamed, but he was oddly more at ease.
In fact, two thirds of the cloud that had gathered over him seemed to have dispersed. The guilty feeling would not leave him. Neither would the self-satisfaction.
When he got back to the lean-to, however, he had a surprise of another sort waiting for him. As he rounded the rocks and came toward the group of pines that sheltered and shrouded his little camp, he saw two men lolling in the sheds. They sat up as he appeared.
At least, they were not the Crossons, because both of them were armed to the teeth. Each had a rifle close at hand. Each wore at least one revolver. Each had a heavy ammunition belt.
They looked at the trapper, and then they turned their unshaven faces toward one another, as though silently consulting. And such was the ominous nature of their silence that Lefty Ranger took firmly into his mind the fact that he, also, was armed. And that revolver of his he could use, in a pinch.
He halted a few strides from them. “Hello, strangers,” he said.
“Hullo,” said one of them. The man spoke without real interest, and he stared steadily at Ranger. There was something ominous about the indifference of that man. In this wild country one might have suspected that every human would be glad to see his fellow.
“Who are you?” asked the second man harshly.
“That’s my business,” said Ranger, and moved his hand a little closer to his revolver.
“It’s mine now, though,” said the second man. He was one of those hump-shouldered people whose crookedness of back is rather an excess of muscle than the sign of a deformity. His head was thrust out in front on the end of a bulky neck. He looked like a clumsy lump of a man. But as he spoke these words he conjured out a revolver with such flashing speed that Ranger’s own weapon was not half drawn before he found himself looking into the round, dark, empty eye of death.
“Now, what’s your name?” repeated the other.
His companion was grinning, more of a sneer than a grin. And the gunman’s eye glittered in such an uncertain way that Ranger was reasonably certain that the fellow would as soon shoot him down as not. This man already had drunk of blood. The sign of it was in his ey
e. Therefore Ranger did not hesitate.
“My name’s Ranger,” he said.
“Yeah,” said the other, “and your first name is Forest, ain’t it?”
His friend laughed at the jest.
“My name is Bill Ranger,” said the man from the Northland.
The gunman moistened his thin lips behind the dark veil of a brushy mustache. “You’re too dog-gone’ good to talk to strangers, ain’t you?” he asked.
Ranger flushed. “You got the drop on me,” he said.
“Not that you didn’t make a move for yourself,” said the other.
“No. I made a move,” said Ranger honestly. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“You made it, and you lost out. And I got half a mind to make you pay the regular price.”
“Aw, have a heart, Wully,” said the second man.
“If he was five years younger, I wouldn’t have no heart,” said Wully. And it was plain that he meant it.
“Now,” went on Wully, “what you doin’ up here?”
“I’m trapping.”
“I see that you got some pelts and you got a trap line. But what you doin’ up here?”
“What I told you.”
“Don’t lie!”
“You show me a place where I can catch more varmints and I’ll go there,” said Lefty Bill Ranger. “This here place is better than they told me. Look what I’ve got in this one day’s work, will you?”
The other two exchanged glances.
“Well, maybe he’s all right,” said Wully. And he lowered the muzzle of his gun.
Chapter Nine
He was not through catechizing the other man, though.
“How long you been here?”
“Couple days,” said Ranger.
“How you goin’ to get your stuff out?”
“I come in with a burro, but the wolves tore its throat out. When I get my pile, I’ll buy a mule from down there, I guess. Or a couple of ’em, if I have enough to load ’em. It looks like I have it, all right.”
Wully leaned back, his dangerous eyes still fixed carefully upon Ranger. “You give him a go, Sam,” he said.
Sam was an opposite type. Thin, almost too cadaverousness, light of eye, smiling of mouth. There was still something about him that revolted the blood of Ranger.
“Why, I don’t wanna know much,” said Sam, “only, what’s the name of that ranch down there?”
“It’s the Crosson place, I guess.”
“Who told you so?”
“They told me back at Tuckerville.”
“Who?”
“Sol Murphy.”
“He’s seen Sol Murphy,” said Sam aside to Wully.
“Well, what of it? Go ahead,” Wully said.
“You been down to visit the ranch?”
“No,” said Ranger.
“Why not?”
“Sol Murphy told me that they were kind of queer.”
“Who?”
“The Crossons.”
“Queer, are they?” said Wully. “What kind of queer?”
“Like a coin,” suggested Sam.
“Shut up, Sam,” said Wully roughly. “You talk like a fool. What kind of queer?” he repeated to Ranger.
“I dunno. He didn’t say.”
“Didn’t he?”
“No.”
“Well,” said Wully, “you haven’t found out nothin’ about them?”
“About them? No.”
“I’m gonna find out about ’em,” said Wully, suddenly rising.
“Hold on!” said Sam.
“You yaller dog!” said Wully through his teeth.
“No, I ain’t a yella dog. But I don’t wanna do nothin’ foolish.”
“I say you’re a yaller dog. You won’t take no chances. That’s what a yaller dog is, ain’t it?”
Sam stood up in turn reluctantly. “I don’t like it,” he said. “When gents like Jake the Cooler, and Mississippi Slim tell us that the Crossons are dead poison to . . .”
“Shut up!” yelled Wully furiously. “Who you talkin’ about?”
“Aw, I dunno. Nobody,” Sam said sullenly.
“You ever hear them names before?” asked the savage Wully of Ranger.
“No, I never heard them before.”
“A good thing that you ain’t,” declared Wully. “Well, old-timer, I’m tired of hearin’ about the Crossons and what they can do and what they can’t do. I’m dead tired of it, and I’m gonna go down and find out for myself.”
Sam pointed a skinny arm toward the trees that enshrouded the Crosson house. “Are you gonna hike over to them?” he asked.
“Go get the horses and shut up,” directed the formidable Wully. “I’m gonna go down there and find out for myself.” He stood closer to the rim of the hill, turning his back upon the trapper. “I’m gonna kill me some beef,” he announced. “That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna kill me some beef, and then I’ll see what those Crossons do about it.”
He turned suddenly back upon Ranger as Sam went off to get the horses. “They say that the Crossons don’t pack no guns,” he said.
Ranger nodded. “I’ve heard that,” he said.
A grin of lewd joy and satisfaction appeared upon the face of Wully. He leered at Ranger, and then licked his lips. “I guess I’ll find out about the Crossons, all right,” he said.
A warning leaped into the throat of Ranger, but he checked it unspoken. After all, this man deserved all the trouble that his brutal instincts might lead him toward. And yet he almost pitied the bully. Perhaps a little description of how the sun-darkened youth had entered the shrubbery and killed the mountain lion might have dimmed the joy that was in the heart of Wully.
But Ranger said nothing. He was busy looking, now, at the horses that the companion of Wully had brought up. They were a splendid pair, and rough fellows like Sam and Wully had no right to possess such exquisite thoroughbreds, lean and iron-hard of limb, deep-chested, low to the ground, and long over it. They had eyes like stars and the muzzles of deers. And they lifted their proud heads and looked beyond these two men as though they disdained the human hands that controlled them and looked far off to find other masters.
Sam made one further protest before they mounted. “Wully,” he said, “we ain’t learnin’ anythin’ by this.”
“How do you know,” said Wully, “before we’ve gone and looked?”
“Anyway, we’ll get a beefsteak or two out of it.”
Straightway they mounted and were off into the sunset time, running their horses with a speed down the slope of the hill. Ranger looked after them, shaking his head. He did not need to be told that they were a bad pair. No good man would have risked his horse’s shoulders to make such a descent as that.
Off across the level green they flashed, and away past the very island of shrubbery in the midst of which the day before the puma had been killed. The nerves of the trapper began to jump.
They went on. They scoured almost out of sight upon the green and then back to the ears of Ranger, very dimly, rang the hammer stroke of a rifle exploding, and then another shot, as though in answer.
Faintly, far away, Ranger saw the animal fall, sinking down behind, and then dropping.
Almost immediately afterward the dimming light of the evening shook a thin veil between him and the two marauders, and he could not see either of them.
He set about preparing his own supper, frowning darkly. There was no impulse in Ranger that was not honest to the core, and the dishonesty of thieves who would kill a steer for the sake of cutting a few steaks out of the carcass made him hot with anger. Such men should be opposed. But he knew that he had not the skill or the power to oppose a trained man-killer like Wully. Sam, too, looked like the type of rat that fights with poisoned teeth when it is cornered.
And yet revenge might overtake both of them. The thought of the running wolf pack and of the wild young rider behind it came strongly back into the mind of Ranger.
He finished off his coffee a
nd started to clean up the tins. It was work that he did not finish at once, for just as he put a chiming stack of things together, ready to rub them with sand and then wash them with water, he heard far away the wavering cry that for twenty-four hours never had been quite out of his ears. It was the wailing call of the wolf pack on the run, many cries joined together.
Regardless of the almost utter darkness, he caught up his glasses and, running to the verge of the hill shoulder, tried vainly to probe the dull twilight. It shifted and rolled before his eyes, and would reveal nothing to him. He could only read the voice of the pack, and that swept closer and closer to him, so that the hair began to stir on his head as the scalp prickled and contracted with horror. What was happening there on the smooth green of the Crosson fields, or in the thickets that spotted the ranch?
The yelling notes came nearer and nearer. And the notes changed. They grew shrill, and he knew that the runners were closing in on prey of some sort. Could it be Wully and Sam?
Then, up from the plain, like a voice shouting from the deeps of a dark well, he heard human cries ringing. They seemed to start up from the ground beneath his feet, those screams. Not of agony, he repeatedly told himself, but of utter dread.
Was it Wully and Sam? Even if it were they, he pitied them mightily, and at the same time he wished himself far away.
Just at the foot of the ascent, so far as he could judge, the noises of the pack ceased suddenly, and not a murmur of it followed. Were they saving their breath as they swept up the slope? For he heard noises approaching. There were scratchings and scramblings along the sloping shale of the bank, and they seemed to come toward him at greater than human speed.
He crouched back in the shadows of the pines. He cursed the bad luck that caused the fire to find a resinous mine in the heart of one of the pieces of wood in his fire, so that the flames suddenly threw up brilliant yellow beads of light all around him. The pines were great black silhouettes, and the stars went out. And Ranger, gripping his rifle hard, prepared for whatever might come.
