by Max Brand
Menneval closed his eyes and leaned back a little in his chair, so great was his relief as he heard this promising beginning. But Lyons did not so much as glance aside at his companions. He went on: “You’ll be able to see the boy, Ranger?”
“I’ll see him. Yes. He’s waiting for me now.”
“Back there at the saloon?”
“Yes. I’ll talk to him. I’ll hold him for twenty-four hours or a little longer. I’ll manage to keep him there somehow, until you get away.”
“Then go back and give him a message for me. Tell him that tomorrow, at noon, I’m going to walk out of the front door of this hotel and straight up the street through Shannon, and, if I see his face, I’ll pull a gun and shoot him down if I can.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
All that Nan Lyons could learn was that her cousin would stay in Shannon for another day. She had tried in every way to get something out of him, but he was taciturn for the first time. And the thing began to madden her.
If there had been an officer of the law in Shannon, she would have gone to him for help. Sometimes she thought of appealing to the big, rough men of Shannon and begging them to give Chester Lyons protection against that fierce and uncanny lad. But she knew that she dared not do this. Lyons himself never would forgive her, for he would far rather be killed out of hand than to ask help against any single man.
And the nerves of Nan began to tauten to the breaking point. She would not talk to Chester Lyons. There was no confidant to whom she could turn. She seemed stripped of all help.
The very shadows of the clouds sweeping across the window of her room made her start violently and lose color. She was finding Oliver Crosson like a ghost in all things. Suddenly she decided that she could endure it no longer. She would have to leave the hotel. And leave it she did.
There was a slope below it, where the truck garden was laid out on a sort of upper terrace, and below this extended a region of bush and second growth, the bigger trees having been felled for firewood. And then the forest itself began, still sloping away with the fall of the valley level. It was not one of those vast, dark growths of evergreens, shoulder to shoulder, so that a perpetual twilight and damp evening reigned under them even in the midst of the brightest August day. It was, instead, a cheerfully open woodland where one could wander pleasantly back and forth, where natural clearings appeared and springs came piping out of the ground, with little green meadows about them.
From her window in the hotel, she could look down over some of these clearings. Now she remembered them and the brightness of the sun, and the cheerfulness of that woodland made her yearn to be there, walking by herself, escaping from her thoughts. So down she went.
She passed the truck garden. She wound by a narrow path through the borderland of thickly massed shrubbery and second-growth trees. And so she came into the forest itself. It was better than she had hoped for even. It was not all evergreens, but here and there were deciduous trees, their more delicate and yellowish green foliage looking like a mist against the dark and shadowy heads of the pine trees that towered above them.
Almost at once she heard a musical bubbling and rippling of water and she located the source of it. It was a good spring that leaped a foot from the surface of the ground and then spread out in a pool, from which the current flowed softly along, with green margins, very silent and pleasant underfoot. It was the most casual of streams. Sometimes it danced and rippled over a little cascade that would have made a child clap its hands with pleasure; sometimes it idled in swinging curves; sometimes it spread into still pools that showed only a faint stir at either end, where the water entered and left it.
She began to walk along the course of this stream. She felt like wandering, and the course of the water was like a companion and a careless guide, taking her to the easiest place. She had barely started down the waterway, when she heard, distinctly, the sound of a breaking twig. Of that she was sure; furthermore, the sound was a little muffled, as it usually is when a softly clad foot, say, presses upon the fallen wood.
In an instant she was on the alert. She looked carefully about her. She stepped this way and that. But she could see nothing suspicious. Moreover, a wind had come up, not strongly but in little gusts, and it might have been that two boughs had touched together, and a dry little branch had broken at the contact. Such things were continually happening in woods. Indeed, such a thing as a silent woodland is a term, not a possible fact. Above all, she was reassured by the sight of the roof of the hotel, which was plainly visible through a cleft between some of the larger trees. So Nan went on.
After that, she gave most of her attention to the stream itself. Looking into it, she could see the forest, the sky, even glimpses of the sun in the sky, blinding bright as a falling bolt of golden lightning.
She began to have a fancy that human lives were like that. In places they were full of sound and white water, taking the attention, making one frown. But at times they spread out placidly, and then the deep images of thought and of beauty fall into the mind and are held there so lucidly that others can pause and feel the grace and charm of that life, and then go on smiling and content.
She would like to have a life like that, she told herself, without too much excitement, a quiet life with a pleasant home, children, and a garden, not too large, but something that her own hands and thought could cherish and care for. Other people wished to go rushing through the world like great rivers, bearing boats, bearing ships, smashing through to the distant ocean. But, for herself, she would rather have the quiet way, like this stream with the blue and gold of heaven falling into it.
She stopped to look at a little brown water dog, stretched on a mossy-topped stone. The tip of its tail was in the water. She kneeled to look at it more closely, when suddenly it vanished into the stream.
The water was very still here. When she leaned still farther, she could see her own face as in a mirror whose back is not very well silvered. But there was the glint of her hair, the shadow of her hat brim, and even the glow of the reflection that fell upon her cheek. More distant objects were reflected more closely, like the intense and shining whiteness of one towering cloud in the central sky, the gleaming leaves of the trees, and the blue of the sky, with all its suggestion of nearness and yet of impalpable distance. So crystal clear was this standing water, that she could see the pebbles on the bottom, the water weeds and grasses, standing straight up, with never a wavering of head or of stem. She could see a twig, thoroughly massed over, and the almost invisible shadow of a minnow swerving through the shallow depths.
She leaned there until the stones began to hurt her knees, and she was about to rise when the image of a wolf’s head appeared in the water close beside her, the wicked little bright eyes, the puckered brow of diabolical wisdom, the lolling red tongue, and the glitter of the long fangs. She had not had time to leap to her feet before, on the opposite side, she saw a second image, and this was of a man. He was leaning a little, so that she could see his face clearly, and on it there was a smile, either of mirth or of contempt.
Nan jumped up, with her hands gripped, ice on her lips, ice on her heart.
And there was Oliver Crosson of the wolves.
There was not only that one that she had seen in the water—now it squatted, watching her intently and with a savage interest—but on either side of the boy was another of the monsters, each lolling a red tongue, each wrinkling its bright eyes at her.
She drew in her breath to scream. But, from a corner of the eye, she saw the hotel again, the blink of an upper window, and she restrained the impulse to cry out.
She wondered why he did not speak. He was only smiling, watching her, and mute. She tried to edge away down the stream a little. With an idea of bolting, was it?
One of the wolves, a lean, gray female, came and sat down before her and dared her with eyes of a shameless boldness to move another inch. So she stood still.
“They could hear me at the hotel, if I yelled,” she said.
“You know that, I guess.”
“If you shouted?” said the boy. He opened his eyes at her. It was like the naïve way of a child. “Why should you shout?” he asked her.
She did not speak until she was sure that her voice would not tremble. But even then she was wrong. There was a decided quake in it as she said: “Do you think it’s an easy thing to be here like this . . . and have wolves . . . and . . . wolves, I mean, come out at one?”
“Oh, it’s the wolves,” he said. “They’re nothing. They wouldn’t touch you. I’ll show you that they wouldn’t touch you, if you’ll let me.”
“Show me, then,” she said.
“Well, it’s an easy thing. Just give me your hand, will you?”
She looked blankly at him. And then curiosity mastered her as it often masters the young and the foolish. And she thought of the gay grand story she would make of this when she returned to the hotel and told Chester Lyons how she, alone and unafraid, had stood there with the wolf-man and talked to him in the woods. It would be something worthwhile.
She held out her hand and he took it gently with the lightest of touches.
“It’s like this,” he said, explaining. “They don’t like strangers. Lots of dogs are that way, you know. Now you see this one. She’s the fiercest. She’s really a sort of demon. But she’s going to be introduced to you, and after that she’ll never harm you. She’d be a friend to you, in fact, I think.”
He spoke softly. The sound did form a word, so far as her straining ears could make out. Or was it some soft, guttural Indian tongue? It seemed wordless. It was not unmusical, but rather something between a deep growl and a whine.
The gray female, when she heard it, threw herself back as if about to attack. Her eyes turned green. She showed her set of needle-sharp teeth.
“She’ll jump,” said the girl, jerking back involuntarily.
He did not close his hand around her wrist. The gentle touch, however, fitted her like a glove, and she could not get away. “She won’t jump an inch,” he said. He spoke again, and suddenly the wolf skulked forward, tail between legs, still with the silent sneer, and came straight under the hand of Nan Lyons.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Now Nan Lyons was as one who stands on the brink of danger, but feels impelled to take the risk on account of the audience that watches. It seemed to her that the whole body of the big wolf was trembling with a virulent hatred and that the naked teeth fairly dripped a poison of resentment. But the man smiled down on the female wolf steadily, and suddenly the eye of the lobo turned from the girl to the master and clung there. She no longer trembled with hatred. She stood erect. Her lip no longer writhed back hard from the glitter of teeth. She was more like a house dog about to be petted.
“Now she’s safe,” said the boy, and Nan, with a vast effort, let her hand fall and fall until it touched the head of the wolf, which shrank down a foot or more from the contact. Its glance was now swerved back to the face of Nan herself, but there was more fear than enmity in the look. The hand of Nan descended again. What a vast power of will it cost her. And she found herself stroking the fur of the brute, whose eyes closed at each touch and, opening again, surveyed her with the look of one who has been hypnotized.
“You see,” said the boy. “She’s safe enough. I can make the rest of ’em do the same thing, if you wish.”
Nan straightened. Her hand was freed, she blinked and shook her head a little to assure herself that this was not a dream. “One is as good as a crowd,” she said.
She saw the gray wolf leap backward, stiff-legged, as though out of a trap, and to it slunk the other two wolves, half snarling as they sniffed at the head of the mother, as they detected upon the fur the evidence of a dangerous hand.
“Why, they hate humans,” she said. “They’d like to cut my throat, every one of them.”
“Why not?” explained Oliver Crosson. “You see the way they’re born and the way they live. They hunt, they find fresh meat on the ground, and they eat it in spite of a little scent of man about it, and they die in an hour or so, poisoned. Then there are some of them that escape and remember. They tell the rest, and they go playing over the open country. Men come on horses and hunt them. Then again, they’re simply sleeping in the sun, and they hear thunder when there’s no cloud in the sky and die as they wake up, with lightning through the brain.” He looked fixedly at her. “You can understand that, I suppose?” he said.
She had been accustomed, all her life, to look every man in the face except those who stared at her in such a way that the only thing to do was to be unconscious of their glances. The eye of the boy was not insolent, however. It merely burned with his question, and a sort of unspoken demand that she should see as he had seen.
She made a vague gesture toward the three brutes. “I don’t quite know,” she said. “You understand better than I do. They love you, I suppose.”
“Of course, they do,” said young Crosson. “But we’ve grown up together. It’s a different thing for all of us. If one of ’em has a thorn in his foot, he comes limping to me naturally. If they’re hungry, they come and sit down around me as though I were a dying elk in the snow.” He broke off with a laugh.
“Then you go hunting for them?” she asked.
“What else should I do?” he replied. “Of course, I go hunting for them just as they go hunting for me.”
“You don’t mean to say that they go hunting for you,” she said, incredulous.
“I never lie,” he said with a gentle and rebuking dignity.
She flushed. It was as if, in a sense, she had questioned the word of an innocent child. He seemed to be sunning himself in the pleasure of her company and in utter belief in all that she would seem to be. Then how could she doubt him?
“I only mean,” she said, “that I don’t see how they could hunt for you.”
“Well,” he said, “sometimes I go hunting and spot a place where I know that a deer is lying. You know how it is. You see that the trail is only an hour or two old, and that it points out of water into covert.”
“How would you tell that the trail is only one or two hours old?” she asked him, beginning to feel with a little pinch of anger that perhaps after all he was deceiving her.
He hesitated. “You can tell that yourself, I suppose?” he insisted.
“No. And how can you, really?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s the way that grass comes up after you’ve stepped on it . . . slowly, in the spring, when the ground’s soft and the grass is growing . . . faster in the tough days of the summer, when it’s wiry. You can tell from the way that the grass is rising about how long since it has been walked over.”
“But suppose there is no grass?” she demanded, determined not to be convinced.
“Well,” he answered readily, “then you lie flat on your face near the hoof print in the ground. If it’s wet ground, there’s a trace of water in the bottom of the hole or there isn’t. If it’s dry ground, then from the edges of the hole there are grains of the sand or the dust still sliding off, one by one, and spilling down into the hollow. By the time you’ve looked a few hundred times you begin to know just about how old a trail may be.”
She took a breath and nodded. She began to feel as if she were passing through easily opened gates into a new world.
“Well, then,” she said, “we’ve got to the place where you know that there’s a deer in a covert?”
“How the wolves hunt them for me?”
“Yes.”
“Why, that’s pretty easy. First, you take four or five wolves. Then you lay off a course about a mile from the covert, and you turn on that point and lay a trail around the covert.”
“You run for three miles, you mean?”
“Yes, for three or four.” He went on briskly, as though the matter were quite an ordinary thing for a child to know. “Every now and then, where the covert’s good and the space about right . . . every mile, perhaps . . . you leave a wolf behind you and po
int out the direction to be watched.”
“You tell a wolf to wait there, and he does it?”
“Oh, yes. You can teach a yearling in three lessons. Especially if you have a wise old she-wolf like Bianca to help you out. She gives them a couple of taps a good deal harder than I’d have the heart to do. Well, then, your wolves are down there, waiting, and they lie in a circle all around the covert. Then you go down yourself into the covert and rouse the deer out. Sometimes, if you’re very careful, you’ll come right up the wind to the very spot where the deer is lying, and half a dozen times there’s only been need of a jump and a knife thrust to end the thing.
“But usually the deer’s up and away. And then the nearest wolf runs and cuts it off. It swerves, but the wolf keeps the outer side of the circle. The deer can’t run back to the covert, because the scent of man is in there among the woods. Sometimes the man is on the rim of the woods, running along, keeping the course on the inside. And the wolf runs until it’s winded, or at least until it comes to the next wolf. Then it drops down into hiding, and the fresh wolf is up, ready to sprint another mile, and the deer runs around that circle with a new wolf jumping up every mile and running at full speed.”
“The poor thing,” the girl murmured.
“Well, we have to eat,” said the boy, and added a little guiltily: “Besides, there’s a sport in it. But that’s the way the wolves hunt for me.”
“And eat what they kill, too, I suppose. What good does it do you?”
“Why, I whistle them off when they’ve pulled the deer down.”
“Come, come!” she cried. “Will they leave the good red meat of a kill just because you whistle to them?”
“Yes, they’ll leave it,” he said. “That sounds pretty impossible, perhaps. But a wolf can be taught. And not with a whip, either. I make them discipline each other. All they know is that the commands come from me, and the punishment comes from each other.” He made a little gesture, as though inviting her to see how simple it was. “There’s nothing strange about it at all,” he said.
