by Max Brand
“Who’s there?” called Kinkaid. Then: “It came from yonder by the creek. Scatter, boys! Give a challenge as you go. If you meet anyone who won’t speak, don’t waste any time, but open up and . . .”
Tom Farnsworth was already out of the grove. He crossed the lawn beyond it like a sprinter. He dived through a hole in the old hedge. He twisted to the left and found his horse, waiting at the place where it had been left, but not the horse alone, for a mounted man, very tall and on a horse of great size, sat his saddle nearby, holding the reins of Tom’s mount.
“Who’s there?” gasped Tom, snatching out his gun as he ran.
“Bobbie!” called a guarded voice.
“Thank goodness . . . good boy.” He flung himself into the saddle.
“What’s happened, sir?”
It did not occur to Tom to keep back any secret from this man. “I’ve killed Jack Pattison.”
“Lord, Lord!” groaned the Negro. “You’re not sure, sir?”
“I shot him through the forehead . . . straight through the forehead, Bobbie. Can a man live after that?”
Another groan from Bobbie.
“What’s to be done?”
“I’m thinkin’ . . . I’m thinkin’.”
“Best thing is to ride straight to the sheriff and give myself up. The sheriff would show me fair play.”
“Master Tom, you’re not very popular in Daggett just now. That was what brought me out after you tonight.”
“What do you mean, Bobbie?”
“I mean that, when I saw you start for town, I guessed that there’d be trouble. So I came along.”
“Start moving now. They’re coming close.”
The searchers from the house were beating through the garden, and now there was an outcry of horror. It could mean but one thing.
“They’ve found the dead body,” said Tom. “Bobbie, this is my last minute as a free man. After this, I’m going to be a hound and run, and never stop running.”
“Mister Tom, wait and listen to me. I have a way out of all this. You ride straight home. Don’t go to the sheriff and tell him what you’ve done. Don’t do that, but ride straight home. If you go to the sheriff, you can trust that a mob will go to the jail to lynch you. Everybody loved Jack Pattison. People will go wild when they learn what’s happened to him. But you go straight home the way I tell you. When you get home, go right straight up to your bed and turn in.”
“You want me to put my head quietly into the noose?” asked Tom.
“Mister Tom,” said the Negro, “have I ever missed out on a promise I’ve made?”
“You haven’t, Bobbie.”
“Then just trust me this one time more to take you out of this trouble. I have a way all planned. Nobody will ever guess that you have a hand in what’s happened tonight, unless Pattison wakes up and talks.”
“I wish to goodness he would. If he’d talk again, I’d give them free leave to hang me. Bobbie, what can you do?”
“Just let it all to me, sir. I have a way in mind. But you have to go home first.”
“Bobbie, God knows what devil got into me the other day when I struck you.”
“I’ve forgotten what you mean, sir.”
“You won’t come with me, Bobbie?”
“No, sir.”
“Good night, then, and good luck.”
“Good night, sir.”
Tom Farnsworth still hesitated for a little time, but now the noise from the Kinkaid house was growing more and more ugly. He could hear sounds from the stable behind the house, which was a very certain proof that they were saddling horses and making ready to pursue the murderer of poor Jack Pattison. Here was Bobbie, at whose side he somehow felt he should remain. But Bobbie was waving him away, and there the road stretched white and cool before him, twisting away into the pleasant darkness of the trees not far away. He let his long-legged bay mare drift softly through the silent dust that lay thick and light as feathers along the sides of the road. Presently, rounding the first turn and getting well out of the sight of the Kinkaid place, he gave the high-spirited creature her head, and she was away at once with a long, easy gallop. In the meantime, filled with a bitter concern, he wondered what could be in the mind of Bobbie.
“A nigger will show yellow sooner or later. Just give him time, and the bad streak will crop out,” someone had said to him. He had never forgotten it. And he felt now an ugly premonition that Bobbie would use his knowledge of what had happened in order to get a full revenge for the beating he had received so lately. Indeed, he would be almost more than human, Farnsworth felt, if he did not make some use of that power now in his hands. He had merely to go to the men who were mustering at the Kinkaid house. A single word would send them thundering toward the Farnsworth house. So Tom drew up his horse and waited for a time to see what would happen, and in what direction the current of the pursuit would flow. He had not long to wait. There was a dim outbreak of yelling from the center of the town, which he had just left behind him. Then the voices began to recede rapidly, until he heard them no more, but only the hollow roar of hoofs, passing over a bridge. Tom gave this his own interpretation.
The cunning rascal, said Tom to himself, he has told them that he saw the guilty man, and he has sent them on a wild-goose chase. He’s a handy fellow to have, is Bobbie.
IV
Bobbie had waited near the Kinkaid house with never a thought of treachery rising in his mind. His attitude toward his young master was a peculiar one. He did not love Tom. The blows that had been showered upon him lately had not been absolutely the first he had received. But, heretofore, Tom had been a little too much in awe of his gigantic servant to be free with punishment of a corporal nature. Yet he had taken Bobbie for granted from the first. They were almost exactly of an age. Bobbie was only a month or two older, but he had matured more quickly than the white boy, as Negroes almost always do. From the very first he had been little better than a slave to Tom. Never being without him, Tom had but a small value to place upon him. He heard other people make complimentary remarks about Bobbie, but he saw little reason for them. He accepted Bobbie as men accept pleasant weather with a sort of impersonal good nature.
Such was the attitude of Tom toward Bobbie, and of this attitude Bobbie was very well aware. For his own part he considered his master as a sort of limb of his own body. He could not separate himself from the thought of Tom Farnsworth. He reached the age of memory in the service of Tom. He had continued in it all his life. He could not possibly think of his own comfort and happiness first.
What he thought of, when Tom confessed that he had shot a man, was of his own grandfather when that dusky-faced, white-headed old man should hear the tidings that a Farnsworth had done a murder. What a passion of grief and of shame the old man would fall into, not because a Farnsworth could have committed a crime, but because his grandson could have allowed the crime to be committed. Such was the stern fashion in which he would take Bobbie to account. In the early days, when Tom was whipped by his father for stealing fruit or for any other of a thousand mischiefs, Bobbie was punished twice as severely by his grandfather, simply because he had not been able to invent the means of dissuading his young master from the crime.
So it was that on this night, as he heard Tom speaking, he saw the stern face of the aged Negro and shivered with apprehension. He would rather have faced a thousand whips, a thousand guns, than his irate grandfather in a bad temper.
“Son,” the old man had said when the tidings had come of how Bobbie had been publicly flogged by Tom Farnsworth, “niggers is niggers these days. They’s dirt. They ain’t no more what they used to be. Oh, Bobbie, I ain’t got the patience to talk none to you. Ah’m sick inside. You’ve made Master Tom disgrace himself before the whole town.”
This was only a small sample of the sympathy poor Bobbie received upon this and other occasions. He was like one of those ministers who served a monarch in the days when “a king could do no wrong.” The guilt of the ruler meant th
e death of the minister who had executed his decrees. So it was with Bobbie. And, as he learned from the lips of Tom himself that he had shot and killed young Pattison, all that Bobbie could do was say to himself: I’ve got to find some way to bring him off. I can’t face Granddad, if I fail Tom now.
It was not, truly speaking, sheer love for the master, but it was that blind thing that sometimes keeps men marching and fighting and struggling to death, a thing divorced from love or even sympathy—the devotion to a cause. The Farnsworths were such a cause to Bobbie. Tom was part of the Farnsworths. So the servant marched resolutely ahead to take the risk upon his own head. He waited, first of all, until Tom was well out of sight down the thick gloom of the road. Then, sure that he could proceed without being recalled at a critical moment, he passed down the road slowly, keeping close to the fence, so that there would be the greater chance of his being seen from the garden. He was spotted almost at once.
“Hello!” someone sang out. “Who’s there?”
Instead of answering, Bobbie ducked along the back of his horse and spurred away. This brought a shot, whistling above his head, and then a chorus of shouts: “I’ve seen him . . . a big man on a big horse . . . heading back through town.”
Babel swelled up from the place. But already they had done much work and made many preparations. All that the people needed—they were saddling horses already—was such a stimulus as the explosion of that gun to make them leap into action. They rushed down the driveway from the stables and past Kinkaid’s house. They spilled out into the street and spread out to keep from jostling, one against the other, until they saw in what direction they must next ride. So doing, they spotted the fugitive, moving swiftly down the street toward the very heart of the town. They raised a cry that would have done credit to a gang of Comanches newly riding on the warpath, with the blood appetite keen from long observance of peaceful ways. A score of men were almost instantly under way. For there were the men from Kinkaid’s place plus neighbors who had heard the shot and happened to have horses standing ready—for it was not very late in the night. Still others rushed to stables and tossed saddles on their mounts when they heard that wild and long-drawn yell from many throats, serving as a signal to tell every man in town that the quarry was running, and that he was in full flight. So they stormed in pursuit of the hunted, eager to come up and lend a hand to the good work. And work it was, before the morning dawned upon them.
Bobbie went through the center of Daggett, twisting at every corner. He did not race his horse. In fact, the animal would not stand racing. It was a sturdily built roan, able to carry the two hundred and forty pounds Bobbie weighed in his clothes. No spindle-legged sprinter of a horse could be expected to handle Bobbie’s weight, with the added pounds of a saddle that had to be made extra large and strong for the same reason. The result was that Bobbie had to be mounted on a thirteen-hundred-pound giant with sturdy ways and only an immense amount of endurance to recommend him. He had the two points that mean toughness, as a rule. The one was his roan coloring; the other was his Roman nose. The roan could strike a long canter and keep to it through most of a day, even with the burden of Bobbie on his back. It was at this pace—or at only just a little more—that Bobbie went through the town. Every time he turned a corner, he could do it without drawing rein. Every time the pursuit foamed around the corner behind him, it swung wide. Racing horses crashed against one another. Men lost their tempers and blamed one another heartily. But they gained very little ground on Bobbie and the roan.
Then they drew out of Daggett. On the outskirts someone yelled: “What’s Bobbie done?” It was a boy’s piping voice that could be heard half a mile away.
“It’s Bobbie!” ran another voice through the posse. And they repeated it with an oath: “It’s Bobbie! There’ll be dead men among us before we ever get that coon. If he’s gone bad, he’ll turn out a plumb lion.”
They straightway settled down for a long hunt. Those who happened to be better mounted than the rest did not press rashly forward in the hunt—for every man of them had seen Bobbie take a Colt in either hand and roll two tin cans in differing directions, kicking them along with sprays of dust, as the slugs spat into the ground just in the rear. They had seen him do tricks with a rifle, also. They had watched him box. For every man could well recall that historic occasion when the great black, who was battling upward among the ranks of the country’s heavyweights, had paused at Daggett to astonish the natives with his prowess. Bobbie had taken a bet and gone in against him. They had fought mightily, and young Bobbie had at last struck that Negro beneath the heart and then beneath the jaw with all his force, sending him to the hospital to recover. They knew all of these things about Bobbie. If he could do so many things in sport, they could not help wondering what he would be able to do when he was fighting desperately for his life. At least they were unwilling to crowd him. When the daylight came, they would be prepared to open up their guns on him and bring him back to them. So they pushed steadily on, but made no endeavor to run him down suddenly. They wanted, if possible, a peaceful surrender, not a butchery. But that peaceful surrender, they knew, would mean a lynching for Bobbie when he was brought back to Daggett, for, as they rushed out of the town, the word had been whispered among them that poor Jack Pattison was breathing, indeed, but fast dying—that he could not possibly live until the morning light began the new day.
They stormed along behind Bobbie out of Daggett, down the dry course of the Pickett River, and to the rise of hills that had been dignified by the title of the Daggett Mountains. They might have served for mountains in Wales or Scotland, but here, where Nature worked with a generous and a more hastily liberal hand, they were no more than hills. Into these they pushed Bobbie, who still fled fast before them.
Just before dawn he reached Milton Harrwitz’s place. He spurred with all the might of his roan down the slope, leading to the ranch in the hollow. In the field he roped a muscular five-year-old gray gelding, pitched a saddle onto its back, and rode off like mad again, with the bullets beginning to whistle around his head. As he rode, he twisted on the back of the gelding and managed to pass the girths beneath the belly on the galloping horse, and so to cinch them up—a feat truly close to the miraculous. But in ten minutes all was settled, the gray had not lost ground, and the moment Bobbie settled down to the work of seriously jockeying him, the gray began to make a gap between the big Negro and the pursuers.
Mischief, however, had been born by that maneuver. Bobbie had forgotten something of the most vital importance, something that no one west of the Mississippi is allowed to neglect. There may be reasons why one man may kill another man; there are even known occasions when it is a desirable and highly honorable affair. But there is never any occasion when the theft of a horse can be overlooked. If the posse worked honestly to get at Bobbie before, it now worked in feverish earnest.
He fled all that day and into the next night. Then he was headed. The telegraph had worked against him in a round-about fashion. The wire had gone triangling clear up to Denver and then back again to Kiever City. From Kiever two score men and youngsters, who had nothing better to do, spread across the hills to find the Negro. They went in groups of three to five, well armed. Some of them had dogs—big hounds were popular in that district, being crosses of the mastiff and the greyhound breed. They had the burly shoulders and the fighting jaws and wills of the former breed and something of the speed and the endurance of the latter. Four men and four dogs fell across the trail of Bobbie. It is known through all the district, five hundred miles in any direction, that the men of Kiever City are like their dogs, strong and lean and swift and hard fighters. And their horses are like the men and the dogs. Yet Bobbie gave them the slip. As the four plunged on through the gray of the dawn, they heard one voice, of the four that bayed before them, grow silent. Then another ended, and then a third. The fourth dog raised a wail, and they rode swiftly up on him. They passed one huge brute with its throat slashed open, then another, and at
the third dead body they found the fourth dog, the sole survivor, standing to mourn its mate. How Bobbie had done it they could not tell, but he must have found a way of swinging back in the saddle and meeting the leap of each hound with the slash of his long-bladed hunting knife.
They spread the tidings quickly to their companions in the hills. Such news travels without the aid of a telegraph wire. They learned that Bobbie was a dangerous man, indeed. The very next night he proved it. He had been flying for three days now, without rest or sleep. He had stolen and changed horses twice more on his way. But still the pursuers rose up out of the ground before him and clung in his rear, for the men of Kiever City and the Kiever Mountains do not give up a trail easily. Apparently he saw that straightway flight could not save him. He doubled straight down a narrow cañon, fell upon a party of three who were riding hotly after him, and went cleanly through them. He shot the first man off his horse, driving the bullet through the fellow’s right thigh. Then he dropped his revolver and caught at the other two with his bare hands. He emptied two saddles with two gestures and left two writhing, stricken men on the ground behind him, as he cantered away, leading their horses. To those horses he changed. It was two long hours before they could spread the tidings of how he had broken through their ring, and by that time Bobbie was twenty miles, or thereabouts, away. He had this advantage: he had dodged all pursuit and could now hide and rest himself and his horse. He had this disadvantage: the men of Kiever City and the Kiever Mountains now felt it their duty and incumbent upon their honor to hunt Bobbie to the death.
V
On the second morning after the melodramatic flight of Bobbie, his young master, Tom Farnsworth, rode down the countryside and found the ranch of Milton Harrwitz. Harrwitz was a Russian who had lived on the Steppes in his youth, and he had learned how to ride and raise cattle from the Tartars when he was a boy, having been stolen and carried away by a group of wild nomadic marauders. When he was twenty, he was a chief, because his long legs could cling to a horse and his hands could shoot a rifle with great precision. At twenty-five he met a romantic American girl, won her heart by his wild, strange face and his horsemanship, married her, and came to the States. There he broke her heart, spent her money, left her dying behind him, and went West. The cow range was nearer to his heart and his liking than anything he had seen since Siberia. He took the remnant of his wife’s money, bought a small herd, and ever since that time had slowly prospered. Now he was worth some hundreds of thousands. He was still a barbarian, but he had lived so long in the community that his neighbors were willing to overlook many of his faults. Like most Russians he was a good neighbor, true to those who trusted him, liberal with money to a friend, and, above all, an implacable enemy to those who excited his wrath. All of these qualities were highly admirable in the eyes of the men of the cow country. They were rather awe-stricken by the black squalor in which Harrwitz lived, by his swarthy, greasy skin, his bright eyes, and his smile like the hungry grin of a beast. But he had been a hero when the last forest fire swept the hills, and his other qualities had been proven. No one in the county would be more readily listened to.
