Макс Брэнд
Way of the Lawless
CHAPTER 27
The bullets of the posse had neither torn a tendon nor broken a bone. Striking at close range and driven by highpower rifles, the slugs had whipped cleanly through the flesh of Andrew Lanning, and the flesh closed again, almost as swiftly as ice freezes firm behind the wire that cuts it. In a very few days he could sit up, and finally came down the ladder with Pop beneath him and Jud steadying his shoulders from above. That was a gala day in the house. Indeed, they had lived well ever since the coming of Andrew, for he had insisted that he bear the household expense while he remained there, since they would not allow him to depart.
"And I'll let you pay for things, Andrew," Pop had said, "if you won't say nothing about it, ever, to Jud. He's a proud kid, is Jud, and he'd bust his heart if he thought I was lettin' you spend a cent here."
But this day they had a fine steak, brought out from Tomo by Pop the evening before, and they had beans with plenty of pork and molasses in them, cream biscuits, which Pop could make delicious beyond belief, to say nothing of canned tomatoes with bits of dried bread in them, and coffee as black as night. Such was the celebration when Andrew came down to join his hosts, and so high did all spirits rise that even Jud, the resolute and the alert, forgot his watch. Every day from dawn to dark he was up to the door or to the rear window, keeping the landscape under a sweeping observance every few moments, lest some chance traveler—all search for Andrew Lanning had, of course, ceased with the moment of his disappearance—should happen by and see the stranger in the household of Pop. But during these festivities all else was forgotten, and in the midst of things a decided, rapid knock was heard at the door.
Speech was cut off at the root by that sound. For whoever the stranger might be, he must certainly have heard three voices raised in that room. It was Andrew who spoke. And he spoke in only a whisper. "Whoever it may be, let him in," said Andrew, "and, if there's any danger about him, he won't leave till I'm able to leave. Open the door, Jud."
And Jud, with a stricken look, crossed the floor with trailing feet. The knock was repeated; it had a metallic clang, as though the man outside were rapping with the butt of a gun in his impatience, and Andrew, setting his teeth, laid his hand on the handle of his revolver. Here Jud cast open the door, and, standing close to it with her forefeet on the top step, was the bay mare. She instantly thrust in her head and snorted in the direction of the stranger.
"Thank heaven!" said Andrew. "I thought it was the guns again!" And Jud, shouting with delight and relief, threw his arms around the neck of the horse. "It's Sally!" he said. "Sally, you rascal!"
"That good-for-nothing hoss Sally," complained the old man. "Shoo her away, Jud."
But Andrew protested at that, and Jud cast him a glance of gratitude. Andrew himself got up from the table and went across the room with half of an apple in his hand. He sliced it into bits, and she took them daintily from between his fingers. And when Jud reluctantly ordered her away she did not blunder down the steps, but threw her weight back on her haunches and swerved lightly away. It fascinated Andrew; he had never seen so much of feline control in the muscles of a horse. When he turned back to the table he announced: "Pop, I've got to ride that horse. I've got to have her. How does she sell?"
"She ain't mine," said Pop. "You better ask Jud."
Jud was at once white and red. He looked at his hero, and then he looked into his mind and saw the picture of Sally. A way out occurred to him. "You can have her when you can ride her," he said. "She ain't much use except to look at. But if you can saddle her and ride her before you leave—well, you can leave on her, Andy."
It was the beginning of busy days for Andrew. The cold weather was coming on rapidly. Now the higher mountains above them were swiftly whitening, while the line of the snow was creeping nearer and nearer. The sight of it alarmed Andrew, and, with the thought of being snow-bound in these hills, his blood turned cold. What he yearned for were the open spaces of the mountain desert, where he could see the enemy approach. But every day in the cabin the terror grew that someone would pass, some one, unnoticed, would observe the stranger. The whisper would reach Tomo—the posse would come again, and the second time the trap was sure to work. He must get away, but no ordinary horse would do for him. If he had had a fine animal under him Bill Dozier would never have run him down, and he would still be within the border of the law. A fine horse—such a horse as Sally, say!
If he had been strong he would have attempted to break her at once, but he was not strong. He could barely support his own weight during the first couple of days after he left the bunk, and he had to use his mind. He began, then, at the point where Jud had left off.
Jud could ride Sally with a scrap of cloth beneath him; Andrew started to increase the size of that cloth. To keep it in place he made a long strip of sacking to serve as a cinch, and before the first day was gone she was thoroughly used to it. With this great step accomplished, Andrew increased the burden each time he changed the pad. He got a big tarpaulin and folded it many times; the third day she was accepting it calmly and had ceased to turn her head and nose it. Then he carried up a small sack of flour and put that in place upon the tarpaulin. She winced under the dead-weight burden; there followed a full half hour of frantic bucking which would have pitched the best rider in the world out of a saddle, but the sack of flour was tied on, and Sally could not dislodge it. When she was tired of bucking she stood still, and then discovered that the sack of flour was not only harmless but that it was good to eat. Andrew was barely in time to save the contents of the sack from her teeth.
It was another long step forward in the education of Sally. Next he fashioned clumsy imitations of stirrups, and there was a long fight between Sally and stirrups, but the stirrups, being inanimate, won, and Sally submitted to the bouncing wooden things at her sides. And still, day after day, Andrew built his imitation saddle closer and closer to the real thing, until he had taken a real pair of cinches off one of Pop's saddles and had taught her to stand the pressure without flinching.
There was another great return from Andrew's long and steady intimacy with the mare. She came to accept him absolutely. She knew his voice; she would come to his whistle; and finally, when every vestige of unsoundness had left his wounds, he climbed into that improvised saddle and put his feet in the stirrups. Sally winced down in her catlike way and shuddered, but he began to talk to her, and the familiar voice decided Sally. She merely turned her head and rubbed his knee with her nose. The battle was over and won. Ten minutes later Andrew had cinched a real saddle in place, and she bore the weight of the leather without a stir. The memory of that first saddle and the biting of the bur beneath it had been gradually wiped from her mind, and the new saddle was connected indisolubly with the voice and the hand of the man. At the end of that day's work Andrew carried the saddle back into the house with a happy heart.
And the next day he took his first real ride on the back of the mare. He noted how easily she answered the play of his wrist, how little her head moved in and out, so that he seldom had to sift the reins through his fingers to keep in touch with the bit. He could start her from a stand into a full gallop with a touch of his knees, and he could bring her to a sliding halt with the least pressure on the reins. He could tell, indeed, that she was one of those rare possessions, a horse with a wise mouth.
And yet he had small occasion to keep up on the bit as he rode her. She was no colt which hardly knew its own paces. She was a stanch five-year-old, and she had roamed the mountains about Pop's place at will. She went like a wild thing over the broken going. That catlike agility with which she wound among the rocks, hardly impaired her speed as she swerved. Andrew found her a book whose pages he could turn forever and always find something new.
He forgot where he was going. He only knew that the wind was clipping his face and that Sally was eating up the ground, and he came to himself with a start, after a moment, realizing that his dream had carried him perilously out of the mouth of the ravine. He had even allowed the mare to reach a bit of winding road, rough indeed, but cut by many wheels and making a white streak across the country. Andrew drew in his breath anxiously and turned her back for the cañon.
CHAPTER 28
It was, indeed, a grave moment, yet the chances were large that even if he met someone on the road he would not be recognized, for it had been many days since the death of Andrew Lanning was announced through the countryside. He gritted his teeth when he thought that this single burst of childish carelessness might have imperiled all that he and Jud and Pop had worked for so long and so earnestly—the time when he could take the bay mare and start the ride across the mountains to the comparative safety on the other side.
That time, he made up his mind, would be the next evening. He was well; Sally was thoroughly mastered; and, with a horse beneath him which, he felt, could give even the gray stallion of Hal Dozier hard work, and therefore show her heels to any other animal on the mountain desert, he looked forward to the crossing of the mountains as an accomplished fact. Always supposing that he could pass Twin Falls and the fringe of towns in the hills, without being recognized and the alarm sent out.
Going back up the road toward the ravine at a brisk canter, he pursued the illuminating comparison between Sally and Dozier's famous Gray Peter. Of course, nothing but a downright test of speed and weight-carrying power, horse to horse, could decide which was the superior, but Andrew had ridden Gray Peter many times when he and Uncle Jasper went out to the Dozier place, and he felt that he could sum up the differences between the two beautiful animals. Sally was the smaller of the two, for instance. She could not stand more than fifteen hands, or fifteen-one at the most. Gray Peter was a full sixteen hands of strong bone and fine muscle, a big animal—almost too big for some purposes. Among these rocks, now, he would stand no chance with Sally. Gray Peter was a picture horse. When one looked at him one felt that he was a standard by which other animals should be measured. He carried his head loftily, and there was a lordly flaunt to his tail. On the other hand, Sally was rather long and low. Furthermore, her neck, which was by no means the heavy neck of the gray stallion, she was apt to carry stretched rather straight out and not curled proudly up as Gray Peter carried his. Neither did she bear her tail so proudly. Some of this, of course, was due to the difference between a mare and a stallion, but still more came from the differing natures of the two animals. In the head lay the greatest variation. The head of Gray Peter was close to perfection, light, compact, heavy of jowl; his eye at all times was filled with an intolerable brightness, a keen flame of courage and eagerness. But one could find a fault with Sally's head. In general, it was very well shaped, with the wide forehead and all the other good points which invariably go with that feature; but her face was just a trifle dished. Moreover, her eye was apt to be a bit dull. She had been a pet all her life, and, like most pets, her eye partook of the human quality. It had a conversational way of brightening and growing dull. On the whole, the head of Sally had a whimsical, inquisitive expression, and by her whole carriage she seemed to be perpetually putting her nose into other business than her own.
But the gait was the main difference. Riding Gray Peter, one felt an enormous force urging at the bit and ready and willing to expend itself to the very last ounce, with tremendous courage and good heart; there was always a touch of fear that Gray Peter, plunging unabated over rough and smooth, might be running himself out. But Sally would not maintain one pace. She was apt to shorten her stride for choppy going, and she would lengthen it like a witch on the level. She kept changing the elevation of her head. She ran freely, looking about her and taking note of what she saw, so that she gave an indescribable effect of enjoying the gallop just as much as her rider, but in a different way. All in all, Gray Peter was a glorious machine; Sally was a tricky intelligence. Gray Peter's heart was never in doubt, but what would Sally's courage be in a pinch?
Full of these comparisons, studying Sally as one would study a friend, Andrew forgot again all around him, and so he came suddenly, around a bend in the road, upon a buckboard with two men in it. He went by the buckboard with a wave of greeting and a side glance, and it was not until he was quite around the elbow turn that he remembered that one of the men in the wagon had looked at him with a strange intentness. It was a big man with a great blond beard, parted as though with a comb by the wind.
He rode back around the bend, and there, down the road, he saw the buckboard bouncing, with the two horses pulling it at a dead gallop and the driver leaning back in the seat.
But the other man, the big man with the beard, had picked a rifle out of the bed of the wagon, and now he sat turned in the seat, with his blond beard blown sidewise as he looked back. Beyond a doubt Andrew had been recognized, and now the two were speeding to Tomo to give their report and raise the alarm a second time. Andrew, with a groan, shot his hand to the long holster of the rifle which Pop had insisted that he take with him if he rode out. There was still plenty of time for a long shot. He saw the rifle jerk up to the shoulder of the big man; something hummed by him, and then the report came barking up the ravine.
But Andrew turned Sally and went around the bend; that old desire to rush on the men and shoot them down, that same cold tingling of the nerves, which he had felt when he faced the posse after the fall of Bill Dozier, was on him again, and he had to fight it down. He mastered it, and galloped with a heavy heart up the ravine and to the house of Pop. The old man saw him; he called to Jud, and the two stood in front of the door to admire the horseman and his horse. But Andrew flung himself out of the saddle and came to them sadly. He told them what had happened, the meeting, the recognition. There was only one thing to do—make up the pack as soon as possible and leave the place. For they would know where he had been hiding. Sally was famous all through the mountains; she was known as Pop's outlaw horse, and the searchers would come straight to his house.
Pop took the news philosophically, but Jud became a pitiful figure of stone in his grief. He came to life again to help in the packing. They worked swiftly, and Andrew began to ask the final questions about the best and least-known trails over the mountains. Pop discouraged the attempt.
"You seen what happened before," he said. "They'll have learned their lesson from Hal Dozier. They'll take the telephone and rouse the towns all along the mountains. In two hours, Andy, two hundred men will be blocking every trail and closin' in on you."
And Andrew reluctantly admitted the truth of what he said. He resigned himself gloomily to turning back onto the mountain desert, and now he remembered the warning of failure which Henry Allister had given him. He felt, indeed, that the great outlaw had simply allowed him to run on a long rope, knowing that he must travel in a circle and eventually come back to the band.
Now the pack was made—he saw Jud covertly tuck some little mementoes into it—and he drew Pop aside and dropped a weight of gold coins into his pocket.
"You tarnation scoundrel!" began Pop huskily.
"Hush," said Andrew, "or Jud will hear you and know that I've tried to leave some money. You don't want to ruin me with Jud, do you?"
Pop was uneasy and uncertain.
"I've had your food these weeks and your care, Pop," said Andrew, "and now I walk off with a saddle and a horse and an outfit all yours. It's too much. I can't take charity. But suppose I accept it as a gift; I leave you an exchange—a present for Jud that you can give him later on. Is that fair?"
"Andy," said the old man, "you've double-crossed me, and you've got me where I can't talk out before Jud. But I'll get even yet. Good-by, lad, and put this one thing under your hat: It's the loneliness that's goin' to be the hardest thing to fight, Andy. You'll get so tired of bein' by yourself that you'll risk murder for the sake of a talk. But then hold hard. Stay by yourself. Don't trust to nobody. And keep clear of towns. Will you do that?"
"That's plain common sense, Pop."
"Aye, lad, and the plain things are always the hardest things to do."
Next came Jud. He was very white, but he approached Andrew with a careless swagger and shook hands firmly.
"When you bump into that Dozier, Andy," he said, "get him, will you? S'long!"
He turned sharply and sauntered toward the open door of the house. But before he was halfway to it they heard a choking sound; Jud broke into a run, and, once past the door, slammed it behind him.
"Don't mind him," said Pop, clearing his throat violently. "He'll cry the sick feelin' out of his insides. God bless you, Andy! And remember what I say: The loneliness is the hard thing to fight, but keep clear of men, and after a time they'll forget about you. You can settle down and nobody'll rake up old scores. I know."
"D'you think it can be done?"
There was a faint, cold twinkle in the eyes of Pop. "I'll tell a man it can be done," he said slowly. "When you come back here I may be able to tell you a little story, Andy. Now climb on Sally and don't hit nothin' but the high spots."
CHAPTER 29
Even in his own lifetime a man in the mountain desert passes swiftly from the fact of history into the dream of legend. The telephone and the newspaper cannot bring that lonely region into the domain of cold truth. In the time that followed people seized on the story of Andrew Lanning and embroidered it with rare trimmings. It was told over and over again in saloons and around family firesides and in the bunk houses of many ranches. For Andrew had done what many men failed to do in spite of a score of killings—he struck the public fancy. People realized, however vaguely, that here was a unique story of the making of a desperado, and they gathered the story of Andrew Lanning to their hearts.
On the whole, it was not an unkindly interest. In reality the sympathy was with the outlaw. For everyone knew that Hal Dozier was on the trail again, and everyone felt that in the end he would run down his man, and there was a general hope that the chase might be a long one. For one thing, the end of that chase would have removed one of the few vital current bits of news. Men could no longer open conversations by asking the last tidings of Andrew. Such questions were always a signal for an unlocking of tongues around the circle.
Many untruths were told. For instance, the blowing of the safe in Allertown was falsely attributed to Andrew, while in reality he knew nothing about "soup" and its uses. And the running of the cows off the Circle O Bar range toward the border was another exploit which was wrongly checked to his credit or discredit. Also the brutal butchery in the night at Buffalo Head was sometimes said to be Andrew's work, but in general the men of the mountain desert came to know that the outlaw was not a red-handed murderer, but simply a man who fought for his own life.
The truths in themselves were enough to bear telling and retelling. Andrew's Thanksgiving dinner at William Foster's house, with a revolver on the table and a smile on his lips, was a pleasant tale and a thrilling one as well, for Foster had been able to go to the telephone and warn the nearest officer of the law. There was the incident of the jammed rifle at The Crossing; the tale of how a youngster at Tomo decided that he would rival the career of the great man—how he got a fine bay mare and started a blossoming career of crime by sticking up three men on the road and committing several depredations which were all attributed to Andrew, until Andrew himself ran down the foolish fellow, shot the gun out of his hand, gave him a talking that recalled his lost senses.
But all details fell into insignificance compared with the general theme, which was the mighty duel between Andrew and Hal Dozier—the unescapable manhunter and the trapwise outlaw. Hal did not lose any reputation because he failed to take Andrew Lanning at once. The very fact that he was able to keep close enough to make out the trail at all increased his fame. He did not even lose his high standing because he would not hunt Andrew alone. He always kept a group with him, and people said that he was wise to do it. Not because he was not a match for Andrew Lanning singlehanded, but because it was folly to risk life when there were odds which might be used against the desperado. But everyone felt that eventually Lanning would draw the deputy marshal away from his posse, and then the outlaw would turn, and there would follow a battle of the giants. The whole mountain desert waited for that time to come and bated its breath in hope and fear of it.
But if the men of the mountain desert considered Hal Dozier the greatest enemy of Andrew, he himself had quite another point of view. It was the loneliness, as Pop had promised him. There were days when he hardly touched food such was his distaste for the ugly messes which he had to cook with his own hands; there were days when he would have risked his life to eat a meal served by the hands of another and cooked by another man. That was the secret of that Thanksgiving dinner at the Foster house, though others put it down to sheer, reckless mischief. And today, as he made his fire between two stones—a smoldering, evil-smelling fire of sagebrush—the smoke kept running up his clothes and choking his lungs with its pungency. And the fat bacon which he cut turned his stomach. At last he sat down, forgetting the bacon in the pan, forgetting the long fast and the hard ride which had preceded this meal, and stared at the fire.
Rather, the fire was the thing which he kept chiefly in the center of his vision, but his glances went everywhere, to all sides, up, and down. Hal Dozier had hunted him hotly down the valley of the Little Silver River, but near the village of Los Toros the fagged posse and Hal himself had dropped back and once more given up the chase. No doubt they would rest for a few hours in the town, change horses, and then come after him again.
It was a new Andrew Lanning that sat there by the fire. He had left Martindale a clear-faced boy; the months that followed had changed him to a man; the boyhood had been literally burned out of him. The skin of his face, indeed, refused to tan, but now, instead of a healthy and crisp white it was a colorless sallow. The rounded cheeks were now straight and sank in sharply beneath his cheek bones, with a sharply incised line beside the mouth. And his expression at all times was one of quivering alertness—the mouth a little compressed and straight, the nostrils seeming a trifle distended, and the eyes as restless as the eyes of a hungry wolf.
Moreover, all of Andrew's actions had come to bear out this same expression of his face. If he sat down his legs were gathered, and he seemed about to stand up. If he walked he went with a nervous step, rising a little on his toes as though he were about to break into a run or as though he were poising himself to whirl at any alarm. He sat in this manner even now, under that dead gray sky of sheeted clouds, and in the middle of that great rolling plain, lifeless and colorless—lifeless except for the wind that hummed across it, pointed with cold. Andrew, looking from the dull glimmer of his fire to that dead waste, sighed. He whistled, and Sally came instantly to the call and dropped her head beside his own. She, at least, had not changed in the long pursuits and the hard life. It had made her gaunt. It had hardened and matured her muscles, but her head was the same, and her changeable, human eyes, the eyes of a pet, had not altered.
She stood there with her head down, silently; and Andrew, his hands locked around his knees, neither spoke to her nor stirred. But by degrees the pain and the hunger went out of his face, and, as though she knew that she was no longer needed, Sally tipped his sombrero over his eyes with a toss of her head, and, having given this signal of disgust at being called without a purpose, she went back to her work of cropping the gramma grass, which of all grasses a horse loves best. Andrew straightened his hat and cast one glance after her.
A shade of thought passed over his face as he looked at her. But this time the posse was probably once more starting on out of Los Toros and taking his trail. It would mean another test; he did not fear for her, but he pitied her for the hard work that was coming, and he looked almost with regret over the long racing lines of her body. And it was then, coming out of the sight of Sally, the thought of the posse, and the disgust for the greasy bacon in the pan, that Andrew received a quite new idea. It was to stop his flight, turn about, and double like a fox straight back toward Los Toros, making a detour to the left. The posse would plunge ahead, and he could cut in toward Los Toros. For he had determined to eat once again, at least, at a table covered with a white cloth, food prepared by the hand of another. Sally was known; he would leave her in the grove beside the Little Silver River. For himself, weeks had passed since any man had seen him, and certainly no one in Los Toros had met him face to face. He would be unknown except for a general description. And to disarm suspicion entirely he would leave his cartridge belt and his revolver with Sally in the woods. For what human being, no matter how imaginative, would possibly dream of Andrew Lanning going unarmed into a town and sitting calmly at a table to order a meal?
