The Lawless West (7 page)

The cry that the fat man raised in the bank at Jer-neyville proved to be louder and longer than Trainor had dreamed. It struck up echoes that, so it seemed, raised men out of the ground for hundreds of miles. He rode southward at first, aiming at the Río Grande and safety in the confusion beyond that muddy little river. But the first four days brought twice that many brushes with pursuing posses.

The first day of his flight went by well enough. The second day it ceased to be a joke. The third day, hard pressed on two sides, he became a criminal in fact as well as in theory by stealing a horse, even though he left behind him the worn-out gray of twice the value of the animal he took in exchange. The law had no time to waste on such trifles as this. The point was that he now rode on property that was not his. The written law of the land would send him to prison for the act, and the unwritten law of the Southwest would hang him for the same reason.

It was on the third night that he decided that the
trail southward was growing entirely too hot for him. The trouble was that they knew exactly what his goal was. 200 miles away flowed the Río Grande, but every mile of the 200 would be policed with men ready to shoot to kill.

There was another border to the north, ten times as far away, but, since his pursuers never dreamed that he would strike in that direction, he might safely reach it. So that night he turned his pinto north and west and rode like mad for the railroad. Before dawn he was beside the tracks. In the gray of the early morning light he was lying stretched on the rods of a thundering freight that shot him northward, covering a day’s ride for a horse in the space of a single hour.

Yet all was not smooth on that trip to the Northland. By no means! Before it ended, he knew the hardness of the fists of a brakeman, and many a shack knew the hardness of the quick fists of Jack Trainor. He knew other things, also, but, at the end of ten days of fighting and starving and freezing, with the bitter weather biting him more and more, he found himself at length flung from a speeding train that was roaring through a mountain pass.

He turned a dozen somersaults when he struck the ground, but he sat up, sound in body and bone, although sadly bruised. And then he watched the train thunder away out of view down the pass. He was left alone, half frozen, with the cold of an early winter night numbing his body, and the Canadian Rockies soaring up on every side toward the cold shining of the stars. And never in his life had he felt such loneliness, such a sense of utter helplessness. To him, home meant the wide silence of the desert with hills rolling softly against the horizon. Such
monster forest trees as those that marched in ragged ranks up these mountainsides were almost like human beings to Jack Trainor.

Yet, he must trust to fortune to strike through those same dark and forbidding trees and attempt to find food, for he was desperately hungry. Thirty-six hours of exposure without food of any kind gave him the appetite of a wolf, and like a wolf he stalked up the slope among the trees, bent on finding game.

A rising moon made the cold visible, so to speak, and gave it teeth to pierce to the very heart of the scantily clad cowpuncher. He trudged on up hill and down dale, feeling that, if he paused, the cold would numb his muscles so that they could not be used. And yet there was no sign of life before him or on any side.

The white moonshine was displaced by an ugly dawn, for no sooner did the sun show its edge than the sky was covered by a mass of clouds driving rapidly before the wind, and the day came up dim with the storm howling through the trees. A sort of madness came on Trainor. He had put many a long mile behind him, and now he decided that there was no chance of coming across the habitation of man in this direction, for he had reached not the slightest sign of a trail in all the distance he had covered. Therefore, he determined to turn back toward the tracks. Only madness could have given him that determination, for he was long past the point where he had sufficient strength to bring him to the spot from which he started during the night. Moreover, even if he wished to get back, that was now becoming increasingly difficult, for whirls of snow began to appear on the wind, blowing through the branches above him softly, and spotting the solid black of the
evergreens with white. This fall of snow was quickly transformed into such a downpouring as he had never dreamed of in his southland. It was like the descent of a myriad of gigantic moths flying down on noiseless wings and piling up on the ground.

Before an hour passed he was staggering through drifts knee high, where the wind had whipped and piled them on the edges of the open places. The air in front of him was filled with white. His senses began to reel; long since, he had lost all sense of direction. In fact, he had reached that point at which many a man would have given up, but pride kept him going. He could not admit defeat, no matter to what extreme he were pushed, and, just as he would have fought a human enemy to the bitter end, so he fought on mutely against weariness, cold, and devastating hunger.

Once he stumbled. He roused himself later to find that he had fallen into a profound sleep. And he was numb to the elbows and the knees. He got up and beat the circulation back in a frenzy, and then rushed blindly ahead, for he knew that, if he paused once again to rest in that fashion, the exhaustion of nearly three days without sleep would, combined with the cold, destroy him.

But now he found that his senses were swimming. He could not distinguish the way that he kept. Sometimes, he crashed into the trunks of trees. Sometimes, when he hooked an arm across his face to protect himself from the thicket that he seemed about to plunge into, he found that there was nothing but empty air and the rushing of the snow before him.

Every step he was taking now was straight away from the railroad. Indeed, ever since he started, save
for a brief half hour, he had been working on a line due north from the tracks. And now a mere chance floored him, so greatly was he reduced. He slipped on a stone under the lee of a great tree, struck his head violently against the trunk, and collapsed to the ground. Had he possessed a tithe of his ordinary strength, he would not have minded that fall and blow on the head at all, but in his present condition of exhaustion it was enough to throw him into the deep oblivion of senselessness.

He was roused from that senselessness as from a profound sleep by a huge voice that called to him out of an immense distance. He smiled and shook his head. It seemed to him that someone was calling to him to get up and start a day’s work in the pitiless cold of the world—someone was asking him to leave a cozy bed.

But the voice thundered over him again. He felt himself being shaken. Cruelly he was wrenched to his feet. He was beaten and thumped, and ever that immense voice roared at him. Then suddenly the veil dropped from his eyes, and he beheld himself standing in the midst of a forest full of blowing snow with a monstrous man looming above him, pommeling him with one fist while with the other arm he held him erect, and all the while shouting to him to make him regain his senses.

That glimpse of the startling truth ended in a mist of blackness again, and he crumpled into a deep sleep once more. But, just before the sleep came on, he felt himself lifted and pitched over the shoulder of the stranger.

It seemed to him that a nightmare journey began. Sometimes, he was enduring another of those beatings. Again, he was being carried on by the giant, although
this was obviously folly. What man was large enough to carry him through such a bitter storm as this, while the wind plucked at them and swung them back and forth?

After that a longer sleep ensued, and it was broken, at length, with a sense of burning in his throat and burning, also, of his feet and his face and his hands. He opened his eyes and looked up. Brandy had been poured down his throat. He was swathed in hot blankets. He was lying beside a red-hot stove. Then, as his senses cleared still further, he saw above him the strange giant of the storm, black-bearded, with bright, bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a tangle of uncombed hair. Out of his throat issued a great roar, that familiar voice of his dreams: “Hello…hello…hello!”

The voice fairly drowned the mind of Jack Trainor, but he managed to smile faintly. “I’m here, right enough,” he said.

At that, the big man slumped into a chair and heaved a great sigh. Jack saw that the other was on the point of collapse from exhaustion. Sweat was running down his face. The rosy cheeks were veined with purple from overexertion.

“Lord, Lord,” groaned the big man. “I thought that you’d never come ’round. I thought you was going…”

He did not finish his suggestion, but lolled back more heavily in his chair, laughing weakly and making a gesture to Jack to signify that all was well.

The man of the cattle ranges of the southland heaved himself up on his elbow and looked about him. He found that he was in a small cabin, the walls of which were of massive logs, with a small stove in the center, a bunk on one side, and guns,
traps, and fishing tackle covering the walls. Plainly it was a trapper who had blundered upon him. Then it occurred to him with a start that he weighed a full 180 pounds.

“How far did you carry me?” he asked.

“Three miles…I guess,” gasped the other.

“Three miles?” echoed Jack, and then, looking more closely at his companion, he saw that it was indeed possible. The man was a giant, standing several inches above six feet, and weighing twenty or thirty pounds above 200—and all of this solid muscle.

But now the prostrate giant recovered himself. He rose from his chair and staggered to a corner from which he began to produce bacon and flour, and in a few minutes he had the beginnings of a meal smoking on top of the stove. As for Jack, he felt that, had he been 100 miles away and soundly asleep, his nose would have brought him these tidings of food and roused him.

Sitting up to throw back his covers, he found that he was astonishingly weak. He had to lean back against the side of the cabin again, and the big man, reeling with weakness as though from liquor, laughed joyously at him.

“The last mile pretty near finished me,” he declared. “I thought I was gone, my friend, I promise you. But I prayed to the good Lord. He gave me strength. And so here we are, both of us!” And he laughed again.

There was something at once so kindly and so childishly simple in what he said, and in his manner of saying it, that Jack felt his very heart warmed by the big man.

“Partner,” he said, and found that his voice was strangely small and husky, “you’ve saved my life.
Nobody else that I know of could’ve carried me the way you carried me.”

“I?” said the other, shaking his head violently. “What I have done is nothing…nothing. But only think of the luck…that I saw the toe of your boot sticking up through the surface of the snow, and that I knew it was not a branch showing.”

Jack Trainor shuddered and caught his breath. Had he been as near to death as that? Had the snow entirely drifted over him?

He held out his hand to the big man. “What’s your name? I’m Jack Trainor.”

“And I, Joseph Bigot.”

“Joseph, before I come to the end of my life, I’ll show you how I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”

“Tush,”
said the other, flushing a brighter red. “You talk about such things later. Now I got no time!”

And he resolutely turned his back upon his guest and went ahead with the preparation of the food.

A month had passed. The mountains were covered with a thick white crust that would bear the weight of a man. And behold a new Jack Trainor, whistling down the mountain trail! He was clad in a clumsy fur garment that obviously had been made for a bigger man than he. His appearance was that of a monster in a sagging skin. But he walked freely and easily on the far side of the trail, he entered the cabin, and he exhibited the duster of pelts that he had carried in.

Big Joseph Bigot sat cross-legged on the floor, working over the last broken trap that he had stayed at home to repair that day. His practiced eye looked swiftly over the catch of the day, and he shook his head.

“No more days like yesterday…but then, my friend, that is enough luck for one season, eh?”

“Sure,” said Jack, smiling, “luck enough, I guess. And here’s another that I forgot to throw in with the rest.”

And, so saying, he threw down a dark and shining
pelt, a fox skin, the fur of which was like blowing feathers, so soft and light was it. It brought a shout from Bigot. He plunged to his feet and seized the skin. He sprang to the door with it. He let the gray light fall upon it. Then he whirled and executed about the cabin a clumsy bear dance that threatened to wreck the place.

“Ah,” he cried when he could speak, “ah, Jack, it is true, what I told you yesterday when we brought in the catch! You have beginner’s luck! If we keep on, we shall be rich. You hear? Rich!”

Jack Trainor regarded his companion with a great deal of curiosity and even a trace of scorn. According to his own code, it was far better to conceal all traces of emotion. As for the bit of soft fur that he had taken from the trap, and that he now had shown, he had known that it was a particularly fine one to look at and to touch. But why it should bring such rejoicing from the trapper he could not imagine.

“I dunno,” he said slowly, “but it looks to me like a pretty far cry from this here fur to being rich.”

“Does it?” said Joseph Bigot. “Man alive, d’you know what that fur is?”

“What?”

“It’s blue fox! It’s the finest fur that a man can get. It’s what every trapper dreams about. If I told you that a thousand dollars would be…”

“A thousand dollars,” gasped Jack, amazed.

“I dunno what the market will be,” said Joseph Bigot, “but I know this one thing…that I’m going to write to the girl today and tell her that in the spring we can get married.” He cast up both of his long arms and shook his fists at the ceiling. “The time’s come!” he said. “I’ve waited twelve years, and now the time’s come!”

Jack Trainor forgot about the fox skin and the price it might bring. Instead, he could think of nothing but the last statement of the big Canadian.

“D’you mean to say that you’ve been engaged to the same girl for twelve years?” he breathed.

Bigot laughed. “Twelve years I have waited,” he answered enigmatically. “First I wait for one, and then I wait for the other…twelve years altogether.”

And he would say no more about it until they had cooked and eaten their supper and cleaned up the tins. After that, they sat around for the long, bleak evening. Outside, the freezing sap in the trees was bursting with loud reports from time to time, for the thermometer had dropped fully thirty degrees since midday. At midday it had been cold enough, a wind at ten below zero coursing over the summit and shrieking through the trees. That wind had the edges of icy knives to go through and through even the thickest furs, and the only way to keep from being frozen was to stir about. Now, at night, there was not a stir of the air. The big pale moon moved up a cloudless sky. The mountains, under its light, were either black with forest and shadow or glistening in strange blue-white. And the cold was so terrible that it needed no wind to drive it home.

In the sides of the little cabin it found crevices and cracks through which to slide like rapier points, stabbing every living thing it struck. The stove roared, and the wood within it kept up a steady hissing of sap and humming, while the top of the stove was red hot. All the air in the room above the top of that stove was clear and warm. All the air below the surface of that stove was glittering with hoar frost. The upper parts of the bodies of the men were almost too warm, but below the knees they were
slowly freezing. One could feel the sharply defined borderline between the upper and the lower strata of atmosphere by passing the hand through the air. It was almost like moving the hands from warm water into ice water.

Jack Trainor, in fact, had not stopped trembling during the first three weeks of his stay. But, after that, as he grew hardened exteriorly to the biting weather, and, as his body accumulated the natural protection of a thin layer of fat over its entire surface, he began to fare better. And now, thoroughly accustomed to the heavy weight of the thick clothes and the furs with which the generous Bigot had equipped him, inured to the drafts and the bitter sweep of the winds, Jack had commenced to enjoy his strange surroundings and his new life.

He had been of little use to Bigot at first, but by constant study he made himself a sufficient master of the work to tend a line of traps after Bigot had set them out, and in this fashion he was able to double the amount of ground that the big man covered with his lines. To be sure, he could never be more than a very clumsy amateur, for to become a really fine trapper one must begin in childhood to study animals and the ways of taking them. More than that, one must be born with a certain gift.

Merely by his ability to cover ground was he useful when it came to tending the traps. There were other ways in which he was of greater service, and chief among these was his skill as a hunter. To be sure, the hunting in the snow-covered mountains was quite a different thing from the hunting in the southern deserts. But, once a hunter, always a hunter, no matter in what climate or country or for what game. A man who can shoot deer will, up to a
certain point, be an excellent hunter of anything else from coyotes to tigers. And Jack Trainor guarded the trap lines from those terrible enemies of the trapper that prowl through the night and devour before the dawn the prizes that the steel jaws have taken. Many a bobcat and lynx he dropped with his quick rifle, and Bigot, a most second-rate marksman in spite of a life spent in practice, wondered at these successes of his new ally.

As for the work he was doing, Bigot promised a share in the profits when the spring came and they returned to the lowlands, but the profits meant nothing to Jack Trainor. He was glad to have a haven during this winter. Moreover, he was beginning to see that the resolution he had so lightly taken, to sacrifice himself in the interests of his brother-in-law, was apt to lead to most lasting and disastrous results. During this winter, he was more or less free, for the stern weather and the inaccessible mountains would shut him off from discovery. They had almost no communication with the outer world. Once a fortnight, Bigot tramped down to the nearest little town and post office. There he sent out his mail and collected what had come for him, purchased needed supplies—as much as he could carry upon his back—and turned again into the stern trail that led over the peaks to his little cabin. Other than this fortnightly touch with the world, they were utterly isolated. But what would happen when the spring came and the trails were opened? The arm of the law was long, and the servants of the law were fleet.

So it was that many a solemn thought drifted slowly through the mind of Jack Trainor as he sat on this evening in the cabin and listened to the booming of the frozen trees and felt the cold numbing his
feet. Also, he was much amused by the actions of the trapper. Joe had brought out writing materials and placed them upon the little homemade table. He was sitting, with his pencil poised above the paper, the expression upon his face that of one determined to do or die, and feeling that death was nearer than accomplishment.

He felt that this time Bigot would welcome an opportunity to talk, and therefore he asked again: “And what about that story you started to tell me, Joe, about the twelve-year engagement? What’s the yarn behind that?”

As he had half expected, Joe Bigot laid down his pencil with a sigh of relief and turned upon his companion.