The Max Brand Megapack (397 page)

He breathed deeply, and then: “It was like jumping into cold water all of a sudden. I felt hollow inside. And then all at once I knew they’d never been a hoss like him in the mountains. I knew he was an outlaw. I knew he was plumb bad. But I knew he was a king, lady, and I couldn’t no more shoot him that I could lie behind a bush and shoot a man.” He was suddenly on fire.

“Looked to me like he was my hoss. Like he’d been planned for me. I wanted him terrible bad, the way you want things when you’re a kid—the way you want Christmas the day before, when it don’t seem like you could wait for tomorrow.”

“But—he’s a man-killer, Mr. Perris. I’ve seen it!”

His hand went out to her and she listened in utter amazement while he pleaded with all his heart in his voice.

“Lemme have a chance to make him my hoss, murders or not! Lemme stay here on the ranch and work, because they’s no other good place for hunting him. I know you want them mares, but some day I’ll get my rope on him and then I swear I’ll break him or he’ll break me. I’ll break him, ride him to death, or he’ll pitch me off and finish me liked he finished Cordova. But I know I can handle him. I sure feel it inside of me, lady! Pay? I don’t want pay! I’ll work for nothing. If I had a stake, I’d give it to you for a chance to keep on trying for him. I know I’m asking a pile. You want the mares and you can get them the minute Alcatraz is dropped with a bullet,—but I tell you straight, he’s worth all of ’em—all six and more!”

A light came over his face. “Miss Jordan, lemme stay on and try my luck and if I get him and break him, I’ll turn him over to you. And I tell you: he’s the wind on four feet.”

“You’ll do all this and then give him to me when he’s gentled and broken—if that can be done? Then why do you want him?”

“I want to show him that he’s got a master. He’s played with me and plumb fooled me all these weeks. I want to get on him and show him he’s beat.” His fierce joy in the thought was contagious. “I want to make him turn when I pull on the reins. I’ll have him start when I want to start and stop when I want to stop. I’ll make him glad when I talk soft to him and shake when I talk hard. He’s made a fool of me; I’ll make a fool and a show of him. Lady, will you say yes?”

He had swept her off her feet and with a mind full of a riot of imaginings—the frantic stallion, the clinging rider, the struggle for superiority—she breathed: “Yes, yes! A thousand times yes—and good luck, Mr. Perris.”

He tossed his arms above his head and cried out joyously.

“Lady, it’s more’n ten years of life to me!”

“But wait!” she said, suddenly aware of Hervey, lingering in the background. “I haven’t the power to let you stay. It’s Mr. Hervey who has authority while my father is away.”

The lips of Red Jim twitched to a sneering malevolence mingled with gloom.

“It’s up to him?” he echoed. “Then I might of spared myself all of this talk.”

It would all be over in a moment. The foreman would utter the refusal. Red Perris would be in his saddle and bound towards the mountains. And that thought gave Marianne sudden insight into the fact that the Valley of the Eagles would be a drear, lonely place without Red Jim.

“You don’t know Mr. Hervey,” she broke in before the foreman could speak for himself. “He’ll bear no malice to you. He’s forgotten that squabble over—”

“Sure I have,” said Lew Hervey. “I’ve forgotten all about it. But the way I figure, Miss Jordan, is that Perris is like a chunk of dynamite on the ranch. Any day one of the boys may run into him and there’ll be a killing. They’re red-hot against him. They might start for him in a gang one of these days, for all I know. For his own sake, Perris had better leave the Valley.”

He had advanced his argument cunningly enough and by the way Marianne’s eyes grew large and her color changed, he knew that he had made his point.

“Would they do that?” she gasped. “Have we such men?”

“I dunno,” said Lew. “He sure rode ’em hard that morning.”

“Then go,” cried Marianne, turning eagerly to Red Jim. “For heaven’s sake, go at once! Forget Alcatraz—forget the mares—but start at once, Mr. Perris!”

Even a blind man might have guessed many things from the tremor of her voice. Lew Hervey saw enough to make his eyes contract to the brightness of a ferret’s as he glanced from the girl to handsome Jim Perris. But the red-headed adventurer was quite blind, quite deaf. No matter how the thing had been done, he knew that the girl and the foreman were now both combined to drive him from the ranch, from Alcatraz. For a moment of blind anger he wanted to crush, kill, destroy. Then he turned on his heel and strode towards the arch which led into the patio.

“Mind you!” called Lew Hervey in warning. “It’s on your own head, Perris. If you don’t leave, I’ll throw you off!”

Red Jim flashed about under the shade of the arch.

“Come get me, and be damned,” he said.

And then he was gone. The cowpunchers, furious at this open defiance of them all, boiled out into the patio, growling.

“You see?” said Hervey to the girl. “He won’t be satisfied till there’s a killing!”

“Keep them back!” she pleaded. “Don’t let them go, Mr. Hervey. Don’t let them follow him!”

One sharp, short order from Hervey stopped the foremost as they ran for the entrance. In fact, not one of them was peculiarly keen to follow such a trail as this in the darkness. Breathless silence fell over the patio, and then they heard the departing beat of the hoofs of Red’s horse. And the shock of every footfall struck home in the heart of Marianne and filled her with a great loneliness and terror. And then the noise of the gallop died away in the far-off night.

CHAPTER XVII

INVISIBLE DANGER

Alcatraz, cresting the hill, warned the mares with a snort. One by one the bays brought up their beautiful heads to attention but the grey, as was her custom in moments of crisis or indecision, trotted forward to the side of the leader and glanced over the rolling lands below. Her decision was instant and decisive. She shook her head and turning to the side, she started down the left slope at a trot. Alcatraz called her back with another snort. He knew, as well as she did, the meaning of that faint odor on the east wind: it was man, unmistakably the great enemy; but during five days that scent had hung steadily here and yet, over all the miles which he could survey there was no sign of a man nor any places where man could be concealed. There was not a tree; there was not a fallen log; there was not a stump; there was not a rock of such respectable dimensions that even a rabbit would dare to seek shelter behind it. Still, mysteriously, the scent of man was there.

Alcatraz stamped with impatience and when the grey whinnied he merely shook his head angrily in answer. It irritated him to have her always right, always cautious, and besides he felt somewhat shamed by the necessity of using her as a court of last appeal. To be sure, he was a keener judge of the sights and scents of the mountain desert than any of the half-bred mares but though he lived to fifty years he would never approach the stored wisdom, the uncanny acuteness of eye, ear, and nostril of the wild grey. Her view-point seemed, at times, that of the high-sailing buzzards, for she guessed, miles and miles away, what water-holes were dry and what “tanks” brimmed with water; what trails were broken by landslides since they had last been travelled and where new trails might be found or made; when it was wise to seek shelter because a sand-storm was brewing; where the grass grew thickest and most succulent on far-off hillsides; and so on and on the treasury of her knowledge could be delved in inexhaustibly.

On only one point did he feel that his cleverness might rival hers and that point was the most important of all—man the Great Destroyer. She knew him only from a distance whereas had not Alcatraz breathed that dreaded scent close at hand? Had he not on one unforgetable occasion felt the soft flesh turn to pulp beneath his stamping feet, and heard the breaking of bones? His nostrils distended at the memory and again he searched the lowlands.

No, there was not a shadow of a place where man might be concealed and that scent could be nothing but a snare and an illusion. To be sure there were other ways hardly less convenient to the waterhole, but why should he be turned from the easiest way day after day because of this unbodied warning? He started down the slope.

It brought the grey after him, neighing wildly, but though she circled around him at full speed time after time, he would not pause, and when she attempted to block him he raised his head and pushed her away with the resistless urge of breast and shoulders. At that she attempted no more forceful persuasion but fell in behind him, still pausing from time to time to send her mournfully persuasive whinny after the obdurate leader until even the bays, usually so blindly docile, grew alarmed and fell back to a huddled grouping half way between Alcatraz and the trailing grey. It touched his pride sharply, this division of their trust. Twice he slackened his lope and called to them to hasten and when they responded with only a faint-hearted trot he was forced to mask his impatience. Coming to a walk he cropped imaginary grasses from time to time and so induced the others to draw nearer.

It was slow work going down the hollow in this way, and hot work, too, but though he often glanced up yearningly towards the wooded hills beyond, he kept to his pretense of carelessness and so managed to hold the mares in a close-bunched group behind him. In the meantime the scent grew stronger, closer to the ground on that east wind. Time and again he raised his head and stared earnestly, but it was impossible for any living creature to stalk within hundreds of yards of him without being seen—whereas that scent spoke of one almost within leaping distance. Once it seemed to his excited imagination—as he lowered his head to sniff at a tuft of dead grasses—that he heard the sound of human breathing.

He snorted the foolish thought into nothingness and after a glance back to make sure that his companions followed, he resolutely stepped out into the very heart of the man-scent. So closely was that phantom located by the sense of smell that it seemed to Alcatraz he could see the exact spot on the hillside behind a small rock where the ghost must lie. Yet he disdained to flee from empty air and for all his beating heart he raised his head and walked sedately on. The danger spot was drifting past on his left when a squeal of fear from the wild grey far in the rear made Alcatraz leap sidewise with catlike suddenness.

Growing by magic from the sand behind the little rock the head and shoulders of a man appeared, his shadow pouring down the sun-whitened slope. In his hand he swung a rapidly lengthening loop of rope and as his arm went back it knocked off the fellow’s hat and exposed a shock of red hair. So much Alcatraz saw while the paralysis of fear locked every joint for the tenth part of a second, and deeply as he dreaded the apparition itself he dreaded more the whipping circle of rope. For had he not seen the dead thing become alive and snakelike in the skilled hand of Manuel Cordova? The freezing terror relaxed; the sand crunched away under the drive of his rear hoofs as he flung himself forward—with firm footing to aid he would have slid from beneath the flying danger, but as it was he heard the live rope whisper in the air above his head.

He landed on stiff legs, checked his forward impetus and flung sidewise. On solid footing he would have dodged successfully; as it was the noose barely clipped past his ear.

As the rope touched his neck, it seemed to Alcatraz that every wound dealt him by the hand of man was suddenly aching and bleeding again, the skin along his flanks quivered where the spurs of Cordova had driven home time and again, and on shoulders and belly and hips there were burning stripes where the quirt had raised its wale. Most horrible of all, in his mouth came the taste of iron and his own blood where the Spanish bit had wrenched his jaws apart. Out of the old days he might have remembered the first and bitterest lesson—that it is folly to pull against a rope—but now he saw nothing save the fleeing forms of the seven mares and his own freedom vanishing with them. In his mid-leap the lariat hummed taut, sank in a burning circle into the flesh at the base of his neck, and he was flung to the ground. No man’s power could have stopped him so short; the cunning enemy had turned a half-hitch around the top of that deep-rooted rock.

He landed, not inert, but shocked out of hysteria into all his old cunning—that wily savagery which had kept Cordova in fear, ten-fold more terrible since the free life had clothed him with his full strength. The very impetus of his fall he used to help him whirl to his feet, and as he rose he knew what he must do. To struggle against the tools of man was always madness and brought only pain as a result; like a good general he determined to end the battle by getting at the root of the enemy’s fire, and wheeling on his hind legs he charged Red Perris.

The first leap revealed the mystery of the man’s appearance. Behind this rock, which was barely sufficient shelter for his head, he had excavated a pit sufficient to shelter his crouching body and the sand which he removed for this purpose had been spread evenly over the slope so that no suspicion might be created in the most watchful eye. He had sprung from his concealment and was now working to loosen the half-hitch from the rock. As the knot came free Alcatraz was turning and now Perris faced the charge with the rope caught in his hand. What could he do? There was only one thing, and the stallion saw the heavy revolver bared and levelled at him, a flickering bit of metal. He knew well what it meant but there was no hope save to rush on; another stride and he would be on that frail creature, tearing with his teeth and crushing with his hoofs. And then a miracle happened. The revolver was flung aside, a gleaming arc and a splash of sand where it struck; Red Perris preferred to risk his life rather than end the battle before it was well begun with a bullet. He crouched over the rope as though he had braced himself to meet the shock of the charging stallion. But that was not his purpose. As the stallion rushed on him he darted to one side and the fore hoof with which Alcatraz struck merely slashed his shirt down the back.