Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (57 page)

He was given a final encouragement when the three
women were safely beyond the black horse by one more quick and
laughing glance over the yellow shoulder. He promised himself, still
watching, that he wouldn’t neglect the invitation, but also that he
wouldn’t put himself at a disadvantage by acting with undue
eagerness. Hurry of any sort and for any reason was against his
natural inclination this morning anyway. He was full of lazy
well-being, heavy and at ease and also, for some reason, he was
finding the familiar uproar and motion and color of the Embarcadero
unusually satisfying. Smoking and smiling, he watched from beneath
his drooping lids the three women growing smaller among carts and
horses, street cars and hurrying men, and was about to turn after
them and commence his leisurely pursuit when they vanished, perhaps
behind the great brewery wagon, piled high with barrels, which was
just then slowly passing.

The effect of their disappearance upon him was not
that of anything so natural, however. He was astonished. His idleness
and contentment were gone in an instant, and he became alarmed
because his body was so unmanageably slow in answering his desire to
hurry after the three women. It seemed to him now that the last
glance of the woman in yellow had not been the signature of the
invitation after all, but an urgent, a terrified warning. He became
certain that her eyes had been staring at his in horror, because of
some danger which threatened him. She hadn’t been laughing at all;
she had been gasping, or even screaming; it was impossible in the
complex uproar of the waterfront to tell which. Nor was there any
question that the mock flight of the three women had at that very
instant become an actual flight. He believed also that there had
been, at the last moment, something familiar about the backs of the
two women, with the woman in yellow, the tall, long-striding one in
the center, and the short, quick one on the other side. Their
likeness to women he knew disturbed him even more than that of the
woman in yellow, but he hadn’t even glanced at them as they passed
him, more than to make sure the woman in yellow was the one worth
watching, and now there was no time to consult with his memory. He
had first to discover what the danger was. He believed it to be
almost upon him now, and he groaned at his own unwieldiness, but
managed at last to turn his head, and then knew at once that he had
been expecting this attack from the moment he had seen the human,
yellow eyes of the horse and the unnecessary little hurry of escape
by the woman in yellow.

The black horse was nearly upon him, looming twice
his height above him, and over its head, between its ears, he beheld
the driver, whom he hadn’t noticed before, a man unbelievably tall
and narrow, with yellow, inhuman eyes full of a deadly delight. He
had a long, dark beard, which flowed back upon the wind of his
approach, and his left arm was lifted threateningly against the sky,
which was suddenly gray and foggy and filled, as with streaming lower
clouds, with the drifting smokes of the city. In his upraised fist,
the bearded man was brandishing a great, black bullwhip.

Curt cried out and raised an arm across his face
to cover it from the expected cut of the lash, but astonishingly he
was flicked only lightly and not across the face at all, but upon his
right leg just above the knee. Then he realized that it hadn’t been
such a light blow after all, for the pain increased until it stung
almost unendurably. As he was telling himself that the whip must have
cut him like a knife, it became very dark on the Embarcadero, much
darker than fog alone could make it, so he knew he had been wrong
about the time of day. It wasn’t morning at all, but the beginning
of night. He became dreadfully confused, and the most confusing thing
was that he knew now, the instant the pain had begun he had known,
that the vengeful, bearded man was Arthur. The pain, however, became
much more important than the impending threat of Arthur and the
intelligent horse, which had now begun to shine like red gold and to
develop an iridescent halo, as if it were coming through a flaming
circus  hoop.

He moved his hand quickly to brush away the pain. At
once he was sitting, half-lying, really, in front of a small fire
with nothing but empty snow around it. For a moment this
transformation brought him tremendous relief, because he’d expected
to have to dodge Arthur and the horse again, and now they weren’t
there. Then he saw that what he’d brushed off his leg was a
cigarette butt. It was lying on cedar boughs beside him, not on gray
paving blocks, and the end of it, with the ash newly knocked off, was
glowing brightly. He came back into the waking world completely. He
looked quickly up across the clearing. Certainly he had done no more
than partly close his eyes for an instant, yet the shadows had
advanced dangerously toward him from every quarter. He could hardly
make out the trees at the edge of the clearing. His mind cried,
"Jump," but the best he could do was to bring his body
lumberingly to its knees and get the carbine, with maddening
slowness, turned toward the north edge. After a moment of scrutiny,
he relaxed, still studying the vague woods, but letting himself back
onto his heels and condemning himself aloud.

"Geez," he said bitterly, "fallin’
asleep."

When he felt that he could risk a look away from the
edge of the woods, he glanced at the fire. It was burned down to less
than half what it had been when he’d watched the panther with a
halo staring out of it. Also it was falling into separate elements
that would have left him no light at all in a very short time longer.

"You gotta keep awake," he told himself
urgently. "You gotta keep awake and keep that fire up. That’s
all that bastard’s waitin’ for, you asleep and the fire down.
Geez, boy,” he exploded in the first full comprehension of what a
few minutes more of sleep would have meant.

He got to his feet laboriously and, turning the
carbine as he turned, peered all around the shadowy border of the
clearing. When he had decided, moving his thoughts with almost as
much difficulty as he had in moving his body, that he could afford
another look away from the woods, he threw live more boughs from the
pile onto the fire. At first slowly, and then with a rush, the flames
came up through them and the clearing was once more defensible. He
stood attentively at guard for some time, but then, since only the
firelight and the shadows it made had moved, decided that he could
risk some action against the threat of returning
drowsiness.
He vigorously rubbed the spot on his leg where the cigarette had
burned him and then stretched himself, holding the carbine aloft and
arching his back, urging every muscle of his body to return to
usefulness. He relaxed with a sigh and began to walk about in small
circles and figures of eight on the sinking couch of boughs,
stretching his legs one at a time, straining his head down and
shaking it. But even after that he felt dull. He made another
examination of the outer line of his defenses and knelt, with the
carbine across his thighs, and scrubbed his face fiercely with one
handful of snow after another. After that it seemed to him that his
mind was nearly to be trusted, although his body still refused to be
completely aroused. Kneeling there with the snow-wet on his face, he
considered the problem, moving each idea separately, as if it were a
large and almost square stone. Suddenly he raised his head.

"Smoke," he said with satisfaction. "Keep
smokin’."

He seated himself cross-legged upon the boughs, the
carbine ready across his lap, and drew his papers and sack of tobacco
out from under the parka and began to make cigarettes.

"Last about ten minutes apiece," he
decided. “Mostly longer, but say ten. Then ten minutes between
cigarettes. That’s three an hour. There’ll be daylight enough to
get going by six o’clock. It’s about. . ."

He squinted up at the sky, trying to see the stars
through the imprisoning aura of the fire. Only a few of them were
visible, and they were such faint points and so far apart that he
cou1dn’t recognize any constellation. He thought of getting up and
going beyond the light for a look, but he wasn’t sure he could make
a good guess even then. He’d never paid much attention to stars.
Lethargy and the thought of standing out there in the darkness and
staring up instead of keeping his gaze upon a useful worldly level
decided him against the effort.

"You can figure it close enough," he said,
working at the cigarettes again. "Say it was dark about six. Not
any earlier, anyway, and that’ll make it an even twelve hours. I
must of been up in the valley about then."

He began to estimate the time it had taken him to
climb the lower ridge, play his ridiculous little drama on top of it
and then get down into the clearing, and start the fire and cut the
big pile of boughs. For the first time he realized how spasmodically
he had moved, here waiting on guard for a long while, there advancing
with the utmost caution, and finally descending in a series of blind,
panic-stricken rushes. In review the whole journey since dark was a
dream in which action is without sequence and there is no dependable
sense of time or place. The clear, even-paced dream of the 
Embarcadero was daylit reality compared to it, except for the final,
murderous rush of the man-eyed horse and the animal-eyed driver. Yet
as he reviewed his progress and at the same time remembered the
dream, it was the clear and amusing passage of the three women which
receded and dwindled and became transparent, while curiosity and
lingering fear allied the monstrous assault of the horse and the
teamster with his actual retreat from the cat.

"Holy God," he muttered, "didn’t I
know what I was doin’ at all?" and resigned himself to
calculating the time it would have taken him to
get across the ridge in daylight at a steady pace, such as he might
have maintained in the course of an ordinary hunt.

"That’ll be close enough for this cigarette
business," he assured the monitor, who had been weakened by
sleep and made terribly uneasy by this last wrestling with the
mingled experiences of the sleep world and the waking.

"Three hours," he admitted finally. "It
couldn’t have been less, that’s a cinch. Call it nine o’c1ock
now then."

At the conclusion the monitor promptly lost his
self-control, and cried out wildly within. Only nine o’clock. I
thought it was midnight anyway. Nine o’clock. That’s nine hours
to wait. You can’t last nine hours, you fool. You can’t keep
awake nine hours. You aren’t even really awake right now. Nine
hours. Oh, my God.

Curt experienced a frantic urge to get up and make a
run for it right now, and at the same time he underwent a great
rising, dilating, tremulous motion of the spirit, a wordless prayer
in extremity. The "Oh, my God," of the monitor was not
merely a profane exclamation, by any means. All of the three days’
need of help, of someone to talk to, of lapses into unaccustomed
panic, and self—doubt, and dreaminess, came together in him, and
the monitor cried it out in
those three
words.

In his present heaviness, and in the security of the
firelit clearing, however, even despair had only the power it might
have in a borderline dream which part or him refused to believe,
remaining aloof and critical.

"Take it easy, will you?" he told the
cringing monitor. "Nine hours? What the hell’s nine hours? You
can take anything for nine hours."

"What was it I figured?" he asked himself,
and finally found it. "Three cigarettes an hour," he said.
"That’s twenty-seven cigarettes."

There were papers enough to make only fourteen
cigarettes, however. When the last paper had been used, he counted
the cigarettes, laid out in a row on the bough beside him, and there
were only fourteen.

"A1l right," he said quickly, before the
monitor could wail again. "You’ll have to wait a little longer
between smokes, that’s all. It’ll be. .."

He labored slowly at the problem, helping himself
with figures written into the snow with a twig, and making several
errors, each of which caused a raging despair almost equal to that
which had followed the attempt to review his retreat. After four
tries, he arrived at the conclusion that there were five hundred and
sixty minutes in nine hours. But then he brooded for some time, and
finally bent his head down and pummeled the back of it with both
lists, and cried softly, "Geez, can’t you think at all?"
because he couldn’t make up his mind what calculation was required
to discover the number of minutes between cigarettes. At last,
however, he decided that he should divide five
hundred and sixty by fourteen. He got the answer to this on only the
second try, and was encouraged because it was so probable that it
seemed to justify his selection of division.

"Forty minutes," he announced happily. "One
cigarette every forty minutes."

He was about to settle himself in the unthinking ease
of one who has only to observe a completed table of answers in order
to know what to do and when to do it, when it occurred to him that he
hadn’t allowed for the time required to smoke the cigarettes.

"Oh, dammit to hell," he groaned, and
suddenly and furiously wiped out all the figures he had drawn in the
snow.

"No," he retorted, after a minute, "you
gotta know. Ten minutes to a cigarette, I figured. Times fourteen,
that’s . . ."