The Range Dwellers by B. M. Bower (best books to read all time txt) 📗

I held out the paper to Perry Potter, "Have some one saddle up Shylock," I ordered, quite as if he had been Rankin. "And Frosty will have to go with me as far as Osage. We can make it by to-morrow noon—through King's Highway. I mean to get that early afternoon train."

The last sentence I sent back over my shoulder, on my way to the house. Dad sick—dying? I cursed the miles between us. Frisco was a long, a terribly long, way off; it seemed in another world.

By then I was on my way back to the corral, with a decent suit of clothes on and a few things stuffed into a bag, and with a roll of money—money that I had earned—in my pocket. I couldn't have been ten minutes, but it seemed more. And Frisco was a long way off!

"You'd better take the rest of the boys part way," Potter greeted dryly as I came up.

I brushed past him and swung up into the saddle, feeling that if I stopped to answer I might be too late. I had a foolish notion that even a long breath would conspire to delay me. Frosty was already on his horse, and I noticed, without thinking about it at the time, that he was riding a long-legged sorrel, "Spikes," that could match Shylock on a long chase—as this was like to be.

We were off at a run, without once looking back or saying good-by to a man of them; for farewells take minutes in the saying, and minutes meant—more than I cared to think about just then. They were good fellows, those cowboys, but I left them standing awkwardly, as men do in the face of calamity they may not hinder, without a thought of whether I should ever see one of them again. With Frosty galloping at my right, elbow to elbow, we faced the dim, purple outline of White Divide.

Already the dusk was creeping over the prairie-land, and little sleepy birds started out of the grasses and flew protesting away from our rush past their nesting-places. Frosty spoke when we had passed out of the home-field, even in our haste stopping to close and tie fast the gate behind us.

"You don't want to run your horse down in the first ten miles, Ellis; we'll make time by taking it easy at first, and you'll get there just as soon." I knew he was right about it, and pulled Shylock down to the steady lope that was his natural gait. It was hard, though, to just "mosey" along as if we were starting out to kill time and earn our daily wage in the easiest possible manner. One's nerves demanded an unusual pace—a pace that would soothe fear by its very headlong race against misfortune.

Once or twice it occurred to me to wonder, just for a minute, how we should fare in King's Highway; but mostly my thoughts stuck to dad, and how it happened that he was "critically ill," as the message had put it. Crawford had sent that message; I knew from the precise way it was worded—Crawford never said sick—and Crawford was about as conservative a man as one could well be, and be human. He was as unemotional as a properly trained footman; Jenks, our butler, showed more feeling. But Crawford, if he was conservative, was also conscientious. Dad had had him for ten years, and trusted him a million miles farther than he would trust anybody else—for Crawford could no more lie than could the multiplication-table; if he said dad was "critically ill," that settled it; dad was. I used to tell Barney MacTague, when he thought it queer that I knew so little about dad's affairs, that dad was a fireproof safe, and Crawford was the combination lock. But perhaps it was the other way around; at any rate, they understood each other perfectly, and no other living man understood either.

The darkness flowed down over the land and hid the farther hills; the sky-line crept closer until White Divide seemed the boundary of the world, and all beyond its tumbled shade was untried mystery. Frosty, a shadowy figure rising and falling regularly beside me, turned his face and spoke again:

"We ought to make Pochette's Crossing by daylight, or a little after—with luck," he said. "We'll have to get horses from him to go on with; these will be all in, when we get that far."

"We'll try and sneak through the pass," I answered, putting unpleasant thoughts resolutely behind me. "We can't take time to argue the point out with old King."

"Sneak nothing," Frosty retorted grimly. "You don't know King, if you're counting on that."

I came near asking how he expected to get through, then; when I remembered my own spectacular flight, on a certain occasion, I felt that Frosty was calmly disowning our only hope.

We rode quietly into the mouth of King's Highway, our horses stepping softly in the deep sand of the trail as if they, too, realized the exigencies of the situation. We crossed the little stream that is the first baby beginning of Honey Creek—which flows through our ranch—with scarce a splash to betray our passing, and stopped before the closed gate. Frosty got down to swing it open, and his fingers touched a padlock doing business with bulldog pertinacity. Clearly, King was minded to protect himself from unwelcome evening callers.

"We'll have to take down the wires," Frosty murmured, coming back to where I waited. "Got your gun handy? Yuh might need it before long." Frosty was not warlike by nature, and when he advised having a gun handy I knew the situation to be critical.

We took down a panel of fence without interruption or sign of life at the house, not more than fifty yards away; Frosty whispered that they were probably at supper, and that it was our best time. I was foolish enough to regret going by without chance of a word with Beryl, great as was my haste. I had not seen her since that day Frosty and I had ridden into their picnic—though I made efforts enough, the Lord knows—and I was not at all happy over my many failures.

Whether it was good luck or bad, I saw her rise up from a hammock on the porch as we went by—for, as I said before, King's house was much closer to the trail than was decent; I could have leaned from the saddle and touched her with my quirt.

"Mr. Carleton"—I was fool enough to gloat over her instant recognition, in the dark like that—"what are you doing here—at this hour? Don't you know the risk? And your promise—" She spoke in an undertone, as if she were afraid of being overheard—which I don't doubt she was.

But if she had been a Delilah she couldn't have betrayed me more completely. Frosty motioned imperatively for me to go on, but I had pulled up at her first word, and there I stood, waiting for her to finish, that I might explain that I had not lightly broken my promise; that I was compelled to cut off that extra sixty miles which would have made me, perhaps, too late. But I didn't tell her anything; there wasn't time. Frosty, waiting disapprovingly a length ahead, looked back and beckoned again insistently. At the same instant a door behind the girl opened with a jerk, and King himself bulked large and angry in the lamplight. Beryl shrank backward with a little cry—and I knew she had not meant to do me a hurt.

"Come on, you fool!" cried Frosty, and struck his horse savagely. I jabbed in my spurs, and Shylock leaped his length and fled down that familiar trail to the "gantlet," as I had always called it mentally after that second passing. But King, behind us, fired three shots quickly, one after another—and, as the bullets sang past, I knew them for a signal.

A dozen men, as it seemed to me, swarmed out from divers places to dispute our passing, and shots were being fired in the dark, their starting-point betrayed by vicious little spurts of flame. Shylock winced cruelly, as we whipped around the first shed, and I called out sharply to Frosty, still a length ahead. He turned just as my horse went down to his knees.

I jerked my feet from the stirrups and landed free and upright, which was a blessing. And it was then that I swung morally far back to the primitive, and wanted to kill, and kill, with never a thought for parley or retreat. Frosty, like the stanch old pal he was, pulled up and came back to me, though the bullets were flying fast and thick—and not wide enough for derision on our part.

"Jump up behind," he commanded, shooting as he spoke. "We'll get out of this damned trap."

I had my doubts, and fired away without paying him much attention. I wanted, more than anything, to get the man who had shot down Shylock. That isn't a pretty confession, but it has the virtue of being the truth. So, while Frosty fired at the spurts of red and cursed me for stopping there, I crouched behind my dead horse and fought back with evil in my heart and a mighty poor aim.

Then, just as the first excitement was hardening into deliberate malevolence, came a clatter from beyond the house, and a chorus of familiar yells and the spiteful snapping of pistols. It was our boys—thirty of the biggest-hearted, bravest fellows that ever wore spurs, and, as they came thundering down to us, I could make out the bent, wiry figure of old Perry Potter in the lead, yelling and shooting wickeder than any one else in the crowd.

"Ellis!" he shouted, and I lifted up my voice and let him know that, like Webster, "I still lived." They came on with a rush that the King faction could not stay, to where I was ambushed between the solid walls of two sheds, with Shylock's bulk before me and Frosty swearing at my back.

"Horse hit?" snapped Perry Potter breathlessly. "I knowed it. Just like yuh. Get onto this'n uh mine—he's the best in the bunch—and light out—if yuh still want t' catch that train."

I came back from the primitive with a rush. I no longer wanted to kill and kill. Dad was lying "critically ill" in Frisco—and Frisco was a long way off! The miles between bulked big and black before me, so that I shivered and forgot my quarrel with King. I must catch that train.

I went with one leap up into the saddle as Perry Potter slid down, thought vaguely that I never could ride with the stirrups so short, but that there was not time to lengthen them; took my feet peevishly out of them altogether, and dashed down, that winding way between King's sheds and corrals while the Ragged H boys kept King's men at bay, and the unmusical medley of shots and yells followed us far in the darkness of the pass. At the last fence, where we perforce drew rein to make a free passage for our horses, I looked back, like one Mrs. Lot. A red glare lit the whole sky behind us with starry sparks, shooting up higher into the low-hanging crimson smoke-clouds. I stared, uncomprehending for a moment; then the thought of her stabbed through my brain, and I felt a sudden horror. "And Beryl's back among those devils!" I cried aloud, as I pulled my horse around.

"Beryl"—Frosty laid peculiar stress upon the name I had let slip—"isn't likely to be down among the sheds, where that fire is. Our boys are collecting damages for Shylock, I guess; hope they make a good job of it."

I felt silly enough just then to quarrel with my grandmother; I hate giving a man cause for thinking me a love-sick lobster, as I'd no doubt Frosty thought me. I led my horse over the wires he had let down, and we went on without stopping to put them back on the posts. It was some time before I spoke again, and, when I did, the subject was quite different; I was mourning because I hadn't the Yellow Peril to eat up the miles with.

"What good would that do yuh?" Frosty asked, with a composure I could only call unfeeling. "Yuh couldn't get a train, anyway, before the one yuh will get; motors are all right, in their place—but a horse isn't to be despised, either. I'd rather be stranded with a tired horse than a broken-down motor."

I did not agree with him, partly because I was not at all pleased with my present mount, and partly because I was not in amiable mood; so we galloped along in sulky silence, while a washed-out moon sidled over our heads and dodged behind cloud-banks quite as