Riders of the Silences by Max Brand (ebook reader with highlight function .txt) 📗

some crowned head who made hunting and racing his chief end in life, for these were animals worthy of the sport of kings.

They were chosen each from among literal hundreds, and they were cared for far more tenderly than the masters cared for themselves. There was a reason in it, for upon their speed and endurance depended the life of the outlaw. Moreover, the policy of Jim Boone was one of actual "long riding."

Here he had come to a pause for a few days to recuperate his horses and his men. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would be on the spur again and sweeping off to a distant point in the mountain-desert to strike and be gone again before the rangers knew well that he had been there. Very rarely did one settler have another neighbor at a distance of less than two hundred miles. It meant arduous and continual riding, and a horse with any defect was worse than useless because the speed of the gang had to be the speed of the slowest horse in the lot.

It was some time before the two long riders had completed the grooming of their horses and had gone down the hill and into the house. In the largest habitable room they found a fire fed with rotten timbers from the wrecked portion of the building, and scattered through the room a sullen and dejected group: Mansie, Branch, Jim Boone, and Black Morgan Gandil.

At a glance it was easy to detect their malady; it was the horrible ennui which comes to men who are always surrounded by one set of faces. If a man is happily married he may bear with his wife and his children constantly through long stretches of time, but the glamour of life lies in the varying personalities which a man glimpses in passing, but never knows.

This was a rare crew. Every man of them was marked for courage and stamina and wild daring. Yet even so in their passive moments they hated each other with a hate that passed the understanding of common men.

Through seven years they had held together, through fair weather and foul, and now each knew from the other's expression the words that were about to be spoken, and each knew that the other was reading him, and loathing what he read.

So they were apt to relapse into long silences unless Jack was with them, for being a woman her variety was infinite, or Pierre le Rouge, whom all except Black Gandil loved and petted, and feared.

They were a battered crowd. Wind and hard weather and a thousand suns had marked them, and the hand of man had branded them. Here and there was a touch of gray in their hair, and about the mouth of each were lines which in such silent moments as this one gave an expression of yearning.

"What's up? What's wrong?" asked Wilbur from the door, but since no answer was deigned he said no more.

But Pierre, like a charmed man who dares to walk among lions, strolled easily through the room, and looked into the face of big Boone, who smiled faintly up to him, and Black Gandil, who scowled doubly dark, and Bud Mansie, who shifted uneasily in his chair and then nodded, and finally to Branch. He dropped a hand on the massive shoulder of the blacksmith.

"Well?" he asked.

Branch let himself droop back into his chair. His big, dull, colorless eyes stared up to his friend.

"I dunno, lad. I'm just weary with the sort of tired that you can't help by sleepin'. Understand?"

Pierre nodded, slowly, because he sympathized. "And the trouble?"

Branch stared about as if searching for a reason. "Jack's upstairs sulking; Patterson hasn't come home yet."

And Black Gandil, who heard all things, said without looking up: "A man that saves a shipwrecked fellow, he gets bad luck for thanks."

Pierre turned a considerable eye on him, and Gandil scowled back.

"You've been croaking for six years, Morgan, about the bad luck that would come to Jim from saving me out of the snow. It's never happened, has it?"

Gandil, snarling from one side of his mouth, answered: "Where's
Patterson?"

"Am I responsible if the blockhead has got drunk someplace?"

"Patterson doesn't get drunk—not that way. And he knows that we were to start again today."

"There ain't no doubt of that," commented Branch.

"It's the straight dope. Patterson keeps his dates," said Bud Mansie.

The booming bass of Jim Boone broke in: "Shut up, the whole gang of you. We've had luck for the six years Pierre has been with us. Who calls him a Jonah?"

And Black Gandil answered: "I do. I've sailed the seas. I know bad luck when I see it."

"You've been seeing it for six years."

"The worst storms come on a voyage that starts with fair weather.
Patterson? He's gone; he ain't just delayed; he's gone."

It was not the first of these gloomy prophecies which Gandil had made, but each time a heavy gloom broke over Red Pierre. For when he summed up the good fortune which the cross of Father Victor had brought him, he found that he had gained a father, and lost him at their first meeting; and he had won money on that night of the gambling, but it had cost the life of another man almost at once. The horse which carried him away from the vengeance in Morgantown had died on the way and he had been saved from the landslide, but the girl had perished.

He had driven McGurk from the ranges, and where would the penalty fall on those who were near and dear to him? In a superstitious horror he had asked himself the question a thousand times, and finally he could hardly bear to look into the ominous, brooding eyes of Black Gandil. It was as if the man had a certain and evil knowledge of the future.

CHAPTER 17

The knowledge of the torment he was inflicting made the eye of Black
Gandil bright with triumph.

He continued, and now every man in the room was sitting up, alert, with gloomy eyes fixed upon Pierre: "Patterson is the first, but he ain't the last. He's just the start. Who's next?" He looked slowly around.

"Is it you, Bud, or you, Phil, or you, Jim, or maybe me?"

And Pierre said: "What makes you think you know that trouble's coming,
Morgan?"

"Because my blood runs cold in me when I look at you."

Red Pierre grew rigid and straightened in a way they knew.

"Damn you, Gandil, I've borne with you and your croaking too long, d'ye hear? Too long, and I'll hear no more of it, understand?"

"Why not? You'll hear from me every time I sight you in the offing.
You c'n lay to that!"

The others were tense, ready to spring for cover, but Boone reared up his great figure.

"Don't answer him, Pierre. You, Gandil, shut your face or I'll break ye in two."

The fierce eyes of Pierre le Rouge never wavered from his victim, but he answered: "Keep out of this. This is my party. I'll tell you why you'll stop gibbering, Gandil."

He made a pace forward and every man shrank a little away from him.

"Because the cold in your blood is part hate and more fear, Black
Gandil."

The eyes of Gandil glared back for an instant. With all his soul he yearned for the courage to pull his gun, but his arm was numb; he could not move it, and his eyes wavered and fell.

The shaggy gray head of Jim Boone fell likewise, and he was murmuring to his savage old heart: "The good days are over. They'll never rest till one of 'em is dead, and then the rest will take sides and we'll have gun-plays at night. Seven years, and then to break up!"

Dick Wilbur, as usual, was the pacifier. He strode across the room, and the sharp sound of his heels on the creaking floor broke the tension. He said softly to Pierre: "You've raised hell enough. Now let's go and get Jack down here to undo what you've just finished. Besides, you've got to ask her for that dance, eh?"

The glance of Pierre still lingered on Gandil as he turned and followed Wilbur up the complaining stairs to the one habitable room in the second story of the house. It was set aside for the use of Jacqueline.

At the door Wilbur said: "Shrug your shoulders back; you look as if you were going to jump at something. And wipe the wolf look off your face. After all, Jack's a girl, not a gunfighter."

Then he knocked and opened the door.

She lay face down on her bunk, her head turned from them toward the wall. Slender and supple and strong, it was still only the size of her boots and her hands that would make one look at her twice and then guess that this was a woman, for she was dressed, from trousers even to the bright bandanna knotted around her throat, like any prosperous range rider.

Now, to be sure, the thick coils of black hair told her sex, but when the broad-brimmed sombrero was pulled well down on her head, when the cartridge-belt and the six-gun were slung about her waist, and most of all when she spurred her mount recklessly across the hills no one could have suspected that this was not some graceful boy born and bred in the mountain-desert, willful as a young mountain lion, and as dangerous.

"Sleepy?" called Wilbur.

She waited a moment and then queried with exaggerated impudence:
"Well?"

Ennui unspeakable was in that drawling monotone.

"Brace up; I've got news for you. And I've brought Pierre along to tell you about it."

"Oh!"

And she sat bolt upright with shining eyes. Instantly she remembered to yawn again, but her glance smiled on them above her hand.

She apologized. "Awfully sleepy, Dick."

But he was not deceived. He said: "There's a dance down near the
Barnes place, and Pierre wants you to go with him."

"Pierre! A dance?"

He explained: "Dick's lost his head over a girl with yellow hair, and he wants me to go down and see her. He thought you might want to go along." Her face changed like the moon when a cloud blows across it. She answered with another slow, insolent yawn: "Thanks! I'm staying home tonight."

Wilbur glared his rage covertly at Pierre, but the latter was blandly unconscious that he had made any faux pas.

He said carelessly: "Too bad. It might be interesting. Jack?"

At his voice she looked up—a sharp and graceful toss of her head.

"What?"

"The girl with the yellow hair."

"Then go ahead and see her. I won't keep you. You don't mind if I go on sleeping? Sit down and be at home."

With this she calmly turned her back again and seemed thoroughly disposed to carry out her word.

Red Pierre flushed a little, watching her, and he spoke his anger outright: "You're acting like a sulky kid, Jack, not like a man."

It was a habit of his to forget that she was a woman. Without turning her head she answered: "Do you want to know why?"

"You're like a cat showing your claws. Go on! Tell me what the reason is."

"Because I get tired of you."

In all his life he had never been so scorned. He did not see the covert grin of Wilbur in the background. He blurted: "Tired?"

"Awfully. You don't mind me being frank, do you, Pierre?"

He could only stammer: "Sometimes I wish to God you were a man,
Jack!"

"You don't often remember that I'm a woman."

"Do you mean that I'm rude or rough with you, Jacqueline?" Still the silence, but Wilbur was grinning broader than ever. "Answer me!"

She started up and faced him, her face convulsed with rage.

"What do you want me to say? Yes, you are rude—I hate you and your lot. Go away from me; I don't want you; I hate you all."

And she would have said more, but furious sobs swelled her throat and she could not speak, but dropped, face down, on the bunk and gripped the blankets in each hardset hand. Over her Pierre leaned, utterly bewildered, found nothing that he could say, and then turned and strode, frowning, from the room. Wilbur hastened after him and caught him just as the door was closing.

"Come back," he pleaded. "This is the best game I've