Читать книгу The Whispering Outlaw - Макс Брэнд - Страница 9

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The explosion had rather a force than a noise. It took hold on the house like the hand of an earthquake and made it shudder. At the same time an almost soft and puffing noise of the explosion was audible not so much through the house itself as in the distance around it, where the sound traveled through the thin, pure mountain air and made every cow-puncher in the bunk house sit up, bolt erect, to listen and to wonder. In the dining room upstairs, every guest and the wise host himself sat staring, glass or cigar in hand for a frozen moment.

Then: "A lifter!" muttered someone who had been a miner in his youth.

"An explosion!" cried Sheriff Kenworthy. "By heavens—it can't be"

The last thought had turned him white and so stunned him that he was unable to complete the utterance of it aloud, or even to himself. Neither could he move. During that precious interval there was only one person in the room who stirred, and this was Rose Kenworthy, herself. She had not let an instant go by in idleness, but after the report she slipped from her chair and ran to the door, where she listened to the quivering echo like that which follows the passing of a man with a heavy tread. Then she ran back to one of the astonished guests.

"Bud Chalmers," she cried softly to him, "that came from the cellar where my father keeps his—Come! Let's see what's there!"

He had to take her arm and draw her back, or she would have led the way in person, as though she preferred such an adventure and such a risk to the scene which she had been forced to sit through in the dining room.

By this time the whole group of men had turned in a body, and they rushed down the stairs, poured into the cellar, and found a broad dark mouth yawning in the cellar wall. They streamed in, guns in hand, electric torches quivering with eagerness. What they found was the floor of the little room strewn with a litter of papers, the door of the safe lifted cleanly from its mighty hinges, and the interior of the safe entirely gutted. It brought a wailing cry of almost childish rage from the newly famous sheriff. He fell upon his knees in front of the safe, and threw out his fat arms. What he might have said would never be known, for the slender form of Rose darted to his side.

"Dad," she whispered in his ear, while her strong young hand sank into his soft shoulder, "they're watching you—you'll die with shame if you don't act like a man now!"

It brought him to his feet. He was able to muster a roar as he turned to his posse, and then pointed to the door which opened at the rear of the cellar.

"That's the way, boys," he cried. "That's the way that dog went! Let's ride him down-five thousand in cash to the man who drives a bullet into him."

"Look here!" cried someone.

He turned the round, bright eye of his torch against the wall of the cellar and there they saw, white and new, a great "W," inscribed in careless scratches.

"The Whisperer!" came the cry of a dozen men. "The devil has dared to do this while we upstairs"

Flushing with anger, they glanced to one another. In truth, The Whisperer had chosen to make a mock of them, and there was no doubt about it. While they drank honor to the sheriff and scorn to the baffled outlaw, he was proving that their dragnet had not touched him at all by actually plundering the safe of the chief of the vigilantes, with all of his men scattered about.

They stormed from the cellar; they found their horses; they stormed out from the house in a great circle, some riding toward every point of the compass, and in this fashion one man sighted a gray horse in the moonshine, half lost among the shadows of overhanging trees. He shouted a challenge, whereat the other put spurs to his horse and galloped across the fields. At once the hue and cry was raised. They flogged and spurred their horses forward furiously, on the trail of the other, who aimed his flight straight for the neighboring canyon mouth, and was immediately lost in the woods which crowded it.

In the meantime, they had hardly disappeared when there issued from the little room in the sheriff's cellar where the safe was kept, and actually from behind the safe itself, that same masked robber who had dared to insult the power of Mr. Kenworthy in his own house. He left the cellar leisurely, strolled to a knot of trees near the house, and there mounted a horse which had been left in concealment. He now struck away at a swinging gallop, whistling softly to himself, and riding rather as one who enjoyed the rhythm of the gallop than as one who needed desperate speed to save him from a great danger.

But as for the posse, they rode with a wild unconcern for the nature of the ground over which their horses flew. There is nothing that makes a man so utterly reckless as an affront to his vanity. Not a man there but would have gladly lost half his blood for the sake of sinking a bullet into the body of The Whisperer because of this night's insolence. They gave their horses wings, and they were quickly upon the very heels of the fugitive. Only the thick screen of the trees kept them from riddling him with bullets, for they were constantly in short revolver range. They might have run him down almost at once had it not been that he had apparently carefully planned the way of his retreat, and dodged from one narrow avenue in the woodland to another, so that they were several times lost for a moment and gave up valuable rods of ground before they caught the trail again.

Foremost among them galloped Rose Kenworthy herself. Not that she carried a gun, or that she could have used one, but she would not be left behind in a hunt which was more exciting than ever a fox hunt in the world! She had a saddle upon her tall bay gelding before the others were fairly under way. She flew two fences and caught up with them as they twisted across the first fields, and after that, she was in the very front, though her father swore and the other men begged her to go home. But Rose, being an only child, had of course been terribly spoiled; she did not even think of obeying them, but she cantered on, cheering her horse along and shouting with glee as she swung right and left to dodge the low-sweeping boughs of the evergreens.

The big bay went lame suddenly. He stumbled, almost fell, and then slowed to a walk.

"Now go home!" shouted someone darting past at full speed. Which of course determined Rose to stay on that trail if she had to go forward all night on foot. She flung herself from the gelding's back while the hunt slid past her and went crashing into a thicket beyond. She turned the gelding loose. The poor fellow would find the best way home to his stable and at his own speed, which would be better for him than leading. Then she started to tramp forward with her throat closed and her heart huge with wrath. To add to her fury, the way was interlaced with many entanglements of roots, and every now and then she tripped and almost fell upon them. Twice, indeed, she actually plunged forward upon her hands and skinned them on the gnarled bark or the stones on which she struck.

Who, in the midst of a ranting argument, while pacing back and forth, has tripped and stumbled? Who has stubbed his toe while promenading with the greatest dignity? Such things are nothing to small mishaps while one is in a passion; and Rose Kenworthy would have taken mountains in her hands and smashed them to pieces against one another, so wild was her passion of temper. When she scrambled to her feet after the second fall, she paused and stamped and beat her stinging hands together in impotent fury.

"Oh," cried Rose, "if only I were a man—if only I weren't such a—such a--"

She could think of no fitting word, and so she strode on over the cushioning mats of needles with her fists clenched and her eyes rolling among the shadows; the noise of the hunt had died out far, far before her, and the knowledge that she was doing a very foolish thing in following them only increased her rage and her determination. So it was, coming out into a little clearing in the forest, she was amazed to come on the scent of a cigarette. She looked about her in the deepest astonishment, but entirely without fear. That emotion, in fact, was well-nigh a stranger in her composition.

She was in a forest of huge yellow pines, and the light of the moon struck down in spots here and there across the woodland. There was some distance from the ground before the big first branches began, and Rose could look far away down avenues of brown columns, with silver spots of the moonshine falling here and there, quite regularly, upon the pavement of fallen needles. To her it seemed a windless night, but pine trees will tremble with air currents which the human skin cannot detect, and in the stillness of the atmosphere all the needles were astir and made a faint and ghostly hushing sound.

A little rivulet was not far away, raising a merry bubbling and calling as it tumbled over the edge of a boulder into a pool beneath, and through that thin and pure mountain air the sound struck across the canyon and was rung faintly and deeply back in echo from the opposite wall of the little valley; so that it seemed there was another waterfall in the distance, a thundering giant whose strength was just beginning to make the air tremble.

This was the scene, and these were the sounds in which Rose found herself when that poignant and rich fragrance of the tobacco came to her and scattered the tatters of her passion away, and poured upon her mind the holy water of that mountain quiet.

She could see no source of the smoke at first, and then she saw, in a patch of the deepest shadow, the figure of a man sitting with his back to her, cross-legged upon a great stump, as quiet as a stone, or a meditating Indian. Nothing about him stirred except his right hand, from which the silver curl of the smoke went upward as he brought the cigarette to his lips and carried it away again. His head was bare. His face was raised toward the sky as though he peered out from his shadow upon the brilliance of the moon, which was now rounding into the three quarters, and drowning all the stars in her floods of silver. From his head, raised in this fashion, long black hair fell away—hair almost long enough to touch his shoulders, and cut away in a thick, sharp stroke at that point. It had a striking effect.

Indeed, there was everything about his attitude, his immobility, his black, long hair, the thinness of his face—for she could see the prominence of his cheek bone and the hollow line of his cheek—to make her think that this stranger was truly an Indian. Yet she knew that he was not, before she saw him fairly.

She herself had not moved from her place after first coming into the clearing; but the stranger suddenly bounded from his tree-stump chair as though shot upward from springs. He landed upon his feet, facing her, and at the side of a tree trunk, behind which he disappeared. In no longer a time than it takes the camera shutter to wink back and forth, this picture was rubbed out, and she found herself alone in the clearing.

There was a little touch of fear in her, then. But she shrugged her shoulders and forced that weak sensation away. Then she crossed the clearing and followed a curious impulse which made her sit upon the stump just where the stranger had sat, and raise her head. But having done so, she did not see the moon or the sky. She closed her eyes to all of that. Instead, far up the canyon she heard the noise of the racing man hunt as it thundered along at the heels of its prey.

Apparently the cliff faces on either side of the valley were so placed by a freak of nature that they reflected all the sounds from the upper valley as mirrors will repeat light, and focused them, faintly to be sure, at this particular point. But how could this long-haired stranger have known the thing? Where was he when the hunt rushed past, sweeping across this very clearing? Suddenly, she knew that the black-haired youth was standing just behind her, watching her as still as a stone!