Читать книгу Painted Ponies - Alan Le May - Страница 20
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ОглавлениеBY the clear light of evening Morgan resaddled the mouse-gray horse.
“Where yuh goin’ now?” Downey asked. Throughout the day he had taken a sarcastic fatherly attitude toward Morgan, whom he conceived to be acting like a child. “Goin’ to work all night?”
“Gimme that hunk o’ paper,” was Slide’s answer.
“Huh?”
“The one Geer wrote.”
Mystified, Downey searched his pockets and dug up the peculiar affidavit left for Morgan by Partridge Geer. “What’s the desper’te campaign now?”
“I anyways want these folks to know I’m white,” Morgan muttered.
“Well, of all the crazy, dang fool—”
The gray horse moved off, headed northward. Downey made extravagant rejecting motions with the palms of both hands.
“Puddin’head!” he roared after the rider. “Yuh pore woolly sheep!”
Slide Morgan sloped forward in his saddle with a weary motion, and ignominiously spurred the gray out of earshot.
As he rode north he detested the move he was making, ashamed that he should care to justify himself before any living man. The odd testimonial in the scrawling hand of Partridge Geer was a slender expedient, unworthy of use. But above all it was bitter to know that his blood had been questioned, and that the question stood.
The doubt of his blood must be dislodged from the minds of these people, especially in the case of the girl. For he realized now that it had been Nancy Chase who had hovered behind his ambitious dreams; it was she who had made the Arrow C cabin his first home, the logical center of the world.
He consoled himself that he was not seeking a reconciliation with Chase. When he had knocked out the half-breed question he meant to ride out of the range for good. After he had thrashed the living daylights out of Lew Cade he would be free to ride south, letting the long reaches of the prairie drift between himself and the Arrow C.
Twilight was deepening as Morgan, embittered of mood, approached the log buildings in the cottonwoods by Moccasin Lake.
A heavy drag of reluctance was upon him as he guided the gray toward the night-horse shelter under the trees; and he let the horse drop to a slouching walk, its hoofs silent in the dust.
Figures stood by the shelter, and Morgan reined his horse to a stop. A swift thrill stirred him as he saw that Nancy was there. Then the angle of a broad hat told him that the other figure, standing so close and talking so earnestly, was that of Lew Cade.
Suddenly, with a rush of fury, he saw the two figures merge together as Cade gathered Nancy into his arms. For a moment that seemed to reel on endlessly the figures stood as one.
It may be that Morgan would have turned his horse and ridden away; but for the next few moments a foregone fate seemed to control him, as if he were a puppet being put through movements that had been decided upon ages ago. As he sat frozen in his saddle his horse moved forward of its own accord, drawn by the smell of hay. The two figures by the night-horse shelter separated as the gray horse came close. Morgan heard Nancy’s gasp, and glimpsed that her face was white in the dusk.
“Now,” something said, “is the time to thrash this man within an inch of his life.”
He dropped from his horse and rushed. Cade stood for but a fraction of a second, uncertain; then, with a quick step forward, he met the attack. They reeled with the shock of their impact, and clinched. Morgan pumped in three terrific smashes to face, neck, and ribs with his right hand, his buck-skinned fist as hard as parfleche-wrapped rock. Cade’s breath whistled in his ear as they locked and went down, and Morgan felt a savage exultation as he recognized that his man was hurt.
Cade’s right arm writhed to his thigh, and as it jerked upward Morgan’s ear caught the swift movement of steel on leather. Cade’s pistol was out; his wrist struggled in Morgan’s grip as he strove to bring the muzzle to bear. Slide flung himself backward, wrenching his right arm free. As he drew, both men gained their knees.
Cade’s gun exploded into the ground, and Morgan, winning free with his right arm, struck down desperately at the man’s head with the gun butt in his clenched fist. Fist and gun butt missed as the men swayed, but the pistol barrel crashed down upon its mark. Lew Cade went limp.
Morgan slowly rose, his knees quivering with the shock of the effort, and bent to examine his enemy’s face. The man’s breath was coming hoarsely through his teeth; the light eyes stared, half open, unseeing. Across the forehead a dark trickle crawled, as if a fly crept there, a fly that had been dipped in blood.
All of these things must have happened within the bracket of a few seconds; for he had swung unsteadily into his saddle and turned the gray’s head south before he heard some one running from the cabin.
He let the mouse-gray horse walk away at his own pace from the Arrow C. Behind him he could hear a startled exclamation, hurrying feet, a hail from the place Cade had fallen, an answer from the house.
The strides of the gray were slow; he seemed to creep by inches over the ground, yet Morgan held himself in check, disdaining to urge the animal on. Gradually, as slowly as the movements of a fever dream, they drew away from the cottonwoods. The alarmed voices receded, slowly becoming small against the prairie silence; until at last a single sound of a voice far behind cut through him like an arrow, Nancy’s voice, choked with tears. Then nothing more; he found himself alone in the gathering night.
After long plodding the gray horse broke into a swinging lope. He spurred the animal into a run, struggling to shake himself free from a nameless dread. Presently, as he rode, he took from his pocket the ragged testimonial of Partridge Geer, and tore it into bits that fluttered away into the thickening dark.
