Читать книгу On the Trail of Four - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 9

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I felt like a child so angry that it wants to destroy the entire world and furious because it hasn’t the strength to do it. I picked up a big rock and smashed it to bits as a way of easing my mind. Then I sat down to consider.

My total possessions consisted of my rifle and two revolvers, together with a very scanty amount of ammunition, because during the days I was taking care of José, I had shot away a good deal of powder and lead to keep us in meat. It takes as much ammunition to kill a squirrel as it does to kill a deer. My mule, and my pack, were now possessions of the grateful José.

After a time, my anger abated a little. I told myself that I had been simply a fool, and being a fool, I had to take the penalty. Since I had chosen to treat José like a man instead of like a snake, as he deserved, there was nothing for me to do but to dress myself with patience. But, at twenty-two, patience is the smallest of a man’s virtues.

Yet, though I was on foot, I had not the slightest idea of giving up the chase. In a few minutes I was up and plugging away on foot. My hope was that José would not understand Spike’s uncanny ability to negotiate steep cliffs; and if he kept the mule off the rocks, I might still be able to keep to the trail, whereas if Spike followed the short cuts it would need the eye of an eagle to make out his way.

I kept those hopes all through the morning, for José apparently trusted that no man on foot would attempt to follow a mounted man. But, just before noon, I saw where Spike had lunged over the brow of the mountain and shortened the trail by going down into the valley beneath. I knew that I was close to the end of my trailing.

Indeed, within a single hour the sign was lost. José, apparently seeing at once the peculiar talents of the mule, had pushed him straight ahead at every tangle of rock and was following an air-line course across the country. There among the rocks I lost the sign and sat down to think over what more I might be able to do. Finally I decided that I should try to cut for the sign of the four horses and their two riders, but I had no luck whatever!

I went back to the direction in which Spike had been traveling and I tried to lay a straight course across country in the general trend which José had been following. The quartet had been using the easier ways of getting across the land, but José, on Spike, used him as an eagle uses its wings. I was fairly confident that he had picked out the exact direction.

So I laid out a landmark to the north and west and another to the south and east, exactly on the course which José had been following. For five long days, I pushed the leagues behind me.

On the fifth day I dropped from the upper mountains into a little valley and saw, to my great delight, half a dozen ranch houses scattered here and there. Best of all, I saw some horses and I felt that the end of my long trek on foot had come. This was worth a pause. I wanted a horse, but I wanted one able to carry two hundred and twenty pounds and carry it fast and far.

I found a tiny bit of freckled boyhood under the shadow of a great straw sombrero. He sat on a potbellied old pony—a caricature of age and weakness with that infant holding the reins. I spoke to him.

“Sammy, whereabouts is there a good horse for sale?”

Sammy looked me over with care and a fearless eye. There was a good deal to see. I had broken my razor six weeks before. There was already a considerable forest on my face before I started on this trail, and now my features were well hidden.

“Pa has a couple of hosses to sell,” he declared at last. “Hey, Spot, you old fool!”

He cracked his blacksnake in the air. He was riding herd on a score of milk cows and heifers, to keep them on a stretch of pasture and away from a field of sowed barley hay.

“They’re too wore out for cutting wood,” said the boy. “Maybe they’d suit you, though.”

“A good horse, son,” I repeated, “that can carry me and carry me fast.”

He looked over my bulk and then grinned. “Old Brinsly, he got up half a dozen of the San Marin hosses a while back,” said the boy. “Maybe you’d want to pay the price of one of them?”

The name stuck in my throat. San Marin! I remembered where I had last seen it.

“What are the San Marin horses?” I asked him.

“Ain’t you heard? They’re the brood of that Comanche hoss. Pa says they can’t be beat. But the price of ’em can’t be beat, neither. Nothing less than five hundred. That’s all they want!”

“I’d like to look at them for fun,” said I. “Where’s the Brinsly place?”

He pointed it out to me—a wedge of roof rising out of the horizon mist, and I started off to see the Comanche horses. It was a stiff five-mile walk to the place, but I had my reward. The very first pasture into which I looked contained six horses of a build which I thought I recognized. I had seen that cut of horse between me and the dawn colors some twenty days before—horses that seemed half Arab and half thoroughbred!

They were all bay and chestnut—the colors of hot blood, and they were made according to a style that filled the eye. They were not big—I suppose that the tallest of them was not two inches over fifteen hands—but I did not have to ask if they could carry weight. What quarters, what shoulders, what powerful short coupling! I suppose that to some they would have seemed a little short of leg—rather pony built. But I noticed the fine taper from haunch to hock, and I told myself that this was running stock. I like a horse with brains, too, and these animals had intelligence. They looked back at me out of their deerlike eyes.

I went to the house and asked the cook for Mr. Brinsly.

“What for?” said he.

“I want to buy one of his San Marin horses,” said I.

It made his jaw drop and presently, after he had hurried back into the house, a thin-faced man of middle age with the look and the voice of a gentleman, came out to me.

He did not show his surprise or his curiosity at the sight of me. He merely said: “I’m sorry but these horses of mine are not for sale. I brought them up here at a considerable expense and great cost of trouble.”

But what I noticed most of all was that he did not look at me as I was accustomed to have people look. He did not stare at me with the words “Hugo Ames” forming on his lips. I saw that I could thank my broken razor of six weeks before. So I told him frankly my trouble was, that my weight broke down an average horse and that I saw his San Marin stock looked like weight carriers.

He took me out to the pasture, at that, and he seemed glad enough to talk about them. It was his hope, he told me, to gradually breed them until they had replaced all the common stock on his ranch, and he pointed them out to me one by one until his finger stopped with a low-built chestnut mare.

“I could let you have her,” said he. “Except that I would not sell her to any man. There is too much devil in her. I even hesitate about breeding her, for the fiend which was in Comanche is in her, full stock!”

I looked at her again. She was not as pretty as the others, but her ample and powerful lines appealed to me. I asked him his price. As for her temper, I did not care for that. It is my theory that no horse is bad because of wrong instincts, but simply because it has been maltreated by people. I felt there was plenty of time for me to tame Sandy, as he called her. So I asked him to name a price, and he put on a high one—seven hundred and fifty dollars.

She was driven into the corral and I looked her over—perfectly sound, six years old, in the maturity of her strength, and with a wicked eye that promised a bad temper, to be sure, but the endurance which a great many mean horses possess. I paid Mr. Brinsly his seven hundred and fifty and bought an old saddle and bridle from him also. Then I inquired about San Marin and told him that I had come down from the north.

There was still a long journey ahead of me. Five hundred miles, according to Brinsly.

But that distance did not daunt me. I was more and more convinced that this was exactly the type of horse which I had seen ridden by the four whom I had trailed, so I started down the road with Sandy on a lead rope behind me, to the great disappointment of Mr. Brinsly, who had expected me to try her paces at once.

I had not such pride, however. I ride about as well as most men, but I am no genius in the saddle. I decided that when I mounted Sandy I would have her more or less at my mercy.

What I did, then, was to stop at the village and load her with a heavy pack of food—a great many unnecessaries in the line of canned goods which would increase her poundage in the pack. Then I took Sandy straight ahead for a two-day march. I gave her scant chance for food or for water, and I walked her in the heaviest going that I could find.

At the end of the second day, when she was quite downheaded with weariness, I unstrapped the pack and I risked myself in the saddle. It was exactly as I had hoped that it might be. Sandy snorted and tried a few buck jumps in the thick sand, which was the place that I had selected. Then she stood still and flattened her ears. I slapped her gently on the flank with my open hand, and Sandy broke into a gentle trot.

I was delighted; my delight was a little premature, but this, however, is something which I must tell about later on. From that moment and through the rest of my journey, Sandy worked like a trooper. She reeled off her fifty miles a day through all manner of going. On the eleventh day after I had left Mr. Brinsly’s place, I worked Sandy up a steep mountainside and saw directly beneath me the beautiful valley which bore the name of San Marin.