Читать книгу The Cross Brand - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 4

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That impact forced up on either side of the body a puff of dust, which was deep on the floor. Before the little clouds settled, Jack Bristol was beside the prostrate man and had jerked him over to his back. There was a deep gash across his forehead where he had struck the floor. Blood was hot and thick on the breast of his coat. Jack kneeled, fumbled for the pulse, felt none, and sprang up again to flee for his life.

Down the street men were calling. He heard them with wonderful clearness.

‘Hey, Billy, come in! There’s hell popping up at—’

‘I’m coming. Where’s Jordan? Hey, Pop, we’ve got to get—’

‘Run, boys. There’s enough of us!’

But still they clamored as they swept slowly up the street. No, they were not moving slowly. They were only slow by comparison with the leaping speed with which the brain of Jack Bristol was considering possibilities.

Should he stay to demand his trial as a man fighting in self-defense? No, that would never do; he could hear beforehand the roar of angry mirth with which Red Bend would hear of this plea from Jack Bristol, gambler from time to time, spendthrift on all occasions while the money lasted, and gun-fighter extraordinary. No, he must never dream of standing his ground. His first difficulty would be to find a fast horse. His gray gelding was fast enough to escape most pursuit, but the gray was in a distant pasture. But why should he worry about getting a fast horse when brown Susan herself stood just outside his window? And why not be hunted for horse-stealing as well as murder?

He was out of the window as that thought half formed. Susan drew back, but only a step. He whipped into the saddle with half a dozen men plunging toward him, the leaders not fifty yards away, with the liquid dust spurting up around their feet. He had known those men all his life. But now they went at him like town-dogs at a wolf, yelling, ‘He’s got Harry—he’s dropped the sheriff—shoot the hound!’

Jack Bristol sent Sue into a racing gallop with a single word. In an instant he had twitched her around the corner of the house with a flight of bullets singing behind her. She took a high fence flying. She sprinted across a cleared space beyond. She winged her way across a second fence and was hopelessly out of range for effective revolver shooting before the pursuers reached the corner of the house. So they tumbled into the house, instead of continuing, and there they found the sheriff, dripping with blood, in the act of rising from the floor.

‘Leave Jack alone!’ were his first words. ‘I’m not killed. I brung this on myself. He glanced a chunk of lead along my ribs, and I deserved it! Get Doc Chisholm, boys!’

‘But Jack has grabbed Susan!’

Here the sheriff groaned, but almost at once he controlled himself and answered, ‘Then let him take her till he finds out that he ain’t wanted here. All I hope to God is that he don’t turn desperado because he thinks that he’s done one killing already.’

Of course Jack Bristol could not know it, but that was the reason there was no pursuit. He himself attributed it to the known speed of brown Susan. The good citizens of Red Bend knew enough about her not to expect to run her down in a straight chase; only by maneuver and adroit laying of traps could they expect to capture the man who bestrode her. Such was the reason to which Jack Bristol attributed the failure of any pursuit, though, as a matter of fact, Sheriff Ganton was sending out hasty messages in all directions striving to head off the fugitive and let him know that the law had no claim against him. It was all the easier for the sheriff to send those messages because, that night, Maude Purcell sat by his bed to nurse him. The more brilliant and dashing figure of Jack Bristol might have turned her head for the instant, but when she heard of the wounding of Harry Ganton all doubt was dissolved. A voice spoke out of her heart and drove her to the sheriff’s side.

But that night Jack Bristol squatted beside the thin and wavering smoke of his camp-fire and peered from his hilltop into the desert horizon with the feeling that the hostility of the world encompassed him with full as perfect and unbroken a circle. And in truth it was not altogether an unpleasant sensation. It was a test of strength, and he had plenty of that. He stretched his arms and felt the long muscles give with a quiver. Yes, he had plenty of strength. He felt, also, that for the first time he was playing the rôle for which he was intended. He was no producer. He was simply a consumer. He was framed by nature to take, not to make. He was equipped with an eye which saw more surely, a hand which struck more quickly, a soul without dread of others. And all his life he had felt that law was a burden not made for him to carry.

Now the band was snapped and as a first fruit of his labor—behold brown Susan! He turned with a word. The mare came to him like a dog. She regarded him with glistening, affectionate eyes until a cloud of smoke filled her nostrils. She snorted the smoke out and retreated. But still, from the little distance, she regarded him with pricking ears. He had known her since she was a foal. He had loved her from the first as a miracle of horse-flesh. Harry Ganton, consenting to his plea, had allowed him to break the filly in her third year. And now, in her fifth, what wonder was it that she obeyed him almost by instinct. The sheriff had been like an interloper upon her back. Here was her true master! And was it not worth while to be guilty of a theft when stealing brought such a reward as this?

In a sort of ecstasy, Jack Bristol sprang up and began pacing up and down. They would never catch him, now that he had brown Susan. No doubt they were laying their traps, even now. But their traps would never catch him. Other men, weaker men, after they committed their crimes, were sure to circle back to their home towns sooner or later. But he would prove the exception. There were no ties of a sufficient strength to make him return. No, he would lay a course straight to the north and strike a thousand miles into the mountains.

He lived up to the letter of that resolution. For the three following days he pressed on at great speed to outstrip the first rush of the pursuit. At the end of that time he struck a more steady and easy gait and every stage of the journey brought him further and further on the journey north. During the first week, if he had gone into any town, he would probably have found news which would have made him return on his tracks. But he avoided all towns, and soon he was in a strange land to which the following messages of honest Harry Ganton never extended.

So the day at last came, far, far north in the Rockies, when he decided that he must have come into a new land where no one could have heard of him. Brown Susan had just topped a great height. From the shoulder of the mountain they saw a host of smaller peaks marching away in ridge on ridge to the farther north, all as sharp as waves which a storm has whipped up to points. Heavy forest filled the hollows and the lower stretches. It thinned as it climbed, until it came to the desert at timberline.

From that point of vantage, it seemed an eternity of mountains. They seemed to roll out in all directions to the end of the world. It was sunset time. The summits were bright; the lowlands were already black. And Jack Bristol, born and bred to the open of the flat desert, shuddered a little before he allowed Susan to lurch onto the downslope.

All strange country is apt to be terrible. This prospect chilled the man from the desert to the very heart. But he reassured himself. He had lived on the country through a thousand mile trip. He had not spent a cent. On one occasion he had slipped into an outlying ranch-house and stolen an ample supply of ammunition. Otherwise he had not needed the assistance of men. Neither had brown Susan. She had the lines of an Arab; but she had the incredible durability of a mustang. Now she was a trifle gaunt of belly, her forward ribs were showing, but her head was as high, her eye as bright, her tail as arched as when she began the long journey. If horse and rider could survive what they had survived, there was surely nothing to concern them even in a forest wilderness. Where there were living trees other things must live also.

But when they reached the bottom of the slope, Susan going with goat-footed agility among the rocks, and the damp, thick shadow of premature night closed above their heads. Jack Bristol cursed softly, and it seemed to him that half of the high spirit went out of the mare at the same instant. She went timorously on. A great roaring grew out at them from the right. It turned into the distinguishable dashing of a waterfall. And this, in turn, struck out a thousand varying echoes from cliffs and steep hillsides, so that noises continually played around them. Next, they entered a blackness of a great forest. They made their way, not by light, but by distinguishing shadows among shadows. And the penetrating dampness was like an accumulating weight upon the spirit of Jack Bristol.

The way at length began to pitch up again. The trees grew more sparse. And presently, opening into a pleasant clearing, he found himself face to face with a little cabin. It was made of logs, but it was quite pretentious in size. Rather than use up any of the arable land in the level space below it, and on account of which, no doubt, it had been built, the cabin stood among the rocks of the farther slope, leaning back to keep from a fall. Altogether, it seemed to Jack Bristol the most beautiful dwelling he had ever looked upon.

A horse neighed from a small pasture near the house. Susan quivered on the verge of replying, but a sharp slap on the flank made her shake her head and change her mind with a soft little grunt. In the meantime, from his place of secure shadow, Jack watched the smoke rise straight above the stovepipe until it reached a region of greater light. The smoke column, for mysterious reasons, was an assurance that kindly people inhabited the house. To be sure, it would be better to go on, but when the wind carried a faint scent of frying bacon to the nostrils of Bristol, he gave way.

He crossed the clearing. Without dismounting, he leaned from the saddle and tapped at the door. It was opened by a bald-headed man with a Roman nose and a great mass of dirty-gray beard. His sleeves were rolled up over hairy forearms. In one hand he carried a great butcher knife, greasy and steaming.

‘Howdy,’ said Jack Bristol. ‘Have you got room for an extra man tonight?’

‘Howdy, stranger,’ said the man of the log cabin. He paused while he surveyed Jack keenly. ‘I reckon I might.’