Читать книгу Blood on the Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 9

Table of Contents

“It was him that caught Gray Cloud, was it?” said Ray Pendleton. “That didn’t come out before. You say that he carried Gray Cloud all the way back to the ranch—without a muzzle? Hey, Dave, is that right? You foller what we been sayin’?”

“It sounds like a lot,” said Dave, abashed when called upon to speak before so many. “But it was mostly luck, or accident. There was a grass fire coming along when I found him in the trap, and he was simply more afraid of the fire than he was of me. You see? That was what tamed him.”

Before Pendleton answered, Dave heard someone murmur: “Talks sometimes like he had all his wits about him, don’t he?”

Ray Pendleton said: “You may call it luck, brother, but I don’t want that kind of luck on my shoulders for a four-mile hike. Not me!”

There was general chuckle of agreement, as this remark was made. And then the swinging doors were abruptly cast wide by a long arm, and through the opening came Jim and Doc Weaver. They were formidable fellows, and looked it. They were as tall as Dave Reagan, and as heavily made, though perhaps their weight was not gathered with such consummate skill around the shoulders and arms, as his was. But they were famous for their strength and their bulldog tenacity in a fight.

They stood side by side at the door, each, in entering, having made a stride away from it, and halted.

They seemed, to the enchanted eyes of young Dave Reagan, the most magnificent and the most formidable pair of men he had ever laid eyes upon. To be sure, he had seen them before, and that naturally meant seeing them together, since they were inseparable. But at other times it had been like seeing wolves in cages. Now they were stepping abroad, looking for prey, and ready to use their fighting forces upon it.

A very different matter, indeed, from an ordinary day!

Old stories rushed through his mind, stories he had found in his books about princes, about giants. These were like giants—great in strength, that is to say, and dreadful without being kindly.

It was said of Jim Weaver that he had entered a cave and killed a mountain lion with his bare hands!

Aye, they were mighty men!

And he looked, from them, to Bush Reagan, growing gray and somewhat thin with years, and his two sons, who looked fragile.

It was unfair, such a fight. It was terribly unfair! Bush and his two boys were not exceptionally good shots. They did not have practice enough to make them good. Their case was not like his—who was sure to have a dressing down unless he returned home with at least one head of game for every two cartridges expended! To shoot a deer was not enough; it must be dropped dead in its tracks!

That was the school in which he had learned to shoot with a rifle. And then, many a time, out of mere cruelty and casual desire to torment, Bush Reagan had given him a revolver only, to take out on a hunting expedition. That meant infinitely careful stalking, but when the range was short enough, he could make a revolver kill even more surely than a rifle. He had an instinct for it.

The gun that was given him was always the same, and Bush Reagan had armed him with it on this occasion. It was an old-fashioned single-action Colt, with the sights and the trigger filed away—a gun to be fanned with the thumb. But familiarity had made it precious and unfailing in his grip.

All of that training, he felt, was a vast advantage, in such a time as this. The Reagans, his cousins, had not had it. The Weaver twins distinctly had. They had been great hunters for many years. And the list of their battles with men was very, very long.

So it was that the sense of unfairness rose higher and higher in Dave’s heart, like a black cloud.

He heard Jim Weaver say: “Pete and Hank—you Reagan, there—stand out of that, will you?”

Every man in the room had drawn back against the wall. Only Ray Pendleton stood behind the bar, tall, narrow-shouldered, his arms folded over his hollow chest, his colorless eyes flashing this way and that. He, Pendleton, would enjoy the battle, no matter how it turned out.

The three Reagans at the bar turned, as one man. The glance of Bush Reagan fell like a whiplash on Dave, to bring him into action.

“Four of you, are there?” asked Doc Weaver. “Four—if you count the dummy, there! Is that the way that the Reagans fight?”

“Go get two more of your gang, and be damned,” said Bush Reagan.

Dave was amazed to hear his voice, so high was it, and so unnaturally thin.

“We’ll get two more, and pronto!” said Jim Weaver, “only I wouldn’t wanta have that on my conscience!”

He pointed a thumb in contempt and disgust toward Dave Reagan, as he said this.

Dave stepped forward. He was angered, a passion that he rarely felt. It was not the contempt leveled toward himself that he now resented, but rather the fact that his cousins, comparatively inexperienced in the use of weapons, should be called upon to fight for their lives in this manner.

So he stepped forward with a step that was long and wonderfully light. For he felt very much as he did when he began a stalk that had to be both rapid and silent.

The two Weavers glanced toward him without interest.

He stopped very close to them, and said: “It’s not right, Jim and Doc.”

“What ain’t right, kid?” asked Doc Weaver.

His upper lip lifted a little, as he spoke. The man was a wolf. His teeth gleamed beneath the furling of the lip. Dave frowned at him with a suddenly increased distaste. That expression on the face of Weaver sent a tingle from his brain down to his fingers, and made them contract a little.

“You and Jim are good fighters,” said Dave. “My cousins are not very good shots. And they’re not strong, the way you are. A fight like this wouldn’t be fair.”

“What’re you whinin’ about?” demanded Doc Weaver.

He made a half step closer to the boy and drew himself up, but he could not make himself taller than young Reagan.

“I’m not whining,” said Dave. “It’s all right for me. I’m strong enough, and I’m a good shot, too. I’ve had more practice than they’ve had.”

“You get out of the way,” said Doc. “You get out. We don’t aim to plant any lead in half-wits like you, if we can help it.”

The word brought the stinging blood into Dave’s cheek.

“You oughtn’t to talk like that,” he said—words that were to be remembered long in Rusty Creek. “You’re calling me names.”

“Oh, get out of the way,” said Doc, losing patience, and he cuffed the face of Dave with the back of his hand.

It would have been easy enough for big Reagan to avoid that blow. But something rose up savagely in him and made him actually lean forward to meet it. It stung his face. It lacerated his upper lip a little on the inside. His mouth was numbed by the force of it, and the taste of his own blood was instantly on his palate.

Then, and only then, he acted. He hit Doc Weaver with a lifting fist that lodged in the small ribs of that man’s side and buckled him over like a piece of rusty wire. He was knocked sidelong into his brother, and Jim Weaver, as he whipped out a revolver, went crashing to the floor.

As he fell, he fired the only shot of the battle, a shot that knocked a hole in the board ceiling—it is still pointed out in the saloon!

It was the only shot because Dave Reagan stepped on the fallen arm. The bone snapped under the weight of his body. He plucked the gun from the nerveless hand, threw it on the floor, picked up the struggling cursing bulk of Jim, carried him lightly to the door, and with a swing of his body hurled Weaver into the street.

He returned.

Doc Weaver lay writhing on the floor, gasping in the effort to regain his wind. He also had drawn a gun, but he was too blind with pain to try to use it. It was kicked from his grip. Then he was raised as his brother had been, and carried to the door, and hurled swiftly with the same powerful swing into the darkness.

Distinctly, the men in the saloon heard the impact of Doc Weaver’s body in the dusty roadway, his curse, and his groan as he struggled to his knees.

Dave turned back to his three amazed cousins.

He was dusting his hands.

“We’d better go along,” said he.

He was not even panting, Ray Pendleton averred, afterwards. Perhaps that was not the truth, but it was clear that he was not excited. It seemed to Dave Reagan that a marvelous thing had happened, but the miracle to him was not his own strength, but the weakness of the others.

He explained it to himself very simply. A lucky blow had disabled Doc Weaver. And then Jim Weaver, with a broken bone in his arm, his gun hand, at that, had been practically helpless.

Yes, luck had accounted for the whole battle, as far as Dave was concerned.

He repeated, to the stunned face of Bush Reagan: “We’d better go along, Bush. Everything for supper will have to be all warmed again. It’s a lucky thing that I hadn’t made the coffee, isn’t it?” Those words, also, were long remembered.

They would have been the sheerest affectation coming from any other person, but from Dave Reagan they could be believed.

“We’ll wait a minute, Dave,” said Bush Reagan. “The Weavers, they might decide that they’ll come back inside, ag’in. Wouldn’t wanta disappoint ’em, if they did.”

“No,” said Dave seriously, “I don’t think that Doc and Jim will come back.”

A sudden gust of laughter broke and roared about his ears. Men surged around him, still laughing, patting his shoulders, probing at the thick cushions of muscle that explained the things that they had just seen performed, and Ray Pendleton was crying:

“Here’s where everybody liquors on the house!”