Читать книгу Pleasant Jim - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

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Pleasant was no typical cowpuncher. Above all, he refused to crowd his feet into the narrow-toed and high-heeled boots which may hold a stirrup well enough but which leave one floundering on dry land like some foolish amphibian. He searched hastily for more signs, but he who had made that impression had done the rest of his walking with the greatest of care upon the rocks, so that no spoor remained. It was possible that the footmark might have been made days and days before, preserved there in the softness of the ground. Pleasant dropped on his knees and pored over the imprint. However, he could see the small, wiry grasses, some no larger than a dowl, gradually raising themselves—a small, stealthy movement, yet it told him what he wanted to know: that the man who trod there had been on the mountain surely during the night!

Perhaps he was still here, lurking behind the rocks, hidden in the brush; perhaps he had gone down to warn his companions that Black Mountain was occupied; perhaps at this moment he was in the act of stealing the two horses! In a panic, Pleasant hurried to them and breathed more easily as he stood between them, glaring about at every shadow; and whatever fear was in him was accented by the idle curiosity of the horses, lifting their heads and nudging him with their soft muzzles.

He picked up a saddle, and slowly equipped each of the horses for the trail, fighting out his own problem as he did so. But he could see no purpose in immediate flight. If hostile eyes were watching the summit, what could be easier than for them to spot him if he tried to get down with two horses? So he decided to wait for night, which would give him another chance at the signal sending—and the earning of the thousand.

It was a mortally long and weary day; his rifle was never out of his hand while he gathered the second pile of brush, making it even larger than the first; and every time a branch crackled in his hands, he paused to listen and to watch.

The dull eternity of the afternoon went by at last and his heart began to return with the dusk. As the shadows deepened, he strained his eyes the more through his glass, for with the coming of evening his enemies, whoever they might be, were more apt to show themselves. All the side of Black Mountain which he could view he scanned, and studied to blindness the hollows at its base with never a sign of man or horse.

So the darkness grew and once more he was standing in the rose of the afterglow in an upper world above the flat fields of the night. Again he kindled the fire, taking care, this time, to apply the match to a section of dry leaves and twigs; his reward was an instant up-burst of flame and in a few moments the shaking arm of red was brandishing above Black Mountain. It was at its very height when an eye of crimson looked at him across the valley from a lower peak—one that he had noted before as being no rock-mass but rather a great cromlech of piled stones. That winking point of light towered presently into a bonfire, and the moment he was sure of it, Pleasant flung on his own blaze a few large rocks and then a tarpaulin loaded with pebbles and carefully gathered sand. His blaze was not extinguished save at one side, but into the sand he thrust the little metal matchsafe and then sprang back to the heads of his horses.

He had kept them behind a bowlder so that when he retreated to them he would be in shadow from his fire, and here he waited a moment, his heart beating fast. All below him the slope was regularly studded with big rocks like the crenelated top of a wall, and through one of the embrasures he now saw a shadowy form moving swiftly upward. Another shadow appeared beyond a second opening between the great stones, and Pleasant could guess that he had not seen all of the party. Leading the horses, he hurried to the farther side of the peak and there he saw nothing immediately beneath him. It was the roughest and least practicable way down the slope, but he knew that he must go that way. So he sprang into the saddle on the mare. She had the quick, sure footing that was most useful for such work as this. The gelding he cast loose, well knowing that that good-natured and faithful animal would follow him unless a bullet stopped it.

Then, not twenty yards behind him, he heard the rolling of a rock and a stifled curse. That was his signal. The least touch of the spur sent the good mare forward and he urged her like a bounding stone, headlong down the steep slope.

No men on that side? She had not made three strides when two voices shouted at him from a clump of shrubbery to halt. For answer, to unsettle their aim, he tried a snap shot above their heads and in return two rifles clanged.

He heard not even the whistle of the bullets; the mare did not wince, and by that he knew that he had gone by unscathed.

No men on that side?

He heard a half dozen—they seemed a half hundred to Pleasant as a crescent fear mastered him—shouting to one another: “It’s Long Tom Rizdal! This way! Shoot, shoot, for God’s sake! Watch for him, you below!”

So they yelled. From behind rocks and bushes the odd shadows leaped out and rifles swung in a long gleam to their shoulders. But they had only the night to shoot by, and they were firing at a target that moved downward like an avalanche. As well be crushed in the jaws of rock as in the jaws of the law, it seemed to Pleasant; moreover, the mare had gained such momentum that it seemed impossible to stop her. She darted through a broken maze of bowlders and brush, grazing death a score of times, and so came to a long plunge of stone rubble and gravel. Sitting well back on her haunches, she tobogganed down the fall; and at the bottom of it the gelding with a snort of fear shot past them, staggered as he reached more level going, and then tumbled head over heels. He was up again like a cat, and galloping at the side of the mare across the lower reaches of Black Mountain; all the noise was far behind them, and it came from men on foot!

So Pleasant rated the mare at an easy canter. They had descended the upper parapet of the mountain—when he looked back it seemed a sheer wall—and they were dropping more gradually now into the hollow of the valley. Danger, no doubt, was safely distanced, but if enemies lay before him they now would have something better than starlight to shoot by, for a treacherous moon now stood up on the shoulder of an eastern peak and turned the valley pale. It was an open stretch, only cross-hatched by low-lying streaks of brush. The slope was not sharp and Pleasant made the grade easier by running quartering down it towards the bottom of the valley; the footing was good; and the mare ran kindly with the gelding high-headed beside her, apparently none the worse for his fall.

Nevertheless, Pleasant checked her, and sitting still in the saddle he cupped his ear against the wind and listened. The rabbit is a foolish creature, but it knows that the hearing often may be trusted beyond the sight; Pleasant had learned this trick from the cotton-tail and now his caution quickly rewarded him, for straight before him, muffled as they came up the wind, he heard the dull beating of hoofs.

He twitched the mare about and barely had started her north when half a dozen riders bent around the foot of Black Mountain in single file and came pouring after him. A full gallop could not drop them; glancing over his shoulder he saw them gaining, so he settled the mare into a racing stride. With flattened ears she steadied to her work; the gelding, despite his empty saddle, was jerked away to the rear, and for a full mile they flew before Pleasant looked back again and chuckled grimly when he saw the gap he had opened.

But he kept her at her labor until her head began to come up and the gelding drew alongside once more. Then—he had practiced it many a time—he changed to the saddle of his spare horse.

Two horses are better than one. The posse rode gallantly and well, regardless of broken ground, tearing thorns, and dangerous, sharp-edged rocks that reached for them on either side; but they failed behind the good gelding. He was warmed and ready, by this time, and in half an hour up the hard grade of White’s Ravine he left the pursuit out of hearing, out of sight. Pleasant began to take the worst up-pitches at a walk; he knew that he was saved. And whether or not the six threw up their work on the spot or toiled vainly in his rear, he had no further sight of them.

All night he headed steadily through the lower valleys and into the foothills. There, at dawn, he made camp, slept for three hours, and took up the trail again. In the dusk of that evening he made the head of Fisher’s Valley, and so came to his own lower gate. The weary horses pricked their ears, and with a lighter step they climbed the last path. Before the barn Pleasant dismounted, unsaddled, and then stood awhile smoking a cigarette and looking genially forth upon the world. The sky was a dark blue bowl touched with points of gold, and nowhere within the lips of that broad grail, he felt, was there a happier man than he.

He listened to the eager munching of the tired horses as they fell to upon their oats, grinding their teeth down against the bottom of the feed box. Above his head a bat with staggering flight followed the swarming insects. Even for the flittermouse there was a place and a need in this best of all possible worlds.

And a thousand from twenty-five hundred left fifteen hundred to go!

Well, that was only a step, and once the debt was raised, he promised himself a little ease and pleasure instead of endless labor, endless thought; he could trust himself in a poker game now and again, perhaps; he could grant himself the joy of drawing the plans, at least, of the new and big house; he could start work upon the valley road, now so full of bogs and pitches; and he could buy that pair of pearl-handled guns in the window of Cross-Thomas & Hardy’s store!

He felt very tired; he felt the honest satisfaction that only comes with weariness and labor well ended, and so he walked slowly towards his shanty with no shadow whatever upon his conscience.