Читать книгу Twenty Notches - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 7

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He had spent his portion of time in Kentucky, and whoever so much as puts his foot inside the State of the green hills on which a blue shadow lies is bound to breathe in from the air some knowledge of horseflesh. The tramp had some such knowledge, and he walked up and down behind the horses for a moment, forgetful of everything except their beauty. That beauty was not the sleekness of round-sided circus ponies. They had bones to show, but to his eyes there was a point with almost every bone. And such bone beneath the feel of a wisely gripping hand—such wide, flat bone, ironhard, with none of the round and the sponginess of cold blood!

Whatever he felt about the rest, there was one which particularly caught his fancy. That was a bay mare of a peculiarly washy color, the worst in the world, and the three white stockings which are proverbially supposed to make a good horseman “deny ’em.”

He did not deny this mare.

She had an ugly head with a distinctly Roman nose that spoke of a will of her own. Her eye was small, and red-rimmed with bad temper. Her hips and her withers thrust boldly out, but she looked to his keen eye like a creature of both speed and bottom, and when she tried to kick his head off, then strike him to the ground, and finally bit at him like a snapping wolf, he felt that his judgment had been reinforced rather than countered.

He gave her one sharp stroke with the cruel and supple-lashed quirt. Then she stood still, though her ears were flattened with poisonous closeness. Then he saddled her, while still she failed to move, and still silently promised to explode beneath him the instant he mounted her.

At last, he had her out of the stable. In the saddle which he had picked out, there was a good fifteen-shot Winchester, loaded. Behind the same saddle a slicker was rolled. She was now ready for a long campaign, and he had not forgotten to put a twenty-pound pad of oats across her back. That would make her defy pursuit for a time, at least.

It was just the end of darkness when he got on her back, that is to say, it was that moment which appears the darkest because the very stars have lost their brilliancy, and because the mountains are black. These mountains, beaded with dark pines on the heights, and made dusky with sun-burned brush, lower down, the tramp looked on with a good deal of doubt. He had been through the mountain-desert before, but usually on freight trains. Now he was to take it with a horse, and the first thing that he saw as the dawn brightened a little in the east, was a low-swinging buzzard making round upon round, searching for some prey close to the house of Man.

Still there was no sign of the awakening of Trot Enderby.

The tramp could imagine him stretched out in his bed in the deepest dream of the poor slave who lay in the woodpile, crushed, rain-wet, and cold to the bone, shuddering and shivering, and ready for another day of torment. Of this would the dream of Enderby be.

In the meantime, the tramp swung onto the back of fifteen-two of loaded fiendishness worse than an exploding bomb.

Those pressed-back ears were not for nothing. She pitched the tramp out of the saddle with her first buck, and almost caught him with her second as he was coming down through the air.

He hit the ground flat. The dust spurted beneath him. The sound of his fall was as the clapping of hands. And he rose in time to see her tail switching through the door of the barn, which luckily he had left open.

Half stunned he went, but he went running.

This had been a bad experience, but it might have been worse. There might have been twenty-four hours of solid torture worse than this. He had just been through such a time.

Who would say that a woodpile is the nurse of Spartan patience? It was to the tramp. To be bucked from a horse was as nothing compared to being fastened by fear to the handles of a cross-cut saw.

He ran into that barn.

This time she was not tethered in a stall, and she came for him headfirst. He stunned her with a stroke over the head with the loaded butt of the whip, and took her out, staggering.

He forgot the man. He forgot everything connected with escape. A cold and settled fury rose in him. He rode her forth, still staggering. The instant that her head cleared she pitched him clean over the fence, and scampered back to the barn again.

This time he climbed over the fence with the taste of his own blood running down into his mouth from ear and nose. Surely that second fall had been most crushing.

When he ran into the barn, he found her at the farther end, with her head thrown high, nodding up and down, and her upper lip thrust out, and her eyes wild with stubbornness and terror.

At this sight, the soul of the tramp was touched with pity. One might have thought that he could have saved his pity for himself, with his blood running down his face and his body so bruised and aching, and his head singing a song of its own. But he recognized dreadful terror, such as had so often possessed his soul, and he knew that no physical pain is equal to the white torture of terror.

He went up to the mare with a gentle voice and an outstretched hand which presently she noticed, pricked her ears, and then allowed herself to be led quietly from the barn.

He mounted her without trouble. She trembled and sidestepped when she felt his weight settle in the saddle. Then, as he loosed the reins, she tossed her head as though she expected to be struck over the head again.

He gentled her with quiet words. And how far better it was than the lash or the loaded butt of a whip!

The east was pink as he jogged her at last to the gate of the big corral, slid back the bar, and rode her through, and he turned her up the gully road, leaving the gate open behind him.

All was well with the tramp, so far as fresh morning, and pure air, and clear sky were concerned. His heart was high, and his mind was strong; but the gait of his chosen steed was enough to topple down towers of strongest stone!

She walked with a jerk. She trotted with a heavy pounding. And her gallop was a thing to dream of, not to tell, so awkwardly did she smite the ground.

He was on the point of turning around, and, in spite of the fact that it must be near to the rising time of Trot Enderby, he would have gone back to get a second horse, when a tuft of dried weed rolled beside the trail, and the mare bolted.

She ran for a half mile like a thrown stone which knows where it is going.

She ran as though with the beat of wings, and she ran, finally, like water shooting without a single riffle down a flume.

There was no more beat or jerk or strain to that wonderful flight than the flowing of the wind through the blue heavens. Like an eagle she made her rider feel. He had to throw back his head and laugh.

Half a mile she sprinted up the hill, and at the top he managed to get her under control again. After that, he noticed that she was not even breathing hard. He cared not for a heavy trot or for a clumsy gallop. He knew that her racing speed was that of a bullet, and he felt as though he had left ten thousand keen enemies behind him.

She had an ewe neck, among her other faults. He ran his hand along that uptwisted neck, now, and blessed her for her virtues. Let others have the show horses and circus performers. He was contented with the ugly lines of the mare, and that one virtue.

Then he sat her at a sharp trot for ten miles.

It nearly reduced his interior to scrambled eggs, but never once did that flawless machine stop pulling ahead on the bridle, and never once did she diminish her pace, up hill and down. It was not like sitting on a horse. It was like riding behind an engine which besides strength had the ability to pick its footing over rough as well as smooth ground.

He had no more goal than a runaway child.

He would not have been able to decide which way to go, no matter what prospects lay before him. But all that really mattered to the Sleeper was that he had found free happiness. It was not the money he had stolen, not the horse he rode, or even the mysterious gun in the holster, which filled his soul with content, though he himself would have said so. Something had happened in the Sleeper, as minute, as invisible as the germinating of the life in the seed, and the sprouting of the stalk.

He was not aware of this, except very vaguely. He knew that there was a change. He felt his manliness, for instance; but above all he was interested in the deeds which he had done during the past night. He had grown at a stroke almost rich. And he possessed a horse which seemed capable of keeping him away from any dangerous pursuit. No wonder his spirits were high. He was a thief, and now he felt a thief’s joy.

A rabbit started out from behind a rock and scooted across the nearest sky line.

“Now, gun,” said the Sleeper, “we’ll see what you’re worth, and Doc’s yarning about you!”

He pulled out the revolver, the old, clumsy, heavy gun, and fired; the rabbit ducked over the sky edge.

The thief put up the revolver with a laugh.

“Magic my eye!” he said to the sensitive ears of the mare. “I missed that rabbit a foot. If you won’t kill a rabbit, just what’ll you do about a man, for me?”

The trail wound down sharply, and he was busy for a quarter of an hour trying to keep in the saddle, for the mare went downhill like a mountain goat. She jumped from side to side down the gully, landing with four feet bunched together and with her head lowered. Sometimes it seemed as though she surely were bumping the rocks with her chin.

This action, with humped back and with lowered head, and this writhing from side to side at a great but an uncertain speed, made a very good imitation of bucking, and poor Sleeper bumped heavily, holding on with both hands and letting the mare find her own way and use her own tactics. He was badly frightened. He expected to be jumped from the saddle at any moment, or else that the mare as she plunged headfirst would lose her footing and that they would roll in a battered mass to the bottom of the slope.

However, neither of these things happened.

And a moment later, at the bottom of the pass, he reined the mare panting around the corner of the cliff.

In the very center of the trail at the foot of the height lay the body of a jack rabbit with a bullet-hole through the head!