Читать книгу The Gambler - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

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The mustang came over the hill with its head stretched low and long, while the little animal snaked it across the ground at the full scramble of its speed. It was a tired brute making a great effort at the end of a day of punishing work, but it at least did its best and the best of a running mustang is always astonishingly good. It works at close to top efficiency up to the stride that kills it.

So the mustang shot down the hillside with foam flying back and sticking to its working shoulders where the wet skin showed every grain and fluting of the muscles. The rider was a big man who looked even larger than the fact, because his horse was so very small; and the man acted like one pursued, turning his head time and again to the left to scan the point at which the road tipped up over the next hill before it dropped into the hollow.

At every glance he flogged the mustang with a sharper blow of the quirt. That little beast, exhausted and half blind, had still strength enough to shy to one side as a rabbit started up under its very feet and fled up the slope of the hill. The rider was nearly thrown from his seat by this side twist, but he clung with hands and spurred heels until he could right himself.

By that time, the horse had brought him to the edge of a dense thicket which rose over the road. Here he dismounted in haste. The horse which had seemed small enough even with the master in the saddle, now appeared hardly more than a great dog in size as the man loomed above it, dragging it forward into the shrubbery.

Then, leaving the horse with thrown reins, he worked his way forward through the brush until he was close to the side of the roadway. He had no sooner gained a position of advantage from which he could peer out in the road and the surrounding country, remaining concealed himself, then he uttered a faint exclamation of satisfaction. For he had seen a single rider just come over the crest of the hill to the west. He who lay in covert began to make busy preparations. It was stifling hot in the open where the wind stirred; but in the brush, where the branches were too thin to make any adequate shade, but where the foliage served to shut away every vestige of a breeze, he was in an oven. Moreover, every leaf and every stem in that thicket was gray with a powdering of dust which had been raised from the road in clouds by passing vehicles which had settled like the soft wings of moths upon the shrubs. And this dust, disturbed by the commotion he made in pressing forward, had been knocked into the air. It hung as thick as a fog in the brush, filling his nose, sifting between his bandanna and his neck, stinging his eyes and turning to rivulets of mud on his hot face.

He drew out a dirty blue handkerchief and mopped his eyes free of perspiration and dirt. After this, regardless of the focused sun which burned through his vest, through his shirt, and began to broil the flesh of his back, he pushed his rifle slowly ahead of him through the gap in the shrubbery until it commanded the road at his pleasure. Having done this, he gave his whole attention to the rider.

The latter had now passed the crown of the hill when the same rabbit which the first traveler had startled from a covert started up again and darted across the road. At this, though it did not shy, the fine black horse of the second man stopped and pricked its ears after the fugitive. Its master seemed in no hurry. He was willing enough, perhaps, to enjoy quietly the breeze out of the east which blew with pleasant coolness up the hillside and besides, from this hill he could look across a generous semicircle from the Santa Inez range on the north to that vast huddle of hills and peaks collectively called Comanche Mountain in the north and east, then over the narrow tawny ribbon of the Mirraquipa River streaking away to the southeast through a deep cañon, and so to the south where the bald-headed Digger range rolled away in rank on rank-like waves. Three oddly mated names to be grouped in one landscape! But the Spaniard, the Indian, and the American had all stamped something of themselves in this region. Just in the center of the arc stood San Pablo town with its white walls scattered on either side of Mirraquipa River.

The old Spanish town had suddenly started to grow again after a sleep of two centuries. Around those white walls there was an added girth like a thick rind around the white-skinned fruit of an orange. These were clustering frame shacks which had been hastily thrown up to accommodate newcomers, and the sunburned canvas of many tents blending with the unpainted pine huts. For a double good fortune had come upon San Pablo.

Far off among the tumbled crests of Comanche Mountain gold had been struck; within the same month silver was found in the Digger range, so that both yellow wealth and white tumbled into the little town in the same season. For a thousand necessities the miners sent to the city of San Pablo. All their wagon trains must roll through that universal halting place. And the wages and the raw gold and silver must be expended in San Pablo from Friday night to Monday morning. Already regular stages had been established to each of the two spreading mining camps. Even from this great distance the eye of the traveler could pierce through the crystal clarity of the mountain air and mark the dark steaks of the mule teams—ten and fourteen on a wagon, dragging up the opposite mountain slopes, followed by thin, trailing clouds of dust. And sometimes, though it seemed impossible, the broad wink of the sun along some animal’s side, polished with perspiration, was visible as a tiny spark of light to him who sat in his saddle overlooking the scene.

He raised his glance from the town, from the roads, from the nearer brown mountains, from the distant blue peaks, to the pale-blue heaven above, burning with the radiance of the sun. Even in the air there was stirring life; the buzzards drifted up, against the wind, in immense circles, wandering slowly toward focal points just above San Pablo. Seeing that, an odd thought came through the mind of the spectator that there was filthy corruption in San Pablo, and that these scavengers of the air were waiting for death.

He was not the man to hold a moral thought or a moral picture in mind for any length of time, however. Now he spoke to his horse, and that gallant stallion arched his neck a little and pricked his ears in response. As they went on down the hillside the rider drew out a handkerchief. It was not blue or red like the ordinary capacious bandanna of the range. It was purest white, newly laundered, and required to be shaken out of its folds before he could use it, after which he wiped his face clean, slowly, with scrupulous care, lifting his hat to dry the perspiration on his brow, running the cloth under his neckband, then whipping the dust off the sleeves of his linen coat and out of the wrinkles of his riding breeches and from the polished surface of his riding boots. For he sat in an English saddle, and his whole equipment was such as an English country squire might have chosen to don for very hot weather. His very horse was different, how different from the lump-headed, roach-backed mustang which had carried yonder fellow who lay hidden and sweltering in the dusty thicket. Such a horse as he of the linen riding coat bestrode would not have been out of place when the elect of Oxfordshire gather to hunt the first fox of the season. From its thin mane to its sparse tail, from its quivering nostrils to its black, hard hoofs, it was a thing of beauty. It walked as a cat walks, as lightly, as daintily. It galloped as a bird flies, with just so much delightful freedom and swiftness of stride.

Now it came down the hill flaunting the aristocratic little head as gayly as though there were not fifty hard miles behind it since that morning dawned. For it was thoroughbred in blood and bone!

Its rider was a thin-faced man something over thirty, though how far he had passed that mark it would have been hard to say. He gave an impression like his horse, of supple endurance and exquisite finish rather than sheer might. Plainly he had not been raised up under the blazing suns of the mountain desert. His face was pale, and that pallor was the more accentuated because both his eyebrows and his eyelashes were so exceedingly blond that they were almost white—so very blond that his gray eyes seemed black by contrast. And the heat had only served to bring a slight flush into each thin cheek. Regarding his thin-lipped mouth, habitually a little compressed, and his rather high-arched nose, and his restless eyes, one hesitated to pronounce him more impatient by nature or more nerveless by constant and rigorous self-discipline.

He was apparently a man of contrasts, however. For if he had the face both of a conqueror and a tyrant, on the other hand, he rode with a woman’s light rein and kept control of his mount, one might say, not so much by power of arm as by those infinitely subtle nothings which are telegraphed from the mind of a fine horseman, through the delicately sensitive tips of his fingers, along the reins as along nerves, and so to the brain and the soul of the horse.

He had come almost opposite to the shrubbery when his eyes caught a wink of the sun as small as one of those flashes from a far-off team toiling up the mountainside, but now infinitely nearer—at the very roadside, in fact! It was such a flash as it reflected from the smooth surface of a bit of shining quartz, say, or from well-kept steel. It was such a thing as makes an ordinary man merely turn his head, slowly; but the reflexes of this rider were like the reflexes of a wild animal which a whisper rouses from soundest sleep and which strikes before it sees, by the miracle of instinct.

With a touch of the spurs and a sway of the reins he made his horse leap sidewise half a dozen feet, and at the same instant his nervous hand whipped out a revolver and fired blindly in the direction of the thicket. There was answer more instant than an echo—the deep, clanging report of a rifle, and the muttering of the hidden marksman. The bullet whipped the hat cleanly from the head of the rider; before that hat fell halfway to the ground he had fired again, and this time at a definite target.

From the shrubbery arose a big man through a cloud of dust, knocked from the branches around him. He staggered straightforward to the road, blindly, his arms thrown out before him, and stumbling over a rock, pitched face downward into the liquid dust.