Читать книгу Trouble's Messenger - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11

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The eight who had preceded had looked, to Messenger, like powerful and graceful predatory animals in their strength and in the fierceness and the wildness of their eyes. They did not need fresh scalps dangling from their reins to prove to young Messenger that they were as savage and dangerous as so many tigers. Something swelled up in him suddenly, hotly.

He himself had been taught all the arts of destruction. He had been prepared through all his life to kill and to avoid death. Those arts he had not practiced. But when he saw these savages, suddenly he was glad with all his heart that his hands had been equipped with uncanny skill.

But although they seemed formidable, there was not one who disturbed his self-confidence in the slightest. Like some champion looking at a group of antagonists, he had measured them calmly, and decided that this man was too heavy for his strength, that one too nervous, yonder fellow too slow. They were the instant judgments that a practiced eye will make in such matters.

Then came War Lance, and it seemed to the boy that the very ground quaked beneath him. For this was, to be sure, a different matter. The very horse beneath the chief was different from those that the others bestrode. It was one of those dappled chestnuts, so dark that dappling, like a faint patterning of leopard spots, was barely distinguishable. Only when the sun struck the velvet of him in a certain way, the design was apparent. He seemed all silk and steel, supple steel that bends and never breaks, sword steel that a warrior can put the trust of his life in. He was a hand and more taller than the rest of his companions, but size had not taken from him the slightest portion of the same nervous fire that burned in them. Only, in him, it was reduced and subdued to the control of his mind. He went with a sober and easy gait. There was no need to check him in with a stern hand for, at his ease, he regarded the ground before him and looked with pricking ears at the riders in front and at the people upon either side. It was only when he looked at the boy that Messenger could tell that the same wild spirit was in him that appeared in all the actions of the other horses. For, in his eyes, a fire flashed from the stallion. It was like the look of a caged eagle, incomparably fierce, grand, and untamable. One might have said that he submitted to the control of this man because he loved the battle and could endure the matchless valor and strength of his rider.

For so War Lance appeared. Physically he seemed the match, and more, for the most powerful of his companions, although they were the picked men of many tribes. As when a thousand athletes walk upon a field, yet one of them, by something in his bearing and the smooth harmony of his might and the carriage of his head, appears a champion, so War Lance appeared among his chosen men.

There was need of the extra size in the stallion. There was need to support the thews and sinews of that warrior on his back. Although he was massive, he certainly was no sluggard. The tendons behind his knee and the smallness of the knee itself told the accurate eye of Messenger a sufficient story.

There was not a touch of paint on the body of the horse or upon the body or the face of the master. In his long hair were set only two eagle feathers. One might well have said that he disdained adornment, and he had reason. He had been created to take the eye of every beholder, and to keep the attention riveted on him.

But those matters of horse and the man’s body were purely secondary to Messenger. He looked to the face, and dwelt there enthralled. The man appeared forty. Being an Indian, he might be perhaps ten years younger. He had the true Indian features. Nose and chin and mouth appeared inflexible in terrible severity, but the brow was as nobly made as any white man’s, and the eyes were large, luminous, and thoughtful. Perhaps they were a little over bright, like the eyes of the horse he bestrode, but he kept all under perfect control. Suddenly the boy could understand how the braves had listened to the prophecies or the dreams of this man and believed in them. Given a red skin, perhaps he himself might....

Here, as the chief came almost opposite, War Lance turned his head, and the bright, keen glance centered suddenly upon the face of Messenger, and dwelt there.

It struck Messenger like a blow. It dazzled and dizzied him, and he was blinking and half unnerved when the brass howitzer on top of the fort roared with a deep, hollow reverberation. He started.

At that explosion, the eight horses that had gone before became frantic and hardly could be restrained by their perfect riders. But not so the stallion and War Lance. With an unaltered step, the great horse came to the edge of the ditch and, seeming merely to stretch out for a slightly larger stride, was somehow across it—an elastic impulse, rather than an actual jump, it seemed to Messenger. Fierce, keen, overmastering desire and envy suddenly burned in his heart and in his brain.

He had had his training on the best of Kentucky and Virginia bred blood horses. On them he had been forced to gallop across the roughest country bareback. On them he had been taught to do foolish circus tricks that he had scorned and detested. He had had to rise and stand at a gallop. He had had to learn to lay himself along the side of a racing, headlong mount. He had fallen to the ground in every possible posture. His neck had been half broken a hundred times. He had been a mass of bruises and of sores, until that dreadful education was finished. As his skill had increased, he had been rewarded with still finer and wilder and more unbroken mounts. He had gained a peculiarly savage pleasure in mastering them, one after the other. He had learned to love some of them—the only creatures in his young life to whom he had been able to give the least scruple of affection. But never had he seen such a horse as this stallion.

It was a storm wind incarnate. It was a hurricane gathered in the hand and at the will of the master. Distance did not exist before its stride. Its courage would never fail its strength, and its strength would never fail its courage.

“Yes, sir,” Lessing, at his elbow, said. “Two looks at that one would turn a saint into a hoss thief, I reckon.” He laughed a little huskily, as though he himself had had the same emotion that burned in the boy.

But that voice and that laughter brought young Messenger down from the strange height to which he had mounted. He was snatched back to the earth, and he glanced aside at Lessing with something almost like disgust in his eyes.

Then, however, he could look at the rest of the procession. Rather dimly he saw the last half of the sacred band go by, and mechanically he told himself that it was a match for the first half of the same troop. Man and beast were as good, perhaps better. But they seemed slight things compared with War Lance and his stallion. What else, indeed, in the whole world, was worthy of comparison with that hero?

Breathing heavily, as though he had been running up a hill, Messenger surveyed the procession that followed. All the warriors of the tribes that were present at the fort streamed by him. The brass howitzer boomed again, and yet again in welcome, for Louis Desparr knew when to spare his gunpowder and when to be lavish with it. That cannon on the roof was the chief item among his dignities. Yet it seemed to Messenger like the noise of a silly pop-gun, when such a man as War Lance was in presence.

He tried to estimate the men as they rode by him. Calmly he told himself that they were athletes, nearly every one. Even the old men rode their horses with a wonderful skill. But they meant nothing to Messenger. His heart and his soul were yonder, behind the palisades, where War Lance was now, perhaps springing down from his charger.

He turned to Lessing. “Let’s go inside,” he suggested.

“Aye.” Lessing grinned. “You wanna have another look at War Lance, close up. But not too close, son. That’s the kind of a fire that’ll burn the hands, I’m tellin’ you. The kind of a fire that’ll burn you to the heart in a half of a second. Besides, there’s something else comin’ up here. Damned me if it don’t look like Summer Day has come back here, the skunk! I’ve told you that I like the Injuns, son, but there’s exceptions, the same as there is among the whites. And Summer Day is the worst of ’em. The murderin’, stealin’, faithless, treacherous hound! How come that the Blackfeet and the Piegans would make a chief out of him? Yes, sir, that’s Summer Day. I can tell by the way he hangs his head to one side, like he was sorry for something. He’s got plenty to be sorry for, the scoundrel! That’s Summer Day. I’d pawn my hide that it is, and damn’ lot of insolence he’s got to come back here to the fort!”

“Who is he?” asked Messenger, hardly hearing his own question, so disturbed was his mind by other thoughts and that other great picture.

“Why,” said Lessing, “he’s the real head chief of the Blackfeet. War Lance has got more fame for fightin’, but Summer Day is a good second to him. Besides, Summer Day is a grand, high-flyin’ medicine man of the first water. He can wither your face in a night, and bend your back double in a day, the Injuns believe. He gets rich, curin’ fools. Hot baths is his main hold, like it is with all of ’em, but his lingo is better than most, and they believe in him. Besides, he’s got a terrible long list of scalps and coups, and more hosses than anybody else in the whole nation. Yes, sir, that’s old Summer Day. Not old, either, except in meanness. He killed a half-breed at the fort here, right after it was opened, and then he faded out into the open country. What’s brought him back ... unless War Lance done some persuadin’!”

This chief had chosen, oddly enough, to take the absolutely rearmost position in the line of warriors, and behind him began the rout of children and women who poured behind, but leaving a safe distance of respect and fear between them and the great medicine man. His head hanging a little to one side, as though in remorseful thought or weariness, Summer Day came closer. He was a beast of a man. His hair was like that of a horse’s tail—as long and as coarse, and some of it tumbled unheeded down across his face. A monster of a man, in his sleekly sloping shoulders appeared the immeasurable power of an animal. He did not have a picture horse, like one of the sacred band. Instead, he rode a shaggy, typical pony, although doubtless it possessed wonderful, although hidden, virtues. As he came by, the chief lifted his eyes and glanced with a glittering look to the side.

Messenger stood, stiff as a lance. “It is he!” he gasped.

Lessing, turning suddenly upon him, amazed, saw that the boy was as white as stone, and knew that he had found the object of his quest.