Читать книгу Red Devil of the Range - Max Brand - Страница 7

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IT was the very rose of the morning, when young Everard Winton rode over the hill and down to the shack of Harry Lawson.

Early at is was, Harry Lawson was already up. He was in front of his house, with his face toward the sun, seated on a sagging cracker box and whittling at thin sticks from which he was constructing stretchers on which pelts could be dried. It was said that Harry Lawson had spent his every penny on that long, long hunt for the red horse. In that quest he had hired many a man; many a horse had been ridden to death; many a month had been consumed relentlessly. He had been almost rich. All was spent to capture the red stallion which he could not ride!

To eke out a living, Harry Lawson was trapping wolves and coyotes for the bounty and for the value of the pelts.

There was a time when Harry Lawson had bet five thousand dollars on the single ruffle of a faro pack—and lost—and shrugged his shoulders at the loss. Now he had fewer dollars than he formerly had thousands. On the other hand, in the old days he was merely "Half-breed Harry" or "That Lawson Injun." And now he was a revered figure. Men rode scores of miles to look at his splendid horse. The legend of the long pursuit of the Red Pacer filled the range.

Lawson remained the same dusty-faced, sawed-off, bow-legged specimen of an unpretentious cow-puncher that he had always been. He looked very much what he was, a cross between a stubby Comanche squaw and a hardy Highlander.

He looked up as the boy jogged the mustang nearer, but continued his whittling, merely reducing the size of his shavings as he stared at Everard Winton with fixed eyes.

The latter approached, dismounted, and waved to the half-breed.

"I'm Ned Winton's son, Lawson," he said.

He went over and held out his hand. The Indian took it without rising. His curiously impersonal eyes wandered steadily over the face of the boy, as though he looked at a picture rather than a human being.

"I'll take a look at the Red Pacer, if I may," said Everard.

The Indian shrugged his shoulders.

Winton stepped to the corral fence. He went with his eyes to the ground. Only when he reached the bars did he look up, suddenly; and then he blinked and gripped the nearest bar with both hands. His eyes dimmed; he heard a singing in his ears, and his heart rose like a bubble in his breast.

He blinked the moisture out of his eyes and looked again. There was a glow, a light, about the stallion. It was not the sheen of his eyes or the shimmer of the sunshine down his flanks; that was not the light that the boy saw around the horse. Dark red chestnut, the name was not hard to understand. There were three white marks—a splash in the tail, a star between the eyes, and one silken white stocking drawn up almost to the knee.

The boy went back to Harry Lawson, who remained on the cracker box, whittling.

"Suppose somebody could ride that horse, what price would you put on him?" asked Everard.

The half-breed looked away toward the sky, considered for a long moment with dim eyes, and then shrugged his shoulders.

The boy caught his breath with impatience.

"Suppose I put a saddle on him?May I try him?" he asked, at last.

Harry Lawson nodded.

When the stallion saw young Winton enter the corral he came to life and swung around the big corral with a flourish. He made the place look small, as a circus seal makes its foolish tub look small. It seemed to the boy that with every stride the monster horse rode high enough to clear the fence, had he been of a mind to do so. Winton snared the red hoRse around the neck at the first cast. To his delighted amazement the stallion stood still at once. One lesson he had learned perfectly—not to pull against a rope. The saddle and bridle were worked on with equal ease, and there was not even a protest when Winton swung himself into the saddle. But when he hit home in it, the action began.

It seemed to him, a minute later, that the great horse had risen under him, turned into a fountain of fire, and dissolved as it struck the earth, dropping its rider into a cloud of darkness.

Then Everard Winton was sitting up in the depth of the corral dust and spitting dust from his mouth. Blood came with the dust. He put up a hand and found that red was trickling from both mouth and nose. There was a rip in his trouser leg and a cut in the skin beneath the rip. Blood trickled down that leg, also, and the wound burned like fire. That was where he had grazed the fence.

He dragged himself to his feet, but he was so dizzy that he had to sit down again, at once. He felt as though a club had struck him at the base of the brain.

When his wits cleared again, he saw that the saddle was lying in the middle of the enclosure. The stallion had bucked it cleanly off, and he was in a far corner now, nibbling at the grass that extended a little distance under the fence, his ears pricking. The very contented switching of his tail was like the gesture of one who has done a task well.

The boy waited for a full half hour before the misery was out of his brain and the sickness out of his heart. Then he stood up and turned to see that the half-breed was moving away from him, working busily to fit together the pieces of a stretcher. Harry Lawson was not excited, it appeared, by the proceedings of this new aspirant.

The Winton blood and the pride of the Wintons stood up in the boy. Again he caught the horse by the trailing lariat, and saddled it as easily as before. Mounted again, he was once more hurled up into the sky. But this time he hit the saddle when he came down. He stuck through that and half a dozen skyrocketings. Then the big horse spun around in a sudden circle and Everard went off, stretched flat out in the air and whirled as he shot forward. He clicked his head against a corral post and lay face down in the dust for half an hour.

When he awakened, he was almost suffocating, and the increasing heat of the sun was burning the back of his neck.

He sat up in a world that rocked about him as if he had been in a small boat in a heavy sea. He had to close his eyes, and it was another half hour before he ventured to get to his feet. But he could not stay on them; he had to sit down again. Only much later did he manage to get to the watering trough, turn on the tap, and drink deep. That refreshed him.

He looked toward the house and saw that the half-breed was still whittling sticks. Again Harry Lawson's back was toward the corral. For all he knew, a dead man lay in the corral—dead with a broken neck or a cracked skull. But that did not trouble the half-breed.

The saddle, too, was lying in the middle of the corral once more, though it had been cinched up with redoubled care.

Winton went to pick it up, and found it a loose, pulpy wreck. The stallion must have rubbed it against the fence posts when he found that he could not simply shake it off. Winton's riding was ended for that day, but he was glad of it. Nothing but the fact that the Indian was there to look on would have induced him to make even another trial.

So, with bowed head, he went toward the corral gate, trailing the ruined saddle under his arm. He did not look up until he had reached the gate itself; and then he saw that Harry Lawson was facing toward him, at last, and regarding him and the horse. It was with amusement that the half-breed looked upon him; it was with a smile that turned into the heartiest, but the most silent of laughter.

The boy ground his teeth together! If he had been a little older, he would have controlled himself. But at the sight of that mockery, a madness fired his brain. The nausea left him, all at once, and he whirled about, fairly running to the stallion. Saddle or not, he would try again, for the sake of manhood.

He sprang onto the bare back of the great horse and waited for the explosion that would hurl him at the blue sky. But the Red Pacer merely turned his head. Without alarm, with what seemed an air of curious surprise, he regarded the first man ever to sit on his naked back.