Читать книгу The Lightning Warrior - Max Brand - Страница 5

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Cobalt went down to the saloon and staked his dog team against six hundred dollars as a start. Before the next morning, he had won forty thousand dollars. He took a week spending that money. None of it went in dissipation. Everything was sunk in the preparation to get more gold out of the earth. Then he disappeared from Circle City and went to the diggings.

Everyone knew about that conversation he had had with Sylvia Baird. That talk was so typical of Cobalt that people could not help repeating the details of it and laughing heartily. They even asked Sylvia about it, and Sylvia would laugh in turn. But Circle City stopping laughing, and so did Sylvia Baird, when it was learned that Cobalt was organizing his expedition and hiring many hands. Circle City stopped smiling because it very well knew that, when Cobalt bent his energies in any direction, the time for foolish comment had ended. I think that Sylvia began to worry almost at once.

I saw her shortly after Cobalt went into the wilderness, and I chatted with her a little about Cobalt. Her way of putting the thing was characteristic.

"I hear that Cobalt is a great friend of yours," I said.

"Friend?" replied Sylvia. "Oh, not at all. I've only met him once, you know. Yet he means a good deal to me."

"Does he?" I asked.

"Yes. Because he's going to marry me it appears."

"Great Scott! That's exciting!"

"Isn't it?"

She joked about it so openly that everyone could speak of it freely, but all the while she was uneasy. I could see that because I had come to know her very well.

"Suppose," she said one day, "that Cobalt should come back from the mines with a fortune and hold me to my joke?"

"Then he would have a chance to do the laughing," I said.

"Are you serious?" she asked.

"Are you serious?" I replied.

"I'm frightened, a little. For once he gets a thing into his head—"

There was one comfort, and that lay in the reports that came back to us. Cobalt and his crew were tearing up the ground and getting hardly a taste of color. In the meantime Circle City had something that drowned out even Cobalt as a topic of interest, and that was the appearance of a white wolf the Indians were said to have named the Lightning Warrior for so swiftly did he attack and parry. Having seen him, I can give an authentic account of his looks. He was closer to a bear in bulk than to a wolf. Those who know wolves realize that it is a goodish-size beast that has a footprint four inches across. When it is a giant, it has a spread of five inches. There have been some half fabulous reports from time to time of wolves with paws of more than five inches' measurement; but the Lightning Warrior of Circle City marked out a six-inch circle as he put down his paw. This I know because I measured the thing myself, not once but twenty times.

A wolf which makes a four-inch track is big enough to cause plenty of trouble. Swell the beast to the dimensions of the Lightning Warrior and the dangerous possibilities are multiplied by ten. When I saw that fellow standing in front of a wall of brush, with the wind ruffling his mane, he looked to me like the god of wolves. His whiteness was the amazing thing, the incredible thing. He shone as snow shines. His eyes and his tongue were bloodstains in the fluffing radiance. One hears of white wolves very often, but usually they are the color of coffee and milk or simply a dirty yellow, but this lord of wolves was entirely and purely white.

He called himself forcibly to the attention of Circle City and, having stepped to the center of the stage, he remained there. He turned himself into a frightful plague through his appetite which was for dogs. He would eat anything with no more conscience than fire, but his regular diet was dogs. Even for wolves a diet of Eskimo Huskies seems rather tough, for Huskies are themselves nine-tenths wolf. In the dog teams working from Circle City, there were more than a few pure-blood wolves pulling at the lines. However, the Lightning Warrior did not spare them. Anything which had been tainted by the hand of man was especially delightful to him. He cared not so long as the animal was large enough to make him a few mouthfuls.

There were in Circle City some Mackenzie Huskies that were twice the size of the average wolf and that were twice as hardy as well, for they were kept in the pink of condition by hard labor and spare feeding. A Mackenzie Husky will hamstring a horse or a cow as neatly as ever a wolf could do the same job. A Mackenzie Husky fights like a wolf, fencing for an opening, cutting and slashing as with a saber. Nevertheless, Joe Frazer saw two Huskies of the biggest type, weighing well over a hundred and fifty pounds apiece, slaughtered by that white plague, the Lightning Warrior.

At the time, Joe carried no gun. He could merely shout and run toward the fight from a distance, but long before he arrived the throats of the two dogs were cut. Joe said that the wolf seemed twice the size of the dogs. We knew this could not be. I suppose it was action which magnified the apparent size of the monster, that and the results of his daring play. He fought right on until Joe Frazer was almost on the spot. Then the Lightning Warrior gave the coup de grâce to the second of the Huskies, standing with a forepaw on each of the dead bodies and defying Joe with a look to come on.

Joe was not a fool. When he saw the silent snarl of that brute, he started backing up, and the infernal creature at once came stalking after him, sliding along on its stomach. Joe had only a hunting knife. He drew this out, but he said he would just as soon have faced a lion, armed with a stiletto, as to face that white beast with a mere hunting knife in his hand. He began to shout. Every time he yelled, the wolf paused a little and looked off at Joe's house in the distance.

Finally, the shouts of Joe got to the ear of Jim Bridger, who was Joe's partner, and Bridger came running out with a rifle in his hands. When the Lightning Warrior saw the rifle, he turned and went for distance and more air. Joe Frazer said that the animal started so fast and worked so hard to get into the middle of the horizon that he left a moan of effort in the air behind him. Certainly he faded out so fast that Bridger could not even attempt to shoot. At any rate Bridger was a strange fellow, and he did not shoot on principle. I heard him talk the thing over with Joe Frazer.

"You might have winged him," Frazer insisted.

Bridger answered: "Nothing told me to shoot at him."

"Nothing told you?" shouted Frazer. "Wasn't I there howling my head off to make you shoot at that white lump of murder?"

"No voice inside of me told me to shoot," said Bridger. "There's no good in taking a crack at any wolf unless you've got guidance."

"You talk like a crazy man," said Frazer.

Perhaps Bridger was a little touched on the subject, but he remained as sober as you please and swore that nobody in Circle City would get a bullet into the Lightning Warrior until it pleased the beast to permit the shooting. People laughed at Bridger, and very rightly after he had said this. When Bridger saw people laugh, he grew hot with anger. He actually made a standing bet that nobody in Circle City would shoot or trap the Lightning Warrior. He bet a hundred ounces of gold dust on the proposition.

A hundred ounces, at seventeen dollars an ounce, made pretty good pay for a small job. When people heard that Bridger was in earnest and actually had put up the sack at the saloon, they started to work their heads off to get that wolf. For a few days they burned up ammunition, but none of the bullets grazed the Lightning Warrior. Bridger used to hear the stories with a faint sneer.

"None of you will ever get him," he swore.

He began to grow complacent. I think that the wolf had been half a joke to him at the first, but now it more than justified all that he ever had claimed for it. So Bridger erected the thing into a mystery. He no longer smiled when the Lightning Warrior was mentioned, but he would put on a profound and understanding air and shake his head a few times, and he was apt to leave the room if people persisted in the subject. Then came the Morrissey affair, and after that the subject of the wolf was taboo with everyone.