Читать книгу The Lightning Warrior - Max Brand - Страница 6

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Morrissey, a big, powerful Irishman, had gone out from Circle City with a string of eight dogs, practically a double freight team. The Lightning Warrior went with him. He ate dogs one by one, killing them in the night. At last, Morrissey slept with the remaining in a huddle about him, the four wedging closely together. He did not need to tell them why he wanted them there. They seemed to know. The dread of the monster was in the air, and they had breathed it.

A dog was killed that very night. Poor Morrissey heard the crunching of its neck bones under the teeth of the beast as he awakened from a sound sleep and saw the Lightning Warrior go off, bearing the body of the Husky trailing from his jaws. After that Morrissey tried to keep awake all the way back to Circle City, but he was eight days out and, of course, he failed. He dropped all but one sled, and he put out at full speed with his remaining three dogs. Two days later, he dropped into a brief slumber after a halt. He was wakened by a wild outburst and saw his three dogs banded valiantly together, facing the white killer. They might as well have tried to escape from death itself. The Lightning Warrior stopped playing when he saw the man waken. He broke the neck of the leader and, when the other dogs backed away, the wolf went off with its profits. This all had happened far too rapidly for Morrissey to intervene.

A day or two later, the Lightning Warrior no longer kept out of sight. He was always to the right and a little ahead of the sled team. He seemed to poor Morrissey as big as a lion, and a thousand times more diabolical. As Morrissey was staggering along, half dead for the lack of sleep, that infernal brute ran in and killed his seventh victim right under the eyes of the driver! Then Morrissey had only one dog, and he lightened the sled to skeleton proportions and made the burst of the last two days toward Circle City.

The first day the last remaining sled dog was struck down by the white lightning. On the final march which he made without a pack of any kind, with nothing to eat except a few tea leaves to crumble between his teeth, that fiend of a Lightning Warrior followed him closely, followed him with an increasing interest, until Morrissey felt sure that the diet list of the Lightning Warrior would be soon varied with flesh other than that of dogs. He managed to keep his eyes open but, when he pushed open the door of the saloon and staggered in among us, I can assure you that Morrissey was a very sick-looking man.

He was white and shaking, and he poured off three shots of that stifling whiskey, one after the other. Somebody asked Morrissey why he was so pale, and Morrissey asked the other how he would look if he had been jogging across country with a demon to dog his steps? Morrissey went quite out of his head when he talked about it. It was a month before he was sound mentally, and we used to have to sit and listen to him raving in the wildest way.

Poor Morrissey! He recovered his mental balance, finally, but he had been very hard hit. From being the most openhearted, cheerful fellow imaginable, he became sullen and morose nor would he have anything to do with his oldest friends. After the Morrissey business, the hunting of the white plague became a passion with everyone. The town combined. Rifles, poison, traps of all kinds, lures and baits of all descriptions were employed. The townsmen worked together. I helped during the hunting on many a bitter day and night.

This whole episode made a terrific impression upon all of us in Circle City. Men had carried weapons before in the hope of getting a chance at the Lightning Warrior and the hundred ounces. Now, when we went armed, I think that none of us really wanted to encounter the brute, no matter how good the light for shooting. I won't go so far as to say that a single wolf had terrorized the entire community, but it was something very akin to a panic that gripped the men of the town. I can look back clearly to my own emotions of the moment and remember that the last thing I wanted was an opportunity to win the hundred ounces of the reward.

If it had not been for the Lightning Warrior, we would have talked about nothing but Cobalt and Sylvia Baird until the following season, but the Lightning Warrior first divided our attention, and then he practically monopolized it. We had to rub our eyes when Cobalt suddenly turned up one day with five of his crew at his side. He had brought twelve hundred pounds of nuggets and dust from the diggings!

The few of us who were not at the mines at the moment went half mad when we heard of this bonanza. Cobalt gave up his claims now that he had his money. He said that three mule packs of gold dust were enough for any man, and I suppose that he was right. At any rate other people went out to work on the very spot where Cobalt had found his fortune, and they collected exactly nothing at all. It had been more luck than skill. He had struck some rich pockets. When they were emptied, there was little more than a trace of the right color remaining.

One can imagine the excitement in Circle City now. For here was Cobalt back among us, his pockets filled with gold. Yonder was lovely Sylvia Baird who had told him, in jest or in madness, that she would marry him when he could give her certain things. To be sure, he was not rich now, but he had enough assured him to make certain of a pleasant home.

I remember that we looked upon Cobalt with a gasp of new surprise. We talked the matter over among us, and we decided that, if the girl had asked for a crown of diamonds, Cobalt would have ripped open the earth with his bare hands until he found it. We had faith in him before. We had an infinite faith in him now.

He spent two days in resting, that is to say in drinking! The two terms were synonymous with Cobalt as with most of the other miners, but he had a head of well riveted armor-plate, and there was no addling him with alcohol. At the end of the two days he went to call on Sylvia Baird.

She was ready for him. At least she was as well prepared as a human being can be before meeting a giant like Cobalt. She told him how wonderful he was. When he named the weight of the dust he had brought in from the mines, she considered it and decided that the income from such a sum, well invested, would just about do to house her wonderful husband properly.

On this day snow was falling. The flakes whirled with a stifling thickness outside the window, and it seemed that the world had been clapped into a flour sack and well shaken with the dust. Sylvia kept poking at the window and scratching designs on it. Cobalt sat in the opposite corner of the room and watched her like a wolf. He knew perfectly well what she was thinking, and she knew that he knew. Their conversations were the oddest games in the world.

For instance, when her father came in, Sylvia said: "Look, look, Father! Here's Cobalt back from the mines and quite a rich man now. Have you met my father, Cobalt? Oh, yes, on the day you asked him if you could marry me. Sit down, Father, and talk to Cobalt a little and feast your eyes on him. He's looking a little thinner, don't you think, the poor dear! You've had some frostbite in that poor red nose of yours, Cobalt."

Henry Baird tried to break through the air of banter and mockery between that pair. "Look here, Sylvia," he said, "I want to know how seriously you are taking this whole affair?"

"Seriously?" cried Sylvia. "Good heavens, Father, of course I can't be anything but serious. Not considering the opportunity that's been cast in my path. Father, you don't suppose—oh, this will amuse Circle City. This will fairly dissolve Cobalt with laughter—to think that any woman could even dream for a single moment of refusing to marry him!"

Cobalt stuck out his jaw more than a trifle, but he did not answer this scoffer. Henry Baird looked sharply at the younger man.

"Cobalt," he said, "is this a game with you, too? Or are you really serious?"

"Mister Baird," Cobalt stated, "I'm going to play it the way she wants. If she wants to laugh at me, she can keep right on laughing up the steps to the altar because that's where I'll lead her one of these days."

"Of course you will," said that little imp of a Sylvia. "Of course, you'll lead me to the altar, if you want to. Oh, Cobalt, when I think of the number of girls whose hearts will break that day. When you think of it, Cobalt, how can you be so cruel to them all? Oh, the poor things! They can't help loving you, Cobalt. They can't help it any more than I can help it. You ought to know that."

"Go on. Go right on, Sylvia," said Cobalt. "I like the taste of you today better than ever. I like to sit down and close my eyes and just listen and pretend to myself that you're a man, after all, and big enough for me to put my hands on you."

"That's what I call real love, Father," commented the girl. "He cares for me so much that sometimes he thinks I'm as important as a man. Oh, Cobalt, what a delightful flatterer you are. Did you ever hear anything like it, Father?"

"I never heard anything like you, Sylvia," replied her father sternly.

"It's Cobalt who inspires me," said Sylvia. "You can't expect me to remain ordinary when such a man as Cobalt has noticed me. You can't expect that, can you?"

"Sylvia," returned her father, "you ought to be whipped and put to bed without supper. Cobalt, I don't know exactly your attitude, but I'm ashamed of the way Sylvia is acting."

"Yeah," agreed Cobalt, "she's acting, all right, but one of these days she'll find that I'm up there on the stage with her and signed for life in the same company. That's what I'm waiting for. Sylvia, what do you want for an engagement ring?"

She held out one of her lovely hands. "I never wear rings, my dear," she said, "but I'll tell you what I'd simply adore."

"Tell me then," said Cobalt.

"I'd be charmed to have the skin of the Lightning Warrior, Cobalt, without the marks of trap teeth, or knife, or bullet on any part of him," stated the girl.