Читать книгу The Lightning Warrior - Max Brand - Страница 7

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Some imp must have stolen into the mind of Sylvia. Otherwise, she never could have conceived such an idea. To capture the Lightning Warrior was almost fabulously difficult. The best hunters and trappers of Circle City, where all men could hunt and trap a little, had tried in vain, tempted by that offer of the two thousand dollar reward. But, to capture him without either traps or bullets or knives, this was preposterous!

Cobalt, as he listened to her, watched her deep blue eyes intently. He stood there like a stone, staring, while Baird was saying: "That's a foolish remark, Sylvia. As if a man could go out into the wilderness and capture the white beast bare-handed!"

"Oh, Father," said Sylvia, clasping her hands together in mock admiration of Cobalt, "you don't know what he can do. He himself hardly knows. No other man can match the things that he does. Do you think that he will shrink from a little thing like this?"

Cobalt asked: "Is that the price mark on the tag?"

She half closed her eyes. I imagine she was thinking fast and hard, and there was no doubting the direction of his last remark. Everything had been a jest. Even the ripping of that fortune out of the earth was a part of the joke. This was different. If he went out with his bare hands to do this marvel, their mutual jest would have drawn to an end. She did not answer the last remark directly, therefore, but merely said: "I've always wanted a big white fur."

So Cobalt said good bye and left her the second time and heard her father saying angrily that she should not press a jest as far as this. It was a joke, but Cobalt intended to turn it into earnest. That same day he went out from Circle City with his dog team, his half-wild string of savage brutes, and traveled up the Yukon slowly. His load was chiefly dried fish for his team, and the goal of his journey was the Lightning Warrior. The dogs were bait. The weapon and the trap consisted merely in a strong rope.

He was no expert with a lariat, so he practiced on the way, making a thousand casts a day to get the hang of the thing. Suppose that he managed to get the rope over the head of the brute, how would he proceed? His hands would have to be the clubs that beat it senseless. Or did he even think of what he would do when the crisis came? Perhaps not. His was a simple plan. To the execution of it, he would trust patience and his superhuman power of arm and body.

On the second day he saw the Lightning Warrior, the first time his eyes had rested on the beast. He had trusted that his team would be followed as Morrissey's was followed. He was right. When he saw the big silhouette of the monster, standing on a white hummock against the sky, the old superstition thrust into his mind that this might be a man-wolf, a loup-garou.

The brute seemed to know perfectly that the man carried no gun. He stood there on the top of the hummock and allowed the dog team to pass him at a distance of fifty feet.

That savage team should have become wildly excited at the sight of the wolf. They should have tried with all their might to get at him. Instead, they hung their heads and seemed oppressed with fear. Cobalt stopped them and went out with his rope toward the brute that remained on the hummock. When he was six strides from him, he yawned at Cobalt like a cat, showing his red gullet and the teeth gleaming like pearls. Then he bounded to the side and was gone into a thicket.

Even Cobalt's heart beat fast, and he hesitated before entering the underbrush. But enter it he did. He walked cautiously. He was an excellent woodsman, and he knew how to step so that his feet made no noise that a human ear at least could hear. Before he had gone ten paces, he heard the terrified yelling of his team and rushed back to see what had happened. It was the Lightning Warrior that had happened. He had come out of the shrubbery and, giving his shoulder to the leader, had killed that dog with a single slash across its throat. Now the team cowered together. They did not seem to have offered the slightest resistance to the white thunderbolt which now sat at a little distance and licked the blood from his snowy breast and from his forelegs.

He went on about his toilet with the most perfect care and indifference to the man approaching him. This time Cobalt determined to try a long cast. When he came within six steps, the beast yawned at him in the same horrible manner. That instant Cobalt made his cast. He flung with an underhand motion, which is the Mexican way, and the swiftest of all. The coil went out like a serpent striking, but it missed the Lightning Warrior. He had not leaped back or to the side. He simply jumped in, so that the rope flew over his head. As the lariat fell, Cobalt found himself unarmed, empty handed, with that massive killer crouching at his feet for the spring. What other man would have done what he did? He stepped straight forward, and the Lightning Warrior bounded lightly to the side. He approached again, and the snowy murderer fairly turned tail and fled across the wastes. The dog team saw him go, picked up heart, and sang a chorus of tardy defiance.

Then Cobalt went back and sat down on his sled for a time. He was not feeling well. His hands were a trifle uncertain, and there was a slight sense of numbness about his knees. While he sat there, thinking of what he was attempting, he told himself that he was a fool. He thought back to Sylvia also.

It was not only her beauty that drove him. It was also the memory of her dainty voice and her softly sneering ironies. Perhaps she was back there in Circle City, laughing at the idiot who had gone out into the wilderness because she chose to make a joke of him! But it was her wickedness which flavored her beauty. There was no other person like her. She stood apart from all the rest.

After he had thought of her for a time, his strength and courage revived. He stood up, cut the dead leader from the harness, and drove on slowly. He knew that he was beginning a long duel. He was not prepared, however, for the full weight of the disaster which overtook him. His own relentless determination drove him on to court it.

Two days out from Circle City, he had already lost a dog. Ten days later, his last one was gone. He was mushing ahead alone, pulling the sled with patient strength. Still the Lightning Warrior was following him! Just as he had followed Morrissey and almost destroyed the man on the verge of Circle City, so now he followed Cobalt. When his face was toward him, the beast dared not attack Cobalt.

On the first day he had established a moral superiority, and the balance never shifted against him. But the danger would not come from the front. He would attack him from either side or, most probably, from the rear. If Cobalt could defend his back, his face was safe.

Once, very tired, cold from a ripping wind, he built his fire and had it flaming when a sudden cramp of terror gripped the small of his back. He had heard, and he had seen, nothing of the Lightning Warrior all that day but, twitching around suddenly, he saw the monster in the act of leaping. Cobalt side-stepped. The big wolf twisted in the air and, striking the snow well beyond the fire, he was instantly gone among the brush again. That was a lesson for Cobalt.

From that moment he lived as though he were surrounded by hostile Indians. One instant of lack of precaution and the teeth would be in his throat, and the beast would be drinking his blood. He kept to the woods most of the time. They were tenfold more perilous, in that they offered a chance for stalking to that werewolf. At the same time they might give him more chances to use the rope. In fact, in six weeks he cast the rope three times, including the first failure. Once the edge of the coil struck the monster between the eyes. But that was the closest Cobalt came to success.

He decided that the rope was too light. It had to be heavier so that it could be thrown with speed, like a flexible metal cable. So he worked in strips of rawhide until the weight of the noose end of the rope was trebled. It was now like handling a mass of chain. The noose was stiffened, more likely to hold its form. As he practiced with the rope on stones and stumps, he told himself that he now had a half chance to succeed when next an opportunity came to him.

For that opportunity he waited on the bank of a small salmon stream. He was glad of the fishing. His own supply of provisions was getting very low, but he worked at the fishing patiently, cleaned the big salmon, then cured them on racks above a fire. He accumulated far more food than he needed, because of the pleasure which he took in being merely occupied. The surplus he cached as high as practicable in trees.

So the winter came, the river freezing to a stone. Still he waited there on the bank, and still the Lightning Warrior never left him! Once, before the long winter night began, in the dusk of the year, he had a sight of the loup-garouhunting. The thing amazed him and filled his mind like a nightmare for weeks thereafter. He had heard the long, deep hunting cry of the Lightning Warrior not far off, flying through the woods. As the noise approached very near, he went to see what he could find.

There in a clearing he found the white monster, stalking in a swift circle around one of the biggest lynxes that Cobalt had ever seen. It did not seem possible that a wolf could undertake to make a stand against a full-grown lynx, with its equipment of needle fangs and knife-like claws. The wolf was attacking, but the manner of the attack was strange. There was no sudden rush in. The Lightning Warrior circled and circled, keeping just on the horizon of the cat's leaping distance. The lynx turned slowly, by jerks, to face the danger, always tensed, always ready for the bound whose striking speed must make up for its lack of weight. Still the wolf circled until the lynx, turning its head, seemed to look for an opportunity to escape. The Lightning Warrior, marking that movement, slid in closer. The lynx bristled with head close to the ground, ready to spring, but still the wolf was not ready.

For twenty minutes Cobalt, frozen with interest, watched the drama and gradually understood. The wild cat had the fighting power of an explosive, but its prodigious frenzy of strength could not endure with patience under any strain. Its moment for battle already was passing. Its nerves were crumbling. It was ready to flee. It dipped its head and licked at the snow. Its tufted ears flickered. Suddenly the Lightning Warrior struck. He had been going on his steady round for so long that even the cat who watched the scene was totally unprepared, and the big wild cat seemed hypnotized. It appeared to Cobalt that the lynx made not a single effort to save itself. The lobo simply caught it by the back of the neck and broke the spine.

Cobalt could remember, with a bitter spirit, how the great beast had stalked him and his dog team, day after day, and reaped a red harvest. The creature was made of blood lust. Now he stood above the prey for a moment, gazing about it, ready to scent any suspicious smells upon the wind. Failing in this, he prepared to eat, and this was the moment when Cobalt gathered his rope, prepared his noose, and began to slide out from his place of covert to make another effort.