Читать книгу The Lightning Warrior - Max Brand - Страница 9

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To describe the hunting of the Lightning Warrior is a simple thing, but one has to remember that an entire year was cut out of the life of Cobalt. At the end of that time in the warmth of the year, when the sun was at its height and the mosquitoes were blackening the flats and the yellow Yukon was rolling unbarred by ice toward the sea, Cobalt came back. I had come in from the mines on some sort of business, I forget what, and there were enough others, what with newcomers and the rest, to fill the saloon when Cobalt opened the door and waved to us. He looked about the same, only a little blacker of skin from the long, bitter weathering that he had gone through. Of course, he was in rags that even an Indian might have scorned, but Cobalt often looked like that when he came in from a long trek. He had been in our minds for a year and, when he stepped back inside that door, he had not been forgotten. It showed the vast force in him that even an arctic year of starving, laboring, hoping, groaning had not shut him from our thoughts.

When he opened the door and stepped inside, with the flash of the sun behind him, a shout went up. Some people had said that he must be dead, that the wolf had got him before this. But to most of us he seemed a deathless thing, like a waterfall which may be frozen up for a time but which most of the year will be dashing and smashing at the rocks. I remember that there was a cheechako at that moment handling the bent iron bar that had been taken down from the wall for his curious eyes. In the midst of his futile efforts, he saw that ragged man in the door not a very big man, certainly not a handsome man yet the cheechako knew when he set eyes upon him.

"It's Cobalt!" whispered the cheechako, grinning like a happy child and straining at the bar.

Cobalt came with that light step of his, like the step of a man about to break into a run, and we surged toward him. But we stopped, like a wave that founders on a bar, recoiling suddenly. For behind Cobalt came the Lightning Warrior! Yes, striding in like a king, more glorious, more beautiful than ever, came the Lightning Warrior, holding his head high as a king ought to hold it and making himself blind to the poor, pitiful humans around him whom he despised. Mind you, there was no lead rope on him. There was no muzzle on him, either. All that he wore in token of being subdued was a pack fitted snugly upon his back. The Lightning Warrior was being used as a pack dog! How can I put down what I, for one, felt about this thing? It seemed that the entire universe had been reversed. For there was the primitive mind of the wilderness, the savage hunter, turned into a domestic servant.

After a moment we began to recover a little at the sight of Cobalt resting his heel on the footrail and calling for drinks. He set them up for the house, and we took the glasses in forgetful fingers and stared not at the red stain in the liquor but at the red stain in the eyes of the wolf. We could see him closely enough now to make out the color of the eyes. It was the whites of them which were red-stained, but the eyes themselves were blue, a pale, clear blue, a strange color to find in the eyes of a wolf, almost as strange as the snowy purity of the coat itself.

"Come up," said Cobalt. "Come up closer, old-timer!"

He made a quick motion with his hand, and the wolf glided up under it. He did not shrink. Neither did he wag his tail nor snarl. Nor did a softer light appear in his eyes, but all at once every man in that room knew that the beast hated Cobalt with an entire and a deathless hatred. That made the miracle complete. There was no muzzle over those teeth which, at a stroke, could have cut half through the leg of a man or broken his neck at the nape. Yet Cobalt dared to walk freely forward with this menace behind him. Without a rope to control him, the Lightning Warrior followed at the heels of his master like a dog, though he could have turned and disappeared in a moment in the brush, to be free again forever.

No, it was not the body or the soul of the beast that Cobalt had mastered. It was only the brain. He left the body un-crippled and strong. He had not overwhelmed the hidden soul of the great animal and won his love. He simply had subdued the brain until the monster felt helpless in the grip of his master's will.

How was all this finally accomplished? Cobalt would never say. He could be persuaded to say a little about the days when he used to sit and fix his eyes upon the wolf, and how they had stared at one another, but there he ended.

I remember how the bartender leaned across the bar, his eyes like two moons, and asked: "How did you do it, Cobalt?"

We all listened, as for the voice of a prophet, but Cobalt simply said: "Why, look here, boys, it's not the first time that a man has caught a wild wolf and tamed it. And he's tame, isn't he? Look at him. Gentle as a lamb."

Gentle as a chained demon, he should have said. Someone verged too close to the brute and got a silent snarl that made him jump ten feet. Yes, the Lightning Warrior was gentle to the hand and the will of his master, but in reality his very soul was plunged deeper in revolt and rage against all men. We thought that we could read one extra page in the story. Beside the right eye of Cobalt and running down his cheek, there was a thin red line. It was a scar such as a knife stroke might have left. It would whiten in time, but at this very moment it looked just like a little stream of fresh blood.

Yes, other men had caught wild wolves and taken them. They had caught the wolves with cunning traps, and they had taken them with a whip. But one glance at the face of Cobalt told us other things. We knew, in a flash, that his bare hands were the weapons with which he had schooled the beast.

For my part, as I looked at them, I realized another thing: that there was tragedy in the offing. It seemed that Cobalt felt my gaze for presently he said to me: "Chalmers, will you walk out with me? I want to talk to you a little."

I went out with him into the arctic sun, which is not like the sun of more southerly places. There is always some trace of a dream about it. It is a thing seen with the mind rather than something felt by the body, though in all conscience I have seen it hot enough even in that Far North.

We went out, with me stepping rather short and keeping half an eye or more upon that white monster. I think he was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. The whiteness of a polar bear was tawny compared with him, and the whiteness of the most brushed and bathed, combed and fluffed lap dog was dull compared with the pure brightness of the Lightning Warrior.

"Now, Chalmers, you're older than I am," said Cobalt, facing about and giving me his eye in that direct and almost intolerable fashion of his.

"I'm a good deal older, as years go, Cobalt," I said.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Cobalt, for he always hated the half answers which make up the talk of most of us. "What do you mean by older as years go?"

"I mean," I said, hunting through my mind, "that time is a thin effect with a lot of us, thin as arctic sunshine. I've seen men, Cobalt, who can age more in a year than others can in ten."

"Age how?" he asked.

"Ideas, thoughts, accomplishments."

"And trouble?" he finished off.

"Yes, trouble," I admitted, uncomfortably.

"Do you think that I've raised trouble now?" he asked me.

I hesitated.

"Oh, you know. Everybody knows about it," he said.

"Perhaps that's the chief trouble," I said.

"Why?" he demanded sharply.

"Well, you can see for yourself," I responded.

"Don't tell me what I can see for myself, man," said Cobalt. "Tell me what you see."

I saw that he was under a strain. He was at the breaking point and, if he broke, the explosion would shake Circle City.

"I'll tell you something," I parried. "Once when I was a youngster, there was a marriage advertised in a side show in a circus. The tallest man in the world was to marry the fattest lady in the world. They sold admissions for fifty cents. I was only a boy, and I went and saw the marriage."

"What has that got to do with me?" he asked. "What has that got to do with me and—well, with me and Sylvia Baird?"

He challenged me with his hard, bright eye, which was turning from gray to a pale, luminous blue. I think that the Scandinavian warriors of another age must have looked like that when they ran naked into the dance of the swords, the banquet of the blades as they used to call it.

"I mean," I said, "that it was a pretty public thing—the engagement, the marriage, and all in that circus tent."

He pointed a finger at me like a gun. "You really mean that I've dragged Sylvia too much out into the light of publicity."

I nodded.

"All right," he said. "All right! I see what you mean. And what do you think? That I'm going to back down?"

"Back down?" I echoed quite vaguely.

"You know, throw up the game, just because she's a little sensitive?" He tried to smile. It was only a grimace. Then he broke out: "You come along with me to the Baird house, will you? I want to talk some more to you."

I knew that he did not mean that. He wanted me there in the hope that my presence would help him to keep from doing some wild, absurd thing. I went, unwittingly and very much afraid, at his side up the street.