Читать книгу The Quest of Lee Garrison - Max Brand - Страница 10

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That failure in the pass amid the snow, seemed as definite an end as the falling of the curtain on the last act of a tragedy. Yet he found himself mechanically plodding on through the storm with no more hope than one driven on a treadmill by a whip. Half frozen, feeble, despairing, he descended from the peak until a sudden wind tore the clouds to tatters and let through a hearty burst of sunshine. Garrison took it as a sign from heaven, and in half an hour he was singing on the northward trail of Moonshine.

It was well that he could not look into the future. But every night, when he lay down, it was with a hope, and every morning, when he stood up, it was with a hope. He labored across the rugged Pinasco country, a continual up and down of ravines, wading through icy creeks up to the waist and struggling up a succession of weary slopes through thickets of dewberries and wild blackberries which the bears come down to eat. He slept short watches, dropping down in wet or dry, hard or soft, wherever his strength failed him, and wakened again by a sure alarm—a feeling of impending loss. Sometimes on the march he grew light-headed and found himself in strange surroundings, having walked miles and miles, following the trial with an unconscious attention. For food he had the quarter of the deer for a time, eked out with the wild, red haws with their crab-apple flavor, a delicious novelty. When the venison became rank, he killed where and what he could, never deviating from the sign of Moonshine in order to hunt game.

So he came to the valley of the Rio Grande, gaunt, sun-blackened, but with a spirit edged like a keen appetite. His body was starved to lightness, but his eyes blazed out of a shadow as though in passing through the fire he had carried some of it away with him. And, indeed, never a day passed without one glimpse of Moonshine, a golden moment that was enough to carry him on with a high head. But from the brow of a mesa on the Rio Grande, on this great day, he had at last a long view and a clear view of the stallion. The face of the mesa dropped to a wild tangle of willows beneath, and from the farther side of the trees the gray horse trotted into the flat beside the river.

To Garrison that sight of the silver beauty was as a glimpse of the Grail to humble Bors or the starved soul of Lancelot. Tears of joy misted his eyes. He brushed the moisture away to see the stallion pause, turn his head into the wind to reconnoiter some distant danger, perhaps, and then trot ahead. He aimed at a place where the river wound in an oxbow loop, a loop wide at the belly, but close together at the neck.

Here Lee Garrison leaped to his feet and stood, trembling with a thought. Suppose that winding current were swifter than Moonshine anticipated, too swift to be forded? Then, when the horse turned from the edge of the stream, suppose that Lee could gain the throat of the loop and block the retreat?

He slid down the face of the mesa by swinging himself from one projecting bush to another, or letting himself shoot down a sandy slope. At the bottom he ran like an Indian, weaving among the trees, until a distant sound like the rumbling of a heavy wagon across a bridge stopped him. It might be thunder, yet, as far as the eye could see, the sky was clear of a cloud. Moreover, there was this difference: it was not a single boom or a succession of noises, but a steady roar that grew in volume perceptibly during the moment he stood there. Then he understood. He had heard that same grumbling before, up some river valley, and at length had seen a solid wall of water rush down the ravine, tearing up old trees as it went, ripping out banks, filling the valley with thunder. A sudden downpour of rain in mountains might cause it, or the breaking of a natural dam. Suppose that speeding wave struck Moonshine as the stallion was swimming?

As he raced out of the willows, he saw his nightmare realized. Down the river came a bluff-front of foam and thunder with stripped tree trunks jumping in it like little sticks in the hands of a juggler. Moonshine was galloping toward the farthest arc of the circle, thoroughly within the trap, for, unless he crossed the stream before that tidal wave swept past, he would be hemmed in by the tremendous current which followed that moving ridge of water. And here was Lee Garrison, pausing for breath in the mouth of the loop, swinging his rope and opening the noose. He heard a great rending and crashing up the riverbed and saw a line of willows near the bank shaved away and juggled like straws in the waters. Nothing could live in that torrent; a freak of the current tossed a long trunk into the air, javelin-wise.

Even the stallion seemed appalled, but, turning to retreat, he saw Lee blocking that narrow pass. He stopped a moment with head high, his tail and mane flaunted in the wind. Then he came like a bullet straight at the man. A bull closes its eyes before it strikes, but a horse keeps his eyes wide open, and, when a mustang runs amuck, guns are in order. Dodging is practically impossible. Lee Garrison jerked up his revolver, caught the silver head in the sights, and dropped the gun. He could not shoot. He swung the lariat, prepared for a leap to one side as he cast the rope. The stallion came on like a thing made of light until Lee swayed forward to make his cast. Then Moonshine veered. A spray of sand shot into the face of the cowpuncher, and the gray was racing straight back down the loop, neighing as he ran.

It had been an Indian charge, an attempt to conquer through fear, and it left Lee shaken and cursing with relief and admiration. But the feint at the man had taken desperately needed time. Now the white wall was ripping its way with thunder around the upper corner of the loop. A spray of white shot high in the air as, in its straight course down the riverbed, it smashed against the bank not six yards from him. The ground shook beneath him, and the roar stunned his ears, then, as a dense rain showered upon him, the water bank veered to the right and lurched along the upper side of the loop. The stallion ran for the ford with his head turned, watching the progress of that shouting torrent as it leaped and foamed and tossed the trees it had uprooted. Lee dropped the rope, cupped his hands to his mouth, and into the uproar shrieked his warning. He might as well have tried to throw a straw against a sixty-mile gale.

The wave was rounding the upper corner of the loop when Moonshine shot from the bank into the muddy stream, disappeared, and came up halfway across the water with pricking ears. Gallantly he swam, making a wake behind him, but now the water about him shuddered into little waves before the coming of the flood. Lee dropped to his knees and covered his eyes, digging his nails into his face.

The thundering overwhelmed even his thoughts. It filled his mind as the sun fills the heavens. Then it seemed that a long, hoarse cry, like the scream of a horse dying in agony, pierced through the roaring. Now the moving wall of destruction roared away, bearing his picture of the dead body, tumbled in the waters, to be washed on the banks far below. He dreaded so to look on the truth that he had to fight his hands down from his face. Yonder stood Moonshine on the farther bank, dripping with water, and, in the sun, too brilliant to be looked upon. He whirled and raced off, a flowing form of light. The knot in Lee's throat was loosened, and through him passed a great weakness of thanksgiving.

He could not follow until the flood subsided. Therefore, he built a fire, and, pouring water into a hole in a rock, he heated it with stones from the fire and made sagebrush tea. In this he soaked his sore feet, and, while he sat there, he was deep in his tattered Malory. The tales that he read now by preference were those which he had once shunned with a half-physical aversion, the adventures of the quest of the Grail. At the end of each day's march, indeed, he propped his eyes open a little longer to read of Percival and the black horse, or how Lionel fought with Bors, his brother. Sometimes he looked down from his reading at his wasted brown fingers, thin as the hands of a hermit. At such moments he wondered at himself. This day, when he closed the book and rose for the trail, he had lost the hope of capturing the stallion, but the quest itself, if the differentiation can be understood, was more a burning part of him than ever.

The labor or the pursuit itself grew less, for although he climbed out of the valley of the Rio Grande and soon struck the lofty Mogollon Mountains and a forest of virgin pine, he was hardened to his work. He knew how to measure himself, at what pace to climb, and how to save himself through the heat of the day for a greater effort in the evening. The sign was always fresh, now, for Moonshine, robbed of rest, hard pressed to find fodder as he traveled, weakened rapidly. In the distance Lee noted the lean rump, and sometimes he even saw the shadows of the ribs of starvation. It gave him a peculiar pain to see what he was accomplishing, and yet he pressed on relentlessly. And so he came out of the Mogollons and reached the lava beds.

Black rock flowed to the end of the world. There were bits and even long stretches of glassy stuff, maddening to walk on, or rutted and ridged places terrible for moccasined feet. Again there were expanses like coal cinders made of blown glass, endless areas of petrified coke, and domes as large as huge haystacks as if there the molten rock had bubbled up and solidified before it could fall. In that black wilderness he made no attempt to follow the trail, but merely gave himself to a desperate effort to win across before night. That afternoon he recklessly exhausted his canteen and his strength. Yet the evening found him still struggling with bruised feet among those endless mounds of burned stone, and he submitted to the inevitable sorrow that was to come.

The cinders were better for a bed than the rock. He scraped a quantity of them together, leveled them off, and scattered his pack upon them. But no sleep came to him that night. No matter how he wrapped himself, the wind that hisses among the rocks found its way to his skin, parching him, drying his throat to parchment. He forced a swallow at regular intervals to keep his throat partially moist, and each swallow was a greater effort, until his muscles ached. There seemed nothing vivifying in that wind, as though the oxygen had been robbed from it, so that he had to fight back a continual desire to open his mouth wide and gape down the air in great mouthfuls. He dared not do it. An instant's gulping of the cold wind would desiccate his mouth until the tongue puffed and cracked at last. All the night he regulated his breathing and fought away the panic as it surged at him. Overhead, the stars were bright in a dim, steel-blue heaven, and they burned down closer and closer, to watch him. They started the panics, those eyelike stars.

Dawn came. He had prayed for it. Then he roused out of a stupor and found the stars dim, the sky gray. The day was beginning. He sat up, dropped his face between his hands, and thought. If he turned back the way he had come, he knew that he could last out the journey and gain the last spring from which he had drunk in the mountainside. If he went on, there was an unknown stretch of the lava flow. Unless he crossed it before darkness, he would die. But to turn back meant the end of all hope of taking Moonshine. Tales of the book drifted through his memory, knights who had quested till they came to the very gates of discovery, and then turned away conquered by their own weak hearts. At last he took up his pack with trembling hands, set a course as well as he could by the cool, blue Zuni Mountains south and east, and started.

The sun came up red, huge, without heat, and, drifting a little above the horizon, was lost in a sheeting of gray clouds. There it stayed all the day, small and dim as a moon, and left the world below to a wind which had grown in violence during the night. Now it whined among the rocks fully in Lee's face. He became childishly sullen, as though the gale had been directed to that quarter of the compass by a personal malignancy. Worst of all, it forced down his nostrils a stinging dust that was invisible to the eye but burned his throat and stifled him with a peculiarly pungent odor. Several times he had to turn his back to the wind to take an easy breath.

By the middle of the morning the gale had increased, but it ceased to take any scruple of the thoughts of Lee Garrison. His mind was fully occupied by a morbid study of the thirst that burned in him. In the first hour of walking, his tongue had begun to puff, and the effort of keeping his mouth closed nearly stifled him, but worse than that was the torment of swallowing. It was about noon, or thereabouts, that he stopped short, realizing that he could not swallow again. His throat was numb with the vain struggle. The panic which was ever just at his shoulder now leaped on him, and his reason staggered.

Only a little more and he would plunge into gibbering idiocy. He thrust his hand in front of his eyes and studied the fingers as he wiggled them slowly back and forth. All the tortures of thirst were nothing compared to that fear of the insanity that comes with it. Another instant and the hallucinations would begin with daydreams of fountains of crystal cold water, of mountains of snow, of delectable berries, frosted and juicy, of endless bottles of icy wine. Then he would see a blue lake in the middle of the desert, a lake so real that the waves rolled in and broke with a shower of spray upon the shore.

And with the dead aches in his throat he tried to occupy his mind by remembering long quotations from Malory, but always those quotations began to repeat themselves automatically, meaninglessly, and the whole force of his mind, he would discover suddenly, was fixed on a dream of the snowstorm in the Guadalupes. Ah, if such a storm should come now, he would walk with his head bent far back and let the great, luscious flakes pour into his open mouth. He would sweep them to his lips with both hands.

Here his sane self wakened Lee from a trance in which he actually walked with his head far back, his mouth gaping wide. It had been a narrow escape. The perspiration started out all over his weakened body as he realized how close the peril had come, and he forced his bleeding feet into a run. Yet the thought of escape by flight was in itself madness. He stopped. He sank his teeth in his forearm and sucked the crimson substance. And that gave him the power to draw one free breath and swallow again.

Out of the torture that followed he remembered two things. Once he looked behind him and saw that a red trail led up to him made by his own lacerated feet. And again there was a crisis during which he seriously considered lancing the swollen tongue that choked him. He balanced that thought soberly for a time, walking with the open knife in his hand.

Coming out of another haze, he noticed that he was seeing the lava hummocks farthest ahead of him against a background of light gray, as the desert stretched before him. He shouted—it was only a hoarse, gagging murmur—and the black nightmare vanished. Then he dropped to his knees, scooped up the sand, and let it fall back through his fingers, laughing aloud.

It was hearing that horrible, small laughter that sobered him to the understanding that, although sand were preferable to stone, he was still far from water, and ten days' searching might not find it. What would Moonshine himself do? He had a gift like other wild horses, doubtless, and would scent water from far off. On this hint he built. If he could find Moonshine's trail, it might lead him to safety. As well look for the paths of the stars in the seas, however, as try to find the trace of his footprints in this sand that ran like water into every depression Lee's moccasins made. A touch of wind washed the surface smooth again. With the soft sand easing the pain of his feet like a blessing, he laid his course in an S-shape, winding back and forth in the hope of striking a bit of firm ground that would hold the sign of the stallion.

He found it at last in a little island of clay among the drift- sand—three hoof marks. With his knife he drew a straight line through the prints—it pointed the direction of Moonshine's flight. Even then his chance was small, for that direction might change, if the horse had not actually scented water.

The sun, as if realizing that there was no longer a chance of discouraging the traveler with gray and cold, had broken through the clouds that tumbled down to the horizon. Facing a blinding sun, he struck away from the firm ground and was instantly ankle deep. As he labored on, the blood swayed into his brain each time he lifted the rearward foot. It crowded behind his eye until the skull threatened to split, then ebbed, and weakness ran through him. Between the spasms of agony of breathing and walking he felt a sort of divine promise that, if he endured this last test of fire, Moonshine must be his. He was paying in full.

Straight before him something glittered, as though there were two suns, one in the sky and one flat on the desert. It changed to a ball of fire set in pale blue. A cloud drifted across the sun. The ball of fire grew dim among the sands. It was water, a wide, blue pool, a miracle of spring water brimming a hollow not fifty feet away.

He went on his hands and knees until he lay at full length on the moist brim with his face buried in the pool.