Читать книгу The Quest of Lee Garrison - Max Brand - Страница 7

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The lantern burned clearly, and Garrison was content. Before him stretched a lengthy maze of adventures, jousts, waylayings, challenges—half a dozen full evenings of readings before he came to the quests for the Holy Grail and the breaking of that peerless fellowship of the Round Table. So Lee, rich in the prospect, stretched himself at the loaded board. He could never see in the Grail a sufficient cause for the ruin of the Round Table. Therefore, he always approached that section of Malory with a fallen heart, but tonight he was reading of the crisp early days when Camelot was a new name. He raised his head from the book only once, and it was only to feel the settling down of utter night.

For he had learned that there is an instant of white magic just at the end of the evening. Perhaps it is the time when the creatures that see in the dark come into their own. That moment had come, when Lee lifted his head. The silence that camped on the Staked Plains became a listening thing with a heartbeat somewhere in it. The breeze lifted the corner of the page like an invisible finger. So ended the dull day, and the night began with a breathless pause as when a door opens, but those within are not yet seen. The world died with the day, and the people of the books sprang into life. Ladies who, in the day, were bland names, became on such a night brilliant realities with infinite lives of smiles and glances. About the lonely castle he now saw the wilderness sweeping in green waves like a sea, covering the walls with a spray of vines. So solemn became the illusion of that moment that the figure that loomed in the doorway and stood there, swaying, seemed only an intruder in the dream.

Between an American Indian and an Arthurian legend, however, there existed a gap sufficient to shock Garrison into wakefulness. It was a broad-shouldered, bowlegged fellow in moccasins, with a hickory shirt, a hat set so far toward the back of his head that it pushed his ears forward, and, dangling to his shoulders, were two plaits of hair wrapped in red flannel, with a red snapper at each end. He supported himself with his hands against the door, glaring at the white man and leaning in as though he were about to leap on the prostrate figure. That illusion lasted long enough to bring Lee Garrison to his feet with the speed of a snake uncoiling. Then he saw that the poor fellow had braced himself against a staggering weakness. His arms shook under the weight they supported, and the glare of his eyes was that inward light of suffering long endured.

Among the few established facts about Lee Garrison was an aversion to both Mexicans and Indians, but after a single glance at this man he caught him under the armpits and swung him down to the floor of the dugout. It was a dead weight that he lifted. The shoulders of the Indian gave under the pressure of an ugly limpness, and he remained in exactly the position in which Garrison deposited him—shouldering against the wall with one leg twisted oddly to the side and his right hand doubled against the floor, the weight of the arm falling against the back of the wrist. In spite of the fiery eyes of the Indian, Lee knew that the man was dying. He ripped away a stack of cans from a corner. They tumbled with a prodigious racket across the floor and revealed the hidden treasure, a half-emptied flask of whiskey, that he handed to the Indian.

But the fingers in which the man tried to grasp it slipped from the glass as though numb with cold, and his arm fell. Garrison, shuddering at the sight of that mortal weakness, placed the flask at the lips of the Indian, and, when he took it away, the bottle was empty.

"Good," sighed the other, and he had strength enough to take the cup of water that Lee poured.

"I have stayed too long," said the Indian in an English so perfectly enunciated that Lee started. "I must go on again."

He spread his hands on either side of him and strove to raise his body. There was no result, and a shadow dropped across his eyes. Perspiration glistened on his coppery forehead, but he smiled at the white man.

"For heaven's sake, lie down and take it easy," said Lee.

The other shook his head. There was a bubbling huskiness in his voice in which he explained gravely: "I am hollow inside and filled with fire. If I lie down, it will run into my head and burn me up."

"A very good idea," said Lee quietly. "A fellow can fool fire that way, now and then. Give me your hand, will you?"

He took the languid wrist. The skin was hot. The pulse ran faint and fast as the ticking of a clock. The Indian was dying of pneumonia.

"I'm sorry I've finished your whiskey stock," he said. "I'll bring you out a new supply, when I come back this way. My name is John Ramps."

Lee mumbled his own name in acknowledgment of the introduction. It would be morning before he could go to the ranch and return with help, and long before morning John Ramps would be dead.

"Moonshine will think I've left his trail," said the Indian. "But though Moonshine is clever, one can't expect a horse to know what goes on inside the brain of a man. He could run faster than my horses ran, and naturally he doesn't think I can overtake him on foot."

The feet of John Ramps were clad in moccasins, worn to shreds.

"Is Moonshine a horse?" asked Lee.

"You don't know him? Well, this is far from his home country. There were eight of us with horses, when we took the trail of Moonshine in the Diamond Star Desert."

"But that's in Idaho, Ramps!" cried Garrison.

"Yes, a long trail. However, I'm surprised that you don't know of Moonshine, Mister Garrison. He's a silver-gray mustang. You've seen moonlight running on water? That's his color. Fire in a wind, galloping across a stubble field, that's the way he runs. Now I must go. All the others who have tried have lost. Even Handsome Harry Chandler lost. He took his best horse. And last he rode his black mare. But even Laughter could not turn Moonshine. So he thinks that John Ramps, too, has failed. He does not know that I can still run as fast as the wind."

He lurched to his feet, but at the first step he crumpled into the arms of the white man, and Lee laid him on the blanket. He thought, then, that the end had come, for there was no perceptible breathing, but he found, at length, a faint flutter of the heart. He sponged the face and breast and hands of the man, and then sat beside John Ramps to wait for the final rattle of breathing. Literally, the dying man was a frame of bones loosely covered with skin. His mouth was fallen ajar, but to Lee Garrison there was nothing repulsive in the face. It took him back to the quests of Arthur's paladins after the Holy Grail. They must have ridden like this, day and night, wasting themselves to shadows, burned by their desire for one glimpse of salvation. Even so, the Indian and his eight companions had ridden a thousand miles, killing their horses under them, no doubt, until only this man remained of the eight. He had spurred his last mount until it died, and, then, half mad with weariness and the hysteria of fever, he had gone on by foot.

The Indian spoke. It was not the death rattle, but a harsh phrase of Indian dialect. The voice went on, detached, broken, but now it spoke English.

"Who stays to throw water, when the forest burns? John Ramps is burning for the horse." There followed a burst of rapid chatter in his own tongue. The next English words made only a few phrases: "Let her go to another wickiup—I cannot stay." Here he fell into inaudible mutterings, rolling his head from side to side, and plucking aimlessly at his breast. Then: "Be not afraid. It is not Tahquits, pounding the bones of a victim. The hoofs of Moonshine make the thunder, and John Ramps is on his back."

Was it weeks, months, even years, perhaps, since John Ramps started on the trail of the stallion? The chase was as strange to Lee as the story of the Grail. It was stranger, for in the years of his riding on the ranges he had found in horses only creatures to be subdued by force, whipped into obedience, crushed with the stronger hand. A sullen anger came in him at the thought that a dumb beast had been able to kill this man. He felt a pang that one of the human race could have responded to a spark that had never touched him, could have risked his life with so open a hand for the sake of a beast.

The Indian spoke again, and his voice was lower and harsher. The breath seemed to die between every dragging syllable.

"Brothers, it was no fault in the trap—the trap was good, but he is like his name—he is like moonshine, and he eludes us. A man can take fire on two sticks and carry it through the wind—or he can gather water in his hands—or he can even put the wind in a bag and keep it—but who can gather moonshine?"

The picture Lee Garrison saw was the narrow, yellow triangle of a campfire and eight swarthy faces, glittering by that light. A sudden shout from John Ramps made his hair bristle. The Indian had jerked himself to a sitting posture, and his face was a frenzy.

"Ho! We have him. My mountain sheep, my red beauty, faster, faster! Hei!"

Over his head he swung one arm, a gesture so vivid that the whirling loop of the lasso flashed like a shadow across the eyes of Lee. The hand fell, and the body pitched back, and Lee, leaning close over a face that was contorted in the last agony, heard a whisper: "He is gone!"

The same whisper, it seemed, drained the last life from John Ramps, for almost at once a mist brushed across the fiery eyes as though the lamp that shone down on them had grown suddenly dim, and a gradual smile stole across the lips of John Ramps. Perhaps, thought the cowpuncher, the soul of the Indian was already flying down the trail of Moonshine and saw the fugitive.