Читать книгу The Quest of Lee Garrison - Max Brand - Страница 8

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It seemed to Lee, as he looked down to the eternal triumph of that smile, that the most opulent cattle kings did not build as well as John Ramps, for their names would last only as long as their fortunes held together. But John Ramps, building nothing, had left a thing that would never die, a story of which he was a part. He died for the sake of it, and, as long as men loved horses, they would not cease to thrill when they heard how the Indian trailed the gray stallion a thousand miles across the mountains. Here, in a bronze skin, was the type of a Galahad. Lee went to the door of the dugout. The moonlight lay in pale waves over the rolling ground outside. There was not a sound. He thought back a little. The cattle range had been a joyless place to him, a drab region, but it had at least given him escape from people and provided him with a great blessing—silence. As he stood there, he grew sad with the desire to be among men. He had lived among them with his eyes closed, for there must be others in whom burned the fire of John Ramps. Perhaps, with patient searching, he could find one such and buckle that man to him for a friend.

In the meantime, he must bury the Indian. Here on the plains was the place for him, lying face up, not too far away from this same moonlight.

He picked up the body of John Ramps, a withered body of bones and skin, and fifty yards from the dugout he placed it in a deep crevice among the rocks. Prying against the keystone of the overhanging boulders, he loosed and sent down a ponderous shower of rock. The roar of the fall filled his ears for a moment longer, and then the peace of the desert washed like a wave about him. In a nearby Spanish dagger the wind was whispering; that was the end. All trace of John Ramps was gone from the face of the earth, and only one man knew his monument.

Then, as though a voice from behind bade him turn, he swung sharply and saw what seemed a cloud of moonlight gathered into a moving form. It glided over a hilltop, disappeared in the wash of shade that filled a gully, and slipped into view again over a closer rise of ground. It was Moonshine.

If he had never heard of the stallion before, the name would have burst from his lips as it did now in a shout. Moonshine stopped with a suddenness that sent his mane tumbling forward in a flurry of silver, and stood fast, a creature of light.

He neighed like a challenge, or a gloating over the dead man, then whirled and fled. Oh, the swing and lightness of that stride—like a wave in the free ocean! Perhaps the soft surface sand buried the noise of hoofs. Like a phantom the wild horse drifted over the hill and faded into the shadow below.

He came into view again on a farther rise. Then Moonshine was absorbed in the heart of the night. The face of Lee Garrison was like that of one who struggled to keep alive in his memory a dying music.

It was hard to turn back, for a power drew him down the trail of the horse. He closed his eyes. At once against the black of his vision the form of Moonshine stood out, luminous silver.

He had found his passions so entirely inside the covers of books that this reality, taking him by the throat, bewildered him. Had the soul of John Ramps come into his body? It was the memory of the mustang's gallop that maddened him—to sit on that back would be to sit like a leaf in a level wind. Between his knees he could sense the lithe, strong barrel of Moonshine, and his face was hot with longing to feel the wind of Moonshine's galloping.

He found himself in the dugout with his head between his hands. His face was hot. The fingers against his face were cold. His heart fluttered in a strange, airy manner, but, when he sprang up, his mind at least was clear.

This note he scrawled: I got a hurry call, and I am gone. This, with some perishables that could not be trusted without guard in the dugout, he put into the saddlebags, after cinching up Pinto. When he had cut the hobble ropes, the little horse, true to his homing instinct, darted toward the ranch house. So with the bridges burned, Lee turned back to the dugout and swept together the necessaries. Since he had to travel on foot, he cut his list of essentials to the bone. In a minute, at most, he was striding across the sand.

A cartridge belt slung over his shoulder carried his ammunition, and it supported at the lower end of the loop the heavy Colt .45. To catch a horse without a rope is nearly impossible. Lee bore thirty feet of it. A saddle blanket for shelter at night, some sulphur matches, a small package of salt, a great, powerful knife with one razor edge and another blade that defied the thickest tin can—these made up his pack, together with some odds and ends which included that prime essential of the cattle country, pliers, the key to the barbed-wire region.

It would not have been too much to carry over even fairly firm roads, but the sand melted like quicksilver under his feet, for he wore the small-soled, sharp-heeled boots of the cattleman, that give the smallest walking surfaces. The heels sank deep, and in the midst of each stride there was a giving and slipping back. His eye had formed the horseman's habit of wandering forward across the landscape at the pace of a lope, and now his glances pulled him forward as though he were leaning against the wind. There is a quick, soft step for sand, barely breaking the surface as the foot falls, Indian fashion, but Lee was fighting ahead, slipping, stumbling.

The night was cool, yet Lee in ten minutes was dripping, and he sighed in ardent relief as the sand shelved to a shore of firm ground. He had reached the Capped Rock, where, the ground having settled on one side of a fissure, a ridge of broken stone protrudes along a fault, and great boulders tumble from the plateau to the lower level. From the upper ridge he scanned anxiously the dimmer regions below him.

Something winked far off like a bit of water exposed to the moon. The silvery shape dissolved in the shadows of another hollow. It seemed a mad thing for a man to start out to walk down a horse—and such a horse as Moonshine, above all. Indeed, the stallion might shake off all pursuit by one great burst across the country, fifty miles of running, say, that would effectually destroy all hopes of keeping the trail. Yet there was small fear that Moonshine would be so full of heart after a thousand-mile hunt across the mountains. The Indians had served one purpose by their long trailing—they had taken the edge off the mustang's wildness, and they had blunted his fear of man.

Many times, lately, he must have had the scent of man in his wide nostrils, and many times he must have shaken off his horror with a small burst of galloping. Probably he would do the same with Lee, just keeping out of the danger distance. In that case there was one chance in three, the cowpuncher thought, of success, for the stallion would hardly have shaken off his pursuer and settled down to graze, when once more the man would plod within sight, and Moonshine must be off again, and hardly would he lie down to sleep when again the man scent would drift close. The gray must have slept on his feet, and even then he would only have an opportunity for brief dozes. As for Lee, he could choose his time for rest and make his sleep brief. He had all the advantage of the general who takes the offensive and keeps the opponent guessing. All of this went swiftly through the mind of the cowpuncher, and then he started down among the rocks.