Читать книгу The Quest of Lee Garrison - Max Brand - Страница 9

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For all the pleasant ease of the first few steps on the firm ground, he quickly discovered that even the sand was preferable to this going, for sharp-edged rocks bruised his feet through the thin soles, and his spurs caught and clanked on every projecting stone. Moreover, the scrupulously shop-made boots gave no play at heel or instep, and he lumbered and halted in his stride. A sensation of prickling heat about the heel told him that the skin was chafing away. But a snug shoe and a horse with a long rein, these had been his two dominant requirements for so long that he had come to think of his body as necessarily terminating in boots. The yipping of a coyote mocked him as he paused, and the barking made him think of the coyote's fluffy fur and how it would feel against his aching feet. The cry of the little hunter was coming down the wind, for otherwise Lee could never have come within a mile of the wanderer's acute nose, but now Lee took covert in a brake of scrub cedar and heard the yelping coming straight at him.

The wind had blown a black slit across the hollow, and against this darkness the light-yellow body of the skulker appeared plainly a moment later. He trotted with his head low, for since the wind was at his back the coyote had to trust to the treacherous ground smells, distinguishing nicely between the new and the old, foe and friend, that which would hunt, that which might be hunted. Two rope lengths from Lee he stopped and stood alert. Whatever sixth sense warned him, the coyote let reason outweigh intuition, and, instead of changing his course at once, he pointed his slender nose and raised his cry. The bark of Lee's revolver turned it into a sharp squeak. The yellow body shot high, struck the earth again with an audible impact, and lay wonderfully limp and thin.

As he ripped off the skin from the hot form, snorting the pungent odor out of his nostrils, Lee Garrison could only pray that Moonshine would be spending much of this night in sleep. The fresh pelt would be useless until it was at least partially dried, so he cut four small cedar branches to stretch the hide and fastened it securely at his back. There it must dry as he walked.

The pause allowed his feet to puff, but after the first few tortured steps the pressure shut off the circulation of the blood. Presently all feeling ceased below the ankles. There was only the ache of leg muscles protesting against this unaccustomed exercise.

He went on. The soreness grew. The aches accumulated and sprang out in surprising places. But he set himself a measured pace and kept at it with monotonous effort. He felt certain that the stallion must have followed a cut through certain low hills, far ahead, and to this goal he pointed. If pain were the price of Moonshine, he was beginning to pay in generous installments.

Now black mountains began to grow out of the horizon, seeming to drift toward him. The sky turned from full silver to a ghostly mist, fog colored—dawn was coming. With that, weariness struck him squarely between the eyes, and he knew he must make a halt.

Skirting into a cedar brake, he saw the nervous head and topknot of a blue Mexican quail, and shot it. He dressed the quail swiftly and placed it over a fragrant flame of cedar branches. As long as he could, he endured the odor of the roasting meat, and then he devoured his meal, half raw.

The day was quickening now, the sky blue, the east fresh with color. A few breaths of that keen, clear air drove the ache of sleeplessness from his brain, and he started again toward the pass among the tumbling hills.

In the firm sand of the pass he found the small prints of Moonshine as clear as print on a white page, and, with his revolver, he measured the steps accurately, scratching the odd distance on the barrel of his gun. By this measure, better than by any other method, he could identify the stallion's trail. As he hurried on, it seemed to Lee that out of the prints before him the body of the horse arose and drifted before him with rhythmic pace.

During the day he halted only twice, for, after a pause, it became more than a man could endure to step again on those agonizing feet. That straightforward progress brought a reward, however. He came on Moonshine beside a water hole near plenty of long grass which the stallion was eating so eagerly that Lee guessed how famine pinched him. For his own part, as the gray raced off into the evening, he had barely strength to stagger to the edge of the hole. There he dropped into the mud and drank the lukewarm water. Afterward, it was vain to attempt to drag his boots off over those swollen feet, so he cut away the leather below the ankles and tossed spurs and all far off. One glance at his feet, and he buried them in the mud. It was a green slime, unspeakably soft, cool. It drank up the fever of his blood; it cleared his head; it drained away the thousand aches while he lay flat on his back, breathing with a hoarse rattle of content, his arms thrown out crosswise, staring up at the evening sky where the colors were mingling softly and gaily.

There, with his feet in the mud, he took the half-dried skin of the coyote and fashioned moccasins. A double fold of skin made the soles. The uppers were crudely shaped and joined to the sole with a strip of sinew passed through holes which he cut with his knife. That done, in the gathering darkness he lay back and waited until a blue quail came fearlessly to the water and killed it.

It was painful going in the morning, but he kept at it gingerly along a trail that was as clear as if it had been stamped out. He reached the Pecos country that day, with the great brown mountains growing up beyond to the white snow that topped Guadalupe. The rolling land swept into a great vega, and in the midst of it he stumbled upon the river. A few rods back it was not visible. When he reached the famous stream, he found little three-foot banks hemming in a swift, muddy current no broader than a street. He forded that bitter water at the Delaware Crossing and went on into a sandy country.

The sign led toward Guadalupe until at night, at the base of the great mountain that now filled a quarter of the sky, the trail swung sharply to the right. It made Lee Garrison draw a deep breath of relief. Moonshine had traveled swiftly that day, and now he must lead by many a mile, but by that veering of the tracks Lee knew that the mustang was taking the ravine to the right in order to cut into the heart of the mountains. That would lead him about on a winding course, and Lee, going straight over the shoulder of the mountain, might cut across the path before Moonshine came up with him. For that reason he decided to eat his supper, if he could find game, rest a brief time, and then press straight over the shoulder of the mountain.

Luck gave him his game in the form of a white-tailed buck that stood out of the short brush against the skyline not two hundred yards away. Lee stalked him as silently as a snake, and, coming up out of the gully, he fired from below and dropped the deer with the first shot. It was a fine eight-point fellow, running close to one hundred and fifty pounds, but all of him went to waste except the plump hindquarters. Off one of these Lee cut himself a huge steak and broiled it over cedar coals, a meal for a king. While he smoked his cigarette afterward, he watched the falling night across the plains below, while above him the air whispered through evergreen boughs, and that nameless keen fragrance was blowing. His body ached when he thought what a bed those piled branches would make. But when the butt of the cigarette was tossed away, he paused only long enough to massage his sore leg muscles with his knuckles, fasten the untouched quarter of the buck across his shoulders, and then he pressed on up the slope.

At midnight he reached a crest that seemed closer to the stars than he had ever been before, but they were visible for a moment only. A freshening wind was carrying great burdens of clouds across the sky, and the stars were flicked out, one by one. In the redoubled darkness the voices of the wind crowded close to him with lonely wailing, but Lee armed himself against despondency. He glanced back of him to make sure of his direction and then went down the slope toward the ravine along which Moonshine must surely be climbing.

A gust, as he started, struck him heavily, and, instead of slackening, it increased in stronger puffs, one crowded after the other, humming and whining across the ridges and plucking at Lee Garrison with fingers of ice. Below, the valley was black as a cave.

He was too old a cattleman to become panic stricken at the approach of a storm, but, as he went on, he took stock of the swift falling of the temperature, the rapidly increasing numbness of toes and fingers, the prickling about his cheekbones. A true hurricane was in the brewing. A blast of sleet rattled through the shrubs, then clouds of snow poured about him, waving down like great moth wings and clothing the air to stifling with its density. It seemed that he would never stagger to the bottom of the first descent.

A moment later, however, he came into that ravine which, he knew, must be the course of Moonshine as he crossed the Guadalupes. The level-driving snow literally roofed the gorge, but he could see for a little distance, up and down. Behind an outcropping of rock he crouched to wait, straining his eyes down the hollow for some sign of the stallion. It might be that Moonshine had turned with the gale and drifted as cattle drift, but Lee had strong faith that, in spite of the wind and weather, the gray would keep to his course like a thinking man. The cold mountains went by. Drifts of sheeted snow from time to time blew past him like ghosts, or galloping gray horses, and his heart leaped at so many false hopes that he would not believe when, out of the snow flurries below him, he made out a moving shape that grew into the mustang struggling through the storm on his journey north, steady as a ship that drives by compass.

He slid his hand back and gripped the coil of the rope. Gallantly Moonshine came up the rise until, just in front of Lee, an arm of the wind shot sidewise and stopped the horse like a jerk of a stake rope. Lee Garrison shook out the noose a little. He lurched up and forward for the cast. But his body crumbled under the effort. The cold had made him as brittle as straw, for he had crouched by the rock too long. His legs buckled at the knees. The rope was caught by the wind and flung back into his face, while the horse leaped past him with a snort, almost within the reach of his fingertips.

To tantalize him the more, he regained muscular control at once. The strong effort now sent his blood leaping. He sprang to his feet and rushed down the ravine, shouting, shaking the rope above his head. The storm tore off his curses at his lips. He stumbled and fell flat a dozen times. But he kept on until he heard, far away, the storm-drowned neigh of Moonshine. Then, with a groan, he crumpled up on a bank of snow.