The Black Rider (16 page)

It was deserted like the lower floor of the big house. Even the stable, which the Moores had built behind their home, was lofty and mansion-like, finished at the top with sky-reaching gables and adorned at the upper rim of the roof with an elaborate cornice of carved wood, half of whose figures had cracked away with the passage of the years and the lack of paint.

As he stepped through the great arch of the central door, he found a single lamp burning behind a chimney black with smoke. This he took as a lantern and examined the horses in the stalls. There were only five kept there for the night. The rest were in the corrals behind the building, and in the first of these corrals he found Sunset.

The stallion had been placed by himself and, the moment the lamp from the light struck on him, he came straight for the bearer, his big eyes as bright as two burning disks, and the lamplight was quivering and running along the silk of his red flanks

Macdonald uttered a faint exclamation of delight. It was the first time in his wild life that he had secured
anything through fraud. Treachery had never been one of his mental qualities. But, as the horse nosed at his shoulder and whinnied softly, as though they had been friends for many a year, his heart leaped. Every man, he had always felt, will commit one crime before his life was over, and this must be the crime of Macdonald. How much bloodshed, how many deaths could be laid to his score did not matter. He had risked his own life in taking the life of another. But here he had gone behind another man and cheated him with hired trickery!

It was very base. The whole soul of Macdonald revolted at the thought of Jenkins and the part he had played. But he would use Sunset as tenderly as any master could use him. That, at least, was certain.

In five minutes his saddle was on the back of the stallion, his roll was strapped to it, and he had vaulted into the stirrups and jogged out onto the main street of the town. There were no noises. The town slept the sleep of the mountains, black and stirless. The great stars were bright above him. And under him the stallion was dancing with eagerness to be off at full speed, dancing and playing lightly against the bit, but as smooth of action as running water.

He spoke gently, and Sunset was off into a breathtaking gallop, no pitch and pound, as of the range mustang, but a long and sweeping stride, as though the beat of invisible wings bore him up and floated him over the ground. They flashed out of town. Now the blackness of the plain lay before them, and Sunset was settling to his work. A horse? No, it was like sitting on the back of an eagle. The cold of the nightmare left him, and it seemed to Macdonald that, if he turned, he would see the girl of his vision cantering beside him, laughing up to him!

Now he touched Sunset with the spurs. It was half a mile before he could pull the startled horse out of a
mad run and bring him into a canter again, with hand and voice soothing the stallion. By that time all thoughts of the dream were behind him. But for how long? When would she come again to make his heart ache with loneliness and to fill him again with the sad certainty of disaster toward which he was traveling?

One thing at least was necessary. He must find action—action which would employ him to the full. He must have battle such as he had never had before. He must fight against odds. He must plunge into danger as into cleansing waters, and these would wash the memory from his mind.

So at least it seemed to Macdonald, as he gnawed his lip and rode on into the night. And he cast around in his thoughts for an objective. It was no longer easy to find the danger which was the breath of his nostrils. Time had been when the shrug of a shoulder or a careless word would plunge him into battle. But that time had passed. His reputation had spread wide before him and men took far more from him than they would take from their ordinary fellows. Moreover, how many sheriffs had warned him solemnly that the next time there was a killing by him in their county, self-defense would be no defense, but he would be left to the mercy of the crowd?

He must find some ready-made trouble, and with that the inspiration came to him. Five years before in the town of Sudeth he had killed young Bill Gregory, and the Gregorys one and all had sworn that he would never live to spend another day in that town. What could be more perfect? He had only to ride into the town of Sudeth and take a room in the hotel. The next move would be up to the Gregorys. There were scores of them about the place, and they were not the type of men to forget past oaths.

T
he tidings of his coming went out on wings, and that night the Gregorys assembled. In the course of two generations a large family had multiplied greatly and become almost a clan, of which the head was old Charles Gregory; and it was at his ranchhouse, a scant mile from the town of Sudeth, that the assembly gathered. Old or young, gray or dark, they packed into the big dining room. The elders sat. The younger men, the fighting van of the Gregory family, were ranged around the wall, smoking cigarettes until their faces were lost behind a haze, but speaking rarely or never. For it was felt in the Gregory family that age had its rights and its wisdom, and that young men may listen to them with profit.

Old Charles Gregory himself sat at the head of the board. Time had withered, but not faded, him. His arms and hands were shrunk like the arms and hands of a mummy, but his thin, bronzed cheek still held a healthful glow, and his eyes were as bright as the eyes of a youth. He opened the meeting with a little speech.

“There ain’t no use saying why we’ve come together, folks,” he said. “The hound has come back. It wasn’t enough that we didn’t follow him out and finish him off after he murdered poor Bill. That wasn’t enough. We kept the law and stayed quiet. But being quiet only made him figure that he could walk right over us. So
he’s back here sitting easy at the hotel and waiting for us to do something. The question is: What are we going to do?”

The elders around the table neither stirred nor spoke, but there was a slight and uneasy shifting of feet around the wall and a dull jingling of spurs. Not a man there but was a man of action.

“None of you seem to have no ideas!” said Charles Gregory fiercely. “But first off I’d better tell you just what happened when Bill was killed. There’s been a lot of talk about it since. There’s been five years for talk to grow up, and talk grows faster than any weed on the range! I’ll tell you the facts because, come my time of life, the longer ago a thing happens the clearer it is to me!”

He paused and closed his eyes. For the moment he looked like a weary mask of death. Now again his eyes looked out from the steep shadow of his brows, and he went on: “And you younger people listen close. You’re going to hear the facts. It started over nothing, the way most shooting scrapes start. Bill comes riding into town one day and goes up on the verandah and sits down in a chair. Pretty soon Abe Sawyer comes up to him and says to him: ‘You know who that chair belongs to?’

“‘I dunno,’ says Bill.

“‘Gordon Macdonald has been sitting in it,’ says Abe.

“‘Who’s Gordon Macdonald?’ says Bill.

“‘A nacheral born man-killer,’ says Abe, ‘and the worst man with a gun that ever was born.’

“Bill sits and thinks a minute.

“‘I don’t know how much gunfighter he is,’ says Bill, ‘but he sure ain’t got this chair mortgaged. If he happens to sit down in it in the morning, he ain’t going to have it kept for him here all day!’

“Abe didn’t say no more about it. He went off and
sat down to watch, and pretty soon a big man comes out through the door of the hotel and taps Bill on the shoulder.

“‘Excuse me, partner,’ he says, ‘but this is my chair!’

“Bill answers without turning his head. ‘D’you think that you can hold down a chair all day by just sitting in it once?’

“‘I was fixing my spurs,’ says the big man, ‘and I left one of ‘em lying on each side of the chair. Ain’t that enough to hold down a chair for a man for two minutes? Besides, there’s other chairs out here on the porch, and you could have sat in one of them, couldn’t you?’

“Bill looks down and he sees the spurs for the first time. He looks up to the face of Macdonald, and he said later that it was like looking up into the face of a lion. His nerve sort of faded out of him.

“‘Maybe you’re right,’ says he and gets up and takes another chair. But, while he’s sitting in the other chair, he sees half a dozen of the gents that have watched the whole thing sort of looking at him and then at one another and smiling. A shiver runs up Bill’s spine, and he starts asking himself if they think he’s taken water. He’s got half a mind to go over and pick a fight with Macdonald right there, to show that he has nerve enough to suit any man. But then he remembers that he’s going to marry poor Jenny inside of a week, and he decides that he ain’t got no right to fight a gunman.

“He goes on home. As soon as he sits down to the supper table in comes his cousin, Jack, over yonder…oh, Jack, it was a poor part you played that night!…and started joking with Bill because he’d give up his chair to Macdonald. Bill didn’t say a word to nobody. But he gets up from the table and goes out and saddles a hoss and starts for Sudeth town. He runs down the street, jumps off’n his hoss, and dives into the hotel.

There he looks up this Macdonald. He starts in cussing Macdonald, with his hand on the butt of his gun. He says that Macdonald must have started talking about him and calling him yaller. But Macdonald talks back to him plumb soft and says that he don’t want no trouble, and that the matter about the chair don’t mean nothing. Pretty soon Bill got to thinking that
Macdonald
was yaller, I guess, from the soft way that Macdonald talks. Anyways he goes up and punches Macdonald on the jaw. Macdonald knocks him down. While Bill lies on the floor, he pulls his gun, and Macdonald waits till he sees the steel, then he pulls his own Colt like a flash and kills poor Bill.”

Charles Gregory paused, looking down to his withered hands, clasped above the table. There was no sound in the room.

“That’s the straight of that killing of Bill, and it sounds like Bill was simply a fool. But since then we’ve heard a lot about Macdonald, and we know that he’s one of these gents that goes around hunting trouble, and when he gets into trouble he backs up and talks soft and tries to make the other gent lead at him, but the minute anything is started, Macdonald does all the finishing. He lives on murder! We’ve traced him a ways, and we’ve planted twenty dead men to his credit! Now, folks, this Macdonald is the man we told to get out of Sudeth and never come back, and here he is in town again. I seen the sheriff today. All he said was that he had a long trip to make and was leaving
pronto
, which was the same as saying that he knew that Macdonald was a plumb bad one, and that he wouldn’t dislike having us wipe him out. Ain’t I right? The only question is: How are we going to do it?”

There was a small, respectful pause at the conclusion of this speech, and finally Henry Gregory, a wide-shouldered,
gray-headed man, spoke from the farther end of the table. No one in that room was more respected by the others.

“I’ve had my storms,” he said, “and I’ve done my fighting. But the older I get the more I figure that no good can come out of the muzzle of a Colt with a forty-five slug. And I say short and
pronto:
no more fighting! Let Macdonald stay. Poor Bill is dead. There ain’t no doubt that it was no better than murder. There ain’t no doubt that this Macdonald is a professional, and before we could get rid of him, a couple of our boys are sure to go down. I say: hands off of Macdonald.”

“There’d be a lot of talk!” exclaimed half a dozen voices in a chorus.

“Nobody but a fool would accuse the Gregorys of being cowards,” said Henry. “What fools say don’t bother us none. We can let ’em chatter!”

Someone stepped forward from the wall of the room with a clank of spurs. It was the face of Jack Gregory that came out of the mist of smoke.

“Folks,” he said, “I’d ought to wait until my elders have finished talking, maybe, but I got something to say that needs saying pretty bad. Grandfather Charles was sure right when he said that it was me joking Bill that sent him into town to fight. God knows that I didn’t mean no harm. Me and Bill was always pals, everybody knows. But it was me that got Bill killed, and I’ll never live it down with myself! What I got to say is this. Let me go in and face the music. Let me meet Macdonald and try my luck. It’s my business!”

There was a stern hum of dissent, and Mack Gregory, the father of Jack, turned and glanced gloomily at his son.

“No,” said old Charles Gregory, speaking again, “we’ve passed our word that Macdonald should never come
back to Sudeth, and he’s done it. Right or wrong, we’ve passed our word. It ain’t the business of Jack. It’s the business of all of us! Speaking personal, I say that it would be suicide to send only one man. We need more! Macdonald is a lion!”

There was another growl of agreement.

“Are we going to let folks say that the Gregorys have to fight in twos?” protested Henry Gregory, but he was not heard.

In another moment they were busy preparing the lots and then making the draw. By weird chance it fell upon both the sons of the peacemaker, Henry Gregory. Steve and Joe were his only children, great-boned, silent fellows, as swarthy of skin as Indians and as terrible as twin wildcats in a fight. Certainly the choice could not have fallen upon two more formidable men.

“But it ain’t right,” protested Jack. “I sure ought to have a hand. If Steve and Joe are hurt, the blame of it will come back on me, and I can’t stand it!”

“Shut up!” snarled his father. “You’re playing the fool, son. Are you wiser than all the rest of us?”

So Jack was cried down, but his mind was not put at rest by all the talk. He heard it decided that the attack on Macdonald should be made in the morning. He heard the farewells, as the party broke up. And, witnessing all these things through a mist, all he saw clearly was the stern face of Henry Gregory, now wan with sorrow for his sons. He saw that, and it determined him on the spot. He waited until the assembly had scattered, then he took his horse, fell to the rear, and presently had turned down a path and started for the town of Sudeth.