Read The Max Brand Megapack Online
Authors: Max Brand,Frederick Faust
Tags: #old west, #outlaw, #gunslinger, #Western, #cowboy
The Max Brand Megapack (348 page)
As he spoke he threw Arizona a gun and belt, and the latter imitated Sinclair in buckling it on. But the fat man then made for the door of the cell. Outside the rush reached the entrance to the jail and split on it. The voices leaped into a tumult.
“By thunder,” demanded Arizona, “are you going to wait for
that
?”
“You want Kern to get into trouble?” asked Sinclair. “Grab this end and tie his ankles, while I fix his hands.”
Frantically they worked together.
“Are you comfortable, sheriff?”
He lay securely trussed in a corner of the passageway.
“Dead easy, boys. Now what’s your plan?”
“Is there a back way out?”
“No way in or out but the front door. You got to wait till they smash it. There they start now! Then dive out, as they rush. They won’t be expecting nothing like that. But gag me first.”
Hastily Sinclair obeyed. The door of the jail was shaking and groaning under the attack from without, and the shouts were a steady roar. Then he hurried to the front of the little building. Arizona was already there, gun in hand, watching the door bulge under the impact. Evidently they had caught up a heavy timber, and a dozen men were pounding it against the massive door. Sinclair caught the gun arm of his companion.
“Fatty,” he said hastily, “gunplay will spoil everything. We got to take ’em by surprise. Fast running will save us, maybe. Fast shooting ain’t any good when it’s one man agin’ fifty, and these boys mean business.”
Arizona reluctantly let his gun drop back in its holster. He nodded to Sinclair. The latter gave his directions swiftly, speaking loudly to make his voice carry over the roar of the crowd.
“When the door goes down, which it’ll do pretty pronto, I’ll dive out from this side, and you run from the other side, straight into the crowd. I’ll turn to the right, and you turn to the left. The minute you’re around the corner of the building shoot back over your shoulder, or straight into the air. It’ll make ’em think that you’ve stopped and are going to fight ’em off from the corner. They’ll take it slow, you can bet. Then beat it straight on for the cottonwoods behind the blacksmith shop.”
“They’ll drop us the minute we show.”
“Sure, we got the long chance, and nothing more. Is that good enough for you?”
He was rewarded in the dimness by a glint in the eyes of Arizona, and then the fat man gripped his hand.
“You and me agin’ the world.”
In the meantime the door was bulging in the center under blows of increasing weight. A second battering ram was now brought into play, and the rain of blows was unceasing. Still between shocks, the door sprang back, but there was a telltale rattle at every blow. Finally, as a yell sprang up from the crowd at the sight, the upper hinge snapped loudly, and the door sagged in. Both timbers were now apparently swung at the same moment. Under the joint impact the door was literally lifted from its last hinge and hurled inward. And with it lunged the two battering rams and the men who had wielded them. They tumbled headlong, carried away by the very weight of their successful blow.
“Now!” called Sinclair, and he sprang with an Indian yell over the heads of the sprawling men in the doorway and into the thick of the crowd.
Half a dozen of the drawn guns whipped up at the sight, but no one could make sure in the half-light of the identity of the man who had dashed out. Their imaginations placed the two prisoners safely behind the bars inside. Before they could think twice, a second figure leaped through the doorway and passed them in the opposite direction.
Then they awakened to the fact, but they awakened in confusion. A dozen shots blazed in either direction, but they were wild, snapshots of men taken off balance.
Two leaps took Sinclair through the thick of the astonished men before him. He came to the scattering edges and saw a man dive at him. The cowpuncher beat the butt of his gun into the latter’s face and sped on, whipping around the corner of the little jail, with bullets whistling after him.
His own gun, as he leaped out of sight, he fired into the ground, and he heard a similar shot from the far side of the building. Those two shots, as he had predicted, checked the pursuers one vital second and kept them milling in front of the jail. Then they spilled out around the corners, each man running low, his gun ready.
But Sinclair, deep in the darkness of the tree shadows behind the jail, was already out of sight. He caught a glimpse of Arizona sprinting ahead of him for dear life. They reached the cottonwoods together and were greeted by a low shout from the girl; she was running out from the shelter, dragging the horses after her.
Arizona went into his saddle with a single leap. Sinclair paused to take the jump, with his hand on the pommel, and as he lifted himself up with a jump, a gun blazed in point-blank range from the nearest shrubbery.
There was a yell from Arizona, not of pain, but of rage. They saw his gun glistening in his hand, and, swerving his horse to disturb the aim of the marksman, his weapon’s first report blended with the second shot from the bushes, a tongue of darting flame. Straight at the flash of a target Arizona had fired, and there was an answering yell. Out of the dark of the shrubbery a great form leaped, with a grotesque shadow beneath it on the moon-whitened ground.
“Cartwright!” cried Sinclair, as the big man collapsed and became a shapeless, inanimate black heap.
Straight ahead Arizona was already spurring, and Sinclair waved once to the white face of Jig, then shot after his companion, while the trees and shrubbery to their left emitted a sudden swarm of men and barking guns.
But to strike a rapidly moving object with a revolver is never easy, and to strike by the moonlight is difficult indeed. A dangerous flight of slugs bored the air around the fugitives for the first hundred yards of their flight, but after that the firing ceased, as the men of Sour Creek ran for their horses.
Straight on into the night rode the pair.
* * * *
One year had made Arizona a little plumper, and one year had drawn Riley Sinclair more lean and somber, when they rode out on the shoulder of a flat-topped mountain and looked down into the hollow, where the late afternoon sun was already sending broad shadows out from every rise of ground. Sour Creek was a blur and a twinkle of glass in the distance.
“Come to think of it,” said Arizona, “it’s just one year today. Riley, was it that that brung you back here, and me, unknowing?”
The tall man made no answer, but shaded his eyes to peer down into the valley, and Arizona made no attempt to pursue the conversation. He was long since accustomed to the silences of his traveling mate. Seeing that Sinclair showed no disposition either to speak or move, he left the big cowpuncher to himself and started off through the trees in search of game. The sign of a deer caught his eye and hurried him on into a futile chase, from which he returned in the early dark of the evening. He was guided by the fire which Sinclair had kindled on the shoulder, but to his surprise, as he drew nearer, the fire dwindled, very much as if Riley had entirely forgotten to replenish it with dry wood.
A year of wild life had sharpened the caution of Arizona. That neglect of his fire was by no means in keeping with the usual methods of Sinclair. Before he came to the last spur of the hill, Arizona dismounted and stole up on foot. He listened intently. There was not a sound of anyone moving about. There was only an occasional crackle of the dying fire. When he came to the edge of the shoulder, Arizona raised his head cautiously to peer over.
He saw a faintly illumined picture of Riley Sinclair, sitting with his hat off, his face raised, and such a light in his face that there needed no play of the fire to tell its meaning. Beside him sat a girl, more distinct, for she was dressed in white, and the fire gleamed and curled and modeled her hair and cast a highlight on her chin, her throat, and her hand in the brown hand of Sinclair.
Arizona winced down out of sight and stole back under the trees.
“Doggone me,” he said to his horse, “they both remembered the day.”
THE NIGHT HORSEMAN (1920)
CHAPTER I
THE SCHOLAR
At the age of six Randall Byrne could name and bound every state in the Union and give the date of its admission; at nine he was conversant with Homeric Greek and Caesar; at twelve he read Aristophanes with perfect understanding of the allusions of the day and divided his leisure between Ovid and Horace; at fifteen, wearied by the simplicity of Old English and Thirteenth Century Italian, he dipped into the history of Philosophy and passed from that, naturally, into calculus and the higher mathematics; at eighteen he took an A.B. from Harvard and while idling away a pleasant summer with Hebrew and Sanscrit he delved lightly into biology and its kindred sciences, having reached the conclusion that Truth is greater than Goodness or Beauty, because it comprises both, and the whole is greater than any of its parts; at twenty-one he pocketed his Ph.D. and was touched with the fever of his first practical enthusiasm—surgery. At twenty-four he was an M.D. and a distinguished diagnostician, though he preferred work in his laboratory in his endeavor to resolve the elements into simpler forms; also he published at this time a work on anthropology whose circulation was limited to two hundred copies, and he received in return two hundred letters of congratulation from great men who had tried to read his book; at twenty-seven he collapsed one fine spring day on the floor of his laboratory. That afternoon he was carried into the presence of a great physician who was also a very vulgar man. The great physician felt his pulse and looked into his dim eyes.
“You have a hundred and twenty horsepower brain and a runabout body,” said the great physician.
“I have come,” answered Randall Byrne faintly, “for the solution of a problem, not for the statement thereof.”
“I’m not through,” said the great physician. “Among other things you are a damned fool.”
Randall Byrne here rubbed his eyes.
“What steps do you suggest that I consider?” he queried.
The great physician spat noisily.
“Marry a farmer’s daughter,” he said brutally.
“But,” said Randall Byrne vaguely.
“I am a busy man and you’ve wasted ten minutes of my time,” said the great physician, turning back to his plate glass window. “My secretary will send you a bill for one thousand dollars. Good-day.”
And therefore, ten days later, Randall Byrne sat in his room in the hotel at Elkhead.
He had just written (to his friend Swinnerton Loughburne, M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D.): “Incontrovertibly the introduction of the personal equation leads to lamentable inversions, and the perceptive faculties when contemplating phenomena through the lens of ego too often conceive an accidental connotation or manifest distortion to be actuality, for the physical (or personal) too often beclouds that power of inner vision which so unerringly penetrates to the inherent truths of incorporeity and the extramundane. Yet this problem, to your eyes, I fear, not essentially novel or peculiarly involute, holds for my contemplative faculties an extraordinary fascination, to wit: wherein does the mind, in itself a muscle, escape from the laws of the physical, and wherein and wherefore do the laws of the physical exercise so inexorable a jurisdiction over the processes of the mind, so that a disorder of the visual nerve actually distorts the asomatous and veils the pneumatoscopic?
“Your pardon, dear Loughburne, for these lapses from the general to the particular, but in a lighter moment of idleness, I pray you give some careless thought to a problem now painfully my own, though rooted inevitably so deeply in the dirt of the commonplace.
“But you have asked me in letter of recent date for the particular physical aspects of my present environment, and though (as you so well know) it is my conviction that the physical fact is not and only the immaterial is, yet I shall gladly look about me—a thing I have not yet seen occasion to do—and describe to you the details of my present condition.”
Accordingly, at this point Randall Byrne removed from his nose his thick glasses and holding them poised he stared through the window at the view without. He had quite changed his appearance by removing the spectacles, for the owlish touch was gone and he seemed at a stroke ten years younger. It was such a face as one is glad to examine in detail, lean, pale, the transparent skin stretched tightly over cheekbones, nose, and chin. That chin was built on good fighting lines, though somewhat over-delicate in substance and the mouth quite colourless, but oddly enough the upper lip had that habitual appearance of stiff compression which is characteristic of highly strung temperaments; it is a noticeable feature of nearly every great actor, for instance. The nose was straight and very thin and in a strong sidelight a tracery of the red blood showed through at the nostrils. The eyes were deeply buried and the lower lids bruised with purple—weak eyes that blinked at a change of light or a sudden thought—distant eyes which missed the design of wall paper and saw the trees growing on the mountains. The forehead was Byrne’s most noticeable feature, pyramidal, swelling largely towards the top and divided in the centre into two distinct lobes by a single marked furrow which gave his expression a hint of the wistful. Looking at that forehead one was strangely conscious of the brain beneath. There seemed no bony structure; the mind, undefended, was growing and pushing the confining walls further out.
And the fragility which the head suggested the body confirmed, for he was not framed to labor. The burden of the noble head had bowed the slender throat and crooked the shoulders, and when he moved his arm it seemed the arm of a skeleton too loosely clad. There was a differing connotation in the hands, to be sure. They were thin—bones and sinews chiefly, with the violet of the veins showing along the backs; but they were active hands without tremor—hands ideal for the accurate scalpel, where a fractional error means death to the helpless.
After a moment of staring through the window the scholar wrote again: “The major portion of Elkhead lies within plain sight of my window. I see a general merchandise store, twenty-seven buildings of a comparatively major and eleven of a minor significance, and five saloons. The streets—”
The streets, however, were not described at that sitting, for at this juncture a heavy hand knocked and the door of Randall Byrne’s room was flung open by Hank Dwight, proprietor of Elkhead’s saloon—a versatile man, expert behind the bar or in a blacksmith shop.
“Doc,” said Hank Dwight, “you’re wanted.” Randall Byrne placed his spectacles more firmly on his nose to consider his host.
“What—” he began, but Hank Dwight had already turned on his heel.
“Her name is Kate Cumberland. A little speed, doc. She’s in a hurry.”
“If no other physician is available,” protested Byrne, following slowly down the stairs, “I suppose I must see her.”
“If they was another within ten miles, d’you s’pose I’d call on you?” asked Hank Dwight.
So saying, he led the way out onto the veranda, where the doctor was aware of a girl in a short riding skirt who stood with one gloved hand on her hip while the other slapped a quirt idly against her riding boots.
CHAPTER II
WORDS AND BULLETS
“Here’s a gent that calls himself a doc,” said Hank Dwight by way of an introduction. “If you can use him, Miss Cumberland, fly to it!”
And he left them alone.
Now the sun lay directly behind Kate Cumberland and in order to look at her closely the doctor had to shade his weak eyes and pucker his brows; for from beneath her wide sombrero there rolled a cloud of golden hair as bright as the sunshine itself—a sad strain upon the visual nerve of Doctor Randall Byrne. He repeated her name, bowed, and when he straightened, blinked again. As if she appreciated that strain upon his eyes she stepped closer, and entered the shadow.
“Doctor Hardin is not in town,” she said, “and I have to bring a physician out to the ranch at once; my father is critically ill.”
Randall Byrne rubbed his lean chin.
“I am not practicing at present,” he said reluctantly. Then he saw that she was watching him closely, weighing him with her eyes, and it came to the mind of Randall Byrne that he was not a large man and might not incline the scale far from the horizontal.
“I am hardly equipped—” began Byrne.
“You will not need equipment,” she interrupted. “His trouble lies in his nerves and the state of his mind.”
A slight gleam lighted the eyes of the doctor.
“Ah,” he murmured. “The mind?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his bloodless hands slowly together, and when he spoke his voice was sharp and quick and wholly impersonal. “Tell me the symptoms!”
“Can’t we talk those over on the way to the ranch? Even if we start now it will be dark before we arrive.”
“But,” protested the doctor, “I have not yet decided—this precipitancy—”
“Oh,” she said, and flushed. He perceived that she was on the verge of turning away, but something withheld her. “There is no other physician within reach; my father is very ill. I only ask that you come as a diagnostician, doctor!”
“But a ride to your ranch,” he said miserably. “I presume you refer to riding a horse?”
“Naturally.”
“I am unfamiliar with that means of locomotion,” said the doctor with serious eyes, “and in fact have not carried my acquaintance with the equine species beyond a purely experimental stage. Anatomically I have a superficial knowledge, but on the one occasion on which I sat in a saddle I observed that the docility of the horse is probably a poetic fallacy.”
He rubbed his left shoulder thoughtfully and saw a slight tremor at the corners of the girl’s mouth. It caused his vision to clear and concentrate; he found that the lips were, in fact, in the very act of smiling. The face of the doctor brightened.
“You shall ride my own horse,” said the girl. “She is perfectly gentle and has a very easy gait. I’m sure you’ll have not the slightest trouble with her.”
“And you?”
“I’ll find something about town; it doesn’t matter what.”
“This,” said the doctor, “is most remarkable. You choose your mounts at random?”
“But you will go?” she insisted.
“Ah, yes, the trip to the ranch!” groaned the doctor. “Let me see: the physical obstacles to such a trip while many are not altogether insuperable, I may say; in the meantime the moral urge which compels me towards the ranch seems to be of the first order.” He sighed. “Is it not strange, Miss Cumberland, that man, though distinguished from the lower orders by mind, so often is controlled in his actions by ethical impulses which override the considerations of reason? An observation which leads us towards the conclusion that the passion for goodness is a principle hardly secondary to the passion for truth. Understand that I build the hypothesis only tentatively, with many reservations, among which—”
He broke off short. The smile was growing upon her lips.
“I will put together a few of my things,” said the doctor, “and come down to you at once.”
“Good!” said the girl, “I’ll be waiting for you with two horses before you are ready.”
He turned away, but had taken hardly a step before he turned, saying: “But why are you so sure that you will be ready before I—” but she was already down the steps from the veranda and stepping briskly down the street.
“There is an element of the unexplainable in woman,” said the doctor, and resumed his way to his room. Once there, something prompted him to act with the greatest possible speed. He tossed his toilet articles and a few changes of linen into a small, flexible valise and ran down the stairs. He reached the veranda again, panting, and the girl was not in sight; a smile of triumph appeared on the grave, colourless lips of the doctor. “Feminine instinct, however, is not infallible,” he observed to himself, and to one of the cowboys, lounging loosely in a chair nearby, he continued his train of thoughts aloud: “Though the verity of the feminine intuition has already been thrown in a shade of doubt by many thinkers, as you will undoubtedly agree.”
The man thus addressed allowed his lower jaw to drop but after a moment he ejaculated: “Now what in hell d’you mean by that?”
The doctor already turned away, intent upon his thoughts, but he now paused and again faced the cowboy. He said, frowning: “There is unnecessary violence in your remark, sir.”
“Duck your glasses,” said the worthy in question. “You ain’t talkin’ to a book, you’re talking to a man.”
“And in your attitude,” went on the doctor, “there is an element of offense which if carried farther might be corrected by physical violence.”
“I don’t foller your words,” said the cattleman, “but from the drift of your tune I gather you’re a bit peeved; and if you are—”
His voice had risen to a ringing note as he proceeded and he now slipped from his chair and faced Randall Byrne, a big man, brown, hard-handed. The doctor crimsoned.
“Well?” he echoed, but in place of a deep ring his words were pitched in a high squeak of defiance.
He saw a large hand contract to a fist, but almost instantly the big man grinned, and his eyes went past Byrne.
“Oh, hell!” he grunted, and turned his back with a chuckle.
For an instant there was a mad impulse in the doctor to spring at this fellow but a wave of impotence overwhelmed him. He knew that he was white around the mouth, and there was a dryness in his throat.
“The excitement of imminent physical contest and personal danger,” he diagnosed swiftly, “causing acceleration of the pulse and attendant weakness of the body—a state unworthy of the balanced intellect.”
Having brought back his poise by this quick interposition of reason, he went his way down the long veranda. Against a pillar leaned another tall cattleman, also brown and lean and hard.
“May I inquire,” he said, “if you have any information direct or casual concerning a family named Cumberland which possesses ranch property in this vicinity?”
“You may,” said the cowpuncher, and continued to roll his cigarette.
“Well,” said the doctor, “do you know anything about them?”
“Sure,” said the other, and having finished his cigarette he introduced it between his lips. It seemed to occur to him instantly, however, that he was committing an inhospitable breach, for he produced his Durham and brown papers with a start and extended them towards the doctor.