The Max Brand Megapack (452 page)

“True!” exclaimed Milman. “There are a lot of men inside the law who can’t claim such qualities. What else did Trainor say? Did the Kid have a plan of any sort?”

“He had a plan,” said the other, “but he wouldn’t tell Bud. I think he told Bud that if he got to work in the Dixon camp, there’d be a signal that we all could see. Trainor has gone around to the other side of the hollow, so’s to be near to the scene if it comes to a fight.”

“I’m going to the same place,” answered Milman, and straightway cantered off toward the south, to find the main road that bridged the lower canyon of Hurry Creek.

He rode steadily, and he rode hard, the good horse stretching out gallantly beneath the weight of its master. And so the road rang under the iron hoofs, the bridge thundered underneath, and the rancher, over the rail, got one glimpse of the dark and roaring hollow of the canyon.

He thought of a man working with hand and foot through the spray and the darkness of such an inferno. And for what? For the cattle owned by another man!

Bewilderment again surged in a wave over the brain of Mil-man.

At the first gate, he turned in from the road, and headed across the bills until he came out on the verge of them, after making the long detour. From that verge, as he drew the horse down to a milder gait, he could see the camp fire in the hollow, and the dust from the moving cattle blew again to his nostrils.

A moment later, he saw a swift shadow speed across the lowland, and a crackling of the rifle shots welled up to him, sounding wonderfully faint and far away, almost like bells of an unseen village.

He hurried on again, his heart in his throat. It seemed to him that the final fight might be about to commence, and he doubted the end of it. He had good men—men who could shoot straight enough at a deer, but men are not deer, and the best of game hunters may make the worst of soldiers.

Sweeping down to the lower plain, he found, beyond the outskirts of the massed cattle, several of his riders, and Bud Trainor among them.

They reported that a rider had come in from the outside and slipping through a gap among the cattle, had safely reached the lines of the Dixon camp, in spite of their shooting. Who the stranger was, they could not guess, unless he were simply a hired gunman sent up from Dry Creek by Shay, perhaps bearing a message of some importance to the camp to maintain the spirit of the defenders of those two lines of barbed-wire fences that controlled the priceless waters of Hurry Creek.

Bud Trainor, in the midst of this explanation, began to argue with another rider, a very small figure of a man, as it seemed to Milman, and mounted on a mere pony of a mustang.

“You get the dickens out of here and go home!” commanded Bud. “Whatcha doin’ away up here, anyway? Get out of here and go back, as fast as you kin!”

“You can’t chase me out of here,” said the piping voice of a child. “You ain’t got a chance to chase me out of here! Not all the way back home. I heard that the Kid was up here and that’s why I come, because him and me is partners!”

“Who is it?” asked Milman.

“It’s a fool kid cousin of mine,” declared Bud Trainor. “This kid Davey is always up to his neck in trouble. And here he is ag’in. He couldn’t fill one leg of a pair of trousers, but he thinks that he’s a man. I never see such a young fool!”

Milman, in spite of his manifold troubles, began to laugh a little.

“You’d better cut back to the road, young fellow,” said he, “and then follow it up to my ranch house. You’ll be welcome there, and you can turn into a good bed. My wife and daughter wil! take care of you. But tell me one thing. What makes you a partner of the Kid?”

He asked with the keenest curiosity. Once before, on this night, he had heard a testimonial to the many qualities of the Kid. Here was a boy, finally, to add his word.

“Why, I dunno,” said Davey, after an instant of thought, “but him and me, we just sort of hit it off, together!”

The punchers laughed uproariously.

“All right,” said Davey fiercely, “you laugh, but I’d be in at the death to help the Kid when a whole lot of you would be scratchin’ your noses and holdin’ back!”

They laughed again, but not quite so loudly.

“Now, you get out of here. They’s likely to be trouble, and bad trouble!” said Bud Trainor.

But, before he could speak another word, a thing happened which took the attention of every one quite away from Davey Trainor and his odd affairs.

For, from the center of the heaped shadows of the Dixon camp, a column of bluish flame shot up, and then the whole mass of the big woodpile put up an arm of towering fire that clutched at the very sky.

“What in the name of thunder is happenin’ there?” asked one puncher.

“It’s an explosion,” guessed Milman. “Some of their gunpowder has caught fire—”

“It’s an explosion, all right!” shouted Bud Trainor. “And it’s the Kid that’s exploded it. It’s his signal. It means that he’s at work! Heaven bless him, there ain’t another man like him in the world. He’s gone and done it ag’in! He’s gone and done it, d’you hear? He’s in there raisin’ the devil with the whole crowd of them!”

Here there arose a prolonged rattling gunfire from within the camp, or from that direction, the sounds coming back from the hill faces like hollow hands clapping violently together. An odd time and an odd scene for applause!

Then, through the mass of the cattle, which divided a little to this side and that before the charge, streamed thirty or forty swiftly galloping horses, with no visible riders on their backs. Many of these took a noble header over some cow which could not get from the path, but, rising again, the band streamed on up the bottom of the hollow, cleaving a way as they went, like a flying wedge.

“It’s the Kid! It’s the Kid!” screamed little Davey Trainor.

All the punchers in the Milman service on that side of the hollow were riding, now, toward the point at which the frightened horses were issuing from among the cattle masses.

But Davey was there the first of all, and bending low, so that he could examine the silhouettes of the animals one by one, more closely, he strained his eyes to make out the form of a rider on one of them.

There was nothing to be seen. There was no rider, however flattened on the back or, Indian fashion, along the side of one of those racing horses, that could have escaped the glance of the sharp-eyed boy.

In the meantime, the inferno of flame continued to whirl upwards into the air from the camp of Dixon, throwing out long arms which vanished almost as quickly as they appeared.

“It’s the Kid’s work,” said Milman suddenly. “No other man could have done so much, and the fire and the escape of the horses cannot both be accidents!”

“But where’s the Kid now?” demanded Bud, excited. “He ought to’ve been on the back of one of those horses. And where’s Davey? Davey, you little fool, where are you?”

But Davey was gone!

CHAPTER 40

For the Sake of Cows

He had gone off, perhaps, to the top of one of the nearer hills in order to get another view of the camp fire and to strain his eyes toward the figures which were near it. For, from that distance, they could see forms indistinctly, moving about in the yellow red of the firelight.

Those who waited in that excited group had something else to think of, a moment later, for a rider came up to them at wild speed, and young Georgia Milman’s voice called out frantically to know if her father was there.

“Aye,” said Milman, after a moment of hisitation. “I’m here, Georgia. What brought you out?”

He rode out to meet her, and she, wheeling her horse, went with him a sufficient distance to cover the sound of their voices from the ears of the others.

“What is it, Georgia?” he asked her.

She was half weeping with relief at finding him.

“I’ve come like mad all the way from the house,” she said. “I saw Tex Marshall on the other side of Hurry Creek and he said that you’d come around here. Father, I’ve come out to tell you that Mother and I don’t care what’s happened in the past. We don’t care. You’re ours.”

He reached for her through the starlight and found her hand in his with a strong grip, worthy of a man.

“Your mother, too, Georgia?” he asked her.

“Yes, Mother, too. Of course!”

“She’s always known that there was something wrong,” said Milman. “But—I can only thank God and the two of you. Georgia, some day I’ll be able to tell you a story that will be hard to believe. So hard that I couldn’t try to tell it today, when you taxed me.”

“I believe it already,” she told him loyally. “Oh, Dad, it’s the three of us against the world. D’you think Mother or I could fail you now, when the bottom is falling out of everything?”

Something like a groan welled up in the throat of Milman. He crushed Georgia’s hand and then let it fall.

“I’m going to talk it all out to the two of you,” said he. “But not now. There’s something else to think about now. You saw the explosion?”

“Where?”

“In the hollow there in Dixon’s camp.”

“Explosion?”

“Doesn’t that camp fire look big to you?”

“Yes it does. What happened?”

“That’s what we don’t know. We only know that the Kid left Bud Trainor and lowered himself by Trainor’s lariat into the gorge of the upper creek. He was trying to get to the camp of Dixon, inside the fence lines where they’ve been keeping watch. We don’t know, but we suspect that the Kid may have caused the explosion that we saw in the camp—and the woodpile caught fire from it. Then there was a stampede of the horses from the same direction. They broke out through the herds. We don’t know what to make of it—”

“And the Kid didn’t come out with the horses?” asked the girl.

“No.”

“Then he’s back there in the camp!”

“We’ve no proof at all that he ever reached the camp. It seems humanly impossible that he could have got down the wall of the ravine and—”

She cried out, choking away the sound miserably at the end. And that cry stabbed her father with a quick and frantic pain.

“You care a frightful lot about him, Georgia?” said he.

“Aye,” said she. “A frightful lot!”

“He’s tried this crazy thing for your sake, Georgia?”

“For me? For me?” said the girl, agony in her voice. “No, no! Don’t you see that what he means to do is to smash you as he smashed the other four? How could he try to do anything for my sake, then? It’s not for me. It’s the misery of the poor dumb cows that’s making him try to do what no man can win through to!”

“I don’t know what to make of him,” declared the father. “There never was another man like him. Who else in the world would try such a thing—for the sake of dumb beasts?”

“There are no other men like him,” she said. “But what will become of him and all of us, I don’t know. I don’t dare to guess. But he’s down there in that camp, I’ll swear.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because he couldn’t fail. There’s no failure in him. He could die. I know that. But it will take men to kill him. It’ll certainly take men to kill him!”

They went back to the rest of the watchers and all stared anxiously down toward the fire. It no longer threw up flames so brilliantly. The strength of the burning had rotted away the woodpile and allowed it to spill out on the side. A strong glow, constantly reddening, was thrown up from this mass, but the light was much less clear and far-reaching.

“Who has a strong pair of glasses?” asked Milman.

“I have a pair,” said a puncher, “but they really ain’t any good for night work.”

Then a rider came up to them, sweeping from the hollow at a gallop, in spite of the slope.

And, as he came in, the shrill, piping voice of Davey Trainor cried out: “He’s in there! He’s in there! I seen him!”

They swarmed suddenly around the boy. Here was excitement. The passion that was in him seemed to illumine his face far more than the starlight.

“What did you see, Davey? Where’ve you been?”

“I wanted to go look. I couldn’t stay out here with the rest of you just millin’ around and doin’ nothing’. I went and had a look. You can get through the cows. The worst ones is out on this side. The ones inside is pretty nigh dead with the thirst. I got through, anyway. I got through, and I seen him!”

“Who, who? Davey, who d’you mean?”

“Who do I mean? I mean him that started the fire, and that busted the fence, and that burned up their chuck and that burned up their wagons and their wood supply, so’s they’re as bare as my hand of everything that folks would need. The Kid—the Kid, of course! There ain’t anybody else that could do such things, is there?”

“He’s there!” cried Bud Trainor. “I might’ve knowed that it was him. I did know it. I felt the ache of it in my bones!” Tears began to stream down the face of Georgia.

She pressed her hands against her eyes, but the tears pressed through and her hands were wet.

It was the end, she felt. Yet she controlled the throes of her sobbing. Dimly, she heard the voices of the men.

“Who’s gonna do something?” demanded the voice of Davey Trainor, sharp and biting as the noise of a cricket on a hearth. “Who’s gonna get started and do something for the Kid? He wouldn’t leave a partner down there with them crooks! He wouldn’t just sit around and look and talk. He’d be down there sure raisin’ hell for the sake of his bunky! Who’s gonna start something up here, for him? I’ll make one!”

This fierce and piping voice silenced them, for a moment.

“There are twenty men down there,” said one of the punchers, sullenly. “I’d take a chance for the Kid. But not no chance like that. It ain’t a lot of wooly lambs that are down there with Dixon.”

Milman took charge of the cross-questioning of the lad. “Tell me, Davey, just what you saw?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Davey. “When I got through the cows, I come to a place where I seen that there was three or four gents workin’ to patch up a gap that had been broke through the wire fencing. They was cussing a good deal.

“I worked along, keepin’ on the edge of the darkness, which wasn’t none too hard, because the light of that fire’s so bright that all of them that are near it are sort of blinded, I reckon. Fifty feet from the fire, it’s like they was lookin’ at black windows. They couldn’t see out no farther. Anyway, I worked down the line.