Silvertip's Strike (9 page)

He had fired high on purpose. To shoot even at hostile men with nothing but blind chance to guide the bullet was against his nature, and the force of necessity had little control over his instincts. But, though he purposely had fired the warning shot high, a yell of derision came from the men in the next room. There seemed to be three or four of them, at least. Their footfalls rapidly retreated; they made no further effort, for the moment, to get into the kitchen.

After that, a portion of them, at least, were heard leaving the dining room. Perhaps one man was left there as a guard and spy to hem in the maneuvers of the three.

Silver saw a dim silhouette of a man move out toward the big corral and the shed. Another and another stealthy figure followed. Parade was out there in the shed, either munching hay or lying down at ease. Parade was there, but Silver would not fire at the unknown men on account of any hope of preserving the stallion. He had, in fact, a strong hope that the horse would be able to preserve himself.

Then Farrel fired a shot. The boom of the gun was thunderous in the small kitchen. It seemed to bring a jingling echo out of the iron-work of the stove. Outside, there was silence. Then voices stirred far away at the horse shed, followed by an outcry of curses at the farther end of the house.

“I missed that one, all right,” Farrel said. “I won't miss the next, I hope.”

They heard doors flung open, and heavy feet trampling across floors. At last there were men in the next room, where Silver had lounged all those recent days.

Someone bawled out: “We got you! We know you're in the kitchen. We're goin' to blow you to pieces, Silver! We're goin' to smear you all over the place.”

Silver said nothing.

He could make out the rumbling voice of Delgas saying: “This is where the hound has been takin' it easy. This is where he's been sleepin' away his days. Oh, ain't he goin' to eat his heart — ain't he eatin' it now, to think what a fool we've made of him?”

One of the others laughed. Someone burst out in a tirade. Silver got up and went quietly to the door that opened on this room. He began to move away, silently, the chairs that were braced against it.

Then the girl reached for him and found him in the darkness. “Don't do it! Don't do it!” she said.

“What?” whispered Silver.

“You want to throw that door open and sweep them out of the house. Don't do it, Jim. Please don't go mad!”

He realized that he
was
mad, that an overmastering hunger to destroy them like reptiles had made a blackness of his brain. He put the chair soundlessly back in place and went back to lie on the floor at the door.

Some day, he knew, he would be led to throw his life away by the headlong sweeping of one of those fighting impulses of his that throttled his good sense and judgment. He grew afraid, as he lay there, not of all the danger that lay in the outer night but of himself. He began to forget the whole situation and wonder about himself; but all the while he was as alert as a wild cat hunting over strange ground.

From the horse shed came a crashing and snorting.

It raised him to his feet. The girl was beside him again, with her hand on his arm. He struck it away and strode for the door. She gripped him again.

“They're waiting for you to go out, when you hear Parade!” she warned him. “They're watching this door and the window, hoping that you'll come out. They're watching from each side, I know. They want to murder you, Jim!”

He thought of the soft gold of Parade and of the flexible steel that underlay the surface; he thought of the great wise brain of the stallion and the heart without fear. He began to tremble. The girl's hands kept pulsing against him, not strongly, but with a steady rhythm.

“No,” he whispered at last. “I won't go. I'm ashamed. I'm only a fool and a baby. And you see through me. But I won't go.”

He made himself get down on one knee, and then she went back to her place against the wall.

“She's the captain, the leader, the brain, and I'm only a pair of blind hands working by direction,” he told himself.

He began to see her with clearness. He saw her more clearly in the darkness than ever he had seen her before in the light of the day, for he could place his memory on every bit of her.

She wore rubber gloves to keep her hands from puffing and reddening in the dishwater, but nevertheless, potatoes and onions and the handling of meat had stained her skin. Her hands were small and well-made but they were not pretty. Hands of a woman ought to be smooth and brown; they don't need to be very little, but the skin should be perfectly kept, thought Silver. And her hands would never be right because all her life she would be working away at sewing or cooking or scrubbing floors. She got right down on her knees and went after a floor with might and main. He had seen her making the suds fly. She scrubbed a floor white, like the deck of a ship. And if she were not doing work like that for a husband, she would surely be doing it for hire.

Silver decided, suddenly, that it was the matter of her hands that kept her from being beautiful, in his eyes. Her face was well enough. And her eyes were a blue stain in it. When she looked at Silver, her eyes and her mouth were still with awe; when she looked at Farrel, a smile kept dawning and dying on her lips and eyes. She kept taking gentle possession of him with her glances.

It might be a woman something like that who would one day, for the first time, fling open the door to Silver's heart and walk in and take command. Men said that when the moment came, they were helpless. They resisted, they fought against the thing, they fled from it. But they always fled in a circle and came back to the starting point. He would be like all the rest — one day!

Out of the shed figures moved again. A door opened with a crash.

“Ride him, cowboy! Ride him!” yelled a chorus of voices.

He heard the brazen neigh of Parade. It made him think of days of long ago when he had followed the great horse across the endless desert. That neigh had been the challenge that rung in his ears in those times until by chance and fortune and kindness, more than strength, at last he made the great horse his own. But it was not possession. He belonged to Parade as much as Parade belonged to him.

Now he was fighting against the mastery of another man, out there in the darkness. Silver heard the thumping of the hoofs on the ground, then a form exploded upward, vaguely spread-eagled against the horizon stars.

“Get the rope! Hold him! That's it!” shouted voices. “Now, Rutherford, if you can ride anything that wears hair, you take your turn!”

They might wear down Parade among them, taking him turn after turn. A whistle trilled suddenly out of the mouth of Silver. It brought as an echo a wild tumult, an outcrying. A gun barked, and another weapon spat fire. Then a mighty form winged over the corral fence.

Silver stood up, and called. Right to the kitchen door raced Parade, skidded to a halt, then entered, crouched low, feeling his way over the sagging, creaking boards, with bended legs. Like a monstrous cat shuddering on unknown ground, surrounded by the fear of traps, the big horse entered to the voice of Silver. At another word he lay down. His great breathing filled the room. The shouting outside was a dim and vague and distant thing to Silver, as he ran his hand over the body of the stallion, feeling for blood.

He found nothing. Blood was not running onto the floor, either. The hand which gripped the heart of Silver gradually relaxed. He drew his hand slowly over the face of the horse, reading the features of it with well-remembering finger tips. Then he went back to lie down at guard in the doorway again.

Out by the shed, men were cursing, blaming one another. And Silver began to laugh, a mere soundless vibration in the darkness.

For toward the east he saw the gleam of an increasing pyramid of light on the horizon and he knew that before long the moon would be riding above the desert. The instant its bright rim was up, all of those men would be in peril around the ranch house, and they must know it by this time. A very little longer and they probably would withdraw.

The most alarming outburst of all came afterward. Perhaps it was the loss of the great horse that maddened the gang, but suddenly in the house broke out a great crashing and smashing as if men with axes were breaking all they could put their hands on. Voices came into the next room and bawled out curses. Other voices shouted in triumph as various bits of loot were found.

And then Rutherford was saying in his calm way: “You've won the second round, too, Silver. But the end of the fight hasn't come yet. Something tells me that I'm going to have the killing of you, Jim, and ride your horse afterward.”

Although he did not lift his voice, he seemed to be speaking right there in the kitchen beside Silver. It was an uncanny thing. It sent strange shudders of apprehension through the body of Silver.

After that, the gang withdrew. In the distance behind the corral there were noises of the snorting horses as they were saddled and bridled. A few loud whoops were raised by the chorus, and after that they heard the beat of the departing hoofs.

Silver went out first, made a tour around the house, and then through the darkness of all the rooms inside it. For it was not impossible that a man or two might have been left behind to take him by surprise after he had counted on the retreat of the entire body. However, he found nothing except the smashed furniture and the ruined rooms where the thugs of Rutherford and Delgas had wreaked their angry disappointment.

It was only after he had completed his tour that Silver came back into the kitchen, called Parade into the open with a word, and gave permission for the kindling of a light. He asked for bacon and corn bread and coffee. He gave one glance at the girl and her sweetheart, their faces still pale and set from the ordeal that had been passed. Then he said:

“I'm going outside to have another look around and try to think out the next step. Whatever it is, you'll probably have to ride with me and leave Esther behind. Say good-by before I get back. That is, if you still want to see this business through, Farrel.”

He went outside and watched the rising of the moon as it puffed out its swollen yellow cheeks and then, climbing higher in the sky, drew into a smaller, brighter sphere of silver. It was one of those nights when a man thinks that he can see not the flatness of the disk but the roundness of the orb. As Silver watched the progress of the moon, he saw it strike a cloud into transparent spray and emerge on the farther side, sweeping along as though a stronger wind were in that billowing, bright sail.

He could not help wondering what that moon would see of him before the sun came up to turn its brilliance into no more than a pale-azure cloud in the Western sky. Delgas, and the crowd of punchers who had all done time, and above all, the pale, thoughtful face of Rutherford — they would have to be encountered, perhaps, before this single night had ended.

He went back, finally, into the kitchen, and as he entered, he heard young Dan Farrel laughing with the girl. The smoke and steam of cookery made a bright mist in the room. He felt a tang of appetite greater than he had known for a week. The anxiety since the supper gong sounded had been like a day's labor to build hunger.

They sat together, the three of them, while the stallion wandered back and forth outside, now and then putting his head through the doorway to watch his master, recoiling again because of the offensive smell of cooked meat and steaming coffee.

“He'd rather have oats,” said the girl. “I'll get him an apple. Will he eat apples?”

Silver said vaguely: “I remember a time when he ate raw meat. Raw meat, wrapped up in fat, and stuffed down his throat. He ate a lot of it. He ate nothing else for four days — and he kept on going!”

“On a diet of meat?” cried Farrel, agape. “How did that happen? In a desert somewhere?”

“Pretty much in a desert. Away down south in Mexico, where the mountains are all scalped and where the sun burns the grass down to the roots Sometimes I found a cactus and pared the thorns off of it and shredded the fibers and gave some of that to Parade, too. It was filthy stuff. It was like offering him dry rope. But he'll eat anything in a pinch. He ran wild, you know, and wild horses know the point of eating or dying. Parade will always eat!”

“What was happening?” asked the girl. “Had you just got lost in the desert? How terrible!”

“Lost?” said Silver, more vaguely than before. “Well, that's one way of putting it. I had to be lost to the eyes of a lot of hombres who were riding after me.”

“After you? But they never caught up with you?”

Silver looked at her with a very faint and very grim smile.

“Yes,” he said. “Some of them caught up with me, too. But after a time that gang stopped following and turned back.”

“All that were left of 'em?” suggested Farrel eagerly.

“Well,” said Silver, as he finished eating and confined his attention to coffee, “there's still a job ahead. Farrel, you don't own a hair of a cow or an acre of land in the deal. Do you still want to ride with me?”

“I do,” said Farrel.

Silver looked at the girl.

“Do you think that he ought to?” asked Silver.

She kept looking at Silver with great eyes of fear while she reached out for Farrel and blindly found him. Then as her hand tightened on him, she said:

“Yes. I think he ought to go.”

“You've made up your mind?” asked Silver.

“I'd rather,” said she, and paused, but went on again: “I'd rather remember him dead in a way like that — than dodging.”

Silver said nothing. He began to frown into his coffee. It was almost unprecedented in his life. He had been with plenty of men who were willing to fight most desperately, but always because they had as great a goal as he, or a greater one. It was a novelty to him to find a fellow who was willing to throw himself away out of friendship, or gratitude for a past service.