The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI.
THE IMPLACABLE FRIEND.
Waring neither slept nor rested till he sighted a horseman silhouetted for a moment against the sunrise on the rounded crest of a distant hill.
It was two in the morning, and he knew that Ticely would travel all night and sleep in the daytime. He made camp in a sunny hollow where the feed was high, picketed his horse, and slept for four hours. Then he found and took the ridge which Ticely was following, and followed it all day. As night approached, he kept in the hollows, in the willows and low, scrubby timber, for he knew Ticely would look back from every high point on the undulating ridge to see if he were pursued, and to overtake him Bruce must travel during several hours of night when Ticely, too, would be traveling.
He caught up with him at ten o'clock the second morning. Hoof marks in a soft spot showed where his partner had turned down into a draw a few hours before. Waring tied his horse to a slender, upright rock on the other side of the slope, and very cautiously crawled down the draw till he came upon the camp in a thick clump of brush near the stream bed.
His boots off, but otherwise fully dressed, a light blanket partly covering him, Ticely lay sprawled beside the embers of a small fire, his head pillowed on his saddle. Waring crawled free of the brush, raised himself upon his knees, drew his gun from his hip, and with his left hand flicked a pebble at his partner's head. Ticely rubbed his ear and muttered. A second pebble brought him awake and alarmed. He flung out his arm toward his gun, which lay in its holster and belt, within his reach. But, as he turned, his eyes met those of Waring.
“Why, what in” His surprise at Waring's mere presence turned to stupefaction, as his gaze took in his young partner's posture—on his knees, his right elbow at his waist, his hand holding a pointed gun. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, making no effort to grasp his gun. Then a sense of absurdity gained on his bewilderment and he half smiled. But Waring did not smile.
“What's the big idea, Bruce?” asked Ticely, sitting up.
“Just this: I want you to come back with me, and I was afraid you wouldn't. So—I'm taking no chances. You'll have to excuse me for holdin' a gun on you.”
“Oh, don't mention it,” said Ticely grimly. Staring at him with narrow eyes, he slowly flushed with anger.
“You've been following me—and keeping out of sight?”
Waring nodded. “If you'd sighted me any time you looked back along the ridge, you'd have taken me for an enemy, and then—Lord knows when I'd ever have caught up with you!”
“I see,” said Ticely, an anxiously meditative eye on the gun, horizontal, motionless. He didn't like that gun. His instincts told him it was no joke, but his brain insisted that it must be, so he said: “So you're trying to show me how easy it is for friend Collins and his fellow maniacs to get me! You're wrong. Only you and I and Ak Tuk know anything about this moose trail along the ridges.”
“I know that,” replied Bruce. “I'm not trying to show you anything. I'm just telling you to come back with me.”
Ticely's eye roved over the whole kneeling figure of his partner. At war still with his surer instincts, his brain, abandoning perforce the joke theory, now questioned the lad's sanity.
“You say you want me to go back to Midas?”
“I sure do. It's the only way. You can't do anything else, Fred.” He paused appealingly.
“Go ahead,” said Ticely quietly, “I'm listening. Say what you've come to say.”
“I will!” said Bruce; and he found a tongue that neither he nor Ticely ever knew he possessed.
“You've stolen away like a thief in the night, Fred. You can't do that! They'll think you're guiltier than you are. Not only they, but your real friends, and your—well, the whole world.”
“Guiltier than I am!” Ticely pointed an accusing finger at him. “Go slow, now, young man.”
“Guiltier than you are,” repeated Bruce obstinately. “I know just how guilty that is, if you don't. It's all come to me, dogging you along the ridges, thinking it out, mile after mile. Things I heard in Seattle, in the office and out of it—things I didn't understand, then, came to me, and I put them alongside of this Midas business in Nome, and I see it was all the same. The same kind of thing. Only up here, in the wilds, with no law, and the men you deceived being altogether and ribbing each other up, makes the result worse, that's all.
“You know how to make people think things that you don't actually say. It's so easy for you—this selling that you explained to me everybody does—so easy that you go further and worse than the rest. I suppose you can't hardly help it. And being caught as you were—just having to get money—why you did the most careful and genius-like job you ever did in your life. I won't ask you any questions. You told me all you was willing to then, and I won't ask you any more—not with a gun in my hand. I won't force you except in one thing—to go back. That, I've got to do!”
“Got to do!' What on earth do you mean?”
“Got to!” repeated the lad miserably. “If you were a whelp, I'd have let you go—yes, and helped you all I could, I guess, for the things I owe you—you and your wife. But you're too much of a man to let go that way. Think! You're only part guilty; and they're some guilty, too. And you've got a right to a trial, if what you did is as bad as a crime on the books. Come back, own up to what you've done, give 'em back everything, and then, if you must fight for your rights like a man. I'm with you, and Manners is, and there's others, too, when it comes to a show-down—there's bound to be!”
Ticely understood perfectly. And in the core of his heart he was unangry. But angry remonstrance was necessary, and there was heat in his reply:
“Look here, Bruce. If you're serious about this—and I guess you are, or you wouldn't be holding a gun on me!—let me remind you of what I told them in my note, which I meant, absolutely. I'm going to Nome—and stay. I want men to deal with, sober men, not lunatics. I don't want to embroil you in any hopeless gun fight against heavy odds. I'm fighting for my rights in a sensible, practical way.”
“They'll say you tried to jump a boat and failed! They'll flash the news all over Alaska and the Outside. And it'll be worse than it really is—far worse. They'll have you plainly guilty of a dirty swindle—proved by your own flight at night over the hills. They won't admit that they were going to get you themselves. And your running away will damn you forever in the eyes of the world.”
“What the world says—what does that weigh against a matter of life and death!”
“But that's only part of it. How about yourself—in your own eyes? Running from men who are nearly as bad as yourself; putting your back to them; skulking away in the night. Mebbe I'm wrong about that, but the man you've been to me can't do it! I got no right to let you. And, damn me, I won't!”
Thoroughly alarmed now, Ticely, pondering this singular speech, became conscious that he was confronting a man with a great pride of physical courage. There was Waring's weakness! And the salesman in Ticely reached out for it. A sneer curled his lips.
“I get you now,” he said slowly, leaning forward and pressing his fingers in the dry moss. “You've got to bring me back! They caught you, and gave you your choice of being lynched yourself or swearing you'd bring me back!”
Waring's eyes looked horror.
“You don't think that, Fred. You're saying it on 'the chance that Id rather let you go than have you think that about me. You don't believe it. You can't!”
“Don't they know you're after me?”
“No one except Joan. And I let her think we went together.”
There was only one thing left to the baffled man—to force the hand of his implacable friend. Slowly he reached out his arm for the holster, but at the first sign of movement toward it, Waring drew a bead on Ticely's forearm.
“I'll bore it, Fred!”
“You'd shoot me? Me!”
“Yes.”
“A man that has been to you”
“Don't say it, Mr. Ticely; I know it better than you do. And it's just because of that”
“All right,” said Ticely quietly. “What do you want me to do?”
Bruce took a stout strip of seal hide from his pocket and tossed it over to the sitting man.
“Tie the free end around your left wrist and wind it up as far as the noose at the ether end—that's it. Now slip your right wrist in the noose and draw it tight. I'll make a more comfortable job of it, in a minute.”
First securing Ticely's gun belt, Waring bound his partner's hands more securely, and tied his feet together. Leaving him for a few minutes, he returned with his horse, brought up Ticely's from the grassy bank of the creek, and saddled both animals. He untied Ticely's feet, and held the horse while his partner mounted. The stake rope was still around the animal's neck. Holding it in his hand, Waring mounted his own horse, and led up the ravine to the ridge trail.