CHAPTER IX
The sun was canting down toward the dike of the mountains when Original Bill returned to consciousness. It was not a comfortable transition; the beat of a thousand Sioux war drums was pulsing through his head. His whole body seemed a thing apart, beyond his power to order. His opening eyes gazed upon a roughly beamed and strange roof which had a way of expanding and contracting in defiance of all experience governing the behavior of roofs.
When he essayed to sit up there was a metallic clatter under him; a pair of handcuffs had slipped from his chest, where they lay, to the floor. The bright metal served to bridge the gulf of darkness whence the man was emerging. He recalled the fight,—two against one; his desperate twistings and turnings with a human shield held before him to receive the expected bullet. Original's hand stole to the holster over his heart; a shock of surprise came to him when he found his .45 reposing snugly under its spring.
The weapon had been in his pocket when he came to grips with Zang Whistler. The outlaw's act of restoring the gun to its place rather than confiscating it as a prize of war was a graceful courtesy not lost on Original. After all, had not he and Zang Whistler ridden trail together through hot sun and thunderstorm back in the old days before Zang took to carrying a running iron, before he was blackballed as a brand smoker? This incident of the gun remaining inviolate was but a touch of that chivalry of the cattle clan which made Zang Whistler and Original Bill Blunt kin despite the private warfare between them.
As for the girl Hilma—that blond-haired mountain cat who had pounded him into insensibility when she found shooting impossible—the range inspector's brain was still too clouded to grapple with this complexity in the situation.
He helped himself to his feet by a grip on the table edge, staggered to the water pail and plunged his burning head into its cold depths. Strength came rushing back to him with the dissolving of the last cobwebs of unconsciousness. He heard a yearning whinny and went to the opened door. Tige, his loyal little horse, companion of a thousand days and nights in the vastness of the Big Country, came trotting up, bridle dragging, to nuzzle under his master's arm and express through inarticulate burblings and squeakings all the horsy fear phantoms he had undergone.
Here again was a white man's restraint on the part of Zang Whistler, Original reflected. The outlaw might have taken Tige as booty of successful combat and left his owner here afoot in the wilderness.
It took but a cursory survey of the interior of the cabin to tell the story of what had followed the conclusion of the fight. Here the basin filled with reddened water and with scraps of rags lying near; there the blue zinc trunk, cover thrown back and contents tumbled.
So the girl had ridden off with Zang? Well
As he cantered through the purpling twilight on the long road back to Two Moons Original let his thoughts idly dally round a head crowned with dandelion gold and eyes the color of deep mountain ice in shadows. Here, he reflected, was a girl the like of whom his limited experience with women never had shown him; here, too, an enemy such as he had never known.
The women of the Big Country—and they were not many—pretty generally fell into two classes: the colorless, work-worn women of the homesteads who came to town semi-annually, perched on the hard seats of farm wagons and whose listless eyes seemed never to see over the edge of a precious dollar; and those other women of the towns who wore red slippers in the daytime and played the piano o' nights. Neither class ever had touched Original even remotely.
But this Hilma Ring—this woman of surpassing beauty and the temper of a female lynx—what was there about her that sent a call deep into the primitive soul of a man? Or, as Original phrased it, "put the brand on a man."
Twice he had encountered her. On the first occasion smoldering hostility on her part had flared into quick anger; she had deliberately shot at him. Then this second vivid experience when he had found her at the battle pitch of a she-grizzly with cubs, furiously lashing out with Zang's gun, ready to kill, insensate with the lust to kill. He, Original, had been forced to manhandle her in that battle back in the cabin to save his own life, yet in the height of conflict he had felt that strange call coming from the girl, that lure of the unconquered female.
Though Original was as innocent of feminine psychology as his horse Tige, somehow he sensed through instinct rather than deduced from reason that for the man who could conquer this tiger woman—break her as an outlawed horse is broken—triumph would be sweetened by a tremendous rushing from a wellspring of love.
Was Zang Whistler that woman breaker? The hazard that he might be sent a quick stab of jealousy to the range rider's heart. Why, he did not know.
"He sure is plumb welcome to her, Tige, if he can get her," Original tried to reassure himself in communion with the only confidant he had ever admitted to his heart's secrets. "But that kiss I busted into was n't comin' any too easy. She 'd creased that Zang fella from forelock to chin strap, an' it 's a fair bet she 'd bit him if I had n't taken a hand into the game."
So Original Bill jogged on through the velvety dark toward Two Moons, and just beyond his saddle horn floated a dim vision of a girl with an aureole of yellow gold framing unconquered eyes that blazed hate.
Hours before the first light of the town glimmered over the top of the last rolling divide, resolution had taken firm root in the breast of the range inspector. He was going to meet up with this fighting daughter of the Vikings once more. If she had retreated to the Spout with Zang Whistler, all right; into the Spout he would ride, come one come forty, and he would bring out with him Hilma Ring and Whistler. The girl and her lover had won the first pot, Original grimly reflected, but there would still be another deal. It was not easy for one of Original's caliber to admit defeat; the very quick of his soul was galled by the outlaw's escape from a trap the range inspector had patiently spread for the head of the Teapot Spout gang of herd raiders. But deeper still rankled the thought that it had been a woman's hand that foiled the springing of this trap, that a woman had stretched him insensible when for long years no hand of man had been quick or cunning enough to achieve that end.
"Tige, little hoss, you hear me make my brag. Day 's coming when you 'll carry double, an' that young she-wolf 'll be right here 'longside my saddle horn, spirit broke an' tame as a pet squirrel. Either that, Tige hoss, or you 'll have another rider."
Sioux Pass is the single gateway through the Broken Horns from the range country of the east into the high-basin country lying in the lap of three mountain ranges and caught up on its westernmost slopes to the very ridge-pole of the continent. At the time this story tells itself the Basin had not yet come under even the shadowy reign of law that boasted dominion over the Big Country to the east of the Broken Horns; it was a No Man's Land where the trapper and the elk killer occasionally crossed the trail of a prospector; no train whistle broke the stillness of the high places. Into this wilderness the old outlaw trail from Montana to Mexico loses itself before venturing out to skirt Utah's Bed Desert and follow the Colorado River to Nogales and the Line. Over this trail once rode Harvey and Loney Logan, the slayers of Old Man Landusky; its dim traceries through the aisles of the forest knew the lurking figure of Sluefoot Thompson, outlaw and train robber, before he lost his head down near Vernal, Utah. A paradise of hunted men was the Basin; its outpost and strongest citadel was Teapot Spout, just east of where Sioux Pass gives on to the rolling billows of the Big Country.
The Pass trail is a water-hewn alley gouged through the reluctant granite. For miles its tortuous way curves and twists about the shoulders of the mountains, dipping into box cañons where purple shadows clot even at the sun's meridian, rising steeply to skirt the precarious brinks of gorges which roar with the diapason of hidden water. Then the trail launches its culminating surprise. Suddenly the heavy curtains of the hills are parted, and the wayfarer stands upon the very proscenium of the Big Country displayed in its entirety.
A world of crystal light stretching out and out to unmeasured distances; light that is flawless and sparkling as a quartz spear; light which seems to carry a taste like water from a mountain spring. As Noah looked upon a clean, washed world so the rider on the high bib of the Pass's exit sees a universe untarnished, virginal in its fleckless beauty. Clean as the sea—like a sea caught and frozen in agitation—in this billowy infinity of brown and tawny and cinnabar red. Away and away, more than a hundred miles as man measures them, lie the purple headlands of the Black Hills. In nearer distance, yet two days' riding, the broken thumbs of Pumpkin Buttes push up from a saline desert; the telescopic atmosphere brings their serrated flanks into high relief; you see the runnels of winter's torrents traced in longitudes from blunt crown to spreading base of each butte. For the rest, north and south and east, just wave upon wave of grassed land, burned the color of a panther's coat by summer sun. Where the waves break into higher crests stretch lines of mesas, wind sculptured into fantastic cathedral columns. Meandering stream courses are threads of burnished silver wire, intermeshed, looped one within the other to make a broader strand, which is Powder River.
A clean world, a sweet world that Big Country! But on this day in June—the day when Zang Whistler and Hilma Ring rode together toward the Teapot Spout—somewhere in those interminable folds of warm brown earth man was soiling the wilderness. Near two spots of smoldering embers the earth was drinking up the blood of slaughtered sheep. Here and there on the illimitable sweep other blood spots marked the slaying of men from ambush. Because one clan of men, the pioneers in this clean land, who had come with their herds of longhorns from the South to fatten them on the free bounty of Nature and glean an easy increment of wealth, now found their Eden disputed by a second wave of adventurers, rank growths of hate were springing from the soil of the Big Country. Because the squatter and homesteader strung his webs of barbed wire—killer of man and beast in the night stampede—round precious water holes and along fat river bottoms, and because the possessors of sheep bands demanded their share of the range bounties, now the day of violence, of reprisals and resistance was come to blacken what the world's first day had left clean and unsullied.
The sun was westering when Uncle Alf, the evangelist, rode out from the dim sack of the Pass and drew rein on this shelf above the Big Country. The self-appointed scourge of God had been coursing the wilderness of the Basin, halting wherever a handful of men had gathered together in a settlement to preach his doctrine of twelfth-hour repentance on the imminence of a judgment day of bitter penalties. Also he had sounded his new bugle note of crusade against the Philistines of the cattle clan. He had ranged the forested tangle of the Basin, summoning its silent men, its hunted men, to cross the mountains with him and join a new Joshua's host which he would raise against the oppressors of the weak. On both counts his mission had failed to bear fruit. Dwellers in the Basin knew no distinction between cattlemen and sheepmen, hated them both because their coming inevitably spelt the peopling of the wilderness and the destruction of a solitude which asked no questions. Uncle Alf boiled righteous wrath over the utter baseness of those who were deaf to his exhortings.
"Let fire come down from heaven and utterly destroy 'em," was the prophet's parting valedictory for the recalcitrants who now lay shut behind him by the gate of the mountains. Then he let his rapt eye sweep the noble expanse of the Big Country like an unfolded scroll at his feet. The spirit of the wild seer leaped in tune with the sublimity there made manifest. He saw in the leagues of tumbling divides stretching to purpling distances creation of Genesis fresh from the Hand that labored. All the heaving world below him and the pure depths of the sky rimmed over it seemed vibrant with the vitality of God. Only man was vile.
Uncle Alf turned his horse to the downward trail. From the depths of his chest came rumbling a song. Head back, eyes staring raptly at the blazing ball of the sun, the evangelist sent a great voice booming out into the silence:
That heavenly music! what is it I hear!
The notes of the harpers ring sweet on my ear.
And see, soft unfolding, them portals of gold;
The King all arrayed in his beauty behold!
Oh, give me—oh, give me the wings of a dove!
Let me hasten my flight to them mansions above.
As Uncle Alf took the dip down to the lower plain he saw far off a moving spot against the brown. It was, perhaps, twenty miles away. It was moving toward him on the trail to Sioux Pass. The wilderness preacher urged his mount into a canter, for he was expecting to spend the night at a ranch on the upper reaches of Teapot, and the sun already was riding the rim of the Broken Horns behind him.
Down dropped the sun and the quick dark of the Big Country came marching in a wide zone of shadow from the feet of the mountains. Uncle Alf rode on steadily. When his mind was not conning bits of Scripture and automatically pigeonholing them against the exigencies of one of the prophet's extempore sermons, it harked back to idle speculation as to the moving dot seen on the plain; why had not the horseman riding the Sioux Pass trail been met? What could have caused his diversion from the trail here in this country of no habitations?
Much solitude in the Big Country breeds clairvoyance. From the untenanted air, from the whispers of the silver birches in the stream beds come voices of the weird for the inner ear of the man alone. With Uncle Alf, who lived in constant communion with saints and prophets of an ancient day and whose mind was attuned to those rarefied wave emanations which bring a howl from the wolf and a snort of terror from the horse when man senses nothing untoward, there was a strong clairvoyant sense he named a calling. Now, riding alone and in the waxing dark, the man received a calling, warning him that the horseman he had seen from afar and expected to meet was a son of Belial.
As surely as if human lips had uttered the words Uncle Alf plucked from the night the message: "It is the Killer you shall meet."
Every hair on his old head pricked up with rage and that danger thrill still surviving from the days of the tree folk. Even as his voice growled and muttered curses in his beard his gangling frame stiffened to the animal reflex of the battle call. His eyes sharpened themselves for peering through the clotted shadows.
"Behold, Boaz winnoweth barley to-night," he muttered, "and in the night season shall the chaff be burned entirely."
Three short, sharp barks from a coyote somewhere ahead in the dark caused Uncle Alf suddenly to rein in his horse. His ears strained themselves for another noise and at last they detected the shuff-shuff of horse's hoofs at an easy trot. They were still a distance off.
Uncle Alf whirled his horse about and made at a walk for the brink of a coulee into which the trail dipped a hundred yards back. Over the edge of this slash across the countryside the trail dropped precipitously twenty feet or more to the dry creek bed, then rose to take the farther wall at a steep angle. At the bottom of this U-drop of the trail a tuft of cottonwoods ripped from its moorings somewhere upstream by a spring flood had lodged beside the trail; the trees were eking out a starved life in half leaf. Behind the cottonwood clump Uncle Alf drove his horse and waited, one hand pinching hard on the beast's nostrils to shut off a possible neigh.
The range preacher had no weapon.
Perhaps ten minutes of waiting, then a black bulk showed against the lesser dark at the edge of the coulee. A rattle of stones as the night rider's mount bunched his hoofs for the slide down to the bottom of the coulee. Just as the horse struck bottom Uncle Alf dug his heels into his pony's flanks and sent him crashing straight for horse and rider.
"Murderer!" screamed Uncle Alf. The other fumbled with a saddle holster, but before he could draw his rifle a snakelike arm whipped about his throat just as his horse staggered under the impact of collision. He was dragged from his saddle and held dangling, feet above the ground, by the garroting arm.
The one attacked had blindly held to his bridle rein when he was swept off the horse. Now his beast, charging and plunging in a folly of terror, swung his flank viciously against the man's middle, catching his body and driving it against Uncle Alf's saddle girth. A strangled scream of pain and the struggling figure suddenly relaxed. That instant, too, Uncle Alf's saddle girth parted; the top-heavy saddle toppled, and the circuit rider went down to the stream bed with his prisoner. Both horses dashed down the coulee; the noise of their hoofs against the stones died to nothingness.
The instant he struck ground Uncle Alf rolled on top of the man he had grappled, ready to pin him down with knees and body while his hands went to the throat. But there was not a flicker of movement in the form beneath him.
Wary against a possible trick, Uncle Alf dared let one hand grope for his saddle and draw it close. The fumbling hand found and untied the picket rope from its place under the horn. Then very carefully Uncle Alf bound his man, giving him the hogtie,—bound feet canted over the back and noosed to the neck. When he had finished he lighted a match, turned his trussed prisoner over and held the match close to a coarse face. Uncle Alf recognized the man whom Hilma Ring had named as the slayer of her father—the Killer.
"Look down, dear God. I, Alpheus, even I have brung a man of blood to thy judgment."