The bullets of the posse had neither torn a tendon nor broken a bone.
Striking at close range and driven by highpower rifles, the slugs had
whipped cleanly through the flesh of Andrew Lanning, and the flesh
closed again, almost as swiftly as ice freezes firm behind the wire that
cuts it. In a very few days he could sit up, and finally came down the
ladder with Pop beneath him and Jud steadying his shoulders from above.
That was a gala day in the house. Indeed, they had lived well ever since
the coming of Andrew, for he had insisted that he bear the household
expense while he remained there, since they would not allow him
to depart.
"And I'll let you pay for things, Andrew," Pop had said, "if you won't
say nothing about it, ever, to Jud. He's a proud kid, is Jud, and he'd
bust his heart if he thought I was lettin' you spend a cent here."
But this day they had a fine steak, brought out from Tomo by Pop the
evening before, and they had beans with plenty of pork and molasses in
them, cream biscuits, which Pop could make delicious beyond belief, to
say nothing of canned tomatoes with bits of dried bread in them, and
coffee as black as night. Such was the celebration when Andrew came down
to join his hosts, and so high did all spirits rise that even Jud, the
resolute and the alert, forgot his watch. Every day from dawn to dark he
was up to the door or to the rear window, keeping the landscape under a
sweeping observance every few moments, lest some chance traveler--all
search for Andrew Lanning had, of course, ceased with the moment of his
disappearance--should happen by and see the stranger in the household
of Pop. But during these festivities all else was forgotten, and in the
midst of things a decided, rapid knock was heard at the door.
Speech was cut off at the root by that sound. For whoever the stranger
might be, he must certainly have heard three voices raised in that room.
It was Andrew who spoke. And he spoke in only a whisper. "Whoever it may
be, let him in," said Andrew, "and, if there's any danger about him, he
won't leave till I'm able to leave. Open the door, Jud."
And Jud, with a stricken look, crossed the floor with trailing feet. The
knock was repeated; it had a metallic clang, as though the man outside
were rapping with the butt of a gun in his impatience, and Andrew,
setting his teeth, laid his hand on the handle of his revolver. Here Jud
cast open the door, and, standing close to it with her forefeet on the
top step, was the bay mare. She instantly thrust in her head and snorted
in the direction of the stranger.
"Thank heaven!" said Andrew. "I thought it was the guns again!" And Jud,
shouting with delight and relief, threw his arms around the neck of the
horse. "It's Sally!" he said. "Sally, you rascal!"
"That good-for-nothing hoss Sally," complained the old man. "Shoo her
away, Jud."
But Andrew protested at that, and Jud cast him a glance of gratitude.
Andrew himself got up from the table and went across the room with half
of an apple in his hand. He sliced it into bits, and she took them
daintily from between his fingers. And when Jud reluctantly ordered her
away she did not blunder down the steps, but threw her weight back on
her haunches and swerved lightly away. It fascinated Andrew; he had
never seen so much of feline control in the muscles of a horse. When he
turned back to the table he announced: "Pop, I've got to ride that
horse. I've got to have her. How does she sell?"
"She ain't mine," said Pop. "You better ask Jud."
Jud was at once white and red. He looked at his hero, and then he looked
into his mind and saw the picture of Sally. A way out occurred to him.
"You can have her when you can ride her," he said. "She ain't much use
except to look at. But if you can saddle her and ride her before you
leave--well, you can leave on her, Andy."
It was the beginning of busy days for Andrew. The cold weather was
coming on rapidly. Now the higher mountains above them were swiftly
whitening, while the line of the snow was creeping nearer and nearer.
The sight of it alarmed Andrew, and, with the thought of being
snow-bound in these hills, his blood turned cold. What he yearned for
were the open spaces of the mountain desert, where he could see the
enemy approach. But every day in the cabin the terror grew that someone
would pass, some one, unnoticed, would observe the stranger. The whisper
would reach Tomo--the posse would come again, and the second time the
trap was sure to work. He must get away, but no ordinary horse would do
for him. If he had had a fine animal under him Bill Dozier would never
have run him down, and he would still be within the border of the law. A
fine horse--such a horse as Sally, say!
If he had been strong he would have attempted to break her at once, but
he was not strong. He could barely support his own weight during the
first couple of days after he left the bunk, and he had to use his mind.
He began, then, at the point where Jud had left off.
Jud could ride Sally with a scrap of cloth beneath him; Andrew started
to increase the size of that cloth. To keep it in place he made a long
strip of sacking to serve as a cinch, and before the first day was gone
she was thoroughly used to it. With this great step accomplished, Andrew
increased the burden each time he changed the pad. He got a big
tarpaulin and folded it many times; the third day she was accepting it
calmly and had ceased to turn her head and nose it. Then he carried up a
small sack of flour and put that in place upon the tarpaulin. She winced
under the dead-weight burden; there followed a full half hour of frantic
bucking which would have pitched the best rider in the world out of a
saddle, but the sack of flour was tied on, and Sally could not dislodge
it. When she was tired of bucking she stood still, and then discovered
that the sack of flour was not only harmless but that it was good to
eat. Andrew was barely in time to save the contents of the sack from
her teeth.
It was another long step forward in the education of Sally. Next he
fashioned clumsy imitations of stirrups, and there was a long fight
between Sally and stirrups, but the stirrups, being inanimate, won, and
Sally submitted to the bouncing wooden things at her sides. And still,
day after day, Andrew built his imitation saddle closer and closer to
the real thing, until he had taken a real pair of cinches off one of
Pop's saddles and had taught her to stand the pressure without
flinching.
There was another great return from Andrew's long and steady intimacy
with the mare. She came to accept him absolutely. She knew his voice;
she would come to his whistle; and finally, when every vestige of
unsoundness had left his wounds, he climbed into that improvised saddle
and put his feet in the stirrups. Sally winced down in her catlike way
and shuddered, but he began to talk to her, and the familiar voice
decided Sally. She merely turned her head and rubbed his knee with her
nose. The battle was over and won. Ten minutes later Andrew had cinched
a real saddle in place, and she bore the weight of the leather without a
stir. The memory of that first saddle and the biting of the bur beneath
it had been gradually wiped from her mind, and the new saddle was
connected indisolubly with the voice and the hand of the man. At the end
of that day's work Andrew carried the saddle back into the house with a
happy heart.
And the next day he took his first real ride on the back of the mare. He
noted how easily she answered the play of his wrist, how little her head
moved in and out, so that he seldom had to sift the reins through his
fingers to keep in touch with the bit. He could start her from a stand
into a full gallop with a touch of his knees, and he could bring her to
a sliding halt with the least pressure on the reins. He could tell,
indeed, that she was one of those rare possessions, a horse with a
wise mouth.
And yet he had small occasion to keep up on the bit as he rode her. She
was no colt which hardly knew its own paces. She was a stanch
five-year-old, and she had roamed the mountains about Pop's place at
will. She went like a wild thing over the broken going. That catlike
agility with which she wound among the rocks, hardly impaired her speed
as she swerved. Andrew found her a book whose pages he could turn
forever and always find something new.
He forgot where he was going. He only knew that the wind was clipping
his face and that Sally was eating up the ground, and he came to himself
with a start, after a moment, realizing that his dream had carried him
perilously out of the mouth of the ravine. He had even allowed the mare
to reach a bit of winding road, rough indeed, but cut by many wheels and
making a white streak across the country. Andrew drew in his breath
anxiously and turned her back for the canyon.