THE NARROW PASSAGE
Light came with unutterable mystery. Yet Haig lay for a moment
waiting, mistrustful of the peace that encompassed him. Then he
cautiously raised his head, and looked. Trixy stood near him, panting
and wild-eyed. The whole surface of the plateau was glistening wet; a
cold breeze poured over him, without violence; and the sky above him
was as innocent and bright as a baby's smile.
Where, then, was the storm? He moved his head painfully, and searched
the horizon; and yonder, around the icy parapets of Silver Tip, with
roll on roll of reverberations in its wake, the black storm was in
full flight. His eyes followed it with a curious and exaggerated
interest; for he had seen its birth, and tested its power, and it had
given him a new experience.
Presently he tried to rise, and found that his limbs were numb. His
right arm ached to the tips of his fingers. His head swam, and he had
difficulty in arranging his impressions in any sort of orderly
succession, especially those in which Sunnysides participated.
"I wonder how much of it really happened!" he mused.
Unexpectedly his eyes lighted on his revolver, where it lay among the
stones at his side. Ah! It had burned his fingers. He picked it up,
and examined it curiously. But none of the cartridges had been
exploded. The gun, then, had been knocked out of his hand before he
could lift and aim it; and the storm had taunted him with Sunnysides,
and cheated him. No matter! The game was not yet up.
He struggled to his feet, and stretched himself, and pounded his
chest, which ached from his heavy breathing. Then his eyes sought the
trail ahead, scanning the level spaces and the heaped-up masses of
granite; and an instant later a cry escaped his lips. For there,
perhaps half a mile away, and mounting rapidly a gray ridge of rock,
his body outlined against the blue sky, was Sunnysides. It had been no
vision, then, no figment of his tortured brain. But where had the
horse been all this time, to have been caught in the same storm with
his pursuer, despite his half-hour start, his greater speed, and the
night that came between them? True, there had been a storm in the
night; that might have delayed, but it should not have kept him. True,
too, he might have lost the trail, and wandered over the plateau; but
Haig could not have missed him, if he had been anywhere in sight
before the storm revealed him. No, nothing could explain it; and there
remained only one hypothesis, which was untenable, preposterous and
mad. And yet it fascinated and held him. He had once said jocularly
that Sunnysides was not a real horse at all; that he was a demon--a
spirit. Well, it was a real horse, right enough, that had crushed him,
and thrown him again, and broken Bill Craven's leg, and fled; and that
was a real horse yonder, outlined against the sky. If some devilish
instinct in the brute, or some agent of Destiny, or mere fling of
chance had held him on the plateau to tantalize and lead on his
pursuer--
"Dreaming again!" Haig muttered, with a wry smile, and yet with a
vague uneasiness that he could not put down.
But in another instant he had leaped to his horse, tested the cinches
with trembling fingers, climbed stiffly into the saddle, and dug the
spurs into Trixy's flanks. When he looked again toward the ridge, the
outlaw had disappeared; but there was no ignis-fatuus trick in that;
and the horse would be seen again when Haig too had topped the rise.
For the trail was now leading him in a relatively straight line toward
the exact spot where Sunnysides had vanished; and more assuring than
all else, a very material and comforting proof that this was a real
horse he followed, was the discovery he made halfway up the slope.
There, among the stones, lay the outlaw's saddle. Clearly the runaway
had only just now been able to shake it off, and its condition,
bruised and cut and dirty, showed that Sunnysides had been put to some
trouble to be rid of it, having doubtless rolled over and over on it
in his efforts to be free. And there, too, was a plausible explanation
of the fact that Sunnysides was not now far on the trail.
From the top of the ridge, Haig saw the outlaw picking his way through
a wilderness of rocks that had the grewsome aspect of a cemetery--the
graveyard of the gods. Following through this depressing scene, he
lost sight of Sunnysides, and on emerging upon another floor-like
expanse of solid stone he received a surprise that caused him to rein
up Trixy with a jerk. The quarry was nowhere in sight, though Haig's
position gave him a sweeping view of the flat ahead of him, even to
the edge of the summit, now scarcely three quarters of a mile away.
There was no possibility that the horse could have traversed that
distance in the time Haig was passing through the "cemetery;" neither
was there any place on that part of the plateau where it could be
concealed.
The trail itself solved the mystery. It did not lead straight on, as
Haig had imagined; and he experienced some difficulty in finding it on
the smooth floor, from which the elements had all but obliterated the
crosses made by the pioneers. Then his astonishment was great to find
that it turned at a sharp angle to the left, dropped sheer over the
edge of the flat rock, coiled down a slope littered with debris to
another field of loose stones, and in a quarter of a mile brought up
at the brink of a cliff. Sunnysides, then, had crossed the summit, and
was descending to whatever lay below.
In ten minutes Haig himself was at the margin of the chasm; for little
wider than a chasm was that deep and narrow gulch, far up the side of
Thunder Mountain, into which he now looked in wonderment and
perplexity. A thousand feet or more below him lay a tiny patch of
meadow of a brilliant green, with a thread of water sparkling through
it, and on all sides, excepting that nearest him, black forests
encompassed it, and mounted dense to the timber line save where, at
his right, the stream ran down through its gorge. There, evidently,
would go the trail also, dropping into the Black Lake country, of evil
reputation.
But where now was the trail? He dismounted, and leaned over the edge
of the precipice; and there he discovered that he had missed the
exact point of departure by some fifteen yards, and that at this
distance to his left there was a break in the sharp brink, where the
trail fell off precipitately to a heap of broken stone and sand. The
cliff had been shattered in some convulsion of nature, or loosened and
disintegrated by the elements, and enormous masses of it had fallen
into the gulch. These masses appeared to be in a state of instability,
and it was not clear to Haig, from where he lay, how a trail could
ever have been picked out among those jutting rocks and slides of
debris, or how, once found, it could have remained intact on that
shifting foundation. Was it possible that any living thing had ever
made its way down (much less _up_) that steep and treacherous rubble
heap?
He was studying it incredulously, when Sunnysides suddenly resolved
all doubts. From behind a projecting rock the horse came out on one of
the many rough ledges that had been formed by lateral cleavage of the
cliff in its fall. Hesitating a moment there, he plunged down a short
declivity, and landed sprawling on another shelf perhaps twenty feet
lower down, and somewhat to the right of the first, where he once more
vanished from Haig's sight.
"All right!" cried Haig. "If you can do that we can. Eh, Trixy?"
He mounted quickly, urged the reluctant mare to the break in the edge
of the cliff, and forced her over. For some thirty feet the trail went
down the face of the precipice, much like a fire escape on the wall of
a tenement house, barely wide enough to accommodate horse and
rider,--so narrow, indeed, that Haig's left leg was scraped and
bruised by hard contact with the stone. At the bottom of this incline,
his amazement was great at finding a solid platform of rock, on which,
he was able easily to turn and go down another incline underneath the
first. Plainly all this was not the result of accident; the hands of
men had been busy here; and picks and shovels had supplemented the
work of nature. But below the next platform there certainly had been a
secondary slide of rock, for the trail was nowhere discernible, though
it should evidently have slipped down, at a greater angle from the
cliff than before, to a third turning point on a shelf some forty feet
away to the left. Here the debris was loose and fine, and with a
little urging Trixy was induced to take the descent, carrying
quantities of sand and stones with her as she slid and sprawled safely
to the next goal.
Thus they went, sometimes finding the trail plain over solid rock and
hard-packed debris, sometimes slipping and scrambling among stones and
sand, but always drawing nearer and nearer in a zigzag course, now
easy and then difficult, to the green vale below. There were moments
when Trixy was on her knees, moments when she was on her haunches,
moments when she stood swaying above the pit, and moments when all
traces of the trail had vanished. But somewhere below was Sunnysides.
Far down the declivity, so near the valley that Haig was able to look
across into the tops of the tallest pines, they came to what appeared
to be the last of the rocky ledges. Having for some minutes seen
nothing of the outlaw, Haig supposed that the runaway had already
reached the meadow, and was by now on the trail through the forest.
But just as Trixy's shod hoofs struck the platform with a clatter,
Haig caught sight of Sunnysides far out on the narrow shelf. He was
trotting briskly along, for the shelf was smooth and level. But, on a
sudden he stopped, stood a moment with his head thrust forward and
down, and then turned cautiously around, his four feet bunched
together on the narrow footing.
"What's up now?" ejaculated Haig.
And then he saw it. Twice before he had noted where a similar error
might have been made, on other ledges farther up; and he himself had
avoided them only by carefully studying the aspect of the declivity
below him. Sunnysides had undoubtedly lost time through such mistakes;
and now he was trapped. At the point where he stood, the shelf ended
abruptly "in the air"; and between him and the exit at the other end
of the platform was Haig. The trail had come down to about the middle
of this platform, which was like an unrailed balcony, scarce three
feet in width, with a high wall of rock on one side, and on the other
a straight drop of twenty feet to a veritable chute of stones that
terminated in a widespread litter of debris on the meadow.
"Caught like a rat!" cried Haig. "I've got you now!"
But what could he do with him? His rope was useless on that meager
footing, where there was barely room for his horse to stand, much less
for Haig to swing a noose. And worse: if Sunnysides was trapped, so
was his enemy; for the horse was already, through fright or
belligerency, moving slowly toward Haig. In a flash it was clear to
Haig that the outlaw meant to have it out with him then and there; and
that there would be no time to turn Trixy, and find the outlet into
the valley.
"It's too bad, but--"
He drew his revolver, and waited. There was yet a chance, he thought,
or hoped, that the horse would halt, and postpone the issue. He did
not want to kill him; he had not come across Thunder Mountain to kill
him; he had come to take him back to Paradise Park. And so he
waited--fatally. The outlaw came slowly until half the space between
him and Haig had been covered. Then, at a distance of perhaps a
hundred feet, when no choice was left to him, Haig swung up his gun,
and fired. At that very instant, Sunnysides uttered a savage cry, a
shrill neigh ending in a scream; and, charged at the horse and rider
in his path.
Haig fired again, and missed; threw himself forward on Trixy's neck,
jerked the pony's head in toward the wall, and fired again; and
missed. He tried to shoot once more, into the very face of the
oncoming brute, but too late. There was a vision of flaming black eyes
and white teeth, in a yellow blur; and then a tremendous impact, a
crash. Trixy was flung back on her haunches, with one hind leg over
the edge of the shelf, Haig barely hanging in the saddle. The outlaw
leaped back, and lunged again; thrust himself between Trixy and the
wall; toppled pony and rider off into the void; and passed on, with a
shriek of triumphant rage.
Haig and Trixy turned in the air, struck the chute of stones and sand,
and rolled over and over as they went down in a flying slide of
debris. But Haig did not know that, for his head struck a stone at the
first contact with the chute.
* * * * *
Sentience returned to him through mists of pain. He lay in a twisted
heap on a patch of grass, surrounded by the scattered detritus of the
cliff. At first he could not remember, and could not see. His head
rang with pain, and his eyes were filled with dust, and with something
wet. He managed presently to lift an arm and wipe his eyes with his
hand; and saw dimly that the hand was covered with blood. His eyes
then filled again; and he swept his sleeves across them and his
forehead. That was better. Blinking, and wiping his face again and
again, he looked dully around him until memory came back, and brought
recognition of his plight.
He tried to sit up, but sank down quickly with a groan. One leg was
bent almost double under the other, and would not move. This fact
struck him at first as very queer--an inexplicable phenomenon. Then he
tried it again. His left leg moved at his will, and that encouraged
him. His right hip and part of the thigh too moved, but the leg below
lay loose and dead.
The blood was in his eyes again. It exasperated him; he could do
nothing unless he were able to see. He wiped his face again with his
sleeve, then put his hand to his head, and winced a little as the
fingers touched a gash just above the left temple, from which the
blood still flowed. By turning his head he found that the blood ran
down away from his eyes instead of into them. The new position also
gave him a view of several things that held his attention.
First there was the clutter of stones around him. Then his eyes swept
upward to the ledge whence he had come rolling down--how far? He
calculated the distance curiously. Eighty feet--a hundred, surely. How
did he come to be still alive? he wondered. And Trixy! Where was she.
Once more he tackled the problem of sitting up, and it became easier
now in his full understanding of his condition. By ignoring the dead
leg entirely, since it was of no further use to him, he contrived to
raise himself with his hands on the ground behind him for support.
Then with a jerk that brought a cry of pain, he sat erect, swaying but
resolute. At this instant he heard a soft whinny behind him. Twisting
himself around, he saw Trixy lying some twenty feet away, with her
forelegs doubled up beneath her, and her head lifted and pointed
toward him. He studied the little mare a moment.
"Trixy! Get up!" he commanded suspiciously.
She lifted her head higher, made a desperate effort to rise, sank
back, and whinnied piteously.
"So! Yours too, eh! Nice fix, Trixy!"
He surveyed the scene. They were in a bright green meadow about two
hundred yards in width and perhaps half a mile in length. Across the
meadow from where he lay the black forest mounted toward the sky. At
one end the vale narrowed into a mere ravine, which vanished upward in
deep woods; at the other it widened to the forest, and by the way the
pine-masses came down to this spot from both sides he knew that there
the trail ran down the mountain toward the Black Lake country. The
vale was very still under the bright blue sky; there was just a murmur
in the forest; and no sound of birds came to his ears.
"A beautiful site--for a graveyard!" he said aloud, and smiled.
The blood still trickled into his eyes, and annoyed him greatly. It
must be stopped, or he could do nothing that needed to be done. In an
inside pocket of his coat he found a handkerchief, which he bound
around his head, after he had wiped his face once more. The pain in
his head had subsided to a dull throbbing, which did not matter.
But--
"God! I'm thirsty!" he muttered.
He looked again across the meadow. The thread of water that he had
seen from the top of the cliff was a considerable brook that ran
silently through about the middle of the green. He measured the
distance,--fifty or sixty yards, maybe seventy, or more. He could do
it, by dragging himself along the ground, he thought. But was it worth
the effort, and the pain? It would hurt him like the devil--that
broken leg. Never did like pain; would probably howl; and that would
not be nice, even with no creature but Trixy to hear him. No; he would
stay where he was. Then suddenly he thought of Pete's whisky, and
thrust his hand into his pocket, only to encounter fragments of
glass.
"That's a lesson," he thought grimly. "Never carry whisky in glass
bottles."
And now his roving eyes lighted once more on Trixy. No good letting
her suffer. He would send her away first. On the thought, his hand
went back to the holster at his hip; and stayed there, while his
heart stood still, and a chill went over him, and thought ceased. The
holster was empty.
After a while he was able to think about it. One of two things would
happen to him. There were, very probably, mountain lions in those
forests. But they were not the worst thing he faced. To be eaten were
perhaps preferable to dying little by little, of hunger and thirst. He
had been near starvation, twice in his life; and once he had been
thirsty,--that is to say, _thirsty_,--and God save him from dying of
thirst! But wait! He hesitated; then held his breath; and in a total
suspension of thought slowly reached his hand down into a side pocket
of his trousers. And then he almost yelled aloud for joy. His
pocketknife was there!
Meanwhile--Trixy. It was cruel not to be able to end her suffering.
What had become of the gun? It was in his hand when he toppled over
the edge of the platform, and must have fallen with him. So it could
not be far away, though perhaps buried out of sight. He began
patiently to inspect every square foot of the ground around him, as
far as he could trust his eyes to see clearly, separating the space
into imaginary segments of a circle, and scrutinizing each of them
until he had set apart every tuft of grass from every other tuft, and
every stone from its neighbors. Minute after minute, with dogged
perseverance, he kept himself at this exhausting task until the sweat
was rolling down, his face, and his eyes burned deep in his head. Then
suddenly something leaped inside of him,--some nerve that was quicker
than thought in its response to vision.
"Ah!"
The gun lay against a stone, its muzzle upward, at a distance of about
forty feet, beyond and somewhat to the left of Trixy. It would take
some crawling; and that would hurt. But when he had fixed the gun's
position in his mind, so that he might not miss it, he set his teeth
together, and started.
No great distance, after all, is forty feet. That is to say, no great
distance after you've covered it. And the pain did not matter now. He
lay on the ground again, flattened out, panting and gazing up at the
blue sky. The sweat stood in big cold drops on his face; and he
trembled as if stricken with ague. He could not shoot in that
condition; he must rest, and wait. But the thirst was torture now.
After a time, he turned himself half around in order to face Trixy,
and rested his right elbow on the ground, with the gun up in the air.
"Good-by, Trixy!" he said softly.
But wait! How many shots left? He examined the revolver. Two! For an
instant he was stricken again with dread. Then his left hand felt for
the belt at his waist; and he laughed nervously. What a state he was
in! There were cartridges to burn!
The gun came slowly down to an aim, then waved in his hand as he
pulled the trigger.
"Hell!" he muttered.
He tried again, pulling himself together, and gritting his teeth. The
second report rang out, and echoed high among the rocks. The mare's
head fell, her body quivered, one hind foot kicked out; and she was
gone.
Oh, yes! He could hit good horses! But not Sunnysides.
He ejected the exploded cartridges, and filled the chambers with fresh
ones; then lay back and rested again, the gun still clutched in his
hand. And why did he wait? To get strength, for one thing. He wanted
to sit up to do it, since he could not stand. And then--there was
another trouble. Four times before he had tried to do it, and
something had happened,--something different and utterly unexpected
each time had checked him. It had not so much mattered then, because
he could afford to wait. But now--
He drew upon the last of his reserves of strength, and sat up--too
suddenly. An excruciating pain shot through his injured leg, and
radiated like flame through every nerve and tissue of his body. The
revolver, half lifted, fell from his fingers. Swaying, he groped for
it, clutched it again, and frantically raised it to his head. And when
he felt the hard muzzle just above his ear, he pulled the trigger. And
so the third report went ringing through the quiet valley, and Philip
Haig sank backward on the greensward, and lay still.