THE BATTLE
Too late to interfere in the struggle about to be enacted, the girl
stood rigidly beside a great red pine tree, fixing her gaze upon Van,
on whose heels, as he walked, jingled a glinting pair of spurs.
From the small corral he was leading forth as handsome an animal as
Beth had ever seen, already saddled, bridled--and blindfolded. The
horse was a chestnut, magnificently sculptured and muscled. He was of
medium size, and as trim and hard as a nail. His coat fairly glistened
in the sun.
Despite his beauty there was something about him that betokened menace.
It was not altogether that the men all stood away--all save Van--nor
yet that the need for a blindfold argued danger in his composition.
There was something acutely disquieting in the backward folding of his
ears, the quiver of his sinews, the reluctant manner of his stepping.
Beth did not and could not know that an "outlaw" is a horse so utterly
abandoned to ways of broncho crime and equine deviltry that no man is
able to break him--that having conquered man after man, perhaps even
with fatal results to his riders, he has become absolutely depraved and
impossible of submission. She only knew that her heart was beating
rapidly, painfully, that her breath came in gasps, that her whole
nervous system was involved in some manner of anguish. She saw the
Chinese cook run past to witness the game, but all her faculties were
focused on the man and horse--both sinister, tense, and grim.
Van had not turned in Beth's direction. He was wholly unaware of her
presence. He halted when the horse was well out towards the center of
the open, and the outlaw braced awkwardly, as if to receive an attack.
With the bridle reins held in his hand at the pommel of the saddle, Van
stood for a moment by the chestnut's side, then, with incredible
celerity of movement, suddenly placed his foot in the stirrup and was
up and well seated before the blinded pony could have moved.
Nothing happened. No one made a sound. No one, apparently, save Beth,
had expected anything to happen. She felt a rush of relief--that came
prematurely.
Van now leaned forward, as the horse remained stiffly braced, and
slipping the blindfold from the pony's eyes, sat back in the saddle
alertly.
Even then the chestnut did not move. He had gone through this ordeal
many times before. He had often been mounted--but not for long at a
time. He had even been exhausted by a stubborn "broncho buster"--some
hardy human burr who could ride a crazy comet--but always he had won in
the end. In a word he had earned his sobriquet, which in broncho-land
is never lightly bestowed.
Van was not in the least deceived. However, he was eager for the
conflict to begin. He had no time to waste. He snatched off his hat,
let out a wild, shrill yell, dug with his spurs and struck the animal a
resounding slap on the flank, that, like a fulminate, suddenly
detonated the pent-up explosives in the beast.
He "lit into" bucking of astounding violence with the quickness of
dynamite.
It was terrific. For a moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie
of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed with
eccentric motion.
The horse shot up in the air like a loose, distorted piece of statuary,
blown from its pedestal by some gigantic disturbance. He appeared to
buckle in his mid-air leap like a bended thing of metal, then dropped
to the earth, stiff-legged as an iron image, to bound up again with mad
and furious gyrations that seemed to the girl to twist both horse and
rider into one live mass of incongruity,
He struck like a ruin, falling from the sky, went up again with
demon-like activity, once more descended--once more hurtled wildly
aloft--and repeated this maneuver with a swiftness utterly bewildering.
Had some diabolical wind, together with a huge, volcanic force, taken
insane possession of the animal, to fire him skyward, whirl him about,
thrash him down viciously and fling him up again, time after time, he
could not have churned with greater violence.
He never came down in the same place twice, but he always came down
stiff-legged. The jolt was sickening. All about, in a narrow,
earth-cut circle he bucked, beginning to grunt and warm to his work and
hence to increase the deviltry and malice of his actions.
Van had yelled but that once. He saw nothing, knew nothing, save a
dizzy world, abruptly gone crazy about him.
To Beth it seemed as if the horror would never have an end. One
glimpse she had of Van's white face, but nothing could it tell of his
strength or the lack thereof. She felt she must look and look till he
was killed. There could be no other issue, she was sure. And for
herself there could be no escape from the awful fascination of the
merciless brute, inflicting this torture on the man.
It did end, however, rather unexpectedly--that particular phase of the
conflict. The horse grew weary of the effort, made in vain, to
dislodge the stubborn torment on his back. He changed the program with
the deadliest of all a broncho's tricks.
Pausing for the briefest part of a second, while Van must certainly
have been reeling with hideous motion and jolt, the chestnut quickly
reared on high, to drop himself clean over backwards. It was thus that
once he had crushed the life from a rider.
"Oh!" screamed Both, and she sank beside the tree.
The men all yelled. They were furious and afraid.
With hoofs wildly flaying the air, while he loomed tall and unreal in
such an attitude, the broncho hung for a moment in mid-poise, then
dropped over sheer--as if to be shattered into fragments.
But a mass of the bronze-like group was detached, and fell to one side,
on its thigh. It was Van. He had seen what was coming in time.
Instantly up, as the brute rolled quickly to arise, he leaped in the
saddle, the horn of which had snapped, and he and the chestnut came
erect together, as if miraculously the equestrian group had been
restored.
"Yi! Yi!" he yelled, like the madman he was--mad with the heat of the
fight--and he dug in his spurs with vicious might.
Back to it wildly, with fury increased, the broncho leaped responsively.
Here, there, all the field over, the demon thrashed, catapulting
incredibly. He tried new tricks, invented new volcanics of motion,
developed new whirlwinds of violence.
Once more, then, as he had on the first occasion, the beast reared up
and fell backward to the earth. Once more Van dropped away from his
bulk and caught him before he could rise. This time, however, he did
not immediately mount--and the men went running to his side.
"Fer God's sake, boy, let me kill the brute!" cried Gettysburg taking
up a club.
"I'll shoot him! I'll shoot him! I'll shoot him!" said Napoleon
wildly, but without any weapon in his hands.
Beth beheld and heard it all. She was once more standing rigidly by
her tree, unable to move or speak. She wished to run to Van as the men
had run, but not to slay the broncho--only to beg the horseman not to
mount again.
She saw him push the men away and stand like the broncho's guard. His
face was streaked with blood--his blood--jolted alike from his mouth
and nose by the shocks to which he had been subjected.
"Let the horse alone!" he commanded roughly. "Good stuff in this
broncho--somewhere. Get me a bottle of water, right away--a big
one--get it full."
His partners started at once to raise objections. The Indian stood by
stolidly looking on.
"You can't go no further. Van, you can't----" started Gettysburg.
"Sominagot! Una ma, hong oy! Una ca see fut!" said the Chinese-cook,
swearing vehemently in the language likeliest to count, and he ran at
once towards the kitchen.
Van was replacing the blindfold on the broncho's eyes. The animal was
panting, sweating, quivering in every muscle. His ears went backward
and forward rapidly. The blindfold shut out a wild, unreasoning
challenge and defiance that burned like a torch in his eyes.
Algy came running with a big bottle, filled and corked.
"Fer God's sake, leave me kill him!" Gettysburg was repeating
automatically. "Van, if you ain't got no respect fer yourself, ain't
you got none left fer us old doggone cusses?"
"Give me the bottle, Algy," Van replied. "You're the only game sport
on the ranch."
Still he did not discover Beth. His attentions were engrossed by the
horse. He was dizzy, dazed, but a dogged master still of his forces.
Up he mounted to the saddle again, the bottle held firmly in his grasp.
"Slip off the blinder," he said to his friends, and Algy it was who
obeyed.
"Damn you, now you buck!" cried Van wildly, and his heels ignited the
volcano.
For five solid minutes the broncho redoubled his scheme of demoniac
fury. Then he poised, let out a shrill scream of challenge, and
abruptly raised to repeat the backward fall.
Up, up he went, an ungainly sight, and then--the heavens split in twain.
He was only well lifted from the earth when, with a thunderous,
terrible blow, Van crashed the bottle downward, fairly between his
ears, and burst it on his skull.
The weapon was shattered with a frightening thud. Red pieces of glass
and streaming water poured in a cataract down across the broncho's eyes
as if very doom itself had suddenly cracked. A cataclysm could not
have been more horrible. An indescribable fright and awe overwhelmed
the brutish mind as with a cloud of lead.
Down swiftly he dropped to his proper position, perhaps with a fear
that his crown was gaping open from impact with the sky. He was
stunned by the blow upon his brain, and weakened in every fiber. He
started to run, in terror of the thing, and the being still solid in
the saddle. Wildly he went around the cove, in the panic of utter
defeat.
The men began to cheer, their voices choked and hoarse. Van rode now
as fate might ride the very devil. He spurred the horse to furious,
exhausting speed, guiding him wildly around the mountain theater.
Again and again they circled the grassy arena, till foam and lather
whitened the broncho's flank, chest, and mouth, and his nostril burned
red as living flame.
When at last the animal, weary and undone, would have sobered down to a
trot or walk, Van forced him anew to crazy speed. At least five miles
he drove him thus, till the broncho's sides, like the rider's face,
were red with blood mingled with sweat.
Beth, at the climax, had gone down suddenly, leaning against the tree.
She had not fainted, but was far too weak to stand. Her eyes only
moved. She watched the two, that seemed welded into one, go racing
madly against fatigue.
At last she beheld the look of the conquered--the utter surrender of
the broken and subdued--gleam dully from the wilted pony's eyes. She
pitied the animal she had feared and hated but a few brief moments
before. She began to think that the man was perhaps the brute, after
all, to ride the exhausted creature thus without a sign of mercy.
She rose to her feet as the two came at last to a halt, master and
servant, conquered and conqueror, man and quivering beast.
Then Van got down, and her heart, that had pitied the horse, welled
with deeper feeling for the rider. She had never in her life seen a
face so drawn, so utterly haggard beneath a mask of red as that
presented by the horseman.
Van nearly fell, but would not fall, and instead stood trembling, his
arm by natural inclination now circling the neck of the pony.
"Well, Suvy," he said not ungently, "we gave each other hell.
Hereafter we're going to be friends."
Beth heard him. She also saw the chestnut turn and regard the man with
a look of appeal and dumb questioning in his eyes that choked her--with
joy and compassion together. She someway knew that this man and horse
would be comrades while they lived.
Half an hour afterward as she, Van, and Elsa rode forward as before,
she saw the man in affection pat the broncho on the neck. And the
horse pricked his ears in a newfound gladness in service and friendship
that his nature could not yet comprehend.