|All day long Bulldog Carney had found, where the trail was soft, the
odd imprint of that goblined inturned hoof. All day in the saddle,
riding a trail that winds in and out among rocks, and trees, and cliffs
monotonously similar, the hush of the everlasting hills holding in
subjection man's soul, the towering giants of embattled rocks thrusting
up towards God's dome pigmying to nothingness that rat, a man, produces
a comatose condition of mind; man becomes a child, incapable of little
beyond the recognition of trivial things; the erratic swoop of a bird,
the sudden roar of a cataract, the dirge-like sigh of wind through the
harp of a giant pine.
And so, curiously, Bulldog's fancy had toyed aimlessly with the history
of the cayuse that owned that inturned left forefoot. Always where the
hoof's imprint lay was the flat track of a miner's boot, the hob nails
denting the black earth with stolid persistency. But the owner of the
miner's boot seemed of little moment; it was the abnormal hoof that, by
a strange perversity, haunted Carney.
The man was probably a placer miner coming down out of the Eagle Hills,
leading a pack pony that carried his duffel and, perhaps, a small
fortune in gold. Of course, like Carney, he was heading for steel, for
the town of Bucking Horse.
Toward evening, as Carney rode down a winding trail that led to the
ford of Singing Water, rounding an abrupt turn the mouth of a huge cave
yawned in the side of a cliff away to his left. Something of life had
melted into its dark shadow that had the semblance of a man; or it might
have been a bear or a wolf. Lower down in the valley that was called the
Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge, his buckskin shied, and with a snort
of fear left the trail and elliptically came back to it twenty yards
beyond.
In the centre of the ellipse, on the trail, stood a gaunt form, a huge
dog-wolf. He was a sinister figure, his snarling lips curled back from
strong yellow fangs, his wide powerful head low hung, and the black
bristles on his back erect in challenge.
The whole thing was weird, uncanny; a single wolf to stand his ground in
daylight was unusual.
Instinctively Bulldog reined in the buckskin, and half turning in the
saddle, with something of a shudder, searched the ground at the wolf's
feet dreading to find something. But there was nothing.
The dog-wolf, with a snarling twist of his head, sprang into the bushes
just as Carney dropped a hand to his gun; his quick eye had seen the
movement.
Carney had meant to camp just beyond the ford of Singing Water, but the
usually placid buckskin was fretful, nervous.
A haunting something was in the air; Carney, himself, felt it. The
sudden apparition of the wolf could not account for this mental unrest,
either in man or beast, for they were both inured to the trail, and a
wolf meant little beyond a skulking beast that a pistol shot would drive
away.
High above the rider towered Old Squaw Mountain. It was like a battered
feudal castle, on its upper reaches turret and tower and bastion
catching vagrant shafts of gold and green, as, beyond, in the far
west, a flaming sun slid down behind the Selkirks. Where he rode in the
twisted valley a chill had struck the air, suggesting vaults, dungeons;
the giant ferns hung heavy like the plumes of knights drooping with
the death dew. A reaching stretch of salmon bushes studded with myriad
berries that gleamed like topaz jewels hedged on both sides the purling,
frothing stream that still held the green tint of its glacier birth.
Many times in his opium running Carney had swung along this wild trail
almost unconscious of the way, his mind travelling far afield; now
back to the old days of club life; to the years of army routine; to the
bright and happy scenes where rich-gowned women and cultured men laughed
and bantered with him. At times it was the newer rough life of the West;
the ever-present warfare of man against man; the yesterday where he had
won, or the to-morrow where he might cast a losing hazard--where the
dice might turn groggily from a six-spotted side to a deuce, and the
thrower take a fall.
But to-night, as he rode, something of depression, of a narrow
environment, of an evil one, was astride the withers of his horse; the
mountains seemed to close in and oppress him. The buckskin, too, swung
his heavy lop ears irritably back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes
one ear was pricked forward as though its owner searched the beyond,
the now glooming valley that, at a little distance, was but a blur,
the other ear held backward as though it would drink in the sounds of
pursuit.
Pursuit! that was the very thing; instinctively the rider turned in his
saddle, one hand on the horn, and held his piercing gray eyes on the
back trail, searching for the embodiment of this phantasy. The unrest
had developed that far into conception, something evil hovered on his
trail, man or beast. But he saw nothing but the swaying kaleidoscope of
tumbling forest shadows; rocks that, half gloomed, took fantastic forms;
bushes that swayed with the rolling gait of a grizzly.
The buckskin had quickened his pace as if, tired though he was, he would
go on beyond that valley of fear before they camped.
Where the trail skirted the brink of a cliff that had a drop of fifty
feet, Carney felt the horse tremble, and saw him hug the inner wall;
and, when they had rounded the point, the buckskin, with a snort of
relief, clamped the snaffle in his teeth and broke into a canter.
"I wonder--by Jove!" and Bulldog, pulling the buckskin to a stand,
slipped from his back, and searched the black-loamed trail.
"I believe you're right, Pat," he said, addressing the buckskin;
"something happened back there." He walked for a dozen paces ahead of
the horse, his keen gray eyes on the earth. He stopped and rubbed his
chin, thinking--thinking aloud.
"There are tracks, Patsy boy--moccasins; but we've lost our
gunboat-footed friend. What do you make of that, Patsy--gone over the
cliff? But that damn wolf's pugs are here; he's travelled up and down.
By gad! two of them!"
Then, in silence, Carney moved along the way, searching and pondering;
cast into a curious, superstitious mood that he could not shake off.
The inturned hoof-print had vanished, so the owner of the big feet that
carried hob-nailed boots did not ride.
Each time that Carney stopped to bend down in study of the trail the
buckskin pushed at him fretfully with his soft muzzle and rattled the
snaffle against his bridle teeth.
At last Carney stroked the animal's head reassuringly, saying: "You're
quite right, pal--it's none of our business. Besides, we're a pair of
old grannies imagining things."
But as he lifted to the saddle, Bulldog, like the horse, felt a
compelling inclination to go beyond the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge
to camp for the night.
Even as they climbed to a higher level of flat land, from back on the
trail that was now lost in the deepening gloom, came the howl of a
wolf; and then, from somewhere beyond floated the answering call of the
dog-wolf's mate--a whimpering, hungry note in her weird wail.
"Bleat, damn you!" Carney cursed softly; "if you bother us I'll sit by
with a gun and watch Patsy boy kick you to death."
As if some genii of the hills had taken up and sent on silent waves his
challenge, there came filtering through the pines and birch a snarling
yelp.
"By gad!" and Carney cocked his ear, pulling the horse to a stand.
Then in the heavy silence of the wooded hills he pushed on again
muttering, "There's something wrong about that wolf howl--it's
different."
Where a big pine had showered the earth with cones till the covering
was soft, and deep, and springy, and odorous like a perfumed mattress of
velvet, he hesitated; but the buckskin, in the finer animal reasoning,
pleaded with little impatient steps and shakes of the head that they
push on.
Carney yielded, saying softly: "Go on, kiddie boy; peace of mind is good
dope for a sleep."
So it was ten o'clock when the two travellers, Carney and Pat, camped
in an open, where the moon, like a silver mirror, bathed the earth in
reassuring light. Here the buckskin had come to a halt, filled his lungs
with the perfumed air in deep draughts, and turning his head half round
had waited for his partner to dismount.
It was curious this man of steel nerve and flawless courage feeling at
all the guidance of unknown threatenings, unexplainable disquietude. He
did not even build a fire; but choosing a place where the grass was rich
he spread his blanket beside the horse's picket pin.
Bulldog's life had provided him with different sleeping moods; it was a
curious subconscious matter of mental adjustment before he slipped away
from the land of knowing. Sometimes he could sleep like a tired laborer,
heavily, unresponsive to the noise of turmoil; at other times, when
deep sleep might cost him his life, his senses hovered so close to
consciousness that a dried leaf scurrying before the wind would call him
to alert action. So now he lay on his blanket, sometimes over the border
of spirit land, and sometimes conscious of the buckskin's pull at the
crisp grass. Once he came wide awake, with no movement but the lifting
of his eyelids. He had heard nothing; and now the gray eyes, searching
the moonlit plain, saw nothing. Yet within was a full consciousness that
there was something--not close, but hovering there beyond.
The buckskin also knew. He had been lying down, but with a snort of
discontent his forequarters went up and he canted to his feet with a
spring of wariness. Perhaps it was the wolves.
But after a little Carney knew it was not the wolves; they, cunning
devils, would have circled beyond his vision, and the buckskin, with
his delicate scent, would have swung his head the full circle of the
compass; but he stood facing down the back trail; the thing was there,
watching.
After that Carney slept again, lighter if possible, thankful that he had
yielded to the wisdom of the horse and sought the open.
Half a dozen times there was this gentle transition from the sleep that
was hardly a sleep, to a full acute wakening. And then the paling sky
told that night was slipping off to the western ranges, and that beyond
the Rockies, to the east, day was sleepily travelling in from the
plains.
The horse was again feeding; and Carney, shaking off the lethargy of his
broken sleep, gathered some dried stunted bushes, and, building a little
fire, made a pot of tea; confiding to the buckskin as he mounted that he
considered himself no end of a superstitious ass to have bothered over a
nothing.
Not far from where Carney had camped the trail he followed turned to
the left to sweep around a mountain, and here it joined, for a time, the
trail running from Fort Steel west toward the Kootenay. The sun, topping
the Rockies, had lifted from the earth the graying shadows, and now
Carney saw, as he thought, the hoof-prints of the day before.
There was a feeling of relief with this discovery. There had been a
morbid disquiet in his mind; a mental conviction that something had
happened to that intoed cayuse and his huge-footed owner. Now all the
weird fancies of the night had been just a vagary of mind. Where the
trail was earthed, holding clear impressions, he dismounted, and walked
ahead of the buckskin, reading the lettered clay. Here and there was
imprinted a moccasined foot; once there was the impression of boots; but
they were not the huge imprints of hob-nailed soles. They showed that
a man had dismounted, and then mounted again; and the cayuse had not
an inturned left forefoot; also the toe wall of one hind foot was badly
broken. His stride was longer, too; he did not walk with the short step
of a pack pony.
The indefinable depression took possession of Bulldog again; he tried
to shake it off--it was childish. The huge-footed one perhaps was a
prospector, and had wandered up into some one of the gulches looking for
gold. That was objecting Reason formulating an hypothesis.
Then presently Carney discovered the confusing element of the same
cayuse tracks heading the other way, as if the man on horseback had
travelled both up and down the trail.
Where the Bucking Horse trail left the Kootenay trail after circling the
mountain, Carney saw that the hoof prints continued toward Kootenay.
And there were a myriad of tracks; many mounted men had swung from the
Bucking Horse trail to the Kootenay path; they had gone and returned,
for the hoof prints that toed toward Bucking Horse lay on top.
This also was strange; men did not ride out from the sleepy old town in
a troop like cavalry. There was but one explanation, the explanation
of the West--those mounted men had ridden after somebody--had trailed
somebody who was wanted quick.
This crescendo to his associated train of thought obliterated mentally
the goblin-footed cayuse, the huge hob-nailed boot, the something at the
cliff, the hovering oppression of the night--everything.
Carney closed his mind to the torturing riddle and rode, sometimes
humming an Irish ballad of Mangin's.
It was late afternoon when he rode into Bucking Horse; and Bucking Horse
was in a ferment.
Seth Long's hotel, the Gold Nugget, was the cauldron in which the waters
of unrest seethed.
A lynching was in a state of almost completion, with Jeanette Holt's
brother, Harry, elected to play the leading part of the lynched. Through
the deference paid to his well-known activity when hostile events were
afoot, Carney was cordially drawn into the maelstrom of ugly-tempered
men.
Jeanette's brother may be said to have suffered from a preponderance of
opinion against him, for only Jeanette, and with less energy, Seth
Long, were on his side. All Bucking Horse, angry Bucking Horse, was for
stringing him up _tout de suite_. The times were propitious for this
entertainment, for Sergeant Black, of the Mounted Police, was over at
Fort Steel, or somewhere else on patrol, and the law was in the keeping
of the mob.
Ostensibly Carney ranged himself on the side of law and order. That is
what he meant when, leaning carelessly against the Nugget bar, one hand
on his hip, chummily close to the butt of his six-gun, he said:
"This town had got a pretty good name, as towns go in the mountains,
and my idea of a man that's too handy at the lynch game is that he's a
pretty poor sport."
"How's that, Bulldog?" Kootenay Jim snapped.
"He's a poor sport," Carney drawled, "because he's got a hundred to one
the best of it--first, last, and always; he isn't in any danger when he
starts, because it's a hundred men to one poor devil, who, generally,
isn't armed, and he knows that at the finish his mates will perjure
themselves to save their own necks. I've seen one or two lynch mobs and
they were generally egged on by men who were yellow."
Carney's gray eyes looked out over the room full of angry men with a
quiet thoughtful steadiness that forced home the conviction that he was
wording a logic he would demonstrate. No other man in that room could
have stood up against that plank bar and declared himself without being
called quick.
"You hear fust what this rat done, Bulldog, then we'll hear what you've
got to say," Kootenay growled.
"That's well spoken, Kootenay," Bulldog answered. "I'm fresh in off the
trail, and perhaps I'm quieter than the rest of you, but first, being
fresh in off the trail, there's a little custom to be observed."
With a sweep of his hand Carney waved a salute to a line of bottles
behind the bar.
Jeanette, standing in the open door that led from the bar to the
dining-room, gripping the door till her nails sank into the pine, felt
hot tears gush into her eyes. How wise, how cool, this brave Bulldog
that she loved so well. She had had no chance to plead with him for
help. He had just come into that murder-crazed throng, and the words had
been hurled at him from a dozen mouths that her brother Harry--Harry the
waster, the no-good, the gambler--had been found to be the man who had
murdered returning miners on the trail for their gold, and that they
were going to string him up.
And now there he stood, her god of a man, Bulldog Carney, ranged on her
side, calm, and brave. It was the first glint of hope since they had
brought her brother in, bound to the back of a cayuse. She had pushed
her way amongst the men, but they were like wolves; she had pleaded
and begged for delay, but the evidence was so overwhelming; absolutely
hopeless it had appeared. But now something whispered "Hope".
It was curious the quieting effect that single drink at the bar had; the
magnetism of Carney seemed to envelop the men, to make them reasonable.
Ordinarily they were reasonable men. Bulldog knew this, and he played
the card of reason.
For the two or three gun men--Kootenay Jim, John of Slocan, and Denver
Ike--Carney had his own terrible personality and his six-gun; he could
deal with those three toughs if necessary.
"Now tell me, boys, what started this hellery," Carney asked when they
had drunk.
The story was fired at him; if a voice hesitated, another took up the
narrative.
Miners returning from the gold field up in the Eagle Hills had
mysteriously disappeared, never turning up at Bucking Horse. A man would
have left the Eagle Hills, and somebody drifting in from the same place
later on, would ask for him at Bucking Horse--nobody had seen him.
Then one after another two skeletons had been found on the trail; the
bodies had been devoured by wolves.
"And wolves don't eat gold--not what you'd notice, as a steady chuck,"
Kootenay Jim yelped.
"Men wolves do," Carney thrust back, and his gray eyes said plainly,
"That's your food, Jim."
"Meanin' what by that, pard?" Kootenay snarled, his face evil in a
threat.
"Just what the words convey--you sort them out, Kootenay."
But Miner Graham interposed. "We got kinder leary about this wolf game,
Carney, 'cause they ain't bothered nobody else 'cept men packin'
in their winnin's from the Eagle Hills; and four days ago Caribou
Dave--here he is sittin' right here--he arrives packin' Fourteen-foot
Johnson--that is, all that's left of Fourteen-foot."
"Johnson was my pal," Caribou Dave interrupted, a quaver in his voice,
"and he leaves the Eagle Nest two days ahead of me, packin' a big
clean-up of gold on a cayuse. He was goin' to mooch aroun' Buckin' Horse
till I creeps in afoot, then we was goin' out. We been together a good
many years, ol' Fourteen-foot and me."
Something seemed to break in Caribou's voice and Graham added: "Dave
finds his mate at the foot of a cliff."
Carney started; and instinctively Kootenay's hand dropped to his gun,
thinking something was going to happen.
"I dunno just what makes me look there for Fourteen-foot, Bulldog,"
Caribou Dave explained. "I was comin' along the trail seein' the marks
of 'em damn big feet of his, and they looked good to me--I guess I was
gettin' kinder homesick for him; when I'd camp I'd go out and paw 'em
tracks; 'twas kinder like shakin' hands. We been together a good many
years, buckin' the mountains and the plains, and sometimes havin' a bit
of fun. I'm comin' along, as I says, and I sees a kinder scrimmage
like, as if his old tan-colored cayuse had got gay, or took the blind
staggers, or somethin'; there was a lot of tracks. But I give up
thinkin' it out, 'cause I knowed if the damn cayuse had jack-rabbited
any, Fourteen-foot'd pick him and his load up and carry him. Then I see
some wolf tracks--dang near as big as a steer's they was--and I figger
Fourteen-foot's had a set-to with a couple of 'em timber coyotes and
lammed hell's delight out of 'em, 'cause he could've done it. Then I'm
follerin' the cayuse's trail agen, pickin' it up here and there, and all
at onct it jumps me that the big feet is missin'. Sure I natural figger
Johnson's got mussed up a bit with the wolves and is ridin'; but there's
the dang wolf tracks agen. And some moccasin feet has been passin'
along, too. Then the hoss tracks cuts out just same's if he'd spread his
wings and gone up in the air--they just ain't."
"Then Caribou gets a hunch and goes back and peeks over the cliff,"
Miner Graham added, for old David had stopped speaking to bite viciously
at a black plug of tobacco to hide his feelings.
"I dunno what made me do it," Caribou interrupted; "it was just same's
Fourteen-foot's callin' me. There ain't nobody can make me believe that
if two men paddles together twenty years, had their little fights, and
show-downs, and still sticks, that one of 'em is going to cut clean out
just 'cause he goes over the Big Divide--'tain't natural. I tell you,
boys, Fourteen-foot's callin' me--that's what he is, when I goes back."
Then Graham had to take up the narrative, for Caribou, heading straight
for the bar, pointed dumbly at a black bottle.
"Yes, Carney," Graham said, "Caribou packs into Buckin' Horse on his
back what was left of Fourteen-foot, and there wasn't no gold and no
sign of the cayuse. Then we swarms out, a few of us, and picks up cayuse
tracks most partic'lar where the Eagle Hills trail hits the trail for
Kootenay. And when we overhaul the cayuse that's layin' down 'em tracks
it's Fourteen-foot's hawse, and a-ridin' him is Harry Holt."
"And he's got the gold you was talkin' 'bout wolves eatin', Bulldog,"
Kootenay Jim said with a sneer. "He was hangin' 'round here busted,
cleaned to the bone, and there he's a-ridin' Fourteen-foot's cayuse,
with lots of gold."
"That's the whole case then, is it, boys?" Carney asked quietly.
"Ain't it enough?" Kootenay Jim snarled.
"No, it isn't. You were tried for murder once yourself, Kootenay, and
you got off, though everybody knew it was the dead man's money in
your pocket. You got off because nobody saw you kill the man, and the
circumstantial evidence gave you the benefit of the doubt."
"I ain't bein' tried for this, Bulldog. Your bringin' up old scores
might get you in wrong."
"You're not being tried, Kootenay, but another man is, and I say he's
got to have a fair chance. You bring him here, boys, and let me hear
his story; that's only fair, men amongst men. Because I give you fair
warning, boys, if this lynching goes through, and you're in wrong, I'm
going to denounce you; not one of you will get away--_not one!_"
"We'll bring him, Bulldog," Graham said; "what you say is only fair, but
swing he will."
Jeanette's brother had been locked in the pen in the log police
barracks. He was brought into the Gold Nugget, and his defence was what
might be called powerfully weak. It was simply a statement that he had
bought the cayuse from an Indian on the trail outside Bucking Horse. He
refused to say where he had got the gold, simply declaring that he had
killed nobody, had never seen Fourteen-foot Johnson, and knew nothing
about the murder..
Something in the earnestness of the man convinced Carney that he was
innocent. However, that was, so far as Carney's action was concerned,
a minor matter; it was Jeanette's brother, and he was going to save him
from being lynched if he had to fight the roomful of men--there was no
doubt whatever about that in his mind.
"I can't say, boys," Carney began, "that you can be blamed for thinking
you've got the right man."
"That's what we figgered," Graham declared.
"But you've not gone far enough in sifting the evidence if you sure
don't want to lynch an innocent man. The only evidence you have is that
you caught Flarry on Johnson's cayuse. How do you know it's Johnson's
cayuse?"
"Caribou says it is," Graham answered.
"And Harry says it was an Indian's cayuse," Carney affirmed.
"He most natural just ordinar'ly lies about it," Kootenay ventured
viciously.
"Where's the cayuse?" Carney asked.
"Out in the stable," two or three voices answered.
"I want to see him. Mind, boys, I'm working for you as much as for that
poor devil you want to string up, because if you get the wrong man I'm
going to denounce you, that's as sure as God made little apples."
His quiet earnestness was compelling. All the fierce heat of passion
had gone from the men; there still remained the grim determination that,
convinced they were right, nothing but the death of some of them would
check. But somehow they felt that the logic of conviction would swing
even Carney to their side.
So, without even a word from a leader, they all thronged out to the
stable yard; the cayuse was brought forth, and, at Bulldog's request,
led up and down the yard, his hoofs leaving an imprint in the bare clay
at every step. It was the footprints alone that interested Carney. He
studied them intently, a horrible dread in his heart as he searched for
that goblined hoof that inturned. But the two forefeet left saucer-like
imprints, that, though they were both slightly intoed, as is the way
of a cayuse, neither was like the curious goblined track that had so
fastened on his fancy out in the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge.
And also there was the broken toe wall of the hind foot that he had seen
on the newer trail.
He turned to Caribou Dave, asking, "What makes you think this is
Johnson's pack horse?"
"There ain't no thinkin' 'bout it," Caribou answered with asperity.
"When I see my boots I don't _think_ they're mine, I just most natur'ly
figger they are and pull 'em on. I'd know that dun-colored rat if I see
him in a wild herd."
"And yet," Carney objected in an even tone, "this isn't the cayuse that
Johnson toted out his duffel from the Eagle Hills on."
A cackle issued from Kootenay Jim's long, scraggy neck:
"That settles it, boys; Bulldog passes the buck and the game's over.
Caribou is just an ord'nary liar, 'cordin' to Judge Carney."
"Caribou is perfectly honest in his belief," Carney declared. "There
isn't more than half a dozen colors for horses, and there are a good
many thousand horses in this territory, so a great many of them are the
same color. And the general structure of different cayuses is as similar
as so many wheelbarrows. That brand on his shoulder may be a C, or a new
moon, or a flapjack."