It was within an hour of daybreak when Carney, astride his buckskin,
slipped quietly out of Bucking Horse, and took the trail that skirted
the tortuous stream toward the south. He had had no sleep, but that
didn't matter; for two or three days and nights at a stretch he could go
without sleep when necessary. Perhaps when he spelled for breakfast, as
the buckskin fed on the now drying autumn grass, he would snatch a brief
half hour of slumber, and again at noon; that would be quite enough.
When the light became strong he examined the trail. There were several
tracks, cayuse tracks, the larger footprints of what were called
bronchos, the track of pack mules; they were coming and going. But they
were cold trails, seemingly not one fresh. Little cobwebs, like gossamer
wings, stretched across the sunken bowl-like indentations, and dew
sparkled on the silver mesh like jewels in the morning sun.
It was quite ten o'clock when Carney discovered the footprints of a
pony that were evidently fresh; here and there the outcupped black earth
where the cayuse had cantered glistened fresh in the sunlight.
Carney could not say just where the cayuse had struck the trial he was
on. It gave him a depressed feeling. Perhaps the rider carried the loot,
and had circled to escape interception. But when Carney came to the
cross trail that ran from Fort Steel to Kootenay the cayuse tracks
turned to the right toward Kootenay, and he felt a conviction that the
rider was not associated with the murder. With that start he would be
heading for across the border; he would not make for a Canadian town
where he would be in touch with the wires.
Along the border trail there were no fresh tracks.
It was toward evening when Carney passed through the Valley of the
Grizzley's Bridge--past the gruesome place where Fourteen-foot Johnson
had been killed by Jack the Wolf; past where he himself had been caught
in the bear trap.
The buckskin remembered it all; he was in a hurry to get beyond it; he
clattered over the narrow, winding, up-and-down footpath with the eager
hasty step of a fleeing goat, his head swinging nervously, his big lop
ears weaving back and forth in apprehension.
Well beyond the Valley of the Grizzley's Bridge, past the dark maw of
the cave in which Jack the Wolf had hidden the stolen gold, Carney went,
camping in the valley, that had now broadened out, when its holding
walls of mountain sides had blanketed the light so that he travelled
along an obliterated trail, obliterated to all but the buckskin's finer
sense of perception.
At the first graying of the eastern sky he was up, and after a snatch of
breakfast for himself and the buckskin, hurrying south again. No one had
passed in the night for Carney had slept on one side of the trail while
the horse fed or rested on the other, with a picket line stretched
between them: and there were no fresh tracks.
At two o'clock he came to the little log shack just this side of the U.
S. border where Oregon kept his solitary ward. Nobody had passed, Oregon
advised; and Carney gave the old man his instructions, which were to
search any passer, and if he had the fifty-dollar bills or the marked
cards, hobble him and bring him back to Bucking Horse.
Over a pan of bacon and a pot of strong tea Oregon reported to his
superior all the details of their own endeavor, which, in truth, was
opium running. That was his office, to drift across the line casually,
back and forth, as a prospector, and keep posted as to customs officers;
who they were, where the kind-hearted ones were, and where the fanatical
ones were; for once Carney had been ambushed, practically illegally,
five miles within Canadian territory, and had had to fight his way
out, leaving twenty thousand dollars' worth of opium in the hand of a
tyrannical customs department.
At four o'clock Carney sat the buckskin, and reached down to grasp the
hand of his lieutenant.
"I'll tell you, Bulldog," the latter said, swinging his eyes down the
valley toward the southwest, "there's somethin' brewin' in the way of
weather. My hip is pickin' a quarrel with that flat-nosed bit of
lead that's been nestin' in a j'int, until I just natural feel as if
somebody'd fresh plugged me."
Carney laughed, for the day was glorious. The valley bed through which
wandered, now sluggishly, a green-tinged stream, lay like a glorious
oriental rug, its colors rich-tinted by the warm flood of golden light
that hung in the cedar and pine perfumed air. The lower reaches of the
hills on either side were crimson, and gold, and pink, and purple, and
emerald green, all softened into a gentle maze-like tapestry where the
gaillardias and monkshood and wolf-willow and salmonberry and saskatoon
bushes caressed each other in luxurious profusion, their floral bloom
preserved in autumn tawny richness by the dry mountain air.
And this splendor of God's artistry, this wondrous great tapestry,
was hung against the sombre green wall of a pine and fir forest that
zigzagged and stood in blocks all up the mountain side like the design
of some giant cubist.
Carney laughed and swung his gloved hand in a semicircle of derision.
"It's purty," Oregon said, "it's purty, but I've seen a purty woman, all
smilin' too, break out in a hell of a temper afore you could say
'hands up.' My hip don't never make no mistakes, 'cause it ain't got no
fancies. It's a-comin'. You ride like hell, Carney; it's a-comin'. Say,
Bulldog, look at that," and Oregon's long, lean, not over-clean finger
pointed to the buckskin's head; "he knows as well as I do that the
Old Man of the Mountains is cookin' up somethin'. See 'em mule lugs of
his--see the white of that eye? And he ain't takin' in no purty scenery,
he's lookin' over his shoulder down off there," and Oregon stretched a
long arm toward the west, toward the home of the blue-green mountains of
ice, the glaciers.
"It's too early for a blizzard," Carney contended. "It might be, if they
run on schedule time like the trains, but they don't. I froze to death
once in one in September. I come back to life again, 'cause I'd been
good always; and perhaps, Bulldog, your record mightn't let you out if
you got caught between here and Buckin' Horse in a real he-game of snow
hell'ry. The trail runs mostly up narrow valleys that would pile twenty
feet deep, and I reckon, though you don't care overmuch yourself what
gener'ly happens, you don't want to give the buckskin a raw deal by
gettin' him into any fool finish. He knows; he wants to get to a nice
little silk-lined sleepin' box afore this snoozer hits the mountains.
Good-bye, Bulldog, and ride like hell--the buckskin won't mind; let him
run the show--he knows, the clever little cuss."
Carney's slim fingers, though steel, were almost welded together in the
heat of the squeeze they got in Oregon's bear-trap of a paw.
The trail here was like a prairie road for the valley was flat, and the
buckskin accentuated his apprehensive eagerness by whisking away at a
sharp canter. Carney could hear, from over his shoulder, the croaking
bellow of Oregon who had noticed this: "He knows, Bulldog. Leave him
alone. Let him run things hisself!"
Though Carney had laughed at Oregon's gloomy forecast, he knew the old
man was weather-wise, that a lifetime spent in the hills and the wide
places of earth had tutored him to the varying moods of the elements;
that his super-sense was akin to the subtle understanding of animals.
So he rode late into the night, sometimes sleeping in the saddle, as
the buckskin, with loose rein, picked his way up hill and down dale
and along the brink of gorges with the surefootedness of a big-horn. He
camped beneath a giant pine whose fallen cones and needles had spread
a luxurious mattress, and whose balsam, all unstoppered, floated in the
air, a perfume that was like a balm of life.
Almost across the trail Carney slept lest the bearer of the loot might
slip by in the night.
He had lain down with one gray blanket over him; he had gone to sleep
with a delicious sense of warmth and cosiness; he woke shivering. His
eyes opened to a gray light, a faint gray, the steeliness that filtered
down into the gloomed valley from a paling sky. A day was being born;
the night was dying.
An appalling hush was in the air; the valley was as devoid of sound as
though the very trees had died in the night; as if the air itself had
been sucked out from between the hills, leaving a void.
The buckskin was up and picking at the tender shoots of a young birch.
It had been a half-whinnying snort from the horse that had wakened
Carney, for now he repeated it, and threw his head up, the lop ears
cocked as though he listened for some break in the horrible stillness,
watched for something that was creeping stealthily over the mountains
from the west.
Carney wet the palm of his hand and held it up. It chilled as though it
had been dipped in evaporating spirits. Looking at the buckskin Oregon's
croak came back:
"He knows: ride like hell, Bulldog!"
Carney rose, and poured a little feed of oats from his bag on a corner
of his blanket for the horse. He built a fire and brewed in a copper pot
his tea. Once the shaft of smoke that spiraled lazily upward flickered
and swished flat like a streaming whisp of hair; and above, high up in
the giant pine harp, a minor string wailed a thin tremulous note. The
gray of the morning that had been growing bright now gloomed again
as though night had fled backwards before the thing that was in the
mountains to the west.
The buckskin shivered; the hairs of his coat stood on end like fur in a
bitter cold day; he snapped at the oats as though he bit at the neck
of a stallion; he crushed them in his strong jaws as though he were
famished, or ate to save them from a thief.
In five minutes the strings of the giant harp above Carney's head were
playing a dirge; the smoke of his fire swirled, and the blaze darted
here and there angrily, like the tongue of a serpent. From far across
the valley, from somewhere in the rocky caverns of the mighty hills,
came the heavy moans of genii. It was hardly a noise, it was a great
oppression, a manifestation of turmoil, of the turmoil of God's majesty,
His creation in travail.
Carney quaffed the scalding tea, and raced with the buckskin in the
eating of his food. He became a living thermometer; his chilling blood
told him that the temperature was going down, down, down. The day
before he had ridden with his coat hung to the horn of his saddle; now
a vagrant thought flashed to his buffalo coat in his room at the Gold
Nugget.
He saddled the buckskin, and the horse, at the pinch of the cinch,
turned from his oats that were only half eaten, and held up his head for
the bit.
Carney strapped his dunnage to the back of the saddle, mounted, and the
buckskin, with a snort of relief, took the trail with eager steps.
It wound down to the valley here toward the west, and little needles
stabbed at the rider's eyes and cheeks as though the air were filled
with indiscernible diamond dust. It stung; it burned his nostrils; it
seemed to penetrate the horse's lungs, for he gave a snorting cough.
And now the full orchestra of the hills was filling the valleys and the
canyons with an overture, as if perched on the snowed slope of Squaw
Mountain was the hydraulicon of Vitruvius, a torrent raging its many
throats into unearthly dirge.
Carney's brain vibrated with this presage of the something that had
thrilled his horse. In his ears the wailing, sighing, reverberating
music seemed to carry as refrain the words of Oregon: "Ride like hell,
Carney! Ride like hell!"
And, as if the command were within the buckskin's knowing, he raced
where the path was good; and where it was bad he scrambled over the
stones and shelving rocks and projecting roots with catlike haste.
In Carney's mind was the cave, the worked-out mine tunnel that drove
into the mountain side; the cave that Jack the Wolf had homed in when he
murdered the men on the trail; it was two hours beyond. If he could make
that he and the buckskin would be safe, for the horse could enter it
too.
In the thought of saving his life the buckskin occupied a dual place;
that's what Oregon had said; he had no right to jeopardize the gallant
little steed that had saved him more than once with fleet heel and stout
heart.
He patted the eager straining neck in front of him, and, though he
spoke aloud, his voice was little more in that valley of echo and
reverberation than a whisper: "Good Patsy boy, we'll make it. Don't fret
yourself tired, old sport; we'll make it--the cave."
The horse seemed to swing his head reassuringly as though he, too, had
in his heart the undying courage that nothing daunted.
Now the invisible cutting dust that had scorched Carney's face had taken
visible form; it was like fierce-driven flour. Across the valley the
towering hills were blurred shapes. Carney's eyelashes were frozen
ridges above his eyes; his breath floated away in little clouds of ice;
the buckskin coat of the horse had turned to gray.
Sometimes at the turn of a cliff was a false lull as if the storm had
been stayed; and then in twenty yards the doors of the frozen north
swung again and icy fingers of death gripped man and beast.
And all the time the white prisms were growing larger; closer objects
were being blotted out; the prison walls of ice were coming closer; it
was more difficult to breathe; his life blood was growing sluggish; a
chill was suggesting indifference--why fight?
The horse's feet were muffled by the ghastly white rug, the blizzard was
spreading over the earth that the day before had been a cloth of gold;
it was like a winding sheet.
Carney could feel the brave little beast falter and lurch as the
merciless snow clutched at his legs where it had swirled into billows.
To the man direction was lost--it was like being above the clouds; but
the buckskin held on his way straight and true; fighting, fighting,
making the glorious fight that is without fear. To stop, to falter,
meant death; the buckskin knew it; but he was tiring.
Carney unslung his picket line, put the loop around his chest below his
arms, fastened it to the saddle horn, leaving a play of eight feet, and
slipping to the ground, clutched the horse's tail, and patted him on the
rump. The buckskin knew; he had checked for five seconds; now he went on
again, the weight off his back being a relief.
The change was good. Carney had felt the chill of death creeping over
him in the saddle; the deadly chill, the palpitating of the chest that
preluded a false warmth that meant the end, the sleep of death. Now the
exertion wined his blood; it brought the battling back.
Time, too, like direction, was a haze in the man's mind. Two hours away
the cave had been, and surely they had struggled on hour after hour. It
scarce mattered; to draw forth his watch and look was a waste of energy,
the vital energy that weighed against his death; an ounce of it wasted
was folly; just on through the enveloping curtain of that white wall.
Carney had meant to remount the horse when he was warmer, when he
himself was tiring; but it would be murder, murder of the little hero
that had fought his battles ever since they had been together. The
buckskin's flanks were pumping spasmodically, like the sides of a
bellows; his withers drooped; his head was low hung; he looked lean and
small--scarce mightier than a jack rabbit, knee deep in the shifting sea
of snow.
But the cave must be near. Carney found himself repeating these words:
"The cave is near, the cave is near, Patsy; on, boy--the cave is near."
His mind dwelt on the wood that he had left in the cave when he took
Jack the Wolf to Bucking Horse; of how cosy it would be with a bright
fire going, and the baffled blizzard howling without. Yes, he would make
it. Was his life, so full of the wild adventures that he had always won
out on, to be blotted by just a snowstorm, just cold?
He took a lofty stand against this. He was possessed of a feeling that
it was a combat between the crude elements and his vital force of mental
stamina. If he kept up his courage he would win out, as he always had.
It was just Excelsior and Success, just----
There was a swirl of oblivion; he had flown through space and collided
with another world; there had been some sort of a gross shock; he was
alone, floating through space, and passing through snowladen clouds.
There was a restful exhilaration, such as he had felt once when passing
under an anesthetic--Nirvana.
Then the cold snout of some abnormal creature in these regions of the
beyond pressed against his face. Gradually, as though waking from
a dream--it was the muzzle of the buckskin nosing him back to
consciousness. He struggled painfully to his feet. How heavy his legs
were; at the bottom of them were leaden-soled diver's boots. His
brain, not more than half clearing at that, he realized that he and the
buckskin had slid from a treacherous shelf of rock, and fallen a dozen
feet; the snow, unwittingly kind, catching them in a lap of feathery
softness. But for the gallant horse he would have lain there, never to
rise again of his own volition.
They scrambled back to the trail, he and the little horse, and they were
going forward. Oregon's command was working out--"Let the buckskin have
his own way."
If they had been out on the prairie undoubtedly they would have gone
around in a circle--in fact, Carney once had done so--and the cold would
have been more intense, the sweep of the wind more life-sapping; but
here in the valleys in places the snow piled deeper; it was like surf
rolling up in billows; it took the life force out of man and horse.
Carney was so wearied by the sustained struggle that was like a man
battling the waves, half the time beneath the waters, that his flagged
senses became atrophied, numbed, scarce tabulating anything but the fact
that they still held on toward the cave.
Then he heard a bell. Curious that. Was it all a dream--or was this the
real thing: that he was in a merry party, a sleighing party--that they
were going to a ball in a stone palace? He could hear a sleigh bell.
Then he was nice and warm. He stretched himself lazily. It was a
dream--he was waking.
When he opened his eyes he saw a fire, and the flickering firelight
played on stone walls. Beside the fire was sitting a man; behind him
something stamped on the stone floor.
He turned his head and saw the buckskin asleep on his feet with low-hung
head.
"How d'you feel, Stranger?" the man at the fire asked, rising up, and
coming to his side.
Carney stared; he was supposed to be back there fighting a blizzard. And
now, remembrance, coursing with langourous speed through his mind, he
was in the cave where he had held Jack the Wolf a prisoner.
He sat up and pondered this with groggy slowness.
"Some horse, that, Stranger." The man's voice that had sounded thinly
sinister had a humanized tone as he said this.
Carney's tongue was dry, puckered from the lowered vitality. He tried to
answer, and the man, noting this, said: "Take your time, Mister. You're
makin' the grade all right, all right. I knowed you was just asleep. Try
this dope."
He poured some hot tea into a tin cup. It toniced the tired Carney; it
was like oil on the dry bearings of a delicate machine.
"Some April shower," the man said, piling wood on the fire. "I heerd a
horse neigh--it was kind of a squeal, and my bronch havin' drifted out
to sea ahead of this damn gale, I thinks he's come back. I heerd his
bell, and I makes a fight with ol' white whiskers--'twan't more'n 'bout
ten yards at that--and there's that danged rat of yours, and he won't
come in to the warm 'cause you'd got pinned agin a boulder and snow; he
seemed to know that if he pulled too hard he'd break your danged neck.
Then we got you in--that's all. Some horse!"
This and the warmth and the tonic tea brought Carney up to date. He held
out his hand.
But a curious metamorphosis in the man startled Carney. He turned
surlily to shake up the fire, throwing over his shoulder: "I ain't done
nothin'; you've got to thank that little jack rabbit fer pullin' you
through. I went out after my own bronch."
"But ain't I all right, Stranger?" Carney asked gently, for he had met
many men in the waste places with just this curious antipathy to an
unknown. Oregon was like that. Men living in the wide outside became
like outcast buffalo bulls, in their supersensitiveness--every man was
an enemy till he proved himself.
The man straightened up, and his eyes that were set too close together
each side of the fin-like nose rested on Carney in a squinting look of
distrust.
"I ain't never knowed but one man was _all right_, and the Mounted
Police hounded him till he give up."
The cave man turned the stem of the pipe he had been smoking toward the
horse. "That buckskin with the mule ears belongs to Bulldog Carney. Are
you him, or are you a hawse thief?"
"How do you know the horse?"
"I got reason a-plenty to know him. He cleaned me out in Walla
Walla when he beat Clatawa; and I guess you're the racin' shark that
cold-decked us boys with this ringer."
Now Bulldog knew why the aversion.
"I'm Carney," he 'admitted; "but it was the gamblers put up the job; I
just beat them out."
"Where d'you come from now?" the cave man asked.
"Bailey's Ferry," Carney answered in oblique precaution. He noticed that
the other hung with peculiar intensity on his answer.
"How long was you fightin' that blizzard?"
"Since daylight--when I broke camp." Carney looked at his watch; it was
three o'clock. "How long have I been here?"
"A couple of hours. Was you runnin' booze or hop, Bulldog?"
Carney started. Perhaps the cave man was conveying a covert threat,
an intimation that he might inform on him. "Don't let's talk shop," he
answered.
"I ain't got no sore spots on my hide," the other sneered; "I'm an
ord'nary damn fool of a gold chaser, and I've been up in the Eagle Hills
trailin' a ledge of auriferous quartz that's buck-jumpin' acrost the
mountains so damn fast I never got a chanct to rope it. I'd a-stuck her
out if the chuck hadn't petered. When I'd just got enough sowbelly to
see me to the outside I pulled my freight. That's me, Goldbug Dave."
The other's statement flashed into Carney's mind a sudden disturbing
thought--_food!_ He, himself, had about one day's supply--had he it? He
turned to his dunnage and saddle that lay where they had been tossed
by the cave man when he had stripped them from the horse. His bacon and
bannock were gone!