Lawton believed himself to be ill-used. He had written to Stone a
strangely composed and spelled account of the whole matter, and mingled
reproaches for having gotten him into it; and Stone had replied that it
was no affair of his one way or another, but so far as he could make out
Lawton had made a mess of it and a qualified fool of himself.
Whereupon the rancher, his feelings being much injured, and his trust in
mankind in general shattered, did as many a wiser man has done before
him,--made himself very drunk, and in his cups told all that he knew to
two women and a man. "I'd like to know whose affair it is, if it ain't
his, the measly sneak. He sicked me on,"--oaths, as the grammars phrase
it, "understood." The tears dribbled off his fierce mustache, and the
women and the man laughed at him, but they were quite as drunk as he
was, and they forgot all about it at once. Lawton did not forget. He
thought of it a great deal, and the more he thought, the more he wanted
revenge.
Now if one cannot have revenge upon the real malefactor himself, because
one is afraid of him, there is still satisfaction to be derived, to a
certain extent, from wreaking it upon the innocent, of whom one is not
afraid. Lawton felt, in his simple soul, that Stone was astute with the
astuteness of the devil and all his angels. On the other hand, he
believed the government to be dull. It was big, but it was stupid. Was
not the whole frontier evidence of that fact to him? Clearly, then, the
government was the one to be got even with.
He had been in hiding three weeks. Part of the time he had stayed in the
town near the post, small, but as frontier towns went, eminently
respectable and law-abiding. For the rest he had lain low in a house of
very bad name at the exact edge of the military reservation. The poison
of the vile liquor he had drunk without ceasing had gotten itself into
his brain. He had reached the criminal point, not bold,--he was never
that,--but considerably more dangerous, upon the whole. He drank more
deeply for two days longer, after he received Stone's letter, and then,
when he was quite mad, when his eyes were bleared and fiery and his head
was dry and hot and his heart terrible within him, he went out into the
black night.
It was still early. The mountain echoes had not sung back the tattoo of
the trumpets as yet. There was a storm coming on from the snow peak in
the west, and the clouds, dark with light edges, were thick in the sky.
Lawton was sober enough now. Not so far away in its little pocket among
the hills he could see the post, with all its lights twinkling, as
though one of the clear starry patches in the heavens were reflected in
a black lake in the valley. And the road stretched out faint and gray
before him.
He went in through the gate, and was once more upon that reservation he
had been commanded by the overbearing tyrant representative of the
military to leave, several weeks before. As he trudged along, tattoo
went. In the clear silence, beneath the sounding-boards of the low
clouds, he heard the voice of one of the sergeants. He shook his fist in
the direction. Tattoo being over, some of the lights were put out, but
there were still plenty to guide him. He did not want to get there too
early, so he walked more slowly, and when he came to the edge of the
garrison, he hesitated.
The chances of detection would certainly be less if he should go back of
the officers' quarters, instead of the barracks. But to do that he would
have to cross the road which led from the trader's to the quadrangle,
and he would surely meet some one, if it were only some servant girl and
her lover. He had observed and learned some things in his week of
waiting in the post--that week which otherwise had gone for worse than
nothing. He took the back of the barracks, keeping well away from them,
stumbling in and out among rubbish heaps. He had no very clear idea of
what he meant to do, or of why he was going in this particular
direction; but he was ready for anything that might offer to his hand.
If he came upon Landor or the adjutant or any of them, he would put a
knife into him. But he was not going to the trouble of hunting them
out. And so he walked on, and came to the haystacks, looming, denser
shadows against the sky.
Then taps sounded, ringing its brazen dirge to the night in a long, last
note. It ended once, but the bugler went to the other side of the parade
and began again. Lawton repeated the shaking of his fist. He was growing
impatient, and also scared. A little more of that shrill music, and his
nerves would go into a thousand quivering shreds--he would be useless.
Would the cursed, the many times cursed military never get to bed? He
waited in the shadow of the corrals, leaning against the low wall,
gathering his forces. The sentry evidently did not see him. The post
grew more and more still, the clouds more and more thick.
Gradually it began to form itself in his softened brain what he meant to
do. It is safest to avenge oneself upon dumb beasts, after all. By and
by he began to feel along the adobe wall, and when he found a niche for
his foot, he started to clamber up. He had climbed so many corral walls,
to sit atop of them with his great, booted legs dangling, and
meditatively whittle when he should have been at work, that it was easy
for him, and in a moment he was on the shingled roof, lying flat. In
another he had dropped down upon a bed of straw.
He put out his hand and touched a warm, smooth flank. The horse gave a
little low whinny. Quick as a flash he whipped out his knife and
hamstrung it, not that one only, but ten other mules and horses before
he stopped. He groped from stall to stall, and in each cut just once,
unerringly and deep, so that the poor beast, which had turned its head
and nosed at the touch of the hand of one of those humans who had always
been its friends, was left writhing, with no possible outcome but death
with a bullet in its head.
He was waking now to his work. But he had enough of horses. He stopped,
sheathed his knife, and, feeling in his pockets, drew out a box of
matches. A little spluttering flame caught in a pile of straw, and
showed a hind foot dragging helplessly. It crept up, and the mule
plunged on three legs, dragging the other along. It snorted, and then
every animal in that corral, which was the quartermaster's, smelt danger
and snorted too, and struck from side to side of its stall. Those in the
next corral caught the fear.
If the sentry outside heard, he paid no attention. It was common enough
for the horses to take a simultaneous fit of restlessness in the night,
startled by some bat flapping through the beams or by a rat scurrying in
the grain. In ten minutes more a flame had reached the roof. In another
ten minutes the sentry had discharged his carbine three times, fire call
had been sounded in quick, alarming notes, and men and officers, half
dressed, had come running from the barracks and the line.
Any other fire--excepting always in an ammunition magazine--is easier to
handle than one in a stable. It takes time to blind plunging horses and
lead them out singly. And there is no time to take. Hay and straw and
gunny-sacks and the dry wood of the stable go up like tinder. It has
burned itself out before you can begin to extinguish it.
There were four corrals in the one, and two of them were on fire. They
had spread wet blankets on the roof of the third, but it, too, caught
directly. The big, yellow-hearted flames poured up into the sky. The
glow was cast back again from the blackness of the low clouds, and lit
up the ground with a dazing shimmer. It blinded and burned and set the
rules of fire drill pretty well at naught, when the only water supply
was in small buckets and a few barrels, and the horses had kicked over
two of the latter.
In the corral where the fire had started and was best under way, and in
the stall farthest from the gate, a little pinto mustang was jerking at
its halter and squealing with fear. It was Cairness's horse. He had been
allowed to stable it there, and he himself was not down with his scouts
in the ill-smelling camp across the creek, but had a room at the
sutler's store, a good three-quarters of a mile from the corrals. As
soon as the bugle call awoke him, he started at a run; but the fire was
beyond fighting when he got there.
He grabbed a man at the gate, who happened to be the quartermaster
sergeant himself, and asked if his horse had been taken out.
The sergeant spent more time upon the oaths with which he embellished
the counter-question as to how he should know anything about it, than
would have been consumed in a civil explanation.
Cairness dropped him and went into the corrals to see for himself. The
fire roared and hissed, flung charred wood into the air, and let it fall
back again. He remembered, in an inconsequent flash, how one night in
the South Pacific he had taken a very pretty girl below to see the
engines. They had stood in the stoke-hole on a heap of coal, hand in
hand, down beneath the motion of the decks where the only movement
seemed to be the jar of the screw working against the thrust block and
the reverberation of the connecting-rod and engines. A luckless,
dust-caked wretch of a stoker had thrown open the door of a furnace in
front of them, and they had seen the roaring, sputtering, seething whirl
of fire within. They had given a simultaneous cry, hiding their scorched
faces in their arms, and stumbled blindly over the coal beds back to the
clattering of the engine rooms.
It had all been very like this, only that this was a little worse, for
there were half a dozen dead animals lying across the stalls, and others
were being shot. The pistols snapped sharply, and the smell of powder
was more pungent than all the other smells.
He passed an officer who had a smoking six-shooter in his hand, and
yelled in his ear, "Why are you doing that?" He had forgotten that it
was by no means his place to question.
"Been hamstrung," the officer bawled back hoarsely.
In the end stall the bronco was still squealing and whimpering in an
almost human key. He struck it on the flank with his open palm and
spoke, "Get over there." It had been made so much of a pet, and had
been so constantly with him, that it was more intelligent than the
average of its kind. It got over and stood quiet and still, trembling.
He cut the halter close to the knot, turned it out of the stall, and
flinging himself across its back dug his heels into its belly.
Just for a moment it hesitated, then started with the bronco spring,
jumping the dead mules, shying from right to left and back again, and
going out through the gates at a run. Cairness held on with his knees as
he had learned to do when he had played at stock-rider around Katâwa and
Glen Lomond in the days of his boyhood, as he had done since with the
recruits at hurdle drill, or when he had chased a fleet heifer across
the prairie and had had no time to saddle. He could keep his seat, no
fear concerning that, but it was all he could do. The pony was not to be
stopped. He had only what was left of the halter shank by way of a
bridle, and it was none at all. A Mexican knife bit would hardly have
availed.
They tore on, away from the noise of the flames, of the falling timber
and the shouted commands, around the haystacks so close to the
barbed-wire fence that the barbs cut his boot, off by the back of the
quarters, and then upon the road that led from the reservation. If the
pony could be kept on that road, there was small danger from dog holes.
He would run himself out in time. The length of time was what was
uncertain, however. A cow-pony can go a good many hours at a stretch.
Cairness sat more erect, and settled down to wait. The motion was so
swift that he hardly felt it. He turned his head and looked back at the
flaming corrals, and, remembering the dead animals, wondered who had
hamstrung them. Then he peered forward again the little way he could see
along the road, and began to make out that there was some one ahead of
him. Whoever it was scurrying ahead there, bent almost double in his
speed, was the one who had hamstrung the mules and horses, and who had
set fire to the corrals. The pony was rather more under control now. It
could be guided by the halter shank.
The man, still running, dodged from the road and started across country.
Cairness wheeled and followed him. It was open ground, with not so much
as a scrub oak or a rock in sight. The thick darkness offered the only
chance of escape. But Cairness had chased yearlings in nights as black,
and had brought them back to the herd. Down by the creek where the trees
were thick, there would have been a good chance for escape, almost a
certainty indeed, but there was little here. The man dodged again. It
was just to that very thing that the pony had been trained. Habit got
the better of stampede with it. It, too, dodged sharply.
Cairness leaned far over and made a grab, but the first time he missed.
The second he caught the neckerchief and held it, dragging the man, who
resisted with all his giant strength, digging his toes into the ground
as they tore along. And he was heavy. Cairness had no stirrup or pommel
to trust to. He saw that it was a case of falling or of leaving go, and
he decided to fall. The man would go underneath anyway.
The man did go underneath and bravely offered resistance. Cairness had
the twofold strength of his wiry build and of his bull-dog race. But
Lawton--he knew it was Lawton now--would have been stronger yet, save
that the three weeks' spree had told, and he was breathless.
Cairness sat across him and held a revolver to his mouth. The life of
the plains teaches agility of various sorts, but chiefly in the matter
of drawing a six-shooter. "You fired the corrals," Cairness gasped.
The fall had knocked the breath from his body. The under dog did not
answer.
"And you hamstrung those horses."
No answer still.
"Why did you do it?"
No answer.
"I'll break your jaws if you don't open them." The jaws opened
forthwith, but no sound came, and Lawton struggled feebly.
It occurred to Cairness then that with no breath in your lungs and with
twelve stone on your chest, speech is difficult. He slid off and knelt
beside the rancher, still with the revolver levelled. "Now, why did you
do it, eh?" He enforced the "eh" with a shake.
"I dunno. I didn't."
"Didn't you, then? You did, though, and you can go back with me till we
find out why. Give me your firearms. Lively!"
Lawton produced a brace of revolvers.
"And your knife."
He handed it over also.
"Now you get up and walk in front of me, and don't you try to bolt. I
can run faster than you can, and, anyway, I'll shoot you if you try it."
Lawton moved ahead a few steps; then he began to cry, loudly,
blubbering, his nerves gone all to shreds. He implored and pleaded and
wailed. He hadn't known what he was doing. He had been drunk. They had
treated him badly about the beef contract. Stone had gone back on him.
The oaths that he sobbed forth were not new to Cairness, but they were
very ugly.
"Cheese that cussing, do you hear?" he ordered.
Lawton stopped. To forbid him swearing was to forbid him speech. He
shuffled ahead in silence.
When Cairness got him to the post and turned him over to the
officer-of-the-day, the fire had burned itself out and quiet was
settling down again. Big warm drops were beginning to splash from the
clouds.
The officer-of-the-day put Lawton into the care of the guard and asked
Cairness in to have a drink, calling him "my good man." Cairness was
properly aware of the condescension involved in being asked into an
officer's dining room, but he objected to being condescended to by a man
who doubled his negatives, and he refused.
"Is there anything, then, that I can do for you? the officer asked. His
intentions were good; Cairness was bound to realize that, too.
"Yes, sir," he answered; "you can see that I get a mounted man and a
horse at reveille to-morrow. I want to hunt for my pony. I lost it when
I caught that man."
The officer-of-the-day agreed. And Cairness, not having a hat to raise,
forgot himself and saluted. Then he went back to the sutler's through
the already pelting rain. He was glad he had caught Lawton, mainly
because of what he hoped to get out of him yet, about the Kirby affair.
But he was sorry for the big clumsy fool, too. He had been an
easy-going, well-intentioned boss in the days when Cairness had been his
hand. And, too, he was sorry, very sorry, about the pony. If it were to
fall into the hands of Mexicans or even of some of the Mescalero
Indians, his chances of seeing it again would be slight. And he was fond
of it, mainly because it had helped him to save Mrs. Landor's life.