Every experience through which Lynette Brooke had gone until now
seemed suddenly dwarfed into insignificance by the present. She was
so utterly wearied out physically that muscles all over her body,
demanding their hour of relaxation and having that relaxation denied
them through the nervous stress laid upon her, quivered piteously.
Hers was that frame of mind which distorts and magnifies, whipping out
of its true semblance all actual conditions or building them up into
monstrous, grotesque shapes. She was afraid of that great, staring dog
on the threshold; more afraid of him than she had ever been of any
man, Thor's master not excepted. For here was a fear which she could
not throttle down. She would have sighed in content and have gone
to sleep, her turbulent emotions quieted, if only it had been Bruce
Standing's hard hand on the chain denying her her liberty instead of
a great dog lying across the door-step.... Enough here to make her
clinch her teeth to hold back a scream of panic-swept nerves; yet this
was not all. For still that cry, heard through the woods, rang in her
ears; still she built up in the picture which her quick fancy limned
the vision of Mexicali Joe at the mercy of merciless men; Joe, who had
lied to them, hoping to deliver them into the hands of one greater than
they; Joe, who at the end, with them demanding to see what he had to
show them, must be driven to the last extremity to fight for time....
And, blurring everything else at times, there swept over her another
picture; that of Timber-Wolf, wounded and white-faced, stalking in that
fearless way of his among them, confronting three armed men ... or
four?... and then man-killing.... They were all wolves! She shuddered.
And Thor, watching her, filled the quiet cabin with the sound of his
low suspicious growling.
"Thor!" she called him, hardly above a whisper. Her lips were dry.
"Good old Thor!"
His throaty rumble of a growl, telling her of his distrust as
eloquently as it could have done had Thor the words of man at his
command, was her answer.
"Thor!" She called him again, her voice soft, pleading, coaxing. Then
she lifted herself a few inches on her elbow; like a flash Thor was up
on his haunches, his growl became a snarl, a quick glint of his teeth
showing, a sharp-pointed gleam of menace.
Yet Lynette held her position, steady upon her elbow; she had never
known a tenser moment. Her throat contracted with her fear; and yet she
kept telling herself stubbornly that yonder was but a dog, a thing of
only brute intelligence, while she had the human brain to oppose him
with; that, some way, she could outwit him. So she did not lie back; to
do so would, she felt, show Thor that she was afraid of him. She made
no further forward movement but she held what she had been suffered to
gain.
And then she set herself to dominate Thor, a wolf-like dog. She spoke
to him; but first she waited until she could be sure of her voice. That
brute instinct of Thor's would know the slightest quaver of fear when
he heard it. She controlled herself and her voice; she made her tones
low and soft and gentle; she kept them firm. She told herself: "Thor is
but doing his master's bidding because he loves his master! I'll make
him love me! He distrusts.... I'll make him trust instead!" And all the
while she kept her own eyes steady upon Thor's.
"Thor!" she said quietly. And again: "Thor. Good old Thor. Good old
dog!"
... Thor had set her down as an enemy; his master's enemy; his master
had commanded him: "Watch her, Thor!" Thor's knowledge was not wide;
yet what he knew he did know thoroughly. And yet Thor had had no
evidence, beyond that offered by a chain, of any open enmity between
his master and this captive; master and girl had travelled all day long
together and neither had flown at the other's throat. More than that,
it had been at the master's own command this very morning that Thor had
felt her hand upon his head; a hand as light as a falling leaf. And now
she spoke to him in his master's own words, but with such a different
voice, calling him Thor, good old dog....
It was a soothing voice, a voice made for tender caresses. She spoke
again and again and again. And she was not afraid; Thor could see no
flickering sign of fear in her. A voice softer than had been the touch
of her hand.
"Thor!" she called him. And his growl was scarcely more growl than
whine. For Thor, before Bruce Standing had been gone twenty minutes,
was growing uncertain. Lynette had had dogs of her own; she knew the
ways of dogs, and in this she had the advantage, since Thor knew
nothing of the ways of women nor of their guile. The dog was restless;
his eyes, upon hers, were no longer so steady. Now and then Thor shook
his head and his eyes wandered.
"Thor," said Lynette, and now, though her voice, as before, was low and
gentle, there was the note of command in it, "lie down!"
There was an experiment ... and it failed. Thor was on four feet in a
flash; his growl was unmistakable now; the snarling note came back into
it threateningly. She thought that he was going to fly at her throat....
Yet already was the lesser intelligence, though coupled with the
greater physical power, confused.
Lynette moved slowly; she put her hands up above her head and stretched
out her arms and yawned; Thor growled, but there was little threat in
the growl; just suspicion. Again she moved slowly; close enough, in
the restricted area embraced by the cabin walls, was the table; on it
some morsels of food left from their dinner. Without rising from the
bunk, she reached the tin plate; she took it up, all the while moving
with unhastening slowness. Thor's eyes followed her straying hand; Thor
had been fed, and yet the dog's capacity for food was enormous. He
understood the meaning of her gesture; his eyes hungered.
She dropped the plate to the floor but, before it struck, not three
feet in front of the dog, she cried out sharply, her voice ringing, her
command at last emphatic:
"No, Thor! No! No, I tell you!"
Had she offered the dog the food she would have but awaked within him a
new and violent distrust; he was not so easily to be tricked. But when
she tossed before him something that he was slavering for, and then
laid her command upon him to hold back, she achieved something over
him; he would have held back in any case, but now he held back at her
command.
"Watch it, Thor!" she cried out loudly. "Watch it, sir!"
The big dog stared at her; at the fallen morsels; back at her, plainly
at loss. And then again, more sharply, she commanded him:
"Watch it, Thor!... Lie down, Thor!"
And Thor, though he growled, lay down.... And his wolfish eyes now were
upon the plate and its spilled contents rather than upon her.
"If I can but have time!" Lynette was telling herself excitedly. "If
only I can have time ... I can make that dog do what I say to do!...
God, give me time!"
When Bruce Standing, rushing through the forest land, came upon
them ... Taggart and the others ... they were grouped about a
despairing, hopeless Mexicali Joe. For Mexicali Joe's _amigo_, the
great Timber-Wolf, in whom next to God he put all trust, had failed
him. And Joe had come to the end of his tether, the end of lies and
excuses and empty explanations. And now Taggart, as brutal a man as
ever wore the badge of the law, was impatient, and meant to make an
end of all procrastinations. It was his intention to give Mexicali Joe
such a "third degree" as never any man had lived to experience before
to-night. Rage, chagrin, disappointment, and natural, innate brutality
spurred him on. Even Young Gallup, who was no chicken-hearted man at
best, demurred; but Taggart cursed him off and told him to hold his
tongue, and planned matters to his own liking.
"Jim Taggart's got Injun blood in him, you know," muttered Gallup
uneasily to Cliff Shipton ... as though that might explain anything.
Even to such as Young Gallup, a man of whose humanity little was to
be said, explanations were logical requirements. For Jim Taggart was
at his evil worst. With cruelly hard fist he had knocked the little
Mexican down; before Joe could get to his feet he booted him; when Joe
stood, tottering, Taggart knocked him down again, jarring the quivering
flame of life within him. And only at that did Jim Taggart, a man of
no imagination but of colossal brutality, count that he was beginning.
Then it was that Joe cried out; that his scream pierced through the
night's stillness; that he pleaded with Taggart, saying:
"This time, I tell you the true! I tell you ever'thing...."
"You're damned right you will," shouted Taggart, beside himself with
his long baffled rage. "When I get good and ready to listen. And I'm
not listening now, you Mexico pup! First you go through hell, and then
I'll know that you tell the truth! Fool with me, would you; with me,
Jim Taggart? You----"
Then Taggart began his third degree, listening to neither Joe's
pleadings nor yet to the voice of Young Gallup.
The four men were in Bruce Standing's old cabin; the door was wide
open, since here, so far from the world, in the dense outer fringes of
Timber-Wolf's isolated wilderness kingdom, no man of them ... saving
Joe alone, who had now given up hope ... had a thought of another human
eye to see; Shipton, at a curt word from Taggart, had piled the mouth
of the fireplace full of dead-wood, for the sole sake of light, and it
was hot in the small room. Taggart had bound the Mexican's hands behind
him, drawing the thong so tight that it cut cruelly into the flesh....
Taggart had knocked Joe down and had booted him to his heart's content;
the swarthy face had turned a sick white. Taggart's eyes were glowing
like coals raked out from hell's own sulphurous fires; he was sure of
the outcome, sure of swift success, and yet now, in pure fiendishness,
more absorbed in his own unleashed deviltry than in the mere matter of
raw gold, which he counted securely his as soon as he was ready for it.
Whether or not Indian blood ran in his veins, elemental savagery did.
Mexicali Joe, unable to rise, or in fear for his life if he stirred,
lay on the floor, his eyes dilated with terror, staring up into
Taggart's convulsed face.
"I tell you the true!" he screamed. "This time, before God, I tell----"
"Shut up, you greaser-dog!" Taggart, a man of full measure, kicked him,
and under the driving pain inflicted by that heavy boot, Joe's eyes
flickered and closed, and Joe's brain staggered upon the dizzy black
verge of unconsciousness. Taggart saw and understood and pitched a
dipperful of water in his face. Joe gasped faintly. Taggart stepped to
the fireplace, and snatched out a blazing pine branch.
"I've put my brand on more'n one treacherous dog!" he jeered. "You'll
find my stock running across the wild places in seven States! Here's
where I plant the sign of the cross on you, Mexico! Right square
between the eyes!"
Suddenly he thrust the burning brand toward Joe's forehead. Joe cried
out in terror:
"For the love of God!..." His two hands were behind him, but,
galvanized, he fought the pine fagot with his whole body. He strove to
thrust it aside; he fought against his weakness to roll over; Taggart's
heavy foot was in his middle, holding him down; the burning branch in
Taggart's heavy hands was as steady as a steel rod set in concrete;
Joe's threshing panic disturbed it scarcely more than the wind would
have done.... Another scream, shrilling through the night; the smell
of burnt flesh; a red wound on Joe's forehead; Taggart's ugly laugh;
and then suddenly, from just without the open doorway, a terrible shout
from Bruce Standing, and then, in two seconds, Bruce Standing's great
bulk among them.
"My God!" roared Standing. "_My God!_ ... You, Jim Taggart!..."
Shipton's rifle stood in a corner; Shipton, as lithe as a cat, leaped
for it. Gallup's was in his hand; he whipped it to his shoulder.
Taggart for one instant was stupefied; then he swept high above
his head the smoke-emitting, redly glowing pine limb. Joe, weeping
hysterically, writhing on the floor, was gasping: "_Jesus Maria!_" ...
God had heard his prayers; God and Bruce Standing.
But in to-night's game of hazard it was Timber-Wolf who chose to
shuffle, cut, and deal the cards; his rifle was in his hands; it
required but the gentlest touch of his finger to send any man of them
to his last repose. His eyes, the roving eyes of rage, were everywhere
at once.
"I'd kill you, Taggart, and be glad of the chanth! You, too, Gallup!
Drop that gun!"
First of them all, it was Cliff Shipton who came to the motionless halt
of shocked consternation; he lifted his hands, his face blanched; he
tried to speak, and only succeeded in making the noise of air gushing
through dry lips. Gallup stopped midway in his purpose of firing, for
Timber Wolf's rifle barrel was trained square upon his chest; at the
look in Standing's eye and the timbre of his voice, Gallup's gun fell
clattering to the floor. Taggart mouthed and cursed, and slowly let his
blazing fagot sink toward the floor.
For every man of them knew Timber-Wolf well; and they knew that
incongruous _lisping_ which surprised him and mastered his utterance
only when his rage was of the greatest. When Timber-Wolf lisped it was
because such a fiery storm raged through his breast as to make of him a
man who would kill and kill and kill and glory in the killing.
"And I'd have given a million dollars to thee any man of you put up a
fight!" he was saying harshly. "God, what a thet of cowardly curth! And
you, Jim Taggart, I onth had for bunk-mate and onth thought a man!"
He reached out suddenly, and with his bare, open palm slapped Taggart's
face; and Taggart staggered backward under the blow until his thick
shoulders brought up against the wall with such a thud that the cabin
shuddered under the impact.
"Get up, Joe!" growled Standing. "You're another yellow dog, but ...
get up and come here!"
Joe scrambled to his feet and came hurrying. Standing kept his rifle in
his right hand. Using his left stiffly, he got out his knife and cut
the Mexican's bonds.
"Go!" he cried savagely. "While you've got legth under you! And thith
time keep clear, or hell take you! I'm through with you ... you make me
thick!..."
Mexicali Joe, with one last frightened look over his shoulder, fled;
they heard his running feet outside. He was jabbering unintelligibly as
he fled: "_Señor Caballero!_ ... _Dios!_ ... those devils!..."
Joe was gone. Bruce Standing's work was done. He looked grim and
implacable, a man of iron heated in the red-hot furnace of rage. He
yearned for Taggart to make a move; or for Gallup. Shipton, as a lesser
cur, he ignored.
They saw how white, as white as a clean sheet of paper, his face was;
they did not fully understand why, since a man's face, when he is in a
terrible rage, may whiten, as an effect of the searing emotion; they
did not know how he had driven his wounded body all day long nor how
sore his wound was. They could not guess that even now he was holding
himself upright and towering among them through the fierce bending of
his indomitable will. That same will he bent terribly for clean-cut
articulation.
"Taggart!" he said, and his voice rang as clear as the striking of an
iron hammer upon a resounding anvil. "I'll tempt you to be a man such
as you _once_ were, before you went yellow clean through ... and I'll
show you, your _self_, how dirty a yellow you've gone! Pick up Young
Gallup's rifle!"
Taggart glared at him and muttered and hesitated, tugged one way
by hatred and the madness of wrath, tugged the other way by his
fear of the certainty of death. Lights, bluish lights, flickered in
Timber-Wolf's eyes. He said again:
"Pick up that rifle! Other_wise_, in _less_ than ten _sec_onds you are
a dead man!"
Taggart's face was red when Standing began to speak; ashen by the last
word. Nervously and in great haste he stooped and caught up the gun.
"You've got your _chance_, Jim Taggart! Your last _chance_! To fight
it out, or say, for _these_ men to hear: 'I'm a dirty yellow dog!' If
you're game we'll fight it out. I'll give you an even break; and we'll
kill each other!"
Taggart held the rifle, not lifted quite to his waist; his hands were
rigid upon it and did not tremble. He was not a coward; on many an
occasion, when he had borne his sheriff's badge recklessly through
violence, he had shown himself a brave man. He knew now that it lay
within his power, if he were quick and sure, to kill Bruce Standing,
whom he had come to hate, so that his hatred was like a running sore.
And he knew, too, that killing, he would be killed. If it were any man
on earth whom he confronted save Bruce Standing....
So he hesitated, for brave man as Jim Taggart always was, he was a man
who did not want to die. And Standing laughed at him and said:
"You've had your chance; you still have it. Now, fight it out or tuck
your tail between your legs and do my bidding! And my bidding to you,
so that I needn't expect a bullet in the back when I leave you, is to
smash that rifle into flinders against the rock chimney. _And step
lively!_"
The last words came sharp and sudden, and Taggart started. And then,
hesitating no longer, he whirled the rifle up by the barrel and brought
it with all his might crashing against the fireplace; the fragments
fell from his tingling fingers. And again Standing laughed at him and
again commanded him, saying:
"There are two more rifles; do the same for each one! And remember, Jim
Taggart, every time you touch a gun you've got the even break to fight
it out; and every time you smash a gun you are saying out loud: 'I'm a
dirty yellow dog!' _Only make it snappy, Jim Taggart!_"
One after the other, and hastily, Jim Taggart smashed the butts off
two rifles and jammed trigger and trigger-guard so that from firearms
the weapons were resolved into the estate of so much scrap-iron and
splintered wood.
"I'll take your two toy guns, Jim," said Standing. "And remember this;
at short range the man with the revolver has the edge! When you drag
a gun out you've got your chance to come up shooting! Don't overlook
that! And remember along with it, that when you hand me a gun, butt-end
first, you are saying aloud for the world to hear: 'I'm a dirty yellow
dog!'"
"By God...."
"Yes, Jim Taggart, ... by God, you're a dirty dog!"
Lingeringly Taggart drew forth the heavy side-arms dragging at his
holsters; all the while he was tempted almost beyond resistance to
avail himself of his opportunity and of that quick sure skill of his;
to shoot from the hip, as he could do with the swiftness of a flash
of the wrist; he could shoot and kill. And within his heart, knowing
Bruce Standing as he did, he knew, too, that though he shot true to a
hair line, none the less, Bruce Standing would kill him.... He gave a
gun into Standing's left hand and saw it thrust into his belt. Then
was Taggart's time to snatch out his other weapon and drill that hole
through the big body in front of him which would surely let the life
run out; now was his chance, while for an instant one of Standing's
hands was busy at his belt!... If it had been any other man in the
world there confronting him! Any man but Bruce Standing! Jim Taggart
was near weeping. But he drew out his second revolver and saw it
bestowed as its fellow had been.
"Four times you've said it, plainer than words!" cried Standing
ringingly. "Gallup will never forget; and he'll tell the tale! Shipton
will remember and will blab! And, what's worse for the soul of a man,
Jim Taggart, you'll remember to the last day you live!... And now you
three can consider yourselves as so many mongrel curs whose back-biting
teeth I've knocked down your throats for you! I'll leave you to your
growlings and whinings!"
He swung about and went out. He knew both Gallup and Shipton, knew
them and their habits well, and knew that neither man had the habit
of carrying a pistol. Further, their coats were off, and he had seen
that neither had a holster at his belt. So he turned his back on them
to emphasize his contempt and did not turn his head as he plunged
into the outside night and into the thick dark under the trees, going
back to his hidden cabin and Lynette and Thor. He realized that he
himself, despite a herculean physique, was near the tether's end of his
endurance; he realized that Lynette was also heavily borne down by all
that she, a girl, had gone through and that he had left her overlong
with his wolfish dog.
What he could not know was that a revolver which had once already
shot him in the back had followed him all these miles through the
wilderness and was now lying on the bunk in the cabin he had just
quitted; he could not know how, at the Gallup House after Babe Deveril
had flung it in Taggart's face, Lynette's pistol had lain there on the
floor until Taggart had been aroused to consciousness; nor how Gallup
had picked it up, nor how Taggart had muttered: "Save it, Young. It
may come in handy for evidence in court." Gallup had stuck it into his
pocket; he had brought it with him; he had tossed it down among the
blankets....
Taggart stared after him with terrible eyes; Taggart remembered and,
when he dared, flung himself across the room, snatching for it among
the covers. Standing, hastening, strode on. Taggart found the weapon;
he ran out of the cabin with it in his hand; dodged to one side of
the open door to be out of way of the firelight. Standing hurried on,
he had not seen Taggart; Taggart could scarcely see him, could but
make out vaguely a blur where he heard heavy footfalls.... It was all
chance; but now no longer was Taggart himself running the desperate
chances. He fired, one shot after another, until he emptied the little
gun--four shots altogether; the hammer clicked down on the fifth, the
empty shell.
Chance, pure chance; and yet chance is ironical and loves its own grim
jest. The first bullet, the only one of them all to find its target,
struck Timber-Wolf. And it was as though this questing bit of lead were
seeking to tread the same path blazed by its angry brother down at the
Gallup House in Big Pine. For it, like the other from the same muzzle,
struck him from behind; and it, too, struck him upon the left side, in
the outer shoulder, not half a dozen inches from the spot where he had
been shot before....
Standing staggered and caught his breath with a grunt; he lurched into
a tree and stood leaning against it. For a moment he was dizzied and
could not see clearly. Then, turning, he made out the cabin behind
him; the bright rectangle of the door; two dark running forms leaping
through it, gone into the gulf of the black night. He jerked up his
rifle, holding it in one hand, unsupported by the other, his shoulder,
the right, against the tree. But they were gone before he could shoot.
He waited. He heard a breaking through brush; men running. They were
running away! They did not know that they had hit him; they could not
tell, and they were afraid of his return! He lifted his voice and
shouted at them in the sudden grip of a terrible anger. He listened
to the noise they made and strove to judge their positions and began
shooting after them. He fired until the rifle clip was empty. Then,
while awkwardly, with one hand, he put in a fresh clip, he listened
again. Silence only.
... He was strangely weak and uncertain; he had to draw his brows down
with a steely effort to clear his thoughts. They were gone ... they
would not come back ... it was too dark to look for them. And he had
left that girl overlong ... and he was shot full of pain. A surge of
anger for every surge of weakness....
He started on toward his hidden cabin and Lynette. He blundered into a
tree. He could feel the hot blood down his shoulder. He began using his
rifle as a man may use a cane, leaning on it heavily.