Twenty-four hours from Alder to Elkhead, and beyond Elkhead to the
Cumberland ranch, is long riding and hard riding, but not far after dark
on the following night, Joan lifted her head, where she played with the
puppy on the hearth, and listened. There was no sound audible to the
others in the living room; they did not even mark the manner in which
she sat up, and then rose to her feet. But when she whispered “Daddy
Dan!” it brought each of the three out of his chair. Still they heard
nothing, and Buck and Lee Haines would have retaken their chairs had not
Kate gone to the window and thrown it wide. Then they caught it, very
far off, very thin and small, a delicate thread of music, an eerie
whistling. Without a word, she closed the window, crossed the room and
from the table she took up a cartridge belt from which hung the holster
with the revolver which Whistling Dan taught her to use so well. She
buckled it about her. Lee Haines and Daniels, without a word, imitated
her actions. Their guns were already on--every moment since they reached
the ranch they had gone armed but now they looked to them, and tried the
actions a few times before they thrust them back into the holsters.
It was odd to watch them. They were like the last remnant of a garrison,
outworn with fighting, which prepares in grim quiet for the final stand.
The whistling rose a little in volume now. It was a happy sound, without
a recognizable tune, but a gay, wild improvisation as if a violinist,
drunk, was remembering snatches of masterpieces, throwing out lovely
fragments here and there and filling the intervals out of his own
excited fancy. Joan ran to the window, forgetful of the puppy, and
kneeled there in the chair, looking out. The whistling stopped as Kate
drew down the curtain to cut out Joan's view. It was far too dark for
the child to see out, but she often would sit like this, looking into
the dark.
The whistling began again as Joan turned silently on her mother,
uncomplaining, but with a singular glint in her eyes, a sort of
flickering, inward light that came out by glances and starts. Now the
sound of the rider blew closer and closer. Kate gestured the men to
their positions, one for each of the two inner doors while she herself
took the outer one. There was not a trace of color in her face, but
otherwise she was as calm as a stone, and from her an atmosphere
pervaded the room, so that men also stood quietly at their posts,
without a word, without a sign to each other. They had their unspoken
order from Kate. She would resist to the death and she expected the same
from them. They were prepared.
Still that crescendo of the whistling continued; it seemed as if it
would never reach them; it grew loud as a bird singing in that very
room, and still it continued to swell, increase--then suddenly went
out. As if it were the signal for which she had been waiting all these
heartbreaking moments, Kate opened the front door, ran quickly down the
hall, and stood an instant later on the path in front of the house. She
had locked the doors as she went through, and now she heard one of the
men rattling the lock to follow her. The rattling ceased. Evidently they
decided that they would hold the fort as they were.
Her heel hardly sank in the sand when she saw him. He came out of the
night like a black shadow among shadows, with the speed of the wind
to carry him. A light creak of leather as he halted, a glimmer of star
light on Satan as he wheeled, a clink of steel, and then Dan was coming
up the path.
She knew him perfectly even before she could make out the details of the
form; she knew him by the light, swift, almost noiseless step, like
the padding footfall of a great cat--a sense of weight without sound.
Another form skulked behind him--Black Bart.
He was close, very close, before he stopped, or seemed to see her,
though she felt that he must have been aware of her since he first rode
up. He was so close, indeed, that the starlight--the brim of his hat
standing up somewhat from the swift riding--showed his face quite
clearly to her. It was boyish, almost, in its extreme youth, and so
thinly molded, and his frame so lightly made, that he seemed one risen
from a wasting bed of sickness. The wind fluttered his shirt and she
wondered, as she had wondered so often before, where he gained that
incredible strength in so meager a body. In all her life she had never
loved him as she loved him now. But her mind was as fixed as a star.
“You can't have her, Dan. You can't have her! Don't you see how terrible
a thing you'd make her? She's my blood, my pain, my love, and you want
to take her up yonder to the mountains and the loneliness--I'll die to
keep her!”
Now the moon, which had been buried in a drift of clouds, broke through
them, and seemed in an instant to slide a vast distance towards the
earth, a crooked half moon with its edges eaten by the mist. Under this
light she could see him more clearly, and she became aware of the thing
she dreaded, the faint smile which barely touched at the corners of his
mouth; and in his eyes a swirl of yellow light, half guessed at, half
real. All her strength poured out of her. She felt her knees buckle,
felt the fingers about the light revolver butt relax, felt every nerve
grow slack. She was helpless, and it was not fear of the man, but of
something which stalked behind him, inhuman, irresistible; not the
wolf-dog, but something more than Satan, and Bart, and Whistling Dan,
something of which they were only a part.
He began to whistle, thoughtfully, like one who considers a plan of
action and yet hesitates to begin. She felt his eyes run over her, as
if judging how he should put her most gently to one side; then from the
house, very lightly, hardly more than an echo of Dan's whistling, came
an answer--the very same refrain. Joan was calling to him.
At that he stepped forward, but the thing which stirred him, had
hardened the mind of Kate. The weakness passed in a flash. It was Joan,
and for Joan!
“Not a step!” she whispered, and jerked out her gun. “Not a step!”
He stood with one hand trailing carelessly from his hip, and at the
gleam of her steel his other hand dropped to a holster, fumbled there,
and came away empty; he could not touch her, not with the weight of
a finger. That thoughtful whistle came again: once more the answering
whistle drifted out from the house; and he moved forward another pace.
She had chosen her mark carefully, the upper corner of the seam of the
pocket upon his shirt, and before his foot struck the ground she fired.
For an instant she felt that she missed the mark, for he stood perfectly
upright, but when she saw that the yellow was gone from his eyes. They
were empty of everything except a great wonder. He wavered to his knees,
and then sank down with his arms around Black Bart. He seemed, indeed,
to crumple away into the night. Then she heard a shouting and trampling
in the house, and a breaking open of doors, and she knew that she had
killed Whistling Dan. She would have gone to him, but the snarl of Bart
drove her back. Then she saw Satan galloping up the path and come to a
sliding halt where he stood with his delicate nose close to the face of
the master. There was no struggle with death, only a sigh like a motion
of wind in far off trees, and then, softly, easily Black Bart extricated
himself from the master, and moved away down the path, all wolf, all
wild. Behind him, Satan whirled with a snort, and they rushed away into
the night each in an opposite direction. The long companionship of the
three was ended, and the seventh man was dead for Grey Molly.
Lee Haines and Buck Daniels were around her now. She heard nothing
distinctly, only a great, vague clamor of voices while she kneeled and
turned the body of Barry on its back. It was marvelously light; she
could almost have picked it up in her arms, she felt. She folded the
hands across his breast, and the limp fingers were delicate as the
fingers of a sick child. Buck Daniels lay prone by the dead man weeping
aloud; and Lee Haines stood with his face buried in his hands; but there
was no tear on the face of Kate.
As she closed the eyes, the empty, hollow eyes, she heard a distant
calling, a hoarse and dissonant chiming. She looked up and saw a wedge
of wild geese flying low across the moon.