Mountain Storms Read online

  HUNTED

  Tom scanned the plain eagerly right and left, but over the rolling ground, now white with moonshine, he saw no dark forms of hurrying horsemen. He let his weary horse continue at the same pace. Then, from a slight elevation, he caught sight of the wide, bright body of the river flowing through the distance ahead of him. They could swim that to safety.

  But, as he sent Sideways ahead at a slightly freshened pace, a change of the wind brought an ominous sound to his ear. He swung sharply about, and he saw, streaking across the crest of a low knoll, a compact body of half a dozen mounted men, aimed at him at full speed. Even if he gained the water, they could riddle him with bullets.

  Other Leisure books by Max Brand ®:

  THE RANGE FINDER

  THE GOLDEN CAT

  PETER BLUE

  MORE TALES OF THE WILD WEST

  FLAMING FORTUNE

  THE RUNAWAYS

  BLUE KINGDOM

  JOKERS EXTRA WILD

  CRUSADER

  SMOKING GUNS

  THE LONE RIDER

  THE UNTAMED WEST (Anthology)

  THE TYRANT

  THE WELDING QUIRT

  THE BRIGHT FACE OF DANGER

  DON DIABLO

  THE OUTLAW REDEEMER

  THE GOLD TRAIL

  THE PERIL TREK

  THE MASTERMAN

  TIMBER LINE

  THE OVERLAND KID

  THE HOUSE OF GOLD

  THE GERALDI TRAIL

  GUNMAN’S GOAL

  CHINOOK

  IN THE HILLS OF MONTEREY

  THE LOST VALLEY

  THE FUGITIVE’S MISSION

  THE SURVIVAL OF JUAN ORO

  THE GAUNTLET

  STOLEN GOLD

  THE WOLF STRAIN

  MEN BEYOND THE LAW

  BEYOND THE OUTPOSTS

  THE STONE THAT SHINES

  THE OATH OF OFFICE

  DUST ACROSS THE RANGE/THE CROSS BRAND

  THE ROCK OF KIEVER

  SOFT METAL

  THUNDER MOON AND THE SKY PEOPLE

  RED WIND AND THUNDER MOON

  THE LEGEND OF THUNDER MOON

  THE QUEST OF LEE GARRISON

  SAFETY Mc TEE

  TWO SIXES

  SIXTEEN IN NOME

  MAX

  BRAND®

  MOUNTAIN

  STORMS

  Dorchester

  Publishing

  DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

  Published by special arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency.

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2004 by Golden West Literary Agency

  “Wild Freedom” first appeared as a six-part serial under the George Owen Baxter byline in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine (11/11/22–12/16/22). Copyright © 1922 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1950 by Dorothy Faust. Copyright © 2004 by Golden West Literary Agency for restored material. Acknowledgment is made to Condé Nast Publications, Inc., for their cooperation.

  The name Max Brand ® is a registered trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and cannot be used for any purpose without express written permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Trade ISBN: 978-1-4285-1862-9

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-4285-0333-5

  First Dorchester Publishing, Co., Inc. edition: November 2006

  The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  MOUNTAIN

  STORMS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHERE DANGER STALKS

  No seasoned mountaineer would have tried to cross the mountain range encumbered as John Parks was, and with the cloud streamers blown out stiffly from the summits and snapping off little fleecy bits that the wind hurried across the sky. Even in the lowlands the norther had spread an Arctic chill, and the bald heights must be insufferably cold. To be sure, the trip would have been practicable enough to warmly dressed, active men, but the little burro would slow the pace of the journey to a dreary crawl, and, besides, there was Tommy to think of. Hardened far beyond city children by this three years in the mountains, still, at twelve, there is a marked limit to a boy’s endurance. He was already fagged by the journey, for, although they had come only ten miles since morning, it had been bitter work for Tommy up and down the hills, and it might be ten miles more across the summits and down to shelter on the farther side.

  John Parks consulted his son.

  “We could camp over yonder, Tommy,” he said. “You see that little hollow with the pines standing around it?”

  Tommy looked, and his heart went out to the circle among the trees as though the night had already closed and the evergreens were full of shine and shadow from a fire built in their midst.

  “But,” went on John Parks, “it’s not far past noon, and just over that next crest is the place.”

  He lifted his gaunt face with that strange smile that Tommy knew so well. All his life he had seen his father looking far off from the sorrows of every day to a bright tomorrow.

  “So what do you think, Tommy?” John Parks asked, resting his hand on the shoulder of his son. “Do you think we could make it without tiring you out?”

  The wind stooped against them and passed an icy thrill through the body of the boy, but, when he looked up, he found the smile still on his father’s face as though he heard already the far-off murmur of the Turnbull River. What a weary way they had come to find that promised land.

  “Oh,” he said, “I can make it, Dad. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  The hand closed on his shoulder.

  “Ah, you’re a tough fellow, Tommy,” said John Parks. “We’ll try it, then.”
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  They trudged on, the burro grunting and switching his tail before them. They climbed 2,000 feet in three miles with the trees dwindling and dwarfing until they came to a waist-high hedge of lodgepole pine, willow, and tough shrubs at timberline, a hedge shaved level across the top by the edge of storm winds, running in and out along the mountainsides at one height like the verge of green water. Above was the bald region of the summit. The sun had melted the surface snow; the wind had frozen it again, and now it blazed like glass. That was poor footing for the climb. Even the burro, as it pressed out from the thicket, shrank with a tentative hoof. Moreover, the wind now leaped into their faces. It flattened the burro’s ears and drove his tail straight out. Tommy looked up in dismay, but John Parks shook a bony hand above his head.

  “They can’t beat us, Tommy!” he shouted. “It takes more than wind and weather to beat us!”

  “No, Dad, we’ll make it,” Tommy tried to say, but the wind passed his lips and blew a stiff pocket in one cheek, so he put down his head and staggered on in the lee of John Parks. Then his father took his hand, and with that aid he managed to keep steadily at work. When John Parks looked down at him, he even managed a pinch-faced smile, but all the time the core of warmth at his heart was shrinking, and the numbing cold spread swiftly up to his shoulders, then up his legs to the knees, to the hips. He centered all his mind, all his will, on every step he made, but, oh, the weariness that the cold was bringing home to him!

  A fresher blast caught him and wrenched him to the side against John Parks.

  “Steady, Tommy!” cried his father. “It’s all downhill now. Don’t you see? We’re going to make it easily, boy!”

  It was true, for, when Tommy looked ahead, there was no longer that soul-taking, upward slope. Instead, his eye pitched down past the snow fields to the dark streak of timberline, and past timberline to a great, green valley with a river running straight as a silver arrow through its heart. That was the promised land, then, and yonder was the Turnbull. Here was the place where his father’s traps every day would take full toll, where the deer came up to the edge of the campfire to watch and wonder, where the cabin was to rise, where the ground would be cleared.

  He pushed himself away from John Parks and with a cry made the first step down the slope. His legs buckled. Their strength around the knees had turned to water, and he pitched down on his face. His heart swelled with grief. Now, indeed, he had shamed himself. All the praise for strength and for stolid endurance that had been showered on him during the journey was thrown away through this hideous weakness. He strove to raise himself, but his elbows were like his knees, unstrung and helpless.

  John Parks scooped the small body up and stood with it crushed to him. Poor Tommy looked up into a face that was wild with terror.

  “I’m only winded!” he cried faintly. “And I slipped. I can go on now, Dad.”

  But, while one arm drew him closer to a bony breast, the other was thrown to the sky.

  “Heaven forgive me. Heaven help me,” murmured John Parks.

  He lowered Tommy gently to the snow, and there he lay limply. Even the hot shame could not nerve him as he watched his father strip off his coat. Tommy was raised and wrapped in the garment closely while John Parks cried: “Oh, Tommy, hold on . . . fight hard. I’ll be down to the trees in no time. Fight, Tommy!”

  The burro was left to follow aimlessly in the rear, shaking his head at the wind, while John Parks stumbled and slipped and ran down the slope. Tommy tried to protest. He knew well enough that it was dangerous for a man to run unprotected into the face of that icy wind, but, when he tried to speak, his voice became an unintelligible gibbering. Presently his mind became as numb as his body. Thought formed dimly as dream figures. Sometimes it seemed to him that the wind had lifted them and was sweeping them back to the terrible summit. Then the gasping voice of John Parks would come to him like a hand pushing away clouds of sleep: “Fight, Tommy. Oh, Tommy, keep fighting!” Yet the drowsiness increased. He began to wonder why they did not stop, now that they had found such a pleasant time for sleeping.

  At length his father was no longer slipping as he ran. The strong, sweet breath of evergreens was filling his nostrils, and suddenly he was dropped to the ground. The shock recalled him enough to clear his eyes, but it was not until John Parks had torn dead branches from the trees, had piled them, had kindled them to a flame, that he understood. The first yellow leap of the fire told him how near he had been to death, and now he was placed on the very verge of the fire while his father, gasping and coughing, pummeled his body and rubbed the blood into circulation. In half an hour he was tingling painfully in hands and feet. His face was swollen with heat. But the danger was gone, and, as if to prove that all was well again, the burro stumbled into the clearing and stood with one long ear tilted forward to the fire.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALONE WITH BILLY

  There followed a drowsy time for Tommy. Now and again he was roused with a sudden shuddering to a memory of the labor up the mountainside. But those daylight touches of realization were only momentary. On the whole, he was lost in warm content by the fire. He roused himself for five minutes to drink coffee and eat bacon and flapjacks. But after that he sank back into a semi-trance. Afterward, he could remember seeing and wondering at the livid face of his father and the great, feverish, bright eyes of John Parks as he fell asleep. In that sleep he was followed by dreams of disaster. He found himself again struggling up an endless slope of ice-glazed snow, with the wind shrieking into his face and tugging at his body, while his father strode before him with long steps, tossing up his arms to the driving clouds and laughing like a maniac.

  Once he came dimly half awake and actually heard the voice of John Parks, laughing and crying out near him. It seemed odd to him that his father should be talking like this in the middle of the night, but sleep had half numbed his brain, and he was unconscious again in a moment.

  He only wakened with the sun fully in his face and shoved himself up on his arms and blinked about him. The nightmare gradually lifted from his brain. He was able to see that the little clearing in which the fire had been made the night before, the embers of which were still sending up a tiny drift of smoke, was fringed with young aspens, now newly leafed with sprays of young yellow-green— almost more yellow than green as the sun shone through the fresh-sprouting foliage. And yonder was the burro, absurdly nibbling at the sprouts on a bush and paying no heed to the rich grass.

  “Oh, Dad!” called Tommy, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

  There was no answer. The silence swept suddenly around him and became an awful thing. At a little distance, a confused roaring and dashing that had troubled his sleep he now made out to be the voice of a river. They must be close, then, to the bank of the river; it was that famous Turnbull River of which they had heard so much. As for the absence of his father, that could be explained by the fact that he had gone fishing to take their breakfast out of the water.

  So Tommy stood up and stretched himself carefully. To his surprise, there was nothing wrong with him more than a drowsiness and lethargy of the muscles, if it might be called that. Before he had taken half a dozen steps about the clearing, that lethargy was departing. The very first glance told him that surmise had been correct. A trail well defined in the rain-softened ground led away from the camp in the direction of the river.

  He followed the trail easily, but as he went, his wonder grew, for the signs wandered back and forth drunkenly. Sometimes the steps were short, sometimes they were long. Here he had stumbled and lurched sidewise against a young sapling, as the damaged branches showed as did a deep footprint at its base as well. Tommy paused and drew a breath of dismay. Something was decidedly wrong. His father was no expert mountaineer, he knew. When the doctor’s orders, three years before, had sent poor John Parks in search of health in the open country, he had been a great deal of a tenderfoot. And at his age it was impossible to learn all that he needed to know about mountain life and moun
tain ways. But to have made this trail required that a man should have walked in the darkness, stumbling here and there. If John Parks had walked away from the camp in the darkness . . .

  Here the mind of Tommy trembled and drew back from the conclusion that had jumped upon him full-grown. Before his mother’s death, he had heard her once in a raving delirium. Now, as he thought back to the husky, harsh voice of his father nearby him in the darkness, he felt certain that John Parks, also, must have been delirious. Yes, that was it, for, otherwise, men did not waken and laugh so wildly in the heart of the night. Why had he not wakened the instant he heard that laughter and taken care of the older man?

  Tommy hurried on along the trail. It was more and more sadly evident that something had gone wrong as the trail reeled onward. It reached a grove of close-standing, lodgepole pines. Apparently John Parks had been unable to find his way among them. Here and again he had attempted to go through and had recoiled after running into a trunk. Finally he had given up the effort, and the trail wound fifty feet to the left.

  By this time Tommy was half blind with fear and bewilderment, and he ran on, panting, his feet slipping on the wet grass. Momentarily the noise of the Turnbull grew louder, and at length he came through a scattered screen of trees with the dash of a waterfall making the ground beneath his feet tremble. A hundred feet above him, the smooth, green water slid over the edge of a cliff, surrounded itself with a lace of white spray as it fell, and then the solid column was powdered on the rocks, spread out again in a black, swirling pool, and finally emptied into a long, flume-like channel down which the current raced like galloping horses.

  Where the bank rose sheerly, twenty feet above the edge of that whirling pool, the tracks of his father ceased. Tommy, strangled with fear, looked up to the pale blue sky above him. By an effort into which all his will was thrown, he managed to look down again—then fell on his knees, moaning.

  To his eyes the whole matter was as clear as though he had read it in the pages of a book. Here the ground on the lip of the bank had been gouged away by the feet of John Parks as the poor man slipped and fell. Whirling in that fall, he had reached out with both hands. There one had slipped on the wet grass. There the other of them had caught at a small shrub and torn it out by the roots. Finally there was the place where both hands had taken their last hold on the edge of the bank— a hold beneath which the dirt had melted away and had let him drop straight to the water below.