Out of the Wilderness Read online

  He started the big, blue roan toward the indicated spot. Poor White Helen began to fight again—but with the choking noose around her neck and the weight of the big gelding in the scale against her, fate was speaking against her, and she was drawn into the corral.

  It was the one structure near the shack that was in a state of good repair. There was reason for it, since Simonides and his men often had some high-hearted horse to confine here. The fence was as tall as it was strong. Elena flashed around it the instant she was loosed from the rope. Then, finding no weak point, she sprang to the center and raised her head in a heart-broken neigh that went shivering far and wide across the forest.

  There was silence. Then, out of the distance, came something like an answering echo—the voice of Sandy, calling for Chris through Chorleywood, while Chris lay dead, so many dusty miles away.

  Simonides said: “He looks like a simple, young fool. What’s the danger in him?”

  “He’s made Coudray run like a scared dog,” Dunstan told him. “That’s what he’s done already today. And he’s coming back, Simonides. When he comes, there’ll be trouble…and maybe more trouble than you and I can handle.”

  Simonides smiled, but then, growing more sober, he whistled. Two men sauntered out from the cabin. “I made a point of keeping two of the best fellows in the world on hand,” he explained. “There’s Lew…the little chap…and Shack Edwards. Shack might have made himself into a light-heavyweight champion a couple of years ago, but he got mixed up with a little card game one night…and the next morning the coppers were after him. Lew weighs about two hundred, though he doesn’t look it. Before he found out his talents, he used to waste his time wrestling…for pretty big money, at that. Besides, they’re pretty much at home with guns, and Lew is a wizard with a knife. I’m not without two hands myself, and we know what you can do, Dunstan…particularly when you have to fight for what that mare means to you. Do you still think that we’ll have any trouble with this half-wit? What a blank, dead eye he has.”

  Dunstan took stock of the pair again, and truly it seemed to him that he had never before seen two more formidable men than these, standing side-by-side—Lew, low and broad and powerful, the other, rangy, fast, with shoulders and arms meant for heavy, battering work. Besides, here was his own strength, and Simonides, like a tiger cat. At last, he smiled.

  “You have the men, Simonides, and even that idiot won’t be able to break through. But tonight, all four of us are going to stand watch on the corral.”

  “Very well,” Simonides said. “We won’t go to sleep at our posts. Only…what keeps us from telling this Sweyn that the dog must have lost itself in the woods, for that matter?”

  “Because if there’s a trail, he’ll find it. And if he doesn’t find it, he’ll know that there isn’t any trail. Y’understand?”

  “Unless he’s got the nose of a hunting hound himself, how could he be sure of that?”

  “I don’t know what he’s got. I know what he’ll do. By sunset he’ll be back here, breathing fire for fair.”

  Thirty

  He was not back at sunset time, nor when the yellow moon went up like a disembodied flame through the eastern trees, losing itself in the overhanging pall of the clouds that already shut away the stars. The wind blew soft; it was wet with mist. Now and then a rattle of rain fell on the roof of the shed beside the corral. Still the four watchers could see the ghostly figure of the little white mare as she roamed ceaselessly up and down across the corral.

  “Suppose that this poor fool did take the mare to Mirandos and try to claim the girl,” Simonides said. “I know that Mirandos is a lawkeeper, but he’s a proud devil, too. Before he saw his daughter married to a clod like that, he would have a knife stuck between the shoulders of Mister Sweyn. So, Dunstan, you may say that it’s for Sweyn’s own good to keep the mare away from him. It simply keeps him out of danger.”

  He laughed—it was a light, heartless, effortless laughter. That laughter showed to Dunstan, like a great cold light, the whole world of crime and those who live in it. Yet, had ever a man committed such a wrong as he was planning to practice against poor Sandy Sweyn, the half-wit?

  “Another half hour…,” Dunstan insisted.

  “Your man has gone to bed,” Simonides said in a soft whisper. “He’s lost his way and can’t come back to us.”

  “What’s that in the shed?” cried the sudden voice of Lew. “Shack, watch yourself!”

  The ex-prize fighter had been assigned the task of watching the little shed that opened onto the corral.

  Then they heard the loud, absurdly, squeaking voice of Shack as he yelled: “Keep back from me, kid…I don’t want to do you no harm! Then take this!”

  There was an instant of shuffling, then the sound of a blow of terrible force. It drove the breath in one gasp out of some man’s body, then there was a heavy fall.

  “Shack has settled your wild man,” Simonides declared.

  “No one man could settle him with bare hands,” vowed Dunstan. “Listen….”

  There was a sudden battering and crashing and rending of boards at the back of the shed.

  “He’s breaking down the wall of the shed to let the mare out!” shouted Simonides. “Lew! Shack! Get at him…guns, boys! Dunstan, come with me…and come fast!”

  Lew took the shortest course to get at the seat of the trouble. He came like a bulldog, head down, hungry to get those trained hands of his on the man who battered at the wall of the shed in the darkness, yonder. Once he fixed his experienced fingers on the other….

  He sprang into the darkness, and found there the shining form of Elena Blanca herself, and beside her the shadow of a man, beating a great gap open. He lurched at Sandy Sweyn and put his arms around the half-wit’s body.

  There are no words except those of Lew to describe what followed. He told of it long afterward.

  “I figgered on squashing the breath out of him. I throwed my arms clean around his body and his arms. Then I give all my strength to the bear hug, and I feel him sort of sink in in the middle. Then he stops sinking in. He turns into Indian rubber, y’understand? He turned into a bunch of ligaments and tendons like them that run up from the back of a horse. He just spread out and his arms, they give a wiggle like a pair of pythons…and there he was free with his arms. He turned around in my grip as easy as though it was his girl that was hugging him. And he fixed one hand under my chin and jammed my head back.

  “I felt like I had rested my chin by accident on the head of a piston. After that…he hit me…hard, that’s the reason why my jaw is planted sort of lop-sided on my face, y’understand? I didn’t feel nothing much. It just paralyzed me. I went numb. Sitting in the electric chair and having the current turned on…that would be about like getting the wallop from that Sweyn. They call him the half-wit. I tell you, nobody that was a fool could ever’ve learned to hit like that.”

  In short, Lew had leaped into the dark and grappled with his man. Half a second later, he lay senseless upon the ground. By this time, Simonides and Dunstan had rounded the outside of the corral and were making for the shed where the wall was in the act of being battered down.

  But that sound of battering ceased. What they next heard was from the farther side of the corral. The gate had been barred and secured with a padlocked chain. What they heard was the scream of hard wood being torn away from rusted nails. A shriek, groan, another shriek, and then a section of the ponderous top rail was flung with a clangor upon the ground.

  Back turned Dunstan to get around the side of the shed. Little Simonides, with a stream of odd-sounding curses flowing from his lips, led the way. They leaped around the shed’s side and into full view of the corral, in time to see a man’s body disappear on the farther side of the fence, through the gap made by the tearing down of the upper rail.

  Still the fence was high—impossibly high, so it seemed. Dunstan, as he fi
red wildly toward the spot where Sandy had sunk toward the ground, felt that they had won the game, after all, and kept the mare.

  Simonides was shooting, too, but he had only a vague direction in which to aim. Sandy was prone on the ground, and, in the darkness, he was completely swallowed. Only his voice could guide the bullets as he shouted: “Elena! Here, girl. Here, Elena!”

  “She’ll never make the fence even with the top rail down,” gasped out Simonides.

  There went the little mare, a ghostly streak across the black of the corral. She headed fair and true toward the voice of the man she loved. They saw her slim body arch high into the air—and then the clash as her hoofs struck the rail—the shock as she toppled and sprawled flat upon the ground on the farther side

  “A broken neck…and that’s the end of the chase,” Dunstan muttered, groaning.

  No—she was up and on her feet like an agile little cat. As she struck forward at a gallop, the two who strained their eyes after her saw a great shadow rise from the ground and leap upon her back. There, flattened along her, Sandy drove like an arrow toward the sheltering shadow of the distant trees, where the great blue roan was waiting for him.

  Still he was not in safety, for Simonides raised his gun and steadied his aim. His was a hand that never had missed so close a target as this. But the heavy hand of Dunstan struck down the rifle, and the bullet plowed uselessly into the ground.

  “You fool!” snarled the outlaw. “I’d have dropped the mare, for sure. And then we could have finished up this Sweyn and taken our own time to do it!”

  “Let him go,” Dunstan said. “There may be ways of stopping him before he gets to Mirandos, even now. But he’s earned his getaway. And I couldn’t see the mare murdered. She belongs to Catalina Mirandos, and not to me.”

  Simonides said: “Did you see Sweyn come up from the ground? I’ve seen a tiger spring like that out of a shadow and break the neck of a buffalo bull in India. And this Sweyn…he is a tiger, man.”

  “Aye,” Dunstan averred, “but he’ll do no harm to us. There’s no malice in him.”

  “Not before tonight,” Simonides said. “He never knew his strength…except with beasts. But tonight, we’ve given him a chance to taste his own power, and I tell you, Dunstan, every wound in my body is aching. He’ll be back, sooner or later, and he’ll let us know what he thinks of us…with those hands of his. Others are going to feel the strength of him, too, Dunstan. You’ve shown a man that he can play the tiger. From this time on, heaven help the people who stand in his way. He’ll be ten devils tied up in one body.”

  “He can never have the girl. Old Mirandos will see to that,” Dunstan said.

  “I’m not thinking of the girl,” Simonides said. “I’m thinking of the men. I’m thinking of ourselves. If he can buy the girl with Elena Blanca, and then settle down and forget tonight…bless him for it, and give him more power.”

  Part III

  Thirty-One

  In the long run, everything depends upon Dick in this narrative. The strength and the strange wisdom of Sandy Sweyn, the fiery beauty of Catalina Mirandos, the sage gravity of her father, the big shoulders of handsome José Rézan, the resourceful courage of Sheriff Kilmer, the wind-blown grace of Elena Blanca, and even the freckled face and the crooked smile of Peggy Kilmer, could not have brought about the final conclusion of this history, giving it the shaping that it took, without the presence of Dick. It is really necessary to give him a little space in the beginning.

  Dick was only five years old, but into those five years he had crowded such a quantity of learning that, in certain ways, he was wiser than the wisest king who ever sat upon a throne. There was in Dick a mild nobility such as others might envy but never imitate, unless their ancestry was clearly traceable, as was Dick’s, through a, family tree so long that it fairly filled a volume, branching out to truly colossal proportions. There was courage, too, in Dick, and such devotion to the cause he espoused as the Spartans of old might have striven toward as an ideal.

  Dick was a setter—a beautiful, red-coated Irish setter—clad in long and curling silk, with the grace of an angel and the mild eye of a saint. He was a saint, this dog. Any bird man will tell you that all good setters have been breathed upon by heavenly virtues before ever they enter this world of thorns. Since Ireland is just a little nearer to heaven than any other country—as several million people will agree—it is natural that the Irish setter should have entered just a little more deeply into sainthood than any other breed.

  Dick, lying on the lawn outside the patio of Señor Mirandos, maintained his composure with a steadfast eye. One would never have guessed, to see the manner in which he wagged his tail and softened his eye on the approach of the gardener, of the deep sorrow in the soul of the dog.

  Yet how many crosses were here. From ranging after birds in old Erin to running the arid trails of the great Western desert of the States is a great difference, indeed. However, Dick would not show these swift emotions as they crossed his mind. As the gardener drew near to him, he abased his head a little and brushed the lawn with the long feather of his wagging tail. Into his eyes came a gentle light of love.

  The gardener was a stranger, but that really did not greatly matter. Long ago, while he was still in the awkwardness of puppyhood, Dick had been taught by his lovely mother and had partly learned for himself, that all men are good, gentle, and true. Therefore he greeted them all in the same manner, with only a certain reservation of extra grace for those who he knew and loved.

  However, all was not well in the soul of Dick. If he had allowed himself to give over to melancholy, he would have crept into a corner and died of a broken heart. Poor Dick yearned for just a single breath of peat smoke, such as he had known of old.

  Here men forgot his name of Dick and called him Ricardo. Men spoke to him in a strange language whose accents were all new to him. He would have been quite at sea, had not his mother taught him from infancy that one can read the faces of men just as clearly as one can hear their spoken words.

  Dick lay on the lawn and listened to the humming of the wind down the valley. That wind brought to him keen scents of the pine trees; from time to time his delicate nostrils informed him that birds were on the wing, but no such birds as he had hunted in green Ireland. He closed his eyes, dropped his head upon his forepaws, and yearned after older and better days.

  Then a high, musical voice called: “Ricardo!” He heard it twice before he realized that the name was meant for him. Up he jumped with a guilty start and hurried through the patio to where his young mistress waited for him in the shade. He approached her with care, head lowered, tail wagging in the most conciliatory manner. It was true that her voice was wonderfully sweet, but there was a quirt in her hand. He knew of old that that quirt could sting. However, he came at her voice, for still the instinct and the lesson remained firm in his mind that, no matter how strange and cruel some of their ways might be, mankind must be right. It was foolish and very sinful to doubt them. Only children might be shunned, for they did not seem to know that when one’s tail is pulled it causes an exquisite pain; also, they are most careless about stepping upon sensitive paws.

  “Sit down,” the girl said. “Sit down, Ricardo!”

  Ricardo sat down at once.

  “Don’t look at me as though I were going to beat you!” Catalina Mirandos cried, and she slapped the quirt angrily against her skirt.

  A shiver ran through Dick. He gave, in spite of himself, only a tithe of his attention to the face of the girl. The rest of it was concentrated upon the lash of the whip, which he knew could cut so deep. Therefore, he failed to understand when the silver voice commanded sharply: “Come closer, Ricardo!”

  Since that order was given in Spanish, Dick did not budge.

  “Come closer! I have never seen such a stupid dog! Come right over here!”

  Poor Dick merely crouched lower to the gro
und and wagged his conciliatory tail. The quirt whirled in the air. There was an angry shout from the girl, and Dick blinked his eyes shut in supreme dread. The whip did not fall upon him, for accident intervened.

  “Catalina!” called the voice of a man. She looked askance at her father, who entered the patio.

  He was no great lover of animals, but he was a just man, this Mirandos. He said: “What a devil is in you, Catalina, to make you beat your dog in this way.”

  “I am only trying to teach him a lesson,” she said, more angry than ever, “but the fool will not learn.”

  “Ah, well,” her father said, looking curiously at her, “I often wonder, my dear, if you beat him because you wish to teach him?”

  “Why else should I?” she said, and stamped her foot.

  “Another reason may be that you like to use your power to make him crouch, poor devil. You wish to feel your power over him just as you wish to feel your power over men. Just as you make men crouch before you and act like cowardly fools, because they want your smiles. Is there not some truth in that?”

  Tears of passion sprang into the eyes of the girl. “It is always this way,” she said. “You always find the hardest things to call me, the worst interpretation to put upon everything that I do. You are never kind.”

  “There you are,” her father said. “In a temper at the dog because he doesn’t understand your language. In a temper with me because you will not listen to what I say.”

  “Do I not listen?”

  “Yes, but you will not try to understand me. Have you ever sat down by yourself, Catalina, and wondered if you could be wrong about anything? Do you not always tell yourself that you are right, and the rest of the world is cold and brutal if it happens to disagree with you?”

  “I am going to my room,” Catalina said. “I shall not stay here to be abused.”