Out of the Wilderness Page 3

  “I mean just that.”

  “And you’d bet on it?”

  “I shall be breaking my rule, if I do, for I never bet on a sure thing.”

  If there was one vanity that stood near to the heart of Peter Dunstan it was the breed of horses that he had introduced upon his ranch. Except for racing thoroughbreds he was of the opinion that no stock of horses in the world could beat his own. Of all the horses that he had ever owned, the gray gelding had the fleetest foot. When he heard the doctor, therefore, casting aspersion upon the gelding in such a confident manner, the very hair of Dunstan stirred upon his scalp.

  “A sure thing, Doctor,” he said sarcastically, “is the sort of a matter that a fellow will put real money on.”

  “Dunstan, I don’t like to rob you.”

  The rancher broke out with a huge oath. “Man, man,” he cried, “if you’re fool enough to back the roan against this flyer, I have five hundred dollars to say that I’ll win!”

  “Do you mean that?” the doctor asked stiffly.

  “As the boys used to say…put up or shut up.”

  “Dunstan,” the doctor said, turning pale with anger, “I tell you that I have seen the mare run and therefore I have an advantage over you.”

  “Bah!” Dunstan hissed. “And I’ve heard the stories about her when she was running wild. But I tell you, man, that she weighs close to thirteen hundred pounds…or even more. No brute of that weight can really move with a horse like the one under my saddle. When a wild horse is chased, there’s no rider, no saddle, no cinches, no bridle and bit to bother it. That’s why the mare baffled the hunters for so long. Besides, she’s a tricky fiend. You can see that in her eye, quickly enough. Don’t tell me, Morgan, that she could move in the same flight with the running type.”

  The doctor exclaimed: “I tell you that mare will walk away from your gelding! And if you want to bet on it make it five hundred or five thousand. I don’t care which. Five thousand would teach you a lesson.”

  That talk was just a shade franker than any that the rancher had listened to since he became a known man in the West. His fighting jaw thrust out ominously.

  “Do you mean that you would put up five thousand dollars on the race, Doctor?”

  “My checkbook is in my pocket. Shall I write my check?”

  Dunstan answered: “I’d just as soon tell you that I’m carrying my checkbook, also. If you don’t mind, we’ll leave the checks with one of the boys as stakeholder….”

  In another moment two brown hands were scratching away at narrow, colored strips of paper. Then the two checks were in the hand of Shorty. His blue eyes blazed when he heard the terms of the bet. He asked with an almost moaning eagerness whether there were any other people on the Morgan place who would back the roan with hard cash.

  Oh, yes, there were plenty. All the crew of the hay press, said the doctor, would be willing to bet their shirts on her ability to beat the gelding thoroughly. The doctor was right. The instant that the rumor of the race reached the hay-press crew, the baling operations stopped at once, and the crew swarmed out to make sure that the race was indeed to take place.

  All was not ready, however, when the doctor and the rancher had decided upon the contest. There still remained another party to the contract. At first he seemed to raise insuperable difficulties. That was Sandy Sweyn.

  He had fallen to work the instant that the hay press stopped in its operations. With a hard-twisted wisp of hay he was rubbing down the roan assiduously. As the living dust cloud in which she had been walking cleared away, her coat could be seen to glimmer and then to shine like a burnished metal under the swift and powerful strokes of Sandy.

  The rancher, observing her anew, felt a sudden sinking of the heart. He was aware, for the first time, of the reach of her legs, of the great bone with which they were finished off beneath knee and hock. Still, such was the massive bulk of haunch and shoulder that he was encouraged again almost at once. Looking at her up to the belly, with its clean line like the hull of a racing yacht, she appeared a true flyer. Above that point, she might almost have been a work horse. No, not quite so bad as that, for no work horse since the beginning of time ever had muscles so neatly outlined and so sleek. Such bulk and suggested speed combined had never been seen by the comprehending eye of Dunstan, unless it were in the single glimpse he had had of the naked forearm of Sandy Sweyn, when the latter had tugged at the singletree of the mare.

  The doctor explained to the youth with care that he wished to have him ride the mare against the rancher’s gelding. Sandy Sweyn listened, his eyes fixed not upon the doctor but upon the gelding with a strange blank look that filled the rancher already with horror and wonder and aversion.

  “I dunno,” Sandy said, “but I guess that I ain’t gonna ride Cleo against a lame horse.”

  Five

  The rancher stared, then shouted: “Lame horse? Lame nonsense! Doctor, you can’t back out of the bet like this! The checks are posted, and I intend to collect. It will be a sound lesson to you. Stick to medicine and to dry farming, Doctor, but don’t risk your valuable opinion on horseflesh, after this, and prepare to back it up with so much hard cash.”

  That was not a very rude speech, according to Peter Dunstan’s standards of harsh and kind. Yet it made the doctor flush and toss his head, like a colt when the spur pricks, and it is conscious of no fault.

  “It’s not my remark,” said the doctor. “It’s Sandy Sweyn that says that.”

  “And what the devil does he know about this horse, when he sees it for the first time?”

  “He’s never wrong, Dunstan. I assure you that he knows what he’s speaking about, or else he doesn’t speak.”

  Dunstan, with the flaring vision of $5,000 at hand, could not restrain himself. It would be a stroke that would fatten his bank account on the one hand and give him a bit of excellent table talk the rest of his days, on the other. For both reasons the prospect was prized by Peter Dunstan.

  He said, at last: “Look here, man, and see whether or not this is a crippled horse.” He whirled the gelding away, raced it a few strides, and then swept it back again. “Did it limp? Did it falter?” shouted Peter Dunstan hotly from his cloud of dust.

  Then he was aware of Sandy Sweyn approaching, with the unhitched roan mare following like a dog at his heels.

  “He ain’t gonna show up lame until he’s rode hard and begins to bang the ground racing,” Sandy Sweyn said. “This here is where he’s gonna break down.”

  Raising his blank eyes to the face of the rancher, he pressed his forefinger deep into the muscular shoulder of the gelding. Beneath him, Dunstan felt a shudder of pain go through the body of the fine horse.

  He glanced sharply down and into the dull eyes of the youth, trying to find his soul and perhaps a hidden cunning there. All he found was an impenetrable wall of mist.

  “I’ll try him again,” Dunstan said. “I’ve ridden long enough to be able to tell a lame horse about as well as the next one.”

  And he carried the gelding off again in a brisk canter. However, the action of the rangy creature seemed perfection to him, and to all of them who stood by and watched, as well. Peter Dunstan came back more fixed in his purpose than ever.

  “My horse is ready, man!” he called to the doctor as he swung to the ground. “I’ve posted my forfeit, and I’ve offered my horse. Now what will you do next?”

  There was a clamor of noise around them where the hay balers were laying their bets with the cowpunchers of Dunstan’s train. Big bets for them—$30—$50—$100—determined by whether a man had been unlucky and had to post his pay of the month to come, or had been more successful in his recent adventure at poker. In the midst of this confusion, Sandy Sweyn calmly protested that he would not race the mare against a lame horse.

  “But,” the doctor insisted, “he wants to risk the gelding.”

  “H
as he asked his horse whether or not it wants to run?” Sandy Sweyn asked. “No, he ain’t. Because you can see in the eye of that horse that he don’t feel fast today.”

  Dunstan, leaving the gelding behind him, strode straight up to the half-wit and pointed a finger sternly in his face. “Look here,” he said. “We’ve heard enough nonsense from you, Sandy. Now we’re going to have this race run, and you’re going to ride in it whether you want to or not. D’you hear me? Because from this time on, I’m your boss, Sandy. And you come to me for orders.”

  Sandy Sweyn looked in amazement from the tall form of the angry rancher to the saddened face of the doctor.

  “You know,” Dr. Morgan explained gently, “that I have to leave this place, Sandy. And you wouldn’t be happy in the city where I am going to live. You couldn’t take Cleo along with you, you know.”

  A dark understanding broke upon the face of Sandy. “I couldn’t take Cleo?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’d have to stay here, I suppose,” Sandy Sweyn said. “But is he going to be my boss, then?” He pointed dubiously at Peter Dunstan.

  “He owns this place, Sandy. And you like the place, don’t you? You like the place and you know it. The people here understand you, and you understand them. So I thought it would be better for you to stay on here with Mister Dunstan. He will take care of you.”

  “If you mind your step, and do what you’re told!” Peter Dunstan insisted loudly.

  He did not believe in sentimentality, this Peter Dunstan. He believed in the facts of life, which to him were hard and stern matters that could not be winked at. He never wanted to shelter himself behind generalities or mask himself with soft speeches. His rough voice made the eyes of Sandy Sweyn widen and turn an appealing gaze upon the doctor.

  The poor doctor looked only down upon the ground. He had done all that he could for Sandy Sweyn, and he could not manage a better scheme of things for him. So he said gravely: “I think that you had better do as Mister Dunstan says, Sandy.”

  “Ah,” Sandy said, sighing and looking with his blank eyes upon the rancher, “it don’t seem to me like there is much but trouble lying ahead.”

  Then he turned to the mare and began to strip the harness from her back.

  A saddle was quickly fitted to her. In the meantime, Dunstan was equally busy. If the roan had been performing brutally hard work in the dust beside the haystack, the gelding had just had a hard canter across the country, and Dunstan did not believe in throwing away any chances. It was not his style, for life is life, and money is money. Why should one be careless with it?

  Straightway, he said to Shorty, the lightest in body and the toughest in soul of all who rode in his train: “Shorty, can you handle the big boy today?”

  Shorty looked askance at the tall form of his master’s horse. “I’ll handle him or kill him,” said the genial Shorty. “You leave him to me. Just shorten them stirrups a bit, will you?”

  “I’ll do that,” Dunstan said, delighted, “and if you can ride him, Shorty, as I know you can, you get…an extra fifty, if you win.”

  For Dunstan was not needlessly generous. There is no law that compels a man to make large offers, you know. However, the mere honor of the task was enough to persuade Shorty. He tingled with pride to the roots of his very red hair as he strode with a swagger through his hardy companions.

  “You soft-shelled suckers,” the amiable Shorty said, “leave me be and gimme room.”

  They hardly begrudged him this speech—they were so entirely rejoiced to see a hundred and fifty pounds in the saddle on the gelding, instead of the two hundred at which Dunstan turned the beam.

  The doctor, however, was amazed. “Why,” he said, “I thought you were to do the riding yourself, man.”

  “Did you think that? Was there anything said about riders? Why, you can pick out any lightweight that you please, Doctor. And then double the bets, if you wish.”

  The right fist of the doctor doubled into an iron-hard knot, but he did not strike. Whether with hand or weapon, he knew that to engage with this bully would be simply to invite humiliation.

  “The course then, Dunstan?” he said tersely.

  “Around that black rock and back again, d’you think?”

  The doctor allowed himself to smile. “That’s nearly a mile and a half, man,” he said, “and distance tells in favor of the lightly weighted horse, of course. Do you seriously suggest it, Dunstan? With seventy pounds less in the saddle than goes on Cleo?”

  The nerve of the rancher was as steady as a wall of brass. Look for look he repaid the contemptuous smile of Dr. Morgan.

  “Pick out another course, if you like,” he said. “I’ve made my suggestion, but please yourself.”

  Dr. Morgan shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s no use. I see that you’ve beaten me before the race begins. Why, man, you ought to know that nobody in the world can ride that roan devil except Sandy Sweyn, and Sandy weighs a full two hundred and twenty pounds. Aye, or a little bit more. But we’ll have the pleasure of seeing how fast Cleo can run. Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Just fire your pistol to give them the word. Sandy, it’s to be around that black rock…the one with the three heads on it. Do you see?”

  “I see.”

  “Ride hard…but not too hard, Sandy. You can’t beat the gelding. But try not to be disgraced.”

  “Beat the gelding?” Sandy Sweyn said. “Why, there ain’t no trouble about that. Even if he had four good legs under him, there wouldn’t be no trouble about that. I’ll catch him at the rock and I’ll walk away from him coming back.”

  With one ear the rancher overheard the amazing confidence of this remark, but the greater portion of his attention was given to instructing his jockey. “Get the big boy going and keep him at it. Not too much of the spurs. He hates the spurs except when I’m using them, and then I make him like ’em. You can swing the quirt on him. It’ll be good for him. Put a little spice in the loafer.”

  “I’ll run his head off and make that plow horse sick in a quarter of a mile. The doctor is a nut to put a bet on a race like this,” the gentle Shorty said. “Give us the signal to start, will you?”

  Six

  The start was in line with the big derrick above the haystack, and the finish was to be at the same line. The spectators scattered themselves in various places of vantage, more particularly upon the top of the stack, on the table of the hay press, and one daring fellow—the roustabout of the baling crew—clambered out and sat on the swinging tip of the derrick’s boom, to the envy and admiration of all of the rest.

  In this manner, they got a view of the course from the moment that the rancher’s gun exploded and the two darted off over the sunburned fields.

  The yell that greeted that start was followed by a groan from the hay-press crew. They saw that their favorite was not only under the disadvantage of seventy pounds of extra weight, but also he was forced to run in going much worse than that of the gelding. That lithe racer, with the lighter burden of Shorty in the saddle, went lightly across the hay stubble, but the tremendously pounding hoofs of the roan broke through the crust and raised puffs of dust and clotted soil at every fling of his hoofs.

  “We’re beat…we’re cheated!” said the bale-roller with a groan.

  “Steady,” answered Dr. Morgan. “Let’s not whimper when we pay. They’d rather have us whine than take our money.”

  The faces of the hay-press men set like iron, while the doctor smiled almost benignantly down upon Peter Dunstan. Who could have guessed from the doctor’s face that rage and scorn and regret were tearing his heart?

  He managed to say amiably: “Cleo will beat your horse yet, Dunstan.”

  “Well,” muttered the tall rancher, “I wouldn’t believe that there was that much go in any horse of that cut…with as muc
h weight on her back.”

  The doctor looked across the field carelessly. Then his heart leaped fairly into his throat. He had not more than pretended to stare after the two sweeping forms. Now what he saw was the gelding, stretched out true and straight in the height of his speed, with Shorty raised in the stirrups and bent forward along the neck of his mount, jockeying him along to take the full advantage of every effort that the fine animal made.

  In the saddle of Cleo, the solid form of big Sandy Sweyn sat erect, as though he had no more than the most indifferent interest in this race. Yet the reaching nose of the big mare was upon the hip of the gelding, and she maintained her place fairly as they swept out of view behind the rock. Like a breeze, the memory of the doctor recalled to him the prediction of his jockey. I’ll catch him at the rock and walk away from him on the way back.

  This was a miracle, not a thing that any man could even pray for.

  There was the utter silence of complete wonder from the watchers in the distance. There was the silence of despair in the heart of Shorty as he jerked the gelding short around the rock and headed him for the home goal.

  The pounding monster had remained at his hip all the way to the rock, and a horrible dread was in Shorty that the promise of the half-wit to his old master would be performed. He straightened the gelding toward the haystack three quarters of a mile away. The quirt hissed and bit the flank of the gallant beast; in answer there was only a convulsive jerking of the body of the gelding—sure proof that the whip cut him, but that he could not answer with a greater burst of speed.

  At that very moment, as the pride of all the Dunstan horses launched out at fullest speed, the monstrous roan mare drew up beside—a blue roan—like a gleaming blue shadow, with the red of polished granite shining through. The very ground shook under the beat of her hoofs, and she was gaining steadily. Then Sandy Sweyn leaned a little in the saddle, and, as he swayed forward, he seemed to make the great mare stumble into redoubled speed.