The Winged Horse Read online

  But there followed only a light brushing of cloth across the back of his hand as he hit with a jerk through the air. And, at the same instant, from the corner of his eye he saw the Kid glide forward, sway up on his toes, and settle again, and as he settled a trip hammer smote the base of Muldoon’s jaw, and knocked him sidewise, and spun him around.

  He fell on one knee and one hand. The yell of the cowpunchers was like the scream of an eagle, tearing his ears, and all the winds of the world seemed to be pouring their thunders through his brain. The crimson patch in the east was a broad stripe of fire that hurtled around and around the horizon.

  Then his brain cleared a little. The men stopped swaying and seemed to stand still. The earth no longer heaved and staggered beneath him. Muldoon knew that he was a beaten man, but the greatness of his loss was too much for him to understand. A king at the crisis of the battle might have felt thus, seeing his kingdom poured like sand through his numb fingers.

  “You’re out of form, old-timer,” the Kid said, stepping closer. “Suppose we lay off of this and shake?”

  “Gimme a hand up,” Muldoon said, and stretched forth his arm.

  Instantly it was taken and he rose to his feet, and, rising, he felt that weakness was gone from his knees. Red fire within his blood and brain gave him a double strength, and he hurled himself on the Kid and gripped him in his great arms. He was regardless of the yell from the men at this foul play. He was merely occupied in pinioning both the arms of the Kid.

  But that was like trying to pinion two strong serpents, one of which instantly was loosed, and a fist began to jerk up under the chin of Muldoon, tapping rapidly, a deadly sledgehammering that flung across the brain of the wagon boss sheets of dark spray. He flung forward and they went to the earth together. But it was he whose back struck the mud. Somehow, he had been twisted about in midair. The Kid knelt upon his chest, and that iron fist was poised.

  “Am I Lonesome?” the Kid asked.

  “You’re Lonesome … and be hanged to you,” said Muldoon.

  “You never seen anybody but me on the back of that mare?”

  “Maybe I never did,” muttered Muldoon.

  He was freed.

  Slowly he climbed to his feet, and found all the men rapidly mounting and riding away to their work, where the rain-sleeked weanlings were drifting with the wind, their backs bowed, their hearts small with the misery of this world. Shame for the fall of their master was in the hearts of all those cowpunchers, and the wagon boss knew it. He knew, also, that the word would go out far and wide. The victories of fighting men often are not widely reported, but the fall of the great always is trumpeted far and wide.

  It seemed to Muldoon, staring about him with wide eyes, that the black-faced mountains must be aware of what had happened. And yonder was the back of the new cowhand moving away from him. He felt a vast impulse to shout out, and when the other turned, to meet him with a leveled gun. But he hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation he knew that he would never have the courage to act as he willed. He had met a better man. The bitterness of gall was in the mouth of Muldoon, and passing down to the very roots of his tongue.

  At the fire, the cook set out a basin of hot water. Muldoon washed his face. Then iodine was sluiced through his wounds, and he grinned at the fiery searching of it. Gladly he would have stood with one hand burning in the fire of real flame, if he could have undone this morning’s work.

  He looked at the face of the cook. That man was frowning, but not happy.

  Someone cleared his throat and came closer. Muldoon did not turn. He knew that it was the Kid, and a loathing and horror of himself and of this man who had conquered him froze his blood.

  “Muldoon,” said the voice of the Kid.

  Muldoon shrugged his great shoulders. Of what use was their greatness? Or the invincible length of his arm? Or the mighty hands that could break the neck of a steer?

  “Will you listen?” the Kid asked. “I’m a four-flusher as a puncher. I can’t handle a rope. I couldn’t daub a rope on a post. I never handled a branding iron in my life. I don’t know one end of a cow from the other. I ain’t come up here to spoil your game for you, Muldoon. What’s happened had to happen. Now I say this … the colonel sent me up here because he thought you could use me …but not to work the cows. If you want to use me, I’m your man. I won’t back talk. I’ll do the jobs that you point out to me. Does that sound to you? If it don’t, I’m going back to town again and look for something simpler.”

  Muldoon looked across the iron mountains, and he heard the wind ringing, ringing in his ear. The burning of the iodine ended, but the ache of his hurts began. How had such a youngster delivered such stunning blows?

  “Why not keep him and box with him?” asked the cook.

  Why not? Muldoon thought. “Stay on and box with me?” he said.

  “Sure,” the Kid said.

  “Good,” said Muldoon. “Good, I’m gonna have a use for you.” And he grinned a horrible, vast grin.

  Who could tell when he had put himself back in training?

  Chapter Seven

  Young cattle work slowly. With a foolish persistence, they mill at the slightest provocation or where there is no provocation at all except an idiotic thought in the most idiotic of all the herd. There is only one lesson which they have mastered, and that is that they must follow every bad example as soon as it is set for them.

  The storm had favored the start of the day’s drive, which should have been the last march to the main ranch house, for with its cold blasts and icy rattlings of rain and sleet, it whipped the weanlings in the correct direction. But before the drive was an hour old, and after the cook wagon had been dismissed to go careening and bumping and swaying on its way home, the wind changed its mind.

  “It’s acting up,” declared Muldoon, “exactly like a weaver that don’t know its own mind, because it ain’t got any mind to know.”

  Sometimes it drove in from the sides; sometimes it leaped from the far horizon and smote the young cattle in the face. No matter from what direction it came, it quickly made them turn their rumps toward it and drift with its force, in spite of yelling cowpunchers who rode straight up and lashed at the heads of the stupid brutes. They even fired their guns under the noses of the leaders, but cold and wind and weariness had induced utter disregard of death.

  “They ain’t had their coffee,” Muldoon said. “They’re worse off even than us. Their coffee has been ice water, and their bunks these nights have been running wet. No wonder they’re ornery.”

  Muldoon rode as the rearmost man, not from indolence, but so that he could keep his eye upon the whole drift and progress of the herd, and, in case of need, he would dash in to render assistance. Beside him went the Kid, or Lonesome, or, as this camp was beginning to call him from his last name, the Lamb.

  One might have called it a most surprising thing that Muldoon should select his conqueror as a riding companion. But since he kept to the rear for strategic and tactical purposes, and since the Lamb rode there to avoid possible labor, they began to come together. If the Lamb had been in the slightest degree superior or sneering, such consort would have been impossible, but, as a matter of fact, the youngster was polite and even a little deferential, and some of the edge had been filed from that sharp tongue of his, so that he gave the impression of one who would not willingly have risked an encounter in the future.

  Such a battle, Muldoon vaguely promised himself. He would not set a date, but fiercely he told himself that one day he would even the score. This determination restored his self-respect. Moreover, he discovered that the other cowpunchers looked upon his gashed and still bleeding face with more awe and fear than ever before. So he consented to ride beside the Lamb. He even confided his problems to the latter.

  “Here it is noon, and we’re stuck. We ain’t done half a mile in the last hour and the wind is settling ag
’in’ us. I got a good mind to try old Beacon Creek.”

  What was Beacon Creek? It was a deep and sheer-walled ravine that ran with a foam of currents in the spring, as the snows melted, and which was dry and dead the rest of the year. It formed a wide arc, cutting through the heart of the hills. And, best of all, while giving shelter from the wind and the driving force of the rain, it would conduct the herd almost to the door of the ranch house.

  “Why not, then?” asked the Lamb.

  “You dunno the lay of the land. That ravine has got doors in it, and all of those doors open out on the Montague side. Suppose that they was to be on hand, they’d pretty near cry with joy. They could just open one of them doors and shunt the whole doggone half of the herd down their way. That’d please the colonel a good deal, I reckon.”

  “Maybe you could use me on that side of the herd?” said the boy modestly.

  Muldoon looked earnestly at him. “You mean that you’re willing to tackle that sort of a job for me, Kid?”

  “I gotta earn my keep some way,” the Lamb said.

  Muldoon waited for no more, but he set out with a shout that was stifled and rammed down his throat by the hard fist of the wind. By gestures and arm swingings rather than speech, he told his herders what he wanted, and they turned the heads of the young cattle toward the ravine. When they came to the verge of it, they hesitated, and the leaders swung about and stood sidewise, wretchedly humping their backs against the weather.

  For a great voice was pealing up and down through the ravine, and it boomed through hollow sides, and roared like the rushing of a thousand ocean waves, and sang in the deeps of the hollow until the ground trembled under the feet of the cattle, and the cowpuncher from the lofty verge looked down into that rain-made twilight beneath them. It was as dark as December in the Scottish Highlands, when the feet of the clouds trail through the bleak heather.

  The wagon boss and two others, with a timely charge and an explosion of guns, finally startled the herd, and they tipped their leaders over the brim. Down the long, sharp slope they went, bellowing with fear, their legs braced, sitting down to the force of that toboggan. All in a moment, this trouble was ended, and the weanlings turned down the ravine in the proper direction.

  The drive proceeded with trebled speed, for the whole weight of the wind was cut away by the grand rising of the ravine walls. The tumult that they had heard now seemed to range far over their heads. The mists boiled over the upper ledges, and wild, dark forms of shadow leaped out, and soared slowly across the street that was fenced along the sky. Those shoutings and apparitions, however, meant very little to men or to cattle, for all were weary. They cared nothing for spiritual dangers or spiritual beauties. All they wanted was a little comfort for the flesh, and down in the palm of the valley they had relief from the endless tugging of the wind, tied to them with inescapable ropes.

  The cowboys worked in the rear of the herd. At the western side was the Lamb on his slender mare, working constantly between the flood of cattle and the rocks. Usually the herd was kept fairly well to the left, but now and again came to a place so narrow that the slow stream of tired animals covered the floor of the valley from side to side, like water. All the gaps in the valley wall, as Muldoon had pointed out, were to the west, and in crowded times, some of the herd was sure to be sucked down these narrow outlets, led by the invincible desire of a cow to go in the wrong direction. But these false starts were remedied without great difficulty.

  “It’s the bold move that works the best,” Muldoon declared, exulting, for they had very little distance to go in order to reach the ranch, and there were only two breaks remaining in the western wall of the cañon.

  And now, just as he exulted, he heard a weird, small shouting that rang up the valley toward him, under the hood of the roaring of the upper storm, and he saw the whole head of the drive swirl into a western gate through the wall of the valley.

  He thrust his horse wildly ahead with his spurs, but he knew that he was riding too late. So were the other cowpunchers, for they had a solid mass of beef between them and the danger point, where the rapid Montague horsemen had suddenly emerged and now flickered back and forth in front of the herd, turning it. Then he could hear the bellowing and sharp voices of the weanlings as they galloped forward, seeming to gain new strength from this new direction.

  There was only Lonesome to stop the raid—lonely in very fact, now, against this flood of danger and great numbers. And the wagon boss looked toward his new hired man in an agony. He saw the rider of the slender mare gallop straight toward the break, and saw in the intense gloom the flash of the gun in his hand. Three riders were suddenly before that lone rider, firing in return. The saddle of one was empty, now, and a second dropped forward and embraced the neck of his mount, but the third dived straight ahead on a huge black horse, and the Lamb went down like a pasteboard man on a pasteboard steed before that charge.

  Still, the weanlings were whirling into the open mouth of that chute with terrible speed, but Muldoon himself was now driving up the flank, where the Lamb had been, cursing wildly, his rifle pumping in his hands, and good men struggling fiercely behind him to keep up.

  They saw the clever riders of the Montagues split across the face of the young cattle, as though knowing that they had run off as many as they could safely handle. They had two thirds hurrying down their chute. One third remained to be driven home to the colonel.

  Muldoon, sick with grief and hysterical with rage, turned into the western gate to follow and to avenge, but a pair of Winchesters were clanging in the heart of the gorge. A bullet clipped the brim of his sombrero, and another brought water to his eyes, jerking past his face. Wisely he reined his mustang around and came out onto the floor of Beacon Creek.

  The weanlings hurried in the distance, switching their tails as though in guilty haste. The cowboys remained in a silent half circle, regardless of the young cattle that had been saved, as some lifted the dead body of the mare so that the Lamb could be drawn out from beneath.

  He was not white, because it would have been impossible for his brown-leather cheeks to have assumed such a tint. But he was distinctly a pale yellow, and his eyes were closed.

  They brought a hatful of water from a rivulet that streamed down the wall of the ravine and dashed it over his face. That instant he revived and stood up, staggering. His two hip holsters were empty, but out of the recesses of his clothes he mysteriously produced two more guns.

  “Where are they?” gasped the Lamb.

  “They’re gone, and most of the herd with ’em,” said one of the men.

  “What happened?”

  They pointed to the dead mare.

  The Lamb put up his guns.

  “Too bad,” Muldoon said, “because I’d say that’s about a thousand dollars worth of gallop lying there.”

  The Lamb started to answer, but his lips merely twitched. He took off his hat like one who wants to find a thought that is difficult to come at, and the rain beat hard against his face, and the wind fluttered the mane of the dead mare, and streamed her tail along the ground.

  Chapter Eight

  They came home from that disastrous trail in silence, crushed in mind and in soul. The cowpunchers took in the dwindled body of young beeves. Behind them at a good round distance rode Muldoon and the Kid, or otherwise the Lamb. The storm had abated as soon as the weanlings were lost, and the disaster completed. Now the darkness was fast coming down and Muldoon and the Kid—on a borrowed horse—trailed farther and farther behind in the black of the night. Since the wind had fallen, they could speak together with greater ease, but the Kid did not want to speak a great deal. Only, from time to time, wild words stormed up in his throat.

  All the young cattle were under fence before the wagon boss and the Lamb came into the ranch house, carrying their saddles after putting up their mounts in the barn. The colonel himself was ready to meet them a
s they stamped into the long, low bunk room.

  He shook hands with Muldoon and, cheerfully as though he had lost fifty dollars at faro, said, “We can’t always win, old man.” Then he reached up and laid a hand on the shoulder of the Lamb. “I’ll get you as fine a horse as the mare, son,” he said.

  The Lamb looked at him with eyes that burned like fire, then he struck aside the colonel’s hand and walked on.

  The colonel did not follow. He did not pay any attention to that utterly savage rejoinder, but he looked after the youth with a little pity and a little awe. So did they all. The boy was as straight and his step as light as ever, and there was no mark on his face of any hurt. All his wounds were inward. His face was white, his eyes were smudges of darkness, and if he tried to smile carelessly, he merely succeeded in pinching the corners of his mouth. Going to the bunk that was assigned to him, he flung his blankets on it, lay down, and began to smoke one cigarette after another. He did not go in to supper. He was not hungry, he said.

  Muldoon’s face was so black that, at the table, no one dared to open a conversation. Even the colonel, cheerful under such a stroke of bad fortune, would not speak, until at length Muldoon got up and took a great steaming tin of black coffee into the bunk room. The others looked knowingly at one another.

  “He’s gonna play nurse to him,” said someone.

  “What happened to Muldoon? Did a horse throw him and roll on him?” the colonel asked.

  “The Lamb happened to him,” said the cook, who had stubbed his way in with a freshly filled coffee pot. “Awful neat. Got a left like the slam of a double-barreled mule … got a right like the fall of a tree. A loopin’ right … up and over … a regular letter home.”