Out of the Wilderness Read online

  “I yelled out…‘Hey, don’t bust that axe.’…because it scared me to see the way that he was sinking that axe as though it was soft white pine that he was handling. Well, sir, that yell of mine sort of startled him, and he gave that stroke extra hard. Smash went the handle. There it is now…the one that looks as though a lion had spent the afternoon chewing it up for fun. No, Mister Dunstan, I am not a very particular sort of a man, but I could put up with busted tools where I couldn’t put up with bein’ burned alive, and that’s what pretty near happened.”

  Dunstan sat down in amazement and asked for fuller particulars and now some great black, burned patches on the floor were shown to him.

  “I tell that fool to put some fresh wood in the fire. He does. But he gets a hold of a chunk of wood that he had cut with whiskers on it, and the whiskers make it so big that it won’t fit into the stove. He turns around to me with the smoke pourin’ out into the kitchen and spoilin’ everything and he says…‘Steve, this here stick, it don’t seem to fit very well.’

  “‘You dunderhead,’ I yells at him. ‘Ain’t you able to jam it in?’

  “‘I’ll do my best,’ says he in that fool, mild way of his, and he does. That was what he done, too. He jammed it in. He give it a shove and there wasn’t quite room. And then he braced one hand ag’in’ the wall and he give the stick another shove, and this time, I can tell you that something moved. That stove buckled like a shell had exploded on the inside of it, and it comes down smash and leaves a lot of red-hot coals go rolling across on the floor.

  “It was a terrible job. I got so choked with smoke that I couldn’t do a thing, and had to go and hang my head out of the window to get some fresh air. While I was doing that, the house pretty near burned down. And it would’ve burned down, except that fool, he don’t care what sort of air he has to breathe. He just out and clears up them burning sticks and tramples the sparks out, and then he helps me to set up the stove again…him doing wrong everything that I start to do right. Pretty soon I give him a yell and grabbed up a frying pan and slammed him with it. I thought that it would’ve brained him, but it was pretty near wore out, and it busted all to pieces. He just stood there, rubbing his head and looking at me sort of mild and surprised that way that he has. Then I told him to get out, and he got.”

  The rancher listened to this long narrative with wonder. “And then you couldn’t find a thing for him to do?” he said finally.

  “What could I find? If this here world was lined with steel, maybe there would be a place for him, or if we was sinking a shaft in quartzite with double jacks and extra strong drills, then he would come in pretty handy…if he could ever hit the drill on the head, without glancing it off and busting his own arms. Around a ranch, life is too dog-gone’ delicate for a gent like him. What I would mostly like to know is how you got enough of a grouch ag’in’ me to send me a dumbbell like that for a roustabout?”

  Dunstan was too wise to remain there in conversation over such a dainty point. He merely added: “You told him to do what he pleased?”

  “I did. And I meant it, and the man that don’t like what I….”

  Dunstan waited for no more, but glided discreetly through the door of the kitchen. He walked in thought back to the corral. He had his promise to the doctor in his mind, but to maintain on the ranch a youth who was incapable of service was a thought that goaded the rancher to the very heart. Waste—purest waste—and it was not upon such principles as these that his success in life had been based.

  He stood, at last, before the stolid figure on the fence. “And what about the horse, Sandy?” he asked. “I suppose that the gelding is in his grave by this time. I suppose that after you got through taking care of him, he was about ready to feed the buzzards?”

  “No,” Sandy answered, “he ain’t meant for the buzzards. Would you like to see him?”

  “See him? Yes, where do you keep him?”

  “Right here.” He whistled a sharp, thin note that was answered by the beat of hoofs at once. From behind the shed, a horse came at a gallop. It was the gelding, with all the limp gone from his gallop, and the lame shoulder doing its full share of service without a perceptible flaw.

  “Look out!” Dunstan cried, in even more alarm than wonder, as he saw the savage horse come straight up behind the half-wit. “Look out, Sandy, or he’ll tear your head off….”

  “Why should he?” Sandy asked blandly. “Him and me are pretty good friends. “Ain’t we, old-timer?” He stretched out his arm, and the long head and neck of the gelding were passed that moment beneath it. There he stood, with pricking ears and a happy light in his eyes that the rancher had never seen there before.

  “Confound it,” Peter Dunstan said, “how did you manage to tame that brute?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Sandy said thoughtfully. “All he needed was somebody to talk to that he could understand. You see?”

  “Talk to? You mean to say that he could understand you…and you could understand him?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What lingo did he speak?”

  “Not words,” Sandy explained. “But there is a different sort of a language for everything, you know. Only, you got to sort of open up your mind”—he made a wide gesture—“then, you sort of get in touch…you understand?”

  The thin scream of a hawk floated down from above and slid coldly into the soul of Peter Dunstan in the pause that followed. He wanted to laugh but dared not.

  “Do you understand that?” Dunstan as he pointed up.

  “Sure,” said Sandy Sweyn. “And he’ll understand me.” He placed both his thumbs in his mouth and then emitted a piercing, half-vocal whistle that tore through the air and drove up—until it seemed to strike the floating hawk like a bullet. In one swoop the preying bird sagged half the distance toward the earth, and then hung on what Peter Dunstan would have liked to call—a listening wing.

  Nine

  One might say that Dunstan found himself in a stupid position. He stood with mouth wide open, his face bearing a stricken look. When he glanced at Sandy Sweyn again, he saw that that young man had seemingly forgotten all about the hawk that he had whistled out of the sky. He was now rubbing the nose of the gelding with an affectionate hand. For the first time in Dunstan’s life, there arose before his mind a strange premonition of events and things beyond all common seeing and all common hearing. Dunstan shut the door of his mind upon these uncanny emotions and mental hints.

  “Saddle that gelding for me, Sandy,” he said. “Saddle that gelding for me, because I’m going to try him out right now. It’s not possible that he’s cured so completely and so soon. Saddle him, and bring him to the door of the house. Then whistle to let me know that you’re there.”

  With this, Peter Dunstan returned to the house. There he found Steve McGuire with a pan between his knees, into which he dropped potato after potato, as fast as his hands could slice away their brown covers and turn them to a crystal-shining white.

  “Now, Steve,” the rancher said, “I want you to tell me what that half-wit has been doing to cure the lame shoulder of the gelding?”

  “What has he been doing?” Steve McGuire echoed with a frown. “All I know is that he went out, got an armful of weeds and stuff from the hills, came back, stewed them up in a wash boiler, and filled the house with an odor that hasn’t washed out or aired out yet. And he’s taken that stuff and used it to rub into the shoulder of the horse. It ought to’ve killed the poor brute or cured it. And if it’s cured, it’s because the nerves in its nose ain’t sensitive none.”

  Dunstan sighed with relief. “There’s no miracle about it, then,” he said. “Just a simple matter of herbs.”

  McGuire sniffed loudly, then asked: “But where did he learn to doctor up animals like that?”

  “From Doctor Morgan, of course,” said Dunstan. But he did not believe what he said. “He gentled that crazy brute of
a horse that I’ve been fighting every time I get on his back,” Dunstan said.

  “Would you call him a gentle horse now?” McGuire asked, putting his head to one side. “If you had seen him make a dive at me when I was coming back from the barn with a hatful of eggs the other day, you wouldn’t be saying that he was gentled none. No, sir. He made a pass at me with his teeth just as I was driving through the bars of the fence and he pretty near tore out the seat of my trousers. I squashed a dozen eggs all over myself.”

  “Bah!” said Dunstan. “He has the horse so gentle that it comes running to his whistle. More like a confounded dog than anything else. I’m going to ride the horse now and see how he is.”

  “You’re going to ride him now?” McGuire questioned. “Well, Dunstan, I’m telling you right here and now that that Sandy Sweyn ain’t the kind that will ever do many useful things for other folks. The tricks that he turns might have some sort of use for himself, but not for no others. I’ll bet you that you’ll find that horses has got something wrong with him.”

  “Man,” the rancher said, “haven’t I seen him with my own eyes, galloping as fast as he ever did in his life? A smoother action than he had the day that the roan mare with a ton of fool on her back was able to run away from him. I’ll ride the gelding. You come and watch.”

  “Captain,” McGuire said, “that’s just the thing that I’m gonna do.”

  There was a wicked light in the eye of McGuire as he stepped to the door and peered at the gelding Sandy led up to the house. While Sandy stood at the head of the horse, Dunstan mounted with more ease than he had ever found possible on all of the occasions when he swung himself upon the back of the same animal in the past.

  He had time to settle his feet in the stirrups and freshen the grip of his knees. If the ears of the gelding flickered back for an instant, they pricked forward again at once, for the hand of Sandy Sweyn was gently rubbing his velvety nose.

  Sandy said: “He ain’t feeling right, Mister Dunstan.”

  “Who told you that?” asked Dunstan.

  “He ain’t feeling right in his mind.”

  “About what?”

  “About you,” Sandy said.

  “I’ll mend that,” Dunstan said. “Stand away from his head, will you?”

  No sooner said than done. Sandy Sweyn stepped back to one side, and the gelding stepped the other way, and stepped into the air at the same time. He gave himself a twist around while he was off terra firma, such a violent twist that one of Dunstan’s feet was disengaged from the stirrup. Before that foot could find its place again, the horse landed with all his force upon one stiffened foreleg. It happened that the side on which the leg came down was that on which Dunstan had already lost the stirrup.

  He was a fine rider and in ordinary circumstances he would have kept his seat in spite of such bucking. But the lost stirrup was against him. The force of gravity and the gelding worked in beautiful accord, and Peter Dunstan crashed to the ground.

  His courage was not daunted. While he was flying through mid-air he was already yelling: “Stop him! Head him! Don’t let him get away!” He rose with his face badly scratched, his shoulder almost dislocated, and a handful of sand sifting up and down between his shirt and his skin. Then he saw that there was no need to ride in pursuit of the gelding.

  It stood with Sandy Sweyn as a sort of bulwark between it and the rancher, eying him with a bright, big-eyed curiosity over the shoulder of the half-wit.

  Dunstan flung down his hat and kicked it farther away from him. “I’ll ride that horse or break his neck…or let him break mine!” he shouted in a white heat.

  For he had conquered that horse before, and it is intolerable even to dream that what we have once beaten cannot be controlled again. There is no war so fierce as that of a king against a rebellious conquest. The elder brother can never understand his younger brother for growing up, nor can he forgive him for it. Perfect confidence swelled the heart of Dunstan, moreover. If he had needed any spur, it would have been the calm remark of Steve McGuire from the kitchen door.

  “I’d leave that horse strictly alone, boss. He ain’t acting like he was at home to you.”

  Once more the rancher rushed and found himself in the saddle. He took a firm toe hold on the stirrups. A glittering devil shone from his eyes. “Let him go!” he shouted to Sandy Sweyn.

  As Sandy Sweyn removed his hand from the bridle of the gelding, the same phenomenon was repeated. The mild, bright eyes of the gelding grew as wicked as those of his master. His head turned into a snaky, ominous thing. He left the earth as though he intended to live in air for a while. He did not fight in a foolish passion but with a wicked malice.

  There are ways and ways by which a mustang deposits his rider on the desert, but perhaps one way is most certain of all—and that is to whirl while bucking. For as the rider swings dizzily in the saddle, he has to maintain his equilibrium, control his dizziness, and resist the whiplash snappings of his spinal column all at one and the same moment.

  Dunstan was a fine rider, as has been said before, but he was mortal. Finally he swung far out to the side. At that very moment the gelding chose to buck jump in the opposite direction, checking his swing with a wonderful skill. It was as though the saddle had been snatched from beneath Dunstan. He was not slung from the saddle. He even seemed to hang for an instant in mid-air. He fell only a scant six feet, but that fall was solid and compact. He fell upon his side, rolled upon his back limply, and lay still with each fist clenched, but with his wide eyes blank.

  Sandy Sweyn stood entranced in wonder. The yell of the cook did not rouse him. As the gelding ran to him again, he began to smooth the shining neck of the horse and murmur little, soothing, wordless sounds.

  Steve McGuire, in the meantime, was busy fetching water. He drenched Peter Dunstan from head to foot. Still the rancher did not stir. He strove to lift his boss in his strong arms. But two hundred limp pounds are an almost impossible burden even for a strong man to manage, unless he knows the knack of it. McGuire was rather a master in the art of flooring men than in that of lifting them up again.

  Strength of wits seemed to come to Sandy Sweyn at last. He advanced and brushed the cook lightly to one side. As McGuire explained afterward to a friend, it was as though a twisted bar of living steel—if such a thing can be imagined—had touched against him, with a mighty engine propelling it. Sandy stooped and picked up the fallen man, lightly. He advanced to the kitchen door. He shifted his burden, and supporting it in one arm, as a father might support a slender child, with his free hand he opened the door and so passed on into the house.

  McGuire recovered his senses at last and showed the way to a bed. There the master of the ranch was laid.

  A minute later he opened his eyes—closed them—and when they were opened again, they were lighted with full understanding of all that had passed. They rested upon Sandy’s blank face for a long moment.

  “There’s a bull running amuck on my range, Sandy,” he said. “A big, red Durham bull that used to belong to your friend, the doctor. Go out and bring it in. There’s a ring already in its nose.”

  Ten

  Making no comment, Sandy Sweyn turned in perfect good humor and left the house.

  “How are you, chief?” said McGuire.

  “Beaten,” said the rancher, “plain beaten, Steve.”

  McGuire flushed. “If I had knowed that the horse was as plumb bad as all that….”

  That was the nearest that he could come to an apology. But Dunstan broke in: “Oh, I don’t mean the horse.”

  Before McGuire could answer with a question, his eye fell upon a form beyond the window and he exclaimed: “Blast me, Dunstan, if the fool ain’t starting out on foot!”

  The reply of the rancher turned him to stone. “I knew he would,” said Dunstan.

  “Knew that he would?” McGuire cried. “Why, man, that t
here red bull has been tearing up the range. He killed the big….”

  “I know. I saw the body.”

  “He’ll murder the boy, chief!”

  “There’ll be one fool less in the world,” Dunstan said coldly. “No, what I’m after is to find out if this Sandy Sweyn is really just a man that has a sort of power over animals…or if he’s really weird.”

  “Weird?” echoed McGuire.

  “I mean that.” He raised himself from the bed and sat down in a chair by the window. Apparently his mind was so intent on the problem that occupied it that he had quite forgotten his badly bruised body. “I used to hold that horse in the hollow of my hand, Steve.”

  “He was always a good deal of a handful,” McGuire said. “But I’ve seen you make him like it.”

  “But today he was changed. He was like a crazy thing, Steve. Not crazy, either. He seemed to be fighting with brains. If a man’s brain had the body of a horse to use, he might have fought something like that.”

  A little chill struck through the honest brain of Steve McGuire. “Chief, what’re you driving at?”

  Dunstan rolled a cigarette. “I hardly just know,” he admitted. “But look here. We know that this Sweyn has done strange things with the roan and with the gelding. That may mean that he has only a trick with horses. And a good many people have been able to do something like that. But what is the biggest fool thing in the world? A bull, Steve. There’s no sense to it at all, when it gets its temper up. That Durham has its temper up. Its sides are gashed, and the wounds not healed. It’s made a kill, and it’s the king of the range. Now, Steve, I tell you that if this half-wit can bring in the red bull, there is something weird about him…something so weird that I’ll believe that he was able to put something into the mind of the gelding and show him how to pitch me on my head. We’ll wait, and we’ll see.”