The Winged Horse Page 6

  There was a sort of allegorical interest and significance in this thought that arrested the mind of the boy, but only for a moment. He was so entirely a man of action that he felt for his guns, and stepped on again.

  Through the woods a creek rippled down the mountainside, and over the creek a moldering bridge had been built of massive, fallen trees, now half rotten. Upon the bridge he paused, listening to the whirl and roar of the water, for the larger voice of the wind was, for the moment, shut away to silence behind the rising woods. And he thought with what headlong folly he had approached up to this point. As though the Montagues would not be keeping watch and ward, no matter what the hour of the night.

  He listened keenly. He probed the trees before him. Since he saw nothing, he went on across the bridge and paused again, close to a dripping pine. Behind him he heard a faint groaning. It was a wonderfully human sound, and, glancing back with a start, he was in time to see the bridge sagging out from the bank and turning. It came to a trembling pause. It had been forced out upon a central pivot and now pointed up and down the stream. Twenty broad feet of emptiness lay between the visitor and escape. He could not help wondering why, if he had been spotted, the watcher had not opened fire upon him instead of turning the bridge, but he realized that this was no light for accurate shooting.

  He stepped aside through the trees, made a brief detour, and came back toward the road again. It opened up broad and straight, leading fairly for the house, and as he waited there, listening, intent and motionless, he saw a pair of shadows detach themselves from the gloom of the wood and pass slowly across the road behind him. Their heads were turned the other way. Perhaps they were fairly assured that they had penned him between them and the impassable banks of the creek.

  At any rate, he could not pause for further deductions. He went straight on up the road, keeping constantly under the steep shadows at the side of it. His presence here was momently more and more hazardous, for though it was hardly likely that they could guess that he, the Lonesome Kid, the Lamb, was actually within their precincts, yet they were informed that an enemy had approached them, and their guns would hardly ask questions before they fired at the first suspicious figure.

  This was bad enough even on a pitch-dark night, but the night no longer was pitch dark. The moon came out in stronger flares and for longer periods. The wind was as fierce as ever, as cold, as biting, and with it came strong flurries of sleet and rain that sometimes struck against the front of his slicker with the noise of an open hand striking his face. Sometimes he was like an ironclad warrior, half dissolving under a mist and shower of blows.

  Then the house stood suddenly before him. He had passed the last tree. He looked out of the shadows and saw the stark, ugly, rambling pile, all glistening now with wet, its windows looking like squares of smoke. And from the corners of the eaves, a silver, steady stream of water was pouring down and crashing on the ground, and the spray from this small cataract, leaping up again, formed and clung in slender icicles.

  Then a dark band of clouds passed across the moon, and the house was half lost, and pushed away, and banished under a thick penciling of rain. In the very midst of this rushing and crashing of noise, as the downpour burst upon him, the Lamb heard, as distinctly as though the air had been still as it always is before thunder, the uncertain, half-strangled breathing of a man immediately behind him. Then he knew that that breathing was indeed only inches from his back. He had been followed. Perhaps there were others behind him, too. They had drawn their net cleverly around him; they had mocked and laughed at him as he attempted to stalk their fortress.

  The Lamb felt that this was his moment of death. But he determined to die with his teeth bared, at the least, and, slipping out a Colt with inconspicuous smoothness, he whirled about. He saw the loom of a big, dark form behind him, and the glint of a leveled gun. He heard the click of a hammer falling upon a cap. And then he jammed his Colt into the stomach of the Montague.

  “Kind of wet for just one gun,” suggested the Lamb. “Damp enough to spoil pretty near any powder and caps. Reach up for the first branch over your head, stranger, will you?”

  The hands of the other rose. When they were the height of the Lamb’s throat, they paused, but after a moment they resumed their rising. The revolver had fallen with a splash into the mud and the water at their feet.

  “Who are you?” asked the Lamb.

  “The unluckiest fool that ever stepped,” the captive said.

  “What name?”

  “Dan Burns.”

  “Are you a Montague?”

  “Sure. Ain’t I here?”

  “Who am I, then?”

  “You’re one of the Loring’s outfit, of course.”

  “What one?”

  “The new one. The Kid, I s’pose.”

  “What makes you bet on that?”

  “None of the rest would’ve took such a fool chance as this.”

  “Why is it a fool chance?”

  “Well, shouldn’t you be dead in the mud, there, where that gun of mine is now lyin’?”

  “It’s true. Did they expect me down here tonight?”

  “Old Montague thought that you’d maybe come.”

  “Burns …”

  “Aye?”

  “I don’t want to be murdering you.”

  “I feel the same about it,” Burns said, and, in spite of the gun that was jammed into the pit of his stomach, he seemed to chuckle.

  “Could you play out this hand for the sake of a square deal?” asked the Lamb.

  “I could, I s’pose. What cards do you want?”

  “Only one. I want to draw a crack at Jimmy Montague.”

  “You want Jimmy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Man, man, why for do you want to chuck yourself away?”

  “That’s my business. Can you take me to his room?”

  “I s’pose I can.”

  “How many men are watching tonight?”

  “Five.”

  “That leaves how many inside?”

  “Fifteen, I think … besides the kids. You see what you’re tackling?”

  “Lead me on,” the Lamb said. “I want to see the way in … the way out can take care of itself.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Dan Burns appeared to be a philosopher.

  He reasoned shortly and aloud, “If I take you in, you’ll get your head blowed off … if I don’t, you’ll blow off mine. I like you a lot, but I like my own hide better. Come on, kid.” He turned about, his hands still shoulder high, and led the way toward the house.

  The Lamb said in his ear—for he walked closer than Burns’ shadow behind him, “I hope that the wind don’t stagger you into making no wrong step, brother. It’s cold enough to make maple syrup, and if you make a bad pass, I’m gonna draw your sap.”

  Burns nodded, and as he did, the wind tore off his hat with a shriek and blew his long hair fluttering and snapping straight out behind him.

  They came up to a small door, like a postern let into a wall, and here Burns fitted a key into the lock and opened it, the well-oiled bolt sliding softly in the wards. They passed inside. And closing the door, they shut out the roar of the wind, only its fierce whistling followed them indoors.

  They stood unmoving for a time. The Lamb had pressed the muzzle of his Colt into the small of the back of Dan Burns, and the latter seemed to be pausing for thought. Their clothes dripped steadily, noisily to the floor—one stream spattered upon naked wood, and another sopped upon carpeting. The Lamb breathed short, for he was scenting the odors of cookery such as cling in a house when winter weather keeps the windows closed.

  “Just slow and steady, Danny,” he advised the other, “like your wife didn’t know that you was out, and the stairs creaked a good deal.”

  With all the required caution, Dan Burns led the way thro
ugh the hall and then up a flight of steps, a very narrow flight that angled once or twice from side to side. In spite of himself, the Lamb felt that the return trail was growing somewhat obscured in his memory.

  Dan Burns suddenly stopped, and the gun was quickly jabbed deeply into his flesh. “You want a fair and square crack at Jim Montague, do you?” Dan asked.

  “That’s all I ask, son.”

  “Suppose I take you to his room, what you gonna do? Yell at him and start shootin’?”

  “I’ll give him a fair warning, by light or by dark,” said the Lamb. “I never murdered, and I never will.”

  “You’ll speak first before you start shootin’?”

  “Why, man, I’m new in this part of the land. You dunno me, yet. I ain’t a sneak. I don’t … I don’t … shoot horses instead of their riders.” His voice had choked a little.

  Dan Burns, deep in thought, now seemed to reach a conclusion. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do what I can for you.”

  “You’ve sworn that already, Danny. I ain’t doubting you.”

  Danny said nothing, but led on at a brisker pace. Twice more they twisted from side to side in the hallway. Then they came to a door that, like most of the entrances in the house, was set in broad, and low, and solid. A man of a shade more than average height would have to stoop to pass through.

  Here the guide paused.

  “Is this it, Burns?” whispered the Lamb.

  He heard Burns answer in shaking tones, “I’m a skunk. But what else could I do?”

  “I had my gun on you,” the Lamb said, swallowing his contempt for the traitor. “What else could you do?”

  “They’ll never think of that.” Burns sighed.

  “They’ll never know of that … they’ll never know what you’ve done.”

  “Monty? He knows everything. He’s a clever one.” Burns stooped, worked softly at the lock of the door, and gradually drew it wide. The air from the chamber wafted slowly out to the Lamb, and it seemed to him sweet and strange like the breath of the wind that has touched a meadow of spring flowers. Inside the room, there was a little dusk, light fit to make shadows only more shadowy.

  Burns stood back. From the small flame of the lamp that burned inside the chamber there was only a single thin splinter of light, and this struck against the eyes of Burns, and they seemed to the Lamb as hard and as bright as the eyes of a bird. He sidled past his guide, shrinking a little low, with a ponderous Colt in either hand—the left hand for Burns, if the latter should attempt any treachery, and the right hand for whatever danger lay in the room before him.

  Burns, however, attempted nothing, except softly to push the door shut behind the intruder. He closed it—but he did more, for a soft and heavy click now told the Lamb that Burns must have removed the key from the inside of the door. At any rate, he now had locked it from outside. The floor trembled with a deep, soft vibration; Burns apparently was running at full speed down the outer corridor.

  But what matter that the Lamb was locked into the room with Jim Montague? Indeed, if he were to die, he never would have a chance to perish in battle by the hand of a more famous antagonist than this big man appeared to be. Besides, the Lamb was unable to think of the future or to weigh other dangers, for his mind was possessed by the picture of terrible Jim Montague as he had seen that monster riding through the storm on the great black horse, and the realization of the battle that now lay under his hand.

  At the closing of the door and the changing of the draft of air, the flame in the lamp cowered down to a mere pin head of light that was really no light at all, but rather like a waning eye that observed but was not to be seen.

  The Lamb leaned back against the wall and freshened his grip upon his guns. Then he remembered his promise to Burns; he remembered, too, his own sense of honor that was a cloth with many tattered places and with many holes in it, but nevertheless a cloth of gold.

  Then he put up his guns so that he should have no advantage over his enemy. At the same time he heard a groaning voice that said, “I’ve done no good. You gotta do good to pay your way to a second chance. I’ve paid my way to punishment. I’ve paid my way to destruction.”

  There was such a sighing despair in this voice that the Lamb felt himself go chill. It was Jimmy Montague, then, his conscience speaking to him in the night. Something relented in the Lamb’s iron heart.

  Then he saw a white form pass across the dark of the room in silence. The form paused; the flame of the lamp rose with a flutter and a faint sound like the whisper of silks. By that light, the Lamb saw that a girl in a white robe was standing and leaning over the bed. He heard her murmur above the man, then she stepped back, and he saw, by the flare of the lamplight tossed lightly up and down by the pressure of the draft, a worn, haggard face, thin, pain-ridden, and by no means the face of Jim Montague.

  The Lamb could remember it in another place that same day. One rider had swayed to one side and clutched at his horse to keep from falling as the Lamb rode in, delivering his charge. Here lay that rider. Then he heard the wounded man say, “Where are you, Miss Patten?”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “I dunno that I can see you,” the wounded man said.

  “Here’s my hand, Sammy.”

  “Oh, where are you?” he said. “I can feel your hand, but I can’t see you very good. You look like a ghost to me, Louise.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, and the watcher could see her face. She was very young, very pretty, and under the play of the rising and falling lamplight the sheen of her skin seemed to vary, until it appeared that a light was shining from within her. It was only a small thing to the eye, but the fancy entered deeply into the mind of the Lamb, and he thought of her as some translucent, unearthly thing.

  “I’m not a ghost, Sammy. I’m sitting here on your bed, and watching out that any bad thing can’t come near you.”

  She put her hand on his forehead. She talked to him as though to a helpless child, and the charm and the wonder of this half paralyzed the brain of the Lamb and made him forget that he had been betrayed into this chamber so easily by treacherous Dan Burns—made him forget that other consequences must follow upon this betrayal.

  “You’re not a ghost. No, no. I’m a lot more ghost than you, and I know that,” cried the sick man.

  “You’re being foolish, Sammy. You’re as good as well, if you’ll sweep all the dust and the doubt into the corner of your mind and close a door on it.”

  “I got no trust in myself,” Sammy groaned. “Hold hard onto my hand, Louise. There’s no good in me, but there’s enough good in you maybe to pull me through.” He added in a rapid, trembling voice, “He come smashin’ through the rain with his guns flashin’. When it hit me, it was like two hands of fire had took and broke me open … like you’d break a biscuit … and poured me full of fire, like you’d pour a biscuit full of honey. And I’m still broken, Louise. I’m shakin’ and shakin’ …”

  “Steady … steady,” said her gentle voice. “It’s mostly a bad dream, a lot worse than the facts.”

  “He’s like something out of a nightmare. There’s danger and death in him.”

  “Jimmy put him down,” the girl said with a sudden ring in her voice.

  “Aye, but it took Jimmy to put him down. What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Are you better?”

  “Aye, a lot better. You gotta touch with you, Louise.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The sick man relaxed. His hand fell suddenly from its grip upon the girl, and in one moment he was smiling sleepily upon her, and in the next he was lost in slumber.

  There was another thing to take the attention of the Lamb, however, and that was an outbreak of voices far off in the house, at such a distance, in fact, that he hardly could tell in what direction they proceeded. There were footfalls, too, of heavy men moving at a r
un, but the sound of them was rather a vibration in the floor, and something on the table in the center of this room began to stir and tinkle lightly with the throb of the far-off running feet.

  The girl rose from the bed, took the lamp from its stand, and, turning about, walked directly up to him. She raised the lamp, so that the light would fall more directly upon his face, and he had to pucker his brows into a heavy frown to endure the glare of the lamp so near to him. The same light slipped like water over the arm of the girl, from which the loose sleeve of her robe had fallen back, and gleamed upon the hair that ran like a twist of solid gold down in front of her shoulder.

  She looked to the Lamb a delicately fragile thing. He grew a little dizzy as he stared at her, but her voice brought him back to his senses quickly enough.

  “Who are you?”

  “Me?” said the Lamb.

  “Why are you here? Who are you?” she repeated.

  He gaped at her, and knew that she had been aware for a long moment of his presence in the room. Perhaps even when he entered she had known, but she had gone to the sick man, first, and quieted him.

  The wonder of the Lamb grew more intense. He felt as once he had felt before—a very small boy before a very tall teacher. And then the sense of his awe turned in him and made him laugh a little—that he, being what he was, should have ventured into the house of his enemies, being what they were, and that, having been betrayed into the most mortal peril of his life, he should stand now agape, helpless, overawed before a slender girl.

  He said, “I’m Alfred Lamb.”

  “I thought so,” she said. And she nodded at him, with a clear, placid brow.

  He jerked a thumb toward the door. “A yellow coyote that I collared outside swore he’d show me the way to Jim Montague’s room if I didn’t blow his head off. He showed me here, instead.”

  “You wanted Jimmy?”