Book: The Freebooters of the Wilderness

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> The Freebooters of the Wilderness




Wayland's glance ran along the trail; and for an instant, the writhing
sun glare played the same trick with his own vision. Something a dirty
white quivered above the black lava table like the loose canvas top of
a tented wagon. The Ranger side-stepped the trail for a different
angle of refraction. The object blurred, then reappeared, a leaf from
a note book not thirty yards away. Wayland went quickly forward. He
was aware as he walked that the shrivelled earth heaved and sank so
that he had the sensation of staggering. It was a dirty leaf from a
note book fouled by the Desert winds and lodged in the sage brush.
Then, he looked twice. It was not lodged. It was stuck down in the
branches secure against the wind. The ranger pulled the thing off.
The under side showed tobacco stains. On the upper were scrawled in
heavy pencil; _By. 20 ml du est if yu don't cath upp hit itt est flagg
midnite frate carrie yu mine sitty_.

"Railway twenty miles due East," translated Wayland. "That is probably
true. I think there is a branch line runs a hundred miles in to Mine
City. If you don't catch up, hit it East, flag the midnight freight,
she'll carry you to Mine City. Well? What do you make of it? Did
they leave it; or did some body else? If it had been there long, the
wind would have torn it to tatters."

"Let me see it." The old man turned it over in his hand. "Evidently
left to direct the man back in the Pass; they don't believe he's dead."

The Ranger took it back and read it over. "If they're lagging back for
the missing man, why didn't they leave a message sooner? Trail doesn't
fork here. Why did they leave word here?"

"There really is a railway somewhere here, Wayland?"

"There must be if one knew where to find it."

Matthews smiled. "Then, A take it this is a gentle hint to go off and
lose ourselves trying to find it."

Wayland's eyes rested on the slow-moving dust cloud against the horizon.

"Then it is a case of who lasts out!" He looked at his white haired
companion. "But there's no call for you to risk _your_ life on the
last lap of the race. It's not your job. It means another day;
perhaps, two. If you'd take my horse, it's fresher, and the water bag,
you could ride out to the railroad to-night. Those fellows are not
good for many miles more unless they hit a spring. Let me go on alone,
sir."

"Alone?" The old man's face flushed furious, livid. . . . "Git epp!"


Up a sand bluff, heaving to the heat waves; down a slither of ash dust;
then, across the petrified black lava roll; down to a saline sink,
white and blistering to the sight; over a silt bank crumbly as flour;
and on and yet on; across the dusty sage-smelling parched plain . . .
they moved; always following the tracks; tracks confused and doubling
back as if the hind horse lagged; with blood drip and shuffling
dragging hoofs; always keeping the dust whirl of the fore horizon in
view; on and on, but speaking scarcely at all!

The Ranger again had that curious sensation of the earth slipping away
from his foot steps. He had thrown away his leather coat early in the
morning. Now be found himself tearing off the loose red tie round the
flannel collar of the Service suit; and he pulled himself sharply
together recognizing the fevered instinct to strip off all hampering
clothing. It was as much a heat-death symptom as sleep forbodes frost
death. He did not walk in a daze as the old man rode, half numbness,
half drowse. He walked with a throb--throb--throb in his temples like
the fall of water. He wanted to run; to strip himself as an athlete
for a race; and all the time, he kept walking as if the heaving earth
went writhing away from each step.

"Don't y' think ye better open that pack, an' get a drink for y'rself,
my boy?"

Wayland was pausing in the shadow of a sand butte, and the old man had
ridden up.

"Want it for yourself?"

"Not a drop."

"Better keep it for the horses, then; if we can keep them going to the
next spring, they'll carry us out. Anything the matter with me that
you ask that?"

"Oh no; A thought A saw you wave y'r arms."

The Ranger looked at the elder man. He was riding leaning forward
heavily; and the dust had trenched deep fatigue lines in the hollow
beneath his eyes and from the nostrils to the mouth. Wayland didn't
retort that the frontiersman's speech had sounded guttural and muffled.
He was not sure it was _not_ the fault of his own ears.


They worked slowly to the crest of the sand roll, zig-zagging to break
the steepness. An ash-colored shadow skulked along the tracks of the
outlaw trail. The little mule gave a squealing hind kick. The shadow
looked back: it was a coyote, scenting the tracks of the drovers' lame
horse. It went loping over the sand a blurr of gray.

"Curious thing that, Wayland! Notice the antics of the mule? Always
see that in a range bred beast, centuries of ham stringing."

The Ranger did not answer. The sand was no longer heaving in waves.
It was running, sliding like the glossy surface of the sea. The throb
of his temples, the slide of the sand, the lakes of light, light and
crystal pools, that ran away as you came up, all brought visions of
water. The dust cloud on the sky line dipped and disappeared behind a
ridge of rolling sand.

There was the drowsy swash of saddle leather and the padded chug of
dragging feet and the hum, the hypnotic hum, of the heat that drowsed
from delirium to sleep.


"I think," said Wayland, "this seems a pretty good jumping-off place
for a rest."

The afternoon was waning. They were under shelter of a sand bank from
the wind and sun.

"A think, Wayland, this is nearly my jumping off place altogether."

Matthews spoke feebly. On pretense of steadying the fagged broncho,
the Ranger helped him to dismount. Then, Wayland unsaddled and drew
the water bag from the pack trees. He handed it over to the old man.
Matthews pushed it aside: "Keep it for yourself to-morrow. If y' find
no spring, y'll need the water to-morrow; but A'll take y'r flask of
brandy if y' don't mind?"

"That's a fool thing to take in the heat, sir."

"'Tis if y' intend to live, Wayland; but A'm at the end of this Trail.
A'd like a bit strength t' tell y' a thing or two before . . . as we
rest! Don't waste any water on flap jacks."

The mule lay rolling in the sage brush. The two horses stood with
lowered heads chacking on the bit and pawing. Wayland saw the brandy
flush mount to the purplish pallor of the old man's face.

"Wayland, this is _my_ jumping off place! A'm at the end of the Track.
The Trail where the tracks all point one way. 'Tis na' sensible y'r
hangin' back for me! If y'll take the fresh horse an' go on alone,
y'll get out! If the railroad is only thirty miles due East, y' can
make that. We'll rest a bit here, then after sundown we'll ride on;
an' in the dark A'll drop back. If it hurts y' t' think of it, A'll
head my horse due East for the railroad! Y'll go on, Wayland! Y'll
not turn back for me!"

It took the Ranger a moment to realize what the old frontiersman was
trying to say. "I think you'd better take another drink of that
brandy," he said. "It seems to me a fool thing to let a good man die
for the sake of catching three outlaw blackguards."

"'Tis not for the sake o' three blackguards!" The words came out with
a rap. "'Tis to vindicate justice, 'tis to uphold law, an' till every
good citizen is willin' to lay down his life hounding outrage to th'
very covert o' Hell, t' die protectin' law an' justice an' innocence
an' right, y'r Nation wull be ruled by paltroons an' cowards an'
white-vested blackguards! Go; go on; go on to the end till ye fall and
rot! If th' Devil takes to the open an' the saints take to cover,
whose goin' t' fight the battle for right? The Armageddon o' y'r
Nation? 'Tis easy t' be a good citizen when the bands are playin' an'
the cannon roarin'. 'Tis harder in times o' peace to fight the battle
o' the lone man! These outlaws, these blackguards, these cut throats,
they're only the tools of the Man Higher Up! Get them, then go on for
the Man Higher Up! Leave me, when A drop back in the dark to-night; if
A'm in my senses, A'll shout a bravo and give y' a wave! Y'r the Man
on the Job, the Nation's job! 'Tis not by bludgeons and bayonets, 'tis
by ballots and brains y'll fight this battle out; and fight y' must or
y'r freedom will go the way o' the old world despotisms down in a
welter. A wish y'd go to the top o' the bank and have a look ahead."


An absurd sense of power, of resolution from despair, of will to
do--suddenly swept over the Ranger. He forgot his fatigue. Months
afterwards, a fellow student who had become a professor in psychology
explained to him that it was a case of consciousness dipping suddenly
down to the sublimal reservoirs of unconscious strength that lie in
humanity; but then, Wayland had left two factors of explanation untold:
first, that the dying trumpet call of the old warrior missionary had
opened the doors of consciousness to that night on the Ridge of the
Holy Cross; second, that the setting sun tinging all the buttes and
hummocks and plains with rose flame somehow tinctured his being with
consciousness of her, consciousness of the life drafts he had taken
from her lips that night of the Death Watch.

He went across to the pack trees. Picking up the cross trees and
blankets, he laid them on the ground as a pillow.

"If you will rest here, sir, I'll go above and have a look."


From the top of the sand bank, the Ranger looked down to see the old
man lying with his face to the sky, his head pillowed on the saddle
blankets, sound asleep. He looked across the Desert. The sun had sunk
behind the azure strip of the mountain sky line. The billows of lava,
black and glazed, the ashy silt pink-tinged to the sun-glow, the
heaving orange sands . . . lay palpitating infinite almost with a
oneness that was of God. Wayland was not given to prayers. Perhaps,
like all men of action, he tried to make his life a prayer. Somehow,
something within him prayed wordlessly now . . . not for exceptional
advantage in the game of life, not for remission of the laws of Nature,
not for miracle, but for aptitude to play the game according to rules.
His wordless prayer did not end in an "amen." It ended in a little
hard laugh. As though Right were such a simple business as just
personally being good! or an insurance policy against damnation and
guarantee for salvation! What was it the old man had said? Your right
must be made into might . . . that was the game of life: the saving of
the Nation: the good old-fashioned square deal no matter which party
cut the cards. Right made Might, Might made Right; that was what the
Nation wanted!

Then, it came again, the touch, the consciousness, the will to power,
to do, to fight and overcome. He rose and looked across the Desert. A
puff of dust, a swirl and eddy of riders, resolved itself through the
terra cotta mist to the forms of three men going over the crest of the
sand roll against the red sun-wrack of the sky line; three figures far
apart, riding slowly, crawling against the face of the distant sky; one
man in advance bent over his pummel; a second rider with a pack horse
in tow pulling and dragging on the halter rope, the pack horse white
and lame, stopping at every step, the man crunched, huddling fore done,
down in his saddle; then dragging far to the rear, just cresting the
sky line as the other two disappeared, swaying from side to side, a
ragged wreck lying almost forward on his horse's neck; was he being
deserted?

Wayland uttered a jubilant low whistle and tumbled down the sand bank
to his camp kit.


The wind was at lull and the velvet air palpitating as a human pulse.
The after-glow lay on the orange sands cresting all the ridges with
cressets of flame. Wayland was riding bare backed.

"When we sight them, I want you to drop back, sir! The Desert's got
them. They haven't the resistance of dead fish left. If we cut across
this sink, as I make it, we'll save a couple of miles and almost meet
them on the other side of the next ridge."

When Wayland had wakened the old frontiersman, he had babbled
inconsequently about the sea. Mixing brandy with the last of the
sediment water, Wayland got him into the saddle. There were queer
splotches of blood under the skin on the backs of his hands; but when
the brandy relieved his fatigue, he stopped babbling of the sea and
spoke coherently.

"Y' mind the man, whose wife died in the Desert, Wayland?"

His horse stumbled. The Ranger snatched at the bridle and jerked it up.

"Yes," said Wayland.

"Vera noble of the woman; 'tis all right on _her_ record, Wayland; but
what do y' think o' th' man?"

"But in this case, the man took her in to save her life."

"A wasn't thinking of _his_ case," answered the other bluntly. "A was
thinking of _yours_."

The horse stumbled again. This time, the Ranger kept hold of the
bridle rein.

"A didna' just mean t' tell y', Wayland; but A want y' t' know before A
drop back. A saw it in her eyes, Wayland, yon night she went up the
Ridge trail, and oh, man, A was loth to speak: she would cheer y' on in
y'r work, A thought, perhaps--perhaps, the Lord might be playin' an ace
card an' A'd no be trumpin' my partner's tricks; but 'tisn't so;
Wayland, 'tisn't so! This Desert hell proves me wrong. She isna for
y', man; no man can ask a woman to come into a fight that may mean
this! It's a man's job, Wayland; an' the man who would drag a woman
into the sufferin' of it isn't worthy of her . . . isn't the man to do
the job. Oh yes, A know, a woman's love is ready to jump in the fire
an' all that. Hoh! The man's love that'll let her is poor stuff,
Wayland, base metal, kind o' love to burn all away to dross an' ashes
when the fires come! Her's will come out pure gold thro' it all, but
man alive, Wayland, think o' her when she finds his as dross; an' if he
lets her sacrifice hers for his, 'tis dross!"

Wayland grew suddenly hot all over. He could not bring himself to name
her, much less indulge in the cheap confessional of tawdry loose held
affection. He had heard men discuss their love affairs: men who could
discuss them hadn't any; theirs was the sense reflex of the frog that
kicks when you tickle its nerve-end. He rode on unspeaking.

"Y'll be tellin' y'rself 'tis too sacred to mouthe--with an old fellow
like me. All right! We'll say it is _too_ sacred; but that minds me
of a Cree rascal on my Reserve, an old medicine man, always talkin' of
his sacred medicine bag; well, one day when he was good an' far away,
good an' plenty drunk, A took a peep into his medicine bag; there was
nothin' inside but a little snake that hissed; an' him beatin' the big
drum! Hoh! sacred?

"Y'll be tellin' me y'r passion vows are stronger than life or death?
Hoh! Y'd be a poor man if love wasn't stronger than death without any
vows and big drum! Y'll be tellin' me y've warned her not t' link her
life up wi' y'rs, to help y' resist an' all that; well, while y'r
playin' y'r high and mighty self-sacrifice, did y'r manhood melt in the
love light o' her eyes?"

Wayland jerked his horse roughly to a dead stop. "Mr. Matthews, for
what reason are you saying all this?"

"A'll tell y' that too! A've come for her, Wayland. A've come to take
her back to her people. Y' don't understand, her father is a MacDonald
of the Lovatt clan--came out with Wolfe's regiment in 1759."

"In 1759?" repeated Wayland. "I heard her father say that very year."

"Yes, and a dark doursome race they are. Lovatt: Fraser MacDonald was
his name; fought under Wolfe and joined the up country furhunters.
When he came back from his hunting one year, he found his wife had
eloped with an officer of the regiment; so he took to the north woods
an' married an Indian girl and his son was the man o' the iron arm, the
piper for little Sir George in the thirties, who blew the bag pipes up
Saskatchewan and over the mountains and down the Columbia and all round
them lakes where y'r Holy Cross Forest is. They were a' dark fearsome
men in their loves and hates. This man married late in life, he had
two sons, Angus of Prince Albert an' your Donald here. He never saw
his father alive. The Lovatt estates have been restored by law; but
the line is bred out, down to a little old lady whose waitin' me up at
my Mission on Saskatchewan. She came huntin' heirs. Angus had married
an Indian woman; he'll never go back, nor his sons. They're livin'
under a tent to-day. What would they do wi' a castle and liveried
servants and tenants an' things? Donald, y'r sheep king man, married a
white girl. Some time after '85 she left him for the part he took in
the Rebellion. She died after the child's birth; and the father
claimed the daughter. He's known they'd have to come for his daughter
some day, spite of his part in the Rebellion; and that was no such
shameful thing as y' might think, if y've lived long enough in the
West, t' understand! He has educated the daughter for the place. As A
guess, she knows nothing of it, doesn't know who her mother was, or why
her father had to leave Canada. A guessed that much when y'r Indian
woman sent me the wrong road from the Ridge trail, that night! She
doesn't even know who that Indian woman is."

"You came--for her?" repeated Wayland slowly. The night on the Ridge
came back to him! Calamity's fear when the old frontiersman arrived;
Bat's threat to expose something; Eleanor's perturbed letter; the
father's half furtive defiant existence. He was too proud to ask more
than the other cared to tell, too loyal to pry into any part of her
life that she could not willingly share with him. He sat gazing into
the mystic afterglow of the Desert, a flame of fire over a lake of
light. It was as the old man had said, he had asked her to strengthen
his resolution; and he drank in the love light of her eyes as he asked.
He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his
weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that
forged eternally their beings into one. But this, this was the Hand
from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the
Destiny Thing which Man's Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder.
Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it
affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had
foreseen: the fighter must fight alone. Love might send forth; but
love must not be suffered to draw back.

"Why do you tell me all this?"

The old man moistened his lips before speaking. "If A don't go out,
Wayland, A want y' t' see that her father's told, that she's taken
back. When A saw the love light in her face come out like stars and
her breath break when A spoke of you as a Ranger fellow, when A saw
that, A thought, no matter what A thought. If y' married her, d' y'
think y' could go off on the firing line; d' y' think y' would if y'
knew y'd left her in danger? They'd strike at you through her, Wayland
. . . it would be the end of free fightin'. A ask no promise. 'Tis
enough A've told y'. Drive on!"


They moved slowly up the sand ridge, the Ranger a little ahead,
oblivious of the livid blue of the old man's lips and the drag on the
bridle rope till a quick jerk ripped the line from his loose hold; and
he glanced back to see the other's horse stagger, flounder up again,
waver and sink with a sucking groan. Wayland sprang just in time to
catch the old frontiersman. He tore the saddle from the fallen broncho
and cinched it on his own horse. Then he lifted Matthews, protesting,
to the fresh mount, "till we reach the next rest place," he said, tying
the halter rope of the pack mule to the saddle pommel. "Go on, I'll
come."


Wayland waited till the horse and mule passed over the crest of the
sand bank; then, he took out his revolver. A shudder ran through the
fallen horse. The Ranger's hand trembled. He stroked its neck. "Poor
devil; it's none of your affair either. I wonder how the God of the
game will square it with the dumb brutes?"

He ran his left hand down the white face of the broncho. It hobbled as
if to stagger up, and sank back dumb, faithful, trying to the end, one
fore knee bent to rise, the neck outstretched. Wayland's right hand
went swiftly close between eye and ear. He shot, in quick succession,
three times, his hand fumbling, his sight turned aside.


Neither spoke as they advanced down the other side of the sand ridge,
the Ranger steadying himself with a hand to the mule's neck. The bank
dipped to a white alkali pit where the light lay in dead pools, gray in
the twilight, quivering with heat, layers of blue air above ashes of
death. For the second time that day, the sand colored thing skulked
across the trail. Wayland took hold of both bridles and led down, the
old man wakening as from a stupor. The alkali pit lay perhaps a mile
distant, gray and fading in the red light.


"Wayland, is that water?"

"Where? I can't see it."

"There, at the foot of the hill."

"With trees up side down? No, sir! It may be mirage of water miles
away, carried by the rays of this twilight; but if you can see it and
the horses can't smell it, you can bet on a false pool!"

But the little mule had jerked free with a low squeal.

"A tell you, Wayland, there is water;" and he began babbling again
inconsequently of the sea, running his words together incoherent, half
delirious.

"Go on and see, then! I'll follow! If there's water, look out for the
drovers."

Wayland let go his hold of the bridle. Horse and mule shot down the
sand bank. He saw them shoulder neck and neck along the white alkali
bottom, then break to a gallop, the old man hanging to the pommel; then
all disappeared round the end of the bank. Wayland slithered down the
sand slope and dashed to the top of the next hill breathless. Below
lay the glister of water, real water and no mirage, glassy, gray and
sinister. The Ranger uttered a yell; then paused in his head-long
descent.

The pony had plunged in belly deep; the mule had lowered its head; the
old man was kneeling at the brink. Wayland saw him lave the water up
with his hand: then throw it violently back. All at once, the grip of
life snapped. Matthews was lying motionless on the sand. The horse
was chocking its head up and down; the mule was stamping angrily with
fore feet roiling the pool bottom. It had been one of the salt sinks
that lie in the depressions of the Desert.




CHAPTER XVII

WHERE THE TRACKS ALL POINT ONE WAY

Wayland poured the last very driblets of water sediments from the skin
bag. This, he forced past the old man's lips. Then he drew the
unconscious form back on the saddle blankets, loosened the neck of the
shirt, laved the temples and wrists with the salt water, tore strips of
canvas from the tent square, wet that and laid it on the old man's
forehead. He ran his hand inside the shirt and felt the heart. It was
still beating, beating furiously, with faint flutterings, then
accessions of fresh fury. The lips were black and swollen. The eyes
were sunken; and the veins stood out in deadly clear purplish
reticulation with splotches of transfused blood under the shrivelled
skin of the hands. Then, he raised the old white head from the pack
trees,--brave old warrior for right going down the Trail where the
Tracks All Point One Way--, and somehow got a mouthful of brandy past
the clinched teeth. The breath came fast and faint like the heart
beats. Once, the eyes opened; but they were glazed and unseeing.
Wayland laid the old head on the pillowed pack trees, fitting rest for
frontiersman of the wilderness; then he stood up to think! A terrible
passion of tenderness, of question, of defiance to God, rushed through
his thoughts. The animals take their tragedies dumb and uncomplaining.
Man alone has not learned the futility of shouting impotent reproaches
at a brazen sky.


The Ranger unsaddled the pony. Then he tethered the mule and broncho
by separate ropes to the boulders. He placed the brandy flask by the
old man's right hand. He thought a moment. Then he laid the loaded
rifle close to the same hand.

The eyes were still staring wide open unseeing. The purple lips began
babbling wordless words, words of the sea, words that ran into one
another inarticulate. Wayland stooped and took the left hand in his
own palm. It was cold and heavy, a thing detached from life; and the
purple swollen lips were still babbling in inarticulate whispers.
Should he leave him to die there alone; or go forth to seek; seek what?

The Ranger stooped and pressed his lips to the blood-blotched back of
the faithful shrivelled old hand. He did not shed a tear. We weep
only when we are half hurt.


Wayland seized the Service axe and uncased his own rifle. Then in
words that were not worshipful, not bending his knees, but standing
with his hat off, he uttered what may have been a prayer, or may have
been blasphemy. I leave you to judge: "By God, if there is a God, why
doesn't He waken up? If there is a God, does _He_ stand for right? Is
there such a thing as Right; or is Right the dream of fools? I want to
know! If there is a God, I want God to speak out clear and plain,
right now, in plain facts, so I can understand, and not so blamed long
ago that a plain fellow can't make out what's the right thing to do."

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