Caroline Lockhart

“ He wallowed and threshed about like a suffering animal, beating the earth with his clenched fists, during the paroxysms of cutting, wrenching pain. His suffering was supreme. All else in the world shrank into insignificance beside it. No thoughts of Dora fortified him; no mother’s face came to comfort him; nor that of any human being he had ever known. He was just Smith—self-centred—alone; just Smith, fighting and suffering and struggling for his life. ”

“ When the sorrel pony at the head of the team felt the rope grow taut on the saddle-horn, it lay down to its work. The grit and muscle of a dozen horses seemed concentrated in the little cayuse. It pulled until every vein and cord in its body appeared to stand out beneath its skin. It lay down on the rope until its chest almost touched the ground. There was a look of determination that was almost human in its bright, excited eyes as it strained and struggled on the slippery hillside with no word of urging from the girl. ”

“ Dora had been reading “Hiawatha” aloud each evening to Susie, Tubbs, and Smith, so when she finally closed the grammar, she asked if he would like to hear more of the Indian story, as he called it, to which he nodded assent.
Dora read well, with intelligence and sympathy; her trained voice was flexible. Then, too, she loved this greatest of American legends. It appealed to her audience as perhaps no other poem would have done. It was real to them, it was “life,” their life in a little different environment and told in a musical rhythm which held them breathless, enchanted. ”

“ It never before had occurred to Smith that the world through which he had gone his tumultuous way was a beautiful place, or that there was joy in the simple fact of being strongly alive. When the sage-brush commenced to turn green and the many brilliant flowers of the desert bloomed, when the air was stimulating like wine and fragrant with the scents of spring, it had meant little to Smith beyond the facts that horse-feed would soon be plentiful and that he could lay aside his Mackinaw coat. ”

“ In a kind of subconscious arrogance, he believed that he was stronger than Fate, more powerful than Death. He would not die; he would live because he wanted to live. Death was not for him—Smith. For others, but not for him.
At last the paroxysms became less frequent and lost their violence. When they ceased altogether, he lay limp and half-conscious. He was content to remain motionless until the flies and insects of the sand roused him to the fact that another day had come.
He was incredibly weak, and it took all his remaining strength to throw his forty-pound cow-saddle upon his horse’s back. ”

“ It is doubtful if any but steel-colored eyes can take on the look which Ralston’s contained as they met Smith’s. His skin was gray as he straightened himself and drew a hand which shook noticeably the length of his cheek and across his mouth.
In great anger, anger which precedes some quick and desperate act, almost every person has some gesture peculiar to himself, and this was Ralston’s. ”

“ There were many, many trails and wire fences to bewilder one, and people—hundreds of people—people who were not always kind. His answers filled her with vague fears. To be only sixteen, and alone, is cause enough for tears, and Susie shed them now.
McArthur, with a radiant face, was riding toward the ranch to which he had become singularly attached. His saddle-pockets bulged with mail, and his elbows flapped joyously as he urged his horse to greater speed. ”

“ Their voices are strong to-day,” said Running Rabbit.
The Indians threw Smith upon the edge of the crevice, face downward, so that he could look below. With his staring, bloodshot eyes he saw them all—dozens of them—a hundred or more! Crawling on the shelves and in the bottom, writhing, wriggling, hissing, coiled to strike! Every marking, every shading, every size—Smith saw them all with his bulging, fascinated eyes. The Indians stoned them until a forked tongue darted from every mouth and every wicked eye flamed red. ”

“ The brown mare had responded to Ralston’s signal like the loyal, honest little brute she was. The gravel flew behind them, and the rat-a-tat-tat of the horses’ hoofs on the hard road was like the roll of a drum. They were running neck and neck, but Ralston had little fear of the result, unless the gray had phenomenal speed.
Ralston knew that whoever reached the gate first must open it. If he could get far enough in the lead, he could afford to do so; if not, he meant to “pull” his horse and leave it to Smith. The real race would be from the gate to the pony. ”

“ With the lightning-like gesture which had made his name a byword where Babe himself was unknown, he pulled his six-shooter from its holster and shot Tubbs through the head. He fell his length, like a bundle of blankets, and, even as he dropped, Babe was in the saddle and away.
It was a desperate race that was on, between desperate men; for if Smith was desperate, Ralston was not less so. Every fibre of his being was concentrated in the determination to recapture the man who had twice outwitted him. The deputy sheriff’s reputation was at stake ”

“ A certain self-contained, spectacled youth, whose weekly letters arrived with regularity, rose before her mental vision, and as quickly vanished, leaving in his stead a man of a different type, a man at once unyielding and gentle, both shy and bold; a man who seemed to typify in himself the faults and virtues of the raw but vigorous West. Though she hesitated, she replied:
“No, there is no one.”
And Ralston, fording the stream, lifted his eyes midway and saw Smith raise Dora’s hand to his lips. ”

“ Ralston, waxing philosophical went on: “It’s a great thing to be able to wait, Susie—coolly, smilingly, to wait—providing, as the phrase goes, you hustle while you wait. One victory for your enemy doesn’t mean defeat for yourself. It’s usually the last trick that counts, and sometimes games are long in the playing. Wait for your enemy’s head, and when it comes up, whack it! Neither you nor I, Susie, have been reared to believe that when we are swatted on one cheek we should turn the other.” ”

“ There’s two things in the world a feller’ll go through hell for—just two: love and gold. I don’t mean money, but gold—the pure stuff. They’ll waller through snow-drifts, they’ll swim rivers with the ice runnin’, they’ll crawl through canyons and over trails on their hands and knees, they’ll starve and they’ll freeze, they’ll work till the blood runs from their blistered hands, they’ll kill their horses and their pardners, for gold! And they’ll do it for love. Yes, I’ve seen it a-plenty, me—Smith. ”

“ Ralston laughed.
“We’ve got secrets—the bug-hunter and me.”
“You’re rather young for secrets, Susie.”
“Nobody’s too young for secrets,” she declared. “Haven’t you any?”
“Sure,” Ralston nodded.
“I like you,” Susie whispered impulsively. “Let’s swap secrets.”
He looked at her and wished he dared. He would have liked to tell her of his mission, to ask her help; for he realized that, if she chose, no one could help him more. Like Smith, he recognized that quality in her they each called “gameness,” and even more than Smith he appreciated the commingling of Scotch shrewdness and Indian craft. ”

“ Had this young woman possessed no other good feature, her markedly fine complexion alone would have saved her from plainness. But her thick brown hair, glossy, and growing prettily about her temples, was equally attractive to the men who had been used to seeing only the straight, black hair of the Indian women, and Susie’s sun-bleached pigtail, which, as Meeteetse took frequent occasion to remind her, looked like a hair-cinch. Her eyes, set rather too far apart for beauty, were round, with pupils which dilated until they all but covered the blue iris ”

“ It hurt his pride, his self-respect, to regard Smith in the light of a rival—a successful rival.
“By Gad!” he cried aloud, and with a heat which belied his self-abnegation. “If he were only a decent white man! But to be let down and out by the only woman I ever gave a whoop for in all my life, for a fellow like that! Say, it’s tough!”
Ralston’s newly acquired serenity, the depth of which he had reason to doubt, was further disturbed by a distant clatter of hoofs. He sat up and watched the oncoming of the angriest-looking Indian that ever quirted a cayuse over a reservation. ”

“ The crevice below was a breeding-place, a rattlesnakes’ den. Smith had seen such places often, and the stench which came from them when the sun was hot was like nothing else in the world. The recollection alone was almost enough to nauseate him, and he always had ridden a wide circle at the first whiff.
His aversion for snakes was like a pre-natal mark. He avoided cowpunchers who wore rattlesnake bands on their hats or stretched the skin over the edge of the cantle of their saddles. He always slept with a hair rope around his blankets when he spent a night in the open. ”

“ Dora Marshall knew nothing of men like Smith, or of natures like those of the men of the mountains and ranges, who paid her homage. Her knowledge of life and people was drawn from the limited experiences of a small, Middle West town, together with a year at a Middle West co-ed college, and as a result of the latter the Schoolmarm cherished a fine belief in her worldly wisdom, whereas, in a measure, her lack of it was one of her charms. Susie, in her way, was wiser. ”

“ Every other emotion paled, every other interest faded, beside the intensity of his desire to stop the man ahead of him.
Smith knew that he had only a chance in a thousand. He had seen Ralston with a six-shooter explode a cartridge placed on a rock as far away as he could see it, and he was riding the little brown mare whose swiftness Smith had reason to remember.
But he had the start, his bronco was young, its wind of the best, and it might have speed. The country was rough, Ralston’s horse might fall with him. ”

“ Susie, who had entered, saw McArthur’s embarrassment, and refused to join in the shout of laughter, though her eyes danced.
“Don’t mind him,” she said comfortingly, as she eyed Meeteetse, sprawled on his back with his eyes closed. “He’s afraid he’ll learn something. He used to be a sheep-herder, and I don’t reckon he’s got more’n two hundred and fifty words in his whole vocabulary. Why, I’ll bet he never heard a word of more’n three syllables before. Get up, Meeteetse. Go out in the fresh air and build yourself a couple of them sheep-herder’s monuments. It’ll make you feel better.” ”

“ She sat her sturdy, spirited pony like a cowboy. She was about sixteen, with a suggestion of boyishness in her appearance. Her brown hair, worn in a single braid, was bleached to a lighter shade on top, as if she rode always with bared head. Her eyes were gray, in curious contrast to a tawny skin. She was slight to scrawniness, and, one might have thought, insufficiently clad for the time of year.
“Bogged down, pardner?” she inquired in a friendly voice, as she rode up behind and drew rein. “I’ve been in that soap-hole myself. Here, ketch to my pommel, and I’ll snake you out.” ”

“ Take him.”
Ralston knew as well as though he had witnessed the act that Smith had hammered the frogs of Molly’s feet until they were bruised and sore as boils. Her lameness would not be permanent—she would recover in a week or two; but the abuse of, the cruelty to, the little mare he loved filled Ralston with a hatred for Smith as relentless and deep as Smith’s own.
“A man who could do a thing like that,” said Ralston through his set teeth, “is no common cur! He’s wolf—all wolf! He isn’t staying here for love, alone. There’s something else. ”

“ His skin was the color of his saddle-leather, and his inflamed eye-balls had the redness of live coals. Smith was far from handsome that morning.
His own recent sufferings had in nowise made him more merciful: he spurred his stiff and lifeless horse without pity, but he spurred uselessly. It stumbled under him as he drove the spiritless band toward the hopeless waste ahead of him.
“Unless I’m turned around, we ought to get out of this to-day,” he thought. The effort of speaking aloud was too great to be made. “Unless I’m lost, or fall off my horse, we ought to make it sure.” ”

“ The strength of excitement came to him, and once more he sat erect in the saddle, fingering the trigger as the horseman came steadily on.
“He rides like a Texican,” Smith thought. There was something familiar in the stranger’s outlines, the way he threw his weight in one stirrup, but Smith was taking no chances. He put out a hand in warning, and the other man stopped.
The swarthy face of the stranger wore a comprehending grin. No honest man drove horses across the Bad Lands. He threw the Indian sign of friendship to Smith, and they each advanced. ”

“ Tubbs knew only the sage-brush plains.
McArthur now replied dryly, but without irritation:
“My real trade—‘job,’ if you prefer—is anthropology. Strictly speaking, I might, I think, be called an anthropologist.”
“Gawd, feller!” ejaculated Smith in mock dismay. “Don’t tip your hand like that. I’m a killer myself, but I plays a lone game. I opens up to no man or woman livin’.”
Tubbs looked slightly ashamed of his employer.
“Pardon me?”
“I say, never give nobody the cinch on you. Many a good man’s tongue has hung him.” ”