Dwellers in the Hills/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
WHEN PROVIDENCE IS PAGAN
THE strength of the current did not seem to be so powerful as I had judged it. However, its determination was difficult. The horse swam with great ease, but he was an extraordinary horse, with a capacity for doing with this apparent ease everything which it pleased him to attempt. I do not know whether this arose from the stirring of larger powers ordinarily latent, or whether the horse's manner somehow concealed the amount of the effort. I think the former is more probable.
Half-way across the river, we were not more than twenty yards down-stream from the ferry landing. Ump shouted to turn down into the eddy, and I swung El Mahdi around. A dozen long strokes brought us into the almost quiet water of the great rim to this circle, a circle that was a hundred yards in diameter, in which the water moved from the circumference to the centre with a velocity increasing with the contracting of its orbit, from almost dead water in its rim to a whirling eddy in its centre.
I pulled El Mahdi up and let him drift with the motion of the water. We swung slowly around the circle, moving inward so gently that our progress was almost imperceptible.
The panic of men carried out in flood water can be easily understood. The activity of any power is very apt to alarm when that power is controlled by no intelligence. It is the unthinking nature of the force that strikes the terror. Death and the dark would lose much if they lost this attribute. The water bubbled over the saddle. The horse drifted like a chip. To my eyes, a few feet above this flood, the water seemed to lift on all sides, not unlike the sloping rim of some enormous yellow dish, in which I was moving gradually to the centre.
If I should strike out toward the shore, we should be swimming up-hill, while the current turning inward was apparently travelling down. This delusion of grade is well known to the swimmer. It is the chiefest terror of great water. Expert swimmers floating easily in flood water have been observed to turn over suddenly, throw up their arms, and go down. This is probably panic caused by believing themselves caught in the vortex of a cone, from which there seems no escape, except by the impossible one of swimming up to its rim, rising on all sides to the sky.
In a few minutes El Mahdi was in the centre of the eddy, carried by a current growing always stronger. In this centre the water boiled, but it was for the most part because of a lashing of surface currents. There seemed to be no heavy twist of the deep water into anything like a dangerous whirlpool. Still there was a pull, a tugging of the current to a centre. Again I was unable to estimate the power of this drag, as it was impossible to estimate how much resistance was being offered by the horse.
In the vortex of the eddy the delusion of the vast cone was more pronounced. It was one of the dangerous elements to be considered. I observed the horse closely to determine, if possible, whether he possessed this delusion. If he did, there was not the slightest evidence of it. He seemed to swim on the wide river with the indifference of floating timber, his head lying flat, and the yellow waves slipping over him to my waist. The sun beat into this mighty dish. Sometimes, when it caught the water at a proper angle, I was blinded and closed my eyes. Neither of these things seemed to give El Mahdi the slightest annoyance. I heard Ump shout and turned the horse toward the south shore. He swam straight out of the eddy with that same mysterious ease that characterised every effort of this eccentric animal, and headed for the bank of the river on the line of a bee. He struck the current beyond the dead water, turned a little up stream and came out on the sod not a hundred paces below the ferry. Both Ump and Jud rode down to meet me.
El Mahdi shook the clinging water from his hide and resumed his attitude of careless indifference.
"Great fathers!" exclaimed Jud, looking the horse over, "you ain't turned a hair on him. He ain't even blowed. It must be easy swimmin'."
"Don't fool yourself," said the hunchback. "You can't depend on that horse. He 'd let on it was easy if it busted a girt."
"It was easy for him," I said, rising to the defence.
"Ho, ho," said Ump, "I would n't think you 'd be throwin' bokays after that duckin'. I saw him. It was n't so killin' easy."
"It could n't be so bad," said Jud; "the horse ain't a bit winded."
"Laddiebuck," cried the hunchback, "you 'll see before you get through. That current's bad."
I turned around in the saddle. "Then you 're not going to put them in?" I said.
"Damn it!" said the hunchback, "we 've got to put 'em in."
"Don't you think we 'll get them over all right?" said I, bidding for the consolation of hope.
"God knows," answered the hunchback. "It 'll be the toughest sleddin' that we ever went up against." Then he turned his mare and rode back to the house of the ferrymen, and we followed him.
Ump stopped at the door and called to the old woman. "Granny," he said, "set us out a bite." Then he climbed down from the Bay Eagle, one leg at a time, as a spider might have done.
"Quiller," he called to me, "pull off your saddle, an' let Jud feed that long-legged son of a seacook. He 'll float better with a full belly."
Jud dismounted from the Cardinal. "When does the dippin' begin?" he said. "Mornin' or afternoon service?"
The hunchback squinted at the sun. "It 's eleven o'clock now," he answered. "In an hour we 'll lock horns with Hawk Rufe an' hell an' high water, an' the devil keeps what he gits."
Jud took off the saddles and fed the horses shelled corn in the grass before the door, and after the frugal dinner we waited for an hour. The hunchback was a good general. When he went out to the desperate sally he would go with fresh men and fresh horses. I spent that hour on my back.
Across the road under the chestnut trees the black cattle rested in the shade, gathering strength for the long swim. On the sod before the door the horses rolled, turning entirely over with their feet in the air. Jud lay with his legs stretched out, his back to the earth, and his huge arms folded across his face.
Ump sat doubled up on the skirt of his saddle, his elbows in his lap, his long fingers linked together, and the shaggy hair straggling across his face. He was the king of the crooked men, planning his battle with the river while his lieutenants slept with their bellies to the sun.
I was moving in some swift dream when the stamping of the horses waked me and I jumped up. Jud was tightening the girth on El Mahdi. The Cardinal stood beside him bridled and saddled. Ump was sitting on the Bay Eagle, his coat and hat off, giving some order to the ferrymen who were starting to bring up the cattle. The hunchback was saving every breath of his horses. He looked like some dwarfish general of old times.
I climbed up on El Mahdi bareheaded, in my shirt sleeves, as I had ridden him before. Jud took off his coat and hat and threw them away. Then he pulled off his shirt, tied it in a knot to the saddle-ring, tightened the belt of his breeches, and got on his horse naked to the waist. It was the order of the hunchback.
"Throw 'em away," he said; "a breath in your horse will be worth all the duds you can git in a cart."
Danel and Mart laid down the fence and brought the cattle into the common by the ferry. Directed by the hunchback they moved the leaders of the drove around to the ferry landing. The great body of the cattle filled the open behind the house. The six hundred black muleys made the arc of a tremendous circle, swinging from the ferry landing around to the road. It was impossible to get farther up the river on this side because of a dense beech thicket running for a quarter of a mile above the open.
It was our plan to put the cattle in at the highest point, a few at a time, and thereby establish a continuous line across the river. If we could hold this line in a reasonable loop, we might hope to get over. If it broke and the cattle drifted down-stream we would probably never be able to get them out.
When the drove stood as the hunchback wished it, he rode down to the edge of the river, Jud and I following him. I felt the powerful influence exerted by the courage of this man. He leaned over and patted the silk shoulders of the Bay Eagle. "Good girl," he said, "good girl." It was like a last caress, a word spoken in the ear of the loved one on the verge of a struggle sure to be lost, the last whisper carrying all the devotion of a lifetime. Did the man at heart believe we could succeed? If the cattle were lost, did he expect to get out with his life? I think not.
Against this, the Cardinal and his huge naked rider contrasted strangely. They represented brute strength marching out with brute fearlessness into an unthinking struggle. Fellows and mates, these, the bronze giant and his horse. They might go under the yellow water of the Valley River, but it would be the last act of the last struggle.
As for me, I think I failed to realise the magnitude of this desperate move. I saw but hazily what the keen instinct of the hunchback saw so well,—all the possibilities of disaster. I went on that day as an aide goes with his general into a charge. I lacked the sense of understanding existing between the other men and their horses, but I had in its stead an all-powerful faith in the eccentric El Mahdi. No matter what happened, he would come out of it somehow.
Domestic cattle will usually follow a horse. It was the plan that I should go first, to lead fifty steers put in with me. Then Jud should follow to keep the bunch moving, while Ump and the two ferrymen fed the line, a few at a time, keeping it unbroken, and as thin as possible.
This was the only plan offering any shadow of hope. We could not swim the cattle in small bunches because each bunch would require one or two drivers, and the best horse would go down on his third trip. That course was out of the question, and this was the only other.
I think Ump had another object in putting me before the drove. If trouble came, I would not be caught in the tangle of cattle. I rode into the river, and they put the fifty leaders in behind me. This time El Mahdi lowered himself easily into the water and began to swim. I held him in as much as I could, and looked back over my shoulder.
The muleys dropped from the sod bank, went under to their black noses, came up, shook the water from their ears, and struck out, following the tail of the horse. They all swam deep, the water running across the middle of their backs, their long tails, the tips of their shoulders, and their quaint inky faces visible above the yellow water.
One after another they took the river until there were fifty behind me. Then Jud rode in, and the advance of the line was under way. Ump shouted to swing with the current as far as I could without getting into the eddy, and I forced El Mahdi gradually down-stream holding his bit with both hands to make him swim as slow as he could.
We seemed to creep to the middle of the river. A Polled-Angus bullock with an irregular white streak running across his nose led the drove, following close at the horse's tail. That steer was Destiny. No criminal ever watched the face of his judge with more desperate interest than I watched the dish-face of that muley. I was now at the very middle of the river, and the turn must be made against the current. Would the steer follow me, or would he take the natural line of least resistance into the swinging water of the eddy? It was not a dozen yards below, whirling around to its boiling centre. The steer swam almost up to the horse's tail. I turned El Mahdi slowly against the current, and watched the black bullock over my shoulder. He turned after the horse. The current struck him in the deep forequarters; he swung out below the horse, threw his big chest to the current, and followed El Mahdi's tail like a fish following a bait. I arose in the stirrups and wiped the sweat off my face with my sleeve.
I could have shouted as I looked back. Jud and the fifty were turning the loop as though they were swinging at the end of a pendulum, every steer following his fellow like a sheep. Jud's red horse was the only bit of colour against that long line of black bobbing heads.
Behind him a string of swimming cattle reached in a long curve to the south bank of the Valley River. We moved slowly up the north curve of the long loop to the ferry landing. It was vastly harder swimming against the current, but the three-year-old steer is an animal of great strength. To know this, one has but to look at his deep shoulders and his massive brisket. The yellow water bubbled up over the backs of the cattle. The strong current swung their bodies around until their tails were down-stream, and the little waves danced in fantastic eddies around their puffing muzzles. But they clung to the crupper of El Mahdi with dogged tenacity, and when he climbed the north bank of the Valley River, the blazed face of the Polled-Angus leader came up out of the water at his heels.
I rode out on the good hard ground, and turned the horse's head toward the river. My heart sang and shouted under my shirt. The very joy of what I saw seemed to fill my throat choking full. The black heads dotted across the river might have been strung on a string. There were three hundred cattle in that water.
Jud and the first fifty were creeping up the last arm of the mighty curve, swimming together like brothers, the Cardinal sunk to his red head, and the naked body of his rider glistening in the sun.
When they reached the bank below me, I could restrain my joy no longer. I rose in the stirrups and whooped like the wildest savage that ever scalped a settler. I think the devil's imps sleeping somewhere must have heard that whooping.