Trails to Two Moons/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX
Over in the eastern sky above the dim Black Hills the velvety blackness that is night in the Big Country began insensibly to grow less like the nap on a black butterfly's wing and the stars that had been burning there, each suspended by invisible cords from the vault of heaven, retreated and became one with the flatness of the sky. The pallid east flushed its first harebell pink while all the remaining sweep of celestial lights glowed as if night were to be eternal. Bit by bit the blot of the Big Country became a blur; the blur took dim form. Hills rose from nothingness. Buttes were conjured out of the void. The long sleepy waves of the divides stirred under the first breath of dawn, their frozen tides restless to be freed.
Deeper flushed the pink in the east. Down in the line of alders that marked the course of a stream faint chitterings and flutterings betokened the waking of the wilderness things. An owl's insistent who-o-o-o-whup which had been the pulse beat of the night was stilled so suddenly that the whole void between earth and dimming stars seemed to hang breathless for its repetition. A coyote with his early-morning kill between his paws sent quavering through the half light a meat call to a mate. Dawn came swiftly.
It found Original sitting a borrowed horse atop the highest butte in Bad Water Breaks, waiting for light. He was alone. He had ridden all night crisscrossing over the Big Country that lies between Two Moons and Teapot Creek, seeking Hilma Ring, whom he believed lost.
After the sudden savage apparition of the girl who rode him down in the Fashion Stables and cut him with the bridle rein Original had saddled the first horse to hand, left a brief note explaining his action on Lonny Moore's slate and started across the Poison Spider bridge in pursuit. The girl had, perhaps, ten minutes' start of him. Between the bridge and Twenty Mile Creek there was but a single road with no forking. Believing Hilma was making for her home, the man confidently expected to overhaul her before she reached the ford of Twenty Mile. Though he knew nothing of the horse between his knees, he counted on the girl's failure to get out of a rebellious Tige one-half that little horse was capable of giving.
But he had not gone ten miles before he became convinced the girl was not ahead of him. Dismounting, he had examined with lighted matches the thin dust lying over the hard 'dobe of the road; no cut hoof marks in the dew-drenched ribbon of dirt. Where had she turned off, and why?
Then he remembered one of Tige's little tricks. Whenever he rode Tige over this road to Teapot, if there were no pressing hurry, he allowed the little horse to take a cross trail leading a mile off the road to a salt lick. Never had he passed that cross trail without a pantomime of protest on Tige's part. It was one of their little games—a secret between friends, this ear-flattening and angry side-stepping mock heroics on Tige's part. Back to the cross trail rode Original. Once more the lighted match. Tige's trail lay plain as a painted arrow along the salt-lick path; the hoof prints showed he had swerved at full gallop and without his rider's knowledge, for there was no break made by a bridle tug.
At the salt lick little was revealed to the keen eye of the trailer. Tige had tried to stop. Once he had bucked in protest against the will of the rider which pushed him on, then he had compromised with his old racking gait. But he was following a dim, forgotten trail leaping cross country to Wild Horse Cañon in the wildest of the Powder River Country. The girl Hilma was lost in the Big Country.
So, after a night of slow traveling in the general direction of the trail Tige had taken—so faint it was that Original could only pick up familiar landmarks as they came out of the night's sack—he awaited the coming of the light on the highest pinnacle of Bad Water Breaks. He was on the highest ground for thirty miles around; Hilma could not move anywhere within that radius without eventually revealing herself to the trailer.
Strengthening light played upon the cathedral columns of the breaks all around—wind-and-water-hewn terrain all chopped and scarred into coulees and snaglike buttes. Light rolled back the night from all the waves of the divides between the breaks and Pumpkin Buttes far to the southward. Stronger became the contours until all the land lay like a relief map in clay and putty under Original's feet.
Then he saw the girl. Just a slow moving dot of blue away off to the southeast where the Crazy Squaw feels its way toward Powder. He watched her for a while, watched her make a wide circle and come to a halt, circle again and stop in a swale between divides. That tiny dot of blue cried across crystal spaces "Lost—lost!"
A slow smile tugged at the corners of Original's mouth as he put his borrowed mount to the steep declivity of the butte and came jolting down into the tortuous alleys of the coulees. A little of pity in that smile; a little of sardonic humor. To him, who could traverse the most dangerous stretches of the Big Country in the dark and at full tilt, who knew this mountain-bound wilderness as a city dweller knows his flat, that wandering dot of blue was a bird in the net.
"Stranger hoss," he caroled, with the lilt of laughter in his voice, "you 're bound to meet up with a fightin' wild cat right soon. But she sure has lost some of her claws. She 'll have to pay some for holdin' up my game."
The wily trailer played his game so neatly that the girl did not see him until he came swinging at a trot straight down from the crest of a little swell fairly upon her. At sight of him her eyes widened in terror, and she tried to put Tige into a run. The stubborn little brute took two or three stiff-legged plunges, then stopped and whinnied a welcome to his master as Original slipped swiftly alongside and brought the other horse to a halt with hand at the bit.
The man said nothing for a minute. He contented himself with looking with a quizzical pucker about his eyes into the girl's face. Overnight terror of wandering had left its stamp there, but the fighting spirit of her strove mightily to hang up the emblems of defiance in eyes and cheeks.
"Sorta takin' the morning air, I reckon," Original said with a broad smile. No answer.
"They 's not many wagon tracks hereabouts an' the country 's fair to middlin' safe for anybody who don't find herself wishful to meet up with strangers." Original seemed to be talking more to Tige than to the girl; there was an impersonal quality in his speech. "Yes, ma'am, this here 's called Cattle Kate's country—here round Crazy Squaw. You 've heard tell of Cattle Kate?" He looked up with polite interest. The girl's lips tightened against an answer. Her eyes were alert against the unguessed objective of Original's attack.
"Well," he drawled in a voice that was musical in its odd cachinnations—"well, Cattle Kate was the only woman hung in the Big Country—up to date. She was hung for a hoss thief 'long with Old Man Averill."
Hilma started despite herself, then the angry flush deepened on her cheeks. She made an impatient gesture with her shoulders as if to challenge the man to do his worst, now that he had her prisoner.
"What have I to do with all this talk—Cattle Kate and Cattle Kate's country?" she defied. The man's face suddenly fell into serious lines, which a faint flickering of humor around the eyes almost belied.
"That 's my hoss you 're ridin', an' out in this country it 's always been a sort of custom that when somebody takes somebody else's hoss without saying so much as thank you there 's bound to be misunderstandings—sometimes misunderstandings right serious. Leastwise, that 's the law for men; we 've only had one woman hoss thief, like I was sayin'."
The girl sensed that this enemy of hers was playing with her—letting her run like an injured mouse, as it were, only to follow with the smiting paw. But up through her consuming rage at his cruelty pushed once more that great fear of the night before; the fear that had sent her blundering through the willows seeking to lose the shadow of a jail behind her. Now he spoke of horse stealing. To be sure, in her desperation of the night before she had determined to steal a horse in order to put town behind her, but she had not expected to be caught. That it was Original's horse she had stolen and Original himself who now had her helpless here in the wilderness of a sudden seemed terrible beyond endurance.
The instinct of woman, old as Eve, came to her rescue. When in a tight place take the offensive.
"I might have counted on seeing you out here. I might have known you could n't keep yourself from fighting a woman." Original was a fair mark for the barb. He flushed angrily, and the hint of humor about his eyes sped on the instant.
"That 's my little hoss Tige you 're ridin', let me remind you. I followed my property. If you was a man I would n't be passin' conversation polite and proper. The owner of a hoss animal don't have much to say to the man who stole him when he meets up with that man; one or t'other mostly 's beyond talk. You 'll oblige me, ma'am, by gettin' down off my hoss."
Hilma, quick to press the advantage her feminine guile had established, tossed her head with a laugh.
"And if I don't get down?" she challenged. Instantly the girl regretted carrying the high hand so far. By a sudden pressure of the knees Original had ranged his horse alongside Tige, and his left arm whipped out to encircle her waist. She felt herself lifted from the saddle as if she were a child, and even as she twisted to bring her hands into play she was lowered across the man's saddle horn. She gave her shoulders a mighty heave to break the grip across her biceps, but, somehow, the struggle only seemed to tighten the steel band that held them close to her body.
The girl's body was bent slowly back until her eyes were forced to meet the black eyes above them. These were dancing now. The lips of the man were parted in a radiant smile. His whole face beamed impish mischief.
"The most reg'lar treatment for hoss thieves," said he, "is to drive 'em under a Cottonwood tree, an' when somebody gives the bronc a cut he runs away, leavin' Mister Hoss Thief right there under the cottonwood tree. But the law hereabouts don't say they 's no special treatment for special cases." The smiling lips were slowly descending toward hers. Fun devils danced in those black eyes.
"Which it 's my privilege an' my duty right here an' now to do."
He kissed her full on the lips. He laughed and kissed her again. Then, just as he released the hold on her straining arms, he leaped lightly out of the saddle and was sitting on Tige's back before Hilma could fully recover herself.
The girl swayed slightly. Her face was drained white. Her startled eyes stared straight ahead. "Oh!" she whispered, and again, "Oh!"
"Now we 'll be amblin' along," came Original's matter-of-fact command. Tige broke into a trot and the livery horse dumbly followed. Hilma set her feet in the stirrups and pulled her skirts down to cover her stockings. Automatic were her movements. Her mind was not a part of her. It was racing like a wild locomotive.
Horror, blind passion, fear, shame,—like a revolving color chart these emotions flickered across her consciousness, each leaving its trace of an impression to mingle with the next and produce a blur of sensation. Then slowly emerged a thought which would not down, try as she would furiously to suppress it.
"The first man," so ran that thought—"the first man to" At first the thought did not finish itself, but kept reiterating itself through her brain courses like a hammer's din. Then in a flash the thing popped out completed :
"The first man to break me down!"
Tears stood in the girl's eyes,—tears of anger, yes, and of self-revelation. Had she a rifle in her hands she would have leveled it at those smoothly rippling shoulders a few paces before her and without compunction sent a bullet between them. Yet
All at once a vivid picture of that minute when she was in his arms flashed on the retina of her soul. She saw again the laughing eyes,—clean eyes with naught but mischief in them; she saw the impish mockery of the lips that leant toward hers, lips with a will power behind them. "Which it 's my privilege an' my duty right here an' now to do."
At once the girl was furiously angry with herself for permitting this softening picture to come to her. Her heart steeled itself against the insidious voice of any counsel for the defense. And so over an endless treadmill wearily Hilma Ring's soul climbed and climbed while miles unreeled themselves behind her and all the Big Country round about lay glorious in the morning.
Not once did the man before her look back.
Finally they descended a long gentle slope to a road that wound about its base—the first road they had seen since they left Cattle Kate's country. Reaching it, Original brought Tige to a halt and turned.
"Your way lies over yonder." He gave a sweep of his arm along the road to the south. "You can't miss the road in daylight. I 'll tell Lonny Moore about the horse you 're ridin', an' he can send for it."
He gravely lifted his hat, turned and cantered to the north, leaving the girl staring.