The Max Brand Megapack. Max Brand
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come to Dan—this first taste of his own powers—this first taste (she shuddered) of blood!
“Dan, you’ve told me that you like me. You have to make a choice now, between pursuing this man, and me.”
“You don’t understand,” he explained carefully. “I got to follow him. I can’t help it no more’n Black Bart can help howlin’ when he sees the moon.”
He fell silent, listening. Far across the hills came the plaintive wail of a coyote—that shrill bodiless sound. Kate trembled.
“Dan!”
Outside, Satan whinnied softly like a call. She leaned and her lips touched his. He thrust her away almost roughly.
“They’s blood on my lips, Kate! I can’t kiss you till they’re clean.”
He turned his head.
“You must listen to me, Dan!”
“Kate, would you talk to the wind?”
“Yes, if I loved the wind!”
He turned his head.
She pleaded: “Here are my hands to cover your eyes and shut out the thoughts of this man you hate. Here are my lips, dear, to tell you that I love you unless this thirst for killing carries you away from me. Stay with me! Give me your heart to keep gentle!”
He said nothing, but even through the dark she was aware of a struggle in his face, and then, through the gloom, she began to see his eyes more clearly. They seemed to be illuminated by a light from within—they changed—there was a hint of yellow in the brown. And she spoke again, blindly, passionately.
“Give me your promise! It is so easy to do. One little word will make you safe. It will save you from yourself.”
Still he answered nothing. Black Bart came and crouched at his head and stared at her fixedly.
“Speak to me!”
Only the yellow light answered her. Cold fear fought in her heart, but love still struggled against it.
“For the last time—for God’s sake, Dan!”
Still that silence. She rose, shaking and weak. The changeless eyes followed her. Only fear remained now. She backed towards the door, slowly, then faster, and faster. At the threshold she whirled and plunged into the night.
Up the road she raced. Once she stumbled and fell to her knees. She cried out and glanced behind her, breathing again when she saw that nothing followed. At the house she made no pause, though she heard the voice of her father singing. She could not tell him. He should be the last in all the world to know. She went to her room and huddled into bed.
Presently a knock came at her door, and her father’s voice asked if she were ill. She pleaded that she had a bad headache and wished to be alone. He asked if she had seen Dan. By a great effort she managed to reply that Dan had ridden to a neighbouring ranch. Her father left the door without further question. Afterwards she heard him in the distance singing his favourite mournful ballads. It doubled her sense of woe and brought home the clinging fear. She felt that if she could weep she might live, but otherwise her heart would burst. And after hours and hours of that torture which burns the name of “woman” in the soul of a girl, the tears came. The roosters announced the dawn before she slept.
Late the next morning old Joe Cumberland knocked again at her door. He was beginning to fear that this illness might be serious. Moreover, he had a definite purpose in rousing her.
“Yes?” she called, after the second knock.
“Look out your window, honey, down to Morgan’s place. You remember I said I was goin’ to clean up the landscape?”
The mention of Morgan’s place cleared the sleep from Kate’s mind and it brought back the horror of the night before. Shivering she slipped from her bed and went to the window. Morgan’s place was a mass of towering flames!
She grasped the window-sill and stared again. It could not be. It must be merely another part of the nightmare, and no reality. Her father’s voice, high with exultation, came dimly to her ears, but what she saw was Dan as he had laid there the night before, hurt, helpless, too weak to move!
“There’s the end of it,” Joe Cumberland was saying complacently outside her door. “There ain’t goin’ to be even a shadow of the saloon left nor nothin’ that’s in it. I jest travelled down there this mornin’ and touched a match to it!”
Still she stared without moving, without making a sound. She was seeing Dan as he must have wakened from a swoonlike sleep with the smell of smoke and the heat of rising flames around him. She saw him struggle, and fail to reach his feet. She almost heard him cry out—a sound drowned easily by the roar of the fire, and the crackling of the wood. She saw him drag himself with his hands across the floor, only to be beaten back by a solid wall of flame. Black Bart crouched beside him and would not leave his doomed master. Fascinated by the raging fire the black stallion Satan would break from the shed and rush into the flames!—and so the inseparable three must have perished together!
“Why don’t you speak, Kate?” called her father.
“Dan!” she screamed, and pitched forward to the floor.
CHAPTER IX
THE PHANTOM RIDER
In the daytime the willows along the wide, level river bottom seemed an unnatural growth, for they made a streak of yellow-green across the mountain-desert when all other verdure withered and died. After nightfall they became still more dreary. Even when the air was calm there was apt to be a sound as of wind, for the tenuous, trailing branches brushed lightly together, making a guarded whispering like ghosts.
In a small clearing among these willows sat Silent and his companions. A fifth member had just arrived at this rendezvous, answered the quiet greeting with a wave of his hand, and was now busy caring for his horse. Bill Kilduff, who had a natural inclination and talent for cookery, raked up the deft dying coals of the fire over which he had cooked the supper, and set about preparing bacon and coffee for the newcomer. The latter came forward, and squatted close to the cook, watching the process with a careful eye. He made a sharp contrast with the rest of the group. From one side his profile showed the face of a good-natured boy, but when he turned his head the flicker of the firelight ran down a scar which gleamed in a jagged semi-circle from his right eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. This whole side of his countenance was drawn by the cut, the mouth stretching to a perpetual grimace. When he spoke it was as if he were attempting secrecy. The rest of the men waited in patience until he finished eating. Then Silent asked: “What news, Jordan?”
Jordan kept his regretful eyes a moment longer on his empty coffee cup.
“There ain’t a pile to tell,” he answered at last. “I suppose you heard about what happened to the chap you beat up at Morgan’s place the other day?”
“Who knows that I beat him up?” asked Silent sharply.
“Nobody,” said Jordan, “but when I heard the description of the man that hit Whistling Dan with the chair, I knew it was Jim Silent.”
“What about Barry?” asked Haines, but Jordan still kept his eyes upon the chief.
“They was sayin’ pretty general,” he went on, “that you needed that chair, Jim. Is that right?”
The other three glanced covertly to each other. Silent’s hand bunched into a great fist.
“He went loco. I had to slam him. Was he hurt bad?”
“The cut on his head wasn’t much, but he was left lyin’ in the saloon that night, an’ the next mornin’ old Joe Cumberland, not knowin’ that Whistlin’ Dan was in there, come down an’ touched a match to the old joint. She went up in smoke an’ took Dan along.”
No one spoke for a moment. Then Silent cried out: “Then what was that whistlin’ I’ve heard down the road behind us?”