The Seventh Man by Max Brand (books to read romance .TXT) 📕

His silence was more terrible than a snarl; yet she stretched out her hand and made another step. It brought a sharp tensing of the body of Bart—the fur stood up about his throat like the mane of a lion, and his eyes were a devilish green. Another instant she kept her place, and then she remembered the story of Haines—how Bart had gone with his master to that killing at Alder. If he had killed once, he would kill again; wild as he had been on that other time when she quelled him, he had never before been like this. The courage melted out of her; she forgot the pleasant day outside; she saw only those blazing eyes and shrank back towards the center of the cave. The muscles of the wolf relaxed visibly, and not till that moment did she realize how close she had been to the crisis.

“Bad Bart!” cried Joan, running in between. “Bad, bad dog!”

“Stop, Joan! Don't go near him!”

But Joan was already almost to Bart. When Kate would have run to snatch the child away that deep, rattling growl stopped her again, and now she saw that Joan ran not the slightest danger. She stood beside the huge beast with her tiny fist raised.

“I'll tell Daddy Dan on you,” she shrilled.

Black Bart made a furtive, cringing movement towards the child, but instantly stiffened again and sent his warning down the cave to Kate. Then a shadow fell across the entrance and Dan stood there with Satan walking behind. His glance ran from the bristling body of Bart to Kate, shrinking among the shadows, and lingered without a spark of recognition.

“Satan,” he ordered, “go on in to your place.”

The black stallion glided past the master and came on until he saw Kate. He stopped, snorting, and then circled her with his head suspiciously high, and ears back until he reached the place where his saddle was usually hung. There he waited, and Kate felt the eyes of the horse, the wolf, the man, and even Joan, curiously upon her. “Evenin',” nodded Dan, “might you have come up for supper?” That was all. Not a step towards her, not a smile, not a greeting, and between them stood Joan, her hands clasped idly before her while she looked from face to face, trying to understand. All the pangs of heart which come to woman between girlhood and old age went burningly through Kate in that breathing space, and afterwards she was cold, and saw herself and all the others clearly.

“I haven't come for supper. I've come to bring you back, Dan.”

Not that she had the slightest hope that he would come, but she watched him curiously, almost as if he were a stranger, to see how he would answer.

“Come back?” he echoed. “To the cabin?”

“Where else?”

“It ain't happy there.” He started. “You come up here with us, Kate.”

“And raise Joan like a young animal in a cave?”

He looked at her with wonder, and then at the child.

“Ain't you happy, Joan, up here?”

“Oh, Daddy Dan, Joan's so happy!”

“You see,” he said to Kate, “she's terribly happy.”

It was his utter simplicity which convinced her that arguments and pleas would be perfectly useless. Just behind the cool command which she kept over herself now was hysteria. She knew that if she relaxed her purposefulness for an instant the love for him would rush over her, weaken her. She kept her mind clear and steady with a great effort which was like divorcing herself from herself. When she spoke, there was another being which stood aside listening in wonder to the words.

“You've chosen this life, Dan, I won't blame you for leaving me this time any more than I blamed you the other times. I suppose it isn't you. It's the same impulse, after all, that took you south after—after the wild geese.” She stopped, almost broken down by the memory, and then recalled herself sternly. “It's the same thing that led you away after MacStrann through the storm. But whether it's a weakness in you, or the force of something outside your control, I see this thing clearly; we can't go on. This is the end.”

He seemed troubled, vaguely, as a dog is anxious when it sees a child weep and cannot make out the reason.

“Oh, Dan,” she burst out, “I love you more than ever! If it were I alone, I'd follow you to the end of the world, and live as you live, and do as you do. But it's Joan. She has to be raised as a child should be raised. She isn't going to live with—with wild horses and wolves all her life. And if she stays on here, don't you see that the same thing which is a curse in you will grow strong and be a curse in her? Don't you see it growing? It's in her eyes! Her step is too light. She's lost her fear of the dark. She's drifting back into wildness. Dan, she has to go with me back to the cabin!”

At that she saw him start again, and his hand went out with a swift, subtle gesture towards Joan.

“Let me have her! I have to have her! She's mine!” Then more gently: “You can come to see her whenever you will. And, finally pray God you will come and stay with us always.”

He had stepped to Joan while she spoke, and his hands made a quick movement of cherishing about her golden head, without touching it. For the first and the last time in her life, she saw something akin to fear in his eyes.

“Kate, I can't come back. I got things to do—out here!”

“Then let me take her.”

She watched the wavering in him.

“Things would be kind of empty if she was gone, Kate.”

“Why?” she asked bitterly. “You say you have your work to do—out here?”

He considered this gravely.

“I dunno. Except that I sort of need her.”

She knew from of old that such questions only puzzled him, and soon he would cast away the attempt to decide, and act. Action was his sphere. There was only one matter in which he was unfailingly, relentlessly the same, and that was justice. To that sense in him she would make her last appeal.

“Dan, I can't take her. I only ask you to see that I'm right. She belongs to me, I bought her with pain.”

It was a staggering blow to Whistling Dan. He took off his sombrero and passed his hand slowly across his forehead, then looked at her with a dumb appeal.

“I only want you to do the thing you think is square, Dan.”

Once more he winced.

Then, slowly: “I'm tryin' to be square. Tryin' hard. I know you got a