The Man of the Forest by Zane Grey (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕

had forbidden him to express on a living

counterfeit. Wilson was shaken, as if by a palsy. He choked

over passionate, incoherent invective. It was class hate

first, then the hate of real manhood for a craven, then the

hate of disgrace for a murder. No man so fair as a

gun-fighter in the Western creed of an “even break”!

 

Wilson’s terrible cataclysm of passion passed. Straightening

up, he sheathed his weapon and began a slow pace before the

fire. Not many moments afterward he jerked his head high and

listened. Horses were softly thudding through the forest.

Soon Anson rode into sight with his men and one of the

strayed horses. It chanced, too, that young Burt appeared on

the other side of the glade. He walked quickly, as one who

anticipated news.

 

Snake Anson as he dismounted espied the dead man.

 

“Jim — I thought I heard a shot.”

 

The others exclaimed and leaped off their horses to view the

prostrate form with that curiosity and strange fear common

to all men confronted by sight of sudden death.

 

That emotion was only momentary.

 

“Shot his lamp out!” ejaculated Moze.

 

“Wonder how Gunman Riggs liked thet plumb center peg!”

exclaimed Shady Jones, with a hard laugh.

 

“Back of his head all gone!” gasped young Burt. Not

improbably he had not seen a great many bullet-marked men.

 

“Jim! — the long-haired fool didn’t try to draw on you!”

exclaimed Snake Anson, astounded.

 

Wilson neither spoke nor ceased his pacing.

 

“What was it over?” added Anson, curiously.

 

“He hit the gurl,” replied Wilson.

 

Then there were long-drawn exclamations all around, and

glance met glance.

 

“Jim, you saved me the job,” continued the outlaw leader.

“An’ I’m much obliged… . Fellars, search Riggs an’ we’ll

divvy… . Thet all right, Jim?”

 

“Shore, an’ you can have my share.”

 

They found bank-notes in the man’s pocket and considerable

gold worn in a money-belt around his waist. Shady Jones

appropriated his boots, and Moze his gun. Then they left him

as he had fallen.

 

“Jim, you’ll have to track them lost hosses. Two still

missin’ an’ one of them’s mine,” called Anson as Wilson

paced to the end of his beat.

 

The girl heard Anson, for she put her head out of the spruce

shelter and called: “Riggs said he’d hid two of the horses.

They must be close. He came that way.”

 

“Howdy, kid! Thet’s good news,” replied Anson. His spirits

were rising. “He must hev wanted you to slope with him?”

 

“Yes. I wouldn’t go.”

 

“An’ then he hit you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Wal, recallin’ your talk of yestiddy, I can’t see as Mister

Riggs lasted much longer hyar than he’d hev lasted in Texas.

We’ve some of thet great country right in our outfit.”

 

The girl withdrew her white face.

 

“It’s break camp, boys,” was the leader’s order. “A couple

of you look up them hosses. They’ll be hid in some thick

spruces. The rest of us ‘ll pack.”

 

Soon the gang was on the move, heading toward the height of

land, and swerving from it only to find soft and grassy

ground that would not leave any tracks.

 

They did not travel more than a dozen miles during the

afternoon, but they climbed bench after bench until they

reached the timbered plateau that stretched in sheer black

slope up to the peaks. Here rose the great and gloomy forest

of firs and pines, with the spruce overshadowed and thinned

out. The last hour of travel was tedious and toilsome, a

zigzag, winding, breaking, climbing hunt for the kind of

camp-site suited to Anson’s fancy. He seemed to be growing

strangely irrational about selecting places to camp. At

last, for no reason that could have been manifest to a good

woodsman, he chose a gloomy bowl in the center of the

densest forest that had been traversed. The opening, if such

it could have been called, was not a park or even a glade. A

dark cliff, with strange holes, rose to one side, but not so

high as the lofty pines that brushed it. Along its base

babbled a brook, running over such formation of rock that

from different points near at hand it gave forth different

sounds, some singing, others melodious, and one at least of

a hollow, weird, deep sound, not loud, but strangely

penetrating.

 

“Sure spooky I say,” observed Shady, sentiently.

 

The little uplift of mood, coincident with the rifling of

Riggs’s person, had not worn over to this evening camp. What

talk the outlaws indulged in was necessary and conducted in

low tones. The place enjoined silence.

 

Wilson performed for the girl very much the same service as

he had the night before. Only he advised her not to starve

herself; she must eat to keep up her strength. She complied

at the expense of considerable effort.

 

As it had been a back-breaking day, in which all of them,

except the girl, had climbed miles on foot, they did not

linger awake long enough after supper to learn what a wild,

weird, and pitch-black spot the outlaw leader had chosen.

The little spaces of open ground between the huge-trunked

pine-trees had no counterpart up in the lofty spreading

foliage. Not a star could blink a wan ray of light into that

Stygian pit. The wind, cutting down over abrupt heights

farther up, sang in the pine-needles as if they were strings

vibrant with chords. Dismal creaks were audible. They were

the forest sounds of branch or tree rubbing one another, but

which needed the corrective medium of daylight to convince

any human that they were other than ghostly. Then, despite

the wind and despite the changing murmur of the brook, there

seemed to be a silence insulating them, as deep and

impenetrable as the darkness.

 

But the outlaws, who were fugitives now, slept the sleep of

the weary, and heard nothing. They awoke with the sun, when

the forest seemed smoky in a golden gloom, when light and

bird and squirrel proclaimed the day.

 

The horses had not strayed out of this basin during the

night, a circumstance that Anson was not slow to appreciate.

 

“It ain’t no cheerful camp, but I never seen a safer place

to hole up in,” he remarked to Wilson.

 

“Wal, yes — if any place is safe,” replied that ally,

dubiously.

 

“We can watch our back tracks. There ain’t any other way to

git in hyar thet I see.”

 

“Snake, we was tolerable fair sheep-rustlers, but we’re no

good woodsmen.”

 

Anson grumbled his disdain of this comrade who had once been

his mainstay. Then he sent Burt out to hunt fresh meat and

engaged his other men at cards. As they now had the means to

gamble, they at once became absorbed. Wilson smoked and

divided his thoughtful gaze between the gamblers and the

drooping figure of the girl. The morning air was keen, and

she, evidently not caring to be near her captors beside the

campfire, had sought the only sunny spot in this gloomy

dell. A couple of hours passed; the sun climbed high; the

air grew warmer. Once the outlaw leader raised his head to

scan the heavy-timbered slopes that inclosed the camp.

 

“Jim, them hosses are strayin’ off,” he observed.

 

Wilson leisurely rose and stalked off across the small, open

patches, in the direction of the horses. They had grazed

around from the right toward the outlet of the brook. Here

headed a ravine, dense and green. Two of the horses had gone

down. Wilson evidently heard them, though they were not in

sight, and he circled somewhat so as to get ahead of them

and drive them back. The invisible brook ran down over the

rocks with murmur and babble. He halted with instinctive

action. He listened. Forest sounds, soft, lulling, came on

the warm, pine-scented breeze. It would have taken no keen

ear to hear soft and rapid padded footfalls. He moved on

cautiously and turned into a little open, mossy spot,

brown-matted and odorous, full of ferns and bluebells. In

the middle of this, deep in the moss, he espied a huge round

track of a cougar. He bent over it. Suddenly he stiffened,

then straightened guardedly. At that instant he received a

hard prod in the back. Throwing up his hands, he stood

still, then slowly turned. A tall hunter in gray buckskin,

gray-eyed and square-jawed, had him covered with a cocked

rifle. And beside this hunter stood a monster cougar,

snarling and blinking.