Black Jack

Down the Bear Creek road Terence Hollis rode as he had never ridden before.  To be sure, it was not the first time that El Sangre had stretched to the full his mighty strength, but on those other occasions he had fought the burst of speed, straining back in groaning stirrup leathers, with his full weight wresting at the bit.  Now he let the rein play to such a point that he was barely keeping the power of the stallion in touch.  He lightened his weight as only a fine horseman can do, shifting a few vital inches forward, and with the burden falling more over his withers, El Sangre fled like a racer down the valley.  Not that he was fully extended.  His head was not stretched out as a cow-pony’s head is stretched when he runs; he held it rather high, as though he carried in his big heart a reserve strength ready to be called on for any emergency.  For all that, it was running such as Terry had never known.

The wind became a blast, jerking the brim of his sombrero up and whistling in his hair.  He was letting the shame, the grief, the thousand regrets of that parting with Aunt Elizabeth be blown out of his soul.  His mind was a whirl; the thoughts became blurs.  As a matter of fact, Terry was being reborn.

He had lived a life perfectly sheltered.  The care of Elizabeth Cornish had surrounded him as the Blue Mountains and Sleep Mountain surrounded Bear Valley and fenced off the full power of the storm winds.  The reality of life had never reached him.  Now, all in a day, the burden was placed on his back, and he felt the spur driven home to the quick.  No wonder that he winced, that his heart contracted.

But now that he was awakening, everything was new.  Uncle Vance, whom he had always secretly despised, now seemed a fine character, gentle, cultured, thoughtful of others.  Aunt Elizabeth Cornish he had accepted as a sort of natural fact, as though there were a blood tie between them.  Now he was suddenly aware of twenty-four years of patient love.  The sorrow of it, that only the loss of that love should have brought him realization of it.  Vague thoughts and aspirations formed in his mind.  He yearned toward some large and heroic deed which should re-establish himself in her respect.  He wished to find her in need, in great trouble, free her from some crushing burden with one perilous effort, lay his homage at her feet.

All of which meant that Terry Hollis was a boy—­a bewildered, heart-stricken boy.  Not that he would have undone what he had done.  It seemed to him inevitable that he should resent the story of the sheriff and shoot him down or be shot down himself.  All that he regretted was that he had remained mute before Aunt Elizabeth, unable to explain to her a thing which he felt so keenly.  And for the first time he realized the flinty basis of her nature.  The same thing that enabled her to give half a lifetime to the cherishing of a theory, also enabled her to cast all the result of that labor out of her life.  It stung him again to the quick every time he thought of it.  There was something wrong.  He felt that a hundred hands of affection gave him hold on her.  And yet all those grips were brushed away.

The torment was setting him on fire.  And the fire was burning away the smug complacency which had come to him during his long life in the valley.

When El Sangre pulled out of his racing gallop and struck out up a slope at his natural gait, the ground-devouring pace, Terry Hollis was panting and twisting in the saddle as though the labor of the gallop had been his.  They climbed and climbed, and still his mind was involved in a haze of thought.  It cleared when he found that there were no longer high mountains before him.  He drew El Sangre to a halt with a word.  The great stallion turned his head as he paused and looked back to his master with a confiding eye as though waiting willingly for directions.  And all at once the heart of Terence went out to the blood-bay as it had never gone before to any creature, dumb or human.  For El Sangre had known such pain as he himself was learning at this moment.  El Sangre was giving him true trust, true love, and asking him for no return.

The stallion, following his own will, had branched off from the Bear Creek trail and climbed through the lower range of the Blue Peaks.  They were standing now on a mountain-top.  The red of the sunset filled the west and brought the sky close to them with the lower drifts of stained clouds.  Eastward the winding length of Bear Creek was turning pink and purple.  The Cornish ranch had never seemed so beautiful to Terry as it was at this moment.  It was a kingdom, and he was leaving, the disinherited heir.

He turned west to the blare of the sunset.  Blue Mountains tumbled away in lessening ranges—­beyond was Craterville, and he must go there today.  That was the world to him just then.  And something new passed through Terry.  The world was below him; it lay at his feet with its hopes and its battles.  And he was strong for the test.  He had been living in a dream.  Now he would live in fact.  And it was glorious to live!

And when his arms fell, his right hand lodged instinctively on the butt of his revolver.  It was a prophetic gesture, but there, again, was something that Terry Hollis did not understand.

He called to El Sangre softly.  The stallion responded with the faintest of whinnies to the vibrant power in the voice of the master; and at that smooth, effortless pace, he glided down the hillside, weaving dexterously among the jagged outcroppings of rock.  A period had been placed after Terry’s old life.  And this was how he rode into the new.

The long and ever-changing mountain twilight began as he wound through the lower ranges.  And when the full dark came, he broke from the last sweep of foothills and El Sangre roused to a gallop over the level toward Craterville.

He had been in the town before, of course.  But he felt this evening that he had really never seen it before.  On other days what existed outside of Bear Valley did not very much matter.  That was the hub around which the rest of the world revolved, so far as Terry was concerned.  It was very different now.  Craterville, in fact, was a huddle of broken-down houses among a great scattering of boulders with the big mountains plunging up on every side to the dull blue of the night sky.

But Craterville was also something more.  It was a place where several hundred human beings lived, any one of whom might be the decisive influence in the life of Terry.  Young men and old men were in that town, cunning and strength; old crones and lovely girls were there.  Whom would he meet?  What should he see?  A sudden kindness toward others poured through Terry Hollis.  After all, every man might be a treasure to him.  A queer choking came in his throat when he thought of all that he had missed by his contemptuous aloofness.

One thing gave him check.  This was primarily the sheriff’s town, and by this time they knew all about the shooting.  But what of that?  He had fought fairly, almost too fairly.

He passed the first shapeless shack.  The hoofs of El Sangre bit into the dust, choking and red in daylight, and acrid of scent by the night.  All was very quiet except for a stir of voices in the distance here and there, always kept hushed as though the speaker felt and acknowledged the influence of the profound night in the mountains.  Someone came down the street carrying a lantern.  It turned his steps into vast spokes of shadows that rushed back and forth across the houses with the swing of the light.  The lantern light gleamed on the stained flank of El Sangre.

“Halloo, Jake, that you?”

The man with the lantern raised it, but its light merely served to blind him.  Terry passed on without a word and heard the other mutter behind him:  “Some damn stranger!”

Perhaps strangers were not welcome in Craterville.  At least, it seemed so when he reached the hotel after putting up his horse in the shed behind the old building.  Half a dozen dark forms sat on the veranda talking in the subdued voices which he had noted before.  Terry stepped through the lighted doorway.  There was no one inside.

“Want something?” called a voice from the porch.  The widow Rickson came in to him.

“A room, please,” said Terry.

But she was gaping at him.  “You!  Terence—­Hollis!”

A thousand things seemed to be in that last word, which she brought out with a shrill ring of her voice.  Terry noted that the talking on the porch was cut off as though a hand had been clapped over the mouth of every man.

He recalled that the widow had been long a friend of the sheriff and he was suddenly embarrassed.

“If you have a spare room, Mrs. Rickson.  Otherwise, I’ll find—­”

Her manner had changed.  It became as strangely ingratiating as it had been horrified, suspicious, before.

“Sure I got a room.  Best in the house, if you want it.  And—­you’ll be hungry, Mr.—­Hollis?”

He wondered why she insisted so savagely on that newfound name?  He admitted that he was very hungry from his ride, and she led him back to the kitchen and gave him cold ham and coffee and vast slices of bread and butter.

She did not talk much while he ate, and he noted that she asked no questions.  Afterwards she led him through the silence of the place up to the second story and gave him a room at the corner of the building.  He thanked her.  She paused at the door with her hand on the knob, and her eyes fixed him through and through with a glittering, hostile stare.  A wisp of gray hair had fallen across her cheek, and there it was plastered to the skin with sweat, for the evening was, warm.

“No trouble,” she muttered at length.  “None at all.  Make yourself to home, Mr.—­Hollis!”