Riders of the Silences

Consciousness returned to Pierre slowly.  Many a time his eyes opened, and he saw nothing, but when he did see and hear it was by vague glimpses.

He heard the crunch of the snow underfoot; he heard the panting and snorting of the horses; he felt the swing and jolt of the saddle beneath him; he saw the grim faces of the long-riders, and he said:  “The law has taken me.”

Thereafter he let his will lapse, and surrendered to the sleepy numbness which assailed his brain in waves.  He was riding without support by this time, but it was an automatic effort.  There was no more real life in him than in a dummy figure.  It was not the effect of the blow.  It was rather the long exposure and the overexertion of mind and body during the evening and night.  He had simply collapsed beneath the strain.

But an old army man has said:  “Give me a soldier of eighteen or twenty.  In a single day he may not march quite so far as a more mature man or carry quite so much weight.  He will go to sleep each night dead to the world.  But in the morning he awakens a new man.  He is like a slate from which all the writing has been erased.  He is ready for a new day and a new world.  Thirty days of campaigning leaves him as strong and fresh as ever.

“Thirty days of campaigning leaves the old soldier a wreck.  Why?  Because as a man grows older he loses the ability to sleep soundly.  He carries the nervous strain of one day over to the next.  Life is a serious problem to a man over thirty.  To a man under thirty it is simply a game.  For my part, give me men who can play at war.”

So it was with Pierre le Rouge.  He woke with a faint heaviness of head, and stretched himself.  There were many sore places, but nothing more.  He looked up, and the slant winter sun cut across his face and made a patch of bright yellow on the wall beside him.

Next he heard a faint humming, and, turning his head, saw a boy of fourteen or perhaps a little more, busily cleaning a rifle in a way that betokened the most expert knowledge of the weapon.  Pierre himself knew rifles as a preacher knows his Bible, and as he lay half awake and half asleep he smiled with enjoyment to see the deft fingers move here and there, wiping away the oil.  A green hand will spend half a day cleaning a gun, and then do the work imperfectly; an expert does the job efficiently in ten minutes.  This was an expert.

Undoubtedly this was a true son of the mountain-desert.  He wore his old slouch hat even in the house, and his skin was that olive brown which comes from many years of exposure to the wind and sun.  At the same time there was a peculiar fineness about the boy.  His feet were astonishingly small and the hands thin and slender for all their supple strength.  And his neck was not bony, as it is in most youths at this gawky age, but smoothly rounded.

Men grow big of bone and sparse of flesh in the mountain-desert.  It was the more surprising to Pierre to see this young fellow with the marvelously delicate-cut features.  By some freak of nature here was a place where the breed ran to high blood.

The cleaning completed, the boy tossed the butt of the gun to his shoulder and squinted down the barrel.  Then he loaded the magazine, weighted the gun deftly at the balance, and dropped the rifle across his knees.

“Morning,” said Pierre le Rouge cheerily, and swung off the bunk to the floor.  “How old’s the gun?”

The boy, without the slightest show of excitement, snapped the butt to his shoulder and drew a bead on Pierre’s breast.

“Sit down before you get all heated up,” said a musical voice.  “There’s nobody waiting for you on horseback.”

And Pierre sat down, partly because Western men never argue a point when that little black hole is staring them in the face, partly because he remembered with a rush that the last time he had fully possessed his consciousness he had been lying in the snow with the cross gripped hard and the toppling mass of the landslide above him.  All that had happened between was blotted from his memory.  He fumbled at his throat.  The cross was not there.  He touched his pockets.  “Ease your hands away from your hip,” said the cold voice of the boy, who had dropped his gun to the ready with a significant finger curled around the trigger, “or I’ll drill you clean.”

Pierre obediently raised his hands to the level of his shoulders.  The boy sneered.

“This isn’t a hold-up,” he explained.  “Put ’em down again, but watch yourself.”

The sneer varied to a contemptuous smile.

“I guess you’re tame, all right.”

“Point that gun another way, will you, son?”

The boy flushed.

“Don’t call me son.”

“Is this a lockup—­a jail?”

“This?”

“What is it, then?  The last I remember I was lying in the snow with—­”

“I wish to God you’d been let there,” said the boy bitterly.

But Pierre, overwhelmed with the endeavor to recollect, rushed on with his questions and paid no heed to the tone.

“I had a cross in my hand—­”

The scorn of the boy grew to mighty proportions.

“It’s there in the breast-pocket of your shirt.”

Pierre drew out the little cross, and the touch of it against his palm restored whatever of his strength was lacking.  Very carefully he attached it to the chain about his throat.  Then he looked up to the contempt of the boy, and as he did so another memory burst on him and brought him to his feet.  The gun went to the boy’s shoulders at the same time.

“When I was found—­was anyone else with me?”

“Nope.”

“What happened?”

“Must have been buried in the landslide.  Half a hill caved in, and the dirt rolled you down to the bottom.  Plain luck, that’s all, that kept you from going out.”

“Luck?” said Pierre and he laid his hand against his breast where he could feel the outline of the cross.  “Yes, I suppose it was luck.  And she—­”

He sat down slowly and buried his face in his hands.  A new tone came in the voice of the boy as he asked:  “Was a woman with you?” But Pierre heard only the tone and not the words.  His face was gray when he looked up again, and his voice hard.

“Tell me as briefly as you can how I come here, and who picked me up.”

“My father and his men.  They passed you lying on the snow.  They brought you home.”

“Who is your father?”

The boy stiffened and his color rose.

“My father is Jim Boone.”

Instinctively, while he stared, the right hand of Pierre le Rouge crept toward his hip.

“Keep your hand steady,” said the boy.  “I got a nervous trigger-finger.  Yeh, dad is pretty well known.”

“You’re his son?”

“I’m Jack Boone.”

“But I’ve heard—­tell me, why am I under guard?”

Jack was instantly aflame with the old anger.

“Not because I want you here.”

“Who does?”

“Dad.”

“Put away your pop-gun and talk sense.  I won’t try to get away until Jim Boone comes.  I only fight men.”

Even the anger and grief of the boy could not keep him from smiling.

“Just the same I’ll keep the shooting-iron handy.  Sit still.  A gun don’t keep me from talking sense, does it?  You’re here to take Hal’s place.  Hal!” The little wail told a thousand things, and Pierre, shocked out of the thought of his own troubles, waited.

“My brother, Hal; he’s dead; he died last night, and on the way back dad found you and brought you to take Hal’s place. Hal’s place!”

The accent showed how impossible it was that Hal’s place could be taken by any mortal man.

“I got orders to keep you here, but if I was to do what I’d like to do, I’d give you the best horse on the place and tell you to clear out.  That’s me!”

“Then do it.”

“And face dad afterward?”

“Tell him I overpowered you.  That would be easy; you a slip of a boy, and me a man.”

“Stranger, it goes to show you may have heard of Jim Boone, but you don’t anyways know him.  When he orders a thing done he wants it done, and he don’t care how, and he don’t ask questions why.  He just raises hell.”

“He really expects to keep me here?”

“Expects?  He will.”

“Going to tie me up?” asked Pierre ironically.

“Maybe,” answered Jack, overlooking the irony.  “Maybe he’ll just put you on my shoulders to guard.”

He moved the gun significantly.

“And I can do it.”

“Of course.  But he would have to let me go sometime.”

“Not till you’d promised to stick by him.  I told him that myself, but he said that you’re young and that he’d teach you to like this life whether you wanted to or not.  Me speaking personally, I agree with Black Gandil:  This is the worst fool thing that dad has ever done.  What do we want with you—­in Hal’s place!”

“But I’ve got a thing to do right away—­today; it can’t wait.”

“Give dad your word to come back and he’ll let you go.  He says you’re the kind that will keep your word.  You see, he found you with a cross in your hand.”

And Jack’s lips curled again.

It was all absurd, too impossible to be real.  The only real things were the body of yellow-haired Mary Brown, under the tumbled rocks and dirt of the landslide, and the body of Martin Ryder waiting to be placed in that corner plot where the grass grew quicker than all other grass in the spring of the year.

However, having fallen among madmen, he must use cunning to get away before the outlaw and his men came back from wherever they had gone.  Otherwise there would be more bloodshed, more play of guns and hum of lead.

“Tell me of Hal,” he said, and dropped his elbows on his knees as if he accepted his fate.

“Don’t know you well enough to talk of Hal.”

“I’m sorry.”

The boy made a little gesture of apology.

“I guess that was a mean thing to say.  Sure I’ll tell you about Hal—­if I can.”

“Tell me anything you can,” said Pierre gently, “because I’ve got to try to be like him, haven’t I?”

“You could try till rattlers got tame, but it’d take ten like you to make one like Hal.  He was dad’s own son—­he was my brother.”

The sob came openly now, and the tears were a mist in the boy’s eyes.

“What’s your name?”

“Pierre.”

“Pierre?  I suppose I got to learn it.”

“I suppose so.”  And he edged farther forward so that he was sitting only on the edge of the bunk.

“Please do.”  And he gathered his feet under him, ready for a spring forward and a grip at the boy’s threatening rifle.

Jack had canted his head a little to one side.  “Did you ever see a horse that was gentle and yet had never been ridden, or his spirit broke, Pierre—­”

Here Pierre made his leap swift as some bobcat of the northern woods; his hand whipped out as lightning fast as the striking paw of the lynx, and the gun was jerked from the hands of Jack.  Not before the boy clutched at it with a cry of horror, but the force of the pull sent him lurching to the floor and broke his grip.

He was up in an instant, however, and a knife of ugly length glittered in his hand as he sprang at Pierre.

Pierre tossed aside the rifle and met the attack barehanded.  He caught the knife-bearing hand at the wrist and under his grip the hand loosened its hold and the steel tinkled on the floor.  His other arm caught the body of Jack in a mighty vise.

There was a brief and futile struggle, and a hissing of breath in the silence till the hat tumbled from the head of Jack and down over the shoulders streamed a torrent of silken black hair.

Pierre stepped back.  This was the meaning, then, of the strangely small feet and hands and the low music of the voice.  It was the body of a girl that he had held.