The Sagebrusher by Emerson Hough (first ebook reader txt) 📖

know she had struck him with two shots, the second of which had broken his leg and left him disabled. She had shot a man. He was there in front of her, about to die.

"Are you hurt?" she demanded, staring, the revolver in both her hands. "Keep away. I'll kill you!"

"You—— Don't shoot again," he cried, as she moved. She could not tell what he meant, what really had happened, except that he was helpless. She rose and fled, groping, stumbling, falling. She could hear him crying out. He did not follow her.

In the forest growth at this altitude the trees stood large, straight and tall, not very close together. The earth was covered with a dense floor of pine needles. As she ran she felt her feet slipping, sinking. Now and again she brought up against a tree. Still she kept on, sobbing, her hands outstretched, getting away farther than would have been possible in denser cover. She felt the sand of the roadway under her feet as her course curved back toward the road, endeavored to follow the trail for a time, but found herself again on the pine needles, running she knew not where or how. She had no hope. She knew she was fleeing death and facing death. Very well, she would meet it further on and in a better guise.

She felt that she was passing down, along the mountain side, advanced more rapidly, stumbling, tripping—and so at last fell full length over a log which lay across her course. Stunned by the impact of her fall beyond and below the unseen barrier, she lay prone and quite unconscious.

At a length of unknown moments, she gained her senses. She sat up, felt about her, listened. There was no sound of pursuit. Only the high wailing of the pines came to her ears.

She could not know it, but the men were not following her. When they heard the sound of three shots ring out, every man busy in his work of sabotage stopped where he was. Was it a surprise? Were officers or the ranchers coming? They scattered, hiding among the trees.

They could hear the bellowing of Big Aleck, beseeching aid. They advanced cautiously, to spy out what had happened and saw him rolling from side to side, striving to rise, falling back. The woman was nowhere visible.

"Who done it, Aleck?" demanded the man next in command, when he had ventured closer. "Did she shoot you?"

Aleck groaned as he rolled over, his face upward. A nod showed his crippled shoulder. His other hand Big Aleck feebly placed upon his hip. They bent over him.

"By God, she got you fair that time!" said one investigator. "She's plugged you twice. She wasn't blind. Where did she go?"

"I don't know where—I heard her run. God, that leg! What will I do? I can't stay here alone!"

"I tell you, you'll have to! If that girl's not blind she'll get out and give this snap away."

"But you can take me out with you, fellers. I can ride." Aleck was pleading, his face gray with pain.

"Worst thing we could do, either for you or for us," replied the other, coldly. "If we got you down to the settlements what could we say? If you was shot once we could call it an accident, but shot twice, and once through the hip from behind—how would that be explained, I'd like to know? Folks would begin to ask too many questions. Besides, they'd ask where that girl was. Then there's the fires you set. No, sir, you stay right here. We other fellers'll get out of here as fast as we can."

"And leave me here?" The terror in Big Aleck's voice had been piteous for any men but these.

"Listen! Before midnight I'll be at the Company dam. I'll tell that new doctor there's been an accident up here in the timber camp. I'll tell him to come up here to-morrow morning sure. When he gets here, you tell him how the accident happened. It's up to you, then. You'll have to pay him pretty well, of course."

"And that reminds me," he went on, "we fellers has got to have the funds, Aleck. We'll need money more'n you will now. Here!"

He stooped over and began to feel in Aleck's coat, drew out a heavy wallet, and began to transfer the bills to his own pocket.

"I'll leave you a hundred and fifty. That's enough," said he. "No telling what we fellers'll have to do before we get out of this. Your getting shot here is apt to blow the whole thing. Did she take the gun away with her?"

Aleck groaned and rolled his head. "I don't know," he said.

Jim Denny was the new leader of the brigand party. "Hell's bells!" said he, impatiently now. "We can't be fooling around—this don't look good to me. Noon to-morrow, anyways, the Doctor ought to be here. As for us, we got to beat it now."

The wolf pack knew no mercy nor unselfishness. Aleck got no more attention from them. There were two cars beside the one which had brought Aleck and Mary Warren up the day before. This last one they left, seeing that the tire was in bad condition. Not one of them turned to say good-by to Aleck as he lay in the tent where he had been dragged.

"Got it right on top the hip bone," said one man. "She busted him plenty with that soft-nose."

"And served him right," said Jim Denny, the new leader, grumbling. "Aleck has never been looking for the worst of it, any way of the game. If he had left that woman down below where she belonged, we wouldn't be in this fix. I tell you them ranchers'll be out in a pack after us, and the only thing we can do is to pull our freight good and plenty right now."

The whir of the engine drowned conversation. An instant later the two carloads of banditti were passing down around curve after curve of the sandy road. Mary Warren, still dazed, and dull where she lay, heard them go by. Yonder then, lay the trail—but could she know which way? If she turned her head she would lose the direction. She kept her eyes fixed upon the last point of the compass from which she had heard the car distinctly, and taking the muzzle of the revolver in her hand, endeavored to scratch a mark in the sand to give her the direction later by the sense of touch. She laid the pistol itself at the upper end of the little furrow, pointing toward the road which she had left. Sinking down, she resigned herself to what she felt must soon be the end.

The chill of the mountain night was coming on. The whispering in the pines grew less. Vaguely she sensed that the sun was low, that soon twilight would come. She had no means of making a fire, had no covering, no food. Simply a lost unit of one of the many species inhabiting the earth, surviving each as it may, she cowered alone and helpless in the wilderness.

The hush of the evening came. The pines were silent. There was only one little faint sound above her—in some tree, she thought. It was made by a worm boring under the bark, seeking place for the larvae which presently it would leave, in order that its species might endure. A small sound, of no great carrying power.

CHAPTER XVI THE REBIRTH OF SIM GAGE

Neither Sim Gage nor his neighbor slept to any worth that night. At times one would speak, but they held no discussion. Wid Gardner, in an iron wrath, was thinking much.

Sim Gage lay with his eyes opened toward the rude ceiling. In his heart was something new. Hitherto in all his life he had never quarreled with fate, but smiled at it as something beyond his making or his mending. He was one of the world's lost sheep, one of the army of the unhoping. The mountains, the valleys, the trees, had been enough for him, the glint of the sun on the silver gray of the sage yonder on the plains. He had been content to spend his life here where chance had thrown him. But now—and Sim Gage himself knew it—something new had been born in Sim Gage's heart. It troubled him. He lay there and bent his mind upon the puzzle, intensely, wonderingly.

It had been bravado with him up to the time that he knew this girl was coming out. After that, curiosity and a sense of fair play, mingled, had ensued. Then a new feeling had come after he had met the girl herself—pity, and remorse in regard to a helpless woman. Sim Gage did not know the dangerous kinship that pity holds. He knew no proverbs and no poetry.

But now, mixed also with his feeling of vague loss, his sense of rage, there was now, as Sim Gage realized perfectly well, a new and yet more powerful emotion in his soul. He was not the same man, now; he never again would be. Pity and propinquity and the great law had done their work! For the first and only time in all his life Sim Gage was in love!

Love dareth and endureth all things, magnifies and lessens, softens and hardens, loosens and binds, establishes for itself new worlds, fabricates for itself new values, chastens, humbles, makes weak, makes strong. Sim Gage never before had known how merciless, how cruel all this may be. He was in love. With all his heart and life and soul he loved her, right or wrong. There had been a miracle in Two-Forks Valley.

The two men were astir long before dawn. Wid Gardner first kicked off his blankets. "I'll find me a horse," said he. "You git breakfast, Sim, if you can." He went into the darkness of the starlit morning.

Sim Gage, his wounded leg stiff and painful enough, crawled out of his bunk—the same where She but now had slept—and made some sort of a light by means of matches and a stub of candle; found a stick and made some shavings; made shift to start a fire. With a hatchet he found on the floor he hacked off more of the charred woodwork of his own door-frame, seeing that it must be ruined altogether. It was nothing to him what became of this house. The only question in his mind was, Where was She? What had happened to Her?

His breakfast was that of the solitary man in such surroundings. He got a little bacon into a pan, chipped up some potatoes which he managed to pare—old potatoes now, and ready to sprout long since. He mixed up some flour and water with salt and baking powder and cooked that in a pan.

The odors of the cooking brought new life into the otherwise silent interior of Sim Gage's cabin. Sim felt something at his feet, at his leg. It was the Airedale puppy which he had left curled up all night at the foot of his bed. The scent of the meat now had awakened him, and he was begging his new master for attention.

Sim leaned down stiffly to pat him on the head, gave him a bit of food. Then he bethought him of the sack of fowls which he had entirely forgotten—found them luckily still alive in the wagon bed, cut off the sacking around them, and drove them out into the open to shift for themselves as best they might. But the little dog would not be cast off. He followed Sim wherever he went, licked his hand. That made him think how She would have petted the puppy had She been there. He had got the dog for Her.

By the time he had the meal ready Wid Gardner was back leading a horse. There was no saddle at either ranch now, but Wid searched around and found a bit of discarded