The Man of the Forest Part 67

"Wal--miss--I--I'll do my best licks. But I ain't gamblin' none on results. Be patient. Keep your nerve. Don't get scared. I reckon between me an' Dale you'll git away from heah."

Withdrawing his head, he got up and returned to the camp-fire, where Anson was waiting curiously.

"I left the grub. But she didn't touch it. Seems sort of sick to me, like she was poisoned."

"Jim, didn't I hear you talkin'?" asked Anson.

"Sh.o.r.e. I was coaxin' her. Reckon she ain't so ranty as she was. But she sh.o.r.e is doubled-up, an' sickish."

"Wuss an' wuss all the time," said Anson, between his teeth. "An'

where's Burt? Hyar it's noon an' he left early. He never was no woodsman. He's got lost."

"Either thet or he's run into somethin'," replied Wilson, thoughtfully.

Anson doubled a huge fist and cursed deep under his breath--the reaction of a man whose accomplices and partners and tools, whose luck, whose faith in himself had failed him. He flung himself down under a tree, and after a while, when his rigidity relaxed, he probably fell asleep. Moze and Shady kept at their game. Wilson paced to and fro, sat down, and then got up to bunch the horses again, walked around the dell and back to camp. The afternoon hours were long. And they were waiting hours. The act of waiting appeared on the surface of all these outlaws did.

At sunset the golden gloom of the glen changed to a vague, thick twilight. Anson rolled over, yawned, and sat up. As he glanced around, evidently seeking Burt, his face clouded.

"No sign of Burt?" he asked.

Wilson expressed a mild surprise. "Wal, Snake, you ain't expectin' Burt now?"

"I am, course I am. Why not?" demanded Anson. "Any other time we'd look fer him, wouldn't we?"

"Any other time ain't now.... Burt won't ever come back!" Wilson spoke it with a positive finality.

"A-huh! Some more of them queer feelin's of yourn--operatin' again, hey?

Them onnatural kind thet you can't explain, hey?"

Anson's queries were bitter and rancorous.

"Yes. An', Snake, I tax you with this heah. Ain't any of them queer feelin's operatin' in you?"

"No!" rolled out the leader, savagely. But his pa.s.sionate denial was a proof that he lied. From the moment of this outburst, which was a fierce clinging to the old, brave instincts of his character, unless a sudden change marked the nature of his fortunes, he would rapidly deteriorate to the breaking-point. And in such brutal, unrestrained natures as his this breaking-point meant a desperate stand, a desperate forcing of events, a desperate acc.u.mulation of pa.s.sions that stalked out to deal and to meet disaster and blood and death.

Wilson put a little wood on the fire and he munched a biscuit. No one asked him to cook. No one made any effort to do so. One by one each man went to the pack to get some bread and meat.

Then they waited as men who knew not what they waited for, yet hated and dreaded it.

Twilight in that glen was naturally a strange, veiled condition of the atmosphere. It was a merging of shade and light, which two seemed to make gray, creeping shadows.

Suddenly a snorting and stamping of the horses startled the men.

"Somethin' scared the hosses," said Anson, rising. "Come on."

Moze accompanied him, and they disappeared in the gloom. More trampling of hoofs was heard, then a cracking of brush, and the deep voices of men. At length the two outlaws returned, leading three of the horses, which they haltered in the open glen.

The camp-fire light showed Anson's face dark and serious.

"Jim, them hosses are wilder 'n deer," he said. "I ketched mine, an'

Moze got two. But the rest worked away whenever we come close. Some varmint has scared them bad. We all gotta rustle out thar quick."

Wilson rose, shaking his head doubtfully. And at that moment the quiet air split to a piercing, horrid neigh of a terrified horse. Prolonged to a screech, it broke and ended. Then followed snorts of fright, pound and crack and thud of hoofs, and crash of brush; then a gathering thumping, cras.h.i.+ng roar, split by piercing sounds.

"Stampede!" yelled Anson, and he ran to hold his own horse, which he had haltered right in camp. It was big and wild-looking, and now reared and plunged to break away. Anson just got there in time, and then it took all his weight to pull the horse down. Not until the cras.h.i.+ng, snorting, pounding melee had subsided and died away over the rim of the glen did Anson dare leave his frightened favorite.

"Gone! Our horses are gone! Did you hear 'em?" he exclaimed, blankly.

"Sh.o.r.e. They're a cut-up an' crippled bunch by now," replied Wilson.

"Boss, we'll never git 'ern back, not 'n a hundred years," declared Moze.

"Thet settles us, Snake Anson," stridently added Shady Jones. "Them hosses are gone! You can kiss your hand to them.... They wasn't hobbled.

They hed an orful scare. They split on thet stampede an' they'll never git together. ... See what you've fetched us to!"

Under the force of this triple arraignment the outlaw leader dropped to his seat, staggered and silenced. In fact, silence fell upon all the men and likewise enfolded the glen.

Night set in jet-black, dismal, lonely, without a star. Faintly the wind moaned. Weirdly the brook babbled through its strange chords to end in the sound that was hollow. It was never the same--a rumble, as if faint, distant thunder--a deep gurgle, as of water drawn into a vortex--a rolling, as of a stone in swift current. The black cliff was invisible, yet seemed to have many weird faces; the giant pines loomed spectral; the shadows were thick, moving, changing. Flickering lights from the camp-fire circled the huge trunks and played fantastically over the brooding men. This camp-fire did not burn or blaze cheerily; it had no glow, no sputter, no white heart, no red, living embers. One by one the outlaws, as if with common consent, tried their hands at making the fire burn aright. What little wood had been collected was old; it would burn up with false flare, only to die quickly.

After a while not one of the outlaws spoke or stirred. Not one smoked.

Their gloomy eyes were fixed on the fire. Each one was concerned with his own thoughts, his own lonely soul unconsciously full of a doubt of the future. That brooding hour severed him from comrade.

At night nothing seemed the same as it was by day. With success and plenty, with full-blooded action past and more in store, these outlaws were as different from their present state as this black night was different from the bright day they waited for. Wilson, though he played a deep game of deceit for the sake of the helpless girl--and thus did not have haunting and superst.i.tious fears on her account--was probably more conscious of impending catastrophe than any of them.

The evil they had done spoke in the voice of nature, out of the darkness, and was interpreted by each according to his hopes and fears.

Fear was their predominating sense. For years they had lived with some species of fear--of honest men or vengeance, of pursuit, of starvation, of lack of drink or gold, of blood and death, of stronger men, of luck, of chance, of fate, of mysterious nameless force. Wilson was the type of fearless spirit, but he endured the most gnawing and implacable fear of all--that of himself--that he must inevitably fall to deeds beneath his manhood.

So they hunched around the camp-fire, brooding because hope was at lowest ebb; listening because the weird, black silence, with its moan of wind and hollow laugh of brook, compelled them to hear; waiting for sleep, for the hours to pa.s.s, for whatever was to come.

And it was Anson who caught the first intimation of an impending doom.

CHAPTER XXIII

"Listen!"

Anson whispered tensely. His poise was motionless, his eyes roved everywhere. He held up a shaking, bludgy finger, to command silence.

A third and stranger sound accompanied the low, weird moan of the wind, and the hollow mockery of the brook--and it seemed a barely perceptible, exquisitely delicate wail or whine. It filled in the lulls between the other sounds.

"If thet's some varmint he's close," whispered Anson.

"But sh.o.r.e, it's far off," said Wilson.

Shady Jones and Moze divided their opinions in the same way.

All breathed freer when the wail ceased, relaxing to their former lounging positions around the fire. An impenetrable wall of blackness circled the pale s.p.a.ce lighted by the camp-fire; and this circle contained the dark, somber group of men in the center, the dying camp-fire, and a few spectral trunks of pines and the tethered horses on the outer edge. The horses scarcely moved from their tracks, and their erect, alert heads attested to their sensitiveness to the peculiarities of the night.