Blue Kingdom (3 page)

From this explosion the mustang dropped lightly down, and Tom Bizbee fell in another place, and fell
not to rise again. He stretched flat on his back, with his arms thrown wide. Spinning like a top, the gray horse whirled to savage him!

It was too sudden for thought, too horrible for expectation. The time for succor was some fifth part of a second before those steel-clad hoofs would smash in the breastbone, or shatter the face and skull of poor Bizbee. But with the yell of distress that arose mingled the sharp, hoarse bark of a revolver.

The gray mustang lurched up on his hind legs, wavered in the air, as though about to drop on the fallen man, and then crashed backward, dead.

“What a wonderful shot!” said Elizabeth Furneaux.

“Him that fired it was the same drunk cowpuncher!” said a judge.

She stared. The crowd was flooding onto the field and examining the wound—a bullet hole through the head of the gray! But Carrick Dunmore was gripping the bars and looking through them at the mare within.

“Who is he? What's his name?” asked Elizabeth.

“Him? That's Carrick Dunmore, that. . . .”

“Carrick Dunmore? Great heavens!” she exclaimed, and changed color. Her horse moved off, and she seemed too stunned to handle the reins and check him in place.

“What's the matter with her? What's Carrick Dunmore in her life?” muttered one of the judges.

“Why, I never thought of it before now. But wasn't her ma's name Dunmore?”

“Hey! Then maybe they're related in some way?”

“Why, maybe! What'll Carrie do? Ride the dappled chestnut?”

“Oh, he might try. But no man's son's gonna ride that mare, my boy.”

Carrick Dunmore was still at the bars, considering Excuse Me. “What's the breeding of this here mare, Colonel?” he asked.

“Well, what'd you guess, Carrie?”

“I'd guess she was sired by a streak of lightnin' out of a black nor'west blizzard, Colonel.”

The colonel laughed.

“Don't look like a man would be none at home with her,” remarked the thoughtful Carrick Dunmore.

“Who'd you expect to be easy with her, Carrie?” went on the colonel, enjoying this conversation.

“Why, a couple of well-growed grizzly bears might handle her . . . or a pack of mountain lions might have some chance, if she didn't kick out their hind sights.”

“Dunmore,” said one of the judges, coming up, “she's the last horse that hasn't been ridden, or tried. Do you want her, or do you stay out of this?”

“If they was fifty hosses here in these here pens,” said Carrick Dunmore, “and, if I was to have the first choice, I wouldn't pick nothin' but her. Where's all these cowboys? Ain't they got an eye in their heads? Payin' all that attention to common mutts when they's a thoroughbred queen of Spain standin' here to take 'em in one jump all the way to glory? Lead out beautiful. I wanna be interduced.”

Six men, busily, cautiously laboring, snubbed her head short against a post, then worked the blanket and saddle onto her velvet back. She did not struggle greatly. Now and again there would be a ripple through the shoulder muscles, or a bending of the back upward.
But like one that knows that the time has not yet come to strike, she waited.

“She's pretty quiet, ain't she?” said the colonel.

“Aw, she's quiet,” said Dunmore. “She's about as quiet, it seems to me, as a blast of powder before the fire gets to it. I bet that she's got wings.”

They led her out, blindfolded, and Carrick Dunmore mounted. He was still far from recovered from the fumes of drink. His foot twice missed the stirrup, and he seemed to need the help of many hands to heave into the saddle. But once he was fitted into it, he squeezed the mare with his knees, and she grunted at the enormous pressure.

Elizabeth Furneaux, lingering near, watched this performance with a pale face and with eyes that burned with a peculiar interest. Then she turned her horse and deliberately rode away from the grounds, only stopping to speak for a moment to the colonel. Behind her arose a wild whoop from the crowd, and, looking back, she could see Excuse Me black against the sun, with the hat of her rider batting her ears, and the swinging legs of him scratching her fore and aft. She waited to see no more, but with a shudder put her horse into a canter and hastened home.

In the meantime, Excuse Me showed her worth. Her exhibitions had been limited affairs in every sense before this. It was like putting a heavyweight champion against an amateur feather, to see her entertaining the best of cowpunchers who had come her way, but now she had met a master of the craft, and she did all that a horse could do. She fished for the sun and, landing, strove to jam her forehoofs to the heart of the earth.
But the earth was furnished with springs, as it were, and cast her up again into the air. She was like a hawk that, missing its prey as it stoops, leaps with the bracing of its wings almost to the same vantage point and so shoots down again and again as rook or dove hurries for the shelter of the woods.

So Excuse Me went across the field. Her rider lost his right stirrup at the second jump—got it at the third—lost both stirrups at the fourth—found them again at the next. He circled the field, sometimes with the sun showing between him and the saddle, but still in his place. It was dreadful work. For Excuse Me threw in sudden variations, here and there, sometimes spinning in a circle with wonderful speed, the most deadly of all the tricks of a bucking horse. Sometimes she fenced-rowed for a bit, her hoofs flickering in a jigsaw frame upon the ground.

As that first slow circle was completed, men saw that blood was streaming from the nose of Carrick Dunmore.

“But he's got her licked,” they told one another.

Fiercely they said it, whispering, gripping the rails of the barrier, while they set their teeth hard, and hoped.

The six strangers, who had done so well, were gathered in one group, watching very thoughtfully, not with malicious eyes, but with a profound appreciation, such as one consummate artist yields to the work of another, even when it's entered in competition with his own.

Twice around the pair worked. Then, as the mare was covered with flecks and streaks of foam and markings of blood where the cruel spurs had rasped her
skin, men could see, also, that the face of Dunmore was deadly pale, his mouth opened, his eyes empty.

“By gravy,” cried the colonel, “has she got him?”

“Nobody ever rode better,” said Pete Logan, at his side. “Good ol' Carrie. Ride her, boy! Bust her! Hey, there. . . .”

Excuse Me had flicked over backward to the earth, her rider swerving sideways from the saddle. She rolled and pitched her hoofs, reaching her head about violently to tear the leg of Dunmore. But a fist of leaden weight smote Excuse Me upon the muzzle, and, as Dunmore settled into the saddle, she skyrocketed, twisting over in mid-air, and so went crashing down upon her back.

Dunmore, cast from the saddle, slowly crawled to his knees, and the mare lay for an instant still, also, then twisted over and pawed her way up to stand. Dunmore would have risen, but he could not. His legs seemed paralyzed, but he was seen to draw himself upon his strong hands toward the mare, and, as she lurched up, he reached for a stirrup leather and raised himself by a grappled saddle horn, and so, as she lurched to stand, she swayed him up with her. Men saw him reach back with his right hand and drag his right leg over the cantle. It flopped down helplessly and dangled, regardless of the stirrup, and a groan of sympathy and disappointment came from the watching crowd.

The very next fling of the mare would surely throw him. But Excuse Me flung no more. She stood for a while, with hanging head and with legs spread far apart. The reins hung idly down.

“Beat,” said all that crowd in a single voice. Although so many sounds were in it, it was not a loud voice, but as though each man and woman were announcing to himself a miracle.

Then Dunmore slipped still farther forward. His arms hung over the neck of the mare, and, with him in that position, loosely sagging toward the ground, Excuse Me walked quietly back to her pen and entered it veritably like one returned after an arduous and trying journey.

They took Dunmore from her and stretched him along the ground. A doctor kneeled by him, and listened to his heart, to his breathing. Then he touched him here and there with a needle and watched the reactions of the nerves and the muscles. Then he stood up.

“I'm very glad to say that there's nothing serious,” he said. “Only a temporary paralysis of the legs after the fall. And one other remarkable fact, my friends. This man is unconscious now from the fall. And . . . he must have been unconscious when he crawled back to the mare and mounted her with his hands alone.”

The doctor went away. He said to his wife as they climbed into their buggy: “Rather a pity that he wasn't killed. It would have been a fine ending for a perfectly worthless life.”

From his long trance Carrick Dunmore wakened in a large, sunny room. His stunned brain had slipped into a deep sleep, and so he had spent a round of the clock and more. It was the prime of the day, and the sun flowed brilliantly through the lofty windows. It was an old-fashioned house. By the big, square room and the time-thinned carpet on the floor, he could guess the face of the house on the outside. It would be of wood, with a romantic wooden lantern built up from the center, and a good deal of gingerbread work about the eaves. It was one of those places made to look like a castle on the outside and a little like a palace within.

Nevertheless, Carrick was impressed and wondered how he had gotten here. But his brain refused to work hard on any subject. He lay back on his pillow and contentedly, lazily, watched the quiver of the shadows of the lace curtain falling upon the opposite wall. He noticed that the wallpaper was ragged, and there were water stains that proved that the roof had not been kept in very good repair. But chiefly he occupied himself
with a painting that was on the wall facing his bed. It showed a town of twisted streets and red-tiled roofs swarming up the side of a hill; terraced olive orchards lay on either side like puffs of dissolving smoke, and in the sky was eternal sunshine and eternal peace.

“Hello!” said a voice at the window. It was a handsome woman of middle age, with a brown look of the outdoors. She was leading Excuse Me, and the window sill came so close to the ground that the mare was easily able to put her head in. She snorted in the direction of her master, and then looked half fiercely and half curiously about the room.

“She knows you,” said the woman, “the beautiful rascal.”

“And I know her,” said Carrick Dunmore, “but I'm afraid that I never met you, ma'am.”

“No, you haven't,” she said. “But I'm Elizabeth Furneaux. When you were hurt, of course, you were brought to my house.” He looked puzzled, and she went on: “Partly because I'm close, and partly, of course, because I had to do what I could for the head of my family. Well, I wanted you to see Excuse Me, and now I'll go bring you some breakfast.”

She disappeared, and Carrick Dunmore pondered with a startled brain a phrase she had used. He—the head of her family? However, he grew drowsy almost at once, and very nearly had to waken from deep sleep when the door opened and Miss Furneaux came in, carrying a tray of food. She put it on a bed tray that straddled him, and uncovered to him the fume of oatmeal porridge, with a yellow jug of cream beside it, two broad slabs of ham fried to a crinkle at the edges,
and four eggs mounted richly on the field of that ham. Then there was another covered dish that contained wedges of hot cornbread, three inches thick, and a dish of butter. She stood without smiling at the foot of the bed and surveyed him with a mild and direct gaze such as he never had received before except from a man— and very few men, indeed, looked at Carrick Dunmore so straight.

He, looking back at her, decided that she not only had brought in the tray, but that she had cooked the food that was on it. By her hands, somehow, he could tell it, and the flush of heat about the lower part of her face. In one stroke he wrote her down as a woman who was a lady by birth and a man by necessity. Her work ranged from the kitchen to the herd, and he was sure of it.

“I'll go out, if you'll eat more comfortably when you're not watched,” she said.

Dunmore smiled at her. He had one of those surprisingly bright smiles that light up a face as though a veil had been brushed aside before it.

“Crowds never bothered me, Miss Furneaux,” he replied. “I could sleep through all the noise of a boiler factory, and I could sit down and eat with a thousand ladies and gents walkin' by and lettin' fall their monocles at the looks of me.” With this, he poured the contents of the cream jug upon the oatmeal and heaped a white island of sugar in the center of the cream. This he then stirred vigorously with a tablespoon.

“It makes me hungry to watch you,” said Elizabeth Furneaux, laughing a little in a very pleasant voice.

“You,” he said, “are what I'd call a good provider.
This would be somethin' to dream about, if hotels could frame up such chuck.”

“My dear Cousin Carrick,” she said, “of course, I'm delighted to have you . . . as long as you'll stay.”

He paused, halfway through the ham and eggs. “Am I your cousin?”

“Not a shadow of a doubt of it. My mother was a Dunmore of Virginia, you know.”

“Dunmore . . . Virginia,” he repeated. “Why, that's a funny thing, isn't it? And that's what you meant by callin' me the head of the house, I suppose?”

“Exactly.”

“No more men left in Virginia?”

“No. Except Alf Dunmore's pair of twins. Their picture came last week, and they're cute little fellows. But only five years old.”

“That's old enough to make a steer mean,” said Dunmore, “but I've gotta say that, if the house has me for a head, it's not goin' to use its brain much. It'll be more apt to crawl along on hands and feet.”