Stolen Stallion (9 page)

T
HEY TOOK THE STALLION ON TWO LARIATS AND HALF LED,
and half dragged him away, looking back a few times, contentedly, on the body they left behind them. It was not until they were out of sight that Silvertip’s head turned slightly to the side, and a groan came through his parched lips.

If they had heard it, they would have come back like tigers to finish their work, or else they would have loosed the stallion and fled away like carrion crows to a distant region. They would have separated, changed their names, shaved their faces, and striven in a new life more completely to bury themselves from the eye of Silvertip. But they went on in happy ignorance that the rifle bullet had glanced on the skull of Silver, instead of boring its way straight through the brain.

They had Parade delivered into their hands in exactly the state in which they could work on him. Half dead with fatigue, more than half starved, he looked more like an ancient caricature than the king of the Sierra Blanca desert. So one of them hauled at him from in front, and the other fed a quirt into him to urge him across the desert. He tried more than once to fight back. His spirit was not dead, but his body failed him.

When they came in sight of Mischief, hardly in better shape than her son, in spite of the fact that she had not made the frightful journey through Salt Creek, it was easy for Chuck to catch the mare, while Lefty held the stallion.

At this stroke, they exulted beyond words. They were bringing in both the stallion and the mare, where the ablest men in the West had failed. Perhaps it was true that more than a hundred thousand dollars had been spent in time, horseflesh, and other ways, in order to capture Parade. All of that money had been spent in vain. And now they were bringing him in!

There was reputation in it, in the first place. There was enough reputation to last a dozen men the course of their lives.

There was money in it, too, for what would not some rancher pay to get hold of this famous animal in order to improve his saddle stock? Besides, Parade could be showed at a quarter a head, and people would throng to see him, close at hand. His very picture would have a good cash value.

Lefty and Chuck were thrifty souls, and they talked over these prospects with a calm determination to miss no tricks. Even Mischief was of value, as the companion who for so long had gone limping at the side of Parade. She was the stamp and seal of his identity.

“It ain’t what you do,” said Chuck. “It’s the way you do it, that counts. There’s poor old Silvertip now. There’s a gent that’s been talked about and wrote about and sung about. And he takes and burns himself up, and he does what nobody else can do, and he gets as thin as a crow, flyin’ after Parade. And what does he get out of it?”

“He gets a bullet through the head,” said Lefty, grinning. “And we get Parade.”

“It ain’t what you do,” Chuck repeated. “It’s the way you do it that counts. And we’ve done this the right way. If that Parade don’t fall down flat before we get him to a corral and some good grass.”

“There ain’t any hurry about that,” said Lefty. “We got him weakened and we’re goin’ to keep him weakened till he’s broke.”

In this there was the sort of sense that could not fail to appeal to such a mind as that of Chuck. That same day, they put a saddle on the back of the exhausted stallion, and Lefty mounted.

There was one minute of violent bucking, one flash in the pan, one faint suggestion of the explosion that would have taken place had Parade possessed his strength, and then the big horse crumpled to the ground.

For a time they feared that he was about to die. But his body was not dead. It had been toughened through too many years of famine and pursuit to give way so suddenly now. He was able to rise again, and stumble on. And when they came to grass and water, the men spent two whole days letting the stallion and the mare recuperate.

In the olden time, Parade would have recovered with amazing speed. But now his progress was very slow. His body was still intact, but the heart and the pride in him had been almost fatally wounded.

It hardly mattered that the saddle was placed on him every day. It hardly mattered that his flanks felt the goring stroke of the spurs, or that the quirt bit into his hide, or that his tender mouth was sawed by the savage grip of the Spanish bit. The chief indignity already had befallen him. He had been mastered!

And every inch of the Sierra Blanca was an insult and a reproach to him. The ragged summits of the mountains that he had viewed so many times with a feeling of kinship and companionship, now seemed to stare down at him with scornful eyes. Behind him followed the ghosts of the fine horses which had been at his command. They were gone with his freedom, and there was no heart left in him.

Vainly Lefty and Chuck waited for a return of his magnificence, as they drifted him slowly south. Flesh appeared once more over his ribs. He was as he had been before, but the horse which responded to whip and spur was far other than the old king of the Sierra Blanca. The spring was gone from his step, the arch from his neck, the fire from his eyes. Weariness was always in him, the weariness of the spirit.

That was how they brought him into Parmalee.

The great Parmalee rodeo was about to commence; in ten days it would start, and in the meantime, visitors, cattle buyers, cowpunchers, were beginning to pour into town. It was a perfect opportunity for the showing of the stallion, and Lefty and Chuck made the most of it.

Harry Richmond had his stallion, Brandy, in a corral near the race track. Adjoining it was a high-walled inclosure used sometimes for the breaking of very refractory mustangs, with a snubbing post in the center. Here the mare and the great Parade were placed. It was a simple matter to hang cheap canvas around the inclosure so that people could not peek in. It was equally simple to build a little platform against the side of the fence, and there, for twenty-five cents, a man could stand as long as he wished to stare at the famous outlaw.

Dave Larchmont came and stood there almost half a day, with that poor Englishman, Hammersley, beside him. Hammersley was almost ruined now, men said. He carried his head as high as ever, and his back as straight, and his mustache bristled as fiercely, and his eye was as stern as when he had spent thousands upon thousands in the pursuit of Parade. But it was said that his fortune had melted away. He had spent too much time horse hunting, and not enough in the management of his place.

There was a long silence between him and Larchmont, and then Hammersley said:

“D’you know what it’s really like, Larchmont?”

“It’s like seeing a ghost,” said Larchmont.

“No,” said Hammersley, “it’s like seeing the poor relation of a great man. The name may be the same, and the face may be the same, but the great heart’s gone, Larchmont. The heart’s gone, and nothing will bring it back again!”

Even to see the ghost, the fading relic of what Parade had once been, people were willing to come, not once, but many times. It was a poor day when Chuck and Lefty did not haul in from twenty to thirty dollars, and this was money so sweet and so easily come by that Chuck took a bit to drink, and Lefty to poker. They managed to spend their winnings in that way, easily enough.

“Suppose that Silvertip could see us now,” said Chuck, one evening, as he leaned against a bar beside his partner. “He’d doggone nigh rise out of his grave, wouldn’t he, Lefty?”

“Him?” snapped Lefty. “I kind of half wish that we’d left him alone.”

“Whatcha talkin’ about?” demanded Chuck. “Ain’t it the best day’s work that we ever done in our lives? Or you got an idea that murder will out, eh?”

Lefty pointed before him, at the mirror, and seemed to be squinting at his own image in the glass.

“We went and murdered Parade,” he said. His face puckered.

“What kind of fool talk is this here?” demanded Chuck.

“You wouldn’t understand,” answered Lefty. “I was just thinkin’.”

“Quit your crabbin’ while the coin is rollin’ in,” said Chuck.

“What I mean to say,” remarked Lefty, “that hoss was plumb satisfied with Silvertip. Account of bein’ hauled back up over the edge of the cliff, maybe. I thought that fool of a Silver was goin’ to slip over the edge himself, for a while.” He shook his head.

“Are you tryin’ to get mysterious, or something like that?” demanded Chuck. “Whatcha mean — the hoss bein’ plumb satisfied with Silver? Didn’t Silver wear Parade down? Didn’t Silver nigh onto kill the both of them, he chased that hoss so long?”

“You seen Parade eatin’ out of Silver’s hand,” said Lefty gloomily.

“Well, he’ll eat out of our hands, too,” said Chuck, with a grin.

“He won’t,” said Lefty. “I been and tried him, and he won’t. You’d think that there was poison in my hand. If I take and stir up the barley or the oats for him in his feed box, he’ll smell at it, but he won’t eat. You try the same thing, and see.”

“I’ve tried it — and he won’t eat what I’ve touched,” agreed Chuck. “What’s the matter with him?”

“I was sayin’ a while back,” answered Lefty, “that he took and ate out of the hand of Silvertip. That’s all that I was sayin’. He was right friendly with Silver.”

“He was dead beat, and he couldn’t help what he did,” argued Chuck.

“He took and ate out of Silver’s hand,” said Lefty.

“What’s the idea? Was, that crook of a man-killer — was he any better than us?” demanded Chuck.

“I was just thinkin’ about Parade eatin’ out of his hand,” said Lefty dreamily.

His friend glared at him.

The main thing is right here in this,” said Chuck at last. “Can we get Parade in shape to run him in the big race?”

“At the rodeo?”

“Yeah, at the rodeo.”

“I dunno,” said Lefty. “He ain’t hardly got ambition to eat his oats. How would he come to run in a race?”

“We could stick a shot of somethin’ into him,” suggested Chuck.

“Yeah, we could do that,” said Lefty. “But he’d have Brandy to beat, and I guess there ain’t any hoss beatin’ Brandy. He’s a thoroughbred.”

“Nothin’ that ever lived,” said Chuck, “could beat Parade. Everybody knows that.”

“Not on a fifty-mile run,” answered Lefty. “Not out there in the desert. But he ain’t made for a one- or two-mile sprint. There’s too much of him to get goin’. Who’s this old codger?”

“It’s Charlie Moore, that’s been takin’ care of Brandy a long time. Hello, Charlie.”

Charlie Moore came slowly up to them, smiling vaguely.

“Gents,” he said, “I been fired by Mr. Richmond. Seems like him and Brandy don’t need me no more. I was wonderin’ could you use me to take care of Parade?”

“What should we need of a man to take care of that hoss? Ain’t we got a pair of hands apiece and ten minutes a day to work on him?” demanded Chuck.

“All right,” said Moore. His vague old eyes steadied on them for a moment. “I just sort of cottoned to him, was all. And ten minutes ain’t hardly enough to polish the hoofs of a horse like Parade, was all I was thinkin’.”

He turned and went slowly out the door.

“Maybe we missed somethin’,” said Lefty. “Maybe
he
could wake up Parade better’n a shot of dope.”

“You talk like a fool today,” said Chuck. “Leave off your thinkin’, and let’s have another drink.”

I
N THE EVENING OF THE DAY, AS SOON AS THE STREAM OF
visitors stopped flowing up onto the platform — at twenty-five cents a head — in order to see Parade and the old mare, the canvas screen that turned the corral into a showroom was taken down, so that the wind might freely blow across the pair of captives. And on this evening, Parade and Mischief stood head to shoulder, she facing away to the northwest, the direction of the Sierra Blanca, and he looking in the opposite direction, into the pen where Brandy was kept. The sun was hardly down; it was still flinging up an abundance of fire that clung to the clouds in red and gold, and it would be long before the twilight ended. This is the time when cowpunchers lounge, between day and night, and forget the hard day, and try to make every moment an eternity before it is necessary to go to bed again — which means one step from breakfast and the saddle.

“I can see all the peaks of the Sierra Blanca,” said the old mare.

“All of them?” asked Parade sadly.

“All white and blue against the red of the sky — it’s as red as firelight shining on smoke.”

“Can you see old Mount Blanco, itself?” asked Parade.

“I can see it clear to the shoulders,” said Mischief, “and below that it turns blue and melts into the other mountains.”

“If we had gone up there, into the ravines,” said Parade, “then, perhaps, they never would have run us down.”

“You can feed on regret like moldy hay,” said Mischief, “but it will give you indigestion and pain, afterward.”

“Perhaps it will,” said Parade, “but what else is there to think of?”

“Think of the time to come,” said the mare. “Prepare for the moment when you may be able to strike one blow for freedom. Be like a coiled snake. It’s better to die trying to get back to the Sierra Blanca than it is to live a slave all the days of your life.”

“That may be true,” said Parade, “but even if we escaped, he would come again and walk us down.”

“You said that and you meant it,” said the mare, “but you saw him fall dead.”

“Yes,” said Parade.

“And there is no other man in the world who ever tried to do such a thing as he managed. Now that he is gone, there is no other.”

“You want me to play the king again,” said the stallion. “I know the ways of the business now. That’s true. I’ve learned how to shoot the bar that holds a gate, even. I could open this big gate here, for that matter, except that besides the bar there’s a padlock on the outside. And if I were free, I could gather the best horses from the ranches, I could go and raid their corrals and their ranges, and run off with what I want. But there’s no heart in me to do these things, mother. Man would come again. The Great Enemy would find me; I would fail; I would be hunted down.”

“I can see the other mountains fading,” said Mischief. There’s only one mountain left for me to remember, and And that’s the way with my memory of this life, Parade. I have thought you were a king, but I was always wrong.

There’s only one mountain left for me to remember, and that is your father. He was the king!”

“You said,” answered Parade, “that Man simply walked down into the valley and led him away. At least, I fought harder than that!”

“It’s not by reins and saddles and spurs and ropes that men control some of us,” said the mare, “but Man puts his will on some of us, and then we can never escape. And your father was raised by a man he loved. He used to talk to me about the touch of his hand and the magic of the voice. I heard that voice calling out to your father, and he could not move. But if he had been raised wild and free, like you, Man never would have been able to break his heart as your heart has been broken!”

“Tell me more about the mountains,” said Parade. “Can you see them now?”

“Only Mount Blanco, and the blue is growing up from the earth and covering it more and more; now to the shoulders, and the summit is all that remains, like a white cloud. Look for yourself.”

“I’d rather hear about the mountains than see them,” said Parade. “I look down at the ground all day long, because when I see the Sierra Blanca in the distance, I begin to think of the great days, and of the great runs, and I can taste the water of every water hole, and the grasses, and the tips of the shrubs on the foothills. But most of all, how we left Man struggling behind us, like little foolish pools of dust that the wind has raised and then run away from.”

“You can think of those days,” said the mare, “but still you haven’t the heart — ”

“You never passed two days staggering up the Salt Creek,” said Parade. “If you had, you would have left your heart on the ground there. Hush! The old stallion in the next corral wants to talk to us.”

“Let him talk to himself,” said Mischief. “I’m tired of horses. I want to be alone. Ah, the day you were foaled, when I looked at you and saw you leading all the herds in the world, blackening the valleys, sweeping over mountains — but there is only one horse, after all, and he is dead — or so old that death is only a step from him.”

She moved off to a far corner of the corral, and Parade went to the fence, and touched the nose of the old horse, half of whose head was reached through the bars.

After touching noses, they went through the rest of the formal greeting which two well-bred horses always exchange. That is to say, they withdrew half a pace from one another, tossed their heads high, stamped, and returned to look at one another with bright, half-mischievous eyes.

“I have watched you and heard your voices,” said Brandy, “and there is something about your companion that reminds me of the one happy moment of my life, long, long ago. The one really happy moment, because it was the one free moment.”

“Have you been free?” asked Parade.

“There was a time when I ran free,” said Brandy. “That was longer ago than a colt like you could remember. But let me tell you, I have not always been like this, with staring hips and gaunt withers, and a scrawny neck, and sunken places over my eyes. Before Time had moth-eaten my coat, I shone almost as you do. Well, it’s a foolish business to boast about the past!”

“It is,” said Parade. “I have seen the time when a hundred horses followed me, and the men who hunted us might as well have hunted a flock of wild hawks in the sky. But those days are ended, and now I’m like you — a beaten drudge, a slave of man.”

Suddenly Mischief came across the corral and stood at the side of Parade.

She said to Brandy: “There is something about you that reminds me of an old companion of mine. I wish that I could hear you neigh out with your full voice. I think it might have a meaning for me.”

“There is nothing for me to neigh out loud about,” said Brandy. “Not unless I fall to thinking of the past, and that’s a melancholy business.”

“And what do you think of most in the past?” asked Mischief.

“One glorious time on which I don’t dwell,” said Brandy. “And for the rest — I’m a race horse, you see. And I think of races. I wonder if either of you ever faced the barrier?”

“I don’t know what it is,” said Mischief.

“A webbing,” said the old stallion, “and the other horses stand beside you. The youngsters are on tiptoe. You can hear the crowd of people screaming higher and higher. The starters are trying to get the horses perfectly in line. The webbing flies up. There’s one deep groan from all the people — and the race is on. And every start is another pull at the heart. It makes me young to think of it.”

“You’re old,” said Mischief, “to still be racing. Do you win, these days?”

“Age doesn’t matter so very much, up to ten or twelve,” said Brandy. “That is, it doesn’t if your blood lines are right. So I’m told, at least.”

“For my part,” said Mischief, “I always hold that one horse is as good as another!”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” said Brandy, “in case you don’t happen to be a thoroughbred.”

“Thoroughbred, fiddlesticks!” said the mare. “I can tell you that I’ve been on deserts where a silly thoroughbred, with his paper skin and his soft ways of living, would wither up in a single day.”

“I’ve no doubt you’re right,” said Brandy politely. “I didn’t mean to claim any superiority. We were simply speaking of — ”

“Thoroughbred, my foot!” snorted Mischief, interrupting. “For my part, I’m a democrat, and I don’t care who knows it. I never believed in an aristocracy, and in a free country, there’s no place for one. You’re a thoroughbred, are you? Your long legs and your narrow chest, I suppose. I’d like to see those long legs climbing among some of the rocks that I’ve, scampered through. Oh, it would do me a precious lot of good to see you trying to haul yourself over ice-coated rocks in the middle of winter, to get through a frozen pass — or else starve on the desert side!”

“Hush,” said Parade. “You’re insulting him.”

“Thoroughbred, is he?” said Mischief furiously. “Well, I never laid eyes on a thoroughbred in my life, that I ever had any use for — barring one. And that one didn’t look like this poor, skinny wreck.”

“Go off and leave us alone,” said Parade. “You’ve disgraced us both.”

“I’m glad to leave you,” said Mischief, “though what you can find to talk about to a conceited, overbearing, rude, intolerant boor of a worn out thoroughbred, I can’t tell.”

With that, she stalked across the corral, and Parade apologized at once.

“The fact of the matter is,” said Parade, “that it’s a tender subject with her. But I’ll tell you that the only horse she ever respected was a thoroughbred, who was my father.”

“Was he, indeed?” said Brandy. “What were
his
blood lines, then?”

“You must understand,” said Parade, “that my mother was a simple soul, and at the time she met my father, I dare say that she didn’t know a blood line from a forty-foot rope.”

“I understand you perfectly. She simply didn’t ask,” said Brandy. “And what a pity that is, because all thoroughbreds are more or less related. If you could dig down into your past, you might be able to find that you and I are cousins. My father was Single Shot, and my mother was Mary Anne; no, you wouldn’t be able to place her very well, but, of course, you’ve heard of Single Shot?”

“No,” said Parade. “I’m sorry to say that I haven’t. I’ve lived away from race tracks.”

“And a lucky thing for you,” said Brandy. “There’s no good comes to a young horse from such a business. I want to talk to you about it, but here’s my friend, Man. I must go talk to him.”

The rather bowed form of Charlie Moore was approaching the corral, his gentle voice sending a greeting before him.