Max Brand

The Sheriff Rides

Warsaw 2017

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER ONE

At timberline, John Signal paused. Before him, the pass narrowed to a gorge, dark and silent as a throat of iron; behind him, the slope dipped and folded like a sea heaped up by some prodigious wind until it descended to the green of the valley, far off and quiet as standing water. By shading his eyes and peering, he could discern that glimmer of green clearly in spite of the blue mist of distance; and clear as a streak of quicksilver he made out the face of the river. Where the bright mark divided, there was the village which had been home to him. He never would see it again!

At that thought, John Signal made his face as stern and as hard as the black cliffs before him; young Westerners refuse to melt with emotion, and Signal was only twenty-two! But he wondered, now, why he never before had appreciated the beauty of the white streets of the town, smoking with dust at every touch of the wind, or the narrow gardens on either side; and in his memory all the houses looked like the faces of dear friends, and all the hours of his life seemed to cling about those buildings, like plants rooted in rich mold. Suppose that he went back to face them, and rode to the sheriff’s office and gave himself up?

He turned his horse about with a sudden twitch of the reins, but, so doing, he noticed how much thinner the gelding was across the shoulders, how much sharper the ridge of the neck. All the sleekness of the pasture fat had evaporated in the labor of lifting his rider from that far-off gleam of water to this upland. Should all that labor be wasted? Besides, if he returned, his friends would look at one another and smile, and say that John Signal’s nerve had failed in the great pinch. They would point out that it had often happened before; the hero of the school yard and the vacant lot and the bunkhouse grew soft of heart when real danger came.

Thinking of the town itself, John Signal was about to rush back in surrender. Thinking of the people in it, he became grimly resolute and turned the gelding back toward the throat of the pass.

He was on the verge of timberline, which ran along the deeply incised profile of the mountains like a water mark–a stain left, as it were, by the lower atmosphere, with its fogs and vapors and climbing mists. He, like some amphibious creature, for the first time was lifting his head and shoulders from the deep and breathing the pure air of the upper region. This thought pleased John Signal, and he turned and re-turned it in his mind, like a toy. Sometimes a metaphor is like a pack, bending the back; sometimes it is like a sword in the hand. The boy, much heartened, looked about him with a smile.

The outermost line of the trees, in their unending battle against mountain wind and mountain cold, were flung forward, groveling to the ground, clinging desperately; limber pine and alpine fir, the quaking aspen, black birch and arctic willow still marched against the height and lived on where they had fallen. The air was as still as the waters of a standing pool, but the trees seemed to be still fighting against the wind which had dwarfed and broken and distorted them; and yet it could not drive them back.

It seemed to John Signal that he could understand this battle in another way. Where the forest could climb, man could climb also, and the laws of man, and all beneath this water mark upon the mountains was the dominion of sheriff and judge; but now his horse was carrying him out of the lower region to a place above the law.

He looked up to the dark portals of the pass as if to a gate on which he expected to read some inscription. Once he was inside the rocky throat, darkness fell over him.

The echoes raised by the shod hoofs of his horse came faintly, hollowly upon his ear, floating upon air so thin that it hardly would bear up the sound; and the snorting and breathing of the gelding was like the puffing of another animal, pursuing him at a distance. John Signal felt as though he had ridden into a dream, and he was more than ever startled when he came to the end of the narrow pass and saw before him the treeless gardens of the upper mountains.

He could see, now, that, although he had gone over one ridge of the world, he was not yet at the summit, but in a sort of half land, between the bottom and the top. To his left he looked up the face of a thousand-foot cliff and at the top saw a mountain sheep–very like a tuft of cloud lodged on the rough edge of the rock; and beyond that lofty mass there were other peaks, but all before him and to the right was a comparatively level plateau without a tree, without a bush, but so thickly stippled by ten million million flowers that it appeared not painted but streaked with bits of tinted atmosphere. And for the first time, having passed the dark gate to this land above the law, John Signal understood that it was not only cold and mighty, but also that it possessed a radiant and a lonely beauty of its own.

The winter was not ended here, and never would be, even in August heats; all the northern slopes were agleam with ice or dazzling white with snow, but the flowers that covered the upland meadows–spring beauties, the daisy, the forget-me-not, purple asters, and the goldenrod, and many more–advanced to the edge of the ice and of the icy rocks. Yes, they even blossomed on the backs of the boulders, and through the very ice itself the avalanche lily pushed up to the sun, drilling its way by miracle to the air and to the light.

He rode on past a whole slope of paintbrushes, white-pointed by wild buckwheat, and now he observed that these gardens had their own peculiar music, as well. Here rose a cloud of buzzing sounds and drifted down the wind–bees, filling the air with a sound of sleep; and yonder a flock of ptarmigans, startled from a feast on the buds of arctic willows, rose on noisy wings, whirled in a circle, flashed in the sun, and settled again to their banquet. Butterflies, too, were everywhere adrift, like unbalanced leaves, trying to settle to the ground and rarely succeeding, and then only to be tossed up again to waver in the air.

This was all a very pretty scene, but the boy was hungry, and three or four hundred pounds of mutton was looking blandly down upon him from the height. He uncased the rifle which he carried in a long holster beneath his right knee, the muzzle down. His hands were a little cold. This was not an atmosphere or a light in which he had been accustomed to shooting, but he told himself grimly that he must not waste ammunition. Suppose, then, that yonder puff of white wool upon the rock lip were a man with a rifle leveled in return?

At this, with narrowed eye like a fighting man, he jumped the butt of his rifle into the hollow of his shoulder and fired. The sheep stood unmoved, but he lowered the gun without a second shot. One bullet a day would have to keep him in meat; otherwise, he simply would starve himself by way of punishment.

Providence, one might have said, had heard this resolution as it was registered in the heart of Signal, and now it tipped the mountain sheep from the ledge. It went down a four-hundred-foot slide, cannoned out into empty air, and fell with a crunch not fifty yards away. Signal went to it curiously, rather than with an outburst of savage appetite. He turned the heavy body. He had aimed at the right shoulder, a little back; and in that spot, exactly, he found the bullet wound!

When he saw this, he looked up and stared at the dark mouth of the pass by which he had been admitted, and he smiled in content and in something more than content. Then he set about butchering the sheep with care, for if he could preserve this meat in part by jerking it, he would not have to go hungry for weeks–it was a three hundred and fifty pound ram.

For fuel, he had to go back through the pass and use his short-hafted ax on the tough timberline trees. Returning with a load of this firewood, he set about his cookery. Even then, he dared not unsaddle his horse, and many a glance he cast at the shadowy mouth of the pass; for if they were following close upon his heels, they would have to come at him through this doorway. No matter how many, he was grimly confident that he could close that door and bolt it with bullets from the rifle.

By noon, he began his cookery; he did not finish it until evening, which came on early and cold when the sun got behind the western heights and all the valley was flooded with chill shadow. It had not been a very neat job. His fingers were scorched, and half of the meat was rather burned than cooked, besides which, a great deal of it would have to be seasoned yet more with heat before he could hope to preserve it. However, he felt that a day or two of the fierce white sun of these uplands would finish the cure, and so he rolled up the rest of his supply in the big sheepskin and prepared to find a shelter for the night.

He was drawing up the cinches of his saddle when a shadow of danger crossed his mind, and, whirling about, he saw a horseman coming toward him, not from the mouth of the stone pass, but in the opposite direction. Even at that distance, he could see that it was a big man, on a big horse, and through the shadows he made out a horizontal gleam balanced across the pommel of the saddle; a mountaineer with a rifle in readiness, then!

He made no secret of his own precautions, but threw his gun across the hollow of his left arm and placed a finger on the trigger. Then he watched the other come up as a lookout watched the approach of a strange ship at sea–a ship at sea in the days of pirates and the buccaneers.

Looming first as a tall, imposing form, the stranger now appeared at close range rather a gaunt figure, his face overshadowed with a beard of many days’ growth, and his clothes loose and ragged to a surprising degree. With a keen eye he looked upon John Signal, a keen and sunken eye, and then made a little gesture of greeting, half a wave of the hand, half a military salute.

Signal merely nodded, and kept the gun in readiness.

“You raised quite a smoke, young feller,” said the man of the mountains. “I see that you got a bighorn. Your first?”

And his lips twitched a little in a very faint smile beneath his beard. Signal suddenly felt very keenly his youth and his inexperience. He freshened his grip upon the rifle, as the thing which made him equal to any man! And then his sense of good manners returned to him.

“If you’re hungry,” he said, “get down and eat!”

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