Max Brand

The Jackson Trail

Warsaw 2019

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER I

ALL through the lava flows and the blow sands of the desert the hunt had ranged, and then up through the foothills, and through the heights of Jackson Pass, and still beyond the pass and into the open, easily flowing country on the other side of the range, the green side, where the rain clouds were ever and again tangling about the summits and giving down the showers that fed the grass, Larry Burns still kept the hunting pack at a distance.

It was a pack in more than name, for they were using dogs to get Larry Burns, and behind those dogs rode a dozen picked men, and among the rest was a fellow with hair so pale that it was almost white, and eyebrows that were, literally, silver, and a mouth pinched hard together as if he were continually fixing his mind upon some hard problem.

The vision of that face, and that narrow-shouldered fellow with the dusty gray skin and the implacable eyes had never left the mind of Larry Burns. And when he first heard the dogs sing out, he knew that he was gone. He knew that for all his fine riding, and for all his clever wits, and for all his knowledge of the country, still he was doomed; and that knowledge worked like an acid in the heart of Burns. A fine pack of hounds trained to the work, and Marshal Tex Arnold at the head of them made a combination which he could not solve.

Still he persisted.

He had ridden more than two hundred miles, and he had managed this by changing horses twice. The new horses he had not asked for. He simply had taken them as he found them. For what is horse stealing to a man convicted of murder, and wearing upon his wrists the little steel bracelets which seem as light as silk but are as strong as the grip of the devil?

But, when he changed horses, the posse which followed must have changed also. For still they came on, and now, as he entered the open country beyond the pass, he could hear the booming and the chime of the dogs, a music that crowded the throat of the cut and came faintly out to the open.

Larry Burns licked his lips and tasted from them the salt of sweat, and the dry burning of alkali. He was very thirsty. He had not tasted water for more than half a day, and the horrible fatigue that worked in his body from head to foot was matched by the water famine that ran in his veins, and centered in the hollow of his throat. But he licked his lips, and turned his head; he grinned at the sound of the dogs.

He had made up his mind that he would die fighting.

He knew all about the death cell. It was the one thing he feared. Not death itself, not the foolish simplicity of the hanging, not even the knotting of the rope about his neck, or the terrible moments of pause when he had been asked to speak his last words, if there were any to utter.

He had made up his mind what those words should be:

“I lived my own way. I’ve had a good time. About this gent Carson, I tell you again that I never killed him. But that don’t matter. You’ve got me squeezed for it, and I might as well die for a job that I didn’t do as for one that I did. My pipe is filled to the lip, and I’m ready to smoke it if you hold the match. That’s all I have to say. I never played no favorites and I never asked for no partners but one. And he’s turned straight–the fool! As for the rest of you, you can all go to the devil. I’ve lived my life. I’ve liked the taste of it. That’s all that I have to say. Turn me off, and be damned to you!”

That was the death speech that he wanted to make.

He had framed and reframed it, and he could not find a word that he wanted to change. It was the truth, from first to last; because, really, he had not killed Carson. And all the rest was true, also–particularly that he had had no partner except one.

Ah, if that one had stayed with him, he never would have come to grief! If the magic hands of that helper had been working beside him, he could have laughed at all the powers of the law, he was sure. Even now, he had aimed through the pass and toward the house of that partner as a drowning man aims for the bit of floating wreckage. And as he came on, he pondered in his mind what reception he would get.

To that old partner he had not been entirely true. He had cheated his friend. But when the years have passed, we are apt to forget the bitter and remember the sweet; and Larry Burns prayed that it might be so now.

He eased himself a little forward in the saddle. The ache of his legs above the knees, along the inner muscles of the thighs, was a thing not to be uttered in words. It could only be groaned out in curses. The back of his neck ached as though some one had been beating him over that spot with a club.

He thought that aching might come from the nodding of his head. A dozen times in the last twelve hours he had found himself nodding. Sometimes he felt that his head would jerk off, or that the stroke of his chin would fracture a rib. His chin was bruised with the pounding. It was sore to his touch.

So he eased himself forward in the saddle. It was not really ease that he found. It was only a change of pain. At that change he grinned, and felt with his smile no familiar furrowing of his cheeks. They had been sleek, fat cheeks when he left the jail. But they were drawn hard, now. He could guess that he had lost–say twenty pounds, during these two days of punishment.

If he had been that much lighter from the start, who could say that the posse ever would have managed to hang to his heels so closely? Ay, if only he had kept himself in training in jail. In spite of the restricted space, he could have done setting-up exercises. He could have walked a pace and made a turn, and walked again. He could have worked out for an hour a day and so kept from his body the filthy sleek of the prison fat.

So thought Larry Burns, now, and thrust out his big, square jaw and glared ahead of him and dared not look behind again. For he could hear the noise of the dogs breaking out from the mouth of the pass, and he knew by the way that the sound flowed down the slope behind him that the riders were gaining. He gave his own horse the spur. But there was little response. The mustang began to trot, but the trot was a stagger. The weight of his rider had killed him. And Burns cursed that weight.

Many a time he had boasted of his inches. Many a time he had been able to stand straight and look down on others. He had had his own way through a crowd. There were very few who had cared to face him. So he had loved the bigness of his body and been proud of it, but now he cursed it, because the bigness of his bones was anchoring him and letting the posse sweep up from behind.

He listened to the sound and tried to calculate the distance they were behind, and the rate at which they would overtake him. It might be in half an hour. After all, their horses were tired, too. It was not for nothing that he had ridden himself to the dropping point, and worn out his third horse in two days.

They would talk about this–the newspapers. They would make a great thing–not of him for the heroism of his flight, but of the marshal, for the terrible resolution of his pursuit. That’s what they would find to praise.

The marshal!

Once more the soul of the fugitive rose in a mighty dread and a mighty hatred for that pale, thin face, the color of dust. He felt that he would be willing to die, that he would gladly die, if only he could remove the honor of his death from the head of the marshal. If only he could manage to thwart that famous manhunter, it would fill his cup!

And now, as the trail wound and lifted to the wave of a green hill, he saw before him his chance. It was a small house, painted white, with a red roof, and it was not large, not imposing. Behind it was a little barn–that had not been there, when he last saw the layout–and behind the barn there was the tangle of corral fencing. That tangle had grown, too. The place was enlarging. The place was prospering. One did not enlarge corrals without a reason!

He thought of that prosperity as he saw the white of the house winking through the silver shimmer of the poplar trees that surrounded it. Prosperity to Larry Burns always had meant the wealth that succeeds a good haul. But it meant something else in this case. It meant that the owner of that ranch had worked his feet into the soil, just like a tree, and that he was drawing nutriment and strength out of the ground.

“Yeah, he was right,” said Larry Burns. “We all give him the laugh, but he was right. That’s the nacheral way. That’s the right way–”

His jaw fell. He gaped vaguely at the house, and at his own thought. He was too weary to hold the thought long. His brain ached almost as his body ached. But somewhere in the back of his mind he registered that thought. He had been wrong. He always had been wrong. One could raise money, fast enough, at the point of a gun. But money was not happiness. Happiness grew only on cultivated soil–with hard work–like wheat.

He nodded at the thought, and then he shook his head at it. He wished, vaguely, that he could have reached this conclusion when he had been a boy. But when he was a boy, he had not been hunted for his life.

And he had not had the great exemplar of that house on the hillside, the twinkling of the poplar trees, the fat-sided barn, and the bright curve of the creek that ran down into the valley bottom.

Ah, what a sleek valley it was! The fat of it shone green and smiling upon the troubled mind of the outlaw. He almost felt–in honesty–that if he had looked with a clear eye at that spot, in the old days, and if he could have made it his, he would have given up the wrong path.

He pressed on. The mustang was very tired, now, but it seemed to guess that the white house and the poplars were the final goal, so it freshened its pace and even lifted its lumpish head a little. It had seemed a miracle to the rider that the mustang could keep up its head at all on such a long, scrawny neck, during the interminable and nodding leagues of their journey!

And so they pressed on toward the house among the poplars until the trail turned into a road, and from the road, Larry Burns could see the house in more intimate detail.

He drew up his mustang at once with a grunt of dismay.

CHAPTER II

IT was a lonely part of the world. Neighbors were few and far between. And Larry Burns had counted upon being able to see his friend alone. But he was wrong, it appeared, for yonder were a dozen horses hitched to the rack near the house, and at a second hitching rack there were buggies, also, and the tough buckboard which could be driven almost anywhere that a horse can walk.

There was some sort of a celebration in that house. And what could it be? Men did not gather like this except for a birth, a wedding, or a death.

“Jesse’s gone and died on me,” said Larry Burns.

He almost forgot his own terrible weariness, his more terrible fear, in the thought that his friend might have died. For that was like imagining the life gone out of a thunderbolt. And what a brilliant stroke was gone from this world, if Jesse was no more!

Larry Burns wagged his head again at the thought, meanwhile pushing the mustang on. And he thought, as he rode, of what that other man had been, and of the lightness of that body, light as a leopard, and as terribly swift and strong as one. And he thought of the thin, handsome face, and the flash of the dark eyes, and, above all, he remembered the smile which was forever appearing and disappearing about the corners of the mouth of the man. He remembered the hands last of all, the hands of a magician, the hands which worked, as it were, with independent brains, and found their way onto secrets of their own accord.

Ay, if he were gone, the world would never see such another after him!

But now the booming voices of the pack came in a swelling wave down the slope behind Burns, and he drove home his spurs and made the mustang sway into a tired, rickety lope. Something had to be tried. And that house was his only resort!

So he drove the mustang straight into the poplars, dismounted, threw the reins, and stumbled on toward the ranch house. He was so blind with fatigue that he did not go toward a door. He simply ran on, with his arms thrown out before him, toward the nearest side of the house.

Then he saw, with his bloodshot eyes, a swirl of men and women in a front room of the house. No, it was not a funeral. He could tell that by the sound of the laughter. It was something else. A birth?

Well, perhaps. But men did not gather to give congratulations for a birth. The women folks might be foolish and gay because of such an event But not the men. And yet the men were there, also, striding about with pleased and silly looks.

Now it came about that Larry Burns, as he ran forward, passed a second window, and there he saw a thing that smote him, suddenly, beneath the fifth rib and to the heart.

It was a girl in white, in flowing white, with a white veil over her head, and a face of such loveliness that it was luminous to the thought of Larry Burns.

He could remember, now. He had heard of her. He had had her described to him in painful, absurd detail by friends who strove in vain to paint the unpaintable.

She was no Venus. She was no queen of beauty. She was simply a pretty girl–and something more! Ay, much more, for she had been true to that strange fellow who stood there before her, that lean and flickering sword blade of a man, that handsome, smiling, subtle fellow who had the grace of a cat, and the wit of a cat also, compared with all others.

For there was the object of the quest of Burns–there was Jackson himself. All the meaning of this gathering came suddenly home to the fugitive, and he saw that he had arrived upon the wedding day of his friend.

For that matter, could he even call himself, now, the friend of Jackson, who had put away his old ways and his old companions and become strictly a follower of the law? And had he not, long before this, given Jackson sufficient cause to disown him? So pondered Burns, miserably, as he strode up to the window.

That window was open, with the full sun striking upon it, but a shower of climbing vines which rose from the ground and descended again like a fountain of fine green spray allowed Burns to stand there as an unseen witness.

He had two things in his mind. One, frightfully acute, and burning in his consciousness, was the cry of the pack that began to boom upon his ear like the sound of waves roaring and beating in a cave. And the other thing was what was passing in the room before him.

He stared, most of all, not into the bright face of the girl, but at Jackson and at Jackson’s smile. She put her hands up on the shoulders of her lover.

“Now, Mary,” said he, “you’re going to be serious about something. Let me know what it is and get it over, will you? It always scares me when you look at me with pity, as you’re doing now.”

Her own smile came and went.

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