Flaming Irons E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

From the popular author of „Destry Rides Again” comes an exciting saga of adventure, romance, honor, and danger, in the Old West. Les Tarron was just a boy when five strangers rode into his life and changed it forever. Years later – jailed, hunted and betrayed – Les felt the hatred burning inside him like a fever and set out, determinedance and death. The plot is well constructed with well drawn subsidiary characters and provides a number of interesting twists. Brand does keep you guessing about what is going to happen next, and his descriptions of deep emotion is always appreciated.

Leseprobe

Contents

I. A FINE PAIR

II. A SUCCESSOR TO SAMSON

III. BY PROCESS OF DEDUCTION

IV. A MINOR PROPHET

V. ACROSS THE HILLS

VI. LIKE A GALLON OF WATER

VII. "SOMETHING PRETTY FINE"

VIII. A DRIFTING LOG

IX. SLIPPERY SHORES

X. FIVE RIDERS SEARCHING

XI. FOR THE LOST CAUSE

XII. A BELTED KNIGHT

XIII. A WAY WITH HORSES

XIV. A CORNERED WILD-CAT

XV. VAIN SEARCH

XVI. BREAKFAST FOR TWO

XVII. WHAT FLIES BY NIGHT

XVIII. WHAT THE MOONLIGHT SHOWED

XIX. LIKE A GALE OF WIND

XX. IN THE DUST OF THE TRAIL

XXI. AS TIME IS MEASURED

XXII. A MAN WITH THREE HORSES

XXIII. WHERE LIES LA PAZ?

XXIV. THE PILLARS OF SMOKE

XXV. THE END OF A FAMOUS MAN

XXVI. ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD

XXVII. ENTER JUAN CORDOBA

XXVIII. BY STARLIGHT AND FIRELIGHT

XXIX. GOODBYE MONTE!

XXX. A LIGHT SHINING

XXXI. BRAVE TALK

XXXII. LIGHT FEET ON THE MOUNTAINS

XXXIII. OVER THE PRECIPICE

XXXIV. A BEGGAR AFOOT

XXXV. CAPTAIN COURAGEOUS

XXXVI. A CURTAIN-RAISER

XXXVII. 'GAINST SOLID STEEL

XXXVIII. THREE ON THE LOOKOUT

XXXIX. CLOSE TO THE CLUE!

XL. IF FORTUNE FAVOR

XLI. THROUGH THE TALL GATEWAY

XLII. A DARK-EYED MAIDEN

XLIII. ONE REACHES THE CITY IN THE SKY

I. A FINE PAIR

If the colt had stood still and taken things calmly all would have been well, and they could have worked it out in time. But the colt was not much over three years–just old enough to have its strength and not old enough to have full sense. Except to one person, it was as wild as any unsaddled mustang from the farthest range of the mountains. And when it found itself caught in the treacherous mud at the edge of the water hole, it began to flounder and fight with a terrible energy.

Tarron and his older boy got a lariat of stout rawhide over its head and tried to pull it out in that way, but it was sunk much too deep.

Then they ventured into the slush and tried to quiet the fine gray, but their presence only made the handsome fellow more wild with fear.

It was down to the shoulders; then down to the very withers, and such were the furious efforts which it made that its strength was rapidly ebbing, and before long its exhausted head would sink.

A horse is too intelligent in some crises. A mule, when in a tight corner, will stand quiet and trust to Providence whose special care has always been mules. But when a horse cannot solve a riddle, like many a high-spirited and high-strung man, it gives up, surrenders completely, and so is lost.

A very little more and the gray would surrender in just that manner, and Tarron knew it.

He was desperately put to it. From his little place, where he managed to provide for his family only by dint of the most constant exertions, he could not afford to lose a sheep or a calf, to say nothing of the finest horse that mare had ever foaled in those mountains.

Suddenly he cried: “Where’s Les? Where’s Les? Get Les down here, Joe!”

Joe, with a nod, leaped on the back of his cow pony and spurred over the hill.

When he reached the house he shouted, as he sprang from the saddle, “Where’s Les?”

Mrs. Tarron, dishcloth in hand, came toward him in a flurry.

“Poor Les has a dreadful headache. He’s still in bed, I guess.”

“Oh, dash his headaches! The gray’s drowning in the tank!”

And Joe Tarron hurried up the ladder to the attic room.

It was still semidark in that room. The atmosphere was close, and in a corner an outline could be dimly discerned under a huddle of bedclothes.

“Les!” Joe yelled.

There was no answer.

Hurrying to the huddle of clothes, he tore them off the prostrate form of the sleeper.

“Les!”

There was a faint groan, and then a feeble voice muttered: “Sick, Joe. Can’t get up–”

“Damn you and your sickness! Get up! Get up! I know the kind of sickness that keeps you in bed on frosty mornings!”

Les Tarron groaned softly again, and, turning on his side, his heavy breathing announced that he was already falling into soundest slumber.

His brother, in an impatient fury, stretched out a hand to strike, but something withheld him.

“You fool!” he shouted. “It’s the gray, your own colt, bogged down at the edge of the tank–”

You would have said that he had struck some vital nerve, not of a man, but of a cat, so quickly did Les Tarron spring to his feet. He was past his brother in a bound. Half dressed, his long hair flying behind him, he dropped from the trap door, disdaining the ladder–fled through the kitchen, and, springing into the saddle on the mustang, rode furiously away while Joe afoot labored heavily behind.

When he got to the edge of the tank, he could see his father keeping the lariat taut, but it was patently a useless effort to maintain the head of the colt above the edge of the slime. The eyes of the gray, usually so fiery bright, were now glassing over.

“Jim!” called the rescuer.

The mud-covered ears of the colt pricked, and he uttered a feeble whinny, as Les Tarron jumped from the saddle and stood on the edge of the tank.

“In bed–by heaven, I might of knowed it!” sneered his father. “Now save the gray, or it’s the last day that I keep and feed your useless carcass!”

Les Tarron hardly seemed to hear. He reached one hand over his shoulder and plucked away his undershirt. The garment, not coming free at once, was ripped in twain by the force of that grasp. A strange thing to see, for the shirt was of stoutest wool, and one would have guessed that the united strength of two men could hardly have accomplished so easily what a single gesture had done now. However, now that the shirt was off and the sun glinted on the naked torso of Les Tarron, the explanation was not far to seek. He was no giant in bulk, but Nature, which makes so many forms in slipshod haste, had here worked with the delicate hand of an artist and composed all in a perfect harmony and a perfect balance. The muscles stirred and moved like living snakes beneath his skin.

He had come barefooted. Now he stepped straight into the slush.

“Keep a pull on Jim’s head,” he directed. “Not too hard, y’understand, but hard enough to take advantage of what I’m gunna do.”

“What are you gunna do?” asked the father, seeing his son already sunk hip-deep in the mud.

Les did not answer. Bending low, he seemed to find a grip on the horse and made an effort to move him.

It caused the muscles along his back to stand out like knotted fists, but it only drove Les Tarron shoulder-deep into the mud.

“Steady!” shouted the father in alarm. “It’s no good! Anyway, you ain’t fool enough to think that you can lift the weight of a horse, are you? Get out of that mud before you’re drowned, you blockhead.”

Still Les Tarron made no reply. He squelched through the mud. He straddled a little farther apart and felt a firmer bottom beneath his gripping toes. Then he took a great breath, and, leaning over, he sank shoulders, neck, and head beneath the surface of the slime.

In the filthy darkness beneath, his hands fumbled, and presently he found his grip–both hands and wrists thrust under the barrel of the gray behind the elbows.

Then he began to lift, with flexed legs that stiffened and straightened, and with bent back that struggled to straighten also.

A groan from the colt told of a body half crushed by the gigantic pressure. The gray tried to rear to avoid the pain, and so some of its weight was transferred to the hindquarters. Suddenly he was thrust up, head and neck, clear of the mud.

There was a shout of triumph from the shore. Then beside the colt rose the mud-covered head of Les Tarron. He had to tip his head up to clear his face; then, wiping away the filth from mouth and eyes and nose, he breathed a great gasp of relief, and waved a blackened arm toward his father and brother.

“Great work, Les! Now, get out of that and come ashore. I thought that you’d never come up again. You were down a whole minute!”

“Leave me be,” said Les Tarron. “He ain’t cleared yet!”

The colt had begun its desperate struggles once more, but now a single word from its master quieted it. Back to the sunken hind quarters went Les Tarron, moving with desperate flounderings. Once more he sank beneath the surface of the mud. Once more he bent and strained–and now the colt was fairly dragged out from the deeper mud which had imprisoned it.

The strain on the lariat could tell, from this point. The struggles of the gray itself were helpful, and last of all was the gigantic strength of Les Tarron moving the horse and lifting it forward.

In five minutes the rescued colt was on firm ground, and stood with sinking head and trembling legs while all three washed off the thick layers of mud with water.

Once clean, a horse was revealed eminently worth even such efforts as these had been, a compactly built, powerful animal, with legs which mean speed.

“My, but ain’t you a mess?” sneered Joe at his mighty brother.

“That’s nothing,” answered Les.

He ran down to a point where firm ground came to the edge of the little artificial lake. There he plunged in, and presently he came up white, freed from the black mud. He stood, dripping, beside the dripping colt, and his father, with a sort of happy sadness, admired the magnificent group.

“Ah, Les,” said he, “if you could ever come into yourself and be worthy of sitting in the saddle on that horse, what a man you’d be! But there ain’t much chance of it, I’m afraid. And one of these days you’ll just be bogged down and lost–like Jim here nearly was. Lost doing something useless and foolish, and men are gunna be glad that you’re done for!”

These bitter words seemed to slip unregarded over the youth’s head. Now that the limbs of the colt had ceased to tremble Les Tarron leaped up and sat sidewise on its back. There was no need of bridle to guide Jim; a word or two and he broke into a gliding pace that carried them softly over the hill, horse and rider, still dripping wet, flashing like a precious stone in the morning sun.

“Watch ‘em go,” said the rancher to his older son, “watch ‘em go! And where would you find a finer pair than them, Joe? Where would you ever see a finer horse–that won’t cut a cow, or work with a rope? Where would you ever see a finer man–that won’t ride herd or handle a lariat or a branding iron or a pitchfork? Aye, strong enough to lift a horse, as you and me have seen this day, but what good’ll his strength be put to, I’m asking you? And yet they say that God made all things with a purpose–even the flies in the air!”

“Aye,” said Joe bitterly, “and he made Les so that we could have our foretaste of hell on earth!”

II. A SUCCESSOR TO SAMSON

Les Tarron left the colt in the small paddock near the house. It followed him along the fence, whinnying piteously, for it knew as clearly as a man would have known that it owed its life to the intervention of its young master.

At the kitchen door, Mrs. Tarron raised her work-reddened hands.

“Les Tarron! What d’ye mean running around the country more’n half naked to make folks think you’re a monkey or something? And what–”

The boy walked lightly past her. It required a good deal to rouse him from his habitual apathy, but the enormous effort he had made to free the colt had set his blood in circulation, and he was stirred even to the point of mirth. He smiled at his mother, and going into the front room measured the distance from the floor to the trap door of his attic, took a running step, and leaped. He missed his hold with one hand, but the left gripped the edge.

“Les Tarron!” cried his mother, following him to the door, “Did you hear me speak to you? Did you–oh, land love us!”

She paused in the doorway and looked up to him, where he hung swinging by one hand.

“Les! Wait till I move the ladder. You’ll fall and hurt yourself!”

“No, leave the ladder alone. I’m all right.”

“Wait one minute! Can you hold yourself with one hand?”

He merely laughed.

“Oh, I can hold myself I think–if you move quick!”

Panting with haste and dread, she dragged the heavy ladder close to him.

“Can you manage now, son?”

“I’ll try,” said he.

And then, with one arm–

You, young man who have chinned yourself with both hands often, have you ever chinned yourself with one? And have you ever hung at the full stretch of your single arm and then drawn yourself up head high? And, worst of all, have you let yourself dangle for a couple of minutes and then tried to make your numbed muscles work?

Les Tarron lifted himself slowly, still laughing down at his mother, and hoisted himself through the trap door into the attic above.

His mother, staring up at him a-gape, grew furious as she saw that he had been making a mock both of her and of his danger.

She stood beneath the trap and hurled angry words up at him until she heard a blithe and unconcerned whistle rising from the room over her head.

Then, quite at a loss, she shook her fist at the gap in the ceiling and went silently back to her kitchen work. She was the only member of the family who had the slightest sympathy for Les. He was her son; therefore, while the others called him fool and sluggard, and though she could not deny that he was both, at least she would reserve the right to love him still.

She did not understand him. Most people thought that there was nothing worth understanding in the youth, but his mother felt that he was a mysterious problem that might be solved by a wise head at some future time.

There had never been a half-wit on either side of the family. She could trace her own blood back for several generations, and all her kin had been mentally alert. The same was true about the line of Tarron.

Whence, then, this anomaly had come?

She could not tell, she could not even guess; but she was fond of watching and waiting, and when she saw her lazy boy developing into a lazier man, and a worthless idleness consuming all his days, she still would hope that one day he would change, and rouse himself to better things.

Today, however, she despaired. She knew enough of men and of their physical prowess to feel sure that few persons would have been able to do the thing which she had seen her son accomplish with such ease.

It did not rouse her admiration. Rather, it filled her with awe and unrest.

She remembered that when Les was a mite of seven he could master his tough, work-strengthened brother of ten. And thus far throughout his life, when he cared to call upon his reserve powers, he could accomplish things which were beyond the capacity of other men.

So thought the mother, working in her kitchen while, meantime, she listened to the whistling of her son.

It was a pleasant sound, but quite unlike the whistling that one hears from the average boy in the morning. One could not call it a tune, but there was rhythm and music in it. The whistling stopped, and through the window, far away over the fields, she could hear the song of birds, unseen among the shrubbery.

Mrs. Tarron dropped her dish mop with a soft exclamation and glanced over her shoulder in terror, for it seemed to her that the song of the distant birds was like an echo of her boy’s whistling.

Just at that moment, there was the soft padding shock of a heavy weight falling upon the floor of the next room, and she winced again. When Les dropped from the trap door of the attic, the shock sent a crash through the entire house. And it had never before occurred to her that when her lumpish younger son did the same thing, it was like the muffled fall of a cat.

Now, Les came yawning into the doorway, and as he stretched, and the old clothes which he had donned cracked at the seams, she lost her momentary awe of him.

“Go comb your hair!” she commanded. “You look a sight.”

“Hungry!” he responded. “Lemme have something to eat.”

“If you eat in this house, young man,” she replied, “how often have I told you that you’ll have to be on time for meals?”

Raising her voice, she added harshly: “And what about the cows? What about the cows? Ain’t you going to take them down to the pasture, you lazy good-for-nothing?”

“Eh, yah!” yawned Les Tarron.

He opened the bread can and took out half a loaf of stale bread. Munching that, he walked away contentedly. His mother stared after him, shaking her head over him for the ten thousandth time. For, certainly, he was not like the others of his kin. There was no resemblance. She had had to cater to her husband and her first son with meticulous care. Good cooking and plenteous fare were essential to them, but this wastrel could get on as well with dry bread as they could with beefsteak! Aye, and he throve better than they on any diet. He could eat like a wolf, and then curl up and sleep for twenty-four hours; and could go for three days thereafter without tasting anything but water. And if–

But she closed her mind upon such memories. They were too upsetting. About everything else in her family she was fond of gossiping to the neighbors, but about Les she never would say a word; because she feared lest the uncanny thoughts which she herself often had about the boy should spread abroad and be reflected in the minds of others.

In the meantime, Les Tarron had gone down to the corral and called out the cows.

He did not drive them before him, as a cowherd should; but waited until the great red bull, the master of the little herd, had lumbered through the gate. Then with a bound he seated himself astride the fleshy hump across the shoulders of the monster.

The bull lashed his tail fiercely and lurched his head from side to side, with deep-mouthed bellowing; but he had attempted to shake off this clinging pest many a time before, and now he quickly gave up the battle and rolled on down the road with his accustomed majestic gait.

The cows followed. Sometimes the calves would race ahead for a short distance, keen to get the good grass of the pasture, but Les Tarron paid no heed.

He sat on the bull’s back with his eyes closed. Stretching forth his arms blindly, once more he tensed his arms and smiled with joy as he felt the slight ache in his muscles.

The bull stopped before the pasture bars. The boy swung down, pitched off the bars, and let the herd through.

It was a difficult task, this of herding in the pasture. For one half of the ground had been summer-fallowed, and the other half was covered with tender green-growing wheat. On the summer fallow the herd was welcome to reach for the bits of grass beneath the plow furrows. But there was the constant temptation of the tender wheat field beyond.

Young Les Tarron selected a pleasant shady tree at a corner of the pasture, and there stretched himself, his eyes half closed. The bull made straight for the wheat field, with the whole herd behind him, but as he came within half a dozen paces of the forbidden land a sharp, biting whistling from the herdsman stopped his majesty.

The bull paused, changing uneasily from foot to foot. But after pawing up the dust a few times, he turned sullenly and rambled back into the plowed area. The herd followed his example; and Les Tarron, secure in the knowledge that no one of the dumb brutes would dare to disobey his whistled warning, completely closed his eyes.

Not to sleep, but to see more clearly.

For it was the very greatest day in his life. He had known that he was stronger than other men, but the greatness of his strength he had not realized. Now, for the first time he had put forth his utmost might, and the sure consciousness of his muscular prowess sent a tingle along his blood and through his heart.

It had been a great joy. And perhaps–who could tell?–there would be other occasions before very long in which he could use all of his powers; use them to their utmost!

So he lay there on his back, enjoying himself in these reflections, until a voice called from beyond the edges of his daydream:

“Hello! Boy! Oh, boy!”

He opened his eyes but he did not sit up.

“Hey, boy! Hey, kid! Come here!”

Les Tarron closed his eyes again.

“You sassy brat! Will this fetch you?”

And a bullet sung above his head and spattered solidly into the tree trunk!