The Jackson Trail E-Book

Max Brand

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

One of the most prolific writers of all time, he wrote more than 500 novels and nearly 15 million words under the pen name of Max Brand and seventeen others. Alongside Zane Grey, the western section of any bookstore is usually packed with Max Brand titles. „The Jackson Trail” is another outstanding western that demands your attention. In it, Jesse Jackson is riding where the law feared to go... Packed with enough action and interesting twists to please even the most die-hard fans of the genre, the novel also addresses a wide range of important themes with insight and sensitivity. Max Brand leads the reader on a very authentic tale of the old west the way it was. Written in the thirties, but still fresh and enjoyable today.

Leseprobe

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.

“You know what it is, Jesse,” said she. “This is your last chance to think the thing over and change your mind.”

“My chance to change my mind?” said he.

“Yes,” she answered. “It’s not too late for that, either. You know what’s before you.”

“You are before me,” said Jackson, in a voice that stirred even the heart of the man who waited and watched outside of the window.

“I’m before you,” said the girl, gravely, “but other things are before you, too. A lot of dull, monotonous work is before you; and you’ve been always as free as a hawk. A lot of stupid days are before you, too, and you’ve always hunted for pleasure, a good deal more keenly than a prospector hunts for gold. There’ll come a time when this little farm will seem smaller to you than the palm of your hand, and you’ll want to leave it. But when you want to leave, you’ll find yourself tied by a lot of invisible ropes which will be harder to shake off than any of the handcuffs you’re so capable of loosening. You’ll be tied to me. Even if you’ve stopped caring about me, you’ll be tied by the thought that I’m a duty to you. And perhaps there’ll be children, and you’re too big a fellow to hurt small things, even those of any other man. You see, Jesse, you’ve been running up hill and down dale, and taking whole mountain ranges in your stride, as it were, and now you’re thinking of popping over the fence into a corral–an easy fence to jump over going in, but you’ll never be able to jump over it to go out. You’d have to tear it down, and wreck everything, and break my heart.”

“Listen to me!” broke in Jackson.

She shook her head.

“I’m making a speech,” she said, “and I want to run on to the end of it. Then you can speak. I lay awake last night and composed this. I mean every word of it. It would break my heart to lose you later on. But if I lost you now my heart wouldn’t break–quite. I could manage to stand it. The reasons would be pretty clear, you know. And I’m going out of the room for a moment, and leave you here to think the thing over. Give the pros and the cons a balancing. Make up your mind about what you wish to do. You’ve got all your former life on the one side, and the wildness and the happiness–and the freedom. And then on the other hand there’s I. And I’m going to be a dull woman, many and many a time. You stay here behind me, Jesse. I’m going through that door, I’m going to wait in that next room and harden my heart. And you stay here. And in five minutes I’m coming back for your answer. But during those five minutes, I want you to stay here and think.”

So she turned away from Jackson, and she went, with one smile for him over her shoulder, through the door and into the farther room. As the door closed behind her, a great rumble of laughter came from the people who had gathered in the front of the house. It seemed like a stage-stroke of mockery–the mob amused by a tragic moment.

Jackson started toward the door through which the girl had gone, then he turned toward the window, with a solemn, thoughtful face. And at that moment he saw, framed in the tender, showering green of the vines, the face of Larry Burns.

He sprang back. It was not a step but a leap. Then, with that gliding and catlike gait which Burns knew so well from of old, Jesse Jackson came to the window.

“What the devil is this?” he asked.

“It’s Larry Burns,” said the criminal.

And he held up his manacled hands.

“It’s Larry Burns today, and a dead man tomorrow, Jesse. I come here to say good-by to you.”

And, with his shackled wrists, he made a gesture toward the sound of the pack, which was pouring steadily nearer, and seemed at any instant about to burst through the screen of the poplars.

“I’ve rode two hundred miles in two days, and I’m beat,” said the husky voice of Larry Burns. “I know that I about crooked you one of those days long ago, Jesse. But now I’m beat. They’re gunna get me–”

“You killed Carson. I hope they hang you as high as the moon. I don’t care what you did to me. I can forget that. But you killed poor Carson! I hope they hang you up and let you rot!”

He smiled as he spoke, and his smile iced the very soul of Burns.

Said Burns:

“Will you listen, Jesse?”

“Ay?” said Jackson, sneering.

And he seemed to be subtly withdrawing from the other, as though there were a contagion in the breath of the criminal.

“I never killed Carson,” said Burns. “Look! I tell you straight. I never killed Carson. I bumped off others. I don’t cry, none. I got it coming. Only, I never done that to Carson.”

“Who did?” asked Jackson.

“Blaze done it. You know that Blaze could do it as well as me. Blaze done it and–”

“Where’s your horse?” said Jackson.

“There in the poplars.”

Then Jackson reached down and took the manacles of the other in his slender fingers; and, while he held them, he stared down into the face of Burns.

There was no great friendship in his look, but there was a profound understanding of the lines of weariness and exhaustion which he saw there–the red of the eyes, and the grin of fatigue about the lips. He cast one look over his shoulder toward the life that was around him, the life from which he was stepping, he could not tell for how long.

Then, setting his teeth, he touched the handcuffs, and they fell by magic from the wrists of the other. And Jackson leaped down through the window to the ground, merely saying: “Head for the barn. Lie up there. Then go to Mary, after dark, and she’ll see that you have everything that you need. Tell her that I sent you. I’ll get your horse and try to pull the hounds off the trail.”

CHAPTER III

WHEN Jackson ran through the poplars, he found the roar of the hunt rising in his face like steam; and there among the slender trees he found the mustang as the other had left it, head fallen, knees bowed and trembling.

It was a done horse, a sagged and beaten horse; and, as Jackson ran his wise eye over the animal, he shook his head, and the corner of his lip lifted a trifle. Yet he did not hesitate; for, having committed himself to his course, he would not draw back. He swept up the reins, and, without touching the stirrups, leaped lightly into the saddle.

Even at that shock of a weight so far less than the burden which it had been carrying, the mustang staggered and did not find its balance again for a moment. Jackson, setting his teeth, waited patiently for that proper instant, and then he took the mustang out through the poplar wood.

He did not spur, and he did not strike with a whip, but he seemed to gather the horse, just as he gathered the reins in his hand, as though down the taut reins there were flowing an electric current of increased power which passed into the animal itself and renerved the loosened thews and the sinews.

He headed, not out into the open, where the going would have been much easier and faster, but straight up through the trees, following the windings of the grove; and, as he rode, with the mustang coming to some faint life again beneath the saddle, he heard the hunt strike the lower end of the poplars, and at once the din of the voices was blanketed and dimmed by the trees.

The mustang shuddered. It had been running away from that sound long enough to know that there must be peril in it. It shuddered, and raised its head a little. So Jackson brought it to a feeble trot. And now they came out from the screen of the trees and into a meadow where twenty of his own horses were grazing.

He groaned as he looked at them. They were his pride; his master work, the breeding of those horses. There was not one dash of thoroughbred blood in them. They were mustang pure and simple, but they were hand-picked mustangs, and that good and ancient blood of the Barbs and Arabs which had been brought by the Conquistadores into Mexico now was showing itself. Many weeds would crop up in that garden, but he vowed to himself that he would persist in the labor until he had managed to get together a true strain, which would remain flawless forever.

What horses they would be! Here before him was a fair promise, here, wandering over the grass of the meadow land. They were not large. Not a one of them stood more than an inch or so above fifteen hands. But they were made of hammered iron, and they worked on springs and cogs, not muscles. Tireless, active, wise, they looked as fierce as beasts of prey, rather than servants of man.

Jackson had not tried to tame them. He let them run wild. When the time came to try and to test them he knew that he could manage that task–when the time came.

But in the meantime, he felt that it might strip some of the native bloom from the wild flowering of their strength and their courage and their greatness of heart, if he were to handle and fondle and subdue them from the start. He wanted them to grow up on this range as grim and keen and gay as the wild lads of the West who grow in the saddle, and learn the smell of gunpowder before they know the smell of flowers.

So, as Jackson broke from the shelter of the wood and crossed this pasture land, he looked at his own horses with a sort of fierce envy. He would pick any one of the lot, throw a saddle on its back, and then laugh at all the best efforts of the posse which was hunting poor Larry Burns.

But he could not do that. The whole point of his maneuver was to lead the hunt astray by riding on the horse of Burns, and so to work them to a distance.

What would they do to him, then, if they caught him? Well, it would be a tight fix and very uncomfortable. His own reputation was far from a sound one, and, of course, he would be accused of complicity in the escape of a condemned criminal, a man beyond and outside of the law.

So he pushed the mustang on. He had to get across the clear and open meadow and into the woods beyond before the hunt broke out from the poplars; or else, at one sight of him, every man of them would realize that the bulky figure of Burns was no longer before them.

He hurried the horse on, but as he neared the shadow of the woods beyond, with the noise of the dogs thickening always behind him, he looked back toward the house.

It was almost time for Mary, the five minutes up, to come back into the room. Surely she would come with her head high, and in smiling confidence. And when she saw that the room was empty, what thought would be hers? How would she stare around, incredulous? And then, as the blow sank home, what would come over the girl?

To think that he could run away like a whipped cur instead of taking advantage of her generosity to stand up like a man and announce that his mind was altered–

It would be almost the death of Mary; and might it not, in the end, be the death of her love for him?

Sweat streamed on the face of Jackson at the thought.

Well, he would have to round off this business of the posse and of Larry Burns as quickly as possible. But his heart misgave him. The thing had happened too pat, on his wedding day, like a trick devised long ago and carefully rehearsed and planned by Fate. So he was snatched away from Mary once more; and, though he told himself that the intervening time must not be long, still he was in doubt and in great trouble.

He was well inside the fringe of the woods, when, looking back, he had dim glimpses of the dogs breaking out through the poplars. They were very tired dogs, but still they ran gallantly. And after them came the riders on horses which staggered with fatigue. But they went on, and on.

And suddenly the heads of the hounds were lifted from the ground. A new and higher note, a terribly exulting note, rang in the music of their crying, their tails lifted with their heads. And all in a sweep they broke forward at a freshened pace. The riders behind them, at the same moment, began to shout to one another and to point ahead, and then with a yell they put whip and spur to their mounts.

There was no mystery about this change, in the eye of Jackson. He simply knew that the dogs had caught sight of their quarry, as he hurried away through the trees, and for that reason they lifted their heads.

Jackson had had one chance in ten of riding that horse away from the pursuit. Now he had one chance in a thousand, and he knew it. He knew, furthermore, that among the dapplings of the shadows in the woods, the posse, when they sighted him, would not be so readily able to distinguish between his bulk and that of the former occupant of this saddle. They were likely to open fire at once, and they would certainly shoot not for the horse alone but for the man, and to kill. They had ridden far enough. Their weariness must be almost like the agonizing fatigue of Larry Burns.

He realized these things, as he pushed the mustang on. On his right, there was a rolling sweep of trees, high, dense brush in patches, and on his left there was a creek bed with precipitous banks. In any one of those patches of brush he might have hidden both horse and man with the greatest ease. But he did not dare to take that chance, of course, now that he had dogs at his heels.

Something about the yelling of the dogs maddened Jackson. He jerked about in the saddle, once, and glared behind him, his fingers working nervously at the handles of the rifle, which protruded from the long saddle holster, running down under his knee. He was half of a mind, in that savage burst of temper, to wrench out the weapon and open fire through the trees.

What if he only knocked over some of the leading dogs?

No, he dared not.

He dared not adventure the smallest thing that might appear to be a crime. For a single vestige of a crime might ruin his chances of happiness with Mary.

He was riding and fighting not for Larry Burns, really, but for his chance at true life. The old life was not beckoning to him, in spite of what the girl had said. There was only fear that he might be crowded back into a semblance of it.

He knew, as he listened to the roar of the dogs, and the crackling of the shrubbery, as the horses crashed through it, that they were gaining fast, and yet he could not get the mustang above its present shambling dogtrot. He felt that if he urged it beyond that gait, the beast might crumble to the ground like a stack of cards.

He veered a little toward the creek. In the wild tangle of thorns and shrubbery which grew along its precipitous banks, it seemed that there might and must be some means of escape. That was a labyrinth. But it was no mask against the trailing hounds. Not even the semblance of a real trail problem could be created for them in such a place.

As he went on–his eye dim with trouble and with thought–twisting a little from time to time in the saddle, he came to the place where the great spruce had fallen, some years before, and made the natural bridge across the creek, sagging a good deal in the belly, now, but still holding its place, powerfully, from bank to bank.

When he saw it, Jackson caught his breath. And then he knew, in an instant, that he must succumb to the thought which had just come to him. It intrigued and maddened him with fear and with delight.

What if he could ride the mustang across that sagging tree trunk? He dared not walk and try to lead the animal. The scent of his boots on the ground might be enough to falsify the trail. And besides, there would be no time to dismount and try to urge the weary beast along by pulling at the reins.

So, instead, he drove the horse straight up to the lofty butt of the tree, at a place where the truncated roots offered something of a natural stairway to the top.

The mustang merely paused, put down its head, and braced all four legs.

CHAPTER IV

IT was as though the horse realized in the instant what was in the mind of the rider. And Jackson, sighting down the length of the tree trunk, saw at once that the tree was neither so large nor so secure as he had remembered it.

The trunk had been used by various animals to cross the chasm. And the bark had gradually been worn slick, or rubbed, in places, to the inner wood. Lying in continual shadow, slippery with the moss which was growing upon it here and there, that trunk afforded a surface hardly more secure than a rock covered with a film of oil. Even Jackson shuddered at the sight of it.

But, a moment later, he had fairly lifted the horse up the ascending roots to the top of the big trunk. One could not have told how he had managed the thing, but again it was certainly not with whip or with spur. It was that grip on the reins, and the voice never raised, quiet and insistent, which seemed to carry with it both a reassurance and a command.

Balanced on the top of the round of the tree, the horse pricked its ears at the terrible way that lay before it. Then it flattened them in a resolute denial, from which even Jackson probably could not have persuaded it, had it not been that at this moment the hounds, straining forward at full speed, came nearer through the woods, and, with a fresh burst of their yelling, gave the mustang the needed impetus.

It went forward suddenly, with small, dancing steps. Its knees shook, not with weakness, now, but with the desperate desire to maintain a more delicately sure balance. It dropped its head, not so much in fatigue as in the desire to sniff out each footstep that it should take.

And so they passed from the verge of the ground and out onto the sagging strip which suspended them above the cañon. And the mustang went on, with ever shortening steps.

When the hounds roared through the woods close behind, the horse shook from head to hoof, but still it went on. And Jackson, nicely poising his weight in the saddle, tried to sit firm enough to keep the horse encouraged, but lightly enough so that, if the slip should come, he could hurl himself to either side out of the saddle and so attempt to gain a hold upon the trunk of the tree in falling.

That chance, he knew, would be desperately small. The simplest lurch to the side would ruin him. And, measuring the distance of the fall beneath him, he knew that such a drop would kill both horse and man, instantly.

A sense of fatality came over him. It seemed to him, perhaps foolishly enough, that the tree had been knocked down and fallen here under the weight of the wind, only to provide this trap for him, and that the years and the mold and the wet had accumulated to make that trap yet more and more perfect.

And it seemed to Jackson that he had passed this place before, and that always, in so passing it, he had felt a breath of disaster on his face, as he felt it now, coming damp and cool down the ravine. And the wet smell of the ground and of the rotting leaves was to him like the smell of the grave.

So they came out to the very center of that natural bridge; and, as they reached the place, a hound which had raced well in advance of the rest, sprang up to the top of the trunk and came howling at the heels of the horse.

The mustang shivered, and then stopped. And Jackson, turning delicately in the saddle, shifting his weight not a scruple from the exact center, took his life in his hands to draw a revolver and fire. The bullet split the skull of the big, brindled beast, and it fell like a lump to the ground well beneath.

Jackson turned back to face forward, but as he did so, he felt a hoof of the mustang slip beneath him. Only by a hair’s breadth of chance was that horse able to hold its balance upon three legs alone. And yet hold its balance it did, and then stepped forward, and saw safety wonderfully close and closer; so it hurried, and sprang at last onto the honest, kind, safe ground beyond the ravine.

Jackson did not so much as turn to look at the peril which he had passed, but he pressed on into the screening of the brush, for behind him he heard the mounted hunt come pouring, and he heard the yell of their voices, and the rage and the amazement.

The brush was still stirring behind the mustang, and into this stir of branches a dozen rifle bullets, came crackling at once. But Jackson did not flee onward. He felt the mustang drooping and sagging like a rag beneath him, and he drew the poor beast into the shelter of a great tree stump on the very verge of the ravine.

There, dismounting, he himself sat down upon a projecting root, and, looking at his hands, found them quivering a little–a very little. He bit his lip at the sight. He was getting soft and weak, he vowed to his heart. In the old days, peril–as great as this, fully–had not troubled his nerves after the ordeal. Yes, he was getting soft!

He heard them on the other side of the ravine whistling in the dogs, which went scrambling out upon the dangerous trunk of the tree only to crouch down trembling when they came to the center of it. The trail clearly crossed here, but it seemed as though death were crossing, also. And, close as he was, Jackson could hear the conversation clearly.

“I thought that he’d come up Jackson’s way to get a change of hosses,” said a hard, clear voice.

Jackson suddenly stood up, as he heard the answer in a deeper, a gruffer tone:

“Jackson wouldn’t deal with murdering swine like that Burns.”

Jackson in person ventured to peek around the edge of the stump and he spotted the last speaker at once.