The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 15
DAN had not returned when Barrett woke before sunrise next morning. It was not to be expected, Barrett considered, until Dan's money was gone; nothing for him to worry about, much as he liked the young chap and wished him better companions. Dan would resent it if he should go for him and fetch him back to the hay-making. Let him alone and he would return shame-faced and repentant in a day or two.
Barrett raked into windrows the hay cut the day before, and then spent considerable time working out which end of the hayrack was the bow. He got it straight after several experiments in fitting it to the wagon, and put on what he considered a tremendous load of hay, with the intention of driving it over to Nearing's barn after dinner.
It wasn't so much of a load, but it was fresh and fragrant, a fit offering on the altar of gratitude, Barrett believed, such as was due for the favors shown and the help extended in this venture. Nearing should have, by all courtesy and right, the first fruits of their labor there.
He drove this imposing load of hay around to the front of the cabin, and left it standing in the fairway of the harbor, as he thought of the grass-grown road letting through the gate into the highway. He was returning from feeding the team to prepare his own dinner, when his attention was arrested by two horsemen approaching from the direction of the ranch.
There seemed to be something familiar in the pose of one of them. Barrett went on past the house, stopping near the wire fence at the roadside to wait the rise of the riders out of a little swale, thinking it might be some of the boys of the Diamond Tail whom he would not want to let pass without a friendly hail.
At the first sight of the riders as they came up out of the hollow, Barrett's heart fluttered and seemed to drop. Dale Findlay was the rider whose carriage seemed familiar, fixed but transitorily in his memory from the day he had seen the superintendent ride into Eagle Rock camp.
Barrett was unarmed; his revolver hung in the house, a hundred feet or more behind him, where he had left it that morning before going to work. It had seemed such an unfitting implement to drag around in the peaceful occupation of hay-making. Besides, the weight of it was considerable around the body of a sweating man.
Too late now he realized his over-confidence in his situation and pursuit. Dale Findlay, not a hundred yards away, had his gun out, carrying it raised high to throw down for a shot that he should not mean to cripple.
Barrett made a dash for the load of hay a few rods to the right of where he stood, hoping desperately to make that shelter before Findlay could throw a telling shot. As he ran he heard the crack of their guns, but he made it to the wagon untouched. There he waited until they should ride past a little way, as he knew they would do, in their purpose of driving him into the open again.
Findlay rode by in a moment, his speed checked. He leaned over his saddle-horn, looking sharply along the load of hay, into which Barrett pressed himself until only his legs and feet were visible on the ground. Evidently Findlay could not see that much of him, for he threw a shot at the top of the load, calling to his companion some directions which Barrett could not catch.
Hoping, against all reason as he knew, that he could keep the hay between him and the two scoundrels who sought his life as coolly and systematically as they would brand a calf, Barrett broke from his hiding and ran for the house. He ran a quartering course, in such manner that Findlay's companion would see him first.
There was no ground, certainly, for Barrett's thought that this man would not be so deeply, so personally, concerned in killing him as Findlay. But this was the thing that flashed into his mind as he ran toward the cabin, holding a course that, if followed, must compel him to veer sharply to reach the door.
Barrett heard the first shot that followed his break from shelter strike the logs of the house. Others close after it snipped through the tall grass at his feet. Findlay was not firing those shots; he knew that as well as if he had turned to see. Findlay had not seen him yet; every foot was a precious gain. It was the hound-faced man, companion of Findlay on all his rides, who was throwing those wild shots. Findlay's aim would be more deadly.
What wild-rising thoughts press into the compass of a breath when a man flees the outreaching hand of death! In a yard Barrett reviewed the affairs of the Elk Mountain Cattle Company from its beginning to that day; reviewed his own life, its mistakes, its hidden things, its hopes and ambitions now so far away. Alma Nearing, Dan Gustin, Fred Grubb, all leaped up and whirled in the fast-spinning reel of panoramic review, the hot, burning urge of life speeding him on toward the open door.
It seemed as though his breast must burst in the pressure of that perilous flight, all life concentrated there, big, pulse-quickened, ready to leap away from the broken citadel which it warmed and sanctified. Dale Findlay was firing now, and Barrett was still a rod from the door.
At the very threshold the pang of a bullet smote him. The pain of it was as if a redhot bayonet had been plunged into his breast. Barrett sank to his knees, the day suddenly darkening, a hand thrown out to the doorpost; he fell within the door, arms spread as if to embrace the shelter his striving could not win in time.
But the life, the soul, that mysterious essence that quickens brain and heart, had fled for only a moment, as swallows fly in consternation at evening from a familiar resting-place at the fall of a bit of mortar, a fragment of soot. Death had not won dominion yet; the pale soul came fluttering back to its seat.
At the sound of a horse galloping into the dooryard, Barrett drew himself into the cabin, staggered to his feet, closed and barred the heavy batten door.
A bullet splintered the oak near him, bursting through the thick plank as he drew the bar into the upright forks fitted rudely to support it. Blood was rising to his mouth as he turned to snatch his pistol from the nail beside the door. He knew a lung had been Pierced; the thought of death was upon him.
The one small window in the cabin, its glass long since shot out by passing cowboys, had been boarded up with sawmill slabs spiked to the logs. It would need a crowbar to pry them loose. These slabs were bullet-pitted outside, indicating that they had been put there by the former occupants of the place after the shining mark of their window panes had been dimmed. The room was dark, save only for the light that leaked in about the crevices of the door, a gloomy place for a trapped, wounded man to defend the failing shred of his life as he might.
Barrett believed he had but a few minutes to live. His hurt was in the right breast, a little way below the collar bone. With every inspiration of breath he could feel the blood bubble out of the wound; where it escaped into the pleural cavity there was a burning as if a stream of living fire wasted from his veins. And, strangely enough, inconsistent with his peril as it might be, Barrett's dominating thought was that he must die unavenged, unable to drag even one of his murderers down with him into the dark.
Findlay and the other man evidently believed him already dead; near the door they were talking of him as one accounted for and done. Barrett knew they were still sitting in their saddles, not thinking it worth while to dismount over such a trivial affair.
Sick as he was, dizzy as the world and dark before his vision; racked by such agony as no man endures twice, the desire for revenge leaped as high in Barrett's heart as if life bloomed full behind it. For of all the human passions, vengeance is the first, the strongest, and the last.
Light came in between the logs at a place near the door where the earth plaster had fallen away. The hole was small, about a foct from the floor. Barrett pulled himself along the floor to the opening and squinted out. He could see the legs of a horse a little way from the cabin wall. The rider he could not see.
With pistol barrel he pushed cautiously against the hard adobe which filled the four-inch crack between the logs. The two men rode nearer; one tried the door with his foot from the saddle. Barrett heard Findlay order his man to inspect the window and, in his haste to improve the little time he believed to be his, he pushed incautiously against the blocking earth, dislodging a large piece which fell near Findlay's horse, startling the beast to a warning snort.
Findlay dashed away from the door. Peering through his chink, Barrett saw him, leaning and looking in his cautious way, lift his pistol and fire several quick shots into the door. Although he could see Findlay plainly, Barrett discovered that he could not train his pistol through the chink for a shot. At the best he could do little more than cripple the horse, but he fired, gripping, clinging, holding in reeling desperation to the fast-running line of life.
Findlay's answering shot knocked dirt into Barrett's eyes. Blindly the wounded man fired again. To his surprise, no shot replied. He steadied himself with hand against the wall, and looked out, wondering dimly if his wild chance shot had hit.
But no; they had another plan for putting out the embers of life which they had discovered still warming their victim's heart. They were backing the load of hay toward the cabin; the smoke that blew ahead of it told that they had set it afire. They intended to block up the door with the burning load of hay and roast him like a grub in a nut.
Barrett believed it would be better to die in the open, fighting with his last breath, the trembling thread quickly cut by a bullet, than to lie huddled there in torture multiplied. He got to his knees, pistol in his left hand, his right arm numb from the wound in a numbness that seemed spreading, involving all his members.
He groped, with his pistol barrel until he found the bar across the door; pushed it, dislodged it. A moment 80, weaving upon his knees, he stood, like a seasick man upon a rolling ship. Then a darkness rose, and swept upward and over him, obscuring all the world.
Yet not insensible he lay there, smothered in this incomparable blackness, face to the floor. Some finer sense, some independent, projectible attribute, it seemed, stood sentinel outside that threatened door. Barrett saw, as a man in a dream, every turn of the wheels that brought the bulging end of the load of hay nearer; saw the gray-green smoke rising in growing volume above the red flame that mounted and wavered and whipped in the wind; saw the scuffing feet of Findlay and his man as they pushed at the thick wagon-tongue, peering through the smoke and flame to guide the load precisely.
All this he saw, although his eyes were blinded in the obscuration of a blackness deeper than the deepest night, and his limbs lay heavy, helpless, immovable as if weighted with chains.
Perhaps the spirit, apart from his body save by some thin filament that soon must dissolve, hovered there cognizant of all this striving, this cruel determination, to have an insignificant human life. Whatever it was, Edgar Barrett saw without eyes, heard without ears, but did not feel again the pain of his wound or the dread of death.
Then away from this immediate scene the sentinel seemed to speed, discovering one riding swiftly, a coiled rope swinging at the saddle-horn, dust of the fleet horse gray in the green plain.
Nearer the rider came, yet there seemed a mist before his face. Barrett was conscious of a struggle to identify the rider, as a man rebels and fights to break through the inconsistencies of a dream, knowing that it is nothing more than a dream, and turns in relief, though still asleep, when he has thrown off the overriding terror of its shadow.
Dan Gustin, said that living sense that struggled in the wounded man's soul to pierce the mist before the rider's face; Dan Gustin, the man logically to be expected. Still the rider's face was obscured by the mist. Only the pistol was plainly evident in his hand, and the coiled rope swinging at the saddle-horn.
There was a soundless burst of flame from the rider's pistol; another, another. Quick mounting, frantic riding away, that leaping, soundless flame reaching after the murderous scoundrels. And then peace; profound, silent, sweet.
The mysterious sentinel returned again to report to Barrett's numb body the contact of cold water on his face. And there was the sound of a woman crying, piteous and low.
Barrett opened his conscious eyes again upon the day. Not far away from where he lay stood the burning load of hay, a saddled horse still straining on the rope that ran from saddle-horn to end of the ironlooped wagon tongue. The cabin he could not see, but the sky was over him, the breath of life was in his throat, the sound of a woman's low, choked sobbing in his ears.
Alma Nearing bent over him, her weeping changed at sight of his revival into a glad, a boundlessly thankful, cry.
It was as though death had yielded him one flash of consciousness that he might impress upon the records of human gratitude, scroll so sacred and so scant, the credit he must have been uneasy in his grave to have left ungiven. Then the door was closed again, and Barrett lay as the dead.