Ben Blair Part 23

He had for some reason been spared, after all, and hope arose in his breast. He began to look around him. Not two rods away, his face clearly in sight, his eyes closed, dead asleep, lay the figure of the man who had waylaid him. For a moment he looked at the figure steadily; then, in distinct animal cunning, the lids of the close-set eyes tightened.

Stealthily, almost holding his breath, he started to rise, then fell back with a jerk. For the first time he realized that he was bound hand and foot, so he could scarcely stir. He struggled, at first cautiously, then desperately, to be free; but the straps which bound him, those which had held his own blanket, only cut the deeper; and he gave it up.

Flat on his back he lay watching the sleeper, his anger increasing.

Again his eyes tightened.

"Wake up, curse you!" he yelled suddenly.

No answer, only the steady rise and fall of the sleeper's chest.

"Wake up, I say!" repeated the voice, in a tone to raise the dead.

This time there was response--of action. Slowly Ben Blair roused, and got up. A moment he looked about him; then, tearing a strip off his blanket, he walked over, and, against the other's protests and promises of silence, forced open the bearded lips, as though giving a horse the bit, and tied a gag full in the cursing mouth. Without a word or a superfluous look he returned and lay down. Another minute, and the regular breathing showed he was again asleep.

During all the warmth of that day Ben Blair slept on, as a child sleeps, as sleep the very aged; and although the bearded man had freed himself from the gag at last, he did not again make a sound. Too miserable himself to sleep, he lay staring at the other. Gradually through the haze of impotent anger a realization of his position came to him. He could not avoid the issue. To be sure, he was still alive; but what of the future? A host of possibilities flashed into his mind, but in every one there faced him a single termination. By no process of reasoning could he escape the inevitable end; and despite the chilliness of the air a sweat broke out over him. Contrition for what he had done he could not feel--long ago he had pa.s.sed even the possibility of that; but fear, deadly and absorbing fear, had him in its clutch. The pa.s.sing of the years, years full of lawlessness and violence, had left him the same man whom bartender "Mick" had terrorized in the long ago; and for the first time in his wretched life, personal death--not of another but of himself--looked at him with steady eyes, and he could not return the gaze. All he could do was to wait, and think--and thoughts were madness.

Again and again, knowing what the result would be, but seeking merely a diversion, he struggled at the straps until he was breathless; but relentless as time one picture kept recurring to his brain. In it was a rope, a stout rope, dangling from something he could not distinctly recognize; but what he could see, and see plainly, was a figure of a man, a bearded man--_himself_--at its end. The body swayed back and forth as he had once seen that of a "rustler" whom a group of cowboys had left hanging to the scraggly branch of a scrub-oak; as a pendulum marks time, measuring the velocity of the prairie wind.

With each recurrence of the vision the perspiration broke out over the man anew, the sunburned forehead paled. This was what it was coming to; he could not escape it. If ever purpose was unmistakably written on a human face, it had been on the face of the man who lay sleeping so near, the man who had trailed him like a tiger and caught him when he thought he was safe. From another, there might still be hope; but from this one, Jennie Blair's son--The vision of a woman lying white and motionless on the coa.r.s.e blankets of a bunk, of a small boy with wonderfully clear blue eyes pounding harmlessly at the legs of the man looking down; the sound of a childish voice, accusing, menacing, ringing out over all, "You've killed her! You've killed her!"--this like a chasm stood between them, and could never be crossed. Clasped together, the long nervous fingers, a gentleman's fingers still, twined and gripped each other.

No, there was no hope. Better that the hands he had felt about his throat in the morning had done their work. He shut his eyes. A hot wave of anger, anger against himself, swept all other thoughts before it.

Why, having gotten safely away, having successfully hidden himself, had he ever returned? Why, having in the depths of his nest in the middle of the island escaped once, had a paltry desire for revenge against the man he fancied had led the attack sent him back? What satisfaction was it, if in taking the life of the other man it cost him his own? Fool that he had been to imagine he could escape where no one had ever escaped before! Fool! Fool! Thus dragged by the long hours of the afternoon.

With the coming of the chill of evening, Ben Blair awoke and rubbed his eyes. A moment later he arose, and, walking over to his captive, looked down at him, steadily, peculiarly. So long as he could, Tom Blair returned the gaze; but at last his eyes fell. A voice sounded in his ears, a voice speaking low and clearly.

"You're a human being," it said. "Physically, I'm of your species, modelled from the same clay." A long pause. "I wonder if anywhere in my make-up there's a streak of such as you!" Again a moment of silence, in which the elder man felt the blue eyes of the younger piercing him through and through. "If I thought there was a trace, or the suggestion of a trace, before G.o.d, I'd kill you and myself, and I'd do it now!" The speaker scanned the prostrate figure from head to foot, and back again.

"And do it now," he repeated.

Silence fell; and in it, though he dared not look, coward Tom Blair fancied he heard a movement, imagined the other man about to put the threat into execution.

"No, no!" he pleaded. "People are different--different as day and night.

You belong to your mother's kind, and she was good and pure." Every trace of the man's nerve was gone. But one instinct was active--to placate this relentless being, his captor. He fairly grovelled. "I swear she was pure. I swear it!"

Without speaking a word, Ben turned. Going back to his snow-blind, he packed his blanket and camp kit swiftly and strapped them to his shoulders. Returning, he gathered the things he had found upon the other's person--the rifle, the revolvers, the sheath-knife--into a pile; then deliberately, one against the other, he broke them until they were useless. Only the blanket he preserved, tossing it down by the side of the prostrate figure.

"Tom Blair," he said, no indication now that he had ever been nearer to the other than a stranger, "Tom Blair, I've got a few things to say to you, and if you're wise you'll listen carefully, for I sha'n't repeat them. You're going with me, and you're going free; but if you try to escape, or cause me trouble, as sure as I'm alive this minute I'll strip off every st.i.tch of clothing you wear and leave you where I catch you though the snow be up to your waist."

Slowly he reached over and untied first the feet then the hands. "Get up," he ordered.

Tom Blair arose, stretched himself stiffly.

"Take that," Ben indicated the blanket, "and go ahead straight for the river."

The bearded man obeyed. To have secured his freedom he could not have done otherwise.

For ten minutes they moved ahead, only the crunching snow breaking the stillness.

"Trot!" said Ben.

"I can't."

"Trot!" There was no misunderstanding the tone.

In single file they jogged ahead, reached the river, and descended to the level surface of its bed.

"Keep to the middle, and go straight ahead."

On they went--jog, jog, jog.

Of a sudden from under cover of the bank a frightened cottontail sprang forth and started running. Instantly there was the report of a big revolver, and Tom jumped as though he felt the bullet in his back. Again the report sounded, and this time the rabbit rolled over and over in the snow.

Without stopping, Ben picked up the still struggling game and slipped a couple of fresh cartridges into the empty revolver chambers. The banks were lined with burrows and tracks, and within five minutes a second cottontail met the fate of the first.

"Come back!" called Ben to the man ahead.

Again Tom obeyed. He would have gone barefoot in the snow without a question now.

"Can you make a fire?"

"Yes."

"Do it, then. I left the matches in your pocket."

On opposite sides of the fire, from long forked sticks of green ash, they broiled strips of the meat which Ben dressed and cut. Likewise fronting each other, they ate in silence. Darkness was falling, and the glow from the embers lit their faces like those of two friends camping after a day's hunt. Had it not all been such deadly earnest, the scene would have been farce-comedy. Suddenly Tom Blair raised his eyes.

"What are you going to do with me?" he asked directly.

Ben said nothing.

The question was not repeated, but another trembled on the speaker's lips. At last it found words.

"When you had me down I--I thought you had done for me. Why did you--let me up?"

A pause followed. Then Ben's blue eyes raised and met the other's.

"You'd really like to know?"

"Yes."

Another moment of hesitation, but the youth's eyes did not move. "Very well, I'll tell you." More to himself than to the other he was speaking.

His voice softened unconsciously. "A girl saved you that time, Tom Blair, a girl you never saw. You haven't any idea what it means, but I love that girl, and I could never look her in the face again with blood on my hands, even such blood as yours. That's the reason."

For a moment Tom Blair was silent; then into his brain there flashed a suggestion, and he grasped at it as a drowning man at a straw.

"Wouldn't it be blood on your hands just the same if you take me back where we're headed, back to Mick Kennedy and--"

With a single motion, swift as though raised by a spring, Ben was upon his feet.

"Pick up your blanket!"

"But--"

"Silence!" The big square jaw shot forward like the piston of an engine.