Ben Blair Part 24

"Not another word of that, now or ever. Not another word!"

For a second the other paused doggedly, then taking up his load he moved ahead into the shadow.

Hour after hour they advanced, alternately walking and trotting, following the winding bed of the stream. Darkness fell, until they could not see each other's faces, until they were merely two black pa.s.sing shadows; but the figure behind was relentless. Stimulating, compelling, he forced himself close. Ever and anon they could hear the frightened dash of a rabbit away from their path. More than once a snow-owl fluttered over their heads; but they took no notice. Twice the man in advance stumbled and fell; but though Ben paused he spoke no word. Like a soldier of the ranks on secret forced march, ignorant of his destination, given only conjecture as to what the morrow would bring forth, Tom Blair panted ahead.

With the coming of daylight Ben slowed to a walk, and looked about in quest of breakfast. Game was plentiful along the shelter of the stream, and before they had advanced a half-mile farther he saw ahead a flock of grouse roosting in the diverging branches of a cottonwood tree. At two hundred yards, selecting those on the lowest branches, he dropped half a dozen, one after the other, with the rifle; and still the remainder of the flock did not fly. Very different were they from the open-land prairie chicken, whom a mere sound will send a-wing.

As on the night before, they broiled each what he wished, and, carefully cleaning the others, Ben packed them with his kit. Then, stolid as an Indian, he cleared a spot of earth, and wrapping himself in his blanket lay down full in the suns.h.i.+ne, smoking his pipe impa.s.sively. Taking the cue, Tom Blair likewise curled up like a dog near at hand.

Slowly and more slowly came the puffs of smoke from the captor's pipe; at last they ceased entirely. The lids of the youth's eyes closed, his breath came deep and regular. Beneath the blanket a muscle here and there twitched involuntarily, as in one who is very weary and asleep.

An hour pa.s.sed, an hour without a sound; then, looking closely, a spectator could have seen one of Tom Blair's eyes open and close furtively. Again it opened, and its mate as well--to remain so. For a minute, two minutes, they studied the companion face uncertainly, suspiciously, then savagely. Another minute, and the body had risen to hands and knees. Still Ben did not stir, still the great expanse of his chest rose and fell. Tom Blair was satisfied. Hand over hand, feeling his way like a cat, he advanced toward the prostrate figure. Despite his caution, the crust of the snow crackled once beneath his touch, and he paused, a soundless curse forming upon his lips; but the warning pa.s.sed unheeded, and, bolder than before, he padded on.

Eight feet he gained, then ten. His color heightened, the repressed arteries throbbed above the gaudy neckerchief, the skulking animal intensified in the tightened muscles of the temples. As many feet again; but a few more minutes--then liberty and life. The better to guard his movements, his gaze fell. Out and down went his right hand, then his left, as his lithe body slid forward. Again he glanced up, paused--and on the instant every muscle of his tense body went suddenly lax. Instead of the closed eyes and sleeping face he had expected, two steady eyes were giving him back look for look. There had not been a motion; the face was yet that of a sleeper; the chest still rose and fell steadily; but the eyes!

Tom Blair's teeth ground each other like those of a dog with rabies. The suggestion of froth came to his lips.

"Curse you!" he cried. "Curse you forever!"

A moment they lay so, a moment wherein the last vestige of hope left the mind of the captive; but in it Ben Blair spoke no word. Maddening, immeasurably worse than denunciation, was that relentless silence. It was uncanny; and the bearded man felt the hairs of his head rising as the mane of a dog or a wolf lifts at a sound it does not understand.

"Say something," he pleaded desperately. "Shoot me, kill me, do anything--but don't look at me like that!" and, fairly writhing, he crawled back to his blanket and buried his head in its depths.

With the coming of evening coolness, Ben again made preparation for the journey. Neither of the men made reference to the incidents of the day, but on Tom Blair's face there was a new expression, like that of a criminal on his pa.s.sage from the cell to the hangman's trap. If the younger man saw it, he gave no sign; and as on the night before, they jogged ahead. Before daylight broke, the comparatively smooth bed of Bad River merged into the irregular surface of the Missouri. Then they halted. Why they stopped there, Tom Blair could not at the time tell; but with the coming of daylight he understood. Where he had crossed and Ben had followed there was not now a single track, but many--a score at least. At the margin of the stream, where the cavalcade had stopped, the snow was tramped hard as a stockade; and in the centre of the beaten place, distinct against the white, was a dark spot where a great camp-fire had been built. At the river the party had stopped. Obviously, there the last snow had obliterated the trail, and, seeing that they had turned back, Tom Blair gave a sigh of relief. Whatever the future had in store for him, it could reveal nothing so fearful as a meeting with those whom intuition told him had made up that party.

But his relief was short-lived. Again, after they had breakfasted from the grouse in the pack, Ben ordered the onward march, along the bank of the great river. As they moved ahead, a realization of their destination at last came to the captive, and for the first time he balked.

"Do what you wish with me," he cried. "I'll not go a step farther."

They were perhaps a mile down the river. The bordering hills enclosed them like an arena.

"Very well." Ben Blair spoke as though the occurrence were one of every-day repet.i.tion. "Give me your clothes!"

Tom's face settled stubbornly.

"You'll have to take them."

The youth's hand sought his hip, and a bullet spat at the snow within three inches of the other's feet. There was a meaning pause. Slowly the bravado left the other's face.

"Don't keep me waiting!" urged Ben.

Slowly, very slowly, off came the captive's coat and vest. Despite his efforts, the hands which loosened the b.u.t.tons trembled uncontrollably.

Following the vest came the s.h.i.+rt, then a shoe, and the sock beneath.

His foot touched the snow. For the first time a faint realization of the thing he was choosing came to him. The vicious bite of the frost upon the bare skin was not a possibility of the future, but a condition of the immediate now; and he weakened. But in the moment of his indecision, the wave of stubbornness and of blinding hate again flooded him, and a rush of hot curses left his lips.

For a moment, the last time in their lives, the two men eyed each other fairly. Indescribable hate was written upon one face; the other was as blank as the surrounding snow. Its very immobility chilled Tom Blair and cowed him into silence. Without a word he replaced shoe and coat and took up his blanket. An advancing step sounded behind him, and, understanding, he moved ahead. After a while the foot-fall again gained upon him, and once more the walk merged into the interminable jog-jog of the back-trail.

It was morning when the two began that last relay. It was four o'clock in the afternoon when they arrived amid the outskirts of the scattered prairie terminus which was their destination. Within ten minutes thereafter the two had separated. The older man, in charge of a lank, unshaven frontiersman, chiefly noticeable from a quid of tobacco which swelled one cheek like an abscess, and a nickle-plated star which he wore on the lapel of his coat, was headed for the pretentious white painted building known as the court-house. The younger, catching sight of a wind-twisted sign lettered "Hotel," made for it as though sighting the promised land. In the office, as he pa.s.sed through, was a crowd of men entirely too large to have gathered by chance in a frontier hostelry, who eyed him peculiarly; but he took no notice, and five minutes later, upon the bedraggled bed of the unplastered upper room that the landlord gave him, without even his boots removed, he was deep in the realm of oblivion.

Some time later--he had no idea of the hour save that all was dark--he was awakened by a confusion of voices in the room below, a slamming of doors, a thumping of great boots upon the bare floor. Scarcely remembering his whereabouts, he rolled from his bed and thrust his head out of the narrow window. Here and there about the town were scattered lights--some stationary, others, which he took to be lanterns, moving.

On the street beneath his window two men went by on a run. Half way up the block, before the well-lighted front of a saloon, a motley crowd was s.h.i.+fting back and forth, restless as ants in a hill, the murmur of their voices sounding menacing as the distant hum of swarming bees. All at once from out the door there burst fair into the crowd a heavy man with great shoulders and a bull neck. About him, even in the uncertain light, there seemed to the watcher something very familiar. What he said, Ben could not understand; but he turned his head this way and that, and his motions were unmistakable. The crowd made way before him as sheep before a dog, and closing behind followed steadily in his wake. Gradually as the leader advanced the ma.s.s gained momentum. At first the pace had been a slow walk. In the s.p.a.ce of seconds it became a swift one, then a run, with a wild scramble by those in the rear to gain front place. The frozen ground rumbled under their rus.h.i.+ng feet. The direction of their movement, at first uncertain, became definite. It was a direct line for the centrally located court-house; and, no longer doubtful of their purpose, Ben left the window, fairly tumbled downstairs, and rushed through the now deserted office into the equally deserted street.

The court-house square was but two blocks away; but the mob had a good lead, and when the youth arrived he found the s.p.a.ce within the surrounding chain fence fairly covered. Where the people could all have come from struck him even at that moment as a mystery. Certainly all told the town could not in itself have mustered half the number.

Elbowing his way among them, however, he began soon to understand. Here and there among the ma.s.s he caught sight of familiar faces,--Russell of the Circle R Ranch, Stetson of the "XI," each taking no part, but with hats slouched low over their eyes watching every movement of the drama.

Pa.s.sing around a jam he could not press through, Ben felt a detaining hand upon his arm, and turning, he was face to face with Grannis. The grip of the overseer tightened.

"I've been looking for you, Blair," he said, "I know what you've been trying to do, but most of the crowd don't and won't. They're ugly. You'd better keep back."

For answer Ben eyed the cowboy squarely.

"I thought I left you in charge of the ranch," he said evenly.

The weather-stained face of the foreman reddened in the s.h.i.+fting lantern light, but the eyes did not drop.

"I have been. I just got here." A dignity which well became him spoke in the steady voice. "I had a reason for coming."

Ben released his gaze.

"The others are here too?"

"No, they're all at the ranch. Graham and I attended to that."

"I just saw Russell and Stetson. They couldn't possibly have got here to-day from home. Has--has this been planned?"

Grannis nodded. "Yes. Kennedy and his gang have been watching here and at the ranch for days. They thought you'd show up at one place or the other. The whole country is out. There are lots of strangers here, from ranches I never heard of before. Seems as though everybody knew Rankin and heard of his being shot. You'd better let them have it their way.

It'll amount to the same in the end, and death itself couldn't stop them now."

He took a step forward; for Ben, understanding all, had at last moved on.

"Blair!" he called after him, again extending a detaining hand. His voice took on a new note--intimate, personal, a tone of which no one would have thought it capable. "Blair, listen to me! Stop!"

But he might as well have spoken to the swiftly flowing water beneath the ice of the great river. Of a sudden, from out a pa.s.sage leading into the cell-room of the court-house bas.e.m.e.nt, a black swarm of men had emerged, bearing by sheer animal force a struggling object in their midst. The silence of those who waited, the lull before the storm, on the instant ended. A very Babel of voices took its place. By common consent, as though drawn by centripetal force, actors and spectators crowded together until they were a solid block of humanity. Caught in the midst, Grannis and Ben alike could for a moment but move with the ma.s.s. So fierce was the crush that their very breath seemed imprisoned in their lungs.

Like molten metal the crowd began to flow--to the right, in the direction of the railroad track. With each pa.s.sing moment the confusion was, if possible, greater than before. Here and there a cowboy, unable to control his excess of feeling, emptied his revolver into the air.

Once Ben heard the wailing yelp of a dog caught under foot of the ma.s.s.

To his left, a little man with a white collar, obviously a mere spectator, pleaded loudly to be released from the pressure. Adding to the confusion, the bell on the town-hall began ringing furiously.

On they went, a hundred yards, two hundred, reached the railroad track, stopped. In the midst of the leaders, looming over their heads, was a whitened telegraph pole. Of a sudden a lariat shot up over the painted cross-arm, and dropped, the two ends dangling free; and, understanding it all, the spectators again became silent. Everything moved like clockwork. From somewhere in the darkness a bare-backed pony was produced and brought directly under the dangling rope. Astride him a dark-bearded figure with hands tied behind his back was placed and firmly held. Swiftly a running noose, fas.h.i.+oned from the ends of the lariat, was slipped over the captive's neck. A man grasped the bit of the mustang. Before him, the crowd began to give way. The great bull-necked leader--Mick Kennedy, every one now saw it was--held up his hand for silence, and turned to the helpless figure astride the pony.

"Tom Blair!" he said,--and such was now the silence that a whisper would have been audible,--"Tom Blair, have you anything you wish to say?"

The dark shape took no notice. Apparently it did not hear.

Mick Kennedy hesitated. Upon his lips a repet.i.tion of the question was forming--but it got no farther. In the midst of the ma.s.s of spectators there was a sudden tumult, a scattering from one spot as from a lighted bomb.

"Make way!" demanded an insistent voice. "Let me through!" And for a moment, forgetting the other interest, the spectators turned to this newer one.

At first they could distinguish nothing perfectly; then amidst the confusion they made out the form of a long-armed, long-faced youth, his head lowered, his shoulder before him like a wedge, crowding his way to the fore.