Ironheart

Tom called a warning to Hollister as the engineer and his prisoner struck out into the blinding storm. “Careful you don’t get lost. Looks like she’s gettin’ her back up for a reg’lar snifter.”

The snow was still falling thickly, but it had behind it now a driving wind that slapped it in the faces of the men at a slanting angle. Presently under the lee of a hill they got their backs to the storm, but this did not greatly improve conditions, for the whip of the wind caught up the surface drifts and whirled them at the travelers.

Hollister had buckled on a belt with a revolver and had taken the precaution to rope his prisoner to him with ten feet of slack between. They ploughed through the new snow that had fallen above the crust, making slow progress even with the wind to help.

From the shelter of the gulch they came into the full force of the howling hurricane. It caught them as they crossed a mesa leading to a cañon. Hollister realized that the snow was thinning, but the wind was rising and the temperature falling. He did not like that. Even to his lack of experience there was the feel of a blizzard in the air. Moreover, before they were halfway across the mesa he had a sense of having lost his direction.

Cig dropped back, whining. This was an adventure wholly out of his line. He was game enough in his way, but bucking blizzards was not one of the things he had known in his city-cramped experience.

“We gotta go back. It’ll get us sure if we don’t,” he pleaded.

Tug would have turned back gladly enough if he had known which way to go, but in the swirl of white that enveloped them he did not know east from west. The thing to do, he judged, was to strike as straight a line as possible. This ought to take them off the mesa to the shelter of some draw or wooded ravine.

“It’ll be better when we get where the wind can’t slam across the open at us,” he said.

For the moment at least the former convict was innocuous. He was wholly preoccupied with the battle against the storm. Tug took the lead and broke trail.

The whirling snow stung his face like burning sand. His skis clogged with the weight of the drifts. Each dragging step gave him the sense of lifting a leaden ball chained to his feet.

Cig went down, whimpering. “I’m all in!” he shrieked through the noise of the screaming blasts.

“Forget it, man!” Hollister dragged him to his feet. “If you quit now you’re done for. Keep coming. We’ll get off this mesa soon. It can’t be far now.”

He was none too confident himself. Stories came to his mind of men who had wandered round and round in a circle till the blizzard had taken toll of their vitality and claimed them for its own.

The prisoner sank down again and had to be dragged out of the drift into which he had fallen. Five or six times the taut rope stopped Tug’s progress. Somehow he cheered and bullied the worn-out man to the edge of the mesa, down a sharp slope, and into the wind-break of a young grove of pines.

Into the snow Cig dropped helplessly. The hinges of his knees wouldn’t hold him any longer. His expression reminded Hollister of the frightened face of a child.

“I’m goin’ west,” he said.

“Not this trip,” the engineer told him. “Buck up and we’ll make it fine. Don’t know this country, do you? We’re at the mouth of a gulch.”

Cig looked around. In front of him was a twisted pine that looked like an umbrella blown inside out. He recognized it.

“This gulch leads into another. There’s a cabin in it,” he said. “A heluva long ways from here.”

“Then we’d better get started,” Tug suggested. “The cabin won’t come to us.”

He gave the Bowery tough a hand to help him to his feet. Cig pulled himself up.

“Never get there in the world,” he complained. “Tell you I’m done.”

He staggered into the drifts after his leader. The bitter wind and cold searched through their clothing to freeze the life out of them. At the end of a long slow two hundred yards, the weaker man quit.

Hollister came back to him. He lay huddled on the newly broken trail.

“Get up!” ordered Tug.

“Nothin’ doing. I’m through. Go on an’ leave me if youse want to, you big stiff.”

It was the man’s last flare of defiance. He collapsed into himself, helpless as a boxer counted out in the roped ring. Hollister tugged at him, cuffed him, scolded, and encouraged. None of these seemed even to reach his consciousness. He lay inert, even the will to live beaten out of him.

In that moment, while Hollister stood there considering, buffeted by the howling wind and the sting of the pelting sleet, he saw at his feet a brother whose life must be saved and not an outlaw and potential murderer. He could not leave Cig, even to save himself.

Tug’s teeth fastened to one end of a mitten. He dragged it from his hand. Half-frozen fingers searched in his pocket for a knife and found it. They could not open the blade, and he did this, too, with his teeth. Then, dropping to one knee awkwardly, he sawed at the thongs which fastened the other’s skis. They were coated with ice, but he managed to sever them.

He picked up the supine body and ploughed forward up the gulch. The hope he nursed was a cold and forlorn one. He did not know the cañon or how far it was to the gulch in which the cabin was. By mistake he might go wandering up a draw which led nowhere. Or he might drop in his tracks from sheer exhaustion.

But he was a fighter. It was not in him to give up. He had to stagger on, to crawl forward, to drag his burden after him when he could not carry it. His teeth were set fast, clinched with the primal instinct to go through with it as long as he could edge an inch toward his goal.

A gulch opened out of the cañon. Into it he turned, head down against a wind that hit him like a wall. The air, thick with sifted ice, intensely cold, sapped the warmth and vitality of his body. His numbed legs doubled under the weight of him as though hinged. He was down and up again and down, but the call of life still drove him. Automatically he clung to his helpless load as though it were a part of himself.

Out of the furious gray flurry a cabin detached itself. He weaved a crooked path toward it, reached the wall, crept along the logs to a door. Against this he plunged forward, reaching for the latch blindly.

The door gave, and he pitched to the floor.

He lay there, conscious, but with scarcely energy enough of mind or body to register impressions. A fire roared up the chimney. He knew that. Some one rose with an exclamation of amazement at his intrusion. There was a hiatus of time. His companion of the adventure, still tied to him, lay on the floor. A man was stooping over Cig, busy with the removal of his ice-coated garments.

The man cut the rope. Hollister crawled closer to the fire. He unfastened the slicker and flung it aside. If he had not lost his knife, he would have cut the thongs of the skis. Instead, he thrust his feet close to the red glow to thaw out the ice-knots that had gathered.

He was exhausted from the fight through the deep drifts, but he was not physically in a bad way. A few hours’ sleep would be all he needed to set him right.

“Take a nip of this,” a squeaky voice advised.

Hollister turned his head quickly. He looked into the leathery face and skim-milk eyes of Jake Prowers. It would be hard to say which of them was the more startled.

“By jiminy by jinks, if it ain’t the smart-aleck hobo engineer,” the cattleman announced to himself.

“Is he alive?” asked Tug, nodding toward the man on the floor.

“Be all right in a li’l’ while. His eyes flickered when I gave him a drink. How’d you come here, anyhow?”

“Got lost in the storm. He played out. Had to drag him.” Tug rubbed his hands together to restore circulation.

“Mean you got lost an’ just happened in here?”

“Yes.”

“Hmp! Better be born lucky than with brains, I’ll say. What were you doin’ out in the blizzard? Where you headed for?”

“I was taking him to Wild Horse—to the sheriff.”

A mask dropped over the eyes of the little cattleman. “What for? What’s he been doin’?”

“He’s wanted for shooting Mr. Reed and firing his wheatfield.”

“You been appointed deputy sheriff since you took to playin’ good?”

“And for other things,” the engineer added, as though Prowers’s sneer had not been uttered.

“Meanin’ which?”

“Kidnapping Reed’s little girl.”

“No proof of that a-tall. Anything more?”

The eyes of the two met and grew chill. Hollister knew that the rancher was feeling out the ground. He wanted to find out what had taken place to-day.

“What more could there be?” Tug asked quietly.

Neither relaxed the rigor of his gaze. In the light-blue orbs of the older was an expression cold and cruel, almost unhuman, indefinably menacing.

“Claims I was tryin’ to blow up his mine.” The voice came from behind Prowers. It was faint and querulous. “Say, I’m froze up inside. Gimme a drink, Jake.”

Prowers passed the bottle over. He continued to look at the uninvited guest who knew too much. “Howcome you to get that notion about him blowin’ up yore tunnel?” he asked.

“Caught him at it. Dragged him back and made him show where he had put the sticks of powder,” Hollister answered grimly. “You interested in this, Mr. Prowers?”

“Some. Why not? Got to be neighborly, haven’t I?” The high voice had fallen to a soft purr. It came to Hollister, with a cold swift patter of mice feet down his spine, that he was in deadly danger. Nobody knew he was here, except these two men. Cig had only to give it out that they had become separated in the blizzard. They could, unless he was able to protect himself, murder him and dispose of the body in entire safety. If reports were true, Prowers was an adept at that kind of sinister business. Tug had, of course, a revolver, but he knew that the cattleman could beat him to the draw whenever he chose. The old man was a famous shot. He would take his time. He would make sure before he struck. The blow would fall when his victim’s wariness relaxed, at the moment when he was least expecting it.

Tug knew that neither of these two in the room with him had any regard for the sanctity of human life. There are such people, a few among many millions, essentially feral, untouched by any sense of common kinship in the human race. Prowers would be moved by one consideration only. Would it pay to obliterate him? The greatest factor in the strength of the cattleman’s position was that men regarded him with fear and awe. The disappearance of Hollister would stir up whisperings and suspicions. Others would read the obvious lesson. Daunted, they would sidestep the old man rather than oppose him. Yet no proof could be found to establish definitely a crime, or at any rate to connect him with it.

The issue of the Sweetwater Dam project meant more to Prowers than dollars and cents. His power and influence in the neighborhood were at stake, and it was for these that he lived. If the irrigation project should be successful, it would bring about a change in the character of the country. Settlers would pour in, farm the Flat Tops, and gobble up the remnants of the open range. To the new phase of cattle-raising that must develop, he was unalterably opposed. He had no intention, if he could prevent it, of seeing Paradise Valley dominated by other men and other ways. The development of the land would make Clint Reed bulk larger in the county; it would inevitably push Jake into the background and make of him a minor figure.

To prevent this, Prowers would stick at nothing. Hollister was only a subordinate, but his death would serve excellently to point a sinister moral. If more important persons did not take warning, they, too, might vanish from the paths of the living.

“You’re neighborly enough, even if you visited us by deputy this morning,” Hollister answered, level gaze fixed on the cattleman.

“Did I visit you by deputy?” Jake asked, gently ironical.

“Didn’t you? One with six sticks of dynamite to help us on the job.”

“News to me. How about it, Cig? What’s yore smart-aleck friend drivin’ at?”

Cig had crept forward to the fire and lay crouched on the hearth. His twitching face registered the torture of a circulation beginning to normalize itself again in frozen hands and feet.

“Said he’d turn me over to that guy Reed. Took advantage of me while I was played out to beat me up,” snarled the city tough. He finished with a string of vile epithets.

The splenetic laughter of the cattleman cackled out. “So you’re aimin’ to take Cig here down to Daniels with that cock-an’-bull story you cooked up. Is that the play?”

“Yes, I’m going to take him down—now or later.”

This appeared to amuse the little man. His cracked laughter sounded again. “Now or later, by jimmy by jinks. My hobo friend, if you’d lived in this country long as I have, you wouldn’t gamble heavy on that ‘later.’ If you’d read yore Bible proper, you’d know that man’s days are as grass, which withers up considerable an’ sudden. Things happen in this world of woe right onexpected.”

Tug did not dodge this covert threat. He dragged it into the open. “What could happen to me now we’re safe out of the storm, Mr. Prowers?”

The skim-milk eyes did not change expression, but there seemed to lie back of them the jeer of mockery. “Why, ’most anything. We eat canned tomatoes for supper, say—an’ you get lead poisonin’. I’ve known real healthy-lookin’ folks fall asleep an’ never wake up.”

“Yes. That’s true,” Hollister agreed, an odd sinking in the pit of his stomach. “And I’ve seen murderers who could have passed a first-class life insurance examination quit living very suddenly. The other day I read a piece about a scoundrel in Mexico who had killed two or three people. He rather had the habit. When he shot another in the back, his neighbors rode to his ranch one night and hanged him to his own wagon tongue.”

“I always did say Mexico was no place for a white man to live,” the old fellow piped amiably. “Well, I expect you boys are hungry, buckin’ this blizzard. What say to some dinner?”

“Good enough. No canned tomatoes, though, if you please.”

Once more Hollister and Prowers measured eyes before the cattleman grinned evilly.

“Glad you mentioned it. I was aimin’ to have tomatoes,” he said.