The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition - Max Brand

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eye could follow the leap of his hand as it darted down and fastened around the snake just behind the head. The long brown body writhed about his wrist, with rattles clashing. He severed the head deftly and tossed the twisting mass back on the rocks.

      Then, as if he had performed the most ordinary act, he rubbed his gloves in the sand, cleansed his knife in a similar manner, and stepped back to his horse. Contrary to the rules of horse-nature, the stallion had not flinched at sight of the snake, but actually advanced a high-headed pace or two with his short ears laid flat on his neck, and a sudden red fury in his eyes. He seemed to watch for an opportunity to help his master. As the man approached after killing the snake the stallion let his ears go forward again and touched his nose against his master's shoulder. When the latter swung into the saddle, the wolf-dog came to his side, reared, and resting his forefeet on the stirrup stared up into the rider's face. The man nodded to him, whereat, as if he understood a spoken word, the dog dropped back and trotted ahead. The rider touched the reins and galloped down the easy slope. The little episode had given the effect of a three-cornered conversation. Yet the man had been as silent as the animals.

      In a moment he was lost among the hills, but still his whistling came back, fainter and fainter, until it was merely a thrilling whisper that dwelt in the air but came from no certain direction.

      His course lay towards a road which looped whitely across the hills. The road twisted over a low ridge where a house stood among a grove of cottonwoods dense enough and tall enough to break the main force of any wind. On the same road, a thousand yards closer to the rider of the black stallion, was Morgan's place.

      2. THE PANTHER

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      In the ranch house old Joseph Cumberland frowned on the floor as he heard his daughter say: "It isn't right, Dad. I never noticed it before I went away to school, but since I've come back I begin to feel that it's shameful to treat Dan in this way."

      Her eyes brightened and she shook her golden head for emphasis. Her father watched her with a faintly quizzical smile and made no reply. The dignity of ownership of many thousand cattle kept the old rancher's shoulders square, and there was an antique gentility about his thin face with its white goatee. He was more like a quaint figure of the seventeenth century than a successful cattleman of the twentieth.

      "It is shameful, Dad," she went on, encouraged by his silence, "or you could tell me some reason."

      "Some reason for not letting him have a gun?" asked the rancher, still with the quizzical smile.

      "Yes, yes!" she said eagerly, "and some reason for treating him in a thousand ways as if he were an irresponsible boy."

      "Why, Kate, gal, you have tears in your eyes!"

      He drew her onto a stool beside him, holding both her hands, and searched her face with eyes as blue and almost as bright as her own. "How does it come that you're so interested in Dan?"

      "Why, Dad, dear," and she avoided his gaze, "I've always been interested in him. Haven't we grown up together?"

      "Part ways you have."

      "And haven't we been always just like brother and sister?"

      "You're talkin' a little more'n sisterly, Kate."

      "What do you mean?"

      "Ay, ay! What do I mean! And now you're all red. Kate, I got an idea it's nigh onto time to let Dan start on his way."

      He could not have found a surer way to drive the crimson from her face and turn it white to the lips.

      "Dad!"

      "Well, Kate?"

      "You wouldn't send Dan away!"

      Before he could answer she dropped her head against his shoulder and broke into great sobs. He stroked her head with his calloused, sunburned hand and his eyes filmed with a distant gaze.

      "I might have knowed it!" he said over and over again; "I might have knowed it! Hush, my silly gal."

      Her sobbing ceased with magic suddenness.

      "Then you won't send him away?"

      "Listen to me while I talk to you straight," said Joe Cumberland, "and accordin' to the way you take it will depend whether Dan goes or stays. Will you listen?"

      "Dear Dad, with all my heart!"

      "Humph!" he grunted, "that's just what I don't want. This what I'm goin' to tell you is a queer thing—a mighty lot like a fairy tale, maybe. I've kept it back from you years an' years thinkin' you'd find out the truth about Dan for yourself. But bein' so close to him has made you sort of blind, maybe! No man will criticize his own hoss."

      "Go on, tell me what you mean. I won't interrupt."

      He was silent for a moment, frowning to gather his thoughts.

      "Have you ever seen a mule, Kate?"

      "Of course!"

      "Maybe you've noticed that a mule is just as strong as a horse— "

      "Yes."

      "—but their muscles ain't a third as big?"

      "Yes, but what on earth—"

      "Well, Kate, Dan is built light an' yet he's stronger than the biggest men around here."

      "Are you going to send him away simply because he's strong?"

      "It doesn't show nothin'," said the old man gently, "savin' that he's different from the regular run of men—an' I've seen a considerable pile of men, honey. There's other funny things about Dan maybe you ain't noticed. Take the way he has with hosses an' other animals. The wildest man-killin', spur-hatin' bronchos don't put up no fight when them long legs of Dan settle round 'em."

      "Because they know fighting won't help them!"

      "Maybe so, maybe so," he said quietly, "but it's kind of queer, Kate, that after most a hundred men on the best hosses in these parts had ridden in relays after Satan an' couldn't lay a rope on him, Dan could jest go out on foot with a halter an' come back in ten days leadin' the wildest devil of a mustang that ever hated men."

      "It was a glorious thing to do!" she said.

      Old Cumberland sighed and then shook his head.

      "It shows more'n that, honey. There ain't any man but Dan that can sit the saddle on Satan. If Dan should die, Satan wouldn't be no more use to other men than a piece of haltered lightnin'. An' then tell me how Dan got hold of that wolf, Black Bart, as he calls him."

      "It isn't a wolf, Dad," said Kate, "it's a dog. Dan says so himself."

      "Sure he says so," answered her father, "but there was a lone wolf prowlin' round these parts for a considerable time an' raisin' Cain with the calves an' the colts. An' Black Bart comes pretty close to a description of the lone wolf. Maybe you remember Dan found his 'dog' lyin' in a gully with a bullet through his shoulder. If he was a dog how'd he come to be shot —"

      "Some brute of a sheep herder may have done it. What could it prove?"

      "It only proves that Dan is queer—powerful queer! Satan an' Black Bart are still as wild as they ever was, except that they got one master. An' they ain't got a thing to do with other people. Black Bart'd tear the heart out of a man that so much as patted his head."

      "Why," she cried, "he'll let me do anything with him!"

      "Humph!" said Cumberland, a little baffled; "maybe that's because Dan is kind of fond of you, gal, an' he has sort of introduced you to his pets, damn 'em! That's just the pint! How is he able to make his man-killers act sweet with you an' play the devil with everybody else."

      "It wasn't Dan at all!" she said stoutly, "and he isn't queer. Satan and Black Bart let me do what I want with them because they know I love them for their beauty and their strength."

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