Part 14

Carney wet the palm of his hand and held it up. It chilled as though it had been dipped in evaporating spirits. Looking at the buckskin Oregon's croak came back:

"He knows: ride like hell, Bulldog!"

Carney rose, and poured a little feed of oats from his bag on a corner of his blanket for the horse. He built a fire and brewed in a copper pot his tea. Once the shaft of smoke that spiraled lazily upward flickered and swished flat like a streaming whisp of hair; and above, high up in the giant pine harp, a minor string wailed a thin tremulous note. The gray of the morning that had been growing bright now gloomed again as though night had fled backwards before the thing that was in the mountains to the west.

The buckskin shivered; the hairs of his coat stood on end like fur in a bitter cold day; he snapped at the oats as though he bit at the neck of a stallion; he crushed them in his strong jaws as though he were famished, or ate to save them from a thief.

In five minutes the strings of the giant harp above Carney's head were playing a dirge; the smoke of his fire swirled, and the blaze darted here and there angrily, like the tongue of a serpent. From far across the valley, from somewhere in the rocky caverns of the mighty hills, came the heavy moans of genii. It was hardly a noise, it was a great oppression, a manifestation of turmoil, of the turmoil of God's majesty, His creation in travail.

Carney quaffed the scalding tea, and raced with the buckskin in the eating of his food. He became a living thermometer; his chilling blood told him that the temperature was going down, down, down. The day before he had ridden with his coat hung to the horn of his saddle; now a vagrant thought flashed to his buffalo coat in his room at the Gold Nugget.

He saddled the buckskin, and the horse, at the pinch of the cinch, turned from his oats that were only half eaten, and held up his head for the bit.

Carney strapped his dunnage to the back of the saddle, mounted, and the buckskin, with a snort of relief, took the trail with eager steps. It wound down to the valley here toward the west, and little needles stabbed at the rider's eyes and cheeks as though the air were filled with indiscernible diamond dust. It stung; it burned his nostrils; it seemed to penetrate the horse's lungs, for he gave a snorting cough.

And now the full orchestra of the hills was filling the valleys and the canyons with an overture, as if perched on the snowed slope of Squaw Mountain was the hydraulicon of Vitruvius, a torrent raging its many throats into unearthly dirge.

Carney's brain vibrated with this presage of the something that had thrilled his horse. In his ears the wailing, sighing, reverberating music seemed to carry as refrain the words of Oregon: "Ride like hell, Carney! Ride like hell!"

And, as if the command were within the buckskin's knowing, he raced where the path was good; and where it was bad he scrambled over the stones and shelving rocks and projecting roots with catlike haste.

In Carney's mind was the cave, the worked-out mine tunnel that drove into the mountain side; the cave that Jack the Wolf had homed in when he murdered the men on the trail; it was two hours beyond. If he could make that he and the buckskin would be safe, for the horse could enter it too.

In the thought of saving his life the buckskin occupied a dual place; that's what Oregon had said; he had no right to jeopardize the gallant little steed that had saved him more than once with fleet heel and stout heart.

He patted the eager straining neck in front of him, and, though he spoke aloud, his voice was little more in that valley of echo and reverberation than a whisper: "Good Patsy boy, we'll make it. Don't fret yourself tired, old sport; we'll make it--the cave."

The horse seemed to swing his head reassuringly as though he, too, had in his heart the undying courage that nothing daunted.

Now the invisible cutting dust that had scorched Carney's face had taken visible form; it was like fierce-driven flour. Across the valley the towering hills were blurred shapes. Carney's eyelashes were frozen ridges above his eyes; his breath floated away in little clouds of ice; the buckskin coat of the horse had turned to gray.

Sometimes at the turn of a cliff was a false lull as if the storm had been stayed; and then in twenty yards the doors of the frozen north swung again and icy fingers of death gripped man and beast.

And all the time the white prisms were growing larger; closer objects were being blotted out; the prison walls of ice were coming closer; it was more difficult to breathe; his life blood was growing sluggish; a chill was suggesting indifference--why fight?

The horse's feet were muffled by the ghastly white rug, the blizzard was spreading over the earth that the day before had been a cloth of gold; it was like a winding sheet.

Carney could feel the brave little beast falter and lurch as the merciless snow clutched at his legs where it had swirled into billows.

To the man direction was lost--it was like being above the clouds; but the buckskin held on his way straight and true; fighting, fighting, making the glorious fight that is without fear. To stop, to falter, meant death; the buckskin knew it; but he was tiring.

Carney unslung his picket line, put the loop around his chest below his arms, fastened it to the saddle horn, leaving a play of eight feet, and slipping to the ground, clutched the horse's tail, and patted him on the rump. The buckskin knew; he had checked for five seconds; now he went on again, the weight off his back being a relief.

The change was good. Carney had felt the chill of death creeping over him in the saddle; the deadly chill, the palpitating of the chest that preluded a false warmth that meant the end, the sleep of death. Now the exertion wined his blood; it brought the battling back.

Time, too, like direction, was a haze in the man's mind. Two hours away the cave had been, and surely they had struggled on hour after hour. It scarce mattered; to draw forth his watch and look was a waste of energy, the vital energy that weighed against his death; an ounce of it wasted was folly; just on through the enveloping curtain of that white wall.

Carney had meant to remount the horse when he was warmer, when he himself was tiring; but it would be murder, murder of the little hero that had fought his battles ever since they had been together. The buckskin's flanks were pumping spasmodically, like the sides of a bellows; his withers drooped; his head was low hung; he looked lean and small--scarce mightier than a jack rabbit, knee deep in the shifting sea of snow.

But the cave must be near. Carney found himself repeating these words: "The cave is near, the cave is near, Patsy; on, boy--the cave is near." His mind dwelt on the wood that he had left in the cave when he took Jack the Wolf to Bucking Horse; of how cosy it would be with a bright fire going, and the baffled blizzard howling without. Yes, he would make it. Was his life, so full of the wild adventures that he had always won out on, to be blotted by just a snowstorm, just cold?

He took a lofty stand against this. He was possessed of a feeling that it was a combat between the crude elements and his vital force of mental stamina. If he kept up his courage he would win out, as he always had. It was just Excelsior and Success, just----

There was a swirl of oblivion; he had flown through space and collided with another world; there had been some sort of a gross shock; he was alone, floating through space, and passing through snowladen clouds. There was a restful exhilaration, such as he had felt once when passing under an anesthetic--Nirvana.

Then the cold snout of some abnormal creature in these regions of the beyond pressed against his face. Gradually, as though waking from a dream--it was the muzzle of the buckskin nosing him back to consciousness. He struggled painfully to his feet. How heavy his legs were; at the bottom of them were leaden-soled diver's boots. His brain, not more than half clearing at that, he realized that he and the buckskin had slid from a treacherous shelf of rock, and fallen a dozen feet; the snow, unwittingly kind, catching them in a lap of feathery softness. But for the gallant horse he would have lain there, never to rise again of his own volition.

They scrambled back to the trail, he and the little horse, and they were going forward. Oregon's command was working out--"Let the buckskin have his own way."

If they had been out on the prairie undoubtedly they would have gone around in a circle--in fact, Carney once had done so--and the cold would have been more intense, the sweep of the wind more life-sapping; but here in the valleys in places the snow piled deeper; it was like surf rolling up in billows; it took the life force out of man and horse.

Carney was so wearied by the sustained struggle that was like a man battling the waves, half the time beneath the waters, that his flagged senses became atrophied, numbed, scarce tabulating anything but the fact that they still held on toward the cave.

Then he heard a bell. Curious that. Was it all a dream--or was this the real thing: that he was in a merry party, a sleighing party--that they were going to a ball in a stone palace? He could hear a sleigh bell.

Then he was nice and warm. He stretched himself lazily. It was a dream--he was waking.

When he opened his eyes he saw a fire, and the flickering firelight played on stone walls. Beside the fire was sitting a man; behind him something stamped on the stone floor.

He turned his head and saw the buckskin asleep on his feet with low-hung head.

"How d'you feel, Stranger?" the man at the fire asked, rising up, and coming to his side.

Carney stared; he was supposed to be back there fighting a blizzard. And now, remembrance, coursing with langourous speed through his mind, he was in the cave where he had held Jack the Wolf a prisoner.

He sat up and pondered this with groggy slowness.

"Some horse, that, Stranger." The man's voice that had sounded thinly sinister had a humanized tone as he said this.

Carney's tongue was dry, puckered from the lowered vitality. He tried to answer, and the man, noting this, said: "Take your time, Mister. You're makin' the grade all right, all right. I knowed you was just asleep. Try this dope."

He poured some hot tea into a tin cup. It toniced the tired Carney; it was like oil on the dry bearings of a delicate machine.

"Some April shower," the man said, piling wood on the fire. "I heerd a horse neigh--it was kind of a squeal, and my bronch havin' drifted out to sea ahead of this damn gale, I thinks he's come back. I heerd his bell, and I makes a fight with ol' white whiskers--'twan't more'n 'bout ten yards at that--and there's that danged rat of yours, and he won't come in to the warm 'cause you'd got pinned agin a boulder and snow; he seemed to know that if he pulled too hard he'd break your danged neck. Then we got you in--that's all. Some horse!"

This and the warmth and the tonic tea brought Carney up to date. He held out his hand.

But a curious metamorphosis in the man startled Carney. He turned surlily to shake up the fire, throwing over his shoulder: "I ain't done nothin'; you've got to thank that little jack rabbit fer pullin' you through. I went out after my own bronch."

"But ain't I all right, Stranger?" Carney asked gently, for he had met many men in the waste places with just this curious antipathy to an unknown. Oregon was like that. Men living in the wide outside became like outcast buffalo bulls, in their supersensitiveness--every man was an enemy till he proved himself.

The man straightened up, and his eyes that were set too close together each side of the fin-like nose rested on Carney in a squinting look of distrust.

"I ain't never knowed but one man was _all right_, and the Mounted Police hounded him till he give up."

The cave man turned the stem of the pipe he had been smoking toward the horse. "That buckskin with the mule ears belongs to Bulldog Carney. Are you him, or are you a hawse thief?"

"How do you know the horse?"

"I got reason a-plenty to know him. He cleaned me out in Walla Walla when he beat Clatawa; and I guess you're the racin' shark that cold-decked us boys with this ringer."

Now Bulldog knew why the aversion.

"I'm Carney," he 'admitted; "but it was the gamblers put up the job; I just beat them out."

"Where d'you come from now?" the cave man asked.

"Bailey's Ferry," Carney answered in oblique precaution. He noticed that the other hung with peculiar intensity on his answer.

"How long was you fightin' that blizzard?"

"Since daylight--when I broke camp." Carney looked at his watch; it was three o'clock. "How long have I been here?"

"A couple of hours. Was you runnin' booze or hop, Bulldog?"

Carney started. Perhaps the cave man was conveying a covert threat, an intimation that he might inform on him. "Don't let's talk shop," he answered.

"I ain't got no sore spots on my hide," the other sneered; "I'm an ord'nary damn fool of a gold chaser, and I've been up in the Eagle Hills trailin' a ledge of auriferous quartz that's buck-jumpin' acrost the mountains so damn fast I never got a chanct to rope it. I'd a-stuck her out if the chuck hadn't petered. When I'd just got enough sowbelly to see me to the outside I pulled my freight. That's me, Goldbug Dave."

The other's statement flashed into Carney's mind a sudden disturbing thought--_food!_ He, himself, had about one day's supply--had he it? He turned to his dunnage and saddle that lay where they had been tossed by the cave man when he had stripped them from the horse. His bacon and bannock were gone!

Wheeling, he asked, "Did you see anything of my grub?"

"All that was on your bronch is there, Bulldog. I don't rob no man's cache. And all I got's here," he held up in one hand a slab of bacon, about four pounds in weight, and in the other a drill bag, in its bottom a round bulge of flour the size of a cocoa-nut "That's got to get me to Bailey's Ferry," he added as he dropped them back at the head of his blankets.

A subconscious presentment of trouble caused Carney, through force of habit, to caress the place where his gun should have been--the pigskin pocket was empty.

The other man bared his teeth; it was like the quiver of a wolf's lip. "Your Gatt must've kicked out back there in the snow; I see it was gone."

Bulldog knew this was a lie; he knew the cave man had taken his gun. He ran his eye over his host's physical exhibit--when the time came he would get his gun back or appropriate the one so in evidence in the other's belt. He went back to his dunnage, a thought of the buckskin in his mind; to his joy he found the horse's oats safe in the bag. This fastened the idea he had that the other had stolen his food, for his bacon and bannock had been in the same bag, they could hardly have worked out and the oats remain.

He sat down again, and mentally arranged the situation. He could hear outside the blizzard still raging; he could see in the opening the swirling snow that indeed had gradually raised a barrier, a white gate to their chamber. This kept the intense cold out, a cold that was at least fifty below zero. The snow would lie in the valleys through which the trail wound twenty feet deep in places. They had no snowshoes; he had no food; and Goldbug Dave's store was only sufficient for a week with two men eating it.

He knew that there was something in Dave's mind; either a bargain, or a fight for the food. They might be imprisoned for a month; a chinook wind might come up the next day, or the day following that would melt the snow with its soft warm kiss like rain washes a street.

Carney was not hungry; the strain had left him fagged--he was hungry only for rest; and the buckskin, he knew, felt the same desire.

He lay down, and had slept two hours when he was wakened by the sweet perfume of frying pork.

Casually he noticed that but one slice of bacon lay in the pan. He watched the cook turn it over and over with the point of his hunting knife, cooking it slowly, economically, hoarding every drop of its vital fat. When the bacon was cooked the chef lifted it out on the point of his knife and stirred some flour into the gravy, adding water, preparing that well-known delicacy of the trail known as slumgullion.

Dave withdrew the pan and let it rest on the stone floor just beside the fire; then he looked across af Carney, and, catching the gray of his opened eyes, worded the foreboding thought that had been in Carney's mind before he fell asleep.

"I ain't got no call to give you a show-down on this, Bulldog, but I'm goin' to. When I snaked you in here that didn't cost me nothin'; anyways you was down and out for the count. Now you've come back it ain't up to me to throw my chanct away by de-clarin' you in on this grub; I'd be a damn fool to do it--I'd be just playin' agin myself."

Then he spat in the fire and held the pan over its blaze to warm the slimy mixture.

Carney remained silent, and his host, as if making out a case for himself continued: "We may be bottled up here for a week, or a month. Two men ain't got no chanct on that grub-pile, no chanct."

"Why don't you eat it then?" and Carney sat up. "I could, 'cause it's mine; but I got a proposition to make--you can take it or leave it."

"Spit it out."

"It's just this"--the fox eyes shifted uneasily to the little buckskin, and then back to Carney's face--"I'll share this grub if, when it's gone, you cut in with the bronch."

Carney shivered at this, inwardly; facially he didn't twitch an eye; his features were as immobile as though he had just filled a royal flush. The proposition sounded as cold-blooded as if the other man had asked him to slit the throat of a brother for a cannibalistic orgy.

"It's only ord'nary hawse sense," Dave added when Carney did not speak; "kept in the snow that meat'd last us a month. Feelin's don't count when a man's playin' fer his life, and that's what we're doin'."

"I don't dispute the sense of your proposition, my kind friend," Carney said in a well-mastered voice: "I'm not hungry just now, and I'll think it over. I've got a sneaking regard for the little buckskin, but, of course, if I don't get out he'd starve to death anyway."

"Take your time," and the owner of the pan pulled it between his legs, ate the slice of bacon, and with a tin spoon lapped up the glutinous mess.

Carney watched this performance, smothering the anger and hunger that were now battling in him. It was a one-sided argument; the other man had a gun, and Carney knew that he would use it the minute his store of provisions were gone--perhaps before that. And Carney was determined to make the discussion more equitable. Once he could put a hand on the dictator, the lop-sided argument would true itself up. As to killing the little buckskin that had saved his life--bah! the very idea of it made his fingers twitch for a grasp of the other's windpipe.

For a long time Carney sat moodily turning over in his mind something; and the other man, having lighted his pipe, sat back against the wall of the cave smoking.

At last Carney spoke. "There's a way out of this."

"Yes, if a chinook blows up Kettlebelly Valley--there ain't no other way. The manna days is all gone by."

"There's another way. This is an old worked-out mine we're in, the Lost Ledge Mine."

"She's worked out, right enough. There never was nothin' but a few stringers of gold--they soon petered out."

"When the men who were working this mine pulled out they left a lot of heavy truck behind," Carney continued. "There's a forge, coal, tools, and, what I'm thinking of, half a dozen sets of horse snowshoes back there. I could put a set of those snowshoes on the buckskin and make Bucking Horse in three or four days. He wore them down in the Cour d'Alene."

"If you had the grub," Dave snapped; "where're you goin' to get that?"

"Half of what you've got would keep me up that long on short rations."

"And what about me--where do I come in on givin' you half my grub?"

"The other half would keep you alive till I could bring a rescue party on snowshoes and dog-train." Dave sucked at his pipe, pondering this proposition in silence; then he said, as if having made up his mind to do a generous act: "I'll cut the cards with you--your bronch agin half my chuck. If you win you can try this fool trick, if I win the bronch is mine to do the same thing, or use him to keep us both alive till a chinook blows up."

From an inside pocket of his coat he brought forth a pack of cards, and slid them apart, fan-shaped, on the corner of his blanket.

Carney was almost startled into a betrayal. On the backs of the cards winged _seven blue doves_. It was the pack that had been stolen from Seth Long's pocket, and the man that sat behind them was the murderer of Seth Long, Carney knew. Yes, it was the same pack; there was the same slight variation of the wings. In a second Carney had mastered himself.

"I guess it's fair," he said hesitatingly; "let me think it over--I'm fond of that little cuss, but I guess a man's life comes first."

He sat looking into the fire thinking, and if Dave had been a mind reader the gun in his belt would have covered Carney for the latter was thinking, "There are three aces in that pack and the fourth is in my pocket."

Then he spoke, shifting closer to the blanket on which the other sat:

"I'll cut!"

"Draw a card, then," Dave commanded, touching the strung-out pack.

Carney could see the acute-angled wings of the middle dove on a card; he turned it up--it was the ace of diamonds.

"Some draw!" Dave declared. Then he deftly flipped over the ace of spades, adding: "Horse and horse, Bulldog; draw agin."

"Shuffle and spread-eagle them again, for luck," Carney suggested.

Dave gathered the cards, gave them a riffle, and swept them along the blanket in a tenuous stream.

Carney edged closer to the ribbon of blue-doved cards; and the owner of them, a sneer on his lips, craned his head and shoulders forward in a gambler's eagerness.

Intensity, too, seemed to claim Bulldog; he rested his elbows on his knees and scanned the cards as if he hesitated over the risk. There, a little to the right, he discovered the third ace, the only one in the pack. If he turned that Dave could not tie him again. He knew that the minute he turned over that card the cave-man would know that he had been double-crossed in his sure thing; his gun would be thrust into Carney's face; perhaps--once a killer always a killer--he would not hesitate but would kill.

So Carney let his right hand hover carelessly a little beyond the ace, while his left crept closer to Dave's right wrist.

"Why don't you draw your card?" Dave snarled. "What're you----"

Carney's right hand flopped over the ace of clubs, and in the same split second his left closed like the jaws of a vise on Dave's wrist.

"Turn over a card with your left hand, quick!" he commanded.

Dave, as if in the act of obeying, reached for his gun with the left hand, but a twist of the imprisoned wrist, almost tearing his arm from the shoulder socket, turned him on his back, and his gun was whisked from its pigskin pocket by Carney.

Then Bulldog released the wrist and commanded: "Draw that card, quick, or I'll plug you; then we'll talk!"

Sullenly the other turned the card: as if in mockery it was a "jack."

"You lose," Carney declared. "Now sit back there against the wall."

Cursing Bulldog for a cold-deck sharp, the other sullenly obeyed.

Then Carney turned up the end of Dave's blanket and found, as he knew he should, Hadley's plethoric wallet, and his own six-gun. This proceeding had hushed the other man's profane denunciation; his eyes held a foreboding look.

Carney stepped back to the fire, saying: