'drag' Harlan

CHAPTER I. A Desert Rider

A DESERT RIDER

From out of the shimmering haze that veiled the mystic eastern space came a big black horse bearing a rider. Swinging wide, to avoid the feathery dust that lay at the base of a huge sand dune, the black horse loped, making no sound, and seeming to glide forward without effort. Like a somber, gigantic ghost the animal moved, heroic of mold, embodying the spirit of the country, seeming to bear the sinister message of the desert, the whispered promise of death, the lingering threat, the grim mockery of life, and the conviction of futility.

The black horse had come far. The glossy coat of him was thickly sprinkled with alkali dust, sifted upon him by the wind of his passage through the desert; his black muzzle was gray with it; ropes of it matted his mane, his forelock had become a gray-tinged wisp which he fretfully tossed; the dust had rimmed his eyes, causing them to loom large and wild; and as his rider pulled him to a halt on the western side of the sand dune--where both horse and rider would not be visible on the sky line--he drew a deep breath, shook his head vigorously, and blew a thin stream of dust from his nostrils.

With head and ears erect, his eyes flaming his undying courage and his contempt for distance and the burning heat that the midday sun poured upon him, he gazed westward, snorting long breaths into his eager lungs.

The rider sat motionless upon him--rigid and alert. His gaze also went into the west; and he blinked against the white glare of sun and distance, squinting his eyes and scanning the featureless waste with appraising glances.

In the breathless, dead calm of the desert there was no sound or movement. On all sides the vast gray waste stretched, a yawning inferno of dead, dry sand overhung with a brassy, cloudless sky in which swam the huge ball of molten silver that for ages had ruled that baked and shriveled land.

A score of miles westward--twoscore, perhaps--the shadowy peaks of some mountains loomed upward into the mystic haze, with purple bases melting into the horizon; southward were other mountains, equally distant and mysterious; northward--so far away that they blurred in the vision--were still other mountains. Intervening on all sides was the stretching, soundless, aching void of desolation, carrying to the rider its lurking threat of death, the promise of evil to come.

The man, however, seemed unperturbed. In his narrowed, squinting eyes as he watched the desert was a gleam of comprehension, of knowledge intimate and sympathetic. They glowed with the serene calm of confidence; and far back in them lurked a glint of grim mockery. It was as though they visualized the threatened dangers upon which they looked, answering the threat with contempt.

The man was tall. His slim waist was girded by a cartridge belt which was studded with leaden missiles for the rifle that reposed in the saddle holster, and for the two heavy pistols that sagged at his hips. A gray woolen shirt adorned his broad shoulders; a scarlet neckerchief at his throat which had covered his mouth as he rode was now drooping on his chest; and the big, wide-brimmed felt hat he wore was jammed far down over his forehead. The well-worn leather chaps that covered his legs could not conceal their sinewy strength, nor could the gauntleted leather gloves on his hands hide the capable size of them.

He was a fixture of this great waste of world in whose center he sat. He belonged to the country; he was as much a part of it as the somber mountains, the sun-baked sand, the dead lava, and the hardy, evil-looking cacti growth that raised its spined and mocking green above the arid stretch. He symbolized the spirit of the country--from the slicker that bulged at the cantle of the saddle behind him, to the capable gloved hands that were now resting on the pommel of the saddle--he represented the force which was destined to conquer the waste places.

For two days he had been fighting the desert; and in the serene calm of his eyes was the identical indomitability that had been in them when he had set forth. As he peered westward the strong lines around his mouth relaxed, his lips opened a trifle, and a mirthless smile wreathed them. He patted the shoulder of the black horse, and the dead dust ballooned from the animal's coat and floated heavily downward.

"We're about halfway, Purgatory," he said aloud, his voice coming flat and expressionless in the dead, vacuum-like silence. He did not cease to peer westward nor to throw sharp glances north and south. He drew off a glove and pushed his hat back, using a pocket handkerchief to brush the dust from his face and running the fingers of the hand through his hair--thereby producing another ballooning dust cloud which splayed heavily downward.

"What's botherin' me is that shootin'," he went on, still speaking to the black horse. "We sure enough heard it--didn't we?" He laughed, again patting the black's shoulder. "An' you heard it first--as usual--with me trailin' along about half a second behind. But we sure heard 'em, eh?"

The black horse whinnied lowly, whereupon the rider dismounted, and stretched himself.

From a water-bag at the cantle of the saddle he poured water into his big hat, watching sympathetically while the big horse drank. Some few drops that still remained in the hat after the horse had finished he playfully shook on the animal's head, smiling widely at the whinny of delight that greeted the action. He merely wet his own lips from the water-bag. Then for an instant, after replacing the bag, he stood at the black's shoulder, his face serious.

"We'll hit the Kelso water-hole about sundown, I reckon, Purgatory," he said. "That's certain. There's only one thing can stop us--that shootin'. If it's Apaches, why, I reckon there's a long dry spell ahead of us; but if it's only Greasers----"

He grinned with grim eloquence, patted the black again, and climbed into the saddle. Again, as before, he sat silent upon his mount, scanning the sun-scorched waste; and then he rode forward.

An hour later, during which he loped the black horse slowly, he again drew the animal to a halt and gazed around him, frowning, his eyes gleaming with a savage intolerance.

The shooting he had heard some time previous to his appearance at the base of the big sand dune had not been done by Indians. He was almost convinced of that now. Or, if Indians had done the shooting, they had not yet observed him. The fact that he had seen no smoke signals proved that.

Still, there was the deep silence on every hand to bring doubt into his mind; and he knew that Indians--especially Apaches--were tricky, sometimes foregoing the smoke signals to lie in ambush. And very likely--if they had seen him coming--they were doing that very thing: waiting for him to ride into the trap they had prepared. He had not been able to locate the point from which the reports had come. It had seemed to him that they had come from a point directly westward; but he could not be sure, for he had seen no smoke.

He talked no more to the horse, sitting rigidly in the saddle, erect, his head bent a little forward, his chin thrusting, his lips curving with a bitterly savage snarl. He felt the presence of living things with him in the desert; a presentiment had gripped him--a conviction that living men were close and hostile.

Reaching downward, he drew the rifle from the saddle holster and examined its mechanism. Placing it across his knee, he drew out his heavy pistols, one after another, slowly twirling the cylinders. He replaced the pistols, making sure that the holster flaps were out of the way so that they would not catch or drag at the weapons when he wanted to use them--and with the rifle resting across his legs near the saddle horn, he rode slowly forward.

He swung wide of even the small sand dunes as he passed them, and he kept a vigilant eye upon the dead rocks that dotted the level at infrequent intervals. Even the cactus clumps received flattering attention; and the little stretches of greasewood that came within range of his vision were examined closely.

At the end of half an hour he had seen nothing unusual. Here and there he had noticed a rattler lurking in the shade of a rock or partly concealed under the thorny blade of a sprawling cactus; and he had seen a sage hen nestling in the hot sand. But these were fixtures--as was also the Mexican eagle that winged its slow way in mile-wide circles in the glaring, heat-pulsing sky.

The rider again halted the black horse. The presentiment of evil had grown upon him, and he twisted around in the saddle, sweeping the desolate vast level with cold, alert, puzzled eyes.

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