The Greatest Westerns of Ernest Haycox. Ernest Haycox

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СКАЧАТЬ may have been that Xavier Francois Lonestar Lee heard that scream, though the noise of the canyon might have absorbed so shrill a sound before it reached the man's ears. But at any rate he saw the posse through the fog and he heard them shooting; and he obeyed a natural, primitive impulse. Raising the shotgun he fired point-blank at the nearing boat. The fine shot sang and snapped in the water. Mack yelled again and ducked. "Let 'er go! The crazy loon's reachin' for more shells!"

      The second blast came sleeting across the interval, indescribably vicious as it sheered and spat in the current and whined against the boat's side. Jim Chaffee felt a thin, sharp pain slicing into his shoulder; turning, he saw that Lee was making ready for another aim, and he understood then how impossible the situation had of a sudden become. Buckshot was deadly; he dared not attempt to bluff through it. So he reversed the impulse of the oars and the boat, urged onward by the added force, raced into the dim, droning depths of the canyon.

      Mack Moran's immediate reaction was one of absurd, hilarious satisfaction. "Doggone that Lee person. He'll never get this boat back again. Serves him right." Then he noticed Chaffee's wrist muscles snapping hard against the oars and at that point the full realization of the approaching ordeal smote him squarely in the middle of his shoulder blades. His leathery cheeks tightened; through the gray gloom his face seemed to pucker owlishly, and there appeared to be a withdrawal of blood from his compressed lips. "Man, let's you and me hit for the shore sudden."

      "What shore?"

      "Huh?" Mack looked around, startled. The lower end of that gravel strip upon which Lee's house precariously perched was sliding past them, narrowing swiftly to nothing more than a ledge. Even as he looked that ledge fell away into the river and was absorbed by the sheer face of the canyon wall and there was nothing left but a stubborn, black expanse of pitted rock rising and vanishing beyond the curling mists. The booming fury of water struggling through the farther recesses grew perceptibly louder. Chaffee threw his weight against the oars and the skiff, traveling stern foremost, shot along like a thing alive. Mack protested. "Say, we're goin' thirty miles an hour, or I'm an Australian boomerang thrower. What's the need of all this hustle? Let's slow down some and consider the matter in detail. Me, I don't like to rush."

      "Ain't going as fast as we seem," said Chaffee. "But we might just as well get this over with. It don't do any good to think about Devil's Boil too long. Wonder if that posse is racin' along the rim to reach Linderman's ahead of us?"

      Sight of Lee's ferry long ago had been shut off by the fog wreath. "Last I saw," said Mack, "they was all lined up on the shore, gawpin' at us. Didn't seem to be in no hurry."

      "Reasonable for them to look at it that way," was Chaffee's grim observation. "Better take off your boots and shirt."

      "No, sir, I hate to get my feet wet."

      "Well, here's where we start. Lay down on the bottom, Mack, so I can see the rocks comin' up."

      Mack obeyed. The boat began to pitch, stern rising and slapping into the rollers. Up from the throat of the gorge came the sound as of a high wind beating through a forest, of water pouring mightily over a cliff. Chaffee lifted his oars and let the craft drift of its own momentum. Ahead, the river seemed to slant at an increased angle—another piece of deception moving water holds up to man—and from wall to wall there was nothing but white spearheads flashing dully in the half light. The boat leaped onward and began to turn. Chaffee dipped an oar, almost losing it. He dug in, pulled the boat square with the current, and rested again. The black jaws of a rock yawned beside him, spray lashed out and spattered the prone Mack.

      "Sunk?" yelled Mack, half rising.

      The boat rose and dropped with a force that knocked the puncher flat on his face. They were gripped by warring eddies, pulled and battered and rocked. Chaffee lowered both oars and braked the boat's speed, body weaving, muscles and joints crackling with the immense pressure. Mack lifted his head again and found himsellf canted against one side, staring into a hollow that appeared to be carved from green glass. The boat sprang back; all this was behind them, smooth water lapped against the boards. Chaffee sagged and wiped sweat and spray from his face.

      Mack crawled to the stern seat and rolled a cigarette, trying to speak casually. "Well, guess that was the worst of it, uh?"

      "You know better. We ain't been nowhere yet."

      "Our sunny, light-hearted friend speakin'. Never thought I'd ever get seasick out in the middle of the desert. But I shore squirmed back yonder. Say—look—there's a place we could step ashore. See that shelf?"

      "Yeah. And see what's back of it. A wall, straight up. Would it buy us anything to land? Can't fly out of this hole. And nobody's goin' to row down after us."

      "If I ever get ashore once—" muttered Mack.

      "Do you hear somethin'?"

      The canyon trembled with it—a faint, pulsating snore that sounded like the guttering of some primeval monster; yet the tempo remained constant, never varying, never dying out. The farther they floated the deeper and more thunderous was the reverberation thrown across the towering walls. And somehow, for all the advancing light of day, the gorge was plunged in a more profound twilight. It began to narrow, and Chaffee discovered a point jutting out in front of them. The smoothness of the stream face was broken into warning ridges. White water beckoned. Around that approaching point began the Long Slide, terminating in the Devil's Boil. Of the four men who had started from Lee's in the past thirty years, three had lost their lives in the Boil; and to that mad, tortured area with its great vaults battered by dynamic hydraulic attacks and its tempestuous suction Mack Moran and Jim Chaffee were now rapidly approaching.

      "Yuh, I hear it," grumbled Mack. He looked longingly to the faint strip of shelving on the south side. "I bet a man could cut some sort of a stone ladder up there. Jim."

      "What with?"

      "There yuh go again. Well, call me for breakfast, Mister Chaffee. If I hear a trumpet or a harp I'll know it won't be beans and bacon. Go to it, kid."

      The rough water took them, the boat shot around the jutting point of the south wall. The incline of the river's bed seemed far greater than at any previous stage of the trip. As they straightened into the Long Slide a vast roar battered either precipice and they were actually dizzied by the impact of a vibrating, stuttering conflict of force against force just beyond sight. In another moment a charging white wall of water broke through the fog; spray covered them. Chaffee, dog tired, pulled in the oars.

      "What's the use of dippin' a toothpick in Niagara?" The torrent of sound tore the words out of his mouth. Mack looked backward. Chaffee leaned down. "One man made it! Hang on to your pants! Here we go!"

      Mack's face was blurred in the mist, but he winked and clamped both arms around the stern seat. Chaffee jammed his feet between boat bottom and the middle seat. The skiff swayed and lurched into a trough; at that moment Chaffee had a clear view of the Devil's Boil—nothing but cascading fury one side and a slick, uprearing wall of water that seemed to defy the law of gravity on the other. Seeing it, he pushed the oars under him, pulled himself as low as he could, and tightened all muscles.

      There is in water a power that nothing else under the blue canopy of heaven possesses. Man may dam it, yet the slowly impounding force laps away at the barrier, constantly making sallies and thrusts and forever threatening to break free; man may ride upon it, but never with a sure sense of safety, for it is a thing alive, ceaseless and destructive. It wears away all before it; it moves onward, nor can anything check its final victory. So, as Chaffee rode into the mists of fury, he resigned himself to death as others had done, even though in the dim recesses of his being the unquenchable flame of life desire still burned. СКАЧАТЬ