The Greatest Westerns of Ernest Haycox. Ernest Haycox

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СКАЧАТЬ on his life's vitality, slowly breaking down the fine machinery of his body. After the horse had thrown him he had crawled better than one mile along the gathering darkness to the cabin. The place was just as some itinerant trapper had left it—a pile of wood by the stove, a half-dozen battered utensils hung along the wall. But excepting a rind of bacon as hard as a rock and an empty flour sack there was nothing left to eat in the cupboard. During the first two days he considered himself absolutely destitute of food. After that an empty stomach jogged his wits and he experimented. He filled a lard pail with water. Turning the flour sack inside out he took his pocket knife and scraped away the gray film of flour left in the seams. This went into the pail of water. After it went the bacon rind. He stoked the stove and let the mixture boil of an hour.

      The lard can smelled bad to begin with, the bacon rind was not easy to look at. "However, it's nourishment, ain't it?" he consoled himself, and poured out a small portion of the brew. He had always heard that a starving man could eat anything and say that it was as good as a king's dish. The first drink of this rancid, anemic soup convinced him that was gross error. Nothing in all his mature experience tasted half as horrible. He choked down the revolt of his stomach and optimistically took his pulse. Maybe it was the last jog of nourishment in the bacon rind and flour that made him feel a kind of glow. Maybe it was just the hot water, maybe it was only the excitement of hope. All in all, it was a poor experiment. In fact, it seemed to make matters worse, for the hot water further aggravated the sensation of being as hollow as a drum. He drank a little more on the third day. But on the fourth day disgust took him and he threw can and contents across the room. "I'd as lief eat dead rats."

      Meanwhile, the snowdrift piled higher around the cabin, and he knew that unless he kept some sort of an alley cleared from the door the time would come when he couldn't get out, as weak as he was becoming. On hands and knees he crawled across the room and opened the door, to face a solid wall of snow. Very patiently he burrowed a tunnel upward through it, working in the manner of a mole. He reached daylight and looked into a dim, bleak world blasted by the bitter wind; he heard the shrill and weird wailing of the peaks lost above the pall. A minute or two of this was ample. He slid back into the cabin and built a stronger fire to thaw the frozen marrow of his bones.

      By the fifth day he had used all of the wood. The next fuel was the bunk. The posts and the lodgepole stringers went into the stove. All that was then left was the cupboard, and he was afraid that once the cupboard came down more rifts of the cabin wall would be uncovered there. Debating over this, the fire died and the snow water in the pan cooled. He pulled on his sock and shoe and rose to his one good foot.

      "Got to keep the fire burnin'," said he with a spry cheerfulness. "While I'm warm I might as well be good an' warm. When I'm cold it won't make no difference, anyhow. Mister Cupboard, come to your uncle."

      The cupboard was only a dry-goods box nailed to the wall. He hopped over to it and gripped the edges, hauling downward with his weight. The cupboard gave slightly and resisted. Jim Chaffee let his arm fall; and an expression of shocked surprise flickered across his slim face. Two ten penny nails—nothing more—anchored that box. And he couldn't pull it down. This was bold handwriting on the cabin wall. He became aware than that he was weaker than he figured and he made no further attempt at getting firewood. Instead, he hopped back to the stove and plunged into an involved train of thoughts.

      "Now this ain't really so bad. I'm alive, ain't I? I'm not hangin' by mere perspiration to the edge of the canyon. And I'm not dodgin' any bullets. Nobody can poison my soup, because there ain't any soup to poison. It bein' cold, I don't need to worry about bein' bit by a hydrophobia dog. Shucks, there's lots of things that can't happen to me. The point is, I wonder what Mack's up to?"

      He had promised to drop a line from Bannock City. Mack would worry about not getting a letter. Mack would begin to look ahead and count over possibilities. Knowing his partner very well, Jim understood that after a certain length of time had elapsed without word Mack Moran would not sit idle. The battling puncher would fet aboard a horse and investigate. Right there was a definite hope.

      "Question becomes, how long will he wait?" pondered Jim Chaffee. "If everything had gone according to schedule I'd have written three days ago, and he'd have said letter by now. He'll be wonderin' right now. But he'll wait another twenty-four hours, anyhow. Then he'll start up this way. If I can hold out till Tuesday—"

      Tuesday seemed remote. In fact the longer he studied his position the more impossibly distant Tuesday became. He took himself to account. "Listen, Chaffee, what's the idea of expectin' somebody else to hoist you out of this pickle? It ain't your style. You're twenty-one, free, white, and hungry. You got into this jackpot. Now it's up to you and nobody else. Do somethin'."

      A gunny sack lay over in one corner of the room. He boosted himself across the floor and got it. Taking his knife he cut a hole in the sewed end and shook out the dirt. Then he measured himself against it and slit an aperture on either side. Throwing the sack over his head he found he had a smock which, though quite dusty and smelling very evil, gave him so much extra protection. Thus far he had no idea at all of what he meant to do. The next logical thing seemed to be an inspection of his gun, and following that he moved toward the door.

      "It's a long way back to Gorman's lodge," he muttered. "Too far to crawl. But do somethin' anyhow. You can't expect a break unless you go out there and make one. Stick here much longer and you'll be pickin' bananas off the wall. It's serious when a man begins talkin' to himself unless he's a sheep herder. Just amble out and have a look."

      He opened the door and found the tunnel half filled in. So he took up the bitter work of clearing another alley to the surface. Once again the knife edge of the slashing wind bit into his bones, and once again he heard the shrill wailing of the peaks above him. According to his judgment it was around noon, but he had no way of exactly determining. There was no hint of sun in the cheerless snow mist, no hint of time's passage at all except the waxing and waning of the thin, bleak light. He was isolated, cut off from human kind in this high, storm battered world.

      The rounding alley of the pass beckoned either way. West was back to timber line, back to Gorman's. East was into the adjacent valley. All landmarks were buried, and the weaving, driving snow choked out everything but the immediate foreground. Rising to one knee he studied this desolation neither hopefully nor otherwise. He could fight, and he was so prepared to fight—the last great fight for simple existence; yet at the same time he was a gambler at heart and, being a gambler, studied his chances with a critical eye. Not for a moment did he allow himself the folly of optimism. He knew very well that the elements had him hamstrung, that they were pulling him down to a soundless and not unpleasant death. So much he admitted.

      "Why lay down and quit in that cabin? I might make it to Gorman's. I might. Wind's behind me and it's down grade. Well, if there's any other chances I'd better think of 'em right now before I start."

      He was conscious all of a sudden that the intense cold didn't bite him as it should. He wasn't feeling it like he ought to feel it. "A good man can stand lots of this," said he. "But it gets a thin old wolf like me sudden, I better be movin'. I sure do wish I could eat coffee and flapjacks in that little log house of mine once more."

      He crawled away from the tunnel, testing his strength against the snow. Ten yards left him doubtful. Twenty more yards and he stopped, breathing hard and feeling the quiver of his muscles. It may have been a momentary flash of despair that turned him about for a last look at the summit cabin; it may have been a recognition of defeat; or it may have been some impalpable note of warning singing along the whipping wind. But he turned at any rate; and deep in the mist, beyond the cabin, he saw a tall silhouette moving across the gray background of the storm. It woke all the hope he had left; it dredged up the last of his strength. He stood on his knees, trying to penetrate the pall; he shouted, knowing that the wind whipped his words on down the slope—the wrong way. Then the silhouette disappeared.

      "Eyes СКАЧАТЬ