CHAPTER XXXVINemesis
THE hills were wrapped in the hush of the close of day. The sun had long since dropped behind the skyline of mountain-tops. And now the heavens, which had flamed out in a glorious wake, were faded to the thin, cold yellow which the purple of evening was deepening every moment. In a short time the lesser glory of a myriad night-lights would embark upon its brief, triumphant reign.
Night was already in the heart of the great forests. The last of the twilit distance had been swallowed up by the advance of hungry shadows. Now, with darkness reigning, the hush was crowded with the strange pianissimos of invisible life, and the uneasy creak of tree-trunks, stirred by the cold breath from the glacial heights, that was insufficient to do more than provoke a chill shudder down the stately aisles.
A camp-fire was smouldering comfortingly at the feet of the man squatting over it. He was a queer, crouching figure, with hands clasped tightly about his drawn-up knees. His somewhat sunken eyes looked to shine with a desperate gleam as they caught the ruddy reflection of fitful flame. A single revolver was strapped about his waist.
His clothes were sufficiently scant for the chill of the night. They were rough, and worn, and looked to be loose on a body that had lost some of its wonted robustness. The pipe thrust between his jaws was unlit, empty. From the crown of his loose-brimmed prairie hat, drawn low over his head, and his lean cheeks, with their stubbleof black beard and whisker, right down to his long, heavy boots, he looked unclean, unkempt, something of the “mean-white” so despised by the manhood of the outworld.
But Andy McFardell’s appearance at the moment did him less than justice. It was the result of a long, weary trail. The man was wasted, underfed, hard driven. His life for many days had been little better than that of some forest beast, for his way had lain unmapped, unscheduled. He had been moving blindly, searching a region where the only humanity he was likely to encounter must be avoided. Careless of himself, careless of everything but his task, now with hope soaring high, now with despair wringing his heart, he had moved on and on with tireless purpose.
Near by a rifle lay on the ground, and a few yards away his horse was tethered at a place where the only possible feed was the green foliage of a low-growing shrub. The beast was in no better case than its rider. Even in the uncertain light of the camp-fire the sharp angles of its quarters were plainly discernible, and the dejected droop of its whole body was pitiful as it slumbered standing. Close at hand, as near to the fire as safety permitted, the man’s blanket was lying ready for the moment when sleep overtook him. But that moment was not yet.
He had no intention of slumbering for hours yet. Sleep just now was the last thing that concerned him. He wanted to think. He wanted to plan. He desired to map out to the last detail all that was yet to come. He was in that condition of mental exaltation when physical needs and comforts had no place in his consideration. It was sufficient that he had lived for this moment—this great moment when he saw the man who had been the first cause of his downfall held absolutely at his mercy.
Mercy? He knew no such word. There was no mercy for Jim Pryse. There was no mercy for any one. He was fighting for some sort of worldly salvation for himself.It was the only sort of salvation he understood, and furthermore, he realised that it looked to be within his grasp.
He bestirred himself, hardly realising his purpose or the thing he did. He released his knees and stood up. He moved over to a small pile of deadwood fuel, which was his whole store. He brought an armful back with him, and recklessly flung it on the fire. Then he squatted again upon his haunches.
He sucked at his empty pipe. He had nothing with which to refill it. But it gave him the taste of tobacco, and, in his present mood, it was sufficient.
He smiled as he watched the leap of the flames which so readily devoured the dead, resinous wood. It was a smile of fierce derision—an ugly smile that played about his loose mouth. What fools those folk were to have given him such a chance. He would never have found the place. He could never have hoped to do so.
The smile died out of his eyes as he thought of the prolonged labour of his search. The weary days, probing, seeking, in a hill country whose confusion was sufficient to madden the bewildered human mind. The days of blistering heat. The nights of cheerless solitude. The weary dispiritment of it all to a man who has given up everything, staked all upon the chance of things, relying only upon his endurance and the skill acquired in a police training. No, he would never have discovered Jim Pryse’s hiding-place but for the folly of those associated with him. And yet—and yet—there it was, so easy to arrive at. The way was practically a direct trail from the Marton farm.
His smile returned. He recalled the vision of Lightning as he had halted at the entrance to the valley of that queer creek. For himself he had only narrowly escaped the man’s observation. The old man’s attention had been held in another direction, or surely his discovery musthave been inevitable. Then had come that woman on her black horse. How he had strained to discover the talk that passed between them. But it had been impossible to hear from his shelter in the woods. He could see. Oh, yes, he could see. And when they moved up that queer creek together he was as close on their heels as safety from discovery permitted.
Then had come the arrival at the lagoon and the three-way source of the creek. And then—and then he had watched from a distance the ascent to the mouth of the cavern out of which the waters cascaded. Even now, in his mood of tremendous elation, he found the mystery of that weird inlet into the heart of the hills something profoundly absorbing.
He continued thinking of it all. He wanted to do nothing else. He remembered his own ultimate passage of that tunnel, and the revelation beyond. And he wondered how it came that Pryse had first discovered it. Yes. It certainly was no wonder that the police patrols sent out in pursuit of the man had returned to report complete failure. No police patrol could have found it; could ever have hoped to find it. No trained policeman would have admitted that that cavern mouth could by any miracle be the entrance to another, higher valley. But they would learn the facts now surely enough. Oh, yes.
He reached out a foot and kicked the fire together. Then he glanced over in the direction of his horse. After that he turned an ear to the sound of the breeze in the foliage overhead. It had increased. And the chill of the night had increased with it.
He turned again to the fire and shook his head.
No. He would tell them nothing but the fact that he could lead them to the hiding-place of Jim Pryse, who was due for five years in the penitentiary—with hard labour. He passed his tongue across his lips with intense satisfaction. Yes. He would tell Leedham Branch that.And his price for the man’s recapture would be very definite.
He hugged himself gleefully, for he knew that nothing could be more sure than that his price would be paid. If he knew the Police it certainly would. There would be no preliminary payment. But on fulfilment of his part it would be different. A cold word of approval. A word to the Sergeant-Major. A regimental order. Reinstatement. And then his final triumph. He would beg to be allowed to convey the prisoner to the penitentiary.
He laughed audibly as he wondered if the old kit he had returned into store would come back to him again. Perhaps.
Oh, it was fine. It was the happiest dream he had dreamed since he had set out. But it was more than a dream. It was a certainty—a whole, complete certainty, of which nothing short of death could rob him. With the first of to-morrow’s daylight he would set out for Calford. He should make it in two days. His old horse could do it. It would have to do it.
After awhile he rose again from the fire and replenished it with the remains of his fuel store. It was his final precaution. Then he rolled his blanket about his tough body, and, using his saddle for a pillow, stretched himself out as near to the fire as safety permitted. Far into the night he lay there, wakeful and thinking. But finally he slumbered with the dreamlessness of complete weariness.
Not for one moment had a single thought been given to the girl whose love he had so wantonly betrayed.
The trail lifted gently out of the valley. It was a trail Andy McFardell knew by heart. In one direction it led to the pleasant purlieus of Barney Lake’s hotel in Hartspool.In the other it lost itself somewhere behind him in the foothills he had learned to hate so cordially.
Somewhere up there, at the top of the incline, where a dense bush country reached out towards the wide undulations of the prairie beyond, the trail forked. And it was of that fork that the man was thinking, for the right-hand trail led to Calford, which was just now his whole object and purpose in life. He wanted to look once more upon the city from which he had so long been banished. He wanted to look on it with the eyes of a victor. For days now he had been living through a succession of wonderful anticipations. They had grown into almost grotesque proportions. He felt that his approach to Calford was in the nature of a triumphal progress.
His only anxiety now was for his horse. There was nothing else that could hold up the plans he had so carefully made. He had no sympathy for the well-nigh foundered creature. He cared not a jot that the poor thing was terribly saddle-galled. It meant nothing to him that its ribs looked as though the wind must blow through them, and its quarters were so lean and shrunken that the bones looked to be about to burst the skin covering them. He wanted to reach Calford. He intended to reach Calford. And his anxiety was for how the poor, wasted brute was to negotiate that last fifty miles still remaining. His mood was merciless. The horse would have to carry him till it dropped. After that? Well, after that, he would walk. That was all.
The dishevelled outfit topped the valley slope at last, and passed into something of shade from the brazen light of the sun. The road had entered a luxuriant spruce bluff that was wholly inviting, and stirred even the jaded spirits of the horse. The creature broke into a shuffling amble which by no effort of imagination could have been regarded as a lope.
The trail went on in its own peculiar winding fashionalong the line of least resistance, and there was not a moment when the horseman could obtain a view for more than fifty yards ahead. But that was of no consequence. The road was perfectly familiar. Andy McFardell knew there was less than half a mile to the fork, and then——
The ambling horse stumbled. The man flung himself back in the saddle with a shout of blasphemy. With all the strength of arms and body he sought to keep the falling creature on its feet. It was a vain effort. The beast was too utterly weary to help itself or be helped. It had tripped badly over some unseen obstruction, and pitched headlong.
For the second time in his life Andy McFardell found disaster in the fall of his horse.
The man sprawled clear of the saddle. He was unhurt, and, on the instant, made to spring to his feet. But he never got beyond a sitting posture. He was held there motionless and something dumfounded. As once before, a man was standing over him with a levelled gun. A pair of stern, merciless eyes were looking down into his. The face of the man was lined, and burnt to a deep bronze. It was old in years, but alight with cold purpose. Even the grey hair and the tatter of the whisker could not lessen the significance of the hate which shone so frigidly in his sunken eyes.
It was the last man Andy McFardell had thought to encounter. It was Lightning.