CHAPTER VI
THE BATTLE
Too late to interfere in the struggle about to be enacted, the girl stood rigidly beside a great red pine tree, fixing her gaze upon Van, on whose heels, as he walked, jingled a glinting pair of spurs.
From the small corral he was leading forth as handsome an animal as Beth had ever seen, already saddled, bridled—and blindfolded. The horse was a chestnut, magnificently sculptured and muscled. He was of medium size, and as trim and hard as a nail. His coat fairly glistened in the sun.
Despite his beauty there was something about him that betokened menace. It was not altogether that the men all stood away—all save Van—nor yet that the need for a blindfold argued danger in his composition. There was something acutely disquieting in the backward folding of his ears, the quiver of his sinews, the reluctant manner of his stepping.
Beth did not and could not know that an "outlaw" is a horse so utterly abandoned to ways of broncho crime and equine deviltry that no man is able to break him—that having conquered man after man, perhaps even with fatal results to his riders, he has become absolutely depraved and impossible of submission. She only knew that her heart was beating rapidly, painfully, that her breath came in gasps, that her whole nervous system was involved in some manner of anguish. She saw the Chinese cook run past to witness the game, but all her faculties were focused on the man and horse—both sinister, tense, and grim.
Van had not turned in Beth's direction. He was wholly unaware of her presence. He halted when the horse was well out towards the center of the open, and the outlaw braced awkwardly, as if to receive an attack.
With the bridle reins held in his hand at the pommel of the saddle, Van stood for a moment by the chestnut's side, then, with incredible celerity of movement, suddenly placed his foot in the stirrup and was up and well seated before the blinded pony could have moved.
Nothing happened. No one made a sound. No one, apparently, save Beth, had expected anything to happen. She felt a rush of relief—that came prematurely.
Van now leaned forward, as the horse remained stiffly braced, and slipping the blindfold from the pony's eyes, sat back in the saddle alertly.
Even then the chestnut did not move. He had gone through this ordeal many times before. He had often been mounted—but not for long at a time. He had even been exhausted by a stubborn "broncho buster"—some hardy human burr who could ride a crazy comet—but always he had won in the end. In a word he had earned his sobriquet, which in broncho-land is never lightly bestowed.
Van was not in the least deceived. However, he was eager for the conflict to begin. He had no time to waste. He snatched off his hat, let out a wild, shrill yell, dug with his spurs and struck the animal a resounding slap on the flank, that, like a fulminate, suddenly detonated the pent-up explosives in the beast.
He "lit into" bucking of astounding violence with the quickness of dynamite.
It was terrific. For a moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed with eccentric motion.
The horse shot up in the air like a loose, distorted piece of statuary, blown from its pedestal by some gigantic disturbance. He appeared to buckle in his mid-air leap like a bended thing of metal, then dropped to the earth, stiff-legged as an iron image, to bound up again with mad and furious gyrations that seemed to the girl to twist both horse and rider into one live mass of incongruity,
He struck like a ruin, falling from the sky, went up again with demon-like activity, once more descended—once more hurtled wildly aloft—and repeated this maneuver with a swiftness utterly bewildering.
Had some diabolical wind, together with a huge, volcanic force, taken insane possession of the animal, to fire him skyward, whirl him about, thrash him down viciously and fling him up again, time after time, he could not have churned with greater violence.
He never came down in the same place twice, but he always came down stiff-legged. The jolt was sickening. All about, in a narrow, earth-cut circle he bucked, beginning to grunt and warm to his work and hence to increase the deviltry and malice of his actions.
Van had yelled but that once. He saw nothing, knew nothing, save a dizzy world, abruptly gone crazy about him.
To Beth it seemed as if the horror would never have an end. One glimpse she had of Van's white face, but nothing could it tell of his strength or the lack thereof. She felt she must look and look till he was killed. There could be no other issue, she was sure. And for herself there could be no escape from the awful fascination of the merciless brute, inflicting this torture on the man.
It did end, however, rather unexpectedly—that particular phase of the conflict. The horse grew weary of the effort, made in vain, to dislodge the stubborn torment on his back. He changed the program with the deadliest of all a broncho's tricks.
Pausing for the briefest part of a second, while Van must certainly have been reeling with hideous motion and jolt, the chestnut quickly reared on high, to drop himself clean over backwards. It was thus that once he had crushed the life from a rider.
"Oh!" screamed Both, and she sank beside the tree.
The men all yelled. They were furious and afraid.
With hoofs wildly flaying the air, while he loomed tall and unreal in such an attitude, the broncho hung for a moment in mid-poise, then dropped over sheer—as if to be shattered into fragments.
But a mass of the bronze-like group was detached, and fell to one side, on its thigh. It was Van. He had seen what was coming in time.
Instantly up, as the brute rolled quickly to arise, he leaped in the saddle, the horn of which had snapped, and he and the chestnut came erect together, as if miraculously the equestrian group had been restored.
"Yi! Yi!" he yelled, like the madman he was—mad with the heat of the fight—and he dug in his spurs with vicious might.
Back to it wildly, with fury increased, the broncho leaped responsively.
Here, there, all the field over, the demon thrashed, catapulting incredibly. He tried new tricks, invented new volcanics of motion, developed new whirlwinds of violence.
Once more, then, as he had on the first occasion, the beast reared up and fell backward to the earth. Once more Van dropped away from his bulk and caught him before he could rise. This time, however, he did not immediately mount—and the men went running to his side.
"Fer God's sake, boy, let me kill the brute!" cried Gettysburg taking up a club.
"I'll shoot him! I'll shoot him! I'll shoot him!" said Napoleon wildly, but without any weapon in his hands.
Beth beheld and heard it all. She was once more standing rigidly by her tree, unable to move or speak. She wished to run to Van as the men had run, but not to slay the broncho—only to beg the horseman not to mount again.
She saw him push the men away and stand like the broncho's guard. His face was streaked with blood—his blood—jolted alike from his mouth and nose by the shocks to which he had been subjected.
"Let the horse alone!" he commanded roughly. "Good stuff in this broncho—somewhere. Get me a bottle of water, right away—a big one—get it full."
His partners started at once to raise objections. The Indian stood by stolidly looking on.
"You can't go no further. Van, you can't——" started Gettysburg.
"Sominagot! Una ma, hong oy! Una ca see fut!" said the Chinese-cook, swearing vehemently in the language likeliest to count, and he ran at once towards the kitchen.
Van was replacing the blindfold on the broncho's eyes. The animal was panting, sweating, quivering in every muscle. His ears went backward and forward rapidly. The blindfold shut out a wild, unreasoning challenge and defiance that burned like a torch in his eyes.
Algy came running with a big bottle, filled and corked.
"Fer God's sake, leave me kill him!" Gettysburg was repeating automatically. "Van, if you ain't got no respect fer yourself, ain't you got none left fer us old doggone cusses?"
"Give me the bottle, Algy," Van replied. "You're the only game sport on the ranch."
Still he did not discover Beth. His attentions were engrossed by the horse. He was dizzy, dazed, but a dogged master still of his forces. Up he mounted to the saddle again, the bottle held firmly in his grasp.
"Slip off the blinder," he said to his friends, and Algy it was who obeyed.
"Damn you, now you buck!" cried Van wildly, and his heels ignited the volcano.
For five solid minutes the broncho redoubled his scheme of demoniac fury. Then he poised, let out a shrill scream of challenge, and abruptly raised to repeat the backward fall.
Up, up he went, an ungainly sight, and then—the heavens split in twain.
He was only well lifted from the earth when, with a thunderous, terrible blow, Van crashed the bottle downward, fairly between his ears, and burst it on his skull.
The weapon was shattered with a frightening thud. Red pieces of glass and streaming water poured in a cataract down across the broncho's eyes as if very doom itself had suddenly cracked. A cataclysm could not have been more horrible. An indescribable fright and awe overwhelmed the brutish mind as with a cloud of lead.
Down swiftly he dropped to his proper position, perhaps with a fear that his crown was gaping open from impact with the sky. He was stunned by the blow upon his brain, and weakened in every fiber. He started to run, in terror of the thing, and the being still solid in the saddle. Wildly he went around the cove, in the panic of utter defeat.
The men began to cheer, their voices choked and hoarse. Van rode now as fate might ride the very devil. He spurred the horse to furious, exhausting speed, guiding him wildly around the mountain theater. Again and again they circled the grassy arena, till foam and lather whitened the broncho's flank, chest, and mouth, and his nostril burned red as living flame.
When at last the animal, weary and undone, would have sobered down to a trot or walk, Van forced him anew to crazy speed. At least five miles he drove him thus, till the broncho's sides, like the rider's face, were red with blood mingled with sweat.
Beth, at the climax, had gone down suddenly, leaning against the tree. She had not fainted, but was far too weak to stand. Her eyes only moved. She watched the two, that seemed welded into one, go racing madly against fatigue.
At last she beheld the look of the conquered—the utter surrender of the broken and subdued—gleam dully from the wilted pony's eyes. She pitied the animal she had feared and hated but a few brief moments before. She began to think that the man was perhaps the brute, after all, to ride the exhausted creature thus without a sign of mercy.
She rose to her feet as the two came at last to a halt, master and servant, conquered and conqueror, man and quivering beast.
Then Van got down, and her heart, that had pitied the horse, welled with deeper feeling for the rider. She had never in her life seen a face so drawn, so utterly haggard beneath a mask of red as that presented by the horseman.
Van nearly fell, but would not fall, and instead stood trembling, his arm by natural inclination now circling the neck of the pony.
"Well, Suvy," he said not ungently, "we gave each other hell. Hereafter we're going to be friends."
Beth heard him. She also saw the chestnut turn and regard the man with a look of appeal and dumb questioning in his eyes that choked her—with joy and compassion together. She someway knew that this man and horse would be comrades while they lived.
Half an hour afterward as she, Van, and Elsa rode forward as before, she saw the man in affection pat the broncho on the neck. And the horse pricked his ears in a newfound gladness in service and friendship that his nature could not yet comprehend.