THE CHALLENGE OF THE BRUTE
There had been yellow, mellow weather for weeks on weeks, but this day dawned hard and cold. Some projected rancor of the winter was in the air. Westward the peaks were blanketed with thick gray clouds, while eastward a sullen redness showed where the sun strove to rise on an angry world. The wind was the kind that scrapes raw the nerves, buffeting man and beast with cross-currents and unexpected blasts, howling and shrieking around chimneys and gables, covering everything with dust and sand.
Haig awoke to hear the wind tearing at the shutters and the roof, the pines on the hillside thundering like surf, the hills reverberating with the maddest trumpetings. He lay a moment listening; his pulse quickened, at the sound of all that tumult; and he leaped from his bed calling loudly for Slim Jim. It was a day for battle. The very elements were up and at it, as if all nature had enlisted in the struggle between man and brute.
For all his eagerness, he ate his breakfast leisurely, resolved to make no such error as he had made before. There should be no mad haste and no anger; no working on an empty stomach, on nerves drawn taut. Bacon and eggs and buckwheat cakes, with coffee and a single 194 pipe, occupied an hour or more; and then, feeling fit for anything, he set out for the corrals.
He did not scruple this time to take every precaution known to the experts of the corrals. Bill was mounted on the wisest horse in the stables, with a lariat ready against the event of Sunnysides trying the fence again. Then Haig directed Farrish, Curly, and Pete to rope and saddle the outlaw, saving himself for the supreme struggle. But to their astonishment there was none of the difficulties in the preliminaries that they encountered on the previous occasion; only two or three vicious movements, no more.
“Foxy, ain’t you?” said Farrish to the outlaw, when the saddle was on. “Savin’ yourself, are you, you yellow devil?”
The horse was led as before into the larger corral. He stepped nimbly, obediently, as if resistance were the farthest thing from his thoughts, even when Haig, his arch-enemy, walked up to him, grasped the bridle, and looked steadily into his eyes. For a moment all stood still, as the challenge passed between man and brute. Then Haig tested the cinches of the saddle, looked carefully around him, and disposed the men with a final word to each.
“Now then! Off with it!”
Farrish removed the last rope, and then only the bridle rein in Haig’s hand, and the fence yonder, stoutly repaired since the last battle, remained between Sunnysides and the sandhills of the San Luis. True, only a fence and a guard had held him all these weeks of his captivity, but that fence had been built up, on his arrival, two planks higher than the one in which he now 195 found himself again, and from which he had all but escaped at the first opportunity.
Haig put his feet cautiously into the stirrup, and sprang into the saddle. He was prepared for a repetition of the trick that had almost cost him his life, and ready to swing himself out of the saddle if Sunnysides should go over backward again. But the horse was indeed “foxy”; one would have said that he knew his man, and would waste no time or energy on manœuvers that his enemy had discounted. For some seconds he stood quite motionless, while Haig settled firmly in his seat, and gripped the bridle rein expectantly. At length the horse lifted and turned his head, and looked, as it appeared, toward the western mountains, half hidden in the gray swirl of clouds.