THE NIGHT RIDER
February had been a month of tremendous rains. Days of downpour were succeeded by days of leaden skies and damp, brooding warmth, and then the clouds opened again and the downpour was renewed. Along the Mother Lode the rivers ran bank-high and the camps sat in lagoons, the sound of running water rising from the old flumes and ditches. Down every gully that cut the foothills came streams, loud-voiced and full of haste as they rushed under the wooden bridges.
It was a night toward the end of the month, no rain falling now, but the sky sagging low with a weight of cloud. An eye trained to such obscurity could have made out the landscape in looming degrees of darkness, masses rising against levels, the fields a shade lighter than the trees. These were discernible as huddlings and blots and caverned blacknesses into which the road dove and was lost. To the left the chaparral rose from the trail's edge in dense solidity, exhaling rich earth scents and the aromatic breath of pine and bay. The roadbed was torn to pieces, ruts knee-high; the stones, washed loose of soil, ringing to the blow of a moving hoof.
A rider, advancing slowly, had noticed this and with a jerk of his rein, directed his horse to the oozy grass along the side. Here, noiseless, man and beast passed, a moving blackness against stationary black, leaves and branches brushing against them. Neither heeded this; both were used to rough ways and night traveling and to each every foot of the road was familiar.
Under a roof of matted branches they drew up; the horse, the reins loose, stretched its neck, blowing softly from widened nostrils. The man took a match box from his pocket, struck a light and looked at his watch—it was close on ten. The flame, breaking out in a red spurt, gilded the limbs of the overarching trees, the glistening leaves, the horse's glossy neck and the man's face. It glowed beneath the brim of his hat like a portrait executed on a background of velvet varnished by the match's gleam—it was the face of Garland the outlaw.
His hand again on the rein sent its message and the horse padded softly on through the arch of trees to the open road. Had it been brighter Garland could have seen to the right rolling country, fields sprinkled with oak domes, falling away to the valley, to the left the chaparral's smothering thickness. Between them the road passed, a pale skein across the backs of the foothills, connecting camps and little towns. Farther on the Stanislaus River, rushing down from the Sierra, would crook its current, to run, swift and turbulent, beyond the screen of alders and willows.
The road ascended, and on a hillcrest he again halted and looked back, listening. Unimpeded by trees, the thick air holding all sound close to the earth, he could hear far-distant noises. The bark of a dog came clear—that was from Alec Porter's ranch on the slopes toward the valley. Facing ahead he caught, faint and thin, the roar of the Crystal Star's stamp mill. Over to the right—the road would loop down toward it at the next turning—was Columbus, gutted and dying slowly among its abandoned diggings.
He avoided this turn, taking a branch trail that slanted through the thicket, wet leaves slapping against him, the horse's hoofs sucking into the spongy turf. It was still and dark, the air drenched with the odors of mossed roots and pungent leaves. When he emerged, the lights of Columbus shone below, a small sprinkling of yellow dots gathered about the central brightness of the Magnolia Saloon. The night was so still he could hear the voices of roysterers straggling home.
Presently the rushing weight of the Stanislaus River swept along the nearby bank. He could hear the rustle of its current, the wash of its waves sucking and nosing on the stones; feel the breath of its swollen tide chilled by mountain snows. It was up to the alder bushes, nearly flood high, cutting him off from a detour he had hoped to make—he would have to ride through San Marco. He put a spur to his horse and took it boldly, hoping the mud would dull the sound of his passage. The cabins and shacks that fringed the town were dark but in the main street there were lights, from the ground floor of the Mountain Hotel where he caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved men playing cards, from the Pioneer Saloon, whence the jingling notes of a piano issued. There was less mud than he had expected and the thud of his flying hoofs was flung from wall to wall and called out a burst of barking dogs, and a startled face behind a drawn curtain in a red-lit cabin window.
Then away into the darkness—round Chinese Crossing, under the eaves of the spreading plant of the Northern Light, up a hill and down on the other side through a tunnel of trees to the Stanislaus Ferry. As he passed into their hollow he could hear the thunder of the Lizzie J's stamps across the river, beating gigantic on the silence, shaking the night.