WHEN the march began again, it turned and angled straight north through a canyon that led into a broken sea of mountains. In fact, the peaks often had wave shapes, the tall crests curving up and seeming ready to break forward or back. But they were all naked rock, those summits. That was why they shone like water in the afternoon sun.
Even the scenery grew wilder and stranger, and Derry trudged on silently. The sweat sprang constantly on his skin and instantly dried away to a dust of salt in the acrid air. Some of the ravines were tormenting ovens. Others were merciful flumes of shadow through which the waters of coolness poured over the marchers. And always, up there in the lead, the old man and Barry Christian led the way. The strength of Old Man Cary in the saddle was an amazing thing. He could hardly walk without tottering, but in the saddle he was of redoubled strength.
In the heat of the day, he stripped off his shirt. His head was left bare, and that polished scalp always carried a burning highlight. He seemed to be on fire, but he preferred the Indian half-nakedness to clothes of any sort One could see the wide spring of his shoulders, the gaunt tendons that reached up and down the sides of his withered neck. One could count his ribs like great fingers clasping his skeleton sides. He was death-in-life. But he was up there at the head of his clan, and something told Tom Derry that the old man would die before he relinquished his place. He had been content to loll about when he was still in the valley which he had made the home of his people, but when they were cast out of that residence, he would lead them again until they found means to settle in another place. There was still more strength in his will than in all the rest of his people.
In the meantime, Derry was guarded before and behind. He had expected that the Carys would treat him with more hatred than ever, since his battle with Hugh. Instead, their entire attitude seemed to have undergone a favourable change. And finally Hugh himself, with bloodstained bandages over his face, rode up beside the pedestrian and dismounted, and walked with him for a little.
“I’d give you the mustang to ride,” said Hugh Cary, “but most of the boys would be agin’ it. They’re comin’ around, but most of ’em would still be agin’ it. Doggone me, they want to see how long you can last on foot, like this.”
The friendliness underlying this speech amazed Derry, and he stared at his huge companion.
The one battered eye of Hugh that appeared under the edge of the upper bandage squinted back at Derry with something like humour.
“You licked me proper,” Hugh declared. “Them that know always lick them that don’t know. The old man says that, and the old man can’t be wrong. One of these days, maybe you’ll teach me how to box. You got an overhand wallop that dropped on me out of nothin’ at all. It sure plastered me. It dragged my face all down toward my chin. But it taught me something.”
His cheerfulness was immense.
“When you socked me that first couple in the ribs, I thought you was goin’ to keep hammerin’ at the body. Why didn’t you?”
“Because it was like hitting at the staves of a barrel,” said Derry, smiling in turn.
“Those punches sprung the staves of the barrel so doggone bad it pretty nigh gave me heart failure,” admitted Hugh. “I laughed, but I felt pretty sick. That was what brung my guard down, and you got at my face. My jaw pretty nigh was cracked, the first time you slammed it. But the eyes — you didn’t hit nothin’ but eyes, after that. I felt like my eyes was each as big as a saucepan. Where’d you learn to box, brother?”
“On a ship,” explained Derry. “A fellow taught me. I had to learn or get my head knocked off. And I got my head knocked off a good many times before I learned how to block. After I could block, then I had to learn how to hit. There were only two buttons that rang a bell in the head of that Yankee skipper. One was the point of his chin, and one was the centre of his stomach.”
Hugh Cary laughed. Then, growing more sober, he asked: “How come Barry Christian to hate you so much? Because you hooked up with Jim Silver?”
“I didn’t hook up with Silver. He had me — and he let me go. That was all.” Then he added, out of the bitterness of his heart: “But I wish that I had hooked up with Silver.”
“Ay,” said Hugh Cary, “I seen him once. I seen him, and Frosty, and Parade. I come over a ridge, and on the next one, toward the sun, there was a deer runnin’ lickety-split. You never seen a deer leg it like that one. It was half a mile off, and no good me tryin’ at it. And then the deer takes a jump in the air, and drops, and lies still, and I hear the report of a rifle come floatin’ up to me soft and easy out of the hollow of the valley, like a trout driftin’ up through still water. And I looked down there into the hollow and I seen a golden hoss, and a grey wolf, and a man. I couldn’t see the man very good, but by the shape of his head and shoulders, I’d know him again. He looked like he could lift a ton or run faster than a stag. I knew him by the look — and that was Jim Silver. It give me a kind of creeps, seein’ him like that. I was glad that he hadn’t seen me instead of the deer.”
“Why?” asked Derry. “He wouldn’t have shot at you, would he?”
“Maybe not,” said Cary, “but you might ‘a’ noticed that the Carys are kind of wild and free and do as they please, no matter what toes they step on. And Jim Silver don’t like that sort of thing. He’s best pleased by them that keep their own places. Wildness he don’t like, and every man that does wrong is kind of a private enemy, for Silver. It ain’t no business of his, but he makes it his business. Understand?”
“I begin to understand,” said Derry gloomily.
“And no man could stand agin’ him,” said Hugh Cary, with awe in his voice, “except that lies and meanness is things that Silver don’t understand, and that’s why Barry Christian is still got two legs to walk on the earth, instead of bein’ dead and under the ground. Here comes M’ria driftin’ back, and I reckon she wants to talk to you. Be seein’ you ag’in, partner.”
There was something about this interview that cleared the mind of Derry of many obscurities. It made of Buck Rainey, for one thing, a complete and perfect liar, for Derry remembered every word of Rainey’s first description of Silver as the incarnation of evil. It made of Rainey the type of the lying, shifting enemy who managed to exist against Silver by sheer force of trickery, and not of strength.
It made of Silver himself that brightness and greatness at which Derry had been able to guess when he was still in the hands of the strange man.
Then “Molly” Cary was back beside him. She, too, dropped from the saddle to the ground and stepped lightly along with him. The whip welt that ran off the bare of her shoulder under the deer-skin jacket had grown and swollen; it was a bright crimson now. But when Derry asked her about it, she merely smiled. She said not a word. And then she examined him with her eyes, brightly and carefully.
“The whip cuts are stinging you pretty bad, Tom,” she remarked, “but as long as they don’t make you sick, it’s all right. Pain doesn’t matter. Not till it makes you sick. What was Hugh saying?”
“Asking me to teach him boxing.”
“He’s the best of the lot — except the old man. He’s more like what the old man must have been.”
Derry squinted ahead at the drawn skeleton that was now the old man, but if that frame were stuffed out with young power and sleeked over with young flesh, it might well have been closely similar to the bulk of Hugh.
He asked the girl where they were heading.
“For Wool Creek,” she said.
“And for what?”
“Gold,” she answered. “Christian has news about a gang of men that went up through the old diggings on Wool Creek. Tenderfeet, mind you! Away up there, to have a vacation and shoot at deer they couldn’t hit, and fish for trout they couldn’t catch, and then one of them finds an old pan and washes out some mud — and there’s gold in the pan! Well, that’s the story — and at that the whole crowd went wild, and started washing, and they’ve been there washing gold for a couple of months, and they’ve found tons of it.”
“Tons?” exclaimed Derry.
“A whole lot of it,” she answered. “Enough to load a lot of mules, anyway. They’ve started coming up Wool Creek, now, to head through the pass and get back to civilization and all be rich, but I guess they’ll have to go through without the gold. It’ll stick to Christian and Cary fingers!”
She laughed as she said this.
“How does that strike you, Molly?”
“Why, it strikes me good,” she answered, surprised. “Why not?”
“Robbery?” he asked. “That strikes you good, does it?”
“Robbery?” she answered, frowning. “No, you wouldn’t rob anyone you know. You wouldn’t rob a friend. You’d die first. But robbing strangers — what’s wrong with that?”
Derry looked blankly ahead of him, and stumbled over a rock. He was amazed. No matter how long he was with this odd clan, he still was very far from coming to any clear understanding of them. Their habits of living were queer, but their habits of thinking were yet more odd.
“We’ll clean ’em out,” said the girl, with enthusiasm, “and then the Cary share of it, along with the money the old man got for setting Christian free, will be enough to buy us another valley, somewhere off in the mountains — a bigger and better valley than we had before, somewhere that the winters won’t be so cold and freeze so many cows, every now and then. We’ll have enough money to stock the new place, too, they say. And you’ll move in with the rest of us and settle down with me.”
Her eyes shone as she visualized the future.
Derry spread out his hands.
“Look, Molly,” he said. “I’ve always lived off the thick of the skin of my hands. I’ll keep on living that way. Stolen money may be all right for the Carys, but it’s no good for the Derrys.”
“You’ve got some funny ideas,” she told him. “I don’t like that one.”
“Don’t you?” asked Derry, setting out his jaw. “I’ll tell you a funnier idea than that one, though. When you and I settle down, you won’t be a Cary any longer. You’ll be a Derry.”
“Will I? Well, it sounds about the same.”
“It won’t be the same, though. The Derrys are straight. They don’t live on loot.”
She flew into a passion. “What do I care about you and your ideas?” she exclaimed. “Gold was made to be taken, and only fools won’t try to get their share. You’re too good for the Carys, are you? Then you’re too good for me!”
So she whipped into the saddle and rode hastily back to rejoin the old man.