the Night Horseman (1920) by Max Brand Read Free Book Online

wings 'em. Plants a chunk of lead in a shoulder, or an arm, or a leg. That's all. They ain't no love of blood in Dan-except--"
    "Well?"
    "Doc," said Buck with a shudder. "I ain't goin' to talk about the exceptions. Mostly the news we gets of Dan is about troubles he's had. But sometimes we hear of gents he's helped out when they was sick, and things like that. They ain't nobody like Dan when a gent is down sick, I'll tell a man!"
    The doctor sighed.
    He said: "And do I understand you to say that the girl and this man-Whistling Dan, as you call him-are intimately and sentimentally related?"
    "She loves him," said Daniels slowly. "She loves the ground he walks on and the places where he's been."
    "But, sir, it would seem probable from your own reasoning that the return of the man, in this case, will not be unwelcome to her."
    "Reason?" broke out Daniels bitterly. "What the hell has reason got to do with Whistling Dan? Man, man! If Barry was to come back d'you suppose he'd remember that he'd once told Kate he loved her? Doc, I know him as near as any man can know him. I tell you, he thinks no more of her than-than the wild geese think of her. If old Joe dies because Dan is away-well, Cumberland is an old man anyway. But how could I stand to see Barry pass Kate by with an empty eye, the way he'd do if he come back? I'd want to kill him, and I'd get bumped off tryin' it, like as not. And what would it do to Kate? It'd kill her, Doc, as sure as you're born."
    "Your assumption being," murmured the doctor, "that if she never sees the man again she will eventually forget him."
    "D'you forget a knife that's sticking into you? No, she won't forget him. But maybe after a while she'll be able to stand thinkin' about him. She'll get used to the hurt. She'll be able to talk and laugh the way she used to. Oh, doc, if you could of seen her as I've seen her in the old days--"
    "When the man was with her?" cut in the doctor.
    Buck Daniels caught his breath.
    "Damn your eternal soul, doc!" he said softly.
    And for a time neither of the spoke. Whatever went on in the mind of Daniels, it was something that contorted his face. As for Byrne, he was trying to match fact and possibility and he was finding a large gap between the two; for he tried to visualize the man whose presence had been food to old Joe Cumberland, and whose absence had taken the oil from the lamp so that the flame now flickered dimly, nearly out. But he could build no such picture. He could merely draw together a vague abstraction of a man to whom the storm and the wild geese who ride the storm had meaning and relationship. The logic which he loved was breaking to pieces in the hands of Randall Byrne.
    Silence, after all, is only a name, never a fact. Thee are noises in the most absolute quiet. If there is not even the sound of the cricket or the wind, if there are not even ghost whispers in the houses, there is the sigh of one's own breathing, and in those moments of deadly waiting the beat of the heart may be as loud and as awful as the rattle of the death-march. Now, between the doctor and the cowpuncher, such a silence began. Buck Daniels wanted nothing more in the world than to be out of that room, but the eye of the doctor held him, unwillingly. And there began once more that eternal waiting, waiting, waiting, which was the horror of the place, until the faint creakings through the windshaken house took on the meaning of footsteps stalking down the hall and pausing at the door, and there was the hushing breath of one who listened and smiled to himself! Now the doctor became aware that the eye of Buck Daniels was widening, brightening; it was as if the mind of the big man were giving way in the strain. His face blanched. Even the lips had no color, and they moved, gibberingly.
    "Listen!" he said.
    "It is the wind," answered the doctor, but his voice was hardly audible.
    "Listen!" commanded Daniels again.
    The doctor could hear it then. It was a pulse of sound obscure as the