And Michael barked twice. The first time was when Harley Kennan, astride a hot-blooded sorrel colt, tried to make it leap a narrow stream. Villa4 reined5 in her steed at the crest7 beyond, and, looking back into the little valley, waited for the colt to receive its lesson. Michael waited, too, but closer at hand. At first he lay down, panting from his run, by the stream-edge. But he did not know horses very well, and soon his anxiety for the welfare of Harley Kennan brought him to his feet.
Harley was gentle and persuasive8 and all patience as he strove to make the colt take the leap. The urge of voice and rein6 was of the mildest; but the animal balked9 the take-off each time, and the hot thoroughbredness in its veins10 made it sweat and lather11. The velvet12 of young grass was torn up by its hoofs13, and its terror of the stream was such, that, when fetched to the edge at a canter, it stiffened14 and crouched15 to an abrupt16 stop, then reared on its hind17-legs. Which was too much for Michael.
He sprang at the horse’s head as it came down with forefeet to earth, and as he sprang he barked. In his bark was censure18 and menace, and, as the horse reared again, he leaped into the air after it, his teeth clipping together as he just barely missed its nose.
Villa rode back down the slope to the opposite bank of the stream.
“Mercy!” she cried. “Listen to him! He’s actually barking.”
“He thinks the colt is trying to do some damage to me,” Harley said. “That’s his provocation19. He hasn’t forgotten how to bark. He’s reading the colt a lecture.”
“If he gets him by the nose it will be more than a lecture,” Villa warned. “Be careful, Harley, or he will.”
“Now, Michael, lie down and be good,” Harley commanded. “It’s all right, I tell you. It’s an right. Lie down.”
Michael sank down obediently, but protestingly; and he had eyes only for the horse’s antics, while all his muscles were gathered tensely to spring in case the horse threatened injury to Harley again.
“I can’t give in to him now, or he never will jump anything,” Harley said to his wife, as he whirled about to gallop20 back to a distance. “Either I lift him over or I take a cropper.”
He came back at full speed, and the colt, despite himself, unable to stop, lifted into the leap that would avoid the stream he feared, so that he cleared it with a good two yards to spare on the other side.
The next time Michael barked was when Harley, on the same hot-blood mount, strove to close a poorly hung gate on the steep pitch of a mountain wood-road. Michael endured the danger to his man-god as long as he could, then flew at the colt’s head in a frenzy21 of barking.
“Anyway, his barking helped,” Harley conceded, as he managed to close the gate. “Michael must certainly have told the colt that he’d give him what-for if he didn’t behave.”
“At any rate, he’s not tongue-tied,” Villa laughed, “even if he isn’t very loquacious22.”
And Michael’s loquacity23 never went farther. Only on these two occasions, when his master-god seemed to be in peril24, was he known to bark. He never barked at the moon, nor at hillside echoes, nor at any prowling thing. A particular echo, to be heard directly from the ranch-house, was an unfailing source of exercise for Jerry’s lungs. At such times that Jerry barked, Michael, with a bored expression, would lie down and wait until the duet was over. Nor did he bark when he attacked strange dogs that strayed upon the ranch.
“He fights like a veteran,” Harley remarked, after witnessing one such encounter. “He’s cold-blooded. There’s no excitement in him.”
“He’s old before his time,” Villa said. “There is no heart of play left in him, and no desire for speech. Just the same I know he loves me, and you—”
“Without having to be voluble about it,” her husband completed for her.
“You can see it shining in those quiet eyes of his,” she supplemented.
“Reminds me of one of the survivors25 of Lieutenant26 Greeley’s Expedition I used to know,” he agreed. “He was an enlisted27 soldier and one of the handful of survivors. He had been through so much that he was just as subdued28 as Michael and just as taciturn. He bored most people, who could not understand him. Of course, the truth was the other way around. They bored him. They knew so little of life that he knew the last word of. And one could scarcely get any word out of him. It was not that he had forgotten how to speak, but that he could not see any reason for speaking when nobody could understand. He was really crusty from too-bitter wise experience. But all you had to do was look at him in his tremendous repose29 and know that he had been through the thousand hells, including all the frozen ones. His eyes had the same quietness of Michael’s. And they had the same wisdom. I’d give almost anything to know how he got his shoulder scarred. It must have been a tiger or a lion.”
* * * * *
The man, like the mountain lion whom Michael had encountered up the mountain, had strayed down from the wilds of Mendocino County, following the ruggedest mountain stretches, and, at night, crossing the farmed valley spaces where the presence of man was a danger to him. Like the mountain lion, the man was an enemy to man, and all men were his enemies, seeking his life which he had forfeited30 in ways more terrible than the lion which had merely killed calves31 for food.
Like the mountain lion, the man was a killer32. But, unlike the lion, his vague description and the narrative33 of his deeds was in all the newspapers, and mankind was a vast deal more interested in him than in the lion. The lion had slain34 calves in upland pastures. But the man, for purposes of robbery, had slain an entire family—the postmaster, his wife, and their three children, in the upstairs over the post office in the mountain village of Chisholm.
For two weeks the man had eluded35 and exceeded pursuit. His last crossing had been from the mountains of the Russian River, across wide-farmed Santa Rosa Valley, to Sonoma Mountain. For two days he had laired and rested, sleeping much, in the wildest and most inaccessible36 precincts of the Kennan Ranch. With him he had carried coffee stolen from the last house he had raided. One of Harley Kennan’s angora goats had furnished him with meat. Four times he had slept the clock around from exhaustion37, rousing on occasion, like any animal, to eat voraciously38 of the goat-meat, to drink large quantities of the coffee hot or cold, and to sink down into heavy but nightmare-ridden sleep.
And in the meantime civilization, with its efficient organization and intricate inventions, including electricity, had closed in on him. Electricity had surrounded him. The spoken word had located him in the wild canyons40 of Sonoma Mountain and fringed the mountain with posses of peace-officers and detachments of armed farmers. More terrible to them than any mountain lion was a man-killing42 man astray in their landscape. The telephone on the Kennan Ranch, and the telephones on all other ranches43 abutting44 on Sonoma Mountain, had rung often and transmitted purposeful conversations and arrangements.
So it happened, when the posses had begun to penetrate45 the mountain, and when the man was compelled to make a daylight dash down into the Valley of the Moon to cross over to the mountain fastnesses that lay between it and Napa Valley, that Harley Kennan rode out on the hot-blooded colt he was training. He was not in pursuit of the man who had slain the postmaster of Chisholm and his family. The mountain was alive with man-hunters, as he well knew, for a score had bedded and eaten at the ranch house the night before. So the meeting of Harley Kennan with the man was unplanned and eventful.
It was not the first meeting with men the man had had that day. During the preceding night he had noted46 the campfires of several posses. At dawn, attempting to break forth47 down the south-western slopes of the mountain toward Petaluma, he had encountered not less than five separate detachments of dairy-ranchers all armed with Winchesters and shotguns. Breaking back to cover, the chase hot on his heels, he had run full tilt48 into a party of village youths from Glen Ellen and Caliente. Their squirrel and deer rifles had missed him, but his back had been peppered with birdshot in a score of places, the leaden pellets penetrating49 maddeningly in a score of places just under the skin.
In the rush of his retreat down the canyon41 slope, he had plunged50 into a bunch of shorthorn steers51, who, far more startled than he, had rolled him on the forest floor, trampled52 over him in their panic, and smashed his rifle under their hoofs. Weaponless, desperate, stinging and aching from his superficial wounds and bruises53, he had circled the forest slopes along deer-paths, crossed two canyons, and begun to descend54 the horse-trail he found in the third canyon.
It was on this trail, going down, that he met the reporter coming up. The reporter was—well, just a reporter, from the city, knowing only city ways, who had never before engaged in a man-hunt. The livery horse he had rented down in the valley was a broken-kneed, jaded55, and spiritless creature, that stood calmly while its rider was dragged from its back by the wild-looking and violently impetuous man who sprang out around a sharp turn of the trail. The reporter struck at his assailant once with his riding-whip. Then he received a beating, such as he had often written up about sailor-rows and saloon-frequenters in his cub-reporter days, but which for the first time it was his lot to experience.
To the man’s disgust he found the reporter unarmed save for a pencil and a wad of copy paper. Out of his disappointment in not securing a weapon, he beat the reporter up some more, left him wailing57 among the ferns, and, astride the reporter’s horse, urging it on with the reporter’s whip, continued down the trail.
Jerry, ever keenest on the hunting, had ranged farther afield than Michael as the pair of them accompanied Harley Kennan on his early morning ride. Even so, Michael, at the heels of his master’s horse, did not see nor understand the beginning of the catastrophe58. For that matter, neither did Harley. Where a steep, eight-foot bank came down to the edge of the road along which he was riding, Harley and the hot-blood colt were startled by an eruption59 through the screen of manzanita bushes above. Looking up, he saw a reluctant horse and a forceful rider plunging60 in mid-air down upon him. In that flashing glimpse, even as he reined and spurred to make his own horse leap sidewise out from under, Harley Kennan observed the scratched skin and torn clothing, the wild-burning eyes, and the haggardness under the scraggly growth of beard, of the man-hunted man.
The livery horse was justifiably61 reluctant to make that leap out and down the bank. Too painfully aware of the penalty its broken knees and rheumatic joints62 must pay, it dug its hoofs into the steep slope of moss63 and only sprang out and clear in the air in order to avoid a fall. Even so, its shoulder impacted against the shoulder of the whirling colt below it, overthrowing65 the latter. Harley Kennan’s leg, caught under against the earth, snapped, and the colt, twisted and twisting as it struck the ground, snapped its backbone66.
To his utter disgust, the man, pursued by an armed countryside, found Harley Kennan, his latest victim, like the reporter, to be weaponless. Dismounted, he snarled67 in his rage and disappointment and deliberately69 kicked the helpless man in the side. He had drawn70 back his foot for the second kick, when Michael took a hand—or a leg, rather, sinking his teeth into the calf71 of the back-drawn leg about to administer the kick.
With a curse the man jerked his leg clear, Michael’s teeth ribboning flesh and trousers.
“Good boy, Michael!” Harley applauded from where he lay helplessly pinioned72 under his horse. “Hey! Michael!” he continued, lapsing73 back into bêche-de-mer, “chase ’m that white fella marster to hell outa here along bush!”
“I’ll kick your head off for that,” the man gritted74 at Harley through his teeth.
Savage75 as were his acts and utterance76, the man was nearly ready to cry. The long pursuit, his hand against all mankind and all mankind against him, had begun to break his stamina77. He was surrounded by enemies. Even youths had risen up and peppered his back with birdshot, and beef cattle had trod him underfoot and smashed his rifle. Everything conspired78 against him. And now it was a dog that had slashed79 down his leg. He was on the death-road. Never before had this impressed him with such clear certainty. Everything was against him. His desire to cry was hysterical80, and hysteria, in a desperate man, is
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