The Man from the Sky
Max Brand
(Frederick Faust)
I
When Torridon wakened, the sun was not five minutes below the horizon, and he jumped from his blankets and reproached himself in silent gloom. For many days, now, he had been striving to imitate the habits of Roger Lincoln. That great hunter had observed that life on the plains was best begun with the first grayness of dawn, and best ended with the total dark. Or, he would say, a little more morning, a little more evening, made one day into two. Even the Indians might be gained upon in this manner, and as for the ordinary whites who trekked across the plains, they worked like moles, a step at a time, blindly.
But here was another day stolen almost upon Torridon before he was on his feet.
He was surprised that the fire was not burning, but, as a matter of fact, Roger Lincoln was nowhere around. The gray mare grazed close to the camp, near tall Ashur. But Roger Lincoln apparently had gone off to hunt; his rifle was missing with him.
This was not extraordinary. Between the dark and the dawn always was the best hunting, he used to observe—when the plains animals were least aware of the world, their senses yet unsharpened, and before they were aware that the sheltering blanket of the night had been withdrawn from them they might be stolen upon and dispatched.
The sun had a dazzling eye out over the plain before Torridon had finished these observations. In a moment more it was above the edge of the sky. It was time to prepare breakfast. As a matter of fact, Roger Lincoln did not like to make fires in the day; the thin arms of smoke that rose waved signals to a great distance and attracted unknown eyes.
“Everything you don’t know is dangerous,” Lincoln was apt to say.
Therefore, in the preparation of the fire, Torridon was extra careful. In a small patch of brush nearby he found some dead branches, and these he broke up small, and lighted and maintained the smallest of fires. He had learned from Lincoln, too, that a great flare of fire is not necessary for cookery. A small tongue of flame playing constantly right on the bottom of a pan will accomplish great results. And it is a fine art to extend gradually a bed of coals that casts off no smoke at all.
By great efforts and perfect concentration, he was assured when he had breakfast prepared that there had not been more than one or two puffs of smoke large enough to be worth noticing. The rest was a fume that hardly could have been visible two hundred yards away.
When he had finished the cookery, he sat down to wait. It might be that Lincoln had found an attractive shot, wounded the game, and been drawn far afield to track it.
So he waited a full hour, ate a cold meal, and settled himself again.
The sun was high, walking slowly through the heavens, and the heat became momently greater. The air was delicate with the scent of the May bloom of the prairie. And he began to drowse.
Since they began their long march for Fort Kendry, and had voyaged beyond the settlements into the emptiness of the plains, Lincoln had insisted on hard journeys every day, and Torridon, in consequence, had been put through a severe grilling. He had grown thinner and more brown in the open air. His muscles were taking on a tough fiber such as they never had possessed before, but nevertheless it had often been torture. He was just beginning to be inured to the labor and the constant racking in the saddle. If it had not been for the silken gaits of the great black stallion, he knew that he never could have kept up his end. But now he saw a chance to rest.
Roger Lincoln, no doubt, never would have dreamed of drowsing in the uncovered nakedness of the prairie during the day, but that was because he was almost more panther than man. And young Torridon felt that he was gathered into a deep security by the very fact that, no matter what enemy the prairie might hold, it also held Roger Lincoln. To the wisdom, the skill, the courage of that famous man he implicitly bowed.
So he fell sound asleep, with his head in the shadow of a small bush. There would be a quiet lecture from Lincoln when that hunter returned to the camp, but the joy of relaxing in the sun that drew the soreness from his muscles was more than the youngster could forego.
He wakened at last with a start, feeling that he had been hearing whispering voices. His heart was beating wildly, and he got to his knees and looked cautiously about him.
Lincoln’s gray mare and Ashur still were grazing nearby; nothing stirred on the plain except the shining footprints of the wind upon the grass, now and again.
He was reassured by this sense of peace until, glancing down, he saw that his shadow lay small at his feet. The sun was straight overhead, and he had slept away the entire morning. Half a day had gone by, and there was no trace of Roger Lincoln’s return.
In seven hours he could have gone afoot nearly twenty miles out and twenty miles back. But it might be that, starting back with a heavy load of newly shot game, he had stepped in a hole and wrenched an ankle. Even Roger Lincoln could not be entirely impervious to accident.
Torridon made up two packs, carefully, like a schoolboy working to please a master, for Lincoln was a shrewd and keen critic of everything that his pupil did. He knew how to make silence thunder with his displeasure.
When that work seemed fairly well done, then he mounted Ashur, and, taking the gray on the lead, he began to ride through the prairie. Lincoln had showed him how to go about such a thing, using a starting point as the center of widening circles, and so tracing a larger and a larger web, covering every inch of the ground.
For two hours he kept Ashur in brisk motion. At the end of that time he paused at the verge of a riverbed and began to arrange his thoughts. There had been no sight and there had been no sign of his companion. Though, from the back of a horse, half a dozen times he had been on low hillocks from which the plain was visible for many miles around, nothing had moved into his ken.
He freshened his grip on the heavy rifle that he had learned to balance across the pommel of his saddle, and fought back the panic that leaped up in his breast. Something had happened to Roger Lincoln! He swallowed hard when he thought what that meant.
Fort Kendry, where he hoped to find Nancy Brett, still was eight days’ march away from them, Lincoln had said, and, as for its direction, he had only the slightest idea. He could see, now, that he had been following the great scout with half of his brain asleep, trusting blindly to the guidance of his companion and never trying to think out the trail problems for himself.
He was lost, then. He was totally lost.
Across his mind went grim memories of tales he had heard from Lincoln about the plains—men who wandered for weary weeks, with no game in sight, with no glimpse of a human being, until chance saved them—saved one out of a hundred who passed through such a time.
And he, Paul Torridon, ignorant totally of all that a lonely man should do, ignorant of the way to return, ignorant of the trail that lay ahead, what would become of him? Dreadful panic gripped him, shook him. He was lost!
He got down off his horse and took out paper and pencil. He wrote swiftly:
To whoever finds my body. If my gun and my horse are near, you are welcome to them. Treat the horse well. It is the best I ever have seen. Only—if you wish to ride him, don’t wear spurs. They drive him mad. Whatever I have you are welcome to.
But for heaven’s sake take the enclosed note to Nancy Brett, at Fort Kendry. She is living there with her cousin, Samuel Brett, and his wife.
He signed that Paul Torridon, and then he went on to write, more slowly:
Dear Nancy:
I write this knowing that I am hopelessly lost on the plains and that I haven’t one chance in a hundred of coming out alive. This will reach you only if white men and not red find my body.