Blue Kingdom (29 page)

Dodd was silent, but he nodded a little, looking off into the distance as though he were seeing and recognizing the truth there.

“You'll be able to carry Jimmy. He's light.”

“Me?” shrilled Jimmy Larren. “Who's gonna carry me out?” He worked himself up on one elbow. “Whatcha mean, chief?”

“What good will it be to me to have you here?” asked Dunmore sternly.

“Can't I clean and load guns as good as the next one? You wouldn't turn me off, chief. What's the good of anything, if I can't make the last march with you? What's the good of belongin' to a friend, if you can't make the last stand with him, eh?”

Dunmore leaned over him. “If the two of us are gone, Jimmy, who'll be alive to really look after her?”

Jimmy Larren opened great eyes. “You mean I'm to watch after her?”

“Aye,” whispered Dunmore. “Even whether she knows it or not. I've tried to bring her down out of the mountains, Jimmy, and I've failed. You'll tackle it, one day, and win.”

Jimmy Larren looked at the ceiling with anguished eyes. “Have I gotta leave you, chief?”

“There ain't any other way, Jimmy. You can see for yourself. So long, old-timer.”

They shook hands, and Dunmore, lifting him, placed him in the lean, strong arms of Whitey Dodd. One last glance Jimmy cast at his hero. He tried to make a last speech, but his manhood, at that moment, deserted him. He buried his face on the shoulder of the old man and wept, fighting hard against the noise so that it sounded only like a soft moaning.

Whitey Dodd said in farewell: “Possession is nine points in the law, young feller. You got your own life in your hand. Keep a-hopin', and you may learn how to keep it there. Nobody's dead till he's closed his eyes.”

He went out, bearing the boy, and Beatrice lingered an instant behind.

“Is there one big thing that you want done in the world?” she asked. “If there is, I'd try to do it for you.”

“You would? Then send Furneaux back to his own people.”

“Send him back?”

“It's what I came up here to do, Beatrice. I thought that I could beat Tankerton and all his men. But I was foolish to think so.”

“Furneaux!” she gasped again. “But you taunted him, and worked up trouble with him.”

“One of the best ways of sending a man home is on a stretcher.”

“Then . . . I'll send him if I can. Is there anything else?”

“There's nothing else,” he said, “except for yourself. Get out of Tankerton's hands, Beatrice.”

“I shall. I shall,” she said. “I thought he was a lion, but after I saw. . . .” She checked herself, although the very heart of Dunmore yearned to hear more. “Furneaux and myself . . . and nothing that is for you, Carrick?”

“Aye, one thing that's for me. Take Jimmy under your wing. He'll be worth the trouble, goodness knows, because I never seen the makings of a better man.”

“I'll do it,” said the girl. “Oh, Carrick, why did you make me hate you those other days? But I was blind. I should have known you were playing some deep game unselfishly. I should have guessed from little Jimmy Larren, when he picked you out of all the band.”

“It's time to go,” he announced. “Furneaux and the rest will be wonderin' at you if. . . .”

“Dunmore! Dunmore!” shouted Furneaux loudly. “Are you holding the girl back?”

He led her to the door. “She's comin' at once,” he answered, and added softly to her: “There's one last thing you could do. Remember me on Sundays and on holidays, now and then, and think of me as a fellow who lived a lazy and a useless and a pretty crooked life, but, before the end, he thanked heaven that he tried to do one decent thing . . . and failed tryin' it. And
he found one woman and loved her, and lost her . . . but died mighty glad of the findin'.”

He saw that she would have spoken again. But, like Jimmy, she seemed choked.

“Good-bye,” said Dunmore, and helped her through the doorway, and closed the door after her.

When Dunmore was alone, he looked around him and prepared to die. From the edges of the clearing, he heard a sudden shouting and whooping, by which he knew that the girl had come to the hands of the Tanker-tons again. The next moment, it seemed that a hundred rifles blazed. He distinctly heard the thudding of the bullets into the wood, and then a
clang
and a crashing from the pans that hung on the wall behind the stove. That answered what Dodd had said of the impregnable walls of his house. In certain spots, at least, the lead would fly through like water through a sieve.

He tried the flooring. The boards were loose and came away easily in his hand. He ripped up three of them. From a corner he took a shovel and started scooping up the earth beneath the flooring.
Clang!
rang a bullet that glanced from the iron blade of the shovel. Another clipped close past his head. But every swing of his arms drove the shovel deeply into the soil, and quickly he had entrenched himself.

As for the wound on his cheek, it was a trifle. Already
the blood had stopped flowing. He laid himself down behind his barricade and waited.

Wasp sounds darted above his head. Again and again the pans crashed against the wall; a steady tattoo drummed upon the stove; they were searching the cabin through and through with rapid fire from repeating rifles, and no doubt they would continue steadily.

No, the firing died off. Only a single shot came now and again, as though, having vented their spleen in a first outburst, they were content to keep him disturbed with an occasional shot.

He chose that moment to slip across the floor to one of Dodd's loopholes, and, when he looked out, he was glad that he had come in time. For he saw a pair of shadows work out from the trees and slide rapidly along the ground toward the nest of rocks. He drew up his rifle and fired. The leading shadow twisted into a knot, like a worm that has been stepped upon. The second bounded to its feet and fled. Dunmore fired low, aiming between hip and thigh, and saw the fellow topple. The speed of his running carried him along, and with a cry he rolled back into the shelter of the trees.

There was a wild burst of rifle fire, a chorus of fierce shouting that reminded him of the baying of a pack of hounds, and something stung the calf of his leg.

At the same instant the door of the cabin swung open with a loud creaking. He whirled, rifle at the ready, but no one appeared. There was only the deadly whistling of the bullets as they cut through the opening and lodged with sullen
thud
s against the rear wall of the house. Then he knew what had happened. The rusty bolt had been cracked in two by the impact of
bullets, and the weight of flying lead had driven the door wide open. He was not really sorry. The door itself was too thin for a shield, and with it open he had a wider view of what was happening outside. He could see, for instance, the wounded man rolling on the ground in agony.

At the first let-down in the fire, he raised his head above his trench and thundered: “Go get your sick man, Tankerton. I won't shoot you down.”

A bullet, as though in answer, struck the dirt before him and filled his mouth with a loose shower of soil.

He spat it out with a curse, and heard the clear, rising voice of Tankerton calling: “I'll take that offer, Dunmore! Two of you fellows go out and get Mike.”

There was a pause. Dunmore could hear the muttering of the distant voices, almost immediately drowned by a roar of the wind, which was rising rapidly. Then, out of the shadows, appeared two men without guns in their hands. They skulked along uncertainly, as though they expected bullets at any moment, but Dunmore held his fire. He saw them reach Mike, and pick up the hurt man between them. Mike groaned loudly, then was carried forward in a run, like children fleeing from the dark, but still Dunmore did not fire. As a result, he got a rousing cheer from the Tankertons. Yet he would not trust them as much as they had trusted him. He went instantly to the back of the cabin, as the firing recommenced, and from a loophole there he scanned that side of the battle.

The ground was empty, as well as he could see, but sight now was difficult. Rapid clouds had swept across the face of the moon and the woods were blurred
masses of shadow. A moment later, the rain rattled against the thatched roof. The wind whistled it into the cabin, and the face of Dunmore was wet with water and with blood.

The firing instantly increased in volume. Across the threshold of the door and against the window, a steady succession of bullets plunged. That was to keep him from trying to break away in the dimness caused by the rainstorm. He had other troubles within the shack, for with a sudden crashing, the stove, battered by many bullets, lurched to the floor. The room filled with smoke and steam. Scattered embers rolled everywhere, and he had to become a firefighter.

With a blanket, he thrashed right and left, and stamped out the bigger fragments. He won, but a stifling mist had filled the room. He could hardly breathe in it, and through that the wasp sounds of the bullets still were darting everywhere. A knife thrust, it seemed, raked his left side—such a wound as Jimmy had received.

Dunmore sat down with a sudden sense that he was lost, indeed, that moment.

“The cabin's on fire!” he heard a voice yelling—the voice of Tankerton. “Charge him, boys!”

“Charge him yourself!” answered a bass roar. “Let the fire take care of him.”

Dunmore tore off his coat. He did not wait to draw his shirt and underwear over his head, but the tough cloth parted like paper under his mighty fingertips. He was naked to the waist, and, fumbling through the confusion of the cabin, he found on the bunk the remnants of his roll of bandages. Around his body he passed a
thick, binding arm of cloth and tied it tight. He could have laughed as he performed that operation, but the strong grip of the cloth numbed the pain and left him more at ease. It would make him more fit for the final moment of his life, for he intended, when the weakness from his wounds increased upon him, to fling out the door and rush the enemy. If he could get to them and die fighting hand to hand, that would be the vital comfort for his end. The fierce thought of it warmed all his blood.

The darkness increased. It was one of those mountain storms during which the clouds seem to be built like the ranges over which they were floating—a league-thick belt of densest moisture. All starlight, all moonshine had disappeared. The night became blacker and blacker.

But still the rifle fire continued. They had spotted the window and the door, and such a steady flow of bullets swept at those vital points that it was impossible for any creature to pass through the stream unmaimed.

There was another possibility, however. With the shovel, he enlarged the hole of his trench, found foundation logs, and in a few minutes, had mined beneath them. Once the hole was open, he thrust his head up into the open air, and ducked again as a rifle spat fire not ten strides away from the cover of a fallen log. He heard the bullet hum over his head and felt sure that he was seen. But when he raised a broken section of board, it did not draw the enemy's fire. No, the man had been blazing away blindly at the house.

Dunmore crawled back into the house to consider for a moment. He went for a last tour of the loopholes, peering anxiously into the mist on every side, until it
seemed to him that something stirred to the south of the building. Aye, three forms suddenly loomed, running hard toward him, not twenty feet away, as it seemed.

He fired point-blank. It was death, he knew, as he curled his finger on the trigger. The middle man of the trio bounded into the air with arms and legs spread-eagled. His yell stabbed the brain of Dunmore like a blinding flash of light. That cry was cut off in the middle, and the body dropped heavily to the earth, while the two companions, shouting with terror, turned and bolted. In half a second, the gray penciling of the rain had entirely covered them from view.

He went back to the trench and lay curled there, while the outburst of revengeful fire that he had expected beat upon the shack. During this, his hands were not idle. He was lashing a revolver to a piece of wood. To the trigger of the gun, he attached one end of a big ball of string. This ball he next passed through the mouth of a large loophole and let it fall on the outside. The gun itself he then fixed with the muzzle protruding from the loophole, securing it safely there by means of the board that already had been tied to the handles. After that, he was ready for his great experiment.

He returned to his mine beneath the wall of the house and crawled out, secured the fallen ball of string, and began to wriggle forward toward the log nearby. He had hardly started when the rifleman fired again. Dunmore lay flat, then tugged the string. Behind him, the revolver banged. His plan had worked almost too well, for the bullet actually skimmed the hair of his head.

He went on. He pressed himself into the mud and
worked as a snake would work, but holding now in his right hand a heavy Colt. Not for firing. It must serve him as a club now. Then, when he was hardly a half arm's distance from the log, the pale gleam of the rifle and the dark outline of the sharpshooter's head appeared again. Were there two men behind the log? If so, his plan was totally spoiled, but he had to take that chance, and, as the rifleman's head raised, Dunmore struck with the butt of the revolver.

It barely reached not the head but the face of the other. He pitched back, with a cry, but the blow had so stunned him that even his cry was faint. The next instant Dunmore was across the log like a wildcat and had the fellow by the throat.

There was murderous force in the hands of Dunmore, for his own life depended on his ability to dispose of the man without allowing him to make a sound, but, as he grappled with him, he recognized, as he thought, something in the face of the other in spite of the dimness of the light. He jerked the man closer till his face was a scant inch away. It was Chelton.