He wanted to know more about Black Jack, and he wanted to hear the story from the lips of this man. A strange warmth had come over him. It had seemed for a moment that there was a third impalpable presence in the room—his father listening. And the thrill of it remained, a ghostly and yet a real thing.
But he checked his impulse. Let Denver go, and the thought of his father with him. For the influence of Black Jack, he felt, was quicksand pulling him down. The very fact that he was his father's son had made him shoot down one man. Again the shadow of Black Jack had fallen across his path today and tempted2 him to crime. How real the temptation had been, Terry did not know until he was alone. Half of ten thousand dollars would support him for many a month. One thing was certain. He must let his father remain simply a name.
Going to the window in his stocking feet, he listened again. There were more voices murmuring on the veranda3 of the hotel now, but within a few moments forms began to drift away down the street, and finally there was silence. Evidently the widow had not secured backing as strong as she could have desired. And Terry went to bed and to sleep.
He wakened with the first touch of dawn along the wall beside his bed and tumbled out to dress. It was early, even for a mountain town. The rattling4 at the kitchen stove commenced while he was on the way downstairs. And he had to waste time with a visit to El Sangre in the stable before his breakfast was ready.
Craterville was in the hollow behind him when the sun rose, and El Sangre was taking up the miles with the tireless rhythm of his pace. He had intended searching for work of some sort near Craterville, but now he realized that it could not be. He must go farther. He must go where his name was not known.
For two days he held on through the broken country, climbing more than he dropped. Twice he came above the ragged5 timber line, with its wind-shaped army of stunted6 trees, and over the tiny flowers of the summit lands. At the end of the second day he came out on the edge of a precipitous descent to a prosperous grazing country below. There would be his goal.
A big mountain sheep rounded a corner with a little flock behind him. Terry dropped the leader with a snapshot and watched the flock scamper7 down what was almost the sheer face of a cliff—a beautiful bit of acrobatics8. They found foothold on ridges9 a couple of inches deep, hardly visible to the eye from above. Plunging10 down a straight drop without a sign of a ledge11 for fifty feet below them, they broke the force of the fall and slowed themselves constantly by striking their hoofs12 from side to side against the face of the cliff. And so they landed, with bunched feet, on the first broad terrace below and again bounced over the ledge and so out of sight.
He dined on wild mutton that evening. In the morning he hunted along the edge of the cliffs until he came to a difficult route down to the valley. An ordinary horse would never have made it, but El Sangre was in his glory. If he had not the agility13 of the mountain sheep, he was well-nigh as level-headed in the face of tremendous heights. He knew how to pitch ten feet down to a terrace and strike on his bunched hoofs so that the force of the fall would not break his legs or unseat his rider. Again he understood how to drive in the toes of his hoofs and go up safely through loose gravel14 where most horses, even mustangs, would have skidded15 to the bottom of the slope. And he was wise in trails. Twice he rejected the courses which Terry picked, and the rider very wisely let him have his way. The result was that they took a more winding16, but a far safer course, and arrived before midmorning in the bottomlands.
The first ranch
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