The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Night Horseman, by Max Brand

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Night Horseman

Author: Max Brand

Release Date: May 26, 2004 [EBook #12436] Last Updated: August 13, 2009

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT HORSEMAN ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell and PG Distributed Proofreaders

By Max Brand

The Untamed Trailin'
The Night Horseman

THE NIGHT HORSEMAN

BY

MAX BRAND

1920

CONTENTS

I.—THE SCHOLAR

II.—WORDS AND BULLETS

III.—THE DOCTOR RIDES

IV.—THE CHAIN

V.—THE WAITING

VI.—THE MISSION STARTS

VII.—JERRY STRANN

VIII.—THE GIFT-HORSE

IX.—BATTLE LIGHT

X.—"SWEET ADELINE"

XI.—THE BUZZARD

XII.—FINESSE

XIII.—THE THREE

XIV.—MUSIC FOR OLD NICK

XV.—OLD GARY PETERS

XVI.—THE COMING OF NIGHT

XVII.—BUCK MAKES HIS GET-AWAY

XVIII.—DOCTOR BYRNE ANALYSES

XIX.—SUSPENSE

XX.—THE COMING

XXI.—MAC STRANN DECIDES TO KEEP THE LAW

XXII.—PATIENCE

XXIII.—HOW MAC STRANN KEPT THE LAW

XXIV.—DOCTOR BYRNE LOOKS INTO THE PAST

XXV.—WEREWOLF

XXVI.—THE BATTLE

XXVII.—THE CONQUEST

XXVIII.—THE TRAIL

XXIX.—TALK

XXX.—THE VOICE OF BLACK BART

XXXI.—THE MESSAGE

XXXII.—VICTORY

XXXIII.—DOCTOR BYRNE SHOWS THE TRUTH

XXXIV.—THE ACID TEST

XXXV.—PALE ANNIE

XXXVI.—THE DISCOVERY OF LIFE

XXXVII.—THE PIEBALD

XXXVIII.—THE CHALLENGE

XXXIX.—THE STORM

XL.—THE ARROYO

XLI.—THE FALLING OF NIGHT

XLII.—THE JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

THE NIGHT HORSEMAN

CHAPTER I

THE SCHOLAR

At the age of six Randall Byrne could name and bound every state in the Union and give the date of its admission; at nine he was conversant with Homeric Greek and Caesar; at twelve he read Aristophanes with perfect understanding of the allusions of the day and divided his leisure between Ovid and Horace; at fifteen, wearied by the simplicity of Old English and Thirteenth Century Italian, he dipped into the history of Philosophy and passed from that, naturally, into calculus and the higher mathematics; at eighteen he took an A.B. from Harvard and while idling away a pleasant summer with Hebrew and Sanscrit he delved lightly into biology and its kindred sciences, having reached the conclusion that Truth is greater than Goodness or Beauty, because it comprises both, and the whole is greater than any of its parts; at twenty-one he pocketed his Ph.D. and was touched with the fever of his first practical enthusiasm—surgery. At twenty-four he was an M.D. and a distinguished diagnostician, though he preferred work in his laboratory in his endeavor to resolve the elements into simpler forms; also he published at this time a work on anthropology whose circulation was limited to two hundred copies, and he received in return two hundred letters of congratulation from great men who had tried to read his book; at twenty-seven he collapsed one fine spring day on the floor of his laboratory. That afternoon he was carried into the presence of a great physician who was also a very vulgar man. The great physician felt his pulse and looked into his dim eyes.

"You have a hundred and twenty horsepower brain and a runabout body," said the great physician.

"I have come," answered Randall Byrne faintly, "for the solution of a problem, not for the statement thereof."

"I'm not through," said the great physician. "Among other things you are a damned fool."

Randall Byrne here rubbed his eyes.

"What steps do you suggest that I consider?" he queried.

The great physician spat noisily.

"Marry a farmer's daughter," he said brutally.

"But," said Randall Byrne vaguely.

"I am a busy man and you've wasted ten minutes of my time," said the great physician, turning back to his plate glass window. "My secretary will send you a bill for one thousand dollars. Good-day."

And therefore, ten days later, Randall Byrne sat in his room in the hotel at Elkhead.

He had just written (to his friend Swinnerton Loughburne, M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D.): "Incontrovertibly the introduction of the personal equation leads to lamentable inversions, and the perceptive faculties when contemplating phenomena through the lens of ego too often conceive an accidental connotation or manifest distortion to be actuality, for the physical (or personal) too often beclouds that power of inner vision which so unerringly penetrates to the inherent truths of incorporeity and the extramundane. Yet this problem, to your eyes, I fear, not essentially novel or peculiarly involute, holds for my contemplative faculties an extraordinary fascination, to wit: wherein does the mind, in itself a muscle, escape from the laws of the physical, and wherein and wherefore do the laws of the physical exercise so inexorable a jurisdiction over the processes of the mind, so that a disorder of the visual nerve actually distorts the asomatous and veils the pneumatoscopic?

"Your pardon, dear Loughburne, for these lapses from the general to the particular, but in a lighter moment of idleness, I pray you give some careless thought to a problem now painfully my own, though rooted inevitably so deeply in the dirt of the commonplace.

"But you have asked me in letter of recent date for the particular physical aspects of my present environment, and though (as you so well know) it is my conviction that the physical fact is not and only the immaterial is, yet I shall gladly look about me—a thing I have not yet seen occasion to do—and describe to you the details of my present condition."

Accordingly, at this point Randall Byrne removed from his nose his thick glasses and holding them poised he stared through the window at the view without. He had quite changed his appearance by removing the spectacles, for the owlish touch was gone and he seemed at a stroke ten years younger. It was such a face as one is glad to examine in detail, lean, pale, the transparent skin stretched tightly over cheekbones, nose, and chin. That chin was built on good fighting lines, though somewhat over-delicate in substance and the mouth quite colourless, but oddly enough the upper lip had that habitual appearance of stiff compression which is