The Night Horseman

The Night Horseman

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]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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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