The Blackguard
9781465677044
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
That is exactly what the bugle said to a man who was sitting on the edge of the bench-land in the evening calm. He was a very big man, dressed in a grey woollen undershirt, worn-out riding-breeches with a two-inch yellow stripe down the legs, and jack-boots. By his side lay a broad grey slouch-hat, such as cowboys wear; on his knees a bath-towel—dry; and in his neighbourhood lingered a faint aroma of stables. The man's bare arms were like the thighs of an average sinner, his shoulders, thighs, breast, neck, all of gigantic strength and beauty, a sight that would have appealed to any athlete as beyond the loveliness of women. The setting sun just touched his wavy, crisp, black hair with a lustre of metal. Again, his face, still, strong, silent, had an odd suggestiveness of a bronze statue, that of something Greek but uncanny, a faun, perhaps, or a satyr. The hair, sweeping low over his brows, might almost conceal incipient horns; his ears might have been tufted; his features defying all the rules—stuck on anyhow; the subtle devilry of his deep black eyes, the ugly fascination, the whimsical dignity; the bearing lofty, defiant, almost magnificent; and again, an air, indefinite enough, of sorrowful majesty;—how well everything about the man fitted one name—the Blackguard. That was La Mancha's name, by consent of the five troops of the Mounted Police; and somehow the common use of it conveyed no sense of reproach but rather of endearment. From the Commissioner down to the smallest recruit the whole five hundred were half-afraid of him, except one man; yet no civilian ventured to speak ill of the Blackguard, or he would have had his head punched. To say bad things about the Blackguard was to slight the Force. And the one man who did not fear this latter-day satyr, who ruled him as mind rules matter, was a certain little Corporal, who, with a neat briar pipe well alight, was picking his dainty way over the gravel—coming down from the camp in the evening calm. This was Corporal Dandy Irvine, with a sunburnt face, a neatly-pointed moustache, the buttons of his scarlet jacket glowing like gold in the light, whose clothes always fitted, whose forage-cap was correctly poised on three hairs, whose boots and spurs were always brilliantly polished. And now he just touched the Blackguard to show that he was present, and sat down beside him without any remarks whatever. So, for five minutes, the two looked gravely out over the valley like Dignity and Impudence, both too lazy to speak. They were looking across the Kootenay Valley—the upper Kootenay, from a tongue of the bench-land made by the deep gulch of Wild Horse Creek where it came down from the mountains. At their backs rose the huge timbered foothills of the Rocky Mountains; opposite, across the vast Kootenay trench, rose the still mightier foothills of the Selkirks, and high above the deepening purple of the forests soared the clear cool azure of the snows up into the silence of those sharp-cut Alps, reaching away forever and forever to north and south against the roseate translucent afterglow. Down yonder the river wandered crimson through misty prairies, where the trees stood in clusters pointing up, as the sentinel stars came one by one on guard.
