Arslan

was the horses, almost more than the boys on their backs, who rallied to him and obeyed him.

He was fourteen, and he had his first girl, installed now in the school among Arslan’s. He had picked her himself—Peggy Rose, perfect exemplum of her name—but Arslan, in his own harvesting, had left her to be picked.

Later he may hate me. Later, perhaps, he might. Now he rode his roan mare amid the herd, rode sometimes alone with me, hunted and raced and wrestled with his companions. They were the young ones, his own age or one year older or two, who chafed now at Arslan and his arrogant muscular gang. They would be forever the babies of their families; old men in the young wilderness, they would wither unmatured, spoiled brats to the end, the darling buds of May enduring fruitlessly into December. They were desperate and innocent as lemmings, happy as bees. They gathered to Sanjar as to their single hope.

The herd flared wide across the field, grudgingly turning to his shrill whoops. He rounded their outskirts, driving the little mare hard, bunching them gradually closer; pulled ahead of the herd and then slowed, calling to them by name as they overran him; and the rush dwindled and dried as they passed me along the fencerow, the riderless horses stepping knee-deep in broom sedge that matched their own colors. Sanjar raised his hand to me, the half salute that was his greeting, and I rode out from under the trees and walked my horse beside the blowing mare.

“Want to come north with me?” His eyes sparkled, but it was a half-hearted invitation. He was saying, I’m going north. Come if you will, I don’t want you.

“No, thanks. Will he let you go?”

“I’m going!” But it was the joyful defiance of the beloved son. I could be stopped, but not by him; he could stop anyone else, but not me. They had quarreled for weeks now. He was too young, Arslan said—Sanjar who had been eleven when he killed three men single-handed, who had been nine when Arslan boasted, “He is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard.” It was a little late to shelter Sanjar. But Arslan’s eyes would redden with anger as he shouted, “Not this year!” It was already October; he would ride, if he went, into winter. Spassky had pitched his wigwam towns among the forested hills of the Great Lakes, where good hunting outweighed bad weather; and to visit Spassky and scout out the territory between was Sanjar’s excuse for seeking his fortune. “You’ll go next summer.” Next summer would be more reasonable, yes; but it would be permitted and therefore unsatisfactory.

We rode slowly into town. The wind was in our faces, droning and singing in our ears. The sky was the original of blues, scraped and sanded clean by that scouring air. The dazzling maples shed their gold rags around us. A pieced landscape, crazily stitched with its rail fences, opened before us as we turned through the gate into the road: woods multicolored and splotched with bare darkness, the touching spring green of new wheat, fields molten with goldenrod and Spanish needle, fields rusty with the broom sedge that would stand all winter, embroidered with the tarnishing purple of ironweed and loosestrife; the pale even stubble of mown wheat, the harsh stripes of trampled cornfields, the dully shining thatch of haystacks; Kraftsville itself, beautiful from here, a speckled parkland of trees in whose colored shades occasional roofs glinted.

The low sun was deepening into red, and every perishing lawn was a green-rubbed gold. We pulled up beside Franklin’s house. Sanjar’s eyes danced. “We’re going tomorrow,” he cried suddenly. Blithe Sanjar, whose secrets were all innocent. He leaned over the mare’s head, naming to me the boys who would go with him. “Hunt, I’m telling you this.” He straightened. “I’m telling Arslan tonight.”

“Take care, you hear?” We grinned at each other.

“You mean tonight, or tomorrow?” he said, and laughed. Later he may hate me. Not yet; no, not yet. He had planted wild roses on Rusudan’s grave, blithe Sanjar, without a word to anyone. Dog roses, their arcing stems furred with spines. I looked at the flowerless tangle below what I had been accustomed to think of, so many years ago, as Arslan’s window. Come May again, and rosy June, those ungraspable briars would flower with the simplest and loveliest of blooms, and wild bees sing around the pink and gold. “See you, Hunt,” said Sanjar, and he clucked the mare into a sudden trot.

By morning the town glowed with expectation. It was Sanjar’s followers, the chosen troop and the disgruntled rejectees, who had spread the news. The prospect of a showdown quarrel was as good as a holiday; at daybreak the loafers were gathering around the school. Franklin closed himself in his room with a stack of paperwork, while I loafed as eagerly as any, leaning with elbows on Arslan’s windowsill. But the quarrel began late, and when it moved out onto the schoolground it was already past climax. Only then I came down the stairs, and out, through Franklin’s porch, down the well-patched walk, across Pearl Street (unrutted still, for all the rains of spring, the summer wheels), unhurrying.

Sanjar swung into the saddle, his courtiers demurely following suit, and wheeled the little roan to face us all. In the gold of the high morning sun he seemed luminous himself. He thrust one hand into the mare’s mane, a gesture unconscious and beautiful as the cataract of coarse red hairs that poured upon the arching neck. Arslan limped forward a wounded pace. Girl Peggy stood forlorn, rumpled by the wind.

“Any messages?” Sanjar sang out. Certainly with the muscles of his back he felt the watchful attention of his retinue; his legs were warmed as much by the attendant crowd as by the mare’s round sides; even the hand in the red mane must be aware of Peggy. But the flushed young face was all concentrated on Arslan.

And Arslan, stern and grave, with basalt eyes, answered presently, “Ask Spassky if he can send me a good pipe.”

“I will!” It was a cry of exultation. He lifted the reins, raising the red mane like spray, and spun toward the road, heeling his body around and bringing the mare to follow, as a young centaur might turn and bound away. With scrambling hooves the courtiers followed.

Arslan’s hand had risen in the mild ghost of a salute. His lifted bronze face glowed with the grim furnace- light of pride. Now he would watch until the little troop was out of sight and hearing. But he did not. They had barely rounded the turn, a compact knot of motion, when he swung upon sobbing Peggy. “Go kill the broilers and roasters! And start dressing them!”

Stupid and shaken, she stared. “Now!” he barked, bell-mouthed Arslan, the voice that had wheeled the irregular cavalry at Clairmont like a flight of swifts. She turned mechanically under the force of it, and—in mid-step at last realizing what she was commanded to do—gasped tearfully, “How many?”

“All of them!” He swept her away with a gesture that eddied the other girls with its backwash. “Fay! Judy! Get on there and help her!” And, swinging back, “Jerry! Buck! Take as many men as you need and butcher the slaughter hogs. Hunt! Go bring me a deer.”

Go bring me a deer. And without a break he completed his wheeling maneuver and moved schoolward, swinging left and right to fire orders, driving the watchers like schools of shiners in a creek. He had imposed on me not a set of instructions, but a responsibility. All right. I would bring him his deer.

In the room that was his bedroom, study, and arsenal (I could not even remember, now, what classroom it had been) I sought and found his hunting rifle and the treasured cartridges with which to load it. The everyday bow and quiver that stood beside my bed in Franklin’s house were too prosaic now for this day’s hunt. I put my own saddle on the big dun and led one of the quarter horses. The cool October sun was high. Every deer in the district would be bedded down for the long rest. I tied the horses under the first trees of Karcher’s woods, beside a leaf- padded pool. For a little way the woods were open. Hickory, oak, ash, persimmon, sassafras, stood like good neighbors, a little withdrawn but with interlocking branches. It was the best of hiking weather, the worst for hunting. Dry leaves crackled at every step. Bare twigs curved in endless facsimiles of antlers. I went up the round swell of the hill that rose like a wooded cenotaph from the place where Arslan’s true love had died, and paused below its crest to ready the gun and let the noise of my tramping soak away into the quiet and be forgotten.

Beyond, the woods thickened. The down-slope was cut into deep, irregular gullies—midget ravines that merged and intersected, their channels choked with many autumns’ leaf falls. Buried at the slope’s foot, a nameless creek felt its forgotten way. I crossed its dank-smelling sandstone below one of the windfall dams that broke it into pools, and moved by slow gradations upstream along the wilder slope of the far side. Layered outcrops of stone and the miniature boulders cracked from them, and here and there a still-sound fallen log, gave me silent footing through the rustling welter of autumn. At each step I paused, scanning the barely altered scene until every element of it declared itself clearly, and choosing the next few feet of my route. It was a stooping, twisting way, picked to avoid the tangled brush and branches rather than to bend them aside; movement visible was even more hazardous than movement audible. An automatic pleasure, like that of the monotonous routines of sex, possessed me. The sweet dark woods, the dear dim woods, the wonderful woods and glades. But it was