Swords From the East Read Online Free

tobacco enough to smoke every minute until you die, and a horse and sleigh."
    He gulped the heavy smoke of his pipe down into his lungs, and glanced keenly at the Buriat.
    The creases in Maak's leathern face changed as he rubbed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. His black eyes twinkled. Maak had come as near as possible to a smile.
    "No," he grunted. "What would I do without them?"
    He pointed at the white buck that lingered near his tent.
    When the Siberian retired to the big tent with a rug on the earth and a cot and lantern, Maak examined it from the opening with great appreciation. He was the last to retire to shelter from the cold.
    The evening had been an eventful one. Maak would have enough to think about all winter. He had been entertained by a trader.
    It was long after Maak had disappeared that Orani came out of his tent and moved silently off into the dark. An hour later the half-breed returned, and sought his blankets.
    The camp by the stream was motionless except for the anxious movements of a big reindeer and the illusion of motion produced by the play of the northern fires in the sky.
    The next morning they had no glimpse of Qoren Vairgin, the king of the spirit world who drives the sun across the sky behind flying white reindeer. Heavy clouds, settling athwart the snow peaks of the Syansk, hid the sun.
    "Snow is coming in the valley," muttered the Mongol servant to Orani.
    Thoughtfully the half-breed nodded but made no move to rise from his blankets by the fire.
    The reindeer keeper also had noted the signs in the sky. He lingered for awhile hoping to see the departure of the trader; he even ventured to offer Petrovan some tobacco.
    "Pah!" the trader grunted to Orani. "I would rather smoke dried horsedroppings. These mountain men are mongrels."
    Orani's slant eyes narrowed and his hand went instinctively to his knife. When Petrovan had traded or gambled in a bad streak of luck, the Siberian was accustomed to slur Orani's mixed parentage.
    "They are no better, excellency," he retorted, "than the overfed hounds that lie in the ditches of Irkutsk."
    More than once Petrovan had been carried out of these same ditches when drunk.
    Orani did not touch his knife, for he saw the other's eyes on him sidewise and knew that Petrovan's heavy pistol was in his belt. The Siberian shrugged and fell to watching Maak, who had mounted the white buck and was mustering his herd.
    Two beasts were missing-young bucks that often strayed. Maak was anxious to work down into the larch and beech forests before the snow came, and he set out in search of the two reindeer.
    He cast up the mountainside to the edge of the snow line without finding reindeer or tracks. Then he circled down, looking into the gullies where moss beds might have tempted his pets. Maak knew his charges as a shepherd knows his sheep. Reindeer were in fact very much like sheep.
    When he had searched vainly for two hours, Maak headed back to camp expecting that the missing animals would have returned to the herd. Glancing into a ravine giving into the river, he stiffened in his saddle.
    Below him lay the young reindeer, their throats cut. Maak bent over them and saw that they had been dead for many hours. He looked for the place where steaks might have been cut from the haunches. A puzzled glare came into his black eyes.
    His first thought had been that the Mongol servant or Orani had butchered the half-tame animals, to get the meat he had refused to sell. But no meat had been taken from the carcasses. Only the throats had been cut.
    Suddenly Maak grunted and climbed into the small saddle on the shoulders of the stalwart white buck. He raced the short distance into camp, and found that there was no longer a camp. Even his skin tent had been kicked down and thrown on the fire.
    Men, horses, and reindeer herd had disappeared. Maak was a figure turned to stone. He was thinking out the thing slowly. Someone had killed his two animals-someone who knew that he