Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US, page 709
As he went up the stairs, today, he passed at the first hall that same crisply pretty girl whom he had seen on the street in the morning. She shrank back from him with a little exclamation, and he hesitated.
It was not her prettiness that held him. It was sheerest irritation. He took off his hat and turned toward her.
“Are you afraid of me, ma’am?” said John Signal.
She retreated yet another step. Her eyes glanced toward the head of the stairs with a hunted look, as though she were estimating the probable chances of escape by bolting. Then she gave up and, turning, she fled into one of those large corner rooms which have been mentioned.
He, angered more than ever, strode on to his own cubby-hole and sat down to take his head in his hand and ponder. He could see no solution for his problem, and he had not long to dream over it, for a heavy hand struck his door. He sang out, and immediately there stood before him the alert, strongly built man of middle age whom he had seen with the girl that morning.
“My daughter!” began the other.
John Signal looked at him with expressive eyes.
“And who are you?” asked Signal.
“My name is Morley Shand. Did you ever hear it?”
“I never did.”
Mr. Shand seemed gravely taken aback.
“Mr. Alias,” he said, “since you choose to pass by that name, I wish to tell you that no matter how you may behave among the ruffians of Monument, with me it will be necessary for you to take a different line. And when it comes to bullying my daughter in this very house where—”
“Is that she waiting outside the door?” asked Signal.
Mr. Shand turned and snatched the door open. He revealed the chambermaid. She was a brown-faced girl from the range, obviously pressed into this work on the spur of the moment. She had not yet had a chance to turn pale.
“What will you have? Why are you here?” asked Mr. Shand in increasing anger.
She leaned her hand against the door jamb.
“I heard him speak to Miss Shand,” said she.
“Ah!” cried Mr. Morley Shand. “If I have a witness of this affair, I think that I can make life fairly hot for you in Monument! No matter what else Westerners may be, they don’t allow insults to—”
“Hold on,” said the chambermaid. “You start drifting like that with your head down, and you’ll hang up on wire, before long. I heard everything that was said, and I seen it all. I was cleaning the next flight of steps up. Miss Shand shied when Mr. Alias come upstairs to the landing. He only asked her if she was afraid of him.”
“And that was enough to make my girl run for her life?” shouted Mr. Shand in increasing fury.
“When a pony ain’t bridle wise, you can’t blame it for bolting,” said the girl.
Mr. Shand, thus balked, turned his anger upon the newcomer.
“I’ve never heard of such infernal rudeness!” he declared. “I’ll let your mistress know about this, my fine girl!”
He burst from the room. From the door the calm voice of Signal pursued him.
“You better think that over twice, before you start yapping about her,” said Signal.
Mr. Shand whirled about. He was fairly explosive with his fury, but suddenly he turned pale and retreated.
“He thought about guns,” said the chambermaid, nodding confidentially at Signal.
“Who are you?” asked the latter.
“I’m Polly. I do this floor and help wash up after meals, and keep the vegetable garden.”
“Is that all you do?”
“That’s all.”
“And what do you get?”
“I get forty.”
“A week?”
“What d’you mean? A month, of course.”
“Come in and sit down,” said he.
“Is it right?” said Polly.
“And why not?”
She grinned at him. Freckles spotted the nose and the upper cheeks of Polly. She had hair redder than her freckles. Her nose had never grown up.
“It might get you talked about,” said Polly. “Having a girl into your room, I mean.”
She walked straight in as she spoke. Before the window there was a plain wooden kitchen table. Against this she leaned.
“Besides,” said she, “I might get fired.”
“For what?”
“Aw — sassing his lordship, you see.”
“I don’t think that he’ll talk.”
“He will, though. You take a law-and-order gent like him, he can’t help talking, no more than a calf can help bawling, or a burro braying.”
“If he says a word—” said the boy darkly.
“What could you do?” she asked calmly. “He’s too tenderfoot to pack a gun, except in a bag. And he’s too old for you to hit him. If you whacked him in the stomach he’d have indigestion the rest of his life.”
“Sit down,” he invited, smiling at her.
She perched herself on the edge of the table.
“This is breaking all the rules,” said she, “confabbing with men guests and — sitting on tables!”
“You’re fine,” said the boy, admiring her heartily.
“Get out!” said she. “I’m all full of freckles!”
“What are they?” said he, gallantly.
“They’re a lot. Sulphuric acid and lye won’t take ’em out.”
“Did you try?”
“Both ways, and it wouldn’t work!”
“Suppose,” said he, “that you lose your job here?”
“Well, what of it? It’s a pretty big country!”
“Look here. Are you alone?”
“Me? I should say not! I’m with the celebrated gun-fighter, John Alias. Is that being alone? It is not!” she answered herself.
“I’m not celebrated,” he told her, “and I’m not a gun-fighter. You remember that.”
“I’ll try to,” said she, “but other people won’t let me! Not since they’ve got you into the papers!”
“The papers are fools!” said he.
“Sure they are,” she agreed, “but they’re giving you a lot of free space. I could use some of it, I can tell you!”
“For what?”
“Me? For getting on the stage.”
“And what would you do on the stage?”
“I gotta swell voice,” said she. “Let me sashay out onto the stage of that opera house and I’ll tell you what, they’ll put me on the pay roll.”
“Have you tried them?”
“Who, the manager?”
“Yes.”
“I tried the manager. He’d been down at Mortimer’s Saloon drinking gin fizzes. He remembered right away that he’d known me since I was a little girl. He started to hold my hand.”
“The coyote!” said the boy with earnest anger.
“I told him that I wasn’t a two-year-old and that I didn’t need gentling, but that didn’t stop him. So I slapped his face and beat it!”
“A man like that ought to be run out of town,” declared the deputy sheriff.
“Aw, leave him alone,” said she. “He’s all right. Only he was a little sappy, that day. He was not seeing his best, and didn’t spot my freckles!” she concluded with her smile. Then she added: “But if they run me out of this job, I’ll call on him again.”
“If you do, I’ll take you there,” said he.
“Would you do that?”
“Of course I would.”
“Well,” she said, “that would put me in the papers. ‘Our distinguished young deputy sheriff took a day off from man-eating and sashayed up to the opera house with Polly Noonan, the well-known chambermaid—’ Say, John Alias, could you stand for that?”
“I dunno,” said he, thoughtful. “I don’t think that they’d drag any woman into print through me. I don’t think that even these newspapers would dare to do that!”
“Wouldn’t they? I hope they would.”
“Well,” said he, “I’d have to take my chance on that.”
She regarded him with a thoughtful frown, her chin propped on one palm. It was not a graceful position in which she sat, but there are some so gifted in creation that they cannot be awkward. And the eyes of young John Signal having been opened toward the beauty of woman upon this day, he had regard to the hand, like that of a child, and the roundness of the wrist. Her smile, moreover, was a flash of good cheer, and her eyes were blue beyond belief. Neither could one say that her hair was sheer red, but it was golden where the sun touched, dark copper in the shadow. For the first time in his life, John Signal thoroughly enjoyed a color scheme.
“You’re all right,” said the girl. “You’re a straight shooter and a good fellow. I’d like to have some way of paying you back, if you would take me down there to the opera house.”
“You could pay me back,” said he.
She looked down at the floor, and then straight back at him.
“And how?” said she.
“I need advice,” said John Signal.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Advice?” said she. “I’m fuller of it than Monument is full of dust. You’re in trouble?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen all the kinds of trouble there are. Go on, Johnny Alias. Maybe I can show you the way out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
HE LOOKED AT her with such appreciation of her cocksureness and poise and with such a growing sense of her charm that she shook her head at him and gave him a dark look.
“Don’t do that!” she said.
“Don’t do what?”
“Think about yourself, not me. What sort of trouble are you in? With the Bone outfit, I hear.”
“They don’t bother me much — just now. I’m in trouble with myself.”
“That’s the worst kind,” she agreed. “Take a horse that interferes, he’s always liable to give himself a bad fall, isn’t he?”
“All right,” said he. “I’ll put this straight. Suppose that you did a man a good turn.”
“How good?”
“Well, had him under your gun — and didn’t shoot. And having a reason to shoot, say?”
“I follow that. Go on! Who was it?”
“This is all supposing.”
“All right.”
“And afterward, you fix him up a little.”
“Well?”
“Then suppose that you get into a corner, afterward. A mighty bad corner. Life or death for you. And this same fellow drifts in and helps you out of the pinch?”
“I can see that! It squares you both up.”
“Then suppose that you got a lot of bad information about that fellow, and it’s sort of your duty to arrest him—”
“You being deputy sheriff?”
“That’s it.”
She took this gravely under consideration. Then she said:
“I’ll tell you what: There’s a lot of different kind of people floating around in the world.”
He nodded.
“They’re like money.”
He nodded again.
“Some of ’em are just copper. They got a face printed on ’em, and they’re round as a gold piece, and got the same kind of milling, and all. But they’re cheap stuff. They don’t amount to much, except just to fill in and make change.”
He smiled.
“Then there’s paper money. Some of it’s worth a dollar. Some of it’s worth a thousand, according to the print that’s put on it, and who put the print. You pass one ten dollar bill and get change for it. You pass another and get jailed, because the money’s crooked. And there’s a lot of men that way. According to the way that you read ’em, they may be worth something, but at bottom, they’re just made up of paper junk; touch a match to ’em, and a lot of million dollar people would go up in a couple of whiffs of smoke.”
“That’s right.”
“Then there’s some coin that’s silver. It’s all right. It means what it says. It’s worth something. But you’d have to have a whole train of mules to carry away a fortune in it. And a lot of people are that way, that I’ve met. They look pretty enough and bright enough, but you’d have to have a thousand of ’em to get anywhere with such friends.”
“That’s true as a book. I’ve known that kind, too. That’s the common or garden sort of a man. Every place is full of ’em.”
“But on the other hand, here’s gold,” said the girl. “There ain’t a lot of it, but there’s some. It’s real money. You can rub it thin, and it still passes. With a pocket full of it, you can go around the world. You can take a golden coin and batter it out of shape. You can stamp on it and twist it crooked — but still it’s worth just the same. You can’t light it with a match, and you can’t show it up with acids and what not. And some people are that way. And when you’ve tried ’em, and stamped on ’em, and picked ’em up crooked, even, if they got the real stuff in them, they’re worth something! That’s the way, it seems to me, with this fellow that you stood by. That must of been pretty fine, and I wish that I’d seen it. But along comes his chance, and he stands behind you, just when you need him. Well, it seems to me, sort of, that if I was a deputy sheriff, or deputy God Almighty, I wouldn’t harm that man. I’d just let him alone. I’d keep him for a friend. I’d put him in my pocket and hope that maybe, some time, I could pick up one more friend just like him, because that would make the real music!”
He waited for a moment, turning the idea in his mind, and at last he said to her:
“I think you’re right. This thing was spinning around in my brain. You see, I’d taken an oath to do certain sorts of things.”
“I know that. But an oath is words; guns can say a lot more; you and your friend have talked with guns, eh?”
“You’ve helped me a lot,” he assured her. “I’ll go down there to the opera house with you, whenever you say the word. Is that a go?”
“It is! Tomorrow morning?”
“Right!”
She slipped down from the table.
“They’ll be calling for me pretty soon. I’ve got to get along. I’m glad that I met you.”
“And me the same.”
“So long, Johnny.”
“How old are you?”
“Me? I’m nineteen.”
“Nineteen!” he cried.
“Is that so bad?”
“Floating around in the world all by yourself.”
“Well,” she said, “a young horse can stand a terrible lot of bad weather.”
“You were raised on the range?”
“The range raised me,” she answered. “And by the way, how old are you, John Alias?”
“Oh,” said he, “I’m twenty-two, you see!”
She paused by the door and made a face of pretended gravity.
“Oh,” said she, “you’re all of that, are you? Why,” she added, “you’re a real growed-up man, ain’t you?”
She slipped through the door and into the hall.
“Hey, Polly!” he called, and followed her in much haste.
At the door he saw her scurrying. But she paused at a little distance.
“What did you mean by that?” he asked her.
“By what?” said she.
“By laughing,” said he.
“Ain’t that allowed in the game?”
“Wait a minute, Polly, will you?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said she, and slipped from view around the corner of the hallway.
He hesitated, and then he went back into his room and began to pace up and down. He felt the oddest change in his mind and in his whole being. He had been, before, vastly depressed, confused, bewildered. He had been walking through a room of darkness. Now the door suddenly had been opened and he stood in sunshine and the song of birds.
In his walking, he found himself snapping his fingers softly, smiling to himself. The problems were solved. The difficulties were ended, and that complicated Gordian knot had been cut. All of this change had been effected he hardly knew how.
It appeared now perfectly patent that he could not betray his friendship with Colter by arresting him for the murder of the Mexicans in San Real Ca¤on. There was no necessary plan for his action except to drift with the current of events. Perhaps he would have the fortune to stumble upon others of those who had waylaid the Pinetas. At any rate, he would keep his eyes wide open and hope. Furthermore, there was plenty of crime and criminals about Monument, outside of Colter and his crew!
Then he stopped. He opened his eyes, as it were, and saw that he had been walking in a happy trance. Who had done this thing to him and touched him with such magic? Why, who else but the red-headed, freckle-faced, blue-eyed girl called Polly?
He sat down on the window sill and rolled a cigarette, whistling to himself, and as he lighted the smoke, he saw an arm, a shoulder, and part of a head appear around the corner of a barn; also, the sun gleamed on a long, steel barrel. He flung himself backward to the floor of the room as the rifle clanged. The bullet clipped the sill and a splinter of wood struck him in the face.
Springing up, he flattened himself against the wall and peered cautiously out, but he had only a glimpse of a man darting around the corner of the horse shed.
It did not pay to fall into dreams in Monument!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WELL HEALED OF all dreaming, then, he went down from his room to the rear yard as a cat goes down after a mouse. Around the house he flashed, found the rear gate of the yard locked, and, still catlike, over it he went and came to a horse shed, where a weary-faced man, with a prodigious yawn, was saddling a pinto mustang in the stall next to Grundy, the roan.
Grundy, at least, was safe!
“Stranger,” said Signal, “you heard a rifle fired around the corner, here?”
“Yes, sure,” said the other. “Somebody potting a rabbit, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Yep. And must of hit it. I heard him run off afterward as though he aimed to pick up what he’d plugged.”
“And who was it?”
“I never seen his face.”
The tired man turned slowly to Signal and added:
“What’s the matter? Was it your rabbit that he was shootin’ at?”
