Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US, page 743
Oh, they gave him the cheer, well enough. There wasn’t a rascally speculator in the bunch who didn’t know quite well that Steve’s heroism in the stagecoach runaway was the real source of Piegan’s present prosperity. So they strained their throats for Steve Cole, and then they whooped up the bidding on that lot, and I heard it knocked down for twenty-five hundred dollars.
Yes, the colonel had given Steve half a dozen lots; he hadn’t realized how the prices would soar!
While that cheering and bidding was going on, I worked the girl to the back of the crowd, and then we walked down the street together. Charlie Butcher, his face horribly yellow and white, his eyes red with whisky, came by, and I sang out to him to find Steven Cole and send him to the hotel, pronto. Charlie saluted, and went on.
“Are you running this town, Jerry?” she asked me, tilting up her face.
“No, but I’m a charter member,” I told her, fairly enough. “I want to tell you about Steve, though.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “It was all told to me when I heard them cheer. He’s found himself. That’s what you wanted to say, isn’t it? He’s on his feet, and able to make his own way.”
“And way for another, too,” said I. “He’s the gamest and the straightest fellow in town. He had a bad start, but he’s making a great finish.”
“It’s you, Jerry, that I want to find out about,” said she. “You’ve lost that gray look you used to have.”
“My heart’s gone right,” said I.
She stopped short.
“Do you mean it?” she asked me.
“I mean it. It’s true.”
She gasped with pleasure. It nearly sent my heart bad again to see the shine of her eyes.
“And are you going back into the ring again, Jerry?” she asked me.
The question was a shock. I don’t know why, exactly, but the shock was there. I had to look for a moment far away into my own mind before I could answer her. Once nothing in the world had mattered except that I wanted to be middleweight champion of the world. And that championship had been fairly near, I thought. The hope of it had filled my days with electricity and fire. But now that was changed.
Somehow all of those old triumphs inside the ropes were dim and childish. They were a lifetime away. Perhaps I could get back into training, but that was not in my mind, at all.
“No,” I told her. “I’ll never go back to that. I’ve graduated from that business.”
“And what’s the business to be, then?” she asked.
I looked around me — not particularly at the shacks and the dusty streets of Piegan, but beyond, at the blue ranges of mountains.
“This!” said I, with a wave of my hand.
She gave me a good, hard look, and then she said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I understand!”
That made me like her better than ever. I stepped into a seventh heaven. I hardly know how we reached the hotel, but when we walked into the lobby, we were just in time to see Steve Cole run up and grab a tall, dignified fellow of sixty. And the dignity melted out of that man, and he caught Steve and hugged him before all the people.
No one had to tell me that I was watching a family reunion. I started to fade out of the picture, but Betty Cole caught my hand and held me there. She even dragged me up to the pair of them, and she introduced me to Parker Cole, himself!
They said that Parker Cole was a hard business man, and I could believe it. He had an eye that went through me with one glance, like the flicker of a rapier. Then he shook hands with me. I felt a good deal like a fool, for Steve was blurting out things he might have saved until I was out of hearing.
However, it was a pretty proud moment for me, and off yonder in the corner, Colonel Riggs and Tracy Dixon, and the two engineers were on tiptoe with eagerness to meet the great Cole. But just then a bomb dropped into the lobby of the Riggs Hotel. A bomb in human flesh and blood.
It still takes my breath when I think of it, the consummate nerve and coolness of the fellow in coming singly into our town, but nerve and coolness were overplus in him. For into the lobby walked the bulldog form of Sidney Maker himself!
CHAPTER XXXVIII. VENGEANCE
EVERYTHING ELSE WAS forgotten, of course. Twenty men rose silently around the lobby, and twenty hands were gripping the same number of guns, not too covertly.
Riggs showed a good deal of courage, I must say. He stalked up to his rival and said:
“I’m glad to see you here, Maker, under pleasanter auspices than during your last little visit!”
He stretched out his hand. Maker did not hesitate. He took the hand and gave it a grip that brought a howl from the colonel’s mouth.
“I ought to wreck your little village for you,” said Maker, in his heavy, bawling voice, “but it’s not worth while. If you’ve kept the thing on the map, remember that it’s not your credit. That goes to Jerry Ash. He’s a man! As for the railroad, when you see that idiot, Dixon, tell him that Makerville doesn’t care anything about him. We’ll buy his line, if we want it, or else we’ll build one of our own and put him out of business. We’ve struck hundred-and-twenty-dollar silver in the hills three miles from town. Tell that to Dixon, too. It’ll make him feel pretty good when he tries to load his freight trains with the sort of hot air that feeds a town like Piegan!”
It was all true. They had struck the great Cavendish lode. People know how many fortunes came out of that.
After he had blasted the others, Maker came across the lobby straight to me. I almost thought that he was going to use his fists on me, his look was so threatening. But when he came up, he stuck out his hand. I gave him mine, and met the pressure of his hold. He stood there holding my hand and staring into my face earnestly.
“Kid,” he said, “it was a grand trick. It ought to win the game for you. But remember that out here a lot of games are lost and winnings wiped out in the last play. I don’t mind. My town is on the map. We don’t have to come to the railroad; the railroad has to come to us. I say that I don’t mind, but some of my boys do. They mind badly. They want your scalp and they mean to have it. I’m trying to hold them back, but they want blood. Kid, beat it out of Piegan and get some distance between you and this part of the country, will you? Whether you will or not, I’m giving you the best advice. You know why I give it, too!”
When he had said that, he turned on his heel and walked out of the lobby, and I was plenty ready to sit down and think things over!
I faded right out of that cheerful family group and got off into my own room, and stayed there until night. I had dinner brought up on a tray, and then I lay down to decide what I should do.
There was no doubt that this was a serious business. Maker was taking his life in his hands when he rode into Piegan, and he knew it perfectly well. He had come because he felt under a serious obligation to me. He would not have come unless he felt that it were a matter of life or death.
And it was my life and death that were concerned!
You can imagine that my nerves were not exactly smooth, at that time. Still, it was the worst moment in the world, for me. If I left, I would be leaving Betty Cole, at the very moment when she had arrived!
In the midst of these thoughts, there was a rap at my door, and when I sang out, Steve and Betty came in. He stood back, looking worried and dark with trouble. She did the talking. And what she said was begging me to get out of Piegan, get fast, and get far.
I looked straight back at her and said:
“It’s pretty hard for me to go.”
“It ought not to be,” she said.
“It is, though,” said I.
I kept on looking straight at her, and suddenly she flushed to the forehead.
“If you go now, you can always come back, Jerry,” said she.
“Look,” said Steve Cole, “if you two are going to be — Well, let me get out of this.”
“We’re not going to be any way at all,” said she, redder than before. “Jerry, I want you to say that you’ll leave Piegan! The man meant what he said, when he told you that your life was in danger.”
“If you want me to go, Betty,” said I, putting all the emphasis I could on the words, “I’ll do as you say.”
“And all this while, I was not budging my eyes from her, of course. She could have pretended to misunderstand, but she was not small enough for that. She met my eye like a soldier, and she went on:
“I want you to go, Jerry. I want you to go at once.”
“Good-bye, then,” said I.
She shook hands with me, and enough was in our eyes to settle our future as clearly as words could have managed the trick.
When she and Steve went from the room, I only half saw them go. I was in a haze, and a trance, and couldn’t see straight.
It was partly that haze which caused what happened immediately afterwards.
I went over and dragged out my war bag, when something creaked behind me. I turned, carelessly both hands full, and there I saw a small man standing between me and the window, a small man with his head thrusting forward and canted a bit to one side as he looked down a pair of big Colts at my head and heart.
It was Chuck.
That was a thunderclap. But habit is a strange thing.
Even then, while I felt the awful shock of the thing, I was listening to my heart, waiting for it to begin to stagger and go crazy. I sighed with relief when it raced, to be sure, but with a firm and rhythmic beat.
I was my old self!
I said: “What is it, Chuck? Murder?”
“Not murder,” said he. “But we’re taking our turn with you, Poker-face. You’ve had plenty of turns before this.”
“That’s true,” I answered. “In fact, you seem to be dealing yourself a hand out of my own pack!”
He did not smile. There was a horrible hunger in his eyes. They shifted just a little, as they traveled over me. He seemed to be hunting for the best places to send his bullets home.
I heard the door swish softly behind me, and a sudden hope jumped — and died as I heard Chuck say:
“It’s all right, boys. He hasn’t got a gun on him. I almost wish that he had! Bert, do up his hands. You might as well do them up behind him.”
“I’ll do ’em up,” said the snarling voice of Bert, which I remembered so well.
They were all there.
Swede stood in front of me, grinning till his scalp twitched. Three more were back in the shadow by the door. The six mighty men of Sid Maker had come for me and have me they would.
I thought of everything. Of trying to grab a gun and make a fight of it. Of yelling out. Of doing anything to attract attention.
Then they would fill me full of lead, and they would die for it afterwards, every one of them, horribly, at the hands of the Piegan mob.
Perhaps Chuck read what was in my mind.
“Not murder, Poker-face,” said he. “That’s not our idea. You haven’t gone that low, and we won’t cut lower than you’ve done. But you’ll face us one at a time. We’ll draw lots. All we want is a quiet place, to have the thing out.”
Then they marched me out of the hotel.
Yes, just as easily as I write the words, they took me out of that place and not a soul saw us, not a word was spoken to us. We simply went down the back stairs and out through the yard, and in the grove where I had hidden horses for Maker and Chuck, on that other night, they had their own mounts waiting.
I climbed into a saddle, helped by Chuck and Swede. Then we rode at a walk away from Piegan and into the hills.
I remember that clouds were blowing across the stars, and gusts of rain whipped us, now and again. But though I felt the sting of the drops, they did not seem either cold or wet to me.
I supposed that was because part of my nervous system had gone to sleep.
Swede rode beside me, my horse’s lead rope over the pommel of his saddle.
“You and the gal, kind of sweet on each other, ain’t you?” he said, chuckling, sneering at the same time.
Chuck snarled in his bull-terrier’s voice from the head of the line: “Cut that out, Swede! Leave him be!”
I was grateful to Chuck for that. I was grateful, but all the while, I was knowing that Chuck’s gun would be the one to down me. I felt it. I mean, I almost could feel the crash and the rending of the bullet as it tore through flesh and bone.
We got up to a hollow where trees were growing dense all around the edge, and as we worked through them, Swede said:
“This is far enough. Bert, you got the lanterns?”
“It’s not far enough,” insisted Chuck. “You know that the chief will be on our trail, before very long.”
“Maker’ll never find us here,” said Bert.
“We won’t stop here. It’s too close. I know a better place farther on,” declared Chuck. “Maker would rather lose an arm than have anything serious happen to Poker-face. He owes the kid his life, and he don’t forget that, as you all know. Didn’t he come into Piegan to-day to warn him? Wasn’t he taking his own life in his hands when he did that? He’ll work out our trail as soon as he misses us from his camp, this evening!”
I began to have a small hope. If it were true — if Maker really were apt to come on our trail — well, he was the one person in the world who could handle these gunmen with a word.
In spite of what Chuck said, the others were firm.
“You’ve had your own way too much, Chuck,” said Bert. “Let’s get the dirty work over with. This is where we stop.”
Chuck gave in, and as a signal of his giving way, he dropped from his stirrups to the ground.
But he said: “There’s to be no dirty work. Mind that, Bert. The first fellow who tries to murder the kid will have to murder me afterwards. I mean what I say!”
This did not go without another argument.
“look at here,” said Bert. “He’s made us the laughing-stock of the whole range. He’s made fools of us. I had a kind of a reputation. It’s gone, since Poker-face come along. I say: Sock him, and finish the job.”
“That’s what I say, too,” said Swede.
And the others agreed, heartily. The work might be too dangerous, they said. Why should they spill their own blood, when they had me entirely helpless?
“He never dealt cards off the bottom of the pack,” Chuck said. “You can’t do it to him. If you do, my guns are on his side.”
That was final. They wanted my scalp, but they feared those deadly guns of Chuck about as much as I did.
Bert gave up the dispute with a groan, and lighted the lanterns. They were hung on the low side branches of a tree, and gave a very fair light, except when a guest of wind set them swinging. Then the plan of the fight was explained to me by Chuck, who had thought the whole thing out in detail.
With free hands, and a gun in my thigh holster, I was to take a position under the tree, and ten paces away my opponent would stand. We would have our backs to one another, and at the word of command, we would whirl and commence shooting until one of us fell or begged for mercy.
When he used that word, I had a sudden picture of myself groveling, begging for my life! It made me half sick. I started to pray, not for life, but for the courage to meet my death like a man.
Because there was no real hope for me, unless it lay in the hardly to be hoped for arrival of Maker himself. There was hardly a man of the six, I well knew, who was not a faster and a surer hand with a revolver than I. One, even two, I might down by luck. But six such warriors I could never dream of flattening, one after the other.
Perhaps there was one grisly ghost of a hope left to me — a terrible wound that might lay me out, and yet leave a spark of life that could be nursed back into a flame.
You can see how far my hopes had sunk, when I thought of that!
They were to draw lots for their turns.
In the meantime, my hands were set free. Then they proceeded to draw the lots. I looked them over, with a vague wonder, while I kneaded my wrists to get the blood and life and strength back into them.
Perhaps it would be Chuck — and then my troubles would soon be over, of course.
But it was Bert.
Well, I was almost glad of that. I had no liking for that man. He was as bitter and vengeful as a wolf, and as he stood there before me, his thin lips twisting with a hatred, and his eyes bright and small as the eyes of a beast, I had no hesitation in wanting to put an end to him.
I had a gun, now. It was a Colt with the usual good balance. It had a hair trigger, and would shoot, Chuck assured me, for it was his gun, as easily as breathing.
Chuck stood off to one side, to give the signal. Before we turned our back on one another, he said:
“Is there anything you want to say, Poker-face?”
I said: “No, not a thing. Only, get on with this business, because I’m scared cold, already.”
Swede laughed, a loud, horrible, bawling sound.
“He’s got the cold nerve, ain’t he?” said Swede.
But it wasn’t nerve. It was telling them the truth. Yet that laughter, that bit of praise, went like wine through my blood, and steadied me.
“How about you, Bert?” asked Chuck. “You want to say anything we could remember for you?”
“Not a single thing,” said Bert. “Lemme at him. That’s all. I’m goin’ to eat him. I can feel it in my bones.”
“Turn your backs, then,” said Chuck.
I turned about.
“When I say, ‘Start,’” said Chuck, “you turn and begin shooting.”
And, almost instantly, he added: “Start!”
I spun and drew in the same instant. I had in mind not to turn too far, for fear the impetus of the swing about would throw my gun out of line with its mark. So I only made a quarter turn with my feet, and twisted my shoulders around. This presented the side line of my body to the bullets of the other fellow. I didn’t try to aim, either. I just threw the gun out of half-arm distance, and fired at the blur of Bert as the form of him jumped into line with my vision.
He was around, too, and fully facing me. Perhaps he had lost a part of a second in making so full a turn. At any rate, he only fired his weapon into the ground, a spasmodic, natural contraction of the hand. For my bullet had gone home. I heard the spat of it against his face like the clapping of hands together. He threw a forearm across his forehead, covering the wound, and dropped straight forward. His body hit with a loose, jostling sound, then he lay still.
