Valley Thieves

by Max Brand

  I shrugged my shoulders and said what everyone knows—that Jim Silver has other reasons for his strange migrations than the trail of Barry Christian. As well to ask a swallow why it flies south for the winter and north for the summer as to ask why Jim Silver appeared and disappeared.

  "I've heard of Jim Silver," said Clonmel. "He's a lot of man, I've heard."

  "Have you really heard of Jim Silver?" said Julie Perigord, mockingly. "You're a real Westerner then, Harry. You must live right on this earth with the rest of us. He's even heard of Jim Silver, Charlotte," she ran on. "Isn't that wonderful? He can probably fry bacon and eat eggs, too. He's not a tenderfoot, after all."

  Clonmel smiled right through this bantering, but he was not very amused by it. His color grew a little warmer.

  The wind had stopped screaming so loudly by this time. The girl said that she ought to think of starting back, and Clonmel suggested that he should go with her.

  "And take me home—where Will. Cary could see you?" asked Julie, who was a little too frank at all times. "You may be so hardy that you've heard of Jim Silver, but I wouldn't have you meet Will Cary at the end of a trail. No, I'll be able to take care of myself."

  It was a cruel speech. I blushed for Julie. I blushed for poor Harry Clonmel because he had to listen to it. I saw his jaw set and knew that he meant to make trouble, because of this.

  But what trouble could he make? He was a fighting man, a fearless man, but he simply was not familiar with the language of knives and guns that savages like Will Cary spoke. And why ask a man to go to Mars unless he knows the language of the Martians, or can stay long enough to learn it? My big friend Clonmel had done very well, indeed. He was almost at the level of my son Al, with a rifle, and already he was better than Al when it came to handling a man-sized .45 Colt. But that meant that, in mountain parlance, he had exactly a small boy's chance against such warriors as Will Cary. The brutal unfairness of the system against which Clonmel had to compete, struck me hard, just then.

  The wind started whistling again.

  "If you don't want me to take you home," said Clonmel, "perhaps I'd better go ahead and warn them that you're spending the night here?"

  "Oh, they won't care where I am," said Julie. "Dean Cary would be glad to have me blown away for good and all. And if Will gives a rap—well, it will teach him not to give me orders next time. He can let me do as I please!"

  There was a good deal of the savage in Julie, all right. I started to protest. Then the wind yelled louder than before. Clonmel said:

  "I'd better go tell the Carys that she's staying over night. Hadn't I?"

  "Nonsense!" cried Julie. "I'll ride back by myself. If he can ride through this weather, I can, too. I'll be my own messenger—and get laughed at for the news I bring!"

  She was in a bitter, irritated humor. I suppose she saw that she had put herself in a foolish position, and it was hard for her to feel humble as a result.

  There was no need for her to tag her last speech by exclaiming, finally: "A fine thing if I let a tenderfoot get frost-bitten running errands for me!"

  She laughed a little as she said that. Clonmel closed his eyes. I think he wanted to break her pretty neck, just then. So did I.

  "Tie up your tongue, Julie," I said. "You can see this is no laughing matter. You can't go back through this sort of weather. Listen to that wind!"

  "Oh, can't I go back?" she asked dangerously.

  "No. I won't let you," said I.

  "Don't talk that way to me, please," said Julie, with a good deal of devil in her eyes.

  She was acting like a five-year-old. She knew it, and that didn't make it any better.

  Charlotte laughed a little and said:

  "The Carys are going to be worried because you're gone, but I don't know what we can do, until the wind drops a little. Certainly you can't go back there alone."

  "Oh, can't I? I'm going, though," said Julie, and stepped to the door.

  I was too amazed by her to interfere. Big Clonmel made one step and caught her wrist.

  "Don't be a little fool," he said.

  It hit me like a fist. It seemed to hit Julie, too. She turned slowly away from the door. Her face was frozen, she was so moved. She said:

  "I have been making a fool of myself. Excuse me, Charlotte. Someone had to tell me sooner or later, I suppose."

  The wind whistled "Yes" outside the shack. Hail rattled in a volley against the walls of the house, and Charlotte tried to get the talk away to more agreeable tracks. She said that we would simply have to wait until the weather cleared a little. If it got much better, then one of the men would take Julie home—it was only an hour or so through the pass. The one who took her could stay the night at the Cary house. Otherwise, if it were possible, one of us must press through and tell the Cary family that she was safe at our house.

  "I'd like to see this Jim Silver," Clonmel said. "What's the look of him?"

  "He's all man," said Julie, "but he's such a gentleman that some people are fooled."

  She put a lot of sting in that, avoiding the face of Clonmel with her eyes. Charlotte was the good Samaritan again and started rattling along about the time she had seen Jim Silver. Then she got out a picture of him and handed it to Clonmel.

  I looked at it over his shoulder, because it did a man good to see even the picture of Jim Silver and to know that such a man was standing for decency and kindness and law wherever he appeared in the mountains.

  Even the snapshot showed something of the kindness and steadiness and calm of that man—such a hero that other men could not feel jealousy on account of his reputation.

  I was thinking these things, when I touched the shoulder of Clonmel with mine, and felt a slight shudder running through him.

  "I'd like to meet him," he said suddenly.

  "Jim Silver?" echoed the girl.

  Clonmel lifted his head, but looked at the wall, not at the girl.

  "Yes," he said. "I've got to meet him."

  "When you do," said the girl, "bring back a souvenir to the rest of us. Parade and Frosty, for instance."

  "Would that mean something to you?" asked Clonmel through his teeth.

  "I'd leave home for such a man as that," said Julie carelessly.

  "We'll have to see about that," said Clonmel, and I saw, with a shock, that he was not smiling.

  CHAPTER V

  Clonmel's Agreement

  WE wound up with a bad compromise. That storm kept on smashing out of the northwest, and Julie would not let one of the men take news back to the Cary house about where she was, and certainly we could not let her go back by herself. So we wound up by staying where we were. We went to bed, at last, with Al and big Clonmel in the attic, as usual, and Julie tucked away on a couch in the front room. It had been a jolly evening. We had a little second-hand organ, and my wife pumped away on it, and made it wheeze out tunes that we all sang to. It was a good thing to hear Clonmel's voice lift and boom and ring, with the soprano of Julie brightening over it like white tips over the shouldering waves. And one of the best parts of the singing was to watch the way the eyes of Clonmel and Julie met in the middle of a passage, laughing at each other and loving the music.

  When we were alone, my wife said to me: "Bill, there's going to be a lot of trouble. Harry Clonmel is out of his head about Julie, and Julie is a little bit staggered by the size and the looks of Harry Clonmel."

  "No," said I. "She kept badgering him all the time, looking down on him as though she despised him a little—except when they were singing together."

  "Nonsense!" said my wife. "Men have no eyes. Great, blind, hulking, blundering, thick-handed numb-wits! What can they see of the things that are going on inside the minds of people? As plain as day, that girl was drawing on poor Harry Clonmel."

  Charlotte had a way of piling up words in this manner.

  I said angrily: "I don't see that Harry needs pity. They'd make a fine match."

  "As well matched as two runaway horses in one t
eam!" said Charlotte. "What are you thinking of ? Do you imagine that Will Cary will let another man even look sidewise at Julie?"

  That was true. I went to sleep in gloom, knowing that Harry Clonmel had put the whole of his headlong will on Julie, and that Cary was bound to make trouble. But how could such a fellow as Clonmel get through life without striking reefs? He drew too big a draft, so to speak, and small harbors would never hold him; he simply had to sail the open seas.

  Well, in the morning the alarm clock sounded, and I half wakened and waited for the booming call of Clonmel in the attic, to set the house in motion. But the call did not come. Something about the silence got me out of bed and into my clothes in jig time. And when I stepped outside the house, I saw Al looking worried.

  "Where's Harry?" I asked him.

  "I don't know. He wasn't in the attic when the alarm went off. Maybe he's out at the barn," said Al.

  But Harry was not at the barn. He was nowhere around the place, and he did not show up for breakfast, either. It was a queer, nervous sort of a breakfast, with Julie Perigord looking absently off into the distance and seeming to listen to the last uproar of the storm which had begun to clear out of the northwest so that we could see the big shoulders of Mount Craven butting through the windy mists.

  Nobody talked about Harry Clonmel. He had left his pack, but he had taken his mustang. Then where could he have gone? We couldn't guess, and, therefore, we were silent.

  We had finished breakfast, very nearly, when a sound of singing blew down the wind. That organ note could come out of only one throat. We glanced at one another, alarmed, pleased, conjecturing. Then we all started up and hurried out through the kitchen door.

  What I saw still freezes my mind when I think of it. The pen stands still above the paper and won't write it down, for out there on his mustang, coming along at a good canter, was big Harry Clonmel, and on a lead rope beside him was Parade!

  There was no doubt about it. I never had laid eyes on the famous stallion before, but the beauty and the gold of him shone in my eyes and I knew that that was Parade, at last—Jim Silver's horse on the lead rope of Clonmel!

  That was enough, but it wasn't all, for beside Parade, hitched to him by another rope, heavily muzzled to keep his clever teeth harmless, skulked the biggest gray wolf that I've ever seen, a dust-colored monster of a hundred and fifty pounds, if he was an ounce.

  And I knew that that was Frosty who served Jim Silver in many ways that a man could never compass, whose nose and ears and teeth and cunning were at the beck and call of his master.

  There they came toward us, the stallion keeping pace with the fast canter of the mustang by gliding along at an easy trot. Up they swept; the mustang skidded to a halt, Harry Clonmel flung himself to the ground and cried out:

  "You wanted to see 'em, Julie. Here they are!"

  Great Scott! The words hammered against my brain. She had said, the night before, that she would leave home for the man who could take the stallion and the wolf away from Jim Silver. And here Harry had accomplished the marvel.

  He had paid some price for the job. There was a bandage twisted about his head with a stain of red on it, as though a bullet or a knife might have glanced as close as this to his life. But it was merely a scratch, and Clonmel was bursting with happy merriment.

  Then I thought of another thing. If the stallion and the wolf were here, there could be only one explanation. Jim Silver was dead. He would certainly have fought to the end for Parade, to say nothing of Frosty, and if Jim Silver were dead, the greatest figure in the whole range of mountains had been brushed away, the greatest force for law and order had been removed from that wild land.

  My wife, in a shrilling voice, cried out: "Harry, have you murdered Jim Silver?"

  "Murdered him? He's as full of life as a cricket," said Harry Clonmel.

  "You've killed him! You murdered him, you wretched—" began Charlotte, but the booming voice of Clonmel silenced and overrode her, saying:

  "Jim Silver and I simply made a little agreement, and there's no harm done."

  He began to laugh again.

  Agreement? I thought to myself, what agreement would Jim Silver make to give up Parade and Frosty? What agreement would he make unless the grasp of Clonmel had first mastered to helplessness even the terrible hands of Silver?

  The thing made me shudder. It was horrible. It would have been like seeing a child beat a grown man. It would be like seeing a wasp, with the hypnotic hum of his wings, freeze a spider to weakness. It would be like anything unnatural and, therefore, disgusting, if Harry Clonmel, for all his size, his power, his courage, could stand for an instant in fight before famous Jim Silver.

  But there stood Clonmel, laughing, and yonder were Parade and the wolf!

  Well, the world spun around before my eyes. The stallion threw up his head, turned, and sent his trumpet sound of neighing toward the mountains out of which the last shreds of the storm were blowing. He was calling his master, and the wolf sat down on his haunches and pointed his nose toward the same mountains and howled dismally.

  "You wanted to see Parade and Frosty," said Clonmel to the girl. "Well, how would you like to ride Parade home?"

  "Ride Parade!" she exclaimed, and her eyes shone. "Ride Parade? But only Jim Silver can ride him. He'll throw and savage any other person!"

  "That's true for some," said Clonmel, "but he's no longer the same wild-caught hawk that he was when Silver trailed him down in the desert. He won't savage me, for instance."

  He stepped right up to the golden stallion, and Parade, stretching his head, blew a breath from his wide red nostrils on the giant. His flattened ears twitched suddenly forward. It was plain that he looked upon this man as a friend, and my heart sickened strangely in me; it was like seeing treachery in a dumb beast.

  Charlotte said: "You're not going to ride Parade, Julie. Great heavens, what are you thinking of? Parade belongs with Jim Silver, and he's going back to his master."

  "Julie, you're going to ride home on Parade," said Clonmel. "I'm taking half a day off, Bill," he added to me.

  The girl went up to the stallion with her hand held out, palm up. The big horse snorted and lunged back until Clonmel caught him and drew him gently forward.

  "You have to have an introduction," he said to Julie. "Stand there, and then I'll bring him up to you."

  He did that, talking softly, soothing the stallion with his hand, until presently the chestnut and the girl were face to face. They made a fine picture, each as splendid a specimen as the other, each of them trembling with excitement.

  It was a queer thing to hear her talk to him, panting.

  "I'd give—half my life—to ride you—a mile, Parade!"

  Then she got her hand on his face, and he drew back, and was again drawn forward, and finally permitted her touch to remain there.

  And five minutes later she sat there in the saddle, frightened but delighted, while Clonmel explained what she should do. There was only a light hackamore on the head of Parade. Men said that only once had a bit been between his teeth. It was folly to try to rule him by force of hand, therefore. A loose rein and a gentle touch, however, might make him go as smoothly as the wind.

  As I watched her start to pace Parade gently up and down, talking to him in a quieting voice, risking the unchainable force of him on the lightness of her own hands, my heart kept on sinking.

  Charlotte said to me suddenly: "You go along with them. Something is bound to happen. Bill Avon, you've got to see it through—whatever it is. Go along with them!"

  I knew that that was right. I went out and caught up a horse and saddled it. By that time, the pair had started across the plain toward the pass that split through the mountains beside Mount Craven, and the wolf still skulked on the lead rope beside the stallion, pulling out as far as the rope would let him go.

  I kept a good distance to the rear, because those two gay young people probably had a lot to say to one another, and a lot of admiration to shed out o
f their eyes. I must say that they made a good picture as they drifted ahead of me. Now they were cantering their horses, and I could see them turning their heads, while fragments of their laughter blew back to me. It was all very young and fine, but the devil would be to pay before long, I was sure.

  It was like opening a play which has some very gay first chapters, but whose label is tragedy.

  CHAPTER VI

  At the Cary Place

  THE pass was always a dreary place, but on this day it was more weird than ever, with the tag ends of the storm still blowing in tatters through the gulch, and the flash and quick rushing of water down the cliffs and across the floor of the ravine. The whole thing had a wet gleam, as though it had just been heaved out of an ocean. It was like a bit of new world making, and when I glanced ahead at Clonmel and the girl, I could not help feeling that they were the sort of people to inhabit big, new spaces. They had the spirit for it. As for me, too much dust was in my nostrils.

  I kept trailing along behind them until they were through the pass and coming right down on the outskirts of the town of Blue Water. And still they were so wrapped up in one another that they never turned their heads to see what might be coming behind them. As we got nearer the town, where the trails braided together into a wagon road, I saw a number of people come out from the byways and from the scattering of houses, and in every case they seemed to be stunned by the appearance of the stallion on which the girl was riding.

  I cantered up to the pair at last, when they were getting close to the Cary house, where Julie lived as the ward of Dean Cary. She was also engaged to Dean's son, Will Cary, as she had told Clonmel the night before. But as I stared at the pair of them, I could not help thinking that that engagement now stood on most precarious feet.

  As I came up, big Clonmel sang out to me, not at all surprised that I was there:

  "Look at the way she's handling Parade, Bill!"

  I regarded the horse and the girl jealously. Jealously, because a hero is a property of every ordinary man and because of such men as Jim Silver the rest of us stand straighter. He was a man who had never been found in a cruel, mean, or cowardly action. He had never been beaten by equal odds. He had dared to measure himself against the cunning and the forces of the great Barry Christian. And Silver had built himself into a sort of kingship, with his throne naturally on the back of the great golden chestnut, Parade. It was as though Julie, with her slender brown hands, had dethroned the hero and dared recklessly to take his place. And as I looked at her and then at Clonmel, I almost hated the pair of them. I would have given a vast deal to learn what had happened up there in the woods on the side of the great mountain when Clonmel surprised Silver and mastered him.