by Max Brand
“What’s all this?” she asked. She took her hand away from him. “Some crazy matter of honor … or is it a bet?”
“It’s more than honor.”
“You’re going back?”
“I have to go,” he told her.
“Then I spill the beans about you all over town.”
He held himself so hard that he trembled. After a while he said, “Get up on the mare, then, and I’ll take you back to town.”
“You’ve got to go back and take it, do you?” she asked. “Slip, what’s come over you? What’s the matter with you, anyway? Do you think I don’t know what those mugs can do and will do? What is it that pulls you back to San Jacinto?”
“Business,” he said.
“Five thousand dollars in blood money?”
He made no answer.
“Listen,” she said. “Tell me one thing. If you hadn’t grabbed me with Cicely right here, would you have gone on trekking farther west to trail me?”
“No,” he said.
“Then it doesn’t matter,” she sighed. “I would have lost anyway.”
He said, “If I hadn’t caught up with you here … you would have come back to San Jacinto?”
“Of course I would,” she said. “Hi, quit it, Slip! Don’t be polite and doubting. I’m for you. Can’t you see that?”
“Are you?” he asked, bewildered more than ever, and still very nervous.
“What do you make of that?” she murmured to herself. And then aloud and with anger she demanded, “You don’t think I’m a horse thief, do you, Slip?”
“No,” he said, following a sudden light. “You’re not a thief, Skeeter.”
“No?” she echoed. She began to laugh. “When I hit the stem, you watch my smoke. And when I’m on the road with Pop, who finds the chickens in the dark and wishes them off the roost so soft they keep right on sleeping till they find themselves in the mulligan? Oh, Slip, I could swipe eyelashes and never make the eyes blink, but I’m a regular sort of guy, at that. Do you think I could be?”
“I think you could be,” said Liddell. “I think you are.” He swung into the saddle on Cicely. “Hop on behind,” he said.
She stepped on his stirrup and was suddenly seated behind the cantle with an arm lightly around him.
“You’re breathing deep and feeling better,” she observed. “Did you think I’d really go to town and pull a phony on you?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight,” he answered as the mare picked her way among the boulders.
“They’re talking in the streets about you,” she said. “Those people will never rest easy till they’ve done something about you, and, when they start, they’ll have ropes in their hands. You know that?”
“I know that,” he said.
“And still you’re not scared of death?”
“I suppose I’m scared,” he answered.
“But you’ve got to go back?”
“I’ve got to go back.”
“All right,” she answered chiefly to herself. “Will you let me see a lot of you while you last?”
“All you can stand.”
“D’you ever suppose things?”
“Yeah, once in a while.”
“Well, suppose that I was dolled up in fluff and zingo and perfume, would you like me a lot better?”
“I like you fine the way you are.”
“Fine?” she repeated.
“Yeah, fine.”
“Once I was at a masquerade and I swiped a dress and made up like a girl,” said Skeeter. “I tell you what I did. I went and combed out my hair and brushed it up, and a million waves and curls came into it, and it shone like nobody’s business.”
“It shines plenty right now.”
“Yeah, but you got no idea,” said Skeeter. “And I got myself into a red dress with a yellow kind of a whatnot around the neck. It had a lot of zingo, is what that old dress had, and believe you me.”
“I believe you, all right,” said Liddell.
“And there was red slippers that squeezed my toes,” said Skeeter, “because from going barefoot my feet are kind of spread. But they’re not very big feet, at that? Would you say?” She stuck out a foot.
“They’re OK feet, I’d say,” replied Liddell.
“But those slippers went with the dress, and when you start getting fashionable, the pain don’t count,” she observed. “I had on a lot of things underneath, too, so it was kind of hard to breathe. But the point I make is what I did to the men at that party. I knocked ’em right out of their chairs.”
“I’ll bet you did,” agreed Liddell.
“If I was to take and lean forward and look at you, I’d see a smile on your pan, right now,” she declared.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he replied. “Except enjoying what you’re saying. That’s the only smile you’d see.”
“Honest?” she asked.
“Honest.”
“Well,” she said, “they certainly were a dizzy lot … but the slippers wore me out and I pretty near died before the last dance was over. And I walked home barefoot, and I’ll tell you what, Slip, I kind of felt sorry for men, the way a skirt and a dish of perfume knock ’em for a row of loops. What kind of perfume do you like, Slip?”
“Soap,” he answered.
“What?” she demanded.
“Just a kind of a clean smell,” he told her.
“Geez, you’re a funny kind of a guy,” she remarked after thinking this over. “But take you by and large, you’re the most man that I ever bumped into.”
“Thanks,” said Liddell, “and you’re the most …”
“Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “You don’t half know about me, yet. You haven’t even read the headlines. You wait and see.”
“All right. I’ll wait,” said Liddell.
VIII
It was dusk when they came to the edge of San Jacinto. “You get off here,” he told her. “I’ve got to get to an appointment and I’m nearly late now.”
“Is it a blond?” she asked. She stood by the mare with her arms akimbo, looking up.
“It’s not a blond,” he told her, smiling down.
“I know,” said Skeeter. “It’s old lipstick … old powder-her-nose … that Dolores, the poor dummy that couldn’t get past the third grade.”
“She’s not a bad sort of a girl. You ought to know her,” said Liddell. “Where do you stay, Skeeter?”
“You know the second bridge, and a string of little white shacks down south of it? I live in one of those.”
“Thanks,” said Liddell. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Thanks for asking,” said the girl. And then as he cantered the mare away, she was adding, “Thanks for nothing … thanks for being a sap-head … I never saw such a cockeyed bozo in my life. Can’t he see I’m eating my heart like bread, because of him?”
But suddenly she broke into a run, following behind him when she saw him turn the mare onto the river road.
It would have done you good to see her run. You know how most girls scamper, leaning forward as though they were about to fall on their faces, and their feet stuttering along behind them and their hands catching at the air? Well, Skeeter ran with a good knee lift and her legs blowing out behind her the way a champion runs when he means business. She slid along through the shadows as easy as you please, keeping close to the side of the lane so that the willows would cover her, because she wanted to know what Liddell had to do down the river road, that time of the day.
The road took a good dip from the town level down to the waterside and the big San Jacinto went drifting along and, through the gaps in the tulles, she could see the last golden, rusting, tarnishing stain of the sunset afloat on the water. Then there was nothing but tulles, and the dust raised by the galloping mare burned the lungs of Skeeter
because the wind had fallen away to nothing as it generally does out there at sundown and the dust hung where the heels of the mare kicked it.
The light grew dull, also, but she was able to see her man turn off the road and go into the tulles. They were tall enough to cover him to the neck. Just his head moved along above the feathery tips of the tulles. And Skeeter dropped down on a bank and watched, and panted, and listened.
She could hear the plopping of the hoofs of the mare as Cicely entered the muck out of which the tulles grew, and far back of her, out of the town, floated the voice of the fiesta, made up of the bawling of cattle—they had been doing some roping that day—and the pattering hoofs of horses, and the barking of dogs that made no sense at all, and the shrill of children calling out as they played, and the trembling of musical strings.
That sharp, accurate ear of hers dissolved the cloud of sound into these thin elements but still she could hear the mare working her way out into the marshland. It took nerve to ride the mare out there into the dark, where a quicksand might grab her legs any moment.
Then she heard something else that stopped her heart, for some reason. It was a whistle composed of three notes—one long and two short. It was repeated, on a high pitch. In that musical brain of hers she recorded the pitch and the rhythm faultlessly.
Three or four times the whistle was repeated. Then a silence set in, and out of the silence grew the faint noise of oars groaning in their locks. This noise also ended, and the silence closed in, and the damp coolness of the night covered her body and rose to her lips. She was listening so hard that she almost forgot to breathe.
Minutes of this followed. At last the noise of hoofs plumping through the marsh came back again toward the riverbank. The black silhouette of a horseman lurched out of the tulles and turned up the road.
Skeeter, lying flat behind the trunk of a tree, peered out, and she knew against the stars the outline of the rider. She could tell him by the angle of his hat and the cant of his head. The mare wanted to gallop hard but he reined her in. She heard his voice saying gently, “Easy, Sis! Easy does it, honey. Easy, girl.”
The words did something to her. She smiled all the way down the line to the shack where old Pop was waiting. They had two ground-floor rooms, to the back, where they could hear the swish-swash of the river currents all night long. When Pop heard her, he did not turn his head at once. He was sewing up a secondhand pair of trousers—because when you buy secondhand stuff, it’s always better to go over the seams, first, and tighten up the bad places, and all the buttons can do with a stitch or two. That way, they last twice as long. So when he heard her come in, he stopped sewing but he did not turn his head. Neither of them spoke.
There was a little, round, rusted iron stove in a corner with an iron pot simmering on top of it and filling the room with a greasy smell. She took a granite cooking spoon off the table, went over to the pot, and stirred the contents. She lifted a spoonful and let it slop back. There were carrots, beans, some sort of greens, tomatoes, and strings and fragments of meat all mushed up from long cooking. She piled a good heap of the mulligan stew on a paper plate and sat on the table with the plate in her lap. She used the graniteware spoon to eat with and a big chunk of bread as a pusher. When the end of the bread was well-smeared with gravy, she bit off the wet part. Otherwise the bread was too stale and hard to bite into.
Pop said, “I been knowing all the time that you’d turn soft. And today’s the time. I been trying for years and years to keep you clean and straight. But the dirt that’s under the skin has gotta come out. So you went and run off with somebody, did you? He gives you a whistle and you go right off with him. I been seeing it come over you.”
She looked calmly upon him, working hard over a mouthful. Time had put its hands on him, and twisted. Time had taken him by the nape of the neck and pushed his head forward and bent a crook in his back. A shag of greasy gray hair stuck down over the collar of his shirt.
He was old. He was like a man going downhill, a long step every day. So she merely said, “What’s been happening in town?”
He answered, “You don’t wanna talk about where you been?”
“What’s been happening in town?” she repeated.
“Money. That’s what’s been happening. Everybody’s had his hand in his pocket all day long, shelling out cash. If you’d been here to do the dance, we’d’ve taken in a hundred bucks. Even me alone doing jigs on the accordion with my hat on the sidewalk, even me, I took in more’n eight dollars.”
“That’s good.” She nodded.
“Not that you get any share nor hide nor hair of it!” he shouted. “You didn’t take a step to help in the making of it.”
“OK,” said the girl. “Nothing else important?”
“Nothing except what they’re all talking about. This bozo that you went to warn this morning … this Slip Liddell … he’s yella. He took a run-out powder. He blew out of town. He’ll never be seen in San Jacinto again. He’s got no more name than a Chinaman, right now. The people are laughing at him.”
“Maybe I made a mistake,” she said as she finished her meal. She got down from the table, filled a tin bucket with water from the tap, and went into the next room.
“Whatcha gonna do?” demanded Pop.
“I’m taking a bath,” she said.
“Why you gonna take a bath?” he asked. “You ain’t done any dancing today or sweated yourself up any.”
For answer, the key turned into the lock. Drowsily he heard the swishing of water in the next room. Before his mind turned two more gloomy corners, she was back again, still toweling her hair.
“That perfume is over there in the second drawer …” he said.
“I got a new kind of perfume.”
“Whatcha mean?” asked Pop.
“Soap,” she said.
“You gone and lost your mind?” cried Pop. “A good, sweet smell on you is what you need, particular after you been dancing hard. It’ll turn dimes into quarters when the boys come to chuck money into the hat.”
“A good clean smell is good enough for me,” said Skeeter. “How come they all say that Liddell is yellow? Because they didn’t find him around town?”
“I’ll tell you what it’s come to,” answered Pop. “There’s a young feller by the name of Heath … remember him?”
“I remember him,” she answered.
“He’s been telling the world that, if it can find Liddell, he’ll be waiting for him up in the Royal Saloon.”
“He’s been telling what?” exclaimed Skeeter.
“Telling the whole world … that he’s waiting there in the Royal for Liddell, if Slip has the nerve to come and have a showdown with him,” said Pop. “He’s daring Liddell to show his face inside the Royal Saloon, and he’ll change his looks for him. Because he says that the longer he thinks, the surer he is that he can’t leave in the world the sort of rat that took and murdered poor Frank Pollard. And if …”
He started up from his chair, shouting, “Hi, Skeeter! Where are you …?”
But Skeeter was gone through the door and up the street. She ran the entire way and her knees were gone under her when she reached the Royal Saloon. She cut right in across the vacant lot beside it to save time, and in this way came to the open window. Something was very odd about the place. She realized, as she hurried up, that not a sound was coming from the Royal at what should have been one of its busiest moments of the day. When she looked through the window, she saw the reason at a glance and the heart went out of her.
For everything inside the Royal was as still as paint. It looked, in fact, as though an artist had snapshot the scene. Some of the men at the tables, half risen, rested their weight on the arms of their chairs as though still in the act of rising. Instead of the long line at the bar, a dozen or so had stepped back to leave it clear for two people, and these were Liddell and young Mark Hea
th.
The pause must have lasted for some time.
Heath was green-white but his eyes were fixed and dangerous. He said now in a strained, high-pitched voice, “I’m telling you again. You’ve got a gun. Fill your hand and we start.”
It was like something out of a ghost of an old barroom in the West. He must have remembered it out of stories of the past, that phrase about filling the hand with a gun. His own hand was back behind his hip and he was leaning forward a little as though to balance the weight of the draw.
She saw Pudge McArthur and Soapy Jones, too. They were at a table near the bar. Pudge had his hand under his coat; Soapy’s gun was out in plain view and it pointed steadily toward Liddell. It looked too big—a caricature of a weapon, a funny-paper revolver.
She wanted to yell out something as a warning to Liddell, but she had become a part of that frozen scene inside the Royal, and no voice would issue from her lips.
Then she heard Liddell saying, “I’ve got something better than a gun to fill my hand. I’ve got a drink here, Heath. Here’s to you and here’s to everybody.” He lifted the whiskey, waved it left and right to the crowd, and poured it down his throat.
“Keep the change, Chuck,” he said, and walked out of the place with a deliberate step. The swing-door was still oscillating when Pudge McArthur jumped out of his chair and shouted, “I told you he was yella, Mark! I told you he’d lost his guts! Foller him up! Give him hell!”
But whatever Mark Heath was prepared to do in the future, he was at this moment wiping the sweat from his face and reaching an uncertain hand for his own drink.
IX
Skeeter felt very sick. Twice as she went down the street she paused to rest her hand against a wall and regain breath and strength. There was a great bustling everywhere and the voices of girls giggling and laughing, for almost the gayest moment of the fiesta came this night with the open-air dance on the platform under the cypresses by the river. This stir of expectancy and happiness sickened her more than ever. For her, this was a funeral moment. She walked wretchedly in procession after the death of a man’s reputation.
