by Max Brand
I got no answer to this hail. I yelled again at the top of my lungs, and, when I received no response this time, I decided that Truck must have started down to the town that night and decided not to return through the fog. At any rate, that was no good reason why I should not go in and cook myself a few slices of bacon and a cup of coffee, to say nothing of a mouthful of cold pone that I might find in the bread box.
I opened the latch without any difficulty and stepped in. I shouted once more, because Truck, being on in years, might be a little deaf and a very heavy sleeper.
“Truck Janvers!”
I called at the top of my lungs, but I got nothing in response but the deep, sudden echo of my own voice roaring back at me, and instantly stilled. Then I lighted a match. There was no Janvers there—he had left in a hurry, apparently, for yonder was a table tilted over against the wall, and here were two chairs overturned. I was about to take a step forward when an instinct in my very flesh made me look down. And there lay Janvers at my feet, with crimson stains on his gray hair.
I had the two lanterns lighted instantly. In such a case one needs plenty of light before one attempts to see what has happened. Then I kneeled over him.
One bullet had struck him in the breast and come out under his shoulder blade behind. Another bullet had struck his body lower down. As I ripped away his shirt, I discovered these things. The second bullet had not come out. But, by the position of both wounds, I guessed very safely that either of them would have been enough to soak the life out of poor Truck Janvers. The wounds were still bleeding. There was still a ray of life left in him, but it was already twinkling, and it would soon be out.
Yet if I could fan that to a momentary fire and learn the name of his murderer—that would be an end worthwhile. And this was the sort of a case that would make Sheriff Jud Hawkins spend sleepless days and nights of labor until he had solved it. For it was his boast that a poor man was more promptly avenged than a rich one, in his county.
I thought of trying bandages. But I saw that that would be a useless formality. Probably the pain would kill him instantly. Besides, he was not bleeding fast. I had a flask of brandy that I carried with me constantly—Mexican brandy, colorless as water and terrible as nitroglycerine. I wedged open the hard-gripped teeth of the miner and poured a dram of that awful pale-faced brandy down his throat. He gasped feebly. Then he managed to swallow the stuff. I tried him with a second swig, and his dazed eyes slowly opened wide and looked out blankly at me.
I heaved him up. He was a burden even to my arms. And I sat him up in a chair against the wall. Still he watched me with sagging mouth and with those dreadful, dying eyes—as though he were struggling to make out my features at a great distance.
“Janvers!” I shouted at him. “Wake up and talk . . . who did it to you?”
There was a faint gleam in his eyes, I thought. But no words came. He made a numb movement with his lips, but only a gasp came from his throat.
I tried the brandy again—I put half the flask down his throat, and with that half pint of liquid fire in him, he began to show a sign of life. His eyelids fluttered over his dull eyes, and a groan left his lips.
In the white, blind night outside, Spike echoed that groan with a snort, as though he had stumbled against a rock.
“Who did it, Janvers?” I shouted to him.
His head wobbled over to one side. Life was dropping out of him fast, but he began to speak with a great effort.
“My boy . . . San Marin. . . .”
Then a whisper passed under the pit of my arm as I leaned over him and a heavy knife buried itself in the hollow of the throat of Janvers. He dropped back in the chair, dead. And then he rolled heavily from the chair and fell on the floor upon his face.
I was on the floor myself, by that time, which is the safest place by all odds in time of such emergency, but I was facing the door with my revolver stretched out before me. There was nothing but the solid sheet of the fog and one long arm of white mist reaching into the cabin as though that was the ghostly arm that had just flung the knife into the throat of the miner.
Then blindly I ran out into the night, but three steps through that blanketing mist assured me that I was playing the part of a fool. Whoever had flung that knife or fired the shots into the body of Janvers, I could not locate them in such weather as this. I turned back slowly to the cabin and went in to the dead man again.
II
If I could not immediately follow after the murderer, I could at least make sure what had been the motive of this cold-blooded crime, to complete which the assassin had sneaked back and thrown the knife. Perhaps, through a thinning of the fog, as he hurried away, he saw the glimmer of the light from the cabin and knew that someone was there—someone who might take advantage of a dying whisper of the other. So the final touch had been given.
I cannot tell you how infuriating it was to me. It was not the first time, of course, that I had seen death. Although I was not half so familiar with it as those fools who wrote articles for newspapers and magazines about red-handed Hugo Ames, the outlaw. But I had never witnessed a death that took me so by the throat—that had so much ghostly terror about it. And a great deal of pathos, too, for I couldn’t imagine this dead man as a villain in the life of anyone.
I went mechanically through the shack. There was not the least doubt, of course, that the crime had been committed not for revenge but on account of the poor little pittance of gold old Truck Janvers had been able to grind out with his coffee mill in the past month or so.
Yet I went through the cabin, turning things over with an idle hand, because there was nothing else for me to do in the white blanket of the fog that lay over the world outside. And then miserably concealed in a corner of the hut, I stumbled onto a little box, and in the box a canvas bag, and in the bag a small handful of sparkling yellow dust—here was the treasure of poor Janvers. Here was the only motive for which I could imagine a murder. I sifted the stuff carelessly back and forth in my hands, and some of it spilled onto my clothes. I cared nothing about the stuff itself. But if there was no money motif, as you might call it, behind the killing, what was the reason?
It was not a very cheerful situation in which to consider a murder mystery. The drifting forms in the white mist beyond the open door sent shudders of apprehension through me. And I restored the gold to the bag, the bag to the box, and the box to the corner from which I had just taken it.
Another possibility leaped into my mind. It was possible that the vein that Janvers was working had opened out into a rich streak and that someone, envying his fortune, had decided to steal from him the source of the gold rather than the gold itself. But this was a thing that I could not investigate further until the daylight came and I could enter his hole in the ground.
Yet it seemed most highly improbable that old Truck, with his fondness for hard liquor, would be wasting golden moments on the side of the hill when here in the sack was enough to take him to the village to celebrate his discovery.
I turned from the cabin to Truck himself. His blunt face and high, Scandinavian cheek bones were certainly not easily associable with mystery of any kind.
So I went through his pockets. I found odds and ends—nothing else. In his wallet there were three much-soiled and crumpled dollar bills. There were a couple of clippings from newspapers—foolish cartoons that had caught the eye of the simple fellow. And there was a letter, as well. The envelope had rubbed to tatters and a mass of pulp. The outer fold of the letter itself was a blurred mass of ink that no eyes in the world could have deciphered as writing.
I opened it without interest, but, the moment it was unfolded, I was truly startled to find within a man’s handwriting, but a handwriting of the finest quality—well formed and flowing—a handwriting young, rich in character—the sort of writing that one might associate with a man of talent—talent in some handicraft. The writing of a gentleman, I thought it was, as well.
All of this was all the more intriguing, of
course, because as far as I had heard of Janvers—and he had been in these mountains for ten years at least—he hardly knew a handful of people who could pass as civilized.
And then again, there was a renewed interest because this was a familiar letter.
. . . but afterward, I grew tired of such a way of life, Truck. . . .
Those were the first words that I could make out. I turned to the signature and found: Crinky.
That was another poser. The sort of nickname one could give to a girl, say—a little girl. And what the devil had a man by the name of Crinky to do with this rough-handed old miner and prospector?
I scratched my head over that, and then I went back to the reading of the letter itself. But who had ever heard of such a name as Crinky? No one that I know. There was something rather catchy about the name—a token of affection, you might almost say. At least, that was how I read it in that cabin, beside the dead man. You will see that my mind was reaching after very small clues indeed.
I began with the letter where I had left off:
. . . I grew tired of such a way of life, Truck, I had to settle down in some way. And you know the rest.
I know that you don’t approve of what I have decided on. And I know why you don’t approve. But I ask you to remember two things. The first is that I’m not the same fellow you used to know. I think that you would be almost proud to recognize me, now. The second is that people down here in San Marin haven’t the same outlook on life that you have. They aren’t so stern. They don’t expect so much of a man—especially of a young man.
If I haven’t been a model—well, I’ll admit all of that. And I haven’t been industrious, either. I’ve been as full of faults as a haystack is full of straws. But then, you know that a man can change. Look at your own life!
I suppose that I should not leave that in the letter for fear that it might anger you, but I presume, after all, that you are too fair and square to mind frank talk. At least, you have always been very frank with me.
Perhaps, at the base, you are entirely right. But remember that every man will try to live. There’s that instinct in us. And I am merely fighting to live.
You must not smile at that. When I say that I am fighting to live, I mean just that. Other people may be able to scratch out an existence and call it life. But I cannot be satisfied with that. I must live beautifully or else I do not care to live at all.
Now I know that you will smile when you read this, and you will think of the other years of my life, and what I have done with my time in them. You will say that there has not been much beauty of life in them, at the least. But, after all, you never have understood me. I want to ask you to let me try to explain myself to you.
If I have done wrong things—and of course we both know that I have done lots of them—it has been because I could not endure the existence that I had to pass through. I had to have something better and finer. And if I committed crimes, it was so that I could come to the surface of the water once in a long time and have one glimpse of the blue and one breath of purest air.
I admit that I perhaps wallowed in darkness for fifty-one weeks of the year, but it was all so that in the single week remaining I could be able to live in the light. Do you understand me?
I ask you—I beg you on my knees—to think it over carefully. You will find that if I have a chance to live in the light always, I shall never again make you call me a devil.
You can destroy my chance of happiness. You can destroy my chance of becoming a good and a useful man. It needs only a word from you to do it. But for the sake of mercy, let me go on in my own way. At the worst, I shall never draw you into my affairs again. As ever.
Crinky
What a letter and what a signature!
I sat there and brooded over that missive a dozen times in a row. I should have been certain that this was a letter that Janvers had picked up and with which he had nothing to do. But he was named in the very first line of it.
An easy letter, a humble letter, a gentle letter, and yet a desperate letter, too. I guessed that there might be steel claws behind this velvet if Crinky were cornered.
And that name—Crinky. A devilish odd and intriguing name. But what had it to do with that dead bull, Truck Janvers?
Finally I put the letter carefully back into his pocket. I did not need it any more. I knew every word of it by heart and I also knew that I should repeat that letter 100 times, unconsciously, until it was printed in my flesh, so to speak.
However that may be, I knew suddenly and perfectly why Truck Janvers had been killed. He was able to stretch out his hand from the distance and forbid that happiness toward which Crinky was aspiring.
What did that happiness of Crinky consist in? Some guilty thing, no doubt. And perhaps the power of Truck over this stranger was his knowledge of the stranger’s past.
However, I had not failed to note in the letter of Crinky a certain gentle and appealing tone. It was hard for me, even out of written words, to imagine this as a man capable of serious crimes.
But on the spot I made up my mind that I could not rest until I had followed the name of Crinky around the entire world and located the owner of it at last. I had one clue that might work out in the beginning.
My boy . . . San Marin. . . .
In the town of San Marin, therefore, I intended to hunt for news first of all. But where was San Marin? And how could I, an outlawed man, travel safely toward it, and into a country where I knew nothing of the people or the landscape? Madness, you will say, for me to slip out of my hole-in-the-wall country where I was familiar with every crevice, and risk myself abroad.
Well, I thought of all these things, but in the end I knew that I could not resist the temptation. I had to ride on that trail, no matter where it took me.
It was not that I had any particular fondness for Truck. Of course he was almost an utter stranger to me, but the crime against him was what fascinated me. I guessed at a vast power of evil behind the crime. But, oh, if I could have had a hint of the real blackness behind the knife that struck him down, I should never have been able to wrap myself in my blankets that night and sleep in the cabin on the floor beside the murdered man.
III
It was not strange that I wakened after a short sleep, an hour before sunrise. The fog had cleared. First I took Truck’s burro. It was hobbled, which was fair proof that it had a hankering to move toward some other place than home. Perhaps it was bought from someone in the village in the valley below. At any rate, I had to take a chance. If I hoped to get on the trail of the murderer, I could not wait to bury the body of Janvers. I merely saddled the burro and pinned a great piece of paper on the side of the saddle:
Truck Janvers Lies Murdered in his Cabin
Then I turned the burro loose and clipped it along the side. It made an honest effort to plant its hard little hoofs in the middle of my brow, but my boxing training helped me to side-step, and the heels darted over my shoulder.
Then I was glad to see the little beast jog down the trail toward the village. That contrary-minded burro would not hurry even toward liberty.
After that was done, I cut for the sign of the murderer. I found my own sign—oceans of it. I had tied up my trail in a delightfully foolish tangle the night before, as I could see. But I had to work for a long time, and the morning light was bright before I found what I wanted. At a considerable distance from the shack, and over the brow of the ridge, I found a great pool of horse tracks. And from this pool a trail led away, covered by the prints of no fewer than four horses.
It was very interesting. For one thing, it gave me no fear that the trail would be any too difficult to follow or that the speed of that retiring party would be any too great. I don’t think that I ever saw a body of four horsemen who could escape from me if I had even an ordinary horse for the pursuit. Four always ride slower than the slowest horse in the party. For there is only one reason for getting ahead in every mind in a party, but there are four reasons for lingering
at whatever comes in the trail. And there are four heads to be consulted in the solution of every problem.
Well, being contented with what I had seen, I went back and cooked a breakfast. You will think that it was a rather gruesome thing to sit quietly by and cook a meal while a dead man lay stretched in the cabin beside me. But I hardly saw him. I only saw the mystery before me, and all the deepening wonders that were attached to it. For, you see, the fact that four riders had come to strike down poor Truck Janvers was enough to raise the killing above a normal murder.
They had ridden up through the night, deliberately. In the first place, they had reconnoitered the situation with the greatest care. They were so sure of themselves and the direction in which they were traveling that a fog that had baffled me and a good mount that I was on did not bother them at all. They had proceeded through the mist as straight as though they were following a mist. In spite of the sheltering fog—or for fear lest it might suddenly thin or lift in a puff of wind—they had halted their horses beyond the ridge. Then they had stolen ahead to the cabin—one or more.
I could not find any traces of their feet. To be sure, the soil around the cabin was extremely rocky, but, even so, their ability to move up to the cabin in the night without leaving a single sign rather bewildered me. Although, for that matter, I have never been an Indian when it comes to trailing. Some people are endowed with an extra sense in that matter, but no white man has ever attained to the perfection of good Indians.
At any rate, I decided that the trail proved one thing at least. Which was that these people had ridden straight toward Truck Janvers with the agreed purpose of destroying the miner. There was nothing haphazard about the matter. They had not ridden past the cabin, but only up to it, and then they had doubled straight back. Truck Janvers had been a dead man, in their minds, a long time before the two bullets and the knife ended him.
Furthermore, I felt that the four had acted with such caution that I had to deal not with impulsive brutality under the influence of whiskey, but with a very cold, steady murderousness that it was hard to conceive. How could such a simple fellow as Janvers have offended four men enough to make them ride by night to do away with him without a fighting chance?
