Larramee's Ranch

by Max Brand

  “I have not said it. But a banker has a certain position.”

  “Nevertheless, there is a price which may be reached for most men after which they become interested in whatever is said. I think that I may interest you, Mr. Maybeck.”

  One might have expected the honest Mr. Maybeck to flush with rage at such a suggestion as this, but the honest Mr. Maybeck was not at all enraged. He was too curious. And though he heard a man declare that he believed the banker was capable of taking a bribe, Mr. Maybeck merely shrugged his shoulders and prepared to listen. He considered his virtue so strong that the idea of a fall from glory was ridiculous to him.

  “Very well,” said he.

  It was as though he had said: “Begin, tempter!”

  “I am dealing in large figures from the start,” said Holden, “because I want large support from an important man. A man like you, Maybeck, can elect members to the State senate and assembly merely by speaking a word. A man like you has a distinct and a direct weight with the governor.”

  Mr. Maybeck cleared his throat. This was not altogether unpleasing. He began to see that Holden was something more than a criminal. He was a brilliant mind capable of great insight.

  “These things are possible, perhaps,” said he.

  “Ten thousand dollars is my retainer’s fee to you, for your good influence in case I get into trouble,” said Holden.

  The banker’s flush grew brighter. It was a large sum of money. Ten thousand dollars in cash would build the whole new wing to his house which he had planned, and enlarge his stable also. Ten thousand was a year’s salary for an important man. Ten thousand, by its very mention, made him look toward Mr. Holden in a new manner. He ceased to be a mere robber. Robbery became a business, considered in the light of such finance, and Holden was a businessman—following a lucrative business, at that.

  Still, ten thousand was not enough. The mention of such a sum merely served to make him more acutely aware of his own virtue. He flushed warmly; a delicious sensation of joy ran through his flesh.

  “I feel that you are a man of discretion, Holden,” said he. “And I appreciate what you have to say. Nevertheless—I tell you frankly and truthfully—that I cannot be bought. My influence, such as it is, cannot be exchanged for dollars!” He sat back in his chair and shook his head.

  He added: “Ten thousand is a large sum. Apply it to a good purpose—”

  “Ten thousand?” said Holden calmly. “You misunderstood. Twenty thousand was the amount I mentioned.”

  Mr. Maybeck stopped wagging his head. He stared fixedly at his companion, and as he stared, he saw another vision, great and bright and terrible. He saw the dreadful picture of himself submitting to the temptation and accepting the bribe.

  Then he rolled out of his chair, pitched to his feet, and began to pad hastily up and down the linoleum of his office on his rubber heels, glancing out the clouded glass which walled him in and which nevertheless gave him sight of the shadowy line at the paying teller’s window and the shadow of the paying teller himself behind the barred window.

  It was the horror of fear of yielding that checked him.

  “Mr. Holden,” said he, “you talk to me like a man who had no conscience—” Then he added hastily, remembering that this visitor most probably carried a gun and knew how to use it—“I mean to say, money cannot move me. I know myself. I know money. Money cannot budge me. Go somewhere else. Offer them your money. But with me—” He shook his head and sighed. “It won’t do, Mr. Holden! It won’t do!”

  “Very well,” said Holden. “I am the last man in the world to offer a bribe. Consider, rather, that I am simply opening up business relations with you?”

  “Eh?” gasped out the banker, grasping at the thought and then failing to seize it firmly enough.

  “I said,” went on Holden, “that I would consider a sum of thirty thousand dollars—”

  “Did you say thirty thousand?” asked Maybeck softly.

  “I said thirty or forty thousand,” answered Holden firmly. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I suppose that I did.”

  “I said that I would consider thirty or forty thousand dollars well invested.”

  “To buy me!” cried the banker wringing his hands. “To buy my soul. Oh, heaven defend me!”

  “Nonsense,” answered Holden, feeling a sort of fierce joy as he saw that weak and flabby soul melting under the fire. “Nonsense, man! It is merely as I would pay a lawyer a retaining fee. I am trying to buy his interest—not his honesty! Buy you? Why, Mr. Maybeck, the whole world knows that you’re worth a million if you’re worth a penny!”

  He had trebled the actual fortune of the banker, but Maybeck nodded. The belief in strength is sometimes strength.

  “How could I buy you,” said Holden, “with a mere forty or fifty thousand dollars?”

  Here the banker came stiffly erect.

  “Did you say fifty thousand dollars?” he asked huskily.

  “I said fifty thousand dollars,” said Holden, “not for your direct interest in my affairs, but your influence with the judge who may some day try me. For your influence with the governor for a pardon in case I am one day sentenced. For these things, I would offer to you—as to a lawyer, do you understand? Or to an insurance company—fifty thousand dollars!”

  “Bribery!” moaned the miserable Maybeck.

  “Is law a dishonest or a dishonorable business?”

  “God forbid!”

  “Is insurance illegal?”

  “No, no!”

  “Very well, sir! What is your answer?”

  “My head is spinning,” said the banker. “I try to see both sides of this question. Surely, surely there are two sides. I have seen dishonesty in honest people. Surely there may be honor in a—”

  “In a thief? Perhaps there is. It is a possibility, at least. I have heard about it in books. And for sixty thousand dollars—”

  “Sixty thousand?” echoed the poor banker.

  “Exactly.”

  “Man, man, can you be sure of yourself when you speak of such a vast sum?”

  “You understand, sir? With this money you can replace what was taken from your bank.”

  “By the eternal gods!” cried Maybeck. “You are the man who plundered the bank!”

  He looked at Holden as at a midday ghost. Holden had hardly expected to have the matter take this turn. However, he was suspected of so much already that it was impossible to be more under the shadow.

  “I have asked you a question,” said Holden. “Sixty thousand, Mr. Maybeck?”

  “Enough,” said the poor banker. “But about the money—”

  “I have your word?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Shake hands with me.”

  “Very well, Holden. I wish you luck.”

  “But will you work to give me luck?”

  “Why not? Why not?”

  “If you should fail, I would find a way to pass the word to my friends. Do you know what they would do, Maybeck?”

  “Eh?”

  “They would cut your throat, my fat friend, from ear to ear!”

  “Phaugh! Well, well, Holden. We have shaken hands on the thing. And now—the money? You said sixty thousand?”

  He was nodding and trembling with delight and with avarice.

  “Here,” said Holden, “is the money.”

  He drew out a packet, an astonishingly little packet. And he placed it on the desk. The banker tore the package open and examined the bills feverishly.

  “It is not the same,” he said with a sigh. “It is not the same money which was taken from our vaults. However, it is the will of God. He took away and He returned it again. Mysteriously, but truly.”

  “I, then,” said Holden sneeringly, “am able to consider myself an agent of God?”

  “You?” cried the other. “No, no! You are the devil himself!” He added, gripping the arm of Holden. “But even if you are the devil, you will find it hard to get out of
this trouble, Holden. Look!”

  He swept his arm toward the glass walls, and Holden saw all around him a thickly pressed line of men, their dim shadows falling on the clouded glass.

  “They are waiting,” said the president, “for my signal!”

  “Your signal?”

  “Do you think that we are fools in this town of Maybeck? I tell you, Holden, that the moment you entered the bank a clerk telephoned to me.”

  “And told you that I had come?”

  “Exactly!”

  “And what of that?”

  “What of that? Man, man, you don’t know that everything is known! We understand. The story was spread all through the mountain towns early this morning by the telegraph, and they have put out a reward for you that will bring out a thousand armed men hunting for you before noon!”

  Holden grew sick and pale. “What have they charged against me?” he asked.

  “That you murdered—a devilish thing to have done, man—that you murdered in cold blood old Alec Marshall and his son, at Timber Valley!”

  “I murdered two men?”

  “Holden, they have the proofs. A man on a red horse, the color and the size of your stallion, was seen to leave Timber Valley. His trail was followed up the valley. There lay Alec and his boy dead in their shack. Holden, nothing can save you!”

  “And when I entered the bank?”

  “God forgive me, Holden, I had them send for the sheriff to take charge.”

  “Those are his men, then?”

  “Those are his men!”

  Holden sat down in a chair and took out a cigarette.

  “What will you do?” breathed the banker.

  “Smoke,” said Holden, “and think the thing over!”

  CHAPTER 24

  The sheriff was a man who was worthy of his place. He was no politician who had gained office through shaking hands and telling stories and laughing at the poor wit of every man of the street. He was a fighter. In the far mountains he had spent an apprenticeship of twenty years catching animals in traps and still hunting them with guns. From this he graduated to the more exciting business of hunting men.

  He worked for the love of the work. He hated a criminal as much as he hated a “varmint.” Cowardly and cruel as a wolf or a coyote might be, it was the opinion of the sheriff that the cruelty and the cowardice of a criminal was apt to exceed by far all the wickedness of any animal. Therefore he hunted them down religiously and remorselessly.

  He had held office for only two terms. When he came, he found Maybeck County with its newly found prosperity, a hunting ground for crooks of all descriptions. But during the last two years the only crime worth calling a crime that had taken place in the county, had taken place in the robbery of the bank itself. Such had been the efficiency of his labors!

  When he got the telephone message from the bank that the much-heralded Holden was in that building, he did not wait for his deputy, who had gone around the corner for tobacco. He started out as he was. He did not even go into the back room for his hat. His long, tangled locks in themselves must protect his head and shade his eyes.

  On the way he picked up what assistance he wanted. He signaled his assistants one by one, a man here and a man there—all trained and proven fighters. Better three good men than thirty “talkers,” as the sheriff was apt to call the heroes of the hotel stove side.

  He had more than three good men with him when he reached the bank, however. He had been peculiarly lucky as he went down the main street of the town. At one swoop he had gathered in the three Morrissey brothers, each as good a man as the other, and every one a crack shot and a fighter who would fight for the love of the battle and for no other inducement.

  The sheriff reached the bank, therefore, in high fettle. He had behind him no fewer than eleven hard-headed, hard-handed, strong-riding, straight-shooting heroes. Perhaps some men of the law would have scorned such reinforcements. They would have gone to make the arrest themselves, single-handed. But the sheriff did not care in the least about show. He had been a trapper. And trappers do not care about the beauty of the beast, the courage of his last stand, the loveliness of the deer in flight, the puma at bay. What he wants is pelts and bounties. And he gets them, though not in showy ways. This man of the law had no fear. But he had no folly, either. He never boasted, and he never threw away a chance. He could make himself striking and popular through his record, and through his record only. Even those who knew him best were apt to be those who feared him most, for the more he knew of human nature, the more he declared the seeds of the devil were in all of us! That was certain.

  This was the leader of the thick line of broad-shouldered men who surrounded the office of the president and whose shadows fell inward upon the walls of clouded glass. And as they gathered there, they turned to the sheriff for orders.

  “Shall we bust in?” their eyes asked him.

  He shook his head. They asked him again, in words, after a time. Then he took the cashier aside.

  “Is that office sound?” he asked.

  “It’s got glass walls,” said the cashier.

  “They’s other kind of walls around the glass,” said the sheriff, smiling toward those waiting guards of his. “What about the ceiling and the floor?”

  “The ceiling is eleven feet from the floor. It’s hard, thick plaster under steel lath—and—”

  “That’s enough,” said the sheriff, “because he ain’t gonna melt his way through that, I guess. Now what about the floor?”

  “Flags laid across boards—”

  The sheriff raised his hand and smiled. Then he went back to the line and said calmly: “Boys, there’s no use hurryin’ that trap. Let it make its own catch. They’re still talkin’. And when the president is ready for us to work, he’ll be ready to stop talkin’. We’ve got him caught. I guess he’s worth waitin’ for. Speakin’ personal, I’d as soon wait all day for the sight of this here Holden behind the bars.”

  The others nodded. The sheriff had won too many times for them to doubt him now.

  In the meantime, though it seemed a foolish precaution, he guarded against the possible retreat of the criminal. Yonder in the street stood the great red-bay stallion, Clancy, and under the head of the big horse lay the shaggy wolf dog, Sneak. Admittedly, once the cripple sat on the back of Clancy, it was sheerest folly to pursue him. The thing to do was to keep him from getting at the horse.

  So the sheriff went out and posted his deputy, who had come to the scene by this time with a full half dozen well-armed men who had also gathered, around Clancy and the big dog. It might have seemed a great deal more than was necessary, this flock of men, this little army. But as has been said before, the sheriff was not a man who ever threw away a single chance. He made his victories count by their completeness, not by their glory.

  If he could get five men to fight against one, he would think it sheerest madness to go into the battle with mere odds of three to one.

  Then he returned to the line which waited around the president’s office. It was now pointed out to the sheriff that for ten minutes there had been no sound of voices from the office, coming dimly and muffled through the heavy glass and wood walls of the room.

  Still he was in no hurry. “Maybe they’re talkin’ soft,” he said.

  But the word passed out into the street that probably the capture would be made by forcing the office door at any minute. And people began to brace their nerves to prepare for the shock of the explosions of guns. Because it was taken for granted that so terrible a person as the famous and mysterious little cripple would never let himself be taken except at an awful price.

  The whole town of Maybeck was there—hundreds and hundreds of people packed in around the front of the bank. And then a sharp, thin whistle cut the air from a distance a block away down the street. It was a most ordinary sound, but it made the great stallion prick his ears and toss up his head. And the guards stood closer in a ring around him, facing resolutely any attack. The attack c
ame, but not from the expected quarter. It came from the rear, the stallion himself rushing suddenly forward. He knocked down five men in the crowd in the first leap. The wolf dog slashed the bodies of three more. Then yells of “Mad dog!” scattered the throng and left a broadening path down which the red horse and the gray dog streaked.

  They whipped around the first corner. Then the hoofbeats stopped suddenly; and every one in the crowd knew why the horse had paused. By a miracle, Holden was there!

  CHAPTER 25

  A little child, himself a cripple so that he had been delayed far behind the other children when the rumor swept them toward the center of the town and the bank itself, was the only one to see the actual details of how the wolf dog and the great red horse came storming around the corner of the street up to the little man who waited for them, covered with dust, his clothes torn, looking as though he had been trampled in the dust by a wild herd. He saw the stallion pause. He saw the cripple clamber to the saddle with infinite pains, his face contorted with the agony of his haste and of his effort. He saw the man loosen the reins. He saw the great horse dart away down the street just as the far-flung foreguard of the sheriff’s men came whirling around the corner in their pursuit. They had time to pour in one crashing, rattling volley as the red stallion swung out of view. And that was the last they saw of Clancy or Clancy’s rider on that day.

  By the time they reached the edge of the town, no matter how fiercely they spurred, Clancy had swept his rider away into the concealment of the hills; and after that they could never sight him. In the meantime, the sheriff and those who were nearest about him standing near the office of the president of the bank, when they heard from the street the wild shout that the criminal was escaping, waited no longer, but half a dozen stout shoulders were leaned against the door and burst it open. They lurched into the office and there they were able at a glance to see the cause of escape. For Mr. Maybeck lay stretched upon the floor, and he was swathed head and foot in thickly twisted ropes. A handkerchief, wadded into his throat, prevented him from making any outcry, and his face was swollen and purple, his eyes starting from his head from the violence of his exertions to work the gag from between his teeth with his tongue.