by Brand, Max
He considered.
“No, I haven’t been broken all to pieces,” he said.
“You won’t talk, eh?” she demanded, backing up from him a little.
A queer alarm ran through him.
“Are you angry, Sally?” he asked her.
“Not very,” she said. “You have to act like a mug, I suppose. That’s the way you see yourself and you have to act that way. But why don’t you cut loose? There’s no rope on you. Say something. Say you’re glad to be back here in Sally’s kitchen. Say anything.”
“I wanted to say that,” he answered.
“You wanted to say what?”
“Well, that I’m glad — ”
He hesitated. He felt that he was making a fool of himself, and he flushed.
“Well, I’ll breeze along,” said Taxi.
After he had said that, he had to start for the door. He didn’t want to go to the door, but what he had said compelled him. She got hold of his arm and pulled him around to face the light. Her violence startled him.
“You didn’t come down here just to breeze along again in two seconds. Why did you come?” she demanded.
“I wanted to see you,” said Taxi, compelled to truth because he could think of nothing else to say.
“Are you being bright and smart?” she asked, half of herself. “No; he means it, partly. He’s only part Indian, and the rest of him is almost human, tonight. What part of you is Indian, Taxi?”
“Indian?” he exclaimed.
He touched the black gloss of his hair, more startled than ever.
“I have no Indian blood,” he said.
She began to laugh.
“Why, you’re only about four years old,” she told him. “No Indian, eh? No, because even an Indian does a little boasting after he’s come in from the warpath. Stop being dark and secret. I’ll tell you, it does my heart good to see you again!”
“Does it?” said Taxi. “Do you mean that?”
“Do I sound as if I’m just making conversation?” asked the girl.
“I’m glad of that,” said Taxi.
He looked up so that the black lashes no longer were a veil, and his pale, bright eyes burned against her own.
“It hit me all at once, up there in the hills to-day,” he said. “I was hungry for something. I found out that I was hungry to see you again. So I came down.”
She folded her arms again, and from that support raised one hand to her chin. Her head bowed. She studied him with an upward glance.
“What’s this all about, Taxi?” she asked.
He said hastily: “I don’t know. Nothing. I don’t mean ‘nothing.’ It’s about you, I suppose. Isn’t it all right?”
“It’s not just a line,” she said aloud, but to herself. “He means it. Well, Taxi, you can go right ahead and talk like this as much as you want to. I like it. I like it a lot.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Taxi.
“Oh, no?” she asked.
“No,” said Taxi. “I feel like a fool. I don’t know what to say.”
“If you can’t talk, what do you want to do?” said the girl.
He considered. Then he answered: “I’d like to sit down there by the stove and watch you?”
“Would you?” said the girl. “Not wanting to step up and help me finish with the kitchen, are you?”
“No,” said he seriously. “I’d rather sit still and watch you. I’ve been remembering your face quite clearly, but not clearly enough. I was wrong about the mouth.”
“Were you?” said the girl.
“Yes. I thought it was too big.”
“It is,” she answered.
“I don’t think so,” said he. “It looks about right to me. All of you looks about right to me.”
“What are you trying to do, Taxi? Make love to me?”
“Making love to you?” he exclaimed. “Love? Why, no. Look here, Sally. I wouldn’t be that sort of a dog. You don’t think that I’d be that sort of a dog, do you?”
He grew pale with anxiety. He came a little closer to her and, in the midst of making a gesture, found that he had taken hold of her hand. He said:
“I know what I am, and I suppose you guess what I am. I wouldn’t be such a dog — to make love to a girl that’s right. You don’t think I’m that sort of a hound, do you, Sally?”
She kept peering at him earnestly, as though she were almost discovering something in the bright pallor of his eyes.
“I don’t know what you are,” said the girl. “Tell me what you are, Taxi, will you?”
“You haven’t guessed? I’m a yegg, Sally. Safe cracking is my business.”
“That ought to be a lot of fun,” said Sally.
“Whatever you do, I hope you won’t laugh at me,” said Taxi sadly.
“I’m a mile and a half from laughing,” said the girl. “There’s a whole mountain between me and a laugh.”
And straightway she was laughing. She stopped herself and studied his worried face for a moment.
“It doesn’t make you sick to think of a yegg being in your house?” asked Taxi.
“I sort of like it,” said the girl. “What else are you?”
“A jailbird,” said Taxi.
“That goes with safe cracking. It always does,” she said. “It’s about three weeks of safe cracking and three years in jail, isn’t it, Taxi?”
He was silent. After all, she was not very far wrong. Something about her way of putting it made out Taxi and all other criminals mere fools, mere weak wits.
“Jail always for safe cracking?” she asked.
“No. They haven’t caught me so often like that. But they try to run me up Salt Creek all the time. The cops want to frame me and run me up Salt Creek. That’s why I’ve been in prison a lot. I beat the rap — but not entirely. I get a year or two out of it, for some reason or other.”
“What’s Salt Creek?”
“The electric chair.”
“Ah?” said the girl.
He could see that that had struck her in the face.
“I’m saying the wrong things,” said Taxi. “I don’t know how to talk to women. I won’t talk any more.”
“You’re saying the right things,” she told him. “How do they try to frame you?”
“They always call it murder,” said Taxi. “It’s murder every time, according to the cops.”
“What’s murder?”
“They’re down on me,” said Taxi, “so they try to call it murder every time I drop a man.”
She took a breath. She seemed to need it.
“I’m a fool,” said Taxi. “I shouldn’t talk like this. I won’t talk any more.”
“Go on, go on!” she whispered. “I want to hear every word. Taxi, when you say — when you speak about dropping a man, you mean shooting — you mean killing a man?”
“You know,” said Taxi. “When somebody doublecrosses you. Then you go for him, of course.”
“Of course,” whispered the girl faintly.
“He knows you’re after him. That’s what makes the game.
“Game?” murmured the girl.
“You see, if he knows that you’re coming, then he’ll get his pals around him. He won’t sleep. He’ll be in hell, and he’ll be ready night and day. You just let him hang on the tree and get ripe. After a while you go and pick him off.”
He laughed a little. His eyes went brightly into the past, remembering certain occasions.
She seemed to be cold. Even her voice trembled. Her eyes gave over narrowing and sharpening to pierce his mind and kept getting bigger and bigger.
“And then,” said Taxi, explaining, “after that happens a few times, you have some enemies. They’ll always be gunning for you. Sometimes they think they have you. It means a fight. Besides, there are always some of the big fellows who try to arm in on a successful business like mine. If you don’t give them a percentage, they start a pack of gunmen after you. When that happens, I try to dodge the gunmen and get
at the big fellows. That’s the best part of the game, when you get at the big fellows. But there’s always trouble. If you get a big fellow, you do time. That’s all there is to it. You do time.”
She began to shake her head.
“You’re simply different, Taxi,” she said. “I’ve never met anybody like you. I want to ask you another thing. Jim Silver left Horseshoe Flat to find you. Did you see him?”
“I’m like the rest,” said Taxi mournfully. “They all told me the same thing. They all said that when I fell for a girl, I’d talk my head off.”
She waited as though she knew he would say more. Then he said, very tersely:
“Larue and three more of ‘em got me in the Round-up Bar. They took me out to a place where Barry Christian was living in the mountains. He set a mug called Babe to work beating me up to make me confess that I was working with Silver and tell Christian what Silver’s plans were. Babe beat me to sleep, a couple of times. Then I found myself folded over the back of a horse. Silver was carrying me high, wide, and handsome, as you people say. Christian and some of his crew were chasing us. Even Parade couldn’t carry double and beat that lot.
“Silver threw a dead tree trunk across a ravine, handed himself across it, and then called to Parade. He’d lashed me to the horse. Parade jumped the gap; and Silver hid me in a cave until the Christian outfit stopped searching for us. He took care of me till I could walk. I don’t know what he had in the back of his brain. I don’t know what he wanted to use me for. I asked him. He wouldn’t say. So when I was able, I slipped away from him, got a horse, and then came straight back here. That’s the biggest part of the story.”
“Taxi,” she cried, “what would Jim Silver have in the back of his mind except the wishing to help you?”
“Charity?” asked Taxi coldly. Then he shook his head and added: “Not in this world. When there were elves and fairies, maybe. But people don’t throw away something for nothing in this day. Silver had something in the back of his mind. I don’t know what.”
“Jim Silver,” said the girl, “is the finest man in the world!”
“Maybe,” said Taxi. “But not that fine. He — ”
The dining room door sagged softly open. The form of a man appeared there, vaguely seen, but there was plenty of light shining on the big automatic with which he covered Taxi.
XX
Captured
EYES less sharp than those of Taxi would have seen the gun, also. But he made out even the face in the shadow and recognized “Plug” Kennedy, who for seven years had dogged him since the days when Taxi was a precocious boy of the underworld. Whatever chances were to be taken, there could be none risked on Plug’s shooting abilities. He was famous with a gun. He was almost too famous to be on the side of the law.
The voice of Plug drawled out the familiar word: “All right. Hoist them, Taxi!”
The girl whirled about. She leaped straight between Taxi and the leveled gun, crying:
“Run, Taxi!”
He hit her out of the path of danger with a back stroke of his arm. She staggered off and crashed against the kitchen wall as Taxi lifted his hands till they were level with his ears.
“You fool!” said Taxi to her. “He’d shoot through ten like you to get at me.”
“Fast work, Taxi,” said the hard, slow voice of Plug Kennedy as he edged through the doorway and farther into the light. “One split part of a second more and she would have got something that was on its way for you.”
She stood by the wall, the breath knocked out of her, gasping. Taxi wanted to gasp, also.
Plug Kennedy was drawing closer. He took short steps as though he were carrying a glass of whisky filled to the brim. That was because he did not want to upset the silken fineness of his aim by jarring the gun out of line to the least degree.
“All right,” said Plug. “Turn around, kid.”
Taxi turned. He knew the technique and he turned slowly.
“Want ‘em behind me?” he asked.
“Never mind,” said Plug. “I’ve got a new idea for you. Just keep them up high. Touch the ceiling, Taxi.”
Taxi stretched his arms. Plug, with a painful accuracy, laid the muzzle of his gun against Taxi’s backbone. Then he reached in front and with his left hand fanned Taxi for weapons.
“Hey! No gun?” he demanded.
“I’ve been a little hurried lately,” said Taxi.
“You’re getting careless, kid,” answered Plug. “I know people back in the Big Noise that won’t believe me when I tell ‘em that I found Taxi when he wasn’t heeled. Looks like you’re tryin’ to make it easy for me, son!”
His left hand kept on fumbling. He drove the muzzle of the automatic harder directly against Taxi’s spine.
“You got the old outfit in your clothes, the same as ever, eh?” said he.
“There’s no better place for it, Plug,” said Taxi.
“No,” said Plug. “There’s no better place, I guess.”
He stepped back, all his movements soft and easy. Sweat of a mortal anxiety, no matter what his advantages of position were, was running down his face. He was like a man in a cage, handling a tiger.
“Now turn around,” he said huskily. He took a pair of handcuffs out of a coat pocket.
Taxi, turning, slowly lowered his arms and held them out. The bright steel bracelets instantly clicked into place. The girl did not move, but she moaned aloud. He turned his head and looked at her.
“That’s only a start,” said Plug. “I know how fast you can shed anything in the way of a steel fit, Taxi. I’ve got something better than that for you, old son.”
He drew out a pair of leather cuffs with a strong steel chain joining them. Clumsily, with one hand, he got one of the cuffs over the left wrist of Taxi and drew it tight with a buckle. The other cuff he used in the same way. There were four small, strong buckles on each of these leather cuffs, and he pulled each one tight.
When he had done that, he seemed to feel more at ease and unlocked the steel cuff that was on Taxi’s left arm and snapped it over his own left wrist.
He began to sigh and smile.
“There!” said Plug. “Look over that system, Taxi. I thought it all out by myself. I worked the whole gag out by myself, old son, and it’s a beauty, eh? You can shed the steel bracelets as fast as they’re chucked on you, but nobody in the world can ever get these cuffs off without working the buckles. And look! The buckles are stiff, and the leather strap runs through three guards. Any child in the world could unbuckle those straps, but not without pulling and hauling. I keep that leather resined so that it sticks, almost like glue. And there you are, Taxi. You’ll never get those off without high-signing me, eh?”
“It looks that way,” said Taxi.
“You’re bright, Taxi, but you won’t think your way out of those cuffs all the way to the Big Noise, and I’m telling you.”
“Perhaps not,” said Taxi.
“Perhaps not is right,” said the detective. “We’ll barge along. Excuse me, lady. I’m sorry, but business is business, in these hard times.”
She had not moved. It seemed to Taxi that she was incapable of movement. He turned with Plug Kennedy and went toward the rear door of the kitchen.
“This is the quickest way out,” said Kennedy.
Then the girl came with a sudden rush.
“Hey, quit it! Back up!” commanded Kennedy.
She paid no attention. She had Taxi by the sleeves of his coat.
“I know that I’ll never see you again,” she told him.
Something came over him. He looked beyond her with his pale, bright eyes and said: “There’s no steel can hold me. They don’t build walls thick enough or high enough. I’m coming back to you.”
He leaned over a little.
She made it easy for him, holding up her face, but he felt shy and awkward. His lips were trembling; he was trembling all over when he kissed her.
He was almost glad when he was outside of the room, at las
t, under the open sky, though he knew that he was on his way to prison. They went around to the front of the house, down the street, through an alley, and by a winding route came at last to a back door, through a cluttered back yard.
There Plug knocked three times, and the door was presently opened by none other than Pudge, the bartender.
XXI
Bound East
WHEN Pudge recognized his visitors, he jerked the door wide open. He invited them into a little back room and started rubbing his hands with pleasure.
“You got him, Kennedy!” he said. “I told you that you and me would be able to do business together. You can see it in our names. Plug and Pudge. That sounds like a team. And I told you my tip would be right. I knew he’d come back there. When the tough mugs get an idea about a girl, they’re weak. They’re so weak that they’re soggy.”
“They are,” said Plug. “What beats me is that there was any girl at all. That’s why I thought you were batty. There’s never been no girl before. But there’s where old Father Time gets in. He softens up the hard ones. This girl is a peach, Pudge. Didn’t she jump between him and my gun so’s he could run or fight! And didn’t he knock her out of the way instead of pulling a gun or a knife, or something! It’s funny. He ain’t the same as he used to be. He’s all softened up.”
Plug talked so slowly that it took him some time to make this speech.
Taxi said: “Plug, I don’t ask favors.”
“No, you don’t,” admitted Plug. “What’s up?”
“Shut your mouth about the girl, will you?”
Plug Kennedy laughed. “All right,” he said. “I’ll shut up about her.”
He kept on laughing. “He’s all softened up,” he said to Pudge again.
Pudge came close to Taxi. From his superior height he looked down on him carefully.
“Young feller,” he said, “I’m glad to get you out of this neck of the woods. I see Babe’s thumb marks on you; and you’ve got a memorandum from Pudge on your skull, out of sight. But I been thinking that before the wind-up, maybe you’d leave some marks on the two of us, and that those marks would never rub off!”
He turned to Kennedy.
“We can settle now,” he said.
