by Brand, Max
“Friend of Doc Shore’s?” he asked with an elaborate nonchalance.
Silver looked at a blunt bulldog face with the hair brushed stiffly up in a high pompadour. He looked down at the black and broken nails of the waiter’s hands.
Then, with irritation, he demanded: “When a man asks for a pawnbroker, does it prove that he’s the pawnbroker’s friend?”
The waiter started a little. He made gestures with both hands as he answered:
“Oh, sure it don’t. It don’t prove nothing at all!”
But it was plain that the fellow thought it proved a great deal. His eyes squinted, and he smiled a bit to one side of his face, as though he were able to speak important things if he cared to do so. It was the attitude of the man who will demonstrate that his wits are as good as the next fellow’s.
Silver ordered a steak with fried potatoes and onions, and mashed turnips, and a wedge of apple pie, and coffee with hot milk. He was still waiting for the order when a slender youth of two and twenty, with a dark and handsome face, came smiling into the restaurant and straight past Silvertip toward the lunch counter. His lips did not seem to part, and yet Silver distinctly heard words in the air as the stranger went by. And the words were: “Leave Copper Creek — fast!”
Silver drew a breath, and with that breath came the urge to leave Copper Creek, and Crowtown, and that whole section of the range, and never return to it. What we fear most of all is what we cannot understand, and Silvertip could not understand.
He should get up from his table, cancel his order, and march from the restaurant, saddle Parade, and take his pack from the hotel, to fade from Copper Creek into the outer night. That was what the advice of the stranger had been, obviously; that was what his own instincts told him to do. But a strange thing held him.
He could not tell why the dark and handsome face of the man seemed so familiar to him, but he could almost touch it with his memory, almost give it a name — though at the same time something told him that he never had seen those features before.
Then he suddenly remembered the pictures in the old album in the house of the judge. He remembered the photograph of the fourteen-year-old boy, and his mind shut like a trap on the truth. This was Raoul Brender, nicknamed “Rap.” This was the goal of his search!
— And “the goal” had murmured the warning to leave at once!
Suddenly Jim Silver was afraid.
He began to ask himself if the nerve which had always been his was abandoning him at last — if courage is like cloth, a thing that can be rubbed through and worn out? He had heard that in a good many places, and more than once he had had frightful chances to see men of reputed bravery show yellow — yes, and in front of a crowd. Perhaps the same thing was happening to him. Perhaps the last act of grim courage in his life had been the interception of Butch Lawson, and the execution of that man.
Execution was a better term, Silver felt. It had not been murder; it could not even be called a killing; it was simply that society had been outraged, and that Silver had been society’s tool to put the matter of the outrage right.
So he remained there. He heard the cook break out into hearty laughter, and bawl:
“Rap Brender, you’re a card, all right!”
And Rap Brender laughed, also. He had given a warning to a stranger, and now he sat at the lunch counter, laughing and chatting. There was little care on the mind of this Rap Brender, but Silver would have given a great deal to know what was in Rap’s mind. Somehow, he felt, there was a way of linking everything together — Crowtown, Lawson, Deputy Sheriff Granger, the gold watch, the mark that had been cut on the back of the watch — a sort of double L turned downward — and finally old Doc Shore.
Looking back into his memory, Silver could swear that the last expression of Shore had been that of one ready to do murder. And therefore murder was now in the air. It was not for the sake of some small thing that Brender had warned him, but because his very life was endangered.
In our dreams, our thoughts will summon up before the closed eyes of the mind the faces we name. So it seemed to Silver now, as he thought of Shore and looked vacantly toward the big window that fronted on the street. For there the face of the pawnbroker took shape — the divided mist of white beard, the red, smiling mouth, and the peering eyes. Those eyes assuredly found Jim Silver, dwelt upon him for a moment, and then Doc Shore broke into laughter as he turned away.
Jim Silver felt that sinister mirth in his very soul. It was as though Shore were so sure Silver was trapped and so familiar with the game that he did not even care to pause to see the finish of the quarry.
The food came in a long, oval platter nicked brown at the edges. The fried potatoes sent up a rank odor of old pork fat; the onions were underdone; the coffee was acrid with chicory. And anger bubbled suddenly in the breast of Silver. He could recognize the sort of treatment that restaurant owners give to patrons they don’t wish to serve. In the back of the room, the cook and Brender were laughing again, and it seemed to Silver that the laughter was a mockery directed at him.
A bow-legged cow-puncher came in. He took off a pair of ragged old leather chaps, time and sweat-blackened, and spotted with white where thorns had freshly torn the surface. The chaps he hung on a peg, looked at them, seemed to find them too grotesque dangling on the wall, and flopped them over the back of a chair. He sat at the corner table in the front of the room, facing Silver, and began to rub the tips of his fingers over the rough of his unshaven beard while he waited to give an order.
But as he gradually turned his head back and forth, one spark came out from his eyes and went into the soul of Silver. And suddenly the whole room stood up in a blaze of light for Silver. He saw everything with a redoubled clearness, for he knew that if there were a danger pointing at his life, the fellow in the corner was the weapon which was pointing at his head.
There was only that first look, and then the man folded his arms on the edge of the table and seemed to stare down at his own reflections. He had a low forehead, with the flesh puckered in waves upon it; the top of his head was like that of an infant, but the whole lower part of his face spread out, and the nostrils flared into fish-hook twists at the corners.
He meant business, that fellow.
Silvertip went on eating. And suddenly the onions seemed delicious, and the steak was tender, and the coffee was as perfect as if he had been hungering and thirsting for a month in hard country. For the danger that had turned him cold in prospect was merely a piquant sauce, now that he was seeing the actual semblance of it.
Then a tall man came in, one with buck teeth that kept him smiling, and a great knob of an Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. He took a chair to the side of Silver, and, with his back against the wall, faced him in turn. Immediately behind him entered a third, one of those “average” men who are hard to describe, except that he had a way of looking fixedly, taking up one thing at a time with his eyes. He went straight down toward the rear of the room, and seated himself at a table directly behind that of Silvertip.
The thing was obvious now. It could hardly have been an ordinary custom for the men of Copper Creek to sit at the tables; the lunch counter, where the cookery could be watched, was the natural place for hungry people to sit, and though weariness and an abstraction of the mind had made Silver take a table, it was hardly likely that three other men, immediately after him, should do the same thing. It was not chance, either, that had distributed them in such a pattern, making Silver the exact center of the design. The meaning was simple: he was about to be filled with lead.
He hunched back his chair, turned slowly, and called for another cup of coffee. The waiter came to get his cup. That waiter was very pale now.
He snatched up the saucer and cup as though he were removing it from before a leper. He was sweating, and not with the heat of the room.
Now that the chair had been pushed back, Silver’s plan was simple. He would drop a spoon, lean for it, and slide suddenly to the fl
oor with a gun in each hand. The fellow behind him, with the lingering eyes, must be his first target, then the man with the buck teeth, and last the cow-puncher in the front of the room. Every shot would have to tell; there could be no misses. Three snap-shots, while he lay on the floor, and every one a bull’s-eye; that was the program that lay before him.
He decided that he would wait until the second cup was brought to him.
“Rap,” said the voice of the man behind him.
“Yes, Larry,” said Brender.
“Get the cook and the waiter out of the way,” came the sudden command.
And Silver knew that he had waited too long. The thing was about to begin now.
He turned slowly in his chair, his right arm over the back of it. His position looked helpless enough, his legs crossed, his arm at that angle. But he could get his guns from under his armpits with one flashing gesture, and a thrust of his foot would hurl the table from in front of him and cast him in a backward dive toward the floor.
That moment of confusion might give him a chance to make his guns start chattering, and if that were possible, he would still have a fighting chance. But as he turned and saw the cook and the waiter slinking with frightened faces out of the little kitchen through a rear door, he estimated those chances as one in a thousand. For these were men who lived by the gun, all of them.
“If you make a fast move,” said the man called Larry, “it will take you right into hell, Silvertip. Understand?”
“I understand,” said Silver. “Are you the messenger boys of Doc Shore? Come here to collect me?”
“Cool, ain’t he?” commented the man in the front of the room. He drew, without haste, a long-barreled Colt, and laid it on the table in front of him.
“He’s cool,” said the buck-toothed man at the side of the room. “He’s a good ticket, and he’s going to be punched for a long ride. Silver, you don’t have to talk, but I’d like to know what happened to Butch Lawson.”
“The slug hit him under the heart,” said Silvertip. “He lasted long enough to speak a few words. That was all. Then he turned over and went to sleep.”
“He lasted long enough to make a sucker out of you,” remarked Larry.
“I don’t know,” said Rap Brender, leaning both his elbows against the edge of the lunch counter. “Maybe there was room for Silvertip to have a little surprise. I’m not so sure that he’s been a sucker.”
“We haven’t got all night,” said Larry. “Silver, you’ve done a few things in the world. You’ve built yourself a name. It’s a pity that you’ve got to go out like this. But orders are orders. Boys, get him covered!”
“Wait a minute!” called a harsh, stern voice. It came from Rap Brender. He stood as before, but now there was a gun in each hand. “Keep your guns out of sight, partners,” he was commanding. “I’ve got something to say to you.”
“Hold on, Rap,” muttered Larry. “You know where you stand already. If you butt into this game, you’ll wish you were dead long before you’re planted underground!”
“I hear you talk,” said Rap Brender. “What I say is that Silvertip is facing the music in a way that I like to see. We’re not going to jump him in a pack. We’re going to take him on one by one.”
It seemed to Silver that Brender grew larger, taller, as he spoke. The meaning in his face was clear, and so was the ring of his voice. It compelled a moment of silence from the others.
“Thanks, Brender,” said Silver, and waited.
No matter how the thing turned out, Silver was glad now that he had come into the mountains to find young Rap Brender. The game was hard, and the chances were long, but the reward would be worth fighting for. He looked at the clean features of Brender, now drawn tense and hard, and saw that there was the true steel in him.
The buck-toothed man stood up, little by little unfolding the great length of his body.
“You been reading books again, Rap,” said he. “You been reading books and getting romantic. You’re going to stand by and watch three duels, are you? Why, you poor fool, this ain’t what you think. This is Silver, and his guns speak a coupla dozen languages.”
“Brender,” said Larry, “if you don’t like this job, step out the back way, and we’ll finish it without you.”
“I’ve made my talk,” said Brender. “And I’ve made my suggestion. If it doesn’t sound to you, get out of the place, the three of you. Watch your hand, Stew!”
The last was a shout. He of the fleshy forehead, in the front of the room, had snatched toward’ his gun, but his hand remained still in mid-air, and the gun on the table was untouched.
“You nearly collected it on the button just then,” said Brender.
“I guess you know what this means, Rap,” said Larry.
He stood up in turn.
Brender had a spot of white in the middle of each cheek. His dark eyes glittered.
“I know what it means,” he said. “It means that I’m through. And thank Heaven for that. I always thought you were a filthy lot. Now I know it. I hoped that you would have clean hands, Larry, but I see you’re in with the rest. Get out of this. You can go the back way.”
Larry looked deliberately around the room. Then he made a vague gesture of salute to Silver.
“It looks as though you’re going to win this hand, Silver,” he said. “I thought we had you cooked, but you had an ace up your sleeve. Come on, boys.”
He turned toward the stricken, desperate face of Brender.
“I’ll be seeing you, Rap,” he said, and passed on.
They moved in single file, slowly, through the kitchen and out the rear door of the restaurant. Brender and Silver remained alone.
CHAPTER VI
Flaming Guns
FOR an instant the world receded from them, and in the moment of silence, staring at one another, each realized what he had found in the other.
“Are you coming with me or riding alone?” asked Silver.
“With you,” said Rap Brender. “My horse is in the hotel stable with yours. But Christian’s men may have the stable guarded by this time. We’ve got to run like the devil. Come on!”
They went out of the restaurant with a rush. The thunder of their footfalls was still echoing through the long wooden box of a room when they stepped into the dust of the street. Ahead of them, two forms, bending far forward, were sprinting across the way and into the dark throat of an alley, as Brender and Silver headed for the hotel, with Rap well in the lead.
And as he ran, Silver saw the image of Christian, and marveled at the genius of the man who knew so well how to gather about him men who feared nothing except himself. Shore must be one of them. The scrawl on the back of the watch must have been short for the message, “Kill the bearer.”
Rap Brender glanced impatiently back over his shoulder. And, throwing off all thought, Silver was instantly up with the smaller man. But size did not matter. If it were Christian that Brender had defied for the sake of a stranger, there was the soul of a giant in this slender fellow.
He heard Brender gasping: “Take rear stable door. I’ll take front!”
So they split apart, rounding to the rear of the hotel, and Silver cut back to the farther end of the long, low barn. The door was open. Something moved in the tar-black interior, a shadow within the shadow, and a dull gleam of metal.
“Hold up! Who’s there?” demanded a voice.
“Saddle up!” panted Silver, checking his run, but striding straight forward. “Brender’s gone wrong and bolted. Saddle up and come along!”
“Brender couldn’t go wrong. Who are you?”
“You fool!” said Silver.
“Back up, brother, till I know you,” commanded the shadow in the broad doorway.
But the gleam of the gun had dropped from breast-high as low as the hip, and Silver took his chance.
Everything was obscurity, except the tarnished gleam of the gun and the pale spot of the face against that velvet blackness. It was guesswork to find the chi
n, but the fighting instinct helped him. He felt his knuckles bite home against the jawbone.
The gun flashed. The boom of it rolled through the barn, and a dozen horses sprang to their feet, snorting.
Silver already had laid the barrel of his Colt along the head of that staggering form in the darkness. The man fell under the very feet of the horses. Silver took him by the heels and jerked him against the wall.
A swift form came at him out of the darkness, calling softly: “Silver!”
“All right. He’s down,” said Silver, and made for Parade.
There is an extra sense that teaches a cow-puncher how to saddle swiftly in the dark. He gets his practice in the early gloom of autumn and winter mornings. Now saddle and bridle were whipped over the stallion.
“The back way! Quick!” called Rap Brender, whose hands seemed to possess a faster touch than even those of Silver.
Lantern light came pitching and swaying toward the front door of the barn. A man was shouting as he ran:
“Who’s there? What’s up? Jerry — Pete — come on!”
At the door of the barn, the lantern light steadied while the bearer waited, perhaps, for the reënforcement that Pete and Jerry would bring him. But Silver was already through the rear door on Parade. And the slender form of Rap Brender was whipping into the saddle.
Off to the right, not fifty yards, two horsemen rushed them at the run. Brender and Silver already had their mounts under way. The wind of the gallop began to whip Silver’s face. Guns crackled rapidly. Those fellows were fanning their revolvers or they could not have shot so fast. Turning in the saddle, he gave them their answer, a smooth-flowing salvo as fast as his thumb could flick the hammer of his gun.
Five shots and a yell answered those bullets. He saw the two pursuers split apart; darkness dissolved them as they slowed down, and out across the open fields behind Copper Creek, Silver and Brender cut down into the narrows of the canyon.
The ragged face of the cliff rushed by them on one side, the broken gleaming of the creek on the other.
