Silvertip

by Brand, Max

  He cast the door open. A servant carried in a lighted lamp before them to reveal a big chamber. Silvertip saw a gleaming of dark, polished wooden chests of drawers and a huge wardrobe, and the slender, shining posts of another big four-poster bed. The servant pushed open the heavy shutters of two windows and let the thin dappling of the stars be seen. They looked both close and dim, except one burning yellow eye of light.

  Old Monterey took Silver’s hand.

  “In everything you say and everything you do,” he said, “you are now as the master of the house. Señor, good night. An old man gives you his blessing.”

  The girl went out with him. The servant remained for a moment, moving slowly here and there to open the bed, to dust the window sills, which were covered with fine silt. Before he left, the fellow paused at the door and looked at Silvertip out of narrowed eyes. He continued to stare, unwinking, for a moment, then he nodded, and, with a muttered good night, left the room.

  Silver could not settle down at once. He had to walk between the hall door and the windows, back and forth, back and forth, struggling with the thoughts that worked like moles under the surface of his mind.

  As he looked back on the events that had occurred since that evening when he rode down from the mountains into Cruces, it seemed to him that miraculous influences had been working on him all the while. He had been seized upon like driftwood by a powerful current, and brought straight down to the moment he desired. Now he was accepted by the family of the man he had killed. All the strength of Monterey and his men would be focused to help him in his work, and he was given freely his opportunity to step into the shoes of the dead man. In a sense, the ghost of young Pedro Monterey was most certainly walking up and down with him.

  Other things, small problems, remained to be explained. For one thing, if Bandini had been retained as a tutor to educate Pedro as a fighting man, it was odd that the teacher and the pupil should have been so obviously quarreling when they were in Cruces together. But this was a minor point. The main fact was that at last he was confronting the unfinished life work of the dead man. He could not falter now. But though that work was exactly where his strength was the greatest, he felt assured that there were odds against him too great to be overcome. Monterey, with all of his men, had struggled vainly these many years. It would be strange indeed if he could succeed where so many had failed utterly.

  Even when he had been imprisoned he had hardly felt a more intimate sense of peril than that which followed him coldly up and down through this room. And in the background of his brain the thought of the Drummons rose up like thunderheads in a winter sky.

  He was still pacing the floor when a tap came at the door, and he opened it on Julia. There seemed to be no light whatever in the hallway. The black hand of darkness held her in sharp relief.

  “Is your uncle still holding a stiff upper lip?” asked Silver. “I’ve never seen a stronger will.”

  “He’s shaking like a leaf now,” said the girl. “But he won’t let himself think about Pedrillo. He keeps poor Pedro out of his mind. That’s the reason why he’s able to bear up. And he’ll keep fighting back the sorrow, because that alone would be enough to kill him, and he won’t die until he’s made the Drummons suffer.”

  Silver nodded. “Señorita,” he said, “I want to know a few things.”

  “I thought you would,” she answered. “Ask me.”

  “About you first. Who are you?”

  “I’m the waif, the orphan, the poor relation. My name is Monterey, also.”

  “You’re no more Mexican,” said he, “than I am.”

  “My mother was American,” she told him. “That’s all about me.”

  “Your father and your mother died, and Don Arturo took you in?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been happy here?”

  “Who can be really happy in the Haverhill? There’s a curse on the entire valley.”

  “How close a relation are you of this family?”

  “A third cousin.”

  “And you want to leave the Haverhill and the Casa Monterey?”

  “Not until Uncle Arturo is either happy or — dead.”

  “Tell me about Pedro. Sit down and tell me.”

  She sat on the edge of a chair. He sat down in turn and took his unshaven, unclean face between his hands.

  “Pedro was handsome — but you saw him.”

  “The finest-looking lad I ever saw.”

  “And he was the true steel all the way through. He laughed a little too much to please his father. But he had the making of a fine man.”

  “I knew it,” said Silver bitterly. “There was no flaw in him, and I — ” He finished with a gesture. “Tell me more about him,” he urged.

  “You only shortened his life a little,” she answered. “He was to go against the Drummons in a short time, and they would have crushed him at once. Pedro was not clever. He was not very wise or strong-minded, either. He was simply honest and cheerful and brave. He would not have known how to meet the Drummons. He would have ridden straight at them — and that would have been the end.”

  Silver lifted his head and looked at her, but he was seeing the face of the dead man again. He felt that it was true — that young Pedro would have charged a mountain blindly.

  “There’s another thing — Bandini,” he said. “Bandini is a rascal.”

  “Does Monterey know that?”

  “No. Uncle Arturo loves him — simply because he can ride well and shoot straight, and because, he pretends to have a deathless devotion to my uncle and his cause. But as a matter of fact, all that he’s interested in is in lining his wallet with more money. I’m sure of it. He worked here teaching Pedro how to ride, how to shoot, even how to fight with a knife. It used to be a savage thing to see them fighting, even although the knives were wood! But Uncle Arturo believes in Bandini almost as he believes in the Bible.”

  “Where will Bandini be now?”

  “Taking charge of the body of poor Pedrillo, seeing that it’s embalmed, bringing it back toward the Haverhill.”

  “He’ll be here soon?”

  “Yes. What else do you want to know?”

  His eyes surveyed her face curiously. She was not beautiful, but something from the mind spoke in her face. The lips and chin were modeled with the tender delicacy of childhood still; but across the forehead and eyes she was a woman.

  “Only one other thing,” said Silvertip. “That’s about the servants. They hate me. But will you try to tell them that I’m not a monster?”

  “You’re wise,” she answered. “You’re so wise that you’ll add a few days to your life, perhaps.”

  “A few days?” said Silver. “I’ll live to be as old as Monterey.”

  She looked up at him and smiled.

  “I hope so,” she said, and almost immediately she said good night, and walked off into the thick blackness of the hall with the surety of one born blind and stepping through a familiar place.

  Silver closed the door, stripped, took a sponge bath in cold water, and went to bed. The coolness of the sheets soothed him. All the blood of his body seemed to be gathered in his head, and to be whirling and churning there.

  He looked to the side out the window. Now that the room was thoroughly darkened, the stars were both brighter and more distant. He watched the patterning in which they were set. By degrees it grew confused. The points of light seemed to be moving a little. They softened, blurred, and Silver was asleep.

  CHAPTER XIV

  The Sheriff

  THE sheriff came up with the sun, so to speak, and old Arturo Monterey and Silver had to go out and meet him on the terrace garden behind the house. Silver had risen to find that fresh clothes were laid out on a chair beside his bed. When he had shaved, he looked at a face four shades paler than it had been for years, and chiseled lean and hard by pain. And then he tried on the clothes and found that they fitted almost miraculously.

  But they were Mexican type. There w
as a tightly fitted jacket, with his big shoulders exploding out above the narrowness of the waist, and there was a sash that went about the hips, and all the middle of his body was incased as in armor, though the trousers flared out at the bottom a little. His own old sombrero looked sadly out of place with such an outfit. There was another hat with the clothes, one with a silver band of Mexican wheelwork girdling the crown, but he could not induce himself to put this on. It was bad enough to be Mexican to the neck; his head had to remain in an American fashion.

  He had barely finished dressing when he received the summons to join Monterey in the terrace garden behind the house. He went uneasily, wondering about the cat-footed one who had been able to enter his room unheard during the night and place that outfit at his hand. There the body of Chuck Terry was laid out among the tall flowers exactly where the imprint of it had fallen the night before.

  The sheriff considered the situation with a sour eye. He was a true Haverhill man, with the jowls, the blunt jaw and nose, the huge brows that kept the eyes in shadow. And, like the rest of the tribe, it seemed as though the sun could have no power to influence his skin; very few of those men were tanned. The majority, and the sheriff was one of them, kept an unhealthy white, like that of things which seldom see the day. Those Haverhill men all looked as though they were freshly out of prison.

  He listened to the story with angry eyes that shifted from the face of Monterey to that of Silver.

  “How would you know?” challenged the sheriff. “How would you know that poor Chuck here wasn’t just comin’ up to make a friendly call?”

  “Perhaps that was all he was doing. In that case, we made an unhappy mistake,” said Monterey.

  The profound irony of this remark influenced even the mind of the sheriff. He kicked the ground and stamped on it impatiently.

  “You gents,” said the sheriff, “oughta take your time about things. There’s been too much shootin’ around the Haverhill. And it’s gotta stop. I’m goin’ to stop it. You all hear me? Here comes Chuck. Just kind of curious. He was only a kid. He was younger than his years. Everybody knew that. Just a great big, open-hearted, fine kid. Just curious. Like the way an antelope is curious, the poor fool! And he comes up here with a friend, and they wanta have a look at the great Arturo Monterey. That’s all they wanta do. And by thunder, I’m goin’ to jail the pair of you for murder, is what I’m goin’ to do! There ain’t any sense. There ain’t right in it. There ain’t any judge, and there ain’t any jury that wouldn’t call it murder!”

  “When a fellow’s so curious that he and his pal start sneaking up behind a man at night,” said Silver, “and when they start shooting as soon as they hear some one behind them sing out — ”

  “Just kind of startled, maybe,” suggested the sheriff.

  But presently he was scowling at the ground.

  Monterey, in that moment, let his eyes run over the new clothes on the body of Silver, and at the new face which had been revealed by the shaving away of the shaggy growth of beard. He seemed to find much that was worth seeing, and his glance wandered intently from feature to feature. To Silver, aware of the survey, it seemed as though the old man were weighing him in a fine balance and accepting him as a thing of price.

  “All right,” said the sheriff. “I oughta take up the two of you, but there’s enough trouble already, and this’ll just make more. I’ll leave you go free. You, Monterey — and you’re the gent called Silver?”

  “Yes,” said he.

  “You’re the one with the white horns, are you?” said the sheriff. “Well, young feller, if you’d keep your horns out of this business here in Haverhill Valley, you’d be a lot better off, and so would we. You been makin’ trouble, and you’re goin’ to make a lot more trouble, and before the end, maybe you’ll wish that you never seen the Haverhill River, or the Haverhill men that the whole valley had oughta belong to!”

  After that he had the body of the dead man placed in his buckboard and drove off, but his venomous eyes dwelt continually on Silver all the time that the preparations were going on; particularly after he had stared for a time at the red spot on the left breast of the coat of Chuck Terry.

  “They’ve laid their eyes on you now, señor,” said Monterey, “and that means that the air you breathe in this valley is poisoned from this moment on. But you have a horse, and yonder is the nearest way to the first pass. And in two hours you can be safely over the hills. Think carefully, my friend. Every chance is against us. They have numbers. They have craft. They have the cruelty of devils and the persistence of hungry beasts. Nothing but the last chance is left to you if you remain!”

  It was not half-hearted persuasion. As in the eyes of the girl now and again, so in the eyes of Monterey, something came up from the spirit and spoke to Silvertip.

  But he slowly shook his head and smiled.

  Julia came suddenly out to them from the house. Her glance found Silver and dwelt on him with a smile. He knew that she had picked the outfit, by the look she gaye it.

  “I have stopped trying to persuade him,” said Monterey. “If he is to stay here, Heaven knows it is of his own free will; and like a gift from Heaven I take him. You have news in your face, Julia. What is it?”

  “Juan Perez is a madman,” said the girl. “He has bitten his lips till they bleed. I tried to speak to him. But he lay on a bed and kept beating his head with his hands. He says that he is shamed forever. Something will have to be done about him. You must go to him, Uncle Arturo.”

  “No,” said Silver. “I’ll go myself.”

  “You?” she cried. “He will try to kill you! There is a wild devil in him. It’s more dangerous to rob a man of his self-respect than to take the cubs from a she-bear.”

  “I’m the man to see him,” said Silver. “Let me go to him.”

  “Perhaps,” said Arturo Monterey. “But I shall go with you. Juan Perez is the most faithful of the faithful, but there never was a more dangerous man.”

  “Show me to the door of his room,” said Silver. “Then leave me there.”

  The two of them conducted him. They went across the patio and into the long wing where the servants were housed. At the end of the long and narrow upper hall, Arturo Monterey stopped before a door.

  “Go back now,” said Silver. “Or else stand here quietly. I know how to handle this case. And if I don’t manage him now, he’ll put a knife in my back later on. Stand quietly, and don’t argue. I have to have my way about this.”

  He knocked at the door. A faint groan answered him. He opened the door and stepped into a naked little room with only the mask of a grizzly hanging on the wall, and the claws of the great bear strung on a half necklace below the head. On a cot lay the tall form of Perez, face down.

  “Juan Perez!” said Silver.

  The Mexican came to life with a bound. He said nothing. The devil that was in him needed no sound for expression. The writhing face of Juan Perez expressed him fully enough.

  The Mexican had thrown off his belt. Now he caught from it the long hunting knife whose handle projected from a leather sheath. The steel flashed in the dim room as Perez leaped.

  But Silver put his hands behind his back and waited. The left hand of Perez caught at his throat. The knife trembled with the tense strength of the arm that wielded it. But it was not driven home.

  “Will you listen to me?” said Silver.

  Juan Perez thrust himself back to arm’s length. The gringo was in his power. The point of that knife could find the life with a single slight gesture. But though the Mexican was half mad with shame, there was manliness in him that made it impossible to strike an unresisting enemy.

  “Now, gringo — now, dog,” he groaned. “Take your gun and fight me man to man!”

  “We are serving the same master, Juan Perez,” said Silver. “Will he gain very much if we kill one another? The Drummons will laugh; they will be the ones to gain.”

  “You tore me from my horse in the town; you have beaten me senseless
and left me in your own prison; and the people are laughing at me!” cried Juan Perez.

  “And you,” said Silver, “have thrown me into the slime of a dark cellar, and tossed my bread into the foul water, and left me there to starve and go mad in the dark. Which of us has suffered the most from the other?”

  The logic of this statement was so convincing that the left hand of Perez fell away from the collar of Silver’s jacket. He retreated a step, breathing very hard. His teeth were set. He seemed striving to work himself again to the height of his passion, but an increasing calmness appeared in his eyes.

  “If I forgive you,” said Silver, “it will be a greater thing in the eyes of every one than if you forgive me. And that is what I have come to say to you. Let us forgive one another. Let me have your hand. We are each wise enough to know that the other man is worth fear. Therefore he is worth respect. I respect you, Juan Perez. I want you for my friend. That is why I have come here. That is why I humble myself and take the first long steps. They told me that you would kill me the instant that I appeared, but I knew that you are an honorable man. Here is my hand, Perez. Give me yours!”

  “And how about my shame?” muttered Perez. “The smiles? The sneers?”

  “I have seen a great many brave men in the world,” said Silver, “but I don’t know one brave enough to sneer or smile when he sees Juan Perez and Silver walking shoulder to shoulder as friends.”

  Juan Perez suddenly clasped the hand of Silver. The other hand of the Mexican was struck against his forehead.

  “What am I doing?” he exclaimed. “Have my wits gone?”

  “Is it a foolish thing,” said Silver, “to turn an enemy into a friend? Are you afraid of what old women will say, or do you want the friendship of true men?”

  “You are right,” said Perez, taking his breath in great gulps. “There is no more truth in all the blue sky than in what you have said. But let me be alone for a little longer. Let me prepare myself. Then I shall walk out into the open day and take your hand where every one can see us. And if there are smiles — ”