by Max Brand
Dear Carver,
I’m taking a chance on sending this. If it’s opened, you’re lost. But if I don’t send it, you’re lost, anyway. This way, I can make sure of you getting away, I think.
This opening paragraph had so staggered the reason of Carver that he could barely make sense of the rest of the letter. It went on:
My idea is this: It will take anywhere from four to six weeks for your wound to heal. And all that time I’ll stick out my part here in jail or—if it takes that long—in prison, Carver. But, as soon as you’re able to take to the saddle, then start riding, put a lot of miles between you and Porterville, and then mail back a confession that will turn me loose. That ought to be easy for you.
After that, maybe if you leave the country and settle down away off somewhere, your wife and the little girl can be sent after you. If they have no money, I’ll work until they’re fixed up.
The reason I’m willing to do it, Carver, is because of the little girl. She ought to have a better chance than she’ll get if she’s raised as the daughter of a jailbird.
Take my advice, Carver. All I ask is that you get well quickly. Because I sure hate life behind the bars. I wasn’t cut out for this sort of party. I have to set my teeth to keep going. But I will keep going, and you can lay to that. I’ll keep my mouth shut and let them do what they want to do. But, when the time comes, I guess that you’ll slide out and leave the confession behind you.
You don’t need to worry about your wife and Mary, because I’ll sure do my best to take care of them both.
So long, Carver. Here’s wishing you all the luck in the world. You don’t need to send me any answer. Just know I’ve had a sort of a thrill wondering if you’d really write the confession. But I’ve stopped doubting just about as quick as I began. I know you’ll play square on your side, and I’ll play square on mine, and so we’ll make the best of a bad deal.
—Tom Keene
No wonder that, he had to drop the letter twice with a gasp of incredulity, and then raise it again to reread.
After that he lay perfectly still in a sort of happy semidream. Under his head was the thick lump of his coat used as a pillow to raise his head upon the couch, and into his trance there passed the blissful knowledge that part of the lump that supported his head was composed of the wallet stuffed thick with the money that was his spoil.
The screen door at the front of the house creaked open. The light, quick step of his wife came tapping down the hall. And not until that moment did he think of concealing the damning letter, or of destroying it. He gripped it to tear it to shreds. But what if the keen ear of his wife should catch the sound? What if she should come running in? Keen with suspicion, what if she should gather up some of the small fragments? He recalled anecdotes of people who had put together just such torn bits of paper and out of them constructed the answer to the riddle.
Accordingly he stuffed the paper hastily under his coat. But as he did so, he made out that she was not coming directly to him. She went instead into the room of Mary. The doors were open, and he could hear her clearly.
“Is your father asleep?”
“I haven’t heard a whisper out of his room. I guess he is.”
“Oh, Mary, I’m glad that you weren’t in town today to hear what people are saying about Tom Keene.”
“I don’t care what they say!” Mary exclaimed. “I won’t believe any wrong about him.”
“Why, Mary, he shot down your own father.”
“Maybe Dad was in the wrong.”
“Hush.”
“But how could he have had time to get so far away and do that robbery that folks talk about?”
John Carver heaved himself up, despite a severe twinge from his wound, and he listened breathlessly. But he relaxed and sank back when he heard his wife replying in a perfectly calm voice, “Why, everyone knows that the White Mask has all the confederates he wants. Distance is nothing to him. He could have relays of horses fixed. Don’t you see what was in his head? He showed up here … he acted kind to us, the sneak … and all the time he was planning to jump away off south and do that safe blowing. But folks wouldn’t believe that it could be he, even if evidence pointed at him, because they would have seen him up here such a little while before.”
“I can’t talk you down. All I know is that it isn’t right for you to turn on him.”
“After he’s shot down my husband? How you talk, Mary! You’re ’most out of your head. Now you go to sleep.”
She passed out of the room, and the door clicked behind her. Mary’s protesting voice was cut away to nothing, and presently Mrs. Carver tiptoed to the door of her husband’s room. He greeted her with a smile. The faith that she had just shown in him had touched his vanity. And her flush of excitement had recalled an almost girlish prettiness to her cheeks. When she saw that he was awake, she came in with a smile and asked how he was.
“I’m doing fine,” Carver said, a great reaction sweeping over him. “But gimme a drink, Lizzie.”
By his tone there was only one sort of drink conceivable. She would rather have starved thrice over than not have whiskey in the house. Now she brought him the tall bottle and the glass. He filled a big portion and tossed it off raw. Then he lay back with a sigh and a smacking of his lips.
“This pain, it sure wears a man out,” he muttered. “What’s the news, Lizzie?”
“Oh, I have a whole armful of news. I went right in, and the first person I met was Missus Alice … but you can’t listen to me in any comfort with that coat all wrinkled up under your head. Wait till I smooth it out. Then I’ll tell you all about it.”
So saying, she reached for the coat, and in a semicomatose condition he even partially lifted his head so that she could take it. It was only after she had it in her hands that he recalled what that coat contained, and with a prodigious oath he reached for it.
But lucklessly she had shaken the coat out upside down, and from an inside pocket fell a wallet that thudded softly on the floor at her feet, flopped open, and exposed an interior stuffed full of greenbacks. Moreover, at the same time, from one of the outer pockets of the coat, there slipped a wad of stuff that dissolved in the draft close to the surface of the floor and fluttered softly away—a whole host of greenbacks.
Chapter Twenty
Even when the money fell to the floor, John Carver could have explained, but his nerve left him. For an instant he gazed, his brain swirling with alarm and with the effects of the stupefying slug of whiskey.
“Good Lord!” he breathed, and stared up to Elizabeth, with his guilt making his eyes big.
But her mind grasped at the truth only by dim degrees. She went straight toward the door of discovery. “What … money … why, John, there are thousands here. Where … where did you earn …?” That door to the truth was thrown wide, but she could endure only a glimpse of what was revealed. “John!” she cried. “Tell me that it ain’t so! You … you … oh, my head’s spinning.”
He was up on his feet. “Stop yelling, you fool!” he gasped. “Stop that racket. Mary’ll hear! The brat’s been waiting for something to happen, and, if she hears, she’ll be telling all that she knows. Stop yelling, I say!”
She caught at him. “The White Mask … not you, John!”
She had caught at the arm that hung in the sling, and he tore her away and flung her off with such force that she staggered against the table in the center of the room. It went over with a crash. The whiskey bottle flew clear to the stone hearth and shivered upon it with a loud splintering of glass. And at that moment Mary Carver, white with fear, opened the door and stood before them.
Her father slumped down upon the couch as though this were the death stroke and he no longer had the strength to struggle against fate, but the effect upon his wife was remarkable. From the very depths of hysterical terror and shame and grief she rallied like a flash and turned a
pale but laughing face on Mary.
“I slipped and stumbled against the table, honey. That’s all.”
Mary nodded. “I thought somebody … had fallen …” And she closed the door.
John’s wife turned away, and he groaned, “Elizabeth, you’re wonderful. Just plumb wonderful. How could you face them bright, prying eyes of hers?”
“Stop talking,” Mrs. Carver commanded, turning a gray, set face toward him. In that instant she had passed from terror to calm command. “Lie down on the couch.”
He obeyed, gaping at her.
“Look quiet. Look cheerful.”
“How can I manage to fix the way my face is? I ain’t got a mirror, and I ain’t an actor.”
“You do what I tell you to do,” Elizabeth said sternly. With hands moving faster than the picking beaks of starved birds, she was gathering the fallen money from the floor, and now she stuffed it into the bosom of her dress and placed the wallet under her apron.
“If she guesses what’s the truth,” Elizabeth Carver said, “d’you know what she’ll do? She’ll run to the town and go through the streets screaming it.”
“The little brat!” Carver snarled. “She won’t dare. Her own father …”
“And a fine father you’ve been to her,” his wife interrupted with a sneer. “You’ve never come near her except to strike her. You’ve never petted her or held her in your lap since …”
“Since she got old enough to look me in the face,” said the father. “Because she had a queer, grown-up look about her. Besides, how much of me shows in her?”
“Little … thank heaven. She’s your own child, but there’s none of your soul in her. But in two minutes, John, she was closer to Tom Keene than to you in twelve years. The very first day, when he brought her up, living, out of the well where she might have died, she lay that night in her bed, with him sitting beside her, and talked her heart out to him. Why, she worships the ground he walks on. And if she finds that she can get him out of jail, I tell you, John, she’d send you behind the bars, and she’d send me with you.”
“Us that brought her into the world,” whined John Carver. “For a stranger that …”
“That saved her from dying out of it,” the mother said sternly.
And Carver gasped and was still.
Mrs. Carver sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands, trembling. And John Carver lay on the couch gaping at her. At length he grew restive and managed to say, “Elizabeth, dear, what are …?”
“Don’t talk to me,” she gasped. “I don’t want to hear you talk. I’ve got to think. I’ve got to think. Oh, dear heaven, tell me what to do.”
John Carver swallowed. “They’s only one thing for you to do, and that’s to stand by him you swore to stand by through thick and thin when you married him.”
“John, John, don’t you see it’s enough to drag us all down into disgrace and worse if I don’t tell the truth?”
“You … you don’t have to talk at all,” he breathed. “That’s the thing to do. Don’t talk. If they should ask you questions, you just tell ’em what you seen …”
“But I know it as well as if I’d been there.”
“What do you know?”
“That what you said you did is just exactly what he did. You’re the one that rode the roan over the hill with the mask on, and he’s the one that ran and called to you to stop. And you drew your gun and tried to kill him, but he shot you down.”
“And little you care, except that you wished my neck had been busted by the fall, eh?”
“And then, like a saint, which he is, when he found out that you were Mary’s father, he took your place on the horse and tried to lead them off. They might have killed him.” She added in a shrill little moan, “But like as not you’d let him rot in prison in your place.”
“But you won’t be talking, Lizzie?”
“No, no … and when at last it’s known … Mary, the daughter of a thief … a murderer …”
“That’s a lie! I never killed a man. I …” He caught at one part of her speech. “It never has to be known. Nobody but you and me and him knows of it, Lizzie.”
“What?”
The unutterable baseness of his proposal made him cringe as he spoke, but he managed to say distinctly enough, “If he tries to tell the story about what he done and how he took the part of the White Mask, just out of the bigness of his heart and for want of something better to do, nobody’ll believe him. They’ll laugh at him. I know what they’ll do. I can hear the courtroom chuckle when he tries to say that.” He chuckled himself.
“Not ever let it be known?” poor Mrs. Carver murmured. “Oh, John, is this the kind of man that you are?”
He blinked at that rebuff, but he went ahead swiftly. “You listen to me. I got close to five thousand left out of the boodle. With that I can make a new start. You know the Miller five hundred acres?”
She nodded. She was only hearing him with half of her attention. With the other half of her mind she was considering sadly the first suggestion he had made.
“He offered to rent the land to me last year,” John Carver said. “He ain’t so bad, old Miller, if you come right down to it. But I didn’t have the teams or the seed to put them five hundred in. But I could do it now. And I could fix up the house so’s you’d never know it. And there’s more land that I could rent, too, honey. And the first thing you know, that five thousand would grow into twenty thousand. And then …”
“Tom Keene would be wearing stripes in a prison.”
“Is he a father of a family, I ask you? Ain’t a married man got a right to have some sort of exceptions made for him?”
She shuddered. “Don’t stop and talk about that. Go on, John. I’m trying to listen, but … oh, Lord, I never dreamed that the inside of your mind had things like this in it.”
He shrugged that scornful and bitter attack away and went on, “We could get back on our feet. Think of being able to go down into Porterville and look everybody we met in the face and know that we didn’t owe a soul a cent. Think of that!”
She gasped. It was, indeed, like the thought of entering heaven.
“And the doctor, and everybody … if they looked sharp at us, we could turn right around and look back at them sharp. We could show ’em what it is to be a Carver. And then there’s Mary. A fine chance she’d have in the world if folks knowed that her father was a jailbird. A fine husband she could get.”
Mrs. Carver cried out as though he had struck her. “Don’t, John!”
“But ain’t it the truth, and don’t we have to look the truth in the face?”
“Yes, yes.”
“But if you was to forget that you seen anything or guessed anything, honey, Mary could be sent off to school and brought up as fine as the Swain boy … much good his books ever done him, the yaller-hearted hound. And when she come back, why, she’ll have the pretty face to marry her pick of the country.”
He rose to his feet and made a grand gesture. He stalked up and down the room with the future brought upon his once handsome face, and, behold, Elizabeth Carver sat with her work-hardened hands clasped and pressed between her knees while she looked up to her husband with a touch of that old confidence and trust with which she had looked up to him in the days of their courtship.
“Oh, John!” she cried. “She might even marry young Jerry Swain …”
“Him?” snarled the father. “Well,” he added, recollecting himself, “she might even do that … if you wanted her to. She’ll have the face, and I mean that she’ll have the education, too. She’ll be as good as any, if you stand by me in this, Lizzie.”
With the price that must be paid recalled to her, she became white of face at once. But this time she was silent.
Chapter Twenty-One
It takes all kinds to make up a town in the Far West. And Attorney
Charles Whitney was one of the oddities. Why he should have left his native New York, could never be understood. And why he should have picked out Porterville, of all other places, for even a temporary place of residence, was indeed a mystery to all who saw him. As a matter of fact, he had a past that might account for a great deal. And he had picked out Porterville on the map as being probably the most obscure place in the country that fell short of being a desert. It was not quite that, but, when he reached it, he thought that he had truly reached the falling off place, for the roar of the elevated trains where they thunder around the last turn off the Bowery was not yet quite out of his ears.
At any rate, here he was in Porterville, and he managed to gain a living. His law practice was not great, but it kept him in cigarettes and neckties of variegated color. Those were his chief necessities. Enough persons came in with small things to be attended to float him along. That they came to see the curiosity did not at all matter to Charlie Whitney. He was used to being stared at, and he rather liked it, in fact. Besides, he had a theory that sooner or later, when he got his fingers well limbered up, he would be able to relieve the rubes of some of the money that they flaunted at the gambling tables in Porterville with such criminal recklessness. To be sure, his fingers had not yet achieved the necessary degree of subtlety. But he was waiting and practicing.
When the judge assigned to him the case of the man who was reputed to be the celebrated White Mask, Charlie Whitney groaned. Of course Tom Keene was penniless, for otherwise he would not have been called at all, which did not make it easier for the lawyer to adjust himself to the work that was given into his hands.
But after the case had begun to develop, although it would not come to trial for some time, it assumed new phases that attracted him. It seemed that Tom Keene was either a simpleton or else a very profound rogue playing a part skillfully. And if he were the latter, it would pay the lawyer to take no chances. He had no desire to risk his neck when the man got out of prison.
