Firebrand Trevison

by Seltzer, Charles Alden

  “I’ve been nearly crazy, I think,” he said to the girl with a wan smile of self-accusation. “I want you to forget what I said.”

  “What happened at Manti?” she demanded, ignoring his words.

  He laughed at the recollection, tucking his rifle under his arm, preparatory to leaving. “I went after the record. I got it. There was a fight. But I got away.”

  “But the fire!”

  “I was forced to smash a lamp in the courthouse. The wick fell into the oil, and I couldn’t delay to—”

  “Was anybody hurt—besides you?”

  “Braman’s dead.” The girl gasped and shrank from him, and he saw that she believed he had killed the banker, and he was about to deny the crime when Agatha’s voice shrilled through the doorway:

  “There are some men coming, Rosalind!” And then, vindictively: “I presume they are desperadoes—too!”

  “Deputies!” said Trevison. The girl clasped her hands over her breast in dismay, which changed to terror when she saw Trevison stiffen and leap toward the door. She was afraid for him, horrified over this second lawless deed, dumb with doubt and indecision—and she didn’t want them to catch him!

  He opened the door, paused on the threshold and smiled at her with straight, hard lips.

  “Braman was—”

  “Go!” she cried in a frenzy of anxiety; “go!”

  He laughed mockingly, and looked at her intently. “I suppose I will never understand women. You are my enemy, and yet you give me food and drink and are eager to have me escape your accomplice. Don’t you know that this record will ruin him?”

  “Go, go!” she panted.

  “Well, you’re a puzzle!” he said. She saw him leap into the saddle, and she ran to the lamp, blew out the flame, and returned to the open door, in which she stood for a long time, listening to rapid hoof beats that gradually receded. Before they died out entirely there came the sound of many others, growing in volume and drawing nearer, and she beat her hands together, murmuring:

  “Run, Nigger—run, run, run!”

  * * *

  She closed the door as the hoof beats sounded in the yard, locking it and retreating to the foot of the stairs, where Agatha stood.

  “What does it all mean?” asked the elder woman. She was trembling.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” whispered the girl, gulping hard to keep her voice from breaking. “It’s something about Trevison’s land. And I’m afraid, Aunty, that there is something terribly wrong. Mr. Corrigan says it belongs to him, and the court in Manti has decided in his favor. But according to the record in Trevison’s possession, he has a clear title to it.”

  “There, there,” consoled Agatha; “your father wouldn’t permit—”

  “No, no!” said the girl, vehemently; “he wouldn’t. But I can’t understand why Trevison fights so hard if—if he is in the wrong!”

  “He is a desperado, my dear; a wild, reckless spirit who has no regard for law and order. Of course, if these men are after him, you will tell them he was here!”

  “No!” said the girl, sharply; “I shan’t!”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t,” acquiesced Agatha. She patted the girl’s shoulder. “Maybe it would be for the best, dear—he may be in the right. And I think I understand why you went riding with him so much, dear. He may be wild and reckless, but he’s a man—every inch of him!”

  The girl squeezed her relative’s hand and went to open the door, upon which had come a loud knock. Corrigan stood framed in the opening. She could see his face only dimly.

  “There’s no occasion for alarm, Miss Benham,” he said, and she felt that he could see her better than she could see him, and thus must have discerned something of her emotion. “I must apologize for this noisy demonstration. I believe I’m a little excited, though. Has Trevison passed here within the last hour or so?”

  “No,” she said, firmly.

  He laughed shortly. “Well, we’ll get him. I’ve split my men up—some have gone to his ranch, the others have headed for Levins’ place.”

  “What has happened?”

  “Enough. Judge Lindman disappeared—the supposition is that he was abducted. I placed some men around the courthouse, to safeguard the records, and Trevison broke in and set fire to the place. He also robbed the safe in the bank, and killed Braman—choked him to death. A most revolting murder. I’m sorry I disturbed you—good night.”

  The girl closed the door as he left it, and leaned against it, weak and shaking. Corrigan’s voice had a curious note in it. He had told her he was sorry to have disturbed her, but the words had not rung true—there had been too much satisfaction in them. What was she to believe from this night’s events? One thought leaped vividly above the others that rioted in her mind: Trevison had again sinned against the law, and this time his crime was murder! She shrank away from the door and joined Agatha at the foot of the stairs.

  “Aunty,” she sobbed; “I want to go away. I want to go back East, away from this lawlessness and confusion!”

  “There, there, dear,” soothed Agatha. “I am sure everything will come out all right. But Trevison does look to be the sort of a man who would abduct a judge, doesn’t he? If I were a girl, and felt that he were in love with me, I’d be mighty careful—”

  “That he wouldn’t abduct you?” laughed the girl, tremulously, cheered by the change in her relative’s manner.

  “No,” said Agatha, slyly. “I’d be mighty careful that he got me!”

  “Oh!” said the girl, and buried her face in her aunt’s shoulder.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXV

  IN THE DARK

  Trevison faced the darkness between him and the pueblo with a wild hope pulsing through his veins. Rosalind Benham had had an opportunity to deliver him into the hands of his enemy and she had not taken advantage of it. There was but one interpretation that he might place upon her failure to aid her accomplice. She declined to take an active part in the scheme. She had been passive, content to watch while Corrigan did the real work. Possibly she had no conception of the enormity of the crime. She had been eager to have Corrigan win, and influenced by her affection and his arguments she had done what she could without actually committing herself to the robbery. It was a charitable explanation, and had many flaws, but he clung to it persistently, nurturing it with his hopes and his hunger for her, building it up until it became a structure of logic firmly fixed and impregnable. Women were easily influenced—that had been his experience with them—he was forced to accept it as a trait of the sex. So he absolved her, his hunger for her in no way sated at the end.

  His thoughts ran to Corrigan in a riot of rage that pained him like a knife thrust; his lust for vengeance was a savage, bitter-visaged demon that held him in its clutch and made his temples pound with a yearning to slay. And that, of course, would have to be the end. For the enmity that lay between them was not a thing to be settled by the law—it was a man to man struggle that could be settled in only one way—by the passions, naked, elemental, eternal. He saw it coming; he leaped to meet it, eagerly.

  Every stride the black horse made shortened by that much the journey he had resolved upon, and Nigger never ran as he was running now. The black seemed to feel that he was on the last lap of a race that had lasted for more than forty-eight hours, with short intervals of rest between, and he did his best without faltering.

  Order had come out of the chaos of plot and counterplot; Trevison’s course was to be as direct as his hatred. He would go to the pueblo, take Judge Lindman and the record to Santa Fe, and then return to Manti for a last meeting with Corrigan.

  A late moon, rising from a cleft in some distant mountains, bathed the plains with a silvery flood when horse and rider reached a point within a mile of the pueblo, and Nigger covered the remainder of the distance at a pace that made the night air drum in Trevison’s ears. The big black slowed as he came to a section of broken country surrounding the ancient city, but he got through it quickly and skir
ted the sand slopes, taking the steep acclivity leading to the ledge of the pueblo in a dozen catlike leaps and coming to a halt in the shadow of an adobe house, heaving deeply, his rider flung himself out of the saddle and ran along the ledge to the door of the chamber where he had imprisoned Judge Lindman.

  Trevison could see no sign of the Judge or Levins. The ledge was bare, aglow, the openings of the communal houses facing it loomed dark, like the doors of tombs. A ghastly, unearthly silence greeted Trevison’s call after the echoes died away; the upper tier of adobe boxes seemed to nod in ghostly derision as his gaze swept them. There was no sound, no movement, except the regular cough of his own laboring lungs, and the rustle of his clothing as his chest swelled and deflated with the effort. He exclaimed impatiently and retraced his steps, peering into recesses between the communal houses, certain that the Judge and Levins had fallen asleep in his absence. He turned at a corner and in a dark angle almost stumbled over Levins. He was lying on his stomach, his right arm under his head, his face turned sideways. Trevison thought at first that he was asleep and prodded him gently with the toe of his boot. A groan smote his ears and he kneeled quickly, turning Levins over. Something damp and warm met his fingers as he seized the man by the shoulder, and he drew the hand away quickly, exclaiming sharply as he noted the stain on it.

  His exclamation brought Levins’ eyes open, and he stared upward, stupidly at first, then with a bright gaze of comprehension. He struggled and sat up, swaying from side to side.

  “They got the Judge, ‘Brand’—they run him off, with my cayuse!”

  “Who got him?”

  “I ain’t reckonin’ to know. Some of Corrigan’s scum, most likely—I didn’t see ’em close.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Not a hell of a while. Mebbe fifteen or twenty minutes. I been missin’ a lot of time, I reckon. Can’t have been long, though.”

  “Which way did they go?”

  “Off towards Manti. Two of ’em took him. The rest is layin’ low somewhere, most likely. Watch out they don’t get you! I ain’t seen ’em run off, yet!”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I ain’t got it clear in my head, yet. Just happened, I reckon. The Judge was settin’ on the ledge just in front of the dobie house you had him in. I was moseyin’ along the edge, tryin’ to figger out what a light in the sky off towards Manti meant. I couldn’t figger it out—what in hell was it, anyway?”

  “The courthouse burned—maybe the bank.”

  Levins chuckled. “You got the record, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “An’ I’ve lost the Judge! Ain’t I a box-head, though!”

  “That’s all right. Go ahead. What happened?”

  “I was moseyin along the ledge. Just when I got to the slope where we come up—passin’ it—I seen a bunch of guys, on horses, coming out of the shadow of an angle, down there. I hadn’t seen ’em before. I knowed somethin’ was up an’ I turned, to light out for shelter. An’ just then one of ’em burns me in the back—with a rifle bullet. It couldn’t have been no six, from that distance. It took the starch out of me, an’ I caved, I reckon, for a little while. When I woke up the Judge was gone. The moon had just come up an’ I seen him ridin’ away on my cayuse, between two other guys. I reckon I must have gone off again, when you shook me.” He laughed, weakly. “What gets me, is where them other guys went, after the two sloped with the Judge. If they’d have been hangin’ around they’d sure have got you, comin’ up here, wouldn’t they?”

  Trevison’s answer was a hoarse exclamation. He swung Levins up and bore him into one of the communal houses, whose opening faced away from the plains and the activity. Then he ran to where he had left Nigger, leading the animal back into the zig-zag passages, pulling his rifle out of the saddle holster and stationing himself in the shadow of the house in which he had taken Levins.

  “They’ve come back, eh?” the wounded man’s voice floated out to him.

  “Yes—five or six of them. No—eight! They’ve got sharp eyes, too!” he added stepping back as a rifle bullet droned over his head, chipping a chunk of adobe from the roof of the box in whose shelter he stood.

  * * *

  Sullenly, Corrigan had returned to Manti with the deputies that had accompanied him to the Bar B. He had half expected to find Trevison at the ranchhouse, for he had watched him when he had ridden away and he seemed to have been headed in that direction. Jealousy dwelt darkly in the big man’s heart, and he had found his reason for the suspicion there. He thought he knew truth when he saw it, and he would have sworn that truth shone from Rosalind Benham’s eyes when she had told him that she had not seen Trevison pass that way. He had not known that what he took for the truth was the cleverest bit of acting the girl had ever been called upon to do. He had decided that Trevison had swung off the Bar B trail somewhere between Manti and the ranchhouse, and he led his deputies back to town, content to permit his men to continue the search for Trevison, for he was convinced that the latter’s visit to the courthouse had resulted in disappointment, for he had faith in Judge Lindman’s declaration that he had destroyed the record. He had accused himself many times for his lack of caution in not being present when the record had been destroyed, but regrets had become impotent and futile.

  Reaching Manti, he dispersed his deputies and sought his bed in the Castle. He had not been in bed more than an hour when an attendant of the hotel called to him through the door that a man named Gieger wanted to talk with him, below. He dressed and went down to the street, to find Gieger and another deputy sitting on their horses in front of the hotel with Judge Lindman, drooping from his long vigil, between them.

  Corrigan grinned scornfully at the Judge.

  “Clever, eh?” he sneered. He spoke softly, for the dawn was not far away, and he knew that a voice carries resonantly at that hour.

  “I don’t understand you!” Judicial dignity sat sadly on the Judge; he was tired and haggard, and his voice was a weak treble. “If you mean—”

  “I’ll show you what I mean.” Corrigan motioned to the deputies. “Bring him along!” Leading the way he took them through Manti’s back door across a railroad spur to a shanty beside the track which the engineer in charge of the dam occasionally occupied when his duty compelled him to check up arriving material and supplies. Because plans and other valuable papers were sometimes left in the shed it was stoutly built, covered with corrugated iron, and the windows barred with iron, prison-like. Reaching the shed, Corrigan unlocked the door, shoved the Judge inside, closed the door on the Judge’s indignant protests, questioned the deputies briefly, gave them orders and then re-entered the shed, closing the door behind him.

  He towered over the Judge, who had sunk weakly to a bench. It was pitch dark in the shed, but Corrigan had seen the Judge drop on the bench and knew exactly where he was.

  “I want the whole story—without any reservations,” said Corrigan, hoarsely; “and I want it quick—as fast as you can talk!”

  The Judge got up, resenting the other’s tone. He had also a half-formed resolution to assert his independence, for he had received certain assurances from Trevison with regard to his past which had impressed him—and still impressed him.

  “I refuse to be questioned by you, sir—especially in this manner! I do not purpose to take further—”

  The Judge felt Corrigan’s fingers at his throat, and gasped with horror, throwing up his hands to ward them off, failed, and heard Corrigan’s laugh as the fingers gripped his throat and held.

  When the Judge came to, it was with an excruciatingly painful struggle that left him shrinking and nerveless, lying in a corner, blinking at the light of a kerosene lamp. Corrigan sat on the edge of a flat-topped desk watching him with an ugly, appraising, speculative grin. It was as though the man were mentally gambling on his chances to recover from the throttling.

  “Well,” he said when the Judge at last struggled and sat up; “how do you like it? You’ll get more if you don’
t talk fast and straight! Who wrote that letter, from Dry Bottom?”

  Neither judicial dignity or resolutions of independence could resist the threatened danger of further violence that shone from Corrigan’s eyes, and the Judge whispered gaspingly:

  “Trevison.”

  “I thought so! Now, be careful how you answer this. What did Trevison want in the courthouse?”

  “The original record of the land transfers.”

  “Did he get it?” Corrigan’s voice was dangerously even, and the Judge squirmed and coughed before he spoke the hesitating word that was an admission of his deception:

  “I told him—where—it was.”

  Paralyzed with fear, the Judge watched Corrigan slip off the desk and approach him. He got to his feet and raised his hands to shield his throat as the big man stopped in front of him.

  “Don’t, Corrigan—don’t, for God’s sake!”

  “Bah!” said the big man. He struck, venomously. An instant later he put out the light and stepped down into the gray dawn, locking the door of the shanty behind him and not looking back.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXVI

  THE ASHES

  Rosalind Benham got up with the dawn and looked out of a window toward Manti. She had not slept. She stood at the window for some time and then returned to the bed and sat on its edge, staring thoughtfully downward. She could not get Trevison out of her mind. It seemed to her that a crisis had come and that it was imperative for her to reach a decision—to pronounce judgment. She was trying to do this calmly; she was trying to keep sentiment from prejudicing her. She found it difficult when considering Trevison, but when she arrayed Hester Harvey against her longing for the man she found that her scorn helped her to achieve a mental balance that permitted her to think of him almost dispassionately. She became a mere onlooker, with a calm, clear vision. In this rôle she weighed him. His deeds, his manner, his claims, she arrayed against Corrigan and his counter-claims and ambitions, and was surprised to discover that were she to be called upon to pass judgment on the basis of this surface evidence she would have decided in favor of Trevison. She had fought against that, for it was a tacit admission that her father was in some way connected with Corrigan’s scheme, but she admitted it finally, with a pulse of repugnance, and when she placed Levins’ story on the mental balance, with the knowledge that she had seen the record which seemed to prove the contention of fraud in the land transaction, the evidence favored Trevison overwhelmingly.