“Get out,” said the bandit, “an’ tell the rest of ’em that there’s a deadline drawn at the edge of the trees. They can cross it when they get tired of livin’.”
Jerry made vain motions to him with lips and hands to stay and wondered why she dared not sneak out; but his eves were not for her. Like the rest he moved side-wise, and darted out into the night. Black Jim turned to Jerry and she set her teeth to make her glance cross his boldly. There was a subtle change of his expression. He jerked a hand toward the door.
“That last man,” he said, “did you really want him to stay?”
“Yes,” she said faintly, “I’m afraid!”
CHAPTER VI
Greek Meets Greek
To her astonishment he nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said, “they-all ain’t much more’n cattle.”
With that he disappeared into the next room. He came back at once bearing a bolstered revolver which he dropped beside her carelessly.
“They’re a rotten gang, all right,” he went on, “and that last man—why did you want him to stay?”
Under the direct question of his eyes, her own dropped till they fell upon the revolver-butt, significantly protruding from the holster.
“You don’t need to tell me,” he said gently, “I guess you thought you’d be safer with two. But that pale-faced one ain’t a man. He’s a skunk. I told him to keep ’em out.”
She did not answer. Her head remained bowed with wonder. Montgomery had been no protection to her. Even now there were twelve grim men who were twelve dangers to her. Yet in the presence of this man-queller, she felt unutterably safe. She glanced at her injured hand and smiled at her sense of security. Black Jim retreated. He came back with a great armful of logs.
Hunger and weariness fought like drugs against the stimulus of fear. She found herself drowsing as she stared into the growing blaze of flames. Her ear caught the chink, the rattle, and the hiss of cookery. Then she watched as through a haze the tall figure of Black Jim, swart against the fire. Through her exhaustion, her suffering, and her fear, that shadowy figure became the symbol of the protector.
He came before her again carrying a tin plate that bore a steaming venison steak flanked with big chunks of bread and a cup of black coffee. She tasted the coffee first and it cleared her mind, pumped strong blood through her body again.
Another woman would have roused to a paralyzing terror when her faculties returned; but now the strange schooling of Annie Kerrigan stood her in good stead. She was used to men, but she was not used to the fear of them. After all, what difference was there between this man and those she had known before? She had felt helpless indeed when the twelve filled the room. She had seen and she should never forget a certain flickering light of hunger in their eyes. They were dangerous, but that element of danger she did not see in Black Jim. Some men are dangerous to men alone. Others threaten all nature; born destroyers. She knew that Black Jim was of the first category. Nothing told her except a small inner voice that chanted courage to her heart. Consequently when the hot coffee gave her strength she sat erect, propping herself with her sound hand.
“I say!” she called. He started where he sat before his food at the table, lifted his head, and stared at her.
“What about these hobbles, deary?” she went on. His eyes widened, but he answered nothing.
“Cut out the silent treatment, cutie,” said Jerry, her courage rising, “and this rope. You’ve got your stage guarded. There’s no fear that I’ll jump through the curtain to get to the audience. I can’t run away, I’m not very slow, but bullets are a little faster. So drop the hobbles, Alexander. They’re away out of date.”
He sat with knife poised and ear canted a trifle to one side as if he strained every effort to follow the meaning of her slang. At last he comprehended, nodded, and set her free with a few strokes of a knife.
“It’s all right to let you go free,” he said, “but you got to remember that this shack may be watched from now on. You could get away any time. I won’t stop you. But outside you’ll find, maybe no bullets, but some of the boys who were in here a while ago. Savvy?”
She understood, but she shrugged the terror away, as she would have shrugged away self-consciousness on the stage.
“All right, Jimmy,” she said cheerfully, “I savvy. Lend me a hand, will you?”
She reached up with a smile for him to assist her to her feet. His astonishment at this familiar treatment made his eyes big again, and Jerry laughed.
“It’s all right, cutie,” she said. “You’ve got a funny name, but you can’t get by as a nightmare as far as I’m concerned. Not without a make-up. Can the glassy eye, and give me your hand.”
He extended his hand hesitatingly, and she drew herself erect with some difficulty, for she had remained a long time in a cramped position.
“It’s all right to feed some Swede farmhand in the corner, Oscar, but not La Belle Geraldine. Nix. It isn’t done. There’s no red light on that table, is there?”
“Red light?” he repeated.
“Sure. I mean there’s no danger sign. Say, deary, do I have to translate everything I say into ‘Mother Goose’ rimes? I mean, may I eat at the table, or do I have to stay on the floor?”
He regarded her a moment with his usual somber concern. Then he turned and carried a stool to the table and brought her food to it.
“This is solid comfort,” declared Jerry, as she settled herself at the board, and she attacked the venison with great vigor.
There were certain difficulties, however, against which she had to struggle. Her right hand was useless to manage the knife, but she managed to steady the fork between the third and fourth fingers. With her left hand she tried to cut the meat, but progress in this way was highly unsatisfactory. In the midst of her labors a brawny hand carried away her plate.
She looked up with a laugh and surrendered her knife and fork.
“After all,” she said, “you flashed the gun that put my hand to the bad. So it’s up to you to do the prompting when I break down.”
He raised his eyes a moment to consider this statement, but he failed to find the clue to its meaning, went on silently cutting up the meat, and finally passed it back to her. Dumfounded by this reticence, Jerry kept a suspicious eye upon him. Among the people with whom she was familiar silence meant anger, plots, hatred. Evidently he turned the matter over seriously in his mind, for his gaze was fixed far away.
“Lady,” he said at last, meeting her inquiry with his dull, unreadable eyes, “was you-all born with that vocabulary, or did you jest find it?”
Jerry rested her chin upon a clenched white fist while she smiled at him.
“You’re wrong twice, Solomon,” she answered, “an angel slipped it to me in a dream.”
“Which a dream like that is some nightmare,” nodded Black Jim. “Would you-all mind wakin’ up when you talk to me?”
He chuckled softly.
“Say, Oscar,” said Jerry, “I’d lay a bet that’s the first time you’ve laughed this year.”
He was sober at once.
“Why?”
“The wrinkles around your eyes ain’t worn very deep.”
He shrugged his shoulders and confined his attention to his plate for a time, as if the matter no longer interested him, but when she had half forgotten it he resumed, breaking into the midst of her chatter: “Speakin’ of wrinkles, you don’t look more’n a yearling yourse’f. Which I would ask, how old are you, ma’am?”
The instinct of the eternal feminine made her parry the question for a moment.
“I’m old enough,” she answered; “but take it from me, I don’t have to wear a wig.”
“H-m!” he growled, considering this evasive return. “What I want to know is where you-all got to know so much?”
“Know so much?” repeated Jerry, “On the level, Oscar, or speaking with a smile? I mean, do you ask that straight?”
“Straight as I shoot,” he said.
She l
eaned back, curiosity greater than her mirth.
“Honest,” said La Belle Geraldine, “you’ve got me beat. You’ve got me feeling like a toe-dancer in the mud. You’re the original mystery, all right. To hear people talk of you, you’d think Black Jim put the ‘damn’ in ‘death’; but if I just met you at a dance, I’d think you were so green you didn’t know the first violin from the drummer.”
“Speakin’ in general,” replied the bandit carefully, “I get your drift, but even if I begin allowing for the wind—”
“Meaning the way I talk, I suppose,” broke in Jerry.
“Even allowin’ for that,” went on Black Jim, “I don’t think I could shoot straight enough to ring the bell. You’ve got me side-stepped.”
“Go on,” said Jerry, “I’ll keep them amused till you bring on the heavy stuff. What do you mean?”
“Well,” drawled Black Jim, “you look a heap more like a picture of a lady I once saw in a soap ad than anything else. You’re all pink an’ white an’ soft, with eyes like a two-day calf.”
“Go right on, Shakespeare,” murmured La Belle Geraldine; “you can’t make me mad.”
“When I brought you up here,” said Black Jim, “I figured that when you come to, you’d begin yellin’ an’ hollerin’ an’ raisin’ Cain. I was sort of steelin’ myself to it when you opened your eyes a while ago. Lady “—here he leaned across the table earnestly—” I was expectin’ a plumb hell of a time.” He grinned broadly. “I got it, all right, but not the kind I thought.”
“I sure panned you some,” nodded Jerry. “I thought—”
She stopped. To tell Black Jim that she thought she was talking to Frederick Montgomery when she recovered from her faint, would be to expose that worthy; for once it were known that he was only a temporary bandit, his days in the valley would be short indeed. In his pose as a man-killer, an ex-convict, a felon in the shadow of the law, he was as safe as a child in the bosom of his family. Otherwise, a dozen practiced fighters would be hot on his trail. “I was just sore,” concluded La Belle, “to think I had balled up everything by flashing a small-time act on a big-time stage.”
The pun amused her so that she broke into hearty laughter. The sound reacted on both her and the bandit. Though he fell silent again and scarcely spoke for the next hour or more, she thought that she could detect a greater kindliness about his eyes.
He went about cleaning up the tin dishes with singular deftness. When he concluded he turned abruptly upon her.
“Time to turn in. You sleep there. I bunk in the next room. S’long!”
He turned at the entrance of the other apartment.
“How’s your hand?”
“Doing fine,” smiled Jerry. “S’long, Jim!”
CHAPTER VII
Jerry Takes Lessons
She was still smiling when she slipped down among the blankets. For some time she lay there wondering. By all the laws of Nature she should not have closed an eye for anxiety. She pictured all the dangers of her position one by one, and then—smiled again! She could not be afraid of this man. The very terror he inspired in others was a warm sense of protection around her. The weary muscles of her body relaxed by slow degrees. The wind hummed like a muted violin through the trees outside. She slept.
When she woke, a fire burned on the hearth brightly again, and the room filled with the savor of fried bacon and steaming coffee. Black Jim sat at the table draining his tin cup. Jerry sat up with a yawn.
“Hello, Jim!” she called. “Say, this mountain air is all the dope for hard sleeping; what?”
He lowered the cup and smiled back at her.
“I’m glad you-all slept well,” he drawled, and rose from the table.
“I’m goin’ off on a bit of a trip today,” he said, “but before I go I want to tell you—”
“My name’s Geraldine,” she answered, “but most people shorten it up to Jerry.”
“Which I’d tell a man jest about hits you off,” he answered. “You ain’t seen much of the valley. I suppose you’ll want Jo explore around a lot, an’ you can go as far as you like; but jest pack that shootin’-iron with you by way of a friend. Come here to the door and I’ll show you how far you can go.”
She followed him obediently, and standing at the entrance to the shack looked out over the silver-misted valley. Four guardian peaks surrounded a gorge about a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, narrowing toward the farther end, where the entrance gap could not have been more than a hundred yards in width. The shack of Black Jim huddled against the precipitous wall of rock at the opposite extremity of the valley and stood upon ground higher than the rest of the floor. Great trees rose on all sides, and what she saw was made out through the spaces between these monsters.
“Where are the others?” she asked.
He waved his hand in a generous circle.
“All around. Maybe you could wander about for a month and never find where they stay. But if you meet ’em they’ll be gladder to see you than you’ll be to see them.”
“And if I stay right here,” she asked him, “would I be in danger from them here?”
“They came last night,” he said grimly, “but I got an idea they won’t be in no hurry to come again. At the edge of those trees is a deadline. They know if they come beyond that they’re takin’ their own chances. If you see ’em come, make your gun talk for you.”
He stepped through the door and she followed him a pace into the open air. The big roan horse, lean of neck and powerful of shoulder, stood near, his bridle-reins hanging over his head. Black Jim swung into the saddle.
“Jest hobble this one idea so it don’t never get outside your brain,” said Black Jim. “The men in this valley are only up here because they wanted to get above the law—and they are above it. The only law they know, the only law I know, is to play square with each other. Partner, I’ve busted that law by bringin’ you in here. Accordin’ to all the rules there ain’t no place for any one here exceptin’ the men that’s beyond the law. I dunno what they’ll do. Maybe it’s war. Maybe it ain’t. Rope that idea and stick a brand on it. S’long, Jerry. An’ don’t get near that gap down to the far end of the valley.”
He spurred the roan through the trees and disappeared, leaving Jerry to listen to the rapidly diminishing sound of the horse’s feet.
Then the silence dropped like a cloak about her, save for the light humming of the wind through the upper branches. She went back and buckled the revolver with its holster about her waist. She felt strangely as if that act placed her at once among the ranks of those who, as Black Jim said, were “above the law.”
A great impulse to collapse in the middle of the floor and weep rose in her. All that life of gaiety, of action, of many butterfly hopes, was lost to her. Years might pass before she could break away from this valley of the damned. Perhaps she might actually grow old here, away from men, away from the lure of the footlights. Hopelessness tightened about her heart—and Jerry began to sing while the tears ran down her face. After all, she was trained to fight against misery, and she fought now until the tears stopped and her voice was sure. The very sound of the song was a cure to all ills.
She set about examining the cabin with the practical mind of any one who had had to make a home of a dressing room in a theater, and who can give a domestic touch even to a compartment in a Pullman.
The main room could be made more attractive. When her hand healed she could cut some young evergreens and place them here and there. That floor could be cleaned. Those clothes, if they had to hang on the wall, might at least be shaken free from dust and covered with sacking. She turned her attention to the adjoining room.
Here was the bunk of Black Jim, covered with a few tumbled blankets. Another pair of lanterns sat in a corner. More clothes lay here and there about the floor. Beyond this roof lay the horse-shed. She turned back to examine Jim’s belongings. What caught her eye was a little pile of books upon a rudely made shelf. She took them down one by one. He
re was the explanation of the bandit’s mixed English, sometimes almost scholarly and correct, but again full of Western vernacular. It was a cross between the slang of cowboy and mountaineer, and the vocabulary of the educated.
There were six volumes all told. The first she opened was Scott’s “Redgauntlet” which fell open at “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” Next came a volume of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies—“Othello,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” and “Hamlet”; “Gil Bias”; a volume of Poe’s verse, and another of Byron’s; and finally quaint old Mallory’s “Morte d’Arthur.”
“Can you beat it?” whispered Jerry to the blank wall. “And me—I haven’t read a single one of ’em!”
How he had got them she could not imagine. Perhaps he took them with other loot from a stage. At any rate, they were here, and their presence made her strangely ill at ease.
There is a peculiar reverence for books in the minds of the most illiterate. It is a superstition which runs back to the days when the written word had to be copied by hand and a man was esteemed rich if he possessed three or four manuscripts. That legendary reverence grew almost to worship in the early Renaissance, and when the invention of John Fust finally brought literature within the grasp of the poorest man, the early respect still clung to ink and paper —clings to it today.
Of books Jerry knew little enough and consequently had the greater respect. In school she had gone as far as the “Merchant of Venice,” but blank verse was an impassable fence which stood between her and the dramatic action. When she started out on her own gay path through the world she found small time for reading and less desire. Books were all very well, and the knowledge which might be found in them was doubtless desirable, but for Jerry as unattainable as the shining limousines which purr down Fifth Avenue.
Her first impulse when she saw this little array of books was a blind anger, whose cause she could scarcely discover. It seemed as if the reading of those books had suddenly placed the bandit as far away from her as he was away from the law. But when the anger died away a tingling excitement followed.
The Second Western Megapack Page 41
