by Brand, Max
“That’ll make supper,” said Silver, as he cleaned the kill. “You’re welcome to have it with me. Or do you have to go on into the town?” he asked, as they rode on again.
“I have to go on into the town,” answered Trainor.
“Well, there you are,” said Silver, pointing ahead.
All that Trainor could see, at first, was the wide sweep of the distant hills, rolling low, like heat clouds against the horizon. And he saw the Spanish bayonet here and there, and grisly cactus forms, and the nightmare shape of the ocotillo, and whatever barbed spikes and noisome varnishes could preserve from the teeth of deer or desert cattle. Finally, he saw a winking light in the distance and knew it was the sun flashing from glass. That was Alkali town, far away.
“There you are,” said Silver, “but my trail goes this way. If you have to hunt long and hard for your brother, we may meet again. Do you mind a bit of advice?”
“No,” said Trainor. “I’d like to have it — from you.”
“Do a lot of looking and very little talking in Alkali,” said Silver. “That’s my advice. Sometimes things will show themselves, if a man waits long enough.”
He gripped the hand of Trainor and said, with a faint smile:
“Frosty will remember you. So shall I!”
Then he rode away, letting Parade stretch out into a swinging canter that bore him off so rapidly that Trainor could see how much the gait of his mustang had held Silver back this day.
Where would the man go, if not into the town itself? All that he needed, men said, were salt and a gun; he would find enough to eat with that provision and no other. Therefore, at what dry camps would he halt, what trails would he pick up and use the nose of Frosty for following?
Trainor jogged his horse steadily on until he came into a beaten trail, and this led him rapidly to a road, deeply rutted by freight wagons. This, in turn, carried him to Alkali.
It was just one of those unpainted towns, half of frame and half of canvas, which look so time-dried that the wind might pick them up and scatter them over the desert the next time a storm blew. But Trainor knew that fortunes had passed through that town from the mines that were dug into the slopes of the southern hills. The mines had been failing for a long time, now, and Alkali was shriveling rapidly, but a sense of an exciting past breathed to him out of the old shacks as he went by.
Then he saw the Wilbur Hotel, tied his horse at the hitch rack, and went over the creaking boards of the veranda into the dark coolness of the lobby.
He said to the one-armed clerk at the desk: “My name is Trainor, and — ”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted the clerk.
He disappeared into another room and came back with a tall, lean, pale-faced man whose hair had disappeared from the crown of his head.
“You’re Ben Trainor?” he asked. “My name is Wilbur.” He paused to consider Trainor. “I’ll show you your brother’s stuff,” he added, and led the way up two flights of noisy stairs to an attic. There he pulled a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle from among a mass of trunks and suit-cases and dropped the burden on the floor.
“Maybe you can find out something from this stuff,” said Wilbur. “Otherwise — well, there’s the desert, and it doesn’t answer many questions.”
“While my brother was here,” said Trainor, “did you see him about with any suspicious characters? Notice anything about what he did?”
“Most of the characters in Alkali are suspicious,” said Wilbur. “That’s why I charge high prices in this hotel. This is one of the ends of the trail, Mr. Trainor. If you want to look that stuff over, I’ll show you to a room.”
He took Trainor down to the floor below and opened for him a small bedroom.
“You had something in your mind when you wrote me the letter. There was something between the lines,” insisted Trainor.
Wilbur looked out of the window as a wall of desert dust went by and allowed the face of the saloon across the street to be seen again.
“I had an idea,” he said at last, “but ideas are cheap.”
“I’d like to hear this one,” answered Trainor.
“Well, then,” said Wilbur, “my idea was, after he was a week overdue, that he would never come back. I’m sorry to say that, and I hope there’s nothing in it. I’ve had the same ideas about other people, though, and I’m generally right.”
“What made you think that?” asked Trainor, tense with fear and excitement.
“I don’t know,” said Wilbur. “Your brother Clive was just a little too well-washed for this part of the world. He kept the salt washed out of his shirt, and that’s being almost a dandy down here in Alkali.”
He turned, then, and left the room.
CHAPTER III
The Knife
TRAINOR uncorded that bundle, flung open the flaps, and smelled the staleness of the clothes. A well-battered pair of knee boots, a canvas coat, some torn shirts, socks, and other odds and ends of clothes made up the bulk of the package. A canvas-backed note-book in one pocket of the coat and a shard of brittle, black rock in the other side pocket completed the list.
To that bit of stone, Trainor paid no attention. The note-book was a different matter, for he knew his brother’s habit of writing down casual and important details in the pages of a book from day to day.
There were six months’ notes in the thirty filled pages of the book. Half of the items were unintelligible scribblings, aids to the memory. And Ben Trainor got forward to the last bits, which must have been written closest to the time of Clive’s departure from Alkali. Everything was very broken and haphazard. Clive was no romantic lady’s man, but he mentioned a girl a number of times.
The references ran like this, at different times:
“Where she has nothing to gain, why shouldn’t a woman be trusted?”
Later: “She’s not pretty enough to be crooked.”
Then: “It’s money that she’s after, and I’m a fool.”
Finally: “Well, it’s better to be a fool about a woman once than never to be a fool at all.”
That was all Ben Trainor found to suggest that a woman had something to do with the disappearance of his brother. He thought that the references were so strong, considering the cold-blooded nature of Clive so far as girls were concerned, that once he was able to spot the girl, he would be able to find out exactly why and where Clive had gone from the town.
He returned to the study of the note-book again. But there was not a single other phrase that caught his attention except this, just two pages before the end: “Gold should not be wrapped up in anything so black.”
That made Ben Trainor look at the little splinter of black rock that he had taken out of the pocket of the canvas coat. He broke it in two and could see no glint of yellow. He broke it again, and this time he distinctly saw the glitter of a very fine yellow beading.
His teeth gripped hard together. His scalp prickled and contracted, for he knew that the two greatest themes of misery had been sounded by his brother before disappearing: woman and gold!
There was an assay office in the town, of course. He got out of the hotel at once, merely pausing in the lobby to say to Wilbur that he could dispose of Clive’s old clothes as he saw fit. He, Ben Trainor, had no more use for them.
Wilbur looked him over with that half-cold and half-sardonic eye before he answered: “You’ve found the same trail, Trainor. I suppose the same desert will be swallowing you, one of these days. It has a stomach that likes red meat, they say.”
But Trainor overlooked that remark and went straight down the street to the first assay office. In a sense it was a court of final appeal and of grim judgment. He saw a bearded man of sixty coming out of the door laughing and prancing like a colt. He saw inside, a big, grim man who kept staring fixedly at a scrap of paper and shaking his head at it. The blue around the eyes and the white about the mouth of the miner told how frightfully he had suffered to get his specimen for the assay office, and now the paper was telling him, ca
lmly, in words and figures that could not be doubted, that his specimen from the mine was worthless.
There was a short receiving counter, and behind it a man with a gray head, a fine brow, the tired face of a scholar who bends too much over his books at night. A red-headed lad sitting in a corner made a fine contrast with the man in charge. The boy was apparently there for the sake of doing odd jobs, and now he rested as only a boy can rest, his whole body slumped into a lump and his eyes blank with daydreams.
To the elderly clerk, Trainor gave the specimen and saw it wrapped up, ticketed, labeled, his name taken for references. He could have the report the next day, he was told.
But as he listened, Trainor kept staring at the hands of the other instead of at his face. For those hands had trembled strangely, had been noticeably nervous and unsure as they made the package. Trainor glanced suddenly up and saw a slight but distinct compression about the lips of the clerk.
Then he turned away, puzzled, troubled.
He could be sure that the sight of that very tiny shard of stone had made a great impression on the clerk of the assay office. It had made such an impression that the man had had the look of one about to cry out loud with astonishment and excitement.
Trainor went through the door to the sidewalk. Down the street there was a crowd pouring along with the elderly man who had apparently just received a good report from the assay office, and he was still flinging up his hands and heels like a young fool.
There was great desire in Trainor to be alone because he had small bits of things that he wanted to put together — those notes in the book of his lost brother, the warnings of Wilbur, the odd actions of the clerk of the assay office. So he turned down a side alley into the next street of the town and saw, immediately before him, the hurrying, chunky form of the same red-headed lad he had seen in the assay office.
Something clicked, like a closing trap, in the mind of Trainor. He drew a deduction, a relationship, he hardly knew why, between the nervous hands of the assay clerk and this scurrying messenger. For he could see the white envelope of a letter in the hand of the boy.
A moment before, there had been no pressing message to be sent from the office. But since Trainor’s coming, it had become necessary to rush the boy right away.
Ben Trainor followed, lengthening his stride, until he saw the youngster duck up an obscure alley between two buildings. When he came to that alley in turn, he saw the boy knocking at the back door of a building which must front on the main street, a building with a false front that rose in a triangle half a story above the rest of the structure.
Trainor did not follow, directly. Instead, he crossed the mouth of the alley and walked on, turned after a moment, retraced his steps across the alley slowly, again. This time he saw the rear door opening, and a black-coated man with a wide black hat on his head taking the letter from the boy — a man whose face seemed very pale, perhaps by contrast with the darkness of his hat and coat, a young and handsome fellow whose pallor might be that of sickness or of too much night life.
Trainor went on, still more slowly.
The get-up of the fellow in the black coat was exactly that which a professional gambler would be apt to use. They could generally be spotted by a garb which they all seemed to think was merely that of a man of money and plenty of idle time on his hands.
Very well, then, thought Trainor, as he came back into the main street of Alkali, there was some connection between the assay office and a gambler at a back door — of what?
It was not hard to spot the building that he wanted from its high, pyramidal false front. It was the saloon which carried the name, “Golden Hope.”
In the Golden Hope there was a tall young fellow with a pale and handsome face who had to do with letters received from the assay office. And that was to Trainor very interesting indeed.
He sauntered on down the street, trying to make something more of this queer bit of evidence. He passed the shack which carried a small legend across one window: “John Mahan, Deputy Sheriff,” and as he saw it, he was greatly tempted to walk straight into the place and lay his cards on the table before the man of the law.
That would be dangerous. What he knew was perhaps best locked up in his breast. A story told to one man is told practically to the entire world.
He went up the street again and entered the bar of the Golden Hope. It was a long bar that ran down a side of a narrow room. Doors opened at the back and in the opposite wall. Apparently it was quite an establishment, and the three bartenders on duty told that a big crowd was expected as the usual patronage. There were only a dozen drinkers now, leaning their elbows at the bar and taking whisky or beer, and Trainor got a place at one corner of the bar and ordered a beer.
It was flat stuff, without much head, but he accepted it without a complaint. As he sipped it, he glanced over the men in the place and thought that he never had seen a harder lot.
True, nearly all of the men in Alkali were a rough crew. Unshaven fellows in battered or even tattered clothes are apt to look fairly grim, but the three bartenders, particularly one with a twisted face, were special choices in the way of evil. Even the men who leaned at the bar had the look of hangers-on rather than of regular miners out of work or blowing in their pay. There was no gaiety about them. There was no sense of revel. All voices were lowered in this saloon, and Trainor could not help feeling that speculative, curious eyes were turned toward him now and again.
What caught his attention next, with a start, was a knife with which a man seated at one of the little round tables in a comer was aimlessly whittling at a stick, dropping the shavings in fine curls into a spittoon. For the handle of that knife, as much as Trainer could see of it, seemed to be composed of gray pearl and black.
And exactly such a knife had belonged to his lost brother!
He could feel a cold sweat starting on his forehead; he could feel the skin of his brow gathering and prickling. So he stared down into his glass of beer, sipped it, called up again in his mind the detailed picture of the fellow with the knife.
He was a broad, formidable chunk of a man, with a great double-tufted black mustache that bristled when the whittler compressed his lips. This he did very often, for he seemed to have a habit of frowning and scowling at the same instant, during his meditations.
Perhaps he was thinking at that very moment of the last struggle of Clive Trainor!
Vainly Ben Trainor tried to tell himself that the knife probably meant nothing, that there were sure to be thousands of knives of pearl and black exactly like the one his brother had owned.
But he knew it was not true. Black horn and clean gray pearl had been overlaid on the handle of Clive’s knife. And there was one nick rather deep, and close to the end — a nick in the pearl.
At this moment the man of the black mustache laid down the knife. That temptation was too much for Ben Trainor. He crossed the floor with a casual step, picked up one of a pile of newspapers that lay on another table, and at the same time looked intently at the fully exposed knife.
Toward one end of it, there was a nick that ran into the pearl and showed yellow metal of the frame of the handle!
CHAPTER IV
The Fighter
PASSION was strong in young Ben Trainor, and it almost mastered him now. The tide of it made him want to drive straight at the fellow of the black mustache. Then he remembered that, like a fool, he had not brought a gun. For that matter, he was no expert with a revolver. He could shoot his share of meat with a rifle, but a revolver, in his life of work, was an almost useless adornment. And such fellows as this one of the mustache were fairly sure to be experts. He had the look of a fighter. The long scar that jagged down a side of his cheek was the sort of a thing that a knife stroke might have registered.
Besides, there were other ways of getting hold of a knife than by murdering the owner.
He stepped to the next table, saying:
“Pardon me, stranger. That’s a good-looking knife you have there
.”
The fellow was smoothing absently, with the tips of his fingers, the stick which he had been whittling. Now he looked up rather askance at Trainor, and the turn of his head brought out the bulging strength of his neck tendons.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a pretty good knife.”
His paw gathered the knife, his thumb clicked the blade shut, and he dropped it into his pocket. There was profound insolence in the action, as though to stop with it any further talk on the subject. And the suspicions of Trainor burned up to a white heat.
“Can a fellow buy knives like that in this town?” he asked, controlling his voice.
“Yeah, if you know which pawnshop to try in,” said the other.
He stood up from his chair and looked Trainor up and down. Then he turned his back to stride away toward the bar.
“Wait a minute,” said Trainor, touching his shoulder.
That shoulder was hard-padded with muscles. The chunky man spun around at the touch.
“Yeah? Yeah?” he queried angrily. “What’s the matter now? Wanta know something more? Wanta find out where you can buy some soap and give yourself a clean start?”
Two or three of those idlers at the bar began to laugh loudly.
“Wake him up, Blacky,” said one of them.
And that bartender with the twisted face was smiling — on one side only.
“You’re talking pretty hard talk, partner,” said Trainor.
“If I was your partner,” the man called Blacky said, “I’d change my job and get a new kind.” And he opened his mouth and laughed in Trainor’s face.
It was a great deal too much. The hand of Trainor moved like a flash beyond his control. The flat of it struck fairly across the open mouth of Blacky.
“Hi!” yelled two or three voices at the bar. “Let him have it, Blacky!”
Blacky had accepted the blow and stopped laughing. He was smiling now, instead. And then, putting up his guard, he moved in at Trainor with little dancing steps, the left fist jerking out in feints at the head, the right hand poised for serious business. He had his jaw tucked down behind the shelter of his massive left shoulder, and Trainor knew that he had on his hands an artist in fisticuffs.
