by Brand, Max
Silver sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
“Go on with it,” he said.
“Well, I’m going to hook you with the names of the hombres that are coming to lift my hair. Because, when you hear those names, your mouth is going to water. It’s the sort of meat you like. It’s high! The two of ’em are crooks from away back. They’ve both done their killings and plenty of ’em. They’re stake runners. They start from scratch when it comes to guns, and one of ’em is Morris Delgas. You know Delgas?”
“I know him,” said Silver.
“He killed Rex Walters and Lefty Markham; those are about the best two he killed. But there’s others.”
“I know what Morrie Delgas has done,” answered Silver.
“A nice fly for a trout to rise at, eh? But the other’s a shade better, even. The other’s that devil of a Harry Rutherford! I don’t need to ask if you know that little drink of poison! It wouldn’t be healthy for you not to know! A little left-handed streak of misery, is what he is. Some people say he’s the slickest hand with a gun that ever fanned a Colt. That’s what a lot of people say. I don’t know. I’d back you against him. That’s all I know. And the money I put down goes into your pocket. Listen to me, Silver. When I say money, I mean it. Big money.”
Silver shook his head and stood up slowly.
“Hey!” cried Wycombe. “Don’t act that way. Wait a minute. Listen.”
“I don’t want to listen,” said Silver.
“Wait! I’m talking something like this — five thousand apiece. I know you, Jim. You’re not small time. For each one of those hombres, five thousand bucks paid on the spot.”
“I don’t want it,” said Silver.
A moment of silence struck between them. Silver heard the ticking of a clock that was not in the room. He heard the buzzing of a big bluebottle that circled around and around the room. He smelled the aromatic sharpness of hot varnish, and knew that his body was covered with sweat, also. Wycombe was staring at him.
“Have I banked on a lame horse? Have you lost your nerve?” whispered Wycombe.
Then his voice came out with a bang. “I said five thousand. I mean it. I’ll give you five thousand on account, Jim! Those hombres mean to murder me, I tell you. I’ll pay you five thousand advance just to be the bodyguard!”
“I don’t want the money,” said Silver.
“You mean,” shouted Wycombe, “that you don’t want any part of my game. You don’t want me!”
Silver was silent. He knew that anything could happen now, and he was ready for it, looking fixedly into the eyes of Wycombe and watching the trembling of the upper lip that hung crookedly over the buckteeth.
“I’ve missed!” whispered Wycombe. He cried out suddenly: “Listen to me. I can’t slip up. Listen to me, Jim. I’ve got ten thousand dollars right here in this room. It’s yours!”
Silver shook his head. A whole storm of rage and darkness poured over the eyes of Wycombe. His body trembled. His mouth kept working vainly around the prominence of those big front teeth.
“All right,” he said at last, and, turning on his heel, he walked out of the room.
Silver followed him, looking left and right as he stepped cautiously through each doorway. As he went toward the back of the house, he heard the voice of Wycombe ring out ahead of him:
“What the devil do you mean by coming up here and hanging around the kitchen? Get out on the range, where you belong. Foreman? You’re no foreman. You’re no good. I’ve got a mind to fire you on the spot. I’m sick of the pretty face of you.”
Silver, stepping into the kitchen, saw Wycombe in the middle of the floor, shaking his fist at a tall, brown-faced youth who stood with his sombrero in the tips of his fingers, his back to the door. On the floor he had just laid the quarters of a deer. Anger had marked the cheeks of this fellow with white, and pure rage was about to burst out of his lips when the girl intervened. She was behind the back of Wycombe, so that only Silver saw her frightened gesture of entreaty. Both hands remained for an instant pressed against her throat while her eyes talked to the foreman.
He took a great breath.
“I thought you folks might want some fresh venison, was all,” said he.
He began to turn toward the door. It was very hard for him, Silver could see that, to swallow the string of insults that had just been poured at him. In a sense, Silver felt guilty, because it was plain that Wycombe felt himself enough of a gun fighter to handle this honest cow-puncher, and the wrath which he had accumulated during his interview with Silver was to be poured out now.
It was the girl who had stopped the retort that might have meant gunfire. And, if she had stopped it, most assuredly it had not been because her great concern was for Wycombe.
“I’m going to teach you,” shouted Wycombe, beside himself with rage as he saw the other giving way, “I’m going to teach you that your place is out where — ”
“Wait a minute, Wycombe,” said Silver.
Wycombe spun about with his shoulders suddenly against the wall, the very attitude of a man who fears that he may be attacked from two sides at once.
“Hey — well, what you want?” he barked.
“I’ve been thinking things over,” said Silver.
He felt the eyes of the girl suddenly on his face; he felt the wonder in them.
Wycombe was instantly changed. He seemed to forget his foreman in a flash.
“You mean that, Jim?” he cried. “You’re going to stand by me and take a chance to — ”
“I’ll stand by you, I suppose,” said Silver.
“Come on back in that room,” urged Wycombe. “I’m going to pay you now to — ”
“Wait a moment,” said Silver.
He walked slowly toward the young foreman, who was closing the door. The latter paused, opened the door again.
“Wycombe’s temper is not worth much,” said Silver, “and sometimes he talks a lot.”
He held out his hand with a smile.
“My name is Jim Silver,” he said.
The white face of the foreman turned crimson. He knew, it was clear, that this gesture on the part of Silver was purely in token that the stranger had overheard but had not lost respect for the foreman because he had taken water in the row. Never was a stronger grasp laid on the hand of Silver.
“I’m Dan Farrel,” said he. “And — thanks. It’s great to meet you, Silver. It’s great!”
He went out, closing the door hastily behind him, as though he wished to conceal something that was coming into his face.
Silver, turning, saw Wycombe beckoning impatiently at the other door of the kitchen. He saw, also, one flash of gratitude and astonishment in the eyes of the girl. Then he went on through the door with Wycombe and back into the study.
“You gave me a turn, Silver.” Steve Wycombe laughed. “You can throw a bluff with anybody I ever saw. I thought for a minute that you meant what you said. Wait a minute. Ten thousand, I said, and ten thousand it’s going to be.”
He started to unlock the door of a big square-faced safe that filled a corner of the room.
“No,” said Silver. “I don’t want the cash.”
“You don’t want what?” shouted Wycombe.
“I don’t take blood money,” said Silver.
Wycombe straightened his body with jerks and finally faced his guest with a frown.
“I never was able to figure you out,” he said. “You beat me — but that’s all right. As long as you’re with me, anything’s all right! Only — ”
He paused, and then shrugged his lean shoulders twice.
“About that fellow Farrel,” he said. “Why did you make that funny play about him? Going up and shaking hands with the bum when he’d just backed down and taken water like a cur?”
“He’s not a cur. He’s a man,” said Silver. “And I’d rather murder a man than shame him.”
CHAPTER III
SILVER LISTENS
They sat for a time in the office. Wycom
be drank more of the old rye whisky. Silver smoked cigarettes and did the listening, as a rule.
He had merely said: “Let’s find out why the pair are after you. It’s quite a time since you were in the games where you rubbed elbows with the pair of ’em. Two or three years, I should say.”
“All that matters,” said Wycombe, “is that they’re after me, and that you know what they look like.”
“No,” said Silver. “I need to know more.”
Wycombe curled his upper lip to speak, and once more the lip stayed curled on the projecting teeth while Wycombe changed his mind about the words he was to have spoken.
“Well,” he said at last, “you won’t be a hired man. You’re going to have your full share in the show.”
He struck out his jaw after the way he had, and tossed back the blond hair.
“I’m sorry I got sore in front of the girl,” he said suddenly. “You think she noticed?”
“She noticed,” said Silver.
“What did she look like?” asked Wycombe.
“Frightened,” said Silver.
Wycombe lolled back in his chair, suddenly at ease.
“It don’t do any harm to throw a scare into a jane,” he declared. “Let ’em know that there’s a real man around, and they like it all the better. You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” said Silver, probing the dark and mean soul of the man with a steady eye.
But Wycombe failed to understand the glance. He went on: “You know how it is. A girl likes to see a man that’s up to something. She doesn’t want to have a yellow pup around. She’s always liked that foreman of mine pretty well. She’ll hate his heart from now on. Eh?”
“Perhaps,” said Silver.
“They know my record, around here,” went on Wycombe. “They know that I’m no soft-handed baby. Eh?”
“They ought to know that.”
“But, going back a little — I’m kind of beat by you, Silver. You throw ten thousand dollars out the window?”
Silver shrugged his shoulders.
“I want to be my own man,” said he. “I want to do as I please. And I don’t want blood money. I never took any, and I don’t want it.”
“But you’ll hire out — you’ll stay here, I mean — and keep an eye out for me?”
“I’ll stay here — for a while. If Morrie Delgas and Harry Rutherford show up, I’ll try my hand fighting for you. I’ll work for you as though you’d paid me the money, Wycombe — unless you start kicking things around.”
“Kicking you around?” said Wycombe, laughing. “I’m not a half-wit, old son.”
“Let’s hear the story of why the pair are on your trail.”
“Why pick on that? Why does it matter?”
“Because,” said Silver, “the cause that puts a man on a trail is the grindstone that sharpens the edge of him. I want to know what sort of a temper and edge these fellows are wearing.”
Wycombe considered gloomily. He made himself a cigarette and then remarked:
“You know Gold Gulch?”
“Yes.”
“Know Fourth Street?”
“Yes.”
“Know the pawnshop on the corner?”
“Pudge Wayland used to run it.”
“That’s right. Know anything more about Pudge?”
“He was a crook and a fence.”
“He was a crook and a fence, all right,” said Wycombe. “Know what happened to him?”
“He was shot.”
“By whom?” asked Wycombe.
“I never heard.”
“Nobody else did, except a few. I’m the fellow that killed him.”
Silver actually sighed with relief.
“Is that what’s behind this trail that Morrie Delgas and Rutherford are on?”
“That’s it!” said Steve Wycombe, brightening. “I ought to have a medal and a vote of thanks for getting that fat Gila monster out of the world, instead of inheriting trouble about it, eh?”
“It seems that way. How did the thing happen?”
“I’d had words with him. It was a couple of years back. I’d had words with him. About nothing much. Just about a loan he’d made me on a gold watch. I was sore. The next time I saw him, I was coming out of the mouth of an alley. It was night. I saw the fat back of Pudge Wayland come across the street. I sang out and swore at him. He whirled around. I was drunk. I was on a mean drunk. You know, the kind when you don’t know what you’re doing. I thought I saw a gun in his hand. I shot him dead. That’s all.”
He stuck out his lower jaw and stared at the floor.
“That’s all — except that he wasn’t even wearing a gun?” suggested Silver.
“The fool,” said Steve Wycombe, “should ‘a’ had one on, anyway. There was a witness, y’understand? A sap of a no-good sneak thief. He saw everything. He spotted me. I had to give him a regular pension to keep his mouth shut. And he went off into Mexico, where he’d be safe in case I decided to pay him the rest of his pension with a chunk of lead. He stayed down there and collected my checks. Just like that. And then the blockhead goes and gets into a row, a while ago, and gets himself knifed up, and the doctors say that he’s going to die, and he lies there on the floor of a saloon and tells what he knows to the fellow that knifed him. Makes a confession, d’you see? And the fellow that knifed him is Harry Rutherford, and with Harry is that Morrie Delgas.
“Well, this is how the thing all hitches together. That Pudge Wayland was a fence, and you know it. And he’d done a lot of work for Delgas and for Rutherford, both of ’em, because they were working hand in glove. And when Wayland died, he had a whole slew of stolen goods on his hands, and a big pile of it belonged to those two thugs.
“You see what had happened? I bump off Pudge Wayland. His heirs get everything in his shop — and it’s a ton! They clean out his safe. They get themselves rich, and gyp Morrie and Harry out of a whole little fortune in honest stolen goods they’d given to Pudge. That must have been the way of it.
“Anyway, my man lies there on the floor of the cantina and talks his fool head off, and he sees that pair shake hands over him and swear that they’ll go and bump off Wycombe, just to even the account. They’d always hated me, anyway, since a little poker game we once played together. And then the fool fellow, he doesn’t die, after all; but he gets better, and he’s honest enough to write me a letter and tell me how he happened to put those two bloodhounds on my trail. But you see the funny part?”
“I don’t know what part would be funny to you,” said Silver.
“Why,” said Wycombe, “ain’t it a scream that’d curdle your blood to think of me bumping off a fat fool like Pudge Wayland and then getting a pair of wildcats like those two dropped right down my back?”
CHAPTER IV
SILVER GIVES WARNING
The evening came on, and Jim Silver was glad of a chance to get out of the tobacco reek and whisky smell of the closed house into the open. Besides, there was something unusual — rain promised over the desert, and thunder bumping and rumbling in the sky just like carts going over iron bridges.
Steve Wycombe went off by himself for a few moments, and Silver was gladdest of all to be alone. He wanted to do some thinking. He had come to the hardest moment of all, which is when a man tries to untangle his own actions and discover the motives of them. He kept telling himself that he was a fool to have bound himself to fight for this fellow Wycombe and, above all, to have bound himself against such formidable men as Morris Delgas and that ravenous ghost of a man, Harry Rutherford.
Certainly it was not compassion for Wycombe that kept him on the place. He could hardly put his finger on the cause until he saw young Dan Farrel walk from the first corral toward the bunk house. Then he could remember and be sure that it was something about Farrel and the girl that had turned the scales and induced him to stay. Why?
Well, he could not say exactly. He was simply a prospector in the land of trouble, and there seemed to be a rich
strike of danger and complications straight ahead of him.
A pair of cow-punchers came away from the horse shed and ran sneaking up on their foreman. They were almost on him when he sidestepped. There was a swift flurry of action, an uproar of laughing voices, and the foreman went on, leaving his two men to pick themselves up from the ground. Jim Silver was pleased enough to smile. He waved Farrel over to him.
“What do you say about rain, Farrel?” he asked.
Farrel shook his head. “It’s the wrong season,” he declared. “You don’t know how rain comes here — just a few drops at a time — just enough to keep the lips wet and the patient from dying. Just enough water to keep the grass from dying clear down to the bottom of its roots. This is a dry ranch, Silver!”
He nodded and smiled as he spoke.
“You like it.” said Jim Silver. “There’s something about it you like, or that you expect to like later on.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you’ll put up with a good deal in order to stay on it. Why, Farrel? There are plenty of jobs everywhere for good cowmen.”
Farrel stared at him. Then turning toward the foothills, he waved his hand west and north and east.
“You see how those mountains are heaped up in three bunches? Over there to the east are the Rendais — that’s old Mount Kendal back there in blue and white, just on the right. Over here, straight north, that second bunch make up the Humphreys Mountains. I don’t have to tell you which is Mount Humphreys itself. Look at the way it goes jump into the sky! Now, yonder on the left, right over there bang against the west, you see the biggest of the three bunches? Those are the Farrel Mountains.”
Silver looked not so much at the silhouette of ragged blackness in the west, not so much at the three vast masses of cumulus clouds which were blossoming over the three groups of mountains, as he did into the lean, brown face of Dan Farrel. For it seemed to Silver that some of the fire and grandeur of the sunset mountains was reflected in the face of the cow-puncher.
