by Brand, Max
He kneeled beside Wycombe in an effort to feel his pulse.
“Don’t touch me. Keep your murdering hands away from me,” said Wycombe, in a horrible, bubbling voice. “Boys, don’t believe him. He’s lying. Tear him apart. Let me see you split him open. I’ve got a thousand dollars for the man who — ”
“Shut up, Steve,” said a voice from the doorway. “He only stole a march on us.”
Silver saw two men at the entrance of the room, one a great, hairy brute, and the other small and dapper, with a pale face. He knew that Delgas and Rutherford had arrived too late.
CHAPTER VI
WYCOMBE’S WILL
Some of the men threw sand on the burning oil and put it out. At the directions of Silver, two more dragged in a mattress, with the blankets folded to lift his head and shoulders, for when he lay flat his own blood choked him.
Silver cut away the clothes, tried to stop the bleeding in chest and back with handfuls of dust, and bound a thick bandage made of a torn sheet around and around the scrawny body. Hollow-chested, lean of shoulders and arms, Wycombe looked no more than a boy. It had only been his spirit that made him dangerous, and the same spirit was still green in his eyes. He kept rolling his glance from Delgas to Silver to Rutherford.
“Give me a shot of hooch,” he said. “I’ve got some thinking to do.”
Silver tilted his head and applied a bottle of whisky to the lips. Wycombe drank it like water. Afterward he closed his eyes for a long moment, but he was not dead. Silver could see the pulse beat in the scrawny hollow of the throat.
“I wanta have a pen and paper,” said Wycombe. “Silver, you write down what I say. I’m going to make my will.”
One of the men ran off to get what was needed.
Rutherford sat down on the floor beside Wycombe.
“I’m sorry to see you this way, Steve,” said he. “I hoped that you’d be up and about when we arrived. You’re not much use to us this way, Steve. We’ve been killing you every day for a long time. Now that you’re passing out on your own hook, there doesn’t seem to be anything left for us to do. The world’s a hollow place for us, with you out of it!”
“Yeah?” murmured Wycombe. “He shot me in the dark. He sided with that rat of a Farrel of mine. And I’d hired Silver to keep the two of you away from me.”
“Had you?” said Rutherford.
He turned his thin, handsome face toward Jim Silver and smiled.
“Old Jim Silver,” he said softly. “Always up to something.”
Delgas came and put his hands on his knees. The hair grew like fur down to the second knuckles.
“How d’you feel, kid?” he asked.
“There’s hands inside of me tearing me apart,” said Wycombe.
“Too bad,” said Delgas, and began to grin widely, nodding at Wycombe. “We had lots of hell, but it’s better than nothing to get a flash of you when you’re like that.”
“You swine!” breathed Steve Wycombe.
“Let him alone, Delgas,” said Silver. “Get up and stand back from him, Rutherford. He’s a dying man.”
“Oh,” said Rutherford. “You don’t like my manners, Silver?”
He rose slowly, still smiling.
“I don’t like your manners,” said Silver.
He looked at them calmly.
“Now!” whispered Wycombe, his eyes burning. “Are you going to take water from him, the pair of you? Jump him — blow him to pieces, boys! I’ll thank you, and I’ll pay you for doing it! It’ll make a red-letter day in your lives, the cash I’ll give you!”
“And be mobbed by this gang when we open up? We’re not such fools,” said Rutherford.
He stepped back. Wycombe glowered at Silver.
“I’ve got no luck,” he said.
“You’ll be hearing from us, Silver,” said Delgas.
“Thanks,” said Silver. “Come and take tea with me, one day. Any old time would suit me.”
The paper and ink and pen arrived. Silver sat down cross-legged and dipped the pen and poised it above the writing pad.
“Go ahead, Wycombe,” he suggested.
“I want this to sound like law,” said Wycombe. “Write like this. Put the date down and the place, first. Then say: ‘I, Stephen Wycombe, being in my right mind and the full possession of my faculties, make this my last will and testament.’ How does that sound to you, boys? Legal?”
The cow-punchers formed an outer semicircle. Some of them were standing. Some were sitting on their heels, watching.
“It sounds like a book,” said one of them.
“That’s the way you gotta sound, or else the lawyers will take you all apart,” said Wycombe. “Somebody wipe my mouth. I don’t seem to have any hands.”
Red came close and wiped the bloody lips with a bandanna. He gave Wycombe another taste of the whisky.
“It’s hard,” said Wycombe, “to think of losing out on all of that seventeen-year-old rye! Go on writing, Silver. ‘Last will and testament. It takes the place of, and makes null, all other wills and testaments that I may have made.’ You see, I haven’t made any other wills; but you’ve got to talk like that in a will.”
He went on: “I give, devise, and bequeath to my dear friend, Morris Delgas, one third of all the bulls, steers, cows, and calves in my possession.”
“Hey,” said Delgas. “What’s this?”
“Shut up!” whispered Wycombe. “I gotta keep enough breath to finish. Go on writing, Silver. ‘One half of all my land, except as shall hereinafter be excepted.’ How’s that for fancy talk? I was educated all right. A lot of good my education has done me! Go on: ‘And to my dear friend, Henry Rutherford, I give, devise, and bequeath one third of all the live stock in my possession, together with one half of my land, except as shall be hereinafter excepted.’ Have you got that?”
“I have it,” said Silver, working with a rapid pen.
“Well,” murmured Harry Rutherford softly, “this is the richest thing that I ever heard of. Where does the poison come in, Wycombe?”
“Wait a minute. He’s having his joke,” said Delgas. “The catch is going to come now.”
“Go on writing,” urged Wycombe. “And to my dear friend called variously Arizona Jim, Silvertip, Silver, Jim Silver, and other aliases — I mean the man who caught the famous wild horse, Parade — I give, devise, and bequeath all the cash in my possession, together with the debts which I owe and one third of all the live stock on my place. In addition I give, devise, and bequeath to Jim Silver, alias Arizona Jim, alias Silvertip, all the water rights to the big tank called Johnson’s Lake, and I give him outright the house and the corrals and all the ground in every direction for one half mile from the ranch house.’ There, boys, that looks like a pretty even split, to me. Silver don’t get any land to speak of, but he gets cash and water. Give me that to sign, Jim, will you?”
Silver held the pad before him. Wycombe, with a twitching mouth, scratched on his signature.
“That look all right and legal, Silver?” asked Wycombe.
“It looks right enough to me,” said Silver.
“Sign it, then. Everybody in the room sign it. Silver, write down: ‘Witnessed this day by me,’ and then the rest of you sign under that place. Understand?”
The paper was accordingly passed around. Wycombe lay back, nodding a little as he heard the scratching of the pen. Once Silver found the eyes of the dying man fixed upon him with a deathless malice and hatred.
“The gent that should have guarded me, he shoots me down!” said Wycombe. Then, suddenly, he asked: “Where’s the girl and where’s Farrel? Go call ’em in, will you? I wanta say good-by to them. I gotta remember my manners and say good-by to all of my old friends.”
He closed his eyes. His mouth opened. Silver could no longer see the beat of the pulse in the hollow of the throat. When he touched the face of Wycombe, he found the skin clammy with cold sweat.
One of the punchers came back, bringing the girl and tall Dan Farrel. She
held back. Farrel had an arm about her, supporting her forward. Her eyes were doubly large in the pallor of her face.
So the two of them came before the dying man.
“They’re here,” said Silver.
The eyes of Wycombe fluttered and then opened. He frowned to bring his attention on the pair.
“Farrel and Esther. Fine-looking pair, eh?” he muttered. “The two of you — I want to say something to you. You’re the ones that knifed me. Except because of your pretty mug, Esther, I’d be all right now. I’d be drinking rye and taking it easy, instead of going where I’m bound. I — ” He gasped.
“Whisky!” he whispered.
Silver poured a large dram down his throat. He coughed and strangled feebly over it. The bubbling of his voice became greater, as though some of the liquid were in his lungs.
He said: “I never wasted time on girls before I saw you, Esther.”
“Steve,” cried the girl, “I never wanted to lead you on. I never said a word to you. The only reason that I didn’t tell you right away that I loved Danny was because I was afraid that he’d be fired, and he can’t live away from this place.”
“Yeah? Can’t he?” murmured Wycombe. “He’ll damned well live away from it, now that these three hombres have the place. And this is what I wanta say to the pair of you: I hope you have nothing but rotten bad luck. I hope the pair of you get sickness and meanness. I hope you start in hating each other. If you have kids, I hope that they’re halfwits and that they’re sick every day of their lives. I hope you’re broke and stay broke. I hope you have to beg, and folks kick you out of their way. If there’s anything in the curse of a dying man, I put it on — ”
His head dropped back. The girl, with her hands pressed before her eyes, shut out the grisly picture of the dying man.
“Take me away, Danny!” she murmured.
“I put — a curse,” muttered Wycombe, “on — on — ”
He bit at the air, writhed his legs together, and sat bolt upright.
“I can’t breathe!” he gasped. “Give me air — whisky. I — ”
Blood bubbles broke on his lips. He twisted suddenly, fell on his side, and lay still.
Silver leaned close above him for an instant, then turned him on his back and closed the eyes. Wycombe was smiling in death as in life, with his upper lip caught crookedly across his projecting teeth. Silver, with a fold of the blanket, covered that repulsive face.
He stood up and faced the silence of the group.
“Friends,” he said, “the law is going to put an eye on all of this. You fellows jot down everything that you can remember of exactly what’s happened. You’ll have to answer questions. One thing is straight — I killed Wycombe. I shot him to keep him from murdering Farrel — and myself. Farrel, were you hurt?”
“A graze along the ribs,” said Dan Farrel. “It’s nothing.”
“Lemme tell you all something,” boomed the great bass voice of Morris Delgas. “I dunno just how it’s going to work out, but this here Wycombe was always a poison rat. It looks like he’s done something for us, but before we get through we’ll find out that he’s put a knife through us, every one. I’m going to go out and get some fresh air.”
CHAPTER VII
THE NEW MANAGER
A coroner came out from Pepper Gulch the next morning and made an examination. He was an old-timer with a dull-blue eye and tobacco-stained blond mustache. His examination lasted not more than half an hour, after which he pronounced over a glass of rye whisky, aged seventeen years:
“The way it looks to me, it would be pretty hard to kill a gent like Steve Wycombe without doin’ it in self-defense. I dunno that you could pick up any jury around this part of the world that would accuse a man of nothin’ more than self-defense even if there was eye-witnesses that seen somebody bash Steve over the head when his back was turned.”
The reputation of Wycombe was in this manner its own reward. The body was carted to the town to be buried in the plot where other and hardly more honorable ancestors had lain before him, and the will which he had signed was promptly recorded and filed.
The result was that the three to whom the inheritance had so strangely come could enter upon the possession at once. It was not many days later that they held a conference in the very room that had formerly been the office of the dead man.
Morris Delgas, because he was the oldest and the largest of the trio, presided. He sat not in a chair but on the desk, with his shirt open and his sleeves rolled up. The man was everywhere furred over with black hair. His forehead was wide and very low, with a knob at either corner of it to match the cheek bones beneath. He looked like a perfect specimen for the prize ring, now grown a little overweight.
He wore new boots, graced with golden, spoon-handled spurs; but otherwise he showed no token of the sudden good fortune that had come to him, for his clothes were those which any cow-puncher might have donned as a working outfit. His shirt was blue flannel, in spite of the heat of the weather; his hat was a very battered old felt, and the only evidence of wealth lay in the golden spurs and in the great fat cigar into which he had sunk his teeth.
He liked the feel of it so well that he could not relax the grip of his teeth for an instant. The oily stain ran across his mouth. The tongue with which he licked those lips became stained, also. But he never touched the cigar with his hand. He smoked it rarely in puffs, but let it burn slowly with the movements of his breath, and when he changed its position, it was done by manipulations of the teeth and the tongue. In fact, he was a formidable brute of a man. His body looked too gross for activity, but his eye was as bright as the eye of a wild cat.
Sitting there on the desk, with his huge back turned to the windows, he literally cast a shadow over the other two men.
“Gents,” he said, “we gotta get together. We gotta find out what was in the crazy bean of Steve Wycombe when he passed us this ground, and then we gotta see how we can pull together. Because look at the lay of the land. Me and Harry have got half the acres. And, believe me, there’s some acres! I been out and rode all around the place, and it’s a long day’s ride. And we each got a third of the live stock, along with you, Silver. But there’s another way of lookin’ at the thing. We got the land and our shares of the stock. But you got the most part of the water, if not all. Except for some shallow kind of pools that stand a while around in the spring rains, there ain’t no water on the rest of the place. The cows have gotta come in to the big tank or else they’ve gotta come right in here to the home place. It’s a funny business, and I guess that the brains must have run with the blood right out of poor old Steve! Now’s the time for us to talk a spell and keep shut up afterward.”
“Wycombe wasn’t crazy,” said Harry Rutherford. “Not a bit.”
“What was he, then?” asked big Delgas.
“He was out for blood, that’s all,” said Rutherford.
“Go on, handsome, and tell me what you mean,” said Delgas.
“Aw, you tell him, Silver,” said Rutherford. “He can’t see it. Poor old Delgas is so gentle and trusting that he doesn’t know how to look around the corner and see the devil in what people do.”
Silver smiled, his faint, faint smile. “As Wycombe lay dying,” he said, “there were three men in the world that he wanted to kill. Name ’em, Delgas.”
“You first, because you’d sunk a shot in him between wind and water,” said Delgas presently. “And I suppose that me and Rutherford would come on the list, too.”
“Very well,” said Silver, “and to whom did he leave his land?”
“Well, the same three. But how’s he goin’ to kill us by givin’ us the land?”
“Because he hoped that we’d not be friends. He hoped that you and Rutherford would hang together and that you’d be against me, and that we’d start a war and fight to a finish.”
“Hey!” exclaimed Delgas. “You mean that, Silver? You think that’s the straight of it, Harry?”
Harry Rutherford
waved a slender hand.
“Of course that’s it,” he said. “Don’t be so dumb, Brother Morris. Wycombe set us up for a battle royal. What else could he have had in his mind? Think that he wanted to reward us for being after his scalp?”
Delgas champed noisily on the butt of his cigar, the smoke squeezing out of the burning end of it in little rapid puffs.
“I begin to see,” said he. “We can starve out Silver because we’ve got the land, and he can starve out us because he’s got the water. The minute one shuts down on the other, there’s bound to be trouble. It’s a fight to the finish, and a mighty quick fight.”
“There’s only one way out,” said Rutherford.
“Name it,” said Delgas.
“Not to fight,” said Rutherford.
“Sure! And that’s easy,” said Delgas. He turned to Silver. “You got a kind of an upstage way about you,” he declared. “And maybe you ain’t been very friendly toward the pair of us, now and then. But that don’t matter to me so much. I can get on with anybody. My skin is thick enough. And I got a place in my system where I could use the dough we’re goin’ to pull down out of this business.”
“So have I,” said Rutherford. “All we need to do is to lay down a scheme to run the ranch. One of us has to run it, and the others stand by, and make a few suggestions.”
“It won’t work,” said Silver.
“Why not?” asked Rutherford sharply.
Silver turned up the palm of his right hand.
“Do the same thing,” he said to the others.
They obeyed him, frowning with curiosity.
“We’ve got soft hands,” said Silver.
“Now, what the devil does that mean?” asked Delgas.
“Why, it means that we don’t know enough about the business to run a ranch, any of us,” answered Rutherford shortly.
He left his chair and walked rapidly back and forth through the room. He seemed to be angry. Now and then he swore softly under his breath.
“Well,” he exclaimed suddenly, stopping right in front of Silver, “what’s the solution?”
“I haven’t any,” said Silver.
