by Max Brand
“Twenty minutes...a half hour...not more.”
“I’ll wait for you,” said the tall man. “I’ll have you first, and your friend afterward. Ma’am, I’ve changed my mind about havin’ tomatoes.”
He left the can on the counter, unpaid for, and strode through the doorway to the street. They could see his profile as he crossed toward the saloon, and he was smiling broadly, like one who has newly heard an amusing story, but will keep the mirth of it entirely to himself.
“You’d better hurry, Charlie, if you want to get home and back in twenty minutes,” Marian Lane said.
He started from his dream and glared at her. “What’s in you, Marian?” he demanded of her. “What’s wrong with Duval that you mention his name to every gent that comes this way? What’s he done that you should have it in for him? Confound me, if you ain’t the bottom of all the trouble that I have in this town!”
Chapter Six
When Charlie Nash had left, running through the door like a man pursued, the girl waited for another moment, then acted swiftly. She locked the front door of the shop, pulled down the lamp on its chains until she could extinguish it, and then ran back through the aisle of the store, swerving this way and that in the darkness to avoid every obstacle. She opened a rear door that led to her own room above, and, fleeing up the stairs, she was plucking off white apron and white dress as she went.
Now the door slammed behind her in her own room. She stood in the darkness, panting, fumbling for a match, and around her the rising evening breeze was whispering at the window curtains and stirring the pale sweetness of lavender.
The match broke in her excited fingers, but the next one spurted flames. The flame ran across the wick of the lamp, whose chimney she had tilted to the side. At first it squatted, then rose in an increasing wave of brightness as the wick was warmed.
By that light she dressed, stepping into a khaki skirt, thrusting her arms into a blouse, jamming a hat on her head. The slippers were kicked from her feet and short boots dragged on, while she exclaimed impatiently at this delay.
Then down the stairs she went, swinging herself through the doorway at the bottom by one hand, like a fugitive boy with a father’s wrath behind him — so raced outdoors.
Behind her store was a small corral, where one rarely ridden pinto grew fat and sleepy, day by day. Now that his mistress came in dire need of him, he frisked at once to life, and scurried from corner to corner in the corral, throwing up his heels and grunting with content at this pleasant excitement.
She paused to consider darkly, then hurried to the shed and brought out a blacksnake. The first sound of its snapper was enough for the refractory pinto. He stood still, with head stiff and high, ears flattened. He was dragged in by the mane, saddled, bridled, and she was in the saddle.
She did not go up the main street of the town. It was her purpose to remain unseen, in all that followed, if she could manage it — unseen except by one pair of eyes. So she took the way she knew across the back lots, dodging here and there behind the back fences, stooping to keep from being knocked from her place by the low boughs.
In this way she came out upon the high road that climbed the hill, but even this she did not follow, preferring to plunge straight across it and take the dim trail by the bank of the creek. This was daring riding. Even by day it was a broken and difficult way, but she gave the mustang the whip and trusted to his brute intelligence, his more than humanly keen eye.
Rounding the second bend, he slipped heavily, staggering on the verge of the bank. So for a dizzy moment she saw the water beneath her, and felt that the roar of it was leaping up at her ear. Yet he recovered. As a jockey rides, crouched far forward, hands far out on the reins, so she rode, swayed to the side of the high horn of the saddle. Branches shot over her head. The broken ends of limbs torn off by wind or lightning reached at her with jagged points, but through the tangle of danger she rushed the pinto without flinching until she saw the meadows stretch at her side, and headed straight across them for the lighted door of the house.
When they reached plowed ground, it checked the pony so suddenly that she was nearly flung from the saddle, but she recovered in time to check him just beneath the house. There she dismounted and threw the reins. There for a moment she waited, breathing deep, replacing her hat in its proper position, relaxing from the strain of the gallop. Then she went to the door of Duval.
The evening was warm. A shower in the afternoon had purified the air without chilling it, and, therefore, the door was open, so that she could look in on Duval beside his green-shaded light. She had heard other men describe the details of his household appointments so carefully that she knew them now as though her eye already had rested on them. It was like a twice-told tale, one telling of which had come to her in a dream.
She saw the stove, the top of it carefully scrubbed clean of soot and grease stains — that famous stove on the naked, glowing iron of which Duval cooked his famous steaks. She saw the wood for the next fire stacked neatly at one side, the kindling in a tidy pile near it. The table on which those celebrated feasts were spread divided the room in two. That nearest the door was kitchen and dining room. Beyond, stretched the circular rag rug, rich with red and blue. A shelf of books filled a corner — why had no one told her of their titles? Three or four big comfortable chairs and a little round table with a lamp on it — the green-shaded lamp — and the pale face of Duval lost in shadow, the light falling only on his open book and the lean hands that held it.
She saw this in that instant she paused at the door, and knew that Duval had become aware of her before he lowered the book and looked up.
Now that the book was down, he came to her hurriedly. “You ain’t come sashaying all the way up here through the night, have you?” asked Duval. “Not because of that tarragon vinegar? That could’ve waited, even if Dad Wilbur did ask for it again today.”
“Why,” she said, “it wasn’t the tarragon.” She drawled the words carefully. “It was a bit of news that I thought you ought to hear. News about a friend of yours.”
“What friend?” asked Duval.
“Charlie Nash. A stranger came into the store this evening and happened to hear your name....”
“From you?” Duval asked mildly. But she felt the keen, gray eyes fixed on her steadily.
“I don’t remember...Charlie, I think. It seemed to throw the man into a rage...a big, lean, ugly man, with a leathery face and a crooked, thin mouth. He wanted to know where you live, and he said such terrible things about you that Charlie....”
“Tackled him?”
“Ran straight into a gun.”
“And Charlie’s bare-handed,” Duval muttered. “Bare-handed, on account of my advice....”
“The stranger is waiting for him in Pete’s Place,” she added. “He’ll be down there in five minutes, or so, I expect. Charlie will, I mean.”
Duval reached a hat from a peg on the wall. “You rode up?” he asked in his gentle way.
“Yes,” she said.
“I reckon you won’t mind walking back, then,” said Duval. “I’m kind of pressed for time.” He was through the door as he spoke.
Marian, following a step or two, was in time to see him spring on the back of the pinto like a mountain lion at the kill, heard the grunt of the pony as strong knees crushed its sides, then the scuffing of hoofs that struggled for a footing in the loose earth, and horse and rider vanished in the gloom.
She started a step or so after him, but, reconsidering, she went hurriedly back into the house. She was frightened now, it seemed. She looked askance at the steep flight of stairs that led up to the attic rooms, as though they were letting down invisible dangers upon her. The door behind her and the door before, were open throats of terrible possibilities, so that she went on tiptoe, hands clenched at her sides, but still resolutely persisting until she stood before the books.
They were battered volumes. A worn set in blue buckram bindings were labeled with the title HAKLUYT’S VOYAGES. She saw a TOM JONES in two fat volumes. There was a narrow Marlowe beside it, then a book on woodland flowers, one on the game fishes of the Catalina Islands, Boccaccio wickedly set in a dark corner....
She had seen enough titles, and, hurrying toward the door, she only paused to glance at the thick volume he had been reading as she entered. It was the most self-revealing, the wisest of essayists, Montaigne.
“Cowpuncher?” she said in a whisper. Then, as though fear overcame her, she ran to the door, but paused there and looked back with a frown at all the room, as one striving to fit together the bits of a most difficult puzzle.
“Cowpuncher my foot,” she said. “But what is Duval?”
She carried that question unanswered into the open night, then remembered the thing that might be happening even this moment in the village of Moose Creek.
That thought started her running, light as a boy, with a swiftly springing step, straight down through the perils of the dark creek trail. She knew what she would do, if only she could reach the place in time. As she ran, she listened for the half-stifled report of a revolver, heard none, and raced on still faster. Once, she stumbled over a projecting root and tumbled head over heels, but this did not deter her. On she went like a whirlwind, dodging the black trunks as they leaped up under her face, and so ran on behind the rear fences of the village on the creekside until she came opposite the back of Pete’s Place. There she turned in.
Chapter Seven
She knew every feature of the place out of the exploits of her childhood, which had ended not so many years before. In those days, whatever a boy would dare to do, she would do, also. She even could lead the way into perilous adventures in the times when she wore overalls, a flipping pigtail — stuffed inside her jacket most of the time — and knees as often bruised and gashed as those of any headlong boy in Moose Creek. And, still, at times, she yearned for the years when she had worn her freckles with never a care in the world. Then came womanhood, and with a nun’s cold finger touched her eyelids and her lips.
The old practice was gone, but still she knew how to climb up the brick wall that helped to keep the river at bay from the rear marshes of Pete’s back yard. The top of it was not four inches wide, and there was a long fall to the water beneath, yet she stood upright, and walked easily along it, her arms stretched out on either side to give her balance.
She reached the rear wall of the house. On that roof, she once had hidden in an important crisis of a game of hide-and-seek, to the despair of every boy in the village. Now she worked her way deftly across it, lowered herself to the low top of the kitchen, and from this dropped again to the ground. She was inside the back yard of Pete’s Place, without the use of a key for entering that sanctuary. And straight before her was an open window that allowed fresh air to blow in among the billows of smoke that filled the barroom.
The big stranger was nearest to her. She could have reached through the window and touched his shoulder. Beyond him stood half a dozen others with tall beer glasses before them, or little whiskeys, no taller than three of her slender fingers. These who stood farthest from her were dimly seen through the haze of smoke from swiftly burning cigarettes. But of one thing she made sure at once, if for no other reason than that the cynosure of all eyes was this newcomer — Duval was not there.
She rubbed her eyes like a child wakening from sleep, and looked again, searchingly, into every corner.
It was true. Duval had not come!
Hurriedly she strove to reconstruct or to adapt her conception of the man. But no matter what shadows she could admit into the picture, she could not think of him as one tainted by cowardice. Yet, when she looked again at the stranger, she was not so sure, for he seemed to Marian Lane the most formidable she had ever seen.
He stood now in an attitude of reflection at the bar, which Pete polished solicitously before him.
“I seen you before, stranger, I reckon?” suggested Pete.
“No,” said the other, “you never did, or you’d know me. I’m Larry Jude.”
The girl, in the outer night, saw heads jerked back a little, as though the name had struck them with a physical impact. She herself thought she had heard it in the casual talk of men, or in the newspapers. She could not be sure, except that it was connected with brutal violence.
“There’s one around here that’s called a man,” said Jude. “Duval.”
Pete stood stiffly at attention.
“You know his house?” asked the stranger.
“Yes,” said Pete.
“Man!” Jude repeated. “Boy-killer, I’d say!”
It was a fierce hour of trial for Pete. He grew pale, but he did not give back from his duty to a friend. “He’s pretty highly considered around here,” he said. “He...he’s a friend of mine, in fact.”
“A friend of yours?” said Jude. “A friend of yours?”
His great shoulders swayed a little forward over the bar, but Pete stood his ground, very white of face now. Jude, however, laughed suddenly.
“A boy-killer, is what I said. A boy-killer. D’you hear me? D’you all hear me when I talk?”
He threw up his head, and every man at the bar started. Yet they kept their attention, in pretense, fixed upon their drinks, so that it was obvious that they did not wish to have the newcomer’s eyes specially focused upon them.
The girl at the window, no matter what her excitement, scanned those faces critically and knew that she would remember them as men who had failed. For all of these men had accepted the hospitality of Duval either in his house or at this bar, or had listened to his singing and praised it, or won from him deeply at cards, or “borrowed” a stake to take them home.
She was hardly amazed when she saw them turn their heads from Jude toward the other end of the bar, for certainly they would have chosen to find another object of interest in that direction.
In fact, she did discern a new form just against the farther window. She could not see the face, but she made out the leisurely posture of the figure, one elbow on the bar and the hands loosely interlocked. Then, as by a single phrase one recognizes a piece of music, so she recognized Duval.
How he had come, she could not tell. There had been no noticeable swinging open of the door, but like a ghost he had melted into this room and materialized at the bar facing Jude.
She glanced back at that lofty man, and saw that from the moment of throwing up his head he had not stirred, except his right hand, which gripped the handle of his Colt. Powerfully it gripped it, the skin whitening over the knuckles. Except for that sign, he looked rather like a soldier, frozen in the attitude of attention.
So were they all, for that matter, from Pete to the least of the drinkers at his bar — one with a glass arrested halfway to his lips, one with a match flaming in his fingertips, but never approaching the cigarette for which it was intended. All of them men of stone, except that careless figure at the farther end of the bar.
He who held the match had his fingers singed, and started as he dropped the red ember. At that movement, the gun of Jude leaped almost from its holster — then slowly sank back again into the leather.
All the line at the bar slipped away softly, as though they would not attract attention, and flattened themselves against the wall. Their heads never had turned. At big Jude they cast not a single look, but kept their attention riveted upon Duval. Marian herself could hardly draw her eyes away until, as a rift opened in the smoke, she saw that he was smiling.
At this, with a gasp, she glanced back at Jude to see how he was taking it. First, she noted that the hand that grasped the Colt was trembling, and then she discovered that his coat across the shoulders was growing slack and tense in turns as he drew in great breaths. His head, indeed, moved a little with the greatness of his breathing. And all a
t once she forgot the brutality of this man, the savagery grained in his soul and sneering on his lips, as she would have forgotten the ferocity of a tiger, if she had seen it struggling against a torture. So, Jude was struggling. He was able and willing enough to risk his life in quick action, she could have wagered, but this slow torment, this mysterious strain of nerves and will against an intangible force was breaking him. He shuddered suddenly from head to foot. She could see his jaw sag and his tongue moisten his lips.
At that moment, Duval spoke. The sound of his voice made the gun leap again in the holster of Jude, but for the second time he failed to draw it clear. There was a different reason now, she could guess.
“And here’s another Jude,” Duval had said.
He walked slowly down the barroom, with his hands resting lightly on his hips — far, far from any weapon. Indeed, if he were armed, there was no sign of it. She noted now, as she wondered at the inhuman courage of this man, how he was dressed. Details of his appearance had not entered her eye when she saw him in his house, but now she was aware of common blue overalls cinched about the hips with a tanned belt of common hide, and of a flannel shirt that once had been blue, but was faded almost gray from the washtub. It was open at the throat, and the sleeves were rolled up to the elbows for comfort and coolness in part, no doubt, but in part, one would guess, because the sleeves had shrunk. He could have stood as the commonest plowboy on the range, had it not been for that indefinable thing that still she could not even name, but it was Duval.
As he came, the enchanted eyes of the watchers followed him. Big Jude shrank back perceptibly until his shoulders were pressed against the window and obscured her vision.
She could only hear the voice of Duval speaking terrible things in the most casual tone.
“If I’d had an idea there was more like the kid,” said Duval, “I wouldn’t have knocked him over to stop him. I would have killed him, partner. But I figured that he was the only one of his kind and that maybe the world wouldn’t want to lose him. He’d go behind bars to be looked at, five cents a look. But now that I have a slant at you, I know it’s a tribe, like the snake tribe, all poison and of no use, except they eat rats, and toads, and such.”
