by Max Brand
“I saw him stand up and look Kinkaid in the eye,” he said. “There wasn’t any backing up. Kinkaid seemed like he’d been hit with a lead pipe. He wasn’t used to having gents eye him that way.”
They chuckled. The whole range was proud of its new champion, rejoiced in his valor, thanked him for his kindness, admired him for his wisdom, and loved him more than ever for his folly.
But what they did not understand at all was the thing that Marian Lane suggested to Charlie Nash, as they were dancing together still later that morning. He had gone over the great good points of his friend as a disciple and a worshiper, in an outburst from the heart.
“Of course,” said the girl, “but suppose he’s thought out all these things before? Suppose the farm’s only a blind, and the other things all done for a game? I don’t think that anyone in the world could ever have been such an idiot as to plan to fatten cattle on cabbages...certainly not a smart whip like Duval. You can think what you please, but I know that he’s laughing at us a lot more than we’re laughing at him.”
She compressed her lips a little and waited for Charlie’s explosion of wrath. It followed at once.
“I never seen such a poison-mean nature like you got, Marian. Everything you don’t understand, you’re against. It’s a wonder to me you don’t hate the birds, because you can’t fly like them!”
At this moment, a man ran into the room shouting in a loud voice: “Where’s Marshal Kinkaid? Where’s Dick Kinkaid?”
The orchestra slackened, almost died out, and fell into a softened discord, without any tune except that in the violin, while the messenger blundered across the floor, and, finding Kinkaid in his corner, bellowed: “Mister Kinkaid, trouble’s poppin’! They’ve cracked the safe of Broom and Carson, and they’ve got clean away with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars that there was inside of it! They’ve got clean off, and nobody knows where they’ve gone or who they might be except that one of them had hurt himself in the hand and left some red marks...!”
Kinkaid took his informant under his arm and departed from the room with him. Duval disappeared at the same instant. He headed back across the hills toward his home as fast as a horse could trot between the shafts of the borrowed buggy of Simon Wilbur. Sagging to a jog on the upgrades, rattling down the farther slopes, Duval drove into the gray of the dawn, and the pink of the morning, and saw the bright golden rim of the sun stare out over the hills before he drew up at Wilbur’s.
There he hastily stowed the buggy, and led his horse back to his own corral, and then went softly down the path to the cabin.
The front door was open, as it was their custom to leave it in all except the windiest weather. Duval walked freely in and found old Henry asleep, smiling at his dreams.
“Henry!” he called. “The sun’s up, and the cow is waiting for you at the barn.”
“Hello,” Henry said. “How was the fourteen-carat marshal, and did you bring home his watch and chain, or wasn’t there even that left of him, when you got through?”
“Did you think that I went there to fight him?” asked Duval. “I went there to let him see me and to try a game of bluff.”
“That worked? I never, in all my life, saw a better pokerface than yours, in a pinch.”
“Nothing works with Kinkaid,” Duval said frankly. “He doesn’t care a whit for anything but his gun, and you can’t bluff a man who has nothing on the table but iron and gunpowder. He has to have a weak spot.”
“Not lame nowhere?” Henry asked, sitting up with a yawn.
“The girl?” murmured Duval suddenly. “Is that a chance?” He snapped his fingers and laughed through teeth that almost met. “I wonder,” he said softly. He added: “How was the night with you, Henry?”
“Lonely, a little. I took a walk.”
“As far as what?”
“Oh, up the road and over a coupla hills. That’s all. Then I come home and I’m asleep before I know it. I’m getting old, I tell you.”
“Aye,” Duval said sternly, “you’re getting’ old.”
“Now what’s the matter?” asked Henry.
“When a man’s hands begin to slip, it’s time for him to call himself old. Let me see yours.”
Henry stood up from the bed, his long shanks looking as spindling as those of a child as he stood before Duval, but his hands were behind his back.
“What’s the lead?” Henry asked angrily. “Because I barked my hand openin’ that fool of a latch on the gate when I come home....”
“You rattle-headed bungler,” Duval said. “You driveling, out-of-date cracker of penny banks for children! You’ve left your mark on the Broom and Carson safe, and Kinkaid is going to run down the trail to my house and snag us both!”
Chapter Seventeen
It was a long and jagged rip on the inside of the left forefinger. Duval bathed it in hot salt water until the face of Henry wrinkled with pain. Then he dressed it with care, making the bandage as secure as possible, but also as thin.
“There’ll be no trouble,” Henry said reassuringly. “I’ve torn my finger on that sharp notch under the latch. What’s wrong with that?”
“Kinkaid,” Duval said.
“Kinkaid may be keen, but what would ever bring him here?”
“Robbery or no robbery, he’d come here anyway to see me. And you live with me, Henry, I suppose?” He added: “What the deuce made you do it, after I’d warned you?”
“It was the face of that safe that kept lookin’ in on me,” confessed Henry. “I went to bed and put out the light. I was ready to go to sleep. I was asleep, when I seen the safe like the face of a friend, winkin’ at me. I got up and lighted the lamp, seen your chair, and went back to bed again...but all the time I was feelin’ the long green under my fingers, rustlin’ and crunchin’ in my hand. I felt like a starved cow when it sees green grass on the edge of the road. Pretty soon I was in the saddle on Cherry, and headin’ it over the hills....”
“Cherry?” groaned Duval.
“Why not? What else? The mule?”
“Why not? Because there’s nothing like Cherry on the whole range!”
“She didn’t talk,” Henry said, grinning, “goin’ or comin’.”
“She had to step on the ground, though!” Duval said.
Henry stared in consternation.
“What did you do with her when you got there?”
“Tied her in a clump of poplars about a furlong from the finish.”
“That’s better.” Duval nodded. “Did you leave any fingerprints in that blood?”
“I wiped every mark. Didn’t have time to get all of the blood away, but every mark was wiped over.”
Duval nodded again, and Henry, his eyes smiling with contentment, went on: “The night watchman was strollin’ around the place the whole time. Once he stood for about ten minutes lookin’ through the front window. I had the door of the safe open, by that time. When the can opener said hello to it, it answered right back. It swung open so fast I thought it was goin’ to talk French. But the watchman didn’t see anything. He was lookin’ at his own ideas of the world, I suppose.” He chuckled. “Here,” he said, as Duval finished bandaging the finger. “Here’s the stuff.” He started to raise the thin straw pallet from his bunk, but Duval stopped him with a word.
“I don’t want to see it.”
“Hey, what?” Henry demanded, amazed. “It won’t hurt your eyes. You get your percentage, anyway....”
Duval raised one finger. “How long have you known me, Henry?”
“Twenty years, sir. Nineteen, to be on the dotted line.”
“Did you ever see me mix drinks?”
“No, sir.”
“What am I?”
“The champion....”
“Farmer?”
Henry grinned. “I’ll eat the crops you raise,” he said.
“But am I a farmer?”
“You have the look and the lingo when you want to put it on.”
“Just now, Henry, I’m a farmer. I never do wrong. I love the law, and I read the Kendry Evening News. D’you understand?”
“You’re buried, you mean?”
“I mean that I’m a farmer and nothing else. If that satchel of yours were filled with selected diamonds, I wouldn’t have as much use for them as I would for ten pounds of oats. Once more, Henry, I don’t mix my drinks.”
Henry gasped.
“But you have,” went on Duval, “and there may be the dickens to pay. If Kinkaid isn’t here before the morning’s over, I don’t know men and their faces. Go get the shotgun and start hunting.”
“Huntin’ what, sir?”
“I don’t care what. Go and shoot a few shells at the air, if you want to, but don’t come back till noon. Scout this place as if it were filled with wild Indians before you show your face again. That hand of yours mustn’t be seen. Is that all clear?”
“Clear as glass, sir. I’ll tell you how it was. The thin steel plate on the outside of the....”
“I don’t care a whit how you cut your finger. The point is, that the thing was done. Now get out of here, and take your boodle with you. Hide it wherever you like.”
“Look here,” Henry began with a sudden defiance. “You think it’s a grocery store till that I’ve cleaned out, but it ain’t. There’s a hundred and eighty thou-....”
“Green bits for rabbits,” said Duval. “Go try to find the rabbits with that gun of yours. Start moving, and move fast. You’re trying to shoot some sort of meat for us. You understand? Go on, Henry. You can have breakfast and lunch together, when you come back. Take some hardtack in your pocket. Now, get out!”
Henry departed swiftly enough. At the verge of the blossoming brush, he paused reluctantly, satchel in one hand and gun in the other, to look back toward the shack.
Duval watched him from the door and called guardedly: “Whatever you do, don’t decide that you can run away from trouble and bolt. The telegraph is faster than your long legs, Henry.”
Henry waved. The next instant, the green of the shrubbery and the foam of the blossoms had closed like water over him, and he was gone from view.
Duval, after this, started his breakfast, stripped, and ran for a plunge in the icy brook. He came back from this well wakened and keyed for the day. He dressed while he ate, and before the sun was lifted high enough to begin warming the earth, he was out with horse and mule, running a small, heavy harrow over the plowed ground in the lower meadow, while a dozen blackbirds followed critically, watching for worms and grubs.
The air was still cool, but warm enough to redouble the fragrance of the pines, when he heard the hoof beats of a horse pause at his gate, and then saw the lofty form of Marshal Richard Kinkaid coming up the path between the fields.
He appeared to even better advantage now than he had done the night before. He wore a loose, unbuttoned coat of a dull plaid, a blue shirt with a bandanna knotted about the throat, the knot at the back of the neck and the red dappled silk flowing down over his breast. His gun belt sagged far down over the right thigh, where it supported a long holster whose black surfacing had been worn to a shining brown in most places. He wore chaps of strong, tanned leather, deeply scored everywhere from the knee down by the brush through which they had been plunged in many a hot ride. It seemed to Duval that he could see the shrubbery dashed apart before him, and washed together behind his flying horse.
But above all, the massive form the marshal was crowned and completed by the high sombrero that he wore, in the Mexican style. His only ornament was the band of priceless gold-work that encircled the crown of the hat. His left hand was sheathed in a glove as thin as a weevil’s skin, to borrow the poet’s simile, but the same hand carried the glove for the right. That hand must always remain bare. Duval knew. He could tell by the sun-blackened state of the skin that this was the case, as he halted the team at the end of the land and waited for the big man to draw nearer. By some vital inches he had been overtopped the night before, but now the lofty hat added to the difference.
The marshal did not shake hands. Instead, he waved the glove briefly.
“You don’t take days off, Duval,” he commented. “Dance all night...work all day.”
Cheerful, friendly words, but spoken without the slightest softening of feature. The frown of stern and rather contemptuous thought remained stamped upon the face of big Kinkaid.
“Same to you,” Duval said. “You mean Broom and Carson Company, I guess?”
The marshal responded obliquely: “Hired men ain’t their own masters, you know.”
“You had breakfast?”
“No.”
“Come up and I’ll give you a hand-out.”
The lips of the marshal parted, and then closed. “No,” he said. “I gotta lose some weight. I’m getting too fat for the horses that I can buy. But I’d like to have a talk with you, and set down a minute.” Plainly, his first impulse had been acquiescence.
“Sure,” said Duval.
He left the team. They would amuse themselves in their own way, the mule standing with one hip sagged down, and ears cocked awry, the saddle horse picking at random blades of grass that showed under the sods of the plowed furrows beside it. There they would stand all day in the sun, if need be. So Duval was free to take his formidable guest up to the house.
Before they went in, Kinkaid paused in front of the verandah step and turned his grim, handsome face toward the bubbling of the river, and then to the banks of foliage that hedged in the farm.
“Quiet, here,” he remarked. “You could hear yourself think in this here place, Duval.”
“Aye,” said Duval, “there ain’t many comes up the road, excepting Wilbur. Go on in.”
The marshal entered, stooping his head lower than need was to pass beneath the cross-beam of the door. Inside, he removed his hat, almost reluctantly, and Duval could not help feeling that the reason for this seeming reluctance was that without hats they were more nearly equaled in height.
He pointed to his own big chair, and the marshal sat down in it. He filled it completely. In a way, he was more imposing as he reclined in the chair at ease than when he stood erect, hat and all, for in this relaxed posture the imagination of the spectator was excited as to the possibilities of the colossus in action.
Never before in all his days had Duval seen such a body, such a face, such gleaming, steady eyes, which laid a weight instantly upon him.
“Coffee, anyway?” Duval offered.
“Coffee?” repeated the other, his eye flashing hungrily toward the big blackened pot upon the stove. Then he shook his head. “I don’t need anything,” he declared.
But Duval, alert before, was tenfold keen thereafter, for he knew that the marshal had some point in refusing to taste, beneath his roof, either food or drink.
Chapter Eighteen
Whether in the Christian grace or the pagan libation, all peoples at one time or another have attached some religious significance to the partaking of food, and in the West there is still a trace of the same influence felt, though it appears there rather as a vague superstition. No man could say exactly what it means, or of what importance it may be, but he who enters the house of another and hangs his bridle on the wall, he who eats bread and tastes liquor, has in some mysterious manner established a bond between himself and his host. His host is placed under a certain duty, and so is the guest.
To Duval, closely watching, it appeared undoubted that the marshal had felt some obscure qualm of conscience, and if he had guessed at once that the visit was not altogether friendly, his last doubt was now removed.
The esteem that he felt for the physical and mental powers of the marshal was not without some return, he was soon aware, for though Kinkaid managed to cover
much under a casual manner, still there was a question and a faint doubt in his eyes, such as appears when a man is not entirely sure of his surroundings. It was plain that the door behind him and the window in front were both in his mind, as he faced Duval. But, more than this, there was something in his host that he could not fathom and that he was hungry to get at.
“You been up at the Broom and Carson place, I suppose?” Duval said purposely, taking up the question that was most in his mind.
“Yeah. I been there.”
“That’s a clean-up,” Duval said thoughtfully. “You take a clean-up like that, it’s worthwhile.”
“What good does it do the crook in a penitentiary?” asked Kinkaid.
“Why not? Maybe he gets fifteen years. Good behavior, and he’s out in ten,” Duval explained. “Well, when he’s out, he goes back to the place where he’s cached the coin, picks it out of the ground, and he’s fixed for the rest of his life. Ten years down, and everything else on credit is pretty soft, I’d tell a man.”
“Some of them figure it that way,” the marshal said without interest. “This was an old hand, though, and nobody young enough to want to risk ten years in jail.”
“Old fellow, eh?” Duval said, bright with interest.
“Yeah. Pretty old, I reckon.”
“Well, dog-gone me if I see how you tell his age,” Duval said, as one prepared to admire brilliance beyond his own scope.
“Well, he didn’t have too much time on his hands, but everything he done was neat. Laid the drawers and the trays out in rows, and didn’t ruffle everything up. A young crook leaves a messy job. The old boys, they’re likely to have a sort of pride in appearances, if you follow my drift.”
“Sure,” agreed Duval, “I could see how that might be. Still, you might be wrong.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I’ll have him before long.”
“Good!” Duval said. “If they go around busting safes, it’s better to keep money buried in the ground than investing it in banks.”
“Sure,” agreed the marshal. He paused, letting his eye rather covertly drift about the room. “You done a pile of dancing in your time,” said Kinkaid, apropos of nothing.
