by Max Brand
“What did they do?”
“Nothin’! What could they do? But now, every man jack of ’em figgers that Duval has got what they all wanted. Henry come in for a part of the yarn. I talked to his face, and I told him that I wanted to meet Duval ag’in.”
“You lied.”
“Maybe I did,” answered the other with a strange frankness. “Maybe once havin’ felt his eyes, I wouldn’t be no good no more ag’in’ him. But I gotta hope, don’t I? I gotta hope that someday I can have a chance back at him, and then get him, or else he gets me, and I die like a man, and not like no danged coward.”
The solemnity of this speech took the marshal by surprise, but his mind was already too fully occupied with the news he had heard.
“What happened then?”
“As I started out, I went up the road behind the brush, and I seen Duval come slidin’ down the hill on the mare, Cherry. He was aimed at makin’ trouble. I guess that Henry had gone back and told him.”
“Then Henry’s alone at the cabin?”
“He is, unless Duval has come straight back from the town.”
“He ain’t going straight back,” declared Kinkaid. “He’s gonna wait down there in the town, and try what his talk can do to rub out what you told ’em.”
“He won’t have no success at all,” said Jude. “You can mistake a lie for the truth, but not after truth has been along and showed its real face at you.”
“Wait,” muttered the marshal. “Duval gone...only Henry in the house...what’s a better chance than that to get inside the house, I’d like to know.”
“You mean to go inside of Duval’s house? Why not go and put your foot in a steel bear trap?” Jude asked angrily, and yet touched with admiration. “You’ll be tellin’ me pretty soon that you got no fear of any man in the world.”
“I mean it,” answered the marshal firmly. “But now let’s go down and get to Duval’s place. He may be started back by now.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It was not pleasant to Jude to return to the house of Duval. Having been there once, he would, as he expressed it well, as soon have put his foot inside a steel bear trap. However, since the marshal would have it so, so it must be.
And they rode down from the hills through the romantic twilight like falling stones aimed at the head of Duval. The pebbles scattered before the flying hoofs of their horses, the dust rose in thick puffs behind them as they plunged down from the last dim rose of the day into the dark of the lower valleys.
As they rushed on, the dry, pure air of the heights, only sharpened by the scent of the pines, departed behind them, and, instead, they entered a moister region, where the earth gave up a sense of coolness, and the air was soft with the breath of growing things. All in the upper region was silence, or sounds so muffled that they were no more than the living pulse of the silence. But in the lowlands, there were the sounds of cattle and dogs, and the very noise of the galloping hoofs flew up more loudly to their ears.
So they came to the verge of Duval’s place and dismounted.
“Why are you hanging back?” asked the marshal roughly as he started into the hedge of shrubs, and then turned back to his companion.
Jude did not answer. He remained in the attitude of one who has taken a step forward and been arrested there by something he has seen or heard. His face was lost in the darkness, and yet there was something that breathed from him of intolerable fear.
The marshal was not peculiarly sensitive to the feelings of others, but this cold of dread he could sense, and he remarked shortly: “Stay here, then. And if there’s a sight of Duval coming back up the road, or a sound of his horse...you could tell the long beat of her gallop, I reckon...you whistle to me, not too loud, and I’ll know what to expect.”
“Suppose he’s there now?”
Kinkaid peered through the hedge. “The house ain’t lighted,” he argued. “If he was there, they’d be a light...maybe....”
He left his sentence unfinished, as the possibilities of disaster surged up into his mind. Once before he had gone toward that house expecting to find it tenanted, because the light was shining from it, and that time he had found it empty. Now, again, he was stealing forward confidently because it was dark, and there might be within the thick night of the cabin the pale face and the gray eyes of Duval.
Yet the marshal’s spirit, unlike that of Jude, had not been broken. He hesitated only one moment, and then slid through the shrubbery and walked with long strides straight for the cabin. He did not attempt to stalk the place. He marched straight to the house and beat against that door. He heard the hollow echo of the knock die swiftly inside, so he thrust the door wide and entered.
Within, the hot, close air of the day poured against his face and made him break into a perspiration. But, casting one look behind him at the safe, free outdoors that he was leaving, he unshuttered the dark lantern that he carried and started to work.
He found the trap that led to the cellar, opened it, and descended into the moist coolness of the lower house.
The walls were roughly masoned stone. The floor was merely packed dirt. First, he went around the walls, tapping them cautiously, and listening to find the hollow sound that would mean a cavity within. It was difficult work, but the marshal was an expert.
It was while he proceeded in this fashion that he stepped on what seemed to him a softer portion of the floor, and, turning the full light of the lantern upon it, he was reasonable sure that here the earth was a shade loose, and that it was heaped a trifle above the surrounding level.
Instantly, he was scooping it away. In a moment, he had touched oiled silk. In another instant, there was spread out on the cellar floor a gleaming row of burglar’s tools, of the finest steel, of the latest fashion. He regarded them with an appreciative eye, but he did not take them.
Instead, he rolled them up exactly as they had been, and, replacing them in the hole, he cautiously restored the earth, and spent a moment stamping down the soil that he had displaced. Here it occurred to Kinkaid that any warning whistle would hardly reach him as he worked in the cellar. Moreover, had he found enough?
He hastened up the ladder to the house itself and went to the door. But here he paused, uncertain, ill at ease. With all his soul, he yearned to be gone, but an odd thing decided him. Out of the town, he heard the distant barking of a dog, high pitched and sounding uncannily like mocking laughter with caught breath. Laughter at him, for giving up the work when so much remained unlearned, undecided.
He gritted his teeth and turned back to the cellar door. Here, with his hand upon it, the perspiration rolled out on his forehead. Whatever else he did, he could not return to the cellar below, so far from freedom. Telling himself that, after all, that cellar would yield him no more returns, he gave himself to the search of the house itself. He would take the attic later. In the meantime, here were the walls and the floor of the house.
The ray of the lantern began to pass around the walls, scrutinizing every joint of the logs until it came to the short angling ones that built up one blunt corner, and to tap the logs here, Kinkaid found that it was necessary to reach across the bed.
The very first stroke he made rang hollow on his ear. He had to pause to wipe his face, because the drops were blinding him, but then he started a serious examination of that log. Those above and below it were normal to the ear, but this one was distinctly flawed. At last, gripping it with both hands, he jerked back — and the front face of it came easily away.
Within, he found two things. The first was to him beyond all price, for it was the gun belt that he had lost, the brown-rubbed holster, and within the holster his own revolver with the nine storied niches in its handle. He dragged it out with the joy of an Indian recovering his medicine bag. He trembled with indescribable pleasure, like a child, as he belted the familiar weapon around him, and as the touch of the mother earth tre
bled the strength of Antæus, so the grip of the belt about him and the sense of the old gun at his hip seemed to double the strength of Dick Kinkaid.
But there remained the second object in this home-made niche. It was a small chamois sack, the mouth of which he pulled wide and poured some of the contents into his hand. He blinked at what he found, jerked the string that closed the sack, and dropped it into his pocket.
He had found all that he wished, a thousand times more. He held Duval in the cup of his hand, as it were, and yet there was nothing to be gained and much to be lost by letting Duval know at once that he was destroyed.
So he picked up the section of log that he had removed, and replaced it. It was while he was pushing it home that Kinkaid heard the whistle and, hearing it, knew that the same sound had been in his ear before.
He had been warned by the whistle of Jude, several times repeated, but unheeded by his conscious mind — except that this might account for the extraordinary tension of his nerves. Otherwise, his absorption in his present work had prevented him from realizing what was happening outside the cabin.
He stood back, therefore, against the wall, as he heard the approaching footfall, and drawing his own revolver, his tried and proved weapon, he gripped it hard, until the notches rubbed into his skin. At that distance, he would not fail.
He raised it, leveled it, and as a footstep approached the cabin from without, he prepared to shoot Duval the instant the silhouette of the man appeared dimly embraced within the rectangle of the door, against the stars of the horizon.
It seemed to the marshal, waiting in a growing self-confidence, that Duval himself must have realized that the end was near, with such a slow and dragging step did he approach the cabin. Then the shadow stepped into the prepared frame, not swiftly, lightly, as Duval usually moved, but with an uncertain waver, like a wounded man, or one whose strength has been strangely sapped.
And a weary voice sounded: “I thought I’d closed this door when I left...I’m gettin’ old.”
The voice of Henry!
In mid-impulse against the trigger, Kinkaid checked his forefinger. And, standing at ease, smiling now, he waited until Henry had lighted a lamp, blown out the match, and was standing back from the growing flame in the chimney.
Then he said: “Henry, don’t turn around!”
Henry jerked halfway about despite that command, then controlled the motion.
“Well, well,” he said, “if it ain’t the marshal come back to pay a sort of a surprise call on us.”
“I’ve come to pay a call,” the marshal said grimly. “And I was sorry to find you both out of the place. Where’s your boss?”
“Him? Oh, he’s gone off on the mare.”
“You lie!”
“Look in the corral, then.”
“Where did he go?”
“Where you’ll never find him, if he don’t want to be found!”
Kinkaid could not keep back the curse that leaped to his lips at this unwelcome news. “Gone?”
“I dunno,” said old Henry. “I never know what he’ll do. But whatever it is, I know that it’ll be too deep and hard for you to follow, Kinkaid.”
The marshal laughed. “You poor trusting fool,” he said. “You jackass! I got Duval in the palm of my hand.”
“That’s what the feller said that held the prickly pear,” remarked Henry, “and then he closed the fingers and wished mighty hard that he hadn’t.”
“March out the door!” the marshal ordered.
“Me? What’s wrong with me?”
“Robbery’s what’s wrong with you, man.”
“Robbery? There’s an idea,” Henry said.
But, as he spoke, his hand glided beneath his coat. For some reason, the instant that movement began, Kinkaid knew what it meant. He did not fear for himself, but understood Henry’s intention was to take his own life. So he leaped wonderfully swiftly for a man of his size, and as the muzzle of the weapon whipped up under Henry’s chin, Kinkaid struck the hand away. The next instant, the report of the gun thundered in the room.
Chapter Thirty
The noise of the revolver exploding made Kinkaid hasten his prisoner, unharmed, into the open, merely pausing to kick the door to with a thrust of his heel, and while he did so he heard a guarded whistle from the hedge.
“That’s the signal, eh?” Henry said musingly. “That’s the warnin’ for you, Kinkaid, when you come robbin’?”
The marshal threw a fold of his big bandanna over the mouth of his captive and held it tightly twisted at the nape of his neck. In that manner he effectually silenced Henry, and with his free hand gripping the old man by the elbow, he forced him rapidly forward toward the hedge.
But up from the lower gate came the swinging beat of the hoofs of a horse, and as though sunshine fell upon her, Kinkaid thought he could see the striding of the mare, Cherry. He hurried his prisoner on, therefore, until they came to the hedge. There he paused, fearing to call the attention of Duval by making any sound of rustling in passing through.
Duval, in the meantime, had reached the corral and was inside it, unsaddling the mare.
“Henry!” he called.
There was no answer from the house. It seemed to the marshal, waiting at the hedge, that Duval might have guessed by the light that streamed through the window of the cabin that Henry was not inside, for to Kinkaid, who knew, it appeared as though the lighted windows were the eyes of an idiot, opening upon the empty soul within.
Yet, to Duval, it probably promised a lighted fire in the stove, a steaming kettle, and the rattling preparation for supper.
“Henry!” he called again.
Then big Kinkaid distinctly heard the other murmur: “The old fellow’s losing his ears.”
Shortly afterward the whistle of Duval went toward the house, and as the sound grew dim around the corner of the cabin, Kinkaid plunged through the hedge and gained the road beyond.
“One for me,” he said briefly to the waiting Jude.
A strangled voice began in Jude’s throat and dissolved into the words: “Was that...was that a whistle, Kinkaid? I thought that was the gallop of the mare.”
“Gimme your horse,” said Kinkaid in answer.
And as the other led it up, Kinkaid with his gigantic strength lifted old Henry and literally threw him into the saddle. He mounted his own horse the next instant and rode on at a slow walk, lest the beat of hoofs might convey some message to Duval.
“Walk back behind us,” he said to Jude, “and keep your ears open. That cat might see trails in the dark and come after us. Walk far enough back so the scuffing of the hoofs through the dust won’t sound in your ears, or the creaking of the saddles.”
Jude obeyed. Quakingly he obeyed, and walked with his head perpetually turned over his shoulder, ever and anon seeming to hear the rattle of a gallop on stones far behind, and to see the loom of a horseman after him.
But no horseman appeared, and the imaginary gallop did not actually sound, while they passed slowly down byways to the rear of the town, and so to the back door of Sheriff Nat Adare’s sanctum, the Moose Creek jail.
It was opened at the marshal’s knock.
“Who’s there?” the jailer asked, growling out through a crack of the door.
The heavy hand of the marshal cast the door wide open and nearly felled the jailer. “Kinkaid and a prisoner,” he announced. “Show me the cells.”
There was no protest against his brutal roughness. The jailer, nursing his head where the door had struck him, mutely showed the way, lantern in hand, until he arrived at the short avenue of cells.
Into the central one of these, Kinkaid had the prisoner locked.
“Got food?” he asked.
“Rice and ’lasses,” said the latter. “I’ll go get....”
“That’s good enough for him,” declared Kin
kaid. “Feed him. Jude, come with me.”
He went out to the rear of the jail again, and there talked quietly with Jude in the darkness.
“And...him?” Jude asked in a shaken voice, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder. “Duval? Is he gonna go loose?”
“He’s got to go loose for a while,” said the marshal. “I’ve got enough to get him...but I can’t spring it for a while. I’ve got to get a little extra proof, and then I’ll close in on him. But in the meantime, he’s gonna find out what I’ve done. He’ll find out before morning where Henry is. He may find out before that what I’ve taken from the house.”
“And run?”
“I dunno,” the marshal said thoughtfully, “I guess he won’t run, or, leastwise, very far. By the way I write him down, he ain’t the kind that’ll run out on a partner, and Henry’s a friend of his. He’ll stand by to try to help Henry. And Henry’s the bait that’ll be dangled in front of him until I’ve got the proof that I need and can put the irons on him. If I could’ve left the stuff there...if I could’ve left the stuff there....” He paused, with a wistful note in his voice, then concluded: “That would’ve made it easy to get all the proofs I need, I reckon. But I couldn’t do that.”
He touched the handle of his old gun as he spoke. It was true. He could not let that remain away from him when such a man as Duval was near.
“I dunno what you’re talkin’ about,” said the blunt Jude.
“You’ll learn later. What I want you to do is to go back up there and shadow the house.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I can’t do it,” said the other with calm decision. “I ain’t got the nerve to do it... yet. Maybe I’ll get it later on and try. But just now I’m played out.”
The marshal hesitated, breathing hard, he was so angered by this weakness, yet he said not a word of reproof. He himself had been through such a searching fire of suspense that same evening that he could understand the failure in the heart of Jude. He merely laid a comforting hand upon the shoulder of his companion and murmured: “Stay a while and steady up, man. You’ll be all right again. Everybody gets the jumps at this game. And Duval ain’t a house cat. He’s wild. Take your time. If you find that you can get up there later and use your ears and your eyes, I’d take it kind.”
