The Winged Horse

by Max Brand

  “He a fellow that can be handled,” Jimmy said with unaffected indifference. “And I know the man to do it.”

  “Do you?” taunted McGuire. “I’ll tell you what, Jimmy. He’s too fast for you.”

  “Is he? I licked him once. I can do it again.”

  “You licked his horse … not him.”

  “Shut up,” said the young Montague. “You make me tired.”

  They reached the house and went up to his room. It was as small and bleak as any room in the house. Surroundings made no difference to Jimmy. But he had quite a modern desk in a corner of the little chamber, and, unlocking a lower drawer of this, he presently took out a small box, and from the box he took a thin, golden watch and laid it beside McGuire’s watch.

  “Look!” he commanded.

  The half-breed gasped. They were as like to one another as two peas!

  Chapter Forty

  All the thoughts of Jimmy, however, were not for the ear of his brutal companion. And when he opened the backs of both watches and placed them face down, McGuire, looking over his shoulder, failed to see what his master was observing, and this was that while the initials were W. D. in the watch that already was in his possession, and A. D. in the watch that he had taken from McGuire, still there were other circumstances, which made the similarity more striking. It was hardly such a great mystery that two watches of the same pattern should be found, for the company that produced the watch might have turned out thousands of the same pattern, but what seemed extraordinary in the extreme was that the letters in each case were formed with exactly the same method. The Ds could not have been told apart, and the A and the W looked as though they had come from the same letterpress.

  Still bent above the watches after he had closed them, Jimmy said quietly, “Jack, you got this watch where?”

  “Out of a pawnshop,” said Jack stubbornly.

  The big man glared at him as though on the point of knocking him down, but, changing his mind, he said gravely, “Suppose I pay you down seventy-five dollars. Would you give me the watch?”

  “You said it would cost a hundred and fifty,” countered the half-breed.

  “This here is cash,” big Jimmy said in a businesslike manner, and he counted upon the table two twenty-dollar gold pieces, and six half-eagles, and then added five, ponderous, massive dollars in silver.

  It was the only form of wealth with which the eye of the cowpuncher was acquainted, and he could not help a flutter of his hand toward the money. “I’ll take it,” he said suddenly, and swept the coins in his other hand. He backed away, uncertain and a little afraid. It did not seem possible that Jimmy would resign such money in such a manner—and for the sake of a broken watch picked out of the snow.

  Young Montague merely nodded and smiled. “I’m giving you that money … I keep the watch. There’s only one thing that you gotta do for me, and that is to tell me where you picked it up.”

  The half-breed halted with his hand on the knob of the door. With his retreat secured, he waited there, willing to talk, the newly acquired money weighing pleasantly in his pocket. He felt that he had secured a crushing victory over the injustices of this wicked world.

  “I picked it up out of the snow,” he said suddenly, and he guffawed in the face of Jimmy.

  “I thought you did,” answered the son of the rancher. “Where?”

  “On the side of the mountain, yonder.”

  “That’s all right, Jack. I’m glad that you got it. Any sign around?”

  “Why, there was sign, all right. But none that I could trace down to him that made it, I guess.”

  “What sort of sign?”

  “I come across the hills, the other night, and there I seen a couple of fires shine all at once out of the woods on the mountain.”

  “Facing where?”

  “Across toward the southeast. I looked at ’em. All at once they went out, and I rode on home. The next mornin’ I started out bright and early. I went up the valley and there I come on sign of a gent that had walked along under the edge of the trees.”

  “Could you make anything out of it?”

  “I would take him to be a gent as heavy as me, taller, and younger a bit.”

  “Go on.”

  “Snow was fallin’ a good deal, that mornin’, and I didn’t lie around and wait to trail them tracks back. I turned on to the back track. First, I seen where a horse had come out of the woods and crossed the valley.”

  “Go on, man. A horse, eh? From where?”

  “From southeast.”

  “Loring’s direction, eh?”

  “Aye, I would’ve said that it laid a straight line for Loring’s place.”

  “Go on!”

  “I will. Gimme time. I followed them tracks back through the woods, and in a bit of clearin’, under the snow, I found the smudge of two fires that had been smothered there before they’d had a chance to get goin’ real good.”

  “What has that got to do with a watch?”

  “Over to the side, under a tree, I found the watch. I kicked it out of the snow as I was walkin’ along.”

  Closing his eyes, Jimmy seemed to be digesting the information that he had received, and that it pleased him there could not be the slightest doubt, for he grinned in a ghastly fashion at the other now. He said, “Partner, I want you to take a good think. There wasn’t any sign that you could’ve used to hang the job on anybody?”

  “Signs like them is pretty general,” said the half-breed. Then, his face wrinkling with poisonous malice, he went on, “But the other night, about half an hour after I seen those signs in the valley, in come your new man, the Lamb, as they call him, with bark stains on the shoulders of his coat, like he’d been brushin’ along through the trees. He’d been walkin’ in deep snow. He said that he’d had a fall in the woods. That was all. The woods here near the house, he meant. I dunno. It don’t mean nothin’. I don’t want the Lamb on my trail,” concluded Jack McGuire.

  “Sure you don’t,” Jimmy said soothingly, “because there ain’t anything in what you’ve said that would ever mean anything to the Lamb. Go on along, McGuire. I’m through with you.”

  McGuire retreated in a good deal of haste. His heavy footfall faded down the hall, and instantly Montague issued from his room and sought that of his grandfather.

  The old man was rousing the fire with a heavy poker, and he turned, blinking his old eyes from the smoke that had rolled into them, and cursed his grandson and the world at large.

  Before him, Jimmy put down the watch. He said, “You always say that the Lamb reminds you of somebody.”

  “Sure,” Monty Montague said. “He reminds me of good luck. Because that’s what he’s brung to us. He’s broke the back of Loring, and all that we need to do now is to cook and eat the meat. What do you mean?”

  “I’m gonna tell you a little story. Then you can make up your mind.”

  And he told his story, and he told it with care. He had not come quite to the end with the suspicion of McGuire, when Monty Montague touched him on the shoulder to stop him.

  “I seen the finish before you came to it,” he said calmly. “Him that the Lamb reminds me of is Will Dunstan. What would you think of it? And why would anybody that’s connected with Will Dunstan be down here packin’ a wrong name, except that he wanted to make some trouble about the death of Will?”

  “Aye,” Jimmy said. “Why?”

  The old man pointed a sudden finger at his grandson. “You know something about the finish of Dunstan,” he said.

  “I killed him,” answered the other with perfect calm. “Why?”

  “I only wanted to know,” said Monty Montague. “That was all. This here is Will Dunstan’s cousin. He ain’t like enough to be a brother. He’s down here to find the trail of the killer. Most likely he’s on it now. Those horse tracks pointed across the hills.
Straight to Loring. He’s still Loring’s man, then.”

  “Aye, but he done up Fargo. That’s the thing that I couldn’t get past.”

  “He had an old grudge ag’in’ Fargo … besides, he loves a fight better than a tiger. But wait a minute. It won’t be so hard to find out what he is. Get him up here, and we’ll see if he’s got a watch.”

  And, therefore, it was that, not two minutes later, young Alfred Dunstan, more widely known under many another name, walked into the room where the two were talking softly together.

  “Sit down, sit down, young fellow,” said the older Montague with a hearty voice. “We’re talkin’ over right times for tacklin’ the Loring place, son. We’re even thinkin’ that night might be better than day, accordin’ to certain ways of thinkin’.”

  “I don’t see how,” the Lamb said.

  “Hold on. What time is it now, Jimmy?”

  “I dunno. My watch is stopped,” the young Montague said.

  “You blockhead!” roared the other furiously. “When you get better sense than to put castor oil into the insides of a watch, maybe you’ll have a watch that’ll run for you.”

  “How was I to know that castor oil wouldn’t work?” growled Jimmy.

  “Because it run a wagon, you thought it’d run a watch, you loon,” snarled Montague, “both a wagon and a watch havin’ wheels.”

  “I’ll step down to the kitchen and see by the clock of the cook. Ain’t you got a watch on yourself?”

  “You know damn well that I dropped it on the floor last night,” said Montague.

  Jimmy disappeared from the room, and the old man went into a savage paroxysm of anger, abusing the clumsiness and the stupidity of the younger generation that filled this degenerate world. In his violence, his coat button pulled through its loose buttonhole, and an expansive gesture showed the waistcoat of the old man drawn tightly across his breast by the swing of his arm—and in the lower vest pocket, in a neat circle, there was outlined the impression of the watch that it previously contained.

  It was not much. Neither is the snapping of a twig in the forest, but the Lamb from that instant grew as alert as a frightened wolf in the wood. He leaned to pick a match from the floor, and when he straightened, the old man’s coat was buttoned again, and his keen eyes probed anxiously at the face of the Lamb.

  The glance was an additional reason to the Lamb.

  A moment later, big Jimmy returned to the room.

  “And what time is it, Jimmy?” asked Montague with well-assumed eagerness.

  “It’s late,” growled Jimmy. “It’s very late. Come here a minute into the hall with me while I tell you what we gotta do to that chump McGuire …”

  He hung in the doorway, but now the Lamb saw a strange movement of old Montague’s hand. He saw it from the corner of his eye, and in that instant he leaped from his chair and got into a corner, with a Colt firm in either hand.

  Jimmy sprang back through the door and slammed it. Old Montague’s own hand fumbled beneath his coat, and the flash of steel disappeared.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Old man and young, they watched each other grimly. They heard the lock of the hall door turn with a screech from the outside.

  “Are you all right, Monty?” called Jimmy from the hall.

  “I’m as right as I can be,” Montague said grimly. “What you plan on, Jimmy?”

  “I plan on smokin’ him out and havin’ his hide,” Jimmy said. “That’s what I plan on. But before the news goes to Loring that his spy is caught, I’m gonna raid Loring right now, and when I come back from crawin’ on his bones, then I’m gonna finish up with the Lamb, as he calls himself. Dunstan, you hear me talk?”

  The Lamb listened to that name with a slight smile. His face was white, but he nodded and answered with perfect self-control and gravity. “I hear you, Jimmy. There’s only one thing ag’in’ that plan of yours. I seem to have your old grandfather in here with me. The smokin’ out of me might be the smokin’ out of him, too.”

  “It might,” Jimmy agreed. “That’d be a pretty hard blow, to me.”

  He stamped on the floor and shouted. Presently footsteps came running up toward him, while old Monty Montague said to the youth with him, “Old bones can fertilize new lands, is the idea of Jimmy. Bright, promisin’ boy, is Jimmy.”

  “Bright murder is what he does best,” commented the Lamb.

  “Why, we guessed that you were lookin’ into that line,” said Montague. “Was he a cousin of yours? Will Dunstan, I mean?”

  Under the shock of that question, the Lamb knew that all his secret purpose had been revealed. It disturbed him. He could not imagine how the truth could have come out so suddenly against him. But Montague, as though unwilling to perplex him, grated out, almost gently, “It was the findin’ of your watch, son.”

  There was a murmur of voices in the hall. Then steps departed.

  “He’s gone off. He’s left his guard behind him. Now, maybe he made a fool mistake, in doin’ that,” suggested Monty Montague. He went to the door and tapped. “Who’s there?” he called.

  “Me! Milligan.”

  “Milligan, I’m glad that it’s you. Open the door for me.”

  Milligan laughed loudly. “I know the whole game,” he said.

  “Milligan,” persisted the old rancher, “he’ll like you no better for knowing how he put an end to his own father. He’s done murder before. He’ll do it ag’in.”

  “I’d trust a young rat rather than an old one,” insisted Milligan. “There ain’t any use of your talking with me. You can’t argue me down.”

  “Milligan!”

  “Aye?”

  “There’s eight thousand in cash on me this minute.”

  “Let it stay there. Every gambler has gotta carry a big stake,” Milligan said. “This here stake may be high enough to win any hand but the one that you’re playing now, old-timer.”

  Old Montague turned away with a shrug of his shoulders. “I’m kinda half glad that he didn’t listen to me,” he said to the Lamb. “I can’t live forever. Sit down, kid. We’ll have a chance to talk for a while before they come back and get you.”

  A heavy hand suddenly beat on the hall door. “Hello, Dunstan!”

  “I’m here!” the Lamb called calmly.

  “You dirty dog, you done me proper once, but I’m gonna be in at the last laugh,” gloated Milligan.

  “You’re a fine fellow,” said the Lamb. “Leave us be in peace. We need to talk.” He turned to Monty Montague. “There’s ways and ways that we might manage to get out of here,” the Lamb said. “What’s beyond the windows?”

  “I dunno,” Montague said. “Nothing but thin air that I can recollect. And nothin’ above them windows that you could reach to. Set down, son, and we’ll have a little yarn together.”

  “I was always interested to draw the fangs of a snake before I did tricks with him,” the Lamb said. “Back up ag’in’ that wall, and fetch your hands up over your head.”

  “I’m an old man, for you to be foolin’ with me,” said Montague. “You and me go west the same way. What more do you want out of me?”

  “Your teeth!” the Lamb said impatiently. “Man, don’t you irritate me none. I’ll kill you as quick as I’d stamp on a snake’s head coming under my door.”

  “Well, well,” murmured Montague. “I take this kinda mean and hard, from a young man to an old.” And, struggling, he forced his hands above his shoulder height, while his bright old eyes glittered venomously at the Lamb.

  The latter, with professional adroitness, fanned his victim, and from that surprising veteran he took no fewer than two Colts, a small, blunt-nosed Derringer that hung by a cord from about his neck, “I should’ve tried a last shot at you with that,” the old warrior snapped, and then a pair of slender-bladed Italian knives, fitted for throwing, or for deadl
y poniard work, hand to hand.

  “Nice, quiet old gent you are,” the Lamb commented, looking at the formidable arsenal that he had lined up on the table. “Now sit down,” he invited. “We can talk, after this.”

  “Listen,” Montague said, and his eyes flared as he raised his hand.

  Out of the cold night they could hear the whinnying of horses, and then a trampling on the bridge.

  “They’re gone,” said the old man. “And luck keep Loring’s watch strong and good this night … or else it’ll be the last night he’ll see, and all of his boys with him.”

  There was a slight rustling at one of the windows, and a quantity of the snow that was heaped and frosted tight against the pane fell away.

  “The wind is changin’,” the old man commented. He began to pack his pipe contentedly.

  The Lamb remarked, “I can see the inside lining of your mind, old-timer.”

  “And what is it made of?”

  “Something harder than felt,” the Lamb said. “You see your way out of this.”

  “How come?” said old Monty. “Ain’t it plain that Jimmy would rather see me dead than you free? And ain’t it plain that he’ll never be able to get at you before you’ve got at me? And ain’t it plain that you’d take a pride in finishin’ off me before the boys smoked you out?”

  “You poison old varmint,” the Lamb hissed, his lip lifting. “You know that I don’t pawn the bones of old men. It isn’t my style. I leave it for low-down ones like the Montagues. Is that straight with you?”

  “I understand you fine,” Monty Montague said. “A damn fine, large, an’ liberal nature is yours, kid. And I got no doubt, if once I was shut of this here room and you, that I’d be able to persuade Jimmy to have better sense about you.”

  The Lamb smiled sourly again, and, as he did so, his mind flickered away to the picture of the naked countryside, moon-ridden, silver-bright, and the cavalcade of strong riders making across it. He could see the grim possibilities of that attack, for Loring, trusting in the report that the attack was due for the dawn, would relax every trace of vigilance in the night, in order to rest his men, short-handed as he was. And it seemed to the Lamb that he could see the train of practiced fighters making steadily across the snows toward the black, sleeping house, with the shimmer of the moon upon its dark windows. As Indians fought and slaughtered, so would those men of the Montagues. For the fiend himself could not have gathered together a primer crew of cutthroats.