by Max Brand
So Spooner Joe merely smiled a little. “I guess you’ll wait a long time before Menneval shows up here,” he said.
“No, not a moment,” said a voice at the farther end of the bar.
Everyone looked with a start in the direction from which the words had come, and there they saw the middle-aged, slender man who was leaning on one elbow against the foot of the board. He pushed back his hood a little, and the staring eyes of the others saw a clean-shaven, lean face. It was very brown. It was as brown as the face of an Indian almost, not with the reddish, weathered look familiar in those travelers over the snows of Alaska, but a deep mahogany. So dark was the color of his face that the blue of his eyes shone with an electric brightness against that background.
It was more than the mere contrast of color. Certainly those eyes had meaning for almost every man in the room. They did not shout the name, but the mere whisper of it clove from wall to wall: “Menneval.”
Spooner Joe grew rigid. He was half turned toward the man, and a covert hand, slowly, softly, drew a Colt revolver from the shelf beneath the bar.
“I’ll put my guarantee on that sack of gold,” said Menneval. “I’ll guarantee that Spooner will spend it fairly and squarely on the right people and never put an ounce in his own pocket. Why should he when most of it will go right back over his own bar again?” His voice changed a very little. “Spooner, put down that gun. Don’t be a fool.”
The bartender, with a gasping sigh, restored the gun to the shelf.
“Now, boys,” said Menneval, “as long as I’m here for a few minutes, we might as well liquor together. Spooner, throw us some glasses and a few bottles, will you?”
Drinks of the so-called whiskey at the Spooner bar were sixty cents apiece—at that time the current rate in Circle City. Afterward the prices were to soar again.
Menneval threw out a small poke, solidly filled, but, when the bartender, coming out from his trance, spun the bottles down the bar and the clinking glasses after them, the men who stood in the long, irregular line touched neither the glasses nor the bottles. They looked before them as men in a dream, seeing strange visions.
Menneval filled his glass without appearing to give it a glance. Then, slowly, he raised the glass toward his lips. “Boys,” he said, “here’s how. And who says no to Menneval?” His glance ran up and down the line.
“I’ll drink with you!” exclaimed Lefty Ranger. He pushed his hood clear back. His bald head glistened like a pale, polished rock. And, snatching up the bottle nearest him, he filled his glass.
“Nobody else? Nobody else?” said Menneval.
One by one, sullenly, as the quiet pressure of his eyes fell upon them, they filled their glasses, and in silence they raised them to their lips and swallowed.
“And you, Spooner Joe?” called Menneval.
There was still no anger in his voice. But under that quiet challenge Spooner broke out into a profuse sweat that made his face shine. He poured out three fingers and swallowed them like a man who needed the stimulant, not the pleasure of the drink. Then he measured out the gold dust from Menneval’s bag.
“That’s better,” said Menneval. “That shows that we’re all friends. All friends here together. Now some of you are free to hurry off and tell the authorities that I’m here. Run along. Any of you are free to go. I won’t follow you. And I’ll be here when the crowd gets back. Spooner, you heard my guarantee on that sack of gold. If I hear that you’ve gone crooked with any part of it, I’ll drop in and give you a call. Now send some food into the back room. Ranger needs a meal, and I’m going to watch him eat it. I’ll be in there, you can tell the fellows who pack the guns. I’ll be in there sitting between the door and the window, waiting for them. That’s all.”
He restored the poke to his belt, and, turning on his heel, he walked slowly out of the room, without even a glance over his shoulder.
Spooner Joe reached again for the gun, now that the back of Menneval was turned, but the fingers seemed to freeze on the handles, and he could not raise the weight of the heavy Colt. Another man, with a faint snarl, actually jerked a weapon from under his coat and leveled it at the retreating form. But he did not fire. Enchantment seemed to make his forefinger helpless, and Menneval walked, undisturbed, out of the room.
Chapter Three
No one stirred, aside from Spooner and the other who had drawn the gun, until Menneval was out of the room.
Then a weight seemed to be taken from every mind. Suddenly they turned their heads to one another. And yet few words were spoken. One or two turned and looked suddenly toward the door.
The man who had drawn the gun hastily swallowed another drink. Then he muffled himself in his parka and went straight to the outer door, opened it, and leaned against the whirl of snow that blew about him, for a slight wind had risen.
He closed the door after him, and again the men at the bar looked at one another solemnly and with meaning.
“It ain’t right,” said Lefty Ranger suddenly. “It ain’t right. He’s said where he’ll be. It ain’t right to take advantage of him. It ain’t fair. You wouldn’t fight dogs a hundred against one.”
“You’d fight wolves that way, though,” said Spooner coldly.
“Well,” said another, “are you gonna go back in that room with him, Ranger?”
“Why not?” asked Ranger. “I dunno what he’s done that’s so bad.”
“Murder ain’t much, I guess,” said someone with a forced casualness.
“I dunno how much murder he’s done,” said Ranger. “Maybe he’s all right. I’m gonna go back and talk to him, anyway.”
“You got a nerve,” said a friend. “Don’t you go and be a fool. You keep away from Menneval.”
“What’s he done?” said the mail carrier. “I don’t see any reason. I been inside as long as any of you, I guess. What’s he done that you look at him like he has leprosy?”
“Oh, he ain’t done much,” said Spooner. “He ain’t done much.” He laughed soundlessly. Then he gave an order to a waiter. Food was to be taken into the back room. Menneval had ordered that this be done.
“He’s had four partners,” said a man who was older than anyone present. He was a hardy old prospector with a face like a mangy squirrel—the gray hair grew only in tufts on it.
“And where are them four?” someone asked.
“I’ll tell you,” said the old prospector. “He’s had four partners. There was Charley Harmon, first. Charley was the cleanest kid that ever got this far north. There was no better than Charley Harmon. Everybody knows that. Well, he was the first, and he just disappeared. Got pneumonia, they said.”
“There was that fellow that we called Chuck Spenser, or Tiny for short,” one in the group said. “What become of him?”
“Oh, he got pneumonia,” said the prospector sourly. “There was Garry O’Day. He had a terrible accident with a gun, it turned out. Menneval said that was pneumonia, too. But Shamus and Terry March found the body of Garry O’Day in the ice, and there was a bullet hole right between the eyes.”
“The last was Lew Pollard,” said Spooner.
“Pollard was a thug, a thief, and a hard-boiled egg,” said the prospector. “He wasn’t no help to have around. The only reason that he took on Menneval as a partner was because he figgered that no matter how tough Menneval was, he was a little tougher himself. Well, nobody has heard of Lew Pollard for quite a spell. And nobody is gonna hear of him again.” He raised his hand high and dropped it soundlessly upon the bar. His voice softened to the greatest gentleness. “And nobody,” continued the old-timer, “is ever gonna get anything good out of Menneval . . . because he ain’t like us. He ain’t a bit like us . . . he is plumb different.”
“All right,” said Ranger. “Let him be different. I’m gonna eat my meal, and I’ll take my chance with Menneval.”
Straightway he left the room and went to the little apartment at the rear that was often used by gamblers who wished to escape from the disturbance
of the crowd.
At the door of this room Ranger paused, shocked to a standstill. On a small table at the side of the room, between the door and window, stood a tray heaped with food. A vast platter of steaming beans particularly fed his eyes. But near the table sat Menneval. He had taken off his outer garments. He sat bareheaded, in a light, closely fitting jacket. It showed the slender, trim body of a boy, but in actual years he might be forty-five, or closer to fifty, even; there was in him a potential age that was incalculable. His hair was perfectly white, close-cropped, and so sleek and thin that it fitted him like a smooth silver cap, but it was not the white of the hair that gave the sense of years to that face. There was hardly a line upon that face. But it looked as though it were hammered out of a metal, delicately and carefully, by the infinitely small hammers of time.
Ranger, after that hesitation, nerved himself. If he had seen without being seen, he would have turned about and gone back to the bar, or actually fled from the building. But he had been seen, and shame supplied the warmth of a courage that had failed him. He went on to the table and sat down before his tray of food, clearing his throat. From the big barroom there was not a sound. In place of the usual riot—particularly the riot of a mail arrival—a waiting silence filled Spooner’s saloon.
“Ranger,” said Menneval, “don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm.”
“Afraid?” said Ranger. He was about to deny it, but then he felt that it would, indeed, be foolish to try to deceive those keen, steady blue eyes. “Yes,” he admitted, “you threw a scare into me when I come into the doorway. But I’m over it mostly.”
“Good,” said Menneval. “Go ahead and eat your meal.”
It embarrassed Ranger for a time to eat with that eye watching him. But presently a great surge of hunger overcame all sense of place and time. He ate like a starved wolf, and, looking up once or twice, he saw that the other was watching him with the faintest smile of amusement, like a father watching a child at the table.
And yet he was the full age of Menneval, or very nearly so. He knew that mere years are no measure, however. If he had fifty full lives, he never could pour into them what already had poured through the blue eyes of Menneval. What they had said in the barroom was right. The man was simply different.
He went to the kitchen, got himself a second cup of coffee, and looked hard at the Chinese cook. The latter merely shrugged his shoulders. “They are all around,” he said.
Lefty Ranger went back to the table. He felt much better. There was vital warmth in him now. It seemed as though a comfortable fire was glowing right under his heart. It seemed as though he never could be cold again. The fumes of the coffee were in his nostrils, and the fumes of the whiskey were in his brain.
“Menneval,” he said, “they’re all around the place, waiting for you.”
“Of course they are,” said Menneval. “They’re all around the place, with their trigger fingers growing numb. That’s why I’m waiting in here. And now, Ranger, I want to speak to you for one minute.” He laid the poke from which he had paid for the drinks upon the table. “I want six months of your time,” he said. “In this poke there are not quite twenty pounds of gold. That means six thousand dollars. Will that pay you for six months?”
Ranger stared. “What you want me to do, Menneval?” he asked finally, and he swallowed hard. It was high pay. It was the highest pay that ever had been offered to him, and for what?
“I want you,” said the other, “to go outside. I want you to go clear down to California. I want you to go up into the hills to the town of Tuckerville. In the country near Tuckerville you’ll hear of a man named Peter Crosson. He lives on a small farm. He’s half scientist, half farmer, half hunter, half Nature lover. With him there’s a lad of twenty-one or two. That’s his son. His name is Oliver Crosson. I want you to find those people, and I want you to talk to them. I want you to find out everything you can about both of them. You’re not to tell them who sent you. You’re not to tell them that you’re interested in finding out about them. You’re to act as though you simply chanced on them. When you’ve found out everything about their occupations, their habits of mind, their entire character, you’ll come back here to Circle City and tell me all that you know.”
The mouth of Ranger fell agape with wonder. “What’s it all for?” he asked.
“I’m curious. That’s all. I offer you six thousand dollars. Will you take the pay?”
“Is it gonna bring harm to the Crossons?”
“Harm?” said the other. He became thoughtful. “No,” he said, “I really think that I could not possibly harm them in any way.” He said it quite solemnly.
“Will you tell me why you should pick me out for a spy?” asked Ranger. “There’s plenty more here that you could send that are twice as foxy as I am.”
“I’m sending you because you’re an honest man,” said the other. “And there’s nobody else in Circle City that I’d trust . . . as you trusted Doc Harness, and as he was right in trusting you.” He got up from the table. “That’s all,” he said. “Will you go?”
“Yes,” said Ranger. He was bewildered. He could not escape from the will of his table mate.
“Good bye, then,” said Menneval. He left the poke on the table. He enclosed himself in his furred coat and drew the hood over his head. Then he jerked wide the door just beside the table. He jerked it wide, and stepped quickly back as three rifles rang out in rapid succession beyond the door, and three bullets humming through lodged with separate, heavy shocks in the logs of the opposite wall.
Menneval laughed, and now he glided through the doorway into the whirling of the white snow dust, light and rapid as the shadow of a bird.
Other rifle shots followed; they diminished in the distance. And Ranger heard a hoarse shouting pass away. But he was not disturbed. The laughter of Menneval was still in his ears, and he knew that the man had escaped unharmed.
Chapter Four
Alaska was so in the blood and in the bone of Lefty Bill Ranger that he could not get it out of his mind. Even after he arrived in Tuckerville, he would still awake with a start in the middle of the night, with a nightmare dread that he was freezing to death because there was not a sufficient weight of blankets upon his body. But he was not freezing. On the contrary, he was sweltering with heat. Even when the cold wind blew down from the snows of the Sierras, Ranger could go abroad in his shirt sleeves, so powerfully was the resistance to cold built up in his blood and in his nerves; exposure that would have given another man pneumonia was to him no more than a comfortable coolness.
He did not stay long in Tuckerville, with its pleasant peach and plum orchards and genial sense of well-being in the air. He only waited there long enough to find out about the Crossons. As a matter of fact, it seemed as though Tuckerville hardly knew that the Crossons existed. It was only from the owner of the general merchandise store that he could pick up any facts of importance. To that store, as to the only port within many miles, all the outlying people through the hills and mountains near Tuckerville and Tucker Flat had to come sooner or later. The half-wild trappers, the still wilder and more lonely prospectors, the sheepherders, loneliest and wildest of all, now and again had to come to the general merchandise store—once a year, let us say. And Sol Murphy, who ran the store, kept these vagabond peoples charted in his mind as a ship’s chandler keeps a reckoning of the various tramp freighters that have made his port and taken supplies from him.
So he remembered the Crossons, but even he remembered them vaguely. Nevertheless, he said several things. One was that the Crossons were queer. Queer is a word that may mean almost anything out West. It may mean strange. It may mean spiteful. It may mean dangerous. It may mean half-witted. Queer is the term of last resort for people whose vocabularies are short, and, when Sol Murphy attached the words to the Crossons, he both shook and scratched his head.
“What d’you mean by queer?” asked Ranger.
“What makes you wanna know about ’em?” asked
the storekeeper.
“Oh, I just heard somebody speak of the Crossons. What d’you mean by queer?”
“Wait till you see Peter Crosson and you’ll know what I mean. He ain’t like other folks. He don’t care.”
“He don’t care?”
“No,” said Sol. “He don’t care about nothin’. You’ll see. He runs his cows in the hills. Suppose that a bear comes down and raids him . . . why, he don’t care. Suppose that a mountain lion, it comes down and slaughters a few colts and calves . . . why, he don’t care. He don’t hardly bother to go and set traps for ’em.”
Sol continued to shake and scratch his head, so that Ranger began to feel that the heart of the mystery was about to be exposed to him. He waited patiently, on the watch, and suddenly Sol Murphy broke out, leaning a little across the counter. “I’ll tell you something . . . you’re a trapper, ain’t you?”
“Yeah,” said Ranger.
For that was the character that he had assumed, and he had gone so far as to buy a few traps from Sol. In fact, he had done a little trapping in the old days, the days divorced by more than time from his present self, which had been made by the white Northland.
“If you’re a trapper, you get into the hills by the Crosson Ranch and you’ll find that the dog-gone’ animals ain’t got no fear of you hardly. Seth Thomas, he was up there in them hills a year or two back, and dog-gone me if a grizzly didn’t come right out and give him a run.”
“Charged him?” suggested Lefty Ranger.
“Charged him? Yeah. Hunted him down and charged him, and didn’t care shucks about his rifle. He put Seth up a tree, and Seth dropped his gun, and that bear, he batted that rifle to rags and then went off, and Seth come back to town mighty mad and swearin’ he was gonna go back and lift that bear’s hair. But he never went back for some reason or other.” He laughed a little at the thought, but instantly he grew serious again. “Look here, stranger,” he said to Ranger, again leaning across the counter.
