The False Rider

by Max Brand

  Before he could get any further in his warnings and his preparations, there was a tap at the door. It was a light, quick rap of two soft beats, a pause, and a harder blow.

  The eye of Barry Christian flashed as he recognized a signal that must have some meaning to the great Jim Silver.

  He went to the door and opened it. Before him stood a slender man of hardly a shade more than middle height, and dressed in a dapper blue suit, with a soft gray hat, and a pair of chamois gloves in his hand. His black hair was sleeked until it glistened. If he had been leaning on a walking stick, he would have served as a fashion advertisement out of a magazine. But Barry Christian had no illusions about the character under that dude exterior.

  He held out his hand and pressed the lean, nervous fingers of “Taxi.”

  “Hello, Taxi,” he said in a voice raised only a little above a whisper. “The old man has told me all about you. Silver’s knocked out. Listen—don’t stay long with him. He’s all shot to pieces. Tired, I mean. Come on in.”

  He backed away, and as he backed up, the slender fellow came with a soundless step through the doorway, and lifting his eyes, which were kept constantly lowered, he gave Christian one pale, bright gleam of inspection. Then he walked on toward the bed, smiling, and holding out his hand.

  “Jim, old boy!” he said.

  Gregor held out a hand that had a big riding glove on it.

  “Covered with rash,” he explained, coughing as he spoke. “How are you, Taxi?”

  “I’m always on top of the world when I hear that you’re anywhere near,” said Taxi, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “What’s knocked you out?”

  Gregor pressed his head all the deeper among the pillows and let his arm fall at his side.

  “Been through a lot,” he said, in a muffled, groaning voice, “and more trouble ahead.”

  Taxi stood up.

  “I’m on deck,” he offered.

  “Later,” said Gregor, carefully maintaining that same groaning voice. “How many people saw you come?”

  “About three—outside the hotel. You know I don’t walk the main streets when I can possibly help it, Jim.”

  “Good,” muttered Gregor. “If the rats know that you’re with me, they may run for cover before I get my teeth in them.”

  “What rats?” asked Taxi.

  “Tell you later. Taxi, will you help?”

  “Don’t ask. You know.”

  “Good! Get out of town. Five or ten miles out, and stay put. Wait for me. I’ll send you word when I want you. Tell me where you’ll be.”

  Taxi hesitated. Then he said: “There’s a broken road that runs straight west of Crow’s Nest. Never used. Out there, four or five miles, between a pair of steep hills that bear to the south, there’s a little shack. I’ll go there and wait, and nobody shall see me leave Crow’s Nest, only the people in the hotel here. Can they be trusted?”

  “Nobody,” said Gregor, shaking his head slowly. “Trust nobody.”

  Taxi held out his hand. Gregor took it and let his arm fall wearily away again.

  “So long,” said Gregor.

  “I wish I could stay here through the pinch,” said Taxi, “but you always know best. I’ll be out there waiting. I’ll have fast horses with me and I’ll be ready to jump.”

  He turned to Christian.

  “I don’t know you, but I’ve seen you somewhere,” said Taxi.

  “I’m Thomas Bennett,” said Christian, nodding. “I’ve been around, all right. Maybe you have seen me.”

  Taxi went to the door, turned there as though he were about to speak once more, and then bent his pale, bright glance on Christian for another moment. After that, he left the room, and the door made no sound as he shut it behind him.

  “Well—” began Duff Gregor.

  A frantic signal came from Barry Christian, cutting him short. Another signal made him relax once more in bed. Christian stood transfixed. Even in that dim light, Gregor could see that the face of his famous companion was shining with sweat.

  “That’s one step behind us, and maybe the longest step of the lot,” said Christian in a whisper.

  He went to the door and listened for a moment. Then he opened the door and looked into the hall. Turning back, he mopped his face and slumped down into a chair.

  “The wildcat!” said Christian. “Did you ever see such a pair of eyes? You can get up now.”

  “Bored right into me through the shadows,” said Gregor.

  He sat up and began to pull on his clothes. He, also, had need to wipe his forehead.

  “You did it well,” said Christian, after a moment of thought. “You couldn’t have done it much better. But he suspected something.”

  “He sure gave you a look, brother,” agreed the other.

  “There was a ghost walking through his brain just then,” answered Christian. “He couldn’t put his finger on the right spot in his memory and he probably never will. He can’t think of Barry Christian and Jim Silver being together in the same room. The two ideas won’t fit. He’s in some sort of doubt, but not enough to keep him from doing what you told him to do. That’s the way that Silver would act—short sentences and let the other fellow do the guessing. You did it well, Duff, and you didn’t slip on your English, either.”

  “Aw, I can talk as good as anybody, when I get my mind fixed on it,” said Duff Gregor. “Don’t you worry about me, brother, when it comes to being slick. Slick enough to skate over the thinnest ice you ever seen.”

  Christian considered him gravely for a moment and said nothing. He went back to the door, opened it, peered up and down the hall, and returned.

  “Walks like a cat too,” he said. “He is a cat.”

  “That’s how he hit me,” said Gregor.

  “All the luck in the world,” groaned Christian, “couldn’t have hitched a more dangerous man to Jim Silver.”

  “Why can’t you buy him off? Give him a big split if he throws in with us?” asked Gregor.

  Christian stared at him, but then he nodded.

  “I understand what you mean,” he said. “I used to think the same thing, in the old days. I used to think that every man has his price, but that was before I met Jim Silver. Money’s dirt to him. Money’s dirt to this handsome young rat of a Taxi. I couldn’t buy him if I offered him a diamond as big as my fist.”

  “It looks to me,” said Gregor, “as though we’d better drift out of this town pretty pronto.”

  The big man nodded. “We have to work fast,” he said. “There’s that suspicion in the back of Taxi’s brain, and he may come back to investigate.”

  “Suppose,” said Gregor, “that he hears how I came prancing into town with the crowd cheering. That won’t mate up very well with the way he found me stretched out here.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Christian. “Taxi knows that Silver could bluff out the devil himself, when it comes to a showdown. Gregor, we have to work fast. But if things go well, before Jim Silver learns of his double here in Crow’s Nest, we’ll have a fortune in our pockets. And leaving town, we’ll drop in at a little shack between a pair of hills four or five miles out of Crow’s Nest, and there I’ll settle an old score. There’ll be one less man in the world when I get through with this job—and Taxi!”

  CHAPTER 7

  Wilbur’s Bank

  The rest of that day was spent, presently, in making a little tour of the town, Gregor and Christian riding side by side. Gregor did very well. Perhaps fifty times they were stopped and asked to have a drink at the next saloon, but Gregor always said: “Thanks, but this is my dry time of day.”

  The only advice that Christian gave him was: “Keep the voice down. Stop grinning, and hardly let yourself smile. Look kind—and tired. That’s the nearest you can come to Jim Silver, I’m afraid.”

  They ate quickly, in a corner of the hotel dining room. It was an empty room when they sat down to eat. It was a crowded room before they had been there for five minutes. Duff Gregor, bat
hed in this light of another’s glory, could hardly keep from thrusting out his chest and exulting. But his companion’s quick, stern eye kept him in hand.

  A ten-year-old boy with the fore part of his face scrubbed till it was red and shining, while the dust of the day’s playing still remained like a fine gray fur over the ears, came up and said:

  “Mr. Silver, the kids been and challenged me that I wouldn’t dare to come in here and shake hands with you, so I come, anyway. My name’s Joe Crosby.”

  Duff Gregor held out his hand with a grin. Christian kicked him violently beneath the table, and Gregor rose and controlled his grin to a smile.

  “I’m glad to meet you, Joe,” he said. “Glad to meet any of your friends, too. What can I do for you?”

  “Do for me?” crowed the boy. “Lemme sit one second in the saddle on Parade! By Jiminy, would you let me do that?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Gregor. “Tomorrow morning, wherever you see me and Parade together.”

  The boy went off in a trance of joy, and Christian said:

  “That was all right, but wipe the grin off. Don’t look as though you’d just been elected mayor of the town.”

  Gregor said, in a voice that shuddered with ecstasy: “I could have more than that. I could be the mayor of the town and I could have the ground that it’s built on, too. I’m Jim Silver.”

  Christian smiled at him with narrowed eyes. “Keep on thinking it,” he said, “and Heaven help you if you bump into the real man again!”

  They turned in early that night. It was a hard job to get across the lobby, for the editor of the newspaper had come to interview the great visitor and get his first impressions of Crow’s Nest. And the manager of the big hotel at the spring had come, also, to offer to Jim Silver the best suite in the building. Then there were prominent men from the lumber camps, from the mines, and from the ranches, who wanted to shake hands with Jim Silver.

  Gregor shook hands willingly enough, and he smiled on them all before he managed to get to the stairs. There Christian covered his retreat, saying:

  “The chief’s all fagged out. He’s going to turn in, boys. And you know how it is—he won’t take something for nothing, and he doesn’t like a lot of publicity. I’ll just tell you all one thing. He likes Crow’s Nest better than any town he was ever in in his life before. I don’t know but what he’ll want to settle down in it. He says that a man has to settle down sometime in his days.”

  They gave the name of Jim Silver a good, hearty cheer, when they heard this announcement, and Christian went up to the room where Gregor was waiting and found him stretched out on the bed with his hands folded under his head, full of gloomy reflections.

  “Listen to ’em, Christian! Listen to ’em yell and cheer. All for Jim Silver. Doggone me if it don’t make me sort of sick. What’s Jim Silver done to get all that glory?”

  “Nothing much,” said Christian coldly. “You could do the same thing. All you have to do is to shoot straighter than anybody else, ride a horse that can catch anything else on the range, and be willing to lay down your life for a square deal wherever you find the crooks collected. That’s all you need to do, and after a few years, if you’re not dead and have a lot of luck, you’ll be just as famous as Jim Silver.”

  Gregor stared up at the ceiling.

  “I’ll tell you what, Barry,” he said, “it kind of makes a man think. It kind of makes a man wanta start all over again and try to do the right thing.”

  “And get buried in the dust that the successful crooks raise as they ride past you? Is that what you want?” asked Christian.

  Gregor shook his head and sighed again.

  “I know,” he said. “Only a fellow can’t help thinking!”

  “You do your thinking in your sleep,” said Christian. “While we’re on this lay, I intend to do your daytime thinking for you. Keep that straight in your head all the time.”

  “I’ll keep it straight,” groaned Gregor.

  In the morning, five minutes after the doors of the Merchants & Miners Bank had been opened, Duff Gregor, alias Jim Silver, walked into the institution.

  He went alone, but only because Barry Christian had been at work since shortly after daybreak, schooling him in deportment, watching him walk up and down, cursing him for the manner in which he was apt to break into grins and bad English.

  Gregor was already more than a little weary, but he was very determined, because he knew all about the greatness of the stakes that he was playing for.

  The Merchants & Miners Bank had been reared from a weak infancy to great strength by the skill and the business integrity of a real financier, Henry Wilbur. He had come out to this country and settled in it because he liked it. And the reason he liked it had nothing to do with the sunsets behind towering mountains, but a great deal to do with the splendid forests of pine and spruce that covered the sides of the slopes. He did not wax enthusiastic about the many-colored cliffs of granite and porphyry, but he had a keen eye for the precious metals that could be found vetoing them here and there. He never brooded dreamily over the pleasant green meadows, but he knew to a half acre how much land was required to keep a steer in good flesh through any sort of a season.

  Henry Wilbur knew a great deal about three important industries, but he lacked the intimate practical knowledge which would enable him to step directly into any one of the three fields. He did the next best thing. He picked out men who did have the practical knowledge and training and he backed them. That was how he made money. He was the partner, ready at hand, of any man with brains and industry.

  Many a story was told of fellows who had walked into the office of Henry Wilbur without a cent in their pockets and nothing but ideas in their heads, and of how they had came out again with enough gold to break the back of a mule. Sometimes Wilbur put a bet on the wrong man. In those cases, he swallowed his losses with a smile. His faith in human nature could never be destroyed, and since he had both faith and judgment, he won two times out of three, which is enough to make a fortune keep mounting.

  He succeeded, in short, because he knew men and because men knew him. They knew that he was loyal, generous, and faithful. They opened their hearts to Henry Wilbur, and he knew how to bolster weak places and re-enforce strong points. His bank was like a great heart which kept money, life, hope, and energy constantly in circulation through those mountains. One thing he had never touched was the exploitation of the mineral springs of Crow’s Nest. He would have nothing to do with them because he was not assured that there was something more in the cure than faith and advertising. His interests were all based on the soil and its products, vegetable or mineral.

  Being a modest man, he had kept the physical surroundings of his bank modest, also. It was simply a little squat house built of natural stone such as cropped out in every vacant lot in Crow’s Nest. The stone that had been cleared, years ago, to give a place for the building was what had been used to erect its walls. That was typical of the sensible thrift of Henry Wilbur. He said, when other business men of the growing town urged him to put up a building more in proportion to the size of his success:

  “All a man needs is good light to see by, good air to breathe, and space enough to sit and think. I have all these things in this place, and so have the men who work with me. Why should I make a change?”

  So he sat in the same office which had been his for twenty years, and behind the very same desk. That desk had begun to spring in the knees, and, therefore, he had remedied the defect by having a long iron rod run through it from side to side. When the nut was screwed up tight on the strong threads, the desk pulled its feet in and was as strong as ever.

  It was the sign, “Henry Wilbur, Private Office,” that caught the eye of Duff Gregor, as he walked into the bank that morning.

  The janitor-doorman, with his eyes popping out from his head, came hurrying to meet Gregor. Behind their clouded windows or in their cages of bronze-gilt steel, the clerks and tellers stood up and gaped at the great man.<
br />
  Gregor took off his hat and looked slowly around him.

  “Well, well,” he said. “This is what a bank is like, eh? It’s about the first time I ever was in one.”

  He had composed that speech on the way to the bank, because Barry Christian, before sending him off alone, had said:

  “Don’t try to be smart. Jim Silver is so simple that he’d be willing to ask questions of a five-year-old child. There’s no side to him, and when he hears a compliment, you can see that it hurts.”

  The janitor said: “It’s a bank, all right. I’ll show you over the place, Mr. Silver. Wait just a minute while I get my keys and—”

  “Don’t you trouble yourself,” said Gregor. “The fact is that I’d like to speak a word to Mr. Henry Wilbur, if he’s not too mighty busy.”

  “Mr. Wilbur won’t be too busy to see you,” said the janitor heartily. “I guess there’s nobody on this side of the Mississippi that would be too busy to see you. As soon as Mr. Wilbur comes in, he’ll—Hi! Here he comes now with his daughter.”

  Gregor saw a big man, whose shoulders sloped a bit from too much sitting at a desk, a big man leaning with the weight of his body, a large, flushed face, with dark eyebrows that gave accent to the noble largeness of the forehead. His eyes were grave, his mouth was smiling, and he had the air of one who has faced trouble many times and never with a subdued spirit.

  The girl beside him was like her father, but with all the grossness of flesh and the hardness of experience removed. She was slender, straight; she had the direct eye that goes with a simple mind, and that clear and unstained brightness which cannot be after life has been tasted. She was not beautiful. She was something more. Even Gregor could realize that. He wondered what the name of Jim Silver would do to her.

  The janitor-doorman was making straight for Henry Wilbur, exclaiming as he came up to him:

  “Jim Silver is here, Mr. Wilbur. He wants to see you. Here’s Mr. Wilbur, Jim Silver!” Then he added: “Miss Ruth Wilbur too.”