The False Rider

by Max Brand

  When he went into the house, he was met by his wife and daughter. He took the hands of his wife and said to her:

  “Molly, it’s true. I’m sorry to tell you that every penny has been cleaned out of the bank safe. There’s not a nickel left except a few bonds that are not negotiable. Not enough to count. Not enough to make a penny on the dollar.”

  Mrs. Wilbur was as small, as withered, as dry, as her husband was large and robust. She made a gesture with one lean, bloodless hand, as though to put away the facts that had just been spoken, and, peering into the face of her husband, she asked:

  “Henry, you’re not making up your mind to do any foolish thing, are you?”

  He patted her shoulder and smiled down at her.

  “That depends on what you call foolish,” he said.

  She stood back from him, as though she wanted a little distance to see more clearly both his face and the dreadful thought that had come into her mind. For she knew him very well indeed, and all the workings of that brave and gentle heart of his. Her voice came out chokingly:

  “Henry, you’ve lost more than anyone else. You’re not going to throw away your personal holdings to pay a part of the losses?”

  Then, without waiting for the answer, she demanded: “How much was taken away?”

  He looked at his daughter, and she nodded. She was pale, but steady as a rock. He had always guessed and hoped that she was chiefly his child. Now he knew it.

  She said: “Mother, we’d better not trouble Father now. There’s nothing to do except the right thing, and he knows better what that is than we do.”

  “I want to know!” exclaimed the wife. “Henry Wilbur, how much was taken from the bank vault?”

  He hesitated, and then he said: “Over—four—hundred—thousand—dollars.”

  As he spoke, the weight of the words inclined his head a little. A wild screech came out of the throat of his wife.

  “Henry, Henry!” she screamed at him. “You’re not going to throw away everything to pay a part of that? You’re not going to—”

  “Mother!” said the girl. “We have to leave him alone. We have to. There’s only one thing to do, and he knows what that should be.”

  Mrs. Wilbur’s head dropped on her shoulder. She was almost fainting, and between them, her husband and her daughter got her stretched on her bed. There Ruth Wilbur worked over her until she had recovered enough to break into wild sobbing.

  “He’ll give it all away!” mourned Mrs. Wilbur. “We’ll die in paupers’ graves. Oh, what have we done to deserve it? What have we done to deserve this? Ruth, child, darling, he loves you more than the rest of the world. Go and fall on your knees. Beg him not to ruin us. Remind him that he owes something to your future. He’ll turn us out on the streets. He’ll sell the house from over our heads. Go to him! Go to him!”

  The girl went—not to fall on her knees and beg, however.

  She found him in the library, dictating to his stenographer. He was, in fact, drawing up a list of his personal assets. As for his properties in mines and timbers, he knew that well enough. The more personal items, however, required thought, and he was giving his attention to them as the girl entered, softly, unobserved.

  Harry Craig, Wilbur’s secretary, was drawing up the list as his chief dictated. It was typical of Henry Wilbur that he should have chosen a man like Craig to be his secretary, loading him with favors, nursing his investments, making him wealthy enough to be independent.

  Harry Craig had been born into the world with a twisted body and a half-paralyzed left side. He was so ugly that people could not endure his presence, and, therefore, his mind became as twisted as his body, until Henry Wilbur, out of great pity in his heart, took Craig in hand and gradually untwisted the tangles of his dark and bitter soul. To Craig, Wilbur was more than a man. He was a religion. For Craig, there was Henry Wilbur, and behind him, far away, unimportant, there was the rest of the world.

  Now he sat crookedly in his chair, resting his deformed, gloved left hand on the edge of the paper on which he was writing. He peered aslant at what he wrote and seemed to take no interest in anything except the beauty of the letters which he was forming.

  As for Henry Wilbur, he kept his head up and his eye calm, but his heart was dying in him, and his daughter knew it. She knew everything about him. She always had, from the time she was a small thing. She stood there by the door, silent, unobserved, and watched her father in his torment. Tears began to run down her face, not because she was sad about him, but because she felt he was so glorious.

  He was saying: “That brings us to the bank building and the ground it stands on. It has some value. It’s in a good position, and when a new bank is set up in Crow’s Nest, probably the new concern won’t be able to do better than take over the old building. We can put down the value as twenty-five thousand dollars, I think. Next, there’s this house and the land on which it stands.”

  “This house?” said Craig, without looking up.

  “Yes, this house,” answered Wilbur.

  “Your home?” asked Craig, jerking his head so that he could peer into the face of the banker.

  “Yes, my home. It has to go. Everything has to go,” said Wilbur.

  The girl took in her breath slowly. She had guessed it; her mother, even, had guessed it. Everything was to go in order to redeem the losses which had fallen upon the depositors of the town. The tears stopped running down her face, because she was supremely glad that there was one such man in the world. Her color changed. Her eyes brightened. She began to shine with beauty of the sort that time cannot corrupt in the eyes nor rub out of the face.

  “The house,” said Wilbur, “ought to bring in about fifteen thousand dollars. It cost a good deal more than that to build, but this blow is apt to flatten things out in Crow’s Nest, for the time being. Prices will be low. Say another five thousand for the land we’ve built on. That makes twenty thousand. Then there are the furnishings.”

  “The furniture, Mr. Wilbur?” said Craig.

  “Yes,” said Wilbur. “Furniture doesn’t bring in much, but some of the rugs have a more or less stable value. Then there are the books.”

  Wilbur ran his eyes over the lines of books which filled the wall spaces in the room. His happy times of rest had been spent in that room. It was the Mecca of his life to which he retired to be with his higher self. Books had always been his care and affection. He could name every book on these shelves by its size and position. He knew this room as he knew the palm of his hand.

  “Altogether, furniture and books and all, put down ten thousand dollars. I hope we’ll be able to get more, but in forced sales, one never knows. Now what does that bring the total to?”

  “There are some other things that could be added,” said Craig, in a hard, rasping voice.

  “Such as what?” asked Wilbur.

  “Your wife’s jewelry. And your daughter’s.”

  “My wife—may be persuaded,” said Wilbur, “but for the time being it will be best not to list her personal possessions. Of course, whatever Ruth has will be sold along with my own things.”

  He spoke with perfect confidence, and suddenly, as she listened, she felt that she was rewarded and repaid beforehand for any pain that life could give her in all the years to come. She had his utter faith, and nothing else was of importance.

  As her father spoke her name, he turned his head suddenly, and saw her. The sight of her got him quickly out of his chair. Craig turned about and made an odd, gurgling sound in the hollow of his throat.

  “I’m sorry, my dear,” said Henry Wilbur. “Everything has to go. Your things and my things. It would mean a continual shame to me if every effort were not made to pay—”

  He had begun to come toward her with a rather fumbling, uncertain step. She met him before he could go far, and measured him with her outstretched hands just the right distance so that she could look squarely into his eyes.

  “If you did anything else,” she said, “I’d be ash
amed of you. If you weren’t going to throw everything away for the sake of your good name, I’d be ashamed.”

  He had been very flushed as he approached her; now he grew pale with a sudden access of emotion of another sort.

  “Do you hear, Craig?” he said. “Do you hear? One person understands and—and—”

  He made a vague, pawing gesture with one hand, bent to the side, and then sprawled on the floor.

  Ruth dropped on her knees, grabbed his vest, and ripped it open. The buttons came crackling off. She put her ear over his heart. He was fat. There was a muffling layer of flesh between his heart and her ear. She could hear nothing—he was dead! No, then she got it, a subdued, hesitant fluttering, guessed at rather than known.

  Craig threw himself at his master. He grabbed at the girl with his sound hand and with his useless, gloved claw.

  “You’ve killed him!” he screamed at her. “You’ve murdered him! Get away from him!”

  Ruth jumped up, saying:

  “Open the window. Throw water on him. Fan his face. I’m getting the doctor!”

  She was already running for the door as she spoke the last words.

  CHAPTER 17

  A Woman’s Power

  In the next room she saw her mother. Mrs. Wilbur had got up from her bed when she heard the scream of Craig. Now, with her false hair spilling in one direction and her real hair falling in another, with her dress loosened at the throat and her eyes staring, she came tottering toward her daughter, holding out her hands. And she looked to Ruth Wilbur like the living picture of the ruined fortunes of the house.

  “What’s happened, Ruth?” she cried.

  The girl tried to dodge. One wonderfully strong hand caught her and attached itself to her. She twisted about silently and struck the hand away. Then she ran on from the house and down the steps.

  From the main street came an uproar of voices. A thousand people seemed to be shouting one phrase, but they were out of rhythm with one another, and, therefore, it was simply a great obscurity of formless sound that she heard.

  She was on the back of a mustang which was tethered at the hitch rack in front of the house. There was always a horse ready there, day and night. It was a rule that her father had made, and perhaps it would be the saving of his life, now.

  She sent that mustang hurtling down the long slope of the driveway toward the street. She had time to remember that she was not wearing a divided skirt and, therefore, her appearance was not modest; it was such that her mother would almost prefer death to such an exhibition. She was able to think of that, and smile vaguely at it.

  Then the mustang began to pitch. It was full of kinks, and she laid the quirt into the mean little beast savagely. In half a dozen strokes it felt the pain of the whiplash more than the ugliness of its own temper, and it had straightened out to a dead run as the girl shot out through the gateway into the street.

  The air was filled with a filmy cloud of dust that thickened, two blocks away, into a heavy white mist. There were hundreds of people in the street, packing in closer and closer, like iron filings over a magnet. And the center of attraction was a tall man on a great chestnut horse. She knew it was a stallion by the forelock and the arch of the neck like the bending of a mighty bow.

  Hands were being raised against the rider by men farther back in the crowd. Those in front were threatening, also. They were about to drag that man from his horse and kill him, and she knew it.

  But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that the doctor’s house was straight down this street, and there was no other way of getting to it. Not unless she turned back and rode clear around the bridge that arched across the gulch and so, by tortuous way, up to the doctor’s house from the other side.

  However, there was no time for that. Her father lay dying on the carpet of the library. Perhaps he was dead already. She had to get through that crowd. If they had to kill that man—well, she hoped they would kill him now so that she could ride through as they scattered.

  She would try the outskirts, and try to press through across the sidewalk.

  She turned in. The frightened mustang began to pitch and squeal with fear. It helped to clear a path before them with its antics. Men cursed and dodged out of the way.

  She saw that she was going to win through, and the instant that she was sure of that, her mind cleared so that she was able to hear the words that the crowd shouted. Every man had a different phrase of hatred and contempt, but all of them were shouting about Jim Silver. They were saying that they would show him that he could not bluff the entire town of Crow’s Nest. They would show him the justice of the greatest jurist in the world—Judge Lynch. One man was waving a rope over his head, yelling that he had the hemp that would break the neck of crooked Jim Silver.

  It was Jim Silver. That was the chestnut stallion, and there was the man who had robbed her father’s bank—the man whose indirect hand had stretched Henry Wilbur on the floor, perhaps dying.

  She hoped they would tear Jim Silver to pieces! There was no feminine mercy or pity, no tenderness or horror in her. Her body was as tough and strong as the body of a boy. She had done her share of hunting big game, too, and her mind was as grim and stern as the mind of a man when she was roused.

  She was roused now, and, staring across the heads of the crowd, through the mist of the dust, she hated the rider with all her heart. It was as she stared that the sudden realization came to her that this was not the face of the man who had leaned above her in her father’s garden and taken her in his arms and kissed her. There was no beast in this man. He was calmly waiting at the hands of that crowd for the thing that could not be avoided. That other fellow would not have been able to endure. He would have had his guns out, by this time, shooting, killing before he was killed. Or else he would be screeching out appeals. But this man was simply waiting.

  She looked again and was sure. There was a resemblance between that other Jim Silver and this one. A mere resemblance, and that was all. But the crowd was seeing what it wanted to see. It wanted to have the bank robber in its hands and it was determined that this was the man.

  Ruth cried out: “It’s not the man you want! You’re wrong! He’s not the man!”

  But her voice was piping and thin in her own ears, against the growing roar of the crowd. For the tumult was gathering head and rising in crescendo. Action would follow very quickly.

  She looked wildly about her. A gap had opened. She could break through and get to the doctor and bring him back on the run to her father’s house. But still she could not leave this place until she had struck one blow for that big, brown-faced fellow who was so calmly waiting for death.

  It was the real Jim Silver. She knew that. Truth, when it strikes the heart, rings it like a bell. It was the real Parade on which he sat. There was something more beautiful, more massive, more wildly free about the head of the famous horse. This was the real hero, and the robber was a pretender.

  Then she saw the sheriff.

  Sheriff Dick Williams was doing his best to break into the crowd. He was taking men by the shoulders and trying to draw them back. He could not succeed. Only now and again he pried two men apart and pressed between them, yelling that he represented the law, that he must make that rider his prisoner. Fists were suddenly raised, but no man dared to strike the representative of the law. The hands remained poised an instant until he was recognized, and then they dropped down again. But he could not make real headway through the mass of the throng. He would only spur them on more quickly to the murder.

  The hat of Dick Williams flew off. Ruth Wilbur jammed the mustang straight at his gray, tousled head.

  Men turned and yelled savagely at her. She pressed straight ahead. She got the frothing muzzle of the horse at the shoulder of Williams. She leaned forward and screamed at his ear:

  “Get up here! We’ll ride through!”

  He turned a bewildered face toward her.

  “That isn’t the bank robber! That’s not the man who work
ed in the bank!” she screeched.

  The sheriff shouted an astonished rejoinder. She could not make out the words in the increasing roar of the many voices. For the time for action had come at last, and the men around Silver were reaching up their hands, grabbing at him.

  Dick Williams swung up in the stirrup which she abandoned to him.

  “Get out of the saddle! Let me ride through!” he shouted in her ear.

  “You need a woman. A man can’t do anything!” she answered, and she drove the spurs remorselessly deep into the flanks of her horse.

  The mustang plunged ahead. Its shoulders hurled the press aside. A man went down, crying out in terror. It seemed to the girl that the horse trampled straight over the fallen body. She spurred again and again. She worked the rowels into the sides of the mustang. It reared and struck out. From those iron-shod hoofs, men shrank away. They yelled curses at her. Hands grabbed at her to pluck her from the saddle. She felt her dress ripping, here and there. The man who was swinging the rope aimed the noose at her. She ducked. The rope knocked her hair out of its coil and sent it down in a bright flood.

  But now she was in the midst of the dust cloud and the shouting and close to Jim Silver.

  It was like being in the middle of a stampede. They were not humans. They were animals, packed close together and hot for murder. She cut at them with her quirt. They twitched their faces around—blind, distorted faces—and saw the man of the law and the desperate girl. They gave back.

  She was perfectly right. No man could have done such a thing with that crowd, but a woman was different. There is a certain point west of the Mississippi where a woman becomes different, where something sacred begins to attach to femininity, and that swirling knot of men parted and fell back from Silver, as the girl came up.

  She stood up in the stirrups and shouted:

  “This isn’t the man! This isn’t the man who robbed the bank! This isn’t the man!”