The Cure of Silver Cañon

by Max Brand

  That was one of the incidents that was most vivid.

  Then, somebody had insisted upon singing a solo, in a very deep, rough bass voice. Carney had complimented him and told him he had a voice like Niagara Falls.

  A little, wizened man with buried eyes and hatchet face had confided to Carney that he was a Comanche chief and that he was on the warpath hunting white scalps; that he had a war cry that beat thunder a mile, and that when he whooped, people scattered. Whereupon he whooped and kept on whooping and swinging a bottle in lieu of a tomahawk until the bartender reached across the bar and tapped the Comanche chief with a mallet.

  A tall, sad-faced man with long mustaches had poured forth the story of a gloomy life between drinks.

  Once he had complained that the whiskey was too weak for him. What he wanted was liquid dynamite so he could get warmed up inside.

  Later he was telling a story to which everyone listened with much amusement. Roars of laughter had greeted his telling of it. Men had clapped him on the back when he was finished. Only one man in the crowd had seemed serious.

  Lew Carney began to smile to himself as he remembered the effect of his tale. The tale itself came back to him. It was about eight men pulling a wagon across the desert, while two horses were tethered behind it.

  At this point in the restoration of the day before, Carney sat erect in his bed. He had told the story of the phantom wagon in a saloon full of men. The story would go abroad. The murderer or murderers of that man he had found dead in the desert would be warned in time. He ground his teeth at the thought, but then settled himself back in the bed and, with a prodigious effort, summoned up other bits of the scene.

  He remembered, for instance, that after he told the story, somebody had pressed through the crowd and assured him in a voice tearful that it was the tallest lie that had ever been voiced between the Sierras and the old Rockies. Whereat another man had said that there was one greater lie, and that was old man Tomkins’ story about the team of horses that was so fast that when a snowstorm overtook him in his buckboard, he put the whip on his team and arrived home without a bit of snow on him, though the back of his wagon was full to the top of the boards.

  After that half a dozen men had insisted on having Carney drink with them. So he had poured six drinks into one tall glass and had drunk with them all, while the crowd cheered. After this incident he could remember almost nothing except that a strong arm had been beneath his shoulders part of the time, and that a voice at his ear had kept assuring him that it was “all right … don’t worry … lemme take care of you.”

  Finding that past this point it was hopeless to try to reconstruct the past, he returned to the beginning, to the first telling of the tale of the wagon, and strove to make what had happened clearer. Bit by bit new things came to him. And then he came again in his memories to the man who had looked seriously, for one instant. It had been just a shadow of gloom that had crossed the face of this man. Then he had turned and gone through the crowd.

  “By heaven,” Lew said to the silent walls of his room. “That gent knew something about the wagon.”

  If he could recall the face of the man, he felt that two-thirds of the distance would have been covered toward finding the murderer, the cur who had shot the other man from behind. But the face was gone. It was a vague blur of which he remembered only a brown mustache, rather close-cropped. But there were a hundred such mustaches in Cayuse.

  He got up and dressed slowly. He had come to the halting point. Dim and uncertain as this clue would be, even if the stranger actually had some connection with the murder, even if he had not been simply disgusted by the drunken tale, so that he turned and left in contempt. Yet in time his memory might clear, Carney felt, and the veil be lifted from the significant face of the man. It seemed as though the curtain of obscurity dropped just to the top of the mustache, like a mask. There was the strong chin, the contemptuous, stern mouth, and the brown mustache, cropped close. But of eyes and nose and forehead, he could remember nothing.

  Downstairs, he found that he had been the involuntary guest of Bud Lockhart overnight in the little lodging house. He went to the big parlor to repay his host. Smiles greeted his entrance. He reduced his pace to the slowest sauntering and deliberately met each eye as he passed. The result was that the smiles died out, and he left a train of sober faces behind him.

  With his self-confidence somewhat restored by this running of the gantlet, he found Bud Lockhart and was received with a grin that no amount of staring sufficed to wipe out. He discovered that Bud seemed actually to admire him for the drunken party of the day before.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Bud said, “you get in solid with me. Some’s got one test for a gent and some’s got another. But for me, let me once get a gent drunk and I’ll tell you all about how the insides of his head are put together. If a gent is noisy but keepin’ his tongue down to make a bluff, he’ll begin to shoutin’ as soon as the red-eye is under his belt. And if he’s yaller, he’ll try to bully a fellow smaller than himself. And if he’s a blow-hard, he’ll start his blowin’. But if he’s a gentleman, sir, it’s sure to crop out when the whiskey is spinnin’ in his head.”

  At this Carney looked Bud in the eye with even more particular care.

  “And after I knocked a man down and insulted another and told a lot of foolish stories, just where do you place me, Lockhart?”

  “Do you remember that far back?” Bud asked with a chuckle. “Son, you put away enough whiskey to float a ship. You just simply got a nacheral ability to blot up the booze.”

  “How much tea did you mix with my stuff?”

  At this Bud flushed a little, but he replied, “Don’t let ’em tell you anything about me. No matter what it was you drank, you put away just twice as much as was enough. Son, you done noble, and I tell it to you. You done noble. Only one fight, and seein’ it was you, I’d say that you spent a plumb peaceable day.”

  “Bud,” broke in the other, “I think I chattered some more about that ghost wagon. Did I?”

  “Ghost wagon? What? Oh, sure, I remember it now. That funny idea of yours about seein’ a wagon with eight men pullin’ it? Sure, you told that yarn, but everybody put it down for just a yarn and had a good laugh out of it. I suppose you’ve got that fool idea out of your head by this time, Lew? Good thing if you have.”

  Lew Carney began to feel that there was far more generous manliness in Bud Lockhart than he had ever guessed.

  “I’ll tell you how it is,” he said. “I’d put the thing out of my head if I could, but I can’t. Know why? Because it’s a fact.”

  The smile of the big man became somewhat stereotyped.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure it’s a fact.”

  “Are you trying to humor me?” Carney asked with a growl.

  The older man suddenly took his friend by the arm and tapped his breast with a vast, confidential forefinger.

  “Listen, son. The first time you pulled that story it was a swell joke, understand? The second time it won’t get such a good hand. The third time people are apt to pass the wink when you start talkin’.”

  “But I tell you, man, I saw that thing as clearly …”

  “Sure, sure you did. I don’t doubt you, Lew. Not me. But some of the boys don’t know you as well as I do. You’ll start explainin’ to ’em real serious, and then they’ll pass the wink along. Savvy? They’ll begin to tap their heads. You know what happened to Harry the Nut? Between you and me, I think he had just as good sense as you and me have. But he done that one queer thing over to Townsend’s, and when he tried to explain, it didn’t do any good. Then pretty soon he was doin’ nothin’ but explainin’ and tryin’ to make people take him serious. You remember? And after a while he got to thinkin’ about that one thing so much that I guess he did go sort of batty. It’s an easy thing to do. I’ll tell you what, Lew. If you can’t figure out a thing, just start th
inkin’ about somethin’ else. That’s the way I do.”

  There was something at once so hearty and so sane about this advice that the young gambler nodded his head. He had a wild impulse to declare outright that he knew there was a close connection between the ghost wagon and the dead man who the freighters had brought in the day before. But he checked himself on the verge of speech. For this tale would be even more difficult of explanation than the first.

  Instead he took the big man’s hand and made his own lean fingers sink into the soft fat ones of Bud Lockhart. “You got a good head, Bud,” he said, “and you got a good heart. I’m all for you and I’m glad you’re for me. If you ever hear me talk about the ghost wagon again, you can make me eat the words.”

  The big man sighed and an expression of relief spread visibly across his face. Oil had been cast upon troubled waters. “Now the thing for you is a little excitement, son,” he advised. “Go over to that table. I’ll bring you the stakes … and you start dealin’ for the house.”

  “Whatever you say goes for me today,” Carney murmured obediently.

  “And as for the coin,” said the fat man, “you just split it with the house any way you think is the right way.”

  V

  Only half of the mind of Lew Carney was on the cards, and west of the Rockies it needs very close attention indeed to win at poker. Once he collared a fellow clumsily trying to hold out a card. At the urgent entreaty of Bud Lockhart to do him no serious damage, he merely threw him out of the place. Luck now inclined a little more to his side, when the men who took their chances at his table saw that they could not crook the cards, but still he lost for the house, steadily. He had an assignment of experienced and steady players, and the chances seemed to favor them.

  By noon he was far behind. By midafternoon Bud Lockhart was seen to be lingering in the offing and biting his lip. Before evening Carney threw down the cards in disgust and went to his employer.

  “I’m through,” he said. “I can’t play for another man. I can’t keep my head on the game. I’ll square up for what I’ve lost for you.”

  “You’ll not,” said Lockhart. “But if you think the luck ain’t with you, well, luck takes her own time comin’ around … and if the draw ain’t with you, well, knock off for a while.”

  “I’m doing it. S’long, Bud.”

  “Not leavin’ the house, old man?” The proprietor moved back before the door with his enormous arms outspread in protest. “Not goin’ to beat it away right now, are you, Lew?”

  “Why not? I want a change of air. Getting nervous.”

  “Sit down over there. Wait a minute. I’ll get you a drink.”

  “Not now.”

  “Bah! You don’t know what you need. Besides, I’ve got something to say to you.” He hurried away, turned. “Don’t move out of that chair,” he directed, and Carney sank into it, as though impelled by the wind of the big man’s gesture.

  Once in it, however, he stirred uneasily. The events of the day before had served to make him a well-known character in the place. Wherever people moved, they often turned and directed a smile at the young gambler, and such glances irritated him. Not that the smiles were exactly offensive. Usually they were accompanied by some reference to the celebrated tale of the evening before, the amazing lie about the ghost wagon. Yet Carney felt his temper rise. He wanted to be away from this place. He did not know how many of these strangers he had drunk with the night before. Perhaps he had drunk with his hand on the shoulder of some. He had seen drunken men do that, and the thought made his flesh crawl. For Lew Carney was not in any respect a good democrat and there was very little society that he preferred to his own. Not that he was a snob, but his was a heart that went out very seldom, and then with a tide of selfless passion. And the faces in this room made him feel unclean himself. He dreaded touching his own cheek with the tips of his fingers for fear that he would feel the stubble left by the hasty shave of that morning.

  Above all, at this moment, the thought of the vast flesh and the all-embracing kindliness of his host was irksome to him. He felt under an obligation for the night before, and the manner in which Lockhart had handled the delicate situation of the gambling losses deepened the obligation, made it a thing that a mere payment of cash could not balance. He had to stay there and wait for the return of Bud, and yet he could not stay. With a sudden, overmastering impulse, he started up from his chair and strode swiftly to the door.

  His hand was upon the knob when a finger touched his shoulder. He turned. There stood Glory Patrick, the man who kept order in the parlor and gaming hall of Bud Lockhart. Glory was a known man whether with his bare hands or with a knife or gun. And Lew Carney had seen him working all three, at one time or another. He smiled kindly upon the rough man; his eyeteeth showed with his smile.

  Glory smiled in turn.

  Who has not seen two wolves grin at each other?

  “The boss wants you, chief,” said Glory. “Ain’t you goin’ to wait for him?”

  “Can’t do it. Tell Bud that I’ll be back.” He looked around rather guiltily. The big man was nowhere in sight. And then he turned abruptly upon Glory. “Did he send you to stop me just now?”

  “Nope. But I seen that he was comin’ back and would want you ag’in.”

  It was all said smoothly enough, but when Carney asked his direct question the eyes of the bouncer had flicked away for the briefest of spaces, a glance as swift as the flash of a cat’s paw when it makes play with the lightning movements of a mouse.

  Yet it told something to Lew Carney. It told him a thing so incredible that for an instant he was stunned by it. He, Lew Carney, battler extraordinaire, fighter by preference, trouble-seeker by nature, gunman by instinct, boxer by training, bull terrier by grace of the thing that went boiling through his veins, was stopped at the door of this place by a bouncer acting under the order of fat Bud Lockhart.

  It shocked Carney; it robbed him of strength and made him an infant. “Doesn’t Bud want me to go?” he asked.

  “Nope. Between you and me, I don’t think he does.”

  “Oh,” Carney said softly. “Wouldn’t you let me go?”

  “You got me right,” said Glory.

  Carney dropped his head back so that he could only look at Glory by glancing far down, with only the rim of his eyes. He began to laugh gently and without a sound. At length he straightened his head. All he said was, “Oh, is that what it means?”

  Glory went white about the mouth, and his eyes seemed to sink in under his brows. He was a brave man, as all the world knew. He was a strong man, as Lew Carney perfectly understood. But he had not the exquisite nicety of touch; he lacked the lightning precision of the windy-haired youth who now stood with a devil in either eye. All of these things both of them knew, and both knew that the other understood. Glory was quite willing to take up an insult and die in the fight, but he would infinitely prefer that Lew Carney should withdraw without another syllable. And as for Carney, he balanced the chances. He rolled the temptation under his tongue with the delight of a connoisseur, and then turned on his heel and walked out.

  It had all passed within a breathing space, yet the space of five seconds had seen a little drama begin, reach a climax of life and death, and end, all without sound, all without gesture of violence, so that a man rolling a cigarette nearby never knew that he had stood within a yard of a gunplay.

  The door swung behind Lew Carney and he stepped into the street and confronted the man with the close-cropped brown mustache. All at once he felt some power beyond him had taken him by the shoulder and made him start up from the chair where he had sat to await the coming of Bud Lockhart, had forced him through the door past Glory Patrick, and had thrust him out into the daylight of the street and into the presence of this man. It was no guesswork. The moment he saw the fellow the film of indecision was whipped away, and he distinctly remembered how this man h
ad heard the tale of the ghost wagon begun and had turned with a shadow on his face and gone through the crowd. It might mean nothing, but a small whisper in the heart of Lew Carney told him that it meant everything.

  He had not met the eye of the other. The man stood at the heads of two horses, before a store across the street, and his glance was toward the door of the shop. The source of the expectancy soon appeared. She was a dark girl of the mountain desert, but with a fine high color that showed through the tan. That much Lew Carney could see, and though the broad brim of her sombrero obscured the upper part of her face, there was something about her that fitted into the mind of Carney. Who has not thought of music and heard the same tune sung in the distance? So it was with Carney. It was as though he had met her before.

  She went straight to one of the horses, and he of the brown mustache went to hold her stirrup and give her a hand. The moment they stood side by side, Lew felt that they belonged together. There was about them both the same cool air of self-possession, the same atmosphere of good breeding. The old clothes and the ragged felt hat of the man could not cover his distinction of manner. He did not belong in such an outfit. His personality broke through it with a suggestion of far other attire. He should have been in cool whites, Carney felt, and the cigarette between his fingers should have been tailor-made instead of brown paper. In fact, just as the girl had fitted into Carney’s own mind, so now the man stepping up to her drew her into a second and more perfect setting. And it cost the gambler a pang, an exquisite small pain that kept close to his heart.