by Max Brand
A can of oil overturned in the body of the wagon and the work of the fire was now quickly completed. Literally under her eyes Mary Hamilton saw the vehicle melt away, while the outlaws piled what loot they had rescued on the two horses.
A sharp altercation followed. For the seven insisted that John Hamilton be left to die in the storm where he lay, but once more the will of the leader prevailed. He made them take the wounded man in an improvised litter between the two animals. He himself rode one, and Mary rode the other, and so this strange procession started away toward the southern hills.
Behind them they left the iron skeleton of the wagon, already covered by the blowing sand. And so the mystery of the ghost wagon was explained. As for the revolver in the hand of Delaney, it had been placed there on impulse by the ironically chivalrous Jack Doyle—a tribute from one fighting man to another, as he had said afterward.
They found the shack by Coyote Springs after a march that brought terrible suffering to John Hamilton. Once there the gang insisted on an immediate return to loot the mine and recover their horses. To secure the horses back at the mine, one of the men was dispatched immediately. Another went to Cayuse to buy a second wagon and mules. Jack Doyle, giving way to another of his singularly kindly impulses, agreed to ride into Cayuse with the girl, while she met her brother and warned him away from the useless and dangerous trip into the desert. Doyle had risked his own life and the danger of public recognition to escort her. It was partly for the sake of seeing his financial backer, Bud Lockhart, and partly no doubt for the sake of winning the girl. He had only extracted from her a promise that, while in the town, she would not attempt to enlist any sympathizers, and that she would not speak a word or in any way cast them under a suspicion.
When she met Lew Carney, the whole truth had come tumbling up to her lips, only to be driven back again by a remorseless conscience. One word to him, then, and she and her father could have been easily saved, and the outlaw apprehended by force of numbers. But she stayed with her promise, and, when Doyle found her after his fruitless trip back to Bud Lockhart, she had felt bound in honor to repeat to him every word of her interview with Lew Carney. But Doyle felt assured that Lockhart would take care of the fellow, though, to make matters safe, he made her run her horse with his for the first few miles to outdistance any pursuit among the hills.
Such was the story of the ghost wagon in all its details as Lew Carney gathered it, partly from the girl, mostly from her father.
“And there,” John Hamilton said calmly at the conclusion, “is the end of it.”
He pointed as he spoke, and Lew Carney saw the gray of the dawn overcoming the moonlight and changing the black mountains to blue.
XI
The three watched in silence.
“There’s one thing I can’t understand,” Lew Carney said at last, “and that’s how a man of the caliber of Jack Doyle can stand by and see a helpless man murdered. Why is it? He’s played square the rest of the way.”
The answer was both terrible and simple. The father raised his arm and pointed to the girl.
“He was pleasant to her as long as he could be,” explained John Hamilton. “But on the way back from Cayuse he figured that he’d done enough for her. He asked her then if there was any chance for him to be her friend, as much her friend as she’d let him be. She told him that she could never regard him as anything other than a black murderer. And she threw in a word about Delaney. And since then he’s changed. He sees there’s no chance with her by fair play, and I think he’s ready for foul. And there she stands, free to leave if she will … and there she stays, doing me no good … an anchor around my neck dragging me down, knowing that I’ll suffer double because she stayed with me to the finish. After they finish me … Mary …”
He choked as he looked at her, and she laid her finger warningly upon her white lips. She was wonderfully steady, and there was no quiver in her voice as she said, “It’ll never come to that. Never!” And the two men glanced at each other, for they knew what she meant.
The revel outside rose to a yell of laughter and song. Lew Carney, his heart too full for endurance, went to the front door and looked out. There sat the six. Five of them were doing a veritable Indian war dance around the blaze, and their faces were the faces of madmen. But one man sat with a coat drawn like a cloak around his shoulders. He did not move. He did not glance at the others once. He sat with his knees bunched before him and his hands clasped around them, and Lew Carney knew that his position had not changed for hours. He felt, also, that there was a greater distance between that calm man sitting beside the fire and the wild men who danced around it, than there was between himself, Lew Carney, and the outlaws. While Jack Doyle was one of the band he led, at the same time he was apart from it. A touch of understanding and pity came to Lew Carney: the outlaw had sat there through the night looking on at the debauch with a stony face, never touching the liquor, but eating his heart out with the acid thought of the girl. He was not with the rest no matter if they rubbed his shoulders. And in that quiet, sitting figure there was strength greater than the strength of all the others combined, a controlling strength, no matter how they raved.
It was this last conclusion that gave the idea to Lew Carney. He turned and went hastily back to the room.
“Go to the front of the shack,” he said to Mary Hamilton, “and call in Doyle. Don’t ask any questions. This is the last chance for all of us, and I’m going to take it.”
Instead of immediately obeying, she stood for a moment looking at him, her head held high. He would have thought that she was smiling if her eyes had not been bright with tears. But that look stayed with him to the day of his death.
Then she went to the front of the house, and they heard her calling.
“What is it?” asked John Hamilton. “Are you going to try to do for Jack Doyle alone? No use, Carney. There’s too many of ’em. They’d only have to touch a match to the house, and … there’s the end.”
They heard the girl coming back and the tread of a man moving with a soft, long step behind her. In a moment she was back in the room, and Jack Doyle, entering with her, was met by a soft call from the side. He did not turn. He seemed to see through the side of his head the leveled gun of Lew Carney, but he kept his glance steadily on the girl, and his face was working. She had turned toward him with a faint cry and now she shrank away, frightened by his expression.
“But now that you have him,” John Hamilton said in a disgusted tone, “what are you going to do with him? Eat him?”
“I’m going to use him,” Lew Carney advised, “to lick seven skunks into shape for us. That’s what I’ll do with him.”
For the first time the outlaw turned toward Lew Carney, and Lew felt as though a pair of lights had focused on him. Once before he had felt fear. It was when the ghost wagon crawled up Silver Cañon. He felt it again looking straight into the eyes of Jack Doyle. For the fellow escaped classification. One could not say of him “good” or “bad.” If the eyes of Lew Carney sometimes flamed with mirth or hate, these eyes of Jack Doyle had a property of phosphorus. They seemed self-luminous. He turned to the girl again.
“Is this your idea?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Well?” he repeated to Lew Carney.
“Yes,” nodded the other, “it’s my idea. Now, watch yourself, Doyle. I’ve an eye on every move you make. I’m reading your mind. These folks didn’t see any way of using you, but I do. There’s only one way we can get loose from this shack, and that’s by having you call off your pack of biting dogs. And you’re going to do it, Doyle. Why? Because if you don’t, I’ll blow your head off. Is that all straight? Yes?”
“You want me to talk to ’em while you keep me covered with a gun?”
“No. Give us your word that you’ll do what you can to make your men pull away, and you’re free to turn around and leave the room.”
The outlaw flushed and paled in quick succession. “I give you my word,” he said without effort.
“Wait,” murmured Lew Carney. “Don’t give your word to me. Give it to Mary Hamilton. She’ll be glad to hear you talk, I think.”
“Curse you,” whispered the leader through his teeth.
He turned slowly to the girl. Standing back against the far wall of the room, with the shadow across her face, she put her hand behind her to get support. She trembled when the look of Doyle fell on her, and Lew Carney saw her eyes shift and glow in the shadow. He knew then that the outlaw had once inspired something more than fear and horror in her. He could see Doyle standing on tiptoe like a leashed dog, straining with all the force of will and mind toward her, and Carney knew that the fellow had at least had grounds for hope, that he was fighting for the last time to regain that hope, and that he read in the whitening face of the girl the end of his chance.
At last—and it all happened in the gruesome silence—he looked across from her to Lew Carney, and the fingers of Lew Carney shuddered on the handles of his gun. He knew why this one man could tame the seven, wild as they might be.
Doyle looked back to the girl. “I give you my word,” he said quietly, and he turned away.
“Wait!” called John Hamilton. “Are you going to trust to the bare word of a …?”
But Lew Carney raised his hand and checked the father. He did more. He restored his revolver to its holster. And Doyle stepped close to him. He spoke softly and rapidly in such a guarded voice that no one else could hear the murmured words.
“You win,” he said. “You’ve made a pretty play. You’ve got her. But as sure as there’s a moon in the sky, I’ll come back to you. I’ll smash you as you’ve smashed me. You’re free now. But count your days, Carney. Drink fast. You pay me the reckoning for everything.”
He was gone through the door, and his soft, swift step crossed the outer room. They heard the voices of the seven raised beyond the house. They heard one calm voice giving answer. Before the dawn broke, the eight men were gone miraculously and all the danger passed with them.
When the last sounds died away, Lew Carney turned to the girl, and she let him take her hand. But her face was hidden in her other arm, and to the end of his life Lew Carney was never to know whether she wept for sheer relief and happiness or because of Jack Doyle.
And this was how Lew Carney came over to the side of the law and reached the end of the trail of the ghost wagon.
the end
About the Author
Max Brand® is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways.
Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.
Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world. A great deal more about this author and his work can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1997) edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski.