Outlaw's Pursuit

by Max Brand

  “Do not taunt me, Lewis,” she said. “Whatever he is, he is merciful, and he did not tear out your throat when you lay helpless on the floor in his arms.”

  “Helpless? I?” There was a groan from Vidett, and then the snarling admission: “Ah, what a jackass I was not to strike him when the opportunity was presented to me. One more bullet as he sprawled on the floor. But by his manner of falling, I thought that the lout was dead. I had aimed for the heart.”

  “Gentle Lewis.”

  “Come, Rosa. We know one another.”

  “Better every moment. Tell me now what your plan was?”

  “I tell you simply . . . I would put you into a light sleep. . . .”

  “Light?”

  “You are waked from it now, are you not?”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “Heaven’s name . . . listen to the confusion in the house. The servants have been raised. There will be guns in a moment . . . Rosa, there is no time for explanations. Only trust yourself to my love.”

  “Lewis, I love you until my heart bleeds. But I trust a cold stone more than I trust you.”

  “I intended to gut the cellar of the house. The jewels were all that you and I could take with us.”

  “All? There is more than a million pesos worth of them. Far more!”

  “Is it true, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “The more reason, in the name of heaven, for you and for me to run together . . . with our sweet Conchita, also . . . to leave this stupid valley and the desert that you hate so much . . . and escape.”

  “With my father left behind? Lewis, you are clever, but he is wise. You might run fast, but he would find wings for his fat old body and overtake us. Do you not know him?”

  “I know that he’s dangerous, but I am no child. And every minute the danger grows . . . a warning may get to the town of San Marin. There may be armed men here at any moment . . . Rosa, Rosa, set my hands free and liberate me, or we all are lost!”

  She hesitated. I saw her slump to the floor beside him. And she cast one guilty glance across her shoulder and toward me. I saw, then, that she had taken the knife from the hand of Conchita and the deadly edge of the steel was at the cord. One touch, and that serpent of a man would be free. One puff of her breath, after that, and the lamp would be out and the room lost in darkness. In such a fight in pitchy black, there was no doubt as to who would be the winner.

  And yet I did not try to intervene. I supported myself on one leg with one hand and a shoulder spread against the wall. I kept the other hand on the butt of a revolver, but I did not draw it. I merely frowned down at her, and wondered.

  “Señor Mendez!” came her cry to me. “What makes you trust me?”

  “Because,” I said, “I know that you are the daughter of Caporno, and I know that you love him as he loves you. You will not turn loose a rat to murder him.”

  “No!” cried the girl. “I shall not. Lewis, it is true. You have robbed him, and you are too wise to leave this house without trying to make him harmless behind us. Tell me . . . you planned his murder in the end to make all safe.”

  “It is false,” said Vidett.

  “Will you swear?”

  “I’ll swear.”

  “But what is sacred to you?” asked the girl.

  “The Bible, then.”

  But Rosa laughed. “The Bible? For you to make an oath?”

  And suddenly an imp took me by the throat and made me cry out: “I’ve an oath for him. Will you swear by the blood of Truck Janvers . . . Crinky?”

  I had fumbled blindly, maliciously in the dark, never expecting that I could get any real response from a man so thoroughly on his guard against all things at all times. But I had a little overestimated the nerve strength of the name Crinky. It brought a sudden cry of agony from him and then a gasping voice.

  “Truck Janvers . . . who in the devil’s name. . . ?”

  “Will you swear by that, Lewis?” asked the girl, although she shuddered, watching his emotion.

  “No!” Vidett screamed suddenly. “But if I meant to finish him, it was because he needed finishing. Because I knew . . . from his own mouth . . . that he would never let us marry, Rosa. Because I knew that the old devil had planned to torment us a while longer, and then slide me behind the bars of a penitentiary to get me out of your way. There’s the truth, heaven help me.”

  “And that’s the truth,” said Rosa with a savage quiver in her throat. “Ah, what a beast I’ve loved. What I beast I still love.”

  She leaped up and stood back from him in horror. But as she stood beside me, there was such blind passion in her still, that she was sobbing softly and steadily with a heartbreaking grief.

  Something else came before me through the darkness—the miracle of that fat man, Caporno, who in spite of his wickedness had been able to teach his cold-hearted daughter to love him with such a love.

  XXIX

  The bag of treasure that young Vidett had appropriated was now in the hands of his former ladylove. She spilled out the contents on the couch and I saw a dazzling river of color—green and red and yellow and blue and purest flashing crystal all jumbled together, quivering with brilliancy as the light in the lamp quivered a little and changed.

  I did not have to be any judge of jewels to understand that this was a great wealth that I looked upon. A great wealth—perhaps the million that had been mentioned.

  Rosa scooped the jewels into the bag again, and then stood over Vidett.

  “You got the cellar key from my father?”

  “Yes,” Vidett said sullenly.

  “Where is it now?”

  “The others have it.”

  “He lies,” I said. “He would not trust it to any other person, of course. He has it and we’ll search him for it.”

  “Keep off!” gasped Vidett. “I’d rather be filled with bullets than touched by a swine!”

  The hatred of Vidett was like the hate of a snake. I felt half poisoned by it. But at least, I had the satisfaction of seeing the key in the hand of Rosa.

  She kept it, but she gave the bag of treasure into my keeping.

  “Good,” commented Vidett from the floor. “You trust him so much more than you can trust me, my dear Rosa?”

  “I trust him because I have to trust him,” said the daughter of Caporno.

  “Ah, Rosa, don’t be a fool! Do you think that Mendez is here for anything more than the plunder he can get from you?”

  “I do think that he is not,” she declared, and turned toward me. “Señor, you are going down with me. If Conchita is not afraid to stay here with Vidett. And if you can drag yourself down the stairs.”

  “I am not afraid, señorita,” said the brave girl. “I am not in the least afraid. Believe in me. I shall keep him where he is. If he stirs, I shall have this knife ready . . . with your permission.”

  “You have my permission,” said Rosa Caporno—and, ah, but her voice was like chilled steel. “If he tries to trick you or to get away . . . strike home, Chita!”

  A sibilant sigh from Vidett announced that in that instant he saw himself robbed of plunder, wife, and all future happiness.

  But Rosa left him without another word and we hurried out of the room.

  I say that we hurried, although that is a strange name for it. A child could have moved faster. In the hallway, I had to throw my left arm over the shoulder of Rosa Caporno. And she gave me an amazing strength to support and steady me as I hopped along on my one useful leg. But still she was not able to balance and control 220 pounds of reeling bone and muscle, and our trail was the trail of a wriggling snake as we staggered down the corridors.

  Before we reached the stairway, she announced her plan and her hope to me.

  The key to the cellar was not the key to the ordinary cellar that extended beneath the house, but, far beneath that series of store chambers, there was another deep room, cut out of the solid rock and ventilated only by two small air passages, which were repeatedly
fortified throughout their length by crossbars of steel. There was only one door leading to that sub-basement, and the key was the one that opened the door—an affair a foot thick, and made of the finest iron and tool-proofed steel. In that room, Rosa told me, were the treasure chests of her father, piled one on top of the other, chests each almost as secure as a separate vault, but all permeable, no doubt, by the instruments that had been brought by the assistants of Vidett.

  From one of those boxes, which Vidett well knew beforehand, he had taken the jewel casket and gutted it of its contents, with a part of which he had tried to bribe that sturdily faithful little Conchita.

  But there were very many of those boxes in the cellar. There were many and many of the chests, like trunks, but made of finest steel, and in these the possessions of her father were secured. What she hoped was that, since the plunderers had not been in the house very long, they would still be employed in tearing open the trunks one by one. A few of them might be scattered over the house, confining the servants to their rooms, or at least keeping them away from any intervention in the robbery. But the main group she hoped to find down in the sub-basement still at their work, with the bulk of the treasure still unremoved.

  “But,” I said, “how can there be much more treasure than there is in this bag already?”

  “Gold,” said the girl. “A ton of gold, señor. And paper money. They will hunt for that until they have found all of it. Vidett knew how much there was and he would have told.”

  We reached the stairway and here I gripped the balustrade’s rail and with both hands on it swung myself down faster than the girl could run at my side. Yet it was hard work, and I had stopped at the first landing above the main hall to take my breath, with Rosa Caporno not half a step behind me, when I heard the steps of a man running up the stairs toward me. His head and shoulders came in view at that instant. He did not pause for a challenge. There was no purpose of questioning in his mind. He simply jerked up a revolver and smashed a bullet at my head.

  It cut past my ear, a hair’s breadth away.

  I did not wait to parley, either. But I got him with a snap shot from the hip and cursed with satisfaction as I saw him fall.

  But what a crashing he made. He tumbled backward, head over heels, his body crashing at full length on the broad steps until he floundered to a loose-jointed halt on the floor of the hall below.

  “He is dead!” said Rosa Caporno savagely. “Thank heaven.”

  “Thank heaven,” I echoed. And I struggled down the remaining flight of the stairs to the hallway.

  That shot had not startled any of the followers of Vidett, it seemed. They were either too far away in the house to hear the noise, or else the racket that had been raised in a dozen parts of the big building by this time drowned all the sound of the shots and the thundering fall.

  We stepped over the body of that dead man and Rosa again put her whole strength under my left arm and we hobbled crazily away. She turned me down a cross corridor and so I came to the door of the room of Sam Clyde. I told the girl that I intended to go in to see how he was. She urged me bitterly to hurry on with her. Already we might be too late. As for this man, if Vidett had any real desire to finish him, there was no question as to what had happened to him long before this.

  Still I insisted. I thrust the door open and a .45 Colt spoke from the dark.

  “Clyde,” I said. “Are you going to murder your friends?”

  “Mendez? Old-timer, I didn’t know. I was taking no chances. A rat might’ve slipped into the room in the dark and gnawed the heart out of me before I knowed it.”

  I hurried to him and leaned over the bed.

  “How did you get the gun?” I asked him.

  “I give five pesos to a sneakin’, yaller-faced skunk that come in here bringing my supper with him. He brung me the gat. And it ain’t a bad one. Got a nice balance and. . . .”

  “Clyde, there’s a gang of roughs looting the house. Vidett brought ’em.”

  “That’s like him.”

  “Tell me in one breath, if you can, what you know about him?”

  “I know enough to fix up a pretty fat book about that gent, and you can lay to that.”

  “You called him Crinky?”

  “That was the nickname that his dad give him.”

  “Who was his father?”

  “Truck Janvers. Ever hear of him?”

  I forgot the stabbing pain of my wounded leg. I forgot the girl, waiting in the darkness behind me.

  “Truck Janvers,” I breathed.

  “Did you know him?”

  “I was in the cabin the night he died. I saw the knife stick in his throat.”

  He said after a gasping moment: “I was down in the cabin the next day. It was me that buried poor old Truck. I seen that he wasn’t knifed for his money. I figgered that it was something dirtier than that. So I come down on his trail. And when I got wind of Crinky. . . .”

  “His own father!” I groaned. For it was too horrible to be true.

  “Man, man,” muttered Sam Clyde. “You know nothin’ about Crinky if you think that it bein’ his father would stop him any. Oh, no. He was right in there to play his own hand, and it didn’t make no difference what stood between him and the thing he wanted. It was his old man threatening to tell in San Marin what he knew about Crinky that made Crinky decide to get rid of him. He wanted that talk stopped. And it sure would’ve busted up the marriage if old Truck had wrote down to Caporno and told him about what sort of a sneak this here Crinky was. You see, Truck got married near thirty years ago, when he was all flush and hot after makin’ a big gold strike. He got married to a pretty little French girl named Vidett. Well, she and Truck didn’t get along none too well. A couple of years later she got a divorce and she took along with her the boy that was born.

  “That’s this Crinky. Truck didn’t hear nothin’ from him until he was pretty near a man, and after that the letters come pretty frequent . . . mostly askin’ for money. Though there was a spell of quiet . . . three years when Crinky was in the pen. . . .”

  “Is it true?” asked the husky voice of the girl behind me.

  “I’ll give you my word and my oath, ma’am, whomsoever you might be. . . .”

  “Lie quiet,” I said to Clyde. “Señorita, let us hurry on. Still it may not be too late.”

  XXX

  I had with me a very grim-faced girl as we reached the outer hall and turned down it again. She said not a word, but, now and again, a panting breath broke from her and I knew that her spirit was on fire within her.

  She led me, now, down a second flight of steps that penetrated to the first level of the basement. And then down a second flight that brought us to still another range of subterranean rooms. There was apparently a strong desire on the part of her father to establish suitable foundation before he built the house itself. I felt, as we turned down one twisting passage after another, as though we were in the midst of a labyrinth.

  But the girl never paused. She hurried me on steadily until she came to a heavy door that she opened, and from beneath, through another door and down another short flight of steps, I heard a roar of voices. Not like twenty—but like 200.

  A pair came laughing and singing up the steps toward the second massive door that stood ajar. They were carrying some heavy burden between them—I could tell by their grunting and by the slowness with which they mounted.

  What it was they bore upward could be readily guessed by stout canvas hampers that stood on the steps of the stairway beside us. Rosa Caporno flipped open one of the covers and threw the flash of an electric torch into the interior. And I saw the dull, rich glimmer of bar gold within—a shallow layer, but a ponderous one, no doubt.

  So I swung myself down clumsily—for there were no railings on either side of the stairs, and I reached and drew open the great second door. A foot thick, indeed, but by its weight I rather judged it to be made of lead than of steel.

  It came slowly back and just before me I
saw two well-masked men, swaying and staggering with the weight of their burden as they reached the upper landing.

  I had a revolver in my hand, but I could not shoot. I think that I was not born with a reluctance to take life, but long familiarity with danger and with death had taken from me all impulse to destroy. There was no need here. I could hurt them terribly enough with the gun as a club. I steadied myself against the wall with one hand and with the other dashed the gun into the face of the nearest bearer. I felt bone give to the stroke—mouth and nose must have been beaten in by the blow, and he fell with a muffled scream of pain behind his mask.

  The second man had torn out his own weapon when I reached for him, but before he could press the trigger, I had fetched him a slap beside the head with the long, heavy barrel of the Colt. It flipped him from the unrailed stairway and I heard his body strike with a sickening heaviness and dullness on the floor beneath a moment later.

  By this time there had been warning enough to the others below. Three men came crowding into view, guns in hand, as I strained the door forward. I had no need of my own Colt. I let it fall and gave both my hands to the work that lay under them. And that was ample. I could have sworn that there were resisting hands on the other side of the door, dragging back against me.

  The guns barked in a rattling volley beneath me. Two bullets ripped through the screen of thin board on the inside of the door and hugged flatly against the heavy face of metal beneath. The third slug was better aimed. It sliced a furrow across my cheek.

  But that was nothing. They would do no more than scratch the surface of my flesh if they got to me before the door was closed. And now there were half a dozen flying up the stairway toward me.

  The door was now swaying so far shut that it was a screen against their bullets, however. And here was Rosa at my side, moaning with eagerness and throwing all her weight into the work, while the giant door screamed wildly on its rusted hinges and slowly, slowly drew toward a close.

  It was almost shut. Rosa gave up her work of pushing and, fixing the key in the lock, stood ready to turn the wards as soon as the door was shut. And then—with only an inch more to go—two men struck the door together, giving it the solid shock of their shoulders. My forward progress was stopped. Two or three more slammed against it from the other side and I was jarred back a whole foot.