Valley of Outlaws

by Max Brand

  “I didn’t say shot,” he corrected her in all honesty. “I said killed, Kitty. You’ve got to allow that there’s a pretty big difference there. You might nick a man,” he explained, “and not do him anything but good . . . just let the fever out of him. You understand that, Kitty?”

  “I see,” she said, smiling. “Sort of a doctor, aren’t you, Terry. Sort of a wandering physician. And I’ll bet that you never charge a penny for a treatment.”

  Wisely he was silent.

  “Well,” said Kitty, dropping her aloof attitude, “I suppose it’s pretty bad.”

  Inspiration made him remain silent.

  “There isn’t one single speck of remorse in you!” she stormed at him suddenly. “You’re proud and glad that you’ve done those shootings and killings. It’s what you stand on . . . it gives you your reputation. ‘There comes Terry Shawn . . . you’d better look out . . . he’s a terrible killer. Kill a man as soon as look at him!’ You like that. You drink it in. Oh, I know.”

  “You don’t though,” he argued with heat. “You don’t know anything about it, Kitty. Speaking of remorse,” he continued, “I tell you that nobody has suffered the way that I have. Many a night I couldn’t sleep. Mind you, I never forced the fighting. I never looked for trouble. But to think, in any case, of a man lying there dead . . . it’s a terrible thing. It haunts me. I’ve been tortured by it, Kitty, speaking of remorse.”

  “You look it. You look tortured,” said Kitty ironically. “Oh, I see you think I’m a regular soft-head, Terry Shawn. But I’m not. You’d never give up this life, you love it so well.”

  “I live the way that I see a chance to live,” he insisted. “But if I saw a chance to do better, I mean if I had something else to live for . . . dog-gone it, Kitty, you know what I mean. I’m wild about you, I mean.”

  “I didn’t come out here to talk like that,” said Kitty, growing a brighter pink.

  “I know you didn’t,” he said. “But I did,” he admitted shamelessly. “I had to tell you.”

  “I’ve got to go back,” said the girl, turning the head of her horse around.

  “No!” exclaimed Mr. Shawn violently, and, with a prick of the spurs, he lifted his horse fairly across her way.

  Kitty turned as white as she had been red before. For, indeed, no one in the world could have been prepared for the sudden change that had occurred in the outlaw. It was like seeing a sword in a showcase, one moment, and to see it, the next, held level with one’s eyes by the skilled hand of an enemy.

  For one dreadful giddy moment Kitty’s heart failed her. Shawn seemed a madman in this wild mood. What desperate move would he next make?

  “You knew, too,” said Terence Shawn in a ringing voice. “Of course you knew that I was so crazy about you when I went into the dance hall last night that I couldn’t keep away. You knew when you came out this morning that I’d tell you that I loved you, but you just thought that you’d try the high hand and keep me under. I tell you, you can’t. You can have done with me, mighty quick. Say the word and I’ll never cross your trail again. But if you want to think me over . . . here I am, and here I’ll always be. Kitty, I’d do anything for you. I’d work harder than a beaver for you. I’d build you a house and work in the ground for you. I’d make you happy, or die trying, but I’ll not be a slave and a bulldozed sneak, the way it seems you’d like to make me. You knew I was a gunfighter before ever you let me meet you here. Now you know some more facts. Do you want to hear something extra?”

  As this torrent of words burst upon the ears of Kitty, the last vestige of her calm smile, her manner of easy superiority, vanished. She shrank smaller in the saddle. She watched him, fascinated, and the—“Yes.”—that fell from her lips was spoken automatically.

  “I’ll tell you, then,” Shawn went stormily on. “I lied when I said that I had remorse. I’ve never gone after a clean decent fellow, and the skunks that I’ve accounted for, I’m glad of. I love the fighting! I’d rather have a good fight than a million dollars. I like the snarl on the mouth of the other fellow, and the second of quiet before the draw, when his nerves are working on him, and he has to go first for his gun. I love it, do you see? Only, I love one thing better, and that’s you. I’d chuck it all for you, quit clean, turn around, and start new, and once I made the new start, I’d never go back on you. Because I just plain love you and want you. Have you got anything to say?”

  “I have to go home,” was all the astounded Kitty could think to reply.

  “Have you got anything to say?” he repeated savagely.

  And, pressing his horse closer, he passed an arm and a hand of iron around Kitty. She was trembling so violently that she could not manage to free herself; her wits were quite confused and no words would come to her.

  “Let me go, Terry,” she pleaded.

  Instead, he tipped up her face and kissed Kitty Bowen fairly on the lips.

  Then he stood on the ground, offering her the hat that had tumbled from her head.

  “Your hair will be getting all wet,” said the outlaw.

  That voice brought her out of the mists of confusion.

  “Yes,” murmured Kitty, but she made no move to put it on, and held it in her hand, staring helplessly before her.

  Shawn sat his horse again beside her. “We’ll start on back, now,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. But she made no move, and let her horse start on of its own accord, the loose reins hanging on its neck.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Now Kitty Bowen, as she again drew near her home, found the thought of a ride into Lister a great bore. She wanted at once to be alone among familiar objects, and, above all, to be alone in her own room. So she cast discretion to the winds and, instead of going to town as she had planned, turned back toward the ranch house when she had said good bye to Terry Shawn.

  Her head was quite awhirl. Nothing had been as she expected to find it—least of all, Terry Shawn. When they said good bye, she had feared that he would kiss her again, but, instead, he took off his hat and regarded her gravely and humbly, from a distance. It almost seemed as if, having treated her roughly that one time, she had thereby become a thing sacred to Terry Shawn, and, as she went on toward the house, she knew that for all his lordly declaration of independence he was now in her hands.

  She even checked her horse, and, turning in the saddle, looked back toward him, smiling a little, but already he had gone into the woods and was out of sight.

  So she came home, unsaddled her horse, and turned it into the corral. Then, having tossed a pitchfork load of hay over the fence for it, she went into the house. On the side verandah, she came straight upon the sheriff. Involuntarily she started back with an exclamation of surprise.

  The sheriff did not rise; he maintained his position in the chair, slumped far down on the middle of his spine. Only at sight of her, he began to waggle the upper one of his crossed legs more violently.

  “Hello, an’ how are you, Kitty?” asked the sheriff. “And what kind of mischief have you been into now?”

  “What a queer thing to ask,” said Kitty, frowning.

  This morning she did not like this badinage, to which she usually responded so brightly. The sheriff suddenly appeared to her an unkempt, slovenly, ridiculous, and repulsive person. She had to exercise tremendous self-control to prevent that opinion from shining forth in her face.

  The sheriff, however, appeared oblivious of the bad impression that he was making. “You wouldn’t talk to me about it,” he said, with a sly wink. “But I can guess, honey. I can guess. Dancin’ around with gunmen and robbers and murderers in the night, and gallivantin’ off in the day to secret meetin’s with them. You can’t fool me!”

  The sheriff was shaking a long forefinger at her in teasing admonishment, when Kitty, flushing with annoyance and confusion, rushed suddenly past him into the house. At this he shrank still lower into his chair, his great, spindling shanks stretched awkwardly out before him.

  The clothes
were never made that would fit the sheriff accurately, and long since he had given up the effort to find a tidy measure. He would walk into a store and say: “I want something that’ll wear, y’understand? Now show me some good wool, will you?” And when it had been shown to him, he was apt to seize the top coat of the pile. “This’ll do for me.”

  “It fits you pretty bad in the arms, Sheriff,” the clerk might suggest.

  “I don’t like to have no coat hangin’ around my hands and botherin’ them,” the sheriff would retort, putting down the money for the coat.

  He was a caricature. He knew it and had almost forgotten to be hurt by the sneers and the smiles that greeted him on all hands. In a way he knew that his popularity was founded in a large measure upon that same absurd appearance; for who could be jealous of the brave exploits of a man who, in all other respects, was totally absurd?

  So the votes were always cast for Lank Heney, and he remained sheriff, smiled at, scoffed at, but trusted implicitly by all of the law-abiding people of the range, and dreaded as ardently by the criminals. So the sheriff had almost forgotten, in the process of time, that his skin, after all, was very thin, that shame and misery were as wife and child to him, and that nothing remained for him in life except to go on existing as a sort of ridiculous hero.

  He had forgotten these things until the girl rushed past him with scorn and anger and disappeared into the house. Then, sliding still lower in his chair, he clasped his long, bony face in his long, bony hands and asked himself what he had done.

  For suddenly he was sick and weak, as he had not been since his school days, when the little girls had giggled behind his back, or had stood aside and laughed to see him stumble as he passed them. So it was on this morning, suddenly. He found himself as sensitive as he had been in those other, earlier years. And why? When he asked himself that question, the answer that leaped into his mind made him sit up, stiff and straight, and grip his knees in fear and in pain.

  He was not more than thirty-five, but the whole world treated him as though he were fifty. He was thirty-five, but Kitty Bowen was twenty. He was a clown; she was everything that was gracious, graceful, and desirable. So the sheriff told himself. And the greater the distance that he struck off between them, the more profoundly he plumbed the abyss, the more bitterly his heart ached.

  Looking back to what he had said to Kitty, it seemed to the sheriff that he had uttered no word that should have angered her so seriously. However, all his life he had been unable to understand what pleased and what displeased others; he only knew that ridicule and scorn always were heaped on his head whether he were silent or noisy.

  He could hear the girl inside the house, and then the brisk, cheerful voice of her mother: “Goodness, Kitty, you haven’t gone racing all the way to town and back?”

  “I didn’t go to town at all,” said Kitty sullenly.

  “Where did you go, then?”

  “Oh, I jogged up the valley,” said Kitty. “It was too foggy for a long ride to town, so I just had a breath of air and then came back.”

  “Kitty,” said her mother, “really it looks to me as though you’re getting a little sense. It’s the first time that I ever heard of such a thing as weather stopping you from doing what you wanted to do.”

  A door clicked shut and the voices could no longer be heard out on the verandah. The sheriff rose slowly from his chair, unlimbered his awkward height with a yawn and stretch, and then walked with a slouching stride down the steps and away.

  He did not mount his horse. In fact, he intended only to stroll up and down for a short time to try to take his mind off his troubles.

  To amuse himself, he followed the fresh sign of the horse on which Kitty had ridden. Just beside it, and weaving now and again across the second trail, was the sign of her going forth, and the active eye of the sheriff noted the differences. Little pebbles and dust grains were still being dislodged from the upper edges and sides of the latter set of tracks and rolling down into the bottoms of the hoof prints. But the earlier tracks, although hardly much more than an hour old, were already settled. Both sets had been made within the last two or three hours, because the fog and misting rain had not yet wet down the tracks nor drenched the cracks where the dry earth showed through.

  He regarded these things with a careless and yet a comprehending eye, and presently he turned off from the straight path away from the house and found himself following the trail toward the nearest copse—certainly she had told the truth and had been riding up the valley, and not down it.

  In the meantime, it eased the sheriff’s mind to have this small employment. He had come out to Bowen’s on request, to use the place as headquarters in the hunt for the outlaw, Shawn, and this little encounter with the girl had crossed him like a sudden and blighting shadow.

  He advanced, then, toward the trees, following the trail with a mere glance now and then. As he came close to the edge of the woodland, he noticed another set of hoof marks in the grass. Here they came to a pause, turned back, entered the trees. Here they passed straight on down the valley toward Lister. Here the tracks of the girl’s horse had turned to the side—and here the other rider had come alongside.

  What manner of horse had made those tracks, then? Or might it not be that the second trail had been made at a different time?

  Upon his knees, the sheriff examined the tracks and he saw that he was wrong. Just as the grass was erecting itself in one set of hoof hollows, so was it rising once more in the other. And the look of the gravel in one shallow hole was like that in the next.

  No, those two had ridden side-by-side, unless the second rider had trailed the first.

  No, that was not possible either, for the hoofs of the girl’s horse had remained on the narrow bridle path, while the other rider had taken the rough on one side, as a man, say, would do to please a lady.

  The heart of the sheriff contracted with pain. A man had been riding with Kitty Bowen up the valley. What manner of man could this be—one who would not call at the house of the Bowens; who made secret appointments in the early morning; who saw the girl, rode with her, and left her suddenly to slip away down the valley once more, while she came on to the house, her face glowing with happiness?

  Now, as the sheriff repeated all of these details over to himself, he found himself suddenly in the position of one who has been hopelessly juggling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle until by chance they suddenly fitted together and made a well-ordered whole. So it was with the sheriff, and as he added up the bits of evidence, he saw, with a pang of wonder and grief, that all of this testimony pointed straight toward some man who dared not call on the girl at her house.

  Who, then, could be afraid to come to Bowen’s place? One under the shadow of the law, perhaps—such a one as handsome young Terence Shawn, who the very night before had dared to enter the dance hall in the town of Lister, and while there had made a fool of Sheriff Lank Heney in the eyes of everyone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When that exciting possibility entered the mind of Sheriff Heney, he became at once the man of action. He cut straight through the rear of the woods to the back of the Bowen place, where he caught up his mustang, whipped and spurred the antics and pitching out of the system of that tough-mouthed little mongrel, and then raced him back to the valley trail.

  As he shot past the house, he saw Kitty’s face at a window, and he could not tell whether the face was pale through fear or was only blurred to paleness by the speed of his going, but in his heart of hearts he shrewdly suspected that the girl guessed his mission. He wished, then, that he had departed more secretly, but there was such a fire burning in the soul of the sheriff that it drove him recklessly on, until he came to the woods in the ravine.

  There he checked his pace a little—not to an easy trot or canter, but to a gallop at which he still could search the trees before him with some degree of thoroughness. He maintained that pace for a considerable distance, and then he saw suddenly what he wanted, startlingl
y close.

  He was riding in a little woodland lane, the floor of which was carpeted with a thick layer of pine needles that deadened the sound of his hoof beats. Looking to the left, he saw another horseman riding down just such another winding lane, and not twenty yards distant. They looked at one another at the same instant; Heney recognized Terry Shawn and reached for his gun, and he saw Shawn grab at his own weapon.

  There was this difference between them—the sheriff, as he sighted the foe, steadied his horse and drew it to a stop, so that his marksmanship might be more accurate, whereas Shawn, with a shout and a touch of his knee, turned his mount straight on through the trees. He charged his enemy as he fired!

  Never had Lank Heney been so alert as he was on this day, never had his hand been so swift, and the result was that he got in the first shot, firing from the hip. He knew that shot was low to the right; his second was equally high to the left, but before he could get in a third bullet that would split the difference and drop Terry Shawn from the saddle, the latter, charging fiercely, had fired in turn.

  A kind providence saved the sheriff. His mustang, stopping short, swerved a little to the side and, squatting on its hind legs, threw up its head. Straight through that head went the bullet from the outlaw’s gun, and the little mustang pitched over on its side, dead. The sheriff barely managed to shake his feet loose from the stirrups when he was sent spinning head over heels. His head struck a root. He came up staggering, dizzy, his hand empty—he had lost his Colt in his fall—and found Terry Shawn just before him with a gun held lightly in his fingers, ready to drop on the mark.

  “Hello,” said Shawn. “I see you’re a popular sort of man, Lank.”

  The sheriff said nothing, but blinked his way back to full consciousness.

  “Even your horse will die for you,” explained the outlaw with a grin. “What sent you zooming down the valley on my trail this morning, Sheriff?”

  Lank regarded him with a quiet interest. His time to die had come, and he was amazed that the ending troubled him so little.