by Max Brand
Yet Shawn paid no heed to this fiery blast, although it made the ground wave before his eyes and seemed to breathe forth a thin mist that steamed constantly upward. Yet he knew that no mist could be there, for during months and months there had been no more moisture than that which the fog of the morning brought to the range. That fog was gone now; only on the southern horizon was there visible a dull, gray bank that might spread north again during the hours of darkness. But weather was of no importance to young Shawn now.
Sometimes he was filled with such wrath against Joe that he wanted to turn about and ride to the shack and shoot his friend in the doorway. But he never could bring himself to such a mad act, for he knew that Joe loved him, and that all the counsel that the lanky, wise cowpuncher had spoken had been given, purely and simply, for his own good.
Nevertheless, he was ill at ease. Of all the treasures of his mind, the picture of Kitty as she had appeared to him that morning was the most vivid and the most recurrent. He saw her so plainly that it almost seemed her ghost was still beside him, cool and damp of cheek, with smiling lips and gentle eyes. He had been through a hundred flirtations, but never before had he loved, and the anguish and the joy of it overpowered him. For there was no mental stability in Terry Shawn. He could ride ten days without food and with little water. He could fight far beyond the limit of most men’s endurance, but he could not build a fence against the torments of the mind.
Sometimes he felt, during this ride, that he would soon break through the restraint that Joe had placed upon him, and again he felt that he rather would throw away his life than place Kitty Bowen in the slightest danger of future unhappiness at his own hands. The good and evil spirits never tugged so hard at one poor mortal soul as they tugged at the outlaw during that hot ride.
His conclusion was merely that which had flashed across his brain back at the house of Joe. He must have diversion. He must have some means of pacifying his outraged nerves and revolting soul, and therefore he would go into Lister—ride into Lister by the open light of day.
It was no more dangerous, say, than a visit of Paris would have been to the tents of the Greeks, but the very danger was what intrigued Shawn. He turned to peril as another man turns to whiskey in a similar crisis. And is it not strange that man never commits such follies and crimes as when the peace of his mind has been disturbed by love of woman?
Now, from the top of the last hill, he looked down into the valley. The town looked half buried in cool greenery, but he knew the terrible and humid heat that reigned there in the shadows. Only in the distance the silver face of the river was alluring, with the broad and clumsy etching of trees against its surface.
A whirlwind suddenly began at the upper end of the valley and, covering Lister with a cloud of white dust, left it clean again, and circled aimlessly onward until it disappeared as suddenly as it had risen.
That’s the way with me today, thought the outlaw. I’ll raise a dust when I come in, and I’ll go out like nothing at all. He chuckled with a savage enjoyment of that grim idea, and then cantered his horse down the slope. He had made up his mind where he would go in the town—he would go to Lowrie’s, and there he would stretch his legs in the cool shade and order a drink, and watch the dice roll and the cards fall. He might even play a little himself.
When he came down from the hill, however, he did not turn to the little back alley that led by a secret way to Lowrie’s. Instead, on a sudden whim, he cantered straight on down the main street of the town. A dust cloud was pitched into the air before him by a brisk wind, but that mist obscured him too well, and therefore, since what he wanted was excitement, Shawn brought his horse back to a walk. The dust settled; he now was visible to all men.
So he waited, his nerves tingling, while many and many a curious, half-anxious glance was cast toward him. He always managed to pass by before a definite alarm was given out. The slowness of his pace allowed him to drift easily into the view of the passers-by, and each time he passed out of their ken again, without intervention.
In this manner was the outlaw welcomed in the town of Lister—merely by a few casual turns of the head—until he came to the bridge that lay across the river. On the arch of the bridge sat two small boys, chattering. They looked up as the rider passed them.
“Hey, Billy! Don’t that look like Terry Shawn, though?” asked one of them excitedly.
“Don’t it look like Christmas,” responded the other disgustedly. “Would Shawn ride into Lister in broad daylight? He ain’t crazy, I guess.”
We see what we expect to see.
So the heart of young Terry Shawn lightened a little. He began to smile somewhat to himself, and very confidently he turned to the left on the far side of the bridge, and entered the alley where the gaming house of Lowrie stood. He tied his horse under a tree, then kicked the swinging door that commanded the entrance of the gaming house. He found, within, a tolerantly cool atmosphere, an odor of liquor, a lazy bartender, and half a dozen men, half asleep in a corner around a table.
Terence Shawn strode to the bar and struck upon it with the flat of his hand, so hard that it was like the report of a revolver.
“Stand up on your hind legs and come and get it,” he commanded. “Stand up and raise your thirst because I’m going to quench it, boys. Who’ll have a drink with Terry Shawn?”
Chapter Nineteen
They rose and they came swiftly in answer to that call—the drunken yegg, the pair of darkly handsome professional gamesters, the jockey, retired from the turf because of certain unsavory practices, the treasure seeker from south of the Río Grande, filled with wonderful stories but carrying no gold, the hired gunman who wandered across the West, selling his services and dividing his time between jobs with liquor and gun practice.
These men arose silently as shadows, and as silently they came about the bar, ranging before the slender, brown-faced lad with covert smiles of pleasure. They themselves were not without their reputations. They had done their share of deviltry, and they would labor again and again when the opportunity arose, but they had not achieved such a position in the eyes of the world as had Terry Shawn. He had made crime brilliant, beautiful; young boys and old men read or heard of his exploits with fast-beating hearts, and because of his gallant course, the whole profession of the lawbreaker was raised on high.
The gunman, in particular, rejoiced. He could say, someday: “My partner, Terry Shawn . . . one day when we was drinking together down in Lowrie’s, in Lister . . .”
So thinking, he glided silent as a falling leaf behind the outlaw, and the famous man stirred a little, as though touched with a spur-point of suspicion. Nevertheless, Shawn hardened himself against the danger and watched the glasses filled by a bartender as furtive, as shifty-eyed as any of the guests who stood before him.
Young Shawn beat again on the bar before him and shouted: “Who else is here? Who’s hanging around the corner, there? Come and drink, but don’t stay and listen, or you’ll be dead before you’re five minutes older.”
And not one, but three men came slowly from an inner room and paused in the doorway while they fixed their bright, small eyes on the noisy Terry, then they stepped to the bar. They accepted their drinks with the left hand. Their manner of taking their potions was by waving the glass briskly to one side and then the other, and then tossing off the whiskey with a swift movement, so that the drink was tipped down the throat without making it necessary for them to turn back their heads. How often has a man been shot through the heart while his eyes examined the ceiling and whiskey poured down his throat?
“You with the black mustache,” said Terry Shawn, “step up here and talk to me.” He repeated suddenly: “You with the black mustache and the cat eyes, step up here and talk to me, I said!”
The desperate ring in his voice had its effect. For one thing, he was in the most terrible danger, for all that evil crew faced toward him, unafraid and calculating. The little bartender leaned against the bar, touching it softly with the
tips of his delicate fingers. He, too, was thinking, and Shawn knew that one gesture of those delicate fingers would bring guns and knives at his throat.
Nevertheless, no signal was given, and the appointed man stepped slowly forward. He stood close to Terry, tall, unafraid, and out of his curious animal eyes he looked straight into the soul of Terry Shawn. He looked steadily and unflinchingly.
“I know you, don’t I?” asked Shawn.
“Maybe you do, Shawn.”
“You’re Slippery Joe of Boston, ain’t you?”
“You have me wrong,” said the other, and his pearly white teeth showed as he spoke. Such are the teeth of a cat—translucent, white, and pointed.
“I don’t think that I’ve got you wrong,” insisted Shawn. “You’re Boston Joe, the fellow that can ring up a pack three times and knock three crimps in it. Miss the first one and you’ll hit the second, and Joe can read them wherever you cut. Is that right, Joe?”
The latter raised a dainty hand—his left hand—and just touched his mustaches. But the first touch against their waxed and polished surface made him remove his hand in haste, as though he feared to spoil that triumph of the toilet.
“You’re Boston Joe, all right,” continued the garrulous outlaw. “You’re the fellow that got the tenderfoot from Manhattan and grabbed his wad, that night down in Phoenix. He shot himself the next morning. You remember?”
“I never was in Phoenix in my life,” said the other gently.
“It must have been you,” declared Terry Shawn. “You’re the fellow that rolled the tame pair of dice all night in El Paso . . . all night, on a blanket and bouncing ’em on one wall. That was the night that you took that San Antone kid . . . he cut his throat the next day. You remember, Blackie?”
Blackie shrank a little, as though the roughly found nickname offended his delicate soul to its very depths.
“I never saw you in El Paso,” he said.
“You must be mistaken,” said the outlaw.
“I’m never mistaken,” answered the other in the same delicate and chilled voice.
“Then why have you got this?” asked the outlaw.
Very swift was Blackie as he went for his gun with a gesture as fast, say, as the play of light from the face of a little hand mirror, but he was not fast enough for the speed with which Terry Shawn reached out and caught him by the wrist.
Under that iron pressure, Blackie’s fingers turned numb and he dropped on the floor a shining little automatic—small enough to be hidden in a coat pocket, in a sleeve, say—small and infinitely deadly, with a shower of seven bullets to be launched at a single touch of the finger. That weapon fell, and Terry Shawn clipped it out of mid-air, just as it was touching the boards. So an eagle stoops and catches the fish that he has made the hawk disgorge.
“I’m mistaken about you?” asked Terry Shawn cheerfully. “But then explain what I see here?” He turned the slender hand of the other over on the bar and exposed the soft and folded palm and the long, long, slender fingers. “Otherwise,” said Terry, “how did you get a hand like that? There’s no honest work in that. It could pick a watch out of a stranger’s pocket . . . better still, it could pick the right card out of a pack. Am I right?”
Blackie returned no answer. Since he had lost his gun, he showed not the slightest perturbation, and his strange eyes never left the face of the outlaw.
“And so,” said Shawn, “suppose that you and I and a couple of others sit down to a game of poker, where you can use your arts and I can use mine? What do you say, Blackie of Phoenix and El Paso?”
With this he offered back the automatic, but he offered it muzzle first, only slowly relaxing his grip on the handle. Blackie accepted the weapon in the same gingerly style in which it was offered, and now the faintest of smiles appeared on his lips—one could hardly say whether it were a smile of purest pleasure or a smile of purest malice.
“We might sit in at a little friendly game,” he said.
“And who else?” asked Shawn, stepping back and looking over the crowd again.
At that moment he noticed another form, not a whit less sinister than any of the others—it was José, the Mexican, standing in the inner doorway.
“There’s another man with a hand for cards,” he said. “José, will you make one?”
“Señor, a poor man must do as he is bidden,” said José, but his glittering eye belied the humility of his speech.
The five were made up, then, of José, Blackie, Shawn, and those two silken-handed gentlemen who had appeared with Blackie from the interior of the house. To that interior room they now returned, all five, and, as they settled around the round table, the little bartender like a shadow drifted near them.
“What’ll you drink, gents?” he asked.
“Something that you’ll drink before us,” said Terry Shawn. “Something honest, to go with an honest game of cards.”
He smiled as he said this last, and the bartender smiled in sympathetic understanding, and all were pleasant and at ease around that table except José, who sat stiffly in his chair and had grown a little pale. The lust of gold hunger showed in José, then; he was a famished man set at a board that was heaped with delicacies just to his taste, and, as the cards rattled in the first deal, a shudder ran through his body. He rubbed his hands slowly and violently together. He flexed the fingers one by one, and then he picked up his deal as though each card weighed a pound. Terry Shawn looked steadily across at him; the Mexican flashed back a single glance; they understood one another perfectly.
Indeed, there was singular harmony all around that table. Each man knew that the other four were quite capable of handling the pack with cunning crookedness, and each man trusted that his own skill would be greater than that of the others. The betting was very odd. Men laid down three of a kind without risking a penny. Again, two pair saw $500 on the table, and $500 won.
There was no conversation. Bets were laid in silence or with the quiet signal of a lifted finger, and there was no sound other than the light click, rattle, and whisper of the cards. What dealing it was. Sometimes all four cards in the air at once, spinning low to the table, hovering, descending like birds, very accurately. The three gamblers were three pillars of ice. Terry Shawn was one keenly amused, and the Mexican fierce and tense.
So hours began to drop away. Piles of money appeared, and shifted this way and that.
Then Blackie pushed back his chair. “I’ll step out and take a breath of air.”
“But you won’t come back to this game,” said José gently.
And suddenly the dealer stopped in the midst of his deal. A little waiting silence dropped upon the group.
Chapter Twenty
Now when Blackie had waited his moment he smiled again and nodded. Then he stood up and left the room. His two fellow gamblers stared after him.
“But he can’t pull out like that,” said one of them.
“I’m two hundred down to him,” said the other.
“Let’s get him back!”
They sprang up from the table. “Friends,” said Shawn, “that ends the game, you know.”
“Don’t you believe it,” said one in hasty answer as he parted, and the two disappeared through an opposite room.
The bartender laid five drinks noiselessly on the edge of the table and withdrew, but, as he was going, the long arm of José darted out and caught him. The Mexican made an eloquent motion of drinking.
“Have a glass,” insisted Terry Shawn. “Drink it up, bartender. That’s what José means.”
The little bartender fawned upon them, smiling, with eyes that wrinkled out of sight, but he shook his head and strove to slip away.
“D’you hear me?” cried Shawn. “Drink it up, man. You’re not a temperance lecturer, I suppose? Take a glass . . . here.”
“Thank you,” said the bartender, suddenly changing his mind, and he picked up a drink with a little bow.
“It won’t do,” replied Shawn. “Not that one, but this very
same glass that you set down before me. I’m going to give you the honor of having my own drink, d’you hear? So down with it.” He rose and stood above the bartender with a sinister laugh, and now the little man shrank away before him. “I’ll give you one more second before I pour it down your throat,” said Shawn.
Like a cornered rat, silent but savage, the bartender shook a knife from his sleeve and drove it straight at the breast of Shawn, but his aim was spoiled by a glassful of burning liquor that was cast into his eyes. Then knuckles of steel rapped him on the jaw and he toppled headlong to the floor and lay still.
“Poison, José,” said Shawn. “What a fine gang they are. Poison to turn the trick . . . if they couldn’t handle the cards well enough.”
José was long since on his feet, a heavy, old-fashioned Colt in his hand. “It is time to leave,” he said.
“And how, José?”
“By the door, señor, of course.”
“Well, try that way.”
José stepped to the first door; the heavy click of the lock against the bolt answered the pressure of his hand. He tried each of the other two doors in turn, and each was similarly secured.
There was no time for comment; the voice of a man beyond the last of the doors now came to them like a purr.
“Terry Shawn.”
“There’s my good friend Blackie on the far side of that door,” said Shawn. “We’d better have a little conversation with him. Hello, Blackie. Do you want to get back inside?”
Blackie laughed sweetly. “I’m worried about you, Shawn,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Shawn. “That’s real friendly.”
“A gunman,” continued Blackie, “and the crookedest dealer that ever took a poker deck in the palm of his hand . . . and yet you walk into a trap like this, Shawn. I’m really cut up about it. I see that even the cleverest fellows have their weak sides.”