by Max Brand
“Aw, forget it, Hack,” said the outlaw in disgust. “He wouldn’t play the fool like that over any girl!”
“Wouldn’t he? You don’t know him,” said Hack earnestly. “Makin’ the girls cock-eyed is a sort of a profession with Jim, and he’s always practicing. What chance, I ask you, would a gent like me or you have against a fellow like Berry? None whatever. He can relieve a man of his wife or his best girl so easy that the gent don’t know what’s happened until he’s left alone.”
This was a long speech, even for Hack, but it was a subject on which, apparently, he felt deeply.
“He’s kept you out of double harness, maybe?” suggested Shawn curiously.
“Oh, well,” said Hack Thomas, rather red of face, “let him go. What difference does it make what he’s done? Only, kid, you look after him, now. He’s making a dead set at her. I’ve given you a fair warning.”
He said it in such a pointblank manner that Terry Shawn set his teeth and lengthened his stride as he hurried up the valley. Hack Thomas made no effort to follow, but, contenting himself with falling to the rear, he smiled and chuckled softly to himself. He even rubbed his hands and laughed until his shoulders shook.
“Now, Jimmy,” he said aloud, but to himself. “Now, Jimmy, you watch yourself pretty careful, old feller.”
Jimmy had no apparent thought of watching over himself, however. When they reached the shack, he set about making himself busy, preparing for the girl a basin of hot water for washing, to brace her after her long journey. And he piled the pine boughs of two beds one on top of the other and heaped it deep with soft skins so that she could lie down and rest.
It made no difference that she declined the invitation, but sat on the edge of the bed, her hands locked around her knees, perfectly cheerful and gay and chatty, for it seemed to be fixed in the mind of Jim Berry that she was a languishing and exhausted creature who must be handled as wilting flowers are handled.
“I’m not going to fade, Jim,” she said, “until time does it to me. Get away and take care of yourself . . . but I don’t mind a bit of coffee, if you’ve got some handy.”
He looked on her and sadly shook his head, then he turned with a sigh.
“You look kind of weak yourself, Jim,” she said.
“Letting you come here . . . I ought not to say anything,” said Berry, “but I can’t help coming out with it. What was Shawn thinking of?”
“Nothing. He didn’t know that I was coming.”
“He didn’t?” Mr. Berry laughed gently and wisely.
“Did he think that I’d really trail along after him?” cried the girl, flushed with instant pride and anger. “Did he expect me to come trailing after him?”
“I’m not saying anything,” said Berry, with a most eloquent shrug of the shoulders. “Only . . .” He bit his lips, as though to keep something back.
“I’ve got to know!” cried Kitty.
“How can I talk?” he asked in obvious distress.
“He did think that I’d come then! Oh!” she cried, and covered her crimsoned face.
He answered obliquely, speaking as a strong man should to a woman in distress, with a tenderly deepened voice. “Don’t you worry none. I’m goin’ to see you through this, Kitty. I’m goin’ to take charge of things. Don’t you worry. You just lay back and rest a while.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Plainly the weather was changing. The strong wind had fallen away, and the last remnant of cloud mantle had been snatched from the head and shoulders of old Mount Shannon. When sunset came, the colors streamed up all across the sky, tinting it deeply at the horizon, and blending with a mysterious delicacy in the zenith. For the moment, there was no atmospheric depth, and the sky looked like a vast Chinese bowl of porcelain, polished, and with the stark blackness of the mountains and their fringings of magnificent trees stamped against a softer background.
It was below freezing point. There was no fireplace or hearth inside the shack, for Shannon used fire for cookery alone. Even in midwinter, he sat in his house wrapped heavily with skins, but with no heat in the place—indeed, he was rarely inside, except to clean and stretch skins, and to sleep.
However, this manner of living did not please Jim Berry, because, he said, one could not expose a delicately nurtured girl like Kitty Bowen to the evil damp and cold of that cabin. He would not have it.
“Stuff!” said Kitty. “I’m big and strong, and cold doesn’t bother me.”
However, he insisted, and, by his direction and chiefly by his work, a great bonfire was built close to the door of the house, so that a flood of heat and brightness entered every part of the shack. Kitty had protested once; afterward, she luxuriated in the warmth and in the comfort.
Shannon came home in the midst of the preparations for dinner. Hack Thomas, that same morning, had shot a fat buck and brought in the carcass on his mighty shoulders. That venison had been roasted in the Dutch oven, and, when the iron lids were removed, through the still air stole a pervading fragrance, richer, to their eager nostrils, than the fragrance of roses, more delightful than the pure odor of the pines.
Into that happy scene, at that lucky moment, came Shannon. He greeted them solemnly, with raised hand and a charming smile. Then he saw the girl, and his smile went out. He scanned the group hastily, and suddenly pointed to Jim Berry with a frown. It was perfectly clear that he objected to the girl’s presence. Berry merely shrugged his shoulders and pointed in turn to Terry Shawn. Under the sparkling, angry eyes of this hermit, Shawn was subdued and troubled.
“Look here, Shannon,” he said. “I want to tell you how it is. You see, Miss Bowen, yonder . . .” He broke off then. “What’s the use?” he said. “He can’t understand.”
Shannon, however, seemed to master his first emotion of annoyance. He approached the girl and raised his hat as he bowed before her, so that it seemed, for a moment, that words must come from the speaking courtesy of his expression. Then he went on into the horse shed, the beautiful chestnut following at his heels, and dancing and shying away from the proximity of the others.
Kitty, tears in her eyes, faced the others. “Isn’t there some way of telling him who I am?” she asked.
“He doesn’t blame you for coming,” said Terry Shawn. “He heaps it all on me, thanks to Jim.”
He turned to Jim Berry with a cold glance that bored into the eyes of Berry and left his brain icy and numb with a sudden fear. However, he shook off that unpleasant feeling and bent his attention upon the girl. He had given her a comfortable place to sit near the oven. He had insisted in wrapping a goatskin around her feet for warmth, and by that means had rendered her helpless, so that she was forced to accept his other ministrations. Restlessly and eagerly he fetched and carried for her—coffee, roasted meat, a tin plate, a knife, a bit of clean-whittled birch bark for a fork or spoon as occasion should demand, and, while he tended on her, he kept up a cheerful and gentle current of talk.
Terry Shawn, on the obscure verge of the circle, spoke not a word, but the keen eye of Hack Thomas found him out, and there was malice in that eye. He went to him and touched his shoulder.
“Cheer up, kid,” he whispered. “You’d better buck up and take a hand. Girls hate a dummy, you know.”
“Oh, don’t bother me,” answered Terry Shawn, and sank into his black silence once more. He was growing more and more ugly, and his lower jaw was thrust out menacingly.
When Shannon came for dinner, way was made for him instantly, but the portion he took was small. He ate rapidly, and the minute he had finished he was gone again, toward the horse shed.
“He doesn’t like it,” said the girl unhappily. “He doesn’t like having me here. I don’t know what to do.”
She looked at Shawn, whose eyes were on the ground, then she turned to Berry. “What shall I do, Jim?” she asked.
“I’ll write out a note for him,” said Jim. “Don’t you worry none.”
He was as good as his word, and, retiring away from
the others, he scratched on the back of an envelope:
Don’t make a mistake. Kitty Bowen is a fine girl. It’s Shawn’s fault. He got her to come up here.
Then he went to find the master of the house and discovered him only by chance, concealed in a little clump of shrubbery near the rear corner of the house. The man of the mountain was on his knees, his face raised, absorbed in prayer, and, for a moment, even the keen mind of Jim Berry was impressed—almost as forcefully as it had been by the dangerous glance of Terry Shawn, a little before. For it seemed as though there were some strong connection between this silent hermit and the bright, cold faces of the stars above him.
At length, he touched the shoulder of old Shannon, and, when the latter rose stiffly, he scratched a match so that the old man could read what was written.
Shannon read, and then slowly raised his eyes and looked fully into the face, into the very soul of the other. There was neither accusation nor doubt in that look, but rather a profound inquiry, and for some reason Jim Berry was unable to endure the question.
With the last flame of the match, he touched the envelope, and saw it burst into fire, curl in the heat, blacken, and fall to the ground a wisp of carbon, instantly dissolved by the first touch of wind.
He went back to the fire, then, and straightway set to work preparing the sleeping place of the girl for the night. He set up, with skin stretchers and cured pelts, a little screen in a corner of the shack, and inside this compartment he built up a comfortable pile of the softest pine boughs, overlaid with more pelts.
“You’re played out,” he said to the girl. “You’d better turn in and have a long sleep. Come along, and I’ll fix up a light for you.”
He led the way into the shack and left Hack Thomas with the outlaw, alone.
“You been watching?” asked Hack Thomas with the same quiet malice. “See how he’s taken her in hand? Oh, he’s smooth and he’s deep.”
Terrence Shawn made no reply; he was sunk in a deep and black reflection, and in his turn he went into the shack and rolled into his bed, while Jim Berry came out to sit by the fire and his friend, Hack.
They smoked in quiet, for a time.
“When’d you get to know her so well?” asked Thomas at last.
“I used to work on their place,” answered Jim Berry. “Used to ride Bowen’s range, and I taught the girl how to handle a horse. She had the nerve of a regular bronc’ peeler, and a natural seat, and a firm pair of hands . . . so we got on. She was only a little kid, then, with a whip of pigtail hangin’ down her back.”
“She’s come on, since then,” suggested Hack Thomas.
“She’s come on,” agreed the ladies’ man.
“Tell me something,” said Hack Thomas, pretending to yawn. “You ever hear from Lulu any more?”
“Who?” asked Berry, puzzled.
“Lu Perkins.”
“Oh, your old girl?”
“Maybe you could call her that,” admitted Hack with carefully studied indifference.
“I haven’t heard from her for a year,” said Jim Berry. “Got tired of writing all the time. That girl, she’d write you a book . . . took an hour to read one of her letters. I chucked it . . . I got tired.”
Hack Thomas was silent for a moment, then he murmured: “You always get tired, kid. You always chuck them, pretty quick.”
“A man’s got to have variety,” remarked Jim Berry. “Can’t live on venison for a year . . . can’t live on ice cream, either. I’m goin’ to turn in.”
“Wait a minute,” said Hack. “I just wanted to ask you . . . you been watching the kid?”
“Kitty?”
“Shawn, I mean.”
“What about him?”
“He’s looking pretty black. If I were you, I’d keep my gun loose in the holster.” advised Hack.
Jim spoke savagely: “I’ve let him come over me once, and I don’t aim to let him try anything again. If he’s wanting that girl, let him keep her. That’s all I’ve got to say. Let him keep her, if he can. But if he wants another kind of trouble, I’m ready for him, night or day, with a knife or a gun or any way that he says.”
“That’s the way,” said Hack Thomas dryly. “Talk right up, Jimmy. Don’t you back up a step till you back right into your grave.”
Jim Berry shrugged his shoulders, grunted, and retreated toward his sleeping quarters.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Hack Thomas had somewhat the nature of a politician. A politician, we take it, is one who controls, without seeming to have the upper hand. A politician works from the inside—by means of a smile he does more than by means of a blow. So it was with Hack Thomas.
He never had forgotten pretty Lu and the days when he had hoped to make her his wife. She was all that he had hoped for and wanted, and Jim Berry had taken her away. For a month, Hack had alternated between grief and rage, wondering whether or not he should go to Berry, gun in hand, and demand satisfaction, but he and Berry had been partners in crime for many years, and a little delay merely blunted the edge of his purpose, but never removed his malice.
That anger that is unexpressed enters the blood. At least, so it did with Hack Thomas, and he had waited through many a long month for the chance to break even with his companion. Now fortune had placed the chance in his hands. If he had been asked directly whether or not he wished the death of Terry Shawn or of Jim Berry, beyond a doubt he would have answered with horror that he desired neither. He was merely giving a certain shape and direction to events that would take care of themselves.
Bitterness poisoned the heart of Hack Thomas; he wanted the whip to be laid upon the back of Jim Berry, wanted to see him sick and broken, after which he dimly envisioned himself healing the wounds and caring for the stricken man. Suppose that the blow was one which could not be healed? Of that, he refused to think, but permitted himself to look only as far as the prospect proved agreeable.
The next morning saw the indefatigable Jim Berry again at work to please and care for Kitty Bowen, while Shannon went off hunting, and Hack lingered around the cabin with no care on his hands except to watch young Terry Shawn earnestly at work with the chestnut. It seemed to Hack Thomas that the youth was making little enough progress, but the patience of Shawn seemed limitless.
Many small steps at last make a mile, and Shawn worked over Sky Pilot with endless endurance. He had reached a point, now, where Sky Pilot accepted him as a necessary part of the landscape, even if not a pleasant one. He would graze to the very feet of Terry Shawn; he would take grain, after some snorting and precautionary starts and stampings, from the very hand of the gunfighter. It seemed almost as if Sky Pilot realized there was some sort of game that he and this man were playing together. At least, he saw no harm in taking delicious tidbits from this fellow, nor even in allowing his smooth back to be stroked, while he reached for a tuft of seed grass.
Many a wise old mustang, a hardened veteran of the range, might have told him that familiarity with man is apt to bring loss of independence, and that, by cunning kindness, man breaks the spirit, as well as by the use of whip, and spur, and jaw-breaking curb, but there was no such warning for Sky Pilot.
He had in mind only one sort of man-fashioned danger, and that was the danger of spur and quirt and gripping cinches. So now he allowed this former enemy, this smooth-voiced youngster, to while away the time with him, wandering idly about with him over the rich grass of the meadow, silently and patiently.
Jim Berry and the girl disappeared up the stream, finally, on a fishing excursion. They returned just before noon, their voices ringing out in gay laughter, and, as Berry went off to cut fresh evergreen boughs and resinous wood for the fire, Shawn came into the shack and met the girl.
She was cleaning the fish and preparing them for cooking, and Shawn stood over her and looked down with a melancholy interest on the flying, supple hands. Hack Thomas arose and wandered away toward the trees, perhaps to help Jim Berry, perhaps to mask his contented grin.
“Be useful, Terry,” said the girl. “Bring me a bucket of water.”
“Kitty,” he said.
“Hurry,” she said impatiently.
“Kitty,” he repeated pleadingly, and she looked up at him.
“Now what’s up? Have you got a toothache, Terry? You’ve been glooming around long enough.”
He hooked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Berry. “I want to talk to you about Berry,” he said.
“Go on, then.”
“How long have you known him?”
“About twenty times as long as I’ve known you,” she said promptly. “Why?”
“I only wanted to say that Berry has got a name, do you understand?”
She stood up. “A name for what?”
“For being a lady-killer. He’s caused a lot of unhappiness.”
She paused, stared, and then spoke sharply: “Terry Shawn, I’m surprised!”
“Ask anybody,” said Shawn. “Everybody knows.”
“To come here like this,” she said, “and talk behind the back of a man.”
His teeth came together with a sharp click.
“If you wanted to say something about him, why not talk right out in front of him?” she demanded.
“I’m talking to you,” said Terry Shawn, “because I have a right to talk. I don’t want to see you losing your head over that man.”
“Losing my head!” she cried. “How dare you talk to me like that?”
“You’ve made up your mind to get mad,” said Shawn sullenly. “There’s no use in my saying anything more.”
“There’s a lot of use,” she cried, growing more and more angry. “You’ve accused poor Jim Berry when his back was turned, just because he was polite. You might learn something from him, Terence Shawn!”