Peyton

by Max Brand

  “Is it worthwhile getting through the fences?” asked Jerry.

  “Dear, innocent Jerry Peyton,” the consul remarked. “Is it worth your while? Let me tell you a few facts. There are exactly three hundred and thirteen thousand acres of workable land in Saint Hilaire . . . and the land that can be worked is so rich that all you have to do is sit and smile at it to make things grow. Matter of fact, the hard work is only to make the right things grow. If you can beat the weeds, you have a fortune by the throat. Well, this land is cut up about as follows. A hundred and thirteen thousand acres are held by five thousand landowners, about twenty acres to a shot, and they’re all prosperous little farms, at that. Which gives you an idea what the land will do. Then there’s another class of farmers . . . about fifty altogether, and among them they own the rest of the three hundred thousand acres. You figure that out for yourself. Fifty into two hundred thousand is four thousand acres apiece.” As he said this, he covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head sadly. “Four thousand acres breaking their hearts growing stuff for you while you sit back and curse the foreman for not doubling the profits so you can have two steam yachts instead of one.”

  A sort of horror fell upon the face of the consul. He went on: “But that’s not all, dear friend. Tarry a while. Of the fifty, forty of ’em have a hundred thousand of the acreage. The other hundred thousand are divided among ten grand moguls, ten little princelets with ten thousand acres apiece.”

  “What do they raise on this land?” asked Jerry.

  “Anything they think of planting. Coffee, sugar, tobacco . . . God knows what all . . . and the only things they don’t grow are the things they’ve forgotten to plant. Those ten little kings own the rest of the island. They work together in a clique. They control the forty because they control not only the market but the social affairs of the island. And through controlling the forty they control everything. Suppose I should offend one of the ten? In twenty-four hours wheels would begin to spin in Washington . . . twenty-four hours after that a nasty little note would be on its way to me . . . or maybe a cablegram.”

  “Speed burners, eh?” Jerry interjected.

  “Money’s no object, of course. By degrees they’re eating up the forty smaller fellows, and they’re edging out and taking in the little holdings of the five thousand. Give them a few more years and they’ll have the whole island under their thumbs.”

  “And the fifty are the poker trees?” Jerry asked, leaning back in his chair and caressing his lean fingers, never thickened by harder labor than the swinging of a quirt.

  “With fences,” the consul added, and he looked at Jerry with attention.

  “I wonder,” said Jerry, “if you know the names of the fifty?”

  “I might be able to get a list,” the consul replied without enthusiasm. He drummed his fat fingertips against the top of the table. “In a way,” he continued, “anyone who acted as a sign post and pointed me on in my journey would have to be considered in. Peyton, I see that you are a fellow of intelligence. This is a devil of a job, and I don’t get many asides.”

  The cowpuncher waved his hand.

  “Frankly,” the consul continued, “have you enough money to put up a front that will carry you through the fences?”

  The fingers of Jerry wandered beneath his coat and touched the butt of his .45. “Between you and me,” he said, “the best thing I have is a friend who’ll back me for all that’s in him.”

  “He’ll plunge with you?”

  “To the limit.”

  “He’s a strong one?”

  “I’ve never been able to faze him,” said Jerry.

  The consul drew out a fountain pen and an envelope and began to write on the back of it.

  “Names?” said Jerry.

  “Trees,” said the consul.

  “Suppose you begin with the top of the gang and work down . . . just offhand . . . I like to pick things by the sound of ’em.”

  “Sure. Well, there’s the de Remi family. Old French crowd and the cream of social doings in the island. Then I suppose you could bunch in order the Franklins, the Ramseys, the Parkhursts, the Van Huytens, and the Da Costas. They’re all old stuff in Saint Hilaire. There’s a newer set, too, that figures in with the old gang . . . the Quests, the Gentreys, the Langleys, and the Pattraisons. That’s the list of the upper ten. They’re the Five Hundred of this joint, plus the guardian angels, and the ruling hand. They’re the ones I have to kowtow to”—his face darkened—“and they’re the ones who pat me on the back and send along the good word . . . when they think to do it. I make myself handy for them . . . sort of errand boy, you know, between them and Washington . . . and now and then they ask me up to tea and tell me to drop in any time. You know?”

  Jerry had never been to a tea, but he had learned, among other things in his brief and rather crowded life, that most valuable of all conversational assets, the ability to use a timely silence. He said not a word, and the consul felt that he was wholly comprehended.

  “Suppose you begin at the bottom of the list,” said Jerry. “This Pattraison outfit?”

  “They and the Quests and the Gentreys and the Langleys,” said the author, “are a new fry on the island. Of course they’re big guns compared with the small landowners, but, after all, the Pattraisons aren’t the last word. You know? Old Henry Pattraison is a card. He was a brewer, they say, before he sank a big wallop of an investment in Saint Hilaire . . . there’s a sort of custom here of forgetting the past of a family and judging it purely by its Saint Hilaire record, but a brewer was a bit strong even for Saint Hilaire’s customs. They frowned him down, for a while . . . but after a while they forgot about his past and remembered that he had one of the best estates in the island and that eventually his heirs would be among the social leaders. Couldn’t keep ’em from it. So they took in Mister Pattraison. Also, he’s a hearty old soul, clean as a whistle and game to the core.”

  “That sounds all right to me,” said Jerry. “Now the Langleys.”

  “I put them down in the lower flight because they’re newcomers like the Pattraisons,” the consul went on. “As a matter of fact, Langley himself was in bad odor for a time. As I said before, people are judged by what they do in Saint Hilaire, not by what they did before. Nobody knew what Langley was before he came here, but he pulled a bad one before he’d been long in the island. He got a small holding in the hills . . . all the central part of Saint Hilaire is hilly, you know . . . and then before the people knew it he had grabbed almost all of Guzman’s property, and today old Don Manuel has just a clump of trees and a smile to live on. It’s a long story . . . the one they tell about the way Langley cut in on Don Manuel Guzman. Anyway, he got the land, and the de Remi crowd wouldn’t receive him for a long time afterward.

  “Then Patricia came out. You know the way a girl does? One year she’s a skinny kid, mostly legs and elbows . . . the next time you see her she’s in blossom and knocks your eye out with a full-grown woman’s smile. Well, Patricia bloomed like that and she’s an extra fine flower. Saint Hilaire took one look at her, and then fell all over itself being nice to the whole family. James Langley wasn’t overwhelmed. Not by a long distance. He’s a frosty sort of chap, anyway . . . never speak to him, but I come within an ace of calling him Sir James, you see? Well, he saw that Patricia was the biggest social power in Saint Hilaire. He had the young men of the island in the palm of his hand. No matter what their parents wanted to do, their sons were sure to break away and come to the girl . . . and she’s a beauty, man. So Langley sat back and watched and let the first lot of ’em bark their knuckles against his doors without opening to them. Finally he let them in one by one, and he let them in in such a manner that today he’s the social dictator of Saint Hilaire. I suppose old Missus de Remi . . . Madame, they call her . . . runs him close when it comes to a pinch, but, all in all, Langley is the king. Missus Langley isn’t a forward sort, but her husband has the big ace in Patricia and she can be played every day. Nobody h
as a successful party unless she’s there . . . nobody thinks the landscape is complete unless her face is in the offing. You see? The de Remi crowd itself is helpless against a girl like that. They may regain part of their prestige after she’s married, but, if her father uses his head and marries her off to one of the first-flight families, he’ll still be the dictator.”

  “It looks as if the Langley crowd would be a good one to get by the heel,” said Jerry carelessly.

  “They would well enough, but look sharp there. Langley is a fox. And there’s only one word in that house . . . James Langley!”

  “To the devil with him, then,” Jerry said coldly. “Let’s go on to the next best bet.”

  XV

  Before night, Jerry had a map of the island; before he went to bed he had studied all the main features, and, above all, he knew every approach to the house of James P. Langley. His plan, like the plans of most intelligent men, was eminently simple. He would go straight over the hills, enter the plantation of James Langley, shoot his man, and come straight back to the harbor. There he would hire one of the big launches that he had seen gliding about the harbor and go for the mainland—or for one of the larger islands to the east where there was room for an able-bodied man to hide. With all this arranged in his mind, he undressed, bathed, and retired for a perfectly sound sleep.

  In the morning he was awakened by a light weight striking his chest. He sat up and saw a bright-colored bird sitting on the foot of the bed, looking at him without alarm. It was only a sugar bird, on its eternal quest for insects, but Jerry could not know this, and to him there was something preternatural in the wisdom of the little head tucked to one side and the eyes that glittered at him without fear.

  “If you’ve come to advise me, partner,” said Jerry to the bird, “fire away.”

  The bird flew to the windowsill and looked back at him.

  “If it’s action you want,” said Jerry, getting out of bed, “I’m all set.” And when the bird at once darted through the window into the open air outside, a thrill went through Jerry. He felt that the omen was good, and at once he began to sing. He was singing again when he left the little shabby hotel after a breakfast of strange fruits and abominable coffee, and hired a horse for the day. That a man should go with music in his heart to kill another may appear unforgivably callous, but, in Jerry’s code, it was established so firmly that an insult to his dead father must be avenged with death, that to shrink from it would have been to him what a denial of God is to most men. He accepted a stern necessity, and, although the horse was saddled with a pad that was a novel form of equitation to the cowpuncher, and, although the revolver irked him beneath the rim of his trousers, yet he sang as he rode because he was nearing the end of his quest.

  Jerry was so happy, now, that he noted only the fine road before him, and the glossy brilliance of the tropical foliage on either side of him. Sometimes the sun set a whole field of it flashing so that he was almost blinded, but, aside from such times, or when a strange new scent struck him, Jerry paid as little heed to the country through which he rode as if it had been the old familiar way from the ranch to Sloan.

  So he came to a great stone fence that ran out of sight on either side, and straight before him was the end of the road, blocked by an iron gate of towering size. On a pillar beside the gate these words were deeply carved in the stone: Langley Manor. And it struck Jerry with a sense of fatal significance that the end of his trail should be the end of a road as well. A Negro boy came out and opened the gate unquestioningly to the white man; Jerry tossed him a quarter and went through onto a winding gravel way that wove leisurely from side to side, fenced with enormous palm trees. Then he saw before him a house with a mighty façade, and twelve pillars of bright stone going up the height of two stories, in the center, about the portico. There were other columns, on the wing entrance. That was where vehicles drove up, he saw. And for a single instant Jerry wondered if he had not come all this distance on a wild-goose chase—for how could the owner of this great estate possibly be the hold-up artist who had taken his father’s gun in malice, some three months before?

  Imagination rarely took a violent hold upon Jerry’s mind, however. Presently he gave his horse to another Negro boy—there seemed a limitless stock of them moving about—and spoke to a formidable porter at the front door—a white man, who felt the dignity of his position. He made way immediately for Jerry and took his hat. Then he asked for the name.

  “Tell Mister Langley,” said Jerry, “that I wish to surprise him. When he sees me, he’ll understand why I don’t want to be announced.” He continued, smiling broadly upon the other: “Don’t even describe me to him.” Then, chuckling openly: “In fact, it would spoil the whole business if you tell him what I look like.”

  The guardian of the door bowed as one who disdained such boyishness, and, having bowed Jerry through the door into the largest room Jerry had ever seen, he disappeared. The cowpuncher made sure that he was alone in the room—it required a full moment to sweep the big floor space and be certain—and then he stepped to the curtain through which the servant had gone. Behind the edge of it he saw the other going unhurriedly up the stairs. And such stairs! They wound out of the level of the reception hall with the dignity of a swerving river. They invited one’s eye up, slowly, and, when the glance had traveled for a distance up the stairway, it was easier to look up to the ceiling of the reception hall and appreciate the loftiness of that apartment. As for the room in which he then stood, Jerry now looked about him only long enough to locate a hidden place from which he could command the doorway unseen. There were three that answered the purpose nicely. He chose a great tapestry that a draft from the open window was already furling back at one side. Here he could stand and see everything that passed through the door, yet he would be perfectly concealed. He would call out the name of Langley as soon as the latter entered, step out as he did so, and, when the master of the house turned, he would give him time to go for his gun first. So much Jerry decided as he stood behind the tapestry. Then he began to listen to the silence of the house.

  It was so intense that a foolish fancy came to him that his approach had been noted, the servants and the master warned, and now by scores they were softly creeping up to surround the room in which he stood. Yet, a moment later, he realized that it was only the size of the place and the thickness of the walls that cut off the sounds of kitchen life and housecleaning activities which to Jerry were inseparable from the conception of such a dwelling. He thought, now, of the immense importance of the life that he was about to end. It was the power that had built the wall against which he leaned; it was the hand that hung the tapestry before him; it was the will that ordered this very silence. If that life were taken, the whole fabric would crumble. That big domestic who had gone with such leisurely dignity up the stairs, how he would leap as he heard the shot that killed James Langley. What uproar would rush into this room, and after that a quiet, with only one or two women near the dead body

  Such thoughts as these unnerve a man. Jerry stopped himself and reversed the direction of his mind. He recalled again how he had pleaded with the robber not to take The Voice of La Paloma; he saw again Hank Peyton making the weapon a death gift to him. And just as his mind had reached that flinty hardness, there was a soft step. He looked, and saw a middle-aged man with black hair and a pair of shiny black eyes standing in the door of the apartment, looking about with a frown of bewilderment. Beyond a shadow of a doubt this was the man. He raised a hand to his thick mustache, and the hand was of womanish slenderness and pallor.

  “Langley!” called Jerry, and slipped out from behind the tapestry.

  His own hand was hanging in mid-air, ready for the lightning reach for his gun, but the master of the house turned without haste and faced him.

  “Get out your gun,” said Jerry, keeping his voice soft. “I’m here for you.”

  The hand of the other stirred, and Jerry’s leaped to the butt of his weapon—and then he saw the
hand keep on rising until it was stroking the square, rather fat chin. He’ll deny that he knows me, Jerry thought to himself.

  At that moment the master of the house remarked: “So it took you three months to get here, eh?”

  “Look,” said Jerry, and he glided a step closer, “I’m giving you a square break. You’ve got a gun on you. Get it out. You can make your move first . . . I’ll allow you that much.”

  “Tut, tut,” the other replied. “Three months of travel and still hot for more road work. My dear boy, you’re a perfect demon when it comes to energy.”

  “I’ll count three,” said Jerry. “I know you’ve got a gun, and I’m going to make you use it. When I say ‘three,’ if you don’t draw, I’m going to shoot you down like a hound. You’ve got nothing else coming to you.”

  XVI

  He counted slowly, and the white hand merely moved from the chin to the mustache. The bluff did not work. It did not even begin to work.

  “No one looking on at this scene,” Langley said, “would ever be able to believe that you’re the son of old Hank Peyton. I’ll tell you what, Jerry . . . men aren’t what they used to be. You haven’t the nerve to shoot a man in cold blood.”

  Jerry had seen many cool men in his day—he was fairly cool-headed himself—but he looked on Langley, now, as he might a superhuman creature.

  “We’ll go into the little room behind you,” said Langley. He came to the door and waved Jerry in ahead of him.

  “Thanks,” said Jerry. “You go first.”

  The host smiled and went straight to a chair. “Sit down,” he said, waving to another.

  “I’m easier standing,” said Jerry.

  “Yes, it does make it clumsy to get out a gun . . . sitting down . . . unless you know the trick,” he observed tauntingly.

  Jerry flushed, and, accepting the challenge, he drew the chair squarely before Langley, and with its back to the wall. He sat down on the very edge of it.