by Max Brand
Her hand froze on the edge of the counter. Before her eyes, the lighted lamp became a long swirl of yellow flame. When her sight cleared again, she found that Jack Hopper was standing back a little from the counter, saying slowly: “Well, Sue, I guess I’ll change my mind about having another piece. Let it go.” He turned his back and went to the stove, and there he stood with his hands spread out to the blaze. Why had he not cried out? Because he thought that she had some profound reason for wishing to shelter the fugitive—and because Jack Hopper loved her.
The rest gave her a sentimental kindness, but Jack was different. He was no foolish boy, but a grown and hardened man, with a man’s firmness, a man’s singleness of thought and purpose. For two years he had been campaigning quietly to win her. And in turn, if she did not love him, she respected him as a rock of strength and of honesty. What passed in his mind now as he turned from the counter and stood by the stove?
The sheriff followed him with some question. How calamities rain one upon the other. His foot slipped; he looked down with a cry: “Blood, by the heavens! There’s blood on the floor!” Then: “How did this stuff come here, Sue?”
They turned to her, but none with eyes so piercingly intent as those of Jack Hopper. In that crisis she felt herself perfectly calm. There was a stir beside her. She saw from the corner of her eye how Billy Angel was propping himself feebly upon one elbow. He was listening, too.
“One of the brakies off of Three Seventeen was whittling wood by the stove,” she said. “He cut his finger.”
“Where’s the shavings, then?” snapped out the sheriff, frowning at her.
She saw the flush run up the face of Jack Hopper—saw him frown in a belligerent manner at the sheriff.
“He said it would dry up and stop bleeding,” Sue said. “He sat there like a fool, letting it drip on my floor until I made him stop.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. I swept up the shavings. But I hadn’t time to clean up that mess.”
The sheriff nodded. “I’ll tell you, fellows,” he said to his companions, “I figgered for a minute that maybe that bullet of mine had nicked Billy Angel. He twisted around like it might’ve stung him a mite. Have you heard about the murder, Sue?”
“I don’t want to hear,” she said. “These horror stories put my nerves on edge.”
“Since when?” The sheriff chuckled. “Well, Sue, you’re a queer one. You’ve always been hunting for all the shooting stories. This was a bad case. Young Charlie Ormond . . . the son of that rich Ormond . . . he was stabbed in the back by his cousin . . . this Billy Angel. A darned black case, I’d say. Angel was taken in by old Ormond and raised by him the same as Charlie.”
She gaped at that recital of horror. “Are you sure he did it, Tom?”
“Wasn’t he seen? Oh, there ain’t any doubt of it. And he ran for it. An honest man always takes the chance of bein’ arrested. This here Billy Angel, he turned and cut for it like a streak.” He said to his companions: “Rustle around, boys. See if you can figger it out so’s you get the best hosses around the town and have ’em ready by the mornin’. Surefooted ones are what you’ll want after this snow. It’s gonna be sloppy work tomorrow if the wind pulls around to the south ag’in.”
They went out, calling back to her as they passed through the door, each with some foolish thing to add to what the others said. But she waved to them all with the same fixed, meaningless smile. Then she looked down at Billy Angel.
He was sitting up with his back against the wall. Even while they were calling their farewells to her, he was calmly straightening the bandage on his arm where the bleeding had ceased entirely. Now he looked up calmly at her.
“Well?” she said, feeling that her heart had turned to iron in her breast.
“You could have saved the sheriff a pile of work by pointing behind the counter.”
She answered coldly: “They never do things that way in my family. If the dogs were after it . . . I wouldn’t show even a rat to ’em.”
He watched her quietly. “I understand,” he said.
III
HOPPER LEARNS HER SECRET
She would have given a great deal to have recalled that last speech of hers in the face of this perfect poise of the fugitive. For the steadiness with which his eyes held upon her seemed to tell her that, no matter what the sheriff had said, and no matter what the man himself confessed, he never could have been guilty of that dastardly crime of which he was accused. Moreover, there was a sense of a scornful curiosity with which he examined her, and seemed, behind those bright black eyes of his, to be weighing her. And finding her, no doubt, wanting.
Still, she could not unbend at once, and she was full of the revolt that had recently swept over her. There was iron in her voice when she said: “Can you walk?”
“I figger that I can,” he said. “Anyway, I aim to try.” He laid hold upon the supporting post that held up the counter, and, pulling with the one hand and thrusting himself up with the other, he managed to sway to his knees. There he paused. She could hear his panting, and his breast worked with the cost of the labor. There came to her a disgusting suspicion that he was overdoing the fatigue and acting a part for the sake of imposing upon her. She did not stir to help him. Now he strove again, and came to his feet by degrees, and stood with his big hand spread on the counter, leaning over it, breathing hard.
There was no sham here. She could see a tremor in those large hands, and that was proof enough. No acting could counterfeit the reality so perfectly. Once again there was a sudden and hot melting of the girl’s heart.
“Billy Angel,” she said fiercely, “did you do it? Did you really do it?”
Even in that moment of near collapse, his caustic humor did not desert him. “Are you aimin’ to believe what I say?” he asked her.
“I shall believe it.”
“Why, then, sure I didn’t.” He grinned at her again, as though part in mockery and part asking her to step inside a more intimate understanding of this affair. There was no way in which she could come close to him. Still he thrust her away to arm’s length and seemed to laugh at her attempts to know him and the truth about him. Something about that grim independence made her admire him; something about it made her fear him. He seemed capable of anything, of facing one hundred men with guns in their hands—or, indeed, of stabbing one helpless man in the back by stealth. She would have paid down without an afterthought the treasures of a Crœsus to have known the truth. She would have paid down that much to win from him one serious, open, frank-hearted answer.
“You didn’t do it,” she said. “Well, God knows, I hope you didn’t. Now I got to get you upstairs where I can have a look at that wound.”
He pointed up and over his shoulder. “Up to your room?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head with a half-scornful, half-mirthful smile. “I’ll be off.”
“You’ll freeze to death in an hour. Look at the windows.”
They were clouded with thick white, quite opaque.
“Sue,” he said, “I dunno but what you’re an ace-high trump, but when it comes to hidin’ in your room . . .” His smile disappeared; a wild and vacant look crossed his face, and he reeled, holding tight to the edge of the counter while his knees sagged. Only a giant effort of the will had kept him erect, she could see. She caught at him as she had done before, passing his unwounded arm over her shoulder, taking him around the triple-corded muscles of the waist with her free arm.
“Come along,” she commanded, and dragged him toward the door that led to the upstairs room.
Then his bravado deserted him. “Sue,” he said, “for heaven’s sake, lemme go. I don’t deserve the good treatment a dog . . .”
“I’m doin’ no more for you than I would for a hurt dog.”
“Lemme rest one minute more,” he gasped out, “and then I can get outside. . . .”
“To die?”
“I’ll find a . . . a way. . . .” He reeled, and the
weight of his body sent them both staggering.
In that moment she brought him through the door. “Now up the stairs. You’ve got to work for me, and with me, Billy Angel!”
“Lemme rest . . . one minute. . . .”
She let him lean against the wall, his head fallen back, his wounded arm hanging limply, the other loosely over her, pressing close to him with its powerless weight. She could count the beating of his heart, feeble and fluttering, with pauses in the beats. It seemed that mere loss of blood could not so affect him. In that great bulk of muscle and bone there was only the faintest winking light of life, ready to snap out and leave all cold and dark forever. And it must be she, with an uninstructed wisdom, who should cherish that flame and keep it fluttering until it burned up strong again.
“Can you try now, Billy?”
“I’ll try now.”
“There’s one step up.” She lifted him with a fearful effort. “No, the other leg . . . the right leg, Billy. Steady. Now another step. Lean on me . . . I’m strong.”
“I got to go. . . .”
“In a little while. When you’ve had half an hour’s sleep.”
He muttered with a drunken thickness: “That’s it . . . a mite of sleep will set me up. . . . I’ll . . . I’ll sleep here . . . right on the stairs . . . it’s good enough.”
It meant all his power every moment of that nightmare of a climb—and more than all her strength when he reeled and wavered—which was at every other step. But at last he reached the head of the stairs, and she brought him safely into her room. When she brought him into it, for the first time it seemed to her a mere corner—so small it was. They reached the bed—he slipped from her shoulder, and the bed groaned under his weight. There he lay on his back with his arms cast out clumsily.
Once more there was that look of death in his face. The eyelids were slightly opened, and the glazed pupils glimmered with the suggestion of departed life. Only, as she watched him with dread in her throat, she saw a faint twitching of his lips. Then she hurried about the proper bandaging of the wound. She brought warm water and washed it. Then, with care, she closed the rough edges of the wound, still oozing blood. It was no easy task. The great, twisted muscles of the forearm were as firm and tough as the thigh of an ordinary man, but she fixed the bandage in place. She had half a bottle of rye whiskey. She brought it for him and sat on the bed, lifting his head. His head alone, limp as it was, was a burden. It seemed a miracle now that she had been able to support that tottering, wavering bulk of a man. At last the glass was at his lips, they parted, tasted the stuff, and then swallowed it down.
Almost immediately a faint flush came into his face, and then his eyes fluttered open. They looked blankly up to her. “What’s wrong? What’s up?” he asked, half frowning.
“Nothing,” she said very softly.
“Nothing wrong? I thought . . . I dreamed . . . all right, then. I’ll sleep. I got work . . . tomorrow. . . .” He sighed and instantly he was sound asleep.
She watched him for a moment, and then, hearing the jingle of her store bell, she rose hurriedly. She passed the mirror, and, catching a glimpse of her face, she found that it still wore a faint smile, half-wistful, half-contented.
She was wondering at herself as she ran down the stairs. In the lunchroom she found the last man in the world she wanted to confront at that moment—Jack Hopper himself. She wanted to appear perfectly calm, perfectly cheerful, but, instead, she knew that she had turned white and that she was staring at him.
“I thought,” he said stiffly, “that maybe you might need something done . . . for your friend.”
“Friend?” she answered. “Why, Jack, I never saw the poor fellow before tonight.”
The raising of his eyebrows stopped her. He quivered with a passion of disbelief and of scorn. “He looked pretty bad hurt,” said Jack Hopper. “If there was anything that I could do . . .”
“He’s gone, Jack. I only kept him here until the sheriff was gone. . . .”
“Billy Angel is gone?” exclaimed the engineer.
“Yes. Right after the sheriff went away . . . and the rest of the boys.”
“Did he sneak out the back way?”
“No,” she said, lying desperately. “He walked right out the front door. . . .”
He turned a dark red, and she knew, at once, that he must have been keeping a close watch upon that door and that he was certain no Billy Angel had passed that way.
“Well,” said Hopper coldly, “I s’pose that there ain’t much I can do then?”
“I guess not,” she answered, full of wretchedness, and hating Billy Angel with all her heart for the miserable tangle in which he had involved her.
Twice Jack Hopper turned his hat in his hands; twice words came to the verge of his compressed lips. Then—“Good night!” he snapped out at her, and turned on his heel. The closing of the door behind him seemed to the girl the definite act that separated her from the rest of the law-abiding world.
IV
DELIRIUM
She closed the counter for the night now, then she went up to bed. There was a second room in the story above. It was hardly a room. It was rather a mere corner with a cot in it and a bit of cracked glass for a mirror on the wall, with a tiny dormer window peering out over the roof.
There she lay down, but she had hardly closed her eyes when she heard talking in the building. She wakened and sat up, her heart thundering. It was Billy Angel, then, that they had come for. Jack Hopper, after all, had not been able to keep the terrible secret. She hastened to the door of her room in time to hear the speaking again, and this time she made it out as coming from her own chamber. It was a strange voice, raised high one moment, sinking the next, almost like two men in rapid conversation, yet she could tell that there was only one speaker. It was not Sheriff Tom Kitchin. Certainly it was not Jack Hopper, or any other man she knew. Who could it be, then?
She crouched outside the door, listening. She heard the voice rumble on:
“Take the second road and ride along half a mile . . . talk straight to him. Talk like you didn’t fear him none. Talk like you expect to get a square deal, and most likely you’ll get one. Steady! Steady! Look here, I’ve come talkin’ business, Charlie. Will you hear me? Go to the second house. Throw a stone up through the window. It’ll be open. I’ll do that.”
The voice died with a groan. It was Billy Angel in helpless delirium. In the silence that followed, she strove to unravel the babbling and bring sense out of it, but she strove vainly.
Suddenly the voice resumed: “Now, Charlie, here we are together, and there ain’t nobody likely to step in between us.”
At this, a chill of deadly apprehension ran through the blood of the girl. For was this not a rehearsal of the murder scene in which he had struck down Charles Ormond? She had a wild desire to turn and flee, a terror lest she should hear him condemn himself with his own mouth.
“A knife, old son, will do the trick as well. A knife is a handy thing. Look what a wolf can do with his teeth. Suppose that he had a tooth as long as this . . . made of steel . . . and with the strength of a man’s arm behind it . . . why, Charlie, he’d crawl into the caves of mountain lions and rip their bellies open when they jumped at him. And the best thing is . . . a knife don’t make a sound . . . only a whisper when it sinks into you and asks the soul out of you. If you . . .”
There was no need of anything more convincing than this. To have denied his guilt after this would have been utterest blindness, she felt. But, in the meantime, that voice was rising every moment. Murderer though he was, he was helpless, and, moreover, she had gone too far to draw back now. She must bring back his strength to him if she could, keeping him secretly in her house.
She opened the door and went hastily in. The lamp was turned so low that only a tiny yellow new moon of flame showed and turned the room into a sea of dark, on which bulky shadows rode and stirred with the flickering of the flame. Only the mirror looked back at her with a dim, ghost
ly face.
On the bed Billy Angel was a black giant. He was humped against the headboard, his chin on his breast, his enormous arms thrown wide. He spoke not a word, but, while she watched him, filled with terror, she saw one great hand rise and fall, and it seemed to the girl that she was watching the knife driven home into the back of dead Charles Ormond.
She wanted to flee then. The company of a dog, even, would have been a treasure, but she must remain there and do the work that lay before her. If his voice were raised again to its last pitch, it would be strange if someone did not hear it as they passed in the street. And if a man’s voice were heard in her house at this hour, every man in Derby would come to the rescue with weapon in hand.
She sat on the edge of the bed. The strength of his hurried, uneven panting made a slight tremor run continually through the room. There was no intelligence in the roving of his eyes. It was the blank, wild glare of delirium that had given him for the moment a false strength. That glare became fixed upon her now, and the head of Billy Angel thrust out toward her a little.
“Is it you, Charlie?” he asked loudly. “And are you ready?”
“It’s Sue Markham,” said the girl, trembling. “Billy Angel, talk soft. They’ll hear you in the street!”
“You’re not Charlie?”
“No, no.”
“You lie!” snarled out Billy Angel. “I’ve been waitin’ a tiresome time, Charlie. But I got you here now, Charlie, and I’m gonna leave you to rot here, in this cave where no man’ll ever find you. . . .”
A hand fixed on her arm with a grip like iron; she was drawn slowly inside the reach of his other hand. Billy Angel had begun to laugh like a devil incarnate.
“Now, Charlie,” he said, “what you got to say? I have you here. I can break you to pieces like an orange. Where’s your strength, Charlie? Have you turned yaller? Has the nerve gone out of you? You’re tremblin’ like a woman. . . .”