by Max Brand
“Eyes? Study spoiled them, I suppose. Quite a student. Bookish, you know. You can always tell the touch!”
“Exactly! But Aunt Carrie—what’s he doing, rioting in a town like this? Playing bad man on the range?”
“Tush, dear. What has he done? He saved the life of a dog that a lot of brutal boys were murdering. Then he came into my house and talked to me. Then he outfaced Crogan. And he—”
“And afterwards dared to say—oh, if word of this ever gets to my Eastern friends, I’ll never hear the end of it. Do you know that he actually said that he intended to marry me?”
“I suppose he does.”
“Aunt Carrie!”
“Do you blame a man for wanting to marry a girl like you?”
“But he implied—I’ve spent the whole day denying it. And it does no good. The harder I talk the more people smile and look knowing.”
“You had best stop talking and begin praying, my dear, if you want to keep yourself out of the hands of that fellow.”
“Aunt Carrie, what on earth do you mean?”
“He’s the sort of a man that has his own way in the end.”
“I had rather—” she began strongly, but the older woman interrupted.
“I know. I’ve heard girls say that before. But it makes no difference. It isn’t what you want to do. It’s what your nature forces you to do against your will. That’s what counts between a man and a woman. And this Holden, he’s the most difficult sort to understand.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s much stronger than he thinks he is. He really thinks that he’s a simple fellow. As a matter of fact—he staggered me, Alexa, as much as he outfaced Crogan.”
“I should think he would stagger any one, with his impertinence! However, I imagine that we’ll soon learn something. Father is having him watched. Do you know that he was away from the hotel all of last night?”
“Really?”
“No one knows where. But still we’re watching. Dad will find out. Of course the man is up to some villainy. I—I hope that they land him in jail.”
“Because he loves you, Alexa?”
“Aunt Carrie! How can you use such a word to dignify—the—the—”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” sighed Alexa. “These men are too difficult to understand. But—but—”
“Open the window,” said Aunt Carrie. “Open it a little wider than it is—it’s too warm in here. No, I’ll do it myself.”
Tom Holden heard her steps approaching and strove to slip away through the flowers, but just as he started, he caught his toe between two stones and jammed his shoe. He had to pause to disentangle it, and looking up in a horror of guilty fright, he found Aunt Carrie looking coldly, emotionlessly down to him, nodding slowly in agreement with some former conviction.
As for Holden, having disentangled himself, he waited in a frenzy of cold fear. If the girl should ever hear that he was a common eavesdropper, that would be the end of him. Then he heard Aunt Carrie say: “We’ve talked enough about that man Holden.”
“But, Aunt Carrie, that’s just what I wanted—”
“Nonsense. He isn’t so much bother. A little runt of an insignificant cripple!” She raised her harsh voice until it rang: “A little poverty-stricken nobody! Bah!”
“But you just said that he—”
“Nonsense! Every woman has a divine right to change her mind and tell the truth. Now—”
Holden was gone. Those last whiplash sentences had seared his very soul and left scars which would not soon disappear. He crept back to the hotel by the back way. And in his room he fell on his bed and lay with his arms cast out wide, staring at the ceiling, wondering why he chose to keep his wretched life on this painful earth.
For he was all of that—a poverty-stricken little nobody—not worth conversation on his behalf. What further truths would Aunt Carrie be prompted to speak concerning him? Then a new thought made him sit up suddenly. For it occurred to him that if she had intended to ruin him with Alexa forever, she would simply have lowered her voice and told the girl what she had just seen. Instead, she had preferred to speak so that Holden himself could not fail to understand what she said. Perhaps she was punishing him, but reserving a greater mercy.
The dark came, and he went out to his odd task again. There was a difference in the stallion at once. Perhaps his rations had not been overgenerous that day, but at any rate, he came to the wheat heads at once and ripped them out of the fingers of Holden and flaunted across the corral with them, snorting with triumph. There he waited until he had devoured them. But there was still the fragrance of the wheat heads to draw him back. He came again and again he stole. He came still again, and this time, his twitching, prehensile upper lip touched the fingers of the man’s hand and Clancy leaped backward and whirled away with a shudder of hatred and fear.
All of this was before the waiting of Holden had lasted an hour. And by midnight, Clancy was eating crumbled wheat heads out of the naked palm of Holden!
That was midnight, and long before dawn Holden sat inside the bars of the corral, waiting, waiting, the wheat heads in his hand.
Once big Clancy dashed at him and reared to beat his skull to bits with a few hammer strokes of his forehoofs. But the stallion dropped down without having struck. Once Clancy wheeled and lashed out with heels that went whirring six inches over the head of the seated form. But something told Holden that this miss was carefully calculated beforehand. And just before the gray of the dawn began, Clancy came to him and smelled him and sniffed him from head to heel, and pushed off his hat with mischievous muzzle, and nibbled at his hair, and pinched the flesh of his shoulder cruelly with his teeth, and then, pawing, struck the shins of Holden with a brutally heavy hoof.
There was this one reward, that Holden, raising a slow and cautious hand, was able to touch the sleek muzzle of the stallion and thereby bestow upon it the first caress of its life!
When that was done, he felt that he had conquered half a kingdom! He slipped out of the corral and went back to the hotel and so up to his room.
Just as he opened the door, a shadow slipped out upon either side of him and grasped his skinny arms. Steel glinted in the shadows of the dawn; and rasping voices jarred in his ear.
“He’ll have it on him,” said one. “Give him a look-over now!”
With that, in silence, he was handcuffed. And in the grip of these giants he knew that the first effort to struggle or to escape by force would be to expose his terrible, his incredible weakness. So he stood quietly. They searched him from head to foot. Finally, when they had probed his boots and turned out every pocket, they stood back, gloomy and silent.
“One of you,” said Holden, “is the sheriff, I suppose?”
“Where was you last night?” asked a gruff voice.
Holden swelled his chest and made his voice loud. “Whistling at the moon,” said he. “Where were you?”
“He must of buried it, sheriff,” muttered the second man.
“Talk up,” said the sheriff, “and tell us what and who was with you, and who tipped you off and fixed the plant, and I’ll see what can be done for you, Holden. I mean, you tell me that, knowin’ that you’re under arrest right now!”
“Thanks,” said Holden. “I am going to write down the names of both of you men and never forget them. In the meantime, I’ll be glad to tell you what I was doing. I was taking a walk through the trees—”
The sheriff’s companion snarled like an angry dog, but the sheriff himself merely shrugged his shoulders in the lamplight.
“It’s no use,” said he. “This gent is too smart. He put the stuff away before he come back, and now we got nothin’ on him. Holden, you’re loose.”
CHAPTER 14
There in the darkness followed a hurried consultation.
“Ain’t you gunna do nothin’?” asked the sheriff’s assistant. “Are you gunna let him go free, to raise hell with us when he catches us one by one, later o
n?”
“The law is the law,” declared the sheriff, “which we ain’t got nothin’ agin’ this gent. He says that he was walkin’ around all night amusin’ himself. Which we ain’t got no proof that he wasn’t. And we got to do the provin’! Holden,” he continued, “all I’m sayin’ to you is that we’re watchin’ you all the time and we’re watchin’ you close. If you so much as look crooked, we’ll have you mighty pronto!”
With this warning, spoken in a very unforceful fashion, the men of the law departed from the room and left Holden to his reflections. But whatever they were, he was too exhausted by his night watch to ponder anything very long. In ten minutes he was sound asleep, and he did not stir in his place in the bed until three in the afternoon.
Then he sat up, with his head hot and ringing, and his eyes dull, and the face which looked back at him from the bit of mirror over the chest of drawers was worn and pale. How could these strong men of the cattle ranges, these fierce and willing fighters, look upon him for an instant without realizing that he was a mere shell of weakness?
But when he came down the stairs, he was received with a solemn gloom on the brow of the proprietor. He was led into the dining room at once as a privileged guest.
“Late hours is hard on the eyes,” observed the host sullenly, staring down at the worn eyes of the little man, but Holden, overcome with feeble languor, had not even energy enough to enable him to smile back at the other. He looked sadly down to the floor, and stroked the savage head of Sneak.
After that late breakfast, he went on down the street to the white house of the witch and knocked at her door. He knew by a stir and then a whispering silence in the place that she was there and that she had heard him, but she did not answer. He did not knock again. He merely waited in silence, leaning on his staff, his hat in his hand.
Five, ten, perhaps fifteen minutes he waited there, growing faint with the effort. Then the door was snatched open and Miss Davis stood before him, glowering.
“Why d’you come sneaking up to me?” said she. “I don’t want to see you ever again.”
“Of course not,” murmured Holden, not daring to meet her angry eyes.
“Then why are you here? What are you doing, moping around my front door?”
“The longer you punished me out here,” said he with the most abject submission, “the less I thought you’d punish me afterward.”
“Punish you? Bah!” cried the witch. “What have I to do with a fellow who comes sneaking and crawling—to listen to ladies talking together?”
“I have nothing to say,” admitted he miserably, “except that I’m playing a lone hand against great odds, Aunt Carrie—Miss Davis, I mean!”
“At least,” she said sneeringly, “you are not trying to live up to your foolish contract with big Clancy. You are wise enough not to risk your neck with that devil, any of these days, no matter what you do for a living, wandering around at night, Mr. Hold-up Man Holden!”
She shrugged her shoulders. “The whole town knows all about you,” she said cruelly. “It knows about the robberies that are going on. It knows that you sneak out of the hotel at night. And when they catch you red-handed—there’ll be a lynching, Mr. Holden. I promise you that! The patience of this town of Larramee won’t last forever!”
He turned this matter hastily in his mind. Since he was perfectly guiltless of any such intention as robbery, and since the suspicion against him helped to bolster up the idea that he was a formidable character, it was as well, he thought, to allow them to continue in the error of their ways. Moreover, while they looked for him abroad, committing outrages here and there about the countryside, it would all the better shield him in his work with the stallion in the corral at night.
“You will never forgive me, then,” he asked Aunt Carrie sadly.
“What difference does it make, whether I forgive you or not?” she snapped out at him. “Will my forgiveness help to make you a better man?”
“Immensely better,” he vowed to her. “And—did you tell her—”
“Don’t mention her name!” cried the tyrannical witch. “You are not worthy to mention her name. I’ll not hear you do it, on my honor!”
“I hope to do as you wish,” said he faintly.
“Then leave Larramee!”
“Do you mean that?”
“Of course I do!”
“After all,” he said, “if I have not your assistance and good advice, I might as well surrender at once and leave the town, I suppose. Good-by, Miss Davis,” and he started away.
“Come back here,” she commanded.
He turned slowly toward her.
“You are a rascal,” said Aunt Carrie. “But I really think that you’ve been punished enough. No, I didn’t tell Alexa. If she hasn’t wit enough to find out what sort of a man you are, and find it out to her own satisfaction—”
“If I ever meet her,” sighed he.
“Do you depend upon me for that introduction?”
“Of course not. I depend on Clancy, you know.”
“Heavens, child! Do you really intend to try your hand with that brute?”
“I am reading about horse training,” said the liar smoothly. “And when I know a little more, I’ll start in.”
“You’ve never handled horses at all?” she asked.
“Never. It would be hard for me to sit in a saddle, you know, unless I were tied in.”
Aunt Carrie threw up a hand in dismay. “Well,” said she, “you are a madman. Now go back and get some sleep. You are worn out—with your raids and your rantings around the country at night! The next time you try it, my fine young man, you’ll get a bullet through your head. That will be sauce for your pudding, I presume!”
He left the little white house immensely relieved, and going to the edge of the town, he sat for a long time under the shade of a tree watching Sneak made frantic and foolish efforts to catch little fish which were drifting over the bright, sun-yellowed shoal water of a pool at his feet. Holden closed his eyes and dreamed, and felt the strength from the soil pass up into his exhausted body and felt the peace and the deep surety of the woods enter into his mind.
After that, in the dusk, he went back to the hotel. It was a lonely time of the day, when houseless men listened with empty hearts to the cheerful voices of other men, and when the calling and the crying of children has an added meaning. To these things Holden listened, and then he turned his head to the north and looked up to the great house on the distant hill, already blackening against the sunset colors which ringed the horizon.
He idled through the early evening; but the full darkness had barely closed down on the town before he was again in the corral with Clancy. He was greeted even as on the night before with a charge and a rearing of that gigantic body above him, but the stallion dropped down again, quietly, to all fours. He began to sniff Holden from head to foot; knocked off the hat of the patient cripple; nibbled again at his hair; and so submitted at last, to have his muzzle rubbed while he ate the wheat heads.
Then Holden rose and stood by the monster. As he rose, little by little, Clancy shrank away to the farther side of the corral. There he stood shaking his fine head until the mane flowed and bristled in the air like a stiffened crest. But there was still the same fragrance of wheat heads, and the low, murmuring voice of this man was unlike other human voices. Other humans yelled, and their words were like little explosions. Other men snarled and whined and shrilled like beasts—like dogs and hateful wolves, for instance. But this man was different. There was another thing in his voice than a mere noise. There was something to listen to, something almost to be understood; something which remained, ever, just around the corner from intelligibility.
So Clancy began to come back to the man, little by little, stopping to paw the earth like an angered bull, and then snort and shake his head, as though denouncing himself because he trusted one of these dangerous humans for even the split part of a second!
It was only the third night. But w
hen once the door of the confidence of a horse has been opened, be it no more than a glimpse of light, there is apt to be a rapid progress toward an understanding. But before that third night was over, Holden was able to stand at the head of the stallion and put an arm around his neck!
It was very exhausting work, almost like handling fire, hour after hour, and when the dawn came again, Holden was half dead with exhaustion in his bed. He slept like a drugged man until the late afternoon. Then he rose, ate as before, solitary in the dining room, and waited for the coming of the night.
That was his program for day after day and for night after night. In the meantime, the depredations of the outlaw who was raiding the country during this same period became, night by night, more terrible. He was a small man—a man about the build of Tom Holden. And he was a merciless killer, who preferred to leave his victims dead behind him, rather than to let them live to give testimony against him, perhaps, at a later date.
And, during this time, as Holden slipped out of the hotel night after night, on every evening the sheriff or one of his men entered the dark room of Holden after his departure, and searched it carefully, methodically, regardless of the vicious snarling of Sneak, where he was tied at the foot of the bed. But they found nothing—not a sign of a clew which could lead them into the past crimes of this suspected man or point toward any of his future plans. It seemed, however, a most dreadful thing that the great Larramee should actually entertain the thought of this criminal as a son-in-law to be!
The sheriff in person called on Larramee and stated all of his suspicions frankly and freely: When he was ended, Mr. Larramee responded with no heat whatever.
“My dear sir,” said he, “I do not criticize the actions of this remarkable young man. I have never said that he is to be the future husband of my daughter. I have never said that he was not to be. On the contrary, I want him to work out his own way. I only hope that I shall not be a stumbling-block in his path. You say he is a robber. It may be that he is. Then, my dear sir, I entreat you to find him in a crime and put him in prison. Certainly I do not wish to have my daughter married to a thug and an outlaw! But—how does the rascal manage to ride a horse, considering that withered leg of his?”