by Brand, Max
It was strange. It was like discovering a new food without which one could not exist and which could only be found far from one’s old haunts.
The bird sang, and, as it ended, Silver said quietly: “I’ve known people who shot singing birds.”
That was all. Taxi could not tell why, but the words drove back a bolt in his heart and made him exclaim:
“Silver, why did you do it? Why did you risk your neck to help me? What can you get out of me?”
“Why did I do it?” asked Silver. He looked at Taxi with a strange twinkle in his eyes. “Why, I don’t know,” he concluded. He went on with his work of cutting up venison into gobbets of the right size to be impaled on a wooden spit and turned at the fire.
That was when Taxi made up his mind. Whatever went on inside the brain of Silver, the man was too cunning, too subtle for him. He would have to get away. He wanted with all his heart to ask Silver what plan they could execute together against Barry Christian. But he would ask no more questions. He decided, then and there, to escape from this too formidable companion the first time opportunity came his way.
XVIII
Departure
THE simplest and first idea was to leave in the night. The second thought, however, was better. At night, Silver slept more lightly than a wild cat, and, besides, the stallion gave his master warning whenever the least sound came near to the camp. It would be awkward to explain to Silver, if he were found stealing off in the middle of the dark. But every day Silver was gone for a considerable time, and that was when Taxi decided that he would make his start.
He had climbed the hill near the cave, and from the top of it he could look down across the valley where Parade had leaped the ravine. He could also see, across the higher level, two ranch houses. From one of those places he could “borrow” a horse and make tracks for the cabin where he had been a prisoner. The great Barry Christian probably was no longer there. He must have moved on long before. But perhaps there would be in the house some clew as to the direction in which the gang had fled.
So in the prime of the morning Taxi lay stretched on a bit of sunny turf and watched Silver saddle the stallion and prepare to ride off.
“You’ll be able to stand a saddle before long,” said Silver.
“Another week,” Taxi answered.
“Another week?” echoed Silver, and then sighed a little.
It was the first time that he had shown the least impatience, and it seemed to Taxi that it was just the same as receiving marching orders.
The moment that Silver was gone, Taxi took a broad white chip and wrote on it with a scrap of charcoal:
DEAR SILVER: Sorry to go without saying good-by, but I’m getting overdue in other places. What your game was with me as one of the cards I don’t know. Anyway, I owe you my neck and I’m a man who pays.
TAXI
When he had written that, he reconsidered for a moment, remembering above all a certain smile that was often on the lips of Silver, a quiet and brooding smile which only came when he was in silence, looking across the sweep of the mountains, or contemplating Parade as the big horse grazed in the meadow. What went on in the head of Silver at those times baffled Taxi. It was the memory of these moments that made him doubt, to a slight degree, that he was right in attributing to Silver some practical motive in the saving of his life. However, this touch of conscience was by no means sharp. The whole experience of Taxi had been teaching him that one cannot get something for nothing in this world.
He stood up, put on his coat, and brushed it off, looking down at the cloth with a rueful face, for it was spotted with grease and bloodstains into which dust had worked deep. No cleaning process could ever make it presentable again.
Then he struck off across country at an easy run.
On the way, he decided that “borrowing” horses might be a bad idea. In this part of the world men were said to lynch horse thieves more readily than they strung up murderers. They made a fine point of the matter, saying that the greatness of the crime could not be judged by the value of the horse. There was a profound moral reason or superstition hidden somewhere in their minds.
So Taxi went straight up to the first ranch house, and when an old, bent man with a tuft of goat’s beard on his chin came to the screen door, he said that he wanted to buy a horse.
The old man got out a pair of spectacles and put them on the end of his nose to stare at Taxi.
“What would a man be doin’ out here in the middle of nowhere without a horse?” asked the rancher.
“I was heading for Horseshoe Flat,” said Taxi, “and last night, while I was asleep, somebody must have gumshoed up and stolen my saddle. He got my horse, too, and left me to hoof it.”
“Well,” said the old man, “a gent that’s ready to steal a hoss is ready to steal a saddle, too, I reckon. We’ll go out and take a look at some ponies.”
He took Taxi out to a big corral where stood a roan with an ugly Roman nose and a gray with a more dainty head.
“You take your pick,” said the rancher. “We got one price on most of our mustangs. Either of them’ll cost you fifty bucks, and I guess the gray’s a likely lookin’ pony, eh?”
“The gray looks well,” said Taxi. “I’ll take the roan.”
The old man grinned suddenly at him. “You looked like a tenderfoot,” he admitted. “But maybe they have hosses in your home parts, too.”
It wasn’t necessary for Taxi to tell him that human nature and human pastimes were very much the same in all parts of the world. Men in the East may ride differently, but some of them can ride and ride well. So he simply picked out an old saddle and bridle, paid his bill, and wondered, as he received his change, at the peculiarly slipshod methods of Barry Christian and his men, who had satisfied themselves by taking his guns and leaving him with all his money, to say nothing of the complete burglar kit which was tucked away in the seams of his clothes and in his shoes.
He rode straight across country, from that spot, and sent the tough little roan dodging among the pine trees that surrounded the house where Barry Christian had been, as confidently as though he had received definite notice that the gang had vacated the place.
Of course, he was right. There was not a sign of a human being about the cabin. When he went inside, he found many tokens of a quick departure. In the kitchen pantry there was still a good deal of flour in the bin, a quantity of canned goods on the shelves, and a fine ham totally untouched. He found an unopened can of tobacco in the living room, together with some books.
He went scenting through that house for something that might give him a clew to use on the road. He got down to the cellar, at last, where the morning sun slanted down the steps and made a thin slit of gold on the moist earth of the floor.
It seemed to him that he could see himself lying there, a ghost, with Babe sitting near by canted to one side in his chair, reading a newspaper by candlelight. The illusion was so strong that it chilled him and made him want to get out again into the full glare of the sun.
He paused, first, at the spot where the little buckskin sacks of gold had been ranged. There on the ground glittered a few particles left from the handful which he had spilled on the night when he attempted his escape.
The sight of them made him feel again the old agony by which he had passed across the floor and up the steps.
Even the manner in which he had opened the locks of his manacles had not caused them to look for a picklock on his person. And in some ways, he decided, Barry Christian and his men were actually a simple lot.
He went back to the main floor of the house again, but still he could find nothing really worthy of his attention, except his own image as he went by a mirror. He stopped and stared at himself. He looked thinner and older. Here and there on his face appeared thin streaks of fading green — the last of the bruises which Babe had beaten into his flesh. And for the thousandth time he wondered, as he stood there, what he would do to Babe when fortune and his good right hand made him at l
ast the master of the brute.
He remembered what “Tony the Greek” had done in that house on Eighth Street. Tony had walled his dearest enemy into the cellar foundations. Tony was a good mason, and he had built a neat new wall that was exactly like the other walls. He built in his enemy until the bricks and mortar came up to the chin of the man. Then he let him stay there, said report, for three days, until the poor devil went screaming crazy. Then Tony used to go down into his cellar and sit with a bottle of wine and sandwiches and eat and drink and laugh when the crazy man screamed, because it was a subbasement, and not a sound could drift up from it to the street. After a while, Tony built up the rest of the wall to the ceiling, over the yelling lips of the crazy man, and it was not for five years that the dead body was discovered when the house was torn down.
They never did anything to Tony for that neat bit of work. Tony had, in fact, gone up Salt Creek two years before the discovery was made.
And when Taxi looked back on that thought, he decided that Tony’s way might be a very good way with Babe.
After Babe — or, really, before him — there was Charlie Larue. That would not be hard, and it would be very pleasant, because Charlie would never be able to face him again. Charlie’s nerve was gone and would never come back so long as Taxi was in the vicinity.
Finally, there was Barry Christian.
That was a different matter. Even Jim Silver had not been able to put Christian in his pocket, except for one occasion. And, grudgingly, bitterly, Taxi surmised that Silver was a better man than he. Better, at least, with a gun, and armed with mysterious motives which were beyond human comprehension, motives that made him venture his life to rescue a stranger who had no possible claims upon him, motives that made him put himself inside the power of the Christian outfit for days and days to nurse the sick man.
Mere humanity could not account for this. There was something very deep about it, and Taxi felt a shuddering awe for a man whose secret purposes were so well and so darkly concealed.
He got out of the log cabin, at last, and remounted the roan.
Where should he go next? Somewhere Barry Christian and his men were probably splitting up the gold dust in shares and preparing to spend the profits. Somewhere Taxi must get on their trail again. But the West seemed very big to him, as he sat there on the horse, while the roan thrust out its stubborn head against the bit.
Something else was moving uneasily in the mind of Taxi. He could not place it, at first. It was like a hunger for a certain sort of food, just as a man will yearn suddenly for cheese and beer, or for steak and onions, and it was only after a long moment that he realized what the thing was that troubled him with desire.
He wanted to see the girl again!
That seemed to Taxi the strangest moment in his life, as he sat there among the pine trees with a triple man trail stretching dimly before him and realized that he wanted to see a mere girl. He tried to tell himself that she was simply a kitchen drudge. He tried to remember disagreeable things, such as the way her hair had been stuck in dark wisps against the perspiration of her forehead, and how the streak of dishwater had stained her apron, and how her hands had been reddened and roughened by hard work. But, though he could recall these things, he could also see in his mind how the youth and strength had kept rising and shining in her eyes. He could see the brown of her forearm and the round white of her upper arm. He could see the blue vein in it.
It was dangerous for him to go back to Horseshoe Flat. It was the last place in the world for him to go to, because when he was seen, he would be spotted, and word would go to Pudge, and from Pudge it would go to the gang.
Suppose that he brought an action against Pudge for assault and battery? He smiled at that. It would be a funny thing if he ever used the law on his side of the fence. It was too funny even to be thought of.
Suddenly he loosed the reins and started the roan straight down through the hills in the direction of the Flat.
XIX
Taxi Talks
THERE was time to waste, after he was close to the town. He spent it idly in a thicket, lying out on his stomach with his elbows on the ground and his chin in his hands.
He kept thinking. It wasn’t about the Christian gang that he thought so much, but chiefly about Silver, and then about the girl. After a time, as the sun went down, he was not thinking of Silver at all, but only about the girl.
“I’ve been the fall guy, around here. I’ve been a dud. Every time she thinks about me, she laughs,” he told himself.
Then it was dark, and he rode slowly in toward Horseshoe Flat. She would have finished serving supper, by this time. She would be clearing off the dishes from the long table. The men would be sitting about, rocking back in their chairs and smoking cigarettes. Some of them would use toothpicks of wood or quills. These fellows out in the West had queer manners. But small things don’t matter in a man’s make-up.
He got down to the town, rode around to the boarding house, tied the roan across the street, three houses up, and then came to the back door of the Creighton place. He had worked everything out, and now there was the rattling of dishes in the kitchen. She began to sing.
That darkened the mind of Taxi. As if she gave a rap about him! But of course she didn’t give a rap. He was just a bum, a fall guy that every one kicked around.
It was a funny thing that he should have got her on his mind. Back there in the Big Noise there were some blondes who would have chucked everything to belong to him. There were some real steppers, who knew about him and how he could fade through steel walls and get right at the secret mind of the biggest sort of safes. They were ready to gamble on him. There was one that was almost perfect. She was a lady, practically. When she made up, you hardly knew that she had put on anything. Her cheeks were just natural — except that they were always the same. When she smoked, no red came off on her cigarettes. She had brains, that girl had. And she was all for Taxi.
“Taxi, when you’re feeling restless,” she had said, “come around and take me for a ride, will you?”
He had never gone to take her for a ride. She was just lost in a crowd, so far as he was concerned. He knew that when a man falls for a girl, he always gets into trouble about it. Some of the toughest mugs in the world have tumbled for a blonde and then talked too much. You can’t help talking to a woman, it seems. You tell yourself that you won’t, but just the same you talk, and after a while the blonde sells you out. That’s the way it always goes. The prettier they are, the deeper they nick you.
And here he was, like a fool, in spite of all he knew, standing on the kitchen steps and preparing to go inside to talk to a kitchen mechanic. Well, he wouldn’t be such a fool. He’d leave that place and never come back. But still he kept standing there.
The door jerked open. The song rang loudly in his ears. There was the girl standing above him. She did not start at the sight of a man standing there on the steps. She shaded her eyes with one hand and peered down at him, saying:
“Hello! Come to collect something, partner?”
Then she gasped. She caught him by the lapels of the coat and fairly dragged him into the kitchen.
There she held him, while her frightened eyes ran over him for a moment. Then she darted away and locked both the doors, pulled down the window shade, and leaned back against the drainboard by the sink, panting. She had finished the dishes. There were just some pans on the drainboard. The aluminum was covered with little bright scratches from the sand soap she had been using on it.
She still seemed frightened; she was still panting.
“My Jiminy, Taxi!” she breathed. “Am I glad to see you? Ask me, am I glad to see you!”
He couldn’t ask her that. He made a cigarette and went over and stood by the stove. She watched him, and then broke out:
“Talk to me, Taxi! Tell me something! What’s happened to you?”
“Well,” said Taxi, “I’ve got my clothes all covered with spots. A lot of dust has happened to me.”
He smiled at her, but she made a gesture as though she wanted to wipe that smile out.
“What happened in the saloon? Was Jim Silver right? Did Pudge lay you out? Who did the shooting? Where did the gang take you? What did Larue do? Who else was there? Have you seen Jim Silver? What has been happening?”
“I’ve been out in the open air getting a sunburn,” said Taxi.
She folded her arms at that, and began to nod in a severely judicial manner.
Then she walked up close to him and stood there, examining his face with her eyes.
“Somebody’s been beating your face off,” she said. “I know what an old bruise looks like.”
“Do you?” said Taxi.
“There’s a big patch on the side of your head where the hair has hardly grown out at all. Is that where Pudge whanged you?”
He ran the delicate tips of his fingers over the place where Pudge had fitted his skull to the butt of the gun. He said nothing.
“Go on! Talk!” she urged.
“I’ve been having a rest cure,” said Taxi. “I’ve been lying out in the sun and having a rest cure.”
“Don’t be such a great big man,” she commanded. “Break loose and tell me something. You don’t have to be such a great big man when you’re around me. The harder they are, the quicker they break. You look as though you’d been broken all to pieces, Taxi.”