Silvertip's Search

by Brand, Max

Not one of those townsmen had joined in the pursuit, even with Silvertip to lead them, but Silver could well understand that if a helpless prisoner were brought back among them, he might be “sort of clawed up.”

  “You’re in my hand, Butch,” said he.

  “Well, go ahead and close your hand,” said Butch. “But I ain’t going back. You shouldn’t need more’n one shot to finish me, I guess.”

  He contemplated, with odd satisfaction, the steadiness of the gun in the hand of Silvertip. The high light on top of the barrel did not waiver.

  “Why did you kill Granger?” asked Silvertip.

  “Is he dead, sure enough?” asked Lawson.

  “I guess he’s dead enough,” answered Silver.

  “I’m dog-gone glad of that.”

  “You hated him, eh?”

  “Me? Why, no. I didn’t hate him.”

  “But you’re glad he’s dead?”

  “Well, I’m going to die now, and nobody would wanta die for a job that he hadn’t finished.”

  “If you didn’t hate him, why did you kill him?”

  “Why? Orders, you fool! What other reason would I be having?”

  “Orders from whom?”

  “You dunno, eh?” asked Butch.

  “No,” said Silvertip.

  “Well, I ain’t going to tell you, then.”

  “If you’re going to die, Butch, what difference does it make if you tell the truth?”

  “Because if I tell you, they’ll find a way to make hell hotter for me. Besides, why should I talk to you?”

  Silver stared at him. A solitaire, that loveliest songster of the West, exploded its pent-up melody from the top of a bush not far away.

  “You’re a good hand with a revolver, Butch?” said Silver.

  “Fair to middling,” said Lawson.

  “So am I,” remarked Silver. “I’m going to give you an even break.”

  He caused the gun that was in his hand to disappear under his coat. At once the hand of Lawson jerked back toward the right hip, but paused. He seemed bewildered.

  “I dunno that I make it out,” declared Lawson, shaking his head.

  “What don’t you make out?”

  “Suppose that I put a slug in you, it’s all right. But suppose you shoot me, it ain’t going to do you no good. They’ll get you afterward. They’ll get you if it takes ten years and a million dollars.”

  “Who’ll get me?”

  “I’ve told you something, and you wanta know what. I tell you something more — haul out of here — get off my trail — clear out of the country, and maybe no more trouble’ll come down on you.”

  “Thanks,” said Silver. “Now, will you listen to me?”

  “Yeah. I’ll listen, I guess. For a minute. Then I’m starting.”

  “The next time that solitaire starts its song, we go for our guns. Does that suit you?”

  “Sure,” said Butch. He broke into a violent laughter suddenly, though still he kept his chin down, as one prepared for instant action. “You wanta die to music. And that’s all right by me.”

  “Are you ready?” asked Silver.

  “Ready and right,” said Lawson.

  “Then be still, and wait for the song.”

  They waited. All the sounds from the valley drew suddenly in upon the ears of Silver, as though he were flying down through the air toward the ravine. Or was it simply that every sense had grown more tensely alert? Then the sweet whistle of the solitaire burst out again.

  He shot Butch Lawson through the chest while Lawson’s gun was still swinging up. Butch fired into the ground. A spray of gravel dashed against the knees of Silver. He saw Lawson staggering, losing balance, falling backward, and it seemed a horrible thing to let the body strike the ground.

  He got to Lawson in time to catch him beneath the armpits and so lower him till he was prone.

  Lawson looked straight up into the sky.

  “I got enough,” he said thickly. “I give up.”

  The red was running over his chest. Lawson put his two hands over the spot, lifted them, and the blood dripped down into his face while he looked at his crimson hands.

  “Am I going to die?” asked Lawson.

  “You’re going to die,” said Silvertip. He was a sick white. He added: “I wish that I’d never seen Crowtown!”

  Then: “Lawson, nobody can help you. You’re passing out fast. But if there’s any message I can take for you, if there’s any word you want to send — I’ll take it.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter where I wanta send it?”

  “Yes.”

  Lawson pulled out a flat gold watch; earned money could never have bought it for him.

  “Gimme a knife,” he directed.

  Silvertip took out and opened a pocketknife. With the point of the knife, with a staggering hand, Lawson carved a scroll on the back of the gold case.

  “Take it to Copper Creek. Give it to Doc Shore,” said Lawson. “He’ll understand.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all,” said Lawson.

  “No personal message that you want to send? No friend — ”

  “I ain’t such a fool!” said Butch harshly. “What would I want of a friend — ”

  He began to pant, saying “Ha-ha-ha,” rapidly with every outgoing breath. He opened his mouth, but could not get enough air. He began to bite at the air. He lifted himself on one elbow, and then turned on his side.

  His panting turned into another sound as he tried to speak.

  Silver dropped to one knee, waiting for the words.

  Then the panting stopped, and Butch Lawson lay down softly, pressing his face against the ground.

  CHAPTER IV

  Copper Creek

  SILVERTIP washed the blood from the watch at the rivulet that ran across the trail a few steps away. The water was so cold that the tips of his fingers turned pink, and an icy ache penetrated at the roots of his finger nails.

  Then he mounted the stallion and rode on back to Crowtown, leaving the mustang contentedly cropping the tender young grass near its master.

  When he got into the town, he found a crowd still milling about in front of the hotel and on its veranda. And everybody looked at him with wide, still eyes. When he asked questions, people answered him in low voices. They wanted to know what had happened between him and Lawson. He shook his head and asked about Granger.

  “Granger ain’t dead,” they said. “He’s lucky. He ain’t dead. The bullet just run around his ribs, is all. It’s a good thing Granger wasn’t bumped off.”

  There had been no reason, then, to kill that man who now lay with his face pressed against the trail high up the hillside. There was no reason to have “them” on his trail. “They” were of course the men of Barry Christian, who would spend ten years and a million dollars to revenge Butch Lawson.

  Silver made a cigarette and lighted it. His face was as calm as a stone.

  “Can I see Granger?” he asked.

  “Sure. Everybody is seeing him.’’

  They took Silver into the hotel. Granger lay on a couch, propped up a little by many pillows. He was suffering pain; the lines of it were drawing deeper and deeper into his face.

  His eyes glinted sidewise at Silver, and then resumed the consideration of the cracks in the ceiling. Sweat was oozing out on his forehead all the time. A woman with stooped shoulders, and a shawl over them, was on her knees beside him. She dried the sweat on her husband’s face now and then and said nothing, simply watched him. Other people were in the room. They all stood back in corners, looking, listening, as though they could see the soul departing.

  “Butch is lying dead on the trail yonder,” said Silver.

  The deputy sheriff turned his head and stared.

  “They tol’ me you went up after him,” said he. “Did you fix him?”

  “I thought he’d killed you,” said Silver. “He shot you from behind. I thought he’d killed you. I w
ent up and stopped him. He wouldn’t come back. We fought it out with a clean break. Butch is dead.”

  He looked at the deputy sheriff, and Granger looked back at him. Other voices stirred and were silent in the corners of the room. Death, after all, had come. It seemed a satisfaction to them, in a way, to know that the alarm had not been for nothing. And this was a big day in the history of the village. Twenty such days are about all that a mountain town can count upon in the whole course of its existence.

  “You want to hold me for the killing?” asked Silver.

  A murmur of protest came out of the corners of the room. The deputy sheriff rolled an agonized but reproving eye, and the murmur ceased.

  “Is the wound in front?” asked the deputy sheriff.

  “Yes.”

  “Where you going to be — if we want you?”

  “I’m going to Copper Creek.”

  The deputy sheriff blinked.

  “Why Copper Creek?” he asked.

  “Why not?” said Silver.

  “Well, all right,” said the deputy sheriff slowly. “You can go.”

  Silver said to the other bystanders: “I want to be alone with Granger for a couple of minutes. Will you let me have that time with him?”

  No one answered. They looked at Silver and then at one another, but nobody moved.

  “Get out, all of you!” said Granger.

  At that they moved with shambling feet, like a flock of sheep, and trooped in one mass out of the room.

  Silver said: “Granger, Christian’s men are going to hunt me down, of course. Well, all that I want is a fair chance to fight back. I can’t fight all of Barry Christian’s gang, but I might be able to fight Christian himself. What I want you to do is to give me one steer that will help to put me on his trail.”

  Granger looked at him with blank, indifferent eyes.

  “In the old days,” said Silver suddenly, “I was useful to you once. I hate to remind you of that day. But I have to.”

  “I know,” said Granger, “I’d ‘a’ got a slug of lead through me, except for you, that day in the saloon.”

  “Let me have a direction to follow toward the trail of Christian. That’s all I ask for. Will you help me, Granger?”

  “I’ve listened to you once before. And now I’m here with lead pumped through me,” said Granger. “You go wherever you please. Go to the devil, for all of me. I won’t talk to you any more.”

  He shut his teeth and his eyes. Silvertip stared at him for a moment, and then went from the room, stepping softly over the faded roses of the worn carpet.

  When he was out in the street, he asked the way and the distance to Copper Creek. It was down on the edge of the desert, they told him. It was twenty miles away through the mountains, downhill all the way. And it was among the foothills close to the edge of the desert.

  So he mounted the stallion and started at once.

  He was in no haste in his preparations. Some of the men came out onto the veranda to watch him start. They said nothing. They merely looked at him with troubled eyes. When they spoke, it was very softly, to one another. And when at last he was outside of Crowtown, Silver felt as though he had left the darkness of a nightmare and come into a safely lighted room.

  It was true that the twenty miles to Copper Creek were almost all downhill. Then, as he came out through a ravine, he looked down on the desert like a gray mist, and saw in a lower valley the blinking windows of the town, which was stretched out long and thin through the windings of a gorge.

  Copper Creek was a word that had had much meaning for Deputy Sheriff Granger. What could that meaning be? At least, there was a sinister significance attached to the place. The very mention of it had caused Granger to look on Silver as upon a lost soul.

  But when he rode into the town, it looked to him like any other place which had once been a booming mining town and since then has shrunk its interests to less exciting forms of adventure. There was a line of houses at scattered intervals, or crowded shoulder to shoulder, on either side of the creek. Two thirds of those houses were vacant. Half of the remainder had fallen into disrepair over the heads of the occupants. Because people who live in a dying town seem to take it for granted that disrepair, like disease, is catching, and hardly worth fighting against.

  He passed the small district of shops. The sun was far down in the western sky, so that a rolling crimson fire walked across the windowpanes to the left of Silver. And the same light made the stallion gleam brightly enough to startle the attention of people who lounged on their front porches at the end of the day. The beauty of Parade pulled to attention a group of small lads who were scampering across the street in a game of tag.

  “I’m looking for a fellow called Doc Shore,” said Silver. “Can you tell me where to find him, sons?”

  “Doc Shore?” they echoed in three shrill voices that melted into one phrase of sound.

  And then they were silent, staring.

  They knew “Doc” Shore, and they did not know him favorably. That much was clear.

  “Doc Shore!” he repeated. “Where can I find him?”

  The smaller lads stood silent. The eldest hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

  “That way,” he said.

  Silver rode gloomily up the street. For he began to feel that the last request of Butch Lawson had loaded him with something more than a watch with a gold case and Swiss works. This foreboding grew on him with every step Parade made, until he saw, to his left, the little golden moons of a pawnbroker’s shop, and across the window the letters: “Dr. Shore.”

  Silver sighed with relief. Perhaps there was, in the mind of the dying Lawson, a memory that he owed some obscure debt to Shore. For that reason he had commissioned Silver to return the watch — to its rightful owner, perhaps?

  At any rate, that made a clear explanation. It was only the little scroll which Lawson had cut into the back of the gold case that troubled Silver. The thing might have a meaning more than he could understand, or it might simply have been the signature of a man unable to write his own name.

  He dismounted, slapped the neck of the stallion, and, knowing that the horse would now stand there patiently, waiting for him until the ground took fire beneath his feet, Silver walked into the pawnbroker’s shop.

  A little man with a double stream of misty beard hanging from his chin, and pink-rimmed eyes, and a red-mouthed smile, stood up from a high stool and put the flat of both hands on the counter.

  So he waited, still smiling, still expectant. The white hairs of the beard were so sparse that they did not hide the features beneath it.

  Silver slid the watch onto the counter; he kept his hand over it.

  “You know Butch Lawson?” he asked.

  The little old man kept on smiling, but his eyes rolled upward in the act of memory. “Butch Lawson?” he repeated.

  He continued to reflect. Then his pale eyes focused with a sudden brightness on the face of Silver.

  “Are you a friend of his?” he asked.

  “Do you know him?” countered Silver.

  “Oh, very well!” said Doc Shore. “Of course I know Butch. But sometimes the names of a few of the boys pass out of my memory. One cannot remember everything, you know. The mind balks at too many details — and I’m an old man! But Butch is a friend of yours?”

  “Butch is dead,” said Silver.

  If there were friendship between them, it would be a shock to the pawnbroker, but Silver felt that a shock was due to the oily flow of the old man’s talk.

  The pawnbroker accepted the news with a mere lifting of his brows.

  “Dead, eh? Tut, tut! Well, young men may die before the old ones. So poor Butch is dead?”

  “And he asked me to take this to you. He asked me while he was dying,” said Silver.

  He uncovered the watch.

  The pawnbroker lifted it, weighed it, looked at Silver with surprised eyes, and then turned the watch on its face. What he saw on the back made him duck his head down su
ddenly.

  Then slowly he straightened. The smile was gone from his red lips. They puckered a little, and the thin mist of the beard spread out thinner than ever, from side to side.

  “Well, then,” said the pawnbroker, “I’m glad to have the watch. I thought that Butch might have forgotten me. But honesty will show its hand when a man dies. And there we are!”

  He spread his hands on the counter again, and the smile came back to him.

  “You’re staying in Copper Creek a while?”

  “I’m leaving in the morning,” said Silvertip. “So long and good luck to you!”

  He stepped out of the door. As it closed, a bell jingled softly, and, glancing back, he saw that the pawnbroker still leaned over the counter, staring fixedly before him. There was no longer a smile, but a look of such evil as Silver never had seen on a human face.

  CHAPTER V

  The Warning

  SILVER went to the hotel, booked a room, and sat for a time on his bed, staring out the window. In its narrow frame were held an immensity of mountains, like great thoughts in the span of a brow. The distances turned from blue to purple, to dusty black, and the night walked up to the window and breathed through it. But still Silver remained there, thinking. His old wounds touched him with fingers of pain; he felt a weakness, a running out of strength, a breathlessness.

  So he stood up suddenly. He knew that it was fear that had come into him like the cold, damp breath of a cellar, and the way to get out of it was to move into some sort of action. The nightmare in his mind was persisting. He kept seeing the dead man, Lawson, sit up on the trail, and then rise, and walk to him with dead eyes, and laughter behind that ragged beard.

  Christian, like the devil in other lands, was here the root of all evil. And Silver walked in a mist.

  He thought of the dead man; he thought of the evil face of Doc Shore.

  Silver went down to the street and into a restaurant that had a lunch counter built in front of the stove, and some little tables scattered through a long and narrow room. Silver usually took a corner table, but he was too preoccupied to care where he sat just now, so he picked out a place halfway down the wall and slid into a chair.

  The waiter came out to him in a white apron spotted with grease, and began to arrange the salt and pepper shakers aimlessly while he waited for the order.