by Max Brand
He could not put off the two who had lost to him. He could not. They were known men, fierce, ready to fight full as freely as they were ready to gamble. Such as these would not accept promises.
Had he a friend of whom he could ask money? No, his only friends were the whining hangers-on who preyed upon him. Not one of them would come to his assistance when he was in need. Only when he was flush they knew him well. He vowed that instant that he detested every one of them. For that matter, he had no love for a single human being. And most, of all he hated these calm men sitting at the table and playing so carelessly, as though they had the resources of millions behind them.
He watched with verminous glee while the cards flashed and fell. Out of that game one of the two must come out the loser. He would wait until he could see on whom the blow fell.
In consideration of the fact that Tom’s capital was only seven dollars, the bets were small, very small to begin with. With every hand the deal changed. Tom Keene was losing steadily. His seven shrank to six, to five, to four. Was it a trick of the light, or was the sweat really beginning to shine on the forehead of the bearded man?
Jerry Swain decided that it was sweat of excitement, and his malignant heart gloated at the sight. Here was pain. No matter in whom, it helped to pay back for what he had suffered.
At the table, Tom Keene, reaching to cut, had felt beneath the middle finger of his hand—that dexterous and highly sensitized fingertip that the long absence from work with the cards had seemed to make more true and delicate in touch than ever before—and under the tip of that finger it seemed to him that he felt a crimp in the side of the pack, such a crimp as a man makes when he has run up the pack and wishes the cut to fall at this place. He hesitated, then he struck squarely into that crimp and cut. That hand then was lost before it began. They were betting only dimes and quarters. But the cards that were floated to him across the table were now so good he had to bet higher, to save his face. That hand cost him fifty percent of his remaining capital. He had two dollars left.
Then came his deal, and he sent his thoughts in quest of an answer to a great question. If he sat through this game, playing honestly, he would be trimmed of what was left, and Mrs. Carver would go hungry. But would heaven approve of cheating at cards, even to cheat a cheat? The old gaming instinct was hot in him. The gambler—and the cause of Mrs. Carver—triumphed.
The Lord forgive me, Tom Keene thought, and promptly and deftly stacked the deck.
Chapter Ten
In ten minutes he had won twenty dollars. In ten minutes more he had won a hundred dollars while the crowd, forgetful of waiting dinners and calling wives, watched, spellbound. Long before, Will Jackson had realized what was happening. He had caught a Tartar. Ordinarily he felt that he could have cleaned up this thick-fingered rascal in no time, but tonight things were against him. His hands were stiff. And he lacked adroitness of mind, also. As a matter of fact, he was furious when the crowd, which had come expecting to see him deftly and painlessly relieve the stranger of his money, stayed and beheld the great gambler of the village suddenly trimmed.
Then, for just a moment, he lost his head. He plunged blindly, dealt a straight hand, bet the limit of Keene’s stakes on a full house, and saw four of a kind take away his money. He was five hundred dollars in the hole when Tom Keene pushed back his chair.
“Poker,” he said, “is all very well in its own way, but it’s a terrible slow game, Jackson. Suppose we try the dice. If you still insist on losing your money to charity, why, Jackson, let’s go double or nothing at the dice, because my time’s not my own. I’m a busy man, Jackson. I can’t bother around here with small potatoes.”
Jackson turned white under the badinage. If he could have found a pretext, he would cheerfully have pumped a stream of lead into his tormentor. Forcing himself to smile, he found the dice and led the way to a table covered with green felt, with a high wall at the rear for the bounce of the little cubes.
The devil was in it—the very devil. In a single roll he had a chance to clean the stranger of everything. The dice were given to his dexterous hands by the toss of a coin. Fair and true he rolled them, saw them click lightly—he could call them, even against that wall, nine times out of ten—and then saw them fall back, not seven, but ten. And the bearded stranger scooped up the stakes.
He was one thousand dollars richer than he had been when he entered Porterville at sunset.
“Once more!” Jackson pleaded.
“It was double or nothing,” Tom Keene said. “That’s the finish, I guess. Which, any way you look at it, is a lesson for you, Jackson. Luck is one thing, but God Almighty is another. So long!”
Take it and be hanged, Jackson thought, but he followed to the door, saying softly, “Now that you got a thousand, I’ll be watching your charity, stranger. Go just as far as you like. There’s the Muldoons down the street. Bill Muldoon has been out of work a month, sick with a fever. I guess they could use a hundred or so. Don’t let that hold you back if you’re set on giving coin away.”
“Is there any friend of Muldoon’s here?” asked this astonishing itinerant preacher.
A long-faced man appeared, frowning dubiously. “I know old Bill, I guess,” he said. “What about it?”
“Here’s a hundred for him,” Tom Keene said. He shoved it into the hands of the other, and, in the clamor of surprise that followed, he sidestepped through the jam and gained the street. There he swung into the saddle on Major, and the beautiful stallion, breaking into a jog trot guided by voice and the pressure of the knees alone, passed slowly down toward the far end of the village.
He left an admiring and stupefied crowd behind him that, as he melted into the dusk, turned upon Will Jackson and greeted him with a tremendous guffaw. It did not make so much difference that the home champion was beaten so long as the beating had been administered with such immense good nature.
“The White Mask himself couldn’t have made money any easier,” they declared, referring to a successful and mysterious robber who had operated through the mountains for some years.
Of all the people in the town, only one failed to show a desire to stand around and talk about what had happened. That man was Jerry Swain. Slipping out to the hitching rack at the side of the house, he loosed and threw the reins over the head of his bay mare, and, while all eyes stared down the street toward the form of the stranger disappearing into the darkness, Jerry Swain picked his way around the back of the houses and cut toward the road in the direction Tom Keene had started.
He spurred the mare to a frenzy of running and at length jerked her to a halt in a hollow where a young grove of pines shouldered close together in a thicket of greenery. He wedged the horse back among these and brought out his revolver, for he had noted, when Tom Keene left the gambling hall, that he wore no gun. His reasoning was simple. He needed five hundred dollars. Yonder came a man who professed that he wanted no money for himself but simply collected it for others. In that case, Jerry would relieve him of the wallet. He could also use very well the spare change outside the five hundred dollars. If only the fool hadn’t given away that hundred to Muldoon. It irritated Jerry as though the thousand dollars had been his from the first instant.
His heart began to jump. And presently it leaped into his throat, but a white fire was rising through the trees on top of the nearest hill to the eastward. That white fire grew into a broad moon, and Jerry cursed. The light would make it easy to recognize him. He slashed holes in his handkerchief, and then decided that it would be too complicated, take far too long, to arrange a complete mask with eyeholes. Indeed, at that very moment the hoofs of a horse beat heavily over a small bridge a short distance down the road, and Jerry hastily tied the handkerchief over the lower part of his face. That would conceal him sufficiently by moonlight. His mare, however, must not be seen. She was too well known, both for her beauty and her speed. So he dismounted and knelt behind th
e first line of the trees.
Over the hilltop came Tom Keene, looking immense as a giant on the top of the black horse, with the great moon behind. He jogged slowly into the hollow. Jerry could hear him humming. And what a terrible man this joyous monster was, and how huge his shoulders loomed as he came down the hollow. Suppose …? But there was no time for supposing, no time for the terror that lurked inside Jerry to come to the surface. Here was his victim at hand. He leaped out and presented the revolver, shouting, “Hands up, curse you, or I’ll blow your head off!”
The hands of the big man went obediently up, and the great black horse stopped.
“Inside your vest pocket you’ve got a wallet. Throw it here!”
The wallet thudded lightly in the dust at his feet. After all, how easy it was. What fools men were because more of them did not do this.
He kicked the wallet open, and with a glance down he saw the edges of a neat stack of bills. And he laughed contentedly. Laughter, however, was not the thing that he must use. He informed Tom Keene, with a burst of curses, that he had better get out of the hollow and ride straight on. “Because, if you try to break back to town, I’ll drill you clean,” declared the amateur road agent. He drew the wallet closer with his toe. “And keep them hands up!”
The big man had started to lower them, but now he obediently made them rigid again, and with a low word to the black horse he passed on. Scarcely had he gone by when Jerry stooped toward the wallet and scooped it up with his left hand, still directing the revolver carelessly after the victim. As he did so, a shadow struck across the moon-whitened road, and he glanced up in alarm to see a monstrosity flying toward him. Tom Keene had whirled in the saddle and now leaped with both arms stiffly outstretched.
The revolver barked from the hand of Jerry, but it was a random shot fired without direction—a mere convulsive twitch of the forefinger over the trigger. The next instant a mountain, literally, fell upon him and crushed him to the earth. The revolver was torn from his grip. He was jerked up to his feet again by a force as resistless as that which had beaten him down, and the cold nose of his own revolver was thrust into his stomach.
“You rat!” Tom Keene cried, and wrenched the handkerchief from Jerry’s face, well-nigh breaking his neck with the violence. At the same time he pressed the muzzle of the gun into the hollow of the robber’s throat.
“No, no, no, no!” gasped Jerry. All his breath departed from him as though he had been plunged into cold water to the chin. He slipped to his knees in the dirt and held out his hands to Tom. “No, no!” wailed Jerry Swain. “I … I … I can’t die. For heaven’s sake don’t k-k-kill me! My father will …”
“Get up,” the big man said, gesturing recklessly with the gun.
Jerry obeyed although he had scarcely the strength to stagger to his feet. “My father is …” he began.
“I know who your father is,” Tom said. “I seen you back in Jackson’s. They told me about you. They told me that you were a hound. And now I see that they’re right. They told me that you were a fool. Stop shaking … I ain’t going to shoot you. Seeing you act like this makes me sick … like you was carrion between me and the wind. It sure takes the stuff out of me to see you shake like that.”
Jerry Swain marvelously recovered by that assurance. He found it possible to stand straight. “If you don’t tell, I can …”
“I’m not going to tell,” said Tom. “You don’t have to buy me with promises. It’s simply because they tell me that your father is an honest man that I’m not going to tell. But what I want you to listen to, Swain, is this. They laugh at you when your back is turned. D’you think that you have any friends back there in Jackson’s? I should say not. You’re simply the easy mark. They pluck you and turn you out. Then you go back to your father and get more money out of him. You’re simply the means they use of getting stuff out of your father. Understand? And when your back is turned, they laugh at you louder than ever.”
“It’s not true,” gasped out Jerry, writhing with shame as he had never writhed before. “They know that I’ve helped too many of them out when they were low.”
“For everything good you’ve done, they thank your father, if they thank anyone. You can lay to that, kid.”
Jerry Swain groaned. Then his thin, handsome face contracted with rage. “Curse them,” he said. “I’ll get even with ’em all.”
“Start in getting even with yourself, Swain,” Tom advised. “Take a look at the way things are drifting. You’re headed for a fall. I know there ain’t much chance of changing you, but I’m playing for long odds. Swain, you got one chance in twenty of making a man of yourself. I’m turning you loose in the hopes that you’ll be man enough to find it. So long!”
Chapter Eleven
The head of Jerry Swain remained bowed in humility just so long as it took Tom to ride over the next hill. Then he raised it again and shook his fist in the direction of the generous enemy. Having been caught and shamed in the commission of a crime, he felt only a deep malignancy toward his discoverer. Besides, like most weak men, he hated Tom for his strength of mind and body. Last and not least, the money that he had held in his hand for an instant was now torn away from him again, and he saw himself confronted once more with the unenviable necessity of facing his father. At that thought his whole soul quaked hardly less than he had shaken when the cold muzzle of his own gun had been shoved into the hollow of his throat. He dreaded his stern father hardly less than death.
All the way home he revolved possibilities in his brain, but he could arrive at no good argument or excuse. There was nothing for it but to go to the rancher and ask for five hundred dollars in cash at once. Otherwise, he would have to answer for it to the men to whom he owed the money. And, much as he dreaded his father, he dreaded that pair still more.
He could tell now, by the slightest effort in retrospect, that they were practiced sharpers working together, hand in glove. The backward glance very often clears the most confusing puzzles. He could also see, by the same glance, that they were a hardy pair, and that they would be very apt to present their claims for money with guns. A coward himself, he felt instinctively that all other men were both brave and desperately careless of such a matter as the lives of others.
In the quandary in which he found himself, his mind also reverted sometimes to the warning words of Tom Keene. They, also, were true. He had been used as a fool and a gull by the gamblers at Jackson’s. And he cursed both them and himself for it, without extending any thought of gratitude toward Tom for the insight.
It was true. All his life they had simply despoiled him, at the same time piling him with ridiculous praises and calling him the best of game sports and good losers. And all the time they talked, his money flowed. No wonder they were glad to see him appear at the bar in the saloon or at the gambling table in Jackson’s. No wonder they fought for a place in his company. He was better than the goose of the fable. He laid golden eggs for the nearest. And he could remember, now, a thousand looks and winks and murmurs exchanged among his companions. How great a gull he had been.
In the bitterness of his heart he wished, like Nero, that the men of the world had only one neck. Never again would he trust anyone or anything. Not even his own relative should be admitted into his confidence. Tom Keene had aimed to introduce humility into the heart of the young rancher. Instead, he had planted inexhaustible hatred.
As he turned from the road into the avenue of lofty poplars that led to the big house, and that was his father’s particular pride, he saw, sure enough, two shadowy horsemen riding out from the trees. They ranged alongside him.
“We missed you,” they said, “and we thought that maybe you was in a rush to get home and grab the money to pay us. You see, we know how plumb set you are on paying off all your debts quick.”
He returned no answer, but, going first to the stable and throwing the reins to the Negro there—for it was a po
int of his father’s pride that his family should not have to care for their own horses—he came back to the front of the house.
“We’ll be waiting right here,” the two gamblers told him. “But make it pronto, will you? We ain’t used to being out this late in the dark.”
And their low, mocking laughter followed him as he went slowly toward the front steps. Slowly, slowly he dragged himself up to the door, praying for an inspiration, but, when he stood in the hall, he knew that there was nothing for it except to tell his father the ugly truth.
And he went straight to the library and did it.
Jerry Swain Sr. was there, as always at this time of night, buried in his big chair by the fire, and with weary but indomitable face, forcing his eyes along the page of the book. Around him stretched the specially bound tomes of his library. There was a sprinkling of fine volumes of handmade paper bound in parchment. And yonder a long set flashed in spotless white pigskin. Other and soberer bindings in morocco and in heavy brown calf swept in almost numberless units around the capacious walls of the room. Every book was a chosen volume. A special librarian had selected them. Every book was a known book. There were no fascinating obscurities. There were no light and intriguing memoirs, no ranges of gay fiction spiced with love and danger.
The librarian had leaned toward history. There were, of course, translations of the classic historians from Herodotus and Cassio. And all the modern, most lengthy, and most dry writers found their place. Philosophy found her place in bulk, also.
And here, seated before his fireplace, with great dictionary on the one hand and a stiff-backed chair to keep him to his task, old Jerry Swain, in his sixty-fifth year, marched relentlessly ahead in his course of reading, which was to take him through every one of the volumes in the big, high-ceilinged room. Heaven alone could tell how he hated it. He had not the gift of letters, but, just as he had sat the saddle twenty hours out of twenty-four in his youth and made his herd grow, so now he sat for a definite length of time every day in this dismal library and scourged his mind on to fresh labors.