Old Carver Ranch

by Max Brand

  But when he went downstairs, his brow still puckered in thought, he was greeted by an unexpected voice.

  “Breakfast is ready,” Mary Carver was saying. “It is waiting for you, Mister Kenyon.”

  Then he jerked up his big head and stared at her. She was an encumbrance, decidedly. His quarrel was with the mother and the father, and he had nothing to do with the offspring. He must get her out of the house in some manner. He had hardly noticed her during the month when he was laying his traps, but, now that he was ready to strike, he must have her gone. He studied her carefully. She was a trifle pale this morning, he thought. And there was a singular air of sadness about her.

  Doubtless Carver had told his wife and daughter all that had happened. In such case, let it stand as it was. He would crush out the last feeling of pity that might linger in his heart for her. Because, after all, she was the daughter of the mother and the father who had conspired against him. She came of an evil line, and therefore she herself must be evil. Appearances were shallow; they amounted to nothing.

  So he hardened his heart as he went into the dining room. And, as he began to eat, he was aware of her out of the corner of his eye where she waited in the shadow near the kitchen door. At first, she had taken up a white apron and her part as a servant with a sort of joyous enthusiasm as a new experience. And she had always appeared to Tom like an actress in a part—a thousand-dollars-a-week actress in the part of a five-dollars-a-week servant. There was an element of the ridiculous in the affair.

  But this morning she fitted perfectly into her place. There was no longer any playing of a role. When he looked directly at her, he found her staring with wide, sad eyes straight before her. In spite of himself, that expression surprised him with a pain of misgiving. But he forced the emotion out of his head. What had he to do with the troubles of a girl? His business in life was to extract from a mature man and woman the same amount of pain that had been extracted from him by the professional methods of the prison. Then a great thought came to him. How could he better torment the parents than through the child?

  He dropped his knife with a clatter and leaned back in his chair, full of a savage satisfaction. She had started forward a step at the clatter of the knife. Now, before she could retreat again, he summoned her by merely crooking his finger, not looking at her at all.

  She came slowly before him and stood with her hands in front of her, the fingers interlaced gracefully, her eyes quietly upon him.

  “Last night,” said Tom, “your father talked to you?”

  That question banished whatever color remained in her face. But still she did not flinch. He expected her voice to tremble. But it was perfectly even and smooth.

  “No,” she answered.

  “What?”

  She flinched now, but it was only from the sudden explosiveness of the word. “No,” she said.

  “Then what’s the matter with you?” Tom Keene asked, pushing straight for the heart of the matter. “What’s in your face? What’s in your eyes?”

  “I am sorry,” said the girl. “If there’s anything wrong with me, I’m sorry.”

  “There is,” he declared, frowning. “There’s enough trouble around without finding it on faces. Smiles are what I like to see. Will you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now tell me again. Your father didn’t talk with you?”

  “No. I overheard him … a little.”

  “Ah?” He struck his fist on the table. “I see that breeding will tell in one shape or another. Eavesdropping on your own father, eh? Because he came in late?”

  She flushed with anger, then changed to wonder, as though she could not believe what her senses were telling her of this man who had been, for a whole month, so kind a master. But suddenly she controlled herself. She was as calm and grave as he had ever seen her.

  She did not answer the insult directly, and he felt a pang of shame at his own brutality, but that feeling was quickly banished. “Go on,” he said, “tell me what you heard. You’ve got a dead eye and a white skin. I want to know what you heard.”

  She winced and set her teeth. But still she made no audible protest. Only she passed through a silent moment of nerving herself before she could speak. When she managed it, she spoke very softly. “I heard him say,” she said, “that he had … robbed a man … and that you knew about it … that you had taken what he … stole.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  She started and looked wildly up at him. “Is there more than that to know?”

  He knew, at once, that the parents had decided that she must not know more of the disgraceful truth than was unavoidable. Tom Keene smiled in his self-content. This was better and better. It was another whip with which he threatened the Carvers. If they offended in a small way, he would let the whole grisly story of betrayal be told. If they offended in a large way, it would be jail and disgrace in the eyes of the world for the man.

  “That’s enough, I guess.” Tom nodded. “And what does that make you plan?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When, I say, are you going to leave them?”

  “Leave them? Now that they need me?”

  Tom considered her with mock enthusiasm. “That’s good enough to have come out of a copybook,” he said. “But don’t lie to me. I want to know how long it will be before you leave this place and go off to change your name and forget the disgrace.”

  “I’ll stay here,” she said. “No matter what he’s done, he’s my father. No matter what others say, I’m not ashamed of him.”

  “No?” Tom said, fiercely disappointed as a hound is when the hare doubles back to a momentary safety through his very teeth. “No? That’s more copybook talk. But what the devil good will you be to him?”

  “I’ll be one person who still trusts in him. That is a great deal.”

  “Bah! Comfort John Carver … you?”

  “Yes, I.”

  “Well, that’s charity. Charity and duty mixed up together, I suppose.”

  “No, no. It’s love, Mister Kenyon. And if I put my trust in him, he surely will be happier. Don’t you think so?”

  It startled him so that he half rose from his chair, and then, settling suddenly into it, he ground it back a little from the table. “Don’t ask me about it. But you’re babbling Bible talk at me. Bible talk!” His tremendous laughter crowded the room. The morning light in the water in his glass trembled. Then he cleared his eyes to look at her again. Would she be indignant at his scoffing, or would she be filled with the holy zeal to convert him?

  She was neither; she simply stood back a little into the shadowy corner and watched him quietly.

  “Am I lost for laughing at the Bible?” he asked her.

  “I hope not.”

  “Come, come. Hereafter I want smiles. But for one moment each day I’ll let you tell me the truth. Tell the truth now. You hate me, eh? You wish me damned as black as coal.”

  But she only smiled and shook her head. And all at once he felt foolishly as if she had escaped from him, and as though his reach did not quite extend to her. He fell back upon another method.

  “Go tell your father,” he said, “that I want Major saddled. Tell him I want the horse brought around to the front of the house at once.”

  “I’ll saddle him myself. It’s dangerous for anyone else to come near him with a saddle.”

  “You’ll saddle him? You’ll do what I tell you to do, if you please. Send your father … and then come back here. I may have need of you.”

  He lowered his eyes to his plate, prepared for the tremulous voice of protest and weeping. But, to his unutterable astonishment, she simply paused for an instant, and then went with a quiet step from the room.

  Tom was so amazed that he waited a moment, thinking that she surely must come back, and, when she failed to do so, he rose from the
table and stepped hastily to the window. And there he saw her already disappearing into the cottage. There was only a moment’s pause. Then she came out again and walked slowly back toward the big house. An instant later her father appeared, whiter than death, and faced toward the corral where the great Major stood, shimmering and beautiful and terrible in his strength.

  He had barely time to resume his place at the table when she was back with him in the room. He went on eating, humming to himself in his great bass voice. Truly this was a moment such as he could not have planned in detail. It was the result of an inspiration. Yonder at the corral, John Carver was about to risk his life saddling the great black stallion. At the cottage stood his wife with the horror of his danger striking her dumb. And here in the room with the tyrant who had brought all this danger on the head of Carver was the daughter, serving him and standing at the window through which she could see the peril of her father.

  No wonder that Tom Keene smiled to himself and could not keep from humming. And across his mind there flashed a picture out of the past—how he had been locked in a small cell, a murderously small cell in which he could neither stand up nor stretch out on the floor, but in a wretched cramped position had to endure the hours of the torture on one scant portion of bread and water each twenty-four, and how, thrice daily, the crafty warden had had the great trays of food borne steaming past the prisoner.

  That had been a torment such as he thought it must have been past the ingenuity of man to surpass. And yet he had a shrewd faith that the torture that he himself had contrived on this bright morning was not falling far short of the other. And his voice swelled in volume as he hummed, until it was like the murmur of a whole hive of prodigious, rumbling bees at work in the sunshine. But sometimes even a perfect thing can be made more perfect. In the parlor, in view through the opened sliding doors, he saw the piano.

  “You play the piano?” he queried. Mary did not answer for a moment. “I’ve heard your father say that you do …”

  “Yes,” she breathed. “I play it sometimes.”

  “Let’s have a tune now, if you please.”

  “I … if …” she began, stammering.

  “You’re too modest,” said Tom easily. “I’ll wager you can sing, too, and accompany yourself. And what’s a better way of beginning the day than with a song? Let’s have a song, please, Miss Carver.”

  She hesitated for a bitter moment, and he turned in his chair. Her glance was out the window and fixed on some far-off subject with such desperate fear that it well-nigh drew Tom from his chair to run and look. But in a moment she was aware that he watched her expectantly, and she started toward the parlor.

  And he saw, as she went past him, that there was no anger or revolt in her expression, but only profound pain and fear. He wondered at that. But now she was opening the piano—and now she sat at it. She was so tensed that even in this distance he could see her hand trembling upon the white keys.

  “What shall I sing?”

  “Anything,” Tom said, and to himself he thought: By the Lord, she’s going through with it.

  An instant later a tremulous voice rose, quavered, and then steadied desperately into an air to which she kept a soft accompaniment stirring on the piano. It was a Scotch song; he had never heard it before. He could not have remembered a moment later what the words or the tune were, so great was his excitement. He simply knew that she was singing at his command while her father braved the stallion in the corral. Yes, if she turned her head, she would be able to look across the house, and through the dining room window she could catch at least a glimpse of the struggle.

  Then, through singing, there broke the sharp, tearing sound of a horse’s squeal of rage and fear. A stifled cry came from the girl as she rose from the piano. From the outside the scream of a woman was thin and small.

  “Sit down!” commanded Tom sternly. “Sit down and keep on with the song!”

  And then, like an answer to the girl’s prayer, the shout of John Carver was heard, clear and strong, rolling through the open window. To Tom’s own bewilderment, she sank back onto the bench before the piano and began again to play. Her voice quavered and struggled weakly, but at length she managed to strike the true note where her song had been interrupted. And she kept on to the end of the verse.

  The song was hardly terminated when the snort and the stamping of a horse in front of the house announced that Major had been successfully saddled and was now waiting for the master. And there was a sob of relief in the stifled sigh of the girl.

  “What shall I sing next?” she asked. “Or is that enough?”

  “Enough?” Tom Keene said as he rose from the table and kicked his chair clear. “It’s only a beginning. It’s only a small beginning.”

  She winced away from him, but he strode on toward the door with a chuckle. At the hitching rack he found Major, stamping and frothing already from the excitement, and nearby was John Carver still shaking from his close call.

  “Thanks,” Tom said as he swung into the saddle. “I see that you and Major are going to get on.”

  He received only a glance of rage and terror from poor Carver. Then, as he turned toward the house, he saw Mary Carver stepping away from the window from which she had been watching him mount the stallion.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Speaking of women,” said Jerry Swain Sr. at the breakfast table just one day later, “a woman waited for is a woman lost, I believe. Which reminds me that I haven’t heard you speaking of Mary Carver lately. Not for a whole month, Jerry. And that means that you haven’t been near her.”

  “How is that?” queried the son, not unwilling to put off the embarrassing question for a moment while he combed his wits for an excuse.

  “Why,” said the father, “there are some women who drive a man to cursing, and the best we can do by most of them is to be silent … but now and then there is one who makes us talk … turns us into poets. They are few and far between, but they shine like stars at night, Lord bless ’em. And such a one is Mary Carver. When you have been to see her, you come home raving. You find her face in the fire. You draw it in the empty air.” He dropped down from this rather elevated strain with a sigh and a frown. “And I wonder, Jerry, why in blazes you don’t keep on in the only business that you and I agree upon? You can break your heart for the sake of a gambling table, and you can groan for the sake …”

  “No gambling to amount to anything for a long time, you know,” protested Jerry Jr. anxiously.

  “Don’t lie to me,” he father answered a little wearily. “I have to watch you, Jerry, and I know that you’ve played off and on pretty steadily during the past seven years or more. And I also know that you’ve lost pretty steadily. Where you’ve got the money to pay your debts, I don’t know, unless you’ve persuaded your friends to wait for the old man to pass on.”

  “Father!” cried the son in righteous horror.

  “Bah!” snorted Jerry Sr. “If they wait for that, they’ll wait a long, ripe time! But we’ll skip over that. We’ll come back, if you please, to lovely Mary Carver. Why haven’t you been near her all these days?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Jerry Jr. said. “Ever since you gave me that southwest section to farm I …”

  “Blast the half-section! If farming interferes with the only good job you’re ever apt to do in your entire lifetime, I’ll sell the place. No, Jerry, my boy, why she will look at you twice, I can’t tell. But, if she’ll tolerate you, you may consider that as an entering wedge to be followed up by assiduous pounding. Yes, sir, constant attention is what wins ’em, unless you have the brains for a sudden flash of fire and enthusiasm that will carry them off their feet. And you and I both know that you haven’t the brains for that, so why waste time talking about it? Come, come, why aren’t you at the Carver place every day of your life?”

  The half-contemptuous, half-patronizing tone that the stern old
fellow adopted toward his son was the one, after all, which Jerry Jr. was glad to hear. He knew that the rest of the rancher’s scale embraced invective and terrible sarcasm, and that these weapons were ever sharp and in store for use.

  He had intended, however, to go back to the pursuit of Mary Carver on that very day, and he had only been held back by the constant fear of John Carver. For, when the report went the rounds of the countryside that a heavy winner at the gambling hall in Porterville had been robbed on the road just outside of the town by a man wearing a white mask, he guessed at once that Carver had done the work to gain the money for which he had asked Jerry previously on that very night.

  He assured his father, therefore, that this very day would see his return to the courting of Mary, and he had no doubt that he would soon be able to press the matter through to a satisfactory conclusion. When he had finished his little speech, the rancher continued, “Because, if you take much longer, Jerry, we’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  “Elsewhere?” exclaimed Jerry in the greatest alarm.

  “I’m getting along in years,” the father said. “As a matter of fact, I’m failing rapidly. I have three diseases, the least of which would kill me within three years, my boy.”

  “The devil!” gasped Jerry.

  The old man stiffened and regarded his son with fiery eyes. “Your heart is pained for me, I see,” he said dryly. “But no matter for that, Jerry. The point is that I have not long to overlook your affairs and mine, and I shall certainly see you married to a wife you’ll stick to before I die. And I intend to see that you’ll stick to her by settling half of the estate on your first born. So, in short, we’ll give you ten days from this morning for winning the promise of Mary. Ten days from this morning, and not a day longer. After that, we’ll ask Colonel Winwood and his daughter Estelle to spend a month with us. Mary Carver would be a glorious victory, but Estelle would be well enough as a match.”