Old Carver Ranch

by Max Brand

  “Not Keene … I mean Kenyon … I mean Keene is Kenyon …”

  “Jerry, you’ve gone mad. Sit down yonder and straighten this tangle for me.”

  “No, no. I can’t stay here. I’ve got to be alone. In the morning …”

  “The devil fly off with the morning. I may be dead before the morning dawns. What I want to know now is what you mean by Keene and Kenyon being the same?”

  “Simply because the names are somewhat the same, I mixed them …”

  “You gave the first name, too, Tom Keene and … but, Jerry, you’ve kept something from me. Out with it, now, for I’ll have it sooner or later. And if I have to fight for it, it will go all the harder for you.”

  The son writhed. He struggled to find some excuses, but there were no remaining loopholes for escape. He was being drawn deeper and deeper into the net.

  “For heaven’s sake listen to me!” he exclaimed. “I only meant that …”

  “You’ve lied.”

  “I tell you, Keene was pardoned. I mean … No … when he thought I could save the Carvers if I married Mary, he made me tell Mary …”

  His father raised a hand and stepped back from him. Jerry slumped into a chair and covered his face with his hands.

  “I’m going crazy,” he gasped out. “I … I don’t know what I’m saying. In the …”

  “But I do,” said Jerry Swain Sr. “I begin to get a glimpse of a very queer truth. Keene and Kenyon are the same … Timothy Kenyon … Tom Keene … not very dissimilar names, at that. I should have thought of it. Tom Keene is pardoned, picks up some money somewhere, and, altered by his eight years in prison … without that big black beard of his, for instance … he comes back under an assumed name to … to do what?”

  “I …”

  “Answer me!”

  “Oh, Lord, if I tell you, they’ll murder me!”

  Jerry Swain stepped closer to the unnerved son. His own face was a singular study of disgust and scorn and agony as he viewed the cowardice of his son. “Who do you mean by they?”

  “Kenyon and Carver … I mean …”

  “What has Carver against you?”

  “Because he knows I know him. That’s what he holds against me. He’s tried to murder me already. He knows that I could send him to prison in a minute and …” He stopped and raised a horrified and bewildered face. “Good heaven,” he whispered. “What have I said?”

  His father drew up a chair opposite and sat down. He struck his clenched fist sharply into the palm of his other hand. “You’ve said just enough to get me started. Now, Jerry, here you sit until you’ve made a clean breast of it. Begin talking.”

  Chapter Forty

  It was nearly midnight when the tap came at the library door of Jerry Swain Sr. He deliberately laid aside the book he had been reading, put the place card in it, and then called, “Come in!”

  The door swung open. John Carver stepped into the room, while the servant who had ushered him in reached for the doorknob and drew the door closed. In the bright light of that room, John Carver blinked, barely making out the features of the other. Neither was he put at ease by the greeting of the rancher.

  “Sit down over here, Carver. No, in that chair yonder, where I can watch you. I like to watch a man’s face when I’m talking business with him. I can’t have too much light on a man’s face for my purpose.”

  John Carver took the designated chair. He sat down on the mere edge of it, his hat clasped between his hands, and his glance wandering here and there and only furtively reaching the face of his host. In quite another manner he had been used to face Swain in the old days when his own father yet lived and the fortunes of the two families were more or less equal. But now he was like a serf before a feudal lord—a guilty serf, far remiss in his dues. And indeed he felt that in the cramped, withered, dying body of Swain there was a more dangerous power than in all the brawn of his own body. And the very next speech of Swain was a bomb that shattered whatever remained of the composure of Carver.

  “Carver, I’ve talked to Jerry, and he’s told me everything.” He went on, as the other flinched back in the chair, “He told me everything, or, rather, I dragged it out of him. It seems that he is a rascal. He’s been keeping you poor. If this earth of ours were a place where the most perfect justice is done, I have no doubt that I should express my willingness to reimburse you for every penny you were blackmailed out of by my son. But this earth is not such a place of justice, and I believe that when a fool is trimmed, he deserves his trimming, as a rule. It makes the rest of us keep our wits about us.”

  Here John Carver seemed about to speak, but he could find no words. Only the cold voice of the rancher was browbeating him back toward his self-possession, and this seemed to be the result that Swain most desired. He nodded with satisfaction as the black scowl gathered on the face of his visitor.

  Then he jumped to his point, leaning suddenly forward in his aggressive way and saying, “The point is, Carver, that you and I are suddenly in the same boat, and that there is one thing holding us both back. That is Tom Keene.”

  Carver leaped from his chair, but the raised hand of Swain literally pressed him back into it.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know everything. I know that you’re the White Mask. I know that you sent Tom Keene to prison in your place. But be at ease. I’m not one of those who holds up his hands in horror on account of the sins of others. I have some tidy little sins of my own to ballast the ship with, you see. It is a little raw to send up the man to whom you owed the life of your daughter and who actually kept you from the bloodhounds. But I’m not the one to wail about such matters. Tom Keene played the part of a fool, and he has paid the fool’s price … eight years in prison.” He drew a long breath. “Now to come back to you, Carver. You have to get back on your feet, and you can’t as long as this Keene, like a devil, keeps you under his thumb. Therefore, your enmity to him is established on a strong enough basis. For my part, I freely admit that the thing I want most is to see Jerry married to your girl. And, since I have found out the pitiful weakness of the rascal, I am keener for the marriage than ever. I have to have stronger blood to bolster up mine. My grandson must have some bone and fire of spirit, so that marriage must take place, but it can’t take place on account of Tom Keene. He won’t stand for it, according to Jerry, because he very rightly sees that it would mean that you and Missus Carver would be drawn under the protection of my power. This is perfectly clear.”

  “Are you trying to show me that Tom Keene is the man who is making my life a torment?” Carver grumbled, for the speech of his host had been long enough to permit him to recover some of his poise and self-assurance. “If I’d run into a cliff, would you think I wouldn’t know what was stopping me from going ahead?”

  “I wouldn’t ask that. I’d simply ask if you knew how to get the cliff out of your way.”

  “Eh?”

  “I mean this … since I see that you’re the kind of man I can talk to … Tom Keene must die, John.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “What? The White Mask, and yet you turn up your eyes at that?”

  “No matter what I’ve done in the past, I’ve never done that, Swain. If that’s your way, it’s no wonder you’ve got on in the world. But I’ve never shot at a man except to defend myself.”

  “You’ll start now, then,” said Swain. “You’re going back now to the ranch, and you’re going to find Tom Keene and kill him. You understand? You’re going to simply brush him out of your way and mine.”

  But John Carver rose slowly and stood with braced feet and doubled fists, glaring down at the rich man.

  “Swain,” he said, “I sure used to envy you. But I’m through with that. I see the kind of gent that you are, and it plumb sickens me. Like father, like son. That’s sure true. Young Jerry ain’t worth the powder it would take to blow him to kingdom come and ol
d Jerry ain’t much better. He climbed by driving other folks into the mud. Well, Swain, here’s one dirty job that you’ll have to do yourself if you really want it done. I’m going back, and, no matter what becomes of me, I tell you I’m a better man than you, Swain. Good bye.” And he turned and stamped out of the room.

  Jerry Swain sat for a time with a stunned look. At length he swept a hand before his face as though brushing a cobweb from his brain. Never in his life had he so completely misjudged a man as he had misjudged John Carver.

  There remained a task that must be accomplished. He got up from the chair again and began to walk back and forth in the room, his step halting, his feet trailing in the velvet softness of the carpet. As he walked, his thoughts formed with the greatest rapidity. He had scored a great failure; he must balance it with a great success.

  Ten minutes later he had made up his mind firmly, and, having made it up, he started to act at once. First he went to his room, laboring slowly up the steps. Then he changed into his riding togs and slipped a revolver into his hip pocket. Next he went to a closet full of dusty, musty, unused clothes and extracted from a box a great sombrero. When he had knotted the big sombrero at his throat and jammed the hat over his eyes, he was suddenly changed. He went back ten or fifteen years at a step and seemed to be once more that restless Jerry Swain who had been still driving on his way toward a great success with a remorseless energy.

  But when he started down the stairs from his room, the pain in which he took each step warned him that he was far from his old self. Only the face remained the same, and would be the same to the last.

  He went out in the darkness to the stables, but there he did not select for saddling one of those dainty-limbed, light-stepping thoroughbreds that he had brought in at a great cost to please his son. Instead, he put the saddle on a down-headed cow pony a full fifteen years old if she was a day, and then sent her shambling out into the night.

  She was old, she was vicious, and she brought a series of muffled groans from her rider as she bucked to work the kinks out of her limbs. But at length she shook her head savagely, admitted the presence of the old master by pressing her ears flat along her neck, and struck into a lope that she could maintain, at will, for the rest of the night.

  And the old master well-nigh demanded this feat of her, for he pressed on steadily through the night until in the dawn they were in a high tangle of mountains far from their starting point. Looking back as the rose hue of the morning grew, he glanced down to the blue distance where his home must be. There they still slept while he schemed and fought for them. What would become of the house of Swain when he was gone?

  Again the chill of shame and dread pierced him when he thought of his craven son. And he gave the spurs to his mare and forced her at a gallop up a sharp slope. At the top, the ground gave back in a rough shoulder thick with trees, and behind these trees was the dim outline of a log cabin screened by the grove almost as though by night. To this house he went, dismounted, and pushed open with his foot the unlatched door.

  Glancing inside, he saw no less than five men asleep on rude bunks. On opposite sides of the room four of them slept in a double tier like the berths on a ship. But along the wall facing the door was a bunk of more luxurious dimensions. The intruder, with the faint dawn light to help him, moved stealthily around and peered at every face and form.

  The four were young giants of the mountains, thick-thewed, framed to give and receive the shocks of battle, with ragged beards already growing on their chins, and with their uncombed, seldom-cut hair tumbling over their eyes. They were close to the brute, indeed. Where their hands hung limply over the edge of a bunk, they were of appalling suggestiveness of power.

  Jerry Swain noted all of these facts with the most consummate satisfaction before he went to the other end of the room, carefully avoiding a litter of traps and other gear of hunters. Like a shadow, he reached the fifth bunk and leaned over the sleeper, who was a man fit to be the sire of such a brood of sons. A heavy beard, black as ink—blue-black and shimmering faintly in the dull light—flowed over the great arch of his chest. His face, even in his sleep, was set in the lines of indomitable and sullen pride and ferocity.

  When Swain dropped a hand on the muscular shoulder, the first impulse of the sleeper was to reach out and grapple silently with the stranger. His tremendous grip fell upon and well-nigh crushed the invalid, already suffering from the effects of the long and wearying ride. But a whisper came from the unresisting Swain.

  “It’s I … Jerry Swain.”

  Instantly he was released, and the trapper, fully clothed as he had lain down to sleep, started up from the bunk. Swain laid a finger across his lips as a signal for silence, then led the way out of the shack. He continued until they had passed the outskirts of the little grove. Then he faced his towering companion.

  “Well, Landers,” he said slowly, “you haven’t changed much. Your beard is a little thicker, and I see you have four big sons instead of the four little shavers that I used to know. But otherwise your family seems to be about the same.”

  “It is,” said the gigantic mountaineer. “But you … I can’t say as much for you, Swain. You look plumb petered out. I’d say that you been living inside too much. If you was to try six months of this life up here, your chest would begin to stick out again. You never were much for size, but you used to have strength of your own, Jerry. Well, well, I’m glad to see you. It brings some of the old days, red-hot and boiling, back to my mind, Swain.”

  “Memories like that,” answered Jerry Swain, “I put away where they won’t get out and trip me up.”

  “Never fear me, partner. I keep mum.”

  “I’m glad you do. Otherwise, there are folks that would take a terrible lot of interest in what you could tell ’em, Landers.”

  The big man nodded. Then he buried his thick, dirty fingers in his beard and waited, his eyes sharp and small as the eyes of a fox in spite of the unwieldy bulk of his body. Indeed, he seemed in more ways than one to have the mind of a fox directing the leonine frame of his body.

  “I’ll be quiet enough,” he said. “But it ain’t for that that you’ve rode clear up here. You ain’t that fond of your old friends that you’d go a-riding to see ’em, Jerry.” He chuckled in great enjoyment of this small jest.

  “No,” said Jerry, “I’ve need of you. I want some work done.”

  “The sort of work that I last done for you?” And, at the mere thought, big Landers glanced in dismay over his shoulder at the listening trees.

  “That sort of work … exactly,” the rancher confirmed.

  Landers started. “I’m through with that,” he said. “You paid well. It started me off and got me fixed up with guns and traps, and I still keep a little in the bank … enough to keep me going fine, Swain, without no more deals of that kind. No, I don’t want to talk to you about it.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” the other said scornfully. “You have more than yourself to think about. Haven’t you four sons? Are you going to turn them loose with nothing but their hands to help them?”

  “Have you come here trying to get them into some of your dirty work? I’ll throttle you first, Jerry.”

  Jerry Swain shook his head impatiently. “You don’t follow me,” he declared.

  “I follow you too well. I ain’t going to listen to that smooth tongue of yours, neither. I’ve been honest the last fifteen years, and it ain’t going to be you, Swain, that’ll change me now.”

  Jerry Swain stepped back a trifle and looked with a smile of pity—the smile of a superior man—upon his companion. At length he said gently, “The last time that I came to talk business with you, partner, I was talking a few hundred dollars. It will be different now.”

  “Eh?” said the trapper,

  “Why, Landers, I am now a wealthy man. How did I become wealthy? By not allowing my conscience to trouble me. But no matter f
or that. The important thing now is to make you see things in the new light. This would mean prosperity for you. It would mean that you and the boys could buy a small farm down on the river … some of that river-bottom land that you used to hanker for in the old days …”

  “You remember even that?”

  “I never forget such things,” said the other. “They are the handles by which a man may be lifted up and put down again. The little things are what rule us, Landers, eh? But no, partner, think of that farm by the river.”

  “I dunno what you’re talking about,” Landers said half mournfully, half angrily. “Couldn’t touch any sort of farm down there for less’n four or five thousand dollars.”

  “Well?”

  Landers started. “What do you mean, Swain?” he gasped out.

  “I simply mean that four or five thousand dollars wouldn’t scare me out. I’d still be willing to talk business.”

  There was a sort of groan from Landers. “Tell me what it is. If I can do it, I’ll try.”

  “You can’t. Not you alone, Landers. No, you’re a good man, a mighty valuable man. But you can’t do this. It will mean work for you and your four big sons.”

  “Then I’ll let the work go. I’m going to raise ’em with clean hands.”

  “You’re a fool. Their hands will be just as clean on the farm … when they get there.”

  Another groan came from Landers, but then he brushed the other away. “I’ll not listen,” he vowed.

  “Yes, you will,” replied the smaller man. “I’m just starting to talk.”

  And big Landers wheeled slowly, uncertainly, and came back and stood, vast, above the form of Jerry Swain.

  Chapter Forty-One

  With such violence was Tom Keene roused from his sleep that he sat bolt upright in his bed. But immediately he perceived the house to be in the grip of one of those sudden windstorms that plunge across some hundreds of miles of mountains between dark and dawn, making the tallest trees, the stoutest buildings shudder and tremble under their touch. Such a storm was now shaking the old Carver house, and Tom, having listened for a few moments, was certain that, what, in his sleep, had seemed to him like creaking on the stairs, must certainly be nothing but the effect of the violent wind. He lay back in the bed, accordingly, and no sooner was his strong body composed than, as is the gift of those who live in the open, he was instantly and soundly asleep.