by Max Brand
“Love o’ Pete,” breathed Genniver. “A runt like you. A kid like you.” He caught at his second revolver, but it stuck in the holster, and, in the tug at it, he unbalanced and toppled upon his side.
Garlan followed him and stood over him, his head critically aslant.
“By gravy,” said Genniver, “if you didn’t do it.”
V
Now Jerry Garlan rode among the trees. The sun was high and bright, and through the upper branches, scatterings of blue sky appeared, falling sometimes through the leaves and sometimes retreating toward the zenith. There was enough wind to keep the branches wavering a little, and Jerry Garlan rode through the swinging patches of sun and shade with the drenching sweetness of the pines about him.
So he came to a scattering of boulders. They grew suddenly out of the ground, flung onto the soil from what height, and from what distance?
His horse jogged slowly around the side of the first great obstacle, and, while Garlan was looking up at its gray, moss-streaked ribs, he noticed that the head of his mount tossed a little, and the ears pricked. It was only a small sign, but Jerry Garlan trusted a horse more than he would trust himself. He rode around the corner of that rock with a revolver leveled in his hand—and came straight against a man on a roan mustang who likewise held a naked gun in readiness.
Their horses touched noses. The two men stared for an instant, and then Garlan murmured: “It’s Tom Quail.”
“It’s little Jerry Garlan,” said Tom Quail.
Yet Garlan was not little, and certainly Tom Quail was not large. He was built like a prize fighter. He had a face that was all ridged with heavy bone; the nose was a mere button—a button that had been stepped on. In addition he possessed very wide shoulders and very long arms, but the shortness of his stirrups was the most amazing thing of all.
“Well, kid,” said Tom Quail, “dog-gone me if it ain’t a pleasure to see you. We’ll shake on it.” He extended a vast hand.
“I’m glad to see you, too,” said Jerry Garlan, overlooking the hand.
“You’ve got too set up to shake hands with an old friend, I see,” said Quail.
“I don’t trust your hand,” said Garlan frankly. “I don’t want all my fingers broken.”
This frankness, and the tribute to his vast strength, seemed to please Tom Quail greatly. He could not forbear smiling, although he was not the man to show moods of amenity. He thrust his revolver into its holster. Jerry Garlan followed that example.
“So you pulled off the deal,” said Tom Quail.
Garlan shrugged his shoulders.
“You can talk to me,” said Quail. “I knew all about it ten days ago. It was a good job, all right. But why did you kill Dixon?”
“I didn’t kill him,” said Jerry.
“Of course you didn’t,” agreed Tom Quail. “You didn’t kill him. You wouldn’t kill him. But Genniver did, and that amounts to the same thing.”
“How do you make that out?” asked Jerry.
“You was with Genniver . . . Genniver killed Dixon . . . just the same as if you fired the shot yourself. That’s law.”
“Is it?”
“I know all about it. I been in the jug three times. I know all about law. It ain’t a good case that saves your hide in the law. It’s money. I know all about it,” Quail assured him gravely. “And whatcha gonna do with yourself now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s Billy Genniver?”
“I parted from him,” said Garlan.
“What way did he go?”
“I don’t know that, either,” said Garlan.
“I do,” said the other.
“Do you?”
“He went below. He’d been sign-markin’ the road for years and years.”
Garlan was silently watchful.
“And a kid like you sent him there,” murmured Tom Quail. “That shows how things happen. Anybody might stumble and bust his neck, easy. It shows the funny kind of a world it is.”
“What makes you think that I sent him there?” asked Garlan.
“Would he shoot himself? Could he shoot himself through the back?”
Garlan started. “That bullet certainly went through him from the front,” he said.
“And yet you didn’t shoot him?”
Garlan bit his lip. It was a simple trap into which he had fallen. Then he looked upon Tom Quail with a curiously impersonal eye. The latter seemed to understand at once.
“Don’t try it, kid,” he said. “It ain’t worth it, is it? You can’t kill everybody that guesses you dropped big Genniver, can you? Besides, I’d probably drop you first, if you made a pass.”
He did not seem alarmed. And the calmness of his voice and manner made Garlan sigh a little.
“When did they find Genniver?” he asked.
“About three hours after you left him,” said Tom Quail. “He wasn’t quite cold, I guess.”
“And they all thought that I’d done it?”
“I’m the only man in the world that knew that you were with Genniver. Of course, the folks could guess that it was Genniver’s partner in the robbery that had plugged him.”
“I suppose they could,” murmured Garlan with another sigh.
“But nobody but me knows your name. Except for me, you’re free and easy, kid.”
“And if you were rubbed out,” said Garlan, “then there would be nobody left who knew?”
“You wouldn’t try it,” said Tom Quail with conviction. “I’m an older hand than you are with a gun.”
“So was Genniver,” replied Garlan, smiling a little.
Tom Quail, with distinct distaste, observed that smile and frowned in answer. “Genniver was a clumsy scout,” he said. “But I aim to be your friend, kid. I don’t want to make no trouble for you.”
“Thanks,” said Garlan.
“Which way do you ride, Jerry?”
“I don’t know. I’m following my nose, sort of. I’d like to reach a town.”
“I’ll go along with you and show you.”
“I’ll go alone,” said Garlan.
The face of Tom Quail, at this, became still blacker. “Too bad that you can’t collect the reward on Genniver,” he said.
“Is there a reward?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
“Eight thousand bucks . . . the last that I heard. Maybe it’s gone up a few pegs since I last had word. Eight thousand bucks, eh? Now, kid, between you and me we ought to be able to frame up something.”
“I don’t follow you there.”
“I’ll explain it all to you. You and me was riding through the woods. We came onto Genniver and his partner. We fought. Genniver dropped at the first shot you fired. His pal beat it through the woods. No, he jumped into the creek. That was how we bagged Genniver. You see?”
“And then you’d claim the eight thousand reward?”
“Why not? Of course!”
“Listen to me,” said Jerry. “If that money were multiplied by ten and then multiplied again by ten, and all offered to me in a bag set with diamonds, I wouldn’t have it.”
“Oh,” said Tom Quail, “it’d be plumb revoltin’ to you, I guess? It’d pretty near turn your stomach. Is that it?”
“I’ve finished my piece,” said Garlan. “Good bye.”
Then the fury burst from the lips of Quail, but only in a single word. “You . . . !” he bellowed. Then he checked himself in mid speech, mid gesture. His face grew purple with restrained passion. “You’ll hear from me,” said Tom Quail, and dashed his horse past Garlan’s, and rode savagely off through the woods.
Garlan looked after him. He had hoped, with some fortune and much care, to slip quite away from all evil consequences that might have followed upon the death of Genniver. Now he saw that his hopes were foolish and could not bear fruit. Tom Quail was poisonously enraged, and Quail was not a man to forget what he considered an injury.
So Garlan rode on, falling into a d
reamy state of worry, and letting the horse drift of its own will through the woods. He came in time to a small creek, and down its banks he followed until it joined a larger stream, and by this he rode on until, in the late afternoon, he came out into the open and saw a town in the distance stretched before him.
Obviously it was well placed, for it was a door on the one hand to the timberland, and on the other it opened upon the brown hills of the cow country. It was different from many other Western towns, in that it was not composed of paintless shacks. In fact, it was a prosperous single street, with residences scattered at a little distance, as though the well-to-do had come up from the hills and down from the timber to put up their homes here. And the reason was the double streak of silver that flowed away among the hills to the southwest. The railroad had brought life to this spot.
Garlan took careful note of all the surroundings. He drew out a field glass and with that he studied the town and its environs, for he knew that the time to map a new district is when one is at a little distance, not in the midst of the place, where the forest cannot be seen for the trees.
When he had completed this mental chart, he rode on in.
VI
Hard at work in his shop was Sheriff Daniel Tilly, for the exacting duties that the law demanded from him never were sufficient to take him entirely away from the passion of his heart—carpentry. He was accustomed to spend all his spare moments, therefore, in the shop behind his house. He had a lathe, a little forge in a corner with an adequate anvil in front of it. He had a long workbench, and he had great store of tools of all kinds. Sheriff Daniel Tilly used to say: “Wood is honest. Wood don’t tell you lies.”
So he worked in wood, and he worked in iron, also, although iron he did not like. “Iron’s the skeleton,” said Sheriff Daniel Tilly. “The bones hold the flesh in place. That’s all. That’s the way with iron. Something that you can build around.”
He always had piles of timber seasoning in sheds around his shop, and in the shop itself there was the pure sweetness of newly sawed wood, and a powdering of sawdust was apt to be found anywhere—even on the tops of the low rafters.
He was working furiously this evening on a pair of wooden candlesticks. He had to keep the lathe in motion with his foot strokes. The light was bad. He was running delicate rounds, completing the design—and he bent down low, his spectacles sliding down toward the end of his nose.
It was a long nose, intensely, painfully red; its redness was set off by pale, thick eyebrows. The sheriff’s eyes were very small and seemed sadly wistful, and they were the palest of pale grays, and the eyelashes were a pale gray, also. He looked exactly what he was—a wonderfully simple, earnest, patient, hard-working man—and yet he had a touch of another quality. Because of it, he had been undisputed sheriff of the county for ten years.
He exclaimed impatiently when a shadow crossed the threshold of his shop. “Get out of my light!” said Daniel Tilly. “I gotta finish this here. Get out of my light, will you?”
“Yes,” said Garlan, and stepped to the side.
At his voice, the sheriff looked up, and then he allowed the voice of the lathe to die down to the faintest whisper.
“Well?” he complained. “What might you be wantin’ with me, young man?”
“I wanted to give you something that I found,” said Garlan.
“Well, well,” murmured the sheriff. “You wanted to give me something that you found, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And where might you’ve found it?”
“Right in the middle of the trail running through the trees, yonder.”
“You found it right in the middle of the trail?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“A wallet with a lot of money in it.”
“How much?”
“Too much to steal,” said Garlan with engaging frankness, and he smiled at the sheriff. “There’s ten thousand dollars in it. I suppose that it must belong to one of the lumber companies. It must be payroll money.”
“Ten thousand dollars!” exclaimed the sheriff. “I never seen that much money. And you brought it in to me?”
“I thought you’d better take charge of it. Unless you think that somebody else would be more in line.”
“I gotta be the servant of the law,” growled the sheriff. “I’m paid for that. Lemme see the wallet, will you?”
It was dark pigskin, time-polished, deepest amber in tone.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Daniel Tilly, rubbing his thumb lovingly over the wallet, “there’s something to be said for leather work. There’s a good deal to be said for it. It’s got a feeling to it. Only, look at the way that it rots. Look at the way that it decays. Leather chairs . . . you look at the torn places. No, I’d rather have wood. I’d a lot rather have the wood.”
Young Garlan nodded. “I’ll have to be going on,” he said. “Good bye, Sheriff.”
“Hey, hold on,” said the sheriff. “You can’t run along off like this. Wait a minute, will you?”
The youth seemed unwilling to pause. “I don’t see what more I can do,” he declared. “I’ll have to drift along, Sheriff. Good night.”
Daniel Tilly shook his spectacles into his hand and ran to the door. “You can’t go,” he protested. “Why, I gotta good idea that people would say that I’d swiped some of the money out of the wallet, if you didn’t stay here and count it over with me.”
Garlan hesitated.
“Then I’ll have to have your name, and everything like that,” said Daniel Tilly. “Hello, what’s that bag, there?”
“I don’t know,” said the boy with a little emphasis of impatience.
“Don’t you? Well, maybe Maria dropped it there. She’s pretty careless. You take a woman when she gets on in years a little, she gets pretty careless, son. Wait a minute. Where’s my spectacles?”
“In your hand,” said Garlan.
“Of course they are!” The sheriff sighed, and there was a glimmer of amusement in the eyes of Garlan. “I’ll get some paper ready. I have some paper somewhere about me. Lemme see . . . lemme see.” He reached in pocket after pocket.
“Here is a bit,” said Garlan.
“That’ll do just fine,” agreed the sheriff. “You’re a handy young man,” he added. “I can see that. Bright and honest and handy.” He went on: “Here we are. You stand by and check me. I’m gonna count over this money.”
He proceeded with the count rapidly until he pushed aside $9,000. But he went on more slowly with the latter part of the count. “Ninety-one hundred . . . Now, it must’ve come into your head . . . I mean that you could’ve walked off with this here money.”
“Of course it did,” said Garlan.
“And why didn’t you take it?”
“It was too much. It frightened me . . . the idea of taking so much money as that.”
“That’s funny,” said the sheriff. “Ninety-two hundred . . . ninety-three hundred . . . I’ve known other folks that way. Don’t mind a little pocket-picking . . . but they’d never touch your bank account. Steal a pie out of the window, but never take your purse. Well, not that I mean that you’d steal pies, either. I can see that you been brought up well. Ninety-four . . . ninety-five hundred . . . and we’re getting near the end. What’s your business, young man?”
“Anything I can get to do,” said Garlan. “I hardly care what it might be. Something honest, and something quick. I don’t fancy starving in this bleak country.”
“Where you lived, mostly?”
“Up and down the range,” said Garlan.
“Ninety-six hundred . . . ninety-seven . . . ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . . An honest man is the best work of God. Somebody said that. Who was it?”
“I don’t know. It sounds like Goldsmith, doesn’t it?” said the boy. “They used to trot out the old maxims, in those days, didn’t they?”
“Ah, and how should I know?” asked the sheriff sadly. “I never have no time for books. There�
�s always something that’s got to be done in the shop, you see . . . and then my outside work’ll take up weeks and weeks.”
“You’ve been sheriff for a long time?” asked Garlan. “And do you like the work?”
“I hate it,” said the sheriff. “But the folks seen that times was pretty quiet and that I was pretty poor and they offered me the job. So naturally I took it.”
“That was kind,” said Garlan.
“Wasn’t it!” exclaimed Tilly in the heartiest agreement. “But it’s terrible risky business, just the same. You never know when you’re gonna be called on to handle a dangerous criminal.”
“You’ve had a good deal of experience already, I suppose?” said Garlan, hiding his smile of peaceful contempt.
“Not much. Enough to scare me out of ten years, though,” said Daniel Tilly. “Ten thousand dollars, and there’s the sum complete, I guess. Just the way that you found it. You wouldn’t’ve slipped out a few of the notes and put them into your pockets, would you, now?” He laughed at his own thought. “Just write down your name here, will you? Write it this way, if you don’t mind, because I need a better light than this . . . ‘I, the undersigned, found a pigskin wallet on this day in the forest near Buckskin, and I opened it and counted ten thousand dollars inside. I took this wallet to Buckskin and gave it to Daniel Tilly, the sheriff, into his safekeeping, to return it to the owner of the money.’”
The signature—“Jeremiah Gannon” was traced out by Garlan. And, eager to be off, he stepped to the door, dusting from his elbows some sawdust that had remained after he leaned against the board.
“I’ll be going on,” said Garlan.
“Will you?” said the sheriff. “Well, good luck to you. A lot of good luck to you. But where did you get this paper, Mister Gannon?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Must have been on the range?”
“Oh, of course.”
“Because you’ve spent your life on the range, practically, I suppose?”
“Yes, practically. Good night, Sheriff.”
“Wait a minute, young man. I want to find out from you where you was able to buy fine handmade paper on this here range?”
VII