by Max Brand
“Some hold that he hides in some gulch with a lot of other outlaws. They don’t think he leads a gang, because he always works alone, but they believe that other gunmen have found his hiding-place and are living near him. If that is the case, and Black Jim can be found in his home, we will clean out the bandits who have given our town a black name.
“If Black Jim is caught, he will surely hang. He hasn’t killed anyone yet, but he’s wounded nine or ten, and if he’s ever pressed hard, there’s sure to be a lot of bloodshed. However, it’s up to the brave men of Snider Gulch to take the chance. If they get him they’ll probably get the rest of the gun-fighters who have been sticking up stages (which is Black Jim’s specialty), and robbing and killing lone miners and prospectors, which is the long suit of the rest of the crowd.
“In conclusion, all we have to say is that the men who gets the money for Black Jim’s capture will earn it, and our respect along with it.”
She dropped the paper.
“Now do you see, Freddie?”
“I’m no psychic wonder, Jerry,” he answered with some irritation. “How can I tell what act you’re thinking of? Wait a minute!”
He gaped at her with sudden astonishment.
“Say, Jerry,” he growled, “have you got a hunch that I’m going to go out and catch this man-eating Black Jim?”
She broke into musical laughter.
“Freddie,” she said, when she could speak again. “I’d as soon send you to capture the bandit as I’d send a baby with a paper knife to capture a machine gun. No, deary, I know you want to get out of here, but I don’t want you to start east in a coffin. It costs too much!”
“Slip it to me easy, Jerry,” he said, “or I’ll get peeved.”
“Don’t make me nervous,” she mocked. “I don’t ask you to do anything rough except to put on clothes like the ones these fellows around here are wearing — heavy boots, overalls, broad-brimmed hat, red bandanna around the neck.”
He stared at her without comprehension.
“Do you think they’ll pay to see me in an outfit like that?”
“They ought to, and it’s my idea to make them. It’s a nice little bit for us both, Freddie. First act starts like this. Stage set: A western mining town, Three Rivers. Enter the lead — a girl, stunning blonde, wears corduroy walking skirt.”
Montgomery grinned but still looked baffled.
“You hate yourself all right,” he said, “but lead on the action.”
“Nobody knows why the girl is there, and nobody cares, because they don’t ask questions in a mining town.”
“Not even about the theater,” groaned Montgomery.
“Shut up, Freddie,” cut in La Belle Geraldine, “you spoil the scene with your monologue stunts. I say, the swell blonde appears and buys a seat on the stage which starts that afternoon, running towards Truckee. She kids the driver along a little and he lets her sit on the seat beside him. As soon as she gets planted there she begins to talk — let me see — yes, she begins to hand out a swift line of chatter about what she can do with a revolver. Then she shows him a little nickel-plated revolver which she carries with her. He asks her to show off her skill, but she says ‘Nothing stirring, Oscar.’ Finally they go around a curve and out rides a masked bandit on a roan horse. Everybody on the stage holds up their arms as soon as he comes out with his gun leveled.”
“How do you know they would?” said Montgomery.
“Because they always do,” answered Geraldine. “Nobody thinks of making a fight when a masked man on a roan horse appears, because they know it’s Black Jim, who can shoot the core out of an apple at five hundred yards, or something like that. Well, they all hold up their hands except the girl, who raises her revolver and fires, and though she used a blank cartridge the gun jumps out of the grip of the bandit as if a bullet hit it. Then he holds up his hands and everybody in the stage cheers, and the girl takes the bandit prisoner. The stage turns around and carries them back to Three Rivers.
“The people of the town come to look at Black Jim—”
“And they see I’m not the guy they want. Then the game’s blown.”
“Not a hope,” said Jerry. “They don’t know anything about this man-killer except the color of his horse. They’ll take you for granted.”
“Sure,” groaned Montgomery, “and hang me to the nearest tree, what?”
“Take it easy, Freddie. There’s some law around here. You just keep your face shut after they take you. They’ll wait to try you the next day, anyway. That’ll give me time to cash in the reward. I’ll be fifty miles east before they get wise. The next morning when they come in to stick a rope on your neck, you simply light a cigarette and tell them it’s all a mistake. Let ’em go to Snider Gulch to the hotel and they can find a hundred people to recognize you as a ham actor. Tell them you were merely trying a little act of your own when you stuck up the stage, and that your partner flashed the gun from the driver’s seat. Say, kid, the people of Three Rivers will see the laugh is on them, and they’ll buy you a ticket to Denver just to get rid of you. I’ll meet you there, and then we’ll trot on to Broadway, savvy? It’s a dream!”
“A nightmare,” growled Montgomery, though light entered his face; “but still—”
“Well?”
“Jerry, I begin to think it wouldn’t be such a hard thing to get away with this! But what if you couldn’t get me out of the town? What if they started to lynch me without waiting for the law?”
“That’s easy,” smiled Geraldine. “Then I step out and tell them it’s simply one grand joke. All we would have to be sorry about is the money we spent on your horse and clothes and gun. It’s a chance, Freddie, but it’s a chance that’s worth taking. Two thousand dollars reward!”
Montgomery’s eyes hardened.
“Jerry,” he whispered, “every stage that leaves Three Rivers has a lot of pure gold in the boot. Why not play the bandit part legitimate and grab the gold? It’s a lot simpler, and there’s no more risk.”
Geraldine studied him curiously.
“You’ve got the makings of a fine crook, Freddie. It’s in your eye now.”
He colored and glanced away.
“It’s no go, deary. If we cheat these miners with my little game, at least we know that the money comes only from the rich birds who can afford to put up a reward. But if we grab the cash in the boot, how can we tell we aren’t taking the bread and jam out of the mouth of some pick-swinger with a family to support?”
She finished with a smile, but there was a suggestion of hardness in her voice.
“Jerry,” he answered, “you’re certainly fast in the bean. I’d go a ten-spot to a Canadian dime that you could make up with one hand and darn stockings with the other. We’ll do it your way if you insist. It’ll be a great show,”
“Right you are, Freddie. You’ve got the face for the act.”
They had to spread a hundred dollars over a horse, a revolver, and Montgomery’s clothes. He spent most of the day shopping and at night came home with the necessary roan, a tall animal which was cheapened by bad ring-bones. His clothes; except the hat and boots, were very inexpensive, and he managed to buy a secondhand revolver for six dollars.
While he made these purchases, La Belle Geraldine, now registered at the “hotel” as Annie Kerrigan, opened a conversation with the girl who worked in the store. She proved diffident at first, with an envious eye upon Jerry’s hat with its jaunty feather curled along the side; but in the end La Belle’s smile thawed the cold.
“She handed me the frosty eye,” reported Jerry to Montgomery that evening, “until I put her wise on some millinery stunts. After that it was easy. She told me all she knew about Black Jim, and a lot more. People say he’s a big chap — so are you, Freddie. His complexion is dark — so is yours. One queer thing is that he has never killed any one. The paper said that and the girl said it, too. It seems he’s a big-time guy with a gun, and when he shoots he can pick a man in the arm or the leg, just
as he pleases. I don’t suppose you can hit a house at ten yards, Freddie, but it’s a cinch they aren’t going to try you out with a revolver — not as long as they have a hunch you’re Black Jim.”
That night Montgomery learned all that could be told about the stage route and the time it left Three Rivers. By dawn of the next day he and Jerry were on the road toward Three Rivers by different routes.
CHAPTER II. HANDS UP!
THE HAPPINESS OF women, say the moralists, depends upon their ability to preserve illusions. Annie Kerrigan punched so many holes in that rule that she made it look like a colander.
Illusions and gloom filled her earlier girlhood in her little Illinois hometown. Those illusions chiefly concerned men. They made the masculine sex appear vast in strength and illimitable in mystery.
She remembered saying to a youth who wore a white flower in his lapel and parted his hair in the middle and curled it on the sides: “When I talk to you, I feel as if I were poking at a man in armor. I never find the real you. What is it?”
The youth occupied two hours in telling her about the real you. He was so excited that he held her hand as he proceeded in the revelation. When he left she boiled down everything he had said. It was chiefly air, and all that wasn’t air was surrounded with quotation marks so large that even Annie Kerrigan could see them. So she revised her opinion of men a little.
In place of part of the question marks she substituted quotations. As she grew older and prettier she learned more. In fact she learned a good deal more than she wished to know about every attractive youth in her town.
So Annie Kerrigan started out to conquer new worlds of knowledge.
Her family balked, but Annie was firm. She went to Chicago, where she found the stockyards — and more men. They smiled at her in the streets. They stared at her in restaurants. They accosted her at corners. So the mystery wore off.
About this time Annie was left alone in the world to support herself. She starved for six months in a department store. Then an enterprising theatrical manager offered her a chance in a third-rate vaudeville circuit.
Before that season ended she had completed her definition of men. In her eyes they were one-half quotation marks and the other half bluff. Every one of them had his pet mystery and secret. Annie Kerrigan found that if she could get them to tell her that secret, they forged their own chains of slavery and gave her the key to the lock.
In time she held enough keys to open the doors of a whole city full of masculine souls. But she never used those keys, because, as she often said to herself, she wasn’t interested in interior decoration. The exceptions were when she wanted a raise in salary or a pleasure excursion.
In this manner Annie Kerrigan of many illusions and more woes developed into La Belle Geraldine with no illusions: a light heart and a conscience that defied insomnia. She loved no one in particular — not even herself — but she found the world a tolerably comfortable place. To be sure, it was not a dream world. La Belle Geraldine was so practical that she knew cigarettes stain the fingers yellow and increase the pulse. She even learned that Orange Pekoe tea is pleasanter than cocktails, and that men are more often foolish than villainous.
Without illusions, the mental courage of Jerry equaled that of a man. Therefore she commenced this adventure without fear or doubt of the result.
It was a long journey, but her lithe, strong body, never weakened by excess, never grown heavy with idleness, shook off the fatigue of the labor, as a coyote that has traveled all day and all night shakes off its weariness and trots on, pointing its keen nose against the wind. So she went on, sometimes humming” an air, sometimes pausing an instant to look across the valley at the burly peaks — and far beyond these, range after range of purple-clad monsters, like a great hierarchy whose heads rise closer and closer to heaven itself. She found herself smiling in spite of herself, and for no cause whatever.
She had estimated the distance to Three Rivers at about ten miles. Yet it seemed to her that she had covered scarcely a third of that space when the road twisted down and she was in the village. It was even smaller than Snider Gulch. The type of man to which she had grown accustomed during the past few weeks swarmed the street. They paid little attention to her, even as she had expected. Mountains discourage personal curiosity.
The six horses were already hitched to the stage and baggage was piled in the boot. After she bought a passage to Truckee, her money was exhausted. If she failed, the prospect was black indeed. She could not even telegraph for help, particularly since there was not a telegraph line within two days’ journey. She shrugged this thought away as unworthy.
When the passengers climbed up to select their seats, Geraldine remained on the ground to talk with the driver about his near leader, a long barreled bay with a ragged mane and a wicked eye. The driver as he went from horse to horse, examining tugs and other vital parts of the harness, informed her that the bay was the best mountain horse he had ever driven, and that with this team he could make two hours’ better time than on any of the other relays between Three Rivers and Truckee.
She showed such smiling interest in this explanation that he asked her to sit up on his seat while he detailed the other points of interest about this team.
Her heart quickened. The first point in the game was won.
As they swung out onto the shadowed road — for the canons were already half dark, though it was barely sunset — she made a careful inventory of the passengers. There were nine besides herself and all were men. Two of them sitting just behind the driver, held sawed off shotguns across their knees and stared with frowning sagacity into the trees on either side of the road, as if they already feared an attack. Their tense expectancy satisfied La Belle Geraldine that the first appearance of her bandit would take the fight out of them. The others were mostly young fellows who hailed each other in loud voices and broke into an immediate exchange of mining gossip. She feared nothing from any of these.
The driver worried her more. To be sure his only weapon was a rifle which lay along the seat just behind him, with its muzzle pointing out to the side, a clumsy position for rapid work. But his lean face with the small, sad eye made her guess at qualities of quiet fearlessness. However, it was useless to speculate on the chances for or against Montgomery! The event could be scarcely more than half an hour away.
They had scarcely left Three Rivers behind when she produced the small revolver from her pocket. The driver grinned and asked if it were loaded. It was a sufficient opening for Geraldine. She sketched briefly for his benefit a life in the wilds during which she had been brought up with a rifle in one hand and a revolver in the other. The stage driver heard her with grim amusement, while she detailed her skill in knocking squirrels out of a treetop.
“The top of a tree like that one, lady?” he asked, pointing out a great sugar pine.
“You don’t believe me?” asked Jerry, with a convincing assumption of pique, “I wish there was a chance for me to show you.”
“H-m!” said the driver. “There’s a tolerable lot of things for you to aim at along the road. Take a whirl at anything you want to. The horses won’t bolt when they, hear the gun.”
“If I did hit it,” said Jerry, with truly feminine logic, “you would think it was luck.”
She dropped the pistol back into the pocket of her dress. They were swinging round a curve which brought them to the foot of the long slope, at the top of which Montgomery must be waiting.
“I hope something happens,” she assured the driver, “and then I’ll show you real shooting.”
“Maybe,” he nodded, “I’ve lived so long, nothin’ surprises me, lady.”
She smiled into the fast-growing night and made no answer. Then she broke out into idle chatter again, asking the names of all the horses and a thousand other questions, for a childish fear came to her that he might hear the beating of her heart and learn its meaning. Up they drudged on the long slope, the harness creaking rhythmically as the horses leaned into th
e collars, and the traces stiff and quivering with the violence of the pull. The driver with his reins gathered in one hand and the long whip poised in the other, flicked the laggards with the lash.
“Look at them lug all together as if they was tryin’ to keep time!” he said to Geraldine? “I call that a team; but this grade here keeps them winded for a half an hour after we hit the top.”
The rank odor of the sweating horses rose to her. A silence, as if their imaginations labored with the team, fell upon the passengers. Even Geraldine found herself leaning forward in the seat, as though this would lessen the load.
“Yo ho, boys!” shouted the driver.
“Get into that collar, Dixie, you wall-eyed excuse for a hoss! Yea, Queen, good girl!”
His whip snapped and hummed through the air.
“One more lug altogether and we’re there!”
They lurched up onto the level ground and the horses, still leaning forward to the strain of the pull, stumbled into a feeble trot. Jerry sat a little side-wise in the seat so that from the corner of her eye she could watch the rest of the passengers. One of the guards was lighting a cigarette for the other!
“Hands up!” called a voice.
The driver cursed softly, and his arms went slowly into the air; the hands of the two guards shot up even more rapidly. Not three yards from the halted leaders, a masked man sat on a roan horse, reined across the road: and covered the stage with his revolver.
“Keep those hands up!” ordered the bandit. “Now get out of that stage — and don’t get your hands down while you’re doin’ it! You — all there by the driver, get up your hands damned quick!”
CHAPTER III. THE MIXED CAST
A GREAT TIDE of mirth swelled in Jerry’s throat. She recognized in these deep and ringing tones, the stage voice of Freddie Montgomery. Truly he played his part well!