by Max Brand
In the beginning of that day’s march all she knew was that her father trusted her to this stranger, Donnegan, to take her to The Corner, where he was to find Jack Landis and bring Jack back to his old allegiance and find what he was doing with his time and his money. It was a quite natural proceeding, for Jack was a wild sort, and he was probably gambling away all the gold that was dug in his mines. It was perfectly natural throughout, except that she should have been trusted so entirely to a stranger. That was a remarkable thing, but, then, her father was a remarkable man, and it was not the first time that his actions had been inscrutable, whether concerning her or the affairs of other people. She had heard men come into their house cursing Colonel Macon with death in their faces; she had seen them sneak out after a soft-voiced interview and never appear again. In her eyes, her father was invincible, all-powerful. When she thought of superlatives, she thought of him. Her conception of mystery was the smile of the colonel, and her conception of tenderness was bounded by the gentle voice of the same man. Therefore, it was entirely sufficient to her that the colonel had said: “Go, and trust everything to Donnegan. He has the power to command you and you must obey — until Jack comes back to you.”
That was odd, for, as far as she knew, Jack had never left her. But she had early discarded any will to question her father. Curiosity was a thing which the fat man hated above all else.
Therefore, it was really not strange to her that throughout the journey her guide did not speak half a dozen words to her. Once or twice when she attempted to open the conversation he had replied with crushing monosyllables, and there was an end. For the rest, he was always swinging down the trail ahead of her at a steady, unchanging, rapid stride. Uphill and down it never varied. And so they came out upon the shoulder of the hill and saw the storm center of The Corner. They were in the hills behind the town; two miles would bring them into it. And now Donnegan came back to her from the mule. He took off his hat and shook the dust away; he brushed a hand across his face. He was still unshaven. The red stubble made him hideous, and the dust and perspiration covered his face as with a mask. Only his eyes were rimmed with white skin.
“You’d better get off the horse, here,” said Donnegan.
He held her stirrup, and she obeyed without a word.
“Sit down.”
She sat down on the flat-topped boulder which he designated, and, looking up, observed the first sign of emotion in his face. He was frowning, and his face was drawn a little.
“You are tired,” he stated.
“A little.”
“You are tired,” said the wanderer in a tone that implied dislike of any denial. Therefore she made no answer. “I’m going down into the town to look things over. I don’t want to parade you through the streets until I know where Landis is to be found and how he’ll receive you. The Corner is a wild town; you understand?”
“Yes,” she said blankly, and noted nervously that the reply did not please him. He actually scowled at her.
“You’ll be all right here. I’ll leave the pack mule with you; if anything should happen — but nothing is going to happen, I’ll be back in an hour or so. There’s a pool of water. You can get a cold drink there and wash up if you want to while I’m gone. But don’t go to sleep!”
“Why not?”
“A place like this is sure to have a lot of stragglers hunting around it. Bad characters. You understand?”
She could not understand why he should make a mystery of it; but then, he was almost as strange as her father. His careful English and his ragged clothes were typical of him inside and out.
“You have a gun there in your holster. Can you use it?”
“Yes.”
“Try it.”
It was a thirty-two, a woman’s light weapon. She took it out and balanced it in her hand.
“The blue rock down the hillside. Let me see you chip it.”
Her hand went up, and without pausing to sight along the barrel, she fired; fire flew from the rock, and there appeared a white, small scar. Donnegan sighed with relief.
“If you squeezed the butt rather than pulled the trigger,” he commented, “you would have made a bull’s-eye that time. Now, I don’t mean that in any likelihood you’ll have to defend yourself. I simply want you to be aware that there’s plenty of trouble around The Corner.”
“Yes,” said the girl.
“You’re not afraid?”
“Oh, no.”
Donnegan settled his hat a little more firmly upon his head. He had been on the verge of attributing her gentleness to a blank, stupid mind; he began to realize that there was metal under the surface. He felt that some of the qualities of the father were echoed faintly, and at a distance, in the child. In a way, she made him think of an unawakened creature. When she was roused, if the time ever came, it might be that her eye could become a thing alternately of fire and ice, and her voice might carry with a ring.
“This business has to be gotten through quickly,” he went on. “One meeting with Jack Landis will be enough.”
She wondered why he set his jaw when he said this, but he was wondering how deeply the colonel’s ward had fallen into the clutches of Nelly Lebrun. If that first meeting did not bring Landis to his senses, what followed? One of two things. Either the girl must stay on in The Corner and try her hand with her fiance again, or else the final brutal suggestion of the colonel must be followed; he must kill Landis. It was a cold-blooded suggestion, but Donnegan was a cold-blooded man. As he looked at the girl, where she sat on the boulder, he knew definitely, first and last, that he loved her, and that he would never again love any other woman. Every instinct drew him toward the necessity of destroying Landis. There was his stumbling block. But what if she truly loved Landis?
He would have to wait in order to find that out. And as he stood there with the sun shining on the red stubble on his face he made a resolution the more profound because it was formed in silence: if she truly loved Landis he would serve her hand and foot until she had her will.
But all he said was simply: “I shall be back before it’s dark.”
“I shall be comfortable here,” replied the girl, and smiled farewell at him.
And while Donnegan went down the slope full of darkness he thought of that smile.
The Corner spread more clearly before him with every step he made. It was a type of the gold-rush town. Of course most of the dwellings were tents — dog tents many of them; but there was a surprising sprinkling of wooden shacks, some of them of considerable size. Beginning at the very edge of the town and spread over the sand flats were the mines and the black sprinkling of laborers. And the town itself was roughly jumbled around one street. Over to the left the main road into The Corner crossed the wide, shallow ford of the Young Muddy River and up this road he saw half a dozen wagons coming, wagons of all sizes; but nothing went out of The Corner. People who came stayed there, it seemed.
He dropped over the lower hills, and the voice of the gold town rose to him. It was a murmur like that of an army preparing for battle. Now and then a blast exploded, for what purpose he could not imagine in this school of mining. But as a rule the sounds were subdued by the distance. He caught the muttering of many voices, in which laughter and shouts were brought to the level of a whisper at close hand; and through all this there was a persistent clangor of metallic sounds. No doubt from the blacksmith shops where picks and other implements were made or sharpened and all sorts of repairing carried on. But the predominant tone of the voice of The Corner was this persistent ringing of metal. It suggested to Donnegan that here was a town filled with men of iron and all the gentler parts of their natures forgotten. An odd place to bring such a woman as Lou Macon, surely!
He reached the level, and entered the town.
CHAPTER 11
HUNTING FOR NEWS, he went naturally to the news emporium which took the place of the daily paper — namely, he went to the saloons. But on the way he ran through a liberal cross-section of The Corne
r’s populace. First of all, the tents and the ruder shacks. He saw little sheet-iron stoves with the tin dishes piled, unwashed, upon the tops of them when the miners rushed back to their work; broken handles of picks and shovels; worn-out shirts and overalls lay where they had been tossed; here was a flat strip of canvas supported by four four-foot poles and without shelter at the sides, and the belongings of one careless miner tumbled beneath this miserable shelter; another man had striven for some semblance of a home and he had framed a five-foot walk leading up to the closed flap of his tent with stones of a regular size. But nowhere was there a sign of life, and would not be until semidarkness brought the unwilling workers back to the tents.
Out of this district he passed quickly onto the main street, and here there was a different atmosphere. The first thing he saw was a man dressed as a cowpuncher from belt to spurs — spurs on a miner — but above the waist he blossomed in a frock coat and a silk hat. Around the coat he had fastened his belt, and the shirt beneath the coat was common flannel, open at the throat. He walked, or rather staggered, on the arm of an equally strange companion who was arrayed in a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers, white dancing pumps, and a vast sombrero! But as if this was not sufficient protection for his head, he carried a parasol of the most brilliant green silk and twirled it above his head. The two held a wavering course and went blindly past Donnegan.
It was sufficiently clear that the storekeeper had followed the gold.
He noted a cowboy sitting in his saddle while he rolled a cigarette. Obviously he had come in to look things over rather than to share in the mining, and he made the one sane, critical note in the carnival of noise and color. Donnegan began to pass stores. There was the jeweler’s; the gent’s furnishing; a real estate office — what could real estate be doing on the Young Muddy’s desert? Here was the pawnshop, the windows of which were already packed. The blacksmith had a great establishment, and the roar of the anvils never died away; feed and grain and a dozen lunch-counter restaurants. All this had come to The Corner within six weeks.
Liquor seemed to be plentiful, too. In the entire length of the street he hardly saw a sober man, except the cowboy. Half a dozen in one group pitched silver dollars at a mark. But he was in the saloon district now, and dominant among the rest was the big, unpainted front of a building before which hung an enormous sign:
LEBRUN’S JOY EMPORIUM
Donnegan turned in under the sign.
It was one big room. The bar stretched completely around two sides of it. The floor was dirt, but packed to the hardness of wood. The low roof was supported by a scattering of wooden pillars, and across the floor the gaming tables were spread. At that vast bar not ten men were drinking now; at the crowding tables there were not half a dozen players; yet behind the bar stood a dozen tenders ready to meet the evening rush from the mines. And at the tables waited an equal number of the professional gamblers of the house.
From the door Donnegan observed these things with one sweeping glance, and then proceeded to transform himself. One jerk at the visor of his cap brought it down over his eyes and covered his face with shadow; a single shrug bunched the ragged coat high around his shoulders, and the shoulders themselves he allowed to drop forward. With his hands in his pockets he glided slowly across the room toward the bar, for all the world a picture of the guttersnipe who had been kicked from pillar to post until self-respect is dead in him. And pausing in his advance, he leaned against one of the pillars and looked hungrily toward the bar.
He was immediately hailed from behind the bar with: “Hey, you. No tramps in here. Pay and stay in Lebrun’s!”
The command brought an immediate protest. A big fellow stepped from the bar, his sombrero pushed to the back of his head, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow away from vast hairy forearms. One of his long arms swept out and brought Donnegan to the bar.
“I ain’t no prophet,” declared the giant, “but I can spot a man that’s dry. What’ll you have, bud?” And to the bartender he added: “Leave him be, pardner, unless you’re all set for considerable noise in here.”
“Long as his drinks are paid for,” muttered the bartender, “here he stays. But these floaters do make me tired!”
He jabbed the bottle across the bar at Donnegan and spun a glass noisily at him, and the “floater” observed the angry bartender with a frightened side glance, and then poured his drink gingerly. When the glass was half full he hesitated and sought the face of the bartender again, for permission to go on.
“Fill her up!” commanded the giant. “Fill her up, lad, and drink hearty.”
“I never yet,” observed the bartender darkly, “seen a beggar that wasn’t a hog.”
At this Donnegan’s protector shifted his belt so that the holster came a little more forward on his thigh.
“Son,” he said, “how long you been in these parts?”
“Long enough,” declared the other, and lowered his black brows. “Long enough to be sick of it.”
“Maybe, maybe,” returned the cowpuncher-miner, “meantime you tie to this. We got queer ways out here. When a gent drinks with us he’s our friend. This lad here is my pardner, just now. If I was him I would of knocked your head off before now for what you’ve said—”
“I don’t want no trouble,” Donnegan said whiningly.
At this the bartender chuckled, and the miner showed his teeth in his disgust.
“Every gent has got his own way,” he said sourly. “But while you drink with Hal Stern you drink with your chin up, bud. And don’t forget it. And them that tries to run over you got to run over me.”
Saying this, he laid his large left hand on the bar and leaned a little toward the bartender, but his right hand remained hanging loosely at his side. It was near the holster, as Donnegan noticed. And the bartender, having met the boring glance of the big man for a moment, turned surlily away. The giant looked to Donnegan and observed: “Know a good definition of the word, skunk?”
“Nope,” said Donnegan, brightening now that the stern eye, of the bartender was turned away.
“Here’s one that might do. A skunk is a critter that bites when your back is turned and runs when you look it in the eye. Here’s how!”
He drained his own glass, and Donnegan dexterously followed the example.
“And what might you be doing around these parts?” asked the big man, veiling his contempt under a mild geniality.
“Me? Oh, nothing.”
“Looking for a job, eh?”
Donnegan shrugged.
“Work ain’t my line,” he confided.
“H’m-m-m,” said Hal Stern. “Well, you don’t make no bones about it.”
“But just now,” continued Donnegan, “I thought maybe I’d pick up some sort of a job for a while.” He looked ruefully at the palms of his hands which were as tender as the hands of a woman. “Heard a fellow say that Jack Landis was a good sort to work for — didn’t rush his men none. They said I might find him here.”
The big man grunted.
“Too early for him. He don’t circulate around much till the sun goes down. Kind of hard on his skin, the sun, maybe. So you’re going to work for him?”
“I was figuring on it.”
“Well, tie to this, bud. If you work for him you won’t have him over you.”
“No?”
“No, you’ll have” — he glanced a little uneasily around him— “Lord Nick.”
“Who’s he?”
“Who’s he?” The big man started in astonishment. “Sufferin’ catamounts! Who is he?” He laughed in a disagreeable manner. “Well, son, you’ll find out, right enough!”
“The way you talk, he don’t sound none too good.”
Hal Stern grew anxious. “The way I talk? Have I said anything agin’ him? Not a word! He’s — he’s — well, there ain’t ever been trouble between us and there never ain’t going to be.” He flushed and looked steadily at Donnegan. “Maybe he sent you to talk to me?” he asked coldly.
But Donnegan’s eyes took on a childish wideness.
“Why, I never seen him,” he declared. Hall Stern allowed the muscles of his face to relax. “All right,” he said, “they’s no harm done. But Lord Nick is a name that ain’t handled none too free in these here parts. Remember that!”
“But how,” pondered Donnegan, “can I be working for Lord Nick when I sign up to work under Jack Landis?”
“I’ll tell you how. Nick and Lebrun work together. Split profits. And Nelly Lebrun works Landis for his dust. So the stuff goes in a circle — Landis to Nelly to Lebrun to Nick. That clear?”
“I don’t quite see it,” murmured Donnegan.
“I didn’t think you would,” declared the other, and snorted his disgust. “But that’s all I’m going to say. Here come the boys — and dead dry!”
For the afternoon was verging upon evening, and the first drift of laborers from the mines was pouring into The Corner. One thing at least was clear to Donnegan: that everyone knew how infatuated Landis had become with Nelly Lebrun and that Landis had not built up an extraordinarily good name for himself.
CHAPTER 12
BY THE TIME absolute darkness had set in, Donnegan, in the new role of lady’s eron, sat before a dying fire with Louise Macon beside him. He had easily seen from his talk with Stern that Landis was a public figure, whether from the richness of his claims or his relations with Lord Nick and Lebrun, or because of all these things; but as a public figure it would be impossible to see him alone in his own tent, and unless Louise could meet him alone half her power over him — supposing that she still retained any — would be lost. Better by far that Landis should come to her than that she should come to him, so Donnegan had rented two tents by the day at an outrageous figure from the enterprising real estate company of The Corner and to this new home he brought the girl.