by Max Brand
“Now, that was what opened our eyes to Jess. Jud Linsey was called a quick man with his shooting irons, but beside Jess that day he looked as if he was standing still to have his picture taken. After Jud drops, Jess sings out in his quiet way: ‘Well, boys, you see what I’ve done. And I ask you: What other way out was there for me?’
“They wasn’t any other way, and we all knowed it. So we didn’t say nothing. And Jess turns his back and walks out without nobody lifting his hand. But old ‘Pike’ Malone says to me, he says: ‘Caswell, they’s a good man gone wrong today.’
“And Pike told the truth. The sheriff went near crazy when he heard about the killing of his son-in-law. He rides up to the house of Jess Dreer and calls him out and cusses him up and down and tells him to come with him. The sheriff was aching for a gun play, but Jess didn’t come halfway. He goes right along to the jail.
“Then comes the trial. They was twelve fair men on the jury, but what could they do? It was a plain case of manslaughter, the easiest they could let Jess off. And after he heard the decision, he busted jail.
“The sheriff followed hotfoot; some said that he left the way open for Jess so that he could have the pleasure of dropping him with his own guns instead of waiting for Jess to serve his sentence. The sheriff runs Jess down easy — because the first place Jess went was home. The sheriff goes in for him, and the sheriff never comes out again. But Jess Dreer comes out and rides off on the sheriff’s hoss.
“They wasn’t anything for it except to start after him with a posse, not that any of us really wanted to tackle the job. But we couldn’t have our town put on the map as an easy place for a getaway. That wouldn’t do. We got our guns and climbed on our hosses and followed Jess Dreer for blood.
“He’d have got away, because he has the real eye for a trail, and he knows how to shake any crowd that ever got together. But his hoss went lame, and we caught up with him.”
At this point the sheriff paused, sighed, and looked for a long moment at the fire.
“That was the time,” he said at length, “that Jess Dreer cut his name into the memory of the Southwest — and he cut it deep. Afterward Jess Dreer went on, and we went back. I got this that day.”
He touched a scar where a bullet had furrowed the base of his broad, tanned neck.
“And now here I am on his trail,” said the sheriff. He shook his head gloomily. “I may get Jess. Chances are that Jess’ll get me. I ain’t got no grudge agin’ him. But I got to make a place for myself. It’s a gamble how the trail will turn out, but it’s a sure thing that they don’t want a sheriff long down my way until they find the man that can get Jess Dreer. What’ve I got on my side? Numbers. They don’t count. You’ve just seen how he slides through them. What else have I got? The fact that Jess has got away so often that maybe his luck is just about played out.
“Eight years of luck. Pretty soon he’ll tumble. And — maybe — I’ll be there with a gun to catch him when he drops!”
At the conclusion of this tale there was a silence; even Mrs. Valentine was motionless and her knitting needles were crossed idly for the first time in many an hour. But Mary, without a word, got up and left the room. She walked with her head fallen. There seemed to be a haze across her eyes, for when she reached the door, she fumbled blindly for it a moment.
All of this Morgan Valentine saw. What passed through his mind it would be impossible to say, but when the door had closed upon his niece, he said softly to Caswell: “Sheriff, between you and me, I think it’d be a pretty good idea if you didn’t talk no more to Mary about this Jess Dreer.”
“Why not?”
“If you had a house built of dead leaves,” said Morgan Valentine, “would you encourage folks to come and light matches in it?”
CHAPTER 13
THERE WAS NO sleep for Mary Valentine when she reached her room after Jess Dreer had escaped. She had drawn a picture by guesswork, and the picture had become a living thing.
She lighted the lamp to undress. At once the thought of going to bed became detestable, for she foresaw long hours of sleeplessness, twisting and turning from side to side. She tried to read, but the print tangled on the page, became a blur out of which grew a face and a form and a voice.
Throwing the magazine away, she tried to daydream, but the living reality cut into the midst of her dream. She blew out the lamp, but the moment it was extinguished, the pale moonlight cut into the room and brought back with breathtaking vividness the picture of Jess Dreer as he had got up from the chair and stretched himself before the window.
At length she slipped into a deep chair beside the bed and dropped her face in her hands. Time cannot be measured in some moods. She could not tell whether it was hours or moments before there was a faint scratching sound outside her window, but when she looked up, there sat the long body of Jess Dreer in the window, jet-black in the moonlight, in the very attitude he had been in when he dropped for the ground. She hardly dared to look again, and then she heard the ghost murmur: “Whist! Mary Valentine!”
At that, she started up, half fearful and tingling with a singularly happy excitement.
But when she ran to him, his greeting was characteristic.
“Well, well! Not in bed yet? Is that the way to treat yourself, Mary Valentine? I wouldn’t treat my old hoss like that!”
“Do you know that the sheriffs are still in the house? That they haven’t gone to bed? That their men are here? Do you know that, Jess Dreer?”
“I scouted around a bit first and seen their hosses saddled like they was hesitating about giving me another run.”
“And yet you came back?”
“Not for fun,” said Dreer.
“Come inside. They’ll see you sitting there!”
“This is good enough for me.”
“But if it wasn’t out of madness, what was it that brought you back?”
“Common sense. They’ll hunt for me tomorrow over the hills. I’ll be riding off the other way.”
“You’re doubling on them. But Salt Springs lies the other way, and they’re sure to comb the district around the town. They always do. The amateurs start by looking near home.”
“They’re more generally right than the professionals, then. But Caswell is one of these crafty fellows. He starts right in to get inside my mind, find out what I’m thinking about, and then outguess me.” He laughed softly. “Caswell follers me as if he was a general; as if I was an army with a board of strategy — and here I am, plain Jess Dreer. All I do is to act simple, and that always fools him.”
“Listen to me.”
“Yes.”
“Jess Dreer, why have you come back?”
“Partly I’ve told you why. Partly because I left in such a terrible hurry that I forgot something. After all you done for me, I plumb forgot to thank you. So I come back to tell you now that you’re the finest girl I’ve ever knowed, Mary Valentine.”
“Hush!” she whispered. And to cover her emotion and the tremor of her voice, she added: “Isn’t that someone listening at the door?”
“Not a soul. They ain’t anybody near. And they’s another reason why I had to come back. Like as not you’ll be hearing considerable talk about me the next few days. You’ll be hearing about Jess Dreer the murderer, Jess Dreer the gambler, Jess Dreer the robber, Jess Dreer the no-good hound. Well, mostly I don’t care what people think about me after I’ve gone by. My trail fades out, and what they think about me don’t reach my ears, so why should I care? But this is different.”
He turned more fully toward her and looked up. She could see him frown with the effort of hard thought.
“I ain’t much good with words. I’m out of practice, too. But this is the way I feel. When I come to this house I struck soft dirt, and I’ve left a trail that’s going to last. I mean — I mean — I got an idea that maybe you won’t forget me for quite a while, you see—”
He spoke very apologetically.
“I shall never forget you,” said the girl.
He paused.
“No,” he said carefully, “I don’t think you ever will.”
It would have been disgusting assurance on the part of another man; but it seemed perfectly natural coming from Jess Dreer.
“And here’s the way I feel,” he went on, “that if ever you should get your head filled full of wrong ideas about me, I’d know it if I was a thousand miles away. I’d know it, and I’d feel like someone had stuck a knife in me — and then — turned the knife. It would hurt, you see?”
She could not answer.
“Maybe this’ll sound all foolish to you,” said Jess Dreer, “but what I say now I say because you’re the first human being that’s ever gone a step out of his way to help me since the law turned me out. You took a chance. You risked something. You got me a chance to get clear. And so what I say now I say for you and God and me to hear. That’s a fact!
“I ain’t going to pile up a lot of excuses. All I say is this: That first a wrong was done, and that I took the law into my own hands, and then the law threw me out. And since that time, no matter what liars say, I’ve never lifted my hand except to defend myself. They’s another thing. I’ve took the money of other people. I’ll tell you why. When they run me away from my home, they run me away from my own cattle and my own land. It was a good-paying ranch and I figure that the world owes me as much as I’d have made clear off that ranch. And that’s what I take every year — or less. And I’ve never yet taken it from nobody who couldn’t afford to lose it. Mostly I’ve taken it across card tables, but some — I’ve taken at the end of a gun.”
He paused.
Suddenly she was aware that he was in an agony; that he had spoken in an agony; that he sat now, waiting in a silent torment, for her judgment. And a great humility rushed over Mary Valentine. An ache came in the hollow of her throat. And somehow — she herself did not know how — she had taken both his hands.
“I’m talking the same way,” she said, “for you and God to hear me; and I swear that I’ll never believe harm of you, Jess Dreer.”
He raised her hands suddenly to his face; her finger tips touched hot, pounding pulses in his temples; and his hands were quivering.
“God bless you!” he said.
Was it possible that he had kissed her hands?
“For eight years I’ve been riding on a lone trail,” said Jess Dreer. “I’ve had the spur dug into me for eight years. And a spur leaves scars. And now, for the first time, I’ve reached a stopping place.”
“If you can stay,” she was whispering, “oh, Jess, we’ll find a way to clear you!”
“Girl, you don’t know men! But wherever I may go on the outtrail, night and morning, I’ll send my thoughts back to you.”
“Are you going? No, no! Not yet. I have something to say — I—”
She could not finish the sentence.
“But if you should ever need me; then send for me. I’m a gambler, as I’ve said. And they’s a string of places through the mountains where they know me. In Salt Springs they’s one. Dan Carrol knows me, and he can get word to me wherever I am — by underground wires. Good-by.”
“Not yet, Jess.”
“It ain’t right for me to stay. Is there something troubling you, girl?”
At length she said: “Go now; quickly.”
He stared at her in wonder. She stood erect; her face was buried in her hands. And then Jess Dreer slipped down from the window.
Afterward, she cried out, or thought she cried out, but he did not turn again. After a while she saw him pass on Angelina over the top of the hill, and across the moon.
CHAPTER 14
NEXT TO THE rooster in the chicken yards, the cook is generally the first living thing to waken on a ranch. Even during the short nights and long days of early summer he is in his kitchen while the dawn is still chilly and gray. But on the ranch of Morgan Valentine there was always one person up even before the cook began to rattle at the lids of his big stove, and that person was the owner. He was like one of those old-fashioned skippers who keeps only one eye closed even during the dogwatch. Usually Morgan Valentine employed the early hour in a walk among the ranch buildings. He enjoyed that morning stroll while the light grew brighter and brighter on the mountaintops and the mists became thin in the lower valleys. Each day he watched his big domain unroll before his eye, and the first pride of the possessor flowed back upon him.
But this morning he went into the living room and knocked up a fire over the coals which remained from the night before. It burned poorly. There were charred ends of logs from which the smoldering heat had been eating the life all night, and now they glowed like charcoal, but would not flame. A thick smoke rose toward the chimney, and some of it rolled out and curled around the mantelpiece and filled the room with pungent scent.
Morgan Valentine remained hanging over this dreary blaze. A man, if fifty, is generally fat enough to content himself with the present, but when he turns back to the past, it is dangerous. And Valentine was thinking of the past. There had been something in Jess Dreer which made him reminiscent of the days when he and his brother became empire builders in this valley. Sitting before the fire, the rancher recalled how the tall man had sat back in the shadow and watched the others with bright, uneasy eyes. Like a wild animal, thought Valentine, which has come out of the night, and even in captivity carries with it an air of the freedom of the outer spaces.
That was the thing which tormented him. Jess Dreer was free. Free and penniless, no doubt, but freedom was worth poverty. Here was he, the rich man, tied down by his wealth. What had it brought him except an unloved wife and children who were hardly more than names to him? To Jess Dreer the whole mountain desert was synonymous with the word “home.”
There was something infinitely attractive to Valentine in the character of the outlaw. There was an honesty — if that word could be used with a thief — that drew the rancher as he had never been drawn before to any man except his dead brother.
Someone was coughing in the hall; he recognized his wife even before she appeared in the door.
“Why, Morgan, I thought the house was on fire,” she said, and straightway she went to a window and opened it. “The house was that full of smoke,” she added, coughing again.
He returned no answer to this, but kicked the log fragments again, and this time a yellow tongue of fire leaped out and hung for a moment quivering in the mist of smoke as though it had a life of its own. After that, the blaze began, and the smoke diminished. There had been a touch of irritation in that kick at the smoldering wood, but now he was able to turn his usual calm face toward his wife.
“You look kind of tired,” he said kindly.
“How could I look any other way after last night?”
“Bear up for a little while, Mother. Mary is leaving in a few days and then you can have a long rest.”
Maude Valentine regarded her husband critically. She had studied this silent man with profound attention for many years and knew less about him now than she had at the beginning.
“I been thinking something,” she said slowly, and folded her hands before her. “After Mary goes, every time you miss her, you’ll look to me and be angry.”
“I’m never angry, Mother.”
At this a little spot of color came up in each cheek.
“I wish you’d talk straight out to me once in a while, Morgan. I wish you’d talk man talk to me now and then.”
He shrugged his shoulders, but she went on in spite of this danger sign: “Even if you was to storm at me, Morgan, I’d like it better than — this!”
“I try to be kind, Mother.”
“Kind?” she said. “Kind?” And there was a breathless little check in her voice. It suddenly occurred to the man that she was acting as if she had been enduring for a long time and had now reached the limit of her strength. He braced himself with that chilly feeling in his back which a man usually has when he faces the hysteria of a woman.
“Well,”
she said at length, so calmly that his nerves gradually began to relax, “we won’t talk any more about her. We’ll talk about — you, Morgan.”
And she made a step toward him as timid as a girl approaching her new lover who has not yet completed his avowal. Now and then a sort of youthful beauty would flush across this middle-aged woman’s face.
“Just now,” said he, “I’d kind of like to talk about her. You ain’t apt to admire her, Mother, but you got to admit that what she did last night was pretty fine.”
Maude Valentine blinked.
“Fine?” she gasped, “Getting a murdering outlaw away from a sheriff. Fine?”
“Two sheriffs,” corrected her husband grimly.
“Are you laughing at me, Morgan?”
“I mean, she took a bad job off my hands, Mother.”
“Off your hands?”
“Would you of had me let them take my guest under my roof, when he come here by my invitation?”
She found no ready answer to this, but nevertheless she instinctively shook her head.
“If it hadn’t been for Mary, I’d of had to stand back to back with that Jess Dreer and fought ’em off.”
He sighed.
“I think we’d of cleaned ’em up. Then it would of meant that I’d be riding this minute beside Jess Dreer on the long outtrail, no matter where it takes him, and every man’s hand agin’ us. That’s what it would of meant.”
“Morgan, I actually believe that you almost regret it!”
“Sometimes — I dunno. But it’s Mary that’s kept me here.”
“Ah, but you don’t look down deep and get the reasons why she done it, dear. Do you know what they were?”
“Well?”
She bore the patient, neglectful tone.
“Because she saw that Dreer was paying a lot of attention to Elizabeth. She was not being talked to. She was jealous! That’s the whole fact of it!”
“Maude,” said her husband after a moment of silence, “here comes the sheriffs. Maybe you better meet ’em and make ’em at home.”