Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  His companion gaped in amazement. “After he has tried to saddle a murder on you? But possibly the sheriff is wrong, and I’m wrong. There are qualities in Al Rankin that can make a man stick to him through thick and thin, even as you seem to be doing.”

  “There are.”

  “I’m glad of it,” said Mr. Sumpter. “I’ve been making up my mind that my daughter shall never see the fellow again. But he may be an extraordinary sort of man. The reports against him may be exaggerated. Tell me, Mister Lake, the good things you have noted in him.”

  “I can do that short, Mister Sumpter... his wife.”

  “His wife?” Then, as he understood, Sumpter frowned. “It’s on account of my girl, Anne, that you’re prepared to stay by Rankin? Is that it? I’ve never heard her mention your name among her friends.”

  “She doesn’t know me. But let that go.”

  “Mister Lake, let me tell you, once and for all, that the best thing you can do for Anne is to let the law take its course. You have already done too much, I believe. You are the man who removed from Smiley the evidence which would have hung Rankin. Far better if he had swung on the gallows. There would have been an end to him and another beginning for Anne. The best thing you can do is to turn around and go back.”

  “Your daughter will be the best judge of that.”

  He was favored with a long and searching scrutiny, and then, at the approach of the station agent, he turned to the man and asked for directions. They were easily given. One had only to take the road and keep on around the side of the next hill. It was easy walking because the snow was firm. No one could mistake the Rankin house. There was no other in sight.

  Sumpter and Lake started out side by side. They talked little at first, but Sumpter seemed to have taken a determined liking to the younger man, and finally he began on the story of the marriage.

  It was by no means a novel tale. The life of his daughter had fallen into two distinct divisions, it seemed. First, she had been a romping girl typical of the West. She did anything that boys could do and sometimes did it a good deal better. The tomboy period ended when she was sent East to a girls’ school. On her return she was a new personality, it seemed. But one undercurrent of her nature remained the same — she continued to love the outdoors and the life of the mountains. The time she had spent away from her homeland had served to idealize it. The East to her had always remained the country of the efféte. Constantly harking back to the wild days of her girlhood, she came back expecting in a measure to take up the old times as she had left them, and she had been shocked to find she could not. The thing she admired she could no longer do, and she was physically incapable of the thirty miles a day in the saddle that had once been nothing to her. So she transferred her interests; she began to idolize the Western men. She loved their freedom. She professed a liking even for their dialect. At this crucial moment in stepped Al Rankin.

  He was everything that she admired. He could almost literally ride anything that walked on four feet. His courage was known. Although he was a comparative stranger in their town, tales followed out of the mountains, and it was said that he had killed “his man.”

  This was enough to startle Sumpter and put him on his guard. He went so far as to forbid the girl having anything to do with the stranger until he had been able to learn more about his past. But the prohibition, as usual in such cases, merely confirmed the girl in her liking. She refused to see other men. She concentrated stubbornly on Albert Rankin and wasted on him all of her inborn aptitude for idealization. When her father attempted to argue, he was met with stubborn silence.

  He decided, more indulgently than wisely, to let her have her own way, trusting to her woman’s intuition, and fearing to drive her to rashness by a prolonged opposition. For stubbornness was a Sumpter characteristic, and, under all of her gentleness of exterior manner, Anne Sumpter at heart could be firm as a rock. And the father, recognizing the family trait, gave way.

  No sooner was the ban lifted than Al Rankin was constantly in the house. Their engagement followed, and at once he pressed for an early marriage. The girl consented. She declared it was the way of the West. Her father and even her mother protested only half-heartedly. They had been won over by the pleasant manner and easy social address of handsome Albert Rankin. Financially they easily learned that he was sound enough. The marriage followed.

  Even before the ceremony Mr. Sumpter received the first serious warnings in the shape of several anonymous letters, and one was signed by Hugh Smiley. They made various unsavory charges against young Rankin, but Sumpter gave them slight attention. In the first place because he despised anonymous blackmail, and in the second place because in the case of Smiley he felt a bitter personal spite.

  “But, when I took her to the train,” concluded Sumpter, “I had a premonition that she was embarking toward a disaster. It came over me all at once, when we stepped into the coach. But then it was too late to do anything.

  “It was not long. Last night the telegram came from Sheriff White of Everett, informing me in outline of everything that had happened. He also told me that Rankin is now outside the law. So that nothing can prevent me from taking my girl back to her home and teaching her to forget this horrible affair. It might be that I shall need help. In that case, may I call on you?”

  “When you get her consent, call on me,” said Lake.

  “You don’t think she’ll come?”

  “I’ve stopped thinking,” said Bob Lake bitterly. “The things I figure on all come out wrong.”

  VII.— “FOR BETTER OR WORSE”

  ROUNDING THE HILL, they paused by mutual consent and stared at one another. Stretching to the right before them, the hillside flattened into a spacious plateau heavily forested, and above the trees in three tall gables rose the roof of the house. To Bob Lake it seemed to have the dimensions of a palace, and his heart fell.

  To him a house in the mountains meant a three-room shack. How would he be able to face the mistress of this mansion and talk to her of the things that he began to feel vaguely forming in his mind?

  “I remember hearing something about it,” Sumpter was saying. “But can you imagine the owner of a property like this becoming a common gunfighter and gamester?”

  Bob Lake returned no answer. They struggled over the slippery snow up the hillside, and on the level of the plateau every step among the trees revealed the more and more imposing proportions of the house. Built of the heaviest timbers, it was settled to the natural slope of the ground like a piece of landscape. At night and unlighted it must have seemed merely the peaked crest of the mountain.

  “But why a house like that... up here?” asked Bob Lake.

  “Rankin’s father had a great deal of money. He was an Easterner, but he built this hunting lodge and raised Albert in the wilds. Wanted to get him back to nature, as I understand it, and he succeeded.”

  They came out onto a semicircular opening in the woods before the lodge, and presently they rang the doorbell. A Chinese boy admitted them and took their names. When he had gone, Bob Lake pointed to the big logs that were smoldering in the fireplace of the hall. “No real use,” he said, “but just for folks to look at when they come saunterin’ in.”

  Then they admired the paneling in the great style of redwood. The stonework about the fireplace alone, Bob Lake decided, would have cost his entire fortune to reproduce. Wherever his eye fell, it reported back to his mind a detail which made him more gloomy.

  There was light, rapid fall of feet, and then down the generous curve of the great staircase came Anne. She was huddling a wrap of blue, shimmering stuff around her shoulders as she ran; Bob Lake did not miss even this detail. The light from a window that opened on the stairway showed her brightly for a moment, and then she descended into the shadow of the hall and was in the arms of her father.

  A dozen half laughing and half excited questions tumbled out all at once, and then, as her father stepped back gravely, she saw Bob Lake. If he had any fear th
at she might have forgotten him, that fear was banished instantly. There was a flash and paling of color as she looked at him and, it seemed to Lake, no little alarm in her manner.

  “You know Mister Lake?” her father was saying.

  She bowed to him, recovering her self-possession. “I’ve seen Mister Lake before. But, Dad, what brought you here? Have you missed me already? And have you seen the house? And isn’t it wonderful? And the servants... and everything you could imagine.”

  “I have missed you,” said Sumpter. “But that isn’t exactly what’s brought me here. If Mister Lake will excuse us for a moment, I wish to talk with you alone.”

  They made their brief excuses to Bob Lake, and then she drew her father into the library, lined with more books than Sumpter had ever seen in one room before.

  “It’s serious?” she murmured to him.

  “Very serious. The first thing for you to do is to pack up your things and come back home with me. I can explain things on the way in detail.”

  He could have been more diplomatic, but he was not in a tender mood. He felt that she had so thoroughly messed matters in her marriage that there was not a little of “I told you so” in his attitude. And the result was that he hurt her cruelly with his very first speech.

  “It’s Al!” she exclaimed. “Something has happened to Al. I knew it, when I saw you come!”

  “Something has happened to Al,” repeated her father grimly. “Besides, what’s more to the point, Al has done a good deal to others.”

  “But what?”

  “Anne, I want you to take your father’s word. I don’t want to go into details just now. The main thing is that you’ve married a hound, and you’ve got to get away from this house as fast as you can. Will you trust me for that?”

  He might as well have trusted a mother to send her child to the gallows. “Are you trying to drive me mad?” she asked. “What’s happened to Al? Is... is he hurt?”

  “Never better in his life.”

  “Then... ?”

  “Which is more than can be said for at least one of his acquaintances.”

  “There’s been a fight?”

  “Not a fight.”

  “Tell me everything... everything. I knew there was something serious about it from the manner of that man who took him off the train.”

  “Do you know why he was taken off the train?”

  “No.”

  “It was an arrest.”

  “Ah! On what charge?”

  “Murder!” He drove the word at her brutally. He was determined that, before he ended this interview, he would have her so thoroughly subdued to his will that she would never question it again. But, instead of crumbling before his attack, she rallied to meet it.

  There was an unexpected basis of strength in her nature that always came to the top in an emergency. All his life her father had been astonished when he was confronted by it.

  “It’s not true,” she said quite calmly.

  “Do you think I’d lie to you, Anne?”

  “Someone else has lied to you... or else they trapped Al with a false charge. At this very moment I know as surely as I know that I’m standing here, that Al is a free man!” She said it proudly.

  “You’re right. He’s free.”

  It staggered Anne in spite of her surety of the moment before. “Then... ?”

  “Do you know who to thank for his freedom? The romantic fool downstairs... Lake. Who is he?”

  “Lake? Thank him? What do you mean by that?” She came close to him with eagerness that he could not understand in her face. “What did Mister Lake do? What did he do?”

  “Saved the neck of Al Rankin, that’s all.”

  “I knew it... almost.”

  “You knew what?”

  “Nothing. Tell me what Mister Lake did.”

  “The sheriff arrested Al Rankin without evidence. He was waiting for evidence that a man didn’t dare to bring in, for fear of having his throat cut. That’s the sort of a man your husband is. This Lake... the idiot... intercepted Smiley on his way and took the evidence from him. That evidence was the revolver with which Rankin had killed a man named Coy... deliberate murder, Anne!”

  “I don’t....”

  “Don’t say you don’t believe it. Don’t act like a stubborn child, my dear.”

  “But why did Mister Lake do it? Did he know Al?”

  “Never saw him before that day. He was riding behind you on the train. Can you figure out why he did it?”

  Her flush was a marvelous thing to see. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “No, I can’t understand. I’ve never spoken to him before today.”

  “Everybody seems to have gone mad,” said her father. “But I have told you enough to convince you that you’ve got to go back with me?”

  “Do you think I shall leave Al for a charge that even the law can’t hold against him?”

  “But there’s a new charge, Anne.”

  “And this time?” she queried.

  “Murder again.”

  “Ah!” She winced from that blow and then made herself meet his eyes.

  “You’ve made a fool of yourself, and that’s the short of it, my dear. You’ve let a crazy, romantic idea run away with you. Now, come back home and face the music and forget this devil of a Rankin. I never liked him. I warned you against him from the first.”

  “They’ll never convict Al! They can’t.”

  “Not with eyewitnesses?”

  “Who?”

  “The man who was killed lived long enough to name his murderer. That man was Smiley.”

  “He lied out of malice.”

  “Did he? There was another man. It was a man who had just saved Rankin from the gallows at the risk of his own neck. It was a man who had done these things out of the bigness of his heart. To repay him for what he had done Al Rankin tried to shift the blame for the murder on his shoulders. That’s the sort of a cur Rankin is. And the name of the living witness against Rankin is the man downstairs... Bob Lake! Will you call him a liar?”

  She was struck mute. Feeling her way, she found a chair and sank slowly into it. Still she watched her father with haunted eyes.

  “And now, Anne,” he went on, growing suddenly gentle, the thing for you to do is to come back to people who love you and people you can trust. I’ll keep you from this murdering devil, this ungrateful, hard, scheming sneak.”

  “Oh, Dad,” she whispered, “how can I go back? How can I go back and face them and live down their whispers and their smiles?”

  “Why, curse ’em,” said her father. “I’ll knock off the head of the first man that raises his voice against you or insults you with a grin. And as for the gossip of the women... why, honey, you can silence the whole pack of ’em with a single smile.”

  A very wan smile rewarded him for his flattery. Still she shook her head. “What right have I to desert him? ‘For better or worse.’ I’ve no right to leave him... and he’ll still be proven innocent.”

  “You can’t meet my eye, when you say that.”

  “Dad, I can’t go. I can’t!”

  “Anne, why not?”

  “Shame... pride... everything keeps me here.”

  “It’s ruin, Anne.”

  “I’ve brought it on my own head... besides... I won’t admit that he’s wrong. I’m going to stay.”

  “Then, by heaven, I’m going to stay here with a gun. If your husband comes inside the door, he’s a dead man.”

  VIII.— “A STRANGE COMBINATION”

  SHE LEFT HIM raging up and down the room and pausing with a stamp of the foot from time to time, when he recalled her stubbornness. He felt very much like one who has brought a chance of escape to a prisoner and finds the obstinate fool unwilling to accept freedom.

  But Anne slipped out and came on Bob Lake, sitting in the hall where she had left him. He sat with his chin propped upon one great brown fist while he studied empty space. On his puckered forehead there was the wistfulness of a man who su
bmits to inevitable defeat. She paused on the stairs to study him. He was by no means a handsome fellow, she decided, and yet she liked his very ugliness. There was a certain dauntless honesty about that face that others had felt before her. She saw, too, as any woman with the feel of the West in her blood will do, the breadth of his shoulders, his fighting jaw, and the size of hands capable of holding and retaining what they seized — or else crushing it under the fingers. Anne Sumpter liked these things, and, having finished her catalogue of details, she went on to surprise him.

  A man who is surprised, she knew, is always half disarmed and left open to the eye of a woman. Smiling faintly, she reached the hall before he sensed her coming.

  “My father has told me about you,” she said, taking pity on his confusion, but she had not by any means intended to. “He has told me,” she went on, “that you have done a good deal for Mister Rankin.”

  Then she waited, she hardly knew for what. He was not quite so clumsy as she had expected. She discovered that he had a way of looking at one so that it was difficult to bear his eye. His seriousness was contagious.

  “Lady,” he said gravely, “I dunno what your father has said. But if you want facts, I’ll give ’em to you.”

  “By all means,” said the girl, and paused for the recital. There would be much boasting in it, she had no doubt.

  “The facts are these,” said Bob Lake, reflecting on them as though to make sure that he was correct. “It come in my way to do a little favor for Al Rankin, and I done it.”

  Was that the way he phrased a service that had kept her husband from the gallows?

  “Then it came in Al Rankin’s way to do a kind of a bad-looking trick to me, and it appears like he done it, too. So that’s how it stands between Al Rankin and me.”

  And was this the way he described what her father had called an attempt to put the blame of a murder on his shoulders? She was staggered by this studious understatement. And there was a ring of truth about it that went home. For the first time a great doubt about Al Rankin entered her mind and lodged there.