Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “Then,” she said, “as Al’s wife I can only hope that the time will soon come when he can explain that away.”

  “I hope so, too,” said the big man frankly, “but I misdoubt it. The point is, we’ve come to a pass where gun talk is a pile more likely than man talk.”

  Again that very simplicity of expression shocked her into belief. She began to feel suddenly that this was the reality for which she had been consciously seeking and never finding.

  But she said coldly: “And why have you come to tell me these things... and you’ve come a long distance, Mister Lake?”

  “Because,” he answered calmly, “it came into my mind that you might have heard enough things from your father to think that you got hooked up with a yaller hound.”

  “Do you think Al Rankin is that?”

  He paused, lost in thought. “No,” he said, “I ain’t sure of it. Not quite.”

  “And why do you wish to find out what I think?”

  “Because,” he said, “if you was to think that way, it’d come in handy for me to go out and blow off the head of this same Al Rankin.”

  She could merely stare at him. “Mister Lake, I don’t suppose I should listen to you, but, you have helped Mister Rankin... and you do seem to feel that you have been wronged. But... do you realize that you are talking to Al Rankin’s wife?”

  “Lady,” he said, “it’s something that I can’t forget.”

  “Do you actually expect me to ask you to go out with a gun to find my husband?”

  “I ask you to talk frank to me, like I’m doing to you,” he said.

  “And suppose that I don’t give you this mad commission?”

  “Then it’s up to me to go out and get to Al Rankin and see that he’s safe and sound and clean out of the hands of the law which is tryin’ tolerable hard to reach him, I figure.”

  “Of all the strange men I have ever known or heard of,” she said slowly, “you’re the strangest, Mister Lake.”

  “Me? Strange? Not a bit. I can tell you everything about myself in half a minute... everything worth knowing, that is.”

  “Then I earnestly wish that you would.”

  “Plain cowpuncher, lady. Does that answer?”

  “Cowpuncher? But there are all manner of cowpunchers, aren’t there?”

  “No, they’re mostly a pretty lazy set, take ’em by and large. They punch cows because they’d rather ride than walk. Not very clean in the skin, seeing the kind of a life they lead, and not a terrible lot cleaner under the skin, seeing the life they lead. Off and on they sort of smell of their work, you might say. They happen onto the range sort of casual, most of ’em, and they happen off the range sort of casual, most of ’em. They drink considerable, and they cuss considerable. Some of ’em dies in their boots and is glad of it, and some of ’em dies in their boots and is sorry for it. Religion they ain’t bothered a pile with. Past they ain’t got. Family don’t bother ’em none.” He paused to pick up the fragments of facts that might have strayed from his attention during this strange recital, and then he looked up to her faintly smiling face. “And there you are, lady, with a pretty fair picture, taking it by and large, of Bob Lake. Will it do?”

  She knew by the very bitterness of his smile that he was not understating this time, but really striving to give her a literal portrait of himself, as he was, so that she might not be led astray hereafter in her estimation of him. With all her heart she admired that fearless honesty.

  “I think,” she said gently, “that you’ve named all the things about yourself that don’t count a bit, and you’ve deliberately left out of account everything that really matters.”

  He bowed profoundly. “Lady, I never figured on having the last word with you, even about myself.”

  She could not help smiling. And then she stopped and wondered at herself. It was the most serious day of her life, and here she was forgetting the seriousness and centering only on this odd man — this stranger. What was coming to her husband all this time? “If I asked you,” she said at length, “you would go out to help Mister Rankin?”

  “I suppose,” he said gloomily, “that I would.”

  “And will you tell me why?”

  “Because I done wrong by Al Rankin,” he answered after another moment.

  “Wrong to him? How?”

  “Speakin’ man to man, that’s a thing I can’t talk about.”

  “But speaking man to woman, Mister Lake?”

  “All the more reason.”

  At that it became absolutely necessary for her to know. Of course, she guessed quite distinctly, and she knew that she was walking on dangerous ground. But what woman could have done otherwise?

  “It’s a mystery,” she said. “And... I’d like to know. How in the world could you possibly have wronged Al Rankin?”

  “By envyin’ him, Missus Rankin. When the sheriff took him off the train, I was sitting behind you, and I wished that he’d never come back... I started in hoping that he was done for. Well, that sort of thing is poison. So I jumped off the train to make up.”

  “Do you know that there are no other men like you, Mister Lake?”

  “Millions of ’em, lady, but they don’t let themselves go. Well, they ain’t any real reason why I should horn in here. You’re going back home with your father?”

  “I’m not. I’m staying here.”

  He blinked and then looked earnestly at her. “Stay here and wait for Al?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What you’ve heard about him, don’t turn you ag’in’ him none?”

  “Not a bit.”

  Bob Lake sighed. “You’re sure fond of him,” he replied. “Well, that lets me out.”

  He picked up his hat, and she knew perfectly well that the moment he passed through the door he would be out of her life and gone forever. It was a hard thing to look forward to. Between the lines of his blunt speech she had been reading busily for herself, and what she read was a romance so astonishing that it carried her back to her days of fairy stories. Out of those pages all this seemed to have happened — a fairy tale turned into the ways and days of the 20th Century. A strange combination of Faithful John, Mysterious Prince, and Wandering Knight — there he went out of her life.

  “Wait!” called the girl faintly.

  He paused.

  “A little while ago you made an offer. You said you would try to help my husband, if I asked you to.”

  “I did.”

  “You meant that?”

  “Lady, are you going to take me up?”

  “Ah, now you want to withdraw?”

  He came back to her. “Listen,” he said, “you think it over careful. Think it over a whole pile. But, if you need me, say the word. It ain’t an easy thing to do, Missus Rankin. But, if you start me, I’ll stick with it to the finish.”

  “But don’t you see that there are no friends who will help him now? He’s alone. Nothing but enemies around him. Mister Lake....”

  “You don’t have to plead,” said Bob Lake. “Tell me straight what you want me to do.”

  “Find him,” said the girl, “and keep him safe.”

  IX. AL SLEEPS IN HIS BOOTS

  OUT OF EVERETT, Al Rankin rode hard, cursing in spite of his newly gained liberty. He had been on the point of running back into the room after shooting Smiley. That was his plan as Lake had afterward seen. He would come back, appearing surprised at what he found, and the gun on the floor would convict Bob Lake. He hated Hugh Smiley for various reasons; he hated Bob Lake as a man of evil generally hates those who have found him out. The very fact that his life had depended on the romantic generosity of a stranger was abhorrent to him. The time might come, perhaps, when Bob Lake would boast of how he kept no less a person than Al Rankin from the halter.

  For all these causes Rankin wished both Smiley and Bob Lake out of the way. And he had cunningly contrived it so that one blow might destroy both without bringing even a breath of suspicion upon his own head. Only one thing
foiled him, and that was his own inaccuracy with the revolver. Had he thought twice he would have aimed for the head — it was far surer. But the bullet through the body had not taken the life instantly — it had left enough breath in the lungs of Hugh Smiley for him to cry out the name of his murderer, and Rankin, running back into the building, had heard that cry and recognized the voice. At one stroke all of his plans were ruined.

  He hurried out of the jail again, and, rounding the corner at the hitching rack, he chose with a single glance the best of the three horses that were tethered there — a rangy bay with legs enough for speed and a wide expanse of breast that promised staying qualities. He had no time for a longer examination and threw himself hastily into the saddle. A moment later he was galloping swiftly out of Everett.

  From the moment he swung onto the back of that horse, he became a thing more to be shunned than the guilt of a dozen murders — he became a horse thief. There is an old maxim west of the Rockies: “It takes a man to kill a man; it takes a skunk to steal a horse.” Al Rankin knew the maxim well enough. He knew various other things connected with horse thieves and their ways. And yet here he was on the back of a stolen horse.

  Crime had been for Al Rankin a temptation like liquor to other men. If he had been born poor, he probably would have found sufficient excitement in the mere work of earning a living, which is rarely dull in a cattle country. But Al Rankin had never known the sting of breaking blisters on the inside of his hands. He had never known the pleasure of earned money, whether in the making or the spending. His only joy in life had come out of matching his wits against the wits of others and his speed of hand and straightness of eye against theirs. The trouble with Al was that he was different from his fellows. He despised his victims, and, when a man does that, he is past hoping for.

  What tortured him with shame now was not that he had attempted to destroy his benefactor, Bob Lake, but that the obscure crime of killing Coy so long ago should have led to such complicated consequences. Of all the acts of his life that was probably the least blameless, for Coy needed killing if ever a man did. But out of that death the train of consequences sprang. It was that killing which had determined him on leaving the mountains for a time. That departure sent him into the life of Anne Sumpter. And Anne Sumpter led directly to the break with Smiley’s daughter which in turn had worked back to put him in peril from Smiley himself. And to get even with Smiley he had now definitely enlisted against himself the enmity of the first man he had ever met whom he had definitely respected — that man was Bob Lake.

  He was in fact, though he would not admit it, not a little afraid of Lake. Not that he would have feared a test of physical strength or a gun play man to man, but there were qualities in Lake that he did not understand, and whatever men do not understand they fear and hate. With all his soul Rankin hated Bob Lake.

  He drew up the bay on a hilltop and looked back at Everett, a sprawling, shapeless shadow. By this time they knew that he was a horse thief. By this time the posse had started after him. He shook his fist into the night at them and spat in his contempt. In a way, there was a sort of fierce pleasure in knowing that from this time forth the hand of every man would be against him, his hand against every man.

  Murderer and horse thief! There was a fine ending for Al Rankin, son of Judge Rankin. But he would fool them. For how long? Coldly there stepped into his mind the memory of other men, cool, confident, clever, experienced, who had from time to time passed outside the law. One by one they always fell. One by one their brief careers of wild living had ended with a wild or a wretched death. Some confederate enraged or bribed to betray them — but he, Al Rankin, would have no confederates. Other thoughts came to him.

  “Curse resolutions,” he said softly to himself. “I’ll play the game the way it comes to me, and the boys that get me will pay a full price.” And then he went on.

  Another thought came to him and made him spur on the horse. For the first time in many hours he had recalled his wife. Again he cursed into the night — cursed Bill White and dead Hugh Smiley and his daughter and the interloper. Bob Lake. This was their work, he decided. He hardly knew Anne Sumpter — that name came to him more readily than the new one. He had sought her out because, when he went into her home town, she had been the attraction. He had wanted her because it seemed that everyone else wanted her. To his self-centered point of view she would have been desirable for this reason alone. And, indeed, he had not stopped to learn more about her. He had instantly concentrated upon learning how to win her. He had stepped into her home. He had studied her environment. He had quickly learned that she loved the West for its rough freedom, and he had exaggerated all these qualities in himself for her sake. It had from the first been a great game. He enjoyed it because he felt that he was deceiving her with consummate skill. Not once had he allowed his real self to come to the surface until that moment when he was saying good bye to her on the train to follow Bill White. Then for a moment the ugly inner self cropped up to the surface, and the sudden whitening of her face had been the result of his speech.

  But bah, he concluded at this point in his reflections. I’ll fool her again. I’ll fool her all her life. She ain’t got the brains to see through me. I’ll have her thinking I’m a martyr before she’s two days older.

  It was very necessary that he should educate her to this belief in him now that he was a wanderer. She must be his base of supplies. She must be ready to send him succor of money and supplies from time to time. She must be the rock on which he was to build his safety and happiness. And again he cursed. It was surely an irony of fate that compelled him to accept a woman as a partner — he who had never had partners of any description.

  Now, in the very beginning of his duel with the law, he found himself without any of the essentials. He had not a sign of a weapon except his pocket knife. He had very little money. It was necessary at once to strike to his base of supplies and get both money and weapons. As a matter of fact, it was the direction which he would choose. His cleverness was known. Ordinarily Bill White would have guarded the home of a man he wanted in the hope that the criminal would head toward it for refuge. But dealing with Al Rankin, the canny sheriff would probably never try such simple methods. He would attempt something complicated — some smart deduction — and Al Rankin would baffle him by doing the simple thing.

  He decided to strike from the south toward the home town, making a wide detour and traveling in a loose semicircle so as to keep within a region of easy trails. In this manner he came down into that region where the deep and narrow gorge, which began near Greytown, spread out into a wider valley with tillable ground in patches here and there. It was near to his home in a matter of miles, but he had never been in that exact region before. The lowlands of the farmers were not exciting enough to attract Al Rankin. He was glad of this fact now, because it gave him a chance to harbor safely without much fear of being recognized. The first thing he did, when he reached that valley, was to head straight for a crossroads hotel and put up his horse for the night.

  It was very bold, but he counted on two things. First that the news of his crimes and a description of him might not have been spread as yet. Second that he would never be expected and looked for so close to his home. It would be generally surmised that he would strike out for distant regions.

  All went as smoothly as he could have wished. There were not, apparently, more than four or five men staying in the hotel that night, and he saw not a single face that was even remotely familiar. He put up his horse in security, ate his dinner with the five men before him, and then went up to his room.

  But the scheme had not been as simple as it seemed. The moment he was alone in his room he began to worry, for he realized that he had stepped out of his natural character. Ordinarily he would not have favored these yokels with a single word more than orders for food. But this night he knew that he had been exceedingly affable, making himself laugh at their jests, even venturing a few stale jokes, and putting himse
lf out to be agreeable. Was it not possible that he had been so unnatural that they would suspect something? Might they not be putting their heads together downstairs this very moment?

  He heard a loud burst of laughter downstairs, and his skin prickled. What if that laughter was at his expense? His pulse quickened. With soft steps he stole about his room and took stock of his surroundings. There was fortunately one easy exit that he could use in case of need. There was a shed beside the hotel, and the roof of it joined the side of the main building a couple of feet below his window. It would be easy in a pinch to slip out the window and down this roof, and then drop lightly to the ground.

  Having noted this, he breathed more easily, and, returning to the door, he examined the lock. It was a stout affair, and there was besides a strong bolt on the inside. This he shot home and felt fairly assured against a surprise attack. But he dared not take off his boots, when he lay down on the bed. For the first time the meaning of the phrase “dying in one’s boots” came home to him with all its force.

  In the meantime, how should he sleep? Finding himself fast approaching a stage of hysterical excitement, he shrugged his shoulders, turned on his side, calmly assured himself that he was frightening his mind with silly fancies, and closed his eyes, determined to find sleep until the dawn. Then one day’s march would bring him home. The closing of his eyes automatically induced drowsiness, and he was on the verge of falling fast asleep, when he heard a soft tapping at the door.

  It brought him off the bed and onto his feet in the middle of the floor with one soundless bound. What could it mean? He slipped to the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “A friend. Let me in, Al.”

  “What news?”

  “Danger, Al... and hurry.”

  X. RANKIN’S ESCAPE

  WERE THEY ATTEMPTING to lure him out with this stale pretext? He decided to take the gambler’s chance which he loved above all things. The moment he had drawn the bolt he leaped back and landed noiselessly far to the side where an enemy would never look for him on first entering. On one point he was certain. If there were the glint of a gun in the hand of the man who entered, he would fling the open, heavy pocket knife that he now held in his hand. That was a dainty little art which he had picked up in odd moments from an Italian friend.