by Max Brand
“Tell me why, Kirby?”
“Because it ain’t right for any man to stand up and take the law into his hands. It ain’t at all right, son. I speak that ought to know what I’m talking about. I’ve killed my list, Heaven pity me, and I’ve seen some hard-boiled eggs go down eating my lead. But it never give me no joy, particular. I ain’t a particular happy man, kid. You leave the law be. It’ll do its own work with no advice from you or from me.”
“It’s let Magruder live these years and grow fat!” said Phil Slader.
“Magruder ain’t dead yet,” said Lon Kirby. “And you take it from me, the way that a man dies is what puts the mark on the way that he lived. Magruder will have a sick way of dying. His finish will be worse than a dog’s, or I miss my guess about him.”
“You might as well tell me what you know about dad’s finish,” said Phil Slader.
“I don’t know nothing — except that Magruder lies when he says that he beat your dad fair and square and man to man.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I knew your dad. I was a youngster. Too young to be trying my hand at the sort of game that I liked. Lemme see. It was twenty years ago that I first met up with your father. He was young, too. But he wasn’t a fool kid, like me. I was sixteen and thought that I was the hardest man that ever stepped into stirrups and yelled for a fight. But your father convinced me a lot different.”
He smiled and shook his head, looking back with a foolish fondness into those dimly distant days of his youth. “I was talking big and acting big around that camp,” said Lon Kirby. “And I ran slam into your dad, and I got up and cussed him out and told him what I thought about him and dared him to stand up and fight me!”
“Ah!” said Phil Slader, and leaned forward to listen more perfectly.
“He was about twenty-four or five,” said the outlaw. “That was young. But he had ten years of it behind him, and that made him old. Besides, he had as much sense as he had nerve, which means a whole oceanful of it. He looked me in the eye and let me talk myself out. And he smoked his cigarette and watched the smoke blow up and curl away against the stars.
“The young kids that were sitting around, they were mighty scared and tickled to hear anybody talk like that to Slader himself. But the older gents, they didn’t smile. They didn’t even look at me. It was as though I didn’t count at all in that picture. They just kept their eyes riveted on Jack, as though he was the one who would do the things that really counted.
“Well, I just talked myself out, after a while, and still Jack hadn’t answered me. I felt a little queer about it, but pretty proud, on the whole.
“And when I met Jack Slader the next morning he just smiled and nodded to me, until I told myself that I had made the great man take water! Yes, I was fool enough to tell myself that. And it was two days later that I happened to be standing beside Slader when a rabbit jumped up and ran away.
“‘Take a try at it, Lon,’ says Jack.
“I did, and I missed, and then he snatched out his Colt and fired from the hip, and that rabbit jumped in the air and turned somersaults into heaven. I never saw such a shot before, and I’ll never see such a shot again.
“I could only stand there and stare, and, of course, I knew why he had asked me to try that shot. Because he knew that I’d miss, and because he knew that he wouldn’t, and he wanted to show me what would have happened to me if I had fought with him that other night.
“Well, it made me feel pretty low and mean and shaky. But he took my gun and fired it at a tree — and missed it on purpose.
“‘I think that your gun shoots a shade to the right too much,’ said Jack. And he handed the gat back to me. That was his way. He wouldn’t make a fool even out of me, much as I deserved it that day.
“Of course, it was a terrible drop for me, but it took me three whole days before I got up my nerve to walk up to the camp fire, where the rest of the gents were all sitting around. And I says:
“‘Jack, I made a fool of myself here the other night. All I got to say is that I’m all the names that I called you. I want to apologize, and I hope that you’ll accept it.’
“No idea what it cost me to eat dirt that way. I had to go out and rehearse that speech for days and hours. And even then, when I came to make it, I had to stutter and stammer through it. When I made my little talk, some of the older men nodded and grunted, but the youngsters, they all sneered at me, as though they would rather of died than of done such a thing. Well, Jack Slader he stood right up and took my hand.
“‘Thank you for sayin’ that before the rest of the bunch, Lon’, says he. ‘But there wasn’t any need of it. I knew that you were sorry. Though I see that there’s some of the young puppies here that don’t understand the thing that you’ve just done.’
“And he looked around that circle slow and easy. I’ll tell you that he had an eye that was hard to meet, and glances dropped like leaves in October. After that, he was my friend. He never forced his advice on me about anything, but when I asked him about something, a few days later, he told me that I ought to go home. He showed me where this sort of a life wound up. But I wouldn’t believe him. Why, looking at Jack, he was so dog-gone handsome and sort of shining and glorious that I told myself that a life that was good enough for him was plenty good enough for me! And so there I stuck and got to be the thing that he warned me against!”
This speech was delivered slowly by Lon Kirby, with many pauses — not as one who hunts for words, but as one who lingers a little, seeing more and more clearly the pictures of which he was to speak. What he said came from very near his heart. There was a natural silence after this speech.
Then Lon Kirby said: “It seems as though you didn’t know your old man very good?”
Phil shook his head. He could not speak.
“All right,” said Lon Kirby. “You don’t need to be ashamed and hang your head. Because he was the sort of a man that was worth your while getting soft about. He was white, one hundred per cent white, if I haven’t been around the world a good long distance, but I’ve never yet found nobody that would match up with him for a minute! You take my word for it! Nothing that I’ve said about him was enough. He was a whole size larger than anybody else that I ever met!”
There was another pause, and some of the brightness had died out of the eyes of Phil when the other said: “Now you can get a general idea of some of the reasons why Magruder never could of killed your dad. Magruder is a good fighting man. He’s a straight shot and he’s a quick one, and he’s as good, or he used to be, as I am myself, which is saying enough for pretty near any man. But he never seen the day when he would of stood up to your father — not even for the half part of a second, y’understand me?”
“I understand, all right,” said Phil Slader.
“And now,” said the other, “it seems that things has sort of changed between you and me. It looks almost as though we had growed friendly — or is it only talk — which is like booze and often goes to the head?”
CHAPTER XXII
IT SEEMED TO Phil Slader that all the kindness in the manner of Lon Kirby was almost purely adventitious. If that gentleness was founded upon old relations with the great Jack Slader, those relations were much too aëriform to be counted upon heavily. Under the surface of all this gentleness he felt the presence of iron qualities, hardly masked.
So he waited, saying nothing.
As for Lon Kirby, it seemed that he would gladly have heard more talk from Phil, either persuasive or adversative, so that he could find some manner of working himself out of this affair in one way or another. But the silence of Phil threw the whole moral weight of the decision squarely upon him. And he writhed mentally under the burden.
“Now, kid,” said he, “I want you to tell me what you expect that I should do here.”
Phil Slader thought upon the question for some time and then slowly looked up.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I see that you want t
o do what’s right by me. But this is a stickler. If you leave me free, I may scoot away, you think, and raise the folks to hunt the river for you. If you don’t leave me free, it’s kinder to kill me, and you feel that that is hardly fair and square to my father. Ain’t that the way that things stand?”
Kirby blinked, like one who, after wandering through thickest night for a long time, sees a sudden flash across the sky before him and hears it crash near his very feet. So it was with Kirby. He had lived so much among the crafty and the cunning that to find one example of frankness and honesty was almost more than he could believe. He remained for a long time, studying the face of Phil Slader, but failing to find there any hint of hypocrisy.
“That’s the way that things stand,” said Lon Kirby at last. “Here’s the money, too. That counts. Because you had a chance to count it.”
“Yes,” said Phil.
“How much was there?”
“A hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars.”
“A hundred and eighty-two or eighty-three. Which makes up a pretty neat little wad of money, eh?”
Phil nodded.
“I ain’t a miser,” said the bandit, “but you got to admit that I have my reasons for treating that money sort of respectful. You might say that it’s my all, eh? It represents my savings and my checking account, too!”
Phil nodded again.
“And d’you aim to understand why I buried that coin?”
“Of course. You’re taking a long chance, fetching down along the river in this way. You may win through safe enough, but then, again, you may miss altogether. You may run straight into their hands, and if they catch you, you don’t want them to catch the money at the same time. Still, this ain’t the only place you can hide it.”
The other grinned rather more broadly than before.
“I might leave you here and go off down the stream and hide it in some other place, eh? Yes, and you might follow and see the new place as good as this one, kid! You might do that, and you would do that. What?”
“No,” said Phil, “not if I told you that I wouldn’t.”
“D’you expect me to believe that?”
“No, not at all.”
The bandit shrank again and bit his lip. He stared for a moment down at the ground.
“You look square. You act square,” said he. “And I know that your father was the squarest crook that ever cracked a safe or stuck up a stage in the old days.”
Here he raised his head again and stared fixedly at Phil. Inspiration had come.
“Kid,” said he, “I don’t want to make any fool of myself, but the funny idea has come along to me that maybe I’ve found out an honest man!”
He spoke it with such emotion that Phil Slader gaped at him and answered: “Why, I hope I’m one of the honest people, Kirby!”
“One of them? If you’re honest,” said the bandit, “you’re about the only one. Don’t tell me. I started among good folks. I’ve seen how much sneaking crookedness there was in them. The bad that is in good people is a terrible badness, kid. Look at me. I’m mean and hard and crooked and I know that I’m bad. I can appreciate that badness, and I can appreciate what real goodness should be, too.
“I’ve had pals, in my day, that I’ve swore to be true to, and they’ve swore to be true to me. And I’ve had them leave me in the lurch — some of them quit me when the pinch come and the guns were about to start talkin’. And some weakened when it come to making a fair-split of the loot. And some double crossed me for no good reason, except because they got jealous of me, or something foolish like that, y’understand? Oh, yes, I’ve had my experiences. But I haven’t found a square shooter and an honest man yet — except Jack Slader — and they had a price on his head!”
He began to laugh and he ended his laugh with a snarl.
“I have no more partners now, kid. Gents never disappoint me, because I never give them a chance. And I’m not going to give you the chance, either! Kid, if I get soft about you, it means that I’m getting old and weak, and near my finish! Ain’t that a fact?”
“Maybe it is,” said Phil Slader coldly. “I don’t know you. But I’m not going to beg. And if you’re through telling me what a rotten lot other folks are, now tell me what you’re going to do with me, will you?”
For he had grown more and more irritated as he listened to Kirby. He knew, indeed, that he was standing rubbing elbows with a miserable death. But he found that the thought did not fill him with fear, but rather raised joy in his heart. He felt more defiance in him than fear. It was that absence of fear that delighted him and filled him with wonder.
But the devil in Lon Kirby was no intangible thing; it was a living and breathing soul, and now it leaped into his face, transforming him wonderfully.
“By Heaven!” gasped Kirby. “Why, you’re beggin’ me to shoot, ain’t you?”
Phil Slader shrugged his shoulders. “You been talking a lot of bunk about the folks that you knew and didn’t know, Kirby. And you been saying what gents was honest, and what wasn’t. But the whole point that interests me is this: If you can trust me, you turn me loose, and the thing ends that way. If you can’t trust me, you pull a gun and shoot me. That’s the whole of it. Now, you make up your mind which you’re going to do, because I can’t persuade you, and I’m not going to try.”
“Aye,” said the other, glaring at him. “You’re pretty near mean enough to be honest, kid. You’ve got something in you, though — you got some honesty in you — but how much is there? How much is there?”
Phil shrugged his shoulders again.
“How old are you, Slader?”
“Nearly twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two? Aye, and when was there ever a hundred and eighty thousand dollars’ worth of honesty in a kid twenty-two years old?”
The wide shoulders of Slader were shrugged again.
“One chance in a thousand,” said the outlaw, more to himself than to his companion. “But I’ve played chances that long, before this, so why shouldn’t I play them again? Why not again? A thousand to one, kid, that you’re a crook, but I take the chance on you!”
Hearing him say it so quietly and thoughtfully, Phil Slader could hardly believe his ears. But he saw Lon Kirby stand up and pick from the ground the revolver, which he had taken from his antagonist.
That weapon was passed to Phil, handle first. He had only to press the trigger with his finger and send Lon Kirby to the last accounting — while he himself picked a hundred and eighty thousand dollars from the gravel.
He thrust the Colt deep in its holster and he smiled at Lon Kirby.
“Lon,” said he, “if this was to be the . . . .”
“Shut up, kid,” said Lon Kirby. “Shut up and don’t talk. It looks easy for you to play square with me — just now when you got your chance to live safe and happy. But maybe things won’t be so good when you go back home and sleep over this to-night. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and you’ll see yourself dressed up in fancy togs, with a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in your pocket. That’s what you’ll see, eh?”
Phil Slader made no reply. He could see that the very inmost nature of Lon Kirby had been stirred by the scene through which they had just passed. His heart had been opened, and a stranger permitted to look into the guarded sanctum which exists in the soul of every man. Now he revolted against the familiarity which he had permitted in a stranger and was closing the portals of the inner temples.
“So long,” said Lon Kirby. And he turned on his heel.
He crossed the opening until he came within a stride or two of the undergrowth which edged the beach. Then terror seemed to stab him suddenly in the small of the back. He leaped forward and disappeared with a crash out of the view of that potential enemy who stood in the clearing, with a gun behind at his waist.
But after that first crash, there was silence, and whether the other was slinking away toward his raft, beyond the point, or whether he had remained crouched there in hiding to
observe the man whom he had put in danger of death and freed again, Phil could not tell. However, he raised the heavy boulder and let it sink again into its former position, covering solidly the treasure of Lon Kirby.
CHAPTER XXIII
IT WAS NOT until Phil Slader had gone back from the marshes along the river and started for the hotel of Magruder that he began to recollect the other great event of this day. Even so, though he was riding back to face Magruder — who might be a murderer or not, as the case chanced, the crisis between himself and Doc seemed a very slight affair compared to that interview between himself and the outlaw.
Yet the two, in a way, went hand in hand. For the greatest incident in that interview had been the recollections which Lon Kirby had expressed concerning famous Jack Slader.
The picture in the mind of Phil which made up the living representation of his father had been composed of vague remembrances out of his childhood, to a small degree, and to a greater extent of the stories and the impressions which had constantly been brought to his ears since he reached the age of distinct memories. What he recalled in person was a darkly handsome man, usually smiling, with flashing, quick-moving eyes, who appeared when not expected and disappeared again without any good reason. It was a very vague picture, a mass of vague hints with on agglutinate to hold the different impressions together; that was the sense of fear which had always accompanied his father like a shadow — not dread of Jack Slader himself, but an atmosphere of terror in which Jack lived and moved — the dread which is the breath in the nostrils of the hunted man. His mother did not appear at all to the eye of his mind. She was merely a vague sensation of sorrow and of sweetness, lodged far in the back of his mind.
But the greatest part, by far, that he knew of his father was not brought to his mind by memory; it was built out of the impressions which others had carried to him, and those impressions had been chiefly grim things enough. He had seen his father in every attitude of the desperado and gun fighter. He had seen him gun and knife in hand; he had seen him stealing through the night, like a stalking cat; he had seen him revealed in midday with a black mask across his face; he had seen Jack Slader galloping, yelling, through a startled town; he had listened to the explosion of Jack Slader’s Colt in many a barroom brawl. Until, at last, a streak of red flame and a smudge of stinging powder smoke obscured in the mind of the boy his own image of the man.