by Max Brand
“Did he know that? I knew that he might have guessed it because his spies had told him my real name.”
“Not his spies. He could recognize you by your face. You are much like your father, he says, and your father was a man who once injured Alvarez.”
“Injured him? The lying hypocrite!”
“He is worse than that. Only I know what he truly is! But about you... he told you that he knew your name. But it was only so that by telling you part of the truth he could keep you from guessing that he understood everything.”
“And what is that ‘everything?’”
“If he knew that I were telling you, he would have me burned inch by inch!”
“He shall never touch you with the weight of a finger!”
“Then this is it! He says that you are one of a whole gang. The first man to attack him was a member. And others were to follow, he told me. He was in constant peril of his life. So he determined to get an expert fighter’s protection, and he started the rodeo. He said that he knew someone of his enemies would appear at that rodeo in the hope that they could get into the house and there murder him. He expected that some enemy whose face was unknown to him...”
“And that was I?”
“That was you. When he brought you home, he told me that he had the prize he wanted. He had one of the enemy’s camp, and he would buy you. And having bought you, he would have a protector who knew the faces and all the plans of all his enemies. No one else could be so valuable. Everything was prepared for your coming as if it were a stage.”
“He was so sure I would answer his invitation?”
“Yes. He was sure of that. And once you came here he depended on his money to buy you. But even his money would not do entirely. He said that money was strong, but sometimes romance was stronger, and so he planned it that I should walk in the garden outside the window while he was talking with you. He even told me what dress I should wear so as to make the best possible picture.”
“He was right,” murmured Kobbe. “It was you who kept me here. But what a dog he is to make you a bait!”
“I was more ashamed than by anything else he has ever made me do. And when I looked through the window and saw your face and
your honest eyes looking out at me... I could not stand it. I turned and ran.”
“God bless you!”
“But now you understand only part. When he has finished using you, he is going to destroy you. He has told me that. And he has no shame or remorse about it. He says that you started to threaten his life and therefore it is only logical and just that he should threaten your life. When you are no longer of advantage to him, he’ll wipe you out of his way. He says it is the rule of war. And if he knew now what I have told you, he’d destroy us both, and...”
Again fear choked her. He took both her hands.
“Listen to me. He’ll do neither of us harm. We’re leaving this house. And we leave together. God help him if he tries to stop us.”
“But he has armed men...”
“I know his armed men. If I have to shoot my way through them, I’ll do it. But it won’t come to that. Tell me one thing first: why is he so afraid if he knows so much about what is going on among his enemies?”
“Because though he trusts that you will be enough to save him, you expect to become rich from the work, and because you know the plans of your other friends. Because he is as cowardly as he is cruel.”
“I believe in the cowardice. I’ve seen it. Yet tell me, if you fear and hate him so, why have you stayed here?”
“Because I didn’t know where to go if I left this place. And I had no one I could trust to go with me.”
“And that was all?”
“A hundred times it has been all that kept me from leaving. A hundred times I have lain awake at night and wondered how God could let me keep living in such unhappiness!”
“Does it mean that you will leave this house with me... at once... tonight?”
“The moment I can get a cloak.”
“Do not wait even for that!”
“I must.”
“And you have thought that if you leave you will become poor at a step?”
“I have thought of that. That is less than nothing.”
“Before you go to your room, shall I tell you the true story of how I happened to come hunting Alvarez?”
“I know that there was a good reason.”
“It was like this: ten years ago my father was in South America. He was rich in coffee plantations, and he had a wide circle of friends who were also great growers. And they, again, were affiliated with other people, and the whole made a large and powerful party in politics. They grew discontented with the harsh treatment which they received from the party which was in power. Finally they were so badly treated that there were imprisonments. And then they decided on a rebellion. In the party which had decided to rebel was my father, and of the others the most prominent was a man named Quinnado. It was Quinnado who first had become discontented with the government. It was Quinnado who first schemed to rebel. It was Quinnado who was the backbone of the whole affair.
“But at the last moment Quinnado disappeared from the country, and at the same moment the chief heads of the proposed rebellion were arrested, given sham trials, and immediately executed. My father was one of those who paid the penalty.
“Of course the reasoning of the other leaders was perfectly simple. It was known that Quinnado had sold his entire estates at a handsome figure, and he had vowed that he would use the entire sum to forward the revolution. This seemed so extremely generous that the other members of the revolutionary party immediately made him treasurer of the scheme and turned into his hands immense sums of money which they had raised for the war which was to come. The size of the sum was too much for Quinnado. He must have sold the secrets of the party to the government for a bonus of hard cash plus liberty to leave the country and go abroad where he could settle down in a new place with a new name, since it was certain that he could never live in his native land where so many hundreds of orphans and infuriated relatives would be willing to sell their own lives if they might take his in exchange.
“That was the general theory. But there were some who felt that Quinnado had been done away with and that his body had been lost as well as the names of those who murdered him. Nevertheless, among those of the revolutionists who survived there were some who escaped the proscription and who organized themselves for the purpose of hunting down Quinnado and pinning the result of his crimes upon him, if he were actually living.
“Finally, after searching for ten years, they found him here in the American West. This was the last place they looked for him because he had always hated America and things American. But they located him here and they organized to get him out of the way. It was about the same time that they found me and brought me into the work. I hardly liked an assassination scheme and told them so, but they swore that they would use me in some such way that I should not at least have to fire any bullet at a man whose back was turned to me.
“I joined in on that presumption. I entered the rodeo and when Quinnado, or Alvarez as he calls himself, sent for me, I came. You know what followed. He called me by my real name, which is John Kobbe Turner. He made me the proposition you know of, and he bought me by letting me see your face.
“There is my whole story. And there is only one thing that I want to write at the end of it: which is that I have succeeded in taking you away to freedom. And yet I’ve been half-baffled, Miriam, by Quinnado, when I see what he has done. And when I saw how he has made himself respected and liked in this community, I began to doubt what my other friends had told me of him. I began to think that he must be an honest man, or if he was crooked before, he must have reformed!”
“But you could not expect to know him as I know him. He has never done anything except what he has figured out to be of benefit to himself. He has raised me for years, but it was because from the very first he had decided that some day h
e would marry me. And to effect that, he has kept me away from all young people, all...” Her voice broke with her anger. “Then we must go quickly, if we go at all.”
He nodded. “I’ll take you to the door of your room and wait for you there.”
So they hurried out of the room and across the great hall where the weird moonlight had grown brighter, and up the steps and down the corridor to the door of her room. There they paused.
“Do you know,” she whispered, “just now when I’m about to leave this house forever, I feel more deeply in his power than ever before? And just now I feel that he knows everything in my mind as clearly as if it were written out for him in black and white.”
“Let him know what he pleases about you once we’re outside this house.”
“But how can we get through his guards?”
“They’re posted to keep people out, not to keep them in.”
She hesitated with her hand on the door. Then, with a lift of her head so that he almost saw her smiling up to him through the darkness, she opened the door quickly and stepped inside.
The door closed. He heard the faint falling of her steps as she crossed the room, and then — a sharp click and he knew that the door had been locked on the inside, and yet he had distinctly heard her walk away from it! Some other person was in that room.
XI. QUINNADO!
THE FIRST THOUGHT of Kobbe was that Alvarez had sent Jenkins or some other guard to the room of the girl to take charge of her and see that she did not escape from the house. This indicated that he had knowledge of the interview which had just passed between Kobbe and the girl. Miriam had been so confident that the rancher could not fail to read what was happening in her mind that she had almost persuaded Kobbe as well.
Yet he knew on second thought that there was no man he had seen on the place who would stand guard over the girl against her wish. Certainly Jenkins was not of that ilk.
There was a sound as of someone stumbling and then recovering himself as softly as possible. It came from the short flight of steps leading into the upper hall. Something else stirred at the opposite end of the hall, and the full meaning came to him instantly. They were blocking each end of the hall and were closing in on him. Alvarez had learned the purport of his talk with the girl and was more eager to destroy than to use him for his own protection against his old enemies.
He looked eagerly and vainly around him for an escape, but the trap was nearly shut. There was only one possibility, and that was through the door into the room of the girl.
The stealthy sounds drew closer on either hand. When they came within arm’s reach, he would die. He looked anxiously around him. Like all men in desperation, he began to feel about with his hands, as though the eyes were not enough. And, so doing, his fingertips touched the molding beside the door. The post was so massive that it thrust out a couple of inches from the main line of the wall. If it were so thick at the side, above the door lintel might be still deeper. He reached up and tested it. To his amazement he found that there was a ledge a full six inches deep.
After that he was in temporary safety for an instant, at the least. He caught hold on the ledge, swung himself sidewise and up like a pendulum, and managed to plant one foot on the ledge. Then he struggled up above the ledge. He would have fallen back, of course, from such a meager foothold, but he found that there were other projections to which he could cling, and he was able to turn around and finally to squat upon his heels and stare down into the darkness.
The stealthy sounds were gradually approaching down the hall on either side. But in the meantime, what was happening in the room of the girl? There was not a sound, not a whisper. And yet the walls were not at all sound-proof. He had even been able to hear, from the hall, the light tapping of her feet as she had crossed the floor. And that was not all. He had heard the turning of the key within the lock. He knew that another person beside the girl was there, and yet not a whisper to tell him of what was happening came to his ears. It was a maddening suspense.
What happened in the room of Miriam had been sufficiently horrible. She had crossed the room in the thick darkness and already had her hand upon the switch which would flood the room with electric light when she heard the click of the turning lock in the hall door. Yet it gave her only a momentary start. She attributed it, at once, to the touching of the outer knob of the door by Kobbe, who must be waiting there impatiently for her return. And when she returned to him there would be an end to the long shadow of unhappiness in which she had lived. So she pulled the switch, and the lights poured through the room.
When she turned, she saw Alvarez with his back to the door and a smile on his pale face! It was the swift ending of her dream of success. She braced her hand against the table behind her and faced him with her teeth set.
He darkened, at that, and the smile faded from his face. It was the first time she had let him even have a hint of her true emotions concerning him. He recovered almost at once, however, and gestured toward the door to a little study which was a part of her suite. There was nothing to do but obey him. He could make her go by force, if he chose. And the silence of his movements, his use of gestures in the place of words, showed that he knew Kobbe was waiting for her outside the hall door. Waiting for her, at least, unless he had been alarmed by the noise of that turning lock. But in that case, what could he do?
She went into the study. Alvarez, still in silence, followed her and locked that door as well behind them.
“Now,” he said, and his voice was as oily smooth as ever, “we can talk here quietly together. There are two doors and two walls between us and any disturbance.”
“It is our last talk,” she said, “and it will have to be a brief one.”
He smiled, showing two perfectly even lines of white teeth, and for the first time she began to guess at what might happen, not to herself, but to Kobbe, who waited outside in the hall.
“I have been listening to you and my friend, Kobbe,” he said.
“Eavesdropping?” Miriam asked scornfully.
“An old habit of mine and a very useful one. A proud man does not do it. But I am not proud. If I had been proud, I should have died long ago.”
“And now?” she asked.
“I am deciding this moment what to do with him.”
“With Señor Kobbe?”
“Use his right name!” snapped out Alvarez. “You know it as well as I do.”
“Very good, Señor Quinnado.”
He shrank as though she had struck him. And she instantly regretted that she had gone so far.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But... I want to know what you intend doing about him.”
“About Kobbe... or Turner, to give him his right name? I have this moment made up my mind. He is to be removed, Miriam. He is to make an unfortunate attempt to escape. And he is to be unfortunately shot down by my overzealous guards. A regrettable affair, eh?”
Her lips stirred without making a sound.
“You are white, Miriam,” he said. “This evidently cuts rather deep.”
“If you do that...”
“I am a devil, eh?”
“There is no word for you if you do that!”
He had been walking back and forth, but now he whirled around on her.
“Miriam, you love him!”
“Love him? I have never seen him before today.”
“I say that you love him!”
“He is the finest man I have ever seen. He is the most honest and the most fearless. If I do not love him, at least I honor him!”
“And the word that you have given me that we shall be married?”
“You have dragged that promise out of me. Besides, I promised to marry Señor Alvarez and not Señor Quinnado.”
“That name again? And yet suppose, Miriam, that we make a bargain and that I marry you, after all?”
“I had rather die.”
“Because you care so much for this Turner? This Kobbe?”
“Yes, yes! Bec
ause I care so much for him!”
“But he is mine, now.”
“He will not be taken. There is something about him which cannot be beaten.”
Miriam’s eyes shone.
“You will see. He is mine, Miriam. I’ll offer you his life for the sake of your hand.”
“You will marry me, knowing that I detest you?”
“Possession is the main thing. Everything else is an incident. You will understand better later on.”
“What a hypocrite and liar you have been for these ten years!”
“I have acted a part with the most consummate difficulty, and I have acted it better than it ever could have been acted upon the stage. That is the point of distinction. I am waiting for your answer, Miriam!”
They were interrupted by a sound of scuffling and then voices loud enough to drift through the two walls to their ears from the inner hall of the house.
“Do you hear?” asked Alvarez, alias Quinnado. “They have taken him now, I believe!”
He threw open the door. At once the noises were more audible. He ran across her bedroom and opened the door into the outer hall. Instantly a group of men struggled in, bringing Kobbe in their center. And there was a faint cry of grief and of terror from Miriam. Kobbe himself was furious rather than frightened. He was busy marking the faces of each of his captors. If he lived out the peril and met them again in freedom, it would go hard with all of them. That much was sure, and the grim expressions of his captors showed that they realized what they had done.
He could hardly hope for mercy.
“We’ve got him, Alvarez,” said Jenkins. “And now that we have him, we’re going to get rid of him if you’ll say the word. It can show up that we found him prowling around the house. They can never lay a hand on us for getting rid of him in that way. But if he’s left alive he’s going to make these parts too hot to hold him and us too. Understand?”
“Listen,” pleaded Miriam at the shoulder of Alvarez. “Have him freed and I swear that I shall never see him again.”
“And become the loving wife of Alvarez?”