by Max Brand
Fifty sturdy men of affairs gathered under his roof for dinner to taste the excellent whisky of the rancher, to partake of his fine fare, and to see lovely Rose Kenworthy, newly come home from an Eastern school. For she presided at one end of that huge table while her father presided at the other.
At that dinner they made much talk, and in the end they elected an active committee of a dozen of their ablest members to go to the sheriff and ask to be allowed to participate in the suppression of the crime wave. Kenworthy, of course, was the chairman who went to the sheriff and offered the aid of the citizens in the campaign against The Whisperer. For, since that mysterious name had been first mentioned, it was constantly in use as the guiding spirit behind every crime.
Had he possessed a dozen bodies, he could not have been in every locality where crimes were blamed upon him. That name became a fascinating illusion. Every bank robbery was laid to his name; and every hobo with sore feet and five days’ whiskers on his face was arrested and gravely given the third degree to see if he might not be the master criminal.
“No one,” said Kenworthy to the sheriff, “has been able to spot the master criminal. I propose to forget that name. I propose a great crusade against crime in general, throwing out a great dragnet. When we haul it in, The Whisperer will be one of those entangled in the meshes.”
He cleared his throat. He was a pompous man who wore a stiff white collar even when he was riding on the range. He talked even to his daughter in the quiet of his home as if he were making a political speech from a stump, and he had a way of tucking his rather small chin inside his collar, thrusting his hands into his coat pockets, spreading his legs apart, and delivering his thoughts upon the right way to carve a goose with as much passion as an old, ranting actor doing the closet scene in the third act of Hamlet.
The sheriff did not smile. For Kenworthy was too rich and too successful to be smiled at. He was never referred to in any of the local papers saving as “our distinguished neighbor,” or “the cattle king,” or, “one of our most distinguished citizens.” To laugh at such a man was apt to have cost the sheriff five thousand votes at the next election! For the rancher secretly owned a controlling share in some three or four of those papers which most assiduously mentioned his name. So the sheriff duly swore in Kenworthy as a deputy and gave him the authority to enlist others in the name of the law.
Immediately the “crusade against The Whisperer” began to be a serious affair. There were virtually pledged to it some thirty or forty of the strongest men on the range, each of whom could throw three or four well- mounted, well-armed men into the field for a campaign of any duration, without missing their hands from the working forces upon their ranches.
Deputy Kenworthy found himself placed at the head of a hundred hardy fellows who knew the range to a T, and who were keen as fox hounds on the trial because each one of them was promised three months’ pay in a lump sum if he could strike down or capture any man who was afterward proved to be a criminal. Kenworthy hardly knew how to dispose of such large forces, but he was one of those men who could take advice even when trying to give it; if he wanted to know how to build a skyscraper, he would have called upon an eminent architect and started giving him his own ideas until the architect in wrathful self-defense blurted out a few of the truths concerning that matter.
So Kenworthy now went around and talked to some of the old-timers who had been members of vigilante committees, and it was not long before he learned from them that the best weapon of all against crime was that simple name — vigilante! It was of such a power that the strongest bands of criminals and outlaws melted away before it; it had a marvelous prestige, and was known never to have failed in the past. Deputy Kenworthy swallowed the thought at once, equipped his crusaders with the name of vigilantes, and started out to mop up the country.
He mismanaged it sadly. He left holes a mile wide in the nets he spread. But, nevertheless, he had a hundred sharp-eyed fellows working for him, and they began to turn in results in spite of Kenworthy’s blundering methods. They caught one rascal of a cattle rustler; they nailed a horse thief; and then they caught a yegg, an old and expert safe cracker. What they did to him was not pleasant to relate, but the group which caught him consisted of old, hard hands, and they determined to make the yegg talk. They tied him to a tree and toasted his feet until he fainted over the fire, and when he recovered his senses the sight of the flames made him begin to blab all that he knew. It was enough.
He gave them names and places as fast as they could write them down. They spent three weeks of furious riding, wearing out a horse and man every other day, but at the end of the three weeks the crime wave in Kenworthy’s county was suppressed with a vengeance, the jails were packed, and suddenly it was as safe to walk the open highroad as it had been dangerous before.
Just as the campaign was closing, the time of the county election rolled around, and in noisy admiration of the rancher’s work, he was rushed into the office of the sheriff at the last moment, by a tremendous vote, to his own bewilderment and infinite gratification. So he gave a dinner in his big ranch house to celebrate the end of the crime wave and the beginning of his term as sheriff. It was a very happy affair. Men arose one by one and told him what an eminent man and public benefactor he was, until the face of Rose Kenworthy was crimson with shame, and the face of her father was crimson with happiness. At length he rose in turn and announced that he had at least put an end to the crime wave and that The Whisperer would never be heard from again.
“Because, gentlemen,” said the rancher, “somewhere among those whom we have caught in my dragnet — somewhere among the rascals whom my vigilantes have brought in, is that arch-rogue who dared to show his face among us in this county of — ours.”
He had almost said “mine,” but saved himself at the last instant.
“The Whisperer,” he continued, “is dead; and may he never rise again!”
This toast was drunk with cheers, so loud that they made a shadowy figure which was at that instant stealing downstairs into the new sheriff’s cellar, pause and listen. But presently he went on again. He reached the bottom level of the cellar and searched the wall deliberately with his pocket electric torch. The faint glow thrown back upon him revealed the fact that he was completely masked, his head being hung in black all round. He examined the wall until he discovered something to his interest upon the plain surface of the bricks. He began to fumble at one of these, finally drew it forth, and then inserted his hand into the aperture which it left. At once there was a sharp click followed by a rolling noise of the most oily smoothness; and a section of the wall, a full three feet wide, swung softly open and revealed, within, the lofty and glimmering face of a steel safe.
With the utmost satisfaction, the masked man surveyed it. Then he raised his head and listened with the greatest apparent content to the noise of mirth which continued above him and which was audible even to the faint chiming of the glasses, now and then, because of some door which was left open into the dining room. He now closed the door of the vault behind him almost reluctantly. He laid forth a quantity of yellow laundry soap, excellent for rough cleaning and excellent, also, for the construction of those molds which yeggs run cleverly around the edges of the door of a safe, so that nitroglycerine may be induced to flow around it and trickle into the crack of the door, no matter how narrow.
He next produced a small flask which those of the “trade” would have guessed at once to be filled with the “soup.” And, having laid forth these articles, he looked over the safe with the greatest deliberation. He laid his hand upon its bluff and rounded corners as though he admired with all his heart the solidity of its workmanship and the exquisite strength of the tool-proof steel itself. Then, having completed his survey, he set suddenly to work to make his mold of the soap.
VI. IN THE CLEARING
THE EXPLOSION HAD rather a force than a noise. It took hold on the house like the hand of an earthquake and made it shudder. At the same
time an almost soft and puffing noise of the explosion was audible not so much through the house itself as in the distance around it, where the sound traveled through the thin, pure mountain air and made every cow-puncher in the bunk house sit up, bolt erect, to listen and to wonder. In the dining room upstairs, every guest and the wise host himself sat staring, glass or cigar in hand for a frozen moment.
Then: “A lifter!” muttered someone who had been a miner in his youth.
“An explosion!” cried Sheriff Kenworthy. “By heavens — it can’t be”
The last thought had turned him white and so stunned him that he was unable to complete the utterance of it aloud, or even to himself. Neither could he move. During that precious interval there was only one person in the room who stirred, and this was Rose Kenworthy, herself. She had not let an instant go by in idleness, but after the report she slipped from her chair and ran to the door, where she listened to the quivering echo like that which follows the passing of a man with a heavy tread. Then she ran back to one of the astonished guests.
“Bud Chalmers,” she cried softly to him, “that came from the cellar where my father keeps his — Come! Let’s see what’s there!”
He had to take her arm and draw her back, or she would have led the way in person, as though she preferred such an adventure and such a risk to the scene which she had been forced to sit through in the dining room.
By this time the whole group of men had turned in a body, and they rushed down the stairs, poured into the cellar, and found a broad dark mouth yawning in the cellar wall. They streamed in, guns in hand, electric torches quivering with eagerness. What they found was the floor of the little room strewn with a litter of papers, the door of the safe lifted cleanly from its mighty hinges, and the interior of the safe entirely gutted. It brought a wailing cry of almost childish rage from the newly famous sheriff. He fell upon his knees in front of the safe, and threw out his fat arms. What he might have said would never be known, for the slender form of Rose darted to his side.
“Dad,” she whispered in his ear, while her strong young hand sank into his soft shoulder, “they’re watching you — you’ll die with shame if you don’t act like a man now!”
It brought him to his feet. He was able to muster a roar as he turned to his posse, and then pointed to the door which opened at the rear of the cellar.
“That’s the way, boys,” he cried. “That’s the way that dog went! Let’s ride him down-five thousand in cash to the man who drives a bullet into him.”
“Look here!” cried someone.
He turned the round, bright eye of his torch against the wall of the cellar and there they saw, white and new, a great “W,” inscribed in careless scratches.
“The Whisperer!” came the cry of a dozen men. “The devil has dared to do this while we upstairs”
Flushing with anger, they glanced to one another. In truth, The Whisperer had chosen to make a mock of them, and there was no doubt about it. While they drank honor to the sheriff and scorn to the baffled outlaw, he was proving that their dragnet had not touched him at all by actually plundering the safe of the chief of the vigilantes, with all of his men scattered about.
They stormed from the cellar; they found their horses; they stormed out from the house in a great circle, some riding toward every point of the compass, and in this fashion one man sighted a gray horse in the moonshine, half lost among the shadows of overhanging trees. He shouted a challenge, whereat the other put spurs to his horse and galloped across the fields. At once the hue and cry was raised. They flogged and spurred their horses forward furiously, on the trail of the other, who aimed his flight straight for the neighboring canyon mouth, and was immediately lost in the woods which crowded it.
In the meantime, they had hardly disappeared when there issued from the little room in the sheriff’s cellar where the safe was kept, and actually from behind the safe itself, that same masked robber who had dared to insult the power of Mr. Kenworthy in his own house. He left the cellar leisurely, strolled to a knot of trees near the house, and there mounted a horse which had been left in concealment. He now struck away at a swinging gallop, whistling softly to himself, and riding rather as one who enjoyed the rhythm of the gallop than as one who needed desperate speed to save him from a great danger.
But as for the posse, they rode with a wild unconcern for the nature of the ground over which their horses flew. There is nothing that makes a man so utterly reckless as an affront to his vanity. Not a man there but would have gladly lost half his blood for the sake of sinking a bullet into the body of The Whisperer because of this night’s insolence. They gave their horses wings, and they were quickly upon the very heels of the fugitive. Only the thick screen of the trees kept them from riddling him with bullets, for they were constantly in short revolver range. They might have run him down almost at once had it not been that he had apparently carefully planned the way of his retreat, and dodged from one narrow avenue in the woodland to another, so that they were several times lost for a moment and gave up valuable rods of ground before they caught the trail again.
Foremost among them galloped Rose Kenworthy herself. Not that she carried a gun, or that she could have used one, but she would not be left behind in a hunt which was more exciting than ever a fox hunt in the world! She had a saddle upon her tall bay gelding before the others were fairly under way. She flew two fences and caught up with them as they twisted across the first fields, and after that, she was in the very front, though her father swore and the other men begged her to go home. But Rose, being an only child, had of course been terribly spoiled; she did not even think of obeying them, but she cantered on, cheering her horse along and shouting with glee as she swung right and left to dodge the low-sweeping boughs of the evergreens.
The big bay went lame suddenly. He stumbled, almost fell, and then slowed to a walk.
“Now go home!” shouted someone darting past at full speed. Which of course determined Rose to stay on that trail if she had to go forward all night on foot. She flung herself from the gelding’s back while the hunt slid past her and went crashing into a thicket beyond. She turned the gelding loose. The poor fellow would find the best way home to his stable and at his own speed, which would be better for him than leading. Then she started to tramp forward with her throat closed and her heart huge with wrath. To add to her fury, the way was interlaced with many entanglements of roots, and every now and then she tripped and almost fell upon them. Twice, indeed, she actually plunged forward upon her hands and skinned them on the gnarled bark or the stones on which she struck.
Who, in the midst of a ranting argument, while pacing back and forth, has tripped and stumbled? Who has stubbed his toe while promenading with the greatest dignity? Such things are nothing to small mishaps while one is in a passion; and Rose Kenworthy would have taken mountains in her hands and smashed them to pieces against one another, so wild was her passion of temper. When she scrambled to her feet after the second fall, she paused and stamped and beat her stinging hands together in impotent fury.
“Oh,” cried Rose, “if only I were a man — if only I weren’t such a — such a—”
She could think of no fitting word, and so she strode on over the cushioning mats of needles with her fists clenched and her eyes rolling among the shadows; the noise of the hunt had died out far, far before her, and the knowledge that she was doing a very foolish thing in following them only increased her rage and her determination. So it was, coming out into a little clearing in the forest, she was amazed to come on the scent of a cigarette. She looked about her in the deepest astonishment, but entirely without fear. That emotion, in fact, was well-nigh a stranger in her composition.
She was in a forest of huge yellow pines, and the light of the moon struck down in spots here and there across the woodland. There was some distance from the ground before the big first branches began, and Rose could look far away down avenues of brown columns, with silver spots of the moonshine falling here and there, qui
te regularly, upon the pavement of fallen needles. To her it seemed a windless night, but pine trees will tremble with air currents which the human skin cannot detect, and in the stillness of the atmosphere all the needles were astir and made a faint and ghostly hushing sound.
A little rivulet was not far away, raising a merry bubbling and calling as it tumbled over the edge of a boulder into a pool beneath, and through that thin and pure mountain air the sound struck across the canyon and was rung faintly and deeply back in echo from the opposite wall of the little valley; so that it seemed there was another waterfall in the distance, a thundering giant whose strength was just beginning to make the air tremble.
This was the scene, and these were the sounds in which Rose found herself when that poignant and rich fragrance of the tobacco came to her and scattered the tatters of her passion away, and poured upon her mind the holy water of that mountain quiet.
She could see no source of the smoke at first, and then she saw, in a patch of the deepest shadow, the figure of a man sitting with his back to her, cross-legged upon a great stump, as quiet as a stone, or a meditating Indian. Nothing about him stirred except his right hand, from which the silver curl of the smoke went upward as he brought the cigarette to his lips and carried it away again. His head was bare. His face was raised toward the sky as though he peered out from his shadow upon the brilliance of the moon, which was now rounding into the three quarters, and drowning all the stars in her floods of silver. From his head, raised in this fashion, long black hair fell away — hair almost long enough to touch his shoulders, and cut away in a thick, sharp stroke at that point. It had a striking effect.
Indeed, there was everything about his attitude, his immobility, his black, long hair, the thinness of his face — for she could see the prominence of his cheek bone and the hollow line of his cheek — to make her think that this stranger was truly an Indian. Yet she knew that he was not, before she saw him fairly.